Wednesday 18 November 2009

What I’ve been doing!

Stavanger for a lo-o-o-ng week but I wasn’t bored. The best part was they didn’t let me stay at the little 150 year-old, almost by-the-harbour, beautifully worked, but haunted house. So I could write a poem about it and do jazzpoesi with Johan Egdetveit, wonderfully versatile accordionist. Beautiful Wednesday evening at a vegan cafe called Resept. Lots of poetry. Lots.

Then we did the library and we did the barnamuseet, the children’s museum, where I donned a raincoat and hat to read a rain story of a wet crow to four year olds. They loved it! Saturday was exciting with more poetry reads broadcast to a live audience at St Andrews, Scotland. Hats off to ICORN and Sharahzad for all those memorable days!

Thursday 8 October 2009

End of Autumn

Ersfjordbotn is a little settlement on the island of Kvaløya. We were there last Saturday taking part in the big literature festival that Tromsø sponsors every fall.
Something about driving out of the city and into the country. To use a cliche, it was breathtakingly beautiful when we swung round the curve and the vista of fjord and farms opened out to us. Fading Autumn colours, and the first sunshine in days, made it even more beautiful than we remembered.
In the evening the moon obliged, and slowly glided up over a low mountain, like a child’s balloon, forgotten after a party..sounds like dejavu, but nature repeating itself, year after year, season after season is never cliched. Don’t listen to the cynics….

Saturday 29 August 2009

Dark skies again

I must have looked daft…looking upward, skyward on my way out to town. I was hoping to see stars in the dark skies. That is something I look forward to at the end of summer here. Dark Skies. Moon. Stars visible to the naked eye. Again. Would you miss the sun if it was taken away? even for a day? I think a friend asked that in a song…I counted three stars, one small, two biggish.

Tuesday 4 August 2009

Indian Summer

I know an Indian summer refers to a short summer but I like to call Summer 2009 my Indian summer because its wonderfully warm with the kind of heat that makes you break out in a sweat…summers in India are wet, sticky, sweaty affairs…beautiful only when recollected in tranquility…then you can recall the fireflies at dusk and the jasmine at night…heady scents, nights that are thick with insect sounds and frog calls…and days that begin with watermelons…

Friday 17 July 2009

Jazz poesi

This is a very fluid project that Ola Rokkones and Jon Eirik Boska and I have worked on…we did our first recording two days ago..none of us quite sure what was going to happen..and then it all came together..beautifully, satisfyingly…lovely…so I read poems while they played the saxofone and drums or while Jon Eirik made the strangest sounds…incredibly sweet water-tinkling sounds sometimes..or forest sounds..amazing the repertoire of sounds they both had on just these instruments..and Ola…gave me ship-leaving-shore sounds…yummy, big sea sounds…Ohh..I stayed on adrenalin for 48 hours after..

Wednesday 24 June 2009

Drawings coming along…

Spoke to Katrina and Kamilla this morning..the girls are making more drawings for me, so Løven i kjøleskapet (The Lion in the Refrigerator) will have more pictures…marv..the girls are so clever at making pictures …and it is such joy to work together like this…with them visualising my stories in their own way…makes it all come alive, it does too…love you guys…

Monday 15 June 2009

Early to bed, early to rise

Some things don’t really change, do they? Like this one. And if it’s late to bed, it’s still early to rise, because the body is wired like that..okay, not so early but still I can only get in six and a half hours of sleep if I go to bed after midnight…prolly something to do with the midnight sun..not the “too much light” theory..but I guess the body is getting used to living in the arctic..oh well..could have been worse….

Friday 12 June 2009

Docu Film Ideas

Been all over city centre with Moses to get ideas for a docu-film on Tromsø. Quite fun. Moses is new to Tromsø, and this being his first summer, he asked if the trees on Tromsdalen had sprouted overnight as all he had seen all winter was snow and greyness. This little city is amazingly colourful and multicultural. More so in summer. Sounds, Sights, and Smells…I love the city in summer…we’re still waiting for the sunflower man to arrive..every summer, he is there in the city centre, harmonica in place, big drum tied to his toe, banjo lower down his chest and one more musical instrument I have temporarily forgotten…

Monday 8 June 2009

Oslo

Feels like I’ve been away a long time..it wasn’t that long..four days, five? Oslo was warmer and wonderful..I have been able to appreciate it so much more now, the old houses, the many streets near Nils Juels gate and Thomas Hefteyes gate …spent a glorious afternoon laying in green grass in the castle park..away from conferences, et al…when you lie down, your whole perspective of things change…the sky is farther away, the trees hover over you, the birds are more curious, three white-gray birds with funny red beaks came close to examine me..lol

Tuesday 26 May 2009

What do you do?

What do you do when you get a 4000 kroner telephone bill? Take a flying jump into the fjord? Nah..you’re already quite hanged by the bill, in any case. What do you say when your progeny uses the telephone for one-hour plus long distance calls?Is there a fix-it-yourself manual out there somewhere?
The sun is streaming into my window after three days of rain, does that mean things will get better? One can hope, can’t one? Time to go and buy another lotto….

Monday 25 May 2009

The Lion and the Elephant

“Stop doing that!” said the Lion.
“Doing what?” asked the elephant.
“What you keep doing, stop idolising me, I’m not a hero.”
“But you are,” said the elephant, “Look at you, you’re the king of the jungle and you are strong and brave.”
“I’ll tell you my secret then,” said the lion in an irritated tone,”I may be strong but I am not brave. I am frightened of mice and lice. Furthermore, I am mortally ashamed of something I did to my brother. When we were younger, we fought over a marble, and I bit off his finger.” The lion hung his head in shame and guilt. “It was in anger but I have regretted it ever since.”

In the Loft!

For the first time, we went up to the top floor of this three storeyed house that we live in. Wonderful! The roof slopes in where the corners are and Arne, our landlord, has kept his childhood home very much the same way as he had grown up in it. Like something from a century ago. And bannisters that curved so deep into the wall you could’nt slide down them. Lodve and Phillip live there in hidden alcove rooms: cubby-holes, sort of, only much bigger and roomier yet incredibly cosy…

Friday 22 May 2009

Seagulls nesting

A seagull is nesting on the corner of the roof of the house adjacent to ours. Its partner walks the roof restlessly, up and down and from north to south and from west to east. The broody one never leaves the nest..we watch it as soon as we wake and in the day and just before we go to bed. It sits there keeping its egg warm.

Monday 18 May 2009

Moris Farhi’s ‘A designated man’ Book Review

A brutal tenderness: reviewing Moris Farhi’s “A designated man”

I read Moris Farhi’s book in one sitting. Six hours. It was an incredible book. I don’t want to use the word fascinating because I don’t want to associate Moris’s book with any overused adjectival phrases. It’s the sort of writing that makes me want to search for or create new adjectives to describe my responses to the book. Which is why I am using the oxymoron, brutally tender, to describe what I got out of reading the book.

It has a brutal theme: bloodletting and honour killing. But it also has the tenderness of love and life bravely resurging through the violence and death. Like arctic flowers that defy snow and ice and hard earth to snake their way out of a rockface and bloom like bright splotches of paint. To repeat the refrain, not tediously, but clearly and like an infrequent morningsong: life is holy, death is not, killing is the most unholy act. And loving, is a sanctifying act, with the power to regenerate, forgive, reconcile and thus, engender hope for future life.

On the small island of Skender, live the Kristofs, Goras, Rogosins,Kaplans, and others, their days preoccupied by age-old feuding. In fact, the main occupation upon Skender is feuding. And the majority follow it singlemindedly. The pattern of life on Skender is as follows: A member of one of the families is killed. This is swiftly followed by a killing in another family. Which is followed by yet another revenge killing.There is a constant engagement in revenge killing so that the cycle never ends.

It is the way of life on Skender. Upheld by the Law, which is in turn, upheld by the “Righteous Toma,” harsh guardian of the Law. What is the Law? It is nothing other than the ‘consecration of death’ and the belief that revenge killing is honourable, that the family that remains unavenged is disgraced. In other words it is a glorification of death and killing. The Morituri are the young men and women who are being trained by Toma, to take over as future feudists and protectionists of The Law. They chant, “Honour!Strength! Honour!Death!”

Toma has brainwashed them into believing that willingness to embrace death at any time purifies one’s blood. It is the only way to cleanse one’s soul and to make the earth fruitful. With this distorted ideology of honour, he rules Skender with an iron spiritual hand.

Into this forgotten island, comes Xenos, the stranger, but he is no stranger. He is Osip Gora, son of Eleonora the falcon and Anibal, a former feudist who breaks away and solitarily believes that feuding is wrong. Fearless, unswayed by Toma’s rhetoric,Osip chooses the friendship of Kokona, the ancient teacher and Dev, her lover. It is also interesting that Kokona and Dev and a young man Marius, form a minority that oppose the honour killings. On arrival on the island, Osip is almost killed by Bostan. Bostan is the deadliest of the feudists, a designated man.

The designated men are actually women in whose families all the males have been killed off. These women choose to become the avengers of the family name, dress as men and train to use guns to kill. Eleonora, Osip’s mother was a designated man.

What happens to a civilisation when their women abandon mercy and the loving nature of women altogether to become men? It becomes doomed to die. Both Eleonora and Bostan became designated men to avenge their husbands. Eleonora is described as bloodthirsty and hungering for more blood as soon as she has killed. She becomes obssessed by the idea of honour, has no compunctions about sending away her young son so she can get on with the business of killing. Eleonora is soon killed.

Bostan lives a very dangerous life. With his skills as a sharpshooter, he hunts and is constantly hunted until the day he is shot and left for dead.

Rescued by Dev and Osip, Bostan or Bostana, is tended back to life by Osip with whom she falls in love. That changes her completely. Bostana reverts back to her womanly identity and gives up being a designated man. But this cannot take place without deep repercussions. Bostana’s son Zemun, is an indoctrinated disciple of Toma. Blinded by Toma’s teaching and his own desire to kill, he shoots his mother at the height of the reconciliation party. Osip Gora loses the woman he loves, after months of tenderly giving her life. He takes her body away and later, their charred remains are found at his estate.

The novel ends tragically. It is right. It is as it should be. Hope, if it is genuine, can be engendered, only out of deep darkness. As though it were a hard resurrection. Death-defying to the end. Resurrection can’t have been easy. It took Christ three days and three nights to defeat death.

The lovers die. The harbingers of new life possibilities for the island of Skender die. But that is not all. The minority who do not support killing, grow. Kokona is alive though Dev dies and she remains the symbol of life lived with wisdom. She is the most powerful metaphor for the island, the woman who has seen so many deaths that she has grown immune to the fear of death. She is the island. She is the life that surges back.

This is the message of the book, the truth that life is more precious than death. Simple and profound. Like a parable whose truth we easily lose sight of but it never loses meaning. Walk out into the new Spring air and see a crocus pushing up through hoary frost and trying to bloom, that is what the book evokes, the fragile and yet tenacious grip love has on life and the way it gives hope back to it.

This book has tremendously moved me. Once in a long while comes along a writer with great power, of words, yes, but not just of words alone, a writer with a great heart whose heart shows through in his writing. I believe in the message of Moris Farhi here. I don’t feel embarrassed to be a bit hyperbolic. If all the world could read this book, there would be no more wars.
Amen.

Wednesday 8 April 2009

Who am I?

Hei, jeg er en poet, roman og novelleforfatter. Historiene mine er svært visuelle, og jeg setter stor pris på å jobbe med visuelle artister og illustrører.

I det siste har jeg jobbet med et samarbeids prosjekt kalt jazzpoesi hvor jeg komponerer dikt til musikk en venn av meg lager. Jeg er åpen til prosjekter som blander tekst med andre typer kunst og utrykk.

Easterine