she flâneries

A few weeks ago Roving took me to one of the most beautiful cities in Norway: Ålesund on the western coast.  Ålesund is beautiful for two reasons. 1) It is on the western coast of Norway. 2) The city burned down in January 1904 and Kaiser Wilhelm, who had vacationed in the area, paid to rebuild the town center in Art Nouveau style. 

I traveled to Ålesund from Bergen, another of Norway’s lovely cities.  Even though every cultural guide warns against drawing parallels between one’s home culture and the place one is visiting, I couldn’t help but think that Ålesund is a little like Taos to Bergen’s Santa Fe.

Here’s Bergen:

Here’s Ålesund:

Ålesund is smaller, possibly more beautiful still than Bergen, and remarkably consistent in its commitment to Art Nouveau style.

 

I was smitten by the local museum dedicated to Art Nouveau, and I couldn’t stop taking pictures.

From the owl motif on the banister:

To the modest desk that reminded me of my own Arts and Crafts Movement desk back in St. Louis:

Everywhere was evidence of the early twentieth century effort to capture the symmetry of nature in art.

The story of Ålesund’s fire is perhaps not that different from other cities of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  San Francisco, of course, springs to the mind of this western historian.  Nonetheless, there was something especially poignant about the museum’s account of everyday people of Ålesund suddenly homeless and hungry in the middle of winter in Norway.  The museum includes a small rotating exhibition, and I was fortunate to catch the photographs of Margrethe Svendsen, who documented the city in the late 1890s and Petrine Wiik, who photographed Ålesund in the years following the fire.

Their work reminded me of the ways in which women see other women in cities.  Where women’s work and leisure might have been invisible to other visitors, Svendsen and Wiik saw women on bicycles, swapping stories on a stoop, and tending shop.  I was entranced by a stereographic card of little girls sharing a tea party:

Women who tour cities, observe and absorb are not often who we imagine when we imagine the urban rover.  It was men, after all, who roamed New York by gas light.

But it was women who were on my mind.  All three of Norway’s Roving Scholars are women this year, and just the day before my leisure in Ålesund, I had visited with teachers from Cypress at Ålesund Videregåndeskole.  One mentioned that I had the perfect name for my work this year.  “You know the flâneur?” said my Cypriot interlocutor.  “Yes, I do!” I said, realization slowly dawning.  My husband, an ardent Francophile, has long appreciated the resonance between my name and that of the nineteenth-century Parisian urban wanderer.  “Well, you have the perfect name,” she said with confidence.  “Because that is what the flâneur does.  He flâneries!  And that is what you will do here in Norway as you visit city to city.”

My morning at the museum complete, I walked through Ålesund and up into the hill above the city.  Rain first threatened and then fell.

   

The pictures, I am afraid, do not quite do the hike justice.  I had left my camera at home in Oslo, and I took all the photos here with my phone.  But that’s all right.  I’ll be back.  That’s how I flânerie.

Water Buffalo Bill

In honor of this week’s Western History Association meeting in Tucson, Arizona, I am sharing what I consider to be my greatest find thus far in Norway: a Tarzan comic book featuring Wild West show performer Buffalo Bill…in Norwegian!

What was Buffalo Bill doing in the jungles of Africa hanging with the Apenes Konge?  Well, since I don’t speak Norwegian, at first it appeared to me that he had arrived to wrestle a triceratops and battle a tank.  But, no – turns out the tank is in a separate story.

I confess that I wasn’t entirely surprised to see Buffalo Bill sharing the page with another iconic figure of nineteenth-century primitivism.  As the historian Louis Warren well explains, Buffalo Bill (William Cody) was both a malleable cultural symbol and a man who knew his own symbolic power.  He even served as inspiration for parts of Bram Stoker’s Dracula.  Who’s to say Cody didn’t have something to do with Tarzan too? 

In presentations to high school students here in Norway, Tarzan has even come up and allowed me to mention my fabulous flea market find.  In a presentation on Native Americans, I describe the stereotypes of the “savage savage” and the “noble savage” and how such stereotypes affect contemporary native people. 

English is a part of the core curriculum in Norway, and students are quite proficient in the language.  The term “savage,” however is new to most of them, and I have struggled to describe it.  Teachers are reluctant to allow Norwegian in their English classrooms, so I have cast about for synonyms in English with which teenagers might be familiar: “Um…primitive….simple….” I pause and gesture to the phrases on the screen while I stall for time. “It can be both an adjective and a noun….and…um…It means uncivilized.”  In one class, somewhat to the teacher’s consternation, the students began to chatter in Norwegian. “Villmann?” They asked.  “Yes!” I said.  We moved on, but one student frowned and squirmed for the remainder of our time.  Finally, at the end, she asked, “Villmann?  Like Tarzan?”  “Yes!” I said again, thrilled to babble on about my new comic book.  I thought the student had great historical insight.  Indeed, as my colleague Rachel St. John pointed out when I mentioned the comic to her: “How very nineteenth century!”

 

Except that the comic book is from 1977.

How can this be? Well, let’s contextualize, shall we?

A little B+ research (that’s Googling for those of you who have just joined the blog) revealed that there was a major oil blowout in the North Sea in 1977.  In fact, it was the worst in Norwegian history.  I was initially elated to discover this.  Not, you know, because I’m happy about oil spills, but because that would explain the environmental anxiety of the story.  Tarzan frets over the water buffalo, worried that it will be taken to the United States for Buffalo Bill’s show.  Later, when the triceratops shows up, Tarzan is more successful than Buffalo Bill in subduing it.  And he is utterly scornful when Buffalo Bill starts dropping the names of his fellow celebrities.  

No doubt there was a fair amount of anxiety about humans’ mastery of nature following the 1977 blowout.  Such wrangling over who gets top billing as Chief Wrangler makes sense.  Does nature require a gentle touch or a firm hand?

All this was great.  Except that the blowout occurred in April of 1977, and the comic book must be from late February or March, thus its injunction to “Kjøp nytt Tarzan 19. Mars!”

So, what was going on in 1977 before April?  Some more B+ research revealed that concern over African wildlife hunting – particularly elephant hunting for ivory – was acute in 1977.  Kenya banned the hunting of all wildlife that year, and 1977 remains the cutoff for import of wild ivory to the United States.  My guess is that the triceratops and the water buffalo were stand-ins for elephants. (But I’d have to do A-level research to be sure.) 

Could the beauty of primitive Africa have arrived on U.S. shores?  Not if Tarzan had anything to do with it.  At the close of the issue, Buffalo Bill offers Tarzan a job as an animal trainer and a role as the “Savage of Borneo.”  

Tarzan gives him a scornful look before taking the triceratops back to its homeland.  In the final frame, Buffalo Bill announces that he’ll never understand foreigners.  It would appear that 1977 Tarzan had a few more economic options than did 1877 Native American performers. 

And Native Americans, of course, aren’t foreigners.  Students here still watch the Simpsons and are delighted to review the episode “Much Apu about Nothing,” in which an Indian American becomes a citizen like his friend, Homer, a self-proclaimed “native American” whose daughter reminds him not to forget the first American Indians.  Regardless of their English ability, most students here seem to catch on that the plot of Dances with Wolves is familiar…they’ve seen this story before…of course…Avatar! 

But whether they’re in the pages of a comic book or on the rodeo stage or in outer space, we ask a lot of our villmenn.  They must achieve, nay, embody an understanding of nature that their observers do not have.  I teach the meaning of the word, but ultimately my students here know better before they walk into my class.  Whether noble or brutal, there’s no such thing as a savage.

    

Nature Bingo

Recently my son asked that I discuss him less online. 

“Of course.” I said.

But then I learned he had played Nature Bingo at a sculpture fair for children.

“May I talk about Nature Bingo on my blog?” I asked.

“Only if you don’t mention me,” he said.

“But I wasn’t even there,” I said. “How can I describe it without mentioning you?”

“You could say this,” he said. “Recently, my family learned how to play Nature Bingo.  They learned at a sculpture fair.  You find things outside like rocks and pine cones.  We had everything we needed except a bird song.  But then a crow cawed and so we won.”

“Are you talking about Nature Bingo?” asked my husband.

“Yes,” I said, “But I am not supposed to mention anyone by name.” 

“Can I be Commander Cool?” asked my husband.

“Of course,” I said. “How did you know to look for a bird song and not just a bird?” I asked. 

“The squares were marked with an eye, a hand, and an ear,” said Commander Cool.

“Cool!” I said.

“Commander Cool,” said my son.

And that is how you play Nature Bingo.

My family came home at sunset and took this lovely picture.