Personal – Koba English

Doktor Glas Daily

One of the few books I have left of my personal library at my parents’ house in the US is a Swedish paperback copy of Doktor Glas. It’s an early testament to my Swedish studies, with penciled notes covering the first page (after which point I gave up taking notes). I flipped through it while I was home, without anything else in Swedish except Min är hämnden—which was of course dependent on how quickly I could get through the French first. As my eyes fell over the opening paragraph, I remembered the email newsletter that I’d heard so much about: Dracula Daily. In case you missed it, web designer Matt Kirkland got the idea to set up a Substack that sends subscribers bite-sized (har har) chunks of Dracula to people via email. Dracula is an epistolary novel, so the episodic format of an email newsletter pretty neatly aligns with the original structure of the novel. On the dates of the letters (or newspaper articles, etc.), the newsletter sends out the corresponding chapter by email. It’s become quite popular. There are memes.

Then I noticed that the date of the first entry in Doktor Glas, June 12, wasn’t too far behind the actual calendar date.

Wouldn’t it be fun to do a version of Dracula Daily with this?

Thus I read Doktor Glas for the third or fourth time, this time in brief extracts, letting the story unfold for me in real time at the same pace as it unfolds for Tyko Glas.

I’d previously done a short walking tour of Stockholm based on the book as well. It was a fantastic idea, but presented through a bloated app that was a bit too gimmicky for the source material and that just about drained all the battery life out of my phone in little over an hour. Maybe one year I’ll combine the two and attempt to be in the right places on the right dates to get my reading done.

I mention all of this because October 7 is the date of the final chapter in Doktor Glas. This year’s reading is now over, and I can say that reading a book in this kind of controlled release format had a surprising effect on the entire experience.

Normally when you read a novel you’re compressing days, months, years of time into a few hours of a reading experience, or quite possibly extending a day or even just one or two hours of events into a reading experience that’s much longer than twenty-four hours. (I defy anyone, for example, to get through all of Ulysses in a single day.) But when you move through the story at the same speed as the character does, it becomes embodied in a very specific way. You have to move through the same stretches of time as them, waiting just as long as they do for something to happen. With the specific combination of Doktor Glas and living in Stockholm, the setting around you cycles through the same seasons that Glas describes. (Climate change reading of Doktor Glas: how do his descriptions of weather in Stockholm from June to September compare to what the equivalent period is like here now?)

On a spookier note, at times the practice took on a spiritual dimension, not dissimilar to what Zoltan describes in “Reading Jane Eyre as a Sacred Text.” There were even moments when it felt like outright bibliomancy. On a day when I felt absolutely terrible, for example, because I felt like I had made a fool out of myself in matters of friendship, Glas addresses the jilted Fru Gregorious: “Du måste komma över det. Du skall se att livet ännu har mycket för dig. Du skall vara stark.” Coincidence or not, there was something comforting about stumbling across those exact words in that precise moment.

The Dracula Daily format is also a fun exercise in patience and delayed gratification in a world where the default habit is to consume an entire book, show, series, whatever as quickly as possible. On the one hand it can make a big important classic less intimidating, but for something as relatively short as Doktor Glas it has the opposite effect, slowing you down and preventing you from reading the whole thing in just a few days. You pay closer attention. If all I have to read today is this paragraph, then I might as well look up this or that word that I can kind of guess at but don’t know for certain. I might as well read the whole section two or three times. Several weeks go by without any entries, building anticipation; other times the next chapter is no longer the inevitable forward momentum of a story but a pleasant surprise that you had nearly forgotten about.

This was a rewarding exercise and I’m grateful to Matt Kirkland for inadvertently giving me the idea. I look forward to applying it to other books.

Vacation Reading List 2024, Part 2

I just returned from a quick trip to London and then Dalarna. It was a short one with a lot of activities (visiting friends, chores at a summer house) so I didn’t plan much reading beyond:

Latest issue of Historiskan
Latest issue of Karavan
The Bright Ages (ebook)
My daily reading of Doktor Glas (inspired by the phenomenon of Dracula Daily)

and then the emergency book in my purse (Truth: A Brief History of Total Bullshit)

Did I succeed in only reading what I planned to read? Of course not!

Latest issue of Historiskan
Latest issue of Situation STHLM
Latest issue of Karavan (still a few stories left)
The Bright Ages
My daily reading of Doktor Glas
Chokepoint Capitalism
En rackarunge

At some point I became so worried about finishing Truth too early and being left without an emergency book that I read literally anything else. I also came home with three (3) new books. Oops.

Other trip highlights include The British Library, a fantastic clarinet performance at The Foundling Museum, long walks along the canal in Hackney Wick, dinner at Dishoom, and a visit to Newspeak House. Oh, and disappearing into the woods to pick a copious amount of berries, feeding rabbits, hauling firewood, my first-ever games of Kubb, and taking a cave buddy to Falu Gruva.

Vacation Reading List 2024, Part 1: Follow-Up

How did my reading goals for my recent vacation shake out?

Back issues of Karavan and Historiskan for the journey

Halfway. I finished Historiskan (and some old issues of Situation Stockholm) by the time I boarded my flight out of Reykjavik, but I never got around to Karavan.

I have La vengeance m’appartient by Marie NDiaye in paperback from the library and in Swedish (Min är hämnden) on my phone

I made substantial progress on this. I didn’t finish it, but I came real close (and would have probably finished it on the flight home if I hadn’t left the book at my parents, prayers for its safe return). Bonus: one of my US libraries has the English translation in ebook so I can compare all three!

I also have digital copies of Burnout: The Emotional Experience of Political Defeat by Hannah Proctor and The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe by Matthew Gabriele and David M. Perry

I dipped into Bright Ages now and again. My loan expired and then it was unavailable for a while, so I didn’t quite finish it. I read maybe, like, one page of Burnout.

Last year I left my copy of David Graeber’s Debt at my parents’ house, so maybe I’ll pick it up a third time to see if anything more sticks

Didn’t even see this around the house so I’m not sure if I actually left it there, or if it got put away or thrown out or something else.

Of course, now that I’ve written all that down, I will immediately get distracted by a library or bookstore and wander over to something completely unrelated

This is indeed the way. Even before I left, on what I didn’t realize would be my last visit to Stadsbiblioteket for several years, I checked out Ali Smith’s Summer (hefty book; stayed home) and Elizabeth Smart’s By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept (very skinny book; came with me). Once in US bookstores, however, I forced myself to stick to my TBR goals. In Chicago I picked up Refuse to Be Done and Mumbo Jumbo.

I also removed a garbage-tier mid-century iteration of The Law of Attraction from a Little Free Library, read the whole thing on my surprise Amtrak journey from Indianapolis to Philadelphia, and abandoned it at the Port Authority Bus Terminal. This isn’t like the time where I hoped that I had released Braiding Sweetgrass into the wild to spread and propagate. I mean I literally threw the book in the garbage. I originally picked it up because the cover looked sufficiently vintage enough to be an interesting period piece, at least, and then only later realized what it actually was. I no longer remember the title or author, and even if I did I wouldn’t want to include it in my reading for the year because The Law of Attraction and all its ilk feels…icky.

But after that I refrained from acquiring more books, mostly because I was so engrossed with La vengeance m’appartient. (With time off to read By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept in one sitting.)

Pretty good work all around, I’d say!

Vacation Reading List 2024, Part 1

Another visit back to the US this Saturday! What are my reading plans?

Back issues of Karavan and Historiskan for the journey.
I have La vengeance m’appartient by Marie NDiaye in paperback from the library and in Swedish (Min är hämnden) on my phone.
I also have digital copies of Burnout: The Emotional Experience of Political Defeat by Hannah Proctor and The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe by Matthew Gabriele and David M. Perry.
Last year I left my copy of David Graeber’s Debt at my parents’ house, so maybe I’ll pick it up a third time to see if anything more sticks.

Of course, now that I’ve written all that down, I will immediately get distracted by a library or bookstore and wander over to something completely unrelated. This is the way.

Litteraturmässan 2024: Konsten att läsa

Another Litteraturmässan has come and gone! What did I learn about the art of reading from the various talks and panels I attended?

1. Eight poets
Not much. I only dipped in after Somaya El Sousi’s reading and wasn’t particularly taken by what was on offer so I dipped out quickly thereafter. Instead, I bought a copy of her poetry collection and sat with it throughout the day. I’m left wondering if listening to her read would have made any difference. I’m also left wondering how to address the apparent gap in my Swedish where spoken poetry becomes just an incomprehensible wave of sound, why is that?

2. Missenträsk revisited
I wasn’t originally planning to attend this one because I don’t know anything about Sarah Lidman, but I got drawn into the discussion with Jennifer Hayashida as I was walking by the stage and stood and listened to nearly the entirety of it. While my own feelings about literary translation as a career constantly waver from “wow living the dream” to “too much pressure for me to handle,” I am drawn like a moth to the flame of literary translators themselves. Sometimes envious, always admiring.

3. What do we do when we read?
This was billed as a “phenomenological investigation,” and while I don’t think it was quite that deep, Nioosha Shams was also so engaging that I stopped in my tracks to listen. Fun to see the topic of bibliomancy come up at a serious academic event.

4. Renew your library card
The one talk that I had actually scheduled in my life after a concerted effort to finish Singulariteten, but like the two previous talks, Karam was so lively and charming I probably would have wandered into it anyway. The meaning of libraries for nerdy kids from decidedly non-academic families, how they should (and shouldn’t) be designed and supported.

5. Four poets
I had an easier time with this poetry reading. Maybe because this was a different genre/generation of poets, or maybe because this was the evening portion of the event at Musikaliska Kvarteret and I had started imbibing, who knows. That said, this is where I began to feel like a dinosaur even though the people in charge of putting on this event are (as far as I can judge these things) at least my age if not older. A young man in a t-shirt and jeans and slightly greasy (or maybe heavily stylized with product?) hair looked so nervous and out of place that I wanted to go up and say something friendly to him, but then he turned out to be one of the poets reading this time around. Everyone around me, seated either on the floor or a vintage fancy couch (how bohemian), exuded powerful art student vibes. Nike Markelius read poetry about her mother’s death set to a soundtrack and I got pretty choked up.

6. How to write a novel
Several drinks had happened by now. If you held a gun to my head and asked me to summarize the arguments made by either Stefan Lindberg or Jerker Virdborg, or the main points of “Manifest för ett nytt litterärt decennium,” I would be well dead.

7. Hundra hästar (Maria Törnqvist med band)
Not sure what a musical act had to do with the art of reading, but maybe Maria Törnqvist expressed some of her academic work in the form of song and it just passed me by. The band slapped, at least.

And it was at that point, dear reader, I realized that I was too sleepy and too awkward to enjoy the rest of the night, so I went out on a high note and caught the subway back home.

Vacation Reading List: Debrief

Here was my original plan for this vacation. How have I done so far?

I have two copies of The Little Horses of Tarquinia checked out of the library, one in Swedish and one in French. I don’t normally like to take library books with me on international trips but I’m making an exception this time around. I’m on my way to finishing both of these before my trip is over, if I don’t get distracted by doomscrolling. These have been my steadfast companions during sleepovers and leisurely Amtrak journeys.
~~Back issues of Karavan that I can conveniently leave in airplane seat pockets or on buses without feeling guilty.~~ Couldn’t have paced this better. I have maybe half an issue left, perfect for in-flight reading back home.
Rose/House for the Austin Feminist Sci-Fi Book Club (ebook). Finished!
There’s always The Essays of Michel de Montaigne I have at the ready on my phone. And yet, I don’t think I even opened it.
The Gray House was a free Kindle download on World Translation Day years ago. I was almost immediately put off by the book and had forgotten about it until it turned up as the Armenian entry in the Eurovision Book Contest, so I might give it another shot. Spoiler: I did not give it another shot.
~~A David Graeber paperback of some kind, though whether it’s re-reading Debt or branching out into The Dawn of Everything I have yet to decide.~~ I went with re-reading Debt, and am nearly done that. Whatever I have left unread (un-reread?) will remain so; I brought it along specifically to pass on to my parents.

What did I read instead?

At the last minute I threw an Ester Blenda Nordström book in my bag, just in case I didn’t have enough to read. This was unnecessary. I haven’t even opened it yet.
In Seattle I acquired a copy of Gift From the Sea, which has been on my to-read pile since a friend had me read a selection from it at her wedding in 2015. (Or perhaps 2014?) I finished it on a bus somewhere between Des Moines and Chicago. It is now boxed up, waiting to be shipped to Sweden.
In Des Moines I acquired a copy of Braiding Sweetgrass, which has been recommended and reviewed by several people whose taste I trust. They did not lead me wrong here. I finished it on the bus from Chicago and released it into the wild at a Greyhound station in Indianapolis.
I also had an ebook copy of Severance for our Austin Feminist Sci-Fi Book Club that I forgot to mention in my original list. I finished that, though I barely remember where or when.
While at my parents’ house I relaxed with a couple pieces of kid lit that I’d always meant to read but never got around to: Emil and the Detectives, Berries Goodman.
I also had a package waiting for me from a friend with assorted books. Out of those I finished a precious tiny baby volume of Kafka short stories (the Penguin Classics edition of “The Judgement” and “In the Penal Colony”) and Abraham H. Maslow’s Religions, Values, and Peak-Experiences.
I made a pit stop to renew one of my library cards and immediately picked up I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.
Out of the several boxes of books I was originally intending to mail to Sweden, I blazed through Full House: The Spread of Excellence From Plato to Darwin and passed it on to a friend I thought would be interested in it. I love Stephen Jay Gould but there are other books of his that I’d rather have in my permanent collection.
Down in Austin I acquired a copy of The Barbizon, which has been on my to-read list since it was featured in LitHub back in 2021, and which I blazed through in a day and a half and was able to pass on to another member of the Austin Feminist Sci-Fi Book Club.
Bonus book read in Austin: We Have Always Lived in the Castle.

Every time I travel somewhere, one of my most primal fears is that I won’t have enough to read. And yet this just goes to show that I will always have enough to read.

Vacation Reading List

This coming Saturday I’ll be in the US for six weeks or so, visiting family and catching up with assorted friends all over the country. So far my itinerary includes Seattle, Portland, Des Moines, Philadelphia and the Lehigh Valley, and very likely Austin. What portion of the book backlog will I be catching up on in all these places?

I have two copies of The Little Horses of Tarquinia checked out of the library, one in Swedish and one in French. I don’t normally like to take library books with me on international trips but I’m making an exception this time around.
Back issues of Karavan that I can conveniently leave in airplane seat pockets or on buses without feeling guilty.
Rose/House for the Austin Feminist Sci-Fi Book Club (ebook).
There’s always The Essays of Michel de Montaigne I have at the ready on my phone.
The Gray House was a free Kindle download on World Translation Day years ago. I was almost immediately put off by the book and had forgotten about it until it turned up as the Armenian entry in the Eurovision Book Contest, so I might give it another shot.
A David Graeber paperback of some kind, though whether it’s re-reading Debt or branching out into The Dawn of Everything I have yet to decide.

Beyond that, I expect I will wander into bookstores while I’m in the US—never mind what I might have left at my parents’ house—so I’m deliberately exercising restraint when it comes to packing books. And, of course, now that I’ve written up an aspirational list, I’ve all but guaranteed that I’ll read everything else except those!

The Big Balloon (A Love Story)

I decided to get an early start on some classic New Year’s resolutions like decluttering and ending long-term toxic relationships by having an emergency gallbladder removal two days after Christmas!

Medical drawing of a gallbladder — This one does not spark joy!

It also left me with three and a half days of nothing to do but chip away at my ebook collection; I didn’t take my purse and its ever-present paperback with me to the ER, as I fully expected to return home the same day. Well, well, well. Fortunately my phone is a miniature library of obscure and half-forgotten ebooks and I could keep myself distracted in the long waits between ultrasounds and discussions with surgeons. Most of that time was spent with the back half of Rick Berlin’s The Big Balloon (A Love Story), which up to that point I’d been reading on my morning commute.

I’m not hip to the Boston art scene, I didn’t know who Rick Berlin was before I bought the book, I’d never heard of any of his musical projects. But he put out an ad for the book on one of my go-to podcasts and since the premise sounded unique, or at least interesting, I decided to give it a try. I feel that’s only worth mentioning because someone who’s either a fan of Berlin, or familiar with his artistic milieu, will probably have a different response to it than I did.

Out of every possible Pandemic Project or Pandemic Novel, The Big Balloon is maybe the only one I can imagine that will be at all tolerable to revisit in more normal times (if we ever have more normal times). Even though the book is the direct result of COVID-19, it’s never about COVID-19. The conceit is simply this: The Big Balloon is a collection photos of items around Berlin’s home and reflections, stories and reminisces related to each item. Each little essay is entirely self-contained, with no attempt to impose chronological or thematic order on the collection (aside from organizing it into chapters based on rooms). The result is like a literary version of a Cubist portrait, where different years of Berlin’s life and different aspects of himself are presented simultaneously—or as close to simultaneously as you can get in something you read. Something about using the limitations of lockdowns to open up a vast interior world, etc. etc.

The Big Balloon worked well for commute and hospital reading because each essay was never especially long, so I could dip in and out according to subway arrivals or morphine-addled focus. And that was precisely the intended effect:

There is no linear structure to this book. No over-arching narrative. Each entry is self-contained. One piece can relate to another, but it isn’t necessary to make that connection. The reader can pick it up, crack it open anywhere, read a section and put it down. The ‘chapters’ are just the rooms in my house.

It could be said that I chose this odd-ball format for bathroom reading. For those with short attention spans. On the other hand, much as I love the twists and turns of a full blown story, the Haiku simplicity of disparate entries exposes Berlin as if opening the paper window flaps of a Twelve Days Of Christmas holiday card in no particular order.

The highly personal nature of the material also, in a way, made up for the fact that I wasn’t allowed to have any visitors. I wasn’t exactly starved for social contact generally, between the two other patients sharing my room and chatting with the nurses doing their rounds, but that’s not the same as time with your nearest and dearest in the darkest, coldest days of the year. The next best thing was Berlin plunging right to the depths of his own psyche to share with me, and the rest of his readership:

The Big Balloon is super personal. Most art, at least the art I love best, is personal. From another’s truth one extrapolates one’s own echo, wisdom, embarrassment and laughter. That’s what I’d hope for you, dear reader. That you’d laugh or at least find something self-relevant in these independent passages of my peculiar life.

A creative not-so-little undertaking that makes me want to ask the same of my friends, or save up for a dry spell on the ol’ bloggo. “Choose ten things around your house and write an essay about each one of them.” Maybe make that an additional step in the KonMari method.

Happy New Year!

Three Weeks in Östersund

Despite being my longest vacation in a good long while, compared to other vacations I have the least to say about Östersund after the fact. This is hardly surprising; after all, I set out with the intention of making this trip as low-key and do-nothing as possible. It ended up being slightly more do-nothing than I maybe intended, seeing as I forgot that at least one of the museums I wanted to visit closed for the season in the middle of my trip, but no matter! I finished all of the books on my Östersund reading list, so I’m calling this vacation a win.

The most eventful part of the trip was dealing with my lodgings. I booked a loft apartment AirBnB close to the water for most of the trip, but for the first and last nights I wanted to stay in town so I didn’t have to stress about catching buses and all of my bags and so on.

A dock and breaker leading into the water, on an overcast day with a bench in the foreground. — I did a fair chunk of reading here.

My first hotel was an absolute pit—a “Best Western” I booked using grocery store customer loyalty points that bait-and-switched me into a run-down hostel that was pretty clearly a separate commercial operation altogether—and then on my second to last day I realized my booking at the same “Best Western” had never gone through. I don’t like booking lodgings at the last minute (it was too late to try to use more loyalty points), but on the plus side it was much nicer than the first place and not at a ridiculous cost. The same price, actually, I would have paid for my first room if I’d been paying in cash.

As for tourist attractions, I made a couple visits to Jamtli and also stopped by Frösö сhurch.

In an unexpected turn of events, one of my Stockholm friends was also up for an overnight stay in Östersund for schooling related matters. That’s how our first in-person interaction in nearly two years ended up happening in another city entirely.

An askew view of two half-empty beers and a small blue bowl of French fries on a black table. — That hand is proof I wasn’t drinking alone at Bishop’s Arms.

Now it’s really properly fall. Lazy summer days are over and it’s back to the grindstone. I have a few months’ grace time to focus on my own studies before the high season kicks in at work, so I better make good use of it.

Paris: The Four Hot Takes

(I’m still in Östersund, so perfect time to talk about a previous vacation!)

Paris smells like piss, everyone smokes, and there’s ham in everything. That’s the second thing I noticed. The first thing was straight off airplane, thrust into the chaos of the RER line to Paris being serviced by a bus replacement: my French listening comprehension had dwindled to absolutely worthless. If it had ever been worth anything. That impression faded, however, while the piss, the smoking, and the ham were constants throughout the trip.

Fortunately for those of us who can’t stand ham, there are croque poulets in the world.

It was a singular moment to be in Paris. It was the best of times (midsummer!), the worst of times (Roe, a suicide in my sambo’s family), the weirdest of times (the Banksy art theft trial). Everything was very surreal. I thought a lot about Weimar Germany, especially at the cabaret performance we had booked on Wednesday night.

In addition to the cabaret, I had a full agenda for basically the whole trip, happy to cede the planning to someone else who had been to Paris already and was familiar-ish with everything. As a result, the trip was a good balance of The Hits (Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe, Shakespeare and Company, the Luxembourg Gardens, the catacombs) and slightly more offbeat destinations (aforementioned cabaret show, only a quick driveby the outside of the Louvre, a very specific crepe place).

We drank a lot of wine and ate a lot of cheese, but we also walked all over except for one metro trip and one Uber trip, so it didn’t feel particularly indolent. I certainly caught my fair share of sun.

By the end of my trip, it also dawned on me just how successfully Paris tourism has capitalized on its literary history. That was the fourth thing I noticed. You can visit Bar Hemingway if you’re lucky—there’s only 25 seats in the whole place. There’s a line down the block at Shakespeare and Company less than an hour after opening, even on a weekday. The same can be said for Les Deux Magots and Cafe Flore, which are now officially located at “Place Sartre-Beauvoir.”

Paris is a city that knows how to market itself, and maybe that’s why I wasn’t particularly sad to leave it. I had a great time—there’s certainly more to do in Paris than you can do in a week—but there was nothing charming or romantic that even tempted me to fantasize about another, more Parisian life. Paris syndrome came to mind. Whether it’s romance or philosophy or jazz, people show up with this crystallized ideal in their head and then you realize that the clubs and cafes your favorite artists frequented are unnaturally, unnervingly the same as they were back then…and therefore different. They are fossilized and lifeless; today’s de Beauvoirs and Hemingways and Baldwins are in completely different clubs in completely different neighborhoods. The cycle continues and in another hundred years they’ll also be tourist destinations—assuming humanity makes it that long.

On the other hand, An American in Paris still felt very much like an on-point tonal portrait of the city, even though it’s nearly 100 years old and even though Paris has seen some pretty tough, drastic history since then.

Memorial for Jewish children from the local neighborhood who died in the Holocaust.

And Paris is huge. Going from my little village suburb of Stockholm into the 6th Arrondissement was probably just as overwhelming as switching languages. So many cars, so many sirens, so many people. Even Gamla Stan, probably the nearest analogue Stockholm has, is calmer and quieter, the narrower streets making it hard for there to be all that much car traffic. Which bookends very nicely to the first thing I noticed: my French was shit.

Which again, shouldn’t have been a surprise. But I can negotiate daily life in Swedish without really any hiccups; in Korea I was there for a year at time, part of a larger system that included other NESTs and hagwon owners willing to scrounge up the occasional babysitter for tasks like visas and bank visits. Trying to operate in French was like trying to shift gears without a clutch, and I didn’t have the time to get the hang of it. Swedish, in comparison, was immediately lucid. Comprehension was instantaneous. I was surprised at how much of a relief it was to hear it again.

Imagine my surprise at meeting another Swede.

Borta bra men hemma bäst. There’s no place like home.