Speaking of Scots language...!
"First book in Harry Potter series translated into Scots" (BBC news article)
Awww. This makes me happy.
"Mr and Mrs Dursley, o nummer fower, Privet Loan, were prood tae say that they were gey normal, thank ye verra much..."
Friday, November 10, 2017
Tuesday, November 7, 2017
Say It in Doric
Today our professor gave us a lecture in Doric. By which I mean: He gave a lecture, and the language that he was speaking as he did so was Doric.
Doric is the variety of Scots spoken in this region of Scotland, the Northeast. Scots, in turn, is a language related to English (unlike Gaelic, which is a very different language). I've seen Scots described as a language...or a dialect...it seems to be one of those gray areas where linguists can debate endlessly what constitutes a language and what a dialect. My professor just referred to it as the "vernacular."
This came up when we were in class, working on topics relating to the provision of bilingual English/Gaelic library services in the western parts of Scotland where Gaelic is spoken. And our professor started talking about Scots, and how there hasn't been as much support for maintaining it as there has been for Gaelic. Then it turned out a couple years ago he gave a lecture in Doric (he grew up speaking it, switching between Doric for home and English for school) and he asked if we'd like to hear some of that lecture.
We said YES. (Or at least, I did!)
It was so fascinating. (Both the content of the lecture – about Doric language, literature and culture – and simply the fact of getting to hear so much Doric spoken at a stretch.) I would say I got the gist of pretty much everything he talked about, even if I certainly didn't understand every word, and I'm very pleased about that.
To give you an example of how different Doric is and isn't, here's the title of the talk:
Fa div ye think ye are
Or fit we hiv forgottin tae mine aboot
(translation: Who do you think you are
Or what we've forgotten to remember)
You can see how it's in some ways recognizable as English or at least English-adjacent, but also has very different vocabulary and pronunciation. ("What" becomes "fit," "when" becomes "fin," "who" becomes "fa," etc. – so there are regular patterns of vowel shifts and such between standard English and Scots, but the overall result ends up looking quite different between the two languages.)
SO COOL! Definitely another thing I would not have gotten to learn about if I'd gone to grad school in Boston.
Doric is the variety of Scots spoken in this region of Scotland, the Northeast. Scots, in turn, is a language related to English (unlike Gaelic, which is a very different language). I've seen Scots described as a language...or a dialect...it seems to be one of those gray areas where linguists can debate endlessly what constitutes a language and what a dialect. My professor just referred to it as the "vernacular."
This came up when we were in class, working on topics relating to the provision of bilingual English/Gaelic library services in the western parts of Scotland where Gaelic is spoken. And our professor started talking about Scots, and how there hasn't been as much support for maintaining it as there has been for Gaelic. Then it turned out a couple years ago he gave a lecture in Doric (he grew up speaking it, switching between Doric for home and English for school) and he asked if we'd like to hear some of that lecture.
We said YES. (Or at least, I did!)
It was so fascinating. (Both the content of the lecture – about Doric language, literature and culture – and simply the fact of getting to hear so much Doric spoken at a stretch.) I would say I got the gist of pretty much everything he talked about, even if I certainly didn't understand every word, and I'm very pleased about that.
To give you an example of how different Doric is and isn't, here's the title of the talk:
Fa div ye think ye are
Or fit we hiv forgottin tae mine aboot
(translation: Who do you think you are
Or what we've forgotten to remember)
You can see how it's in some ways recognizable as English or at least English-adjacent, but also has very different vocabulary and pronunciation. ("What" becomes "fit," "when" becomes "fin," "who" becomes "fa," etc. – so there are regular patterns of vowel shifts and such between standard English and Scots, but the overall result ends up looking quite different between the two languages.)
SO COOL! Definitely another thing I would not have gotten to learn about if I'd gone to grad school in Boston.
Wednesday, November 1, 2017
Libraries on the Move (Literally)
Okay, mobile libraries are officially my new favorite thing. What an amazing way to provide a lot of service to a really wide (rural, low-population density) area. And they all seem so very, very cheerful about it!
(Yes, I got sucked into watching yet another charming short video about one of the mobile libraries in the Outer Hebrides. And you know, just saying that – that my research for an assignment led me to the looking into the mobile libraries of the Outer Hebrides – really drives home that that's not something I would have gotten to learn much about if I'd done library school in Boston or New York, is it?)
If you feel so inclined, and if you want to be seriously impressed by how much a library can do with quite little, check out the Lewis Mobile Library:
Or, for that matter, the Harris Mobile Library:
(There's a wonderful little bit of Gaelic spoken in the Lewis one. And charming shots of schoolkids filing into the library van to check out books in the Harris one. Some of the roads the van is traveling in that Lewis video are single lane, with periodic pull-out spots for those rare cases when there are actually vehicles traveling in both directions at the same time – that's how remote some of these places are.)
Also, because I can't ever go long without pointing out how awesome Orkney Library is, I'd just like to mention that Orkney's mobile library is named "Booky McBookface" and it tweets out which of Orkney's islands it's going to visit each day. E.g.:
(Yes, I got sucked into watching yet another charming short video about one of the mobile libraries in the Outer Hebrides. And you know, just saying that – that my research for an assignment led me to the looking into the mobile libraries of the Outer Hebrides – really drives home that that's not something I would have gotten to learn much about if I'd done library school in Boston or New York, is it?)
If you feel so inclined, and if you want to be seriously impressed by how much a library can do with quite little, check out the Lewis Mobile Library:
Or, for that matter, the Harris Mobile Library:
(There's a wonderful little bit of Gaelic spoken in the Lewis one. And charming shots of schoolkids filing into the library van to check out books in the Harris one. Some of the roads the van is traveling in that Lewis video are single lane, with periodic pull-out spots for those rare cases when there are actually vehicles traveling in both directions at the same time – that's how remote some of these places are.)
Also, because I can't ever go long without pointing out how awesome Orkney Library is, I'd just like to mention that Orkney's mobile library is named "Booky McBookface" and it tweets out which of Orkney's islands it's going to visit each day. E.g.:
Sunday, October 22, 2017
Library Dork
Oh, goodness, I am really such a dork.
My master's program is already having us submit preferences for the fieldwork placement we do in April, so I'm doing background research by looking up lots of interesting public libraries. (Anyone who knows me will probably not be surprised to hear that my definition of "interesting" tends towards obscure locations, remote/dramatic/stormy-northern-Atlantic islands, and communities that speak dialects or minority languages.)
Anyway, so I spent an afternoon getting misty-eyed over charming little videos shot by various local libraries to promote their services. Videos showing all the many ways kids and adults use their library in Gaelic-speaking County Donegal, Ireland, for example, or the vital services provided by the mobile libraries that drive around to small communities and housebound individuals in the remotest parts of the Outer Hebrides in Scotland.
Libraries! Communities! Books! Languages! So many things I love! I want to go to all these places...
Meanwhile, though, I'll leave you with the delight that is Orkney Library's Twitter. They have a Twitter feud with Shetland Library (Shetland is also a remote Scottish archipelago, but even more remote than Orkney). They got J. K. Rowling to show up to their book club. They create puns entirely out of book covers. Oh, and just incidentally they provide award-winning service to a part of Scotland that seems like it should be the far-flung edge of the world.
Orkney Library is my new crush.
My master's program is already having us submit preferences for the fieldwork placement we do in April, so I'm doing background research by looking up lots of interesting public libraries. (Anyone who knows me will probably not be surprised to hear that my definition of "interesting" tends towards obscure locations, remote/dramatic/stormy-northern-Atlantic islands, and communities that speak dialects or minority languages.)
Anyway, so I spent an afternoon getting misty-eyed over charming little videos shot by various local libraries to promote their services. Videos showing all the many ways kids and adults use their library in Gaelic-speaking County Donegal, Ireland, for example, or the vital services provided by the mobile libraries that drive around to small communities and housebound individuals in the remotest parts of the Outer Hebrides in Scotland.
Libraries! Communities! Books! Languages! So many things I love! I want to go to all these places...
Meanwhile, though, I'll leave you with the delight that is Orkney Library's Twitter. They have a Twitter feud with Shetland Library (Shetland is also a remote Scottish archipelago, but even more remote than Orkney). They got J. K. Rowling to show up to their book club. They create puns entirely out of book covers. Oh, and just incidentally they provide award-winning service to a part of Scotland that seems like it should be the far-flung edge of the world.
Orkney Library is my new crush.
Sunday, October 1, 2017
Aberdeen First Impressions
Nearly three weeks in Aberdeen, and I have first impressions to share!
(This is going to be quite long and scattershot, since it's a jumble of impressions from these entire first three weeks. I still can't promise I'll have much time to write anything during the semester, but if I do, future posts should be a bit more coordinated than this first one!)
ABERDEEN: FIRST IMPRESSIONS
I arrived in the city under relentless rain, which I sense will become a theme. I've lived in a lot of changeable-weather places, a lot of places that take a perverse pride in saying things like "If you don't like the weather – just wait five minutes!" But I've never experienced anything quite like this.
Aberdeen goes from bright sun to pouring rain with whiplash speed, so many times in one afternoon that I lose count. I went on a walking tour of Aberdeen street art (more on that later) and in that hour or so I can't tell you how many times I went...Oh wait, is it raining all of a sudden? Better put my umbrella up. Wait, it's not raining anymore, why am I holding this umbrella? Wait, is it raining AGAIN?
Here's the view out my window, in a rare moment of sun:
Aberdeen is known as the "granite city" and it is indeed a sea of granite grey. It doesn't quite have that "seriously every single building looks like a castle" vibe of Edinburgh, but it's definitely got a bit of that.
It's a maritime city, centered around the offshore North Sea oil industry, which has apparently made it very international. (Someone told me that there is or at least used to be a French school, an American school, even a Dutch school, because so many people come through here for the oil industry.)
I accidentally went to the Maritime Museum (I was actually only trying to find a bathroom, but a museum employee handed me a brochure the moment I walked in the door, and everyone was so nice that I felt I really ought to look at their museum) and got this view over the harbor:
I'm still laughing at myself because long before I'd done the more necessary things like setting up a bank account or even a phone, I'd already gone and gotten a public library card. And accidentally checked out eight books the very first day I had the card. You can take the girl out of the library, but, well, you know the rest!
(One of my flatmates also made the mistake of asking me for book recommendations, and I wrote her out a whole page of titles... I hadn't had a chance to do "reader's advisory" – as it's called within the library field – in a while, and I got enthused.)
Both the central library and the little library in my neighborhood are quite charming. Among many other things, it made me grin that they'd made their own display signs for various genres. Here's a sign for "romance" with their own made-up titles incorporating specifically Aberdeen things:
("Claimed by the Oil Tycoon" (self-explanatory); "One Night at the Thistle Hotel" (thistles = a Scottish symbol); "Dalliance in the Duthie Park" (a big local park in Aberdeen))
Ah, so many quirky British things I could talk about! Most of them are things I knew before, from previous trips here, but it's fun digging into what it's like to live with them.
Hot and cold water from separate taps in every sink. So you can have cold water, or hot water, but not a mix of both. (Unless you're willing to plug the sink and fill it with your own custom blend of water from both the hot and cold taps, but who actually does that? Every time you wash your hands?)
Also: THE HEALTH AND SAFETY OBSESSION IS REAL. On/off switches on every electrical outlet. (Yes, you have to plug your appliance into the outlet, and turn on the outlet itself.) On/of switch for the shower. (Yes, the shower only works when you turn it on if you also previously turned on a specific switch outside the bathroom.) And no electrical outlets in bathrooms, no, no no!
And at our "inductions" (basically just information sessions) at the university, each lecture started with a little mini-lecture about where to go in event of fire, where to find the first aid kit in the lecture hall, etc. Bless, as the British would say. (As in: Aw, aren't they sweet.)
Also, though, here's health and safety gone off the rails: In my building (a university residential hall), they regularly check that the fire alarms still work. And by regularly, I mean: every week. So every Thursday around noon-ish, they set off the fire alarm. We're not supposed to react to this as if it were an actual fire drill; we're suppose to know that it's not a real fire alarm going off...unless it keeps going for a long time, and then we should think that it's a real fire and leave the building. So in their zeal to test that the system is "working," they're essentially creating a system where they've trained us not to react to the fire alarm when we hear it. ???
The UK, man. So many things that make delightfully no sense at all.
And so many turns of phrase that make me grin. Like this surprisingly existential street sign:
More things that delight me:
The price of food! It's actually affordable! I mean, I arrived here straight from Iceland, so I nearly swooned with delight the first time I went to the supermarket and found a block of cheese for £2 instead of $17. But compared to the US, too, this feels like being back in a reasonable place where the cost of living is bearable. (Like Germany. And definitely not like the US.)
Postcodes! I still can't quite fathom how they've made this work, but British postcodes (zip codes) are incredibly specific – as in, pinpointed to one particular building level of specific. So unlike in the US (or Germany), where a zip code applies to a whole town or a big section of a city, in the UK someone can tell you their postcode and you know exactly what building it is. (As far as I can tell, the first half of the code is for the city as a whole, and the second half is building-specific.)
And the whole driving-on-the-left thing is, of course, an adjustment, no matter how much you know it in theory. This is less because of the actual driving on the left, and more because of all the other things that are subtly different because of it.
Like: When I as a pedestrian am standing at a corner, waiting to see if that approaching car is going to turn into my path or if it's safe to cross, the turning car takes a different arc than my brain is expecting, because it's turning into a different part of the road, the left side instead of the right. So it takes real concentration to follow those little cues that are usually automatic. ("Car hasn't started to turn yet, so it's clearly not going to come this way. Safe to cross. NO WAIT, it's turning after all! Why did it turn later than I was expecting it to turn!")
Anyway, mostly I've just been moving in and getting set up in a new country and figuring out how to do this whole university thing again after so long (though lectures have barely started – things should get properly going this week) but here are a few fun things I've also done:
Castle visit! The university arranged a bunch of outings for new students, so my flatmates and I went on a trip to Dunnottar Castle, a nearby one of Scotland's approximately 50 billion castles. I was surprised that my Scottish flatmate came along, given that she'd just been saying how many castles she went to as a kid on innumerable class trips. But Scotland has so many castles that she still hadn't been to this one.
If you're going to build a castle, do choose a dramatic cliff-top location like this:
Street art tour! Aberdeen hosts an international street art festival, and I went on a guided tour of some of the amazing art created by this year's participants, from whole-side-of-a-building murals to little sketches and figurines hidden in unlikely places. Or, in the mid-range, this delightful picture of a girl and her baby unicorn:
(Yes, the unicorn is Scotland's national animal. No, I don't know, either.)
Biking the Deeside Way! The university has a bike hire (rental) program, where you can have a bicycle for the whole semester, which makes me deliriously happy. I went out for a first exploratory foray along the Deeside Way, a lovely long-distance path that stretches all the way from Aberdeen at the coast into Cairngorms National Park, 41 miles inland. I only went as far as Drumoak (about 19 miles round trip), but I can't wait to explore more. Oooh, idyllic Scottish countryside:
And: first house dinner! My residential hall is pretty small, only about 25 people, and it felt strange that I'd seen the others coming in and out but nobody had really introduced themselves. So I suggested to our RAs that we have some kind of get-to-know-you event... It was a success, and everyone brought a ton of food!
And I'll leave you with a note about the river, because I'm in love with the River Dee already. The campus sits directly on its bank, and I've discovered there's a footpath that runs all along the river: not just here by the campus, where we're a bit outside of town, but along its whole length, even closer to the city center.
My Scottish flatmate was unimpressed, when I mentioned how excited I am by this footpath ("in Glasgow, the footpath by the river would be where the junkies hang out") but for an American, used to the ultra-possessive nature of US property laws that so often leave no public access at all to lakes and rivers, I think the fact that anyone can walk anywhere along this river is downright amazing.
Here's a shot of my beloved river, on an unusually beautiful September day in Aberdeen:
(This is going to be quite long and scattershot, since it's a jumble of impressions from these entire first three weeks. I still can't promise I'll have much time to write anything during the semester, but if I do, future posts should be a bit more coordinated than this first one!)
ABERDEEN: FIRST IMPRESSIONS
I arrived in the city under relentless rain, which I sense will become a theme. I've lived in a lot of changeable-weather places, a lot of places that take a perverse pride in saying things like "If you don't like the weather – just wait five minutes!" But I've never experienced anything quite like this.
Aberdeen goes from bright sun to pouring rain with whiplash speed, so many times in one afternoon that I lose count. I went on a walking tour of Aberdeen street art (more on that later) and in that hour or so I can't tell you how many times I went...Oh wait, is it raining all of a sudden? Better put my umbrella up. Wait, it's not raining anymore, why am I holding this umbrella? Wait, is it raining AGAIN?
Here's the view out my window, in a rare moment of sun:
Aberdeen is known as the "granite city" and it is indeed a sea of granite grey. It doesn't quite have that "seriously every single building looks like a castle" vibe of Edinburgh, but it's definitely got a bit of that.
It's a maritime city, centered around the offshore North Sea oil industry, which has apparently made it very international. (Someone told me that there is or at least used to be a French school, an American school, even a Dutch school, because so many people come through here for the oil industry.)
I accidentally went to the Maritime Museum (I was actually only trying to find a bathroom, but a museum employee handed me a brochure the moment I walked in the door, and everyone was so nice that I felt I really ought to look at their museum) and got this view over the harbor:
I'm still laughing at myself because long before I'd done the more necessary things like setting up a bank account or even a phone, I'd already gone and gotten a public library card. And accidentally checked out eight books the very first day I had the card. You can take the girl out of the library, but, well, you know the rest!
(One of my flatmates also made the mistake of asking me for book recommendations, and I wrote her out a whole page of titles... I hadn't had a chance to do "reader's advisory" – as it's called within the library field – in a while, and I got enthused.)
Both the central library and the little library in my neighborhood are quite charming. Among many other things, it made me grin that they'd made their own display signs for various genres. Here's a sign for "romance" with their own made-up titles incorporating specifically Aberdeen things:
Ah, so many quirky British things I could talk about! Most of them are things I knew before, from previous trips here, but it's fun digging into what it's like to live with them.
Hot and cold water from separate taps in every sink. So you can have cold water, or hot water, but not a mix of both. (Unless you're willing to plug the sink and fill it with your own custom blend of water from both the hot and cold taps, but who actually does that? Every time you wash your hands?)
Also: THE HEALTH AND SAFETY OBSESSION IS REAL. On/off switches on every electrical outlet. (Yes, you have to plug your appliance into the outlet, and turn on the outlet itself.) On/of switch for the shower. (Yes, the shower only works when you turn it on if you also previously turned on a specific switch outside the bathroom.) And no electrical outlets in bathrooms, no, no no!
And at our "inductions" (basically just information sessions) at the university, each lecture started with a little mini-lecture about where to go in event of fire, where to find the first aid kit in the lecture hall, etc. Bless, as the British would say. (As in: Aw, aren't they sweet.)
Also, though, here's health and safety gone off the rails: In my building (a university residential hall), they regularly check that the fire alarms still work. And by regularly, I mean: every week. So every Thursday around noon-ish, they set off the fire alarm. We're not supposed to react to this as if it were an actual fire drill; we're suppose to know that it's not a real fire alarm going off...unless it keeps going for a long time, and then we should think that it's a real fire and leave the building. So in their zeal to test that the system is "working," they're essentially creating a system where they've trained us not to react to the fire alarm when we hear it. ???
The UK, man. So many things that make delightfully no sense at all.
And so many turns of phrase that make me grin. Like this surprisingly existential street sign:
More things that delight me:
The price of food! It's actually affordable! I mean, I arrived here straight from Iceland, so I nearly swooned with delight the first time I went to the supermarket and found a block of cheese for £2 instead of $17. But compared to the US, too, this feels like being back in a reasonable place where the cost of living is bearable. (Like Germany. And definitely not like the US.)
Postcodes! I still can't quite fathom how they've made this work, but British postcodes (zip codes) are incredibly specific – as in, pinpointed to one particular building level of specific. So unlike in the US (or Germany), where a zip code applies to a whole town or a big section of a city, in the UK someone can tell you their postcode and you know exactly what building it is. (As far as I can tell, the first half of the code is for the city as a whole, and the second half is building-specific.)
And the whole driving-on-the-left thing is, of course, an adjustment, no matter how much you know it in theory. This is less because of the actual driving on the left, and more because of all the other things that are subtly different because of it.
Like: When I as a pedestrian am standing at a corner, waiting to see if that approaching car is going to turn into my path or if it's safe to cross, the turning car takes a different arc than my brain is expecting, because it's turning into a different part of the road, the left side instead of the right. So it takes real concentration to follow those little cues that are usually automatic. ("Car hasn't started to turn yet, so it's clearly not going to come this way. Safe to cross. NO WAIT, it's turning after all! Why did it turn later than I was expecting it to turn!")
Anyway, mostly I've just been moving in and getting set up in a new country and figuring out how to do this whole university thing again after so long (though lectures have barely started – things should get properly going this week) but here are a few fun things I've also done:
Castle visit! The university arranged a bunch of outings for new students, so my flatmates and I went on a trip to Dunnottar Castle, a nearby one of Scotland's approximately 50 billion castles. I was surprised that my Scottish flatmate came along, given that she'd just been saying how many castles she went to as a kid on innumerable class trips. But Scotland has so many castles that she still hadn't been to this one.
If you're going to build a castle, do choose a dramatic cliff-top location like this:
Street art tour! Aberdeen hosts an international street art festival, and I went on a guided tour of some of the amazing art created by this year's participants, from whole-side-of-a-building murals to little sketches and figurines hidden in unlikely places. Or, in the mid-range, this delightful picture of a girl and her baby unicorn:
Biking the Deeside Way! The university has a bike hire (rental) program, where you can have a bicycle for the whole semester, which makes me deliriously happy. I went out for a first exploratory foray along the Deeside Way, a lovely long-distance path that stretches all the way from Aberdeen at the coast into Cairngorms National Park, 41 miles inland. I only went as far as Drumoak (about 19 miles round trip), but I can't wait to explore more. Oooh, idyllic Scottish countryside:
And: first house dinner! My residential hall is pretty small, only about 25 people, and it felt strange that I'd seen the others coming in and out but nobody had really introduced themselves. So I suggested to our RAs that we have some kind of get-to-know-you event... It was a success, and everyone brought a ton of food!
And I'll leave you with a note about the river, because I'm in love with the River Dee already. The campus sits directly on its bank, and I've discovered there's a footpath that runs all along the river: not just here by the campus, where we're a bit outside of town, but along its whole length, even closer to the city center.
My Scottish flatmate was unimpressed, when I mentioned how excited I am by this footpath ("in Glasgow, the footpath by the river would be where the junkies hang out") but for an American, used to the ultra-possessive nature of US property laws that so often leave no public access at all to lakes and rivers, I think the fact that anyone can walk anywhere along this river is downright amazing.
Here's a shot of my beloved river, on an unusually beautiful September day in Aberdeen:
Tuesday, September 5, 2017
All Year
I'm traveling again! So I may start doing a little travel writing here again, though no promises. (Right now, too busy doing the things to write about the things...)
BUT I'm moving to Scotland in a week (!) and on the way there I'm visiting Iceland for a bit: seeing friends, helping out with a music festival or two, and just generally being in this place I love so much.
This sign, in Keflavík Airport, made me laugh:
Truth!
BUT I'm moving to Scotland in a week (!) and on the way there I'm visiting Iceland for a bit: seeing friends, helping out with a music festival or two, and just generally being in this place I love so much.
This sign, in Keflavík Airport, made me laugh:
Truth!
Wednesday, December 7, 2016
"First Song": One Second of Fame!
I met so many great musicians in Iceland this summer, while helping to run the Melodica Reykjavík festival, but probably my favorite discovery was a German singer/musician/painter named Peter Piek, a guy with a sweet, strange voice and a gentle presence and mad skills with a guitar and a bass and a looping pedal.
He collaborates with a video director named Marcus Grysczok to make these stop-motion music videos where Marcus photographs Peter jumping in the air lots and lots and lots of times, so that in the final product it looks like he's flying. They were shooting a new video while they were touring in Iceland, so on an idyllic, sunny day down by Reykjavík harbor, during an outdoor breakfast we hosted for all the musicians between performance nights of Melodica, a whole bunch of us put in cameo appearances: We each took a turn standing in one spot and jumping on Marcus' command – 20 jumps, I think, which at one frame per jump is just enough to make up one second of footage. See if you can spot my one second of fame!
The video is finally out, and it's cool and catchy as I knew it would be, but also way more beautiful than I could have imagined. Iceland...sometimes I look at pictures of Iceland and wonder how it's even possible that we're not all in Iceland, all the time. Plus, it's full of familiar faces and beloved places, from Reykjavík to Ísafjörður and in between, from my friends' amazing house where they host concerts in a converted former dance hall to all those wonderful Melodica folks jumping in the sunshine down by the harbor on a Reykjavík day nearly too beautiful to be true.
He collaborates with a video director named Marcus Grysczok to make these stop-motion music videos where Marcus photographs Peter jumping in the air lots and lots and lots of times, so that in the final product it looks like he's flying. They were shooting a new video while they were touring in Iceland, so on an idyllic, sunny day down by Reykjavík harbor, during an outdoor breakfast we hosted for all the musicians between performance nights of Melodica, a whole bunch of us put in cameo appearances: We each took a turn standing in one spot and jumping on Marcus' command – 20 jumps, I think, which at one frame per jump is just enough to make up one second of footage. See if you can spot my one second of fame!
The video is finally out, and it's cool and catchy as I knew it would be, but also way more beautiful than I could have imagined. Iceland...sometimes I look at pictures of Iceland and wonder how it's even possible that we're not all in Iceland, all the time. Plus, it's full of familiar faces and beloved places, from Reykjavík to Ísafjörður and in between, from my friends' amazing house where they host concerts in a converted former dance hall to all those wonderful Melodica folks jumping in the sunshine down by the harbor on a Reykjavík day nearly too beautiful to be true.
Tuesday, November 22, 2016
Ísafjörður Glimpses
Here, at long last, as snow settles over upstate New York, are the pictures from my beautiful, unforgettable summer in Ísafjörður, the little town perched up in the far reaches of the West Fjords of Iceland:
ÍSAFJÖRÐUR GLIMPSES
Everything from waterfalls to glaciers to northern lights, with a whole lot of road trips and puns (in Icelandic!) and grammar cramming sessions in between. I went there to take a three-week language course, but in the process made so many friends, and found yet another place that now feels like home.
ÍSAFJÖRÐUR GLIMPSES
Everything from waterfalls to glaciers to northern lights, with a whole lot of road trips and puns (in Icelandic!) and grammar cramming sessions in between. I went there to take a three-week language course, but in the process made so many friends, and found yet another place that now feels like home.
Sunday, October 2, 2016
Reykjavík Glimpses
I've now officially been back home for 1 month, and I'm almost-kind-of-not-quite-just-barely managing to catch back up on Life*. I've caught up on one subset of my photos from the
summer – so here are pictures just from Reykjavík, with others still to
come:
REYKJAVÍK GLIMPSES
*(Searching for an apartment, moving into the apartment, starting back at my job, starting back at my other job, catching up with friends I haven't seen in three months, struggling to manage the return of my daily debilitating headaches, struggling to get back into my school year work schedule of 6 am wake-ups (and I have never, ever been a morning person), planning a big trip to a family wedding, single-handedly organizing a local show by an international musician I've been wanting to bring to my town for ages... Those are just some of the things I've been juggling this past month. Sheesh, no wonder I'm exhausted.)
REYKJAVÍK GLIMPSES
*(Searching for an apartment, moving into the apartment, starting back at my job, starting back at my other job, catching up with friends I haven't seen in three months, struggling to manage the return of my daily debilitating headaches, struggling to get back into my school year work schedule of 6 am wake-ups (and I have never, ever been a morning person), planning a big trip to a family wedding, single-handedly organizing a local show by an international musician I've been wanting to bring to my town for ages... Those are just some of the things I've been juggling this past month. Sheesh, no wonder I'm exhausted.)
Wednesday, August 17, 2016
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