rapprochement

Remember the woeful tale of the border treaty with Russia? FM Paet flew out to Moscow in '05, came back waving the magic paper to fix the line between the two lands, told newspapers it was a "done deal," but then pesky parliamentarians added a preamble that made reference to another law that referenced the 1920 treaty that established Estonian statehood. Then Putin got wind of it in the Kremlin and he had FM Lavrov bring him the treaty on a platter so that he could retract Russia's signature, using liquid paper I presume (that was before he crumpled it, stomped on it, blew his nose on it, judo chopped it, and threw it in the fireplace). Now the signing of the new treaty is set to occur again (this time, they say, in Tallinn in July), and it seems like there will be no troubling preambles, and Putin can keep his trusty bottle of liquid paper in his desk's top drawer. Lavrov, meantime, can fly in and ride past the inspiring supermarkets that line the road from the airport to the city center and look out on the glorious Hanseatic skyline from the precipice of the Foreign Ministry on Iceland Square and feel deep and bone-aching sorrow for not getting to be the FM of such an awesome country.

multikulti

Has it occurred to any of the hijackers or knifers or hackers or exploding backpackers that the number one killing entity of Muslims worldwide is probably other Muslims? Or do they think it's their exclusive job to kill themselves? How many car bombs have been set off in Iraq's sectarian civil war, hundreds of dead, the perpetrators -- OTHER MUSLIMS. And yet the fists are shaken at drones and stray bullets and Americans and Britons and French, because these legacy colonial administrators have obviously not taken their mandates seriously! There is this tendency among the Left to feel, deep down in the inner lining of their entrails, that while "terrorism" is abhorrent, it is somehow justified (or at least explainable) because of our neocolonial policies. Yet the unenlightened child minds of these exotic lands continue to murder one another, to even eat each other's hearts. Perhaps the schism is not religious or political, therefore, but merely human stupidity, the cancer of all existence, period.

I honestly don't know where I sit in all of this, other than being a bemused nihilistic rambler man. No, Mr. Cameron, your little task force isn't going to solve a thing. Task forces, roundtables. I've got an idea, boys, let's tie it all up in red tape. Stick the failure of multikulti in committee and kill it. As if it was a law! That's what you get when you let lawyers run countries. O, Britain, incubator of sectarian violence. Norsemen and Anglo-Saxons, Romans and Celts, Catholics and Protestants. Everyone's got his own justifying almighty. Here I recall an Estonian newspaperman lamenting EU accession many years ago. "If they let the Muslims in, we're done for," said sad-eyed he. But, Estonian newspaper man, don't you see ... we're already done for.

von trapp

"All the people from this country should be removed and replaced with Brazilians." This was my Latin American friend's response to the question, "So how are you getting along in Estonia?"

Sometimes it feels that way. As much as we care about Estonia and it's people, they can get annoying. We are equally as annoying for them, or at least amusing. Example. I am a father, and yet am not an Estonian father. I yell at my naughty children in shops, WHAT THE HECK DO YOU THINK YOU'RE DOING? They tend to ignore my spontaneous outbursts. An Estonian father though is austere and firm. All he has to do is mutter a few lines under his breath, and his children fall back in line. Good Estonian fathers are like The Sound of Music's Captain von Trapp before he started sleeping with Fraulein Maria.

That severity in character, respect for discipline, order, silence ... it can drive a non-Estonian to the edge. It builds up over time. My little daughter Maria, aged 20 months, greeted every passerby in Haapsalu over the weekend with, "Tere!" I would estimate that 20 percent of those greeted bothered to look at her or respond. The others winced and scurried by, as if they felt as if they had been found out by the friendly toddler. Why so reticent? I wondered. Did they think they were invisible?

statistical condom

Interesting to see the Russian question pop up from time to time, along with statistics ... "X percent THIS, therefore THIS ..." Statistics are important because they are used in the transmission of halftruths, lies, propaganda, so always wear a statistical condom! One discussion that caught my ear revolved around the translation of Estonian law into the Russian language, a suggestion made by a Social Democrat named Ossinovski. Society comes unglued at the very mention of such ideas, with statistics tossed around like rice at a wedding, "X percent THIS, therefore THIS!" I scratch my own itchy head ... Yeah, why not translate the laws?

I have always been opposed to making Russian a second-state language, not just because I like Estonian so much because I think it's so cute with all of that ä ü õ ö, but also because I feel it is unnecessary. I am of the opinion that forced legal inclusiveness is, in two words, complete bullshit. "Oh, look, the official languages of Kosovo are Kosovar Albanian AND Serbian." That'll get them to stop hating each other, sure ... Or, "Just look at Finland, just look at Canada!" -- the linguistic minorities there are bitching round the clock. The Quebecois complain about not having their own state, the Anglophones in Quebec complain about living in the Francosphere. And so, as you already knew, NOBODY IS EVER HAPPY.

Then I start thinking about the multilingual origins of the Estonian state with its Danish and German merchants and border Russians and deposed Polish counts, and I recall that during the 1920s and '30s, Estonian politicians used to go to Narva or Petseri and give addresses ... in Russian. So what exactly are we restoring the state to, if that's how it was in the earlier period of independence? What is the default for which we yearn? Are we going back in time, or involved in a completely new state-building project? Stuff to consider.

But, back to the question: Estonian laws in Russian? ... Why not? Why not in English, too? Hell, let's add Swedish. The Swedes are still a tiny minority, but, unlike the Russian minority, they are actually growing. If you model it out over the next 500,000 years, at current growth rates, the Swedish minority will surpass the Russian minority in 253,000 years. So, that's my advice. Think ahead. Be the future.

zooropa

The Estonians do it, too, but the British are the worst ... £69 to Europe!" says the airline advertisement in Victoria Station ... Terrific, but aren't we in Europe, already? Is this some kind of scam? £69 to remain standing in place? ... How can the British look at themselves in the mirror and believe that they are somehow less European than the Swedes or the Danes or the Dutch, or any other Northern European kingdom ruled by inbred monarchies from dank castles? And this at a time when PM Cameron's eurosceptic tory backbenchers are in revolt ... I've heard the Estonians tell odd tales of travels to "Europe," which in the local imagination combines the canals of Venice with the banking streets of Switzerland and other assorted landmarks (La Tour Eiffel, British Houses of Parliament, Spanish Bullfighting) ... too bad that they don't realize that Estonia is a lot like East Anglia... EUROPE ... Look at the map, it starts over here and runs to over here, you're it, and there's no escaping it ...

matsid

Yesterday watched three local citizens parade down the street -- a grandmother, a mother, and a daughter -- all of them smoking. Then the word came to me, "matsid." I am not sure who the poor, ill-mannered country bumpkin was that gave the Estonians this term, but his name was Mats ... To be called Mats (or even worse, Mats Hobusega ("Mats with Horse")) is to have one's poor, dirty, country roots put on display for all to see ... Drinking, smoking, TV game shows, the habits of the lower classes (yes, string me up now, oh would-be French Revolutionaries, elitist second estate snob that I am) ... I've seen locals drinking and smoking in the morning on the streets in town ... cigarettes, beer, breakfast cereals ... these are the things that go together in their mindset [but hush, do not criticize the matsid's habits, nor even suggest {aloud} that they are matsid, or that matsid even exist!] ... And yet, when they walk by on parade, even the Estonian who is but one rung above this bottom-rung untouchable class is known to look over his/her monied, educated shoulder and sneer and spit ... 

"Once a mats, {ptui!} always a mats ..."

little wooden town

Tartu, that's a Little Wooden Town! From the lips of a Tallinner, the words are derisive, little and wooden meaning small and inadequate, not metropolitan, cosmopolitan, urbane ... Yet people in a little wooden town are also quite little {as small as they are anywhere} and in this context, this Little Wooden Town impresses. Like John and Paul and George and Ringo sang, Tartu is getting better all the time, blocks of postwar wooden shanties cleaned up and made new, yellow and orange and other creamy mild colors, so that when you are walking along at night under all of those Big Wooden Windows and Wooden Gingerbread and Architectural Curiosity, the Warm Electric Lamp Glows, under the Eaves of the Big Wooden Houses and the Eavesdropping on Goodlooking Young People's Conversations, well ... you DO feel like you are in the middle of something, even if it is just a puny, pathetic, backwater, upstream, remote joke of a Little Wooden Town ...

high and holy

It's always a big come down being back, I don't mean an emotional come down though Estonia can be pretty boring and lonely, but, you know everywhere with me is boring and lonely at least some of the time ... I once sat on the steps of the New York Public Library on a Saturday afternoon watching the automobiles fling by, my God, never been lonelier, but wait! The come down, yes ... I love the way the Finnish air bathes me on the bus from the airport to the plane, it's cool, mild, relaxing, like peppermint astringent, that refreshing, you know, a nice, cool, longdrink of a refreshment, spiced with clarity, purity, holiness, saintliness ...

... Lots of religious thoughts these days (not me, no, no conversion for me, never) They asked me what my faith was in Bali, I told them Catholic, not that I am one, but I once was one, and to-date, it's been my most enduring exposure to faith, which is why I feel I must tell SOMEBODY about EVERY bad deed I've ever done, because Confession is in my nature, though I still cannot figure Christianity out {HE LOVES US, but WE MUST FEAR HIM???} I'm sure I just got it all wrong the first time and it all makes sense. Maybe Pope Emeritus Benedict 16's book contains some clues, helpful hints ...

... The Balinese are Hindus with a tiny Muslim minority and though everybody's good pals, officially, you can tell that they don't take the Muslims very seriously, or that they see them as ridiculous, with their evening prayers and non-pork eating [this in a land of daily flower and incense and fruit offerings to the many Hindu Gods, where cows roam free, swinging their tails at flies] Can't say "on sul hästi hästi" to the Muslims, they must be addressed with Selamat Tinggal. I kept thinking of Cat Stevens/Yusef Islam and Kätlin Mrabte, author of Minu Maroko, Gentile converts to Muhammedism and the thought that I was thinking was, "What, the hell were they thinking?" But here I am purchasing my copy of the Ramayana, so who am I to speak? Our taxi driver had what appeared to be large grains of salt pasted to his forehead. Must have been another high holy Hindu day ...

The Estonians claim to not be religious ... pure bunk, bullshit, jama. Explain to me all of your holy days then, my post-Soviet atheist friends ... Where were we? Oh, yes ...

• Vastlapäev (Shrove Tuesday, celebrated by sledding, eating rolls filled with whipped cream)
• Jüripäev (Saint George's Day, April 23, celebrated by burning manor houses, killing landlords)
• Jaanipäev (the big one, Saint John's Day, June 24, celebrating by eating grilled meats, leaping over bonfires)
• Hingedepäev (All Souls' Day, Nov. 2, celebrated by lighting candles)
• Mardipäev (Saint Martin's Day, Nov. 11, celebrated by cross dressing)
• Kadripäev (Saint Catherine's Day, Nov. 25, also celebrated by cross dressing)
• Luutsipäev (Saint Lucy's Day, Dec. 13, also celebrated by lighting candles)

... about the cross dressing, each year our house is stormed by Kadrisantid (boys dressed up like Saint Catherine) and Mardisantid (girls dressed up like Saint Martin) and they come inside our house with their raggedy old dresses or ashy mustaches and do a little dance called the kaerajaan - "Kaerajaan, Kaerajaan!" -- they fold their arms and put one foot in front of the other while remaining in place ...  If we are feeling particularly magnanimous, we reward our visitors with a little piece of fruit or a candy. And these people claim to have no affinity with religion?

So, next time an Estonian tries to tell you he's not religious, don't question his lack of faith. Simply cross your arms and put one foot in front of the other and sing, "Kaerajaan, kaerajaan." See if he doesn't join you.

on sul hästi hästi?

On sul hästi hästi, or, as the Balinese say it, om-su-hasti-hasti. This is how they greet one another on this Indonesian island. It reminds me of our old friend Vello Vedelik and his various theories on the origins of nations, putting the Estonians at the center of it all, the chosen people, the first Europeans, the fathers and mothers of the Guanche people of the Canary Islands, and now, as my ears suspect, the distant cousins of the Balinese, who greet each other with a broad smile, "On sul hästi hästi?" ("Is everything okay?") Hästi hästi! is the islander's response.

"Bush was right." This is what a guide told me a day ago at Goa Lawah, the Hindu Bat Cave. I thought about asking him, "Right about what?" but said nothing because I have no stomach for conflict. The conservative/liberal think tankers who see Estonian economic policy as a lighthouse to the world's astray darkened lands, certainly miss GWB, because "those were the days," the days when they were more important, when people listened to them, when they had the ears of an administration led by a man who cartoonists portrayed as having very large ears.

Obama meanwhile is a weakling. Why doesn't he just take out Iran? And North Korea? And Russia? And, while he's at it, go back in time and defeat the Viet Cong? Show them we're not to be trifled with! These are the kinds of fantasies that filled the Bush years with Lewis Carroll logic and opaque purple haze. After America crawled out of its post-Vietnam doldrums with some handy invasions of islands and isthmuses and peninsulas,segments of its elite became so lovedrunk on their invincibility and childhood postwar mythos, that they thought they could raze vast and complicated post-colonial territories and rebuild them in their divine image. And the clean-up man Obama isn't resolute enough to see that they were right! I mean, after Boston, isn't it obvious?

On sul hästi hästi, they ask me on Bali, om-su-hasti-hasti. I'd like to say, "Ei ole." But the Balinese don't say that. They are good Hindus. They say, Om-santi-santi.

look homeward, angel

Copley Square, a familiar place. A familiar place for beer drinking and hamburger consumption and overhearing hipsters badmouthing Red State America on a snoozy Sunday afternoon. Named after John Singleton Copley, portraitist to the Boston Brahmin. "But the people in this town ... the people in this town make me feel like Sean Hannity," my Obama-voting friend Eamon once told me there on leafy, liberal Copley Square. I nearly followed Eamon up to B-town after college, was planning on setting up above a cannoli shop in the North End and affecting one of those accents that drops the r and overdoes it on the äääää. I could have been there on the finish line that fated day, had my legs blown off by bolts and other metal bits.

I keep pulling lucky numbers, but I know that sooner or later an unlucky one will come up.

... on the Baltic Queen between Stockholm and Tallinn in late winter waters, March, with the broken window glass ice crumpling and scraping the hull of this un-Titanic, playing video games in the ship's arcade, one has real-looking guns, aiming at real-looking people, my daughter starts to play it. "Aim this way, now squeeze the trigger," instructs adolescent freckly finnic face (an Estonian though). And at the end of this "game," after we've both been wasted by adversaries, he confides in me in the arcade dark, "I love guns." He loves guns?

 ... Violence here and violence, ultraviolence, sex and violence. New York, Bali, Madrid, London, Boston, more unlucky numbers pulled. And who to blame? It's not the pretty Malaysian Muslim girls with their peacock-like headscarves and round faces and scooters and ivorywhite smiles. It's Timothy and Tamerlan and Dzokhar. The social cancer of those who kill and maim and ruin innocents to satisfy a vague political goal and succeed by seeing it never addressed because it is associated with their rotten blood-stained selves.

Some call these murderers "terrorists." You and I know them better as "idiots."

margaret and nelson and jaak

SDE party member Jaak Allik has stepped in some Esto political doo doo by saying that Russia has never attacked Estonia (actually, it was in the context of Russia attacking only Estonia -- he {correctly, I think} points out that most Russian conquests of the windy peninsula took place as part of larger continental wars involving many countries) But it's a great opportunity to ramble on about history because this is an election year [Estonian municipal elections will be held in autumn] and Allik's party SDE is doing well in the polls, and what better way to drag them down, then to Question Their Patriotism? Allik is the son of Olga Lauristin and Hendrik Allik, both of whom were Estonian Communists, so, of course, there are quips about his traitorous genes.

Which brings us to the recently deceased Margaret Thatcher, who is being celebrated and villainized. Thatcher famously called {the now universally beloved} Nelson Mandela a "terrorist" -- one of the charges against her from those who do not remember her leadership fondly. But in the early 1960s, Mandela did co-found a militant organization and led a bombing campaign against government targets. So these are our choices? British conservatism or the South African Communist Party?

Nobody is a hundred-percent pure, nobody is a hundred-percent good, nobody is a hundred-percent honest. As human beings we all bear the sins of our ancestors on our souls. Fingers may be pointed, spin round like weathercocks, but the British people elected Thatcher, and the South African people backed Mandela and later made him their president, and Jaak Allik may be the son of Communists, but there are plenty of people who are the sons and daughters of even less savory elements. We are all Margaret Thatcher and Nelson Mandela and Jaak Allik. They are just individual manifestations of our conflicted and often irrational psyche, the varying consciences of a giant that so desperately wants things in the world to be well and in order, but somehow always manages to screw things up.

of gays and matrimony

Years ago, my well-meaning, liberal arts college-educated friends started taking me aside. I apparently had missed practice, and didn't know all of the new plays by heart, so they decided to enlighten me as to what the new progressive playbook contained, and on page one was the right of men to marry men, and women to marry women. "Really?" I asked without prejudice. "Come on, man, you should be able to marry whoever you want!" I got the opposite play from the campus Republicans, who were taking me aside and putting their [strictly platonic] hands on my shoulders and saying, "But if They get the right to marry, then They can adopt." Jaws drop, horror. Not normal, said they, no way!

These were the Al Gore "civil union" days, and I supported the former vice president, not out of any belief in any virtue or universal truth [oh, hell no], but simply because I grasped the problems that faced same-sex couples [taxes! hospital visitation rights!], and I thought that the civil union Trojan Horse had a better chance of making it past the gates of traditional Christian America than some extended sojourn into the dank depths of rabbit-hole questions like, "But are you born with it?" Well, if [formerly straight] Sex and the City star Cynthia Nixon is our poster lesbian, then obviously not! [Which is also why the arguments about gay marriage are so ridiculous: straight woman decides she's actually lesbian, leaves husband for woman, takes kids and - voila! - kids suddenly have two moms]

I am of the two-camps camp, actually, the "born this way" camp and the "chose this way" camp, some born with, some chose, which actually makes me part of the "just don't give a shit" camp. That's right, I don't care how gays got gay, or what makes gay people gay, or, really about gays at all, well, as little as I care about straights. They're just people, all of them, not one more fascinating than the other, at least when sexual orientation is concerned. Which is why I really wish that each one of the United States, and Estonia, too, would legalize same-sex partnerships, so I can stop hearing about it and having my well-meaning, liberal arts college-educated friends go over the playbook with me, again and again and again, and watch people trade Biblical quotes on the Internets and see legally minded pals advocate civil unions for opposite-sex couples, with liberal use of exclamation marks ...

In Estonia, I even signed a petition in support of it, just to keep it moving toward that final relieving destination, where it's SO normal that nobody talks about it anymore. I have been grateful to see the public opinion shift in the last few years toward support for same-sex marriages, because it means that, at last, Praise Be to You, Lord Christ, Western society can move on with its life. Same-sex marriage, your fifteen minutes/years are almost up ...

a little of that, a little of this

Is Estonia a very conservative country or a very liberal country? I cannot tell. Conservative, yes, conservative about language and about eating habits and about not whistling in houses (or else they'll burn!), but also liberal, yes, liberal as in having three children with three different men, none of whom have ever lived with you, none of whom have ever seen their offspring {and may not even be aware they exist, and you may not even know their last names} BUT ... Hush! Do not speak of such things! Because Estonia is a conservative place, where such things are not spoken of. Estonian gender roles are fixed and rigid and permeable and porous, even gaseous ... Consider: Härra Giustino's critique of Estonian men and their "golden hands" is actually a shrouded criticism of bimboland's wannabe Marilyn Monroe wimmin who are just {sigh} so dainty and {sigh} ladylike that they {sigh} can't be bothered with turning a screw three times clockwise ... That's MAN'S work, and besides, I just got my nails done!!! And yet there they are, the Estonian wimmin, stooping down in the dirt with all of those potatoes ... "Hey, pass the, uh, Sovetskoye Shampanskoye ... That's what's so great about talgud, you know ... *hiccup* you get to work in the outdoors [wipes sweat from face with dirty dirt-soiled hand] and get sun on your face and ...gluglugglug ... Hey, give me another sip of that wouldya?" Oh, Estonia, land of contrasts, land of flat taxation and state-run healthcare system, a little of this, a little of that, a little of that, a little of this ...

étienne

Étienne is one of my oldest friends, not that I have known him for so long, but because, literally, at age 74, he is among my oldest friends. I had known this French geneticist for years before I had the courage to ask him the question, "So, if you're about 40 years older than me, does that mean that you remember the war?"

"I do have a few recollections from WWII, not tragic ones, my family and myself didn't go through particularly tragic moments, especially, of course, as seen through a child's eyes..." said  Étienne. "I do remember German soldiers playing with my little sister's pram, sitting in it and launching themselves down an incline," he said. "And I remember, really remember, not because people told me about it, the liberation of Paris, the noise of tanks driving through our street, the hurried cutting of a few flowers in our garden and the rough, unshaven cheek of a solider I was kissing on the tank on which I had been hoisted -- these were French tanks from the "Division Leclerc", as the Allies had gracefully allowed them to come in first. Of course I wasn't aware of all the awful things that were taking place."

I share these stories of Étienne's because they remind me of my wife's grandmother's story about the March 1949 deportations. The Laanemaa (nee Landmann) family was on Stalin's shit list for a number of reasons. One: Martin, the father, had served in the Estonian War of Independence. Two: Martin, the father, had been a member of Omakaitse, the Estonian national guard, both before the war and during the German occupation. Three: the Laanemaa family was wealthier than average. Because of this, Martin had already been deported in 1948. In 1949, they came for his wife and two daughters. The eldest, Salme, was arrested and sent to Siberia. The mother, Anna, and her younger daughter, Laine, hid in the forest and managed to escape deportation. They made an attempt to return to the village (on the west coast of Estonia), but decided against it when they saw other villagers walking around wearing their clothes. Their house had apparently been looted.

That is the kind of detail you can only get from talking to your older relatives. We know so much about what happened in occupied Paris, but who can now forget the image of two young German soldiers stealing a little girl's carriage and taking turns riding it down a hill? Likewise, who can now forget -- for I surely can't -- the image of a woman and her teenage daughter, who had been living in the forests in March, peeking out from behind some bushes only to see a neighbor walk by wearing one of their coats? So, if you get a chance, talk to your older friends and relatives about their memories of certain events. You may be surprised by what you hear.

trotsky berezovsky

winners/losers

One aspect of the Yana Toom affair that I brought out in my talk in Stockholm was a generational dimension, and it's one that's been on my mind in recent weeks. I was thinking about my friends (roughly my age) who travel around the world, and then I thought about two very famous Estonians, Marko Matvere and Jaan Tätte, who also travel around the world. Except when our friends travel around the world, it's just traveling around the world. But when Matvere and Tätte travel around the world, it's a Big Fucking Deal. Oh, look, Tätte sent home a postcard from Hawaii. Let's put it in a museum! Why are they so important? Sure, they write songs. But my friends also write songs. Sure, they appear on TV and in film. But ... so do some of my friends. And yet, whatever Matvere and Tätte do seems to be more imbued with meaning, more relevant. They are, ühesõnaga, culturally significant.

The only real difference between the Tätte and Matveres of Estonia and people my age, is that they are a little older. They are of the so-called "Winner's Generation." (They are both pushing 50). This is pretty hilarious construct for Americans, because in America, the generation born in the 1960s was pretty much seen as getting screwed at every stage of their life [See Reality Bites]. But in Estonia, people born in the 1960s are number one. Think of the first Laar government from 1992. Much has been made of their youth at the time. Laar was 32. Foreign minister Jüri Luik was 27. Defense minister Indrek Kannik was 28 (just checked these by the way, though I recall Laar boasting at a conference about the young members of his first government). Two decades on, not much has changed. The big boys are still running the show. There are younger ministers, some even my age, but they are usually somebody's protege. Who makes the big decisions about Estonia's future? The Winners.

But who is a Winner? I usually think of Savisaar as the first Winner, not because he wins so many elections, but because he thinks he's so important. He may count on some pensioners' votes, but the painstaking/philosophical/academic approaches of say Paul-Eerik Rummo or Jaan Kaplinski are absent. People wonder what Savisaar stands for. That's easy. Savisaar stands for whatever Savisaar happens to think at the time, naturally. End of story. It was this combative nature that earned him the nickname, "Piggy." And what you see down the line after him is a long list of Piggies. They are significant just because ... they are significant.

And, to draw Yana Toom in here a little, all of the issues that molested their psyches during the Brezhnev stagnation continue to plague Estonian politics. Russification is one of those issues. It's not unlike Vietnam in the United States. Remember the 2004 election and the "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth"? Somehow, what happened in Southeast Asia at the tail-end of the 1960s became more important than what was happening in Afghanistan and Iraq in the middle of the 00s. And for younger, less diverse generations of Estonians, these questions about language and history are not as important as being able to find a good job. But for the Winners they were, and will continue to be, among the most significant issues we face. A discussion about minority issues in Estonia today does not occur in the context of 2013 but, too often, in the context of 1980. But, as Kaplinski alluded to in his essay (see discussion in previous post) Estonian-Russian interpersonal relations before the war, before the Winners came onto the scene, and in the tsarist era, were actually pretty okay. Not that it matters much what he says. It's got to be frustrating for the Kaplinskis of Estonia. He's now an elder in society, and yet all this wise old man can do is write essays and hope that somebody reads them.

The thing about Yana Toom is that she is a Winner, at least technically. She's the same age as Juhan Pärts, Jüri Luik, a year younger than Matvere, two years younger than Tätte. Except Yana Toom is not a winner. She's a loser. I would not like to see the conditions under which she becomes the foreign minister of the Republic of Estonia. But Estonian Russians of her age have to deal with that. While their EstoEsto peers climbed quickly to hold the top positions in the land, meet with presidents and kings and queens, and generally can count on having things named after them when they are dead, the Yana Tooms of Estonia cannot point to a similar amount of success. These are people who were completely socialized in the Soviet system, who became adults before it fell apart, who looked forward to one future and yet were handed a very different one. That's bound to generate some bitterness.

re: toomsayers

So the talk went well. I reread some of the opinion pieces regarding MP Yana Toom' s {some say misinterpreted} characterization of Estonian as a dying language/culture and came away with two perspectives: she's right and she's wrong. I leaned toward Rikken's retort: that Estonian language/culture was really in danger in the second decade of the 18th century after the Great Northern War when there were about 150,000 people left on the land. Here, I was reminded of my gradeschool study of the other peripheral northern land, Iceland. Their fragile tongue was in even greater peril. There were about 60,000 of them up until the middle of the 19th century. Which is why the idea that Estonian is a dying language seemed so ridiculous to me. If countries could dwindle to sizes one tenth (or even less) of what currently exists in Estonia, then how could we expect the whole language/culture to vanish in a few generations?

When I did my Iceland project in 1991, the population of that country was about 250K. Today it's about 320K. So, they have grown, while Estonia's population has gotten smaller. Why? As I noted in the talk, their climate is just as depressing -- darker, and with no trees. Sure, they don't have Russia {and Germany} in the neighborhood, but they do have volcanos and plagues -- 37 plagues in the past few hundred years which consistently eroded and tested the population base. Icelanders leave the island to find work elsewhere {such as Hallgrímur, the friendly agent we met at the car rental service in Munich} and they have Slavic immigrants too -- 13 percent of the nation is foreign born, the largest minority is Polish. Oh, and they had an even more apocalyptic recession during which Christmas trees were burned. No, any excuse you can come up with to explain away their population growth won't stick. So, what makes people stay in {and make more babies in} Iceland?

The only honest answer I could come up with is a higher standard of living. In any system of rankings, you will find this other economic pirate country at the top of the heap. Estonia is farther down, not as far down as some of its other neighbors, but far enough down to make it a less desirable place to live. Want to keep Estonia healthy? Continue to make raising the standard of living your national goal. Not just wealth, mind you, health, education, blah blah ... I'll stop now before your soc dem radar goes off ...

But the Estonian population is a bit tricky. The 2000 Census shows 930K ethnoEstos, 350K russoEstos. The 2011 Census shows 890K ethnoEstos, 320K russoEstos. So, the number of ethnoEstos is about the same as it was in the 1934 census (888K) at which time the number of russoEstos was about 92K [in case you have been misled to believe in the myth of a purely ethnoEsto prewar Estonia]. Mind you, there was a terrible war, mass deportations (and fleeing) from Estonia after 1934 (and Soviet population transfer) and Estonian is still spoken, at least in my home.

And to bring Yana Toom back in here ... the russoEsto population has declined significantly in this country. If ethnoEsto language/culture appears to be on the way out, then russoEsto lang/cult is one step ahead out that oblivion door. Two more things/thoughts: Soviet population transfer was not an organic means of population growth (birth rate+controlled immigration). And the idea that the Estonian population would continue to grow after 1989 beyond that 1.6M (or whatever it was) is ... well ... not a good idea. So, honestly, I am not sure what the {real, sustainable} population of Estonia should be.

Finally, talked about generational differences -- Winners, Losers. But that's already another post ...

oht on õhus

This weekend - Saturday - I will present/lecture/speak at the Estonian House in Stockholm. It's in honor of emakeelepäev (mother language day, in Estonia, language is feminine, but the country itself is masculine, isamaa, father land, national anthem - mu isamaa, mu õnn ja rõõm, 'my fatherland, my happiness and joy ...') enough of that! The question put to me is "Is the Estonian language (and culture) in danger?" Oh, should I chucklechortle and say, "No, it's not, nothing to see here folks, now move along, Ansip's got it all taken care of ..." Or should I peddle negativity (decreasing population, emigration, naughty girls marrying foreign boys, russians, WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE!)

I'd argue -- to start -- that the language isn't in trouble, but the culture is, and the threat isn't from the East but the West, as American-style consumerism commands the adoption of America's commercial culture, right down to the fact that holidays never celebrated in this land have become Marketing Opportunities and I can now hear the Everly Brothers sing "Bye Bye Love" when I go shopping at the local home improvement store. And -- most cringeworthy -- I've heard tale of Esto teenagers who speak english to each other because it's like, just so cool, and that's how they speak on Jersey Shore (sort of).

To me, as an American, it's embarrassing. You are so ashamed of your language that you'd rather pretend to be Homo americanus (a nation of other people who abandoned their national identities in the pursuit of "fitting in" and "success")? If you're going to do that, you might as well leave Lasnamäe for Las Vegas ... Get a new more Hollywood last name too -- Sepp won't do, but SMITH! {and it means the same thing!}

Listen, I am as proud of Phil and Don Everly as any other American. Their music was/is great ["Wake up, little Susie, wake up ..."] but Estonia has its own Phil and Don Everlys. Be proud of them. Give them more airplay at the home improvement store ... they deserve it.

like two drops of water

French President François Hollande and Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves

badass e.e.

-Why do you wish to go to Russia?
-Because I’ve never been there.
-(He slumps,recovers). You are interested in economic and sociological problems?
-No.
-Perhaps you are aware that there has been a change of government in recent years?
-yes(I say without being able to suppress a smile).
-And your sympathies are not with socialism?
-may I be perfectly frank?
-Please!
-I know almost nothing about these important matters and care even less.
-(His eyes appreciate my answer). For what do you care?
-my work.
-Which is writing?
-and painting.
-What kind of writing?
-chiefly verse; some prose.
-Then you wish to go to Russia as a writer and painter? Is that it?
-no; I wish to go as myself.
-(An almost smile). Do you realize that to go as what you call yourself will cost a great deal?
-I’ve been told so.
-Let me earnestly warn you(says the sandyhaired spokesman for the Soviet Embassy in Paris)that such is the case. Visiting Russia as you intend would be futile from every point of view. The best way for you to go would be as a member of some organization
-but,so far as I know,I’m not a member of any organization.
-from e.e. cummings' EIMI (1933)

where to?

Ilves: "Today, on the 95th anniversary of Estonia, the thought of independence has, once again, become natural. It neither requires interpretation nor explanation because it is a basic truth. // Standing on this foundation, we compare ourselves to other nations, and no longer to those who used to share our fate, but instead to those whose history and opportunities have, in the meantime, been different. // And this is exactly what it should be like. For we cannot endlessly search the past for the cause of our problems like a former colony that continues to blame it all on some 19th century injustice." Laar: "Right-wing parties have been in power for so long and this is a risk because in politics it is clear that things change because people would like to see new faces. They would like to try something new, new concepts or trends. But this is a luxury that you can afford in a strong democracy. I don’t know if Estonia would survive such experimenting, life will tell." // ERR: "The countrywide survey indicated that 23 percent of decided voters would support the Reform Party if elections were held tomorrow, an increase of three percentage points from last month." // Ilves: "No, I do not consider the current government to be irreplaceable, nor do I consider the way our decisions are made to be the best. Both will inevitably change if only the citizens so wish." // ERR: "The two opposition parties, Center and the Social Democrats continue to lead the polls, each with 26 percent support in February. January's figures were 28 percent for Center and 27 percent for the Soc Dems." // Ilves: "One of the greatest virtues of democracy is the legal transfer of power without the spilling of blood, in which the state continues, and decision-makers change. Democracy teaches us that if one is insensitive or deaf to the murmurings of the people, someone else will soon come to power, already after the next elections." // Laar: "There is a possibility that when people come to power, they will also come to their senses. This is always a possibility and very welcome. But more often than not, it will not happen. Then it will be difficult, especially if you look at promises that have been made in public. When these promises get to be implemented, the consequences will be dire."

no memory

"And did you see, he was born in 1988?" "So what." "I don't know, it's just weird for me still." "What, that they've grown up and become young adults?" "And not even, ____'s daughter was born in '92! Now, she's a young lawyer in Tallinn." "A lawyer?" "Yes." "I wanted to write a column about them once, but I never got around to it. There is this quote in The Shawshank Redemption. He's talking about how he wants to forget about prison and go to Mexico, to the Pacific, because they say the Pacific has no memory. And that's how I feel about them. They have no memory. No Cold War, no Persian Gulf War. On one hand, it's kind of sad, but on the other, it's liberating and fresh. No memory. It's like starting all over." "It's a good movie, especially the last scene." "I know. But think about it. To us, Gorbachev is like an old uncle. He's a huge, I don't know how to say it, kuju, you know." "Uh huh." "But to them, he's just someone in a textbook, some guy who led the Soviet Union for a few years before it fell apart ... Oh, Uncle Gorby, we've missed you, it's been too long" ...

say che

Got to thinking about Ernesto "Che" Guevara at the spa in Pärnu ... him of all people. I think it was the cover of Minu Jamaica that set off the thought, how Bob Marley was one of the 20th century's lowercase jesuses, and then naturally Guevara entered my mind as another ... Or maybe I just looked in the mirror at my red eyes, chlorine-moussed hair and beard and thought, "My God, he's alive!" He's a lightning rod, Che. For some he's a revolutionary Robin Hood, for others a Red Executioner. The lefties love him because he escaped "drawing room Bolshevik" status (that's what August Rei called Johannes Vares) by having the nutsack to resort to violence and think that he could actually win ...  The discussions about his legacy always wind up in, "Oh yeah, that, well ... anyway," territory. "X killed Y, what do you have to say about that?" "Oh yeah, that, well ... anyway."  Ho hum. It seems that blood is on everybody's hands around this table. Which side are you on anyway, huh, the fruit company's or the Marxist guerillas'? The cigar-chomping dictators' or the cigar-chomping rebels'? Are you down with fruit company exploitation or world revolution?! Usually, when I am at a restaurant and given such unsavory choices, I pack up my things and find another restaurant ...

flash fiction

Here comes the judge, here comes the judge ... I am a judge in a new contest for something called flashfiction. What is flashfiction? It comes to you in a flash BOOM! BAM! Shit's written, done, submitted, passed on for judgment to me and Vello Vikerkaar and Mike Collier ... almost as if you wrote it in your sleep, or maybe the other you wrote it, you know, the lightning quick Flash Gordon you. But what the hell am I talking about? What should you be writing in your sleep? Details: "ERR News challenges readers to write short stories of a maximum 750 words that capture a particular aspect of life in northern Europe." More here. And one sentence in Estonian should appear somewhere in the story. Think on that one. Nokk kinni, saba lahti? No. Kel jänu, sel jalad? No. Alguses ei saa pidama, pärast vedama? Wait ...

here's to swimmin'

... with bowlegged women ... This is what the oldtimey fisherman Quint says in Jaws. I've written too much already about Estonian wimmin here on this blog, as if I was an expert, or that anyone desired such insight or expertise. But honesty, honesty ... the honest message is that when I returned to Tallinn a week or so back and was confronted with the gray and the white and the brown and the black, the stale glow of shop lights on the slush of the rutted sidewalks, this soul of mine plummeted to the lowest rungs of "What have I done?" and yet was resurrected by the female kind, hope! ... these local girls know how to dress, they dress well, buttons up, zippers down, they'll take your angst off, knock the foam off your coffees and beers. And it ain't like Elsewhere East Europe, where they'll disgust you with yellow-high-heeled whorewear ... these are Estonians, blue, black, and white, tight-lipped and tidy and taciturn ... that's what the roving foreign fishermen who harbor in these waters don't understand ... they may look pretty pretty on the outside, but behind those fruity bosoms (that just make your mind icemelt over with warmth and champagne bubbliness and harp-playing angels) is just another stoic, stalwart, seafarin' Estonian man ... one may appear more pleasant than the other, but they are still one in the same, flesh from flesh ... incarnate. Imagine me, though, transplanted to this part of the world as a young man, a Walking Hormone set down in a biological Nor'easter.

I never stood a chance.

jõudu / tarvis

One peculiarity among the people of this country is what I call "workguilt" or work-associated or work-related guilt. This is the idea that we must all be working, working very hard, and slackers/shirkers are scorned by the all-seeing village eye [An Estonian's dream is that he dies while working, says my friend Ain].  // When you are walking down the street in Estonia, and you see someone doing some form of manual labor -- the most respected kind! -- you are obligated to bellow out a buoyant "jõudu!" (which means "strength"), to which the sweaty snow shoveler or wood chopper or brush clearer grunts "tarvis!" ("needed") in a bassy, work-worn, air-gasping voice. // The other day the femme and I were walking down the street here in Viljandi and chanced upon several very industrious neighbors who were building a basilica-sized igloo. So taken with the size of their ambition, we forgot to speak up. No big deal. But a geyserburst of workguilt erupted up up a little farther down the road. // "I should have yelled out 'jõudu'," my femme lamented after we passed the iglooists. "Why don't you go back and say it," I offered. "No," she sulked and shook her head and whimpered on. "The moment has already passed."

Read more about workguilt in my column, "Golden Hands," here. It's part of a new collection that will be published this month by AK called Misjonäripoos, or "The Missionary Position."

thinner

Iron lady. Psychopath?

An interesting commentary by Estonian journalist Krister Kivi on a recent media event in Britain, where an actress who played the former British prime minister described her as having "oversights when it came to thousands of people. No, millions," as "not being in touch with herself or anybody else," and as having "psychopathic tendencies." Kivi notes that it was Thatcher who inspired the architects of post-1991 Estonia, who are still in power, and likens some Estonian officials' fetish for a lean state to anorexia. Estonia stands before its mirror, Kivi writes, admiring "how trim is her waistline, how balanced are her budgets." In the pursuit of this perfect body image, "one stops to feel hunger," even as the organism's "hair falls from its head and its stomach shrivels to the size of an apricot."

Grisly.

It's interesting to give Thatcher another look in the rearview mirror. I knew her as a child, when she was just another 1980s cultural icon: Ronald Reagan, Michael Jackson, Mihhail Gorbachev, Prince, Margaret Thatcher, Madonna. It was the era of personality cults. We kids spent perhaps more time thinking about the source of MJ's white glove or Gorby's magnificent birthmark than we ever did trying to figure out what was the difference between glasnost and perestroika. It's interesting to think that a significant number of Estonia's political elite were my age at that time, that is, fully formed adults with careers and children, and I wonder if they still see the Iron Lady the same way. That is, it might be 2013 on the streets of Estonia, but it could still be 1987 in the heads of some of its leadership.

seedless

In the local Maxima supermarket the other day I was asked the question, "Kas need on seemneteta?" by an earnest cashier, who held up the bunches of grapes in a clear plastic bag, across which was written in gigantic letters, S E E D L E S S.

For the uninitiated, a 'ta' ending to a word means 'without,' and a 'ga' ending means 'with.' Läksin poodi Epuga, I went to the shop with Epp, läksin poodi Eputa, I went to the shop without Epp.

Back from the good ol' USofA, it startled me a bit that this poor soul in bumblefuckbogland could hold up a bag that said S E E D L E S S on it, and ask me if the grapes within had seeds or no seeds. But she's a foreigner, or, rather, I am a foreigner, so why should I expect her to understand English?

I did lean a bit over the counter and say, "You know, S E E D L E S S means seemneteta in English." She blushed a bit, those moist apple freckled cheeks. A plump cashier, a young cashier. I peered at her nametag. Her first name was something like, Angela. Her second was too long to be bothered with. Maybe it said Baryshnikov or Rachmaninoff.

Maxima, though Lithuanian owned, is the domain of the Estonian Russians. Maybe it's the cheaper prices (because most Estonian Russians are poor, except for the wealthiest people in Estonia, the transit tsars and restauranteurs and casino magnates, who are also Estonian Russians). Or maybe they feel a big Balto-Slavic affinity with the Lithuanians. Shit, whatever it is, if you want to meet a Russian in some homogeneous town (with some culture) in south Estonia, he or she can be found behind the register at the local Maxima.

Like the gal chatting with the American in Estlandic about S E E D L E S S grapes.

And if you are searching for a point, there is none. But life is entertaining, no?

oh georgia

Estonia continues to support Georgia's aspirations to join the EU and NATO. So said Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves recently. Its accession to these organizations is up to the Georgians' ability to meet their criteria, and no external powers should influence these process, he said.

I do wonder about where Georgia fits into the post-2008 "global order." That is, until the heady year of '08, we were experiencing a dynamic of continued EU and NATO expansion, which logically could extend as far east as the leaders of these organizations saw fit. But economic crises, political crises, and, well, multiple crises have diminished that eagerness.

I also wonder about the psychology behind Estonian diplomacy, which appears to be based on pure principle, but could also be seen as the outcome of interlocking myths about Estonia's role in the world, such as "the little country that showed it could be done isn't about to keep anybody else down"  ...

Some interesting discussions with Georgian students yielded the information that Georgia sees EU integration in terms of attaining a higher status, and that it is not thought of in civilizational terms of hooking up with ancient Black Sea trading partners like Romania or Bulgaria (whereas the Estonians reconstructed themselves as a forgotten outpost of Scandinavia, which, quite naturally, was deserving of membership), and when they think about NATO, they think about the US and some stalwart allies, not their neighboring NATO-member country Turkey.

It's all just a bit too abstract for my unseasoned mind to grasp. Too many slippery concepts about status and democracy and corruption and whatever else you can throw at the wall. Expect the Georgians to live up to standards of organizations that are not met by constituent members? Be like us, but not like Berslusconi? And how are their oligarchs different from our oligarchs really? Do any of these big words still harbor any meaning?

Where's that Hemingway quote? Ah. There it is:

"There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity. Certain numbers were the same way and certain dates and these with the names of the places were all you could say and have them mean anything. Words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates."

the lonely crowd

I have just finished The Voice is All: The Lonely Victory of Jack Kerouac. It's a biography that digs into the American author's French Canadian roots. And, the thing is, I understand the author as he is portrayed, and I think that a lot of us do. Here is a man who could never be fully American, as his first language was French, and who, once he left his hometown to attend Columbia University, could never again be from Lowell, Massachusetts. He was at once too French to be American, too American to be French, too Lowell to glide with ease among New York's intelligentsia, too worldly to reconnect with his factory town roots.

I am attending a cousin's wedding here in New York, got to visit the beach where I played as a child. It's a homecoming. The beach that night was black and cold, but the lights of the houses were just as I had left them almost 30 years before. Nothing has changed there, but I have changed, and yet am still fundamentally the same. In Viljandi, moving between the hard-drinking-smoking white trash and folk hipsters, I will return to the same base dynamic. Even the globetrottingest most dissident Estonian hipsters are still Estonians, and to espouse Estonianness is to spend one's life before the mirror.  In Estonia, bar fights become "rebellions," lonely tsarist poets become icons of national literature.

Molehill, meet mountain.

Still, I am happy to be going back. I am happy to be going anywhere. I've got a pretty good reading list set up for my return: Dos Passos Manhattan Transfer, e.e. cummings' EIMI, and, of course, Jack London, the other Big Jack. I also have Anais Nin's Delta of Venus. Pity me, the few female writers I most connect with are Nin and Tina Fey. Also setting up my music website, though it needs much improvement. Astonished to find I created, with help, listenable music. Got a new book coming out called Missionary Position. Still looking for a publisher for Montreal Demons/The Demons of Montreal. Doing light rewrites in brief passings. Amazing how eight or nine months can help you see things for what they are, and bring out those great motifs and ideas with a brilliant shine.

There are many other things going on too, but those I cannot reveal to you, at least not this time.

the thaw

Drip, drip, drop.

I've been stateside for a number of weeks now, and will be for a number of weeks more. Two news items to lighten the heart out of E-land ... First, an opera, about Krugman and Ilves, with lyrics penned by my dear friend Scott Diel. It's international news. On a less serious note, Europe's healthiest economy has its worst drug problem (and highest HIV infection rate).

One week plus was spent on the West Coast, affectionately dubbed by me as the Pot Coast, where the air is thick with green smoke, and everyone is second-hand stoned. All of that goofy sunshine is a bit of a change from Estonia, where the darkness had put a damp chill in my soul, until I could barely communicate with anyone, not unlike so many of my neighbors.

When you go from North to South, cold to bearable, darkness to sunshine, something happens to you. I can only equate it to the prickling feeling one feels in his toes as the blood rushes in after a period of elevated suspension.

At City Lights in San Francisco, I went looking for a kindred book to cozy up with and could find nothing among the current jewels and emeralds of contemporary writers workshops. I went home with Jack London instead, Northland Tales, a literary godfather without an MFA. To my surprise, London encountered this sensation too. Just as he describes, an emotional thaw takes place when exposed to the sun's rays after light starvation. One becomes human again, more human than he will ever feel.

This was how I was feeling. It is a feeling I would like to nourish and maintain, though slowly it is being pried from my enlightened hands by 24-hour news coverage and village gossip. This was a feeling I met during my first winter in Estonia a decade ago. I touched on it in the first book, where the protagonist confesses his attraction to many other women to his wife-to-be. Diel wasn't buying it. He wrote to me. How could the main character have been so naive? Of course he knew that his eye would continue to wander, with or without ring.

But that wasn't the point! Not at all. That was a tale of being emotionally overwhelmed by a change in environment. It's not that the main character is attracted to other women, it's that in the context of going from dark to light, these simple biological impulses evolved into phenomenon that could, I suspect, jeopardize one's sanity. Drinking, carousing, knife-fighting, womanizing, philandering, believing in elves ... in Greenland, I am told of how they wait for the ship to arrive with its bounty of booze, then do it with whomever in the snow between the pretty-as-a-chocolate-box houses.

So it goes. I am very grateful though for the sensations, the emotional thaw, the enhancement in perception. I am richer for it, which is why I must say thank you Krugman and Ilves, thank you TIME and thank you Wall Street Journal, thank you Kurt Vonnegut and Aldous Huxley. Where would I be without you? But most of all, thank you Jack London. I finished half of your Northland tales in California. I'll finish the second half in Estonia.

nii naljakas

Käi perse, Semper!

So, the number one most read blog post last year appeared in April. "Eat Your Heart Out, Truman Capote!" Not like so many Estonian and Esto-connected readers care so much about Mr. Capote, or Friedebert Tuglas for that matter. It was because of something I included in the post: the fact that a member of the Estonian Writers Union told my wife, a rejected applicant, partially in jest, that membership depends on on who one drinks and sleeps with.

This led to an Õhtuleht article, where the headline inferred that I was the one who said the stuff about drinking and sleeping with writers. After that, Mele Pesti discussed the manner in which my words were taken out of context in Memokraat. Meantime, the affable gents at the Writers Union were sending me private messages on the world's most popular social networking site about how getting in has absolutely, positively nothing to do with whom one sleeps and drinks. Absurd!

My main point was that there is a disconnect between some of Estonia's archaic ideas about art (or anything) and the reality -- a shred of evidence being that self-annointed "writers" wallow away in obscurity, while people who sell many, many books are not even deemed to be worthy of the term "writer" in an Estonian context. I am actually not writing about myself here, though when I accidentally told someone I was a writer, a kirjanik, it amused them greatly, and I was informed that only people who can translate from ancient Greek into Estonian dialect are allowed to call themselves writers in this little cold land. See what I mean? Anyway, whatever I tried to say, it interested people. That controversial post received about five to ten times more clicks than any other in 2012.

eestlanna pariisis

From one jobu to another.

Had the chance to watch a film on the Finnair flight. Three films, in fact. The other two are not worthy of discussion, not only because they had nothing to do with Estonia, but because they were so outrageously stupid (The Campaign and The Hangover), although this reverence for stupidity is among the sturdiest pillars of Americanness.

Eestlanna Pariisis is not a stupid American film. It is a quiet, brooding European film and it made me cry. Maybe that happened because I was so exhausted. But there was something about the way that Anne's (Laine Mägi) life in Estonia was portrayed -- the jobu drunk ex-husband, the spacey grandmother with dementia, the silent funeral with vodka shots, the unrenovated apartment with Soviet furnishings, the primped, self-absorbed kids who couldn't stick around for a funeral because they had to go to work, not to mention all the darkness and snow --  that brought me to tears, probably because it was so accurate.

My sister-in-law's mother-in-law really does have dementia and lives at home. We do have close relatives whose lives have been destroyed by alcohol. Most of the 80s and 90s-born youth in our Estonian family ("Republicans" as the Estonian writer Andrei Hvostov describes the rising generation of Estonian youth that has no memory of the Soviet era) have adopted global personas and fantasize of a new, hipper existence at the center of it all in New York or London. Goodbye Põltsamaa, hello Paris!

But as Anne finds out, Paris isn't much better than Tallinn. She trades one jobu (jerk) at home for another abroad, in this case nasty old coot and Estonian exile named Frida (Jeanne Moreau). I hate to say it, but I think Estonians were proud that the aging film legend Moreau appeared in an Ilmar Raag film with the word Estonienne in the title, that Frenchness itself could coexist with Estonianness in such a mopey and intense European manner. Moreau didn't speak Estonian in the film, except maybe an attempt at "Tere," but a lot of exiles have left their linguistic identities behind, as I have seen time and again.

It's the, "Wait, this isn't a dream?" phenomenon. Estonia feels like an island, you see. Water and swamps all around. When you leave, you start to wonder if it really exists. It made my heart stir a bit to hear Estonian and French spoken in the same scene, not only because it proved that Estonia is real, but because Mägi has superb diction and I could understand every word, so unlike Seenelkäik (Mushrooming), another film from the past year, where actors Raivo Tamm and Juhan Ulfsak's muddy and impenetrable baritones made my wife our official translator.

Mägi also played her body well. There were messages in the simple ways she removed trays of food or cleaned up an intentionally spilled cup of tea. Mägi has a thin, elegant frame and as she doesn't say much (many Estonians aren't big talkers), so she has to use her movements to fill scenes with the emotions required (humiliation, determination, loneliness, apprehension). I did find some of the Frenchness in the film overplayed (the fresh croissants, the fashion), but I can't criticize that, considering I did some of the same things in my novel Montreal Demons ("behold, the boulangerie, the thigh high boots!") Plus, this is a film geared to ladies who go to the cinema with other ladies, not to the audience of The Hangover or The Campaign, or even Seenelkäik, ie. guys like me.

So, is it a great film? I am not a film critic. Maybe it was terrible. But I liked it and it had an effect on me sitting up there above the cold clouds and strong gusts of Greenlandic wind. Yes, I liked it.

that black man

Ebony and ivory.

"Daddy, who's that black man?" "Shh. Be quiet!" "But the black man?" ""That's Dave Benton." "Is he from America? He looks like Obama." "No, he's from Aruba, I think." "Aruba?" "It's an island."

This dialogue took place at a Christmas concert at the Vanemuine theater in Tartu. And, I have to say, I quieted my child, not only because the rest of the audience at the Dave Benton and Annely Peebo concert seemed stiff and conservative and not welcoming of small children interrupting Härra Benton's "Santa Claus is Coming to Town," but because she noted that Härra Benton is of a different race.

It was a reflex, of course and everything here is contextual. I am a product of place and time and have grown up thinking of people of African descent as being sensitive about their identity. But I am in my own way a time capsule, and little girls today don't know much about Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, Huey Newton, and, of course, the Reverend Al Sharpton, nor have they seen a Spike Lee movie. Even in the US, it seems like the passions of the postmodern, post-Civil Rights political correctness identity crisis have long cooled. And the fact is that Dave Benton is a black man, especially when he's standing on stage next to Annely Peebo, who looks like the heroine of a Wagner opera.

It was a good concert by the way, a fun tribute to every stereotype about Christmas concerts -- blaring saxophone solo, anyone? -- and there was also the pleasant mismatch of Benton's smooth operator finger-snapping crooning and Peebo's scintillating soprano, which billowed up into the higher octaves like plumes of hot steam off an extinguished Christmas fire. My daughters' favorite song was "Feliz Navidad," and even the old ladies with the wooden faces were clapping along by that point, but my handling of the topic of racial identity also was turning in the back of my mind.

According to a book I have been reading called Nurture Shock, so-called white parents rarely talk about race with their children, and if they do it's usually packaged in some gunky "skin color doesn't matter, it's what's inside" gobbeldygook. I say "so-called white" because I think "white" is a bullshit term used by Americans to separate themselves from Europeans because of our/their massive hybrid inferiority-superiority complex ("I'm not a filthy cheese-eating European, I'm white"), but that's neither here nor there.

The truth is that the "we're all the same/skin color doesn't matter" argument would never pass my kids' sniff test. My eldest daughter is asking me questions all the time like, "Why are most rappers black?" And here I am, driving the road between Viljandi and Tartu, passing farmhouses and forests, wondering if I should start with slave work songs or Gil Scott-Heron's "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" or just skip ahead to Grandmaster Flash and Sugarhill Gang. Or I could have said, "That's not true, Eminem is a fine rapper and he's not black. See, what are you talking about? Skin color doesn't matter!" Too bad Mr. Benton himself wasn't in the backseat so he could have leaned forward in his trademark white suit and answered simply, "because black people are awesome."

Usually my response to "Why is that man black?" is "Because some of his/her ancestors came from Africa." Seems like a pretty legitimate take on the question. The roots of many popular American music forms also trace back to Africa. Don't ask me. Ask James Brown. Okay, he's dead. But listen to his music. The answer is Africa. It's a way of thinking I have picked up from the Estonians, for whom nationality is a deep and meaningful construct. The very words "German," "Russian," or "Finn" are loaded with shared ideas about those nationalities related to genetics and history.

In a way, I am teaching my children to think similarly. Connect the man's blackness with Africa. Why is Obama black? Because his father was from Kenya. See, it's no lie, and it's not mixing up the message with complex concepts that little kids have a hard time grasping because they didn't grow up listening to Public Enemy's Fear of a Black Planet. And, to compare, why is my family white? Could it be that most of our ancestors come from Europe? Sometimes the answers to the most difficult questions are as deceptive in their simplicity as the melody of a good Christmas standard.

in his own write

Market research.

I'm half way through João Lopes Marques' Estonia: Paradise Without Palm Trees. Or maybe I am a third of the way through. Or 55 percent. The Portuguese-born writer has assembled for me a collection of his work, a collection that does not proceed chronologically in terms of when the pieces were written, so I have taken the liberty of starting the book at the end and working backward to the beginning, with some guilty pleasure reading about wife carrying contests and provincial girls along the way.

João is one of Estonia's resident expatriate writers. There are many of us -- how many I do not know. Vello Vikerkaar certainly counts as an expat writer. And Abdul Turay's got a new book out this week called Väike Valge Riik ("The Little White Country") about Estonian political culture. I'll get that one for Christmas maybe and read it too. I jest that it's market research for the next Minu Eesti book. But based on what I have read from Vello, João, and Abdul, I can see that we are all very different writers, and that our similarlity begins and ends with the fact that we are foreigners living in and writing about Estonia.

Vello is the recluse. Nobody knows who he really is or if that's even his real name. Plus he's got a bit of a mean streak."Life isn't fair," seems to be a recurring theme. Yet he's affable too, he can turn the charm on and off. If he were one of the actors who have played James Bond, he'd easily be Sean Connery.

João is Portuguese, but beyond that, he is a European. I can sense it in his well thought out dissections of everyday life in the capital city. There is a measured cadence to his manner of writing, and yet there is also coolness to it too, a euro reservation that frustrates me at times. I want João to get angry, maybe rob a bank. But he doesn't. He's just too cool. If he were a Bond actor, he'd probably be Timothy Dalton, sliding down a hill in a cello case.

Abdul is British, which means he can say pretty much anything and, as long as he's got his spectacles on, people will revere it as the words of an Oxford professor. Plus he's got gravitas. It's like he got off the plane at Tallinn one day, and the next he's on primetime TV talking about economic policy. Some balls. So he has a way of carrying himself, but he's no empty suit. If he was, he would have been devoured by tabloid wolves long ago. Because of this bold brashness, I'd have to call him Daniel Craig, whether he likes it or not.

And me? I am unintentionally funny. My wife calls me "Mr. Bean" because I can't walk across a room without knocking a lamp over. I worked hard on a novel last year called Montreal Demons. It has its humorous parts too, but it is also has some darker themes of sex and religion. It's gotten positive reviews, and some who have read the English version say it's better than the Estonian one. one reader even said it was like Gonzo with some Raymond Chandler and a hint of Hemingway, which made me feel really good.

Yet people in Estonia don't want Hemingway from Giustino. They want comedy. They want oozing floods of meat jelly and exploding blood sausages. It's like I'm Peter Sellers in Casino Royale. Even if I tried to play the role straight, people would still think I was joking.

Sometimes I wonder if every European country has its local purveyors of English-language literature. I would think it fine and good if they do. And I think it is fine and good that Estonia has Vello, João, Abdul, and even that clown who wrote My Estonia to kick around. Why, it's like having Sean Connery, Timothy Dalton, Daniel Craig, and Peter Sellers in the same movie.

little saint nick

Al, Brian, Dennis, Mike, Carl ... but no Nick

Nikolaus came to my daughter's preschool the other day and handed out gifts. It was a major event. It was also the first time I had heard this name, or one like it, uttered among the Estonians. You see, there are no Nicks in Estonia. I know Markus, and Martin, and Märtin and Marko. Kaarel and Mihkel and Luukas and Vello. But as far as I can recall ... there is not one Nick in Eesti at all.

I could never understand this. There are Nicks in every other country. Nicola in Italy. Niko in Finland. Nikolao in Esperanto. Sure, I have known some derivatives here in Estonia. There is Klaus, the workman who works on our house in Viljandi. Then there was Nils, the nihilistic musician with the ponytail who wore black all the time and lived next door to us in Tartu. Yet there seems to be an aversion to Nicks. When a friend gave birth to a boy, I suggested the name Nikolai, which I thought could have a certain tsarist flair (because anything old is fresh and new in Eesti-land). The tot was christened Sander instead.

I took up the subject with Sven the baker here in Viljandi (because there are plenty of Svens in Estonia) and he sort of laughed at me and told me it was the simplest thing in the world. "That's because Nick," he said, "is the Estonian equivalent of 'dick.'" And not only. The verb nikkuma has the same meaning as the English verbs "to fuck" and "to screw." For Estonians, the phonetic "Nick" is a thing or a thing that one does with one's thing, but not the actual person who has the thing or who does the doing with said thing.

The dialogue with Sven occurred at the local Christmas fair, where I butchered several unrehearsed Christmas songs on stage. I was going to learn "Little Saint Nick," a rocking Beach Boys tune, but gave up when I realized that my crooner's voice could not do justice to Brian Wilson's California surfer cool. "Good thing I didn't sing that song," I told Sven. "They would have thrown gingerbread at me."

Roll Call

I realize that it's been a while since I last updated my "Gateways to the Northern Dimension" list and that many sterling web logs may have escaped my notice. If you know of anything worthy of inclusion that concerns the northern lands of Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Iceland, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, Sweden, and assorted duchies, provinces, and former imperial masters, please share.

purged

The singer, not the song.

It's been a while since I read Purge, and it was not an easy book for me to read. Sometimes books are like that, they come to you and then you flip through a few pages and put them on your shelf, beside all those other books you would like to read. Then one morning you pick it up when you are on the way to the WC, and finish it later that afternoon. Purge was one of these kinds of books.

Of course, my expectations were too high. I saw Oksanen's face in so many places, I began to wonder if was my own face, or just another one of my many faces. She has an image though. At the Helsinki Book Fair last month, it towered over the many sellers and booths, the poster of Oksanen. I walked into a vast exhibition and convention center, face to face with Angry Birds and whatever else, but all I could see was a giant Oksanen looming in the distance. Did she have another book coming out? I wasn't sure. What was most important was that she existed and was perhaps writing something new.

So I had my expectations. I cannot say that I loved the book, or understand its success. Still, 99 percent of the books available at the local shop aren't worthy of one's time, so something like this, a historical drama with pregnant themes shines through the shit. And I also cannot deny that Purge touched me in some way, or at least it has stayed with me. I can remember most of the characters, my images of them, their relationships to one another, the scenery. It's certainly like a film, and when I was informed that it was originally written as a play, it made perfect sense.

Yet something about the characters deeply annoyed me. One of the main story lines in the book was Aliide's deep affection for her brother-in-law Hans. And by the end of the book, I still couldn't see what she saw in the guy. Sure, it takes place many years ago, so perhaps this elementary school tale of unrequited love and jealousy could have played out between grown adults, but so many times I just wanted to reach through the pages and shake the young Aliide and maybe throw a glass of cold water in her face and say, "Stop being so naive!" My own cynicism prevented me from relating to such a story.

The character Zara seemed equally as naive. I think we all smelled sexual slavery the minute her friend in Vladivostock started to chat her up about promising opportunities in the West. I have known plenty of such naive young people in my life, perhaps once was one, and can believe in such turns of events. But as a reader, as someone in the story, I could not invest my emotions in such circumstances. Was it more tragic that she was a prostitute or that she was duped into becoming one?

Something about this book reminded me of DH Lawrence, or the half of Lady Chatterley's Lover I read before I put that down (and still haven't retrieved it on the way to the WC). Perhaps it was the relative powerlessness of the female characters, and how the external world, represented by male characters, fenced in their decisions, their lives. Constance Chatterley goes from Clifford Chatterley to Mellors, the gamekeeper. Her life is defined by her relationships to two very different men. Aliide's world is, again, defined by her relationships to two different men -- her brother-in-law Hans Pekk and her husband Martin Truu. And Zara is actually a slave to men -- to her pimp and his clients. Was James Brown right when he sang, "It's a Man's Man's Man's World"? And here I am, living in Estonian matriarchy, thinking it's always been the other way around.

Anyway, let's contrast that with Oksanen, a woman whose life is now fenced in not by men, but by the overwhelming success of this novel, and who will spend the rest of her writing career trying to live up to those great expectations, or trying to distance herself from it. It's a phenomenon I have known at a much smaller scale. I would love to read a book about a character like Oksanen. Maybe she could write one. Or maybe that would be a little bit too much like Reality TV.

the heiress

This time with no mustache.

When I first set foot on Estonian soil 10 years ago, the prime minister of this land was a man by the name of Siim Kallas. I didn't know that then, and the March 2003 elections brought to Stenbock House another man with a different disposition who I would come to recognize on sight. That man was named Juhan Parts. But this is not a post about Juhan Parts, though I know you all wish it was.

Anyway, Siim Kallas, a peculiarly likable fellow. He is one of the chosen few who never age. Go back to those photos of Kallas from the IME project in 1987 and he looks exactly the same. He's even got the same dapper mustache, which would look odd on any other fellow, but seems to suit him, in fact, I am afraid to know what he looks like without his trademark vüntsid.

I caught him once at a Lennart Meri Conference where the moderator butchered his name, referring to the gentleman with the two 'i's as "Sim." "Sim this," and "Sim that." I cringed everytime he said it, but Siim (rhymes with scheme) didn't wince once. Instead he went on and on about something that I cannot remember but sounding very intelligent and using hand gestures that signaled his self confidence to the audience.

Siim did his part during the EU accession referendum in 2003 by urging Estonians into voting yes by summoning the ghost of Kekkoslovakia, a derogatory term for Finland in the post-war, pre-EU years, where the president had to phone Moscow before deciding anything, even if he wanted to take a piss. In following years, Härra Kallas flew away to Brussels to become a commissioner of something (vice president for mobility and transport, thank you very much) and Tartu Mayor Andrus Ansip became the new face of the Reform Party and has been for the past seven years, leading Kallas' political baby through two successful elections.

But Kallas has another a baby, a biological one. And these days in Estonia her face is everywhere. Kallas' baby is not really a baby anymore. Her name is Kaja and she is 35 years old and she is very pretty. Of course, she has a sterling CV with accomplishments as a lawyer and businesswoman, ambition, intelligence, but she also happens to look really good, which is why magazines just can't help but make Kaja Kallas their cover girl. For weeks (months?) it seems that she has appeared on the cover of all printed material in the nation. The stories about her feed an intense public interest.

"Could she be Estonia's first female prime minister?" one tabloid even ventured to ask. Hmm. Could she? Even people who despise the current leader have confessed to me. "If she would run, I would vote for her."

Given the public's dissatisfaction with Mr. Ansip and his party's sinking approval ratings (just a point or two over the opposition Social Democrats and Centre partisans in the most recent poll), this regular Estonian magazine browser here has begun to smell a PR offensive. With the stench of Silvergate, and whistleblower Silver Meikar's expulsion from the party (an event that Kallas publicly distanced herself from), the ship of the current government is taking on water. Party investors stand to lose state capture opportunities. And an aging statesman (and there could be no finer a term for Siim Kallas) could see his political legacy as architect of Estonia's perpetual number one party tarnished. We are left to wonder, can his daughter and true political heir bail them all out?

letters from beijing and shanghai

The world belongs to you. Estonia belongs to you.

I'm a dinosaur. I imagined Beijing, I conjured Shanghai. I could see the men and women in their gray and blue uniforms with their gray and blue hats and their little red books, the walls but tapestries of propaganda red with little golden stars. Nothing but bicycles, nothing but cigarettes, nothing but military police and rice. But the "bicycle era is over," they told me from the driver's seats of their BMWs and Mercedes, and Big Brother is no longer Mao, but a retired American military man by the name of Colonel Sanders.

The satanically smug Colonel Sanders grinned down on me from a hundred locations in Beijing, Shanghai, Hangzhou. In the Beijing metro, one can watch a commercial on the small digital televisions that are mounted in each train, a young pretty woman, a young handsome man, fashionable, sporty, business-like, the future, walking in peace, hand in hand, through a local business district, until the pretty young Chinese woman spies the Colonel and then they sort of leap through the air toward the gates of KFC where mushrooms collide with sauce midair and shrimps parachute into steaming plates of rice and the caramel-colored secret sauce bubbles and oozes forth from the buns of fried chicken sandwiches. So happy! 

In the back alleys of Shanghai, I was escorted into what could be called a townhouse where a young Estonian socialite now dwells. Like many promising youth, she has turned her back on her native country and vowed never to return. Refugees like her feel suffocated by the village gossip, the incestuous romances, the lack of opportunity as the gluttonous Winners Generation continues to gorge itself ever forward. They have grown sour on the atrophying political scene, where even the most damning of political scandals can't bring down the Teflon Dons. And did you hear that Estonian Air is cancelling its route to London? Tragic. At home, the media sounds and pounds the alarms as Estonia's youth pack their bags and move away. But the youth don't care. They are already gone.

Anyway, it was an enchanting evening of pizza and hää eesti seltskond. One Estonian man, a hulking Viking of an individual who runs a Belgian window factory outside Shanghai, informed me of the pleasures of slaughtering pigs and making one's own verikäkk. He keeps boa constrictors and feeds them rats. In winter visits to Pärnu, he takes his truck out on the frozen bay for rally racing. He complains how the Chinese men spend all their time lazing about and eating and whoring and not renovating their homes, even if a window gets jammed or a tile falls off the ceiling, "Can you believe it?"

The Estonian sea pirate warned me about the chemicals in all Chinese food, how one producer of lamb meat was actually taking beef and soaking it in lamb piss and passing it off as the real thing. Mmm, lamb piss, delicious. It's so common though. Expats in Estonia bitch about the Estonians, expats in China bitch about the Chinese. What is an expat but a bitch who only bitches? "Bitch, bitch, bitch," as a friend's wife mock-says when her expat man goes off on the shoddiness of Estonian  journalism, "bitch, bitch, bitch."

China is a land where people drink only hot water, and foot massages are extremely painful. And yet there is a majestic quality to it all, even to the bundles of toilet paper that litter the restaurant floors, as if it was just charming tumbleweed in some Old West saloon. It's a raw, intuitive place, China. There is no need for safety belts, or for even following traffic rules, and pigs and dragons are lucky. In China, sometimes it is best not to know things. Like, what was in that food I just ate? I don't know, but it tasted good and that's all that matters. Or, did the chef wash his hands? I don't know, but I didn't get sick this time and that's all that matters. Who cares if it was soaked in lamb piss or not if we wake up well the next morning and our toes are still tapping? Why do we demand on knowing so much in the West, huh? Ignorance is bliss indeed.

But still, I was tricked. The little boy in me expected one kind of cultural revolution, I got another in the form of two Louis Vuitton stores in one city, Shanghai, the "Paris of the East." Never have I witnessed such shameless materialism, and this in a people's republic, where the the Starbucks mermaid swims alongside the golden hammer and sickle of the CPC in the public's stream of consciousness.

Security was tight in Tiananmen Square, where the 18th party congress met to annoint the next generation of leaders. Nobody was sure of the outcome, yet the outcome was assured. Of course, statistician Nate Silver told us that Obama's victory over Mitt "47 Percent" Romney was certain as well. According to Prime Minister Ansip, Reform continues to be the most popular party in Estonia by a percentage point. So there. But still, the clawing anxiety, the anticipation, the foreplay, the debates, the build up, the waiting, the incessant website refreshing -- in China, it just wasn't there.

It reminded me in ways of the selection of the new pope. And in the Vatican of the East that rainy windblown week, all eyes were trained on the center of Beijing for that telling puff of white smoke.