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.

letter from helsinki

Perfection comes at a price.

I'm getting fleeced, maybe by my own idiocy, maybe by the metric system, maybe by the Finns, and, just maybe, by all of these things. Macadamia nuts and dried strawberries at €2.99 for 100 grams at the Kamppi shopping center in downtown Helsinki. It sounds reasonable, though I have a hard time conceptualizing 100 grams of anything. And yet when it's time to pay up, the cheeky Vietnamese Finn at the booth charges me €24.99 ($32) like it's no big deal. And, after a brief "you must be joking" look, I pay it anyway, handing her a €50 bill, only to be handed back half of the amount in currency, and the other half in two, half-filled bags of nuts and strawberries.

The higher price tag must have been linked to the products' innate superiority. It was one of the few reasonable explanations. But how were they superior? I am not going to speculate that each nut was fashioned with laser-like precision by some local titan of design, named Timo perhaps, to exude the correct art nouveau properties, though in Finland, I might believe it. Or could it be that these nuts and strawberries were superior because they were in Finland, and in Finland, things are superior and cost more, by nature?

It's no wonder that so many Estonian workers flock to this northern land of perfection. The salaries are many times higher. A babysitter in Viljandi will work for €2 an hour. In Helsinki, our Estonian friend pays her babysitter €14 an hour, to do pretty much the same job. The Finn earns seven times more than the Estonian! Little did I know, but all of my neighbors and acquaintances who do the weekly trek to Helsinki are rolling in it. Maybe that's why they all drive such nice cars.

And I would wager that it is easier for an Estonian to integrate into Finnish society than most other nationalities. Even I felt disarmingly at home there, despite the parallel universe prices. The faces were familiar, the names were familiar, as was the language. After getting lost, I was able to get directions from some grocery store sellers and understand what they were telling me. I realize that just hearing all of this Estonian all the time has opened my mind to Finnish, Karelian, Vepsian, a whole new linguistic world.

And yet the Finnish-Estonian relationship is complex. Consider the English text on the Viking Line ferry screens. These are large monitors found in the corridors of the ship that provide information about various destinations. Tallinn's includes the lines, "Since gaining its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991" and "hotels are up to Western European standards." Either they haven't changed those informative blurbs since 1996, or somebody is living in a timewarp. My experience is actually that hotels in old Western Europe are not up to Estonian standards. At my hotel in Hamburg, I was given a large, old-fashioned key, to be left at the reception desk. In Rome, wifi was free, but only in the lobby, and it didn't work half the time. And in Helsinki, I had to actually pay for parking across the street from our hotel with coins from the "lippuautomaatti." Can you imagine? Estonian radio stations may be stuck in the 1980s, but when it comes to "Western European standards," the world's only post-communist nordic country has left them all behind.,

A bit more on the dreaded "N" word is warranted. I sometimes get the feeling that "Nordic" is a code word for Finnish, as if one means the other and vice versa. Few nationalities are so keen on the term, other than the marketing savvy Estonians, who see it as a self-promoting "in." But what exactly is "Finnish" and what exactly is "Nordic?" Where is the line between the two? It seems as if "Finnish" is some kind of premodern concept, of saunas and national folk costumes and accordions, 19th century prints of flaxen maidens working in the fields.

But "Nordic?" "Nordic" is ocularly appealing coffee mugs and aerodynamic chairs, Marimekko prints, a pair of smart, dark-framed glasses on every face. "Nordic" is some kind of 1968-minted version of "the future" that has been tweaked by time and technology. Because of this, a person in Finland can feel as if he is both simultaneously stuck in the past and living in a science fiction film.

The Estonians, for all of their tech agility, still seem to have a complex in regards to the Finns. I won't call it an inferiority complex, but as a friend informed me, anytime she confesses that she is Estonian, she is looked upon with disapproving glances, as if a plumber had barged into a meeting of bankers, his ass crack hanging loose for all to see. When my wife had trouble returning a sweater at Kamppi, thanks to a particularly difficult seller, she was heard to ponder aloud, "I wonder if she treated me like that because I am Estonian." And when I asked her why she didn't try to speak Finnish with the locals, she answered, "Why should every Estonian speak Finnish to the Finns? They should try speaking Estonian to me." I was pleased to see how Finland got under her skin, after being mocked during our visit to Russia for my "illogical" fear of being trailed by the FSB, "as if I was so important."

In the midst of this, I started to better understand the Estonians' desire to take the Finns down a notch. Sure they may be wealthier, and more "Nordic," but the Finns and Estonians spring from the same rough country roots, as do most Europeans. Let's go back a few generations before the Finns got their Marimekko sweaters and Urho Kekkonen glasses and progressive politics and take a look at all the peasants sawing timber and sullying their hands in the fields. So when Estonians begroan Finnish haughtiness in the media, they are actually just trying to keep their old friend's ego in check. And that is a mark of true friendship.

I have to end here by saying that in spite of its high prices and obsession with perfection, and occassional haughtiness, I really do love Helsinki. It is the place where I fell in love. And there was a moment when I was looking out the apartment window before the snow fell, and the golden and brown leaves were swirling around an adjacent playground, that I felt that the place actually might be perfect, in its own rugged, rocky, Finnish way. So I recommend a visit to all. But first practice by standing in front of a toilet and flushing €50 bills down, one after the other. And when at last it doesn't hurt anymore, then you are ready to experience Finland.

toidupoliitika

Food, glorious food.

You are what you eat, so they say, and what you eat defines you. On the road north from Tartu, I would often pass a sign spraypainted on the side of a bus stop with a curious bespeckled cartoon face and a bubble above in which was written, "Fuck milk. Go Vegan!"

The sign always made me angry because it was in English, and so was aimed at tourists or truck drivers from foreign lands. They didn't have the common decency to figure out how to spread their message in the national language! Or perhaps it was intelligent for the animal rights activists to go after them rather than the Estonians, because the day the Estonians forsake verivorst in favor of tofu blood sausages en masse is the day I win the Eurovision Song Contest.

The gulf in perceptions toward food between the well-meaning cosmopolitan who has eschewed factory farming and all of its ills and the average Estonian is vast. I know many people in Estonia who are largely responsible for their own food supply, hell, they give it away to us, in the form of smoked meats and fish, gallons of sauerkraut and apple juice, cartons of potatoes, carrots, and beets. If meat is murder, then our neighbors and family members in Estonia are guilty as charged -- they raise the animals and slaughter them as they wish, they pull the fish from the lakes, smoke them and gobble them up.

Could I really pull one of them aside and say, "Hey, buddy. Fuck milk. Go Vegan?" No I couldn't. The larger ideas that have led Global Citizen X to abstain from animal products on principle would be lost on the rural Estonian who maintains his own food supply, animal and vegetable alike, much as his fathers before him. And that's what makes "food totalitarianism" objectionable to me. In my heart, I am a traditionalist. No verivorst for the Estonians, no chorizo for the Spaniards, no pepperoni for the Italians? Again, food defines us, and to abandon millennia-old recipes for tofu cutlets is to cast off one's heritage for the culinary equivalent of Star Trek, to boldly go where no man has gone before, a diet without animal products, the final frontier.

I wrestled with these ideas while reading Jonathan Saffran Foer's landmark Eating Animals, contemplating an Estonian translation. Would it sell? Would the audience be receptive? Is it my civic duty as a global citizen to present alternative viewpoints to the northern European blood-eating masses? The author resides in Brooklyn, where the only farmland left has been turned into an open air museum, and one has access to animal-free food products at the snap of his fingers.

But Brooklyn is far and away from Viljandi. One fellow I know here in town is"Jutukas Kalev," so called because he is jutukas, talkative, meaning that he never shuts up. He lives on the edge of the city in a ramshackle dwelling beside a condemned barn where he makes apple juice for his patrons, you bring him the fruit, he gives you the raw by-product, that's his business. During one of his many soliloquys, which generally focus on local police department corruption, he explained how he only uses searasv, lard, to grease his frying pan, because the dairy products are too expensive. "Who can afford butter in this economy?" he said, thrusting an apple-grimed finger in the air. I just nodded and paid him. It's the best thing to do.

"Would Kalev buy an Estonian translation of Eating Animals?" I pondered while leaving his property, three large containers of raw juice in the back of my car. "Would he 'fuck milk'? Would he 'go vegan?'" In a word, no. Kalev didn't seem like a reader I could count on. Too bad, because there are a lot of good points in that book and many others that recount the horrors of factory farming because they are, well, rather horrific. And some of it hits close to home. There is a pig factory across the lake. On certain days you can smell the death and shit wafting through the air.

Yet some things are changing in E-land. Local activism has recently pushed food producers into selling sausages that are "e-vaba," minus dreaded "e" chemical additives, emulsifiers and food colorings and "flavor enhancers," stuff your great grandmother's great grandmother wouldn't eat. Don't forget, just as an animal product-free life is one futuristic pipe dream, the yellow #5 reality we inhabit isn't too far from being another form of science fiction.

As for me, I live in limbo, the shadowy borderlands between the totalitarian food regimes, scorned by the vegans and the hot dog contest judges. It has become apparent to me that a diet comprised of too many animal products is unhealthy. One need not completely "fuck milk" to appreciate that soy and rice-derived products are easier on the constitution. Moreover, the more I read about traditional lifestyles, the more I see how much our ancestors valued precious animal products. Shepherds in the Italian countryside ate their pasta with eggs because they were starved for protein. The bulk of their diet consisted of fruits and vegetables. Whether or not their protein source was the product of a chicken's menstrual cycle, or disrespectful toward these sacred birds, didn't enter into it.

So here I am at the checkout line at Selver on a Tuesday afternoon, a schizophrenic shopper, buying soy milk and regular milk together, buying packages of tofu cutlets and salmon steaks, and real butter too, because I am lucky enough to be able to afford it. That graffiti on the road out of Tartu still annoys me, because it was in English, and also because it seemed so far removed from the lives of men like Jutukas Kalev. At the same time, I like the vanilla-flavored soy milk because it goes down easy and, most importantly, because it tastes good. I'm glad that I am able to buy it whenever I want. My satisfaction trumps all.

hot cakes

In a small town, even pastries are political.

Sven knows I buy bread at Selver. How Sven found out, I do not know, but he's given me hell for it a few times now. "You keep eating that shit," he says, "and you'll be dead in, like, three weeks!"

Sven takes an interest in where I buy my bread in Viljandi because he is a baker, and would prefer that I buy only bread from him. I often do, but sometimes I can't help but bring home a doughy loaf of rosinasai from the archenemy of all independent food stores across Estonia.

Sven the baker keeps an eye on the market. He knows where each man gets his daily bread. When a cafe opened up nearby he wasted no time in tearing apart the competitor's wares. "And did you see those cakes? So puny and dry. Let me tell you, anyone who eats that stuff will be dead in, like ..."

I did go into the rival's bakery once just to see what was on offer. I made sure to look over my shoulder when I stepped through the doorway, scanned the windows on the opposite building, hoping that no one in the town would report back to Sven that I was seen entering the "other" cafe.  And, sure enough, the cakes inside were small and dry. As many Estonian bakers suffer from severe myopia, they only see dry and small cakes and pastries on the shelves of other bakeries, and assume that these are the only kinds of cakes that exist the world over.

That keeps me going back to Sven's cafe for baked goods, with the occasional guilty trek to Selver, but now I hear a high-end cafe is opening up just around the corner, a place where a stale roll graced with a dead fish isn't the resident baker's idea of fine cuisine. Sven and I haven't discussed the new cafe, but we both know "it" exists. Needless to say, if I do go there, it will be early in the morning, or just before closing time. I'll have to wear a trench coat and a false mustache. Such is life in a small town.

letter from sweden

It's lonely at the top.

These poor Swedes. They are so self deprecating. The king? An idiot. Their beer? Nothing special. But Mariestads is a fine brew, it does the trick, and the king hasn't started any wars, so ... why are they so down on themselves?

"I don't understand these Swedes," an older British man confided in me years ago. "They seem so pleasant, even happy, they are industrious, cooperative, good team players, never complain, and then one day they wake up and decide to kill themselves."

"It's because they finally figure out that everything is controlled," said my friend Erland, a Swedish chef who happens to live in Viljandi. "They ask themselves, 'If the state controls everything, what's the sense in living anymore?'"

Entertainment, I might answer. The big scandal in Stockholm these days revolves around a the appearance of a few mysterious one-crown coins that feature the profile of King Carl XVI Gustaf.

Yet these were not your average coins. Instead of the usual "Carl XVI Gustaf Sveriges Konung" ('Carl XVI Gustaf Sweden's King'), the text written around the image of the King's head on the coins read "Vår horkarl till Kung," which translates roughly into English as "Our whorer of a King."

After much public discussion and high-tech analyses at the Swedish state bank, the defacer of the coins came forward to acknowledge his work as art, and to claim that he has committed no crime. As the coins were never in circulation, and they were real coins, the coin artist argues that he is not guilty of forgery. The Swedish authorities know not what to do. They feel he has done something wrong, but they are not sure yet what it is. "The king can charge me if he likes," says the defiant coin artist.

I heard this and other lamentations during my savage and tragic sojourn into the capital of Scandinavia. Savage you say? Tragic, how so? Well, for example, I did not notice that my hotel in Uppsala had a shared shower when I booked it. Early in the morning I tiptoed down the hall to use it, while it was still relatively clean, in nothing but my bathrobe. I had grabbed my room key before I left, of course, and inserted into my pocket. But things were not as they seemed. To my horror, I discovered it was not my hotel key but my train ticket from the night before. And so my fellow lodgers might have heard a dripping wet half nude American man standing in the corridor at 6.20 am mutter something to himself along the lines of, "Oh my God, I am so fucked!"

I hid in the janitor's closet until I came to my senses, and then called the front desk from the hall phone but got no answer. I stepped out into the staircase while another door shut behind me, locking me out of my own floor, then descended the cold stairs barefoot. Luckily, there was someone on the first floor vacuuming in the lobby. A trio of Indian businessmen sat around sipping coffees but didn't seem to notice me, as such attire is common in their country. The Swedish woman understood at once the problem, and we returned to my room, where I was let in, and thanked her many times with all the takk skal du have and takk  så mycket I could muster. Then I opened up the room window, let the cool air pour in, and stared out at the sun rising over the Uppsala skyline, wondering how an idiot like me had managed to score a career, a wife, and three children.

Skyline? Well, actually, in Uppsala there is no such thing. Only the spire of the Domkyrka could be seen from afar, the same church that guided me to my hotel room the previous night. I had bounced around with my luggage from the train station up the hill, no urge to use a cab, as I wanted to see the city. It did not disappoint. The glistening waters of the canal. The spectral Swedish ladies ghosting by on bikes, silent, golden heads forward. The faces of the young and beautiful students laughing behind the cafe windows. The darkness of night, the perfection of the ivy hanging on the fences, the moonlight on the red-tiled roofs, the yellow glow of life through the ancient windows. The silence of a university town, punctured by the lone cries of inebriated happy students. This was Sweden as I imagined it, first encountered it, never forgot it.

In some ways, it reminded me of Estonia, yes, but it was better kept, cut and trimmed, more controlled, less hostage to the architectural whims of well-connected businessmen. To stare at the so-called skylines of Uppsala and Tartu is to see it all, lovely buildings, but few taller than three floors, surrounded by lush forests and the lull of distant streams. But there was no Tigutorn in Uppsala, thank God.

Amidst these ponderings, I made it back down to Stockholm, a city that claims to be the "capital of Scandinavia," but that's not saying much. I mean, what's the competition? Oslo? Copenhagen? Reykjavik? A certain Estonian word comes to mind here, provintslik, provincial. Reykjavik isn't really a city, it's a town, and so is Tartu for that matter, or Turku, or Bergen. These are big towns, not cities. But they must be called cities, because even if Sweden is as long as India, there are few people there, and those who do live there fulltime don't make a lot of noise. So houses become villages, villages become towns, towns become cities, cities become regions. You've read Astrid Lindgren's books, so you know how good the Swedes are at make believe.

Yet at least they get the joke, the joke of themselves. For all of their self loathing and introspectiveness, their dumb king and unexplained suicides, the Swedes of all northerners seem to have noticed long ago that people abroad confused them with the Swiss or, once in a while, the Swazis. When it dawned upon them, I do not know, but they decided that something must be organized, so some time in recent history, a new construction was born, a "Nordic Council."

What a splendid name it was. One could see them, sitting around at some ice hotel, warmed by their sled dogs, talking in vowel-laden sentences about, well, important stuff, like the latest coin scandal, or, "Did you see what the Estonian president wrote on Twitter?" The Estonians were off limits in the 1950s, but the Swedes did manage to pull in the Danes and the Norwegians, the Icelanders and the Faroese and the Greenlanders. After Stalin died, they even pulled in the Finns. It was their antidote to irrelevance. Their main university city may have lacked a skyline, but they weren't about to be outdone in any category by the West Germans or any other fictional continental nationality.

Nej! They were Swedes, the top of the world, the pinnacle of mankind! Not only did they live long and prosper, but they were all magnificently blonde. And under the auspices of the Nordic Council, the Swedes could siphon talent from adjacent countries and former territories and claim it was in their own collective self interest to send their biggest brains to Uppsala! Genius.

There is still much competition and finger pointing though.

"The Finns are really macho, they think that all Swedes are gay," a Swedish friend informed me during a boat trip in the archipelago. "My friend actually is gay but he works at Nokia, and he is too afraid to tell anybody. He says it's really awful, they are always trying to set him up with girls."

Our Finnish friend smiled when he heard this but said nothing. Then they turned on me. "How is the homosexual situation in Estonia, Giustino?"

I was now in a position to influence people's opinions about my wife's country. Of course, I just wanted to say that it was wonderful, and Estonian gays are the most content of all Estonians. And, from my perspective, it is rather tolerant. At the same time, Estonia still seems to be stuck in "don't ask, don't tell" land. It's your own business, so don't discuss any of that gay stuff with me! What people don't realize is that all of Estonian sexuality is like this. Nobody talks about sex, but people seem to do it quite often. Every month brings news of new babies. And yet if you actually came upon the mothers and fathers, few would openly express their desire for anything. I don't think an Estonian man has ever pulled me aside and said something like, "Hey now, that Kadri Simson is really sexy." If nude photos of the presidental pair were to surface, people would yawn and turn the page.

"But which is the country where they introduced a bill to make homosexuality an offense?" the Swede asked on the boat. When I answered "Lithuania," he pulled his jacket tighter and shuddered.

"You know, we in Sweden consider Estonia a Nordic country," he said. "But Lithuania ..." he furrowed his brow and didn't finish his sentence.

Only then it occurred to me that I had been writing a blog about Estonia, "the world's only post-communist Nordic country," for more than seven years.

Still, I did not raise the issue. It was just a statement that was handed to me, and I did not know what I should answer. Should I thank them, or agree? Should I protest? Could I honestly try to pass Riga off as the "Capital of the Baltics" without making them laugh, not to mention embarrassing myself? No. In the end, I just smiled and nodded, that's what they thought, and since they actually were from the Nordic countries, who was I to argue with them? I wouldn't dare mention it front of the Lithuanians though. The very coupling of the "N" word and Estonia produces sad, sorrowful faces down south.

Yet, as different as Sweden and Estonia are, I have to say that I could see where the Swede was coming from, for, after spending much time among the Swedes, I felt like I was talking to the Estonians. Other than their beer and their king, the Swedes complained about their marginalization, their isolation. Their best and brightest left to the UK or the US, they said, where they were paid much higher salaries, compensation they could never get in their home countries.

But at the same time, the Swedes exuded that inner steely confidence, that resolve. They had an innate belief that they could do better, that they must do better, and because of this faith, they would do better. They were relentless in their pursuit of making things better, all things, infrastructure, healthcare, sandwiches. And many of the Estonians I know are the same way. They are never content.

As our boat stole away into the night, I did wonder that if these northerners thought of Estonia as a fellow country, then how come it didn't have a place on the vaunted Nordic Council? Surely that schemer Carl Bildt has known that it is to Sweden's advantage to steal away Estonia's best talent under the guise of Nordic cooperation. So where is Estonia's invite to the ice hotel?

bundle up

So that you won't catch cold!

It's still summer. I keep reminding people around me but they don't seem to believe me. Honestly, this year has been so cold that I am thinking of writing a depressing novel in Estonian called Külm Aasta, if it hasn't been done before, because so many Estonian years would qualify. The novel would be set in Viljandi and involve disappearing cats, local oligarchs, grimy drunks, and folk musicians.

But that's not what this post is about. As I was saying, it is still summer, but the Estonians think otherwise. So when it is warm and sunny out, they seem puzzled. "Kui imelik, päris suvine ilm," somebody remarked to me yesterday, "how strange, what nice summery weather." I answered "Jah," but what I was really thinking was, "Of course it feels like summer, it is still summer, damnit!"

I should get a t-shirt made up that says  "Sept. 22" on the front and "Autumn Equinox" on the back. I don't think anybody would believe me though. For Estonians, fall begins on Sept. 1, the first day of school. End of story.

Clothing at this time of the year never suffices. It is either too cold or too warm. A cool breeze hits you as you walk outside so you put on a light jacket. By the time you are walking back from the store in the warm sun you notice that you are sweating. You take off the jacket and another breeze hits you and all of a sudden you are cold again. It makes me wonder if I should get one of those full-body track suits that middle-aged Italian guys wear. No matter the season, you are always comfortable!

A glance out the window provides no useful information. At the first instant of a cool breeze, Estonian mothers begin swaddling their children, a practice that will continue until May or so of next year, when they just might let their child leave the house his or her head uncovered. This morning I spied the neighbor boy collecting firewood wearing a thermal hat, an insulated jacket, and boots. It looked as if it was about to snow! But when I stepped outside, except for  a cool breeze blowing off the lake, it felt like t-shirt weather. It's still summer, damnit!

The official explanation for all the swaddling and bundling that goes on in Estonia is that it's done, "so that you won't catch cold." I am not so sure I believe in this. Is it really true that even slight exposure to cool weather will make one ill? I feel just as bad sweating feverishly in a heavy jacket on a warm late summer day as I do getting a few goosebumps in a t-shirt. It seems that there is no good option: both approaches could make one sick.

But these are questions, and the Estonians don't like to be interrogated about their customs. Things just are as they are, and that means that even if it is 18 degrees Celsius outside (64 degrees Fahrenheit), you better put on your woolen cap and winter jacket, "so that you won't catch cold."

Still, I feel bad for those little Estonian boys and girls who are forced to wear winter clothing deep into spring. Even on hot late April days, when the sewers groan with melted ice and snow, days on which most people would feel fine just putting on a light, long-sleeved shirt, you can catch sight of some poor youth trudging down the street in hat, scarf, jacket, gloves, thermal pants and boots, and holding the hand of an overprotective female relative.

This may not be the Arctic, but sometimes it sure feels like it.

cracked

Smile!

I would like to entertain you, to complete you, to take your mind off of the things that eat away at your being each day. This is the world we have drawn for ourselves, a world that orbits around the pursuit of happiness. We keep after it though it slips from our hands like soap. And here is the camera now, look up ...

When I was a boy at the ocean I would get taken down by waves, and some of them were big, and then some of them were monstrous, walls of moving salty water that sucked me up and pounded the meat of my body into the shells and sand. That's how my most recent bout of jetlag has overwhelmed me. I am exhausted. But I don't think it is this one travel that has exhausted me. It's 33 years of forward motion.

Scott Fitzgerald called it "the crack-up," a blow that doesn't hit you all at once, but takes you down over time, so that you can only pinpoint the moment the rushing water collided with your being in retrospect. In a lot of ways, he was describing jetlag, that sinister hangover that just won't go away, no matter how much sleep, no matter how much coffee. You long to get back to you, but you left you somewhere else, in a hotel room in Chicago maybe, or perhaps tucked under the seat on that Finnair flight. But this is a different kind of jetlag, a jetlag of the soul.

Estonia is cool these days, the end of August. Summer peaked with Viljandi Folk, when my home was turned into a temporary hostel. Viljandi is a hard town, a wild town. The streets here where we live are unpaved, so they are hard on the feet, hard on the shoes, hard on the legs. The homes are heated by wood, so the smoky air is hard on the lungs, the temperature is hard on the body. A person needs to be hard to live in Viljandi. I am still soft, and I am not sure if I can adapt. My neighbor watches me, smoking. His constant expression is one of quiet amusement. He's wondering when I will crack. He thinks it's only a matter of time.

The neighbor across the street smokes too, except he's 10 years old. I watched his mulleted father beating a carpet the other morning. There are class issues here in Viljandi, in Estonia. And class is not just how much money you make, but how you speak, what you eat, what you talk about. Class defines whether or not you will feel comfortable parading around town with a half empty beer can in your hands on a Wednesday afternoon, or playing bossa nova music at a dinner party. Class creates jealousy and friction, malice and misunderstandings. Most of all, class leads to ignorance. You don't see me, I don't see you. We live right next to each other, but very far apart. Even children grasp this, without being lectured.

Will I crack? I think not. I hope not. These are just complications, I tell myself. I'm not going to go the way of the drink like F. Scott, or burn up in a madhouse like Zelda. And I am definitely not going to do myself in ala Hemingway. I'm like the stubborn moss on the ruins in the Old Town of Viljandi. Smoke all you want neighbors, let me be the mellifluous entertainment in your morning charades. But as hard as these Viljandi streets are, some days the sun does shine. It reflects in the puddles among the cobblestones along with the close blue ceiling of the northern sky. And on these days, I feel that I'm this side of paradise.