The Position of the Sun

February 1st, Stockholm

I learned recently that the technical definition of the tropics is whether the sun is positioned directly overhead. I was trying to explain to a ten year old Swedish boy how you know you’re in a tropical place, and I was leaning on the weather, the humidity, the wetness, even the creeping, unrelenting vines and trees that creep into windows and break up walls. And then we went to the simple English Wikipedia page and looked it up, and as it turns out, none of those other things matter. It’s all about the sun.

I can’t conceive of the sun being like that, positioned directly overhead, bearing down on the tops of people’s heads with the force of a hammer. I cringe for the delicate skin at the part of my hair that already gets more sun than it should. I imagine that I would need to hide, tuck myself away until the perfectly apportioned 12-hour night was upon us again, and I could safely emerge. The furthest south I've been is Hong Kong, technically tropical, but just barely, and I spent a lot of time in the shade cast by the vertical city.

The sun is low here. It’s one of the things that reminds me, in the midst of normal, daily life, just how far north we really are. The satellite dishes do that, too. They don’t point up at the nice, 45-degree angle here, not like they do in California. No, they point straight out here in Stockholm, facing you head on if you’re looking at them from a rooftop, and when we ventured north of the Arctic Circle, the dishes at the Abisko train station pointed ever-so-slightly down, tracing the curvature of the earth. In December and January, when I went out for a walk at two thirty or three, to catch the last of the daylight, the sun hovered, barely cresting the horizon, bright still, but so weak that I could look right at it, even with my blue eyes. I didn’t have to crane my neck, the way I did as a child, testing out whether adults were right or not about what would happen if I looked into the sun. No, the sun and I were equals, each with our own moderate light, each with our own perfectly appropriate warmth, regarding each other across a field of snow.

You lose things, living like this. You lose the guarantee of warmth, that strangely perceptible movement of molecules, coming from outside of yourself. You are your own powerstation, creating the heat that you need, preserving the heat that you have, taking none of it for granted. There is never quite enough, or there is just enough—I’m never certain which it is.  But the grandiose sun god has no power, not like he does further south. People here don’t have to bow or stoop. The sun sinks below the horizon almost as quickly as it emerged, demanding no homage, slipping away as easily as the sacred in the face of hypothermia. Life continues regardless.

China vs. Sweden, Part II

I've noticed recently that there are several things these places have in common, beyond a fondness for Ikea as a place to pass time. Today, three come to mind in particular:

1. A fondness for hotdogs
2. A love of systems
3. A love of ways to get around the systems in place

Going to keep my eyes peeled for more.

Writing Across Gender Lines

I've been giving a lot of thought to the project of writing from a gender perspective different from one's own lately, for fairly obvious reasons. At The Atlantic, Michele Willens has posted a nice meditation on some of the questions and potential roadblocks that arise with projects like these. 

I chose to write a male main character precisely because of these roadblocks. Had I written a female character instead, the reflexive shift into my own experience in China would have been too hard to avoid, and when I began my novel, that experience was still so close that it would have colored everything, and not in a positive way. By following a young man around, rather than a young woman, I was forced to sit at a slight distance, and it was this distance that allowed me to write fiction, rather than thinly-disguised memoir. 

As time has gone on and Will has survived more drafts than I can possibly count, other benefits to his being male have slowly emerged. For one, the experience of a white male expat in China is still quite different at times than that of a white female expat, and that allowed me to explore certain themes that would have remained at arm's length had I been writing a woman. That said, I am very aware that the majority of the supporting characters are decidedly female, and it would be dishonest of me to say that they weren't easier, in a lot of ways, than Will himself has been.

Some people have suggested to me that this might just be the main character effect, and that it's always trickier to figure that person out compared to those who are not so spotlighted. But I do think that writing a man is harder for me than writing a woman in a similar situation would be, even if it has been better for the project overall. 

That said, Sally Koslow, as quoted by Willens, may well be correct. It may be more difficult for men to effectively cross that gender line. Koslow believes that "By default, women have it easier than men when they attempt to craft characters of the opposite sex, because our whole lives we've been reading vast amounts of literature written by men." But even if we take this as truth, I have to wonder to what extent women writers are influenced by our years of reading women--as written by men. What have we internalized as somehow "necessary" or "true" about literary representations of women that may only be necessary/true because it became conventional through a long line of male authors? (Women's Studies 101, right here.) And assuming that there is at least something that's come out of that long line that's worth challenging, do women writers have a responsibility to represent ourselves in a fictional space that we create and control? 

Someone Develop This Already

This piece in The New Yorker by Elizabeth Kolbert is making the rounds, and her description of a night at a sleep research facility has me wondering: in an age of data proliferation, not least in the realm of our private lives and bodily functions, is home-sleep monitoring next? Because when the sleep researcher told her that she got a crappy night's sleep after this:

At around 10 p.m., a technician came to fetch me. She measured my head from various directions—front to back, side to side—and began attaching electrodes: three on the back of my scalp, two on each temple, three more on my chin, two on each leg, and two on my chest. Each electrode trailed a color-coded wire, which got plugged into what looked like a backgammon board. Some rubber tubes were stuck into my nose and mouth, belts were wrapped around my chest and waist, and an oxygen monitor that emitted an eerie red glow was taped to my index finger. I and the wires and the backgammon board got into bed. The technician plugged the board into a data logger and attached two more wires to each of the belts. Then she wished me good night

my only question was how sleep researchers ever manage to track and study someone getting a GOOD night sleep. I'm one of the apparent few Americans getting enough these days (between eight and nine hours, like clockwork, and I fall asleep just fine), but I doubt a stint in a lab would show that.

So iphone app, anyone? Cheap or disposable sensors you can hook to yourself and your phone in the comfort of your own bed to track your REM cycles and compare it with other biometric data that you are undoubtedly already collecting? It seems like the next logical thing...

I Play With Twitter: Fairy Tales, 140 characters or less

Buried my brothers in coffins of straw and wood. Now to stoke the fire--it's going to be cold tonight, and I'm expecting visitors.

If she fell for the comb and ribbons, this apple's a lock. Can one really be fairest if it requires the support of mining dwarves?

11 1/2 brothers rehumanized. Still, he will always see the wing. On his wedding day, his bride will hide tears, cutting the suit sleeve.

Cold and starving or fattened and baked? Small German children just can't win, to say nothing of witches these days.

#140tales