Mole, to me, is magical and somewhat mysterious. I had heard of it, but the first time I actually ate it was in a wonderful restaurant in Santa Cruz, called Chocolate, where all dishes were made with ... you guessed it.

I have tried it elsewhere since then, but nothing has ever quite lived up to that first moment of magic, in part because the mole in Santa Cruz was served with corn bread and a delicious salad with pumpkin seeds and coriander. I have hesitated to try making it myself because it requires so many ingredients and (supposedly) so much time. In the final analysis, the ingredients pose the main problem. Trondheim simply does not have a reliable, good selection of South-American ingredients (something I have struggled with when making carapulcra, as well). This is especially a problem when you get to chili peppers.

Mole requires a wide range. One recipe I encountered suggested the ancho, pasilla, mulato and chipotle. Another substituted the guajillo for pasilla and mulato. We were fortunate enough to find chipotle quite easily, but it took me ages to finally track down the ancho and the guajillo. Do not (do NOT) just buy "red chili". You want one (or four) that have a fairly strong flavour, but which will not burn your tongue off.


At any rate, I read up on moles and all the different recipes of the internet, and here is my (somewhat hodgepodge) attempt at the dish.

First, make chicken stock. So many ...

I keep applying for jobs. It has been a constant of my life since before I finished my PhD. While I have been employed most of this period, my contracts have ranged from one year to four months, to part-time, and so I cannot rely on staying employed without applying for jobs constantly.

Even when I am offered a job, I keep applying for jobs until I have a signed contract in my hands, because such offers have been overturned in the past. And once I do have a contract, it is generally for such a short period, and the application process in academia so long, that the work on new applications starts again immediately.

Now, you could legitimately question how academia is helped by young academics using so much of their time on job applications instead of actual research in what could (otherwise) be some of our most productive years. And I could go on at length about that, but it is not my topic today.

Today, I handed in an application to a Norwegian higher education institution which shall remain unnamed because I would like to be offered the job. And before I get to my point, I will say one thing for applications to Norwegian institutions: they all use the same system, which you will recognise as a miracle if you have tried applying for jobs in the UK, where every university seems to stake its pride on having invented a new and more convolutedly strange online ...

My home town, Molde, is currently in the middle of an annual celebration of literature (which follows a few weeks after an annual celebration of jazz -- once we get to setting up an annual celebration of chocolate all will be perfect, and the ugly post-war architecture will be forgotten). The name of the event is Bjørnsonfestivalen, and as a literary festival it includes segments on the failure of the justice system, the political situation in Burma, Turkey and Ukraine, and a panel on Norway at war in Afghanistan, alongside a discussion of literature and the environment, interviews with authors, readings of poetry and discussions of books. This festival is not one that believes in art for art's sake alone, nor the separation of art and politics. Quite naturally, I'd say, since the eponymous author, Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson (one of the four¹ greats of Norwegian literature and a Nobel Prize winner in literature, who went to school here), was for much of his life a strong, radical political voice in both Norwegian and the wider European society.

After a lovely breakfast lecture about the importance of Gabriel García Márquez to the author Pedro Carmona-Alvarez, who came to Norway from Chile as a young boy, I therefore went directly to a panel called "Norway at War", which opened with a clip of wonderfully frank documentary footage created by young Afghani women, trying to show the real Afghanistan. Unfortunately it was cut short, and I never found out what the documentary ...

Exactly two thousand years ago, on August 19th 14 AD, the first Roman emperor, Augustus, died.

He was born Gaius Octavius, a son of the Roman family Octavii, who were plebeians (not of the Roman elite). However, he was adopted by Gaius Julius Caesar, his patrician great uncle; and when Caesar on the Ides of March in 44 BC was stabbed repeatedly and died, Octavian became his heir.

Augustus, like Princeps, was a title he gained in 27 BC, after he defeated Cleopatra and Mark Anthony (see Shakespeare for proper historical treatment of that topic), and after a century of unrest established the Pax Romana, which lasted over 200 years, and provided the framework for literary greats like Vergil, Ovid and Horace. And he did it with a political skill that leaves me a little weak in the knees. With a propagandistic fervour which is indistinguishable from the greatest works of the period, from Vergil's Aeneid to Livy's Ab Urbe Condita, he established Rome. And even literally, it was to a large extent in his reign that Rome as a city of marble was built.

I won't pretend the man was a saint, and dismantling the republic may have seemed like less of a good idea once Caligula, Nero and later (my favourite) Heliogabalus made their appearance; but Augustus' legacy is still worth a moment of your time. Take an hour to read up on it.

His final words, according to Suetonius, who (granted) wrote more than ...

Mea culpa.

I really cannot blame anyone else. Which is a horrible feeling. I blush at regular intervals thinking about this. Here is my confession:

I created a course from scratch. It was all my doing (well, except for the part where I didn't make my students read 50 novels in one semester): I constructed a syllabus which included ten different authors, all but one of which were white, male, Western and heterosexual (to the best of my knowledge). That's right. I did the thing.

I have no excuse. There are reasons of course. Aplenty: It was a tricky syllabus to construct, as it had to consist of a very few books (only 1/4 of the semester's course load), and these books had to be written in English and be particularly useful for the discussion of science fiction in relation to their historical contexts. In addition, I wanted it to serve as an introduction to the field of science fiction studies, which means a sort of "greatest hits" -- because while science fiction is becoming increasingly mainstream I was not at all confident that my students were already science fiction readers², and I wanted to show how later books build on earlier ones.

This double aim of the course probably contributed to the lack of diversity. First, because I was so focused on getting the right range in period, focus, reading load and so on, that the question ...

Way back when, when I started my Master's thesis, I felt quite daring in choosing to focus on books that I thought of as not really literary. I knew the theory, had read up on all sorts of people who would seem to suggest (if not stating outright) that the study of popular culture was a valid academic field, maybe even an interesting one. Even so, I clung closely to Bakhtin, shouting "carnivalesque!" and "post-modern parody!" at anyone who got close. Figuratively, of course. Mostly. And I sprinkled my thesis liberally with references to Deleuze, Derrida and other Greats. To make sure it was serious enough (in its treatment of a literature founded on laughter).

This urge to justify my focus was based in the impression, which I know I am not alone in having, that a scholarly approach to literature means studying either the very old or the very high. And that anything that smells of genre isn't far above knee height, all the more convenient for kicking.

Being an academic, for me, is to a large extent about trying to get to grips with my own preconceptions, the dissonance between theory that makes sense and the unquestioned "truths" that surround me (and which I have internalised). My PhD was an attempt to make sense of my revulsion at the thought of fan fiction in a post-Benjamin and post-Barthes world; my Master's argued for the creative potential in a parodic treatment of pop culture, but the ...

This time last year I was miffed. I had absolutely had it with people (generally men, but too often women) who claimed that feminism was no longer needed, that western feminists were whiny hysterics who simply refused to see that they had won, that we were wrong to waste our energy on searching for flaws in our own culture when women in other countries had actual problems.

Mostly, though, I was tired.

Because it is draining to have your experience of the world continuously dismissed; to keep noticing new things that make you angry, and then to have it called immaterial; to have gained the tools to describe what is going on, but to have to dispense with them in every discussion; to know that if you are going to change minds you are going to have to start at the absolute beginning and explain some things in very basic ways. And you are going to have to do it again and again. Because not only does communicating the experience mean that you have to demonstrate patterns in events, you also have to tie these patterns to similar patterns, explain how they relate to power, show the consequences of the patterns, the power and the events -- all of these somehow intangible and easily dismissed on their own -- and you have to do it over and over to different people in different contexts.

When I was 18, I revelled in this. I would seek out this sort of debate. Someone was ...

A week or so ago, Tor and I were buying a gift for a six-year-old girl. Morally opposed to buying anything pink or glittery, and having been told that age six is too young for a chemistry set, we decided on a book of experiments. Every six-year-old should have one. I know this because I did not have one growing up, and as a result I was 16 before I was introduced to the magic that is corn starch (or, since we are in Norway, potato starch) in water. And from what I have been told, Karoline has yet to encounter it. I will remedy this at the first opportunity and see if I can't furnish a video of the event.

But this is not the story of the lack of science in my childhood (it was a perfectly happy one, filled with musketeers and hobbits, so I am not really complaining). This is the story of how we discovered the magical properties of water.

I know, I know. It keeps the planet alive and makes us something other than heaps of dust and so on. But that is not the magic I am talking about. Nor am I planning to make some sort of insane claim about water having memory or somehow being able to furnish free energy forever. This is about the magic of cutting glass under water with your kitchen scissors.

It sounds like pure fiction. And I should know. Then again, much science does.

So ...

Today we celebrate Burns Night, in honour of Robert Burns. Not properly, in our house, (un)fortunately: There was no haggis to be got for love nor money (we may not have tried very hard); but Tor cracked open the whisky (For relaxing times, make it Suntory time!) and I cracked open the books (The Complete Annotated Works of Burns printed by Blackie and sons in 1877). And a good time was had by all.

I'm a feminist. And a reader. That said, I am also sexist as all hell.

I did a quick count of the books I finished last year, and discovered only 8 out of 35 were written by women. Half convinced it must be a statistical outlier (because I had been researching Sherlock Holmes, and I'm a feminist, damnit!), I looked over my lists from earlier years. The number for the year before that was 12/52. And the year before that 13/57. It seems I'm consistently reading only 20% women. Some years more (say, if I'm re-reading Harry Potter), some years much less (there is one dismal one where only 7 out of 55 were women).

At least, so far, this year (having finished only one book), I've read 100% women: the wonderfully named The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making, to boot. That said, on my "currently reading" list, which at the moment contains 75 books, only 18 are written by women. Hovering around 20% again. And according to Librarything, only about 20% of the books I own were written by women.

This is not a surprise, really. I am perfectly aware that I have grown up in a culture in which we are subtly (and sometimes not-so-subtly) taught that men's opinions are worth more than women's: men's thoughts can be deep and universal, whereas women's tend towards limited and superficial. Men write art ...