My mind was in two places for quite a bit of the week, working to refine my class schedule and set up a study structure that works for me, while trying to grapple with news from the US. The never-ending barrage of authoritarian power grabs and hateful propaganda from White House is bad enough, but the latest school shooting in Minneapolis was extra fixating for how close it was to where I used to live. I don’t have anything unique to say. It’s heartbreaking, and it keeps happening, and it’s only one of so many threats to people’s physical and psychological safety that are compounding and festering over time. I wondered when I moved here if being in another country would allow me to feel some remove, a release from the daily horror of present-day America. It does not.
I ended up dropping one of my classes, the one about Hybrid Threats. I was overloaded to the maximum allowable credits, 40 ECTS instead of the typical 30, so I knew it might be too much. It would have been doable, but I decided to choose quality over quantity and reducing to 34 ECTS will let me focus more energy on the topics I’m most interested in. Between this choice, and the need to swap a class due to a scheduling conflict, my final schedule ends up much more balanced throughout the week from where I started. Also, no classes on Friday means I have expanded possibilities for weekend trips.
I went searching for a sculpture today, which I saw when I first visited Reykjavík in 2016 but didn’t remember where it was located. I found it outside the Catholic Church in Landakotstún. It’s titled “Köllun,” which seems to translate to either “Calling” or “Vocation” and was made by Steinunn Thorarinsdottir in honor of Icelandic nuns. I love the way the glass lets the light shine through; the artist said she “strived to have the work be gentle and quiet” and I think she was really successful.
Her website includes examples of other sculptures that make use of similar glass inlay techniques, such as this stunning example.
Noted & Done
- Finished reading How Infrastructure Works: Inside the Systems That Shape Our World by Deb Chachra. Yes, this means I’m finding time to read outside of my grad school workload, and yes again that when choosing to read a book for pleasure, I picked one about infrastructure. Highly recommended! Engaging throughout and Deb is a really great writer.
- Finished reading The World of the Cold War: 1945-1991 by Vladislav Zubok, which was assigned for my class “Iceland‘s Foreign Relations.” It came out earlier this year and the author brings an interesting perspective having spent 30 years in the USSR, and now 30 years in the West. A good refresher for me, especially on the earlier decades that weren’t as top of mind.
- Watched Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, which you know, is what it is. I like a good non-stop action movie from time-to-time, but while I can overlook the lack of believability in technology and physical feats, I’m more of a stickler for geography. There’s no spoilers in telling you that a key scene takes place on St. Matthew Island in Alaska, which is unrealistically depicted as being surrounded by thick ice that you could run a team of sled dogs on. The waters around St. Matthew don’t freeze solid like that, but luckily the folks over at Northern Journal have already written a fact checking article about it.
- Attended the release party for Jack Armitage’s “Strengjavera” at Mengi. The music was made using a Magnetic Resonator Piano (MRP), and is compiled from recordings of his installation at Nordic House in 2023. Apparently he also used an MRP in collaboration with composer Atli Örvarsson on the soundtrack for the Apple TV+ show Silo.
- The Love That Remains will be Iceland’s submission to the Academy Awards. It’s Hlynur Pálmason’s third time having a movie selected for the awards (previously A White, White Day and Godland) so finger’s crossed that this is his year.