Our Nordic Expedition, Part 28 -- Heading for Trondheim

After leaving Bronnoysund we took a slight detour to visit the Torghatten -- this island, which supposedly looks like a reclining fat man wearing a tall hat. There is, of course, an accompanying legend, explaining the distinctive feature. Supposedly this tall-hatted man fell in love with and won the affections of one of the "seven sisters". This angered a troll that also loved the sister so he lay in ambush for the tall-hatted man and shot an arrow into his stomach.

As we proceeded around the island, the reason for the arrow part of the legend became obvious.

Viewed up close you can see a hole running through the hill, supposedly caused by the evil troll's fatal arrow.

Then, as the sun set we wended our way south through the Vikna island group, arriving in the middle of the night at Rorvik, a town of about 1,500 inhabitants. There some of us briefly disembarked and checked out the Norveg museum.

There were a number of exhibits portraying aspects of the local fishing industry. This one, in particular, interested me.

Then we steamed on through the night through open seas heading for one of my favorite cities -- Trondheim. We arrived early in the morning and several of us headed out for a walking tour of the old town. Naturally, I took my camera.

We walked from the modern docks toward the old shipbuilding center of the city.

Much of the old industrial center has been replaced by condominiums.

But across the Verftsbrua [yard bridge], recently renamed the "Blomsterbrua" [flower bridge] for some reason, much of the old shipyard complex remains as an open air industrial museum.

In the background we can see the steeple of the Nidaros Cathedral.

One of the old drydocks, which for my purposes serves as a reflecting pool.

Our Nordic Expedition, Part 29 -- The Trondheim Yards

The port of Trondheim has transformed much of its old extensive shipyards into an outdoor museum where visitors could view remnants of the city's industrial past. We were lucky to be able to view it in the early morning on a day with excellent weather. In fact, our entire trip was blessed with extraordinarily good weather.

As we left the shipyards we entered a gorgeous neighborhood in which twisty little streets opened onto circles garnished with works of art.

This picture is not out of focus. The blurry effect comes from the texture of the wall covering.

What a lovely place to live -- but the best is yet to come, just around the corner....

Our Nordic Expedition, Part 30 -- The Nider River

After our stroll through lovely residential streets we turned a corner and were treated to this vision. That is the Nidelva river. It runs through the middle of Trondheim and we got to it early on a still morning while the water was glassy smooth -- perfect for taking pictures. 

The only disturbances were caused by these ducks and they soon went away.

Warehouses line both sides of the river.

These two boats fascinated me and I took a lot of pictures of them from different angles.

This is the "Old Town Bridge of Trondheim" -- a wonderful place from which to take pictures.

Looking east from the bridge.

Looking west from the bridge. The large structure at the top of the hill is the main building of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology -- an important national institution. Approximately one fifth of Trondheim's population is students, which makes for an interesting local culture.

Stiftsgården, the royal residence in Trondheim.

Walking back to the docks.

Then back aboard our boat to rest up as we headed on to our next destination.

Our Nordic Expedition, Part 31 -- Kristiansund

Our last stop before returning to Bergen and leaving the country was at Kristiansund, a town of about 25,000 people concentrated on four very small islands. Because of the limited land area available for settlement, Kristiansund has the highest population density of any town in Norway and the closely-packed housing makes for some interesting images.

Approaching the harbor...

As you can see, every possible site near the harbor has a house on it.

Bridges connect the islands and allow for easy movement among them.

Entering the harbor...

The waterfront.

Densely-packed, multi-color housing. I like it! It makes for nice pictures.

Walking along the waterfront we encountered this remnant of WWII.

The black freighter was featured in the 1965 film, "The Heroes of Telemark" starring Kirk Douglas.

Kristiansund is a charming place, but by this point most of us were in a hurry to get back to Bergen, get organized, and get on a plane back to the States.

Our Nordic Expedition, Part 32 -- End of the Journey

Our last port of call in Norway was where our journey had begun -- in Bergen. All through the trip we had been blessed by good weather, something that our guide commented on frequently. But when we returned to Bergen we found that, as usual, there was a storm brewing and rain clouds were cresting over the mountains.

We walked around for a while in the damp, reacquainting ourselves with this lovely city. Then after a short rest we headed for the airport and took flight back to our homes.

I hope you enjoyed this account of our Nordic experiences. It took a lot longer to post than I expected -- mostly because a long trip to India intervened in the process. If you are interested in finding out what we saw and did there, keep coming back to this blog. I'll be posting about our adventures in the heart of the subcontinent over the next few weeks.

Iowahawk Slams Bloom's Slam of Iowa

Iowahawk [the funniest writer on the interrwebs] unloads on University of Iowa professor, Stephen Bloom, who published an unflattering profile of the State in the Atlantic Blog. Read Bloom's piece here, then the Iowahawk response here.

The Unsustainability of the Welfare State

Nice piece in the WaPo by Robert Samuelson on the similarities between Europe's and America's financial crises. On both continents mid-Twentieth Century regimes embarked upon a vast expansion of the welfare state that, while politically popular was ultimately economically unsustainable. He writes:

The numbers — to those who don’t know them — are astonishing. In 1870, all government spending was 7.3 percent of national income in the United States, 9.4 percent in Britain, 10 percent in Germany and 12.6 percent in France. By 2007, the figures were 36.6 percent for the United States, 44.6 percent for Britain, 43.9 percent for Germany and 52.6 percent for France. Military costs once dominated budgets; now, social spending does. 

....



The modern welfare state has reached a historic reckoning. As a political institution, it hasn’t adapted to change. Politics and economics are at loggerheads. Vast populations in Europe and America expect promised benefits and, understandably, resent any hint that they will be cut. Elected politicians respond accordingly. But the resulting inertia poses an economic threat, one already realized in Europe. As deficits or taxes rise, the risk is that economic instability will increase, growth will decline, or both. Paying promised benefits becomes harder. Or austerity becomes unavoidable.

The paradox is that the welfare state, designed to improve security and dampen social conflict, now looms as an engine for insecurity, conflict and disappointment.

Read the whole thing here.

History Wars Heat Up

For the past half century and more students in Western educational institutions and indeed the general public have been subjected to an unrelenting stream of calumny and abuse on the subject of "imperialism" -- specifically, the two or three centuries in which Western nation states dominated non-Western peoples around the globe. Imperialism, we were told, was everywhere destructive of native cultures, stultifying them and degrading the populations subjected to colonial rule. Often it was genocidal. The legacy of colonialism included political and economic dislocation, psychological enervation, and a sense of cultural uncertainty against which post-colonial peoples are still struggling, and which accounts for the abysmal performance of many post-colonial regimes. What is perhaps worse, imperialism was in itself a manifestation of deep and abiding defects within Western culture itself, a manifestation of racism, a fear of "the other", a product of predatory capitalism, or a way of exporting antagonisms produced by domestic oppression onto other peoples.

Elements of this critique are drawn from many sources -- from the exuberance of non-Western nationalists, from the propaganda efforts of communist regimes, from the mystical dreams of cultural and religious radicals -- but they lead to a common conclusion:

So poisonous has the experience of Western imperialism been, critics argue, that non-Western societies can only advance by divesting themselves of that heritage. Anti-colonialism has thus adopted anti-capitalist, anti-Christian, and indeed anti-"white" positions and programs while indulging in extravagant visions of a return to the virtues of primitive simplicity, the restoration of a glorious period of past dominance, or a new, indigenous form of social organization.

With few exceptions academics, journalists, and cultural and intellectual elites throughout the West have embraced this criticism. Few, whether from matters of belief or fear of criticism, have stood up to oppose or correct it. It has become the received wisdom of our academic and political cultures. One of those few brave souls who have mad the case for imperialism has been Naill Ferguson, one of today's most prolific and popular historians. In a series of books and articles he has argued that, despite the undoubted abuses and occasional horrors associated with imperialism, many aspects of imperial rule, particularly in the British empire, were benign and beneficial to subject peoples. He laments the great Twentieth Century wars that ended the period of Western domination, and calls upon the United States to pick up the banner of world leadership that Britain no longer is able to carry. For this, he has been viciously attacked and among the most prominent of his antagonists has been Indian scholar Paskaj Mishra, who wrote a blistering critique of Ferguson's recent writings in which he portrayed his subject as a reactionary Atlantic man who writes "white people's histories" rife with unapologetic neoimperialism and more than a touch of racism. Most insultingly, he repeatedly compared Ferguson's views with those of early Twentieth Century racial theorist T. L. Stoddard.

[Read Mishra's review and Ferguson's letter in response to it, and the back-and-forth charges that ensued in the London Review of Books here.]

Outraged by the personal attacks in Mishra's review, particularly the suggestion that he was a racist, Ferguson [who left his Scottish wife to marry Somalian political activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali] struck back with a series of letters which forced Mishra to back away to some extent from the charge of racism [admitting that nobody, not even Ferguson, these days thinks quite like Stoddard]. Not satisfied, though, Ferguson has since threatened to press his case in court stating "If he won't apologise for calling me a racist, I will persecute him until he does." [here] So the controversy stands now. It's a fine dust-up in which articulate spokesmen representing radically different world-views go at it hammer and tongs.

Gad! I love this stuff!

UPDATE:

For a sympathetic review of Prof. Ferguson's book check out Donald Kagan's piece in the NYT here.

Kagan's review earned him this attack by economist Brad DeLong, who wants to write historical villains out of the Western Heritage.

DeLong's rant engendered this response from Ross Douthat in the New York Times. He points out that it is not so easy to separate heroes from villains, that good and evil coexist within the human soul, and that claiming a civilizational affiliation with the good guys necessarily entails a link to the bad guys because both are part of the same culture.

It just keeps getting better and better.

Last Works

Nice piece in Slate by Jan Swafford on the subject of how impending death affected some of the world's greatest composers and their work. Beethoven [my favorite] for instance:

In his late works Beethoven pushed every envelope in every direction. As his body failed, his music became more complex and more simple, grander and more intimate, more spiritual and more comic, more exalted and more nutty. Representing the latter quality is his bizarre, notorious Grosse fuge, Great Fugue, the original finale of the Op. 130 String Quartet. Here is music that will be eternally avant-garde and in some dimensions nearly beyond comprehension.

When Op. 130 premiered Beethoven was quite deaf, so he didn't attend the concert and waited at a tavern for a report. When friends arrived and told him that the fugue had not gone over well, he exploded, "Cattle! Asses!" Only in the later 20th century were players and audiences really ready to contend with it. Beethoven's last completed piece, though, was something of an anticlimax. After his anxious publisher persuaded him to spin off the Grosse fuge as a separate piece, Beethoven, in terrible shape and close to entering his deathbed, finished a new finale for the Op. 130 quartet. The replacement finale is a jaunty little piece, more or less the opposite of the manic fugue.

When his time came, after weeks of suffering—probably from advanced cirrhosis of the liver on top of who knows what other miseries— Beethoven went out with a little joke. To friends surrounding his deathbed he quoted in Latin the conclusion of classical Roman theatricals: "Applaud, friends, the comedy is over." Witnesses said that a couple of days later he emerged from a coma during a storm and died after a thunderclap, shaking his fist at the sky.

Read the whole thing here and follow the links to hear some of the greatest music ever written.