Betsy Devine: Funny ha-ha and/or funny peculiar

Ice crystals in polarized light

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

Al Gore’s Nobel Lecture includes a Nobel story that I didn’t know:

Sometimes, without warning, the future knocks on our door with a precious and painful vision of what might be. One hundred and nineteen years ago, a wealthy inventor read his own obituary, mistakenly published years before his death. Wrongly believing the inventor had just died, a newspaper printed a harsh judgment of his life’s work, unfairly labeling him “The Merchant of Death” because of his invention – dynamite. Shaken by this condemnation, the inventor made a fateful choice to serve the cause of peace.

Seven years later, Alfred Nobel created this prize and the others that bear his name.

The whole speech is worth reading, not least for Al Gore’s reminder that “political will is a renewable resource.”

Well worth remembering, as our shared future ticks closer.

On December 10, toward the end of the Nobel evening and wine, some remarks of wisdom ensued over our brandy glasses.

The considered advice of Nobel laureate Barry Sharpless was that zinc gluconate is an excellent preventive medicine.

My finest advice was that sleeping in really cold bedrooms is like free marriage therapy eight hours in each twenty-four. (I’m not sure now this would work for Europeans, if they have separate-but-equal duvets. It is based on experience in American big beds.)

Then Barry and I turned hopefully to Carl Bildt, Sweden’s Foreign Minister in both real and Second Life, who was (during his stint as Sweden’s Prime Minister) the first head of state ever to send out an email to another head of state, in that particular case US President Bill Clinton. (I found this out from Mr. Google, not from Carl Bildt.) But instead of advice, he imparted some meta-wisdom that I am still thinking about.

He said, “People imagine that the job of a diplomat is being polite to foreigners. That is not the job.”

So last night, when I found myself seated in Stockholms Slottet on the very enjoyable border of France with Norway (between the distinguished ambassadors to Sweden from those two large glamorous countries), I did interesting research into Carl Bildt’s statement.

But this blogpost is already long enough. More wisdom (I hope) will flow after I do some packing.

Another later, late-night Nobel party

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

This marble statue in Stockholm’s royal Palace is holding a flower and looking very much the way I feel right now.

It’s been a lovely and very long birthday today.

Visiting Second Sweden

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

As you can see, my Second Life avatar, here shown visiting Second Life’s House of Sweden, looks exactly like me except for her massive investment in many styles of cotton-candy and bubblegum pink hair.

This Second Life Swedish embassy has many features real embassies sadly lack–including a sauna. Also, if you visit outside normal business hours, you can sit down at one of the shiny reception computers and pretend to blog!

In Second Life we both look even more glamorous

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

Here is Sweden’s Foreign Minister Carl Bildt, who opened a Swedish embassy in
Second Life and blogs every day.

What a role model! No wonder he has so many shiny gold medals!

I just posted a pile of my Nobel photos on Flickr and now I am going to sleep. Tomorrow’s my birthday.

No, wait–today is my birthday. Really time to sleep now!

This just in — at the Nobel banquet tonight “Betzy Devine Wilczek” will be walking down marble stairs with the charming and funny Barry Sharpless, who won a Nobel for chemistry in 2001.

And I also get to talk to, on my right, Sweden’s Foreign Minister Carl Bildt, a former Prime Minister who opened a Swedish Embassy in Second Life. And he has a blog!

This is going to be just so much fun!

Stockholms Slott by night

Originally uploaded by bodilla77

… (at least in my life) starts with a golden crest and continues in engraved caps lock:

“THE FIRST MARSHAL OF THE COURT IS COMMANDED BY

HIS MAJESTY THE KING

TO INVITE

Professor and Mrs. … [redacted, next time could be you!]

to a Dinner

TO BE GIVEN BY

THEIR MAJESTIES THE KING AND QUEEN OF SWEDEN…”

and so on and so on.

Of course we’re incredibly honored and said “Yes please,” in our most formalistic style (though without any CAPS LOCK).

(Not least because December 11 is my birthday!)

But don’t you think it sounds just the littlest bit as though the First Marshall is wishing we’d all just stay home?

My fanciest dress-up

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

Just a little anxiety going on here in Stockholm, where tomorrow is the huge Nobel Prize ceremony. And banquet.

Fortunately, I’m from New England so I still have all the lovely finery my sister RiRi helped me buy way back in 2004. (Our mother’s belief system, summed up in four lines: “Use it up, wear it out, make it do, do without.”)

In fact, 2007 would be a whole lot less nervous for both me and Frank except that Anna Björk of Swedish TV 4 has invited us both to show up on her Nobel TV show which runs all day long.

Tomorrow!

Frank is on in the morning and will pick up his tailcoat en route home from the studio. My little spot is right before the ceremony, which means that at least I’ll be wearing my fanciest dress, which you can see in the photo. (I got dress anxiety at the worst possible moment, when Frank was in Paris giving lectures, so I took some photos so that I could ask his advice.)

And the brilliant Alex at Clipp-er Salong (Vasagatan 19, they are wonderful) has promised to do my hair in some nice way.

I will not have my huge favorite Timex digital watch on, at least not if I can remember to take the thing off.

I had been imagining this year’s Nobel Prize parties would be less stressful because 1) I’ve done this once now and 2) Frank is not getting a prize this year. But I think being on TV is a bit more scary even than sitting next to Sweden’s handsome and charming Prince Carl Philip,

The scariest part is that Frank seems to have told Anna that he and I took dancing lessons back in the US–and now it seems our dancing together might get on TV too, though only much later on the Nobel evening.

I am certainly better at dancing, much better, than I was before we took very enjoyable dance lessons from Jeff Allen. I am certainly not Dancing With the Stars caliber either.

Eek, I just have to say. Eek.

Though I am looking forward to every bit of it, even as I tremble.

sneering squirrel

Originally uploaded by Fifi LePew

Of all the condescending and unfairly snarky non-reviews of a good book I’ve seen in the New York Times, this morning’s haute hit-piece on Gods Behaving Badly takes the let-them-eat-cake gâteau.

..although Ms. Phillips fulfills her purely lighthearted ambitions for this story, she provides a cautionary example to budding novelists everywhere. Though her background includes stints as an independent bookseller and BBC researcher, she also has a blog full of her thoughts about the hot competition on a television dance-contest show. When writers lived on Mount Olympus, they didn’t talk about things like that.

A blogger? Dear me! And she blogs about TV dance contests? How dare such a low-life pen light-hearted novels about what-if worlds of deposed Greek gods stuck into modern-day London? You or I might imagine this concept is clever. The book’s craftmanship is so seamless you or I just may not notice the author’s “writing.”

You or I might even think those are virtues worth praising in someone’s first novel? Hmmph, sniffs Ms. Maslin, the novel is “flossy, high-concept.”

Author/blogger Marie Phillips mildly remarks that Maslin “could hardly squeeze another spoiler in and still stick to the word limit.” In fact, the plot spoilers are the best of Maslin’s obnoxious review, which falls apart even by its own limited logic when she tries to tell readers that these wildly inventive plot twists have been torn from a book that is (Maslin says) “sitcomlike” and “suggests the help of fiction-writing software.”

In case you can’t tell, I’m angry because I loved this book, first published in England and given show-placement in Uppsala’s English bookstore on the front table with Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman–whose fans will adore it. I don’t know Marie Phillips and I don’t want to know Janet Maslin, whose contrastingly reverent review of Dean Koontz’s glurge about his dead dog also makes me feel nauseous.

But then “real writers,” even when they stumble, all deserve real respect (“Nice clothes there, Emperor!”), quite unlike a mere blogger.

We just got email from our friend Piotr Haszczyn in Poland with a bunch of links to recent Polish news articles, whose contents (I hope) are guessable from the photos on them:

• Four photos of Frank in Babice School, meeting its children and staff: This looks like a serious article about Frank’s visit to his Polish grandmother’s home town and the really nice ceremony put on by Babice School.
• Photo of Frank with Betsy smiling, photo of Frank with Uncle Walter joking around, plus a title that plainly mentions pierogi: To make Americans happy, just feed them pierogi!
• Photo of Frank next to Nobel monument in NYC; photo of Frank’s Babice cousin expertly repairing some complicated machinery: Polish men look good in hats…and they are all very smart.

The internet and newspapers being what they are, those links may vanish–but our memories of a great party most surely will not.