Day 22/retreat day 3

I only had a couple of hours today before checking out. I worked on revising chapter 5, and although I didn't get as far as I would have liked on the Giza section, I did make a bunch of corrections through out and added an important section to the conclusion where I try to contextualize these new religious readings of Peer Gynt within contemporary Norwegian society. It isn't fully worked out yet, but I think I'm on the right track. I cut 99 words and added 377.

Along the way, as I was consulting some of the Giza sources I actually found a couple of references that strengthen my argument in chapter four, so I added them there, for another 104 words.

PAGES/WORDS WRITTEN: 481

That brings my grand total for the retreat to 5293 words. Not too shabby! I managed my thirty pages and more in only twenty-two days, and so I guess that means the end of daily reports on this blog. I'll take some days off for Christmas. There's still some final revisions that need to be done (including translating quotes and making a bibliography) before I can submit the manuscript, and I also need to craft a book proposal for publishers, so I'll check in sporadically with updates on those fronts. This has been an exciting and challenging process. I'm sure I'll look back on these entries with some amusement at a later date. It has been fun to document the thought process for such a complex project. I'm not totally sure whether the blog has helped or hindered me. My suspicion is that it helped in the sense that it motivated me to get something done many times when I otherwise wouldn't have, just so that I would have something (anything!) positive to report. Cheers!

Day 21/retreat day 2

Første økt: I woke up with a fever and felt really terrible, but some ibuprofen, juice and warm tea seem to have helped. I started out by reading Tveterås's article, then read through my own chapter two. There were quite a few things that stood out as needing revision, and it also became clear where I could insert a longish paragraph on Botten-Hansen's Huldrebrylluppet and why I have chosen not to discuss it at length in the chapter. It was a relief to figure out what to do about Botten-Hansen, and especially that I didn't have to revise chapter two in a major way. I then spent the next couple of hours revising the chapter, and am now calling it done. I tallied an increase of 534 words. I also discovered that I have repeated the same long quote from Witoszek in chapters two and four, so I took it out of chapter four, which is the longest chapter any way. It's now down to 10,247 words. I'm going to take a little break now and then start preparing for my next økt, which will be adding new material to chapter three.

Andre økt: Well that was weird! I took Tore Rem's article on the 2006 "Ibsen Year" with me to lunch hoping that he would have written something good about Ivo de Figueiredo's Slipp meg: En bok om Henrik Ibsen, but he only mentioned it in passing. I did find some good stuff that works really well for my introduction, however. I had known that I was going to have to do some major cutting in the intro, so I just went ahead and started in on that after lunch. I started out with 3364 words and cut out a long section of 879 words. I replaced it with a new section linking cultural studies, politics and parody. I wrote 577 words, for a net loss of 320, and a net gain of a much stronger introduction to my book! I'm now going to say that it's done and move on to rereading de Figueiredo and Nærum for chapter three.

Tredje økt: For the last two hours or so I have totally cranked on chapter three. I added an additional 1518 words, and have cleaned it up a lot. I think all the analysis is in place now, so from here on out it's just polishing. My plan now is to do some polishing of the last remaining chapter (five) after dinner, get a good night's sleep, and get up early in order to bang out a rough conclusion to the book before I have to leave here at 10:30. If I can do that I will have accomplished everything I set out to do on this retreat. But I'm already further along than I had hoped for. This is definitely an outstanding way to get complicated work done. I'm already excited to get home and start celebrating the Christmas season with my family undistracted by this book!

Siste økt: Right before going to dinner I got a bee in my bonnet and laid down about 180 words of ... gasp... conclusion. I can't believe it. I broke the ice on the part of the book that has been haunting me for months. It was a relief just to get something on paper. In doing so it occurred to me that it might be worth taking a second look at Asbjørn Aarseth's 1978 article, "Peer Gynt som tolkningsproblem," so I started skimming it over dinner. I couldn't even finish it because so many bells started going off in my head. I also got a good idea for a brief paragraph to add to the introduction, in which I make a clear case for including non-literary material in my analysis. That's done, and now I'm about to start in on the conclusion, leaving chapter five for tomorrow morning. My goal is to work until "Storbynatt" at 10:30, if I can stay awake that late, that is.

Siste økt, part two: Phew. I can't believe I made it onto the fifth page of the conclusion. I wrote the paragraph on Aarseth and roughed out each of the paragraphs summarizing the five chapters. And since I was closing in on 4000 words total for the day, I tried to come up with something sweeping to say about the whole book. It's probably gibberish, but I made it to a huge milestone, and who knows, it might actually be usable. Now I'm really mentally exhausted, and am throwing in the towel for the night. Even if I don't get anything written tomorrow, this retreat has been phenomenally useful (and if I can squeeze out 200 words tomorrow I will have broken 5000 words total for the retreat)!

PAGES/WORDS WRITTEN: 4081 words!

Day 20/retreat day 1

It almost killed me to get here (I have a horrible and debilitating cold), but I'm up high above the city of Oslo at the Voksenåsen conference center. It feels like I'm the only guest here, and the conditions are perfect for getting a lot of work done. I arrived about 1:30 and by 4 o'clock it was starting to get dark. Here's the view from my window:

The building to the left is the rest of the conference center, and you can just see the lights of Oslo beyond the trees. And this is what I've been looking at for most of the afternoon:

I can make faces at myself in the mirror as I'm writing. It's a comfy little work space, and actually my room is quite spacious, with two single beds and a fairly large bathroom. And best of all it's perfectly quiet.

I thought I would report on my "økter," which is to say work periods. My first one today was from arrival to dinner time, and I hope to get in another økt after dinner.

Første økt: I finished reading Øvrelid's book on the Per Gynt festival, and revised chapter four. It ended up growing a bit. I added 473 words, so the total for the chapter is now 10,338 words. I think I'm going to leave it at that. Now in the 45 minutes before dinner I'm going to start reading Botten-Hansen's Huldrebrylluppet, and will probably spend the rest of the evening doing that. If I get through it, I may start revising chapter 2, otherwise that's first up for tomorrow morning.

Andre økt: I got through the first 50 pages of Huldrebrylluppet before dinner, but it was too unwieldy to take with me to the dining room, so I picked up Gisle Selnes's article on Ibsen's Hegelianism to read instead. Boy am I glad I did! A bunch of things pertaining to chapter 1 became clearer to me, so after eating I came back and started revising the chapter. I added 258 words, and I'm going to call it done for now. I'm now going to crawl in bed and read the remaining 100 pages of Huldrebrylluppet.

ETA: Finished Huldrebrylluppet with 20 minutes to spare before an episode of Lewis. I think I've earned the right to watch it. The play made pretty much no sense at all to me. I'll need to re-read Tveterås's article tomorrow at breakfast and hope for divine inspiration as to how I'm going to integrate a discussion of Huldrebrylluppet into chapter 2. Gulp.

PAGES/WORDS WRITTEN: 731

Day 19

Flatline. Woke up with the cold I have been fearing. No energy to read anything. The only thing I did was assemble article notebook number two. It was all I could do to punch holes in the articles.

PAGES/WORDS WRITTEN: zero

Day 18

The only thing book related that I've done today is some sporadic reading in Ragnar Øvrelid's history of  Per Gynt-stemnet. It is useful and is a good supplement to Sverre Mørkhagen's book on the historical Per Gynt. The best factoid so far is that an advertising guru named Robert Millar published a book in 1945 pointing out the potential market for Peer Gynt tourism in Gudbrandsdal. I'd love to get my hands on that book!

ETA: The title of the book is Norges tredje turistattraksjon (Oslo: Tanum, 1945) and it's only 44 pages long. I've ordered it from the National Library.

PAGES/WORDS WRITTEN: zero

Day 17

Today I had to run around like a madwoman gathering everything together that I'm going to need for my retreat on Monday. Thankfully, two necessary books came in through ILL:

Øvrelid, Ragnar. Per Gynt-stemnet 1928-2003. Lillehammer: Dølaringen Boklag, 2003.

Figueiredo, Ivo de. Slipp meg: En bok om Henrik Ibsen. Oslo: Aschehoug, 2006.

And then I went ahead and bought a copy of:

Runde, Øystein and Geir Moen. De fire store: bukk fra luften, bukk fra bunnen, Obstfelder er forsvunnen. Oslo: Cappelen Damm, 2010.

I've got all the articles in two binders, a selection of key books, a CD of the latest version of every chapter, a print out of the whole manuscript, volume five of Henrik Ibsens Skrifter, and the Oxford English translation. It will be heavy (I'll probably have to pack a wheeled suitcase) but do-able. I'm stoked, but it will have to wait, since I won't really be able to do any work over the weekend.

PAGES/WORDS WRITTEN: zero

Day 16

The clock just hit 7 am and I am the proud new owner of a thousand words. I woke up with an opening sentence for the section on modern parody in chapter three. Just as I sat down to gloat over this here I heard my son with his daily morning bellowing "mamma." Phew. Sqeezed those three pages in just in time!

I hope there's more to come today!

By the way, I meant to mention yesterday that I got a tip on this comic book from the fabulous librarian at the Ibsen Center. I'm getting it asap, and will included it in my chapter on literary parodies. Yes indeed!

Closing in on 11:30 am and I've racked up another thousand words on chapter three. I was beginning to feel desperate that I'd never get anything done this week. This feels really good!

Shazam! Closing in on 2:00 pm and I squeezed out yet another 1000 words.

PAGES/WORDS WRITTEN: 9 pages

Day 15

Today was a "housekeeping" day, as I have used the ides of each month as a milestone. My tally as of today is 148 pages, which still leaves 22 to go out of my 30 pages for the month. Sigh. I am starting to entertain thoughts of January as perhaps being necessary for the completion of the book. But January is already filled with other projects: revisions on a cabin essay, preparing the Bjørnson paper for submission, reading all the essays for the Hamsun volume that I'm co-editing, prepping for class, and writing the Maurits C. Hansen section for the cabin book. Gulp.

At any rate, I did my tally, and what's more printed everything out and collected the draft in a binder. It's a pretty solid looking document! I also did some paper pushing, which is to say collecting all of my loose secondary literature into a binder as well. I ran out of time at work (had a fascinating two and a half hour meeting with a scholar from Scotland that killed much of my day, but was very worth it) so they remain unsorted, but at least they're a step closer. I realized that I don't have anything close to a working bibliography prepared either. And then there's the awful fact that I'll need to prepare a formal book proposal to send to my potential publishers. Eep.

I also read a short essay by Asbjørn Aarseth called "Peer Gynt som tolkingsproblem" and got a little further in chapter five of Hutcheon's A Theory of Parody.

PAGES/WORDS WRITTEN: zero

Day 14

Read about half of chapter 3 in Linda Hutcheon's A Theory of Parody on the commute today. Also photocopied all of Paul Botten-Hansen's Huldrebrylluppet in preparation for reading it. This was my last full day of oral exams, so as of tomorrow I can pick up more intensive work on the book again.

ETA: finished chapters 3 and 4 in Hutcheon. Found a key passage on page 75:

"[...] parody's transgressions ultimately remain authorized - authorized by the very norm it seeks to subvert. Even in mocking, parody reinforces; in formal terms, it inscribes the mocked conventions onto itself, thereby guaranteeing their continued existence."

ETA: also sent an email to someone requesting some help with some sources. Practical stuff counts too, right?

PAGES/WORDS WRITTEN: about 80 scribbled words

Day 13

I'll admit it. I'm totally overwhelmed. I have had a continuous headache for more than 48 hours now. The only book related thing I was able to do today was photocopy Linda Hutcheon's A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms. I had to photocopy the entire thing (it's thankfully short) from the non-lending student library because the copy I ordered a month ago at the main library still hasn't arrived. Because I was in oral exams and/or intense pain all day, I really only just scratched the surface of reading the introductory chapter, but I can already tell that it's going to be very useful, and may even be exactly what has been missing from the theoretical apparatus of the book. So yay for photocopying, which is all I'm capable of right now, apparently.

ETA: went back and read the introduction to A Theory of Parody more thoroughly, and also read the second chapter, "Defining Parody." I had expected this to be relevant to chapter 3, which it is, but I hadn't expected how relevant it would be to the rest of the book, and especially chapter 2. I'm so excited about this now!

PAGES/WORDS WRITTEN: pfft!

Day 12

Gasp! I forgot to post yesterday. Nothing to report, really, other than the fact that I tried to start reading Trond Jahr Larsen's Peer Gynt-koden and basically failed.

PAGES/WORDS WRITTEN: zero

Day 11

Wrote a quick little paragraph on the Østvedt book.

PAGES/WORDS WRITTEN: 197

Day 10

Since I had to give oral exams all day today I knew in advance that this would be a non-writing day. I decided to skim an "old style" study of Henrik Ibsen from the late sixties on my commute into work, and  as I expected it's bad. But what I wasn't expecting is that it is bad in such an incredibly interesting way. It fits in perfectly to chapter four and the whole cluster of problems around an imagined historical model for Ibsen's fictional character, Peer Gynt, and the insertion of that character into the actual landscape in various ways.

The book is Einar Østvedt's Henrik Ibsen: Miljø og mennesker from 1968. He states categorically that there  was an historical Peer Gynt (impossible to prove) and what's more, he freaking went on a walking tour of the Rondane mountain range "in Peer's footsteps" and then wrote a chapter about it it in his ostensibly academic treatise on Ibsen's literary works. In-freaking-credible! There is virtually no distinction between this chapter and typical chapters in the handbooks on literary tourism in Britain that Watson writes about. He has long descriptive passages of the landscape, he writes about his own accommodations and travails, and he speculates wildly about what the "real" Peer must have felt and thought in the landscape. I can barely contain myself over how ridiculous and perfect this chapter is for my own analysis. Holy guacamole I wish I had been a literary scholar back in the 1960s - it is astounding what they got away with. Even his bibliography is enough to make me apoplexic. If a student of mine handed in a paper with a bibliography like that I would fail her.

I showed my (much older) colleague the book and she laughed out loud and had a rush of nostalgia. She remembered having to read it when she was a graduate student, and said she hadn't heard or seen it in over thirty years. It's so fun to be able to bring in a level of metacriticism, since in my project the academic reception of Peer Gynt is as much fair game for analysis as any other type of interpretation or appropriation of the text.

PAGES/WORDS WRITTEN: zero

Day 9

I think I'm going to call chapter four done, at least as a draft. I spent my work time today reading through it and revising, and after a pretty thorough edit I have to say I'm pretty happy with it. There's one paragraph that I think is also in chapter two (I'll have to make a decision about which one will keep it) and a paragraph that I may want to move to chapter three, but other than that it holds up surprisingly well as a cohesive chapter, despite having been written piecemeal.

There's a certain symbolic advantage to declaring the draft finished, even though I know there's still more polishing needed before I submit it to a publisher (that goes for the whole book, of course). Right now I need to redirect my attention elsewhere: next week I'm going to work on the weakest chapter of the book, the one on revisionist or parallel novels based on Peer Gynt. I'll miss about three days of writing because of oral exams, unfortunately, so there probably be much to report here until Wednesday at the earliest.

I had a thought this morning after reading through chapter four that I should really switch the order of chapters three and four. This one is strong, three probably isn't. Three relates thematically to five pretty well, so that maybe some synergy might be generated by having them next to each other instead of split up by four? And four kind of continues some issues raised in one and two... We'll see.

It's amazing that this book is actually starting to materialize. One thing I need to do before my retreat is gather all my materials in notebooks. I've already got a theoretical binder going. I need one for all the newspaper articles, and of course one for the actual manuscript draft! It's always exciting to me to fill a binder with the makings of a brand new book - definitely one of my book writing rituals.

PAGES WORDS WRITTEN: the mathematical total is 393. I did a massive amount of cutting and adding today, so there's no telling what the actual number of words written is.

Day 8

I started reading through chapter four with an eye toward revision, and didn't even make it onto page four before a fit of major rewriting came on. I'm much happier with the first three pages now, and have also somehow sneakily increased the length by nearly 300 words too! So now I'm officially onto the thirtieth page and can relax and revise to my heart's content.

Next week I'm going to tackle chapter three, if I can get the theory materials I need from the library. That is really the only chapter that requires major expansion. Right now it's at 18 pages, so there's quite a lot of work to do! I still need to do work on chapters one, two, and five, but it's relatively minor.

PAGES/WORDS WRITTEN: 294 words

Day 7

No real work on the book so far today. I did finish reading what I needed to get through in Watson's Literary Tourism and Nineteenth-Century Culture. Otherwise, I spent my time at work doing a totally necessary office purge and assembling all my secondary literature for the book into a notebook. That counts for something, doesn't it?


PAGES/WORDS WRITTEN: zero

Day 6

Woke up and added a little bit based on Watson's Literary Tourism to chapter four. When I saw that this brought me to just under 1000 new words in the past 24 hours I did a little editing of the introductory section and bumped the total up to 1010 words. Yippee, I made my first milestone for the month! It looks like 1000 words is about three pages double-spaced for me, so that means I now need a total of 9000 words by the end of the month. I think I can, I think I can...


Later: Had a fairly non-productive day at work. I did get good feedback on my introduction draft, though I'm going to sit on that for a while longer - maybe even until I'm done with all five chapters - before I revise it. I did some reading in Per Gynt-Gården: En gjestebok to see if there was anything there I could make use of. Not sure there was. I was interested to read how Dobloug's background is described as lower middle class and average, despite the fact that both his mother and he inherited what amounts to a fortune. He stresses his being raised by a single mother in a humble Oslo apartment, perhaps as a way of authenticating and legitimizing the raw luxury of the Per Gynt-gården itself? I don't think, though, that there's really any reason to include that discussion in my chapter.


I also read some more in the Watson monograph, and have found some good material. I decided to start a second document, as I'm not sure how much of that material will actually make it into the chapter. I've printed out the draft of the chapter so far, and will read it carefully tomorrow. I haven't looked at it as a whole at all. 


One other task I got done was the drafting of an abstract for the Across Media conference in Trondheim in early May. I'm calling it "Tourism as Adaptation: Ibsen's Peer Gynt in Gudbrandsdalen."


PAGES/WORDS WRITTEN: 455 words

Day 5

Woke up this morning and started skimming Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett's Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums and Heritage (1998). Found some useful material in chapter three, "Destination Museum," so I sat down to work it into chapter four. I added about 150 words before E woke up and started his incessant chattering.


While perusing Kirshenblatt-Gimblett I came up with a good idea for a small, non-Peer Gynt project on the Ibsen Museum.


Later: up to 523 words by adding an introductory section to the chapter based on Kirshenblatt-Gimblett. Now I need to turn my attention to Nicola J. Watson and define "literary tourism" for the chapter. But I think I'll read a little further in Kirshenblatt-Gimblett first, to make sure I'm not missing things of major importance. I think I need to read chapter one, "Objects of Ethnography," where she defines "in situ" display in terms of metonymy and mimesis.


Later still: added a short section to the conclusion, up to 705 words added to the chapter. I found the seven "propositions" (149) that Kirshenblatt-Gimblett bases her argument on really productive. Here they are:

1. Heritage is a new mode of cultural production in the present that has recourse to the past.
2. Heritage is a "value added" industry.
3. Heritage produces the local for export.
4. A hallmark of heritage is the problematic relationship of its objects to the instruments of their display.
5. Heritage is produced through a process that forecloses what is shown.
6. Heritage tests the alienability of inalienable possessions.
7. A key to heritage productions is their virtuality, whether in the presence or the absence of actualities.

I found number four particularly useful, so I had to stop there and work it into my conclusion before reading further. I may come to regret my hastiness, but I'm really just so engaged by the reading that I get swept up in it. Now I have to stop working though and start engaging with my offspring!

PAGES/WORDS WRITTEN: 523 words

Day 4

I did nothing book-related today.

PAGES/WORDS WRITTEN: zero

Day 3

Today I read two articles:

1. Herbert, David. “Literary Places, Tourism and the Heritage Experience.” Annals of Tourism Research 28.2 (2001): 312-333 (helps define the terms of the problem of “authenticity” in relation to both historical and fictional sites)
2. Halewood, Chris and Kevin Hannam. “Viking Heritage Tourism: Authenticity and Commodification.”Annals of Tourism Research 28.3 (2001):565-580 (awkward style and some obvious spelling mistakes like "krøner" instead of "kroner" turned me off, but the bibliography is very useful)

Other than that, nothing.

PAGES/WORDS WRITTEN: zero

Day 2

Started reading Hans Aaraas' Peer Gynt: En drøm om en drømmer og hans drøm. Oslo: Gyldendal Norsk Forlag, 1995 this morning. It is a phenomenological reading of PG, and it got me thinking about chapter one and my Deleuzian reading. I am thinking of how to restructure that chapter so that I present my own reading in opposition to three philosophical interpretations. One I already have from the article version. One I'd like to add is a discussion building off of Kristin Gjesdal's article, "Ibsen om Hegel, kulturelt besserwisseri og den store kunstens begynnelse." I should also probably add Gisle Selnes' "Ibsens orientalisme: En hegeliansk historie," which I haven't read yet. And then I might also add Aaraas as a third example, though I'm not exactly sure.

Once on campus I picked up three books at the library:

• Hansen, Erik Fosnes, ed. Per Gynt-Gården: En gjestebok. Oslo: Forlaget Press, 2008.
• Iversen, Ragnvald. Ibsen-ordbok: Ordforrådet i Henrik Ibsens samlede verker. Oslo: Gyldendal Norsk Forlag, 1858.
• Larsen, Trond Jahr. Peer Gynt-koden. Oslo: Abstrakt, 2006.

The first of these is a total treasure trove of material for chapter four. I was able to add about 200 words to the chapter, and have ideas for a lot more. In particular, an essay by Kjell Arild Pollestad got me thinking of Per Gynt-Gården as a place of pilgrimage, which in turn got me curious about literary pilgrimage (or tourism) in general. Assuming that there's been work done to theorize this I went to the MLA database and found the following reference:

• Watson, Nicola J., ed. Literary Tourism and Nineteenth-Century Culture. Basingstoke, England: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.

This looks really promising, with tons of fun articles. I think it will help me construct the theoretical component that is missing from chapter four.

*

ETA: I'm not even done reading the introduction to Literary Tourism and Nineteenth-Century Culture and I can already tell this is going to be really useful. Here's an important quote for framing my chapter four:

• "[...] writers on place and literature have usually been more interested in the effect of place upon an individual author's oeuvre [...] than in how an oeuvre might have shaped the subsequent history of a place" (4-5). Right on! The author goes on to argue that literary scholars have been embarrassed by the ("lowbrow") phenomenon of literary tourism, which is why it is only now that scholars are starting to pay attention to it. 

Another good formulation:

• "With the de-differentiation of the literary from other forms of story-telling, scholars of the cross-media migration and adaptation of a story in popular culture have become aware of tourism as a form of adaptation" (6). Yes! Yes! Yes!

Right there I've learned a term for what I'm looking at, "cross-media migration" and the paragraph goes on to describe the newly formed field of studies know as "heritage studies," which is also totally relevant to what I want to do. Watson describes it as describing "[...] how literary heritage is expressed in place" (6)!!!!

Watson cites the following really promising sources for heritage studies:

• Newby, Peter. "Literature and the Fashioning of Tourist Taste." Humanistic Geography and Literature. Ed. Douglas Pocock. London: Croom Helm, 1980.
• Pocock, Douglas. "The Experience of a Literary Place." Humanistic Geography and Literature. Ed. Douglas Pocock. London: Croom Helm, 1980.
• Fawcett, Clara and Patricia Cormack. "Guarding Authenticity at Literary Tourism Sites." Annals of Tourism Research  28.3 (2001): 686-704
• Kirschenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara. Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums and Heritage. Berkeley, CA: U California P, 1998. Here's the kicker: "[...] tourists travel to actual destinations to experience virtual places" (9).
• Herbert, David T. "Literary Places, Tourism, and the Heritage Experience." Annals of Tourism Research 28.2 (2001): 312-33

Then there's Watson's own book, The Literary Tourist: Readers and Places in Romantic and Victorian Britain (2006), which I absolutely must read. Here's how she summarizes it:

[...] a history and a taxonomy of literary tourist sites, principally British, from the late eighteenth century through to the late nineteenth, arguing that literary place is (counter-intuitively) produced by writing mediated by acts of readerly tourism, and that it is the internal dynamics of an author's works, buttressed by a particularised series of intertexts and associated publishing practices, which produce literary place, and not the other way around (however strenuously place may subsequently be organised to look like the originating ground for writing). Identifying the ways in which texts solicit readers to locate and re-experience them within the specificities of place, the book also examines how places have been designed to accrete, secrete, and authenticate "memories" of writers and of works, effecting in aggregate a mapping of national literary heritage onto a national mythic geography. (Literary Tourism 7)

Wow. That's exactly what I've been writing about, but I was completely unaware of all of this prior research. It will be so helpful to have this to build upon!

*

Since I was at a four-hour mentoring meeting, the only other thing I had time for was to piece together a paper proposal on Gatas Gynt for the 2011 SASS conference in Chicago. I now really have to stop working on this fun stuff and turn my attention to preparing for tomorrow. Drat. Just when things are getting good! I do think I'll swing by the library and pick up the book on literary tourism though! Oh, I did try calling that person at the amateur theater company in Lillehammer, but she didn't answer her phone.

PAGES/WORDS WRITTEN: a little over 200 words

Day 1

• Shower thought: I could use the Øverland/Opøien PG comic strip from 1970 as an opening anecdote to chapter 3. I wonder if it can be related to the lead up to the EEC referendum in 1972. What else was going on in Norway in 1970? The first wave of immigration. Need to read Jon Nygård's piece about it in Aftenposten.
• Shower thought: I should just call Maihaugen to inquire about the St. Hansnats Eventyr performance. Is it still going on? 

I should also probably think about this (and the may reviews of the performance listed in Ibsen-bibliografien):

Haagensen, Nils-Øivind. "Nynorsk bukkeritt." Klassekampen Oslo 11/1-(2005) (Om Jon Fosses oversettelse av Peer Gynt til nynorsk for Robert Wilsons oppsetning på Det norske teatret. Intervju med dramaturg Ola E. Bø. )

There's mention of translation to Gudbrandsdal dialect and an earlier Nynorsk translation for Det norske Teatret in chapter 4. I need to integrate this new translation into that factoid. But wait, maybe it merits a slightly longer discussion in chapter 3 too?

Oooh, and what about this:

Frihet som livsbetingelse: Ibsen international short text project. Oslo: Transit, 2006 (Antologi med åtte av de norske bidragene til Det Åpne Teaters "Ibsen international short text challenge 2006": Husarenes ettermiddag / Jesper Halle. Fridom / Jon Fosse. Stolen / Gro Dahle. Jegerne / Wetle Holtan. Skade / Arne Lygre. Utflukt / Gyrid Axe Øvsteng. Vi to / Marit Tusvik. Rød, Snø og Ulven / Lisa C B Lie. ISBN 82-7596-073-8, ISBN 978-82-7596-073-1 

I definitely need to look at that to see if there are any PG-related texts. ETA: I looked at it and it will have to wait until later. I just don't have time right now to read it, though I'll try to squeeze it in after Christmas.

There is also a short film competition from the same year (the Ibsen Jubilee) that I want to look at, but both will probably end up being a separate project.

• Afternoon: No research or writing, since I had to prepare my last class for the term, which is on Jon Fosse's Nokon kjem til å komme. I did call Maihaugen and got the number for a contact at Lillehammer Amatørteater, the company that put on the production. I was a little intimidated to cold call a person who is probably just a volunteer. I would have much preferred an email address. I'll need to work up the guts to call her. It doesn't sound like it was much of a success beyond the 1991 performance.

• Afternoon: On and off all day I checked out various hotels and resorts, and ended up booking a room at Voksenåsen (up past Holmenkollen here on the outskirts of Oslo) for my writing retreat from 20-22 December. It's expensive, but I really hope it will be worth it.

• On the ferry: read Tveterås, Harald L. “Botten-Hansens Huldrebrylluppet og Ibsens Peer Gynt.” Edda 4 (1967): 247-262

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