“Here the Homeless May Demand their Right”’

This is a scan of my latest causerie published on August 27^th 2011 in Göteborgs-Posten as Linnéa J Lundblad. Click on the picture to see it in a larger, readable format. I have made the habit this year of reviewing every article after publication – thanks to Annie back home in Gothenburg this is possible even from northern California – and until now I have never been *really* pissed at my editor. In this article, I paraphrased a famous citation by Dag Hammarskjöld [“Du återvänder aldrig; en annan man möter en annan stad”] by exchanging ‘man’ for ‘woman’, but that was not the limit of the obscurity I inflicted upon the aforism: I wrote ‘said to me a literary jack of all trades a couple of generations older.’ Only in the end of the article did I clear up the fog – or so I thought – by naming my source. My editor, however, didn’t catch the subtlety of my intertextuality but changed my paraphrase of the quote [!] so as to make a sentence that sounded like someone had *actually* said this to me personally [!!]. I am appalled by the thought that people working at one of Sweden’s largest daily newspapers would fail to recognize such an obvious reference to the man who was general secretary of the UN for almost a decade as well as a member of the Swedish Academy.

In my next article – which I will write either tomorrow night or on Thursday evening – I will take another crucial figure in Swedish culture, obscure their wisdom, and once again my editor will think I just happen to run into all these cool folks on campus here at Cal. Viva la Ignorance!

Oh and I’m not entirely sure what this one is about – it seems to me it is hardly about homeless people – I’m beyond ‘topicality’ and now writing causerie for causerie’s sake.