Friday October 9. Stockholm - Copenhagen: 10.21 am – 3.31 pm

Well hello euphoria.

This may well be the most beautiful departure I've ever had from a train station. The sun was shining, the departure platform at Stockholm Central was number 10 (no running in stairs), the Espresso House coffee was decently brewed - not too strong - and, all of a sudden and most beautifully, the subject of my blog changed from I to we.

It may well be an offense to our dearly beloved Scandinavian Jantelag to mention that we are traveling with the InterRail (Eurail) Première Classe but this whole venture is meant to be a celebration so, so be it.

Was it Andy Warhol - or maybe more likely Bob Colacello - who claimed something like ”if you need to put it down on a paper, it's not worth remembering”?

I am (oops, back to myself again) constantly scribbling notes so this will end up a big pile of trivia, just the way I like it.

And speaking of which, did you notice that, apart from the horrible nausea caused by the X2000 trains, the conductors of SJ have quite an undignified way of checking your ticket? All they do is make a blue ball pen check on it. So boring and unconductorlike.

Where's the special ticket clipper? Hopefully still down in Europe.

But who uses paper tickets anymore? Forse only nostalgic InterRail travellers.

Disclaimer

Much inspired by Hjärta Smärta, Carl Fredrik Holtermann, and Emi Gunér I am writing this blog for several reasons:

As a decennial celebration of running my own business.

For show and inspiration.

Because it's darn fun to write and translate.

WARNING!

I'll be using Wikipedia a lot. Even though as a source it's not flawless, it sure is fast.

Like all social media, my blog, as any other, is a sort of cry for help, but then isn't all communication?

Debut

Ulla Bjerne's debut novel from 1916 was, significantly, called My Other Self (Mitt andra jag).

The main character, the sculptress Nora, is hosting the wildest and most bizarre gang in Montparnasse when she is not traveling listlessly around Europe's metropole's during World War I, trying to find meaning and a place for her split (sexual) identity.

The book opens (my translation):

I had a letter from Uncle Jacob today. It was short but to the point. I am hereby sending money for your return trip. You have no reason to stay in France during the war.

During this same period Ulla Bjerne was herself sent home to Sweden from Barcelona by the Swedish counsellor of legation. Her unescorted visits to cafés and bullfights were simply not acceptable.

She was fictionalizing her own life when she wrote:

-No, a Spanish woman mustn't sit alone in a café, the old senora tells her smiling. And she adds:

-Aren't you being stared at?

-You bet! the other day there was a long line out on the street, all of them gaping at me so that the waiter had to wave his handkerchief to pass the crowd.

In Ulla Bjerne's writing it's easy to find gay themes and characters, but never explicit ones. My conviction nonetheless is that she was bisexual (and that she would find it extremely tacky to have anybody comment on that or use that word.)

Obviously, like any other true bohemian in those days, Ulla Bjerne went to Capri. This, among other things, I will try to learn more about in the coming weeks.

Ulla Bjerne

The author Ulla Bjerne was an eccentric in her own right, less extravagantly so than Luisa Casati Stampa (below), however visually striking and controversial as she would favour men's clothing, smoke a pipe and look like a garçonne a decade before the style was popularized in the 20's.

She wrote some 30 books between 1916 and 1958, all of them dealing with the same theme: a woman's (or a man's) right to choose her (or his) own way of living. There is a constant stream of gender playfulness and provocation in her texts

Above is her portrait painted by Swedish artist Isaac Grünewald 1916. This painting was the first modernist acquisition by the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm and caused an uproar among conservative art lovers. (The painting is now part of the Moderna museet collection.)

Luisa Casati Stampa

A portrait by Man Ray of La Marchesa Luisa Casati Stampa, taken at the Hotel Ritz in Paris and said to be one of the most important surrealist images.

La Marchesa rented Munthe's Villa San Michele between 1912 and 1927, much to his annoyance and wonder it seems.

Sometimes referred to as the only female futurist - even though the futurists were overtly antifeminist - the Duchess was perfectly eccentric, walking pet leopards and monkeys at dinner parties all over Europe, possibly once sporting a tiny snake as a necklace.

I love the idea that her paths may have been crossed by my grandmother's cousin Ulla Bjerne (1890–1969) at the Capri town square around 1920.

Here is my kind of poetry.

Friday Oct 9

Stockholm - Copenhagen: 10.21 am – 3.31 pm

Copenhagen - Munich: 6.53 pm – 8.57 am

Saturday Oct 10

Munich - Bologna: 9.31 am – 4.11 pm

Bologna - Naples: 4.25 pm – 8.46 pm

Sunday Oct 11

Naples - Capri: around noon. I think.

What is this thing called blog?

Blog is any of a number of emotions and experiences related to a sense of strong affection and attachment.

Also, it demands quite a lot of editing.