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Last Friday was the first excursion of the second four-week course in Swedish at the Uppsala International Summer Institute. We loaded aboard a big bus and our first stop, two hours later, was at the Carl Larsson house in a tiny village in Dalarna. Any Swedish readers will have to excuse the reach, but I found Larsson to be a sort of late 19th century/early 20th century Norman Rockwell -- a gifted painter who captured the spirit of the time and was tremendously admired. Larsson was born poor but married well. His wife Karin was also an artist, from a good bourgeois family in Dalarna, the wooded province some 200 miles northwest of Stockholm. It is known now especially as a holiday destination, and the cabins (stugor) rent at a premium during the long holidays of the Swedish summer.
Carl Larsson's grandchildren still own the house, and they have scrupulously preserved it. Above is Larsson's painting of the sitting room on the ground floor that looks out over a little lake. We were not allowed to take pictures inside the house, but if we had, we could have reproduced the scene almost exactly.
 Larsson's father-in-law gave the couple a house in Dalarna, where they lived for more than twenty years, raising seven children. Larsson's watercolors and paintings were popular, often reproduced in books and magazines. The Larssons had a quaint but generous sense of humor. Larsson painted portraits of the children, each on a different door in the house. Karin gave up painting and representational art but devoted herself to textiles, turning out some strikingly modern patterns. Larsson did a portrait of Christ for the village church and in 1916, shortly before his death, he painted a series of portraits of local craftsmen and dignitaries. He donated them to the town, and the portraits are on display in the local parrish hall.
Friday was a marathon expedition, though. From there the bus drove us to the Falun copper mine, where we had a 45-minute guided tour down into the bowels of the earth, to see the remains of a copper mine that stopped producing in 1992, no doubt driven out of business by low prices and by competition from South America. The site had been exploited for about a thousand years and in the mid 1700's it represented about a third of Sweden's economy.
The third stop of the day was a strange one -- at a meadow above a distant lake, where some local entrepreneurs had put up a hotel with handicraft shops. No visible sign of human life nearby, other than coffee shops and restaurants. I was somewhat annoyed by the evident expectation that we would happily purchase our lunches there, so I took a long walk in the countryside -- following signs about a mile and a half to the local railway station where, as I suspected, there was a simple supermarket. During my hike back to the bus I dined on dark bread, pepper salami and blue cheese.
Studying Swedish
The summer institute gathers more than a hundred students, most of them from Europe, for four hours of morning classes in the Swedish language and two hours of afternoon classes available in English or in Swedish, including studies of the Swedish welfare state, Swedish literature, Swedish film, Swedish pop music, or applied grammar and conversation. I worried about the morning class, but I found out quickly enough that although some of the dozen students in my assigned level may sound pretty good, we all have a lot to learn about the grammar. I had found when deciphering Swedish for myself over the years since about 2003 that the language seems to lie about halfway between German and English, a fact that helped with passive understanding. For active production of the language, my German too often takes over my tongue. And, in bizarre fashion, the Swedish word for "I" is "Jag" -- which when pronounced resembles the Spanish "Yo." So I am forever assembling my sentences as if I were coupling together Lego blocks.
As ever, keen for literature, I signed up for the course in Swedish literature. The teacher is Ylva, a lively woman who reminds me powerfully of the bizarre little designer/seamstress in the Pixar film The Incredibles. The texts are fine and I've gotten a fast overview of early 20th century Swedish literature, but my God, spoken Swedish is such a bizarre collection of melody, rhythm and crazed consonants that I can follow only dimly what she is saying. My comprehension has improved -- from about 5% at the start to perhaps 40% now. Assuming that I manage to make my way back here next year, I will almost certainly wrap myself up in those conversation and pronuncation courses in the afternoons.
K's gift of a new laptop computer has been tremendously useful but perhaps a mixed blessing. I can access the Internet both at the school and at home, for the charming proprietor of this efficiency studio left me her USB-connected port to the local Internet service. So I have continued to maintain AustinLiveTheatre.com, keeping the calendar and postings generally up to date. I have gotten e-mails from some Austin theatre folk who don't know that I'm summering in Sweden as a refuge from theatre burnout. I have a draft going about some of the doubled productions currently underway in Austin -- two of Cat on A Hot Tin Roof and two of Romeo and Juliet. But add that activity to the demands of language study and I find that I am a tired puppy at the end of the day. Fortunately, Skype functions well and most evenings I can contact K in Austin for a video chat when she gets home from teaching.
The school provides lunch vouchers for either of two local restaurants, guaranteeing that on four days a week we will have either grub at the Riverside Restaurant or some interesting ecology-friendly food at the Eco restaurant. For the evenings I have the luxury of cooking for myself or simply assembling meals from the nearby grocery -- and with cheese, dark bread, veg and those big summertime berries, that has not been difficult at all.
MM
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