Helsinki

Today on our flight we were discussing the work in progress --monads and functional programming (Kathy will use this programming language in her new media art) and my fictions about the dysfunctional. By this, I refer to the power dynamics and games or "theater" that people in romantic relationships deploy. Deploy may not be the right word, maybe the word is enjoy, but they only enjoy until they're fed up, and then they deploy power struggles and/or they break up (or not) and complain about the injustice (that they initially accepted or even set up) to others. I'm writing a story about these sort of insanities.

The thing about me is that I tend to rely on visual images in my thinking, in my writing, and everywhere. I am also aware of objects or visual images in relation to a subject or a situation, so I reach for an image that might represent a dysfunctional love affair.  The thing about Kathy is that she tends to focus on patterns and meta-data.  I looked over her shoulder. In the article she was reading, I noticed this sentence:

If m is Nothing, there is nothing to do and the result is Nothing. Otherwise, in the Just x case, g is applied to x, the underlying value wrapped in Just, to give a Maybe b result, which might be Nothing, depending on what g does to x. 

Of course romantic relationships are full of maybe, just, and nothing.  But functional programming is a language chaining together individual statements in imperative programming, which is similar to using semicolons to join independent clauses.

This made me ponder the way that Virginia Woolf and James Baldwin framed sentences.  The use of equal emphasis in sentences, short sentences with no dependent clauses is called parataxis (Hemingway, for example). The use of dependent clauses and independent clauses in such a way to show cause and effect is called hypotaxis (James Baldwin and Virginia Woolf, for example). Virginia Woolf tends to string together long sentences with semicolons.

I might make use of maybe, just and nothing. For the rest of the flight I stared out of the window at the cloudscape, seeing a meandering opening in the clouds that looked like a flying river. When I looked down at the openings in the clouds, I could see islands in the sheen of the sea in darkness.

We arrived in Helsinki this evening, took a city bus into the center (5 Euros for a ticket), and checked into the Hotelli Finn. This is a small hotel, more like a hostel or dorm room, but we do have a private room with its own bath. The website did say "we are not a five star hotel," and it's true. But it is in an excellent location.

Dinner was at the Kosmos Ravintola. I had glass of red wine and the arctic char, with a light cream sauce with roe, lemon, and a fennel cake (finely chopped fennel, carrot, onion). Delicious.  Kathy had an appetizer sampler of reindeer, herring, false morel mushrooms, pickled cucumbers, cheese with a tiny glass of vodka. Plus sourdough rye bread slathered with fresh butter.  Desserts: ice cream and cloudberries.

 The temperature was fine, 2+C or 35 F.  It was late, but we walked to the harbor where I took these slightly unfocused pictures of the cathedrals and the ferris wheel.  Suddenly it was 1:15 am, and we had no idea it was so late, so we turned off the lights and went to sleep.