Re: Thjanks!

[lstanwyk <lstanwyk@RYERSON.CA>]

Hi Elmer:

        Am into the Viking history thing as well, but have fantasies about
visiting Sweden - there's something about that place - must have been
Swedish in a past life (yeah, right!).  Iceland has always fascinated
me, though.  Have you ever seen the film, 'Wild Side', about two friends
in Iceland, one wanting the good life and the other a 'bad' seed making
the good friend's life utter Hell - sounds morbid, at moments maudlin,
but quite an excellent film (spoken in Icelandic).

Cheers!

L.S.

> Elmer Elevator wrote:
>
> Wow ... I want to thank everybody who responded to the Bjork thread.
> I've always had a fantasy about going to Iceland. (In our spelling, we
> emphasize the Ice part, but their spelling always was meant to
> emphasize the Island aspect. It's Greenland, the next stop westward on
> the Old Viking Trail, that has all the Ice.) Now I think I'm
> ratcheting up my fantasy. Imagine -- just a lousy airport layover, and
> you end up driving through the volcano and lava flows and splashing
> around in the hot springs! I'll never say, "Oh, bummer, another
> airport layover!" again. (Schiphol is a GREAT, thrilling, fun airport
> for layovers.)
>
> When I was involuntarily and grudgingly forced to attend mandatory
> college, a retired priest who did not strike me as a repository of
> Wild Thrills forced us to read "Njal's Saga." I braced myself for
> another tremendously boring literary classic experience, but WOW! It
> was the most thrilling, lurid, colorful, swashbuckling, violent
> adventure of protracted family revenge I'd ever read! It's still very
> near the top of my Great Books List. And most of the places where the
> noisy, bloody events of circa 1000 took place (including a
> spectacularly wild account of the conversion to Christianity) are
> still there -- Iceland isn't prone to rapid change or overdevelopment.
> (Most of the families involved in the big massacres are still there,
> too -- Iceland's a hard place to flee from.) So I've always planned on
> quite a bit more than just the free airline day bus to the hot
> springs.
>
> Lately I've been seduced by a website of some people who run an
> Icelandic pony ranch and take tourist idiots like moiself on pony
> treks through volcano and geyser territory. That's a very difficult
> trip to purge from my fantasy queue. I can't imagine a living
> experience that would so closely resemble a dream.
>
> Too bad Gould doesn't seem to have ended up there. Unexpected visits
> to screwy places like that must have been one of the few perqs of his
> concert career he looked back on with nostalgia. I've been to his
> Hudson Bay wilderness haunts and agree with everybody that Iceland
> would definitely have been his cuppa tea. The English artist William
> Morris took a youthful visit to Iceland, and it inspired his art for
> the rest of his life. (If anybody says, "Oh, the wallpaper guy?"
> consider yourself whacked on the knuckles.)
>
> Elmer "the Happy Wanderer"
>