Word: danishness
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When Ernest Hemingway awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954, he informed the committee that there was another author more deserving: "That beautiful writer Isak Dinesen." It was not one of Papa's displays of calculated modesty. The Danish baroness Karen Blixen, who hid under a series of pseudonyms, did deserve the prize she never received. Other rewards came: public adulation, critical respect, worldwide royalties. But as Poet Judith Thurman makes clear in her scrupulous and elegant biography, the baroness also suffered tribulations that force weaker souls to despair or madness. "All sorrows can be borne," she declared...
Jean Malaurie, director of the French Center for Arctic Studies, sets the alarm for 1951, when the U.S., with the permission of the Danish government, began construction of an Air Force base at Thule. It was also the year that Malaurie completed months of darkness and months of light living among the vanishing "Hyperboreans," the name ancient Greeks gave to a mythic northern race. The author prefers "Polar Eskimo," and estimates that there are about 100,000 of them: 39,000 in Greenland, 35,000 in Alaska, 23,000 in Canada and 1,600 in the Chukotski region of Siberia...
...Malaurie returns to Greenland to find Polar Eskimos in the sort of trouble their ancestors could not have dreamed of. Danish welfare, a money system and processed foods have badly stretched the bonds that give a hunting society its cohesiveness and strength. Eating no longer requires special skills or cunning, even for the foxes who gorge themselves at the Thule airbase garbage dump...
...Scandinavian design is not so much a style as a visual morality, a powerful force for beauty and meaning. Nor is the modern mode of Scandinavian design frozen into an abstract machine aesthetic. It is a creative way of meeting changing practical and emotional needs. Seen in this context, Danish modern is fresh, exciting and timeless. Like Finnish Architect Alvar Aalto's bentwood armchair (circa 1929) or Norwegian Eystein Sandnes' 1959 porcelain tableware, Danish modern transcends fashion...
...Tapio Wirkkala (1946-47) are another example of this. Wirkkala's artistic craft ennobles ordinary glass. It turns an industrial material into a living one. The same is true of Denmark's Finn Juhl's famous armchair of 1945 and, for that matter, all Danish-modern wood furniture. The sensuous, sculptural shapes seem to flow into one organic unit...