The internet promised to democratise access to scholarship. Several platforms have taken up that promise with varying degrees of success — and integrity. This blog-post is an attempt to briefly assess the main options, and to make some recommendations.

Academia.edu is perhaps the most prominent name in academic file-sharing, though the name itself is something of a false credential: the site would not qualify for a .edu domain under current rules, being a commercial venture rather than an educational institution. Its core limitation is practical — accessing the repository requires registration, creating a threshold that sits awkwardly with the open-access ethos the platform nominally promotes.

ResearchGate presents a more polished face. The interface is modern, and connecting with other scholars is relatively frictionless. But spend any time there and a certain atmosphere becomes unmistakable: it feels, inescapably, like LinkedIn. The platform leans heavily on metrics — scores, statistics, impact tallies — deployed as a kind of gamified encouragement, a Pavlovian loop of nudges and notifications designed to keep you engaged. For scholars more interested in ideas than in the performance of scholarship, this technophilic faith in largely meaningless numbers makes for an uneasy environment.

Google Scholar is a useful listing of research. Its indexing is broad and reasonably accurate, and it certainly has its use in assembling bibliographies or tracking down papers. But it is essentially a library catalogue. There is little here beyond the search function.

The platform we would most readily recommend is the network anchored by the PhilPapers/PhilEvents/PhilPeople suite, maintained by the Institute of Philosophy at the University of London. (The network also includes PhilJobs and PhilArchive, though we have no direct experience with those.)

What distinguishes this network is precisely that it is one — a genuine web, not merely a platform. Papers, people, events, and books are knitted together in ways that actually reflect how philosophical work moves through the world: a paper connects to its author's profile, which connects to their institutional context, which connects to upcoming events in their area, which connects to the wider literature. The word network is used too casually elsewhere; here it earns its meaning.

The metadata is of genuinely high quality — a consequence, we suspect, of it being maintained largely by scholars themselves rather than automated scrapers or commercial content teams. The interface is clean, fast, and free from the visual noise of ads and engagement mechanics. There are no gamified prompts, no impact scores dressed up as professional affirmation. You orient yourself quickly and get engaged as a scholar, not consumer.

PhilPapers does have a repository function, and it is useful. But its deeper value lies in its library and connective functions: finding people, situating scholarship, tracing the living relationships between ideas and the researchers who hold them. In an era when so many platforms are drifting toward what might fairly be called enshittification — the slow subordination of user value to platform revenue — this network remains, refreshingly, on the side of the researcher.

For philosophers and adjacent scholars, it is the clear choice. For everyone else, it remains a model worth studying.

Posted 6 Mar, 2026. Modified 6 Mar, 2026.

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An often recurring question is: How many readers does<em>Inscriptions</em> have? This post is an attempt to approximate an answer.

Certainly, in a digital era this question cannot be simply answered by referring to the number of copies sold or otherwise in circulation. Page hits (such as provided by Google Analytics or Matomo) can give an indication, but it isn’t a very precise measure, as one visitor may generate several hits, some hits are made by digital robots or spiders, and some hits simply “bounce,” with the visitor only curious about the front page, not ending up actually reading anything.

However, below is a metric that might be more precise: We are increasingly consistent in assigning Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) to all our publications, including articles and issues ofInscriptions. Hits on these DOIs are counted by Crossref, a neutral, not-for-profit organisation that serves the scholarly community as a DOI registration agency. Each DOI is connected to a landing page, and this is important, as hits here mean that viewers has gone a step further in their efforts to identify a specific article, and not just bounced off the journal’s cover. By looking at DOIs we can reduce the chance of including illegitimate hits.

The numbers are quite consistent: We have about 400 reads in average per month over the last year, fluctuating from 195 in June last year to 539 in March this year. This translates to somewhere between 4000 and 5000 reads annually. Since a read in this context means a hit to a landing page we still cannot know for certain how many physical persons hide behind this readership; one person may read one or several articles. Nevertheless, for a independent journal, wholly run outside for-profit corporations and state institutions, this seems like a number we can be happy with.

Can important, rigorous scholarship only be produced in within the established order? We are reminded of Pierre Bourdieu’s words inOutline of a Theory of Practice: “Every established order tends to produce the naturalization of its own arbitrariness.” Our sustainability and success contribute to revealing the arbitrary nature of the current order.

-------- Forwarded Message --------
Subject: Resolution Report for prefix 10.59391 from Jun 3, 2025
Date: Thu, 5 Jun 2025 14:08:20 +0200
From: reports@crossref.org
To: forleggeren@tankebanen.no

Resolutions for last 12 months

New to this report? Start here: learn what a resolution is and how it works: https://www.crossref.org/documentation/reports/resolution-report/.

Resolutions by month

This section of the report provides the total number of resolutions per month for the past 12 months, by prefix (count) and overall (all members).

This month’s popular DOIs

Below are the top 10 successfully resolved DOIs for this month. This list represents the most popular DOIs, as measured by the number of times each DOI was successfully resolved.

Posted 6 Jun, 2025. Modified 12 Jul, 2025.

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New publication on sport and ethics.

There is a new volume of essays out on Sport and Religion, edited by the talented Constantino Pereira Martins and Luísa Ávila da Costa. I have been fortunate enough to be included in it with an essay on “A Silent Leap: Sport Beyond Ethics,” essentially a rumination on Kierkegaard and ethics in sport. The conjuncture of sport and religion has received scant attention in the mainstream of sports philosophy. In the recent voluminous and authoritative Routledge Handbook of Sports Philosophy (2017), for instance, the conjunct of religion and sport is only briefly mentioned. I write in the abstract that in the works of Søren Kierkegaard we find “the potential to reveal a transcendental reality – a sphere of the infinite – through the secular rituals of sport, and thus to bring the infinite in touch with our finite reality, enabling us to overcome our existential dread, our ‘sickness unto death,’ as Kierkegaard termed it. To Kierkegaard faith could never simply be pronounced as an attribute, it had to be experienced and lived-through, and this event of religion was characterised by his image of the ‘leap of faith,’ the moment when we suspend our ethical constraints and make a decision to, simply, believe.”

The bowling-sequences in The Big Lebowski and football becoming handball, as was the case of with Diego Maradona’s infamous “hand of God” against England in the quarter-finals of the 1986 World Cup, show that sport can offer moments of faith – experiences that defy rules and logic, and instead point toward a higher, often unspoken truth. Rather than simply teaching us to be good losers or obedient players, sport can challenge the very structure of our social norms. It opens space for silence, mystery, and transcendence.

The essays finds its place in a volume that disentangles an “intricate interplay between sport and religion.” In their introduction the editors note that this is a collection that “probes the liminal spaces where athletic pursuit transcends mere physicality and approaches the sacred.” The book can be purchased through the Brazil-based publisher at https://editoradialetica.com/. You may also read my essay on this link.

Posted 12 Apr, 2025. Modified 16 Apr, 2025.

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New publication on Jon Fosse and negative mysticism.

The fine folks at mongrel matter is out with a new collection of essays, Philosophy of Final Words. It features 25 contributions on death, dying, epitaphs, and many more topics connected to thinking on finality. I am delighted to be included with an essay on Jon Fosse’s negative mysticism. It discusses his early essays along with the short novel Morning and Evening. Here’s from the abstract:

We are accustomed to thinking of death as the ultimate finality. Existential philosophy, including that of Martin Heidegger, has held death to be the absolute limit against which it is possible to think life. Even more so, he held, does death serve to define our humanity, since we, as a species, are the only ones able to contemplate our finitude. In so far as this became the rallying cry for modernist philosophy it also became a sign of its limit. If human beings are superior in their thinking ability, the pessimists asked, how come we have put ourselves on the brink of extinction, polluting our waters, creating ever more powerful weapons, now with the capacity to eliminate all life on this planet many times over, heating our small rock in space to the extent that life crumbles and withers? In Morning and Evening the author, critic, and recent Nobel laureate Jon Fosse tears open a rift in the hitherto sutured fabric of liminality that distinguished existentialists from other philosophers, and that has divided humans from animals, and the living from the dead. This essay discusses Fosse’s negative mysticism and the way it serves to offer a highly complex response to the notion of facticity. What is at stake is how what Milan Kundera called “God’s laughter” manifests itself in the polyphonic complexity of Fosse’s text, providing a paradoxical and surprising inversion of the realist doxa on singularity and difference.

The book is available for purchase (you decide the price!) through the Distort Book Club. More information about mongrel matter is available here.

Posted 7 Mar, 2025. Modified 7 Mar, 2025.

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Here are my concluding words to the 4th Ereignis Conference, presented in Gdynia, Poland, on August 11, 2024.

Very briefly to round off this conference and I will just go straight into it. It won’t be very long so that we can have a nice rest all of us.

First I will do some pragmatics, even though I’m not the greatest pragmatic I will still start there. There is an aftermath to this conference. Many people have asked about it and I will just repeat it now so that it’s very clear to everyone. We will publish a volume of proceedings. This will be a genuine publication with an ISBN number. It will be archived in the National Library and archive.com and elsewhere. It will not be peer reviewed however. What we will do is that we will invite all of you to send us the papers that you have given this weekend. We will send you formatting instructions because it has to be quite meticulously formatted for us to not have to spend too much time doing this. We don’t have a enormous staff here, so we do it ourselves. So, please, it has to be properly formatted and we will send those instructions probably next week. This will be a purely electronic publication. It will not exist in print.

The second thing we will do is that we will invite everyone here to submit a full paper to our peer reviewed journal Inscriptions. Our section editor for Academic Articles, along with an American scholar who is now in Japan, Andrew Jorn, and myself will look at the look at all the submissions along with external reviewers. It’s a blind review process and those who get accepted there can be published then by Inscriptions in a special section devoted to to this conference. Whether that will be in the January next year or if it will be in our issue number two next year, this is something we haven’t decided on yet, but it will be out next year.

The third thing is that we have instituted as sort of formal evaluation structure for all our events and we will invite you to submit an evaluation form. This is something that we do on our web page and I will take that up here. Okay, so when you log into our our web page, this is what you get up on your screen. You can modify your profile. It might be useful to be aware of this button and then you can do more stuff here. It will come up a button where you can submit your evaluation for this conference, but then at the very bottom of this page there is a discussion group and I would encourage everyone to ask questions, to answer questions that are already there and participate and make this a lively forum. This is for the benefit of all of us. It will strengthen the center and you know, we can all learn something, so, please, feel encouraged to do that. Right, so we will send out instructions for for these things probably next week already.

That was the pragmatic part. Now I will talk a little bit about this conference as a whole. I will just give some very very brief comments about silence. Already Matthew in his first keynote yesterday talked about this thing: silence as a kind of translation. Silence is connected very intimately to translation. Again, Ronnie this morning talked about that silence can be about sort of translation of being, that being is or being can be silent. Silence needs to be translated somehow. There can be a nothing, as some ontologies would would claim, that does not require translation.

Thus, silence can be the beginning of speech, or it can be about converting silence into speech and then we are we returning to the topic of Matthew’s keynote because there he says he said that there is a conversion of experience that happens. And we discussed whether this also entails a conversion of the speaking subject. Matthew discussed Jon Fosse and his conversion into Catholicism about a decade ago and the question is posed in Septology, his mammoth of a novel, and we may ask whether this novel is essentially about a conversion. So what we have is a conversion of silence into speech, but also about a conversion of the speaking subject and the question of whether these two elements can be usefully held apart. So this is one major question that I think remains after this conference.

Or I would say ala Wittgenstein that silence could be the end of speech. The last line of the tractatus that Chris brought up, for example, comes to mind here:

Of that which I cannot speak I must remain silent.

Searle discusses the task of those who want to defend the earlier Ogden translation. For instance, the famous last line of the book,

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

What cannot be said, cannot be said!

Was sich nicht sagen läßt, läßt sich nicht sagen!

Since the earlier translation is so well known, I felt the need to keep the inverted word order in my translation, rather than translating the sentence more directly as “We must not talk about what cannot be spoken of” or “We mustn’t try to say what cannot be said.” But no “whereof …thereof” or “About things we cannot speak of we must keep silent.”

And so and this is Searle’s final line in the Tractatus.

About things we cannot speak of we must keep silent.

And with those words I thank everyone for participating and We will leave it at that. Thank you very much.

Posted 14 Sep, 2024. Modified 7 Mar, 2025.

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Gutter får bedre resultater i matematikk når den som vurderer prøvene ikke vet kjønnet til den som prøves. Hva er grunnen til at gutter får kjønnsfratrekk når karakterene settes i skolen?

Dette innlegget er tidligere publisert i nettavisen Subjekt.

Oppfatningen av jenter som søte, snille og stort sett føyelige, og gutter som høyrøstede, brutale og oftere slemme får store konsekvenser for barna våre og mulighetene deres når de vokser opp. Det litt banale perspektivet på kjønnsforskjeller kommer til uttrykk på mange samfunnsområder. Vi får følelsen av at det litt idealiserte, Bakkebygrenda-aktige perspektivet gjør seg gjeldende f. eks. i mediedekningen av politiske personligheter både ute (Clinton vs. Trump) og på hjemmebane (Solberg vs. Moxnes). Hovedanliggendet her er hvordan ideen om de søte små pikene og de voldsomme, uvørne guttene har fått lov til å skape en betydelig strukturell forskjell – omtrent halvparten av oss vil vel si urettferdighet – som begynner i grunnskolen og som etterhvert får dramatiske og radikale effekter i form av uliketer i utdannings- og arbeidsmuligheter, med påfølgende avvikende innektsnivå, i gutters disfavør.

Mannsutvalget kom med sin rapport for to uker siden. Særlig når den suppleres med subjektive opplevelser, slik som vi fikk i samtalen mellom utvalgets leder Claus Jervell og Magnus Marsdal i sistnevntes podkast Mímir og Marsdal, får vi et utfyllende og temmelig oppdatert bilde av likestillingen i Norge sett fra menns og gutters perspektiv. Lærere og andre folk i utdanningssektoren har lenge visst at det er en skjevhet i hvordan jenter og gutter verdsettes i skolen. Gitt at den mest objektive vurderingen av elevers ferdigheter er den som gis når eleven og den som vurderer ikke er kjent for hverandre og den mest subjektive er vurderingen som foretas av læreren alene, har vi en skala av vurderinger fra nasjonale og internasjonale prøver i den ene enden av skalaen og standpunktkarakterer satt av faglærer på den andre. Mellom disse to har vi eksamenskarakterene, som i hovedsak settes av et kollegium.

Siden vi har nasjonale prøver i tre fag, lesing (på norsk), engelsk og matematikk, gir det mening å sammenligne karakterene i disse tre fagene. I femte trinn skårer gutter og jenter omtrent likt, jenter ett skalapoeng bedre, i lesing, mens gutter skårer tre skalapoeng bedre i regning. De nasjonale forskjellene i disse fagene øker når barna blir eldre. Når vi kommer til niende trinn skårer jentene tre skalapoeng bedre i lesing, mens guttene skårer tre skalapoeng bedre i regning. I engelsk skårer guttene litt bedre enn jentene på femtetrinn mens ulikheten er borte på niende trinn. Likevel, når læreren får lov å sette sin egen karakter får jentene høyest karakter i alle fag, med unntak av gym. I gjennomsnitt får guttene fire grunnskolepoeng færre enn jentene. (Kilde for disse tallene er NOU 2024: 8, s. 107-108.)

Det som er nytt i denne rapporten er at tendensen til å forfordele jentene fortsetter og er blitt forsterket. Forskjellene er økende i fagene: guttene blir stadig bedre enn jentene i matte mens jentene blir bedre enn guttene i lesing, samtidig som jentene får stadig bedre utgangspunkt etter grunnskolen. Forskjellene som har sin årsak i kjønn er store og økende.

Dette skjer til tross for at det pedagogiske etablissementet i årevis har satt i tiltak for å utjevne forskjellen mellom elevenes objektive ferdigheter og karakterene de får. Høyt prioritert har såkalte vurderingsfellesskap vært. Dette betyr i korte trekk at lærere settes sammen for å bli enige om hvilke karakterer som passer til ulike besvarelser. Dermed, har man tenkt, skulle det bli en mer lik vurdering på tvers av besvarelser og elevgrupper. Som datagrunnlaget til Mannsutvalget viser har tiltakene vært feilslått. Avstanden i grunnskolepoeng mellom jentene og guttene fortsetter å øke, i guttenes disfavør, til tross for at guttenes kompetanse objektivt sett stadig blir bedre enn jentenes i matte.

Det vi nå må våge å gjøre er å spørre hva som er årsaken til at jentene får høyere karakterer i fag der de har lavere kompetanse. Mannsutvalget forsøker ikke å besvare dette spørsmålet direkte. Før vi forsøker å gi en forklaring er det likevel på sin plass med et viktig forbehold: Mannsutvalget og forfatteren av denne kronikken er ikke imot kvinners rettigheter og naturligvis for likestilling mellom kjønnene. Denne likestillingen bør ta form av mulighetslikestilling. Det er og vil fortsette å være forskjeller mellom kjønnene; det er ikke noe mål å fjerne disse forskjellene. Poenget her er heller ikke å bestemme hvorvidt likestilling er et spillteoretisk pluss-sum- eller null-sum-spill, som Erna Solberg har yndet å prosedere spørsmålet. I noen tilfeller er kjønnskampen åpenbart en strid om begrensede ressurser der kjønnene står mot hverandre, som når den kvinnelige ledelsen ved Universitetet i Oslos lar 14 kvinner og to menn få delta i institusjonens koordineringsgruppe for likestilling. På andre områder, f. eks. i omsorgsspørmål, kan det tenkes at både barna og foreldre av begge kjønn vil få et godt utfall av større grad av likestilling. Dette er likevel ikke hovedpoenget her. Det vi vet er at jenter og gutter har ulikt ferdighetsnivå i skolen men at karakterene de får i skolefagene inverterer denne kjønnsmessige forskjellen. Gutter er bedre i matte, men får dårligere karakterer.

Når vi vet at forskjellene mellom gutter og jenter i ferdigheter øker – gutter blir stadig flinkere enn jenter i matte – mens vurderingen går motsatt vei, i gutters disfavør, er det på tide å anerkjenne at strategien for å skape likhet mellom karakterer og faktiske ferdigheter har mislyktes. Når forsøket på å skape vurderingsfellesskap ikke har utjevnet forskjellene er det nærliggende å spørre om det er dypereliggende årsaker til at lærere foretrekker jenter i klasserommet, og belønner dem deretter til standpunkt, selv om gutenne har bedre ferdigheter. Kan årsaken være at jenter er lettere å ha med å gjøre, mens gutter anses som høyrøstede og vanskelige?

En indikator på at dette kan være tilfellet er at når lærerne blir spør om hvilket kjønn som er mest modent når de begynner på barneskolen svarer det store flertallet at jentene er modne og guttene barnslige. Vi vet samtidig at det store flertallet av barneskolelærere er nettopp kvinner. Det kan synes som om man foretrekker barn av sitt eget kjønn når man vurderer hvilke barn som skal anses som modne.

Vi vet imidlertid også at det ikke er en direkte sammenheng mellom læreren kjønn og forskjeller i standpunktkarakterer. Enkelt forklart gir både mannlige og kvinnelige lærere jenter bedre karakterer. Det er derfor en forenkling å hevde at lærere forfordeler sitt eget kjønn.

En mer nærliggende forklaring på det store og voksende misforholdet mellom ferdigheter og utdeling av belønning og straff i form av standpunktkarakterer i gutters disfavør er at det foreligger en vanlig kulturell oppfatning om gutter som brutale og oftere slemme enn jenter, og at det er lærerens oppgave å påvirke guttene for å få dem til å forandre seg. Jenters belønning i form av bedre karakterer er derfor en belønning for at jenter er enklere å ha med å gjøre og for at de oppfører seg slik læreren og utdanningssystemet vil. Gutter straffes tilsvarende for at de oftere oppleves å stikke kjepper i hjulene for utdanningsmaskinen.

Denne mekanismen for belønning og avstraffelse kan være ubevisst. Vi trenger mer kunnskap om forholdet mellom læreres oppfatning av kjønnenes oppførsel og standpunktkarakterene barna være får i skolen.

Posted 13 May, 2024. Modified 13 May, 2024.

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There is something to say about silence in politics that goes beyond both the psychoanalytic repression theory -- we’re silent because we’ve pushed the troublesome content out of our consciousness -- and the critical claim that we’re silent because of convenience -- speaking up about injustice might prove too costly for our career. The politics of silence goes beyond simple expedience to something more profound: we hold our tongue because it is our calling.

The critical inflexion of this would amount to something like “for you to hold this post, or achieve this kind of recognition (Bourdieu) you must at least appear to subscribe to our dogma”, and thus repress or stay silent about any objections you might have. A case in point, much discussed in Norway these days, is how successive Foreign Ministers have stayed silent on the imprisonment and possible extradition to the US of Julian Assange. The American legal order has promised to prosecute Assange outside the civilian system -- in Military Courts that practice significant silencing of relevant details -- and within the bounds of a system that practices capital punishment. How come these FMs use such evasive language when Assange’s case comes up? One explanation is that it is not because they simply repress any objections, or that they take a chance on not saying anything so as not to impede their career (although a former FM was elevated to the post of Norway’s Ambassador to Washington just the other day), but that they wouldn’t have been named FM were they likely to speak up on the issue. Their silence is a part of their post, so to speak.

In other words, the situation is worse than the individualising critique implicit in the theories of repression and expedience.

More, and to join our conference on silence and politics: 2024 Ereignis Conference.

Posted 28 Mar, 2024. Modified 11 Feb, 2026.

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Some thoughts on recent geopolitical suggestions in the US election campaign.

Right, so in so far as Mr Trump’s point is that we should pay our bills he is right. We small people, we who dream of one day having sufficient wealth to live well in this world, don’t we imagine that we will, in this prospective future, powerfully collect our outstanding balance, that we will not be taken for fools, but that we will stand firm and demand our right? And what right is more certain than our right to have our outstanding balance settled?

However, a part from this appeal to the small in us the reality of Mr Trump’s claims is, unfortunately, highly questionable. Far be it for a newly minted man of action to be concerned with such niceties as realities; let us nevertheless look at a few of them:

1. Apparently the encounter so vividly narrated by Mr Trump did not feature as its main antagonists a male head of state, as Mr Trump claimed, but rather Mrs. Ursula von Leyen, who was head of the European Commission at the time (Thierry Breton in an interview with France’s LCI television, referred to by Reuters at https://www.reuters.com/world/european-officials-criticize-trumps-nato-comments-2024-02-11/). Probably an insignificant case of memory loss on Mr Trump’s side, no?

2. There is no agreement in Nato that all member states should funnel 2 % of their GDP to defence spending. In reality this was a recommendation made in 2014 as a goal to be reached by the end of this year, but surely we are able to discern the difference between a recommendation and a demand? (For more information about the status of the 2 % target, see e.g. https://www.reuters.com/world/nato-allies-agree-spend-at-least-2-their-gdp-defence-diplomats-2023-07-07/.)

3. Article 5 of the Nato treaty stipulates that an attack on one member state is to be considered an attack on all. For that reason when USA was attacked on 9-11 her allies in that alliance mistered forces & munitions in support of the invasion of Afganisthan. (You can read more about Nato’s Isaf mission here: https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/topics_8189.htm.) “On September 12, 2001, the day after the 9/11 attacks, NATO met in an emergency session. For the first and only time in its history, NATO invoked Article 5. All 18 of the United States’s allies stated they would support America’s response to the attacks” (https://www.911memorial.org/learn/resources/digital-exhibitions/digital-exhibition-revealed-hunt-bin-laden/international-community-responds). It would show an unprecedented level of ingratitude should the US on a future, say, Russian invasion of Denmark say to the Danes that they feel Article 5 does no longer apply.

The international interstate system is anarchic. For the last 30 years or so it has been dominated by one “super” power. Suggestions that this power will no longer be able to honour its commitments indicates that we are entering a new era, an era in which we will see a larger number of “great” powers dominate, and where the former “super” power will be reduced to one among these.

Posted 12 Feb, 2024. Modified 7 Mar, 2026.

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2023 in publishing: new books in poetry and creative criticism from Tankebanen forlag.

It's strange how I can't stop thinking about Laika. People shouldn't think so much. “Time heals all wounds,” Mrs. Arvidsson says. Mrs. Arvidsson says some wise things. You have to try to forget.

In the middle of scholarship, conferences, seminars, exhibits, and sundry other stuff we easily forget that we also have a foot in the publishing industry. Tankebanen forlag is a publisher registered in Norway, which means that we dutifully send off packages of our books and journals once or twice a year to Norway’s National Library. They, in turn, ship copies of our publications to lending libraries so that the “general public,” so-called, may borrow our books and journal for free.

Public libraries are great things. While libraries have ancient roots — there are evidence of archives and libraries in Egypt and Mesopotamia — it appears that it was Gajus Asinius Pollio who founded the first public library in 39 BCE. The notion of a “general” public is particularly relevant here, as Pollio was, indeed, a general, and the “public” in his sense, while not strictly limited to generals, was severly circumscribed.

In more contemporary times there was once, amid a few very great corporations, a small publisher that issued one or two books a year, along with a peer-reviewed journal. This publisher, bearing the name of Tankebanen forlag, has come out with these fine books this year:

• Pintxos: Small Delicacies & Chance Encounters, by Gray Kochhar-Lindgren, a fine collection of thoughts, interventions, tidbits, and various other short texts, with references to art, philosophy, food, travel, and many other domains. Fun, explorative, and immensely readable this book is available in print and as e-book.
• A Listener and Other Poems about Musicm by Christopher Norris, is a series of finely crafted formal verse in a variety of verse forms, including the sonnet, terzanelle, quatrain, terza rima, ottava rima, and pantoum. The poems treat composers, such as Shostakovich and Philip Glass, and a great many music-related themes. Available in print and as ebook.

Back-copies of the print edition of our journal, which comes out with two issues per year, can be ordered from our distributor at the cheaply price of no more than €24.

Being a publisher is fun, fun, fun, but it doesn't really pay off in financial terms. However, should you feel that our initative in the industry is worthwhile, order our books or copies of the journal in print.

Thank you for your support, and happy holidays!

Posted 20 Dec, 2023. Modified 11 Feb, 2026.

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Inspired by an ongoing discussion with Matthew Keenan on surrealism and poetry in the <a href="https://ereignis.no/ereignis.php">Ereignis forum</a> and elsewhere, here is a new translation of one of the earliest published poems by Tor Ulven (1953-1995).

Ulven’s early work is playful, with surprising turns and unusual imagery. The central figure in this collection is the urfugl, or “original bird,” whose shade has given name to the book. The Archaeopteryx or “Urvogel” (German), was a genus of avian dinosaurs. Unlike contemporary birds it had teeth and jaws instead of a beak. The name derives from the ancient Greek ἀρχαῖος (archaīos), ancient, and πτέρυξ (ptéryx), feather or wing. In Ulven’s lifetime Archaeopteryx was regarded as the oldest known bird.

In this poem imagery from paleontology and sorcery meet with Ulven’s unique world-view. Read the poem in full here.

Posted 23 Oct, 2023. Modified 7 Mar, 2026.

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