Icelandic family history

From my sister, Johanna McCloy:

I’m corresponding with our cousin Jennifer (Kelly* and Eulah’s daughter) and she told me she went to Iceland to visit the family homestead last year. I asked her to share info and photos, and she’s beginning to send me images and maps and history from what she knows. I am loving it!  I thought you would, too. I’ll summarize many emails and info into as tight a message as I can:

*Kelly is my mother's older brother and was one of her best friends ever.  Eulah is the wife my mother loved too.

My mother Lillian Thorbjorg McCloy's grandfather Sveinn Kristjanson was born 9/18/1836. This is where we’re from originally in Iceland, excerpted from one of Jennifer’s emails:

Our family homestead is called Bjarnastadir and if you look at Iceland you'll see Akureyi (second largest city after Reykjavik) in the north & the homestead is a little to the east and south of it.

Look up Bjanastadir, Iceland on Google. Either images or maps. It’s gorgeous! Reminds me of photos of Ireland* The attached two photos were taken on our family homestead by Jennifer. (The woman in photo #2 is her daughter). She wrote this about them:

[*where our paternal grandfather is from!]

That house is on our homestead along with the turf house.

Sveinn moved from Iceland to a small farm 3 miles south of the small town of Gimli, Manitoba in 1883, so… when he was 47 years old. Gimli was called “Small Iceland” due to the large block of Icelandic settlers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rural_Municipality_of_Gimli
The farm was near what was then called Willow River and a short distance to the main road. They farmed there for 20 years  (not sure what they farmed) and then moved to Sask, close to  Wynyard, Saskatchewan. I looked it up. Another Icelandic settlement: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wynyard,_Saskatchewan

His son, our grandfather Thorkell, was a child from Sveinn's second marriage. (Who knew? Sveinn had two children with wife #1. No elaboration or info on what happened to her… or when he married each wife.)

Thorkell was one of seven or eight kids with wife #2, Veronika Ragnkedur Thorkelsdottir (her brother was a Minister at the Lutheran Cathedral in Reykjavik).  Thorkell's wife, our grandmother, was Johanna Eggertsdottir Sigurdson from Selkirk.

Sveinn died on 7/4/1918, so almost eight years before Mama was born. So he lived to be 82.

That’s the nutshell.

Isn’t this great??

Wanting to deconstruct layers:  there are three on the top.
- A raggedy little striped shirt that only reaches to the elbow, gone thin, with tiny holes, from so many washings, Nina gave it to me.  The thinness of that cotton so blissful in heat.
- Over which a soft Danskin jacket of brushed cotton, suede-like in feel, deep red on the outside deep lavender on the in (w hoodie to match ), found washed and pressed in a box in the lobby of an ex-boyfriend's apt building; the Lobby of Many Things, or Hoarders Lived There!)
- Over which my mother's classically designed brown raincoat, very light, with pockets and another hood, while
- around my neck I wore two scarves, very sheer, one with gold thread running through and falling off behind me, something my friend Kathryn gave me; it was wrapping for a present,
-and another sheer very sheer pink scarf, did I buy this one myself, at some cheap fair NYC?
- The boots are vegan (read: plastic), left behind by abovementioned Nina's sometime tenant, a young woman who left them behind when she joined the airforce and became a paratrooper;
- as for underwear, you may ask, and I will say,
Exactly.
- And speaking of what you don't…see, my head is tilted too far back for a glimpse of the samurai knot with a small but slightly splashy kiki fountain vamping out of it, and all those tendrils drifting down.
- Re what you do see?  My camera smile; never unself conscious unless candid.
Thank you to the nice neighbor who took it!  And nice meeting you, Dave, and also Phillip, the gorgeous black deaf* youth who lived in the house next door.  (PYT, don'tcha wanna ask me out??)
*think of the advantages he would have, while going out with me!

Thus I realized that I was walking around in gifted clothing.  Except for the navy pants that tucked into the Cossack-style xcellnt monsoon boots with too-long laces, all of it was given me.
Above me the sky was such a brilliant blue, and the clouds so bright white, it hurt to look up, even as softer, lower, fog draped them and there came down the lightest fractions of water; so light they just caught the sun and were tiny flashes of silver in the air, not nearly enough to dampen anything, but falling upon us like grace.
And there I was, walking with Sammy through it, dressed in gifted.

Love and Terror

Why is letting people love you sometimes the hardest thing in the world to do?

I don't know, but the answer is tangled in the web that makes you love people who don't in fact love you the way you are.  You're just a piece of work waiting to be altered. 

Men seem to like the wild in me, but as soon as I commit to them, they start trying to tame it.  It doesn't end well, and I mean for me, either.  They find someone else, and I find my self-esteem around my ankles.   

'It's like The Taming of the Shrew,' a friend suggested.  Gee THANKS.  Because who doesn't love being called a nasty little rodent?  (Seriously, isn't that what a shrew is?)

Okay, COMPUTER!  We're not even a minute away from that Star Trek model where you just say Computer!  And it pulls out the answer.  Right now I have to get on a new tab and google shrew.  SIGH.

It's terrifying how fast we get used to convenience.

So yeah, a shrew has 'heavy dentition' -- meaning serious fangs.  More like tusks.  Tame THAT mothafucka!

Does this mean I have an 'attitude' problem?  I don't feel like I do...I mostly feel like I'm always on the verge of apology.  Though the last time a man wrote to me 'I can't get you out of my mind' I wrote, 'Try.'  He said, 'That worked.'  I instantly apologized, but I could NOT resist the joke!  Is that it means to try to be a comedian?  To just blurt shit out (always asking forgiveness, never permission)? -- yup.  Pretty sure that's it.

Apparently it also means being a huge potty-mouth.  No problem there!  Especially after I saw that much re-shared post about people who swear being more intelligent (of course, there's a limit; if you put fuckin between every other word, you're just a fuckin moron).

Huh?  What do you mean, off-topic?  

Am reading this book, He's Scared/She's Scared, and I can't help but think, Jesus Christ, shouldn't we be??

Given what I know, consider me terrified!

Heartbreak, now that is truly frightening -- when you actually feel a fissure beneath your sternum and between your ribs -- I push my fingers into it, and it's like there's this ragged hole where I need my soul to be.  I let my soul go too easily. 

But what's the point, if you don't?  It's a conundrum. It's a koan.  It's the narrative we have to live in order to find out who we love, who to love, and, I hope, how to do it better.  Animals, friends, family, lovers, the Dalai Lama, and every sentient being in anguish and need.

(Wait, this was supposed to be about intimacy...)

I crave it, but if it's given too easily, I am suspicious. I become wary caustic girl.  Those are my super-heroine powers!)  

Has anyone yet realized that oh is the opposite of ho??

Yes I think I am the first!

(See, start talking about intimacy and I'm about to turn this machine off and go read my new book, I Love Dick.  F'real).

HA!

Over and out.

Excerpt from Sing Me, work-in-progress

"I need a fix cause I'm going dowwwwn...."

Magic Man


She rushed up to the room, just in time to see Clarence's shrunken body, his ribs, so...ema – so enunciated (she gave him what she could, even in her mind), and then to see a shockingly violent heaving into a large plastic container the nurse held for him, her other arm around his back so he could sit up as the most virulent substance gushed out of his mouth, so viscous and black it looked like oil, but thicker -- and the smell --!  Jesus, she had no words to describe that smell: it was beyond sulfuric, it was toxicity itself.
     She let go of his head and he fell back down as the nurse lifted the bucket of putridity, headed for disposal till Zoe stopped her in the doorway.
What is that, she whispered even though Clarence had fallen back unconscious.
That his blood, nina.  He got a hole in his heart, como se – fungal -- and is infected his blood.       That (eying the bucket) is what 'nourish' his system ri' now.
Oh my God!  Oh my God, oh my God – what can I do?  Can I do something?
Si, said the little Puerto Rican nurse.  Puedes rogar.  Her voice was calm but fierce, even as she eased out of the room.  You can pray.  You can pray for your amigo.  And I think maybe on your knees, pray hard as you can.
Yo me voy a mi casa, y voy a rezar tambien, she went on.  In my own house, she deciphered it for Zoe's stunned look, I will pray, too.
And here still were more women, strangers, willing to get on their knees for him.  Women, always wanting to save him!  Including, and most fiercely (the bitterness in her gut), herself.
In truth, the minute the nurse left, carrying that substance with her, that's what Zoe did because she had to feel like was doing something.   She knelt next to his gone self and prayed until her knees were killing, until even her wrists ached, she was clutching the steeple of her own hands so hard.
He was thoroughly gone, but she kept vigil at his bedside, only going into the bathroom late at night to sneak a shower, scrubs out her dainties, then eat the tray of food both she and the nurses knew was really for her, since he couldn't eat (not with that tube feeding him – a picc line, they called it, and she kept thinking, how appropriate/ for a music man...)
Ti-ny dancer, she sang in a half-whisper, letting the melody lilt, switching randomly from one song to the next midstream.
It seemed like the minutes dragged and then she looked up and it was two hours later – the best part of playing, always.  She strummed a silly lullabye, noodling it around a song somehow every child seemed to learn:

Floatin on the river down Jordan
Floatin on the river down Styx
Floatin on the ri-ver Ni-le
Floatin on the Am-a-zon.../
I got Cerberus here to guide me
His wing-man starry Sirius
S'long's I got doggies paddlin
Know they gonna take me home...

God, Clarence said, his voice a croak, as her face slowly rose to see him trying to wipe the crust off his single open eye, too shaky to manage.  Is this how they torture you back to life?
Back to/real-i-ty!, sprang the song line in her head, lumping up her throat, tears running down her face, Thank God, she thought, God thank you thank you thank you GOD!
Back to the he-re and nowww, she sang, so quietly nothing but Clarence's bat ears could've heard.
Jesus, my man, Clarence said, and she caught the sideways-tears pillow swipe.  What fresh hell is this?
Hell?  No, hell is where you wuz headed, blackman.  This here is a li'l patch of cloud, got your own morphine drip – (ignoring his snort of derision – 'morphine's just a body high,' he'd always said this – 'but heroin, now, that takes you down some serious rivers...') And your own personal harpist –
Yeah, playin a guitar –
-– singing you some serious river lullabyes.
Do I look gone?  You're missin some real bye in your lullas.
But ain't it sweet to fucking wake up and swim some riverwater, you ungrateful otter?
She saw him catch his breath then, hit the morphine pump onetwothree onetwothree onetwothree then saw the sweat beading his brow, and just like the rivers she was picturing, he was drenched.
I'm getting the nurse, she said, her guitar banging gracelessly onto the floor, Clarence trying to lift a hand as if to stop her, unable to keep it upright.
She stood in the doorway while the skilled, big, fresh-on-duty and stoic dreadlocked Jamaican RN swapped the wet sheets for dry so deftly Clarence was simply rolled back, then forth – something the man would do twelve times in the next ten hours -- and done with great gentleness, the RN untied and lifted off his hospital gown and swapped it with the new, smelling sweetly of laundry, tying it for him tenderly in the back, doing his best not to touch the patient whose every bloodstream, every nerve ending, every bone and muscle and the all of his skin screamed pain.
Gown! Came the absurd thought as she lurked in the doorway – I'm lurking, this thought, too, I'm a lurker -- and then again, Gown?  Wow, there was some pie-eyed optimism!
Delusion, Clarence had once pronounced, Is its own reward.
Unless you're a paranoid junkie with delusions of grandeur, she'd retorted.
What, you think me not a Person of Interest?
A POA?  I believe that's gone, sold to the dealer who holds your paycheck!  By far, she'd added, The highest bidder – considering his interest, of course.
Thank you, Z-bitch – you're so good at kickin a dawg when he's down.
Save the ghetto-speak for your starry-eyed debutantes.  Tell me, though, seriously, do you let them ALL tramp stamp your birthdate?
Nah, he said, Soma them just get C was here (nodding, but not without effort he tried to hide, to his innermost thigh).
Ah, the groin.  So sub-subtle.
You were gonna say sublet weren'tcha.
Fuck you.
Fuck YOU, he said.  Ain't nobody axed you to sit me bedside –
And there he did his uncanny impression of a young Jamaican girl – 'my babynurse,' is what he'd called the woman his mother had hired three months after he was born and her maternity leave was over, a young woman arrived so recently from her own delivery that she brought her own baby along and secretly breastfed Clarence, too – 'extra antibodies,' he said she'd said in her beautiful accent).
Obviously you're making that up, Zoe had responded at the time of the story, but he just went on, 'I know about all kinds of t'ings,' she'd said.  She did, too.  Shit's kept me alive, he used to say.  And boy did it make a tata fetishist outta me.'  All of it fiction, surely, but only Clarence could make it come alive.
And it did seem Jamaica (or at least its hired nurses) were fighting for him.
Third sheet change later, Clarence snugged dry and tight as an infant swaddled, Zoe saw him shivering nevertheless, a shiver like an earthquake, making his jaws audibly clang against each other, his arms gone rigid over his hiccuping ribcage.
Before she could even turn, the RN was bustling back in with an armful of blankets.
Straight from the warmer, he said, ignoring Clarence when he tried to thank him, putting a stick with a small green sponge at the end into his patient's mouth.  He poured a glass of water from a small bedside pitcher.
Try to keep dis 'tween your teeths, he said, And dis–here -- he turned and lasered a look at Zoe before looking back to Clarence, Dis water, you drink it all up.
You put the lime in de coconut, she half-sang, and got a smile from the RN before he left.
And shut the fuck up, Clarence said, his teeths still knocking.
Sure, why not, she said, walking into the room only as much as she needed to grab the handle of her guitar.  Incredible how much better the conversation went when you were still in a coma.
He turned his face away.
What, no zinger?  No 'but isn't that the way you like it, just the sound of your own voice?'
He tried to turn away and succeeded only in making the covers come loose, his cocoon come undone.  She could see his body shaking still, and stiffly she pushed the blankets tighter.  He said nothing, but his lips were blue.
Fucking hell, she said, both fright and curse, double-making sure she'd left no draft uncovered.
Thanks, he muttered tersely, and she knew he was working very hard not to cry, his misery as palpable as a mist in that dark room.
God how men hated to let anyone see them cry.   
    Well, she thought.  So do I.
She turned to finally leave, and next thing she knew she was crawling on top of him, draping her own hot, near-sweating body across him, limb for limb, burying her face in his neck, until finally the shivering subsided and he was breathing more easily – enough, at least, to say, Shit whitegirl, I ain't up to doin the mystery dance so you best quit crushin me.
You thank God for me, she said, getting off him only to sit back in the chair, to pull the guitar back into her waiting lap, and with relief, watched his eyes drift shut.
She sang to his closed eyes as if she were alone, just bits and riffs of this and that, of Joni Mitchell and the Smiths, of Courtney Love a cappella and Snoop Dog w/ Dre, threw in a little Lhasa de Sela, and some Tupac too, humming or making stuff up when she forgot the words, playing as though she were simply distracting herself in some nameless airport, her thoughts already on the plane she was about to board or the one she'd just got off.
This, she realized, as she heard his labored breathing come easier, This endless back and forth – this is Clarence 'n me.

Interview with Caroline Leavitt and myself

Caroline L:  I always think there is a reason to write, something haunting you. What's your reason?

Kristin McC:  I absolutely agree.  That something is haunting me is the reason to write the book.

If I could sum it up in one paragraph, I'd just do a brief essay.  The struggle through the thickets of consciousness, subconsciousness and the dreamland of unconsciousness is why I write; there is something, some answer, I am trying to achieve, or completely explore.

     In Velocity, it was the wild but perfectly, as I saw it, logical connection of grief to sexual obsession. It was a way this particular young woman dealt with the loss of her mother, and along with that, the loss of her capacity to communicate with her father.  It's about authority, the need for it, the defiance of it, and all the old wounds of adolescence.  It's about doing anything except feel the pain of death – or being orphaned.
     It's also about the realms of worlds that have always existed around you/one/her as a child that my character, Ellie Lowell, was somehow unaware of – eg, people like Jesse (a biker, half Cherokee, who deals with but is not a Hell's Angel, squatting in some ramble-down shack – living by his rules entirely, trusting not white man, not Indian – but perhaps, very briefly, this little white girl who clings to his every move).
It's about going home and finding it utterly foreign; it's about risk over security, breaking rather than keeping the rules, about sexuality that in a flash seems to steal your soul, body first.  Of building a world of illusion and wanting to literally die when it crumbles.
And for me as a first-time novelist, the challenge was to write with equal force about the terrifying nihilism of death, of losing one's mother, and the crazed pull to sex – to write about sex graphically without ever veering into the porno-.

      For Some Girls, it was about trying to understand how it is that we learn to be women by studying the way other women become so – mothers, sisters, friends, and finally, lovers.  It was about the romance that only women can make when they're together, and the fluidity of gender (this was waaaay back in the Dark Ages of 1989, Manhattan), the terror of seeing oneself in a way one never would have imagined, the struggle to assimilate new aspects of one's being – and one's sexual identity is the cornerstone, I have nearly always found (why 'Pat' of SNL was such a disturbing character!) of identity.
I also wanted to write about the way only women can appreciate certain other women's beauty, and most of all, how one becomes captivated by a singular intelligence, sensuality, and soul.  How deep that attraction goes.  It was me walking a tightrope between 'coming out' vs simply (as if!) 'falling in love', perhaps just once, with perhaps only this one woman; does this make her bi?  Technically, I guess so, though it's not how I think of her/them.  
It is also, crucially, my love letter to Manhattan; once I got it all down on paper, there was this sense:  I can rest now.

And with Hollywood Savage I wanted to explore the theme of fidelity and in/  from the male point of view, for reasons that made a strangely sympathetic autobiographical sense to me.  I wanted to write about Hollywood and its delirious illogic, its addiction to cliché, creative run by bureaucrats, and the difficulty of converting novel to script.
It was a contrast between cities, and an exploration (inspired in some odd degree Proust's The Captive) of passion, jealousy, the need to hold, to have, to keep.  It's about the humiliation of having someone else seduce your Other, and the weird need for revenge; and it was about two very different women who nevertheless have a whole world (one man) in common.

        The older I get, the more every book is really about New York.  In the first, it's about a girl who left to find herself, did, then came back home, very briefly, for a life-changing summer in North Carolina.
In Some Etc, it's about a young woman's flight to NYC to become someone more like her next door neighbor, and in Hollywood Savage it's about living on the other end of the country and looking back, with extreme homesickness, at the place you finally, with great effort, made your own.
I miss New York could be the name of all my books, I sometimes think (but – NAH).

CL:  What kind of writer are you?

KMc:  I don't outline unless I get lost in the morass (see:  work in progress).  I crave the Muse, love Elizabeth Gilbert's take on it, pray to James Salter for help, and read his work along with Amy Hempel's and Don DeLillo's and Antoine St. Exupery's and Jayne Anne Phillip' short stories, Joy Williams' earlier work, as well as Michael Ondaatje and Marguerite Duras for inspiration when I feel I'm just going through the motions.

What question didn't I ask that I should have?

Only this:  why is it that people will ascribe 'James Salter' –like qualities to male writers simply because they write about men and women, but never see his influence in any women??  (See hero not named above.  Who needs to give herself away that badly.  TMI, ri???)

(Yeah maybe not include that last bit; don't wanna give myself away entirely).

Please let me know if there's anything else you need, or want from me.
Again, Caroline:  thank you.

Freedom: knowing nobody reads this

Not supposed to care what other people think.
What a crock of shit (this, I wrote)...

I honestly do NOT care what people on the street, driving by in cars, standing across the bar, walking past me on the street, think of me.  Why should I?  They are strangers, every bit as self-absorbed as myself, wondering (maybe!) if anyone around them is thinking about them (or even noticing them!)  That old saying holds:  'you would worry a lot less what others thought of you if you knew how little they did.'

I do really care, I'm told by some much too much, what the people I live with and love think of me.  I care what I think of myself.  I care what my family thinks of me, and to some extent (the sales kind) what readers think of me.

When someone I love goes after me, names every last little (I mean little little) thing I have done wrong, which has 'embarrassed,' or put off or made angry or irritated or upset, what they say sticks in my brain like fucking velcro.  Compliments do too, but we tend -- not to hoard, so much, as simply not to think of saying them.  We think, Doesn't she look pretty, and we smile, but somehow don't bother to say out loud.  Women of course being better about this with each other -- men I think go years without bothering to say anything kind to each other out loud; they roughhouse, tease, dodge, weave.  I mean hey -- isn't that what athletes do? 

I am occasionally treated to sessions that seem to border on hatred in their vitriol, a listing of (see above) flaws that make you look at yourself the next day and see my child face aging it seems at supernatural speeds, tears, it seems, always at the ready...

Try to cultivate prayer, try to create an oasis for myself in the roar of violent emotions, a tiny spot of calm (so often centered on Zelly, my beautiful Abyssinian lynx-lookalike, who sleeps so deeply and so lightly at the same time, who finds comfort against the hard edges of the stacks of books on my bed, who makes peace look beyond effortless...)

Usually I have to put somebody else's mind/thoughts/print in front of face, try to become subsumed in that other, other-created world, with an entirely different cast of characters (for me books ARE: Calgon, take me away!!)

So thank GOD for the writers, thank you authors, thank you publishers, thank you bookstores and the iniimitable people that run them -- without you, I would be dead.

KMcC

We have to learn to differentiate kind instruction from deconstructive criticism; as in the kind of thing that robs someone's confidence, such a rare vein of ore in all of us (unless you're living right, or never let anybody that far in). Got a really long call from Patrick, whose first words were making fun of me for the lamest attempt at self-offing ever. He was scornful and I laughed really hard and we were back in 10th grade, suffering from adolescence, catching each other's eye over some insanely minor detail and losing our minds. A lost mind is a terrible thing to find.

Yes you are here at TripleXK, listening to her philosophical musings...do call in; after a long day of writing really fast for forty-five minutes, I am up for some human discourse. If you have any vodka, drop by...
NO, NOT really.
(Wait, maybe...)
Just kidding.

(As I rip off Eddie Izzard).
But seriously, please. Somebody give me some airtime. My theme song is all picked out:
'I'm WIDE A-WAAAAAAKE! I'm WIDE A-WAAAKE...! I'm not sleee-pinnnnngg, oh, no.'
by U2.

I want to play Amy Winehouse and that French singer and Leonard Cohen and Nick Drake and the Clash and the Who and the Stones' B side of Tattoo You (one long perfect song) and Buffalo Springfield and Shirley Bassey and Massive Attack and a Tribe Called Quest and a LOT of Led Z., and Cole Porter and New Order and Thelonious Monk, Alone in SF -- the entire album -- and The Gentle Side of John Coltrane and Courtney Love and Madonna (Ray of Light) and the Cocteau Twins and Nirvana and Smashing Pumpkins and Stan Getz and Shirley Horn and Astrid y Arturo Joabim (the Joabims), and Kanye West and Ray Charles and the Temptations and Pink Floyd and Portishead and George Michael and Billie Holiday (what's a day without the Lady?) and John McCloy, and Ten Inch Men, and Cinnamon Rush, and Waz Ziehl, and -- you get the sonic picture. All interspersed w my charming comments, plus calls from other insomaniacs still up -- the 12-3 am slot. Then I can sleep until 1 pm and never feel guilty for skipping morning, the scourge of my existence, for as long as I keep the job. (Paid, with benefits. This is what I see).