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About me and the site | Twenty-something male who likes text. Obsessed with things such as books, reality, communication, and one or two tv-shows.

Archives | Things written here since... well, 2001. Some of it is good, some is utter shait.

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e-mail | J. Nicklas Andersson

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2001-10-01

Despite some of the unfortunate circumstances I’ve had a fun weekend. But where to begin? The weird notion I got as I realised that it was easy to find the places and that I never got lost? Or, should I tell the stories as I remember them, one by one, fractured and in broken pieces that I myself have trouble mending together? I think I’ll do the last.

Sten (Thaning, Upsala-fan) had another fanzine, which is weirder than Tori Amos on acid in a lounge suite partying with Hunter S Thompson. Sten, a new fanzine? It cannot be! But it was, and as usual it was great. For you who don’t know him, most of you then, he says things — often from a bizarre point of view that few other people can master. “I wonder what the Dinosaurs thought when they realized that they where on fire?” is a typical example. He’s a goldmine, and should write a book. He won’t, but he should.

Oh, I almost forgot. During the weekend I was at an sf-convention (no, not one with pjs, actors and signings of expensive photos; the other kind with books and beers and authors and talks about books, jazz and other things in life) in Gothenburg, where I don’t live and had to stay at a bed & breakfast. Sharing room with seven complete strangers I never met — as they where asleep when I dropped in at half past two in the night. The con was fun, as I wrote before, but it lacked a proper bar. We had to go out to find beer in order to be able to talk at the same time.

Some of us took our things and went out to a pub, and what a pub it was. It was a part of a hotel not far from the con, and their only fault was that they didn’t have Guinness on tap. With us, a semi-drunk and in my opinion egocentric person clung to our huddle despite that we really didn’t have much in common. Did I say he was egocentric? Well, I meant it too, but that is a far to weak phrase in this case. He couldn’t keep quiet and had to talk to everyone. His biggest fear was — from what little I could decipher and before I moved to another table to discuss small press and things like that — that anyone would think of him as an idiot. But that was probably the alcohol. For some reason he liked the word “shallow” a whole lot. Obviously, according to his logic, if you thought a book was good, but that you couldn’t stand up and do an essay type of speech about what feelings you felt when reading it, you where shallow. I where moved to tears by the romantic comedy Fight Club, but I can’t say why: I am a shallow man indeed.

In that hotel bar, Bellis explained why he won’t read a word of Ulf Lundell (swedish singer/songwriter/author) in his life: when Lundells generation novel Jack was published, a young Bellis worked in a bookstore. The book was a huge bestseller and this meant much work. For two weeks, he carried crates of the book, he sorted them in the shelves and put them in envelopes for mail-order. This meant war, a war which could only be won with a die hard dedication, such as vowing never to have anything too do with the damn author again. It seems to have worked so far.

Earlier that day, Saturday 29th, there had been an auction for a good cause: raise money for Åka to get to a con in Dublin. I like that part, because never has so much junk been sold for so much money (outside e-Bay of course). Some jokes where fun, but very tasteless. Bellis was the auctioneer, and he was brilliant as usual. I bought some books, being there with a highly constrained budget and all. (Michael Moorcock, Christopher Priest, Mary Stewart, M John Harrison and Ray Bradbury if anyone is interested.)

I laughed and the other people in the train looked at me as if I where nuts. Well, if they had read Edward Savio’s Idiots in the Machine, especially the both scenes in the beginning at the post office and in the convenience store, they too would have laughed.

Much to my dismay, I see that this is very confusing and not at all in any order at all. It’s still to close to the actual event for me to sort anything out. Clarifications and additions will probably happen later. I think I need to sleep.

The world is not as it used to be. Dave Eggers tour de force A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius has been translated into Swedish, with a weaker title but that was obvious from the start. But I shouldn’t complain, a good — wow, I just made the understatement of the year — book deserves to be spread as far and as much as possible. I will not recommend it, because if I did, no one would ever read it.

The “new” X-Files with Robert Patrick has just begun over here, five minutes ago. I hope they’re better than the last few seasons, which imo has been rather pale and, to be painfully frank, unwatchable. So far, so good though. I’m positively surprised.