Weblog | I don't like the word blog, it's ugly. Anyway, new content happens here. (Swedish dito)

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.

Books | Books read, not books written. So far I've struggled to maintain unpublished.

Photo | I like my camera and it likes me.

Links | Outwards, away, flee.

e-mail | J. Nicklas Andersson

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Dry thunder

Thunder, no rain. Something is wrong here. Yes, you guessed it. This is another futile post where I, perhaps wrongly, assume everything would be for the better if it rained just so little.

If the air weren’t this damp I wouldn’t bother to complain. In truth, I would have little nothing to complain about. Further more I would have nothing much to write about except how I sit up late at night and watch Shogun — mainly because there is little else to do.

What do you know? The rain arrived. It’s like gunfire. Loud bangs, flashes, smoke that raises from the ground and a smattering sound when a water-bullet hits an object like a window or a roof. Surprisingly enough, there are no bad transmission dots in Shogun. However, I don’t know for how long the power will stay. The light has blinked, menacingly, twice now.

Anyway, I’m happy. Never mind that Orson Welles speaker voice just disappeared from the tv among green, red and blue static. It’s raining, the air feels a lot cooler already and besides that, I managed to snap a few neat looking photos through the window. There is no way I’m going out now, in the middle of the night. I don’t know how well my camera reacts when soaked in water.

More ado about phonetics

Not doing much at the moment except sitting down reading phonetics and Flann O’Brien. Between those two, Flann O’Brien wins in style, prose and panache hands down. The story has a better flow as well. Too bad I spend most time with the phonetics-book. Some of the signs in the book are different from what we used in class, but Ladefoged is a nice man so he actually added things such as “some books may use this {symbol} instead.” Most apparent is the upside-down and curly w, a sound we transcribe as a horseshoe. Also, we don’t use the flipped r at all, which is a shame. It would be much simpler that way.

I even understand those mouth-diagrams that our teacher threw up on overhead for five seconds. (The book also contains pictures of vocal cords doing sounds. I don’t think I need to know that.) Just a few weeks left until the exam. I will be ready this time.

This heat is killing me. Turn it off, please.

Drunken confidence

In a slightly intoxicated state and after too much of Tenacious D, Tommy and I decided that we should record a dialog with the digicam. A few further ado’s later, we had come up with a script. He came up with the script, I was at the bathroom. I hooked it up and said action.

     -- Have you read the latest X-Men? I delivered the line without both skill as well and meaning. It all came out rather flat.      -- Why are you always on about X-men, Stan? He said it almost in the same manner as I would have used.      -- I want to be one. At this point Monty Python, if they ever see this, can probably sue us.      -- What?      -- I want to be a superhero.      -- You wanna be a superhero?! But you can’t be one. My mind blanked, I couldn’t remember a thing. I looked down on the table and tired to get back in the right place. It failed. I blame Tommy as he tried to go up to John Cleese-level in pitch. He didn’t succeed.      -- Don’t you bloody repress me!      -- I don’t repress you... You don’t have a spandex-suit. What are you going to wear? Slippers and a weenie? In my mind everything came to a halt. What did he say?      -- It’s a beanie faggot. Oh, fuck. What did I just say?

Now. Much can be held against the script, even more can be blamed on against our acting ability, but really, some of this was actually in the script. The “weenie” was supposed to be “beanie” and I just tried my best to work the correction into the script. That was probably the one thing that worked. Lines disappeared and were lost as the sidekick’s illicit handwriting made it hard to read. My God, in hindsight I wish I had read it all in advance and changed it. No really need now, as the camera didn’t want to record us with sound nor picture. The mic was all static noise and everything looked black due to incompetent lightening.

Learning curve

Three weeks — take a few hours — until it’s my birthday. This is some of the things I’ve learnt during this year:

a) My fifth grade teachers were wrong about how to behave if an tom bomb falls down by the church (which is right across the street from the school).

b) People who thinks Judge Dredd is a good movie, shouldn’t be allowed to talk about movies in public.

c) I read a book by Emma Bull and the next thing she does is to break her arm. I’m jinxed.

d) Newspapers much compare everything to movies. Stop that.

e) How to study and get the desired results.

f) Computer animated cat food commercials are pretty horrible.

g) People get confused when you try to explain Mornington Crescent in under five minutes.

h) Eating a sausage in a hotel lounge is not considered rude because — well — everything is relative.

i) I have far too few meta-books.

j) A giant Sloth killed the Dinosaurs.

k) Växjö has a mime school.

l) I need more cds with Curve as well as lots more books.

Literary fiction that's also a meta-book

For once I didn’t hesitate and got indecisive. I simply stretched forwards and pulled Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds from the bookshelf. You know, the one that blocks the window. As I read it, line-by-line, I wonder why I didn’t read it immediately when it arrived a month ago.

So far, and for once I take it really slow as the book is rather short and I want it to last as long as possible, it is wonderful. The language. The characters. The way he builds everything up. Once again, I know I’ve said so elsewhere, I wish we could have had something of O’Brien’s books as course literature. (Still, I hesitate a bit to begin reading The Poor Mouth for obvious reasons.)

“Whether in or out, I always kept the door of my bedroom locked. This made my movements a matter of some secrecy and enabled me to spend an inclement day in bed without disturbing my uncle’s assumption that I had gone to the Collage to attend my studies.” (p.14, Penguin, 2000)

I’m starting to believe that it can’t be much better than this. And why is it that all the really great writers are dead? (Well, almost. Gene Wolfe still lives just to prove this theory wrong.)

I want rain

This weather is starting to irritate me. I am, invariably, a cold-person. I like it when it’s cold, best is at 15 degrees C, but I can cope with pretty much any degree below that. The key thing is that if it’s too cold, you can always put on more, or better, clothes. This doesn’t work with the weather we have right now. It has gone so far that I even wish for snow.

If I remove any more I’d be butt naked. I’m far to shy for that. My options are few. I could go into hibernation, but then I would miss out when it rains. The rain period between the summer and fall is the best time of the year. I want rain, badly.

Because then I can go out, sit under the roof and read a book or two while I hear the water drops commit kamikaze above. No other sounds are necessary, indeed they’re everything but welcome. Other noises would tear away the peace the rain gives me as well as distract.

• encyclopaedia/kardia: Judas
  

Ant hunter extra ordinare

An ant had gone astray and crawled around on my monitor. Don’t ask me how it got there, but there it was. I picked it up and wondered what to do with it. Should I crush it and prove my strength, or should I simply throw it away? There are many ways to discard ants and it’s not easy to make the right choice. It turned out that I didn’t have to choose.

I dropped it. It fell down and disappeared between the keys of my keyboard. Being who I am, I couldn’t let it be. What if it steals the keys? (Please, do not question my rationale. I know it’s flaky at best.) So, I did what I had to do: clean the keyboard. I started out by shaking it violently. Things fell out. Dust and stuff. And then even more stuff and dust. I opened it up and saw very much of this dust, collected in clouds too big to be shaken out. I don’t know exactly how much dirt a keyboard can contain, but I believe I had even more than that.

Oh, the ant, damned if I know where it went. I probably vacuumed it up because I never saw it again.

• encyclopaedia/kardia: Ant Hunter
  

Rewrite, please.

Saw Vanilla Sky. I wanted to like it but at most I can just say that it was decent at times. You have Cameron Crowe and some of the actors from his (brilliant) Almost Famous in it, but it lacks something in the execution. They throw in plot twists after plot twists that after a while don’t seem to fit in. And don’t let me get started on the ending. Talk about deus ex machina. It shattered whatever little they had succeeded to build up into fragments invisible to the naked eye. If you want that plot twist, you have to go along with it and see where it takes you and not use it as the end of the road. The trailer signalled an entire different movie, one that in hindsight seemed a lot more interesting.

I also saw Spy Game which can be best described as con games within CIA. It ended too early, way too early as they could have gone on for ten to twenty minutes at least. When I think about it Spy Game didn’t have an ending. It suffered from Neal Stephenson’s decease, where everything just stops at the last page. But unlike Vanilla Sky it didn’t ruin everything because I didn’t feel cheated.

Anxiety -- now?

All I can think of is the phonetics test at the end of August. I don’t know why, there is plenty of time left, time that I’ll probably end up spending on other things. I seriously consider rummaging around all the libraries I can find in order to find some good books about this (and maybe I’ll just happen to find a chest full of gold doubloons while I’m at it). The books I have — The Study of Language (George Yule) and Oxford English Grammar (Sidney Greenbaum) — may be good in all the right places, but they’re far to brief about this.

Since they’ve all I got at the moment, I’ve spent the afternoon reading through them. So far, I’ve come to this conclusion: reading phonetics out loud is easy, while transcribing them in your head isn’t. In any way, I can’t help to think that the schwa is too flexible for its own good as well as just being neat.

TV screen at dusk

TV-night. It all began with Donnie Darko — again. It is a bit cheating though as I watched it on dvd and not a tv-channel. Anyhow, the movie still manages to surprise me. There are a few minor plot holes as well as the figure-out-your-own-version-ending, but up to that point... damn. This is how science fiction movies should be made. I would go so far and call this a true Dicksean movie, although the esteemed Mr Dick didn’t have anything to do with it. The easy explanation: it’s in the same tradition. I want more of this instead of the normal cop-outs that Hollywood produces.

At nine they showed episode two of V. It wasn’t as bad as I remembered it. I wish they could have used some other influences than World War II. The suits, their insignia and everything else about is is soaked in historical reminiscence. It simply doesn’t get more transparent then this. But, as I said before, the special effects still suck. Do they actually believe that we trust them when they say that this is the best they could do seven years after the first and rather cheap Star Wars? Of course, Cleopatra 2525 — oh, it’s so bad I can’t express myself — is made over 20 years after the light sable duelling crackpot story so I should perhaps be a bit more forgiving.

In the middle, the West Wing part two of In the Shadow of Two Gunmen. Slow, unmerciful and just all around great. Not as moving this time around, so I had time to enjoy it more without Aaron Sorkin pushing my buttons. All those flashbacks? Haunting. I’ve never seen flashbacks work so smooth before. Usually they break the narrative and make everything fall to pieces. But not this time. Amazing.

Now, Buffy season two. Only on vhs so far, dvd planned as soon as I get money. I like Spike. I want a lot more of Spike. I’ve only seen up until the middle of third season, but from what I’ve heard none of the newer bad guys can measure up to the Mayor.

Can you believe that there are people out there that don’t believe in the compelling power of a tv screen? It’s almost as good as a good book. No, I tell a lie, any books are better but that doesn’t mean that tv is bad. Quite the opposite. (I think I’m rambling here.)

Sleeping disorder

Once again I have problem with insomnia. A special kind of insomnia, I only have trouble sleeping at night. I can sleep when the sun shines, all I need to do is to rest my head somewhere that’s preferably comfortable and — snap! — I’m asleep. But when I want to sleep, I can’t. It’s impossible.

As soon as it’s dusk something happens with me. If I had been a bit sleepy, that feeling will be gone. I’ll be wide-awake in a few seconds and it is as if the drowsiness hadn’t been there in the first place. If I’m awake to start with, I’ll go into hyper-mode — just as I do after five cups of coffee.

Do my glands suffer from a weird case of photosynthesis? So that when they’re hit by nocturnal light they produces natural caffeine?

Met some people #3

Coffee. It’s probably one of the few times I meet people this summer - not counting the two usual suspects. I must hasten to add that they both were present today. We sat down, got our first cup and then watched the others drop in. Some of us talked more, other talked less. I was, as per usual, one of those who talked less - despite knowing all the people somewhat well. (I’m one of those who seem more verbose in text than in person.)

Since I sat closest to the sun I thought it could have been a bit more of the gentle breeze than it was, but still, it was nice. Ola proved to be quite an exceptional human encyclopedia about trivial pop culture facts. I mean, the sad person actually knew the titles of the Police Academy-movies and when dubious artists had their birthday. He also talked quite a lot, so maybe we’re all on the same level if you consider the total number of words uttered by each and one of us.

On the way home I borrowed Almost Famous Bootleg Cut and Donnie Darko from Boo. Tommy dropped by bit later and we watched Beast Cops, which is from Hong Kong and everything you might extrapolate from the title is wrong. Really, I mean that.

Leave that building alone

The only time I see abandoned buildings are when I go by train. The sad part is that the train doesn’t stop, but swishes and dashes straight past and all I can do is to stare and with tears in my eyes see how the buildings disappear.

This fascination for what has been has really grown since when I first laid my hands on the book Pleasure of Ruins (mentioned several times here in the past). Since I like the photos in the book I surfed around a bit just to see if there were any other good sites out there. I found some, but was rather under whelmed by most of them.

Ruins of Detroit (as well as other places) is devised as a tour — pretty much like that typography and road signs that floats around. Nice to navigate around but unfortunately not many pictures from inside.

Even though abandoned-buildings.com is in flash and is a bit wrong in the user interface-department, I really like it. Just look at the control tower they found in Antwerp. Not many photos of each site, but quality seem more important.

Neither of the sites I’ve found could measure up to Henk van Rensbergen’s abandoned places but I didn’t expect them to.
There are lots more sites such as these, but right now I hadn’t the time to look through them.

Look out there

I’m still learning tons each day, but I’m starting to see a change for the better. Less and less photos suffer from blurriness or to slow shutter (with moving objects such as humans) which is a good thing.

Oh, and since there is fog outside I’m considering watching zombie movies all night long.

I found Mr Barker sitting on a shelf

Found Clive Barker’s Books of Blood in the local used bookshop — omnibus one and two — for 35 skr a piece (approx. $3.5 / £2.5). I couldn’t believe it at first, but no, they were, to steal a phrase from the Frantics, “actually actual.” A month ago I’d only read him translated into Swedish. I had thought about getting some English copies before, but after the con I thought I’d at least check him out a bit better. (I bounced off the translated Damnation Game, much to another con-member’s dismay.)

First I thought that I should read whatever I already owned. As I only had a copy of the Thief of Always, that was a rather easy thing to do. It was also, from another point of view, much easier to accomplish than my previous idea to work my way through the unread Philip K. Dick — after a while you just want to read something else before reality flushes itself down the drain while you watch and wave bye, bye.

So, I ordered Weaveworld and Imajica in pocket from Voyager — the classics imprint which looks really good. Weaveworld, which was issued last year and had much better paper than Imajica, is still my favourite of Barker’s works so far.

And now these two books. I’ll probably wait a bit. After all, I have that non-genre short story-collection with M. John Harrison on the shelf as well as Philip Reeve’s Mortal Engines. Priorities, priorities...