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 So far I've struggled to maintain unpublished.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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Alive?

Fun, fun, fun in the fluffy chair. Almost. While I could sit and scream “MTV get of the air!” to the tv, I don’t. I make fanzines instead. Small fanzines, in every way. Small number of copies and small in size — at least if you compare against the normal run off the mill Swedish stf-fanzines.

That’s one reason for the quiet, but I’ve written lots of stuff elsewhere too. There’s not enough words I guess. Anyway. Hi. I’m fine. Go watch Firefly, you lucky people.

Die!

About First Tuesday of the Month Uppsala pub gatherings this month: Only a fool engage in a two-front war, but those where my French Fries damnit. The blood wasn’t mine. However, the pepsi was mine, and I’m not sure if the war to keep my food was worth the loss of half of it.

Fantastika 2003

I’m still a bit wired from this weekends sf-con. I have things to write, as I’ve promised Sten that I’ll write about the etymological dictionary I snatched up as it slipped by his otherwise preying gaze in my next fanzine. Since he hadn’t seen it in the first place, I could see nothing faulty in my behaviour. It is about words that have their origins as names. (Did you know that pamphlet comes from the main character in a 12th Century poem about a pimp? Fitting, yes?)

The con was a lot of fun, although the ad hoc power struggles between different parts of the building that housed the con did its best to wound it mortally with bizarre policies — it did succeed to make it bleed towards the evening when it became hard to enter the building after 18:00.

I sat down mostly and managed to ignore more of the programme than ever before. Two panel discussions I had to attend as I was in the panel — no way out there. But I can’t really complain though. One was about the silly mainstream vs genre literature. I see them as literature only, and try to find good books period, no matter what marketing gimmick it says on the spine. The other panel was about Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

However, I have had serious thoughts about one of the other things I went and saw as a passive audience: the fan guest of honour interview. I don’t think it is a part of the programme, so I shouldn’t feel guilty that I was there and watched it. Not that I do, but still, sort of. Anyway, some (but not much) beer and whisky was drunk, and food eaten. Meet nice people too.

I can cut things again

I found my pair of scissors. They were in the fanzine box under my desk the whole time. I’ve been going bonkers about them since just after Christmas. And to think I found them just because of a throwaway comment on the Sverifandom-list.

Brown envelopes

Recently, I’ve felt a sudden drop in motivation. Very little has affected me and I haven’t bothered to do anything. Something happened though, last week. I realised that I don’t like the literature course we’re currently undertaking. I don’t like it at all, and the lecturer we have just irks me. I can’t wait until the linguistics course.

Something to occupy my time and make me once again believe in humanity arrived this morning. Three envelopes, brown. Remarkable that a few stapled heaps of paper can enlighten the day that much. One of the heaps consisted of utter crap. Vile waste of paper, ink and staple. The rest ranged from good to most excellent. I think I need to start on another fanzine soon. Really soon. But this time without a deadline. It will have to take the time it will take.

In the meantime, I just found out that Spaced season two has been shipped. It will probably arrive in the middle of next week. Call of Christmas because who will need food and relatives when this show exists and can be watched over and over and over again? (The show actually made me want a bean-bag. That, if something, is sick.)

Insanity

I started yesterday, and now I sit here with eleven pages already. Two days went when I did nothing and then I juast had to start typing another fanzine. This time I have no deadline, thank God. But still. Two days. It is like someone had replaced a fuse or something, as I have several ideas in my had for other, more focused ‘zines.

It might be that I have nothing else to do, as the literature for the course still hasn’t arrived (one of the books should be read until tomorrow tuesday.) Reading fanzines is much, much more fun though.

Number 131

I’ve got a lot of books to read in the course, Shakespeare, Bronte, Pinter and a bunch of other English classic literary works. (No Flann O’Brien which bugs me to no end. They have books by him in the library but they don’t use them to anything. Weird. No Jerome K. Jerome either and they have several Three Men in a Boat aligned on the shelves. Those books we were assigned to read had been forgotten by the library altogether, so we’re forced to buy them. Bastards.)

However, and this is a big one of those, I’ve just agreed to write the apa membership fanzine for April/May. Despite I have had problem filling out my own fanzine (which by the way will now take even longer to get finished). Despite that I now have a deadline and I suck at those. Despite all the work we’ve been assigned to read at the course. I must be crazy.

This has made me realise that I’ve got to have some priorities, sort things up in an order which represents how important it is. Fanac or study? Fanac or study? There is only one way out though and I’ve known it all along. It is as if the choice glows and illuminate the room. It’s in my blood, I can’t betray and turn my back on it no matter how much I really need to.

School, bend over.

Mimeo ink

Weird fact of the day: I think I’m allergic to certain brands of mimeo ink. So sometimes I sneeze and scratch my hands when reading fanzines from the 70s and 80s. It’s annoying, as several of these fanzines are good.

Fanzines and lots of them

The last two days have been spent with fanzines. Both reading old stf-fanzines from somewhere in the middle of the 80-ies up until fairly recent and at the same time writing number four of Aynia. So far I’ve written about 15 A4-pages, somethings tells me it will grow a bit more before it’s finished. I must not think of the post-work with copying and stuff like that. If I do, everything will halt. Again.

Not the usual snack

I forgot one thing about the con that I really must write about. I don’t even know how I could have forgotten it in the first place.

Janne Wallenius had a huge sausage from Germany — I don’t really know why it’s important where it was from, but somehow it just feels right to mention it — wrapped inside paper which he kept in his pocket during all three days. He didn’t always hid it though, so when he walked around there, he ate from it from time to time and asked other people in a very polite way if they too wanted some. No one did. He even brought it with him into the bar in the Park Aveny Hotel.

“This bar is probably not the best place to eat from that sausage, at least not like that,” John-Henri told him in the calm way only he can manage.

“Bah! I have behaved myself much worse before, in much fine company than this.” He took another bite while the rest of us laughed.

Later, someone speculated that he had the sausage because the con was “dry” — all thanks to paranoia-suffering owners that hadn’t been clear on this until it was too late, so there where no usable bar in the house — so he couldn’t have his usual bottle of Vodka. This time he laughed.

“I had Vodka, but it’s almost empty now.”

And it didn't rain

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.

Clause and effect

The minutes from the Westercon 51 business meeting in -98 is in every possible way a masterpiece.

This committee is the descendant of a committee formed at Westercon 47 (Los Angles, 1994) to study a bylaws amendment to strike out all occurrences of “obligatory” and insert “mandatory.” This amendment has been referred annually since then to a series of committees with different names (”MOO”, “Squeal”, and “Oink”) for further consideration and recommendations. Seth Breidbart, the only member of the current incarnation of this committee, moved that the Committee be continued and that it continue to investigate the matters referred to it.

Ruth Sachter moved to amend the motion to continue the committee by changing the name of the Committee from “Oink Committee” to “Neep Committee.” This passed by a substantial majority.

Pay extra attention to the clause where the possible locations for the con is discussed:

Provided that, upon the annexation of Australia by the United States of America or the annexation of the United States of America by Australia, Section 3.1 shall be amended to read: “Any site in Australia, or on the North American continent west of the 104th west meridian, or in the state of Hawaii, shall be eligible to be the site of a Westercon, except as restricted by the provisions of these bylaws.”

And I support point 4.4 wholeheartedly. When things like this happens, who can not love fandom?

Delirium brings forth the brain ghosts

“Corflu. I need Corflu!”, I exclaimed as I staggered out of the room. I don’t know why because I don’t use a mimeograph to stencil fanzines, I use a regular copy machine, that’s how uncultivated I am — no respect for the past. From which dark depths of my mind did corflu come from? If I had some, I would be a hero, a rich hero in these times where corflu is valued more than gold and harder than Jesus to come by. A mimeo would be nice, but a Blickenderfer 5 electric typewriter from 1895 would be better. I’d pay with a perfectly good kidney for one of those, not my kidney, but a kidney nevertheless.