Just another thought

There are only two forces in the universe that are constant: love and war. Death is not a force, death is all journeys' end. Death is at the end of war. But death is also at the end of love. Life consists of love and warfare. Death is the fulfilment of life.

Goodnight.

A good weekend and a bloody poem

I've had a good weekend. On Friday I went into town and had a coffee with two new friends from England and afterwards we went to after work and met with their friends, a bunch of international students. Always good fun to meet new people like that and speak English. After that I went to my brother's crib were we drank Scotch and watched Pulp Fiction. We did not drink every time the word "fuck" was said, because it is said 271 times in that movie. Impressive.

On Saturday me, my brother and my girlfriend went to my favourite place in town, the rock music bar called simply "Rockbaren". It's almost always pleasant and I have a lot of good memories from that place. Finally, today me and my girl went to her sister's new farm a long way outside of town. A very cozy place, but there is a lot of work to be done. Too much for my lazy ass.

Here's another poem that was published in the anthology at Sussex Uni:

The one I fantasize about killing
is you
I want to murder you
I need to slaughter you
beat you down and stamp on your head
a bloody pulp
crack your teeth
split your skull
break your spine
like you broke mine
eat your flesh
cut you open,
fingernails in wounds,
softness of flesh and blood
and gore and guts
between my fingers
I feel
grind your bones, feed on tainted marrow
I lean forward
on my hands and knees
licking and munching away
at your opened belly,
ravaged broken body
the red red red
gushing over my teeth
dripping to my chest
I laugh
at the blood on my hands,
the bloody mess that once was you
my love

Oh, fun! A list!

Today I'm just gonna post a list. Everybody loves a list. I know you do. Here's a list of the interesting books I'm gonna order online when I get my new credit card (my old one got eaten by an ATM on Saturday...):

By Petrarch:

Africa

De Vita Solitaria

Secretum

By Vergil:

The Aenid

By Giovanni Pico della Mirandola:

On The Dignity of Man

A Platonick Discourse Upon Love

Conclusiones

By the Marquis de Sade:

The 120 Days of Sodom and Other Writings

By Francois Rabelais:

Gargantua and Pantagruel

Interesting titles. There are a lot of renaissance writings that are almost forgotten today but that really deserve a reading. I'm gonna make it my mission to study these and spread them in this backwater country of mine.

Specialized ignorance

A lot of good things have been said about poetry. Samuel Taylor Coleridge called poetry "the best words in the best order". One thing I especially like is what Joseph Warren Beach wrote in his A Romantic View of Poetry from 1963: "Poetry begins with words; and with words begin all the higher satisfactions of human experience."

Sometime, somewhere, something went wrong. People back in the day could do all sorts of things; cultivate a garden, speak different languages, cook various dishes, mend their clothes and homes, handle animals and hunt. I know that not all people could do all these things, but it seems that people generally had a wider range of skills back then. Today the people who have the time and money to actually learn different things don't. They end up being supid on television or just bored. It's sad, really. I'm watchin Jersey Shore right now and well... no comments. It just makes me sad to be a modern human being.

The universities in earlier centuries weren't as specialized as they are today. Knowledge was all about knowing the great philosophers, the great poets, the great scientists, and what they had thought, thought of and thought up. You read the great works and from that your own thoughts evolved. You studied harder as well. I read somewhere that the typical 16th-century university week consisted of five days of intense studies, from 6 A.M. til late evening. No wonder Martin Luther was a fully educated priest and philosopher with knowledge of medicin, Latin and Greek at the age of 22. Today I'm at uni two days a week, four hours a day. And that is called full-time studies. It's ridiculous!
Today everything is much more specialized. People are experts in some areas and completely ignorant in others. I, for example, know that William Caxton set up a printing press in London in 1476, thus helping in the standardization of the language, but I'm completely at a loss when it comes to mending a fuse or patching my jeans. It's a natural evolution but it's not for the good. Sometimes you just wish you had been born in a different age.

A prophetic afterthought

I've still not recovered from my cold but at least I'm not feverish tonight. Wednesday was a good cinematic day for me, maybe thanks to the fever. Besides Californication I watched Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon and later One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Hard to say which was the best. Or maybe not. You've gotta love Jack Nicholson. However, Rashomon was a great film and it made me think what an impact one single day, one event, can have on your life. And I loved the music.

Tonight I'm gonna watch The Road, starring Viggo Mortensen, and I'm looking forward to it because I like Cormac McCarthy's stories. I hope we'll soon se an adaptation of Blood Meridian.

Last night I was up watching the Penguins-Maple Leafs game and to my disappointment the Pens lost a tight battle. But I also got a few ideas. Somehow it seems that the best ideas always comes late at night, drunk or not. For some time I've nourished an idea of a science fiction story and last night I've got a breakthrough, or whatever you wanna call it. I don't know about science fiction really, but if you'd call 1984 science fiction then you'll file my story under that label too. Anyway, you might see it someday, if I manage to piss the entire story out of my ass.

I'm starting to feel like when I blogged before, like I don't have anything to write about half the time, but now I see that that's alright because the truth about blogs is that you don't have to have anything to write about. You just type and hope for the best (i.e. some dumb schmuck reads it and thinks it's important). Well good luck to me and all the schmucks out there looking for something.

I'll just finish off with a poem that was featured in an anthology that the write club in England published. Don't worry if you don't understand it, it's nonsense and a lot of bullshit wordvomiting:

A prophetic afterthought,

a visionary past:

she can see herself

on top of the Universe,

while jellyfish are painting dreams

and the arduous raspberry

with clouded judgement

perceives a blue motion

in a mirrored eye;

jabberwocks may scream

in the midday moonlight

as counted innumerable fairies

live their death

and a sinking piece of grass

reflects the mischievous minds

of mawkish connoisseurs;

trumpets chime in

the chatter of a silent wood

and as the charred image

make a feint

before it melts like whiskey

in a wooden pond,

she is slowly transcended back

into our chimerical reality.

Down with a fever

I'm down with a fever and it really sucks. Fevers are generally not much fun, but today has been a fucking lost day. I mean, I hate when your energy is so sapped that you can't even read a book. Yeah, that's how i felt this morning, I was on the couch with my book but the only thing I could do was close my eyes and just... exist in a weird, in-a-chrysalis kind of way, like I wasn't really alive but still aware of things around me. When the pills and rest started working I was able to crawl out of my shell (or sit up) and watch Californication. My girlfriend does not like the series, which is a crying shame because I like it so much. The thing is that she can't see past the "fucking and punching" to the things that I really dig with it, which are the dialogues and the musical and literary references. It's a smart show. Sure there is a lot of fornication, but that's just to be expected (smiley), but that's not the main thing.

After my girl went to work I unwrapped the third season and started watching. I have to say that so far (four episodes in) I haven't laughed as much as I did from the first two seasons. But that might just be the fever, it's taking the edge off everything. Fuck it.

I spent saturday night at my parents' house where they hosted a family dinner for my father's cousins, whom I hadn't met before. It was a good night and I think it's very important to get to know your family. I think that is one of the reasons why so many Western-civilization-kids today feel lost; family values are dwindling, family bonds breaking too early. I think you need a firm ground to stand on before you're able to leap into the too cold pool that is life.

Well, enough of that crap. I'm gonna take another pill, lean back, and watch the next episode. Good night all you bums out there.

The Poetry of Punk Rock

Holy fuck. I didn't think Bad Religion could get any better but I was wrong. Very wrong. I'd say the new The Dissent of Man is the best album since Generator. And this one might hold one of the best punk rock songs of all time: The Resist Stance. It embodies everything Bad Religion, and true punk rock, stand for. It's kind of like William Wordsworth's poem The Tables Turned from 1798, in which he managed to express (in one stanza) the whole romantic idea:

"One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can."

Another song on this album, Wrong Way Kids, has a couple of lines that I think every grownup should take to heart:

"The kids today are gone away petitioning the dust
With nobody to look up to because they're looking up to us
Just misfit melancholy dregs gone lost in the mall
Wanderers to nowhere at all"

To me Bad Religion is to modern music what William Wordsworth was for 18th century poetry. The best, most poetical and most important artist of the day.

That's all for today folks, I've got some serious listening to do before I go to my friend's party. Sleep well or fuck hard tonight, I don't care as long as you all enjoy yourselves. Peace out.

The humanity of Science Fiction and the inhumanity of the Baptist Church

My girlfriend asked me a while back what I find so intriguing about Science Fiction novels and my answer puzzled her somewhat. I said "their humanity". You see, good Science Fiction stories are not just about starships, technical gadgets, and fighting aliens with lasers, they're about love, politics, survival, and other aspects of humanity.

Often set in the future, in troubled times when we've reached for the stars and found various frightening and dangerous stuff, these novels offer us a good way to explore our humanity. Faced with inhumanity and perilous adventures in alien lands, we are forced to search for and safeguard those things that define us as human. Sure there are other genres where you can do the same kind of exploring, certain crime novels perhaps, but nothing can be so inhuman as aliens, and therefore it is inevitably so, that when humans are set against aliens there will be a lot of lessons about how to be human. Some people might argue that Science Fiction is ridiculous because it's not believable. But I say that it if you can see past the technical and unbelievable stuff, Science Fiction is a treasure chest of humanity that deserves to be opened. So give Science Fiction a shot. Hell, give it your best laser blast.

I finished The Winds of Dune yesterday morning and I have to say that it was really good. I thought that they couldn't come up with much new material but I was wrong, and I eagerly await the forthcoming The Throne of Dune. After that one, however, there can't be much blank space (no pun intended) to fill. In the meantime I'll indulge in the writings of Robert Heinlein, starting with The Puppet Masters.

I read in today's paper about the funeral of Brendan Looney, an American soldier who died recently in a helicopter crash in Afghanistan. He was buried in the Arlington Cemetary in Washington. When exiting the subway the mourners were met by Fred and Mary Phelps and their Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, all armed with placards saying things like "Thank God for dead soldiers" and "Don't mourn the dead". This church hates homosexuals and they crash military funerals because they believe that God punishes American soldiers because the USA tolerate gay people. This is the same church people that celecrated (that's celebrated + desecrated) the death of Heath Ledger by waving placards with "Heath in Hell" and "Fags die, God laughs". WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH THESE PEOPLE? If someone gunned Shirley Phelps Roper down, I reckon enough people would laugh to drown the sound of God weeping.

Elite or no?

There is an ongoing debate in Swedish media about whether or not there is such a thing as a cultural elite; and if there is, do we need it? I saw a talkshow a while back wherein the host asked his guests if they thought they belonged to that cultural elite (there was a TV comedian, an author and the cultural editor for Sweden's biggest - and crappiest - tabloid). Both the comedian and the author said no, the cultural editor immediately said yes. That tells us something, I think. Writers and such, the actual "performers" of culture, do not believe they are an elite, but the people who write about culture do.

I don't think there is a cultural elite, at least not one made up of critics and self-important editors. I do however believe that literature is split in two, and this in turn splits readers into two camps - the wide audience and the "narrow". The authors are not to blame for this though, but rather publishers, critics and editors - yeah, that's right, the self-proclaimed cultural elite. All authors who write what I'd like to call "literature for the thinking", underground or bigger, and whose books express thoughts, insights, and ideas that cause readers to stop and think, inevitably end up at the mercy of this elite. And these people seem to find some kind of perverted pleasure in keeping this literature from the wider audience by reviewing it and rating it difficult or... elite.

However, I did say that literature is devided to begin with. That is because some litearature is not for "the thinking", such as chick lit, bloggers' autobiographies, and the new, cheap-ass Swedich crime novels. Maybe there is instead an intellectual elite who reads, or writes, better literature. But just because self-important critics read this kind of books doesn't mean that they belong to the intellectual elite.

Just to be able to indulge in a bit of self-loathing, I'll act the critic myself and post a review I wrote on Marcus Birros Flyktsoda. I'll post it in Swedish because I wrote it in Swedish. This blog is an exercise in English but my litarary criticism is not.

Marcus Birros Flyktsoda når inte riktigt ända fram. Jag anar och känner igen en hel del tankar men de blir aldrig riktigt fullföljda, det känns som om en språklig begränsning stoppar tankarna precis innan de beskrivits fullt ut. Birros kärva språk och idoga användande av korta meningar kanske är ett stilgrepp, kanske är det författarens språkliga maximum, så långt som hans språk sträcker sig - i vilket fall räcker det inte till för att nå ända fram, tränga ända in. Trots att författaren har en bakgrund som alkoholist och därmed bör ha hemska erfarenheter lyckas hans beskrivningar av Lucas Destinos tragiska tillvaro inte slå an medlidandets sträng i läsaren. Nu är det kanske inte medlidande Birro letar efter, men någon sträng borde han i vart fall lyckas slå an, men icke.

Dessutom lider hans roman av en av vår tids litterära krämpor, nämligen Undermålig Korrekturläsning. I den utgåva jag hade till förfogande (Tre Böckers pocketutgåva, 2006) hittade jag diverse tryck- och stavfel, samt ett felaktigt val av personligt pronomen (dessutom får den citerade låttexten i början av boken mig att undra över Birros engelskakunskaper). När jag själv skriver korrekturläser jag alltid tre gånger, två gånger innan någon annan får göra det och en gång till när denna extra rättning är gjord. Jag kan inte förstå hur man kan ha så bråttom att få ut sina ord i etern att man inte bryr sig om ifall de är rättstavade.

Någon har skrivit på baksidan av boken att romanen är fylld av tröst. Den har jag svårt att se, det öppna slutet känns egentligen inte så öppet, eller snarare är det öppet endast mot en sorlig framtid.

Marcus Birros Flyktsoda är en roman som försöker säga något viktigt, men som inte räcker ända fram.

"From high up on the mountain, if you shit a rocky turd"

I just came home from an evening at my friend's. It's always good to spend an otherwise boring monday evening watching the odd samurai-slaughter movie. However, we started off by watching the first of Christopher Lee's Dracula movies, which was an interesting dip into the history of horror films. After reading up on mr Lee on IMDB I have found my next cultural milestone: Howling II: Stirba - Werewolf Bitch from 1985.

We then turned to the first of the Lone Wolf and Cub films, subtitled The Sword of Vengeance, from 1972 (it's interesting to note that the first four movies were all released in 1972, followed by one the next year, and the last the year after that). The Lone Wolf is one mean character.

Favourite quote from this movie (two girls singing a song on a mountain road): "From high up on the mountain, if you shit a rocky turd". Gotta love the Japanese.

I got a high pass on my first exam, but I'm not all that excited about it because I made quite a few unnecessary mistakes. But never mind. Right now I'm too tired to sit here trying to entertain you. I'm going to bed, but first I'm gonna finish watching South Park. Go Mega-Barbra Streisand!

Hungover for better or worse

Uuuuuuhhh... I'm hungover today. Last night I went out together with my brother, my girlfriend and her friend to a club here in Gothenburg where one of my mates played with his band Reenact. Check them out on Myspace: myspace.com/reenact. I am very proud of my friend Martin, bassist, who recently started taking singing lessons and who now sings the refrain in "Better or Worse" really well.

Anyway, it was a fun night with lots of beer and headbanging, and I'm dealing with the consequences today. It's been a very "slow" day with lots of reading. Sometimes it's good to be hungover because you get the opportunity to really relax and just chill out. Normally when you try to do that all the things you should do weigh too heavily on you, but when you're hungover you just can't be bothered with them and you end up barefoot on the couch with a good book and no worries. Wonderful. Too bad I have shitloads of homework to do.

I'm studying Italian at the moment and I will probably do that for some time. Last term I took the B level course in English and I didn't learn shit. I bought some interesting anthologies and read King Lear, but otherwise it was just a long stretch of incredibly boring grammar sessions. Italian is a different story though, I learn new stuff all the time and it's quite a lot of fun. My goal is to work as a translator, preferably working from home translating novels. I reckon I'll end up in an office translating dishwasher manuals.

Just realized that I haven't bought Bad Religion's latest album yet. I'm gonna order The Dissent of Man on Wednesday when the third season of Californication is released in Sweden, and then I won't know which I'll look forward to the most.

Goodnight all you suckers out there.

A modern day who?

I hate feeling mentally blocked. I don't mean that I'm a retard, or crazy, or anything, it's just that a lot of the time I feel like one; not being able to put my thoughts to paper in the proper way I instead lean back and don't write at all.



Perhaps there is too much input, too much infotainment crowding in my mind, rendering me unable to produce any kind of output. I hate that. I know I have things to say, important things, at least for myself and to the people around me, but it feels like I can't get it out properly because something is blocking me. It's not that I don't have time or opportunity to do it, there are no kinds of physical barriers, only this mental blockage that bugs the shit out of me. With so much inspirational stuff bombarding me every day in the shape of Californication, underground movies and rock music you'd think I'd be able to write that damned second book. But no. The only things I can muster are a couple of lousy poems and this shit blog.



Yeah, you heard me. Second book. I did write one and I am waiting replies from various publishers. But I don't think they'll accept it. And it is because of a funny (well, scary really) reason, and that is that it's too literary. There are a lot of references to early 20th century Swedish literary works and the sad thing is that the publishers of today will probably miss out on that. You see, in Sweden (I can't speak for any other country, but I imagine that it's better in the US with agents and the like) publishers don't know enough literary history, or they just don't care. The only thing that matters is if something will sell, and this is because we are a small country with a few large publishing houses and a couple of smaller ones, and none of them are able to take risks with narrow or underground literature.

Well this isn't really the saddest thing. The worst part in all this is that it is not good literature that sells today, no, what really gets publishers wet are easy-to-read crime novels and 24-year-old celebrities' autobiographies. No chance for proper books or poetry to get published unless you're already known from TV or a fashion blog, and that has been the sad state of Swedish publishing for a while now.

Remember in Californication when Mia steals Hank's novel and the publishers call it a modern day Lolita? That kind of story would certainly sell in Sweden too, it's just that the publishers wouldn't call it a modern day Lolita, they would just call it "modern", because they don't know who the fuck Lolita is.






Anyway. I thought I'd just finish off today with a poem that I wrote a while back about the Iraqi war. Enjoy the lousiness of it.



THE SOLDIER'S LAMENT
What Duty brings this sorrow to my heart,
Keeping me in lands forlorn, from my native soil apart?
I try retreating to that inward eye
And calm my senses with remembrance of my childhood's sky,
That woundrous mix of shades of blue and joy;
-- Why can't a man forever be
As innocent and happy as when he was a boy?
-- Alas, I cannot see;
My inward eye is blinded, my childhood's sky is dark,
Blinded by a Flashbang, that horrid, uncivilized spark.
My home this desert camp has been
And the hostile Iraqi sky is all I've seen;
For two long years I've watched my comrades die;
For what? For Duty and a governmental lie;
And until they realize that this is wrong
I'll march to my grave singing this despondent song.

Long time no see

Fucking hell. I never thought I'd start blogging again but here we go. It's been almost a year, and since I didn't have any readers last time (except you Kev, you weird bastard) I don't expect to have any now. But fuck that. It's always good to write.

I'm gonna take it slow and not reveal too much about what I've been doing since last November, at least not all at once. Right now I'll just let you know that the move went well, I'm now living together with my dearly beloved in a cramped apartment in eastern Gothenburg, and the everyday shit of grown-up life is weighing heavy on my shoulders. I hate doing the dishes, I hate cleaning and I hate that it takes a whole day to do the laundry. But I love cooking, I love going to bed and waking up beside my beautiful girlfriend (who somehow, almost magically, manages to grow more cute every day), and I love the view from our very own balcony. We can see the entire city. Well, not really. If it weren't for the obligatory Swedish big-ass trees blocking the view, we would see the entire city. The little we see is good enough though.

Anyway, I've also got a new job, I'm working long hours in a warehouse, packing and shipping delicatessen. It's a good job because there are no annoying costumers and I can walk around all day listening to punk rock on my cheap Mp3-player (NOT an Ipod). But it's also boring as hell. And I gotta get up at 04:45 in the morning, which is the closest you can come to hell in the cold and dark Swedish fall/winter mornings.

However, that's not the only reason why my bed is calling out to me. Since last time, the Herbert/Anderson-machine has managed to produce another Dune-novel: The Winds of Dune, that I opened up this morning. It's a little weird to return to that universe, especially since I know how it all ends, but I'm excited. However, I can't shrug off the feeling that they are just squeezing every last dime out of Frank Herbert's manuscripts. Never mind. I like the books.