Various stuff

Am in the middle of editing The Dostoyevsky Reel, which doesn't look as bad as I first thought it was. It's at times quite good, even though I'm saying this myself. It's just that I've been forgetting that if it's situated in 1964, everyone should be smoking cigarettes - now there's none of that!

So, the holiday is drawing to a close. I'm actually anxious to get back to work, which probably means that the holiday was spent well.

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Just finished Lewis Trondheim's Approximativement/Minä Lewis Trondheim (Asema 2005) which is one of the first and most important autobiographical graphic novels that have been very popular during the last three or four years. It's excellent, even though the masculine self-hate (sic!) Trondheim discusses is at times a bit overwhelming.

Read also the Hobbit graphic novel by Charles Dixon and David Wenzel. The recent translation has been harshly criticized in Finland and everyone's been wondering what the publisher was thinking. My bet is they were thinking about money, but the graphic novel isn't really that bad. It's too static at times and too close to Tolkien to really elevate into a moving graphic presentation - there's just too much captions. I don't know who really needs to read so much of them, especially when even in Tolkien there's too much babbling ("Well, my young reader, now you may ask what kind of a creature this Bilbo Baggins is" etc. etc.). But the art is pretty good, although very old-fashioned, and the story is still quite good and made me want to read more Tolkien. (Just don't got the time right now. Realized, though, that it's almost 20 years now when I read Silmarillion. Should tackle that again. And maybe try again some of his unpublished stuff.)

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Kauto is talking more and more each day. He produces now quite comprehensible four- or even five-word sentences and you can actually talk with him. Once he came to me and said: "Jutellaan/Let's talk." Then I told him what had been going on that day etc., and he listened to me with care and answered when I asked him something. It's fun! (What's not fun is that he's still not very easy to get to sleep. Now he at least sleeps through the night...)