The 2000th blog post of Pulpetti

I've been thinking a lot lately of what I should be writing here now that I have reached the 2,000th post line. I've been unaware of whether I should just do a regular blog post (I have several things coming up) or whether I should do a long special post – and if that, what should it be? One subject I thought of was the history of this blog – but is anyone interested? My 1000th post was a long article on H. A. DeRosso. (For some reason many people have read this minuscule write-up on my 1900th post.)

There hasn't been much going on here at Pulpetti. I've been lazy for the past two or three years. At first I used to write one or even two posts per day! I can't grasp where I found all that time, still working my ass off writing books and newspaper articles and reviews of books and films and what not. I don't seem to be able to find that time even now when I seem to have less work at my hands than, say, five years ago. And some three years ago I decided I should concentrate more on my Finnish blog (here at Julkaisemattomia, meaning The Unpublished, the name I've been trying to get rid of). Hey, I'm a Finnish writer after all! My readers are Finnish, so why promote in English?

But then again I've made some friends with Pulpetti: Kevin Wignall, Todd Mason (acquaintance also from several Yahoo groups - and yet another thing I don't have time for anymore!), Bruce Grossman, James Reasoner, Bill Crider... Pulpetti was also elemental when I started editing the crime paperback series for the Arktinen Banaani publisher some years ago. The series didn't last long, but the books are still out there, here's hoping someone will find them and become a writer and write the goddamnedest book in the annals of the Finnish literature. And there's also this point: I really want to write about this pulpy and sleazy hardboiled stuff, I'm not sure if there's enough interest with Finnish readers to warrant a whole blog in Finnish. (I sometimes get the feeling that even though there's much love for, say, James Ellroy or Charles Willeford in Finland, there's not much interest for new writers in this genre we so affectedly call noir. Maybe that's the case everywhere.)

I've been working on a book that will be called "Pulpografia Britannica", focusing on the British crime fiction published in Finnish in cheap paperbacks or pamphlets. I haven't written about those books as much as one would hope, and I have a hard time explaining why that is. (One explanation is that I haven't really read all the books I'm covering, some I've just sampled or browsed through.) There are some writers I'd really like to cover (Angus Ross, for example), but at the same time I've been reading lots of other books, for example the new Finnish translation of James Fenimore Cooper's The Deerslayer which I painstakingly tackled through for a review. (I don't think I'll be reading the other books in the Leatherstocking series, though there will be new translations for all of them.) At the time I'm tackling through the collection of Bruno Schulz's weird surrealistic stories, again for a review. I should be writing about them as well in here. Why don't I? It is at times pretty hard to write something substantial about a book or a film in a language that's not your own. Try it someday! I don't know how people like Nabokov or Conrad did it. (Well, they were idiosyncratic and not easy writers, Conrad being even clumsy.)

I didn't mean this to get so wordy and, well, pathetic? Suffice to say that even though I've been thinking about quitting Pulpetti, I'm sure I'll keep on posting stuff about books and films and stuff.

When I posted the above-mentioned 1900th post, Jerry House (whose blog I should be reading more) said I should send a cake to every reader of Pulpetti, when I reach the 2000 limit. So here's cake to everyone out there!