My political career

(As the elections are approaching, I thought I'd revise my short political career. In Finnish.)

Urani poliittisten järjestöjen luottamustoimissa:

SDNL:n Porin osaston puheenjohtaja, 1988-1990 (?). Osasto on aina ollut vireä, mutta jostain syystä noina vuosina tarvittiin jotakuta bulvaania heiluttamaan nuijaa kokouksissa. Piirisihteerihän kuitenkin hoiti käytännön työt.

Porin sosialistiset koululaiset, puheenjohtaja, 1988-1990 (?); jäsenmäärä oli muistaakseni kolme, jolloin se käsitti minut, sihteerin ja tilinhoitajan. Tilinhoitaja ei ollut porilainen koululainen, vaan aikuinen ihminen (hän oli Tiedonantajan Porin-konttorin hoitajan vaimo). En tiedä enää, kuinka tosissaan sihteeri oli mukana toiminnassa. Järjestö oli siis käytännössä olemassa vain paperilla. En tiedä, onko sitä enää edes paperilla.

Osallistuin vuonna 1997 SDNL:n liittokokoukseen, jossa vahvistettiin - jos nyt oikein muistan - SDNL:n nimenmuutos Vasemmistonuoriksi. Jälkeenpäin minulle sanottiin, että kokouksessa jyräsivät "enemmistöläiset" - todistus siitä, miten vanhat rintamalinjat elävät vasemmistossa edelleen. Demokratiassa tietty enemmistö jyllää, vaikka ei aina olisi syytäkään. Näiden kytkösten takia minulle tulee edelleen Libero, ja luenkin sen aina mielelläni.

Äänestänyt olen Vasemmistoliittoa, SKP:tä ja vihreitä. Olen aina pyrkinyt äänestämään naista, mutta kaksi kertaa olen äänestänyt miestä. Tampereen kunnallisvaaleissa äänestin vihreitten Kai Ovaskaista, joka nyt on ehdolla eduskuntaan - jos luette tämän ja uskotte minua, niin äänestäkää häntä, hän on erittäin fiksu mies. Ylioppilaskunnan vaaleissa äänestin aina naista, puoluelinjathan siellä ovat usein merkityksettömät. Kummatkin ehdokkaani seitsemän vuoden aikana pääsivät läpi ja olivat erittäin asiallisia ja fiksuja.

Oman poliittisen urani fiksuin teko oli kieltäytyä kahdesti pyynnöstä lähteä ehdokkaaksi ylioppilaskunnan vaaleihin. En kuitenkaan olisi ollut riittävän kiinnostunut asioista, vaikka uskon, että silloisella näkyvyydelläni esimerkiksi Aviisissa olisin varmasti päässyt läpi. Minua pyytänyt ihminen on sittemmin ollut tärkeä Tampereen vihreiden taustavaikuttaja - en koe vihreitä niin omaksi porukaksi, että olisin tuntenut olevani järkevästi mukana heidän poliittisissa päätöksissään. Voi tietysti olla, että ko. ihminen pyysi kaikkia vastaantulijoita ehdokkaaksi.

Oikeastaan pyyntöjä lähteä Tamyyn oli kolme - Olli Löytty, joka nykyään tekee kirjallisuudentutkijan uraa, sanoi minulle joskus -91, että hän tekee minulle niin hyvän kampanjan, etten voi olla menemättä läpi. Annoin ymmärtää, etten ole kovin kiinnostunut. Ollista tuli sittemmin Ilkka U. Pesämaan kanssa Tamyn kulttuurisihteeri.

Huumoriehdokkaista on tosin Tamyn vaaleista noussut esiin kiehtovia ilmiöitä, kuten Pasi Heikura ja Simo Frangén, jotka eivät tainneet käydä yhdessäkään edustajiston kokouksessa. Sympaattisin vaalikampanja oli Tero Alangon ja Markku Makkosen johtamalla poppariryhmittymällä - heidän vaalilauseensa oli "Hyvä biisi on tärkein". Tero ja Markku olisivat myös olleet fiksuja kavereita edustajistoon - on mahdollista, että Tero pääsi läpikin, en enää muista.

Tampereella oli Tamyssa enemmän aatteen paloa ja vaihtoehtojen tuntua kuin sittemmin Turun yliopiston ylioppilaskunnassa, jota tarkkailin muutaman vuoden ajan Turun Ylioppilaslehden toimittajan ja päätoimittajan paikalta. Nyt jälkeenpäin hiukan hävettää, että suhtauduin Tyyhyn niin ylimielisesti kuin suhtauduin, mutta kokemus kertoi, että sinne oli pesiytynyt enemmän ns. poliittisia broilereita. Ville Niinistöä tosin kunnioitan enkä pane vastaan, että meillä perheessä häntä äänestetään. Saatan äänestää häntä itsekin, mutta en haluaisi antaa enää periksi naisperiaatteestani.

Edelläolevasta voi päätellä, että minulla ei ole poliittista kotia. Onko ihme? Miten tällaisessa poliittisessa ilmastossa (tai ylipäätään kulttuurissa) voisi olla jokin asiallisesti muotoiltu johdonmukainen poliittinen mielipide? En ihmettele, että juuri nyt on noussut esille puheenvuoroja, joiden keskeinen sisältö on "ihmiset ovat tyhmiä" (viittaan esim. Jyrki Kiiskisen hienoon kirjoitukseen Hesarin sunnuntaisivuilla, mutta myös Ilkka Halavan kommentteihin ihmisten poliittisesta mielipiteenmuodostuksesta, joka parhaimmillaankin on sattumanvaraista).

En keksi asialle mitään ratkaisua, paitsi vallankumouksen. Mietin aiemmin tänään, että lehdet ja muut mediat voisivat tehdä päätöksen olla uutisoimatta mitään politiikkaan liittyvää vaalien alla - silloin ihmisten pitäisi oikeasti ottaa asioista selvää ja muodostaa mielipiteensä. Mutta se on yhtä mahdoton ajatus kuin vallankumouskin.

The history of thriller

I posted the history of thriller I mentioned earlier to this blog. It's in Finnish.

Congrats to Tapani

By the way, I forgot to mention that Tapani Bagge (whose novel Puhaltaja I'm translating) recently won the Clue of the Year award of the Finnish Whodunit Society.

Gordon Young's Everhard stories

Here's a short post I posted to the Rara-Avis e-mail group earlier today, about who was the first hardboiled crime writer:

Stephen Mertz writes in this article:

"It is recorded fact that Carroll John Daly, in the pages of Black Mask in 1923, produced the first hardboiled private eye story, predating Hammett's first Continental Op tale by a number of months."

Isn't it always a bit dangerous to claim someone or something was the first one? There certainly were hardboiled stories before that and there certainly were private eye stories before that. I've read Gordon Young's story about Everhard, who was a private-eyeish hero who likes to shoot and doesn't even shake hands with anyone. I seem to remember that he was more hardboiled than Daly's Race Williams, who likes to show off, which Everhard never did.

Gordon Young had lots of Everhard stories in the Adventure pulp magazine from 1917 to 1921 - so they stopped a year before Daly wrote his first story in Black Mask!

My other activities at the moment

Mentioned being busy. Well, today I submitted a new book to the publisher. It's a collection of old and new crime and adventure stories by writers of the Turku region. The oldest story is from 1939, by Harry Etelä (Aimo Viherluoto), who was also known as a songwriter, mainly specializing in schlagers. I may have to write more about him. There's a good adventure story by Olavi Tuomola, taking place in Shanghai just before the WWII.

The book, called Viides testamentti/The Fifth Testament, according to M.G. Soikkeli's story in the book, is a good collection and hope it gathers some attention. It's just no one seems to be buying short story collections anymore. So it's a bit of an experiment to the publisher. We will be doing more of this sort with the same publisher, for example a collection of Harry Etelä's horror stories that are quite spectacular given that almost no one else wrote horror stories in the late thirties here in Finland.

I'm also doing a rough translation of Tapani Bagge's Puhaltaja. Tapani, as some of you may remember, made a deal with the American Point Blank Press about his first crime novel and it was going to come out under the title The Jack. It seemed, though, that the head of Point Blank didn't have time to do the translation himself (JT Lindroos hails originally from Finland), so I suggested both to JT and Tapani that I could do the first rough version and JT could polish it.

I've done some four or five pages so far, and let me tell you that it's no small feat to translate in a language that's not your own. Especially when Tapani uses lots of slang expressions that even I don't know what they mean. There's also lots of talk about cars and stealing them, and I've been at odds with all the words. However, Tapani okayed my efforts and so I'm continuing at the pace of a page a day.

But once The Jack is out in the US, it will be a hardboiled delight: Tapani writes very sparsely and tightly and he knows his milieu of lowdown petty criminals and car thieves. There's lots of black humor and violence. (I may even up put a new blog to post the translations one day at the time, but I'll have to ask what JT and Tapani think about that.)

And before that, I have a book coming out. It was a small, but very pleasant surprise: an old friend of mine was elected a while back director of a non-fiction publishing house and the first thing he said to me was: "What if we put out your old articles as a book?" It's already in printers. The book collects nine longish articles I wrote some ten years ago about unknown Finnish poets. If it sells enough copies, there should be a sequel. Well, that won't be as easy, since I'd have to do some research for it and read the books.

Dan Brown's earlier thrillers

I've mentioned in passing one or two times that I'm editing a reference book on thriller writers for a Finnish non-fiction publisher. I've been reading Sidney Sheldon lately and let me tell you, it's no pleasure. I had to take a break and start Brian Garfield's The Paladin - it's the last one I haven't read yet. Garfield is God compared to some other writers I've been tackling with, even though The Paladin is not Garfield at his best.

I've been writing also the history of the thriller genre to act as a foreword to the whole book, and it is more difficult than it seems at first, since the boundaries of the genre are so flexible. I think I'm now finished with the article (I'd post it here, but it's understandably in Finnish only; well, that hasn't stopped me before) and just now I got to thinking: what kind of reviews did Dan Brown's early novels receive before he wrote The Da Vinci Code (which, in case you don't remember or even know, I thought was the worst book ever given its popularity and media attention)? It would be interesting to read them, since the reviews now are quite predictable. (I'm pretty ashamed of Nelson De Mille giving a blurb to Brown saying something like "Brown is pure genius". If this guy is pure genius, then I'm Jesus Christ.)

By the way, someone here claims that Garfield's novel The Paladin is stated being based "on fact". I'm pretty certain that Garfield himself says on his short preface that the novel is based only on what "Christopher Creighton" has told to be true. Garfield says that he can't know the truth himself. I'd believe Garfield only wanted to write a thrilling story.

Busy, busy world, pt. 2

Been busy and will be busy. And I slept pretty badly last night. For no apparent reason, except that Leland Palmer singing "come on, get happy, get ready for the judgment day!" kept ringing in my head all through the night. The final count was something like four hours of sleep.

Lots and lots of pulp and other stuff on eBay

Check out this seller. A huge amount of almost everything from original artwork and old fanzines to Disney-related stuff.

Duane Swierczynski about Goodis

As I said earlier, I was writing an article about David Goodis, the quintessential noir writer of the fourties and fifties. For a side article, I asked Duane Swierczynski why he likes Goodis. I'll post his questions here as well:

>What makes Goodis so important?

Well, I'm not sure about important--I mean, reading a David Goodis novel has not been known to cure impotence and/or mild skin conditions. But he is special, because his novels are the blackest comedies you'll ever read. So black, in fact, you can barely detect the comedy.

>What made you pick up Goodis in the first place?

I sought him out because he was writing books set in the Philly neighborhoods I knew; that was a mindblower for me. And he was writing about Phialdelphia about 20 years before I was born; reading his novels are kind of like stepping into a local time machine.

>What's your favourite amongst Goodis's books?

It's a toss-up between BLACK FRIDAY and DOWN THERE (SHOOT THE PIANO PLAYER), the ultimate in little-guy-get-screwed noir novels.

RSP RIP

The death of classic paperback writer Richard S. Prather didn't go unnoticed by me - it's just I haven't had much time to blog lately. A great writer at times, some of his best work is found in Strip for Murder (1955) and Slab Happy (1958). His non-Scott work has evaded me so far, I'll read The Peddler reprint soon. (Actually I don't know when I have time.)

Moomins and Lost

Here's some thoughts about what Moomins may have to do with outlining the TV series Lost.

My Goodis collection

I'm writing an article about David Goodis, one of the seminal hardboiled writers of the fourties and fifties, and thought I'd scan some books from my own collection...

Naaaah, just kiddin'. I looked these up on Abebooks. I wouldn't mind owning a book on the left: it's the first hardcover edition of Goodis's most famous mystery novel, Dark Passage (1946). Neither would I have any trouble having the photoplay edition below.

Goodis's first

Here's Goodis's first novel, from 1938. It belongs to the social realist school of the thirties, but the reviews were bad and Goodis abandoned more serious writing to hack away stories for the aviation pulps.

Moon in the Gutter

Just finished this (I read the early nineties (or late eighties?) Midnight Classic reprint). It's very good, even though I had some quibbles at the romantic ending. I decided to name Goodis "a proto-Bukowski" in my article (even though I'm a known hater of Bukowski.)

Romance Goodis?

This looks a bit like a romance paperback, don't you think?

Of Missing Persons

Here's a book Goodis wrote from his own film treatment. It's not said to be one of Goodis's best, but I like the paperback cover.

Another Goodis

Goodis's last novel, published posthumously in the year of his death, in 1967.

The Wounded and the Slain

Here's only Goodis novel to be situated outside the U.S. The book will be reprinted by Hard Case Crime, as most of you already know, and here's also the coming cover by Glen Orbik.

Penkkarimuistoja

(This is about some personal reminiscences.)

Törmäsin eilen - kuten arvata saattaa - penkkariajelijoihin. En jaksanut jäädä katselemaan mellastusta, koska halusin päästä kotiin lepäämään; Kauto oli nukkunut huonosti viime yönä ja olin aivan uuvuksissa vietyäni Ottilian aamulla kouluun ja tutkittuani Leo Mäenpään lehtinovellituotantoa yliopiston kirjastossa parin tunnin ajan. Loikin tien poikki melkein kuorma-autojen edestä ja työnnyin pällistelevien ihmisten välistä kävelykadulle.

Abien rekkoihin liimaamat tunnuslauseet hiukan vaivasivat minua latteudellaan. "Abi on jumalasi - sinulla ei saa olla muita jumalia" (pitäisi kai olla "älä pidä muita jumalia"). "A bit of rock" (get it? minulla kesti jonkin aikaa ennen kuin tajusin). "We will rock you". En saanut viimeksi mainitusta millään tavalla tolkkua, miten se liittyi penkkariajeluun tai ylipäätään koko penkkariajatukseen. Riehuminen huvitti minua, mutta enpä ole siitä ikinä ollut kovin kiinnostunut enkä nytkään nähnyt syytä jäädä pällistelemään ja poimimaan karkkeja. Ehkä sitten kun Kauto tai Ottilia tulevat ylioppilaiksi.

Olen tietysti snobi, mutta vielä pahempi olin itse 18-vuotiaana. 17-vuotiaana kieltäydyin osallistumasta vanhojen päivään millään tavalla ja pinnasin koulusta. Kävin mieluummin poliittista keskustelua SDNL:n (nyk. Vasemmistonuoret) piirisihteerin kanssa Porin Puistotalolla. Muistan nähneeni pari luokkakaveria kadulla penkkariajelujen aikana, mutta katseemme eivät kohdanneet. Menin kotiin ja pysyin siellä.

Seuraavana vuonna olin kyllä mukana meiningeissä, en tiedä mikä muutos oli tapahtunut. Join vain niin pirusti viinaa - yhdellä ensimmäisistä ryyppyreissuistani - edellisenä iltana enkä päässyt ajeluun mukaan. Olin ilmeisesti oksentanut taksiin, koska muistan lompakossani olleen sadan markan setelin eikä se ollut lompakossa enää aamulla. En tiennyt, mitä krapulalle voi tehdä, eikä tiennyt äitinikään. Se siitä sitten. Elokuvakerhon esityksessä kävin kyllä iltakuudelta. Se varmaan kertoo preferensseistäni tuolloin.

Olen siis myös kade juhliville ja riehuville abeille, kun katselen heidän bailaustaan ja esitän kyynisesti kiinnostumatonta. Toisaalta, tekee mieli sanoa, meillä oli sentään jotain ideaa.. tai no, muistan kyllä, että teimme kuorma-autojen tekstit luokkatoverini Kimmon kanssa varttitunnissa, kun kukaan muu luokaltamme ei suostunut edes tulemaan paikalle suttaamaan tekstejä. En tiedä enää, mistä se johtui. Teimme kaksi kylttiä, joista muistan ainakin toisen: "Jeesus tulee, oletko aulis?" Se viittasi ruotsinopettajaamme Aulikseen, tavattoman ujoon ja vähä-ääniseen mieheen, jonka ei olisi kuulunut olla opettajana. Toivottavasti hän ei loukkaantunut.

Kun järjestin samaisen Kimmon kanssa luokkakokouksen muutama vuosi sitten, pidin lyhyen puheen, jossa sanoin haluavani ottaa hiukan takaisin vuoden -90 pelleilyjä ja osata ryypätä jengin kanssa, jonka koin vajaa 15 vuotta sitten pettäneeni. En ollut suurinta osaa porukasta juuri nähnyt, häivyin Porista melkein saman tien opiskelemaan ja sillä tiellä olen pysynyt. (Eräs ystäväni sanoi jokin aika sitten, että alan olla siinä iässä, että muuttaminen kotipaikkakunnalle tulee ajankohtaiseksi. Toivottavasti ei ihan vielä.)

Mainitsin tuossa keskustelleeni vanhojen päivien aikana politiikasta. Enemmänkin keskustelimme siitä, miten olin pettynyt politiikkaan enkä kokenut sitä mielekkääksi ja kiinnostavaksi. Tähän on monia syitä, joihin en tässä mene (osa on niin henkilökohtaisia, että en halua retostellakaan niitä julkisuudessa), mutta tunto vain syveni tämän aamun Hesaria lukiessa: Suvi-Anne Siimes rökötti Vasemmistoliittoa, puoluetta, jota olen useimmin äänestänyt, ja puolueen poliittista ja johtokulttuuria. Tuli hetkeksi olo, että jos en äänestäisikään. Demareihin en usko, vihreistä ei ota oikein kunnolla selvää, SKP (jota olen myös äänestänyt, lähinnä sen takia, että heillä on ollut nuoria naisehdokkaita, jotka vaikuttavat vilpittömiltä; naiivi peruste, myönnän sen) taas on tai ainakin sen voi nähdä nostalgisena neuvostolaisena jäänteenä. Pienimmän pahan äänestämisen logiikka astuu kuvaan, ja se ei ole hyvä, eikä ainakaan kerro hyvää uskostani ihmisiin. Valitettavasti.

An Israeli Goodis

Here's a David Goodis paperback published in Israel by Priory (I think it was actually a British outfit, doing books in Israel for taxing reasons).

More films seen: The Catamount Killing, Rock & Rule, Mars

Last Monday the Finnish Film Archive treated us with two rare films: the Canadian Rock & Rule from 1983 and Mars, a Soviet documentary by Pavel Klushantsev, from 1968. Mars was very beautiful and the scenes on the fictional Mars were breath-taking. It's evident Kubrick learned a lot from Klushantsev. The print was very pretty, with beautifully faded colours, and the Finnish voice-over narration held some poetic descriptions, such as "jos tuhka keväällä vihannoisi".

Rock & Rule, however, was something entirely different. It's an animated film, about 80 minutes long. The tale is set in a distant future after the nuclear war. Rodents seem to have evolved into humanlike creatures and they play rock'n'roll. The soundtrack has some great tracks by Cheap Trick (a band that I've otherwise never really got into) and some not so great by Lou Reed ("My name is Mok") and Debbie Harry. Have these ever been released? I couldn't make out if there's ever been a soundtrack release. The original synthesizer music in the film is horrible.

The animation in the film is actually very good and boasts many different and striking styles. I seem to remember reading that the making of the film took three years to complete. Now it would take three months, with all the computers and shit.

But the storyline in Rock & Rule is not enough - the premise is funny, though: Mok, a super rocker (who's sold "plutonium"), seeks to find a way to bring a demon into one of his concerts. What would Ozzy Osbourne think of this? The story line is a bit thin and there are not enough funny gags. Furthermore, the acoustics in the film are pretty noisy. All the characters are shouting in stupid voices all the time and then there's the synthesizer whining. It's as if the makers didn't believe in their own dialogue. Well, it's evident in many of the recent animated features that there's just gotta be speed and noise all the time.

Lots of people walked out during the film, but I didn't think it was really all that bad. There's a whole web site devoted to the film.

I also managed to see through The Catamount Killing from 1974. It's the most pulp-related film of the three, as it's based on a novel by James Hadley Chase, one of the most important hardboiled writers of Britain. The film is a bastard, to put it nicely: it's situated in America, it's based on a British novel, it's financed by German money and directed by a Polish director, namely Krzysztof Zanussi, who's better known as an art-house director (and one or two of his films that I've seen have been pretty powerful). Also the lead actor is the German Horst Buccholz. He's quite hysterical throughout the movie.

There are some nice touches here and there (especially the climax at the end with Buccholz rushing out of a house with camera following), but overall the film is too slow and you never quite believe how a neurotic jerk like Buchholz could be a bank manager. The music by Wojciech Kilar is very good, eerie and atmospheric.

The Fury of the Vikings

I saw a nice curiosity at the Finnish Film Archive last Monday: the horror classic Mario Bava's The Fury of the Vikings (or The Invaders or Erik the Conqueror, in Finnish, Viikinkien kosto) from 1961. It was the other of the two viking films Bava made in the early sixties.

The film was quite nice, very atmospheric and fabulously shot. Some of the frames were very nicely staged and Bava really knew how to use Cinemascope, with open sea looming at the back. The fight scenes were expertly cut and they hid the low budget astonishingly. The plot should've been better, some of the stuff happening went by all too fast and some of the action wasn't explained enough. The Finnish copy from the sixties was in a bad shape and, especially during the first reel, all the dark objects on the screen seemed to be bursting into flames. I was bugged to see some of the people take a camp approach to the film, even though there weren't any reasons as the film was pretty fluent and well-made (and I'm beginning to get fed up with camp attitude: it's arrogant and obnoxious and so last week).

While it's been pretty obvious to some horror and other genre buffs for many years or even decades now, I've been slowly realizing that the history of cinema is not just a cavalcade of artistic non-genre masterpieces, but it's also, and maybe more essentially so, the history of popular films and popular film-making where there are no deep, hidden messages in the films. I liked this a lot better than some of, say, Fellini's films from the seventies. The magnificent set pieces were there, but there was more dramatic drive in Bava than in Fellini (and in Fellini's films, say Casanova or Satyricon they shout all the time). Well, of course this was mostly eye-candy, but there was also artistic expression blown to full.

Blogger fuckers

I'm not at all very keen to do anything but my work. I really hate adjusting things, be they electronic, mechanical or Blogger accounts. Now the Blogger fucktards scared the shit out of me by forcing me to change over the new Blogger - when I didn't really need that. Do you see any of that AdWords/Flag This Blog/Widget shit in here? I don't even know what they are and I don't want to lose my time to find out. It's like everyone is suddenly some fucking nerd. I don't want to do any of that, I just want to post some shit when I feel like it, and that's it.

For a minute I thought I'd lost everything, but it turned out that it was possible to have many blogs (like I do) with the same Google account. But for the time lost finding this, I should be able to fee Blogger. Would something like 20$ be doable?

I love Bester's two SF novels, so this is fitting

I am: Alfred Bester A pyrotechnic talent who put only a small portion of his energy into writing.

Which science fiction writer are you?