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And some three years ago I decided I should concentrate more on my Finnish blog (here at Julkaisemattomia, meaning The Unpublished, the name I've been trying to get rid of).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!

Milestone post!

I didn't realize my post on the men's adventure mags book Weasels Ripped My Flesh was my 1900th post. Will have to celebrate! Only one hundred to go! What should I do in my 2000nd post? This was my 1000th post. Seems like it takes five years to do thousand posts!

My new Tumblr blog

I was cleaning up an old computer and deleting most of the pictures stored therein, but I got to pity all the cover scans and other stuff I've been saving, so I decided to up a new blog. It's also called Pulpetti, but it's at Tumblr, so I could use the same moniker. Here it is.

I'm making changes in my blog policy

All the time I've been blogging at Pulpetti (or is it "on Pulpetti"?), I've felt awkward about the bilingual nature of my blog. It seems to me that some of my Finnish readers or even my friends are not very interested in the pulp/hardboiled aspect of this blog and commenting to a English-language blog post seems strange to them. I've posted some stuff in Finnish here - on politics or some other topical, well, topics and some such -, but I've felt they don't really fit in here. (And my English-speaking readers have absolutely no clue what they are about, even though almost every Finnish reader here knows what I'm talking about when I'm writing in English.)

So I'm making some changes. Nothing big and the pulp stuff keeps on coming, that's for sure, but I'm directing my Finnish-language posts to another blog. I'm not setting up a new blog, but I'll be posting my stuff about politics and shit to the Julkaisemattomia/The Unpublished blog that I've had for some years now as some sort of a sidekick blog. Now it'll become the main blog for my Finnish-speaking blog posts. So, all the stuff about my personal life, national politics or some such will be there. I won't promise I'll post there often, but I'll be peppering the blog with what was the purpose of the blog in the first place: my unpublished stuff or stuff that was published in too ephemeral places for a general reader to find. (Peppering? That's some spicy stuff, I'll tell you...)

We'll see how this keeps on working. And don't worry: if I'll be drawing any new comics about the adventures of Ottilia and Kauto, I'll be posting them here.

Okay, I run into trouble already - got to thinking where I'll post the old Finnish pulp and paperback covers (and I have a patch of vintage Finnish pin-up illos coming). Umm... Decided! I'll post them here. The Julkaisemattomia blog will remain a rather non-visual blog.

The Shamus awards

I notice from The Rap Sheet that the Shamus awards (given to the best private eye novels published during a year, mainly (or only?) in the US) have been given to books I've read or am reading at the moment. The Shamus for the best novel went to Reed Farrel Coleman whose The James Deans I liked a great deal (this machine is working so slow that I won't go looking for the post I made on it in Pulpetti, um, 1½ years ago). I'm just now reading Soul Patch, the book that won the first prize. It's wonderful so far, but it seems that Coleman had a stricter editor at Plume, his previous publisher. But more on that later.

The best first novel and the best paperback novel I both read, but unfortunately never managed to talk about them here in Pulpetti: I think I mentioned Sean Chercover's Big City, Bad Blood, but I know I didn't mention Charles Ard.. ehem, Richard Aleas's Songs of Innocence. Even though I thought it was great - a private eye book just won't get any bleaker than this. And Aleas writes with ease and keeps you turning the pages, even though you know the ending will be grim. I also liked Chercover's book, but it was a bit too long on the private eye's personal life even when it didn't seem to be important to the book and the plot - compare it to Coleman's Soul Patch in which Moe Prager's love life is essential to the plot.

Mind you, these are not average private eye novels in any way. There are still many readers (especially in Finland - since we don't get these books in Finnish) who think that the private eye genre is locked somewhere in the era and style of Raymond Chandler or that it's just some lone hero joking around and drinking booze à la our very own Reijo Mäki. All these three books bring fresh air to the genre that many thought was dead by the eighties.

(Which was nonsense in the first place. [Which I came to understand only later. {But more on that later.}])

I'm a guest writer

I was invited to promote discussion as a guest writer of the month at the Rihmasto website. The discussion is understandably in Finnish. Here's my contribution - it's about the fact that Mika Waltari's career would be totally different if he started writing now. (Hell, do you think anyone would publish Sinuhe egyptiläinen/The Egyptian now?)

Here's also the too long introduction on me I wrote.

Blogging brilliance? What the..?

As you've probably noticed, I haven't blogged about anything high profile lately, nor have I written about my projects or any reviews of interesting books, old, forgotten or contemporary or coming. I should, though, and I will.

Despite all this, my friend Urpo gave me a blogging brilliance reward. I went, "What the blazes is she thinking? And why is the thing so ugly? And just what the dickens does the text mean? Is it any known language? Brillante weblog, Premio-2005?"

But thanks anyway. Should I put it up somewhere in sight? And how does one accomplish that?

PS. I edited the text, realizing this is a family blog. I might also add that if the reward should go to someone, it would have to be pHinn here.

The Bookaholics' Guide to Book Blogs

I finally got my hands on The Bookaholics' Guide to Book Blogs (Marion Boyars, 2007). The publisher had asked a permission to cite Pulpetti in the book and I was curious to see what they'd have to say about me.

There were two citations, the first one being about Ki-Gor and the Finnish translation I found in an otherwise forgettable magazine and the second one about Harry Etelä whose horror stories I collected in a small volume last Fall. Pulpetti is in the chapter called "Fan Blogs, Obsessives and the Extreme", which is fine by me. What's simply great is that Harry Etelä gets mentioned in an English book! I'm sure he'd've appreciated. (Here's hoping this will boost the sales, which have been pretty low so far.)

Rebecca Gillieron writes:

For a European perspective it is also worth checking out Finnish writer Juri Nummelin's Pulpetti. At the tender age of thirty-five he has already written a number of books on the history of cinema, rare first names, Western writers and foor, but pulp fiction is his real passion. That he really knows his stuff is self-evident, take a look at this post about finding a rare magazine at a flea market, as you will almost see him salivating, the enthusiasm is so infectious (...)

(...) his blog makes for some interesting reading, if for no other reason that as an example of the in-depth knowledge and passion that fan bloggers have for their chosen field/idols.

There's a slight error. Rebecca Gillieron writes that I'm offering copies of Jungle Stories - a rare pulp magazine! I was only thinking that if someone might be interested in the article about the Tarzan clones in my own pulpish fanzine, Pulp, I've got copies left. (The thing is settled. Rebecca Gillieron said to me in an e-mail that they'd change it for the second printing.)

The whole book seems quite interesting, a bit essayish and humorous, but usually on the analytic side. Lots of citations, which might make for uninteresting reading, if one's not interested in the particular item. The book has chapters on many different types of blogs, some of bthem being very literary, some being very pulpish and trashy (like Bookgasm or Groovy Age of Horror), some being about the whole internet business and the change of book publishing. Sarah Weinman gets mentioned coupla times.

PS. FictionBitch wasn't particularly impressed. Here's James Carson at BlogCritics.

Not so groovy prediction from Curt Purcell

Curt Purcell, who does a good job with his Groovy Age of Horror blog writing about ephemeral paperbacks and letting guys like Jaakko (who's Finnish, by the way) post absolutely wacky scans of the Italian fumetti comics, got serious about the American presidential elections. (Sorry about getting to this so late, have been behind in my blogging. Don't think I'll catch up.) Curt's future doesn't look all too promising - his worst case scenario includes George W. Bush taking over by force.

His post reminds me of the rumour that was circulating in the mid-eighties: the constitutional law will be changed so that Ronald Reagan gets elected to this third season. This may have been Leftist propaganda I was fed with during the eighties. (I also seem to remember someone saying they'd nominate Reagan for a king, but.. c'mon, who'd believe that?)

But here's Curt also posting the entire contents of a men's mag from 1964, called Battle Cry. Curt's using a new device called Issuu. It seems nice and works pretty swiftly and is definitely better than posting PDF's on a site, but seems also that it slows down the blog. I might use the same device myself to scan some mags I have or some such - but it would take some time, which I don't seem to have. (Though, complaining about the time I don't have takes up a considerable amount of time, so I should stop and just make whatever is that what I would do if I had the time.)

Note that one of the stories in the mag is written by a guy called Irwin Porges. He was the brother of science fiction and crime writer Arthur Porges and a writer of an Edgar Rice Burroughs biography.