My mustache - now long gone

As I said a week back, I started to grow a mustache. But earlier today I shaved them off. Didn't like them. I looked too much like a geek and not a day younger - even though one of my reasons to start growing them was that I'd seen lots of young guys looking cool in their mustaches. And furthermore, Elina said they are scrapy. So: goodbye, mustache!

Here's a picture though. They didn't get very long in a week, but I'm performing in public tomorrow (hey, remember that Kevin Wignall is coming to Helsinki!), so I thought I'd better get rid of them.

I have a huge wart in my neck. I've said time and time again that this is no family blog. (The garment I'm wearing is the legendary vintage blue terrycloth overall that I keep instead of a robe, which I've always found a bit clumsy.)

Back from the vacation, catching up on Facebook, Twitter, e-mail and what not

We just returned from our three-day trip to a summer cabin. Everything was fine, even though Kauto threw a big rock at the back of my head. It was an accident and he said immediately he was sorry, but still... Elina was later pretty amazed I didn't get angry. The weather treated us two ways: first it was warm and sunshine, then it wasn't that anymore, almost the exact opposite. However, Kauto and Ottilia got to fish for the first time in their lives (and me for the second time in my life!). Kauto even got two! Ottilia caught one, but it fell from the hook. We killed the two fish, but we couldn't eat them, which is kind of stupid.

Okay, here's an interesting article on how Facebook will - probably - change literature. Thanks for the link to Sarah Weinman on Twitter!

PS. And, oh, I decided I'll grow me a mustache. Photos later.

Book done and gone

I sent the manuscript for the reference book on writers of historical fiction to the publisher today. I'm really taking a vacation now. It's been hell of a Spring around here and I need a break. So even though I've been posting lazily lately, don't expect anything very sudden.

I started my vacation going book-hunting with Antti Tuomainen who came from Helsinki to visit Turku. He's a crime writer, with two noir novels under his belt - alongside with Tapani Bagge, he's the only noir writer working in Finland nowadays - one that can be taken seriously. It's a real shame his novels haven't been getting enough attention. But I'm digressing here. I found quite a bunch of interesting books, ranging from Donald Goines to Diane Johnson's biography of Hammett and Wayne Dundee's first novel, The Burning Season.

I'm reading Jonathan Maberry's zombie thriller, Patient Zero, and I'm really waiting to get back to it. It's more of a thriller than I really like about a book, but the combat scenes with zombies are very, very thrilling.

A Mickey Mouse oddity

Here's Mickey Mouse dressed up in a woollen shirt. The picture is from a DDR broschure for making up clothes for dolls and other toys - I found it in a thrift store earlier this week (the broschure is actually in Russian). I can't find a year in the whole thing, but it must be from the sixties.

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.

Some more attitude

A friend of mine sent me some pictures from the birthday party I had with another friend of mine. Here I'm spinning some records - perhaps it's "Touch Me" by Samantha Fox - and rocking to the tune. Rock on, baby!

(As for the possible videos of my playing DIY masterpieces... well, you'll just have to wait. They are coming, but slowly...)

Here's attitude for you

I was cleaning my work desk and found some old photos of me that I got from my father and his wife some months back. Here's a picture of me from 1990 (I think). I'd been in a hospital for a back surgery and someone brought me a shaving machine. I don't know why I'm doing it in the yard. Yeah, I've had hair. As you can see, I also almost had a full beard.

Taannoin taannoin taannoin... koettakaa nyt jumalauta!

Ottaako ketään muuta päähän taannoin-sanan pahoinpitely? Jarkko Jokelainen kirjoitti Nytin kolumnissa jokin aika sitten tehneensä "taannoin" Kissin konserttiarvion - se oli ollut edellisviikolla. Tänään Jussi Karjalainen arvioi Väkivallan vihollinen -elokuvan ja päätti arvionsa toteamalla, että vigilantismi palasi valkokankaille "taannoin", kun Jodie Fosterin uusi elokuva tuli teattereihin - ja sehän oli jumalauta tämän vuoden ensi-ilta!

Tämmöinen taannoin-veistely on pahentunut viimeisen vuoden aikana ihan järjettömästi. Eikö kenelläkään ole enää mitään käsitystä siitä, mitä se tarkoittaa? Taannoin ei ole sama asia kuin viikko tai edes kolme kuukautta sitten!

Kirjoitin aiheesta muutamia kuukausia sitten (ilmeisesti "taannoin") Aamulehden Valo-lehden blogiin. Koska sitä ei sieltä lukenut kukaan, laitan sen vielä tähän:

Taannoinen vai eilinen?

Lehdessä luki tänään, että ruotsalainen hittileffa Fucking Åmål oli "taannoinen". Saman päivän viikkoliitteessä lukee, että tv-sarja Laakson kuningaskin oli "taannoinen". Samanlaisia juttuja on ollut näkyvillä useamminkin, joku kolmen vuoden takainen juttu voi olla vaikka "takavuosien menestys".

Muistellaanpa: Fucking Åmål oli vuodelta 1998, eihän siitä ole kymmentäkään vuotta. Laakson kuninkaan teko alkoi vuonna 2000 ja sitä tehtiin vielä 2005!

Kysymys kuuluukin: mikä helvetin taannoinen? Minkä takavuosien? Onko ihmisten - toimittajienkin - historia näin lyhyt? Loppuuko se kymmenen vuoden taakse? Eikö takavuosien jutuksi voisi ehkä sanoa jotain, joka tehtiin esimerkiksi vuonna 1969 - jolloin vaikkapa Fellinin Satyriconia voisi nimittää "takavuosien kummajaiseksi". "Taannoisena" voisi ehkä pitää jotain Kuplaa eli Soapia, jonka ensimmäinen Suomessa nähty jakso esitettiin Lake Placidin olympialaisten avajaisten kanssa samaan aikaan.

Vai onko kyse syvemmin ajateltuna historian lopusta? Koska menneisyydellä ja sen kiistoilla ja saavutuksilla ei ole mitään väliä, parin vuoden takaiset jutut ovat jo mennyttä aikaa ja maailmaa?

Pictures from our trips

If you want to see some pictures I took from our trip, go here. The texts are in Finnish, but you should be able to fathom what the pictures are about. The first two are from the Ähtäri nature park in the midwest of Finland. (Or some such place.)

Just got back

We got back from our family trips yesterday, but our holiday still continues, so there won't be much blogging. Would post some pictures, but I forgot the camera at my uncle's place in Mänttä (where we spent time swimming, barbecueing and going to the modern art festival).

Finished things

I feel like a million bucks. The reason: I finished some hours back the first draft of the translation of a major new American hardboiled caper novel. I'm a bit too busy to write about the whole thing more fully, but you can guess what that novel is, when I tell that I burst out laughing when I received a spam e-mail two or three minutes after completing the job - the message "came" from "Wachovia bank". (And you may remember that I've hinted at the past on this blog and probably elsewhere, too, that I'll be editing a series of crime paperbacks. More on this later. Stay tuned.)

The translation is not the only thing that was finished lately. Yesterday I picked up from the printers the latest issue of Ässä. You may remember that my hobby is to publish small press crime magazines (or fanzines; I don't know what word I should use). Ässä is the kid brother of the family. It contains only stories under 1,000 words, preferably even shorter. It's the world's smallest pulp mag, a magazine with flash fiction stories.

The newest issue, No. 2, is a bit smaller than the previous one, from the last year, but it was only due my lack of time. There's not, for example, an old story from the archives (the last issue had two, one by Otso Kantokorpi and one by Jussi Kylätasku, both Finnish writers). There are more translations than original Finnish stories - Ässä has stories by JT Ellison, Patti Abbott, Patricia J. Hale, Pearce Hansen, Todd Mason and John Weagly. The Finnish writers in the issue are Pasi Karppanen, Tapani Bagge, Salla Simukka and myself. (Well, okay, Tapani's and Salla's stories are old - they were published in a flash fiction series I edited for a weekly paper, Valo, last year.)

The picture accompanying this post was just too hilarious not to use: when I went to the printers, the magazines were wrapped in a pink paper. That's just too cute!

The cover illo is by anonymous - I found it in a sixties' book that dealt with media violence.

Happy Midsummer's Eve to everyone!

Fun stuff heard at the gym

I went to the gym to do some workouts after a long break. The gym guy was talking with some people at the front desk, who had probably been asking for some advice, seemingly about losing weight, even though the girl whom the guy talked to was exceptionally slender and slim. When I walked in and started to wave my club card, I heard the guy say: "We know from Auschwitz that the extra kilos always go away. Even the fat Jews lost all their lard there."

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.

Mika Waltari

As you've probably guessed, I've been busy. With the usual various assortements I try to get daily done*, I've been working on a book about Mika Waltari who's the most famous Finnish writer outside Finland (maybe in here, too).

As you probably can guess by now, my book will be about his lesser-known works. Which means it's largely about his early career and his pulp magazine and other fictionmaggish contributions. I'll be writing a series of articles about those here in Pulpetti for the next few weeks and I'll be starting with his horror story collection, Kuolleen silmät / The Dead Man's Eyes, as by Kristian Korppi, from 1926. It's a much-sought collector's item which I couldn't possibly afford myself, but luckily the university library has a copy.

So, stay tuned! (Maybe tomorrow or on Friday.) If you want to prep yourself, try to locate a copy of The Dedalus Book of Finnish Fantasy, ed. by Johanna Sinisalo. It includes a translation of Waltari's sword and sorcerish novellette "Island of the Setting Sun" from the Korppi collection. Sinisalo's book came out in 2005. I'm pretty sure people like Bill Crider and James Reasoner would like Waltari's story.

* Which means: translating two books, one into Finnish, one into English, and typing and editing a collection of Finnish Western stories that will be out in November, and rewriting my crime novel manuscript. I'll get back to all these in due time. Forgot to mention that I revised and sold a manuscript that I'd already thought had went to limbo: FinnLectura will publish a history of cinema I wrote, targeting the book for teenagers and preteens (apparently I failed, since they are aiming the book at adult students!).

It's my birthday

I turned 36 last Saturday. I had a birthday party last Friday in a local club with my friend Rooper whose actual birthday was on Friday. Six of our friends played records and we also were DJ's for a while. I played some classics like Samantha Fox's Touch Me and Sabrina's Boys... the crowd was wild.

We also had a bit of a show. I played - with Kauto's acoustic toy guitar (or actually ukulele, since it has only four strings) - some of the old songs I recorded back in the late eighties, under the name Yuri. They were some sort of acoustic punk or hardcore punk, with songs lasting from two seconds to thirty. Some of the titles I played: Kill Kill Kill, I Am a Dead Milkman and Exaggerate. The whole gig lasted for about five minutes - at least that's what I hope.

My kid brother Matias (of The Demars fame) was also there and we reconstructed some of the songs we recorded at the approximately same time under the group name The National Panasonic Boys. We had a bunch of other toy instruments beside the ukulele and we switched them between songs. Some titles: The Echoing Sound of Space, I Eat Bread, The Vengeance of Robots and We Screw You (Bylsimme sinut in Finnish; we didn't know 20 years ago what the word "bylsiä" really means).

I hope to be able to post some of the songs on my MySpace account or on YouTube. Mind you, I really can't play or sing, but it was fun. This may be the beginning of my second career. (I've never performed live and only four of my songs have ever been released, and then it was only limited edition of compilation C-cassette called Kuolleena haudattuja/Buried Dead.)

YYA-sopimus ja minä

(This is about Finnish history and politics. Would be too difficult to write about it in English. Next: a Finnish P.I. writer from the sixties. That I'll write in English.)

Viime sunnuntaina tuli kuluneeksi 60 vuotta YYA-sopimuksen allekirjoittamisesta. Se tarkoittaa sitä, että vuonna 1978 samasta sopimuksesta tuli kuluneeksi 30 vuotta. Olin tuolloin kuusivuotias - tai tietysti viisi-, koska sopimuksen allekirjoituspäivä kerran oli 6.4., reilu kuukausi ennen syntymäpäivääni.

YYA-sopimus ei ollut mitään peruskauraa. Sitä juhlittiin perusteellisesti ja ympäri maan. Porissakin järjestettiin oma, ilmeisesti Suomi-Neuvostoliitto-seuran masinoima juhla, joka pidettiin Pohjois-Porin yläasteen juhlasalissa Pormestarinluodossa. Paikalla oli paljon tärkeitä ja hienoja ihmisiä. On mahdollista, että isäni - joka oli tuolloin Porin asukasyhdistysten neuvottelukunnan (tai vastaavan) puheenjohtaja - piti paikalla puheen. Varmasti kaikki porilaiset poliitikot ja paikkakunnan media olivat paikalla. Epäilen, että myös Satakunnan Kansan toimittaja oli lähetetty tekemään juttua, vaikka lehti oli tuolloin hyvinkin pappishenkisen kokoomuslainen.

Muistan, että olimme siellä isoveljeni kanssa myymässä arpoja - tunsin itseni tärkeäksi pitäessäni kädessäni sellaista alumiinista rengasta, johon arvat on kiinnitetty. Edustimme ehkä pioneereja - Pohjois-Porin pioneerien kokoontumispaikka oli Aaltosen Jaskan äidin luona Toejoella (Jaska soittaa nykyään rumpuja Nuorissa Vihaisissa Miehissä; tai soitti ainakin kun näin bändin viimeksi noin neljä vuotta sitten Pormestarinluodon Asukasyhdistyksen markkinoilla*). Toinen vaihtoehto on, että olimme paikalla asukasyhdistyksen kautta.

Mitään muuta en muistakaan. Arvat.

Vuonna 1988 ei vastaavaa tilaisuutta ehkä järjestetty tai jos järjestettiinkin, en ollut mukana.

* Tai sitten ei. Wikipedia-artikkeli ei mainitse Jaskaa. Ehkä se oli jokin muu bändi tai Jaska oli vain tuuraaja. Oli miten oli, sain aikoinaan Jaskalta rikkinäisen akustisen kitaran, johon kirjoitin "This machine kills fascists" ja tein noin sata akustista punk-biisiä kotimankalla. Niitä on vuosia myöhemmin julkaistu Lal Lal Lal -levymerkin koostekasetilla Kuolleena haudattuja.

PS. Hesarin sunnuntaisivulla väitettiin, että Neuvostoliitosta tuotiin clearing-sopimuksen takia kaikkea, mikä vähänkin liikkui. En ihan usko. Tuotiinko muka tätä autoa jossain vaiheessa Suomeen?

Don't worry

I've been writing mostly in Finnish for some days now, but don't worry: I'll get back to the regular language soon. I'll be covering the fucking contest between Lord Wimsey and Bertie Wooster in a coming post! You just can't wait...

Mainio nimi dekkarille

Hesarissa oli pari päivää sitten tiedesivulla juttu koralleista. Tietolaatikosta irtosi upea nimi vanhanaikaiselle dekkarille: Kuu kiihottaa koralleja. Vielä kun tuohon keksisi järkevän juonen...

Nytin juttu Filmihullusta

Perjantain Nytissä oli juttu Filmihullusta. Eero Tammi kertoo jutun taustoja täällä. Kommentoin asiaa myöhemmin pidemmin ja tarkemmin, nyt en valitettavasti ehdi.