Missä on Poen Valtameren salaisuus?!

(English summary: it's about the forth-coming collection of Edgar Allan Poe's short stories - in Finnish, that is. I'd thought the book would include also Poe's only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, but no.)

Sain tänään sähköpostissa pdf:n Edgar Allan Poen kaikki tarinat sisältävästä käännöskokoelmasta (Teos, suomentajana Jaana Kapari). Olin luullut, että kirja sisältäisi myös Poen ainoan romaanin, Valtameren salaisuuden (The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, 1838; suom. myös nimellä Gordon Pymin kertomus), mutta ei. Poen romaani jäi tunnetusti torsoksi, mutta monet ovat pitäneet sitä osittain sen kiehtovuuden syynä.

Suomalaisia kirja ei ole juurikaan kiehtonut, koska oudosti se on käännetty viimeksi vuonna 1915! Aiempi käännös onkin jo kaksitoista vuotta vanhempi... En muista ikinä nähneeni kumpaakaan - jaa, Valtameren salaisuuden olen nähnyt niin että siitä puuttui kymmenen viisitoista viimeistä sivua. Pöyhösen keräilykirjojen hintaopas antaa sille hinta-arvioksi 300 mk eli noin 50 e. Hinnan luulisi nousseen vuodesta 1999, jolloin hintaopas ilmestyi.

Minulla on mielikuva, että Erik Bergman olisi säveltänyt romaanista kuoroteoksen suurehkolle orkesterille. Ainakin olen nähnyt tv-taltioinnin, jossa esitettiin suomalaisen nykysäveltäjän kuoroteos juuri Poen romaanin pohjalta. En löydä Googlella juuri mitään todisteita. Hoi, osaako joku auttaa? Musiikki oli tehokasta, hiipivää, pelottavaa. Niin kuin Edgar Allan Poe parhaimmillaan. (Minua ei kauheasti innosta, että nyt on saatavana Poen "hauskat" scifi-jutut, mutta kaipa niille joku kysyntä on.)

Oli miten oli, kirja ilmestyy Helsingin kirjamessuille 27.10. Kulttuuriteko jos mikä - mutta suurempi se olisi ollut, jos mukana olisi ollut tuo lyhyt romaani!

Vieressä - hmm, ilmeisesti - Poen romaanin alkuperäisen painoksen nimilehti. Onko se vaikuttanut Paavo Haavikon Viiniä, kirjoitusta -kokoelman kansikuvaan?

Almost forgot

I almost forgot to mention that I finished editing the YA novel I've written with Elina. Now only some polishing and then to the publishers - again. This must be the fifth time when it goes out. (Nothing compared to Loren Estleman's The Oklahoma Punk: it was rejected over 160 times.)

The title was changed: from Kokkisotatyttö/The Cook Wars Girl to Elämää tylsempi juttu/Worse Than Life.

James Sallis's Drive

Finished Drive by James Sallis last night. It was my first Sallis, but won't be the last, as I liked this quite a bit, even though there was some superficiality to it, especially in the end when one of the characters starts to speak about Borges and Cervantes. Okay, he's a screenwriter, but even that granted, it sounded a bit overimposed to me. I was also quite tired last night when I was reading the book and it came to as no surprise that I didn't understand everything. I'll read it again some of these days (or years).

But Sallis's style is great: very terse, very hardboiled, yet warm and affectionate at the same time. The plot could've been more original, as some people have complained, but I don't think so, since Sallis gives us only glimpses of the plot and switches back and forth in time quite freely (yet making almost all of it quite fluent). It's a case of style over story (not matter), and Sallis pulls it off with ease.

A negative Amazon reviewer says this:

"Something else also bothered me about this book. I felt like I had read this story before. I was right. There's a book called The Company She Keeps by Georgia Durante. It's a true life story published in 1998 of a woman who drove getaway cars for the Mob who later became a stunt driver. The Company She Keeps is also 456 pages of true life experiences including domestic abuse and celebrity fame. If you like reading about action, adventure and inspiration then The Company She Keeps by Georgia Durante is the book for you."

I know nothing about Durante's book, but I don't think it's forbidden to use true stories as a base for novels or other fiction.

(I read the Harcourt paperback reprint, the picture on top is the original edition from Poisoned Pen.)

Some work done after a bad start

I finished the first version of my sword-and-sorcery story I mentioned a while back. I sent it to my friend Jukkahoo to read and give first impressions, mainly on can I publish it in Adventure Stories that's coming out some time before Christmas (or slightly after that).

I'm listening to the Mutant Disco collection I found in the library. Snuky Tate's He's the Groove (from 1979) is a near-excellent piece - actually almost-perfect music with its driving riff and bass line. I also like immensely Ron Rogers's two pieces on the album, especially Naughty Boy the chorus of which just won't stop pounding in my head. (It's just that it seems that Rogers was later in T'Pau which I immensely hated in the late eighties.)

I'm a... er.. what am I?

Some sort of wuzzy nuthead or something to that effect. (I don't know exactly what 'wuzzy' means, but it sort of fits in.) I fucking missed the train just about an hour ago. I was going to Tampere to teach and fucking missed the train! I made it to the station just in time to see the train leave.

Well, here's what happened. I was at the movie archive last night (checking out Robert Bresson's Le diauble propablement or something like that; Devil, Perhaps just might be its English title) and read e-mails at 23.00 or something. I wrote a lengthy and slightly agitated message to a friend of mine who had something negative to say about my book on history of cinema that came out last year. I shouldn't've gotten so angry about it, because even though I read several pages of James Sallis's great Drive I couldn't get to sleep. And I knew it was to be only six hours of sleep. I just rolled around with my eyes closed and thought mainly about my coming teaching gig. For some reason I felt I hadn't done every possible thing for it.

At 03.13 Kauto woke up. I don't know what happened to him - maybe he saw a bad dream. But he just couldn't get back to sleep. We hushed and lulled him for goddamn two hours! I could've killed couple of neighbours for taking a friggin' shower at 04.30 in the friggin' morning - they, for one, kept Kauto awake. At 05.28 or something like that he finally fell asleep.

I knew I couldn't make it if I woke up at 07.00 as I'd promised myself, with only 1,5 hours of decent sleep. I switched the alarm clock to 08.30 thinking I could make it to the later train and still be on time to start the course (which is, by the way, about writing movie reviews*). It was still very hard to get up at 08.30 and I was seriously thinking I'd call in sick. But then I pulled myself together and got up and went to eat. So did Kauto and Elina.

As usual, it took too long for us to get Kauto in shape to take to the zoo.. oops, I mean daycare, and when I finally made it to shower, I noticed that I had something like 14 minutes before the train leaves. (We live just next to the station.) I showered and shaved like a maniac and could've made it - if I hadn't fucking brushed my teeth! I had already my clothes on, had packed the bags, etc., and then out of the blue comes this bright idea to brush my teeth! Well, okay, I did it in a second, but it made me to miss the green lights and I had to wait for the morning traffic to get by. As I said earlier, I made it to platform just in time to see the train some 50 meters away.

When I got back, I checked the busses. Not a help. I tried to phone all the people at the university, but couldn't reach anybody. The usual e-mail address didn't work (of course it didn't!) and I had to use my Hotmail account. When I finally reached someone, they had heard about my misdemeanor and it was decided that the show.. er, I mean, the lecture was cancelled for today and I'd start the whole thing next week.

But now, how the hell am I gonna get something done today? I'm agitated, irritated, tired, bored and in an adrenaline hangover. And hungry, too. (I've been on a friggin' Atkins diet for some days. It bores my eyes out, but I'm destined to lose some kilos of my daddy tummy. They all got in within the last year. Next I'm gonna eat some eggs.)

* Isn't it said that if you can't do art, you become a critic, and if you can't become a critic, you'll have to teach it? It's been at least seven years when I've written an actual movie review. Let's not count the scribbles in this here blog. They are not me at my best. And definitely this day is not me at my best.

Edit: Having been mostly on my back all day, I decided it was "a fuckin' loser" that I was after. But hey, Sallis's Drive is great. Let me get back on that one later.

Poetry

Huonot runot ovat maailman selitys,
antakaa minulle kuppi käteen, niin kerron kaiken ja jätän kertomatta oleellisen,
valehtelut on jo aikoja sitten hoidettu niin että jäljelle jäi vain hengitys, sikarin tuhka,
savu, minä olen nähnyt tämän ennenkin luikertelevan runoihini,
minulla on ollut aiemminkin nämä samat näyt,
tuhkat, munat, tuhkamunat, siittämättömyys, maailmamme selitys,

antakaa meille vauvoja, antakaa meille mitä tahansa,
mitä tahansa ettei meidän tarvitse enää kulkea kumarassa maailman alla,
siltojen alla, pienet ihmiset, voi raukkoja,
suuret ihmiset, voittajan näköiset, luuserit,

kankaita kuljettavat hävittäjät, laivat, upseerit, herkät merimiehet, tatuoinnit perseissään,
peräreiässä, huumeiden salakuljettajat, muovipusseja sisään tunkiessaan ihminen eniten rakastaa itseään,

kuinka tämän vielä saisi järjestykseen,
sataa tai ei sada, ei se ole ihan se ja sama, maailma voi peittyä veteen:
lumeen, härmään, räkään, pyhään ulostukseen,
suusta tulevaan loistavaan puhuntaan,
akti menee päästä sisään, toisesta ulos, tulee jos on tullakseen,

laivat on nimetty näin ja näin,
tuosta tuonne ja takaisin, minulle on aina riittänyt se että olen saanut todeta riittämättömyyteni,
minulla on ollut ennenkin nämä samat ongelmat,
nämä samat puut, samat vadelmat, odelmat, aaluvat,
nimet, etunimet, sukunimet, harvinaiset, tavalliset, vaatimattomat, keskinkertaiset:
minä minun minuuteni ja minän minuudet.

***

Sataa, olen märkä, kuin olisin altaaseen hypännyt,
vaate kiiltää, minä kiillän sisältä,
olen matkannut maailman rajoille, ammattimaisesti,
olen professio, minusta revitään tietueita,
kaiken maailman tiedekunnat ja tietokannat (lienevät samaa kantaa, mistä minä tiedän,
etymologia on minulle vain harrastus: maailman selvittäminen on samaa kuin kantaisi tuskaa harteillaan,
ystäviensä, koko maailman, tuntemattomien ihmisten, joiden nimiä ei tiedä)
ovat vielä viimeiset palat pistelleet,
kakkulapio jäi pöydälle,
kilahti rajusti metallista alustaa vasten,
kirskunta, raavinta, oletusarvoja vastaan tehty oksennuksen kaltainen toimenpide,
kuka avasi oven, oli myös seinää vasten,
pukumiehet ovat lakanneet todistelemasta itselleen minkäänlaisia arvoja.

Oops! I did it again

I forgot to mention in my earlier post that I also had some nice chats (and a good pizza!) with my friend, bookseller extraordinaire, Pasi Louhimies from Libris, Tampere. We also had a visitor during the weekend, a very nice young lady from Helsinki, blogger extraordinaire. Her presence, however, had nothing to do with the book fair, even though - I think I can reveal this without much harm - she works in the publishing industry.

On another note: I'm so ashamed since my credit card at Stockmann was cancelled! I hadn't paid the bills (it was only slightly over 200 euros, but nevertheless) and now I have to cut my credit card in half and post it to them. How embarrassing, how humiliating...

At the Turku Book Fair

1. First, the very unprofessionally produced exhibition of the West Coast pulp fiction writers. I took most of the stuff to the place by bike and I took them away by bike - in the goddamnest rain I've seen this whole year! I was soaking when I'd ridden some 200 meters. I'd packed the books quite well and none got damaged - at least not thoroughly, that is. The exhibition was nice, but not a success. Ah well, we didn't pay anything for the site. I'd brought a nice sixties type writer to the exhibition and hacked away a page of a hardboiled crime story, with the hero being first doublecrossed by a gun-wielding dame and then being attacked by a horde of Chinese killers! My friend, Sami Myllymäki, continued the story at the site, but then the machine broke down!

2. Then the bars. I was drinking on Thursday with my journalist and book-making friend Ville Hänninen and a local SF fandom hero, Pasi Karppanen. We had nice time talking nonsense up to 02.00. I was again drinking last night, Saturday, that is, and had equally nice time: met some old friends I hadn't seen for a long, long time, may have made myself a deal on a book, got some nice ladies irritated by talking absolute nonsense, saw some celeb writers, such as Virpi Hämeen-Anttila and Anna-Leena Härkönen (who was just leaving with his boyfriend, Riku Korhonen, as I entered the bar; too bad since I would've liked to chat with Riku for a while), listened to boring stuff a certain Turku-based intellectual free-lance journalist was babbling, made a promise to give my VHS tape of the film version of Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar to a friend of mine, etc. etc. The usual bar stuff.

3. The actual book fair. I was only at one panel and a marginal one at that, about the current state of Finnish pulp fiction writing. We had Pirkko Arhippa, a very nice lady who's been writing crime and romance since 1968, and Boris Hurtta, the leading Finnish pulpster now working (albeit doing most of his stuff on fanzines and self-publications), with us (Harri Kumpulainen, who some of you know under his Harri Erkki alias, was the chairman) and we talked a bit over 30 minutes. I met most of my author and publishing colleagues at the bar, not at the fair, with my friend Tapani Bagge being the most notable exception. Thanks for the books!

4. I bought some paperbacks from a Turku seller, with some vintage American paperbacks in the bunch. I may talk about these later on.

5. We had a short business discussion on the crime paperback line I'm going to edit. It seems now that it will hit the newstands some time next year! Yee-haa!

6. Now I'm going to shut this machine down and start reading James Sallis's Drive and I hope y'all do the same!

PS. On the left there's a vintage Turku paperback from 1947: Riku Rauta's aka Aake Jermo's Luodinreikä röntgenkuvassa/A Bullet Hole in an X-Ray. Jermo was working in a Turku newspaper at the time and later on he became a rather well-known journalist.

The busy, busy world

Sorry, no updates. Been busy. Will be busy. Let's see again, say, next Friday.

I've been compiling an exhibition of the pulp fiction writers of the West Coast of Finland. The grand opening is at the Turku Book Fair next Friday!

Kaikki Turun kirjamessuille katsomaan Länsirannikon pulp -näyttelyä! (Sori, en muista osastoa enkä jaksa hakea linkkiä messukeskuksen sivuilta...)

Wonderful day at work

I've been so busy today I can't help but wonder! What an amazing day! Now, let's take a look at what I've done:

1. Kauto woke us up at presumably 7.30. (I'd been dreaming for at least an hour that it's 8.05.)

2. I took Kauto to daycare at 9.15 and got back home at 9.30. Read the morning paper and drank some more tea. Read the morning paper's weekly supplement (called Nyt). Looked at some other papers the mail brought. Wondered about the student union newspaper's (where I used to work) headlines. They look too small to me. Took a shit.

3. Opened up the computer at presumably 10.15.

4. Wrote some poems. They turned out pretty bad.

5. Answered the phone. I'll be going to radio to talk about - the movie archive's series that starts next Monday, and not about what a great non-fiction writer I truly am.

6. Translated half a page of a story by JA Konrath for the forth-coming issue of Isku.

7. Wrote a page (or maybe two) for a sword-and-sorcery story I've been thinking about for quite a while. It's situated in Finland in the early 11th century. It turned out to be a horror story. This is strictly hobby writing, but I'll maybe publish this in a magazine called Seikkailukertomuksia/Adventure Stories (it's just so embarrasing to admit that I do mags only because I get my own stories in quite easily).

8. Looked up some stuff in the web on ancient Finnish gods for the story. Stumbled on a comment in which someone says that lots of the Finnish gods came originally from Atlantis.

9. Made my blog round. (Or, walked the blog beat.) Watched Terrill Lankford's ten-minute prologue to Michael Connelly's Echo Park. I didn't think it was very good, but not bad either. Michael Connelly said to me once, when I interviewed him during his visit to Finland, that he thinks Harry Bosch should be played by Donald Sutherland. (Maybe in his younger days.)

10. Then I read the e-mails and answered them. Some work-related exchange with some British authors. Ate lunch with Elina at 12.00. Next I'm going to take a shower. At some point of the morning I asked Elina where I've got this notion that I can do this much non-profit work.

I Was a Teenage Hannibal For FBI

Check this out: it's about Thomas Harris's laziness to come up with titles for his books.

More new poems

Meillä on vallankumous ulkona, kotona kaduilla,
antiikin pylväät ohjenuorat aurinko matkalla kohti kohtua,
kunnes viimein päädymme taivaaseen, meille ojennetaan taivas,
osuus siitä edes, osuus markkinaraosta,
vuohet, ne ovat mainioita, oletteko kuulleet siitäkin, joka söi varpaita,
kukko ei käskien laula eikä kana munien,
olen joskus ennen muinoin ollut tuota mieltä,
nyt riittänee vain jos sanon, että menneet ovat menneitä,
anna arpisten haavojen olla,
muistojen toistuvuus on haavoistamme suurimpia,
meille tajutaan antaa murusia,
murusia suuremmasta ja pienemmästä kakusta,
kuinka me muutoin pystyisimme elämään täällä erämaassa,
jossa kukaan ei auta tänään ketään eikä kukaan puhu,
auringosta kukista pikkulapsista,
etanat on tehty mätänemään,
kaikkien turvallisuus kaikkoaa viimeistään yhdeksäs päivä joulukuuta,
viime vuonna ainakin kävi niin,
maailmanloppu ja poterot, jotka kaivoimme.

Pystyisinkö tiivistämään,
sanomaan kaiken oleellisen:
mies kävelee kadulla, sydän.

Onko mahdollista, onko luultavaa,
että vielä kerran pystyisimme sanomaan ei,
onko sietämätöntä,
onko mahdollista, mahdotonta, mielikuvituksetonta, järjetöntä, delirant,
että vielä sanoisimme mitä haluamme, mitä toivomme, mitä emme toivo,
mitä olemme jättäneet jälkeemme,
mitä tulemme kaikkoamaan,
parhaimmillaan tuhansittain asioita, loputtomiin,
olemme jo luopuneet kaikesta,
meillä on enää vain nämä ja nämä,
se ei riitä, olemme täynnä riittämättömyyttä,
onko mahdollista että se olisi maailmanselityksemme,
sen loppu ja sen alku?

Kuinka kukaan ei saata enää tätä kukkaa sanoa todeksi,
me olemme kuolleet, minä ensimmäisenä,
virastot ovat täynnä jonkinlaista säpinää, mutta ei sen ole niin väliä
kun toivottomuus on keskeistä.

Kukka ei ole enää totta, kadut ovat tyhjät,
elokuvateatterit karkoittavat katsojansa,
kukaan ei ole mennyt kotiin,
minä matkustin kerran Berliiniin, lentokoneella ihan,
se on ainoa ulkomaanmatkani,
olin ulkona,
minulle annettiin ruokaa käteen,
näin itse omin silmin,
se oli semmoinen reissu,
kadut olivat edelleen tyhjät.

****

21.9.

(Tämä on yksi runo.)

Latteus on määritelmämme,
hissit kulkevat tuosta noin ja takaisin, tongittuamme meidän on palattava takaisin ylös,
ylös ylös, alati ylös,
vielä kerran meidän on saatava taivasosamme, vahatut siivet, jotka alkavat sulaa,
kun pääsemme liian korkealle: meille varatut sihteeriköt ovat liian hyvännäköisiä.

Minä olen ennenkin sanonut tämän,
sienissä on metsiä, metsiä on maailmassa, maailma on tyhjä,
ihan oikeasti, lopullisesti,
sieniä on vain olemassa, ne eivät ole maailmassa,
minäkään en ole olemassa, vaivun takavasemmalle,
unohduksiin, uppeluksiin, maailmassa jota ei ole.

Sienet ovat latteita. On olemassa sieni-cappuccino. On latteata sanoa se:
se ei ole mikään määritelmä maailmasta. Eikä riitä meille.
Sihteeriköt sanelevat meille mitä sattuu ja me kirjaamme ylös muutamia oivalluksia.
Oivallus tuskin on se, että ohitse kävelee nainen, kadulla, sydän haarukannokassa, lusikanpesässä.
Joku kysyi kerran, mikä on lusikka-asento.
Se oli yliopisto-opetusta: kerran minäkin vielä voin nousta ja näyttää, että kadut ovat porvarin.
Vallankumousta se vain vaati. Minä olin siellä.
Minä voin sanoa olleeni siellä ja täällä, joka puolella.
Olin täällä tänään, muualla huomenna, tyttöystäväni oli silloin jo kadonnut.

***

Turpea metsikkö, typerä varis, kuinka kuuntelisin sydäntäni:
mies kävelee kadun päästä päähän, on kuin olisi kesä,
talvi meni jo, kohta tulee takaisin mies,
hänellä on päällään turpeesta tehty hattu,
kerran minullakin oli sellainen, istuin alas ja muistin isäni,
joka oli haarukan nokassa, raidallinen paita päällään.
Sellaisia ovat minun muistoni. Kerran muistan menneeni Tarvasjoen lävitse.
Varikset lensivät ohitseni, linnut linnut,
sellaisen biisin tiedän tienneeni lapsuudessani,
oi linnut, linnut, katsokaa tätä maata:
maata vedetään jalkojeni alta
kuin mitäkin mattoa.

One of the best Chases I've read

This must be one of the best James Hadley Chase novels - at least of those I've read. In The Sucker Punch he spins the story of the man caught in the web of fake love, greed and seven million dollars quite well. There's just that it never feels like it takes place in the US. If someone gave it to me without covers or any other identifications and took out the half dozen references, mainly to California, from the text, I'd say it takes place in England. This makes the novel seem pretty empty, without any real content.

I haven't really checked, but I believe the book was first published as by Raymond Marshall, one of Chase's pseudonyms. (Or was it his only one? I'm not sure.) The Finnish title means Dangerous Lust. The used book store clerk has written "Not bought back" on the cover.

I'd say I like the cover, but all the feminists reading this would jump me.

Pulpster at work

Here's me at work. It's actually a promo picture of me after Pulpografia, my first book, came out in 2001.* This was an outtake from a session with my friend Vesa Kataisto who interviewed me for a magazine called Aktivist (kuka muistaa tämän?!) - you see that my eyes are closed and I don't really seem to be doing anything.

The pictures were taken at the office of the Turku Student Newspaper where I was working as an editor at the time. The place seems barren and maybe it really was. The typewriter was, I believe, the newspaper's . I don't know where it's now - it's a very pretty typewriter (had I time, room and money (in this order), I'd collect old typewriters, and perhaps mainly these post-WWII machines).

* Actually it came out in 2000, but it was the day before Christmas Eve, so it doesn't really count.

Edit: I met Vesa Kataisto at the book fair on Saturday and he said that he brought the type writer with him to the photo session. It was from the cellar of Cosmic Comic Café and may still be there.

From Tales of Darkness to modernist Finnish poetry

After I'd read a dozen Tales of Darkness comics I'd found in a trash bin and finished James Hadley Chase's The Sucker Punch (scan coming later), I decided I need something arty and deep. I took a poetry book of Jyrki Pellinen from the shelf and read some twenty poems in it. I've always liked Pellinen's poetry and this prompted me to write some poems (which I posted earlier). Here's one in translation:

names of the kings are like
pieces of wax in a small chimney

the yachts are yellow trees
unspoken light in the wall of the house

three branches marching in line
on the horizon many kilometers away

the blue christmas tree on the yard brings to mind the blue forest
and the people who make no mistakes

(You just gotta admire me - this blog can move from the crudest to the most high-brow with daring eloquence!)

Runoja/New poems

I surprised myself by writing some poems first thing in the morning. Here they are - sorry, in Finnish only. (Huom! Jotkut muotoilut hävisivät jostain syystä. Rivivälejä piti olla alun perin enemmän.)

18.9.2006

Kuolema on pahin kaikista,
kustannussopimus, jazzin kuolema,
me synnymme vielä kerran, tämä on typerä feeniksin tarina,
kuinka me muka vielä saisimme toteutettua itseyttämme,
kuinka kuinka kuinka,
on taannuttu sellaisiin olotiloihin,
joista ei ole poispääsyä: mäkihyppy, verotus, perintäoikeudet,
miten ikinä saamme itsemme takaisin, järjestykseen maamme,
vedet satavat, valuvat pois, me hengitämme haukkoen,
yhteiskunta ei tule vastaan, ei tervehdi, ei ota vastaan lämpimästi,
maailma on kylmä tai lämmin, riippuen mielentilasta,
niitä mitataan asemilla, kaikuluotaimilla, vedenmittausasemilla,
lepakot vaeltavat käytävillä, etsien etsien,
mitä sitten,
kenen hallussa on tieto, on jo päässyt perille,
kukaan vain ei halua perille,
kaikki haluavat olla paikoillaan,
odottaen lähtölaukausta,
kuolemaa.

Käsitavaroissa on aseita,
haarukka silmässä,
nenässä on hippusia, kultaa, hopeaa,
kuparia,
pommit olemme virittäneet jo kauan sitten,
vuosisatain kehitys on peruuttamaton,
meille eivät riitä enää mantrat,
suunnattomat varastot typeryyksiä,
autismi on nykyajan keskeinen ideologia,
haarukannokassa ihmisten sydän.


Kehitys on peruuttamaton. Me emme voi koskaan enää askeltaa taaksepäin. Meille on luvattu tämä. Nämä vuodet ovat kuluneet jo liian kauan. Liian pitkään olemme vaeltaneet keskenämme. Irtiotto tuntuu epäluontevalta. Epätodellinen on myös toiveemme. Että vielä kerran voisimme. Että vielä kerran saisimme koskettaa läpinäkyvää ilmaa, jota emme enää hengitä. Läpinäkyvyys on hallinnoinnin perusperiaatteita. Meitä on hallinnoitu vuosisatoja turhaan. Me emme ole oppineet. Keskuudestamme voi vielä nousta maailmanloppu. Tai maailmanalku, kuka sen tietää. Meille on selitetty kuoleman perusperiaatteet. Kuolema on hallinnoinnin perusperiaatteita. Perusperiaate on myös savu, sen nousu ylös ilmaan ja lopulta haihtuminen. Perusperiaatteita ovat koskemattomuus. Me emme voi koskettaa savua. Se hälvenee ja haihtuu. Usvakin hälvenee. Me emme näe mitään pitkään aikaan. Usva on keskuudessamme. Usva hallinnoi meitä. Perusperiaate on keskeinen. Oikeuksistamme emme luovu. Usva pakenee meitä ja käsiämme, mitään näkemättömiä silmiämme. Usva on me itse. Kuolema ympäröi usvan emmekä me enää tiedä, mistä me saimme oikeutemme.

Away

Will be away for the weekend. May not post. But then again, may post.

Dostojevskin romaanien tasoinen vitsi

- Mitä sanoo K-kaupan somistaja, kun hän huomaa, että sesongin väreistä puuttuu yksi tietty perusväri?

- ?

- Kussa blue?

Erm.. the new issue of Thrilling Detective

I should've mentioned also that the Thrilling Detective site is back with a new issue. It features five new interesting-looking stories and other stuff. The site's head honcho says that the files have 300 new updates - so maybe that's when Michael Power sneaked in. (I'll stop writing now about mediocre stuff like Michael Power. It will be strictly Dostoyevsky from now on.)

Still on Michael Power

Umm... I said that there's no Thrilling Detective entry for Michael Power. Now there is (or then I looked at a wrong place in alphabets; these things may happen).

Okay

I'll kill myself.

In English. IN ENGLISH!

There's an anonymous Finnish guy in a comment saying that I should stop writing in English. ("Inglish pinglish", he says or something to that effect.)

I write in English, even though I know I make grammatical, punctuation and spelling errors (I think I have most errors with the usage of "the" and "a"; sorry about those, mate!) all the time, because I have many English-speaking friends and I think they'd be sorry if I wrote about these matters - with which I mainly mean my all too short excursions into the world of pulp and hardboiled fiction - in Finnish. (At least I hope they'd be sorry...)

Enough of this, though. I was going to say that I may have finished (at least 95 % of it) a book. You remember I was writing a book on movies for teenagers? I decided to make it only the history of movies for teenagers! (Um.. well.. no, not about movies for teenagers.)

My original plan was to include stuff about narration and making of movies, but I thought: "Aw shucks, I don't feel like writing about that, I'll just cut it short and get on with my life!" May've been a stupid career move, but writing the book was a pain in the ass to begin with. (Or an anal plug. I just don't know what that feels like.)

So, anybody out there willing to publish a history of cinema for teenagers? In Finnish. (I can write in Finnish, you know. Sometimes I do it even here, much to the chagrin to my fellow Americans and Britons. And Scots, if Allan Guthrie happens to be here. Do I have any readers in Polish, Spanish (there was one a while back), Portuguese, Japan? Anybody? (I'll kill myself if there are no comments.) Now, should here be a bracket?

On another note, I was book-hunting today with a friend of mine, Kari Elkelä, who maintains a great site on pin-ups, comics and pulps. I found some old porn paperbacks that I hadn't earlier known even existed. Kari bought lots of Swedish paperbacks with nice covers and old men's mags. Ostin myös vanhoja Hesarin Kuukausiliitteitä. Elina on paljon puhunut siitä, että kun meillä on mökki, hän haluaa, että siellä on vanhoja Kuukausiliitteitä.

Error: Paul Denver's Cannons

Sorry, the Cannon novelizations by Paul Denver were made for a British publisher, not an American one, as I said in an earlier post. If I understood correctly, it was the Star paperback imprint of W. H. Allen Ltd. Here's a cover for one of the books.

Edit: Erm... now that I look at my earlier post, I notice that I don't say that they were made for an American publisher. What's "annoin ymmärtää" in English? There were lots of British paperback novelization of American movies and TV shows in the seventies, for example of Universal's horror classics and Disney's animated features.

Paul Denver's Michael Power series

There's no Thrilling Detective entry for Michael Power, but should be: Power was the PI hero in four paperback mysteries by a British writer called Paul Denver, whose real name was Douglas Enefer (under which he also wrote). I've read two of Denver's books and they are mildly entertaining PI stories full of enjoyable clichés - you know, tough policemen, wisecracking PI's, lusty babes asking for trouble, that stuff. The hero gets knocked down every now and then and he recovers with a stiff whiskey shot.

I just finished The Last Laugh (1965) which was worse than the one I read previously, Dead On Time (also 1965). Power is hired to get his hands on a millionaire's daughter who's mistaken to associate herself with known gangsters. Of course the main gangster gets bumped off - and Power knocked on the head. Pretty much okay, but I wouldn't wait for any treat, if I were you. You just enjoy some clichés or then you don't.

The book contains also a short story by Denver. "No Pictures for Cathy" stars another PI, John Lester, and it starts out with Lester getting knocked down (what a surprise!), but someone had ripped off over ten pages of the book. I was already beginning to wonder just how the story can be so short. The main novel is very short, only some 100 pages. Way to go!

Denver wrote later on in his career some Cannon novelizations, but I haven't as yet read them.

The Finnish translation is from 1966 and it was published in a series that was edited by none other than Jyrki Hämäläinen! I was once told that he doesn't want to talk about these things. A friend of mine, a paperback historian of sorts, phoned him and when he'd said to Hämäläinen that he'd like to talk about the Lepohetki/Siesta series Hämäläinen hung up immediately!

(Note to foreigners: Jyrki Hämäläinen was a "legendary" editor of the rock/teenager magazine called Suosikki. He's also written lots of celeb biographies, in which he himself plays a big part.)

Ville Rannan kuvablogi

(English summary: it's about a graphic blog by Ville Ranta, one of the foremost graphic novel and graphic diary artists in Finland at the moment.)

Olen varmaan kamalan myöhässä jo tästä(kin), mutta tässä on kuitenkin kovasti ihailemani Ville Rannan uusi kuvapäiväkirja. Jutut näyttävät jatkavan Rannan albumeista tuttua rosoista ja improvisaatiovoittoista tyyliä (tai mistä minä tiedän, onko se improvisaatiovoittoista, ainakin se näyttää siltä).

A beautiful Finnish book

(Englische Zusammenfassung: I'm taking the book on the left to a flea market. It's in a bad shape and I just recently bought the author's collected works, so there's no need to keep this, even though the Art Nouveau cover is very beautiful.)

Ostin jokin aika sitten kirpparilta Johannes Linnankosken kootut teokset n. 15 senttiä kappale - en siis maksanut koko kolmen kirjan satsista euroakaan! Päätin pistää pois Elinan kauan sitten ostaman huonokuntoisen kappaleen teoksesta Laulu tulipunaisesta kukasta, mutta skannata päätin, koska jugend-henkinen kansi on tavattoman kaunis. Joku on sitä oikeasti sutannut ainakin kahdella eri kynällä ja jollain tunnistamattomalla materiaalilla, mutta koetin kuvaa varten sitä hiukan siistiä. En tiedä taiteilijaa, mutta onpa ainakin kontrastia edelliseen pesäpalloaiheiseen kanteen!

This ain't no family blog

I thought I'd already seen the ugliest crime fiction cover in the whole world (well, at least in Finland), but this one beats it hands down.

Teloittakaa Matti Koski/Execute Matti Koski! is an entry in the Dekkarisarja/Mystery Series that a publisher called Karkir (later called Karprint; if you know what I'm talking about, then you don't wonder) put out in the seventies. The books were short, almost pamphlet-length, and their reputation is pretty bad. The writer was called Eero Linna, but I don't think anyone knows who he really was.

The cover boasts a start of an exciting serial. It's about Mengele and it's presumably by an Israeli writer, called Z. Aldouby.

What I wrote earlier

While deleting old e-mails I noticed that I'd saved a blog post as an e-mail a week ago, but forgotten to post it. It's old now, but there's stuff that I haven't been bragging about, so here goes nevertheless (I've tried to do some vacationing, hence no posts on a regular schedule):

As I said earlier, I was sending two crime novels to a contest. They went off their way late this afternoon! Wish them luck! Even the third one in the contest should get published! Here's hoping!

I'm drinking some wine to celebrate this - alone. Elina is away for a night: she's doing a reportage on maternity hospital's night shift! As if this weren't enough, I'm leaving to Helsinki with Kauto early tomorrow morning - he's going to be photographed as a baby fashion model for the KaksPlus magazine!

And as if this weren't enough, on Monday I'll have to shoot three new inserts for the TV show I was about to host - you remember that stuff, don't you? I promised I'd still be there, doing some additional stuff for the program, but I heard that this will be the last season. (Yeah, the channel bosses really believe in their stuff and support their workers... It lasted one fucking year.)*

And then, on Tuesday, we'll have to have an outline for the book a publisher asked for us to do - for Christmas! It should be out next Spring... aagh... when will this work ever stop?

(Nota bene: the outline was delivered in time and was accepted! Whew! At least some work that I'll get actually paid for! The inserts went well and they'll pay me after the screenings... Maybe I should ask, emm, what's the word, pre-payments? Kauto was a very good fashion model! I'll post the pictures when they are published. There's just so many pictures and cover scans and what not to post here... I read Thoreau's "simplify, simplify!" today and started wondering whether I really should diminish my activities...)

(* I can't really tell you how glad I am that I declined the hosting job. One of these days I'll tell you all about it.)

Unto Kunnas kuollut

Huomasiko kukaan Hesarista sunnuntaina kirjailijan kuolinilmoituksen? Unto Kunnas kuoli 98-vuotiaana (tai 97, jos hän ei ollut vielä ehtinyt täyttää). Kunnas oli syntynyt 1908 ja toimi pitkään sodan jälkeen Ristin Voiton toimitusjohtajana ja julkaisi parikymmentä nuortenromaania, joista osa sijoittuu Afrikkaan, josta han teki myos matkakirjoja (Valkoisen elefantin maa, 1973). Orjatyttö Israelin maalta (1951) on ilmeisesti historiallinen romaani ja sikäli kuuluu samaan sarjaan kuin vaikkapa Waltarin Sinuhe. Myos Orpo-Olavin koettelemukset (neljä painosta, joista viimeisin, tarkistettu -78) vaikuttaa nimensä perusteella erityisen kiinnostavalta. Toivo Fahlenius kuvitti joitain Kunnaksen kirjoja 70-luvulla.

Tässä netistä löytynyt arvostelu yhdestä Kunnaksen kirjasta:

unto kunnas: palopommi
ei kukaan palopommin sytyttäjistä voinut aavistakkaan minkäkaisia seurauksia se aiheuttaisi heille kaikille ja monille sivullisillekkaan...ajattelematon leikki aloitti hirmujännitävän seikkailun jossa kohtalokkaat tapahtumat seurasivat toisiaan. kirjan päähekilöiden suhteissa tulee esille yhtä lailla ystävyyttä ja kohtalonyhteyttä kuin myös kataluutta ja vehkeilyä joka kuitenkin lopulta johtaa rehellisyyden ja toveruuden voittoon...oli aika hyvä kirja KANDEE LUKEE...Arvosana: Hyvää satoa! Arvion kirjoittaja: janne, mutalan koulu 6.lk

Yksi Kunnaksen kirjoista on varhainen kotimainen sarjakuva-albumi. Näin Heikki Kaukorannan netistä löytyvä sarjakuvabibliografia:

Joosef : syvimmän alennuksen - korkeimman kunnian mies / kertonut: Unto Kunnas ; kuvittanut: Inga Fagerholm. - S.l. : Ristin voitto, 1946 (Kuopio : Yhtyneiden lehtien kirjapaino). - 23 s. ; 25 cm.

Tämä saattaa olla kuva Unto Kunnaksesta.

Exhausted

Oh man, I've been tired! I said to Elina yesterday after I'd finally got Kauto to sleep (he's still a pain in the ass when it comes to sleeping) that after finishing two novels you should be able to lay down for a while and not think about anything. I've been tired and drowsy and irritated for the couple last weeks and Elina said she's been worried about me.

But no rest for the wicked or some such: after I'd sent the manuscripts to the contest I had to finish an article (alongside with some more minor stuff) and write a speech to keep at the panel the Finnish Non-Fiction Writers' Association held on Friday. And after that I had to write texts for three new inserts for the Kinoklubi TV program during the weekend. Luckily it was no big deal and shooting them earlier today on Monday took only 1½ hours. Now Elina and I must do a working plan for a publisher that asked us to deliver a non-fiction book by December.

After that's been done, I'll lay down on a sofa and think about nothing! I'll just stare at the wall.

Tekstiä toisessa blogissa

Pistin juuri toiseen blogiini tekstin, jonka pohjalta aion puhua huomenna perjantaina Tietokirjailijoiden järjestämässä seminaarissa. Klo 14 Tieteiden talossa! (Engl. summ.: it's about a longish article I posted on my other blog. It's in Finnish.)

Spillane-korjaus

(English summary: I noticed that there were errors in the bibliography of Finnish Spillane translations.)

Tämmöiset huomasin puuttuvaksi Pulpografiassa olevasta ja tänne Pulpettiin pistetystä Spillanen kioskikirjasuomennosten bibliografiasta. Jos olisin ottanut mukaan kovakantisetkin suomennokset ja Viihdeviikarien/Book Studion 80- ja 90-lukujen kirjat, lista olisi kahta pidempi. (Minua kyllä kritisoitiinkin aikoinaan Book Studion kirjojen poisjättämisestä. Täydennetyssä ja korjatussa laitoksessa ne ovat mukana...)

En jaksa formatoida näitä sen kummemmin, napsin ne vain Fennicasta.

Nainen ilman kasvoja / Mickey Spillane ; suom. Risto Kalliomaa
Julkaisija: Hämeenlinna : Nide , 1955
Ulkoasu: 191 s.
Alkuteos: The big kill
Lisäpainos: 2. p. 1957, (180 s.)

Teoksen nimi: Mike Hammer iskee.. / Englanninkielestä suom. Tapio Hiisivaara
Julkaisija: Alavus : Valpas-mainos , 1967
Ulkoasu: 293 s.
Sarja: (Ässä-sarja ; 8)
Alkuteos: The big kill

Teoksen nimi: Mike Hammer iskee.. / Mickey Spillane ; suomentanut Leevi Lehto
Julkaisija: Helsingissä : Otava , 1992 (Keuruu
Ulkoasu: 256 s. ; 19 cm
Sarja: (Top books)
Alkuteos: The big kill

Sorry: misleading Macdonald title

There's an error in the books of my life meme below: the Ross Macdonald book I first read wasn't The Drowning Pool, it was The Sleeping Beauty. (And I may have never reread it.) But I did see the Paul Newman film, Harper, quite early on, it's based on The Drowning Pool (if I remember correctly, which seems rare these days). That's maybe why I got them mixed. (Why don't you Finnish readers ever correct me in these matters?!)

Totuus Pekka Siitoimesta

http://keskustelu.suomi24.fi/show.fcgi?category=114&conference=4500000000000052&posting=22000000015723424

(English summary: I stumbled on a link that tells the truth about the legendary Finnish nazi leader of the seventies, Pekka Siitoin.)

On fan fiction

There's been a hot debate going on in Lee Goldberg's blog about fan fiction (small wonder, since Goldberg is a known hater of fan fiction). Check it out if you can: there's over 50 comments. No use trying to say anything pro or against, but everyone should admit that fan fiction will be with us for a long, long time, since it's about narcism and narcissistic culture where everyone wants to get their share of the glory, be it about web-published amateur Harry Potter porn or a real money-making best seller.

Another truth is that there's always been fan fiction. I bought some kiddie-made magazines from the early seventies from a flea market. There were two stories with Donald Duck as the hero! (I may scan some of these in the near future, but with all the job stuff happening suddenly, don't know when (or where).)

Manuscript completed

Um, well, hopefully.

I'm talking about the crime novel I'm sending to a crime novel contest. There are actually two, but this is the one that was originally about Joe Novak in the late fifties' Hollywood. I've been very stressful about this, since no matter what I do about it, it still seems unfinished. Maybe it's just the stress. Or then it sucks big time. Nevertheless, I finished editing it thirty minutes ago, writing at least one completely new scene. Now I'm all jitters. Do I get to sleep at night? Seems doubtful.

The other manuscript has been completed a week or two ago. I'll still have to look at it, though.

***

Check out the Helsinki complaints choir here. A friend of mine is singing there, but I don't find her in the crowd.

The Ben Slayton series

Ben Slayton was the hero of the five-book series that was written by Thomas Adcock and Jeffrey Frentzen in the early eighties. Here are three of the Finnish covers. I hear from a reliable source that the books are pretty bad.

Robert Jordan's westerns

Here are covers for two of Robert Jordan's westerns that were discussed shortly in a comment to a previous post about his Conans. Both are from the early eighties and they have been reissued in the nineties under Jordan's real name. It seems, though, that there are so many Jordan fans out there that there are no single copies found in Abebooks for the first editions!

The Fallon series is not technically a western, but it's about the American revolution, so it comes close. The series had three books.

The books of my life

Thanks to Lurker, here's a meme about books of my life.

1. The book that changed my life

I believe it was Ross Macdonald's The Drowning Pool (which was translated as Nukkuva kaunotar, if I remember correctly; too lazy to check now). I'd been reading some Christie and other stuff of her ilk, but then, maybe due to my father's suggestion, I read this while I was 13 or so and was blown away: how can you write about people this real? how can a crime novel be this haunting and true? how can the things in the book stay with you so hard? I'm still a devoted reader of Macdonald, even though I haven't had a chance to reread him as much as I'd like to. My favourite Macdonald, though, has been The Zebra-Striped Hearse (Harriet on iso tyttö).

2. A book that I've read more than once.

There are so many. There's one book that I could read over and over again without being bored: Oliver Bleeck's AKA Ross Thomas's The Brass Go-Between/31 kiloa pronssia. Must be one of the most entertaining books ever written. It may not even be the best crime novel there is, let alone the best novel, but you just can't put it down once you've started. There's also a book that I reread immediately after having read it: the first one of Ursula LeGuin's Earthsea series.

3. A book I'd like to take with me to a deserted island.

Allen Hubin's crime fiction bibliography, possibly with additions on CD and the web.

4. A book that made me a tramp ("hupakko"; I can't think of a better word here).

There's no such thing. Or if there is, it's probably A Man With a Maid by anonymous. (Herra Jackin ihmeellinen huone in Finnish.)

5. A book that made me burst into tears.

I was pretty down after reading Lord of the Rings for the sixth or seventh time five or six years back. The ending is very sad, but the atmosphere in the scenes that take place in Mordor is so grim that it stuck with me for at least a week. Maybe not tears. I cry at movies - Dumbo, for example, is a real tear-jerker for me.

6. A book that I'd wish was written

Pulpografia Fennica. But I'd wish it was written or at least edited by me.

7. A book that I'd wish was never written

The Bible?

8. The book that I'm reading now

Stephen Frances's This Woman Is Death (1965; Mieluummin kuolla in Finnish). A spy thriller by the creator of Hank Janson. Weird, sad atmosphere and quite a controversial hero - a pacifist who's recruited into the world of spies strictly out of boredom. I liked Frances's The Sad and Tender Flesh (1966) very much and recommend this also.

9. A book that I've been meaning to read

Something by Emanuel Swedenborg

10. Challenge five other bloggers

Can't think of any, unless Vesa Sisättö wants to tackle this. Or Jukkahoo. It seems that I have no friends here, doesn't it. Grim story of my life.

German pulp

Here's a shortish article on German pulp and paperback fiction.

Jaakko Ensio, Stirring Science Stories et alii.

I forgot to mention that you should check the Con-Kurssi file No. 4, since it contains an interview with my writer buddy, Jaakko Ensio, who turns out to be almost 90! No wonder since he got started in 1940.

Fellow blogger Lurker bought the issue of Stirring Science Stories and reviews it here (in Finnish, that is). He also took some photos of the Fantasia Noir panel and posted them here. I'm the one with the green Hawaiian shirt. Stepan Chapman is on my right side and Ilja Rautsi on the left.

Lurker also challenged me to a meme. Later, later.

My FinnCon

As I wrote earlier, I'm not really part of the Finnish SF fandom. I'm somewhere on the fringes, knowing lots of guys (and gals, too, got to hug one of them earlier today, em, I mean on Sunday), writing occasionally for the fanzines, selling my own pulp-related mags and fictionmags like Isku to some of the fandom's more educated members, but I just can't share their enthusiasm for the main thing: science fiction. And I'm so way past my intellectual phase that I can't even stand the elitism they seem to have in common with each other. (Let me get back to that later on.) And they seem to be so damn serious about everything! Loosen up a little!

Well, that said, I rather enjoyed myself. Wouldn't have, perhaps, unless I hadn't had an opportunity to booze around with my friends Vesa and Ville H. last Saturday night. It was nice and we had our share of good ideas for forth-coming book projects.

What exactly happened there? We did three issues of aptly stupidly titled Con-Kurssi (the Finnish word for "bankruptcy" is "konkurssi) with my friend Vesa Sisättö. You can check the results in PDF here. There's also James Reasoner saying why Robert E. Howard matters (he's in number 3). It had to to with a panel I was in with four other guys, including graphic novel artist Petri Hiltunen and Praedor novelist Ville Vuorela, about Howard.

It seemed to be a very much liked panel with people giving lots of applause at the end - even though we didn't have a moderator! When I walked to the room and said "hi" to the other guys, they asked me if I was the moderator. We talked lots about the politics, since Howard has been criticized for being racist, sexist, male chauvinist and even fascist. We settled for an agreement that in his stories there's a strong streak of anarchism (or libertarianism), but not a leftist one (as in the sense of Kropotkin or Bakunin). After the panel I recruited Ville Vuorela to write for Seikkailukertomuksia/Adventure Stories I'll be publishing later this year - and hopefully again next year!

I was also in another panel, hosted by Ann VanderMeer (her husband, Jeff VanderMeer, was one of the guests of honor and had his first book, an Ambergris collection, translated to the Con). The panel was about horror, even though it was supposed - at least I thought so - to be about the new weird movement, since the title of the panel was Fantasia Noir (not "fantastic noir", as I wrote earlier*). Well, whatever it was about, this also turned out just fine, even though we didn't have mikes and had to speak up pretty loud. It's hard to speak up loud when you're not speaking in your mother tongue. But Ann was a very good moderator, smooth and polite, but also very informative.

Stepan Chapman (whose The Troika was also translated with VanderMeer's Ambergris) was also there in the panel and he sat right next to me. I could see that he also thought he was going to talk about new weird - he's been very much linked with the movement - because he'd scribbled lots of names into a piece of paper. There were Günter Grass, Jorge Borges, Marquez, Kafka and other familiar names. I noticed one name that's not usually linked with this kind of thing: the Doctor Doolittle writer, Hugh Lofting! Now you know where it all comes from.

Now, to the elitism I mentioned. I noticed people putting up books for book crossing (aah, let me write about that later!) and there were some books that could've interested me, like a fantasy novel by Poul Anderson, but I didn't feel like taking them, because then I would've had to give them away. There were also lots of media tie-ins, such as Sabrina and X-Files novels and the Gremlins novelization by someone called George Gipe.

Now, these may not be great literature, but I was amazed by how hatefully some of the fans took them: "Take them away from me! They are filth!" (Showing anti-Christ symbols with fingers.) What's wrong with you? It's someone's profession, you can't blame anyone for doing what he/she can to support him/her and his/hers family, for Chrissake! Not everyone can settle for an outsider attitude like Stepan Chapman who, I'm sure, would refuse every attempt to get him to write a novelization and writes only what he really wants to (and I totally respect that). But maybe it's just the Nordic welfare state: there's no such thing in the US, the writers need the jobs, and you shouldn't blame them for taking them. It may enable them to write something more worthwhile later on or improve their craftmanship. They can even be better as novels than the original stuff is as TV shows or films.

(This hatred towards commercial writing manifested also in the curling contest that was played with Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time books! By the way, I didn't get a chance to talk about Robert Jordan's Conans, but I'm still reading the book I mentioned. It's not bad at all.)

There were also some other things that I dislike about subcultures: they are cradled inwards and are hostile towards other subcultures. There were lots of discrepancies between the SF fans and the anime fans that also held a con in the same building. I don't really know what it was about, but maybe it could've been avoided. It also strikes me that every subculture takes itself too seriously - this is clearly manifested when they are trying to be funny, as in cosplays and some such. (The winning Xena outfit was nice, though.) (I was talking about this with a friend of mine, who's a veteran in Finnish fandom and has been writing SF for about 40 years now, with some pauses every now and then, and he said the same thing. He compared fans to the Leftist movement in the early seventies.)

As you may remember, I did a small fanzine to sell at FinnCon, called Järkyttäviä Tieteistarinoita/Stirring Science Stories, with stories by Petri Salin, Harri Erkki, B. Hurtanheimo (it's Bela, I hear, Boris's little brother) and Jaakko Ensio. I sold some 30 of them, mainly for my friends, but also some total unknowns bought it, maybe thanks to the cover illo by Timo Ronkainen. Will try to scan the cover for this post. I myself didn't buy anything, even though I checked a seller with lots of SF and fantasy paperbacks, but I got some fanzines.

Aah.. what else was there? Lots of stuff, lots of people, but I'll have to get on with my life. It was nice, even though I didn't see any of the other panels, and I could've talked more about stuff with some friends of mine (had too little time to chat with Jukkahoo, for example), and I could've resisted more a guy who insisted that slash fan fiction is great (he also said that the Finnish slash writers use wrong characters - he wanted to see one about Moomintroll and Snufkin...).

* Not many Google results even with that!

Con report on its way!

Just got back from FinnCon some hours ago. Will be writing a full con report, but not now. Slept some five hours last night, in a drunken haze. The hotel room was good, though, thanks guys for letting me have it!

Off to FinnCon

I'm going to FinnCon tomorrow and will be away for two days. Not that you'll be missing me or anything... It's funny that I've never been a part of SF community in Finland, albeit having published a story (in 1988!) in a fanzine and having written some entries for largely fandom-produced reference works of SF and knowing many of the guys and gals in fandom, but suddenly I'm in the midst of the action: I'm on two panels* and I'll be editing some of the Con-Kurssi magazines! What's more funny (aren't you laughing already?) is that this is my second FinnCon. My earlier one was in 1989! And during all these years I haven't even read much science fiction, apart from occasional Philip K. Dick and some pulp stories! So, what the hell were they thinking when they asked me to come there?

* On Saturday 15:00 I'll be talking about Fantastic Noir with Stepan Chapman et al. Ouch! But, seriously, these guys can come up with new words in no time: I googled "fantastic noir". No results, aside those that start with "Hey, Prince of Tides is fantastic noir film!" On Sunday 15:00 I'm on panel on Robert E. Howard. Now, that's more like me. Swords, semi-naked women, old gods, living dead... I'm going to read a Robert Jordan Conan novel on my way to Helsinki tomorrow morning, so I'll be able to comment on that aspect, too. I know he's much hated for those, but someone is sure buying them. (Or was. Does he write them anymore? The one I picked up at the library was from 1982 or -83.)

Edit: The first Con-Kurssi magazine here. It's PDF, so be prepared to hate the download time. This one was edited by Vesa Sisättö.

The Spider pulp novels

Will Murray, very hilariously, describes having read dozens of Spider pulp novels from the thirties.

Universal's werewolf movies

I watched the Universal's The Wolf Man Legacy DVD collection during the last week. Last night I watched the latter half of Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man and pretty much enjoyed myself. (I'm pretty far from the young intellectual I was back in the nineties (or even the late eighties! Christ!). I could send myself a hate letter from the past just like my friend Tosikko did a while back. What happened to Fellini and Bergman? (Must say that seeing Fellini's Satyricon and Casanova some time ago wore me out: why did they have to shout all the time?!))

The original Wolf Man (1941) isn't much though. It's pretty uninspired and too short (it's a rare occasion, when I say that a film is too short), but there are some good scenes and Jack Pierce's wolf make-up is pretty effective. There were also two other films that have nothing to do with the original werewolf movie (the other one of the two was even made earlier), but were fun to watch, though. (There will be a remake.)

The Werewolf of London (1935) was at times a good B movie with some nice touches and atmosphere, but at times it seemed that they didn't know what they were doing. There were some farcical scenes that weren't funny in the least and didn't really fit in with the rest of the material. Warner Oland as Dr. Yogami was delightful; someone could use the character in some sort of a pulp homage. After all, he's an adventurer who's also a werewolf. But I digress. It was clear also that the makers of this film didn't have their facts straight (if you can use the word here): the disease is called "lycanthrofobia", not "lycanthropia", and the werewolf is just shot to death - not with a silver bullet! Goddamit, get your stuff right!

The She-Wolf of London (1946) was the poorest of the bunch, even though Jean Yarbrough had some nice noirish touches here and there, especially near the end. It seems that the film was banned in Finland in 1947! The original screen story was written, by the way, by pulp fiction classic Dwight Babcock. (So, there must be something about the film in David Wilt's excellent book Hardboiled in Hollywood: Five Black Mask Writers and the Movies, from 1991, but I don't remember anymore what exactly and don't have the book at hand to check.)

Now, to Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man. It's funny that these kind of things are so old - you'd think that stuff like Alien Meets The Silver Surfer were invented in the postmodern nineties, but it ain't so. This one has a very silly title and it has its share of silly moments. There are some lapses in the continuity (one of the crucial characters is seemingly forgotten for at least ten minutes, which in a 74-minute film is a long time) and the relationship between Frankenstein's monster and the Wolf Man is shakily told, at best. Are they friends or enemies? How do they communicate? Why does the monster show the Wolf Man where his master's diary is kept?

But still this is the best of the bunch. Roy William Neill, adept at little thrillers, such as the Sherlock Holmes series with Basil Rathbone, directs with a very noirish touch, camera movements are smooth and the cinematography is all in all very good. Especially the opening scene is eerie. Lon Chaney is in good swing as a hysterical Lawrence Talbot who's awakened from his death sleep. The hystery adds to the noir feel of the film - you see, it's about a man who's doomed from the start. The script, with all its flaws, is by Curt Siodmak, who specialized in bringing noirishness into weird subjects, such as keeping a man's brains alive in a can.

(By the way, you must've figured out I'm not sick anymore!)

Arkiston Turun sarja

Sarja varmistui juuri äsken. Tässä lista vielä ilman lopullista järjestystä. Aloituspäivä on lokakuun eka maanantai. (Engl. summ.: As you may remember, I run the regional series of the Finnish Film Archive's screenings. Here's the series for the coming Fall.)

Altman: 3 Women
Bresson: Paholainen luultavasti
Dovzhenko: Shtshors
Güren: Yol
Kurosawa: Taivas ja helvetti
Brooks: In Cold Blood
Weir: Cars
Jaeckin: Gwendoline
Cassavetes: Shadows
Menzies: Invaders from Mars
Kurosawa: The Bad Sleep Well
Borowczyk: Synnin tarina

Tarzan clones in Spanish

I've linked to this before, but it seems complete now: Tarzan clones all over the world. Too bad it's in Spanish and I can't understand much of it. I'm credited at least two times - thanks, guys! Lots of covers and scans from comics - check them out at least! (Sorry for the overtly sexist and male chauvinist image! I tried another one and it wouldn't work.)

Väärää Arthur Conan Doylea

Pelästyin äsken pahanpäiväisesti. Sain käsiini vanhan Gummeruksen mainoksen, jossa on mm. Sabatinia ja Orczya. Mukana on myös Sir A. Conan Doylen Pakolaiset, josta kerrotaan, että "teoksen I osa antaa oivallisen kuvan Ludvig XIV:sta ja hänen hovistaan, hänen suosikkiensa ja lemmittyjensä vehkeilyistä ja hänen heikkoudestaan (...)". Joku saattaa muistaa, että yritin noin vuosi sitten selvittää, mikä Doylen kirja olisi alun perin Verenimijän uhri, jonka amerikansuomalainen kustantaja julkaisi Michiganissa vajaat sata vuotta sitten. Kirjoitin aiheesta jutun, jossa päädyin lopputulokseen, että kyseessä ei ole oikea Doylen teksti; juttu julkaistiin Ruumiin kulttuurissa (juttu alla).

En ole koskaan nähnyt Pakolaisia, vaikka sen ei Gummeruksen julkaisemana kirjana luulisi olevan kovin harvinainen, joten en tiennyt, että se sijoittuu Ludvig XIV:n aikaan. Hämmästyin asiaa siksi, että Verenimijän uhrikin on historiallinen romaani, joka tapahtuu suureksi osaksi Ranskassa! Luulin jo hetken ajan, että olin tehnyt väärän johtopäätöksen ja Ruumiin kulttuuriin pitää laittaa oikaisu (ja että kaikki pitävät minua nyt luuserina, joka ei osaa tutkia asioita kunnolla).

Minua hämäsi vielä se, että Simo Sjöblomin dekkaribibliografiassa Pakolaisten alkuperäiseksi nimeksi ilmoitetaan The Land of Mist. Se se ei kuitenkaan ole, sillä The Land of Mist on professori Challenger -romaani ja käsittelee spiritualismia. Pakolaisissa itsessään ei alkuperäistä nimeä löydy, mutta parissa guuglailulla selvisi että kyse on romaanista The Refugees. Sekin löytyi netistä kokonaisuudessaan ja näytti muutaman sivun silmäilyn perusteella samalta kuin salaperäinen Verenimijän uhri. En muistanut, millä nimellä olin tallentanut Ruumiin kulttuurin jutun, ja kesti aika kauan ennen kuin sen löysin (mikä tietysti lisäsi paniikkiani; olihan kyseessä tutkijan urani vakavastiotettavuus), mutta kun sen viimein löysin, saatoin huoahtaa: Pakolaiset ja Verenimijän uhri ovat kuin ovatkin eri romaaneja, ja Verenimijän uhri on edelleen vailla oikeata tekijäänsä.

Ja vielä juttu perään:

Saksalainen Holmes ja väärennetty Conan Doyle

Suomenkielisen rikoskirjallisuuden bibliografisteja on pitkään hämännyt kaksi kirjaa, jotka ovat täällä ilmestyneet Arthur Conan Doylen nimellä, mutta joille ei löydy vastinetta salapoliisikirjallisuuden mestarin tuotannosta.
Porilaisen Otto Andersinin kustannusliikkeen vuonna 1918 julkaisema Aatelinen varas on 68-sivuinen vihkonen, joka tuntuu oudolta jo heti kättelyssä. Sherlock Holmes saa kaksi kirjettä, jotka on kirjoitettu eri käsialoilla. Toisessa lähetetään terveisiä metsästysjuhlista Kettrenbow-nimisessä paikassa ja toisessa lukee vain "Auttakaa minua!" Holmes ei olisi Holmes, jos hän ei välittömästi tunnistaisi, että kirjeet on eri käsialoista riippumatta kirjoittanut yksi ja sama ihminen. Selitys: englantilaisen yläluokan ihmiset osaavat kirjoittaa yhtä hyvin kummallakin kädellä. Tämän jälkeen Holmesin luokse tulee eräs Charley Friller, joka sanoo keräilevänsä timantteja. Hänen ongelmansa on, että hän on viime aikoina löytänyt timantteja paikoista, joihin hän ei niitä ole laittanut.
Aatelinen varas on absurdi tarina, jonka tunnistaa nopeasti väärennetyksi. Holmesin päättelykyky on pahassa ruosteessa tai hän on ottanut normaalia suuremman annoksen kokaiinia.
Selvin syy, jonka takia tarina ei voi olla aito ja alkuperäinen, on se, että Watsonin tilalla on tyyppi nimeltä Harry Taxon (Watsonia ei tarinassa nähdä lainkaan). Taxon on Holmesin oppilas ja haluaa tulla yhtä suureksi etsiväksi kuin tämäkin. Taxon on tietysti fiksumpi kuin Watson ja auttaa Holmesia Aatelisessa varkaassa ratkaisemaan rikoksen.
Holmeskin on erilainen. Hänellä on Conan Doylen sankarista poiketen erilaisia teknisiä keksintöjä - hän esimerkiksi näkee peililaitteestaan, kuka on ovella.
Aatelisen varkaan ovat todennäköisesti kirjoittaneet saksalaiset herrat nimeltä Kurt Matull ja Theo Blankensee. Tarinat ilmestyivät alun perin Detektiv Sherlock Holmes -lehdessä vuosina 1907-1911. Harry Taxon sai lopulta oman lehtensäkin, nimeltä Harry Taxon und sein Meister, joka ilmestyi vuosina 1908-1909.
Taxon-tarinat olivat suosittuja muuallakin Euroopassa ja niistä ilmestyi kirjan mittainen kokoelma Memorias Intimas del Rey de los Detectives Espanjassa. Tästä kirjasta Anthony Boucher valitsi ja käänsi tarinan "Jack El Destripator". Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazinessa ilmestyneessä tarinassa Holmes ja Taxon ottavat kiinni Viiltäjä-Jackin, joka on ehtinyt jo 37 uhriin asti. Tarina ilmestyi uudestaan vuonna 1953 Allan Barnardin toimittamassa Viiltäjä-Jack -kokoelmassa The Harlot Killer.
Matullin ja Blankenseen toinen suosittu sankari oli Lord Lister, joka tunnettiin myös nimellä Raffles. Kirjoittajakaksikko oli siis nyysinyt tämänkin hahmon toiselta kirjoittajalta (brittiläiseltä E. W. Hornungilta), mutta Lord Lister vaihtoi nopeasti nimensä ja hänestä tuli John W. Sinclair.
Aatelisen varkaan alkuperä sentään nettiaikana löytyy helposti, mutta vaikeampi, ellei suorastaan mahdoton tapaus on Verenimijän uhri. Kirja ilmestyi suomenkielisenä Michiganissa kahdessa osassa vuosina 1906-1907 ja on Suomessa äärimmäisen harvinainen. Kannessa ja nimiösivulla lukee selvästi Arthur Conan Doyle.
Conan Doylen keräilijät voivat kuitenkin huokaista helpotuksesta, koska 99,99-prosenttisella varmuudella se ei ole Conan Doylen kirjoittama. Kirjan päähenkilö on paroni Luc de Kerjean, joka järjestelee salaliittoa kuningas Ludvig XV:tä vastaan. Tapahtuma-aika on 1770-luku, ja tarinan "verenimijällä" tarkoitetaan salaperäistä Punaisen talon keisarinnaa. Historiallisen salaliittoseikkailun lajityyppiä Conan Doyle ei missään vaiheessa kokeillut ja romaani muistuttaakin enemmän Alexandre Dumasin tai tämän jäljittelijöiden, vaikkapa Ponson du Terrailin, teoksia.
On tietysti mahdollista, että Verenimijän uhri on kirja, jota Conan Doyle ei saanut myydyksi kuin amerikansuomalaiselle kustantamolle, mutta aika epätodennäköiseltä sekin kuulostaa.

Aatelinen varas: Sherlock Holmes'in salapoliisiseikkailuja. Otto Andersin: Pori 1918.
Verenimijän uhri. Osa 1. Kaleva: Michigan 1906. Osa 2. Kaleva: Michigan 1907.

Tässä, tässä ja tässä kuvia aiheeseen liittyen. English summary: It's about some fake Conan Doyles that I was writing about earlier. I thought I'd made a mistake after tumbling on an old book commercial leaflet. It turned out that I was still right.

Stanley Morgan

I read Stanley Morgan's Kuoleman viidakko/Octopus Hill (1970) yesterday, mostly skipping parts of it, for my Pulpografia Britannica project. I found out today that Morgan has his own website here. It has covers for all of his paperbacks, including translations, and a list of his appearances in films, such as Dr. No! The book I read wasn't really much (some of the action scene with flesh-eating baboons were close to good, though), but he seems to have been very popular in his day with his erotic Russ Tobin books.

Being sick

I had to do some work on the computer even while being sick, so I decided to blog a little. I couldn't sleep much during the night, feeling at times too hot and at times too cold and finally got a headache. I got up 05:45 and ate a little and drank some Finrexin (with caffein, vitamin C and pain-killer) and then fell on a couch thinking if I should read or watch telly. I fell asleep for a minute and I then just watched the ceiling, thinking I'll die soon.

It got a little better afterwards, but I've been mainly lying down (laying?) and reading comics and some Conan stories by Robert E. Howard and sleeping and feeling all wiped out.

Just wanted to mention that earlier I read Dave Zeltserman's debut novel Fast Lane, which I can heartily recommend to all the lovers of hardboiled. It's very sociopathic and it reminded me a bit of my as-yet unpublished PI novel (you remember, The Big Blue Jerk-Off?).

Am not in the mood to post pictures, given what happened last night, or even make hyperlinks. Hyperlinks are for jerk-offs.

The Stirring cover

Here's the cover by Timo Ronkainen for the Stirring Science Stories. It's for a very funny story by Petri Salin, who's simply one of the best of current Finnish SF writers. (Fuuuuuck... this takes time to download! I thought I'd just do a quick post and I've been at this for at least 20 minutes, doing nothing useful. And the picture won't fucking show! What say you if I just leave this here and post the cover when the mag comes out from the printers and scan the cover and then post it? It's a very good cover, you'll just have to wait. And patience is rewarded etc., etc. Christ Almighty this Blogger thing!)

And just to clarify things: I'm slowly getting sick, with a sore throat. I think I got it from Kauto who got it from daycare. So, I maybe won't be blogging for a day or two. But you won't die.

New fictionmags

I've been editing and layouting two new fictionmags: the all-story issue of Ruudinsavu/Gunsmoke, the magazine of The Finnish Western Society, and Järkyttäviä Tieteistarinoita/Stirring Science Stories. The latter is published for the future weekend's FinnCon and it features new stories by Petri Salin, Harri Erkki, Boris Hurtta (or actually B. Hurtanheimo) and Jaakko Ensio. There's also a reprint, an anonymous SF story from 1949. The magazine's supposed to be funny and parodic.

The Ruudinsavu issue is a real McCoy: it features translations of stories by Ben Bridges (AKA David Whitehead) and old pulpster D.B. Newton. There are also four new stories by Finnish writers, two of which are veteran crime author Totti Karpela who started out as a teenager penning three Western stories for a dying Finnish pulp mag, Seikkailujen Maailma, and Harri István Mäki, who's known for his books for kids and young adults. He said that he's always wanted to write a Western story - and he delivered a good story, very funny and violent.

So, it's only me who keeps the fictionmagging in Finland alive! (Apart from the romance magazines of Kolmiokirja.)

Here is the Ruudinsavu cover. It's by Jukka Murtosaari and it's for no particular story. The Stirring cover in another post.

Hardboiled or cozies or what?

Editor and publisher Otto Penzler is known largely for his lack of respect for cozies, the mild-mannered, domestic mysteries with knitting old granny amateur detectives. Penzler likes his mysteries hardboiled and bloody.

So do I, but I wouldn't - at least in public - condemn the writers of cozies to Hell, as Penzler seems to be doing. And I'd never, ever say they are bad books because they are written by women. C'mon! Men can write just as lousy as women (and often do) and there have been lots of women who can come up with a dark noir tale (Margaret Millar, Helen Nielsen, Patricia Highsmith from the old ones; Megan Abbott, Sara Gran, from the new ones; and there are lots of others). Men writers spinning their 700-page megathrillers is also just as boring as Agatha Christie's heirs writing about tea parties and murders committed through means that are totally implausible.

Alligator caused it all

Bill Crider posted a nice YouTube clip, cut up from various movies which all use the same scream that was first used in a Western film in the early fifties. It's a rousing clip; check it out.

Titles for books

I've always had difficulties to come up with good titles. I've written hundreds or even thousands of movie reviews, short articles, long academic articles, short stories, and some novels. All the time I may have been thinking about the title longer than I've spent writing the said item.

I'm having the same difficulty with a private eye novel I've written. I'm editing it and I'll be sending it out pretty soon to a crime novel contest and also to various publishers. It's not your typical private eye novel and there's really no crime to be solved (even though my hero does take a case). When I wrote the book last Fall, it didn't have any kind of a title. The file just went by as "Private Eye Novel". When I last sent it to a contest (and got only a thank-you letter), I christened it The Last Call. There is a phone call in the last page, which may or may not be the hero's last one, and the title sure is appropriate. But it's pretty sentimental and clichéd, too. And the book is not sentimental in the least. I'd like to change the title, but don't know what to call it.

With articles and other shorter non-fiction stuff, you can always paraphrase other media, such as movies and TV shows, and reuse the titles with only a little change. This gets pretty tiresome soon - I, for one, have seen enough titles made up from The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Or, for that matter, The Raiders of Lost Ark. (It's actually "Searchers" in Finland and you can guess it's been wildly overused.) No more of that, please!

And while it can work in newspapers or other periodicals, it sure won't work with novels. Who'd read a brutal private eye novel called The Unbearable Heaviness of Sleuthing, or some such? It would sound like it's a collection of witty columns.

One other point: The generic noir titles don't translate very well into Finnish. So, while I could call my novel something like Lonesome Killing, it just wouldn't do in here. I also couldn't really use the word "blue", because the word "sininen" doesn't carry the same overtones in Finnish. Hmm.. let me think, though... There's a scene with a guy jerking off in the first pages and it figures throughout the book, partially influencing everything that happens afterwards. What about The Blue Jerk-Off? (In Finnish: Sininen runkku?) Would you read that? Or even The Big Blue Jerk-Off?

One of my all time favourites

I'm going to throw this book away and I thought I'd scan it first and post the cover here. The book is the Finnish translation of Dan J. Marlowe's One Endless Hour that was first published in 1968 by Fawcett Gold Medal. It's a crime novel with a cold-blooded criminal as its hero - very worrisome, very bloody, but also very surreal in its outcomes. Especially the end has stuck to my mind as an quintessential ending to a life of crime. You don't get any tougher and weirder than that. (The Finnish title means "The Night Without Mercy". Don't know about the cover. It could be Spanish.)

Why am I throwing the book away? I bought it recently, because I wasn't sure whether I really have the book or not (I remember reading it at the university library), but when I got home I noticed there were several pages missing (163-190, to be exact).

By the way, no one seems to be making Wikipedia entries for these forgotten paperback masters. Should I be doing it? Luckily there's the Thrilling Detective site. They have an entry for Marlowe.

Ready for some drooling?

Here's a picture from a Finnish pasta commercial leaflet from the early sixties. The thing looking like a banana is a big sausage covered with cheese. The things on the side are grilled apples. I think that's ketchup in the right corner.

AAAAAAARGH

Digging through some dusty piles of paper I noticed that I hadn't reported back on how I'd used the stipend I'd got for my Pulpografia Britannica project - and it was goddamn due to last January! Hope they won't slaughter me... and deny me the future stipends. Sometimes I feel like I'm such a loser who can't handle simplest things.

Blogeista kirjoina

(English summary: this is about blogs being published as print books.)

Ystäväni Tosikko kirjoitti Minna Hapulin blogikirjasta ja innostuin kommentoimaan melkein liuskan edestä. Siirrän kommentit myös tänne, ihan vain sen takia, että ne joskus julkaistaisiin kirjana:

Joku arvioi jossain lehdessä jokin aika sitten kolumnikokoelmia ja totesi, ettei lehdessä toimivista kolumneista saa kokonaista kirjaa aikaiseksi. Ne kuuluu lukea lehdestä aamukahvilla tai iltapäivällä bussissa. Sama pätee blogeihin. Ohitsevirtaavat ajatukset ovat juuri niitä. Aika, joka tekee kirjan kaikesta, on väliaikaisuutta juhliva ja ylistävä aika.

Hassua tässä on se, että ajatus ei ole mitenkään uusi. Blogien julkaiseminen kirjana liittyy nähdäkseni siihen romanttiseen myyttiin, jonka mukaan Tärkeän Ihmisen kaikki sanomiset on pantava kansien väliin. Maailmahan oli 1800-luvulla ja vielä 1900-luvun alussa kaiken maailman koottuja teoksia. Tehdäänhän niitä vieläkin, mutta kyllä niiden kulta-aika oli jo kauan sitten. Paitsi blogitekstien. Romanttinen ajatus Tärkeän Ihmisen satunnaisten sanomisten merkittävyydestä kokee nyt renessanssin.

Tämä ajatuskulkuni liittyy siihen, että selailin eilen illalla nojatuoliin rötkähdettyäni Tieteellisen sosialismin kirjastoon kuuluvaa teosta "Taiteesta ja estetiikasta", johon oli koottu kirjeistä, päiväkirjoista, artikkelin poikasista, kokonaisista artikkeleista ja arvosteluista kaikki, KAIKKI, mitä Marx ja Engels olivat sanoneet erinäisistä kirjoista ja kirjailijoista ja taiteesta ja musiikista ja muusta. Osan kohdalla ihmettelin vain, miksi ne oli julkaistu.

Tietysti sen takia, että Marxin ja Engelsin tieteellinen sosialismi on jonkinlainen Gesammtkunstwerk, jonka merkittävyys näkyy silloinkin, kun herrat keskustelevat venäjän kielestä ja sen erosta saksan kieleen nähden. Sama pätee kehen tahansa Tärkeään Ihmiseen, jonka kirjeet julkaistaan kymmenenä niteenä.

An old Koululainen mag from 1972

Here's a Finnish fictionmag from 1972: it's Koululainen, meant for kids who can already read. There are some short stories and vignettes and some non-fiction stuff and of course crosswords etc. The cover is kind of scary, don't you think? I read Koululainen back in the late seventies and early eighties, but don't remember much of it.
Nothing much of interest in there, but I got it free from a flea market.

Old sneakers commercial

Very nice old Nokia sneakers commercial from the said issue of the Koululainen magazine. I'd buy any of these any day. (Yes, Nokia started out making tyres and sneakers.)

The Ilves series

Here's by the way a nice link to the Finnish Ilves series that published lots of American hardboiled classics, with some of the translations abridged, I'm sorry to say. (Usually the early ones in the series were abridged, the books from # 25 on are intact. And they are heavily recommended.)

And here's some more, with the Evan Hunter title I mention below.

Evan Hunter: The Evil Sleep!

Here's the original cover for the Hunter book I mention below. I didn't think it was a very good novel when I first read it, but then again the Finnish translation may well be abridged or otherwise not very good. It's about a musician who's on a heroin trip. It seems the book was rewritten and reprinted as by Richard Marsten under the title So Nude, So Dead (Crest 1956).

Rabe: Murder Me For Nickels

Read the Peter Rabe book I mentioned earlier. It was good, but there was just too much stuff going on and I kept being distracted from the book and it took me too long to get it finished. Kids and reading don't mix very well.

Rabe keeps up the tension with just so little that it's almost amazing: nothing seems to happen, yet there's lots of stuff going on all the time. Some of the scenes are hilarious, such as Jack St. Louis (the head guy in the book) getting the mixer removed from the thugs he's himself hired to damage the place. It's no wonder Rabe wrote one of the funniest Batman TV shows I've ever seen (the one in which Joker tries to get Batman into the madhouse; there's a scene where there's the lunatic squad of the police force driving on the road on their way to pick up Batman; there's also Alfred impersonating Batman and climbing up a wall).

There's just one small glitch in all this: the Stark House books are not very appealing. The covers are ugly, the books are too big and there's just too many printing errors (maybe due to scanning and OCRing process; wish they had more money to get someone to type them!). But I don't want to complain. They bring us the most wanted vintage noir and the books are quite cheap: the original Fawcett Gold Medal edition of the Rabe is about 50-60 $ in Abebooks. The Stark House reprint contains also another novel by Rabe and costs 20 bucks. (Plus shipping overseas, of course.)

The cover on top is the original one. It was used (as a mirror image) in Finland to accompany Evan Hunter's first mystery novel, The Evil Sleep! (1952; the Finnish title is Painajainen/Nightmare; it's Ilves # 31, 1963). It was published by a small outfit called Falcon and I understand it's pretty rare. The Finnish book of it is quite common and you can get it for five euros, tops. The lady in the cover, by the way, must have the best legs in the whole universe.

Flash Gordon in Finnish

I'm currently writing an article for a reference book on comic artists that my friend Ville Hänninen is editing. Here are some samples from the first Flash Gordon book that was published in Finland in 1938. The cover on the left was drawn - at least I suppose so - by a man called Martti Masala, who drew almost every cover for the publishing house Ilmarinen in the thirties and early fourties. I think it's a pretty good one, but those guns really look like Raymond Loewy cars.

Flash Gordon has been translated as "Iskevä Salama", which is actually more like "Striking Lightning" or some such. He was called Salama Gordon at times, which comes from Swedish. He was Blixt Gordon in Sweden (Blixt meaning "lightning").

You can see more Finnish Flash Gordons here (only covers). The larger site of Finnish SF comics here.

Flash Gordon in trouble

As he is always... Here's a page from the Finnish Flash Gordon album. Dale Arden is called Tuula in this, Tuula being a very common Finnish name. It sort of demystifies the whole stuff - like Flash Gordon really was James or Bill. (He's Jim in the pirated Israeli novels. I believe this site tells all about it, but can't read Hebrew.)

More Flash Gordon

Another page from the 1938 Flash Gordon album. Nice bondage scene and marvellous heroics. Flash Gordon has gills in this story - they were made (and finally removed) surgically.

Flash Gordon in Finland

Here's a logo that was used only once in the Flash Gordon book from 1938. The caption says "We sing of the guns and the brave". I don't know if this read also in the original Gordons.

The Flash Gordon series was originally published in Finland in the weekly story paper* Jännityslukemisto/Suspense Stories that was Ilmarinen's product.

* I hesitate to use the words "pulp mag" here, since Jännityslukemisto was never a real pulp. The paper is right, but the size is too big. It's too close to A4 (this standard size may not be too familiar for our American readers.)

Paperback reprint of Marton Taiga

There's not been many paperback reprints of Finnish vintage pulp fiction. Some formerly serialized novels of Outsider and Marton Taiga were published as large paperbacks in the late eighties (with cool covers of Jukka Murtosaari, who does illustrations for Isku and articles for Pulp), but formerly there wasn't much. In the mid-seventies, big Finnish publishing house Tammi tried to cash in with paperback reprints of some novels by Marton Taiga. They were originally published by Tammi in the late fourties. Taiga wasn't solely Tammi's author and published with several different outfits, such as Ilmarinen and Mantere that don't exist anymore.

For some reason, the Taiga paperbacks didn't catch on with the readers. I don't know why. The books were nice classic paperbacks, with illustrated covers. Maybe the high-brow Finnish literal culture had made people think that paperbacks are crap, that even these Marton Taigas are some ultraviolent avenger stuff. Even though they are pretty nice and harmless, slightly humorous gangster and adventure stories.

The book above was the first one in the long-running Porkkana/Carrot series that features a young kid called Kid Sparrow as its hero. He has burning red hair, hence his nickname. Carrot works as an errand boy for a big newspaper in New York. The illustrator is not known and the illustration is unsigned.