fredag 23. april 2010

ELLIPSE



I forgot how the earth looked like,
one morning in the mist.
Kind of like green and all,
and all that blue in the midst.
I wonder how the earth would be,
for some one who couldn't see
colours like blue and green.

søndag 7. februar 2010

DIRK

"Six by nine. Forty-two."
"That's it. That's all there is."
"I always thought there was something fundamentally wrong with the universe."
The phrase above is from one of the most popular books ever written, at least in our part of the universe. Douglas Adams wrote the book "A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy", which was published in 1979, and it is from this book I've extracted the quotation. A computer designed to come up witht the answer to "Life, the Universe and Everything" delivers the answer "42", which is not met with gratitude from the people who made the computer. Another gigantic computer is made to figure out what the question is that can fit to the answer, which life itself is part of, but unfortunately this computer is destroyed just before the question is ready.
The computer is Earth.

Douglas Adams died in 2001 only 49 years old, which is a tragedy for all good story-writing. Before he died he also wrote two books about the worn-down private detective Dirk Gently, who is thrown into several more or less crazy happenings. You always laugh when you read Douglas Adams' books. I often choose to read one of his books when I want a break from the boring books and texts I have to read at the University. They often combine norse Gods, time-travel, smart girls and the stupid guys who are in love with them.

Adams was a very smart man, with lot of crazy ideas, and his followers are mostly geeks and nerds, which isn't that weird, seeing that he uses lot of facts that are a bit scientific. But you don't really need any background information to enjoy his books. They are incredibly detailed and everything is explained at least one time, and as long as you keep an eye out for the detailes, the reading experience is awesome!

lørdag 6. februar 2010

GARP

This is John Irving. John never knew his father, due to the fact that his mother was not married at the time of his birth, and this has influenced a lot of his works. In 1978 he wrote his first best-seller, "The World According to Garp", which is a book about a man named T.S. Garp (Technical Sergeant). He is named after his father, who was a Technical Sergeant, and who got parts of shrapnel in his brains during the Second World War, and who is reduced to something resembling a vegetable, unable to take care of himself. The only word he can pronounce is his own name "Garp". In the first chapter of the book we get to know how Garp's mother (who is a nurse) decides to get pregnant with this man, since she does not want a husband, just because she wants a child. Irving claims that this is not a selfbiography, but, well... basically when authors claim that their works aren't selfbiographies, it just confirmes the whole theory.

He wrote Helen that "a part of adolescence is feeling that there's no one else around you who's enough like yourself to understand you." - The World According to Garp, ch. 5

John Irving is still alive today, and he is working on a new novel as we speak. One might say that Irving had some kind of difficult childhood, not knowing who his father was and all that, and a great deal of his characters don't know who one or more of their parents are.

The easiest thing in the world is to write about something close to you, the tricky part is to write about things you have no knowledge of.

Well, most people choose not to write at all, and most of the good authors write about things close to you, Irving is no exception. That does not make him a bad writer, just a normal one. Not having to look up every fact while you write is definetly a good sign and it doesn't complicate the whole writing process more than necessary.

It's by the way always fun to write about sex, and Irving does that a lot. Either he has had some pretty weird experiences or his imagination is just abnormally good.

Or both.


fredag 5. februar 2010

TROTTER

For Ingrid

I keep having some trouble with the scenario..
Which way goes the train and
how are we supposed to get back?
I've tied my shoes and buckled my belt,
how come the trousers are always too big?
Let's go downtown and drink our problems
out the window.

PULP


Charles Bukowski was born in America in 1920. His mother was German and her name was Katharina, which is almost my name, but not quite. His parents moved to America after the First World War, when the German economy collapsed. Economies collapses as economies do best. Bukowski wrote the book "Pulp" just before his death (he died of cancer) and the book was published by his widow. His gravestone reads: "Don't try". I like that.

Don't try.

"Somebody at one of these places ... asked me: "What do you do? How do you write, create?" You don't, I told them. You don't try. That's very important: not to try, either for Cadillacs, creation or immortality. You wait, and if nothing happens, you wait some more. It's like a bug high on the wall. You wait for it to come to you. When it gets close enough you reach out, slap out and kill it. Or if you like its looks you make a pet out of it." - C.B.

The word "pulp" can mean one of these things:

  1. A soft, moist, shapeless mass or matter.
  2. A magazine or book containing lurid subject matter and being characteristically printed on rough,unfinished paper.
  3. The soft center of a fruit
  4. The soft center of a tooth
  5. A mixture of wood, cellulose and/or rags and water ground up to make paper.
  6. Mass of chemically processed wood fibres (cellulose).


His characters are often the low-lifes of society, such as poor detectives,getting impossible jobs, which is the main character in this book. In this book the detectiveNicky Belane is hired by Lady Death to find a deceased, French writer named Céline. Bukowski dedicated the book to "bad writing", which basically says it all.


Writing good is not something you do, it does you. So to speak.

"Pulp" is not a long book. Books do not have to contain an endless amount of pages to be good books. The reason why people write books with an endless amount of pages is because they don't know how to write good books. The good books become bad books and the bad books become good books. How many times can you write "books" before someone tells you that you're repeating yourself?

14. I've checked. Still 5 to go.

Bukowski was a low-life. It's the low-lifes that write the best books. If you're not a low-life, you're an upper-life, and upper-lifes spend too much money on food and thinking too higly of themselves, and most of them write too well. Bukowski didn't write well, but he wrote great books.

Not dedicating what you write to bad writing means that you're a fan of good writing, and being a fan of good writing means that you try to write good yourself. And therein lies the problem: Don't try.


"Dedicated to bad writing."