oakfarm | Entries tagged with writers

About two years ago Swedish writer Sven Lindquist died. Since he was a writer that had meant a lot to me, I wrote one entry about him: Another type of celebrity death. When writing that entry I knew that I should have written more about racism and colonialism, since that was what he wrote about the last decades of his life. However, on those subjects. This year I have seen Sven Lindquist mentioned in articles about the HBO documentary series Exterminate all the brutes* and about the movie African Apocalypse. I haven’t seen the documentary, nor the film, it’s still like Lindquist, back in 1992 when the published a book with the same title as the HBO series: Exterminate all the brutes, was thirty years before his time? It’s even so that the trailer to Exterminate all the brutes quotes the book, and the French military expedition that’s the topic of African Apocalypse plays a big role in the book.

*Of course you might remember the phrase from Heart of darkness and/or from Apocalypse now.

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One lesson from elementary school that I remember was when we had a visitor, an author. She, the author, said that all writers write about their childhood. Since her childhood wasn’t that great, her novel characters all ended up having difficulties in life. Then she added that Astrid Lindgren had a happy childhood and everyone who has read her can see that. Astrid Lindgren (1907-2002) the creator of Pippi Longstocking, if I need to add that.

Anyway, the reason I write down that is that I just saw the Astrid Lindgren quote: "’It's not easy to be a child’ I read in a newspaper and was most surprised, because it is not every day you read something in the newspapers that is really true." So I remember that lesson and thought: “What do you mean? If not even Astrid Lindgren thought it was easy to be a child, what hope is there for other children?”

Actually I also remember that her first son had it rough. She had him when she was nineteen, out of wedlock and he spent his first years in foster care. Well, the thing is that Astrid Lindgren of course most have been in contact with children and grownups with bad childhoods. Maybe she didn’t think about herself. Then, people like to think that Pippi Longstocking is the reason Greta Thunberg is Swedish. Reading Astrid Lindgren to your children will increase the chance they become activists. However the point being, I think it’s safe to say that Thunberg hasn’t had a great childhood. I acctually find Thunberg similary to Ghandi. People living for activism and living as they teach (hope the last makes sense in English). But that's another story.

Another Astrid Lindgren quote is: "Everything great that happened in the world first happened in someone's imagination." That’s nicer.

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Next week I’m travelling south for the course again. Since the teacher said she love Michel Houellebecq, I have to remove my most Houellebecq inspired scentensis in my text. Somehow it should be embarrassing if she discovered I took anything from that French writer.

Good old Houellebecq with his chain smoking of cigarettes he hold between his long finger and ring finger. And beginning so much of a provocateur he was prosecuted for hate speech against muslims. He was found not guilty.

Now the latest about him is that has lost several teeths and isn’t an atheist anymore. Well, not saying those two things are related, it’s just the two things one remember from recent interviews. Chain Smoking and tooth loss sounds more related, however. Paul Austers has apparently changed to e-cigarettes, maybe Houellebecq has done that too.

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textlabbet,
writers

Having my formative years in the 1990s means I thought everything was going to get better all the time. Peacefull protests had ended the cold war, had taken down the Berlin wall, and liberated of the Baltic republic, Ukraine, and other states. And all that without a single nuclear armed Pershing II missile was fired. In South Africa the white supremacist regime fell. Even in the Middle East it, for a short time, looked promising. At the same time there was the war in Yugoslavia and the genocide in Rwanda, but things still looked relative good.

That was international politics. But good things also happened domestically, in Sweden the murder rate was cut in half between 1989-2012. Explanations included an older population and economic stability. But now the murder rate is going up, and so is sexual assault. The same pattern is apparently as well seen in the US and in England and Wales (Scotland and North Ireland must have their own statistic), the murder rate was going down, but now it’s going up.

Then it comes to international politics I am of course not the first to write this. To mention odd things. On the culture pages they say that Austrian writer Stefan Zweig is rediscover now since our time is similar to his. First a happy period of globalisation and progress until 1914, then a long destructive era. You might I have seen Grand Hotel Budapest, that’s inspired by Stefan Zweig’s writing. (In case you didn't know that.) The title of this entry is selfish, since I’m hardly the one most affected by this, but yes, it all makes me depressed.

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Someone said that you when writing could take one third of your story from real life, one third from literatur you have read and one third from your fantasy. I am sure it is a good advice. It also looks simple, just take random things in your head and put it together. Turns out that it isn't. The thing is to know what parts you should use, just because something has happened IRL doesn't mean it could be used. One example. One person in my novel project was slightly based on A. A was a girl that like one and a half decade ago, when I was 20, approached me at a party and started to talk to me. Then we didn’t see each other for some time. However two or three years later me and her was in the same school and again she approached me, but claimed she didn’t remembered me. Add some details and we get when I was young, I apparently was the type of this one girl. Something else that’s apparently is that I’m still proud of that and I wanted to use the story in my novel. See I even write it down here.

Not mentioning that it could be unfair to her to base a character on her (writers do that all the but it’s another story). To write something down "just because it really happened" doesn’t mean it fit a story or even that it’s believably. Maybe this entry does not adding and maybe it’s too long. All I’m saying is that the “1/3 from literature, 1/3 from your own life and 1/3 from fantasy” suggestion, sounds easy, but doesn’t have to be.

Should I write something else about writing? I have know two persons who have had books published. Both complained that their books didn’t sell. One actually is a guy who now work at my old work. I was hoping his novels should be translated to English so I could brag about it for my international friends. The problem is that he say he sells around one book a week. He is doing his authorship "the old fashion way". He’s published on a big publish house, he has been on TV and he's been hold lectures about his books but they do not sell. Since they do not sell I guess I not going to be in the situation I can brag about having meet him for my international friends.

His two novels are not bad and I feel like writing a short presentation, so here it is. They both take place in North Sweden, the first novel take place in the 17-century with nomads, settlers and Germans who looks for ore. I also like his research on the subject, like when he use a north Sami word for the herb angelica (Angelica archangelica).

The second book take place in a near future, when Sweden have build a wall against Finland to stop Finnish refugees. Whatever a wall make you think of the story is not inspired by Trump. It’s a comment to the refugees situation on the Mediterranean sea, but he changed it from the Mediterranean sea to the Baltic sea.

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writers,
writing

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