der mann ohne eigenschaften

This article has been going around social media: As West races back to travel, ‘zero-Covid’ economies like Hong Kong, Singapore and Australia face hermit risk. One detail I noticed was this words ”Britain, where more than half the population has received at least one vaccine dose”. Only half? Last week, not the week that ends today, the week before, we passed 30% vaccinated with at least one dose. Are we just 20% behind? The headline I have seen in British papers told me we in the EU are crazy bad at getting vaccines. Ok, headlines are hyperbolic and shouldn’t be taken literally. The point is, I was under the impression we were much more behind. 

With small letters. Right or not, the reason that the South China morning post article was going around was that the paper is so close to the Chinese regime and the article is seen as prof the regime sees problems with the zero-covid-strategy.

Related. I got my second vaccine dose last Friday. Yesterday I had fever and my body was hurting. You know it actually helped to write. I was spending some time writing for that reason. It made me think of other things when the pain in my legs, back and head. Cool. And when I write about writing, I can, in a subordinate clause, mention that I have sent book scripts to some publishers. The funny thing is, after I have sent it I have realized two things I want to change. So now those two things feels very important and I feel the need to send the improved manus to other publishers. I have always loved when musicians change the lyrics, compared to on the albums, during live performers. That’s how I work. Always trying to improve my texts.

Well I wrote a bit about the teacher who thought we should write more immoral thing. Everyone want to be so good. Everyone follow the correct basic values, but art is an opportunity to explore the evil, the immoral, the bad values. Being a man who was a depressed teenager in the 90's, an example that I will think of is Placebo's song, Slackerbitch. Two decades ago, I one or two times saw depressed teenage girls who took the alliance "Slackerbitch" online. And somewhere online, I read that the singer in Placebo has said that Slackerbitch includes misogyny, but the one who thinks like the guy in the song is wrong. So in such cases did the guys in the group explore misogyny in a way that today's Swedish artists would not dare? Because Swedish cultural figures try to be so good and politically correct?

By the way, the interpretation of the song is that it is about a man who has had sex with a woman. Then he goes home to his boyfriend and says, "sorry, I didn't mean to do that, she means nothing, she's just a 'slackerbitch / faghag whore'". If it's the words that make the song misogyny, or if there's anything else I've missed, I can not tell you about it.


Then another thought I have from the course is the question of the inner logic that is found in stories. An example, a text a course participant had written content a description of two men of middle age, who ate homemade French fries (the novel take place in Brussel), drank whiskey and cognac, smoked cigars and sat together in their bathrobes on the couch. The story contained the words: "they could not keep their hands off each other, they had always been like that, even twenty years ago." What people reacted to was, of course, the words "even twenty years ago". What do you mean "even"? Are the young, beautiful and in love, notoriously bad at touching each other? But there might be an inner logic that they would not have been touchy twenty years ago. I have to admit that, I first thought that they might have been be pathologically afraid of HIV. Then I realized they simply could not have been out twenty years ago. That for that reason they would have tried to hide their love. The point is that there may be an inner logic of something that looks strange. If something in a text looks strange, you can ask if the writer had any meaning in writing like that.

Otherwise, my novel project addresses the new biology and it is written in the form Decamerone meets Douglas Coupland meets Robert Musil. I'm Swedish and thus Americanized and therefore it's no wonder I'm inspired by Douglas Coupland. Okay, he is Canadian but never mind that, several of his books takes place in the United States. And I am a well read European, hence Robert Musil. Decameron, on the other hand, is not there because I'm a well read European. I have read the book but I'm more inspired by Douglas Coupland and two of his books - Generation X (1991) and Generation A (2009) - are built as Decameron. Decameron, by the way, contains more sex than my novel will do if I ever finish it, which I most likely will not do. Another story.

When you give people too much information, they instantly resort to pattern recognition to structure the experience. The work of the artist is to find patterns.

- Marshall McLuhan