Month: December 2019 (Page 5 of 13)

 

Videos

Part I:

Part II:

Part III:

Note: In its entirely, Liveblog by Megan Boyle is over 25 hours long. It is broken into three parts, the longest of which is 22 hours, 40 minutes. Due to the length of the video, Vimeo tends to experience playback issues. For smoother playback, it is recommended that you visit the actual Vimeo page (rather than the embedded videos above) and download the original file.

 

Details

In mid-2018, Nick Toti wrote a series of articles on the movies of Megan Boyle (made in collaboration with her ex-husband Tao Lin) for the website Hammer to Nail. Prior to this, Nick did not know Megan, but through the process of interviewing and writing about her, a friendly acquaintanceship developed. Later that year, Nick read a notice online suggesting that Megan would be doing an insane 48-hour-long nonstop reading of her 700+ page novel, Liveblog. Nick immediately reached out to ask Megan if she wanted him to fly to New York and document the event. She said yes. The result of this misguided endeavor is Liveblog by Megan Boyle, a 25-hour-long video (reading the novel took less time than initially anticipated) that is both a straightforward documentary of this one-of-a-kind literary event and, more subtly, a playful sort of cinematic endurance test (both in its making and for the viewer). Shot on glorious miniDV using an obsolete consumer-grade camera, Liveblog by Megan Boyle is a celebration of that most beautiful of human impulses: making things unnecessarily difficult for oneself by doggedly adhering to arbitrarily adopted principles.

 

Stills

 

The Premiere

 

On the one-year anniversary of Megan’s marathon reading, Peach, an art space in Rotterdam run by Ghislain Amar, hosted installation that included a screening of Liveblog by Megan Boyle in its entirety. The screening was followed by a discussion with Megan, Nick, and Ghislain at Rotterdam’s Center for Contemporary art, Witte de With.

 

Event Photos

 

Nick’s Abandoned Speech

In preparation for the talk at Witte de With, Nick prepared a short introductory speech to provide context for both his movie and Megan’s book. (Pictures of Nick writing his speech can be found above–in case anyone was wondering why he was so rudely typing into his phone during his own screening.) After arriving at Witte de With, Nick quickly realized that it was a much less formal event than he had imagined, so he decided against reading his prepared piece. It is included here for anyone who is interested.

I met Megan Boyle the same way many people have met her: on the internet. One of the sundry misguided movie-related projects that I waste my every waking moment on is a column for the website HammerToNail.com in which I write detailed analyses of relatively unknown works by misfit/oddball filmmakers. It was 2018, so I naturally thought it was the perfect time to write about the three movies Megan made with her ex-husband, the author Tao Lin, back in 2011. At the time of their initial release, these movies were somewhat widely covered in the relatively underground press as something of a publicity stunt to maybe, like, kind of promote Megan’s and Tao’s respective writing careers, or at least to get them more twitter followers, or whatever media people projected onto young American writers at a time when young American writers were generating enough energy to merit media attention in the first place.

In my inimitable prescience, I approached these works seven years after everyone else had utterly stopped giving a flying fuck about them. The reason for this is simple: where others saw their movies as an avenue for hot copy that might generate a precious few extra clicks, I saw them as significant contributions to the history of avant garde cinema. Lost in that ocean of clicks was the simple fact that these earnest, crudely produced movies are subtle masterpieces that marry content and form while also serving as a valuable ethnological record of a specific place/time/milieu that may otherwise have been forever lost in the shifting sands of digital content.

I interviewed Megan as research for the series of articles I went on to write about her movies. I also contacted her publisher and received an advance copy of her new novel, Liveblog. By the time the articles were published, I knew more about Megan than any healthy acquaintance probably should. This, however, is utterly unexceptional.

Anyone who has read Liveblog knows that Megan is an exceptionally open person. She demonstrates an extreme vulnerability as if the typical defense mechanisms that people develop somehow mysteriously skipped her. She’s also incredibly intelligent and self-aware. Vulnerability, intelligence, and self-awareness are a dangerous combination, perhaps especially in a young American woman. It would be one thing if she simply demonstrated these qualities in a private lifelong downward spiral of drugs, sex, depression, and crushing alienation, but Megan takes it a step further. She weaponizes her vulnerability through writing. This shit is no longer just her own isolated problem. It’s also the problem of everyone who reads her. And if you read her and don’t feel implicated in the endless parade of horror that is life as a vulnerable, intelligent, self-aware 20-something girl in America, then you aren’t reading correctly. Megan would probably disagree with that last statement, but that’s because she’s incredibly generous and a better person than me. She’s wrong, though, and I’m right. We’re all terrible people for reading her book instead of actively seeking out every fucked up suffering kid in the world and working with them to fix this machine that produces sadness and disillusionment otherwise known as western civilization.

Ostensibly in promotion of Liveblog, but actually because she’s a crazy person who no one ever stops from making terrible decisions, Megan decided to hold an event in which she would read her entire 707 page novel for a live audience nonstop over the course of two days. With all the moral integrity of an ambulance chasing tabloid photographer, I decided to make a real-time documentary of the entire event. My assumption was that this would be a spectacular trainwreck that might understandably end with Megan having a complete mental breakdown, trapped in the psychological hell of endlessly reliving the events of her book.

Instead, Megan disappointed me by demonstrating what can only be described as a superhuman level of resilience, powering through every one of those 707 pages without even losing her voice. There were some emotional breakdowns and some moments of intense personal disappointment, prompted by equal parts physical exhaustion and frustration with the travails of her seven-years-younger protagonist self. Her reading was deeply felt, and when it wasn’t it was numb in the ways a marathon runner goes numb to that unnatural extremity to which her body is being pushed. It was literature as an Olympics-level event for which only a lifetime of awkwardness punctuated by periods of violent self-loathing could adequate provide training. But Megan has lived this shit in real life. Reading it was nothing.

I said earlier that Megan weaponizes her vulnerability by writing about it. While I believe this is true, it isn’t the complete truth. Liveblog started as the real-time record of a young woman in crisis. But Liveblog the published book is something altogether different. It’s the holstering of the weapon, the taming and re-education of a vicious attack dog. If you’ll spare me the critical indulgence of speaking abstractly about creative production, I think we go back to the sources of our pain over and over again for a reason. First we need to externalize it so that out isolated pain becomes a shared pain. Empathy might bring some understanding, and if not then at least the rush of oversharing may dull some of the pain. The next step is taking that externalized pain and crafting it into something that stands on its own merits, divorced from the source of one’s real life pain. Megan did this by spending five years editing Liveblog into a book. But even that wasn’t enough. Once the book was finished, she had to share it with a rotating audience of friends and strangers while fighting against emotional and physical exhaustion. The very idea of this performance inspired me to fly across the country and create a movie about it at a significant financial loss in addition to the countless hours spent reviewing footage, editing, color-correcting, coordinating with soundtrack musicians, tinkering with graphic design choices, writing title cards, and then trouble-shooting the endless technical problems that come with making a movie that takes longer to watch than it takes the earth to complete a full rotation. And then, after all that, Ghislain Amar and Peach Gallery took the next logical step and presented this travesty, this waking nightmare and crime against good sense, to a rapt and supportive Dutch audience here in Rotterdam. And now that audience will take Megan’s pain with them and in turn share it with their own friends, families, coworkers, and strangers on that new ferry that everyone in South Rotterdam has been talking about today*.

We do this for a very simple reason: we believe in Megan’s pain. We love her pain because we are sadists, but we also love it because we are masochists. With every new level of abstraction, Megan’s pain becomes my pain, becomes your pain, becomes OUR pain. We share this pain because there is enough for everyone, and we all inherently know that people are at their best when they share what they do not need to hoard. Megan’s pain is her gift to the rest of us. So is her humor, her charm, and her incredible talent. And so is her heart—that, like her voice, withstands every possible strain without ever breaking.

—

*This comment about the ferry was a cheap joke that Nick included to get an easy laugh from this specific audience. It won’t make sense to anyone who wasn’t in Rotterdam that weekend when ferries were all anyone seemed to be talking about.

 

And If That’s Not Enough of Nick Ranting About Megan…

Links to the series of articles Nick wrote about Megan Boyle’s (and Tao Lin’s) production company, MDMAfilms:

Article (Part 1)
Article (Part 2)
Interview (Part 1)
Interview (Part 2)

 

Links

More videos from Nick Toti (et al)
Megan Boyle
Megan’s YouTube Channel
Buy Liveblog
Peach Gallery
Peach’s “Liveblog” event page
Witte de With “Liveblog” event page
More music from Caleb Graham (who did the music in Liveblog by Megan Boyle)

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. Wondering how to spend as much of your 48 hourlong weekend as productively as possible? Wonder no more because more than half of your weekend is now spoken for, if you like, in the form of Nick Toti’s new 25 (!) hourlong film record/adaptation of Megan Boyle’s epic work and 2018 book Liveblog by Megan Boyle. Of course, going for mere tasters is also a possibility if your coming hours are otherwise spoken for. Anyway, you’ve got a feast, all thanks to Mr. Toti’s having made the grand entrance of his giant film a gift to this humble blog. Explore please. Thanks, and massive thanks to you, Nick! ** polarvortex, Hi, welcome, and thank you. Yes, I remember reading about the theory that Larsson was the secret. ** David Ehrenstein, Ha ha. Everyone, Mr. Ehrenstein is still offering treasures and booty from his collection in the form of books, CDs, and DVDs to you who want them or who need Xmas gifts for your beloveds stat. Contact him here: [email protected]. ** Bill, The whole novel is pretty much intensity incarnate. Oh, I read about ‘Scream Queen’ somewhere. I didn’t know what it was, but it’s been on my radar ever since. Okay, sounds fun enough. Thanks, Bill, and have a weekend of excellence. ** Sypha, Yes, such sad news about Simon Morris. So terrible in so many ways. Hugs to you. RIP. ** _Black_Acrylic, I think that’s totally plausible. ** Steve Erickson, Oops, on the YouTube blockage. I will say there’s something refreshing about one of ‘our’ videos not making it to ‘your’ shores because the opposite is very frequently the case. I saw the Pop Group way back when, and I think I remember thinking precisely that. ** Quinn R. Hi, Quinn! Very nice to see you, man! Happy holidays to you too! Yep, I’m here for the duration. I do enjoy living in a place where it actually gets cold and where the city is concise and inherently beautiful enough that the Xmas lights/decorations makeover actually has a powerful effect, yes. Unlike LA, where I did enjoy the whole season too, mind you. But it’s not sentimentality, I don’t think. Sentimentality/nostalgia is one of my big enemies in life. I’m somehow imagining Xmas in Florida is not too, too far from an LA Xmas. Okay, about delaying the MFA application. I guess it makes sense that you would want to head into that feeling a full head of steam, as they say. I look forward to reading those upcoming pieces by you. Mm, it does sound like you’ve got some inappropriate internal demons to banish. I think I might have suggested to you before that insecurity is nothing but a lie. Not that that helps. I tend to think insecurity is collateral damage from thinking of oneself in regard to others and what one perceives that others are achieving or succeeding at and that such perceptions are always and inherently just one’s generally baseless fantasies. I’m not suggesting therapy necessarily, but it sure helped me to my huge surprise at the certain rough time in my life. I was fairly wracked with anxieties in my 20s, yes, especially the early 20s. But not so much about my writing at least. I always pretty much allowed myself to believe in my belief that if I stuck to writing and was diligent and patient my writing would work and centralise me and make my other insecurities and anxieties feel more peripheral, which is what weirdly happen. Maybe it helped that I’ve never been cynical even at my lowest. I just somehow was always a basically optimistic and idealistic person who believed the future was a cure. On Zac’s and my new film, we’re starting to try to raise the funds to make it. So just writing grant proposals and sending them off. My new novel is looking for a publisher, so I’m just waiting anxiously to see what happens there. Well, I hope the holidays is very spirit-raising for you and that there’s happiness galore, inner and outer. ** Corey Heiferman, Hi, Corey. Sleeping enough is way key, if you ask me. Or I need enough of it to even get by. Interesting assignment/project. Do you think the slowness you’re dealing with is an indicator that nonfiction filmmaking might be the more suitable venture for you? I know that fiction seems to be inherently tougher, although it’s the opposite for me, but I’m weird. Naturally what you’re writing about is extremely interesting to me. Huh. Quinn’s email does show up here privately, but I don’t know if I should pass it along because of the privacy thing. You’re not on Facebook, right? Quinn’s on Facebook, and you could reach him there, if you are. Or hopefully Quinn will see this or your message and get in touch. Quinn, Corey Heiferman would like to write to you, if you feel like hooking him up with your email addy. I’m on a very heavy deadline to finish the TV series script and there’s a huge ton of work to do, so my ‘holidays’ are going to be spent working open something that I basically can not stand at this point. So quiet outside, the opposite of quiet inside. I hope your time is more carefree. ** Okay. You know what you have in store locally so go nuts, and say/type something to Nick please, and I’ll see you on Monday.

—-

 

‘An indescribable joy always rushes out of great books, even when they speak of ugly, hopeless, or terrifying things.’ — Gilles Deleuze, quoted in ‘Assisted Living’

‘Assisted Living, by Nikanor Teratologen, was originally released in Sweden in 1992 under the title Äldreomsorgen i Övre Kågedalen (roughly translated: Caring for the Elderly in Upper Kage Valley). The book immediately caused an uproar, due in part to the book’s endless “Satanic” parade of rape, murder, sacrilege, bigotry, pedophilia, etc., but also the author’s use of a pseudonym, which led critics to accuse a wide array of major Swedish authors as the creator, including the now goofily popular Stieg Larsson. The result was not only instant-cult-classic and controversial bestselling status for the book, which later would be credited to the novelist Niclas Lundkvist, but also a slew of varying takes on the book’s content, both praising its wild innovations in the way of language and stylizing, and predictably defaming it for its utter lack of reverence, apology, or “humanity.”

‘But that kind of hype can be a load of bullshit in a world where anything that is remotely taboo without redemption can stir the whining not only of religious moralists, but also of those who think the novel, as a form, must wear its redemptive qualities on its face. Upon receiving a copy of the frequently compelling Dalkey Archive edition of an English translation of the novel, I was both excited at the possibilities and dismissive of anything referred to as “not for the faint of heart.” But indeed, if anyone is capable of using these taxonomies not only for their immediate prowess but for changing language and image at once in how they get invoked, it is the Swedes, as I’ve learned from many of their authors who have recently been translated to English, including Aase Berg, Johan Jönsson, and Johannes Göransson.

‘Teratologen’s particular manner in manipulating revulsive fields feels different, though, than even those. The book begins with two installed frameworks to give the book a clandestine, contraband-like feel, with both a preface from the author revealing his usage of the pseudonym as a mechanism rather than a shield (“A dear friend with exquisitely cruel tastes entrusted me with the text you now hold in your hands.”), followed by another foreword from said “dear friend,” who proceeds to explain how the body of the book to come had been derived from a child: a child the dear friend kidnapped, tortured, and killed before finding a stack of wallpaper samples in the boy’s belongings that detail a series of acts between the boy himself and a character known only as “Grandpa.” The opening structure evokes the feeling of the cloaked narrative tunnels of Dennis Cooper, arranging other screens around the reader always floating even as we proceed into the book’s primary body, where the true trauma begins.

‘Basically what happens hereafter is a nonstop stream of human cruelty. In scenes that span a single page to more than 30, we are held in the skull of the child as subject to Grandpa, who is one of the more memorably repugnant characters put on paper. He actually kind of makes the Judge from Blood Meridian look like a sweetheart in comparison. Grandpa fucks the kid incessantly, rants in endless streams of hate jargon meant to demean anything and everything at all, rapes and kills animals and children for fun, and so on. What makes this onslaught even sicker is the way it is related, in a playful, blown-up way, almost like a serial cartoon. The language rams together its subjects with the same impious banging as the described acts themselves.

‘A short list of the ilk of what can be found on pretty much every single page in Assisted Living:

1. On Grandpa having abducted two boys who’ve come by selling gingerbread: “When he was finished with their mouths, he told me to get him a fistful of steel wool. Then he started playing Open the Locked Door with the first kid. The other one curtsied and bowed to Hilding, but a knee to the face took his breath away. After that, Royal showed him how to smoke Sumatra cigarillos and Hilding forced the kid to kiss him down there.”

2. Grandpa fondly reminiscing about his Nazi lifestyle for a kid at the bus stop: “It was a raw February morning in the Whoregod’s year of 1945, and me and Dirlewanger were partying in the orphanage’s ruins. ‘You know that Himmer’s balls taste like Apricots, right?’ he asked.”

3. Grandpa asks the boy to say a prayer for his own “old Grandpa in hell”: “He who knows what a child is, fuck me because I’m small, wherever I go in this world, fill my hands with shit, Satan comes, Satan goes, he loves sheepdick, that’s all, I recited.”

4. Not all of the book is pure onslaught or sick jokes, however. The moments sometimes fold briefly to reveal an underside, though only crammed between the mass, such as here, where we find the central child left alone without Grandpa for a while: “Sometimes I play the quiet game… sometimes I play dead… sometimes I draw old geezers I’ve met and then I pretend I’m them… sometimes I lay on my back in a September field and listen to the earth hurtling though space… to victims shrieking at all the evil deed wrought upon them… then I try to sink into the light, soft, fluid grass and become a part of its mystery…”

‘It goes on and on like this, taking a historical and cultural shit and wallowing in it and spasming around in the most costume-party no-blinking parade of ways. The imagined last words of Jesus, fake literary histories appended with real ones, Axl Rose jokes, destroyed anatomies, gross contortions, confabulated smut literatures: it accrues such a mass so fast it doesn’t even feel like reading. One after another the blows come and before you have a chance to even think about the context the next idea is in your throat. It’s somehow almost… refreshing, in how it comes on. The pages of images and juxtaposing sounds are addictive in their composition and how they fold together, and the burning of the sentences is fun, which in some way masks the true filth of the scenes. It’s not an atrocity meant to be wallowed in, but somehow vacuumed of its own judgment in the presence of itself, which, stepped away from, makes it even more dangerous and deforming. And in its current, you are not released but almost mocked for how smoothly it unscrolls.

‘“He’s the world’s best Grandpa,” the boy tells us right at the beginning. No matter what Grandpa does or says to him, the boy remains faithful, ready, in love. The flapless stream of shit matched by the unjudged eye of both the boy and the decided tone soon take on a feeling much like some kind of hyper newsroom running through the reams of blinkless horror. There is no apology for what humans do, have done, will do. That power, and how it flows past, held in the pages of a book, makes Assisted Living much more than a shock totem or even a vicious catalog. It is, instead, an object both aware of its world and its own work, less like a mirror or a mural than the shitty part of the skin that itches when you want to sleep.’ — Blake Butler, Vice

 

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Further

Nikanor Teratologen @ Wikipedia
‘Assisted Living’ reviewed @ Publishers Weekly
Nikanor Teratologen @ Vertigo Press (Sweden)
‘Nikanor Teratologen – Att hata allt mänskligt liv’ @ NY Moral
Nikanor Teratologen page @ Facebook
Loyal Magazine #6, featuring work by NT
Buy ‘Assisted Living’ @ Dalkey Archive

 

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Extras 1

A short documentary about Nikanor Teratologen (in Swedish)

Kulturnyheterna om Nikanor Teratologen

Tretton scener ur Nikanor Teratologens roman Äldreomsorgen i Övre Kågedalen.

 

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Extras 2

‘“Morfar suger Gud”. If you haven’t read Nikanor Teratologen’s Äldreomsorgen i övre Kågedalen, this will probably seem like an odd shirt to you. Then again, even if you have read it, it may still seem weird. Teratologen is very much the odd one out of Swedish authors, too weird for me even, I’ve only read Äldreomsorgen and left it at that. Others, like Indy (pictured here) hold him in very high regard. Maybe it’s just me not being intellectual enough, that wouldn’t surprise me much. Great shirt though, the way you need prior knowledge to understand it and even if you don’t, it’s still provocative. The design… well, we’ll let that slip for now.’ — Shirts of Satan

 

‘Long as ye can have others suffer, dere ain’t no reason killin’ yerself, Grandpa slobbered jovially. He was asittin’ dere in his rockin’ chair, crochetin’ a Confderence flag. ‘Ein Heldenleben’ was afadin’ out, an’ Larri Isokyrpä an’ Torsten Murkström were busy fadin’ out them as well, sayin’ their thanks for a good cheer. Grandpa had put som strychnine in that coffee, an’ I thought they might as well have it. Ye have to come up with some fresh fun’ an’ games when things go get tedious. Larri stayed with us a little longer, lookin’ me in the eye, jerkin’ his heid like a spastic and slobberin’ an’ shit, but so fuckin’ what, din’t help none. He was one bad ruffian of a dowser, any kids he could put his hands on he turned two noseholes into one. Now they were alyin’ dere lips all blueberry blue, an’ Grandpa put his bobbin’ an’ breezy slobberin’ aside an’ stepped up to them …’ — trans. Einar Heckscher, Strikte Observanz

 

Nikanor TERATOLOGEN is famous in Sweden for the much hated and much loved Äldreomsorgen i Övre Kågedalen book and other classics.
SIEBENSÜNDEN equals very obscure Swedish Sludge Core with members of WARCOLLAPSE, FARCIAL, DOM DÄR, COUNTERBLAST and TOLSHOCK. The band has been more or less (more less than more though, ehr…) active for over ten years and have released two full length albums up till the present day.

GLÄD DIG DU KRISTI LUDER / HERRENS DJURISKA NJUTNING with TERATOLOGEN’s acid-dripping and poignant lyrics accompanying the miserable audible sloth of SIEBENSÜNDEN’s can be seen as an answer to the “righteous” fanatic Christians new morality movement. Put simple it is guaranteed to give you a new angle on the subject of Christian sects and religious indoctrination. That is, if you know Swedish…if not you will still be able to lap up the slowly flowing audible bile which should be a feast for Sludge maniacs, Doomsters, miserable punks, Black Metal misfits and industrial psycho’s alike. The later listener category is also likely to be the ones most fascinated by the sound of SIEBENSUNDEN’s own home made instruments, while the BM aficionados will appreciate the extremely blasphemous message.

 

Doubler/Mashup by VJ fixit: Justin Bieber – Baby ft. Ludacris vs. Sten Ljunggren läser Nikanor Teratologen

 

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Book

Nikanor Teratologen Assisted Living
Dalkey Archive

‘The Marquis de Sade is alive and well and living in Sweden — or perhaps author Nikanor Teratologen is the devil himself, sending the English-speaking world a Scandinavian squib to remind readers that such reassuring figures as vampires and serial killers are no more frightening than pixies or unicorns in light of the depravity contained in one quiet suburb. Reading like a deranged hybrid of Deliverance, Naked Lunch, and Tuesdays with Morrie, and rivaling The 120 Days of Sodom in its challenge to our assumptions as to what is acceptable (or not) in literature, Assisted Living presents us with a series of queasy anecdotes concerning an eleven-year-old boy and his grandfather, a monster for whom murder, violence, incest, drunkenness, and philosophy all pass as equally valid ways to spend one’s time. Whether it’s a study in excess, a parody of provincial proto-fascism, a clear-eyed look at evil, or simply a prodigious literary dare, Assisted Living is unlikely to leave you indifferent.’ — Dalkey Archive

 

Excerpt

Last summer I murdered an eleven year-old boy. He said his name was Helge Holmlund from Hebberhshålet in Upper Kågedalen, north Västerbotten. We met at an urinal in Tivoli just as Men’s Night was closing in on Children’s Day. He struck me as the quiet, frail type – and it was love at first sight. I took him home, and after he’d performed certain choice services, I tied him up and locked him in the soundproof cellar I use for these occasions.
—-For six whole days he gave me exquisite pleasure. After that, I hacked his body into small pieces, wrapped the meat in plastic, priced it and distributed the packages to a number of different display cases in and around Skellefteå.
—-I kept his head for my little collection.

While I was burning the boy’s clothes and other things, I found a hefty stack of old wallpaper samples tucked in his ratty leather backpack. Each sample was covered with a child’s erratic, immature hand, and the words were written with different colored pencils. As I made my way through a few of these fragments, words utterly failed me. A brave new world opened before my eyes – one of vile pleasures and terrifying abominations – with the power to touch me in ways I no longer thought possible. Chuckling at his impudence, weeping at his tender sentiment, trembling with sorrow, paralyzed by hate – I sorted these rough fragments and organized them into offensively seductive stories, each one presumably written by the dead boy.
—-My philological training proved extremely useful in tackling the difficulties posed by these unusually precocious recollections, which the boy had misleadingly entitled, In the Winter of Life. I also made discrete inquiries into the poor boy’s past, a quest that took me far off the beaten path and into the dark and looming Norrland woods, home to more terrifying legends than any one person can take in. I wandered on muddy paths through a rough landscape. On both sides of the Kågeälven, the dark river, the earth is fertile and the view open. I could see dirty gold barley fields, resilient swaths of hay pasture, run-down farms and hopeful new patches of almond potatoes, all stretching away before me; there were graying Västerbotten farmhouses in various states of decay, though clumps of willow trees and stands of birches tried to hide the worst of it. Each of these farmhouses is set well back from the road and has a long approach leading up to it. It’s obvious the folk in these parts want to know who’s coming; they keep to their own. Nonetheless, you can still find a few beautiful old Västerbotten farms scattered here and there: dark red timber buildings with white doors, small porches and shingled roofs. For the most part, though, faded brukshusen – practical farmhouses, each one identical to its neighbor – have taken over. The empty cow barns (which the locals call fusen) have long since been abandoned. Now they use silos. Around these parts, there’s a church for every ten homes. In short, everything’s so modest and respectable you just want to shout “Celebrate cruelty and cunning!” to the heavens. It’s only the old folks who are left out in the country, though in the loosely populated regions of Ersmark and Kusmark a few communities still try to scrape by: making condoms for Skega and crying buckets of tears outside the barred churches. Mystery has been driven from the forests surrounding the riverbeds. Winter in these parts is hard. Blizzards numb all human feelings; thought turns inward. During the long winter, people do their best to forget. Distance leeches all color from the valleys; it’s here the atmosphere changes. Spruces and pines cover both slopes and sorrows. A spiderweb of paths (leading nowhere) spreads throughout the forest. Everything’s condemned to be cut down and carted away. The trees are taller and darker here; their melancholy is stronger than life. The fact that the valley has no visible borders makes escape impossible.
—-

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** David Ehrenstein, Yes, and how strange. ** Bill, Thanks, B. She’s pretty much always wonderful to watch even when the vehicles are often not so great or worse. I didn’t know that about Mark Patton. That’s fascinating. I’d really like to see that documentary. Maybe it’s online somewhere? I’ll check. No, I don’t know Merl Fluin at all, I don’t think. I’ll go investigate her blog to begin with. Thanks so much for that. ** Wow, quiet. Okay. Today this place spotlights an amazing, quite intense novel by the rather wildly controversial Swedish author Nikanor Teratologen that Dalkey Archive heroically brought into the English language several years ago. See if it’s your boat floater. And see you tomorrow.