Jonas Ferry’s blog

There are books that you know you should read. Someone mentions a book and you make a mental note of it. Or you stumble on a review on a blog, or it’s considered one of the classics. This book was one of the former, mentioned to me long ago, but not really as a suggestion.

My friend Sven Holmström used the internet handle Mac Tracbac for a while in the late 90s. He said it was from a book about a clown, so when I found Jac the Clown in the library I picked it up because I recognized the main character’s last name Tracbac. But Jac isn’t Mac, so I thought Sven was wrong. It turned out I was.

Jac the Clown was written in 1930 by the Swedish author Hjalmar Bergman. He was a troubled man that died alone in a hotel room in Berlin on New Year’s day of 1931. He was 47 years old and burnt out on alcohol and stimulants. Jac the Clown was his last work, originally presented as a radio theater. The book is very funny, with a quick dialogue and witty remarks from the author. The characters are all interesting and are given enough space to each have their own storylines. The story switches between kafkaesque situations and realistic studies of happiness and guilt. In my version from 1985 it says that all Swedish plural verb forms have been updated to singular, which makes the text seem more modern. The text feels surprisingly modern, and the themes of guilt, responsibility and relationships explored are timeless.

It tells the tale of Benjamin “Benbé” Borck, a young Swede, that goes to America to meet his wealthy relative Jonathan Borck, or Jac the Clown. Jac is an incredibly famous and influential clown. Each of his performances is sold out as soon as it’s announced. His trademark is anxiety and fear; the more scared he is on stage the more people laugh at and love him. Benbé brings a gift from mutual relatives in Sweden that makes the clown confess he has an illegitimate child back in Sweden. He tries to reconnect with his child, while he prepares for his next tour where he wants to come clean on why he’s famous and what really happened to his clown partner Mac.

You see, as Jac started in the clown business he partnered up with a man called Mac Tracbac. Mac was the best acrobat of the two, and used to walk on tightropes without a safety net. The two partners didn’t like each other, but put work before personal feelings. But Jac was anxious and afraid that Mac would fall and hurt himself, so he constructed a safety rope for Mac to wear. Mac thought Jac wanted to make his act less frightening to get the audience’s attention himself, but with the help of the police Jac forced Mac to wear the safety rope.

Something went wrong. The first time Mac tried it and was jumping between two platforms in the roof of the circus tent the safety rope wound itself around his neck. He fell and was promptly hanged, before his body fell to the ground. The audience was shocked, Jac also, but the circus director forced Jac to go on as nothing had happened. Circus workmen removed the body. As Jac ran with terror in his eyes, jumping around like a monkey, clawing in the air, people began to think it was all part of the act. Finally Jac collapsed and the workmen carried him out as well.

From that day terror was Jac’s way of getting laughter from the audience. Until his final tour when has grown tired of it all. He wants to redeem his dead partner, the dead clown Mac Tracbac, that my friend Sven borrowed his handle from. No more fear for Jac, until the child he’s never met arrives from Sweden.

This is getting silly. Not only am I getting married and celebrating Noir as the Best Roleplaying Game of 2006, I’ve also won a Swedish writing contest!

Each year since 1993 the magazine Ordfront Magasin (page in Swedish) selects a few texts from debuting poets and writers. Last year they had almost 600 submitted texts, I don’t know how many this year. The magazine has 92.000 readers, and is quite well known in Sweden.

My text is the short story Extraknäckt, possible to read for free on the web if you know enough Swedish. The judges called it “a truthful account of life in a workplace in Sweden 2007. A tragicomic story with quick dialogue that feels both absurd and true”. I’m listed as Jonas Ferry, since I’ll change to that soon enough.

Of course I’m really, really proud. It’s a great honor, and I’m very happy.

As you can see from the top icon on the front page I “won” the (Inter)National Novel Writing Month. 50017 words in 25 days, since I started a bit late. I had 39000 words with two days left, and then found out that the NaNoWriMo counter thought I had 1700 words less than that. The otherwise excellent online word processor Writely was apparently more generous than its official counterpart.

Oh well, now I have a lot of story to edit. It has to be done by January 1st since I’m going to submit it to a competition.

The Trial (original title: Der Prozeß) (Franz Kafka, 1925). One morning Josef K. is arrested by two men without being told the charges against him. This is the beginning of a large process against him. It’s not conducted by a formal court of law, but by friends, relatives and co-workers. This court is characterized by the impossible bureaucratic methods required to do something, methods that usually end up doing nothing to further K’s case.

The way I read the book it’s not about an actual trial, but the common human feeling of being trapped and of feeling guilty over things without an actual cause. He’s forced to defend himself without knowing the formal charges against him, by soul searching for mistakes he has done. The way the court works when it arrests K. without accusing him of doing anything wrong is a good description of how the human conscience works. Josef K. seeks help from a defence attorney, an artist and a priest, without success. The court is divided between the lower court that the people he meet know about, and the higher court that is unknown to all. The lower court can only temporarily remove the charges against people, and only the higher court can make the final decision on whether a person is innocent or not. That’s a symbolic view of how people can live with their bad conscience, but only after death can God make the final ruling of innocence according to Kafka.

Kafka wanted the book to be destroyed after his death, but a friend instead saved it and published it. I’m glad he did. This is the first time I read the whole book, having started two or three times. I have seen the film The Trial (David Hugh Jones, 1993) with Kyle MacLachlan and Anthony Hopkins before, and thought it was really good. As far as I remember it follows the book closely, so if you’re not up for the novel you should at least catch the film.

Men Without Women (Ernest Hemingway, 1927). A collection of 14 short stories from early in Hemingway’s career. I bought it because I wanted to see the trademarked Hemingway prose and because I wanted to read some good short stories. I was not disappointed in any way.

Hemingway was absolutely fascinated in different ways of hurting animals, something that doesn’t appeal to me at all. He tells stories of bull fighting, big game hunting and fishing, and doesn’t manage to make any of them beautiful to me in the way he intends. His stories also focus on tough men and the human condition, stoically meeting whatever life throws at them. This focus is a lot more interesting, and the dialogues between these tough-guys are wonderful.

Hemingway’s literary style is usually described as being sparse and simple, and sometimes it’s almost ridiculously so. Here’s the first couple of sentences from the first short story, “The Undefeated”:

“Manuel Garcia climbed the stairs to Don Miguel Retana’s office. He set down his suitcase and knocked on the door. There was no answer. Manuel, standing in the hallway felt there was someone in the room. He felt it through the door.”

And so on. Really simple, but in a great way it describes these simple men. A lot is left unsaid, and when you read the dialogue a lot is left to the reader. The context in which things are said matters a lot, and is usually the only way you have of reading the inner life of the characters.

I feel inspired to imitate the style when I’m writing now, which is stupid because everyone else is already doing it.

I’m reading the children’s book Karlsson-on-the-Roof by Swedish author Astrid Lindgren. It’s from 1955 and a real classic, and for good reasons. Again and again I’m amazed by the language; Astrid had a very effective language that conveys the scenes in as few words as possible. The dialogue is fun as well.

As an example, the main character Lillebror (Little Brother) comes home with a bump on his head and meets his mother in the kitchen. I’m translating from Swedish:

- Krister has thrown stones at me, Little Brother said angrily.
- Oh, my, said mother, such a bad boy! Why didn’t you come in and tell me?
Little Brother shrugged.
- To what use? You don’t know how to throw stones. You couldn’t even hit the wall of a barn.
- Oh, silly, said mother. You don’t think I would have thrown stones at Krister, do you?
- What else would you throw, wondered Little Brother.

Karlsson is a little man with a propeller on his back and a tendency to lie and exaggerate. When Little Brother complains, he just flips his hand and says “that’s a worldly thing”. As a kid I used to get really mad at the constantly cheating Karlsson, but now I can see through the rhetorical tricks he uses. I still get mad, and impressed by the language and the fun situations.

Astrid was a really cool person in real life as well. In 1987 the government gave her a animale care law as a present on her 80th birthday, which she later called “farty” because they didn’t keep what it promised. In 1976 she noticed she had paid 102% in taxes and wrote the story Pomperipossa in Monismania about the event. The finance minister mocked her in a government debate and said that she were better at stories than math. When she was proved right she replied that maybe they should trade jobs, since he was the better one at telling stories.

I just joined National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) today, an international event despite the name. The aim is a 50 000 word novel during November, and we’re almost a month into it already. You can follow my progress live at the top of the page as I upload my word count each day. Wish me luck.

I just read Stephen King’s On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (2000), and was amazed by the similarities to Vincent Baker’s article Creating Theme. I’m going to start by talking about King’s book, and then relate it to roleplaying.

I briefly scanned the biographical first part of King’s book, since I’m not particularly interested in his childhood at the moment. The second part was a lot more interesting, when he started talking about how he goes about writing a novel. In short, his suggestions are to forget about pre-planning the plot, but instead focus on the characters and the situation they’re in. He claims all his novels start with a basic idea, like “What would happen with people locked in a car with a rabid dog outside?” or “What would people do if 99% of the population died?”. From that basic idea he creates characters and starts writing.

King’s working in a three-step manner. First he just writes the whole novel, without looking back, and then he goes through the whole thing to look for linguistic and logical errors. Another very important thing he does during this first revision is to look for an underlying theme, a premise. The theme is different from the situation, even though certain situations more easily give birth to certain themes. Let’s say the situation is that someone finds out a friend has done something criminal. The obvious question is whether they will tell on their friend or not, this can produce the theme “Friendship is more important than anything” or something, but almost any theme, even seemingly unrelated to the issue, could be used to give the story more depth.

A very interesting thing King says is that the most important thing in a novel is the story. A fictional novel doesn’t have to have a theme, but it has to have a story. The thing is that if you have a story and happen to find a theme during the first revision, so much the better. This can raise your novel from good to excellent, and the novel will stay longer with the reader afterwards.

This is all done behind a closed door, without getting feedback from anyone. The reason is because it may hurt more than help if you need to explain the significance of the green colour of the heroine’s clothes, if there is no significance. You won’t know until you’ve finished. After the first revision, where one of the goals is to reduce the word count by 10%, you can show the writing to a couple of people whose opinions you value. This is the basis for a second rewrite, and after that the novel’s done.

To conclude what King’s saying, the three main parts of a novel are the story, the descriptions and the dialogue. To start writing you need a situation, you need characters and if you’re lucky or know what to look for you’ll get a theme.

In “Creating Theme”, Baker says that you need three things:

A) An issue.
B) Characters with a stake in the issue.
C) A dynamic situation.

When you have this, you turn it loose and see if a theme emerges. This is exactly the same thing as King is saying, exactly the same, and I find this very interesting.

King warns the future writer not to create a plot before starting to write, since the result often feels forced. The same thing applies to roleplaying games, of course. In older tips to the GM you could read about flow-charts to mark decision points and stuff like that, and a common suggestion in both writing and adventure design is to come up with the ending first and then lead the story there. King argues for the exact opposite view, and I’m sure roleplayers interested in narrativism would do the same. According to King you will reach an ending when the situation is resolved, when the dog dies and the people can leave the car, and that’s when you should end. A pre-planned plot in a roleplaying game always wrestles with the problems of railroading and frustrates players who feel less important in the story creation.

When I bothered my girlfriend with this view of how writing relates to roleplaying she said “Isn’t this obvious?”. Well it is obvious, but only after someone says it out loud. Now I’ve heard it from both Stephen King and Vincent Baker, and I this is the way I want to roleplay at the moment.

Finally, I have some stuff to say about revisions where you prune your novel when writing and how the same thing is impossible when roleplaying, but that’s another topic that I might revisit. Another topic could be the three ingredients “story, description and dialogue” and how you handle them when roleplaying.

I lördags såg jag en hel film och slutet på fyra andra. Jag har dessutom läst ut en bok och en serie.

The Man with the Golden Arm (1955) med Frank Sinatra i huvudrollen är däremot en sevärd film. Jag såg bara andra halvan, men det räckte för att tycka om filmen. Sinatra spelar en drogberoende trummis som försöker jonglera två kvinnor utan särskilt lyckat resultat. Titelspåret, framfört av Sinatra misstänker jag, satte sig rätt hårt på hjärnan.

Man kan väl inte förvänta sig särskilt hög nivå på skämten om man ser American Pie 2 (2001). Det är det inte heller, och skämten är dessutom väldigt uppenbara. Men det kanske är det som är grejen med den här typen av “pinsamhetsfilmer”, att man som tittare ska inse vad som kan gå snett och sedan sitta och skruva besvärat på sig när karaktären gör precis de fel man förutsett? Sevärd film? Nja.

Skönheten och Odjuret (originaltitel: Beauty and the Beast) (1991) har jag sett förut, men såg halva igen. Jag blev förvånad när jag insåg vilket år den är ifrån, eftersom vissa scener fortfarande är imponerande. Något annat som är imponerande är att sångerna faktiskt för handlingen framåt, och inte bara gör att filmen går på tomgång.

Batman Forever (1995) har jag sett från en fest nånstans i mitten av filmen. Kärlekshistorien kändes fånig, men så är det ofta, och Alfred var som vanligt den mest intressanta karaktären. Jim Carrey är utflippad som vanligt, men just i rollen som Gåtan är det förmodligen okej.

Jag har sett hela Röde Piraten (originaltitel: The Crimson Pirate (1952), men det var långt ifrån första gången. Det var en av mina favoritfilmer när jag var liten, och det är kul att se om den med jämna mellanrum. Vissa slapstickpartier är såklart väldigt fåniga, men vissa delar av filmen håller fortfarande.

Moment 22 (originaltitel: Catch 22) av Joseph Heller utspelas vid en amerikansk flygbas under andra världskriget. Läsaren får följa bokens huvudperson Yossarian, som gör allt för att slippa flyga bombuppdrag, och hans märkliga kollegor. Boken är mycket rolig och dialogerna följer ett eget absurdt mönster man snart vänjer sig vid. Boken rekommenderas såklart.

Jag har läst Paranoia-serien, baserad på rollspelet med samma namn, från 1991 av Tim Eldred. Det är en serie i sex delar numrerad från Clone 1 till Clone 6, och man får följa en klonfamiljs öde. Serien är baserad på andra utgåvan av rollspelet och världen fungerar lite annorlunda mot vad man blivit van vid från Paranoia XP. Det är en märklig blandning av mörk historia och fåniga karaktärer, och på det hela taget mycket bra läsning. Man får helt klart lite inblick i hur Alfakomplexet skulle kunna fungera.

Sen senast har jag sett fyra filmer och läst en bok.

Boken jag läst är American Exorcism : Expelling Demons in the Land of Plenty (2002) av Michael W. Cueno, som inte helt oväntat handlar om exorcism i dagens Amerika. Cueno har varit med på ett femtiotal exorcismer utförda av katolska präster och diverse mindre samfund, och försöker i boken reda ut dels om det finns någon grund för att tro att exorcism fungerar och dels se vilka effekter ritualen har på de som utsätts för den. Cueno menar att antalet utförda ritualer steg kraftigt efter den kända filmens premiär 1973, och att de flesta symptomen var väldigt lika de som visade i filme om än något nedtonade. Han fick inte se några roterande huvuden eller leviterande kropper, däremot en hel del människor som kanske skulle behöva professionell rådgivning. Han bedömmer att det finns något tiotal officiellt utnämnda katolska exorcister i USA, och några hundra från de övriga inriktningarna.

The Dish (2000) utspelar sig 1969 i Australien, med Sam Niell i huvudrollen, vid ett radioteleskop i nån okänd håla. På grund av deras läge får de chansen att ta emot signalerna från Armstrongs månlandning, vilket tydligen är hur det gick till på riktigt. Filmen är sådär lagom småmysig, med lagom underliga karaktärer och lagom spännande saker som går fel. Jag kan nog egentligen inte rekommendera filmen, annat än som underhållning nån tråkig kväll med bara ettan, tvåan och fyran att välja på.

Dragonfly (2002), en spökhistoria med Kevin Costner. Costner är läkaren vars fru går och dör, för att därefter försöka kontakta honom genom nära-döden-upplevelser hos barn på sjukhuset han jobbar på. Historien börjar bra, med bra uppbyggd spänning om vad hon egentligen försöker förmedla, men pajar halvvägs in i filmen när plotten börjar ta längdhopp mellan scenerna. Costner sköter sig väl rätt bra, men filmen lämnar än ändå irriterad för att den kunde varit så mycket bättre. Som vanligt i spökfilmer förklaras inte varför spöken har så svårt att kommunicera i annat än de mest kryptiska symboler, eller varför de bara kan använda sina krafter när folk inte ser på.

Shrek 2 (2004) är en sämre film än den första. Karaktärerna är väl lika bra (de är likadana som ettan), storyn är inte lika bra och skämten känns inte lika nya. De betar av en kavalkad av sagoreferenser i början, liksom för att få det överstökat, och det kanske är ett bra sätt att få in folk i filmen. Vissa grejor är såklart riktigt roliga, som till exempel pepparkakan som parodierar Stay Puft Marshmallow Man (här har ni honom etsad i kisel, förresten). Filmen är väl sevärd ändå, framför allt om man gillade den första filmen.

10th Kingdom (2000) är en miniserie som också den tar en till sagans värld. Referenserna är snyggt invävda, väldigt många och mycket roliga att leta efter. Handlingen kretsar kring en prins förvandlad till hund, en flicka från vår värld som måste rädda sagovärlden och en samling troll som jagar dem. Ed O’Neill (Al Bundy) som trollkung är riktigt rolig och Dianne Wiest (mamman i Edward Scissorhands och Lost Boys) som den onda häxan är oväntat passande att spela ond. Serien rekommenderas verkligen.