Sinister: le premier post d'un petit ponce

[Erlend Hammer]

Hi. 

Since I received my Voice the other night I thought I should use it and tell you all a
bit about myself. I'm Erlend, but sometimes I go under the name of Erland. That, however,
is only when English speaking people have mis-spelled my name, something which happens
quite a lot for some reason. 

I am 21 years old and I live in Norway. For the last year and a half I've been studying
Art History at the University of Bergen. Bergen is a rainy city on the west-coast. Next
semester I'll most likely be studying Philosophy, simply because I'm trying to study the
most useless subjects known to man so that when I'm finished at uni I can go on the dole
or live off my parents. (Unless someone offers me a lush job in the art or music world
that is.) At the moment I'm on vacation, well almost I still have one oral exam to go,
and I'm working as a substitute teacher at the school I attended when I was wee bairn.
Children are naughty these days. 

My favorite book of all time is Dostoevsky's The Idiot. But the most intense reading
experience I've had was The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles, perhaps the most disturbing
book ever written. Even though I can't exactly say why.

As I'm writing this I'm listening to the Tribute to Spacemen 3 album. I like Spacemen 3.
And I love Spiritualized. I tend to become obsessed with things and one of my current
obsessions is that I need to get every Spiritualized record ever released. I am also
obsessed with learning to play the piano, and learning French.

Should I say something about Belle & Sebastian? Maybe. The first time I heard them was
about a year ago when I was sitting in my sister's room watching MTV's Alternative Nation
waiting for a Mogwai video. Hmm, wait, I wasn't actually in my sister's room, I'd stepped
out to go to the loo and when I came out of the bathroom I heard a voice which I thought
sounded a bit like Nick Drake. The video showed a rather handsome young man walking
around a nice-looking town. Anyway, I forgot about this song and the band for a couple of
months. Then a friend gave me a tape she'd made me and on it was a lovely song about
getting away from somewhere because one was dying. I immediately fell in love with this
song and went on a quest to get the album. And that wasn't particularly difficult as a
record store in Oslo was selling it cheaply at this time. 

I read the liner notes and thought to myself that The Idle Thoughts of A Daydreamer would
have been a good title for my then current writing project, ludicrously titled The Erlend
Hammer Manifesto. As you can probably guess "TEHM" was a right self-indulgent load of
bollocks. And a few months later the Manifesto was put to sleep during a depression
caused by a young lady. I deleted it and hopefully those of my friends who received
copies have done the same. And since then my desire to write has turned to eraserdust.
When I was 18 I swore that if I had not written the greatest Norwegian novel ever by the
age of 25, I should kill myself in shame. (And writing the greatest Norwegian novel ever
really wouldn't be that difficult.)

Anyway, I think I have rambled enough for now. Thank you for allowing me entrance into
the collective consciousness that is this list and I'm off to watch re-runs of Home And
Away now. Cheers. Oh, I'll leave you with a limerick about the first time I heard
Belle & Sebastian:

I discovered the band on the telly, 
coming out of the room that was smelly.
I applauded their song, 
but it didn't last long
and the next vi-de-o was by Belly.

Bye for now.

Erlend
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