Sometimes a cigar is just a doutnik

Posted by jukkahoo

(OK, Typepad seems to be fucking this up big time now. Sorry about all the weird shit, not to mentioning the length of this entry...)

I’m back from Plzen and Parcon. And let me tell you, I had fun. Parcon is the Czech and Slovak national SF-convention. Named after the very first such occasion in 1982 which was (or should I say were, as the first few were) held in Pardubice.

This year the gathering took place in Plzen, which is the world famous home of pilsner, namely Urquell, pretty much one of the proper kings of beer.

Plzen is the 4th biggest city in Czech Republic and has about a) 30-50 000, b) 150 000 or c) 300 000 inhabitants. These were the figures we got from three different local fen. The one closest to actual number of about 170 000 was the young femmefan, Teresa, who was also Hal Duncan’s minder. 

Yes, Parcon had Guests of Honour! Hal Duncan, Jeff and Ann VanderMeer (special guest), Ian R. MacLeod and Les Edwards/Edward Miller were all there, nicely fitting to the theme of the con: New Weird. Fancy me going to a con where focus is on new weird? What this really meant, was that every GoH had a presentation called “New Weird”, where they pretty much did what they wanted: read fiction, gave interviews, gave a speech and so on.

The more prominent New Weird –thing was the local publishing house of Laser Books, who has this amazing series thusly named, where they have so far published some twenty books of New Weird persuasion: China Miéville, Steph Swainstonova, K. J. Bishopová, Jay Lake and all guests of honours. Especially Edward Miller, whose artwork glorifies every single book in the series. They even took the typography from his first and probably most known work, the cover for Chiina's Perdido Street Station. These books look good.

Even Yours Truly has made the series! The VanderMeer’s New Weird –anthology was just published in Czech, with my tiny contribution included. Trochu divná fantastika!

How did this happen? And why was I in Plzen?

It’s all Tero’s fault. I first heard about Parcon last year at the Copenhagen Eurocon, where Peter Pavelko asked the status of Euroconference for the national Czech and Slovak convention, while Finncon 2009 seeked the Eurocon-status and didn’t get it. Peter and Parcon were however more luckier. The idea of a Czech SF-con sounded like a plan, not the least because of the theme. Many Finns seemed to be enthusiastic about it, but in the end (even after the GoH’s were finally made public) only the three of us went. Tero had decided early on, but I had the usual doubts, money and work. Then Juha Tupasela decided to join the team and I knew I had to go. Maybe I actually decided earlier, but anyhoo.

Juha is a great guy, intelligent and fun (remember to ask his of his Michael Jackson –story, it’s a KILLER!) person to have around. And despite only recently getting to know the Finndom (he was at Åcon2), a fully faannish bloke.

We managed to get straight tickets to Finnair flights, they were slightly more expensive, but well suited for our timetable. Nothing happened on the flight (which makes it the best kind of a flight) and we arrived to Prague airport at about 10AM, well in schedule, but since my intrepid companions managed to spend eternity at the baggage conveyor belt, we were seriously lagging when we finally managed to coach our way to Zlicin, which is (probably?) a suburb of Prague, where our bus left for Plzen. Pretty darn close call with the final bus, which we made in time, and with two minutes to spare. And luckily there were three seats left for us.

Apparently buses are very popular in Czech Not only are they new (or at least the ones we used were), they are also cheaper and faster than railways. Fancy that. And they serve stuff there: tea, coffee, news papers, Czech pop videos… And they may even have WiFi, though that probably is a misinterpretation of the brochure, which was in Czech. No translation available. All this for four euroes in total. Cheap.

Pátek

In Plzen we were greeted by Peter who had the fun job of being the foreigner liaison, with only a handful of foreigners out and about. We saw quite a lot of Peter, which was fun, since he is a nice guy and looks a lot like a Helsinki fan! We managed to check-in, realise we have no towels, and very hungry. Plan was to seek out a store that sells goods ie. towels, but we only managed to get to the nearby restaurant, called Knight Lochoty. We tried to order something to eat and ran into the biggest problem of the trip: Czechs are very nice people and they treat you well, but they do not speak very good English. Not that I think myself as that much linguistically superior, but if I’m to believe Peter (and some other knowledgable Czechs – OK, backup here, Peter is a Slovak…) only about 15 percent of Czechs speak good English. I’m somewhat ready to believe that with my limited experience.

Thru hand signals, Really Old English version of the Menu and my ingenious phrase book (more of that later), we finally got something. Mostly meat, but that was good. And beer. Cheap, good Gambrinus. Only when Peter came to pick us up, we were told that the big, boldly written lines of incomprehensible Czech meant that the restaurace was also a brewery and had its own brew. We remedied that mistake the next day.

Belly full, we headed toward the City. You see, there is this pub. NO, let me rephrase that. There is The PUB. The PUB stands for Pilsener Urquell Brewery (or something to that effect) and has this amazing contraption: taps in the tables! You goes in, get a glass and pour your own pint. Apparently the beer is some extra special Urquell, non-pasteurized and whatnot, and really clean, crisp, cold and yummy. And costs about €8 for six pints.

Before we hit the joint, where Peter had reserved a table for the duration of the con, we run into the VanderMeers. They insisted on coming with us, and since we’re pretty easy-going bunch, we let them. Which led to the first Battle of the Beer Masterhood. You see, not only does the place have beer taps on the table, they also have this scoreboard, where you can see all the other places where such tables are and how much they are drinking. It’s a Beer-Drinking-Game! And were Finns! What to do…?

During the short time period we had to spend there, before the Opening Ceremonies, we Ruled the score board, until the Brnoans came in. Damn you Brno10! You drunkards! We decided to come back the next day, only this time with Hal Duncan. Shurely we would be invincible?

We headed back to the school (Parcon was held in some kind of a secondary school where you learned stuff about traffic, apparently) at 7PM. There we run into Hal and Les Edward/Edward Miller and some two hundred Czechs and Slovaks - and an opening ceremony, where everything was in Czechs SO, pretty much a Swecon kind of opening. We had a moment to look at the dealers, who were pretty much selling only Czech books, but just looking at them was a real treat. So much is being translated into local brogue, that it makes one ashamed to being a Finn. Some 300+ books are being translated every year and the local talents manage a substantial amount of books as well. I was especially interested in some Czech Conan novels, but couldn’t find anyone, who had both read them and spoke English as well.

At 8, we headed to Tero’s surprise appearance as the Guest Lecturer. Somehow, he’d been included into the programming unbeknownst to him. Furiously, me and Juha were rummaging thru the program leaflet, but evidently we had registered so late, that they hadn’t managed to put us into any program items. After a nice 40-minute chat with a dozen or so people, we headed to the Non-Stop Pub with Juha. Tero managed to find the only Frenchman at the con, who was curious about this many Finns.

Non-Stop Pub was fan-run joint, where you could buy beer, booze, food and other stuff, like t-shirts (200 korunas, €8). Language-block was evident, but we managed to decipher the menu and buy few beers and baguettes. Syr and sunka is cheese and ham. Pivo is beer. Dékuji is “thanks”. Lesson over.

We met Tomas, who seemed to be a media-fan, looked apparently like Juha’s ex-girlfriends non-existing brother and worked as a bodyguard at a German movie studio in France. As far as I know, the only thing that’s certain, is that his name is Tomas (more or less, don’t know about the ´ and ` and such), the rest is debatable. We also met Hal, who seemed happy, and why not, the man has gotten engaged! He is also skint, so I bought him a beer. And then Peter came and sat on the table with a gallon (could’ve been two) filled with honey mead. Sweet, 18 percent and gives you a headache in the morning. Or so Juha says. We all liked it and when I say all, I mean pretty much everyone, since Peter gave cups to everyone who had the temerity to ask a swig. Hal and Jeff seemed to have been really enthused about the mead. And why not, it was good.

Sobota

After we had slept good few hours (I guess we left the pub after 1AM and woke around 9), we decided to finally seek out some towels. Passing the local Lidl, we checked first supermarket Albert, but they didn’t have any towel-like products. I bought a bottle of local cola (Cofula?) which had a strange side taste to it. Not for me.

After some rather longish walking and cool-looking somewhat-Soviet-era blocks of flats, we found Hypernova. Name says it all: not big, not super – hyper. Bought some necessities, like breakfast and Cherry Coke and the towels, and headed back home. Shower-fresh, our trio headed down in order to look at the programming. We listened through the “Czech and Slovak fandom history”, which resonated well with Finnish experience, even if our national conventions are way different. First Parcon attracted some 400 members, which were diligently divided among all 40 or something Czechoslovakian SF-groups. The presentation could’ve been better and I was especially looking forward to more anecdotes, like the one about the club-president, who later formed the Moravian Independence Party!

Like we, the Czech have also co-operation meetings (and evidently the Poles do this too). They have them twice a year, but if I understood correctly, they also have some party-poopers, like this one guy, whoa had organised a media-con in Chotebor same time as Parcon. This had likely a lot to do with lower than expected attendance numbers. Skoda.

I mentioned the 300+ translations per year. A nowadays bestseller would sell something like 10 000, while median is somewhere between 1000-2000 copies. The print numbers are getting down, for example the 1980’s translation of Frank Herbert’s Dune sold more than 100 000 copies! Now that is a Bestseller!

I went and listened to Edward Miller after this. He seemed like a nice chap and clearly the most eagerly-awaited GoH as he was always somewhere else than the rest of the GoH’s, who seemed to gravitate towards us Finns. After Miller time, there was an autograph-session. I’d gotten my copy of the Czech New Weird anthology and asked scribblings from all contributors present. Later we ran into Alastair Rennie, one more author from the book and also a Scot living in

Italy

and a surprise visitor at Parcon.

We had decided to go back to Lochoty and order some food, while looking at a 1963 film Ikarie XB-1. Never happened, as we our table was invaded by the GoH-cohort, in search for English-speakers. Apparently the movie is excellent! As was the meat skewer I had for lunch. Delicious. This time we were able to order the homebrewed. It was a bit sweet, but good.

I skipped Hal’s reading, where the translator read same shit in different language after Hal stopped to take a breath, and headed to Ian R. MacLeod’s beseda. This was apparently local for kaffeeklatch. Hal was late and there was therefore only three of us at the beginning of Ian’s answer, which went well into the next hour. Interesting monologue of his writings, stories, coming works and whatnot, which made me want to seek out more of Mr. MacLeod than just his Light Ages.

Funny detail: Ian’s beseda was marked down to the program list as taking place at the room Ctyrka. Which is evidently “Fourth” in Czech (or isn't, see the comment section) Which is also the room number of the room with a big orange plaque that says something like “Virtualni Cajouna”.

I headed to the Big Hall in order to listen to Jeff, but as every single time before that, the previous number was still on, running late. This time there were three people on stage, talking Czech and giving out liquor. There was also a yapping dog. Truly alien feeling.

Jeff gave a very funny (what else?) speech that was fact-based, yet unbelievable. One thing that he also mentioned was that New Weird has sold so well, that Tachyon is taking a second print! Wahey, this means, that they are also able to pay to those that were left out in the first round, namely us European editors. My first American sale! I explained that I wasn’t looking forward to a check, as that would more than probably mean that in order for me to claim the check, I’d be forced to pay more money than the check was worth. Or that’s my guess anyhow as I cannot believe I’d make too much money out of this one.

And then we headed back to The PUB. We were ten-strong, with us three Finns, Jeff& Ann, Hal, Alastair, Ian R., Fredrick the French and Teresa, Hal’s minder. We ate, we drank and after some heavy drafting, we had managed to climb all the way up to 4^th spot, when we had to get back to the con-site. Late already, Jeff, Tero and I were want of a cigar. Teresa told us of a tobacco shop that was open 24/7 and promised to guide me and Tero there. We must’ve walked to the other side of the town (OK, could’ve been a kilometre or less), but finally we found the place.

And run into the problem le weekend. After some serious discussions and pointings, hand gestures and communication mistakes, we finally learned that sometimes a cigar is not a cigar. Especially when it is doutnik. After this bit of Czech language course, we were able to purchase nice, smooth and mellow Dominican churchills for 110 korunas a piece. Huge, monstrous cigars that take forever to smoke, which we three and Juha and Hal (we got five cigars) did later that night.

Meanwhile, the convention had turned into Czech tourist evening show, with jugglers and medieval musicians. We run into Jeff at the front door of the school, where he was suffocating from a sudden case of Giggleitis. Apparently the musicians had this instrument, which could only be described as “fart-drum” – sweet instrument, but making unfortunate sounds. We catched the rest of the show and my impression was that the singers and players were good performers, whereas the juggler wasn’t more than adequate. Could’ve listened to the minstrels for a bit more, but apparently they has played a fair bit, before we foreigners decided to show up… Sorry.

After the smoking, I chatted with the locals and wondered where the rest of the foreigners had gone? Finally I managed to dig them out. They were sitting around a table, filled with beer bottles and a big Finlandia vodka bottle. Evidently they were forced to accept it as a token of good faith. I joined the team, which consisted of some very tired-looking people, the usual suspects plus the lone German who was present at the con. We chatted happily, drank more and looked at the occasional Czechs who made a brief appearance at the door, evidently checking whether the English-speakers were still up. At around 3AM we finally managed to get few Czechs to join us (one of them might’ve been a Bulgarian?) and after quite a lot of lubrication, the locals managed to speak the lingua franca. Some where rather good in my opinion, but then again, I was…very, very drunk at the time.

Nedéle

Following morning came too soon, and was not definitely helped by Juha’s breakfast of pickled sausages. I had a packet of chips, while Tero had a nourishing bar of Twix. All the good stuff had been eaten by the locals, who had more or less already left the place. Parcon ends properly to the big Saturday boozefest, while the Sunday is really just the picking up pieces and a few ragtag-numbers that attract only a few viewers. So now we know.

Guests of Honours were nowhere to be seen, and since they were heading to a beer bath later in the day, why not? We decided to catch a relatively early bus to the airport. Peter gave us a lift to the station. What a lovely guy. If only we’d brought him more presents than the obligatory salmiakkikossu bottle and Fazer confectionaries. Maybe some Finnish heavy metal? Peter looked like a guy who might enjoy that /c/r/a/p/ kind of music.

Trip back home was uneventful. We had lunch at the airport and paid more for the measly burgers and pizza slices than we did for the rest of the food during the trip. In fact, the best food we got during the day was the Tuna pasta we had on the plane. Really!

Interesting bit: I didn’t buy a single book on the trip, yet I managed to gain a total sum of four books and as many copies of Weird Tales.

This was a good con. Not great, but interesting and fun. As always, Jeff, Ann and Hal were great Guests and we hanged a lot with the, maybe too much? If I’d been a Czech, I might’ve taken offense that the bloody foreigners come and steal Our GoH’s! But I might be wrong, too. It seemed like most of the Czechs were more than happy to be among themselves and get the autograph and listen to the GoH-interviews etc. They didn’t try to chat with Hal or Jeff, and Ghu knows, those guys are willing to talk to anyone, about anything!

Thanks Peter and all the rest of you guys& gals! Marta, Jolana, Tomas, Pagi, Lukas and the Unpronouncable (hope to see you some day at the Rally Finland)! I enjoyed this a great deal!

Comments

[J. Ahlroth]

Great story, thanks!

Hate to be so boring as to talk of books, actually, but - did Hal Duncan say anything about his upcoming Escape from Hell?

[Mekku]

Travel broadens the mind as I also found last week: who would have thought that Vellum could be found on the reduced-price rack at (the tiny) Aarhus airport in Denmark?

They also had a little Japanese garden attached to the terminal building (or hut). Sweet...

[hnu]

really, really sorry i was late to the party, and we didn't get to meet. i arrived in plzen late saturday and could not contact the vandermeers (apparently, some mistake in the phone number i had). we encountered jeff, ann and ian the next morning. and had a beer with hal, ian and the vandermeers that night. and the next morning, we kidnapped the vandermeers all the way to romania :)

[Ben]

Great conrep. Very interesting to hear how the trip went. Travelling=good. Travelling to sf-cons=supergood! :)

[Jan Vaněk jr.]

I left a long comment yesterday, but since I tried (horror of horrors!) to include links, Typepad keeps swallowing it even after I removed HREF tags and kept just URLs. So once more, keeping just the few most important. If they ever fall out of the moderation queue... well, it will be a mess; the first one has clickable links but this one has latest edited version of text.

----

There are some misunderstandings in the post. Together with further comments (damn this tiny textarea), in order of appearance:

Pardubice is in Eastern Bohemia.

The Laser-books (spelled sic) New Weird line covers by Edward Miller can be seen at www.laser-books.cz/neweird.html

Yup, Zličín is a southwestern suburb of Prague where the metro ends so the bus terminal for that direction is located there. And the bus company belongs to an expansive enterpreneur, something like Czech pint-sized Richard Branson. The Praha-Plzeň line (similarly as the original one to Brno; being longer, there you get a whole film - dubbed with English subtitles!) is ideally suited for buses, it's close and connected by a new highway. Decades neglected railways, which can't cherry-pick just the lucrative routes, aren't able to compete. They indeed claim WiFi in (some of?) the buses, though I've read complaints it's not too reliable.

Actually, "U rytíře Lochoty" mean "At Knight Lochota('s)" - we have almost as complicated declination as you :-)

The PUB is supposed to stand for Pilsner Unique Bar (and they look for franchisees abroad :-)

As for Czech Conans, Leonard Medek is probably the best while Vlado Ríša (formerly writing as Richard D. Evans) by far the trashiest. There's a Conan Society (which used to have some contacts with Finland, see the end of its Nemedian News 9/99), but the website www.webpark.sk/conan/ is in a zombie state.

Kofola is a revived 60es thing, the aftertaste comes from licorice. I don't like it either.

This is a really ugly mistake: while there's not much love lost between the organizer of the huge, media/teenager-slanted www.festivalfantazie.cz/en/
in Chotěboř (meaning "Fantasy Festival" - you know, "con" is too slangy to reach audience properly or something; this is the event that was the 2002 Eurocon) and the "dinosaurs" in the Parcon crowd, I don't think anybody ever went against the Parcon date. FF has been using the week around national holidays on 5-6 July. While it may draw away a part of the just-one-con-per-summer audience, the point is that he keeps bidding for Parcon (even after leaving the Czechoslovak Fandom formally in a huff), wanting to make it one more program track in his "multipack" concept, and achieve its ultimate validation that way. He loscot the 2009 Parcon to Plzeň Revisited only after a very tight and acrimonious vote (decided on that club coordination meeting).

Let me stress again that hardly anything except Pratchett gets over the 10 000 copies. The 1988 translation of Dune (legend says, delayed a. o. because the censors didn't like a villain called Vladimir) had print run of exactly 100 000, probably a record even for that time; still, this meant that it remained in shops for years (and who knows how many were pulped in the chaos of early 1990es).

"Čtyřka" literally means... the one-word noun for "letter four", or something like that. (I told this to the organisers - there was even a report of somebody having problem identifying which toilets were which; they promise to learn better). Virtuální čajovna, i. e. "virtual tea-room" (there was a "stone tea-room" next door, teas and even a water pipe having become a feature at Czech and Slovak cons) was a kind of loosely-structured talk program between the GoH besedas.

In the delayed program, the liquor was for "christening" of Vlado Ríša's new Conan book.

And finally, both é in Czech words are actually ě (háček/caron, not acute accent).

[jukkahoo]

Hello Jan! Thanks for the corrections, I feel like I need to apologize for my mistakes, which I think are mostly due to some misunderstandings and lingustial lazyness (especially the caron, which I just couldn't be bothered to dig up, my bad!).

I could've sworn I heard more than a few times that Pardubice was in Slovakia! Stoopid mistake.

Re: Laser. My copy of the New Weird just says Laser, but since everybody kept saying "Laser books", I (again, the lazy person here) didn't bother to check the fine print, which says Laser-books.

I had links to various places too, but for some reason Typepad acted out really bad when I tried to post this thing. All the links were lost as well, including the one to Lochoty. And PUB. Where I actually did see the real name, but after Typepad-problems, I sort of missed correcting it.

Ah, Licorice! That explains Kofola's "taste".

Thanks for the mention of the vote, I actually remember now hearing about it. However, I also heard in a personal conversation about the little friction there is between traditional fandom and the more younger media-fandom, which led me write thus. I guess my poorly stated point was, that even though we (Finns or Czechs alike) arrange these co-operation meetings, we're still occasionally unable to co-operate fully.

About the number of copies I plead to insufficient note taking. And don't get me started on the numbers... We spent a relatively fun and liquid hour sharing the finer points of numerology and which language has more weird translations for common English words. Number 4 was the clincher, none of us Finns was able to pronounce it anywhere near as it should be. I blame the booze AND the background noise.

Replacing the names program rooms have is an age old /t/r/a/d/t/i/t/i/o/n/ foolish thing, which organisers seem to ponder about every time a con is planned. At least the locals were able to deduce the right place by just looking at the numbers.

Now I realise the "tea-room" thing which had bothered me a bit during the con, after hearing about those from Peter. And water pipe. Beseda was a questionmark until I looked my dictionary which translates it as "speech" or "sermon". More like a Guest of Honour speech then than really a Kaffeeklatsch.

Makes perfect sense the liquor distribution, as I do remember seeing the cover of one of those Conan-books on display during the number.

I hope I didn't give too bad an impression to the Czech fandom with my report about us Finns and/or the level of our understanding? I might have catched few of those misunderstandings if the Typepad hadn't acted out and if I'd written this somewhere else than my blog. I tend to... be a bit sloppy with it. Sorry about that.

[jukkahoo]

Jussi, Hal mentioned suffering from a substantial writer's block, even though he hates the term, calling it something like "an excuse for lazy people".

Hal sanoi, että hän on kirjoittanut kirjaan uusiksi ja jos hän voisi, niin hän kirjoittaisi koko homman _vielä_ kerran (etenkin alun), mutta kaiken järjen mukaan hänen pitäisi päästää irti tekstistä ja antaa MonkeyBrainin julkaista kirja. Peukut pystyyn.

[jukkahoo]

Very sad to have missed you too, Horia! I was looking for that a lot. Let's have a rain check.

You know, Jeff & Ann were talking quite a lot about your kidnapping plans and travel arrangements at the con. At some point it almost seemed like they were a bit scared of the prospect! But were probably secretly REALLY looking forward to it.

[hnu]

raincheck it is, jukka! maybe next year, somewhere in europe? :)
the vandermeers have had a fabulous time in romania and you'll see that their fears were completely legitimate :)

[Jan Vaněk jr.]

No problem, I just can't resist correcting inaccuracies in matters Czech (I just learned that there's a British sex-with-vampires series whose author thought it great idea to set it in Moravia; wonder how THAT looks :-)

Laser... well, it's a long story; they got re-incorporated around 2000 but kept the short logo and I think it better to err on the side of formal correctness.

I guess the Pardubice thing must have been a conflation of explaining that Parcons are called after their starts there and that Czechoslovakia was one country by then and so was the fandom; no Czech or Slovak would say such a thing any more than you would for example explain that Helsinki is in Lapland.

The point was taken, but such a mistake about FF could not be let stand. I guess fan feuds are an inevitable part of fandom beyond some size or age (and stressing the media angle on might have been my work, again somewhat misleading in the necessary brevity), but we're not that far yet so as to openly sabotage each other's efforts.

Clearly, tourist dictionaries aren't always reliable. The English one I have here suggests a. o. "confabulation" (?!), but "chat, talk, forum" are quite close to the main meaning. The term "Kaffeeklatsch" (or kaféklač :-) has been imported to a few Czech and Slovak cons in recent years, but not this Parcon.

No, I think the impression you give is all right. Just standard losses in translation, that's inevitable. BTW one Czech Parcon report by a young girl says "After the talk about Finnish fandom I made a principal mistake when I admitted to a friend that I was ashamed to speak English to the Finnish fan who had given it. Since that moment he kept taunting me with that and surely will yet again" - there may be something in your assessment of our national character :-)

Best,

[J. Ahlroth]

Kiitos Jukka updatesta. Siistiä. Ja peukut joo.

[hnu]

10 points question: would you agree to have this translated into Romanian, as a Parcon-report to be published in a print zine? if yes, please contact me!

[peter]

Hi, Jukka
Nice report, thanks for that :-)
Peter
(that one from report) :-)