Reykjavík Grapevine - 16.08.2013, Page 34

Why I Wrote ‘Tales Of Iceland’
Chapter 1
Why Iceland
Why anywhere? It’s unclear how the
places we wish to travel get stuck in
our heads as destinations on a kind of
epic, global to-do list—most of which
will never get done before worms
are sucking out our eyeballs. I know
that stored in my imagination I have
a panoply of countries, cities, vistas,
monuments, spider holes, canteens,
hallowed grounds, and myriad other
Planet Earth destinations I’m always
telling myself I’ll get to eventually.
God help us if interstellar travel ever
works out and suddenly we add mul-
tiple planets and solar systems to that
to-do list in our to-be memory.
With Iceland, however, I remember
the exact moment I decided I had to
get there. I was in college and Quen-
tin Tarantino was on Late Night with
Conan O’Brien raving about his New
Year’s Eve experience in Iceland. “Su-
permodels working at McDonald’s,”
was the phrase that understandably
stuck with me. Previously, I knew ba-
sically nothing about the country ex-
cept that its capital city was Reykjavík
and it wasn’t as cold as Greenland.
[This is the one piece of knowl-
edge-that-shouldn’t-count-as-knowl-
edge everyone retains about Iceland:
that the Vikings switched the names
of Greenland and Iceland in hopes
of tricking everybody as to which
place to call home. Historically, this
is probably kinda-sorta accurate in
the superficial, elementary school-
level way—as roughly accurate as,
“The founding fathers were all great
men.”]
Tarantino—spastic, emphatic, and
on Conan to promote the release of
a film he’d produced that served the
sole purpose of allowing viewers to
watch young people get sadistically
tortured to death—planted a bug in
my brain that never wormed its way
out. I was a college kid who enjoyed
getting drunk and attempting to sleep
with beautiful women, so how could
his endorsement not stick?
[Sooo much has changed since those
days. For instance: Now I have this
weird patch of hair that grows out of
an otherwise hairless quadrant of my
abdomen and I’m terrified to shave
or pluck it for fear it will expand or
coarsen. It’s a totally different world.]
That movie he was promoting was
called Hostel. I remember sitting in
the theater watching this film where
outlandishly beautiful women lured
young kids into torture chambers
to get their thumbs cut off and their
thighs drilled full of holes and their
eyeballs pulled out of their sockets.
As they screamed, I kept thinking
to myself in icy-cool-blue lettering
with mist rising around the edges:
Icccccee-Laaaaaand.
After that, a whole bunch of shit
happened.
I graduated from college, I traveled
the country, I moved to Chicago, I got
a job, I published my first book, I quit
the job, I traveled some more, I wrote
more books, I saw Hostel II. Through
it all, I never really considered travel-
ing to Iceland; it just sat in the back
of my mind, unrealized. It’s strange
the way that opportunity arises in life,
the way forces can coincide and align.
Here is the unremarkable story of
how I ended up actually going to Ice-
land, but first you have to know about
a couple of friends of mine, who will
both go by bastardized versions of
their last names.
[Although I’m about to do a really
terrible job of protecting their identi-
ties, and by the end of this you should
easily be able to Facebook both and
follow them on Twitter.]
“You’re not leaving us in suspense
are you, you sonofabitch?”
—Trin, to Bojo when Bojo said
aloud that he wasn’t sure if he would
take a shower in the morning.
To understand my friend Trin, it’s
really best if you’ve seen the two
NBC sitcoms 30 Rock and Parks and
Recreation. Trin is kind of a hybrid of
Rob Lowe’s Chris Traeger, and Jon
Hamm as Liz Lemon’s two-episode
boyfriend: this incredibly handsome
dude with black hair, bright blue-gray
eyes, a concoction of dark Greek and
Italian features, strong build, resplen-
dent smile.
[Of course I’m comfortable
enough in my sexuality to call anoth-
er guy’s smile “resplendent.” I also
have a Sarah McLachlan song on my
iTunes—“World on Fire”—so eat me.]
Like Jon Hamm on 30 Rock, he’s
this handsome guy who just does
not understand that his handsome-
ness gives him great advantages in
life. From women to work to socializ-
ing, the indefatigable aura of swoon
produced by the red-giant star of his
handsome carries him across the uni-
verse with rainbows trailing. He never
seems to understand that it’s not nor-
mal for a guy to walk into a bar and
have every attractive woman stumble
over themselves to talk to him. He just
can’t comprehend that for the rest of
normal-looking-guy humanity, smil-
ing resplendently won’t cause pant-
ies to dissolve in moisture across a
50-mile radius.
Yet the great (or terrible, depend-
ing on your perspective) thing about
Trin is that his good looks do not
manifest in his personality as arro-
gance and entitlement and cruelty the
way they can in certain people. Like
Chris Traeger, his optimism and love
of life are the two most prominent
qualities to his personality. He’s just
a really, really nice guy. A really nice
guy, who played center for his high
school football team, studied engi-
neering at Georgia Tech and worked
as a consultant for IBM. To be sure,
all this could be totally obnoxious. Ev-
eryone knows a person who’s just too
annoyingly kind and great and perfect
to the point where you think it’s either
bullshit and he’s a child molester or,
even worse, not bullshit. Luckily (or
unluckily), Trin has just enough of an
edge to round him out. He’s funny but
in that really weird way that makes a
person refreshingly normal. For in-
stance, his farts smell like the after-
math of a nuclear holocaust, and he
giggles every time he births one.
In 2011, Trin decided he needed to
try something new; he’d been at his
job at IBM for five years, and he got to
the point where, “I was either going
to keep going along, heading down
that path or I was going to try to do
something I always wanted to do.” He
When I picked up my first copy of
the Reykjavik Grapevine while on
a tour of Iceland, I had this stag-
gering, overwhelming thought
that went something like: "Quit
your job, move to Iceland, never
look back, and write for this won-
derful rag full-time." So taken was
I with the country of Iceland in all
its beauty, friendliness, charm, and ceaseless winking wit, that through-
out my trip I had this unformed urge to just move there and see what
happened.
Alas, I had bills and friends and a career back in the States, so instead
I wrote a travelogue called ‘Tales of Iceland or Running with the Huldufólk
in the Permanent Daylight,’ which juxtaposed a detailed account of my
adventures (and misadventures) with my friends Trin and Bojo with all
the great stories we heard during our travels. This included but is not lim-
ited to: meeting a raging drunk Kiefer Sutherland, interviewing Jón Gnarr,
hiking glaciers, drinking, women, drinking, socio-political and economic
commentary on the island nation, hidden people tours, and drinking. Not
knowing what I'd write or how I'd even begin, I ended up with a document
that simply proved to myself what a potentially life-shaping experience
it can be to travel to a place you never before could conceive of in your
imagination.
Since then, Trin and I have teamed up to turn the ‘Tales of...’ brand
into a series. Right now, we're in Quito, Ecuador, gathering interviews
and experience in one of South America's most interesting and often
overlooked countries. Our ambitions for these books are simple: we want
them to be entertaining as hell, riotously funny, occasionally offensive,
dark, hopeful, dreamlike, challenging, and a quick way to inspire people
to get out and travel. Even if it doesn't inspire them to travel, maybe it will
inspire them to see the world in a different way.
As I write early on in ‘Tales of Iceland,’ these books are not intended
as travel guides. Travel guides
and travel gurus are virtually ev-
erywhere, overflowing bookstore
shelves (or Amazon servers, I
guess). What we're trying to get at
is the peculiar, hilarious, unyield-
ingly strange and wonderful un-
derbelly of modern travel, warts
and all.
Of course this means acknowl-
edging that we may be full of shit
and as soon as a big corporate
publisher comes along and of-
fers us 3,000 USD and a lifetime
supply of skyr in exchange for the
trademark we will sell out faster
than an Icelandic banker (boom!).
But for now these are books com-
ing straight out of my brain, glee-
fully profane and meant for raw
consumption. Hopefully, we will
soon add other writers to the mix. Hopefully, we will soon sell many more
books. Hopefully, we will soon be placed on the watch list of autocratic re-
gimes from Russia to Venezuela because we really love free expression—
it helps you talk about politics, history, justice, environmental rights, and
penis jokes.
The Grapevine was kind enough to include an excerpt from Tales of
Iceland, which will give you an idea of just what exactly this book about
Iceland is all about.
34The Reykjavík Grapevine Issue 12 — 2013 Literature
by Stephen Markley
Illustration: Sigga Rún