We’re having another frosty night. According to my indoors/outdoors thermometer, it’s minus 7.9 degrees Celsius outside, which is pretty damn cold for Northern Germany in late November/early December.
What is more, I’ve got a swollen eyelid, which itches and hurts in spite of applying cotton pads soaked in chamomile tea to the affected eye. So here’s just a quick post and a couple of links:
Matt Cheney from The Mumpsimus has a great post on different ways of reading. Unlike Matt Cheney, I am a visual reader (and writer) and usually see a piece of fiction unfolding like a film in my head.
The 2010 bad sex award goes to Rowan Somerville for his novel The Shape of Her. Make sure to read the sentence comparing a none too successful sex act to pinning a butterfly. That’s one mental image I really could’ve done without.
For good sex scenes and other emotional moments, Janice Hardy has some tips on providing emotional clarity.
Finally, there’s yet another celebrity death to report. German opera singer Peter Hofmann died aged 66. In the 1970s and 1980s, Hofmann was one of the world’s best Wagner tenors, though the fact that he looked like he was born to play a Wagnerian hero helped a lot as well. Hofmann was also one of the first opera singer to record a rock album and play musical roles, at a time when classical and pop music were still strictly separated. In fact, I first became aware of him when his rock album came out in the early 1980s, as I didn’t discover my love of opera until later (and I was never a Wagner fan anyway). In the 1990s, Hofmann’s voice and performing ability declined sharply, which was first blamed on him having “ruined his voice by singing rock songs”, when in truth he was already suffering from Parkinson’s disease.
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