I’m busy with work, but lots of other interesting things happened online and off. Hence, I have lots of links for you today under the cut:
Plagiarism is wrong, even if you are a secretary of state. And zu Guttenberg also seems to have been pretty clumsy about it, too. Never mind that as a public figure he should have known that he would face closer scrutiny than most other PhDs. The man who made the allegations is a professor at my old university, BTW.
The Süddeutsche Zeitung has a side by side comparison This doesn’t look good.
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Vampires are the subject of the current issue of the videogame magazine The Escapist. Several interesting articles, including one on Western style vampire fiction in Japan from a source where I wouldn’t have expected to find them (via Charles Tan)
Talking of vampires, L.J. Smith, author of the Vampire Diaries series of paranormal YA novels on which the eponymous TV show is based, has been fired by her publisher.
Apparently – and I for one did not know this – Vampire Diaries was a work for hire project and so all rights are owned by the publisher. And apparently the publisher’s – and I bet the TV producers’ – vision for the series does not match L.J. Smith’s. It still seems like a nasty move, considering that the original Vampire Diaries novels were published in 1991 and the series only gained renewed recognition in the wake of Twilight and the Vampire Diaries TV show. I strongly suspect that my 7th graders, who gobble up those books, won’t care, but it still strikes me as exceedingly nasty to cut the author who had a great part in the success of the series out of the profits.
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Meanwhile, the big genre controversy of the moment seems to center on this article about nihilistic fantasy of the Joe Abercrombie/Matthew Stover/Steven Erikson/Michael Swanwick* type allegedly sullying the memory of J.R.R. Tolkien and Robert E. Howard, which according to the author is very much akin a dunking a crucifix in piss or shit**. Not surprisingly, the article, written by one Leo Grin, comes from a very rightwing site called Big Hollywood. What is it with American conservatives and their “Big anything” obsession anyway?
Joe Abercrombie is somewhat confused by his apparent membership in the secret cabal of nihilists for the destruction of fantasy and offers a great response here. I don’t particularly care for his books, sorry, but I really love this post.
Unsurprisingly, John C. Wright sides with Leo Grin.
Equally predictably, R. Scott Bakker sides with Joe Abercrombie. In fact, I assume he would have been listed among the decadent nihilists, had Grin ever read him.
Paul Charles Smith believes that epic fantasy is a moral genre per se and also has a follow-up post here.
Jeff Vandermeer offers a roundup of the discussion so far.
Adam Whitehead at the Wertzone wonders whether Leo Grin has ever read either Tolkien or Howard.
Sherwood Smith also wonders about the Tolkien and Howard juxtaposition.
My first reaction to the original article was: Has this guy ever read Howard? Because there isn’t a whole lot of clear-cut heroism in his works, especially not in the Conan stories which are still the most famous. Some of the lesser known characters are more moral than the rather amoral Conan, though. Nonetheless, Howard is the ancestor of the type of nihilist fantasy Leo Grin dislikes so much. For that matter, there isn’t that much clear-cut heroism in Tolkien either. On the other hand, I would definitely consider Stover’s Caine a heroic and moral figure.
Though in other ways, I am somewhat on the fence here, because I am not a fan of the type of fantasy Leo Grin complains about either. I’ve tried reading it, but it’s not my cup of tea. I am not a fan of blood and guts and violence deployed purely for shock value. And relentless darkness gets old really fast, something which Tolkien knew well enough and addressed in On Fairy Stories. In fact, relentless darkness and depression can very easily tip over into self-parody. If you’ve ever laughed or made snarky remarks while reading a book or watching a film where just one awful thing after another happens, then you know what I mean. You either have to take the whole thing as parody or slit your wrists. I ran across an excellent example for this recently and might just blog about it.
However, just because dark, gritty and depressing fantasy is not my cup of tea, that doesn’t mean that it’s automatically evil, destroying the sacred legacy of Tolkien and that other people shouldn’t enjoy it. Because speculative fiction in general and even that subfield called fantasy offers a huge spectrum of works, a lot bigger than in the day of Tolkien and Howard. You want gritty and dark fantasy, you can find it. You want fantasy which adheres to conservative Christian American morality, you can find it. You want Tolkienesque quest fantasy, you can find it. You want sword and sorcery? You want Mythopoeia? You want poetic language (because I suspect the language is what trips up Leo Grin)? You want intricate world building? You want literary sensibility? You want magic in contemporary world settings? You want settings beyond the faux Celtic, faux medieval? You want stories starring something else than a straight white man? You want female heroes, queer heroes, heroes of colour? You want sex and romance to go with your fantasy? The genre has all that and more. You only have to know where to look.
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Smart Bitches, Trashy Books also pointed out this interesting new site, which seems intended to be the Tor.com of romance: Heroes and Heartbreakers
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This post by Theodora Goss about preemptive putdowns and the importance of valuing yourself really resonated with me, particularly the bit about the “spoiled children”.
When I was growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, “spoiled” was a common accusation leveled at the children of the time from the war and postwar generation. And since I was one of the very few children in my village who had lived abroad and was always “bragging” about it, I was considered particularly “spoiled”. I bought it, too, hook, line and sinker and learned to shut up about my experiences and be very, very modest. It was only when I became older that I reflected about it and thought, “I never wore brand name clothes, I never had the latest gadgets, I got less pocket money than many other kids, I never made disparaging remarks about anybody’s clothes, so why the hell was I spoiled?” The answer, it seems, was that I did not fit into the class.
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This article from the New Criterion claims to be a review of A Dictionary of Modern English Usage: The Classic First Edition, but really is a reiteration of the debate between descriptive and prescriptive approaches to linguistics. Sigh, I thought we’d decided this one years ago, but the prescriptives keep coming back. Tellingly, very few of them are linguists.
*Never mind that Swanwick doesn’t really fit in with the others described here.
** Actually, I’m pretty sure that the crucifix dipped in shit or piss thing is a myth, because no such thing ever existed in the history of art. There was one artist who made sculptures, including religious sculptures, from dried elephant poo, but that’s hardly the same thing. But it’s such a fitting indictment of the view certain groups have of modern art, so who cares about facts?
sending...
Hmm, I did wear brand name clothes, because my mother bought them for me. I never liked shopping for clothes so at the time when Esprit had clothes for hefty people, too, I stuck to their sweatshirts were possible. Basically we went to certain shops mom favoured, or – more often – my mum went shopping to the big city and brought clothes back to try out. That’s what I’d wear as long as it fit and as long as she was happy with it. She still critiques my cloth and fiddles with them, I’ve learned to not complain too much because it just never ends – it’s not a point I really feel strongly about though.
I did win the fight about spending my money on books first and foremost, and not on clothes ^^. This means that my main aim as a teacher is not to wear dirty or shoddy clothing and look “ordentlich” – and that’s all ^^.
My parents would probably have brought me brandname clothes, if I had asked for them. I just didn’t particularly care about brandname clothes and walkmen and all those other status symbols of the era, I’d much rather buy books and collectible toys. And my taste in clothes didn’t exactly match the prevalent teen fashion in the 1980s.
I remember that I had an Esprit sweatshirt and a hand-me-down Lacoste shirt (which I never wore to school again, after a boy used “checking whether the crocodile is sewed on” as an excuse to cop a feel), but I didn’t like the logo obsession of the 1980s. I also was terribly skinny as a teenager (long gone now) and the wide cut fashions of the era looked awful on me. Though it was good that they actually made clothes for generously shaped people at the time. Nowadays, it sometimes seems as if the entire clothes industry is focused on skinny 14-year-olds.
Nowadays, I still don’t care for brandnames and mainly make sure that I look “ordentlich” for school and that there isn’t too much skin on display, so I won’t upset the students. Though their female classmates do a pretty good job of that on their own – I have a girl with a taste for transparent blouses and very short skirts in one of my classes.
Heh, well I haven’t got that problem ^^ – no girls!
At the start of puberty I basically gained overweight which I never really lost, I just keep adding to it, slowly but surely, heh.
Well, there is one advantage to single sex schools.
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