I had a dreadful day at school today with some of my fifth-graders acting up so badly that I had to get the headmaster involved. The class was always okay before, but we got new students and two of them act up badly. One at least has a reason, namely the worst last name known to mankind, which probably gets the kid teased to no end. The second seems to be just a spoiled brat.
Anyway, because the noisy and annoying students gave me one hell of a headache, here are some links, largely romance related, because the media always trots out the love, relationship and romance subjects around Valentine’s Day:
At the Guardian, there is a mini-war about chick lit going on, kicked off by Decca Aitkenhead’s condescending profile of/interview with Sophie Kinsella. The point of the whole interview is basically, “You went to Oxford and are a smart woman, so why do you write this trash?”
Jenny Geras, editor at Pan MacMillan, responds here and says that the main problem with chick lit is the unfortunate name and the fact that it is primarily written by and for women and thus falls victim of what Joanna Russ called “the double standard of content”, i.e. men’s concerns are important, women’s concerns are trivial.
The King of Elfland’s Second Cousin has a good post about romance subplots in speculative fiction. The examples he gives are not the ones I would have chosen, but his points are nonetheless interesting.
Business Week has an interesting article about the cover photographers for Harlequin’s category romances.
Jim C. Hines discusses the link and whether there is one between the Church of Scientology and Writers of the Future. I never submitted to Writers of the Future precisely because of the link with the Scientology. For in Germany any sort of connection to Scientology can have disastrous career consequences, particularly if you work in education. And that’s a risk I’d rather not run.
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From Decca Aitkenhead’s introduction: “The book’s key ingredient – a sassy but klutzy female protagonist, embroiled in comical misadventures – could arguably be found in Jane Eyre, leaving any definition so elastic as to verge on meaningless.”
This indicates that Aitkenhead either has not read Jane Eyre or is unclear on basic concepts if she thinks Jane Eyre was sassy, klutzy or comical. Which is a very good predictor of the quality of the rest of the interview.
That line made me stumble as well. Because “a sassy but klutzy female protagonist embroiled in comical misadventures” does so clearly not describe Jane Eyre that I also wondered whether she had ever read the book at all or whether she was getting Jane Eyre mixed up with Jane Austen. Because you could make a case for Emma Woodhouse or Catherine Morland as “sassy but klutzy protagonists embroiled in comical misadventures”. But Jane Eyre?
Though it is rather alarming that an arts & literature journalist at a major paper has zero idea of what Jane Eyre is actually about.
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