Revenge of the Girl Cooties or Do we need a different writers organisation?

Posted on June 5, 2013 by Cora

Warning! Knowing what happened to other women who dared to have opinions, be warned that trollish comments will either be deleted with extreme prejudice or held up for ridicule.

In the past few days, the ongoing discussion about women in SFF has heated up considerably. Most of this is due to some highly problematic columns and articles in the SFWA member magazine Bulletin. I’m not going to comment on the articles themselves, since I’m not an SFWA member and thus haven’t seen the magazine, which is print only (in 2013? Honest?). Besides, the issue seems to be with various articles, including one about the bikini bodies of female editors (Do I get to say that Nathan Bransford and Neil Gaiman are cute, too?) and one about Barbie of all things (liked her, played with her, collected her and designed outfits for her, but I never wanted to be her nor can I quite see what she has to do with SF). The widely reproduced Red Sonja cover image doesn’t bother me that much, but then as a long time comic and SFF reader I am desensitized to unrealistic covers. And I’m shameless enough to flaunt even really out there covers in public – hey, I read pulp mags with damsel in distress covers at university and gave everyone an earful who dared to call me out on it. And BTW, the same people who hated the sight of my superhero comics at university (without ever having read any of them) are now begging me to let them borrow those very same comics, because they never realised how good comics could be.

However, Jim Hines has got a comprehensive round-up of posts and reactions here. If like me you don’t get the actual magazine, Natalie of Radish Reviews has posted some quotes and scans of the most problematic column and it’s not pretty. Sorry, but people saying “This is kind of sexist” is not censorship, sorry. Continue reading →

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Interview with Writer Nathalie Hamidi a.k.a. Irma Geddon

Posted on June 3, 2013 by Cora

Cover NightmarZ Asylum Today I welcome Nathalie Hamidi a.k.a. Poison Godiva a.k.a. Irma Geddon to my blog. Irma is a French writer of dark fantasy and has been nice enough to answer some questions for me.

Hi Cora! Thanks for having me! ^^

  1. Tell us a little about yourself.

I have always wanted to do something creative with my life. When I was a young girl, I had dreams of playing music, singing, dancing, painting, and most of all, writing.

I have done all of this in time, but the one thing that stuck all those years with me (and the last 8 years in particular) was writing. As soon as I got the net at home, I started writing blogs (I was one of the blogosphere pioneers in France), with multiple secret identities, and then more recently I have started to write in my own name.

Life is hard, it’s difficult to find the time to write. My two sons are handicapped: they have a form of autism that goes from mild to severe, and they need constant stimulation for them to make progress. This has lead me to build a very big blog for french-speaking people who have autistic children, and to self-publish a few manuals along the way.

Now that my sons are getting a little bit older and go to school, I can use the time to work on my dream: writing fiction. To publish them I have had to overcome a lot of negative thoughts and dismissal, from people who should be supportive. And publishing, being happy, finding readers — even if it’s one by one — is it’s own reward.

  1. Tell us a bit about the Z series. What is the series about and how many episodes are there so far? How many do you have planned?

So far, I have published two episodes in the Z series, and I am working on episode 3. When I started rewriting and editing my stories, I already had the first eighteen episodes (or, the first three seasons) done. I feel I need at least two more seasons to tell the story right, but I might have to write more than that to feel satisfied with the story I want to tell.

The Z series is about a young girl, Gabrielle, who realizes that her nightmares are coming after her. Of course, this is a very frightening and emotional time for her. To add insult to injury, her father — witness to the first attack — decides to commit her to an asylum and abandons her there. We follow her while she tries to discover what is happening to her, and with the help of Parfait — a mysterious but helpful young man — we will try to understand what the curse that has plagued the women of her family in generations really is about.

I’ve wanted to tell a tale of accepting who you really are, striving for a better life, what love and trust really mean, and why it is important to rise above what life has handed to you. During the following seasons, those themes will evolve as well as Gabrielle.

Cover NightmarZ Parfait

  1. What was the inspiration for the Z series?

All my life, I’ve loved scary stories. Nothing moves me more than a great challenge, a suspenseful read, or a hair-rising, goose-bumping anticipation. I’ve also always been a big nerd about survival and being ready for the zombie apocalypse. I’ve devoured King’s books, Masterton’s, Koontz’s. All I ever wanted to do while reading their books was to write one of my own, to provoke in someone else the thrill I felt right then.

As I was readying myself for NaNoWriMo 2010, the clock was ticking and the beginning of the challenge was rapidly approaching. I was shuffling ideas for plots in my head — I had been unable to decide for one in the previous weeks, and I was quite panicked at the idea of starting November with a blank page in my head. Just before midnight, I had an idea that stuck with me: what if your nightmares became alive and attacked you. From that, during the next thirty days (of literary abandon), the story became alive by itself. I just followed Gabrielle’s and Parfait’s decisions and motives, and let my brain go free. I would have thought this would lead to nothing good, but the story stuck with me for three years before I decided to give it justice by editing it and publishing it.

  1. Z is a serial of novelettes. The serial is, depending on your POV either a very new format that was born from the indie e-book boom or a very old format revived for modern times. What are in your experience the main challenges of writing a serial and what is your approach? Do you have a series bible, detailed outlines, pre-planned plot arcs, etc…?

I love serials. They’re the TV show episode format for books. I have been, all my life, a big fan of good series on TV. Eighteen years ago, it was Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and now it’s Supernatural, Teen Wolf, The Walking Dead… I love that each episode is its own story and that it’s possible that all those episodes develop into a main theme for a season, have an overarching plot, and trickle into the next seasons as well.

With the ebook revolution, it’s now possible, more than ever, to really appreciate this format. I can’t be as avid a reader I once was because of all the work I have to do with my two sons, but eight years ago I would have jumped on that format, which permits a quicker publishing cycle. I always want more, more, more of the characters and universes I like. I like to be able to gorge myself with those stories, and not to need to revisit them after one year of waiting impatiently for the next book.

When I decided to try the serial approach, it came to me naturally without having to rewrite much from my first draft. I was already using the serial format: each episode must be satisfying, and move the plot forward. It was just a matter of cutting in the right places, and adding plot “reminders” in the following episodes — no one wants to re-read the previous episodes, so small reminders are a good thing for readers.

I don’t outline, or loosely. If I write down or tell the story to anyone, I lose the will to write it, so I just list a few ideas, and pick from that along the way, or do a small graph of the pacing of the season. My idea of a good pacing? It always gets worse before and after it gets better.

For writers who want to get into that format, I recommend reading The Secret Story Lair which is full of ideas, and re-watching your favourite shows season by season, to study how it’s done.

Cover NightmarZ

  1. The popularity of serials is controversial, to say the least, since some readers flat out hate serials. Have you ever run into such readers and how do you deal with them?

So far, I haven’t had one reader complain about the format in a way that would make me uncomfortable. The fact that I write short installments is of course mentioned, and some readers write in reviews that they would have prefered something longer, but no one has been aggressive or diminishing. Actually, I take it more like a compliment. They liked my words. They just wish there were more of them!

I think that every reader is entitled to want to read their format of choice. I like serials, so I’ll go on writing serials, since this is what makes me happy for the time being. I will also release a “complete season” ebook and paperback once all episodes are out, that way readers will have the choice: read all at once, or read it along the way, with the possibility of giving me feedback — I welcome feedback. The story is what it is, but I can make it more enjoyable for my readers when I rewrite my first drafts if I know what they are looking for!

  1. As a French native speaker writing and publishing in English, you’re one of a growing number of authors who write in a language that is not your mothertongue. Can you tell us a little bit about the challenges of writing in a language that is not your first? Did you have to deal with any prejudices?

I think I am one of the lucky ones. I have learned English, German and Italian at school, and those were my favourite lectures. I have worked in multilingual environments (in Germany, and for an Italian company), and I have always been praised for my language skills. But you never really know, because people want to be nice and think the fact that you can even converse in a language that is not yours is the ultimate achievement.

I came to the Kboards forum quite confident people wouldn’t slap me with a virtual trout if I made mistakes in English, but I really wanted to make sure that my books would be as much above reproach as possible, so I hired an editor to check them out, and this has been a great experience for me. That is why I don’t give any warning in my books about the fact that English is not my mother tongue, and why I have a little paragraph on my blog asking forgiveness if I make mistakes, since I don’t send forum or blog posts to my editor to check!

  1. In my experience, indie publishing and the e-book revolution has been a particular boon to international authors such as ourselves who live far from the centres of the English language trad publishing industry. Would you agree?

I agree one hundred percent. I can’t fathom why some e-distributors such as Barnes & Noble aren’t yet allowing people from outside the US to work directly with them.

I have a lot of “fans” in French-speaking countries, thanks to my autism weblog. Those are people who would probably buy my books, but won’t, since I write them in English. They’ve been pestering me (in a nice way) and asking me to have them translated in French for them, but for me it’s not yet worth the time or money spent…

English is one of the main languages on Earth. I have many more potential English-speaking readers than there are people who speak French. It’s much more valuable (and interesting) for me to publish in English.

  1. Did you ever pursue traditional publishing, either in French or English? And if so, what were your experiences?

I have never pursued traditional publishing. Until I learned about how it was possible to self-publish, I had stopped dreaming of being an author, because I knew that the waiting around, the rewriting of a story I like into something else, the false hopes, and the fact that my genre is not the one preferred by publishing hourses, would crush me. I just would not have the patience.

Then I learned about Amanda Hocking’s incredible achivement, I’ve bought and read all her books, and the little spark in my heart came back. If she could do it, why couldn’t I? I don’t even want the mega success story: I want to be able to tell my stories, have people read them, and eventually — if I’m lucky — to be able to do this for a living, at my own page.

I like to do my own thing. I like to be the chief, to be the only one who makes decisions with my art. I like being in charge: it’s a wonderful feeling that I’ve lost for the last fifteen years. It feels good to be back with a (writing) revenge!

Cover Calamari Spa Fantasies

  1. In addition to the Zseries, you also write non-fiction under your own name and erotica as Poison Godiva. Can you tell us a little about that?

In 2009, when I started blogging about autism, I realized there were a lot of people that needed help in France. The autism situation here is very dire, and our children are left without proper care, or even tortured by psychoanalytic whim. Other parents were at a loss on how to help their kids.

That’s why I wrote some manuals. They’re very easy to understand, and I aim to be readable by everyone: no scientific words are unexplained, I don’t assume you know even the most basic notion. A lot of people wrote me back to tell me how those books had helped them to potty train their kids, or how they gave them the strength to insist for a real diagnosis for their kid.

I hope to write more of them, based on my own successes with my own kids.

I want to explore more genres than non-fiction and dark fantasy, though, and that’s why I’ve dabbled a little bit in erotica with my Poison Godiva pen name. Erotica is one of the hardest genre to write in, in my opinion. It’s hard to produce something that can work for other readers — that’s true with any kind of fiction, but it’s particularly true for erotica. I like challenges, and most of all I like to write for myself first. I’m hoping some readers will find my paranormal erotica interesting as well.

But I’m not stopping there: I’ll try writing in more genres in the next few years, in order to see what I’m good at, what I really like, and maybe take a few readers on board with me.

Irma Geddon

  1. With Irma Geddon and Poison Godiva you have IMO two of the coolest pen names ever. How did you come up with them?

It’s like having DID (Dissociative Identity Disorder). Irma and Poison are like a part of me, as much as the Nathalie Hamidi part. Yeah, I know, weirdo, right?

Irma is my web-persona, the one that is strong. She is very nerdy, like a mix between a squeeing fangirl and a D&D monster, and does things Nathalie and Poison wouldn’t dare to do. The name came from my IRC days, where I used irma- as a nickname (for Irma Vep, the vampire film). I wanted a domain name for a while, and Irma Geddon was the one that fit: puntastic, as a reader put it, and it sounded like it came with a bang, which was what I wanted.

For my erotica pen name, I wondered how to find one tasteful and intriguing. I love the Lady Godiva story, it is a classic in erotica. Poison is because I love to write about women that know what they want, and are not afraid to say it — “toxic”, “phallic” girls, in the eyes of my nemesises, the French psycho-analysts.

There are a lot of pen names waiting for me to “wear”. As I discover new interests and plots for my fiction, I hope you’ll come to meet them too! 😉

  1. Is there anything else you want to tell our readers?

Reading and writing are some of the most important skills in life. If you can write, read, to get inspiration and to learn the craft.

If you can’t write, or don’t want to, read anyway, and engage with your favourite authors. Make their words/worlds yours by participating. Tell them if you feel their story was special, if it struck a chord in your heart or in your guts.

Authors feed on stories and contacts with their readers. Thank you reader—you make us feel like we’ve found our place in life and we’ve fulfilled our storytelling destiny when your eyes meet the pages of our books.

Thanks for answering my questions, Irma a.k.a. Nathalie a.k.a Poison.

If you want to find out more about Irma, visit her website and blog or follow her on Twitter. Her other personas Nathalie Hamidi and Poison Godiva may be found here. What is more, Irma has recently started Find, Read, Love, a discovery site for new indie books, organized according to author and genre.

The Z series is available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Smashwords and Sony. The first installment, Asylum, is currently free so grab a copy and jump into the world of NightmarZ.

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Invasion of the Girl Cooties

Posted on June 2, 2013 by Cora

At The Story Hub, Stuart Sharp offers his opinion about the increased popularity of science fiction romance. If you assume that he is worrying about romance writers somehow sullying the sacred halls of the SF genre, you got it in one.

Here are some choice quotes:

Except that the new authors coming into the field don’t necessarily get [the shared cultural references of the SF genre]. Their references are all to do with The Formula, grand gestures, love triangles, the tropes of romance or chick lit or YA. They don’t understand the reasoning behind some of the arguments that have been bubbling for years. They certainly don’t get that Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep reference you made in chapter three.

Oh no, those romance writers dare to write SF without having read the past eighty years of SF writing and all Hugo and Nebula finalists since the 1953/1966. How can they possibly hope to understand the genre? And they obviously won’t get a Philip K. Dick reference, because it’s a well known fact that romance fans never read outside their genre (actually romance readers are some of the most voracious readers around and read plenty of things aside from romance). And they have obviously never set foot inside a cinema and never saw Blade Runner (which even has a romance subplot) or any other Philip K. Duick adaption. Bonus points for calling romance a formula genre.

Here’s some more:

The classic involves a romance author thinking they’re being stunningly original while in fact an idea has been given a pretty thorough going over by the sci-fi world already. There’s the part where they often don’t get the details right. And yes, you can be wrong about the details. Or at least, you can go against everything legions of sci-fi fans have decided over the decades. More importantly, there’s the sense in some cases that they don’t care about the details the way some people do. That the romantic story at the heart of the book trumps little things like whether the aliens would conveniently look like attractive humans and be able to speak English.

Right, because aliens who look like humans and can speak English have never appeared in traditional SF at all. I guess I must have imagined Spock and the Doctor and Dejah Thoris and Star Wars and countless others. Never mind that I obviously wasn’t invited to the big meeting where legions of SF fans came to a final and binding decision about all the important details such as how FTL really works or what the singularity is.

Even worse, those romance readers and writers don’t even care about what how FTL works (or can it work at all?) or what the singularity entails. They just care about such unimportant points as characterisation and story. Because it obviously makes for so much better literature if SF writers give us brilliantly imagine big ideas in stories with paper-thin characters and romantic relationships so unrealistic that I wonder whether the author has ever met an actual living, breathing human being before or whether he is secretly the first computer to have passed the Turing test.

Here’s a final quote, because that post really invites it. And BTW, anti-scraper plug-ins are fine, but disabling right-click and copy and paste altogether is a nuissance.

As several romance writers have shown in the case of fantasy already, they have no problems whatsoever trampling over the most beloved elements of the genre.

Those horrible romance writers. How dare they use the furniture of some other genre to write their own stories without consulting the genre consensus first? Never mind that way too many SFF authors, fans and pundits have no problems whatsoever trampling over the feelings of romance writers and readers by calling their works formulaic and just plain bad.

To be fair to Stuart Sharp, he does finish his post on a somewhat conciliatory note that it’s of course possible that romance writer’s perceived ignorance of the genre might lead to original work and that plenty of SF is derivative as hell. Plus, he claims to have written both real SF and romantic SF, plus he apparently used to work as a ghostwriter. At any rate, he has an Amazon author page under his own name here.

Nonetheless, those conciliatory closing remarks don’t mitigate the fact that this is a typical, “Eeww, girl cooties” post. Nor am I alone in interpreting it that way. At Tracing the Stars, SF romance writer C.E. Kilgore asks why SF romance is treated as a genre outcast and why the SF community feels so threatened, considering that SF and SF romance target different readerships. Now I don’t agree with the fact that SF romance or paranormal romance for that matter should be segregated on the romance shelves, so that SFF readers don’t have to see it, because this contributes to keeping crossgenre books invisible to SFF readers. Plus, it’s also a way to keep female writers of SFF, romantic or not, invisible, because if the books are segregated, they might as well not exist. Never mind that we have already seen this with urban fantasy, where books by men are shelves as SFF, while books by women, whether romantic or not, are shelves as paranormal romance and – in one notable case – erotica – for a book that didn’t have any romance, let alone sex scenes. Waterstone’s in the UK is particularly bad about this to the point that I actually once asked a Waterstone’s employee point blank why they were hiding SFF books by female authors in a corner of the crime fiction section.

At the Spacefreighters Lounge, a group blog by writers of romantic SF, Pippa Jay points out that plenty of time-honoured SF classics have important romantic subplots and that without romance, Dune would be just a book about worms. She also refers back to the recent controversy (exhaustively discussed in these pages) about the skewed gender balance with regard to reviews and points out that an SF novel with a strong romantic subplot would be classified as SF, albeit with a romantic subplot, if written by a man, and as SF romance, complete with “Eww, girl cooties”, when written by a woman. And of course, it’s pretty obvious that the SFF genre community does its best to marginalize female dominated subgenres such as urban fantasy, paranormal romancem SF romance and large swathes of YA as “Not part of our genre”, even though it obviously is.

Not inspired by the SF romance discussion (at least not as far as I can tell) but definitely related is this post by Joshua S. Hill at Amazing Stories, wherein he asks why female fantasy writers are immediately dismissed as “girly” for writing romantic plots, whereas men are not.

Meanwhile, another author of romantic SF, Greta van der Pol, asks how romance readers view the SF genre. She also points out that the science and worldbuilding occasionally really is weak in explicit SF romances. Finally, she also makes another interesting point:

I confess I don’t read romance much. I’m too interested in action and adventure to find a love story absorbing. Which probably tells you a fair bit about my writing.

I suspect that this is true for a lot of writers and readers in hybrid genres such as urban fantasy, paranormal romance, SF romance and romantic suspense. These writers and readers are often longtime SFF fans (or suspense fans for romantic suspense) and they like action, adventure and worldbuilding, but they also want a bit more emotion and yes, romance, than “pure” SF/fantasy/suspense tend to offer. I certainly count myself among those readers/writers. I was increasingly unhappy with speculative fiction devolving into emotionless big idea fiction on the one hand and increasingly grimdark macho fantasy with unpleasant characters on the other hand. Then one day, I became aware that there was a whole slew of subgenres such as futuristic romance, paranormal romance, time travel romance and fantasy romance, full of books written mostly by women, which promised the action and worldbuilding I had come to enjoy about SFF, but with more female characters, hopefully less needless violence against said female characters and characters and relationships that rang true to the experience of actual human beings. And I’d never heard of those books and authors and neither had the rest of the SFF community.

Of course, I was overjoyed and began to seek out the books and writers whose names I heard mentioned (mostly among romance readers). And yes, my first attempt at reading SF romance – a book in the now defunct Dorchester LoveSpell line – really did skew too far towards the romance end of the spectrum and had worldbuilding issues. I picked this book and no other, because it had an Asian heroine, BTW. And for all its flaws, it was still a much more enjoyable read than the highly regarded big idea SF novel through which I forced my way at the same time. BTW, the author of said highly regarded SF novel has recently blogged some background information about his various older books, including the one I slogged through at around the same time I discovered futuristic romance. Here is even more. Note what’s missing? There’s hardly any discussion about the characters.

But SF romance has moved on since the early 2000s and the variety of books available now is much broader, just as the science and worldbuilding have become better on average. Indeed, Dorchester – which was the main publisher of SF romance and related subgenres such as time travel and fantasy romance in the early 2000s – used to caution against “long descriptions of science-fiction-type hardware, technology, etc…” and even had a “no time machines” request in the submission guidelines for their time travel romance line, which always confused me to no end, because how can you travel through time, if not by time machine? Nonetheless inventive writers have come up with all sorts of solutions from portals in stone circles (Diana Gabaldon) via magical spells (Theresa Medeiros), magical gemstones (Catherine Mulvany – really good book), magical shoes (Gwynn Cready), brain tumors (Tamara Leigh), malfunctioning electric chairs (Deb Stover – another really good book) to vigorous masturbation (Robin Schone). And coincidentally, Dorchester did publish some novels with technologically based time travel such as Time Transit by Kay Austin.

Indeed, the growing popularity of SF romance that Stuart Sharp remarks upon as well as the fact that the books are getting better with regards to worldbuilding and science than those from the 1990s or early 2000s is largely due to the digital revolution in the publishing industry, which makes niche works such as SF/romance hybrids a lot more viable than they used to be. And IMO this is a very good thing.

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A Big Dump of Mixed Links

Posted on May 31, 2013 by Cora

Somebody found my blog today by googling “cora buhlert sexy pics”. Now I’m torn between wondering who would be looking for sexy pics of my little old self on the internet and what exactly they were hoping to find.

The past few days, I’ve been on something of a roll over at the Pegasus Pulp blog and posted about the renaissance of short fiction due to the e-book revolution and shared some mixed e-book links of interest.

While on the subject of pulp, at The Huffington Post crime fiction writer Walter Mosley writes about the magic of pulp fiction. Walter Mosley has also recently edited an anthology called Black Pulp, which sounds fascinating.

At SF Signal, John H. Stevens offers his take on the current debate about “realistic” female characters in SFF. Meanwhile, Kate Elliott wonders whether it’s possible to not fall into writing that caters to a male gaze.

More on the subject of fighting women, the latest relaunch of the X-Men has an all-female team consisting of Storm, Rogue, Psylocke, Jubilee, Kitty Pryde and Rachel Grey a.k.a. Phoenix. Sounds like a great line-up featuring a lot of characters who were favourites back in my X-Men reading days. Rachel is the only one I don’t much care for. Coincidentally, I’m also happy that Psylocke and Kitty Pryde have gotten better, since last I knew they were dead (Kitty had the hands of likeable character serial killer Joss Whedon at that).

The BBC asks if Doctor Who was rubbish in the 1980s. Even the most casual Doctor Who fan agrees that the answer is “Yes, it was. Sorry.” Though to be fair, there were some excellent Doctor Who stories made in the 1980s such as the Fifth Doctor’s swansong Caves of Androzani, which also features a very young Robert Glenister in a double role. And even the much derided Sixth and Seventh Doctors (not their fault, scripts and budget were ridiculous at the time) have some stories I quite like such as The Mysterious Planet, one of the stories in the Trial of a Timelord plot arc of Colin Baker’s time (on the other hand, I was totally buzzed on anti-cold medicine while I watched it) or Paradise Towers, a good story marred by terrible production values and a guest cast who seem to have been kidnapped from the audience of Top of the Pops, from Sylvester McCoy’s time.

The 2013 Cannes Film Festival has been and gone. Now I have stated my views about the Cannes Film Festival in these pages before. And this year’s festival and awards did absolutely nothing to change that perception. Anyway, the Palme d’Or went to La Vie d’Adèle a.k.a. Blue is the Warmest Colour a three-hour plus drama about a lesbian couple, while the grand prize of the jury went to the Coen brothers latest offering. However, Julie Maroh, author of the graphic novel in which La Vie d’Adèle is based, is not happy with the film, since she considers the sex scenes heteronormative and unrealistic.

What I find striking is how everybody has been remarking on the fact that a lesbian romance could win the Palme d’Or as some kind of great step forward for GLBT cinema. Meanwhile, at the Berlin Film Festival, an independent jury has been awarding the Teddy Award for the best queer film presented at the festival since 1987 (the inaugural winner was Pedro Almodovar BTW – his first award ever), because even back in the 1980s, Berlin had a significant number of films with GLBT themes in the running. Cannes, only 26 years behind Berlin.

That said, Steven Spielberg, this year’s president of the Cannes jury, really seems to enjoy lesbian romances. He was reportedly moved to tears by Aimée & Jaguar, a Jewish German lesbian romance during WWII (based on a true story – the surviving partner of the couple attended the premiere), which was the opening film at the Berlin Film Festival back in 1999.

While on the subject of GLBT issues, The Millions has interviewed speculative fiction’s most infamous homophobe Orson Scott Card in an attempt to offer a more nuanced coverage of Card and his work. Unfortunately for The Millions, the best way to offer a nuanced coverage of Orson Scott Card is not to let him talk at all, because the man keeps digging an ever deeper hole for himself. Anyway, in additions to gays and atheists (He explicitly says in the interview that there is no human being without religion – This human being manages quite fine, thank you), we can now add English majors, English teachers, university creative writing classes, universities in general, political correctness, pornography, experimental fiction, public funding for artworks that Orson Scott Card finds obscene and first person present tense narration and to the long list of things that Orson Scott Card hates. Oh yes, and he hates Germans, too, just because some of us believe that your religion does not give you the right to surgically alter the genitals of a non-consenting baby (scroll down past a lot of stuff about Mitt Romney and his wife). Honestly, by now I suspect that those who haven’t been offended by Orson Scott Card at some point are in the minority. At any rate, this non-religious German former English major and current English teacher who occasionally writes in first person present tense is proud to be disliked by Orson Scott Card.

National Public Radio has a nice article about the last remaining German speakers of Texas, descendants of German settler who came to Texas in the 1840s. Make sure to listen to the audio version, which has clips of two Texans speaking German. Found via Jay Lake, who has just listed me as one of his stops on his morning blog crawl.

For those who are following the travails of my hometown football club Werder Bremen, Werder has now hired a new coach to replace Thomas Schaaf who left/was made to leave not quite so mutually consensually after 14 years. The new coach is Robin Dutt, whose previous job was with the German football association DFB. Let’s hope he’s not a dud. Interestingly, a lot of Google News hits for Robin Dutt were from Indian news sources. Turns out – and I for one did not know this – that Dutt is the son of a German mother and a Bengali father.

I also have a trio of deaths to report:

Legendary SF Jack Vance died aged 96. I have enjoyed many of his works over the years.

German actress Hildegard Krekel died of cancer aged only 60. Ms. Krekel is one of the comparatively few celebrities I have ever seen “in the flesh”, since her husband Max Lorenz is a former Werder Bremen player. I recognized her before I recognized him BTW, because Hildegard Krekel was frequently seen on German TV and also heard as the dubbing voice of Helen Mirren and Bette Davis among others. Of the many shows in which she appeared I liked the little remembered Detektivbüro Roth (Detective Agency Roth) best. However, most Germans will remember Hildegard Krekel mainly as the daughter in the early 1970s sitcom Ein Herz and eine Seele, one of the many local adaptions of the British sitcom Till Death Us Do Part. Another adaption was the longrunning US sitcom All in the Family. Now I have never liked that show in any of its many incarnations – bigotry isn’t funny. Never mind that I suspect that a lot of the fans of the show in whatever incarnation secretly agreed with the bigot Alfred/Alf/Archie. So let’s remember Ms. Krekel for the many parts she played and not just for a single dated and unfunny sitcom.

Finally, Sarah Kirsch, one of the most famous German poets of the postwar era, died May 5 aged 78. The German paper Die Zeit has a longer appreciation which even includes some of her poems.

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Photos of Bath

Posted on May 29, 2013 by Cora

Today is sartorias a.k.a. Sherwood Smith’s birthday, so as a virtual present here are some photos I took during a trip to Bath, historic British spa town best known as the setting of some of Jane Austen’s novels and countless Regency romances, back in 2008 from my personal collection: Continue reading →

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Hugo – The Devolution of a Trend Cocktail

Posted on May 28, 2013 by Cora

I first came across the fashionable cocktail called Hugo in one of the trendier restaurants in town* (not my preferred hangout at all – I was there at the request of someone else) when I spotted what looked like a glass of pinkish champagne with a sprig of herb in the hand of a woman in our party and asked her what it was. “It’s a new drink”, she said, “It’s called Hugo and it’s a mix of prosecco, elderberry sirup and mint.”

That was in late 2011, at around the time that Martin Scorsese’s film Hugo was in cinemas. In fact, I wondered whether the cocktail had been named for the movie. Though according to this article, the drink predates the movie by several months at least and originates in South Tyrol in the Italian Alps.

In the months that followed I kept seeing Hugo on more and more menus in bars and restaurants that were far from anybody’s idea of trendy. By the summer of 2012, it was served as an aperitif at my aunt’s birthday party. And my aunt hasn’t been trendy since approx. 1975.

Fast forward to last week. I’m in the Aldi discount supermarket doing my weekly shopping, when I suddenly spot a bunch of bottles with striking labels and caps in shocking pink in the wine and liquor aisle. Intrigued (“Who on Earth thought that shocking pink was a good colour for a label on a wine bottle?”), I investigate and found this. It’s none other than Hugo, the trend cocktail, prepackaged and premixed and sold at a discount store.

From trend cocktail served in hip bars to pre-bottled drink sold at Aldi in one and a half years. Now that’s devolution.

*In Bremen, “trendy bar or restaurant” usually means that players of the local football club Werder Bremen have been spotted there. It can sometimes give a boost to highly unlikely places such as an African homecooking restaurant in an immigrant neighbourhood.

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New Entries into Old Conversations

Posted on May 26, 2013 by Cora

The science fiction and fantasy genres have the tendency to have the same conversations over and over again, often for decades on end. There is the classic genre versus literary fiction debate, which never goes out of style, the evergreen “Science fiction is dying… again”, the “women in SF” debate, which is not quite as old as the other two, but still has classic status, the upstart grimdark debate and the ever popular “Our new movement will tear down and/or reform SF as we know it”. At the moment, we seem to have shelved the grimdark and “SF is dying” debates until the next outbreak, but this year’s reiteration of the “women in SF” debate is still going on and genre versus literary fiction is rearing its head. Plus, a new movement has been declared. So here are the latest contributions to these longrunning debates:

Foz Meadows responds to the Kameron Hurley essay I linked to in my last post and more precisely to its critics who complain that even if women have always fought in wars and done everything else that men did, those women were outliers by pointing out that the whole bloody fantasy genre is comprised of stories about outliers. So why is a white farmboy who is secretly a prince more acceptable to many than a black female pirate, since both are equally unlikely?

At Lit Reactor, Keith Rawson offers his take on the ongoing literary versus genre fiction debate. Oddly enough, this post comes shortly after the genre wars have been declared won in Britain.

Meanwhile, it’s SF movement time again, for at Tor.com David Barnett asks if there is a New New Wave of science fiction and if the genre needs one. As evidence he cites two new mags called Aventure Rocketship! and Arc as well as the Pornokitch site and the works of Tim Maughan. Now I quite like what Pornokitch is doing and am largely unfamiliar with the other four, but I’m not sure whether three zines and one writer together make up a movement.

Never mind that I’m highly skeptical of the SF genre’s need to constantly make up new movements anyway. And what’s up with naming every new movement something or other wave in homage to the original New Wave? Back in the early 2000s, I hung out with a bunch of guys who were going to storm the stair citadel of speculative fiction in the name of something they called – wait for it – the Next Wave. I don’t think they ever had a manifesto, but SF Site still has some columns about the Next Wave archived. As far as I recall – it’s been a while – it was a sort of Grimdark New Weird with literary ambitions, at least going by the list of writers coopted into the movement. As most of these movements, it never came to much, though they were on to something with noticing that Grimdark was a trend and the New Weird was big in the early 2000s.

Last year, there was a proposed new movement called the Human Wave. These guys were a bit better organized than my old Next Wave pals, cause they actually had a manifesto. The manifesto actually doesn’t sound all that bad and indeed I find quite a bit in there that I can agree with. The only problem is that the writers who associate themselves with the Human Wave dilute their decent points with rants about those evil feminist strawmen Communists in New York who hate science fiction and about how all that is published these days are books about the crime of being human (Paolo Bacigalupi is not the whole of SF) and about how white western men cannot be heroes anymore (they still are heroes in the overwhelming majority of SF). Plus, it seems that what the Human Wave people really want is for Robert E. Heinlein to rise from his grave and write more.

Besides, am I the only one who finds it amusing that even a decidedly rightwing SF movement still names itself in homage to the decidedly not rightwing New Wave? Say what you will about Mundane Science Fiction, but at least they managed to make do with the “wave” in their name.

And now we’ve got the New New Wave, whose name is even sillier than the Next Wave, which really takes some doing. As for what it actually is, David Barnett is remarkably vague on that point. From what I can tell from the Tor.com post, it involves a broader definition of SF, including elements of other genres (i.e. nothing really that the New Wave didn’t already try to do in the 1960s), coming to terms with the fact that the world we live in already is rather science fictional (Slipstream realized that in the 1990s) and being British. Now I am totally in favour of SF becoming more inclusive (so we can maybe stop having the women in SF debate sometime in the future and simply accept that women are part of the genre, as are people of colour, GLBT people, disabled people, non-US people and the whole broad spectrum of humanity out there) and incorporating elements of other genres, though that is already happening, albeit often in corners of the genre that core fandom ignores. But do we really need a movement to do that?

The truth is that speculative fiction, even the corner of it that is labeled SF, is now a very broad genre with lots of trends and subgenres, many of which flourish unknown and unremarked by the both core SF fandom as well as this year’s young revolutionaries storming at the gates of the SF fortress. The rise of indie publishing has further made it possible even for niche works to find their audience, though to be fair, most of the really big indie publishing success so far have been rather conventional and often even backwards looking, e.g. all of those college romances with unpleasant jerk heroes not seen since the demise of the bodiceripper. But just because the potential hasn’t been realized so far and many indie writers are more oriented towards what sells than traditional publishing ever was, doesn’t mean that the potential isn’t there. The Human Wave people mentioned above are mostly self-published, so they can bypass the feminist socialist editors in New York they imagine are holding them down. Most of the writers and zines mentioned in connection with the New New Wave post are either small press or self-published.

So whether the New New Wave really turns into a tsunami which blasts away the SF establishment or whether it fizzles out like most of its predecessors, I’ll still be doing the same thing I’m always doing, that is writing the sort of thing I want to write, whether it fits into currently accepted genre norms or not. Indeed, my attempts at writing SF, though it was always my favourite genre, were stifled by a row of “Thou shalt nots” such as “Thou canst not have FTL travel”, “Thou shalt write about the singularity”, “Thou shalt include global warming in everything that you write” and so on. However – and this is one point where I agree with the Human Wave manifesto, even though I politically disagree with its proponents – I have lately decided that as long as its internally consistent, I can write whatever the hell I want, whether it matches current genre fashion or not. And that’s really the only manifesto I adhere to.

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Eurovision revisited and more feminism and music links

Posted on May 23, 2013 by Cora

First of all, there is an addendum to this year’s Eurovision Song Contest, for Thomas Schreiber, the guy in charge of entertainment at the public TV channel ARD and therefore ultimately responsible for the German entry to the Eurovision Song Contest, blames the poor performance of German contestant Cascada not on the fact that the song was crap, never mind a blatant copy of last year’s winner, nor on the rather unfortunate outfit of singer Natalie Horler but on Angela Merkel of all people. Now if Angela Merkel had actually written or sung the German entry “Glorious” (The mental image is now stuck in my head), Schreiber might be correct. However, his reasoning for blaming Merkel is that her strict austerity policy has made many people particularly in Southern Europe hate Germany and so they decided to punish us by… voting for a Danish waif, an Ukrainian siren carried by a giant and a cute Azerbaijani guy in a glass box instead of Cascada. Sure, right.

So how does he explain that Spain, one of the countries hit hard by austerity measures, gave Germany three points (okay, those were probably due to German holidaymakers in Spain). Or that Israel – not affected by austerity measures, but a country with every reason not to like Germany – gave Cascada six points. Or that the Netherlands, another country in favour of strict austerity measures, made it into the top ten. Nope, the reason for the German Eurovision failure is far simpler. The song was crap and a blatant copy of last year’s winner. And the only one the ARD has to blame is themselves and their so-called “expert jury” which caused a song no one wanted (the expert jury had favoured a different song altogether) to be nominated.

By the way, I heard the delightful Greek entry “Alcohol is free” on the radio today. I’ve not yet heard the forgettable Danish waif who won on the radio yet nor Cascada’s insipid song for that matter.

That’s it for Eurovision and now on to feminism:

At A Dribble of Ink, Kameron Hurley has a great guest post how the prevalent “woman as appendix of some man” narrative is wrong, because women have always done pretty everything, including such supposedly male provinces as fighting and going to war.

For Books Sake has a great post by Rebecca Winson in which she reminds us how subversive Jane Austen or the Brontes really were and asks – in reference to the (usually male) trolls that plague every article and blogpost about or by women writers – whether feminists aren’t the true trolls, since feminist writing is all about subverting the status quo, while those comment trolls are just pitiful wannabes.

Talking of woman centered genres, The Atlantic jumps on the “chick lit is dead” bandwagon and declares that the replacement is something they dub “farm lit”, books about women who leave the big city to enjoy the simple life in the country with a hunky cowboy or rancher. The conclusion the article draws from this is that simple country life, hunky cowboys and flat shoes are more suited to the current economic situation than stiletto heels and martinis and going clubbing in the big city. Never mind that chick lit was never just about stiletto heels and martinis and going clubbing, but about a young woman in the big city finding her place in the world. And such stories have been with us for far longer than since the mid 1990s. Check out this fimic example from 1928 starring a very young Joan Crawford. And they will be with us in some form for a long time yet. Indeed, the “young woman tries to find her place in the world” aspect of chick lit seems to have transferred to the so-called new adult genre, a name that’s even stupider than chick lit, which takes omse doing. Only that new adult fiction seems to have lost much of the humour that characterized chick lit, much to its detriment IMO.

As for stories about women, usually slightly older than the typical chick lit heroine, finding happiness, romance and domestic bliss while renovating cottages and baking cupcakes in the country – duh, those stories have been around for a long time as well. Harlequin has whole lines dedicated to finding domestic bliss with a hot and preferably rich rancher. In the UK, the books about people renovating cottages in the countryside have been mixed in with the single girl in the big city novels for years now and they’re all called chick lit and all packaged with graphic covers. And in Germany, there were complaints about a glut of books about renovating Tuscan villas more than ten years ago, i.e. while chick lit still ruled supreme. Indeed – going for another filmic example – the delightful Christmas in Connecticut from 1945 could be considered an early example of the trend – and indeed a lot more feminist than many latter examples, which takes some doing in traditionally sexist Hollywood.

Finally, let’s get back to music: In memoriam of The Doors keyboarder Ray Manzarek, who died of cancer aged 74, I offer you this wonderful clip from the German TV program kulturzeit, in which Ray Manzarek explains how Riders on the Storm came about – with musical examples.

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Cora’s Reflections on Doctor Who – Nightmare in Silver

Posted on May 21, 2013 by Cora

As I’ve mentioned before, I gave up regularly watching Doctor Who sometime towards the end of the Tennant era. Nonetheless, I come back for the occasional really special episode. And last Saturday’s episode Nightmare in Silver promised to be one of those, considering it was written by Neil Gaiman.

Now I quite liked Neil Gaiman’s first Doctor Who episode, The Doctor’s Wife. It was a very good episode and probably would have ranked as a all-time top five favourite, if it had been broadcast at a time when I still gave a damn about Doctor Who. As for Nightmare in Silver – well, it was underwhelming, to put it kindly.

The episode opens with the Doctor and current companion Clara Oswald, portrayed by Jenna Louise Coleman, as well as two black kids, who were something of a surprise (apparently, Clara is a nanny and those are her charges), arriving on what looks like the fakest moonbase ever. Honestly, this would have been a good moonbase in 1973 and even in 1983, but for 2013 it’s just pathetic. Now it quickly turns out that the terribly fake looking moon where the TARDIS landed is not the real moon at all, but part of the biggest amusement park in the galaxy. Too bad it still looks terribly fake, though.

Indeed, my initial reaction to Nightmare in Silver was, “Shit, this looks like a Sylvester McCoy episode.” If you know anything at all about Doctor Who history, you know how uncomplimentary that is, because the Sylvester McCoy era of the late 1980s is widely considered a nadir of the series where even decent episodes with decent scripts were marred by abysmal production values and budgets of approximately fifty quid per episode. Now there has been the occasional episode of the new Doctor Who that looks flat out cheap – 2005’s The Long Game and Boom Town or 2006’s Fear Her come to mind. But this wasn’t a crappy filler episode, this was an episode written by Neil Gaiman, for heaven’s sake. And you don’t scimp on the production values of a Neil Gaiman episode.

Now there were some moments in the episode where it was clear that the production team spent some money, e.g. they had an army of Cybermen that was actually played by actors and there was some decent CGI in the scene of the Cybermen awakening from their tomb or the scene with a Cyberman moving very fast to kidnap one of the two kids in Clara’s charge. But most of the time, my reaction was, “God, did new Doctor Who always look so cheap and I just didn’t notice?” Because this episode – an episode written by a prominent writer whose name is a draw in itself – looks like crap. The production values would have been acceptable on the Sarah Jane Adventures, back when the juvenile spin-off still existed, but not on the parent show. Now I know that Doctor Who is considered a family show, but that doesn’t mean it has to look like a kids’ show.

But it wasn’t just the production values that dragged this episode down. No, the whole thing felt somewhat silly and campy. Now I quite like Doctor Who to be silly and campy at times. For example, the 2006 episode Love and Monsters, which pretty much everybody else hates, is one of my favourites of new Doctor Who. But silly and campy is not what you want from an episode that was supposed to make the Cybermen scary again.

So what happens? The Doctor takes his companion Clara and her two young charges to the biggest amusement park in the galaxy, but unfortunately, the park is closed, destroyed in the Cyberwars. Now the only people left holding the fort (literally, it turns out) are Herrick from Being Human, a little guy called Porridge, played by SF film legend Warwick Davies, and a platoon of soldiers led by Tamzin Outhwaite, who have been sent to this outpost as a punishment for insubordination. Among the park’s biggest attraction are three inactive Cybermen, one of which is used as a sort of Mechanical Turk chessplayer by the Herrick character and Porridge. The Doctor spots a couple of strange insects which turn out to be tiny cybermats (cybermites, the Doctor calls them) upon closer investuigation. Unsurprisingly, the Cybermen are not inactive after all. They half-cyberize the Herrick character and kidnap and take over the two kids in Clara’s charge, because apparently the Cybermen need children for reasons never fully explained. Tamzin Outhwaite wants to blow up the planet – which is apparently standard operating procedure in case of Cybermen invasions – the Doctor stops her and puts Clara in charge, while he tries to find out how to rescue the children. Alas, the Doctor’s rescue attempt goes horribly wrong, when he gets himself infected with cyberisation as well.

Now it’s quite surprising that in the 47 years since they first appeared on the show, the Cybermen have never once tried to convert the Doctor. After all, converting the Doctor would only be logical, would it? Nonetheless, the Cybermen never tried until this episode and it doesn’t work all that well either. Instead, what happens is that the Doctor and a Cyberplanner wage war inside the Doctor’s mind and his body, which would have been very thrilling indeed, if Star Trek TNG hadn’t done the same thing with Locutus, the Borg Picard, more than twenty years ago. And considering how much I dislike that Star Trek TNG episode (yes, I know it’s popular, but I’ve never liked the Borg and I can’t stand that two-parter), comparing it favourably to Doctor Who is really something for me.

In the end, the Doctor and the Cyberplanner end up paying a round of chess for control of the Doctor’s mind and body, since – as the Doctor informs us – the Timelords invented chess, to the surprise of the Vulcans (okay, wrong franchise). The Doctor finally manages to trick the Cybermen using their old weakness to gold. Indeed, there are some nice shout-outs to old Cybermen episodes such as the fake Moonbase at the beginning, a shout-out to the 1966 episode The Moonbase, or a mention of their old susceptibility to gold and cleaning fluid (though I seem to recall that it was nail polish remover that beat the Cybermen back in the 1960s). We also get a nice sense of the steady evolution of the Cybermen who constantly upgrade themselves to meet new challenges (and indeed they repeatedly outwit our heroes by upgrading themselves).

While the Doctor is fighting the Cyberplanner (didn’t they used to be called Cyberleaders or Cybercontrollers?), Clara marshalls the defenses at a castle attraction in the abandoned park and doesn’t do too badly at first. Meanwhile, Tamzin Outhwaite still wants to blow up the planet and while Clara tries to prevent her from doing it, the detonator breaks down. Even worse, the Cybermen have upgraded themselves to get past the defenses Clare and the soldiers have set up. Oh yes, and there is a whole army of them frozen in a tomb underneath the planet’s surface, a shout-out to the 1968 episode Tomb of the Cybermen. Just as things are completely hopeless, the Doctor manages to beat the Cyberplanner and the Cyberman menace is contained by blowing up the planet after all, courtesy of Warwick Davies, who is revealed to be the Emperor of the Universe and who of course has an override code. Everyone is beamed aboard the Emperor’s spaceship and the Emperor asks Clara to marry him, while the Doctor looks on positively jealous.

The sad thing is that there are some nice set pieces and performances here. I liked the tiny cybermats. I liked the superfast Cyberman and the Cyberman who detached his hand to attack a female soldier. I liked Warwick Davies of all people as the Emperor of the Universe, which puts him in a row with such other awesome height-challenged SFF characters as Miles Vorkosigan and Tyrion Lannister, though Davies’ Emperor of the Universe channels Miles more than Tyrion. What is more, Neil Gaiman is a great writer and Jason Watkins, Warwick Davies and Tamzin Outhwaite are all fine actors. Plus, I like Jenna Louise Coleman as Clara a lot and while I’m not a big fan of Matt Smith’s Eleventh Doctor, Smith himself is undoubtedly a fine actor. So how, with so much talent assembled, could the episode end up such an unholy mess? Indeed, it’s probably telling that I can’t even remember what actually happened some two days after I watched Nightmare in Silver. For a forgettable filler episode, this would be tolerable. For a Neil Gaiman episode not so much.

Between approx. 2002 and 2008, I used to enjoy Doctor Who, both old and new, a whole lot. I’ve never been a die-hard Whovian like those people who started watching as children, but I did consider myself a fan. I stopped watching abruptly towards the end of Tennant’s tenure, when I suddenly realised that I no longer even liked the Doctor, let alone found anything admirable about him. Plus, I was really, really angry at how season 2 of Torchwood ruined everything that had been good about season 1 and killed off my favourite character (after Doctor Who had spent three years telling us that main character cannot die), all because Russell T. Davis and pals got panicked by the negative reviews of some haters.

Ever since then, I’ve tried to go back to Doctor Who once per season or so, hoping to recapture some of the magic. But instead, every time I go back the show looks worse than before. Indeed, my main reaction to Nightmare in Silver was “Crap, was this always so bad?” I think even the most die-hard fans can see by now that Doctor Who is on the decline and has been for a while. And perhaps it’s time to finally let the good Doctor rest for a while again.

The next time trailer turned out to be for the season final, which is tantalisingly called The Name of the Doctor and promises to reveal the Doctor’s greatest secret. Now I’d certainly like to know the Doctor’s name and his greatest secret, but I’m not sure if I’ll bother watching.

For a different perspective, see this interesting article by Charlie Jane Anders on the central problem with Steven Moffat’s Doctor Who.

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Pentecost Monday Links with Bonus Maikäfer

Posted on May 21, 2013 by Cora

This year’s Nebula Awards have been handed out and my reactions are mixed. IMO the weakest book by far won in the best novel category – a pity because there were so many interesting nominees. But then Kim Stanley Robinson is a writer who just doesn’t work for me. And it is notable that 2312 is the most obviously science fictional book among the nominees. In the novella category, I’d have preferred either Aliette de Bodard’s On a Red Station Drifting or Jay Lake’s The Stars Do Not Lie, but then I haven’t read the Nancy Kress novella and it shows up on lots of awards list this year. I totally agree with the award for Aliette de Bodard’s Immersion in the short story category and can’t comment on the novelette category. The Andre Norton Award for the YA category went to another book I’ve never heard of, Fair Coin by E.C. Meyers. Finally, I’m very happy that the Ray Bradbury Award for best dramatic presentation went to Beasts of the Southern Wild, a wonderful indie film with an almost all-black cast, which won over such box office heavyweights as The Hunger Games and The Avengers.

At the Guardian, Stuart Kelly, one of this year’s Booker Prize judges, wonders whether the literary versus genre fiction wars have finally come to an end. We can but hope.

Or maybe Kelly is too optimistic. For Cheryl Morgan offers yet another addendum to the women in SF debate by taking a look at the SF-themed edition of the BBC radio program The Woman’s Hour, which seemed to believe that SF is mainly filmic these days and that women don’t make it.

At the Guardian, John Dugdale has an interesting article about how certain popular fiction characters are defined by their clothing choices and props. Ironically, the article is illustrated by Tom Cruise as Lee Child’s thriller character Jack Reacher, when fans of the books (which I’ve never read, shoot-em-up thrillers not being my thing) complained that Cruise did not match the description of Jack Reacher in the books at all.

Dave Farland a.k.a. Dave Wolverton has a great three part series about getting into the writing zone on his blog.

Also at the Guardian, Jonathan Sperber asks if Karl Marx is still relevant. Oddly enough, nodoy ever asks whether Adam Smith is still relevant (and indeed the article states in the very first sentence that Smith is of course relevant), never mind that Smith predates Marx by decades and is nigh unreadable. I read both Karl Marx and Adam Smith (as well as many other great thinkers of the 18th and 18th centuries) at university and Marx was not just more readably than most, but also more relevant to the world today, whereas Adam Smith just annoyed the hell out of me and everybody else in that class.

iO9 has a great interactive map of American accents and dialects, which makes the linguist in me happy.

More goodness from iO9: Artist Nina Katchadourian arranges book spines to create poetry. I love the one with the sharks and the one with the assassination.

Finally, I saw a Maikäfer or cockchafer in the garden today and managed to capture it on camera. Now I’ve written about Maikäfer (sorry, but cockchafer is a horrible word) and their importance in German folklore before. But this time I got a better photo, which you can see behind the cut: Continue reading →

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