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.

Posted in Books, Links, TV | Tagged , , , , , , | 3 Comments

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.

Posted in TV | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

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 →

Posted in Books, Links, Writing | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Danish Waif Wins Eurovision Song Contest or Thor II: The Musical

Posted on May 19, 2013 by Cora

I almost forgot this was on and spent the first half of the evening watching something else, but while channel flipping during a commercial break, I suddenly realized that the 2013 Eurovision Song Contest was on tonight, broadcast live from Malmö, since Sweden won last year. For those interested in my previous impressions of Europe’s biggest TV event, go here.

In the end, I managed to watch about half the contestants (with some gaps switching back to finish the film I’d started to watch) as well as the break intermezzo and the voting. My overall verdict is that this year was surprisingly strong for Eurovision. There were no downright horrible songs in the final (probably got weeded out during the semi-finals) and quite a few above average entries. Unfortunately, this year’s top three winners were among the weaker songs of the evening.

Runner-up Azerbaijan was probably the best of the top three with a cute guy singing a decent ballad, while another cute guy was dancing in a glass cage and a woman in a red dress with a really long train strutted around on stage. I actually liked Azerbaijan’s entry, though it wasn’t a personal favourite. As for hot guys, this was a really good year for attractive male singers. All three Caucasus countries (Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan) put hot guys on stage and the contestants from Lithuania, Italy and Iceland as well as the background dancers/drummers for the Irish guy all provided eye-candy.

Ukraine in third place, however, was just silly though. A rather forgettable ballad (but then, I went to the loo, while this song was on, so maybe it got better) sung by a pretty woman in a white dress who was carried on stage by a giant viking. Yes, really, Miss Ukraine was carried on stage by a 2.4 meter guy dressed in a viking costume. Why? Well, it’s Eurovision, so who needs a reason for blatant silliness on stage?

Talking of random vikings, there were quite a few of those in this year’s Eurovision Song Contest. But then hey, it is Sweden. In fact, halfway through the show – more precisely while Iceland was singing – I thought, “Crap, this isn’t the Eurovision Song Contest at all. This is Thor II and it’s a musical.” Because the Icelandic contestant was a deadringer for the Mighty Thor, only that he sung about love and loss in Icelandic. Shortly thereafter, we got the giant viking from Ukraine, a Daenerys Targaryen lookalike from Norway (Game of Thrones – the Musical?) and a couple of other contestants, including last year’s winner Loreen, who’d look more at home in Asgard than on the Eurovision stage. Once I’d embarked on that train of thought, I kept waiting for Loki to show up. The cute Azerbaijani dancer in the glass cage was probably the closest Loki analogue. In fact, the Guardian draws the Loki comparison in their liveblog as well.

We didn’t just have vikings on stage, though. There also was a Romanian countertenor vampire named Cesar, whose performance was accompanied by several nearly naked dancers whose contortions looked very slashy indeed. In fact, I wouldn’t have been at all disappointed if this guy had won, because how can you not love the sheer camp value of a Romanian countertenor pretending to be a vampire, while accompanied by naked dancers which gave off rather homoerotic vibes? And talking of homoerotic vibes, I was thrilled to see the otherwise silly Finnish entry “Ding Dong – Marry Me” end with two women, one of them in a wedding dress, kissing, while the break show included a scene of a female priest marrying a gay couple. Two pro same-sex marriage performances at the Eurovision Song Contest, now that’s something to celebrate.

Though my favourite was the Netherlands with a woman singing a great ballad about dead birds falling from the sky. Okay, so it was a song about dead birds falling from the sky – which is sort of reminiscent of the British supernatural teen series The Fades (The Fades – The Musical?) – but it was a good piece of music and the singer had a great voice. Plus, it was pleasantly free of vikings or half-naked women doing contortions in the background.

I’ve also got a soft spot for Greece with a weird folkloristic ska song called “Alcohol is free”, performed by young men in skirts and an elderly man playing a sort of mini-lute. Among all the power ballads, this performance was unique, to say the least. Given Greece’s precarious financial situation, it’s probably just as well that they didn’t win, though they finished in a well deserved fourth place.

However, in the end, the winner was Denmark with a waif-like singer called Emmelie de Forest. Apparently, willowy Emmelie was the favourite to win among bookmakers everywhere. However, I originally missed her performance and the bits I saw during the repeats were not all that impressive, particularly considering the strong showing this year. When she finally repeated her number, flitting on stage barefooted and in a white dress, she seemed rather reminiscent of all of those waif-like heroines of the gothic novels of the 1960s who were inevitably pictured running from sinister mansions while dressed in white nightgowns. Coincidentally, Emmelie de Forest was also a deadringer for the zombie/ghost bad girl from the UK show The Fades, the one who was the girlfriend of the guy who plays Gendry on Game of Thrones. So yup, definitely, The Fades – The Musical. The song itself, however, was forgettable. The drummers/pipe players in the beginning weren’t bad, but the singer itself came across just as waif-like on stage as she had in the green room. During the voting, I had started calling the sacrificial virgin (the trashy adventure film I’d watched before had involved a thwarted virgin sacrifice), because in her artistically tattered white gown she looked just like every sacrifical virgin ever. When she finally won, I thought, “Hey, Denmark, you’re supposed to sacrifice the virgin, not let her sing.”

Germany’s entry, a dance project called Cascada that apparently had a top-ten hit in Britain approx. ten years ago, landed in a well-deserved 21st place. No, actually that’s wrong. Cascada’s 21st place was not deserved, because there were several better songs that placed even lower. Abnd talking of low-placed, I really liked Bonnie Tyler’s song for the UK. That one certainly deserved to do much better than it did.

Now the German commentator Peter Urban seemed disappointed by Cascada’s poor showing, though he really shouldn’t have been, because the song was bad and a blatant copy of last year’s winning song (which wasn’t all that great either), the rather plump singer was dressed horribly (a skin-tight glittering mini-dress is not a good outfit for a full-figured woman) and her nomination was controversial even in Germany, because during the German preliminary voting, both the TV viewers and radio listeners had voted for the Bavarian folkloristic pop band La BrassBanda, but the “expert jury” gave them no points at all, so Cascada was nominated in the end. Personally, I think La BrassBanda would have been a much better choice, if only because they were different from the norm (and Greece, whose song was closest in style to La BrassBanda’s brand of folklore pop finished in fourth place).

Talking of German embarrassments, 2010 winner Lena Meyer-Landrut managed to bungle the German voting results, which she was supposed to report, when she got Denmark and Norway mixed up. Yes, they’re both Scandinavian countries and both had forgettable songs, but come on, Lena, there’s still a difference. BTW, Germany gave 12 points to Hungary of all countries, whose entry was a stereotypical hipster with a guitar, the sort you’d expect to find performing outside a Starbuck’s in Portland, Oregon. No idea why, since there were better acoustic guitar songs like e.g. Malta’s, but the Hungarian hipster really seems to have struck a chord with the German voters.

Finally, I was really impressed by host Petra Mede. Eurovision hosts are mostly forgettable, but this woman was not just funny (loved her half-time performance about things foreigners associate with Sweden) but also looked great with her beehive hairdo and Jean Paul Gaultier designed gowns.

All in all a good show. Pity about the underwhelming winner.

Posted in TV | Tagged , , , , , , | 14 Comments

Photos: Bremen Harbour

Posted on May 18, 2013 by Cora

As promised, here is the second part of the photos I took during my recent excursion to the Walle neighbourhood of Bremen. Part 1 was devoted to the 19th century Walle Cemetery, while part 2 covers photos of the Bremen harbour, which is directly adjacent to the Walle and Gröplingen neighbourhoods.

The harbour of Bremen has declined in importance since the 1980s. The river Weser has the unfortunate tendency to silt up and Bremen is approx. 70 kilometers inland, so all the big vessels so to Bremerhaven at the mouth of the Weser these days. Plus, we lost our two biggest shipyards in the 1980s and 1990s (more about that later). These days, the Bremen harbour area is a curious mix of gentrified shopping, cultural and entertainment venues and old industry, some of it dating back to the turn of the century. Some of the old industrial buildings are also quite stunning and reminiscent of Steampunk settings.

So let’s take a look: Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Football and other links of interest

Posted on May 16, 2013 by Cora

More photos coming tomorrow, but today I’m starting with a subject that rarely comes up in this blog, namely sports, more precisely football (or soccer to the Americans among you). But here in Bremen, this really is the biggest news of the day and top news item over all the political stuff: Coach Thomas Schaaf will be leaving our local football club Werder Bremen after 14 years as head coach and another 17 as a player, effective immediately. The official news sources talk of mutual consent, but unofficially the separation wasn’t quite so mutual and consensual.

Now Werder Bremen played badly during the current season and seems unable to win any matches of late. And an inability to win matches usually results in coaches getting fired. I’ve never understood this – shouldn’t they rather fire the team or those members of it that don’t work, then the coach? Still, the usual response to teams playing badly is sacking coaches. Werder Bremen is actually better in that regard than most German first league clubs, since they don’t tend to fire their coaches and had two coaches, Otto Rehagel and Thomas Schaaf, who stayed on for 14 and 16 years respectively, separated by an interregnum of “those interchangable idiots whose names no one remembers”. What is more, I’ve always liked Thomas Schaaf. He lives near me and his children went to the school where I teach (they were never in my classes, though). And personally, I think Werder didn’t treat him very well by basically making him leave after 14 years, three DFB cup wins and a championship, without so much as a send-off. As for the team, I doubt they’ll do any better under a different coach. Talking to my Mom about this today, I said, “Isn’t Felix Magath [successful but widely disliked football coach] currently unemployed? Werder can hire him, cause Magath is certainly the coach they deserve.”

That’s all about football for now, so all of you who don’t care for sports (I normally don’t care for sports either, but I make an exception for Werder Bremen) can stop scanning. And now on to some other links of interest:

Urban fantasy author Lilith Saintcrow had a series of Livejournal posts about the adventures of the squirrels living in her backyard plagiarized by a Daily Kos user who – in the manner of plagiarists everywhere – denies having lifted any text. Found via Martha Wells.

Foz Meadows has a great post about how the portrayal of wolves, whether werewolves, direwolves or regular wolves, has very little to do with biological reality and how the whole domineering alpha werewolf concept (and have you ever noticed that werewolf heroes are all alphas?) is just sexist claptrap disguised as biology.

Here’s yet another addendum to the latest go-around of the Women in SFF debate, a New York Times article about women and science fiction by Susan Schwartz (by whom I once read a pretty good novel called Heritage of Flight) from 1982, just in case we needed proof how long this debate has been around and how littkle progress has been made. There’s a bonus jab against The Cold Equations as well. Found via Foz Meadows.

Jay Lake has an insightful post about reasons for writing and literary posterity. With regards to posterity, I always find it fascinating to look at bestseller lists as well as the winners of Nobel Prizes, Pulitzer Prizes and other distinguished literary awards of decades past and see how many names you recognize. Most of the time, it’s quite sobering, because you won’t recognize many names either on the bestseller list nor among the award winners. For example, Germany can boast nine winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature (ten, if we include Nelly Sachs, who was born in Germany and wrote in German, but was a Swedish citizen by the time she won). Of those nine, the first three are completely forgotten and unknown to anyone who is not a scholar of German literature. Honestly, you cannot predict which works will stand the test of time and which won’t.

The nominees for the 2013 Mythopoetic Awards have been announced. Looks like a good shortlist and I am particularly pleased to see The Spy Princess by Sherwood Smith among the nominees in the children’s and YA category.

More awards: The television BAFTA awards for 2013 have been awarded and my reaction is a big resounding “Meh”, since I don’t even know what most of the nominated and winning programs are. There’s a lot of love for the adaptions of Shakespeare’s historical dramas broadcast under the banner The Hollow Crown, which is probably deserved since everybody who has seen The Hollow Crown assures me it’s excellent. There’s also love for a mini series called Accused and for something called Mrs Biggs, while the BAFTA award for the best drama series of the year goes to Last Tango in Halifax, a drama about two people in their seventies finding new love. Looks like the BBC is gradually turning into ARD or ZDF, the German public TV channels which are (in)famous for broadcasting lots of dramas about very old people such as this really cheery example called Die Auslöschung (The extinction) in which Klaus Maria Brandauer suffers from Alzheimer’s. Mind you, only last year the best drama series BAFTA went to supernatural teen drama The Fades, in 2011 Sherlock won and in 2010 Misfits, all of which are really good television. And in 2013 the awards goes to a series about elderly people falling in love*. I’ve been having the niggling feeling for a while that British TV – long provider of really good drama programming – is on the decline and has resorted to churning out one nostalgia laden costume drama after another. But this year’s BAFTAs confirm it for me, though at least the nostalgia laden costume dramas weren’t nominated either, unless you count the Ford Maddox Ford adaption Parade’s End. Plus, it’s also notable that while the last three winners in the best drama series category were at least borderline SFF, as were other nominees in the category like Being Human, the only piece of speculative programming that shows up among the nominees is Game of Thrones in the international category, where it lost out against Sex in the City 2.0 a.k.a. Girls.

*It’s probably a well made, well acted programme, but it’s still not something I am even remotely interested in watching, sorry. As for all of those old people dramas on German public TV, not even my Mom watches those and she is the target demographic.

Posted in Books, Links, TV | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | 6 Comments

Photos: Walle Cemetery in Bremen

Posted on May 15, 2013 by Cora

Today, I had business in Walle, a working class and immigrant neighbourhood adjacent to the Bremen harbour. And since I was in the area already, I also took the opportunity to visit my grandmother’s grave at Walle cemetery as well as the Waterfront mall.

At the mall, I had a fake geek girl experience of sorts. Because I had a business appointment, I happened to be dressed fairly conservatively in dark pants and a grey, fairly elegant sweater. And when I went into the movie memorablia store as well as some of the hipper clothing shops at the mall, I got strange looks and a lot more “May I help you?” questions from sales clerks than usual, because I apparently did not look like the sort of person who would go into a shop specializing in surfer and skater wear and buy a Spider-Man t-shirt.

I also happened to have my camera along and took a bunch of photos of the cemetery, which was designed by a famous landscape architect and has some lovely 19th century headstones, as well as of the Bremen harbour area, which is full of interesting and borderline steampunky industrial architecture. So here are some photos. Cemetery first, harbour tomorrow: Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged , , , , , | 7 Comments

Mother’s Day Linkdump

Posted on May 13, 2013 by Cora

The 2013 Locus Awards finalists have been announced. Many good choices there, though the male dominance (four men and one woman) in the YA category is a bit depressing, especially since YA is heavily female dominated. But then, the four male nominees (and the lone female nominee for that matter) are popular and highly respected writers of adult SFF rather than explicit YA writers. Plus, it’s the sort of YA that is free of girl and romance cooties – no love triangles in China Miéville or Paolo Bacigalupi.

Even more awards: The finalists for the John W. Campbell and Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Awards have been announced as well. Nice selection on the Sturgeon Award, though the shortlist for the Campbell Award is very testosterone heavy and also very heavily weighed towards a particular kind of hard SF. But then this is the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, so what do you expect?

Meanwhile, those who have been following the recent awards controversy will have noticed that many of the same names and titles show up on various awards shortlists, so this year’s nominations do seem to reflect what is popular and gets attention in SFF after all, even if it does not reflect the tastes of certain fans and critics.

Also awards related as well as an addendum to yesterday’s post about women and SFF, John Scalzi reports about his very positive experience at RT Booklovers Convention, where he accepted RT’s Reviewers’ Choice award for Redshirts. Scalzi particularly notes how he was made feel welcome, even though he was a man at a primarily female dominated con and a man writing in a different genre at that.

Silvia Moreno-Garcia has a great post about the reasons for and challenges of writing in English as a non-native speaker. As another non-native speaker writing in English, I can certainly sympathize.

Not exactly new, but iO9 has a great post by Kelly Link on strategies for coming up with story ideas.

The Guardian has a lovely article by pianist James Rhodes (nope, not War Machine of Iron Man fame) about the drive to create art. This is just as applicable to writers as to musicians and visual artists.

This is fascinating: According to the Washington Post, linguists have identified a number of words which have remained fairly unchanged since the last Ice Age. However, Language Log is skeptical. Found via Jay Lake.

Finally, over at Pegasus Pulp, I mention how the German edition of Under the Knout just edged onto a bestseller list at Amazon Germany and found itself in very rude company (but then this is Under the Knout, the story which likes to hang out in the gutter) and plug some worthy books and events by other people.

Posted in Books, Links, Writing | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

The Latest on the Women in SFF Debate

Posted on May 12, 2013 by Cora

I’ve been busy with other things these past few days, but meanwhile this year’s women in SFF debate is still going on. But then when is it ever not? Still, here are the latest links:

As part of the Fantasy Book Cafè‘s “Women in SF&F” month, Kate Elliott offers her take on the current debate about the skewed gender balance in reviews. Meanwhile, iO9 weighs in as well.

Also as part of the Fantasy Book Café‘s “Women in SF&F” month, Juliet E. McKenna lays out the many ways in which the skewed gender balance in reviews and the resulting lack of visibility hurts women writers, because it helps to perpetuate the self-fulfilling prophecy that women don’t write SFF and that they don’t sell, even if they do.

As forhow this works in practice, Australian SFF writer Patty Jansen reports that a publisher told her point blank that they are not interested in hard SF by women writers because of the assumption that women don’t read hard SF and men won’t read books by women. It’s their loss, because Patty writes SFF with great characters of both sexes and diverse backgrounds.

Meanwhile, Renay at Lady Business did a similar breakdown for various review blogs. Apparently, this IMO well reasoned post was considered hugely controversial at the sort of places where the mere idea that a woman might have something to say is considered controversial, so here are the ladies of Lady Business reacting to the reactions.

Talking of reactions, Natalie at Radish Reviews, who pointed out that RT Book Reviews does review plenty of SFF by women and that the majority of their reviewers are female, recounts the reactions her post got, which mainly were along the lines of “RT? Who the fuck are they? And anyway, their reviews are too short and not detailed enough and therefore not proper criticism. Plus, they also review romance, so why should we take them seriously?” You can see an example of this (involving at least one critic who claimed he wanted to see more diversity in SFF) in this Twitter conversation.

What annoys me most about all of those “Well, RT doesn’t count” arguments, even more so than the “Criticism – Ur doing it wrong” one, is “But RT is a romance publication, so who cares what they have to say about SF? After all, Strange Horizons doesn’t review romance either.” My answer to this would be, “Well, why don’t they?” Because it is certainly telling that RT Book Reviews, though primarily a romance publication, reviews SF, fantasy, crime fiction and lots of other genres, whereas the main SFF review publications only stick to speculative fiction with the occasional excursion into literary SFF, while excluding certain subgenres like urban fantasy, even though they clearly are speculative fiction. It’s widely known that romance readers are not just very avid readers, but also willing to read across genres. So why aren’t SFF readers willing to step outside their genre bubble?

Also at Radish Reviews, Natalie offers her take on How to Suppress Women’s Writing by Joanna Russ, which even thirty years after its first publication is still as pertinent as ever. Whenever the issue of women in SFF comes up, as it does every couple of months or so, I always find myself reminded of How to Suppress Women’s Writing.

Regarding the all-male Clarke Award shortlist, Farah Mendlesohn has now read the various novels by women that were submitted for the award and comes to the conclusion that only four adult books by women and another four YA novels could be considered SF and that she probably wouldn’t have nominated any of those books either. Alas, this is more a statement about the sad state of SF publishing in the UK, where novels by women are almost impossible to sell due to publisher and bookseller bias. Interestingly, this also echoes my experiences when walking into UK bookshops looking for SFF. Books by female SFF authors, even if those women writers are British, popular and/or award-winning, are a lot more difficult to find in UK bookstores than books by male authors of similar standing. Now there are some male writers who are notoriously difficult to find in the UK (Simon Green comes to mind, even though he is British) as well, but there are far more women.

Over all the discussion about this year’s all-male shortlist for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, it’s easily forgotten who actually won. Well, in this case it was Chris Beckett for his novel Dark Eden. I haven’t read it, so I can’t comment. The premise of an isolated lost space colony is fairly familiar, but then a lot of good SFF is based on very familiar premises. Nice cover, though.

Finally, C.P.D. Harris wonders why so much epic fantasy slavishly recreates medieval gender roles (or what is widely perceived to be medieval gender roles) and ideas of consent, if these issues don’t have any actual impact on the plot. After all, it’s fantasy, so writers are free to divorce themselves from historical reality or what they believe historical reality to be.

Posted in Books, Links | Tagged , , , , , , | 6 Comments

New Story Available: The Dark Lily

Posted on May 11, 2013 by Cora

My latest release, The Dark Lily, is not just another foray into the genre of spy fiction as well as a return to the swinging sixties, but also a prequel to my other 1960s set spy novelette The Other Side of the Curtain. So for those of you who’ve been dying to learn how Zane Smith and Shoushan Kariyan first met (all ten of you or so who read The Other Side of the Curtain, that is, since it’s not exactly my most popular work), this is the story that answers all your questions.

Plus, it’s got a really gorgeous cover inspired by the psychedelic artwork of Wes Wilson and Peter Max. For those who want more visuals, I’ve started a Pinterest board for the Zane Smith and Shoushan Kariyan stories and another for the Silencer series.

The Dark Lily
The_Dark_Lily Beirut, 1965. Eccentric American billionaire Zane Smith is quite entranced by tattooed dancer known only as the Dark Lily. In fact, he is so entranced that he takes her back to his hotel room for a private performance. It’s only when he wakes up in the morning with one hell of a headache and the Dark Lily gone that Smith realizes he may have bitten off more than he can chew.
However, none of the valuables in Smith’s hotel room is missing – nothing save an invitation to a party at the American embassy in Beirut. But why would an exotic dancer attempt to snatch an invitation to an embassy party for herself? And who is the mysterious Dark Lily?
.

For more information, visit The Dark Lily page.
Buy it for the low price of 2.99 USD, EUR or GBP at Amazon US, Amazon UK, Amazon Germany, Amazon France, Amazon Spain, Amazon Italy, Amazon Canada, Amazon Brazil, Amazon Japan, Kobo, Barnes & Noble, Apple iTunes, Casa del Libro, W.H. Smith, DriveThruFiction, OmniLit/AllRomance ebooks and XinXii.
More formats coming soon.

Posted in Books | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments