I had an awful day at school today, including an altercation with a grumpy cleaning lady whom the whole school (students and teachers alike) hates and a kid trying to nick my watch. And had the gall to tell me that it was ugly anyway, when I made him give it back. What a 14-year-old boy wants with a lady’s watch is beyond me.
Besides, I’m tired, so here is a linkdump: Continue reading
I’d been noticing an uptick of hits on my Game of Thrones related posts in the past few days. And a lot of people googled for things like “is game of thrones depressing” (yes) and “does game of thrones have gore” (you bet).
Now I know the reason behind this trend, because it looks like the other shoe – or rather the blade – has dropped on Games of Thrones. For in the episode broadcast this Sunday, Ned Stark, played by Sean Bean, met his fate. Coincidentally, Sean Bean was also stabbed in real life the very same weekend. The things you come across while looking for spoilers for something completely different.
Warning: There will be some spoilers for Game of Thrones (show and book) as well as for Battlestar Galactica (the original mainly) and Spooks in the following, so proceed with caution. Continue reading
Even though I didn’t have school today – Pentecost holidays, hurray – I’m awfully tired. First of all, my sleep this morning was cut short by an infernal noise that turned out to be my stupid neighbours from across the street having the empty plot of land next to their house bulldozed yet again. I don’t know why they can’t just let grass grow on the plot of land, but have to bulldoze it again and again. Mafia body drop-off? A stolen nuke from the Cold War? A crashed UFO that has to be buried? A vault full of vampires biding their time to break free and feast on the neighbourhood? Probably not, but it is fun to speculate.
Since I didn’t have school today, I took the opportunity to head into Bremen. I had some business at the bank and I also ate out for the first time since the EHEC crisis hit. And since I was in town already, I also hit the bookstore and bought Indulgence in Death by J.D. Robb, Heart’s Blood by Juliet Marillier and Goddess of Light by P.C. Cast. I’d missed those books when they originally came out in the mid 2000s, but they are currently being reissued in Britain.
All three books I bought today are speculative fiction by female authors, which is pretty standard for my buying and reading patterns, because in recent years I have been reading a lot more books by women than men. However, I’m somewhat of an exception, because the the gender balance in science fiction discussion sparked by people naming their favourite SF books in the Guardian and mentioning overwhelmingly male writers is still going strong. Indeed, if I had participated in the Guardian poll (which I didn’t), there’s a pretty good chance I might have named a male writer as well, even though I read a lot of women. In fact, the main reason I didn’t participate in the poll was because I couldn’t decide on just one favourite book and writer.
Cheryl Morgan offers a summary of the discussion so far at the SFWA site. Of course, you also get the usual comments by people who claim not to care about or notice an author’s gender, they “just want a good story”. Only that for some reason, all good stories turn out to be written by men. One poster even suggests that SF by women just isn’t as good and that forgotten female authors needn’t be rediscovered, because if they had been any good, they’d certainly would never have been forgotten in the first place. Because worthy books are never forgotten and that single poster’s tastes are the one and only authority in the universe on what is and is not a great SF novel.
The long Pentecost/Whitsun weekend, though I still have one more day of school holidays. I also have links for you:
Yesterday, an airship, more precisely the Goodyear blimp, caught fire and crashed in Hessen. This would seem like a news headline that has made its way here from a parallel universe, if not for the sad fact that the Australian pilot died. His passengers, three journalists, managed to escape.
Agent Rachelle Gardner responds to the darkness in YA fiction debate sparked by that Wall Street Journal article last week. What makes this measured response particularly notable is that Ms. Gardner is an agent specializing in Christian literature.
Sherwood Smith has a great post about gender, reading and representation at the Book View Café.
I have the theory that urban fantasy as a subgenre is more open not just to women, both as protagonists and writers, but also to other traditionally marginalized groups such as people of colour, GLBT people, the poor, etc… We got into an interesting discussion of that point over at the Book View Café. So rather than repeat my points here, why don’t you just head over there?
Salman Rushdie is writing a TV series and explains why TV drama series are in the process of replacing novels in the Guardian.
I don’t believe that TV drama will replace novels anytime soon – they are different media with different storytelling modes. It’s also a bit sad that the shows Rushdie cites as inspiration don’t go beyond the usual suspects. Even if you genuinely like The Wire, West Wing, Mad Men and The Sopranos (as opposed to pretending to like them, because these shows are supposed to be the apex of contemporary television), they aren’t the only good TV shows out there, just the best known and most acceptable for an intellectual person to like. Nonetheless, I will be curious to see what Salman Rushdie comes up with for his “sort of, but not exactly science fiction” show.
Also at the Guardian, Haruki Murakami speaks out against Japan’s continued reliance on nuclear power.
A few days ago, I linked to this discussion of the British slang term “chav” at the Guardian.
Now the Guardian has a follow-up article, in which Suzanne Moore says that it’s not the term “chav” itself that’s the problem but the derogatory attitude towards poor working class people it reflects. The BBC news site also has a round-up of the discussion here. Continue reading
Today is Pentecost or Whitsun weekend, which is a public holiday in Germany. Well, tomorrow, i.e. Monday is a public holiday and those of us working in school like yours truly get Tuesday off as well. So hurray for a long holiday weekend.
Unfortunately, I also had a spot of computer trouble, when the battery charger of my laptop decided to give up the ghost yesterday night. Even more unfortunately, I only realized that the battery charger was faulty when my laptop ran out of power in spite of being plugged in and just wouldn’t recharge. Luckily, I still have the desktop, so I’m not entirely computerless, but it’s still annoying. And of course this has to happen during the long holiday weekend.
And now for some neat links: Continue reading
At the Atlantic, Alan Siegel argues that Ferris Bueller’s Day Off isn’t such a great film as many believe and predictably is accused of lacking a sense of humour by the Ferrisphiles in the comments.
I largely agree with Siegel, because while I love the films of John Hughes like anyone who was a teenager during the 1980s, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is probably the least interesting of his classic teen films (I never much cared for Home Alone and the other children’s films he made during the 1990s). The Breakfast Club, Sixteen Candles and Pretty in Pink were and continue to be so wonderful, because they managed to transcend cultural boundaries and address the universal core of teen experience. I could identify with the characters, even if I never had a prom or detention or a sweet sixteen party or any other of those nigh mythical markers of US teen experience.
From my German POV, I was actually stunned to discover that there really were such things as proms and cheerleaders and homecoming queens and teenagers riding around in cars all night in the US, because I had assumed that all of those things had been made up by Hollywood to sell teen movies. When I spent a summer visiting relatives in Kentucky, I wrote back breathless letters to my friends at home declaring that “the stuff in the movies was actually true”.
But in spite of all cultural differences, the teenagers in The Breakfast Club, Sixteen Candles or Pretty in Pink had actual problems I could relate to such as being reduced to stereotypes or ignored by their family. Ferris Bueller, however, Ferris Bueller was just a smartass – way to reminiscent of the boys in my school that I hated – skipping school and stealing cars with his funny-named friends*. There is nothing universal about the fantasy of skipping school and stealing a Ferrari, when you come from a culture where you don’t even learn to drive until your final year of school.
*That’s another issue I have with Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. None of the characters have even remotely normal names. Cameron was not a common name in the 1980s, though it later gained popularity, and Ferris or Sloane have never been common names at all.
I had a long post almost completely drafted, but then the headache from hell struck last night and effectively kept me from sleeping. I managed to make it through school and my daily translation quota, but now I’m just bloody tired. And while the headache from hell has been downgraded to the headache from purgatory, it hasn’t subsided completely. So you’ll have to wait another day for the longer post full of insights on class prejudice as expressed in popular television programming. In the meantime, here are some links to great posts by other people:
Jim Hines offers the best response yet to the Wall Street Journal article on allegedly morally depraved YA fiction: The Genre Bashing Dumbassery scale. Link found via Sherwood Smith.
Zoe Archer explains why romance novels are feminist at Book Addicts.
Nancy Fulda has two good discussions about the pros and cons of indie publishing going on at her side here and here.
The discussion about the relative lack of women writers in the science fiction genre, particularly in the UK, is still going strong, though by now it has morphed into a discussion of how to define feminist SF. Timmi Duchamp on the US side as well as Gwyneth Jones and Cheryl Morgan on the UK side wonder whether the root of the problem might not be that “feminism” is defined differently in the US and UK.
At the Book View Café, Sherwood Smith has a nice post about genre mixing, a subject that is very dear to my own heart.
Daniel Abraham discusses audience expectations, fan fiction and the so-called sophomore slump.
The 2011 Orange Prize goes to Tea Obreht for The Tiger’s Wife.
Finally, there is a trio of deaths to report. Spanish writer and political activist Jorge Semprun died aged 87, German screenwriter and author of theater comedies Curth Flatow died aged 91 and British voice actor Roy Skelton died aged 79. Roy Skelton had lent his voice to the Daleks and puppets Zippy and George among others.
There are several controversies going on at the moment, so here is a round-up of interesting discussions and challenging links: Continue reading
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