WordPress won’t let me access most of my administration page, so here’s just a quick post and two links:
The Guardian has a long interview of writer Hari Kunzru with Michael Moorcock.
And for more Moorcock, here is the man himself on writing a Doctor Who tie-in novel, also from the Guardian.
Yesterday was a pretty good if busy day. Last night, I attended the monthly translators’ meet-up at Leo’s Restaurant. I had pasta with spicy tuna sauce, red wine and Italian hot chocolate (hot chocolate with a dash of amaretto) not to mention a lot of pleasant communication.
School went pretty well, too. About half of my afternoon class was allegedly ill. Lucky for me it was the troublemaking half, so I had only the quieter students today.
Since today was the last class before the afternoon classes get redistributed after the half-term break, the kids had clamoured to watch the second half of the Doctor Who episode we started three weeks ago. It was End of the World, second episode of the first season of the new series. Well, one kid clamoured to watch the rest of the episode, the rest were mainly happy to get to watch a film instead of doing reading comprehension and grammar exercises. And since we got started early and didn’t have a whole lot of interruptions, we had time for another 45 minute episode afterwards. The kids were not overly excited by the trailer for the next new series Doctor Who episode, The Unquiet Dead (and frankly, the whole Victorian gothic horror set in Wales with Charles Dickens and allusions to his works doesn’t work well for this demographic anyway), so we watched the first episode of Demons, which is another of my “watch with students” shows. Continue reading
Since yesterday was the peculiar holiday known as report card holiday, i.e. two days of no school after the half term report cards have been given out, I decided to take the opportunity to go into Bremen. Actually I wanted to visit my aunt at the hospital, but my uncle told me that she’s running a high fever again, cause still undetermined. I’ve been worried about her for a long time, but now I’m really getting scared.
So I couldn’t visit my aunt, but I decided to go into town anyway. The weather was okay, though a lot colder than forecast. The temperature never went above the freezing point, contrary to the forecast. Besides, it’s not as if I have all that many opportunities. So I first did some local grocery shopping and then drove into town. Continue reading
I’m busy today, so have some links:
From All About Romance: Sentences you won’t find in romance novels. Some of those are just funny, but I’d actually like to see some of those in romance novels at least once in a while. Especially the one about public proposals. Goodness, I can’t think of anything that would be more humiliating.
At the Chronicle of Higher Education, a professor of English at the University of Virginia laments the end of the Western canon and the fact that most people – oh shock – read for entertainment rather than to be inspired.
I thought this sort of high culture – low culture dualism had gone out with the 1970s, but one still finds holdouts from time to time. Dinosaurs die hard, it seems.
On a related note, here is Theodora Goss on what fiction should have and what it should do for the reader.
Here is a great takedown of all of those “male and female brains are completely different and female brains are inferior and only suitable for nurturing professions” pseudoscientific neurological studies from the Times Literary Supplement. I’m very glad to see this crap exposed for the nonsense it is.
At the Observer, someone named Neal Gabler laments the death of professional criticism at the hands of the Internet.
Elsewhere on the Observer site, the critics respond.
This whole “The Internet is killing/democratizing criticism” thing isn’t new. In fact, it’s such an old hat that I probably linked to very similar articles and posts back on the old blog.
But there was one thing in the Neal Gabler article that caught my eye, namely his assertion that for all the alleged democratization of criticism, all of those critics still like the same books, movies, TV shows, bands, etc… And they don’t just all like the same five things, each of those same five things is always the best “Insert medium here” ever. Which is just plain impossible, because our cultural output can’t be so fabulous that it produces a timeless masterpiece every other year or so. Continue reading
I dug out a long abandoned short story with the idea of reviving and finishing it and got a lot of writing done. So here are some writing links:
The Financial Times discusses style guides and what does and does not constitute good writing. Continue reading
Yesterday, I was at the annual Oldenburg Motorbike Show with my Dad.
My Dad’s the biker, I just tag along, so he’ll have someone to talk to and hang out with. Though I did see some neat stuff such as some very cool vintage motorcycles ranging from the stunning (a steampunky contraption of gleaming brass from 1921) to the absurd (a Vespa scooter with a mounted bazooka, which was someone’s idea of a military vehicle). Oddly enough, the military Vespa scooter was a postwar vehicle, since it looked totally like something Hitler or Mussolini would have cooked up to fight and completely fail to stop the advance of the allied troops. The stunt show was pretty neat, too, though the exhaust fumes were almost unbearable.
At the entrance to the parking lot of the exhibition hall, there was a small squad of policemen checking every car, looking for potential troublemakers. Probably because there had been rumours of a biker war that never materialized at the Oldenburg show last year and the police wanted to prevent a repeat performance. There has been a turf war between two rival biker gangs going on for a while now and the news outlets occasionally run a “OMG, evil criminal bikers” article on a slow news day, so the issue is at the forefront of some minds now. What is more, one of the biker gangs has had a booth at the Oldenburg Motorbike Show for years and they’ve never made any trouble that I know of. Most of the time, they just sit at their table, all seven of them, and chat among each other. For a long time, I didn’t even know that those guys were supposed to be criminals.
All that police effort for the sake of seven bikers seemed rather futile, because if criminal biker gangs wanted to use the Oldenburg Motorbike Show as an excuse for a fight, they’d meet somewhere off the grounds and no one could stop them. Never mind that if you know that your club jacket is going to get you banned (the rival gang is automatically banned to prevent fights from breaking out on the exhibition grounds, which might endanger bystanders), you’ll just come to the show in regular garb and put on the jacket in the restroom. Though I didn’t see anyone of the main rival gang, just some members of another gang suspected to be problematic.
Besides, some 99 percent of the attendees were perfectly harmless motorcycle enthusiasts. There were lots of families with young kids and sadly the predictable gender divide. Little boys proudly sit on motorcycles they’re way too young to drive, while little girls stand around and fervently wish they were somewhere else. I always find that depressing, why do Dads not let their little girls sit on the bikes for once? And some of the little girls are interested. I spotted a Dad with twin girls, about five years old, who constantly pointed out and remarked upon various bikes. Of course, they were mainly attracted by bright colours, but it’s a start.
At the Harley-Davidson booth (where else?), they had a woman in a leather bikini who was apparently paid to pose scantily clad on motorcycles. Absolutely no one paid any attention to her. The only reaction was some mild annoyance when she was posing on a bike someone wanted to look at. Only one person was utterly fascinated by the leather-clad woman and that person was a girl of approximately fifteen, who just couldn’t take her eyes of the woman. Somehow, I suspect that’s not the target audience they were planning to attract.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about doing something more with The Silencer, a pulp-style masked vigilante hero I created in the early 2000s, when I became interested in the pulp magazines and their writers.
I have a great deal of respect for the pulp writers of the 1920s, 30s and 40s. They were writing at a speed that is pretty much unimaginable today (unless you are Nora Roberts, that is) and the best of them turned out stories that still manage to thrill some seventy or eighty years after they were written. Not bad for disposable fiction.
I wrote a couple of stories about the Silencer at the time. Two were published, another is basically publication ready, but failed to sell to the very specific anthology market it was aimed at. There are also some unfinished Silencer stories, which may or may not be salvagable.
I’ve always liked the Silencer and his cast of regulars. They were fun to write and still hold up pretty well after several years. It seems like a pity to just leave them lying around on my hard drive and in long out of print magazines. This is still a vague idea at the moment, but perhaps I’ll find a way to do more with the Silencer and his thrilling adventures fighting crime in 1930s New York.
Since I’m already on a pulp kick, I found something very cool: How to write for the pulps from the 1939 Writer’s Yearbook.
Much of this still holds true after over seventy years, even the payment rate hasn’t risen that much. Only old miner and faithful burro stories have gone the way of the pulps in the meantime.
The pulps were all about the action and action of course means fight scenes. So, on a related note,
Lilith Saintcrow has another post up in her series on writing fight scenes.
At school today, I was practicing asking for and giving directions with the kids. First we used a practice map of a made-up town stuffed full with all sorts of interesting places to go and then the London tube map.
With the tube map, I always asked the kids, “What do you want to do in London?” and then asked them to pick a station on the map to start their journey. What they wanted to do differed, though interestingly none of them wanted to see the obvious sights. I sent the reader to Charing Cross Road, the teen fashionista to Oxford Circus, since I suspect she would go crazy in Top Shop. One particularly cheeky boy said he wanted to go to a brothel. I sent him to Soho.
One boy couldn’t decide where he wanted to go, so I gave him a bunch of the usual tourist options and then some of the less usual ones. The boy eventually decided that he wanted to visit the HMS Belfast and that his start point was somewhere on the Docklands Light Railway (Woolwich Arsenal, I think).
However, this boy had also concocted a fairly elaborate story to go with the trip. He told me that he had just bought the Belfast from the mayor of London and converted her into a cruise liner and wanted to take her to Bremerhaven. He even offered me a job serving drinks on his new luxury ship. I played along with the story, all the while thinking that this whole scenario was totally like something out of Hustle.
I mean, you can almost picture it. Here is this foreign investor who thinks he just bought the HMS Belfast to convert into a luxury cruise liners (which is completely crazy in itself, because classification society rules make converting one type of ship into another pretty difficult) standing at the Woolwich Arsenal station and heading out to pick up his purchase, about to realize that it was all a con.
And now for some links:
Kat Howard and Megan Kurashige weigh in on the usefulness of the term “speculative fiction”.
Phyllis Irene Radford a.k.a. P.R. Frost wonders about the popularity of urban fantasy over at the Book View Café.
Neat article about the so-called “Frankfurt kitchen”, the ancestor of today’s kitchens, from the New York Review of Books.
Catherynne Valente explains why she doesn’t like the term “speculative fiction”. (Link found via Charles Tan)
I don’t agree with her at all, because I find the term “speculative fiction” very useful. If we’re talking about works that are very clearly SF or fantasy or horror, then we don’t need an umbrella term at all. But when we’re dealing with works that don’t neatly fit into any one of the three speculative genre boxes (Into which category do the Pern books fit? Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell? The Kate Daniels series by Ilona Andrews? The Silver Metal Lover by Tanith Lee? Every Steampunk novel ever?) or when we want to talk about the three sister genres of science fiction, fantasy and horror together, we need an umbrella term. And speculative fiction is the best one there is at the moment.
Of course, there is also SFF or SFFH (since horror is usually the forgotten one of the three sister genres) and I agree that SFF or SFFH are perfectly useful for blogs, inner fandom communication and the internet. However, we don’t only communicate with fellow fans and SFF or SFFH may be a bit much to take for people who have problems understanding that SF means “science fiction” and not “San Francisco”*.
What is more, when you’re writing in a formal academic context, abbreviations and acronyms like SF are unacceptable. In my MA thesis, I had to do a global search and replace for SF, because I was so used to using SF rather than science fiction that the occasional mistake might have slipped through. Never mind that having to type science fiction over and over again gets really annoying really fast.
In my PhD thesis I am using “speculative fiction” where appropriate, because I am dealing with all three genres and “speculative fiction” still is the best umbrella term we have. “Fantastic fiction” or “Fantastica” would seem to exclude SF (never mind that’s it’s not really all that common a term) and typing out science fiction/fantasy/horror (a.k.a. SFFH) would drive both me and the reader insane very quickly. But speculative fiction is a handy, easily explicable term and it sounds academically acceptable.
As for Catherynne Valente’s claim that non-SFF people tend to assume that “fantasy” means porn, sorry, but I have never had that experience at all or heard of anyone who did. If I use the term “fantasy” or “fantastic literature” with a German non-fan, they will think of Lord of the Rings, the Neverending Story, Inkheart, Momo, Grimm’s Fairy Tales or whatever, but they certainly won’t think porn, because there already is a perfectly acceptable term for porn and that’s porn or – if you want to be a bit more upmarket – erotic literature. I guess it has to do with the American desire to label erotic fiction or porn as something other than it is, because no one here in Germany, not even the elderly professor** who has never heard of Twilight and never read Lord of the Rings, would confuse fantasy with porn.
*Personally, I am always confused when SF ends up standing for “San Francisco”, because I have come to associate the abbreviation with science fiction so much that I expect something called the SF Chronicle to be a science fiction magazine.
**I’m sorry to come up with the clueless elderly professor all the time, but he is actually a composite of several highly respected academics I’ve met and a constant reminder that I have to write my PhD thesis so that the clueless elderly professor will understand what I’m on about.
sending...