Wah – Evil Foreigners are ruining Hollywood – Again!

Posted on January 9, 2011 by Cora

The Atlantic has an article about how international audiences are killing off the comedy and western genres* in Hollywood by refusing to watch American comedies and westerns.

Screeds like this one show up almost as regularly as pronouncements of the impeding death of science fiction and they’re almost as silly. The thesis goes something like this: Hollywood films suck these days (true) and international performance is becoming an ever more important part of Hollywood’s finance model (true). In the next step, these two “trues” are somehow combined into one “false” by stating that international audiences are the reason why Hollywood films suck these days, because international audiences are just too dumb to appreciate the nuances in the work of Hollywood’s great screenwriters and directors.

It’s all a big load of crap, of course. International audiences have different tastes, true, but that does not necessarily mean that they have inferior tastes. What is more, international audiences aren’t one monolithic block. A moviegoer in Copenhagen will have very different preferences from a moviegoer in Bangalore and from one in Buenos Aires. Continue reading →

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Quick Post and a Link

Posted on January 8, 2011 by Cora

I’m still not feeling well and spending three hours grocery shopping in crowded supermarkets yesterday afternoon didn’t help either.

So in lieu of a proper post, here’s an interview with Patricia Briggs.

Housekeeping: I’ve IP-banned a really annoying and persistent comment spammer.

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Fire, Pulp and Romance

Posted on January 7, 2011 by Cora

First the good news, the Moerdijk fire I mentioned in my post yesterday is under control. Locals are still warned to keep their doors and windows closed and not to eat vegetables grown in the open. Shipping on the Hollandse Diep and the Rhine Maas delta is still disrupted. The highway bridge over the Hollandse Diep, which is still the first image that comes to mind after twenty years, was closed as well for a while. But at least, the flames did not reach the chemical waste storage facility my Dad used to manage back in the 1980s.

I talked to my parents today and it turned out that they did not know that the fire was at Moerdijk – all they knew was the “near Rotterdam” information from the TV news. What is more, my Dad did not watch the evening news yesterday, because he was out, so he didn’t see the footage and thus couldn’t recognize the location. He doesn’t remember Chemie Pack though (who have been operated on that site since 1982, according to news reports) and insists that their neighbour back in the day was a paper factory. And come to think of it, yes, there was a paper factory. That’s where I first became aware of the term “Tetra Pack”, painted on a factory wall. According to Google Maps, Tetra Pack still is in the Moerdijk industrial estate, though in a different location, further away from the site of the fire.

In not so good news, I seem to have picked up some kind of bug during my outing yesterday and am not feeling too hot today. I’ve used any immunity system booster I have at my disposal and hope that it goes away.

And now for today’s links:

Mark Charan Newton has a good post on media tie-ins as modern pulp fiction. There’s some of the by now predictable sneering at urban fantasy and paranormal romance in the comments, though. I really wish writers and readers everywhere would stop the “my genre is better than yours” game, because it’s bloody annoying.

On a related note, here’s Sam Sykes on how romantic subplots can be an integral part of epic fantasy and how some male readers actually like the romantic elements, while some female readers actually like the fight scenes and how rigid gender stereotypes are stupid in general. Sam Sykes wasn’t really on my radar so far, but that’s a very good post. Found via Adrian Faulkner.

Finally, Promantica has a post on deciphering the language and blurbs and reviews. Very funny and oh so true.

There actually are a couple of terms and phrases that are an immediate turn-off, when they show up in reviews or blurbs. “Pleasantly slow” and “beautiful, quiet images” are a total turn-off in movie reviews, because it usually translates as “boring as hell”. And just recently, I saw a TV miniseries I had been planning to watch described as “neo-noire in the tradition of The Wire“, which turned me right off something I’d been looking forward to. Because “neo-noire” usually translates into “crime novel I don’t like” and I bloody hate The Wire and hate the whole “best TV show ever” hype surrounding it even more.

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A Blaze from the Past

Posted on January 6, 2011 by Cora

I had a busy day today. First, I visited my aunt in the hospital, then I attended the monthly translators meet-up at Leo’s Restaurant in Bremen. While rushing from the hospital to the restaurant, I passed through the central station. At the station bookshop, I bought two “Romanhefte”, both westerns (I might write an article about that some time, since westerns are the only Romanheft genre I haven’t tackled yet), The Passage by Justin Cronin (relevant for the PhD because of Cronin’s literary credentials) and a gossip magazine for my mother.

The translators meet-up was nice. I met up with a pal from my uni days I hadn’t seen in a while and laughed a lot. For dinner, I had tagliatelle with crawfish and arragula cream sauce and a virgin Pina Colada. Since I was there by car, I couldn’t have alcohol, so wine was out. I’m glad that many bars and restaurants now offer virgin cocktails, so you don’t have to sit around sucking on a bottle of water or non-alcoholic beer (which I don’t even like), if you’re driving.

The weather forecast had prophecied freezing rain for the evening and night. I wanted to get home before the freezing rain hit, but since we were having fun I stayed until eleven anyway and did make it home before the rain. Coincidentally, I just checked the school closures page for Lower Saxony and my county has closed the schools again because of the weather conditions. Which means that my winter holidays have been extended until next week.

Once I came home, I watched the late news on TV. That’s when I first heard about this fire at a chemical plant in the Southern Netherlands. The news report only said the facility was near Rotterdam, but I immediately thought, “Shit, please don’t tell me that’s Moerdijk.”

I told myself it was unlikely. Half the Rhine Maas delta is covered with chemical factories and refineries. That fire could be anywhere within a very large area. However, two minutes of research on the web revealed that the blaze was indeed in Moerdijk. Shit.

So why does a chemical fire in Moerdijk, a small town* in the Netherlands halfway between Rotterdam and Antwerpen on the shores of the Hollandse Diep trouble me so much? Continue reading →

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A Bouquet of Writing Links

Posted on January 5, 2011 by Cora

I don’t really have anything of interest to say, too busy with translating and writing to do much else, so have a couple of writing links instead:

Theodora Goss has a great post on the importance of writing every day. Found via Lilith Saintcrow. I’ve been adhering to the “write every day” mantra for more than four years now, and while I know that it doesn’t work for everyone, it works for me.

Mark Charan Newton posts about a writing exercise using photos for inspiration. His exercise is very similar to the Instant Story Machine exercise I sometimes do with my students. Though of course Mark Charan Newton’s aims (getting people to think out of the box) and his target audience (aspiring writers) is very different from mine, which is basically getting the kids to write at all.

Janice Hardy has great post about worldbuilding, settings and research. The advice is mostly geared towards writers of speculative fiction, but it works just as well for mimetic fiction with real world settings. For example, I determined the setting for “the novel”, which has a realistic setting, very much like Janice Hardy’s first point.

The inspiration for “the novel” was a single scene that just came into my head and wouldn’t let go, so I wrote it down. I could see the location for that one scene (which is set inside an apartment) and had some very vague guesses about the larger setting. Once I realized that there was more to this story than a few scenes, I set about to find a real world place that matched those vague parameters I had.

Meanwhile, Nicola Morgan has a post about the perils of too much research. Found via Charles Tan.

Finally, the Chronicle of Higher Education has an article on bad and clunky student writing.

I actually agree that the example given is clunky and could be better phrased. I even grant him the punctuation. But otherwise the author displays stunning America-centrism. It’s not just the “Yankees” thing (really, who cares whether it’s singular or plural?) either. A lot of the Britishisms he complains about are not in any way wrong English, they’re just a different variety of English. This man’s attitude is the exact opposite of the attitude I got from some of my more inept English teachers at high school, who refused to accept my American usage and marked up Americanisms as errors. I’d have hoped that sort of idiocy would have died out by now, but apparently it lives on in some US colleges.

Though to be honest, from my admittedly outsider POV, I find the way writing and grammar instruction are done in the US highly problematic. I suspect that’s at least partly due to the fact that Elements of Style is still considered the grammar and style bible by many in the US, even though the book has obvious problems and in fact I’ve never heard a Non-American recommend it. The Chronicle of Higher Education has a wonderful article on everything that’s wrong with Strunk & White.

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Brenda Starr, Stieg Larsson and some Housekeeping

Posted on January 4, 2011 by Cora

Today, I took down the Christmas tree and the rest of the holiday decorations. Epiphany Day, i.e. January 6th, is the traditional deadline for getting rid of holiday decorations in my area (though in some regions, e.g. in part of the Netherlands, Christmas decorations stay up until Candlemas, i.e. February 2nd), but I never leave the tree up that long. It’s a natural tree and it starts shedding after New Year.

And now for a couple of links and news: Continue reading →

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New Year Linkdump

Posted on January 3, 2011 by Cora

I was out all day today, at the traditional new year’s day meet-up with some friends of my parents in Teufelsmoor (devil’s moor) north of Bremen. I spent a lot of time in Teufelsmoor as a kid and so I need to limit my exposure, plus I’d already been to Teufelsmoor and seen the friends of the family two weeks ago at a golden wedding anniversary. But I’m very fond of the Greek restaurant where we were having lunch, so I went anyway. I’m not the biggest fan of Greek cuisine as practiced in Germany, too meat heavy for my tastes. But the restaurant where we had lunch today is really great, probably my favourite Greek restaurant in the Bremen area. I had baked feta cheese with vegetables as a starter and a grilled trout with tomato rice and vegetables as a main course.

In other news, I’m still busy with that big translation job. What is more, the anaesthetic gel I’m using against a painful inflammation inside my mouth (I have those inflammations quite often – this one is particularly nasty, because it is difficult to access), has the side-effect of making me ever so slightly high. So here’s a couple of links in lieu of a proper post behind the cut: Continue reading →

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Recently Read Books

Posted on January 2, 2011 by Cora

I’m really behind on discussing “recently read books”, since I already finished one and a half books since this one. Still, here it is:

Steamed by Katie MacAlister

This is exactly the sort of book that the recent Steampunk backlash is aimed at. It uses Steampunk tropes and a Steampunk setting, but the story it tells is a romance. It was not published by an SFF publisher. And the author is not an SFF insider, even though she has written more SFF novels (18, if I counted correctly) than many a recent Hugo winner. In short, Steamed is a classic case of “someone else playing in the SFF sandbox”. However, since I research works mixing elements of SFF and romance, Steamed is exactly the sort of book I’m looking for.

However, I have to admit that I wanted to like this book a lot more than I eventually did. The premise – hunky computer nerd and Steampunk fan as well as his somewhat flaky sister find themselves in a Steampunk world following a lab accident – was absolutely fantastic and full of potential. The execution, however, was lacking in places. Continue reading →

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Happy New Year… and some metrics

Posted on January 1, 2011 by Cora

So 2011 is here and has been for a little over two hours, so here’s a happy, healthy and successful new year to my readers (all two or three of you).

I did the party thing for a few years in my late teens and twenties, but it was never really my thing. So this year for New Year’s Eve, I watched the traditional Dinner For One sketch and even had Mulligatawny soup, first of the four courses of Miss Sophie’s birthday dinner for lunch. Alas, no drunken butler impersonating dead people.

If anyone has never seen Dinner For One, here is the original video and here is an article from Slate about the phenomenon that gladly manages to be largely free of the condescension that dripped from their report about the Swedish love for a Disney Christmas special.

Afterwards, I headed out for dinner with some family members to a local Italian restaurant. I even managed to get there safely, though I stepped into a pile of muddy thawing snow, while exiting my car.

We shared a big antipasto platter, then I had spaghetti with grilled scampi and garlic and for dessert a panne cotta and finally a latte macchiato. We arrived at the restaurant at half past eight, had to wait for ten minutes or so for the people before us to vacate the table. But then we managed to dawdle until twenty to twelve and had to rush home. Luckily, the drive is only seven minutes or so.

I spent the actual start of the new year with an empty glass in hand (because the cork had broken off in the champagne bottle and took longer than expected to extract) waiting for the TV tuner on my laptop to start up. Saw maybe 30 seconds of the Brandenburg Gate fireworks on TV, before going out to have our own fireworks. I had bought a set of mixed fireworks (rockets, volcanoes, a few crackers) at the supermarket for approx. 15 Euros and it provided more than enough bang for my bucks. One firecracker and one rocket failed to ignite. I picked them up and discarded them, so kids won’t take them (a lot of kids roam the streets for firecrackers that failed to ignite) and get hurt.

Some of my students at school go completely fireworks crazy and have their parents (since kids under 18 are not allowed to buy fireworks) buy them a hundred firecrackers or more. I pity the poor neighbours.

Finally, have some blog metrics under the cut: Continue reading →

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Yet Another Linkdump

Posted on December 31, 2010 by Cora

Our almost three weeks of solid snow and frost are thawing just in time for New Year. Unfortunately, that thawing is accompanied by freezing rain, which makes every surface slippery as hell. I’m very glad that I don’t have to go out tomorrow except head to a nearby Italian restaurant for dinner. And the restaurant is in walking range. Not in easy walking range, but it’s possible and I’ve done it, too. Though given how dangerous the slippery roads are, driving is probably still the safer option.

In other news, I’m still busy with that big translation job, so have another linkdump:

Juliette Wade has a great post on what does “normal” mean anyway. As someone who’s never really been normal either – quite deliberately so in my teens, to the point that I explicitly did not wear or do certain things, because that would be too normal – I heartily agree with her.

Here is a great article about all female shoplifting gangs in Victorian London at The Guardian. Great storyfodder there, particularly for historical fiction and Steampunk writers.

And in what will hopefully be the last celebrity death of 2010, singer/dancer Bobby Farrell of Boney M died yesterday aged 61. If you’ve ever seen Boney M, you’ll know Bobby Farrell. He was the lone male member of the group who always danced so enthusiastically. He wasn’t the main singer, though, that was Frank Farian’s voice coming out of Bobby Farrell’s mouth.

I was a young child during the Boney M/disco era. And since Boney M was the brainchild of the German producer/singer Frank Farian, they were on German TV a lot in the 1970s and early 1980s. As a result, I’ve had a lot of exposure to their music and I’ve always been fond of their music. Whatever one may think of Frank Farian, the man knows how to make pop music. He was also ahead of his time, e.g. he used sampling techniques on Boney M songs before it was common. And as for Farian’s tendency to let prettier people dance and move their lips to his singing, so what? I’ve never understood why so many people were so shocked that Milli Vanilli, another Farian band, didn’t sing live, since everybody knew that Boney M. (and most likely Eruption, Farian’s other disco band, too) never sang live either.

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