Judging Books by their Covers

Posted on December 3, 2010 by Cora

It’s still snowing, though no longer quite as cold as before. And of course my heater had to have a failure in the middle of the night (I have a nifty system that sends me a fax to inform me of errors, so I’ll notice before I start freezing to death) and the usual method of dealing with such errors, pressing the reset button on the heater control panel, didn’t work at all. This isn’t the first error of late, I had another two days ago very early in the morning. I suspect a maintenance error, since the heater maintenance person was here only a couple of months ago.

In other news, tonight was the monthly translators’ meeting for December, taking place again at Leo’s restaurant. Which means that I was overly social this week, considering I was out two evenings (first the newleaf reading and then the translators’ meeting) in a row. For me, that’s pretty rare.

I’ve been a big fan of the Cover Café’s annual romance novel cover contest ever since I discovered it several years ago. Coincidentally, they also have a special holiday cover contest going on right now.

However, I have always wondered why there aren’t similar contests for other genres. Because romance certainly isn’t the only genre to profit from celebrating the best design the genre has to offer, considering how godawful many SF, fantasy, mystery, thriller, literary, chick lit, etc… covers can be. And lo and behold, All Things Urban Fantasy has a similar cover contest for urban fantasy covers.

Interestingly, both romance and urban fantasy are oft derided subgenres and much of that derision is based on the fact that “the covers are so awful, so the books must be awful as well”. Never mind that romance covers have gotten a lot better and the past ten years or so and that urban fantasy actually has a whole lot of very striking covers as well as some godawful ones. Though epic fantasy is usually worse, e.g. the US Wheel of Time covers are awful. Besides, judging by sheer blinding cover awfulness, Lois McMaster Bujold’s A Civil Campaign would have to be the worst SF book of the past twenty years. Which it obviously isn’t.

So in short, we all know that judging a book by its cover doesn’t work, yet people persist in doing it. And now two of the most derided genres with the most derided covers, romance and urban fantasy, hold cover contests to honour well designed covers. Coincidence? I think not.

Talking of urban fantasy covers, one of my students, who is an avid reader of YA paranormals and urban fantasy, calls those books “dunkle Bücher”, i.e. “dark books”, because their covers are always dark. IMO that’s as good a genre label as any other.

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Short Snowy Post

Posted on December 2, 2010 by Cora

Here’s yet another quick post, since I’m tired and not feeling too well. And this time, I don’t even have any links.

This early onset winter still has us firmly in its grip. Yesterday, the temperature never rose above approx. minus six degrees Celsius. Most of the time, it was closer to minus eight. And over night, it also snowed again, though we’re still better off than the rest of Germany, where people are drowning in snow.

Yesterday evening, I was at the launch reading of newleaf No. 27 at Lagerhaus Schildstraße. newleaf is the literary magazine of the English department of the University of Bremen. I’ve been on the staff of the magazine for years and am still listed as sales manager as far as I know, though I haven’t done a whole lot of active work since leaving the university.

Still, it was nice seeing many of the old gang again. Pretty good audience turnout, too, particularly considering that newleaf was up against the TV premiere of Neue Vahr Süd, adapted from the eponymous novel by Sven Regener. Both novel and film are set in Bremen in the early 1980s – the title actually refers to a huge postwar housing development, though most of the story takes place elsewhere. The film was shot on location in Bremen, so pretty much half the city was watching.

I’ll do a more detailed write-up of the launch for the newleaf website soon and will probably also put up some photos at the newleaf flickr account.

ETA: The newleaf editors actually picked my suggestion for this issue’s featured classic poem, The Tyger by William Blake.

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Frost and a quick post

Posted on December 1, 2010 by Cora

We’re having another frosty night. According to my indoors/outdoors thermometer, it’s minus 7.9 degrees Celsius outside, which is pretty damn cold for Northern Germany in late November/early December.

What is more, I’ve got a swollen eyelid, which itches and hurts in spite of applying cotton pads soaked in chamomile tea to the affected eye. So here’s just a quick post and a couple of links:

Matt Cheney from The Mumpsimus has a great post on different ways of reading. Unlike Matt Cheney, I am a visual reader (and writer) and usually see a piece of fiction unfolding like a film in my head.

The 2010 bad sex award goes to Rowan Somerville for his novel The Shape of Her. Make sure to read the sentence comparing a none too successful sex act to pinning a butterfly. That’s one mental image I really could’ve done without.

For good sex scenes and other emotional moments, Janice Hardy has some tips on providing emotional clarity.

Finally, there’s yet another celebrity death to report. German opera singer Peter Hofmann died aged 66. In the 1970s and 1980s, Hofmann was one of the world’s best Wagner tenors, though the fact that he looked like he was born to play a Wagnerian hero helped a lot as well. Hofmann was also one of the first opera singer to record a rock album and play musical roles, at a time when classical and pop music were still strictly separated. In fact, I first became aware of him when his rock album came out in the early 1980s, as I didn’t discover my love of opera until later (and I was never a Wagner fan anyway). In the 1990s, Hofmann’s voice and performing ability declined sharply, which was first blamed on him having “ruined his voice by singing rock songs”, when in truth he was already suffering from Parkinson’s disease.

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Upcoming Event

Posted on November 30, 2010 by Cora

And now for a bit of shameless (self)-promotion for those in the Bremen area:

Coffee Rings, the launch reading/performance of No. 27 of newleaf, a literary magazine I’ve been involved with for several years now, will take place on Wednesday, December 1, 2010, 8 pm at the Café KiOto in Lagerhaus Schildstraße.

Here is the official press release from the University of Bremen.

Here is an announcement on the page of the virtual Literaturhaus Bremen.

And here is the Facebook fanpage for newleaf.

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More Celebrity Deaths

Posted on November 30, 2010 by Cora

It really seems to be the season for celebrity deaths, because almost every day you hear that another actor, singer, director, writer or other artist, whose work has influenced your life in big or little ways, has died.

Today, we mourn Leslie Nielsen, aged 83, and Irvin Kershner, aged 87. Here is Leslie Nielsen’s obituary and here is Irvin Kershner’s.

Irvin Kershner will probably be best remembered for his contribution to the SF genre as the director of The Empire Strikes Back and along with Leigh Brackett probably the main reason why Episode V is the best of the Star Wars films.

And while Leslie Nielsen will mainly be remembered for his comedy parts in Airplane!, The Naked Gun, Dracula – Dead and Loving It and many others in the same vein, for me that first film that comes to mind will always be Forbidden Planet, which is probably best SF film made between the release of Metropolis in 1926 and the release of 2001 – A Space Odyssey in 1968. And since I don’t care for 2001, for me Forbidden Planet wasn’t topped until Star Wars 21 years later.

I remember watching Forbidden Planet for the first time around 1990 as part of my quest to track down all of the films mentioned favourably in my stack of film books (more on that here). Forbidden Planet was one of the comparatively few films that completely lived up to its reputation, while most others were either over- or underrated. The appearance of Leslie Nielsen, already a big comedy star at that time, was a surprise, though. Crap, that’s Leslie Nielsen. In a serious role. And he’s young. And kind of handsome, actually.

Finally, not to leave her out, though her work meant a lot less to me than either Kershner’s or Nielsen’s, German folk music singer and jodel queen Maria Hellwig died on Saturday aged 90. Maria Hellwig and her daughter Margot were a sort of constant TV presence for generations of German youths, her folk music shows forced upon us by our parents and grandparents, before we were old enough to have our own TVs or gain control of the remote. Because she maintained her looks remarkably well over the past 30 years or so, Maria Hellwig was also one of those celebrities you secretly suspected of being a vampire. In fact, I suspect that German commercial folk music (which has very little to do with actual folk music and is a horror barely imaginable to those never exposed to it) is dominated by vampires in general. At least Heino is totally a vampire.

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Update on the “fire” and some writing links

Posted on November 29, 2010 by Cora

That flickering flame thing in the neighbours’ garden really is a storm lantern of some kind. The flame is pretty big, though, for a candle. I wouldn’t be surprised if some nighttime or early morning passer-by calls the fire brigade at some point.

I’m not feeling too well today, so here are some links:

On the SFWA site, Jason S. Ridler discusses the actual working conditions for writers in the pulp era. I’ve always had a huge amount of admiration for pulp writers, given the conditions under which they produced fiction, some of which holds up surprisingly well today. I remember talking about my admiration for pulp writers like Walter B. Gibson, creator of The Shadow, and their enormous word output in a university writing class and got a derisive comment from someone, “Well, a writer can hardly be Thomas Mann with such a huge output.” Whereupon I replied, “Not everybody wants to be Thomas Mann. Some of us actually want to write stories that people read without being forced to in school.” Okay, so I really don’t like Thomas Mann and never have.

Charles Stross takes on Steampunk yet again. Complete with bonus swipe against urban fantasy, which has now been taken over by paranormal romance – never mind that most romance readers consider both entirely different genres. Oh yes, and the fake Steampunk novel was written by one Charlene Stress, because obviously women only write fluff anyway. One could almost make on of those noxious bingo cards for stuff like this.

Meanwhile, on the saner side of the genre wars, here is Richard Dansky on “that crap that you like and this brilliant stuff that I like”. Wise words there, with one exception: All of humanity does not agree that Law and Order provides ideal background noise, because I hate the entire Law and Order franchise with a passion, because most of it is nasty propaganda IMO. I can’t even watch the ones with Chris Noth, an actor I normally like (and who deserves better than being remembered mainly as the trophy man of some demented fashion-crazed New Yorker chick).

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Flames in the Night

Posted on November 28, 2010 by Cora

We still have snow plus pretty heavy frost (-7 degrees), by our standards at least. However, the snow and the frost and the frozen trees were hidden by some very thick fog, so we didn’t get to enjoy much of it.

Oh yes, and someone should tell the automatic light sensor in my car that dense fog with 50 meters visibility is definitely sufficient cause to switch on the headlights. I mean, what use is an automatic light sensor, if you can’t trust it? I already reported the problem with the light sensor to the garage a while back and they told me they changed the settings. Doesn’t seem to have helped much, though.

What is more, I’m wondering whether the flickering orange light in my neighbours’ garden is just a particularly long lasting votive candle or storm lantern or whatever the thing next to their front door that they insist on lighting every evening is or whether the candle accidentally tipped over and is in the process of burning the house down. Because in that case, I will have to call the fire brigade and wake the neighbours. Whose phone number I don’t even have, because they only moved here a few months ago. Okay, so burning a live candle unattended in your garden is a stupid idea, even if it’s in some kind of holder or storm lantern. But I still can’t let the neighbour house burn down, especially since it would endanger two or three other houses. At least, the flame doesn’t seem to have grown any bigger in the past half hour (and I checked every ten minute or so), so it’s probably really just the storm lantern or whatever. Still very annoying.

And now for some linkage:

Slate has an article on the first “How to write fiction” book, published in 1895. Found via Will Shetterly.

Meanwhile, here is another Slate article discussing whether the rise of creative writing programs at US university has led to two literary cultures existing in parallel.

What is striking about this article is that even though the author bemoans the increasing commercial pressures on what he calls “New York publishing”, he focuses only on so-called literary fiction and doesn’t take genre fiction into account at all. The New York publishers he’s referring to are the likes of Vintage and Knopf, not Tor, Ace, Berkley or Avon. And apparently, he harbours under the misapprehension that all writers live in New York, specifically in Brooklyn, unless they teach at an MFA program somewhere. Which is of course total crap, because the majority of American writers do not live in New York (Why would they? It’s way too expensive) and get published anyway. Nor does every writer, not even every short story writer, make his or her living by teaching at an MFA program.

So in short, interesting article, but only relevant to a tiny sliver of writers.

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Snowy Friday

Posted on November 27, 2010 by Cora

We had more snow today, and this time it actually stuck around. It also got really cold. At the moment, we’re having six degrees below freezing according to the Firefox weather widget and minus 7.6° C according to the indoor/outdoor thermometer. Looks like winter is coming just in time for the Christmas season.

Of course it had to start snowing just as I was going on my weekly grocery run. I usually do my grocery shopping on Friday morning, but since I was waiting for a delivery (which didn’t even come), I postponed the shopping until the afternoon, exactly at around the time it started snowing.

Yes, I did violate Buy Nothing Day, but then Friday is always my grocery shopping day. Never mind that since Germany doesn’t have Thanksgiving, we don’t have Black Friday as a busy shopping day either. Over here, the busiest days of the Christmas shopping season are the four advent Saturdays as well as December 23rd for the really late shoppers. Besides, I’m not a big fan of Buy Nothing Day anyway, because nothing makes me want to do something more than being told not to do it for some social activist cause or other. If I were in the US, I probably wouldn’t go shopping on Black Friday, but that’s because I hate crowds (same reason I avoid the advent Saturdays like the plague) and not because Adbusters says so.

By the way, I see that they’ve changed the international Buy Nothing Day date to Saturday. I guess someone realized that getting people to stop shopping on a day on which they wouldn’t be overly inclined to shop anyway (beyond “It’s Friday and many folks just got paid”) isn’t much of a victory. Getting them to stop on a Saturday, one of the busy advent Saturdays at that, is more of a challenge.

Finally, Ingrid Pitt, everybody’s favourite sexy vampire, has died aged 73. Though I’ve seen many of her films, I knew very little about her personal life. For example, I had no idea that she began her acting career at the Berliner Ensemble under Berthold Brecht. It’s certainly a long way from Brecht to Hammer horror.

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Of Turkeys and Teen Drama

Posted on November 26, 2010 by Cora

Last night’s snow didn’t even last until morning. By the time I got up, it was all gone except for a few stubborn remnants on the neighbour’s roof.

The internet, it seems, has pretty much shut down thanks to the American compulsion to eat turkey at this time of the year. To quote one of my students, “But turkey is yucky. Why don’t they just eat Grünkohl (North German specialty traditionally served in late November) instead?” Continue reading →

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Snow!

Posted on November 25, 2010 by Cora

I just chanced to look out of the window and saw that we had the first snowfall of the winter overnight (well, actually, it still is night). And just in time for the first advent weekend, too.

I guess this means I’ll have to get my winter boots out of the closet tomorrow.

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