I’ve been fiddling with the appearance of the site again and also added two more header images: a detail of a gable of a medieval townhouse in Lüneburg and a panaroma view of Edinburgh.
This is the plugin I use for the rotating headers by the way. It works very well with the twenty-ten theme.
I’m still playing around with the appearance of the site and added a few plugins. Hereby, I have found the plugins developed by fellow German Nicolas Kuttler very useful and easy to customise.
What is more, I have also added a couple of new headers. The new header images are some historic dock buildings, the detail of a Victorian storefront and the skyline of Liverpool as well as a few vistas of Blackpool, namely two different photos of the North Pier as well as the Central Pier photographed from the top of the Tower. There is a definite bias towards the UK (I really need to upload more German images), architecture, industrial structures and seaside views, which pretty much matches the sort of things I take photos of.
Meanwhile, in the absence of other content, have some links, mainly TV-related:
Here is a great article on Alan Reed, the actor who voiced Fred Flintstone from Tablet, a Jewish online magazine.
I’ve never come across Tablet before, I found the mag via a link from Arts & Letters Daily. However, they have got a good selection of art, literature and culture articles, all from a Jewish perspective. This one about the Jewish roots of the classic TV western Bonanza is very interesting as well.
Meanwhile, SciFi Now, which bills itself as the premier UK SFF magazine (In which universe? Cause in mine, that’s still SFX, though I stopped reading both years ago), discusses how Stargate Universe, the latest entry in the neverending Stargate franchise, is close to cancellation, because the fans just aren’t watching. And apprently, that’s because those selfsame fans are still pissed off about the demise of the predecessor show Stargate Atlantis.
Now I don’t give a damn about either Stargate Universe or Stargate Atlantis or the original Stargate. I gave up on the original Stargate show sometime during season 2, never saw more than five minutes of Stargate Atlantis while waiting for the next programme to start and never saw anything of Stargate Universe at all. Though even I know enough to recognise that the photo shows that cast of Stargate Atlantis and not Stargate Universe, which tells you a lot about the shows and their relative popularity right there.
Nonetheless, there is a lesson in there, namely if you piss off your existing fanbase, while trying to appeal to a better class of viewer (in the current US TV climate, that usually means younger and more masculine), you will frequently end up with no viewers at all. Stargate Universe isn’t the first SFF show to make this mistake. And unlike anything Stargate, the others were shows I cared about.
While on the subject, here is fantasy author Shanna Swendson on the sorry state of genre TV in general. I’m pretty much in the same situation, except that I’ve given up on Doctor Who and related shows as well and never could stomach Eureka in the first place. Right now, the only genre shows I still watch are Supernatural and The Vampire Diaries (and that’s mainly for PhD purposes) plus the Britain’s Being Human and Misfits. I no longer watch any of the space opera type shows, which is pretty sad, considering how much I used to love that sort of thing.
I’m currently suffering from fatigue and a really nasty headache, both of which I suspect were brought on by the really nasty weather we’ve been experiencing of late.
And talking of the weather, why exactly did the drizzle we’d been having all day have to turn into a full-blown downpour the minute I got out of the car to carry the groceries into the house?
Meanwhile, in lieu of a proper post, here is an interview with Anne Rice on religion, sex, immortality and vampires from The Guardian.
Now that my troublesome class decided to behave for once, one of my not-troublesome classes decided to act up instead. I guess just one relatively quiet week is too much to hope for.
What is more, tonight was the monthly translator meet-up at Leo’s restaurant in Bremen. I had pasta with spicy tuna sauce and warm apple pie as a dessert. I probably should’ve forgone the apple pie, but it was tasty.
Finally, here are some interesting observations from Tor.com about how children today relate to Star Wars. This meshes very much with what I have observed in 10 to 14-year-old Star Wars fans. And no, I don’t get the Clone Wars love either – to me it’s the only part of the Star Wars franchise that’s actively unwatchable. I don’t hate the prequels like many others and usually include them in my annual rewatch, but my main love is still reserved for the original trilogy.
One thing the Tor.com post does not mention – and I’m not sure if it’s because it doesn’t match the poster’s experience or because he just never thought about it – is that this kid Star Wars fandom these days is almost 100 percent male. Go into any class between 5th and 8th grade (probably younger as well, but I don’t teach elementary school) and ask the kids what they think about Star Wars. All of the boys will have at least seen some of the various films and/or TV shows and most of them will like it. Whereas many of the girls will not have seen any Star Wars at all and those that have seen the films usually think it’s boring. Even the girls who are into geeky stuff (yes, I have geek girl students, hurray!) are more into manga and anime and Twilight than into Star Wars.
Now Star Wars fandom – like SFF fandom in general – was always male dominated even in the old days, but there used to be a lot more female Star Wars fans in the 1970s and 1980s than there are now. Back when I was at the age my students are now, we had a handful of male Star Wars fans and two and a half female fans (the half was my then best friend whom I infected with the Star Wars virus, though she was never into it like I was). And loving Star Wars was as much of a gendered interest back then as it is now. As a teen, I largely kept my Star Wars fandom secret even from my family, because girls were not supposed to enjoy SF. The other girl fan wasn’t much more open about her fandom either – we had known each other and been friends for ages before we discovered that we both liked Star Wars. And the other girl definitely was a geek, she even ended up marrying a bloke she’d met at the weekly afterschool RPG session in tenth grade.
It’s sad that Star Wars no longer speaks to today’s girls the way it spoke to my generation. And I definitely blame that on the shortcomings of the newer parts of the franchise. Star Wars was never great about gender, but we original fangirls at least had Princess Leia to look up to and Han Solo to drool over. Leia was one of my big role models, I wanted to be her when I grew up, and I had a mayor crush on Harrison Ford.
As for the prequel trilogy and the Clone Wars, the good news is that girls can finally be Jedi now. Because as a teenager, I always assumed based on the evidence in the original Star Wars trilogy that girls couldn’t be Jedi. After all, no one ever tried to train Leia, even though she was awesome, and neither Obi Wan nor Yoda particularly cared about what happened to her. For me, the biggest revelation about the prequels was that there were female Jedi! But even though the prequels and the Clone Wars have girl Jedi, they don’t actually have any good female characters. Padme shows some potential in The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones, but Princess Leia she’s not. And she’s pretty much useless in Revenge of the Sith – obviously pregnancy does not become her. Shmi Skywalker, whom I liked, dies much too soon. I cannot comment about the Ahsoka girl Jedi character in The Clone Wars, because I haven’t been able to watch that. As for the drool factor, none of the men in the prequels or the Clone Wars can hold a candle to Han Solo.
Still – and this is something that many grouchy old-time fans forget – it’s great that Star Wars is still loved and appreciated by a whole new generation of fans, though I wish it would be fans of both gendes. How many kids these days even remember, let alone love E.T – The Extraterrestrial? Yet in its day, E.T. was bigger than Star Wars.
For obvious reasons (“Remember, remember, the fifth of November…”), I’m teaching the Gunpowder Plot in my classes this week. And by some odd synchronicity, Chancellor Merkel as well as some other European governments are experiencing a gunpowder plot of their own.
Back to the historical Gunpowder Plot, the thing that fascinates the students most and will likely be the only fact they remember in a year’s time is the gruesome fate of Guy Fawkes and his co-conspirators. The text I’m using (not mine, but decent text found elsewhere) glosses over the fate of the conspirators. I usually say, “Well, that’s not quite how it happened, the truth was worse…”, and always get pressed for details. One kid even lamented the fact that video cameras had not yet invented in 1606.
Blood and guts and drama. Works every time.
My troublesome class managed to be relatively untroublesome, but I made a terribly embarrassing mistake today. Some ten minutes before the end of the class, there was a knock on the classroom door. I open the door and there’s a mother with a child in tow outside. She’s looking for another teacher, the mother says, because they have an appointment. The kid just stands there a few meters away, desperately wishing to be somewhere else. Continue reading
Because my Tuesday class is the least troublesome and doesn’t leave me completely wiped out, I took the opportunity to visit my aunt after school. She’s temporarily in a care home while recuperating from the series of back operations. She had five or six back operations in a span of as many years, three of which were in the past five months. None of the operations did anything about her pain, if anything, they made things worse. There’s a reason I’m skeptical about the medical profession.
The last time I visited my aunt, she was in a bad shape, but thankfully she seems to be getting back to her old self. I’m very grateful about this, because I was seriously worried about her, at a time when I was dealing with pain issues of my own.
On the way home, I stopped at a supermarket for some grocery shopping. One thing I’ve noticed recently is that supermarket sushi has been getting much better. Used to be that the very big supermarket in urban areas (if you happened to shop in a rural or suburban area, forget it) would sometimes offer plastic boxes of fairly unremarkable sushi. They were okay, if you were in the mood for sushi, but couldn’t go to a sushi bar, but they were nothing special (mostly salmon and cucumber plus some surimi). The presentation was lacking as well – for example, there was usually a big blob of wasabi that would sometimes get all over the sushi.
In the past two months or so, however, supermarket sushi have been getting a lot better in both presentation and taste. They’re almost proper bentos by now. They didn’t have just sushi either, there were also boxes with spring rolls, precooked pasta with sauce (not for me, I cook my own), prepared sandwiches (not for me either), etc… Everything looked very nice. It seems that there is a new supplier, since I’ve seen boxes in the same style in a different supermarket chain as well. I’m not big on prepared food, but when I’m in the mood for sushi, I’ll stick with those.
While sushi is becoming more available in German grocery stores, fortified wine seems to be going out of fashion. I spent several minutes searching the whole wine and liquor department for sherry and finally found a few totally overpriced bottles of sherry and port on the bottom shelf with about fifty different varieties of cream or fruit liqueur towering above it. Marsala, which used to be available at bigger grocery stores, has vanished from the supermarket shelves altogether and seems relegated to specialty shops. Red port is so uncommon that even most restaurants don’t have it. Only Vermouth is still going strong. I have no idea why this is. Apparently, the majority of people are going for different drinks now. Perhaps the decline of home cooking also has something to do with this, because fortified wines are also frequently used as cooking ingredients. But whatever the reason, it sucks.
I still have some prep work to do for school, so here are some miscellaneous links in lieu of a proper post:
Here is a nice post on fiction written by fictional characters from the All About Romance blog.
Quite interesting and I must admit that I have been intrigued by the Nikki Heat novels allegedly written by Richard Castle. However, the poster forgot Kilgore Trout (mentioned by someone in the comments) and William Ashbless (mentioned by yours truly in the comments.
How exactly did this guy win the Nobel Prize for Economics anyway?
Cause he is advocating exactly the sort of behaviour that caused the current economic woes in the first place. And look, an anti-German swipe, too. I just wonder why the German economy is currently doing better than that of the US.
I don’t fully agree with him, because there is a lot of rape in urban fantasy. Aside from Mercy Thompson, there’s also Charlaine Harris’ Sookie Stackhouse, Rachel Caine’s Joanne Baldwin, Carrie Vaughn’s Kitty Norville, Lilith Saintcrow’s Dante Valentine, Keri Arthur’s Riley Jenson, J.D. Robb’s Eve Dallas (not really urban fantasy but SF romantic suspense), Beverly Barton’s Mercy Raintree and that’s just of the top of my head. And all of those books and authors are selling pretty well. What is more, Iron Kissed, was also the point where the Mercy Thompson series really took off and went to hardcover, the Alpha and Omega spin-off series came out (which also has physical and sexual violence perpetrated against its heroine) and Patricia Briggs’ older epic fantasy novels were reissued.
Though I agree that other genres, epic fantasy for one as well as the whole crime fiction/suspense/thriller complex and old-style historical romance (the sort of books that used to be called “bodicerippers” for obvious reasons), are much worse about rape. And given the problematic baggage of rape in the romance genre (it has largely died out by now, but was very common from the early 1970s to the early 1990s), it is certainly telling that one of the reviews outraged by the rape in Iron Kissed is from Dear Author, one of the biggest romance sites on the web.
I also applaud his decision not to subject his heroine to rape, because
a) gratuitous rape used as a plot device or instant trauma is annoying, particularly when it seems as if rape is the only bad thing that can ever happen to female characters, and
b) male authors, including very good male authors, usually suck at writing about rape. I took a class on John Irving at university and the sheer amount of rape in his books always made me cringe. And while I love the Modesty Blaise books by Peter O’Donnell (and Modesty is definitely a precursor to today’s arsekicking urban fantasy heroines), I always hated the rape scenes (there’s more than one), particularly because Modesty’s reaction never rang true emotionally. And O’Donnell was one of those male authors who got women and even wrote under a female pen name.
As for the ambition thing, yes, I totally agree. Interestingly, there also is a school of thought that equates the violent transformation into a vampire or werewolf with rape.
Daniel Abraham also has a followup post to the first post with some links to discussions elsewhere. Some good stuff there.
In October, I wrote 31385 words altogether. That’s about par for me, I write approximately 1000 words a day and have for quite some time.
I count fiction (the novel plus some short stories), poetry (one new poem written in October) as well as academic writing (mainly the PhD thesis) and some brainstorming background stuff. I initially started counting academic writing to motivate myself to do it. I don’t count translation work, emails and blogposts.
Since November is starting today and November is NaNoWriMo time, I’ll see if I can push up the monthly wordcount somewhat. Though I won’t be participating officially in NaNo, because I don’t want to abandon my works in progress for something new.
I chanced to watch Iron Man on TV tonight and enjoyed it a lot more than I thought I would.
I missed the film back when it was in the theatres, partly because I was overly busy with my MA degree or teaching linguistics or something (I don’t remember actually) and partly because I was badly burned out on comic book movies by that point. There were way too many of them and a lot of them, from stuff no one liked such as Fantastic Four or Superman Returns to the much highly praised Christopher Nolan Batman films*, just weren’t very good in my opinion. Besides, after 15 years of reading superhero comics (and a lot more reading European comics), I was badly burned out on superhero comics in general. Continue reading
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