I’ve finally managed to find a way to rotate the header images, so I can have greater variety.
So far there are five images, drawn from my personal collection of photos:
I had a lengthy post drafted, but that one needs more work, so here’s a short housekeeping post instead regarding the question (provided anyone is actually asking him- or herself that question):
Whatever happened to the old site and the old blog?
The answer is, both are gone, since they were hopelessly out of date anyway? I still have a copy of the static parts of the old site on my harddrive, but the blog is gone for good. I needed to make room on the server for the new incarnation of the site. Initially, I tried downloading the old blog, but when that didn’t work, I just deleted it all.
I could probably retrieve some or all posts of the old blog, if Blogger ever lets me into my old account again, but I don’t really want to. The person who wrote the old blog was in many ways quite different from the person I am now (long story and I’m not telling it here) and I wasn’t too keen on keeping those old posts as a reminder. Maybe someday I’ll be more relaxed about this and the old posts will come back, if retrievable. But for now, they’re gone.
I may eventually put up those one page comics I did ages ago again, because my stats show that they got quite a lot of hits right up to the end. Besides, they were kind of neat and I still like them. And I will probably bring back the Disney World poem, because it was one of the top viewed pages on the old site. No idea why that one struck such a chord, but it did.
BTW, so far the top post on the new blog is this one and I’m not quite sure why either, since it was just a bit of frustrated blabbering without saying much of anything at all.
ETA: Just found out that trackback or rather pingback works.
One of the things I used to do a lot on the old blog was talk about books I’d read, films and TV shows I’ve seen. I already had one TV post (well, sort of), so here’s a book post.
Most of the books I read these days (fiction and non-fiction) actually count as research for my PhD thesis on genre hybrids with particular focus on books combining speculative fiction and romance. I’ll perhaps post some more about the thesis in the future, though I’m saving my theories and lightbulb moments for the actual thesis rather than post them on this blog. This post is solely for reflections about books. Continue reading
Found via Jay Lake: Jim van Pelt reflects on the similarities between writing and teaching and how both can eat your brain.
I totally agree with this. Most of time, my brain is either engaged in plotting and character development or planning lessons or wondering how to deal with this or that difficult student or class or preplanning the email I have to write regarding the difficult student/class and so on. Add in thinking about the PhD thesis and other academic issues (and I’d include most of my reflections on books, films and TV shows academic musings) and you’ve pretty much got my day.
While on the twin subjects of writing and teaching, one of my students this year is a budding writer. At the moment, she’s writing wild mash-ups of Twilight and three dozen different animes, but that’s not much different from what I wrote at her age, though with me it was wild mash-ups of Star Wars and three dozen different 1980s cartoon shows. But she’s definitely got talent (for example, she’s got a pretty good grasp of POV for someone who doesn’t yet know what POV is) and I’m doing my best to nurture it a bit. Today after class, we discussed the dangers of Mary Sueism.
And now for something completely different: I don’t rarely watch German-made TV drama, because most of it is not to my taste. However, I’ve really come to enjoy Lasko – Fist of God. It’s utterly batty, the unholy lovechild of an Asian martial arts flick and The Da Vinci Code.
Our hero Lasko is a member of an order of Roman Catholic martial arts monks named “Pugnus Dei” (fist of God). The Catholic church doesn’t have martial arts monks, you say? Who cares, it’s fantasy. The Pugnus Dei monks are the sworn enemies of a secret order named Ares who are planning to take over either the Catholic church or the world or both. Why would a secret Catholic order name itself after a Roman god? No idea and neither, I suspect, do the writers. At any rate, Lasko and his pal Gladius – who is not a martial arts monk, but has talents of his own, most of which likely stem from a not quite so saintly past – struggle with the temptations offered by a succession of attractive female guest stars entranced by Lasko’s muscular abs, square off against the operatives of Ares week after week and always manage to foil their dastardly plans, which include everything from stealing a top secret fifth evangelium in order ton destabilize the Catholic church to releasing a deadly contact poison in various subway systems throughout Europe, passing the deaths off as a mysterious new disease (because forensics obviously haven’t been invented) and then making millions by selling an antidote as a cure against the new disease.
Though the plots are utterly batty, the show is actually very well made. The action sequences are great, but then the RTL folks know how to shoot great action scenes, as proven by more than ten years of Alarm für Cobra 11 (cop show made by the same team that is slightly more realistic). The characters are likable and the whole thing is just great fun.
Oddly enough, my students adore Cobra 11 and hate Lasko, though both shows are actually very similar: A formulaic mix of batty plots, furious action, humour, likable characters and the rare bit of genuine emotional depth. Okay, so Cobra 11 focusses more on explosions and spectacular car crashes (the show is about the adventures of two highway cops on the most unlucky stretch of highway in all of Germany), while Lasko focusses more on martial arts. And of course, the religious angle might be a turn-off for some of the students, though religion is not really played up.
BTW, Alarm für Cobra 11 was the first German TV show to star a Turkish German actor playing a Turkish German character.
It looks as if the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which has been largely discredited, is making a comeback of late.
A few weeks, there was a lengthy article in the New York Times, excerpt from a new book. And now there is this article from a woman whose academic credentials are more convincing than those of the New York Times guy.
I’m not sure what to make of this. I never found the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis particularly convincing, it’s been discredited and SFF writers have been overestimating the implications anyway. I’m looking at you, Languages of Pao and Babel-17, here.
I suspect that the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and variations thereof are the sort of theory that appeals to laypeople a lot more than to linguists.
I’m tired and frustrated and don’t have a whole lot to say.
I’ve seen a lot of stuff about the so-called empathy gap in recent times, which basically means that young people have been becoming less empathetic in the past thirty years or so and that the greatest reduction in empathy happened in the past ten years. There seems to be some confusion as to the causes. Some blame the self-esteem movement, some the rise of digital rather than face to face communication, one deluded person even blames casual sex among college students (In that case, empathy would have died out sometime in 1968).
The study and the whole discussion seemed very American-centric to me, nor was I convinced that there really was such a thing as a lack of empathy. Because I meet a lot of young people in my job and they didn’t all that different than my friends and me at that age. A bit less political perhaps, but otherwise pretty much the same. And definitely not unempathetic – you don’t have discussions about whether James Bond will go to heaven with unempathetic kids.
Today, however, I witnessed a casual disregard for human lives in my classroom that makes me wonder whether those researchers might not be on to something after all.
Sigh. Sometimes teaching can be damn depressing.
I added more haikus to The Haiku Zone widget on the sidebar. There are now 23 haikus in rotation. I have a lot of unpublished poems lying around, mostly dating from the creative writing workshop at university, and a lot of those poems are haiku. I was never quite sure what to do with them (though I had a few published). The Haiku Zone seems like the perfect solution.
I added a Contact Me page as well as the Impressum page required by German law (which was drafted by politicians who didn’t understand the Internet). I’m also still adding to the blogroll. What is more, PDFs of some old stories and articles have been put up on the Bibliography page in case you want to see what I have written aside from haikus.
Tonight, I took a stroll over the Freimarkt, the annual Bremen autumn fair, which celebrates its 975th anniversary this year. Yes, you read that right. Freimarkt was first celebrated in 1035 AD, though the medieval version looked very different from today’s funfair incarnation. By comparison, Munich’s Oktoberfest is only 200 years old.
People visit the Freimarkt for different reasons, for me the biggest draws are the carousels and the food. I took a spin in the Kraken, a Schwarzkopf Monster III from the 1970s, which I’ve ridden pretty much every year since I was old enough.
I also took a ride in the Happy Traveller, which is a particularly pretty Huss Breakdancer. There is another Breakdancer on the Freimarkt and they’re pretty much identical, but I prefer the Happy Traveller, because the design is more attractive and less dated. I mean, Breakdancer may have seemed like a great idea in 1983, when the ride debuted, but in 2010 it’s pretty dated. Not that the Happy Traveller isn’t dated in its own way – the gondolas are decorated with airbrushed portraits of 1980s stars, Boy George, Grace Jones, Axel Rose, Madonna from the Who’s That Girl? period. And the painted backdrop features Michael Jackson leaning to a lamppost in what is supposed to be a Paris street scene. Actually, the dated design of some of the rides and stands is part of the attraction, because you can usually pinpoint when they were built or when the last refurbishment took place by the pop cultural icons depicted in the decorations. I saw a kiddie ride featuring The A-Team, Knight Rider, Arnold Schwarzenegger in Kindergarten Cop and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles – very obviously early 1990s. A game stand – throw a ball and knock down tins or something like that – was decorated with scenes from Raiders of the Lost Ark and the James Bond film Octopussy, which indicates early 1980s. I also saw an ice cream stand decorated with pictured of Shirley Temple. There used to be a bumper car ride decorated with larger than life portraits of long forgotten 1970s pop stars, but unfortunately they repainted that one a few years ago. This year, we had a ride named Transformer. When the fair is over and everybody else is disassembling their rides and packing up, Transformer will simply transform into a giant robot and march along the highway to Hamburg, which is the next big event on the autumn fair circuit.
Finally, I took a ride on the Frisbee, another Huss design. Huss Rides, one of the foremost manufacturers of fairground rides, is a Bremen based company. Therefore, we always got the latest rides at the Freimarkt. Though in recent years, carousel innovation mainly seems to concentrate on fixed rides for amusement parks, not mobile rides for funfairs, so we don’t get so many new rides anymore. Though there were a couple of new to me attractions this year, including a couple of fun houses (probably just repainted) and a stunning skyflyer type ride named Rocket.
There was also rotating house type simulator ride (the seats remain largely stationary, while the room rotates around them) named Hex’n Wippn (Witches Seesaw), which is based on an attraction that debuted at the Chicago World Fair in 1893. This one isn’t that old – I’d guess 1960s by the artwork – but it is apparently one of the last rides of its type in operation. Here is a description of a similar attraction. Not new, but I have never seen that one before.
As for food, I had fish and chips (not quite as good as in Britain, but a pretty good substitute), Chinese veggie stir-fry (a 1980s innovation), a fish roll (North German fairground classic), roasted almonds, another fairground classic, in the not so classic flavour chili cocoa and Schmalzkuchen, a type of deep-fried pastry. I saw several Turkish youths eating Schmalzkuchen, which surprised me, because Schmalzkuchen traditionally contain pig lard and thus aren’t halal. I think the frying fat used to be animal fat as well, though animal fat is rarely used for frying these days. Of course, the lard in the Schmalzkuchen might have been replaced by chicken or goose lard or clarified butter as well.
The New York Times asks the question Why can’t middle-aged women have long hair?
As a long-haired person myself (mine goes down to my hip), I agree with the author. Though the pressure on women to cut long hair doesn’t start with middle age, it starts much earlier. I have had long hair for most of my life (I started growing it out at six and never stopped) and I’ve felt the pressure for most of my life. “When are you going to cut it off?” Interestingly, the pressure mostly comes from other women, usually women who have short hair. Sometimes I suspect it’s jealousy, because long hair certainly attracts attention. I get a lot of pressure, true, but I also get many compliments.
As for older women with long hair, when I was fourteen and had my confirmation (which is a big event in Germany), I had to make the thank you round afterwards, visiting neighbours to say thank you for presents and money. One woman, a former colleague of my mother’s, asked me into her house. She said her mother would love to see me, because she hadn’t seen me since I was a baby. I barely knew the woman and didn’t know her mother at all. Still, I was ushered into the kitchen and there was an old woman, in her seventies or even eighties. That old woman had the most amazing long white hair, bound into two braids. It was a little girl hairstyle that shouldn’t have worked on a woman of her age, but she looked fabulous. Much more fabulous than all the other old women of my acquaintance with their short hair and perms. I told her that I loved her hair and she seemed very pleased. That was the moment where I realized that I wouldn’t have to cut off my hair, even when I grew old.
Gennita Low does have a point there. Today’s urban fantasy and paranormal romance genres are clearly descendants of the gothic novel of the 18th and 19th century. In fact, every popular fiction genre today can be traced back to the 18th/19th century gothic novel in some form, though that is a discussion for another post.
What is more, the Brontes, particularly Jane and Emily (few people have read the vastly underrated Anne), have had a huge influence on the romance genre in general and its paranormal branch in particular.
Stephenie Meyer has even admitted that Wuthering Heights was one of the inspirations for Twilight. Besides, it’s Bella’s favourite book, a fact which gave the novel an unlikely sales boost some 160 years after its first publication. And for Twilight, the themes of obsessive love and an angst-ridden hero certainly apply.
However, Heathcliff is not the original bad boy hero, that would be Lord Byron himself who was even the real life model for one of literature’s first sexy vampires via his friend John Polidori.
More importantly, not every paranormal romance or urban fantasy novel features a possessive and angst-ridden alpha hero nor do all of them have heroes and heroines who are incapable of communicating beyond verbal fights. True, a lot of paranormal romances and urban fantasy novels have this dynamic (usually the ones I don’t particularly care about), but there’s more to the genre than ultra-possessive alpha males and relationships bordering on violence.
sending...