February 19, 2007
And the winner in the weird cross-over category is (envelope, please) ...
December 24, 2006
Cinderella
Good article in the New York Times Magazine by Peggy Orenstein on the whole Princess marketing phenomenon.
There's still time to get to the toy store!
October 5, 2006
Three things
There is a Feminist SF Carnival. Here is the fifth edition.
Pros and cons of teaching popular culture at My Amusement Park (via the latest Teaching Carnival).
Barbie® is not a lesbian. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
September 4, 2006
And even further back ...
Two from the pen of Geoffrey Chaucer: "Serpentes on a Shippe!" and "Geoff. Chaucer Medieval Dick."
August 14, 2006
That old time music
A post from Hal Hall to SF-L alerted subscribers to the existence of OTR.Network: "a new online resource for Old Time Radio (OTR) enthusiasts. We have over 11,000 OTR shows available for instant listening, and we add at least 100 more every week. Oh yeah, did we mention it's free?" A wide range of material, lots of genre shows. Space Patrol, anyone?
Addendum: Subsequent messages to SF-L have linked to Old Time Radio at the Internet Archive, Phil Nichols' Ray Bradbury page, and the Digital Deli.
April 19, 2006
Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus
Peep researchers — like so many others — get self-referential
But not for the Jinker Boy for too much longer, I fear. He is already sceptical about the Easter Bunny.
After the egg hunt he and his friend E. had at our house:
JB: Mummy, how come the Easter Bunny knows E. is allergic to chocolate?
Me: Er, the Easter Bunny knows all about the kids he leaves eggs for.
JB: And how come he knows that I like Kinder Eggs the best?
Me: He keeps good records. He shares a database with Santa Claus.
JB: And how come he left those unused plastic eggs on our kitchen counter?
Me: Have another Peep.
Bonus links:
Big List of Peeps Links
"Peep Research: a study of small fluffy creatures and library usage": a classic in the field.
Wikipedia: history and links (what doesn't Wikipedia know?)
Lord of the Peeps: even better than Lords of the Dance.
Cooking with Peeps and the related Peep Blog (I'm going to make "Peppers and Peeps Stir Fry" for dinner)
October 9, 2005
No drugs or rock 'n' roll
Alterior is on an interesting kick.
Melinama talks about her crushes.
Mae West sings at PCL Linkdump.
"Darling! Our first argument!"
True Porn Clerk Stories (link via growabrain). Compelling.
Mark Dery reports on the Art and Politics of Netporn (ATTN: graphic images) (via BoingBoing):
Billed by its organizers, the Amsterdam-based Institute of Network Cultures in collaboration with Katrien Jacobs and Matteo Pasquinelli, as "the first major international conference on netporn criticism," the Art and Politics of Netporn (September 30-October 1, Amsterdam) made happy bedfellows of Tod Browning and Kraft-Ebbing, Larry Flynt and Foucault.
Pin-ups and French kissing at Bibi's.
From awhile back: dating zen and love zen.
Gallery of Bellydancing Librarians (via Metafilter).
August 21, 2005
Hope for us all
Demi Moore; Jean Claude Van Damme
(link from Exclamation Mark. Be sure to check out Tom Cruise).
July 2, 2005
Talking bout my generation
Watching Live 8.
My god, they're all so old.
It's fucking great!
June 18, 2005
Pulpitations
From BoingBoing. And Bibi. And Mark. None of whom I have raided enough lately; time to get back on track!:
This is a spectacular gallery of vintage European circus posters — dwarves, limbless people, hairy, tall, fat and thin people — with gorgeous artwork and lettering. You can order prints, too.
The History of the Batmobile, robots and monster toys, Yoda origami (PDF file), Weird Tales covers, and Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart" as an animated short film (X-rated in the U.K.) (all from the remarkable Bibi, who doesn't seem to sleep. Ever.)
1950's Sci-Fi Vintage Lobbycards/Posters (via check mark).
Mondo Schlocko. What it says.
Monster Horror Toys and Action Figures and classic horror & science fiction movie posters (via Exclamation Mark).
B Movies (via one man safari).
The Flying Saucers Are Real by Donald Keyhoe (1950): "one of the first books published about the UFO phenomena," in the public domain. And Mars: "In the early years of the twentieth century Percivel Lowell and others speculated that Mars was inhabited by an intelligent species much older than our civilization. This page archives texts (fictional and otherwise) about this hypothesis." (links from Plep).
Albert Slark and Larry Roibal: artists who paint covers for Romances and other genre fiction (also from Plep).
Monster Mags! and UFO Series Home Page (again with the Plep).
Sex in SF (Wikipedia entry).
Late-breakers:
ST personality test. No, I am not most like Worf! (link from the Web Site at the End of the Universe).
William Shatner's version of the movie Seven, a parody done for the MTV movie awards. (link from SFSignal). This is very funny, though maybe not quite as good as the plush animals version I mentioned awhile back.
June 12, 2005
Romentics
Was just alerted to Romentics, a line of gay romance novels. Razor Burn has to be the best title ever. And how cool: the traditional beautiful-young-thing-with-amnesia. His name is Ben. Here is the story in the NYTimes (reg. requ.).
May 22, 2005
Dracula, behave!
Check out Groovy Age of Horror, a niche blog if there ever was one. In the first post, Curt, the author, describe his interests: "a narrow focus on horror in the seventies with a broad inclusion of paperbacks, movies and comics." May offers "A Month of Dracula at Groovy Age of Horror: '60s/'70s paperbacks, fumetti, comics, and movies." Sexploitation alert: lots of writhing, undressed femininity. Not to mention the Mandingo factor (see below). You've been warned. Link from Exclamation Mark.
I'm feeling nostalgic for the time a group of friends and I went to a Halloween party as vampires. It was not too long after Interview with the Vampire came out, and with us we had two tall, dashing Ricean vampires with Byronic hair and shirts with poofy sleeves. But my friend Nancy and I went for Hammer: we were Hammer babes, she in a negligee and I in silk paisley pyjamas, both with teased hair and enough eyeliner to do all of Carnabie St.
I had to clench my mouth all night to keep my fangs from falling out onto the dance floor, but it was worth it.
February 25, 2005
Things to look at
Lowry Educational Site (from Plep). About artist Laurence Stephen Lowry, from Manchester. Interested in industrial scenes; painted Swansea, which is how I heard of him.
Battlestar Gallactica: Episode 1 online (link from Metafilter).
And the best for last: Romance Novels under the covers (via BoingBoing). My pick: Lord of the Tube Socks.
February 22, 2005
George Washington Gets Extreme Makeover
Jim Chevalier posted to the C-18-L listserv with a link to this story: in essence,
a team of scientists is creating a trio of action figures of [George] Washington as part of a larger [US]$95 million educational effort to reintroduce the first president to America, hoping to illustrate who he was better than those countless portraits.
Jim adds to his post:
I don't know if it ever occured to anyone to do this in Washington's lifetime, but the idea wasn't entirely unknown in our period [c18th]. When Simon-Henri Linguet was still a celebrated lawyer, in addition to the hats, etc. sold as Linguet souvenirs, there were apparently little Linguet dolls. Why not Washington dolls?
I think we Canadians are missing the boat here. How about a Sir John A. Macdonald action figure, complete with glass of gin for those two-day filibusters?
A few minutes of googling later: Good god, there already is one! And, he seems to be holding something, and it looks like a glass. That is so much more fun than wooden dentures.
Bonus link:
February 14, 2005
It's that special day!
The St. Valentine's Day Massacre took place 76 years ago, today, in Chicago.
Bloody links:
Haunted Chicago: The St. Valentine's Day Massacre.
Al Capone Museum: lots of visuals. And music!
The St. Valentine's Day Massacre on The Jazz Age Page.
The St. Valentine's Day Massacre at My Al Capone Museum. Lots of photos! Check out the page about the bricks from the walls of the murder room!
HymieWeiss.com has info. on the massacre.
The wierd and wonderful Roger Corman did a movie in 1967.
Inspired? Have a St. Valentine's Day Massacre party.
I swear that Joe and I went to some sort of "Al Capone museum" tourist attraction, some years back, but I cannot find any mention of it on the web. But I did find an "Untouchables Tour." (One of the tour guides is called "Al Dente.")
Anyway. Happy Valentine's Day, y'all.
Update — better late than never (15/2/05): Viewer warning: black and white photographs can be more gruesome than you might think.
January 28, 2005
The performing arts
Garrick as Richard III [inside a gourd??]
Bibi points towards a guided tour of music halls, part of a larger site about performance in the U.K. called PeoplePlay UK: Theatre History Online. Nice pages on Restoration and c18th theatre: lots of graphics and goodies.
Too much of a yawn? Perhaps you'd like to check out buffology: "Every Buffy character, episode, cast member, writer and director and every word of every show, in a searchable database" (via BoingBoing).
WWW Virtual Library: Theatre and Drama.
International Theatre Resources from Artslynx.
Thai Elephant Orchestra (from Mirabilis).
January 27, 2005
Blow 'em up real good!
He's the last man on Earth. And he needs a drink.
I need to be thinking this term, off and on, about the summer course I will be teaching next July. It will be speculative fiction, but it can take any shape. I have always taught it with some sort of overarching theme: "Loving the Alien," "Gender in Space," or "Gender and Sexuality." This time I was thinking of going with single-sex societies. Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland; Phillip Wylie's The Disappearance, which is back in print (here's the edition I have); Sheri Tepper's Gate to Women's Country; Suzy McKee Charnas's Holdfast Chronicles. But since it will be a summer course, and hence more concentrated, I can't really assign the same amount of reading as during the regular term and so I was hoping to fit in several films. Trouble is, can't think of any films based on my prospective theme. Maybe going back to some version of "Loving the Alien" would be more fruitful: hey, then I could show Alien (as you see, it's not necessarily really loving the alien, but more an exploration of how different writers try to create non-humans).
Later: Was thinking about this further and have more or less decided to go with the apocalypse (now there's a catch-phrase: relax, sit back, and go with the apocalypse). One of my favourite themes, as regular readers may know. I could use some of my same-sex societies — both Tepper and Charnas write about post-disaster cultures — and there are gazillion films: so many that I'm sure I can avoid Kevin Costner. Plus there's a cool a graphic novel series. There seems to be a sub-genre of same-sex societies within post-apocalyptic narratives; I wonder why? Is shaking up the heteronormative status quo that apocalyptic a concept? Is losing "the opposite sex" the most dreadful marker of loss and change that we can think of?
Possible cheery texts and films:
The Last Man by Mary Shelley.
John Wyndham's The Day of the Triffids (1951), and the film (1962).
On The Beach: Nevil Shute's 1957 novel, and the 1959 film based on it.
A Boy and His Dog — Harlan Ellison's story and the 1975 film .
The Children of Men by P.D. James. Too bad Greybeard by Brian Aldiss seems to be out of print; they would work well together.
The Omega Man. A classic.
Luc Besson, La Dernier Combat (Fr, 1983)
Night of the Comet for some comic relief.
There is a ton of stuff; I think I will try to have pairs: either filmed versions of written texts, or at least texts and films that work closely together.
There are some RPGs too; don't know much about that but depending upon who signs up for the course, that could be worked in...
I'm multitasking as I write this. The remake of The Dawn of the Dead is on PPV. And I'll tell you one thing: I miss those nice, slow Romero zombies. None of whom were under ten.
Okay. That was tense.
December 8, 2004
Grrrrl power
Both of these are hilarious, though the second one isn't really work safe. Not at all, actually. Though I suppose that would depend on where you worked.
Alias: The Lost Episode
D.E.B.S.: chicks fighting crime.
Thanks to Kip.
December 5, 2004
Hidden depths
Note to my students: yes, I'm marking your papers, but I took a few minutes to generate an image of the superhero inside this unexceptional exterior, thanks to the HeroMachine. Like Lauren's cat, my animal companion has also transmogrified into her inner beast. (Originally seen at Arete, then at Lauren's [who led here] and Dr. P's)
Don't you love the Medusa hair, the trash stockings and the c18th shoes? Wonderful with the kilt, cyber-armour and staff, don't you think?
Well, don't you?
November 29, 2004
More groovy covers
Note the blurb: "He defied the 25th century with a woman who was NOT HIS WIFE—and a WIFE who was NOT A WOMAN." Though I'd bet it's not as promising as it sounds. Philip Jose Farmer was an interesting figure: a bone fide sf writer, but a big name in early sf erotica, too.
Images from Sleaze Science Fiction Covers, part of Vintage Paperbacks & Digests. What a blast from the past! I recognized several of the Frank Frazetta covers because my dad was a real Conan fan (link from Boing Boing).
November 16, 2004
More pulpy goodness
Followup on a recent post: here is Pulp Fiction Paperback Covers: "Warning...you are entering a politically-incorrect zone...if this bothers you, TURN BACK NOW!" (link from Plep). Lots of sf.
November 15, 2004
This caught my eye
for some reason:
Michael's Sketchy & Sci-Fi Book Covers (link from Plep).
November 5, 2004
Guy Fawkes Day
Test your knowledge of November 5 with this quiz at The Guardian (via Catalogue Blog). The assessment I received: "You are aware of the plot but probably think less of it as each year goes by and primary school history lessons become more and more of a distant memory." Cruel but fair. Except the learning about it in primary school part: the gunpowder plot was not big news in Canadian elementary schools. Though my parents, who immigrated from the U.K., kept the bonfire and fireworks tradition alive for many years, until the son of family friends — "good, North-country people" who joined us every year to celebrate the hanging, drawing and quartering of Guy Fawkes — stepped on a nail during the celebrations and had to go to Emergency to get a tetanus shot.
Natalie Bennett posts about the woman who rented the notorious cellar to Guy Fawkes. She got the story from the Oxford DNB, who have an email-a-day service for free.
Bonus links:
The Weekely Newes . London: Printed for Jeffrey Chorlton, and are to be Sold at his Shop, at the the great North Door of St. Pauls's, 1606.—Monday, 31st January, 1606: "A Brief Discourse upon the Arraignment and Execution of the eight traytors."
The full transcription of the trial of the conspirators in the Gunpowder-Plot , from the Complete Collection of State-Trials, London 1776.
This page from the Scrap Album has c19th graphics.
National Archives educational page: was Guy Fawkes tortured? (includes "before" and "after" signatures).
Recipes, including Treason toffee and Bombs on Sticks Toffee Apples.
This page has music.
This page makes popping sounds!
Update (6/11/04): Oh, and how could I have missed Sharon's wonderful post full of Guy Fawkes links and goodies? Particularly interesting is this site full of images, from the c17th on.
October 25, 2004
Interesting blogs
Just came across these:
Fishbucket: Great links, including sections on abandoned and found stuff, pop culture, and ephemera.
Life In The Present: lots of pop culture links and other cool things.
October 3, 2004
Wierd SF
Still working on grant proposal, and trying to put together what I'm going to say about The Man of Feeling tomorrow, but what the hey:
Where's my atomic-powered car? (from Plep).
"If all stories were written like science fiction stories" by Mark Rosenfelder (via FutureTense).
Did you ... or are you just 'special'? (from Shatnerian).
Team America: World Police: according to Boing Boing, " it may be the single best crappy movie you'll see all year."
September 21, 2004
Resistance is futile; you will be cute.
Two Borg stories, neither of which I would have blogged alone, but ... well it's just eerie, that's all.
Even sweeter than those little Borg babies in the fishtanks: the Borg assimilate My Little Pony (via Boing Boing).
And, another reason to be an atheist (via Wierdwriter).
August 27, 2004
SF stuff
Scientists choose their favourite sf authors (from Maud).
Matthew Cheney strongly recommends Light by M. John Harrison.
Tara and Willow together 4ever (from ms.musings).
Jill gets annoyed with fembots.
Very creepy; very beautiful. And as Maud would say, categorization is a conundrum. (from Boing Boing).
Go ask Alice
Lauren's Alice in Wonderland Page: collection of illustrations (from Bookninja [08/23/04]).
Dakota Fanning might be in new Alice film from Spielberg (from Stephany at Maud's).
Alice is big in Japan.
Lewis Carroll Academic Information.
Flash Alice (from Boing Boing).
Alice in Wonderland Theme Park.
Alice In Wonderland and the Shroud of Turin.
Go to Wonderland yourself or send a loved one.
And what would life be without Quizilla? Which Alice in Wonderland Character are you? (link from Sharon. Who is of course also the Chesire Cat.)
[I misplaced a link to a site featuring wierd and creepy photos of a Japanese Alice and her cohorts in a stiff, formal garden setting; it was linked recently on someone's blog. I'd love for anyone who recalls it to leave a comment. Even if the comment begins, "That what 'Add Bookmark' is for, bubblebrain!"]
Update (30/8/04): Thanks to Vernica for the elusive creepy Alice link: Alice in Wonderland staged by Japanese cosplayers (link from Boing Boing). And check out her The Playful Antiquarian for more examples of "Carroll-mania."
August 8, 2004
That was not the amusing post
This is.
So we went to Rainbow Valley, an amusement park in Cavendish, P.E.I. You need to scrutinize the web site to understand the true vibe of the place. That 70s Show should shoot an episode there. Here is one of the two souvenir shops (the other is a castle); maybe Jackie could get a job there:
Here is a close-up of the window (it contains a garden gnome holding a Canadian flag, in case it's not clear):
And the rest of the park is equally wonderful. With the bonus that since it was built way back when, the trees are mature and so the whole place is lovely and shaded.
But I was worried, when we first got there, that it might be overwhelming for the Jinker Boy. After all, he probably could have happily played with any one of the things he saw for half an hour, and here were a couple of acres. It took quite awhile to coax him away from the yellow ducky boat, and then he found a shoe house, presumably of the Old Woman who had so many children she didn't know what to do (and how she managed in one room I can't imagine), and he wouldn't come out:
(Here is a close-up of his face:)
It wasn't as though it was particularly interesting there, either: the shoe was beside a half-filled pond with what looked to be part of a plastic crocodile who had seen better days.
And straight ahead was a band of weird birds who would break into song ("Rocking Robin") at irregular intervals, through no discernible mechanism.
Then there were the various passersby, determined to see every nook and cranny, who stomped up the steps to the shoe house then jumped when they noticed the little boy half hidden behind the stove. I thought we had reached a stalemate when Joe appeared and took matters into his paternal hands:
But don't cry for the Jinker Boy; after this inauspicious beginning he decided that he loved Rainbow Valley. Particularly the water slide.
[Click on image for larger view]
He has been periodically asking when we will go back, ever since.
June 3, 2004
Poaching
culture, poaching links...
Hand knit superhero costumes that look like grandpa's longjohns, embroidery samplers featuring comic book vignettes, beaded trading cards: it's all here (via Boing Boing).
The Heinz Nixdorf Museum: "From cuneiform to computers." Think stone tablets and computers that fill whole rooms (via Boing Boing. Who have the resources). On a related note, Liz Lawley contemplates adding to the landfill.
Elizabeth Gaskell's home open to tourists (from MoorishGirl). I've been to Chawton and Dylan Thomas's boathouse, have walked through Bloomsbury, and will be going to Haworth in July as part of a conference. Now to get up to Manchester ...
More on gendering robots, from the new, refurbished ms.musings.
Also from msmusings: WisCon, and seven women sf writers talk about rewriting a masculine tradition. This from Patricia Wrede: "Size does matter."
Perhaps I have misjudged Eliot all these years (from Rake's Progress).
The Shatnerian keeps up with his home town.
Vintage tobacco ads (and related products such as "Slug-a-Bug insect killer for use around children, food, pets!") and before and after trade card ephemera (from Beautiful Stuff [and here]).
"Corpi, Murakami, and Contemporary Hardboiled Fiction" by Cathy Stebly, about using hard-boiled fiction to examine the past (from wood s lot).
"Studies in Narrative: Science Fiction and Fantasy": twenty lectures that overview both genres, available as MP3 downloads from The University of Minnesota (from Beautiful Stuff).
Index to the biographies and writings of members of the Frankfurt School and The Charles Booth Online Archive (both from Plep).
June 1, 2004
Law & Order art
with a major focus on Lenny, may he enjoy his retirement:
(from Boing Boing).
Interesting which television shows get poached, and in what ways. Though as well as this highbrow stuff, there is plenty of more standard Law & Order fanfic out there (you're all of legal age, right?):
Prosecutorial Discretion
Exculpatory Evidence!
Law & Order slash fanfic
FemFic.org: Law & Order
Law & Order Slash Links
The Law & Order: SVU Femslash Site Index
April 17, 2004
Kill Bill without apology
ms.musings links (scroll down) to an interview with Uma Thurman about her role in Kill Bill:
"I'm not going to buy into that 'because it's a woman it has to be worse,'" she said. "If it's a character, it's a very male character. I mean, the scope of the journey that the character goes through is something that you wouldn't blink twice if you saw Mel Gibson's Mad Max in this position, or Clint Eastwood. The character is severely abused, and it's a revenge story. It's about someone being victimized who, yes, was a former professional assassin.
"It's comic booklike road-kill. It's a very, very familiar story. What is different is that I am a woman and the person fighting their way back out of the grave, the person seeking revenge, the person taking the beating and the person coming back for more fearlessly is me, a woman, and not your typical man. For people to find that to be anti-feminist is interesting to me, because for as many people who find it upsetting on that level, there are many more who find it more sort of exciting and inspiring to see a woman exhibiting as much strength and aggression and power as you expect from a male in storytelling....
Thurman drew inspiration not only from Gibson and Eastwood but two strong women: Gena Rowland's Oscar-nominated performance as a woman hiding a child from the mob in Gloria and bodacious blaxploitation heroine Pam Grier, who is now a regular on Showtime's The L Word.
Thurman spoke of the revelation she had watching both parts of Kill Bill.
"I realize that I didn't grow up watching a movie where a woman was portrayed as so tough and so strong and so fierce and brave," she said. "I went through many other wonderful adventures, but I never saw that, and if there was one thing that I got back out of all the work that went into it, all the pain that went into doing it, it was that that gave me something back. Like, 'Wow.' Like it or not, Kill Bill is an example of that, and that's not common."
It's my birthday next week. I have asked for dinner and a movie.
Addendum (20/4/04):Boing Boing links to an on-line game based on the movie. Caveat: it's in Czech.
April 16, 2004
Pulp
From "The New Republic Online":
What Is Pulps? The criticism of literature has always been one of the fundamental tasks of The New Republic, but there is a difference between the criticism of literature and the criticism of books. Not all books are literature. Yet it is a fundamental fact of American life that large numbers of Americans read books that are not literature. Even if some of those books do not warrant literary examination, they certainly warrant cultural examination. A nation's highest and lowest notions of itself may be found in its amusements. Thinking about America's popular books is a way of thinking about America. In the 1950s and 1960s, critics such as Robert Warshow and Mary McCarthy and Dwight Macdonald taught by example how, and why, intellectual seriousness may be brought to bear upon things that are not intellectually serious; and, in recent decades, with mixed results, the discipline of cultural studies was established on this premise. The aim of this feature of TNR Online will be to toil in the same vineyards, though rather more snappily. Pulps will regularly visit the best-seller list and linger over thrillers, romances, fiction, non-fiction, and even (as The New York Times puts it) "advice, how-to, and miscellaneous" books, as documents of our time, for the purpose of a brief but undoubtedly penetrating exercise in cultural anthropology. After all, influential ideas have a way of turning up in the strangest places. A warning: Pulps will give away the books' plots. Critics have a way of spoiling all the fun.
Well I'm glad that someone is confident of their ability to separate the literary wheat from the chaff. Is anyone else envisioning reviewers typing with one hand while holding their noses with the other?
(From Maud Newton via Cup of Chica.)
Addendum (4:59pm): Check out Beatrice.com for a clear critique of the first Pulps review, posted yesterday. Doesn't sound good.
April 12, 2004
High/Low
Two links on the relationship between "literary" and "popular" culture:
Mark Haddon on the differences between genre and literary fiction, in The Guardian. Via Maud Newton. Haddon sees a place for each:
Genre fiction says: 'Forget the gas bill. Forget the office politics. Pretend you're a spy. Pretend you're a courtesan. Pretend you're the owner of a crumbling gothic mansion on this worryingly foggy promontory.' Literary fiction says: 'Bad luck. You're stuck with who you are, just as these people are stuck with who they are. But use your imagination and you'll see that even the most narrow, humdrum lives are infinite in scope if you examine them with enough care.'
Anne Applebaum sees an increase in the literary divide:
There are still a few "crossover'' writers, mostly writers of excellent popular books about American history, and one or two novelists. But my sense is that their numbers are shrinking, that there's almost no more middle ground. Popular culture now hates high culture so much that it campaigns aggressively against it. High culture now fears popular culture so much that it insulates itself deliberately from it.
Read the Washington Post article (sorry, registration required), or this freely accessible version. (From Crooked Timber via Arts and Letters Daily; Mercury News link from MoorishGirl).
Update (14/4/04): Read Matthew Cheney's post on Applebaum's piece. Cheney prefers the term "escapist" to "genre," and concludes, "Using such a taxonomy, there is no need to separate various forms of genre fiction from the stuff that just gets shelved under "fiction" in bookstores."
April 9, 2004
And then she walked in...
Via Plep: The Thrilling Detective.
Happy Easter to all, and to all, a good night
La Gringa has a scrumptious selection of links to strange and hilarious sites about marshmallow peeps. Go! Read!
My favourite peep, though, is still the one in
Addendum (11/4/04): Go to Boing Boing for a picture of "The Passion of the Peeps."
April 2, 2004
New (to me) blog/women's writing
Check out Notes in the Margin. How could I not blogroll a blog which quotes from Peter Høeg's Smila's Sense of Snow, one of my favourite books?:
You can learn something about your fellow human beings from what they write in the margin.
Some interesting links right up: an 86 years old woman self-publishes a novel about her life in the depression (23/3/04), and the Feminist Press has reissued three pulp novels by women (13/2/04).
From the Feminist Press: The suggestively named Dix Steele is an ex-airman, an isolated, tough-talking drifter.
Lynn is innocently flattered by what seems to be his fatherly interest in her, which includes invitations to stylish parties and to his spectacular country estate. But fatherly interest is not what David Dwight has in mind, and he usually gets what he wants.
The Girls in 3-B reveals in heart-breaking detail the hidden world of mid-century America, where women live on their own in seedy apartments, have premarital sex, get illegal abortions, yearn to be artists, experiment with drugs, and, if they are so inclined, discover a mannered, thriving lesbian underworld.
I can hardly wait.
March 26, 2004
Haven't had a Barbie post in awhile
so here is a cool site, The Distorted Barbie. Paintings, thoughtful commentary, and links. Mattel tried to shut them down in 1997, but the site is still up.
The Distorted Barbie is on detritus.net, "dedicated to recycled culture."
March 24, 2004
Darker Bury St Edmunds
Plep links to the Manor House Museum in Bury St Edmunds, home to a fine collection of interest to the student of horology (clocks, to the rest of us), as well as some stunning costumes and textiles. But Bury St Edmunds is also the site of Moyse's Hall Museum, where can be found macabre artifacts to do with the notorious Red Barn murders in 1827.
I am planning a trip this summer, and I know where I will go first.
Addendum (3/4/04): This is also categorized under the new category of "book art" because the museum holds a book bound in murderer William Corder's skin.
March 13, 2004
File under "this is so cool!"
A recent post at languagehat points to two blogs in Klingon, bo logh and jIqel's Journal.
Perhaps I should post some of the Klingon haiku I wrote (in English, I'm afraid) back in my slasher days. Perhaps after I get tenure. Or lose my job, whichever comes first. Of course, coming out as the worst sort of geek could speed that latter process.
Oh, what the hell!
The targs are mating,
I hear them rustling nearby
in the autumn leaves.
The suns burn my back
as I bury my enemy;
He shouldn't have laughed.
The springtime landscape
reminds me of your body:
I want to plow it.
Under mosquito netting
we lay, exhausted. My love,
don't eat the insects.
February 24, 2004
U.S. Postal Service champions gay rights
Re. the Dr. Seuss commemorative stamp:
First Ernie and Bert, then Tinky Winky. But surely the world of Dr. Seuss is uncontroversial? Wrong.
February 22, 2004
Noted
Two from the Bookslut:
1. Japanese manga for girls and young women.
2. A commemorative stamp has been issued for the late Dr. Seuss.
February 17, 2004
Bar codes and SF
From jill/text: links to a page where you can make your own barcode, part of a barcode art site. Check out the Bar Code Ophra.
Some SF links: Maud Newton links to an if-I-hadn't-read-it-on-the-internet-I-would-never-have-believed-it story about complaints that Asimov's sturdy old warhorse is a porn mag.
In the same post she points to a newly-minted blog, Tenser, said the Tensor (ref. Alfred Bester; no, I haven't read it either) that focuses on "Languages and Linguistics, Japanese and Japanese Animation, Science and Science Fiction, Comedy and Comic Books."
And la gringa dishes the dirt on those annoying sf fans.
February 15, 2004
Improving the cityscape
This from Plep: a link to the Billboard Liberation Front. What it says. With links to other culture jammers.
Time keeps on slippin
A recent post from Chuck Tryon about the birthday of his elderly aunt really resonates for me. Both my grandmothers died in the 1990s, one at the age of 99 and one at 100. They both lived in the UK so I didn't see them very often, but I regret that I didn't find out more from them when I did have the chance. Most of what I know about them is filtered through my parents, which is only a fraction of the picture I'm sure. I don't want to make the same mistake with my parents, who are getting on themselves, but I often find that they don't want to talk about the past too much. Or at least, they only want to remember what they want to remember. And more than once I have asked about something significant that they themselves told me, and recently, and they have no recollection. Quicksand.
And then I think, isn't this some sort of Proustian hubris on my part? I have all-too-frequent proof that I can't even remember, or I misremember, events from my own life, so isn't it a fool's errand to run after my parents and grandparents? Don't we just have to accept that most of the sand falls outside the hourglass? One can try and keep journals or somesuch, but in my experience, one writes the least when things are most eventful. And blogging — the kind of blogging I am doing, anyway, as distinct from the more personal sort — is a way of capturing some types of things, but I don't know how helpful all my Barbie posts are going to be, if I ever look back here in an attempt to reconstruct my own past.
It's a Zeitgeist thing: Memento, that new comedy, 50 First Dates (with Adam Sandler! I can't even imagine one). I'm almost finished the 20th annual collection of the Year's Best Science Fiction edited by by Gardner Dozois (review forthcoming; watch this space), and it strikes me — and no doubt this says something about the demographics of successful sf writers — that a disproportionate number of the stories are about Alzheimer's. More on this soon.
February 14, 2004
Angel R.I.P?
Awwk! Just read on Planned Obsolescence that Angel won't be renewed next season. Well that's a helluva Valentine's Day present.
February 12, 2004
A couple of things...
My new
arrived today and I'm too excited mucking around with it to think straight, but here are a couple of things:
Brian Weatherson at Crooked Timber writes about gender neutral language and why it's okay to use "they" for the singular.
The Books Every Educated Person Should Read post is up to 216 comments and 8 follow-ups. People cannot resist lists. (Or offering advice.)
Maud Newton links to Based on the Book, a "compilation of over 950 book titles, short stories, and plays that have been made into motion pictures" using IMDB.
feministe has a lyrical post on, among other things, putting young children to bed.
February 8, 2004
What if LotR had been written by Jane Austen?
Here is a hilarious site, via Austen-tatious, where are gathered various spoofs of LotR channelled through the likes of Coleridge ("In Khazad-dûm did evil fall / And stately Aragorn despair"), the Beowulf poet ("A great shadow descended / Horrific winged creature with wicked rider"), John Donne ("Goe and catch a falling Ring / Get with child the Elven Queen,"), Robert Burns ("Wee timid, hungry, half-grown hobbit, / Living in hole like ony rabbit,"), John Keats ("O what can ail thee, Frodo lad, / Alone and palely loitering?"), and scads of others. Here is a taste:
e. e. cummings
by Hunter Greenprecious) downward
my) the heat rises
O) the mountain riseslike a mouth the earth
swallows
greedilya finger without its hand
a body without its soul
an evil without its powerbright sun on us both)
remembering(
bobbing forth and back)
my birthday(
he was greedy like the earth)
one life begins(
one life ends)
river like a mouth, cold, hot
ring like a mouth, devouring
consumed i must consume(Sméagol?)
the ring (O
and the body (my
are consumed (precious
Helen Fielding was mentioned twice, much to my delighted surprise, but of course it wasn't Helen, sister of Henry, but that other Helen Fielding.
Most of the writers who are pastiched here are male, which I suppose is hardly surprising. Some of our students are (were?) thinking of putting on a public debate to discuss the proposition that the LotR is a misogynist text. Hope it goes forward.
February 7, 2004
Just when you think it's over
How could there be anything more to say about Janet Jackson's superbowl exposure? Well here, via forty.comething, is a site that demonstrates how to make cupcakes that look like Jackson's errant breast, complete with puzzling jewelry thingy made from icing.
February 6, 2004
A couple of book links
Two links via Maud Newton:
Pop-up and Movable Books from the University of North Texas: A collection of fabulous old books.
(Do you like pop-up books? I do, and Little Bump loves them. And he is finally at an age when he can restrain himself from ripping them to shreds. He particularly loves Jan Pieñkowski's Monster Pops. Last summer I bought him a copy of L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz illustrated by Robert Sabuda, but that's still on the high shelf.
Second link: Cory Doctorow's Eastern Standard Tribe is out, both on paper and electronically. This is the second novel Doctorow has released both ways; his first, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (2003) is also available on-line and from fine bookstores everywhere. Doctorow writes,
[H]ere is the book as a non-physical artifact. A file. A bunch of text, slithery bits that can cross the world in an instant, using the Internet, a tool designed to copy things very quickly from one place to another; and using personal computers, tools designed to slice, dice and rearrange collections of bits. These tools demand that their users copy and slice and dice — rip, mix and burn! — and that's what I'm hoping you will do with this.
What does this mean, though, alongside the safety of the fixed book version? Though I suppose one could slice and dice that as well.
Here's a good one...
From Lying Media Bastards: apparently someone is launching a class action suit againt Janet Jackson, Justin Timberlake, CBS, MTV, and Viacom for the Jackson nipple imbroglio, on behalf of all Americans, because they have apparently "suffered injuries and damages to their reputations as Americans."
I just want someone to explain to me how that nipple jewellry works.
February 5, 2004
"He said bums"
I know with the state of the world and all, and having Paul Martin Junior as PM (say his name as Marg Delahunty does), I should at least try to put up the occasional serious post. But this Guardian piece about the reactions of a group of children to various classic rock pieces is laugh-out-loud, sorry, LOL funny. Even funnier are some of the comments from the grown-ups. Of Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" (1991), young critic Benjamin says, "This would definitely win Pop Idol." Thanks, Crooked Timber.
February 4, 2004
Carrie, eat your heart out.
Here, via the amazing Plep, is a blog about shoes. All about shoes.
I visited the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto the last time I was there. They have some lovely 18thc shoes,
and I was delighted to find a magnet with a picture of them in the giftshop. (If they set up a shoe shop, they would make a killing!)
Joe and I visited the Ellis Island Museum shortly after it reopened—a few years back now—and the thing I remember most strongly is a single, tiny leather bootie, lost by someone (and where are they now?), sitting in a glass display case.
What is it about shoes?
January 28, 2004
Cats and rats and elephants
Kathleen Fitzpatrick at Planned Obsolescence mentions that poem by Shel Silverstein (yes, Matt, it is by him; here's a link to the text and the Irish Rovers' recording) about the feckless unicorns who get left behind when Noah closes up the ark.
Some friends and I, all parents, particularly love Jan Brett's children's books; she does these exquisite paintings. I told these friends that she had done a book of the Noah's ark story but they were not about to run out and buy it. They said they thought it was a cruel story and I suppose, from a child's perspective, that it is. What happens to all the other animals, the ones not chosen? I've always thought that the unicorn song was sad, but really, the whole story is. All those other cats and rats and elephants, the ones who didn't make the cut.
I still may buy the book. But it might sit on the shelf with the little row of white Beatrix Potter books that I love but am reluctant to read at bed-time.
Brave Nude World
I always tell my students to to define their criteria when they are critiquing or reviewing a text. Well here, via Ed via Maud Newton, is a site that is very clear on the definition of a noteworthy sf text: one that includes positive portrayals of nudism. Examples:
[Philip Jose] Farmer's first Riverworld novel, To Your Scattered Bodies Go, begins promisingly enough, from a nudist point of view: Most of the approximately 35 billion people who ever lived on Earth are mysteriously resurrected along the banks of a 10-million mile river on a distant planet, and no one has any clothes.
and
... [Piers] Anthony's [work] cannot be taken very seriously as good writing or even good science fiction.... Nevertheless, the books of his "Adept" series deserve passing mention, since they are among the few in which we have a society where complete nudity is the rule ...
January 27, 2004
Cultural vocabulary
I'm teaching Frankenstein to my intro. class this week. Today I mentioned that Victor Frankenstein is immediately repulsed as soon as the creature moves, particularly when he sees its “dull and yellow” eyes. He does not have even a fleeting moment's elation after virtually years of obsessive work. I made a comparison with the classic film: blank looks. You know: "It's alive!" They laughed, more at their professor bug-eyed and yelling, than in recognition.
The incident reminded me of the last time I taught "Ozymandias" and, in an effort to find common ground, mentioned that the poem reminded me of Charlton Heston falling to his knees when he sees the Statue of Liberty, at the end of The Planet of the Apes, and howling, "Noooo!" Again blank looks. Didn't I mean Mark Wahlberg?
At least I didn't fall to my knees.
I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said--"Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert....Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings,
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away."Percy Bysshe Shelley (1817)
[Charlton Heston, actor, Republican, and past president of the NRA. Look on his works and despair.]
January 23, 2004
One day, in Teletubby land...
Everyone knows that Jerry Falwell claims that Tinky Winky is "promoting the gay lifestyle," right?
Though why he would think so, is anyone's guess.
(Here is the scoop from theory.org.uk.) And here, via The Foo Blog, is someone so far out, Falwell looks almost reasonable in comparison: "TELETUBBIES: Nazi Hybrid Greys in Disguise" (you've been warned). No, wait; Teletubbies are part of a secularizing, goddess-worshipping conspiracy. Then there is the Teletubbies conspiracy site, which has to be a satire. Has to be. Almost certainly satiric is this site about the species Teletubby (Tubbis tele).
I have been meaning to post on the Teletubbies for awhile now. The Pinocchio Theory offered some incisive Tubbie analysis awhile back. And then I was pushed over the edge when my mother, watching with the Jinker Boy, suddenly noticed that Dipsy has darker skin than the other three, and said, "That's odd; I thought they were all one family." I, on the other hand, have always assumed that they are some sort of anarcho-syndicalist commune (this reading of the show as a hotbed of progressive ideology is backed up by the interpolated vignettes of multi-racial groups of children — real children, whose socks fall down, not the polished automatons on Barney — and the episode in which the mummy of the little girl with the puppies is casually revealed to have a tattoo). The Pinocchio Theory post is worth quoting in full:
I watch Teletubbies now and again with Adah (who is now 15 months old), but I have to admit I love it more than she does. I think it�s the most brilliant kids� TV show that I have ever seen (or at least, that I have ever seen as an adult).
Teletubbies is pure bliss.The show has a formal elegance rare for TV: a minimalism as rigorous as those of early Philip Glass or late Samuel Beckett. The beginning and end of the show are always the same: the baby-sun rising, and then setting, with the Teletubbies saying hello and goodbye respectively. Once the sun has risen, the Teletubbies run away over the hills; and a voice emanating from one of those tubes that rise out of the ground asks: �Where have the Teletubbies gone?� This enigmatic question is never answered: it is always followed by a series of abstract scenes, with multiple Teletubbies against monochromatic backdrops. There are only four Teletubbies, but they can be �everywhere,� thanks to their multiple instantiations in these abstract scenes. Other elements are repeated from show to show as well, like the mini-films of children around the world, broadcast through one or another of the Teletubbies� tubbies; and my favorite, the twice-repeated (sometimes more) �Big Hug� that follows the offscreen narrator�s assurance that �Teletubbies love each other very much.�
I also love the puzzling non-narratives that sometimes happen in the latter part of the show: a piece of Tubby Toast is too big for Tinky Winky, Dipsy, or LaaLaa to eat, but Poe (the smallest) manages to eat it just fine. Or, the meadow is mysteriously turned into a big lake, then just as mysteriously back to a meadow again. Or, LaaLaa plays with her (?) ball inside because it has started to rain; but when the rain ends, she goes outside again. Even when these little stories seem like they are going to turn moralistic or didactic, they don�t, but stop short of having a point (I imagine this to be some Western child�s version of a Zen koan, but I don�t really know anything about Zen). Of course, other times there are no such pseudo-narratives at all; the Teletubbies just dance, or march around, or something.
The Teletubbies themselves intrigue me endlessly: it�s so hard to figure out whether their brightly-colored surfaces are skin/fur, or just costumes they are wearing (the seam on their backs suggests it is just a costume, but somehow it makes sense to me that this would be the form of their actual, pre-genital bodies). LaaLaa and Poe seem to be female, because they are smaller and their voices higher; Tinky Winky seems to be male (and gay, as Jerry Falwell claimed); Dipsy remains mysterious to me in this regard. But infantile or pre-genital gender is a strange sort of concept anyway; one thing that is good about the show is that this strangeness is retained intact (instead of being �normalized� by the absurd tyranny of boys-in-blue and girls-in-pink from the moment of birth).
I�m usually not a fan of minimalist art; but here the infantile content perfectly matches the form.
Further to the aesthetics of Teletubbies, via an old post on Law Blog: "Teletubbies inspire new style of jazz."
But are they good for you? Here, just as some have feared, is a photo of someone's baby being hypnotized. But despite what some people say, Teletubbies are educational. Pedro Vera describes how his little one has developed a sense of order and hierarchy from the Teletubbies:
Pedro has an incredible collection of Teletubbies. He has them in all sizes, both plushies and plastic. That is on top of the other zillion toys in the house.Except for one thing: Regardless of where I find them in the house, I always find them arranged in the proper order that they are presented in the TV show:
1. Tinky Winky (Boy, Purple)
2. Dipsy (Boy, Green)
3. Laa Laa (Girl, Yellow)
4. Po (Girl, Red)It is not that they are always in a perfect line (they never are) but that Pedro always sorts them by color. From where I am sitting right now I can see two sets setup that way, and I just saw in my own bedroom there is another set (huge plushies, 2/3rds of Pedro's height) arranged on the foot of our bed.
Surely this can only be a good thing.
And millions of viewers can't be wrong. There is quite a fan base out there. Here are links to 8 Track Diva's knitting patterns for Teletubbies projects (I love the hats). And paper crafts ("All projects require a toilet paper roll to complete"). And cupcakes.
Electronic tubby postcards from the Netherlands.
A webring.
Of course, not everyone likes them. This picture from the frisky Alive and Blogging is frankly disturbing, though I am not entirely sure why since I have worked out my own Tubbie taxonomy which includes a few of these elements (Dipsy=dipsomanic is a no-brainer). Must be the R. Crumb-does-the-playground idea. Mike Rogers would appear to have some serious Tubbies issues. Along with a nightmarish picture that is NOTHING like Teletubby Land, he offers a shoot-'em-up called "Teletubbies mercy killing." And here is another shooting game, though I couldn't figure out how it worked. But my heart wasn't in it.
Then there is the Teletubbies virus hoax and the Teletubbies quiz:
Uh-oh!
And finally (be still, my heart), one can buy one's own Noo Noo.
Tubby successors: Boobahs. On this side of the pond, watch for them Jan. 19 on PBS.