Reading in the dark
[Recent Entries][Archive][Friends][User Info]
Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in the "Kestrell" journal:[<< Previous 20 entries]
|
06:09 pm
[Link] |
Neil Gaiman, Cory Doctorow, John Scalzi interviews
Neil Gaiman at Google
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7LmfCGy_ZLg
and for those in the Boston area, Neil will be the speaker for the first julius Schwartz Memorial Lecture happening on May 23, 7-10 p.m., Kresge Auditorium at MIT.
http://cms.mit.edu/events/specialevents.php#052308
John Scalzi and Cory Doctorow talk about their new young adult books, George Orwell fan fic, and new ways to mentally torture your dog
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THEGpbnp1tM
Also of potential interest is Cory's article in The Guardian about his top tips for sorting email
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/apr/29/email.filter
Current Location: aerye
Current Mood:  cold
Current Music: www.wumb.org
Tags: books, events, mit, writing
|
|
09:12 am
[Link] |
Cory Doctorow's column on how to get people to blog about you
Kes: Cory has a column in Information Week suggesting seventeen tips to increase your chances of getting people to blog about you, and it's notable that many of them are related to improving Web site usability.
Of particular note is the tip about putting everything in it's own place instead of sticking everything on one page: I cannot tell you how often this turns out to be the first suggestion I make to people who consult me about increasing usability. You can have the best descriptions of your event or your product in the world, but if you put a hundred facts on a single Web page, few people are going to get all the way through it.
block quote start
Here's my latest InformationWeek column: "17 Tips For Getting Bloggers
To Write About You." It's a checklist of the stuff that keeps me -- and
many other bloggers -- from posting about sites. There are companies and
causes out there spending their time and money trying to get people to
talk about them online, while shooting themselves in the foot by not
having permalinks (duh), by resizing your browser window (duh), or by
having "linking policies" that seek to set out the circumstances under
which you can link to them.
> Have a link. Seriously: if you want bloggers to link to you, you need to have something linkable. Your upcoming TV show, protest march, product or soccer tournament is literally unbloggable unless you put it on the Web somewhere first.
>
> Have a permanent link. Don't just change the front page of your site every time a new speaker for your speaker-series in announced. A blogger who links to the front page of your site today in a post about the upcoming address by Philo T Farnsworth, wants that link to stay good for in the future, and not point to the upcoming address by Paris Hilton when you change it next week. Put up a separate, permanently linkable page for everything you want to get blogged.
>
> Have a link for everything. Don't have a single page with ten items on it. Blogging a link to the top of your fifty-screen-long page with a blurb about something halfway down generates 200 e-mails from readers who can't find the referenced item.
>
> Use real links. Don't have links with expiring session-keys that are no good if someone revisits the URL later. If a blogger can't send the URL to a friend or put it on the Web, then that blogger can't send people to go look at your stuff. Likewise, avoid the giant, 800-character gobbledegook URLs filled with junky alphabet-soup GUIDs -- if it can't be pasted into IRC without linebreaking, there's some group of compulsive communicators who'll be unable to get to it.
InformationWeek:
http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=206903066
block quote end
Current Location: aerye
Current Music: www.937mikefm.com
Tags: blogs, cdoctorow, usability, writing
|
|
10:47 am
[Link] |
Meta blogging: books on blogs
The New York Review of Books has a "book review" written by Sarah Boxer
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21013
which is extremely short on reviewing the ten books supposedly under discussion but does include some interesting questions regarding the state of the blog, its culture and its writing style.
On one hand, I like Boxer's questioning of whether blogs are a new genre; on the other hand, I feel much more ambivalent about her statement that "While putting together my anthology of blogs, I marveled many times at the large numbers of bloggers obsessed with masked superheroes." As for her final paragraph, I can only guess this will provide the thesis for her own book on blogs (bet you couldn't see that ISBN coming, could you?). Here is the final paragraph:
block quote start
Finally, I think I get the superhero fixation. It's the flying. It's the suspension of punctuation and good manners and even identity. Bloggers at their
computers are Supermen in flight. They break the rules. They go into their virtual phone booths, put on their costumes, bring down their personal villains,
and save the world. Anonymous or not, they inhabit that source of power and hope. Then they come back to their jobs, their dogs, and their lives, and it's
like, "Dude, the ball."
Blog writing is id writing—grandiose, dreamy, private, free-associative, infantile, sexy, petty, dirty. Whether bloggers tell the truth or really are who
they claim to be is another matter, but WTF. They are what they write. And you can't fake that. ;-)
block quote end
For more context and questions, also read
the Language Log commentary on the review
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/005350.html#more
which discusses the gap between blogs and other forms of media such as magazines and radio.
( bits I liked )
Current Location: aerye
Current Mood: slightly irked
Tags: blogs, books, writing
|
|
08:54 pm
[Link] |
Now I know what to title my autobiography...
After
this conversation
http://alexx-kay.livejournal.com/200651.html
with ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) alexx_kay last night, the title defintely needs to be "An Unreliable Narrator."
Now I'm pondering whether the protagonist of _Zeroville_ is an unreliable narrator....I've always thought that the number of fictional and non-fictional characters who fall under the category of "unreliable narrators" are far more numerous than most lit professors and mental health professionals would have us believe.
Current Location: aerye
Current Mood: call me unreliable
Current Music: Call me irresponsible, too
Tags: books, lit crit, writing
|
|
10:52 am
[Link] |
The Gettysburg Address in two minutes
Two minutes was the length of the original speech as Lincoln delivered it.
As my reading group is reading about poetry and poetic language, this description of the creation and delivery of The Gettysburg Address seems to say something very powerful about the nature of truly poetic language: the abstract idea is complex--after all, many writers and scholars have spent their entire lives studying and speculating upon the nature of democracy--and yet, Lincoln's speech describes the idea and the struggle toward making that idea a reality, all within two minutes.
From the Writer's Almanac for today
It was on this day in 1863 that
President Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address
at the dedication of a new cemetery to honor the 23,000 Union soldiers and 20,000 Confederates who had been newly reburied months after the battle. The
organizers had invited the most popular poets of the day to write something in honor of the occasion, but Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Greenleaf Whittier,
and William Jennings Bryant all declined. So the keynote speaker was Edward Everett, known for his speeches about battlefields. Lincoln was invited only
as an afterthought, but he hoped to use the occasion to explain why he thought this horrific war was still worth fighting.
About 15,000 people showed up that day, and the festivities began with a military band. A local preacher offered a long prayer, and then Edward Everett
stood up and spoke for over two hours, describing the Battle of Gettysburg in great detail, and he brought the audience to tears more than once.
When Everett was finished, Lincoln got up, and pulled his speech from his coat pocket. It consisted of only 10 sentences, just 272 words, did not mention
any of the specifics of the war or any of the details of the battle, did not mention the North or the South, and did not mention slavery. What he said
was that our nation was founded on the idea of equality, and the war was being fought over that idea. And he ended by saying, "It is rather for us to be
here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last
full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth
of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."
The audience was distracted by a photographer setting up his camera, and by the time Lincoln had finished his speech and sat down, many people in the audience
didn't even realize he had spoken. But Edward Everett later told the president, "I wish that I could flatter myself that I had come as near to the central
idea of the occasion in two hours as you did in two minutes."
Links:
Web site on The Gettysburg Address, versions, etc.
http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/gettysburgaddress.htm
Also see this reading of the Gettysburg Address from NPR's Audio Artifacts
http://www.npr.org/programs/lnfsound/audio/index.html
Current Location: library
Current Mood:  impressed
Tags: gettysburg address, poetry, writing
|
|
10:30 am
[Link] |
About one of my favorite writers, Algernon Blackwood
There was a biographical essay from The Guardian forwarded to a horror mailing list (included below), and it dwells longingly on Blackwood's fenius for including elements of nature to build atmosphere and suspense in his stories. As this page on
Algernon Blackwood at The Literary Gothic Web site
http://www.litgothic.com/Authors/blackwood.html
points out, though, Blackwood also used descriptions of the architectural spaces of his stories to convey a sense of atmosphere and the uncanny. Blackwood is one of the authors I always have in mind when I think of horror as a genre which often begins with the description of a genius loci, the spirit of a place, to frame the actions and the characters who exist within it, as in
my favorite Blackwood story, "The Man Whom the Trees Loved"
http://www.fullbooks.com/The-Man-Whom-the-Trees-Loved.html
Horror in the shadows
Kate Mosse on her love affair with a neglected master
( continued below cut )
Current Location: library
Current Music: Philip Glass "Dracula" soundtrack
Tags: books, horror, writing
|
|
01:06 pm
[Link] |
Poetry: Helen of Troy, meter, incantatory language, and the crone goddess
Before I give the highlights of my reading group's discussion of our first meeting on poetry, I wanted to recommend this PBS program I caught yesterday, which fits nicely under the subject of poetry. I would love to have a copy of this DVD, and it is available through the PBS online store.
Helen of Troy (documentary, 2005) available from PBS
http://www.shoppbs.org/sm-pbs-helen-of-troy-dvd--pi-2108840.html
Bettany Hughes travels from Sparta to the site of the historical Troy, following the story of Helen of Troy. This is a two-hour film that includes readings from "The Iliad" in Greek, a discussion of the international politics of the time, and some demonstrations of the weapons and fighting techniques between the Greeks and the Trojans.
Back to poetry. Last night the reading group to which I belong had the first meeting to discuss
_The Ode Less Traveled: Unlocking the Poet Within_ by Stephen Fry.
Under the
rubric
http://www.beloit.edu/~classics/museum/WebSite/TechnicalTerms.htm
of
meter
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/17105
--the subject of chapter one--we also discussed rhythm, dialect, blues, ballads and the ritualistic aspects of spoken language.
( continued below cut )
Current Location: library
Current Mood:  sleepy
Current Music: Richard Shindell "On a Sea of Fleur de Lis"
Tags: myth, poetry, writing
|
|
10:49 am
[Link] |
Writing poetry group beginning soon
The reading group I belong to has decided to read Stephen Fry's _The Ode Less Traveled: Unlocking the Poet Within_ and to follow the course of exercises for learning to write poetry. If anyone would like to join us for this, email me for more details. Also, I can provide an etext copy of the book.
I *love* this book, as it teaches both how to write poetry while also enhancing one's ability to appreciate poetry through concrete explanations and examples. From the foreword itself, Fry attempts to approach writing poetry as a thing everyone can do.
block quote start
But maybe you are too old a dog to learn new tricks? Maybe you have missed the bus? That's hooey. Thomas Hardy (a finer poet than he was a novelist in my view) did not start publishing verse till he was nearly sixty.
block quote end
If Fry's book goes about answering the question of "How do I write poetry?", then the next question will most likely be "What should I write about?". There is perhaps no better answer to that question than that found in
_Letters To A Young Poet_ (1908) by Ranier Maria Rilke,
http://www.sfgoth.com/~immanis/rilke/letter1.html
and in particular the following passage from
letter 1 wwritten in Paris on February 17, 1903
http://www.sfgoth.com/~immanis/rilke/letter1.html
block quote start
You ask whether your verses are any good. You ask me. You have asked others before this. You send them to magazines. You compare them with other poems,
and you are upset when certain editors reject your work. Now (since you have said you want my advice) I beg you to stop doing that sort of thing. You are
looking outside, and that is what you should most avoid right now.
( continued below cut )
Current Location: library
Current Mood: lyrical
Current Music: Richard Shindell, Ballad of Mary Magdalene
Tags: books, poetry, reading group, writing
|
|
11:21 am
[Link] |
On shyness and being an extrovert even when you're an introvert on the inside
I am writing this post as a response to ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/syndicated.gif) tinysubversion's initial
post on shyness
http://syndicated.livejournal.com/tinysubversion/98439.html
which I thought was a really great topic to write about.
Though tinysubversion and I are talking about shyness in completely different context--TS is writing a very useful series of articles on networking in the game industry, I'm focusing on people with disabilities--are points are going to overlap in a lot of ways.
I also hear a lot about shyness from other people, especially other blind people who talk about how hard it is to meet new people in order to make social or professional connections.
The thing I find interesting is that, when I try to talk about places or opportunities to meet new people, the conversation usually then turns into a discussion of shyness. People often say to me, "Oh, I'm not like you; I'm shy. It's hard for me to talk to people."
The irony here is that, although many people perceive me as an extrovert, on the inside, I am an introvert, and I don't find it easy to talk to new people, either. Even around people I have met numerous times--say, at Arisia, a science fiction convention which takes place in my home city and to which I have been going for years--I often feel outside of things, like I don't know anyone, or, if I do know them, that they wouldn't really be interested in me going up to them and talking to them. I tell alexx_kay that I don't have a performing bone in my body, but the truth is I can be something of a ham, it's just I am uncomfortable with the idea of being looked at, I begin to obsess over what negative things people might be thinking about me, and I feel like ninety-nine percent of what I say makes me sound stupid.
When I became blind, however, I felt I had to rethink a lot of what I thought about social interactions, especially what signals I was giving to other people about whether I wanted to be perceived as approachable or not. My thoughts and feelings about how I behaved and how I hoped people would behave toward me became part social engineering, part performance, part psychological profiling.
( continued below cut )
Current Location: library
Current Music: Richard Shindell, So Says the Whipoorwill
Tags: mind, writing
|
|
09:55 am
[Link] |
Poisoned apples, ba(n)d candy
As a followup to yesterday's writing on apples as the enchanted fruit of both death and immortality within the world of "The Wicker Man," I thought I would take a brief look at the bad reputation apples have gotten in fairy tales, and how those bad apples are still bobbing up to the surface in modern folklore.
Of course, the idea of bloodred fruit as possessing the property of casting dark enchantments is ancient, and long before the Grimm Brothers were helping to give apples a bad name, pomegranates had already been associated with danger and death
(I like this description of the pomegranate from the Culinary Dictionary
( continued below cut )
Current Location: library
Tags: halloween, horror, writing
|
|
01:56 pm
[Link] |
The Wicker Man (1973): Of apples, ballads, and subversive histories
I recently bought and viewed the DVD of one of my favorite films, the original 1973 "The Wicker Man." There has been and continues to be an incredible amount written about this film, and while much of it comes from reliable sources, there is no way around the fact that some of what has been said and written conflicts on certain points. Similar to "Blade Runner," however, these conflicting stories about the story seem to underscore how its ambiguities only seem to add to its appeal as the narrative holes leave gaps which allow, or even invite, viewers to create individual interpretations to fill in the missing narrative (note that some of these gaps were created by the infamously terrible editing and cutting done on the original 1973 theatrical release, refer to this page on
the various versions of "The Wicker Man"
http://www.steve-p.org/wm/
to have some of those holes filled in).
Complementing the narrative holes, however, there are three elements of the film which help to build our perception of the story and, as these three ingredients consistently appear in the sort of horror which I find compelling, I thought I would talk a bit about them. Those three elements are the strange land, the soundtrack, and the intertextuality of the narrative.
( continued below cut )
Current Location: library
Current Mood: insufficiently caffeinated
Current Music: Stan Rogers, The Witch of Westmoreland
Tags: horror, wicker man, writing
|
|
09:19 am
[Link] |
Of songs and Shakespeare and the Wicker Man
Yesterday was my annual Halloween party and it lasted, for me, until past the witching hour, which is waaay past my usual bedtime. Numerous people made and brought all sorts of delicious food and beverages, including cakes and ale (special thanks to freerange_snark, who made a chocolate cake with black and orange frosting), so I feel the proper tone was created and enjoyed by all.
Here is a sampling of some of the shorts and movies we watched, and I am pleased to note that, at least for me, the party began and ended with Shakespeare:
Slings and Arrows, the first two episodes, but most notably, the opening "Tempest" scene
( continued, includes links )
Current Location: library
Tags: horror, movies, writing
|
|
12:13 pm
[Link] |
13 Days of Halloween: Day 8 Beowulf and monster variations
My reading group has been reading Beowulf, and the fact that most of us read both history and SF is definitely shaping the discussion. For one thing, although at least two of us read the Seamus Heaney translation, we found it less attention-grabbing than our previous readings of other, older translations which placed more importance upon preserving the alliteration and meter of the original manuscript.
(Just last night I ran across this explanation of alliteration in _The Name of the Rose_, in which Adso exclaims "...The words all begin with the same letter!" to which William proudly replies "The men of my islands are all a bit mad.")
So I went looking for one of the more alliterative versions of Beowulf, and found this
Beowulf page from a site that focuses on alliterative poetry
http://alliteration.net/beoIndex.htm
and it seems as if the alliterative sounds convey both mood and movement much more vividly, in part creating the soundtrack to the horror movie images that the story describes:
Cunningly creeping, a spectral stalker
slunk through the night. The spearmen were sleeping
who ought to have held the high-horned house...
That description of the stalker in the dark creeping up on his prey could describe similar scenes from a dozen different horror movies.
and then there is this bit, where Grendel bursts into the hall where the people are sleeping, eyes burning with an unnatural light as he surveys his unsuspecting prey before laughing maniacally:
( continued below cut )
Current Location: library
Current Music: Blackmore's Night, Renaissance Fair
Tags: horror, reading group, writing
|
|
11:26 am
[Link] |
13 Days of Halloween: Day 7 Interview with Paula Gura, editor at Juno Books
Kes: Sorry about the previous lack of LJ cut, it's been added.
For Day 7 of the 13 days of Halloween, here is an
Interview with Paula Guran, editor at
Juno Books
http://www.juno-books.com
and maintainer of the editorial blog
http://juno-books.com/blog/ .
Launched a little less than a year ago, Juno Books "About" page describes its fiction as "a variety of fantasy featuring strong female characters in richly imagined contexts: fiction that takes the reader beyond the ordinary," and from one of its earliest releases,
_Jade Tiger_ by Jenn Reese
http://juno-books.com/jade_tiger_more.html
to the recently released
_Dancing With Werewolves_ by Carole Nelson Douglas
http://juno-books.com/dancing_with_werewolves.html ,
Juno Books is becoming a great source for cross-genre fantasy featuring all sorts of final girls.
The Interview
1. When I first got on the Net back in the '90s, you were already online producing some of the best writing out there on genre. Two aspects I always admired about your commentary on horror in particular was you didn't spend a lot of time going over definitions of what horror is and you were always straightforward about your opinion that people needed to be more knowledgeable and realistic about what genre means in terms of the business of publishing.
PG: I think we may be dealing with two sides of me here: ex-horror maven
vs. current Juno Books editor. The two often disagree. And neither
one can handle complicated questions. So, if you don't mind, I am
going to sort of dissect your questions and answer bit-by-bit.
*It seems that a lot of these discussions of genre and sales come down to attempting to define a genre in terms of gender: horror has a male audience, dark fantasy and paranormal romance has a female audience,
PG: I'm not sure I entirely understand your premise. I don't think
discussions of horror as literature have much to do with gender.
Separately from that, if you are talking "formulaic horror novels"
or "books and stories that go for the gross-out", that kind of
horror is probably read by more males than females. Females are
seldom leading characters, are often victims, and there's not much of
the emotion of horror involved. But novels like Keith Donohue's The
Stolen Child, Natasha Mostert's Season of the Witch, Hilary Mantel's
Beyond Black, Peter Straub's lost boy lost girl or In the Night
Room, James Hynes's The Kings of Infinite Space, or The Night
Country by Stewart O'Nan are probably read equally by both sexes...or
perhaps a bit more by women since women tend to read more than men.
On the other end of the spectrum you have women outnumbering the men
as readers of vampire novels of all varieties, paranormals, and
female-protag urban fantasy.
( continued below cut )
Current Location: library
Current Mood:  aggravated
Tags: horror, sf, writing
|
|
12:34 pm
[Link] |
13 Days of Halloween: Day 6 Interview with Stacie Ponder, horror film blogger
Apologies for missing yesterday's posting, it was a migrain day (all the drawbacks of a hatchet to the head with none of the fun); hopefully I will be able to add something later to make up for it.
For today, however, which is Day 6 of the "13 Days of Halloween," I asked my favorite horror film blogger,
Final Girl (a.k.a. Stacie Ponder)
http://finalgirl.blogspot.com/
if she would be willing to be interviewed, which she was, and she did, despite a crazy schedule that included, along with fellow horror blogger
Amanda By Night
http://amandabynight.blogspot.com/
and Pretty/Scary.Net
http://pretty-scary.net/
coverage of Spike TV's Scream Awards
http://www.pretty-scary.net/article-1052-thread-1-0.html .
The Interview
1. Everytime I read your blog I feel like it's Saturday afternoon and I'm watching my favorite "Creature Double Feature" matinee on t.v. You obviously have not just a love of the horror genre, but a fondness for the > experience many of us had when we first discovered those old horror movies on t.v.
Can you say a bit about what was so great about t.v. horror of the '70s?
And do newbies nowadays have an equivalent resource they can go to in order to discover those classic movies?
FG: There was simply an abundance of horror on t.v. in the 70s and 80s, from
theatrical films shown during hosted programs (like Elvira's Movie Macabre
or Chiller Theatre) or weekend double features (like Creature Double
Feature, as you mentioned) to horror films made for television in all sorts
of subgenres. While these films weren't explicit, they were certainly
scary- just ask anyone who caught Dark Night of the Scarecrow back in the
day!
I think there's several factors that have lead to the loss of these classic
shows, most notably the home video market, the idea of cable t.v., and the
super gigantic multiplex movie theatres. Everything is immediately
accessible, everyone has 10,000 channels to flip through, and I think it's
kind of taken away the specialness of movies on t.v., if that makes any
sense. I mean, I remember when I was a kid, way back before VCRs and/or
Toaster Strudel had been invented- The Wizard of Oz was on t.v. once a year,
and that was the only way to see it...and it was an event. Now there's
never a moment of any day when you can't see the movie, so who's going to
get excited about it? On the one hand, the accessibility is wonderful- I've
been able to track down plenty of titles that I never would have found years
ago...but at the same time, it's like information overload and everyone is
numb.
I really think people who want to get into the classics have to search them
out for themselves, or wait until October rolls around and some cable
channels deign to show horror films. If you don't have cable, though?
Forget it, I think. No more Creature Double Feature, Movie Macabre, or even
something like The Movie Loft. Maybe with the advent of home video, movies
aren't so profitable for t.v. stations anymore, you know? Why watch Friday
the 13th all edited when you can go rent the DVD and see everything? I
don't know. This is turning into some sort of stream-of-consciousness diary
entry babbling answer!
( continued below cut )
Current Location: library
Current Mood: Meta Girl
Current Music: Matt Nathanson, Come On Get Higher
Tags: horror, writing
|
|
11:21 am
[Link] |
13 Days of Halloween: Day 4 Interview with Heidi Martinuzzi, filmmaker
For Day 4 of the "13 Days of Halloween" blog series, I offer another interview, this one with
Heidi Martinuzzi, one of the co-founders of
Pretty/Scary.Net
http://www.pretty-scary.net/
an online community that focuses on female filmmakers, writers, and artists or, as the
Pretty/Scary MySpace page
http://www.myspace.com/prettyscary
says, "For women in horror, by women in horror"
Heidi is also a filmmaker and writer, so she has a unique perspective as both an artist and a critic.
The Interview
1. What prompted you and the other Pretty/Scary co-founders to start the Pretty/Scary community?
HM: Pretty/Scary has a good angle for a horror site. It's hard to compete with other bigger horror sites when you're covering the same news. By covering women, we can promote people who usually don't get promoted and have completely different news than other sites at the same time.
The site was started as a place to celebrate women in horror, but it quickly turned into a news site as well.
2. Female and queer horror fans still seem to be mostly invisible as far as the mainstream media is concerned. Yet one only need spend a little time exploring the Pretty/Scary Web site to realize that not only are there many active female and queer fans and artists, but these fans and artists represent a wide range of subgenres of horror. Unlike the mainstream discussions I have heard there is not a lot of preoccupation with trying to define what "real" horror is. Do you think there is any connection between encouraging a more diverse community and the evolution of a less narrow and homogeneous definition of horror as a genre?
HM: It's almost impossible to define "real" horror films and separate them from "sci-fi horror" and "Thriller" films...
( continued below cut )
Current Location: in the library
Current Mood: accomplished
Tags: horror, writing
|
|
08:43 am
[Link] |
13 Days of Halloween: Day 3 Interview with Lucy Snyder
Kes: This is the second posting, formatting errors have been fixed.
I have to confess, I'm not the biggest fan of zombie stories. I know it's a snob thing, but I like my undead with attitude and, when you have maggots for brains, there's not a lot of RAM left over for creating the perfect bon mot and the witty comeback.
That was before I found out about Lucy A. Snyder's stories and discovered just how much attitude a zombie could dish out.
Lucy A. Snyder first appeared on my reading radar a couple of years ago when I first read the following lines:
block quote start
Cybermancy is the hottest new trend in information technology. Companies worldwide are eagerly deploying cybermantic networking strategies to open doors to a whole new reality of profit.
block quote end
That story was "Your Corporate Network And The Forces Of Darkness"
http://www.strangehorizons.com/2005/20050620/network-darkness-a.shtml
and it is one of the many dark gems collected in Lucy's most recent book, _Installing Linux on a Dead Badger (And Other Oddities)_. _Sparks and Shadows_, a collection of Snyder's science fiction, dark fantasy, and poetry, was also published earlier this year.
To read more about Lucy's many and varied works, go to her Web page
http://www.sff.net/people/lucy-snyder/badgerlinux.html .
The Interview
1. You often get categorized as a horror writer, and yet you write across all sorts of genres -- dark fantasy, poetry, science fiction; how do you see horror as a genre-crossing form of storytelling?
LAS: I think that I've been identified as a horror writer mainly because of my associations rather than my publications. I joined both SFWA and HWA, but I stuck with HWA. In recent years I've gone to Camp Necon and World Horror more often than Readercon and Wiscon. Why? I have to say that horror writers have more fun (every day is Halloween!)
It's often said that science fiction is the literature of ideas, fantasy is the literature of myth, and horror is the literature of fear. The three go together quite nicely if you're willing to think as well as feel.
Enjoying dark literature is a bit like enjoying hot peppers, and a good cook can put the spice in most anything and come up with something tasty.
2. In both your dark fantasy collection Sparks and Shadows and your newest humorous story collection, Installing Linux On a Dead Badger, you use the tropes of horror--zombies, hellhounds, even dangerous children--to tell stories with a subtle but definite political subtext. Do you see yourself as following in the tradition of female horror writers like Angela Carter, Shirley Jackson, even Mary Shelley, who all used horror tropes to tell what were at times very political stories?
LAS: I've got every admiration for Carter, Jackson, and Shelley; it may be that I'm following in their tradition, but it was not a conscious choice on my part.
( interview continued below cut )
Current Location: library
Tags: 13days, horror, writing
|
|
07:39 pm
[Link] |
100 Feminist and Queer Horror Books, Movies, and Personalities Part 1
For Day 2 of my "13 Days of Halloween" blog series, I offer
Vamps, Camp, Madwomen, and Final Girls:
100 Female and Queer Horror Books and Movies Part 1 (1954-1984)
compiled by Kestrell
This list, like all lists, is subjective, but a number of considerations helped shape decisions about what to include.
* I wanted to limit the number to 100 items and I wanted the list to begin with the popularization of horror through t.v. as a medium, so the list begins in the 1950s. Yes, there are plenty of great horror books and movies by women or featuring great female protagonists that predate the 50s, but that would make it an even longer list.
( list below cut )
Current Location: in the library
Current Mood: tired
Current Music: GLaDOS in my head
Tags: horror, writing
|
10:36 am
[Link] |
Some holiday reading (and viewing)
Green Man Review just posted the annual Halloween issue
http://greenmanreview.com/whats_new.html
and it contains, aside from quite a bit about ballads, four book reviews, including my review of
Washington Irving's "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow"
http://greenmanreview.com/book/book_irving_sleepyhollow.html
and also my review of the new DVD of the BBC miniseries "Jekyll," which has a brilliant script written by Stephen Moffat
http://greenmanreview.com/film/film_jekyll.html
block quote start
The question of what distinguishes the men from the monsters is the preoccupying theme of "Jekyll," the newest film version of the Jekyll/Hyde story. While it still portrays the conflict that made Stevenson's story so powerful -- the dualities of being
a human animal, caught in the struggle between the civilized self and the animal instincts -- this version is also one of the smartest, funniest, romantic,
and yes, at times, creepiest, versions of this story I have ever viewed.
block quote end
Current Location: in the library with a travel mug
Tags: halloween, horror, reviews, writing
|
|
09:17 am
[Link] |
13 Days of Halloween: Day 1 Gender and horror fandom
Welcome to my second annual "13 Days of Halloween" blog series.
This year the series will be focusing on female and queer horror. There will be interviews with writers and fellow bloggers and even my own top 100 list of feminist and queer horror movies, books, and personalities.
Today I'm kicking things off with a two-part blog conversation that was part of another blog series, the gender and fan culture debate that has been occuring on Henry Jenkins blog.
James Nadeau , a fellow media studies graduate, and I are actually friends who share an enthusiasm for horror and science fiction, so our post doesn't turn out to be very debatey, because we both agree that horror often has a subversive appeal to female and queer fans. Along the way, we discuss what will be a theme in the upcoming days, how gender becomes intertwined with genre definitions and how opening up the definition of genre results in both more diverse interpretations of horror narratives and a more diverse fan audience. Not coincidentally, this means I'm using an open definition of horror which crosses genres such as dark fantasy, gothics, ghost stories, science fiction, and one of my favorite fence-sitting genres, the psychological thriller.
Gender and Fan Culture ( Round Twenty , Part One): James Nadeau and Alicia "Kestrell" Verlager
http://www.henryjenkins.org/2007/10/gender_and_fan_culture_round_p.html#more
Gender and Fan Culture ( Round Twenty , Part Two): James Nadeau and Alicia "Kestrell" Verlager
http://www.henryjenkins.org/2007/10/gender_and_fan_culture_round_t_6.html
Current Location: aerye
Current Music: www.wumb.org
Tags: fandom, gender, horror, writing
|
[<< Previous 20 entries] |