Linkspam on a Saturday
I am off to walk the dog, but here's a couple of links I grabbed yesterday and didn't get around to posting.
I had no idea I shared my birthday with both Ada Lovelace and Emily Dickinson. Sweet!
MightyGodKing liked the new TRON movie. Cool.
Abigail Nussbaum writes about two recently-cancelled new shows, Rubicon and Terriers. I had only heard a little about the first, but a number of Buffistas were quite enthusiastic about the second. One more for the enormous backlog of television I'll never get around to watching, I suppose.
Michael Stackpole provides an overview of e-readers. I suspect I'll get a smartphone before I get an e-reader, but it's nice to have the resource available.
In politics, a roundup of essays and articles about Wikileaks by Alexis Madrigal at The Atlantic.
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This is an interesting experiment, written for the Racebending challenge: John Winchester was Dine (Navajo); what effect would that have on the story? For myself, I would have liked the story to go farther from canon, but it's pretty cool anyway.
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Thank you all for the lovely birthday wishes. My cold seems to have resurrected itself, so instead of going to see the new Narnia movie, I sat at home with hot tea with whiskey, and watched this week's Fringe.
Oh, and I finished re-reading Edith Pargeter's WWII trilogy (The Eighth Champion of Christendom, Reluctant Odyssey, and Warfare Accomplished). I had read them years ago and remembered liking them but not much else, and so decided they were worth rereading. BTW, Edith Pargeter is better known to most Americans as Ellis Peters, who wrote the Brother Cadfael mysteries. She wrote a number of historical novels under her given name.
They are gorgeously written, a great look at the experience from the perspective of an average infantryman in the British Army, very well-informed for novels written while the war was in progress, and--sadly--rather horribly racist. They're quite moving, and well-characterized, and the action sequences are clear and compelling. Pargeter clearly researched the hell out of this, because the battlefield scenes, especially as the Allies are driving into Germany near the end, are full of details I've never seen anywhere else.
And yet, so painfully racist, especially in the second book, which is partly set in Malaya. It's bizarre, because while at the same time Pargeter makes clear the moral and strategic blunders that led to some of the disasters in the Asian theater (notably the loss of Singapore), including a scathing indictment of colonial arrogance, she doesn't even catch the sweeping and horrendous stereotyping she applies to the Japanese at the same time. She goes out of her way to give us a couple of sympathetic Chinese characters, but the Japanese are uniformly evil raping murdering bucktoothed "sons of heaven" (yes, seriously: bucktoothed).
Yes, product of its time, and enemy prisoners were often treated terribly by the Japanese during the war, and yet I expected better from her, because she is usually so humane, so aware of the many drivers to a given conflict, able to find humanity in even the worst of her villains. Such a shame, because these novels could be classics, if not so flawed by the prejudice exhibited every time the Japanese (in particular, although not exclusively--it's just most evident and offensive) are mentioned.
I wonder whether that's an inherent risk in telling this sort of story, writing it as the conflict is going on. If she had written them ten years later, would they be as vivid and remarkable? And would they be as racist as they are?
Anyway. I could go on at length, but I do need to get out of the house. It makes me wonder, though, if this is why they are OOP--if the publishers decided they were no longer acceptable. Almost makes me want to sit down with a red pen: it wouldn't be that hard to make it, if not sympathetic to the Japanese, at least rather better. ::sigh::
Crossposted from DW, where there are
comments; comment here or there.
I had no idea I shared my birthday with both Ada Lovelace and Emily Dickinson. Sweet!
MightyGodKing liked the new TRON movie. Cool.
Abigail Nussbaum writes about two recently-cancelled new shows, Rubicon and Terriers. I had only heard a little about the first, but a number of Buffistas were quite enthusiastic about the second. One more for the enormous backlog of television I'll never get around to watching, I suppose.
Michael Stackpole provides an overview of e-readers. I suspect I'll get a smartphone before I get an e-reader, but it's nice to have the resource available.
In politics, a roundup of essays and articles about Wikileaks by Alexis Madrigal at The Atlantic.
*
This is an interesting experiment, written for the Racebending challenge: John Winchester was Dine (Navajo); what effect would that have on the story? For myself, I would have liked the story to go farther from canon, but it's pretty cool anyway.
*
Thank you all for the lovely birthday wishes. My cold seems to have resurrected itself, so instead of going to see the new Narnia movie, I sat at home with hot tea with whiskey, and watched this week's Fringe.
Oh, and I finished re-reading Edith Pargeter's WWII trilogy (The Eighth Champion of Christendom, Reluctant Odyssey, and Warfare Accomplished). I had read them years ago and remembered liking them but not much else, and so decided they were worth rereading. BTW, Edith Pargeter is better known to most Americans as Ellis Peters, who wrote the Brother Cadfael mysteries. She wrote a number of historical novels under her given name.
They are gorgeously written, a great look at the experience from the perspective of an average infantryman in the British Army, very well-informed for novels written while the war was in progress, and--sadly--rather horribly racist. They're quite moving, and well-characterized, and the action sequences are clear and compelling. Pargeter clearly researched the hell out of this, because the battlefield scenes, especially as the Allies are driving into Germany near the end, are full of details I've never seen anywhere else.
And yet, so painfully racist, especially in the second book, which is partly set in Malaya. It's bizarre, because while at the same time Pargeter makes clear the moral and strategic blunders that led to some of the disasters in the Asian theater (notably the loss of Singapore), including a scathing indictment of colonial arrogance, she doesn't even catch the sweeping and horrendous stereotyping she applies to the Japanese at the same time. She goes out of her way to give us a couple of sympathetic Chinese characters, but the Japanese are uniformly evil raping murdering bucktoothed "sons of heaven" (yes, seriously: bucktoothed).
Yes, product of its time, and enemy prisoners were often treated terribly by the Japanese during the war, and yet I expected better from her, because she is usually so humane, so aware of the many drivers to a given conflict, able to find humanity in even the worst of her villains. Such a shame, because these novels could be classics, if not so flawed by the prejudice exhibited every time the Japanese (in particular, although not exclusively--it's just most evident and offensive) are mentioned.
I wonder whether that's an inherent risk in telling this sort of story, writing it as the conflict is going on. If she had written them ten years later, would they be as vivid and remarkable? And would they be as racist as they are?
Anyway. I could go on at length, but I do need to get out of the house. It makes me wonder, though, if this is why they are OOP--if the publishers decided they were no longer acceptable. Almost makes me want to sit down with a red pen: it wouldn't be that hard to make it, if not sympathetic to the Japanese, at least rather better. ::sigh::
Crossposted from DW, where there are
comments; comment here or there.