It's a wonderful and significant story
I go up and down on Once Upon a Time (Little Red Riding Hood episode: up up up!), but this vid by beccatoria is everything that is awesome about the show.
Matt Stoller on foreclosure abuses:
Of course, like a good Capitol Hill staffer receiving an incredibly important piece of evidence on a multi-trillion dollar scandal, I was like “this guy is crazy” and quickly got back to working on regulatory reform and surfing the internet. (Unofficial motto of Dodd-Frank: Hey, um, regulators, why don’t you make all the rules and we’ll check out Twitter? Mkay. Also your budget is cut!)
Great article on the new monopolies and how they harm everyone but the richest.
FYFF once again knows my soul: “you’re not a real writer.” ( helens78 has a counterpoint that I, being comfortable with contradiction, also find quite compelling!)
Straight? True Stories of Unexpected Sexual Encounters Between Men, ed. Jack Hart: Despite the title, I’m going to call this one fiction, if only because many of the stories seem to have been submitted by the same authors. Less variation than the other Hart book I read recently, and the cliched language (eight-inch tools featured prominently) seemed more generic.
Dark Delicacies II: Fear, ed. Del Howison & Jeff Gelb: Mainly decent contemporary horror stories. Names I recognized: Barbara Hambly (vampire on the Titanic, which is both funnier and more horrifying than you might think); Joe Lansdale (gore), Tananarive Due (purely mental horror), L.A. Banks (the only one I hated, because of the premise “lots of criminals get off on ‘technicalities’” that was not redeemed by later “humans shouldn’t disregard the law” noises), Greg Kihn (forgettable, but I do know his name!), and Caitlin Kiernan (serial killer loves the violin).
Sarah Monette, Somewhere Beneath Those Waves: Fantasy short stories, often featuring queer characters. My favorite was the AU North America where English and French spies competed in Louisiane, part of the world-spanning French empire, but there were plenty of other treats, including this not-quite-Lovecraftian version of the story of Orpheus: “The houses loured on either side, crammed cheek-by-jowl, tall and narrow-fronted and stern. There were no lights behind any of the windows, but she could not shake the faint, frightened impression that the houses were not deserted, that the rooms behind those staring windows were not empty, and thaot those who waited in those airless, dusty rooms (and waited for what?) were watching her as she went past.” Sadly, the Kindle version seems to have some bizarre formatting error that often chewed up letters adjacent to ellipses, but that affected mood rather than intelligibility.
Neil Gaiman, Fragile Things: Short stories and poems-a couple try too hard to have a twist at the end, and I was left completely cold by the series of drabbles Gaiman wrote for two Tori Amos albums, but at his strongest Gaiman can really mesh the creepy and the cute. The drabble-esque format worked for me best with Fifteen Painted Cards from a Vampire Tarot, where vampires serve as the template for all kinds of encounters with alien-ness, and the collection also includes A Study in Emerald (Holmes/Cthulhu) and The Problem of Susan (Narnia), the strongest pieces. Not incidentally, they’re also the ones that wear their specific predecessors most clearly, though Gaiman writes about Ray Bradbury, Harlan Ellison, and Robert Sheckley as key influences and he’s plainly right about that.
Tristan Crane & Ted Naifeh, How Loathsome: Short graphic novel about the adventures of Catherine, a genderqueer person of unspecified means (work does not appear here except that a guy who tries to pick Catherine up says he’s a Nissan dealer) and heavy drug use. The visuals fit really well with the subject; Catherine is all spikes, while the characters Catherine is attracted to have a nearly-but-not-quite-androgynous appeal. Beauty, the stories suggest, is a negotiation-and in any negotiation, when the parties have very different views of the world, there can be trouble. Structurally, the collection suffers because only three of the four parts include short fantasy stories told/illustrated by Catherine that, as with the pirate comics in Watchman, reflect some aspect of the main narrative; it would have been better to include a fourth for balance. But then again, this is a book that very deliberately refuses balance, so it may well have been a conscious choice, though I’m not sure narrative balance and balance in character are similar enough to require the same treatment. Anyway, I like Naifeh a lot, though I like his fantasy better.
Jackie Morse Kessler, Rage: Melissa Miller, sixteen-year-old soccer player and self-injurer, discovers that she’s the instantiation of War-horse and all-during a very bad weekend. Liked the concept, found the execution too full of overblown prose.
Karen Healey, Guardian of the Dead: Like Healey’s second novel, which I read first, this is a New Zealand Maori-inflected YA fantasy with romance elements. Ellie, a pākehā teen separated from her family for a year at boarding school, discovers a connection to magic and quickly gets drawn into a fight for the lives of millions. I liked that Ellie felt legitimate, normal stirrings of sexual interest in a guy who was not Meant to Be; he turned out to be an ass, but that wasn’t her fault. I also liked the book’s magic: it was remix nation, in that the myths you knew were mostly the ones you saw, and so immersion in multiple cultures gave you multiple perspectives on magic. Ellie got to write her own story, but it was based on the ones she already knew, just like creativity in general.
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.
Matt Stoller on foreclosure abuses:
Of course, like a good Capitol Hill staffer receiving an incredibly important piece of evidence on a multi-trillion dollar scandal, I was like “this guy is crazy” and quickly got back to working on regulatory reform and surfing the internet. (Unofficial motto of Dodd-Frank: Hey, um, regulators, why don’t you make all the rules and we’ll check out Twitter? Mkay. Also your budget is cut!)
Great article on the new monopolies and how they harm everyone but the richest.
FYFF once again knows my soul: “you’re not a real writer.” ( helens78 has a counterpoint that I, being comfortable with contradiction, also find quite compelling!)
Straight? True Stories of Unexpected Sexual Encounters Between Men, ed. Jack Hart: Despite the title, I’m going to call this one fiction, if only because many of the stories seem to have been submitted by the same authors. Less variation than the other Hart book I read recently, and the cliched language (eight-inch tools featured prominently) seemed more generic.
Dark Delicacies II: Fear, ed. Del Howison & Jeff Gelb: Mainly decent contemporary horror stories. Names I recognized: Barbara Hambly (vampire on the Titanic, which is both funnier and more horrifying than you might think); Joe Lansdale (gore), Tananarive Due (purely mental horror), L.A. Banks (the only one I hated, because of the premise “lots of criminals get off on ‘technicalities’” that was not redeemed by later “humans shouldn’t disregard the law” noises), Greg Kihn (forgettable, but I do know his name!), and Caitlin Kiernan (serial killer loves the violin).
Sarah Monette, Somewhere Beneath Those Waves: Fantasy short stories, often featuring queer characters. My favorite was the AU North America where English and French spies competed in Louisiane, part of the world-spanning French empire, but there were plenty of other treats, including this not-quite-Lovecraftian version of the story of Orpheus: “The houses loured on either side, crammed cheek-by-jowl, tall and narrow-fronted and stern. There were no lights behind any of the windows, but she could not shake the faint, frightened impression that the houses were not deserted, that the rooms behind those staring windows were not empty, and thaot those who waited in those airless, dusty rooms (and waited for what?) were watching her as she went past.” Sadly, the Kindle version seems to have some bizarre formatting error that often chewed up letters adjacent to ellipses, but that affected mood rather than intelligibility.
Neil Gaiman, Fragile Things: Short stories and poems-a couple try too hard to have a twist at the end, and I was left completely cold by the series of drabbles Gaiman wrote for two Tori Amos albums, but at his strongest Gaiman can really mesh the creepy and the cute. The drabble-esque format worked for me best with Fifteen Painted Cards from a Vampire Tarot, where vampires serve as the template for all kinds of encounters with alien-ness, and the collection also includes A Study in Emerald (Holmes/Cthulhu) and The Problem of Susan (Narnia), the strongest pieces. Not incidentally, they’re also the ones that wear their specific predecessors most clearly, though Gaiman writes about Ray Bradbury, Harlan Ellison, and Robert Sheckley as key influences and he’s plainly right about that.
Tristan Crane & Ted Naifeh, How Loathsome: Short graphic novel about the adventures of Catherine, a genderqueer person of unspecified means (work does not appear here except that a guy who tries to pick Catherine up says he’s a Nissan dealer) and heavy drug use. The visuals fit really well with the subject; Catherine is all spikes, while the characters Catherine is attracted to have a nearly-but-not-quite-androgynous appeal. Beauty, the stories suggest, is a negotiation-and in any negotiation, when the parties have very different views of the world, there can be trouble. Structurally, the collection suffers because only three of the four parts include short fantasy stories told/illustrated by Catherine that, as with the pirate comics in Watchman, reflect some aspect of the main narrative; it would have been better to include a fourth for balance. But then again, this is a book that very deliberately refuses balance, so it may well have been a conscious choice, though I’m not sure narrative balance and balance in character are similar enough to require the same treatment. Anyway, I like Naifeh a lot, though I like his fantasy better.
Jackie Morse Kessler, Rage: Melissa Miller, sixteen-year-old soccer player and self-injurer, discovers that she’s the instantiation of War-horse and all-during a very bad weekend. Liked the concept, found the execution too full of overblown prose.
Karen Healey, Guardian of the Dead: Like Healey’s second novel, which I read first, this is a New Zealand Maori-inflected YA fantasy with romance elements. Ellie, a pākehā teen separated from her family for a year at boarding school, discovers a connection to magic and quickly gets drawn into a fight for the lives of millions. I liked that Ellie felt legitimate, normal stirrings of sexual interest in a guy who was not Meant to Be; he turned out to be an ass, but that wasn’t her fault. I also liked the book’s magic: it was remix nation, in that the myths you knew were mostly the ones you saw, and so immersion in multiple cultures gave you multiple perspectives on magic. Ellie got to write her own story, but it was based on the ones she already knew, just like creativity in general.
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.