OUaT, education, fiction
OUaT: Goddamn it! I got into this show based on the interesting women and complicated relationships. I did not sign up for having them all literally sidelined so that Rumplestilskin, of all people (?), could go on a friggin’ hero’s journey to find his goodness. Argh!
Humanities Crisis Mad Libs:
Of course humanities classes challenge students to think about big questions; of course that teaching is valuable. But when the argument leaps immediately to synthesis, analysis, and imagination, we give little credit to the scrappy effort needed to master the fundamentals of many humanities fields. Humanities faculty members regularly miss the chance to tell their students and the public about the many other valuable skills they teach: how to write a clear sentence; how to communicate in a foreign language; how to look to the past in order to make decisions today; and so on. All of these are invaluable skills that help students in the world of work. Building these nuts-and-bolts skills also leads to broader vistas.
Mister October, vol. 2: Free LibraryThing early reviewer copy. More stories in honor of Rick Hautala. Clive Barker (portentious/pretentious story of a guy saved from the hangman’s noose; the story just cuts off at the end), Peter Straub, Thomas F. Monteleone, Christopher Golden, Nancy A. Collins, Kim Newman (Hollywood alternate history; seemed pointless without detailed knowledge of the actual facts), Sarah Langan, and some other big names, including a story by Rick Hautala himself about a man who finds a very dangerous corpse at sea. My favorite story was Road Kill (A Dan Shamble, Zombie P.I. story) by Kevin J. Anderson-it’s broad and hokey, but sometimes you just want a zombie P.I. getting mistaken for a vampire and thus assaulted in entirely the wrong way. Lucy Snyder’s Magdala Amygdala was a decent variant on the zombie/vampire virus trope, with people with different afflictions feeding on one another and trying to keep away from the CDC’s enforcement of the no-eating-people rule. Amber Benson’s contribution about a stalker didn’t make much sense to me.
C.J. Cherryh, The Collected Short Fiction of C.J. Cherryh: It’s time for me to admit that, at this point in my life, I’m the wrong audience for Cherryh. The stories are fantasy and sf; a series of them at the beginning involve the far future of some of today’s most famous cities, each subject to a different, mostly declining, fate. The characters are generally though not always dark and troubled; their interior lives are demonstrated mostly by actions and allusions. A constant theme is the incomprehensibility of the Other, and the Other’s similar inability to understand the things the POV character values. While I always had the sense that Cherryh knew eactly what kind of worldbuilding lay behind each story, the overall effect was exhausting.
Stacia Kane, Wrong Ways Down: A Terrible adventure, back before he and Chess were together. Basically, it’s Terrible solving a series of crimes while mooning over how awesome Chess is, and while I have a high tolerance for that (see, e.g., Raleigh Beckett, Peter Bishop, Ichabod Crane) I doubt this would be fun for any but the biggest fans of the series. Also Kane writes even the non-dialogue bits in Terrible’s inconsistent patois, which I find wearying.
Seanan McGuire, Indexing: Yay, another McGuire book I like! This one is about the secret agency that protects us from fairy tales (the narrative) from encroaching on reality. The main protagonist is a Snow White struggling to keep from her destiny (snow, glass, apples) who works with an Evil Stepsister, a brownie/shoemaker type, a Pied Piper, and an ordinary human. But the fairy tale incursions are increasing in frequency and ferocity, and it’s not clear how long they can all survive … I liked the setup a lot and hope they’ll return in future books.
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.
Humanities Crisis Mad Libs:
Of course humanities classes challenge students to think about big questions; of course that teaching is valuable. But when the argument leaps immediately to synthesis, analysis, and imagination, we give little credit to the scrappy effort needed to master the fundamentals of many humanities fields. Humanities faculty members regularly miss the chance to tell their students and the public about the many other valuable skills they teach: how to write a clear sentence; how to communicate in a foreign language; how to look to the past in order to make decisions today; and so on. All of these are invaluable skills that help students in the world of work. Building these nuts-and-bolts skills also leads to broader vistas.
Mister October, vol. 2: Free LibraryThing early reviewer copy. More stories in honor of Rick Hautala. Clive Barker (portentious/pretentious story of a guy saved from the hangman’s noose; the story just cuts off at the end), Peter Straub, Thomas F. Monteleone, Christopher Golden, Nancy A. Collins, Kim Newman (Hollywood alternate history; seemed pointless without detailed knowledge of the actual facts), Sarah Langan, and some other big names, including a story by Rick Hautala himself about a man who finds a very dangerous corpse at sea. My favorite story was Road Kill (A Dan Shamble, Zombie P.I. story) by Kevin J. Anderson-it’s broad and hokey, but sometimes you just want a zombie P.I. getting mistaken for a vampire and thus assaulted in entirely the wrong way. Lucy Snyder’s Magdala Amygdala was a decent variant on the zombie/vampire virus trope, with people with different afflictions feeding on one another and trying to keep away from the CDC’s enforcement of the no-eating-people rule. Amber Benson’s contribution about a stalker didn’t make much sense to me.
C.J. Cherryh, The Collected Short Fiction of C.J. Cherryh: It’s time for me to admit that, at this point in my life, I’m the wrong audience for Cherryh. The stories are fantasy and sf; a series of them at the beginning involve the far future of some of today’s most famous cities, each subject to a different, mostly declining, fate. The characters are generally though not always dark and troubled; their interior lives are demonstrated mostly by actions and allusions. A constant theme is the incomprehensibility of the Other, and the Other’s similar inability to understand the things the POV character values. While I always had the sense that Cherryh knew eactly what kind of worldbuilding lay behind each story, the overall effect was exhausting.
Stacia Kane, Wrong Ways Down: A Terrible adventure, back before he and Chess were together. Basically, it’s Terrible solving a series of crimes while mooning over how awesome Chess is, and while I have a high tolerance for that (see, e.g., Raleigh Beckett, Peter Bishop, Ichabod Crane) I doubt this would be fun for any but the biggest fans of the series. Also Kane writes even the non-dialogue bits in Terrible’s inconsistent patois, which I find wearying.
Seanan McGuire, Indexing: Yay, another McGuire book I like! This one is about the secret agency that protects us from fairy tales (the narrative) from encroaching on reality. The main protagonist is a Snow White struggling to keep from her destiny (snow, glass, apples) who works with an Evil Stepsister, a brownie/shoemaker type, a Pied Piper, and an ordinary human. But the fairy tale incursions are increasing in frequency and ferocity, and it’s not clear how long they can all survive … I liked the setup a lot and hope they’ll return in future books.
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.