Archive for: April, 2011

Review: Journeyman’s Ride, by Marie Harte

Apr 30 2011 Published by under Reviews

Journeyman’s Ride is a steampunk Western paranormal erotic novella published on 4/25/11 by Carina Press. I received my copy free from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for writing a review. Marie Harte has published several erotic romances for Ellora’s Cave, Loose-I.D., and Samhain. This is her first book for Carina. Here’s the description:

Once a footloose journeyman who travelled between worlds, Danner has seen better days. He’s on the outs with the dogs [sic. I think she means "gods" here] for a mistake not his fault. Stuck without his Ride in a world sorely lacking, he makes due helping folks wherever he can. He’s used to dealing with godbolts that come from the sky, taunting deities, and blood ravens that cackle for hours, making his life a living hell. But the arrival of a mysterious beauty on the steam locomotive changes everything.

Mechanical spyders, cannibals, pissed off gods, and blessed lightning are all in a day’s work for Danner. But the love that strikes when he looks at Miranda is impossible to resist. Now if he can just keep her safe from the immoral jackass out to get him, he’ll help her rescue a princess and free herself from the bonds of servitude. All in a day’s work for a journeyman. Because as they say, a journeyman’s life is never dull.

Perhaps you can tell from this blurb what is both attractive and problematic about this novella. There is a lot going on — too much: Norse mythology, the Old West, steampunk, and elements of Regency romance. Danner, the son of Odin, “the father of the Gods”, is a Journeyman, who has been punished for sleeping with a married goddess. The punishment involves taking away his “Ride” — his ability to transport back and forth between the gods’ world and earth. But he can still absorb deadly godbolts and use his power over lightning to guide humans across the dangerous, unsettled West.

Miranda, a white blond beauty from the East, steps off the steam train in Endville and offers Danner payment to guide her to the Crystal Palace, where her cousin Clarissa, a selfish and vain princess, is being held by Western Prince Philippe. Miranda is — she thinks —  the bastard child of Clarissa’s father, but was never recognized by the king, and has been forced to serve Clarissa her entire life. The fact that she is willing to literally go to the ends of the earth to retrieve her signals Miranda’s basic goodness.

This is an erotic novella, so we can’t ask more from the worldbuilding than that subgenre and length allow. The author makes a few attempts to connect the disparate elements of this world, such as claiming that the mechanical inventions are brought by the gods to the humans, but mostly they are a random collection. The author has a pretty literal writing style, as evidenced by the names of the places in which the h/h find themselves: “Endville” (the last stop before the Damned Plains), “Damned Plains” (“a sandy mass of death and danger.”), “Last Chance” (“the last town between the Damned Plains and Spyder Haven”, and of course, “Spyder Haven” (the place where … oh never mind).

The romance elements are too familiar: Danner comes off as a tough-guy womanizer, but in fact, he’s got a heart of gold (when reciting the Journeyman’s duties, he includes: “healing the sick, inspiring artists or craftsmen, waging wars against the oppressed”).  Why has this good, gorgeous man never fallen in love? The plot requires it He just hasn’t wanted to, until he gets a taste of Miranda. Miranda, too, is moral and physical perfection. At first she’s put off by Danner’s crudeness, but quickly gets over that to enjoy his disco stick. Internal conflict is really nonexistent, although there is some external conflict near the end.

The sexual scenes are also par for the course. And their romance climaxes (heh) with an ero-rom trope I dislike: that to really love someone you must experience what what in the butt:

She blinked up at him with lightning in her eyes, and he knew he’d found the future of all his tomorrows right here. “Then I think it’s time, don’t you?”

In my view, Journeyman’s Ride is competently written and has some interesting elements. The setting and worldbuilding are unusual for erotic romance, and are what drew me to this book. But the too-familiar characters, the lack of conflict between the h/h, and the lack of sexual tension made it ultimately just a so-so read for me.

12 responses so far

Friday Five: Jean MacLeod, Judy Mays, AAR, Joanna Russ, Bangable Men of Brit Lit

Apr 29 2011 Published by under Friday Five

Is there a theme this week? I don’t think so, but three of the links are to women writers, all of whom faced struggles of one kind or another to get and stay published.

1. Mills & Boon author Jean MacLeod died this week, at age 103. A resident of England most of her adult life, MacLeod was born in Scotland the year Mills & Boon began, and, according to Jay Dixon, it was on one of her books — 1974′s The Black Cameron — that M&B’s famous rose logo debuted (I wish I could track this cover down. I can only find the Harlequin version. Anyone?). According to her obituary in The Telegraph, MacLeod’s heydey was from the late 1930s to the 1970s, although she working on her 131st book when she died. Alan Boon, son of the founder of the company, gave her advice that guided her her entire career: “never write anything a mother would not want her daughter to read.”

2. AAR contributor Leigh Davis has written a post called More Than I Bargained For — When Books Come with a Message. Davis’ take-home message is sensible:

For me even with non-controversial topics, an author can cross the line when the book loses balance and the message overwhelms the plot, no matter how much how much I agree with the message. Some very controversial subjects are more problematic for authors to handle even with a light touch, not that it can’t be done.

But I absolutely knew before even reading them that the complaints from readers would mostly be about liberal politics, Suzanne Brockmann’s advocacy for gay rights being a prime suspect whenever these discussions arise. I found myself asking what readers call “political”. It tends to be topics they disagree with. For my part, I think all of romance is very political (and often quite conservatively so — pronatalist, heteronormative, pro capitalism, you name it). But putting that aside, I don’t hear anyone complaining about all the Regency era dukes who believe in merit over blood, or all the 19th century heroines who try to help the poor, or all the other ways politics enters the genre. It is very interesting to me what counts as “political discourse”, and, more importantly, what doesn’t. I liked Elaine Mueller‘s comment, which states in part:

And I could be wrong but it seems to me that romance fiction contains its own political message – that the One True Happiness (especially for Woman) is to be found in the one man, one woman exclusive relationship and its happily ever after promise. There are other, slightly lesser happinesses to be found, but they just aren’t quite as good as the One True one.

3. 111 Male Characters of British Literature, in order of Bangability, from the Awl. Our colloquium series speaker two weeks ago claimed that women cannot actually sexually objectify men, so if you feel bad about reading the list, I can try to reconstruct her argument. In a bit of a shocker, Darcy is third. Can you guess who 1 and 2 are?

4. Many of us have been following the Judy Mays story this week. Judy Mays is the pen name of an erotic romance author who also happens to be a 10th grade English teacher in Pennsylvania. Some disgruntled parents got the local paper to write a story about Mays’s sideline, as if writing erotic romance was somehow newsworthy, or, worse, incompatible with teaching high school English. Today we have an impassioned, and amusing, video defense of Mays from one of her former students:

She can’t teach because she has wild sexual fantasies? If Mrs. Buranich can’t teach because of that, then I don’t know who can.

Your child is between the ages of 15 and 17. They know what sex is. And they know that Mrs. Buranich doesn’t want it from them.

5. Joanna Russ, science fiction writer, Hugo and Nebula award winner, academic, and feminist theorist, has died after a long illness. It was announced just a day or two ago that she had entered hospice care. It’s too bad that she did not have more time to benefit from hospice, but this is often the case for a number of reasons. I’ve only read her short story “When It Changed“, about a world without men, which left an impression. In 1998 she wrote a long essay called What Are We Fighting For? Sex, Race, Class, and the Future of Feminism. She showed the world that science fiction — who writes it, who gets published, how they write —  is political. Two short excerpts:

First, caricature stops when confrontation stops. When the air no longer rings with horrid tales of ball-breaking dykes, man-hating neurotics, vicious and parasitic wives, and the rest of the tiny train of male-imagined phantoms, that’s not because feminism has influenced patriarchy but because patriarchy has influenced feminism almost out of existence.

Feminism is something you do, not something you are. Women who say “I’m not a feminist” and proceed to do feminist work are allies no matter what they call themselves.

39 responses so far

Monday Stepback: Jennifer Egan, Andrew Shaffer, Josh Lanyon, Ana T.

Apr 25 2011 Published by under Monday Morning Stepback

The weekly links, opinion, and personal updates post

Links of interest (from the last 2 weeks):

I cannot recall how I found this one (thanks to whoever it was), but you must check out Sequential Crush, a blog devoted to romance comics. Here’s a Q&A with Michael Barson on his new book Agonizing Love: The Golden Era of Romance Comics. Earlier this month, Jacque had a phenomenal week on Ugly Duckling Romances. Check it out!

*****
The Art of Penguin Science Fiction (via @LauraCurtis). Very cool — all the covers from the past decades.

*****

As I prepare today to talk with undergraduate philosophy majors about graduate programs, something my colleague and I do every spring, I have been thinking a lot about Rohan Maitzen’s blog post on The PhD Conundrum. I find it harder every year to walk the line between practical wisdom and dream crushing. I agree completely with Rohan that the major backup arguments to the realization that there are very few tenure track jobs for PhDs in the humanities: (1) the skills argument (“You’ll gain skills you can use in nonacademic careers!”) and (2) the Zen argument (“It’s not the destination, but the journey!”) are both utter fails.

*****

Laura Vivanco reports on a psychological study of sexual behavior as portrayed in romance novels. There are some howlers. The best here:

The total number of sex scenes was surprisingly low, given the lay reputation of romance novels; several books published recently included no sex scenes at all. These results may indicate an increasing trend towards less explicit sexual content in romance novels.

How on earth, one asks, could anyone with even a passing knowledge of the romance genre conclude something so obviously false? By combining faulty assumptions (for example, that contemporary romance is more likely to have sex in it than historical romance), with ignorance (no knowledge that erotic romance even exists, thanks in part to relying on the conservative RITA awards as an indicator of the breadth of the genre). Commenter Liz diplomatically refers to this as “the perils of cross-disciplinary research.” Hm. One of the study authors weighs in at the end of the comment thread.

*****

Thomas MacAulay Millar on the dangers of mainstreaming parts of BDSM culture (via @anahcrow)

the rise of rough sex and sort of BDSM-by-any-other-name in gonzo porn wasn’t a good thing: that it brought with it the physical and psychological aspects of BDSM (I’m paraphrasing here) and popularized them with a mainstream audience, but didn’t normalize all the ethical tools of negotiation and communication that should always go with that stuff.

*****

I don’t care much for Gwyneth Paltrow. So I was thrilled to read this HuffPo takedown of her theory that “Everything in my life that’s good is because I worked my ass off to get it and to maintain it.”

In an age in which America’s class-divide is greater than it’s ever been, our patience has simply waned for the George W. Bushes and Gwyneth Paltrows of the world — people who were born on third base and act like they hit a triple.

*****

Over at Reviews by Jessewave, writer Josh Lanyon opines on reviewers:

[I'm] finding the role of this new brand of blogger-reviewer confusing. These days any goof with a computer and a credit card can call herself an Author, but so too can any goof with a computer and Internet access call herself a Reviewer. It’s all about the DIY. Way back when I first started publishing, reviews were formal affairs. Reviewers were paid professionals. Reviews appeared in newspapers and periodicals. They were flattering or unflattering, fair or unfair, but either way, they were most assuredly impersonal. … The Internet changed all that. Everyone who has a blog or an Amazon or Goodreads account is now a potential literary critic.

I found this comment quite odd, given that it was written by someone who publishes in the most maligned subgenre of the most despised genre of fiction. I’d be curious to know how much of the kind of erotic male/male romance novels Lanyon writes were reviewed by “paid reviewers” in “newspapers and periodicals” before this “new brand” of blogger-reviewer came along.

He goes on:

To further complicate the modern relationship between reviewers and writers — especially in this genre — many of our blogger-reviewers are themselves aspiring writers. It makes sense because one of the best tools for honing your craft is to learn to read analytically. But as we can all testify, there is no one more critical than the ambitious neophyte or the envious peer.

Are we back to this? Negative reviews are the result of professional jealousy and frustrated ambition?

After going on for a while about reason and logic, we have a couple of claims that, well, can’t both be true:

(1) “reviewing is subjective. … Most aspects of literature — up to and including various grammatical fine points — are a matter of taste and style.”

(2) “For a reviewer to have credibility he or she has to get it right most of the time.”

The first kind of comment takes a very deflationary attitude about the reviewer’s project. It seems to say: don’t bother getting it right, because there is nothing to get right. It’s opinion all the way down. The second kind of comment suggests the reverse: if you are going to review, you’d better hold to certain objective standards.

But what bothered me the most about this very long, rambling post was that I felt like I was reading a classic “reviewer-scolding” cloaked in a post which, on the surface advocates taking the high road and not reading or responding to reviews. This kind of thing really does show through, even to goof reviewers like me, with my computer and my internet connection.

*****
Ana of Aneca’s World has two incredibly adorable reasons for her blogging hiatus. For your biggest smile of the day, go forth and see.

*****

Andrew Shaffer’s Great Philosophers Who Failed at Love got reviewed pretty negatively at Literary Kicks by Levi Asher, who does philosophical posts on the weekends. Asher is right to correct Shaffer on small points, like where where Thoreau actually lived (not in the woods, although he visited often), and some larger ones (Plato). The main problem I have with this review is that Asher seems to be reviewing the book he wishes Shaffer had written rather than the one he in fact did, as this inapt comparison suggests:

This book feels like a quickie takeoff on Simon Critchley’s more thoroughly researched Book of Dead Philosophers (which is cited in the bibliography), and it suffers from the same major flaw: a tendency to turn great philosophers into cartoons, and to reach for the punchline instead of the substantial insight.

In The Book of Dead Philosophers, Critchley is using biography to do some serious philosophy. As serious as it gets, given the topic: death. In Great Philosophers, Shaffer is using biography to do comedy. That the subject is philosophers is almost beside the point, except for the irony-making fact that these people are supposed to be so wise.

As a person who makes her living in philosophy, I, too, bristled a bit at the concept and execution Shaffer’s book. For one thing, he defines philosophy much more broadly than most philosophers would. I doubt folks like Diderot, Swedenborg, or Tolstoy are taught in many philosophy 101 courses. But then I remembered that I am a feminist philosopher, and that my kind have been criticizing our tradition for decades for going desperately wrong on the topic of personal relations. Philosophers have gotten it all wrong about not just romantic love, but mothering, friendship, trust, empathy, dependency, and a host of other fixtures of most humans’ daily lives. The tradition has its sensitive exponents (Aristotle on friendship, Hume on the moral emotions) but it mostly just ignores personal relations. It’s about time philosophers took some flak for this attitude in the popular culture.

*Disclaimer: Shaffer sent me a copy of his book, gratis, which I enjoyed. Also, I may have followed Shaffer on Twitter and my gaze may have paused for a second more than was proper on one of the many Romantic Times convention photos of him wearing an Elvis wig, angel wings, and a fishnet wifebeater.

*****

The latest in plagiarism: in journalism, Ed Champion is a victim, and in m/m romance, it’s JL Langley.

*****

Literary v. Commercial Writers, part gazillion:

Jennifer Egan won the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for A Visit from the Goon Squad. Then she said:

There was that scandal with the Harvard student who was found to have plagiarized. But she had plagiarized very derivative, banal stuff. This is your big first move? These are your models?

And the immediate backlash:

From Smart Bitch Sarah and her Bitchery, The Frisky, Blogher, and a quote from The Signature Thing:

If her point is that female writers shouldn’t feel like they’re only qualified to write about shopping and husband-hunting, and that they should, if they want to, tackle bigger, grander subjects—yes, absolutely, I support that. But I think her subtext is that there’s something wrong with women who choose to write about female friendships or motherhood or the search for love; that they’re backing away from a challenge, going the easy route, resigning themselves to a lesser literary genre.

This morning, the Millions weighs in, in What We Call What Women Write, defending Egan:

the offended parties lay claim to a genre ubiquitously referred to as “chick-lit”…  I don’t aim to scrutinize the content of the genre so much as the fact that the chick lit demographic has fully embraced the term. Ladies, it’s 2011. Who refers to women as “chicks” aside from Ed Hardy-wearing man-children? Uninspired as it may be, detractors calling the work “fluffy” can’t really be blamed—it’s built into the name, for god’s sake. It’s difficult to move forward in an argument about the sexist climate in publishing when a group that is supposedly trying to push for more equality has accepted and even defended a derogatory label. Granted, the term was probably coined by some marketing department somewhere, but authors of the genre stand by it unflinchingly (see Michele Gorman’s article in The Guardian). It’s no secret that the chick lit authors are outselling their literary fiction counterparts by far. What’s alarming is that the tremendous success of the genre is largely because it’s marketed to women who identify themselves “chicks.”

I think this argument is unfair. I doubt women who read chick lit “identify themselves as chicks”. And Drewis fails to consider the possibility that those who do use “chick” are using it ironically, or even politically reappropriating it, in the manner that terms like “bitches” and “geeks” have been reappropriated.

What kind of feminist movement condones a suppression of opinion on the basis that we should all be nice and stick together, because we’re girls? What Egan said wasn’t nice. It was honest. It reflected her opinion of a certain type of fiction. Publishing should strive to be a meritocracy (though whether it succeeds is a whole other issue,) and Egan’s comments are an acknowledgment of that. On the other hand, in the chick lit realm, amid the outrage and demand for more respect, there is, in fact cowering: observe Weiner selling herself short (and acknowledging a literary hierarchy) in an interview she gave to the Huffington Post: “Do I think I should be getting all of the attention that Jonathan “Genius” Franzen gets? Nope. Would I like to be taken at least as seriously as a Jonathan Tropper or a Nick Hornby? Absolutely.”

This one strikes closer to an uncomfortable truth that critics of Egan should face. And then there’s also the hypocrisy of taking to a blog to call out Egan for criticizing chick lit while at the same time complaining that all lit fic is dry and pretentious and boring.

And finally,

it does nothing for leveling the playing field if every time a woman author remarks on the quality of a work of fiction, hysteria ensues, she’s thought of as a catty bitch, and there’s a concerted effort to rally the troops against her.

This comment makes me uncomfortable. Any time someone calls women critics “hysterical”, images of dark attics and Freud’s pipe spring to mind. Sure, I saw some ill advised comments, but I did not see any hysteria. There were actual arguments — premises with conclusions –  in the blog posts I linked to above. Maybe Drewis should check them out.

Finally, in the interest of peacemaking, here’s this nice little meditation, Literary and Commercial Writers Should Lay Down their Arms, in The Guardian, by writer Sara Sheridan:

in the last year, I’ll have written an historical novel (of which I’m very proud), a poem, sundry websites, blogs and brochures, edited a non-fiction book on private commission, had a children’s book published in the UK and abroad and written mainstream journalism (sometimes under the cover of an assumed name!) I dread to think what the worthies will make of that but whatever they make of it, I rest assured that things are changing and increasingly writers can garner respect for their trade rather than their genre. We can learn so much looking outside our core field of expertise.

*****

Amazon to offer library books for Kindle. Woot! But wait. The Librarian in Black has some questions, among them:

1. Will Kindle delivery happen via Whispernet as it does for consumers, or use the existing Overdrive console? Overdrive’s user experience has been consistently poor. You know this if you’ve worked with users trying to download eBooks from them. It’s gotten better, but bad web design and bad process design have been unfortunate hallmarks.
2. Are we getting MARC records? They are essential to discovery for users, so I’d say this is a must and hope they’re forthcoming.
3. How are library users’ privacy rights protected (the bookmarks & notes archiving they’re doing)? Both press releases say they will be, but….how?

*****

If you are on Goodreads, and if you are a blogger who has ARCs you would like to swap, there is a new group for you to join.

*****

I thought things were bad enough in my state when LePage got elected. But no, now some Republican wants to pass a law so that a local transgender girl may be legally prevented from using male restrooms. As reported in the HuffPo.

*****

Personal:

Looking forward to eating leavened bread again. Last week of classes. Lots of grading. I’m moderating an 8th grade panel on genetics at a local town hall which should be fun. I’m also meeting a new Hospice friend. And, while I have no plans to get up at the crack of dawn to watch the royal wedding, I’m excited for the pictures and news footage on Friday.

On the blog … not sure. Stay tuned!

HAPPY WEEK!

40 responses so far

Beyond the Bulge: 8 Other Reasons to Watch Labyrinth

Apr 24 2011 Published by under Movies and TV

I recently watched Labyrinth (1986) with my kids via Netflix download play. The screenplay for Labyrinth was written by Jim Henson of Muppets fame, Canadian children’s author Dennis Lee, and Welsh screenwriter and Monty Python troupe member Terry Jones, and the film was produced by George Lucas, among others.

It’s about a 15 year old girl, Sarah, played by Jennifer Connelly, in one of her first roles (she was 15 at the time herself). As the movie opens, she is off in a field, a dreamy teenager in a vaguely Renaissance costume, reciting dramatic lines from a play, Labyrinth. She suddenly realizes she’s late, and runs home, where her annoyed parents are waiting for her to take up sitting duties for her baby brother Toby.

Sarah is aggrieved that she has to take care of Toby, and when he won’t stop crying, she wishes aloud — reciting lines from the play — that the goblins take him away. Cue the arrival of Jareth, the Goblin King, played by David Bowie, who promptly does just what she asked, after demonstrating his skillz with the Fushigi magic gravity balls. Jareth’s castle is surrounded by a vast labyrinth, and Sarah has to make her way through it in 13 hours, or Toby will be turned into a goblin. She makes some friends along the way, there is music and dancing, and lots of near misses.

We (myself and my two sons, ages 9 and 11) enjoyed it, and when I went online to look at commentary on the film, I was stunned that the aspect of the film under most intense scrutiny — and debate — is the bulge in David Bowie’s pants. Was there a codpiece? Did his pants get tighter as the film progressed? Was he — er — excited? And, uh, apparently circumcision is not quite the thing in England. And this is not just hormone crazed 12 year olds hanging out at IMDB: even professional reviews make reference to it (in the Washington Post, for example, the pants are referred to as “over-revelatory”).

I can’t answer those vital and timeless questions, but this is a good movie, not a great one, and there are other reasons to watch it, which I shall now list:

1. Connelly’s acting in this film is not exactly Oscar material, but her character is a Grade A selfish bitch, which was refreshing after so many too good to be true heroines. I had some genuine shaken baby fear for Toby when he was under her watch, and she’s quite violent when she needs to be (pulling the heads off some creatures and nearly suffocating others).  Although the film is constructed as a typical quest, in which the physical journey is mirrored by character growth, in fact, the film gets more and more solipsistic as it progresses. Just as she desired in the opening scene, this world is entirely under Sarah’s control, and the only way that is possible, is if she is the only thing that exists.

Her sidekicks, Hoggle, Ludo and Sir Didymus, have no existence or purpose beyond Sarah’s quest: “Should you need us… for any reason at all…”.  In the final controntation with Jareth, he complains: “Everything that you wanted I have done. You asked that child be taken; I took him. You cowered before me and I was frightening. … I have done it all for you! I am exhausted from living up to your expectations of me.”

The world really does revolve around this teenager.

2. The Bog of Eternal Stench. I mean, come on! A farting, belching swamp. One drop and you stink forever. Good stuff.

3. The lack of exposition. This movie does not spell it all out for you. Or any of it, actually. This may be because it is making itself up as it goes along. To take one obvious unanswered question: Jareth is humanoid, yet he is king of the goblins. So when he threatens to turn Toby into “one of us” — which “us” does he mean? Will Toby get tight lycra pants and frosty eye shadow? Or warts and horns?

4. You can use this film to teach your kids logic.

Sarah confronts two guards, guarding two doors. One door leads to sudden death, the other to the castle. She may only ask one guard a question, but one of them always lies and one always tells the truth. This is a version of the familiar knights and knaves logic puzzle, and Sarah solves it, boosting her confidence, and bringing her closer to Toby.

5. Music and lyrics by David Bowie. The songs are pure 80s cheese (synthesizers + orchestral stuff). The lyrics make little sense: “Chilly down with the fire gang/Think small with the fire gang/Bad hep with the fire gang/when your thing gets wild/Chilly Down”, or “You remind me of the babe./What babe? /The babe with the power. /What power? /The power of voodoo. /Who do? /You do. /Do what? /Remind me of the babe…”. Still, I will take this over Mandy Moore/Disney stuff any day.

6. The balance of the whimsical and the grotesque. The shots of the Labyrinth are really lovely:

And of the Escher inspired castle:

But there are also a lot of — er — earthly nondelights, like the Bog of Eternal Stench, or Jareth’s goblin henchmen fighting over sausages and picking their noses. When Sarah first meets dwarf Hoggle, he is taking a long piss in a fountain. A closer look reveals the fountain is made up of well-endowed pissing dwarfs. Hoggle proceeds to take out a weapon of some kind and exterminate several fairies, shooting them dead midflight. The Fireys pull off their own body parts and throw them into a fire as they dance. And so on.

7. The dream/masquerade ball sequence. Video here.

Sarah gets poisoned by Hoggle, and wakes up transformed into a very adult looking beauty, dressed for the masquerade ball Jareth is hosting in the castle. It’s the closest Jareth comes to seducing Sarah, creeptastic as that is. It’s a very engaging scene, both visually, and in terms of plot, which none of the rest of the film quite matches in intensity. Some folks in LA host a Labyrinth inspired masquerade ball every year.

8. This film is a shrine to the phallus. I know, I said I wasn’t going to dwell on Jareth’s crotch. And I’m not. But even putting aside the many, many, many distracting shots of Bowie’s crotch (at least 6 different pairs of tight pants. According to one blogger, Neil Gaiman once said Bowie’s crotch should have gotten its own trailer on the set), some of them up close from a dwarf’s eye view…

…there is much to behold.

The goblins, like the dwarfs, have protruding crotches, noses and horns. And there’s this:

When crotches, horns and noses aren’t enough, there’s always having a phallus grow out of a head:

The masquerade scene is, from one point of view, just dancing phalluses (the masks) and their excretions (white pearls and dripping white candle wax hanging all about). Tell me I am making this up:

Pearl Necklaces?

Let me touch your -- er -- nose?

Watch out, or I will poke you with my -- oh, never mind.

In this bit, Sarah is startled when a snake pops out of a box. Talk about subtext becoming text:

It is not hard to read this scene as the literal drugging and metaphorical rape of a virginal girl. I have no idea why Henson’s imagination, once he decided to make a more serious film (this was his second, after Dark Crystal), was so dominated by phallic imagery.

Fortunately, all of this will fly right over your kids’ heads. It’s a fun movie that kids – especially those with a gross sense of humor — will enjoy.

20 responses so far

When Your Blog Plateaus

Apr 23 2011 Published by under Blogs and blogging, Navel gazing

I have lots of unfinished posts, but no energy to finish them as I head in to the last week of the academic year. So here’s some lazy navel gazing:

I looked at my stats recently, not just daily stats, but at my stats for the past several months and it hit me: my blog has stopped growing. I’ve had about the same number of daily visitors, the same number of subscribers, the same number of hits, for a while now. I have reached what the blogging experts call a “traffic plateau.”
Continue Reading »

35 responses so far

The Creative Spirit That Gets My Third Grader in Trouble at School

Apr 16 2011 Published by under Navel gazing

My third grader Max has an unusual take on the world and a very quirky sense of humor as a result. He loves to read, and he’s always gravitated to “horror” (Goosebumps books) and books with an odd or subversive sense of humor (Raold Dahl, Neil Gaiman, etc.). He brings this somewhat dark sensibility into the classroom.

So, for example, when given the prompt, “If I were a snowflake…”, Max finishes it this way:

“… I would have a short life unless I flew up because some little kids eat snowflakes not knowing what’s in them. There are many dangers to a snowflake, for example rainwater, snow blowers, us. The worst thing about being a snowflake would be having no head. I hate headless people. I don’t like heights, so I would hate to float but since floating means survival…”

His teachers — with whom, in general, we all get along with quite well — sometimes do not seem to appreciate this sort of thing. He usually gets an average mark, with “Interesting” written in the margins.  Lately, his writing has been getting rejected. Here’s an example of writing that was rejected for being too “silly”:

I will try to write a fable starting … now!

There once was a man who always worried his turtle would explode. Every night he yelled “Help! Help! Help! My turtle’s exploding!” And every day a stranger told him, “Your turtle will be fine.” Soon he took his advice and stopped giving the turtle Don’t Explode Pills. The next day the turtle exploded.

Don’t trust strangers.

The assignment was to create a fable with a lesson. I believe Max did that, in his own way. We love Max’s quirky sense of humor and his original writing. I think there may be other people who appreciate it, too, so I asked him if I could share some of it here, and he agreed, although I had to edit this post several times to meet with his final approval.

Thanks for reading.

42 responses so far

“Re-Reading Authorial Intention and Imagination over Two Centuries

Apr 15 2011 Published by under Academia, Cover commentary, Feminist contentions, Genre musings

… : the Romantic-Era’s Minerva Press Novels and Today’s Popular Romances.”

Ok, that was not my title. Can you tell the English professor half of our team wrote that presentation title? Here’s how a philosopher would write it:

“What is an author?”

So you can see why I left the title to my partner in crime, Elizabeth.

We gave our talk as part of a campus luncheon series put on by the Women in the Curriculum/Women’s Studies program. We had very good attendance, especially from faculty in the English department.

Elizabeth is working on Minerva Press novels, which were not technically romances, but definitely have elements that make them comparable to romance. We’ve been exploring some of the commonalities between Minerva press novels themselves, their production, their authorship, and their readership, and contemporary romance novels.

Rather than try to summarize the entire 90 minute event, I’ll just bullet point a few things, and then stick a couple of my slides in. If you have never heard of Minerva Press, you might start with this wonderful piece by author Carolyn Jewel.

  • “Minerva Press” serves as a metonym for all of the circulating library novels published during this period, although several were not actually published by Minerva. In much the same way, “Harlequin” serves as a metonym for all of romance.
  • Both Minerva Press novels and romance novels are subject to a bizarre juxtaposition, of being repetitive and boring, yet somehow at the same time, too exciting and salacious.
  • In both cases, thanks to writership and readership comprised mostly of women, the feminization of literature coincides with its commodification.
  • The ethos of authorship generated in the Romantic Era made it difficult to see Minerva Press authors as authors. Their originality was not easily detected, they wrote for money, they were women, etc. I would say the same is true of romance novelists.
  • The usual criticisms of Minerva Press and romance novels short circuit critics’ ability to read them as books (rather than as some other kind of productions).

The hurry to use the condemnations of novel reading as evidence of one thesis or another has prevented them from being read in anything but a roughly descriptive or referential way. Their high rhetoric makes them extremely quotable, yet at the same time, their repetitiveness has encouraged the illusion that that are ‘already read’, self-explanatory. –From E.J. Clery, The Rise of Supernatural Fiction, 1762-1800

  • We must read both texts horizontally, as genre, while keeping and eye open for imaginative and creative reformulations of genre.

Knowing my audience mostly doesn’t read romances and would think many of the common assumptions (namely, that it is one book being written over and over) were true, I spent half the time educating them about the genre.  I also spent some time on feminist critique, and on its similarities to nonfeminist critique. I discussed the import, from a feminist point of view, of not viewing romance novels as books. If they are not books, the 26 million women who read them regularly are not readers. This is not just constructing romance readers as passive. It is effacing them.  Here are a few of my slides:

Owning my fandom -- first slide

Education. Folks loved this cover.

More education.

Discussed diversity in cover styles, looking like other genres

Covers that show strong heroines

Probably my favorite moment was during the Q&A when one of our creative writing professors said that while he was used to SFF and mystery being treated with contempt, he had never even thought about the silence around romance novels. They are beneath notice and beneath contempt.

Well, there was a lot more, but that’s the gist of some of it. Thanks for reading along!

11 responses so far

Review: Cinderman, by Anne Stuart

Apr 12 2011 Published by under Reviews

There is no end of fun we could have with this cover. Was the hero wearing eye protection when the lab blew up, or did he just fall asleep on a tanning bed ? What kind of explosion incinerates a shirt and leaves hair, belt and jeans totally intact? And why does a man who experiments with chemical fusion have long flowing locks anyway? Perhaps he was big fan of Extreme (check the guy on the right)?

Continue Reading »

22 responses so far

Older posts »