Waffle

Children's literature is full of scrotums! (Via Neil Gaiman)

Matt Taibbi: Maybe We Deserve to Be Ripped Off By Bush's Billionaires:

While America obsessed about Brittany's shaved head, Bush offered a budget that offers $32.7 billion in tax cuts to the Wal-Mart family alone, while cutting $28 billion from Medicaid.

MediaFork is a new media-ripper derived from HandBrake, whose development had stalled recently. Works on OSX and linux (linux version Command Line only). I couldn't get the source code to build, but the binary version worked swimmingly. So far, I've done all my DVD ripping with MPlayer, but you can never have enough tools... and this one seems to be a little smarter than MPlayer at finding the correct audio channels automagically.

Teen 'sport killings' of homeless on the rise. Reminded me of this Majikthise post from a month or so ago. Remind me to be nice to a homeless person some time.

The man responsible for putting my old band's music on Sellaband and adding old photos showing me in the band also regularly sends me interesting music links, so I can almost forgive him. Today, he sent me a link to Dalek I, an obscure early synth duo. I didn't care much for this sort of thing when I was actually living through the synth pop era, but a lot of it sounds rather good to me now.

Last week, Adam and I wrote what is referred to in fannish circles as a sporking, essentially a written MSTK-ing, of a chapter from the Harry Potter fanfic Hogwarts Exposed for an online community dedicated to that sort of thing. Besides being unbelievably awful,Hogwarts Exposed, noticeable for being based not just on the original Harry Potter stories (indeed it has very little connection with them at all) but on two other fanfics, from which it cribs backstory points about the defeat of Voldemort and Harry's fifth and sixth years at Hogwarts, which presumably weren't available to the HE writer when he was working on it. This makes HE a meta-fanfic.
Because Adam and I wrote our response in character, Adam as the cast of a webcomic he is writing, and me as the main cast of Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan, and because the process got way out of hand —the chapter is quoted nearly in full but the quotations make up only a small part of the finished product— the finished product reads more like a freestyle Role Playing Game than a point by point mocking of a bad fanfiction. I suppose that makes it a meta-meta fanfic. And one in which I let my own characters go out of character for the sake of some cheap gags. Ah well.
Why did we do this? For my part, I'd seen Adam and other writers doing these things before and it seemed like a fun writing exercise, and possibly a way of making the time wasted rubbernecking at Hogwarts Exposed worthwhile, so I thought I'd have a go. All chapters had already been assigned but Adam was willing to share. It's quite a lot of work, actually.
While we're on the subject of fanfics and the canon they're supposedly based on, Andrew Rilstone has something to say about the source material for The Da Vinci Code: the HMS Jesus/Mary Magdalene won't sail, based on what the Gospels actually have to say about Mary Magdalene, which is very little.
Andrew, in case you hadn't seen me wittering on about his writing before, is always a good read and one of very few bloggers who write about Christianity, from a Christian (C of E) perspective without coming across as some deranged fundamentalist.

I am probably going to regret posting this late in the evening after a long working day. Apologies in advance for any lapses in grammar, style or comprehensibility; I'll edit out the worst faults in the morning when my head is clearer.

We have our first recorded instance of Rowling denialism. I'm sure future scholars will debate fiercely whether the Duchess of York or Kate Bush wrote the Harry Potter novels (actually, it would fit Kate Bush rather well, what with her 12-year absense and a history of writing about the supernatural. Unless people start arguing that Kate's discovery at age 15 by one of the biggest rock stars in the world, who conveniently happened to share a mutual acquaintance with her brother, is "too good to be true" and that Kate's songs were really written by Vashti Bunyan during her 35-year absense. Then again, that tale of Vashti's pilgrimage to Scotland, being a descendent of religious writer John Bunyan, dropping out of the public eye for a lifetime after the flop of her first album, having that album slowly gain recognition until the Observer lists it in the top 100 British albums ever and the album fetches &pound 900 at eBay auctions, and then being rediscovered at age 60 by the hottest young stars in indie music? Suuuuuuuure, that's likely).

Film director Nina Grünfeld simply thinks the rags-to-riches story of JK Rowling is too good to be true.

Writing in a commentary in Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten's cultural pages this week, she questioned whether it's really possible for Rowling to have been the sole creative force behind what's become an international book and movie empire.

Grünfeld recounted the stories told about Rowling, where it's claimed the aspiring author was a poor, single mother with a hungry child to feed, who got the idea for Harry Potter while she sat on a delayed train between Manchester and London. With no money for paper or an office, Rowling reportedly started scribbling out the story of Harry Potter on paper napkins picked up in Edinburgh's cafés

Grünfeld called it a "fantastic" story, that "gives hope" not least to single mothers around the world as well as mothers with unrealized dreams and strong purchasing power.

"But can a person be so productive and commercially successful in a media industry where nothing is left to coincidence?" wondered Grünfeld. "Is it possible that a person can write six thick books that are translated into 55 languages and sell more than 250 million copies in less than 10 years? Is it probable that the stories then get filmed and commercially exploited to the degree seen here, without any well-thought-out strategy or highly professional players behind them?"

And then came Grünfeld's provocative question: "Is it possible that JK Rowling exists?" Her own answer: "Well, who do they think they're kidding? Not me!"

Grünfeld then went on to float what she willingly concedes may be a conspiracy theory, that the books instead have been produced by hack writers like those at the syndicate that produced the "Nancy Drew" mystery series for young readers. The author printed on all the books, "Carolyn Keene," never really existed, Grünfeld notes, adding that she thinks Rowling is a product of "a gigantic concern with the names Bloomsbury Publishing plc and Warner Bros" in the concern's ranks.

Yes, it is possible after all to outdo Shakespeare denialists for sheer pointless, headache-inducing obnoxiousness.

The group blog Crooked Timber is holding a seminar on Susanna Clarke and her novel Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell (which I have given to two people so far without having read it myself - looking forward to it though). They've done one on China Mieville before.
Here's the Introduction to the seminar. Susanna Clarke is taking part herself.
They've got off to a flying start. I don't have time to read everything that's already posted, but will get back to it once I've read the novel. In the meantime, I thought some of you might like to know.

I'm sitting on a longer post about literary criticism on the internet, but focused more on the low end of the field: the livejournalers writing essays about Harry Potter for fun. I think the fact that people are writing literary criticism for fun, even if it's not exactly at the academic level (not being at the academic level has its advantages, by the way: the material posted to HP_Essays will be accessible and immediately useful to aspiring writers) will change the field a few years down the line, probably for the better. But that's something for a later posting.

This seminar, on the other hand, is by academics and will almost certainly be the sort of stuff that academics like to write about, if made slightly more accessible to the general public because it goes on a blog. Good. Yesterday, ROCR reader Martin Diehl emailed me with a question about lit crit that I was going to mull over a bit; it'll be helpful to be able to point somewhere and say "This is what they actually do" and also to be able to remind myself of just that. It's been 10 years since I got my degree, so some of my impressions of what people studying literature actually do have become a bit hazy and are probably out of date anyway.

I've had a Dutch edition of Maigret et son Mort by Georges Simenon in the house for almost two years, on loan from Jeroen (the lesson here is: do not lend me books), but hadn't got around to reading it until this weekend. Now that I've read it, I'd like to read some more Maigret. This one lived up to the series' reputation as literate, literary detective novels.

What I liked: the fact that throughout the first half of the novel, the characters took every opportunity to have a drink. Even a five-minute interruption in a stakeout and pursuit was used by the pursuer to knock back a nice cool one. The descriptions of the police work in which Maigret's individual brilliance solved part of the puzzle but the rest of it had to be filled in by relying on reports from other departments and off-the-record chats with minor underworld characters. This made it feel a lot more like real police work than the stylised version we get in detective novels where one person solves crimes alone.

I also liked the switch from fairly light-hearted to grim after the second killing. At that point, the boozing and puzzle-solving is superceded by mass raids and escalating accounts of the depravity of the criminals involved. There's a dark view of human nature contained in the novel - one in which tidy notions that a crime has to have a motive are given short shrift.

But let's not get too Gallic in my praise of the book. It's still a cop novel, not an existentialist magnum opus. It's a few hours spent in the company of the Inspector, his wife and his mates down the station. I'll have some more of that - but lending me the books is probably still a bad idea.

Fear.

I was annoyed a few days ago to hear on the radio that yet another "theory" about the authorship of William Shakespeare's plays had raised its ugly head. Those things are like weeds, or bad pennies, or a particularly sticky kind of dog excrement that you can't quite completely scrape off your shoe. I did some casual googling but couldn't find anything relevant because I hadn't remembered the names of the authors, but Brian Weatherson at Crooked Timber was more dilligent. Actually, his post is far more cautious than I would have been; the comments, however, more than make up for it:
#1 from Jason Bridges:

It is perhaps worth mentioning that there is a long history of books purporting to establish that someone other than Shakespeare wrote his plays; that many of these books (like James and Rubinstein's) get favorable press, have approving prefaces written by well-known Shakespearean actors or directors, and marshal circumstantial evidence in a seemingly compelling way; that all of these books (so far) have proven to ignore evidence that decisively contradicts their theses, and that most Shakespeare scholars regard this genre in the way most evolutionary biologists regard intelligent design.

#9 from Brian:

Tracing back Steve's links, I see that Prof Rubinstein harbours some familiar doubts about evolution. Given that the Prof is disposed to recycle nonsense from outside his area of expertise, one suspects his scholarly objectivity.

And before anyone gets going about bad ad hominem arguments, I should note that in all of these cases there are many many things one could say on all sides of a given question, and non-experts have to defer to some extent to experts in picking out what is most salient. That means having some confidence that the person putting forward the view is acting in good faith. And I'm not particularly disposed to offer such charity to people who recycle the creationist playbook. So I now suspect there's some fairly obvious reason why the Neville theory can't be true, and that the authors of this book are rather declining to tell us what it might be. Given all the publicity there may well be an expert appearing in the press sooner or later to tell us what it is.

I followed that link in Brian's comment, and yes, it's that Rubinstein. The "Professor" who made a laughing stock of himself by recycling all the Creationist talking points while claiming to have an enquiring mind? Here's The Panda's Thumb's fisking of that bit o'rubbish.

I think Brian's second comment gets it right; given what we know about one of the authors, to wit that he's shown himself to be a bit of an idiot when writing in one field outside his area of expertise, there's no reason to consider him on the merits when he's writing in another field (literary scholarship) that is also outside his area of expertise.
However, there's a definite injustice in that this "professor" will undoubtedly make a good deal of money by co-writing a (probably) mendacious and (definitely) ill-thought-out piece of crap that annoys sensible people and actively subtracts from the sum total of human knowledge. At least The Shakespeare Conspiracy still spun a good yarn. This one is just another tiresome variant of "some weak-chinned aristocrat must have written Shakespeare's work because no commoner could be smart enough".

Read all the comments, Pharyngula: A historian disgraces himself, Stromata Blog: A New Shakespeare? and The Times Literary Supplement: Why Not Shakespeare? (scroll). And be glad Einar didn't get to blog about this one first; he's given to hyperbole about human stupidity when faced with IDiocy like that perpetrated by the likes of Rubinstein.

Been having a bit of a week of nostalgia, rereading C.S.Lewis (who I haven't read since i was, oh, 15 or so. I was pleasantly surprised to find him an even better author than I remembered. Quick read, though - I've read two of his books already today and it's only 11am.

However, the reason I bring up The Horse and His Boy in particular is that it has huge numbers of what are now fantasy clichés: a runaway bride, fleeing an arranged marriage; a peasant who's really the heir to a kingdom; talking animal companions - and all of them work, and realising why they work, unlike the majority of books with those tropes made me realise why I hate them normally.

(Spoilers follow, I fear.)

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Now this is more like it! Howl's Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones was so compelling that I couldn't put it down, even when it was getting a bit late and I needed sleep. As a result, my reading of it towards the end became a bit sloppy and I had to stop myself a few times to go back a few pages to see what I missed. No matter: this is one novel I'll be sure to pick up again some time. Despite being written for a Grade 6 reading level, it's a layered story that rewards repeated reading.
Diana Wynne Jones is the writer of The Tough Guide to Fantasyland, a catalogue of fantasy clichés, so it's no surprise that this novel starts out in a very familiar fantasy setting (a pre-modern, monarchical society with wizards and witches actually existing) and with a story cliché to turn on its head: the heroine, Sophie Hatter, is the oldest of three sisters, and therefore expects she will never amount to anything. Wynne Jones has been very succesful in fleshing out this idea with psychologically credible elder-sibling behaviours: Sophie accepts her lot in life, shows responsibility towards the younger sisters, trusts authority, believes what she is told and makes safe, respectable choices - or rather, lets her (on the whole benign) stepmother make those choices for her. Meanwhile, her sisters show talent, attractive personalities as well as physical beauty, and an ability to think outside the box. (Continues with minor spoilers)

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Grunts by Mary Gentle is one of those books I've been meaning to read for a long time, but putting off. I wanted to read it because the cover and blurb suggested something very similar to Terry Pratchett's Guards novels: a humorous story about the people whose job in other, conventional, fantasy novels would be to get butchered by the truckload. I put it off for fear that it would be nothing more than that: a Pratchettesque concept only not as good. Fortunately, it keeps getting reprinted. Grunts, as it turns out, is a much better novel than I had any right to expect; nevertheless, it didn't quite click for me.

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