Category: Link Page 13 of 54

Genre-Bending… Until The Terminology Shatters?

I delighted, way back in 2007, at the suggestion that the perceived distinction between literary fiction and genre fiction might be on the wane.

I think things are still on the move in this regard – more swiftly in TV than books, perhaps, but maybe that’s because the blow has been softened by the wildly successful Doctor Who revival often being referred to as a ‘genre show’ as opposed to ‘a science fiction show’. Anyway, whilst the progress in the realm of books may be slower, it seems that there is still progress, as argued in a very interesting piece in the Wall Street Journal by Lev Grossman which you can read here.

And yes, I’m well aware that in the above, I’m equating (or conflating) ‘the erosion of the barriers between literary and genre fiction’ and ‘progress’, and seeing them as one and the same. This is because I think the divide is an artificial one, rather arbitrarily telling you which subjects are intellectually nourishing and which ones are bad for your brain, and hence I see the removal of this perceived distinction as a step forward.

I Swear On The Cover Of The 1980s Reissue Of The Bible, I’m Not Making This First Bit Up

Back in the olden days, when I worked for Sherratt & Hughes (a bookshop chain long since gobbled up by Waterstones), we received a delivery of the latest edition of The Bible.

And when I say “latest edition”, I don’t mean it had a new foreword by the author and previously unseen material, but rather it was a trendy modern repackaging, with silvery lettering and skyscrapers on it like the opening of Dynasty (actually, that’s appropriate when you think about all the begetting in the first book). Strangely enough, I can’t seem to find a picture of it online, but you’ll take my word for it, won’t you? Thanks.

The reason I was thinking about this is because Wuthering Heights has recently been reissued in a form that’s deliberately meant to lure in fans of the Twilight books and films, as you can see:

Obviously, I’m not the intended audience for this re-issue, but I don’t really have any great objection to this packaging (mind you, I do think it’s a bit blatant to use the tagline from Coppola’s film version of Dracula, but I suppose it’s only old farts like me who are expected to remember this, not fans of Robert Pattinson). I’m not entirely convinced that readers of Twilight will necessarily enjoy Bronte’s book that much, but it might work for some people, and I suspect the hope is that they’ll have bought it by then and that’s another sale.

But in a way, lasting works or characters are often re-packaged and re-purposed in line with the prevailing mood of the times; take a look at the way that, say, books by Ian Fleming or Charles Dickens have changed over the years (often in line with some related TV or film adaptation). Even Shakespeare’s plays get a frequent re-packaging, and as alluded to above, some vastly older volumes have had some profoundly groovy and hip covers. And – as is the case with Wuthering Heights – there are usually other, less zeitgeisty, editions available.

I’d guess that a lot of the fans of Twilight are fans of stuff like Harry Potter who have grown up (as opposed, of course, to grown-up fans of Harry Potter) and are now looking for something in a similar vein (…) though perhaps with a bit more repressed passion. That’s my suspicion for the popularity of the Twilight stuff, anyway – I’m not lured in even out of is-it-good-or-bad curiosity, as I’m not particularly interested in vampires per se (for example, as much as I enjoyed Buffy, the presence of the v-word in the title was actually rather misleading, given all the other Monsters Of The Week).

And in fact, given the current mood of a large amount of the audience, I’m not in the least surprised to see that Oscar Wilde’s only novel, in its latest screen incarnation, is being advertised thus:

Crafty. And given his own tendency for not-always-entirely-accurate self-promotion, I rather suspect Mr Wilde would have approved.

A Day Late And $4,000,000,000 Short

Possibly because I was busy enjoying the day off work and staying away from online matters, I didn’t find out until this morning that Marvel Comics has been bought by Disney for $4bn, which is pretty surprising.

As Marvel has had the lion’s share of success with comics-to-film adaptations in recent years, I can see why Disney might want a bit of that, and also why they’d want to have some of Marvel’s most recognisable characters – Spider-Man, Hulk and Iron Man, for example – in their portfolio.

There are quite of lot of concerns and questions online about the deal, though I’m most inclined to wonder if Disney’s brand and commercial clout might mean a return to comics being readily available on news-stands and in supermarkets in the US; I think the fact that this generally isn’t the case has been one of the factors in the sales decline comics have seen in the past couple of decades – I discovered comics in my local newsagent (both UK comics and imported US titles), but I have no idea where the next generation of comic readers is meant to come from. So I’d be interested to see if there’s a return to comics being stocked in Wal-Marts and the like.

Oh, and given Disney’s family-friendly orientation, I’d be interested to see what effect their purchase of Marvel might have on the possibility of reprinting the more adult sequences in Marvelman stories from the past. But it may not come to pass…

Speaking of comics, DC Comics have recently offered freebie rings (as pictured) to people when they buy copies of certain comics, and they’ve been very popular. And by ‘very’ I mean weirdly popular, with a lot of online posting of an unhealthily excitable nature. Granted, they’re an amusing little item – and they tie in nicely to the Blackest Night storyline in which the rings appear – but surely they’re not worth that much giddiness. Anyone out there remember Pogs? Chromium covers? Fleeting fads in comic promotion, I think, and a mean-spirited part of me wonders if some people are getting a bit giddy about these rings because they’re the only rings they’re ever likely to give or receive in their lifetime… but that part of me is often silenced by the recollection of how geeky I’ve been about comics and many other things.

Many, many other things.

Per Internet Ad Astra

As this picture suggests, outer space is watching us, and as Nietzsche didn’t quite say, if the abyss gazes into us, shouldn’t we also gaze into it ? I think so.

Anyway, in the spirit of checking our Dobsonians have their secondary mirrors aligned correctly (and other matters astronomical), I’d like to point you towards this page on NASA’s website, where you can arrange to have your name – or someone else’s name – put onto a microchip which will be put onto the Mars Science Laboratory rover which will be heading to Mars in 2011.

Granted, thousands of other names will be on there too, but I think it’s an amusing thing anyway, and if you know a fan of matters celestial, they might like to be included. When you sign up, you can print off a free certificate, which could be a fun present for someone.

Until next time, keep watching the skies…

And I Resent Those Unskippable ‘Don’t Pirate Films’ Warning On DVDs I Buy, It Feels Like Paying To Be Told To Do Something I’m Already Doing

I should imagine that, by now, you’ve heard Stephen Fry’s podcast on the subject of piracy, copyright, DRM and the like. If not, it’s worth a listen, as it makes some good points and raises some interesting issues which are worthy of discussion.

I point you towards it, not because I’m going to discuss any of the issues within it, but rather because I was thinking that there’s one area of copyright infringement and piracy which rather tends to be overlooked in these discussions, and probably because it has next to no commercial impact; that is, items which are not commercially available. I’m mainly thinking here of things such as radio and TV shows, but it also applies to albums and films to a slightly smaller degree. I can’t claim to have the most wild and esoteric tastes, but I find that certain things I’d cheerfully pay to own are no longer available, due to never being released on CD or DVD or whatever. Examples would be Victor Lewis-Smith’s Radio 1 shows or the first self-titled album by Animal Logic (for some reason, Animal Logic II is available as a download, though its predecessor isn’t).

So, if I want to own these things, and be able to play them whenever I want, the only real route is to see if I can find them online, and then download them there – which invariably means getting them for free and the original creators getting no money. Which, in the case of items such as the above, I’d actually be happy to pay – and as commercial releases are often of higher quality and contain extras which are missing from copies thrown onto the ‘net, I’d certainly welcome the chance to do that (not to mention the conscience aspect of things).

Now, I’m painfully aware that the vast majority of music and film which you can download from t’web is commercially available – new films and CDs are often there to download within hours of release (if not before) – but I have to say that I feel slightly less bad about downloading material which isn’t available in a commercial form; yes, I know it’s copyright infringement in the most literal sense, but much of the argument about this topic seems to focus on the fact that doing so is taking money away from the appropriate parties, which in the case of non-commercial downloads of non-commercially available material, doesn’t apply. To give an example, before there was a full release of On The Hour, a BBC radio series which was both influential and spectacularly funny, many comedy websites and discussion boards would provide links to places where you could download the series. Now that it’s available to buy through the usual routes in its full form, those sites have removed those links, which seems only right and proper.

So, I think this is a bit of an overlooked area, and as one who’s always keen to replace cassettes and VHS tapes wherever possible (let’s face it, mp3s and DVDs just take up less space), I may simply be trying to justify questionable behaviour on my part as a means of enabling my obsessive-compulsive collecting tendencies to be satisfied. But I like to think there’s something worthy of discussion here.

Incidentally, thinking about the non-availability of items which are owned or produced by the BBC led me to wonder if there isn’t a commercial opportunity for a hybrid of iTunes and the BBC iPlayer whereby one can pay a sliding scale fee to access items which have been broadcast but are no longer on iPlayer; for example, 50p to download an mp3 of a radio show which is over a month old (and which isn’t going to be released commercially), £1 for a TV show or documentary, with the prices increasing depending on DRM issues and whether you can download them to keep or just to stream or whatever, and upwards to the point where downloading the stuff just becomes less attractive than buying the DVD.

I appreciate that the BBC has to balance its public service and commercial thinking, but given that they sell millions of DVDs each year, I would have thought there was some way to ensure that people could get to listen to the Afternoon Play they thought sounded interesting, or see the episode of Mastermind in which someone they knew was a contestant, even if they took place outside the ‘iPlayer timespan’, for a fee which is small enough to be appealing to a punter but useful enough to justify the service.

Just a thought…

I Suspect Everyone Already Knows About This…

… but I’ve recently been having a look at Making Of, and finding it both interesting and informative.

Granted, I’ve mainly been looking at the stuff about screenwriters, but there seems to be a lot of other stuff from people who know all sorts of useful stuff about the making of films.

Have a look, why don’t you?

Feel Free To Steal The Contents Of This Post To Share With Your Friends

Journalism Examination, Paper One

Compare the following items, and then write about the concept of plagiarism, using your own words as little as possible (50 marks):

5 August 2009 – Cracked.com’s article ’15 more images you won’t believe aren’t photoshopped’

and

21 August 2009 – The Sun’s article ‘No computer tricks, just amazing photos’

Bonus Question: Is it clever to steal stuff that’s been viewed over a million times?

Now I Think About It, Plastic’s Not Actually That Malleable, So Perhaps ‘Rubber Man’ Would Have Been More Appropriate A Name?

Pictured, the comic character Plastic Man, who you may recognise from the cartoons which used to be shown on TV.

However, despite the fact that the glasses look kind of similar, am I alone in thinking that ‘Plastic Man’ may not have been the original name for this fancy dress costume?

The hair doesn’t match at all, and the overall look and pose makes me think it may actually have been intended to be someone else who recently died, and who was alleged to have had a fair amount of involvement with plastic in a more medical sense…

My First Attempt At Uploading Home-Made (Well, Abroad-Made, But You Know What I Mean) Video To The Blog….

… so please be gentle with me if it doesn’t work.

Presented for your delectation, though, some footage of the 22 July 2009 total eclipse of the sun, which Mrs MyWife and I saw on honeymoon last month. The footage was shot in Varanasi in India, on the banks of the River Ganges, and runs for just over a minute, with totality occuring about half-way through.

If you decide to watch it, you may well want to turn the volume down a bit, as the sounds of the crowd and the like are pretty loud. And also because this stupid-sounding chap keeps on talking during it, and making asinine remarks. Honestly, some people have no sense of occasion.

I shot this, on a small hand-held digital camera, so I apologise for the shakiness and slightly dodgy picture quality, and for the way it looks a bit grainy – probably avoidable if you’re some kind of expert in editing and formatting, but I’m still finding my way with this techie malarkey, so please indulge me.

Anyway, hope it’s of interest, and that the reaction of the crowd gives you a flavour of the atmosphere and general sense of excitement at seeing what is, I think it’s fair to say, something of a once-in-a-lifetime event.

If this embedding doesn’t work, I’ve also uploaded the video here by way of a backup, though you’ll need Windows Media Player to view it.

Beyond The Fringe

Whilst a lot of coverage of events in Scotland at this time of year focuses on the Edinburgh Fringe, it’s good to see that Auntie Beeb hasn’t forgotten that there are other places in Scotland.

By which I mean: the BBC Writersroom are holding a couple of their roadshow events in Scotland in September.

On Tuesday 1 September, they’re at the probably-not-named-after-the-film Tron Theatre in Glasgow, on Thursday 17 September they’ll be at the probably-not-named-after-the-computer Spectrum Theatre in Inverness, followed by the not-named-after-anything-I-can-think-of-to-allude-to Caird Hall in Dundee on Wednesday 14 October.

Oh, hang on, I’ve just realised that they’re scooting down to the Norwich Playhouse on Wednesday 6 October, which rather throws off the Scottish run of events, doesn’t it? Anyway, 75% Scottish is a good enough proportion to justify the overarching theme of this post, I think.

As is usual with these roadshows, folks from the Writersroom will be talking about what they look for in scripts and how they assess them, and you can save on postage costs by handing your script in to them in person, too.

Entry’s free, but you do need to get your name on the list so they’ll unclip the velvet rope and let you in, and you can find out how to do this (and all the other salient details) here.

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