Pornokitsch

In 1921 - this has a point, bear with me - the compilers of What Editors Want interviewed a lot of the prominent editors (both magazine and publishing house) of the day. They all responded with pages of stuff: formatting advice, genre preference, commercial details, you name it. Very specific.

The best response was a single line from Atlantic's Ellery Sedgewick: "My selection is made according to the whim of one individual."

I. MR. AUGUSTUS RICHARDS'S IDEAL

Mr. Augustus Richards was thirty years of age and unmarried. He could afford to marry, and he had admired many women, but none of them came up to his ideals. Miss Fotheringay, for instance, represented his notions as to what a woman should be physically, but intellectually he found her woefully below his required standard. She was tall and stately—Junoesque some people called her—but in her conversation she was decidedly flippant. She was interested in all the small things of life, but for the great ones she had no inclination. She preferred a dance with a callow youth to a chat with a man of learning. She worshipped artificial in-door life, but had no sympathy with nature. The country she abominated, and her ideas of rest consisted solely in a change of locality, which was why she went to Newport every summer, there to indulge in further routs and dances when she wearied of the routs and dances of New York.

Thoughts Before Watching

So again, "The Tingler" is not a radio drama and again, I am excited as FUCK to watch this. Maybe it’s the title? And the fact that it’s in black and white? And the possibility that this could be anything, like ANYTHING and here we are, toes curled on the edge of this thing that could literally be ANYTHING. It could be the best thing in the world. Illustrious acquaintance says it could be a piece of poo.

This research is from April 2016. The folks at The Pudding analysed thousands of screenplays and did a word count of male and female dialogue.

Unsurprisingly: Hollywood skews heavily in favour of dudes talking.

Pornokitsch will be participating the Self-Published Fantasy Blog-Off again this year, the third year of the competition.

You can learn more about SPFBO and its storied (if brief) history here. 

[The MASTER INDEX for Phase I - Mark Lawrence's blog]

[11/May: Intro post (this one!)]

[16/May: All our books are in hand, and reading has begun.]

[30/May: Finished the initial reading, and will be posting first round reviews from July. Killing the time by giving unwanted writing advice.]

[3/June: This is fun. My  favourite covers for the cover competition. FWIW, I read everything before I saw any covers. Any correlation - or lack there of - with my finalist pick(s) to be discussed.]

[3/July: The first 26 reviews.]

[7/July: ...make that 27 reviews. There was one (belatedly-spotted) invalid entry, so I read and reviewed one of the reservists to make up for it. Added to the link above.]

[13/July: A quick overview of the criteria I'll be using for the next four books.]

[25 - 28/ July: The final four reviews - Under Witch Moon, Irons in the Fire, Dead Letter, and The War of Undoing - including the grand reveal of my Official Finalist™.]

I recently saw a trailer for the upcoming film, Kingsman: The Golden Circle, a sequel to Kingsman: The Secret Service, a 2014 film based on a comic by Mark Millar and frequent collaborator, Bryan Hitch. Directed by Matthew Vaughn, Kingsman recaptured the over-the-top violence of their earlier collaboration Kick-Ass but was playing in the sandbox of a Bond-style spy-action-thriller.

In fact, the film was essentially a Bond spoof and, while it sought to make a point about class prejudice (although what that was I’m not exactly sure), their approach to women was much more in the vein of having their cake and eating it too. The female characters in Kingsman: The Secret Service are almost entirely sidelined, silent or uncomfortably sexualized. While womanizing has been a part of the Bond-style spy movie since its inception, is it a necessary part?

Well, if you want a spy thriller every bit as Bond as Bond (or Kingsman) but without the uncomfortable sexism, I’d highly recommend Ed Brubaker and Steve Epting’s Velvet (colours by Elizabeth Breitweiser, letters by Chris Eliopoulos).

Discussion around separating 'art' from 'artist' is something that springs quite a bit - especially in the SF/F community. I have a lot of theories on why that's so:

• we've got an academic fan tradition, and like to overanalyse context;
• we're a tight-knit community and live in one another's pockets;
• social media makes it so dirty laundry is everyone; 
• our particular blend of escapism often stems from creative people outside of traditional social norms;
• we sure have an awful lot of assholes writing in our genres

Take your pick. But whatever the underlying context, the ultimate question is still the same for each reader: if you don't like the author - personally or politically - do you still read them? Can you separate the author from the work? Should you? Discuss, ad infinitum.

I'm interested in how people answer this question quantitatively. Are readers more likely to separate art and artist than everyone else? And what about genre readers? Are we more or less likely to read books by people we disagree with?

1. Batman Returns

2. Batman

3. The Batman Legos movie, probably 

4. Christopher Reeves' Superman films (all of them, squodged into one big glutinous mass)

5. The Dark Knight

Warning: This month’s post spoils the shit out of 2005’s Serenity, the feature film culmination of Joss Whedon’s gone-too-soon TV space western, Firefly. So if you haven’t seen it, (a) what is the matter with you and (b) stop reading immediately.

It was Dolores Umbridge that got me thinking about the Operative. I know – because they have so much in common, right? One is a cowardly shrew of a witch with no discernible fighting ability, while the other is a mild-mannered, stone-cold killing machine. And yet they do have a lot in common, if you scratch just beneath the surface. They’re both government employees acting on behalf of something bigger and largely invisible. And they both belong to that rarest – and arguably most dangerous – species of villain, the True Believer.