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Happy New Year! There’s much to anticipate in the Wizarding World for 2016, from a new theme park at Universal Studios Hollywood to J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and Cursed Child and Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. To help prepare for all of the biggest Harry Potter events, here is a look ahead to what is set for 2016.
Now-January 31: Hogwarts in the Snow
Warner Bros. Studio Tour London presents the sets of the Harry Potter films in all of their winter splendor. Read more.
January 28-30: A Celebration of Harry Potter
Universal Orlando Resort hosts the annual event with film talent appearances, demonstrations, and Expo. Read more.
February 5: Harry Potter Book Night
Bloomsbury sponsored the first book night in the UK in 2015, but for 2016, it is going international. Read more.
April 7: Opening of Wizarding World of Harry Potter, Universal Studios Hollywood
Hogwarts Castle and the village of Hogsmeade come to life in the California park expansion. Read more.
April 16-17: U.S. Quidditch World Cup 9
US Quidditch (USQ) hosts the tournament in Rock Hill, South Carolina. More than 75 teams have qualified to play.
April 16-17: European Quidditch Cup
Gallipoli, Italy welcomes the club championship for European teams and schools.
June 7: Preview shows of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child
J.K. Rowling’s new play in two parts opens for preview audiences.
July 30: Opening of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child
Opening performance of the play at the Palace Theatre in London’s West End.
July 23-24: IQA World Cup
The International Quidditch Association hosts its World Cup in Frankfurt, Germany.
October 19-23: LeakyCon 2016
The Leaky Cauldron affiliated LeakyCon is back. This year it will be at the Mariott Burbank near Los Angeles, California. Read more.
November 18: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them
J.K. Rowling’s new film starring Eddie Redmayne as Newt Scamander is released in theaters. Read more.
Surely the year will also bring new exhibits from Warner Bros. Studio Tour London, exclusive material from Pottermore, and more informative tweets from J.K. Rowling, so keep visiting The Leaky Cauldron for all of the latest Harry Potter news in 2016!
It’s no surprise to anyone that the highly educated Emma Watson loves a good book. She has touted several favorites in interviews and on social media pages in the last few years.
This month, Harper’s Bazaar published a list of Emma Watson’s recommendations. It was originally compiled by Hello Giggles, with Harper’s Bazaar adding a few more titles from other sources.
The list is mostly novels but also includes singer-songwriter Patti Smith’s memoir, Just Kids. Two authors are listed for multiple books, Cheryl Strayed and Stephenie Meyer. Watson read three of Strayed’s books in three weeks, and she admitted that Meyer’s Twilight series was a guilty pleasure.
Other titles on the list include John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars, which Watson stayed up until the wee hours of the morning reading, and A Thousand Splendid Suns, by Khaled Hosseini, which is also one of Malala Yousafzai’s favorite books.
Erika Johansen’s The Queen of the Tearling made the Emma Watson book list. This novel’s film rights are now owned by Warner Bros., and Watson has been slated to both produce and star in the production.
Harper’s Bazaar includes Emma Watson’s mention of Roald Dahl’s The BFG in a Time magazine interview, but, surprisingly, Le Petit Prince, by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, is not listed. Watson tells Time it is her favorite book, because, like The BFG, it takes her back to her childhood. “I like books that aren’t just lovely but that have memories in themselves. Just like playing a song, picking up a book again that has memories can take you back to another place or another time.”
Who understands this better than a Harry Potter fan?
For all 16 titles on the Emma Watson list from Harper’s Bazaar, see here.
In light of recent events, Leaky would like to share a message in solidarity with The Harry Potter Alliance‘s beautiful Facebook post, and in honour of all victims of violence and injustice in Paris, and worldwide. We remind those who are losing faith to stay strong and spread love and peace in these difficult times.
From Paris to Baghdad, from Brazil to Beruit – close to home and miles overseas – the world is mourning for the violence we are gradually realising is a growing part of everyday life for some, and part of horrendously sudden and unexpected massacres in others.
Now is not the time to blame the innocent or ignore the suffering. Let’s use this devastating event, and those that have come before it in all manner of places and due to all manner of causes to come together and do what we do best: be there for the people who need support.
We send our love, condolences and well-wishes to those in Paris, and to the friends and families of those deceased or suffering, and also those in equally horrific situations. As The Harry Potter Alliance said:
‘Here is how we move forward: keep loving; keep fighting; celebrate story; laugh, dance, sing – with your friends, with strangers, with every single person who keeps showing up when the world tells them not to; resist hatred; resist cynicism; know none of this is foolish; know that it is necessary; protect and defend those who – not for the first time – will be victims of hatred falsely carried out in the name of justice; give love and light to those around you and those around the world; be excellent to each other; be good.
Always, always, always: the weapon we have is love.‘
And, from Albus Dumbledore himself:
It was time I had a website under my own name, and not just this here Mumpsimus. After all, I am more than a mumpsimus! Or so I tell myself.
Thus:
matthewcheney.net!
Because my book of short stories is coming out in January, the focus of the site is my fiction more than anything else. At the moment, there's nothing there that isn't also here, aside from some pictures. But I'm sure I'll figure out something unique to host there in the coming weeks, months, years...
Read the rest of this post
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| sitting in my office, contemplating what to write... |
I've been wanting to try out
TinyLetter for a little while now, having subscribed to a few newsletters that use it, and so I took some time to create
a newsletter aimed at sending out information, musings, etc. about my upcoming collection, Blood: Stories, which Black Lawrence Press will release in January.
Why create such a thing when I've already got this here blog? Because I think of this blog as a more general thing, not really a newsletter. I will put all important information about
Blood here (as well as on
Twitter, and I'll make a Facebook author page one of these days), but the newsletter will have more in-depth material, such as details of the publishing process, background on the stories, etc. There will be some exclusive content and probably even some give-aways, etc. I probably should have titled it Etc., in fact... And it's not all limited to
Blood — if you take a look at
the first letter, you'll see some of the range I'm aiming for. That letter is public, and some of the future ones will be, too, but for the most part I expect to keep the letters private for subscribers only. (I've always wanted to be part of a cabal, and now I've started my own!)
One of the things I note in that first letter is that Mike Allen is
running a Kickstarter to raise funds for his fifth
Clockwork Phoenix anthology, and
all backers can now read a 2006 story of mine that Mike first published, "In Exile". This is, as far as I remember, the only story I've ever published set in the typical fantasy world of elves and wizards and all that. (To learn why, read the newsletter!) Mike made an editorial suggestion for the manuscript that completely fixed a major problem with the story, so I've always been tremendously grateful to him, and I'm thrilled that it's now available to backers of this very worthy Kickstarter.
One of my librarians just sent me this link about an article titled: Neil Gaiman: Why our future depends on libraries, reading and daydreaming
- Neil Gaiman at Chapters reading (Photo credit: phoenixdreaming)
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/oct/15/neil-gaiman-future-libraries-reading-daydreaming
Power stuff. Take a minute to read this message from a noted author about the value of libraries.
The circulation desk as we know it is changing. In my district as we renovate our elementary libraries I have reduced the height of the circulation desk countertop to better accommodate our younger students and self-check. I constantly look at self-check kiosks for both elementary and secondary levels but have yet to purchase a free-standing one.
If you follow this blog you know we just opened our first STEAM Academy with a library commons of less square footage than a traditional campus library. I had a smaller footprint circulation desk custom-made and today it arrived. Ah, it is the right size, shape, and texture for that campus. The students will mostly self-check with a laptop we leave on top along with a scanner. We aren’t taking up valuable landscape with a huge circulation desk and it accomplishes its intent…get books in the hands of our students. What do you think?
Rachel’s Challenge was in the DFW metroplex over this past weekend and I was able to participate in one of the sessions. Rachel’s Challenge came out of the death of Rachel Scott in the 1999 Columbine school shooting. This program is committed to preparing students and adults alike how to stop bullying, but it is also about creating a positive school climate. Certainly our libraries can be a major player in fostering a place where students looking out for others is the norm.
The session I attended was presented by Darrell Scott, Rachel’s father. He spoke of a new component coming to Rachel’s Challenge called Awaken the Learner: Finding the Source of Effective Education This module pinpoints the need for teachers to build relational trust with their students. He admits he is not an educator but wants a way to equip educators with the tools needed to bring the message of kindness and compassion to the classroom.
Scott does bring up an educational philosophy that is still used in some schools today, but I haven’t heard about it since my education classes of long ago. The 3H’s…that is the Head, Heart and Hands method… is used to support emotional intelligence as a way to improve academics. I’ll have to research that topic, but isn’t that the point? Grow and learn, learn and grow.
I also came away with two fantastic quotes:
“It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge.”
Albert Einstein
“I’m not a teacher, but an awakener.”
Robert Frost
Now is your chance to partner with a vendor who is stepping up to help libraries in Moore, OK. Funds4Books.com is an easy way to donate and help those affected by a tornado or other natural disaster.
My district has been all over Participatory Learning for several years now and when I first saw Makerspaces I thought, oh, yes, perfect. Our libraries already have a rudimentary beginning for this and what’s not to like about a DIY space?
“Makerspaces come in all shapes and sizes, but they all serve as a gathering point for tools, projects, mentors and expertise. A collection of tools does not define a Makerspace. Rather, we define it by what it enables: making.” From Makerspace Playbook
Makerspace as in create, build, design bring to life an idea. Not digital 21st or web 3.0 tools, but real tools like my dad had in his workroom.
Not sure what to do or how to start? Download the Makerspace Playbook and get started!
With our new STEAM Academy, makerspace-like areas will be the norm, but why can’t an area in our libraries become a niche space for collaborative hands-on projects? We need places where the 8 or 18-year-old student can teach not only classmates but also the teacher.
This is a pivotal time for our libraries to stand up and reshape the old notions of what can or cannot be done while in the library. I say, bring on the tools…my dad would be proud!
By: Monday's Balcony,
on 4/29/2013
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Monday's Balcony
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I just returned from a couple of days at the Texas Library Conference in Ft. Worth where I had the opportunity to meet new people, renew long distance friendships and learned so many best practices covering a myriad of topics that I was sorry it was over. Even though our state had standardized testing that week, it was a very well attended conference and continued through Saturday to accommodate the many school librarians who could only make the latter part of the week. One tip I know I will repeat is how to make learning about Boolean searching actually fun. Seriously! We were up and moving as we learned the difference between “or” and “more” and how the different words returned different search results. Clever and useful for any level.
I was also a presenter for two sessions and want to let those of you looking for the handouts that they will be posted on the TLA web site soon.
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| part of Jacques Derrida's last library |
Various items...
I recently saw two of the more controversial movies of last year,
Lincoln and
Zero Dark Thirty. I don't feel compelled to say much about the former — it's fine for a Steven Spielberg movie, and wanting it to be more than a Steven Spielberg movie seems to me to be an error. Yes, I would have preferred, say,
Charles Burnett's Lincoln or
Alex Cox's Lincoln or
Cheryl Dunye's Lincoln or even
Guillermo del Toro's Lincoln, but what we got is Spielberg's
Lincoln, and so we should not be surprised that every moment of possible emotion is squeezed through John Williams's typically John Williams score, or that there are lots of faces making faces, or that it is a white savior movie, or that it exemplifies the tradition of quality in Hollywood cinema. What we should be surprised by is that it is not worse — it is easily, to my eyes, Spielberg's most interesting and least annoying historical film. That may have something to do with Tony Kushner's
script (PDF) ... but then, Kushner wrote the execrable
Munich, so who knows. In any case, the performances are generally compelling, and it's nice to see the great
Thaddeus Stevens get some acknowledgement after more than a century of general abuse; Tommy Lee Jones's performance as Stevens is a hoot, and yet not a caricature. On the film's fetishization of compromise and its hatred of radicalism, I'm with
Aaron Bady ("It is, in short, a barely veiled argument that radicals should get in line, be patient, be realistic"), although I also wonder what we would make of the film had it been released ten years ago in exactly the same form. An impossible question, of course, but perhaps an interesting thought experiment, given how Lincoln wrestles with the idea of "war powers".
War Powers could be an alternate title for
Zero Dark Thirty. I have nothing to say right now except that I found the film fascinating and deeply unsettling, but to be able to show why I think it is a devastating and subversive movie I have to wait till I can dig into its details on DVD, because so much of its meaning and effect for me came from specific shots and cuts. Some excellent writing has already been done about it, though — here are the essays that have most fit with my experience of the film:
- "Zero Dark Thirty: Perception, Reality, Perception Again, and 'The Art Defense'" by Glenn Kenny, which masterfully demonstrates why Glenn Greenwald's attack on the film as pro-torture is inaccurate and deceptive. Arguments about how all sorts of things are represented in the film can be legitimately made, I think, but Greenwald seriously distorts what is on screen to fit his thesis (which he had to do, because by the point where he actually saw the movie, he had too much of an emotional stake in the film being what he wanted it to be for him to ever say it was not what he wanted it to be).
- Manohla Dargis's review for The New York Times is a model of intelligent newspaper writing.
- "The Monitor Mentality, or A Means to an End Becomes an End in Itself: Kathryn Bigelow's Zero Dark Thirty" by Ignatiy Vishnevetsky is a fine beginning to understanding what is actually on screen and the implications.
- "A Brief Remark on Zero Dark Thirty" by Steven Shaviro is as insightful as we've come to expect from Shaviro. He's been writing about Kathryn Bigelow's work for many years, and his perspective is helpful. I anxiously look forward to his further writings on the film, because even with this "brief remark" he's delved more meaningfully into it than most other writers.
- Most recently, Nicholas Rombes has published "Zero Dark Thirty and the New History", which looks at the relationship between the film and concepts of history: " Zero Dark Thirty is about how some historical events remain so hot and dangerous that they cannot be treated directly; it would be like staring into the sun. Instead, such histories can only be approached in an administrative, almost bureaucratic fashion, and in such a way that suggests history remains, at the end of the day, a tangle of zero-sum stories, usually competing with each other for legitimacy."
I also recently saw
Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning and
Detention, two interesting films that make a mess of genre expectations.
Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning is as much a horror movie as an action movie, but a horror movie more akin to the works of David Lynch than the average splatter film. (I could have lived without
all the fight scenes being sped up, however.)
Detention is even better, a mad mishmash of teen comedy, absurd sci-fi, and slasher movie. For me, it was the second most consistently delightful film of last year, after
Moonrise Kingdom.
I don't have much to report for recent reading here, mostly because I've been reading books such as
Change and Continuity in the 1984 Elections, which is marvelous, but, well, nothing I'd recommend to get you through the long winter months. I've also just begun reading
Derrida: A Biography by Benoit Peeters (god bless interlibrary loan!), which is thrilling and revelatory so far (100 pages in). I had long believed Derrida made a living well into his twenties as a construction worker, but it turns out this is just another example of one of the many mistaken beliefs I have clung to.
I very much enjoyed Adam Green's profile,
"A Pickpocket's Tale: The Spectacular Thefts of Apollo Robbins" at
The New Yorker recently.
Also, two poems by Suzanne Buffam:
"The New Experience" at The Poetry Foundation and
"Ruined Interior" at
Boston Review.
Finally, a new term has started at the university, so I'm back to teaching. Here are the syllabi for my classes, if you're curious:
Murder, Madness, Mayhem (English Department course that I'm making into a course on dystopia and fascism this term) and
Outlaws, Delinquents, and Other "Deviants" in Film & Society (Communications & Media Studies course that I've making into ... well ... something).
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By: Matthew Cheney,
on 9/13/2012
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The Mumpsimus
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Crickets have taken over The Mumpsimus recently, mostly because I've been working on some projects and have started the new school year.
This will be a fragmentary post trying to capture a few things that seem to me worth capturing before too much more time passes and I enter senescence.
After a hiatus due to some technical reconfigurations at Boomtron, The Sandman Mediations have now resumed with a few thoughts on the first part of The Wake. I'll finish up The Wake in the coming weeks, then continue with Endless Nights, after which I plan to stop.
I made one last video essay before classes started up again, this one on Clint Eastwood's The Outlaw Josey Wales. I'm hoping to make another on Eastwood's Gran Torino soon, but not sure when I'll be able to steal the time.
I watched Eastwood's recent performance of the minor, little-known Samuel Beckett play "Old Man and Chair". Not his best work — the pacing seemed a bit off — but sometimes amusing. I find Eastwood's career fascinating, and I think he's underrated as an actor and, especially, as a director (indeed, I underrated him myself for a long time). But he doesn't really have a flair for comedy, even the absurdist/existential comedy of Beckett. Still, I look forward to his upcoming performance as Hamm in Endgame.
[This led me to write a rambling bit about politics. You probably don't want to read it, since the last thing the world needs is more political rambling. In case you're an addict of such things, though, I've put it at the end of this post as an extra feature.]
Since finishing the considerable amount of reading required of judges for the Shirley Jackson Award, I have hardly been able to read any fiction. This happened to me after finishing with the Best American Fantasy books — I didn't read much, if any, short fiction for a year after Best American Fantasy 3. I've read some short stories since finishing with the Jacksons, but I haven't read all of a single novel, including even Samuel Delany's Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders (though having gotten about 400 pages into it, I've read more of it than any other novel in the last three months). I keep trying with novels, but those reading circuits are still pretty fried.
I've read a lot of nonfiction, though. Most of it for a big project I'm working on about the relationship between 1980s action movies and the Reagan presidency. I was going to list some of the best of them here, but there are so many (I at least skimmed well over 100 books between May and the first week of September) that I can hardly figure out where to begin. I'm getting more organized and focused, so will be able to talk about some of the best of what I've found soon. I can say, this, though: the first chapter of Nixonland by Rick Perlstein is some of the best narrative nonfiction I've ever read. The rest of the book is good, but that first chapter blew me away. (Perlstein's Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus also seems good, but I just started it.)
I pretty much devoured Tom Bissell's new essay collection Magic Hours. I have loved Bissell's essay on Werner Herzog ever since it was published in Harper's in 2006, but had missed most of the other essays in the book, and they're a real pleasure, full of surprises and insights and off-kilter beauty.
This week I've been dipping into an advance copy of Object Lessons: The Paris Review Presents the Art of the Short Story, which offers a healthy selection of stories chosen by other writers, with those writers penning introductory essays. All of the essays are short, many of them only a few paragraphs, but there are some gems of insight: Daniel Alarcón on Joy Williams's "Dimmer", Lydia Davis on Jane Bowles's "Emmy Moore's Journal", Dave Eggers on James Salters's "Bangkok", Jeffrey Eugenides on Denis Johnson's "Car Crash While Hitchhiking", Jonathan Lethem on Thomas Glynn's "Except for the Sickness I'm Quite Healthy Now. You Can Believe That.", Ben Marcus on Donald Barthelme's "Seven Garlic Tales", David Means on Raymond Carver's "Why Don't You Dance", Mona Simpson on Norman Rush's "Lying Presences". And the others, where the essays are more basic or prefatory, are still usually very interesting choices — Norman Rush chooses Guy Davenport's "Dinner at the Bank of England", for instance, and Joy Williams chooses a hilarious send-up of literary life and, especially, awards, Dallas Wiebe's "Night Flight to Stockholm", a story and author I was previously unfamiliar with. It's an excellent and surprising collection, limited primarily by being a collection of stories from a single journal (though one with a 50-year archive), so a certain uniformity crops up, but it is much less uniform than it would have been with all of the stories being chosen by one person. It would be a useful book for a writing class; indeed, I wish it had been available for the writing class I'm currently teaching.
The book I've least enjoyed over the last few months is one I looked at for that writing class I'm currently teaching, Several Short Sentences About Writing by Verlyn Klinkenborg. Fundamentally, my problem with the book was that I disagree with Klinkenborg's valoration of short sentences. (I am a besotted and hopeless lover of long sentences.) But I also loathed the book's layout and bristled at its tone, which struck my mind's ears as that of a supercilious old fart. There are some good ideas and advice about writing in it, but they're scattered and not particularly original. I wrote a draft of a long post about it, but realized it was pointless, because I really only wanted to say one short sentence about the book: I hated it.
I considered saying something about Paul Kincaid's interesting evisceration of a recent round of best-of-the-year anthologies, but then realized I don't care. The audience for those books is getting what it wants. The audience for more adventurous, wide-ranging, and surprising best-of-the-year books is currently too small to make the many expenses of such anthologies attractive to a publisher. Kincaid and I have somewhat different views of things, different priorities and tastes — my sense of exhaustion is closer to John Barth's than his — I'm nonetheless generally sympathetic to the feelings he expresses about those books, even if I couldn't possibly care less about whether elements of the fantastic are "necessary" to a story. So it goes and so it goes.
On the less exhausted front, Jeff VanderMeer just announced a special pre-order sale on three upcoming e-books from Cheeky Frawg: Don’t Pay Bad for Bad & Other Stories by Amos Tutuola, Tainaron by Leena Krohn, and Jagannath by Karin Tidbeck. I wrote the afterword to the Tutuola, have reviewed Tainaron in the past, and am currently reading Jagannath. These are excellent books. I've been reading Jagannath very slowly, because each little story in it is a world. Most have impressed me deeply, and the first story is easily worth the price of the book alone. You can pre-order all three e-books for a total of $13 from Jeff at the first link in this paragraph.
That's it for now. Updates will likely be infrequent for the next few months, because deadlines loom for all sorts of things from here to December for me. Please play well with others.
DELETED SCENE: POLITICAL RAMBLE
I watched more of the Democratic National Performing Arts Spectacle than the Republican National Performing Arts Spectacle, mostly because the Republicans all seemed to be trying for some sort of deliberately awkward, postmodern Pat Buchanan-in-1992 imitation, and I'm with Molly Ivins on that sort of performance: it always sounds better in the original German. The Democrats were at least more pleasant to listen to. Bill Clinton was better than ever — it's exciting to watch someone as charismatic as he is, someone really at the top of his game, one of the best politicians alive. Okay, sure, he killed Ricky Ray Rector, he ushered in the sort of neoliberal welfare reform the Republicans had been trying to enact for years, he gave us Don't Ask/Don't Tell and the Defense of Marriage Act, he — well, why go on. We just love him.
Walter Kirn wrote a dryly funny short story for the New Republic about an unbelievably earnest and naive man who goes to the Democratic National Convention. It's not nearly as good as David Foster Wallace's "Girl with Curious Hair", but it clearly aspires to be of the same genre.
And yes, even though my ideology is vastly closer to Jill Stein (at least according to this quiz), I'll be voting for Obama. I live in a swing state. (I wish I lived in a punk state. Or at least a jazz state.) Back in 2000, I voted for Ralph Nader. I lived in a swing state then, too. So you're welcome: I gave you George W. Bush. Well, no, the Supreme Court gave you George W. Bush, but I did my part. Honestly, though, I wouldn't have voted if it weren't for Nader. Al Gore was a snorefest and Joe Lieberman was insufferable. I was young and hoped a third party of the left might sprout up if Nader got enough votes. Yeah, that was a stupid thought, but like many stupid thoughts I've had, I believed in it deeply.
I thought about those Nader-voting days again when I read Michael Hirsch & Jason Schulman's essay "Beyond November" in Jacobin. Their analysis of why a leftist 3rd party is pretty much impossible in the U.S. seemed mostly accurate to me, but their conclusion (vote for the impossible!) was less convincing. They argue that the AFL-CIO is being hyperbolic in saying the upcoming election offers a choice between two worldviews. True. But then they say: "The real subtext is 'Vote Obama: He’ll screw us less.'" As if that's a bad thing. I think it was Noam Chomsky who once advised something to the effect of: Vote for the lesser of two evils — you get less evil.
But you shouldn't expect to get no evil. So I'll vote for Obama, because I do like to hear nice things said about gay people and women people from the President, even if he's got an addiction to drone strikes and Goldman Sachs, and even if he's anything but a civil libertarian. The Supreme Court matters, too, because as generally boring and centrist as Sotomayor and Kagan are, I'll take them over Thomas, Alito, and Roberts in a heartbeat. Given how long the justices stay on the bench these days, a major legacy every president leaves is his Supreme Court picks. If Romney wins the Presidency, the Congress will probably get at least a few more Republicans, which means he could appoint his own version of Thomas, Alito, or Roberts, because there would be really no need to appoint a David Souter sort of independent thinker (especially given how hated Souter was by all of Romney's supporters and advisors). So, again: less evil.
My great hope, though, is that enough people will care about voting for Obama that they'll vote for local Democrats, particularly in my state, where we went from having a state government run by moderate and conservative Democrats (including a female-majority Senate) to having a Senate and House filled with sociopathic Tea Party conservatives. The last two years have been amusing to watch and painful to live — while we've gotten the fun spectacle of seeing Republicans try to pass a bullying bill aimed at their own leadership, we've also had the state's already tattered social safety net ripped apart, the public university system effectively privatized, and an attempted revocation of the marriage equality laws (a revocation the Republican gubernatorial candidate, social conservative Ovide Lamontagne, says he would happily sign). It's been a ghastly legislature, and the faster they are returned to the caves from whence they came, the better for the people of New Hampshire.
Be sure to catch THE SCORPIO RACES, the book that Seventeen.com called "A wonderful combination of Harry Potter and The Hunger Games that you won't ever want to end."
Written by bestselling author Maggie Stiefvater of SHIVER and FOREVER, THE SCORPIO RACES tells the magical adventure of the most dangerous race in the world where both love and life meet their greatest obstacles, and only the strong of heart can survive.
Entertainment Weekly raves: "In the impossibly thrilling...beautifully executed drama, Stiefvater has established herself as one of the finest YA novelists writing today."
And The New York Times Book Review declares: "Stiefvater, most recognized for her Shiver werewolf romances, not only steps out of the young adult fantasy box with The Scorpio Races but crushes it with pounding hooves... if The Scorpio Races sounds like nothing you’ve ever read, that’s because it is... [Stiefvater has] written a complex literary thriller that pumps new blood into a genre suffering from post-Twilight burnout."
Don't miss this must-read for Muggles everywhere! Make sure to watch the super cool trailer that Maggie created the art and music for by clicking here!
This is a sponsored post.
By: Matthew Cheney,
on 11/14/2011
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Going through notes for old pieces of writing, I discovered this collection of quotations I hoped to sprinkle through a piece of long fiction I was outlining ten years ago. The story itself never came to anything, but some shadowy traces of it remain in the collage...
If the New World fed dreams, what was the Old World reality that whetted the appetite for them? And how did that reality caress and grip the shaping of a new one?
—Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark
Why is it so inconceivable to our dramatists that some people do not know, or care, how they feel all the time? That some people act with a detachable motive, or from a myriad of contradictory ones? Why is life itself less interesting per se than explanations of life?
—Mac Wellman, “The Theater of Good Intentions”
There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness. And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces. And even if he for ever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still higher than other birds upon the plain, even though they soar.
—Herman Melville, Moby Dick
It is the private dominion over things that condemns millions of people to be mere nonentities, living corpses without originality or power of initiative, human machines of flesh and blood, who pile up mountains of wealth for others and pay for it with a gray, dull and wretched existence for themselves. I believe that there can be no real wealth, social wealth, so long as it rests on human lives — young lives, old lives and lives in the making.
—Emma Goldman, “What I Believe”
I have carried out, before my own eyes and against my intention, a part of the modern tragedy: I have made a lasting flaw in the face of the earth, for no lasting good.
—Wendell Berry, “Damage”
A great idea springs up in a man’s soul; it agitates his whole being, transports him from the ignorant present and makes him feel the future in a moment....Why should such a revelation be made to him...if not that he should carry it into practice?
—William Walker, president of Nicaragua, 1855-1857
If we confine the concept of weeds to species adapted to human disturbance, then man is by definition the first and primary weed under whose influence all other weeds have evolved.
—Jack R. Harlan, Crops and Man
Faith defies logic and propels us beyond hope because it is not attached to our desires. Faith is the centerpiece of a connected life. It allows us to live by the grace of invisible strands. It is a belief in a wisdom superior to our own. Faith becomes a teacher in the absence of fact.
—Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge
Of what consequence, though our planet explode, if there is no character involved in the explosion?
—Henry David Thoreau, “Life without Principle”
I actually had to develop a love of the disordered & puzzling, viewing reality as a vast riddle to be joyfully tackle
Now Playing - Nighthawks by Motion Pictures
Life -
Trash in the East is an interesting thing. Back home, every week, you'd take your bags of garbage to the curb, a couple of burly men would pull up in a truck and take them away. That was pretty much the extent of the experience. Eventually, the towns bought a pile of big green or blue plastic containers and instead of bags, you'd
Will Terry has been painting with acrylics for a long time. Behold his pallet.
I didn't intend to disappear from this blog for quite as long as I did, but I got busy with work on the manuscript of Best American Fantasy 3 (the contents of which we'll finally be able to announce next week!) and I've been teaching an online course for Plymouth State University, an interesting experience, since I've never taught classes entirely online before (nor am I all that sure it's a way I like teaching, but that's another story...)
I probably owe you an email.*
Readercon is coming up -- July 9-12. I'll be there Friday afternoon and most of Saturday. The great and glorious Liz Hand and Greer Gilman are guests of honor. The other guests ain't too shabby neither. Except for that Cheney guy. He's a putz.
Some things I've noticed out on the internets:
- Hal Duncan wrote a little post at his blog about ethics, reviewing, criticism, etc. A few people commented. Hal wrote another little post responding in particular to comments by Abigail Nussbaum and me. Then another related post on "The Absence of the Abject". And then two posts on "The Assumption of Authority" (one, two). They're wonderfully provocative and wide-ranging essays, but as the whole is now over 20,000 words long, I haven't been able to keep up with it. But I shall return to it over the course of the summer...
- Jeff VanderMeer has been working for what sounds to me like one of the coolest teen camps in the world, Shared Worlds, and as part of that asked a bunch of writers and other creative-type people, "What’s your pick for the top real-life fantasy or science fiction city?"
- I accompanied Eric Schaller and family to a magnificent concert by David Byrne a few weeks ago. Byrne's earnest dorkiness has been a balm to my soul since I was a kid. He's been on The Colbert Report a couple of times in support of his tour -- here, performing one of my favorite of his new songs, "Life is Long", and here performing "One Fine Day" (in which everybody seems a bit tired). The Colbert studio isn't quite Radio City Music Hall, but still...
- Tor.com has, in less than a year, become one of the best science fiction sites, and they've now launched a store that includes "special picks" from their great array of bloggers. (And, interestingly, though the site is allied with Tor Books, it's striven to be, as they say, "publisher agnostic", so it's not just about Tor's books.)
- Speaking of major SF sites, I enjoyed Charlie Jane Anders's post at io9 titled "4 Authors We Wish Would Return to Science Fiction" because it includes new comments from each of the four writers discussed: Mary Doria Russell, Nicola Griffith, Karen Joy Fowler, and Samuel R. Delany.
- I really loved Jeff Ford's post on the books he survived in primary and secondary school English classes.
- I seem to have written yet another Strange Horizons column.
Meanwhile, I've been reading a bunch of books I haven't written about. Some just for fun -- I went on a bit of an alternative history kick, reading
C.C. Finlay's The Patriot Witch
(available as an authorized PDF download
here) and L. Sprague de Camp's
Lest Darkness Fall.
The Patriot Witch attracted me because I've read some of Charlie Finlay's short stories and enjoyed them, and the book is set during the American Revolution, a time period about which I will read almost anything. The fantasy elements seemed a bit bland to me, but the scenes of the battles of Lexington and Concord were well done, reminding me of Howard Fast's
April Morning
, a book that, along with
Johnny Tremain
, was a favorite of mine when I was young. I'll probably read the next book in the "Traitor to the Crown" series because now I'm curious to see if the fantasy element develops in less familiar ways.
Lest Darkness Fall is, as many people through the decades have said, great fun, a kind of
Connectic Yankee for readers who want their protagonists to be endlessly resourceful, optimistic, and lucky.
Somewhere in there, I also fit in Jack Vance's
Emphyrio
, an engaging example of a certain sort of classic ethnographic science fiction, something halfway between
Lloyd Biggle and
Ursula Le Guin.
I did a bunch of that fun, light reading because on the side I've been delving deeply into various books about British and American colonialism and imperialism for a story I keep telling myself I'm going to write: a steampunk alternate history about a mad scientist, a U.S. and British fight over Nicaragua at the beginning of the 20th century, and the atrocities it all leads to. Among the various books I've been dipping into for my researches are
Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction
by John Rieder,
The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century
by Daniel Headrick,
The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900
by David Edgerton,
Confronting the American Dream: Nicaragua under U.S. Imperial Rule
by Michel Gobat,
The Eclipse of Great Britain: The United States and British Imperial Decline, 1895-1956
by Anne Orde,
The Sleep of Reason: Fantasy and Reality from the Victorian Age to the First World War
by Derek Jarrett,
Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest
by Anne McClintock, as well as such books of their time as Winston Churchill's
My African Journey
(pointed out to me by Njihia Mbitiru, who's been a big help in goading me on to write this story that I keep talking about) and
The Ethiopian: A Narrative of the Society of Human Leopards. Also a couple of books I've been familiar with for a while,
Histories of the Hanged: The Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire
by David Anderson and
Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya
by Caroline Elkins.
Clearly, I don't want to write a story -- I want to write an annotated bibliography!
Now, though, it's time to stop procrastinating and get back to work...
*Speaking of email, I've severely neglected the email address once associated with this blog (themumpsimus at gmail) because it became massively overloaded with spam (partly because I had redirected some ancient addresses at it) and sometime at the beginning of this year I made a resolution to clean it out, find real messages I'd missed, etc. I removed the link to it from this site so that people wouldn't inadvertently use it, but I expected to get it back up and working within a week. Then I kind of kept procrastinating. Every time I thought about it I suffered trauma. Now cleaning out and organizing the inbox is such a Herculean task that I may just give up and start over with a new, clean address. I don't know. I will fight through my anxieties and figure it out soon, though.
Tomorrow (Wednesday) is the first day of classes at Plymouth State University, where I'm teaching now.
This is my eleventh year of teaching. Nonetheless, as ever, the first day looms as something both terrifying and exciting. This year is terrifying for new reasons, most having to do with teaching college for the first time, but last year was a very different environment, too, and I adjusted to that well enough. After the first class or two, the terror will go away, and probably some of the excitement, too, as we settle into a routine, but the unknown is always nerve-wracking.
I've spent much of this week preparing for classes. If you're curious about the sorts of things I'm doing, I've put some information up here. Those pages will grow and change over time, of course, and at least one of them is mostly a placeholder right now, waiting for me to get more time to add to it.
Meanwhile, if you're looking for something to watch, Reprise came out on DVD today in the U.S. I've got it on my Netflix list and will be curious to see if I respond to it as strongly now as I did when I saw it in the spring, when it was, for reasons that are somewhat mysterious to me, exactly the movie I needed.
Also, the Great and Glorious Hannah Tinti, editor extraordinaire of One Story, has welcomed her first novel into the world: The Good Thief
. I bought a copy at a local bookstore; if it's made it to New Hampshire, it ought to be just about everywhere by now. I hate going into a book with huge expectations, but Hannah's just about the best editor I've ever worked with, and I loved her story collection Animal Crackers
, so it's impossible for me not to expect marvels and wonders galore. We shall see...
Read the rest of this post
Via the Strange Maps blog comes this charming illustration of Sherlock Holmes’ residence. It’s by Tokyo based illustrator Russell Stutler. He has several free printable versions on his site, including one with notes.
Here’s a selection in the tradition of the naughty “French” postcard from this rich resource of antique postcards. The site includes DOZENS of categories, basically any theme you can think of from aeroplanes to Alphonse Mucha to “fantaisie”. That latter one seems kind of miscellaneous - kids’ stuff, pin-ups, oddball ones. The site is in French but that won’t stop anyone from just looking, right? But if you do read French, or translate it, there are some essays there too.
History hot off the presses!
Muckrakers by Ann Bausum takes us into the story of investigative journalism—sometimes called the “unofficial fourth branch of government”—and the reporters who used their medium to change America. History teachers covering the early twentieth century will want to use this book in their classrooms particularly for the more than 50 archival photos it contains. Pair this with War, Women, and the News by Catherine Gourley and Journalists at Risk by George Sullivan for a history lesson with a focus on journalism.
English teachers reading The Jungle by Upton Sinclair or The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck with their classes may want to use Muckrakers to give students some historical context to these works of fiction that began with investigative journalism and ended with some big changes. Bring it all together by showing your students how words are still making a difference in the way we live our lives today with books like Fast Food Nation (or the adaptation aimed at young people, Chew on This) or An Inconvenient Truth.
It’s been a long, cold winter. Finally, longer days and brighter sunshine are heralding some warmer weather! The vernal equinox that officially launches the spring season isn’t till next week, but we’re ready to get an early start with these picture books about springtime.
What has 366 days and happens every four years? That’s right- it’s a leap year which means 2008 has an extra day instead of the usual 365! Curious little minds are bound to wonder why? Help your students learn the answers by teaching about the history and concept of calendars. Click here!
As you may remember from last year Tandem Library Books was eager to promote the Cybils’ freshman year to our customers, including the fact that one of our own, a longtime book blogger Mindy, was involved as a panelist and an administrator.
Mindy and the entire Cybils Team did it again and we are thrilled to highlight this year’s Cybil winners, which were announced February 14, 2008.
The 2007 Cybils Winners are:
Boy Toy
Young Adult Novels Winner
The Professor's Daughter
Graphic Novels Winner--Young Adult
Artemis Fowl: The Graphic Novel
Graphic Novels Winner--Elementary/Middle Grade
Tasting the Sky: A Palestinian Childhood
Nonfiction Middle Grade/Young Adult Books Winner
A Crooked Kind of Perfect
Middle Grade Novels Winner
The Chicken Chasing Queen of Lamar County
Fiction Picture Books
Lightship
Nonfiction Picture Books Winner
The True Meaning of Smekday
Fantasy & Science Fiction Winner--Elementary/Middle Grade
Book of a Thousand Days
Fantasy & Science Fiction Winner--Young Adult
This Is Just to Say
Poetry Winner
Don't miss your chance to be involved with this one-of-a-kind award by nominating your favorite titles of 2008 this Fall at www.cybils.com!
Here are all 62 honored titles from 2007.
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Great quotes, Matt. I'm a big fan of the Melville quotes--"time, strength, cash, patience" is the mantra of any writer.
I may steal one or two. I love the Goldman and the Abigail Adams.
Glad you like them, John. (Abigail Adams and Emma Goldman are two favorites of mine for all sorts of things.) I will admit, when I saw the quotes again, I thought, "Oh, John Kessel will be happy with me for the Melvilles!" I think because of reading "Another Orphan" when it came out as a Tor double a couple years ago, I've pretty much always associated you with Moby Dick. (The book, not the creature!)