Mountebank Blog

"There is nothing so impossible in nature, but mountebanks will undertake; nothing so incredible, but they will affirm."

Something Magic about a Fair

Magazine AmericanaI’m pleased to announce that my article “‘Quacks, Yokels, and Light-Fingered Folk’: Oral Performance Art at the Fair” is now published and available in the Venues section of Magazine Americana (published by the American Popular Culture Society). It was fun adapting the somewhat scholarly piece for a more general and popular audience, and I think (modestly) that it turned out to be a pretty good article. What’s nice about the online publication, too, is that I got to include a bunch of color photos. That’s something that’s almost impossible (prohibitive costs) in paper publications, but the photos really add to the piece.

Now the next step is to try to get the process moving more quickly on the film project. This article is the basis of a documentary film–in pre-production (pre-pre-pre-production…we need funding!) with Artifact Pictures. That’s going to be really fun!

The movie list

Aw, what the hell. Everyone else is trying it, and it is fun, so I’m going to give it a shot, too. John Scalzi’s Rough Guide to Sci Fi Movies includes these fifty, and folks are doing the “bold the ones you’ve seen” thing (it gets done with a lot of lists, and I usually avoid joining in). I felt left out! So I’m joining in, too.

Here we go….

The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension!
Akira
Alien
Aliens

Alphaville
Back to the Future
Blade Runner
Brazil
Bride of Frankenstein
Brother From Another Planet
A Clockwork Orange
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
Contact
The Damned
Destination Moon
The Day The Earth Stood Still

Delicatessen
Escape From New York
ET: The Extraterrestrial

Flash Gordon: Space Soldiers (serial)
The Fly (1985 version)
Forbidden Planet

Ghost in the Shell
Gojira/Godzilla
The Incredibles
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956 version)
Jurassic Park
Mad Max 2/The Road Warrior
The Matrix
Metropolis
On the Beach
Planet of the Apes (1968 version)
Robocop
Sleeper

Solaris (1972 version)
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope
Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back
The Stepford Wives
Superman
Terminator 2: Judgement Day

The Thing From Another World
Things to Come
Tron
12 Monkeys

28 Days Later
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
2001: A Space Odyssey

La Voyage Dans la Lune
War of the Worlds (1953 version)

Seems like there aren’t many I’ve missed. Might be a good idea to have a movie festival some weekend soon! 🙂

Heinlein’s Female Troubles

M.G. Lord has a great piece in today’s NY Times on “Heinlein’s Female Troubles.” She really manages, as so few critics do, to hit the core elements of his complexity. Heinlein was in some ways, for his time, a terrifically progressive, even feminist, writer and thinker. But at the same time, his competent, intelligent, female characters (even the Empress of 20 Universes) enjoy being treated as naughty children by stronger, more competent, men.

Heinlein’s body of work as a whole, throughout his career and including the juveniles and the flimsy, solipsistic mishmash in which he so often indulged at the end, give some psychological insight into a complex man, a complex American, from a complex time in American culture and history. The celebration of competence and masculine and ability…the nostalgic longing for small-town life…the idealization of mothers, daughters, and sisters (to the point of complicated and literally or figuratively incestuous scenarios)…the firm libertarianism and the sexual libertinism…it all adds up to a complicated novelist–and thus a damn good one, even at his worst.

It’s rare (and valuable) to see such an intelligent and accurate analysis of Heinlein (or any SF author of his era) in the NY Times. Nice work, Ms. Lord!

Moon Landing Commemorative

In honor of the anniversary of the first human visits to the moon, Google maps has added some very detailed, high resolution, moon maps. Be sure to zoom in all the way for the closest view.
Google Moon.

Famine and Fashion

Famine and FashionThe official publication date is not until June 28, but we received our copies today of the new book, Famine and Fashion, edited (and including a superb article) by my favorite art historian. The book goes beyond art history, though, examining the rich theme of the seamstress through a wide range of disciplinary and theoretical lenses. I may have a personal connection, but I can still give an accurate back-cover blurb– “A fascinating and much-needed collection, an essential addition to the library of any student of labor history, Victorian cultural studies, or urban studies.”

Or you can trust the publisher’s description:

Like the figure of the governess, the seamstress occupied a unique place in the history of the nineteenth century, appearing frequently in debates about women’s work and education, and the condition of the working classes generally in the rapidly changing capitalist marketplace. Like the governess, the figure of the needlewoman is ubiquitous in art, fiction and journalism in the nineteenth century.

The fifteen articles in this book address the seamstress’s appearance as a ‘real’ figure in the changing economies of nineteenth-century Britain, America, and France, and as an important cultural icon in the art and literature of the period. They treat the many different types of needlewomen in the nineteenth century-from skilled milliners and dressmakers, some of whom owned their own businesses selling merchandise to other women (forming a unique ‘female economy’) to women who, through reduced circumstances, were forced into the lowest end of paid needlework, sewing clothing at home for starvation wages-like the impoverished shirt-maker in the famous Victorian poem by Thomas Hood, ‘The Song of the Shirt.’

This volume assembles the work of leading American, British and Canadian scholars from many different fields, including art history, literary criticism, gender studies, labor history, business history, and economic history to draw together recent scholarship on needlewomen from a variety of different disciplines and methodologies. Famine and Fashion will therefore appeal to anyone studying images of work in the nineteenth century, popular and canonical nineteenth-century literature, the history of women’s work, the history of sweated labor, the origins of the ready-made clothing industry and early feminism.

Available now (pre-order) at Amazon.com!

Kansas City in ’07

Heinlein CentennialI’ve just volunteered to help organize the Heinlein Centennial, in Kansas City, July 7, 2007. Don’t know what I can really do to help, but it’s likely to be a huge event. Hope I can at least manage to attend! (Kansas City in July–lovely!). 100 years since the birth of the dean of SF. I’ve got a big Heinlein post to write, sometime–maybe soon, I hope.

British English

Mindstar RisingI’ve read quite a bit of Peter Hamilton (as I’ve described before) lately. So recently I stumbled on two volumes (the first and last, Mindstar Rising and The Nanoflower) of his earliest trilogy. These books have some of his strengths, but not all, and they’re certainly rough around the edges (besides having among the cheesiest of examples of cover art in recent SF history–I mean, the macho 22nd-Century secret agent in a Guess jacket, moussed hair, and a digital watch!), but it’s always fun to see a good writer at an early stage, before he gets the full confidence to do his real work. There’s an excellent portrait of a post-global-warming, post communist, neo-capitalist, England.

His protagonist, Greg Mandel, in these books uses a couple of phrases over and over again, and I’m wondering if they’re common British English, or just Mandel/Hamilton English. I’ve never heard them used before. The first of these, “no messing,” means (obviously) something like “seriously,” or “no shit.” Like “this is a bad situation, no messing.” And the other one is less unusual, but still I kept catching my toe on it, so to speak. He has several characters consistently say “telling you” as an intensifier (similar to “no messing”). So there are sentences like “telling you, Lisa’s in a bad way, no messing.”

There are other Britishisms that I recognize, and have seen before, and they’re just a fun flavor. But those two really did keep disturbing me–I couldn’t seem to read through them transparently.

Among the more familiar ones, too, there’s one that I’ve always wondered about. Where American English would use “it’s up to me” (or “you” or “them” or whatever), the British English version is always “it’s down to me” (as in the well-known lyric from the Stones’ “Under My Thumb”) to mean “it’s my responsibility” or “fault” or “depends on me.” That one gets me very curious. Why the divergence? Where and when did it come from? Neither usage carries a particularly apparent logical or semantic advantage–it seems just arbitrary. But why are they down and we up? Puzzling!

New Reading Rule

The first implementation of my new rule–if I see (or hear) a book mentioned in two different places within one week, and I haven’t read it yet, I have to buy and read it (if I want to! :smile:).

So I’ve just placed an order for Sagan and Druyan’s Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (love that one-click two-day delivery!). In this case, I saw it mentioned in two places on the same day–once in a thread on the Secular Web Forum, and then again in a terrific post on Unscrewing the Inscrutable.

Of course, with Carl Sagan’s books, this new rule is not any kind of a risk!

Really supporting the troops

I don’t usually blog items that are already in boingboing, because I think most of my (few) readers have already seen things there anyhow.

But this one is just too excellent, and deserves all the extra credit it can get. SF author John Scalzi and his excellent publisher Tor Books are offering his novel Old Man’s War as a free download to any troops stationed in Iraq or Afghanistan. They just have to email him and they get it for free. A new SF novel, at the right price, for some folks who probably really need some good reading material. I like the idea very much, and I’ll be supporting the idea by buying the book for myself.

Great New Blog on the Blogroll

Thanks to Nick Matzke at The Panda’s Thumb, I’ve added the SciAm Perspectives blog to the blogroll. It looks like a much funner version of old favorite Scientific American magazine (already quite fun–witness their hilarious “OK, we give up” editorial in the April issue”) magazine.

And if I didn’t have the blog, how else would I know that there’s actually someone out there campaigning to remove the magazine from public libraries on the grounds that the cover story on homo floriensis was “pornography”?