The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2012, pt.11: Sue Lange

The 2012 Experience
by Sue Lange

I’m about as out of date as a person can be and still be breathing. I watch movies twenty years after their premiere. My music is usually fifty years past its prime. I’m just now getting to the classics that most people read in high school. I graduated in ’76. Because of this, I don’t have new information to report here at Aqueduct’s end of year reverie. However, looking at old culture every once in while is not a bad thing. We get wiser as we get older and can find new ideas in yesterday’s mundane trifles. Hopefully my content here will serve some sort of something along those lines.

I did a lot of consuming in 2012. At the end of 2011 Fenton the Dog went viral on YouTube. I discovered it early in the new year. That statement seems to contradict my opening paragraph but a couple of months later on the Internet is “so last year” everywhere else.

I reread a collection of Eudora Welty’s stories. I’d read them about twenty years ago and didn’t get a thing out of the thing. But I’m older and wiser now, you see. Now I get her. Good writer.

2012 marks the year I finally decided to give playwriting a whirl. Dialogue is my favorite part of fiction and I’ve been thinking of trying it out for a while. Before I started I did a lot of reading on the subject. Mostly one-acts because I wanted to learn the short form first. I consumed Samuel Beckett’s pantomimes, Harold Pinter’s Dumb Waiter. Some Lanford Wilson. Edward Albee’s Zoo Story blew me away. But the little known one-acts that come out in yearly collections are great too. Fun even. They’re fast, modern, and easily digested. I discovered a whole new world of artful yakking there.

If any of the Aqueduct readers or writers are working in this realm, please let me know where to find your stuff. I’d love to take a look. I’ve got my own one-act currently workshopping with local theater friends. It’d be great to get feedback from any of you in this circle. The play is called "The Glass Ceiling" and it’s about, well, you can guess. Send me an email if interested (suelange1@verizon.net). My year in music was highlighted by Cirque du Soleil. I caught a performance out in the real world, i.e., not on the boob tube. It was fabulous of course, but extra special because they used live musicians. Thanks for that. I loves me my synthesizer but not all the time. Anybody that comes off of a dime to pay for a drummer and a couple of guitarists is okay in my book. Canada rocks!

Then there were the 101 versions of Peggy Lee’s “Why don’t you do right” that I screened on YouTube during some lost weekend in August. The best one? Ella Fitzgerald with Joe Pass. It’s amazing that a no frills presentation of a no frills song can be so great. If Ella is singing it, of course.

In music, though, the year overall was tragic because this was the year the music truly died. I refer to Etta James’ passing, an indescribably sad moment. She’d been in and out of the music scene her whole life, but seemed to finally be getting the recognition she deserved. She was a trailblazer at Chess records, arguably the best part of her career. She had a singular talent. She was courageous and versatile. She crossed over and taught a lot of others how to do it. She added class to the label and the world of rock and roll in general. And yet she was capable of getting down and dirtier than any rolling stone ever did.

Christine Aguilera does her proud, sure. And Beyoncé, of course. Beyoncé did a good job with Etta’s style in the movie, Cadillac Records, but there’s nothing like Etta singing her own songs. Two measures into “I’d Rather Go Blind” and I’m balling like a baby. Every time. I miss the ‘ol girl. Etta was tasty, strong, and important. She crossed over, from black to white, from R&B to R&R. She was one of the first.

I love her. RIP

Sue Lange's short stories have been published in Adbusters, Apex Digest of SF and Horror, Challenging Destiny and elsewhere. Her novella, We Robots, was published by Aqueduct Press in 2007. She is a founding member of Book View Cafe (http://www.bookviewcafe.com). Visit her website at http://www.suelangetheauthor.com.

Aqueductista News

--Nick Mamatas takes a look at "Wacky Will's" claims that Racefail 2009 and particularly coffeeandink led to his novel's being rejected by the publisher then considering it and getting no bids at a subsequent auction.

--Gwyneth Jones, in a post titled Shora to Shari'a, has more to say about the state of feminism today.

--Vandana Singh, in her Strange Horizons column, offers up Living with the Other: Animals, the City, and the Future

--Sue Lange reflects on Education Now and in the Future, in response to Susan Simesnky Bietelia's artwork in the second issue of the Cascadia Subduction Zone.

--Stephen Sohn at Asian American Literature Fans: A Veritable Literary Feast has posted a Small Press Spotlight on Aqueduct Press, which includes reviews of Vandana Singh's Distances and Of Love and Other Monsters, Claire Light's Slightly Behind and to the Left, and Mary Anne Mohanraj's portion of Without A Map.

--Paul Graham Raven reviews Gwyneth Jones's The Universe of Things for Strange Horizons at great and chewy length. He concludes:

And I’ve already mentioned the deftness and space left in Jones's stories, which always leave you slightly wanting; the gaps she’s left are tantalizing, sometimes even infuriating, like the last bit of table peeping mockingly through an unfinished picture-puzzle. It's a powerful play, and has to be handled just right; give too little, and the reader will feel justly cheated. But give just enough, and that missing piece will haunt the reader long after the last page is turned . . . to the point where one finds oneself hand-cutting puzzle pieces at 3 a.m., making minute adjustments to get them to slot into place, worrying at the hangnail question she's planted in your mind. Jones is resolutely anti-consolatory, staunchly contraPanglossian. She fits out every story with enough ideas to power a lesser writer's novel. She will break your heart, and she will make you think. She will challenge what you think science fiction is about, what it is for, and what it can do in the hands of an expert.

--Don D'Ammassa reveiws Andrea Hairston's Redwood and Wildfire:

Here’s an unconventional fantasy for you, set within the theater community around 1890. Two very different performers travel to Chicago where they become part of the world of minstrel shows and vaudeville. One is half Native American, the other a voodoo practitioner. There’s a good deal of peripheral magic, some of it ambiguous, involving such things as mind reading and out of body experiences, and these are contrasted with the technological wonders being displayed at the current World’s Fair. It’s also about the role of art in transforming society. This is a very ambitious book, and it’s far enough out of the mainstream of fantasy that it might daunt many potential readers. Comparisons are imperfect, particularly with really original work, but this should appeal to fans of John Crowley or Tim Powers.

--Nancy Jane Moore, in Reading for Fun: The Bone Spindle, reviews Anne Sheldon's The Bone Spindle

The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2010, pt. 18: Sue Lange

Sue Lange's 2010 Pleasures
by Sue Lange

What a year it's been for the movies, eh? I'm not talking about the blockbusters or Academy Award winners. I don't have a clue as to what movies those are. I'm talking about the indies. According to one site I came across a few weeks ago, there are independent movies and then there are independent movies. Technically an indie is any movie not made with Hollywood money. Apparently, however, a good number of indie moviemakers are quite well connected, well funded, well endowed even if they are not using the Hollywood studio system. Their product may technically be independent, but not much different than Hollywood, i.e. vapid fare. My definition of independent is rather less strict. I don't care who makes them or what side of the tracks they come from; I like films that are different. And I get to define "different." Unfortunately, I'm not really up to the task. It's more of a feel thing, like Pulp Fiction was different, Kill Bill was not. Regardless of my inability to define the word, I do prefer the independents.

When I say it's been a good year for movies, I'm talking about my own personal viewing of indie flicks. The highpoint was when I bought an all-access pass to my local film festival, the 2010 Greater Reading Film Fest. I had ten glorious days of two to three new movies a day. I slogged through like a hero and came out bleary-eyed, not knowing what hit me. Yes it was exhilarating, and at times numbing, but I saw some great new films: Backyard, Gasland, Linoleum, Dirty Oil, Snow and Ashes, Chameleon, for starters.

Backyard, which took first prize for the best narrative feature, depicts the horror of Juarez, Mexico where in the past twenty years, hundreds, or possibly thousands depending on who you talk to, of women have been abducted and murdered, motive undetermined. The story is difficult to watch, but Juarez's plight is common, I fear, in border towns where one side is fabulously wealthy and the other is incredibly poor. The poorer community swells with immigrant hopefuls moving in from the hinterlands for a better life but stopped by governmental boundary. With too many people available for easy exploitation, things get unruly, unregulated, and strange. In Juarez's case, deadly, for the segment of population called "woman." Amnesty International blames NAFTA for the situation in Juarez, but Backyard never takes that stance. It remains neutral as far as who is at fault, possibly hoping for sympathy from those that might help if only the blame game is not played. Whatever the reasoning is, the movie tells in blatant terms that something horrible is going on in Juarez. You cannot watch the movie without becoming angry, but with no one to blame it is hard to know where to go with your anger.

Gasland took first prize for best documentary feature. I probably don't need to say too much about this one. It's on the Academy Award shortlist so it's getting visibility. It was a most appropriate film to be chosen for a festival that sits so close to the Marcellus Shale Formation.

My 2010 viewing pleasure culminated in Aparna Sen's 15 Park Avenue, which came to me on a disk that included numerous Bollywood previews. Rolling my eyes as I fast-forwarded through them, I wondered about what the heck I had ordered. I needn't have worried. 15 Park Avenue is no quick, young-and-beautiful-but-supremely-intelligent-and-ultimately-hip shoot 'em up, heavy on the cliche and action. For most of the movie it seemed to be nothing more than a trite exploration of the difficulties a certain caregiver experiences as her sister descends into the kind of fantasy life only a true schizophren is lucky enough to experience. The movie is sad, but not depressingly so. Even with the inclusion of a violent gang-rape (we are mercifully spared footage of the actual violence), we do not pity the sisters. The conversations are slow and extended, the scenes long and mild. Halfway through, you wonder where a story so neatly laid out could possibly go. A character from the past turns up, but even that hardly injects mystery or drama. It's not a jarring plot point. So you're muddling through wondering where it's going to end and if this is one of those movies you sigh over but never rent again, and then suddenly wham! you're at the end and omigod! there is something really big here. Just didn't see it coming. In this day of six Hollywood plots, it's not just nice to be surprised, it's miraculous. Astounding. Rent this movie if you can and stick with it to the end. In fact, keep track of the small conversations throughout. There are clues, there are clues.

Movies, movies, movies. I can't get enough. In fact, I love them so much, I'm delving into the craft myself. My partner (Gary Celima) and I have put together a short narrative movie based on my story "Jump" published by Premonitions in 2008. Making movies is an excellent experience and I recommend it to everyone. Be warned, though, it's a bit like getting a tattoo. Before the scab is healed, you're already planning your next one. If you're curious, visit the funding site for Jump (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/suelange/jump-project) and let me know what you think.


For the other pleasures, very quickly:

Reading--I absolutely loved Howard's End. I'd never read any Forster before and hadn't really thought I wanted to. People say his work is ponderous, too detailed, old-fashioned, perhaps silly and self-indulgent. Pish posh. The writing is superb, and like Aparna Sen's movie, seemingly slow and forgettable, but not.

Listening--Just ordered Hillbillly Moon Explosion's Bourgeois Baby CD because it's got a killer version of Mambo Italiano on it. The CD is not available yet in the U.S. I'll have to wait until it makes its way to our shores. Too bad. I need a rockabilly fix. Who'd a thunk the Swedish could rock so successfully?

Sue Lange's short stories have been published in Adbusters, Apex Digest of SF and Horror, Challenging Destiny and elsewhere. Her novella, We Robots, was published by Aqueduct Press in 2007. She is a founding member of Book View Cafe (http://www.bookviewcafe.com). Visit her website at http://www.suelangetheauthor.com.

Talking About Islam During Banned Books Week

Over on the Book View Cafe Blog, we've been writing about censorship in support of Banned Books Week, an annual event sponsored by booksellers and librarians to counter the attacks mounted against some books. Aquedista Sue Lange waxed funny on banning badly written books, I wrote about porn and the Supreme Court, and others provided eloquent insights on Mein Kampf, gatekeeping, comic books, the history of censorship, and the like.

But given recent issues in the SF/F world about Islam, I think Aqueduct fans will particularly appreciate today's post from Judith Tarr, Banned Books: Devil of the Week. Judith, who has actually read the Qur'an and written alternate history that incorporates Islamic culture, writes movingly about the apparently societal need for a "bugbear" and the lies and wars that got us into this mess. She says:

Hate is hate. Bigotry is the same, whatever its target. People have to hide their racism and their sexism behind code words and cultural shorthand, but it’s fairly widely accepted that the word “Muslim” signifies something negative. Something that, even if you’re quite tolerant and rather well educated, you have to defend yourself for defending.

There's also a guest post on the blog by Bahram Nadimi on Islamic contributions to Western culture, with a link to the Common Ground blog, where he plans to continue exploring this topic.

Update 10/2/10: Sarah Zettel's post today on the Qu'ran and book burning also gives us some well-chosen words on how those who would burn books are trying to "erradicate ideas." She points out, "But, as with the people who would ban books, the people who would burn them seldom know what is actually IN the books."

Anyway, more antidotes for the hateful and poisonous words that seem to make up the bulk of this conversation.

Links for a Monday evening

--It's Banned Books Week in the US and the UK. Today's Guardian has an article about it that notes some of the usual targets of book-banning as well as some new ones. I was most interested by the one designated "the eighth most challenged book in the US last year":

Carolyn Mackler, whose novel The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big, Round Things was the eighth most challenged book in the US last year for reasons including its "offensive" language and sexually explicit scenes, sent a statement to be read at the event. "While I'm honoured to be in the company of such amazingly talented authors, I'm certainly not honoured to be on the list," said Mackler. "And while I'm no stranger to book challenges, for some reason I'm always surprised."

She has received "hundreds of letters and emails from teenage girls" who have been inspired by the novel, she said. The book tells the story of Virginia, "a curvy 15-year-old girl who has been made to feel terrible about herself by her not-so-curvy family [but who] ultimately learns to feel good about herself, even to celebrate herself, as she is, without losing weight, without hurting her body."

"I write about teenagers as they are, and my characters sometimes curse, and they hook up, and they confront their parents when they feel they are being wronged. This, I suppose, is upsetting to people who don't want their child exposed to these things. While I sincerely doubt that my book will be someone's only exposure to such content, I respect a parent's wishes for their children. Their children, I emphasise. Not everyone else's," she said. "I am a parent. I closely follow the books that my son reads. If a book is scaring him, we talk about it. If a book doesn't seem appropriate for him, I tuck it away and suggest he wait a few years. I have a good sense of what he's ready for, what he's wondering about. But do I know what is right for his friend or classmate? No way. Please, all of us, let's keep standing up against book banning."

--Meanwhile, Aqueductista Sue Lange has posted Confessions of a Serial Book Banner.

--Strange Horizons has posted a review by Claire Brialey of The Secret Feminist Cabal.

--io9 reports that the UN has appointed Malaysian astrophysicist Mazlan Othman Earth's ambadassor in the case that an extraterrestrial species visit Earth (link courtesy of Liz Henry).

--Censorship isn't exactly book-banning, but the principle is similar. These days, censorship tends to be on "security" grounds, exercised by intelligence agencies. I'm sure everyone will be relieved to hear that some of those many US tax dollars at work in the Pentagon are being used to purchase 10,000 copies of a book written by Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer-- a book vetted in advance, of course, by the author's military superiors-- in order to destroy virtually all of the initial print run. St. Martin's Press, the publisher, is producing a second version, with words, names, and even entire paragraphs blacked out throughout the book's 299 pages. I wonder. Who does St. Martin think will want to subject themselves to such a stymied reading experience? Is it possible they're hoping that non-serious readers will buy the book out of a certain kind of curiosity? It boggles the mind. Here is a portion of CNN's report by Chris Lawrence and Padma Rama:

The Pentagon contacted St. Martin's Press in early August to convey its concerns over the release of the book. According to the publisher, at that time the first printings were just about to be shipped from its warehouse. Shaffer said he and the publisher worked hard "to make sure nothing in the book would be detrimental to national security."

"When you look at what they took out (in the 2nd edition), it's lunacy," Shaffer said.

The Pentagon says Shaffer should have sought wider clearance for the memoir.

"He did clear it with Army Reserve but not with the larger Army and with Department of Defense," Department of Defense spokesman Col. David Lapan said earlier this month. "So he did not meet the requirements under Department of Defense regulations for security review."

One of the book's first lines reads, "Here I was in Afghanistan (redaction) My job: to run the Defense Intelligence Agency's operations out of (redaction) the hub for U.S. operations in country."

In chapter 15, titled "Tipping Point," 21 lines within the first two pages are blacked out.

In the memoir, Shaffer recalls his time in Afghanistan leading a black-ops team during the Bush administration. The Bronze Star medal recipient told CNN he believes the Bush administration's biggest mistake during that time was misunderstanding the culture there.

Defense officials said they are in the process of reimbursing the publisher for the cost of the first printing and have not purchased copies of the redacted version.

At least one seller on the online auction site eBay claiming to have a first-edition printing is selling it for an asking price of nearly $2,000. The listed retail price for the second printing is $25.99.

Which just goes to show that while book-banning and censorship work on similar principles, for authors, the difference is enormous.  

The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2009, Pt. 15: Sue Lange

Sue Lange:
Pleasures of Viewing and Listening in 2009
by Sue Lange


Pleasures of Viewing: Slum Dog Millionaire

Slumdog Millionaire might not be a great movie. It has a Cinderella ending that is improbable, maybe even downright silly if you consider reality important in your viewing pleasure. Despite that it is the most memorable flick I watched in 2009. The subject matter was too serious, too provocative, to pass the picture off as just another Feel Good Movie of the Year.

Slumdog reminds me of another movie I watched in 2009--the 1948 version of Oliver Twist. Both stories depict the lives of motherless children in a world that has no place for such beings. I imagine when Dickens first published Oliver Twist, he gave London's smart set a glimpse into what it is like to be a lost child, one whose only crime was being born. He showed them how cruel and unfair life for the poor can be. With a setting in Mumbai, Slumdog shows how cruel and unfair life amongst India's lost children can be. Like Dickens instructing the 1800s middle class, the directors of Slumdog, Danny Boyle and Loveleen Tandan, show us--the comfortable modern middle class--something we do not know.

In both movies, the main character is an innocent clearly out of place in the streets. Even being ignorant of the streets ourselves, we know this child can not last long without the help of others more clever and more ruthless than himself. In the end, both children escape their fate in silly, improbable ways. Oliver Twist because he is secretly related to a wealthy man who has a big, non-judgmental heart. Jamal in Slumdog knows all the answers on a gameshow despite the fact that he has no education and in all probability can't even read. His limited life experiences somehow correspond exactly to the questions on the show, however, and he wins big time. Both movies have happy endings proving that everything will work out for those who maintain a good attitude.

There's a big difference between Oliver Twist and Slumdog, though, and it lies in our reaction to the circumstances. Dickens' story took place in the 1800s. We watch it and say, wow, the industrial revolution sure did a job on the populace; thank god we're well beyond those evil times! Now we have a minimum wage, and benefits, and laws against child labor, and limits on the working day, and serious universal healthcare--Well, maybe we don't have that, but you see the point.

Slumdog does not let us get away with that. This is a current story. It's still going on. Somewhere at this very moment, the mother of a little Jamal is being murdered in a religious war, leaving behind two orphans who must seek shelter under a canvas blanket in the middle of a garbage dump. Fagin will be along in a minute to take the children under his wing. He'll be plucking their eyes out, of course, but they'll be taken care of. You cannot feel comfortable and watch this movie. You wonder who is to blame. Is the Dickens' industrial revolution just now making it to Mumbai and soon they too will gain enlightenment and the Factory Act? Is this a world of their own making because of an overly religious culture? Well then, they're good with it. Next problem! Or, perhaps it's just the after-effects of English colonialism; it'll all work out in the end if we just maintain our good attitude.

If you think about it too long, though, you may find yourself recalling things you've seen in your own life. Maybe you needed gas at one point and took a wrong turn off the expressway. Maybe you got lost in Baltimore or LA and caught a glimpse of children hanging on the overpass. What was going on there? You begin to think that it may never be possible to save the children. Perhaps there can be no comfortable middle class without a slave class, or Fagin plucking out the eyes of the unwanted.
These are the things that Slumdog leaves you with. Perhaps, despite its pat Disney ending, it is a great movie after all. It is certainly sticking with me.


Pleasures of Listening in 2009: Yumeji's Theme (composed, arranged, and produced by Shigeru Umebayashi)

If anyone hears Yumeji's Theme and doesn't agree that it might be the most beautiful music ever written, they're dead from the neck up.

I think I discovered Wong Kar-wai's In the Mood for Love in 2008, but it took me until 2009 to get hold of the soundtrack. Amazon.com said they had it, but they lied. They didn't have it and they didn't want to tell me they didn't have it. When they finally copped to the fact that didn't have it, they tried to save face by assuring me they'd be getting a shipment in any day now. They can't fool me. I know they don't have any warehouses and so they don't have shipments. I pressed them for an ETA. They did not respond after that so I struck out on my own. CDChild.com had never heard of Wong Kar-wai, In the Mood for Love, it's sequel 2046, the more famous Chungking Express, or even Hong Kong for that matter. I truly was on my own. I searched the backwaters of the Internet for off-the-wall suppliers of music and finally found satisfaction at www.illegalimportsandblackmarketdrygoods.com. They carried a double CD set of the soundtracks of both In the Mood for Love and 2046. The price: about twice what Amazon.com said they would charge if they were in a position to charge. I paid, and gladly, despite the fact that I had a feeling in the pit of my stomach that the site might be a front for identity thieves. I took that chance because I love Yemeji's Theme.

As I write this I am listening to the album, so it all worked out in the end (I maintained my good attitude and that's probably what did it). There's lots of inconsequential music on the CD, but some great Nat King Cole as well. And something called "Blue" that I can only describe as a weird version of St. James Infirmary. And then there's Yumeji's Theme and Yumeji's Theme Redux. When it's done, I'll pop in 2046. I just watched the movie last night. It has more wonderful Shigeru Umebayashi music, a Dean Martin song, a haunting "Siboney" by Xavier Cugat and Connie Frances that makes me very happy, and "Perfidia." Perfect for an escape from the images of lost children huddling under a canvas tarp or hanging about on bridges in the new world.




Sue's serialized novel, The Textile Planet, is available free o’ charge at Book View Cafe. Aqueduct published her novella, We Robots, in 2007.

The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2008, Part Five: Rebecca Ore and Sue Lange

Rebecca Brown:

On Watching a Whole lot of Dr. Who and Torchwood

Recently, I discovered Torchwood and Dr. Who and put a lot of it on my computer. The interesting and perhaps counterintuitive thing about industrial entertainment is that it’s produced by fewer and fewer people, especially for majority cultures with sufficient incomes to matter. Torchwood, as another friend said, is something we both would like to like but the plotting was consistently dumb in the first season (Billis Manger was wasted as a villain and was too much of a troll to dedicate his life to a cheesy all devouring monster) and not much better in the second season. Characters good, plot logic unbelievable (I’m sorry, but a dead man reanimated by alien life force who can speak is breathing even if his lungs aren’t taking fractions of oxygen off).

It’s still compellingly watchable, rather like a drug.

Dr. Who has fewer gaping plot holes, but the characterization isn’t quite as good except for the tenth doctor played by David Tennant.

In the 1980s, I saw Dr. Who for the first time and wasn’t impressed. The current Dr. Who has the necessary mix of being easy to follow along with visual and verbal references that are supposed to engage the more sophisticated (shot of R2D2 among the Daleks, quotes from Proust) and a running defense of popular entertainment as
art (Rowling proves that the best education for a popular novelist is popular work from the past, the classics in Latin and Greek). Our heros meet Queen Victoria and are banished; save five people from Pompeii and meet Agatha Christie who is still in print thousands of years in the future. Other than Queen Victoria (saved by her husband and the doctor, though), women are support except at Torchwood, but the woman in charge of Torchwood London is a parody of the touchy/feely people-person manager and also becomes responsible for making a mess. The other woman whose job isn’t support is Harriet Jones, who is so insecure that she had to identify herself as the Prime Minister, and who the Doctor deposes by asking her right-hand man if she doesn’t look tired.

Sigh. We can have jobs, but most of the time, the team leaders are still men, even if some are gay.

Rebecca is the author os numerous novels, including Gaia's Toys, Slow Funeral, and Time's Child. Aqueduct published her novella Alien Bootlegger in 2005 and will be releasing her new collection of linked stories, Centuries Ago and Very Fast, in April 2009.








Sue Lange:


As a writer, I ought to remark on my reading experiences of 2008, but really, how can I? How can anyone? Without the benefit of cable or even a daily newspaper subscription, I still find myself more informed than ever because of my total immersion, that is, my drowning, in the Internet. In 2008 I was inundated with news from around the world every working minute of every working day. The voices came from everywhere: blogs, alternative news pages, CNN, the websites of thousands of people and organizations unknown to me but fascinating none the less. Every hour hundreds of snippets marking the comings and goings of the planet’s lifeforms flickered across my monitor. No particular entry was ever in front of me long enough for me to register so much as an “omigod” or “I know exactly what you mean” in the comments section. How can I opinionate on anything I read in 2008? I’m quite sure I don’t remember any of it. The moment anything astonishing crossed my browser’s path, I was already clicking on to the next thing. Probably the funniest cat photo since the dawn of mankind.

Movies and music are now my escape from the reality of the written word. How appropriate then, that my most pleasurable 2008 viewing experience includes the most pleasurable listening experience as well. And it marks a sea change for me.

Heretofore my all time favorite movie was Never Cry Wolf, a Disney feature. Go figure. Never Cry Wolf very neatly illustrates the complex predator/prey relationships we’re all familiar with in this National Geographic Special world we live in. We all know the hunter seeks out the weakest individuals amongst the hunted, thereby keeping the population strong through the foils of natural selection. The prey is beautiful. The predator is beautiful. Nature is beautiful and perfect. And so, in my opinion, was the movie. Extra points for the scene with the naked man. Hollywood doesn’t give us many glimpses of male buff. Really, though, the movie appealed to my inner scientist. I love that biology, that Darwin, those efficient dogs. There was humor in the movie as well, and a gorgeous scene of thundering caribou. As is usually the case with Disney, there was something for everyone. In spite of that, I loved it.

This year, though, Lina Wertmüller’s Love and Anarchy replaced Never Cry Wolf in my List of Top One movie. I’d seen this flick a few times before, but only recently realized how fabulous it is. My preference for the empirical and tidy has now been supplanted by the lovely and murky.

I am not naturally a lover of Italian movies. I don’t usually get Fellini. I speak just enough Italian to know we’re not getting good translations, but even if they translated the jokes properly, I probably still wouldn’t get them. Not getting the humor in a Fellini movie is like not getting the humor in a Woody Allen movie. All that’s left is a story about a man who can’t come to grips with his age. He keeps switching up partners, knowing that’s not the answer but he doesn’t know what else to do. Women are objectified, both worshipped and hated. It’s too tragic and hard to watch without the laughs.

Wertmüller’s movies are not introspective like Fellini’s. They are not about her. Her movies are about the big picture, usually Italian politics. And you will get the jokes if you watch more than once. You figure them out even with crappy translations that try to portray Italians as being polite when we know the truth: they’re just like all the rest of us humans. As is usual with Wertmüller, Love and Anarchy juxtaposes the silliest of slapstick alongside serious scenes of frightening or bittersweet circumstance. The result is puzzling and at the same time poignant.

In Love and Anarchy Wertmüller’s two favorite actors, Giancarlo Giannini and Mariangela Melato, play a country bumpkin (Tonino) tasked with assassinating Benito Mussolini, and the prostitute (Salome) assigned to setting him up in Rome. Tonino is innocent of politics, he barely knows the difference between an anarchist and a blackshirt, but he’s on a mission to vindicate a good friend killed by the fascists. Salome is likewise seeking vengeance for the beating death of a friend years earlier.

The movie covers the four days prior to Tonino’s appointment with destiny and stays fairly light throughout. The end, though, is classic Wertmüller: dark, frightening, and bereft of hope. There is evidence early in the story of how ugly it will get, but you don’t realize it with all the other foolishness going on. Despite the romping in the whorehouse, though, there are signs, there are signs. Salome’s description of her fiancé’s death; an innkeeper laughing when recounting how his fingers had been cut off because he’d been tardy with the chicken; Nino Rota’s haunting soundtrack. They all gnaw at you in a barely perceptible way. Only deep down inside do you sense there’s something wrong with this picture.

Like Fellini, Wertmüller uses preposterous, grotesque, clownish characters to keep you off balance, keep your mind off what’s lurking beneath. Take my favorite scene of the movie: dinnertime at the brothel. The prostitutes, madame, and maid are shown eating, joking, arguing, and competing while Tonino silently eats with his hands and watches the back and forth banter like a cat at a ping pong match. A fun time is had by all. After dinner the mood turns broody as Anna Melato plays guitar and sings a mournful song -- “Amara Me.” (Watch the YouTube video of this incredible scene here; it starts about half way through the video.) Extreme close-ups of Salome, Tonino, and Tripolina foreshadow the coming disaster. As a certain something develops between Tripolina and Tonino, it dawns on Salome that the mission is going to fail. She watches the star-crossed lovers and knows they’re going to muck everything up. Without a single spoken word, the scene is classic cinema: it foretells the ending, it is perfectly shot and blocked. It is sick, sad, happy, beautiful, hopeful, doomed, opaque, and totally transparent. The ultimate artistic statement. The audience is probably for the most part ignorant of all that is said and done in that little scene. We watch the rest of the movie unaware of the blackness ahead, but when it comes, we are reminded of the sad song that played as Tonino and Tripolina fell in love.

Wertmüller is not easy. She lulls you into a jolly mood and then slams your face into the concrete. She shows you what life is really like. What it was like under the fascists. Maybe what it could be like again. She does not give any answers. More likely she asks questions. At the end of the movie we learn that Mussolini had actually started pardoning his enemies, the anarchists. Maybe he wasn’t such a bad guy after all. Maybe we should feel sorry for him because he wound up with his head on the spike. She leaves us with an ambiguous quote by Enrico Malatesta, an Italian anarchist, implying a less than gracious attitude on his part toward the martyrs of his revolution. Who were the bad guys, then? we wonder.

Perhaps her views are best summed up by Tripolina’s question to Salome: What is it good for?

I’m not an expert. I’m only a film buff. I wouldn’t know high art if it smashed me in my face with a cream pie. But when a movie comes to me with an important idea and at the same time makes science rivetting as in Never Cry Wolf or history relevant as in Love and Anarchy, I have to say it is beautiful. And it’s certainly worthy of a mention in the 2008 wrap up at Aqueduct Press.

2008: a good year for a wang dang doodle all night long.

Love and Anarchy, 1974, Writer and Director: Lina Wertmüller, with Giancarlo Giannini, Mariangelo Melato, Lina Polito as Tripolina, and Eros Pagni as Spotoletti, the flatulent fascist.

Sue's serialized novel, The Textile Planet, is available free o’ charge at Book View Cafe. Aqueduct published her novella, We Robots, in 2007.

Book View Cafe: A New Venture in Online Publishing

By Nancy Jane Moore

Do you find yourself running out of good fiction to read? Book View Cafe is the solution to your problem!

Book View Cafe is a brand new (we're still arranging the furniture) online source for fiction from 21 writers, including Ursula K. Le Guin, Vonda N. McIntyre, and Aqueduct authors Sue Lange and Nancy Jane Moore.

Book View Cafe has everything from flash fiction to novels, and we include many genres, though we're heaviest on science fiction and fantasy. Most of the content is free, but some authors will also be offering expanded work, subscriptions, print versions, and additional content for a fee.

Right now I'll be posting a new free flash fiction every Sunday -- with an occasional longer story thrown in just to keep you on your toes. My first story, "The English Major's Revenge," debuted Sunday, Nov. 16.

We have a companion blog to the site and it will be updated daily, too. My regular blog posting day is Sunday. Here's my first post: my opinions on flash fiction.

Book View Cafe writers are all professionals with lots of print publishing credits. We just want to widen our publishing horizons.

The authors are:

Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff
Brenda Clough
Katie Daniel
Laura Anne Gilman
Christie Golden
Anne Harris
Sylvia Kelso
Katharine Eliska Kimbriel
Sue Lange
Ursula K. Le Guin
Rebecca Lickiss
Vonda N. McIntyre
Nancy Jane Moore
Pati Nagle
Darcy Pattison
Irene Radford
Madeleine Robins
Amy Sterling
Jennifer Stevenson
Susan Wright
Sarah Zettel

Come by and check us out.

Stuff of Interest

I'm back in Seattle, wishing my two nights away had been three. Yesterday we had Jeanne Gomoll's interview; today we have a couple of interesting posts by Aqueduct authors Sue Lange and Kelley Eskridge. Sue has a guest post-- The Singularity Trap-- today at the Mumpsimus; while Kelley has posted Just Say No To Gender Stability on her blog. Also, I've just seen a lengthy review of the Marq'ssan Cycle by Frann Michel (who gave an interesting paper on Octavia Butler's work at WisCon 32) on her KBOO Radio blog. Check them out!

Stuff of Interest

Nic Clarke reviews Lesley A. Hall's Naomi Mitchison: A Profile of the Life and Work, as well as Mitchison's f/sf novels-- Memoirs of a Spacewoman, Travel Light, and Not By Bread Alone-- at Strange Horizons. Clarke writes:

Hall's study is illuminating and very readable, a welcome guide to both the life and the books. It's perhaps unlikely that a single small press volume could be the trigger for renewed attention to Mitchison's work; but such attention, from both readers and critics, is richly deserved. Re-reading her work now, Mitchison's interest in the many possibilities of what women could become, and of how they might achieve this potential, remains compelling.



From Sue Lange, a trailer for her novella, We, Robots (Conversation Pieces #16).

You can listen to Sue talking about We, Robots on Renee's Book Talk here.

And Pod People has posted a review of We, Robots here.




Matt Staggs has posted interviews with Nisi Shawl, Rachel Swirsky, and L. Timmel Duchamp at Enter the Octopus.


A review of Mindscape has been posted at waiting2speak. Among the reviewer's comments is this:

[Mindscape] confirms that science fiction looks very different when it takes takes seriously 1) that a hero can be female and still sexy, violent, flawed, vulnerable and triumphant 2) a female hero of color can be all of these without being junglefied or mammied 3) people of color can play roles that aren't just witty, "ethnic throwback" sidekicks or helplessly tormented victims.

Readings at WisCon 32

WisCon offers a wide variety of programming across eighteen (gasp!) tracks. Although there are two single-author readers by the year's Guests of Honor, all the rest of the readings are group presentations by four or five authors (or, in the case of the unique Broad Universe Rapid-Fire Reading, by numerous authors offering brief tantalizing bursts of their work). Most of these readings take place in a conference room equipped with several armchairs rather than straight chairs and a table with microphones facing the audience, which gives the room a slightly more comfortable and informal feel. This year, though, a few of the readings were held in other venues-- viz., Madison coffee shops. I wish I'd been able to get out to those, 'cause I love cafe readings. (Maybe next year?) I typically attend several readings in the course of the con, but this year I was able to attend only one, the second of the two groups of Aqueduct authors reading.

Kath and Tom attended the first one (which was held at the same time as one of my panels), though, and got some photos of Aqueduct's authors.

Here is Carolyn Ives Gilman, reading from Aliens of the Heart.















Nisi Shawl read from Filter House.





Anne Sheldon read from Adventures of the Faithful Counselor.



















Wendy Walker also read.


















And Sue Lange read, too.



I was able to attend the second group of Aqueduct authors reading, though. Eleanor Arnason has a few things to say about it in her posts on WisCon, which you can find on her blog. As she notes, she read a very short piece-- and she also announced that she was working on a rewrite of her sequel to A Woman of the Iron People, "Hearth World," for Aqueduct, which evoked a great, roaring cheer from the audience.

















Vandana Singh read the opening of her novella, Of Love and Other Monsters (which resulted in Aqueduct's selling out all the copies of it that we brought to the con by late Sunday afternoon). I know that text well; it was a pleasure hearing the author's own voice speaking it.










Nancy Jane Moore read the dramatic conclusion, rather than the opening, of one of her stories in her new collection from PS Publishing, Conscientious Inconsistencies.






Eileen Gunn read a tantalizing fragment of a story set on Christmas Day, involving elves, that was bizarre, frightening, and heartbreaking and literally had me sitting forward on the edge of my seat, waiting to see what would happen next. And later, after everyone had finished reading, she read her short, stunning poem "To the Moon Alice," which can be found in LCRW #22.

And finally, Andrea Hairston, who is hands-down the best reader I've ever had the pleasure to hear read, offered us the vivid, harrowing first chapter of her new, as yet unpublished novel, which opens in the late-19th-century American South.

I could fairly feel the audience around me shivering (and not just from the room's freezing air, which necessitated Andrea's wearing the jacket that an audience member kindly loaned her).


I loved the reading, I loved the thought that these authors and their fine work are what Aqueduct is all about. What a joy to be in such company!



The format and setting of WisCon's GoH readings are quite different from that of the group readings, for they feature a single author in a 75-minute time slot. I wanted to attend Maureen's, but alas, it was not to be. I can, though, tell you about my own. First, I should probably mention that it was held in one of the larger rooms, where a long table with microphones is placed on a dais in front of many rows of chairs with an aisle between them. This is not a good setup for a reading. For one thing, I prefer to stand when I read. For another, I had no wish to be elevated and distant from the audience. My solution was to detach a microphone from one of its holders and stand on the floor, holding the mike in one hand an the book I was reading from in the other. This was a bit awkward, but it worked as long as I was holding a conversations pieces volume in my hand. (See the photo, which Kath took.) It couldn't work, though, for one of the books of the Marq'ssan Cycle (even the smallest of which are too heavy to hold open in one hand). So then I tried just projecting my voice, without a mike, and found that it worked.



I began by reading "Dear Alice Sheldon" from Talking Back: Epistolary Fantasies. (I have Lena de Tar to thank for having suggested that I read both nonfiction and fiction.) I then read a couple of nonspoilery scenes from Stretto, the last book of the Marq'ssan Cycle. I had prepared other things to read, but I thought, given the excellent composition of the audience attending, that a Q&A might be better. In fact, the Q&A turned into a lively, interesting conversation to which numerous audience members contributed. I'm still thinking about some of it.