Sidetracks - July 28th, 2012

[helloladies]

Sidetracks is a collaborative project featuring various essays, videos, reviews, or other Internet content that we want to share with each other. All past and current links for the Sidetracks project can be found in our Sidetracks tag.

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I am having so many feelings about Teen Wolf, y'all. Every week it just gets better and better and better. I didn't expect much from Season Two and so every week I continue to be flabbergasted at how awesome it is. PLUS, DYLAN O'BRIEN'S FACE.



➝ First up, this amazing vid for Season One. IT'S COMPLETELY ACCURATE, OKAY?

➝ Then, both from Hello, Tailor, Teen Wolf 101: An introduction to the eighth wonder of our world (Season Two spoilers) and Teen Wolf 2x09: Party Guessed (definite Season Two spoilers). These were right on and hilarious.

I NEED TO GET BOTH OF YOU CAUGHT UP. There are so many feelings to be had about this show.

➝ Also of interest, The reaction over the Teen Choice Awards and the clever marketing to fandom to get them to vote for Teen Wolf at the show. The article breaks down why the latter was sly and groundbreaking and extremely savvy. I've never been in a fandom where the creators so clearly appreciate, respect, and have fun with their fans, and have heard plenty of horror stories about the latter, so I am pleased. :)

➝ Switching gears, Anita Sarkeesian was featured on The Current about her work and recent Kickstarter project. There's also an interview with another woman in gaming, Brenda Bailey Gershkovitch, that's worth a read.

➝ Rebecca Tushnet, the Legal Committee chair and Content Policy lead of The Organization for Transformative Works, was interviewed by Reason Magazine in Fan Fiction vs. Copyright - Q&A with Rebecca Tushnet. Rebecca does great work and this interview was awesome. :)

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➝ Shannon Hale on Why boys don't read girls (sometimes):

There’s something that happens to our boys in school. Maybe it’s because they’re around so many other boys, and the pressure to be a boy is high. They’re looking around at each other, trying to figure out what it means to be a boy—and often their conclusion is to be “not a girl.” Whatever a girl is, they must be the opposite. So a book written by a girl? With a girl on the cover? Not something a boy should be caught reading.

But something else happens in school too. Without even meaning to perhaps, the adults in the boy’s life are nudging the boy away from “girl” books to “boy” books. When I go on tour and do school visits, sometimes the school will take the girls out of class for my assembly and not invite the boys. I talk about reading and how to fall in love with reading. I talk about storytelling and how to start your own story. I talk about things that aren’t gender-exclusive. But because I’m a girl and there are girls on my covers, often I’m deemed a girl-only author. I wonder, when a boy author goes to those schools with their books with boys on the covers, are the girls left behind? I want to question this practice. Even if no boy ever really would like one of my books, by not inviting them, we’re reinforcing the wrong and often-damaging notion that there’s girls-only stuff and you aren’t allowed to like it.

♥

➝ Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea books are being reissued with new covers, and SF Signal posted a video where she talks about the series. I'm actually not crazy about the new covers, but I hope this will help introduce a new generation of readers to Earthsea. I know the first few books are not great when it comes to the ladies, but I still love them to pieces for other reasons, and they get infinitely better as the series progresses.

➝ Speaking of videos, here's a profile on Octavia Butler featuring N.K. Jemisin that I thought you'd like to see.

➝ And look, the trailer for the movie adaptation of Marjane Satrapi's Chicken With Plums is out! It's not often that I love movie adaptation of books I enjoy, but Persepolis was brilliant and I'm curious about this one.

➝ At GenderBen! there's a fascinating history of anti-feminist cartoons through the ages.

➝ Angie at Fat Girl Reading wrote a very useful guide to LGBTQ non-fiction for teens. I hadn't heard of most of the books included and they all sound amazing.

➝ The F Word does a great job of calling shenanigans on a recent Guardian interview with Laura Jane Grace, lead singer of the band Against Me!.

➝ Things that make me happy: Korra cosplay at Comic Con :D

➝ It's very obvious to me that the answer to the question "who gets to be a geek?" could never be anything other than "anyone who wants to be, any way they want to be one", but apparently this still needs explaining and Scalzidoes it particularly well.

➝ Six modern classic coming of age stories from Virago in pretty hardback editions? Yes please.

➝ Look, Jodie! Sara Ryan, of Empress of the World fame, interviews Hanne Blank about her book Straight.

➝ Wise words from Lev Grossman:

As far as I can tell what happens when a reader loves a book isn’t actually a wondrous explosion of literary greatness, an inevitable consequence of that book’s inherent value, it’s a complicated combination of all sorts of circumstances: like who the reader is, where they are in their lives, what else they’ve read, what mood they’re in at the exact moment when they pick up the book, whether they’re drunk or sober, what sorts of bullshit they will or won’t put up with (and all novels contain a certain amount of bullshit), whether the author photo looks like their ex-girl/boyfriend, etc. etc.

Likewise a similar confluence of events takes place when a person hates a book.

➝ Last but not least, RIP Margaret Mahy :( I love the tribute at Misrule - it pairs her with Diana Wynne Jones, which I've always done in my head, and it calls The Changeover "one of the great books about nascent teen sexuality ever written". As I said back when I read it, the novel does a brilliant job of presenting a teen girl's budding desire completely unapologeitcally, and that alone is enough to make me love Mahy forever.

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It's all Olympics all the time in my house right now (watching the road race as I type) so I'll start with a few Olympic links.

➝ Caster Semenya carried South Africa's flag in last night's Olympic opening ceremony and my heart swelled when she their team came out last night. There needs to be a whole fuckyeahcastersemenya tumblr after all the shit she's had to put up with.

➝ Mediocre Dave has a really great post called Shakespeare 2012 about the cultural Olympiad, the use of Shakespeare in the Olympic opening ceremony and national propaganda.

I'm obviously a huge fan of the Olympics; both the sporting contests and the various cultural events, but I've been feeling really iffy about aspects of the official nationalist packaging ever since opening ceremony teasers appeared. And the Olympics do provide a really dangerous chance for conservative, nostalgic propaganda/tokenism/government appropriation of the people's voices. So hurray sport, hurray plays, hurray people ringing bells everywhere as performance art, hurray the excellent Paralympics adverts, but I'll be avoiding the news and any government speeches until this is all over.

➝ 18 year old British female weightlifter, Zoe Smith, takes down her Twitter bullies. Fuck anyone who thinks any female athletes aren't gorgeous. They are all beautiful and in so many different ways. Watching them all compete reminds me how much I enjoyed feeling more physically powerful when I was taking a weights class (although I was never going to make the excellent muscles ladies like Smith and Jewel have) and makes me want to start doing the kind of exercise I actually enjoy again. (via Velvet Threads)

➝ Sticking with sport, but moving away from the Olympics here's a really lovely story about basketball player LeBron James reading in public, on the sidelines of the court. Apparently there is some hatred for James in the US, but being a Brit I am unaware of the specifics.

➝ The Hairpin's Texts from Jane Eyre reminds me how weird the men from JE are when you view them with modern eyes. (via cleolinda)

➝ Ana, I can't believe I forgot to recommend that you read Brenna Yovanoff's whole blog when we were talking about writing that tells you about friendship. In this entry titled 'Delilah' she talks about making a new friend in high school.

➝ John Green linked to a scary N Y Times article about retirement planning in the US. No one makes you save money for retirement?! I joined our company scheme a couple of years ago and making even a basic contribution does put a real strain on my wage, so I didn't start when the plan advises you to in order to be able to do things like eat even if your washing machine needs repairing. Every time I read my company pension plan predictions I freak out, so I can't even imagine what I'd feel like if I didn't have some kind of state pension to back me up a little bit in old age.

Over at Stacked Kelly talks about ways to find books from smaller publishers in 'Only you can educate yourself'. She also provides links to a couple of useful tools I hadn't heard much about before.

➝ I am one of the people who would like to read comics but is intimidated by the huge size and time span of many comic book universes. Still, it's not like comic history is ever going away and do I want to keep being someone who'd like to do something, but doesn't? This Guys Lit Wire post, 'The Unfinishable Story of Comics' says people like me should just jump in, which does seem more fun than endlessly putting off reading comic.

➝ And if I need a handy guide to comics I might be interested in Tansy R Roberts is currently putting up a series of posts about female comic book protagonists called 'Where the Wonder Women Are'. I read the first post yesterday and found it easy to understand the history of The Black Canary. I also saw some easy access points into that character's story that don't require me to find rare back issues.

Comments

[renay]

OH GOOD ANA I am glad I am not the only one side-eyeing those covers. I mean...maybe if they're for the children's section (are they?)? Then again, I haven't read them.

[bookgazing]

I read the post at Sara Ryan's blog and it was really lovely. Sometimes it;s really iffy to hear writers talk about their work, because they get all one true definition, but lots of times like in this interview it really opens something up about the work. Thanks for linking to it for me, made me feel special :D