What’s a party without munchies? Make some mini monster eyeball treats for yours from donuts and candy with this how-to by Ashley Rose at Sugar & Cloth; photo by Jared Smith.
Happy Halloween!
Image by Jared Smith via Sugar and Cloth
This post has been edited.
Geeks eat, too! Second Breakfast is an occasional feature in which we talk about food with geeky connections and maybe make some of our own. Yum!
Scandinavia House in New York City runs a new Nordic book club, and this November’s book is The Rabbit Back Literature Society by Finnish author Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen.
Novelist and short-story writer Jääskeläinen writes realistic fantasy (to translate his term reaalifantasia). The Rabbit Back Literature Society, published in 2014 in UK and 2015 in US, is Jääskeläinen’s first novel and the first of his works to be translated into English (from the original Lumikko ja yhdeksän muuta, 2006).
Here’s the publisher’s description:
“Only very special people are chosen by children’s author Laura White to join ‘The Society’, an elite group of writers in the small town of Rabbit Back.
“Now a tenth member has been selected: Ella, literature teacher and possessor of beautifully curving lips.
“But soon Ella discovers that the Society is not what it seems. What is its mysterious ritual, ‘The Game’? What explains the strange disappearance that occurs at Laura’s winter party, in a whirlwind of snow? Why are the words inside books starting to rearrange themselves? Was there once another tenth member, before her?
“Slowly, disturbing secrets that had been buried come to light…
“In this chilling, darkly funny novel, the uncanny brushes up against the everyday in the most beguiling and unexpected of ways.”
The only other piece of Jääskeläinen in English at this writing is Where the Trains Turn (orig. Missä junat kääntyvät, 2000), published in November 2014 by Tor.com.
Apart from Finnish SFF, the book club program for this fall contains Danish contemporary fiction and two Swedish crime thrillers. From scandinaviahouse.org:
“Read and discuss Scandinavian literature in translation as part of Nordic Book Club – ASF’s newest literary series. This season’s selections include Swedish crime thrillers, Danish contemporary fiction, and Finnish fantasy. Discussions typically take place the last Tuesday of the month in the Halldór Laxness Library at Scandinavia House and online at scandinaviahouse.org.”
Jääskeläinen’s book will be discussed on November 24, 2015, at 6 pm at Scandinavia House, 58 Park Ave (Manhattan). The entry is free.
Image: Pushkin Press.
Post edited for style.
Hey, look! We found a thing on the internet! We thought it was cool, and wanted to share it with you.
It is odd to find oneself arguing that a ghost story would be better without the ghosts, but that’s how I felt coming away from Crimson Peak.
Crimson Peak, as others have noted, is a Gothic romance. Ghosts are de rigeur for the genre. They give form to emotional traumas and compel the hero or heroine to uncover the horrible secrets behind them. The ghosts of Crimson Peak fulfill this role and prod the film’s heroine to expose the dark past in the house. Eventually. She takes an awful lot of prodding. In the meantime, the ghosts just take up screen time being ghostly and doing ghost stuff, none of it terribly interesting.
“The ghosts are a metaphor,” we are told early in the film, except they aren’t. A metaphor is when one thing stands for or represents another, but there is nothing metaphorical about the ghosts of Crimson Peak. The ghost of the old woman in the bathtub with a meat cleaver in her head does not represent the lingering traumas of the past or the madness of the characters. It represents the fact that an old woman was killed in that bathtub with a meat cleaver to the head. The crumbling, bleeding house is a metaphor for the unraveling of the family that dwells there, but the ghosts are the most literal ghosts you have ever met.
The only purpose the ghosts serve in the narrative is to nudge our heroine Edith into uncovering the truth. They might as well just be standing in the hallway holding signs that say “PLOT-RELEVANT INFORMATION IN THIS CLOSET” or “ASK QUESTIONS ABOUT THIS BATHROOM.” They are narrative shortcuts that save the heroine the bother of actually having to do much thinking. The most interesting part of the story is when Edith finally does a little investigating, but the ghosts do most of the uncovering for her and rob the story of complexity. I would rather have watched Edith do the work of piecing together what was going on at Allerdale Hall without the ghosts standing around holding their “THIS WAY TO THE PLOT” signs.
“It’s not a ghost story,” we are also told early in the film. “It’s a story with ghosts.” I give the movie enormous credit for its gorgeous visual design and for showing how well a period piece can incorporate active and effective female characters. But maybe it should have been a story without ghosts.
Image: Crimson Peak, (c) Universal Pictures 2015 via imdb
In the Seen on Screen occasional feature, we discuss movies and television shows of interest.
Or: Some History behind Ostrich Riding, Part 5 of 7
Background: I ran into two historical images from California with ostriches used as transportation. That got me wondering about the history of ostrich riding. And that lead me down quite a rabbit hole.
I’ve divided my findings into separate posts (find them with the ostrich riding tag). Warning: serious early history and language nerdery ahead in Serious Academic Voice.
TL;DR – Tracing ostrich riding to a 3rd century BCE tomb find (a statue of Arsinoe II) from Egypt doesn’t hold up. The use of various ostrich products in human material culture dates back thousands of years. A few ancient depictions involve humans handling ostriches; however, extant sources don’t tell us whether ostriches were merely hunted or whether they were also tamed in the ancient world. The most promising source seems to be a description of a magnificent parade put together by Arsinoe II’s husband-brother Ptolemy II. This Grand Procession included eight chariots drawn by pairs of ostriches, and the ostriches may have been ridden by boys in costumes.
I had hoped to find a nice, neat selection of ancient texts putting the Greek word for ‘ostrich’ in context, but even a cursory look reveals that the history of the word strouthos is complex. At best, we can say that there are no immediate red flags either in the original Greek or modern English translations for Arsinoe II’s statue or Ptolemy II’s Grand Procession. The poem Berenice’s Lock was said to contain further evidence of ostriches as mounts in Ptolemaic Egypt after Arsinoe II’s death. Instead, what we seem to have is a case of poetic ambiguity translated with poetic license and taken uncritically as evidence.
Below is the long story.
To mentally prepare myself for reading Empire Ascendant by Kameron Hurley, the middle book in the Worldbreaker saga, I took a quiz to find out which character from The Mirror Empire I might be.
I am… Ghrasia Madah:
“You’re a pragmatic defender, with a dim view of stories and mythology, because you’ve been mythologized yourself, and didn’t much like the taste of the world afterward. A hero, a legend, most days you just try to stand very tall so that people don’t notice you aren’t exactly a physical match for the woman they read about in storybooks.
“You fall a bit too hard for young, whip-smart men with mother issues, but after twenty years married to two of the ‘right’ sorts of men, maybe this is nice change.”
I’ll take pragmatic, but otherwise it’s not very accurate. Ghrasia is a tough, no-nonsense, unpretentious, and persistent lady, though, which I appreciate.
Which Mirror Empire character are you?
Q&A is an occasional feature in which we share our responses to quizzes, questions, and quirky ideas for your entertainment.
In Odessa, Ukraine, a statue of Lenin fated for demolition instead got a new life – as Darth Vader.
The destruction of the statue was called for by a new law that requires the elimination of all landmarks and geographic names dedicated to communist figures. Artist Alexander Milov repurposed the statue and turned Lenin into the dark side. There’s more under Vader’s cloak than a covered-up Lenin’s coat, though: the statue’s head conceals a router delivering Wi-Fi to the immediate area.
Who woulda thunk that Lenin’s pose would be spot on for Vader!
Found via Meduza.
Out There is an occasional feature highlighting intriguing art, spaces, places, phenomena, flora, and fauna.
Halloween will soon be upon us. The origins of this holiday are obscure. It is often connected with the Gaelic festival of Samhain, which marked the end of the harvest and the beginning of winter, but Halloween, at least as popularly celebrated today in the US and some other countries, has wider connections. It is an example of a type of holiday found in many cultures: the “feast of fools.”
This music-only version of the official The Force Awakens trailer edited by Tim Gonzales is awesome:
The Force Awakens Trailer #3 – Music Only Edit
The soundtrack is very effective – I can actually feel the goosebumps moving along my arms and scalp! Apparently the trailer music is a combination of new composition and previous music; see the write-up by Peter Sciretta at /Film.
And this Han’s flashback video by Nick Skywalk does a fantastic(!!) job cutting in scenes from the original trilogy with the Episode VII trailer:
Eight weeks to go!
Bonus link: There used to be a Playstation video game called Star Wars: Masters of Teräs Käsi, published by LucasArts 1997. Teräskäsi is Finnish and literally means ‘steel hand’. This was news to me, but apparently it’s part – albeit a mostly forgotten part – of the official canon. Yay, Finland! 😉
Hey, look! We found a thing on the internet! We thought it was cool, and wanted to share it with you.
It’s well known that George Lucas drew inspiration from mythology when writing Star Wars. Luke Skywalker, the young hero from the planet farthest from the bright center of the universe, gets the call to adventure delivered by droid and goes off on a Campbellian journey to rescue a princess, seek out an ancient mentor, and finally confront his fallen father. The prequel trilogy gave us the tragic version in which Anakin, the great warrior, was driven to madness and destroyed the things he loved the most.
There are smaller touches of myth throughout the Star Wars hexalogy. Luke receives his father’s lightsaber like King Arthur drawing his father’s sword from the stone. The escape from the imperial garbage masher has hints of Jonah and the whale. Luke in the Wampa’s cave has shades of Beowulf.
Like most of the rest of geeky internet, I’ve been watching the trailers for The Force Awakens with excitement. I’ve been struck by something, especially in the latest trailer. The mythology that this latest iteration of Star Wars is working hardest to evoke is… Star Wars.
Star Wars: The Force Awakens Trailer (Official) via Star Wars
Star Wars has transcended being a movie franchise or even an expanded universe. It has reached the point where we can speak of it in terms of mythology.
One of the definitions of myth is that it is a story you know even if you can’t recall ever being told it. Star Wars has that. It is part of our cultural consciousness to the point that even people who haven’t seen the movies (yes, they exist) recognize the sound of a lightsaber and the cadences of the imperial march. Star Wars was all over my childhood, and even though I didn’t get around to seeing the movies until I was a teen (I was a Star Trek fan and young and dumb enough to think that I had to pick one over the other), I recognized Darth Vader, Princess Leia and Yoda on my friends’ lunchboxes.
Another characteristic of myth is that all myths are versions. There is no original, no canon. Though some may disagree on whether this is a good thing, Star Wars has always been an evolving story, getting new versions from small tweaks to big changes. (Yes, I see you in the back in the “Han Shot First” shirt, you can put your hand down.) The new wave of Star Wars movies leaves the old hexalogy alone but reboots the post-Return-of-the-Jedi expanded universe.
For those of us who grew up in the world of Star Wars, it is hard to imagine a time when these stories were not a part of the popular culture, yet there was a time when no one had heard Darth Vader’s breathing or Yoda’s grammar, when no one knew what a lightsaber or a Death Star was. By connecting to the ancient stories we already knew, Star Wars made itself feel timeless. Now it has become a part of that universal memory to be played upon and invoked in its own right.
Images: “This is the weapon of a Jedi knight” via The Film Fatale; wampa via giphy.com
Post edited for style.
In the Seen on Screen occasional feature, we discuss movies and television shows of interest.
Norwegian Theodor Kittelsen (1857-1914) developed into one of Scandinavia’s most popular artists. He’s especially well known for his nature paintings and illustrations of fairy tales, legends, and trolls.
The landscapes in Kittelsen’s paintings remind me of the Finnish wildernesses a lot. There’s also something solemn and contemplative in the mood of his imagery that makes me connect it with Tolkien’s art and writing, on one hand, and, on the other, with the illustrations of Tove Jansson (see examples of her work on Alice in Wonderland and The Hobbit provided by The Official Moomin site).
Out There is an occasional feature highlighting intriguing art, spaces, places, phenomena, flora, and fauna.
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