Stuff of interest (to me anyway) of Friday 16th April 2010.
- Hal Duncan wants to see more fluffy, entertaining gay movies and fewer serious gay movies. Not one to just moan he has written his own: a revamp of As You Like It as a gay highschool musical.
- Andrew Wheeler has the list of bestselling genre novels of 2009. Quite a lot of shitty sf and fantasy books sold really really well last year.
- “I do not believe that the man possesses so much as a single grain of insight into human character, more than a thumbnail understanding of politics or society, or even a base theoretical comprehension of women and their interior lives. His worldview is customarily infantile, occasionally rising to the level of juvenile. His preoccupations are, therefore, those of infants and juveniles”. Tim O’Neil on the Tao of Miller.
- Personally I liked Miller’s eighties work (Daredevil: Born Again, Batman: Year One, Ronin etc.) because while they were juvenile power fantasies, at least they were juvenile power fantasies in which the hero could break his ribs or get his lungs punctured. That was new back then. Now? Not so much.
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Imagine this: you’re the sole Dutch survivor of Sobibor, manage to escape the camp with the Polish man you’ve come to love, hide out in the Polish countryside for months, get rescued by the Russians, get married, go back to Holland via the
Meditterraean, lose your baby in the process and when you finally make it back you’re threatened with deportation as an illegal alien! No wonder Selma Wijnberg, having emigrated to the US, refused to visit her home country until only this week, the 65th anniversary of the liberation of Dutch concentration camp Westerbork. - In general, the treatment of Jews during the war is a dark page in Dutch history. Despite early resistance to anti-Jewish measures here, the Netherlands was the Western European country from which the highest percentage of Jews (> 75 %) was deported. Though after the war everybody had been in the resistance all along, plenty of Dutch officials had to cooperate with this deportation to make it that succesful — and quite a few people profited from it. There’s many a house in Amsterdam that’s been acquired through dodgy means during the war.
- On a lighter note: Be A Sex-Writing Strumpet.