Daniel José Older talks about why you shouldn’t italicise foreign language use in English, but he forgets that it’s only thanks to italisation that we know when spaghetti was still considered an exotic, foreign dish in America!
Your Happening World (August 7th through August 12th)
- Why it’s time to lay the selfish gene to rest – David Dobbs – Aeon – This raises a question: if merely reading a genome differently can change organisms so wildly, why bother rewriting the genome to evolve? How vital, really, are actual changes in the genetic code? Do we always need DNA changes to adapt to new environments? Are there other ways to get the job done? Is the importance of the gene as the driver of evolution being overplayed?
- Water and air are all you need to make one of world’s most important chemicals | Ars Technica – Licht's method claims to use only two-thirds of the energy of the Haber-Bosch process. Along with the elimination of the need to produce hydrogen from natural gas, the overall carbon emissions are reduced quite significantly. The whole process also takes place at milder conditions (Haber-Bosch needs 450°C and 200-times atmospheric pressure).
- The Canadian Priest Kangaroo –
- Every Day Is Like Wednesday: Re: That movie that’s probably well on its way to making tens of millions of dollars already – And, if a lot of people make a lot of money and there are a lot of accolades being thrown about, then a lot of credit is going to go to a lot of people, from whoever cut those winning trailers to the designers and animators who got Rocket's fur to look just so to Gunn himself. If comic book people get any credit, chances are it's going to be as a collective (i.e. "Marvel") or under a "Special Thanks" near the end of the end-credit scrawl (IMDb has comics writers Dan Abnett and Andy Lannning receiving writing credit; if that's on the screen near the "written by" credit, then that's awesome).
- ‘Guardians of the Galaxy’ Character Creators Fight for Cash and Credit – NYTimes.com – As Michael explained in a telephone interview, the focus on his brother has encouraged the studio to reconsider its obligations to him. “The more often Bill’s name gets mentioned, and the more often he is given public credit for something that he did, the easier it is for me to go to Marvel and say, ‘You might want to consider raising your offer.’ ”
Should the WFA use Butler instead of Lovecraft?
I understand the impulse behind this petition, but I don’t understand the need to replace H. P. Lovecraft with Octavia Butler:
Octavia Butler contributed a rich, nuanced, complex body of work during her lifetime. Her novels, essays and short stories changed the entire genre of speculative fiction by complicating our notions of power, race and gender. Her characters were vivid and deeply human and her prose was sharp. She wrote masterfully across the imaginative genres, from science fiction to historical fantasy to horror.
While HP Lovecraft, whose head the current award is modeled after, did leave a lasting mark on speculative fiction, he was also an avowed racist and a terrible wordsmith. Many writers have spoken out about their discomfort with winning an award that lauds someone with such hideous opinions, most notably Nnedi Okorafor. It’s time to stop co-signing his bigotry and move sci-fi/fantasy out of the past.
What strikes me here, as it did Nick Mamatas, who spent some time refuting it, is the gratitious dig at Lovecraft’s writing, which is irrelevant to the purpose of the petition. That Lovecraft was a racist and that his racism was often integral to his stories should be enough; his writing qualities do not enter into it.
It also strikes me as odd to propose Octavia Butler as a replacement. She was a science fiction writer, not a fantasy writer. Just because she’s about the only deceased, prominent black science fiction or fantasy writer people actually know doesn’t make her suitable as figurehead for this particular award. It’s not as if science fiction has no awards named after horrible racists that could do with a bit of a cleanup, frex both the Campbell awards, named after an editior whose racism shaped science fiction far more and for far longer than Lovecraft’s ever did.
Internet dialects
I find this guy fascinating, those dead eyes in that handsomely bland face, slightly nasal voice and the overcompensating with the hands and the bobbing and moving from side to side. It can distract somewhat from his point, which is of the well, duh, variety but argued quickly. Sort of a refresher course for internet culture.
Credit where credit is due
I really like J. Caleb Mozzocco’s handy little guide to the characters in Guardians of the Galaxy and their creators:
And, if a lot of people make a lot of money and there are a lot of accolades being thrown about, then a lot of credit is going to go to a lot of people, from whoever cut those winning trailers to the designers and animators who got Rocket’s fur to look just so to Gunn himself. If comic book people get any credit, chances are it’s going to be as a collective (i.e. “Marvel”) or under a “Special Thanks” near the end of the end-credit scrawl (IMDb has comics writers Dan Abnett and Andy Lannning receiving writing credit; if that’s on the screen near the “written by” credit, then that’s awesome).
I especially like his idea of making a donation to The Hero Initiative equal to the cost of the movie ticket, to help that charity help out comics creators screwed over by the comics companies. Of course it would be better if the comics industry as a whole, and especially the Big Two, should treat their employees better and let the people who actually created the characters that are now making millions in movies for them have a little bit of the slice as well. Still, it was nice that Marvel arranged for a private screening of the movie for Bill Mantlo.
Remember Bill Mantlo? Marvel’s most prolific writer in the eighties, about the only one who could make something as uninspiring a toy as ROM into an actually readable, perhaps even good comic. When Shooter was ousted, Mantlo got less and less work, dropped out of comics to try and become a lawyer, then had a car accident that left him paralysed and penniless. Thanks to the Guardians movie, no less a newspaper than the New York Times wrote about Mantlo:
Like millions of moviegoers over the weekend, Bill Mantlo watched “Guardians of the Galaxy,” the Marvel Studios space adventure that sold more than $172 million in tickets worldwide in its first four days of release.
The film’s success is particularly meaningful to Mr. Mantlo, 62, a comic-book writer who helped create one of the movie’s main characters: the foul-tempered, gun-wielding anthropomorphic Rocket Raccoon.
Mr. Mantlo did not see “Guardians of the Galaxy” in a theater, but in his bed at the nursing home where he is being cared for after a 1992 accident in which he was hit by a car and left with brain damage.
Michael Mantlo, his brother, said Bill owed his health partly to Medicaid and partly to the grass-roots efforts of comics fans, who not only made donations on his behalf but also brought attention to his involvement in creating a character whose value to Marvel had suddenly mushroomed.
As Michael explained in a telephone interview, the focus on his brother has encouraged the studio to reconsider its obligations to him. “The more often Bill’s name gets mentioned, and the more often he is given public credit for something that he did, the easier it is for me to go to Marvel and say, ‘You might want to consider raising your offer.’ ”
It was only the negative publicity around the first Superman movie that finally got Siegel and Shuster a small part of the millions DC/Warner had made of their characters, it’s good to see Michael Mantlo taking advantage of that for his brother here. Bill Mantlo deserves it.