Winter Solstice

Winter Solstice

A blessed Solstice to you all!

the anti-woman new Wicker Man

I saw the original Wicker Man in the mid-seventies. It was by far the most gut-clenching film I've ever seen. From here:

The Wicker Man is a cult 1973 British film combining thriller, horror and musical, directed by Robin Hardy and written by Anthony Shaffer. The film stars Edward Woodward, Christopher Lee, Diane Cilento, Ingrid Pitt and Britt Ekland. Paul Giovanni composed the soundtrack, a recording cited as a major influence on neofolk and psych folk artists.

The original Wicker Man film focused on an island population of pagans that included both men and women -- all of whom were engaged in determining what was to befall the "hero." I remember that the film was steeped in a ancient eroticism as the island population struggled to find their balance between all of those natural forces of opposites.

The new Wicker Man is devoid of male-female tension and eroticism of any kind; the pagan population is totally female (except for a few drones). The new version attributes only to women the chthonic spirit that the original movie rightly attributed to all people who followed the pagan ways. The unspoken message to us in these times is "watch out when those women take over" especially those females who find personal strength in the mythic histories of their gender. They are dangerous. They will destroy you.

The primal darkness in all of us is a powerful and dangerous force. The original Wicker Man captured that terrifying power. The new Wicker Man is a weakened and distorted version of what was once a truly horrifying tale.

(Side note: The star of the original Wicker Man was Edward Woodward. In the new version, the name of the "hero" is Edward Woodward.)

I don't know if you can rent the 1970s Wicker Man, but you can buy it here.

It's worth the price.

(cross posted at www.kalilily.net)

The Writer Ratio

People's perceptions of who reads what are definitely skewed. But what about authors on the publishing end? Do authors self-segregate into particular genres or do editors have some say in what kind of author get published?

I came across the Broad Universe Bean Count which has some very interesting statistics on how many women and men are published in the speculative fiction field. Of course, compared to the romance genre (where most men still work under pseudonyms or with female co-authors), science fiction and fantasy appears to be a bastillion of equality. But nonetheless, the numbers aren't that great. It's true that over the years, the percentage of women winning awards has gone up, but for most of them, the split is still not fifty-fifty.

Some other observations: Male reviewers prefer to review books authored by other males. The majority of stories in anthologies of speculative fiction are by male authors. However, is it possible that this is also a function of how many female speculative fiction writers are present in the first place? The membership of SFWA is not an accurate indicator of how many writers there are--you have to get published first before you can be a member. But according to Strange Horizons, about a third of their submissions were from female writers. I am very curious as to whether this is true or the exception compared to submission statistics to other magazines, agents, and editors.

And another question: Does the sex of the authors also influence what kind of readers are drawn to a genre? With the quality of writing being equal as well as the male/female ratio of writers in whatever genre--would this equalize the readership as well? Or will people still be too hung up on convention and formula to read a book for the story?

(Cross-posted at Syaffolee.)

The Museum of Kitschy Stitches

If you're searching for the perfect holiday gift, if you're having friends over a lot in the coming weeks and want a great conversation-starter, or if you just need to laugh until you're wetting your pants, check out The Museum of Kitschy Stitches: A Gallery of Notorious Knits, by Stitchy McYarnpants. Stitchy is the nom de plume of a Boston-area woman who likes to collect supremely tacky old knitting and crocheting patterns (mainly from the '60s and 70s). She illustrates a few dozen of them along with hilarious commentary in this book.

I saw her a couple of months ago at the local Barnes and Noble, where she was doing a booksigning. She'd brought along a trunkful of hideous creations collected from yard sales and ebay. I bought the book, and it's been generating an evening-ful of reminiscences every time someone has spotted it. At a book discussion I hosted last month, we spent more time discussing this than the book we'd all read. I brought it on a business trip recently and showed it to a female colleague in our hotel room. She insisted I take it to a dinner party hosted in the CEO's home to show his wife. It pretty nearly took over the whole evening.

Stitchy has a website: http://www.stitchymcyarnpants.com/
and I posted a blog entry about her booksignings, which has some pictures of Stitchy and of the treasures in her trunk: http://cicilycorbett.blogspot.com/2006/09/stitchy-mcyarnpants.html.