The Cultural Gutter

geek chic with mad technique

"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars." -- Oscar Wilde

How Does Your Garden Grow?

I make a conscious attempt to not repeat myself with this column.  It would be easy to do:  my favourite writers are my favourites for a reason, and yay, they keep writing great books.  But I figure that wouldn’t be terribly interesting for anyone but me.  Besides, there are so many Romances published every year.  [...]

Love, Pain, and the Whole Damn Thing

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Oprah’s Book Club had a massive impact on the literary landscape, and I mean that in a good, non-dinosaur-killing way. The huge surge in the trade paperback market owes much to Oprah. I was working for Chapters when it went nova, and the number of times we were asked for “y’ know, that book Oprah [...]

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    A novelist takes revenge on writers he doesn’t like via wikipedia. Slate has the story. “Qworty’s edits undermine our trust in this great project. Qworty’s edits prove that Wikipedia’s content can be shaped by people settling grudges and acting out of spite and envy. Qworty alone, by his own account, has made 13,000 edits to Wikipedia. And Qworty, as the record will show, is not to be trusted.”

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    Diane Dooley writes about Mars’ need for women and ways to subvert it.

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    “[T]he mainstreaming of Jane Eyre as a vanilla romance, or even as an exploration of a woman’s pure, uncompromising, and uncomplicated (and religious! and feminist!) integrity, says all kinds of things about our inability to speak honestly about violence and sex.” More on Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, consent, sex and submission, here. (via K.A. Laity)

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    Comic Book Attic talks about comics about comics, with plenty of pages from Joe Simon and Jack Kirby’s The Newsboy Legion for your enjoyment.

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    At Babbler Dabbler, Briana discusses female cyborgs in Ghost In The Shell and in Alien: Resurrection.

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    Commander Chris Hadfield performs David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” in space.

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