The Cultural Gutter

hey, there's something shiny down there...

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

Good Books for Bad Days

By its very nature, a Romance is suffused with positive attitude.  The characters learn who they are, what kind of lives they want, and then proceed to go out and get them. The end result is effort rewarded (which is frankly more interesting than virtue rewarded, because virtuousness can be boring).  We like to read [...]

I Don’t Remember, I Don’t Recall

I literally didn

Robin McKinley’s The Hero and the Crown, a young adult fantasy novel from the early 1980s, always stood out in my memory as a formative read from childhood. Unfortunately I couldn’t really say what the book was about! Over the years, everything about it had faded. The Blue Sword, which McKinley wrote earlier but is [...]

Explaining Vampires

Fledgling was the last book she wrote

I don’t care that much for vampire stories. It’s a reflexive dislike that’s hard to define — basically, I’m not part of the target audience of the whole vampire fascination. Another pet peeve of mine is the amnesiac protagonist. What an absolutely lame excuse to explain everything to the audience! When I see that a [...]

  • Of Note Elsewhere

    A video interview with the Batman of Brampton, Ontario, Canada.

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    “[O]n Saturday night, when you were probably enjoying the discothèque with the other sophisticates, it was finally on: Deadly Spa.” More Deadly Spa here. (via @bethlovesbolly)

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    Kate Elliott asks, “How much sex is too much sex in your science fiction and fantasy?” (Thanks, James!)

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    NPR’s Monkey See blog shares a look at Adventure Time. “Adventure Time insists on emotional honesty.” (via @profmdwhite)

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    Recent shenanigans The Cultural Gutter has been involved in: The lost Drive-In Mob Movie S.P.E.C.T.R.E. on Monster Island; a transcript of the Shaitani Dracula tweetalong organized by The Mysterious Order of the Skeleton Suit; and the ongoing Twitter game/story, “Tonight On Mad Men.”

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    At Vern Reviews The Films Of Cinema, Outlaw Vern offers “one Seagalologist’s perspective on the ‘vulgar auteurism’ debate”: “The practitioners are trying to bring recognition to artists who they think are marginalized, but they’re accidentally creating a ranking of ‘vulgar auteur’ beneath ‘actual auteur.’ And that also shines a spotlight on the idea’s most glaring weakness: even the most establishment of the critical establishment have always worshipped directors who were at some point considered lowbrow–Hitchcock, Fuller, Peckinpah, DePalma.”

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  • Spilling into Twitter

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