starlady38

Which five of my 99 icons do you like best?

oursin

I mentioned these (which appeared between 1984 and 1990) in a recent post, but it has been some time since I'd read them (there is a list of titles here, and dates ) and I wasn't sure how well they'd held up.

Following a reread, my verdict is, not very well, definitely dated, and certain elements of ughness I hadn't noticed before, or which perhaps only become really apparent if you read all 7 books within a space of weeks.

Naturally one likes the idea of an ass-kicking black female amateur detective, and I think that concept initially had enough oomph to carry them, along with the open relationship our heroine has with her bisexual jewel-thief boyfriend (and a recurrent second-string relationship with a black American PI who features in several of the books). Because we don't get anything like enough of that.

However, one can see that as the 80s drew on this could have all got quite problematic but the texts do not register any concerns.

And she does have friendships with women, in fact Penny Black starts with her investigating the murder of her friend Marfa, a sweet if bubbleheaded model and in a couple of other cases she is drawn into a case by a woman friend.

But this time round, I was thinking 'hmmm - a touch of blaxploitation?' Penny may be black but she is very, very privileged - her father is an African ambassador to the UN, her mother is an eccentric British aristocrat, she owns a house in Chelsea. Although she is deeply concerned over poverty and suffering in Africa (this is where the profits from the jewel thefts end up going, in a rather convoluted fashion), the crimes she investigates take place pretty much in high society, among the glitterati, the aristocracy and the super-rich in Britain, the USA and Europe.

The sassy banter and the snappy one-liners seem somewhat thin and forced now, too much striving towards Chandlerian phrase-making.

Penny's not actually that competent as an investigator, or maybe it's more an issue of the plotting being a bit loose and haphazard.

Homophobia goggles on: there seem to be rather too many camp-caricature gay men in book after book.

Also, at least one too many instances of the murderer being a woman motivated by emotional reasons gone to psycho lengths.

Possibly they fail through not going all the way into the fantasy-world of Modesty Blaise or the elegant mannerism of Sarah Caudwell, but trying to keep some kind of precarious toe-hold on something resembling real life.

Anyway, unsatisfactory: I wouldn't even classify them under 'guilty pleasures', because I found them a good deal less pleasurable than I remembered.

And I'm taking Penny Wanawake off the list of fictional sleuths I would like to have beside me in a predicament.

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dinosaurcomics

http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=1616

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December 15th, 2009: So um hey OCTOPODS ARE USING TOOLS NOW Thanks to everyone who wrote in to warn me!! Only one emoticon can capture my feelings right now: >:| – Ryan

oursin

Seen all over this morning, LJ enforces gender binary (but appears to have backtracked, at least in terms of public visibility?).

And not only is this generally enforcing a binary choice on what are More Complicated situations -

I know that when I first signed up I didn't particularly want to indicate with any definiteness that I was female, even though this is probably fairly deducible from list of interests, etc (though those 'what gender is your prose' tests, about which I am yay dubious, tend to tag me as mostly M, anyway).

This was before the ads thing, but generally to eschew potential area of unwanted hassle along gender-related lines.

And it has been noted that Facebook gives the gurleez targetted diet ads and so forth (they also do age-targetting, grrr, grrrr). And I would rather not log on one morning to find that my LJ has become pink and sparkly with hearts dotting the i's..

I still have a few Dreamwidth invite codes, which I have not yet thrown into the common pot, if anyone would like one.

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vilakins

Peter Jackson was interviewed tonight on Campbell Live and spoke about The Lovely Bones, which I have no intention of seeing--or reading. I was more interested in his other films.

He talked about The Hobbit and how someone took a copy of script to Ian McKellen, who read it and liked it, and the copy was promptly destroyed (not that the plot is exactly a secret). He said that he'd like to get Cate Blanchett and Hugo Weaving back to play Galadriel and Elrond.

And then they asked him about Dambusters. Filming starts next year and Jackson has ten Lancaster bomber--yes, ten of those big babies--in a warehouse. I'm looking forward to both of these films.

vilakins

Survey thingy from bigdamnxenafan.

( 16 questions )