I’m Somebody’s Sunshine!
Thanks a lot to Bia Helvetti for nominating my blog for a Sunshine Award. I am very new to the blogosphere (just hit 1,000 views yesterday!) and Bia was one of my very first followers. Her blog is all about story-telling and I’ve been enjoying her stories and our dialog so far. Check out her blog, Child of the Island, here!
So the way the Sunshine Award works is that now that I displayed the logo and gave a shout out to the person who nominated me, it is my job to tell you 10 fun things about myself and then share the love with 10 other blogs I enjoy. So here goes!
First, a few things about me.
1. I think puns are the highest form of comedy and a clever play on words will keep can keep me giggling for days. For instance, my toy poodle is named Gadget (because he’s a toy, get it?)
2. I buy movies based on what I call its rewatchability rating. I am not interested in keeping movies around unless I plan to watch them at least 5 times.
3. A spoonful of sweetened condensed milk in a cup of rich black coffee is pretty much like heaven. (By the way, if you are ever confronted with a yuckily bitter cup of coffee you can add a little shake of salt to it and the bitterness disappears and leaves just the coffee flavor behind.)
4. When I want to try cooking a new food I read at least 4 different recipes and follow none of them. I prefer to combine the best parts of each and make something new and uniquely mine.
5. I used to work in a lending library in a science museum and it was my job to hang around and wait for people to ask me questions about natural history. My favorite encounter was with an 8-year-old who was afraid of werewolves and his mom wanted me to provide a scientific explanation for why werewolves aren’t real.
6. I originally planned to be an art major in college but I ultimately went for Cultural Anthropology. I am very grateful for that education and the way it has broadened my perspective and understanding of the people, past and present, who populate our world.
7. When in my teens I thought I was going to be an artist or writer, but I changed trajectory in college. Now I am really enjoying a return to wordsmithing on this blog and I am working on a novel as well. I am not sure exactly what to call the genre I am writing in because it is one part science and one part magic, because after all, magic is what we call things we don’t yet understand. So for brevity’s sake I just call it Steampunk.
8. I really enjoy making crafts, not just the finished product but creating craft projects for others. In my museum work I have created/adapted several crafts to go along with programming themes and special events. I am looking forward to doing more of that for the blog so stay tuned for more tutorials like my Christmas ornaments.
9. My dad says that my mother and I must both have buttons in our butts because every time we sit down to play cards or a game we start to sing.
10. I am going on an archaeological dig in Greece this summer as an object photographer.
Now, 10 more blogs that add a little sunshine to my life (in no particular order):
1. Andrew Knighton Writes– Andrew is an author who writes insightful posts about writing, reading and life. I mostly read his posts via my wordpress reader but I also really like the theme for his site.
2. Hovercraftdoggy– “Art, architecture, design and photography blog- for your daily dose of inspiration, creativity and beauty.” Whenever one of these posts shows up in my blogroll I know I am in store for some interesting images. Recently there was a really interesting gallery of cosplayers in costume but in their own homes. Very cool.
3. History with a twist– David Lawlor is a journalist who enjoys writing about obscure figures in history. I ran across his entertaining blog when I was looking for information about Emperor Norton (America’s one and only monarch), but ended up reading lots of short articles about things like the transvestite in Custer’s army and covert military sniper trees.
4. Live to write – Write to live– This is a nice blog about writing for writers based out of New Hampshire.
5. Michael Bradley Time Traveler– This is a super fun blog under the “humor and observations” umbrella. I seldom see a preview of a post without looking at the whole thing. Two highlights of this week was an article about how cow farts are destroying the environment and Chinese character tattoo fails. He does not write all the content himself but I like the articles he brings together.
6. MUSE-aholic– all things surreal, psychedelic and quirky in visual art. This site is devoted to art in the extreme. I was mesmerized by the recent conceptual photography post.
7. STEAMED! A steampunk writing blog. I really enjoyed Twas the Night Before Christmas with airship pirates this week.
8. ILLUSTRATION AGE– I am a very visual person so blogs with lots of images always appeal to me. This one features work by many different illustrators.
9. Traveler’s Steampunk Blog– This steamy blog has fun pictures of cosplay and podcasts about the Steampunk scene.
10. Old Design Shop– free vintage images to inspire and add to your creations.
Who adds sunshine to your day?
Victorian Fairy Spotters
Victorian Fairy Spotters by James M. Bordeau
by James M. Bordeau
I was strolling around downtown Ann Arbor, MI yesterday and I ran across a series of whimsical and beautiful pieces by James (Jim) M. Bordeau in the WSG gallery on Main Street. He has created several brass and glass contraptions which he calls “Victorian Fairy Spotters,” as well as one “Steampunk Wand” (the curly one in the corner). I love the notion of a special tool just for finding fairies, and it made me think of one of my all time favorite books, Lady Cottington’s Pressed Fairy Book. I would have loved to handle them but it was an art gallery, not a store, so I resisted the urge to touch. The lighting made it difficult to take photos of the ones lying flat without casting shadows so I could only get a detail of the one above. The spotters were between approximately 8-14 inches in length. I haven’t been able to find much more information about the artist, but there is a very limited profile here.
Steampunk Book Review: The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack
Book cover
I recently moved to a small town, but I had high hopes for the public library because there are two colleges nearby. I had not yet compiled my Steampunk book list, so I went in mostly in search of classic science fiction to get me started on exploring the genre from its roots. But, as I combed the shelves Mark Hodder‘s The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack jumped out at me. I had never heard of the author or Spring Heeled Jack, but calling it a “strange affair,” plus the font on the spine told me I was probably looking at the right time period. I have never realized how much a font could draw me in before and I am so glad I pulled it off the shelf!
The first thing I did before I started to read was look up Spring Heeled Jack. There is a long article about the whole history of sightings here, but basically he was a figure that popped in and out of the public eye during much of the 19th century and into the 20th. He was spotted all over England and eventually made his way to the United States as well. What Mark Hodder does is take all of the historical facts, including names and dates, and builds a new narrative to bring the whole saga together.
In addition to Jack, Hodder also co-opts several of the “Great Victorians” as heroes and villains. The protagonists are Sir Richard Francis Burton and Algernon Charles Swinburne. I was familiar with Burton and his involvement in the debate over the true source of the Nile, but my knowledge ended there. Swinburne was a Victoria-era poet with a taste for the bottle and the teachings of the Marquis de Sade. They seem an unlikely duo but they make an excellent team in this action-packed mystery.
The year is 1861, but the world is filled with things that should not yet have come to pass. Flying armchairs (called rotochairs) help the populace get around and the postal system is composed of foul-mouthed parakeets that have been genetically designed to deliver messages. Queen Victoria was a but a brief blip on the historical radar because she was assassinated only 3 years after becoming queen, leaving the Libertines (who debate whether murder is the ultimate act of individual expression) and Technologists (whose experiments with genetics are way beyond the pale) to vie for social power.
Burton has just finished a night of heavy drinking with some pals and is accosted by a strange man with blue flames framing a devilish face with glowing red eyes. The apparition gives Burton a savage beating all the while warning him to leave the red-eyed man alone. The encounter starts Burton on an adventure that will challenge his mind, body and very sense of self.
I would absolutely recommend this book to anyone who enjoys Steampunk stories. I will definitely be using examples from this novel to help explain the genre to others because there are several re-imagined technologies and “punked” figures from history making appearances. The writing style is engaging and the plot was compelling, so I was very happy to find out there are more books starring this daring duo. You can find a full list with descriptions here.
Next on my reading list: Morlock Night by K. W. Jeter.
Sir Reginald’s Marvellous Organ
Another winner from Sir Reginald.
Mad scientists, airships and class: the politics of Steampunk by Rjurik Davidson
Rjurik Davidson is an author who tackled this topic in 2012 an Australian magazine called Overland. I ended up reading this one because it was listed on Cate Russel-Cole‘s Steampunk Inspiration and How-To for Writers as “a controversial article by people who just don’t get the concept of fantasy” and I absolutely agree with that as an assessment of the literary critics quoted by Davidson, but not of Davidson himself. (Though I don’t agree with Davidson that Steampunk has reached its zenith and is in decline.)
I’ve included the first few paragraphs and a link to the main article below. I’d love to hear what people think of the article, so please come and report back by commenting on this post.
“The subgenre of Steampunk – that subgenre of speculative fiction set in a fantastical Victorian era filled with airships, mad scientists and mechanical replicas of people or animals – may well have reached its zenith. With the new Sherlock Holmes movies, The Golden Compass or Scorsese’s Hugo, it seems possible that the initial burst of zest and inspiration will now settle into a more subtle ticking over of novels and films as the subgenre colonises the cultural spaces still open to it (Heart of Darkness steampunk? Opium-war Steampunk?).
For some time a debate has been raging about the politics of the subgenre.
For some, Steampunk is a reactionary nostalgia for past that never happened. In a review last year, author and critic Adam Roberts claimed that Steampunk is a perfect example of Jameson’s claim that the culture of postmodernism means a loss of any sense of historicity. For Roberts, Steampunk is ‘a studied dismantling of the consecutiveness of history in the service of a particular set of styles and fashions.’ He continues:
the appeal of the genre is in the way it finesses the past into the present. This is an aesthetic strategy it shares with Heroic Fantasy (or much of it) as a mode: a disinclination to encounter the past as past. Most twenty-first century representations of a notional “past” are based on the idea that people in the nineteenth century (or, in post-Tolkienian Fantasy, the middle ages) were basically people exactly like us, and therefore people with whom it requires no effort from the reader to identify.
According to Roberts, Steampunk jettisons a sense of the logic of history. Fundamentally, the subgenre is an irrationalism.
Others have mounted similar arguments. A couple of years ago, science fiction author Charles Stross claimed on his blog that most steampunk refused to face up to the Nineteenth Century as it really was. In that world, Stross claimed:
Life was mostly unpleasant, brutish, and short; the legal status of women in the UK or US was lower than it is in Iran today: politics was by any modern standard horribly corrupt and dominated by authoritarian psychopaths and inbred hereditary aristocrats: it was a priest-ridden era that had barely climbed out of the age of witch-burning, and bigotry and discrimination were ever popular sports: for most of the population starvation was an ever-present threat. I could continue at length. It’s the world that bequeathed us the adjective “Dickensian”, that gave us a fully worked example of the evils of a libertarian minarchist state, and that provoked Marx to write his great consolatory fantasy epic, The Communist Manifesto. It’s the world that gave birth to the horrors of the Modern, and to the mass movements that built pyramids of skulls to mark the triumph of the will. It was a vile, oppressive, poverty-stricken and debased world and we should shed no tears for its passing (or the passing of that which came next).”
Read the whole article here.
Steampunk Stitchery from Urban Threads
I was doing some Pinterest trawling for inspiration for a Steampunk mask and I ran across a tutorial for a beautiful Venetian-style lace mask at http://www.UrbanThreads.com (pictured above). I don’t have the equipment to machine stitch the lace myself, but I started to poke around the site and found a plethora of hand-stitchable design packs for as little as $4. You can check out the whole sets of hand-stitching designs here and machine-stitching designs here.
There are a variety of tutorials for DIY Steampunk on the site, many of which could be adapted for the non-embroiderer. Here are pics of some of my favorites, but you can find all of their tutorials here.
Steampunk Sourcebook: City of Ember (2008)
Like The Golden Compass, City of Ember skirts the edge of “true” Steampunk, but I have seen it on several Steampunk movie countdowns (though interestingly not on book lists.)
Streets of Ember
The story centers on two teenagers, Lina Mayfleet (Saoirse Ronan) and Doon Harrow (Harry Treadaway). We meet them on their Assignment Day when their entire future careers get determined by the luck of the draw. Doon is supposed to become a messenger, but he trades that choice job away to Lina in return for a chance to work under the city and gain access to the generator that supplies the lifeblood of Ember: electricity. Because Ember lies deep below the ground, safe from the terror that took place 241 years ago. Without the generator the entire population would be plunged into total darkness and the electric lights mounted all over the city is there only refuge from the abyss beyond.
But lately, the lights have begun to flicker.
Lina is delighted to become a messenger and dives into her duties with gusto. She is the grownup in her tiny family, which consists of a little sister named Poppy with a propensity for putting things in her mouth and a dear (though slightly crazy) grandmother who spends her days taking thread out of clothing and spooling it for reuse (no on has had new clothes for over a century). In the depths of a closet, Poppy uncovers a mysterious metal box that had belonged to a former mayor and proceeds to gnaw on the contents.
Lina and Doon
Lina recognizes the writing on the pages as coming from the revered and little understood “builders” who created Ember and, with the help of Doon, attempts to recreate the documents from the chewed mess. To their shock and amazement, they seem to be telling of a way out of Ember, and out of the danger of starvation and perpetual darkness. Can Lina and Doon overcome the rampant corruption in their government to discover the truth and lead the citizens of Ember to salvation?
Some fun facts and context:
۞ The movie is based on a novel called The City of Ember that was released in 2003. You can read an interview with the author here about the novel’s tenth anniversary this year.
۞ DuPrau wrote 2 sequels, The People of Sparks (2004) and The Diamond of Darkwood (2008), as well as a prequel called the Prophet of Yonwood (2006) that tells of the cause of the apocalypse that led to the building of Ember.
۞ The City of Ember was made into a graphic novel in 2012 by Niklas Asker.
۞ Harry Treadaway (Doon), most recently appeared in the 2013 Lone Ranger with Johnny Depp. Saoirse Ronan (Lina) has lent her voice as well as her face to several films and is best known for her roles in Atonement and The Lovely Bones.
۞ The film includes a few major changes from the book. First off, giant mutated animals. In the book, Doon keeps a caterpillar to observe it and is utterly fascinated by insects because the people of Ember never see things from above ground. In the film he finds a moth is easily 2 feet across, upping the visual ante but not staying true to the novel. There is also a completely terrifying star nosed mole as large as a hippopotamus that delivers the come-uppence to Ember’s corrupt mayor (played by Bill Murray), which never appeared in the book. Likely this is a reference to the nuclear cause of the apocalypse in the Prophet of Yonwood and mutations that could follow. Personally, I did not like the change, I thought the book was already great without the novelty.
۞ The other big change, which is probably the reason the movie ends up in Steampunk lists and the book does not, is the amount of gadgetry. In the movie, Doon’s father (Tim Robbins) is an inventor and Rube Goldberg type machines cook their breakfast, while in the book he runs a shop populated by old shoe heels and rusty nails. There are also scenes that take place in the huge industrial center under the city, but the tech is all there to create electricity so it is not very Steampunk in the end. But the gritty, dark ambiance and added mechanical gizmos definitely make you feel like you are in the past rather than the distant future.
۞ The set was built in the same shipyard the Titanic was, and many of the interiors that were built were never used in a single shot but add to the depth of the visual story. Check out the clips below the gallery for more windows into the underground city.
Click on the thumbnails for larger images.
For Whom the Gear Turns 