Tuesday News: Malaysian pulp fiction, British Library digitizes sound recordings, ‘cup of tea’ consent video, and Diana Gabaldon interview
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Malaysians Seek Escape in Pulp Fiction as Government’s Grip Tightens – This is such an interesting piece (putting aside some of the usual pejorative language around mass market fiction, especially that aimed at women) about the rise of a new species of pulp fiction in Malaysia that coincides with more government censorship and less societal freedom. In public spaces, books like 50 Shades are officially banned, and newspapers are heavily monitored, but many of these new books are pushing edges that are not even discernible under the current governmental regime and reactionary social trends.
When Anis Suhaila wants a cheap thrill, she turns to Instagram and Twitter to learn about the latest Malaysian paperback releases. But she does not buy them in ordinary bookstores here, some of which do not carry the titles she is most interested in.
Instead, she usually heads to one of the “pop up” book markets that appear occasionally, almost randomly, on the streets in Kuala Lumpur to find what she is looking for: risqué tales of crime, horror and gritty young love that are written in Malay and aimed at young Muslim Malaysians.
The writing can be patchy, but it is fresh and edgy, said Ms. Anis, 24, a manager at an education company, adding that the stories sometimes touch on “something that is relevant” to Malaysia’s political scene. She devours four books a month, she said, the most recent a tale of a boy who can see ghosts.
This new-style pulp fiction, much of it by first-time authors who got their start blogging, is the product of an independent, irreverent publishing industry that has sprung up over the past four years and has tapped into a desire for escapism among younger Malaysians as their country has become more socially conservative. –New York Times
The British Library Announces Plan to Digitize and Share 500,000 “At Risk” Rare and Unique Sound Recordings Online – As the British Library continues to digitize major collections, they are now tackling sound recordings, as part of the Save our Sounds project. More than 500,000 recordings will be digitized and made available for public listening, including:
- Famous writers reading their own works, including Lord Alfred Tennyson, Sylvia Plath and James Joyce
- Radio broadcasts going back to the 1930s, including Radio Luxembourg and long-defunct pre-war stations such as Radio Lyons and Radio Normandie
- A recording which helped to save the bittern from extinction in the UK, as well as many other sounds of British wildlife, coastlines and nature
- A huge corpus of slang, dialects and accents recordings of every social class and regional area of the UK, from the 1950’s Survey of English Dialects collection which reveals just how far our voices have changed over the past century, to the BBC Voices archive containing the diverse voices of contemporary 21st century Britain
- Previously unheard musical performances and plays, including Laurence Olivier playing Coriolanus in 1959, and full recordings of theatre productions going back 40 years
- Life story interviews with people from all walks of life, from Kindertransport refugees, to second wave feminists and people with a range of disabilities –InfoDOCKET
Understand Consent With the Help of Stick Figures and a Cup of Tea – You may have seen this great piece that started as a post defining consent by Rockstar Dinosaur Pirate Princess, and then was animated with stick figures and handy narration. It’s a pretty handy, straightforward primer on sexual consent (although I suspect, like everything else, there are a lot of people who won’t get the analogy, for any number of reasons), and Jane’s great op-ed post today on paradigm differences and rape fantasy in Romance reminded me that I had not posted the story yet. The narrative begins with this simple suggestion for those who don’t ‘get’ consent:
If you’re still struggling, just imagine instead of initiating sex, you’re making them a cup of tea. –Good Magazine & Rockstar Dinosaur Pirate Princess
Outlander Author Diana Gabaldon on the Season-One Finale, and What Changes to the Book Were Hard to Swallow – Last week I stumbled into a really interesting Twitter discussion about the purpose of the rape and torture of Jamie in Outlander, and although I don’t watch the series, when I saw this interview with Gabaldon, I thought it might be informative for fans of the series interested in the way the books have been adapted to television.
The show incorporated a POV change so that we could see some of it through Jamie’s eyes and experiences, which changed how we learned about the extent of the rape and torture by Black Jack in the end. How did you feel about this change?
I wrote the book in first person because it was my first book, and it was easier. I thought that shift works very effectively because this is a visual medium. I understand the visual media very well as I used to write comic books for Walt Disney, and I’ve written a graphic novel. How you carry a story in pictures is different than how you do it in text. In the book, Jamie is telling her little bits and pieces ex post facto about what he went through. He’s telling very vivid, horrifying little details, but it still doesn’t have quite the impact of seeing those little vivid horrifying details. Imagine how boring a scene [would be] where the camera comes in, and it is focused on their faces as he is brokenly spilling these little bits to her. If you aren’t seeing anything but their faces for 15 minutes, you’d be bored. The way they did it is much more effective in terms of the visual medium.–Vulture
