Message, Medium, Musing on Originality

I saw this print on Etsy. Someone had taken a vintage WWII poster and printed it on archival paper in modern colours. I thought it was amazing. I instantly wanted it on yellow. I even emailed the artist (who I thought must be brilliant) to ask if I could please feature a photo on my blog. (I got no reply.)Then I realized I was late to the party. The BBC had already written a story about this poster. Apparently it was printed up on the eve of WWII, but never distributed (why not?). A bookstore owner found one in a book, showed it to his wife and they framed it for their shop. They were inundated with requests for copies. They made a few. One was featured in a holiday gift guide and according to the article, "all hell broke loose". The print I find now on Etsy (from Lisbon), beside being different than the one I originally found on Etsy (from Kentucky), is not only not original, but is riding a wave that has only just reached my shore. BoingBoing blogged it in 2007! There are not only prints available, but now also keychains and pendants and t-shirts. (The t-shirt seller has a photo of a ragged allegedly original poster. You have to scroll down.)

Naturally, the abundance of copies has spawned alternate versions and parodies, like Keep Calm and Carry Guns.

If you're interested in the typeface, consensus seems to be that it was hand-lettered, possibly Johnson or Gill.

Now that I've seen so many version I can't even read it properly anymore - I'm seeing "Kelp Balm" etc. And in the fashion of an indie music snob, who must leap off the "bandwagon" once others are on, I don't want one so badly anymore. I want this this one instead:

There are other incredible posters from WWII (and WWI and others) at the Imperial War Museum in England.

Some more treasures from the IWM are Eat Greens For Health, 6 Reasons Why YOU Should Save and Bad Form in Dress. Can you tell I picked the ones that most apply to me?!

FYI - proceeds from the IWM shop go to support the museum's charitable works, so buy your kids this and teach them a thing or two. (Now, now, I know your children are very smart, keep calm).

Don't Get Me Wrong, Some of My Best Fiction is Science!

David Barnett present a good article (with a great title) about one of my personal bete-noirs: science fiction that refuses to be labeled so.

This annoyed me when Philip K. Dick moved from the Science Fiction section to the Fiction section at the store, 'cause he had "moved into the literary cannon", as my teacher at the time said. I call foul. His work is, was, and will always be science fiction - so why does he get "elevated" to the Fiction aisle, while Harlan Ellison stays in the Science Fiction section? (Did it have more to do with the movie "Minority Report" coming out at the time?)

What puts Oryx and Crake in Fiction? Is Margaret Atwood better than Octavia Butler? Puh-leeze.

Science Fiction, or SF, gets a bad rap because of it's hokey genre associations. Mystery novels, however, don't attract the same disrespect. You can write genre mystery or literary mystery, and your work will be in the mystery aisle with no one pooh-poohing it either way. But if you happen to have a science fiction slant to your novel, then your publisher will take great pains to keep it quarantined from the Science Fiction/Fantasy section. It's just snobbery and makes me grumpy. (As I mentioned a few posts ago, Jonathan Lethem's book was SF marketed as "literary" and still crap.)

I'd be quite happy to do away with most of the categories in the bookstore starting with "Books for Her" tables and "African-American" shelves. I don't like ghettos for people or for the written word.

Spider Robinson wrote an article once delineating between what he writes, "science fiction", and that other, silly genre stuff, "sci-fi". To me, it was a meaningless distinction. (Sorry, I can't find it to post.) IMO, the cream will rise to the top no matter what you call it, and people will gravitate to whatever stories they want in the moment. You could put Anna Karenina in the Romance section and no one's gonna mistake it for The Greek Tycoon's Virgin Wife!

There is a lot of good science fiction out there - Heinlein, Willis, Butler, Robinson, Varley, Hopkinson, and Ellison are just a few. So for "mainstream" authors to write science fiction and then shirk the label does a disservice to all the great SF out there. Why are we still at the not that there's anything wrong with that stage? If, as an author, writing SF is an aberration for you, it would be much classier to say, "There's a lot of excellent science fiction out there, and I'm proud of the company my book is in".

What do you think? Does it matter to you if it's called science fiction, sci-fi, or speculative fiction? If you had to get your Murakami fix from the SF section, would you be caught dead there? What about vampire fiction - is it going to demand its own section in the basement?

Politics, Not Chocolate

I can't blog in detail about the war Israel is fighting right now, because I become an emotional wreck. I usually avoid politics on this blog, because I am no good at debates (see, "emotional wreck", above), and I am not well-read or well-versed enough to enlighten you on anything.

Usually my mom says, "You must stay on top of the news", but today she said, "maybe you should watch a comedy".

Anyhow, my astute sister has a "sticky" post on her blog, Maspik Teruzim, where she has links to posts from other blogs (like IDF Spokesperson and The Muqata to keep you up-to-date on the Israeli news you do not hear from the mainstream media.

For what it's worth, I was born in Be'er Sheva.


Israeli flag courtesy of 4 International Flags