i-Anya

SMH is reporting today that Candace Bushnell’s latest chicklit book could also be made into a TV series, about 3 40s+ very successful career women! Ooohhh how exciting! Here’s a bit of the article:

New sex and the city?
August 26, 2005 - 9:31AM

Sex and the City author Candace Bushnell is in talks to turn her new book Lipstick Jungle, the story of three successful career women in New York, into a television series.

In an interview ahead of the September 6 publication of her latest novel, Bushnell said it was too early to discuss who might play the three main characters - a film producer, a fashion designer and a magazine executive.

Bushnell said Lipstick Jungle was a “pretty philosophical kind of book” about what happens when women like the thirty-something women of Sex and the City get into their forties and experience real success in their careers.

“There’s a lot of interest in Lipstick Jungle becoming a TV series but it’s just a little bit too soon, in a couple of weeks I could tell you all about it,” she added.

Yippee! Something I hope happens because, well… it is my birthday next week, and I am not going to tell you how old I will be but… “get into their forties and experience real success in their careers” … I am hoping the second half of that sentence won’t be too far away either :>

More female fan fiction, from the Sith chicks to the Star Wars chicks. (Not all ‘G’ rated)

Clair Hill reveals the truth behind Star Wars: it’s a chick flick! The tongue-in-cheek piece begins thus:

FOR 28 years boys, men, and men who act like boys, across the world have been waiting to find out the answer to one question. Just what was it that made Anakin Skywalker turn to the dark side and end up a wheezing piece of plastic? Was it greed, the thought of wearing snazzy, and slimming, black for the rest of his life or was he wowed by the chance for a penthouse on the Death Star? Nope, it was none of those things.

In fact he did it all for a chick. Skywalker lost everything, both his legs and arms, and got burnt from head to toe all because he wanted to keep his wife alive. Slightly soppy reasoning and it also sounds like something out of a Bronte novel.

Very amusing. On the SBS Movie Show earlier this week, Megan Spencer’s review commented that Revenge of the Sith actually managed well with the narrative pulling together all the threads from the other movies, but lacked somewhat in dialogue. Megan did say though that the characters were actually developed a little more than usual:

The actors also are allowed to be more emotional in their roles - Natalie Portman shines as the frail Padme and Christensen is convincing as he nears his Vader destiny, progressively becoming more menacing over the course of the film. And the pivotal scene – the one fans have been hanging out to see for 28 years where Lord Vader finally “arises” - is frankly superb, suitably referencing Frankenstein.

I guess the lack of female presence is one reason why there are so many female Star Wars fans writing such fantastic fan fiction. The story world is exciting and has such potential, and the gaps, which usually serve to silence marginal groups, are being used by fans to insert themselves into the fiction. I moved some of my links to fan fiction articles here. One of the very moving points that the girls in my study told me was how in some Star Wars forums they were persecuted for being female fans when it was supposed to be “a boy’s film”. Consequence: they created their own unique spaces to celebrate their fandom, write their fan fiction and create narrative storylines that allowed them to become a combination of both action chick and romantic heroine. (More about this in my Fan Fiction paper about narrative identities)

Reader, I Shagged Him is an article in the Australian Age about Charlotte Bronte. The article is actually a review of (apparently) a very bad biography written about Charlotte Bronte by Elizabeth Gaskell. Here’s a taste:

On the 150th anniversary of her death, it is time to rescue Charlotte Bronte. She has been chained, weeping, to a radiator in the Haworth Parsonage, Yorkshire, for too long. Enough of Gaskell’s fake miserabilia. Enough of the Bronte industry’s veneration of coffins, bonnets and tuberculosis. It is time to exhume the real Charlotte - filthy bitch, grandmother of chick-lit, and friend.

It’s a very refreshing look at the “real” Charlotte Bronte, but what amused me most was not the references to her sexual desires or how she was the “grandmother” of chicklit, but this quote about her role as a schoolteacher:

Charlotte continued in her position as a schoolteacher, which she had already held for a year. But she hated her profession and heartily despised the aggravating brats she was forced to teach.

As the children at Roe Head School did their lessons, she wrote in her journal: “I had been toiling for nearly an hour. I sat sinking from irritation and weariness into a kind of lethargy. The thought came over me: am I to spend all the best part of my life in this wretched bondage, forcibly suppressing my rage at the idleness, the apathy and the hyperbolic and most asinine stupidity of these fat-headed oafs and on compulsion assuming an air of kindness, patience and assiduity? Must I from day to day sit chained to this chair prisoned within these four bare walls, while the glorious summer suns are burning in heaven and the year is revolving in its richest glow and declaring at the close of every summer day the time I am losing will never come again? Just then a dolt came up with a lesson. I thought I should have vomited.”

I’m sorry, but as an ex-schoolteacher I think I am permitted to laugh - I had best not say more because I am a terrible person for finding this hysterical! Personally I decided that when I spent more time managing children than teaching them that it was time for me to change careers. And I am very very thankful that I did. How many teachers do you know that are old, cynical, spend their days shouting at kids, obviously hate teaching, but still do it anyway?! I didn’t want to turn into one of those teachers.

I am Academic Girl
Click on the picture below to read more:

Take the ‘What Kind of Girl Are You?’ quiz at CookingToHookup.com
I guess the results of this quiz are no surprise, though I was hoping to be independent artsy girl! Yes, I’ve been reading the chicklit blogs again - and they’re all pointing to this book called Cooking to Hook Up.

So, apparently boys, if you want to romance me, you need to take me on a ‘Hemingway Picnic’ with tapas and sangria… hmmm, that could work…

The Boyfriend List is a chicklit book by E. Lockhart. She also has a blog where she talks about the book, publishing and so on. She’s started a bit of a meme / challenge for people to write their lists and she’s publishing the funniest ones there. So, just for fun (I don’t think I can do an entire list, but…) here’s…

My First Boyfriend:

Rendall. In grade 6 I passed a note to my friend Louise saying: ‘I like Rendall’. She told Rendall and sent me a note back saying ‘I like you too’. We’d never really spoken to each other before the notes, but that’s when he officially became my boyfriend. The mark of an official boyfriend was to move our desks next to each other. The teacher had all of our desks arranged in groups by ability, and fortunately Rendall and I were both in the same group - we were called ‘The Free Group’ because our teacher had this radical teaching philosophy that the ‘bright’ kids in the class could be given a contract of work to do and sent off outside to work (we usually went to the gardens at the front of the school - the paths were lined with rose bushes and there were all sorts of scented shrubbery and flowers, not to mention the sound of the ocean close by - I loved grade 6!!). Rendall and I would go outside and sit by ourselves behind the bushes - no, we didn’t kiss - we did our mathematics work together.