Archive for the “Reading” Category
US-based toy retailer Toys"R"Us has been reprimanded for gender discrimination following a complaint filed by a group of Swedish sixth graders about the store’s 2008 Christmas catalogue. According to the youngsters, the Toys"R"Us Christmas catalogue featured “outdated gender roles because boys and girls were shown playing with different types of toys, whereby the boys were portrayed as active and the girls as passive”. Thumbing through the catalogue, 13-year-old Hannes Psajd explained that he and his twin sister had always shared the same toys and that he was concerned about the message sent by the Toys"R"Us publication. “Small girls in princess stuff…and here are boys dressed as super heroes. It’s obvious that you get affected by this.” – Read the full article at The Local
Hey Koes, it’s a pony! ;) Photo made by Cheatara
I’m well aware of what kind of comments will be posted by some of our readers but I don’t really care. I’m so sick of these stupid gender clichés. You like boys to be “boyish”? Well, good for you but that doesn’t mean they want to be boyish just because you or the society expects them to be. We should get rid of the whole concept of acting masculine or feminine. The case above isn’t really special for Sweden but I’m glad to see that this Swedish attitude comes to Germany too (even if some Swedes might already be annoyed by all the political correctness ;p).
UPDATE: Boing Boing had a post about this too earlier today and the first 2 comments there made my day. Sorry America, you just got pwned ;o) On a more serious note: Stop thinking of teenagers as brainless mutants, kthx.
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Rarely has a book for young adults been so eagerly anticipated as Tricks of the Trade, the third book by the popular young author Floortje Zwigtman. She understands better than anyone else that adolescents aren’t looking for a neat book of instructions for the future. These are stories that tell it like it is, historical novels about surviving in conditions where the laws and morals of polite society no longer seem to apply.
Adrian Mayfield is born in the poor East End of Victorian London, the son of a pub landlord and a seamstress. However, a different career lies in store for him. It’s not a scenario that the street-hardened lad could have envisaged: a wealthy older gentleman falls in love with him and takes him home. The man is Augustus Trops, a second-rate artist from Flanders. He introduces Adrian to the flamboyant circle of Oscar Wilde, where he meets other men like Augustus and finds work as an artist’s model. The work pays well and he meets the most interesting and powerful people of his time. Adrian is very pleased with his new life at first. Everything appears to be going swimmingly. Until, that is, London’s beau monde decamps to Europe for the summer holidays, as happens every year. Adrian, by now accustomed to luxury, ends up without any income.
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In a male brothel he discovers the flip side of his new life in the twofaced London of the nineteenth century, where gossip, blackmail and brutal police violence make homosexuality a highly dangerous way of life. Then he faces the choice of whether to put his integrity and his friendships on the line so that he doesn’t have to live in a mouldy, cockroach-infested garret.
Tricks of the Trade is an intense book that is difficult to put down. It draws the reader in without resorting to cheap sensationalism. This is a result of Zwigtman’s unique ability to combine critical distance with open intimacy. The raw, breathtaking writing of this sharp, historical portrait really makes the reader think about life. Zwigtman is one of the great modern writers of books for young adults.
This is the first book in a series of three and was published in Dutch under the title “Schijnbewegingen” and in German as “Ich, Adrian Mayfield”. There is no English translation yet because all interested publishers asked the author to removed some of the detailed sex scenes considering the age of the target audience but Zwigtman refused to do so.
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CocoRosie Week Part I
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There was a time when nothing was unlit
When only the gold of my heart would give the time
And then I was strong, but I have lost the flower and the innocence
In this setting I feel lost, nothing makes sense anymore
But I still have a few dreams and as long as I’m given enough time
I’ll go and caress their lips
If time is running too fast
I feel like I can do it
I am a child
I refuse time
I watch the sky and this rainbow alleviates myself
I watch the light and then I wander in my dreams
Forget the time
Keep being a child
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Lyrics by CocoRosie, Translation by Chimel. Photos found by Pink Neptune and Nyneue
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Soaked Greed in a dark Night, it happened.
Gently brought to Death, Entreaty fulfilled with Sorrow.
Unsealed will be the Truth in the Eyes of my Soul.
Full of Shame, full of Disgust, averted from myself.
Nie mehr soll ich dich in den Armen halten.
Nie mehr deine Hände streicheln.
O Geliebter, O du mein Stern, dem ich folgen wollt.
O meine Liebe, versiegt im Sande des Wahns.
Embrace me tight!
Hold me tight! Hold me tight!
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Posted by Josh~ in Articles, Reading, tags: UK
An ‘enterprising and creative’ 17-year-old with Asperger syndrome convinced British aviation officials that he was launching a new airline. Posing as a visionary global entrepreneur — his email .sig files read ‘American Global Group, 35 Countries, 22 Languages, One Team’ — he used phony websites and human engineering to arrange meetings with airport directors and book a local appearance for the 300-person US cast of ‘High School Musical.’
Don’t get a teen boy bored. He might come up with funny ideas.
Tait, who pretended he was in his twenties, even flew to Jersey to attend a 1½-hour long meeting with the director of its airport. Their talks were considered promising enough for a further meeting to be arranged, which was due to be held next week. Other air industry bosses found themselves dealing by telephone or e-mail with Tait’s fellow executives, David Rich and Anita Dash, who proposed to launch a cut-price Channel Islands-based airline servicing most of Europe… "Some of the things he said were the sort of things that were indicative that there might have been some substance to his claims," said Coupar. "If they were real then there would have been opportunities for us to expand our business and that’s not the sort of thing we are going to ignore."
Tait also made approaches, with varying levels of success, to other airlines, including Titan Airways and Aer Arann. When he made contact with Jersey airport, his patter was convincing enough to effect a 90-minute face-to-face meeting with Julian Green, the airport’s director, who said last night: "Jersey airport can confirm it has had discussions with Adam Tait over recent weeks about an ambitious network of services between Jersey, the UK and Europe. Full article at Times Online (Story via Boing Boing, Photo via Kloland)
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Posted by Josh~ in Books, Reading, tags: Germany
When I was about 14 I carried a book with me for weeks, if not months, because I just couldn’t let the protagonist go away. It must have been the first time that I really fell in love with a book. Welcome to The Center of the World…
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A coming of age story set in a remote mountain range in Germany; Steinhöfel weaves the elegant tale of a seventeen-year-old boy named Phil. Although the novel does deal with Phil’s sexuality, it primarily illustrates his tumultuous relationship with his unconventional mother, Glass, and reclusive twin sister, Dianne. From the birth of Phil and Dianne by their teenage mother in the prologue of the story, the family occupies a large estate, called Visible, on the outskirts of a socially repressive and ultra-conservative town. The town not only discriminates against Glass because of her promiscuous nature, but they transfer their criticisms to her two children. Therefore, throughout Phil’s childhood, he feels ostracized despite his mother’s advice to ignore the harshness of the "Little People," or the people who inhabit the town. Phil does discover refuge in the form of a young and vivacious girl named Kat, who becomes his one and only ally. However, despite Phil’s seeming acceptance of his sexuality, he does not believe that his family or his friends would approve of his relationship with a charming and attractive runner, named Nicholas, who becomes his first boyfriend. The novel is written in a first-person narrative with intermittent flashbacks that describe the roots of Phil’s personality.
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Steinhöfel’s greatest accomplishment is that he portrays homosexual relationships as the equivalent of heterosexual relationships. By demonstrating that the journey toward self-discovery of a young gay man is the same as that of a young straight man, Steinhöfel shows that discriminatory views on homosexuality are completely unfounded. In addition to vividly depicting Visible’s breathtaking surroundings, his crisp and graceful prose provides insight into Phil’s complex thoughts and emotions. Satisfying the reader with Phil’s self-discovery, Steinhöfel does an excellent job of balancing the scales between satisfaction and misery, having and wanting. By the end of the novel, one aches with a confused combination of happiness and grief. Steinhöfel and his novel deserve every word of praise!
English ISBN: 0440229324 | German ISBN 3551353158
English Version at Amazon | German Version at Amazon
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More about Arthur Rimbaud
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Destroyer 09 is out and on its way to the first lucky costumers. Here’s what Karl has to say about his newest baby:
I’m immensily proud to announce Destroyer 09. Why? Because of Nicola, a Swedish amateur photographer who took loads and loads of photos of beautiful boys in Naples in the 1970s. Some of them were published in the gay magazines of the time, but most of them were simply buried in Nicola’s drawers. Until now. In a 22-page double feature, we publish the best of Nicola’s photos in colour and black and white, along with an interview with Nicola himself, where he talks about the uniqueness of Naples and how it all suddenly changed to the worse in the 80s. I cannot enough emphasize the following: You do not want to miss this! D9 is the hottest issue of Destroyer since D2, which featured the 10-page interview with Cosidetto and was sold out only weeks after the release. D2 was printed in 1000 copies, D9 will be printed in 2000 copies. However, be warned that they might go very fast.
As usual, you can purchase Destroyer at Ilovemags.com!
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Photo made by Gottfried Helnwein | Found by pinkneptune
If you ever have the chance to learn a new language… use it! You might think you’ll be fine with your own language but believe me, there are wonderful, amazing things waiting for you to be discovered. Things which will never get translated into your language. French poetry, German music, Swedish films or Slovenian fagzines ;) You got your life to explore the world around you and a part of it is to discover how different things can be expressed in other languages than your own. Learning a language is something you will never regret, trust me.
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Britain has an unhealthy Relationship with its Children
As far as annoying, hackneyed phrases go, ‘political correctness gone mad’ takes the number one slot. But every so often you come across a verifiable fact which prompts you to blurt it out, unwillingly, in the same way you yell when you stub your toe. Health and safety regulations affecting children’s playtime usually do the job. Ashburton Junior School, for instance, managed to provoke a barrel-load of Daily Mail bile when it ordered children not to play in the playground 15 minutes before class in case they get hurt last year. Today, local government leaders have called on parents not to wrap their children up in cotton wool, in a carefully planned press campaign designed to rid the public of the idea that local councils are responsible for the layers of health and safety regulations which affect children.
It’s insane and hugely depressing that we even have to talk about this. It goes without saying that children’s playgrounds should have ‘adventure equipment’ –tree houses and zip wires and the like – without councils having to churn out proud press releases to go with them. But we do have to talk about it, and it all stems from our strange and unhealthy relationship with childhood.
As a country, we have a very weird relationship with children. We have turned them into a depository for our better nature. All children are now considered innocence and perfection rolled into one. While we – adults and young adults (now known commonly as hoodies) – are the opposite: evil-minded and untrustworthy. Obviously, adults are all potentially dangerous. But we have started to consider them as if they are innately dangerous. For the record, children are usually not angels. They are, in fact, as cruel and manipulative as any adult. They’re just cuter. Some modern psychology even sees them as far less moral than adults, their social brains having not been formed yet.
Read on…
In the 19th century, a German philosopher called Ludwig Feuerbach had an interesting theory on God. He said humans have a tendency to ascribe all their best qualities – compassion, kindness, love – to God and keep all their worst qualities – selfishness, hatred – to themselves. I’m simplifying to the point of inaccuracy by the way, but Hegelian philosophers make it difficult to summarise their ideas. It sometimes feels as if Britain has done this to its children. We have painted them in absurdly pastel colours, as perfect little angels, and begun to view adulthood as something inexplicably dark and worrying. We have paid a high price. More than a quarter of England’s primary schools now do not have a single male teacher, leaving 4,587 school staffrooms populated solely by women. People in the street are extra cautious even coming into contact with children, for fear of some mad accusation being made against them. The journey to adulthood has become a schizophrenic, jagged road in which our little angels are turned into threatening hoodies, a sort of sub-human faceless tribe dedicated to beating up old ladies.
The UK now regularly appears at the bottom of Unicef tables for child well-being across industrialised countries. Paradoxically, we have made our children less safe. When we distance childhood from adulthood, when we create a sterile space in between adults and children, we dis-incentivise well-meaning strangers from looking out for children in public. We make well-meaning adults think twice before they look after children walking down the street on their own. We prompt suspicion and mistrust in communities which previously did a perfectly good job of looking after children themselves.
Paedophilia – the outrage from which all of this emanates – is, scientifically, a kind of sexuality. It’s a very tragic sexuality, but a sexuality nonetheless. It’s unclear whether it can be treated, for many of the same reasons we cannot turn homosexuals into heterosexuals or visa-versa, even if we wanted to. We can enforce psychological counselling, and in some cases instigate pre-emptive incarceration if we believe someone will act on their urges. In many cases – but by no means all – the sufferer will be strong enough to resist their urges. What we cannot do – or should not do – is hand the issue over to the braying impulses of the mob. This can take the form of actual mobs, like that we saw when the News of the World irresponsibly published the names and details of convicted paedophiles in 2000, or the mob mentality of shrieking tabloid over-reactions. These merely simplify the issue and put children’s relationship with adults further into deep freeze. Parents become paranoid and that, in turn, ultimately makes children less safe.
Children are part of our culture, even if they must be protected from certain aspects of it. I’m the kind of person who generally believes Britain has much more to teach Europe than Europe has to teach us. But in this, we should take a lesson from how they go about things on the continent. Remember your last holiday in Spain or France or Italy? How children played outside in the restaurants and cafés at 11 at night, with their parents happily drinking wine beside them? In Europe, children are part of life, not a divorce from society. New parents do not withdraw into a parallel world where no fun can be had and late nights are a thing of the past. And childhood is not treated in the naive, improbably perfect way it is treated here.
When we talk of children like angels, and turn all adults into suspects, this is what happens; insane health and safety regulations, a reduction in male teachers – with all the absence of positive male roles that entails – and an increased danger to children from sexual predators because of the overly cautious approach adults now take to the young. The path we’ve walked down has taken us to a very strange place. There is a better way. We just have to get over our strange attitudes and incorporate children into society. They are not angels. They are just us, but earlier. We need to protect them. But we also need to stop losing our sanity over how perfect they are.
This comment was written by Ian Dunt for politics.co.uk and does not necessarily represent my opinion on all points he mentioned.
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