And I didn’t scream or faint.
(Almost not at all.)

Question: How do you give Girl With A Pen multiple fangasms?

Answer: Just put Gillian Anderson, Benedict Cumberbatch, James Rhodes, Neil Gaiman and assorted other Awesome People into a room. With books.

Exactly this happened a few weeks ago. Letters Live, a night of Awesome People reading brilliant letters. And by some miracle I managed to get tickets about five seconds before the Cumberbitches found out about it and the whole thing sold out within minutes.

So, for the first time ever and after waiting for about sixteen years, I managed to be in the same building with my biggest celebrity crush / role model / Woman I Want To Be, Gillian Anderson, and watch her do amazing acting stuff live on stage. I also have tickets to see her in A Streetcar Named Desire next year which I probably won’t survive. And what can I say, other than she’s fantastically good at what she does, as well as being gorgeous and utterly charming. Yes, I’m fangirling and I’m not ashamed.

Gillian Anderson

Here’s Gillian reading a very entertaining letter by Dorothy Parker. (YouTube)

Then there was James Rhodes, my favourite living pianist, reading and playing Beethoven. Turns out he is just as gorgeous on the microphone as he is at a piano. Such an inspiration. I need to get myself to one of his gigs. Yes, still fangirling.

Other things I learned that evening:
a) Benedict Cumberbatch is really unnecessarily attractive as well as breathtakingly good at acting. (Seriously, how’s a girl supposed to cope?!)
b) I would really like for Neil Gaiman to read every single one of his stories and novels to me, and
c) I need to listen to more Nick Cave.

And I also got some Cumberbach reading a love letter. Quite gutted I didn’t catch the steamy parts on video.

I’ll stop fangirling now and will get on with the pictures.

Response code is 404

 

And finally, the best bit of dialogue from the book auction that ever occurred. (In the world, ever.)

Gillian Anderson: “£3800 for a bit of Benedict Cumberbatch!”
Neil Gaiman: “…also licked by Gillian Anderson!”

The book eventually sold for £5k. Caitlin Moran bought it, because she has five grand to spare and I haven’t. Not bitter AT ALL.

re:View – Third Star

I’ll keep this one brief because I want you all to watch this movie and I can’t possibly spoil it.

Third Star is a quiet, soul-searching kind of film about friendship and love and life, that follows a terminally ill young man and his three best friends on their final big adventure together – a hiking trip to the remote Welsh countryside.

The premise is simple enough, but this movie is deep, heavy stuff. After watching the end I felt physically sick – I literally just wanted to curl up in a corner and be ill. I couldn’t even cry; this film is beyond crying. That’s how well it is made, and acted. Its impact is so real that it leaves you feeling like you’ve just been kicked in the stomach.

This movie is beautiful and terrible and I never want to watch it again because I couldn’t sit through the ending a second time. But you need to watch it. Watch it now.


Image from thirdstarmovie.com

Pens: 5 out of 5, and a gold pen to Benedict Cumberbatch for acting pain so well it just hurts.

re:View – Star Trek: Into Khan’s Private Quarters Please Darkness

So I’ve been to the cinema to watch Something With Benedict Cumberbatch In It Start Trek: Into Darkness. And was quite surprised to be reminded how much I used to love Star Trek. (Not sure how I ever forgot.)

I don’t think my brain is currently working enough to put a coherent review together, so I’ll just write down some thoughts that crossed my mind while watching the movie, in roughly chronological order. If you manage to make any sense of this, the result might contain some spoilers.

  1. Spock’s a hero.
  2. Kirk’s a hero, too.
  3. Heroism is well underrated in Starfleet HQ.
  4. Spock just doesn’t get it, does he?
  5. ZOMFG BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH’S EVIL VOICE – KILL ME NOW!!!11
  6. Kirk’s being a hero again.
  7. Benedict Cumberbatch is extremely watchable in spandex this role.
  8. LET’S GO TO OUTER SPACE!!!
  9. Simon Pegg as Scotty is one of the funniest things the Enterprise has ever seen.
  10. There’s not enough of Benedict Cumberbatch in this film.
  11. Oh hello, you beautiful dark stranger wielding futuristic heavy weapons!
  12. Khan: 1; Klingon army: 0
  13. NOT THE FACE!!!!!!!
  14. Kirk remembers he’s got some moral integrity.
  15. (And he’s so going to regret it.)
  16. Khan has a heart. And a bloody good reason for doing all this evil shit.
  17. Benedict Cumberbatch’s acting is flawless. That tear…
  18. Unexpected shit happens.
  19. Everyone on board gets their turn at being a hero.
  20. Kirk-sickle and Khan-sickle shooting through space faster than the speed of light. TOO. FUCKING. EXCITING.
  21. Scotty saves the day.
  22. Khan: “BTW I’m actually totally evil AND YOU WILL ALL DIE NOW, kthxbye.”
  23. Assorted heroism; stuff breaks big time.
  24. Khan actually gets hotter the more violent he becomes.
  25. Spock finally gets it and proceeds to being an even bigger hero.
  26. NOT THE FACE, NOT THE FACE, NOT THE FACE!!!!!!!
  27. Kirk’s still the biggest hero of them all.
  28. Some tragic shit happens and I get a bit worried.
  29. Naah, of course it ends well. It’s Star Trek!
  30. I’ll faint now. Just freeze me and put me in that cryotube with Khan, ok?

The best thing about this film, though, is the fact that it inspired the Internet to do THIS:

     

These are from the guys awesome lady at Khan&Kittens on tumblr and there are dozens more…

re:view – The 2013 Bookshelf II

Blimey. Ages since I’ve done a Bookshelf. I can’t even remember half the books I read six months ago. But I’ll try.

This time, we have funny feminists, scandalous classics, a wizard who would totally make Harry Potter cry, the new George Saunders, epic American history, and assorted randomness.

The usual health and spoilers warning applies.

Continue reading →

Because the one thing your cat definitely wants is a crochet hat

This made its way into my inbox today.

Cats need food, water, a life without dogs. But what do cats want? Hats. Of course they do – they’re vain, fickle creatures and a hat lends them instant cool.

 

Crochet cat hats. For the fashion-conscious feline, I suppose.

 

I have no idea where this delightful snippet of information originally came from, but the crazy cat lady crocheter’s Etsy page lives here.

Thank god I’m finally obsessed
with Sherlock!

I’ve recently gotten into Sherlock. I know, took my time. But I’m making up for the slowness – I just don’t have enough time to watch TV! – with the level of my obsession.

So, as I normally do when I start obsessing about something, I went on the internet. And the the internet instantly reminded me of the wonders of fandom, the ship, losing a whole day in fanfiction…and that you can never follow too many feeds posting pictures of Benedict Cumberbatch.

I think I’m enjoying this so much because it takes me back to the days when I was a teenager, had a lot more time to watch TV, and stayed up all night reading (or writing) fanfic and browsing into infinity through forums and galleries. And also because Sherlock is the first TV drama that has really gotten to me in this way since the end of X-Files.

Cheekbones alert! (It’s ok to faint a little.)

 

Ooh, obsessions. How I missed you.

Other contributing factors are certainly that I’ve always been a fan of the original Sherlock stories and, to no small extent, that the Cumberbatch is so damn perfect as Sherlock (and in pretty much every other way, but let’s not digress.)

And then there’s #johnlock. Careful when you tumblr that – the likeliness of NSFW content is high. Johnlock has become the fan community’s label for the relationship between Sherlock and John Watson, which is certainly an interesting one whether you ship it or not. (If you are asking yourself what all this has to do with marine vessels, it’s probably time to look up shipping at this point.)

I’m not exactly a shipper when it comes to Sherlock. Maybe a little bit ship-curious. But I do think that the writers of the series have done a tremendous job in crafting a modern version of the legendary relationship between Sherlock Holmes and John Watson, acknowledging the “are they / are they not?” question with a lighthearted nod at regular intervals. And even though you’d think the writers had fired a fatal blow at the ship by saying recently that romance is not going to happen – “they’re just not wired that way”, apparently – there is certainly enough subtext going on in each episode to keep the ship floating.

So, as much as I enjoy watching and re-watching, and re-watching, and pause-facing Sherlock, I enjoy scrolling through miles of my tumblr and Instagram feeds filled with fun and fancy artwork and shared obsessions. I find it fascinating – and immense fun – to delve into the fandom and observe other people’s perceptions of a TV drama I’m loving. I want to STUDY this stuff. Seriously: If I was still at uni I would totally propose a dissertation analysing the internet’s reaction to the BBC’s Sherlock.

Naturally, my little inner fangirl was extremely delighted last week to find Benedict Cumberbatch ACTUALLY TALKING ABOUT THE FANFIC and Johnlock and all that on TV. That’s just like complete meta-awesomeness.

Here’s the full clip of his appearance on Top Gear from YouTube (until the pull it anyway) and since the Cumberbunny is so utterly watchable you might as well watch the whole thing! (Or if you don’t have ten minutes, BuzzFeed it.)

Cumberbatch discussing Star Trek on Top Gear:

It’s a great relationship…between Kirk and Spock… No! You see, this is it. If I talk about a relationship between two men in a drama, they’re immediately at it. The world wide inter-lie will just basically go, splat, there’s a load of fanfiction, which has me and John Watson floating in space, on a bed, handcuffed to one another…and not just with handcuffs, either.

Oh Sherlock, you see, but you don’t observe…the subtext!

Death and the Penguin*?

So Pearson and Bertelsmann have merged Penguin with Random House, and the best name they could come up with for the venture is Penguin Random House.

Which strikes me as the most lamentable missed opportunity for awesome branding. I mean, why oh why didn’t they call it Random Penguin?!!!

On a more serious note, I do hope that this means good things for the future of books. With all this digital reading stuff and more and more independent bookshops disappearing, I can’t help but worry that my generation will be the one that might see the death of the printed book.

AND I CAN’T LIVE WITHOUT PAPERBACKS!!!

* …by the way, is still one of the gaztrillion books on my to-read list.

Finally a new feminist icon in a drama series I can obsess about

Catching up on BBC2’s crime drama The Fall. Super excited about the character DSI Stella Gibson, and about her feminism especially. So excited I actually laughed and whooped out loud while watching episode 3 in the office at lunchtime.

Favourite Stella Gibson observation so far:

“It’s the one night stand that bothers you, isn’t it? Man fucks woman. Subject: man. Verb: fucks. Object: woman. That’s okay. Woman fucks man. Woman, subject. Man, object. That’s not so comfortable for you, is it.”

Closely followed by this gem of a comeback when she gets scolded by her superior for sleeping with a fellow officer:

Superior: “He was a married man.”
Stella: “He wasn’t wearing a ring.”
Superior”: I’m sure that’ll be some comfort to his wife, when she finds out her husband spent his last night on earth in your bed.”
Stella: “You were a married man when you spent a night in my bed.”

Right back at’cha, double standards!

I have seriously not been this excited about a female character in a drama series since The X-Files and Prime Suspect.


And did I mention that my new feminist hero is being played by my all time favourite actress Gillian Anderson?!

I’ll review The Fall properly at some point. Once my inner fangirl has calmed down a bit.

Perfect places: Alghero, Sardinia

Alghero in northwestern Sardinia is one of my very favourite places on Earth. The city, the sea, the countryside all around – it’s simply got everything going for it. The food. The people. The quiet and calm before and after the tourist season. It’s the kind of place where you always imagine you would lead the perfect life.

Old tower on the city wall with streetlights hooded in red for the Easter processions.

This lovely little town has a gorgeous historical city centre, a maze of tiny cobbled streets that I could get lost in forever – except you never get lost for very long as sooner or later you’ll always end up back on the old city wall, with a stunning view of the sea. Standing up there by the ancient defence towers and the wooden catapults, looking down at the sea smashing against the rocks or across the bay to the mountains cast in shadows by dramatic clouds, you pretty much expect the bandits and the pirates to show up on the horizon any minute.

Vertical garden / garage / appliance storage?

Just in case you didn’t spot that “no boat parking” sign…

I bet the pirates are hiding over there!

Dotted around the tiny streets, sometimes hiding away in cellars and courtyards, you’ll find an astonishing variety restaurants – ranging from a small cramped room serving traditional pizzas to some rather fine dining indeed. My favourite are the small, family run restaurants serving no-nonsense, authentic Sardinian food – big bowls of sausage pasta, followed by a steak that’s so gorgeous it can just sit plain on its plate without even needing any garnish. Oh, the deliciousness! I honestly don’t think I’ve ever eaten such good quality produce in my entire life, not even from the local farms in my native Bavaria or in the top restaurants in London. Sardinia doesn’t mass-produce food; everything is fresh, seasonal, local – and while eating you just feel how good this food is for you. I could go on about this forever, but trust me: You have to go there and try the food for yourself. You’ll never want to go back home and to the supermarket ever again.

Walking north out of Alghero, along the coastal road, the most beautiful seaside awaits: Maria Pia, where forested sand dunes gradually give way to a perfect white beach, offering lots of little, private nooks shaded by trees – the perfect place to sit, undisturbed, and just enjoy the view of the sea and the mountainous coast. If you’ve got wheels (a bike will do), you can also go further up the coast, through pine forests and past olive groves and vineyards, to visit some of the small, hidden beaches that are dotted along the coast. And if you’re out of season and a bit lucky, you’ll have an entire beach to yourself.

In spring you can see Maria Pia in all its rough beauty, before they clean up the beach, while the April storms roll over the mountains.

And after you’ve braved the hilly coastal road, you can always snooze on the beach.

There’s loads more to see around Alghero, for example Neptune’s Grotto, a huge marine cave full of extremely fancy stalagmites and stalactites carved quite spectacularly into the cliffs. Going there by boat you’ll actually land inside the cave in a perfectly turquoise pool – a process that can quickly turn into quite an adventure when the waves get a bit choppy. On my next visit, I’m going to venture a bit further out of town to go to Asinara, a national park island which gets its name from its population of wild Albino donkeys.

And then I’ll just keep exploring the island until I’m old (and rich) enough to buy an olive grove with a little cottage outside Alghero, and retire there. And I shall live happily ever after. Eating Pecorino.