Donald Duck Hat

Lori Foster's Reader & Author Get-Together

Designed to give readers occasion to meet with authors in an informal setting, it also provides authors a chance to meet with editors, agents and publishers, and maybe find their golden opportunity. Not to mention the adulation of their avid fans. With a pizza party on Friday evening, and breakfast, lunch and dinner on Saturday, there was plenty of time for socializing, meeting favorite authors, and finding new ones.

One of the big entertainments of the event is the huge raffle for the gift baskets. This year there were 183 astounding baskets of books and treasures donated by authors, publishers, readers, and even the hotel. Several thousand dollars in raffle ticket sales were raised to benefit a couple of Lori’s favorite charities; One Way Farm (for abused or neglected children) and Animal Adoption Foundation .

This was my fourth trip to Cincinnati for this event, and it was the best year yet.  It just keeps getting better and better, and I’ve already got my calendar marked for next year. I see Lori, Dianne and Linda do, too – posted on the website: “Save the Date for the 2012 Reader & Author Get Together – Friday, June 1 – Sunday, June 3, 2012″

This was my first year to attend the Lori Foster Author/Reader Get Together. Grace Greene (Beach Rental : July 2011) and I went together. We’re a little too far for driving distance but we both agreed…it’s worth the flight and we are totally going to be there again next year.

With my reader hat it was so fun to meet some of my very favorite authors in person and get signed books, too! Everyone was so approachable, and the goody bag rocked!

With my author hat on…I felt so lucky to been one of the authors that contributed a table centerpiece. The gals that sat at my table were so much fun!! Plus, we had one of the luckiest tables in the whole daggone place. I think there were 10 of us at the table but I think this little group took 15 of the gift baskets home. I think 5 were to Kris Bloom. Most of the gals that sat at my table are avid blogger/reviewers. I learned so much from these bright, avid readers!

Oh…and I can’t forget to mention the PhotoBooth. Remember those booths that you jumped into with your friends that clicked out 4 pictures. There was one there. Oh..and cardboard cutout hottie book cover guys. Yeah…hot-hot-hot. It was so much fun.

languagehat.com: DONALD DUCK, PHILOSOPHER.

Donald Duck’s popularity was helped along by Erika Fuchs, a free spirit in owlish glasses who was tasked with translating the stories. A Ph.D. in art history, Dr. Fuchs had never laid eyes on a comic book before the day an editor handed her a Donald Duck story, but no matter. She had a knack for breathing life into the German version of Carl Barks’s duck. Her talent was so great she continued to fill speech bubbles for the denizens of Duckburg (which she renamed Entenhausen, based on the German word for “duck”) until shortly before her death in 2005 at the age of 98.

Ehapa directed Dr. Fuchs to crank up the erudition level of the comics she translated, a task she took seriously. Her interpretations of the comic books often quote (and misquote) from the great classics of German literature, sometimes even inserting political subtexts into the duck tales. Dr. Fuchs both thickens and deepens Mr. Barks’s often sparse dialogues, and the hilariousness of the result may explain why Donald Duck remains the most popular children’s comic in Germany to this day.

Dr. Fuchs’s Donald was no ordinary comic creation. He was a bird of arts and letters, and many Germans credit him with having initiated them into the language of the literary classics. The German comics are peppered with fancy quotations. In one story Donald’s nephews steal famous lines from Friedrich Schiller’s play “William Tell”; Donald garbles a classic Schiller poem, “The Bell,” in another. Other lines are straight out of Goethe, Hölderlin and even Wagner (whose words are put in the mouth of a singing cat). The great books later sounded like old friends when readers encountered them at school. As the German Donald points out, “Reading is educational! We learn so much from the works of our poets and thinkers.” ...

Not only young kids were reading it. Micky Maus became popular entertainment among a newly politicized generation who saw the comics as illustrations of the classic Marxist class struggle. A nationally distributed newsletter put out by left-leaning high school students in 1969 described Dagobert (Scrooge) as the “prototype of the monocapitalist,” Donald as a member of the proletariat, and Tick, Trick and Track as “socialist youth” well on their way to becoming “proper Communists.” Even Frankfurt School philosopher Max Horkheimer admitted to enjoying reading Donald Duck comics before bed.

To repeat myself from the MetaFilter thread...

Yeah, the same applies in Iceland. Andrés Önd, as he is known, is chockfull of literary (and other cultural) references. For example, at one point, the greatest Icelandic poem of the 20th Century, Tíminn og vatnið (Time and the Water) by Steinn Steinarr is parodied expertly.

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