HSU IT Department

Normally when I go to a conference there are at least one or two sessions where I skive off to do something else -- take a walking tour of whatever city we're in, have a nice long lunch and sit in the sun, whatever. Not this one. For every slot there were multiple sessions I wanted to go to; if only I could have cloned myself! This is super long, so I've put the session summaries behind cuts.

So, 8am Thursday I jumped right into "Gender and Sexuality Politics in U.S. Television Culture" with three excellent papers. The first one, "Queered Telefeminism and Female Friendships," among other things showed clips from a very funny episode of Designing Women in which Suzanne encounters an old beauty pageant colleague/competitor who announces she's "come out." At first Suzanne doesn't get it ("Well ah do think forty is a little old to be a debutante, but ever'one deserves a pahty" lol!) but then she assumes the friend must be in love with her. Later she and the friend are in a sauna and Suzanne says, "Ah'm sorry, we just cain't be anythin' more than friends" at which point an older woman who has been listening to their conversation leaves in a huff, and Suzanne leans out the door to shout, "Y'all have a lot more problems then lesbians in your sauna!!" *snerk* The second paper looked at masculinity in Buffy, and raised the interesting point that traditional "macho" masculinity is more often than not portrayed negatively in the series. Examples given include Adam is hyper-strong but constructed, unnatural; Riley's excessive strength and macho abilities come from a drug; Warren is a brilliant engineer but also a misogynistic murderer; Caleb represents classic evangelical viewpoint, women are meant to be dominated. Buffy and Willow, on the other hand, have natural in-born power. The third paper, "The Cinderella Scientist: A critical reading of The Big Bang Theory and Women in Science," really made me think: the presenter reviewed the episode where Leonard is tasked with speaking to a class of high school girls about women in science and pointed out that although the alleged mission is encouraging women in science, the actual women in science are off at Disneyland getting dressed up/made up as princesses, the men ultimately fail at their task and yet they are rewarded (Howard gets to role play as Prince Charming, Leonard gets all hot over Penny in her princess dress, and Amy is lying on the sofa being Snow White and waiting -- in vain, of course -- for Sheldon to kiss her awake. This didn't make me like the show any less, but it did make me think about the degree to which it truly shows women as equals in STEM fields.

Next, a Stephen King session with three papers drawing on his latest novel, Doctor Sleep. Since I'd recently finished reading it, this one caught my interest. The first argued that Dr. Sleep and Joyland, which were written basically during the same time period, could be read as companion texts -- that is, having read one gives you a richer reading experience of the other. King of course is notorious for interlocking people, phrases, ideas, etc. across his entire body of work. The second paper, "Filing/Defiling in Stephen King," explored the extended metaphor of files/memory, and was the most interesting for me as an archivist. At the start of The Shining, the man who's interviewing Jack Torrance for the caretaker position has all these files on him; the Overlook sucks Jack in by pushing its files at him -- the scrapbooks, the boxes of clippings in the basement (like a virus?); in Dreamcatcher Jonesy hides information from the alien possessing him by visualizing his mind as a room of file cabinets and hiding information by misfiling things or putting them behind the cabinets; in Dr. Sleep Abra and Dan share "files" mentally (including the "meme" of a cartoon pedophile that they modify and send back and forth) and Abra visualizes her mind as a room of file cabinets in order to entrap Rose the Hat. It was quite interesting, made me think of Caryn Radick's excellent paper on an archival reading of Dracula. The third paper was about teacher/student relationships in King, specifically Danny/Halloran in The Shining (though of course there's also his father's relationship with his students), and then Danny/Abra and to a certain extent Rose/the girl she turns in Dr. Sleep.

Next session: "Fans Crossing: Cross-Textual, Cross-Media, Cross-Fandom." The first paper was my favorite, about how frustrated viewers of Angel were that Fred and Wesley never had a chance to get together, and then Joss cast them as Beatrice and Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing. The larger point was about creators whose body of work functions as a unified whole that's greater than the sum of its parts, something called (if I wrote it down correctly) "hyper-diegesis." Hyper-diegetic casting, then, is where one character gets to do something as another character, through the medium of the actor playing them both. Like Fred and Wesley, who (sort of) ended up together as Beatrice and Benedick, because Amy Acker and Alexis Denisof played both parts. Then there was one about Walking Dead and how it keeps the fans going through "transmedia storytelling" -- that is, through tv, video games, comic books, etc., so there really is no "off season." The last session was particularly interesting to me as a writer of fanfic: it explored what makes a crossover fic work. Essentially the presenter's argument was that crossovers work when they are able to inhabit a larger universe in which the "strange" elements of both worlds can coexist and neither breaks or conflicts with the other. So for example, a Harry Potter/Twilight crossover in which Lupin grows up in the werewolf community in Forks is perfectly reasonable. She referred to these as "second degree imaginary worlds" which I thought was kind of cool. This is why I love Discworld/Harry Potter crossovers -- all those witches and wizards seem perfectly compatible :)

I was really tempted by the Gothic Classic film session (Dracula, The Haunting, I Walked with a Zombie, Jane Eyre) but instead fell prey to my love of Star Trek and Star Wars. Among other things, I learned that every single one of the Star Wars movies follows the 17 stages of the classic monomyth, that Kirk=Dionysos and Spock=Apollo, and that the Enterprise may be a representation of the Divine Feminine. Yes, really. One interesting snippet of argument is that in Jungian terms one could view Kirk and Spock as each other's "shadow self" which may explain why they're the original and most enduring slash couple: because we perceive them as two halves of a whole.

The last session of the day was maybe my favorite (though it's hard to pick): The Borders of Fandom, Female Desire in Fandom. The first paper was about fan edits like The Phantom Edit which re-cut Episode II to remove all trace of Jar-Jar Binks :D He drew a parallel between this and Hollywood's now-familiar habit of releasing alternate cuts, extended cuts, director's cuts, etc. suggesting that the latter was an outgrowth of the former, and listing some of the informal rules that the fan-edit community has evolved in an attempt to respect copyright. The second paper, "Fake Geek Girls": Who Called the Fandom Police?" was brilliant; it started with Tony Harris' rant against cosplay chicks, then talked about how badly Twilight fans were treated at the 2009 Comic-Con, and questioned the definition of a "real" fan. Does it depend on real-life participation, knowledge of the source material, breadth or depth of engagement? Ultimately (she argued), questioning the authenticity of female fans arises from an assumption of male heterosexuality: "Women do this to get attention from men because." Very interesting and provocative. The last paper was on Johnlock erotica so it was just plain fun :D However, she also made the salient point that good erotica relies on satisfaction for the characters, not just for the reader.

Along the way I also learned an excellent quote from Einstein: "The intuitive mind is a sacred gift, and the rational mind is a faithful servant; we have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift."

Whew, OK, that was fun! If anybody wants to know more about any of the sessions, let me know. For now, I'm off to bed so I can get up at 6am to catch a 7am train ::cries::

Having finished the freelance consulting work which absorbed (sucked dry?) most of my free time for the past six months, I've fallen back into reading with a vengeance. Thus:

Caleb's Crossing, by Geraldine Brooks. Brooks just gets better and better. I started out with People of the Book and was a convert almost immediately; Year of Wonders confirmed it and by the time I got to March I'd become an evangelist. Her writing is truly luminous -- spare but every word well-chosen, and she evokes a time and place better than almost anyone I've ever read. As with People of the Book, she's taken a small historical snippet and built an intensely believable story around it. Her fiction is more real than most people's history.

Best Time Travel Stories of the 20th Century, with everything from big-game hunters going after triceratopses to unresolvable paradoxes to an old man visiting 1950 in an attempt to find a nice Jewish boy for his daughter. Great fun, if a bit uneven (some are better than others). The Le Guin at the end was, as she always is for me, the star of the show.

All four Tiffany Aching books from Terry Pratchett. All of his books make me laugh; the best ones also make me cry. These did. His witches are the most practical, hard-headed, loving, smart, wonderful women I've ever encountered, whether they're practicing "persickology" or avoiding "the cackle", and the Nac Mac Feegles are the best anti-fairies you'll ever meet.

Dracula, My Love, a huge disappointment. Thin, boring, uneven. Skip it. If you've read Fred Saberhagen's The Dracula Tapes, you've read a far far better version of this already. The author tries to turn Mina into a modern woman but doesn't succeed very well -- instead of thinking for herself she's like a weathervane, swinging around to believe whoever is telling her tales at the moment, so it comes across as more of a slightly discordant medley than a coherent tune. In fact, Bram Stoker's Mina is in some ways a more consistent and stronger character than this one. There's a completely irrelevant sub-plot about Mina finding her father and mother, which doesn't even make Mina a more interesting character since it's a very cliche Victorian solution. The book was a bit of a snooze in places because James had to recount in all the events of the original book in order to tell Mina's version of them; apparently she didn't want to assume that anyone had actually read the original, which to my mind is a major flaw (what's wrong with demanding your readers come to a book with a little context??). Finally, the ending, while not bad in and of itself, was entirely wrong for the story thus far. It would have been a tolerable ending for a different version of the story, but for me it didn't fit this one well at all.

So there. Right now I'm working on A Discovery of Witches, which I was excited about until I found out it was only #1 of a trilogy. Why must everyone do trilogies? Why??? I blame it all on Allen and Unwin.

Picked up Wintersmith from the "Just in" shelf at the library and it confirms my opinion that Terry Pratchett is a god. This is one of his best, right up there with Mort, and Hogfather. The witches are in it -- Granny Weatherwax, Nanny Ogg, and Miss Treason -- as well as the Nac Mac Feegles, whom I hadn't met since I hadn't read the two previous Tiffany Aching adventures. The Feegles are...well...the nearest I can get is that they're like Smurfs with a Scottish accent: small, blue, not very bright, and they drink a LOT. Favorite Feegle: Wee Dangerous Spike. Favorite Feegle quote: "'Hooses, banks, dreams, 'tis a' the same to us,' said Rob Anybody. 'There's nothing we cannae get in or oot of.' 'Except maybe pubs,' said Big Yan. 'Oh, aye,' said Rob Anybody cheerfully. 'Gettin' oot o' pubs sometimes causes us a cerrrtain amout o' difficulty, I'll grant ye that.'"

At one point Tiffany witnesses the Dark Morris, a sort of anti-morris dance done in silence, all in black, at midnight in winter (Pratchett says one of his best book-signing moments was when he got to see this performed at a bookstore in Chicago!) She thoughtlessly leaps into the dance which brings her to the attention of the Wintersmith, who thinks she's the Lady of Summer; this makes him try to be much more human than he ought to be (he's an anthropomorphism of a season, after all) and confuses the natural progression of winter and spring. In addition to the hilariously funny moments the book has some quite poignant ones; Pratchett's books (two of them in particular) are the only ones I can think of that have made me both laugh to the point my ribs hurt and also leak the occasional tear, all within the same story.

Have now added the Wee Free Men andA Hat Full of Sky to my bulging to-read list (294!! I will never finish!!!!!).