captain's blog, stardate long-string-of-numbers
Tuesday, 21 June 2005 09:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
freckles_and_doubtToday I achieved several things, gratifyingly enough, thus more or less breaking the run of non-production for the last week:
1. The upright position, and coherence, more or less, by 9am. Tonight, as a daring move, I shall try going to bed by 10.
2. A new cellphone. It's small and blue and looks like a Star Trek communicator. It also produces a cascade of horrible beeps when being switched on or off, and I cannot work out how to kill it. Any Motorola savants out there with enlightenment to vouchsafe, please do so. Anyone else may now feel free to phone me at the same number, I may even answer this time.
3. Two hours of invigilation, a pile of scripts on medieval romance, and vindication from a fellow invigilator. I've always felt vaguely that my enjoyment of invigilating is strange and bizarre; I get all maternal and worried about the students, and spend the time dashing too and fro making sure they're all happy and enabled in terms of things like paper and information, and checking worriedly over their shoulders to see if they're screwing up. But today a colleague wandered up to me halfway through and whispered, "Is it completely bizarre that I love my students while they're writing an exam?", and I knew exactly what she meant. Darned sublimated maternal instinct.
4. Enlightenment. At least in a localised sense. I know why I'm getting such a bizarre kick out of Hollywood genre movies. It's because I've spent the last eight years dealing almost exclusively, on the intellectual plane, with fairy tale. The basic Hollywood big-budget flick, in almost any genre category (romance, comedy, sf, disaster, thriller, action) functions a lot more like folklore than literature. It's about the structure or shape of the story; the internal realistic logic isn't important as long as the genre rules are followed. Characters are not psychologically realistic, they're types. The proper mode of reception is not critical enquiry, but accepting wonder. The above characteristics are drawn straight out of the fairy tale definition in my recent PhD, but they apply absolutely to the Hollywood film. This explains why my quality-radar comes up with such bizarrely different results to most people: the criteria are, quite simply, radically different. You read it here first, folks! The above sizzling insight coming soon to a film journal near you...
Today is Mich's birthday. On the offchance that she remembers to read this blog occasionally: happy birthday, Mich!
1. The upright position, and coherence, more or less, by 9am. Tonight, as a daring move, I shall try going to bed by 10.
2. A new cellphone. It's small and blue and looks like a Star Trek communicator. It also produces a cascade of horrible beeps when being switched on or off, and I cannot work out how to kill it. Any Motorola savants out there with enlightenment to vouchsafe, please do so. Anyone else may now feel free to phone me at the same number, I may even answer this time.
3. Two hours of invigilation, a pile of scripts on medieval romance, and vindication from a fellow invigilator. I've always felt vaguely that my enjoyment of invigilating is strange and bizarre; I get all maternal and worried about the students, and spend the time dashing too and fro making sure they're all happy and enabled in terms of things like paper and information, and checking worriedly over their shoulders to see if they're screwing up. But today a colleague wandered up to me halfway through and whispered, "Is it completely bizarre that I love my students while they're writing an exam?", and I knew exactly what she meant. Darned sublimated maternal instinct.
4. Enlightenment. At least in a localised sense. I know why I'm getting such a bizarre kick out of Hollywood genre movies. It's because I've spent the last eight years dealing almost exclusively, on the intellectual plane, with fairy tale. The basic Hollywood big-budget flick, in almost any genre category (romance, comedy, sf, disaster, thriller, action) functions a lot more like folklore than literature. It's about the structure or shape of the story; the internal realistic logic isn't important as long as the genre rules are followed. Characters are not psychologically realistic, they're types. The proper mode of reception is not critical enquiry, but accepting wonder. The above characteristics are drawn straight out of the fairy tale definition in my recent PhD, but they apply absolutely to the Hollywood film. This explains why my quality-radar comes up with such bizarrely different results to most people: the criteria are, quite simply, radically different. You read it here first, folks! The above sizzling insight coming soon to a film journal near you...
Today is Mich's birthday. On the offchance that she remembers to read this blog occasionally: happy birthday, Mich!
