freckles_and_doubt | Entries tagged with gawsh

Right, one down. That was generally a lovely conference - smallish, beautifully run, papers uniformly interesting (I only really tuned out during one or two of them), and lovely people with whom I had lovely chats. The fun thing about fairy-tale theorists is that if you scratch strategically, just under the surface a high proportion of them are total geeks. Animated conversations at the conference dinner last night included fan fiction, LARPing, the exact wording of Bilbo's drunken birthday-party compliment/insult (under the influence of rather excellent wine none of us could remember the details) and the value of truly dismal B-movies and Alan Rickman. One of the papers was on fairy-tale elements in White Wolf's Changeling, causing me to get into a spirited debate with the speaker about her actual definition of fairy tale based on my actual knowledge of the system and role-playing generally, which I don't think she saw coming at all.

Accents represented at the conference: Flemish, French, American, English, Greek, German, Dutch, Israeli, Japanese, Polish, Russian, Spanish, Australian, Romanian and me, who apparently counts as "English" to the non-Brits and "weird unidentifiable colonial" to the Brits. Curse those creeping South African vowels. Most of the above non-English languages occurred in outbreaks within hearing more or less continually, frequently with mid-conversational switches: a lot of these people are at least bilingual and frequently multilingual, and their English is of course very good. All rather humbling. I was, however, congratulated on my reasonably French pronunciation of such tongue-twisting fairy-tale writers as Madame d'Aulnoy and Mlle l'Heritier, which I suppose makes up for getting "Nicolajeva" dead wrong.

Despite being lovely, the academics present were, alas, clearly academics. A small but spirited catfight broke out on Day 1 around the issue of oral versus literary fairy tale, and intensified as the conference proceeded, with proponents of both sides among the keynote speakers. There was some pointed, slightly nasty and occasionally amusing dissing of each other's theories/works/previous intellectual attacks from behind the lectern, and some insistent spirited debates continuing not quite sotto voce in the back rows. A bit sad, really. Apparently highly-regarded academics require a reasonable dose of territorial instinct to become highly-regarded in the first place. Bother, that's where I'm going wrong.

rumint asked which abbey the conference was inhabiting. It's Saint Peter's Abbey; from the outside it looks like this. (The bits and pieces in the square are because there was a massive Leonard Cohen concert there over the weekend).

It also has a very beautiful refectory, in which restoration has recently revealed a roof mural no-one knew existed; herewith A Conference Inhabiting A Refectory, and a close-up of some of the murals. The abbey people insist the murals are 13th-century, but the style looks far more 15th or 16th to me. I attribute the slightly blurry roof picture to the peril-sensitive nature of my camera. It's protecting me from cherubs.

I slept beautifully late this morning, and am now going to trundle out and sight-see in the medieval quarter for the day. It's not a bad life. If you don't weaken.

Current Mood: academicated, touristy
Current Music: Crowded House

Various wamblings in the comments of my last post have vouchsafed me an Insight, or possibly a Revelation, or at very least a Brainstorm. Which is to say, gawsh, but there are an awful lot of really rather attractive men prancing around contemporary popular culture under the sobriquet of Captain. Is this officially a Thing now? have we all succumbed to the appeal of militarism, or authority, or uniforms? Also, boots. Captains wear good boots. And, judging by the evidence, a lot of them wear good coats. ( I am cutting this to remove long strings of photos from innocent Friends feeds. )

Current Mood: amused
Current Music: Eurythmics, Savage

I have acquired, by some mystic process over the last year or two, a taste for fruit teas. I've always mentally classified them, along with rooibos, as "disgusting pseudo-tea", but then my erstwhile MA student Stacey gave me a bag of something with pomegranate and apple and I was hooked. This is terribly useful: these days if I have a milk drink of any sort before I go to bed I don't sleep because of all the mucus colonising my lungs, so a soothing blackcurrant and vanilla makes a lovely end to the day. It also means that I'm going through honey at a rate of knots, as I like fruit tea with a teaspoon of honey in it (and, ye gods, is that stuff becoming expensive. I always vaguely worried about the death of bees, and now I really do).

The other night I was digging in the jar for the last dregs, and absent-mindedly put a fingerful of honey straight into my mouth instead of the mug. I haven't done that in years: I'm not madly into honey on its own, and don't eat it on bread or waffles or the like. But that taste thing is startling, even more evocative than smell. Suddenly I was back in the room outside the research-station house we lived in when I was a child of 7 or 8, a whitewashed extension reached only from the outside, via a flight of steps. My dad kept bees for a lot of my childhood, and the outside room was where he stored the frames of comb and the jars and the extractor, and the strange white armour and veil he wore to work with the hives. (And the smoker. A bee-smoker is a weird little metal box with an open cone thingy you puff smoke out of - it always fascinated me).

I have no idea if my memories of the extractor are real or partially fantastic, but they're very vivid. I think my dad may, with characteristic Zimbo resourcefulness, have designed it himself, and either made it or caused it to be made. It was a large, white-painted drum on legs, with a spinning contraption on the inside holding the frames with the full comb, a giant handle to wind it with, and a spout at the bottom to collect the honey. You loaded the frames into the spinning thing and wound like hell, and all the honey, propelled by centrifugal force, flew out to the walls of the drum and ran down into the spout, to be collected either into drums, or directly into jars. (I suspect drums, I think there may have been straining and clarifying bits still to do). The noise it made was considerable, and somehow exciting and technical. It was a very sci-fi thing, that extractor.

Honey is magical stuff. I remember the bottling process, the slow, sensuous, organic flow of the viscous dollops into the carefully-sterilised jars; the few random bees who were always bumping around the room; the heavy sweetness of the scent, and the sharp smell of the wax which was melted down from the empty combs, and which my mother used to use for her batiks. The bee-room was at once a fascinating and an alarming space, to a child rife with both the attraction of the honey, and the fear of the drowsy, disoriented bees bumbling around, with the ever-present potential for pain if you accidentally brushed or stepped on one. We were occasionally given chunks of comb to suck and then chew, the weird, tooth-coating texture of the wax a definite offset against the honey itself. I've never liked comb much. It's possibly why I loved the extractor.

Bee-keeping is an integral part of my childhood: the thread of honey's availability in our meals, a luxury taken for granted; the neat boxes of jars we, I think, used to sell; and my dad all clumsy and alien in the suit with the veil. There was a terribly unfortunate concatenation of bee-keeping with goat-keeping a bit later on, when I was a teenager and we'd moved into town; bees respond very badly to goats, and a swarm moved into the stable where the bee stuff was kept, and attacked the three goats who were living down in the paddock. My mother, amazing lady that she is, braved the swarm to rescue the goats and hauled them off the vet, she and all three of them swollen with stings. They all survived, although at least one of the goats had been so badly stung around the ears that she lost large chunks of them, and always presented thereafter a rather rakishly ragged look.

I suspect that one of the appeals of honey is in precisely this beautiful balance of reward and danger, its inextricability from the humble hard-working bee with the nasty sting, and the burning pain which marks the self-immolatory death of the guardian. Honey makes us thieves; its sweetness is stolen. And a spoonful of honey, apparently, holds the past.

Current Mood: nostalgic
Current Music: for some reason, Pet Shop Boys in my HEAD!

Scotland is beautiful. Cold, and bleak, and windswept, and beautiful. Apparently these are the sands from the race in Chariots of Fire. The local industries appear to consist of education, golf and Chariots of Fire jokes.

The St. Andrews cathedral is a rather picturesque ruin, having been abandoned during the Reformation, after which it spent the next few centuries gently falling down. Its slightly unusual position right on the sea probably had something to do with this. The wind off that sea is, as the Scots say, a bit stroppy.

A feature of our Saturday morning stroll around the town was the unexpected American harrier hawk, with attendant falconer, parked off on a park railing. Apparently the falconer has seven of them, which he keeps strategically tethered to rooftops in the town to prevent the seagulls from nesting. This probably works rather well: a harrier hawk is one of your more disagreeable raptors (in the photo it's objecting to a passing labrador). When not tethered on rooftops, they're flown on the golf course to combat the undermining of the greens by rabbits and moles, which I should imagine they also do rather efficiently.

Unfortunately, proximity to a falconer and bird apparently makes me cry. I miss my dad.

I now face the next 24 hours in airports and aircraft, to fortify myself for which I will now descend and partake of an enormous Scottish breakfast, although without the black pudding. See you in Cape Town.

Current Mood: loins girded

Jumping through all the hoops set by the British in the visa obstacle course has caused me to go back to old blog posts in order to work out where and when I travelled at various points in the last decade. (Couldn't find my old passport, so thank heavens for the online diary). This has vouchsafed to me the revelation that I used to post an awful lot more photos than I do currently. I'm not sure why, although I suspect the post-exhaustion reconfiguration of my working day not to start at 7am has cut out a lot of the early-morning-Common shots, alas.

Thus, in mitigation, have some random cats. This photo demonstrates, variously, (a) the beautiful colour graduations in our feline population, (b) a slightly illusory instance of their actual and amicable co-existence, (c) something of the reason behind all the jokes about the Left Wing of the Evil Landlord's Bed, (d) the ineradicable fact that I still haven't got this focus thing quite down, and (e) ears.

Working at home is very civilised. I am contentedly noodling through a week's worth of plaintive student plaints, putting out fires with no more interruptions than the occasional need to replenish the tea supplies, dodge the nice charlady's vaccuuming endeavours, and wind the clock.

Current Mood: contentedly productive

Hello, March! Was I alone in feeling a strange pleasure in writing the date of 29th February? Such an odd, interstitial moment, intermittent enough to feel not quite real. And I wrote it a lot yesterday, given that I was processing 45 orientation leader payments, entailing two separate forms, each of which had to be signed and dated twice. There's a reason why my signature has degenerated, over the last five or six years of signing curriculum forms, into a sort of snarled and loopy scrawl. In which, I may add, it rather beautifully reflects the frequently snarling, snarled and loopy existence of the writer.

I appear to have randomly remembered my undertaking to acknowledge my sources in my involuted subject line quotes. Thus, February! Reading in order from the top (or, if reading the blog's front page, from the bottom), I have referenced the following:

Goats.
Walt Whitman, by way of Ray Bradbury.
Goats.
The opening sentence to The Haunting of Hill House, which is eerily reminiscent of H.P. Lovecraft on horror.
A running gag on Pajiba, my favourite film review site, whose writers are frequently and beautifully rude and invariably refer to the actor Channing Tatum as Charming Potato, a sobriquet presumably aimed more at his acting ability than his appearance, although ymmv.
Charlotte Bronte's introduction to the second edition of Jane Eyre, the one where she actually admitted authorship.
The BeeGees, one of their more mournful early efforts. (Quiet in the peanut gallery, please).
Goats, twice in a row.
David Bowie. I appear to be contractually obligated to include a monthly Bowie quote. "TVC15", in this case.

The Goats quotation craze appears to be mercifully dying. Either that, or my life is less surreal at the moment. Hooray. I think.

Current Mood: gawsh

This is an interesting, if slightly superficial, article from New Scientist about game transfer phenomenon, which is effectively the response to real life as though you're in a computer game. The article drifts off a bit into burble about visual hallucinations, but what really caught me was the writer's description of their own experience driving icy roads and pulling out of a vehicle slide by instinctively using a move from a computer driving game.

Embedding yourself in a computer game for extended periods can have really weird real-life effects, particularly if you're tired and a bit spacey - after the Dragon Age marathons earlier this year, I would catch myself coming out of a social interchange or work interaction and thinking, "Hell, that didn't go well, I need to reload and make different conversation choices". A sort of mental groping for the escape key to access the menus. But it particularly interests me because I think there are similar effects with non-computer gaming, specifically roleplaying.

About fourteen years ago I was the victim of an armed robbery/home invasion; the guy barged into the house, waving a gun, when

bumpycat opened the door to him, and proceeded to tie up both of us and force me around the house at gunpoint, demanding I show him where all the valuable goods were. (A bit doomed; this was back in the impecunious grad student days, and there really wasn't much of value in the house). Fortunately the burglar slamming the door behind him had set off the house alarm; I'd heard the fracas at the front door and, while half asleep, was able to answer the phone for about three seconds when the armed response company phoned to check, and tell them to come quickly. Which they did; but there was an incredibly surreal moment when the armed response guy, receiving no answer from the front door, came round to the bedroom window, to see me, half naked and with my hands tied behind my back, kneeling on the floor. (I'd just woken up, and was wearing only a dressing gown, which had fallen down around my waist. I still remember the puzzled, slightly embarrassed tone of voice in which the guy asked "Is everything all right, ma'am?" I think he was afraid he'd interrupted kinky sex games).

The burglar, hearing the knock at the door, had moved himself out of line of sight by putting his back up against the wall next to the window, keeping the gun trained on me; he'd hissed at me to send the armed response away or he'd shoot me. The interesting thing is that I still have a very vivid memory of exactly how I reacted, which was to suddenly see the whole thing like a hastily sketched roleplaying tac-map - room layout like this, threat here, ally out there, these are your resources, what do you do? It was an astonishingly clear mental image, I can still see it in my head. I reacted exactly as I would have done in, for example, a cyberpunk scenario with

rumint putting us through the wringer again: tactically, and with an analytic calm which detached me from the situation in exactly the same way you are detached while gaming. However emotionally invested you are in the moment, there's always a meta level of thinking about what's happening. I told the armed response guy that there was a burglar with a gun, but he'd gone round the back of the house. The armed response guy promptly rushed off after him, allowing the burglar to leave via the front door without actually shooting anyone. It was very neat. Serious experience points there.

The thing is, the response wasn't just about using gaming tools; it was, effectively, for those few vital seconds, to access the game mindset and, vitally, reflexes. I didn't have to think about it; there was no conscious decision of "OK, let's think tactically now." I think you have to be a lot more experienced with having guns pointed at you in real life to be able to consciously employ tactical thought in that sort of situation. I didn't have to; the gaming reflexes kicked in. I honestly don't think I would have been able to respond as cogently if I hadn't had that experience behind me, and that mindset to access.

I'm playing through Skyrim at the moment as an archer. It would be fascinating to see if the repetitive experience of focus/draw/aim in firing a computer game bow actually had any measurable effect on my extremely basic real-life archery skill. But in a more global sense, shouldn't the in-game experience of a tactical approach to efficiently completing quests give me more facility with real-life goals? I might attain a job I actually wanted if I collected all these journal articles before speaking to the key person at the other end of the map. And, to return to the tabletop issue: we played Fiasco! last night. The reflex in Fiasco! is towards making each particular scene punchy, cinematic and dramatic, with a slant towards disaster. If there's any logic in the world, habitual Fiasco! players should be self-destructive drama queens. Probably it's a good thing we don't play more often.

Current Mood: randomly analytic

Last night I dreamed that Nathan Fillion, who I met accidentally in town, distracted me from preparing properly for my practical Geology exam. When I rushed home just before the exam to pick up pens and glance through my notes, the house had been sealed off by the municipality, who were fumigating by means of chunks of blue glowing stuff. I never found the exam venue, I got lost wandering around a campus that looked more like the Skyrim city of Solitude.

No, I have no idea, either.

The Legendary Boxing Day Braai was lovely! thank you to all the lovely people who attended, and brought ridiculous amounts of food, and held ridiculous conversations, and nobly refrained from laughing at me when I accidentally scattered blueberries all over the kitchen. I had a blast. Unfortunately my Weird Post-DVT Legs had a bit of a hissy fit at all the standing, and are sore and swollen, although to be perfectly fair they used to do that even Pre-DVT. It's official, my feet are simply weird. I trotted them around the Common this morning in revenge. Exercise is supposed to be good for them.

Also, is it just me or do all the Small Spawn Of Friends in my immediate vicinity have beautiful manners? They charmed the hell out of the Evil Landlord's mother. I'm glad she was there, it was a sort of token gesture at making up for the absence of my own mother, who I missed, as did several other people. It's not the same without her. On the other hand, the legendary mantle of my mother's clean-up ability appears to have descended on me, I have wrought mightily upon the devastation, and the house is spotless.

Right, back to Skyrim! Am playing through a second time, this time with a Nord, and a grim determination not to ever use fast travel. It's amazing how much it changes the feel and logic of the game, and gives one a far more vivid, immediate and detailed sense of the map. Also, horses make a lot more sense. However, while the avowed purpose of this playthrough is to join the Stormcloak Rebellion rather than supporting the Empire, currently I can't bring myself to do it because Ulfric is such a filthy racist sod. I suspect my reluctance may also have a bit to do with (a) Lawful Good, and (b) the high levels of atheism in my make-up. Part of the reason for the rebellion is because the Empire have sold out to the Elves and won't let the Nords worship their elevated god-human Talos. I can't seem to get behind the religio-patriotic rage with any conviction. However, I am experiencing an indecent amount of kick at being an archer.

Current Mood: on holiday!
Current Music: She Wants Revenge

dicedcaret once incautiously asked me to explain structuralism, which inevitably led to a voluble email exchange from which he emerged dazed and staggering, and brushing Russian Formalists off himself like coat lint. (They're sticky). The Russian Formalists are the major big gun in my campaign to bring English literary criticism kicking and screaming back into the century before the Century of the Fruitbat, i.e. the one before postmodernism. (Yes, I just accused postmodernism of being a fruitbat). As represented by the distinct sub-school led by Vladimir Propp, the Russians advocate the structuralist analysis of literature, i.e. in terms of an individual text's participation in a larger structure of meaning, which rather often tends to be in terms of genre.

Since I deal with fairy tale, this is important: at the most basic level, fairy tale proffers itself as participating in a universal structure of meaning and form, however illusionary this universality might be. (This is where postmodernism comes in: it joyously explodes notions of universal structure in order to insist that all meaning is contextual and nothing is universal. I also enjoy this, particularly since if you use an interaction of structuralist and postmodernist criticism in your academic writing you can completely piss off two major and opposing schools of thought at once, thus giving yourself a really good excuse for a floundering career).

All of this is important, because it explains why I utterly fell for Catherynne M. Valente's Deathless. Cat Valente is still my literary girl crush: she's an intensely crafted and self-conscious writer, whose abilities with prose cause me to lie voluptuously on the sofa with her books for hours at a time while beautiful words work their way down my body like lovers and my toes wriggle in delight. Deathless is based on the Russian folk tale "Koschei the Deathless", which is a marvellous agglomeration of fairy-tale motifs: ogre hearts hidden in eggs, useless Princes called Ivan, bird-grooms, bride-thefts, Baba Yaga, and Marya Morevna, the princess who slays whole armies. Valente's retelling sets the fairy-tale amid the startling political changes of early twentieth-century Russia. (The bird-grooms respectively hail from the Tsar's guard, the White Guard and the Red Army, with the bulk of the novel set in a Soviet Russia which co-exists with a fairy-tale realm).

This shouldn't work. It works like whoa and dammit: it creates a brilliant, incredible, unlikely, inevitable creature which you can't help but desire hopelessly even while it kicks you repeatedly in the teeth.

It's not just the novel's sense of Russian cold and cruelty, which equally apply to its folklore and its politics. The thing is that communism and fairy tale are both structuralist paradigms. (You knew I was going to get back to Vladimir Propp). Both fairy tale and communism insist on a transcendent, structural reality, a sense in which meaning exists universally on a level above the real. The sparse, stripped-down, essentialist meanings of fairy tale have a dreadful resonance with the sparse, stripped-down, essentialist rigours of life under communist rule. Both encodings believe all too terribly in their own universal rightness, the inescapable inevitability of their narratives. In Valente's hands they don't even conflict; they speak the same language, and the story's protagonists drift from one paradigm to another almost without noticing.

The result is desperately illuminating. The story's viewpoint is that of Marya Morevna, not the annoying Ivan, which is a relief; the tale becomes one of agency, female and political, as well as a love story, one about the bargains and sacrifices of marriage. For all of its novel-length detail and complexity, it retains both the starkness of fairy-tale narrative and its sense of fairy tale's inevitable place in the starkness of Russian life. The result shouldn't be seductive - particularly given my rooted dislike of political writing - but it is. It's an implacably brilliant book. Read it. And, possibly, weep.

Current Mood: fangirly
Current Music: The Cure

One of the minor irritations of the Slight Medical Contretemps which afflicted me in the middle of this year, was its timing. It stuck me in hospital, and immobile/recovering, slap bang over the period when a bunch of movies I would have liked to see were on circuit. In horrible defiance of my ongoing superhero fetish, I thus missed X-Men First Class and Green Lantern, as well as PotC 4, although I'm not too distraught over the last one - Johnny Depp notwithstanding, the films have progressively lost the plot as they staggered onwards into greater and more unrestrained excess. Nonetheless, giant blockbuster special-effects extravaganza superhero films need to be seen on the big screen, all the better to Pow! Blam! Zap!

At any rate, we're watching X-Men FC and PotC 4 for movie club on Sunday, the theme being "Popcorn movies we missed on circuit", and proud of it. Green Lantern arrived in the same batch of videos, and I watched it the other night. I can't say I expected much, the reviews have been terrible, but in the event it was both a bad film, and more interesting than I'd thought it would be.

I Am Not A Comic Book Geek, insofar as I've actually read very few of them, and my collection is a small and random sampling heavily weighted towards Sandman¹ and things which have recently been made into movies (mostly because the folkloric adaptation of mythology across media fascinates me unduly). However, any genuine comics geek is fully entitled to righteously look down their nose at me. I've never read any Green Lantern comics (although my unhealthy relationship with Loot suggests that that will change shortly). I didn't know much about it, other than random sideswipes in geeky blog comments, and a half-arsed sense that "the ring allows you to create anything green, but yellow is DOOM!" is not a well-thought-out superpower.

One movie and a spot of random research later, and it's a fascinating mythology. Its genesis is, I think, identical in sensibility to that of the classic old space operas of E. 'Doc' Smith, whose Skylark and Lensman novels presuppose the same inter-species troop of good ol' American clean-cut lads kicking righteous butt across the universe in the name of Mom and apple pie. The whole thing has a sort of goofy naiveté which verges on the endearingly gormless, and for which I have a low, reprehensible fondness. (I love the Lensman books, if only for their galloping excess. By the end of it they're chucking galaxies and universes at each other). The other influence I can't help detecting is that of animated cartoons: the endless morphability of the ring's creations, and in fact the weird alien races which make up the Corps, are really the opposite of realistic, tending to invoke the no-limits fantasy of an animated space-opera universe rather than anything real.

The film caused me, alas, quite unseemly levels of toe-curling fangirly glee, but that's a personal weakness: while it appeals equally to my mutant organs of space-opera and superhero enjoyment, it's not a good movie. It struggles with precisely the elements of unreality I describe above, and I've spent odd moments of the last few days wondering how on earth they actually could have dealt with the Green Lantern story in any way which would infuse it with even a little bit of grit. It's a fairly tall order, trying to use this mythology to appeal to the sensibilities of an audience conditioned to Dark Knights and the strange element of naturalism achieved by RDJ even in shiny powered armour. I don't think it's impossible, the mythology has some interesting things to say about heroism and power, but they really needed to be a lot more thoughtful about it.

The film, I think, hamstrung itself on two levels: in its special effects, and in its lead actor. The green in this movie is very green. Sunday morning cartoon green. Practically glowing. The suit looks plastic, the aliens look cartoon, the landscapes on Oa appear to originate in an animated special. The green ring creations are apparently radioactive, and horribly prone to slapstick. The script is serviceable, if uninspired, and certainly not good enough to infuse the mythology's over-the-top elements with any degree of conviction. Likewise, Ryan Reynolds is an extremely likeable lead, but in fact his fit with the material is almost too good: you could probably equally accuse him of a sort of goofy naiveté which verges on the endearingly gormless, which means he doesn't quite manage to ground the story in anything particularly real. He tries, but ... nope.

I had fun watching this film, but I'm slightly ashamed of the fact. It also occurs to me that at least part of the enjoyment I am apparently able to gain from bad genre movies and TV is the result of my academic inclinations towards contexualisation, analysis, deconstruction. To be an academic and a fan is to exist surprisingly comfortably in a state of dual personality, both enjoyably invested and equally enjoyably distanced. It means that even a bad and facile movie is layered and textured in surprising ways. It works for me.

¹ If only because I possess four Absolute Sandman tomes, any one of which must weigh rather more than Hobbit.

Current Mood: fatigue levels in the red

I am amused by the way in which tweets in my LJ sidebar occasionally become involuntary poetry. Yesterday I was clearly channelling e e cummings, albeit a younger and less accomplished e c cummings who was probably stoned at the time:

right, well, that was a day
during which I achieved
precisely and absolutely
nothing

The exigencies of space have happily contrived to give the sentence a descending number of words per line, culminating in the solitary splendour of "nothing", null and isolate as the closer to the piece. As an epitaph to my day, during which I did, in fact, achieve nothing, it's fairly effective. I marked about three dozen essays over the weekend, in a bizarre and concentrated two-day burst which suggests I must have dredged some actual self-discipline out of the sludge with a gaff, and it's left me a bit disinclined. For anything, basically. I am re-reading the Ankh Morpork city watch novels in strict chronological order, and eating malva pudding at intervals. (OK, I lied about achieving nothing yesterday. I made a malva pudding).

On the upside, a brief interchange with my boss this morning reveals that she's expecting me back at the end of November, not the start. This is weird. I may, apparently, be permitted to go back a couple of weeks earlier as long as it's only for half days. Why is it that everyone else seems to be taking this illness/fatigue thing more seriously than I am? I still don't quite believe in it. But I'm inherently obedient. On with the non-working, then.

Apopos of not much, to whom might I have incautiously lent my copy of Iron Man 2? It's unaccountably missing from my shelf, and I'm poised on the brink of ordering a spiffy special edition DVD to replace it.

Current Mood: drifty and vague

The French, bless their chaussettes en coton, are fairly legendary for the depth, complexity and Gallic impenetrability of their bureaucracy, which is implemented and negotiated with a sort of cheerfully inflexible bloody-minded patience one has to reluctantly admire. They also do it all in French, which adds to my French-house-owning and bank-account-managing activities a certain forehead-knotting challenge. My French was never fluid or flexible, and A-level travails were really a hell of a long time ago.

There are, however, moments when one has to salute, with a certain tearful relief, the impenetrable thickets of red tape. On Monday I received a cheerful little e-mail missive from my French bank, which, after I'd shunted it through Google Translate and untangled a couple of the more surreal phrases with recourse to my Wordsworth French-English-English-French, turned out to be a polite request for confirmation of the transfer of in excess of EUR4000 from my French account to South Africa. Needless to say, my French bank account, which has been happily accumulating rent and bankrolling repairs at more or less neck-and-neck speeds, doesn't actually contain EUR4000, and I certainly wouldn't be transferring it to South Africa if it did. A certain amount of "eek", shall we say, resulted. Thank heavens the slow-grinding mills of French banking entail a laudable element of paranoia.

There remains, of course, the question of how the hell anyone in SA got hold of my French bank account details in the first place. I have a French credit card, but have never activated or used it, and don't even usually carry it in my wallet. Nonetheless I cannot but feel that this attempt at bank fraud comes very suspiciously on the heels of the wallet robbery experience; I can't find the card in the slightly shambolic desk drawer in which it usually resides, and am inclining to the suspicion that I took it to Australia with me just in case mine proved temperamental, and being distracted by unexpected hospitalisation and the aftermath, never got around to taking it out. I didn't even think of cancelling it when I cancelled all the other cards after the robbery, which was stupid - I should have checked.

But the attempted transfer wasn't, apparently, on the credit card: it was on the cheque account. Dubious scammers could have acquired the details in, I suppose, a number of inventive and/or happenstance ways, which I list in order of increasing likelihood:

The bastard hedge-trimmer could have creatively used the French credit card in some way unknown to me to dig up related account information, although this seems far-fetched; it's far more likely that he actually abstracted a bank printout from my desk while I was distracted by extension cords. I can't find one missing, though, and it would have had to be lying on top of my in-tray, he really had no more than a few seconds in which to act.
There may have been some other piece of paper in my wallet which included the account number. I can't think of what it would be, and it's not the sort of thing I usually carry for good and sufficient security reasons, but I suppose there's a chance.
The time-concatenation with the wallet theft may be coincidence: I may have incautiously thrown out something with an account number on it, which might have ended up in the recycling and been abstracted and put to illegal use by a recycle-sorter.
The time-concatenation with the wallet theft may be coincidence: some noxious individual may have abstracted a bank statement from the postbox before I actually got hold of it. This is actually very likely, since the bank has my home address, and the house postbox lost its padlock to rust a while back and we've never got around to replacing it.

I am very enamoured of my French bank. Not content with emailing me and requesting confirmation of the transfer, they emailed me back within a day to confirm that they'd blocked the transfer and to give me the details on how to cancel the credit card. Since this entails phoning a French number and navigating the process in French, I was still girding my loins when they took matters into their own hands by phoning me at home, divined my frozen horror at their opening barrage of rapid-fire French by the tonal quality of my slightly desperate "Bonjour", switched to slightly laboured but perfectly adequate English, confirmed the transfer cancellation, instituted a new process whereby any transfer out of that account needs a hard copy with my signature, changed my statement address to the far more secure box number, and emailed me, in English, within half an hour of all of the above to confirm it all. I'm a bit stunned, but fortunately don't need to actually parry as apparently they do all that for you. Gawsh.

Things To Do: replace the padlock on the postbox, and change the address details on the few outstanding accounts which use it to the box number. Improve my French conversation. Add to my list of insomnia-beating mental exercises the pleasantly sadistic process of inventing new and ungodly deaths for bank scammers and hedge-trimmers and their noxious ilk. Feel incredibly relieved.

Current Mood: dodged a bullet there
Current Music: Flanders and Swann, IN MY HEAD!

We ran Attack of the Vapours, our insane 24-person parody LARP, for the latest generation of university roleplaying types last night. As a result I'm pretty much dead, but it was fun, and the players did very well. Some really good roleplayers beautifully in character, and a lot of attention paid to costume and prop. Memo to self: always put a costume box onto LARP character sheets in the future. Yes, there will be a future. I haven't written LARPs in far too long, and I have two half-finished and one in concept form which I really want to do. I may noodle around with them during this break. It'll make a pleasant change from the academic papers, even if the academic papers are mostly Miyazaki and Harry Potter.

I have to say, though, Vapour's yearbook photo is annotated "LARP most likely to make me wonder vaguely if my firm conviction that I've never done drugs is actually correct". It was written by a team of four of us in a series of 9am Sunday morning design sessions, and it's insane. It has evil sex twins, and polar-bear fixations, and trained killer attack throwing Pomeranians, and a Sinister Philatelist Subplot which results in the existence of stamps such as the Gawungafingi Badger-Black and the Spasmodic Flying Squirrel. It also rejoices in ranked ability cards which range from "Anyone for tennis?" to "This is not, in fact, the case". Contemplating the ravages wrought by Rudy with the latter brings a tear of joy and pride to my eye. The front page of the LARP explicitly instructs players to use the ability cards in creative and horrifying ways the designers couldn't possibly predict, and wow, did they ever.

I'm also dead because of unexpected root canal on Friday, which tends to leave me feeling as though I've been beaten with clubs. I have a wonderful dentist who has the superpower of giving injections I can't actually feel at all, but the vibrations cause me to clench every muscle in my body until I'm levitating off the chair, and not to relax for at least twelve hours. However, two out of three roots are thoroughly, patiently and meticulously drilled, and the assault on the third is only to come in about a month, by which time my jaw may have unclamped. Hooray.

I should also mention that I'm totally addicted to the one She Wants Revenge album I actually possess, which is Valleyheart (the earlier albums arrive from Amazon shortly), and which is channelling Bauhaus, Depeche Mode and Joy Div in strict rotation. It's poppy and retro and totally derivitive and it makes my little fangirly 80s heart go pit-a-pat.

Current Mood: tired, amused
Current Music: She Wants Revenge, Valleyheart

You know, it's not just the gentle weekly suggestions of my therapist which are starting to make me realise I don't have enough faith in myself. Remember the sad death of Winona, my netbook? She refused to switch on at any price, and eventually by determined trial and error I worked out that her on switch was defunct. I resolved to take her around to her supplier sometime and demand medical attention, and there the matter languished.

Then last night we were role-playing, and the conversation rambled around to matters technogeeknical, as it does, and I had myself a brief, ritual "dead Winona" lament. Whereupon Andrew H-S agreed that yes, it did sound like the on switch was buggered, and why didn't I just open it up and fiddle around a bit, he's seen me fix stuff he can't fix? (On mature reflection I think he must mean that one weekend away in Wilderness with the gang, over a decade ago, when I fixed the broken toilet flushing system with a brass brazing rod and the jeweller's pliers I carry in my handbag, and we spent the rest of the weekend rather drunkenly deciding who we'd like with us come the apocalypse, on grounds of random skills. I made it because of my ability to fix flush toilets. We decided, if I remember correctly, that we were pretty much screwed in genetic terms, we're all bespectacled geek types and our offspring would probably be blind within two generations. We also, for no adequately defined reason, ended up deploying Thakky's husband in a string bikini with a Bowie knife as a boundary patrol, and keeping David in a cage for breeding purposes as he's one of the few of us with 20/20 vision. It was a fairly drunken weekend).

Anyway, fired by this passing testament to my abilities, I just disassembled selected portions of Winona with the Philips screwdriver I keep on my desk, jiggled the switchy bits, blew carefully into the whole thing to remove dust and accreted pocket universes, and screwed it back together, whereupon it booted first go. She is now sitting on my desk meditatively downloading Windows upgrades. I feel smug, and also maddened beyond belief that I didn't trust my own instincts and bloody well do that first off when the problem manifested. Honestly. Two minutes of fiddling and a Philips screwdriver. Think of all the ritual Winona laments I would have saved.

Current Mood: Heh
Current Music: She Wants Revenge

Consolations of this job: spending fifteen minutes putting the fear of wossname into merry students convinced that they can combine a Student's Representative Council position with, for example, the insanely heavy demands of a PPE degree. I’ve seen a lot of these lately, because the student affairs dept has intelligently taken to requiring a curriculum advisor to assess candidates in curriculum terms and give them a stern Dutch Uncle talking to before they can proceed. I have a sinister little “your marks will drop” speech all worked out. Lots of these kids will be fine, they’re solid students evidently possessed of a work ethic as well as a civic consciousness, but others are a lot more borderline. It is my fervent hope that the ones who proceed with an SRC position in the direct teeth of my warnings will at least have enough fear of wossname percolating their systems that they might contrive to be reasonably vigilant about keeping on top of their work.

Today has, in fact, been insanely productive. This is the direct result of, yet again, giant squid gnawing on Seacom cables, which is my placeholder explanation for any failure of internet access on campus. The bandwidth chart has looked like this all day:

- making me feel mildly seasick to contemplate, for reasons quite apart from the internet withdrawal systems and more connected to inner ear fragility. However, I have been forced in the absence of web browsing to actually do some work. Bother.

I am, however, gnashing my teeth rather less than usual as I feel I’m owed a technojinx outbreak. I am still mildly stunned that, after a month of cowardly delay owing to my fear of losing internet access, I last night finally disconnected the ADSL modem to replace it with the brand spanky new wireless one. It connected first go – all the little blinky lights blinked on within about thirty seconds, enthusiastically. As an encore, Winona found the network first go, and the wireless key in fact unlocked it without any trouble other than that occasioned by my slightly hamfisted typing. I am forced to accept that when my sweet Imaginet geeks say the router is pre-formatted, they bloody well mean it. Also, Achievement Unlocked: lying on sofa watching TV and simultaneously looking up random guest stars because they look vaguely familiar).

This, of course, means that I have a spare, entirely functional ADSL router (four-port non-wireless) lying around the house, and will be very happy to put it up for adoption to a good home. Leave bids in the comments. (Not monetary ones. No payment necessary.)

Current Mood: surprisingly calm
Current Music: Fleetwood Mac

The two Egyptian geese who spend a lot of their time posing on the chimney of the residence opposite my office window are clearly a couple. This morning they've been rootling around in the res garden with a whole outbreak of baby goslings. It's ridiculously cute, although possibly unwarrantedly early. The weather has been unseasonably warm in the last couple of weeks, but you know Cape Town still has hailstorms up her sleeve. Poor fluffy birdies.

While we're on the subject of things variously avian,

first_fallen, who is a Mad Knitter in spades, gave me a pair of beautiful knitted fingerless gloves for my birthday, with a cable-stitched wol pattern. In purple. I adore them. She wanted to put a photo on her Ravelry project page, so I set out to take one. A spot of fuffling around revealed that they didn't photograph at all well without hands in them, so I was faced with the interesting challenge of trying to work out how to hold the camera and photograph both my own hands at the same time. In the event, this entailed:

Placing camera on top of a pile of books, carefully judged for height, on my desk.
Placing black cloth over monitor and holding hands up in front of it.
Adjusting distance of camera to frame hands correctly.
Slowly and carefully pushing the camera button with my chin while not moving my hands at all.
Repeating ad nauseam with various blurry or out-of-frame results, then giving up and asking stv to take the photos. (This resulted in a 45-minute photo shoot in which my hands in gloves were carefully posed in fifteen different positions against five different artistic backdrops, including Jo's tweed jacketed back).

They're lovely gloves. But I am fighting a desire to sew little black beads onto all their eyes, just because.

Image obviously by stv, aka Max Barners. Closeup of wols here, for all you mad knitters.

Current Mood: enwolled, begloved
Current Music: Seu Jorge doing acoustic David Bowie in Portuguese

There is no moment when I'm happier or more myself than when I'm prowling around a classroom, such as today, refereeing a spirited discussion of "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" for 20 voluble and intelligent second-years. Lovely tut: I'm still buzzing. So we were dealing in some detail with the Victorian context, and the use of supernatural symbol to explore the desires and anxieties of the age, and in particular Stevenson's presentation of the classically Victorian dichotomies of "good" and "evil" through the figure of Hyde and Jekyll's complicity with him. At which point the discussion takes this sharp right turn:

CHATTY STUDENT (musingly): It's like when you're playing Mass Effect, and you score points for good or evil choices which affect the way your character is viewed, and the direction of events.

ME (surprised and pleased, but attempting to remain suave and professional): Why, yes. *inserts well-directed contextualisation contrasting Victorian views of morality with those of our contemporary age as reflected in computer games, avoiding, with consummate self-control, the word "postmodern"*

ANOTHER, EQUALLY CHATTY STUDENT: Actually, I think the Victorian view is more like Fable. Mass Effect has a lot of grey areas and points where the moral choice is not clear-cut.

ME (trying to repress flashbacks to the last few months of Dragon Age and related rants): Valid point, that's Bioware for you. Although I think that Stevenson is actually problematising the clear-cut dichotomies of Victorian morality... *reigns in and directs resulting melee of input without mentioning Dragon Age more than five times*

I should point out that my seminar, in a somewhat interesting intensification of the usual Humanities Demographic Effect, includes nineteen young ladies, one gentleman, and me. All gaming input up to this point has come from the young ladies.

SOLE GENT (raising hand hesitantly): Um, is this actually happening? I'm in a room full of women and they all game?

A quick poll suggests that they don't all game, but, in fact, seven of the nineteen do, indeed, game quite seriously. Eight if you count me. Subsequent discussions managed to remain bizarrely on the Jekyll and Hyde topic while simultaneously haring off in the direction of doubles, masks, the Hulk, superheroes generally, TwoFace, the doppelganger effect in The Vampire Diaries, and a brief and lateral attempt to get me to commit to whether playing computer games gives free reign to your Dark Side in the same way that taking a potion and releasing Hyde does. (For the record: no).

On the slightly disconcerting side, apparently Dragon Age is determined to colonise all areas of my life, however unlikely. On the upside, the gender balance of geekdom has changed radically in the last five or six years, is all I can say. And a good thing too.

Current Mood: buzzed

A few catch-up post-hospital points:

Those of you planning to take aspirin on long haul flights as a DVT preventer, please reformulate your plans. Two separate and unaffiliated doctors have now told me that aspirin is not effective in thinning venous blood, it tends to have more effect on the arteries, which are not implicated in DVT. If you're really worried you need to take Clexane two days before you travel, but mostly that's prescribed for people who've already faced the DVT affliction. Like me. The socks are effective, but they're most effective in conjunction with moving around often/doing the foot exercises, which are the things you really need to do.
Apparently Hobbit needs about five days to Express his Miff at my three-week absence. He suddenly agreed that I actually existed around Wednesday, and has spent a lot of the subsequent days asleep on the cushioned footstool next to my gammy foot, one paw resting on it in a proprietorial fashion. I'm not sure if the improvement in the hobbling is related or coincidental, but I'm a lot more mobile and in far less pain than I was a week ago.
Immobilisation from DVT is apparently the necessary motivator to actually getting around to ordering a wireless modem for the house, which means I can look up things on IMDB with Winona while watching TV. Score. Once I've set it up, that is.
The improvement in the leg to the point where I can actually sit at the computer for any length of time is absolutely correlated with a sudden rediscovery of my incomplete Dragon Age II game. Huzzah.
Things they actually don't tell you while you're flat on your back with a pulmonary embolism: survival rate for the damned things is about 50%. I got lucky.

Current Mood: better for being off work

Things I Have Learned Over the Last Ten Days:

All that stuff they throw at you on aircraft about long-haul flights and deep vein thrombosis? It's not urban legend. Or old wive's tales. Or scaremongering. Or a cunning way to make you look ridiculous while waving your feet in the air.
Deep vein thrombosis really hurts. Your calf builds up quite ridiculous amounts of pressure, and putting foot to floor after having it elevated invokes the Screaming Agony Death Type Three.
Developing the bloody thing on the flight out to Australia is neatly timed to give you a “gosh, sprained calf” pain which increases only in gradual increments, reaching its full apotheosis in Johannesburg airport after the 14-hour return flight, as you hobble at frantic speeds down the approximately six million miles of Oliver Tambo airport to catch, with a 20-minute window, the replacement connection you've been rebooked on after missing your actual Cape Town connection after high winds in Sydney. At this stage, “desperate to get home” is a thundering understatement.
The ultrasound with which they prod your leg to determine the existence of the doomful blood clot lurking behind your knee is quite ridiculously cool, particularly as operated by the little ultrasound goddess on whose slightest pronouncements doctors hang.
Hospitals are not, contrary to vague expectation, designed to be about your comfort. They are designed to be about your treatment. Your actual comfort and reassurance does happen, but it's very clearly secondary on the priority list of all these incredibly busy people whose actual allegiance is to this enormous unwieldy structure full of important rules.
The above notwithstanding, a lot of hospital staff are actually lovely and empathetic and do deal with your comfort. Eventually.
Hospital is mostly about waiting around. After ten days this gets tired.
If you are a generally unfit sort of person prone to bodily ills, and have moreover trotted obliviously around Australia on a deep vein thrombosis for ten days, you will inevitably develop complications. This means that a few nameless bits of the clot have detached themselves from their spawning ground behind the knee, and have wandered vaguely through the heart and into your lungs, where they've stuck. This causes small sections of collapsed lung, chest pain, shortness of breath, your doctor to put his head into his hands helplessly, and a disconcertingly sudden transfer to the ICU with strict instructions not to move.
If you have multiple pulmonary embolisms, the ICU is an incredibly reassuring place to be. It is also bedlam, filled with noise, chatting staff, beeping machines, and the continual entry and exit of patients.
Hospitals are not restful places. Fortunately their drugs are good.
Pain and concern about collapsed lungs are surprisingly distractable by cool machines, particularly the ones which are a cross between alien tech and the X-Files, and where they give you weird side-effect sensations by pumping you full of iodine.
Avoid any illness which requires you to have blood taken through a pulse point. It hurts like hell and damnation.
Friends are absolutely the only way to retain sanity through a ten-day hospital stay. I am blessed with incredible friends, whose dedication to visits in the teeth of my bored and disconsolate growling, has been wonderful and miraculous.
”Medical aid” is a swear word until you're in hospital for ten days.
There is a bizarre comfort knowing that you can tick the "injury on duty" box on your leave form when you eventually get back to work.
Hospital food is inventively awful.
When it comes to the crunch, the Evil Landlord is actually cheerfully matter-of-fact about being asked to go through a lady's underwear drawer in order to bring fresh underwear to hospitalised housemates.
The list of foods you can't eat while on Warfarin is quite bizarre.
Ten days of internet absence, apart from the withdrawal symptoms, generates a ridiculous quantity of livejournal spam, mostly in Russian.
It's really worth moving around a lot on long haul flights.

Current Mood: very tired of hospitals

Sydney has a very egalitarian attitude to opera. Far from being a bastion of snooty elitism, the Sydney Opera House seems to be a rocking local/tourist hangout, filled to the brim, of a fine winter's evening, with chattering crowds hanging out at the harbourside bars just under the iconic sails. The slightly more formally dressed opera crowd mingle quite cheerfully with the beer-swilling, jeans-wearing tourists. It's all pleasingly eclectic, its air of good-humoured relaxation exemplified neatly by our waiter, who had about seven inverted wineglasses slung through the belt on the back of his waistcoat.

When you approach the opera house by ferry the silhouette, by now the stuff of cliché, looks all ethereal and floaty, like the pictures. One puff of wind and you expect to see the whole thing up sticks and drift out to sea with a stately grace, like a Spanish galleon. Up close, and particularly inside, though, the thing has a sort of a brutal feel, all giant soaring concrete arches and stone, solidly rooted to its peninsula. It's an amazing space, and an amazing history of construction, rife with visions, personalities, cost overruns and hair-tearing moments of "this thing can't be built!" The act of faith to keep going was something extraordinary. The internal theatre and concert spaces are also extraordinary - beautifully designed, and very neatly finangled to give the necessary wing and set storage space under rather than next to them, as dictated by the strange shapes of the external shell. (We took the guided tour, it was fascinating).

The opera itself was a bit weird as an experience; it transpires that I was the only serious opera buff in the group of colleagues who went, and half of them got bored and left at intermission. Cappriccio is a bit of an unfortunate introduction to opera, being an extremely cerebral and meta-level exploration of whether words or music are more important as art forms, but it's frequently witty and the music, while a bit vague and formless at times, has moments of enormous beauty. However, the colleague who booked managed to get us into cheap seats where we couldn't actually see the surtitle strip, which means that we only really had access to half of the words/music debate, rendering it one-sided and curiously moot. It was beautifully staged and sung, though, and I'm utterly glad I went.

In other news, this lurgi is at the well-known "almost accidentally faint while looking at dugong" stage. I need to stay off my feet for a few days. On the upside, I also met a platypus.

Current Mood: dead, floaty

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Freckles & Doubt

With my mastery of narrative structure I should be ruling the cosmos by now.

Entries tagged with gawsh

I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve

o captain my captain

how doth the little busy bee

the empty sky

just be still with me

in like a lion

silhouettes and shadows

wayward puppy is wayward

yolk seeping from their skin like light

no evil shall escape my sight

I have forgotten the plums that were in the icebox

It's not that they're wicked or naturally bad

principle imports: cold cream, xylophones, iambic pentameter

It's not like I meant to. The damn thing malfunctioned or something.

time makes you bolder, children get older

Wednesday wol is cable stitched

you go, girl

docs in socks

she took those pills from the pill concoctor...

the operative word

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December 2024

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