Freckles & Doubt

So riddle me this, readers: why is it that Humanities students, who are registered for this degree presumably because they like this reading and writing kick, are apparently constitutionally incapable of actually reading anything? There's this strange, Teflon-slippery resistance to actual text which characterises the undergraduate gazelle in its natural habitat. They start out by not reading my door, which is decorated with a variety of informative notices including a strict injunction to print out their record before they ask me anything about their curriculum, and which is further embellished with an Ursula Vernon Snoggox by way of reinforcement.



This is a snoggox. I feel it perfectly encapsulates my basic attitude of suspicious rage when confronted by a non-transcript-bearing student. They completely ignore it, and the notice. They further ignore all the notices which delineate, in words of one syllable, my consultation times, and bound cheerfully in at all sorts of odd hours, conspicuously failing in any way to brandish a transcript. Then they look wounded when I imitate the action of the snoggox and grump at them.

This quasi-religious abhorrence of the textual extends to actual classroom practice. I'm teaching internet sexuality at the moment. Their reader contains a choice selection of sex-bloggers, and bits of both the Very Secret Diaries and Cassie Claire's knotty bit of Weasleycest. Apart from being interesting, accessible and dodgy as all get-out, these extracts are further characterised by being short. Have any of the class done the required reading before the lecture? Not bloody likely. A couple of them, if I'm lucky.

I suffer a profound failure of empathy over all this. OK, I passed second-year English with flying colours despite having only read a third of Middlemarch, a novel I unaccountably loathe, necessitating having to fake my way through the exam question with every evidence of success, but other than that I did the damned reading and then some. My intellectual intake at the moment is down at the level of The Vampire Diaries, but even so I read eight books this weekend. Quite apart from my own problem of becoming ridiculously twitchy when deprived of text, it's a basic courtesy to your lecturer to prepare for the class.

I don't want to bemoan the decline in the undergrad student, because I don't think they have actually declined, much. Their schooling is a lot more undisciplined than mine was, but they're still bright young things. What has changed is the amount they read, because more and more their daily lives are not about text, they're about image. They all watch TV and movies, and they frequently impress me with their analytical insight watching movie clips in class. But they don't read as much any more; most of them certainly lack the obsessive, personal, continuous, instrumental relationship I had and still have with books. I read my set works because they were books, not because they were set works. This also explains why so few of these kids relate to the internet in the way I do: most of my interactions are textual, I spend a lot of it writing and reading rather than looking at pictures. For me, it's always about the words. For them, large tracts of words are not just irrelevant, they're increasingly opaque and difficult, because increasingly their skills and focus are going elsewhere.

This is, of course, inevitable; culture changes continuously under technology, and by definition we're all obsolete the instant we acquire a competency. I can't rail at this and say it shouldn't be happening, that would be futile, but I find it sad. I have to work increasingly hard to share a vocabulary with my students, and it's very difficult to teach across a divide between worlds.

On the upside, Vampire Diaries took a sudden upswing in Episode 5, and is suddenly about things that are a lot more real and interesting than all the teen angst. Either that, or the Stockholm Syndrome's got me.

So, vampires. I teach 'em. (And, may I add, for the record, that no fewer than three members of my flist did yesterday start their posts with "So, ...", which is probably expressive of something important, I'm not sure what.) I hasten to add, before you all obligingly imagine rows of little five-year-olds with pasty complexions and pointy teeth sitting attentively in a midnight classroom while I hold forth, I teach undergrad students about vampires rather than trying to teach vampires anything. (A bit difficult to maintain teacherly distance and mystique when pardon me, your teeth are in my neck). Also, I teach vampires and the erotic to strictly third-years, who presumably by this stage of their development are capable of reacting sensibly and without giggling, or at least without too much giggling, to explicit discussions of sex and phallic imagery and Freudian what have you. In the course of this epic teaching quest, currently filed under Department of Things That Keep Me Sane, I naturally get to be very, very rude about Twilight, and yesterday came to a quite sizzling and spontaneous insight which added about fifteen minutes to the lecture by way of digression and interesting debate. I shall now inflict it upon you, whether you like it or not.

See, in a broadly narrative sense vampires morph. They mutate. They are as all symbolic as all get-out, and thus are quite beautifully dense and layered reflections of their context - social, moral, historical, cultural. What vampires have mostly done for about two hundred years is provide us with powerful myths through which we can talk about sex, because the act of biting is a particularly explicit metaphor for sexual penetration, but the nature of the sex has changed over time. They fill, if you want to keep with the Freudian imagery, gaps - they're about desire, and desire is about something missing. Victorian vampires explore sex and seduction and intimacy, in a relatively simple way, because sex and seduction and intimacy were not OK as topics of ordinary literary representation, but were OK when you slithered them off sideways into the symbolic. They were particularly powerful as a vehicle for women to vicariously experience sex, and for men to vicariously work through all their anxieties about homo-eroticism, or women nicking phallic authority. Victorian vampires rock some serious repression.

These are not the concerns of the late twentieth century, which got progressively more open-minded about representing sex; post the sexual revolution of the 60s and the feminist movement, simple sexual freedom or women with fangs were not the major source of anxiety. Which isn't to say there weren't anxieties, and the last few decades of the 1900s saw a huge upsurge in the popularity of vampires - often angsty, interior, half-sympathetic monsters of maximum attractiveness. They kept the vampire power, though, the qualities of strength, mind control, shapeshifting, and were thus a beautiful vehicle to talk about the aspect of sexuality which wasn't OK in these particular times, namely the pleasures of submission. In a feminist and post-feminist age it's somewhat frowned upon, other than in the fringe of BDSM, to enjoy the jolly old stereotypes of an explicitly heterosexual dominance/submission relationship: gosh your fangs are so big, I'll just relax and enjoy it, shall I? So more modern vampires are powerful, dominant, with a swing towards violence (Buffy, Blade), but a subtext of seduction and desirability nonetheless. They're deeply non-PC in all sorts of ways, and we lap them up, hence the ridiculous success of Anne Rice, Laurel K. Hamilton and the rest of the heaving bosoms.

Twilight, though, Twilight is something different. Of course its attitude to sex is all up the pole, being as how it's a thinly-disguised (and badly-written) Mormon abstinence tract; Edward is all desirable but horribly dangerous because SEX! is DANGEROUS! and you SHOULDN'T HAVE IT! no matter how much you want it, cue yearning, repression and smouldering stalker behaviour. He could snap you like a twig, you know, and you're only allowed to get off on the idea because he's not actually touching you.

But I realised yesterday that that's only half of it. Meyer is plugging straight into the American zeitgeist, namely the religious right's frothing hypocricies about sex, but she's also allowing her vampires to morph yet again into another reflection of their context: celebrity culture. Edward glitters. He's a beautiful, powerful, distant, shiny object that you desire hopelessly but can't have. Bella's response, and the response of any screaming Twihard who wants him, is identical to their response to poor Robert Pattinson - it's a fan relationship of the more obsessive kind, desire for a distant ideal which is always unattainable. The first three novels are emotional porn for exactly this kind of relationship, spiced up with the unbelievable, wish-fulfilling fact that the iconic object of affection, in all his unreal beauty, actually reciprocates. Meyer's also not alone in exploiting this fact of modern media life: if you look at the fang-bangers in True Blood or the Sookie novels, they're basically groupies to the celebrity cult of vampires in general. Dracula had his gypsies, but in this day and age he has hordes of teen and post-teen idiots conditioned by media cultures into slavish and often self-destructive devotion to a powerful object of desire.

We get, in short, the vampires we deserve. I can only hope to goodness we grow out of them soon. I also have to say, I didn't realise how incredibly overt with all this Annie Lennox is in Love Song for a Vampire. I should totally have shown that to the class, if only for its lovely concentration of vampire symbolism. Also, does anyone have The Vampire Diaries? Half my class seems to be obsessed with the show, which means I should probably watch it. Sigh.

If my enthusiasms bring me out in a flood of babble, it's worse when they're combined: favourite TV shows and academic analysis, for example, are bad enough in their own right, but academic babble about favourite TV shows is downright exhausting to the hapless onlooker. The same, apparently, is true of cooking and teaching. A nice young man, a deadlocked black dude with a British accent, came up to me in the booze aisle of the supermarket this afternoon and incautiously asked if I minded suggesting what sort of wine he should use for cooking.

Me (enthusiastically): Yes, of course! what are you cooking?
Him (slightly taken aback): Um, lamb.
Me (even more enthusiastically): OK, you want a fairly robust red, I usually go for some sort of blend because they're cheaper. Cabernet, pinotage, that sort of thing.
Him (backing away slightly): Oh, thanks, I -
Me (waving my hands around wildly, which is apparently intrinsic to my teaching process): The first rule is never to cook with anything you wouldn't drink, a really poor quality wine will have a harsh taste which will come through into the food ...
Him (alarmed): ...!
Me (undaunted): ..although conversely, a really good one is a waste, the subtleties of the flavour will be lost. I'd go for a cheap bottle rather than a box.
Him (gamely): The price isn't too much of an issue...
Me (rifling through the shelves manically): Good, but you could go with this cab/merlot blend for under R30, or this Rough Red - I tend to look for something which says "fruity" on the label, the flavour is better with meat than something very dry...
Him (ruefully): I certainly seem to have asked the right person...
Me (a bit conscience-stricken): Oh, sorry, this is probably far more detail than you really wanted. I take my cooking seriously.
Him (gracefully, if a bit wild-eyed): Not at all, I feel like an expert now.
(He grabs a random bottle and flees before I can start holding forth again.)

I suspect I should try to do more formal teaching, insufficient quantities thereof are possibly dangerous to innocent bystanders. On the upside, now he never has to stick his neck out by asking the same question of anyone in a booze aisle in future, and the overall education level of the world has risen by a tiny but vital fraction.

Hmmm. Wayward brain, c'est moi. The last set of subject lines on this blog have referenced, from the bottom, Belle & Sebastian lyrics, heraldry humour, a weak and inexcusable pun, Crowded House lyrics, A. A. Milne, netspeak, Yoda, The Firm's "Star Trekking", and a quote from the Spike sexual-dysfunction scene in Buffy Season 4. Either I'm ridiculously well rounded or I have the attention span of a stunned herring.

In the Department of Consciousness-Challenged Members of the Genus Clupea, this morning I woke up about half an hour before my alarm clock went off and decided to dash up to campus in the first flush of nasty traffic at about 7.15 instead of waiting until it dies down a bit after 8. Twenty minutes later, inching through Rondebosch, I realised it was Wednesday and I'd joyously locked up the house and set the alarm in blithe disregard of the fact that it's the gardener's day. Three seconds later I also realised that I hadn't switched off the alarm clock before I left. Gritting my teeth and turning the car around with a fine insouciance in the face of oncoming traffic, it was forcibly borne upon me that I had one of my contact lenses in back-to-front. I consider it to be a triumph of the will that I returned home with only a few restrained cuss words, and didn't immediately crawl straight back into bed. But my noble plan to finish the marking before the day started was, alas, doomed.

The vagaries of the week have been slightly complicated by the fact that my dad's in Groote Schuur this week, going through a batch of tests in the neurology ward, so the levels of Kafkaesque surreal have been increased materially by the need to negotiate the Giant Medical Bureaucracy That Ate Observatory. The people are surprisingly sweet, but I swear that building warps space-time. It has more floors than it should, and they're all twice as tall as they should be so that one flight of stairs is approximately endless. Also, directions don't work. A compass in that place would merely spin, in a desultory and hapless fashion, until rescued by kindly doctors.

However, consolation from the Department of Helpless Fangirling: China Miéville on crime novels. I've always stoutly maintained that crime novels are non-realist and offer the same narrative pleasures as fantasy, so it's nice to have my opinion (and large collection) confirmed by someone of Mr. Mieville's intellectual stature. This last being indexed by his ability to perpetrate, apparently straight-faced, not only the wonderful phrase I have snagged for today's subject line, but the following set of statements:

The various manly Virgils who appear ex nihilo to escort Marlowe through his oneiric purgatories are not characters, but eloquent opacities in man-shape: much more interesting. Dalgliesh’s irresistibility to hyperrealised moral panics du jour – the poor man manages to contract SARS – is an elegiac opera of Holland Park angst, rather than any quotidian gazette of a policeman’s unhappy lot.

Of course, he's China Miéville and therefore gets away with it, but any student who pulled that on me in an essay would acquire righteous quibbles in the margin in green pen, probably along the lines of "you're over-writing!", "somewhat prolix (look it up)", and "do you actually know what these words mean?" Also, probably, "aargh".

We had a thunderstorm this morning! very happy-making, although not productive of actual rain. The weather is surprisingly hot and sultry, although that may simply be my roaring temperature talking.

Spent the day at home yesterday on account of feeling dreadful, rinse and repeat today. Had to trundle up to campus briefly yesterday to give my last lecture, since it was the last day of term, no rescheduling possible, and there was Vital Exam Stuff I'd promised to tell them. The brief outing left me feeling rather weird - dizzy, sweaty, shaky - although still uncannily able to burble more or less coherently about fanfic, cultural appropriation, demographics, geniune female-centred erotica, and what have you. Informed class that if I had a brain I'd spend the last ten minutes neatly tying up the disparate and yet strangely linked themes of the lecture series, encompassing vampire texts, sex blogs and fan fiction in one giant meta-theory of eroticism, representation and unreality, but since the 'flu had left me with no brain worth mentioning, the synthesis was left as an exercise for the student. They seemed surprisingly cool with this, which suggests that I must somehow have at least partially vouchsafed to them the surreality of the underlying metaphor. Also, amused, but that may have been because I was revealing my enormous geekhood by quoting bits of Cassie Claire from memory.

Spent a lot of the day reading Sharon Shinn, a surprisingly girly stash of which I discovered on my Evil Landlord's groaning shelves. She seems to be one of those writers who defaults to a romance structure, in the sense of Mills and Boon romance, but very entertainingly. Interesting magic, and her people are very real.

I love the bit where I tell a room full of anxious first-years that it's actually significantly difficult to get thrown out of the faculty, they're fine if they pass three courses in their first year. The sharp intake of breath. The helpless, relieved grins. The relaxation of the shoulders as hope dawns. Until this point most of them are petrified that they'll be flung out into the snow if they fail one. Sometimes I really enjoy my job.

Back to lecturing today, which also possibly explains my unusually buoyant mood, to the extent of wandering down the corridor singing "Tell me why! I don't like Mondays..." happily to myself. (Bob Geldorf notwithstanding. Lord, that's an irritating little man). Holding forth for forty-five minutes on the essential unreality of sex in representation seems to calm my inner kvetch quite nicely, thank you, which is fortunate as the Monday shock after a three-day weekend is usually quite nasty. Also, bonus, made a point of using both "resonate" and "evoke" at least once during the lecture. Just for you, stvil. Plus mandatory references to Buffy, Anne Rice diss, and revelation of the existence of Weasleycest to stunned and disbelieving Humanities third-years.

I miss teaching. Memo to self, trade in career, it is skraaatched.

Too weird. Cooking malva pudding is apparently a pervasive process, to the point where I can still smell it on my hair after two days. I am not sure if the effect of this is to mark me inescapably as a stay-at-home domestic type, or if it'll operate closer to David's well-known Vanilla Theory Of Seducing Women (men smelling of vanilla are comforting and safe and associated with kitchens, baking and nurture, therefore get rebuffed less). While he has never adequately demonstrated the validity of this theory to my scientific satisfaction, I possibly ought to go and stand hopefully in a well-ventilated area full of interesting men just in case.

I have emerged from the fog sufficiently to finish this batch of marking, which is something of a relief as I was becoming more than somewhat bored with dragging the pile fruitlessly between home and campus in order to studiously ignore it. Having marked the lot more or less by pretending not to, I have to conclude that students are odd. They had an option between a slightly tricky question on World of Warcraft and its potential for online eroticism, and an easy, wide-open one on the kinds of narrative gaps fanfic usually fills. I spent three lectures on fanfic and half a one on WoW. The WoW question answerers gave me some lovely essays, whereas the fanfic ones were uniformly blah. Memo to self: less information next time, the resulting panic seems to inspire students to actual intellectual activity.

Last Night I Dreamed: an epic dash through forests and into the cellars of houses to evade the golem armies staggering through the trees. I woke up abruptly with my heart pounding at the point where the traumatised girl in the white dress sat bolt upright on her bed and screamed because of the incredibly significant shapes of the ceramic jugs on the cellar wall.

One of my students has insisted on writing her vampire essay on Queen of the Dammed. This is clearly about repression on a scale I have hitherto failed to associate with Anne Rice.

Amusing student errors such as the above are somewhat necessary this afternoon, since I'm menstrual, sore and grumpy as hell, and the continual stream of more than usually lost and hopeless students is irritating me beyond belief. I shall console myself with random photography. There's an Egyptian goose sitting on a chimney on the roof opposite my window, looking somewhat morose in the rain. Every now and then it has itself an enormous conniption about somethingorother, and flaps around honking. Then it goes back to pretending it's sort of weathervane silhouette without the actual vane part.



It's always fascinated me that birds stand on one leg when they're contented. Do you think they like to keep one foot warm, or indicate their basic subliminal trust that no-one's going to sneak up and push them over?

Wheee! Just got back from my first lecture of the semester - man, I'd forgotten how much I enjoy it. I'm buzzed. *bounces gently off walls*. Evilly introducing oblivious third-years to the joys of some of the dodgier corners of the internet - priceless. Also, mumbling about Freud, sexual symbolism, unreality, disembodiment, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the existence of Weasleycest. This puts me on a reasonable footing to deal with the rest of Monday, which is usually tricky because (a) Mondays are always completely insane with student advice, suggesting that the little dears spend all weekend brooding over their curriculum wrongs and simply have to have it sorted out posthaste as Monday dawns, and (b) we do that regular jo&stv socialising thing on Sunday evening so I've always slept badly owing to eating and drinking too much (and, possibly, talking too much shit)¹.

And, with reference to the latter point, I reproduce for your hock and shorror an actual conversation from last night:
EVIL LANDLORD: What's in these potatoes, bacon?
ME: No, coriander and red wine.
EL: Bacon, coriander, taste the same, really.

I have been cooking for ten years for a man who cannot tell the difference between bacon and coriander. Do I need to draw your attention to the inutterable depths of this tragedy? It's enough to make me want to give up cooking. Only not really.

I have to add, just for the record, that I'm not sure if I'm amused or horrified that my previous post should attract so much comments attention, as you witterers give your serious analytic attention to the logic of evil dogs guarding zombies. That's high-class lateral pedantry, that is.

Last Night I Dreamed: I was packing up quantities of Earl Grey teabags very lovingly into a small tin emblazoned with elephants, in order to put it into a care package for someone in prison.

¹ Also, in an interesting departure from the norm, allowing jo to tie me to the sofa with banana fibre.

Lovely collection of obscure words for small technical bits of thing, over at Making Light. A snib is the little knob you click to lock a Yale lock open or closed from the inside. I am also partial to jot and tittle, the actual derivation of which I never knew. (Respectively, the smallest letter of an alphabet, and the dot on an i or j). Also, nurnies and greebles made my day. Pobbles also ran. Edward Lear would be proud.

I think, cautiously, that barring one rather late Honours dissertation and a sudden unexpected Masters external examining to the solar plexus¹, I have this day finished the marking. Possibly all of the marking ever, which is simultaneously a worrying and a horrible thought. Although, given some of the the incredibly inane atrocities inflicted on an unsuspecting Sheri Tepper, not that horrible. Nonetheless, am severely drowning my sorrows in Season 2 of Farscape. Mmmm, John Crichton. (jo&stv, don't lend Season 1 to dragonroost just yet, I forgot to put Disc 6 back in the case before I returned it. Don't shoot me!)

In other news, since our wayward charlady, Phantom!Lizzie, has not yet reappeared, we today found a new one. The house is actually clean for the first time in months. The new lady is a small energetic dynamo person, and does weird and unlikely things like cleaning windowsills and the grubby corners of the kitchen floor. Disturbing those historic layers of grime will undoubtedly summon Phantom!Lizzie from whatever dimension she's currently occupying, but I think I might chalk a few quick symbols and re-banish her.

Last Night I Dreamed: I was buying quantities of yarn from a knitting store in a larney mansion on a hill somewhere. Tea was served, in fine bone china cups. Then the stormtroopers kicked down the door.

¹ Also, in a bizarre case of morphic resonance, on Edward Lear.