Freckles & Doubt

Still with the vampires! For an extremely sly and entertaining take on vampire evolution via entirely cynical corporate interests, see this "Powerpoint presentation". It's apparently a companion to Peter Watts's novel Blindsight, a copy of which I shall have to procure forthwith.

In other news, my morning has been rendered considerably more surreal by a sudden North Korean nuke to the back of the head. Scary-Go-Round is currently even more off-the-wall than usual. Atlantis is rotting to the logical fibre. Ask my Falkenstein party.

The order of the day is clearly distraction. My current family crisis appears to be pursuing its tensions and disagreements somewhere in the vicinity of my navel, since my stomach has been in random and excruciating knots since approximately Friday. If I'm looking pained in your immediate vicinity, please don't take it personally.

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.

Cape Town has come over all coy, and has been swathed in thick mist since last night. This is creepy and atmospheric and is causing me to subliminally expect tripods, or tentacles, or small futuristic armies, to emerge at any moment and lay waste to the suburb. Either that or the mists will eventually lift to reveal the post-apocalyptic wasteland of the already devastated city. On the other hand, I think I'm possibly short on sleep and unduly depressive.

In the Department of Random Linkery, Texts From Last Night is wildly entertaining and occasionally completely surreal. Owing to the resurgence of my lecturing habit it is also impossible for me to read them without trying to deconstruct whether or not these are genuine expressions of drunk/high off-the-wallness, or simulations of same. If simulations, they're extremely effective and practically indistinguishable from the real thing. Also, Baudrillard.

Now I go forth to show clips from Nosferatu and Interview with the Vampire to my third-years, who are a lovely class capable of pleasingly intelligent contribution. Clip-selecting last night revealed that actually Tom Cruise is still bloody irritating in that film - I had the sort of vague impression it was one of his more accomplished outings, but he's simply annoyingly fey in large chunks. However, Creole prostitutes bitten in the breast ftw, analytically speaking. Pray for the actual arrival of Classroom Facilities with the DVD player. Eroticism lectures are all about the equipment.

Good lord. My evenings being bleak and empty as a result of having ripped through Torchwood in short order, I watched the first four episodes of Roswell last night. They're... teen drama. Slow, obvious, slightly flaccid, and distracting because (a) Max is played by the narcissistic cancer-dying wannabe-vampire from Buffy, and (b) I am beginning to understand why Teh Internets have the Katherine Heigl hate, she portrays "smug bitch" with suspicious virtuosity. But the series is vaguely entertaining nonetheless, probably because I'll take my aliens in whatever form I can get. It's an addiction. (Unlike Red Bull).

However, the major revelation vouchsafed by the series is that Stephanie Meyer totally ripped the first bit of Twilight off from the Roswell pilot. She's not only slow, obvious, slightly flaccid, prone to hideous gender politics and totally dire as a writer, she's a plagiarist. Either that or female adolescent romantic yearning has some intrinsic, inevitable component which simply has to be expressed by constructing angsty relationships with super-powerful inhuman stalkery men across a shared bunsen burner. Personally I find the bunsen burner a bit of a stretch.

Weekend of manic socialising ahead, and I'm still short on sleep after graduation hell-week. Anyone finding me in a somnambulistic daze in corner of a party in the next two days, please prod me gently awake and recite a brief orientation spiel.

Hmmm. Zombies are shambling all over my LJ taskbar, and it's not even Halloween yet.

On with the random, since that seems to be my preferred method of bloggery at the moment. I think the hayfever and concomitant sinus problems are fragmenting my brain. Today, random things that are making me happy despite being a bit shambling from insomnia-for-no-adequately-defined-reason.

1. A student just came into my office wearing a T-shirt inscribed "LMAO" over a picture of Chairman Mao corpsing happily. This convoluted in-joke made me laugh in an unseemly fashion, after which said student and I cheerfully bonded over the desirability of the John Howe LotR artwork on my walls. I do like students.


2. I Vant To Suck Your Broccoli. Alternative vampires. Is it fundamentally wrong that I immediately want to go and watch all of the ones on this list that I haven't already seen? (which, I have to say, isn't that many. There's a fine line between academic interest and dodgy obsession).


3. This song is making me happy, even on the twentieth replay. The reunion Eurythmics album is distinguished by some perfectly beautiful tunes. (Couldn't find the actual music video, alas, so this is just audio).
   
   

Now, she says with grim determination, I shall go back to the gym, which I have been bunking for two weeks like a pale, wimpy thing, owing to colds, sinuses and general malaise.

This week has been completely mad, mostly because I'm trying to combine the ravages of Sid with three solid days of interviews with students for purposes of choosing orientation leaders. This has led to the following:
1. The uneasy realisation that probably everyone in the universe but me was a prefect at school. Also, contrary to expectation, the upshot of piling CVs from approximately 53 prefects and 22 head students onto one corner of my desk is not, in fact, a black hole created from critical worthiness mass. Colour me surprised.
2. These are bloody nice kids, and are tending to positively reinforce my tendency to rather like students.
3. After the twenty-sixth interview I have to forcibly prevent myself from leaning back in my chair and steepling my fingers while formulating searching personal questions. Memo to self: am not auditioning minions.

After hitting mac1235 for same, I devoured the first five episodes in the new season of Doctor Who in a marvellous gulp over the weekend. I was all braced to be narked to the max by Donna, who was truly irritating in the Christmas special, but in fact they've toned her down, or perhaps she's toned herself down, enough that I actually rather like her. She's being very nicely built up as having genuine reasons for self-esteem issues, above which she tends to rise pleasingly when the chips are down. She's also down-to-earth in a way which provides wonderful ballast to the Doctor's flightiness, and she offers the complete antithesis to Martha's slightly-droopy-schoolgirl-crushiness. Also, the first episode's Alien Du Jour succeeded in being both cute and fundamentally disgusting in a way I have to respect.

On a not unrelated note, those of you who don't read Neil Gaiman regularly (and I have to add, why the hell not??) may have missed his rather gorgeous piece of Doctor/Shakespeare crossover (scroll down a bit). It's note-perfect. He's a clever man.

Now I have to go and mark twenty-three third-year essays on Vampires and The Sex, which are lurking rather entertainingly under a photocopied reading entitled "Welcome to bisexuality, Captain Kirk!" A quick survey of essay text-choice reveals, on the upside, Buffy, David Gemmel, The Hunger, (fangirlfangirlfangirl) and Tim Powers (wow!). On the downside, umpteen discourses on Interview with a Vampire and two on Queen of the Damned (throws self out of window on reflex). Wish me luck.

p.s. OMG! The fourth student in the pile entitles himself Firstname "The Dragon" Surname. Am wishing I had the courage to sign myself under his awarded mark as Extemp "Docinatrix" -oranea.

In a strange sort of parallax, my mission as a purveyor of obscure topics in cultural studies to the ususpecting undergraduatry has caused me to watch more, weirder and worse vampire movies than a dispassionate observer might, in fact, believe possible for one of my so-called academic pretensions. Most recently, the byways of this odd quest have led me, finally, to view From Dusk Till Dawn - or, more accurately, to flog my reluctant self into sitting through it over two evenings, with a break in the middle to forestall the involuntary onset of the foetal position. Various illuminations have been vouchsafed to me during the course of this experience.

1. That was a god-awful movie. Whatever anyone might say, and notwithstanding its bizarre cult status and celebration by goths, violence fiends and a sizeable chunk of my friends, it was a load of bollocks.
2. Part of its incredible suckage is the direct result of Quentin Tarantino, a jumped-up little self-important git who, in addition to his reliance on violence, hysteria, grime, warped sex and the word "fuck" in place of actual intelligence and scripting ability, is in possession of absolutely no personal charm whatsoever, and should be bludgeoned to death before he's allowed to act.
3. That being said, the casting of said QT as an adenoidal and adolescent sex nut had a certain sort of horrible logic that may, once I have succeeded in uncurling myself from said foetal position, vaguely appeal to me.
4. In addition to the casting of QT, the only vaguely and possibly acceptable elements in the movie as a whole were the basic premise (the combination of serial killers and a strip joint is an obvious but interesting play on the sex/violence premise of the vampire myth) and the final shot of the weird zigguratty structure underlying the strip joint. (I may allow a small side bet on Juliette Lewis, and on George Clooney's interesting arm tattoo).
5. Making violence explicit, gungy and deliberately excessive is neither funny nor cool. (No, I didn't like Pulp Fiction, either).
6. I would rather be forced to re-sit through a medley of selected lowlights from all the horrible vampire movies I have recently watched than watch this one again. While bad, at least none of them were shot through with the huge, mind-numbingly egotistical conviction of their own cleverness.

Right. Having got that off my chest, I feel better now. I'm sure a good slug of rum will unwrap my stomach, which is in knots from sheer irritation, enough to actually let me sleep. That, and all the painkillers for the pounding headache.

I think I shall have to foreswear pop culture and all its works for a while. As another indicator, the effect of re-reading my entire Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser collection in strict chronological order has been to send me screaming into the arms of Henry James, who in happier times I don't actually like at all. To be strictly fair, though, this may simply be the effect of seeing Jane Campion's film of Portrait of a Lady, which I utterly adored. It's had the same effect as the LotR films, in defining for ever my mental sense of certain of the roles in the novel - I will always see Isabel Archer as Nicole Kidman, and Caspar Goodwood (who has always been my favourite character in the book) as Viggo Mortensen. Beautifully made movie, and stunning adaptation. Bugger pop culture, anyway.