Freckles & Doubt

oh gods we have a new COVID variant, and various apparently science-heavy sources, including this one seem to suggest that its jolly little spike proteins have mutated madly enough that current vaccines may not, in fact, slow it down any. Which is creating a horrible, leaden, despairing sense of déja vu: the advice quoted in that article is "go back to March 2020 precautions". I was enjoying the sense of comparative safety in being fully vaccinated: I had my hair cut, and had plans for importing a gardener and a plumber for necessary operations. This is horrible. And I am wincingly aware that it's putting SA in the news in an extremely negative sense.

I'm staggering around a little exhausted today because I was, weirdly enough, participating in a "women in fairy tales" panel as part of a UK-based online storytelling event until about 10.30 last night, which had me both stressed and buzzed enough that I didn't come down enough to actually sleep until nearly midnight. I have done absolutely no research or teaching for two years, since the exigencies of running faculty remote processes take up my time and energy to the exclusion of all else; it was lovely to dip my toe in the water again. The weird upsides of COVID and everything being online being what they are, the panel included speakers from the US and UK as well as me, and the audience was all over the world. Apparently the US was sunny, Cape Town has been unseasonably rainy for a few days, and the UK was locked in a snowstorm, so go global warming. But I found myself apologising, in the greenroom before we started, for SA's latest unhappy contribution to the current catastrophe. Could have done without that, really.

For some bizarre reason my morning Earl Grey tastes faintly of coffee. This seems both unlikely and a little unfair. I don't think there is actually any coffee in the house.

Today is my last day of leave, which I propose to spend doing entirely self-indulgent things which probably include comfort-replaying something hack-and-slashy. It's been a lovely three weeks of leave, which have been characterised by a nice balance of achievement and goofing off.

• I examined a PhD thesis, for the first time ever, which was pretty terrifying going in but actually doable, and I think I've done a reasonably fair and conscientious job despite large tracts of it being in an unfamiliar critical field.
  
• I should have written a paper, but three days in I examined my conscience and state of energy, thought "Hell no" and withdrew from the collection, which made me feel guilty for about three seconds, and then enormously relieved; the editor was nice about it and the world did not end. (I also have to say that if there's a silver lining to the student protest cloud, it makes a magnificent excuse for not being able to do stuff).
  
• I finished Portal, Portal 2 and Firewatch, all three of which were highly enjoyable.
  
• I've managed over the holiday period to get back into exercising, which means I've been walking for about 40 mins daily, and am feeling much better for it.
  
• And, notwithstanding water restrictions, I have madly grown a batch of gem squash plants and a mango seedling from seed, by virtue of randomly planting the remnants of various meals, watering them at erratic intervals, standing back and let the currently rather fierce African sun and my predilection for compost do their stuff.

By way of some faint point to this slightly vague and wandering post, have some random linkery.

• This is an obituary for Leia Organa, rather nicely done.
  
• This is an Ursula Vernon YA portal fantasy, evincing her characteristic combination of whimsy and down-to-earthness, and featuring a particularly virulent toxic mother figure. I loved it.
  
• This, on the other hand, is an entirely adult, very dark, very freaky, very good Ursula Vernon horror story, finishing which made me go "Holy fuck!" out loud. There's feminist fairy-tale rewrites, and then there's ... this.

My subject line is a random Dirk Gently quote for no reason other than a vague association with multiplicity, and the fact that Tumblr has a current sideline in gifs from the new Dirk Gently tv series. It sounds completely off the wall, has anyone seen it?

Ah, the start of term. When lovesome students return in their droves from their dubious personal lives, bringing with them the collected germs of the earth's twelve quarters. Germs! exotic and teeming and ready to leap onto the unsuspecting and hapless forms of those of us luckless staff who are breathed on routinely by students and do not, in fact, possess any immunities to these exciting foreign strains. Half the faculty office is down with 'flu or whatever, including me, who was forced by a particular sod of a virus to lay extremely low all weekend, cancelling at short notice a theatre booking and two dinner dates. My hapless form is, alas, particularly hapless and is beset by various chronic complaints who lay low, like a rake in the grass, waiting to whump me upside the head with fatigue and/or glandular wossnames the second my guard is down. I have spent the last three and a half days pale, spaced, dizzy, nauseous and vaguely resenting the complete bastard who crept in sometime on Friday night and stuffed my throat and the bits under my chin with red-hot prickly burrs. Because, ow. I am back at work today, still pale and ick and very grumpy, but functional for most practical purposes, if they're slow practical purposes and not too demanding. The first student who gives me shit, I'm going to burst into tears and go home.

My state of mind has also been materially improved by the lovely email from the editor of the book to which I contributed 6000 reluctant and angst-filled words on African fairy-tale film. Despite the damned thing arriving in her inbox two months late and permeated with simulation, imposter syndrome and self-doubt, she has responded enthusiastically and with words like "excellent" and "wonderful" and "fascinating", which is particularly good for my lurgified self-esteem. She has also supplied a meticulous edit of the whole thing, with particular attention to eradicating the bits of my deathless prose most given to circumlocution and hesitation, and has materially improved the whole by about three thousand percent. Seriously, this part-time academia thing is very eroding to the linguistic wossnames: reading her edits, I cringe at my own tendency to over-elaboration and waffle. It's worst in the first couple of pages; after that, I settle into something that's mostly more sure and streamlined. I need to write more, clearly. And I need to write more clearly. Memo to self, kick the three and a half papers currently orbiting my brain in conceptual form OUT, and get them onto paper, and then beat them until they're acceptable and send them out into the world. I need the validation, and the practice.

It was a lovely feeling, though, lugging nine tomes on African film and oral literature back up to the library this morning and joyously dumping them. I felt, for once, like a Legit African Critic with the correct street cred, but it was lovely to get the hell rid of the pile.

My subject line is today's XKCD, which I loved, and which I have joyously bastardised. XKCD's apparently on a roll at the moment.

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.

There's this rather sad fact about Skyrim: its designers don't always seem to actually think like players. You realise this if, like me, you really enjoy both the house-buying and the crafting aspects of Skyrim play (look, ma! It's not all about the violence, promise!). I get personal about my houses. Many of them are rather lovely spaces, and it's easy to become emotionally invested in the idea of living in them in between bumbling off slaying bandits and dragons and undead, oh my! I get an unreasonable kick out of games which actually expect you to sleep at night. There are no real penalties if you don't, but there's this sense of ineffable satisfaction (probably not unrelated to my ongoing state of real-life fatigue) in having the "Well Rested" message pop up on the top of the screen.

What I don't enjoy is coming home after a hard day's adventuring, laden with loot, and having to dash across half the town in order to access the blacksmith's forge to upgrade the weapons and armour before I sell them. And then, when you lug them back home to enchant them at your nifty enchanting table (which the Whiterun house doesn't have, what's with that, dammit?), your storage for soul gems and what have you is upstairs in another room because the designers couldn't be arsed to stick a chest or strongbox or barrel next to the place where, you know, you'd actually use it. Ditto with alchemy and your ingredients stores. And the barrels are full of apples, anyway. I have eaten a quite ludicrous number of apples in Skyrim, just to get rid of them. The country's fruit industry must be rolling in it. (And you find the wretched things down in sealed dwemer ruins, locked up for centuries but still perfectly fresh. Undead apples. Explains a lot).

In short, the designers construct the houses without much thought given to the most likely activities a player will pursue within its walls. How difficult could it be to put a grindstone or armouring table in a corner? A chest next to the enchanting table? Instead, houses are filled with an awful lot of pointless "decorative" guff, most of which you can't alter in any way; the things you can alter, like baskets and bowls, are pretty much useless for storage because it's such a royal pain to put things into them.

The quest for Sensible, Efficient Living Space led me to my first encounter with Skyrim mods. Someone has expanded the basement of the Solitude house, which is my favourite anyway, to include a full smithy and lots of storage, plus an update on the currently rather brutal sleeping arrangements for your housecarl (she has a pallet on the floor in a cellar). It's beautiful. I installed it no problem, and wandered around blissfully storing everything, and then left the house, took two adventuring steps, and hit a crash-to-desktop bug which was completely insurmountable. It's a known bug with this mod, and was mostly resolved with the latest patch, but even so still affects a minority of players for inexplicable reasons. I got unlucky. Growl. (And I shall not inflict on you the righteous rant about Skyrim bugginess generally, and the evident cardboard-and-string construction of a game when modding the interior of a house causes save and fast travel crashes a day later at the other end of the world map. But it's a righteous rant).

However, as another inevitable step, this whole debacle has led me to discover the developer console. In fact, half an hour of research on the web and some judicious fiddling, and I have managed to fill my very own basement with smithy tools and barrels and chests galore, my very own self. (The "placeatme" command, and using "help" + keyword, chest, barrel, whatever, to add it where you're standing). It's fiddly and trial-and-error bound, but actually not that difficult. You would not believe the degree of empowered satisfaction this causes. It wriggles right down and pointedly prods the particular and personal button which makes me rejoice in the correct utilisation of system for good. (As an added bonus, the basic object/NPC interactions are nicely done; you stick a grindstone into your house, and your spouse promptly starts using it as part of their wander-around-vaguely domestic routine).

But it also interests me, inevitably, on a broader cultural level. As with Dragon Age, the Skyrim developer console is perfectly accessible, and the web is rich with how-to pages giving codes and tips. This is a base level of player empowerment which is quite a lot more universal than the far more complex and technical toolset available to the much smaller subgroup of players who actually write mods. But the interesting point is the same: while a computer game is a commercial product, it's not, like a movie, a monolithic product. The base assumption of interaction which a game has and a movie doesn't, is expanded outwards: you are not simply expected to interact with the game, you're expected to interact with its construction. To, in fact, adapt it to your own needs via creative input. Compare this to the attitude of film producers to their product - thou shalt not, in their book, do anything other than passively consume it; they frown on excerpting clips, creating mash-ups, using stills - hell, they don't even like their trailers to turn up on YouTube, which is inexplicable to me. A computer game, on the other hand, actively enables the use of the game as the basis for personalisation, adaptation and play, on a meta level quite above the freedom of your avatar in the game world.

It becomes inevitable to put this aspect together with the other striking aspect of Skyrim, which is its community. This is the first time I've ever played a computer game the instant of its release, i.e. at the same time as the rest of the world - hitherto I've played the Evil Landlord's hand-me-downs, sometimes years later. It has been something of a revelation to find out how many people on, for example, my Twitter feed, are hacking through it at the same time as I am. You end up contextualising your own play experience across a very broad spectrum of shared play, whether it's amusing tweets, tips, discussions on wiki pages and forums, or silly Skyrim memes (viz. my subject line).

All of which is leading up to saying: gawsh, computer games, while commercial products, also have a component which speaks to folkloric functions. They are communal, and they actively encourage not just consumption, but production in that communal sense. The fact that they're communally created even at the commercial level probably contributes to this - DRM and bloody Steam authentication notwithstanding, the idea of creative ownership is already distributed. And, of course, in the interaction between you and a game, you are already putting your own storytelling stamp on it in a way you can't with a movie (unless you're a mad fanficcer, and that doesn't really give you access to the images).

And it's fascinating that this personal-production element is reflected on the level of actually stuffing with the game's construction in the same way that a designer does, not just re-shaping on the level of play. That is, the production company doesn't just allow tailoring of game elements, it actively encourages them through the accessibility of the tools. It's a clever commercial move, because it facilitates investment and a sense of ownership, and thereby builds a loyal following, but it also neatly mimics, even in a limited sense, far older, pre-literate patterns of production and distribution within a communal context. And it also suggests, to go full circle to the whinge with which I started this, that some of the omissions and logical thoughtlessnesses in house construction may be a sort of designer shrug - why bother, if the players will sort it out themselves? Thereby increasing their investment and loyalty. Sneaky.

Then again, I'm a fairy-tale theorist, and therefore by necessity a bit of a folklorist. Give a fairy-tale theorist a hammer, and everything looks like a glass slipper.

The faculty is apparently OK with me ambling off on about six weeks of leave. I'm a bit weirded out, frankly. In celebration, and because one of the few things I plan to do with this six weeks is a restful, non-deadline-driven spot of academic writing, have some random fairy-tale links.

• Ursula Vernon does "Little Red Riding Hood". Very well. It's both creepy and down-to-earth. Make sure you read Part II as well.
  
  
• Cat Valente, who is still my literary girl crush, does Coyote myth with high school American football. I am stunned by how brilliantly this works.

There's a big fairy-tale conference in Belgium in August next year, including possibly the two biggest names in my field (Zipes, and one of my thesis examiners). Exploding legs notwithstanding, I am totally going to be there, and am determined to give a paper on E. Nesbit just because. (Just because she gives Billy the King a Lee Enfield rifle and makes her prince into a lift-man. The phrases "prop shift" and "paradigmatic change" will almost certainly be implicated).

In the meantime, the apparent effect of being given permission to be tired and ill is to make me really feel tired and ill. Odd how that happens.

My latest Micfic is up. The theme was "cat", and I've gone all fairy tale. This last is predictable, but in fact this time I've gone so specifically fairy tale that the story is not going to make any sense at all unless you've read Mme D'Aulnoy's "The White Cat". This is actually a serious drawback, it's a moderately obscure tale which I doubt will be familiar to a lot of people.

I'm all torn about this. The story said exactly what I wanted to say about the tale, which revolves around my fascination with the obsessive relationship the prince has with the cat when she's still a cat - it's weird and significant, and has to be accounted for. I have no idea if my personal theory about it is going to be clearly readable from the story. I'm coming to regard this word limit as a nasty, iron-clad personal nemesis who fortnightly dings me over the head with his giant steel club of word-crushing doom. I swear this story could have made sense without the necessity of reading the original tale if I'd had more space.

But the overall question is more philosophical. Postmodernism and intertextuality and all that guff cheerfully assumes that you have to know other texts before you can fully understand the new one that's commenting on them. Is this a legitimate way of adding layering and density and implication? is it cheating? is it elitist? is it pretentious beyond belief? do I worry too much?

The picture, incidentally, is an illustration to the tale by children's illustrators Janet and Anne Grahame Johnstone, who also did The Hundred and One Dalmations. I've always loved those illustrations. This one is gorgeous - White Cat and prince and random courtier watch impressionistic fireworks.

My late papa was always very fond of reciting that deliberately pretentious and jargonistic version of "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" which goes as follows:

Scintillate, scintillate, globule vivific,
How do I ponder thy nature specific,
Poised up above in the ether capacious,
Closely resembling a gem carbonaceous.

As a child I always heard "ether capacious" as one word, and had a vague but wonderful sense of the "ethakapacious" as a sort of expansive, magical, spacious realm up there somewhere. It was something of a let-down when I realised what was actually meant, although in fact "ether capacious" has its own slightly dignified and Victorian sense of enchantment. It almost certainly contains steampunky skyships.

In other news, NPR are streaming the entirety of the new Arcade Fire album. It's luvverly. Large chunks of it sound like someone else entirely, or possibly someone else entirely pretending to be Arcade Fire.

I also forgot to mention that my latest Microfic is up. They incautiously gave me a fairy-tale topic. Oh, deary, deary me. I suspect it'll only fully make sense to anyone who's read as many "Sleeping Beauty" variants as I have (the Arabian Nights one is my favourite, the girl actually gets a say), but hopefully it will be enjoyable, in a slightly pretentious feminist postmodern way, nonetheless.

My Masters student, who has a pleasingly demented streak which has not in any way prevented her submitting a slightly kick-butt dissertation on women in fairy tale (Basile, Perrault and Disney, my work here is done), just popped into my office in order to leave me the following offering:



You add water and it turns into a prince. Apparently. (If you have the duck version, apparently it turns into a princess. The logic here escapes me, although I'm somewhat charmed by the idea of "The Frog Duck to Prince Princess" advertised on the label).

My annoying day full of meetings and annoyance just improved immeasurably. Am off, chortling, to turn frogs into princes and (apparently) watch it grow 600%. For some reason I find this slightly dodgy. In other news, apparently I'm five.

ooooh! Neil Gaiman not only won the Newbery Medal for The Graveyard Book (about which, yay!), he just announced that Neil Jordan is writing and directing a live-action film version. This makes me very, very happy: Jordan's Company of Wolves is a haunting, haunted and truly amazing cinematic adaptation of Angela Carter's postmodern fairy tale, and one of my favourite films. (Freudian imagery, Gothic forests, fearsome werewolf transformations, embedded narrative, self-conscious invocation of the oral voice, and Terence Stamp as the Devil in a Rolls Royce). He does atmosphere, period feel and complicated subtext with focused virtuosity. I'd be even happier if Neil Gaiman was scripting it himself, but I expect good things.

Still working my butt off, but yesterday was an 11-hour day instead of Monday's 13, so perhaps things are looking up. Also, small but measurable improvement in the hobbling. We may yet survive this, troops! she says, charging down the Balaklava valley...