Freckles & Doubt

So, riddle me this: if I'm doing a literature search for "sex blog", why does it pull up the above article from The Journal of Philology? Also, "The Economic Determinants of Entry into Canadian Banking: 1963-7". Your search algorithm, I don't think it does what you think it does.

I am not adjusting well to the rude shock of being back at work, dealing with the usual continual string of student crises. I've basically bribed my way through the last two days with continuous tea and chocolate biscuits, coupled with a slightly manic determination not to do any actual work at all. This last hasn't been too successful, but at least I've been able to alternate admin slog with sex-blog literature searches, and with a gentle mosey through Dracula to select the more dodgy erotic bits for classroom analysis. I am fascinated to discover that the bulk of these in fact involve female rather than male vampires, which says a lot about Victorian patriarchal anxiety. It does considerable violence to my feelings, but for male-on-female bitage, or male-on-male, I may have to descend to Anne Rice. Sigh.

On the upside, my book is out! A copy arrived simultaneously with my return to Cape Town (DHL pitched up as I was unloading suitcases from the car), and now reposes on my desk, being Shown Off to passing students, supervisors and anyone who'll hold still long enough. It's .. pretty! On the downside, this afternoon I proceed reluctantly to the dentist for the Root Canal of Unlikely Delay, followed by (as Stephen Fry would have it), coronation. Me and my battered bank account will be found in a corner this evening, drooling gently.

The faculty office is all over Mary Celeste today - three people down with the gastric bug. Another two were down yesterday, not counting me, and I await tomorrow's tally with bated breath. It seems to have been one of those friendly-puppy sort of bugs, bouncing around slobbering happily on all and sundry. I still feel pale and gut-punched, and words cannot express how bored I am with eating toast, but generally I'm a lot better. Yay.

In between the trail of end-of-term student angst piling up outside my door I've been doing a final editing pass through this index, and I just pressed "Send" to shunt it the hell off to the press, to cries of joy from the nice editing lady who appreciates my appreciation of deadlines. I feel... slightly lost. This thing has eaten my life for three weeks (I'm sorry to have been so boring), and it's incredibly weird to contemplate an evening in which I don't rush home at 4pm to index frantically for another four hours. Weird in a good way, though.

I'm not just out of alphabet, I'm also out of X-Files. Last night I finished watching the X-Files finale - the end, not just of poor limping Season 9, but of the series as a whole. On the whole, while I enjoyed quite goodly chunks of the season, I'm narked and disappointed by its closure. ( Comments may be spoilery, so are lurking after the cut. )

indexindexindex. Now on the last chapter, which should give me the next four or five days to rationalise, reshuffle and double-check before the deadline kicks in. I am completely amazed by how much I've enjoyed this indexing lark, it's a lovely fit to the vague, organic wanderings which characterise my brain in its quest for order.

On the downside, the house is not a happy working environment right now, on account of the atmosphere of icy, implacable hatred. I packed the three cats into boxes this morning and lugged them off to the vet for their annual checkup, a process accompanied by a loud, uncoordinated and indignant chorus most trying to my semi-musical ear. I'm a bit worried that the Evil Landlord is away this weekend, there's a small but real chance that he might come back on Sunday to discover that the cats, working in concert for the first time ever, have buried me in the garden in retribution. I shall have to sleep with a loaded catnip-toy next to my bed.

Have a lovely time at HBD, all you SCA types. I'm a bit wistful, but even if I wasn't on hiatus I'd be too busy with the indexing to go, so I suppose it's all for the best.

X-Files update: into the final season. Dogget still growing on me, he's just so basically decent! Reyes is not quite as irritating as she was, but I still want to feed her to a giant lizard at intervals. And Adam Baldwin is still around, for my Firefly-flashback pleasure. This weekend's problem, of course, is whether being alone in the house will make it impossible to watch X-Files of an evening. I do get very jumpy.

Last Night I Dreamed: I took up a three-year post teaching English and acting as an advisor to a creative writing class at a university in Mumbai. Lovely campus, with a giant flight of steps curiously similar to those of my Cherished Institution.

Memo to self: must acquire hot-air balloon for purposes of surveying the Common near our house. Application of the Gaiman/Pratchett theory of traffic suggests that this apparently innocently irregular trapezoid stretch of ground is, in fact, a cunningly disguised pentagram, Elder Sign or other hideous occultic deformity possibly including the noxious sigil Odegra, Defiler of Traffic. How else do you explain the fact that leaving the house at exactly the same time on the same day of the week will, from week to week, be productive of any random result on a spectrum from "takes five minutes to reach campus" to "takes forty-five minutes to reach the other side of the Common"? Today was hell. Just under an hour from my gate to my campus parking, bumper-to-bumper all the way, and a particularly disgusting quotient of impatient imbeciles clogging the crossings on the turn cycle. No random variables introduced since the same journey on Thursday last week. Either it's Odegra, or there's a demon of mischief possessing the traffic lights and randomly putting them all out of phase. Either way, I spit. Ptooey.

The annoyance of the above has been compounded by one of those days when the students queue outside my door, none of them with the necessary paperwork; the internet is snail-paced, the phone keeps ringing with additional, exciting imbecilities, and I'm embroiled in a war with a rival faculty over orientation venues. I console myself with two things. One: fainting goats. No, really, fainting goats. When startled, their leg muscles lock and they fall over. This is apparently a deliberate breed feature with actual (slightly dubious) evolutionary purpose. I am fond of goats, and wouldn't want to take out my sadistic fury at students on innocent caprines, but they look very funny.

Two: the final proofs of This Damned Book arrived. The layout is incredibly cool, beautifully in keeping with the cover. Now I just have to index it. *girds loins*. On the upside, the irritations of today have been such that I contemplate with active joy the prospect of a week off work even if it must be spent in the embrace of indexulary tentacles. (It was presumably in anticipation of same that Jo confronted us with something not unlike the awakening of Great Cthulhu in our game last night. Cue party exiting harbour at magically-enhanced speed on a stolen boat, to the sound effect of screeching tyres).

Today's Retro Kiddielit installment may be edging into the mainstream, but it has to be said. Alan Garner writes spare, controlled, edgy, dark-tinted children's fantasy, steeped in European mythology and English landscapes; The Weirdstone of Brisigamen and its sequel, The Moon of Gomrath, are fairly high-fantasy, and I devoured them as a child suffering from post-Tolkien fantasy cravings. My favourite of his, though, is far more domestic, a surprisingly adult-themed exploration of love and jealousy through the folkloric tale of Blodeuwedd from the Mabinogion, the Welsh epic. The Owl Service both fascinated me and thoroughly creeped me out as a child: its protagonists are modern teenagers, and their experience of this ancient tale of betrayal and punishment is haunting and unsettling. The central feature of the story also really resonated with me, the patterned dinner service whose design can be seen either as flowers or as owls: I love the way the trick of perception shapes the whole story. I like owls, but in this novel they're downright nasty.

Hmmm. Another addition to the disgracefully long list of Things That Randomly Make Me Cry: baby moose playing in the spray during a heatwave. Apparently.



The Evil Landlord has given me his bloody cold. I am snuffly, trippy and cross, a situation only partially mitigated by baby moose, and unmitigated in any way by the fact that I have to spend the whole weekend wading through my own deathless prose.

Department of Academic Gloating: the approved cover design for my book arrived today. It's stunning - as per my suggestion they've used Ursula Vernon's art deco nouveau "Beauty and the Beast", and done the whole thing with a corresponding art deco nouveau feel and exceptionally beautiful fontage. I am a very, very happy proto-author. I'm also a chapter away from finishing the edit review, which is a good feeling. Current peeve: the copy-editor has taken out all my uses of inverted commas as distance quotes and added "so-called" instead. This annoys me, and there has been much throwing about of stettage. I am also somewhat miffed by her refusal to accept "formulae" as a plural. "Formulas" just looks all wrong to me. Still, she has managed to remove a positively ridiculous, if not indecent, incidence of the completely spurious word "itself", so it possibly all comes out in the wash.

Fired with near-completion, not to mention hopeless fangirliness, I took myself off to see X-Files: I Want To Believe last night. I have heard, from various sources, differing things about this film:

1. It's just like an X-Files episode, and therefore dull and disappointing. (Half of Teh Internets).
   
2. It's just like an X-Files episode, and therefore wow, squeee! (The other half of Teh Internets).
   
3. OMG Mulder and Scully are old and ugly! (Different half of Teh Internets).
   
4. OMG Mulder and Scully are still hot! (Other different half of Teh Internets).
   
5. It's really dark and depressing. (jo&stv).

The upshot of all of this was that I didn't have very high expectations, as a possibly direct result of which I thoroughly enjoyed the film. I think Chris Carter actually went seriously out of his way to provide an antidote to the (equally enjoyable) giant!underground!arctic!alien!spaceship!-vibe of the first movie - this was low budget, gritty and real, with the focus away from special effects and towards the psychological and philosophical interactions which were always the strength of the series, anyway. The games the writers play with self-conscious use of the series clichés are particularly entertaining; I loved the classic X-Filesy driving-a-country-road-at-night opening.

Overall I found it a surprisingly adult and thoughtful film, although really I shouldn't be surprised, the series always had the capacity to deliver that, however interspersed with goofy humour, weird science and grandiose paranoid conspiracy. I'm also revolving some kind of theory as to the symbolic function of snow for Chris Carter; apart from its obvious provision of freeze/thaw motifs for both meaning and emotion, it's visually very effective, and the film was beautifully shot. (The end credits were particularly lovely).

Overall, I think I fall into category 2, with a side helping of category 4, except that, while it's well presented, goofily endearing and eccentrically realistic, Mulder/Scully is just weird.

I happily blew my brain on Thursday night by watching Fahrenheit 911 and Sky High back-to-back, an extremely random and unlikely pairing that gave me a momentary case of dissociative identity disorder, and left me with the slightly confused impression that the world would be rather better off if it were run by secret cabals of campy superheroes than by secret cabals of venal old men. I managed not to see Fahrenheit 911 when it came out, for no adequately defined reason: it's a pretty powerfully manipulative piece of cinema, building up an inexorable case against Bush which is clearly and unashamedly biased, and thus makes for a rather more honest counterpoint to the manipulations of the conservative media. Bit self-indulgently slow in parts, though. Sky High is an equally black-and-white view of good and evil, but infinitely more fun - random props to Kurt Russell and a bonus Bruce Campbell taking the mickey out of themselves.

While we're in the Department of Venal Old Men: I'm afraid that with regard to Zimbabwe at this stage I imitate the action of the ostrich - I don't want to know the details, they make me cry. But I am deriving considerable vindictive satisfaction, even if symbolic rather than meaningful, from the discovery that the Queen has stripped Bob of his knighthood. Go Queenie!

In the Department of Ineffable Cosmic Mistiming, I'm going to have a nicely relaxed week of leave noodling around with the Tepper/Shelley/gothic/sf/marginal genres paper. Then I'm going to go back to work just as my publishers, who seem to have suddenly snapped into production mode, land me with a 100 000-word book to proofread and index in under a month. Note to onlookers: I may be largely unavailable for much of July.

Today's dose of Daily Voice tabloid surrealism:
HE JUMPED FROM EVIL TAXI - PIG.
I can't work out if I misread it driving past, or if the headline writers are actually on high-quality mind-altering substances. Also, I'm vaguely associating it in my mind with a headline a few months back, in which a pig stole someone's wallet, or something. This sounds like the pig's courtroom defense. I did it because he was clearly evil, yer honour, he was in an evil taxi!

I survived the weekend's SCA event, barely - it was successful, fun, completely mind-blowingly exhausting, and I'm ambivalent but generally relieved that I don't get to do it again for a minimum of two years, owing to self-imposed exile on grounds of ingrowing volunteerism and sanity retention. I spent most of yesterday unable to form sentences and more or less horizontal, watching cute kiddie movies. Fortunately, owing to my considerable finessing of this so-called "career" lark, I actually get to define the above as "work". I have the pages of notes to prove it, too. (Sentences not actually necessary for note-taking, fortunately). The score:

Enchanted. Surprisingly enjoyable; I'm sufficiently steeped in Disney and the gosh-darned musical format to derive considerable pleasure from a scientific dissassemblage and snarky parody of the more saccharine, stylised, unrealistic and twee aspects of same. Also, I have no problem with James Marsden sending himself up with enthusiasm for ninety minutes, he's very watchable. Also, bonus completely unrealistic, ironic, large-scale music and dance numbers in public places; they make me happy in the same way that Improv Everywhere does. I'm a girl of simple pleasures, really. In addition to the really complicated and pretentious academic ones.

Happily N'Ever After. During the course of this film I ate an entire tube full of candy-coated chocolate eggs that khoi_boi's nice wife incautiously left in our kitchen on Friday night. (She does this random Easter Bunny thing at this time of year, she always seems to have a stash of chocolate eggs somewhere about her person). The resulting sugar haze was barely sufficient to prevent me from the appropriate Vogon-poetic-auto-cannibalism. It's a dreadful little film, full of plastic people, plot kludges and a pale, struggling germ of self-consciousness fatally choked by stupidity. Bright spots: Hell's Angel witches on sort of speederbike things. Also, the heroine, while deeply irritating, looked very like tsukikoneko, which kept causing me momentary flashes of affection despite the character's irritation value. I am inclined to think, though, that I could have stuck with the analysis of the film I gave in the comments here, way before I'd actually seen it, and saved myself some toothache.

Shrek the Third. Nope. Still necrophilia. I didn't remember much about the film, hence the re-watch, but it turns out that was because my kindly subconscious had cloaked the whole thing in a merciful haze. I'm just grateful I didn't have time to rewatch Hoodwinked. Possibly this evening, when my tissues have restored somewhat and I'll be able to wash the taste out of my mouth with fine food at Africa Café.

This movie-watching is causing me intellectual irritation, like too much fabric softener in the undergarments. There's an underlying principle about contemporary fairy-tale film towards which I'm groping as I update this final chapter, but so far it's eluding me. It occurred to me that you lot are an intelligent bunch of people, you might spot any flaws in my reasoning here, since my brain is apparently rotted by too much cooking, insufficient sleep, and the incipient thumping of Sid the Sinus Headache. However, if this is not your cup of tea, feel free to magnificently refrain from clicking on the cut. ( Fairy-tale burblings lurk within! )

Come to Cape Town, they say. Enjoy the climate. Hah. It's been stinkingly, horribly, unbelievably, traumatically hot for the last few of days - not only is stepping outside like immersing yourself in a nice warm bath of soup, but within no more than twenty seconds you can feel your skin start to burn. Or my skin, at any rate, mostly because I'm very pale as a result of a pathological fear of the sun. Every clear, burnished-blue afternoon the peninsula lovingly piles up big, fat, white thunderheads over the mountains, but it's just to taunt me, nothing ever comes of it. I am consequently, in addition to being horribly busy, somewhat tending to interleave mad bouts of productive activity with sessions reclining on the couch, hand to forehead, whinging in faint and die-away tones.

I finished what I fondly imagined was the last tweaking of the Gaiman/Miéville paper yesterday evening, and then incautiously went and watched the BBC Neverwhere, which gave me a whole crop of new, interesting things to say. (I loved the series, which is interestingly made and brilliantly cast, and the Marquis of Carabas is incredibly cool, although I trust I found more academic ways to say that he's hawt and I fundamentally want his coat). I'm going to have to reserve most of them for the future rewrite/expansion I'm going to have to do (and submit to a fantasy-focused journal whose readers actually know what I'm talking about), since I only have 4000 words for this paper, and am having to lop interesting limbs off arguments left, right and centre (as both my readers pointed out. Perspicacious sods).

So, paper down, and I spent the day immersed in book updates, more precisely in that mad, academic see-saw between "gosh, this is dreadful" and "gosh, this isn't half bad" which reading my own writing always engenders. The first few chapters may still be dreadful, but they're a lot less dreadful than they were this morning. Also, the Cosmic Wossnames hate me: Enchanted isn't out on DVD, and Happily N'Ever After isn't in any of the nearby video stores this evening. I may be updating this concluding chapter (fairy-tale parody) on thumb-suck, Wikipedia, and my l33t scores in Academic Bluff.

Oh, and it isn't just busyness which is making me neglect to post. Work is still flat out, but the Evil Landlord's computer is having hissy fits which cause it to reboot every five minutes, which, given that it harbours the internet connection, is playing merry hell with my connectivity. He blames my techno-jinx. He may have a point.

Phew. In the Department of Bullets Recently Dodged: my car's engine has been making a weird squeaky noise increasingly often for the last couple of weeks. To me it sounded like a proto-incipient version of the squeal you get from a slipping fanbelt, and I suggested this to my Amazing Tame Mechanic this morning when I dropped the car off at the garage. Turns out it is sort of a belt-related noise, only the belt bits related to the cam-shaft, which is squeaking because a vital bit of it is almost seized solid. If I'd carried on blithely driving it, the whole cam would have self-destructed fairly soon, so just as well I went all pre-emptive on it. I am once again grateful for random bits of arcane engine lore imparted by my father when I was a mere adolescent driver prone to cactus-destruction, and which have given me a nervous habit of listening to my car engine more or less continually and trying to match its odder sound effects against my incomplete and shaky mental schematic of the Infernal Combustion Engine. (My Biscuit Tin was really good for odd sound effects. I swear the squeaks and rattles were poltergeist activity and necessary for its continued locomotion).
Score: Self 1, Techno-Jinx 0. Feeling: smug.

In the Department of There's No Such Thing As A Free Lunch: my department gave me a farewell lunch today. Experienced extemp-readers will immediately appreciate the multi-levelled irony inherent in this gesture. They've never employed me properly, they've certainly never paid me properly, they have repeatedly refused to give me an actual post, and I'm only leaving because I refuse to teach any further for the pittance they do pay. The dept. members present were my supporters, and were very sweet, but I'm groping for a metaphor here. It's not locking the stable door after the horse has bolted: it's closer to opening, with a flourish, the triple-locked stable door in order to permit the exit of a horse which was never inside the damned stable in the first place, because it's been locked outside. Cropping the sparse dry grass of the paddock. In the rain.
Score: Self 1 (free lunch), Cosmic Irony 3. Feeling: unloved, but strangely loved.

In the Department of Cosmic Slapdowns: I have to spend the entire weekend doing progression codings, which entails taking the printed academic record of every second-year BSocSci student and counting whether they've completed enough courses to be allowed to continue. This is a howl-inducing combination of time-consuming, nitpicky, mindlessly boring and absolutely vital, and will undoubtedly have caused me to gnaw off a random selection of my own limbs by the end of the weekend.
Score: Self 0, Cosmic Sadism 23. Feeling: aargh.

But! In the Department of Oh My God Eventually, the press finally got back to me about the book revisions. (Remember? The Revisions That Brutalised The Bunny?) Both readers in the second round of reviews strongly recommend publication; both have expressed only minor, easily fixable nitpicks. Both seem to have bought, hook, line and sinker, the notion that the updates involved close, careful, scholarly reading and absorption of a variety of dense critical material. I swear they've almost convinced me that's that what I did.
Self: 3, (ftw), Academia 0 (pwned!). Feeling: inexpressible joy.

And, as a bonus: the departmental lunch featured the reading out of a selection of comments from student assessments of my teaching. The bit that made me snort my champagne:
"My god, what a mind! And ... she is never an arrogant bitch."

It makes it all seem so ... worthwhile! Possibly.