Connemara

I met up with the Fulbrighters in Ireland, new and old, for a trip out to Connemara. Here are some lovely photos! We had music and Irish language (including a visit to TG4, the Irish language television station) for our visit to the Gaeltacht, the remaining areas where Irish remains a primary language.

Working on a couple of things before I head off to Scotland later this week, so must dash!

Albacon Wrap-up

A busy day to finish up the con: yesterday was more leisurely, lunching with Maryann and Mick and giggling at the back of panels, then doing a little work -- I chaired a panel on "Why Write?" which, perversely as ever, I never asked the panelists to answer. Nonetheless, we all had much to say about the subject, about our very different styles and techniques for writing, and about our widely varying levels of self-satisfaction when it came to our own writing. It was a lively panel with plenty of input from the audience, which is what one always hopes to achieve. Afterward we went to the Fountain with Maryann and Mick, and laughs a-plenty followed.

This morning I was on the "creating your own language" panel; yes, another opportunity to trot out the list of languages I had to learn for my doctoral program. It all got silly right away because I emphasized the importance of colloquialisms, using as an example the Finnish swears that use "vittu" (a rather rude word roughly equivalent to "vagina"). I prefer to think of it as a teaching moment and not just a chance to be off-color. Of course, after all the tea I drank to wake myself up this morning, I had to run off in the middle of the panel, but I don't think they missed me much.

We grabbed a quick lunch in the bar (yum, salmon wrap!) then headed up to the "is academia destroying genre literature?" panel in time to argue "No!" All right, oversimplification, but the panel organizer had clearly had some unfortunate personal experiences that influenced his negative stance. I think that by the end of the session Gene and I both had convinced people that while, yes, there are terrible and incompetent instructors (as in any field), academia is not your enemy, reader!

While I lingered chatting with people after the panel, Gene hurried off for the manga panel. The day ended with the British tv program panel, which soon digressed hopelessly into beefs and raptures (as those last panels of the con tend to do). Not enough Torchwood dishing for me.

Got lots of compliments on my new purple locks :-) and best of all, tomorrow's a holiday -- whoo hoo! A chance to catch up...

Publications

I always forget about so many of the things I've written until I have something jog my memory. This week my faulty memory was jogged by reminders about revisions. I had completely forgotten about one of the essays (yeah, that's just how absent-minded I am) and that I was supposed to be revising it. Hee hee -- I have a book review due at the end of the month, too, that I have not forgotten about (I swear, John).

The first is "Heofen rece swealg: Neomedievalism and Spectacle in Grendel: Transcendence of The Great Big Bad" which will appear in an upcoming issue of Studies in Medievalism. It's developed from the paper I gave at the conference in London last November -- the one that also featured Terry Jones. It's about the Grendel opera directed by the fabulous Julie Taymor.

The other essay is "Medieval Community: Lessons from The Black Knight" which will appear in the inaugural issue of LATCH: A journal for the study of the Literary Artifact in Theory, Culture, or History, which I believe will come out in November. I originally presented that as conference paper, too, at Kalamazoo.

Yes, folks -- that's the way to accumulate academic publications less painfully. Commit to a conference (a fairly innocuous thing to do, usually only requires a one page abstract of what you might write); once you've been accepted, think about that ten page conference paper and finally write it (depending on your working habits and Powerpoint needs) a month before the conference (or a week, or on the plane, or -- if you're the really edgy [Miss Wendy*] type, in the bathroom of the hotel the night before you give it while your suite-mates slumber). Once you have the conference paper, someone will possibly ask you to submit it for publication, which you agree to do, then panic once the deadline looms. So you mash it out haphazardly and send it, apologetically reminding the editor that it's just "a draft" of course. Disparaging reader comments help you fix it into something less embarrassing. Then, just when you've forgotten you ever wrote the thing, you find out it's about to be in print.

*in the interest of fairness, I think I ought to mention that she was just finishing her paper, not writing the whole thing...

Buy this book!

It's says "essential" in the title! You know you need it (and if you use the above link, Gene actually gets paid). Will your favorite make the list (hint: is it in print and in English)? The suspense must be killing you -- buy it now!

Roundup

Well, I have survived the first day of classes -- that calls for a cuppa! Right up until I stepped into the first class, I was moaning and dreading it. I always forget it can be so much fun, a chance to be silly, to try to get their bored faces to light up with surprise and, sometimes, interest. Pity I had to end the day with a meeting, but there you are. Since people always ask me, I might as well tell you what I'm teaching this term:

ENG 134 MEDIEVAL LITERATURE
This is a freshman level course that introduces non-English majors to the subject. Emphasis on making it accessible, showing clips of medieval films, lots of group work making sense of the texts, and fun presentations -- they have to come up with their own Beowulf movie pitch and perform a medieval drama.

ENG 206 CREATIVE WRITING
This is the intro course for people to get their feet wet, try different genres and see whether any genius burns. A lot of fun except when someone decides to focus on poetry -- well, there are the occasional exceptions. I had a couple of students at UHD, Pamela Andino and Edgar Fuentes, who were simply brilliant. It can happen.

ENG 379 WRITERS IN MOTION
This is the film topics course and I chose to look at how writers are portrayed in film. Yes, a chance to share movies I love (mostly) and get students to read film more carefully. We tend to take the medium for granted because film allows us to be passive absorbers of its narrative. Well, we spent half an hour talking about Damien Hirst's 40 second film of Beckett's "Breath." That seems promising.

To celebrate surviving the first day, we indulged in pizza and our on-going wallow through the oeuvre of Johnny Vegas. I think this current mania came out of catching up with old episodes of Shooting Stars, where he was a regular with Vic and Bob and Ulrika and wordy-wordy wordsmith Will Self and where he occasionally gave in to his tendency to go off on rants. He also guested on QI; while Stephen seemed a tad trepidatious, he did find himself helpless with laughter at one point (was that when Johnny accused him of subsisting on "swan caviar" available only a select folk like Fry, Noel Edmonds and the Queen?). In Who's Ready for Ice Cream, he says he doesn't do comedy, but pathos. The two stand-up sessions that are extras on the DVD are a really good illustration of that (and yet, funny as hell). In 18 Stone of Idiot, you can see, well, just what the title suggests. It can be gut-bustingly funny and cringingly painful alternately.

On the publication front, I'm thinking about my Valentine issue essay for Up Against the Wall and I've just heard from the editor of the American Horror Film Today, that that collection is moving along mostly on schedule. I don't have a table of contents yet, so I can't tell you what will be in it apart from my essay on Terry Gilliam's Tideland. Now, it's time to go back to campus.