So that was Swancon…
I am still a bit dazed at the fact that I flew across the entire darned continent for a long weekend, to go to a nerdfest, where I knew two people (at the start) and had met maybe two others. That seems weird. Doesn’t it seem weird? Whenever people asked my husband where I was for the weekend, and he explained, their immediate reaction (apparently) was to ask: do people wear capes??
Anyway, it was bloody brilliant. I enjoyed myself immensely… especially once I realised that I could do whatever the heck I liked, that there was very little expected of me and that I didn’t have to wait for permission to go to panels or whatever. That’s a fairly obvious thing, but sometimes I still get caught up in trying to please others when that’s not necessary, or being scared to do something a bit different. Hello!! It’s a nerdfest!!
Anyway#2 – I took copious notes, as is my wont; partly for my own sake, partly for my husband, and partly so as not to fall asleep during panels after too many late nights. Don’t worry, I don’t plan on putting it all online…
Thursday
I actually quite enjoyed my flight. The shuttle ride not to much – I was the last to be dropped off, and was getting quite impatient towards the end (why, I dunno; no one was expecting me!). The hotel had my name wrong, which led to a near-heart attack thinking I didn’t have a room (how would I host room parties?? was my first thought). It was very, very funny seeing the TARDIS in the foyer.
Went for a walk around Northbridge – scoped out potential places to run – it’s a lot like Richmond, I decided, with its proximity to the city (closer than Richmond, actually), and preponderance of Asian stores and restaurants.
Girliecon was in my room that night – Alisa’s scheme for getting all the best people in the one room at the same time. Of course, my room was tiny, but we still managed to fit about 30 people in there that night. With pink drinks and everything! A magnificent time was had – by me, anyway – got to meet Kathryn (finally!), and Dirk and Tehani; catch up with Ben and of course the inimitable Alisa… and a whole bunch of other people, too (sorry, all the parties are blurring together in my brain…). I think I even kicked out the Special Esteemed International Guest of Honour, Rob, when I made everyone leave at about 11pm because my body said it was 1am and wasn’t that time for sleep?
Back from the insanity…
and sleep-deprived place that is Swancon. Wahey! What fun. So much to say… but not right now. Because right now, much to the amusement of my friends at said con, I am about to spend a day at another conference! This one is on Feasting in the (ancient) Aegean. And I doubt there will be room-parties – not like mine, anyway. (And I won’t know, because even if there were, I think my body would break if I asked it to do another late night.)
However, if you’re interested, I am doing an online forum thingy tomorrow night, on my experiences at the con, for a dear friend of mine: it will be happening on RedBubble. I have no idea who will bother tuning in to ask questions, but if you want to come and be provocative you’ll have to sign up to RedBubble first (which doesn’t cost, and doesn’t spam, if you’re interested).
So much more to come… just not right now.
City of Darkness, City of Light
Because I am teaching the French Rev this year, it was recommended that I read City of Darkness, City of Light by Marge Pearcy (I think). It takes six real figures of the rev and gives their perspectives on the events from mid 1780s until late 1790s. It’s a novel, though, so there is a bit of license with regard to motives etc, and dialogue of course – it reminded me of McCollough’s Rome series for that reason.
Anyway: it was good. I enjoyed it. It gives you a good sense of what France was like as a country at the time, as well as of some of the personalities (exaggerated as they may be). It was exciting to see the events unfold from different perspectives, and the characters are well-chosen for that: Pauline is a worker in Paris; Claire is an actress from the country who comes to Paris; Manon is rich and moves between the country and Paris (so it was great to have three women’s perspectives); Georges is an ambitious lawyer; Max is also a lawyer, idealistic and from the country but moves to Paris; and Nicholas is a noble, something of a philosopher and about my favourite character.
For anyone familiar with the revolution, you might spot the one thing that was distressing about this book: the men are Danton, Robespierre, and Condorcet – who, of course, all get killed by their beloved Revolution, as does Manon – surname Roland, responsible for a very influential salon. So four out of six, dead. And knowing that this is going to happen really didn’t help! It was like re-watching a Grand Prix (very loud in the background, here), and knowing that there’s a huge smash coming up just around that bend…
He’s so cute!
And he’s Scottish!
That would be David Tennant, aka David MacDonald!
I have indeed seen him once before, not on Dr Who, and he did have a lovely Scotch accent then, but I thought that might have been put on.
Anyway – he was the guest on Top Gear’s last episode of season 10. He’s funny, he’s got a lovely voice, he was hilarious when talking about Billie Piper (he desperately wanted to beat her in the time trial…) – if you’re a Who fan, and you haven’t seen this episode of Top Gear, you’ll have to try and find it; it could well be on YouTube.
First race-type thing
Melbourne City Sports with the YMCA ran the Super Sunset Series this year, and I think for a few years before. The first was at the zoo – walking distance from here, but only two or so weeks after I started running. The second was at Princes Park, also walking distance, but I didn’t find out about it. Last night it was the Tan – around the Botanic Gardens – not quite walking distance (about 8km) but I did it anyway.
I did the 8km run, which is twice around – twice up a truly ball-breaking hill. I finished in about 54 minutes, which wasn’t last; I’m quite happy to have done 6 minute ks. It also included the furthest I’ve ever run in one stint to date (without a walking rest), so I’m happy with that.
I was fairly stuffed afterwards, though – especially since I decided on a whim to ‘sprint’ the last 20 or so metres – where sprinting is relative after 8km, of course, for me at least. But my love was there to congratulate me, which was wonderful, and to ride home with me in the gloaming, which was fortunate. So I rode 17km or so as well as the 8km run! Which explains why I am still in bed, on my day off, rather than out running before the day turns to high 30s and I become mush. No – I’ve declared today a rest day. So I can feel smug without groaning too much from sore muscles.
Deja-Vu
Another movie review…
We got Deja-Vu throuh BigPond Movies, and it waited on our shelf to be watched for a good number of weeks. We finally got around to it and… hmm. Interesting.
I really enjoy Denzel Washington movies. He’s a great actor. We had no real idea what this movie was about before we watched it, which might have been our mistake. The movie’s mistake is largely that it doesn’t really know what genre it wants to be. In general it is basically a detective story – quite an interesting one, too. And very clearly post Sept 11, too (as are many movies of this type, since they so often make use of the idea of rogue terrorists, or the safety precautions necessary to hopefully deterring them). But then it goes into this weird scifi thing, involving time travel and bizarro paradoxes (paradoces?) that just got, well, weird. And bizarro.
In theory I liked the idea behind the film, but I don’t think it was done with enough panache. Or gumption. Or balls, perhaps – “we like this time travel idea, but we don’t want it to be tooo out there, so reel it in a bit…”.
I enjoyed it, but I don’t think I could recommend it to anyone as a great movie. You’d have to be a mighty big fan of Denzel, or want to see how to mix (or not) standard detective work with scifi in a movie. Or, you know, at home by yourself with nothing to do on a rainy night. Possibly with chocolate, popcorn, and/or alcohol.
The Jane Austen Book Club
I am not, generally, a fluffy movie kind of gal. However, I agreed to go see this movie with two of my very good friends (I realised the other day that I’ve known them for 10 and 11 years! Amazing!) at the Moonlight Cinema. Sadly, Al had to pull out at the last minute, so it was just K and me: right up the front, with blanket and very tasty food, and a bottle of moscato.
Overall, I must admit to enjoying the movie: five women get together to read the six Austens, through various means and for various purposes. A bloke joins them as well, for the obvious reason – getting into the pants of one of them, although it was more refined than that.
A couple of things occurred to me, which I thought I’d share here – mild spoilage:
1. The bloke is a sci-fi buff, and has never read any ‘classics’: in fact, the bloke first meets up with the woman for whom he joins he bookclub, he’s at a scifi con (SwanCon! woohoo!). One of the funnier moments of the movie comes when he first turns up with all six books in one: in case they’re sequels. This is such a classic scifi idea; it makes perfect sense to me. It’s also very interesting to see that this scifi buff is perfectly capable of reading, understanding, and communicating ideas about ‘great literature.’ There’s also an interesting sideline in him convincing the woman to read scifi, at first Ursula le Guin. She refuses for a long time, before he shames her into reading them and she, of course, loves it.
2. Singleness is a huge issue. One of the women is middle-aged-ish, and another is going through a divorce; one is in a troubled marriage, one is a lesbian with fairly tempestuous relationships, and the other has been married six times (currently divorced). So how to deal with being single, and what this means for a woman, is explored a bit (although not great depth). This is not my issue, and as far as I was concerned this was simply part of the movie. The interesting part, I realised, was that there was no mention of Grigg’s singleness. He was in his mid-thirties, at least, and single, but this was never an issue. Not once. Because it’s ok for men to be bachelors, but women are spinsters – bachelorettes just don’t cut it.
3. The last thing to mention is the conclusion. I quite liked the end – I am totally fine with happy endings, even sappy endings, sometimes. The thing that bugged me here was the scripting! It was appalling! There were so many other possible ways of communicating the same idea – even I could have written something better! Anyway… grrr. Nearly spoiled a good movie.
Ah, voyeurism
I missed all of the “Who do you think you are?” episodes on SBS – UK and Aussie – and I was a bit sad about that, because although it’s not entirely my thing I do like a bit of this sort of personal history. Fortunately, my darling mother (she of the apricots) taped those of Bill Oddie and Nigella Lawson. I’ve just now got around to watching them, having had the video waiting for me for weeks. Bill Oddie’s was quite sad – his mother in a “sanitorium,” or asylum, for much of his childhood; he has very few memories of her, and basically no good ones. It was quite interesting hearing his reasons for researching his past.
Nigella comes from a tradition of caterers, which I think is hilarious. I didn’t know she was Jewish, so that was fascinating too: her great grandparents came, respectively, from now west Germany and Amsterdam. The history of Jewish migration and experience is one I know little about, and I wonder just how well researched it is; I would guess fairly well. It gives quite a different view on early modern history in Europe (and, I am sure, on medieval too) from what you get if you simply focus on the Christian European experience.
too much Stargate? Never!
I am lucky enough at the moment to have little bit of what I choose to call play money. My natural Scrooge tendencies are too painful to go into here, but suffice to say that splurging – even on thins that I really want and will get a lot of joy out of – is something I struggle with. So I thought long and hard, and eventually decided it would be worth it: I bought the 59 DVD box of Stargate: SG-1. This is a crazy extravagance; I know someone with them already – although theirs are pirated, and of course I don’t have easy access to them. Plus, this comes in a lovely big box, complete with tacky raised circle (aka stargate) on the front.
Anyway, it arrived on Thursday. We watched the entire first season on the weekend – my love didn’t get into show until about season 2 or 3 when we watched it the first time (oh, did I mention that I’ve already seen the whole lot?), so he enjoyed watching that; I also discovered that first time through I missed a disc – three or four episodes, including the wonderful Antarctic episode. We’re now into the second season, and we’re trying to limit ourselves to only two… or so… episodes a night. Hard, though…
Couple of things of note:
* Samantha is cringingly nerdy in the first couple of episodes. I am so glad they sophisticated her.
* Teal’c is fairly painful in these first few seasons; his facial expressions are just ridiculous. And not always convincing.
* Michael Shanks. Daniel Jackson. *sigh* Wonderful!
* Richard Dean Anderson. Jack O’Neill. As above!
I said something to my love as we watched an episode – something about enjoying the interaction between Jack and Samantha – and he turned to me, in ridicule, and asked whether I had bought 59 DVDs just for the sake of a few, frustratingly brief, interactions between the two.
Well, duh.
The Fisher King
So I’ve been listening to some BBC podcasts recently – the “In Our Time” series. I really enjoy them – the interplay between the three interlocutors, the broad range of topics they cover within the topic itself: it’s all glorious. What I do often find drives me nuts, though, is Melvyn Bragge himself. He so often seems to think he knows everything about the topic after his preliminary reading – I’m happy to admit that he probably spends a number of hours in doing so, but still, he’s talking to people who have spent large amount of their professional lives, at least, thinking about the stuff! He particularly annoyed me in this episode, but I’ll get to that.
I had a most exciting moment in listening to this episode, which has never happened before: I knew one of the people! Well, ‘knew’ in the loosest possible sense; I’ve read most of one of his books, when I was researching for an essay on Robin Hood; and I heard him speak once on the figure of Merlin – Stephen Knight. An Aussie, who teaches in Wales on Arthur-y type things, among other topics. Anyway, it was a very cool moment for me.
So, the episode itself: focussing on the Fisher King, which I think is very cool in and of itself, that you can talk for 40-odd minutes on a fairly obscure literary figure/convention. Awesome. They looked at when the Fisher King first appears – in connection with Arthurian stuff; what his figure represents, pagan and Christian; and what he came to mean, in the 19th and 20th centuries (and they did indeed mention, if only briefly, the movie – which I was waiting for!), in Eliot (I might have to re-read The Waste Land… scary thought) and others.
All up, it was a great deal of fun to read, as I pounded along the path….
You can even, as they say in the business, listen again!
Randomly Yours, Alex 