A Great Day In A Woman's Life

I've finished* my marking!

I have been tagged for a meme by the always-crunchy Aren, and I know exactly what my image is going to be, but I want to sit with my ideas about that post for a while longer, so in the meantime, I'm going to post the three passages that have been keeping me going throughout marking season (here assembled under the heading 'Three Ways To Get A 2:2'):

1. Diana Wynne Jones, from A Tale of Time City:

"Haven't you done any translating either?"
"I've done some," Vivian admitted.
"Let's hear it then." Dr Wilander leaned back and lit his pipe with a tap of one huge finger on its bowl, as if he expected to be listening for the next hour or so.
Vivian looked miserably at her few lines of crossed out and rewritten green writing. "One large black smith threw four coffins about," she read.
"Oh, did he?" Dr Wilander said placidly. "To show off his strength, I suppose. Carry on."
"So that they turned into four very old women," Vivian read. "One went rusty for smoothing clothes. Two went white in moderately cheap jewellery. Three of them turned yellow and got expensive and another four were dense and low in the tables--"
"So now there were ten coffins," Dr Wilander said. "Or maybe ten strange elderly ladies. Some of these were doing the laundry while the rest pranced about in cheap necklaces. I suppose the yellow ones caught jaundice at the sight, while the stupid ones crawled under the furniture in order not to look. Is there any more of this lively narrative?"
"A bit," said Vivian. "Four more were full of electricity, but they were insulated with policemen, so that the town could learn philosophy for at least a year."
"Four more old women and an unspecified number of police," Dr Wilander remarked. "The blacksmith makes at least fifteen. I hope he paid the police for wrapping themselves round the electrical old ladies. It sounds painful. Or are you implying that the police were electrocuted, thus supplying the townsfolk with a valuable moral lesson?"
"I don't know," Vivian said hopelessly.
"But just what," asked Dr Wilander, "do you think your multitudes of old women were really doing?"
"I've no idea," Vivian confessed.
"People don't usually write nonsense," Dr Wilander remarked, still placidly puffing at his pipe.**

2. Douglas Adams, from The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Fit the Second):

VOGON CAPTAIN: So Earthlings I present you with a simple choice. Think carefully for you hold your very lives in your hands. Now choose: either die in the vacuum of space, or… tell me how good you thought my poem was.

FORD: I liked it

VOGON CAPTAIN: Good...

ARTHUR: Oh yes, I thought that some of the metaphysical imagery was particularly effective.

VOGON CAPTAIN: Yes?

ARTHUR: Oh…. and um, interesting rhythmic devices, too, which seemed to counterpoint the, er…

FORD: Counterpoint the surrealism of the underlying metaphor of the, um…

ARTHUR: Humanity of the er -

FORD: Vogonity.

ARTHUR: What?

FORD: Vogonity.

ARTHUR: Oh. Oh! Vogonity. Sorry. Of the poet’s compassionate soul which contrived through the medium of the verse structure to sublimate this, transcend that and come to terms with the fundamental dichotomies of the other. And one is left with a profound and vivid insight into… err…

FORD: Into whatever it was that the poem was about.

3. Diana Wynne Jones again, from Witch Week:

Simon was very cunning. He was clever. He was thoroughly suspicious of the whole thing. They were trying to catch him out somehow. The safest and cleverest thing was not to commit anything to writing. He was sure of that. On the other hand, it would not do to let everyone know how clever he had gone. It would look peculiar. He ought to write just one thing. So, after more than half an hour of deep thought, he wrote:

Doggies.

It took him five minutes. Then he sat back, confident that he had fooled everyone.

*Well, I have two more dissertations to second-mark, and two moderation meetings to go to, and a resubmitted essay to chase up, but last night I finished the last actual pile of stuff and drank two glasses of champagne to celebrate, so that counts.

**Dr Wilander later gives the correct translation for the passage:

The great Faber John made four containers or caskets and hid each of them in one of the Four Ages of the World. The casket made of iron, he concealed in the Age of Iron. The second, which was of silver, he hid in the Silver Age, and the third, which was pure gold, in the Age of Gold. The fourth container was of lead and hidden in the same manner. He filled these four caskets with the greater part of his power and appointed to each one a special guardian. In this way he ensured that Time City would endure throughout a whole Platonic Year.

Rights of Paternity

I just wrote a review for Classical Review and am consequently having to sign Cambridge University Press's copyright form, to assign them my copyright, and look what I found in the small print:

Two 'moral rights' were conferred on authors by the UK Copyright Act in 1988. In the UK an author's 'right of paternity', the right to be properly credited whenever the work is published (or performed or broadcast), requires that this right is asserted in writing.

The right to be credited is a right of paternity? Is that, like, a patronymic? Like, whenever I go about the place, my surname constitutes 'proper credit' to my dad? Wow.

Lesbians; Rome and science fiction

I'd love to write an elegant demolition of this absurdity (Campaigners on the Greek island of Lesbos are to go to court in an attempt to stop a gay rights organisation from using the term "lesbian" - apparently it 'violates their human rights'). But I have no time. Instead I'm going to use this space to jot down some thoughts about the SF paper that started forming in my brane on the walk to work.

-- Rome as transtemporal site (passim in Western culture eg Philip K Dick Valis, Martindale 'The Ruins of Rome', Freud on Rome as city where all times present/accessible.)

-- time travel and the passage in 'Aetiology of Hysteria' about speaking stones, labour of technological mediation which enables direct communication with past

-- obviously we already have these technologies (reading and writing, but esp. audio recording, already disorder time) - 'The Fires of Pompeii' as elaborate argument about history and access to the past (Pompeii as 'fixed point' - b/c always-already 'fixed' in stone?) - but then the people turning to stone before the volcano, and the Doctor being commemorated in marble in the last shot, getting into the historical record - also elaborate argument about the learning of Latin as transtemporal connector (family from Cambridge Latin course, running joke about translation-as-technology [TARDIS translation device] and situatedness [Latin = Welsh, ref to Cardiff as site of Doctor Who, though of course in this ep dislocated into Rome-I-mean-Pompeii [Tony Keen talks about this play on the siting/setting of the ep]).

-- Stone circuit/stone prophecy in 'The Fires of Pompeii'. Stone as recording device. The Stone Tape. Stones speaking in the De Bello Civili, also site of set of meditations on the relationship to the past. Stonesyayy.

-- Necromancy - The Resurrection Glove and Erichtho. Technologies of communication with the dead. Circuit of history. (I always decide to write on the necromancy in DBC and I never do, it's something I've been circling around for like five years now...)

Help me! I will acknowledge you in a footnote!

The paper-machine drives ever onwards... I'm giving a paper to the Leeds branch of the Classical Association in a couple of weeks on 'The Romans and Science Fiction', and I need anecdotes and exciting examples and trivia and stuff. Please to provide:

* Science fiction with Romans in (either literally eg 'The Last Days of Pompeii' or allegorically eg the Romulans in Star Trek?)

* Science fiction about getting information from dead people - I think there was an episode of Torchwood with this theme? Which one was it, and Is there anything else?

* Science fiction about stones speaking or otherwise transmitting information (is there like a humming stone in Dune? What's going on there?) I'm finally going to watch The Stone Tape this week and am very excited about that.

Sources that come with snazzy visuals are particularly appreciated.

THANK YOU IN ADVANCE FOR YOUR HELP.

The queer erotic literature event is now to be called, rather less syllabically, Dirty Books. It'll be in the evening (exact time TBC) of Saturday 5 July, in the St Paul's Pavilion in the South Bank Centre. It's being organized by this profoundly awesome dude, Rupert Smith aka James Lear.

world tour, media whore, pleased the press in belgium

Just been booked to speak about slash at an event about queer erotic literature at the London Literature Festival this summer, probably between 5-10 July. Very excited. More news as it breaks. Keep fingers crossed that this will not clash with the Magnetic Fields concert on the 10th for which we have tickets.

Whee

Just finished the Derrida essay and emailed it to the editor. Going away for a week to see my family now.

As a preview of the essay, here's the bibliography, which fills me with glee:

Beattie, Thomas (2008), The Advocate, ‘Labor of Love’, April 2008. Accessed online at advocate.com (http://advocate.com/issue_story_ektid52664.asp, accessed 5 April 2008).

Bloom, Harold (1973), The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press)

Califia, Pat (1995a), ‘Introduction’, in Califia, ed, Doing it for Daddy: Short and Sexy Fiction about a Very Forbidden Fantasy (Boston: Alyson Publications), pp.9-16.

Califia, Pat (1995b), ‘It Takes A Good Boy To Make A Good Daddy’, in Doing it for Daddy, pp.215-37.

Deleuze, Gilles (1995), Negotiations (New York: Columbia University Press)

Derrida, Jacques (1976), Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press)

Derrida, Jacques (1987), ‘Envois’, in The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press), pp.3-256.

Derrida, Jacques (2004), ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’, in Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (London: Continuum), pp. 67-186.

Edelman, Lee (2004), No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham and London: Duke University Press)

Fritscher, Jack (2000), ‘I am Curious (Leather): Leather Dolce Vita, Pop Culture and the Prime of Mr Larry Townsend’, in Larry Townsend, The Leatherman’s Handbook 25th Anniversary Edition (Beverley Hills: L. T. Publications)

Golding, Sue (johnny de philo) and Zylinska, Joanna (1999), ‘There is Always One More Technology of Otherness’, Culture Machine 1 (1999), section headed ‘sex’, http://culturemachine.tees.ac.uk/Cmach/Backissues/j001/articles/art_glds.htm. Accessed on 4 April 2008.

Hale, C. Jacob (1997), ‘Leatherdyke Boys and Their Daddies: How to Have Sex Without Women Or Men’, Social Text 52/53, pp.223-236.

Hellekson, Karen, and Busse, Kristina (2006), Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet: New Essays (Jefferson: Macfarland Press)

Salusinszky, Imre (1987), ‘Harold Bloom’, in Criticism in Society: Interviews with Jacques Derrida, Northrop Frye, Harold Bloom, Geoffrey Hartman, Frank Kermode, Edward Said, Barbara Johnson, Frank Lentricchia and J. Hillis Miller (New York and London: Methuen), pp. 45-73.

Veyne, Paul (1985), ‘Homosexuality in Ancient Rome’, in Philippe Ariès and Andr Bjin (eds), Western Sexuality: Practice and Precept in Past and Present Times (Oxford: Blackwell), pp.26-35.

Wills, David (2008), Dorsality: Thinking Back through Technology and Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press)


(... and, I've already spotted two typos....)

Wordy

'If I aim at six thousand, I should come in at eight', I've been saying to myself all through this paper.

Currently at 8,100 and still with the conclusion to write and a bunch of footnotes to do.

Gah.