Slayage Day 2

Another day at Slayage, at which we gave our "Sacrificial Virgins" paper, a day early, when I realised this morning that I was going to be on a bus for the airport when our session began tomorrow.  (I'd misread the program).  Fortunately they could fit us into another session at short notice.  Some good questions on inversion, and one excellent point on how the massive plotting mess in the second season of Dollhouse, when Boyd was suddenly and inexplicably retconned (impossibly) into the Big Bad, it was  on the model of the sacrificial virgin (Echo) being sacrificed by her father/protector, which might have been why Joss thought of it, since he likes that pattern (and the pattern of the corruption of mentor figures, perhaps because they always represent authority, thus corporations, thus evil badness, in the Whedonverse).  Though in this particular case that pattern just did not work.

Excellent papers on humour in BtVS vs "Everyone Loves Raymond", "Runaway Heroines" in romance, Buffy and Twilight (BtVS comes off pretty well by comparison with Twilight, in this as in every single other possible comparison - Buffy runs off and is held sternly to account by her friends and family for being selfish and unkind, and her friends and family get on with their lives while she's gone.  Bella runs off and is wildly self-destructive and self-endangering, and the entire damn town runs out to find and save her, and eventually as a result of her spectacular self-destructive emotional blackmail she gets - every single thing she has ever wanted.  So by all means try this at home, girls!)  

Also excellent papers on racism in Hollywood generally, even in St. Joss, and on parenting in the Whedonverse (where Boyd came up again, this time as someone whose model of parenting failed to change from 'fathering' to 'mothering').  I still think the real problem with the Boyd arc is that it was a mistake in the first place, but am intrigued that some readers are trying valiantly to explain it.  There is a lot of interest in Dollhouse generally at this conference; many good papers, and a lot of engaged conversation.  I think perhaps it's been long enough since it ended that we're willing to engage with all of the things that were good about it, and there were a lot, rather than trying to blot the whole thing out of memory because of the catastrophic plot defects in the second season.  Or perhaps that's just me. Nobody has produced a "Dollhouse" collection of papers but it is clearly time someone did.

  And then we all watched Dr. Horrible's Singalong Blog, and sang along, and then watched the Singalong Commentary, which I had never heard before and it is phenomenal.  I shall use Joss' song in the commentary ("Heartbroken") to begin my film course next year.  

Well, possibly.  I could hardly live up to that level of cool for the rest of the course, so perhaps best not to raise their expectations.

Off to England tomorrow, where I will, I am sure, work on Oswald every day.   

Slayage conference

I'm in Vancouver at the Slayage conference. This is the first conference I've ever been to that included a singalong. we ought to include that in our programs.  Many good papers; I especially enjoyed a philosophical one on identity in Dollhouse.  There was also an excellent paper in the same session,by Curry and Velasquez, on how the audience is encouraged to construct Echo as a coherent identity in Dollhouse long before she has her "composite moment" in ep. 12 of season 1, by various framing techniques known in poetry, notably

• things being in the same poem are automatically accepted as belonging together; the reader then tries to figure out how
• presented with separate events / things/ elements the reader will construct a narrative and try to 'tell a story' from them, and link them that way
• material associations - similarities in sound, meter and visuals - will encourage associations in the mind of the reader; they called these "material" because they occur below the level of linguistic meaning.

This made me think about the construction of all character in episodic TV, or indeed in fiction; the author is always encouraging the reader to create a coherent persona for their characters, by inserting very carefully calibrated moments, scenes, and uses of language from which the reader / viewer can construct what will feel like a coherent character.  But the construction is the reader's, not the author's, though the author will have done everything they can to encourage the reader to do that work.  However the author IS assisted by the fact that we are either hard-wired or heavily trained to create coherent character out of disparate hints, in the same way that we are hard-wired (or heavily socialized) to see faces in (for example) clouds, piles of rocks, pictures of pine trees ... so if the hints of coherent character are planted, we will do our best to find them and put them together.  

Of course the job of the writers was particularly tricky in Dollhouse because they had to simultaneously plant the hints of a coherent identity AND construct several completely disparate imprint characters, AND encourage us to believe that there couldn't possibly be a coherent identity underneath because Echo's core identity had been wiped.

That was such an interesting series philosophically; it's a real shame the second season plot arc really didn't work, because that has discouraged people (me at least) from thinking seriously about the series as a work of art.

admin day

Uzbekistan Airways Boarding Pass (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I finally finished the paperwork for the conference participants who wanted travel reimbursements.  If I can just offer some advice to anyone applying for a travel reimbursement:

• If you are sending in several different kinds of receipt, a cover note with a list of the receipts, what they're for, and the amount, will make the bookkeeping much easier for whoever's doing the paperwork.  I kept finding receipts I missed the first, second, and third times I went through the stacks of papers, and then I'd have to recalculate everything.
• Thanks for the boarding passes, really.  But I also need to know what the ticket COST. Send the invoice too.
• if you're sending in scans of boarding passes or what have you by email, send everything in the same email.  One email with a boarding pass, and then another one a few days later from a different account with an invoice, and then another one a week and a half after that saying that you forgot all about your hotel bill, also you had to take a cab to the airport, is understandable; who keeps all their receipts in one place?  Naturally you keep finding things and better to send them late than not at all.  But it does not make the paperwork any easier for the grant holder.
• please: an address to which you would like your check to be sent. Please.

Emailing people and asking for information they had omitted to send me slowed the process down a good deal too.  And this kind of work - collating many different bits of paper from many different sources and organizing them, and then having to re-organize them for the auditors - is very much not my favourite thing.  And it took, even once I stopped dragging my feet, days and days to do.  Everyone else I know who's had to do this says "Oh, I just got the secretary to do it."  How do you get a secretary to do it?   

Anyway.  This is, really, and I mean it, the last time I'm organizing a conference.  I've done it 3 times and I think that is sufficient.  I've done my bit for the discipline.  But if it weren't for all the bloody bookkeeping afterwards and grant-writing beforehand I wouldn't mind doing it again.  That's the worst part of it, by far.  If I were just setting up a venue and a schedule and organizing a lunch, I could do that over a weekend. 

Leaving for Slayage tomorrow, and then for Europe, and Toronto, with the family.  I have not begun to pack, or think about  packing, even. 

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more sacrificial virgins

A vestal virgin, detail of an engraving by Sir Frederic Leighton, created Lord Leighton, the first British artist to be given a title. (around 1880) The artist died in 1896. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

We've finished the sacrificial virgins paper, I'm nearly finished the paperwork from a conference I ran 3 months ago, and I'm due at a conference this weekend.  Then away for a month travelling.

We've cut out about 2/3 of the paper; all the most interesting stuff, because we need to establish the ground first, which I am so over by now, and we've only got 20 minutes.  I'm looking forward to writing the article that will be based on the paper. Whedon uses sacrificial virgins over and over and over, in various forms.  By the time he got to "Cabin in the Woods" I would have said he had done everything he could with it.    (Apparently i was wrong.)    We could write a whole article just on Drusilla.

Several problems arose while thinking it through.  Here's one: how do you identify a "sacrificial virgin"?  By comparing a character to a similar character in Greek tragedy?  Well sure, but what made you pick that character in Greek tragedy?  Why didn't you pick some other character, in some other genre?  One tends to assume one's fixed points, as Catherine Brown points out (I've been listening to her podcast on comparative literature), but in fact there are no fixed points; the reason you decided to compare X and Y is because you had already compared X and Y and decided you could talk about it.

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