Study Leave: Occasional Posts on Research, Writing and Other Academic Matters

Thursday, 30 August 2012

Myth on the Map

Fresco on canvas mounted on board (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Spent my productive time today looking over Myth on the Map. I see that two months ago I was wildly optimistic about getting onto a new author: Homer, perhaps, or Pausanias, this summer. But it is now the end of the summer, and I have spent all the grant money, and we still aren't finished Apollodorus. I don't believe we will ever finish Apollodorus, so there's no point even beginning to wonder what author we should do next. This depresses me.

On the other hand mapping Apollodorus is not such a bad project. I am unlikely to get any more money from the university for this project, but at least Apollodorus on the Map will be a useful website.

Wednesday, 29 August 2012

Dolops, and whirlwinds

English: Menelaus (Ancient Greek: Μενέλαος) was a king of Sparta, the husband of Helen, and a central figure in the Trojan War. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

A particularly dense passage today. In Homer, Dolops tries to kill Meges, remains hopeful of victory even after his spear bounces off Meges' armour and Meges slices off his helmet crest (or possibly yanks off the whole helmet), but is killed by Menelaus, who gets around him and rams a spear through him from behind. Oswald renders this as Dolops not believing he could die even after his spear fails, even after he loses his helmet:

"It was not until the beak of death
Pushed out through his own chest
That he recognized the wings of darkness".

She follows this with a short simile:

"Like when god unwinds his whirlwind
A single cloud moves into the middle sky "

which, like most weather similes, took awhile to locate; but it seems to be the beginning & end of a simile from book 16, where Patroclus has routed the Trojan army and the cloud of dust whirling up from their chaotic retreat is like a cloud sent by Zeus when he's sending a storm. There is a double shift here from Homer to Oswald.

First, the single cloud from Zeus heralding a storm = the 'beak of death' heralding Dolops' own death (the "wings of darkness").

But using a simile from the route of the Trojans in this passage, where they're still winning, reminds us of their coming defeat; so the spear through his chest heralds Dolops' death to him, as a single cloud augurs a storm; but Dolops' death, in turn, is the single cloud for us, that augurs the whirlwind of the coming Trojan rout.

Then spent the afternoon, or some of it, contemplating sacrificial virgins. We have decided to write the easy version of the paper - that is, the chunk that will be the easiest to write, about S1 Buffy - and see if we can find a journal that wants it.

Related articles

Saturday, 25 August 2012

three balls in the air

Jacques-Louis David - Homer Reciting his Verses to the Greeks - WGA06120 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

First, Myth on the Map. Spent an hour today in conversation trying to disentangle when we should, and when we shouldn't, indicate group membership in the xml coding. I don't think like a computer programmer at all and this made my head hurt.

Second, sacrificial virgins. Agreed that we would go over our notes and meet on Tuesday and decide if we actually want to write this paper, since we both have things we are supposed to be doing and will get more credit for doing. But this would be fun. But.

Third, Oswald p. 56, on the deaths of 2 Greeks and 2 Trojans, in a list (though she doesn't identify them by group affiliation, which was particularly striking to me as I'd just spent the morning thinking about groups in Homer; in Homer, the group is the whole point; in Oswald, each individual death is the whole point). She then has a simile which she's pulled from Iliad 12, the battle at the walls where the Trojans and Greeks are flinging boulders at each other:

"As the flakes that fall thick upon a winter's day, when Zeus is minded to snow and to display these his arrows to humankind - he lulls the wind to rest, and snows hour after hour till he has buried the tops of the high mountains, the headlands that jut into the sea, the grassy plains, and the tilled fields of men; the snow lies deep upon the forelands, and havens of the gray sea, but the waves as they come rolling in stay it that it can come no further, though all else is wrapped as with a mantle so heavy are the heavens with snow - even thus thickly did the stones fall on one side and on the other, some thrown at the Trojans, and some by the Trojans at the Achaeans; and the whole wall was in an uproar."

(Perseus website translation).

Oswald's translation is much prettier, and repurposes, this time from active to passive. In Homer, the stones thrown by the Greeks and Trojans at each other fall as thickly as snow in a blizzard. In Oswald, after another list of bodies, it's the deaths; the bodies falling so thickly and fast that they obscure the landscape, the trees, the fields, the harbours and beaches, and are obliterated in the sea.

And it has indeed occurred to me that I would make much faster progress on any one project if I had only one project.

Tuesday, 21 August 2012

Home Again

English: Aerial view of the village of Passchendaele (north is to the right of the photo) before and after the Third Battle of Ypres, 1917. Français : Vue aerienne du village de Passendale, avant et après la troisième bataille d'Ypres, en 1917. Le nord est à droite sur les photos. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

A CWGC cemetery from the First World War: Tyne Cot in the Ypres Salient (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

THE THIRD BATTLE OF YPRES The Battle of Pilckem Ridge : A British 18 pounder field gun battery taking up new positions close to a communication trench near Boesinghe, 31 July 1917. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Map of the Third Battle of Ypres (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

After a month away, I'm back in Victoria and have finally unpacked and got back to my desk. Today, Kaletor, Lykophron and Kleitos have all been killed, "it goes on and on" as Oswald remarks, partly because the list of dead soldiers in the Iliad is so bloody long, but partly because those are a sequence of vengeance-deaths. Ajax kills Kaletor; Hector, enraged at the death of his cousin (N.B. we've never been told that Hector had a cousin called Kaletor until this instant), tries to kill Ajax, misses, and nails Lykophron; Ajax, enraged that his good friend of the family Lykophron who lived with Ajax' family because he'd killed someone back home and whom Ajax honoured like his own father (and we've never been told any of that before either), calls up Teucer to avenge the death. Teucer sends out a hail of arrows but misses Hector and gets Kleitos, who is just riding up into the thick of the battle to help Hector out. "It goes on and on".

Oswald skips all the made-up-this-instant retconning Homer inserts to give these deaths some emotional resonance. First Kaletor, then Lykophron, then Kleitos. They don't, in Oswald, need some made-up reason for someone important (Ajax, Teucer, Hector) to care about them for their deaths to matter. Their deaths already matter.

While we were in Belgium went to Ypres and Passchendaele, and the German and Tyne Cot World War 1 cemeteries. I stood at Ypres, where young men had died by the thousands, mired to the waist in a bog of mud, and blood, and corpses, and ordinance, and mustard gas, and poison, and rain; and knew that I was certainly standing over bodies, or parts of bodies, of soldiers whose corpses had never been found. I thought about the Iliad, where at least the dead, or most of the dead, had names.

Sunday, 15 July 2012

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.

Saturday, 14 July 2012

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.

Wednesday, 11 July 2012

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.