K.A. Laity's Blog, page 154

Converting Monks into Friars in Iowa

So, the trip to Iowa included an unscheduled night in Chicago. A bit irritating to spend all those hours in O'Hare, but the truth is the seasoned traveler needs to be prepared for this kind of inconvenience. I had books to read, things to write and social media at my fingertips where I could complain to my friends. I'd have rather been in Iowa having dinner with folks as planned, but there are worse things than the quiet solitude of an anonymous hotel room. I love hotels. I think it would be terrific to live in a hotel in London with room service and the whole city before me.



More later, but here's the Powerpoint slides from my talk.Consider them an attempt to intrigue you. Forthcoming: the paper with these images embedded and a video of the images with the narration recorded there (assuming it sounds okay). Time's tight: I'm off to PCA in San Antonio on Wednesday. Much to do, so I'm writing this while my students are watching a film. Multi-tasking is the word du jour.



Converting Monks into Friars

Iowa with a Big Question Mark

Powerpoint is Evil

I used Tufte's piece in my own PPT presentation, which as folks on Twitter know, has almost 80 slides. I've described it as being sort of like "The Word" on The Colbert Report. Will this work? Who knows. Still tweaking. But I printed my boarding passes. If you're on Facebook, I'm now having a contest to guess how many gratuitous pop culture references I make in the forty minute speech. Go on, have a guess.

Euro Punks Exhibit

Wednesday already?! Eek! Madness -- this entire week has been, will be, is. Yesterday after the Glass Ceiling talk organized by the Women's Initiative, I jumped in the car and headed down to Kingston for a reading of a new play at the Arts Society of Kingston. The play was on the life of Margaret Fuller and has a lot of potential: the audience offered a lot of good feedback. I hope I'll get a lot of the same on my play.



Two panic moments after the play: first, being horrified to find that my car was missing, afraid it had been towed. No, I had simply walked two blocks past where it was. Can we say distracted? Driving to Bertie's for dinner I had an owl fly right over my hood on the backroads, which initially made me gasp in alarm and then think, "wow, how cool was that?" Great dinner (of course) and then back home again (after midnight).



Finishing the slides for the talk; tomorrow is polishing both. Out with friends Thursday night, on my way to Iowa Friday. Phew! And then next week is PCA. I can relax for a day on the 25th. >_< At last, here's the photos from the Euro Punks Exhibit at the Villa Medici in Rome. A lot of them are awful, but I was snapping away hastily, having fun. At least you get a flavour of the exhibit. If you want to see better pictures, take a look at the catalogue. I know a certain punk rock DJ who might let you take a look at his copy...

April Fools Broad Pod

Okay, well not so much April fools as April fun! The April Broad Pod is up -- that's the podcast from Broad Universe, the organization that supports women in speculative fiction and has a wealth of fabulous people including me! Go on, give it a listen.





[image error]

Today I'm participating in a talk on "The Glass Ceiling" on campus, put together by the young go-getters of the Women's Initiative. Then I'm running down to Kingston for another play reading at the Arts Society of Kingston. It will give me a chance to chat more with the folks there about my own reading of Lumottu , which will be on May 31st (save the date!).



It's Tuesday, so don't forget to check out this week's Overlooked A/V over at Todd's blog.



Rush, rush, rush! The theme of the week. Here's my first word cloud for the talk: still tweaking to do.

Carnival of the Animals

[image error]
Image via Sokoblovsky Farms, petitelapgiraffe.com


The CSR Camerata concert went very well (not just saying that; read the review :-). I had a lot of fun reading Nash's poems and listening to my fabulous colleagues play. We all went out to The Point afterward, which is always lovely, too. I am consequently brainstorming more ways to combine the written word and music. Who wouldn't want to add beautiful music to an academic presentation? Wonderful.



A hectic week ahead which culminates in leaving Friday for Iowa to give the keynote speech at the Craft/Critique/Culture Conference. Let's hope by the time I get on that plane I am happy with the talk and the Powerpoint presentation, so I can relax and read something fun rather than continue tinkering with it all.



Not there yet. Argh -- at least not Sunday afternoon as I type this, though perhaps Monday morning when it posts was supposed to post [d'oh!]. Because I've got events all day Monday, Tuesday and Thursday, so there's precious little time left.



Gulp.

Carnival & FFB: Skeem Life

Tonight! The Saint Rose Camerata plays Camille Saint-Saëns' Carnival of the Animals. I will read some Ogden Nash poems between the songs. Unfortunately not among them is one of the tiny number of poems I can recite by heart (which includes Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky and Dorothy Parker's Résumé):



The wombat lives across the seas

Among the far Antipodes.

He may exist on nuts and berries

Or then again, on missionaries.

His distant habitat precludes

Conclusive knowledge of his moods,

But I would not engage the wombat

In any form of mortal combat.





Wise words!







Get the full round up of Friday's Forgotten Books over at Patti Abbot's blog. I'm stretching the definition of FFB to cover a book that hasn't had much exposure and should: SKEEM LIFE by Gary Robertson. I met Gary on Twitter, first because of his band The Cundeez -- probably because I was touting the Punk Rock Juke Box with Marko (every Thu 12-3 and Fri 11-2 Eastern). Good stuff! As we got to talking, we discovered we both wrote and chatted about plays and books. Gary sent me a lovely package with Skeem Life and his book of poetry, Pure Dundee, and his historical study Gangs of Dundee. You're sensing a theme, eh? He also sent me The Cundeez CDs and a DVD of a performance of his play The Berries.



Well, you know that I'm usually quite good with languages and accents, but I have to admit while I had little trouble reading Dundeez, I have had to listen very closely while watching the play! I'm going to have to watch it again after reading and assimilating the books, but it's a very funny and often rather touching account of a day's work picking berries. Apparently buses would take people out from the city to pick berries during the height of the season, a welcome addition to their often meagre incomes during the tough times, but also a kind of break from the usual routine.



As Robertson puts it in "McGonagall's Disciples" (a reference to the legendary Scottish poet),



We are thi Dundee lihterahti

Ejicated on thi streetz an a but bren scatty



and they speak



Wi language az rough az a rhino's erse

Oary Dundonian in poetic verse

Itz oor tongue, oor dialect, itz how wi converse



You get acclimated quickly. And the stories in Skeem Life are often hilarious though also often relating dangerous events and somewhat scandalous situations, but the matter of fact spirit and unflagging sense of fun triumph. It's a hard life, but there's never any self-pity. Great stuff.



Check out the music, poetry and books, and be sure to keep it oary!

Epiphanies and Inspiration

No column today: I'm not writing any this month as I'm just too swamped. Tonight's the dress rehearsal for the Camerata's production of Saint-Saëns' Carnival of the Animals with me as narrator. Do join us tomorrow night for the performance if you can at 7:30 in the Picotte Recital Hall of the Massry Center. It will be lovely -- we have some amazing performers.







From Rome


I had a little epiphany this morning: Modern publishing is like science, extracting genre from organic story like chemicals from herbs. The best stories straddle genre. I already knew the falseness of marketing to strict genres; what I hadn't realised was its similarity to how medical science has sought to isolate the "effective" chemical and extract it from the plant. What they've been discovering of course is that all the seemingly extraneous elements play important roles in absorption and so forth.



Over at UAlbany they had John Patrick Shanley visiting. I went to the afternoon seminar, as always hoping to hear something that will kick my brain back into high gear. I loved his story about how Cyrano de Bergerac inspired him as young teen in the Bronx, being both tough, smart and a freak -- and getting all his friends pastries with just the power of his words. "That's what I do." He has a very direct (and funny) way of talking, as befits an ex-Marine from a rough part of New York. You can see it when he mentions telling a critique partner in exasperation, "I don't know why you're alive," because his script was full of "lies" and bad writing. But he also says how much he hungers to have the ultimate romantic connection. A lot easier for an ex-Marine to say that and be taken seriously, but you see within the snappy patter the guy who wrote Moonstruck. The image that gave birth to that film was his mother's face and the sky that he saw as a child and then she was gone and what was in the sky? The moon.



He got a little impatient with one guy who seemed to want to pump him for the secrets to success and repeated exactly what I have always believed: writing has shamanic power. You're not writing for yourself, you're writing for your tribe (and sometimes, to find your tribe). All I need, he said, is a torch in the dark telling my stories before a circle of people. "The problem with a lot of bad writing is all the subtext, I'm sick of subtext." People speak less when they tell the truth, Shanley said, because it always costs them something.



Things to keep in mind as I keep working on the talk. Trying not to think about Lucky Jim too much. Be truthful. Offer something real. Tell my tribe what I know.

The Little Video of Calm

In the midst of the mad swirl of our lives, we all need a little moment of calm. Lacking The Little Book of Calm , I try to conjure up soothing images of relaxing situations. Because I love mudlarking along the Thames, I took this video to remind me of those moments of calm.











Of course sometimes I try to relieve stress by simply doing very silly things. Recently YouTube introduced new programs where you can make animation of whatever you like. Yes, if this sounds rather like the video I made for the Women's League of Ale Drinkers, well, it is very much like that. In an idle moment, I decided to animate the lyrics to The Fall's "Dice Man" [based on the cult novel and NOT that crap 'comedian'] and it looks like this:











Silly: but sometimes that's just what you need, right? Well, sure -- some people write poetry -- but I seem to only be able to write asinine poetry. In the meanwhile, I find there is so little time, so much to do.

Review: Vision: From the Life of Hildegard of Bingen

See all of Tuesday's Overlooked Films (and other media) over at Todd Mason's blog.





There's a short BBC film on the life of Hildegard von Bingen that I show to my classes starring the fantastic Patricia Routledge as the visionary healer. Despite its creaky low-budget ambience I prefer it to this one despite its beauties. But I'm all for more films (and plays and books) about one of the many influential women of the Middle Ages. Despite what my students have sometimes told me, there are not only women in medieval times (yes, I have had students say that "there were no women in Anglo-Saxon England" which makes one wonder how there were any men...) but a surprising number were well known at the time not just in retrospect.



Hildegard is one and this film conveys some of the reasons why. Her visions hold center stage here, which is a shame because her music should share that stage. The music is there, but it's as if filmmaker Margarethe von Trotta assumes you already know about the music from the start. Eventually -- and rather gloriously -- the music gets it moment, embodied in a very pagan-looking production of the Ordo Virtutum which releases the nuns from their habits and wimples to look absolutely golden with grace.



But a lot of the film seems unable to see Hildegard's piety except from an anachronistic modernity. There's the gruesome revelation of her spiritual mother's cilice upon her death, where the metal prongs have to be peeled away from her rotting flesh. Hildegard's combativeness against the masculine discipline seems to be the simple misogyny of individuals rather than the more complicated hierarchical world that evolves from a patriarchal structure; after all, Hildegard proves able to negotiate that imposing edifice with skill and insight, circumventing control with targeted appeals to the right ears. The importance of an authoritative endorsement of her work at the Synod of Trier and her correspondence with popes and leaders demonstrates the significant power this "humble vessel" attained.



Of course modern filmmakers can only see the relationships between the women, especially Hildegard's connection to her acolyte Richardis, as a barely concealed sexual attraction, which trivialises the depth and complexity of the lives of women in cloistered world. Hildegard's faith gave her authority and power; it infused her life and her outlook. The visions -- which von Trotta's film suggests are as often put on for show as for genuine insight -- were amazingly complex works that crystalised complex notions into a single multifaceted image. She turned a medical condition that plagued her into a gift that allowed her to interpret and explain in an unprecedented way: true genius.



Nonetheless, there is much to enjoy in the film. Barbara Sukowa makes an arresting Hildegard and the film provides a gorgeous view of medieval life that isn't all leeches and mud. The gardens in particular are lovely: Hildegard as a healer (and the author of Physica and Causae et Curae) also gets short shrift in the film, though we do see her teaching the novices herbs. The film has a leisurely pace, so don't go expecting action/adventure. A good introduction for folks who know nothing about this remarkable woman: with luck, it will inspire you to look further.