Signs Taken for Wonders

Hello folks!

I'm still alive, and still on lj. But (like many?) I'm suffering from excessive guilt re: the time writing entries takes away from Other Things I Ought to be Writing. Ergo, I do not post.

But I will try to do drive-bys now and then. To note things like:

1) I'm teaching a Transatlantic Gothic graduate seminar this semester and it's AMAZING. My students have enormously smart things to say about some interesting material and, my God, I actually LIKED Udolpho this time around.

2) I'm neck deep in cover design etc. for the academic book. Very exciting.

3) My TV obsession de jour is _True Detective,_ although, like many, I'm disappointed by the show's lack of interest in its female characters.

4) I seem to be making regular trips out to Boston & Princeton this semester, so if you live around there, give me a shout.

5) I'll be at ICFA in Orlando in a few weeks. Hopefully I'll see some of you there.

6) I just finished reading my CW classmate J.M Sidorova's striking debut novel The Age of Ice, about a Russian prince plagued by his special relationship with cold. Sidorova marries luminous language to historical detail in a saga of the promise and despair of Enlightenment science. Fans of historical fantasy and Russian novels should definitely check it out.

In a perfect world, I would post more on this lj. In a perfect world, though, I'd also have one of those Harry Potter time turners so that I'd get 36 hours out of every day. And various things like The Power of Habit (good book, you should read it) have convinced me that my writing/creative time is limited. So I'm focusing right now on academic manuscript revisions, which is tricky and irritating and occupying most of my time.

Also this week - a Barenaked Ladies concert (I have to say, they're fun performers), a local version of the Texas Chainsaw Musical, Pacific Rim, which satisfied a monsters-fighting-robots urge I didn't know I had, and Side Effects, which was a slickly made, well-acted and disappointingly misogynist movie from some very talented people. If they'd at least made the wife's character sympathetic, or anything other than a bitchy plot decice, I could have taken it. As it is

Books: I'm reading Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable; Parry's Account of 3 Voyages to the Polar Seas (research); and The Mad Scientist's Daughter.

On my way back from Boskone where, yes, I had a lovely time. matociquala introduced me and Fran Wilde to "Drink," a bartender's bar in which they make pale fruity things called Bohemians, which I'll be hankering after for a long time. Other things I'll be hankering after for a while included the Boskone art show, which had some of the strongest pieces I've seen so far at cons. But alas, the budget would not let me buy.

I didn't end up attending that many panels, but those I did proved interesting. Jim Kelly gave an intriguing talk on the Virtual Utopia, which gave me some ideas for my upcoming lecture on The Matrix. And the "gamechanger" panel added to my reading list, as I knew it would. Other than that, I mainly hung out in the lobby and caught up with familiar faces, including some of the ICFA brigade and mindstalk, who I had yet to meet in his new Boston habitat.

On Sunday we were kidnapped by James D. Macdonald and Debra Doyle and taken indoor skydiving, which is, btw, AWESOME, and does not come with the same terrifying quantity of space and ground found in the other kind of skydiving. I thoroughly approve.

My observations re: indoor skydiving are limited to the fact that a) it's harder than it looks and b) I'd like to do it again. Actually, I'll add that the thing that constantly surprises me about skydiving is the nothing-beneath-you part. The hindpart of my brain equates flying with swimming, but there's a significant difference between feeling yourself supported by water and the what-the-hell-is-THAT sensation of being supported by wind. Wind's much less stable, and it's also full of light and noise and NOTHING, and to someone who's a confident swimmer, it's very odd.

Now: back to work.

First of all, thanks for all your suggestions re: dystopian fiction/tv shows. I haven't heard yet if the course has been approved, but it seems likely that it will be.

I'm excited about this course: it would be my first large lecture course, AND it's a new genre course for me to design. Both of the Brit lit classes I'm teaching this semester are versions of courses I've taught before. Work-load-wise this is a good thing - a lot of prep time is saved - but, masochistically, I miss the frenetic joys and anxieties of a new syllabus.

I just delivered a talk on my research to a group of graduate students and faculty, and you know what? I nailed that sucker.

In my continued efforts to "get a damn internet presence," as some folks at WFC requested, I've started up a companion blog over at blogger.com. It's main function will be to keep track of story pubs, but I'll be crossposting some entries there.

I'm still trying to figure out the blogspot format. Does anyone have any tips?

This is a much shorter list than those of many of my f-list. But still:

Fiction

"The Strange Case of Madeleine Marsh (Aged 14 1/4)" - Realms of Fantasy (RIP, Realms)

"Remains"  - AE - The Canadian Science Fiction Review 

"In the Gardens of the Night" - Beneath Ceaseless Skies

"Birthing Monsters" (poem) - Basement Stories

Academic Essays & Books

"Resurrecting Redgauntlet: the transformation of Walter Scott's nationalist revenants in Bram Stoker's Dracula." Victorian Transformations, ed. Bianca Tredennick, Ashgate 2011.

So I really, really enjoyed white-water rafting. I did it with the same group I tried the scuba class with. Both experiences have made me think that I may have an unforeseen appreciation for watersports.


There's just one problem. 


Watersports seem to give me hives.


For realz, I now have an intensely itchy red rash on my back that bears a striking similarity to the one I developed after scuba diving. I think I might be allergic to the material they use in wetsuits. Either that, or the detergent these rental places use to clean their wetsuits.


Why, universe? Why?!!!? Couldn't you have made me allergic to American football instead?



 

The title of this post is for the benefit of squishymeister, who introduced me to the concept of “no-good” days.

Today was actually more of an absurd, “what will happen next?” kind of day, although that might be the sleep deprivation talking.

It began late last night, when I arrived back in my apt from a wedding on the West Coast. There‘d been a massive water leak down one wall while I was gone. Also, my A/C was broken and the temperature inside the apt was 84 degrees.

No biggie. I left a message for the repair people, then retreated to a happy Canadian place in which I could repress all knowledge of Fahrenheit. (I later found out that a leak upstairs had shorted out the a/c and set it to "heat" rather than cool, so my apt was, and still is, hotter than the outdoors.)

Before going to bed, I remembered that I’d promised to attend a student presentation this week. Checking my email, I discovered that a) the presentation was tomorrow and b) it was scheduled as the first presentation of the morning. To make it, I’d have to get up at what my West-Coast body still believed was 4:30 am. Dedicated teacher that I am, I decided to do it.

So today I trundled down to the conference site, only to realize once I’d arrived that the email had stated the wrong day. The conference is actually tomorrow.

A bunch of other small things went wrong, leading to much head-shaking and muttering. I picked up some groceries to restock my empty fridge, and headed home.

…and ran smack into the middle of a Serious Thunderstorm. 60 mph winds, apparently, though my car was sheltered from the worst of them.

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Beat that, homies.