A Monstrous Conference!

Or rather, a conference about monstrosity.

It went really splendidly, I am pleased to say! Didn't exactly have an auspicious beginning, but it ended up being both a fun and engaging experience.

I got to Leicester around noon after having a frankly dysfunctional morning--the night before, I discovered mold growing in my bedroom and had a hypochondriac freakout about how I was going to inhale spores and die, and so I slept for a scant few hours on my floor away from the wall in question before catching an early morning train. Additionally, getting to Leicester required switching not only trains, but also stations, which meant that I had to almost-run from one part of Newark to another (yes, there is a Newark here) with my luggage because my first train was running a half hour late. It was not great to do that on two hours' sleep.

But in any case, I made the second train, and got to my hotel to drop off myself without too much difficulty; my map-reading skills have apparently improved. I had a slightly harder time finding the DeMontfort campus, but still found it in good time to see the beginning of the conference.

The conference itself was quite interesting, with a good blend of papers and approaches to themes of monstrosity and their implications for literature and culture. We covered everything from American Psycho to Lovecraft to pamphlets of the English Civil Wars, and I particularly liked how different time periods were blended together in discussion such that the central themes of what made a monster and what undermined them always came through strongly, no matter what the context. There was also an openness about letting classic canonical literature reside easily with pop culture that I really liked.

My paper on Saturday seemed to go over quite well also, though as usual I had some esprit d'escalier moments over the questions I got asked. The keynote speakers were both fascinating, and had hilariously opposed ideas about humanism/universalism vs. cultural subjectivity, which played out in lively debate and spilled over into the conference dinner. I also met some great people from all over the world, and talked about everything from steampunk to the horror of Twilight over some really delicious food. So on the whole, it was a very successful weekend.

I'm going to do a more academic write-up of the conference on my reading group's website, so when that goes up, I'll post a link to it as well.


EDIT: The write-up is now online; you can find it here.

Ta for now!

Caaaake

Went out for dinner and drinks with the flatmates the other night for a belated birthday celebration, wherein I sampled a couple of extremely delicious cocktails and gorged myself on some excellent Thai fried rice. It was served in half a pineapple! Delicious!

And also, because she is awesome and also an extremely skilled baker, Barbara made me a cake!

RAINBOW CAKE. It contains so much sugar it's ridiculous. The icing is like flavored crack. But I've had to be up early three days in a row due to a plethora of choir rehearsals, and tomorrow I am editing my paper, emailing lots of people, singing a service at the cathedral with lots of small children, and then making my power point presentation. So I am all about temporarily upping my sugar intake. Cake for breakfast, woohoo!

See, I'm totally not a real person yet.

Things that have happened

Good god, I'm twenty-four now. I'm supposed to be all adult and stuff. What??

I am fighting this by watching How To Train Your Dragon and buying comic books. Yes.

Anyway.

I have finished my conference paper! Or at least a draft of it. I'm going to fix it again next week before I have to present it officially, but so far the people who have read it have enjoyed it, which I'm very pleased about. I'm relieved to have the bulk of it done so that I can go back to concentrating on my thesis, which I haven't done for about a month, oops. In the meantime, I will endure the annoying restrictions of powerpoint and get that done as soon as possible, and then read it all aloud a lot so I don't stutter and let my voice drop down into the bowels of my stressed-out register.

I taught my first tutorial last week, which went fairly well--I have a really excellent group, in that they're all willing to participate but no one person completely dominates discussion. I quite lost track of time, so we talked quite a lot about Robinson Crusoe and not a lot at all about Mansfield Park, but on the whole we covered the main themes that needed to be touched on. I know I need a lot more practice in terms of getting comfortable enough to really listen and use students' points as jumping off points for continuing discussion, but hopefully that will come with repetition and ever more note-taking and study. It was definitely enjoyable though; I must admit I do enjoy teaching on the whole.

I've also been enjoying choir immensely for its fast pace and large repertoire, and the fact that we're going to Rome in the spring to do a tour, which is extremely cool. I've also had the first of a few singing lessons and the instructor has said that I have a few more notes in my upper range if I work at it, which is kind of exciting. It would be nice to have a proper handle on my upper register rather than having to strain to reach notes. We're doing a couple more performances in the cathedral as well, which will never not be awesome.

I've also joined a reading group based in Newcastle that is being organized in part by a friend of mine from Leeds: www.northeast19century.org
We had our first meeting last week and it was very enjoyable, and I'm now in charge of making posters for it, which is good fun. I think it will be a really nice way of getting back into a semi-seminar environment with other postgrads, and having some fun reading literature that isn't necessarily revolving around my specific research. For Halloween we read ghost stories, and next week we're talking about the Brontës and the Lake District Poets.

The days have gotten abominably short again, which never fails to be both depressing and incredibly confusing since I no longer have any sense of when evening is, since the sun sets several hours before any definition of evening begins. It isn't particularly cold yet, though, of which I'm glad. This time, however, I'm prepared! I have fingerless gloves, a hot water bottle, and two extra blankets on my bed. I'm going to look like some sort of bundled urchin, but I am going to be warm all winter. I am determined.

Also, I'm pretty sure that anyone who reads this already knows, but my parents has acquired KITTIES. Eeeeeeeeeee! After a very long debate, they are henceforth named Gwen and Cecily, or alternately Moose and Squirrel, and I cannot wait to go home to meet them. There will be a lot of cooing and squeals of delight involved. Because this is exactly me:

http://xkcd.com/

So yeah. It's gonna be awesome. Either that, or my parents are going to throw me out of the house for being obnoxiously twee.