I said in my previous post that once you start thinking about Diana Wynne Jones, you see traces of her world everywhere. Further evidence (pictorial):
It's not just me, either.![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
steepholm, introducing the first session of the day, announced that where the previous day there had been an open doorway between the two rooms W2 and W3, "today that way is barred." Once you set foot on this road, you cannot turn back. The explanation is prosaic, there is now a projector screen blocking the way, but DWJ makes her magic from prosaic objects, and a projector screen is a perfectly acceptable embodiment of illusion... Or was I just reeling from the shock of finding myself in a lecture theatre at 9 o'clock on a Saturday morning? I thought it was a little odd to put a keynote speaker on at that hour, but perhaps I'm just getting slow and lazy? The room was already quite full when I arrived.
Isobel Armstrong introduced the collection of her sister's poems, which she has just edited and published, by talking about her sister Diana: her "intensely blue eyes," (which character have I just read with unexpected blue eyes?), "she was always very good at anger," aha! it was the Friends' School, and one reason Diana found it uncongenial was that she was torn between the desire to be part of a community and to be a rebel, to be an insider and to be an outsider (that says so much about her characters). I loved, also, her response to comments on Everard's Ride: "I'm glad Antonia [Byatt] felt cheated at the end. She was meant to." Discuss, with reference to the endings of any number of DWJ's books...
( Parallel Worlds / Sessions )
There were another three papers and a keynote speech, but they, like today's session, will wait. This post is long enough already, and it's bedtime...
It's not just me, either.
steepholm, introducing the first session of the day, announced that where the previous day there had been an open doorway between the two rooms W2 and W3, "today that way is barred." Once you set foot on this road, you cannot turn back. The explanation is prosaic, there is now a projector screen blocking the way, but DWJ makes her magic from prosaic objects, and a projector screen is a perfectly acceptable embodiment of illusion... Or was I just reeling from the shock of finding myself in a lecture theatre at 9 o'clock on a Saturday morning? I thought it was a little odd to put a keynote speaker on at that hour, but perhaps I'm just getting slow and lazy? The room was already quite full when I arrived.Isobel Armstrong introduced the collection of her sister's poems, which she has just edited and published, by talking about her sister Diana: her "intensely blue eyes," (which character have I just read with unexpected blue eyes?), "she was always very good at anger," aha! it was the Friends' School, and one reason Diana found it uncongenial was that she was torn between the desire to be part of a community and to be a rebel, to be an insider and to be an outsider (that says so much about her characters). I loved, also, her response to comments on Everard's Ride: "I'm glad Antonia [Byatt] felt cheated at the end. She was meant to." Discuss, with reference to the endings of any number of DWJ's books...
( Parallel Worlds / Sessions )
There were another three papers and a keynote speech, but they, like today's session, will wait. This post is long enough already, and it's bedtime...
