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shewhomustI 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.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...
After coffee, we divided for the first of several parallel sessions: I opted for the 'Nationality and Borders' theme, and this was where I began to be really glad that the conference papers are to be published as an e-book. So I shall have a record of the papers I was sorry to miss (specifically, in this session, Debbie Gascoye's What did they teach her in those schools? or "Damnit, I'm turning into C.S. Lewis!") as well as those where my scribbled notes could not have delivered a verbatim transcript of the paper, not to mention copies of the PowerPoint slides. I continued to scribble down random arguments and quotations, but I may have tended to cherry pick points which fed into ideas I have been considering about my reading, rather than any coherent summary of the speaker's argument (since I can look forward to having that anyway, hooray!). Is this why, paradoxically, one of the papers I found most interesting is one of those about which I have fewest notes? Leah Koch-Michael's proposed paper on 'Dalemark and Denmark' had broadened its scope to become Deconstructing Dalemark: an Alternate History of Northern Europe, and she spoke as a maritime archaeologist. She drew a persuasive parallel between the history of Dalemark (and its prehistory) and those of northern Europe, but what does this tell us? That DWJ knows enough history to fictionalise it convincingly, by all means. But the closer the real life examples to my conception of Dalemark (those figurines do look very much as I picture the household gods of The Spellcoats, for example) the more I want to know whether we are just playing the sort of game I was playing with Prague and Caprona, or whether these things were present in the author's conception as well. Not that it isn't a splendid and educational sort of game to play, anyway: I had not previously known about the Vedbaek swan's wing burial or Haervejen, the green track that runs the length of Denmark.
Amber Hancock works in Border Studies at Bangor, a field I had not previously heard of. I don't have anything coherent to say about her paper on 'Borders and National Identity' other than that I was delighted to see The Homeward Bounders getting so much love at this conference. She quoted Prometheus from that book, that what makes a place real is that you live there, you call it 'home' - or someone does: I've been thinking about Welshness, following a conversation about Miyazaki's Howl, and whether it matters that Howl's connection to our world is specifically to Wales. But Wales doesn't become unreal just because Howl doesn't live there, and nor did DWJ (well, very briefly). This may all come in useful when I complete my re-read of The Merlin Conspiracy.
Nat Case pointed out, in answer to a question, that he lives in Minnesota, in that large part of the US which was laid out on a chequerboard grid: I can't imagine a more extreme contrast with the cartography of Fantasyland. His In short, the map is useless was another terrific talk - with very few illustrations, he warned us, and some blank spaces (these are intentional). There is one truly magnificent illustration, though. The title comes from The Tough Guide to Fantasyland (had I previously heard that explained as a reaction to the reading involved in judging the World Fantasy Award?) but the attitude seems to predate it: fantasy readers want maps, but DWJ seems to have resisted their inclusion. "The geography of the books is bewildering, and I think Jones wanted it that way."
After lunch I chose a session entitled 'A Good Hiding' (in preference to one on families): so if I got more Hexwood than I really wanted, I have only myself to blame. This may be why my notes on Rebecca Vaccaro's paper don't seem to be about her paper at all. Something she said about the Reigners connected with what I have been thinking about the Magids (they say they don't want to run everything, but isn't that what they are quietly doing? Not to mention the Upper Room and its Intentions), the Empire, and indeed Chrestomanci. Our trains of thought seem to have converged again when she asked whether Ann can be the 'hero' (in the sense of central character) of a book which contains minor characters who are heroes (in the heroic sense) like Arthur and Merlin? This, she says, is what the book is asking. That isn't precisely my problem with the book, but it's adjacent.
With Veronica Wagner's paper on magic and the esoteric tradition, I thought we were back at the game of, here are two things, let's see if we can map them onto each other! And it is interesting to see the echoes, though I'm not sure how much they signify. There was an interesting point, though, about whether magic is esoteric in an etymological sense, being reserved for a closed group, which it will be interesting to set alongside this morning's paper by Aishwarya Subramanian about colonialism and The Pinhoe Egg.
Finally - not finally, but finally for now - Avi Naftali did something very clever called Buried Alive: The Arthur / Merlin motif.... He identifies a motif of the sleeping wizard or king: is this a recognised Arthurian trope? It seems to me to conflate Merlin trapped with Arthur sleeping but free to emerge. Add to this kings who are sleeping because they have forgotten, or because they are fragmented in some way, and Avi Naftali is able to identify the motif in almost half of DWJ's novels. He has a case, though he may be overstating it. Or maybe he's not going far enough, I don't think Dogsbody was mentioned... And, editing from the perspective of a day further through The Merlin Conspiracy, there is an actual sleeping dragon waiting to be woken in England's hour of need. Damnit.
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...
After coffee, we divided for the first of several parallel sessions: I opted for the 'Nationality and Borders' theme, and this was where I began to be really glad that the conference papers are to be published as an e-book. So I shall have a record of the papers I was sorry to miss (specifically, in this session, Debbie Gascoye's What did they teach her in those schools? or "Damnit, I'm turning into C.S. Lewis!") as well as those where my scribbled notes could not have delivered a verbatim transcript of the paper, not to mention copies of the PowerPoint slides. I continued to scribble down random arguments and quotations, but I may have tended to cherry pick points which fed into ideas I have been considering about my reading, rather than any coherent summary of the speaker's argument (since I can look forward to having that anyway, hooray!). Is this why, paradoxically, one of the papers I found most interesting is one of those about which I have fewest notes? Leah Koch-Michael's proposed paper on 'Dalemark and Denmark' had broadened its scope to become Deconstructing Dalemark: an Alternate History of Northern Europe, and she spoke as a maritime archaeologist. She drew a persuasive parallel between the history of Dalemark (and its prehistory) and those of northern Europe, but what does this tell us? That DWJ knows enough history to fictionalise it convincingly, by all means. But the closer the real life examples to my conception of Dalemark (those figurines do look very much as I picture the household gods of The Spellcoats, for example) the more I want to know whether we are just playing the sort of game I was playing with Prague and Caprona, or whether these things were present in the author's conception as well. Not that it isn't a splendid and educational sort of game to play, anyway: I had not previously known about the Vedbaek swan's wing burial or Haervejen, the green track that runs the length of Denmark.
Amber Hancock works in Border Studies at Bangor, a field I had not previously heard of. I don't have anything coherent to say about her paper on 'Borders and National Identity' other than that I was delighted to see The Homeward Bounders getting so much love at this conference. She quoted Prometheus from that book, that what makes a place real is that you live there, you call it 'home' - or someone does: I've been thinking about Welshness, following a conversation about Miyazaki's Howl, and whether it matters that Howl's connection to our world is specifically to Wales. But Wales doesn't become unreal just because Howl doesn't live there, and nor did DWJ (well, very briefly). This may all come in useful when I complete my re-read of The Merlin Conspiracy.
Nat Case pointed out, in answer to a question, that he lives in Minnesota, in that large part of the US which was laid out on a chequerboard grid: I can't imagine a more extreme contrast with the cartography of Fantasyland. His In short, the map is useless was another terrific talk - with very few illustrations, he warned us, and some blank spaces (these are intentional). There is one truly magnificent illustration, though. The title comes from The Tough Guide to Fantasyland (had I previously heard that explained as a reaction to the reading involved in judging the World Fantasy Award?) but the attitude seems to predate it: fantasy readers want maps, but DWJ seems to have resisted their inclusion. "The geography of the books is bewildering, and I think Jones wanted it that way."
After lunch I chose a session entitled 'A Good Hiding' (in preference to one on families): so if I got more Hexwood than I really wanted, I have only myself to blame. This may be why my notes on Rebecca Vaccaro's paper don't seem to be about her paper at all. Something she said about the Reigners connected with what I have been thinking about the Magids (they say they don't want to run everything, but isn't that what they are quietly doing? Not to mention the Upper Room and its Intentions), the Empire, and indeed Chrestomanci. Our trains of thought seem to have converged again when she asked whether Ann can be the 'hero' (in the sense of central character) of a book which contains minor characters who are heroes (in the heroic sense) like Arthur and Merlin? This, she says, is what the book is asking. That isn't precisely my problem with the book, but it's adjacent.
With Veronica Wagner's paper on magic and the esoteric tradition, I thought we were back at the game of, here are two things, let's see if we can map them onto each other! And it is interesting to see the echoes, though I'm not sure how much they signify. There was an interesting point, though, about whether magic is esoteric in an etymological sense, being reserved for a closed group, which it will be interesting to set alongside this morning's paper by Aishwarya Subramanian about colonialism and The Pinhoe Egg.
Finally - not finally, but finally for now - Avi Naftali did something very clever called Buried Alive: The Arthur / Merlin motif.... He identifies a motif of the sleeping wizard or king: is this a recognised Arthurian trope? It seems to me to conflate Merlin trapped with Arthur sleeping but free to emerge. Add to this kings who are sleeping because they have forgotten, or because they are fragmented in some way, and Avi Naftali is able to identify the motif in almost half of DWJ's novels. He has a case, though he may be overstating it. Or maybe he's not going far enough, I don't think Dogsbody was mentioned... And, editing from the perspective of a day further through The Merlin Conspiracy, there is an actual sleeping dragon waiting to be woken in England's hour of need. Damnit.
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...
