The end of the affair
Aug. 18th, 2019 01:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shewhomustOr, Diana Wynne Jones conference in Bristol last weekend, day 3: a short day, just Sunday morning.
For my first set of papers I opted for 'Built environments' on the entirely negative grounds that the alternative was two out of three papers on Hexwood, a book I consistently fail to love. This meant missing a promising paper on 'Time in Diana Wynne Jones', but that could be about anything - and I'll see the paper when the ebook is published, so that's all right. I knew Kathleen Jennings as the person who provides such entirely apt covers fornineweaving's books, and was curious what she would say about home invasion and benevolent colonisation in Howl's Moving Castle - but I will never know, as her paper had evolved into 'Contracts and Calcifer', a meditation on contract law and magic which is part of a larger project on jurisprudence in fantasy literature. Oddly, this throws up some illuminating parallels: I liked the idea that a recipe which instructs you to 'do x and accomplish y' is both a spell and a recipe. (I also wrote down "the magical equivalent of confidentiality clauses", though I didn't record what that refers to - but I can imagine possibilities!). Karina Coldrick was interesting on DWJ's multiple worlds and the multiple dimensions of quantum physics, but quantum physics is not something that my brain ever grasps. The session ended with a paper from Catherine Oliver about the use of sensory descriptions in the Dalemark books, a classic piece of close reading (which I regard as a good thing). I think she was arguing that each book was particularly associated with a different sense (The Spellcoats, prehistory and touch; Cart and Cwidder the Middle Ages and hearing): I'd need to reread both the books and the paper to know whether I agreed! The suggestion that Moril (in Cart and Cwidder) has a degree of autism spectrum disorder provoked some particularly interesting discussion. He is acutely sensitive to stimuli, and he is very quick and accurate at measuring the size of an audience (though this, someone suggested, is a trick that performers learn). The diagnosis is anachronistic, of course - it would not have been the author's intention in 1975; but is the modern reader justified in applying it retrospectively?
After coffee, three papers loosely grouped under the heading 'Wizarding Worlds', which I chose because one of the speakers was the wonderful Gilli Bar-Hillel. But her talk, with its focus on the figure of the wizard by other authors (Delia Sherman and Garth Nix) , was overshadowed by Aishwarya Subramanian's '"I belong to Chrestomanci Castle"', a great title entirely justified by the content of the paper. Chrestomanci Castle, she argued, is an English country house, and therefore sustained by the Empire (like the Professor's house in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Malplaquet in Mistress Masham's Repose and Green Knowe; I need to think about this); the magical supplies are brought in from other worlds, like goods imported from the colonies. Yet Chrestomanci is declared innocent of imperial ambition, because his opponents are so obviously in the wrong, power-hungry and unscrupulous. Another paper I look forward to revisiting. All I have written down from Erin Horàkovà's paper is "hortus conclusus" - I think by now I was beginning to suffer from overload.
I had not encountered keynote speaker and Guest of Honour Robin Stevens before this conference, but people spoke with such enthusiasm of her books - a series of period mysteries starring two schoolgirl detectives - that I was happy to sit back and listen as she spoke about her 'charmed life' (moved as a child from Santa Cruz to Pembroke College, Oxford, when her father became Master - yes, that sounds like a fair description) and her love for DWJ's books. Afterwards I bought Murder Most Unladylike, and read much of it on the train home. I enjoyed it, though nowhere near as much as some of those who recommended it: but since they had enthused about how funny it was, I was prepared for that.
So the conference ended on a low key for me, amid a torrential downpour; but it was nevr less than entertaining, stimulated the desire to write at length about some of the books (you have been warned) and I enjoyed it immensely.
Meanwhile, the rain was clearing, and I set out for a wander through Bristol...
For my first set of papers I opted for 'Built environments' on the entirely negative grounds that the alternative was two out of three papers on Hexwood, a book I consistently fail to love. This meant missing a promising paper on 'Time in Diana Wynne Jones', but that could be about anything - and I'll see the paper when the ebook is published, so that's all right. I knew Kathleen Jennings as the person who provides such entirely apt covers for
nineweaving's books, and was curious what she would say about home invasion and benevolent colonisation in Howl's Moving Castle - but I will never know, as her paper had evolved into 'Contracts and Calcifer', a meditation on contract law and magic which is part of a larger project on jurisprudence in fantasy literature. Oddly, this throws up some illuminating parallels: I liked the idea that a recipe which instructs you to 'do x and accomplish y' is both a spell and a recipe. (I also wrote down "the magical equivalent of confidentiality clauses", though I didn't record what that refers to - but I can imagine possibilities!). Karina Coldrick was interesting on DWJ's multiple worlds and the multiple dimensions of quantum physics, but quantum physics is not something that my brain ever grasps. The session ended with a paper from Catherine Oliver about the use of sensory descriptions in the Dalemark books, a classic piece of close reading (which I regard as a good thing). I think she was arguing that each book was particularly associated with a different sense (The Spellcoats, prehistory and touch; Cart and Cwidder the Middle Ages and hearing): I'd need to reread both the books and the paper to know whether I agreed! The suggestion that Moril (in Cart and Cwidder) has a degree of autism spectrum disorder provoked some particularly interesting discussion. He is acutely sensitive to stimuli, and he is very quick and accurate at measuring the size of an audience (though this, someone suggested, is a trick that performers learn). The diagnosis is anachronistic, of course - it would not have been the author's intention in 1975; but is the modern reader justified in applying it retrospectively?After coffee, three papers loosely grouped under the heading 'Wizarding Worlds', which I chose because one of the speakers was the wonderful Gilli Bar-Hillel. But her talk, with its focus on the figure of the wizard by other authors (Delia Sherman and Garth Nix) , was overshadowed by Aishwarya Subramanian's '"I belong to Chrestomanci Castle"', a great title entirely justified by the content of the paper. Chrestomanci Castle, she argued, is an English country house, and therefore sustained by the Empire (like the Professor's house in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Malplaquet in Mistress Masham's Repose and Green Knowe; I need to think about this); the magical supplies are brought in from other worlds, like goods imported from the colonies. Yet Chrestomanci is declared innocent of imperial ambition, because his opponents are so obviously in the wrong, power-hungry and unscrupulous. Another paper I look forward to revisiting. All I have written down from Erin Horàkovà's paper is "hortus conclusus" - I think by now I was beginning to suffer from overload.
I had not encountered keynote speaker and Guest of Honour Robin Stevens before this conference, but people spoke with such enthusiasm of her books - a series of period mysteries starring two schoolgirl detectives - that I was happy to sit back and listen as she spoke about her 'charmed life' (moved as a child from Santa Cruz to Pembroke College, Oxford, when her father became Master - yes, that sounds like a fair description) and her love for DWJ's books. Afterwards I bought Murder Most Unladylike, and read much of it on the train home. I enjoyed it, though nowhere near as much as some of those who recommended it: but since they had enthused about how funny it was, I was prepared for that.
So the conference ended on a low key for me, amid a torrential downpour; but it was nevr less than entertaining, stimulated the desire to write at length about some of the books (you have been warned) and I enjoyed it immensely.
Meanwhile, the rain was clearing, and I set out for a wander through Bristol...
