shewhomust | Entries tagged with bristol

Back on the train, northbound this time, and not as busy, thank goodness. Yesterday was full of many things, which I am still processing: what follows is ordered by chronology, not importance -

( Mercy cut )

And that was that. This morning we had time in hand - I had thought we might enjoy the opportunity to look around the area, but that didn't seem to apply. We vacated our room, booked a taxi, waited and read in the sitting area, lunched at the Upper Crust at Parkway (better than I had expected) and now we are on the train. Homeward bound, mission accomplished.

Crossposts: https://shewhomust.livejournal.com/772544.html

The long-awaited - by me, if by no-one else - post, covering that part of my weekend in Bristol spent wandering around looking at things (as opposed to sitting in a room talking about books). It strikes me as more than usually eccentric, in the mismatch between the things I most want to talk about and the pictures I most want to post: in an ideal world, pictures and text would illuminate each other, but there's nothing perfect about this world. A case in point: I want to start with a picture of my hotel, The Bristol, because it illustrates several things about it. It's just unfortunate that it's rather a dull picture. It does have the merit of being taken from the conference venue (the Watershed):

Hence the conversation (about other people's dinner plans):
E: "The Bristol? But there's a Hotel Bristol in every city in Europe!"
Me: "Yes, but only one of them is actually visible from here."

My room was on the first floor, overlooking the river - which means it was facing an area lively with night-time bars. It was heavily double-glazed, and it needed to be, but it was also screened by trees. I never closed my curtains, and I woke to dappled light, glinting off the water and patterned with leaves, which was a delight. Below the trees you can see the hotel restaurant, where I breakfasted and watched people walking along the harbourside under the trees.

( More under the cut. Also more, and with luck better, pictures... )

I could go on, but this is quite long enough. tl;dr version: I had a lovely time, and took lots of pictures.

Crossposts: https://shewhomust.livejournal.com/694730.html

It's a while since I posted, not because I don't know what to say: as ever, there are plenty of words in my head, it's getting them onto the keyboard that's a problem. Blame the heat, which makes my attic somewhere I don't want to be in the afternoons and evenings; blame computer problems (eventually solved, I hope, by a new power supply); blame Bank Holiday lassitude.

Meanwhile, I am still sorting through my photos of Bristol. They, too, may contribute to a longer post in due course. But for the time being, here's one to be going on with...

Every cathedral should have a garden.

Crossposts: https://shewhomust.livejournal.com/692854.html

Or, Diana Wynne Jones conference in Bristol last weekend, day 3: a short day, just Sunday morning.

( For my own benefit - not guaranteed to be interesting to anyone else! )

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...

Crossposts: https://shewhomust.livejournal.com/692283.html

Picking up from where I stopped yesterday, as my homeward train bounds through the southwest of England: please be forbearing about my even worse than usual typing.

The next three papers were grouped together under the heading 'Power and the Corporations'. I set out to describe this as 'a slightly naughty piece of wordplay', but of course it's entirely in Jones' style ("Power corrupts, but we need electricity.") so fair enough: two papers on power and power structures within the books, one on the treatment of one of the books at the hands of a - or rather, the (British Broadcasting) - corporation. Akiko Yamazaki presented evidence that the reason the Goon's head is disproportionately small is simply that he is not swollen-headed. Can it possibly be that simple? Well, compare this to the massive head created by Venturus as a temple to himself, and iyou end up agreeing that yes, perhaps it can. Aneesh Barai's presentation on money and the University in The Year of the Griffin argues that, give or take a griffin or two, it is all true, and ends with the rallying cry "Do we need to follow the neoliberal system?" Some of the discussion following this panel was fascinating, but I think I'm going to omit it here and put it towards that more general something I've been scribbling in the margins.

The final paper of this session was about the BBC television adaptation of Archer's Goon, an interesting choice as the only one of the books to receive this treatment, though The Ogre Downstairs and Charmed Life were used on Jackanory. It was also a tribute to Anna Home, champion of drama for children at the BBC. And it was illustrated with screengrabs of Archer's Goon from YouTube - very fuzzy screengrabs, but worth investigation.

The afternoon ended with a keynote speech from Gilli Bar-Hillel, whom I remembered vividly from Newcastle. She speaks well, vividly, and I enjoyed her memories of a peripatetic childhood, identifying each of DWJ's books with the American college town in which she first read it. But she has also translated DWJ into Hebrew (and published her, but that's another story): which you would surely assume was an impossible task. Hard enough to translate the huge vocabulary of English into the restricted vocabulary of Hebrew, whoever the author. But an author as playful with words, as profligate with allusions as Diana Wynne Jones? So The Homeward Bounders becomes in Hebrew 'Those Who Walk the Edge', abandoning the pun between bound as boundary/ leap/ tied, but playing up the edge / margin/ marginalised and throwing in for good measure that a walker is the name for a pawn in chess. Sometimes, she said, you pick up a reference, and all you can do is pat yourself on the back and move on, as she did when Howl calls Sophie a "Busy old fool" - but there was no way to escape the more prolonged reference in the same book to Donne's Song. So she translated it into Hebrew, and is justifiably proud of herself for it!

Am I, incidentally, the only person who first met that poem not through Howl's Moving Castle but on John Renbourn's first album? If I weren't restricted to CrossCountry wifi, I'd close this post with it, but things being as they are, it's on YouTube, if you don't know it go listen.

Crossposts: https://shewhomust.livejournal.com/691481.html

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.

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...

Current Location: magic and the esoteric tradition, I thought we were
Crossposts: https://shewhomust.livejournal.com/691260.html

Where did the DWJ Conference experience begin? With a plunge into re-reading the books? Or, as I suggested in my previous post, with getting lost first on the way to the hotel, then within the hotel? At breakfast, when I spotted a fellow guest carrying a copy of Charmed Life, and she joined me and explained that she had won it in a raffle at a convention (possibly London WorldCon), and showed me the tiny slip of paper inscribed: "I belong to Chrestomanci Castle"?

Technically, it didn't start until yesterday afternoon. I spent the morning ambling around a very small part of the city, but I'll save that for a picture-heavy post. Just one tourist view of the waterfront to be going on with:

( And now, the real point of my visit: )

I could, at this point, have found myself a group of dinner companions, but I was suffering from overload. I came back to the hotel, checked e-mail, fell asleep for a bit, went out in search of a quiet dinner, didn't actually get lost but did discover that the road I thought I was taking didn't go where I expected it to, ended up in the Shore Café Bar which may or may not be part of this hotel - it seems to have been disowned, and was very quiet, which is what I was looking for. So that was fine.

Crossposts: https://shewhomust.livejournal.com/691051.html

Almost five years ago, I went to a conference in Newcastle about the wonderful and much-missed Diana Wynne Jones. Now I have come to another, this time, appropriately, in Bristol. I tried to persuade

durham_rambler to accompany me - not to the conference, but to Bristol, to be a tourist and visit family. He wasn't tempted, so I am here alone. It's an unfamiliar experience. I tried to remember if I have ever stayed in a hotel on my own before, and it took me some time to decide that I had (in Versailles, as an undergraduate, at the beginning of my year abroad). Ridiculous, at my age, to see this as any sort of adventure, but...

Ahead of the conference, I have been reading Diana Wynne Jones, of course, enthusiastically rather than methodically. I'm currently in the middle of The Magicians of Caprona, and stumbled over something I hadn't noticed before, and which set me thinking about

steepholm's taxonomy of places, identifiable and other, in DWJ's novels. Caprona is a fictional Italian city - and since it is dominated by two rival families, both alike in dignity, it isn't too far from Verona. But the river that flows through Caprona is the Voltava - and since my first reading of The Magicians of Caprona, I have visited Prague, and learned that the river which flows through that city is the Vltava. This was disconcerting. There's a scene early in the book in which Tonino wanders despondently through the city and finds himself in the Piazza Nuova, the New Square, gazing across the bridge at the Ducal Palace; in Prague, it's the Old Town Square that leads to the Charles Bridge - and isn't there a castle on the other side? Was the author amusing herself by overlaying her Italian city onto the Czech capital?

Probably not. The internet supplies an interview in which Diana reveals all:

...it was my husband who acquired a new record, and it was one that I'd only heard a little of before and that was "Ma Vlast", was it Janaççk? It means "My Country", and he was Czech. Anyway, it’s a beautiful, beautiful suite, each movement is about certain aspects of his country, and one is about… this is why I called the river that, actually, in Caprona... is about the river Voltava. It’s a beautiful, beautiful piece of river music, and when the river swells and becomes itself a river, and therefore itself, it has this wonderful tune, and it's a tune, I thought, "My God, why has nobody put words to it?" This was the origin, the need for words. That's how the book came about.

Another good theory ruined! It is indeed the Vltava, but the connection is musical, not geographical. Which is interesting in itself: the book tries to pretend that magic can be performed by words, by writing spells on slips of paper. But at the same time, what it shows you is magic being worked through music, the power of the angel's song even when a trivial spell is put to the tune, the almost orchestral description of the street battle...

But enough of this. I was late getting to my hotel: since I've also been rereading Deep Secret, I wasn't entirely surprised that the Bristol of my map didn't exactly match the Bristolia all around me (or vice versa)), and that my room is round more corners from the lift than seems fair. But now I'm ready for bed.