London Film and Comic Con/Liz Sladen

Went to the lacklustre London Film and Comic Con Sunday avec Katy and her friends. I say lacklustre—I enjoyed it WAY better than I thought I would, as I generally hate cons?

1) I used to work at anime cons in uni (good money, but irregularly so—not worth the transportation hassle, and the company structures themselves are often infuriatingly poorly organized), and have holdover!eugh. At any moment on the crowded floor I expect to be handed an Obi of Office and forced to sell Deathnote to overweight old men in sailor fuku.

2) I hate meeting actors. They’re men and women wearing the bodies of characters I love, and yet thoroughly not them. I can admire them as people as well as for their characters in rare cases (oh Patrick Stewart, be still my heart), but generally I not only have no wish to meet them, I sneak through the Richmond Waitrose like ninja for paranoid terror that Richard E. Grant will be buying bread or something, and I’ll duck into frozen foods only to be confronted by old!Davison (how dare he no longer look like Five and Tristan, etc.). And then I’ll be startled into gibbering something about all the slash I’ve read/written about People Who Look A Lot Like Them and I’ll have to go home and delete the internet before committing sepukuu.

Am a lot more wary now that I know a friend of mine ran into Grant on a Richmond bus. What is he doing taking mass transit? But I don’t think said friend could have been deceived, as he is incredibly film-savvy. Worrisome!

But, even so, Elizabeth Sladen was there and gave a brief Q&A and I was very charmed.

Katy once commented that Q&A's always, always suck, and aren't as good as proper talks. I tried to defend the masses and their right to Ask Stuff, but in general I’ve come to agree with her.

No matter who's talking or about what, it's nearly always really poorly structured and bad questions. I want to say something better just to SAVE the poor woman from the bajillionth WHAT IS IT LIKE TO TOUCH DAVID TENNANT O_O, and yet do not want to make an ass of myself/do not necessarily have a better question.

Sladen was v. graceful and tried to sort of close off the DO YOU FEEL IN THE UNDISPUTABLE PRESENCE OF GOD WHEN ADRESSING TENNANT MORE OR LESS THAN WHEN CARESSING MATT SMITH?, but no one had better shit? Really people should THINK OF QUESTIONS THEY ARE DYING TO ASK HER beforehand, self included.

Liz Sladen is not the best Question Fielder in the world in terms of taking a dung heap and capitalizing on it. Some people with enough BOMBAST or tact make gold from straw, and that's better when the audience isn't giving you a lot—though it comes off as gittish if they are, I suppose? But she was v. sweet

She did, however, kind of fumble the day's best question—the girl came at it from a triffley awkward angle, but she had good thoughts re: Sladen's remark about being protective of Sarah Jane as a character, and wanting to know how that feminism translated to her work now as a strong OLDER female character/actress. Sladen sort of went 'well, I mean, I intended to do the work and play the character, not sepcifically TO PORTRAY WOMEN'S LIB!!' And I know it wasn't /what she meant/ (in other interviews she’s had more collected, thoughtful remarks on the subject than the Q&A format necessarily allows for), more that she wasn't necessarily playing an AGENDA initially, but she came off as a bit RAR I HATE FEMINISM. Also she side-stepped the opportunity to talk about the Older Actresses/Character thing, which could have been interesting.

Then backrow!girl gracefully moved onto a second question re: working with Billie Piper and complimented her on how hilarious that Doctor-mocking bit of School Reunion was. Interestingly in addition to being lovely and grateful for the compliment, Sladen talked about the director being VERY NERVOUS about it and whether it would play or read as super-catty. Which... sadly I could see?

So that girl could have asked more good questions (that were not the THIRD rendition of WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE MONSTER?! (though I LOVE that without thinking about it she just goes ‘Davros’)) if it hadn't seemed like Liz Sladen HATED HER AND HER FEMINISM OMG due to some awk phrasing.

I think seeing her worked for me because while I love Sarah Jane, she is not an ABSOLUTE FAVORITE of mine, capable of reducing me to a goopuddle. Also I haven’t ever written her—I don’t know, actually, whether it’d be difficult to now, having confronted the unhappy truth that she is a Person.

Though my GOD she has aged well and has great hair, make-up and airbrushing be damned!

London Film and Comic Con/Liz Sladen

Went to the lacklustre London Film and Comic Con Sunday avec Katy and her friends. I say lacklustre—I enjoyed it WAY better than I thought I would, as I generally hate cons?

1) I used to work at anime cons in uni (good money, but irregularly so—not worth the transportation hassle, and the company structures themselves are often infuriatingly poorly organized), and have holdover!eugh. At any moment on the crowded floor I expect to be handed an Obi of Office and forced to sell Deathnote to overweight old men in sailor fuku.

2) I hate meeting actors. They’re men and women wearing the bodies of characters I love, and yet thoroughly not them. I can admire them as people as well as for their characters in rare cases (oh Patrick Stewart, be still my heart), but generally I not only have no wish to meet them, I sneak through the Richmond Waitrose like ninja for paranoid terror that Richard E. Grant will be buying bread or something, and I’ll duck into frozen foods only to be confronted by old!Davison (how dare he no longer look like Five and Tristan, etc.). And then I’ll be startled into gibbering something about all the slash I’ve read/written about People Who Look A Lot Like Them and I’ll have to go home and delete the internet before committing sepukuu.

Am a lot more wary now that I know a friend of mine ran into Grant on a Richmond bus. What is he doing taking mass transit? But I don’t think said friend could have been deceived, as he is incredibly film-savvy. Worrisome!

But, even so, Elizabeth Sladen was there and gave a brief Q&A and I was very charmed.

Katy once commented that Q&A's always, always suck, and aren't as good as proper talks. I tried to defend the masses and their right to Ask Stuff, but in general I’ve come to agree with her.

No matter who's talking or about what, it's nearly always really poorly structured and bad questions. I want to say something better just to SAVE the poor woman from the bajillionth WHAT IS IT LIKE TO TOUCH DAVID TENNANT O_O, and yet do not want to make an ass of myself/do not necessarily have a better question.

Sladen was v. graceful and tried to sort of close off the DO YOU FEEL IN THE UNDISPUTABLE PRESENCE OF GOD WHEN ADRESSING TENNANT MORE OR LESS THAN WHEN CARESSING MATT SMITH?, but no one had better shit? Really people should THINK OF QUESTIONS THEY ARE DYING TO ASK HER beforehand, self included.

Liz Sladen is not the best Question Fielder in the world in terms of taking a dung heap and capitalizing on it. Some people with enough BOMBAST or tact make gold from straw, and that's better when the audience isn't giving you a lot—though it comes off as gittish if they are, I suppose? But she was v. sweet

She did, however, kind of fumble the day's best question—the girl came at it from a triffley awkward angle, but she had good thoughts re: Sladen's remark about being protective of Sarah Jane as a character, and wanting to know how that feminism translated to her work now as a strong OLDER female character/actress. Sladen sort of went 'well, I mean, I intended to do the work and play the character, not sepcifically TO PORTRAY WOMEN'S LIB!!' And I know it wasn't /what she meant/ (in other interviews she’s had more collected, thoughtful remarks on the subject than the Q&A format necessarily allows for), more that she wasn't necessarily playing an AGENDA initially, but she came off as a bit RAR I HATE FEMINISM. Also she side-stepped the opportunity to talk about the Older Actresses/Character thing, which could have been interesting.

Then backrow!girl gracefully moved onto a second question re: working with Billie Piper and complimented her on how hilarious that Doctor-mocking bit of School Reunion was. Interestingly in addition to being lovely and grateful for the compliment, Sladen talked about the director being VERY NERVOUS about it and whether it would play or read as super-catty. Which... sadly I could see?

So that girl could have asked more good questions (that were not the THIRD rendition of WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE MONSTER?! (though I LOVE that without thinking about it she just goes ‘Davros’)) if it hadn't seemed like Liz Sladen HATED HER AND HER FEMINISM OMG due to some awk phrasing.

I think seeing her worked for me because while I love Sarah Jane, she is not an ABSOLUTE FAVORITE of mine, capable of reducing me to a goopuddle. Also I haven’t ever written her—I don’t know, actually, whether it’d be difficult to now, having confronted the unhappy truth that she is a Person.

Though my GOD she has aged well and has great hair, make-up and airbrushing be damned!

Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle

We Have Always Lived In The Castle



Shirely Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House is a really amazing book (don’t be put off by the uninspiring film, "The Haunting"). I read it on my own in high school, and again for Latham’s awesome ‘the Gothic Novel and its Adaptations’ course. I hadn’t read much else of hers, however, because I thought of her as largely a short story writer. Though I objectively recognize the form can do great things, I agree with Cynthia Ozzick’s introduction to her collection Bloodshed’s breakdown of short-stories as either

1) complete, closed circuits, or
2) fragments which comprise a successful narrative, but which are drawn from a larger universe (i.e. the characters have obvious full lives and existences outside of these events—the story exists in a world larger than the story itself),

and I tend to appreciate the latter more than the former. And really that’s a mark of my novelistic drive as a reader and writer—I generally prefer a novel’s prolonged exploration of characters and plots, and tend to avoid short stories because they so often seem competent, but not engaging or endearing.

I saw We Have Always Lived in the Castle as a coffee table book in Richmond’s Tea Box and was startled to realize she had other novels—I’d never seen any, browsing in Iowa City and Columbia’s used bookstores.

Like Hardy, Jackson is big on evocative environmental description. The Blackwood ‘Castle,’ its surrounding forest and the village beyond are, like her Hill House, fully realized, dense, smotheringly sensual. You cannot escape forming not only pictures, but whole floor plans, even if, like me, you are not naturally a terribly visually-minded reader.

The rhythm of the prose is off-putting in its strangeness, but catching—very quickly you’re swept into it, like a strong current, and you begin to think in the books’ patterns.

It is perhaps the most intriguing portrait of agoraphobia I’ve ever encountered. The language of food and home (despite and because of its disruption in the huge multiple murder) and the domestic witchcraft describe and encapsulate the world that will come to embody Merricat’s dream of ‘living on the moon.’ In almost engagement with the idea of hysteria, or of young men as the actors in the outer, rational world, super-governed by social notions of sanity, there’s a continuum between madness and femininity here—and between the strength conferred by both. Uncle Julian, Constance and Merricat are removed from the exterior world—exiles, outcasts and fugitives.

Merricat’s system of magical thinking is at once primitive and canny. Her alien, bewildering intelligence forces an unsentimental empathy. And it’s not ineffective—Cousin Charles is banished by her rites, even if he cannot be kept away with them. By the end of the book, she is the witch who captures Rapunzel and keeps her from all mens’ eyes. She is the witch with the gingerbread house children are warned not to touch. They are goddesses, brought offerings of food, and her cat is a part of her name. Jonas is her familiar and her totem, putting Marricat (and Constance, the Vesta of the piece, ever tending the fire, ever loyal and homey*) in a context with Bastet or Freyja or their earthy witch descendents. Constance and Merricat are Weird Sisters, too intimate a duo to admit a third and comprise the traditional trio. It is haunting and otherworldly, frightening, transcendent, common-place and glorious as a fairy tale should be.

I find the Joyce Carol Oates essay afterwards really unsatisfying. It's at once prosaic and kind of ham-fisted. I thought it would help me think about this kind of complex, delicate book-experience, but it's sort of like a big heavy guy tramping through your garden and smooshing shit. I don't like it, for the book's sake, and it makes me wonder if I'm wrong in my reading—but I don't think I am? I think my reading is fine, and hers too... dogmatic? Too prone to over-simplification, too political. It sort of Mentions interesting things without probing the Whys at all. This is not a novel ABOUT lesbianism in ANY sense, but if Oates caught at the paranoid anti-male elements, then she should have teased those out and explored them, rather than essentially said THIS IS A LESBIAN NOVEL, LIKE JACKSON’S OTHER LESBIAN NOVELS, AND SOME OTHER PEOPLE’S LESBIAN NOVELS. AND THERE'S SOME INCEST.

It's not the Graveyard Book. There's /not/ 'some incest.' The relationship is complex and contradictory, creepy and interesting. I wanted an essay that helped me think about it, not an essay that didn't get it.

At this point J-Co (as the rappers call her) is just the Girl Who Cried Lesbiansex.

* Also it's interesting to note that Merricat refers to an unbreakable continuity of Blackwood Women ('the Blackwood Women have always'), and of Constance as the inheritor of these traditions, while she herself--never womanly in any sexual sense--is always divorced from them. 


Jackson’s novels are below: I’d love to read the ones I haven’t/hear opinions on them!

The Road Through the Wall (1948)
Hangsaman (1951)
The Bird's Nest (1954)
The Sundial (1958)
The Haunting of Hill House (1959)
We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962)

Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle

We Have Always Lived In The Castle



Shirely Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House is a really amazing book (don’t be put off by the uninspiring film, "The Haunting"). I read it on my own in high school, and again for Latham’s awesome ‘the Gothic Novel and its Adaptations’ course. I hadn’t read much else of hers, however, because I thought of her as largely a short story writer. Though I objectively recognize the form can do great things, I agree with Cynthia Ozzick’s introduction to her collection Bloodshed’s breakdown of short-stories as either

1) complete, closed circuits, or
2) fragments which comprise a successful narrative, but which are drawn from a larger universe (i.e. the characters have obvious full lives and existences outside of these events—the story exists in a world larger than the story itself),

and I tend to appreciate the latter more than the former. And really that’s a mark of my novelistic drive as a reader and writer—I generally prefer a novel’s prolonged exploration of characters and plots, and tend to avoid short stories because they so often seem competent, but not engaging or endearing.

I saw We Have Always Lived in the Castle as a coffee table book in Richmond’s Tea Box and was startled to realize she had other novels—I’d never seen any, browsing in Iowa City and Columbia’s used bookstores.

Like Hardy, Jackson is big on evocative environmental description. The Blackwood ‘Castle,’ its surrounding forest and the village beyond are, like her Hill House, fully realized, dense, smotheringly sensual. You cannot escape forming not only pictures, but whole floor plans, even if, like me, you are not naturally a terribly visually-minded reader.

The rhythm of the prose is off-putting in its strangeness, but catching—very quickly you’re swept into it, like a strong current, and you begin to think in the books’ patterns.

It is perhaps the most intriguing portrait of agoraphobia I’ve ever encountered. The language of food and home (despite and because of its disruption in the huge multiple murder) and the domestic witchcraft describe and encapsulate the world that will come to embody Merricat’s dream of ‘living on the moon.’ In almost engagement with the idea of hysteria, or of young men as the actors in the outer, rational world, super-governed by social notions of sanity, there’s a continuum between madness and femininity here—and between the strength conferred by both. Uncle Julian, Constance and Merricat are removed from the exterior world—exiles, outcasts and fugitives.

Merricat’s system of magical thinking is at once primitive and canny. Her alien, bewildering intelligence forces an unsentimental empathy. And it’s not ineffective—Cousin Charles is banished by her rites, even if he cannot be kept away with them. By the end of the book, she is the witch who captures Rapunzel and keeps her from all mens’ eyes. She is the witch with the gingerbread house children are warned not to touch. They are goddesses, brought offerings of food, and her cat is a part of her name. Jonas is her familiar and her totem, putting Marricat (and Constance, the Vesta of the piece, ever tending the fire, ever loyal and homey*) in a context with Bastet or Freyja or their earthy witch descendents. Constance and Merricat are Weird Sisters, too intimate a duo to admit a third and comprise the traditional trio. It is haunting and otherworldly, frightening, transcendent, common-place and glorious as a fairy tale should be.

I find the Joyce Carol Oates essay afterwards really unsatisfying. It's at once prosaic and kind of ham-fisted. I thought it would help me think about this kind of complex, delicate book-experience, but it's sort of like a big heavy guy tramping through your garden and smooshing shit. I don't like it, for the book's sake, and it makes me wonder if I'm wrong in my reading—but I don't think I am? I think my reading is fine, and hers too... dogmatic? Too prone to over-simplification, too political. It sort of Mentions interesting things without probing the Whys at all. This is not a novel ABOUT lesbianism in ANY sense, but if Oates caught at the paranoid anti-male elements, then she should have teased those out and explored them, rather than essentially said THIS IS A LESBIAN NOVEL, LIKE JACKSON’S OTHER LESBIAN NOVELS, AND SOME OTHER PEOPLE’S LESBIAN NOVELS. AND THERE'S SOME INCEST.

It's not the Graveyard Book. There's /not/ 'some incest.' The relationship is complex and contradictory, creepy and interesting. I wanted an essay that helped me think about it, not an essay that didn't get it.

At this point J-Co (as the rappers call her) is just the Girl Who Cried Lesbiansex.

* Also it's interesting to note that Merricat refers to an unbreakable continuity of Blackwood Women ('the Blackwood Women have always'), and of Constance as the inheritor of these traditions, while she herself--never womanly in any sexual sense--is always divorced from them. 


Jackson’s novels are below: I’d love to read the ones I haven’t/hear opinions on them!

The Road Through the Wall (1948)
Hangsaman (1951)
The Bird's Nest (1954)
The Sundial (1958)
The Haunting of Hill House (1959)
We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962)