"And now [I'm] back ... from outer space ..."

[d_aulnoy]

Fantastic Genres was cool, cool, cool. The conference was in New Paltz (best description: west of Poughkeepsie and half as cool (which is glib, but maybe not true, 'cause New Paltz is cool enough to have two tattoo/piercing places, lots of little hippie incense stores, a used book store that netted me Tanith Lee's _The Gorgon and Other Stories, which I've been searching for for years, and the second-best sushi place I've ever been too - I just have this *thing* about small towns with many motels, they creep me out)). I ended up staying in the "mid-range" motel out of the three motels recommended by the conference organizers with V., who is deeply, deeply cool (as I was a pseudo-goth in my youth, she says that she was a pseudo-punk ... being that she still has pink-and-balck hair and I still have a big problem with eye-liner abuse, I think that we should use "recovering" as a prefix instead of "pseudo"), and studies fairy tales in Philly. We got there and thought ... "Well, we can hack it," as we looked at the shag carpeting and the peculiarly damply-textured duvet-covers and the cracked and browning tiles in the bathroom. And then we realized ... this place hadn't been recommended with an asterisk sayin "*Just for graduate students." This place had been recommended to everyone ... so we thought about how that meant that *real people,* people with agents and tenure and salaries and houses would be staying there, and we let out anguished howls of laughter, the adjective being unusually heartfelt - 'cause, they don't deserve it, but the mental image of someone who doesn't have an "I'm-a-graduate-student-and-I-live-in-penury-so-everything-always-sucks" mentality really is kind of funny.

The conference itself was lovely - again, I'll skip the name-dropping, 'cause it'll just annoy everyone else and make me feel more pretentious than I am, but many of the people whose work, and personalities, I love best were there, reading off-the-wall subversive stories, and positing really brilliant theories about genre and fairy tales and Dianna Wynne Jones, and generally having a good time. I was there for two purposes: to be on the latest IA panel, and to read a paper on Balzac, Barthes, and fairy tales.

The paper was ... interesting. I had half an hour all to myself, and a 13 page paper (already cut from 29). You do the math ... I had five minutes for questions, and that was if I hurried. So I hurried, and people laughed in all of the right places, but when the time came for questions, a deathly silence filled the room. I still can't figure out if that meant that I'm brilliant, and said it all, or that I was completely incomprehensible and no-one wanted to hurt my feelings (being that this was the conference where I literally saw presenters being handed their own derriers by audience members, I don't know if that was it). But two girls who are currently in theory-boot camp came up to me afterwards and said that they'd loved it, and that I was *so right,* and that *they* hated Barthes *too* ... maybe when I e-mail them the paper, I'll also e-mail them the "motherfucking Derrida" poem.

And the panel?

I'll post more about that later - right now, I have to go to my folks to pick up my cat, and talking about the panel might take a whiiiiiiiiiiiiile.

Comments

[omnia-mutantur.livejournal.com]

i swoon every time you post. or die a little inside because i'll never know exactly what was said about dianne wynne jones.

yesterday, for the first time ever, sitting on someone's couch, wearing a gigantic patchwork skirt and a little tanktop that said "i look cuter on my knees" and my sandals, i had someone say "you were a goth?" not in the "well, duh" tone, but in the incredulous tone. it was a very strange moment, because i couldn't quite figure out if the incredulity was a good or a bad thing.

[xbusterkeatonx.livejournal.com]

if you hate barthes, there's something magnificently wrong with you.

[d-aulnoy.livejournal.com]

Erm, well, yes, of course there is ... and I'm weighing both words equally.

My fundamental problem with Barthes (should you like a synopsis of the paper) stems from the fact that his positions on the objectivity of the critic and the idea that the author can be removed from the text are undermined by his misreading of the fantastic elements in Balzac's text.

Well, that and the fact that the whole cat thing was just ... odd.

[xbusterkeatonx.livejournal.com]

just out of curiosity-- how much of barthes have you read?

i'd actually like to read this paper.

[d-aulnoy.livejournal.com]

Not hie entire oevre, by any means ... the usual material of theory boots camp, largely, but this paper concerned itself with S/Z and Mythologies. Fundamentally, Balzac was heavily influenced by the contes de fees: he demonstrated some of the connections between femininity and fantasy, going further to prove that as femininity does not imply weakness, fantasy does not imply falsity. Because of his own ... biases, Barthes missed most of these points (well, actually, he marked them "feminine psychology" and moved onto the interesting bits about men's problems, like castration). And, when you read "Mothers and Children," you get the feeling that it's not an isolated area of misogyny ...