Scattered Musings, post-conference edition
- There was radio silence this week because of the Midwest Victorian Studies Association conference, from which I have just returned. It's one of those lovely small conferences where people are friendly and you can rely on having an audience for your talk (as opposed to three people and/or the rest of the panel). There were a number of stimulating papers; I particularly appreciated some new ideas for teaching from the digital humanities panel. My own contribution developed from my own baby white whale, Robert Elsmere, and its habit of doing strange things with quotations (Biblical prooftexting, in particular). As is so often the case, I wound up becoming more sympathetic to Mrs. Ward's habit of mangling quotations every which way once I started writing about the practice, in part because the deliberate misquotations (e.g., the "quotation" from Obermann that is actually from two paragraphs fifty pages apart...) look, on closer examination, like they're making a statement about the rightful liberties an author can take with a text. That being said, with my editor's hat on, the misquotations still make me want to go all Captain Ahab.
- Strictly speaking, I was lucky to get to the conference, as many other attendees had positively Gothic accounts of being trapped for hours (or days) in gloomy airports. Ah, midwestern weather, how we all love you. (Er, no.) I was less impressed by winding up with a cab back to the airport that smelled like it had been drenched in urine; I tried to distract myself from the olfactory situation by imagining all the ways that the car could have acquired that aroma without, well, having been literally drenched in the substance in question.
- Speaking of Gothic, I used my travel time to catch up on some horror anthologies. I don't know if it's age, temperament, taste, or a combination of the two, but even though the stories I was reading were all technically quite fine, I didn't find any of them...horrific. Not a chill was to be had. And yet, there are a number of Victorian/Edwardian tales that still spook me: The Turn of the Screw, for example, or "The Room in the Tower." Perhaps because these stories focus on the tension, the waiting, more than explicit gore?
- I also finally (finally!) managed to finish Anthony Burgess' Earthly Powers. I'm not sure of the novel's place in the historical subgenre of "fictional biographies/autobiographies of mediocrities whose lives embody the era's major cultural and political transformations" (that's a rather clunky name for the subgenre, I must say)--think Any Human Heart, or Liza's Century, or The Stone Diaries, or My Heart Laid Bare. At the end of the novel, the sentimental novelist's sister, Hortense, a nearly-forgotten sculptor, contemplates her work and that of her siblings (a third, long dead, was a successful comic), and concludes, "'I don't suppose any of us was really bad. We meant well, anyway'" (653). Meant as self-exculpation, this assessment also damns what the family represents for the twentieth century--one long aesthetic lapse, momentarily celebrated but then thrown aside as rubbish. Their success was the temporary triumph of the disposable, of the world as celebrated by Hollywood (for which Hortense's ex-husband wrote musical scores). They're popular. There's not much left in the way of transcendence in this novel, as the parallel rise to success of the also popular Carlo Campanati, eventually Pope Gregory, implies: his rise to ecclesiastical power is one long theological error, the "miraculous cure" that promises his sainthood in fact enabling a much greater horror.
- The new iPad keyboard held up for note-taking. Besides needing to use the function key to enable punctuation marks like the colon and semi-colon, I'm also still irritated by the ease with which one is likely to hit "enter" instead of the apostrophe. Overall, though, the keyboard works well enough that I'd be happy to tote the iPad around for conferences or for light note-taking in libraries; I don't think I'd enjoy using it to do lengthy transcriptions.