strange_complex: (Clone Army)
Last time I travelled abroad: mid-January, to Denmark to speak at a conference on public space in Roman Britain (LJ / DW).

Last time I slept in a hotel: on the same trip to Denmark. It was the Scandic Aarhus City and it was very nice.

Last time I flew in a plane: same trip again! I flew with Scandinavian Airlines (SAS) from Manchester to Aarhus, via Copenhagen on the way there and direct on the way back. They seemed very good and had nice onboard food.

Last time I took a train: would you believe, to and from Manchester airport for the same trip.

Last time I took public transport: Wednesday 11 March. I walked to work that day, precisely to avoid it for coronavirus-related reasons, but caught the bus home as a) it was at a quieter time of day and b) I wanted to go to the supermarket on the way home, and the bus stops right outside it but my walking route takes me a different way.

Last time I had a house guest: New Year's Eve / Day. My friend [personal profile] kantti and her husband stayed over for dinner, silly games and champagne.

Last time I got my hair cut: er, when I was about 15? Unless you count the occasional very minor trims which I get either my sister or [personal profile] lady_lugosi1313 to do for me.

Last time I went to the movies: mid-November, to see the premiere screening of a film-of-an-opera which my colleague had acted as research consultant for (LJ / DW).

Last time I went to the theatre: 8 March, to see Robert Lloyd Parry doing Lost Hearts and A Warning to the Curious. It was the last weekend when doing that sort of thing seemed OK. He had a full house, actually. I have seen him do A Warning to the Curious before, but not Lost Hearts. It's one of my favourite M.R. James stories, and it was so good!

Last time I went to a concert: hmmm... There may be something I've forgotten, but judging from what I've recorded here there are two potential answers, depending on what you count: 1) live music from an Icelandic band called amiina accompanying a screening of Fantômas in April 2019 (LJ / DW) or 2) a performance of Donizetti's L'Elisir d'Amore when I was in Vienna at a conference with a colleague in September 2014 (LJ / DW).

Last time I went to an art museum: May 2019 during our DracSoc holiday to Germany, when I spent a whole day on the Museum Island in Berlin, split between the Altes Museum, Neues Museum and the Pergamon Museum. Since I never posted any pictures of their holdings here at the time, I will put one up now, though it's hard to choose what since the Altes Museum in particular was so full of amazing stuff. Probably the most exciting, though, was this famous tondo of the emperor Septimius Severus and his family, which is the only such painted ancient imperial portrait to survive:

2019-05-31 16.55.19.jpg

Last time I sat down in a restaurant: 8 March, before the M.R. James performance the same evening, when I met up with [personal profile] cosmolinguist and [twitter.com profile] HickeyWriter at Mod Pizza in Leeds city centre beforehand.

Last time I went to a party: 20 July 2019, when I went to my friend [twitter.com profile] Bavage's Moon Party to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the moon landing.

Last time I played a board game: arguably today, when I played Story Cubes over Skype with Eloise and Christophe. This is a game consisting of nine dice with pictures on each side, which you have to roll and then tell a story based on the nine pictures which come up, and I realised that we could play it remotely if Eloise rolled the dice and I wrote down what she said they showed. It was kind of chaotic, especially when Christophe joined in, but fun and a nice way to get some contact with them. If that game doesn't count because it doesn't strictly have a board, then New Year's Eve when I played Augustus with [personal profile] kantti and her husband.

I thought filling all that in might make me a bit sad, but actually no - it was a nice way of reliving good memories. Here's to the days when we can do all this stuff without a care once again.
strange_complex: (Vampira)
Two weeks ago, I attended IVFAF, a vampire festival combining an academic conference, a creative congress (i.e. authors talking about their work), a film festival, a number of theatrical performances, a Bram Stoker walk, a cabaret and a ball all into one glorious five-day event. I've been following their activities on Twitter / FB for a while, but their last three events had been in Romania and at times of year when I already had a lot on. This one, though, came to the Highgate area of London, and I decided it was worth devoting a week of summer holiday time to going along.

Back in April, I went to a different two-day conference marking the bicentenary of John Polidori's 'The Vampyre', which also took place in Highgate (though at a different main venue). I never wrote it up here, though I did upload an album of pictures intending to use them as the basis for a never-written entry, mainly of our visit to Highgate cemetery complete with a few screencaps from Taste the Blood of Dracula, which used it as a location. I went along to that conference purely out of interest as a listener, but by the end of it I'd realised that specialists in Gothic literature aren't always in the best position to unpick 'The Vampyre's engagement with Classical antiquity, and indeed that that engagement was considerably deeper and richer than I'd previously realised.

IVFAF 2019 also took the bicentenary of 'The Vampyre' as one of its themes (along with the Highgate Vampire craze and Hammer's vampire films), and I registered for it from my academic email address, which prompted the organiser to ask whether I was planning to offer a paper. Fresh from the recent Polidori conference, I said yes, I probably would, and indeed re-read both Polidori's story and Byron's related Fragment and made some notes on them. But then as the abstract deadline drew closer I looked more soberly at the other tasks I had to do during the same period, and realised that it probably wouldn't actually be a very good idea, so I didn't submit one. I decided I would just go along in the same spirit as I had to the Polidori conference, to enjoy other people's papers and the films, shows, walks and partying around them. Except that then, about three weeks before the conference, I got another slightly plaintive note from the organiser saying that he was holding a slot for me on the programme, and could I send in my abstract? And it turned out I couldn't resist this, so I had yet another look at my calendar, identified three days I could claw out to write the paper after all, and knocked an abstract together. So that is how I turned what was supposed to be a week's holiday into three days of intensive paper preparation followed by travelling down to London and delivering it.

It was fine, though. I had been right in the first place that there was a good paper's worth of things to say about how both Byron and Polidori's stories engaged with Classical antiquity, was able to compile it into a perfectly respectable paper in three days, and indeed managed to identify some quite specific source material for each of them which I don't think has been fully explored before. So it was all in the bag by the end of the Monday, leaving plenty of time for me to relax, travel down to London and settle into my aparthotel on the Tuesday. I even found time that evening (equipped with advice from a few FB friends) to get my nails done in suitably vampiric style in a local nail bar, ready for the week ahead.

2019-07-09 19.41.50.jpg

My paper was scheduled for the first day, which was nice as it meant I could get the worky bit over and done with and then enjoy the rest of the festival. I made sure to attire myself appropriately, and did my thing )

The other papers were good to listen to too )

I didn't spend so much time in the creative congress, which was largely scheduled in parallel with the academic conference, but I mean you might as well sit and listen to Kim Newman being interview by Stephen Jones (editor of The Mammoth Book of Vampire Stories in which Kim's first Anno Dracula story appeared) if you've got no other pressing commitments.

2019-07-11 16.09.08.jpg

The Bram Stoker walk was another highlight )

DracSoc chair Julia also attended the academic conference, while additional members Adrian and Pat joined us at various points in the evenings for dinners, shows and films. We saw two productions by the Don't Go In The Cellar theatre company: 'Sherlock Holmes versus The Sussex Vampire' (which also included versions of The Creeping Man and The Devil's Foot) and 'Dracula's Ghost', in which a very pale-faced lawyer named Mr Leech (whose true identity I'm sure you can guess) periodically visits the widowed Mrs Bram Stoker, interspersed with relating the story of his life. The first was done as a one-man show (as are most DGITC productions), with the audience cast as criminals in Sherlock's memory palace, and worked pretty well, but we felt that Sherlock as a character did struggle a bit without other characters to be clever at. The second was an absolute cracker, though. The inclusion of a second actor on stage playing Mrs Stoker probably helped, but it was basically a whirlwind tour through more or less every possible vampire and Dracula-related story you can think of, all incorporated into and referenced within Mr Leech's life story. My favourite moments were a mention of D.D. Denham (Dracula's alias in The Satanic Rites of Dracula) and a scene in which he meets and speaks with Kali - partly because this references one of the very unmade Hammer Dracula films we'd heard Kieran talking about the previous day, but also because it was just done so effectively, by the actor who'd also been playing Mrs Stoker putting masks on both her face and the back of her head, and undulating her arms in a very divine and otherworldly manner.

I didn't make it to any of the new shorts and feature films which were screened during the days, again because of clashes with the academic conference and Stoker walk, but I did get to three evening showings of vampire classics )

Finally (though not chronologically as it took place on the Friday - but the grand climax of the festival anyway), there was the combined cabaret night and ball at the Birdcage in Camden, some of which was NSFW )

Plans are afoot already for next year's IVFAF, quite possibly to be in Santa Cruz with a Lost Boys theme. I'm not sure I'll make that, but having the chance to go this year was definitely a good thing, and now I even have another Classical vampires paper to maybe think about writing up properly some time soon. Dracula first, though...
strange_complex: (Dracula 1958 cloak)
It's almost a month now since I went to Brașov for the Children of the Night International Dracula Congress, but as I have also been away to Whitby and Warwick for the weekends since I got back, this is the first time I've had a quiet Sunday available for writing about it. This event was the successor to the World Dracula Congress which I attended in Dublin in 2016, and another is already planned back in Brașov again for 2020. It was smaller in scale than the Dublin Congress, with a core of about twenty of us giving papers, but also a pretty large additional audience of local students working on tourism degrees. The link here, fairly obviously, is that Dracula is such a huge tourist draw for Romania (whether they like it or not), with the conference timed to coincide with a local Dracula Film Festival, and those in the tourism industry in both Brașov and beyond are busy thinking hard about how best to present and capitalise on it. So the students came along to learn more about an unavoidably central figure for Romanian tourism, and I guess to experience the conventions of an academic conference.

Meanwhile, I found being part of a smallish core of academic presenters actually really enjoyable. After all, we all had a shared passion and a great excuse to talk about it almost non-stop for the whole conference, so we had all become very much firm friends by the end of the experience. Here we are in front of the conference venue:

SAM_6009.JPG

We were a very international bunch, with a full ten nationalities represented across that line-up: Romanian, Russian, Polish, German, Dutch, Portuguese, British, American, Brazilian and Japanese. Classics conferences are of course generally international too, but with Classics conferences there is usually an clear majority of delegates from the country where the conference is taking place - so e.g. I went to a conference in Vienna a few years ago where the majority language was very definitely German. With this conference, no one language really had a distinct plurality amongst the core delegates, let alone a majority, and that meant that for the first time I really saw how English operates as an international language in these contexts. When a Polish-speaking delegate wanted to chat to Japanese-speaking delegate over coffee, they used English because that was their strongest shared channel of communication. Standing there with my Duolingo-level elementary grasp of Romanian and an awareness that I could have functioned perfectly well for the whole week without even that, it was eye-opening and humbling to see.

My own paper )

Other people's papers )

Bonus fun )

Tours of Brașov, Bran and Târgoviște )
strange_complex: (Dracula Risen hearse smile)
I have been doing lots of cool Dracula-related things lately, but until now haven't had the chance to write them up. They really need it though, as I will definitely want to remember them. So for today this is what I did two weeks ago at the Fourth World Dracula Congress - the latest in a series of ad hoc academic conferences on Dracula which began in Bucharest in 1995.

I wasn't actually sure I would be able to go to this until quite late in the day, as it was scheduled for a Thursday and Friday during term-time, but Friday is our regular research day anyway, and as luck would have it a lecture which I deliver fortnightly on Thursdays did not fall in that week. So off I went! Obviously the choice of Dublin for the venue reflected its status as Bram Stoker's birthplace, and indeed I had already made sure to visit his houses on my previous visits to the city: one of which in 2014 I managed to write up on LJ, and the other of which in 2015 I don't seem to have done, but involved visiting his childhood house on the edge of the city. Indeed, the whole conference actually took place in the same venue as the Augustan poetry conference which was the reason for me going over in 2014: the Long Room Hub on Trinity College campus. It was quite strange operating in the same venue but in a rather different capacity: last time academic, this time fannish. But that distinction only held true for me personally. The conference as a whole was very much an academic event, and indeed more so than I'd expected really. Every paper I heard was strong, and some represented really significant steps forward in our knowledge of Dracula: the novel, its author and the rich mythos behind it all. I'll highlight the two which that most held true for first, and then sketch out the others a little more briefly and by theme.

The first highlight paper was by Hans de Roos on Makt Myrkranna, the Icelandic 'translation' of Dracula )

My second highlight paper was by Paul Murray, author of 'From the Shadow of Dracula: A Life of Bram Stoker', which was initially published in 2004 but released in an updated edition in 2016 )

So those two papers between them were worth the price of admission alone. But then there were lots of other awesome papers! I have grouped them into themes, which in some cases reflect the way they were grouped for the conference, but in others do not. This is just how they come together for me.

Biographical papers )

Literary papers )

Papers on place )

Papers on Dracula from a Romanian perspective )

Papers on historically-attested 'vampire epidemics' in eastern Europe )

And then of course as if the conference were not enough, I also thoroughly enjoyed my third visit to Dublin in as many years. My main companion was Julia, chair of the London-based Dracula Society (i.e. the people I went to Romania and Geneva with), with whom I shared a room at Stauntons on the Green, a pleasant autumnal walk across a park from the city centre. We enjoyed several nice meals together, tried various Irish whiskies, met up with Julia's friend Brian Showers of the Swan River Press who organised a Ghost Story Festival in Dublin earlier this year, took a tour of Trinity campus including its splendid Long Room, and popped into Sweny's chemist, a historical pharmacy which features in James Joyce's Ulysses and is now run by volunteers as a literary centre and site of historical interest. Plus, after Julia had departed for her earlier flight, I mooched around Dublin a little more on my own, tracking down Sheridan le Fanu's house and buying a jolly nice new pair of flares. I close with a few photos of the sights of Dublin )

Click here if you would like view this entry in light text on a dark background.

strange_complex: (Augustus)
Above all, that at least one of the funding applications which I have currently in the pipeline or in the process of being written comes off, so that I can relax about my prospects of carrying out my Augustus project successfully. Ideally, I need funding for both a) the bimillennium conference and b) further sabbatical time, so my big Christmas wish is for any combination of research grants which achieves that. But if I must choose, I would prioritise the conference funding, because I already have some sabbatical time - but I have nothing for the conference yet (eek!).

Click here if you would like view this entry in light text on a dark background.

strange_complex: (Corpus Agrimensorum colonia)
I bought myself a copy of CivCity: Rome in mid-April, but hadn't dared play it until I knew I had some proper free time to devote to it. This weekend, I've been finding out how wise that policy was!

Late-night gaming )

What I thought of it )

On dialogue between gamers and academics - or the lack of it )

So the right sort of noises are beginning to be made on the academic side, and the interest is clearly flourishing on the gaming side. We just need to stretch our hands out - that - little - bit - further...

strange_complex: (Snape writing)
1. Last Wednesday - went off for the day with Mum on the Severn Valley Railway. We saw partridges, pheasants, rabbits, butterflies, great crested grebe, elephants, bison and gazelle. Although I suppose it's only fair to explain that the last three were in a safari park visible from the railway. Enjoyed a lovely picnic at Arley, then walked along the river a bit, glorying in the warm weather. All the way there and back, I examined properties along the route with a buyer's eye. I can't help it now - force of habit.

2. On that note, I'm still waiting to hear about the house. My first offer was rejected; I raised it to what was my absolute upper limit and said so; the seller relayed that it was rather less than she wanted but she'd think about it; I enquired again of the estate agents on Friday, but they said she still hadn't decided. I do know that no other offers have been made, though. So ideally she'll wait a bit longer, see that no-one else is offering and accept my bid. Two people saw it over the weekend, apparently, but I know a lot of people have seen it by now and very few have offered, so I'm cautiously hopeful.

3. Thursday to Saturday saw me attending the annual Classical Association conference. Well, actually it carried on this morning too, but I decided to bunk the last part for the sake of a lie-in and some more relaxed parent time. I must say it was probably the best CA conference I've been to (out of three altogether) in terms of papers and general conviviality. Logistics perhaps not so great - it was in a fairly second-rate hotel, with not wonderful food and tedious queues at the lifts to move around the building. But I spent the conference dinner last night (in the much nicer surroundings of the University of Birmingham's Great Hall) with a big grin on my face, feeling on a high from the whole experience. There's too much to record now, of course, but highlights were the comedy caretaker during John Henderson's opening lecture, some cracking panels on Roman cities and all flavours of Classical Receptions (including Buffy and Achilles / Patroclus m-preg fanfics), and all the lovely people I got to catch up with.

4. Did some enjoyable shopping in Brum on Saturday afternoon - scheduled as excursion time for conference-goers, but I'd been to all the places they suggested visiting many times before, having grown up here. Surprised myself slightly by buying some baseball boots - not my normal style, but I really was desperate for new shoes by this stage, and I think they can become my style. Also got CivCity: Rome, which I've wanted for about a year now, ever since I first heard it was coming out, and was reminded of by a great session on Classics in computer games at the conference. And I enjoyed just generally wandering around Birmingham city centre, experiencing the weird combination of things which haven't changed at all and things which are totally unrecognisable, and exploring the various memories which streets and buildings threw up in my mind. I'm proud of my roots here.

5. Term starts again tomorrow. Wah! Only two weeks of teaching and one of revision classes, but they're going to be pretty tough. I'm more-or-less ready, but have a lot to do over the next few days.

6. Haven't seen this week's Who yet, as I was out at the dinner last night, and now my parents' cable box is broken! So that will have to be squeezed in over the next few days too. Have been reading people's online reactions, though. It seems to have provoked quite a lot of discussion and some division.

7. I am travelling home first class in the train tonight, because there was a cheap weekend upgrade available, and I've always wanted to try it out. It'll be a bit different from the Severan Valley Railway, where we were in a third-class compartment!

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