Scary Monsters...

It's few days now since the Monsters and the Monsters conference at Mansfield College, Oxford, and I'm still pondering the many topics discussed there. It was a fantastically rich mix, from Grendel to viruses, werewolves to mermaids, child killers to killer children, 'prawns' to zombies, lobotomies to Islamophobia, mutation to hermaphroditism, from Dexter to Doris Lessing, Dracula to Twilight, Inferno to Watchmen, Paradise Lost via London and Goblin Market to Oz, Lord Byron to Lovecraft to Crowley to Jung to Lady Gaga... Me? I took along a phantom...

The Dead Aren't Talking

The dead aren’t talking to us. They mutter

Under their lack of breath, or sulk

Towards the eternity that makes them sputter

Like damp flames, the sheer white silk

Of the fatal promise already tattered

And soiled. Why would they want to talk?

After so much disappointment, the battered

Leftovers of the living have nothing to say.

For them, in their void, even language has rotted:

Voice, gesture, image… There’s just no way

They can work up a sweat towards meaning

Or move beyond the mute contempt of a day

That put an end to their days. They’re left leaning

On the sticks and stones of their own odd bones.

The terminal cynicism of a final slow thinning

Is all they can know now of the colours and tones

That were once kind of offered, sort of promised,

Merely hoped for, imagined, invented, between yawns.

(Ivan Phillips fecit 2011)

Strange how my obsessions so often seem to collide with each other. I just came across this odd conjunction of Wyndham Lewis and Doctor Who (well, Karen Gillan) in a report on the re-opening of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery. Amy Pond meets the Enemy...

Left: Naomi Mitchison by Wyndham Lewis (1938); Right: Karen Gillan by Suki Dhanda (2010)

Thy Light Is Come: thoughts about dead blokes

Pondering my visit to Golders Green Cemetery last weekend - paying my respects to Bram Stoker as part of the Open Graves, Open Minds centenary symposium at Keats House - I noticed with dismay that Wyndham Lewis had somehow been missed from the list of noteworthy 'residents' on the Wikipedia entry for the crematorium. That'll be my first ever contribution to Wikipedia then...

While visiting the columbarium where Bram Stoker's ashes are interred (with those of his son Noel), I asked the guide if he could point me in the direction of Lewis's plot. He'd never heard of Lewis, which is fair enough (many people haven't), but what surprised me was that Lewis wasn't 'on the list' at all. In other words, no-one has ever asked to see him. Then again, someone must have done at some point, because Google image throws up this:

Stoker being interred with his son is interesting, because it raises the question of where Florence Stoker might be. I mentioned this to Sir Christopher Frayling over lunch at Keats House on the Saturday (a digression from our previous conversation about Dr Who and the Talons of Weng Chiang) and he suggested that she had been buried elsewhere because, having converted to Catholicism, she would not have allowed herself to be cremated. There is, of course, the persistent rumour about their 'cold' marriage but anyway... A little digging (ouch) and it turns out that she actually was cremated at Golders Green and her ashes scattered in the Garden of Rest there.

Which still doesn't explain why she wasn't put to rest with Bram, because apparently that was the plan...

Coming out from behind the sofa...

 "Have you ever wondered what it's like to be wanderers in the fourth dimension...?"

 

I'm still reflecting happily on the one-day Doctor Who symposium, Visions from Behind the Sofa, that we hosted at the University of Hertfordshire this week. M'colleague Howard Berry worked wonders to secure a great panel of guests -

Dr Kim Akass (Senior Lecturer in Film and Television at University of Hertfordshire, co-Series Editor of the Reading Contemporary Television series (I.B. Tauris))
Kevin Davies (documentary maker, producer of fan film Shakedown)
Cameron K McEwan (Blogtor Who, Twitter: @BlogtorWho)
Toby Hadoke (comedian, author of Moths Ate My Dr Who Scarf)
Mat Irvine (BBC visual effects artist, stalwart of Who, Blake's 7, and more)
Dr Lorna Jowett (Senior Lecturer at the University of Northampton, author of Sex and the Slayer)
Dr Patrick Stokes (Marie Curie Fellow in Philosophy, contributor to Doctor Who and Philosophy: Bigger on the Inside than the Outside)

- not to mention a Dalek and K9, and the pleasingly mixed audience was glorious in both its enthusiasm and staying power.

My thoughts are now drifting towards the notion of a full 2 day academic conference on the subject... But it's OK, I'll slap myself in the face in a minute and get back to marking!

"It's the end. But the moment has been prepared for..."

Intertextual Droid...

An interesting point was made during the lecture this afternoon, one which seems to illustrate the richness and potential of this 'ere 'intertextual' idea. I was talking through my Jacob Epstein. H.R. Giger example, and it was suggested that the 'Rock Drill' sculpture also had some resemblance to the droid figures in the later Star Wars films (the rubbish ones).

What this demonstrates quite clearly, I think, is the way in which everyone has their own intertextual 'web' that is constantly sparking off connections and ideas.

In the zone...

Oh dear. It's been a while since my last posting. That's me marked down for the blogging assignment! Must try harder...

This week's MHC sessions were on structuralism (binary opposition) and seemed to go quite well. For the Digital Animation/MSFX students this was my last offering, as Bill will be taking over the lecture slot from next week. A bitter-sweet moment which, if I really wanted to get carried away, I could probably subject to a spot of structuralist analysis: bitter/sweet, happy/sad, relief/regret... And so here we are in the fascinating mythical realms of the anomalous zone, where lecturers reflect on the last five weeks and wonder how they could have done things differently. I've enjoyed the lectures, as I always do, and I hope the students have too - well, some of them at least. And, of course, for the Interactive Media and Screen Cultures folk, there's more of my particular brand of nonsense to come...