OTHER JOURNAL ENTRIES...
PREVIOUS JOURNAL ENTRY...
13/03/07: Hi all - it's been a while since my last update (Uni work, etc.) but I've finally found time to work on the website. I've hopefully excised any non-working off-site links, added some more links to the --Web Hosting-- section, and put up some of my 50mb+ Warhammer 40K files in the --Downloads-- section (also mirrors for the <50MB files). I've also loaded most of my files (all the small fry, all the <50MB files, and a .pdf of the 4th Edition Rulebook) to --ESnips-- (warning: off-site link) - You can find my public folder --here-- . I keep thinking about doing another redesign - crazy, given my workload, but I keep seeing other people's websites and getting jealous.
In other news, I've got an appointment up at the doctor's surgery to see about my left ear, which has been bugging me for a while now. Certain pitches (like slamming doors) and frequencies cause it to buzz most alarmingly - worryingly, those frequencies include piano music, which I played for hours on end in my younger days with headphones on, and --tinnitus-- runs in the family. It's also the ear I had to have vacuum cleaned a few years ago after I attempted to use screwed-up balls of tissue as earplugs (my parents oh-so-helpfully suggested I try and wash it out in the shower, which melted it into a solid mass which covered my eardrum), so that might have damaged something in there. It's also the ear that I was convinced never worked correctly after some bullies held me down and poured orange juice in it when I was in Comprehensive School. 'Hopefully', though, I've just got what Mum is frequently afflicted with - namely, wax on the eardrum, which she says produces almost identical symptoms (including "gets worse when shower water gets in it", which isn't very consistent with tinnitus).
I think I've managed to secure some accommodation for next year - I've got the forms done and am waiting to hear back from my prospective housemates to arrange a final visit and the signing of the agreement. It's only the second place I've looked at, so hopefully it will be alright (since, adverts for cheaper and ostensibly nicer places have sprung up like crabgrass on the notice boards, so I'm kicking myself). The first place WAS awful, though - tiny shoebox/cupboard room, mildew in the toilet, and only £10 cheaper per month than what I'm looking at now. Plus - and this is the reason my parents forbade me to even keep it on as a backup - the room was illegal. How so? Well, if I may quote from bathnes.gov.uk:
"All residential property should meet the standards of fitness for human habitation required by the Housing Act 1985 ... In summary, each house or flat must:".
"1.2) be structurally stable".
Well, I wouldn't give it too many chances in a gale, I'll say that.
"1.3) be free from dampness".
See above.
"1.4) have adequate ventilation
All habitable rooms ... shall be ventilated direct to the external air by a window".
NO WINDOW. Or at least, the window opens onto the living room, so if the house catches fire I would be quite royally screwed. I presume it once opened onto the outside, but the greedy landlady covered the whole garden with an extension, thus cramming in another bedroom and a living area.
"1.6) have adequate lighting
All habitable rooms must have adequate natural lighting and be provided with an area of clear glazing directly to the outside".
Yeah, that.
"1.10) have adequare means of escape from fire...".
WOOPS.
So, yes, I dropped that like a hot potato. Meanwhile, it seems some of my smug-faced housemates are having problems after gloating about how I probably wouldn't be able to find anything so 'late' (because 6 months in advance is cutting it fine, you know) - one of them had a note attached to their door begging the others to come round so they could trawl through the accommodation database again. Heh.
Meanwhile, Bath Spa University continues to take the trope of Continuous Assessment to new heights of idiocy. Apparently they have interpreted it to mean "there should be no time in the whole semester where you are not actively revising for an exam, preparing material for a final assessment, or being panicked into getting into groups for a film you're making in June". The result? Zero learning actually takes place. Effing great. If I were slightly more conspiratorially minded, I would suspect a feminist plot to benefit women in academia, since girls are allegedly the ones better at "multi-tasking" (i.e. doing lots of things at once badly). Personally speaking, I would prefer a single exam at the end of the year, and if we're "feeling off", tough luck. But then you just know they would require us to prepare for "mock exams" every fortnight for the preceding three months (hell, they're already doing mock exams for the "Compulsory Question" at the end of the year which is supposedly part of the "Continuous Assessment", so hey).
Speaking of not-so-subtle feminism, we've been treated to a great big heaping ('dose' - censorship ed) of the stuff in "Film Studies" (don't laugh, it was the only way I could take Prose Studies now and Writing: The Process in my first semester). Speaking as someone who is an active advocate of egalitarianism and who has done research into feminist film critique and the theory of the male gaze, I was frankly insulted by the obscurantist insanity being spewed out during our lectures and seminars. Here's a rewarding sample of the handouts we were given (YES, THIS IS A HANDOUT BEING USED IN A "CREATIVE WRITING" BA IN AN ENGLISH UNIVERSITY):
"The 'classic text' (applicable to genre and non-genre films) describes a dominant mode of production, which masks its own operation - either in terms of covering over ideological tension and contradiction, thereby giving dominance to a metadiscourse (see pp. 13 and 71), which represents the Truth vis-a-vis (sic.) the film's content and meaning; or in terms of giving the impression that it gives access to the 'real world' ... the placement of women in this way is so necessary to patriarchy as we know it, it follows that the displacement of women would disturb the patriarchal system, and provide a challenge to that world view".
TRANSLATION: "Films are secret masculinist propaganda - they claim to represent reality but actually only portray women in a way that does not challenge their sexist worldview" (OK, that's fairly controversial, but it's a valid point of view - now, why did they have to cloak it in faux-academic windbaggery?).
"Thus the film noir (sic.) expresses alienation, locates its cause squarely in the excesses of female sexuality ('natural' consequences of women's independence) and punishes that excess in order to re-place it within the patriarchal order. It is largely because of this interplay of the notion of independent women vis-à-vis patriarchy that these films are of interest to feminist film theory".
TRANSLATION: "Generally, strong, independent, sexual women come a cropper in Film Noir. Therefore it is an inherently sexist genre" (again, arguably true - but the use of so many radical feminist buzz-words is seriously not appropriate in a supposedly neutral course).
"But the point about these dominating representations of the woman is that each stresses the crucial difference of the woman, her 'otherness'. The woman functions as a fundamental enigma ... and the fetishistic representation of the woman - as an assemblage of arousing fragments - marks out her body as a site of disturbance".
TRANSLATION: "The Womon is so majestic that the male-operated camera can only take part of Her in at any one time (no really, that was actually said in class)". At this point I think we have departed reality and entered la-la land.
"An aggressive debasement of the woman in narration and action, and especially in the sexual act, is prevalent in the Cain-text ... (quote in which the protagonist worships the Earth and calls her Mother snipped - sanity ed) ... Here the woman is a nurturing maternal Body (sic.) in which the hero seeks to be immersed, to return . This incestuous phantasy (sic.) erupts at these 'nervous' points in which the fetishistic representation of the woman as Body signifies rather than disavows the troubling of sexual difference which perturbs the Cain-text ... the illicit wish is relinquished with the placing of the woman, who serves as the signifier of male desire ... The above is an attempt to unpick the text-ure (sic.) of Cain's fiction...".
TRANSLATION: "I cannot write". No, seriously, try to follow the sentence through from "This incestuous phantasy" to "the Cain-text". THIS IS A CREATIVE WRITING COURSE, PEOPLE! Next to it, I made two annotations. The first read "WHAT?!" and the second read "this part is not actually English".
(all emphasis, italics, etc. in the originals)
There's lots more, including a hilariously self-contradictory section in which a homosexual bullfighter and a Mexian prostitute are said to be competing sexually over the hero, and in the next sentence we are told they are actually parent figures (presumably with the homosexual as father, even though we have just been told homosexuals always count as women). These handouts, unsurprisingly, cite Freud, amongst other pseuds, as a source. More surprisingly, three of the handouts were written by men.
After viewing James M. Cain's "Double Indemnity", we were reliably informed that (I quote from my notes):
"Phyllis' death satisfies the "male myth", as she has rebelled against feminine principles and so must die. Neff's homosexual transgression in submitting himself to a woman is 'negated' by his death in the arms of Hayes, another man. In this way heterosexual patriarchy is solidified".
Oh, and Neff is also a homosexual because he says at one point that he "loves" his male co-worker. Dear God, they're going to have a field day with --Falling As They Might-- . All this crap really makes me want to restart my --Rants-- section.
We were also told that every time a woman in film smokes, applies lipstick, wears high heels, or is seen in the same shot as banisters (no, really), that the director is consciously attempting to "subvert femininity" by endowing his female lead with, and I quote, "unnatural phallic power". My response in the (never to be handed in) writeup of my lecture notes:
"This, along with certain other conventions of feminist film critique, seems frankly baffling. If the stiletto represents the male phallus, the femme fatale is exercising dominance over it by treading it underfoot, expressing the superiority of the feminine over the masculine, rather than appropriating the masculine for herself - unless of course we are to take it that the sharp stiletto heel suggests a threat, and the male lead fears "penetration" by it, in which case one might as well (as many feminist critics do, in my opinion to their detriment as credible academics) imply that every bladed weapon, incidence of eating, or depiction of violence, regardless of context, represents sublimated rape of the female by the male*.
Another theory of the femme fatale, drawn from Freudian psycho-analysis, suggests that the femme fatale implies the threat of castration. Accordingly, her threat (to the protagonist and, by proxy, to the default male audience) is reduced by breaking her into parts and focusing on the parts (e.g. her ankles). This, apparently, can be justified because the femme fatale lacks a penis. The fact that all women represented in any medium whatsoever would then be logically defined purely by their existence as personified castration anxiety does not seem to have occurred to the advocates of psycho-sexual feminist critique.
* To further develop this point, how any remotely sensible person can conclude that male fear of penetration by the femme fatale symbolises the rape of women by men is mind-boggling. Similarly, attempts to interpret "woman with a penetrating object" as "homosexual man" and so accuse the male film-maker (and frequently, through him, 50% of the world population) of homophobia, are pathetically weak and their prevalence on courses of academic, literary, and film criticism unbelievable".
Need I point out that I signed up to this module to learn how to write screenplays? Thus far NO actual "Creative Writing" teaching has taken place - instead, we get an English Literature course, but with less reading. 'Great'.
As for --H20 Magazine-- , my laughably-so-called "job" (unpaid and now untitled, I hasten to add), I am **this** close to giving up. Not only are they not returning my emails, but they have now put out another edition without telling me, after giving me a submissions deadline two weeks later (I kid you not - the first I saw of it was a discarded copy in the laundry room). The only time I can get in touch with them (sometimes) is when I go up to the other side of campus in person, whereupon all they can say is "I'm not sure (the editor) checks the email, it's all terribly ad hoc". Well, how professional.
I've been stood up twice now when THEY arranged a meeting, and waited for 30 minutes a pop before (later) learning from the Deputy Editor that no-one felt like coming in. They "would have contacted" me, only my phone was off. YES, BECAUSE I'VE TOLD YOU SIXTY BILLION TIMES I CAN'T GET A SIGNAL WHERE I'M STAYING, SO USE ONE OF THE GOD KNOWS HOW MANY DOZEN COMPUTERS AROUND CAMPUS AND SEND ME A BLOODY EMAIL!!! Dan the Deputy Editor suggested in our (chance) last meeting that I get a free online SMS account, so they can send me texts that way. Good idea, I'm on it! ... 2 hours later, I'm on the computer ... erm, just one problem Dan, no such service exists. You can send texts, but there is not an Internet site in the world that gives out free mobile phone numbers and text inboxes. Fantastic.
Well, it's getting late, so I'd better finish. Signing off, illegitimis nil carborundum, God is the only good, etc.
PS: Wot no footnotes? Academic blasphemy!!