I'm not sure how to recover from a three day conference in insufferable heat,* but last week was not the way to do it. I
so need to get back to reading and watching seventies stuff, but this week I had to read and comment on a PhD thesis, and ponder whether the c and related p words are appropriate discourse for a thesis which is, after all, about people who display their [thank yous] for a living. Why so coy? If you can talk about it, you can use the word. I just have a vision of startled horses.
And editing prose, that of others', I seem to have had a fetish for eliminating the repetition of any word bar "of", "an", "a" or "the" in a sentence. And ideally between consecutive sentences. But then that collides with rhetorical flourishes. On the other hand, there should be a limit to how many time the word "which" can be used in a sentence (even allowing for the fact that there are mysterious, Atlantic-differentiated, rules for when it ought to be "that").
Then there was the summer school, which was advertised as being on comedy and gender, but the organiser had been confused by my consistent use of the phrase "comedy and race". The kids were actually quite smart, although apparently the solution for racism is for the butts of it to get over it. Chiz. Interestingly, whilst the black man's cock joke of
The Office (see
here) was not felt to be racist, the unknowable intention of
Black People Love Us was.
Oh, and note to self, if you feel a sympathique with someone, at least think to get their name. It makes stalking them
so much easier.
Meanwhile, I appear to be acquiring conferences - although I'll think twice about the big vampire one. Part of the operating strategy might be to push forward the comedy research (and I had a word with the supplier to my dealer, last night). Having thought through what to do with a
conference on memory and quite liking the suggestion of
Life on Mars, I have mysteriously acquired a copy of
The Nature of Nicholas (thanks to tilo) without giving credit cards details to a firm specialising in adult and naturist films; in the mean time someone whispered another title in my ear in a different context, and that also does the seventies thing for me. Result.
Now to find a night where I get to bed earlier than 2am.
* One solution involves a bar, and a monologue punctuated by "and another thing...". Catharsis is us.
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