the city that never sleeps
Right! So! New York! I've been meaning to post about the Robin Hood conference since I got back, and now seems like a good time, before this weekend's PAMLA conference in San Francisco. Without further delay, the highlights of the 2009 Biannual Conference of the International Association for Robin Hood Studies:
--the University of Rochester is lovely, with red-brick buildings, trees, a river...actually, all of upstate New York is just gorgeous. It's like everything you've ever heard about New England autumn, bursting with color and the sound of crunching leaves underfoot and misty with rain.
--conference opened with a video chat with the current Sheriff of Nottingham, dressed in full regalia. He seems to be a very good sport about all this.
--first panel was on romance novels, fanfiction, and Robin Hood, especially the BBC series (which inspires a lot of the fanfic). Very interesting; it's both fun and unnerving to see fandom becoming a subject of academic study. (pre-raphaelite1, you'll appreciate this: discussion afterward somehow got into Harry Potter fandom/fanfic and theories of power and power dynamics. Lots of people interested in Snape. I am not an active member of HP fandom--as opposed to being a fan, which I am--and yet always seem to end up in these discussions. It's cool, though.)
--another panel on Robin Hood in comics & graphic novels, specifically focusing on Green Arrow. It was suggested that Robin himself never acquired much of a comics presence, unlike, say, King Arthur, precisely because Green Arrow already existed and could present a more flexible figure at any rate. Sounds logical to me.
--screenings of the 1912 silent film Robin Hood and the 1922 Douglas Fairbanks in Robin Hood (yes, his name is part of the title. copyright reasons.). I had not seen either before, and was fascinated. The 1912 version is decidedly surrealistic (Guy of Gisborne turns into a rabbit? what?), and the Fairbanks version seems to be channeling Peter Pan much of the time. It's very gleeful, and he captures some of the playful qualities of the tradition that seem to have gone missing in more recent versions. There's also apparently a threesome happening at the end--maybe it was the bad influence of the fanfic panel, but I don't think so. It's pretty blatant.
--Stephen Knight giving a paper on absurdity and alterity in the Robin Hood tradition. Stephen Knight is one of those people who will say something incredibly brilliant in a perfectly matter-of-fact way, and you'll sit there nodding and thinking, "well, of course 'Robin Hood and the Potter' is deliberately evoking the absurd--wait a minute, what happened to all my previous theories about this ballad?" Chris Chism is another one of these people, and her paper on the culture of the roads in Robin Hood tales is wonderful in a similar way--everybody knows that Robin and his men waylay travelers, but nobody thinks about what that means, or how it fits into the economics and politics of road-building and travel.
--Helen Philips giving the plenary address. See above, plus she's wonderfully sweet.
--my own paper, on the use of Robin Hood in Peter Beagle's The Last Unicorn, was pretty well attended and went well, if I do say so myself. Questions were asked, and discussion was had, and people laughed at my jokes, so. Yet again, compliments on how well I present. Nobody ever believes that I'm nervous--good?
--music! Lute recital by Paul O'Dette (most famous lutenist in the world), selections from Robin Hood operas, the score for the Douglas Fairbanks film as reconstructed by Gillian Anderson (the musicologist one, not the Dana Scully one).
--dinner and conversations with Frances Tempest, costume designer for the BBC Robin Hood series (seasons 1 & 2). She's very friendly and fun to hang out with--talked about Guy of Gisborne's black leather versus the boy-band inspiration for the Merry Men, and why women seem to prefer Guy to Robin, and the deliberate anachronisms and camp nature of the show. Fun times.
--also, my parents came up and met me after the conference, and we did touristy things like see the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island and go up the Empire State Building (it was raining, but there was still a neat view if you looked straight down). We also saw Phantom of the Opera, with amazingly good seats, and it was...amazingly good.
I think that's it for now. More to come after I'm back from San Francisco. Ah, the jet-setting life of an academic.
--the University of Rochester is lovely, with red-brick buildings, trees, a river...actually, all of upstate New York is just gorgeous. It's like everything you've ever heard about New England autumn, bursting with color and the sound of crunching leaves underfoot and misty with rain.
--conference opened with a video chat with the current Sheriff of Nottingham, dressed in full regalia. He seems to be a very good sport about all this.
--first panel was on romance novels, fanfiction, and Robin Hood, especially the BBC series (which inspires a lot of the fanfic). Very interesting; it's both fun and unnerving to see fandom becoming a subject of academic study. (pre-raphaelite1, you'll appreciate this: discussion afterward somehow got into Harry Potter fandom/fanfic and theories of power and power dynamics. Lots of people interested in Snape. I am not an active member of HP fandom--as opposed to being a fan, which I am--and yet always seem to end up in these discussions. It's cool, though.)
--another panel on Robin Hood in comics & graphic novels, specifically focusing on Green Arrow. It was suggested that Robin himself never acquired much of a comics presence, unlike, say, King Arthur, precisely because Green Arrow already existed and could present a more flexible figure at any rate. Sounds logical to me.
--screenings of the 1912 silent film Robin Hood and the 1922 Douglas Fairbanks in Robin Hood (yes, his name is part of the title. copyright reasons.). I had not seen either before, and was fascinated. The 1912 version is decidedly surrealistic (Guy of Gisborne turns into a rabbit? what?), and the Fairbanks version seems to be channeling Peter Pan much of the time. It's very gleeful, and he captures some of the playful qualities of the tradition that seem to have gone missing in more recent versions. There's also apparently a threesome happening at the end--maybe it was the bad influence of the fanfic panel, but I don't think so. It's pretty blatant.
--Stephen Knight giving a paper on absurdity and alterity in the Robin Hood tradition. Stephen Knight is one of those people who will say something incredibly brilliant in a perfectly matter-of-fact way, and you'll sit there nodding and thinking, "well, of course 'Robin Hood and the Potter' is deliberately evoking the absurd--wait a minute, what happened to all my previous theories about this ballad?" Chris Chism is another one of these people, and her paper on the culture of the roads in Robin Hood tales is wonderful in a similar way--everybody knows that Robin and his men waylay travelers, but nobody thinks about what that means, or how it fits into the economics and politics of road-building and travel.
--Helen Philips giving the plenary address. See above, plus she's wonderfully sweet.
--my own paper, on the use of Robin Hood in Peter Beagle's The Last Unicorn, was pretty well attended and went well, if I do say so myself. Questions were asked, and discussion was had, and people laughed at my jokes, so. Yet again, compliments on how well I present. Nobody ever believes that I'm nervous--good?
--music! Lute recital by Paul O'Dette (most famous lutenist in the world), selections from Robin Hood operas, the score for the Douglas Fairbanks film as reconstructed by Gillian Anderson (the musicologist one, not the Dana Scully one).
--dinner and conversations with Frances Tempest, costume designer for the BBC Robin Hood series (seasons 1 & 2). She's very friendly and fun to hang out with--talked about Guy of Gisborne's black leather versus the boy-band inspiration for the Merry Men, and why women seem to prefer Guy to Robin, and the deliberate anachronisms and camp nature of the show. Fun times.
--also, my parents came up and met me after the conference, and we did touristy things like see the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island and go up the Empire State Building (it was raining, but there was still a neat view if you looked straight down). We also saw Phantom of the Opera, with amazingly good seats, and it was...amazingly good.
I think that's it for now. More to come after I'm back from San Francisco. Ah, the jet-setting life of an academic.