CFP: Hrotsvit 2014: Pageants and Pioneers Conference

To be held on Saturday 31 May 2014 at University of Hull, England

In January 1914 in London, England, the Pioneer Players theatre society produced a remarkable and disturbing play about prostitution. This play was written by Hrostvit, the tenth century nun from Gandersheim. Known also as ‘strong voice’, Hrotsvit has been claimed as the first female dramatist. Edith Craig’s production of the play for the Pioneer Players theatre society and Christopher St John’s translation was part of a programme of encouraging women’s writing for the stage in the period of the campaign for women’s suffrage. The play featured the punishment of the prostitute, Thais, by imprisonment, providing a topical allusion in 1914 to the brutal treatment of suffragettes in London.

This interdisciplinary international conference will mark the centenary of this remarkable production and provide an opportunity for a reassessment of Hrotsvit’s drama, bringing together researchers interested in the modern production of the play as well as the Medieval text and context.

Dr Anna Birch will lead a workshop reading of Paphnutius and a discussion, which will be filmed as part of the ongoing project on Pageants and Pioneers begun in May 2011 with Fragments + Monuments performance and film of A Pageant of Great Women. We look forward also to Pageants and Pioneers 2015, 2016 and 2017.

Confirmed Speakers: Professor Katharine Cockin, Professor Lesley Ferris, Dr Anna Birch, Dr Helene Scheck

Send abstracts of no more than 300 words for papers by 6 January 2014 to Katharine Cockin.

CFP: Reading Animals: An International English Studies Conference

School of English, University of Sheffield, UK
17-20 July 2014

Abstract Deadline: 19 December 2013
Keynote Speakers: Erica Fudge, Tom Tyler, Cary Wolfe, others TBC

Reporting in the journal PMLA on the emergence and consolidation of animal studies, Cary Wolfe drew attention to the role of the Millennial Animals conference, held in the School of English at the University of Sheffield in 2000, as a formative event in this interdisciplinary field. Seeking now to focus the diverse critical practice in animal studies, a second conference at Sheffield seeks to uncover the extent to which the discipline of English Studies now can and should be reimagined as the practice of reading animals.

This conference seeks to reflect and to extend the full range of critical methodologies, forms, canons and geographies current in English Studies; contributions are also most welcome from interested scholars in cognate disciplines. Reading Animals will be programmed to encourage comparative reflection on representations of animals and interspecies encounters in terms of both literary-historical period and overarching interpretive themes. As such, seven keynote presentations are planned; each will focus on how reading animals is crucial in the interpretation of the textual culture of a key period from the Middle Ages to the present. The conference will also feature a plenary panel of key scholars who will reflect on the importance when reading animals of thinking across periods and in thematic, conceptual and formal terms.

Papers should focus on the interpretation of textual animals at any date from the Middle Ages to the present. We seek submissions that read animals in relation to any writers/periods or in terms of the following indicative list of themes:

*Genre/Media/Form/Mode*
animals in genre (adventure; tragedy; classic realism; satire; comedy; epic; lyric; elegy; nature writing; non-fiction, criticism and polemic; detective/mystery; gothic; sf; children's literature; graphic novel)
animal genres (bestiary; fictionalised [auto-]biography; fairy tale; fable; allegory; didactic story; pet memoir)

*Arts, Aesthetics, Philosophies*
reading animals in theatre and performance, music, visual culture, film, dance, theory

*Ethics, Politics, Society*
intersections of species - race - ethnicity - disability - sex - gender - sexuality - class

*History*
animals as subjects and objects of historical interpretation; animal materialisms; post-anthropocentric literary and cultural history

*Science and Technology*
bio-engineering; technologies of animal use; narratives of meat/vivisection; ethology; biosemiotics and zoosemiotics

*Environments and Geographies*
empire and colonialism; politics and poetics of space; globalisation; zoo-heterotopias; extinctions

Abstracts for 20 minute papers (300 words) or pre-formed 3-paper panels (1000 words) are welcome by 19 December, 2013 from researchers at any stage of their career, including early career scholars and postgraduates. Please send by email to the conference convenors.

OUT NOW: The Gothic World (Routledge, 2013)

Edited by Glennis Byron and Dale Townshend

The Gothic World offers an overview of this popular field whilst also extending critical debate in exciting new directions such as film, politics, fashion, architecture, fine art and cyberculture. Structured around the principles of time, space and practice, and including a detailed general introduction, the five sections look at:

• Gothic Histories
• Gothic Spaces
• Gothic Readers and Writers
• Gothic Spectacle
• Contemporary Impulses

The Gothic World seeks to account for the Gothic as a multi-faceted, multi-dimensional force, as a style, an aesthetic experience and a mode of cultural expression that traverses genres, forms, media, disciplines and national boundaries and creates, indeed, its own ‘World’.

Contents:

• Introduction, Dale Townshend

Part I: Gothic Histories
• The Politics of Gothic Historiography, 1660-1800, Sean Silver
• Gothic Antiquarianism in the Eighteenth Century, Rosemary Sweet
• Gothic and the New American Republic, 1770-1800, Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock
• Gothic and the Celtic Fringe, 1750-1830, James Kelly
• British Gothic Nationhood, 1760-1830, Justin D. Edwards
• Gothic Colonies, 1850-1920, Roger Luckhurst
• History, Trauma and the Gothic in Contemporary Western Fictions, Jerrold E. Hogle

Part II: Gothic Spaces

• Gothic and the Architectural Imagination, 1740-1840, Nicole Reynolds
• Gothic Geography, 1760-1830, Benjamin A. Brabon
• Gothic and the Victorian Home, Tamara Wagner
• American Gothic and the Environment, 1800-present, Matthew Wynn Sivils
• Gothic Cities and Suburbs, 1880-present, Sara Wilson
• Gothic in Cyberspace, Bryan Alexander

Part III: Gothic Readers and Writers
• Gothic and the Publishing World, 1780-1820, Anthony Mandal
• Gothic and the History of Reading, 1764-1830, Katie Halsey
• Gothic Adaptation, 1764-1830, Diane Long Hoeveler
• Gothic Romance, 1760-1830, Sue Chaplin
• Gothic Poetry, 1700-1900, David Punter
• Gothic Translation: France, 1760-1830, Angela Wright
• Gothic Translation: Germany, 1760-1830, Barry Murnane
• Gothic and the Child Reader, 1764-1850, M.O. Grenby
• Gothic and the Child Reader, 1850-present, Chloe Buckley
• Gothic Sensations, 1850-1880, Franz J. Potter
• Young Adults and the Contemporary Gothic, Hannah Priest
• The Earliest Parodies of Gothic Literature, Douglass H. Thomson
• Figuring the Author in Modern Gothic Writing, Neil McRobert
• Gothic and the Question of Theory, 1900-present, Scott Brewster

Part IV: Gothic Spectacle
• Gothic and Eighteenth-Century Visual Art, Martin Myrone
• Gothic Visuality in the Nineteenth Century, Elizabeth McCarthy
• Gothic Theater, 1765-present, Diego Saglia
• Ghosts, Monsters and Spirits, 1840-1900, Alexandra Warwick
• Gothic Horror Film from The Haunted Castle (1896) to Psycho (1960), James Morgart
• Gothic Horror Film, 1960-present, Xavier Aldana Reyes
• Southeast Asian Gothic Cinema, Colette Balmain
• Defining a Gothic Aesthetic in Modern and Contemporary Visual Art, Gilda Williams

Part V: Contemporary Impulses
• Sonic Gothic, Isabella van Elferen
• Gothic Lifestyle, Catherine Spooner
• Gothic and Survival Horror Videogames, Ewan Kirkland
• Rewriting the Canon in Contemporary Gothic, Joanne Watkiss
• Gothic Tourism, Emma McEvoy
• Gothic on the Small Screen, Brigid Cherry
• Post-Millennial Monsters: Monstrosity-No-More, Fred Botting

For more information, please visit the publishers' website.

Review of the Bram Stoker International Film Festival (Saturday and Sunday)

Whitby, 24-27 October 2013

This is part three of a three-part review. You can read part two here, and part one here.

Saturday

Nothing on the main screen on Saturday morning appealed to us, so we decided to take the opportunity to try out Sultan’s Sci-Fi Suite… and this was a very good move. We started off with The Brain That Wouldn’t Die (dir. Joseph Green, 1962), slightly silly, slightly sinister evil scientist fare. Brilliant. As was our next choice… Strange Invaders (dir. Michael Laughlin, 1983). Not the best remembered sci-fi flick of the 80s, granted, but a wonderful homage to earlier B-movies and an awful lot of fun. Sultan’s Sci-Fi Suite got a big thumbs up from us.

Back to the main screen, the next film we saw was Pieces of Talent (Joe Stauffer, 2012). This feature film tells the story of Charlotte (Kristi Ray), a wannabe actress stuck working as a waitress and living with her deadbeat mother. One night at work, Charlotte runs into David (David Long), a weird loner who says he’s a filmmaker, and the two strike up a friendship. David wants Charlotte to be part of his new project… but she has no idea what this project really is.

It would be easy to describe Pieces of Talent as a serial killer film. And it is, sort of. But it also a lot more than that. It’s an unsettling, strange and compelling film, which is moved up from ‘good’ to ‘excellent’ by David Long’s amazing performance. Long’s character (he is listed in the credits as playing himself) is more than a hackneyed ‘creepy loner’. Without offering too much backstory, there is a depth and complexity to the character that is almost entirely conveyed through subtle dialogue and physical performance. There’s a scene part way through in which David takes a bath – that’s all that happens – but the combination of skilful direction and Long’s facial expressions communicates beautifully. Pieces of Talent was, without doubt, the highlight of our festival.



Following this, there were two shorts. The first of these, The Graveyard Feeder (dir. Rich Robinson, 2012), was a comedy horror about a graveyard keeper hurrying to save his father’s soul from a creature that’s feeding in the cemetery. I guess this was the sort of film that you either find funny or you don’t. We didn’t, so it didn’t really appeal. The second short in this double bill, on the other hand, could have been made for us.

Killer Kart (dir. James Feeney, 2012) was about exactly that… a killer shopping cart (or trolley for those of us on the other side of the pond). I should probably say that, on our first date, RS and I watched Rubber – a film about a homicidal tyre named Robert – and we credit our shared love of that film as one of the reasons we got together. So a film about a homicidal shopping trolley looked too good to be true… it wasn’t. It was everything we hoped it would be: a silly idea, but played completely straight and packed with references to horror classics and generic tropes. Hands down, the best short film of the festival this year (and one of the best we’ve ever seen at the festival).



Our final film of the evening was Devil in my Ride (dir. Gary Michael Schultz, 2013). Bad-boy Travis (Frank Zieger) returns for his sister Doreen (Erin Breen)’s wedding – but he accidentally gets her possessed by a demon. Travis and Doreen’s new husband Hank (Joey Bicicchi) have to go on a road trip (with demon-Doreen secured in the back of a van) to Las Vegas to find an exorcist. Devil in my Ride is a thoroughly enjoyable black comedy, which manages to stay just the right side of slapstick and hammy acting. The pacing wasn’t always great – the final hunt for the exorcist in Las Vegas was a bit too drawn out – but it was a good film, nonetheless.

Sunday

The final day of the festival started with another trip to the sci-fi screening room, for Invaders From Mars (dir. William Cameron Menzies, 1953). What can I say? An absolute classic – B-movie heaven, complete with pipe-smoking scientist and visible zips on the alien suits, and dripping with Cold War paranoia.

Next on the main screen was a double bill from Japanese director Kayoko Asakura. It began with the short film Hide and Seek (2013). A young girl visits a teacher for a koto lesson, and sees the teacher’s son playing hide and seek. Things are not what they seem. This was a skilful and engaging short film, beautifully shot and carefully paced. Were it not for Killer Kart, this would have been my favourite short of the festival.

Hide and Seek was followed by Asakura’s 2013 feature film, It’s a Beautiful Day. A group of international students in the US travel out to a backwoods retreat – which just happens to be the home of a pair of sadistic and brutal criminals. What differentiates this from the standard rural horror is a strange subplot that may or may not introduce a more supernatural element to the story (it’s not completely explained, and I don’t want to give any major spoilers). It’s a Beautiful Day is a competently made film, but was hard to follow in places. It is a bilingual film – trilingual, technically – with some of the characters only speaking in Japanese and some only in English (the subtitles switch between English and Japanese, clearly anticipating a mixed audience), and with a little Korean here and there. RS found it harder to follow this than I did, and he struggled a little with the heavily accented and broken English of the Japanese characters. I didn’t think this was much of a problem, but I did feel that the communication issues that were signalled so carefully at the film’s opening (the Japanese students didn’t know any English or Korean, the Korean student – though proficient in English – could speak no Japanese, and the backwoods American killers, naturally, were not polyglots) went anywhere. Much more could have been made of this. Overall, the film was a little confused and it was hard to reconcile the disparate plotlines – it was almost as though it was two different films mashed together. The events of the last half an hour complicated things even further, and we still can’t agree on exactly what happened at the film’s climax.

The next film was Heretic (dir. Peter Handford, 2013). Sadly, this was not a high point of the festival. Heretic told the story of Father James (Andrew Squires), a troubled priest who is coming to terms with the deaths of a teenage girl and her stepfather. James is plagued by guilt and returns to the girl’s home to face up to his responsibilities. Poor pacing and lacklustre acting made for a rather dull film, unfortunately, and we didn’t enjoy Heretic.

Following Heretic was the annual festival awards ceremony. Eight awards were given (designed by Neal Harvey of Rubber Gorilla Mask Making Studio), and the winners were announced by Sultan Darmaki. Seven awards were selected by a panel of judges (not sure who they were), and one was voted for by the audience.

Best Screenplay: Vampire Guitar

Best Male Lead: David Long (Pieces of Talent) – and RS and I both wholeheartedly agreed with this choice

Best Female Lead: Lexy Hulme (Lord of Tears) – this seemed like a foregone conclusion, given the praise Hulme’s performance had from the Lord of Tears team and members of the audience in the Q+A. While Hulme’s performance was undoubtedly the high point of the film, RS and I felt that Melanie Serafin (Throwback) or Michele Feren (The Visitant) showed far more range and carried much more of their respective narratives. But they weren’t playing ‘sexy’ characters, of course…

Best SFX: Thanatomorphose – from what I heard, this was a well-deserved award

Best Director: James Hart (Ascension) – this wouldn’t have been our choice

Best Short: Killer Kart – needless to say, we fully agreed with this award

Best Film: Gwai Wik (Re-Cycle) – one of the films that we missed, and apparently we missed out

Audience Choice: Lord of Tears – needless to say, this wasn’t the film we voted for, but as I said earlier, we appeared to be in a minority

After the awards, we watched a couple more films before heading back to Manchester. Dead Shadows (dir. David Cholewa, 2012) was a French horror about a comet crossing the path of the earth and bringing something terrible with it. RS enjoyed this one more than me, though he said it was a bit ‘Day of the Triffids-y’. I thought it needed a little more plot to balance out the gory (and, in one place, grotesque) violence. And then our final film of the festival was The Pyramid (Roberto Albanesi, Luca Alessandro, Simone Chiesa, Alex Visani and Antonio Zannone, 2013), an Italian anthology film about a demonic pyramid-shaped device that passes from person to person, promising infernal destruction. The less said about this film the better… it was not a high point for us.

So with that, we headed home. Some really nice surprises at this year’s festival, and we really enjoyed having the sci-fi movies as an alternative to the horror. Apparently next year’s festival will be five days, rather than the usual four, so we’re intrigued to know what new entertainment will be on offer.

In case you missed them, you can also read my reviews of Thursday and Friday's films.

For more information about the Bram Stoker International Film Festival, please visit their website.

Review of the Bram Stoker International Film Festival (Friday)

Whitby, 24-27 October 2013

This is part two of a three-part review. You can read part one here, and part three here.

We were up bright and early on Friday for Throwback (dir. Travis Bain, 2013), an Australian ‘creature feature’ that made for a great start to the day. Two men travel into the remote wilderness of Far North Queensland in search of a legendary hoard of gold. Instead they fall foul of the Yowie, Australia’s mythical hominid. Well-made and enjoyable, though the ‘fight for survival’ drags a little towards the end. The direction is done well, and the reveal of the monster is handled skilfully. The inclusion of a female character, Rhiannon the bush ranger (Melanie Serafin), gives a bit of a ‘King Kong’ moment that’s a tiny bit predictable, but this is sort of subverted at the film’s climax.

We had to duck out of the festival for a couple of hours (to buy wedding rings, in case you're interested), so missed Terence Fisher’s classic Brides of Dracula and Richard Pawelko’s black comedy Vampire Guitar. We came back for Lord of Tears (dir. Lawrie Brewster, 2013). And I suspect I’m going to be pretty unpopular with festival regulars and the denizens of the internet in my review of Brewster’s debut feature film.

Lord of Tears was, without doubt, the most talked about film at the festival. The creative team behind it introduced the film, gave a Q+A and stayed for the rest of the festival and chatted to other attendees. Though the film was privately financed by the production team, a successful Kickstarter appeal has funded the post-production and publicity. As it transpires, one of the backers was Sultan Al Darmaki, the new BSIFF president, and this has led to Al Darmaki creating his own film company – Dark Dunes Productions – with the intention of working with Brewster and his team on another project in the near future. As can be seen from the Kickstarter pitch, Lord of Tears has been marketed as a ‘Slender Man’, ‘Lovecraft’ horror, and Brewster also listed The Haunting and The Innocents as film inspirations and M.R. James, Edgar Allan Poe and generic ‘Gothic’ ghost stories as literary ones. The film tells the story of James Findlay (Euan Douglas), a schoolteacher who is haunted by his past and inherits a property in the Scottish Highlands. James travels to this house – which he had lived in once as a child – and is forced to revisit the dark secret of his past. While there, he meets a mysterious woman named Eve (Lexy Hulme) and is stalked by the Owl Man (voiced by David Schofield) – the ‘Slender Man’-esque character of the film’s PR campaign.

I’m afraid to say RS and I really did not enjoy this film. Admittedly, it is a low-budget indie film, but the production values are very low. The direction and acting are particularly bad, with some lines read so badly that it is difficult to connect with the characters. Lexy Hulme – known more as a dancer than an actor – shows some promise, but she’s given such terrible lines (“When I go to Paris, I shall waltz down the Champs-Élysées!”), and used mostly for extended and incongruous slow-motion dance sequences (including a ‘supernatural’ sequence inspired by Ringu), that her talents are wasted. The Owl Man – much anticipated by the film’s supporters – is essentially Slender Man with an owl head, and more comedic than frightening.

I think it’s only fair to say, however, that this is just our opinion of the film, and it doesn’t seem to be shared by anyone else. I believe this may be the only negative review of Lord of Tears anywhere on the internet, as every other review is glowing and effusive.

Luckily, our disappointment didn’t last long, as the next film was great! The Visitant (dir. Joe Binkowski, 2012) was an American paranormal entity chiller. Samantha (Michele Feren) performs as a ‘fortune teller’ while trying to make it as an actress, though she doesn’t believe a word of what she tells her clients. When a panicked woman appeals to her to end a ‘haunting’, Samantha is left with more than she bargained for. The Visitant was well-made and well-acted. It’s worth noting that Feren carries almost the entire film herself, with other actors appearing only at the beginning and end (or in video chat), but the film never feels like it was missing other actors. Despite her character running the horror-heroine gamut of screaming, crying, inadvisable actions and confusion, Feren’s performance never grated and we had nothing but sympathy for Samantha at the end of the film. By the end of the second day, The Visitant was definitely our favourite film of the festival so far.

Our evening ended with two short films: Cold Calling (dir. Dan Price, 2013) and The Earth Rejects Him (dir. Jared Skolnik, 2011). Cold Calling was a UK short about a market researcher who needs to knock on one more door to fill his quota… but chooses the wrong house to visit. It was reasonably well-made and intriguing, but at less than five minutes long, it’s hard to say much about this little piece. It felt like there was so much more that could have been shown. The Earth Rejects Him was a more developed piece, telling the story of Ray (Ellis Gage) a young boy who discovers a corpse while out in the woods with his friends. When Ray removes a tooth from the body, things begin to get strange. I really enjoyed this film, and found it unsettling and engaging. RS wasn’t so sure, and felt that too much was left unexplained at the end. However, we both agreed that it was a very well-made short, and showed a lot of promise. I understand that Skolnik is in the process of making a second short film, and I’m looking forward to seeing how his work develops.

The final film of the day was Thanatomorphose (dir. Éric Falardeau, 2012), but we didn’t watch this because I am a bit of a wuss when it comes to body shock stuff. Thanatomorphose is a Canadian film about a young woman who wakes up one day to find her body decomposing. By all accounts, the effects in this film are first rate… but that meant it was too rich for my blood.

Still quite a lot of films to go, so I'm going to split this review again. You can read part three here.

Review of the Bram Stoker International Film Festival 2013 (Thursday)

Whitby, 24-27 October 2013

This is part one of a three-part review. You can read part two here.

This month, my partner (RS) and I headed to the Whitby Spa Pavilion for the Bram Stoker International Film Festival. The festival is an annual event, showcasing horror features, shorts and documentaries from around the globe alongside Gothic-inflected entertainment, such as the Vampire Ball and the 1880s Night. This festival is now in its fifth year, and I’ve attended four out of five (RS has attended for the past three years), so I think we can count ourselves as regulars.

This year saw a couple of changes to the festival, not least the appointment of a new president: Sultan Saaed Al Darmaki, an Emirati businessman who’s made a bit of a splash sponsoring indie film projects on Kickstarter this year. The ‘extracurricular’ activities were also more ambitious than previous years, adding theatre (John Burn’s Aleister Crowley: A Passion for Evil), live music (Friday night’s Children of the Night event, featuring Inkubus Sukkubus, Vampyre Heart and Global Citizen), a ‘dark art exhibition’ and lectures from Karen Oughton and David Annwn Jones to the programme. In addition to this, a second screening room – Sultan’s Sci-Fi Suite, showing classic B-movies all weekend – was also opened this year.

As far as me and RS are concerned though, it’s all about the films and about discovering something new that we wouldn’t otherwise have seen, so we spent most of our time in the main screenings. Here’s what we thought about what we saw…

Thursday kicked off with the feature film Motel 666 (dir. Carlos Jimenez Flores, 2012), starring Wesley John as the host of a ghost-hunting TV show who’ve been called to a motel with a history of supernatural occurrences. The film is a bit of a mixed bag – the premise, while not particularly original, is handled with enthusiasm. The obligatory flashbacks to the ‘horrors’ of the motel are satisfyingly gruesome rather than ghostly, though occasionally my suspension of disbelief was stretched a little bit too far. The spoof credits for ‘Ghost Encounters’ are a lot of fun, and John is excellent (and a lot of fun) in his role as the show’s host Ted. The film’s twist is a bit predictable, but overall we enjoyed the film.

Next up was a double bill: Dollboy (dir. Billy Pon, 2010), followed by Hazmat (dir. Lou Simon, 2013). Dollboy is a short film about a group of people abducted, locked in a disused flea market, and hunted down by a grotesque murderer. The premise is unoriginal and, creepy as the design of the killer is, the execution is nothing new. The film is prefaced with two Grindhouse-style fake trailers: one for Circus of the Dead and the other for Mister Fister. The latter appears to be an excuse to take pointless sexualized violence against women to the most extreme and vile degree – the film is rated ‘PG’ and I can’t even bring myself to say what that stands for: you’ll have to use your imagination – and it left a really bad taste in my mouth.

Fortunately, this was followed up by the feature film Hazmat, which RS and I both enjoyed, and which was introduced by the director. The film followed a TV show (the second fictional TV team of the day!) called Scary Antics – based on the US show Scare Tactics – as they plan and begin to execute a prank on Jacob (Norbert Velez), a dark and unsettled young man who has recently lost his father. Of course, things go horribly wrong. Despite the fact that, in the Q+A following the film, Simon stressed her lack of experience, the film was very well-directed and well-shot. The acting was also good. The only problem we had with this film is that it is very much of a type – a group of characters trapped by a killer, with no chance of escape – and once you accept that premise, there really is nowhere for the narrative to go. As a result, the last half an hour drags a little, and we found ourselves rooting for the killer to get through his task a little quicker. But he is an awesome killer, so that’s not too bad.

After a very short break, we had another double bill. Two shorts, this time: Wounded (dir. Tom Cowles, 2013) and Ascension (dir. James Hart, 2013). Both films were introduced by their directors – and both featured the Yorkshire actor and friend of the BSIFF Mark Rathbone (who, like last year, brought his ferret along for the Q+A). Wounded is a short film about the aftermath of a task force raid on an underground group in an abandoned building. As two survivors face off against one another, one of them begins to feel the effects of his wounds. This film was Cowles’ final degree project, and this showed. I don’t mean to use ‘student film’ as a criticism here, but rather that it was clear that the director was showcasing his cinematography – possible spoiler alert: the film demonstrates Cowles’ skills in make-up, prosthetics and a little CGI, as well as his thorough study of a certain scene from a certain John Landis film) – rather than developing narrative or characterization. Apparently, Cowles got a first in his degree, and from the evidence we saw it was well-deserved, but he said little about his plans for the future.

Ascension was the debut short from James Hart, based on a short story by Dave Jeffery (which was included in Peter Mark May’s Alt-Zombie anthology). In a West Midlands village, a group of survivors band together to protect their community in the face of the zombie apocalypse. Sadly, Hart’s film left us cold (no pun intended). The acting and direction are weak, and there are issues with lighting and audio that make the film hard to watch. I found the film’s premise intriguing (though RS was less convinced), and think I need to read Jeffery’s short story to appreciate this more. I find zombie films that play around with our expectations of the ‘plucky band of survivors’ much more interesting than those films that focus on ‘new’ characteristics of zombies. But the execution here is disappointingly poor.

Thursday was a bit of a full-on day, so we took a break and missed Ivan Zuccon’s Wrath of the Crows (2013). We came back for The Impaler (dir. Derek Hockenbrough, 2013), a film about a group of young Americans who decide to stay at Vlad the Impaler’s castle in Romania during a trip to Europe. The visitors become trapped in a bloody ritual set in motion by Vlad’s 500-year-old pact with the devil. The film was entertaining enough, and competently made, but it could have been a lot better. I think I was expecting more from a film about Vlad the Impaler led by a Romanian creative team. Not only was the film shot in America (though the sets were convincingly European), the version of Vlad was distinctly Hollywood (in fact, it was the ‘Vlad Dracul’ from Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula). I was hoping for a Vlad-as-national-hero rather than Vlad-as-eternal-lover, so was a little disappointed. Overall, The Impaler felt like a modern Hammer horror – complete with a couple of ‘Transylvanian’ characters that would have absolutely been at home in a Hammer feature – and that’s not a bad thing as such, but not the most original offering of the festival.

The next film was a real treat. I’m not sure why I’ve never seen Sion Sono’s Suicide Club (2001) before, but I’m really glad I’ve seen it now. A dark, gory, surreal, hallucinatory and funny journey through a seemingly incomprehensible series of events, Suicide Club starts with 54 schoolgirls throwing themselves under a subway train. This is the beginning of an epidemic of suicides, investigated by Detective Kuroda (Ryô Ishibashi) and apparently linked to the ubiquitous all-girl J-pop group Dessert (written with various romaji spellings). Everything that happens in the film is baffling, compelling and mystifying in equal measure. Is it a film about the shallowness and disconnection of contemporary Japanese culture? Is it a gory and trippy retelling of the Pied Piper folktale? Is it a musing on the existential angst of youth? Is there any message at all behind the film? Probably… possibly… no one seems to agree. But whatever the film is about, it is a work of disturbed genius and we loved it.

Dessert’s signature song, ‘Mail Me’ (which was used to fantastic effect throughout the film) is now the creepiest earworm I’ve ever had. I couldn’t find a video that gives you the full effect, but here’s the song (sorry, no subtitles on this video) in case you want to listen.



Just two more films for us on Thursday (as we decided to skip the late-night screening of John Badham’s Dracula): short films Child Eater (dir. Erlingur Throddsen, 2012) and Count Yoga (dir. Adam Dallas, 2013). The former was a babysitting horror/bogeyman-is-real story that was well-done but unoriginal. The latter was a cringe-worthy ‘comedy’ about a Bulgarian (?!) vampire who has moved to Bondi Beach, Australia. It was as bad as it sounds.

We saw so many films over the weekend, I've had to split this review up. You can read the next part of this review here.

CFP: True Crime: Fact, Fiction, Ideology

Fact, Fiction, Ideology

6-7 June 2014
Manchester, UK

Keynote Lecture: David Schmid (University at Buffalo, SUNY), author of Natural Born Celebrities: Serial Killers in American Culture: ‘The Moors Murders and the “Truth” of True Crime’

Call for Papers

As Mark Seltzer notes, ‘true crime is crime fact that looks like crime fiction’, a popular genre that is obsessed with real-life murder and extreme acts of criminal deviance. Emerging as a genre in magazines of the mid-twentieth century such as True Detective Magazine, and drawing on earlier discourses of confession, memoir and speculation, true crime first received attention as a form of literature with the publication of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1966). It has since diversified into a variety of other media, from television series such as Neil McKay’s Appropriate Adult (2011) to Hollywood films about famous works of the genre, such as David Fincher’s Zodiac (2007). In recent horror-crime fiction and film, such as Adam Nevill’s Last Days (2012) and Scott Derrickson’s Sinister (2012), the act of writing and filming true crime is presented as ensnaring its creators in the gruesome worlds they seek to capture. While its adherence to orthodox law and order perspectives, typified by a tendency to present offenders as monstrous and evil, may seem to position true crime as a conservative genre, its fascination with the lives and minds of serial killers can sometimes lend it a transgressive quality.

True Crime: Fact, Fiction, Ideology is an interdisciplinary conference seeking to explore this genre in its myriad incarnations. Proposals are sought for 20 minute papers. Possible topics may include:
• True crime in popular culture
• Forensic psychology and criminology
• Prison narratives and memoirs
• True crime in fiction and metafiction
• The politics of true crime
• True crime and the law
• Theorizing true crime
• Serial killers and profiling
• Taboo crimes
• The ethics of true crime
• ‘Proto-true crime’ – early examples of the mode, predecessors and precedents

Please send 300-word abstracts to David McWilliam and Hannah Priest by 31st March 2014. All enquiries should also be sent to this address.

This conference is organized by Hic Dragones. For more information about the company and its work, please see the Hic Dragones website.

Blood and Water Launch Parties (Manchester and Leeds)

Blood and Water

The debut novel by Beth Daley

Release Date: 7th November 2013
Publisher: Hic Dragones
For more information, visit the publisher's website

Dora lives by the sea. Dora has always lived by the sea. But she won’t go into the water.

The last time Dora swam in the sea was the day of her mother’s funeral, the day she saw the mermaid. Now she’s an adult, a respectable married woman, and her little sister Lucie has come home from university with a horrible secret. Dora’s safe and dry life begins to fray, as she is torn between protecting her baby sister and facing up to a truth she has always known but never admitted. And the sea keeps calling her, reminding her of what she saw beneath the waves all those years ago… of what will be waiting for her if she dives in again.

Praise for Blood and Water:

A talented new author with a feel for details and how to make them count. Daley’s writing is a cumulation of neat touches that grab hold of you, persuade you to care, and drag you deep into a debut novel soaked in menace.
Toby Stone, author of Aimee and the Bear

Blood and Water Launch Parties

FREE EVENTS in Lancashire (Manchester) and Yorkshire (Leeds), our very own WAR OF THE ROSES! Join us for the launch of Blood and Water.

Thursday, 7 November 2013 from 19:00 to 21:00
Portico Library
57 Mosley St
Manchester M2 3HY
United Kingdom

Wine reception and readings by the author

Sell Tickets Online through Eventbrite

Friday, 8 November 2013 from 18:00 to 20:00
The Maven
1-3 Call Lane
Leeds LS1 7DH
United Kingdom

Event Registration Online for Blood and Water - Book Launch powered by Eventbrite

My Favourite Fictional World... a guest post by Douglas Thompson

As part of the Impossible Spaces blog tour currently being organized by Hic Dragones, I thought it would be nice to invite some of the writers onto the blog to talk about imagined worlds. I asked each guest to name their favourite fictional world (a tricky question, I know, but a fun one). Today I welcome my first guest, Douglas Thompson.

As well as numerous short stories in magazines and anthologies, Douglas Thompson is the author of seven novels: Ultrameta (2009) and Sylvow (2010) both from Eibonvale Press, Apoidea (2011) from The Exaggerated Press, Mechagnosis from Dog Horn (2012), Entanglement from Elsewhen Press (2012), and Volwys and Freasdal from Dog Horn and Acair Publishing respectively, due in late 2013/early 2014.

So, Douglas, what's your favourite fictional world?

That’s a tough one. It tends to send one’s brain off in sci fi directions I suppose, in which case I’d go for something by Ursula Le Guin for sure. Probably the two worlds she creates in The Dispossessed, one of the greatest books of the twentieth century in my opinion - not just in sci fi, but in literature generally. In the book there are two worlds described, a little like The Earth and The Moon. The first one is rich and basically Capitalist, but the second one has been settled by people who create an Anarchist society. Martin Bax, the editor of Ambit magazine told me to read it, which was weird because Ambit is a mainstream literary mag and I thought at that point I was a mainstream writer. But he told me I should write sci fi. I know the words of a visionary when I hear them, and genre boundaries and prejudice must die! Before I read the book I’d have thought the idea of an Anarchist society was some kind of joke... I’d heard that the Anarchist regiments in the Spanish Civil War were useless because nobody could agree who was giving orders! But one of the many, many extraordinary achievements of the book is that it meticulously demonstrates how an Anarchist society might actually work, and indeed ultimately be superior to either a Marxist or a free market model. It also demonstrates how censorship is most insidious of all in a supposedly free Capitalist society, because there the censorship becomes consensual and takes place inside everyone’s head even before they speak. What we call “political correctness” in its most extreme form, in America and Britain, is the

best example of this, and I think Le Guin foresaw this decades in advance. For instance, I suspect that my work has sometimes been rejected by American magazine editors for exactly this reason of political correctness. A little voice in their heads goes “Hey, might this offend someone?” and just to be on the safe side they turn it away with a lame excuse about plot or narrative to cover up their own fear. But I want to offend people. Indeed, it’s probably the only reason I write. At least in an oppressive Communist society, everyone could see the censorship and choose to keep their minds free, but when our minds themselves have become the censors, just where have we left to hide or to escape to?

I make it sound as if The Dispossessed is a dry political diatribe, but it is nothing of the sort. It is a hugely gripping and completely alive novel with deeply imagined characters and situations. It will make you laugh and cry. It is compassionate. Like all great sci fi, it is also a metaphor for own planet, which gives it at times an eerie déjà vu sort of feel, a magical mirror in which we see ourselves and what an exotic, beautiful and terrifying world we are living through.

To be a greatly entertaining writer in a book is one thing, but to also raise and answer big social and anthropological questions at the same time: this is what makes Ursula Le Guin one of the greatest thinkers and artists of our age. Incredible to relate, but I actually gave her a copy of my second novel Sylvow and to my astonishment she emailed me back in thanks a few weeks later... wouldn’t tell me what she thought of it though! Well, it’s enough just so speak to God once, isn’t it, and know she’s there and listening? Seriously, these things are uplifting... the realisation that your heroes are just people and that it might just be your turn one day if you can just stay humble, disbelieve your praise as much as the criticism, and keep on learning.

Douglas Thompson's short story, 'Multiplicity', is one of twenty-one weird and dark tales in the Impossible Spaces anthology - out now from Hic Dragones.

MANCASS News and Programme 2013-14

New publications from the Manchester Centre for Anglo-Saxon Studies:

- Nicholas J. Higham and Martin Ryan, The Anglo-Saxon World, London, Yale University Press, 2013.
- Nicholas J. Higham ed., Wilfrid: Abbot, Bishop, Saint, Donington, Shaun Tyas, 2013.
- Gale R. Owen-Crocker and Brian W. Schneider, ed., Royal Authority in Anglo-Saxon England, Oxford, Archaeopress, BAR British Series 584, 2013.
- Gale R. Owen-Crocker and Brian W. Schneider, ed., Kingship, Legislation and Power in Anglo-Saxon England, Publications of the Manchester Centre for Anglo-Saxon Studies Volume 13, Woodbridge, Boydell, 2013.

Talks and conferences 2013-14
After ordinary meetings members are welcome to join the Director and the speaker for dinner at their own expense.

Monday 30 September 2013
5pm, Samuel Alexander Building Room S. 1.7
Dr Rory Naismith, of the University of Cambridge, will speak on ‘The Forum Hoard of Anglo-Saxon Coins’

Monday 11 November 2013
5pm, room to be announced
Dr Susan Youngs, formerly of the British Museum, will speak on ‘The Prince and the Hanging-bowl: the British presence at Prittlewell’

Monday 10 Feb 2014
5pm, room to be announced
Dr David Woodman, of the University of Cambridge, will speak on ‘The writing of history in twelfth-century Worcester’

Monday 3 March 2014: The Toller Lecture
Professor John Hines, University of Cardiff, will speak on ‘A new chronology and new agenda: the problematic sixth century’ exploring the issues raised by the recent high-precision radio-carbon dating project; 6pm, in the Historic Reading Room, John Rylands Library Deansgate, followed by a free wine reception, followed by dinner at Pesto, Deansgate (about £25 per person). If you wish to attend the post-lecture dinner please book by Monday 24 Feb 2013 with Gale Owen-Crocker.

Thursday 3 April 2014: Joint meeting of MANCASS and the Manchester Medieval Society
Dr Kevin Leahy, of the Portable Antiquities Scheme, will speak on ‘The Staffordshire Hoard’; 6pm in the Historic Reading Room, John Rylands Library Deansgate. If you wish to attend the post-lecture dinner please book by Thursday 27 March 2014 with Susan Thompson.

15-17 April 2014
The MANCASS Easter Conference on ‘Womanhood in Anglo-Saxon England’ will take place at Hulme Hall, The University of Manchester. The Conference will be directed by Professor Gale R. Owen-Crocker, The University of Manchester, in association with Dr Charles Insley, The University of Manchester, and Dr Christine Rauer, University of St Andrews. Offers of 20 minute papers should be submitted, with a short abstract, to Gale Owen-Crocker by 30 November 2013. Registration enquiries should be directed to Brian Schneider.

CFP: The Medieval Chronicle - Die Mittelalterliche Chronik - La Chronique au Moyen Age

Seventh International Conference

7th-10th July 2014
University of Liverpool
Liverpool, UK

The Liverpool Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at The University of Liverpool is delighted to announce that the Seventh International Conference on the Medieval Chronicle will take place at the University of Liverpool, 7th–10th July 2014.

Keynote speakers include: Professor Pauline Stafford (University of Liverpool), Professor Anne D. Hedeman (University of Kansas), Professor Marcus G. Bull (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill), and Professor Christopher Young and Dr Mark Chinca (University of Cambridge).

The aim of the seventh conference is to follow the broad outline of the previous six conferences, allowing scholars who work on different aspects of the medieval chronicle (historical, literary, art-historical) to meet, announce new findings and projects, present new methodologies, and discuss the prospects for collaborative research.

The main themes of the conference are:

1. Chronicle: history or literature?
The chronicle as a historiographical and/or literary genre; genre identification; genre confusion and genre influence; typologies of chronicle; classification; conventions (historiographical, literary or otherwise) and topoi.

2. The function of the chronicle
The function of chronicles in society; contexts historical, literary and social; patronage; reception of the text(s); literacy; orality; performance.

3. The form of the chronicle
The language(s) of the chronicle; inter-relationships of chronicles in multiple languages; prose and/or verse chronicles; manuscript traditions and dissemination; the arrangement of the text.

4. The chronicle and the representation of the past
How chronicles record the past; the relationship with ‘time’; how the reality of the past is encapsulated in the literary form of the chronicle; how chronicles explain the past; motivations given to historical actors; the role of the Divine.

5. Art and Text in the chronicle
How art functions in manuscripts of chronicles; do manuscript illuminations illustrate the texts or do they provide a different discourse that amplifies, re-enforces or contradicts the verbal text; origin and production of illuminations; relationships between author(s), scribe(s) and illuminator(s).

Call for Papers

Papers in English, French or German are invited on any aspect of Medieval Chronicle. Papers will be allocated to sections to give coherence and contrast; authors should identify the main theme to which their paper relates. Papers read at the conference will be strictly limited to twenty (20) minutes in length. The deadline for abstracts is Monday 21 October 2013 (maximum length one (1) side A4 paper, including bibliography). Please email your abstract to the conference organisers. 

The conference will take place on the south campus of the University of Liverpool, near the centre of Liverpool, Merseyside, UK. Liverpool has its own airport – Liverpool John Lennon Airport – with connections to many European cities. Travel through Manchester Airport (which has direct train connections to Liverpool) is also possible. Accommodation will be in Vine Court, newly built en-suite accommodation on the South Campus, fifteenth minutes walk from the centre of Liverpool and Lime Street Station. A variety of guest houses and hotels (at a range of prices) are similarly available near the university.

Additional information about costs, accommodation, travel and registration will be provided shortly on a dedicated conference website.

For further information please contact the organisers.

Dr Godfried Croenen
School of Cultures, Languages & Area Studies
University of Liverpool
Liverpool, Merseyside,
L69 7ZR, UK

Dr Sarah Peverley
School of English
University of Liverpool
Liverpool, Merseyside,
L69 7ZR, UK

Dr Damien Kempf
Department of History
University of Liverpool
Liverpool, Merseyside,
L69 7WZ, UK

CFP: Fighting Dragons and Monsters: Heroic Mythology

The International Association for Comparative Mythology 8th Annual Conference

May 24-26, 2014
Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography
National Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Armenia
Yerevan, Armenia

Conference Website

Call for Papers

We are happy to announce that the 8th Annual Conference of the International Association for Comparative Mythology is to be held at the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography of the National Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Armenia (Yerevan, Armenia) from May 24 to May 26, 2014. All members are warmly invited to give a paper and to participate in the discussions.

Our topic (as well as the conference title) this year will be: Fighting Dragons and Monsters: Heroic Mythology.

The main focus this time will be on the Indo–European, Ancient Near Eastern, and the Caucasus mythology; however, papers about mythology of other regions of the world that conform to the conference topic are also welcome.

A list of prospective talks will be published on our website. Please take note of the following:

Titles

Please send us the title of your paper as soon as possible. That will substantially facilitate planning.

Abstracts

By January 15, 2014, please send, if you intend to participate, a short (300 words or less) abstract of your talk to this address. The abstracts will be reviewed by a selection committee; the selected abstracts will be published on our website.

Paper Length

The expected paper length is 20 minutes plus 10 minutes discussion.

The language of the conference is English.

Conference fee for the participants from North America, Australia, the EU, and Northeast Asia is $50, which will cover the conference dinner and reception. Students from the aforementioned countries and participants from other regions can participate for a reduced fee – $10. For the payment options please see below.

Also, those of you who are not yet official members of IACM, please consider joining the association! The yearly fee is $35 (it is $10 for students and members from countries outside North America, Australia, the EU, and Northeast Asia).

CFP: Late Medieval Court Records

IMC Leeds 7-10 Jul 2014

From the twelfth century on, public courts and the institutionalized legal process obtained a prominent profile in many parts of Europe. Legal authorities and litigants increasingly strove to record and thus shape the legal process through documenting their activities. The sources they produced, grouped together under the term ‘court records’, form a true goldmine for historians. They throw light on historical events and processes that are otherwise difficult if not impossible to access, from legal procedures to daily life and language, to cosmology. Small wonder that some of the most important works on premodern history, like Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s Montaillou and Carlo Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms, have drawn extensively on this type of source.

Yet these sources are not without difficulties for the historian using them. Not only are they often relatively hard to access, requiring extensive palaeographical and linguistic skills, but the information contained in them is seldom straightforward. Court records often purport to contain more than they do, and usually contain more than they seem to do. They are not only very rich but also very challenging sources.

That is why we think it valuable to make this historical source, the court record, the focus of a strand of sessions at the twentieth International Medieval Congress in Leeds from 7-10 July 2014. We hope to gather scholars from different regions to compare and discuss the great variety of records produced by law courts in the later medieval period, as well as the practical and methodological issues connected to their study. The idea of this IMC strand is to form a basis for further discussion and cooperation between early career researchers working with late medieval court records in the future.

We therefore invite proposals from current postgraduate, postdoctoral and other early career researchers in History and any other relevant subject area, for papers of 20 minutes on the topic of late medieval court records. Abstracts must be 200 words maximum. The proposals must include name, institution, contact information, paper title and abstract.

Possible topics for papers include but are not limited to:
• Methodology of court records
• Gendering court records
• Court records and the legal process
• Court records and urban society
• The voice of the ‘common man’ in court records
• Court records and social/religious deviancy
• The comparative approach of court records
• Court records and legal/social/political conflict

Proposals are to be sent to Frans Camphuijsen by September 22nd 2013.

Panel convenors: Sarah Crawford (University of Sydney), James Page (University of St. Andrews) and Frans Camphuijsen (University of Amsterdam)

CFP: "Horror" - 35th Annual Conference of the Southwest Popular/American Culture Association (SWPACA)

Hyatt Regency Hotel & Conference Center
Albuquerque, New Mexico

February 19-22, 2014

The area chair for Horror of the Southwest Popular/American Culture Association invites all interested scholars to submit papers on any aspect of horror in literature, film, television, digital and online as well as general culture. Given the strong showing of work on horror cinema in recent years, we hope to continue this tradition, but also to diversify into new and unconventional areas, especially with the addition of roundtable sessions on a variety of popular topics.

Particularly encouraged are presentations that fit this year’s conference theme, "Popular and American Culture Studies: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow."

If you are interested in being a presenter, please send a detailed abstract (300-400 words) for a paper of 15 to 20 minutes reading time. Please provide contact information, such as name, mailing address, phone number, and especially e-mail address.

If you want to propose a panel of four speakers, or three speakers and one respondent, please include the following information: panel title; name and contact information of the panel chair; an abstract for each paper; contact information for each presenter.

The deadline for submissions is November 1, 2013.

For information about the registration process, registration fees, membership, graduate student awards and course credits, and information about travel and location, please consult the SWPACA's official web site.

Please submit abstracts and panel proposals at the conference website.

CFP: The Geographic Imagination: Conceptualizing Places and Spaces in the Middle Ages

2nd Annual Indiana Medieval Graduate Student Consortium Conference

Call for Papers

Keynote Speaker: Professor Geraldine Heng
Perceval Fellow and Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature, with a joint appointment in Middle Eastern studies and Women’s studies at the University of Texas at Austin

The students of the Indiana Medieval Graduate Student Consortium (IMGC) are pleased to announce that we are accepting submissions for the second annual IMGC conference, 'The Geographic Imagination: Conceptualizing Places and Spaces in the Middle Ages', to take place on 28 Feb-1 Mar 2014 at the University of Notre Dame.

The transnational turn in the humanities over the last two decades has put increasing pressure on our ideas of nationhood and has provided us with a liberating awareness of the constructedness of the spaces we study. New methodologies have developed in response to this pressure as scholars turn to comparative approaches, borderland studies, histoire croisée, studies of empire, and oceanic models in order to accommodate the ambiguities of nationhood and of conceptions of space. Suggested by seminal transnational studies, such as Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic, many critics now study “the flows of people, capital, profits and information.” Recently, David Wallace’s ambitious literary history of Europe has adopted a similarly fluid approach to culture, avoiding a study of “national blocks” of literature, organizing itself instead along transnational itineraries that stretch beyond the European sphere. The Middle Ages offer a particularly broad and rich era in which to encounter fluid notions of space, as any glance at a medieval map such as the famous Hereford mappa mundi invitingly suggests. We invite presentations from all fields to explore any aspect of the medieval “geographic imagination,” of conceptions of space, place, and nation: ideas of geography, cartography, transnational identities and networks, intercultural encounters, mercantile routes, travelogues, rural and urban spaces, religious places, and concepts of locality and local identities.

The IMGC is delighted to announce that our keynote speaker this year will be Dr Geraldine Heng, well known to many of us for her exhaustive and provocative study of medieval romance, Empire of Magic, and her subsequent work on race in the Middle Ages.

Please submit a 300 word abstract for a 15-20 minute paper by 15 Dec, 2013 on the conference website. Proposals should include the title of the paper, presenter's name, institutional and departmental affiliation, and any technology requests.

This conference is generously sponsored by the Nanovic Institute for European Studies. The Nanovic Institute is committed to enriching the intellectual culture of Notre Dame by creating an integrated, interdisciplinary home for students and faculty to explore the evolving ideas, cultures, beliefs, and institutions that shape Europe today.

Dress and Textile Discussion Group (University of Manchester)

Programme for 2013-14

Where: TBC – please see reminders

Time: 5pm

Thursday 10th October 2013
Dr Brenda King: Stitch and Stone. The Leek Embroidery Society and its collaboration with Gothic Revival Architects

Thursday 21st November 2013
Alexandra Lester-Makin: The Kempston Embroidery Revisited

Thursday 13th February 2013
Dr John Peter Wild: Cotton - the New Wool. A Developing Tale from Roman Egypt

Thursday 20th March 2014
Dr Chris Monk: Divine Clothing: Adorning God and the Patriarchs in the Rylands Bible Historiée

Thursday 1st May 2014
Dr Elizabeth Coatsworth: Mrs Christie and English Medieval Embroidery

For more information, please contact Alexandra Lester-Makin.

Review: House of Fear, ed. by Jonathan Oliver (Solaris, 2011)

Published in 2011, House of Fear is an anthology of haunted house short stories, edited by Jonathan Oliver and featuring stories by writers such as Adam Nevill, Sarah Pinborough and Christopher Priest. I picked those three names at random, as the collection’s contents page is an impressive list of well-established UK horror writers (and a couple of American cousins), with a small number of new voices being introduced alongside.

I was asked to review this book for another site I write for, but as that review will be somewhat brief, I thought I’d write a longer post here so I can talk in a bit more detail about the collection. This book definitely deserves the additional space.

The theme (or setting or motif – depending on the way it has been interpreted) that organizes House of Fear is the haunted house. Each of the nineteen stories features a ‘house’ of some description (though ‘home’ is probably a more accurate term), and each one presents a ‘haunting’ of sorts. It wouldn’t be fair to describe House of Fear as a book of ghost stories, however, as ‘haunting’ is to be understood in its widest sense. That said, there are a fair few ghosts within the pages.

The book as a whole is excellent. The editor has done a fantastic job in putting the collection together – in terms of both selection and organization – and Oliver’s introductions to each story are complimentary without being cloying. It’s also nice to read a short story collection with a consistently high standard of writing. There are no weak links in House of Fear, no stories being held up by their more secure and accomplished neighbours. So, when I talk about the high points in the rest of the review, I’m referring to my own personal taste as a reader.

The collection opens with Lisa Tuttle’s excellent ‘Objects in Dreams may be Closer than they Appear’, which sets up expectations for the rest of the collection. Tuttle’s bittersweet tale of a divorced couple’s return to a house they almost bought at the beginning of their marriage begins with a semi-nostalgia laced with rational reflection, before drawing the reader (as the narrator herself is drawn) into an unsettling, obsessive hunt for something just out of reach. The chilling ending packs a real punch. Tuttle’s story is followed by Steven Volk’s ‘Pied-à-terre’ which is a quite different sort of story with a quite different sort of punch – I’ll admit I welled up a bit when I realized what was happening in Volk’s very moving tale. It is a mark of Volk’s talent as a writer that he was able to handle (avoiding spoilers) such emotional material without sentimentalizing or becoming mawkish.

Of the other stories in the collection, Adam Nevill’s ‘Florrie’ and Jonathan Green’s ‘The Doll’s House’ were particularly favourites, though Rebecca Levene’s ‘The Windmill’ was also fantastic. Nevill’s tale of a young man moving into a house made vacant by the death of its elderly owner was perfectly paced and a deft study in tension-building. This story resonated with me, as, like Nevill’s protagonist, my house previously belonged to an old lady who had lived in it her entire adult life. And, like Nevill’s protagonist, I found that the previous owner’s family had simply abandoned her furniture (and some personal belongings) after the house was sold. I am happy to be able to say that’s where the similarities end, as Nevill’s tale is an off-beat horror which (as good horror should) makes you smile just before it terrifies you.

Green’s story should be given to all aspiring writers trying desperately to come up with the perfect ‘idea’, the plot that is so original it will blow their readers’ minds, because ‘The Doll’s House’ is a beautiful example of why that doesn’t matter. A story of the return of a creepy doll’s house is hardly a mind-blowingly original idea, but Green brings his characters (and the house itself) to life with skill and a light touch. In Green’s hands, the familiarity of the story’s basic premise is transformed into a fresh and compelling piece of writing. And the ending is exquisite (at least, it is for those of us who like our horror shocking).

‘The Windmill’ is one of several stories in the collection that reinterpret the haunted house by widening an understanding of ‘home’, and the places in which we might temporarily reside. Levene’s protagonist is a drug dealer serving a prison sentence. With a limited view from his cell, Lee is able to watch a windmill that he knows from his time outside. Unrepentant, Lee is determined to continue dealing from within the prison, but things don’t work out quite the way he planned. Levene mixes down-to-earth realism with a growing sense of the supernatural to produce a story filled with creeping dread.

One final mention (as I don’t have the space here to go through each story in detail) is Christopher Fowler’s ‘An Injustice’. Fowler’s tale begins with a group of student ghost-hunters – as misguided, opinionated and naïve as that sounds – but evolves into something quite different, and really unexpected. Of all the stories in the book, this is the one that genuinely ‘haunted’ me. I was reading the book one story at a time in between shifts and bands at a music festival, which gave me a great opportunity to compare how long each one lingered in my imagination after I’d finished it. Fowler’s easily won – the final ‘reveal’ just doesn’t go away.

As I said, these stories were particular favourites, but the others stories in the collection are all strong. If I had to make criticisms, I found Christopher Priest’s ‘Widow’s Weeds’ a little disappointing. Priest returns to the figure of the professional magician, so a comparison with The Prestige is inevitable. I didn’t feel ‘Widow’s Weeds’ had the intrigue or narrative power of the earlier novel, and the characterization (even allowing for the restrictions of form) was underdeveloped.

Robert Shearman’s ‘The Dark Space in the House in the House in the Garden at the Centre of the World’ also left me a little underwhelmed. A clever premise – which is almost impossible to sum up without ruining the story – promised to be ‘an unusual story of a house in a garden and how people within that house find out what it is to be human’ (in Oliver’s words). The problem for me was that there was little outside of the premise, and while this was indeed unusual and clever, it wasn’t quite enough to sustain my interest.

Nevertheless, as I said, this is a matter of personal taste. I admit I can be quite traditional in my reading tastes, and usually gravitate towards strong plots and well-developed characterization. On the whole, House of Fear delivered this, as well as a few good doses of horror (of differing types).

So, overall, a resounding recommendation. This is a must-read for horror fans. I would go as far as to say – aside from the collections I have edited, of course – this is my favourite short story anthology of recent years.

For more information about House of Fear, please check out the publishers’ website.

CFP: The Health of the Realm: The Historical Context of Medicine in the Early Middle Ages

IMC Leeds 7-10 July 2014

While interest in medicine and medical texts has been growing in recent years, its historical context has largely been neglected. Illness and treatment do not exist in a vacuum: just as chronic stomach pain finds a place alongside Byzantine diplomacy and the Lombard threat in the letters of Gregory the Great, so the Anglo-Saxon Bald's Leechbook transcribes a remedy sent to a sick King Alfred, and Bede records the plague that brought the monastery of Wearmouth-Jarrow to its knees. Medical texts were the product of the circumstances, anxieties, and philosophies of their times, just as the times were shaped by the health of those who lived them.

This session hopes to explore the historical framework of illness, care, and the transmission of medical knowledge. We are looking for papers on any aspect of early medieval medicine that draws on broader themes, on topics including but not limited to:

- Cultural relations and the transmission of texts
- Trade and the market for materia medica
- The economy of medical care
- Transmission
- Vernacular and Latin sources
- Linguistic development and medical texts
- Leadership and Illness
- Death and illness, 'the Great Levellers'
- Soul, body, and the Church

Please send an abstract of no more than 300 words to Christine Voth by September 10, 2013

CFP: Sessions at Kalamazoo 2014

The 49th International Congress on Medieval Studies, Western Michigan University, May 8-11, 2014

Please note: these CFPs are for different sessions at Congress. If you are intending to submit to an abstract, please pay attention to the contact details for that session and direct your emails to the correct person.

CFP: New Readings on Women in Old English Literature Revisited (A Roundtable)

It has been over twenty years since the publication of New Readings on Women in Old English Literature, edited by Helen Damico and Alexandra Hennessey Olsen (Indiana University Press 1990). That text was a landmark, the first to collect scholarship examining Old English texts, both canonical and those less frequently considered, from a feminist perspective. Many of the essays included are still valuable, but it is time for an updating of this important text. Much valuable work has been accomplished in the years since its publication, and more remains to be done. This session is a roundtable in which participants will discuss the state of scholarship that considers Anglo-Saxon texts from a feminist perspective, whatever that might mean today, and what direction an updating of the original volume might take. Helen Damico has agreed to serve as a respondent. This special session is a preliminary part of a project that looks towards producing a new volume of essays updating the original.

Please contact Yvette Kisor by September 15, 2013. Along with your proposal, please include a completed Participant Information Form, which is available on the ICMS website.

CFP: Give and Take: Exchange in Early Medieval English, Norse, and Celtic Literature

Gift-theory and theories of exchange continue to grant interesting insights into medieval literature, and medievalists have important perspectives to contribute to the body of theoretical scholarship on exchange. This session seeks papers exploring concepts of exchange in early medieval Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Celtic literatures and is especially interested in papers that apply gift-theory beyond the simple exchange of gift-items. This means, for instance, considering exchange more broadly (exchanged violence, exchange between generations, exchange between the spiritual and temporal realms, symbolic exchange, etc.), or thinking through conceptual problems within gift-theory addressed by medieval sources: for example, how is meaning negotiated and guaranteed through exchange? Where are the lines are between gift, loan, and purchase? How does the gift reveal or hide intention? How is the extent of selflessness or self-interest determined or judged? How does the gift function as a test or revelation of character? What is the relationship between a thing given and its meaning?

250-300-word abstracts should be sent to Stephanie Clark by September 15. Along with your proposal, please include a completed Participant Information Form, which is available on the ICMS website. Unless requested otherwise, proposals not used in this session will be forwarded on to the Congress committee for consideration for general sessions.

CFP: Single-Manuscript Texts: the Challenges and Opportunities of Uniqueness

For many theories of textual criticism, single-manuscript texts are a problem and anomaly, yet many of the most important works of medieval literature are known from single manuscripts. Within English literature alone, Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, many of the lyrics in Harley 2253, and scores of other texts are unique. Moreover, medieval readers had to cope with lone texts at least as often as do modern scholars. The behavior of scribes, annotators, and translators working from damaged or otherwise problematic exemplars makes clear that in the Middle Ages, people often encountered texts that they could never expect to compare with others. The experience of uniqueness, then, was in fact a normal aspect of medieval book culture. But once we have stopped seeing single-manuscript texts as anomalies, how shall we proceed? Does uniqueness demand its own editorial practice? How should we read books that have no parallels?

With such questions in mind, we hope to bring together scholars working on a range of national languages and time periods to discuss the principles and methods guiding our study of single-manuscript texts, with the goal of understanding how unique manuscripts can be understood within medieval book culture and modern critical practice.

Abstracts and Participant Information Forms should be sent to Arthur W. Bahr.

Queries may also be directed to Emily Thornbury.

CFP: Strange Letters: Alphabets in Medieval Manuscripts

The letter, as most medieval grammatical texts will tell you, is the fundamental unit of language; if you want to know a language, you must know its letters. Throughout much of the western middle ages, knowledge of languages was primarily restricted to Latin and various European vernaculars, all of which were written with the Roman alphabet. Nevertheless, medieval scholars were well aware of other alphabets, and even knew the rudimentary connections among say the Roman, Greek, and Hebrew alphabets. Despite the general inability to interact with these and other languages in a sustained way, medieval scribes exhibit a fascination with a variety of non-Roman alphabets: Greek, and Hebrew, of course, but also Runes, Coptic, Arabic, and invented alphabets like that attributed to Aethicus Ister.

This session looks to bring together scholars working on these alphabets and those with interest in the topic to share each others' insights. Potential topics include but are not limited to:
- Alphabet Collections
- Ciphers and Codes
- Alphabetic/acrostic poetry
- The use of foreign - and pseudo - scripts in medieval art
- The use of letters in charms and magic
- Foreign marginalia
- Manuscript runes

Please send any queries as well as abstracts of no more than 250 words together with a completed Participation Form to session organizer Damian Fleming by September 15, 2013. Please include your name, title, and affiliation on the abstract. Abstracts not accepted for this session will be forwarded to the Congress committee which will consider the paper for inclusion in a general session.

Another Guest Post from a Non-Existent Blogger

A while ago I wrote a blog post about some underhand marketing techniques practised by snakeoil salesmen SEO companies. Specifically I wrote about ‘guest blogging services’, where a company makes a fake persona and offers poorly written guest posts to unsuspecting bloggers (posts that will invariably include backlinks to whichever website had paid for this particular brand of snakeoil optimization).

A couple of funny things happened as a result of this post. Firstly, I didn’t get any more unsolicited emails from ‘guest bloggers’. Secondly (and this might account for the first thing), my blog stats increased with a massive number of hits coming from the search ‘Guest bloggers wanted’. I assume that guest blogging services were carrying out these searches, looking for dupes to post their covert advertisements, but that they were scared off by the content of the post.

Ironically, this has had a great effect on my page rankings – so thank you SEO companies!

But I was starting to miss my fake little correspondents… there’s only so many times you can out ‘Nancy Parker’ on other blogs before it becomes boring. Sigh.

Fortunately, I’d misjudged these fine purveyors of snakeoil sustainable natural link profiles. Not all of them were bright enough to read my post – or, apparently, the second part of the title. And so, I was contacted last week by ‘joshua william’, who had read my blog thoroughly and thought he had an article that would really fit with my other content and appeal to my readers.

The title of this post?

Tips for Making Your Food Last Longer in the Refrigerator

The post itself is mind-numbingly asinine. It includes such vapid gems as:

When storing delicate herbs like basil, chives, cilantro and parsley in the refrigerator, make sure they are covered in plastic in order to get the best and longest life from them.

And:

One of the biggest problems with cheese storage is that it dries out. By rubbing and with a light coat of butter, you can extend the life of your cheese in the refrigerator.

A Google search of some of the terms also reveals that the text has been used in almost the exact same form on other blogs, so it’s not even original banality. To top it all off, the post included an image of a refrigerator to be included, which had been lifted (without any credit or acknowledgement or shame) from a site called Fashion Bloggers.

So who on earth would send me such a bizarrely incongruous post? (NB: In case you've never read my blog before, I mostly post links to academic conferences, book reviews and random musings/rants about popular culture. Over half of my posts are, in one way or another, related to werewolves.)

The author, according to the piece itself, is Vince Bradley. Here’s Vince’s bio (cheeky embedded hyperlink removed, of course):

Vince Bradley is a kitchen appliance technician. He is specializing in stove and refrigerator repair. He likes to write and give advise about how to maintain kitchen appliance in good condition and also how to repair a broken home appliance. He is works for ********** [On reflection, I've decided not to publish the name of this company. They look legit and their only mistake was to trust a dodgy SEO company. I don't want this post to reflect in any way on their business practices.]

I don’t know anything about **********, but from looking at their website and their Twitter feed, I have no doubt that they are a real company. Given what they say about their history and their interactions with customers on social media, I believe they are legitimate and reputable.

But Vince Bradley isn’t. He doesn’t work for ********** – in fact, he doesn’t exist. At some point over the past year, ********** paid to have a new website built and made the mistake of believing they needed snakeoil SEO. Their new website features a fancy new blog feature, which is filled with posts written by… you guessed it… ‘Vince Bradley’. The posts on their site are almost word for word copies of the substandard copy being shilled around as ‘guest blog posts’.

Here’s Vince’s profile pic on the ********** blog:

I couldn’t find any reference to Vince anywhere else on the site, or, indeed, anywhere else on the web (except for an unpopulated and unused Google+ profile containing the same profile picture). A reverse image search threw up a few more pictures though.

Here’s Vince holding a clipboard:

Here’s Vince pointing cheerfully at something:

That’s right, ‘Vince Bradley’ is an image taken from the iStockphotos ‘Serviceman’ series.

I was planning on ending this post here, but there’s an odd little postscript. During my initial communication with ‘joshua william’ (the correspondent who sent me the guest post in the first place), I read his emails on my phone. I assumed (and, I believe, rightly) that ‘joshua william’ was an equally fake persona created by the SEO company.

When I opened his email on my webmail, rather than on my phone app, it turns out ‘joshua william’ also has a Google+ profile. Like Vince’s, joshua’s profile is inactive and empty. But it does have a profile picture:

I do love reverse image searches, so I was curious to know where joshua got his face from. It turns out this was a more direct piece of ‘face theft’, as this image is not taken from a stock photo site, but from an individual’s Twitter account.

The SEO company has lifted an image of Benjamin Mueller, an intern and journalist at the LA Times. I can’t see any connection between Mr Mueller and a dodgy SEO company, so I think this is simply a case of an image being used without permission.

A final little detail though… in checking out Benjamin Mueller’s identity and online profile, I came across a number of articles he’s written for the LA Times. One piece in particular caught my eye: a story from June this year about a California court’s ruling that Pelican Bay State Prison must return a confiscated novel to an inmate. The novel, The Silver Crown by Mathilde Madden, was deemed by guards to be obscenity and ‘liable to cause violence’ and so was removed from him. As was revealed in Mueller’s article, The Silver Crown is a werewolf erotica novel; however, the court ruled that despite the ‘less than Shakespearean’ characters, Madden’s book does possess ‘serious literary value’ and so cannot legally be labelled obscene.

Mueller’s article is a wry, sometimes tongue-in-cheek, look at the court’s ruling and the original confiscation of the ‘furry ménage à trois’, and the implications of confiscating reading material that (while not obscene) contains depictions of sex. I’m glad I found this story, as I hadn’t come across it when it was published in June. And I guess I wouldn’t have found it at all without the nefarious tactics of ‘joshua william’ and his snakeoil snakeoil peddling ilk.

So, in the end, everything eventually came back to werewolves again. There’s a nice lycanthropic inevitability in that.