Conference and Beachcombing

[lavendertook]

I'm going to the International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts in Orlando tomorrow to deliver a Tolkien paper on Friday--wish me luck! I've been majorly stressed out the last two weeks--Raceail09 absorbed so much of my energy and emotional life these past 2 months, as with so many of us, and that put me behind in getting my paper done, but I finished it this weekend and that has been a load of stress off. And luckily nothing overly stressful came up at work the past few weeks. Now I'm stressing over packing and have some social anxiety over the conference, but I should have internet access, so I will be somewhat around, though I'll be more behind in replying. So I'm sorry I haven't been keeping up with commenting. There's also some things that have been bothering me that I've been wanting to post about, but I need to create some filters and I just haven't been able to find the time.

I'm pleased with my pregnant transgendered hobbit paper! It's much tighter than the article length paper I wrote a few years ago (before I even found slash fandom!). All those years in grad school, so I can say "I love hobbits and here's why" in theoretically enhanced language. Hey, it's a stupid life, but someone has to live it. I'll put the paper up in a locked entry later if you're interested--so many posts I want to do and never get to doing! I want to revise the article length paper when I get back--I've refigured race as gender in the paper which is problematic, and I need to go back in and work that through now that I've got more ideas on how to tackle it. Anyway, making sure I submit it to Mythlore, as Verlyn told me to do years ago, is on top of my to do list for this summer.

I'm looking forward to seeing ithiliana and aprilkat again, and meeting a couple of other Tolkien fan LJers, and meeting esmeraldus_neo, hopefully it will be OK for me to talk with supergee, and hopefully I'll get to see a couple other old friends and acquaintances.

Then I'm going to rent a car and drive down to Sanibel Island for a couple of days to collect tiny beautiful shells and walk on the beach. I'm looking forward to listening to a cd jan_u_wine sent me on the way down. And of course there will be photo shoots of hobbit dolls on the beach for upcoming storylines. The only bad thing about traveling is not being able to take my kitties with me. OK, back to figuring out what to wear and packing.

Comments

[mechtild.livejournal.com]

Good luck at the conference, Lavender, and I hope you manage to squeeze in a little recreation. Is Sanibel Island nice? I hadn't heard of it before so I looked it up just now. The pictures show a tropical place with very, very white sand.

[lavendertook.livejournal.com]

Thank you! There was nowhere really to go at the conference, being by the Orlando airport, but I did get to spend some good quality time with ithiliana and aprilkat relaxing, so that made it a great conference. And there was a fabulous Tolkien reading one night. Sanibel is my Tol Eressea. As far as I've been able to find, it may be the best place in the world for collecting shells on the beach due to the island's orientation. Its sands are very white in places, though more mixed with grey than some other beaches along that coastline. I'll be posting pics soon.

[mechtild.livejournal.com]

What kind of a reading was it? A dramatic reading or something informal with fans gathering round and taking turns passing a book? Sanibel sounds wonderful.

I hope you post pics of that, for sure! It's so dismal and wintry still here (just had an ice storm, which is melting along with the last of the snow, hopefully completely).

[lavendertook.livejournal.com]

Just posted on your LJ about read_lotr_aloud. If my earphones work with this work computer, I'll listen to some of the others at lunch today. I got to listen to Jan's cd reading Frodo and Sam poems on the Causeway bridge out to the island--it was perfect--her reading voice is such a dulcet setting for her verses.

Poor you. *hugs* It's rainy and 30 degrees cooler here than what it was in Florida--and the green is so slow in coming--I want to be back among the palms! I need the green far more than I need the warmth. I'll try to get something up tonight.

[mechtild.livejournal.com]

She's good reading Roverandom, too. I don't even like Roverandom but she made it charming to me.

[lavendertook.livejournal.com]

Same here--she made the piece for me. Every child should have a copy of Jan's reading of it.

[lavendertook.livejournal.com]

What kind of a reading was it? A dramatic reading or something informal with fans gathering round and taking turns passing a book?

I'm sorry, mechtild, I think I got my wires crossed on readings here with the one we're doing on LJ.

The reading at the conference was from an adaptation written up by Elizabeth Whittingham--a prof at SUNY who has a book on Tolkien's mythology--and she apparently does this every year. The scene she adapted for us and put into parts this year was when Aragorn, Gandalf, Theoden, Legolas, Gimli, and Eomer ride to Isengard after the sacking and meet Pippin and Merry, and then meet Treebeard, Grima, and Saruman and then parley with Saruman. There's also narrator parts.

We all sat around a table and read. There were around 15 of us. there were also a few people who sat apart and listened to us. Merry's, Pippin's, and the narrator's parts were divied up between a couple of different readers since they were longer parts. I was assigned Legolas's part to read. Our Saruman was truly fabulous. I'm really curious to see the other parts she's adapted for past readings now.

[mechtild.livejournal.com]

What a cool thing for her to do, adapting the book for dramatic reading. Maybe eventually there'll be a new version like the one for the BBC in the 80's evolving out of this?

As for the "read lotr aloud" thing, it never sank in for me until someone explained it (Shirebound?) that it's an online group that somehow records their readings and then links them to something so they can be listened to on LJ. I thought it was a club, like the TS, that got together and did a reading, but a real get-together, not a virtual one.