Okay. Want to wrap this up and move on. Just a quick aside. If you're going to take the steps down to Tower Beach, give yourself more than 15 minutes to climb back up them. Seriously.
Started last day of Slayage with Keynote 3, Tamy Burnett. "I've Got These Evil Hand Issues": Amputation, Identity & Agency in Angel. Was a very interesting exploration, especially of the characters of Lindsey and Spike and how they differed in dealing with losing a limb/s, how a difference between them in levels of accepting responsibility and agency allowed Spike to shift from a villain to a champion while Lindsey could not follow suit. A lot of interesting ideas that I'm barely touching upon. And the author is working with others on a book to explore some of them more fully. I look forward to that.
My choice of morning panel turned out to be a nice one in terms of continuing on a theme. The Body and Sex in the Whedonverses. Bronwen Calvert talked about body swapping and links between identity and the body. Viv Burr spoke about the connection between imagery of torture, crucifixion and sex in Buffy and in general with reference to Sartre's ideas of subject/object. Lewis Call gave a great paper on "That Weird, Unbearable Delight": Representations of Alternative Sexualities in Joss Whedon's Astonishing X-Men. He talked about Kitty/Rasputin, Emma/Scott, and McCoy/Brand especially. Talking about small m minority sexualities and how they're given positive expression in these relationships. Really fascinating stuff. It was a fun panel.
Took the UBC film tour at lunch with Ian Klein, Nikki Stafford, Rhonda Wilcox, Dale Koontz, Ensley Guffey, Nancy Holder and Alysa Hornick. Then skipped the WSA meeting to eat lunch at a burger joint on campus. Their sweet potato fries had cajun seasoning. Perfect.
Afternoon. Made the hard decision to not watch Natstev present her Firefly paper because I really wanted to hear Stacey Abbott talk about Tim Minear. Was a good panel. I tweeted about it and, since she used Minear's twitter name in the title, he saw the tweet and responded to it. That was fun. And actually Mo Tancharoen tweeted at a couple of us about how Slayage went, so of course now I'm totally famous. Hobnobbing with the rich and powerful and all. Why am I talking to you people?
Back to reality. Also heard a talk by Tamara Wilson comparing and contrasting OMWF and Milton's Comus. Since I don't know Comus, it was hard to keep up, but a very interesting piece. And presenter made some witty jokes throughout as well. Abbott is one of a few people that after the fact expressed concern about live tweeting of paper presentations, so I won't go into detail here about her talk on Minear. I'm sure it will all come out in published form soon, hopefully in another wonderful book since I so enjoyed her previous ones.
Then we finished up with a quick talk with all the attending Whedon bookers. They talked about the books they have out and some that will be coming up that I can't wait to read. There will be a Joss Whedon Reader, a book on Fan Phenomena & Buffy, a book on TV Horrors, Buffy the Making of a Slayer retrospective, the Burnett book currently called something like Blood, Body & Soul I mentioned earlier and possibly a new edition of Conversations with new Joss interviews. Much to look forward to.
And that's it. I was at a loss of what to do now that everything was over, so I just lingered. That worked out well because everyone left trouped over to a bus and went to an Indian restaurant in town for dinner. I sat with Elizabeth Rambo (who is as cool in person as she is on twitter) and Tamy Burnett and Ami Comeford, editors of the Literary Angel. That was great. I really got to meet a lot of scholars whose work I admired, who turned out to also be very nice, cool people.
And that was that.
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