Yesterday I gave a talk at the English Department in Humanities, UPR RP, about David Bowie’s character Jareth in Labyrinth.
I won’t go too much into it right now (as I intend to make a whole post of out it), but wanting to share that somewhat informal paper led me to want to reminisce about Alice. As I was writing about the film’s appeal to a certain group of people, I couldn’t help thinking about the many similar elements between the film and the Alice stories.
In September (2015) I was part of a panel at the Alice Through the Ages conferences in Homerton College, the college of education at the University of Cambridge. Last summer I only mentioned the possibility in passing, as I was unsure about whether or not I would be able to go, and I really, really wanted to… The funny thing is, I wrote my last post from Cambridge when they uploaded the Utopística video interview and I didn’t even mention it because I was so enthralled.
This was 6 months ago, and I still get excited when I talk about it. I met so many wonderful (of course), brilliant people, a handful I am now fortunate to call friends. Homerton was the most appropriate of places, a beautiful garden with fragrant flowers in bloom. I wanted to attend every conference (as many of us did), but there were too many going on at the same time. In short, it was all perfect and one of the happiest times of my life.
I am about to post an excerpt from the actual paper. Having mentioned this event before, I felt an update on what happened was owed to the imaginary followed of this blog. I’ll exhaust anyone who cares to listen when they ask, I don’t intend to do it all over again to you, imaginary readers. Lots of things happened, all great, and the panels were fascinating. We all hope for an anthology with our essays, because having met, we are so curious to read the papers we missed. So here’s a gallery in place of an enthusiastic re-telling. I’ve left out the ones with other humans in them (except for Mary Galbraith as The Duchess in the mirror… oh, and that little girl), because I didn’t ask for permission to post them outside of social media, which is semi-private.
I said I wasn’t going to, but I have to share one funny story. In the elevator to our rooms, I complimented a very friendly lady’s violet curls, and we giggled. What I didn’t know at the moment was that she was Karen Coats, whom I used in my research and quoted in my presentation (click the image on the left). A fellow speaker in my panel introduced us, he was friends with her and warned me she would be there, which increased my irrational anxiety. She hadn’t arrived then, though, but it still made me very nervous. I got to spend time with her the day after the hair incident, along with a few other people I ended up loving on a human level, besides the intellectual admiration/fandom. This was but one of the many, many highlights.
This post is a sort of colorful introduction for the next, which was what I thought I was writing when I started. “A brief introduction,” I thought, “I’ll confirm that I did get to go and I’ll post an excerpt, done.” I had been meaning to do this earlier… but I rarely have a moment to even wash my hair lately (yes, since September – I do wash my hair, though – which is why I don’t write blog posts) so I’m taking advantage of tonight (hi, Santurce es Ley) to post some content before it’s already been a year since. #adjunctlife
