downunderdeb

A journal entry - two days in a row, can only mean teenager back to school and me with unlimited access to computer (well at least between 8:30am and 3:30pm).

E-mailed lecturer yesterday to see if I could get a head start on the subject (brown-noser or what) and she said that one of the things we will be looking at is how the Fair Trade agreement between Australia and the United States will affect our cultural exchange. I know a lot of people in the film industry are concerned about the loss of our 'voice', and a return to the bad old days of the 1950s and 1960s when hardly an Australian voice was heard, and even if you were Australian you had to affect a weird upper class Pommy accent to be employed on screen or radio. Know little about the Trade agreement myself, beyond my usual cynicism of anything that little Johnny Howard wants, so it will be interesting to see what I can dig up as I research this week.

Probably will spend afternoon playing with the trial version of Photoshop I downloaded yesterday (points proudly at icon I made - yeah, yeah it's not great, but hey points for effort).

Under the cut is the story of "how I met Rhonda Wilcox and David Lavery" just for kassto and not of interest to anyone else probably, so hence the cut:

Back in 2000 I think it was I wrote an essay about Buffy for uni, and used an article by Rhonda Wilcox as a reference.  A few weeks after that I was reading an article in the Guardian newspaper on Buffy.  Certain aspects of this article resonated, and I kept getting the feeling I had read it before.  So I started checking through my box of Buffy articles, came across Rhonda’s article and did a quick comparison.  The Guardian journalist used almost direct quotes from Rhonda’s article (no referencing of course), and was inaccurate in several details (like the fact that Faith was supposedly dead, not just in gaol).  Anyway I got all irate, raving on about shoddy journalists, someone should let Rhonda know etc etc, when my husband said why don’t you.  So I did - went to my computer, put in her name, and up came her e-mail address.  So I sent her a quick e-mail letting her know about the article, she replied (thanked me, was busy, would read article soon).  A few days later she really replied, after having read the full article, then sending a threatening letter to the Guardian, and finally letting me know.  In gratitude she sent me a copy of “Fighting the Forces” after it was published for, as she wrote in the front of the book, ‘fighting the forces of plagiarism’.  We continued a casual e-mail relationship after that, bemoaning the loss of metaphors in Season 6, replaced by ‘after-school special’ morality, among other things.  Last year she and David Lavery were invited to attend an international Buffy symposium at the University of South Australia, and she contacted me to see whether we could meet up, which we did.  Had a chance to talk to her for an hour or so, at a night-time social function before she had to move on to other things.  Surprisingly we talked mainly about Buffy.  It was great to finally meet her face-to-face, even though I felt awkward and a little hesitant about offering my undergraduate views of Buffy.  She and David are like the grandmother and grandfather of Buffy academics, so I felt I was floundering a little.  Got a chance to meet David the next day, purely by chance.  They were heading to an event in Melbourne, and their plane had been delayed at the airport, and I caught up with them there, waiting for my plane back to Sydney.  David was all a-flutter because he had just received an e-mail containing a picture of the promotional poster for S5 Angel (the one with the two fang boys looking lovely, and which I sadly have to say, graces my study wall - right next to a great black and white photo of the cast of Star Trek: The Next Generation - putting the fan back into fanatic).  Anyway that’s my story of meeting Rhonda and David.  Still hear from Rhonda occasionally - we last corresponded about a liking of the Thomas Covenant Chronicles by Stephen Donaldson, and I specifically mentioned my shock at the rape early in the book.  She suggested we should talk about that, and other rapes/attempted rapes that have been represented in the fantasy genre ::cough:Season6:cough:: but that opportunity hasn’t arisen so far.