Dear Blog,

I’m in bed with my second cold of the semester, but since I am also on STRIKE (http://www.ucu.org.uk/index.cfm?articleid=581) I have decided to write a blog post that isn’t about work (well, not directly at least).

Some time ago now, early in November, I went to a Close Up event in Manchester, where the DJ Dave Haslem interviewed novelist Jeffrey Eugenides. It was a wonderful event. I loved Middlesex and Eugenides’s new novel The Marriage Plot is calling out from my shelf to be read (it will have to wait until the Christmas holidays unfortunately). It sounded excellent from the reading that Eugenides gave at the event, with particular interest for English folk. Part of the plot involves a character’s struggle with the ideas in Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse in her University semiotics class.

A friend recently alerted me to a number of Frankenstein-related projects mentioned in a summer edition of Empire film magazine, which show that the ideas of the novel at least are still alive in the popular imagination. There is speculation that the SF director Shawn Levy may be planning something and if so, according to Empire, this film would join at least five other projects in various stages of planning! These include ‘Universal’s long-planned Guillermo del Toro pic […], Stuart Beattie’s I, Frankenstein, Peter Ackroyd adaptation The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein at Ghost House Pictures, Summit’s This Dark Endeavour [and] Tim Burton’s animated Frankenweenie’ (http://www.empireonline.com/news/story.asp?NID=31870). The range of interest is brilliant I think.

I read today that there’s a new exhibition in Paris, curated by ex-footballer Lillian Thuram, called Human Zoo: The Invention of the Savage, which looks at the global phenomenon (only ended in 1958!) of displaying human ‘exhibits’, including the story of the famous nineteenth-century Saartjie Baartman, a Khoikoi woman from South Africa, who was displayed as the ‘Hottentot Venus: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/nov/29/huam-zoo-paris-exhibition. The idea of this now is abhorrent; Thuram is adamant that these ‘freak shows’ explain the fear of ‘the other’ that continues to persist today.

To end with, I do hope that you are all supporting the strike action. It’s for a very important cause: public sector pensions are being dismantled before our very eyes.

Best,

Sharon