Contrariwise

Saturday began at breakfast with Jo Walton, Ada Palmer, and Cenk Gökce (they saw me in the endless queue, and beckoned).  Afterward, braced with oatmeal, I plunged into the sea of panels again with 200 Years of Frankenstein (Don D’Ammassa, Theodora Goss (leader), Jack Haringa, Kathryn Morrow, Faye Ringel). That was an exemplary panel:   an excellent conversation, earthed in deep reading, crackling with intelligence.  That's why I go to cons.

And at last, I had a panel myself!  Sorting Taxonomies (John Benson, Greer Gilman, Kate Nepveu (leader), Peter Straub, Jacob Weisman). Introducing himself, Peter Straub dumbfounded me by saying that, oh, by the way this person to his left had been the best Readercon guest of honor ever.  Me?  Amongst this dazzling constellation?  Good heavens, no.

Here’s what I wrote for my panel audition:

“I used to make rainbows of colored pencils (and before that crayons) and wonder: should I sort by hue? value? intensity? You could sort books from infrared SF to ultraviolet fantasy; from dark to light; from extravagant to understated. What draws me in, across genres, is voice. I like small scale, minute focus, oddity, the turning year, the comic.”

Maybe one day we could order books by Pantone number.

We were asked what we look for in fiction.  I said my Jane Eyre is not at all about Mr. Rochester:   what I turn to and reread is the description of the watercolors.  That’s often what I’m looking for in books:  that drowned arm with the bracelet; that vision of the evening star.  This desire, I suppose, is somewhat like C. S. Lewis’s Joy, though it’s not Sehnsucht, not longing for a paradise lost.  It’s a little like the classic sense of wonder, but intimate rather than sublime.  It’s—no, not an orrery, not a quite a toy.  It’s finding the true starry sky in a box in a drawer in a forgotten room.

Of course, sometimes I just want a happy ending or miserable orphans or fabulous snark.  Or the lamentable comedy of Pyramus and Thisbe:  a genre I call Why must the show go on?

Onward.

Crowded in at the back of a small room to hear Engineering in Fantasy (Scott Andrews, Richard Butner, John Chu, Ken Liu, Fran Wilde(leader), I couldn’t see who said “OSHA goes to Moria…” (Wilde?), but I think it was Chu or Liu who spoke of the bowman’s warped skeleton:  the living body engineered by doing for the task it does.

The next choice was just awful:  John Crowley’s reading or David Hartwell’s memorial.   Damn.  Dithering between doorways in the hall, I saw Crowley, who (with his usual modesty) said I should pay my respects to Hartwell.  I obeyed.

David was a gentleman and a scholar, and a great raconteur, the John Aubrey of our field.  His ties should be in the Smithsonian, suspended in a zone of light.  As it happens, he never edited me, but he did once nominate Moonwise as the single novel most emblematic of Readercon.  Wow.  The panelists praised Hartwell as a champion of writers he believed in.  There were some excellent (and funny) stories told of his generosity and percipience and outrageous fashion sense.  What I remember best is Suzy Charnas coming up and scratching her back against the railing of the ramp, like a cart horse.  She told how Hartwell had accepted  Motherlines when no one else would; and had pushed her to an ending she’d refused to write, that was (she realized) the true one.  Times how many hundred books?  That’s a legacy.

So I was very glad I heard that.  And still sorry that I missed The Chemical Wedding.  I just hope they get round to posting it.

At that point, I kept running into people I wanted to talk to, and went into hallway bottleneck mode, though I did catch the Tim Powers interview, which made me want to read him.  (I confess I haven't.)  I liked his understatedness.  And I like historical puzzlements and paradoxes.

rushthatspeaks knows this fabulous weird Chinese restaurant in Quincy, so we went there with sovay and Yoon Ha Lee.  Taipei does fiery wonders with shellfish, but what I couldn’t stop eating was a dish called "Sweet Corn w. Salty Egg Yok," which turned out to be individually deep-fried kernels:  unpopcorns.   Salt, fat, sweet, and crunch—all the food groups but chocolate.  The problem there was conversation, as the place reverberates like a kettledrum.  It was like trying to eat in Archer’s Goon.

A few steps away from the uproar is an elegant all-white and snow-silent Japanese dessert place.  Yin and yang.  They do strange authentic shimmery puddings.

Back at Castle Greyskull, there was negothick tickling the ivories for C. S. E. Cooney, all in mermaid green and likewise shimmery, singing fiery fox songs.

After that, it was talk talk talk.

I took my Sunday-morning tea in the green room with Kathleen Jennings, who was sketching in a most exquisite little emblem book, full of delicate and lively thumbnail drawings:  each no bigger than a stamp, and each a story.  Stamps for letters delivered by enchanted cranes.  She told me she’s doing a degree in Australian Gothic, art and literature.  Cool!  I beckoned negothick over, and we talked about Picnic at Hanging Rock, among other things.

I still had two panels left to go.  Coraggio!

New Worlds for Old (Susan Jane Bigelow, Greer Gilman, Theodora Goss, Lauren Roy, Ann Tonsor Zeddies). I know what I told them I was going to say:

“Imagined worlds reflect, retract, dissolve, recrystallize our own. But even what we call mimetic art will always recreate the world it claims to merely represent: the author's mind is a filter. Telling is a complex web of choices. I repeat the First Law of Fiction: there is no there there. Only language.”

I just can’t remember what we said.  I hope some one will remind me, as I thought it went rather well.

On my way to the Shirley Jackson awards, I met Delany in the lobby, waiting for his ride, and we had a long, sometimes rather melancholy, talk on time and memory and writing.  We grow old.   I said I hoped I wasn’t fangirling him. “No,” he said, “I’m fanboying you.”  I will wear a few things that he said at my heart’s core.

Afterward, I rejoiced to hear that Elizabeth Hand and Gemma Files had both won Shirley Jacksons.  Yes!  Thank heavens, the ceremony was recorded, so I could punch the air.

Every year, the quietly admirable Ellen Brody reads from the works of the memorial GOH.  This year, she did a lovely job with the hilarious “The Girl Jones.”

One last round of the book room, and farewell, world's bliss.

Kathleen Jennings read from her dissertation-in-progress, an illustrated Australian Gothic novella called “Flyaway.”  Fabulous!  The sheer placeness of the story made me think of Alan Garner, but funny:  a young girl, faced with a liminal silver-gold creature, a sort of primordial wolf-dingo, says tremulously:  “Good boy.”

Next I heard the last half of the Tanith Lee retrospective (Mike Allen, Gemma Files, Lila Garrott, Theodora Goss (leader), Sonya Taaffe.) By then it had become a lamentation on sheer waste, on a writer that dropped blood-red mulberries all over the ungrateful tarmac of the world.

In the very last hour, came Ace, Aro, and Age (F. Brett Cox, Greer Gilman, Keffy Kehrli, Sonya Taaffe, Jo Walton). There were only four panelists at first, all good people to have this conversation with:  so I joined them.  It’s a pity no one had signed up beforehand as moderator; though Jo did a fine job as pick-up, she hadn’t had the chance to prepare.  Nonetheless, some thoughtful and provocative things got said.  But only in the closing minutes did Sonya burst into an inspired rant on the differing virginities of  Athena and Artemis.  I wish we’d begun there!

rushthatspeaks gave me a lift home, and along the way said I’d like Supersizers, which I’m thoroughly enjoying.  So there!

Nine