Scintillation ...

... is a lovely little convention in Montreal's Chinatown, the successor to Jo Walton's Farthing Party.  The hotel has a pagoda on the roof and a labyrinth of koi ponds in the lobby, and its sidestreet is wall-to-wall great Chinese restaurants (with a scattering of Japanese) at startlingly low prices.

On Thursday night, I was in a mass reading at the Argo, Montreal's oldest (50+ years) Anglophone bookshop, which had been getting sad and shabby, and was bought by a couple of queer young SF devoté(e)s.  Long narrow hole-in-the-wall, packed from end to end with a listening audience.  The event was bracketed by Breton crepes beforehand and spectacular chocolate confections afterward at Juliette et Chocolat:  the S'mores offering came with an inverted brandy glass full of woodsmoke. 

On Friday, there was great dim sum (Kam Fung has started doing those wonderful sweet buns with molten egg yolk inside), followed by division into Expotitions.  I'd already done the botanical gardens, and the art and natural history museums (all highly recommended), and my palate is too unrarefied for an afternoon of serious tea tasting (white, green, and Pu Erh), so I went to the Jean-Talon market, and marvelled at the perfect fruits and vegetables, tasted the exquisite nibbles.

My panels were fabulous!  Folklore, landscape, and linguistics—what more could I want?  I even went into full vatic Nine mode, talking of the Cloudwood.  Uniformly splendid panelists throughout the con:  old greats and up-and-comers like Leah Bobet, and Tamara Vardomskaya, and a new guy named William Alexander.  The Ask a Scientist panel was brilliant and hilarious, and included both stunningly cutting-edge work, and a shoo-in for the IgNobels:  the marine biologist who's been making transparent labyrinthine models of dolphin vaginas and persuading reluctant guy dolphins to mate with them.  Of course, the fertility of dwindling species is a crucial topic, but what's fascinating is the cetacean trick of twisting in the water as a form of birth control.  Jonathan Crowe gave a great paper on the history of the epic fantasy map.  Su Sokol interviewed Rosemary Kirstein, and Marissa Lingen interviewed Sherwood Smith.  rushthatspeaks   had been going to interview me, and I am very sad they couldn't.  Next year, we hope.  Everyone missed them, and hopes they're doing better.  Instead, I did a reading of Little Kingdom (my play about Ben Jonson and Dame Ethel Smyth on the moon) with Emmet O'Brien—an excellent cold reader of blank verse—doing Ben.  He said it reminded him of The Good Place, which I take is high praise.

Very fine leafage in Vermont, especially on the way back.  Not a breathtaking year, but a nice performance, with everything exactly in balance.  There was just enough green left—say, a quarter--to make the turned leaves vibrant, yet almost no trees had gone over entirely.  No sad brown patches or bare limbs.  A white warp of birch trees.  Woods wading in sumac, to the knee in blood.

Nine