On air

Hey, I managed to get to virtual Arisia and appear, juggling Zoom and Discord on my tiny phone screen.  Eyestrain, but no disasters.

Obviously, we all sadly missed live meetings with friends, the hallways, the Green Room, the dealers, and Art Show.  On the bright side, I didn't have to take the T, and could hang around in my slippers, drinking tea.  I confess that after all this confinement, I really enjoyed seeing other people's spaces.  All those bookshelves not my own.

All praise to Programming!  There were some terrific sessions.  sovay   was reliably fabulous on panels ("The Monomyth Myth" and "Leadership in Science Fiction and Fantasy" were especially fine), and in song circles (ballads and chanteys).  Her readings from IgNobel-winning papers were the very sole of wit; and she, Ruthanna Emrys and Gillian Daniels read from some haunting tales.  "The Boatman's Cure" is fine-grained as flint, as sharp.  There are fossils in it.

Andrea Hairston and Vandana Singh are reliably excellent, and it was an unusual pleasure to hear from the Antipodes:  I got to do a panel with Gillian Pollack, sitting 16 hours closer to the end of this administration, on a bright midsummer afternoon.

My part in "Traditional Ballad Bingo"  was modest:  I was charged with finding the valuable virtual prizes, and was inspired to raid the MMA for trophies.

Late Saturday evening, I did "Through the Door: The Appeal of Portal Stories" with Kathryn Sullivan, M. Dalto, and Gillian Pollack (sadly, Genevieve Iseult Eldredge couldn't make it).

Here's the pitch I wrote for it: 

"Many of us begin with Alice. There the longing for the wonders of another world—just down the rabbit hole, just through the looking glass—is offset by the terrors: balanced, like the face/vase paradox, figure and ground. Which way am I going anyway? How far do I want to be lost? Other children start with Narnia or Neverland, which add to the wonders and terrors, seductions and punishments: Pan entices; Susan is disbarred. You lose a world by growing up. ('Leave off at seven'?) The Little White Horse is far gentler: even the exiles from this lovely little inner world get to keep its gate until they’re welcome in again, and even the baddies are embraced its in circle. For the hobbits, The Lord of the Rings is a portal story: we step over the threshold in their company, into an older, far darker and more glorious world than they knew. Then there are all those worlds mocked as tourist traps by Diana Wynne Jones in her brilliant Tough Guide to Fantasyland; then looked at from the flip side in The Dark Lord of Derkholm as eco-magical wastelands ravaged by corporate greed. My first book, Moonwise, is a portal fantasy. I had no idea where I was going with it when I started, only that I wanted in."

What I should have written, but did say on the night is:  Every book is a portal.  And I quoted Le Guin (paraphrasing Tolkien):  “Fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory.”

Great panel.

My reading late on Sunday evening felt like a dress rehearsal in an empty theatre.  Technically, I did all right:  my timing was exact, I managed keep my face on screen while reading from a paper manuscript.  But the radio silence was unnerving:  I couldn't sense how I was going over.   Did anyone laugh?  I got a Discord comment on the lines of:  That was sounded nice but I have no idea what was going on.  That response (and I get a lot of it) always makes me droop.  What I love is when a reader says, On the page, reading you is like free-soloing El Capitan, but hearing you, I really got it.  Sigh.      

"Reading When the World is On Fire" (with Victoria Sandbrook, Lisa Batya Feld, Lena G., Lisa Padol, and Jonathan Woodward) was a joy.

"I wish I could say that I turned to the monuments of literature, the ones you can see from the moon. But no. At first, I could read only witty golden- and silver-age mysteries: books in which the order of things is broken and then comes together. This went with a passion for jigsaw puzzles, which also play at reversing entropy. After a while, I could manage great children’s books (all of Diana Wynne Jones and Tove Jansson), braiding in non-fiction about material culture, about the beautiful things humans can and do make: on costume (by the V&A ); on pottery (by Edmund de Waal ); on antique scientific instruments made like exquisite jewelry; on stagecraft in Elizabethan theatre; on language itself. As a species, we are really good at *things*; but less so at workable societies. We can invent astonishingly elegant mRNA vaccines. Persuading people to take them— Other friends have burrowed deep into the heart of darkness and the seeds of evil. I salute their valor. And still others have studied how the world might—possibly—be saved. I hail them. I want to hear from all of you. What has helped?"

All of us on the panel put together a booklist.

"All the World's a Stage!" didn't really need me. Not with people like Naomi Hinchen, Thom Dunn, Rebecca Maxfield, and Liz Salazar, who take "definitionally unzoomable" as a challenge.  If you say, "Well, there’s not going to be a dream sequence with interpretive dance," they've done it.  Shakespeare?  Goes without saying.  Commedia dell'arte?  Piece of cake.  They can even do slapstick, with a person on one screen socking a person on another.  In sync.  I asked questions, and made a few remarks on the philosophy of stage space, and fourth walls and the radio performers of the 1930s, lined up in their immaculate evening dress, tearing passions to tatters.

Rebecca Maxfield gave us Richard of Gloucester from 3 Henry VI.  I look forward to her Dream.

Hey, guys.  Break a link.

Nine