Arcana -- Being a GoH
Well, I'm back from Arcana where I was Guest of Honor this year.
It was a somewhat strange experience. One steps out of oneself and one's normal environment at any convention, but especially at a con devoted to dark fantasy. The hotel was a displacement in itself. A steam engine sits outside and disused railroad tracks run through the lobby. Somewhere in the immediate area is a model train museum. Once the complex was also home to a jazz club, but that since has moved elsewhere. The general sense is that everything has left the station, somehow leaving the passengers behind. On top of that, my room's a/c breathed hoarsely, the complimentary frig clunked, the alarm went off at midnight -- every midnight -- and small, anonymous objects fell in the dark, not to be found in the morning. Add to that a fare of horror movies after breakfast, panels on ghosts and demons, and horror movies at night. Mind you, I'm fond of such things; I don't usually get such a heavy dose of them, however.
As GoH, I was also on stage much of the time, and found that I've forgotten how to speak in public without stuttering. That's one danger of a hermit's life. It didn't help that I was hoarse with a bad cold and trying hard not to sneeze my brains out.
What shall I say about my return to the UM campus? The place was almost unrecognizable. Without a guide, I would never have found the bookstore where I was scheduled to give a reading along with Pat Wrede and Lois McMaster Bujold, both nice people and fine writers. Down one street I did glimpse the building where I was a grad student all those years ago. It at least looked unchanged. I wonder if they're more tolerant of genre writers than they were in my day. One memory that sticks in my mind is of the head of the English Dept. telling the entire graduate body that "Literary critics are parasites. Parasites do not create." And we were all in training to be critics. They never realized, up to and through a 400 page Phd dissertation, that I wasn't one.
Other highlights: an inter-panel trip to the Mall of America which I'd never visited before. What a huge place. A reading at Dreamhaven bookstore. An expedition to a bead shop where I almost bought a piece of mammoth ivory but ended up with a cabachon of dragon-scale agate.
All in all, a fun, mildly surreal trip.
It was a somewhat strange experience. One steps out of oneself and one's normal environment at any convention, but especially at a con devoted to dark fantasy. The hotel was a displacement in itself. A steam engine sits outside and disused railroad tracks run through the lobby. Somewhere in the immediate area is a model train museum. Once the complex was also home to a jazz club, but that since has moved elsewhere. The general sense is that everything has left the station, somehow leaving the passengers behind. On top of that, my room's a/c breathed hoarsely, the complimentary frig clunked, the alarm went off at midnight -- every midnight -- and small, anonymous objects fell in the dark, not to be found in the morning. Add to that a fare of horror movies after breakfast, panels on ghosts and demons, and horror movies at night. Mind you, I'm fond of such things; I don't usually get such a heavy dose of them, however.
As GoH, I was also on stage much of the time, and found that I've forgotten how to speak in public without stuttering. That's one danger of a hermit's life. It didn't help that I was hoarse with a bad cold and trying hard not to sneeze my brains out.
What shall I say about my return to the UM campus? The place was almost unrecognizable. Without a guide, I would never have found the bookstore where I was scheduled to give a reading along with Pat Wrede and Lois McMaster Bujold, both nice people and fine writers. Down one street I did glimpse the building where I was a grad student all those years ago. It at least looked unchanged. I wonder if they're more tolerant of genre writers than they were in my day. One memory that sticks in my mind is of the head of the English Dept. telling the entire graduate body that "Literary critics are parasites. Parasites do not create." And we were all in training to be critics. They never realized, up to and through a 400 page Phd dissertation, that I wasn't one.
Other highlights: an inter-panel trip to the Mall of America which I'd never visited before. What a huge place. A reading at Dreamhaven bookstore. An expedition to a bead shop where I almost bought a piece of mammoth ivory but ended up with a cabachon of dragon-scale agate.
All in all, a fun, mildly surreal trip.
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