Readercon, Part 1: Thursday
I'll start with general notes and Thursday. I know it will take more than one entry. First, general thoughts, in bulleted list form:
Thursday, 8 PM: My talk on "When the World Ends, and No One Notices." I wasn't taking notes, since i was talking; the format was me talking for 30-35 minutes, and then respondants. At first I prepped for just talking for an hour, but then I heard it was going to be in a panel room with other people instead, so I prepped for conversation. (I actually had a lot of the conversations I ended up sort of having on the panel in the week prior with coworkers, friends, and cats.) The other panelists wanted to just not talk for a half hour, though, so it ended up sort of a combination of everything. There were a couple things I wish I got to, but I think it was largely successful, since people came up to me and said "That was awesome." If nothing else, I made a lot of people want to read The Children's Hospital, which is good, since it is astonishingly wonderful. Talking with sovay about it also gave me an idea for another project; something moving toward a taxonomy of apocalypse by imagining different categories and seeing how each categorization puts texts in conversation with each other differently. What does following Gary Wolfe's "The Remaking of Zero" to the letter do to the way we read end of the world fiction? What if we characterized things by didactic/confusing? Cyclic/full stop? Bang/whimper? I think this has the potential to be very fruitful (if a bit meta).
Thursday, 9 PM: You Don't Know Dictionary! This was a panel ostensibly about how readers react to unknown words in texts and whether or not looking them up is an important part of the reading process, but it ended up being wider-ranging, which was OK. Sarah Micklem, one of the panelists, did talk about saving looking up words in Greer Gilman's fiction for a second reading; that sounded like an interesting way to go about it, actually. Read it once for the sound, a second time for the subtext? Hm. William Barnes came up --- in brief, a philologist obsessed with removing the Latinate who had influences on Hopkins and Morris --- in terms of his incredible influence on fantasy, so little of which is Latinate. Gene Wolfe was proposed as a counterexample.
Greer was asked if she ever encountered words she didn't know; she said yes, there are words with very unusual origins, and she sometimes looks them up. She made a remark about having an OED on an iPhone that would automatically update whenever there was a new word. "A word is born!" This got the panel talking about technology --- specifically about how you can select words to define on the Kindle and how this could hamper reading. (This conversation was quite interesting, and did not have quite so much of the Fear Of Technology I am getting used to seeing in book people. Nonetheless, much like you have the option of either just turning to a page of a reference work, looking at the one thing in the reference work, and then going back to the text rather than browsing around, you have the option of clicking to a definition and spending four hours browsing around Wikipedia. Technology may change the nature of browsing, and maybe the nature of browsing is less or more focused online, but browsing still exists. Yes, the skill of looking things up in books might someday be lost. We also have culturally lost the skill of starting an engine with a hand crank. I'm sure someone somewhere else has nostalgia over that. Sky not falling! Moving on.)
One of the interesting points of discussion was whether or not it mattered if words in a novel were made up or real. Micklen alleged that it didn't matter; she loved the sound, loved encountering the words she didn't know in Wolfe, thought they meant something even when she thought they were made up. Someone (Greer? Lila Garrott? My notes here are vague) mentioned the use of "scoliast" to mean "automaton" in Winterlong as something that straddled the boundary there. (I actually hadn't picked that up when I read Winterlong, though I did pick up other words used in similar fashions.) In defense of not looking things up, someone said that "A definition strips down, takes away a connotation." Greer rhapsodized about "fell": "Mountain, beast of the mountain, cruelty, fall of the spirit. A dictionary won't do that for you."
There is a problem with looking up just words --- it won't help with phrases. (I'm reminded of being in high school and finding an NI-2 at a yard sale and going through and picking out the weird latin phrases and writing short stories based on each one.) I think this was an audience question from Faye Ringel: "Even if you look up all the words, you might not get the depth of allusion ---- You may not get it anyway. A freshman reads Conrad like I read Akkadian." I believe she was talking about her freshmen specifically, as opposed to all freshmen. Lila talked about idealect some, which had previously been mentioned in the context of Seamus Heaney (who you arguably shouldn't need a link for). Does it mean readers[1] get to know more about you than you might be comfortable wth? No, it makes its own camouflage, hides itself under the surface. It's something of a persona or a mask, not naked language; it's always a way in which the writer is guising. But that's another panel. (Indeed it is; Barry Malzberg had some really intersting things to say about this on Sunday.)
The book recommendation to come out of this was Sturgeon's Venus Plus X; looking at the Amazon summary, I can't see why. Anyone know? :)
[1] My notes say "writers" but I'm pretty sure that "readers" was both said and meant.
- This was my fourth year at Readercon, and I finally felt like I knew most people, if not by name, by sight. It was a good feeling, and not a place I really expected to have it. Also, I took Friday off, and it was totally the right call. Not doing so would have caused me to miss like half the con. As a came-Thursday-and-took-Friday-off person I was really glad that Saturday and Sunday were a little more chill; if I had showed up Friday at 7 PM I would have been rather miffed.
- It was my first year as a "pro" and I think I actually did a good job of giving other people things to think about the way that they've been giving me things to think about. So that's a win. Readercon does value some type of credentials in a way I don't fully understand and I should probably explore more at some point, but it was really nice that no one cared that I didn't have a PhD.
- As veejane notes in another con roundup, there were not that many people of color, and most of them were panelists. The sad thing? I had also been prepared to remark that it felt more diverse than last year. (I do think there was more representation of gender variance than in previous years, but I might just be primed to look for it. Come to think of it, that could be going on with race too.)
- I actually only bought three books, mostly because my budget is still smarting from the Anthrocon art show. But the Anthrocon posts don't require as much memory, so I'm writing them later. :)
- Two cons, two weekends, too much. I never want to do anything social ever again, ever. I'm hoping this fades by like Thursday and I return to "I'm an extrovert whose friends are introverts and I'm loooonely" as per normal. :)
- A lot of people have been criticizing the plan for Readercon 21 and, while I don't like "This is your father's Readercon" either, I actually think there's a lot of potential. This might be at least in part due to my I-guess-no-longer-secret plan to help out and do a bunch of organizing to make sure it's awesome. Of course I have to somehow combine that and "thesis!!!" and "moving!!!" and maybe also "wedding!!!" So we'll see. EDIT: Lots of interesting commentary here.
- I literally took more than 100 pages of notes. I filled most of a 5x8 Moleskine. My right arm still hurts, fingers to shoulder. It was worth it. I won't be retyping all of the notes here; I am hoping that summarizing will actually provide a better reading experience, but that depends on me translating things well and choosing the interesting bits, I suppose. :)
Thursday, 8 PM: My talk on "When the World Ends, and No One Notices." I wasn't taking notes, since i was talking; the format was me talking for 30-35 minutes, and then respondants. At first I prepped for just talking for an hour, but then I heard it was going to be in a panel room with other people instead, so I prepped for conversation. (I actually had a lot of the conversations I ended up sort of having on the panel in the week prior with coworkers, friends, and cats.) The other panelists wanted to just not talk for a half hour, though, so it ended up sort of a combination of everything. There were a couple things I wish I got to, but I think it was largely successful, since people came up to me and said "That was awesome." If nothing else, I made a lot of people want to read The Children's Hospital, which is good, since it is astonishingly wonderful. Talking with sovay about it also gave me an idea for another project; something moving toward a taxonomy of apocalypse by imagining different categories and seeing how each categorization puts texts in conversation with each other differently. What does following Gary Wolfe's "The Remaking of Zero" to the letter do to the way we read end of the world fiction? What if we characterized things by didactic/confusing? Cyclic/full stop? Bang/whimper? I think this has the potential to be very fruitful (if a bit meta).
Thursday, 9 PM: You Don't Know Dictionary! This was a panel ostensibly about how readers react to unknown words in texts and whether or not looking them up is an important part of the reading process, but it ended up being wider-ranging, which was OK. Sarah Micklem, one of the panelists, did talk about saving looking up words in Greer Gilman's fiction for a second reading; that sounded like an interesting way to go about it, actually. Read it once for the sound, a second time for the subtext? Hm. William Barnes came up --- in brief, a philologist obsessed with removing the Latinate who had influences on Hopkins and Morris --- in terms of his incredible influence on fantasy, so little of which is Latinate. Gene Wolfe was proposed as a counterexample.
Greer was asked if she ever encountered words she didn't know; she said yes, there are words with very unusual origins, and she sometimes looks them up. She made a remark about having an OED on an iPhone that would automatically update whenever there was a new word. "A word is born!" This got the panel talking about technology --- specifically about how you can select words to define on the Kindle and how this could hamper reading. (This conversation was quite interesting, and did not have quite so much of the Fear Of Technology I am getting used to seeing in book people. Nonetheless, much like you have the option of either just turning to a page of a reference work, looking at the one thing in the reference work, and then going back to the text rather than browsing around, you have the option of clicking to a definition and spending four hours browsing around Wikipedia. Technology may change the nature of browsing, and maybe the nature of browsing is less or more focused online, but browsing still exists. Yes, the skill of looking things up in books might someday be lost. We also have culturally lost the skill of starting an engine with a hand crank. I'm sure someone somewhere else has nostalgia over that. Sky not falling! Moving on.)
One of the interesting points of discussion was whether or not it mattered if words in a novel were made up or real. Micklen alleged that it didn't matter; she loved the sound, loved encountering the words she didn't know in Wolfe, thought they meant something even when she thought they were made up. Someone (Greer? Lila Garrott? My notes here are vague) mentioned the use of "scoliast" to mean "automaton" in Winterlong as something that straddled the boundary there. (I actually hadn't picked that up when I read Winterlong, though I did pick up other words used in similar fashions.) In defense of not looking things up, someone said that "A definition strips down, takes away a connotation." Greer rhapsodized about "fell": "Mountain, beast of the mountain, cruelty, fall of the spirit. A dictionary won't do that for you."
There is a problem with looking up just words --- it won't help with phrases. (I'm reminded of being in high school and finding an NI-2 at a yard sale and going through and picking out the weird latin phrases and writing short stories based on each one.) I think this was an audience question from Faye Ringel: "Even if you look up all the words, you might not get the depth of allusion ---- You may not get it anyway. A freshman reads Conrad like I read Akkadian." I believe she was talking about her freshmen specifically, as opposed to all freshmen. Lila talked about idealect some, which had previously been mentioned in the context of Seamus Heaney (who you arguably shouldn't need a link for). Does it mean readers[1] get to know more about you than you might be comfortable wth? No, it makes its own camouflage, hides itself under the surface. It's something of a persona or a mask, not naked language; it's always a way in which the writer is guising. But that's another panel. (Indeed it is; Barry Malzberg had some really intersting things to say about this on Sunday.)
The book recommendation to come out of this was Sturgeon's Venus Plus X; looking at the Amazon summary, I can't see why. Anyone know? :)
[1] My notes say "writers" but I'm pretty sure that "readers" was both said and meant.