Bits of the Book Tour
So, you may or may not know that we at Worldchanging wrote a book (called, unsurprisingly, "Worldchanging: a user's guide for the 21st century".) Alex (the founder) and his assistants organized a book tour across North America, and I thought it sounded like a good excuse to go to visit friends, particularly the dear ones on the east coast that I never see. So I went along to a few of the book parties: Seattle, Portland, New York, and Vancouver (and will do SF in December), and visited folks in Boston and Northampton along the way, hitting five cities in seven days. Woo-hoo!
Here in Seattle the book party had Alex on stage with Bruce Sterling, which is the first time I saw what a total freak Sterling is. Brilliant and creative, not afraid to gallop wantonly into left field and never come back. I guess that's a useful skill in a science fiction writer, I just didn't expect it to be so... pronounced. Just about my whole Seattle family came to the event, which was awesome, and afterwards I still had time to hit a huge Halloween party with hundreds of Burners in a former elementary school. The part of the Seattle party that fried my brain was the first time someone asked me to sign his book. I thought it'd be like signing a friend's yearbook, but it's more like someone shoving you on stage to accept a surprise honor. As if I don't already have a big enough ego. Although it hadn't really occurred to me that that would happen--I'm just one of sixty authors of the book. (Secretly I want someone to do a scavenger hunt to get the signatures of every author in the book--they're scattered across dozens of cities in several countries on a couple different continents, and most of them have never met each other.)
In Portland the event was in the "World Forestry Center", which I couldn't quite figure out if it was a museum to promote sustainable forestry or a museum for lumber industry propaganda. (For instance, they had a videogame of you in a tree cutting vehicle, where you maneuver the machine's arm around to chop trees down and slice them into bits on the spot. But it was to show minimal-impact forestry techniques.) I think the place was legit, though. It was great hanging around with my friends Darius, Eric, and Larry. Geting out of Portland looked dicey for a minute, though--the flight out was delayed by a bird sucked through the plane's engine on its previous flight. ...which sounds bad at first (and of course was for the bird), but really, you know that must happen all the time, so I was impressed by their honesty in telling us. After an hour and a half of de-fowling, we were on our way to the east coast.
Northampton's hotel rates were ludicrous because it's apparently the height of "Leaf Season", their big tourist draw. Leaf Season. At first I snickered at the idea that their greatest attraction is decaying plant matter, but actually this is really cool--people go there to enjoy the changing of the seasons, commune with Nature, all that. I was there to see Chara, my ex, who's going back to school at Smith, and we had a wonderful time with her showing me around. Being the home of small liberal arts colleges like Smith, Northampton is a cute little crunchy intellectual town with at least one fantastic coffeehouse. The town feels like a neighborhood of Portland, except with granite slab curbs and fancy English Colonial brick buildings that're probably ludicrously old. It's apparently such a nice place that when I was arriving, the airport shuttle driver and both other passengers (who were keen on chatting it up, and I mean keen) were all disappointed when they heard I was only going to be there for one day; they insisted I come back some time. ...I made a mental note to be wary of Northamptonites bearing Kool-Aid. Smith College has a lovely wooded arboretum, with geese in its pond and big enthusiastic squirrels. Later in New York I thought how it's funny that people think of squirrels as being cute and rats being horrible--are a fluffy tail and a bouncy gait are all that separates the wildlife from the vermin? Will rats start wearing tail wigs and hopping, in order to climb the social ladder?
Boston was great because it was the conjunction of people from four distinct periods of my life--high school, Reed, Seattle, and family. And everybody hit it off, which was beautiful to see. The first night my friend Sarah from high school hosted me and Coryn (from Reed) and Sunshine (from Seattle). The next day, the hostel I was supposed to stay in was suddenly booked, so I had to go to a different one across town; stepping out of the subway station for the new place, I saw... someone familiar... who recognized me, too... my cousin Susan who I've only met twice since she was six years old! How bizarre is that? And what's more, she had nothing urgent to do, so she hung out with me & Coryn & Sunshine for the whole rest of the day, and we all had a great time! I'm not woo-woo enough to say that everything happens for a reason, but I'm apparently woo-woo enough to cause things to happen.
The one really notable thing we did was going to the "Mapparium", which I'd never heard of. It's a stained-glass globe, 36 feet across, that you walk through the middle of. Made in the 1930's for Mary Baker Eddy (a tough and smart lady who founded the respectable but oxymoronically named Christian Science Monitor), it was updated for decades to match current geopolitics, but stopped being redrawn in the 1960's. So it's now historical, with all sorts of artifacts like Siam, French West Africa, Italian East Africa, Tibet, and the USSR. It's amazing how much the world's nations have churned in just 40 years. (And even more amazing that most of Africa was still colonies just 40 years ago.) I wish someone would make a globe like the Mapparium where the surface is a big projection display, where you can see countries being redrawn over time. But the equally fun thing was the acoustics of the place--stand in the center and your voice is reflected back to you so perfectly you think you're being mic'ed into your own ears; stand elsewhere with another person talking to you as they walk, and they sound like they're right in your ear, then inside your head, then speaking normally in front of you. And wherever you are, the high frequencies that make crisp consonants and susurrant sibilants, which are normally lost to the world, are bright as summer sun. It's like someone tweaked your nervous system's graphic equalizer.
The last big thing in Boston was that at one point we were waiting around, so we decided to pop into a bookstore; it hadn't occurred to me to look for it, but on the way out, I glanced back and saw THE BOOK!!! On a shelf in the bookstore! Right next to all the other books!! It was in two places, even--one was a shelf away from Decorative Toilets of the World, but the other one was next to a big book on Nelson Mandela. I'd had a copy of the book in my hands a few weeks before, and that was great, but there've been many prototypes I've built that I could hold in my hands that never saw the outside world. To see something you've helped make sitting on the shelf in stores is entirely another matter. It makes you feel like you're actually having an effect on the world, in a way that website statistics on number of visitors per month just can't match. Those are just numbers, not real people in physical places that you can go to.
New York was fun, too--both the book parties went well. The funny part of New York was that my friend Michelle (my "um.. friend" Michelle, here in Seattle) is a photographer and recently wrote a book of her own, on doing real photography with plastic toy cameras; she had a couple book release parties of her own, and the one she had scheduled for New York, by sheer woo-woo coincidence, happened to be on the same day as a Worldchanging book party. So we both went to each others' parties, and stayed at the house of one of the Flying Karamazov Brothers (a juggling troupe which you should see if you haven't), and kicked around New York afterwards. (Managing to find both our books in the same bookstore, which was fun.) I have to say, though, other times I've been to New York I've really enjoyed the energy of it--the buzz, the pulse, of all those people in the mile-high steel and concrete cliffs; this time, the buzz didn't catch me, and I just saw the dirt, grime, and filth that the buzz rides on top of. The world of New York is graffiti-splattered brick and stone, steel in right angles, a wholly synthetic environment way off of human scale. The first night, when I saw the moon shining in between buildings, my first thought was that it looked out of place there.
It was fun in new York, but when I flew in to Vancouver, the first thing I noticed was how clean and nice everything was, and how GREEN. There were trees everywhere, and until downtown they were the biggest things around, just like Seattle. Quite the opposite of the urban jungle. I could feel myself relaxing and breathing. Sure, it was raining (like it still is here), but that's what makes it so green and beautiful. So, of course, I was very happy to flop back into Seattle, while the rest of the Worldchanging crew went on.
It was great fun, but I'm glad I did it to see friends, not to further my career. The hob-nobbing was okay, definitely met some important people and some interesting people (sometimes they were even the same people); but you can't really relax when networking, even when the people you're with are trying to impress you as much as you're trying to impress them. Only when you're with peers, or people who don't care what you do, can you get past that. (Well, okay, and sometimes when you're geeking.) The most fun I had at all the book parties was with people I already knew.