Comments | rax: Readercon, Part 1: Thursday

rax

Readercon, Part 1: Thursday

Jul 14, 2009 07:30

I'll start with general notes and Thursday. I know it will take more than one entry. First, general thoughts, in bulleted list form:

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 ( Read more... )

readercon

Comments 5

ab3nd July 15 2009, 03:58:40 UTC

The "We Lost, We Won" reeked of neophobia, mostly in the form of "Kids these days are illiterate videogamers who thirst for capital-S Story" sort of stuff. That was part of what provoked me to put "R. would spit in these people's ears" in my notes.

jonquil July 15 2009, 19:05:03 UTC

"A word is born!" Anybody who likes this idea would like http://www.wordnik.com -- it's an explicitly descriptive rather than prescriptive dictionary site, where the usage is gathered on the fly from the current Internet corpus including Tweets. I find it a great deal of fun to play with, because I'm a big ol' word geek.

Disclaimer: Not an employee of the company; a friend, Erin McKean, former editor of the Oxford American Dictionary, is a co-founder.

negothick July 18 2009, 19:21:50 UTC

Sorry to be late on this, but for the record--though I know that LJ has gone on miles from this point--I was indeed talking about freshman non-English majors who actively despise reading fiction. They were the ones who had no general knowledge, no worldview into which to insert "Heart of Darkness," so looking up individual words helped them very little. If you have never heard of the Belgian Congo, King Leopold, or Belgium for that matter, it doesn't matter if you comprehend the meaning of individual words--Conrad's novella will make as little sense as Akkadian does to me.

rax July 19 2009, 00:37:03 UTC

Oh now that you say that I remember it perfectly. I should really just learn shorthand :) Thanks for clarifying!

lhexa August 14 2009, 05:28:28 UTC

...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).That's an awesome idea, and bang/whimper is both apt and in-jokey. I do think didactic/despairing would be a better distinction than didactic/confusing... and at this point in the development of literature I think to some degree you would have to conflate apocalyptic and dystopian literature, insofar as they both deal with ultimate human failure. Congratulations on a fruitful talk, though ( ... )