Con Artist

I am returned from Readercon. I need to start taking notes at cons. As it is, I have to rely on my brain, which right now seems to want nothing more than a hot shower and a nice lie down. This is not useful.

So. Let's start with the people. Mostly I hung out with nineweaving, rushthatspeaks, eredien,* oldcharliebrown, Matt Cheney, hans_the_bold, Holly Phillips, Mike and Anita Allen, Dora Goss, Steve Pasechnick (in intervals of forty-five seconds), and John Benson who still does not have a livejournal. I ran into someone I hadn't seen since high school. I waved to a number of people I seem to see only at cons. I have no idea of the number of people I met at the Meet the Pros(e) party on Friday night, but I should be able to make some sort of reasonable estimate from looking over the sentences I got from most of them.** Now that John Crowley is aware of my existence, and I am aware that he teaches at Yale, I think I will really make an effort at least to sit in on one of his classes: I attended his "How I Wrote . . ." for Lord Byron's Novel, and he's a fabulous speaker. When looking for David Hartwell, I was told to scan the crowd for a very loud shirt: and it worked. Eric Van is crazy in a variety of ways, all of them good. Fingers crossed that I will this time remember Julia's name. And I really want to hear Vandana Singh perform Indian epic now.

I was part of two readings and two panel, and this was great fun.*** The first panel, Bookaholics Anonymous, was more of a confessional audience conversation than a panel; but the second was on speculative poetry, moderated by Dora Goss, and I think we could have gone on for hours. (More to the point, I don't think the audience would have revolted if we had: this is crucial.) At the Jabberwocky launch reading, I read my own prose-poem "Shadowplay," Rio Le Moignan's "Baskets Full of Gods," and Jeannelle Ferreira's "My Six Months' Darkness," while Holly Phillips, Mike Allen, and Lila Garrott all read their own work as well as Tim Pratt's and Yoon Ha Lee's. We may not have had the best time-organization or attendance, but nothing to be ashamed of in the performance department. Nothing compares, however, to the Poetry Slan before the presentation of the Rhysling Awards. Joe Haldeman brought the house down—or up, to its feet, applauding—with his rhymed double sestina "Old Twentieth." And Mike Allen stepped down off the podium for "How I Will Outwit the Time Thieves," which he performed with full props and blocking—and did I mention the voice he has? Old-fashioned radio announcers would be jealous. Shakespearean actors probably are. The man has projection, and a sense of timing to match. Those of you who live in the Virginia area: don't take my word for it, track him down and see for yourself!

I didn't win the Rhysling Award. This is also okay: I wasn't expecting to. A shout-out to Tim Pratt for taking home not only the Rhysling Award for Long Poem, but the first runner-up in the same category!

Oh, and the books. I don't have the full complement to hand,**** but I know I acquired at least Jeannelle Ferreira's A Verse from Babylon, Catherynne M. Valente's Apocrypha, Jeffrey Thomas' Punktown and Montrocity, Peter Watts' Starfish, Leena Krohn's Tainaron: Mail from Another City, Michael Cisco's The San Veneficio Canon and The Tyrant, Patricia McKillip's Stepping from the Shadows, Anna Tambour's Spotted Lily, Elizabeth Hand's Mortal Love, P.C. Hodgell's Dark of the Moon,° and a time-share in Joe Lansdale's Bubba Ho-Tep. And finally the hardcover of Greer Gilman's Moonwise, crow-tree cover and all, which makes me happy for many reasons. (This on top of the various contributor's copies that I acquired: Singing Innocence and Experience, The Dybbuk in Love, Jabberwocky #1, The Alchemy of Stars: Rhysling Award Winners Showcase, The 2005 Rhysling Anthology, and Mythic Delirium #12. I am somewhere between "whee!" and "those are mine?" at the minute. I think it's a good feeling.) Meanwhile, I have just finished Mortal Love: and now I want to read a lot of Swinburne.°* The train ride back tomorrow will be fun.

Okay. I think that covers the basics. I haven't gone into the gigantic Indian food order-in on Saturday night, that involved my family and most of the people in the first paragraph, but maybe someone else will have gone over that in their blog and saved me the trouble. (Besides, it's one of those things that sounds like a better story than it was. There was my parents' house. There was a lot of Indian food. There was discussion of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. See?) I wore my elisem necklace, "Remember What You Say In Dreams," for which I still owe her a story: though at the minute it looks as though I am going to owe her a novella. I sang some ballads very late at night. I signed books for people. I wrote something of which I should probably be ashamed. I had a very good time.

And I am, very definitely, coming back next year.

Hope to see you there!

*Among other things, those four of us commandeered a conference room on Friday night and remained there for several hours in a blaze of books, ballads, and conversation. Late-night weirdness is what really makes a convention. And I think we had that in spades. It was good.

**Beyond the high levels of drinking and conversation, the chief feature of Meet the Pros(e) seemed to be the exchange of sentences from one's own work for sentences from others'. One sticks them to whatever is handy—a sheet of wax paper, a napkin, one's T-shirt—and then afterward goes over them and tries to figure out what on earth came from whom. Taken all together, they may be mistaken for surrealist narrative. All happy endings are more or less alike; disasters may be unique. She was saving the square of chocolate for ragnarok. First, four holding notebooks, followed by three in sneakers, two more with briefcases, another six in sandals and Bermudas, then another three laughing loudly at a joke whose punch line must have come just outside the double doors, followed by two more in the denim wraparounds that had first appeared that decade, then still another two with foolscap legal pads, who looked as nervous as I felt, most with long hair, except an older man and a middle-aged woman, both gray (and one woman, also in Bermudas and sandals, with black hair helmet-short), some twenty-five students wandered in to sit on the couches circling the blue carpet. I'm not sure what that last sentence means, but that may be the intention. On Magicanimals.nyb, it says that the Brahmin bulls of East 6th are known to weep whenever a cockroach is exterminated, indicating that some mythical bulls do indeed have tear ducts. The quality of a sporting event is determined by the quality of play of the losing team. Mrs. Black repeated her question, but then the border wobbled over us again. The air tasted awake. Words fled him, as creatures who had once done him wrong and could not now bear his sight. Poor lost Lenore / Raven over door / Quote: Nevermore! There aren't any giant spiders. I do not make the rules; this annoys me, and so I comfort myself by breaking them. I feel as though I had fallen asleep sometime in 1960 . . . that I'm going to wake up soon and the movies, the Lord of the Rings exhibit at the Museum of Science, the Tolkien Symphony in the concert hall, the action figures, the Authentic Replica of the One Ring, will all just be a particularly memorable dream—but then again, I feel the same way about the events of September 11, 2001. I'm left wondering if the rule-breaking and the giant spiders are somehow, arcanely, connected . . .

***As for panels I wasn't part of . . . I sat in on half of "The Protocols of Slipstream," listened to Chapter 9 of Ellen Kushner's upcoming and yet-untitled novel, was happily spoiled for Lord Byron's Novel by John Crowley, and heard Greer Gilman read twice from the third part of her Ashes triptych. Does that count?

****This is because hans_the_bold kindly took a box and a half back to New Haven in his car earlier today, so that I would not have to deal with them on the train: for which I will have to figure out how to perform the appropriate Old Babylonian thanks-offering.

°Which I already own in its original mass-market paperback, but this was a hardcover book club edition which I'm hoping will prove more durable. I already own God Stalk in both editions anyway, so now they match. Did I mention that I was on the Bookaholics Anonymous panel?

°*Is it just my tendency to fasten on secondary characters, or was that anybody else's response?