Last night I went to the movies and became unstuck in time. This is an unnecessarily dramatic way of describing the odd emotional effect of seeing Once (2006) at the Embassy Cinema in Waltham, where I hadn't been since 2003.
It's a lovely short story of a film, sort of a folk-rock concept album; it resists the pull of the sentimental and winds up being bittersweet in a way that is genuine to life rather than tuned by Hollywood, and several of its songs are now stuck in my head. I had been invited to see it with Eric Van and his jack-of-all-trades friend David, who works in an art gallery and can quote extensively from A.E. Housman, and his godson Eddy, who was reading Mort and gave me the most laconic metal horns ever. We went for post-movie snacks at the Watch City Brewing Company and only left around 11:30 when the bar closed and threw us out. By this point, a random sample of the conversation would have included Alan Turing, Buckaroo Banzai, the Aeneid, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Breaker Morant, Babylon 5, the letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, and various facts of biochemistry, and the waiter kept giving us looks that suggested that a table at which no one had ordered anything more mind-altering than soda really shouldn't have been this enthusiastic; they drove me home, in the course of which the conversation somehow evolved into comparative linguistics, and we then spent another half-hour sitting in the car in front of my parents' house, utterly failing to end the conversation. That describes a whole swathe of my college experience right there.
And earlier in the evening, walking up and down Moody Street in search of the comics store (The Outer Limits, closed after 6:30) and the gaming store (Danger Planet, clearly not down the side street I had thought it was) I had used to visit, I stopped into the used book store that hadn't been there when I was at Brandeis. The clerk was a fair-haired Brandeis senior with a yarmulke, who I learned was an English major in creative writing, fantastic and nonfantastic stories both; because we were standing in the aisle of a surprisingly well-stocked science fiction and fantasy section, I asked after the Brandeis Official Readers' Guild. By way of answer, he explained that he had recently been its president. So I told him that I was one of the people who had been involved in its creation, and he asked for my name, and then he said, "Oh. Yes. We have your books in the library." And if science fiction and fantasy clubs have aetiologies, then he knew me also as one of the semi-legendary founders—he remembered that I had been the first Archmage of BORG*, which made me feel weirdly like Albert, and he asked how![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
debka_notion was doing. (How are you doing?) And I was very pleased to hear that the library we put together is not only intact, it's multiplied and now has a permanent home and its books can apparently be taken out from the regular library, which is exactly what it was created for, and it was a little like walking accidentally through one's own ghost. I hadn't thought that student memory lasted more than four years. I hadn't expected to be remembered at Brandeis by anyone other than my professors. I bought Michael Frayn's Copenhagen and walked over to the movie theater.
I kept running into echoes. But it was unexpectedly wonderful.
In other good news, Paula Guran's Best New Romantic Fantasy 2 has been praised by Publisher's Weekly, including "The Depth Oracle." Thanks so much togreygirlbeast and lesser_celery for pointing this out to me!
And I have photographs from Readercon. Proving that we have souls after all,oldcharliebrown captured me and much of the Congerie on film. ( Whether we cast reflections is still debatable. )
And I have con crud; I'm losing my voice. But this weekend was worth it.
*I am not responsible for this acronym. I suspect the word "guild" is my fault, but you will have to askkraada or dasheiff about the rest.
It's a lovely short story of a film, sort of a folk-rock concept album; it resists the pull of the sentimental and winds up being bittersweet in a way that is genuine to life rather than tuned by Hollywood, and several of its songs are now stuck in my head. I had been invited to see it with Eric Van and his jack-of-all-trades friend David, who works in an art gallery and can quote extensively from A.E. Housman, and his godson Eddy, who was reading Mort and gave me the most laconic metal horns ever. We went for post-movie snacks at the Watch City Brewing Company and only left around 11:30 when the bar closed and threw us out. By this point, a random sample of the conversation would have included Alan Turing, Buckaroo Banzai, the Aeneid, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Breaker Morant, Babylon 5, the letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, and various facts of biochemistry, and the waiter kept giving us looks that suggested that a table at which no one had ordered anything more mind-altering than soda really shouldn't have been this enthusiastic; they drove me home, in the course of which the conversation somehow evolved into comparative linguistics, and we then spent another half-hour sitting in the car in front of my parents' house, utterly failing to end the conversation. That describes a whole swathe of my college experience right there.
And earlier in the evening, walking up and down Moody Street in search of the comics store (The Outer Limits, closed after 6:30) and the gaming store (Danger Planet, clearly not down the side street I had thought it was) I had used to visit, I stopped into the used book store that hadn't been there when I was at Brandeis. The clerk was a fair-haired Brandeis senior with a yarmulke, who I learned was an English major in creative writing, fantastic and nonfantastic stories both; because we were standing in the aisle of a surprisingly well-stocked science fiction and fantasy section, I asked after the Brandeis Official Readers' Guild. By way of answer, he explained that he had recently been its president. So I told him that I was one of the people who had been involved in its creation, and he asked for my name, and then he said, "Oh. Yes. We have your books in the library." And if science fiction and fantasy clubs have aetiologies, then he knew me also as one of the semi-legendary founders—he remembered that I had been the first Archmage of BORG*, which made me feel weirdly like Albert, and he asked how
debka_notion was doing. (How are you doing?) And I was very pleased to hear that the library we put together is not only intact, it's multiplied and now has a permanent home and its books can apparently be taken out from the regular library, which is exactly what it was created for, and it was a little like walking accidentally through one's own ghost. I hadn't thought that student memory lasted more than four years. I hadn't expected to be remembered at Brandeis by anyone other than my professors. I bought Michael Frayn's Copenhagen and walked over to the movie theater.I kept running into echoes. But it was unexpectedly wonderful.
In other good news, Paula Guran's Best New Romantic Fantasy 2 has been praised by Publisher's Weekly, including "The Depth Oracle." Thanks so much to
greygirlbeast and lesser_celery for pointing this out to me!And I have photographs from Readercon. Proving that we have souls after all,
oldcharliebrown captured me and much of the Congerie on film. ( Whether we cast reflections is still debatable. )And I have con crud; I'm losing my voice. But this weekend was worth it.
*I am not responsible for this acronym. I suspect the word "guild" is my fault, but you will have to ask
kraada or dasheiff about the rest.
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