I was very well pleased with what I knowed

What should I remember? Yesterday, Saturday, was the kind of frenetic epic that only cons (and in hindsight, college environments) seem to provide: I started the day with Cinderella in North America and finished up with Cassini flybys and in between talked or heard about anything from quantum entanglement to Korean horror to Finnish-language radio and the translation of Gilgameš into Klingon. "SF and Fantasy as the Modern Myth" ended up as a broader discussion of myth and literature than a specific examination of the archetypes of fantasy and science fiction—whether they even qualify as a distinct class of archetypes, or only a sort of subspecies—but nineweaving was there to talk about the constellations of story and Judith Berman about the myths of anthropologists, and once my brain woke up I think I was not discursive dead weight.¹ I heard ericmvan as a formal panelist on genre TV and as audience participation on genre film, and in his best mad professor mode on the subject of quantum randomness.² "Making Language Fit the Culture" was an unexpected standout: instead of dissecting invented languages, as the blurb implied, under the well-prepared moderation of Fred Lerner we talked instead about the treatment of language in science fiction and fantasy, the intersections of subject and style, and exactly how many languages we as a panel spoke, read, or vaguely recognized.³ Equally unexpected was running into Farah Mendlesohn after "The Year in Physics and Astronomy," which resulted in dinner with her, Greer, Eric, grimmwire, Connie Hirsch, and someone whom I hope is kino_kid, because I utterly failed to exchange contact information with her despite a very good conversation about weird film. ICFA is going to rock like unto the volcanoes of Io. If we eat at the hotel restaurant again, however, I think we should make sure in advance that dinner will not take three hours. Entire species could have evolved and suffered mass extinction by the time the check came. I think after that I ate some chocolate from Burdick's and fell over.

Which is not the same as sleep; for unremarkable but annoying reasons, by this afternoon I was so zoned that I bit my tongue while eating baklava and walked into the men's room.⁴ I did hear "Moonwise of Babel: A Conversation on the Nature and Uses of Deep Fantasy," which was a high-wire act I hope someone taped; I do not particularly wonder why I don't believe in UFOs, but I enjoyed hearing Glenn and Eric and parttimedriver speculate. I even had an apparently intelligible exchange with watermelontail, who really deserves his own eight-hour conversation at a con sometime. But none of these were panels I had to appear on; I'm not sure I could have carried off another well enough to satisfy my perfectionism. The rest of the afternoon fortunately turned into a nap, which did somewhat to mitigate the fact that the entire evening since has been book triage—my mother's collection of mysteries, which is almost a library of complete works; Ngaio Marsh, Agatha Christie, Ellis Peters, Dick Francis, Dorothy Sayers, Margery Allingham.⁵ Water damage. Covers flaked scabbily brown. Mysterious bluish rust on my trade paperback of Gaudy Night. It is not happiness.

But my poems "Painted Gods and the Eye of Childhood" and "Lupercal" have been accepted by Space and Time and Not One of Us, respectively. The first of these was written at Arisia, the second last night. At least cons are good for the inspiration, if not the coherence.

Tomorrow I am not getting out of bed until I am awake.

1. I also made some comment that negothick hailed from the front row—"Nice phrase!"—and none of us has any idea what it was. If you were present, please feed less my ego than my amnesia: what was I talking about?

2. I am defaulting to slightly snarky summations, because I never have any idea how much detail anyone other than me wants to read on these subjects, but he is one of the better public speakers I know. Greer is soft-spoken and epigrammatic, which puts her audience in a state of perpetual double-take; Michael Swanwick springs words like scarves and coins off his fingers, to the effect that perhaps while you are admiring his wit, you will notice too late that your wallet has vanished and been replaced by something otherworldly, futuristic, and talking back to you. Eric makes his enthusiasm communicable, high-octane improvisatory, not so much pacing to keep his audience's attention as working off excess energy before maybe he catches on fire, and yet ninety-eight percent of his lecture turns out in complete sentences; any second the rapid-fire elaboration should catch on itself and fling head-over-heels into brain-crash and freeze, and it does not. You never know if this is going to be the night it's ball lightning and catastrophe. Oh, no, sir. This wasn't built by a magician. This was built by a wizard.

3. . . . Many.

4. And failed to notice, until it dawned upon me that the person washing their hands at the sink had a beard and possibly this was not genderfuck, but the wrong door.

5. The last of whom she had been particularly hoping I would pick up, because she thinks I would love Albert Campion. All I know about him is what she told me: that he was created as a parody of Peter Wimsey and then proceeded to develop his own and complicated character. I consider this awesome. I wish most of him were not in a garbage bag right now.