There's no hiding behind my paper and pen

I short-circuited my brain reboot. I watched all three extended editions of The Lord of the Rings with Eric, his godson Eddy, and Dave Swanger (whom astute readers will remember from last summer) yesterday, which came out to approximately twelve hours in front of Eric's mother-of-all-home-systems TV. It was epic. Major, major points for the Anglo-Saxon funeral chant. Other details to be discussed in comments, in an effort to keep this entire post from turning into Tolkien.

< / geekery >

< well, no, come on >

I cannot give a panel-by-panel account of this year's Readercon, but I do have a collection of good memories. At least I got enough sleep for some of them to go into long-term storage. This year I finally stayed at the hotel, which undoubtedly saved me from being a stumbling zombie for more than the last day of the con; I did have to return to my parents' house once, to print out a copy of "The Mirror of Venus" before my reading, but even the miniature spazquest* it turned into did not put me off further experimentation with actually being able to talk to people after midnight. Hanging out with greygirlbeast and humglum on Friday and Saturday was a serious high point, as was being on one panel with Caitlín and two with nineweaving.** The same goes for watermelontail, who showed up for far more of the convention than I had been led to believe, and meeting asakiyume in person for the first time. A strong contender for this year's most awesome stand-alone conversation belongs to Michael Cisco ("You don't have to explain to me what 'psychopomp' means! I probably am a psychopomp!"), with whom I ducked out of Meet the Pros(e) to talk about Plato's Symposium and wound up, after passing through Canaanite divinatory practices, Santa Muerte and Veiovis, the politics of Israel and Judah, and the Popol Vuh, at the Coptic Church. Dinner on Saturday, between the Rhysling Awards*** and Kirk Poland, was a three-car, fifteen-person odyssey to Lemon Tree, at which I met kestrell and rather shouted at [someone whose livejournal name, if any, I do not know] about Patricia McKillip and Diana Wynne Jones; in retrospect, I think I accidentally bounced the first draft of a paper off her. eredien made me an early birthday present of Ian R. MacLeod's The Summer Isles (2005), which I think should be compulsorily read in conjunction with papersky's Farthing (2006). I finally got Caitlín and Spooky's housewarming card to them. I have a slim, signed ARC of A is for Alien, too. gaudior, in her ceremonial duty as best cousin ever, formally threatened Eric with death if he ever hurts me; I haven't yet decided whether making me transcribe Stephen R. Donaldson's The Wounded Land for Kirk Poland counts. ("Wrong suppurated across her features.") I came in with a sinus infection, so I did not pick up con crud. If you subscribe to Sirenia Digest, you'll get to find out what the audience at my reading heard when I ran out of Ostia Naye. In short, while I slept less than the spurious metaphor of your choice, I had a really, really good time.

And now I'm actually going to sleep. I'll figure out what I've forgotten tomorrow.

* Pace time_shark and Anita. The Burlington Marriott is maybe five miles away, tops, but Lowell Street had been blocked off for construction and the detour seemed to shunt us God knows where into the suburban wilderness; I wanted to get back in time for Caitlín's reading (which I crashed and missed three-quarters of, anyway, thanks to arriving at the con with a distinct sleep deficit) and Eric wanted to see Gordon Van Gelder interviewing Jonathan Lethem (which abruptly developed its own scheduling thorns as we got back), and somehow I had failed to eat anything since six o'clock the previous evening (which was just stupid). We did not kill one another. Curiously, by the time I came home on Sunday, the construction had completely cleared and Lowell Street was as drivable as it ever was.

** I needed to have prepared better notes for "Sing Along with Text," but "Fantasists as Modern Philologists" was terrific. For that matter, I enjoyed being able to drag stillsostrange up onstage at lesser_celery's Not One of Us reading. I did not attend anywhere near the number of panels I had planned to; not counting panels, readings, or discussions I was formally involved with, I caught "-Esque No More," Eric's theory of consciousness, "Genre Insights from Styx," and "Finding Hamster Huey's Head," which is probably some kind of ironic, given that I was on the programming committee this year. It was still a lovely con.

*** Congratulations to yuki_onna and fibitz, incidentally!