It's the freakiest show

It is bitter cold winter, but there is some nice gilt light lying on the thin snow of the last few days and I survived Arisia. Every year I've realized I worry about my ability to make it through the convention, but this year I really didn't feel that I wanted to attend at all: I was exhausted to a degree I couldn't remember since 2006. It was a professional commitment, so I made myself stick to it; it was worth it. This is the Cliffs Notes version of the weekend. Then I can get back to writing about all the books and films on my mind catching up on the massive amount of work I neglected. I am still, unsurprisingly, very tired.

[The preceding paragraph optimistically written in between rounds of running after my two-year-old niece in Lexington. The rest of this post written after returning home and watching an episode of Voyager with gaudior and then staring a bit at the wall.]

Friday night was the Strange Horizons reading. We lost rushthatspeaks to ongoing sinus infection, but pleasantly Gillian Daniels was on hand to supply a fourth voice and an additional connection to the magazine. We went round-robin style, sharing themes and contrasting perspectives. ajodasso read a cycle of devastating medical poetry and kindly lent me their smartphone so that I could read a poem of mine I had not thought to print out ("After the Red Sea," still probably the most simultaneously Jewish and genderqueer poem I have written), since I had concentrated mostly on Ghost Signs and my Patreon poems. I met MJ Cunniff in person for the first time and would continue to hang out with them intermittently over the weekend. I sold one of my last two copies of Ghost Signs to a very enthusiastic woman whose name I had to ask to see written before I signed it into the book, not because it was a complicated name, but because that was the level of consciousness I was coming into Arisia with. Everything went into performance. Anything left over was an unforeseen bonus.¹

On Saturday morning, I discovered that not only was a recording made of Tom Lehrer's The Physical Revue in 1951, it is mostly available on the internet. Then I left the house for my three-panel day, which I was legitimately worried about making it to the end of. Spoiler alert: I forget that performance adrenaline still works.

Truly, I should remember by now that my ability to sing does not desert me even when I am sleepless, congested, and semi-permanently impaired in my speech. I did not win the traditional ballad bingo with "The Two Sisters," but I do not resent losing to "Matty Groves." There's just so much sex and murder in that one.

Rose Hayes is an excellent moderator, but the panel on "Genderfluidity and Queerness in Genre" hit right at the point in the afternoon when I was feeling most strung out. I wish I had not said "My gender identity is a mess" rather than "My feelings about my body and my gender are complicated," because the latter is both more accurate and less angsty; I am not in some kind of immediate crisis and would rather not have given the impression that I was. On the other hand, I got compliments afterward on my discussion of Loki and my insistence on bi visibility, so that was nice. (Also, skygiants, there was general Jewish solidarity from the audience on the existence of Anthony Goldstein.) When asked about early encounters with representation, at least I finally remembered Ivanova from Babylon 5 (1994–1998). It would have been nice if I had also recollected in time that one of my earliest models of masculinity was Cosmo Brown in Singin' in the Rain (1952).

"Welcome to the Underworld" was just a lot of fun. It was not the kind of panel with a lot of structure to it, but nineweaving talked about the lyke road of the Milky Way, Gabriel Squailia talked about corpses and bureaucracy, Daniel José Older talked about Dante and the dark cities that reflect the living ones, and I read out some Neo-Assyrian because everyone should know about the bit in Ištar's Descent to the Underworld where she threatens zombie apocalypse, so I think we covered the basics. I gave a shout-out to the Dead Marshes for being the single scariest image in The Lord of the Rings—the books, for God's sake, not the films. Gabriel quoted Tom Waits. Daniel closed the panel by reciting the last lines of his thesis in verse, which I really hope can be read somewhere online by now.

I had dinner in the green room. There was an entire plate of goat's milk cheeses. I ate many of them. It was great.

This year's genderswapped Star Trek was "Journey to Babel," with fantastic costuming for the Andorians and a very fine Sarek and Alexander in Rosalind Martin and Kevin Kordis in addition to the returning cast, who by now my brain considers much more authentic alt-Enterprise crew than those people in the J.J. Abrams films. usernamenumber murdered the hell out of a cantaloupe with a flyswatter for a foley effect. I enjoy that my circle of acquaintances includes people who just do this sort of thing.

Sunday I had the memorial panel for Leonard Nimoy in the evening, but I spent the afternoon in the dealer's room because it is not reasonable to attend a convention without looking at books. I bought my brother a T-shirt silkscreened with a square of the periodic table, with the symbol "Wtf" captioned "The Element of Surprise." I sold my last copy of Ghost Signs standing in front of Auntie Arwen's Spices. Anyone who runs into me and wants the book has to order it from Aqueduct now, which delights me. I re-read about a third of the Death Gate Cycle for the first time in four or five years and I still can't tell if those books are actually good, but they'll apparently be in my head forever.

Much to my surprise, the memorial for Nimoy was also a lot of fun. It was full of stories, from the importance of Spock to Nimoy's stage career to personal encounters at conventions. I had not known that he first performed with a Yiddish theater troupe at age eight, for a settlement house in the now-lost West End of Boston. I remembered that he was part of the voice cast for Lights (1984), but I had no idea he had ever voiced—in two separate television productions!—more than one major Talmudic scholar. I really felt for the audience member's daughter who would now never have the chance to approach Nimoy in some fannish setting and say with great and wide-eyed sincerity, "I loved you as Rashi!"

Remember how the green room on Saturday night had a cheese plate I could eat? When I asked a staffer if there was anything left of it, I was solemnly handed the last remaining goat's milk cheese; she had remembered my thanks—I had been vocal in my appreciation; seriously, most places remember there are people who can't eat dairy, but don't remember there are people who can eat dairy so long as it isn't cow—and saved it for me. The green room this year was awesome.

The David Bowie memorial was visibly last-minute and impromptu, but I was glad we attended just for Chris Hadfield's "Space Oddity." genarti was in the audience in full Goblin King; Greer had photographed her earlier, contact-juggling crystal ball and small child and all. Bowie's Christmas duet with Bing Crosby is a thing of amazement. It took me forever to get home afterward because the Green Line and the 87 bus had evidently had a mortal falling-out, but I staved off the cold by kvetching with a woman who had been similarly stranded by the 69. The Green Line is just very bad at relationships.

By Monday, I think I was awake by force of obstinacy. At least the Red Line was running properly again. "I Hate the Hero" had a great premise, an intelligent audience, a missing panelist, and a moderator with whose style I interacted badly. I talked about the Dresden Files and attemped to articulate that my ability to find a character sympathetic or interesting has nothing to do with whether I find them admirable or conventionally likeable, the last of which is really not a metric I use much in my own reactions. Afterward I realized that I could have applied one of my arguments about Peter Cushing in Cash on Demand (1961) to Seivarden in Ann Leckie's Radch trilogy. Conventions don't have esprit de l'escalier; they have a whole damn pantheon of the things.

"The Story Within the Story" contained the same moderator, but the panelists besides myself were Greer, Genarti, and MJ, so we talked about metafiction and self-deconstructing narratives and plain ordinary embedded stories and could probably have done so for hours. I can remember very little of what I said that wasn't a very forceful recommendation for Jane Yolen's Sister Light, Sister Dark (1989), but MJ made a great point about Ovid's Heroides.

And afterward I meant to run straight for the T and fall over, but instead I stayed and talked for at least an extra hour, because this year's Arisia was an oddly social con. I am not actually complaining. I saw the usual and welcome suspects like ladymondegreen (now with husbands!) and Matthew Timmins, but I also ran into cirne for the first time in at least two years (now dating a mutual friend I didn't realize she knew! Boston: the pocket universe) and hermitgeecko and kept glancing off ratatosk and awhyzip and captainbutler and cucumberseed over the course of the weekend. Max Gladstone said brilliant things about Steven Universe (2013–) in the green room and I told him to watch Only Angels Have Wings (1939), which I will write about as soon as I've gotten enough sleep to reassemble my brain. I was given a memory in the form of a pale blue balloon by a woman cosplaying Joy from Inside Out (2015). In the hallways, I passed a Rose Quartz who was legitimately over six feet tall and a Deadpool cosplaying some other Marvel hero. I admired the porcelain harpies in the art show, three of them on a branch like Sirens. I told Lee Moyer how much I loved his prehistoric sea creatures.

I pretty desperately need to sleep.

1. I was worrying about sticking around the hotel for the Post-Meridian Radio Players when I was informed that their genderswapped Star Trek was actually the next night, whereupon derspatchel and I fled into the only relatively freezing night in search of dinner that did not come from the hotel restaurant. We ended up at Jacob Wirth's, where it turns out that Friday nights are Sing Along with Mel. Actually, this was fantastic. Table by table, groups of giggling students or young professionals would come up to the piano, pick a number out of the lyrics book, and then belt out something popular enough that a bar crowd could be expected to know it, meaning that ninety percent of the songs were completely strange to me. It was genuinely endearing to watch and every now and then I could even chime in. I enjoyed the way the room knew just enough of "Folsom Prison Blues" to shout the line about the man in Reno and then go back to their own conversations. When the entire restaurant joined in for the memorial version of "Space Oddity," it was worth the fact we were there twice as long as planned because our server kept disappearing for half-hours at a time and we didn't think it was courteous to start quoting "The Piano Has Been Drinking."