Twenty-one guns to greet the Gilded Age

Readercon! Starts in four days! Look at this schedule I've got:

Being Vague to Make Space for Horror
Thursday 8:00 PM
Stephen Graham Jones, Darcie Little Badger (m), Sonya Taaffe, teri.zin, Paul Tremblay

In a 2016 blog post, Peter MacDonald argued that many creepypasta stories—unsettling urban legends that have been copied and pasted around the Internet—undermine their effectiveness as works of horror by providing overly concrete answers in the final stretch. Panelists will discuss whether this can be generalized to other horror stories—ones that less obviously blur the line between fiction and reality—and consider the importance to horror of ambiguity around the fantastic and supernatural.

Reading: Sonya Taaffe
Friday 4:30 PM
Sonya Taaffe

(Distinct possibility of nonfiction here. Or fiction in progress. Come find out!)

The White Space Around the Words: The Camaraderie of Poetry and Comedy
Saturday 1:00 PM
Amal El-Mohtar, Greer Gilman, Julia Rios, Romie Stott (m), Sonya Taaffe

In a 2018 interview, comedian Dylan Moran said, "The verbal fun of standup is much more like poetry than prose . . . because a lot of it is about elision, suggestion, inference, the white space around the words. They're much closer than people think, poetry and jokes." Our panelists explore this similarity between poetry and comedy, sharing some of their favorite examples of wordplay that works within the white space.

Dramatic Readings from the Ig Nobel Prizes
Saturday 3:00 PM
Marc Abrahams (m), C.S.E. Cooney, Rose Fox, Heath Miller, Sonya Taaffe

Highlights from Ig Nobel prize-winning studies and patents are presented in dramatic mini-readings by luminaries and experts (in some field). The audience will have an opportunity to ask questions about the research presented. Answers will be based on the expertise of the presenters, who may have a different expertise than the researchers.

Lloyd Alexander, Existentialist
Sunday 11:00 AM
C.S.E. Cooney, Andrea Martinez Corbin, Chris Gerwel, Marissa Lingen (m), Sonya Taaffe

Lloyd Alexander, translator of Jean-Paul Sartre, wrote an existentialist epic fantasy series. As Jesse Schotter writes on Full Stop, "The end of The High King, and Taran’s choice to remain in Prydain . . . salvage[s] the idea of free will within the deterministic framework of the genre." How did existentialism influence Alexander's other work (Time Cat, the Westmark trilogy)? What are other examples of existentialist speculative fiction epics? With the present deconstruction of prophecy-driven epics, how can writers learn from Alexander's work?

The Peril of Being Disbelieved
Sunday 12:00 PM
Meg Elison (m), Gwynne Garfinkle, Elsa Sjunneson-Henry, Sonya Taaffe, teri.zin

In the 2017 essay "The Peril of Being Disbelieved: Horror and the Intuition of Women" at Tor.com, Emily Asher-Perrin examines the horror trope of the woman who intuits that a situation is dangerous but is ignored by those around her, and how that trope mirrors society's refusal to believe women more generally. Panelists will explore the trope, whether and how it is being subverted, and the ways in which other marginalized groups are also disbelieved.

I have the usual problem of desperately needing to sleep and convince my immune system not to let me down at the last minute, but I am looking forward. Who can I hope to see there?

Well, it did not take place—it did not take place

I was very frustratingly woken too many times in the night to get anything like the sleep I needed to make my body stop hurting, but in one of the lulls I dreamed that I had watched and was reviewing two movies with ZaSu Pitts and two movies with Van Heflin. The Pitts were pre-Codes, the Heflins both Westerns. Absolutely none of them existed when I woke. Obviously, I should watch something with ZaSu Pitts or Van Heflin. When I am not trying to finish my week's work in three days so as to afford Readercon. I wish this weekend had not been so comprehensively wiped out with heat.

Low points of yesterday included having to walk from Winter Hill to North Cambridge because the buses of a Sunday just preferred not to and having a dude just walk up to me and rushthatspeaks while we were eating ice cream in Davis Square and try to insert himself into our interaction despite a united and visible refusal on either of our parts to acknowledge his presence as he just sort of hung over us (eventually he asked, "Are you guys smoking pot?" and we answered, "NO," and got up and left). Fortunately, high points included eating summer pudding with redcurrants and raspberries and watching the first two episodes of the new Fruits Basket with Rush-That-Speaks and gaudior, not to mention the weather having cooled sufficiently that I could walk to North Cambridge without deliquescing into a pile of melted proteins on arrival. It looks like perfect seaside sunlight beyond my window now. I would rather be in the ocean even than watching a movie with Van Heflin. Have a couple of links.

1. I don't think I had ever heard of Trupa Trupa before, but this interview and the music video that provoked it got my attention. "The hate and evil are not abstract and we cannot accept it."

2. I'd known the song for years but never actually seen the video until I needed a link for a friend recently: The Moulettes, "Devil of Mine." It gives good underworld masked ball.

3. I am enjoying this thing where someone I knew in grad school is making the news for saying things that need to be heard: Ainsley Hawthorn, "Gender neutrality doesn't hurt children – it's part of our history." I also appreciate being introduced to the baby picture of FDR.