I had the pleasure this evening of reading my poem from the pulpit of the First Baptist Church in America, which for the opening ceremonies of NecronomiCon Providence extended their ancestral slogan of "All Are Welcome" to include monstrosities from beyond the stars, also me. It is a beautiful eighteenth-century meeting house with a Waterford crystal chandelier and a nineteenth-century pipe organ and no air conditioning whatsoever; I appreciated the basket of rattan fans by the door of the sanctuary for congregants to stave off heat prostration with, beelined anyway for a pew near an open window, and had the presence of mind not to sing anything from 1776 out loud. Speakers recounted the history of the church and the city around it, anecdotes and historiography of Lovecraft and his weird fiction contemporaries, the much-missed memory of Sam Gafford. There was organ music, including a ghostly interruption of "Yes! We Have No Bananas." The north and south doors were opened to admit night gaunts, shoggoths, and assorted visitors from Yuggoth. ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
a_reasonable_man asked afterward if I had ever spoken from the pulpit of an old New England meeting house before and I didn't believe I had. I enjoyed it. I was the impression it went well, too.
Afterward some friends and I tried to visit the opening reception of Ars Necronomica 2019: Dark Dreams in the Divine City, but it had air conditioning: the rest of the overheated exodus from the church crashed into the gallery as one and promptly overflowed. We could barely get near the art. We grabbed cheese cubes and cookies and fled. I ended up having dinner at Mokban with Gillian Daniels, teri.zin, Scott R. Jones, and other people whose social media I don't know, but the conversation ranged from structural inequality to cult movies to whatever I must have been doing wrong with my osam-bulgogi and banchan that the server suddenly handed me a spoon. (I still don't know! It isn't like I tried to use my chopsticks on the soup!) There were at least two parties going on around the convention when we got out, but I had a headache doing its best to graduate to a migraine and returned instead to my hotel room, where I remain fond of the clam lamp and worried by the teddy bear apparently made out of blue Play-Doh.
Tomorrow is an avalanche of programming and I have to get some sleep first. I will leave here the signature review I wrote recently of a book I would be recommending to everyone within earshot even if I had not been given the professional opportunity to rate it a star in Publishers Weekly: The Penguin Book of Mermaids (ed. Cristina Bacchilega and Marie Alohalani Brown, October 2019). I did not know about karukany before.
a_reasonable_man asked afterward if I had ever spoken from the pulpit of an old New England meeting house before and I didn't believe I had. I enjoyed it. I was the impression it went well, too.Afterward some friends and I tried to visit the opening reception of Ars Necronomica 2019: Dark Dreams in the Divine City, but it had air conditioning: the rest of the overheated exodus from the church crashed into the gallery as one and promptly overflowed. We could barely get near the art. We grabbed cheese cubes and cookies and fled. I ended up having dinner at Mokban with Gillian Daniels, teri.zin, Scott R. Jones, and other people whose social media I don't know, but the conversation ranged from structural inequality to cult movies to whatever I must have been doing wrong with my osam-bulgogi and banchan that the server suddenly handed me a spoon. (I still don't know! It isn't like I tried to use my chopsticks on the soup!) There were at least two parties going on around the convention when we got out, but I had a headache doing its best to graduate to a migraine and returned instead to my hotel room, where I remain fond of the clam lamp and worried by the teddy bear apparently made out of blue Play-Doh.
Tomorrow is an avalanche of programming and I have to get some sleep first. I will leave here the signature review I wrote recently of a book I would be recommending to everyone within earshot even if I had not been given the professional opportunity to rate it a star in Publishers Weekly: The Penguin Book of Mermaids (ed. Cristina Bacchilega and Marie Alohalani Brown, October 2019). I did not know about karukany before.
