I slept a couple of hours between headaches and caught a train at an hour usually reserved for my gochild and had an amazing last day of NecronomiCon Providence.
Of my back-to-back panels, the standout was "Weird Film from the Pre-Code Era." Matthew Cheney pitched for the two-strip Technicolor uncanny of Doctor X (1932) and Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933). Gillian Daniels broke down the mesmerism of Svengali (1931) and The Mad Genius (1931). I had come prepared to recommend the existential horror of The Lost Patrol (1934) and got sidetracked by a reference to Lovecraft's tastes in cinema into recalling the temporal smash-up of Berkeley Square (1933). Pulling double duty as moderator and projectionist, Gwen Callahan illustrated throughout with slides and clips on the fly. We ran longer than most of the movies we could have kept talking about. "The Sheer Mind-Bending Terror of Physics" was operating at the disadvantage of the last slot in a four-day convention, but it nonetheless obeyed the dictates of gravity and spun centripetally into a broader conversation on the history of science and science fiction and the perpetual revision which can feel like unraveling of the understood world and as Despina Durand finally synthesized, the limits of mortality. Their father trolled brilliantly from the audience with just a few thoughts for the panel. I believe my primary contributions were nuclear physics, radio astronomy, and the impossibility of bargaining with the speed of light in a vacuum.
I feel as though I have forgotten that I used to socialize with large groups of people at regular intervals. At one point in the early afternoon, I was seated at a chair-crowded table commandeered from the patio of a café none of us was officially patronizing, surrounded by Michael Cisco, Sean Moreland, Adam Bolivar, Larissa Glasser, Carrie-Edmund Laben, Fiona Geist, Daphne Gem, and Zin E. Rocklyn, almost none of whom I had seen since my last NecronomiCon in 2019. I ran into K. H. Vaughan in the dealer's room and s.j. bagley at Lovecraft Arts & Sciences and on both sides of my panels was asked to sign books. I got to hug in person someone I had been cut off from with the loss of FB. I was pleased to discover that even after seven years, I remembered the general drift of the walk from the station to the ex-Biltmore Hotel. Probably from running flat out, I did not manage to eat anything beyond a couple of Fig Newtons until taken by Adam and Merlin Cunniff to an outdoor table at Mokban, where I was so enthused by the bulgogi set before me that I completely blanked on the existence of the gochujang I could have added to it. The vague poetry thing that three or four people had told me about in the evening turned out to be a party for Prema Arasu's Vampire Squid (2026) which I was bound to buy from the second the author talked about the inaccuracy of the popular perception of the deep sea as a fearful and incomprehensible void. I could have taken a later train, but correctly forecast that I would have deliquesced into an insentient heap by the time it arrived. Returned to the Boston environs, I collected the car which had been having its headlight repaired, drove home carefully, and ate a lot of coconut-milk mango ice cream. Hestia affirmed that I smelled like hotels and commuter rail.
I could not have done more than one day at this pitch. I felt very ragged and a little like a ringer and people seemed happy to see me. I signed bookstore copies of things I had written. I want to find the Elder Sign from the year I was Poet Laureate—it was silver and seems to have vanished into a box in the packing-out of the last apartment—to put on my computer bag alongside this year's gold and leaf-like design. In addition to the Arasu, I have copies of Adam Bolivar's The Lovecraft Arms (2025), Anita Allen's Nothing Ever Happens Here (2026), and the next-to-latest issue of Spectral Realms (2026) courtesy of the publisher whom I last met voicing the Devil in a puppet-play. It feels nuts that pre-pandemic I never attended this convention more than twice: it feels almost as much home as Readercon. I am phenomenally tired. At the moment I regret nothing. Wish my immune system luck.
Of my back-to-back panels, the standout was "Weird Film from the Pre-Code Era." Matthew Cheney pitched for the two-strip Technicolor uncanny of Doctor X (1932) and Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933). Gillian Daniels broke down the mesmerism of Svengali (1931) and The Mad Genius (1931). I had come prepared to recommend the existential horror of The Lost Patrol (1934) and got sidetracked by a reference to Lovecraft's tastes in cinema into recalling the temporal smash-up of Berkeley Square (1933). Pulling double duty as moderator and projectionist, Gwen Callahan illustrated throughout with slides and clips on the fly. We ran longer than most of the movies we could have kept talking about. "The Sheer Mind-Bending Terror of Physics" was operating at the disadvantage of the last slot in a four-day convention, but it nonetheless obeyed the dictates of gravity and spun centripetally into a broader conversation on the history of science and science fiction and the perpetual revision which can feel like unraveling of the understood world and as Despina Durand finally synthesized, the limits of mortality. Their father trolled brilliantly from the audience with just a few thoughts for the panel. I believe my primary contributions were nuclear physics, radio astronomy, and the impossibility of bargaining with the speed of light in a vacuum.
I feel as though I have forgotten that I used to socialize with large groups of people at regular intervals. At one point in the early afternoon, I was seated at a chair-crowded table commandeered from the patio of a café none of us was officially patronizing, surrounded by Michael Cisco, Sean Moreland, Adam Bolivar, Larissa Glasser, Carrie-Edmund Laben, Fiona Geist, Daphne Gem, and Zin E. Rocklyn, almost none of whom I had seen since my last NecronomiCon in 2019. I ran into K. H. Vaughan in the dealer's room and s.j. bagley at Lovecraft Arts & Sciences and on both sides of my panels was asked to sign books. I got to hug in person someone I had been cut off from with the loss of FB. I was pleased to discover that even after seven years, I remembered the general drift of the walk from the station to the ex-Biltmore Hotel. Probably from running flat out, I did not manage to eat anything beyond a couple of Fig Newtons until taken by Adam and Merlin Cunniff to an outdoor table at Mokban, where I was so enthused by the bulgogi set before me that I completely blanked on the existence of the gochujang I could have added to it. The vague poetry thing that three or four people had told me about in the evening turned out to be a party for Prema Arasu's Vampire Squid (2026) which I was bound to buy from the second the author talked about the inaccuracy of the popular perception of the deep sea as a fearful and incomprehensible void. I could have taken a later train, but correctly forecast that I would have deliquesced into an insentient heap by the time it arrived. Returned to the Boston environs, I collected the car which had been having its headlight repaired, drove home carefully, and ate a lot of coconut-milk mango ice cream. Hestia affirmed that I smelled like hotels and commuter rail.
I could not have done more than one day at this pitch. I felt very ragged and a little like a ringer and people seemed happy to see me. I signed bookstore copies of things I had written. I want to find the Elder Sign from the year I was Poet Laureate—it was silver and seems to have vanished into a box in the packing-out of the last apartment—to put on my computer bag alongside this year's gold and leaf-like design. In addition to the Arasu, I have copies of Adam Bolivar's The Lovecraft Arms (2025), Anita Allen's Nothing Ever Happens Here (2026), and the next-to-latest issue of Spectral Realms (2026) courtesy of the publisher whom I last met voicing the Devil in a puppet-play. It feels nuts that pre-pandemic I never attended this convention more than twice: it feels almost as much home as Readercon. I am phenomenally tired. At the moment I regret nothing. Wish my immune system luck.
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