When the wheel turns under your hand, you must watch your words

[sovay]

That was an amazing Readercon.

I wasn't necessarily expecting it to be. I was coming into it exhausted, sleeping worse than I had in months and really not recovered from the holiday; I had a room at the hotel for the second two nights only, so I was looking at a painfully early morning of public transit on my first day of programming and I'd made no plans to meet up with anyone. I was prepared for it to be the kind of convention where I was simply there and I'd make up the really interesting stuff the next year.

I was greeted with a fifth of Kraken rum (and a bottle of ginger beer to pour it into) and sent off with a copy of Ian Tregillis' Bitter Seeds (2010). And in the interim—

handful_ofdust brings me DVDs of Re-Animator (1985) and Bride of Re-Animator (1990) from Toronto. She is also responsible for the Tregillis and for a first edition of John Blackburn's The Scent of New-Mown Hay (1958), which I read on Friday night to either side of Meet the Pros(e) and then through some miracle of exhaustion avoid getting nightmares from. I don't sleep badly at this convention; I just don't seem to build up any stamina from it. I think I ran all four days on performance adrenaline. It worked.

I am told by more than one person after Friday morning that my reading of "The Clock House" made the poem even more powerful than when they read it for themselves online. first_clark (whom I saw in May as Klaatu in the Post-Meridian Radio Players' The Day the Earth Stood Still) talks me up to third parties in the green room with lines like "a voice like velvet." What I remember mostly is that I introduced it with an impromptu lecture about Morcom and Turing and I thought my voice was pitched all wrong, but I start to wonder if anyone recorded it.

I barely see time_shark or Anita this year outside of readings, but she finds me in the dealer's room and gives me a jar of homemade blackberry jam. I had some on rice cakes for breakfast this morning.

(I have internet for the duration of the con because B., who came with gaudior and rushthatspeaks, lends me his iThingy which is a wireless hotspot. I don't know how I'm supposed to thank him unless I get him a satellite for his cat, or something.)

I am on "Theological Debate in Fantasy and SF" with both lesser_celery and hans_the_bold, which against all of last year's predictions does not prompt the apocalypse. This is a weirdly difficult year to be social in, but at least I see both of them more than once. Torger reads the thrilling conclusion to his masterwork Gay, Bejeweled, Nazi Bikers of Gor and John talks cheerfully about MRSA and Patient Zero while his fellow panelists discuss zombies, vampires, and werewolves.

"Wet Dreams and Nightmares"—the weird erotica panel with greygirlbeast, handful_ofdust, and Samuel R. Delany—could have gone for twice its allotted hour, it was that awesome. Bowtie, to use Caitlín's word. It was sufficiently bowtie that it may have generated a thing about which I will yell enthusiastically once it's announced. Delany has the best entrance timing I've seen offstage in a while.

Everybody is scheduled across from everybody else and that includes through the hours on Friday night when most of us want to eat, but dinner is successfully organized for eleven people with an exactly an hour to order, retrieve, and eat ten dishes from Lemon Tree (in Michael Cisco's room, which is why I leave the bottle of Kraken with him for a day) before anyone is late to their programming. Okay, screw you, T. Witt., I successfully organize dinner for eleven people etc. and I am still really pleased that it worked out. A similar feat is achieved with Asmara the next night, except it's nine people, we have two hours, we drive there (derspatchel meets us in Central Square), and the one car gets Gemma back in time for her reading and the second arrives just in time not to miss the new story, so I am also calling that a success. Somebody else is in charge of dinner next year.

I last about half an hour at Meet the Pros(e) and maybe another half-hour sitting in the hallway talking with various people (and reading John Blackburn) before I run out of social, but I run into papersky first. I don't know if I'll be able to make it to Farthing Party, but she says some things that make me really glad.

(I don't remember where in all of this I bought A Tree of Bones (2012), but I love the way the trilogy developed female characters as it complicated itself out from the spine-triangle of the three men who open A Book of Tongues. It's still a blood-soaked gay porno black magic horse opera, but with women as many-sided and morally slippery as any of their male co-leads. It's pretty awesome.)

Talking about Turing's imitation game during "Pointed Experiments in Indeterminacy" causes a young man at the Shirley Jackson Awards the next day to ask me for the citation. I am also made aware by crowleycrow that I need to read a lot more Richard Hughes. "Vestigial raconteur" is a great description.

"The Works of Caitlín R. Kiernan" keeps generating titles for potential Festschriften or new short story collections, of which the only two I seem to have written down are No Such Objective Thing and Never Apologize for the Necrophilia. I stand by the relevance of both of these statements.

Schreiber' buys the copy of Beyond Binary (2012) I had set up on the table during my reading of "Another Coming." When I asked mroctober for it, he gave me an ARC of Heiresses of Russ 2012: The Year's Best Lesbian Speculative Fiction. I should write some: I want to be in that table of contents.

I am not on any panels with rushthatspeaks this year, but I get to hear them talk about the difference between the fantastic in cities and the fantastic in rural settings and now I want the paper.

The Ideomancer reading includes a six-person mini-script adapted by the author from Kenneth Schneyer's "Neural Net." Holy blap, that was fun. I hope someone got a recording.

Late-night conversation after Kirk Poland (which rosefox wins in her first year of competition) produces the phrase "an enormous dongaroo," which I think should become standard issue when talking about dildos from now on.

I am barely conscious on the last day of the convention, but David Hartwell sells me a pair of pulp magazines for less than the price of one of them. One is the June 1941 issue of Stirring Science Stories, a present for Rob which I drop off later in the afternoon on my glowing autopilot way home. (The title alone made it irresistible, but then the first story I opened to had a professor with a silly name and a Venusian which looks disarmingly "goofy as a radio comedian" and I couldn't leave it.) The other is the Summer 1946 issue of Planet Stories, which I might time-share with him if he's really clever. The title story is Leigh Brackett and Ray Bradbury's "Lorelei of the Red Mist," which I read for the first time in Three Times Infinity (1958); in the same table of contents is the original publication of Bradbury's "The Million-Year Picnic." Also something by Bryce Walton called "Prisoner of the Brain-Mistress," which I haven't read yet, but I hope Shaenon K. Garrity has.

Michael Cisco's reading is terrific. I leave with his copy of Celebrant (2012), signed to me in Greek. It has a city which flows downhill from the future, lead poisoning, and bardo. I like it already.

As I am leaving the debrief to get a ride in the direction of public transit from schreibergasse, the man from Boskone tells me I've been voted Best Hair of the con.

—in other words, this entire weekend could have been tailor-made as a refutation of Tiny Wittgenstein and it doesn't matter that I was falling-down tired every minute or there were people I didn't get to see or the littlest toenail on my right foot came off, as it did for no apparent reason on Friday night; I was happy. I still am, in a kind of vague, wiped out, very reclusive way. I'm sure I'm forgetting things. I'm going to remember a lot, and fondly. I think it's important that I do.

I am going back to ignoring everything first, though.

Comments

[handful-ofdust.livejournal.com]

Cisco and I had an insanely good time talking film--I just watched Viy (on YouTube) and Let's Scare Jessica to Death (on DVD), both at least partially on his recommendation. How would I go about getting in touch with him?

[sovay]

How would I go about getting in touch with him?

Sent you an e-mail!