Readercon, Part 3: Friday II
Jul. 15th, 2009 10:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
raxBefore I start on panels, if you haven't read![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
coffeeandink 's post about the various problems with Readercon behind this link, you should. I don't think these are all insurmountable in and one case I'm not entirely sure that there's a problem[1], but what she ways and the ensuing conversation are important and valuable if you're interested in the present and future of the con.
Panel: Novels You Write Versus Novels You Talk About At Bars
This panel was supposed to have a woman on it but did not. I'm not sure that choosing not to write novels that are terrible ideas particularly needed a female voice (whatever that means) but I noticed it immediately and it seems worth mentioning. The panel wasn't exactly what I was hoping for --- I was hoping for discussion of lots of ridiculous ideas and whether or not they could be made into books --- and it was mostly about the three writers and how they either did write the crazy things they wanted to do or worked them into other things. That was still pretty entertaining, though, and I'm not sorry I attended or anything. I just wanted more crazy. (Partially this is because there's this book I'm working on, and it has fictional books in it, and I'm vaguely pondering their contents, but I think they're terrible ideas...) I'm just going to talk about each author and what they said because that seems like the best way to break it up.
Alan Steele has written something like fifteen books? He talked about having a scope so big that it eventually defeats you. He wanted to write a book about every planet in the solar system, but couldn't manage the outer planets. This was his "Near Space" series --- Uranus, Neptune, and Mercury do not lend themselves to fiction in his opinion. (I think one of those gets settled in Last and First Men but that's sort of cheating --- I'm not a big SF head but I can't think of books that use those either, really.) He also wanted to do a single book that was a grand tour of the entire Milky Way galaxy but he decided it would be the size of a Manhattan phone book and take ten yeas, so instead he's carving it up into little chunks; Galaxy Blues is one such chunk. He also has a book he's been spinning on for ten years that's about the history of science fiction that he's talked up in bars a lot but not been able to sell. He said it was a bad time to be doing experimental work and he might have to wait until the economy got better. This was really interesting to hear --- since I have a day job, those are just not my concerns. It's a great time to be doing experimental work! :)
James Morrow is known for thematically ambitious work (says my notebook, I've never read any of his stuff, though I've always enjoyed his appearances at Readercon). "What is there that even Morrow won't do?" A lot of reviews of the last novel of his trilogy were like "the whole premise is more suited to late night bullshit sessions in college than fiction." After reading Tolkien because he was hired to write a curriculum about it (which is an awesome reason to read Tolkien) he kind of wanted to write a straight-up fantasy novel. He's never going to write it, but the premise survives barbarically in Philosopher's Apprentice --- it's hard to read my handwriting here but I think the hero and three clone women are trapped in a beaker while a city burns around them and one of the clones tells a story about the fantasy novel that he wanted to write but never will? (This made me go do some research and realize the Invisible Library is gone. Oh no!!! I linked to the archive.org copy. Apparently there is a blog but Dear Internet, Not All Content Is Best Organized In Wordpress Goddamnit. Anyway.) He als suggested writing a review of a book that you didn't actually want to write, which is Borgesian. Apparently Lem has a hypothetical Gigamesh which is sort of a Gilgamesh/Ulysses/Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge crossover.
Barry Malzberg said that with one exception he had written everything he wanted to write. Apparently he always wanted to write a series of stories in which scifi and mainstream writers crossed over --- Ernest Hemingway trying to sell to John Cambpell and angry at a successful Asimov. (I couldn't actually tell if he was being serious here or not.) He talked about "the perfect example of a notional novel that should have stayed in the bar": The Iron Dream, a portrayal of a world in which Hitler became a hack fantasy writer and wrote a fantasy novel. (What the WTF.) He said Pale Fire might be the same thing as well, which I disagree with pretty strongly. I thought maybe that Icelander by Dustin Long might be in that category until I realized that: Ada. That novel is for Ada. It wasn't for me, that's why I didn't much care for it. I still have a review written up like five moleskines ago.
Tarot, Myth, and Imagination: Talk by Rachel Pollack
I thought this was going to be about divination systems in fiction. Nope, that was another panel. This was mostly about Tarot. After five minutes of "Oh God why are we not talking about novels" I actually got really into it; it had a lot of interesting additional detail on top of the basic stuff I had learned in the tarot class I took with my mother a while ago. (That is a story in and of itself.) I'll share one of the many stories that Pollack shared both to save my time and to encourage you to take one of her classes or books if you like it and want more like it. (Plus it's not her story per se but her telling.)
Two angels are up in heaven, Shemhezai and Azazel. They say to God, "How can you give these humans attention? Aren't they vile?" God says "You just think that because you don't have bodies." They say "No, no, we're just pure." So God gives them bodies and they immediately fall into lust. Azazel rapes a woman who may or may not die; this is bad. Shemhezai decides to be more subtle, not that that's a high bar. "Hey babe, why don't you come with me, I'm an angel!" "If you're an angel, you should know the secret name of God." He blurts it out, and she repeats it and flies up into Heaven and becomes a star. Azazel is unrepentant and chained upside down in an abyss. On the ritual day of atonement, one goat is slaughtered and another is sent out into the wilderness to Azazel. He's a figure sort of like Milton's Satan. Shemhezai, on the other hand, begs for God's forgiveness, and is hung upside down between heaven and earth with a halo of golden light around his face --- the Hanged Man of the Rider-Waite tarot. Also the tree of life, roots in heaven, fruit on Earth. The ten of pentacles and the hanged man both have the Kaballah Hopscotch pattern. (Her idea of Kaballah Hopscotch is just awesome.)
Will this do much for my writing (since I don't tend to use Tarot for divination since I don't tend to do divination except when my brain chemicals tell me I'm not being a skeptic occasionally)? Probably not, although I sometimes will take out cards and do readings for characters when I get stuck and having a bunch more associations to make that denser is always good. I now have more associations to add to that, and after three hours of straight PANELPANELPANEL it was nice.
A Contextual Definition of "Hallows" in the Work of Greer Gilman, byrushthatspeaks
A twenty-minute talk on the use of the word "hallows" in Greer's work. Absolutely awesome. It convinced me that the biggest spoilers for Greer's work are things like "Hallows" and "un-" and "Ship." Lila actually did the work of finding every occurrence of the word and saying things like "it's used 232 times." This is awesome. I don't want to steal the thunder of her paper which she may still want to publish or something but the definiton of hallows that is used most often is a 12th centry one for "holy person or saint, or the relics or shrine of such a holy person; a conflation of person and place." This would have been archaic to Shakespeare. This is because Greer is awesome. There's also a definition that means "hare's guts," apparently, though it's never used. Hallows also gets conflated with a time of year, and Unhallows with its opposite; so there's a whole lot of the word doing double and triple duty each time it appears, on the planes of place and time and person. ( I actually talked with Greer about language operating polyphonically, though not in anywhere near as much detail in the interview published in the Readercon 20 souvenir book. Which you should read if you have one.)
"Sword in the Hand" byeredien
A twenty-minute talk on how language, and by extension the author, manipulate characters and readers in both Greer's work and the work of Vernor Vinge. I've not read Vinge, so mostly this made me think of Moonwise, and I think it said a lot of interesting things about the relationship of author to reader to text. When we pick up a book, we accept that we are along for the ride; when we write, we are really making the same compact. In Moonwise, Sylvie and Ariane allow us to experience both of these compacts simultaneously through them. They write and are written. Cassandra asked us: Is this ethical? Is it manipulative? I think the answer to both is yes, personally.
Aaand I am totally burning out on doing these, I might wait a day to continue to make sure I am actually providing something awesome. Is it seriously only 4 PM on Friday in my notes? Wow, Readercon. Wow. Also hi to my new LiveJournal friends! I don't post this often normally, don't worry. :)
[1] I really enjoy being lectured to and taking pages and pages of notes. Maybe it's because I've learned to absorb information that way and then process it later at work and in grad school. I do think it's important to have things with other structures --- and for me to attend them sometimes --- but the way Readercon is structured really works for me, and I hope parts of it continue to be structured that way, so that I can keep going there and getting slammed with information and enjoy it.
coffeeandink 's post about the various problems with Readercon behind this link, you should. I don't think these are all insurmountable in and one case I'm not entirely sure that there's a problem[1], but what she ways and the ensuing conversation are important and valuable if you're interested in the present and future of the con. Panel: Novels You Write Versus Novels You Talk About At Bars
This panel was supposed to have a woman on it but did not. I'm not sure that choosing not to write novels that are terrible ideas particularly needed a female voice (whatever that means) but I noticed it immediately and it seems worth mentioning. The panel wasn't exactly what I was hoping for --- I was hoping for discussion of lots of ridiculous ideas and whether or not they could be made into books --- and it was mostly about the three writers and how they either did write the crazy things they wanted to do or worked them into other things. That was still pretty entertaining, though, and I'm not sorry I attended or anything. I just wanted more crazy. (Partially this is because there's this book I'm working on, and it has fictional books in it, and I'm vaguely pondering their contents, but I think they're terrible ideas...) I'm just going to talk about each author and what they said because that seems like the best way to break it up.
Alan Steele has written something like fifteen books? He talked about having a scope so big that it eventually defeats you. He wanted to write a book about every planet in the solar system, but couldn't manage the outer planets. This was his "Near Space" series --- Uranus, Neptune, and Mercury do not lend themselves to fiction in his opinion. (I think one of those gets settled in Last and First Men but that's sort of cheating --- I'm not a big SF head but I can't think of books that use those either, really.) He also wanted to do a single book that was a grand tour of the entire Milky Way galaxy but he decided it would be the size of a Manhattan phone book and take ten yeas, so instead he's carving it up into little chunks; Galaxy Blues is one such chunk. He also has a book he's been spinning on for ten years that's about the history of science fiction that he's talked up in bars a lot but not been able to sell. He said it was a bad time to be doing experimental work and he might have to wait until the economy got better. This was really interesting to hear --- since I have a day job, those are just not my concerns. It's a great time to be doing experimental work! :)
James Morrow is known for thematically ambitious work (says my notebook, I've never read any of his stuff, though I've always enjoyed his appearances at Readercon). "What is there that even Morrow won't do?" A lot of reviews of the last novel of his trilogy were like "the whole premise is more suited to late night bullshit sessions in college than fiction." After reading Tolkien because he was hired to write a curriculum about it (which is an awesome reason to read Tolkien) he kind of wanted to write a straight-up fantasy novel. He's never going to write it, but the premise survives barbarically in Philosopher's Apprentice --- it's hard to read my handwriting here but I think the hero and three clone women are trapped in a beaker while a city burns around them and one of the clones tells a story about the fantasy novel that he wanted to write but never will? (This made me go do some research and realize the Invisible Library is gone. Oh no!!! I linked to the archive.org copy. Apparently there is a blog but Dear Internet, Not All Content Is Best Organized In Wordpress Goddamnit. Anyway.) He als suggested writing a review of a book that you didn't actually want to write, which is Borgesian. Apparently Lem has a hypothetical Gigamesh which is sort of a Gilgamesh/Ulysses/Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge crossover.
Barry Malzberg said that with one exception he had written everything he wanted to write. Apparently he always wanted to write a series of stories in which scifi and mainstream writers crossed over --- Ernest Hemingway trying to sell to John Cambpell and angry at a successful Asimov. (I couldn't actually tell if he was being serious here or not.) He talked about "the perfect example of a notional novel that should have stayed in the bar": The Iron Dream, a portrayal of a world in which Hitler became a hack fantasy writer and wrote a fantasy novel. (What the WTF.) He said Pale Fire might be the same thing as well, which I disagree with pretty strongly. I thought maybe that Icelander by Dustin Long might be in that category until I realized that: Ada. That novel is for Ada. It wasn't for me, that's why I didn't much care for it. I still have a review written up like five moleskines ago.
Tarot, Myth, and Imagination: Talk by Rachel Pollack
I thought this was going to be about divination systems in fiction. Nope, that was another panel. This was mostly about Tarot. After five minutes of "Oh God why are we not talking about novels" I actually got really into it; it had a lot of interesting additional detail on top of the basic stuff I had learned in the tarot class I took with my mother a while ago. (That is a story in and of itself.) I'll share one of the many stories that Pollack shared both to save my time and to encourage you to take one of her classes or books if you like it and want more like it. (Plus it's not her story per se but her telling.)
Two angels are up in heaven, Shemhezai and Azazel. They say to God, "How can you give these humans attention? Aren't they vile?" God says "You just think that because you don't have bodies." They say "No, no, we're just pure." So God gives them bodies and they immediately fall into lust. Azazel rapes a woman who may or may not die; this is bad. Shemhezai decides to be more subtle, not that that's a high bar. "Hey babe, why don't you come with me, I'm an angel!" "If you're an angel, you should know the secret name of God." He blurts it out, and she repeats it and flies up into Heaven and becomes a star. Azazel is unrepentant and chained upside down in an abyss. On the ritual day of atonement, one goat is slaughtered and another is sent out into the wilderness to Azazel. He's a figure sort of like Milton's Satan. Shemhezai, on the other hand, begs for God's forgiveness, and is hung upside down between heaven and earth with a halo of golden light around his face --- the Hanged Man of the Rider-Waite tarot. Also the tree of life, roots in heaven, fruit on Earth. The ten of pentacles and the hanged man both have the Kaballah Hopscotch pattern. (Her idea of Kaballah Hopscotch is just awesome.)
Will this do much for my writing (since I don't tend to use Tarot for divination since I don't tend to do divination except when my brain chemicals tell me I'm not being a skeptic occasionally)? Probably not, although I sometimes will take out cards and do readings for characters when I get stuck and having a bunch more associations to make that denser is always good. I now have more associations to add to that, and after three hours of straight PANELPANELPANEL it was nice.
A Contextual Definition of "Hallows" in the Work of Greer Gilman, by
rushthatspeaks A twenty-minute talk on the use of the word "hallows" in Greer's work. Absolutely awesome. It convinced me that the biggest spoilers for Greer's work are things like "Hallows" and "un-" and "Ship." Lila actually did the work of finding every occurrence of the word and saying things like "it's used 232 times." This is awesome. I don't want to steal the thunder of her paper which she may still want to publish or something but the definiton of hallows that is used most often is a 12th centry one for "holy person or saint, or the relics or shrine of such a holy person; a conflation of person and place." This would have been archaic to Shakespeare. This is because Greer is awesome. There's also a definition that means "hare's guts," apparently, though it's never used. Hallows also gets conflated with a time of year, and Unhallows with its opposite; so there's a whole lot of the word doing double and triple duty each time it appears, on the planes of place and time and person. ( I actually talked with Greer about language operating polyphonically, though not in anywhere near as much detail in the interview published in the Readercon 20 souvenir book. Which you should read if you have one.)
"Sword in the Hand" by
eredien A twenty-minute talk on how language, and by extension the author, manipulate characters and readers in both Greer's work and the work of Vernor Vinge. I've not read Vinge, so mostly this made me think of Moonwise, and I think it said a lot of interesting things about the relationship of author to reader to text. When we pick up a book, we accept that we are along for the ride; when we write, we are really making the same compact. In Moonwise, Sylvie and Ariane allow us to experience both of these compacts simultaneously through them. They write and are written. Cassandra asked us: Is this ethical? Is it manipulative? I think the answer to both is yes, personally.
Aaand I am totally burning out on doing these, I might wait a day to continue to make sure I am actually providing something awesome. Is it seriously only 4 PM on Friday in my notes? Wow, Readercon. Wow. Also hi to my new LiveJournal friends! I don't post this often normally, don't worry. :)
[1] I really enjoy being lectured to and taking pages and pages of notes. Maybe it's because I've learned to absorb information that way and then process it later at work and in grad school. I do think it's important to have things with other structures --- and for me to attend them sometimes --- but the way Readercon is structured really works for me, and I hope parts of it continue to be structured that way, so that I can keep going there and getting slammed with information and enjoy it.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-16 03:08 am (UTC)You are indeed providing a valuable service! I am very glad to hear about the Books/Bars panel, as I had wanted to go to it but there was something else I was doing, so it's really nice to have some notion of what went on.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-16 03:59 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-16 03:50 am (UTC)I strongly suggest reading A Fire Upon the Deep before A Deepness in the Sky to avoid some spoilers (yes, even though Deepness is set earlier in the in-universe chronology; trust me, it makes sense when you read them).
(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-16 04:00 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-23 07:56 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-16 04:36 am (UTC)The only Morrow I've read is Only Begotten Daughter, but I found it chewy enough that I went and got a copy (I'd read my parents').
Cassandra asked us: Is this ethical? Is it manipulative? I think the answer to both is yes, personally.
I, uh. The fundamental nature of fiction is that it rattles around inducing reactions. This is blatantly manipulative by its nature. Y'know?
Maybe I'm not enough of a theoryhead to get it. ;)
(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-16 10:40 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-16 07:56 am (UTC)since I don't tend to use Tarot for divination since I don't tend to do divination except when my brain chemicals tell me I'm not being a skeptic occasionally
In my experience (limited, though I owe the background on a meme I should write up soon), divination is a mechanism for listening to your subconscious. If you throw a bunch of symbols down in front of yourself and try to force them into a pattern that makes sense to you, you'll probably wind up with what you already know, or hope for, or are worried about, even if you hadn't brought that up to the surface yet.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-16 10:42 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-16 11:09 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-16 10:43 am (UTC)finally on LJ
Date: 2009-07-16 02:15 pm (UTC)really enjoyed your notes on this panel and thanks much for the link! by the way, I finally am getting in the LJ swing of things and have crossposted everything (in case it is easier for LJ folks): http://kokonor.livejournal.com/
Re: finally on LJ
Date: 2009-07-16 02:25 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-16 12:23 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-18 03:07 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-21 06:45 pm (UTC)It's somewhat been brought back into the vernacular by Rowling.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-07-21 06:53 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-08-14 05:56 am (UTC)It occurs to me it would be a good writing exercise to write both hostile and friendly "reviews" of one's own novel-in-progress, as a way of trying to envision how others will respond to it.
I hope you continue this series of transcripts. :)
(no subject)
Date: 2009-10-16 06:14 pm (UTC)I've been doing something like this lately and it's been very helpful. Thank you!
(no subject)
Date: 2009-10-25 01:18 am (UTC)