Readercon 19 Notes
Jul. 22nd, 2008 08:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
raxSo this past weekend I attended Readercon. It was my third time attending; I'm not usually a con person, but Readercon is awesome. Basically, it's a convention where the panels are the point, and they're all about literature, and the literature is mostly speculative. I'm not a huge reader or writer of speculative fiction, but I've been dipping toes in each side, and there are some obviously brilliant people talking at this convention every year. I'm not going to try to list all of the people, because I will miss half, but wow. Such company.
This year's Readercon I attended a number of panels, two readings, and the Kirk Poland Memorial Bad Prose Competition --- imagine approaching bad science fiction with all of the pathos and competition and hilarity of a chessboxing match or a NetHack tournament. [1] The panel selection was excellent: I often found myself interested in more than one thing going on at the same time. The con's flavor as a whole seemed maybe a little more political than normal than the past couple of years. I don't know if it was the election or what, but the riffs on the Republican Party and on religion in general (this one surprised me a little) were out in full force. I didn't particularly mind this, but it wasn't the flavor I was expecting, so it was a mite weird, and a little disappointing that a couple of panels got caught up in it. Don't let that stop you from coming to next year's, though, if you think it might be interesting --- because it's awesome. I'm not going to write up notes on everything I saw, just most of it, for those interested or those who attended or just those who want more text to read.
The Not One Of Us reading featured John Benson, Mike Allen, Erin Hoffman, Anke Kriske, Sonya Taaffe, and my wonderful fiancee Cassandra Phillips-Sears. (Someone was pulled out of the audience to read as well, but I didn't get her name, alas; I'm pulling names from the program for these.) Watching Cassandra get really emotionally into one of her poems helped me understand the poem, and her, more. Not to say that the poem isn't evocative on the page --- it is, or it wouldn't have been published --- but it's very personal and, well, I know her very personally. It was a small crowd, but frankly I don't mind having a bunch of excellent work read what feels like to me.
Andrea Hairston read an unfinished paper called "Imagination and Ambiguity in Pan's Labyrinth" with commentary by Mike Allen and Dale Bailey. This paper... is brilliant. Or will be. She discussed in detail how the film's point of view was used to establish the ambiguity of whether or not the magical things going on in the movie are "real," and points out compellingly how Ophelia's fantasies are far from escapist. The audience also got to hear Mike Allen's previously-secret theory of evil, roughly that there is storybook evil (Darth Vader) and genuine evil (Nazis) and that Vidal in Pan's Labyrinth crosses the line when he kills the rabbit hunter. The next thing in my notes (I don't know who said it): "But del Toro has some amount of sympathy. He is not spontaneously evil --- the danger is ideology. Storybook knows he's evil." I also learned at this panel that the movie is in Castillian Spanish and not Mexican Spanish, a distinction I was not savvy enough to pick up on despite being able to disagree with the translator in places. (Spanish movies! There's a way to practice. And I need to pick up those side-by-side Borges analogies...) I took a bunch more notes here if anyone is curious.
John Clute, Elizabeth Hand, David G. Hartwell, Farah Mendlesohn, and Gary K. Wolfe discussed the critical review of science fiction and its place in the overall discourse about literature. Clute and I share the same philosophy on spoliers --- we don't care, at all --- which apparently makes us weird, though Hand said that she often reads endings first. This panel was really fascinating because it made reviewing work seem like a really worthwhile and challenging thing to do. "They're reading it so we don't have to" is in my notes but unattributed, also "Build up portraits of the interlocutor --- composite portrait for conversation when one attempts to treat review text on its own," "intense, fleeting judgements," "Academic reviews are received as vandalism, not an intellectual discourse, says Clute," and my favorite, "Stop this book before it hurts more people!" I really need to transcribe some of the reviews I wrote in old Moleskines...
Jeffrey A. Carver, James Patrick Kelly, Cat Rambo, Graham Sleight, and Gordon Van Gelder talked about giving away texts for free on the internet and the relation of that to piracy. It was an interesting talk that to me echoed back to some of Jesse Vincent's thoughts about Web 2.0 and sharecropping. There seemed to be three models for generating revenue from text online: supporting a physical book product, pay-to-view service, and requesting donations. The people on the panel seemed to think that making $1000 off of a novel in a year was a lot of money online --- that made me kinda queasy. Writing a novel (for me at least) is more work than teaching a class, for which I am going to get $3-4000, which is really less than minimum wage. So I'm underwhelmed. Notes: "Current people giving things away aren't actually making their money on writing. Paid on moral coin.," "Is there an expectation among readers that entertainment should be free? ... Lots of entertainment is free," "In greater danger of piracy or obscurity?," "Webcomics work because they come out every day? Maybe? Is that applicable for fiction?"
"If All Men Were Tolerant, How Would You Shock Your Sister?" featured Paolo Bacigalupi, Rose Fox, Barry N. Malzberg, James Morrow, and Cecilia Tan. This panel had such promise but I think it lacked focus, though it did lead me to think about the role of transgression in Bataille's Story of the Eye and have a really interesting conversation with Greer about it on the ride home. They spent too much time talking about the New Yorker cover, in my opinion, but I got a few interesting things: "conservation of the forbidden?", "transgressive as a problematic term, just an academic way to say naughty," "Roth: How do you do satire in the face of absurdity?", "Is Jack Chick transgressive?", and my favorite, "fiction as a trojan horse to smuggle ideas into the reader."
Greer Gilman gave a brilliant reading from her forthcoming Cloud and Ashes. I was unfortunately too zonked to catch all of it --- I went home right afterward --- but you can bet I'll be preordering her book. You should too!
"Why Don't We Do It In The Reformation?: Underutilized Historical Eras In Spec Fic" featured James L. Cambias, John Crowley, Carolyn Ives Gilman, Walter H. Hunt, Farah Mendlesohn, and Ekaterina Sedia talking about different times one might set alternative historical fiction. The core tenet of the panel was that WWII and the American Civil War are overused and this is a problem, but the whole panel was spent discussing books that had used other time periods and failed, so I was sort of unconvinced that their point was correct. It was still very engaging though, and gave me the idea of an alternate history book where the Spiritualist movement took off because it was actually right. Someone, go forth, write it! Also, "18th century is overbroad: telescoping effects of history."
Debra Doyle, Greer Gilman, Lissanne Lake, Faye Ringel, and Sonya Taaffe talked about the role of language in fantasy in "Fantasists as Modern Philologists." I really loved this panel but I'm not sure how to describe it, so here are notes: "passionate reading of the OED," "Greer puns on 'spell' within ten minutes," "Tolkien as evolutionary biologist of words: dragons through language?," "Greer: The magic is in the casement," "Guy Davenport's essay on how each chapter in Ulysses is another letter of the alphabet --- each is a tree with different symbolism --- forest growing up through Dublin," "(Greer is so postmodern)," "Tolkien as nothing but a philologist's game? What about Hoban? Burgess?," "Tolkien thought languages could be intrinsically beautiful or ugly. Glottal stops are evil!," "Shibboleth: language as marker of belonging," "I disagree with 'reowning the concreteness of words' -- words are fundamentally abstract and their ability to have multiple meanings is the source of their power," "deixis... Carl Bueller: deixis en fantasma, call up ghost in words not in the room. Can't direct the eyes to Lothlorien," "If we go deep enough into language, are there concepts that language can't describe? (Godel)," "Spiraling sense of time reflected in the way language is constructed: verb tenses." You had to be there, but *swoon*
Greer Gilman, Matthew Jarpe, Caitlin R. Kiernan, Allen Steele, and Sonya Taaffe talked about the relations between fiction and music. A lot of it was just "what kind of music do you listen to when you write and why?" which was interesting but not worth writing down, though partially because it's the sort of thing I remember very clearly without needing to write it down. (Kiernan and I have very similar music-and-writing interactions: singing without realizing, playing one song on loop, rock songs with unrelated lyrics.) "It's hard to be Modernist with lawyers around," says Greer, and one of my favorite moments of the whole convention was Sonya shouting "Download Music! Support T.S. Eliot!"
The discussions of copyright law and what you can and can't quote without paying for it were just so depressing.
The Rhysling Award Poetry Slan (I still don't get it, even after looking up Slan) was as always brilliant: it reminded me of the National Poetry Slam in Providence in 2000, and those are some good memories. Obviously(? It's obvious to me) I did not take notes here.
The Kirk Poland was still one of the most hilarious things that I will attend all year, but I missed my yearly dose of R. Lionel Fanthorpe. Luckily, I was able to get a brief fix online. THINKING METAL THINGS. (circuit_four: THINKING MENTAL THINGS!) And that's all here because I have no notes and because I am sort of running out of steam.
Paul Di Filippo, Michael Kandel, James D. Macdonald, James Morrow, and Kathryn Morrow had a panel discussion on "Satire With and WIthout Freedom of Speech." I remember this being a good panel but my notes are kind of sarcastic; not sure what's up with that. The first one says "Europe is 'the other continent now?" which I think rubbed me the wrong way at the time. The question I never got to ask is "Paul discussed how satire uses humor to disarm the reader and weaken those in power so that the reader can be personally and politically affected by the work. Can you disarm your audience with something other than humor for the same purposes? Is that satire? Is it more or less useful, and in what situations? I'm thinking of Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things." (I write questions out before I ask them, which leads to me not asking panels many questions.) Oh, I remember why my notes are snarky now! My opinion of the panelists was much higher than my opinion of the audience, especially the guy behind me who would-not-stop-talking. Some quotes: "J. Morrow: Limbaugh is playing the piano in the whorehouse of the Bush Administration. That's all he's doing," "Gulliver's Travels satirizes elements of the human condition rather than a specific political moment," "Morrow claims very little is irreverent because very little is revered. Huh," "Some panels benefit from questions. Then, there are other panels," " 'If reality is satirical, is satire useful?' 'Oh, every generation says that'," and "Is the valorization of edginess too self-referential? Othering discourse? Privileging education?"
The next panel was kind of a train wreck where the train hit a bus and then was hit by a biplane which caught on fire and lit up a keg of dynamite that started a forest fire and made an oil tanker crash into the shore. "If Fantasy Is Created, Does Science Fiction Evolve?" had the potential to be fascinating and had glimmers of awesome (mad props especially to Judith Berman, who at one point briefly started talking to me instead of to the panel, when she wasn't busy hitting them with the hammer of Oh My God Shut Up), but there were nine or ten people on it all of whom had strong opinions and just talked over each other, and mostly they were arguing about whether religion was stupid or not based on the positions of intelligent design advocates. No, really, this actually happened. A bunch of people walked out. I stayed for the trainwreck and did get a few good notes: "In fantasy and SF, people have inborn traits that make them better than everyone else. (Rand!) Some engineering fiction does not have that," "Yves Menard: Narrative tends to propagate myth," "Myth is just scripture that's had its ass kickec by other scripture," "Biblical singularity fiction." Also, I got a few super-snarky notes, most of which are not worth sharing, but this one, I think, is gold: "Oh look it's a binary versus spectrum argument!! How novel!!!1!!1one! [yes that is a literal transcription] I'm not F or SF, I'm genrequeer!" I inform you of this: There are currently no google hits for the term "genrequeer," though I have added it to the text on my meager website. I occasionally come up with something of merit! I need to do something with this...
The last panel I attended, "Getting Away With Clever: Self-Consciousness in Unconventional Fiction," more than made up for it. Michael Cisco, John Crowley, Gregory Frost, Barry N. Malzberg, and Paul Park talked for an hour about different ways to make literature self-aware, which worked and which didn't, and why. There could have been more why, maybe, but it was a great panel. I am too tired to try to transcribe all of my notes into something coherent right now but if you care a lot like Faith No More kick me and I will. It was so good. So. Good.
In short, you should come to Readercon next year. I mean, Greer Gilman as guest of honor! along with Elizabeth Hand, whose work I don't know but has always seemed awesome on panels I've seen her on.
[1] Speaking of which, Crawl tournament in August. For any of you who might somehow not know that through some other channel.
This year's Readercon I attended a number of panels, two readings, and the Kirk Poland Memorial Bad Prose Competition --- imagine approaching bad science fiction with all of the pathos and competition and hilarity of a chessboxing match or a NetHack tournament. [1] The panel selection was excellent: I often found myself interested in more than one thing going on at the same time. The con's flavor as a whole seemed maybe a little more political than normal than the past couple of years. I don't know if it was the election or what, but the riffs on the Republican Party and on religion in general (this one surprised me a little) were out in full force. I didn't particularly mind this, but it wasn't the flavor I was expecting, so it was a mite weird, and a little disappointing that a couple of panels got caught up in it. Don't let that stop you from coming to next year's, though, if you think it might be interesting --- because it's awesome. I'm not going to write up notes on everything I saw, just most of it, for those interested or those who attended or just those who want more text to read.
The Not One Of Us reading featured John Benson, Mike Allen, Erin Hoffman, Anke Kriske, Sonya Taaffe, and my wonderful fiancee Cassandra Phillips-Sears. (Someone was pulled out of the audience to read as well, but I didn't get her name, alas; I'm pulling names from the program for these.) Watching Cassandra get really emotionally into one of her poems helped me understand the poem, and her, more. Not to say that the poem isn't evocative on the page --- it is, or it wouldn't have been published --- but it's very personal and, well, I know her very personally. It was a small crowd, but frankly I don't mind having a bunch of excellent work read what feels like to me.
Andrea Hairston read an unfinished paper called "Imagination and Ambiguity in Pan's Labyrinth" with commentary by Mike Allen and Dale Bailey. This paper... is brilliant. Or will be. She discussed in detail how the film's point of view was used to establish the ambiguity of whether or not the magical things going on in the movie are "real," and points out compellingly how Ophelia's fantasies are far from escapist. The audience also got to hear Mike Allen's previously-secret theory of evil, roughly that there is storybook evil (Darth Vader) and genuine evil (Nazis) and that Vidal in Pan's Labyrinth crosses the line when he kills the rabbit hunter. The next thing in my notes (I don't know who said it): "But del Toro has some amount of sympathy. He is not spontaneously evil --- the danger is ideology. Storybook knows he's evil." I also learned at this panel that the movie is in Castillian Spanish and not Mexican Spanish, a distinction I was not savvy enough to pick up on despite being able to disagree with the translator in places. (Spanish movies! There's a way to practice. And I need to pick up those side-by-side Borges analogies...) I took a bunch more notes here if anyone is curious.
John Clute, Elizabeth Hand, David G. Hartwell, Farah Mendlesohn, and Gary K. Wolfe discussed the critical review of science fiction and its place in the overall discourse about literature. Clute and I share the same philosophy on spoliers --- we don't care, at all --- which apparently makes us weird, though Hand said that she often reads endings first. This panel was really fascinating because it made reviewing work seem like a really worthwhile and challenging thing to do. "They're reading it so we don't have to" is in my notes but unattributed, also "Build up portraits of the interlocutor --- composite portrait for conversation when one attempts to treat review text on its own," "intense, fleeting judgements," "Academic reviews are received as vandalism, not an intellectual discourse, says Clute," and my favorite, "Stop this book before it hurts more people!" I really need to transcribe some of the reviews I wrote in old Moleskines...
Jeffrey A. Carver, James Patrick Kelly, Cat Rambo, Graham Sleight, and Gordon Van Gelder talked about giving away texts for free on the internet and the relation of that to piracy. It was an interesting talk that to me echoed back to some of Jesse Vincent's thoughts about Web 2.0 and sharecropping. There seemed to be three models for generating revenue from text online: supporting a physical book product, pay-to-view service, and requesting donations. The people on the panel seemed to think that making $1000 off of a novel in a year was a lot of money online --- that made me kinda queasy. Writing a novel (for me at least) is more work than teaching a class, for which I am going to get $3-4000, which is really less than minimum wage. So I'm underwhelmed. Notes: "Current people giving things away aren't actually making their money on writing. Paid on moral coin.," "Is there an expectation among readers that entertainment should be free? ... Lots of entertainment is free," "In greater danger of piracy or obscurity?," "Webcomics work because they come out every day? Maybe? Is that applicable for fiction?"
"If All Men Were Tolerant, How Would You Shock Your Sister?" featured Paolo Bacigalupi, Rose Fox, Barry N. Malzberg, James Morrow, and Cecilia Tan. This panel had such promise but I think it lacked focus, though it did lead me to think about the role of transgression in Bataille's Story of the Eye and have a really interesting conversation with Greer about it on the ride home. They spent too much time talking about the New Yorker cover, in my opinion, but I got a few interesting things: "conservation of the forbidden?", "transgressive as a problematic term, just an academic way to say naughty," "Roth: How do you do satire in the face of absurdity?", "Is Jack Chick transgressive?", and my favorite, "fiction as a trojan horse to smuggle ideas into the reader."
Greer Gilman gave a brilliant reading from her forthcoming Cloud and Ashes. I was unfortunately too zonked to catch all of it --- I went home right afterward --- but you can bet I'll be preordering her book. You should too!
"Why Don't We Do It In The Reformation?: Underutilized Historical Eras In Spec Fic" featured James L. Cambias, John Crowley, Carolyn Ives Gilman, Walter H. Hunt, Farah Mendlesohn, and Ekaterina Sedia talking about different times one might set alternative historical fiction. The core tenet of the panel was that WWII and the American Civil War are overused and this is a problem, but the whole panel was spent discussing books that had used other time periods and failed, so I was sort of unconvinced that their point was correct. It was still very engaging though, and gave me the idea of an alternate history book where the Spiritualist movement took off because it was actually right. Someone, go forth, write it! Also, "18th century is overbroad: telescoping effects of history."
Debra Doyle, Greer Gilman, Lissanne Lake, Faye Ringel, and Sonya Taaffe talked about the role of language in fantasy in "Fantasists as Modern Philologists." I really loved this panel but I'm not sure how to describe it, so here are notes: "passionate reading of the OED," "Greer puns on 'spell' within ten minutes," "Tolkien as evolutionary biologist of words: dragons through language?," "Greer: The magic is in the casement," "Guy Davenport's essay on how each chapter in Ulysses is another letter of the alphabet --- each is a tree with different symbolism --- forest growing up through Dublin," "(Greer is so postmodern)," "Tolkien as nothing but a philologist's game? What about Hoban? Burgess?," "Tolkien thought languages could be intrinsically beautiful or ugly. Glottal stops are evil!," "Shibboleth: language as marker of belonging," "I disagree with 'reowning the concreteness of words' -- words are fundamentally abstract and their ability to have multiple meanings is the source of their power," "deixis... Carl Bueller: deixis en fantasma, call up ghost in words not in the room. Can't direct the eyes to Lothlorien," "If we go deep enough into language, are there concepts that language can't describe? (Godel)," "Spiraling sense of time reflected in the way language is constructed: verb tenses." You had to be there, but *swoon*
Greer Gilman, Matthew Jarpe, Caitlin R. Kiernan, Allen Steele, and Sonya Taaffe talked about the relations between fiction and music. A lot of it was just "what kind of music do you listen to when you write and why?" which was interesting but not worth writing down, though partially because it's the sort of thing I remember very clearly without needing to write it down. (Kiernan and I have very similar music-and-writing interactions: singing without realizing, playing one song on loop, rock songs with unrelated lyrics.) "It's hard to be Modernist with lawyers around," says Greer, and one of my favorite moments of the whole convention was Sonya shouting "Download Music! Support T.S. Eliot!"
The discussions of copyright law and what you can and can't quote without paying for it were just so depressing.
The Rhysling Award Poetry Slan (I still don't get it, even after looking up Slan) was as always brilliant: it reminded me of the National Poetry Slam in Providence in 2000, and those are some good memories. Obviously(? It's obvious to me) I did not take notes here.
The Kirk Poland was still one of the most hilarious things that I will attend all year, but I missed my yearly dose of R. Lionel Fanthorpe. Luckily, I was able to get a brief fix online. THINKING METAL THINGS. (
circuit_four: THINKING MENTAL THINGS!) And that's all here because I have no notes and because I am sort of running out of steam.Paul Di Filippo, Michael Kandel, James D. Macdonald, James Morrow, and Kathryn Morrow had a panel discussion on "Satire With and WIthout Freedom of Speech." I remember this being a good panel but my notes are kind of sarcastic; not sure what's up with that. The first one says "Europe is 'the other continent now?" which I think rubbed me the wrong way at the time. The question I never got to ask is "Paul discussed how satire uses humor to disarm the reader and weaken those in power so that the reader can be personally and politically affected by the work. Can you disarm your audience with something other than humor for the same purposes? Is that satire? Is it more or less useful, and in what situations? I'm thinking of Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things." (I write questions out before I ask them, which leads to me not asking panels many questions.) Oh, I remember why my notes are snarky now! My opinion of the panelists was much higher than my opinion of the audience, especially the guy behind me who would-not-stop-talking. Some quotes: "J. Morrow: Limbaugh is playing the piano in the whorehouse of the Bush Administration. That's all he's doing," "Gulliver's Travels satirizes elements of the human condition rather than a specific political moment," "Morrow claims very little is irreverent because very little is revered. Huh," "Some panels benefit from questions. Then, there are other panels," " 'If reality is satirical, is satire useful?' 'Oh, every generation says that'," and "Is the valorization of edginess too self-referential? Othering discourse? Privileging education?"
The next panel was kind of a train wreck where the train hit a bus and then was hit by a biplane which caught on fire and lit up a keg of dynamite that started a forest fire and made an oil tanker crash into the shore. "If Fantasy Is Created, Does Science Fiction Evolve?" had the potential to be fascinating and had glimmers of awesome (mad props especially to Judith Berman, who at one point briefly started talking to me instead of to the panel, when she wasn't busy hitting them with the hammer of Oh My God Shut Up), but there were nine or ten people on it all of whom had strong opinions and just talked over each other, and mostly they were arguing about whether religion was stupid or not based on the positions of intelligent design advocates. No, really, this actually happened. A bunch of people walked out. I stayed for the trainwreck and did get a few good notes: "In fantasy and SF, people have inborn traits that make them better than everyone else. (Rand!) Some engineering fiction does not have that," "Yves Menard: Narrative tends to propagate myth," "Myth is just scripture that's had its ass kickec by other scripture," "Biblical singularity fiction." Also, I got a few super-snarky notes, most of which are not worth sharing, but this one, I think, is gold: "Oh look it's a binary versus spectrum argument!! How novel!!!1!!1one! [yes that is a literal transcription] I'm not F or SF, I'm genrequeer!" I inform you of this: There are currently no google hits for the term "genrequeer," though I have added it to the text on my meager website. I occasionally come up with something of merit! I need to do something with this...
The last panel I attended, "Getting Away With Clever: Self-Consciousness in Unconventional Fiction," more than made up for it. Michael Cisco, John Crowley, Gregory Frost, Barry N. Malzberg, and Paul Park talked for an hour about different ways to make literature self-aware, which worked and which didn't, and why. There could have been more why, maybe, but it was a great panel. I am too tired to try to transcribe all of my notes into something coherent right now but if you care a lot like Faith No More kick me and I will. It was so good. So. Good.
In short, you should come to Readercon next year. I mean, Greer Gilman as guest of honor! along with Elizabeth Hand, whose work I don't know but has always seemed awesome on panels I've seen her on.
[1] Speaking of which, Crawl tournament in August. For any of you who might somehow not know that through some other channel.