![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rushthatspeaksDue to a collection of the sorts of things that happen sometimes, I only made one day of Readercon this year, Saturday. But it was awesome.
Bookspoils: this year I told![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
gaudior that it was her job to follow me around the dealer's room and at intervals say, in a stern and definitive tone of voice, "NO." She asked if any particular stimulus was required for her to start doing this, and I said, just at regular intervals please.
Therefore I kept it under fifty dollars, which is a miracle like unto a very miraculous thing.
Anyway, I got: The Child Garden, by Geoff Ryman, in hardback for $10;
In Other Words, a collection of John Crowley's nonfiction which has the best author picture ever (a Victorian-style pen-and-ink drawing of a gentleman in a suit and with a raven's or crow's head-- looks just like him);
and thensovay and eredien teamed up and bought me
Angela Carter's picture book for children, Sea-Cat and Dragon King
and I shall clutch it to my bosom and never let it go again except possibly to give public readings on state occasions or if my wife has something to say about it BUT EVEN THEN I WILL STILL OWN IT.
It may be a bad sign that one of my qualifications for 'a day job I would really like' is that it produce enough income for me to buy the correspondence of H.P. Lovecraft, in five volumes. This year is not that year. Probably this decade is not that decade. Sigh.
Stuff I Did: attended the panel on different and rare points of view in fiction, report coming later. Attended the panel on fantasy and inner landscape, report coming later. Got out of the hotel for lunch, thanks toraxvulpine, and therefore had a nice tasty crepe instead of the pub food. Got out of the hotel for dinner to the Lemon Tree in Burlington, with a whole slew of awesome people including nineweaving and negothick and yhlee and teenybuffalo and time_shark and theodosia and my usual familial Congery. Said hello to so many people I cannot possibly manage to list them all, except for being glad of finally getting to exchange more than two words with kate_nepveu, and of getting to meet cristalia. Got to watch sovay starting to read Flora Segunda.
Readings: I went to Greer Gilman's. She was reading from the novel-length third story in the Ashes cycle, and as always read beautifully. I have read her work out loud to myself before, but her dialogue really comes alive to me when she does it-- it's the difference between reading Shakespeare myself and hearing a *really good* Shakespearean do it. When I read it it is dialogue; when she does it is everyday speech, broad and tripping and homespun and lovely and demotic and with a mad music. It is a damn fine novel, and I look forward to reading it in covers.
The Rhysling Award And Science Fiction Poetry Association Poetry Slan was the other reading I went to, and those varied a bit; Cat Valente's 'The Eight Legs of Grandmother Spider' always makes me cry, and was definitely a highlight for me, along with Mike Allen's 'Manifest Density'. I really liked what I heard of Theodora Goss's poem, but she was nearly inaudible due to the placement of the microphone. There was also notable work from people like Leah Bobet and Lucius Shepard (whose 'White Trains' is a profoundly peculiar piece, and I don't know what to make of it).
There was also... okay, look, I don't remember the name of the poem nor the name of the poet, and I'm fairly sure that the person reading it was not said poet, but if one is going to have a poem containing a fairly substantial amount of Japanese, one ought to at least attempt to pronounce it correctly. Or at least not to build the structure of the poem in such a way that it is clear that one does not *know* the correct pronunciation. Or at least, if talking about the atomic bomb, not to, and I am not making this up, blame the existence of hentai on it, and specifically on Robert Oppenheimer. (No, really.) A), hentai as a genre descends from a long and storied tradition of erotic prints and pictures dating from the sixteenth century and earlier, and is not some kind of post-WWII malaise; and B) who says that hentai is inherently evil anyway? Aargh. Also, to paraphrase another member of the audience, gee, who knew Mount Fuji was visible from Hiroshima? (No. REALLY. The poem SAID that.) The sheer damn ignorance was such that I couldn't tell whether to be vaguely offended, or just laugh hysterically.
As for the reading with which I was most intimately concerned, I think it went okay. I told myself at the beginning not to take it too fast, and not to stare over the heads of the audience, and not to try to overemphasize the line breaks because there is no way to make the line breaks in haiku audible, and not to forget to mention that it is an acrostic, and to say where it is coming out, and not faint, and all that. And I think I achieved all of these objectives. But I have no idea how it sounded, because I never do. I've heard it too many times already.
And that was pretty much the con, except of course for the Kirk Poland Memorial Bad Prose Competition, which I will report on later. I had a wonderful time, and look forward to the next one.
Bookspoils: this year I told
gaudior that it was her job to follow me around the dealer's room and at intervals say, in a stern and definitive tone of voice, "NO." She asked if any particular stimulus was required for her to start doing this, and I said, just at regular intervals please.Therefore I kept it under fifty dollars, which is a miracle like unto a very miraculous thing.
Anyway, I got: The Child Garden, by Geoff Ryman, in hardback for $10;
In Other Words, a collection of John Crowley's nonfiction which has the best author picture ever (a Victorian-style pen-and-ink drawing of a gentleman in a suit and with a raven's or crow's head-- looks just like him);
and then
sovay and eredien teamed up and bought meAngela Carter's picture book for children, Sea-Cat and Dragon King
and I shall clutch it to my bosom and never let it go again except possibly to give public readings on state occasions or if my wife has something to say about it BUT EVEN THEN I WILL STILL OWN IT.
It may be a bad sign that one of my qualifications for 'a day job I would really like' is that it produce enough income for me to buy the correspondence of H.P. Lovecraft, in five volumes. This year is not that year. Probably this decade is not that decade. Sigh.
Stuff I Did: attended the panel on different and rare points of view in fiction, report coming later. Attended the panel on fantasy and inner landscape, report coming later. Got out of the hotel for lunch, thanks to
raxvulpine, and therefore had a nice tasty crepe instead of the pub food. Got out of the hotel for dinner to the Lemon Tree in Burlington, with a whole slew of awesome people including nineweaving and negothick and yhlee and teenybuffalo and time_shark and theodosia and my usual familial Congery. Said hello to so many people I cannot possibly manage to list them all, except for being glad of finally getting to exchange more than two words with kate_nepveu, and of getting to meet cristalia. Got to watch sovay starting to read Flora Segunda. Readings: I went to Greer Gilman's. She was reading from the novel-length third story in the Ashes cycle, and as always read beautifully. I have read her work out loud to myself before, but her dialogue really comes alive to me when she does it-- it's the difference between reading Shakespeare myself and hearing a *really good* Shakespearean do it. When I read it it is dialogue; when she does it is everyday speech, broad and tripping and homespun and lovely and demotic and with a mad music. It is a damn fine novel, and I look forward to reading it in covers.
The Rhysling Award And Science Fiction Poetry Association Poetry Slan was the other reading I went to, and those varied a bit; Cat Valente's 'The Eight Legs of Grandmother Spider' always makes me cry, and was definitely a highlight for me, along with Mike Allen's 'Manifest Density'. I really liked what I heard of Theodora Goss's poem, but she was nearly inaudible due to the placement of the microphone. There was also notable work from people like Leah Bobet and Lucius Shepard (whose 'White Trains' is a profoundly peculiar piece, and I don't know what to make of it).
There was also... okay, look, I don't remember the name of the poem nor the name of the poet, and I'm fairly sure that the person reading it was not said poet, but if one is going to have a poem containing a fairly substantial amount of Japanese, one ought to at least attempt to pronounce it correctly. Or at least not to build the structure of the poem in such a way that it is clear that one does not *know* the correct pronunciation. Or at least, if talking about the atomic bomb, not to, and I am not making this up, blame the existence of hentai on it, and specifically on Robert Oppenheimer. (No, really.) A), hentai as a genre descends from a long and storied tradition of erotic prints and pictures dating from the sixteenth century and earlier, and is not some kind of post-WWII malaise; and B) who says that hentai is inherently evil anyway? Aargh. Also, to paraphrase another member of the audience, gee, who knew Mount Fuji was visible from Hiroshima? (No. REALLY. The poem SAID that.) The sheer damn ignorance was such that I couldn't tell whether to be vaguely offended, or just laugh hysterically.
As for the reading with which I was most intimately concerned, I think it went okay. I told myself at the beginning not to take it too fast, and not to stare over the heads of the audience, and not to try to overemphasize the line breaks because there is no way to make the line breaks in haiku audible, and not to forget to mention that it is an acrostic, and to say where it is coming out, and not faint, and all that. And I think I achieved all of these objectives. But I have no idea how it sounded, because I never do. I've heard it too many times already.
And that was pretty much the con, except of course for the Kirk Poland Memorial Bad Prose Competition, which I will report on later. I had a wonderful time, and look forward to the next one.
