Scintillation, day three
Oct. 30th, 2018 05:28 pmI woke, walked briskly around a block, didn't find a breakfast place drawing me in and so bought bao again -- a queue -- and was late to the Joy of Reading session, where everyone had chosen five minutes of prose they liked and read it aloud. Wonderful idea! Very various, and everything was good. Upstairs then to 'Our real influences and why we lie',
( about which I jotted down only a few things. )
Down again to the Ursula Le Guin tribute reading session. The person up the front at the start said, "How many of you definitely want to read something?", and when no one's hand went up began to read the story 'Coming of Age in Karhide'. Badly, I thought. No sense of rhythm. I was very annoyed, and kicked myself for not having put my hand up, because the story was going to take up most of the hour. My mind drifted in annoyance over the initial bits, where setting and history are laid out. At some point, when the narrator has gone to a semi-monastic Fastness, I had begun sinking under the story. I kept on sinking. When somebody says to the narrator the ritual words, "In the act of creation, praise", a tingle ran over my skin (the way tingles will at emotional points in stories), and instead of vanishing in an instant kept on being there for what felt like about twenty seconds. This had never happened before. I was grinning and laughing and happy, and the rushed reading wasn't an irritant, it was a way to get the story quicker, which was nothing but a good thing...
Goodbye, Ursula Le Guin. This worked out to being a more powerful tribute than I could have chosen.
And it was lunch -- but no! it was Ada's secret unprogrammed reading, the one you could only attend if you'd read the first three Terra Ignota books, the beginning of the fourth. At least one person in the audience had read the third of them the night before, after the reading was announced, so they could go. Nothing of plot in the reading, but again, and as with 'Somebody Will', there was more emotional resonance than I'd looked for. The Terra Ignota books haven't always landed with me emotionally, because what she's doing in them is so intricate and so many things at once that I don't trust it to end right, and things I think are flaws might yet turn out not to be, while things I think aren't flaws might become ones. But she cares so much, and it comes through. I am going to carry some of that experience to the books next time I read them, a resonance in Utopia and the Great Conversation which I hadn't yet found on my own; and I'm glad.
And then upstairs to the panel on 'What we can learn from Shakespeare', which as I expected was my favourite panel and one I can use.
( Shakespeare notes )
And then at once the Linguistic Worldbuilding panel, which felt much less like a conversation that the last, more question and response. Unhelpfully, given that, my notes are disorderly, and my memory has largely faded away to what I made notes about.
( Linguistic Worldbuilding notes )
After that I had been sitting down listening to things for almost longer than I could deal with, so I wandered outside and went walking. I got back to the second half of 'Where are the books like Pandemic?' No notes at all. But I remember the panellists dividing up the qualities of the Pandemic boardgame (cooperative, no villain, extremely tense) and finding very few books that matched them all, but a lot of books that had one or another of those qualities; 'people versus nature' turned up a lot, but even those stories have a tendency to have villains in the form of the evil executive who decided not to take forest fire precautions or something. The idea was discussed that Pandemic only looks like a villain-free game because of its scale, and that in reality a pandemic like that would have its fair share of human error, foolishness, small-mindedness, people not understanding that something really big had just happened and so attempting to profit from it as though the status quo were just around the next corner. But there was so much more in this than I'm currently remembering!
And then the last panel of the convention, 'How to imagine the future.' About which the same, and I wish I'd made coherent notes here, because it was one of the most intense panels I went to, and the only fractious one.
( How to imagine the future )
The other two days had been days of meeting people and eating food with people and having fascinating conversations. This was a day of dashing about between (very good) panels and readings, and I landed out of it trying to resist sadness. "Oh. It's over." There was the house party to come; I didn't know how to get there, and feeling very tired just then, lay on my bed for half an hour longer than would plausibly let me arrive on time, inclined to remember that my usual response to even well-constructed house parties is to become a silent and mildly offputting satellite and eventually escape. But I said to myself, "You are not not going to this party, you came a long way to be in its hemisphere." I wandered downstairs, got metro directions from the reception desk, and was about to try putting them into practice when![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rushthatspeaks and nineweaving and Ruthanna Emrys came back from dinner, about to head on to the party, and I asked if their ride had a space, which it did. A gift.
And the party was good. I did my share of orbiting, because if I'm ever going to learn to mingle gracefully the day has not yet come, but so many good conversations, good food, bookshelves to gaze at; and stories told me. And room after room! As I was leaving with a group of uberers I discovered two rooms that I hadn't known the house had.
At the hotel, floor by floor, we left the lift. Goodnight, Scintillation. See you another morning, maybe.
The next day I realised that the con had had a con suite, which I glanced into once and then forgot about completely. Room after room! There was boardgaming going all the time, and I count sixteen programming items I chose not to go to that I'd have liked to. One of the unexpected things for me about Scintillation was how little we talked about books. We did talk about books, but eighty percent of the conversations I had were about something else, with no sense of lack in that. I'm so glad Worldcon is coming to Wellington, because I want to see what one of these things is like when it's actually large. Might it feel smaller? This one felt practically infinite.
( about which I jotted down only a few things. )
Down again to the Ursula Le Guin tribute reading session. The person up the front at the start said, "How many of you definitely want to read something?", and when no one's hand went up began to read the story 'Coming of Age in Karhide'. Badly, I thought. No sense of rhythm. I was very annoyed, and kicked myself for not having put my hand up, because the story was going to take up most of the hour. My mind drifted in annoyance over the initial bits, where setting and history are laid out. At some point, when the narrator has gone to a semi-monastic Fastness, I had begun sinking under the story. I kept on sinking. When somebody says to the narrator the ritual words, "In the act of creation, praise", a tingle ran over my skin (the way tingles will at emotional points in stories), and instead of vanishing in an instant kept on being there for what felt like about twenty seconds. This had never happened before. I was grinning and laughing and happy, and the rushed reading wasn't an irritant, it was a way to get the story quicker, which was nothing but a good thing...
Goodbye, Ursula Le Guin. This worked out to being a more powerful tribute than I could have chosen.
And it was lunch -- but no! it was Ada's secret unprogrammed reading, the one you could only attend if you'd read the first three Terra Ignota books, the beginning of the fourth. At least one person in the audience had read the third of them the night before, after the reading was announced, so they could go. Nothing of plot in the reading, but again, and as with 'Somebody Will', there was more emotional resonance than I'd looked for. The Terra Ignota books haven't always landed with me emotionally, because what she's doing in them is so intricate and so many things at once that I don't trust it to end right, and things I think are flaws might yet turn out not to be, while things I think aren't flaws might become ones. But she cares so much, and it comes through. I am going to carry some of that experience to the books next time I read them, a resonance in Utopia and the Great Conversation which I hadn't yet found on my own; and I'm glad.
And then upstairs to the panel on 'What we can learn from Shakespeare', which as I expected was my favourite panel and one I can use.
( Shakespeare notes )
And then at once the Linguistic Worldbuilding panel, which felt much less like a conversation that the last, more question and response. Unhelpfully, given that, my notes are disorderly, and my memory has largely faded away to what I made notes about.
( Linguistic Worldbuilding notes )
After that I had been sitting down listening to things for almost longer than I could deal with, so I wandered outside and went walking. I got back to the second half of 'Where are the books like Pandemic?' No notes at all. But I remember the panellists dividing up the qualities of the Pandemic boardgame (cooperative, no villain, extremely tense) and finding very few books that matched them all, but a lot of books that had one or another of those qualities; 'people versus nature' turned up a lot, but even those stories have a tendency to have villains in the form of the evil executive who decided not to take forest fire precautions or something. The idea was discussed that Pandemic only looks like a villain-free game because of its scale, and that in reality a pandemic like that would have its fair share of human error, foolishness, small-mindedness, people not understanding that something really big had just happened and so attempting to profit from it as though the status quo were just around the next corner. But there was so much more in this than I'm currently remembering!
And then the last panel of the convention, 'How to imagine the future.' About which the same, and I wish I'd made coherent notes here, because it was one of the most intense panels I went to, and the only fractious one.
( How to imagine the future )
The other two days had been days of meeting people and eating food with people and having fascinating conversations. This was a day of dashing about between (very good) panels and readings, and I landed out of it trying to resist sadness. "Oh. It's over." There was the house party to come; I didn't know how to get there, and feeling very tired just then, lay on my bed for half an hour longer than would plausibly let me arrive on time, inclined to remember that my usual response to even well-constructed house parties is to become a silent and mildly offputting satellite and eventually escape. But I said to myself, "You are not not going to this party, you came a long way to be in its hemisphere." I wandered downstairs, got metro directions from the reception desk, and was about to try putting them into practice when
rushthatspeaks and nineweaving and Ruthanna Emrys came back from dinner, about to head on to the party, and I asked if their ride had a space, which it did. A gift.And the party was good. I did my share of orbiting, because if I'm ever going to learn to mingle gracefully the day has not yet come, but so many good conversations, good food, bookshelves to gaze at; and stories told me. And room after room! As I was leaving with a group of uberers I discovered two rooms that I hadn't known the house had.
At the hotel, floor by floor, we left the lift. Goodnight, Scintillation. See you another morning, maybe.
The next day I realised that the con had had a con suite, which I glanced into once and then forgot about completely. Room after room! There was boardgaming going all the time, and I count sixteen programming items I chose not to go to that I'd have liked to. One of the unexpected things for me about Scintillation was how little we talked about books. We did talk about books, but eighty percent of the conversations I had were about something else, with no sense of lack in that. I'm so glad Worldcon is coming to Wellington, because I want to see what one of these things is like when it's actually large. Might it feel smaller? This one felt practically infinite.
