Scintillation, day two
Oct. 20th, 2018 09:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
landingtreeMontreal custard buns are more like the pure light of heaven than New Zealand custard buns.
I got back from the bun shop just in time for the Good and Evil panel, or possibly just past time, I forget which. I did a lot of arriving slightly late to things. This one, happily, I took notes for:
This panel had Maria Farrell, Marissa Lingen, Ada Palmer, and Jo Walton, with Yves Meynard moderating. In my note-taking I hadn't started attributing statements to people yet. Attributions mostly guesses, quotes mostly paraphrases. (Since Ada Palmer and Jo Walton are the two I've read nonfiction by, my guesses are better as to what they're liable to have said).
What is labeled evil can change with time. The Goblin Emperor reinterprets previous evil, Tolkien's orcs.
Highland reinterpreted. [I do not remember what Highland is. Leaving it in as a possible jog to memory later.]
[Jo] Orcs have an interiority much evil in fantasy lacks. Orcs want your stuff. Sauron just wants domination.
[Ada] One generation will often portray as having interiority something the previous generation didn't. Homer does this, Boticelli does this with the faces of angels, we are doing it. Women are shown with interiority. Orcs are show with interiority. The minor characters bloom up through time.
[One of the books I read (reread) for Scintillation wassartorias' Inda. I made a note at this point about that. Everyone who approaches the status of villain in Inda gets interiority.]
Serial killers are often given as an example of people who lack reasons for their deeds, but in fact serial killers always have them.
Mrs Norris in Dickens, described by A.S. Byatt as having 'motiveless malignity'.
[This must have been the point in the panel where there was a discussion of whether humans can do evil for no reason at all, as explored by Ada's Terra Ignota series. This was one of the things I chewed over afterwards. It's my instinct that even a truly motiveless evildoer would proceed to invent motive for themselves. Human minds work through motives whatever they do. But then I thought, "That's jumping to the end of a road that you'd have to pave with psych papers." And then I thought, but what if humans worked differently?]
[Marissa?] How to do good having been taught it is evil. The moment when Huck Finn decides that he will surely be damned for helping his friend, but that he's going to do it anyway, one of the most powerful in fiction for me.
Daleks are a way to dodge this issue, not to examine it. They supply something to zap.
Marissa: I miss everyone agreeing on Nazis as the definition of evil. [Current politics.]
Orwell identified this weasel-argument: if there is no absolute moral good, then degrees of badness and goodness don't exist either.
Ada: Grant Morrison's The Invisibles has villains which wish to eliminate all extremes of emotion. The best and the worst oppose them equally. So there are two definitions of evil at play: increase of suffering, and diminution of achievement.
Maria: sin as gut flora for the moral imagination's ecosystem. [I wish I remembered the context for this better. Intriguing statement. I think she was saying that without small evils we wouldn't be able to learn not to make large ones?]
The advent of super-wicked problems. A super-wicked problem has three defining features: the clock is running out, there is no central authority, and those trying to solve it are also causing it. See climate change.
We have seen that there is no upper bound to emergent evil. We'd better hope there's no upper bound to emergent good.
Sin: negative or positive numbers? A substance that can weigh down the wicked, or the absence of goods? The idea that sins (like negative numbers) multiply to produce a positive number is the idea of providence. [Implying that there must ultimately be an even number of sins for providence to function.]
Ada: God decided what the worst thing to happen in history would be. God could have chosen something worse, or better. If knowingly preventing your friend from discovering the existence of Montreal custard buns was the worst thing ever to occur, it would have taken the place of the Holocaust in moral discourse, but the discourse would remain essentially the same. To us, the moral bounds look infinite, but they aren't. Fiction lets us widen the bounds. [Two things here, I think, in that God determined not only the worst thing to happen, but also the worst thing to be imaginable.]
Marissa: I choose not to write about misogyny anymore.
Viking view: when there is good, it's because we worked. So did the gods, and suffered terribly, and made mistakes. Baldur is not the god of good, he's the god of light. There are a lot of Viking gods of individual crafts.
Must good and evil now be technological?
Up the stakes in fiction? It doesn't actually work to increase the scale; rather, add what makes you flinch.
Ada: Phoenix, Tezuka: the working-out across all history of the moral capacity of humanity. Each individual story is about a micro-example of human action. The series as a whole is about the question of whether humanity is or can be good.
Marissa: Evil can be fractal. I want to explore the fractalness of good. More fiction that does that.
Small actions and willed blindnesses have given us new scales of problem, of evil. But we don't know what will bear good fruit, of what we do. Small willed seeings?
After that, much as I would have liked to hear about The Future of English, I had to go for a walk to process it all. Well, I still haven't processed it all, but I processed some, and the old port is lovely. Next, Ada Palmer's reading (the first chapter of Too Like the Lightning, pleasant though inessential to me since I've read it three times) and a Q&A; then lunch with David who'd also been on the gardens walk. (Interesting people floating around seeking meal companions! Conventions are amazing!) Although dim sum, as I overheard Jo saying at some point in the weekend, doesn't really work with two: even in Montreal, twelve of the same dumpling was a tactical error.
(Names. 1: I am using the dreamwidth name of anyone whose dreamwidth name I know. 2: it feels odd to call writers I've met either by first name or full name, so I will be random about that. If I manage to break any principles of etiquette on this, please let me know).
And then a panel on John M. Ford. No notes, and I won't try to assign who said what. But this panel is the main reason I'm glad as well as sad that the second of the convention's LARPs was also cancelled. First, because from many angles at once it caused John M. Ford to jump to the top of my reading list as soon as I can find any of him. (None at the Strand. Does anyone have Boston bookshop-wisdom? But I think my local had The Dragon Waiting a month ago, with any luck I'll find it there when I get home). I'm trying not to let my hopes remain at 'he shall assume his place amongst thy favourite writers as was foretold in the beginning' level, because it's a rare reading experience which that would help, and also there's the second reason the panel was so good: people on it had known the man and cared about him, and I couldn't not be moved by it. The panel's existence would have been enough of a recommendation for me to read something of his eventually -- even though I didn't go to the Steerswoman panel, I now know that there's this interesting thing called the Steerswoman series -- but I am emotionally invested in John M. Ford's moral genius and subtlety. That could go either way, when I get to the books.
By moral genius, I mean it sounds like he was a genius in a social and caring way, but it also sounds like he was very good at writing shades of emotion, and aspects of lives that don't usually get written. He writes coming of middle age, he writes what a cyberpunk universe would mean to someone without the use of their legs (before there was cyberpunk) -- and he writes a teenage boy who is a feminist and a sadist and hasn't yet learned you can combine the two, which is a facet of my own adolescence I didn't know I hadn't seen in fiction.
(While I've been writing this entry I've been reading some of his poetry. 'Troy: the Movie.' Very sold).
After John M. Ford I may have hurtled up some stairs and back down them to re-engage my brain -- then there was Being a Gatekeeper, which didn't gel for me. Possibly it's having a one-time book reviewer father, but the overlap between 'didn't know that' and 'am interested in that' was narrow. What's stuck with me is the bit about review databases for the particular use of librarians in selecting library books.
Then came the You Write Funny panel, which was fun, and about which I remember Max Gladstone being in a transition period between different writing habits,nineweaving sitting down to write on a traffic island having stepped into an exuberant current of words while crossing the road, and -- fragments. And then, instead of going into the Steerswoman panel, I had a long conversation with some people in the hall outside, before going off to dinner with another person from the garden walk, Jean, and two other people who... do have names... darn. But one of them was the fantastique and gothic and zombies scholar. They all spoke French, I felt odd about being the one making them speak English. (I've never been anywhere as bilingual as Montreal).
(It's pleasant to be in a context where you mention The Haunting of Hill House in a discussion of horror books and everybody has heard of it. Which reminds me, one of the satisfactions of the Time Travel and Teens panel was that twice I thought of a book relevant to the discussion, and both times it was footnoted less than ten seconds later by someone else. The feeling that the room, in aggregate, has read what I have...)
I hurried away from dinner a little before the others had finished, having realised that the Sassafrass concert was already underway. The panels running beside it are the ones I'm saddest to have missed -- Cthulhu, series writing, what are short stories -- but I wasn't going to miss Sassafrass. I've been listening to bits and pieces of them for years, andseahearth and I spoke some of their songs for an assignment in our high school drama class. Sassafrass went strongly in my head with a years-old regret that it was never going to be practical to go to these overseas science fiction convention thingies, and then with the realisation that Jo Walton had created the perfect one and it was damn well possible whether or not it was practical.
The Norse songs were wonderful. I was tired enough to be mostly zoned out for the pastorals, but I zoned back in for 'Somebody Will'. The song hasn't mean so much to me on its own, but in that room it did.
Then I headed back up to my room to collapse into snooze for half an hour, only my clock informed me that the concert had gone over time by twenty minutes, so I snoozed for three seconds and then dashed downstairs torushthatspeaks' reading, the first chapter of a novel I've been encountering their intriguing hints about for years, and which is itself more intriguing than the hints were. Strong sense that it is doing something complicated, pleasantly limited sense of what that might be,('Gently pastoral but what the hell is going on' may be headed toward being a subgenre), and a world and people I'm happy to have partially in my head in the meantime.
Immediately after that wasnineweaving's reading, from the next Ben Johnson novella, only it may be escaping the bounds of novella and I'd be glad if it did. It is beautiful. (I've never yet had the sense of having finished reading a piece of fiction by nineweaving, I finish one and need to start it again, but in the last year that has shifted from being an offputting thing to a delightful thing).
I talked withnineweaving on the way downstairs to the party afterwards, which was the first conversation at Scintillation I'd had about writing with a writer who's important to me. And then with rushthatspeaks, which was the second. I'd been consciously deferring "Hello person I've never met I love your work" conversations on the basis of eek, but there was no eek component here, it was very nice. Chatted in a circle by the cake table (a good place to be), and ended up in a conversation with three of the people I'd eaten with earlier, and wandered upstairs very tired with a sense that everything was possible and everything was worthwhile.
I got back from the bun shop just in time for the Good and Evil panel, or possibly just past time, I forget which. I did a lot of arriving slightly late to things. This one, happily, I took notes for:
This panel had Maria Farrell, Marissa Lingen, Ada Palmer, and Jo Walton, with Yves Meynard moderating. In my note-taking I hadn't started attributing statements to people yet. Attributions mostly guesses, quotes mostly paraphrases. (Since Ada Palmer and Jo Walton are the two I've read nonfiction by, my guesses are better as to what they're liable to have said).
What is labeled evil can change with time. The Goblin Emperor reinterprets previous evil, Tolkien's orcs.
Highland reinterpreted. [I do not remember what Highland is. Leaving it in as a possible jog to memory later.]
[Jo] Orcs have an interiority much evil in fantasy lacks. Orcs want your stuff. Sauron just wants domination.
[Ada] One generation will often portray as having interiority something the previous generation didn't. Homer does this, Boticelli does this with the faces of angels, we are doing it. Women are shown with interiority. Orcs are show with interiority. The minor characters bloom up through time.
[One of the books I read (reread) for Scintillation was
sartorias' Inda. I made a note at this point about that. Everyone who approaches the status of villain in Inda gets interiority.]Serial killers are often given as an example of people who lack reasons for their deeds, but in fact serial killers always have them.
Mrs Norris in Dickens, described by A.S. Byatt as having 'motiveless malignity'.
[This must have been the point in the panel where there was a discussion of whether humans can do evil for no reason at all, as explored by Ada's Terra Ignota series. This was one of the things I chewed over afterwards. It's my instinct that even a truly motiveless evildoer would proceed to invent motive for themselves. Human minds work through motives whatever they do. But then I thought, "That's jumping to the end of a road that you'd have to pave with psych papers." And then I thought, but what if humans worked differently?]
[Marissa?] How to do good having been taught it is evil. The moment when Huck Finn decides that he will surely be damned for helping his friend, but that he's going to do it anyway, one of the most powerful in fiction for me.
Daleks are a way to dodge this issue, not to examine it. They supply something to zap.
Marissa: I miss everyone agreeing on Nazis as the definition of evil. [Current politics.]
Orwell identified this weasel-argument: if there is no absolute moral good, then degrees of badness and goodness don't exist either.
Ada: Grant Morrison's The Invisibles has villains which wish to eliminate all extremes of emotion. The best and the worst oppose them equally. So there are two definitions of evil at play: increase of suffering, and diminution of achievement.
Maria: sin as gut flora for the moral imagination's ecosystem. [I wish I remembered the context for this better. Intriguing statement. I think she was saying that without small evils we wouldn't be able to learn not to make large ones?]
The advent of super-wicked problems. A super-wicked problem has three defining features: the clock is running out, there is no central authority, and those trying to solve it are also causing it. See climate change.
We have seen that there is no upper bound to emergent evil. We'd better hope there's no upper bound to emergent good.
Sin: negative or positive numbers? A substance that can weigh down the wicked, or the absence of goods? The idea that sins (like negative numbers) multiply to produce a positive number is the idea of providence. [Implying that there must ultimately be an even number of sins for providence to function.]
Ada: God decided what the worst thing to happen in history would be. God could have chosen something worse, or better. If knowingly preventing your friend from discovering the existence of Montreal custard buns was the worst thing ever to occur, it would have taken the place of the Holocaust in moral discourse, but the discourse would remain essentially the same. To us, the moral bounds look infinite, but they aren't. Fiction lets us widen the bounds. [Two things here, I think, in that God determined not only the worst thing to happen, but also the worst thing to be imaginable.]
Marissa: I choose not to write about misogyny anymore.
Viking view: when there is good, it's because we worked. So did the gods, and suffered terribly, and made mistakes. Baldur is not the god of good, he's the god of light. There are a lot of Viking gods of individual crafts.
Must good and evil now be technological?
Up the stakes in fiction? It doesn't actually work to increase the scale; rather, add what makes you flinch.
Ada: Phoenix, Tezuka: the working-out across all history of the moral capacity of humanity. Each individual story is about a micro-example of human action. The series as a whole is about the question of whether humanity is or can be good.
Marissa: Evil can be fractal. I want to explore the fractalness of good. More fiction that does that.
Small actions and willed blindnesses have given us new scales of problem, of evil. But we don't know what will bear good fruit, of what we do. Small willed seeings?
After that, much as I would have liked to hear about The Future of English, I had to go for a walk to process it all. Well, I still haven't processed it all, but I processed some, and the old port is lovely. Next, Ada Palmer's reading (the first chapter of Too Like the Lightning, pleasant though inessential to me since I've read it three times) and a Q&A; then lunch with David who'd also been on the gardens walk. (Interesting people floating around seeking meal companions! Conventions are amazing!) Although dim sum, as I overheard Jo saying at some point in the weekend, doesn't really work with two: even in Montreal, twelve of the same dumpling was a tactical error.
(Names. 1: I am using the dreamwidth name of anyone whose dreamwidth name I know. 2: it feels odd to call writers I've met either by first name or full name, so I will be random about that. If I manage to break any principles of etiquette on this, please let me know).
And then a panel on John M. Ford. No notes, and I won't try to assign who said what. But this panel is the main reason I'm glad as well as sad that the second of the convention's LARPs was also cancelled. First, because from many angles at once it caused John M. Ford to jump to the top of my reading list as soon as I can find any of him. (None at the Strand. Does anyone have Boston bookshop-wisdom? But I think my local had The Dragon Waiting a month ago, with any luck I'll find it there when I get home). I'm trying not to let my hopes remain at 'he shall assume his place amongst thy favourite writers as was foretold in the beginning' level, because it's a rare reading experience which that would help, and also there's the second reason the panel was so good: people on it had known the man and cared about him, and I couldn't not be moved by it. The panel's existence would have been enough of a recommendation for me to read something of his eventually -- even though I didn't go to the Steerswoman panel, I now know that there's this interesting thing called the Steerswoman series -- but I am emotionally invested in John M. Ford's moral genius and subtlety. That could go either way, when I get to the books.
By moral genius, I mean it sounds like he was a genius in a social and caring way, but it also sounds like he was very good at writing shades of emotion, and aspects of lives that don't usually get written. He writes coming of middle age, he writes what a cyberpunk universe would mean to someone without the use of their legs (before there was cyberpunk) -- and he writes a teenage boy who is a feminist and a sadist and hasn't yet learned you can combine the two, which is a facet of my own adolescence I didn't know I hadn't seen in fiction.
(While I've been writing this entry I've been reading some of his poetry. 'Troy: the Movie.' Very sold).
After John M. Ford I may have hurtled up some stairs and back down them to re-engage my brain -- then there was Being a Gatekeeper, which didn't gel for me. Possibly it's having a one-time book reviewer father, but the overlap between 'didn't know that' and 'am interested in that' was narrow. What's stuck with me is the bit about review databases for the particular use of librarians in selecting library books.
Then came the You Write Funny panel, which was fun, and about which I remember Max Gladstone being in a transition period between different writing habits,
nineweaving sitting down to write on a traffic island having stepped into an exuberant current of words while crossing the road, and -- fragments. And then, instead of going into the Steerswoman panel, I had a long conversation with some people in the hall outside, before going off to dinner with another person from the garden walk, Jean, and two other people who... do have names... darn. But one of them was the fantastique and gothic and zombies scholar. They all spoke French, I felt odd about being the one making them speak English. (I've never been anywhere as bilingual as Montreal). (It's pleasant to be in a context where you mention The Haunting of Hill House in a discussion of horror books and everybody has heard of it. Which reminds me, one of the satisfactions of the Time Travel and Teens panel was that twice I thought of a book relevant to the discussion, and both times it was footnoted less than ten seconds later by someone else. The feeling that the room, in aggregate, has read what I have...)
I hurried away from dinner a little before the others had finished, having realised that the Sassafrass concert was already underway. The panels running beside it are the ones I'm saddest to have missed -- Cthulhu, series writing, what are short stories -- but I wasn't going to miss Sassafrass. I've been listening to bits and pieces of them for years, and
seahearth and I spoke some of their songs for an assignment in our high school drama class. Sassafrass went strongly in my head with a years-old regret that it was never going to be practical to go to these overseas science fiction convention thingies, and then with the realisation that Jo Walton had created the perfect one and it was damn well possible whether or not it was practical. The Norse songs were wonderful. I was tired enough to be mostly zoned out for the pastorals, but I zoned back in for 'Somebody Will'. The song hasn't mean so much to me on its own, but in that room it did.
Then I headed back up to my room to collapse into snooze for half an hour, only my clock informed me that the concert had gone over time by twenty minutes, so I snoozed for three seconds and then dashed downstairs to
rushthatspeaks' reading, the first chapter of a novel I've been encountering their intriguing hints about for years, and which is itself more intriguing than the hints were. Strong sense that it is doing something complicated, pleasantly limited sense of what that might be,('Gently pastoral but what the hell is going on' may be headed toward being a subgenre), and a world and people I'm happy to have partially in my head in the meantime. Immediately after that was
nineweaving's reading, from the next Ben Johnson novella, only it may be escaping the bounds of novella and I'd be glad if it did. It is beautiful. (I've never yet had the sense of having finished reading a piece of fiction by nineweaving, I finish one and need to start it again, but in the last year that has shifted from being an offputting thing to a delightful thing). I talked with
nineweaving on the way downstairs to the party afterwards, which was the first conversation at Scintillation I'd had about writing with a writer who's important to me. And then with rushthatspeaks, which was the second. I'd been consciously deferring "Hello person I've never met I love your work" conversations on the basis of eek, but there was no eek component here, it was very nice. Chatted in a circle by the cake table (a good place to be), and ended up in a conversation with three of the people I'd eaten with earlier, and wandered upstairs very tired with a sense that everything was possible and everything was worthwhile.
no subject
Date: 2018-10-22 04:19 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-10-23 02:23 am (UTC)There'll be other years of Scintillation. And there's Worldcon 2020, though I expect that's a long shot. You may hear them yet.
no subject
Date: 2018-10-23 05:23 am (UTC)(Also oooh oooh oooh Longer in Stories than Stone ooh ooh)