Readercon Part 1

I've been working on this in bits of time over the past week; the trouble is that even very quick and piecemeal impressionistic writing about hour-long panels is relatively time-consuming to write, and it tends to run long. So rather than one monster post, I'm going to chop it up and post as I complete sections. Part 1 covers the two panels on Thursday.

This was my first time at Readercon - or really at any writers' convention or SF convention. (My world is film festivals and sometimes academia, and my world is even more an abstinence from potentially entertaining large gatherings because I'm busy.) I had forgotten how dry conference room air is; I drank All The Water and still feel I could have stood to drink more water. Program descriptions of most of the panels I reference here.

Have You Seen Me?: The Absent Children of Urban Fantasy

Pretty much a dud. Being the first panel of the first day, nobody had really gotten into the swing of things. But beyond that, the person who proposed the panel was not there, nor were the people whose writing was referenced, and all of us on the panel basically disagreed with the premises that (a) children were absent (b) children have an inherent sense of wonder (c) urban fantasy is cynical. Aside from which, half of the panelists were Romance writers who seemed to think that urban fantasy was a synonym for paranormal romance, whereas I feel these are extremely different genres, drawing on different traditions, written for different audiences to satisfy different needs. I am now contemplating those differences and why I feel they exist (which is not something I was able to explore within the context of the panel), so I suppose that's something.

Veronica Schanoes, a badass professor who does intense research on the origins of fairy tales, mentioned as part of making another point that the Brothers Grimm, who we usually think of as trusty purveyors of the "dark" versions, actually cleaned things up a bit, and in particular switched a lot of mothers into stepmothers because they felt all the mothers killing children reflected badly on Germany. Hansel & Gretel, Snow White - the villains were originally their biological mothers. (Cinderella, which traces back to B.C. China, seemingly always had a stepmother.)

I offered a quick explanation of why we see fewer children on television than we used to (combination of changes in child labor laws and the move to single-camera instead of multi-camera shows, which means much longer shooting days), and this made a significant impression on some audience members. (I have noticed that being involved in film and TV, even on a totally insignificant level, often makes me the closest thing available to the man behind the curtain in the Wizard of Oz.) I closed by proposing a writing exercise I made up on the fly based on an audience comment about Charles DeLint's work: instead of writing backstories for child characters, try writing forward stories. Figure out who they are as adults and then figure out the children and adolescents who would become that. This is probably the quickest way to break out of writing "kid" characters to instead write characters.

Apocalypse Then

This was quite good, although hard to pull small threads out of. Leah Bobet had to cancel last moment and was replaced by Maria Headley. I was moderator rather than a panelist, which means that I mostly asked questions and made sure everyone got roughly equal time to talk.

I liked everyone on this panel - all smart, all prepared, all with clear points of view. In discussion of survivalist fantasies, Sabrina Vourvoulias pointed out that the idea that a disaster is a chance for personal redemption is very Christian, and she contrasted it to the long community process of reconciliation after society-devastating wars. Maureen McHugh mentioned that the original meaning of "apocalypse" is in the book of Revelations - that it is the apocalypse, and there can only be one, and it is the end, so that one could not have a post-apocalypse. An audience member helpfully pointed out that it came from the (I believe Hebrew) word for uncovering.

Everybody agreed that The Road is overall very irritating. After a ranging but focused discussion that included different cultural tellings of The Great Flood, personal experiences with survivalist culture, personal experiences in the aftermath of natural disasters and political violence, doomsday cults, the appeal of declaring the world has ended or narrowly averted ending (as with the Renaissance representation of the "dark ages" and various "end of Rome" declarations at various points of Roman history, as well as more modern examples), the American cultural idea that a clean slate is the best way to fix a problem, and more, often with a very communitarian bent. However, it was acknowledged that writing about communities instead of individuals is very difficult, simply because the scope tends to be too large for a book.

I asked, as a final question, for each panelist to share what "live like there's no tomorrow" means to them. For me, the most resonant answer was McHugh's; she was diagnosed a few years ago with Hodgkin's Lymphoma, and spoke about how it took her quite some time to be able to take tomorrow for granted, and that this was a goal - that it is a relief to be able to treat everyday life as banal.

Moderating this panel was probably my favorite part of Readercon; I liked the topic and liked the panelists. I also like moderating; it's great fun to figure out how to help a group of people present as their best and most interesting selves, and to tweak and support that in the moment. Being a discussion leader or emcee is something of a native talent (the connection to the role of "director" is not insignificant), but it was also interesting to note in myself that I have probably picked up a few tricks from transcribing a lot of panels on CSPAN, interviews by Charlie Rose, and other similar programming.

Nuisances

I enjoyed this interview with Emily Matchar on The Hairpin (presently my favorite website, with no close runner up) about "the new domesticity" - the middle class turn toward the home-made and homeschooled. My own appraisal of the subject conforms very closely to Matchar's, so I won't rehash it.

However, it's also an interesting reminder that I'm not middle class and that there is something of a cultural gulf in that area that is often visible to me and invisible (but ominous) to many of the people I interact with. (I suspect my social signaling is perplexing in a number of different ways, without trying to be.)

I have no desire whatsoever to make things for myself. I still want nice things, and sometimes that means I have to make them, but given the option I'd rather that somebody else (or several someones, trustworthy and competent, who presumably I am paying enough to live on) do the following:

gardening
cooking
managing money
managing property
sewing
driving
arranging all travel
setting out my clothes in the morning
shopping (including for books, music, and clothes likely to be to my taste)
cleaning
educating children
entertaining children
organizing the library and file cabinets and retreiving things as needed
opening and closing windows and window shades as needed
deciding to have parties and organizing them
buying tickets to cultural events worth my time

I prefer to have a staff, in other words. I don't think, realistically, that I can afford a staff, but when I think of having a lot of money, I think of it not in terms of having a bigger house or a fancy watch, but in terms of being able to hire more people so I don't have to do as much. Presumably I am setting the tone (eg, let's have more fish for dinner; I like this silhouette right now), but if I have to micromanage beyond that I have not hired the right person.

These are the only things I particularly care about having a direct hand in:

the color of walls
setting the alarm clock
writing
directing
lecturing
artwork sales and purchases (I mean gallery-level not decorative)
choosing who to socialize with and which of them to mingle
actual leisure (such as knitting things I don't want, playing the piano, singing a bit, drinking cocktails, sports and board games)
putting children to bed and/or being there when they wake up

I would also like to decide where my chair goes and to be left alone while I read the newspaper in the morning, on mornings I read the newspaper.

It is something of a shock to me that these feelings about what is and isn't desirable aren't universal, although it's good that it works that way, because one would hope this imagined staff enjoyed and found fulfillment in gardening and shopping and cooking and making clothes. Emotionally, this difference in what people enjoy is satisfying and delightful.

But I must say that I live in an area of very wealthy people, and they do not seem to spend their money in ways remotely similar to the ways I would spend my money. For instance, I understand that a vacation home or piece of jewelry can be thought of as a form of savings instead of spending (if you figure you can later resell the investment), but given the option of banking a million dollars and paying an employee $40,000 for 25 years, I'd really rather hire someone, and hire that person long-term. I guarantee I can continue to find things for them to do.

In the meantime, of course, I don't have a million extra dollars and do pretty much everything and don't mind particularly, and it's nice to have that option. And I do wish that the very wealthy people around me who hired people to mow their lawns would instead mow their own lawns, because these lawns are postage-stamp sized and it is ludicrous to hire someone to come in once a week and fill up the road with a truck and make a lot of noise with a ride-on mower. In the name of decency, pay them more and ask that they use a push mower. How is your garden a bucolic illusion if there is a loud ride-on mower on it? And some of us are trying to sound record, you know.