Wiscon, Day Three (almost finished!)

[pantryslut]

Sunday morning I actually got to sleep in, sortof. I had a panel at 10am, "Guilty Pleasures," that I was moderating.

Moderating this panel was the simplest job on earth because both Eileen Gunn and Ellen Klages were on it. Basically, I asked just three questions: "what are some of your guilty pleasures?" "What makes them so pleasurable?" and "If they're so enjoyable, why do you feel guilty about them?"

The discussion turned out to be much deeper than I anticipated, a nice surprise. I expected the panel to be light-hearted, which it was, but I didn't expect us to address class issues, sex, and other such stuff. I almost wish we had a recording so I could play it back.

It made up for missing both "Interstitial Arts" and Chine Mieville's Living Room on politics and writing.

I think that next year we should try a panel called "Wicked Women, or I Love Villains."

After that, it was time to meet my fellow Tiptree judges for lunch. That would include redbird and brisingamen, our chair. We had a hard time finding a suitable place for lunch that was open on Sunday, and after a long traipse around the capitol square ended up at the Radical Rye, where you can get custom sandwiches to order on good home-baked bread. I'm not a big sandwich person, but there were pretty decent. They continued to feed my vegetable deprivation, however, because shredded iceberg lettuce definitely does not count.

I played hooky for most of the rest of the afternoon. I tried to hook up with Melodie to help with Ellen [Kushner] and Delia [Sherman]'s Living Room, but I arrived late and the room had been moved across the hall, so I got confused and the door was closed for videotaping once I'd sorted everything out. I decided to set a good example for everyone else who was late and not sneak in by citing administrative privilege.

I should've gone down to "Women Writers You've Probably Never Heard Of," but instead I hung out in the Tiptree Bakesale room, where tasty goodies left over from the day before beckoned. Afterwards I tried to head to more programming, but ended up in an intense spontaneous hallway discussion about the use of violence by the left, with China Mieville, Tom Becker, Steven, some starry-eyed young woman whose name I never caught, and many other people.

Eventually I drifted down to "The Literature of Consolation," a panel I'd originally been scheduled to be on, but dropped. Another good discussion ensued. My brain is locking up at this point, so you'll just have to trust me.

Odd tidbit learned from the panel: apparently, whether or not one likes Catcher in the Rye can depend on your gender. As Janet Lafler whispered to me, "that scene where he's drunk and trying to impress women in the bar reads very differently if you've ever been that woman." Steven loathes Catcher in the Rye. So I told him he's just genderbent.

I also took notes about consolatory vs. nonconsolatory literature (non-consolatory: Octavia Butler, James TIptree Jr.) and whether or not it was related to the "mashed potato" issue I was discussing earlier. "Is Fathers and Sons consolatory?"

I also added some entried onto my personal Best Beloved Books list:

"Bartleby the Scrivener" by Herman Melville
Kindred by Octavia Butler
The Three Californias series by Kim Stanley Robinson.

By now it was dinnertime. I want to say at this point that it was fully my intention to share dinner meals with someone other than my friend Bill, but it just ended up this way, I'm not sure how. Not that I'm complaining.

We found a gem of a place called the Casbah, off one of the neglected corners of State Street. It serves food from North Africa and the Middle East, and it has three floors, including a cave-like basement where you recline in generous booths as you eat. And their food was so good. And arrived in quantity. And at last, vegetables!

They also offer hookah sessions with flavored tobacco. This seems to be all the rage in Madison, as it was about the third place I'd noticed it. None of the others were in quite so appropriate a venue, though. Perhaps some other year when I am not so poor, I shall try it.

What I ate: a walnut and red pepper paste, and a mezze plate of hummus, dolmas, falafel, baba ganoush, and tabbouli. The hummus was absolutely perfect. The falafel were made with chickpeas not favas, I think (ie they were tan inside, not green), so they tasted different but not bad. Everything else, especially the walnut and red pepper dip, was scrumptious. This place I am going back to.

I do not usually attend the Dessert Salon, and this year was no exception. Usually, I take a nap instead -- it's nice to have a break at this point in the con. Especially this time, as I'd been battling a headache all day -- lack of sleep plus allergies will do that. A nice quiet lie-down in the dark made the GoH speeches after all that more enjoyable.

And I did enjoy both Guest of Honor speeches. I'd hate to choose between them, they were so very different in tone, and actually quite complementary. Carol Emshwiller talked about her life as a writer, complete with playpen anecdotes and statements from her children about how they felt, looking back, about her writing while they were growing up. (They were uniformly positive.) And you bet it was inspiring, seeing such a vital 80-year-old woman up there, clear and unconflicted and full of both charm and wisdom.

China Mieville's speech was very different -- intentionally provoking, subtly reasoned, sharply funny, and full of quotes from Lenin to Zadie Smith. I think it was more daring, more challenging, it took more risks -- and so I'm not surprised to hear that it wasn't as popular as Emshwiller's. I'm not saying that it succeeded in all of its risk-taking. One of the reasons I want to see a transcript some day is because I think that it might do better on paper -- it felt just a little rushed, I suspect because he was nervous. But I do think the topic was more than worthy -- beginning with the arrogance of readers, and ending with the arrogance of artists. And I'm still delighted at how thoughtful he is at all times, how non-doctrinaire. I shouldn't be surprised by this, but alas, I am. I'm still suffering from leftie burnout, it appears, but speeches like this are quite a balm for it.

After this, we needed some light entertainment, so it was onto "Exquisite Corpses and other literary amusements." They way I learned exquisite corpses was in poetry class, where one person would write a line and send it on. The second person would write a line, fold over the first line, and send it on. And so on. At the end you'd end up with a quite surreal and often entertaining poem.

In this case, we did it word-by-word: Adjective, Noun, Verb, Adjective, Noun. And you didn't get to see the previous contribution. At the end, we'd have weird sentences. Some of them were delightfully weird, even synchronously so. I love this game, and so did everyone else -- the game continued even after I left to go to the parties.

Hello, Livejournal Party! Hello, Wyrdsmiths Party! (My friend Bill is a Wyrdsmith.) I even eventually got over to the Small Beer Press party. Whose idea was it to schedule all the cool parties on the same night?

I explained Livejournal to all my non-LJ friends like this: "It appears I have joined a cult." The oddest thing about the LJ party were the number of people who assumed that my little pic is not me. Yes, that's *my* tongue sticking out at the camera, folks, not some random four-year-old.

This was the night I ended up playing "Apples to Apples" with a bunch of folks in Debbie Notkin's hotel room until something past three in the morning. Totally worth it.

Comments

[thette.livejournal.com]

I want to see China Miéville again. He was the most delightful GoH I can imagine... And I out-grossed him!

(Though I really haven't been to many cons. Just one proper. But I'm organizing the two main ones this year.)

[redbird]

One of these days I will get the UK fannish LJers to explain the Cult of the Anonymous Claire. Either that, or they'll kick me out of the eponymous community for asking.