READERCON IMPRESSIONS PART 2 Tuesday, July 13, 2010

We started at 4 pm Friday with an almost disappointingly literate lecture on "The Unknowable Character" led by The Washington Post's Michael Dirda--the only mainstream reviewer I can think of who commonly reviews Science Fiction. The conversation--ostensibly geared toward the problems of writing alienness--veered from Beckett to James Purdy to Dostoyevsky without ever getting as bug-eyed and squishy as I would have liked. The "Authoratativeness in Fiction" panel had the same problem, so I snuck out and joined a standing-room-only lecture on microbes--titled "Microbes!"-- by a practiced lecturer on the subject. There we found out about the very cool notion of bacterially-produced electricity.

Still hot and tired from our bus ride, we escaped the panel for an hour to sit in the hotel's sauna and take a dip in the pool. As I floated face-up in the cool water a perfect sychronicity clicked into place: where I wanted to be and where I happened to be were the same, for maybe the fifteenth or twentieth time in my life.

After the swim there was a fun panel featuring college drop outs--Professor Chip Delany included-- which, once again, did not feature much in the way of Science Fiction, but which did feature a lot of accountable anger, amusingly recalled.

The highlight of that night's party was Barry Malzberg's disquisition on failure, given to commemorate that year's Corwainer Smith Rediscovery Award. Maltzberg is on in years, but above his somewhat crooked body his face popped with sour life as he recounted all the ways in which writers might go forgotten, necessitating the slim consolation of posthumous rediscovery.