My last month in New York has been so busy I've barely taken time to register the fact that I'm abandoning it. I moved here when I was thirty and now I'm moving out seven years later. New York is not the place to find you've transformed from reliably young to borderline middle-aged. At least, not earning what I earn. I suspect it's no more fun for those higher up the service industry. The flight away to quiet, green, smug Massachusetts may have a trace of panic in it. Still, I'm trying to take in this dying city one last time. I feel like I'm failing. I walked from a midtown party up to the Lexington Avenue stop on the N Train, and the buildings were all as anonymous as ever, awesome in their height but newly absurd.
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.
Readercon Impressions Part 1 Monday, July 12, 2010
After a lot of bus riding and walking around the Pioneer Valley cities of Northampton and Amherst--like the rest of the Northeast, they were experiencing record heat-- we finally found a place to live, in a townhouse not far from the UMass campus. We celebrated by canceling all of other showings and having drinks with the local poets. The next day, we took an early bus and went to the Marriott in Burlington, Massachusetts, site of the 21st Annual Readercon.
Burlington itself is a weird simulacra of a city about 7 miles to the north west of Boston, whose buildings encrust, in regular formations common both to bivalvic sea life and retail architecture, the intersection of Interstate 95 and State Road 3. It is a city built to encourage sales without the heady distractions of public life. The only thing distinguishing the Marriott from the nearby Burlington Mall was its bearding of flowering bushes and the swimming pool in back.
Inside was a different matter. By the time we walked into the front lobby at three in the afternoon on Friday, hot and tired from our apartment search, the convention had already been going for a good 24 hours. It was our first big science fiction convention. The front lobby was clogged with men and women, sporting physiques somewhat outlying those held by our Renaissance-era painter friends as falling within the ideal, wrapped to the last lumpen torso in black T-Shirts, either tight-fitting or loose-fitting but never in-between, proclaiming allegiance to "Clarion 2009" or sporting some cloud-borne cryptozoological monstrosity.* The Burlington Marriott is foremost a business hotel, and the hotel's ordinary clientèle, distinguishable by their minority presence as well as by their attractively-fitted clothing and ruddy skin tone, slipped among the Readercon bodies like declawed lions among a thousand confident gazelles.
Another first impression: outsider opinion holds that these conventions are attended exclusively by men, and while that may once have been true, the situation has changed. Unlike your typical corporate boardroom or university creative writing poetry department, the world of science fiction and fantasy has in the last twenty years seen an influx of feminine talent, both lucrative and inspiring. These are not necessarily the spiritual daughters of Russ and Atwood and LeGuin, who were first-rate writers because they had to be, but hard-headed dealers in the business of genre, ready to give a verbal power-point presentation on why her vampire-loves-mermaid steampunk novel is more thrilling than the other three on the market. These earners outnumbered this generation's first-raters like Nalo Hopkinson and Kelly Link, but they were in the right place, in the marketplace, having fun as both fans and untortured practitioners, among their peers. Readercon felt like a solidly co-ed affair.
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