Lewis Powell

Here are some of the different translations of the title of Chapter one of the Zhuangzi: "Free and Easy Wandering" (Watson), "Wandering Far and Unfettered" (Ziporyn), "Wandering Where You Will" (Palmer), "Carefree Wandering" (Mair), "Transcendental Bliss" (Giles).  Obviously one of these is an odd-one-out, being the only one not to invoke the concept of wandering.  I don't have any working knowledge of Classical Chinese, so I can't really judge the relative merits of these translations.  My first exposure to the Zhuangzi was by way of Ziporyn's translation, which is what they call maximalist; but which is also reported to have the merit of capturing the spirit and tone of the work better than some of the more conservative or literal translations.

In the spirit of carefree wandering, I am going to skip forward slightly, past the story of the Sage who speaks of the Spiritlike Man ("Though the age calls for reform, why should he wear himself out over the affairs of the world?"), and go to the shaggy-dog tale that really centers my understanding of (and affection for) the Zhuangzi.

This story co-stars Huizi, the representative of the School of Names, and a friend and foil to Zhuangzi in the text.  Huizi is upset because the Duke of Wei gave him some gourd seeds, and he planted them, and the gourds that grew were ENORMOUS.  Too big, in fact, to use for the things that people use gourds for: 

Zhuangzi says, roughly, "well aren't you clueless when it comes to big things!" And then tells a *whole* other story.

In the town of Song there was a family that washed clothes, and they had a salve they used, to keep their hands from getting chapped.  They made a bit of money each year doing this laundry, which the salve enabled them to do.  A traveler heard about the salve, and offered them 100 measures of gold for the recipe. They talked it over and agreed, realizing that it would take them a whole lot of time to make that much money doing laundry.

The traveler takes the recipe to the King of Wu, who is engaged in war with Yue, and explains that he can help the army, because the salve will help them avoid dropping their weapons in battle (or something along those lines).  The army prevails, the King is grateful, the man is enfeoffed, and becomes a duke.

Zhuangzi goes on to note that the giant gourd could have been used as, essentially, a sort of raft, to lazily and gently float one's way down a river or around a lake. But Huizi was too busy trying to make it work like a ladle or a small bucket.  Zhuangzi suggests that Huizi's head is maybe too cluttered to think of these things, and Huizi retorts:


But you can't insult Zhuangzi by calling him useless. Because uselessness is a virtue for Zhuangzi: 

Now, we'll come back to useless trees, specifically, a bit later. Carpenter Shi (or Stoney, in the Ziporyn translation) will be the foreshadowed carpenter who passes a giant tree that is not fit for chopping and whose wood would not be good to use in any carpentry.  But the statement here from Zhuangzi is clearly too strong. Right before the bit I quoted we get some allusions to animals, and obviously in the animal kingdom, harms befall animals all the time.  And prey animals are not being useful in the sense that we are seeing condemned here, I don't think. So it will be worth unpacking this.  But the central idea being expressed here, seems to be: If you are useless, no one can use you, and you can't get used up.

This anecdote has a lot more going on, because the clever traveler makes himself useful and becomes a Duke.  In the story, this seems to be celebrated as a clever way to use the salve. However, we already saw (in the last discussion), that a sage knows better than to get involved in politics.  So, why use the example of political machinations, and political reward?  In fact, the folks who seem to have won big are the launderers, who sold the salve and no longer have to bleach clothes all winter.  There is something puzzling, at least, about the story, even once we have gotten past the superficial level of the analogy.

But this also reinforces the theme, which I have again noted, but not truly explored, of the sage's remove from the affairs of this world ("Though the age calls for reform, why should he wear himself out over the affairs of the world?").  But here, at least, we are getting more insight into why this is the recommended stance.  In the anecdote about the imitator of the dead, it was because you make more of a hash of things by trying to fix things.  Here, it is because you are a tree.  You can either flourish as a tree, or get converted to lumber.  But in addition to the harms that befall you in getting converted to lumber, lumber is used to manufacture the materials of the conventional world, and the conventional world is the problem you were dissatisfied with.

I am not sure I am fully grasping the Zhuangist rationale, here, to be honest, but a) fear not, this theme is not going away, and b) I think it is okay for me to allow my thoughts to wander some, so long as they are unfettered. 

At least, now, it should be clearer why the keystone tag for this post-series is "learning to be useless".  For me, I have really largely tried to be useful.  Sometimes far too much, sometimes without it being asked, sometimes in ways that were, it turns out, unwelcome busy-bodying.  Definitely in ways that have, on balance, been frustrating to me and have taken a toll.  When I first got into this text, it did feel like the work was yelling at me personally. Both in that I have been the imitator of the deceased who made a giant mess by rushing to the kitchen, and because I have been useful in ways that led me to get used.  I have found it to be, if nothing else, a good corrective to think hard about the value of unlearning the impulse of usefulness, and seeing if that can help me to flourish.

Okay, this wasn't on my "To Write About" list but I apparently have a lot to say about it.

Nathan Fielder has a show on HBO called "The Rehearsal".  It is basically crossing the line between Andy Kaufmanesque and David Lynchesque, while also going on for like Baudrillardian investigation of how can things which represent reality not supplant and distort our understanding of reality.

The premise as presented in the first episode is that Nathan is going to find people who have big moments in their life that they are nervous about, and help them prepare for those moments using intricate rehearsals.  The person in the first episode is Kor, who is enthusiastic about pub trivia, and who was insecure about everyone else on his trivia team having post-BA degrees, so he had lied and told them he had a masters. It's gotten to the point where some of them are sending him job listings that he is not qualified for, and it is stressing him out. He wants to come clean but he is nervous they will be upset about the lie.

Nathan is going to get actors to play Kor's friend, and the ambient folks in the setting where it will happen, to rehears ways it could go.  An odd premise, but straightforward enough. Except that we the audience get the reveal (as does Kor) that Nathan rehearsed the interactions with Kor, using this same method.

The Kor episode is, by itself, a masterpiece of television.  The final moments of the episode involve an intercut of Nathan rehearsing the closing of his conversation (with fake-Kor) and his actual closing conversation with Kor, which is done really well to reveal the way that Nathan is holding back to some extent (though not from the audience, it seems).

Okay, from here on out, there are going to just be big old spoilers. Stop reading here if you don't want spoilers. Definitely do not read any more.

The second episode involves a woman named Angela who wants to find out if raising a child will be right for her. Nathan is going to get a series of child actors swapped out at some scaled frequency, to play a baby through age 18. At night there will be a robot baby, because of laws concerning child labor.  We get a glimpse of Angela's world views. Angela is religious (though she names the baby Adam because is sounds nice, not for religious reasons). There is a lot of intricate stuff going on in the attempt to create verisimilitude. Nathan hires someone to stay up all night and make the robot baby cry, so that Angela will have to wake up and soothe the baby at night. Since Angela plans to have a co-parent if she will have a baby, he encourages her to meet people for dates and see if anyone seems like a good fit to invite into the rehearsal with her.  Meanwhile, Nathan has transported the replica bar he created from the last rehearsal to Oregon and hangs out in it when he isn't in his hotel room. Nathan uses his detailed rehearsal and flow-chart method to talk to the parents of the child actors about changes that come up in the rehearsal plan. And so on. The show is clearly taking on a different character, because Angela's rehearsal is going to be a months long event. It will definitely not be wrapped up in this episode. Angela finds a good match on a date, and invites him to participate in the rehearsal. He turns out to be a very weird guy, but also, there is enough crying from the baby (at Nathan's behest) that he leaves in the middle of the first night. Nathan proposes that he play the role of the co-parent. Was this Nathan's plan the whole time? Was this a plan that was devised when a participant left unexpectedly? On a scripted tv-show you just know that everything was planned the whole time unless a real life event impinged and the writers had to work around it. On normal reality television, you assume the producers are putting their thumbs on the scales. In a documentary, you trust that the events unfolded largely as presented, modulo the perspective of the filmmaker.

The conversation where Nathan is asking Angela if she is comfortable with him joining the rehearsal as a (platonic) co-parent has some very weird highlighting of the power dynamics.  She says explicitly that she likes to pray on things before making a decision, and he mentions that he doesn't want her to feel pressured due to him being in charge, and then asks her whether she has any reservations about trying it out. She then makes a comment about wanting to be in better communication and then she says yeah okay lets try it out.  Now, if Nathan were the subject of someone else's documentary, this scene would scream "oh we're showing how he is pressuring her, even though his words 'say' otherwise" but Nathan is the person making the show. He cut this scene together. He might have even cut answers of unrelated questions together to create the impression of pressuring her when she knew the whole time that she was going to be co-parenting with him. (Or he just manipulated her, and filmed it, and then put it on his show, why invent weirder stories than needed?).  Because this is presented as a documentary/reality show about scripting things to try to predict/control the outcome...it just defies attempts to render this transparent for the viewer. It is Kaufmanesque in that regard.  it's all a bit. Or is it?  I'm somewhat reminded of the Tig Notaro bit where she says the indigo girls are just off stage ready to come out, and then indicates that she is kidding (or is she) back and forth, for ages.

The third episode continues Angela's story, as Nathan tries to balance work and co-parenting, while delving deeper into the off-the-grid homesteading lifestyle that Angela envisions, and reincorporates other people's rehearsals, specifically Patrick: Patrick's inheritance from his grandfather is controlled by a younger sibling, who has approval on whether to disburse it, because the grandpa was worried about Patrick's taste in women. Nathan decides that to heighten the verisimilitude of the rehearsal and add an emotional element, he will create a parallel situation between Patrick and the actor portraying his younger brother, so he stages an excuse for Patrick to bond with the fake-brother's fake-grandfather (Patrick believes this to be the faux-brother's real grandfather), including the promise of some money after the literal gold they have dug up has been appraised. Then days later Nathan relays that the grandfather in question has died.  The actor is reluctant to give the promised money from his "grandfather" to Patrick, because of what he knows about Patrick's girlfriend from their time rehearsing together. Patrick has a very emotional time during their rehearsal in a fake fast food chicken restaurant, surrounded by actors pretending to eat chicken. He does not complete his session with the show. (Fans immediately start wondering if Patrick really ghosted the show, whether Patrick himself is an actor, whether Patrick will return in later episodes, etc.).  There is an interview with the fake grandpa here.  

Now seems like a good time to mention that honesty is very important to me. My fascination with this show is because I am so unsure of whether I will ultimately hate it or find that is says something valuable and interesting about honesty, or both.  Even up to this point, the show largely feels like it is still in the realm of just "is it cruel/exploitative in the way that reality tv is? Is it exploitative at all, given that people agree to be on it?" discourse, or at least, could be contained to that level, with some added fourth-wall breaking.  But the fourth episode is where my reaction to the show became, fundamentally, "what the fuck is this show, what is it doing?"

Nathan goes back to LA because he needs lots of actors for the rehearsals he is doing, he's been running a fake(?) acting studio called the Fielder Method. He trains students in the techniques needed for getting into the characters for rehearsals which is like, subtly observing real people in social settings, learning more about them, and then figuring out how to inhabit them in an unscripted, improv-y way as scene partners for these rehearsals.  Then he wants to figure out how he did as an instructor, so he does a post-facto rehearsal of his class, as one of his students, with a fake-nathan teaching the class, so he can see how the class went.

There have been a lot of think pieces about this show. In my opinion, the best one so far is this vox piece.  I won't go through the full description, but it winds up several layers deep with Nathan getting a student in the class to move into a new apartment in sherman oaks to better inhabit the character they are shadowing, and then Nathan-as-that-student moving into that student's apartment, to better understand how that student feels about the class.

The student is not comfortable with lying. This is not subtext. This is something the student says early in the episode, and Nathan says as the student multiple times during re-enactments.  We also see a glimpse, later of the experience of signing up for the class/show with Nathan narrating the internal experience of being such an actor/student.  The article linked above has a nice summary of this:


Okay, so when I was watching episode four that moment made me jump back to the part of episode 2 where we see a scene where Nathan seems to pressure Angela into agreeing on-the-spot to let Nathan co-parent. Now we have a scene where Nathan elaborately forces us to see how he took a student who doesn't like lying, and goes through the psychology of how he effectively getting this student to be okay with surveilling a stranger to learn more about them, how to do their job, and report back for this acting class. At the end of the episode, that student is playing the role of Paramedic for the absolutely most wild back half of an episode I have maybe ever seen.

Nathan gets back to Oregon and has been gone for a week, which is about 9 years in the accelerate timespan of this experiment. The initial interaction with the now-15 year old Adam (who he has not interacted with before in-character) is awkward, but subdued and unemotional.  Nathan asks Adam to break character and speaks to Joshua, the actor. They talk about how Joshua would feel if his dad had been gone for 9 years and just returned with that level of casualness.  Earlier in the episode, Angela had mentioned (apropos of nothing, it seemed, but, again, we have only the edited footage) that she hated her father.  Nathan asks for a re-do of his return home, grounded in Joshua's suggestion that he would be resentful and angry about a cavalier return after being absent for 9 years. Joshua also went to go talk to/observe, in the interim, some friends of his who didn't have their dad's around growing up. Nathan walks in and his seething son leaves the room angrily. Adam has a drug problem. Nathan and Angela try an intervention. Nathan asks Angela if she wants to reset things back to 6, so he can be part of Adam's childhood. She is fine with it. There is a fake OD.  Thomas (the student from before who did not like lying) is one of the fake paramedics.

When Twin Peaks the Return aired, I remember two things: every single episode I was like "how was this being aired on tv, this feels like a fever dream of experimental cinema" and also that it distinctly felt like it was building to something, and every episode it was like, part of my brain kept trying to figure out what was coming next. And this is combining that with the Andy Kaufman/Tig Notaro, "ah, is this the layer that is the end of the bit, or am I still about to pull the rug out from under you, yet again." This thing is rugs all the way down.

But, I do think one noticeable trend is that Fielder is drawing attention, repeatedly, to the way in which people like Angela or Thomas or whoever, are in situations of unequal power dynamics, or confusing social pressures, and that not just Nathan, but the production set up generally, takes advantage of those things.  I don't think we have gotten to a point where it is saying anything about that yet, but it is too noticeable not to stick out for me.

So, everyone should watch this show and either hate it or not hate it, but then tell me what they think.

I attended Scintillation!  Many events happened while I was there.  I will recap some of them.

FANDOM, COMMUNITY & SHARING JOY (6/13)

The next morning I woke up early, yet again, and went to the hotel restaurant for breakfast.  The hotel lobby and restaurant feature a koi pond.  I hadn't spent much time in the hotel lobby, because the conference had asked us to remain masked any time we were indoors, and after spending so much time masked for panels and conversations in the con areas, most of us were socializing outside.  This was my first time for the weekend really spending actual time around the koi pond. Some other Scintillators were having breakfast a table or so away, and they told me the hint that you can get the fish to come near you with a little bit of scrambled eggs.


The Scintillation Discord has an associated Gather.town instance, which has been built up with grand castles and vistas, including a koi pond: in honor, I believe, of this koi pond, in the lobby of the Holiday Inn.  I had a very nice discussion with the people who had shared that hint with me about the eggs, and headed up to my room, hastily packed my things, realizing that I was now running a bit behind my schedule for departure, and feeling slightly guilty I had asked Joseph to set an early alarm, but we were not too far behind schedule, and then we got checked out of the hotel and on the road. 

At the border, the guard asked what had brought us to Canada, and what I did (when I told him I was a philosophy professor he asked if that meant I was smart, which I was not quite sure how to answer, so I said "often very much not"), and we drove back. Our conversation was easier and better on the way back than it had been on the way there, which, of course, comes from knowing each other much better after several days, especially the way con-time accelerates things.  Joseph is a very kind and considerate person; admirably so. It was fortuitous that he was on my way and wanted to share a ride and a room.  In both directions, the ride felt shorter, it was more enjoyable.  Sharing the ride, sharing the costs, sharing the experience.  These things all enriched the experience for me.

When I got home, and I was unpacking, I was struck, again, by my immense good fortune.  I had won a literal bundle of prizes.  As I said in a previous post: just going to Montreal would have been a joy for me. I have been missing travel so much (and I almost never travel unless it is for work). Dayenu. If I had just gotten to share a board game I love with people who also love it, that would have been a joy for me. I have been craving that shared nerdy board game passion. Dayenu.  If I had just gotten to talk about one book series that I love and am passionate about, with the author in the room, that would have been a joy for me, Dayenu.  (If I had just gotten to talk about the other book series I love and am passionate about, with the author in the room, that would have been a joy for me. Dayenu). If I had just gotten to meet the people I'd been interacting with in the discord for the past year and a half, and find out how their body language works when they lolsob in real life, that would have been a joy. Dayenu. If I had just eaten those Brioche Champignon, well, I think I made my feelings on those pretty clear.

So as I was unpacking, and I had all these raffle prizes, I realized the main thing that was not entirely joyful about the experience was that some of the people I had most connected with through the discord had not made it to Scintillation.  And not only was I sad that I had not met them, I felt that it was unfair, that I had been able to have all of the joy of this experience, and they had not.  It's not like there was something I could have done; I hadn't stolen their spot or anything. I just...felt like it was bittersweet.

The joy of the convention, for me, and of fandom more generally, is in the sharing.  Joseph and I shared the ride to and from the con, and that was better than riding alone.  Eve joined me for the trip to bagels and bookstores my first morning in Montreal, and that was nicer than venturing out by myself.  Sharing a game of Shadowhunters with Andrew, Riley, Caroline, and Francis, was wickedly fun.  Sharing dumplings with Alexis, Emmett, Gretchen, Emma (who did not eat dumplings but joined us) and Shaz was wonderful.  My trip to jean talon resulted in some spices, but the real joy of the trip was sharing a wonderful conversation with Andrew, Mike, Elsa and Emma, just as I was easing into the weekend. 

But it is not just about doing things together instead of going off on one's own (and of course, if you read these perhaps overlong posts, I did several things alone, as well; there is nothing wrong with alone time): the panels themselves are often about sharing one's love of specific books, or one's perspective and approach to thinking about reading or writing.  Community is about sharing parts or aspects of oneself, and fandom is about the enthusiasm and joy of sharing.  So much of this weekend was about the joy of sharing, and I—it wasn't that I felt guilty about coming away with an overflowing goodie bag of prizes, but I was extremely cognizant that I had gotten so much more than I needed to be happy and satisfied already.

So I started sharing my prizes with the people who had not made it.  I didn't quite realize that this was what I was doing at first. Had I realized back when I won the bundle I may have not taken a bundle at all, or put some of the things back on the table, or maybe I would have realized this plan and who I would offer things to and done exactly what I did.  I am happy with how things have turned out.  I found new homes for many of the prizes I had won, like the Earth + Mars scarf, the Quilted Scrabble set, the book of John M. Ford poems, and the fantasy art print with veggies and a dragon hidden among them.  I may try to find homes for some of the others yet, but those were the ones that seemed sendable and potentially meaningful.  Oh, and I am keeping the Scintillation mug, because it says "Scintillation" both literally, and as a memento of this weekend which could not have been more joyful other than if there had been more people there to share it with.


Thanks for reading my very, very extensive and fairly emotional wrap-up posts about this experience.

I am someone who cries, generally, not at sad things, but at uplifting things, so I have cried several times while writing these posts. This con was a wonderful experience for me, and I really, genuinely treasured it.  Thanks to everyone who played a role, large or small, in making the experience what it was, and especially for the care and concern people showed to each other.

I attended Scintillation!  Many events happened while I was there.  I will recap some of them.

The Final Day of the Con! (6/12)

Part 1: Bagels Don't Even Matter!

I wake up early again, because of course I do. I hop on the bus and head to Fairmont, because I want to try a bagel now that I am braced for the texture and that's the other bagel place. It is...fine.  I mean, it is perfectly good, but it did not change my world in a way that is going to lead me to take a strong stand in the bagel debates.

Here is my stand in the bagel debates: My outsider summary of the intra-Montreal bagel division is that Fairmont has some more innovative/inventive flavors on offer but seems like a slightly smaller operation, while St-Viateur Bagel is slightly more traditionalist in their offerings and is also a bit more of the larger scale juggernaut, businesswise.  In terms of the Montreal vs. New York bagel debate: they are just different things. You'd want them for different purposes, and it would be like asking whether an American muffin is better than an English muffin, almost?  I mean they are closer than those two, but like, I'm not going to make a breakfast sandwich with a Montreal bagel, and I'm not going to do whatever people do with Montreal bagels with a New York bagel.  They just look so similar that it confuses you into thinking there is a debate.  Maybe I would have been more invested in the debate if I hadn't gone to Guillame bakery to try see if they had something more substantive for breakfast, after trying this bagel, and discovered that Montreallers should all be declaring themselves the city of the Brioche Champignon Chocolat Blanc et Vanille.

 So I walk into this bakery and am overwhelmed by the varieties of bread.  There are at least 50 types of bread on offer. I am dazed and trying to make sense of it, and a very friendly clerk offers to help me figure out what I might want.  I explain I just had a bagel and am trying to find something else to fill out my breakfast, and he walks me through what they have. The things that are not just bread are either not ready yet (some sandwiches that would be more lunch-time faire) or appear to be enormous (some egg-inflected preparations that are the size of a loaf of bread, but are maybe halfway to being a frittata?).  Trying not to panic, I order a croissant, two mini pecan tarts to save for later, and one Brioche Champignon which he had said was sort of their specialty.  I then ask if there is somewhere nearby I can sit and eat these items, and am directed to a picnic table/bench nearby. I sit down and eat the croissant, and then try this Champignon, which I have never heard of before, nor do I have any idea what to expect.  MY GOODNESS, IT IS THE SINGLE MOST DELICIOUS THING I HAVE EATEN IN MONTREAL.

I was planning to sit at the table and read for a bit, since I had about two and a half hours before anything would happen, but I had the overwhelming urge to share this delicious baked good with others. I went back inside and the clerk, who must have had experiences like this before, was like "ah, you have returned for more Champignon! How many would you like?"  So I bought a dozen, made my way to the bus, and went back to the benches in front of the Journey to the West relief.  Someone asked me for change as I sat down, and I didn't have any, but I did offer them a Champignon. I let people know on the discord about these things, how delicious they were, and that I had them to share, and sat reading my book for a an hour or so.  I don't think other folks were really up yet, but there was a grandma and her child on the bench behind me as I was getting ready to go, so I offered to them. The grandma encouraged her granddaughter to take one, and I smiled as I went up to deliver some to Anthony and Caroline on my way to my room to get my things for the day, and then I took the rest, which was the grand majority of them still, and put them in the con suite, with the coffee and tea, so that people could get them from a central location. I tried to make sure to mention them specifically to con staff and the people working the book table, but mostly I just really wanted to share these delicious baked goods with other people.  They were so good. I literally could not care less about the bagels. Poutine was fine. But this is the grand emperor of Montreal carbohydrates in my book. A++++++ would eat again.  Also I had no idea until six hours later than "Champignon" meant mushroom, at which point I thought "oh do they have mushroom in them? I don't really like mushrooms! oh it is probably because of the shape, that makes sense!"

Part 2: Genres, Paperwork, and Papal Work!

The first panel of the day was "Reading All the Things" which was about reading in different genres.  I don't have good notes from this panel.  I know that the panelists had different conceptions of how to conceptualize genre in the first place, and that some of the things we call genres overlap with each other, because some of them were being framed in terms of the audience they target, some in terms of particular plot points, some in terms of particular ways they would center themes, and so on, but also whether or not they originated principally as publisher's marketing conventions, they have evolved into distinctive norm-bearing collections of texts in conversation with each other, and so, you can't simply write a story where the characters meet-cute and fall in love and say "ah, it's a romance" (or at least, it won't be any good, if you do) because Romance literature has genre-conventions and so on, that have been developed for a fair amount of time now.  One of the more memorable portions of the panel was a discussion about what kinds of promises are made to readers or what kinds of expectations are licensed for them in different sorts of books.  In a mystery novel, characters may meet and get into a relationship, but if the book is centrally a mystery we don't expect the interiority of the main characters' and their feelings about the relationship to occupy the majority of the attention; we expect the clues and questions about who might have had a motive to commit the crime to occupy the attention (and vice versa).  The Yiddish Policeman's Union was mentioned by Jo as an example of a novel written by someone who normally writes outside of Genre fiction that felt like it was participating in the conversation as though it was actually in the conversation, rather than walking into the room and ignoring the rest of the conversation (and she noted that it had been received warmly by the community and lauded in a way where the community acknowledged that it had accomplished this). 

Earlier in the conversation, there was some discussion of the right terminology for how to capture these categories: the word tropes was used, but people resisted it because (I think) it felt somewhat reductive, or at least, not the right fit.  There was another term proposed, but I don't recall what that was, and then I think Ada proposed "formula" as an option, which resonated a bit better for people.  I am always reminded of this Fernand Leger painting (whose name I do not recall, but it was at the DIA in 2011 or 2012) when words don't carve up the world the way we want them to (i.e. always):


We fashion and refashion categories to serve our purposes; it is not arbitrary or entirely capricious what categories we fashion or where their boundaries are, but neither is it neat and tidy, the way we want it to be.  The world may not cooperate, and the categories will always be messy. We always have to qualify, add exceptions and amendments, and it will always be a bit of a hodgepodge, but the categories are artificial things imposed on the world.  The goal is to adopt the ones that are the most useful frame for what we need to do (this can be difficult because sometimes linguistic inertia will combat our efforts to adopt more useful or productive categories).  But this messy world is the one we live in, even if we tidy things up as we go (high school me would be clawing my own eyes out reading this, because high school me was steadfastly against messy categories).  Anyway, this is just me musing about how it is okay that we may not have a perfect answer to how to categorize every book on every shelf: what's important is that if we take the "what books are in conversation with each other" framing—which is a very useful framing— sometimes lots of conversations are going on at once, and that can help to make sense of why some books might be hard to decisively put in one pile or another, or, why one person (if they care very much about one conversation) would say "oh well obviously it goes with these!" and someone else would say "no no, it goes with these!" And none of this settles whether there is a right or a wrong way to shelve the books or value the conversations, but I certainly learned a lot about how people think about different genres, and will be able to catch myself before arguing about genre, and see if i can spot what the people I disagree with are keyed into, so this was a really interesting and eye opening panel.

After the panel, I got to witness a document for another Scintillator! This is probably not super exciting to most people, but I got to read through the instructions, look over her document from list A, certify that it was what it purported to be, enter my information (under penalty of perjury!) and electronically sign that this person was legally eligible to start working (which they were scheduled to do very shortly after the con ended, in fact!).  The electronic element of it was both simplifying and added some hiccups, so it meant we ran a bit late to the Papal election panel, but it was exciting to a) help someone with important work paperwork and b) certify things, officially!  (Look if it was not clear by now that I am a nerd, I don't know what to tell you).  

We then entered the Papal Election panel, already underway.  The Papal Election LARP sounds amazing.  I cannot imagine what herculean efforts it takes to organize and run it.  I've seen how much work it takes to run LARPS for just regular larpers.  Maybe it helps that the people participating aren't "regular larpers" (actually, come to think of it, some of the difficulty of running larps are the larp-community drama, so maybe running it with students taking a class reduces the number of headaches of the form: "we can't have so-and-so play because of bad blood from the middle ages vampire larp two years ago, and we can't have whosit without what'stheirname, because they only play larps together, and if we have what'stheirname, they will want youknowwho, and youknowwho always tries to meta-game, so we'll need a dedicated storyteller to make sure they don't cheat, and that's a full time job").  Anyway, I was torn for the whole panel between a) "oh my god I wish I could take a class like this, this is amazing" because I would love to be a student in this sort of class, and b) "i cannot imagine having the energy to do 1/15th of this, omg" because I am a professor, and holy gosh, I am so impressed with Ada's ability to run this, and like, seven rounds of applause for her and the people who help her run this.  The students who take this really don't know how lucky they are, even if they think they do.

The short version is that students LARP the sociopolitical maneuvering leading up to the Papal election, and their actions actually impact the course of events, which means that they are not being railroaded which means that this is A LOT of work, and requires a lot of central coordination, but also means it is very immersive and gives them a huge amount of insight and memorable learning experience that they probably will retain in a way like no other class.  Jealous/Impressed.  Riley had a fantastic story about an appeal to integrity that (unbeknownst to Riley) no one had ever tried before, which led to a drastically different game outcome, if I recall correctly. 

Part 3: LUNCH AT A TABLE!

One thing I had not done much of this weekend was eat meals at tables.  Most people wanted to eat outside, not many restaurants possessed their own terrasse, and so, we had been eating on benches.  But I had heard of a taco restaurant that had a terrasse. In fact, I walked past it on the way back from the Tiki bar the night before.  I had heard good things about it from Liz and Jon. I told people that I wanted to go there for lunch, because I had a civilized amount of time, but not, you know, unlimited time for lunch. I got a group, and we started walking. A few minutes into the walk, someone noticed that it was overcast.  Carrie and someone else had brought umbrellas.  The table on the terrasse had an umbrella, though it only covered half the table.  The restaurant had the set up where the whole front of the building opened up.  The offered to move us inside four times, I think, but we were all pretty set on staying outside since the open table was not near the front of the restaurant, and it was clear that not everyone was comfortable eating indoors. My only real preference was that my chair have a back and that my food sit on a table.  Between the two umbrellas people had brought and the umbrella built into the terrasse, things were mostly dry.  There was occasional spillover from umbrella onto me or the table, but I did not care. My tacos were good! My horchata was good! My seat had a back! My food was not on my lap!  I explained that I was excited and nervous because the Steerswoman panel was coming up next! I was recommended the Logogryph as a book that evokes similar levels of passion and dedication, by Isabelle, whose name I hope I am spelling correctly (that book is out of print, but you can buy the PDF!).  I shared the pecan tarts with some people at the table, a tres leches cake was ordered and shared, though I passed on that, having had my fill of the pecan tarts, and then made our way back to the hotel (some folks stopped at Harmonie Patisserie to get buns, but I had to change into dry clothes).  I should clarify it did not rain through all of lunch, it just rained hard through about 5-10 minutes of lunch, I think.

Then I headed downstairs to talk about books I had been waiting my entire life 11 months to talk about.

Next time: The Steerswoman Panel, More Steerswoman Conversation, A Raffle! A Picnic! Saying Goodbyes! (And Yet There Will Be Another Post After That One!)

 

BONUS:
 

I said this post had an ode to the Champignon in it, and ambyr said she'd be disappointed if there was no ode in the post, so:

Ode to Brioche Champignon from Guillame Bakery

 

Hear, o muse, my praiseful song,

that this brief poem may right a wrong,

the carb that gets such great esteem,

is not the one that tastes a dream,

In Montreal, breads are at war,

each bagel has its loyal corps,

and let’s not forget dear poutine,

whose legions are at least as keen,

to see their starch defeat all foes.

The true contender? None of those!

 

A sweet brioche with comic shape,

more substance than a simple crepe,

its flavor simple, its name a pun,

I am pretty sure it’s not a “bun”

But the taste is so pure and divine,

One is astonished there is no line

running up the street,

while people wait to eat,

a single bite of Champignon,

Fistfights for their very own.

 

The clear and simple winner,

be it breakfast, lunch, or dinner

for starchiest pride of place,

in any bakery’s display case

Ought obviously to be

this brioche, I plea.

So, please hear my praise,

and let this begin a craze:

Champignon Chocolat Blanc et Vanille

A baked good good enough for any meal.

 I attended Scintillation!  Many events happened while I was there.  I will recap some of them.


Challenge Level: Can I Remember Things That Happened On Saturday? Maybe! (6/11)

Part 1: Montreal does not entirely hate Breakfast!

I have a dog, her name is Scully. Scully is perhaps the most known thing about me.  My students know about Scully because I mention her on the first day of classes. People in discords with me know about her because I post pictures. Scully has her own instagram.  It has more followers than mine. This is as things should be.  One side effect of having Scully is that I have long been accustomed to waking up at around 6 in the morning, because she has historically woken me at this time.  She does not do this any more, but my body has not caught on. And for some reason, it never learned that vacation was a time it could for sure sleep in.  Sometimes at home I could get myself to convince Scully to come up onto the bed and let me sleep in for a while, and sometimes I was just way too tired to wake up, but in general, the dog and my background morning-person-ness conspire to get me up in the mornings. But con programming doesn't actually start until 10:00 am. And you may recall that Montreal does not have a surplus of restaurants that open at 6 am.  So I awoke, I got ready for the day, and I used my phone to find anything that was open at 7:30. This despite the fact that the evening before Anthony had suggested that he would have people over to his room for buns and such before sessions started. I took my kindle and went to a restaurant called Eggspectation.  It was a five minute walk away.  It was actually really nice. The weather was great. Things were quiet. It's fun to be in a city that isn't yours and awake at a time of day when things are not yet up and running and get to just enjoy a nice calm moment of good weather, and then order breakfast.  I sat with my kindle and read some of Ancillary Justice. I just started it before the con, and was basically one chapter in [Reader, I am at chapter four currently, because I have not had much time to read!].  As I was returning from breakfast, I realized I hadn't brought my notebook, and this is when I suddenly realized it wasn't in my room, and I must have lost it the night before.  I checked the two places I could check, re-assured myself that it was just a notebook and a pen, and then joined the people who had gathered for sharing pastries, even though I was not going to partake, because yay: people!

Part 2: Pacing Series

A panel I have notes about! Ada (moderating), Sherwood, Rosemary, and Naomi were the panelists for a panel on how to pace series. This panel was really interesting, since we heard perspectives on series where they are entirely planned out ahead as well as where a book is written and then the author "finds the dark corners of the story and illuminates those" to expand it. into a series (that may not be an exact quote from Naomi, but I tried to write down what was being said). Sherwood said that ideally you write the whole series at once but life doesn't always cooperate, while Rosemary said it is important to write the last line first and work backwards from there. Sherwood emphasized the role of pivot points where things get recontextualized and take on a whole different feeling/character on a second read.  Ada said there are lots of different ways of talking about planning a series: beats, nodes, arcs; regardless, the planning isn't linear.  One knows that certain things—A, B, C—need to happen and in a certain order, and then you work from those elements to fill in the "connective tissue".  There was a really fascinating discussion of how cultural context affects our sense of pacing. Sherwood talked about "cultivation novels" (a genre whose title refers to cultivating one's excellence at a skill), and Ada referred to the contrast between the rule of threes in European fairytales and when she was exposed to Navajo stories in her childhood, which use 4 repetitions, rather than 3, and their pacing felt jarring at first.  Obviously this wasn't because of something about 3 vs. 4 as the correct number of repetitions, but just about what was familiar.  There was also good discussion of when and how to end of cliffhangers, and chapter endings vs. book endings.  I have bolded in my notes "Book recommendation: Mirror of Her Dreams and sequel (must bring together)" though I could not tell you what the recommendation was, or what that note means.

I have a question in my notes that I think was answered over the course of the panel: "For the musical analogy is a series a collection of related musical works or are they the movements of a symphony?"  My impression was that a series was being discussed like a unified whole, and so the symphony analogy was more apt, though, of course, categories are always a bit "as much good as they are worth" and if you think about Discworld novels where people don't agree on what order is best to read them or whether there is a best order vs. a series where some of the books are really a single book—AH I REMEMBERED WHY IT SAYS "MUST BRING TOGETHER"—okay, so someone described, tragically, a person who brought only the first of Mirror of Her Dreams on a hiking trip and the consensus was that it and its sequel are effectively a single book and so it was tragic that the person had to go the entire trip stuck halfway through the book.  Anyway, the boundary of series and not a series but sharing a world and some characters is probably somewhat fuzzy, so maybe this question doesn't have a super precise answer but the general vibe seemed to be more like symphony than just some related works. There was a ton discussed on that panel that I didn't remotely touch on!  Isn't it great to hear what people have to say about these things?

Part 3: Non-Academics understand Lunch!

I took a break during the next session because a) I didn't realize the lunch break would be of a civilized length (academic conferences neglect to do this) and b) you just need to take breaks from sessions or else you will exhaust yourself. I checked out the con-suite where people were assembling this amazing puzzle. It was a great old timey map. I chatted with people. I missed a reading from Perhaps the Stars and a panel on Marge Piercy (though; I have not read any Marge Piercy yet).  I found folks to get lunch with: we got dumplings!  Let me say that the dumplings we got for lunch from Oh Dumplings! were much better than the ones from the place I got dumplings from for dinner (Sammi & Soup?).  I am not describing my dumplings in detail, but they were good. Let me say: I don't think I had a single meal in Montreal that was not very good. The only food experience that wasn't memorably positive was the first Montreal bagel, and that was jarring because of surprising texture. Now, I don't want to upset any die-hard Montreal food fans, but I will say that I was, overall, raving harder about the meals I had in Vancouver a month or so ago, but both cities had amazing food on offer, and I have no complaints, especially as I was not like doing any special legwork to find the best places to go. 

I am led to understand that in preparation for a plastic bag ban, Montreal restaurants are rolling out alternatives. And Oh Dumplings was giving out thin cloth bags for carryout.  This is a sort of odd approach because at scale this is super wasteful, one has to imagine.  At the same time, I am much more likely to keep and use this bag than any of the ordinary takeout bags, even the paper ones, that people give me. I kept and used it for the rest of the con (no more lost notebooks for me!). I don't know the environmental impact; I can't tell the cost, but I will say, this bag was useful, and the dumplings were very good, so I will also advertise their bag (pictured below):


After lunch I attended Gretchen's interactive reading: Romeo and/or Juliet by Ryan North.  We got to play through once as Juliet, and then once as Romeo, and we even had time to do NurseQuest. It was fun, Gretchen does great voices.  I have North's Hamlet and R&/vJ, so I've read them, but it is a wildly different experience to be part of a performed group read through. Highly recommend, would chooseable-path-adventure again!  After this I stuck in the reading room for the beginning of Alexis's reading.  I don't have the name of the collection she read from, but I know/think I remember that it was first nations authors writing sci fi.  I am probably misremembering some aspects of the piece but it was about a sort of cataclysmic circumstance that resembled climate change but much more devastating than current effects of it and the main character was, at one point in the story, having to (quite jarringly for them) wrestle with the actual magnitude of the cataclysm. For Alexis, it was important to think about how to engage with stories from communities when one is not part of those communities where you don't want to appropriate but also don't want to err too far the other way by simply not engaging at all.  There was apparently a work in the volume that contained reference to a figure who (if I understood what was said correctly) the name of this figure is fine to be written but is taboo to be spoken (she mentioned this when explaining she wouldn't be reading that part of that story).  I was losing my ability to focus after the first story, not an uncommon feature of my mid-afternoons generally—I really should have brought some knitting!—and didn't want to be fidgeting and distracting people during the reading, so I left after the first story.

At some point in the mix I bought 20 raffle tickets, and I got a book signed for a friend. But if you think I remember exactly when that happened, you are very wrong! And anyway, the important part is that the next post will have: picnic dinner! a board game! Me becoming a genuine and true and indisputable citizen of Montreal for all time! A story about Canadian politics that weirdly involves me somehow! And a Tiki bar!

 I attended Scintillation!  Many events happened while I was there.  I will recap some of them.

A Man, 2 Panels, No Canals: Scintillation Day 1! (6/10)

(I never claimed to be an expert in palindromes.)

I toyed with the idea of back-tracking and talking about my extensive views on footwear, but I am not cruel.  I do have one prefatory note which is that I said I don't like marzipan, when it would be accurate to say that I last had marzipan back when I was not very good at distinguishing unfamiliar from dislike when it comes to food, so I actually don't know how I feel about marzipan.

Part 1: Registration and Raffle Table!

I had gotten my con badge earlier at the picnic—I know; it is hard to believe I have been omitting some details!—but nevertheless, I went down to registration because that is where the people were! Among them, ari who had agreed to buy my old e-reader.  ari had just arrived from a very long travel day, so my excitement at meeting ari in person and delivering the Kindle was perhaps more than ari had energy to handle.  We completed the exchange and I saw all the things on the raffle table. Or rather, I saw all the things that were at that time on the raffle table, The table continued to accrue more things over the next days!  I had also brought down my contributions, two copies of Rosemary Kirstein's "The Steerswoman" (about which more later), and which I needed to get signed at some point.  This is when I got to meet Alexis!  Alexis was organizing the raffle.  Alexis had not anticipated the amount of things which would be donated.  This is not because she expected people to be ungenerous, but because people were stepping up above and beyond! It was an embarrassment of goodies!  Registration came with one or two raffle tickets (depending on whether you registered as normal or whether you registered as a benefactor for a higher cost to enable someone else to attend), but there were going to be ticket sales also, to buy more tickets.  The raffle draw was on the last day, so you had the whole convention to peruse and set your sights on things and get very excited about what may or may not get to come home with you.  The book seller table was getting set up, the con-suite was getting set up.  Everyone was wearing masks of the appropriate calibre. at all times (at least, that I saw; I wasn't playing detective but the con policy was clear and it was very reassuring to be around people who were all taking it seriously).  A 2000 piece jig saw puzzle was begun. I am slow at jigsaw puzzles and this one looked difficult. This was my first scintillation, so maybe the idea is you just don't expect to finish it? [Reader, I was wrong! People expect to finish the puzzle!].  The raffle table was getting organized into a concept where some of the items would be bundled together, thematically. Not everything would be bundles, but there would be a handful of big prizes—the bundles—and then lots of individual prizes, so that lots of people would win, and people would have big incentive to want to win first, so they could snag a bundle! The con is just starting up, but there is a lot of milling around and excitement!  I met many more people, and then the first panel began!

Part 2: A Panel and a Reading

Scheduling a con must be a delicate thing.  I've been to many, many academic conferences in my life, some much smaller than Scintillation was, and some larger.  The fundamental problem is that you can't arrange the schedule so that there are no conflicts unless the thing is absolutely tiny, and even then, it's too much of a marathon if you arrange it where people are expected to attend every session in a row the whole time.  So, no matter what, there will be a point where the program director has someone ask them "why did you have to schedule X opposite Y?"  A harsh but true answer is always "because there has to be things scheduled opposite each other, and the program isn't built around any one attendee's personal desire to go see those two things".  And while the person asking that question probably doesn't mean it in a rude way, one must be very patient to gracefully respond to such questions as they come up.  But that doesn't mean you just throw spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks. You have to think about the group who attends and how they may divide up for things on the whole, and there are reasons to put things opposite each other. I don't know the ins and outs of this for this convention, but I will say I never felt like I lacked for something to go see; I took breaks to keep myself from getting exhausted or worn out; not because I thought "all of this seems too niche". So the program orchestration was well harmonized, even though there were times when I was torn on what to go see, and even though there were times when I went to no session at all. And if I were trying to apprentice myself as a con program director, I would need to know the ins and outs, but the important part is that it seemed well executed, and the only frustrations were ones that are inescapable as a matter of "I have not learned how to bilocate".

The first session is what academics call a plenary (I don't know if this is the terminology in con-lingo), which means nothing was scheduled against it. Note: Apologies if I get some details about this panel wrong, You will learn later that I lose a notebook and pen at dinner, and virtually the only things that were in the notebook were notes on the panels from Friday. It was a panel called "A Good Read" where Shaz,(moderating), Moti, Doug, and ari, had each chosen a book, and then they all read them, and then discussed the books individually and jointly. The books were Journey by Marta Randall, Sabriel by Garth Nix, China Mountain Zhang, by Maureen McHugh, and Version Control by Dexter Palmer.  I did not catch who picked all of the books, though I think Moti picked Version Control and ari picked Sabriel.  Here is what I retained of the discussion:  Sabriel was the odd-one out, in terms of format/structure, being a sort of straightforward linear story.  There was a lot that it did well, but the romance sub-plot was not resonating with some of the panelists.  It was noted that it does get positive feedback in the reviews, and that it may work better for the YA audience and/or in the original context of release.  Journey is hard to get one's hands on as a physical copy, but is available as e-book. It does some interesting things with shifting perspectives of narration, and [something else that I took notes on, but I could not tell you what the panelists said about it, other than I for sure wrote something else down about Journey]. China Mountain Zhang was highlighted in part because the central characters are not the large scale actors in the sci fi setting; the main character is just a person trying to live their life under the oppressive circumstances of the novel's world, and this is what drew me to it (I bought it from the book display because I liked the idea of a novel that explored the stakes at that scale, while still being science fiction). Version Control was technically-not-time-travel-but-okay-it's-time-travel, and part of the discussion was about the extent to which the social and political satire/commentary were serving the core narrative versus the extent to which they were embodied in authorial opinion digressions that could have been tightened up to better serve the interesting narrative work being done.  What was great about the panel is that I really did get a sense of what made each of the books something that a person had read and loved and wanted to re-read with others for the panel, and even the criticisms and comments about what didn't work for people were offered with generosity and left me thinking "I might read that and consider how and whether it works or doesn't work for me".  As noted, I bought China Mountain Zhang because the concept (a world in which China had obtained control of the United States and the main character has had to conceal several major aspects of his identity (race, sexual orientation) to maintain employment, and how this affects him) was a very compelling concept, and the panelists sold it's execution of the concept as well.

After this panel, I had to choose between a reading by Rosemary Kirstein and a panel on different ways to use history with a great lineup.  You see what I mean, though. You can't schedule con programming without giving people impossible choices.  But I wasn't going to miss the Rosemary Kirstein reading.  Rosemary read some unpublished material from the Steerswoman universe. It was the first couple of chapters from what may be a young adult book set (if I am pegging things correctly) after the fourth book.  I believe it was similar to this reading, [Reader, do not read if you are not already inducted into the Steerswoman series!] but I have not checked to see whether there were major revisions.  Hearing her read it was exhilarating. The jokes worked so well when read aloud. A character who is a minor character in the books and has some "screentime" here came to absolute life in this reading.  I realized how much I loved that character who I have known for all of 10 pages before and now I have known for two additional chapters.  And the reading featured a character I love to death. She had a good chunk of time left after the reading ended so we got to chat about the books. We asked some questions and learned some things, and knew that we would not learn other things, I shared the things I learned with the folks on my Steerswoman Fan Discord server [Reader, you can join, ask me how!]. I had gotten her to sign the copies of the books I was donating to the raffle—that had already been cleared ahead of time through people who, you know, knew her—but I was nervous to ask her to sign my copies. Alexis told me I should just ask but I didn't want to pester her after the reading and Alexis asked her for me, which she graciously accepted, so I now have signed copies of the Steerswoman novels.

Another very earnest digression: If I could go back and add a unifying thematic element to this series of posts, it would have been a good idea to go with dayenu. This is a Hebrew word that means "it would have been enough". If I had just gotten to spend a weekend in Montreal, that would have been a pretty nice time, and I will be honest; I have needed a vacation: dayenu.  If I had gone to Montreal, and just gotten to meet a couple of the people from this discord server that had been my counter to the really difficult isolation of the past couple years; dayenu.  If I had met those people and then just gotten to share the joy of seeing this crowd of people reunite who know each other and be welcomed into the fold with them, as they have a picnic and laugh and hug and enjoy the happiness of being in each others' company again: dayenu.  If I had been welcomed into the fold and then just been witness to the caution and care they took with each other, and the seriousness they observed with the masking policy, and each other's comfort levels with respect to eating outdoors vs. indoors; dayenu. If I had witnessed the care and concern, and then just gotten to listen as they talked about the books they love and what makes those books work for them and enjoy those recommendations: dayenu.  If I had gotten to hear the discussion and recommendations and then just heard the author of my favorite books read her work and talk about it with her: dayenu. But there is another panel, and then dinner with friends, and then: two. more. days. of convention.

I thought I would cover the second panel in this post, but I guess these wrap up posts will be in more parts than I was expecting. TO MY CREDIT: This one did actually start talking about the convention itself.

I attended Scintillation!  Many events happened while I was there.  I will recap some of them.

EN ROUTE (6/8)

I drove to Montreal on Wednesday, because I thought it would give me some time to explore the city. [Reader, I was wrong.].  It gave me time to eat a Montreal Bagel, browse two bookstores, meet some other Scintillators, and eat delicious noodles across from the hotel.  But I am already breaking chronological order.  Because the journey began in Buffalo, and then I picked up another Scintillator en route, and we had a very nice drive.  We had basically only met each other briefly online, but our drive went well and was, as is ideal for this sort of drive, largely uneventful.  There was traffic when we got near to Montreal, and also a lot of French.  I thought there was a lot of French in the cities nearby to me in Ontario, but this is not actually a lot of French, in comparison to Montreal.  The discord was giving evidence that people were already starting to arrive, which meant my plan of spending a couple of pre-con days going off and doing my own thing was obviously not going to happen because I was clearly going to spend those days instead meeting the people I had spent the last couple of years talking to on a discord server and who knew all about my dog and random ups and downs of my day-to-day life, and vice-versa.

We got delicious noodles for dinner.

THE STORM BEFORE THE CON (6/9)

Part 1: BagelQuest

Many years ago, a friend of mine played a game where she would travel somewhere, and then post hints about where she was, and one time the hints she gave were "North America", and "bagels" and I said "New York City" and she said "no" and I said "okay, there is no other place that those clues apply to [Reader, I was wrong.].  At any rate, that is when I learned about Montreal Bagels. And I did not hear the end of this for some time. But please recall that it was my friend, not I, who was in Montreal, so I was not able to partake of them, and compare them to New York Bagels, and take a stance in the Great Bagel Opinions debate. Fast forward to now. This was my first trip to Montreal. So, of course, on my list of things to do is eat the signature carbohydrates (fear not; poutine will enter the story later).  I woke up on Thursday and took the bus with another Scintillator (Eve) down to St. Viateur so that I could try a fresh sesame bagel straight from the oven. You may not know about me that I am very attentive to—some might say sensitive/reactive to—surprising textures in foods. And this bagel was a jarringly unexpected texture.  So I determined myself not to judge Montreal bagels on this experience, and return to give them another try later.  The morning and much of the day, it was raining. I had a rain coat, but my shoes were not rain-resistant. So, soggy-shoed, I decided I was still going to explore this neighborhood, which contained a used book store.  And since it was not raining inside the used bookstore, I got to browse in a very thorough manner,  I wound up buying a used copy of "Adrift in the Stratosphere" (1937) by A.M. Low, based mainly on it standing out on the shelf and the author having been a working scientist and inventor.  I don't have particular reason to expect it to be an especially good book, but I will see!  The owner of the used bookstore recommended a bookstore a street over as also worth looking at, so we went there, where I picked up Elite Capture by Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, and The Many Deaths of Laila Starr. The latter was recommended to me by a very helpful clerk who had to deal with the request "I really like Saga, can you recommend something that has a similar feel to it, without being redundant, and also, ideally is complete, rather than still in progress."  Also, this is probably a good time to stress that I speak no French, and everyone I met in Montreal was very forgiving (or at least piteous) of my monolingual state of being.  I had not yet learned the subtle art of "Bonjour Hi", and so, was primarily signaling this with a panicked look on my face and "I am so sorry; I don't speak French, I am an American."

Part 2: In which I do not wish to be soggy.

This had been a day built into my plans to explore Montreal, however, the rain persisted. So, I returned to the hotel, went to my room, retrieved my bag of board games, and went to a large table in the lobby, where I told people that I would be happy to play board games if anyone was around. I then read books for a while until Tracey showed up and taught me how to play Backgammon!  I won! But with-an-asterisk! Because for half of my plays if not more, she gave me strategic advice for how to beat her, so really Tracey beat herself at Backgammon while I learned the rules, but for purposes of humor, I am currently undefeated at Backgammon and have a perfect record.  Other Scintillators were arriving.  You probably thought when you read the headline of this post that you might get to read about the convention at some point, but you underestimated how prolix I could be!  There is a trip to a grocery store at which we bought the (apparently) superior Canadian version of sensodyne, failed to locate the (known to be) superior Canadian version of me lots of beverages, mistook "batonnets au fromage" for "cheese bayonnets" and were very confused about how to to exit the building. This fact will come back in the finale.  Don't worry, we actually start the convention tomorrow. Eventually.  Very exciting for me was that I got to take a picture of four scintillators who knew each other (Caroline, Riley, Joseph, and Anthony), and post the picture to the discord to celebrate that they had all arrived safe and well and were together—in front of the Journey to the West relief—before we ate dinner together.

Extremely Earnest Digression: Friendship is wonderful, and there is an awkwardness when you first meet people in person that you have been interacting with online for around a year or so, especially if you have been socially isolated and socially isolating for much of that time. If you have been sharing your successes with them, and your frustrations, and your pictures of your dog, and your random thoughts, there can be a sort of intimacy and vulnerability. So, the first days, in anticipation, are abuzz with excitement and nervous energy. Tomorrow is a picnic, but tonight is just a handful of people getting dinner. Many of them know each other.  I look back and want to retroactively calm myself down and tell myself that everything is going to be okay [Reader, it is!], but I can look back on the memories of that first night and viscerally feel the nervousness of hoping that people I've been talking to and sharing joys and sorrows with online will accept me in person.
The important part is that a con-wrap up post does not have to worry about spoilers, and I can tell you now, in this earnest digression, that the nervous worry was not necessary (though I cannot go back in time and undo it), because the people who seemed like friends, were, indeed, friends.

Part 3: Board Games!

After dinner, we played Fantasy Realms, which I describe as "sort of like fantasy gin rummy"—an explanation that has never helped anyone, to the best of my knowledge—and Shadow Hunters—a social deduction game and one of my favorite games, but which really needs at least 5 people to play well.  Board games are great, and it was wonderful to get to play them.  Fantasy Realms is pretty quick to teach (the goal is to have the hand with the highest value at the end, you draw and discard a card each turn and try to make the cards in your hand work well together to increase each other's values; they have a fantasy theme, so, for example if you have the Dragon card it is worth many points, but you have a penalty for having the dragon without also having a wizard card in your hand).  It's a quick game and fairly easy to learn.  Shadow hunters is a great game because it's a game where you don't know who is on your team, and you have to find out during the course of play, which is a great mixture of chaos and logic,  This game was extra chaotic because Riley was given the one secret identity that is allowed to lie in response to the cards that help people puzzle out who is on which team, so many of us got very confused about who were each other's allies and enemies: the perfect game of shadow hunters!

I bet you thought I would get to the con itself at some point. Well, that's going to have to wait for part 2.

Next Time:  Montreal does it's level best to deny tourists' access to breakfast . We shop for sandals and go to a picnic! And unless I say too much about those things: The Convention!

Dear Yuletide Letter Writer,

This is my first time participating in Yuletide (and in any fic exchange, actually)!

I am very excited, and I don't have a lot of specific expectations!  I am providing information to be helpful, because I've read advice on this process and I've seen that it is often helpful to be given some indications of who you are writing for and what that person would want to read, but I also know that ODAD, and that takes pressure off of me!

I had trouble formulating DNWs at first because I feel like most things I could put in a DNW could work in the right story, done in the right way, etc. etc.  Also, the fandoms I was requesting do not have an abundance of fic written for them, so it is not like there are certain tropes or tendencies that I felt like are specifically overdone for those fandoms.  I did settle on some clear DNWs for each one, though (listed at the start of each fandom-specific section, below).

About Me:

I am a philosophy professor. I like to play roleplaying games and board games.  I have a dog named Scully (but I am not as intense of an X-files fan as her name might suggest).  I am a huge fan of the band the mountain goats. In my spare time I also like to do online puzzle hunts, and I cook/bake. I'm a big reader, and I like to watch tv (sci-fi/fantasy/spec fic, but also other stuff, for example, I have endless thoughts about the gilmore girls).  I recently read the Steerswoman series and have become entirely obsessed with it. I cannot do more justice in recommending/describing its virtues than Sumana Harihareswara did here.  These books are just so fantastic.


The Zhuangzi — Zhuang Zhou

DNW: Explicit sexual content

Expanded discussion: I recently discovered the Zhuangzi, after mostly being familiar only with the story of Zhuangzi dreaming he was a butterfly, and proceeded to do a reading group with some folks where we worked through reading the inner chapters and selected outer/miscellaneous chapters. The people involved were reading different translations (I have the Brook Ziporyn translation, which, while obviously a "maximalist" translator, rather than a conservative/literalist translation, is very engaging, and I am a fan of the particular way Ziporyn tried to capture the flavor of the writing; it really comes alive on the page, due to those choices). My original interest in the text is because I am a philosophy professor and I am expanding my familiarity with works outside the western canon. At the same time, the depth of characterization and richly developed parables that come across, even in just a paragraph or so made it an instantly appealing work of literature, not just philosophically, but also from the perspective of me wanting to entertain more stories about the rotating cast of characters that come through in the pages of this book.

It was genuinely hard to choose characters to nominate for the fandom, so I chose Confucius and Huizi whose characterization in the text is part of what makes the text so appealing (they are often foils for Zhuangzi but not simply treated as buffoons) and they appear a number of times in the text, as well as nominating a couple of characters who appear to have been invented for the text (Gnawgap, Kingly Crowbait), and seemed to have some compelling story that could be expanded on (though that applies to virtually every character in the book). In writing up a prompt, I was somewhat tempted to allow a prospective writer the capacity to "wander free and unfettered" and just leave the optional details blank, here, and just see what happened, but I wanted to balance the interests of making the writer's life easier against that Zhuangist approach to submitting the request. As a concession to Zhuangzi, though, I didn't want to restrict the writer's choice of which of the nominated characters to feature, so I left that to your discretion.

Honestly, in retrospect, I almost wish I had chosen the "worldbuilding" tag, but I think that still feels like not quite the right fit for a book that mixes caricatures of real historical figures, figures from legend, and wholly invented characters, to express Taoist philosophy.  Regardless, I would be very excited to see whatever someone else has taken away from the work, and is inspired to write.  The book, is after all, about embracing the breadth and variety of perspective, and about abandoning one's attachment to purpose (both things I am not always the best at).

Maze — Christopher Manson

DNW: Gore (creepy is good but I don't want the kind of blood and violence you see in PG-13 or R horror film)

Optional Details: I was very surprised that there was not already AO3 fanfic about Maze. It has such an intense and devoted community of fans/adherents, I was surprised that there wasn't already some fic written.  There are so many hints and suggestions of further story/detail, so much to allow people to develop their own robust head-canon, I was just almost expecting people to have developed it already, but when I didn't find any, I thought that I'd just love to see that. So I would absolutely love to see something that looks at what happens "off-screen" where we aren't reading, or perhaps on a path-not-taken when guests get stuck in the maze. What do you think is going on with the time shifting that seems to be happening in the book? Maybe you've imagined additional rooms that we didn't get to see? And new avenues to traverse? A different riddle and labyrinth to haunt the a similar cluster of guests on another visit?  The same guests return or slip away from the group, maybe.  So many possibilities, and I'd love to go down any of the paths (just like when I first read the book and was torn about which paths to go down). The book is full of mysteries, and I'd mostly just love to read what someone thinks is going on behind some/any of those mysteries!  The main things I want preserved are the haunting, taunting, eerie atmosphere, and the sense that something is not quite right with the house that we are exploring.  The explorations and theories at this site are largely not the direction I suspect for what is going on, in my opinion, but they do provide some interesting avenues/jumping off points of thought and speculation.

Constellation Games — Leonard Richardson

DNW: Character Death

This is a book about first contact, and it is centered on an unlikely human to be at the center of these events.  So the narrative is very focused on that human.  And don't get me wrong, I love the book!  It is one of my favorites, I've read it more than 15 times, and I've bought it for like, 7 or more people. BUT, insofar as I am giving a prompt here, the thing that is great to me about the book is the humor and fun of thinking about the really alien aliens! And I'd like to see and think more about how they interact with each other, in a way that is less filtered-through-a-human-intermediary.  Tetsuo is my favorite character in the stories, both his speech patterns and his sense of humor generally, and Curic is also a fantastic character (a sharp, no-nonsense personality who is warm-in-their-own-way, but absolutely not up for hugs), and while most of our exposure to the two of them comes from how they have to deal with Ariel, they are great personalities in and of themselves, and have stories worth telling just in terms of their lives as members of a first contact mission.  In the prompt I said "Ideas that I would be especially interested in: life on Ring City during the early events of the book, before they really know what they are dealing with, vis-a-vis humans. Life on or off Ring city, after the events of the book, exploring culture shock (or perhaps lack of it, in Tetsuo's case) of Alien/Farang adjustment to the new situation they find themselves in. Wacky hi-jinks due to anarchist post-scarcity aliens with a disdain for authority having to deal with human bureaucracies! And so on."  My point isn't that I don't want humans to be in the story or anything (it would be hard to leave them out entirely!) But I don't necessarily want a fic that is about the drama of Ariel's life or where the main focus of these great extra-terrestrial characters is about how they feature in Ariel's story, as much as a story of their own.  Wherever/however that story gets told; if it is on earth, among humans, or on ring city, dealing with humans, or approaching earth; whatever makes sense to you.  And I could only nominate four characters, and I went with Tetsuo and Curic, and Ashley and Her, but now that I am formulating the request, I want to be clear that the AI Smoke is also a great inclusion, if you are feeling it, and exploring any of the other alien races included in the story would also be fantastic. I just didn't want to nominate a specific Gaijin character like "He Sees The Map He Throws The Dart" because I didn't have any particular attachment to a story about that character over some other members of the species, etc.

In Conclusion

I hope this is a helpful addition to the prompt for letting you know more about me, and my interests for the fics.  I appreciate that you are willing to participate in this exchange, and I can't wait to see what our shared love of one of these works produces!

Thanks!

JS_Thrill