Last time I travelled internationally I did not yet have a smartphone. I look back and am amazed it went as well as it did. (I know people travelled perfectly well before smartphones, and I guess some of those people were also full of blithe confidence and hadn't bothered to get any maps, so maybe amazed is too strong. Pleasantly surprised.) This trip was the full Google Maps experience, and one of the best fruit salads I've ever had was served to me when I was hot and sore-footed after a trip up The Mountain and typed 'fruit salad' into Google Maps with no particular hope.

(I would not go back again to find the same exact fruit salad. None of my nostalgic memories of Montreal food came through for me this time: the amazing custard buns had become normal, and perhaps the default NZ croissant has improved or perhaps I was simply less croissant-hungry. This trip has laid down an entirely new set of great food memories.)

My plan had been to reach Montreal days early, get over my jet lag, and then be fully alert for the convention. This did not work. I reached Montreal, proceeded to have three lovely days using magic travel energy dredged up out of my bone marrow, and hit the convention without having begun to be able to sleep more than five or six hours a night and with the travel energy used up. 'I should make time to go back to my Airbnb in the afternoon and nap,' I said to myself. There was so much good stuff to attend I didn't do this, and I regretted it. The convention was great, but also, as I wrote at the time, 'A great case study in social tasks and burning out of them.'

(The advanced next form of plan, if and when I go to Scintillation again, will involve arriving in North America weeks beforehand, doing all my travelling first, going to Scintillation, and then leaving before the weather gets hot. It will also involve having a location within five minutes' walk where I can nap.)

Oh, but one lovely part of the first three days was wandering the city, and sitting in a coffee shop near the Basilica, while a conversation about road trip stories took place on the Scintillation discord. The discord is a thriving online community. Usually I'm offset from it by between six and eight hours depending on daylight saving time; it was great to be participating in conversations on there in real time! I'd type up my notes on this conversation too, since it felt basically panel-sized, (what are the most interesting things about road trip stories? What best separates them from other types of travel narrative like quest and pilgrimage?) only it feels slightly less the done thing when it's reporting on semi-private conversation instead of semi-public panels.


( Panel notes for 'Writing the Future' )


After lunch was a panel on How To Write Middle, where I took such scrabbly notes it's not worth typing them up, but it is immediately followed by some quick notes about how I could turn a random dream I had into a story, so it did its job re. giving impetus to go write things. This is also the panel during which William Alexander described the parlor game 'Smoke,' which I co-opted for use in a Starting Writers meetup later that day, so that was very useful and I was able to briefly tell him it had been - he seemed pleased! (The rules of Smoke are that it's twenty questions, where one person is thinking of a character and the others have to ask them questions to guess what it is. Except none of the questions can be factual. They all have to be sideways, poetical type questions. The first one is 'What kind of smoke would the person you're thinking of be?')



( Panel notes for 'Not Saving the World: Stakes in Fantasy' )


Other things that happened on Saturday: nice lunch-stroll with ambyr. Frantic Fanfic session which was fun, although revealing of how much the website does for you: writing as much as you can in three minutes gets the added concern of shuffling paper! (I only realised partway through that the website would shuffle everyone's virtual papers up thoroughly, whereas we were passing papers in a circle and thus always writing in the same order. Not bad, but different. Next time I might shuffle in the middle of the table.)

Starting Writers meetup. I was organising this, and had been very blithe about it until day of, when I suddenly remembered to be stressed at organising a group of people. It went well enough, if I was doing it again I would do it totally differently. Following this, I joined rushthatspeaks for dinner and helped generate The Incident With The Soup That Could Not Be Opened, which was stressful for all concerned - it was good to see him, and sartorias and nineweaving, but I am glad I could catch up with all three of them at less stressed times when there was no unopenable takeaway soup.

Then there was a panel on Education for which I had little remaining energy, though I was introduced to a Scintillator who will be moving to Wellington soon (this will be very nice, the only downside was that the introduction foiled my original plan of lying down on the floor right in back and hearing the panel that way). And then there was Beowulf reading, and home. Pleasantly, my Airbnb, though at a not-ideal distance from the hotel, was also in the same general direction as Gretchen and her friend S were heading, so I could talk more with them on the way about linguistics and Beowulf and things. (She lent me the charming Bea Wolf.)

I probably won't post about my whole trip in detail, but here's the start of it!

From my travel diary, leaving Wellington toward Palmerston North after a day spent frantically packing:

"Set out at 9pm. Desire to make a start, however impractical. Took wrong turn. Drove for a half hour thinking 'What a fun, exciting, stupid shortcut Google Maps has found!' Was in fact driving into the Tararua Ranges. Potholes. Ferns. Slips. An abandoned wall from some old stone building. Only when I found I'd lost cell signal and couldn't tell where I was - but not, by compass, heading north - did I twig to it. Followed the first rule of getting lost: go back to when you weren't. In this case the town of Shannon.

Lovely start to trip. Now in motel. Staff kind, coffee (decaf) godawful yet welcome.

Car good for: shouting like Benjamin Bagby."

...

The next day, the rest of the trip North was tiring/pleasant/dull/alarming. It took nine hours, by far my longest trip as driver up to that point, though it would've gone quicker if I was a more experienced driver, or one who didn't keep getting a little bit lost, or if there hadn't been storms. I ended up driving incredibly slowly in pelting rain towards the end of the trip, with the lights of oncoming cars glaring against the smeared Tararua Ranges mud on the windshield, and being overtaken by large trucks.

It was very nice to stay at Onewhero with Justy and Tim! I had not been there in perhaps a year, partly because of confusion about how my annual leave worked. (This is the first job I've had that has annual leave.) My grandmother Ann visited, and we walked and played cards. All our regular walks felt shorter than they once did - I guess I'd been in quite a stable long-walks habit since last visiting.

...

At San Francisco airport I somehow found myself spending $40 NZ on an egg burger, because I forgot how US dollars and tipping and taxes worked. It was not good, but almost every part of it was unexpected, so that was something. The bacon was a different shape! The cheese was a different color! In New Zealand that menu description would have been talking about an open sandwich! This was the most 'unfamiliar foreign US food' experience I had on the whole trip. I ate plenty of food we don't get in New Zealand, but none that fell into the uncanny valley.

That airport also had a bookshop perhaps as good as Wellington City's main new books bookstore. This is new in my experience of airport bookshops. I bought a cheap paperback of Perhaps the Stars there because the cheap paperback edition never reached NZ to my knowledge. (Later I would discard this book at ambyr's house, having become less whimsical and tired and worked out that I had no use for it and a heavy suitcase.)

Just before boarding at San Francisco, we heard two large beeps and the words 'May I have your attention. There is a fire emergency in the building. You are-' and then silence. So that was exciting.

From the air over the US I saw: a great reflector dish focusing light to the center. Lakes next to lakes, like puddles after rain. Wide clear lines in the forest: firebreaks? (Power line right-of-ways, someone said later.) And coming into Montreal, a moving patch where the city lights seemed to intensify like jewels. (Perhaps it was the sun's reflection off the plane? It seemed big though. And not in the least glary.)

[Note because I'll forget it otherwise: on my departing flight to Houston I later saw the clearest possible oxbow lakes - every phase of them demonstrated, just like I vaguely think I once learned in school. Even crescent-shaped places where the forest was a different color on top of some old lake now filled in.]

As the plane landed in Montreal, a small kid repeated with great glee, "You said a bad word! You're getting emotional!" It is fun to be a small kid who's worked out that rules point both ways.

...

Before bed on the first night, my Airbnb host told me about how Hegelian dialectics helped him succeed as a music agent in the early 2000s. I did not make much reply.

It more or less began as an accident that I spent most of my trip to North America reading books set in New York. I was reading Deep Roots before I got to New York, and I bought The Chosen and the Beautiful having forgotten that The Great Gatsby, which it retells, is set around New York. Then I read Trouble the Saints to complete the pattern. No ill will toward Montreal, Washington D.C., or Boston, where I had good times - and in diverse ways actually better times than I did in New York - but I did not read books set in them.

~

Actually, my trip reading began with the first part of The Savage Detectives, by Roberto Bolaño. This is a long novel that a friend sent me and I thought I would take ages to get around to it unless I isolated myself with it on a plane. It made me laugh out loud as I read it walking onto the plane, so success there! Part one of the book is a diary written by a hapless young lamb of a poet as he enters into an avant-garde poetry movement called the Visceral Realists (without being quite sure what Visceral Realism is, except that he likes it when he sees it) and having a lot of yearning and sex with various young women connected to the movement. Part Two begins to be written from the perspectives of a whole range of other characters, in a way that seemed interesting and to open up perspectives beyond the yearning of the poet, but then I landed in Montreal and began buying books at a rate of about one per minute and the detectives were left behind. (Not literally. They are still in my house).

~

In Montreal, I reread The Other Side of Silence by Margaret Mahy for the first time in years and years, prior to giving it to the Scintillation convention raffle. (Since returning home, I've met up with a friend who has spent ages attempting to track down Mahy books in second hand shops. He thinks they're getting awfully rare here, and is aghast that I just shipped ten of them out of the country. It only took me two weeks of not-very-dedicated searching to find this stack, so either he is wrong or I'm just very lucky). The Other Side of Silence is one of Mahy's YA books, about a girl in a busy family who has decided to stop talking. The book is divided into sections of real life, which is the time she spends with her family, and true life, which is the time she spends climbing alone in the trees over the high walls of the mysterious old Credence house next door, though it becomes more equivocal and less purely her own as the house draws her into its own story. This is in some ways a fairytale retelling and in some ways Gothic. Most of it I like very much. From memory, this is Elizabeth Knox's favourite of Mahy's books, and I can see individual sentences from which I think she took notes. They share a way of being completely unhesitating in pushing themes and elaborate metaphors to the front of the stage.

I give Mahy some praise for being a white writer portraying rap and hip hop as positive things in the nineties: they are other varieties of the word-magic she loves, feeding into the book's themes of speech and silence. At the same time, she tries to write someone improvising hip-hop and I do not think she knows how.

Mahy wrote so much! I look at her bibliography and much of it I've read, some of it I've heard of, but then there's Ultra-Violet Catastrophe! Or, The Unexpected Walk with Great-Uncle Magnus Pringle. As far as I recall I have never seen this book.

~

Deep Roots, by Ruthanna Emrys.

This I bought at Scintillation. It's the sequel to Winter Tide, which I liked fine. At some point I must go back and see if her writing changed or if I did, because I loved both this book and her subsequent one, A Half-built Garden. This series takes Lovecraft and says 'What if he was just as bigoted against his invented monsters as he was about everyone else who was in any way different from him?' It continues the story of Aphra Marsh, survivor of the concentration camps in which the American government killed most of the rest of the land-dwelling branch of her people. She begins the book going with her brother and people they came to trust in the first book to New York, in search of lost members of her blood family. New York is in itself overwhelmingly strange and loud and thronged, but quickly they find that its mundane complexities are not the only ones at play. They encounter people from the wider universe who certainly mean humanity well; the question is whether humanity in general - and Aphra and the agents of the American government she's involved with in particular - will agree on what 'well' means.

This continues to take what's good in Lovecraft - the sense of deep time, overshadowing all-too-mortal humanity; the love of what's comforting and small and known; the difficulties of dealing with what's radically different from you - and reply to it without the horrible racism in really interesting ways. Emrys is very good at writing books about the need to compromise with people whose values you truly don't share. I don't think anyone comes out of this book having got everything they wanted.

~

The Chosen and the Beautiful, by Nghi Vo.

This is one of those 'I am going looking for everything else she's written' kind of reads. It was also an odd experience, because I haven't read The Great Gatsby. Sometimes I can tell things about the original from this retelling - which makes Jordan, not Nick, the narrator; maybe makes the whole thing much queerer and into not so much a love triangle as a love blob (although I am not absolutely sure that doesn't happen in the original); and adds more magic and demons (presumably not quite so directly present in the original or you'd think someone would've told me). I feel like I can guess a lot about the original Gatsby, and something about the original Nick and Tom, and less about the original Daisy, and least of all about the original Jordan because as the narrator the retelling fills her in so thoroughly. The language of this is beautiful, and it fits magic into the world in a way that really works, and I am assuming that about race and sexuality and what it was like to be in New York in its time, it is wider than Gatsby, although I just started reading Gatsby so I get to find out.

...wait, she wrote a sequel? Huh.

~

Trouble the Saints by Alaya Dawn Johnson.

This book starts as the story of Phyllis Green, an assassin in New York as the Second World War looms, working for a mob boss who maybe doesn't have a whole heart made out of gold, but at least has some teeth made of silver, and that's something, right? Phyllis is black, but passes for white to gain his acceptance and move through society as she must - and keep her old family safe from any mob-related fallout.

I am told that a lot of people started reading this book for the badass magical assassin, and were therefore not best pleased by the turns it took. Phyllis is a badass magical assassin, whose saints' hands give her astonishing skills with a knife. But the book is much heavier than that description would indicate. It's more about the consequences and weight of violence - both personal and societal - and the degree to which individual moral choice, and individual loves, can and can't stand up to that. What are one assassin's choices in a world of segregation and war? Well, something. But not enough.

~

...and that is all the books I read in America! Is it all the books I acquired in America? ha ha ha no. I had gone to my mother's house, last stop before travel, with a perfectly reasonable size of suitcase. I then realised I could borrow her suitcase if I wanted, which was twice as big. I returned with the suitcase almost literally full of books - I had three pounds spare in my luggage allowance home. The other books are:

Notes from a Regicide, by Isaac Fellman. Bought at Scintillation, have been looking forward to this, could just have waited til it came in at the library but oh well.

Ship Without Sails, by Sherwood Smith.
Tone and Opacities, by Sofia Samatar.

Also bought at Scintillation.

Hunger: An Unnatural History
Resurrection Man, by Sean Stewart
The Great Believers, by Rebecca Makkai.

These are gifts from ambyr. The last two are interventions in me buying a book in a shop, when ambyr said "You know, you could just take mine."

The Burning Glass: The Life of Naomi Mitchison by Jenni Calder
Mechanique: a Tale of the Circus Tresaulti, by Genevive Valentine
Kingdoms of Elfin, by Sylvia Townsend Warner
Tumble Home and The Dog of the Marriage, by Amy Hempel. (This is the favourite writer of someone in my creative writing course a few years ago whose writing I liked.)
Merchanter's Luck, by C.J. Cherryh
A Grief Observed, by C.S. Lewis

These were from a good D.C. bookstore whose name I forget. [Capitol Hill Books! See comments.]

Remedios Varo: Science Fictions, On Homo Rodans and other writings.

These were from a museum shop. Expensive things look half as expensive in U.S. dollars as I'm used to, and these looked very nice. I had kept on being struck by Varo's art from a distance in the museum and then checking the artist and going, "Oh of course it's another Varo." Richly-textured scenes of magic being done in a somewhat Miyazaki-Howl's-Moving-Castle way. Also I can send one of them to the Australian friends who sent me Savage Detectives.

Warlock, by Oakley Hall.
God Stalk, by P.C. Hodgell

Strand Books.

The Incredible Digging Leviathan, by James P. Blaylock.
The Crane Husband, by Kelly Barnhill.

Behold my incredible restraint in buying only two books in Boston having already decided that I wouldn't have the luggage allowance to buy any more books at all.

The above gloating over my treasures shall inaugurate a time of restraint. I have not actually signed my name to a promise not to buy books for a year - a thing jsthrill once did and that I am considering - but I certainly intend to let the balance between getting and reading swing back to true for a while.

More accounts of my trip to follow, hopefully, unless I get swept away by the present.