Lewis Powell

 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!