Readercon

[asakiyume]

I haven't attended Readercon since it switched venues, but it was nice to be back--even if the hotel is located on an Alcatraz-like hill that makes leaving it on foot feel like a jailbreak (... actually maybe that makes it kind of fun? Maybe the truth is I had fun making my getaways now and then.)

I was there for the second half of Friday, all of Saturday, and Sunday morning. I missed many things I would like to have heard, but I heard and participated in many fun things. Here are a few highlights:


On Friday evening, I got to help playtest a role-playing game that Carlos Hernandez (author of The Assimilated Cuban's Guide to Quantum Santería and spouse of the inestimable C.S.E. Cooney) is creating. The last role-playing game I played was Dungeons & Dragons, and that was when I was in high school, so this was a novel and fun experience for me, and good for Carlos, he said, because he wanted to know how inexperienced players would react. The game involved cards with evocative names ("chains," "the palace," "hunger," "treasure," and "empathy" were what I got) and accompanying images--here's hoping the game makes it to the light of day!


The highlight of Saturday was a panel titled "Defying Colonial Notions of Authenticity," whose panelists (Phenderson Djèli Clark, Darcie Little Badger, José Pablo Iriarte, Ken Liu, and Pablo Defendini) talked with passion, cogency, and nuance on the topic. "Did you learn anything new?" a friend asked, and I realized, it wasn't so much that I learned something new--it's a topic I'm interested in, and I think about it and listen to others talking about it a fair amount--as it was that people expressed the points so clearly. Like Ken Liu pointing out that diversity is a collective trait; one character can't be "diverse," and if you try to make one character stand for a whole group, you're likely to have a messed-up portrayal. Or Darcie Little Badger bringing up the problem of different opinions within a group itself about what a good portrayal is, and Pablo Defendini bringing up the question of language. It was an absorbing conversation.


On Sunday I got to be on a very lively panel on expletives. It's great when panel participants build on what one another say, and it's great when the audience joins in in a positive way, and that's what happened. One audience member told a hilarious story about when his son started playing games online. The son's language got much fouler, and the dad told him the only swears he was allowed to use were ones he made up himself... and then the dad got called in to school because the kid was upsetting his classmates by calling them "fig-pickers." Pretty much everyone in the room decided that was an epithet worth keeping.

There were other highlights, more personal ones (lovely conversations, meeting people--that kind of thing), but I think I'll gush about those to the people in question. For now, let me leave you with this fun image from one of escape-from-Alcatraz walks. The Virgin and Child, attended by a Swan and Seal.

Comments

[sovay]

I was there for the second half of Friday, all of Saturday, and Sunday morning.

I did not see anywhere near as much of you as I would have liked, but I am glad at least we passed in the corridors!

P.S. "Fig-pickers" is great.

[asakiyume]

Isn't fig pickers great? I'm definitely going to add it to my lexicon.

Agreed about the corridor meetings--looking forward to Western Mass readings for sure!

[sartorias]

Fig-pickers!

Glad you had an excellent time.

[asakiyume]

Thank you! I ran into Greg there, and the two of us extolled your virtues :-)

[zyzyly]

Sounds like a great experience. I love "Fig-pickers"

[asakiyume]

It was an all-around great weekend.

[shewhomust]

The Virgin and Child, attended by a Swan and Seal

Is this a well-known piece of local mythology? Or a story waiting to be told?

[asakiyume]

Certainly the latter. The site is actually a place that makes memorial stones, icons, and the like, so this is just a selection of their work, but it just looked so deliberate, and like it absolutely should have a story!

[amaebi]

A stony nativity. A pre-pieta.

Fig-pickers is hilarious-- I wonder if he was influences by cake-sniffers? And Alexei Panshin tossed off a fell-picker when explaining realism and nominalism.

[asakiyume]

I don't know the story behind cake-sniffers, but possibly? Tell me more about Alexei Panshin as well?

[amaebi]

"Cake-sniffers" comes from Lemony Snicket-- it was name-calling denigration by the odious Carmelita Spatz.

I think "fell-pickers" was from the second of Alexei Panshin's Anthony Villers series, The Thurb Revolution. He says something like "If being called a [something] or a fell-picker just makes you laugh, you may be a nominalist." I eventually found Panshin's characterizations of realism/nominalism useful, but only after I learned in another way. :D

[petrichor_pirate]

I like "fig-pickers" as an example because it shows how cursing is really so relative. It's dependent on tone and delivery but also partially whether you're trying to curse at someone or not.

I say "crap-doodles" when something happens that's kinda bad but easily fixable. More of progression along the "oops" spectrum.

[asakiyume]

"Crap-doodles" is cute--for some reason it's conjuring to mind images of that mix of Labrador and poodle that's referred to as a Labradoodle. Maybe Labradoodles leave crap-doodles? You have to carry something with you to pick them up if you're walking a Labradoodle....

[petrichor_pirate]

Hahahaha I hadn't connected them but that's the most hilarious image.

[khiemtran]

"Authenticity" is a tricky one... I think that just as no one person can be "diverse", neither can one character be "inauthentic". Because who is to say that in any given group, there isn't one outlier who does their own thing.

[asakiyume]

The panelists agree with you (I agree with you too). The main thing they were warning against was creating characters that are essentially (colonially dictated) stereotypes. And yet, there are in real life people who do conform to stereotypes! At one point the panelists went around saying stereotypes that particularly bugged them--the Latin American drug dealer, or the drunk American Indian, for example. But that's not to say that there aren't Latin American drug dealers or American Indians with drinking problems! If you're going to write a Latin American drug dealer or a drunk American Indian, you're going to be extra careful that you're not just sketching in a caricature that's nothing but an amalgam of things "everybody knows" about that group.

My talisman for reminding myself of this is the mechanic wiping his hand on an oily rag as he looks up from his work to talk to a customer. That's the image that jumps into my mind when I think "mechanic," but in all my many visits to my mechanic, I have never actually seen him or his assistants do that. It's s visual cliche I must have inherited from movie scenes. (Forgive me if I've used this story on you before... it really is a reminder I use on myself a lot)

Obviously my mechanic *does* have to wipe his hands during the course of the day, and probably whatever he wipes them on does get oily--but if I wanted to create a mechanic based on my actual experience of an actual mechanic, it would be different from that visual cliche.

On the other hand, one thing that one panelist mentioned was that while being Latin American or Chinese or West Indian--or a mechanic--shouldn't dictate how the characters behaved, it's also something of a cop-out to write a character who is [some label] and then have that not affect them or manifest itself in the least. ("She's just a girl who happens to be Black.") That's something I had to/have to think more about. I mean, my heritage on my father's side is Italian, but I feel like it's barely affected me at all--or rather, it's affected me, but not in ways it would be easy to incorporate into a story. So I don't know. Maybe there are some things about characters that are known to authors but that don't figure much in the story? And I guess it depends on what the point of the story is, too. A story about climate change is going to put a lot more emphasis on things like the weather (probably) than a story about feeling pressured to do well on college entrance exams (probably)... though now I'm imagining that the kid who's stressed out about their college entrance exams wants to study climate change...

[khiemtran]

I like the mechanic example! Another thing that comes to mind is when a friend asked a group of us "have you ever met a John Smith?" It turned out that none of us had, even though at one point it was literally the most common English name combination (it's not anymore).

[asakiyume]

Do you happen to know what **is** the most common English name combination now?

[khiemtran]

That's an interesting question... Looking online, it looks like it might be "James Smith", at least in the US. See https://blogs.ancestry.com/cm/calling-james-smith-10-most-common-first-and-surname-combinations/

And, no, I haven't met a James Smith either...

[asakiyume]

From John to James... still sticking with Disciples I see. Thanks!