nineweaving

03:15 pm: Cloud & Ashes: O blithe New-comer!
Here is a space for comments.  If you ask me about my work or world, I will try to answer.

I hear thee and rejoice.

Nine

02:49 pm: Twittered!
By Erin Kissane:                                                               
                                                                               
"Greer Gilman's just noted that 'the first gay psychic vampire novel' was written by a 'pro-Semite' member of the Nazi party."                           
                                                                               
And (by someone I don't recognize):                                                                           
                                                                               
"Readercon!  Pink is the hair color of choice for young female academics."     
                                                                               
 How tweet it is!

And not just pink.  How I wish that someone had caught a picture of Athena's rainbow :  rushthatspeaks  (a deep blue-violet) and rax  (fuchsia) and Erin (an ironic Easter-plushie pink) and Leah (sky-streaked) and vschanoes  (scarlet corkscrews).

Nine
                                                                               

05:55 pm: Bride of Frankenstein
What makes me sad is that I love Readercon.  It bloody well ain't perfect:  I know that.  I've seen it be cranky and calcified and head-in-the-clouds.  I've been annoyed at it myself.  But it’s where I can be most myself in company, a place-time that celebrates diversities of mind, a community of odd ones out.  At my interview, crowleycrow  asked what it’s cost me “to forge such an individual and challenging style, and stick to it,” and I said that it feels like being Quentin Crisp.  Not, thank gods, that anyone’s beat up on me in forty years.  But I do get asked (by friends and family I would like to please) why I don’t write “stories that people can understand.”  At Readercon, I'm people.  I can go about in my farthingale of language, can glory in it as I would in green lipstick.

And there is nothing else like it, nothing that replenishes my soul.  No other catalyst.  My old jest is that I always write better afterward, in August (and I’m a winter person).  But truly, I’ve had two extraordinary bursts of creativity spurred by Readercons.  July 1998, 774 words; August, 11011 words, the whole last two-fifths of “A Crowd of Bone.”  July 2006, 1139 words; August, 13672 words, and then in one unbroken ecstasy through November, all the great apocalyptic chapters of Cloud & Ashes.  It has brought me inspiration.  It has brought me good fortune.

So I was over the moon to be asked to be a Guest of Honor.  I wanted to give something back to what had nurtured me, to inspire others.  I loved being in a gathering of friends, with all those bright young writers, aspiring and rising.

And in the current mood of purgation, there is no rejoicing.

I mourn.

Nine

01:21 am: O frabjous day!
Wright's English Dialect Dictionary can be downloaded (this link to volume one only:  keep going).  The plain text is riddled with errors, but there's a PDF.

Nine

11:11 pm: John Barleycorn got up again...
Readercon speaks.

There's been a lot of confusion about Readercon's plans for next year, caused in part by a flier that we distributed on Sunday and in part by conflicting statements made in public and in private by people involved with the con and by various attendees. We apologize for putting out unclear, incomplete information, and would like to take this opportunity to set the record straight.

Attendees, professional guests, and book dealers can expect a Readercon next year every bit as exciting as our previous twenty. Readercon 21 will be held July 8 – 11, 2010 in Burlington, Massachusetts at the Boston Marriott Burlington.

Readercon 21 will have at least one guest of honor, two tracks of panels, readings, discussions, kaffeeklatches, the Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award, the Rhysling Award Poetry Slan, the Shirley Jackson Award, Meet the Pro(se), and as always the Kirk Poland Memorial Bad Prose Competition.

Our committee is finishing up the business of this year's convention as well as working on Readercon 21. Full details will be available soon.

Diane Martin & David Shaw
Con & Program Chairs for Readercon 21

This is official. Discuss, disseminate as you see fit.

Nine

---

05:55 pm: Enskied
Flaws and all, this Readercon (for me) was utterly lifeshakingly glorious, Hob's garland stolen from Apollo, and the crown of my career.  How often do I get to be a star new-risen?

Most of all, my friends were there, though I barely had a moment free to speak with them.  BBW was there, serene and generous and down-to-earth as ever; my Carolingian friends were there, with cookery and conversation and long memories of all my antics; Deb was there, like a moving statue in ivory and gold, the goddess of fractally evolving fiction.  Even Sylvie was there, seen briefly, like the moon in branches.  And of course, a great of swath of my writerly friends were on the program:  crowleycrow , negothick , sovay , rushthatspeaks , rax , eredien , and a score of others dear to me.

Did you know that the late Hope Mirrlees was there?  And granted a rare interview?  A tour-de-force:  I loved it to distraction.  Afterward, Small Beer Press and Mr. Swanwick presented me with a copy of his Hope-in-the-Mist in an hors série edition by Henry Wessells---handbound in iridescent cloth with marbled endpapers and a foldout frontispiece by Vess--which makes me faint with ecstasy.  Miss Mirrlees herself was good enough to sign it.

John Crowley talked about "My Life in the Theatre, 1910-1960."  Did you know he spent his adolescence dreaming of stage design?  And studying, stitching, painting his visions, all of the sublimest?  I loved hearing about his visionary puppet staging of King John, how he sat and stitched velvet robes for it, plunked down in front of Gunsmoke.  I want the essay now.

sovay  sang Lal Waterson's "The Scarecrow" as a portal into Cloud before I read.  Her singing was transcendent.

Being booked on some of the poetry readings, I got to hear an anthology of poets, a great pleasure.  I stole time to hear sovay  and crowleycrow  read, both very fine indeed.  Each read a story; and he gave us a bit of his new translation of The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz. 

I loved being interviewed by the excellent rushthatspeaks ; I loved watching a panel on my writing, loved seeing myself for the first time like a blue marble hanging in space.  I've never been that far and high before.
                                                                                
I loved nearly all of my panels, and on the others I enjoyed the argument.  The memory of some of them still makes me jump up and down and squeak.                                                                   

Thrud and the Congery were amazing:  they saw to it that I was fed when I hadn't a minute free to eat, bringing goblin-free fruit, eggs, sandwiches, and chocolate.  movingfinger  bore iced mocha at a crucial moment.    
                                                                                   
There was scarcely time for play, but I dropped by a fine party given by the Goblin Fruiterers--with harping!; I had a breakfast with crowleycrow , at which he  praised my work until I looked like a Krakatoa sunrise.  I  gave a lovely small  tea party, with brandied cherries and marzipan.  As ever, the Kirk Polands were a nadir of vulgarity and an absolute blast.  Afterward, on Sunday, I got to unwind at a room party with Ellen Klages, Eileen Gunn, Tachyon Press, and--had we known, alas--the very last of Charles N. Brown's Laphroaig.  I raise a glass of it in memory now, salute his life and work.  A great man, at the heart of our endeavor.

And I want to thank and praise the Readercon gang for all the year of work and planning that went into this.  No, it was not the New Jerusalem, but it engaged, enraged, and briefly--at its very best--it overjoyed us.

Next year, the Entwives.  

Nine                                                                     
                                                                 

10:28 pm: Consternation
Reposted from Myth Happens:

"Let us all agree that "This is your father's Readercon" is a really bad slogan. It has a deskful of negative associations and nothing to do with the current plan for Readercon 21, which is a temporary simplification of the program to something whose creation and coordination will not cause nervous breakdowns among members of the committee. Note that I do not mean simplified intellectually. The only issue is the density of program items. The dealer's room will contain its usual stacks of books. The traditional events—Meet the Pros(e), the presentation of the Rhysling, Shirley Jackson, and Cordwainer Smith Awards, and the Kirk Poland Memorial Bad Prose Competition—will all take place. And please, if there aren't parties all over the place in 2010, something has gone terribly wrong with the whole de-stressing idea. Further information will be forthcoming as soon as I have it, i.e., after the committee has a chance to check its e-mail, breathe for the first time since mid-April, and perhaps water some of its plants or pets. For now, please repost and link as you see fit. And if you have any concerns about Readercon, ask."

Don't Panic.

That was sovay .

Nine here:  truly, that's the worst slogan I've seen since Laura Ashley introduced the bridal gowns of Shakespeare's heroines:  the Juliet, the Cressida, the Desdemona...

But as I understand it, the event will be a sort of open-faced Readercon:  all of the intellectual smörgåsbord,  but only one track of panels, plus (of course) readings, papers, discussions, all of that stuff from the New England state rooms, plus the dealer's room of eternal desire.  Think of the continuations!  Think of the readings!  We could do a Bloomsday, but with Dhalgren, round the clock.*

I love the many-slotted toaster of souls that is Readercon, but after this one I am carbon.  Just once in twenty years, it would be nice to breathe.

How should this be pitched?  I propose a contest.

Anarcho-syndicalist Readercon?

A Night at the Green Room?

Nine

*Afterthought:  I would happily participate in a choral Cloud & Ashes, if that would amuse the punters.

02:39 am: Hey, wasn't that the Delphic sibyl in the swimsuit issue?
Wow.  We made Time!  And they loved the panel that sovay  invented:

"It sounds arcane, but picture six really learned and funny people riffing on early English folk ballads for an hour, in sync, with almost Wu-Tang-like zeal and perfection, and you'll have some idea. Incredibly exciting."

Nine

01:21 pm: Fled is that music
Well, I'm back.

Readercon was glorious.  I am toast.

Your presences--in person and in spirit--overjoyed me.

More when I've rested.

Nine

10:28 pm: Sighted in the unwild!
By sovay , in a bland Barnes & Noble in a giant mall:  Cloud & Ashes and John Crowley's Four Freedoms, side by side on the New Books shelf.  That's like spotting a pair of unicorns eating tulips in a suburban garden center.

Nine

10:28 pm: ...and straight on till morning
Readercon 20:


Thursday 8:00 PM, Salon B: Panel

When The World Ends, And Nobody Notices. Rachel Elizabeth Dillon with
Faye Ringel, Greer Gilman, Tui Sutherland

Apocalyptic fiction often allows the death of society to stand in for
anxieties about our individual deaths. In Chris Adrian’s The Children’s
Hospital, where the world floods and seven hundred ill children and their
support staff float above the end of the world, the characters are too
busy ensuring that the children live to process their anxiety fully. In
Greer Gilman’s Cloud & Ashes, the world is broken and reformed, but the
only ones who seem anxious are the gods. How do these stories fit into the
canon of apocalyptic literature (assuming they do)? We’ll look to critical
work for other examples of cases where the world ends and no one cares,
and discuss the reasons why.

Thursday 9:00 PM, Salon B: Panel

You Don’t Know Dictionary! Lila Garrott, Greer Gilman, Vylar Kaftan (L),
Sarah Micklem, Sonya Taaffe


There’s no need to make up new words when there’s so many great unknown
old ones. Tolkien introduced many readers to the likes of “wain” and
“fell” (in the sense of fierce and cruel), while later writers such as
Greer Gilman and Gene Wolfe have gone much further in plumbing the depths
of unabridged dictionaries. Our panelists share their adventures with
prodigious vocabularies and blank pages. And for the reader, what are the
pros and cons of relying on context versus consulting the Book?

Friday 11:00 AM, Room 458: Kaffeeklatsch

Friday 2:00 PM, VT: Group Reading

Mythic Delirium / Goblin Fruit Group Reading (60 min,.) Mike Allen,
Amal-El Mohtar, and Jessica Paige Wick (co-hosts) with Leah Bobet, M. M.
Buckner, Greer Gilman, Sonya Taaffe, Catherynne M. Valente, Joselle
Vanderhooft et al

Joint reading from Mythic Delirium, the biannual magazine of speculative
poetry edited by Allen (which just published its tenth anniversary issue),
and Goblin Fruit, the quarterly online zine of fantastical poetry edited
by El-Mohtar and Wick (whose Summer 2009 issue is due out now).

Friday 4:00 PM, Salon E: Panel

Words as Magic. John Crowley, Greer Gilman, Ellen Klages, Delia Sherman
(L), Gene Wolfe

[Greatest Hit from Readercon 10.] In Red Magician Lisa Goldstein wrote:
“A magician’s business is with words.” Words are the ultimate power in the
universe of this novel, used to make magic and shape reality. In other
fiction, a facility with the magic of words and language can also be
important in more prosaic ways, both within the story and to the reading
experience. And we cannot forget the beauty of language itself in
literature. We will discuss the various implications of the magic of words
and language, for characters, readers, and writers, in the context of
imaginative literature.


Friday 7:00 PM, ME/ CT: Talk / Discussion (60 min.)

Excellent Foppery: The Use of History in the Fantastic. Graham Sleight
with discussion by John Clute, John Crowley, Greer Gilman, Victoria
Janssen, Robert Killheffer

Following on from his talk at last year’s Readercon (a potted history of
the last twenty years in speculative fiction), Sleight now discusses the
use of history in the fantastic--from John Crowley’s AEgypt sequence to
Tim Powers’s fantasies of history. Other works discussed include Road
Runner cartoons, Harry Potter, slash fiction, and the stories of Elizabeth
Hand, Russell T Davies, and Thomas Pynchon. Overarching theories may be
suggested; gratuitous mentions of Shakespeare may also take place.

Friday 8:00 PM, Salon B: Panel

The Career of Hope Mirrlees. Greer Gilman, Elizabeth Hand (L), Donald G.
Keller, Erin Kissane, Michael Swanwick

Friday 9:00 PM, NH / MA: Reading (60 min.)

from Cloud & Ashes.

Friday 10:00 PM, Salon A: Event (30 min.)

Readercon 20 Grand Ceremony Louise Waugh, Bob Colby, Eric M. Van, Diane
Martin, David G. Shaw; Michael Bishop, Suzy McKee Charnas, John Clute,
John Crowley, Samuel R. Delany, Greer Gilman, Elizabeth Hand, David G.
Hartwell, Barry N. Malzberg, James Morrow, Michael Swanwick, Howard
Waldrop, Gene Wolfe

[Largely a ceremonial introduction of all past GoHs present, and the
induction of this year’s Guests into their hallowed ranks. And some words
about the convention in general. Past GoHs are required to merely walk to
the stage, receive applause, and sit down (and hope that someone from
Locus takes an awe-inspiring photograph).]

Saturday 10:00 AM, Salon F: Autographing

Saturday 12:00 Noon, Salon A: Panel

Call and Response. Kathryn Cramer, Lila Garrott, Greer Gilman, Lev
Grossman (L), Laura Miller

Some fiction is in conscious dialogue with the philosophical content of a
prior work. For instance, Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials is a
response to C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia, Samuel R. Delany’s
Trouble on Triton addresses Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, James
Patrick Kelly’s Burn is a response to Thoreau, and Elizabeth Hand’s “The
Last Trumps” is a reaction to John Crowley’s “The Girlhood of
Shakespeare’s Heroines.” We will discuss these and other examples, and
how they use different approaches and varying degrees of explicitness.
How do such works read independently, out of context as responses?

Saturday 1:00 PM, Salon A: Panel

The Invention of Fantasy in the Antiquarian Revival. Debra Doyle, Greer
Gilman, Erin Kissane, Kathryn Morrow (M), Faye Ringel, Sonya Taaffe

The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw an extraordinary
flowering of scholarship on myth, ritual, and cultural traditions from
ancient Greece to contemporary Sussex, a mix which had a profound effect
on fields as disparate as classical music, analytical psychology, and
literature of the fantastic. Whether the names Jane Ellen Harrison, James
George Frazer, or Cecil Sharp mean anything or nothing to the average
reader of fantasy, their legacy includes the mythic vocabulary that
underpins much of our field--an older world beneath this one which still
seeps through, to be identified in fragments and perilously traced to its
source. Join us in exploring the present-day inheritors of these motifs
and their framework, starting with our own Guests of Honor (Greer Gilman’s
Cloud derives its physics from The Golden Bough and The White Goddess, its
history from Child ballads; Elizabeth Hand’s Mortal Love not only draws on
the Victorian folk revival for inspiration, but sets its plot going among
the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the Folk-Lore Society; Hope Mirrlees’
Lud-in-the-Mist is perhaps the archetypal novel of slippage between
worlds. Green Men in varying guises haunt the fiction of all three). Is
this a peculiarly English take on fantasy? If so, what are two Americans
doing writing it? Or have we all internalized katabasis, solstices, Indo-
European trinities? Bring folksongs to answer the questions if you must,
but Morris dancing will be politely discouraged.

Saturday 3:00 PM, Salon A: Event

The Rhysling Award Poetry Slan. Mike Allen (MC) with Michael Bishop, Leah
Bobet, Lila Garrott, Greer Gilman, Ernest Lilley, Darrell Schweitzer,
Sonya Taaffe, Catherynne M. Valente

(A “poetry slan,” to be confused with “poetry slam,” is a poetry reading
by sf folks, of course.) Climaxed by the presentation of this year’s
Rhysling Awards.

Saturday 4:00 PM, Salon E: Event

Greer Gilman Interviewed by Lila Garrott

Sunday 11:00 AM, Salon E: Panel

Divinatory Systems In Imaginative Literature. John Crowley, Greer Gilman,
Eileen Gunn, Sarah Micklem, Rachel Pollack, Eric M. Van (M)

Divination takes a fundamentally random process (the fall of playing
cards, the position of tea leaves) and regards it as fated and meaningful,
and hence indicative of the future. The use of a divinatory system in a
story thus suggests that the author is concerned with the causal structure
of reality: chance versus fate, randomness versus determinism. What are
the motivations of authors who use divinatory systems in their fiction?
What do such works end up saying about causality? It’s possible to borrow
an existing system (the I Ching in Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High
Castle, the Zodiac in John Crowley’s AEgypt), or invent your own (alternate
Tarot decks in Crowley’s Little, Big and Greer Gilman’s “Jack Daw’s
Pack”); what are the rationales for doing one or the other?

Sunday 12:00 Noon, Salon E: Panel

Outsider Artists and Speculative Fiction. Greer Gilman, Liz Gorinsky,
Elizabeth Hand (M), James Morrow, John Shirley, Michael Swanwick

The popular conception of “outsider art” is art created by unschooled
social outcasts working outside the mainstream and utterly unaware of its
conventions (a paradigmatic figure is Henry Darger, whose 7,000,000 word
fantasy novel The Story of the Vivian Girls ... in the Realms of the Unreal
remains unpublished but whose folk-art illustrations of the ms. fetch up
to $80,000 at auction). However, the definition can be fruitfully
expanded to include anyone whose work derives from and is secondary to an
obsession essentially unrelated to the creation of art. In both cases,
there is a sense that unique art was created because the artist “didn’t
know better” than to take such an unconventional approach. From this
point of view, Tolkien (coincidentally, Darger’s exact contemporary) was
an outsider artist. Are there other examples?

Nine

01:01 am: Silly Sisters
I found these old drawings of mine from when I was writing Moonwise.  Do they look as you imagined them?

Sylvie

Ariane

There are far more sketches and scraps than I remembered--maybe thirty?  Several of the finished ones are at my website, and will be in the Readercon souvenir book.  I'll bring the others, as copies or files, to show my Kaffeeklatsch.  sovay  thinks I should do a chapbook.

Nine

01:20 am: What dragons read

11:48 pm: If you're coming to Readercon...
...when will you arrive?

I want to try to have my reading scheduled when my audience is there to hear it.

The latest program (still a work in progress) is getting richer by the hour.  This con will be astonishing!

Nine

08:08 pm: Juno's Peacock
Just got an early draft of the Readercon panel grid, with readings, papers, and other ceremonials as yet unscheduled.  There will be paradoxes to resolve, and participants playing musical chairs, and a hundred visions and revisions--but isn't it gorgeous?

Mind you, my feathers will be draggled.  That Saturday looks as brutal as glorious.

Nine

10:01 pm: Tattercoats
There will be a coat of rags of sentences at Readercon.  madamebuttery --the cleverest deviser that I know--has begun it.  We sat in her parlour tearing strips for it, like two Fates waiting for the third.  You are invited to write any of my sentences, from any of my works, on it; or bring your own tatters.  Pin the Words on the Writer!

And I have two new Hats from the magnificent Annie Lenox, to go with Juno's Peacock and My Uncle Bob.  One is like a nereid's; the other is Fortuny.


Nine

01:21 am: Thunderstruck
""Discovering the eternal beneath the everyday is the work of prophets; describing the eternal for the everyday, the work of mad prophets. ... It's not often  ...  that a single novel can offer within a glimpse of the infinite, the eternal, the beating heart of mind and myth that lies underneath both the world and the words that generally describe the world...."

"When you sign up for 'Cloud & Ashes,' you're pretty much signing up for a permanent change of perception...."

" 'Cloud & Ashes' is not a book for every reader; but it is a book for every human. (It's also a book for every library that desires to be worthy of that appellation.)"

I'm speechless.

Nine

01:39 pm: Beck and call
sovay  came over to my study, seeking flicker and illusion; so I screened her FairyTale, one of the two films made in 1997 about the Cottingley photographs.  (They do that, don't they?  In 2006, it was magicians.)  Here's the review I wrote when I first saw it, in December of that year:

"I went with two small girls, who were enchanted.  (Many, I think, would not be:  far too subtle and too slow.)  It's a lovely bit of sleight-of-hand, straightforwardly ambiguous.  As Houdini says, in the first few minutes of the film, children are the severest critics of magic:  'They expect nothing; they see everything.'  The photographs are real, but only through the grownups' yearning eyes.  And the fairies?  Well, we see them through the children's eyes, and they are children with their backs against the dark.  This Elsie has survived the illness that took her brother; she's for the mills that he escaped.   Arriving all alone in England, Frances walks through a train full of wounded soldiers, holding up her cat's cradle to a man with half a face.  No Gothic, it's the world they know:  half Eden and half Somme.

"Unlike, say, Hook, this isn't wet-eyed black and white, but all in shades of greys.  There are believers who exploit the children:  the gentle and inexorable Conan Doyle, for one.  There are agnostics who are just and kind:  Elsie's father and Houdini, who respects the girls' illusion while abhorring fraud.  A landlord with a gun confronts a rabble with butterfly nets.  The fairies are his tenantry, he says; if they exist.  There's a cynic cornered by an angry ghost; there are seekers, like the fey and fluting Gardner, who blunders into a fairy ring and sees nothing, nothing at all.

"Charles Sturridge, the director, could do a splendid half of  Little, Big: the pastoral, though not the City, I expect.  (Too crazed.)  He's caught the atmosphere just right, of mingled impishness and Sehnsucht.  Ah, but how I could resist a film with such a bluebell wood?  With such a beck?  I'd go again, if only for the glimpse of Maude Adams as Peter Pan, all velvet-eyed androgyny.  Clap if you believe in fairies, she implores.  The stagehand with the mirror flutters feebly.  Tink-Pavlova sinks and dies. And in the audience, one massive nanny (or an aunt) uplifts slow, dutiful, begrudging hands.  Thwock.  Thwock.

"This one, I may have to buy."

I did.

Nine

10:23 pm: The third seat from Waterloo Bridge

On the 18th day of June


me boys, eighteen hundred and fifteen,
Both horse and foot they did advance; most glorious to be seen,
Both horse and foot they did advance and the bugle-horn did blow
Where the sons of France we made to dance on the Plains of Waterloo.

Nine

08:08 pm: "...a thing of shreds and patches..."; or, The Fool's Coat Project
This was mer_moon 's inspiration.

I have so many sentence-slips in mind for Meet the Pros(e), that I thought of printing them all, on tatters like a Fool's coat.

To which mer_moon replied, "The vision I have is this: a band, to slip around your elbow or your wrist, and from this band, a profusion of ribbons and rags, scraps of cloth, and on the cloth, words embroidered or words penned out, the ink bleeding or staining, and each ribbon or scrap is a different line. And then a matching rag-tattered braid, or a crown,"

To which I answered, "You know what would be deeply deeply cool? If anyone who feels so moved would write me a tatter or so, and bring or send it to me. Then I'd knot them all to millinery wire..."

Would any of you like to play?

I promise I'd wear my words, like a Cloudish guiser.  There would be pictures.

"O that I were a fool! I am ambitious for a motley coat."

Nine
'