calimac

These, in the late afternoon, both went well. My camera worked properly and I was awake.

"Foundational Fantasy You Should Read": pre-con conversations with the other panelists had convinced me that introductory remarks on Dunsany and Peake would be useful, and also some guide into Tolkien's obscurer gems, for which I resurrected The Forgotten Women of Middle-earth. Others recommended some authors I could really do without, but I kept silent about that. We talked a little about the forging of "fantasy" as a publishing genre in the 1960s, and my definition of "foundational" was "from before then," but some of the audience members defined it as anything from before their personal time, so we also got in UKL and DWJ.

"Writing Fantasy in Real Worlds": I'd originally signed up for this because I had things to say on this subject, but finding myself moderator of a panel with five pretty high-powered pro authors on it, including Andrea Hairston and Sarah Pinsker, whose work B. knew even if I didn't, I figured I'd better just pose the questions and let them talk. They gave good value, talking with detail but not from a self-promotional angle about what they've done with these settings, how, and why (notably Wole Talabi's story about rescuing stolen African treasures from the British Museum); and they all also responded with enthusiasm when I asked them to name such work by other authors they'd recommend. Both that and their own work were both more recent and more multicultural than my own knowledge of the subject, so leaving it to them was for the best.

After dinner, about an hour into the Masquerade I turned that on, to find some unskilled belly dancers flouncing around to some really irritating music. This going on for several minutes and showing no signs of ceasing, I turned the feed off.

The great part of not actually being at the worldcon is that you don't feel guilty for missing anything. I didn't watch any panels today (though I'd have liked to see the recording of one from Thursday that I missed if they'd put up the recordings yet), but around evening-time I wondered what they were doing for evening entertainment tonight, as the costumes are tomorrow and the awards on Sunday.

It turned out to be a concert of anime music. A group which both looked and sounded like a high-school jazz orchestra played some occasionally modestly interesting jazz-type compositions while the emcee stood in front, embodying the "wave arms around until music stops" school of non-conducting when he bothered to do anything at all.

The Worldcon is coming up, but though it's only a few hundred miles from here, I'm not going. Remembering from past LA Worldcons the sheer expanse of the Anaheim Convention Center, I don't think I'm any longer up to the expenditure of space and of time that goes with attending a Worldcon.

But I will be there virtually, for at least part of the con. I was contacted by programming and decided to volunteer. So I'll be on four all-online panels, all of them on Saturday. I'm moderating two of these, "Memories of the Worldcons Past" and "Writing Fantasy in Real Worlds," and will be a panelist on two others, "Fandom as a Found Family" and "Foundational Fantasy You Should Read." I'll try to report on these after they happen.

Because they're online and panelists can be anywhere, these programming tracks run 24 hours. My first panel is at 4.30 am. At the` time I signed up for programming, this would have been fine, being about the time I'd get up anyway. But in the last few weeks, it's been just after I finally fall asleep. I don't know what's going to happen, but the last time I tried to get up in the early morning, I was groggy and exhausted all day.

I attended an online Zoom presentation by the Lamplighters, the San Francisco Gilbert & Sullivan society, of three songs recently discovered (like, three months ago) that were cut from G&S's opera Iolanthe before the work was finalized for regular performance in 1882. They were found by a G&S scholar named Marc Shepherd, who was browsing through a rehearsal score in the British Library that apparently nobody else had examined closely before. Sullivan's practice was to destroy any material he didn't use in the final opera, but this rehearsal score must have been missed. Probably they were deleted for the reasons that songs are often deleted from stage musicals at a late stage: unnecessary for plot development, slowing down the action, difficult to sing.

I hadn't heard of this discovery before - except for the text of the third song, which Gilbert published among his poetry - nor did I know until the program that the songs had already been released. Here is Shepherd's account of the songs, and here they are being sung by, as the Lamplighters also did them, professional-quality G&S performers.



I don't find them hidden gems, but they're enjoyable enough, especially in these performances, and I'm glad we have acquired these nuggets.

This weekend there was an Asian Food Fest at the San Mateo fairgrounds. I was hoping to attend and have a report here. The fest opened each day at 10 AM, and I know from past experience with such events that if you want to accomplish anything without standing in line for an hour first, you'd better get there early. Furthermore, parking is expensive, but the fairgrounds are a block from a train station, so if I caught the 9:12 AM train from my local station, I'd be there by opening. But that requires getting up early, and my current so-called sleep schedule has me waking up about 9:30. Of course I could set an alarm and be groggy all day, but that's not compatible with attending a festival nor desirable for a voluntary event. So I didn't go.

I haven't been posting much, not just because not much is happening, but because I'm not in a position where I can get much writing done, even light writing like this, let alone more serious material.

The problem is that, since my return from my trip, I've been suffering from the worst ever attack of a recurrent problem: inability to fall asleep. Along about 10 pm I start feeling sleepy, but lying down produces nothing. Instead of the peaceful relaxed feeling that has always accompanied incipient sleep for me, I feel agitated and jittery, or I start experiencing what I could call dreams, though I'm still awake at the time. For some reason I can't stand these, and get up immediately, which stops them. By then I'm no longer sleepy, and that lasts maybe half an hour before I start feeling sleepy again, and the cycle begins anew.

This goes on for maybe six hours, then I finally fall asleep and am out for most of the morning. During the rest of the day I find that no position, sitting, lying down, or standing, is wholly comfortable, so I move around in a distracted way.

My doctor has given me a pill to promote sleep, and the first night it worked pretty well, but the second night it's made me feel sleepier without putting me out.

I'm very tired of and annoyed by this.

A pillar of Bay Area sf fandom died last week. From Dave's husband, Scott Marley, via Sarah Goodman and Rich McAllister, "Dave was just walking down the street when he collapsed and could not be revived."

I'm not one to write a proper obituary. But I know from personal knowledge that Dave was one of the three partners of The Other Change of Hobbit bookstore when it opened in 1977. He would have been about 24 at the time. It had grown out of the Portable Bookstore that he and Debbie Notkin and Tom Whitmore would bring to aftermeetings of the Little Men club and sell new books to members, often clearing me out of whatever cash I'd intended to keep for the weekend.

Eventually they scraped together the wherewithal to open a brick-and-mortar bookstore, literally between the brick walls of Berkeley's cavernous under-garage mall off Telegraph Avenue - in the space where the Berkeley Public Library's resale book shop is now - licensed the "Change of Hobbit" name from Sherry Gottlieb, and set to business.

It was quite successful for some years, but eventually both other partners left for other things, leaving Dave and a somewhat stable support staff. The shop changed location at least three times before declining bookstore business led it to dribble to a close.

But in the early days it was gangbusters, especially when the presence of the store made it an obvious site for meetings of the Little Men, which had previously subsisted on members' living rooms. Already a veteran of various local newszines Before My Time, Dave started up a monthly club newsletter, usually two pages, sometimes more, titled The Rhodomagnetic Bulletin, after the club's Rhodomagnetic Digest of distant days of yore. This had not just meeting information and relevant news, but articles, often goofy humor by Mike Ward, and reviews. I wrote my first two published reviews, of Humphrey Carpenter's Tolkien biography and then The Silmarillion, at Dave's request for the Rhodomag.

Dave had one other intellectual interest that I shared to an extent, in classical music. But as with his interest in SF as a bookseller, he pursued this to an extreme extent. Dave was the kind of person who'd collect 60 different recordings of Brahms's First Symphony and be ready to discourse on the differences between all of them. I visited his apartment once and it was packed with shelves upon shelves of LPs. He'd also record operas on tape off the radio on the store's sound system, and my greatest sin was to have turned off the radio once because I had to start the meeting. But we'd occasionally have juicy conversations about whither the San Francisco Symphony and so on.

As you've already gathered, Dave was gay. He was just about the first out gay person I ever met (I was from very straightlaced suburbs, and chose Berkeley for college partly to expand my horizons - it worked, too). I remember thinking, "So he's gay. Interesting. But so what?" and I've been comfortable in the company of gays, lesbians, bis, and trans people ever since. I'm sure that Dave's cool and matter of fact attitude towards life helped my understanding.

I've counted myself as an experienced traveler for over 40 years, but even at this point I can still learn tips for how to handle things.

I arrived at the airport for my flight home from Mythcon to find that I had no assigned seat for the flight, and that I'd have to get one from the gate agent, the one who arrives at the gate one hour before departure time. This was initially puzzling, as I'd picked a seat when making the reservation, but the check-in agent explained: the aircraft had been changed to a smaller one, and all the seat assignments erased.

Here's where I learned my lesson. When I'd checked in online the previous day, there'd been an option on the screen to choose a seat. Partly because I was pressed for time at the moment, I'd ignored that, as I already had a seat. I shouldn't have ignored it.

Fortunately I was early at the airport, the gate seating area was not crowded, and I went to stand up at the counter a few minutes before the gate agent arrived, and there was a seat available in the class that I'd requested, so all came out OK.

I'm back from my trip to Mythcon, and now's the time to write about the conference part of the trip.

Mythcon was held in the unlikely grounds of Weatherford, Oklahoma, because the library of the local college, Southwestern Oklahoma State University, is the home of the Mythopoeic Society archives. Our online records are hosted by their website, and - as I saw when I visited by appointment on Friday - the printed records are stored in their vault. All this is at the behest of enthusiastic Mythie and SWOSU library archivist Phillip Fitzsimmons, who also chaired the conference.

Our meeting venue was not on campus, but closer to our hotel (a quick mile's drive or so) in the Stafford Air and Space Museum, established by, or at least because, early US astronaut Thomas P. Stafford (always called "General Stafford" in hushed tones around here) was a native of Weatherford. I went to the museum exhibits and was hugely impressed, especially by the numerous, sometimes replicas and sometimes the real thing, of full-size aircraft, starting with a full-size replica of the Wright Brothers' original plane. I had never seen such a thing outside of grainy old photographs before, and this conveyed the nature of the craft better than do old photos.

The museum has - or had; I think they're in the process of converting it to new exhibit space - a large function room, divisible by temp walls like a hotel ballroom, which it rather resembles. We had it divided in three, registration and dealers in front, one programming room in the middle (mostly online speakers), and the other in back (mostly live). You have to walk through the middle room to get to the back, which could become tricky. I was leaving the back room just as a new session was beginning, and realized as I got to the middle room that if I didn't sit down, the online paper presenter would have only one person in the audience. So I did sit down, and listened to a paper whose fascination wasn't dampened by the fact that I hadn't even heard of any of the three books being discussed. Another time I passed through as the online speaker was explaining that Treebeard introduced Merry and Pippin to homosexuality. That time I just kept walking.

I missed a lot of interesting papers because I had to keep dashing back to the hotel to take naps, regular sleep being a rare function, and another got canceled when the presenter had to run off to the hospital (he's OK), but I did get to some good ones, including John Rosegrant's exploration of Tolkien's sound symbolism and Eric Rauscher's discussion of what Charles Williams's poetry got from Gerald Manley Hopkins and T.S. Eliot. I also heard both Guest of Honor speeches, which I'll not attempt to summarize here. The scholar Joe R. Christopher, still hale at 91, broke his arm in an accidental fall the day before the convention, and while he and his sling did attend, they didn't get there in time for his scheduled speech, which was read by Janet Brennan Croft. The author David R. Slayton delivered his rousing defense of literacy at the banquet. We were all - there were less than 100 in person - stuffed into the banquet room of Lucille's Roadhouse, the restaurant adjacent to and sharing a name and ownership with our hotel. This is clearly the place to dine in Weatherford; I had three dinners there and it never got tired. Weatherford apparently counts as in the South, and the food was mostly Southern in nature (my three entrees were ribs, chicken-fried steak, and pork chop), including having bacon in the green beans, a bit of a surprise if there were any vegetarians present, which I guess not, though the full menu does cater to them.

Plenty of conversations had between papers and late night (the hotel's breakfast nook doubled as an evening con suite) with old friends and new people, some of them wandering in from Signum University's Mythmoot, which I've been pressing for years as the best possible source for new Mythies.

It was hideously hot outside, but dry so not enervating; and we mostly stayed inside with pleasant but, unlike on some previous occasions, not violently overblown air conditioning. Pleasant, I'd say it was indoors. Parking was nearby and sufficient in quantity at both museum and hotel. The Procession marched from the museum's front lobby into the programming room, avoiding the outdoors altogether.

One oddity passed around the conference had been found in miscellaneous donated archives, a small ceramic jar labeled "Gopher Guts." None of the old-time Mythies present had any idea what that was, and Janet asked several people if they'd invent stories about it and write them down in a little booklet. I hope she publishes this; the two before mine were very clever. I thought for a moment and wrote down that it commemorated the ruler of a tiny German principality, Gofür (spelling varied). In this particular principality, probably inspired by L. Sprague de Camp, princes were subject to regular recall elections. Citizens voted by dropping a nut or pebble into one of two jars labeled Gopher Gut and Gopher Schlecht, I forget how I explained the extra "s", and this one had been taken as a souvenir by a US Army soldier after WW2, eventually finding its way into the MythSoc archives.

Texas. In july. It’s perishingly hot here; the only mitigation is that indoors, the air conditioning is not equally punishingly cold. It’s comfortable. This may be a rural Texas or specifically Fort Worth thing, because I have found that super air conditioning even in Dallas.

I’m in Fort Worth because Mythcon next weekend is in Oklahoma and I took a nonstop flight to DFW. On previous trips here I went to Dallas, so this time I am trying Fort Worth. Dallas thinks of itself as a sophisticated Eastern city, but Fort Worth is the Gateway to the West. It has a Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame, which I visited despite knowing nothing of any cowgirls except Annie Oakley. I might learn something, and I did. Turns out there were a lot of ranch-bred women skilled at riding and roping in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show, though there’s not much in the displays about any of them. And these skills are still to be found among ranch women today.

Fort Worth also has a Stockyards district. It’s a small area bursting with a riot of local color, rather like Beale Street in Memphis. And in among the Western wear shops and the Western furniture shops and the saloons are some steakhouses. I couldn’t go to the Stockyards without having a steak, right? {And if ir wouldn’t appeal to you, you wouldn’t be much attracted to the Stockyards anyway,) Ah, it was a good steak, richly flavored without seasoning, crusty and textured and marbled and juicy just as I like them. One down.