conference report

[calimac]

So - what I was doing in Minneapolis. Attending the Fantasy Matters conference at the UM.

I'd seen the call for papers for this last spring, and thought it would be a cool excuse to visit the city, as well as an opportunity to refresh a paper I'd given at Mythcon a few years ago, on fantasy elements in Gilbert and Sullivan. My paper was accepted, I was asked to be on an open discussion panel as well, and we were off.

So clearly the programming would be like that at Mythcons: lots of papers and a few panels. But otherwise I didn't know what to expect. It turned out to be small, about 150 people, mostly in two categories: determinedly aspiring young fantasy authors, and grad students (not all of them young) looking for a chance to beef their scholarly vitas. A few professors, a few independent scholars, a few readers just there to listen. Hardly anyone I knew, very few I'd even heard of.

I'd certainly heard of the keynote speakers, though. Jack Zipes, UM's distinguished folklorist, gave a rousing Marxist denunciation of the commodification and lowest-denominator fixation of commercial fantasy. His speech was very useful to point to for the rest of the conference whenever anybody said "But they had to do it that way [dumb it down, eviscerate the heart of the story, etc.] because it's a moooooovie," an argument that showed up depressingly often. Zipes actually stuck around for most of the conference and made some good comments on papers.

Neil Gaiman was I think only there for his reading and some signing afterwards, but he gave good measure: he read the first chapter of his novel-in-progress, which he described as "The Jungle Book set in a graveyard," accordingly titled The Graveyard Book, the opening telling how its Mowgli came to live in a graveyard and be raised by ghosts.

The papers I attended were all pretty good, free of the more ferrous forms of academic jargon, though the best was by a non-academic, an author past the aspiring stage, Peg Kerr's study of the literalization of "heart of stone" (ice, etc.) metaphors in fantasy ranging from Andersen's "The Snow Queen" to Hughart's Bridge of Birds.

For a conference its size, it was very overprogrammed, with four tracks running at once most of the time. Attendance at individual sessions varied greatly. I guess Gilbert and Sullivan were a bit off track for most of these people, because the attendance at my paper was very small. Everyone still there who'd ever heard me give a paper at Mythcon showed up - all three of them - and about half a dozen others. I got through everything, and the room's installed AV computer did play my homemade CD for the musical illustrations.

The venue was the law school, a building which aspires to ugly brutalism without achieving it. I have to say, though, that the lecture rooms have outstanding acoustics. By prearrangement we took over a nearby pub for Saturday evening, noshing on endless supplies of meatballs and jalapeno poppers, and if you didn't like beer they had French cider. And down on this page here is a photo taken there with me in it.

Comments

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

Should it matter to you, you can avoid sounding like you're not from here by adopting the local nomenclature: "the U of M" or, when in the locality, "the U."

Peg will be gratified that you appreciated her paper, as she reported really working hard on it.

And I've had cocktails with with Jack Zipes. He's charming.

K. [sorry I missed you]

[benjd.livejournal.com]

I attended a conference at the UM Law School building a few years back. As I recall, there was a gigantic photograph of Walter Mondale just inside the main entrance. The building had just been renovated, I believe.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

The portrait is still there, overlooking the atrium on the main floor. Looking up from the lower-level lounge, where we had our breaks, it looms overhead like God.