Baycon Sunday
May. 31st, 2004 10:30 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacThe problem with a 10 AM panel is not so much that there's little audience, but that most of the panelists aren't awake. Makes for a sludgy time, not improved by confusion as to the subject of the panel. The description read, "If you had a time machine, which three books would you take back with you?" I took that as meaning what three books you would take in a time machine going backward in time, one of the other panelists took it as meaning what three books you would take going forward in time, and the moderator wanted us to discuss what three books we'd take to a desert island. To me these are three very different questions.
For desert island books I'd prefer to drop the whole survivalist-guide question, which I find rather uninteresting. I always thought the whole purpose of the question was to ask which few books you would want to live with if you could have only those, desert island or no. Certainly that's the premise of Desert Island Disks, the British radio program which addresses the question of music, as there's not much call for survivalist music. (Although Andy Breckman did write a song called "A Desperate Attempt to Make the Critics' List of the Ten Records They'd Bring to a Desert Island," whose refrain runs "When the weather clears you can make a raft out of bamboo pieces tied securely with rope or twine / Follow the Gulf Stream south, baby, you'll do fine.")
If, as someone suggested, people split in their literary desert-island books between those who'd take the stories they've always loved and those who'd take the classics they always wanted to make time to read, I fall firmly in the former camp. For three hefty volumes, I'd take The Lord of the Rings, Watership Down, and an omnibus of Dunsany short stories.
Going forward in time, it seems to me you wouldn't need to take any books with you unless you expected civilization to fall, in which case you'd have bigger worries than what literature to read, and we're back to the How To Rebuild Civilization manuals. If by the question is meant, "which books do you consider our civilization's greatest?", I'd rather deal with the question direct than with the time-machine conceit.
Going backward, it'd depend on where and when you're going. I chose to pick specific times and places to which I could bring then-unpublished books that would most amusingly amaze and astonish the natives. For instance, the first two volumes of The Lord of the Rings were published four months apart in late 1954, and The Two Towers, as you surely remember, ends on quite a cliffhanger. The Return of the King was scheduled for the next spring, but it was delayed due to Tolkien's niggling with the appendices, and didn't actually appear until October. Tolkien's publisher later said that it was the letters he recived in the interim that caused him to realize he had a classic on his hands. So I suspect that if I showed up at, say, the Worldcon in Cleveland on Labor Day of 1955 saying that I had three advance copies of volume 3 of The Lord of the Rings, I would be very popular.
Also on my Sunday agenda: a "Birds of a Feather" open meeting to discuss "J.R.R. Tolkein's Literary Works," and why do people persist in misspelling his name this way? We had a good discussion and endeavored to schedule a long open reading of participants' favorite Tolkien passages for next year. And the Regency dancing, which I always enjoy. As an intermediate dancer who remembers how hard I found it to reach that level, I enjoy helping beginners and a con dance is a good place to find them. Some pick it up fast, and some, let us say, don't. Dancing the Congress of Vienna waltz with one of the latter was not the highlight of my day, but she clearly enjoyed the dancing, and I enjoyed trying to be of assistance, so it was not what I'd call an unpleasant experience.
Also, having friends come up and whisper to me their secret LJ usernames makes a nice plus to a convention.
For desert island books I'd prefer to drop the whole survivalist-guide question, which I find rather uninteresting. I always thought the whole purpose of the question was to ask which few books you would want to live with if you could have only those, desert island or no. Certainly that's the premise of Desert Island Disks, the British radio program which addresses the question of music, as there's not much call for survivalist music. (Although Andy Breckman did write a song called "A Desperate Attempt to Make the Critics' List of the Ten Records They'd Bring to a Desert Island," whose refrain runs "When the weather clears you can make a raft out of bamboo pieces tied securely with rope or twine / Follow the Gulf Stream south, baby, you'll do fine.")
If, as someone suggested, people split in their literary desert-island books between those who'd take the stories they've always loved and those who'd take the classics they always wanted to make time to read, I fall firmly in the former camp. For three hefty volumes, I'd take The Lord of the Rings, Watership Down, and an omnibus of Dunsany short stories.
Going forward in time, it seems to me you wouldn't need to take any books with you unless you expected civilization to fall, in which case you'd have bigger worries than what literature to read, and we're back to the How To Rebuild Civilization manuals. If by the question is meant, "which books do you consider our civilization's greatest?", I'd rather deal with the question direct than with the time-machine conceit.
Going backward, it'd depend on where and when you're going. I chose to pick specific times and places to which I could bring then-unpublished books that would most amusingly amaze and astonish the natives. For instance, the first two volumes of The Lord of the Rings were published four months apart in late 1954, and The Two Towers, as you surely remember, ends on quite a cliffhanger. The Return of the King was scheduled for the next spring, but it was delayed due to Tolkien's niggling with the appendices, and didn't actually appear until October. Tolkien's publisher later said that it was the letters he recived in the interim that caused him to realize he had a classic on his hands. So I suspect that if I showed up at, say, the Worldcon in Cleveland on Labor Day of 1955 saying that I had three advance copies of volume 3 of The Lord of the Rings, I would be very popular.
Also on my Sunday agenda: a "Birds of a Feather" open meeting to discuss "J.R.R. Tolkein's Literary Works," and why do people persist in misspelling his name this way? We had a good discussion and endeavored to schedule a long open reading of participants' favorite Tolkien passages for next year. And the Regency dancing, which I always enjoy. As an intermediate dancer who remembers how hard I found it to reach that level, I enjoy helping beginners and a con dance is a good place to find them. Some pick it up fast, and some, let us say, don't. Dancing the Congress of Vienna waltz with one of the latter was not the highlight of my day, but she clearly enjoyed the dancing, and I enjoyed trying to be of assistance, so it was not what I'd call an unpleasant experience.
Also, having friends come up and whisper to me their secret LJ usernames makes a nice plus to a convention.
