Mythcon 42

[calimac]

was held by Leslie Donovan, a literature professor at the University of New Mexico, and her small but motivated Hobbit Society of current and former students. Because, if I recall correctly, the UNM dorms were under reconstruction this summer, the conference venue was the nearby MGM Eleganté, a comically misnamed hotel on a commercial/industrial strip in central Albuquerque. One of the alternatives explored had been to house the attendees at the hotel but hold the meetings on campus; this would have been a mistake, as the sleeping facilities were the hotel's poorest feature (shabby, and with front desk and housekeeping seriously understaffed and, to be charitable about it, undertrained), while the meeting rooms were quite adequate aside from occasionally absent microphones and corridors that were too narrow for the number of wheelchairs we had, and the buffet food (Mythcon attendees traditionally take all our meals together) was plentiful, quite good, and very inexpensive. Every morning for breakfast I had the same made-to-order onion and green chile omelet, and I'll be dreaming of that for quite a while. (The tickets for free drinks during cocktail hour were also very popular among the members.)

The highlights of the conference were the addresses by the Guests of Honor. Michael D.C. Drout (we decided that "D.C." stood for "Da Chairmover" after he helped set up seating for one session) gave a provocative talk on Tolkien's underlying rhetorical intent in his "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics" essay: which earlier scholars he was actually replying to and what errors he was trying to correct, and where he overcompensated. It was the kind of talk that makes academic issues passionate and moving. So was that by Catherynne M. Valente, nominally on why fantasies tend to have medieval-style settings, but more broadly on ... well, you can read it yourself. It's not true, though, that this is her full text, as she began with a charmingly audacious invocation of Bilbo's farewell speech from "A Long-Expected Party," and the entire audience called out "Proudfeet!" in unison at the appropriate moment. Last year's Mythopoeic Scholarship Award winner Marek Oziewicz was present, and accepted his award with a moving brief talk on the hope and empathy that The Lord of the Rings brought to him as a teenager reading it in the oppressive conditions of 1980s Poland. Here's this year's winners.

I have to run back to the airport to pick up the luggage that Southwest had mislaid on our trip home, but I'll be back later to say more about the papers and panels, and about New Mexico.

Comments

[wild-patience.livejournal.com]

Minor correction: the hotel was the MCM Elegante, not the MGM. Lord knows, there was nothing Hollywood about it nor elegant. I comforted myself the whole weekend by telling myself that it was probably going to be condemned after we checked out.

One member said his wife had Googled the hotel and read there was a theft problem. One first-time Mythcon attendee asked if there was a Mythcon tradition of leaving a wash cloth on the outside door handle to a room as she had found one. Someone else had, as well. (This was very irritating to me as I was preparing to wash my face one night and found we had no wash cloths whatsoever in our room. I found the housekeeping staff, which had been chatting in the hall for over an hour with the cart in the same spot, and asked for 2 washcloths. They only had one.) Someone else found the door to their room open one time, so we were wondering if the wash cloths on the door were a signal of some sort. Another attendee had the tip money left for the maid stolen -- at least the money was gone and housekeeping had done nothing to the room.