![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Mythcon 42
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.
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.