dira: Bucky Barnes/The Winter Soldier (Default)
Dira Sudis ([personal profile] dira) wrote2004-09-06 04:34 pm

And home again.

I'm back from WorldCon - it's all a bit of a blur, the way cons are, and I haven't quite wrapped my brain around the idea that that was my weekend, and I have to go to work tomorrow, but...



I went to four readings (readings were really the best part of the con this year, I think): Lois McMaster Bujold's, Connie Willis's, Neil Gaiman's, and Terry Pratchett's.

Lois's was most crowded, because they will persist in putting her into tiny rooms every year. I wound up sitting up in front, about a yard back from the edge of the table she sat at - not quite at her feet, but not a bad approximation. We heard chapter one and some of chapter three of The Hallowed Hunt, due out in May or June of next year, and I am deeply excited to see it.

Connie's reading was also crowded, which seemed to surprise her - it was 5:30 on Thursday, and she expected us all to be at dinner, to which I can only say, Do you realize how long we wait for your novels, woman? We can put off dinner another half hour. And whoever decided that Connie should only read for a half hour probably needs the same stern talking-to that the person who chose the room for Lois's reading ought to get. Honestly, people. She's Connie Willis. We heard some of All Clear, the next and apparently final Oxford Time Travelers novel - Connie says she's got about two more novels after that (one, set in an ice age future is her "Tolkien book," something she's been planning to write for decades - I'm hoping this means it turns into a trilogy...) and then plans on switching to short work again in her advancing age. And after that, haiku, or possibly limericks.

Connie only knows one limerick, and she shared it with us:
There once was a man of Devizes,
Whose balls were of two different sizes,
The one was so small,
It was no ball at all,
But the other had won several prizes.


Ahem.

Neil's reading was - well, he showed up a tad late on account of it being ten o'clock Saturday morning, and he was a bit tousled and, y'know, wearing The Jacket, and announced half-apologetically that we were guinea pigs - the first living creatures to hear what he was about to read, so we'd have to let him know how it was, whether it was funny or any good and so on. Needless to say, he had us at The Jacket, and - damn. The man isn't just a brilliant writer, he's a brilliant storyteller. I mean, he does voices! The end of his allotted hour came literally in the middle of a sentence, but we just couldn't bear to have him stop sooner, and he indulged us for as long as he could. So. Hopefully he'll soon finish writing Anansi Boys and then in a year or so we'll all find out what's going on with Fat Charlie.

Terry Pratchett's reading was Sunday at noon, and not too wretchedly crowded mainly by dint of being in an enormous room. He read us a chapter or so from the new (chaptered!) Discworld novel, Going Postal, which sounds brilliant (Vetinari appoints Ankh-Morpork's first Postmaster General in decades) and, er, okay I'll tell you guys something. I bought The Postman. And read it, dashing upstairs and sitting down just inside the door of my bedroom. I was incredibly eager to read it, because, dude. Setting up a postal system. How cool is that? I was really disappointed when the book took its turn into supercomputers and supermen and war and blah blah blah, because setting up a postal system is really where it's at. Hopefully, Going Postal will scratch a bit of that itch, and in any case, it sounds hilarious and fascinating and is due out next month. The copy Terry read from, he auctioned immediately after finishing the reading, and some lucky bastard got to finish the book right then for a donation of $280 to TAFF. Ah, to be a financially secure fan...

Apart from readings, I also did some other stuff.

I have to say, it was a bit odd attending Worldcon this year - I felt much more like a slasher among skiffies than I did even a year ago. I think the difference is that I've since attended slash cons, and got a bit spoiled by the smaller size and the comfy atmosphere. Worldcon is a bit overwhelming by contrast, and I wound up blowing off a lot of programming to hide out in my room watching hockey, or, on Saturday afternoon, to flee the con altogether (on which occasion I wound up hopping the T, figuring out how to navigate to [livejournal.com profile] brooklinegirl's house, and landed myself on her doorstop, and, bless her, she took me in and fed me cookies til I was ready to go back and face the con again).

So, that said, a lot of my favorite parts of the con were the ones that appealed to me as a slasher. (Also the parts where I went drinking with a small group of friends, which, arguably, means just the same thing.)

The first moment of total wonder and happiness I had was when I got to the Art Show and had a look around - much beautiful art which, due to poor planning, I only saw once and never even contemplated bidding on or buying. Still, many beautiful sights, evoking many strange and wonderful things. And then, at Laurie Toby Edison's booth: nudes. Photographed nudes, accompanied by little bits of text. She did a book called Women En Large: Images of Fat Nudes, so the pictures of women were accompanied by various commentaries about women and feminism and all the multitude of body image things that impact me, myself, as a real person, and which I therefore glanced only lightly at. The text beside the images of men, however, quite arrested my attention, and I wound up sitting down to transcribe them, fascinated as any student of the culture of masculinity.

Men don't feel sad when they're down. They feel nothing. They do what they have to do, because they have to, and let everything else go.

They drink. They smoke. Watch some TV. Go to bed early. If you think about it, you get down. So don't think about it. What's to talk about? Don't ask. I don't.
--Dan Montaldi


Real Men don't really have asses. They walk all seized up, or run the risk of being accused of being a wimp or a faggot. It made my back hurt and it made my soul hurt, just so I could try to be a Real Man. Real Men have strong arms and chests and maybe even legs, but they don't have bodies. After all, you can't have a body if you don't have an ass.

The day I found my ass, years of pain and fear were healed. The day I found my ass, I learned to listen to my body, to appreciate it for what it is and how it works. I stopped hating myself for not being a Real Man and began to love myself as a male human being the day I found my ass.
--Charlie Glickman


Masculinity is far more exquisite and fine than femininity. Women can count on the astounding elasticity they have built into femininity. Only with serious, sustained effort can a woman rupture it. The delicate filigree structure of masculinity, in contrast, splinters at the slightest strain. One wrong move, voice modulation, or clothing choice shatters the brittle architecture, and the fuck-up is left standing amid the rubble, vulnerable as a pomegranate in mid-November with its skin ruptured open, tender jewels exposed.
--Jaime Cortez


All of these, of course, are just individual men's feelings on the subject (and these are clearly men far more articulate and self-aware than any slash character I have ever attempted to write) but they do offer some awfully interesting points of view to consider the characterization of men who have lived in the modern Western culture of masculinity. And the discovery of these bits of text, all unexpected, was my first moment of serious enchantment at the con. (Neil's reading was the next day, see.)

Other highlights included the slash panel, which was not nearly so bad as the summary made it sound. I have to admit that I'd been drinking beforehand and so most of what I gleaned from the panel was the discovery that yaoi is pronounced the same as Yahweh. The Lord works in mysterious ways indeed...

Also, the wondrous [livejournal.com profile] astolat arranged for an hour or so of vid showing on Saturday night, so [livejournal.com profile] iuliamentis and I got to watch vids on the really, really big screen, which was quite wonderful and made me feel at home again with the con.

A bit later the same evening were the Hugos, emceed by (!!!) Neil Gaiman, who had substituted a tux and reading glasses for The Jacket and sunglasses, with thoroughly satisfactory results. I really, really don't care that he's precisely old enough to be my father (or, in other words, that he has a daughter my age) because, yowza. Neil.

Bob Silverburg talked a bit about Hugo ceremonies past - he's attended every single one since the first - and once again proved that, no, really, he's cool enough to sustain his massive ego. ("And each time, Heinlein would win, and appear from nowhere, in a white dinner jacket, on a pillar of fire. We got used to it after a while.") For a while, with DUFF and TAFF delegates presenting awards in between Neil's introductions, it became Parade of Increasingly Charming Accents, which made the boring categories move along quickly. Frank Wu won, adorably, and Jay Lake exuberantly. Neil seemed a bit gobsmacked and didn't know what to do with his new Hugo, as he was still, y'know, on-stage. The DUFF delegate (who, incidentally, made all the elves' ears for the LotR movies) accepted the award on behalf of everyone involved in Return of the King. Lois won another Hugo (not positive whether it was her fifth novel Hugo, or fifth overall - I thought she'd already been tied with Heinlein for novels?) which means she now has quite an impressive number of them, and opened her speech with "What Neil Said." The most amazing thing about the Hugo ceremony, for me, was catching in-jokes referring to Hugo awards one and two years past - I was there! So I'm not sure I belong, exactly, but I'm certainly getting the hang of things by sheer repetition...



Being home from WorldCon also means my writing vacation is over. Feel free to resume pestering, if you like doing that sort of thing. *g*