I woke up in time to catch Liz Hand’s 10:00 a.m. reading Saturday. Achieving vertical locomotion that early on a con morning isn’t always guaranteed for me, considering how late into the evenings I often schmooze, but I made an extra effort on account of Liz. She read an excerpt from Wonderwall, her upcoming YA novel about Rimbaud.

For some reason, usually a scheduling conflict, I’d never seen Liz read before, and so her performance was a revelation. She did more then merely tell her tale; she became her characters—a female teen runaway in modern times, the 19th Century teen runaway Arthur Rimbaud, a homeless burned-out rocker, and others.

Midway through the reading, one squirming child raised his hand, and when Liz acknowledged him, he looked at the manuscript in her hands and asked her, “Are you trying to make a joke or something? There are too many pages to read!” Which I think would make a wonderful back cover blurb. Liz continued on with her reading unfazed. (more…)

Jeffrey Ford and I headed off for a late lunch after the reading I mentioned in my previous post, and along the way we bumped into Ellen Datlow, who joined us for drinks and conversation. We spent an hour or so catching up on the stuff of life.

The geography of the hotel restaurant proved that it’s impossible to navigate a convention without bouncing off your friends. For example, when we were seated, Jim Kelly and John Kessel were at the next table, so we of course had to kibitz with them for awhile, but by the time we were done eating, Mark Budz and Marina Fitch had taken their place at that table, setting off more kibitzing. And then, as we were leaving, I noticed that Richard and Carol Parks were behind us (you can see them in the background in the photo above), and so I paused to chat there. And then I saw the Locus gang at a large table plotting to take over the world, so I of course had to stop there as well.

I almost didn’t make it out of the restaurant! (more…)

Friday started off slow. I spent the morning working in my room, and so didn’t get out to attend any official programming until Patrick O’Leary’s 11:30 a.m. reading. Patrick always give good reading. At the World Fantasy Convention in Saratoga Springs last year, he read a piece which will appear in Pete Crowther’s upcoming anthology I Think Therefore I Am, and if Patrick’s moving story is any indication, it will be a great book. This time, he read a story titled “The Little Guy,” which inexplicably has yet to find a market. The sad, funny tale tells the true story of why the Decider-in-Chief’s IQ seems to have fallen year after year after year, and stars Dick Cheney and an alien who speaks with an Irish brogue. He also read a few poems, including one about the woman he was destined to marry, which luckily for him turns out to be the same woman as the woman he is about to marry.

Immediately after that reading, I headed off for my noon kaffeeklatsch. I shared a table with Mary Robinette Kowal, someone whom over the years I’d managed never to meet before. (See, Karen, I don’t know everyone.) Over the course of an hour together, we talked (along with others who came to listen, urge on, and cajole) of the first female archaeologist, of her puppeteering background, and many other topics. And though Mary did not demonstrate those puppetry skills for us, she did perform the magic trick she learned during her brief career as a singing waitress fairy in a Christmas show aboard a cruise ship. That’s a picture of us below, snapped before our event began and I learned how interesting she was.

As soon as the kaffeeklatsch was over, I rushed to a reading given by Jeffrey Ford, one of my favorite writers, and luckily one of my favorite readers as well. He orates with a booming voice and a wry tone, and he’s always entertaining. In his half-hour slot, he read his surreal story “The Dream of Reason,” which will be forthcoming in an Ellen Datlow anthology the name of which he couldn’t recall. I’m glad he’s so popular that the titles of his outlets blur together.

I’ll relate more of yesterday’s busy doings a little later, as soon as I’ve gotten a little more work done, but to keep you busy in the meantime, here are further photos from the con.

There, that’s better. Four-and-a-half hours of sleep can work wonders!

Yesterday began with me waking up at 4:15 and getting to BWI Airport three hours before my 10:05 flight. I had a ton of work to do on the upcoming Fall Preview issue of SCI FI magazine, and doing it at the airport instead of at home that morning meant that I missed all the nasty Baltimore traffic which would have slowed me down had I tried to get there in the midst of rush hour. So I had a calm commute and then many productive hours of wifi work before my flight.

Once all (well, almost all) caught up, I flew to Providence, rather than Boston, to take part in what’s been a longtime Readercon tradition—since Providence and Boston are equidistant from the con’s site of Burlington, Massachusetts, I extend the con conviviality by having lunch in the land of H. P. Lovecraft with Paul Di Filippo (and sometimes his keeper, Deb Newton) before driving to the con with them from there.

Here we are about to devour lunch at their favorite Chinese restaurant.

My fortune cookie told me that You always know the right times to be assertive or to simply wait, which bodes well for not making a fool of myself this weekend—or at least for not making more of a fool of myself that I usually appear to be. (more…)

It is far too late in the evening (or is that far too early in the morning?) for me to have anything coherent to say about Readercon 2008, other than that I’m having fun as usual, and that my photos are beginning to appear online as if by magic.

But before I crash, here I am with John Joseph Adams, perspicacious editor of The Living End, who wisely chose to reprint my Stoker finalist “Almost the Last Story by Almost the Last Man” in his upcoming zombie anthology.

A report on Thursday’s doings will be posted tomorrow when (and if) coherency returns.

Louisa Eremelino interviewed Paul Theroux, author of the classic travel memoir The Great Railway Bazaar as well as other books, both fiction and non-fiction, in the June 30 issue of Publishers Weekly.

She closed out the profile with his anecdote of wandering a porn shop in the Akihabara district of Tokyo with Japanese writer and translator Haruki Murakami:

I think that you see what a society is like, its personality, its character, by looking at its pornography. It’s different in every culture. The way a man treats a prostitute is the way he really is; he’s not on his best behavior. If a Martian arrived on earth and had an hour to sum up this society, I’d send him to a porno shop.

And then maybe to a restaurant.

Editor and Publisher reported today on the bizarre correspondence which supposedly took place in 1952 and 1953 between Samuel Beckett, the existentialist author of Waiting for Godot, and Ernie Bushmiller, the cartoonist responsible for the newspaper strip Nancy.

This sounds much too weird to be true, but then again, stranger things have happened. After all, J.D. Salinger was supposedly a big fan of Gilligan’s Island. And this was Beckett, so you never know.

One letter from Bushmiller, provided by trusted comics historian R.C. Harvey, is quoted as rejecting Beckett’s ideas as follows: (more…)

Tom Toles, the editorial cartoonist for the Washington Post, finally returned from his vacation today. But for those of you who’ve been missing him these past weeks, that single dose might not be enough to assuage your withdrawal symptoms. So to help out, I thought I’d share this image from long ago and far away.

Back in 1973, as a freshman at the State University of New Your at Buffalo, I worked on the student newspaper. That was when what I wanted to be when I grew up was a journalist of the Pete Hamill or Jimmy Breslin mold, handing in three opinionated slice-of-life columns each week. (I never had to desire to be a writer of fiction when I grew up because I always was a writer of fiction; it wasn’t anything I ever thought I had to become.) Tom Toles was also on the staff of the paper, the resident genius. And even though he was brilliant, he was also a nice, sweet guy with no ego. How often do you see that? So he was loved by all, and everybody wanted to get him to illustrate their stories.

I got lucky once. I crossed the border into Canada to attend Cosmic-Con, a Toronto comic-book convention, and convinced my editor at the paper to let me do a feature on the event. (That boss? Howard Kurtz, whose name you may recognize now that he’s a political talking head and the host of CNN’s Reliable Sources.) Tom drew this piece to go with the article.

So for one brief (very brief), shining moment, Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist Tom Toles was also a superhero artist.

I dreamt this morning that I was sitting with friends in a stadium so huge that when I looked across the way I noted the rows on the other side descending so far down that I could not see the bottom and rising so high into the sky that they vanished into a mist. An announcer’s voice buzzed inside my head to tell me that attendance today exceeded 800 million people, which my mind accepted as a possible number in whatever world this dream was set. The voice promised us all a great show that day, and warned that if we wanted to pick up refreshments or go to the bathroom, we’d better do it right then, because the event was starting soon and we wouldn’t want to miss any of the action.

I stepped into the hallway behind me, not pausing to think what a crowd of 800 million people getting popcorns and sodas would be like. Only once I’d entered it, the hallway wasn’t that of a stadium, but rather that of a hospital. And I was suddenly dressed all in white, like an orderly. I had a picture ID clipped to my shirt, and when I flipped it up to peer at it saw that it was indeed my picture. I accepted the scene change, but also kept hunting for the refreshment stand and the restroom. Wouldn’t want to miss the show!

I wandered endless hallways and eventually came to a break room of some kind in which patients were seated at tables, some playing dominos, others watching the small TV that hung from the ceiling. And who should be sitting at one table but writer Gregory Feeley, performing the role of a patient advocate. He was telling an old man about his complicated insurance options. As I passed their table, Greg looked at me curiously, wondering how I had gotten there, but did not pause in his explanation to ask. We acknowledged each other with nods only, and as I moved back out into the hallway, I could hear him continuing on with his advice, the patter of his very competent spiel unbroken.

I woke while still wandering the halls, without ever finding that refreshment stand, and without ever learning what event could be so popular as to draw 800 million people to one location.

I just noticed that the following event is scheduled to take place on Friday at 9:00 p.m.

For me, this will take priority over everything else scheduled that weekend.

Bring your kleenex.

Tom Disch’s “Winter Journey”
(40 min.)
Almost exactly a year after the death of his longtime partner Charles Naylor in September 2004, Tom Disch began writing a sequence of poems, which he shared on his blog. Eventually there were 31 of them. He titled the sequence “Winter Journey” after Schubert’s lieder cycle “Winterreise” (a work Naylor loved). Elizabeth Hand calls the sequence “an extraordinary efflorescence of grief … tragic, bitter, bleakly funny, romantic, heart-rending—and also accessible. I can imagine, by some divine fluke, the book becoming a surprise, posthumous bestseller—an irony Disch would have appreciated.” When the sequence was completed, Disch contacted friend and filmmaker Eric Solstein, and asked if a reading of the work might be videotaped to serve as a suicide note. At its conclusion, he said, he would kill himself, the attendant publicity hopefully contributing to the success of the recording. A deal was struck between Tom and Eric—the taping would proceed if the suicide were postponed for some indefinite period of time. This will be the first public showing of “Winter Journey.” The poems are to be published later this year, by Payseur and Schmidt, with a DVD of the reading included.