Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

cattitude and I got back from Montreal a couple of hours ago; we were there for Scintillation, a small science fiction convention organized by Jo Walton.

I mostly had a good time, despite some bits where I was having trouble connecting/finding people to hang out with, and some down moods that I suspect were due either to physiological stuff (I bruised my left thumb badly, and pain interferes with sleep) or the state of the world outside the convention. I did a lot of walking, at least by my recent standards; if this doesn't leave me miserable in the next day or two, I'm going to treat it as hip strengthening PT and increase my goal for that. ( health/exercise details )

I went to a few program item and enjoyed all of them: Friday evening Jon Singer and Teresa Nielsen Hayden talke about medieval recipes, and Sunday morning Jon and Emmet O'Brien talked about lasers, odd corners of biology (endosymbiosis is more complex than I'd realized), and the possibility of using Bose-Einstein condensates to explore how event horizons work. (They told us that it's possible to slow light down to a few meters per second in a BEC; the suggestion is to see what happens if you move said concentrate at several meters per second, i.e. faster than the speed of light inside the BEC. As far as either of them knew, this hasn't yet been tried.)

As a tribute to Ursula Le Guin, Jo decided to have an hour of people reading Le Guin's work aloud. The pre-con description had said that it would be good if other people read, but Jo was prepared to read Le Guin aloud for an hour. I emailed her last week to say I wanted to read, and mentioning a couple of specific things I was thinking of. Yesterday morning, when I walked into the Jon Singer/Emmet O'Brien mutual interview, Emmet asked if I'd be willing to be organizer for the Le Guin panel an hour later, because Jo might be dealing with other things. I said yes, of course. I decided to read "Coming of Age in Karhide," which worked well: if I'd practiced and known how long it was, I might have picked something shorter, but people enjoyed it, and I got comments afterwards from people who were pleased because they hadn't already read that story. Someone else then read "The First Report of the Shipwrecked Foreigner to the Kadahn of Derb," a delightful piece that is partly about Venice. We then got a couple of excerpts from Malafrena about what it means to work for freedom, and a few poems. (The person who read the poems wanted to read from Le Guin's version of the Tao te ching; I don't think Jo owns that.)

Jo Walton's obituary for/remembrance of Ursula Le Guin.

The first books I can remember buying for myself were the Earthsea trilogy; I don't know if I knew what I was picking up, but I still have those paperbacks (somewhat the worse for wear, but definitely still readable). At the moment I am also thinking of Always Coming Home, The Left Hand of Darkness, "The Matter of Seggri," and "From Elfland to Poughkeepsie." Ask me in eight hours, and the list will be different, but Gethen and the Na Valley are close to my heart.

It seems worth mentioning that at Wiscon 20, there was a staged reading/performance piece based on a bit of Always Coming Home, and I was and am pleased and proud to have been part of it. She came to the rehearsal (where she answered questions about pronunciation, of Kesh names obviously but also at least one English word); I had the chance to thank her for making it possible.

And a quote from decades earlier, which seems apropos and I think she would agree with: Don't mourn, organize.

More saved comments: ( what books we like, Gethen, culling book collections, paying attention, shapes of online discussion )