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The Farthing Party was a small convention (four dozen people), connected to the publication of ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
papersky's most recent novel: people talked about books, and about the rest of the world, and ate lots of good food (she lives in Montreal, which helps). The people who were there were friends who she invited specifically; people who read her LJ; and I think a few people who came with people in one of those groups.
cattitude and I got to Montreal Friday in time for a late lunch; on our way to rendezvous with people at the Metro station, we found adrian_turtle just outside our shared hotel room, so we went over together. I'd guessed we were late, but we were on time to travel with the group. Sitting downstairs at Maple Delight with a small cup of ice cream, after about half an hour I was smiling, glad of the company and chat, and noted that I hadn't realized how much I'd missed this. Being sick, I'd seen few people in person, and only in ones and twos: the largest social thing I had done in a couple of months was lunch with roadnotes and baldanders. I like spending time with the people I love in ones and twos, but I also like the occasional larger group, with friendly conversation.
Hanging out in the bar Friday night worked well in the sense that we had the space to ourselves, so it was reasonably quiet; less well in that the hotel closed it around 11. When I came back downstairs from putting Adrian to bed, and in the process discovering that the hotel had invalidated my and Cattitude's room keys when they gave her hers, almost everyone except the gamers had gone to bed.
Saturday Papersky had gotten us a room for the party, and when the hotel called "last orders" for the bar they confirmed that we could keep the room as long as we wanted/were awake. The party was good conversation and good music:pnh played guitar, and he, elisem, and tnh sang, sometimes with help from others of us: jonsinger and rysmiel on several songs, and I was singing bits of Warren Zevon where rysmiel and I remembered the lyrics and Patrick et al. didn't.
I slept very badly Friday night, and not long enough Saturday night (I was on 10 a.m. programming, and we set an alarm so I could eat beforehand). I'm feeling better now (in part because I slept better Sunday night; an antihistamine may have been instrumental in this). If I seemed distant or distracted, that's likely why. For some of the time, I was literally distant: sitting quietly in our room with Cattitude and Adrian, talking or being held until I felt steadier. (If I was grinning like a loon at my beloveds, I think you know why.)
I have now tried everything from "Please don't" to "If you use the flash on that camera I'll have to kill you," and none of them work reliably at convincing people with cameras who don't know me well not to point a flash at me. (We'll gloss over people who do know me well, because in those cases it's not a communications problem). Is there any reliable way to convey the message "Really don't use a flash in my face, it hurts"?
Walking up to Papersky,rysmiel, and zorinth's home for the Survivors' Tea Party Sunday night felt a bit like coming home. Papersky asking me, when I walked into the kitchen, to toss the empty soda cans into the recycling bin felt even more so. (No, I don't want to do everyone's tidying.)
A large balcony is a fine thing for people holding a party on a summer evening; the apartment got warm from the number of us there, but it was fine out in the open air.
I was a bit nervous about my piece of the Sunday morning read-aloud program item (an excerpt from Desolation Road), and stumbled over it repeatedly beforehand. It worked fine when the time came.tnh read Poul Anderson's "Uncleftish Beholding," a delightfully funny and clear introduction to atomic theory using only Germanic words and roots. ("Uncleftish" because atoms are things that cannot be cleft, or so we once thought.) Part of the fun is what does and doesn't shift: the first three elements become water-stuff, sun-stuff, and stone-stuff, then tin and lead use their homely old names, and the last of the natural elements is ymir-stuff.
The panel I was on, about awards in science fiction and fantasy, didn't entirely cohere, but worked anyway: the other panelists and I took turns telling stories and describing how things work, to the extent we could (where "things" include different award processes, and what if any effect awards have on book sales, contracts, and related matters). As I noted, I couldn't give away secrets of how the Tiptree Award works, because part of how it works is that the Motherboard tells each panel to create its own process. (By contrast, "Low Stakes Fantasy" sometimes seemed to be working at cross-purposes, in part because the four panelists were using at least three different definitions and thus wanted to talk about different things.)
"Time, That With This Strange Excuse" was a good panel that I suspect you couldn't have at most conventions: "A discussion of writers whose political position is indefensible, but whose books are good despite being evil." At a larger con, it would be far too likely to have someone in the audience try to defend one or more of those political positions. (There's an important difference between saying "thus-and-such writer is not a racist/his books aren't racist" and someone getting up and making a racist argument.) The panel, and I think the rest of us, seemed to agree that it's easier to forgive someone from a century ago for writing that includes hateful ideas, than someone today doing the same. [The title is from something Auden wrote and, PNH said, later edited out of the poem in question.]
"Issues in Farthing" was excellent and sometimes emotionally difficult, especially I think for the panelists, because the book itself is excellent and difficult. Elise said that she'd barely been able to talk for a day and a half after reading it, because of how it tangled with her own past; I didn't have that level of problem, but I didn't sleep well for a couple of days, for similar reasons.
The flaw in my friends organizing and running even a small con is that, of course, I get less time with them than I would have if I visited at some other time. The virtue is that they get to see lots of cool people; I get to see those people; and those people get to see each other. That includes meeting new people, reconnecting with people I'd not seen in ages (I hadn't seenhobbitbabe since the one alt.polycon I went to, several years ago in Boston, and I'm not sure when I last saw janetmk, but it had been a few years), and real-time interactions with people I knew only through the net (in my case, pleonastic).
Registration, played by Cally Soukup (WINOLJ because she doesn't need another timesink), handed everyone a namebadge, a program, and a shiny farthing (acquired on eBay by Harriet, who I think isaitchellsee; thank you dichroic). For a con of a few dozen, with one track of programming during the day and no dealer's room, art show, or con suite, registration being portable (one box, carried by Cally) worked remarkably well. People who registered early got their farthings later on.
That part of Montreal (near Sherbrooke Metro, and uphill on St. Denis) is more Francophone than most of the places I've spent time (Papersky and family live in NDG, which is mostly Anglophone), but we got along fine, sleep shortage and all.
dhole sent me home with a Hellenic potsherd, 2nd century CE I think he said, part of the collection he'd been showing around at the Saturday night party. That night he started to float a plan to give me something to take home and then pass on to tnh after some condition had been fulfilled, to which my reaction was "why do people think I'm Teresa's mail drop?" He's not the first person to think of this, and it's not as practical as it sounds to them: New York is large, and I don't see her all that often, and many of those times are either pleasant surprises or in some other city (Montreal, Minneapolis….)
It seemed as thoughdavidgoldfarb spent a lot of time trying to explain Classical Greek grammar to people who know no Greek; I understand enthusiasm, but I had three years of Greek in high school. When he and Cally wound up at the table next to our group (five of us had walked over together) at lunch Sunday, I wound up reminding him that I already knew a lot of this (I'd been helping explain the aorist to TNH Friday night, hence "reminding"), and then asking him to lower his voice so I could talk to other people, since I was having trouble hearing carbonel, who was sitting right next to me.
I have been thinking that I should get my hearing tested, but even if I need/can benefit from hearing aids, they won't enable me to hear a quiet conversation under a loud speech. I'm not always good at controlling my own volume, but volume wasn't the main problem here; it felt as though David wasn't interested in conversation, or not on any topic other than Greek grammar.
Papersky wrote lots of restaurant reviews, and included a quick list of nearby restaurants in the printed program. Somehow, Friday night the entire convention (exceptdhole) wound up at the same small Tibetan restaurant, Shambala, in several groups, which didn't consult each other beforehand. We ate them out of cheese dumplings. Then we ate them out of meat dumplings. Much longer, and they'd probably have been out of even potato dumplings. The food was good, although after sniffing cattitude's salted, buttered tea I declined to taste it, and the chai disappointed me. (Singer identified the lack as a complete absence of cardamom.) I enjoyed watching and listening to jonsinger and adrian_turtle geek about her work and related topics. (I was amused, on the way to the restaurant, to be pointing out to Rysmiel that no, we needed to turn left here, not right.)
Suite 88 was as good as on my previous visit, though this time I didn't find the intense hot chocolate actually mind-altering, only rich and pleasant. While we were sitting drinking our hot chocolate, one of the employees came around with samples of a limoncello-flavored truffle. We didn't buy those; instead, the next night, we went back after dinner and Adrian bought three plain chocolate truffles for us to have right away, and a bag of dark chocolate–covered orange peel for the party.
Fruit Folie's pain dore is fine, and they're serious about fruit; Cattitude was very pleased with his fruit and cheese plate, which had several kinds of each.
The Java U. on St. Denis has coffee beans in the sugar dispensers. I discovered this after trying to sugar a cup of tea Saturday morning; the person behind the counter replaced it for me, when I explained, and didn't charge me (I'd not have argued if she had, since it was partly my mistake), so I dropped a loonie in the tip jar, and used the little packets of sugar instead, and on two subsequent visits during the weekend.
My only regret about the food is that I was tired enough that it didn't seem worth the trouble to call one of the fine, interesting restaurants Papersky listed, book a table, and eat good, subtle food, nor to investigate the interesting-looking bistros we passed while wandering around before dinner Saturday. Yes, Nouveau Delhi is good, and I like their chai: we went there for dinner Saturday night because Adrian and I already knew we liked it, and it was convenient to the con hotel. Sunday I let Adrian and Cattitude lead me to a sushi place and get protein into me. On Thursday I'd been thinking of Au Petit Resto, and maybe Barbarian or maybe Bieres et Compagne (which wouldn't have required a reservation), but they'll be there when I return and am prepared to enjoy them properly. (I wasn't only going back to places I know, or thinking in those terms: Shambala, Le Triskell, Fruit Folie, and Brulerie St. Denis were new to me this weekend.)
papersky's most recent novel: people talked about books, and about the rest of the world, and ate lots of good food (she lives in Montreal, which helps). The people who were there were friends who she invited specifically; people who read her LJ; and I think a few people who came with people in one of those groups.cattitude and I got to Montreal Friday in time for a late lunch; on our way to rendezvous with people at the Metro station, we found adrian_turtle just outside our shared hotel room, so we went over together. I'd guessed we were late, but we were on time to travel with the group. Sitting downstairs at Maple Delight with a small cup of ice cream, after about half an hour I was smiling, glad of the company and chat, and noted that I hadn't realized how much I'd missed this. Being sick, I'd seen few people in person, and only in ones and twos: the largest social thing I had done in a couple of months was lunch with roadnotes and baldanders. I like spending time with the people I love in ones and twos, but I also like the occasional larger group, with friendly conversation.Hanging out in the bar Friday night worked well in the sense that we had the space to ourselves, so it was reasonably quiet; less well in that the hotel closed it around 11. When I came back downstairs from putting Adrian to bed, and in the process discovering that the hotel had invalidated my and Cattitude's room keys when they gave her hers, almost everyone except the gamers had gone to bed.
Saturday Papersky had gotten us a room for the party, and when the hotel called "last orders" for the bar they confirmed that we could keep the room as long as we wanted/were awake. The party was good conversation and good music:
pnh played guitar, and he, elisem, and tnh sang, sometimes with help from others of us: jonsinger and rysmiel on several songs, and I was singing bits of Warren Zevon where rysmiel and I remembered the lyrics and Patrick et al. didn't. I slept very badly Friday night, and not long enough Saturday night (I was on 10 a.m. programming, and we set an alarm so I could eat beforehand). I'm feeling better now (in part because I slept better Sunday night; an antihistamine may have been instrumental in this). If I seemed distant or distracted, that's likely why. For some of the time, I was literally distant: sitting quietly in our room with Cattitude and Adrian, talking or being held until I felt steadier. (If I was grinning like a loon at my beloveds, I think you know why.)
I have now tried everything from "Please don't" to "If you use the flash on that camera I'll have to kill you," and none of them work reliably at convincing people with cameras who don't know me well not to point a flash at me. (We'll gloss over people who do know me well, because in those cases it's not a communications problem). Is there any reliable way to convey the message "Really don't use a flash in my face, it hurts"?
Walking up to Papersky,
rysmiel, and zorinth's home for the Survivors' Tea Party Sunday night felt a bit like coming home. Papersky asking me, when I walked into the kitchen, to toss the empty soda cans into the recycling bin felt even more so. (No, I don't want to do everyone's tidying.)A large balcony is a fine thing for people holding a party on a summer evening; the apartment got warm from the number of us there, but it was fine out in the open air.
I was a bit nervous about my piece of the Sunday morning read-aloud program item (an excerpt from Desolation Road), and stumbled over it repeatedly beforehand. It worked fine when the time came.
tnh read Poul Anderson's "Uncleftish Beholding," a delightfully funny and clear introduction to atomic theory using only Germanic words and roots. ("Uncleftish" because atoms are things that cannot be cleft, or so we once thought.) Part of the fun is what does and doesn't shift: the first three elements become water-stuff, sun-stuff, and stone-stuff, then tin and lead use their homely old names, and the last of the natural elements is ymir-stuff. The panel I was on, about awards in science fiction and fantasy, didn't entirely cohere, but worked anyway: the other panelists and I took turns telling stories and describing how things work, to the extent we could (where "things" include different award processes, and what if any effect awards have on book sales, contracts, and related matters). As I noted, I couldn't give away secrets of how the Tiptree Award works, because part of how it works is that the Motherboard tells each panel to create its own process. (By contrast, "Low Stakes Fantasy" sometimes seemed to be working at cross-purposes, in part because the four panelists were using at least three different definitions and thus wanted to talk about different things.)
"Time, That With This Strange Excuse" was a good panel that I suspect you couldn't have at most conventions: "A discussion of writers whose political position is indefensible, but whose books are good despite being evil." At a larger con, it would be far too likely to have someone in the audience try to defend one or more of those political positions. (There's an important difference between saying "thus-and-such writer is not a racist/his books aren't racist" and someone getting up and making a racist argument.) The panel, and I think the rest of us, seemed to agree that it's easier to forgive someone from a century ago for writing that includes hateful ideas, than someone today doing the same. [The title is from something Auden wrote and, PNH said, later edited out of the poem in question.]
"Issues in Farthing" was excellent and sometimes emotionally difficult, especially I think for the panelists, because the book itself is excellent and difficult. Elise said that she'd barely been able to talk for a day and a half after reading it, because of how it tangled with her own past; I didn't have that level of problem, but I didn't sleep well for a couple of days, for similar reasons.
The flaw in my friends organizing and running even a small con is that, of course, I get less time with them than I would have if I visited at some other time. The virtue is that they get to see lots of cool people; I get to see those people; and those people get to see each other. That includes meeting new people, reconnecting with people I'd not seen in ages (I hadn't seen
hobbitbabe since the one alt.polycon I went to, several years ago in Boston, and I'm not sure when I last saw janetmk, but it had been a few years), and real-time interactions with people I knew only through the net (in my case, pleonastic).Registration, played by Cally Soukup (WINOLJ because she doesn't need another timesink), handed everyone a namebadge, a program, and a shiny farthing (acquired on eBay by Harriet, who I think is
aitchellsee; thank you dichroic). For a con of a few dozen, with one track of programming during the day and no dealer's room, art show, or con suite, registration being portable (one box, carried by Cally) worked remarkably well. People who registered early got their farthings later on.That part of Montreal (near Sherbrooke Metro, and uphill on St. Denis) is more Francophone than most of the places I've spent time (Papersky and family live in NDG, which is mostly Anglophone), but we got along fine, sleep shortage and all.
dhole sent me home with a Hellenic potsherd, 2nd century CE I think he said, part of the collection he'd been showing around at the Saturday night party. That night he started to float a plan to give me something to take home and then pass on to tnh after some condition had been fulfilled, to which my reaction was "why do people think I'm Teresa's mail drop?" He's not the first person to think of this, and it's not as practical as it sounds to them: New York is large, and I don't see her all that often, and many of those times are either pleasant surprises or in some other city (Montreal, Minneapolis….)It seemed as though
davidgoldfarb spent a lot of time trying to explain Classical Greek grammar to people who know no Greek; I understand enthusiasm, but I had three years of Greek in high school. When he and Cally wound up at the table next to our group (five of us had walked over together) at lunch Sunday, I wound up reminding him that I already knew a lot of this (I'd been helping explain the aorist to TNH Friday night, hence "reminding"), and then asking him to lower his voice so I could talk to other people, since I was having trouble hearing carbonel, who was sitting right next to me.I have been thinking that I should get my hearing tested, but even if I need/can benefit from hearing aids, they won't enable me to hear a quiet conversation under a loud speech. I'm not always good at controlling my own volume, but volume wasn't the main problem here; it felt as though David wasn't interested in conversation, or not on any topic other than Greek grammar.
Papersky wrote lots of restaurant reviews, and included a quick list of nearby restaurants in the printed program. Somehow, Friday night the entire convention (except
dhole) wound up at the same small Tibetan restaurant, Shambala, in several groups, which didn't consult each other beforehand. We ate them out of cheese dumplings. Then we ate them out of meat dumplings. Much longer, and they'd probably have been out of even potato dumplings. The food was good, although after sniffing cattitude's salted, buttered tea I declined to taste it, and the chai disappointed me. (Singer identified the lack as a complete absence of cardamom.) I enjoyed watching and listening to jonsinger and adrian_turtle geek about her work and related topics. (I was amused, on the way to the restaurant, to be pointing out to Rysmiel that no, we needed to turn left here, not right.)Suite 88 was as good as on my previous visit, though this time I didn't find the intense hot chocolate actually mind-altering, only rich and pleasant. While we were sitting drinking our hot chocolate, one of the employees came around with samples of a limoncello-flavored truffle. We didn't buy those; instead, the next night, we went back after dinner and Adrian bought three plain chocolate truffles for us to have right away, and a bag of dark chocolate–covered orange peel for the party.
Fruit Folie's pain dore is fine, and they're serious about fruit; Cattitude was very pleased with his fruit and cheese plate, which had several kinds of each.
The Java U. on St. Denis has coffee beans in the sugar dispensers. I discovered this after trying to sugar a cup of tea Saturday morning; the person behind the counter replaced it for me, when I explained, and didn't charge me (I'd not have argued if she had, since it was partly my mistake), so I dropped a loonie in the tip jar, and used the little packets of sugar instead, and on two subsequent visits during the weekend.
My only regret about the food is that I was tired enough that it didn't seem worth the trouble to call one of the fine, interesting restaurants Papersky listed, book a table, and eat good, subtle food, nor to investigate the interesting-looking bistros we passed while wandering around before dinner Saturday. Yes, Nouveau Delhi is good, and I like their chai: we went there for dinner Saturday night because Adrian and I already knew we liked it, and it was convenient to the con hotel. Sunday I let Adrian and Cattitude lead me to a sushi place and get protein into me. On Thursday I'd been thinking of Au Petit Resto, and maybe Barbarian or maybe Bieres et Compagne (which wouldn't have required a reservation), but they'll be there when I return and am prepared to enjoy them properly. (I wasn't only going back to places I know, or thinking in those terms: Shambala, Le Triskell, Fruit Folie, and Brulerie St. Denis were new to me this weekend.)
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2. I'm encountering a lot of Dutch lately, what with the whole thing about moving there, and trying to puzzle it out is a lot like reading Uncleftish Beholdings. Very fun.
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I've known about your issues with flash for a number of years, and try to look for you before popping mine off, as well as making sure that people directly in front of me have enough time to see me and either move away from the person I'm photographing, or say something. Do you object to a flash in the same room if not pointed at you? I'm thinking of a space like the Wiscon Livejournal Party room (aka the Tiptree Bake Sale Room), which has white walls that would certainly reflect a flash, even if you were behind the photographer. I ask because, while I generally dislike flash as being too obtrusive in a social setting, the sad truth is that, indoors at most cons, a non-flash picture will be noticeably fuzzier and often has a random bad color tint from the fluorescent lighting. Thanks.
I'm hoping that the next generation of camera sensors bumps the sensitivity enough that I can permanently break free from flash for casual people photos, but right now it is a useful evil.
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Also, after hanging out earlier in the weekend with someone who lipreads very well, I kind of forgot that speaking quietly but enunciating well wasn't going to work for trying to talk to you over the music, the waiter, and the other patrons, when you were tired. Sorry about that!
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I'm also accustomed to environments where people are more likely to ask for consent before taking photos of people.
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In my defense I'll say only this: I was talking more to Cally and Adrian, who did seem interested; and I was trying to moderate my voice, though unsuccessfully.
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