Potlatch, Friday night

As we drove up to the Domain hotel I saw Matt outside and was *suddenly overwhelmed with the feeling that I was about to see all these people I really really like* yay!!! And then it was just like that. I said hi to some people and was hugged a lot, bought two really nice tektites from elisem, talked with iamnotandrei who was wearing the wizard hat, got my tshirt and badge and stuff, resolved to come back to dealers room with money tomorrow. Ran into E. Peel who was one of my profs in grad school and who is mega awesome expert on narrative theory and utopias. I saw so many other people I totally love!!! How did I miss talking to yellowjellybean? whump made us flip a coin for which book of honor should go first. I won the toss and then i faked doing another toss to decide if we should go first or not. Really I had already decided to go first to get it over with and so that I would not be fidgeting in pain for an hour before speaking.

It went okay, I was not at my speaking best, but did a decent job of moderating and balancing everyone's contributions. In a show of hands I estimated 2/3 of the people in the room had read the book! That felt amazing. So many people made wildly intelligent comments! I wish I'd taken notes! I made one (I think interesting) point about baudrillard, the spectacle, and neobaroque style or "difficult writing" as a way of resistance or response to being caught in the spectacle. I loved what Eileen said about the genre conventions of throwing the reader into a sea of neologisms and weird tech you're supposed to just figure out (or accept not knowing for a while until you figure out) or know from genre conventions of what things are supposed to be like with tech and the future or on the moon. She also mentioned Catalyst by Nina Kiriki Hoffman as a good book to compare... She's right! Zond-7 and Laurel talked about surveillance and Doctorow's book Little Brother. iamnotandrei talked about gaming and rpgs and how well they were represented. their importance in the book to the characters' personal development as well as the point I was thinking of about resistance. Zond-7 made a fabulous point about how stories often construct surveillance or the capacity to do it as being bad because of a supervillain spider at the center of the web watching everything for malicious purposes (and how this is a bad strategy for persuading people that privacy is important ) -- Ford avoided doing that and kept it complex. Then we brought up the elephant in the room aka Heinlein. I was happy that our whole panel wasn't about that. I wish I could remember everything everyone said - I do particularly remember the woman from the audience who said the moment where (Cissy Okuda? Ruby Rincon?) reacted with horror and anger in the park at the Slammer kids playing with water, that was the only moment in the book where she felt like she could identify with one of the characters.

The panel on Always Coming Home, I took notes that were nearly a verbatim transcript. Here they are, a bit raw.

ACH panel

David Bratman
Ellen Peel
Molly Gloss
Amy Thomson

David: introductions.

Ellen reference to Prospero, Tristam Shandy, the feeling of embarrassment that she was expecting or waiting for more of Stone Telling's story and then felt guilty for it

*aud laughter*

Carrier Bag theory of fiction referenced by Molly! *knowing mmm-hmms from audience*

Amy: It's a fantasy, anthropological fantasy, the only thing to do is to read it. I love a good gossipy ethnography.

David: Norman Spinrad's review in Asimov's, " a novella surrounded by the equivalent of the Dune Encyclopedia". It's 40K words therefore it's a novel. As defined by Mike Resnick. ((WELL THEN ! LOL!!)) Also this disrespects the rest of the stories, like the stories which were award winning in their own right and some publicshed separately. Someone else said that novels are stoires that are pointed towards their own ending "the purpose of reading the book is to get to the damn ending" ACH is a mosaic, a portrait, that does contain stories. Which have story power.

David - asks panelsists, How you read it. Reading path? Read first bit, then what? should you or should you not turn to page 173.

Molly whatever you feel like doing is what you should do!

Amy: I think i've read this book at least twice, it's been a while since i've revisted it. I'm a better reader of the book now hthen when it first came out mumblety mumblety years ago. You can approach it from either side of the hinge.

David - skipped some, skipped dangerous people which is a chapter in the middle of a novel written by people in the story, has always skipped in it. Then went back and read it later. even continuous narratives can be read that way... On The Dispossesed and narrative structure. reading some books in chronological order the events take place rather than the ordering of the narrative.

Ellen - It would be neat to try many ways to read it. Do it in a group. Break the groups into smaller groups, each one does it a different way. Another group read just the poetry. Another startig with explanation in the back, ideally they'd all be people who hadn't read it before.

(Oh, we're not a teacher or anything...like a mad scientist who need innocent subjects! I hope Ellen actually does this experiment)

David: Is it a utopia?? my friend (dis?)liked it because she had severe allergies and said she would die in this society... This is relevant only if we view it as a blueprint for an ideal society , a prescriptive utopia but it is not. the Kesh are not "perfect little savages" they argue, fight , parody each other, not something that happens in most utopias. I liked visiting, I wouldn't want to live there. If I were there I'd go to (wakwaha) and spend all my time on the computer. I am visiting and learning about it from an ethnographic perspective

Amy "this is not perfect, it' by the author of The One who walked away from omelas, it's not going to be perfect" what I love about it is that it's a landscape book. I had not spent a lot of time in napa valley but I had before it became disneyland winery for adults I'm a landscape oriented person. I really enjoyed that aspect.. I would havespend all my time in Calistoga...

Molly - "There will always be a sickness in man" bit of the book. Not perfect people, we will always be human beings who argue with each othr aand mess thigns up. The demonstrate a society that is admirable but remains human, not perfectable. In many ways a consensual society which automatically means that it's messy, wil make decisions slowly and with great difficulty and will often make the wrong choices. This is only one small place on a planet. most utopias are set on a planet but this is in a valley. They're not typical. we're told in a couple of places this only applies to people who live in the valley. It's implicit that there''s many other people around the worlds.

David - the cotton people... They're not completely insular. But that's not the primary focus of their interest. It's local. I grew up in this valley here. I felt very much at home in the landscape. Theres great description of the landscape whih is meaningful to me, this place is different from that place, and that is ineherent in the people who live there. le guin one of the few sf writers, who show that a planet has more than one government.

Ellen - Being local, its one fo the charms but it's in some ways a weakness, significant to me that Stone Telling is half Kes and half oteher, her father doesn't have a house, she leaves the vaelly because she oesn't feel comfortable there. she feels a certain annoyance with the people who live there, partly adolescent thing but partly her mixed heritage. Of course she's mixed when she gets to her father's too but then she comes home - not home in a simple way either before she leaves or before she comes back. When she comes back not everyone is pleased to see her. localness is porous in not so good ways. The condors inspire some of the Kesh to take on some warrior ways and things get mixed up. That gives some of the energy to the story... people aren't just sitting around being happy all the tiem.

David - strain of militarism in the Kesh even without the influence of the Condor. Old Women Hating,
Third Child story - both about deeply unhappy people. Who can't be brought out fromt he position they're enmeshed in. Intensely interesting.

Molly - preparing for this panel, searched the web for reviews. In many reviews people said people were creating an idealistic native american society. I think they're wrong. These are people who live in houses i
with kitchens and washing machines . They're not meant to be Native Americans. But the dancing, the houses, etc is where the reviewers are getting this notion. Religion is described as a pagan sort of religion. So they think it sort of resembles native american stuff. you could say the same thing about native american stuff .... (???)

Amy - The problem with reviewing books like this is that reviewers are in a hurry . like lays potato chips you can't really eat this book in a hurry.

David - It only resembles native american stuff in the way that Gandalf resembles Merlin. Not a copy! There was one specific comparison in the book about people living lightly on the land as the native americans did. Maybe that's where some reviewers are getting the idea.

(( But this doesn't take place in a vacuum! If you live in this country and this landscape you would have that impression, we can't detatch from history, also the style of storytelling, this is disingenuous also weirdly defensive! the book itself's narrator has doubts about the point of it all! It's not like anyone went Oh Ursula you heinous racist. No giant defensive reaction is necessary, i should hope we can talk about cultural appropriation and complexities of it without this.... BUT NO And why are people so desperate to deny that anything in the book echoes various Native American cultures? It is interesting! ))

Amy - I know Ursula well enough to read things into the book from knowing her and I know she's a Kroeber and yet I don't know how much her father's work influenced her writing of the book, I just assume it.

(No comment from Ursula)

Tom Becker - strong impression of the book's singualarity. There isn't anything else like it. Is there?

Amy - The closest thing to it I know of is the Silmarillion

Aud - what about the lessing canopus books

Cyn - yeah there's some faint similarities.

aud - the book it's most like for me is sarah monette (somthing)

Aud - slaughterhouse 5, catch 22 (out of order)

what??

Aud - create your own adventure, create your own encyclopeida

ctein - faulker's sound and fury not linear. I don't think of Ursula as jerking the reader around so if it was not reasonable to read the book in the order the pages int he book were printed she would have put them in a different order. (aud laughter) Anyway, what about the sound recordings?

Vonda: poems in the web site and link to todd barton's web site. You can hear them online.

Steven S - Reminds me of role playing game supplements! They traditionally include an adventure .

Strata - Tried to read it when I was young and had only read rocannon's world and I wwent "whaaaa??" But now read it b/c it was Book of Honor and liked it. Deliberate attempt to produce an altered state in the reader. Which I would not put past the author at all. If I saw the segments of the book posted as a blog, a group blog, then it would click! Pepys diary on line, suddenly you get it. calvino, umberto eco, the book is a dialogue between author and reader, le guin is putting up a second level of indirection between author and reader. so that the reader goes WHAT this is another person writing.

Aud: If you grind up page 464 and smoke it...

*everyone laughs*

Liz (me) -I'm a translator. I read this sort of book all the time. It's an anthology of translations, not an encyclopedia. Strata is right it is mean to be many different authorial voices.

aud - yes it says that in the beginning, this is a translation from a language not yet invented

cyn - like David I'm from the east bay, this is home, I felt passionately that this is northern california, this is home. my first edition was the mass market paperback with the owl on it. I read the stone telling bits and then the crunchy bits, I adored them. That comment by Spinrad was a compliment. I *love* the Dune Encyclopedia - my true love was all the crunchy bits!

David - my thing was to take these maps, i work for the us geological survey... I got the topographical maps, and I went to the place and paid my respoect to it.

Aud - There are three rules to writing a novel, and no one knows what they are.

Aud - Novel is such a loaded term - I was taught that novels were a certain narrative structure. But, one of the irritating thing to me about the indian appropriation idea that people got wrong was that she wasn't appropriating indian culture she was appropriating anthroplogy. therefore it's entirely appropriate appropriation becuase i'ts what her parents did. you can't appropriate what your parents are.

((Okay, I think this is totally wrong-headed! at least someone said "appropriation" out loud though. ))

Aud: The Pandora character - she has a strong moral focus - very anthropolgical - she has qualms - am I really describing these people?

aud - it's an accident that it's all one volume. It woudl be a suitcase from our travelling anthropologist and you decide what to read next.

Amy - like one of those experimental books where you open it up and there's bits of things and letters and maybe a feather.

Aud - Ecological book, deeply - they have a broken world that we destroyed and they've inherited.

Amy The book is a dialogue with the present day from the future.

Aud - Anthropology itself was being sent up. There were little jokes everywhere. "Is that tape on yet?"

(This is so true!! It was hilarious!)

David - Motel with the mysteries - send up of far future anthropology of now

Neil - you were taking one deliberate particular spin of utopia. I thought it was utopia, the narrator having a direct dialogue not in the sense of the perfect society one size fits all doesnt this is about as good as it gets with real people

Neil - (something long)

David - Different tribes in norther california on the map

Amy - prescriptive vs descriptive utopias

Mike Ward - Is it this or that? it's a veyr small section of the library of congress card catalogue ... Now, the AIs say that they're not doing anything or interfering and they're just providing services. BUT of course they would!

Aud - USA by John Dos Passos.

David - very much a model for John Brunner.

Aud - I love the book, I read it three times. The thing that bothers me a little bit is that the collapse of the Condor empire is a little convenient. But I can't accept that soeone much like htem would be more successful and might have already succeeded so there are not bigger empires

(3 people) Because of the AI !!!

Aud - you started by asking "is it a novel?" Who cares. It's a great book, it made a permanent difference in how I see the world. I liked it because I entered an altered state and it was a vision of the future that included a more reverent view of other forms of life than humanity. Is this a early form of what Ursula later called a story sweep.

David - it may be, we're going to talk on Saturday about graphic novels etc. why it matters? well, it does, people worry about how it's presented. for many people with many books you have to know how you are supposed to approach the book, to get an understanding of it. If you don't know, you will get negative reaction be ause people's expectations are not met.

Ellen - What you say is very true in general and it's especially true because of its material illustrations and i've always thought it's a real ripoff that adult books don't have them, why do you have to give them up when you grow up? cd, music, etc. Institutional material economic questions that come up with any book but especially this one. One other thing about this, I went to a signing many years ago, the author and Todd Barton who did the music, when he tried to copyright the musical score, the library of congress said no you cannot, it's the traditional music of the Kesh! (everyone breaks up laughing)

aud - role of the AIs. problematic in the book, the way the Kesh are indebted to that they follow in the footsteps of an industrial culture. they have trains, washing machine, computer, none of them exist if they weren't coming out of an industrial cultures. The book has very little good to say about the backwards head people who came before. Contraception. They have a reliable means of population control other than starvation.

Ursula - Many native peoples do control their population. Pre-industrial!

Amy - Ursula you also mentions that the people have lower fertility in general.

Richard P. G. - A wikipedia entry, first sentence, a link somwhere , a video, within that they're another link to something else, about 7 links down you click and the whole system crashes, you start again and it's a totally different story.

David - when people complain about hypertext I tell them it's existed as long as there's been footnotes

Ellen - I think it's interesting theres a people who choose to be relatively low tech rather than are forced to be low tech.

Molly - stone telling tells us this is the closest we get to the history of the Kesh - we don't get to the history of the Kesh. how is her story a history of the Kesh? a puzzle to ponder

Amy - The guy who kept going on about the golden mean. she was trying to get chronology from him, such a beautiful misconnection.

David -Their different view of the world.

Amy: Some of you may have noticed the author sitting in the audience. Ursula do you want to say anything or not?

Ursula - No!


*********

Well, just quickly, to accompany my parenthetical interpolations in the transcript above,

Here is a link to my thoughts a few months ago about Always Coming Home and cultural appropriation, with much-better-than-my-thoughts comments underneath. Read through the comments! They're so good!

http://blogs.feministsf.net/?p=619

************************************

Then I went to the con suite which was quite crowded. I ate really good cheese, and truffle pate and salmon and lemon cake that was heavenly and had champagne. Rook was doing his firefly LARP downstairs and Zond-7 argued in corners about digital rights with guy in suspenders. I hung out with RPG and Stephanie R talking about computers and books. RPG said something about his control language for phone dialing being Swedish and I thought, there is a brilliant hack, for voice activated stuff, set the command lang to be a language you don't normally speak so that the words "Dial" or numbers are still normally useable instead of functioning to switch modes. He told me he ported Eliza to the PDP and got class credit from noam chomsky. Actually he went "there was a linguistic program that emulated blah blah" and I went "Yes... you mean Eliza?" I told him about the history of the game Galactic Conquest. He told me that at the Computer History Museum you can play space war at the PDP-1 demo (OOOOOOOO) Stephanie and I talked about Louisa May Alcott and the pleasures of re-reading. She knows Eight Cousins and Rose in Bloom like the back of her hand, like I do and we had fun talking about it! At some point I began to droop and lay down on a bed for a while. People were having great conversations all around me.

Earlier I was a huge dork by showing Ursula and Vonda the sky map on my G1. you hold it up to the sky and it shows you the names of the stars and planets and things and it knows which way you are pointing (it has gps and a compass) They were underwhelmed, what about actually going out and looking at the sky. But! neato! gadget!!! layer of information! Then later Vonda showed me her pin that has the constituion on it and I whipped out my phone yet again to show her i have We the People app on it which has the constitution and bill of rights and all the amendments! like I said, huge dork moment.

I am going back for the middle of today but have to leave at 4 or so for Zond-7's daughter's birthday and then want to come back Sunday.

Potlatch, Saturday - Scalzi Rule panel

src's notes are much funnier.

(I missed the beginning of panel)
(I'm sorry I don't always catch people's names)

Panelists can answer or respond to a statement as well as a question

"Any problem can be solved given a large enough plastic bag" - Tom Stoppard

Bald dude - I am a teacher and that can happen... a good moderator can deal with that. I fin it funny that a proclaimed libertarian can promote something so tyrannical. It

Dude with brown hair - in defense of the Scalzi rule I think that the spirit rather than the letter is to keep audience members from grandstanding. Scalzi is one of the more successful authors in the genre right now and when he's on a panel there's 200 people in the room. this room right here is already pushing the limit of how many people can have a meaningful conversation. so his rule is based o the sheer size of the room and it's not effective, it would be chaos, you can't carry a line of conversaion with that may people in the room. The larger the group is the more relevant the rule.

Bill - the thing that cause the SR to resonate with me was the That Guy problem. Damian Conway perl programmer. It's a problem we have in fandom we have That Guy. The person who will get up and make those long winded statements and then people who might have spoken up don't. panel organizers can't teach someone mindfulness. but we need that. Jeeez we're in this room full of people who are somewhat ill socialized and I'm just sick of it and I'm going to smack you down

Woman with long white hair - that's not very mindful and compassionate!

Bill: no it's not mindful and compassionate but you can't just raise your hand every 5 seconds

Debbie: I have answers to that but I'm not going to give them.

Woman with long white hair: (something I missed)

Debbie - we're going to pass out handouts afterwards with the history

Dude with black hair and glasses - Scalzi's a blogger, he can say whatever he wants on his blog space. he'll try to listen if you say whatever you want but he can stop you if you go into idiocy. If a simple topic goes viral and nasty and then he gets to go, "what's wrong with you people?" This rule is an extension of that. He has 40,000 readers a day. if he's on the stage he gets the stage. He gets to control it and we should respect that.

Debbie - so you're saying it's an extension of an internet culture into a live space. Or some corner of internet culture.

Woman in purple shirt - I didn't come in to this with a strong opinion. The people who say we're not on the right track, we're not addressing the right problem. In the spirit of brainstorming. when a panel is listed in the convention program, have an explicit something that says this is a panel where the panelists ahve control vs. This is a panel that invites wide disucssion. Another problem for That Guy problem, institute a custom, that if a person starts to grandstand, if 3 people in the audience stand up, the speaker has to sit down.

*everyone laughs and goes woooo*

Trob: I tried to articulate why sf was part of my life, what appealed to me about it. counter to so much of commercialized culture, it broke down the power between author and audience, it took that apart. when I saw that it was appropriate for some contexts rather than other, maybe big cons vs. small cons. maybe for cons produced as a commercial enterprise, it is appropriate but for fan run cons it is not.

Leeanne - people who are experts. well the problem is people who THINK tey are experts and they wish to be on the panel but maybe they weren't because they are not experts . then they respond inappropriately. The social consiousness of knowing when to sit down and shut up is lost on some people. So it's a way to take it out of the realm of social conscience that is beyond some of fandom and make it a simple rule. I also think it's a problem at big and small cons alike.

Debbie" I'm going to call on 3 people and then say something.

Lisa: the person in aud with chip on shoulder or can't sut up. moderator should say at beginning, we want to hear from more people maximum amt of peope here. That means it will not be strange for them to interrupt a person Strong moderator should be willing to cut someone off. With 3 people standing up, I see conspiracies to shut someone up, it's going a direction , I want people with unpopular opinions to be able to talk without being shut up by a rule like that.

Jeanne. my feeling about panelist has to do with are they prepared vs. are they experts. If a panelists are prepared they should get a chance to show us their work. that respect is cahllenged by people in the audience but also sometimes by people on the panel. WisCon we have a panel on making peace, plots about peace rather than war. laurie marks. the moderator obviously hadn't read her books. and laurie being very polite waiting for her chance to speak, the moderator opened up the discussion to the audience before she had a chance to speak. this panel was aimed at laurie, she's not even getting a chance to talk. So as a staff member I was commenting this person should not be allowed to be a moderator ever again. But the audience feedback was great and said best moderator ever because they opened up the discussison to the audience. the moderator should protect the panelists who in theory have prepared. If the scalzi rule supports repsecting the panelists then use it.

Alan b. Respons to bperson who has left room who said you can't have a reasonable conversation with a large amount of people This is not true. I have participated in intense challenging difficult conversations with 700 pople or more. It takes intense faciliation but it can be done. I'm dead set against the Scalzi rule . I don't like the 4th wall . The panle has prepared AND we respect them AND we also get to talk.

Neil. The rule is over general. There are a lot of different ways of doing a panel. The rule applies well to one end of the spectrum. (Long anecdote, I spaced out)

Debbie: To Leanne: I don't think even me and my three closest friends can agree on when that point is when there is a social nuance to shut up and sit down. We need to be aware there is not consensus on when that point is.

Leanne: So some of the panel I've done lately have been on how to be a good audience panel.

Debbie: Mary Kay is online with John Scalzi during this panel. *everyone cracks up*

Mary Kay: He wanted to know what the heck the Scalzi Rule was. Then he said that (statement that I missed...)

Someone: Could you ask him to rephrase that as a question?

Lenny: if you have someone who is a known expert or author who almost never appears then maybe. But I would be opposed to the idea that we purchased tickets to hear the holy experts instead of participating. The idea of the rule might be just to spark conversation and get people conscious of social interaction.

Lise E: I've been a moderator and I've been that guy though never at the same time I can all by myself be 6 people going oo ooo I have an idea. I keep accumulating comments over time. The benefit of having to wait while people are called is that there are many people who are just as briliant as you. Amazing Magazine has a letter column and the fans cut the magazine out of the equatin and started just talking directly to each other. we're here to talk to one another. that said some panels do't even take participation. In a real world non fannish example, if you listen to NPR but are not new yorkers, On the Mdiea syndicated. In NY it was entirely different show. It was a 2 hour live phone in show that talked about news topics. The people who called in and talked were worldwide active journalists who said yeah when I was

Liz Maybe someone said this in the beginning which I missed. It is a gatekeeping mechanism that favors people who have good control of rhetoric. They can still grandstand while asking a question if they have rhetorical skill.

Debbie: We did pretty much talk about it but not quite phrased that way, thanks.

Woman with short red hair: professional conferences, stick mic in middle of room, people get up and go to middle of room and they're timed. That's one way to hear from lots when ther'es 500 people in the room. I haven't seen a class for moderators. To practice moderator skills. truly cut them off eloquently.

Alan: There are different panels for different purposes. If I want to listen to an author reading their works, or there are times when an author comes out and things are set up as an interview. That limits audience participation, but the person who is the subject of the panel gets center stage but there can be some aud participation

Fred - To extend on previous comments. If you think of business meetings they often have a facilitator. These are trained people. That analogy can work for a panel if you have a moderator who is not part of the discussion but is only there to facilitate. If there were a process to identify people who were truly good at that... To have moderators who are not panelists at the same time.

Strata - 45 minutes of bullet points. condensed riff. I have done extensive convention work in IT. how many people here are IT (over half the room raises hands and laughs) What are tools that can be used to create and maintina a cinsciously ... convention space? facilited a panel eric someone, russell qmail, sendmail, and (guy who wrote postfix). Of the 1300 people in the room, half had come to see a jello wrestling cage match, a third were there to get information about each kind of architecture. There is a meta information conversation about types of panel to have here.

red shirt - watch good moderators. debbie, or laurie edison or suzette haden elgin teaches you a lot. my moderating style is not completely like your moderating style. but it is informed by it)

woman with white hair: programming committee has a responsibility to the moderators, if you design a program item to showcase a particular person, tell the moderator, don't expect them to figure it out. Including written instructions. 3% of pepe will read them.... The other thing we did that seemed to work really well, we didn't attempt to use every room all the time. so the moderators could choose to end the program after 15 min or continue it.

Kate: harking back to jeanne's anecdone about laurie marks. woudl it work, is it a complete breach of all fannish social ettiquette. to jump in and say there's a panelist we haven't heard from. We as audienc members need to take some responsiblity for heping an inadquate moderator

Alan - I'm a trained facilitator. (Lots of stuff but I missed it) Yes.

Liz: Yes we should jump in. But my point is, do your homework on the panelists, look them up, know their areas of expertist, you are like an interviewer to draw them out, draw out the best in them. You also can ask some questions, show of hands, from audience, get an idea of who you're speaking to, what might bring out the best from them.

Debbie: laurie marks taught me, ask the audience a question first to be thinking about, then it frames the way they might start talking later on.

Mary kay: I just twittered to myself

Brad: you twitter yourself?!

Debbie: that's a whole other panel

Lenny: That's a whole other question what does the panel hoep to accomplish. one of the puprposes of this conference, separate truth from myth, it is possible for a large group to have good conversation. if you are a con runner, consider it is maybe possible for a large group.

Lee: the panel isn't a pop quiz on the moderator, multiple reduncancy is good. tell the moderator of someone's an expert.

Gayle - panel prep. audience also. setting audience expectation, some people who set up programming for certain cons, encourage the panelists to get together by email and discuss the topic and sort of come to a consensus, this can help the moderator to prepare the audience to know what to expect the panel to be about.

Richard D: Struck by laurie's statement about learning from other moderators. my experience with the greens. watching 700 people in a room talk with great facilitation. poeple learn how to participate in large groups or small greoups. This is a social experiment for all of us. people who are beyond the pale are people who have not learned yet or who are resistant to learning. But there are real skills to facilitation and they are reified skills for social conversations. Scalzi rule looks to set up a paprticular evnriontment, we prefer another form of society, IT or fannish. To do that we have to prepare by training ourselves, or our fellows.

Laurie: if they are willing to be trained.

Richard: this goes back to hunting groups - and some of those solutions are hammers to the head.

Debbie: Anyone who is shy to speak and hasn't spoken, and then we're done

Brad: I'm so shy. Boy, is programming sometimes suckily done. Panelists who wonder why they're on the panel. I've been a moderator at Worldcon. Good to open things up to audience by saying, "Are there any long polemics phrased and disguised as a question?" This warns the audience not to do it. Kathreine suggests egg timer is good.

Lise E.: Then hand out eggs. (everyone laughs)

Katherine: I am Kathrine and I am shy. I knew I would have someone in audience who was strongly opinionated and it felt rude to tell them but I had to, you have to wait 6 other people to talk before you ask a new question. And that worked out really well. (Gotta say it, Brad interrupted Katherine at least 4 times while she said this. LOL Brad!)

Michele: Contrary to my behavior in this panel I tend to be very verbal. I tend to have a lot of questions. you guys saved me from having to do that by asking them all for me. It took me a long time to learn in regular life that you dnot have to always jump in. wait a little hwile before you jump in and ansewr. because someone else might have that same answer, give it more time. In my teens and 20s that was information I needed.

Potlatch, Saturday - Good Reads panel

Naamen - Skin Folk by Nalo Hopkinson
Blindsight - Vito. Degree in Biology. Aliens with compatible biochemistry etc. Watts completely delivers alien aliens.

Karen Anderson - mystery revewer for many years. Fledgling by Octavia Butler. I was working up an overview of all the vampire mystery science fiction. Which is absolutely ghastly. Her cool tone...

James Young I am a retired US service officer. I was stationed in Nigeria for years. Will talk about the tradition of the orisha author of some novels and short stories. Picked Spin, possibly best SF novel written in *years*. I have invented a new term of criticism which applies to pop culture in general (I missed what this term of criticism was)

Naamen - We will talk in the panel and then open it up .

Karen - what makes a good read? how do we feel personally about that?

Naamen - I was teling Vito earlier in my personal preferences I lean towards fantasy or soft sci fi so spin and blindsight were harder sf than I've ever dealt with. They both introduced me to new concepts I hadn't thought about so that was good. nalo is a good read b/c entertaining, fun, introduces me to a culture I wasn't all that familiar with Fledgling is a good read b/c it's Octavia Butler.

Vito - none of these were my favorites in the way I love which is that they drive me crazy so I have to write little notes in the margin and send them to tha author

Karen - the colder the water gets in the bathtub is, the better the books. Spin was one of my great reads historically when I read the first scene I remember I was so excited I jumpped out of the tub and blogged it immediately!

James - Grew up reading Andre Norton and Heinlein as a kid - a friendly and approchable person in tcenter of the story, you don't have to identify but someone you feel comfortable with almost like a friend. If you read Heinlein on writing, he would often emphasize that point. In the realm of the fantastic, the concept be intriguing.

Vito - Blindsight - Siri is an incredibly unlikeable person and the other chars are completely insipid. nonetheless the book works.

Naamen - the main character is only half a person. And he lacks any sort of insight into other people.

Karen - I loved the narrator of Spin, he wasn't insipid. he got to be close to people in history who were creating the future...

James : White Heat, the char is intriguing in and of itself, Watts' use of his ?? character. Intriguing. Not wholly successful character but maybe that' just me.

Naamen. Spin to play off what you were saying about Tyler. For me the novel was not so much about the characters, they were about the ideas. Tyler, everyone, carried both more and less than an average character would.. They didn't have regular characterilzation or movement but they represented different reactions to the Spin. They carried the idea of what do you do when the world ends in a realy interesting way.

Vito - Ayn Rand and Arthur C Clarke all the sensitive character development of Atlas Shruged and all the ?? of Rendevous with Rama.

Karen: Is that the spin trilogy or the Spin Cycle?

Karen: what I'm hearing here is that Spin is simplistic. or, the characters. When I read Blindsight. much made of his degree in biology. I have degrees in psychology and journalism. this is ambitious, there's something they don't know what it is originated by, biooigical or machines? specialists whose brains have been altered in different ways. Sendt with a synthesist wiht half a brain, and no empathy, the perfect journalist. very close to genius, they challeng you the reader to have the same experience. everyone is having an extremely uncomfortable experiences. one that I learned a tremendous amount about writing from.

James - I grew up in minnealpolis and cliford d simack was likea grandfather to me. The wwI era super science era. john campbell and ee doc smith. simak wrote a super scence novel, when you start throwing galaxies around your characters turn to wood. Well think about war and peace.you ve got to have some people you follow throughout their lives. To get a sense of the arc. Trope Opera. Slice and dice approach to modern pop culture. not all of that is bad. you get some genuinely original ideas when you start crunching genres. my main problem with blindsight was t hat I did't think there needed to be a vampriic character. That was too far a trope for me. for Butler's work I confess I had never read any thing by Butler I had been meaning to do so for years. I'm glad I read Fledgeling, it moves very well. She describes homo sapiens... most successful of all these books in terms of operating Trope Opera. Spin the most Stapledonian novel of recent years. The audacity of doing so carries you on. Superman novel ??

Naamen - it's interesting you bring that up about Blndsight not needing the vampire character because that was my favorite character in the book. Tey're more like autistic savants than anything else . Speaking of uncomfortable novels how about Fledgling . the 20 pages she is having sex with a 22 year old logger she picks up by the side of the road, she's feeding off him. not because the sex so much but the scene of the older man putting his hand down her shirt, even though we know she's older than 10, she physically looks like a 10 year old girl and Butler knows how uncomfortable she's making us.

Vito - the vampires are metaphors for children, they suck the life out of you adn your life is now about centering around this other being. !!

aud laughter

Karen - Comfort and discomfort about Skin Folk and Fledgeling, these books make you FEEL in the same ways that Spin and Blindsight make you THINK. (rumble from audience) It's also very very sensuous. A lot of visual, taste, smell, sensuality. That was what drew me to Hopkinson's short stories, I wasn't just reading them I was really feeling them.

James: Hopkinson is the best stylist. I will tell you about ... Yoruba people came from egybt about 80% of the people of color in this country are probably Yoruba. In the caribbean there is this amazing mix that includes yoruba, native american and christian concepts which produces amazing concepts like the Duppy which is a caribbean concept. in yoruba land, the idea is that the spirits can ride certain people in other words they can possess you. If you've ever seen a spirit dance a rhythmic hypnotic effect going on on that person who is being ridden. It can happen very fast. Hopkinson's style was like she was riding me in a kind of spiritual sense. her style draws you in stepping back and trying to get some critical purchase, the one that had the most intense effect on me was Tan Tan and dry bone.

Naamen : open to questions and comments:

Aud: Vampiric? my husband and I refer to our kids as energy vampires. They suck the energy from you! diff species of humans within larger human soceity.

Matt Austern: vamprire have to be there in Blindsight? the radically different way in which the aliens thought, it would have been hard to make that clear without someone in between the way we think and the way aliens thing.

Guy in Aud: Another pro vampire Blindsight opinions. He was incredibly scary. I have not been scared by a vampire since middle school.

Naamen - for me he was also super scary. The whoel point of the book was, is being sentient important to life? humans are an aberration, we being aware of ourselves makes us the freaks of the universe, we shouldn't even be this way. He has it on his web site for free creative commons licensed. he has a huge section of notes on his ideas for all the people on th e edge and his ideas for integrating people with machines.

aud: vampires genetically engineered. why vampires area wonderful idea.

Vito: homo sapiens wheedonus. quote from james nicoll "whenever I find my will to live becoming too strong I read Peter Watts" The thing about the humans going into the artificial heaven and then dying, logical extreme divorced from body.

Bill: Bruce sterling short stories ?? Carl Schroeder's Permanence also good b/c something paradox. and sapience.

James: my other problems with peter watts' book . the nature of consciousness in biology today. but Automata Theory. AI from the 1940s to the early to mid 60s. never really came to complete conclusions but it's important to know what Goedel did at this time before his serious mental reader prevented him from doing any more work. What he said was it was possible to tell the diff between an organic and a machine intelligence. an organic system must perforce be self aware.that self awareness was a necessary consequence of evolutionary development. as life became more complex it requires self awareness. whereas machine survival does not require intelligence As someone in the government at senior levels I can't believe this would not be a military mission. I threw up my hands and said no I can't believer that. so extraordinary as to not be believable. however it is compellingly written and I'm glad he did this. we have to keep pushing ahead on thise issues to do with consciousness, intelligence, and aliens.

aud: idea books vs. character books. as readers, does it disappoint you more if you lose the character or if the characters take over the bok and you lose the idea?

Naamen - I prefer character over idea. the panel about multiple point of view. if the point of views are too quick in one chapter I don't connect to the book. I prefer a character I can connect with to an overarching idea. but I still like an overarching idea book. for me thinking is a disconnect. something that makes me feel

Vito: Blindsight - I have to disagree it's a book that's a don't read it alone in the house at night book, it's scary, it's going to make you feel. Spin : Oh come on have the courage to end the world@!!!

Karen: Some books are very visual . some in which a particular image occurs painted indelibly in my mind. In seattle we had earthquakes and you'd wake up with your house all different. I have a skylight and I can't imagine would be like to look up and see no stars.

Vito - you're begging the question, Is sentience necessary for biological intelligence, machines get smaller and if machines are running on ATP what's the difference between that and life anyway?

James: Do you know how Goedel died? Well he died from paranoid dementia, he starved to death from being afraid of being poisoned. when I read Blindsight I keep thinking poor Goedel!

(stuff was said)

James: I have an undergraduate minor in social anthropolgy. bonobos, large chimps, etc. Watts' point about chimpanzees and self awareness is wrong

(I HAVE A MASTERS DEGREE - IN SCIENCE!)

Karen: many people become so

Vito Why? Why is Octavia Butler writing about having sex with an 11 year old? Was it just to fuck with us? Because I know she likes to do this. Why?

Naamen: one of the great tragedies of fledgling is we are not going to get the sequel. How much our physical form takes precedence over our mental form. Race. she's dealing with incendiary racial material underneath a physically much bigger older white man. she's doing, Shori's a whole new being because she's black. she gets called a lot of names within the book. the vampires are racist. which is the most interesting part. some of the families say we see racism among humans and we don't want it among us. There's 300 years old and they lived through slavery and they can't see black people any other way but it is also that she has human genes mixed in Also she's the sexual aggressor.

Vito: well that was straight out of lolita.

aud: baboon metaphysics is the subtitle... of.... (something)

James: I have always thought that australo probably had a society similar to that of baboons.

(I start laughing uncontrollably)

Nabil: vampires, intelligence, it is about jobs. jobs, career. it's not usually reflected in books. but this guy, his job is his life. this is what project management will look like in 500 years. Translator between autistic geniuses and normal politically adept non geniuses was interesting.

Vito : read kelly eskridge. heh. The vampires kept telling Shori oh we don't see race, we don't see race, right up to the moment where they call her names.

Amy Thomson - admire Octavia as a writer, she never pulls her punches.

Brad - the self awareness of the apes - humans don't understand that... (something) they believe that apes in africa have a creation myth. (What?) Vernor Vinge's essay on the singularity on writing and how to deal with characters who are smarter than you. never write from their point of view, you're not going to pull it off.

Naamen - blindsight again. not from the point of view of the vampire who is the genius but called into question in the end was he giving orders? did he even exist? something else talking or typing through him ? is he even a genius at all? or is the AI just talking through him the whole time? even more complex character

Karen- the author gives the AI a name. The author is humanizing, hinting, trying to throw you off the track?

Vito - on Fledgling. speaking of the racial issues Butler deals with. Shori is this new kind of vampire who can go out in the day. she smells better and one pair of purple eyes away from being a Mary Sue. She ends up winning in the end because of this. This is like the one person you know. This is like Obama, she's super special, she's not the proof that racism is over. if she had not been able to go out in the sun , then what?

Naamen - A mary sue is , it's that story. Well how about Wesley Crusher. they're the best at everything and the main character falls in love with them. It's interesting to think about that and Fledgling. she's better than any other vampire. her family being slaughtered means she doesn't have the perfect life.

Karen - she doesn't know who she is. She's becoming self aware about having those skills. she's a late bloomer, without a nurtured childhood, coming to understanding about their powers. Their confidence level is never quite up to others' She doesn't understand the implications of her powers for a while.

Brad - discovering you're a secret superhero is totally a Mary Sue thing.

James - you are aware I think highly of Fledgling but I did think it was too highly manipulative. It was a little bit too clear that this was a plot device, she was starting out without family, without memory. doesn't detract greatly from it but there were some places where I saw the gears go

Vito - Skin Folk. I loved half of them and then the others the anvil of subtlety just dropped on my head again.

Karen - I ahve become enamored of short stories. I'm not used to sitting down with a whole book of one author's stories. while I think she's an immensely powerful writing I would have had a better time reading the stories separately because reading the book straight through was

Naamen - I was nervous about the book choices, it might reinforce the idea that women write fantasy and men write sf. But what saved it for me is that the vampire is science fiction. It was a science fiction novel for me. genetic engineering.

Vito - I think my favorite bit of Skin Folk was this bit called Greedy Choke Puppy, the first sentence, I'm putting a section on it in my thesis paper! That was my favorite bit because I know what that is. I know what's happening there!

James: how many people know about jumbies and duppies (Defines duppies.) the duppy ganger story Asimovian terms sex toy stories

Vito: I didn't think it was Asimovian. It was totally a David Foster Wallace story with sad people failing to have sex with each other but it is saved through talking to each other and fudge. David Foster Wallace characters should have more fudge.

Naamen - the anvil - the body exchange story. Internalized racism is bad. she trades her body to be a white character. It's a very interesting story. but also the glass bottle trick. Which, Vito, I see you have "shrug* written next to it.

Vito: Well, you say why you like it!

Naamen: well she's very light skinned the house is perpetually cold, she is pregnant, she opens the door that her husband told her never to go into and he is very dark skinned and he doesn't want his child to be dark skinned. so he keeps kiling his wives when they get pregnant. And she turns the heat up and so they come unfrozen. I'm not really into the bluebeard thing but I know of it. So it was pretty new to me. It was something I really enjoyed!

James: of all the stories that was the one which was that was the most Weird Talesish story

Vito: How about the lesbian fisherman story! I liked it! fairy tale fairy tale fairy tale LESBIAN FISTING fairy tale . Yeah!

Aud: Lakoff, awareness, etc

Vito: I have nothing bad to say about Fledgling, a fucking awesome book and you should read it if you haven't

Karen: There are some you feel good, some that just stay with you. then there are ones that inspire me to sit down at my computer and write something myself.

James: All these books show there is enormous vitality in the ream of the fantastic. sf/f are not dead.

Naamen - A couple of books I would not have read, I'm glad I read them all! They're making me want to go out and write, I'm desperate to go out and write a vampire story now!

*******

end of the panel!

********
My thoughts were, I disagreed with nearly everything James said or thought it was kind of odd. I also did not like Spin that much though near the end, I began to see some of the ideas were interesting. But I disliked what I saw as a sort of libertarian manifest destiny message and I also disliked all the characters, the gender politics, the tormented genius idea, the implications that immigrants are smarter or that migration to a frontier means you are a species filtering itself. To me that had ugly implications and I get annoyed given the amount of sf that is about colonization here we have this fantasy of an infinite frontier that is completely empty of other sentients so it is a frontier that allows the expansionist people who seem to have ruined a whole planet to feel innocent in a way that in the history of our actual planet almost no one has been.

The other main thought I walked away with was that I disagreed with the idea that some books were emotional and some were thinky. Skin Folk made me think! Most books do! I don't get where some people think that some books are for emotional or sensual response and some are for "thinking". Super questionable.

I have not read Fledgling but I look forward to it!

I liked that everyone was super creeped out by Blindsight.

What makes a book a "good read" to you?

Potlatch, Saturday - Ursula K. Le Guin reading from Always Coming Home

****

Le Guin reading story of Dira and the family (vampric) drank cows blood etc and villagers interfere to kill him. like a tick.

"That's the story my grandchildren like - kids love to be grossed out, don't they?"

poems:

Ant Dance. "hey, let me out!"
Name of the bear poem
Finders poem
(more poems)
Poem to the people who came before (to us)
"like the idea of a house"

Comments and questions from audience alternating between live and 2nd Life.

Q: grass dance poem. was it deliberate, to leave the space for us to imagine it?

Ursula: I like the idea very much! but it's a long time ago. I don't remember what I was thinking!

q from 2nd life - what's your impression or thoughts about 2nd life.

Ursula: my impression is that I'm seeing it at a rather difficult angle. *laughter* it looks rather like the campus of San Jose State!

Q: I have a three part question. First, do you think as Kesh?

Ursula: Ask one by one. My mind fails. But, yes, when I was writing the book, yes

Q: What about now?

Ursula: Sometimes.

3rd q: (I missed the question.)

Ursula: my involvement with Buddhism is very casual and personal. That one of the poems I read is Taoism. The language of the last poem I thought, reading it you're echonig Lao Tse. The gap at the center of things, that's pure Lao Tse, that's Taoism. all my books are fairly taoistic.

Hawk lightcloud has a question: your Planet of Exile is my favorite of your books, I never see it mentioned, what are your feelings about it?

Ursula: it was my 3rd published novel. a very long time ago. It was written by somoene named Ursula K. Le Guin, back then. *laughs* Any breakthroughs I made with it? hmmmm. With those early 3 books that all came out as ace doubles, I was learning y craft. it was less of a mixture of fantasy and sf than Rocannon's World. But I was getting more into science fiction and learning how to write it.

Cliff: It's traditional, anthrooplogy focusing on tribal societies rather than urban societies. I wonder if your decision to make the Kesh in the future low tech, if you were to write a future anthropology might you make them urban?

Ursula: I would question the term low technology. This is a high technology. They have everything they need - it is a climax technology. It is not showy, it is very green. It recyles constantly. In that sense I consider it a much higher technology than we have. I tried to invent a higher technology than ours. They are in control. people say oh a bunch of indians in huts. What? With washing machines? No. They are in control. We are controlled hopelessly by our automobiles and everything else we've invented in the last 150 years.

Aud: could you repeat that for the people in 2nd life? (laughs)

Ursula: What are they doing in Second Life? *laughs* Let's not knock them, they're our friends.

2nd life q: Are any of your books being made into movies? which do you hope could be?

Ursula: sometimes i hope they're not! *laughs*
Ursula: Lathe of Heaven... movie version. Not a great movie. But a good movie that's held up well over time.
Guy in aud: what about the porn version?
aud: Groans, gasps of shock
Ursula: Let's not go there, at all.

Ursula: I would like the Left Hand of Darkness to be a movie, but they just don't get it. They have problems with the androgynes and the snow. There's not a lot of snow in Hollywood. My books have been so mistreated! They take the names and the characters and they make a whole new plot! Neither of the Earthsea movies have anything to do with Earthsea! How do you get them to pay attention? They don't, unless you're JK Rowling or dead like Tolkien! I don't want to be dead like tolkien!

q: I want to ask about the city of mind. I noticed reading the book that people are getting information from the computer system but they've never talking to each other over it. Would people give up the internet? or was that a projection from before?

Le Guin This is of course pre internet.

(90% of the audience mutters under breath, "No it isn't", but I will give Ursula a free pass for meaning that it is before the Internet was in widespread popular use.)

Ursula: Why would you use computers to talk to each other when you live in the same village? (90% of audience sheepishly looks up from text messaging each other) They are more interested in being physically in the world than they are in communicating in their heads. When I wrote the book, people were not constantly sending out communications via electronic pulse. They did occasionally meet and talk. Their thumbs were not as important. *laughs* Or were important in a different way. I was trying to show a society with enormously different values than us. Take it or leave it though. You don't have to like them. I might go mad there, I'm a city girl. I don't always like them myself. But why not, we don't get that many {different persepectives}.

Hawk: How do you feel about your parents work, and your parents' invovlement with Ishi, have influenced you?

(Dude, most annoying question, imagine being as famous and successful not to mention as old as Le Guin and being asked all the time about something that happened for like 1 year before you were born.)

Ursula: Well, Ishi died in 1915. I was born in 1929. I never even heard of Ishi till I was a grown woman. And I learned about him like all of you might have, by reading my mother's book. My father didn't talk about it. It was a brief friendship with a bitterly unhappy person. My dad just didn't go back there. Of course my parents were a big influence on me, aren't everyone's? But I can't say how. It's a reasonable sounding question but I can't possibly answer it.

q: Which book or world is your favorite of the one's you've written?

Ursula: That's like asking me which of my three children is my favorite.

Some dude: So, which ?

Katrina: Deira whose story you just read. Thinking of all the people or groups or institutions might be symbolized by deira? What were you thinking, if you remember... were you thinking of an institution or a bad part of society that has to be smothered to give the people around them life.

Ursula: it's more complicated than you think. In the first place I'm one of those people I attract ticks. I go into the brush , I come back with a tick. In embarrassing places. They dig in. I have to go to the doctor and say I have a tick in HERE. And it started with a story about a person I know, an endlessly needy person. a black hole of a person. We all know a person like that. A tick is a useful metaphor, it is kind of irrestiable socially. The oil baron. They swell up. A tick is a useful metaphorical insect.

(da dwwweeeee, da dah dah dah!)

Ursula: The great depression, the 2nd world war, the war after war, then weird president after weird president, and of course the huge development of technolgoy in my lifetime. There's a lot to get into in a book. A lot of fantasy and sf is very open to reflecting political or social changes fairly directly sometimes. As we know sf in particular is a very powerful political form of writing. You can say a lot about the politics of your society by saying it a little bit slantwise in our sf. We all do it whether we intend to or not.

q strata About the city of mind in the book. Difference in how the Internet is used. Did you perceive the city of mind as a hinge, to facilitate the non-human cultures around it. Or did I just make that up?

Ursula: No that's perfectly legitimate and it's something the book doesn't talk about at all, there are not only many other societies all over the world but the city of mind may be in touch with other life forms on other worlds, but it's simply not talked about, but we know it's a possibility.

Strata: I found myself continually thinking of Brave new world and wondered if Kesh itself was someobdy else's world where people got put or whether they put people out somewhere else.

'Ursula: No. No, that did not occur to me at all.

Brad: Dispossed, role of sexes in society. Where do you think you've had the most effect on society and what are you the proudest of in that department?

Le Guin. Gee I don't know. It's very hard for a writer to say she's had an effect on society. Um. Again I'm going to answer kind of indirectly. I was very touched a while ago now were talking about the first sta trek series, I was at some meeting in san francisco and someone in the audience talked about why do people read SF? and one girl of 14 or 15 stood up and said, well I watch star trek because it gives me hope because there are all these different people meeting people from other planets and they all look different but they are all able to talk together. And my world they can't talk together. And that put it in a nutshell. Hope. SF does a lot of warning and shaking its finger and don't stand on Zanzibar but she was getting at just the idea that fantasy and sf present an alternative to the world as we know it, opens doors to the intellect and the spirit that you know, we don't have to keep the doors shut, we could live in a different way than we do. To have it lined out for you in a novel is very powerful! Anything but this.

q: I absolutely love Old Women Hating. That is a disagreeable story about old women hating each other. That was largely an aesthetic mood. One problem with utopia is the boring good people. I didn't want my people to be boring. I didn't want them to be GOOD. You had to be good in order to be live there. No. I wanted to show a society that was strong enough to hold stupidity and cantankerousness and not break down! so I had to have some unpleasant people in there and I enjoyed it throroughly.

Q: Very far away from anywhere else. My favorite. On a personal note I credit that book with saving my life.

Le Guin: Thank you for telling me that.

q: Are you familiar with the author of the book (something)

Ursula: No- but I have my assignment thank you!

***********

*** I had to leave at that point, and missed the rest. I was so impressed as always with how gracious Le Guin's answers are to her fans no matter how awkward or shy they are, and how interesting she can make her answers from nearly any starting point. Grace and humor! I also like that she is not afraid to show a little annoyance. It is not all honey. I have to note too that I was skeptical of the 2nd life setup and many people were as well of the cameras etc. but I thought it came out very well, the 2nd life participation was fairly strong, and the feeling of tech and spectacle was somewhat amusing considering the "hot spots" and ubiquitous cameras in Growing Up Weightless, and also, since I typed like a machine gun during the entire panel and whipped out the camera phone a couple of times on top of that, I am not exactly shining with "living in the moment" physical world virtue myself. ***

Evening!

Sneaked out of Potlatch, drove to SF to go to the tail end of A.'s 6th birthday party. Zond-7 had taken Moomin up, they had lunch and then to the cat party!

We took Moomin, A. and H. up to Zond-7's house where there were more presents. They all painted a bird house and we played Zar and listened to the Alphabutt song and they also dug up dirt from the little front yard to put in flowerpots from a kit. I laid flat on my back, which was glorious.

Then we dropped A and H back off at jong's house. Onward to RWC. Z read more Naomi Novik and I cleaned up my Potlatch panel transcript posts. I am dying to read The Caryatids. Z has begun book 4.

I'm walking better. I wasn't sure how/if I would be able to get into jong's house up the stairs or how I would deal with a crowded house full of kids. But it's only a few stairs and I figured the crowd would have cleared out by late in the party. This turned out to be true. But 2 days ago I couldn't have done it. I am walking a little more with crutches. I can manage about halfway across the house without, uncertainly. I can still put on my right sock and shoe. It's a struggle.

I was sad to miss hanging out and talking more with people but I'll do that tomorrow. Did not get to talk with Eileen, or really Naamen. Lunch w vito though and Rook joined us halfway through. His larp last night went well! I wonder how the Hamlet larp is going? I loved it when we played it. Tomorrow I'll have lunch w Timmi. I wish i could stick my forehead on hers and we could download each others' brains.

Meanwhile! A great Obama impersonation/rap of the State of the Nation speech!