MythCon Memories

I spent most of last weekend at the Mythopoeic Society's annual conference. There wasn't much time to blog during the conference, but I took a few notes, so for the benefit of those who might be interested, here's a retrospective commentary. (I have omitted the names of most presenters other than the conference's authorial guest-of-honor, since this blog is not Google-proofed and I do not wish my ignorant ramblings to affect their careers or reputations. The curious may consult the conference schedules found at the website mentioned above.)

Day One : Friday July 30

I was scheduled to work until 1:15, and didn't actually get away from the library until nearly 2:00 thanks to the arrival of some politically timely books that needed to be checked in as received from the wholesaler and sent on their merry way to the cataloging department. On the way down to the conference hotel north of A-Squared, Ol' Whitey decided that it was a good time to begin spewing coolant all over the inside of the engine bay. Fortunately, there was a gas station with a garage nearby. O happy day.

I stopped in to hear several of the papers presented on Friday afternoon:

Surely you don't disbelieve : Tolkien and Pius X : Anti-modernism in Middle-earth. Compared Tolkien's traditionalist attitudes in his Middle-Earth stories with an encyclical by Pope Pius X expressing concern over the direction of faith and scholarship in the twentieth century ("Pascendi dominici gregis"). Interesting, although Catholic theological thought is a little outside my areas of interest, and I tend to bristle at any proclamation advocating censorship of ideas, as this particular encyclical seems to have done. Best Tolkien quote: "Surely you don't disbelieve in the prophesies merely because you had a hand in bringing them about?" (Gandalf to Bilbo)

Two Sonnets by Roger Lancelyn Green. Presented and analyzed two sonnets on themes related to the Inklings, one Arthurian in theme, the other a tribute to C.S. Lewis that punningly played upon the titles of his various books to describe a spiritual pilgrimage. Good enough to inspire me to look up Green's other poems. But then again I'm always a sucker for Arthurian allusions and witty wordplay. Interesting archival/intellectual-property sidelight: apparently some papers of Walter Hooper to which the presenter had access in the past, including a letter from Green regarding these two sonnets, are now at the University of N.C. but forbidden from public and scholarly access. (Perhaps such restrictions are in reaction to this book?)

A game of you -- yes, you. Commentary on volume 5 of conference guest-of-honor Neil Gaiman's Sandman graphic novels.

For whom does the Hogwarts bell toll? Rowling's problem, Tolkien's solution. I would love to work at a university that supported classes like the ones this lady teaches.

Why won't they be free? J.K. Rowling's house-elf problem. Are house-elves merely an analogue for house-slaves? For stereotypical happy slaves, born slaves, a naturally subservient race reminiscent of old racist images of blacks and other "colonized" races? What does that say about JKR's typical promotion of tolerance and freedom from oppression? I'm not sure I understand the bit about applying second-wave feminism.

At dinner, I fell into conversation with several other conference attendees, including one lady who, when she smiled or laughed, bore a rather startling resemblance to S.A.P. I made the mistake of mentioning this to her toward the end of dinner. She studiously avoided me for the rest of the conference.

There was a meet-&-greet reception at Borders, which benefited me only to the extent that it allowed me to pick up a couple of copies of Gaiman's books to have signed tomorrow, and to meet one interesting person, a slight, grey-haired lady with a pleasantly lilting voice who seemed to know just about everything there was to know about comedic fantasy and filksongs. And so back to the conference hotel and a late-night big-screen showing of the BBC's version of Gaiman's Neverwhere. I couldn't help noting a distinctly Dr Who-ish look to the production. This was borne out by later comments overheard....

Day Two: Saturday, July 31

Amazingly, I managed to get to the opening session at the Michigan League building on the U. of Mich. campus on time. The League is, by the way, quite a suitable place for such discussions. Its impressive exterior would fit right in at Hogwarts. The furnishings of the interior rooms are a bit too modernized for such comparisions, but certainly more atmospheric than the bland conference rooms at the hotel!

Bridging Tolkien's Gender Divide: Eowyn and the Role of Women in the Heroic Action in The Lord of the Rings. This paper and the discussion that followed were interesting even though I'd already read similar discussions in other criticism and/or argued about it with various freinds via e'mail. I disagreed particularly with her view that Eomer's and Prince Imrahil's exclamations when Eowyn is found, wounded, on the Pelennor Fields after the great battle, constituted a condemnation of her actions. The former's lament seems to me to be just what one would expect from a warrior who finds a beloved relative gravely wounded; the latter's cry of amazement ("Have even the women of Rohan come to fight for us?") seems to bear more favorable connotations than she credits it with.

Neil Gaiman's Sandman and Joseph Campbell: Creating the Modern Myth. The author of this book did an admirable job of keeping his calm and presenting his paper, although it seemed to me he became (understandably) a bit nervous when this shady-looking character slipped unobtrusively into the back of the room....

After lunch, I walked over to a nearby bookshop. Noted with surprise and pleasure that David Garnett's Lady Into Fox has been attractively reprinted by McSweeney's. (The book gives new meaning to that innocuous phrase "Honey, I've changed"!) Was informed by clerk that I missed Neil Gaiman by about five minutes; he'd apparently been in the store to sign their stock of his books during the Mythopoeic Society's lunch. Damn. On the other hand, I wasn't too late to notice that they're hiring part time booksellers. Hmm.

At 2:00, I went to hear Gaiman read one of his stories and answer questions from listeners. The story he read was, according to him, either the best or the worst possible choice to read at MythCon; the answer (said he) would be determined by whether he was or was not found dangling from a lamppost the next morning. He'd taken special care to ask a friend whether or not the story in question was suitable for a conference where a significant number of the attendees were rabid C.S. Lewis fans, and the freind had said to go right ahead.

Of course, the friend in question was Phillip Pullman....

The story Gaiman read, The Problem of Susan (published in this anthology), is a rather dark and disturbing take on something that I suspect many thoughtful Narniaphiles have contemplated: what of Susan? Although Gaiman does not explicitly identify the characters in the story with characters from the Narnia books, there are enough evocative similarities to make it clear that he's commenting on them, or responding to them. Susan, as some may recall, has a different fate from the other three children in the story. Gaiman's story asks, implicitly, how someone would deal with that kind of experience in later life, and what it might say about God/Aslan. Is Aslan a tame lion? Really? Has Lewis inaccurately "tamed" the nature of a God who would permit evil, death, killing, torture, genocide, and horrific train wrecks that kill children in grisly ways and leave bereaved orphans to grow up alone in poverty? What if He were really, really alien to human morality? Theodicy doesn't often rear its head in fantasy writing, but it rears and roars quite ferociously in this little story.

The story struck a chord with me because there have been times when I have contemplated the possibility that if (1) God is good and (2) God is all-powerful, then (3) God has some explaining to do. Of course, if premise (1) or (2) is untrue, then the philosophical problem is resolved quite neatly, but at a certain cost to human comfort.

Unfortunately, Yours Truly seems to have misplaced the notebook in which he wrote down comments from the questions and discussion that followed, and can remember only the guest-of-honor's comment that the television production of Neverwhere was an example of what he called the Great BBC Sausage Machine. ("No matter what you put in at one end, you get Doctor Who out the other.")

My most embarrassing moment: finally getting to the front of the autograph line, chatting briefly, and realizing, after I handed a book across the table for him to sign, that it was already signed. Oops. (Apparently the hardbound copy of this book, which I had ordered by mail last year from a small specialist press, was one that he had signed for them.) He graciously pointed this out for me, and kindly suggested that the paperback copies I'd also brought along for signing were actually better copies for reading, since the hardbound edition had not been adequately proofread.

Managed to avoid making a total ass of myself at dinner.

I skipped the scheduled evening's entertainment -- a Celtic fiddle band -- in favor of catching a couple of hours of sleep before returning to the conference hotel to catch the large-screen showing of the second half of Neverwhere. However, this was not to be, since a lissom maiden lured me out into the moonlit Michigan night to indulge in .... Golfimbul.

Golfimbul is, quite simply, a game which defies rational explanation, which makes a great deal of sense since it is not played by rational people, but by great guffawing hordes of MythSoc attendees, usually in the dead of night. It is reputedly based on the death of the orc chieftain of the same name, which according to Professor Tolkien, was the origin of a certain game still played by some Big Folk today. It involves a baseball bat, a (plastic) goblin's head, and ceremonial kazoo accompaniment. It's weird and wacky and wonderful, and I am now the world Bronze Medal holder for the Golfimbul distance competition. (Woo hoo!)

(Will write more tomorrow... or, rather, later today.)