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Potlatch 10Friday Spies moved to a new physical location, which seems to have fixed the network problems it was having, thank ghod. I cringe to think how much mail must have queued up at various sited during that time.
 This weekend I went to Potlatch 10. Potlatch is a small book-oriented convention held on the west coast each year, which several of my friends have told me for several years I should consider attending.
And, I was reminded how much I love mass transit when it involves rail lines. I should go up to the city more often by BART and start learning of places to go on foot and using local transit. It might give me a new outlook on San Francisco. Anyway, I arrived at the convention on Saturday morning and immediately met Lucy and our friend Tracy from Madison. Lucy said, "Where did you park?" And I said, "Fremont!" "Fremont??" exclaimed Lucy. Apparently in the rain parking was pretty bad in the city, and she swept Tracy off to lunch and didn't hang around too much longer due to the parking. I must confess I was feeling just a little bit smug.
The keynote story is "Maturity", which is presented with both its original ending (from its magazine publication) and Sturgeon's re-write when it was collected. It's about a precocious man who undergoes drug treatments and becomes brilliant and more "mature", and touches on the subject of what maturity is. It's somewhat interesting, but even in the re-write (which is subtler and deeper than the original) Sturgeon didn't seem to know what to do with it, how he wanted to explore his themes. Its melancholy ending seems both old hat and somewhat contrived today. Many of the stories are one-note affairs, interesting mainly because of Sturgeon's flamboyant and sometimes-manic employ of language. But conceptually they're simple: The title story is about the cost of retribution after a nuclear assault. "Memory" is a straightforward scientific puzzle. "There Is No Defense" is a cautionary tale of war with different pieces of technology. "Hurricane Trio" is a sort of love triangle story with aliens thrown in. Mostly the stories just weren't sophisticated enough to hold my interest very long, and it seemed a peculiar choice of book for a convention.
Potlatch has only one track of programming, thus ensuring that much of the membership (about 180 people, I think) will be at any given panel. The biggest drawback from my standpoint was that several of the panels were in the morning, before I could make the trek up to the convention, so I missed a number of them. Bummer. The "Economics of Iniquity" panel was an interesting consideration of why people are driven to do evil things, though it surprised me that we got through the whole panel without anyone raising the issue of moral relativism vs. moral absolutism (have I mentioned that I don't believe in moral absolutism?). But the "Cutting Edge vs. Rusty Spoon" panel was more intriguing, being about whether and how science fiction holds up over time. After all, the subjects of many older SF stories have since come to pass or been debunked, and this can't help but affect how they read today. I tend to assume that science fiction is more susceptible to this than other forms of literature, though I don't know for sure. I refrained from raising the question of whether art forms have an upper bound on how far they can progress, and therefore ever fewer revolutions and "cutting edge" material as time passes - a theory I picked up from Stephen Jay Gould's Full House, and one which seems plausible to me (heard any cutting edge classical music lately?). But it seemed to me that that panel and audience wouldn't really go for that idea (and besides there were a bazillion people who wanted to contribute as it was).
Saturday evening Tracy and I went out to dinner together. After fum-fuh'ing about where to go for a while (and turning down Bill's invitation to a Brazilian place) I realized that there's a branch of Max's in walking distance of the hotel. So we walked off to that, which was crowded but not overly so, and we had a good dinner and a nice long chat, where I got up-to-date on the doings of many of my old Madison friends.
The con suite at Potlatch was run by a couple of fans, including a south bay fan I know. (She's one of those people who lives 5 miles away from me, but we mainly ever see each other in relatively remote cities or states. Such is fandom.) It was small and sometimes over-crowded, but the food was quite good, particularly the chocolate fondue available on Saturday night. Mmm, was it ever good! Maybe I'll investigate what it would take to make my own chocolate fondue. Or maybe I'll keep working out instead! The main new person I met at the con is Anita Rowland, who I've corresponded with from time to time ever since I started my journal. She's had a tumultuous month, getting laid off and engaged in the course of a week, and now the convention. Yipes! Her occasional photos on her Web site don't really do her justice, as she's more animated than comes across in the stills. I also ran into a fellow who said to me, "Oh, Michael Rawdon! I've wanted to run into you for years!" Nope, I didn't recognize his name, which of course put me on my guard. Well, it turns out that he was a reader of the rec.arts.startrek newsgroup way back when I was a major participant on it. (For those who don't know, I was the "loyal opposition" when The Next Generation was on.) He said I said many things with which he disagreed at the time, but ten years later he thinks I had a few good points. Me, I was mainly croggling over the fact that my reputation (if you can call it that) has held up for a decade! He was a pleasant guy, though, and we also chatted about Babylon 5 for a while. Tracy got me good at one point while talking with some other folks. Someone - I think Anita - mentioned that my journal has gotten interesting lately, and Tracy interjected, "Michael having a date is big news!" I slugged her for that one. She later said that another former cow-orker of ours will be delighted that she drove me to violence. Yeesh. My friends. So I had a pretty good time, and picked up some books from the dealer's room and a quick run to Borderlands Books on Sunday. I would have enjoyed a little more programming, especially in the afternoons, but that's life.
After the con on Sunday I again hopped BART and headed to the east bay to visit Monique. We spent a pleasant evening together, stayed up too late, had to run off to In-n-Out Burger for dinner since nearly everything else was closed (and I refused to eat at Jack-in-the-Box), and she drove me back to my car (so I've now ridden in the Momobile). We've also been talking about the first four books in Lois McMaster Bujold's Miles Vorkosigan series, which I loaned to her and which she's apparently enjoying immensely. She hasn't read a lot of SF, but I might change that! (Evil grin.) So that was a nice way to unwind from a weekend that itself was basically a whole bunch of unwinding! But boy, I'm going to be exhausted tomorrow... Monique and I are looking forward to having more time together some weekend soon, since this "trying to squeeze in a night on an otherwise busy weekend" thing is kinda frustrating to both of us!
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