handslive | Belated WorldCon [mon, 1 sep]

Monday morning I went to two back-to-back Poetry Exercise panels, Odes and Terza Rima. I swear there was nothing else on that I wanted to go to. Okay, that's not 100% true, but the attendance had been so small I felt I was supporting the panel members as much as anything else. And besides, it was fun.

Odes are basically what you'd expect. There are formal examples, but many newer writers use a much looser structure and often write about more mundane things. I wrote a short ode to my LED light. Actually, I wanted to call this 'Ode to my Petzel' but I wasn't sure anyone on the panel would know what a Petzel was (it's an LED head lamp sort of). The 'watch battery' part of the poem is technically incorrect (it takes 3 or 4 AAAs) and needs cleaning up in other respects, too.

Who knew, when I first picked
From the bubble wrapped packages
Your tiny plastic form, your shape,
That first watch battery clicked
Into your belly, shiny lozenge,
Eyes open when I squeezed your nape.

I hope your bright, blue light
Blinding, steady, sharp, and unafraid,
Flattening shapes and shadows with your glare,
Can make a space in which to fight,
Might gild a linoleum path inlaid,
As I run from some unknown, stuttering stare.

Terza Rima is the form used by Dante in his Divine Comedy. To be technical, it's a non-iambic decameter form with a braided rhyme scheme (ABABCBCDC...). Anyway, this was fun and the panelist was also fun and, while I didn't finish anything during the panel, I started something I would like to finish.

And then the Death of Money panel, which had Cory Doctorow, the weird Extropian guy from the Death of Personality panel, Charlie Stross, and some other guy I can't remember. It was an interesting panel (and I was late), and I felt like the people at the back couldn't understand why the panel discussion kept going in the direction it did. It made sense to me. The only thing that really annoyed me was the tendency of the Extropian to wave his little magic "and then we get AI" wand which I don't think results necessarily in either of the extremes proposed (AIs say, "humans use too much entropy" and remove us OR AIs do everything we tell them to and better than we can do it).

And really that was the Con, for me. Went out for a marvelous supper with purplejavatroll and purplecthulhu at Epic in the Royal York. Played on one of the grand pianos on floor 'C' and attracted a very small audience briefly (who were kinder than they needed to be). Had an excellent breakfast (also at Epic). Took the bus out. Bumped into Tim Anderson again while getting off the plane and he remembered me and said hi. Came home and packed up stuff to go camping the next day.

I didn't take any pictures. I discovered that I don't feel comfortable taking pictures of famous people even if I really like their stuff. And I definitely don't feel comfortable taking pictures of total strangers. Oh, and somewhere in there we hit the dealer room one more time and bought some stuff (books and some earrings for pjt).