Monthly culture: August 2019
Saturday, September 7th, 2019 10:21 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tamaranth02AUG19: Van Gogh and Britain (Tate Britain)
There was a lot more Britain than there was Van Gogh. (And many more people than was comfortable: again, there were queues to look at the key pieces.) But I did get to see the brush-strokes on Starry Night over the Rhone.
Guardian review
15-19AUG19: Dublin 2019, an Irish Worldcon (Dublin)
A mixed bag.
Things I liked:
- Ada Palmer's two readings, one of which included spoilers for Perhaps the Stars.
- 'Literary Soundtracks' with Kieron Gillen, Ian McDonald and others -- Spotify shuffle as a kind of Tarot; Anna von Hausswolff; 'Wolf Like Me' for pacing and structure.
- 'The Mathematics of Music' with Gary Lloyd, Nicholas Jackson and others -- auditory equivalents of optical illusions; Shepard tones; how to make a canon.
- The Doubleclicks, who had a Murderbot reference and a song called 'Hanging Out with Cats at Parties'.
- Ian McDonald interview -- "I tend to the panoramic, the sprawling and epic"; writing as an attempt to return to 'the Garden', to safe controllable childhood home; his theory that writers tend to have moved home around the age of 5.
- 'What Fanfiction can teach Genre Writers' -- playfulness; critique and feedback and how to deal with them; how to sustain a longer narrative.
- Hugo winners: The Calculating Stars; Artificial Condition; Archive of Our Own (ha! I am one tiny fraction of a Hugo winner!); Spiderman: Into the Spiderverse.
Things I did not like:
- crowds (the capacity of a building does not indicate how many people can be moving around it, hurriedly, at the same time)
- inability to catch up with friends and acquaintances. I found the bar dark and overcrowded, and I never managed to track down any fanfic / AO3 meetup.
- queuing for programme items that I then couldn't get into. (That said, I was impressed that they tried hard to fix the queuing system: and when I told the Access desk that I couldn't really queue for long, especially in a jostling crowd, they gave me an access sticker.)
- not being able to get a cup of coffee before 9:30 on Friday morning.
23AUG19: Manga (British Museum)
Another exhibition with a layout that encouraged clots of people, for example in front of a small screen showing a short documentary. There were some very interesting exhibits and connections, but perhaps the exhibition suffered from too wide a scope.
Guardian review
There was a lot more Britain than there was Van Gogh. (And many more people than was comfortable: again, there were queues to look at the key pieces.) But I did get to see the brush-strokes on Starry Night over the Rhone.
Guardian review
15-19AUG19: Dublin 2019, an Irish Worldcon (Dublin)
A mixed bag.
Things I liked:
- Ada Palmer's two readings, one of which included spoilers for Perhaps the Stars.
- 'Literary Soundtracks' with Kieron Gillen, Ian McDonald and others -- Spotify shuffle as a kind of Tarot; Anna von Hausswolff; 'Wolf Like Me' for pacing and structure.
- 'The Mathematics of Music' with Gary Lloyd, Nicholas Jackson and others -- auditory equivalents of optical illusions; Shepard tones; how to make a canon.
- The Doubleclicks, who had a Murderbot reference and a song called 'Hanging Out with Cats at Parties'.
- Ian McDonald interview -- "I tend to the panoramic, the sprawling and epic"; writing as an attempt to return to 'the Garden', to safe controllable childhood home; his theory that writers tend to have moved home around the age of 5.
- 'What Fanfiction can teach Genre Writers' -- playfulness; critique and feedback and how to deal with them; how to sustain a longer narrative.
- Hugo winners: The Calculating Stars; Artificial Condition; Archive of Our Own (ha! I am one tiny fraction of a Hugo winner!); Spiderman: Into the Spiderverse.
Things I did not like:
- crowds (the capacity of a building does not indicate how many people can be moving around it, hurriedly, at the same time)
- inability to catch up with friends and acquaintances. I found the bar dark and overcrowded, and I never managed to track down any fanfic / AO3 meetup.
- queuing for programme items that I then couldn't get into. (That said, I was impressed that they tried hard to fix the queuing system: and when I told the Access desk that I couldn't really queue for long, especially in a jostling crowd, they gave me an access sticker.)
- not being able to get a cup of coffee before 9:30 on Friday morning.
23AUG19: Manga (British Museum)
Another exhibition with a layout that encouraged clots of people, for example in front of a small screen showing a short documentary. There were some very interesting exhibits and connections, but perhaps the exhibition suffered from too wide a scope.
Guardian review
