purplecat

Somewhat on a whim, I booked myself to go to Eastercon last weekend. We would have both gone but B. had accidentally booked a trip to Texas to study turtles flipping themselves from their backs to their fronts, so I went alone.

It is almost a decade since we went to Eastercon and I'm not sure why. The last one we attended was in Manchester and I think we were slightly put off by the actual difficulty of getting to help out in anyway - B. never got involved at all. After some effort I ran a Lego Rover session in a tiny cramped room but my experience was that every time I contacted the con comm I was dealing with a different person and ultimately I felt somewhat unwanted. However all the excitement over Worldcon in Glasgow got me thinking that we should give it another try.

The quality of the panels was generally high, a lot better than the first Eastercon I attended where panels were full of people who seemed rather unsure why they were there. I missed both the AI panel and an AI talk - probably just as well as these were the programme items most likely to annoy, but enjoyed panels on writing landscape and world-building. There was a fun Doctor Who panel trying to tease apart the strengths and weaknesses of the current iteration, a fascinating Arthurian panel (albeit one where the Emeritus Professor of Medieval History appeared to have little to say for himself - fortunately the rest of the panel had plenty of interesting thoughts), and the obligatory fanfic panel which talked around the idea of fanfic as a community exercise. Gender representation was good, but the con itself remains predominantly middle-aged (going on elderly), middle-class and white. I also attended the Hay Lecture on genomics and the BSFA Lecture on Diversity in Lord of the Rings (which made some good points, but also a few which were a bit "OK, yes, if you squint really hard"). I had fun at the Ceilidh which was full of confused Scots being confronted with dances they had never encountered before.

The Dealers' Room was oddly disappointing. I was hoping to buy exciting tat and in the end only came away with a dinosaur dice holder - which is very nice, but I'd been expecting more in the way of T-Shirts and jewellery than I found. While waiting for the bus from the ferry to the hotel, I had met a young man from Liverpool University Library who was running a display on the digitisation of their SF collection. I dropped by the stall. It was a bit difficult to appreciate the digitisation - he had iPads on which you could browse the collection, but it wasn't really a circumstance conducive to such browsing. He said most people wanted to talk to him about the collection itself, or their collection, and weren't so interested in the digital bit - but he acknowledged that it was all useful. The archive is here, if you are interested.

There was also a programme of walks which I gathered was fairly new. On the Friday morning before the con had started proper there was a very well-attended walk to Belfast's public library and the Linen Hall (also a Library). The Saturday morning walk started at 7am and was to take two hours ending with breakfast. Rain was forecast so I don't think the organisers were terribly surprised when only two of us showed up. One organiser then cried off since she had a cold. The rain wasn't actually that bad and we had a pleasant walk up the Lagan, via an unplanned detour since we were ahead of time, and culminating in bacon and waffles (in my case) at a Lock keeper's cottage turned cafe. On Sunday morning a small entirely female group (apart from the guide), walked the other way along the Lagan, towards the docks viewing various sculptures and Game of Thrones themed stained glass windows until we reached HMS Caroline. I could only get the hotel for four nights, so had a ferry to catch on Monday morning as a result of which I missed the final walk.

( Photos, mostly of the walks, under the cut )

In the name of clearing out my "to post" backlog I thought I'd do a quick post about a talk we attended at Eastercon on the Illustrated Police News (its relevance to Eastercon is somewhat beyond me, but that is often the case with Eastercon talks, panels and activities). It was given by Linda Stratmann and based on her book Cruel Deeds and Dreadful Calamities: the Illustrated Police News 1864-1938 an illustrated history of the notorious newspaper, (British Library, March 2011). We are vaguely considering purchasing this as Christmas presents for misc relatives.

Linda gave an interesting overview of the nature of the publication, its interests and peculiarities and various recurring themes and motifs but the real stars were the illustrations themselves. I'm particularly fond of the captions! Anyway below the cut are some culled from Google's image search.

( The Illustrated Police News )

Sadly I couldn't find the truly splendid one of a female cuban revolutionary in the middle of a jailbreak, busting elegantly out of her corsets, legs braced apart, firing a gun with one hand and waving a flag with the other...

Good: Eastercon
Bad: Getting behind on multiple fronts
Ugly: Arriving home to find the breaker had tripped in the kitchen and the fridge and freezer had warmed up to room temperature

The Fortunate: Freezer recently defrosted, no meat in fridge.

B. and I just signed up... now to work out how to book the hotel!!

I forgot to mention in my previous Eastercon post the Bartitsu ("The Martial Art of Sherlock Holmes") lecture that we went to. This, it must be said, started slow (and the speaker did a good impression of someone who had been drafted in to talk on the topic at the last minute and was making the best he could from a frantic Google and the discovery of bartitsu.org). However it was interesting to see that Victorian Orientalism also extended to the adoption and adaptation of Eastern Martial Arts nearly a hundred years before the craze resurfaced in the West (experts will now tell me there was a continuous Karate/Judo/Jujitsu/etc tradition in the UK from then onwards). Bartitsu, as a word is a conflation of the surname of Edward William Barton-Wright (who cobbled it together from every Martial Art tradition he could get his hands on, in so far as I could tell) and Jujitsu which was one of its major components.

Most of the talk was an interesting, if not terribly exciting, tour around the Victorian criminal scene, the European components of Bartitsu (specifically Queensbury and pre-Queensbury fist fighting rules) and a discussion of exactly which Jujitsu hold Holmes might have used on Moriarty. Then the topic of women's self defense came up.

The speaker admitted to some qualms about the whole area of self-defense for women, based around the observation that you need a lot of skill to compensate for deficiencies in weight and strength. But he had had a revelation when he looked at Bartitsu:

( namely the use of the umbrella )