fame

John Scalzi is still on the comfort movie circuit, and last night's entry was Notting Hill. I've seen that movie, but only once when it was new, but Scalzi's essay is mostly about a principal topic of that movie, which is the effects of being famous, and I do have some thoughts about that.

I wouldn't go up and speak to a famous person I saw just because they were famous, but a couple times I've been in the presence of an actor or author I admired in a position where I ought to say something. So I just said, "I admire your work; thank you for doing it," because I couldn't go into any more detail without burbling.

By author I mean outside the sf/fantasy field, because there we're both parts of the community and can converse on a more equal basis, and some of them I'm friends with anyway. There are 3 or 4 notable fantasy authors, all women by the way, whom I was already friendly with before they'd ever published anything.

When I lived in Seattle in the early 80s, there were several authors who were part of a fairly close-knit fan community: F.M. Busby (who was called Buz), Vonda N. McIntyre, Joanna Russ. One time when I was visited by friends who were fans but not part of this particular community, I took them along to a fan-community party. I didn't tell them until we arrived that it was at Joanna Russ's house, and they were properly croggled. (I had of course gotten Joanna's permission to bring guests along.)

I've had one brief experience at being famous, within the environment I was existing in. I define topical fame as a situation where everybody's heard of you but few of them know you personally. This was when I was an invited guest speaker at a Tolkien conference at Marquette University, which holds his papers, in 2004. (And which gave rise to this proceedings.) Unlike at a Mythcon, where I know most of the attendees and consequently didn't feel "famous" even when I was Guest of Honor, here I didn't know much of anybody except the other presenters, but they all knew me.

It was a deeply weird experience, I found. People I didn't know kept wanting to come up and talk with me. It was within the context of the conference, so they weren't random accosters like the guy Scalzi describes making a pitch to Tom Hanks. And they had no self-aggrandizing agenda, they just wanted to talk about Tolkien, which I'm happy to do. I kept fretting inwardly over whether I was being polite enough. I'm rather introverted and not very socially adept, so I wasn't sure if I was being good at this. My biggest relief was when I left campus by myself and wasn't famous any more, which - as Scalzi points out - is exactly what the truly famous can't do.

It occurs to me that, instead of a movie about a famous person dating a random everyman, as in Notting Hill, we could have a story about a relationship between two famous people from totally different walks of fame. And we do: it's Katy Perry and Justin Trudeau. (I suppose Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce might qualify, too, though a sports star's fame isn't as different from a pop singer's as a politician's is, and I'm not sure how walk-down-the-street famous Kelce was before he and Swift started dating.)