Mythcon report

I'm back from my trip to Mythcon, and now's the time to write about the conference part of the trip.

Mythcon was held in the unlikely grounds of Weatherford, Oklahoma, because the library of the local college, Southwestern Oklahoma State University, is the home of the Mythopoeic Society archives. Our online records are hosted by their website, and - as I saw when I visited by appointment on Friday - the printed records are stored in their vault. All this is at the behest of enthusiastic Mythie and SWOSU library archivist Phillip Fitzsimmons, who also chaired the conference.

Our meeting venue was not on campus, but closer to our hotel (a quick mile's drive or so) in the Stafford Air and Space Museum, established by, or at least because, early US astronaut Thomas P. Stafford (always called "General Stafford" in hushed tones around here) was a native of Weatherford. I went to the museum exhibits and was hugely impressed, especially by the numerous, sometimes replicas and sometimes the real thing, of full-size aircraft, starting with a full-size replica of the Wright Brothers' original plane. I had never seen such a thing outside of grainy old photographs before, and this conveyed the nature of the craft better than do old photos.

The museum has - or had; I think they're in the process of converting it to new exhibit space - a large function room, divisible by temp walls like a hotel ballroom, which it rather resembles. We had it divided in three, registration and dealers in front, one programming room in the middle (mostly online speakers), and the other in back (mostly live). You have to walk through the middle room to get to the back, which could become tricky. I was leaving the back room just as a new session was beginning, and realized as I got to the middle room that if I didn't sit down, the online paper presenter would have only one person in the audience. So I did sit down, and listened to a paper whose fascination wasn't dampened by the fact that I hadn't even heard of any of the three books being discussed. Another time I passed through as the online speaker was explaining that Treebeard introduced Merry and Pippin to homosexuality. That time I just kept walking.

I missed a lot of interesting papers because I had to keep dashing back to the hotel to take naps, regular sleep being a rare function, and another got canceled when the presenter had to run off to the hospital (he's OK), but I did get to some good ones, including John Rosegrant's exploration of Tolkien's sound symbolism and Eric Rauscher's discussion of what Charles Williams's poetry got from Gerald Manley Hopkins and T.S. Eliot. I also heard both Guest of Honor speeches, which I'll not attempt to summarize here. The scholar Joe R. Christopher, still hale at 91, broke his arm in an accidental fall the day before the convention, and while he and his sling did attend, they didn't get there in time for his scheduled speech, which was read by Janet Brennan Croft. The author David R. Slayton delivered his rousing defense of literacy at the banquet. We were all - there were less than 100 in person - stuffed into the banquet room of Lucille's Roadhouse, the restaurant adjacent to and sharing a name and ownership with our hotel. This is clearly the place to dine in Weatherford; I had three dinners there and it never got tired. Weatherford apparently counts as in the South, and the food was mostly Southern in nature (my three entrees were ribs, chicken-fried steak, and pork chop), including having bacon in the green beans, a bit of a surprise if there were any vegetarians present, which I guess not, though the full menu does cater to them.

Plenty of conversations had between papers and late night (the hotel's breakfast nook doubled as an evening con suite) with old friends and new people, some of them wandering in from Signum University's Mythmoot, which I've been pressing for years as the best possible source for new Mythies.

It was hideously hot outside, but dry so not enervating; and we mostly stayed inside with pleasant but, unlike on some previous occasions, not violently overblown air conditioning. Pleasant, I'd say it was indoors. Parking was nearby and sufficient in quantity at both museum and hotel. The Procession marched from the museum's front lobby into the programming room, avoiding the outdoors altogether.

One oddity passed around the conference had been found in miscellaneous donated archives, a small ceramic jar labeled "Gopher Guts." None of the old-time Mythies present had any idea what that was, and Janet asked several people if they'd invent stories about it and write them down in a little booklet. I hope she publishes this; the two before mine were very clever. I thought for a moment and wrote down that it commemorated the ruler of a tiny German principality, Gofür (spelling varied). In this particular principality, probably inspired by L. Sprague de Camp, princes were subject to regular recall elections. Citizens voted by dropping a nut or pebble into one of two jars labeled Gopher Gut and Gopher Schlecht, I forget how I explained the extra "s", and this one had been taken as a souvenir by a US Army soldier after WW2, eventually finding its way into the MythSoc archives.