The other day, I was pondering how two characters in a new story I'm working on might communicate secretly with each other through an exchange of notes. It occurred to me that they might use a women's script. I knew that there was a real women's script derived from Chinese characters, so I looked it up again. It's nüshu (女書), and it was used by women in Jiangyong County in Hunan Province.
In the course of reading the Wikipedia page on nüshu, I came across the concept of laotong (老同). In the nüshu article, laotong are described as "sworn sisters." On the Wikipedia page for laotong, it's described as a formal relationship/bond between two women, established in childhood or even before birth and meant to endure for a lifetime. Like nüshu, the custom of laotong is from Hunan Province. I was immediately struck by the practice, and particularly by its resemblance to the concept of gemaecce that Nicola Griffith developed for her novel Hild. In Hild, which is set in Anglo-Saxon England, a girl is formally paired with a gemaecce, another girl who will be her friend/companion for life. As far as I know, there is no evidence that women in Anglo-Saxon England actually had gemaecce, but laotong are real. So much story fodder here!
On Sunday evening, my friend Isabelle and I went to In & Of Itself, a magic show at the Geffen Playhouse. Glenn Kaino, the conceptual artist for whom we created Lunar French got us tickets, since he was the show's producer. The performer was magician Derek DelGaudio.
We were admitted into the theater, where another usher tore off the identity end of our cards, leaving us with "I am" stubs. She piled the cards in a neat stack. Isabelle and I found ourselves sitting in the front row of the very intimate theater. The seats filled, and eventually the usher put the tall stack of cards on the table on stage.
If there's any chance you're going to see this show, you should perhaps stop reading. Spoilers for magic shows? Is that a thing?
The set consisted of a wall that looked like it was constructed of gray planks. There were six windows cut into it, with different objects in each one. One contained a golden automaton whose face appeared to be that of…could it be? Frantz Fanon? It was the twin of the Pierrot figure in the moon automaton.
Derek DelGaudio walked on stage and began to tell us a story about a man playing Russian roulette. After finishing the story, he went to one of the windows and took out the half-empty bottle that was sitting in it. He peeled the label off the bottle, folded it into a paper boat, and moved the boat along the back of a chair. A light projected the shadows of the chair and the boat onto the wall, making it look like the boat was bobbing on the ocean. Then he stuck the boat into the back of the chair somehow, so it perched there. He took the bottle and did more shadow games, until at last he passed the bottle in front of the paper boat on the chair. When he lifted the bottle again, the paper boat was floating on the liquid inside of it.
Next, he asked for a volunteer who was willing to come back to the next show, which was to be on Tuesday. Somebody eventually volunteered. Then he called down the volunteer from the last show, who came on stage with a journal in which he'd recorded everything he could remember from the previous show, up until when he'd left. DelGaudio read a few words aloud from his journal entry and then sent him back to his seat.
There followed some nice card tricks. Then DelGaudio told another story–presumably autobiographical?–about growing up in Colorado with his lesbian mothers. He stood next to the window in which a brick was stuck halfway through a pane of cracked glass. Apparently someone threw a brick into their house. After telling the story, he placed the brick, which was painted gold, on the table on which he'd done the card tricks and surrounded it with a little house of cards. He asked the audience to supply the name of an intersection in Los Angeles. We came up with Wilshire & Sepulveda. Then he said the brick was now at that intersection, and he blew down the house of cards to reveal that the brick had vanished.
After the show, I did some poking around online and discovered that people had taken photos of golden bricks found at various intersections around LA. Intersections from previous shows, no doubt. I haven't been to Wilshire & Sepulveda yet to check myself.
At this point, DelGaudio asked the volunteer who said he'd come back to the next show to leave. Before he left, though, he helped DelGaudio choose a random(-ish?) audience member. DelGaudio invited her on stage and asked her what card she'd chosen. She said, "Dapper Dan man." (I had to look that up later. And I've even seen Oh, Brother, Where Art Thou?.) I'm telling this slightly out of order, but DelGaudio climbed a ladder to one of the higher windows, in which lots of envelopes were sitting in a matrix of cubbies. He chose about six letters and presented them to the young woman on stage, pointing out that they were all addressed to him and had some relation written on the back such as "Dad" or "Lawyer." He said she could pick one, so she picked the one that said "Dad." He had her imagine some letter-writing scenarios and then finally had her open the envelope.
She slid her finger under the flap, unfolded the letter inside…and sort of curled up on herself in her chair, covering her mouth with her hand. She exclaimed, stared at DelGaudio, almost started crying. Then she read the letter aloud. It was addressed to Zoe ("my name," she said) and mentioned a family pet and her brother, both by name. It was from her dad. Given her reaction, I imagine the handwriting must have been right. We all stared. This was easily the most impressive moment in the show. I spent a little time later wondering how it all might have worked, but not too much time. I don't really want to figure it out. Though if I were that young woman, the first thing I would've done upon leaving the show is call my dad.
After that stunning bit of magic, DelGaudio asked anyone in the audience who had chosen a card because it was genuinely how they wanted to be seen to stand up. Probably about half the audience rose. Isabelle did. After a few moments' reflection, I decided "cellist" was not actually how I wanted to be seen, so I didn't stand.
After doing the first couple of rows, he told people to sit down if he'd gotten their card right. Everyone in the first few rows sat down. He then continued to name the cards of every other person standing. There were probably well over fifty people. One by one, they sat down as he named the correct card. After the letter from dad, this was the next most impressive bit.
And that was the final act. Or almost. He turned back to the set, which lit up. What were once windows had become posters, and these fell to the ground, leaving a blank wall behind them. The stage floor rose up, revealing a mirror on the underside that showed us our own reflection. And that was the end.
This past weekend was YALLWEST, a YA book and author festival that's the West Coast version of YALLFEST, which takes place in South Carolina. YALLWEST was held at Santa Monica High School, which is ENORMOUS. Seriously, it's the size of a small college campus, with separate buildings for Humanities, Science, etc. It even has Harry Potter-esque houses. Also, the abbreviation for the school is Samohi, which looks like a made-up word in a phonology paper.
Leigh Bardugo suggested that heroes and villains (who they are, what they want) can flow from worldbuilding.
Leigh Bardugo said something which I'll paraphrase from memory as, "No matter what you do/what your passion is, there'll always be days when it feels like a job that you're not good at." This was sort of reassuring for both writing and linguistics.
Write What You Know–Or What You Want?
So I went to this panel after lunch, and I got there early since I'd skipped the noon panel slot. I was first in line (insofar as there was a line), and I was sitting cross-legged on the floor, knitting my cable scarf, when who should appear in the hallway but Sarah McCarry, a.k.a. The Rejectionist, author of the Metamorphoses Trilogy! This wasn't her panel; she was just attending. I tried not to stare in awe as she joined the end of the line.
Speaking of recognizing people, I'm also pretty sure I saw a girl in the audience who was sitting next to me at a panel at the LA Times Festival of Books last year. I guess my memory for faces is better than I thought.
The topic of this panel was a little unclear (even to the panelists), but the conversation turned to diversity and #ownvoices pretty fast.
In the lightning round, Stephanie Kuehn asked everyone to name "the most interesting emotion." I thought this was a fascinating question, so I recorded everyone's responses: JCW: sadness; BC: anger; RA: fear; ES: rage; AG: forgiveness; JV: jealousy; SB: depression; SK: spite.
Another lightning round question was "the last book that made you cry," which opened the door to the panelists telling other panelists which of their books had made them cry, discussing whether they cried over books at all, and sharing stories of crying over books on public transportation.
I didn't take any notes at this panel, but I remember a few things: Arwen Elys Dayton's parents named her after the Lord of the Rings character. Jessica Khoury has a Syrian grandfather.
Someone, I can't remember who now, said she actually felt like writing secondary world fantasy was easier than writing fiction set in the real world because she could control everything and didn't have to worry about getting facts right. I feel exactly the same way. Of course, you end up having to do a lot of research to write fantasy too, but somehow it seems less daunting than trying to write a story set in the real world in any place or time you haven't lived in yourself.
I finished knitting my scarf during this panel!
I'm not sure what the title was supposed to suggest, but this was basically the queer lit panel.
An audience member asked what I thought was a very good question about LGBT people trying to gain acceptance through conformity/by making an effort to portray themselves as "normal." Examples include making the case for gay marriage by showing that gay couples are just like straight couples and criticizing these loathsome bathroom bills by showing pictures of, say, a prototypically masculine-looking trans man in a women's restroom to show how absurd it would be to force him to use it. The audience member's point was that queer folks shouldn't have to mold themselves into society's idea of what normal is in order to be accepted. For instance, people should have the right to use whichever bathroom they feel most comfortable in even if their gender presentation is more ambiguous or they aren't fully passing. In an ideal world, such an argument should be enough to convince people that bathroom bills are harmful and unnecessary (though I fear it isn't). Anyway, to all of this Sarah McCarry said authors should "write about weirdos and freaks" like they're just as "interesting, complex, and valid" as anyone else.
This was a historical fiction panel, with a lot of the conversation focused on research (but the fun parts, like travel and what sorts of things you've Googled that have probably gotten you on an FBI watchlist!).
All the panelists said how valuable oral histories are, and Sherri L. Smith said the Library of Congress has tape recordings of interviews with ordinary people present at historically momentous events.
After my last panel, I nipped down to the Mysterious Galaxy book tent and bought Leigh Bardugo's Six of Crows. It's set in the same universe as her Grisha trilogy, which I never finished, but I've heard a lot of great things about this latest novel, so I'm excited to read it.