(no subject)

[learnedax]

Catching up on the olympics, thanks to TiVo, has made me realize how many strong parallels they have with Pennsic. From the athletic core which revives ancient tradition (with champions contesting points ranging from archery to fencing) to the strong cultural representations of diverse homelands, there's a big cognitive similarity. When landscape-transforming temporary construction, ingrained rivalries, and a healthy dose of pomp and circumstance are taken into account, I begin to seriously wonder whether the two events serve similar psychological purposes.

This nicely dovetails into two longstanding discussions that came up again at war: first, is there any significant difference between Pennsic and a large sci-fi convention, and second, is the role of martial activity within the SCA truly a critical element, or merely a historical quirk?

Specifically, if fighting, as the Olympic tradition seems to, serves a higher purpose than being yet another fun thing that people do, it represents a qualitative difference between the SCA and other things that the counterculture does... And if it's just a diversion for a bunch of stick-jocks, then what is Pennsic but a themed con?

Thoughts?

Comments

[learnedax.livejournal.com]

BM is not part of the Geek Nation. It's not an offshoot of Fandom in any way shape or form.

My knowledge of BM is purely second-hand, so I must bow to your experience.

what would you say that theme is?

DIY interactive art projects.

What is "just" about a Themed Con?

It's not that I consider Geek events in general a lesser class, it is that I wonder what Pennsic's value-add is that makes us endure its hardships.

So what is it you're looking to find?

Meaning. Why we (and in large part I mean I) do what we do. What's special about Pennsic? Could we get the same thing out of an event at a hotel? (Sure, it'd be different, but even keeping the level of authenticity (which I doubt is vital to the majority of Pennsic attendees anyway) there is plenty you can authentically do indoors with the same level of creative effort we currently supply. We ignore modern tents, hot showers, and trips to Walmart, why not ignore hotel rooms?)

I believe the answer is no, and I believe most of us would agree, but I don't know where the magic is. Fresh air? Pride of overcoming the environment? Perverse enjoyment of the heat? None of these seems remotely sufficient, though they all exist in some measure.

Maybe Pennsic is atomic, possessed of a gestalt we can't dissect, but I want to understand its magic, and I don't think that should be impossible.

[siderea]

*Ah*. OK.

Well, that doesn't seem like a mystery to me. The activities of Pennsic and WorldCon are quite different, and their societies are not so overlapping any more. For the first: As interested as I am in SF/F (and not at all in Horror -- when did they get let in?) I'm having trouble marshalling enough interest in WorldCon to go; at least Pennsic has lots of things which I like to do, better and more merchants, my kind of dancing and music, etc. As to the second: When I go to Pennsic, I wi ll see scads of friends from around the Knowne World, because that's the society I'm in. When I go to WorldCon, I'll see... some Scadians I know from around the world. :)

Pennsic is the Jerusalem of Scadians. If you're not going there to immerse yourse lf in your culture, then you're there for some more specific fun. WorldCon is the Jerusalem of Fen. I could go, but would only for specific activities or interests since it's not my social set. I wouldn't be going for the social scene. And I think the opposite is true for Fen who drop in on Pennsic.

Burning Man is very similar in that regard. It's more like Mecca, in that, you have to go, in that society. You can be a Scadian without going to Pennsic, but you can't be a Black Rock Citizen without g oing to Burning Man.

Each of these three events has other differences; deeper differences in the ways their societies organize, their norms and values, and so forth. It would take an army of Anthropology PhDs lifetimes to explicate them all. None of th ese differences is itself a make-or-break sort of thing, but in each case they add up into a gestalt of a society which is quite different from the others, such that Burning Man is not a Pennsic substitute, which is not a WorldCon substitute, etc.

When I said work is central, I'm saying something more than, and more profound than, "fresh air, pride of overcoming the environment, or perverse enjoyment of the heat".

Above all things, Pennsic draws people who want to be in a crowd of 12,000 other people who think being at Pennsic and doing the sorts of things one does at Pennsic is cool. That may sound trivial or tautological, but it's neither.

Pennsic is a gathering, perforce and by choice, of people who think spending their vacation workin g on things, particularly groovy-neato-things (for each person's own personal definition of groovy-neato-things), is cool. So people don't just show up to work, but to see and participate in what other people are working on. We do work as a performa nce art -- terracing hillsides and turning the Barn in to Chartres Cathedral; throwing together a choral performance in a week, or staging a 2000-person battle; turning pots or turning out archers for the war points; erecting gates and fountains, and thro wing parties and dances. We show off the armor we made, the garb we made, the mead we made, the oven we made. We recite the lines we memorized, we demonstrate the flashy dance steps we mastered, we throw the shots we worked on all winter. It's not just that we do cool things, or that there are cool things to see, but that it's a whole society of people doing cool things, for that definition of cool which is particularly Scadian.

At WorldCon, people are also getting together to be with people who share the same notion of what is cool, but it's a different notion of what is cool. It's, if I can extrapolate from the single WorldCon I attended 15 years ago, a notion of cool which is focused around wit and conversation and creative ideas and intelligent d iscourse. One goes, I gather, to a WorldCon to talk and to listen to talk.
[more]C

[juldea.livejournal.com]

In this thread, you have used two words - well, one word and one acronym - that I do not know the definitions of. SMOF = Secret Masters of Fandom, but I have no clue who they are (and perhaps I will remain ignorant, if it's truly secret!) Fen is a word I'm unfamiliar with. Will you please enlighten me? :)

[siderea]

SMOF are the people who run Cons. Think "Service Folks" in SCA parlance.

Fen is the (Midwest?) plural of Fan. One fan, two fen.

[juldea.livejournal.com]

Heh. "Service Folks" isn't a part of my vocabulary yet, either. I assume, then, I can reasonably interchange SMOF and Con Staff?

[alexx-kay.livejournal.com]

SMOFs are (VERY approximately) equivalent to Pelicans. But there is no group which "awards" SMOF-ness. It's just a term that gets used to describe a certain class of person. Not all Staff are SMOFs, and not all SMOFs at a con will automatically be staffing it.

I guess that the fannish equivalent of a peerage *award* would be to be selected as Fan Guest of Honor. Or possibly winning a Hugo in one of those fandom-related categories.

I should also note that this usage of SMOF seems relatively recent to me. When I was getting started in fandom, the term SMOF was used ironically, as a way of commenting both on occasional fannish paranoia, and on the sense that fandom was far too chaotic to *actually* have Secret Masters.

[herooftheage.livejournal.com]

Well, they do appear in the first addition of Illuminati!, so it must have been a common term by 1982. I sort of recall hearing it during the 70s as a joke with a point behind it - i.e. that it was funny to think of people doing the work as the "Secret Masters".

[alexx-kay.livejournal.com]

Oh certainly the term *existed* then. But my impression was that the Illumnati game intended SMOFs as more like "Orbital Mind Control Lasers" (funny due to non-existence) than "Boy Scouts" (funny because of lack of real-world clout).

[dglenn.livejournal.com]

"Fen" is simply the plural of "[SF] fan".

As for SMOFs, not really so secret, more "behind the scenes"; folks who you'll keep running into over and over organizing things or helping the folks who are organizing things. I'm sure there's a nuance or three that I'm missing there, but that's a start.

[juldea.livejournal.com]

Yes, that does help. Thanks!

[jducoeur]

One goes, I gather, to a WorldCon to talk and to listen to talk.

Disclaimer upfront: I agree with the core of your point.

That said, this is an oversimplification of Worldcon -- it's not very different from saying that people go to Pennsic to fight and to watch people fight.

The talking and listening to talking is probably the single biggest element, and informs a lot of the tone, but many (perhaps most) people are actually there for other reasons. Indeed, much like Pennsic, Worldcon is a major nexus of a number of different activities. The filkers are mainly there for the filking; the gamers are mainly there for the gaming; lots of people are there mainly for the shopping and socializing. The fact that 1-2 thousand people or so are mainly there for the panels and lectures and such sounds impressive until you consider that that's out of 3-5 thousand attendees.

So in that respect, it's rather like Pennsic: a large event that cuts across a number of related activities that hang together under a big tent. Like Pennsic, the tone and style are very strongly informed by the nature of the single most central activity, but the activity itself is actually practiced by a minority of the attendees...

[siderea]

The talking and listening to talking is probably the single biggest element, and informs a lot of the tone, but many (perhaps most) people are actually there for other reasons. Indeed, much like Pennsic, Worldcon is a major nexus of a number of different activities. The filkers are mainly there for the filking; the gamers are mainly there for the gaming; lots of people are there mainly for the shopping and socializing.

But, of the alternatives you list, only shoping is not "talking and listening". Gaming is talking and listening (unless you're talking boffers or disk guns, or things like chess?) and socializing is talking and listening. Filking is listening and, oh, alright, singing.

When I wrote "talking and listening", I was trying to find an expression which encompasses the major themes which are as you stated them, particularly: the panels/lectures, the socializing (which, I gather from repute, is more conversational than, say, a dance party), and the awards stuff.

[siderea]

WorldCon is not, I think, focused around being transformative, the way Scadians relate to Pennsic. Scadians talk about Magic Moments, which I think is analogous to the driving thirst of SF Fen for that "Sensowonda". I think it's the same sort of appetite (exoticism), but it takes two very different forms in those two societies (and a third form in BM). Pennsic-goers long to be transported by their experience. Not all of the m are history-oriented, but all of them want the real world to fall away and for them to feel, briefly, like they're someone or somewhere else; a crossing into liminal space. But WorldCon attendees aren't looking for that transport from their WorldCon experience. They're looking, perhaps, for their minds to be blown by fascinating and delightful ideas. I think they're looking for intellectual raport, a camraderie of intellect and fancy. Perhaps some of them would like to chime in?

The equivalent at BM is, I think, the loss of self. Much of BM pursues the ecstatic as opposed to the exotic. This is the commonality between the poets and the partiers, the dancers and the druggies.
o

[matildalucet.livejournal.com]

"transported by their experience." THAT'S what I was trying to bring my mind to. It's hard to get a periodoid atmosphere in a hotel. Too much polish, too much modern-looking staff. The Coopers make an attempt (or so I tell myself, regardless of what they think they're doing) to blend in and I can smile at them and not get distracted. No matter how nice hotel staff is, they don't look like us, don't sound like us, and I feel like an alien in a sideless surcoat in their space (at least at Birka).

[alexx-kay.livejournal.com]

I found fandom long before the SCA, and cons (in general) were certainly "liminal space" for me at the time. I think that a huge part of what made it so impressive for me (and, I suspect, many others of my cohort) was the sense of having found My People, when I hadn't previously known that they even existed. Nowadays, I am with My People almost constantly, so cons are no longer so exciting to me as they once were.

[siderea]

Just to confirm we're on the wavelength: Are you sure you're using "liminal" correctly? Substitute "ritual" and tell me if that sentence still says what you meant for it to say. It does not mean merely "special", and it certainly doesn't mean "impressive", "convivial", "homelike", or "having found My People". Is your second sentence suppose to demonstrate the first, or is it more "in addition to" the first?

See metahacker's comment below about "bringing self along" -- do you agree?

[alexx-kay.livejournal.com]

I believe that I understand what "liminal" means, and that is is close in idea-space to "ritual". My subjective experience of "having found my People" -- when I hadn't previously known that they even existed, which is a vital element -- was very like the (successful) ritual experiences I have had. To use another term from upthread, it was very much a Magic Moment.

On further reflection, there is a significant difference in that that moment of first discovery is not something I sought out, nor that I try to (or think I could) replicate. At least some SCAdians view the creation of such moments as an important goal. So I guess I more or less agree with your point :-)

Regarding "bringing self along": I don't strongly disagree with metahacker, but I think he is describing his own experience more than a universal. At any rate, I have observed people with an opposite polarity to what he describes.

My experience at my first con was not one of leaving myself behind, but of leaving my everyday hide-for-survival mask behind for the first time. Mind, I never identified myself with that mask, and have had little need for it in more recent decades.