Montreal bits

[mrissa]

I keep meaning to post about Farthing Party and the trip to Montreal, but I'm afraid I haven't got anything coherent and organized to say, just sorts of fragments. I keep mulling over mishearing tanac say "emergent fantasy" and trying to figure out what that would look like.

papersky on I forget which panel: "You can tell if something is real if it sometimes makes things worse."

Robert Charles Wilson on the Fixing Novels panel: ask yourself what kind of pleasure the story is to be giving people and if it's doing so. I wonder how much this is something most writers can do well without help. I know some writers are a great deal better at identifying what people might like about their work than others.

I don't have one simple rule for whether a panel is good or not -- but if I've written down a bunch of titles to request from the library, that's a good sign, and the panel that got me that way was the "Honorary SF" panel, the one about works that aren't SF but are much beloved by SF readers anyway. The panelists got past Patrick O'Brian and on to things I hadn't read in fairly short order, much appreciated. (Not that I have any objection to discussions of Patrick O'Brian, of course.)

When we went to Maple Delight for ice cream and papersky and rysmiel said that the cafe and the maple museum downstairs were founded for the promotion of the use of maple syrup, maple sugar, etc., I got this mental sort of translation to a couple of generations of Vorkosigans later, having a Bug Butter Delight shop in Vorbarr Sultana. This pleased me, and I can't remember whether I said it out loud.

I am still obsessed with spinach, and when in Montreal I can feed this obsession with crispy spinach. Three nights in a row for one part of the trip. Oh so fine. Good plain. Good with squids. Good in peanut sauce. So versatile!

Every time I came out of the hotel changing rooms from swimming to get in the elevator and go upstairs to get showered and dressed, the hotel staff was showing someone around the event facilities. Every single time. I got the urge to say, "Women in string bikinis do not come with the conference rooms! You have to bring your own if you want some!" Only I'm not sure how to say that in French. (My French is, however, up for, "Is that also peach-blueberry like the other? Great, I'll take it, too," and, "In Minnesota, we love hockey. It's the State of Hockey, in the U.S." If anyone can tell me what the French for curling is, I'd appreciate it. The sport curling, not the thing hair does.)

Suite 88 is still my chocolate source of choice near the hotel, but seabream and I made it to Juliette et Chocolat (after trying and failing with redbird, cattitude, and timprov), and it is certainly worth attention. I have no idea how long it would take me to try everything interesting on that chocolate menu. Awhile, let's say. More time than I'm likely to get to spend in Montreal. My land. Such an abundance of chocolate.

I really do like Montreal.

Comments

[tanac.livejournal.com]

It is a chocolate haven of sorts, definitely. I don't know that I could live there without becoming quite Round.

Emergent fantasy - sort of like liminal fantasy, only without the 'nobody notices the fantastic elements as anything out of the ordinary because for them that's how life has always been', but perhaps on that same scale of the fantastic (as opposed to a true intrusion fantasy)? And no wide-eyed wonder, either. Just... small joyful moments.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

Do they have to be joyful? If they're not uniformly joyful, maybe my Thing (ILE) would count as that.

[tanac.livejournal.com]

I could see not-joyful, as well. The entire gamut, really, but on a pretty minor scale, each incident take on its own.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

That's a good take on it. I was thinking of it as the sort of thing where it isn't fantasy if you take each piece separately, but taken together they become fantasy.

[columbina.livejournal.com]

I don't think I have ever successfully identified what sort of pleasure my fiction gives OTHER people. I think, for whatever reason, I suck especially badly at it. There are several consequences of this, none of them great. I'd love to improve the skill, but I don't know how.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure how to, either, except to give people things to read and listen to what they say they like. Which has its drawbacks, certainly.

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

My dictionaries assert unanimously that the French for curling is 'le curling'. This is a big disappointment to me.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

No kidding!

[redbird]

This reminder of all the chocolate and ice cream I didn't get this trip is, if nothing else, evidence of the value of longer trips. Despite what the cat had to say when we got back.

[snickelish.livejournal.com]

The panelists got past Patrick O'Brian and on to things I hadn't read in fairly short order, much appreciated.

Ooh! Maybe a list will be forthcoming? Or a link to such a list?

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Alas, but I didn't write down most of the things I had already read, so I think it would be much more useful from someone more organized in that direction than I am.

[snickelish.livejournal.com]

Hmm, I will definitely have to keep an eye out. :)

[rezendi.livejournal.com]

I'm very fond of Montreal myself, and sad that I missed the Farthing party yet again (alas, it was a schedule conflict with this other party in the desert.)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I hope you had a really good time. I promise that nobody would have been happy if you'd stayed in Montreal and I'd gone to Burning Man instead, so it's really just as well we didn't try it that way.

[aedifica]

What's crispy spinach? It sounds promising.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

They flash-fry spinach, I think in peanut oil. No batter or anything, just the spinach. It comes out crispy and fragile. Most of the places that serve it by itself dust it with sugar, which is a hazard: the better crispy spinach has just a tiny bit of sugar, in my opinion. I think it probably takes incredibly hot oil and practiced technique so as to make it crisp rather than wilting.

[aedifica]

It mostly sounds very good. I'm failing to imagine what it would be like with sugar--I'll just have to find some and try it sometime!

[seabream.livejournal.com]

According to my mother, it's not so much flash fried, as deep fried twice. Sort of like sweet potato fries. Also, she's used to it being unseasoned or lightly salted. This may be a thing specific to Hong Kong, much like tossing popcorn in sugar rather than salt. I found it interesting when I learned that there were people who found caramel popcorn perfectly normal but boggled at an order for unsalted buttered popcorn with a request for a sugar shaker.

That Bug Butter shop is a nice image. If you said it aloud I didn't hear it, so I'm glad that you remembered.

More on food combinations: The smoked salmon and maple syrup thing may or may not be specifically Canadian - it's something my mum remembers having had long before she moved here. Same with maple syrup and bacon (sorry tanac).

[aedifica]

Sugared popcorn is German, too--I'm not sure about the rest of Europe, but I remember ordering popcorn in a German movie theater and being very surprised to find it sweet. I got used to it by the end of the movie, but I still generally prefer it salted.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I wonder if that's why it's one of the options in the Omaha area, if I'm remembering correctly. Or whether that's just a kettle corn thing or what.

(It might be an option here, too, but I never get popcorn at art fairs etc. and am mostly not with people who do any more.)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I still think maple syrup would be better with unsmoked salmon, but maple syrup and bacon is not specifically Canadian at all, I can verify. Or else it's part of our status as The Lost Province.

non sequitur

[tournevis.livejournal.com]

You got most of what I noted as interesting in the panels! Love spinach and allergic to spinach *pouts*. French for curling is curling.

Re: non sequitur

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Allergic to spinach? That's awful! I'm so sorry!

One of my superhero names around here is the Non Sequitess.

Re: non sequitur

[tournevis.livejournal.com]

*love* I'm allergic to spinach, kale, tea, berries... It sucks.

Re: non sequitur

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

That does suck. Brussels sprouts, too? Arugula? I feel like I am probably rubbing salt in the wound here, but I just love bitter greens so much that in your position I'd probably keep trying to figure out something that would fulfill the same urge. This has more point when I'm asking people in the same city as me, so I can find sheep cheese for them to eat next time they come over or whatever the thing is.

Re: non sequitur

[tournevis.livejournal.com]

I can have Brussel Sprouts, thank goodness. Arugula, I can have a little. Same with asparagus. Some days I cannot.