{"id":7601,"date":"2017-08-03T13:03:43","date_gmt":"2017-08-03T21:03:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=7601"},"modified":"2017-08-04T05:08:03","modified_gmt":"2017-08-04T13:08:03","slug":"a-tale-of-two-cities-or-i-think-ill-wait-another-year","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=7601","title":{"rendered":"A Tale of Two Cities (or, I Think I’ll Wait Another Year)"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

\"trudeauocalypse\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The first city is Montreal, to which I’ll be returning next week: Concordia once more, this time to deliver a lecture entitled “The Best-Case Apocalypse: Why Reality Is Worse Than Fiction.” (I was going to call it “My Dinner With Daniel”, but I figured the reference might be too obscure.) It’s part of a longer program for summer students, but the events of August 10th\u2014 collectively billed as a “Workshop on Speculative Fictions and Methods”\u2014 is open to the public:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n
\n\n\n\n\n\n
\n
10AM-12PM:<\/div>\n<\/td>\n
\u00a0Sarah Sharma, University of Toronto\u00a0 \u201cNo Exit\u201d<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
\n
1:30-3:30PM:<\/div>\n<\/td>\n
Ezekiel Dixon Roman, University of Pennsylvania, \u201cRethinking Quantification Toward the AutoPoietic Turn\/Overturn\u201d<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
\n
4:00PM-6PM:<\/div>\n<\/td>\n
Me, using a fair bit of casual profanity.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n

I’ll be recycling the pareidolia-origin-of-religion bit from my 2014 Privacy talk, but most of the other stuff is new. Drop by if you happen to be in the neighborhood.\u00a0 The neighborhood is here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

“I’ll bring the smokes, you bring the beer,
\nI think I’ll wait another year.”
\n\u2014Amanda Palmer<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The second City is Lviv, in Ukraine, and holy shit did that implode suddenly.<\/p>\n

Or rather, it imploded over time, and I just found out about it suddenly.<\/p>\n

I mentioned back in April<\/a> that I’d be attending the Lviv International Literary Festival this Fall, in commemoration of the Ukrainian publication\u00a0 of Blindsight<\/em>. Things seemed to be going along tickety-boo. I was corresponding with the translators\u2014 who seemed like really nice people\u2014 and helping them out with the fiddly bits. I was in intermittent touch with Sofia Cheliak, a program director at the festival. Just a few weeks back the translators passed on a message from the publisher, asking what airport I wanted to fly out of.<\/p>\n

Except apparently they didn’t. Or rather, the publisher never sent that message. The translators\u00a0 just\u2014 made it up or something.\u00a0 In fact, the whole thing had been called off<\/a> sometime before July 10, and no one had told me. First I heard of it was when Sofia showed up on Facebook and asked if I could maybe apply for a Canada Council grant to cover the trip. (I could not; I wouldn’t have found out whether said grant had been approved until a couple of months after the festival. Not a chance I was willing to take.)<\/p>\n

Turns out the translators, well, never finished the translation. And then never told me that the trip had been canceled (which apparently they’d been told to do, although since they’d also apparently stopped responding to contact from the publisher, I’m not entirely certain how that instruction was delivered and\/or confirmed.)\u00a0 Apparently Sofia herself didn’t know what was going on until she stumbled onto Oleksy’s (my Ukrainian publisher’s) Facebook announcement.<\/p>\n

I poked the translators myself from this end, got a fractured reply to the effect of we’re-sure-we-told-you-before-but-here-it-is-again<\/em>. Family troubles. Blindsight<\/em> untranslated. SNAFU.<\/p>\n

To Sofia’s and Oleksy’s enormous credit, they’re willing to have me over this fall anyway (last I heard, Sofia was actually approaching the Canadian embassy in hope of some kind of financial support). Given that there won’t be any book in evidence, though, there’s not much I could do there except drink and look cute. At my age, I can only do one of those things with any proficiency, and I bet the average Ukrainian could beat me even at that.<\/p>\n

Next<\/em> year, though, I’m assured that Blindsight<\/em> will be ready. And I’m also assured that the offer to be a festival guest stands. So I think we’re just gonna move the date on that sidebar forward by a year, and steady as she goes.<\/p>\n

It’s been a shitshow, but it looks like we were all blindsided\u2014 me, the festival, the publisher. Sofia and Oleksy are to be commended for offering to make it work anyway\u2014 nay, even encouraging<\/em> me to come this year, and promising me a great time even in the absence of anything to pimp. But clearly it would be better for everyone if we put this off.<\/p>\n

I don’t know if any Lvivians are reading the ‘crawl right now; if so, know that I am truly bummed about this. But know also that I am still really looking forward to getting over there\u2014 and if it takes another year, it’ll just be that much sweeter when I arrive.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The first city is Montreal, to which I’ll be returning next week: Concordia once more, this time to deliver a lecture entitled “The Best-Case Apocalypse: Why Reality Is Worse Than Fiction.” (I was going to call it “My Dinner With Daniel”, but I figured the reference might be too obscure.) It’s part of a longer […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35,20,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7601","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-the-road","category-public-interface","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7601","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7601"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7601\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7615,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7601\/revisions\/7615"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7601"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7601"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7601"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}