Attention Seekers, Value Seekers

I’d like to round out my reactions to the New Age/Paganist convention we attended this past weekend, ConVocation. Convocation is sponsored by The Magical Education Council in Michigan; the 2010 event was the organization’s sixteenth. According to the MEC’s mission statement, “This organization is established for the following purpose: to create community by promoting the sharing of knowledge, experience, and fellowship among people who follow mystical and esoteric traditions.”

As I’ve noted in earlier posts, we’ve recently also attended a science fiction convention called ConFusion just a couple of miles from ConVocation in Detroit’s convention alley, you might say, along I-75 in the metro’s northern suburbs. Structurally the two conventions were very similar, but the interesting contrast for me was a seemingly different internal structure. While attending the last three sci-fi conventions over a period of about six years, it became ever more clear to me that the audiences were shrinking and that at least half of those attending were present (as we were present at the last ConFusion) with the agenda of self-promotion. We were there to sell my novels. This became very obvious in those sessions where I was a panelist and could therefore, from the front table, see the nametags of the audience. Many—and in some panels most—of those attending had panelist ribbons under their nametags. We were addressing insiders who would later address us… Among these some of those simply attending (no ribbon visible) revealed themselves in commentary and questions posed to be would-be artists, writers, or musicians. We were among Attention Seekers. The audience—those seeking values, had greatly diminished.

I must not generalize, of course, but experience is experience. Working our booth in the Vendor room, the same pattern emerged even more sharply. ConFusion is an entertainment venue, but far too few of those who stopped to chat were present for entertainment. They were all selling or promoting something.

Now for the contrast. I mentioned in the last post that ConVocation had a much larger audience; insiders in that audience, however, were the exception. Most of those attending—and eyeballing them they matched ConFusion’s audience in demographic and income characteristics—were present because they sought something of value. A snapshot. I arrived quite early on Friday morning not wishing to miss the single session on publishing. As I entered the lobby and went down the halls to find registration, I saw six different women each sitting on a chair, alone. Each was absorbed in the reading of a book.

This got me thinking in the days that followed. Attention seeking, value seeking. Lots of food for thought there as we look out into the world—especially the cybernetic world of information overload. But the sorting of these thoughts is still in progress.

Interesting Contrasts

We are attending ConVocation, a New Age/Paganist convention just a hop and a skip from the location where we attended ConFusion, the science fiction convention.  We is Dwarf Planet Press. We did not manage to get a vendor spot ahead of time. Had we done so, our tidy, elegant, industrial style booth, used by Editorial Code and Data for a decade at reference publishing conventions (at which we thought we looked  daring) would have looked at ConVocation like a Puritan at a cocktail party. Jewelry, textiles, and magical implements dominated the vendor space, although we glimpsed a book or two for sale at nearly every booth. The contrast between the sci-fi and the pagan event was startling. The differences?

• Attendance: ConVocation was/is crowded, masses of people.
• Content: More than a hundred lectures, presentations, and classes—all of them full.
• Quality: We attended four sessions yesterday, and three of the four were superb.
• Audience Participation: Much more active and lively. In fairness to ConFusion, the few participants there were as well-informed as at ConVocation.

Our first and challenging session yesterday was a presentation by Llewellyn Worldwide, the leading New Age Publisher. I confesss that I'd never heard of them before. Llewellyn publishes 135 books a year. One of their acquisitions editor and a promotional executive gave a fascinating presentation aimed at new writers, but what we heard and understood from comments on the margins, from anecdotes illustrating good advice, and from the context is how one really goes about promoting books in the modern day. Awesome, brother, awesome. But more later, not least some comments on what the contrast tells me. Must run to attend ConVocation's second day—and this conference is good enough so that we must be there at 9 am sharp!

Elusive Culture

Over roughly a decade I’ve attended four science fiction conventions in Michigan, two called ConClave and two ConFusion, my last, this past weekend, one of the latter. Before that time I’d attended one in Minneapolis, one in Chicago, and a WorldCon in Kansas City—that one because I was one of the Hugo nominees and invited to attend. Despite this very limited sample, I drove home from my last ConFusion spontaneously forming, in my thoughts, a strong convictions about the changes over time in SF culture—until I stopped myself dead.

In every earlier case as also in this one, I spent three days in a hotel, attended five or six sessions, talked to two- or three-score people through the noise and the turmoil, watched oddly costumed people, garish goods and strange art on display, listened to prominent figures most of whose books I’d never read—and marveled at it all. And the residual impressions of this activity, filtered through my own accumulated life’s memories, is what I call culture?

No, nothing of the sort. But then, come to think of it, my views of Culture writ large—American culture, Western culture—are built up much the same way: that of the greater culture strongly influenced by a relentless stream of newsprint and media images, mixed with the residues of contacts with real people, problems in business, annoyance in travel, the contents of books read, films seen, art beheld, music heard. And this huge but not systematically studied mélange, synthesized in the endlessly fluctuating cauldrons of emotion into a single impression, that is my own subjective sense of culture. Not that I’ll avoid the word in the future. Such habits are hard to break. But at least today I realize the oddity of speaking of a subjective assessment of reality (or a part of it) as if it had a hard, independent existence, a singularity and stability, outside of myself.

Having said all this, some of the things I noted at ConFusion 2010:

• The paranormal in one special form—vampirism, zombies—played a major role at this convention, and not at all because it was the convention’s theme. It wasn’t. I heard no references to the paranormal as normally understood, the real thing as it were.
• I had a sense that many fans and panelists spontaneously used television series as the central points of reference when wishing to appeal to common knowledge—along with a few well-known fantasy-style books (Tolkien’s, for instance—rather than the science fiction greats).
• The prominent philosophical or sociological issue was feminism, perhaps because most of the authors present were women.
• The economic shadow that now weighs down on Michigan was obvious and tangible, many people suddenly opening up and relating their own woes at great length when asked about themselves. We heard many and very strange tales about the difficulties of getting by. And going to an SF convention was evidently a temporary escape into a better world for many—despite its growing population of blood-sucking mirages made modern, slender, sexy, and immortal.