Although I haven’t been to SXSW or CMJ because I declined to go, I know the scene well. I first went to a SciFi Con in the 80s in Glasgow and felt confused, out of place and a bit attracted. And I think also of the gigs where outsiderdom is self-conciously and extravagantly celebrated, like the crowd of goths in full regelia at a Sisters of Mercy revival, or a visit to town by Keiji Haino, or Sun City Girls….
Anyway, the passage is from The Fortress of Solitude (2002) by Jonathan Lethem, a fictional autobiography, in which the author attends a SciFi Con panel where his dad, Abraham, an experimental film artist who’s money gig is SciFi graphics, is on the podium when someone from the audience asks…
“Do you feel a part of the field, warts and all?”
Abraham shrugged. “It’s a bohemian demimonde, like any other. There are similar convocations in the world of so-called experimental film, but I’ve always declined to go. Some attend imagining they can further themselves. But the work, the true work, is of course carried on elsewhere. Perhaps for me the stakes there are too high, so I accept your invitations instead. I don’t ponder these things. An event like this is an accident, not necessarily a happy one. I frankly marvel at the oddness of a room gathered in honor of a forgotten man, a nobody. Perhaps I can wake you from the trance you’re in, but I doubt it.”
Fifty people laughed in delighted recognition, and a light spontaneous applause broke out. I heard a woman in the row ahead whisper appreciatively, “He always says that.”
“I’m ashamed of myself,” said my father.
The applause grew. Buddy Green shot upright from his chair and led the clapping. Only Pflug refused the consensus, turning in his chair.
“I’ve wasted my life.”
This was the last thing I made out before my father was drowned in the ovation. A two-way masochism was at work here, made possible by the total insularity of the gathering. The bohemian demimonde, as Abraham called it. My father was their pet heretic, their designated griever for lost or abandoned possibility. The way he brandished his failure thrilled this crowd, and they’d obviously known it was coming. By accepting his contempt like a lash on their backs, the Elk Lodge of ForbiddenCon 7 could feel ratified in their unworthy worthiness, their good sense of humor about themselves and their chosen deficiencies.
And yet I felt his not entirely withheld affection too. Through his eyes I could even share it. I thought of my namesake’s “Chimes of Freedom”- tolling for the aching whose wounds cannot be nursed, for the countless confused accused misused strung-out ones and worse, and for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe! Certainly I’d witnessed gatherings of rock critics or college-radio DJs, on panels at the South by Southwest conference or the CMJ, which were no less self-congratulatorily marginal. Only the costumes were different. I flashed on a vision of a world dotted with conferences, convocations, and “Cons” of all types, each an engine for converting feelings of inferiority and self-loathing into their opposites.
The Fortress of Solitude is a very good book and you should read it.