Technically, the rapier is a birthday present for the boy, and the zweihander and seax are mine (the zweihander is nearly as tall as I am, thus the picture with the quarterstaff for scale) but the Siler household acquired a lot of new weaponry today. I thought the Michiana Renaissance Festival was quite a bit more impressive than I was expecting, and the attendance was really impressive– it’s being held at the 4-H Fairgrounds, and judging from the parking in the lot, I’d say attendance was at least a good percentage of what the Fair usually generates on a Saturday.
Got a video game to finish and a book to (hopefully) get a good percentage of the way through, so that’s all I’ve got for today, but one way or another it’s already been a good day.
… okay, that picture doesn’t have anything to do with the Ren Faire, but … holy cow, y’all, Duolingo gets me all the sudden. I really want to use this as a cover pic somewhere, but it’s completely the wrong aspect ratio for everything and that’s very disappointing.
So the Ren Faire (Ren, autocorrect, you bastard, not red! Ren!!!) was an absolute blast even though I almost died, and the only question is whether we’re going to make this an annual event or something we do every couple of years. We are definitely going to pick a weekend where the weather is better, and if I had any influence over the organizers I would be screaming at them that they need to make this a September-October event and not an August-September event.
After making a huge deal about my outfit here and elsewhere for several days, I ended up going with the kilt, hose, sporran, and … that’s it. Why? I spent four seconds outside in that shirt and discovered that it didn’t breathe at all and if I wore it I was going to die. I ended up just throwing on a regular cotton t-shirt, and … it was fine. One way Ren Faires are different from cons is that nobody’s really making a big deal about taking pictures of each other, or at least they aren’t at this one, possibly because there were thirty thousand fucking people there. I posted this picture already, but look at all the nerds:
Everyone in this picture looks comfortably dressed and there are only a couple of people right up near the camera who are clearly in garb (and I’m not sure the woman in the grey dress, dead center, counts) but there were people walking around this thing in full suits of metal armor. People dressed like Jon Snow from Game of Thrones, wearing armor and fur clothing designed for winter. Ren Faire people are a different fucking breed, y’all. These motherfuckers are warriors. They are also crazy, and I cannot believe that I didn’t see a single person passed out from heat exhaustion all day. I couldn’t handle a shirt and there were people walking around in plate armor.
The Michigan festival is particularly cool because it is a permanent installment. I’m not sure how many of these things are fly-by-night operations and how many have permanent buildings like this, but we were there for about five hours and I’m certain we didn’t see everything. There was a mermaid apparently? No idea where she was. We watched a magician and a few jugglers and I kinda wanted the boy to try his hand at throwing spears at things but he declined, and the horses for the joust were probably the largest I’ve ever seen (did we watch the joust? We did not. Too many damn people too close together and no shade.) and the shops were amazing if perhaps crazily overpriced in certain ways and other than the nearly dying and the half-mile walk on a mud path through overgrown foliage from the parking lot, we all had a hell of a lot of fun.
And, oh, Christ, did I spend a lot of money, to the point where I’m not even going to tell you what this fuckawesome quarterstaff and this fuckamazing war hammer cost:
Let me put it this way: I first had my eye on something they were calling a Dwarven Axe, until I discovered they wanted two thousand five hundred dollars for it.
I did not spend two thousand five hundred dollars. I spent a larger fraction of that than I probably should have, though.
The staff is 6′ tall and the war hammer is 36″ or so and … I dunno, maybe twelve-fifteen pounds? Which is a lot more than it might sound, especially if, when you buy it, they wrap it up in cardboard and bubble wrap, making it hard to carry, and you are a mile from your car, and you don’t know that you’re going to buy a quarterstaff at a different booth in a few minutes. That fucking thing will cave in skulls. It’s a murder weapon. It’s functional art! And I had to carry both of them back to the car in million-degree heat and the next time I go back I’m buying daggers!
(I have my next several weapon purchases planned out.)
Go ahead, ask me what I’m gonna do with those. No fucking idea. But I’m really hoping someone breaks into my house soon.
So yeah. We had a great time, I nearly died, and I don’t know that I’m going to make a big deal about dressing up for the next one, or at least not dressing up for this one again, just because I didn’t feel like it made a difference in the way, say, a carefully-constructed cosplay might. If you show up at C2E2 in a full suit of armor people are going to be asking you for pictures all day. I saw some amazing costumes, easily the equal of anything I’ve seen at a con (or close, at least) and … they were just kinda being ignored by everyone. Like, I wasn’t expecting my silly little kilt-and-shirt combination to attract that kind of attention, but I also wasn’t expecting the best costumes to be attracting the same amount of attention as my silly little kilt-and-shirt combination, either. If I do dress up for another Ren Faire, it’s going to be something more … wizardy, I think. Although I do need to find an excuse to wear the kilt somewhere else. I have been resisting being a Kilt Guy for a while now, and I gotta admit, the things are damn comfortable. I’m thinking of showing up in mine for Picture Day this year just to see what happens.
Any other Midwesterners want to recommend any other nearby festivals?
2020 thus far has been an interesting year for reading. 2019 had so many stellar books in it that I had to expand my traditional end-of-the-year Best Of list from ten to fifteen. In general, the quality of what I’ve been reading this year has been reasonably high, but there haven’t been all that many books that I was doing backflips over so far. There have definitely been standouts, of course, but nothing where I was rattling cages and shouting you must read this while running pantsless through the streets.
So it’s pretty cool to have identified my first major WHY DON’T YOU OWN THIS BOOK ALREADY of the year, finally, and even more interesting that it’s turned out to be nonfiction. There are usually a couple of nonfiction books in my top 10, but never one that I thought might be the best book of the year, and Walter Isaacson’s biography of Leonardo da Vinci is absolutely a book that I could see being my favorite of 2020 once the end of the year rolls around. Assuming we’re all still alive, that is.
I have read one other book of Isaacson’s: I was a big fan of his biography of Benjamin Franklin, and having now read this one I’ve got my sights on his book about Albert Einstein. You may notice a theme here; Isaacson very much enjoys writing about geniuses, and one of the best things about this book is the way his sheer enthusiasm for Leonardo shines through every page. This is a book about, with no real fear of contradiction, one of human history’s most interesting people, written by someone who is utterly fascinated by his subject, and it just cannot help but being a tremendously compelling and educational read.
(Two things I learned about da Vinci: I was aware that he was able to write backwards and mirror-imaged, but I was not aware that he always wrote backwards and mirror-imaged. He was left-handed and just taught himself to write that way to save time and keep from smearing ink. Similarly, one of the ways his work is validated when its source is unclear is to look for signs that it was produced by a left-handed person. Second, and I’m not sure how common knowledge this is and it’s possible y’all are going to be surprised I didn’t know this, but he was gay. Not, like, “for the times” gay, or “if he was alive now he’d be” gay, but out and fabulous gay. There apparently exists one of his notebooks where he’s put a to-do list on one of the pages, and one of the items on the list is “go to the bathhouse to look at naked men.”)
(Also, and I’ve Tweeted at him and I’ll update if he responds, but I’d love to know how much work in language Isaacson had to do specifically to write this. I suspect the differences between Renaissance-era Italian and modern Italian are not minor, even before you get to everything da Vinci wrote requiring a mirror to read, and given his other books Isaacson may not even have known Italian before writing the book– every other book he’s written was about someone who, at least, worked primarily in English.)
I can’t pass up talking about the book as a physical object, either. I got the book in paperback, and the paper used both for the cover and for the pages is thick and textured in a way that makes the book an absolute joy to hold. In addition, it’s full of pictures, as one would imagine it would have to be, but they’re scattered throughout rather than as a tip-in in the middle of the book, and every single one of them is in full color. I don’t recall how much I spent for this book, but I’m genuinely surprised it wasn’t $40. Amazon currently has it for twelve bucks. That’s madness for a book of this high quality; this could not have been cheap to print.
I am also in love with the way Isaacson talks about art. I had to take an art history class as a random requirement to get my teaching MA, and while I honestly didn’t do terribly well in the class, reading people who really know a lot about art talking about paintings is something that I will never get tired of even if to a large extent I don’t really know what the hell they’re talking about. Isaacson can drop a paragraph about the emotional resonance of a detail in someone’s eyebrows that I can’t even see, and a good proportion of this book is dedicated to analyzing da Vinci’s artwork, both finished and unfinished. His chapter about the Mona Lisa is a masterwork. I couldn’t have written something like this to save my life; I just don’t have the eye for detail or the vocabulary for it, but it was an immense pleasure to read.
Ten stars, six thumbs up, one finger oddly pointed toward the heavens, go find this and read it right away.
1:07 PM, Wednesday June 17: 2,143,193 confirmed cases and 117,129 Americans dead.
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