Call for papers on the copyfight (ACCUTE 2011)

As advertised at the ACCUTE website (scroll down, scroll way way down), I’m organizing a special session for next year’s ACCUTE conference, during Congress at the U of New Brunswick.

The Copyfight: The Politics of Intellectual Property and Literary Production

Conceived as a critical public intervention in the fast- changing regimes of intellectual property (IP) regulation, this session seeks to bring questions of copyright and its regulation to bear on contemporary literary and cultural studies. The “copyfight” over digital intellectual property regulation, in particular, pits states and corporations against citizens, who are criminalized en masse as ever-stricter IP regulations (such as Bill C-32 and ACTA) that purport to control digital consumption also increasingly control the modes of cultural production. Between enclosures of the “cultural commons” and resistances to these enclosures, literary and cultural production has become politicized in its very forms. Possible topics for this session include:

• Representations and critiques of intellectual property in literature
• Case studies of IP regulation and/or litigation by literary properties or estates
• Analyses of appropriation-based literary and cultural modes, forms, and texts
• Histories of copyright and IP regulation: its definitions, institutions, transformations
• IP issues in the university: e.g. Access Copyright, e-readers, DRM, Open Access, plagiarism
• The political economy of adaptation: fan fiction, parodic use, commentary
• Whither creative license? Copyright’s controls, confiscations, and censorships of cultural production

Following the instructions on this website for member-organized sessions, send your 700 word proposal (or 8-10 page double-spaced paper), a 100 word abstract, a 50 word biographical statement, and the submitter information form, to mccutcheon[at]athabascau[dot]ca by 15 November 2010.

Note: You must be a current ACCUTE member to submit to this session.

NASSR 2010: Romantic Mediations (remediated)

This year’s conference for the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism (NASSR) was co-hosted by UBC, SFU, and the U of Victoria, and held in downtown Vancouver, just blocks from Stanley Park.

View from the top-floor conference rooms of the hotel. Not distracting at all.

This year’s theme, Romantic Mediations, was particularly productive. I say this mostly because of my own research interest in Romanticism’s popular cultural legacies, but also because of the program’s focused and lively discussions, and, in part, because of the increasingly mediated culture of academic conferences.

The theme directed a lot of attention to the diversity of media forms and the materiality of cultural production in the Romantic period. In the first keynote on Thurs., Aug. 18, William Warner and Clifford Siskin advocated a “history of mediation” as a material and concrete alternative to the more traditional but abstract “history of ideas.” Their presentation seemed both coy and provocative: coy, in that their argument seemed to build (albeit productively, imho) on both Marx and McLuhan without acknowledging either; provocative, in that they styled their talk as an exhortation to adopt their approach. The discussion that followed was feisty: some took issue with what seemed a faddish adoption of computing terminology; some grilled them on their sources and precedents; and some felt they were preaching to the converted, advocating a kind of historical materialism already old very old hat to a field transformed thirty years ago by New Historicism. (For my part, I was left curious enough to at least check out their work, like the Re-Enlightenment Project.)

The theme also prompted a lot of contributions on Romantic theatre and performance, leading me to compile a much better bibliography than that which I’d drawn on to draft the talk I was to give on Saturday (in the second of Danny O’Quinn’s two sessions on “media archaeology”). Fred Burwick’s session on Romantic drama included a paper by Melynda Nuss that I initially worried would moot my own, in her claim that “the technology itself was one of the main items on display” in Romantic theatre. But for Nuss this was premise not thesis for an engaging look at the period’s spectacular “aqua-dramas”: plays on nautical themes, with water scenes that drove the invention of some pretty heavy stage machinery. Subsequently, Friday’s keynote gave me the historical puzzle pieces I didn’t know I’d been looking for, as the Welsh science historian Iwan Rhys Morus gave a tour of the theatrical culture of science in Romantic Britain, and how it gave way to the more professional, less sensational practices of Victorian science. (Now I had more than a better bibliography for my work on the first Frankenstein plays–I had to tweak the paper itself, to give a nod to Morus’ work.)

Dr Morus tells us about the predecessors of Dr Moreau.

This keynote took place at SFU’s Woodward campus, nestled between regular downtown and Vancouver’s downtown east side. Strangely, this would not be the only time the conference found itself adjacent to a zombie parade. Moments before the final keynote on Saturday, I was out on the second-storey hotel terrace overlooking Denman Street, alone except for the keynote speaker, Dr Heather Jackson, composing herself before her talk with a crossword. Shouts from the street drew us to the railing, where a hundreds-strong march soon resolved into a mass zombie walk of the kind so popular now.

What do they want? Brainsss. (Photo credit: Louise)

They staggered down the street. They swarmed a parked bus.

Zombie walk participants swarm a bus. (Photo credit: Goh.)

What a perfect performance of re-mediated Gothic. And there I was, caught for once without my camera to re-remediate it. Of course, what with the ubiquity of cameras and the end of privacy and all, most of the zombies brought along their own cameras, documenting the day in sometimes too much detail.

Surely (as Byron told Banks of vivisection) this is too much. (Photo credit: Christine)

But perhaps I digress. Among the proceedings and festivities, some recurring points of reference that were not zombies also emerged, notably Friedrich Kittler’s history of discourse networks circa 1800 and 1900, and Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin’s theory of remediation: the “contradictory imperative” to resort to hyper-mediation as a means to simulate immediacy, as a perennial response to new and emergent media. For example: describing a printed text as an improvised performance (the topic of Angela Esterhammer’s fascinating seminar); or, for a more contemporary example, tweeting from a conference discussion in progress (i.e. “hyper-mediating” an immediate, “live” experience) to communicate some of the interest and urgency of the moment.

Ironically, however, the growing intensity of digital remediation and back-channel dialogue that have become a much-discussed trend in the digital Humanities–”conference hacking,” if you will–were not much in evidence at NASSR (held at a hotel with free wireless, no less). I could find only one other delegate, Katherine D. Harris, who was tweeting the proceedings. The listserv seemed dormant during the event, although it has circulated some well-deserved kudos to the organizers since (which I enthusiastically echo); similarly quiet during the event was the NASSR grad students’ blog, which now has some post-game commentary. I was alerted to a Facebook page for Romantics scholars, where some delegates have shared remarks and reviews. There may well have been more digital mediating of a conference whose theme so clearly invited it, and maybe I just wasn’t picking up the right channels.

And I could have been doing more, for my own part: I could have posted my suggested hash-tag on the listserv; I could have made time for more than tweeting, which admittedly has its limits for encapsulating conceptual complexity. (After all, it’s only now that I’ve found the time to share my own reflections on the event in detail.) I suppose I was just expecting more of the “remediating,” real-time back channel with which Twitter has become so good at supplying (supplementing?) other conferences like the MLA convention.

I’m not advocating more digital dialogue and mediation because it’s increasingly ubiquitous elsewhere, or just to appear tuned in and wired up (although there is a case to be made that publicly remediating debates over literary history and politics can help to change public perceptions about the stakes–or perceived lack thereof–in such fields). As shown by so many of the talks I attended in Vancouver; as shown by NASSR’s attention to media (from prior conference themes like techne and newness to systems like the listserv itself); and as shown by the wider field’s deep and diverse investments in new media (the Blake Archive, Romantic Circles, RaVoN): the discourse networks and media ecologies around 1800 have continued to shape and resonate with our experiences of discourse networks and media ecologies around 2000. So playing more extensively with the interface of hyper-mediated and immediate modes of communication and representation–playing, that is, with remediation in the performance scene of the conference–can shed new light on the ideologies and implications of media (both new and dead), and can transform the shape and tone of the conference as such, which is by no means a new medium, but one that can be not only compromised, but also (and at the same time) enriched and extended by the myriad forms and deployments of remediation.

Congress 2010, day four

Author Lawrence Hill talks about _The Book of Negroes_. Photo courtesy of Boundry.

First thing (and I mean first thing, like before 8 am), Lawrence Hill read from and talked about his bestselling novel The Book of Negroes. (No spoilers, thankfully, as I’m not too far into it.) You can watch an archived video of the proceedings here.

I had to lurch out of there during the Q&A to get to my 9 am session with Socialist Studies on time. After our papers, AU colleague Jay Smith and I fielded great questions and comments about the copyfight from an audience modest in numbers but diverse and engaging in interest and questions: critical communication scholars, a rep from AU Press, a just-graduated English PhD…
A post-session coffee break introduced me to another AU prof, Ingo Schmidt, and then morphed into lunch as a reunion with my UNBSJ colleagues.

This is a placeholder for the better shot the waiter took with Madeley's camera.

The last Congress proceeding I took in was a two-hour panel on Open Access research and publishing, archived on video here.

The four speakers including law professor and copyright activist Michael Geist. Geist took a detour to brief the room on the new Bill C-32, the Copyright Modernization Act, being tabled this week. It was a briefing and a call to action, as Geist clearly explained the problem with DRM or “digital locks”: protecting them under copyright legislation ends up trumping other possible gains for fair dealing, education, criticism, private study, and other non-commercial personal uses of media content. As a call to action, Geist’s talk stressed that the bill might hold some good news (i.e. for fair dealing and education), so Canadians should demand the new bill be fixed, not killed. And fixing it mostly means permitting the circumvention of digital locks when that’s done for lawful reasons.

Geist explains what's wrong with protecting digital locks in copyright law. Photo courtesy of Boundry.

I managed to sneak in the session’s last question, really just to mention the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, which hadn’t yet come up in the session, but which seemed well worth mentioning, given the session’s Twitter activity showing a good deal of shock over just the new national bill itself.

Q: Is there any good news in ACTA? A: No.

I described ACTA as one of several industry pressures facing the OA movement, and asked if there was any “good news” with ACTA and how to mobilize against it. He said he didn’t see any good news with ACTA, but he did brief the audience about it: “The thing about this ‘Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement’ is that it’s not about counterfeiting or trade — it’s an intellectual property agreement.” One, as he summarized it, that would be like a DMCA for the whole world.

After which I retreated, under already smoggy skies freshly smeared with the smoke of nearby forest fires: to catch up on Congress blogging, to meet my UNBSJ colleague for a splendid Caribbean dinner at Mango Bay … and to go buy two dozen St Viateur bagels to fly home with.

Congress 2010, day three

Diana Brydon delivers CACLALS keynote on cognitive justice. Photo courtesy of Boundry.

First stop: Diana Brydon’s keynote for CACLALS. A talk about “cognitive justice,” which we were encouraged to define for ourselves, before she described it as the goal of “reciprocal knowledge production based on dialogues across differences.” She discussed Europe’s Bologna process to illustrate some of the obstacles — and opportunities — for higher education generally (“global higher ed for the moment is more Americanized than it is globalized”) and for postcolonial studies in particular: “neither the political nor the epistemological challenges posed by postcolonial thinking have yet been met.”

Was nice to run into AU colleague Joe Pivato there. Despite what the next photo suggests, I am in fact neither falling asleep nor drunk.

Surprise! You need more coffee. Photo courtesy of Boundry.

Surprise! (At least one of you can see where the camera is.)

Second stop: Saskia Sassen’s keynote for the Royal Society of Canada. This dizzying keynote mapped new connections among territory, authority, and rights (as per her eponymous book) — connections not quite national nor global either, like weaponized state borders (e.g. the USA’s) and the remittances of migrants’ income to their home countries (lots of money travels this way). Her main illustration? States now buying territories in other states, expulsing the people to get at the water, agricultural, and mineral resources. Coca Cola: kicked out of India and then “gently invited to leave” New York state for using up fresh water resources. (Because it takes 15 litres of water to make 1 litre of Coke!) Or China: in talks to buy millions of hectares in the Congo and Zambia for palm-oil plantations. Land purchases that Sassen says are illegal (i.e. states cannot buy the territories of other states), but leveraged through some combination of policy grey zones and tactical blind-eye turning.

In the Q&A that followed, Sassen fielded five questions in a row before answering each in sequence — an impressive performance of recall, improv, and reflection.

But the Q&A went long enough we’d only time for a hurried patio lunch before

Third stop: Will Straw’s keynote for ACCUTE. This was a glimpse into the queer bohemia and pulp press of 1920s Greenwich Village, complete with Canadian connections and a cast of characters that seemed taken from some melodrama of moustache-twirling villains. Among the slides he showed of period gossip tabloids and “spicy” magazines, it was difficult not to get distracted by incidental details. Like the half-page ad for “Melz’s original dissolving rubber prophylactics: more protection, more pleasure!” WTF?

The face one makes on seeing a vintage magazine ad for dissolving rubber prophylactics.

Last stop: the annual ACCUTE dance party. It’s always such fun, and shows such a different and uniquely humanizing side of people, where we get to check our formal roles (student, professor, etc.) at the door … I know I’ve got a thing for dance culture, but I remain amazed that ACCUTE is the only society at Congress that regularly throws a dance party. (Haven’t all the other societies been spending most of the day sitting too?)

Congress 2010, day two

Half the fun of Congress: random reunions.

This morning’s plenary panel for ACCUTE featured three speakers on the complex relationships of First Nations students and scholars to the university in general and English literary studies in particular. Len Findlay moderated and I’m always amazed how eloquently he mixes vernacular and learned language: he described three “frames” of discourse now “re-confining” Canada’s First Nations as “mess up, dress up, and ‘fess up” (referring to the continuing crisis of FNU and the truth & reconciliation procedures taking up the legacy of residental schools, for a couple of examples). Author Warren Cariou advocated “more comprehensive, embodied attention to orality in university literary curriculum” as a means to foster “more genuinely intercultural analysis.” Film-maker and scholar Tasha Hubbard reflected on the complex lived ironies of “indigenous grad students as pioneers” in academia, and very usefully detailed the responsibilities, priorities, and anxieties that First Nations grad students — most of whom come to grad school later in life — must work through while navigating an academic environment too often rife with misunderstanding and racism. Daniel Heath Justice made an impassioned case against chronically “low expectations” for First Nations students: “when you expect the best of people,” and establish a setting in which they can succeed, he said, “they rarely disappoint.” He also gave one of the most plain-speaking rationales of English literary studies I think I’ve ever heard:

Books saved my life. … Literature has changed my life. It initiated my cultural recovery. It didn’t start at home. It started in the academy and it brought me home.

Had lunch with Ben Lefebvre, a grad-school peer from Guelph, now a leading L. M. Montgomery scholar. Then I visited the people at AU Press to find out about open-access publishing: that is, releasing a free electronic edition alongside the for-purchase print edition. U of Ottawa P and maybe WLU P also do this, though AUP introduced OA publishing to Canada.

Paying more attention to Congress-wide events, I went to Ed Broadbent’s talk this afternoon. Watch an archived video of his talk here.

Ed Broadbent addresses Congress. Photo courtesy of Boundry.

He compared the “Golden age of the common man” — the thirty years after World War Two — with the “new barbarism” that began its ascendancy in the hard right turn of the 1980s. Broadbent stressed that social and economic rights (materialized in policies like universal health care, old-age pensions, and other “social safety-net” policies) are legally required in Canada, under section 36 of the 1982 Constitution Act and under Canada’s commitments to the UN (whose foundational 1948 declaration of human rights, he reminded us, was drafted by a Canadian, John Humphrey).

Amidst his more pragmatic, policy-oriented criticisms, Broadbent also supplied a useful interpretive tool for decoding the claims and arguments of neoconservative politicians and ideologues: “when a party advocates slashing housing, health and other benefits, they are assaulting our social and economic rights.” And he made a plug for reading too, encouraging everyone to read The Spirit Level. The authors studied dozens of countries to conclude that more equal societies (those that deliver social services to honour UN and constitutional commitments to social and economic rights) are more stable, just, healthy — better off in every way. Significantly, the USA and the UK ranked at the bottom of the authors’ scale; as Broadbent put it, “unequal societies are not only unfair, they’re dysfunctional.” And he noted that Canada’s ranking somewhere around the middle, but “is becoming more unequal more rapidly than other developed countries.” “It’s time to reverse the trend to growing inequality,” he declared, and cited a survey from the Manning Institute, of all places, showing that 82% of Canadians believe government should play a role in reducing poverty and inequality.

Makes me wish 82% of Canadians would turn out to vote.

The Q&A was feisty, as it kicked off with an NDP hater who seemed keener to rant than query; Broadbent gave just as feisty a retort about the quesitoner’s premises. Nice to see some crackin’, heckle-filled, hot-blooded debate, a welcome change from all the “I’m wondering about…” that’s more typical in my area.

Broadbent's Congress audience. Photo courtesy of Boundry.

Congress 2010, day one

Montreal from my hotel room

I’d like to thank whoever organized ACCUTE’s program for our “Runaway technologies” session this morning: three presentations about Canadian science fiction (assuming Atwood doesn’t mind her work being called that now) and its related discourses (see session title) played very well with each other. The session not only prompted keen questions for all of us presenters, but also generated more questions about connections among the papers than about the individual papers: a good sign of well-harmonized topics. The resulting discussion was really productive and engaging for audience and presenters alike. (Well, so I thought, anyway.) And in the process I made some fine new acquaintances.

I also learned at least one new word. Atwood has described Year of the Flood as a “simultanuel” — not sure about that spelling, but it’s for a “-quel” that’s set next to a prior novel’s story (Oryx and Crake), not before or after it. Too bad our time was up before I got to ask if anyone likes Peter Watts’ word better: “sidequel.”

Which reminds me, Watts has generously shared a kind word about my other Congress paper, which goes into more detail about his work, in relation to the copyfight. Meanwhile, Canada’s news media now report that the Harper regime plans to table its latest version of a Canadian DMCA in one week’s time. What Watts’ characters say of extraterrestrial life, we might also say of Big Media’s persistent campaign to digitally lock down culture:
Technology implies belligerence.

Another highlight today was Carole Boyce Davies’ keynote for CACLALS, which explored Caribbean culture’s “transnational black poetics.”

Carole Boyce Davies addresses CACLALS at Congress. Photo courtesy of Boundry.

It was one of those talks from which you can take away enough reading tips to plan a full-year grad course. Her interpretations of reggae and calypso artists and songs were powerful — as evocative as the lyrics she quoted. I’d have liked to hear more of her angle on Caribbean music forms and their meanings. (And I couldn’t help but reflect that here are music forms, like dancehall, which have flourished by flouting conventional copyright regulations. Is there any correlation between a poetics that can go transnational and an IP culture of flexible fair use?)

The ACCUTE sessions I sat in on this afternoon were, first, another very well-choreographed set of talks about US pop culture and the discourse of “healing America”; and, second, the campus reps’ meeting. Acting as proxy for AU’s designated ACCUTE rep, I got a revealing look at the society’s inner workings. (I could tell you more, but then I’d have to kill you.)

And throughout the day there was the welcome experience (culminating this evening in a rammed roof-patio over egregiously over-priced pints) of catching up and comparing notes with colleagues I haven’t seen in too long. (But then again, I work at home, so my bar for “haven’t seen in a long time” might be set somewhat low.)

mobilizing knowledge at TransCanada 3

The TransCanada Institute’s third and final conference in its Literature, Institutions, Citizenship series just wrapped up last weekend at Mount St Allison U in Sackville. Amidst the provocative papers and discussions, I was enthused and honoured to mobilize knowledge* in the “TransCanDance” post-banquet dance party that I’ve DJ’d now for all three events. And this time I saved the playlist (the longest yet, at 5 hours and change). So here’s what got scholars up to get down; as always, a mix of requests from the floor and the DJ’s own strategic selections. I could name names for some requests, but some knowledge is best mobilized anonymously — and collectively.

[* Thanks to Daniel Coleman for refining my idea that the dancefloor is a site of knowledge production; 'mobilization' better meets SSHRC's current research priorities.]

Ferry Corsten “Rock Your Body, Rock” [vocal intro]
INXS “Calling All Nations”
Sandeep Chowta “Dil kabutarkhana hai”
Shapeshifters “Lola’s Theme (Club Mix)”
Boogie Pimps “Somebody To Love”
The Doors “Hello I Love You (Adam Freeland Fabric mix)”
1755 “Disco Banjo”
Sylvester “Dance (Disco Heat)”
T-Rex “Bang A Gong (Get It On)”
Sly & The Family Stone “Dance to the Music”
The Jackson Five “ABC”
Elvis Presley “Jailhouse Rock” (Spankox Re:Version Highpass Radio Edit)
Credence Clearwater Revival “My back door”
The Beatles “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da”
The Rolling Stones “Jumping Jack Flash”
Kenny Loggins “Footloose”
David Bowie “Modern Love”
Nelly Furtado “Powerless (Josh Desi Remix)”
M.I.A. “Paper Planes (DFA Remix)”
Stevie Wonder “Superstition”
Bob Seger “Old time rock ‘n’ roll”
ABBA “Dancing Queen”
Bee Gees “Stayin’ Alive”
Michael Jackson “Beat It”
A. R. Rahman “Jai Ho (New York Electric Mix)”
Arcade Fire “Neighborhood #3 (Power Out)”
Dusty Springfield “Son of a Preacher Man”
Nine Inch Nails “Closer”
Latin Fresh “Bata Bata”
Daddy Yankee “De La Paz Y De La Guerra”
Tito El Bambino “En La Disco (DJ Mauri)”
Mr Vegas “Heads High (Kill Dem Wid It)”
Major Lazer “Hold The Line”
Madonna “Like a prayer”
New Order “Bizarre Love Triangle”
The Jackson Five “I Want You Back”
Talking Heads “Once in a Lifetime”
David Bowie “Let’s Dance”
Michael Jackson “Billie Jean”
Nirvana “Smells Like Teen Spirit”
The Pixies “u-mass”
The White Stripes “Seven Nation Army”
Sam Roberts “Them Kids”
The Ronettes “Be My Baby”
The Ting Tings “That’s Not My Name”
Maestro Fresh Wes “Let Your Backbone Slide”
Rob Base & DJ E-Z Rock “It Takes Two”
Scissor Sisters “I Don’t Feel Like Dancin’”
Gnarls Barkley “Crazy”
M.I.A. “Boyz”
Young MC “Bust a move”
INXS “New Sensation”
Blondie “Heart Of Glass”
Santogold “Lights Out”
Pulp “Common people”
Go Home Productions “Velvet Sugar”
Feist “1234 (Vanshe Technologic Remix)”
Armand Van Helden feat. Spalding Rockwell “Hear My Name”
Tori Amos “Professional widow (Armand’s star trunk funkin remix)”
Wubble-U “Petal”
Cornershop “Brimful of asha (Norman Cooke remix)
Esau Mwamwaya & Radioclit “Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa”
Neil Diamond “Sweet Caroline”
Jimmy Cliff “Wonderful World”
Toots And The Maytals “Take Me Home Country Roads”
Arakatuba feat. Lilliana “Riva”
Waguignho “Academia de Furacao I”
Tegan and Sara “I Hear Noises”
Justice “DVNO (Justice Remix)”
Leonard Cohen “Closing Time”
John Lennon “Bring On The Lucie (Freda Peeple)”

NASSR Day 3 (concluded)

4 to 5:45 pm – My session on mediation went well: an interesting but connected set of papers, and a significant turnout of delegates ready with thoughtful questions. Turns out one of our panelists is at SUNY Empire State, an open U like Athabasca, or the UK’s, er, Open U.
Otherwise I still have to digest the session’s proceedings, maybe in a separate entry, especially since they announced, at the banquet, that next year’s NASSR in Vancouver will have mediation as its main theme.

7:30 pm – The final plenary talk ranged over Romantic-era philosophies of modernity and music (I was a bit annoyed music was only assigned the work of feeling, not thinking, which seemed to stay pretty specifically the turf of philosophy; but I digress). Our speaker worked in an unusual (and welcome) degree of humour:

“In the OED, ‘sublate’ is defined as ‘to cancel and preserve while elevating to a higher level.’ I wonder what foreigners must think of that word if they come across it: ‘who would ever use this word?’”

Of course no talk like this is complete without coining a few of its own. “Articulacy” was floated early on, as was “supersensible substrate” (okay, that’s not a new coinage, but it’s fun to say); and the Q&A gave us “metaphysicize” as a verb.

Also overheard, whispered somewhere behind me following a late back-&-forth in the Q&A period: “Bad question, boring answer.” Okay then, where did I put those drink tickets?

The banquet was thankfully free of the line-up for drinks that had congested the Thursday reception.

NASSR Day 3 (stride day), part 1

Stride Day because the show hits its stride for my own selfish purposes today: my session’s later this afternoon, and the 8:30 session this morning included a fantastic talk about the discourse of technology in German philosophy. Fantastic because it pointed up parallels between German and Anglophone traditions in thinking about technology I simply hadn’t known about. (In academia, confessing one’s ignorance is regarded either as verboten taboo or as an occasion for vague waffling; it’s funny to see how differently people handle it.)
The other talks were decent too. Particularly the one about meteorology, extreme weather, and hermaphrodite polar bears. Okay, it was actually about genre, but I’m easily distracted by colourful detail. Amazing what comes up in the most unassumingly-titled presentations.

NASSR Day 2

7:30 am – Didn’t I set the alarm for 7? Ah, yes, but forgot to turn it on. Well it seems somebody cashed in a second drink ticket last night. Ow.

8:30 am – Skipping out on first-thing sessions means waiting till now to hit the breakfast room.

9:30 am – The business room’s computers have USB ports my first-gen USB drive won’t fit into, a digital version of Fatass Meets Airplane Seat. Guess I’ll have to drag down the laptop or send myself an e-mail. (It’s always a mystery which is the most relatively secure digital solution when using public hardware.)

10:30 am – Where did all my free morning time go while I’ve been tweaking tomorrow’s talk?

12:30 pm – In the session on Coleridge, with a great talk on his poems by a Western grad-student colleague, I realized as the moderator hogged the Q&A that all the sessions have been padded with generous Q&A time. I’m used to hour-and-fifteen-minutes sessions from other conferences; the sessions here tack on a full 45 after the standard-issue hour allotted for the papers themselves.

Took lunch to my room, working on the paper. Honestly, I thought I had this done ages ago. Am I competing for some imaginary prize?

2
4:00 pm – Charter bus to Duke U’s east campus for a chamber music concert.

(not to be confused with the eponymous hotel)

I’ve never attended a chamber music concert before. So I furtively took some footage, and felt like less of a jerk for the camera beeps after hearing a few other pens being dropped and even some talking from somewhere up behind me. (Apologies for the rough sound quality.)

Somebody else heard it too, in fact they overheard enough to parse that the talking was an (ironic) complaint about somebodyelse’s rudeness for loud breathing. Turns out (more ironically) that the loud breather was in fact the First Violinist, inhaling the music like it was, well, you can parse my analogy.

After the concert, today’s keynote, a talk about period interpretations of the bible as literature, one of numerous talks here about modernity as secularization. (No, I did not hog the Q&A period.)

8 pm – Dined with Western colleagues and a Texan grad student here with her family; we compared notes on the dubious experiment of combining professional conference with family vacation. And amidst a collective review of the concert (why one performer wore sensible shoes, the nasally audible violinist, how different music-listening is today — you know, the points of interest for learned types who aren’t learned about music in particular), I found out about a neat-sounding book: This is your brain on music. Apparently no other human activity lights up as many patches of your brain, all at once, as music. That I might have guessed.

11:45 pm – Well that’s today then. Now to read through my talk once or twice before tucking in.