Conference III: bullets of the rest, and zombies

• The interactive part of my seminar went well. The person who ended up reading was already familiar with the text, which, although not what I'd intended, wasn't bad for the point I was making either. And the audience expressed appreciation for how I'd incorporated it. I'd definitely do it again, in the right circumstances and for a definite reason.
• The conference banquet was held at the same location as a high school prom. Not quite as good as the first conference I ever went to, which was in the same hotel as a debutante ball, but still, not bad.
• I found my first gray hairs in the bathroom at the banquet.
• Meeting other grad students at conferences is weird, especially when you don't work on the same things at all. You're not really there to meet each other for any reason, but you're thrown together by the fact that you're not affiliated with anyone who's introducing you to anyone else. If that makes any sense.
• Meeting really famous people is weird, since no matter what you say, the power differential is such that you're sucking up.
  
• LB describes our awesome meetup! Best meal I had in Cali, with the most attractively tattooed company.
  
• But the best dessert was homemade coffee and Thin Mint ice cream. Hand-cranked by two adorable kids, their parents, and me. Aw.
• The best single talk I heard was on Romero's zombie movies. I had to leave before the session was done, but I really wanted to ask the zombie expert: ARE THERE FAST ZOMBIES? Like, are the creatures in 28 Days/Weeks Later or I Am Legend zombies? They do attack you and make you one of them. But they are not the slowly encroaching, inevitable menaces of all-consuming capitalist culture that slow zombies are. Or are they? Discuss.
  

audience

Hmmm, funny things happen when you start thinking about who your audience will be for an academic paper.

You start to ask yourself what would make them actually interested in your paper. More difficult because the conference I'm going to is extremely general, and my paper was put together very loosely with others out of the general pool.

I can give a 20-minute reading of some stuff from a novel that's interesting on a moment-to-moment level. But to make it interesting on a holistic level requires some framing. No wonder I keep rewriting the first two pages of this talk.

Audience participation

Yea or nay?

Reassurance requested:

I'm putting together a conference presentation that I think begs for some good old-fashioned audience participation. Namely, the presentation is structured around 4 discrete paragraphs from the novel my last chapter was about, and I think 1 or 2 should be read out loud by members of the audience. I'm planning to distribute xeroxes and ask for volunteers.

I'm hoping this will work for a few different reasons:

First, the argument is partially about the ways in which this piece of writing is difficult, which include having to punctuate it as you go along, and the ways in which it becomes rhythmic and chant-like. I think getting another reader to enact this difficulty (and hopefully overcome it to some degree) and this effect would make a dramatic and useful point.

Second, this particular conference operates on a seminar model, where I'll be presenting to a group of people who'll all be presenting to each other over the course of three days. I'm presenting on the second day; hopefully we'll either all be comfortable with each other by then, or it'll serve as a belated icebreaker.

Third, our session is 8-10 a.m., all three days! And I'm scheduled to kick off that second morning! Granted, I'll be jetlagged in a good way, but that may not be true for other people, and a little spontaneous performance should wake them up.

There's no reason not to do this, right?

RBOConferences and female beauty

• There's a conference I want to go to next fall. Do I hedge my bets and propose 2 things, when I don't really want to end up doing both if both end up accepted? Or do I just propose one, and hope that it all works out? The former means both extra work now, and extra work preparing for the conference, but the latter runs the risk of not getting to go to the conference at all, when I'd really like to.
• Honestly, at this point, I'm not really excited about extra work.
  
• In preparation for another conference I'm going to in a couple of weeks, I have to write a paper, fine, but I also have to decide whether or not to shave. It's been a year and a half.
  
• This brings up all kinds of questions of self-presentation: will being unshaven in a beach town (or, in a couple of months, in front of summer students) make me feel uncomfortably self-conscious and conspicuous? Even if it does, is it worth compromising what I've grown to realize is a political stance?
  
• Not that I advocate hairiness for one and all, but seriously, think about how much hair removal is taken for granted as Something One Does. In my part of the country, men and women both need a serious reminder that it's a choice. And my legs are that reminder, dammit.
  
• When I was twelve or so, and reading teen magazines, I was so excited to finally get to shave. The joke was on me, though, since of course the "getting to shave" was always a "having to shave." Having the wool pulled over one's eyes by ideology, that's fun, until it stops being fun.