Hello again, fair readers. Here's what I did this weekend: SLS 2004. The Society for Literature and Science, hosted by Duke University this year, had its annual conference in Durham, NC. It may be hard to believe, but it's true: an academic conference CAN be strange, surreal, and subversive. Our keynote address was given by Donna Haraway, subject of this interview in Wired, and she's definitely subversive. The surreality enters when you walk into the "dance party" at this conference, and you see respected professors and authors of serious intellectual works attempting to boogie. The four-foot ice sculpture in the shape of a dog (with same professors taking photos of Haraway patting it) = both surreal and just plain strange.
I heard some wonderful papers (and a couple that left me entirely cold and/or slightly ill) including one from Bernadette Wegenstein from SUNY Buffalo about (in part) a Marina De Van film called Dans Ma Peau (In My Skin). It was fascinating (in the psychoanalytic sense) and at the same time so abjectly grotesque that I could barely hold down my Marriott food service bagel-with-grape-jelly. Lordy.
How have you been?