More from Vancouver

Continuing from the other day, on my panel at ACLA one speaker discussed Calvino's "If On A Winter's Night A Traveler," and another speaker talked about Borges's "Library of Babel" in relation to new media memes. (My talk, of course, was on airports and the temporality of air travel.)

As I mentioned in my last post, the panel I was on was called "Defining the Postcontemporary"—and I was reminded that Brian Massumi's book "Parables for the Virtual" is one of the books in the series "Post-contemporary Interventions" that Duke University Press publishes. So, even in this loosely topical way, the panel was grappling with similar questions as our class, about what defines the present, and how we might move into a (speculative) future, without nostalgia for past forms and with open minds toward different social practices...

It was just exciting and affirming how many intersections there were, between the conference panel and our class. It made me feel really good about what we have been doing all year: even when our subject seems endlessly expansive or recklessly sloppy, even when we seem to be quibbling about fine points that simultaneously have bewildering scope, we've been on the leading edge of difficult conversations about traditional forms of knowledge and new media technologies. The conference panel made me proud of what we are doing—proud of how you all have been exploring these subjects and making connections across our complex (if all too slippery) contemporary field.