Before we begin today's installment of a trip that happened almost a month ago, a quick update. Due to scheduling errors, I have two, yes two, presentations due next week. One's on Tuesday, and one's on Thursday. The Thursday presentation is on George Packer's Village of Waiting. My approach on it isn't exactly unique--it's got waiting in the title, and I want to look at how Packer fails to engage with time. I'll be borrowing from Foucault's account of repetition and discipline, and McClintock's discussion of panoptic time, which means it may just be my most theoretically inclined paper ever. I've got a good feeling about that.
Less good is my feeling for the other class. I'm presenting on "Private Occasion in a Public Place" by David Antin, and I'm having a hard time coming up with an approach. Antin's gig is that he gives "talking poems," which means he comes to a conference, talks for 20 minutes off the topwith a tape recorder, and calls it a poem. He then transcribes what he says, taking out all the punctuation and capitals and adding some random spacing. And this is also a poem. Unfortunately, the biggest question I can come up with regarding him is "Is this a poem?" which is a pretty old hat question. But it's the important one, in his case, so... so we'll see what happens, I guess.
Later Days.
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