Fantasy Paper Presentation
Well, it's all wet here, no matter what my weather pixie says, but apparently, at least according to the yahoo.com weather guru, it's going to be warm and dry in Siloam Springs, Arkansas, tomorrow, which is where I'll be. What time is our plane leaving? O-dark-thirty, I gather. Into Tulsa, then an hour and a half drive to the town where the campus is. There's three of us, so we can keep each other company with brilliant conversation. And maybe even get some knitting done.
So I have all sorts of work -- teaching, paperwork, various jobs -- I have to get done first, besides the things like, you know, finding clothes and putting them in a sturdy bag. Also I've got a paper around here someplace which I'm supposed to give -- best to find it, as 1) I don't have time to rewrite it, and 2) if I did, it would confuse the responder, who already read the version I sent, and is supposedly ready to respond to that. It would be terribly rude to show up and give a paper Totally Unlike the thing you'd sent in.
Oh, wouldn't that be a hoot, though. Arrive, look all professional (crucial to the success of this project would be the appearance of sanity), converse eruditely with colleagues, and then, when the time to deliver the paper arrives, give one that's not only not what you said it would be, but something entirely different, on an absolutely different subject, but -- and this is key -- NEVER betray in any way that you know it's not the same paper.
Ah, lovely. I'll never do it. But I did enjoy thinking it up for a minute.
In reality, papers as delivered in my field are often NOT what 's on the schedule, as it's customary to invent an abstract, send it in, find it's been accepted, and THEN write the paper, in the course of which one often discovers that one was dead wrong about one's thesis, and can't write the predicted paper, but one sort of like it only ending up in a different place.
So that's normal and boring. But what if I showed up, and instead of discussing Margery Kempe's Autobiography from the point of view of Teresa of Avila's Interior Castle -- which is what I said I'd do -- I instead delivered a paper on, say, Morris dancing in late medieval Cambridgeshire -- which is the paper I'm giving next month, at an entirely different conference? Surely that would be interesting, and add to my fund of life experiences.
Best not. Reputation in academia -- don't want to throw it away for no really good reason, since it's the main currency.
And I may well be pushing it with the knitting blog, anyway.
So I have all sorts of work -- teaching, paperwork, various jobs -- I have to get done first, besides the things like, you know, finding clothes and putting them in a sturdy bag. Also I've got a paper around here someplace which I'm supposed to give -- best to find it, as 1) I don't have time to rewrite it, and 2) if I did, it would confuse the responder, who already read the version I sent, and is supposedly ready to respond to that. It would be terribly rude to show up and give a paper Totally Unlike the thing you'd sent in.
Oh, wouldn't that be a hoot, though. Arrive, look all professional (crucial to the success of this project would be the appearance of sanity), converse eruditely with colleagues, and then, when the time to deliver the paper arrives, give one that's not only not what you said it would be, but something entirely different, on an absolutely different subject, but -- and this is key -- NEVER betray in any way that you know it's not the same paper.
Ah, lovely. I'll never do it. But I did enjoy thinking it up for a minute.
In reality, papers as delivered in my field are often NOT what 's on the schedule, as it's customary to invent an abstract, send it in, find it's been accepted, and THEN write the paper, in the course of which one often discovers that one was dead wrong about one's thesis, and can't write the predicted paper, but one sort of like it only ending up in a different place.
So that's normal and boring. But what if I showed up, and instead of discussing Margery Kempe's Autobiography from the point of view of Teresa of Avila's Interior Castle -- which is what I said I'd do -- I instead delivered a paper on, say, Morris dancing in late medieval Cambridgeshire -- which is the paper I'm giving next month, at an entirely different conference? Surely that would be interesting, and add to my fund of life experiences.
Best not. Reputation in academia -- don't want to throw it away for no really good reason, since it's the main currency.
And I may well be pushing it with the knitting blog, anyway.
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