Re: Back from Texas; relay almost done

>From: Sally Caves <scaves@...>
>
>Matt Pearson wrote:
>
> >
> > How was your paper received?  I remember you got a
> > mixed reception at the SF conference.  What did the utopians
> > make of it all?
>
>There were far fewer people, much to my disappointment (damn these
>back-to-back panels), and I had to go first.  At the SF conference,
>I got to go last, always the place of privilege, especially if
>questions are postponed till the end.  My fellow panelists had
>the worst speaking voices I have ever heard: monotones, and I
>could see some of the audience drifting off.  My paper was the
>most lively, and one conference goer in particular was fascinated
>by it.  He wondered if any of you had submitted your language to
>a test in a mud/moo setup.  I said that that would be interesting,
>but we'd have to get a whole bunch of strangers committed to learning
>the language to test it out, and that seemed unlikely.  Unless it
>was something as popular as Klingon.
>
>Another audience member wanted to give me a bunch of material on
>the internet; she was skeptical about internet communities like
>ours, and her paper was a slight indictment of the "weak ties"
>that an internet community offers in replacement of the "strong ties"
>of a face-to-face community (what do you expect... this is the
>Society for UTOPIAN STUDIES, and there are bound to be luddites
>here).  She was fascinated, though, by my report, and thought it
>needed to be published because what we were doing was so unusual.
>
>I got a few laughs... actually, the SF group was more responsive
>and comic, if perhaps more critical.  And one of the SF audience
>members wanted to mention my paper in her journal on women's
>studies--because of my few remarks about gender and language making.
>
>
>Sally
>
Well....? Do we get to read it now? Or have you already webified it and I
just missed it? And btw, what's a mud/moo setup?

Jennifer


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