Re: Back from Texas; relay almost done

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.

> Waiting breathlessly for the Teonaht cake to come out of the
> translation relay oven...
Yeah, so am I.  Issytra is so slow!

Sally

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SALLY CAVES
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Niffodyr tweluenrem lis teuim an.
"The gods have retractible claws."
                                from _The Gospel of Bastet_
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