not disappeared, just swamped from last week's traveling and a whole mess of masters defenses and the end of the semester... but this weekend I'll be here, thinking, imagining, liking even more the ideas that are here.

from Anne: Jody asked "If the sky were the limit...?"

If the sky were the limit.... it'd be a full vr/cave environment in which people could experiment with moving words around by hand, words that responded in different ways when touched, "printed" argumentative texts that twitched when touched, that flowed into movies suggesting other connotations or showed specific histories behind the arguments, arguments whose logical structures glowed behind the words, words that morphed into other sorts of visualizations and v/v. Arguments you could climb up like mountains or slide down like Alice, textured arguments. I'd like for words to be touchable/physical at the same time that their histories were attached to them.

Perhaps I'll steal a whole lot of felt letters from a Montessori school and attach photographs of their etymologies and particular historical uses to them.

:-)

But your questions, Jody, make me think that our still semi-concrete, preliminary ideas play off each other, in ways we can kick off from, perhaps: I am interested in visualizing the materiality of words; Madeleine in visualizations in a more general way (I hope this is a fair representation, Madeleine); and you in what we aren't showing by the particular choices we would make as we move toward the more concrete.

I am hoping for some sort of installation where all those questions/tensions play off each other at once. Perhaps there are printed banners of our questions on the walls -- big -- with room for people to write responses to the questions as they are contextualized by whatever we install.

Our roles -- as people in the space responsible for the setup -- seem to me up for grabs. We could set up an installation that "ran itself," so that we were each there just to answer questions. Or we could give short presentations to contextualize our work. Or we could be performing continually. Or...

But I guess I am hoping that we come up with something integrated, where our concerns/questions fold into each other, make some integral experience within the room, an experience that raises the questions we hope but that also gets people thinking more concretely about the issues we've each raised. (So the Montessori reference above might be more appropriate than I thought...) (And there is nothing to preclude us documenting the whole thing in multiple ways, and producing something to go on the NCTE website, which they would love, or into Kairos, something in which we deconstructed our documentation process, to encourage viewers/readers to ask the questions you posed, Jody.)

I'll end this too-late after-too-many-papers-responded-to-today message with the comment that the only truly concrete picture in my head of what I want to do is of some writing projected really small up against a wall so that people have to get up close and bend down or sit on the floor to read it.

PS -- I'll be at MLA in SF at Christmas, so I can scope out the particulars of the Hilton, and so can ask if we could be put into a particular room or space that would be most conducive to our desires.

from Anne: shall we dance?

If your dance card isn't already filled, Madeleine Sorapure and I were wondering if you'd like to go on a little venture with us for CCCC 09.

I need to give you a little background, because we're actually going to submit two proposals, probably.

I am on the Executive Committee, and so know that there is a push to come up with "non-talking-head" panel formats in the coming years of the conference. Marilyn Valentino, who is conference chair for next year, is considering how to incorporate some of that for next year, although the call for 09 doesn't specify any alternate proposal formats.

What we're going to do is propose to Marilyn an installation/performance sort of piece. We haven't worked out what, exactly, because we didn't want to do anything until we had a wonderful smart third person on board. So, if you were interested, we'd put our heads together and come up with some sort of topic/argument that got us each interested and excited, and then get creative about how we would use the space and time all together. (Part of what would be included in the proposal is extra time for set-up/take down, as well as some room arrangement that *was not* the usual "all chairs face a raised dias" bit.) But I am contemplating something to do with gender/technology/writing/reading; Madeleine is thinking about visualizations of texts... and you certainly have plenty of interesting ideas to bring to the mix.

Meanwhile, because there's no guarantee that Marilyn would accept such a panel, we're going to go ahead and propose a "regular" panel (but try to push on the format a bit...) just in case the other, more extensive thing ends up not being able to fly. (There's money / time / space issues for the conference in SF, so we'll see.)

But let me know if this is at all interesting to you, if you are still free for a panel, if.....