One Down, and…

Well, I gave my presentation on The Host the other day. I didn’t read a paper, just spoke, which of course is a little risky sometimes, though usually I’m fine when I do that sort of thing. This time, the risk caught up with me, though, and there were a  couple of lapses, but worse, because previous prresentations had gone overtime, I started out with less time than I ought to have had, and had to summarize the last third, on top of that essentially skipping the final chunk (about the ongoing duel between right-wing technophilic/globalization/developmentalist/minjok discourse and left-wing environmentalist/anti-American/resistance/minjung discourse, as seen in the 2008 protests and the more recent discussion of the 4 Rivers “Restoration Project”) almost completely…

Probably wasn’t as much of a crash and burn as it felt like, but I was still a littler disappointed. Will be spending part of tomorrow morning cutting bits of my second (too-long-to-read) paper (to be presented Saturday afternoon) and assembling something of a script for that talk… and maybe a Powerpoint, though we’ll have to see about that.

Anyway, some of the other stuff I saw, such as the morning keynote address by Tom Moylan, a discussion of the work of James Hansen, a short presentation on the utopianism inherent in the disciplinary construction of architecture and design, and some of the analyses of Kim Stanley Robinson’s work that I heard — as well as a short chat with the man himself, and his final address at the end of the day — were worth the while.

I also had dinner with another conference attendee, Andrew Frost — whom I know from long ago on the Culture List (the [tenuously] Iain M. Banks-related mailing list). Wish I could have made it back for his presentation today, as well as John Clute’s closing address, but appointments and all made it impossible. It was great to talk with Andrew, though.

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