| Popis: |
While sitting on the banks of the lagoon outside the UCSB Student Union, Asa and I began a discussion with the contributors as to the order in which they would appear. We made a picnic of the meeting over giant veggie burgers oozing barbecue sauce, and home fries piled high on trembling paper plates. They looked like cafeteria lunches at the grammar school in Brobdingnag. It became a surreal moment, we being well-mannered academics in swell conference clothes with smeared red faces and hands, talking about monsters. From this scene emerged an idea: rather than present each paper separately in a traditional format, the presenters would employ a format that paralleled the liminality of the sand line and the movement of waves. Asa and I proposed that the presenters withdraw and decide among themselves over the next few hours how their ideas would flow and waft and crash, roll in and draw out, all four together, washed up for the audience to discover and interpret like found treasure. It was an astonishingly mad and monstrous idea, and it was groovy to boot. The paper by Megan E. Palmer was presented in three parts, appearing as interludes between the other papers. In this way, the papers generated a collective meaning in addition to the discrete meanings of each paper. They formed a new creature, at once familiar and startlingly new, which, like an arcane creature of the sea, defies categorization. Asa and I were thrilled. We approved with spicy, sanguine teeth. |
