I'm back

After nine hours, four airports, and mild motion sickness, I'm back in 80-degree weather (and a possible cold front!). It was great to see friends and colleagues in Seattle, as usual, and, while EMP Pop Conference itself was good not great, I particularly enjoyed these three papers, as well as presentations by Todd and Tal. The decision to include more papers by academics injected an unwholesome amount of pedagogical oratory and jargon into several promising ideas (I never want to hear about "praxis," "teleological," and "heteronormative valences" in my presence again). In my experience, academics care little about audience reactions because the lecture format isn't particularly kind to the reception of ideas; it's just irrelevant. Also, academics have been taught to expunge their presentations of opinions, so their relation to the material they're presenting is often mystifying, often reflected in neutered prose. Pop music promises a utopian notion of community, and some of the presentations betrayed purely ascetic experiences that often clashed with the inchoate nature of the songs under discussion.