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Show 174 No. Remember, you are here to hear informative, scintillating papers. Sit down somewhere in the middleish section, take out a notebook and a pen, stare straight ahead and stop thinking until someone starts reading. It gets easier. The first three readers move you in all kinds of interesting places: from the Salem witch trials and Kristeva, to Margery Kempe and Jesus, to Willow and Tara in Buffy. You're taking notes. You're engaged. Until the final reader, anyway, who reads every word of her fifteen page paper like a poet turned loose from the Redwoods, savoring every sound, letting each syllable transform from air, to water, to ice before crashing on to the floor and, like glacial depletion played in reverse, filling the room until it's half full and the audience is waiting, frustrated for Spring. But no, that is the wrong attitude. As some of the poets who read like that will remind you, a;reading is a gift. Be generous in rum. Receive. But you're reminded of the story about the child who was given one bicycle part every Christmas, finally having something close to a full bicycle when she turned 18. Where did you hear that story, anyway? Was it a church parable, Be grateful for every gift no matter how unexciting it seems at first? Or possibly an essay on the virtues of delayed gratification? Or was it an anecdote from someone's depressed childhood? After all, what is sadder than an 8 year-old carrying detached handlebars out to the dusty garage to wait with the other bicycle parts lying like severed limbs amid empty gas and cookbooks from the 1970s? |