Dispatches from the Book conference - day 2

Met some cool people. Heard some cool papers. Had a good time.

A quotable quote:
George Eliot Clarke (Black Canadian scholar and poet) - in his keynote today he talked about the difference between "a great body of work" and "a body of great work"

A term I heard for the first time today:
Alliterate - when people can read but don't read...

I heard really interesting papers from a librarian who is asking why we feel so emotional about 'book weeding' (when libraries remove and destroy books to make room), an editor of a literary journal who has introduced systems and technology so his press runs more efficiently, an education specialist who has been working alongside an alternative school for at-risk youth (in Canada) which has trialled using e-Readers for their students instead of paper books, a scholar/poet who is writing a book of poetry about the production of books and writing, and an inspiring fabulous teacher who has worked with her students to enable them get more pleasure out of reading...

Had dinner with friends...

And now, as I go to bed, I know the All Blacks will be meeting Australia in just a few hours...

To be honest, though, I don't really care tonite. I am more aware of the legacy of 15 October... the day of the police raids on Tuhoe and others... the ongoing injustice, imperialism, racism and violence... the NZ govt which is incapable of dealing with an oil spill even as it signs more deals for drilling and fracking, which is disinterested in child poverty, which is attempting to create legislation in order to retroactively make legal the illegal filming and surveillance which produced the bogus charges that underpinned the raids in the early hours of 15 Oct... you know, like make a law which says 'the thing we did that was illegal is now not illegal and it is no longer illegal even for when we did it back then.

I learned one more new word today, from a couple of comic book geeks while we ate our lunch at the conference: 'retcon.' A shorthand for 'retroactive conversion,' this term refers to the practice of changing something about the past which contradicts an earlier version of the same past. So, if the comic has already said that Spiderman became a superhero because X happened, it now changes its mind and changes the backstory so that Spiderman became a superhero because Y happened. Retcon.

NZ govt. RetCON.

Sure, go the ABs. Absolutely. But I hope our national pride extends beyond watching rugby tonite all the way to participating actively in our democracy by going to the polling booths in November...