Prometheus 6

Writing this up before I change my mind...

The panel was rescheduled. I had the slot just before lunch and immediately following a really interesting panel we hoped we could tap for audience. My new position was at 8:30 am. Great. Even better, much of the rescheduling (and there was a significant amount of it) was done after the program was printed. Much of what I prepared on collectivity made little sense in a basically empty room, and improvising in my first academic panel wasn't what I was ready for.

Excuses out of the way, I realized I would have sucked anyway.

I have said any number of times I'm a popularizer, a rhetoritician and polemicist; I am not a scholar. It seems, however, I still held pretensions to the position unknown even to myself. Folks are cool and social here, but when I attend some of the panels I have my non-status as scholar driven home with more force than I am comfortable being on the receiving end of.

I knew I was kind of square-pegging it. My analysis of things in my personal physics metaphor considers history as momentum only. Furthermore, my preparation was sloppy (I am documenting this to preclude any denial...I'm human enough that I'll likely soft-pedal this to myself later if I don't). Okay. I take the same position toward this as I do affirmative action: if your goal is honorable you don't stop at the first failure. You review the failure and take it into account with your next plan.

This doesn't change my support for ASALH. In fact, attending this conference has pretty much locked it down. To a guy as terrestrial and fact driven as I, this is important work they are doing. I fully intend to show you guys that going forward. I think that plays to my strengths. And I need to work on how to get the stuff out of the rabbit-hole under my skull and present it coherantly.