…or, what I learned at the Grad Center.
I’m trying to post the talk here as an mp3 file, but right now I can’t manage to, b/c the file is too large (17MB) for the WordPress interface. Techie fixes welcome!
The event was great, with a lively crowd of faculty and grad students who all seemed engaged & asked great questions. Combined with highway meditation while rushing home in rush hour, I’ve come up with a few new things to splice into “A Poetics of Air” before sending off to the hungry hordes at Postmedeival.
About chronology: Expanding on some brief allusions on air as the opposite of history, I’ll talk about dilation and dissipation, and how airy time seems so much less connected and coherent than oceanic or terrestrial time. The sea is history, says the poet. But air is something else.
About hurricanoes: The post-talk gave me the great reminder that Lear’s word describes a New World storm, and that the word “hurricane” comes from a Native American language, first recorded by Oviedo in Spanish before entering English via Eden’s translations of Peter Martyr. Linguistic evidence for Global Winds!
About causation, invisible and material: Might need a little more thinking here. Airy causation’s invisibility is a source of its power, but I’m still mulling a question about how that relates to unseen ideology formations a la Foucault. I think that material invisibility differs from ideological invisibility — but maybe that’s too simple?
It sounds like a great talk! I’d love to hear it, since I was just yesterday comparing the elemental commonality and yet dissimilarity of water in medieval elemental theory for my thesis!
You could try putting it on Dropbox in the public folder and then sharing the link with us. I’ve had to do that with an interview before, and it worked really well.
Thanks, James. I might go the Dropbox route, though I’m still working on a FTP workaround, which might make this work. I see lots of people posting big audio files all the time on blogs, so there must be a fairly easy way to do it.
I’ve got a page up now with the audio link — tho perhaps I should admit I got some help from the guy who hosts my site! Learning FTP is in my future, perhaps.