In November, just before Thanksgiving break, I presented a paper at the Pacific and Modern Language Association Conference (PAMLA), in San Francisco. Because of my schedule, it worked out that I was only at the conference for the day of my panel, so I missed out on attending a number of other panels – including some on rhetoric and composition – that sounded interesting. This was the one hundred and twenty second annual conference of this professional scholarly organization. It felt good to participate in an event with such a long history, and this specific conference’s longevity, as it were, prompted me to consider what can happen when a small number of people gather together, even if for a very short amount of time, to share and discuss their thoughts.
Our panel focused on humor and comedy. I presented an excerpt from a longer piece of writing, on the work of filmmaker Albert Brooks. Preparing and delivering my work necessitated re-reading and revising my writing. I went back to some fairly old notes, and the paper I ended up presenting, accompanied by a freshly made slide deck, was a combination of relatively new, polished writing and incomplete fragments and jottings, reworked for the conference context. Bringing together these two groups of texts was illuminating. Because I was presenting on Brooks’ 1970s television work, my slide deck was full of images, so this revision had a multimodal dimension, both representationally and rhythmically. By displaying visual illustrations, I could briefly refer to tendencies in his work without having to describe them in detail, so that most of what I said was analytically explanatory. Through this process of revision-as-adaptation, I found out what the continuities were in my thinking about Brooks, and figured out a way of succinctly presenting relatively dense ideas about his reflexive performances. My presentation was itself a performance, in which I read aloud from my text for fifteen minutes.
The other two panelists took different approaches. One was more of a “research talk” whereas the other was something of a hybrid “paper-research talk.” As a trio, we were all talking about humor and comedy, yet our frameworks and communication styles varied considerably. It’d been a while since I’d presented at a conference, and it was a refreshing reminder, for me, about the promise of scholarly communication. Similar to the variety across a conference’s panels, within each individual panel’s lineup there is a fascinating juxtaposition of sensibilities, attitudes, and expressions. Mix in, too, audience members’ reactions, and all kinds of exciting exchanges are possible. While there can be questioning and disagreement, it’s not a debate. Instead, it’s typically a series of open-ended encounters with and about ideas presented through individuals’ distinctive perspectives. Its spirit is cooperative rather than competitive.
I titled this short piece “Reading and Being Read,” because I read my writing for the audience. But my reflections, here, might have been titled “hearing and being heard,” or “seeing and being seen,” as “reading” is intended to capture something threefold: one) making sense of your own thoughts and ideas in explaining them to others; two) making sense of their thoughts, reciprocally; and three) making sense together, as a small group, across multiple modalities. Our colleague Tom Freeland tells me that in the theatre, practitioners “often speak of how something ‘reads’ to the audience.” Similar to a stage performance, then, “taking turns” in the context of a conference panel requires literal presence. Small groups are special for that reason; they allow for engaged, real interaction. This simultaneously receptive and active act of collective “reading,” broadly construed, occurs in a shared social space that doesn’t last very long. Exceedingly brief, it borders on effervescence, but it can be appreciated within a longer history. PAMLA is well into its second century, so it is a privilege to be part of that story (if only very briefly, and modestly.) A century is, from one person’s position, a long, long time, but people have of course been congregating, in small groups, for millennia. We gather to share experiences and ideas, and ways of doing things. And maybe, if we’re lucky, a good laugh.
