3 x 3 in Cullowhee

The reaction to the Liver Mush Wager that my friend Mary Byrnes and I made in the fall has been very weird.  Mary and I never intended for our wager to be a big deal.  It was simply a goofy way of holding ourselves accountable to complete work that we had each already begun.  Our university’s PR office noticed my blog post about the wager in the fall, and this spring they pitched the story to Inside Higher Ed, who, obviously, ran with it.  Other than some slight misquotings, I have no issue with the Inside Higher Ed story.  The author, Kevin Kiley, does a fair enough job of capturing the spirit of our wager.  I do, however, want to respond to some of the comments that have appeared on the Inside Higher Ed website.

At the risk of feeding trolls (some of the comments), I want to respond, individually, to the nine comments that have so far appeared on the story.

Mush or mush

Posted by Tom Riley , Dean, Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at NDSU on May 6, 2011 at 10:00am EDT

Liver mush is good. I hope the papers are not mush. I would love to know the rules for them. It is easier to publish on, say, ‘the graphic novel in virtual environments’ than on Shakespeare. I hope one of the professors is not into the contemporary graphic novel and the other a Shakespearean scholar–ouch! Of course, ‘Shakespeare in Virtual worlds’ might just get into print!

First, I’d like to say that I really respect Tom Riley for posting under his real name.  That is a quite ethical thing for Mr Riley to do.  I think, however, that his perspective is quite frightening, especially coming from a dean.  I think that the rigor of the venue determines whether a work is difficult to publish or “easy” to publish, not the topic.  That is, it would be easy to get a crappy Shakespeare article published in a crappy journal, but quite difficult to get any article published in a top Shakespeare journal.  Similarly, it probably would be easier to get an article on graphic novels published in a third tier venue than in a top tier venue.  All of the articles that I have completed thus far have been submitted to top venues.  They may not all be accepted for publication.  However, I seek out only publication in top venues, and I have not been farming out crap articles to crap journals—nor will I.  The academy has shown time and again, for several decades now, that graphic novels and other pop culture are as worthy of study as Shakespeare.  It is the quality of thought that goes into any project that determines whether or not the project is worthwhile, not the subject of study.

I have not simply cranked out junk work this past year to fulfill a silly bet.  I have followed through on meaningful projects that I would have undertaken with or without the bet.  The bet is silly and insignificant, and only a goofy means through which we have tried to hold ourselves accountable and on task.

brilliant plan!

Posted by Jeanne on May 6, 2011 at 10:30am EDT

Well done– I may adopt the livermush as penalty idea… and the notion of building a cross- discipline community to keep each other accountable is lovely. Keep up the good work.

I don’t know about “brilliant,” Jeanne, but thank you for recognizing our wager for what it is, simply a fun way to deal with the stresses of work.

Posted by Beth Gazley, Indiana University on May 6, 2011 at 10:45am EDT

Having just reached the finish line myself, I say good for you! Best wishes, and enjoy the journey.

Thanks, Beth!  And thanks also for having the courage to leave a comment under your own name.  Jaron Lanier would be very proud of you and Tom!

Posted by Betty Allen , Alumni at Western Carolina University on May 6, 2011 at 11:00am EDT

There are foods from various areas of the country that I know I would never try, so I understand their thoughts on livermush. In fact, if I am ever with people from places other than the area around Shelby, NC, and if there seems to be a lull in the conversation, I just might throw out the word livermush to get some sort of conversation going.

As far as I am concerned. . . I love livermush! I don’t need to know what is in it, I just know I love it. Having grown up in Shelby, I was exposed to livermush as a toddler.

Shelby is known for many things, and livermush is one of them. There is even a Livermush Expo in Shelby in the fall. Perhaps that would be the perfect backdrop to the end of this competition.”

Thanks, Betty, for your comment and for posting under your real name.  I love that a WCU alum came across the story and posted this.  One thing I have determined from all of this is that I must give it a shot.  I think it would be more successful, however, if it were perhaps promoted under a more appetizing name.

Offended

Posted by Jethro Jones , Reading on May 6, 2011 at 11:30am EDT

This article and story is offensive. Maybe next bet you can wager a plate of chitterlings!

Dear “Jethro,” I think your pseudonym is more offensive to rural sensibilities than our wager.  I was raised by a single mother in Appalachia.  I have killed and cleaned my own meat, and enjoyed it (see picture below).  I celebrate rural people and rural ways of life, which is why I accepted my current position, in a very rural community.  You may want to check out my other website: the Rural Image Cooperative.

re: Jethro Jones is offended

Posted by Neophyte prof , College of Tech at John Deere University on May 6, 2011 at 1:15pm EDT

Hmmmm…I certainly didn’t read the article with any sense of negativity toward any kind of diversity…or whatever the reader found offensive…sorry Jethro Jones. Not really sure why it was offensive…of course it could have been any food for that matter (mac ‘n cheese, cow’s tongue, fish eyes…many of my Italian ancestors ate things that I think are completely out of the question). The point of the article was clearly to show a healthy and competitive collegial partnership. As a neophyte I will certainly adopt this approach as I think (sans weird food penalty) it’s a very good idea.

One has to have a pretty thick skin to succeed in the academe Jethro. I don’t believe the intent was even remotely to offend.

Thanks, Neophyte prof.  What’s worrisome to me is that some readers think that Mary and I would have cranked out junk scholarship simply to satisfy this bet.  Really, people think that I would crank out junk writing to avoid a plate of liver mush?  Sorry folks, but I worked too damn hard to earn a PhD at a top university to throw my academic reputation away that stupidly or that quickly.

re: re: Jethro Jones

Posted by ztm , Alumni at Clemson University on May 6, 2011 at 3:30pm EDT

Hey Neophyte prof, JJ is trolling you. Calm down!

Indeed.

publish or livermush

Posted by A Dude in Academe on May 6, 2011 at 5:15pm EDT

The article is hugely offensive, but in academic terms, not cultural ones. The point of research used to be to discover new, important knowledge. The only motivation a scholar needed was a desire to improve humanity through discovery. Nowadays, though, much research is done for purely professional reasons–publish or perish (which translates to, “improve our rankings through scholarly productivity or you walk”). The fact that junior faculty need to resort to sadomasochism to get themselves through the tenure track sums up everything wrong with higher ed today.

It is telling that “publish or perish” is not enough to motivate these two; they need the threat of livermush to get them to work hard. This suggests that losing their jobs is not really that horrible a prospect (not enough to motivate their scholarship, anyway), but livermush is. Livermush, by the way, would seem to sum up everything that is wrong with our food industry today…

The Dude here is offensive.  I undertake important work, and my primary research is into how the intelligence community (the CIA and its sister agencies) uses rhetoric in its work.  My work seeks to address the intelligence failures of 9/11 and the mistaken WMD intelligence, and will hopefully contribute to improving analytical practice within the intelligence community and preventing unnecessary armed conflicts.  As you might be figuring out, I don’t scrawl that scholarship out on the back of diner napkins and send it off to journals.  I slave over it.  I research meticulously, and I do seek to create new knowledge.

And, given the budget situation here in North Carolina, I actually live in constant fear of losing my job.  This bet is a way to try to inject a little humor into an otherwise stressful process.  Chill out.

Posted by electronicmuse on May 6, 2011 at 8:15pm EDT

The contestants should throw all of their articles, and all of the livermush they are unable to eat in a 24 hour period down the longest set of steps on campus.

The literary “output” that travels the farthest wins.

“Fair is fair.”

Thanks for your advice, electronicmuse.  I actually took it. I took a sheaf of papers, all my research that I’ve conducted over the past year, and tossed it, and I mean really chucked it, down the biggest flight of stairs I could find (about 12 stories, in a dorm, and the undergrads gave me some very weird looks as I did this).  When I went down to pick up my papers, all of my ideas were still intact.  The research still held true.  My work was vindicated—it had survived a fall that would have killed most human beings.  Now, your flawlessly designed empirical experiment has validated a year’s worth of work.  I am much relieved.

All in all, this experience has reaffirmed what I already knew about the world.  There are lots of people with a sense of humor in this world, but there are also lots of humorless people in the world. And, I should probably give liver mush a try.

-Nate Kreuter

This is the the first in three four posts about “hacking” conventional academic conferences.  The next two three will be about how to get in, and how to present, and networking, respectively.

I’ve recently become a big fan of THATCamp‘s “unconference” conference model, in which nobody presents (ahem, nobody grandstands), and the content of the unconference is determined collegially by the participants on-site.  It’s a great thing, and yet, conventional academic conferences aren’t going away, but nor should they go away.

I love conventional conferences (there, my THATCamp friends, I said it), but I didn’t used to.  I think I love them now because I’ve learned a system, an admittedly idiosyncratic system, for enjoying them, and for gleaning as much useful intellectual content from them as possible.  I realize that some people have grown weary of conventional conferences, and I’ve grown weary of particular ones, but certainly not of conferences as an intellectual and social “genre.”

Upon realizing recently that I have been refining how I view and attend conferences, I thought I’d type up some of the ways that I feel I’ve made attendance of conventional academic conferences more productive for myself.  I’ll start with an anecdote.  At the 4Cs in New York in 2007, my first major academic conference as a graduate student, I made myself somewhat notorious within my grad program by, while in the audience at a presentation, leaning over to my friend (who shall remain unimplicated), muttering “This is why our field is a fucking joke,” leaving mid-presentation, and walking 30 blocks to a Manhattan fly fishing shop.  (A “joke” to the disciplines that don’t respect rhetoric and composition, is what I was referring to.) The presentation was terrible, but part of the problem was that I hadn’t yet learned how to attend a conference.  It’s this notion, that there are particular skills that we must learn to attend a conference productively, that prompts me to write this post.

What I should have done was save my comment for later (in my defense, I was very quiet, and nobody overheard me), and quietly slipped out to try another session that, ideally, I would already have scouted in the program and marked for quick reference.  So long as you are quiet and discreet, there’s nothing rude about leaving a presentation.  I left, but I blew off the whole conference for the whole day instead of finding another session.  It is less rude to leave a session in between speakers.  But, particularly at large conferences and in a large audience, one shouldn’t be shy about politely leaving.  This is somewhat more awkward at small, intimate conferences, and so I’d use more discretion at those.  Similarly, I’ve often not attended brilliant sessions because they were too packed.  Particularly if someone I know is presenting, it’s not worth it to me to wander into a room, realize it’s full, and spend the next hour and a half standing and sweating.  I can can catch them later.  (Incidentally, people I know are very split on whether to attend all your friends’ sessions, to support them, to to venture into the unknown.  I try to do both.)  I’ll slip out to a less crowded session. So, be willing to leave, politely and quietly and dsiscreetly.

I have come to feel that small but elite conferences are the best ones to attend.  Every field has its major conferences, and at least early in one’s career, it’s probably necessary to attend the majors, if only for networking purposes (which I’ll return to in a bit).  Small conferences are more intimate because of their smallness, and I feel that this intimacy leads many presenters to think more thoughtfully about their contributions, and their interactions.  The smallness also makes meeting and socializing with new people more possible, less awkward, and less intimidating. I recommend hitting a few small, focused conferences, even if they aren’t necessarily in your major field of study.  Part of the fun of conferences is learning that you’re interested in something that you didn’t know you were interested in.

On a related note, it is simply important for graduate students to attend both small and large conferences within their field.  Conference attendance is an important part of acculturation into the field, and one of the best ways to learn what people at other programs are doing and thinking about, one of the best ways to get out of the insular bubble that is your own program.  I never was, and am still not, a fan of conferences specifically for graduate students.  About the only thing they are really useful for is getting the experience of presenting, but even then, you can get that experience at a real conference, one that will count for something on your CV.

Similarly, many new faculty place too much emphasis on conferences.  If you’re on the tenure track, publishing is far more important than conference attendance, both within your own institution and when you go back out on the job market (if you do).  I’ve heard of several people hitting the conference circuit hard, not publishing in the mean time, and find themselves in bad tenure review situations.  Bad deal–don’t privilege conferences above your publishing.  But do use conferences to test new ideas, as a springboard into your publishing.

One of the most obnoxious conference attendees is the one who asks a question at the end of a panel, usually eagerly, and uses the moment as an opportunity to: a) recite their own esoteric and usually irrelevant knowledge; b) mask some sort of comment in the guise of a question; c) baldly self-promote; d) disparage the presenter; e) all of the above.  In short, don’t be that guy.  It’s OK to ask a tough question, so long as it is relevant, asked politely, and doesn’t involve any grandstanding.  As a presenter, I prefer a tough, even combative, question to having to deftly parry some mope who’s done nothing more than spend two minutes reciting everything they’ve read in order to make a comment on my paper that I can’t quite determine the relevance of.

One reason I enjoy conferences more now than I used to is because of my note taking.  I take notes on speakers and presentations in conference programs (god help me if one of these annotated programs ever falls into someone else’s hands).  Basically, I scribble “BAD” or “GOOD” over the entries for the individual speakers I see.  Along with a quick reason for what made them a good or bad speaker.  Now that speakers have developed “reputations” in my own mind, I refer to these past programs before attending a conference and make a point of avoiding speakers I’ve previously categorized as “bad” and seeking out those I’ve identified as “good.”  Basically, I’m saying that it is better to go see a good, smart speaker on a topic of only tangential interest than a bad speaker who is talking about exactly the thing you’re most interested in (in most cases). Making use of such a system of course also means that you check out the conference program ahead of time.  I love the routine of going through a program very thoroughly as I fly in to a conference, if I can get an advance copy.

Quick Tips:

• Socialize with people from within and without your own program, no matter how daunting it may seem.  Introduce yourself to people, or ask friends in-common for introductions.
• Take notes on presentations and presenters, preferably within the conference program (whether analog or digital).
• Don’t try to attend every session, but . . .
• . . . attend a meaningful number of sessions.
• Get to popular sessions early.
• Don’t be a sycophant, with anybody.
• Follow a lark–attend a session that doesn’t on the surface appeal to you on the recommendation of a friend, or simply on your own whim.  If it’s absolutely awful, politely slip out and to a session you’ve designated as a backup.
• Ask questions at panels, but refrain from comments.  And keep your question CONCISE.
• Attend a combination of panels within and outside of what you think your areas of expertise/interest are.
• Enjoy a nice or local or exotic meal if you can, preferably with others.
• See some of the city/area (see photo).

This post has gotten too long already.

This July I’ll be attending the Penn State Rhetoric and Composition Conference (held every other year, on RSA’s off years).  I hadn’t planned on attending until I saw the CFP, which got me very excited.  This will be my first time attending the PSU conference, but I’ve heard good things about it.  If you’re also attending, and particularly if you’re someone I haven’t seen in a while, please drop me a line and let me know:  nathankreuter [at] gmail [dot] com

I’m also excited because I have family in State College and there is great fly fishing there!

The abstract for my paper follows:

Translation Savvy: Beyond Rhetorical Literacies and Across Languages

The call for papers invites us to think about rhetorics and languages in contact, and across medial forms.  Expanding upon one of Collin Gifford Brooke’s arguments in Lingua Fracta, this paper argues that literacy does not adequately encompass the competencies required to rhetorically navigate new media interfaces, nor to cross language boundaries.  Literacies are singular in languages (literate in English, or in French, or Mandarin), and in technologies or interfaces (literate in Windows, or CSS, or in WordPress).  But we cannot anticipate, with the new contacts between languages, and the proliferation of new media technologies, all of the languages/interfaces that student rhetors will one day need to master, nor in what combinations.  This paper argues that we need to go beyond rhetorical literacies, to a concept that I call rhetorical savvy.  If literacy is the ability to navigate a (as in singular) language or media and its rhetorical contingencies with competency, then savvy is the ability to recognize new, and to teach oneself new, literacies for new rhetorical interfaces, as they develop.   The question is, can we teach this more elusive, more encompassing, but less defined quality of rhetorical savvy?  I believe we can, and in the paper I propose a radical new rhetoric curriculum that seeks to teach rhetorical savvy through a combination of analytical, non-English, and technological instruction.  At the core of such instruction would be a new trivium of rhetoric, new media, and language translation.

On Friday, March 11th I participated in the SXSW Interactive panel “Folkways These Days: Crafty Knowledge in Digital Networks.”  Our panel mutated several times before the actual presentation came around.  Originally, we had Magda Sayeg, the Austin Yarn Bomber on the panel, but she had to drop out because of a planned trip to Argentina.  Then, we tried to get printmakers Lana Lambert and Julia Farrill on the panel.  Unfortunately, Lana couldn’t make the trip from Virginia, and for Julia the date of SXSW was too close to the due date of her first child.  So, we invited Collin Farill, an industrial designer with his own firm and Julia’s husband, to join us.  Meanwhile, Magda’s trip fell through and she rejoined the panel.  The day before our panel, Collin emailed to let me know that he couldn’t make it, because the Farill baby was on the way (Congrats, Collin and Julia, but really, you couldn’t get little Oriana to wait until after SXSW?!)

So, the panel ended up being comprised of Will Burdette, Ryan McKerley, Magda Sayeg, and myself, and we presented in that order on the panel.

Will Burdette kicked off the panel with “Folkways, These Days: New Audio Folkways,” an examination of sound folkways, the ways in which sound moves digitally.  My favorite part of his presentation came when Will praised the villainous RIAA, in service of a canny rhetorical point, for forcing people–through its lawsuits–to rethink how music is created and shared.  A slightly expanded version of his presentation is available here through Vimeo.

Next, potter Ryan McKerley talked about how his own work and the work of some potter friends of his.  Ryan doesn’t seem to think that digital networking fundamentally changes how he or his fellow potters execute their work, but is more important of a consideration for the purposes of distribution.  For me the most fascinating moment in his presentation was when he talked about a pottery forger on Etsy who boldly, and in much lower quality, copied the work of one of McKerley’s friends–essentially a case of pottery plagiarism, which I think raises some fascinating issues about intellectual rights/writes, and textuality.

Batting cleanup, more or less, was Magda Sayeg, the rockstar of our panel, founder of Knitta Please, and known globally as the Austin Yarn Bomber.  Our panel probably got an additional boost attendance-wise because Magda yarn bombed the SXSW Interactive green room, to much hype.  Magda talked about how the internet has propelled her own public art, by giving it broader venue with audiences and also bringing her art to the attention of distant audiences who have then commissioned her to create additional pieces.  Such digital distribution of images of her in-place art bombings have also inspired copycat yarn bombers, much to Magda’s delight.

I ended the formal portion of the panel with my own brief talk “Networks in Place: When Fiber Optics Hit the Gravel Road.”  I spoke mainly about longstanding but unremediated problems of digital divide and lack of digital access in rural America.  I also talked about how digital access, both the lack of it, but also inevitably to-arrive access, affects rural traditions, which have developed in distinct ways largely because of cultural isolation.

By far the best part of the panel, or most exciting at least, I thought, was the question-and-answer period, about the last twenty minutes.  Our audience had fascinating questions and comments, and we did our best to contribute meaningful responses.

Full audio of the hour-long panel session can be found here, though I’m not sure that it makes much sense since all four presenters were relying heavily on visuals that are not included in the audio-only recording.

Our panel even received a little bit of press (I’ll add links as I track them down):

Austin Chronicle Reportage.

“By definition, nothing imagined by the human mind is obscene.”

–Justice Hugo Black, roughly remembered and more roughly paraphrased

SXSW Interactive has this year performed a zoological miracle that no one would ever have anticipated from the world famous technology conference, simultaneously managing to both jump the shark and fuck the dog.  And it is the simultaneity of those two acts that truly impresses.  (Yes, I know that the shark was really a car, but this is as far as the bestial metaphor goes, so rest it.)

The panels disappoint.  It is a carousel of Facebook and Twitter imitations, but smaller and for specialized communities.  Unimaginative and disappointing and saddening.  At a journalism panel there is much talk about monetizing and leveraging social media.  I answer email.  One panelist gloats about how she has gone back into the streets to conduct her journalism.  We’re supposed to be impressed?  Where were you before?  No wonder 5,000 Americans died in Iraq–you reported the war from a newsroom, you lazy punk.  In fact, every panel on “The Future of Journalism” convinces me that there will be no journalists in the future.  The ones we have now are clearly a stunted and stupid breed.  We can only pray for an evolutionary mutation.  They can’t turn their 20th Century hulks around–better to burn them back down to the timbers and start fresh, it seems clear.

The silver lining is the yarnbomber, who is on our panel.  She is happy and vibrant and creative, and, goddamn it, she makes things.  This cheers us all, and she deservedly brings with her a fanbase.  In the green room her playful knitting covered yoga balls are a physical and psychological comfort.  Somebody still has ideas, and she’s one of the few, and it is good to see that this year she is already a darling of the conference, and we are grateful that she is on our panel and feel lucky for having invited her.  It is a highlight, to be sure.

On the second day I retreat to the Hill Country and dine on the flesh of at least four animals, in a variety of cuts.  As we walk by the river afterwards I consider raising a cowboy posse to stomp on the throats of the tragically jacked-in conference attendees.  “It won’t take long,”  I’ll tell the cowboy leader.  “We’ll be doing a service.  For the greater good.  It will be fun and it will make us friends and we’ll laugh at the memory of it for years.”  If he balks, I’ll offer to let him drive the rented Mustang back to Austin.  Of a different kind of balking, all of this would be less bad if opening day weren’t still three weeks away.  Baseball rights the tilt of the globe after it spends six months wobbling.  But I give up on the posse–like the fanboys with their clammy hands and bike courier bags, I am more of a thinker than a doer.  Back to the Lavender City, as O Henry called it.

Night descends on the conference and the city.  The neon flickers.  I wander the streets of downtown.

Hours later, scrawny nerdkingoverlords gilled up on overwarm beer trip over a bar’s threshold and out into the street entangled.  They’re fighting.  In a rarity, Austin’s neck-tattooed and former Longhorn football bouncers don’t intervene, resist the opportunity for a free shot, standing instead cross-armed and grinning at their posts, watching, knowing full well that the only casualties in the nerd-on-nerd slapfight will be a couple of vintage tshirts.  Not even any pride will die during one of these Red River slap attacks, for the combatants are too self-unaware to the embarrassments of their actions, even in the sober morning.  And the bouncers have class–they don’t heckle or cheer or even bet, and only half-grin.

I know they won’t reconcile the sports metaphor, but if the siliconvoodoomerchants were a pro football team, this would be their Super Bowl.  And, having made it into the big game through the wildcard berth, some coach made mostly of neck muscles would be screaming over them “Act like you’ve been here before!”  And he’d be right to do it.

A very fat girl in a very small black dress lies unselfconsciously on the sidewalk, face against the wall, curled half-fetal, blubbering and drunk and sad.  Her very tiny friend sits next to her, stroking the hair of the more drunk girl in a token of half-offered and half-obligatory comfort.  The more sober tiny girl’s eyes bat, pleading, “Please kick my drunk friend unconscious so I can get up and go to the WankerDataCorp party at Emo’s.”  Yes, her eyes are that verbose and specific in their demands.  But nobody obliges and kicks her friend unconscious, thank god.  She is stuck.  Stuck there on the sidewalk offering insincere comfort.

After you throw your shoulder into one of supergeekfanboys at the bar, just to get it out of your system, you begin to feel sad for these technogrubbing kids.  They are the contemporary equivalents of midwestern farm girls with one-way bus tickets to Hollywood, stars in their eyes and stars in their dreams but no stars in their futures.  Like the Hollywood dreamer girls of past, for every hiptechnowannabe who makes it here, another hundred will find themselves techno-whored, working subsistence database management (or slinging coffee back home) and to boot feeling as if they’ve been intellectually fragged by the exfriend/expartner who stole their idea for internetnonesensegizmo and that some bigger company bought simply to destroy it.  Even the hotshots of the nerdkingoverlords, the ones already lording over some successful digital fiefdom, are impossible to take seriously, even though they speak seriously from heads propped up in striped button-up shirts with horribly rumpled collars. Horribly rumpled all over.  If you’re going to be one of the nerdkingoverlords collecting my private data, bundling and reselling it (you don’t make anything, don’t build anything you bastards!), then at least iron your goddamn shirt.  Send out for dry-cleaning, you uberdweeb millionaire.  The only ones I respect are the ones who make something, a truly new dataset, a truly new way to read the digital tea leaves.  But those ones are too smart to admit that that’s what they do, unless you know them well.

To walk into the tradehow the next afternoon is to be assaulted by the smell of tons upon tons of offgassing plastics.  Every species of petroleum derivative ever imagined and then synthesized or catalyzed by a chemical engineer is represented, seeping their idiosyncratic and invisible toxic hazes.  Under the chemical reek of the plastics hangs the milder but rank organic stench of wet straw and mushrooms, the medical poker tell of the thousands of untreated chronic masturbators wandering the tradeshow aisles.  One works hard to avoid bumping into one of them in the crowds.

The offgassing plastic smells are from the piles and piles of plastic promotional baubles.  I see them everywhere and I know what we all already know.  The Chinese are winning.  Winning what, I’m less sure, but surely they’re winning.  Not just winning, killing us.  The Chinese central leadership has things like 500 year plans.  Maybe the baubles are part of their plan to cancer us out of existence by year 499.  Or maybe they’re trying to bury us under the plastics next month. Either way, we’re making it easy for them.

But I’m not above it–I collect my baubles.  Flimsy beer coozies and  frisbee that lights up.  Stickers and buttons. Indeed, the screened canvas bags that SXSW gives away to registrants are more prized than anything I can find to put in them.  But I do find three giveaways that impress, a beer key, some watercolors, and a harmonica.

I am greedy about the beer key, but with good reason.  It is metal and functional.  I haven’t seen either of those things here, let alone both in combination.  They are being given out by some smokers’ rights organization, and shaped like little sections of a bike gear with little faux bike chain lanyards.  The message confuses me.  It has the logo of some hippie brand of tobacco printed on it.  What’s the deal, the preferred nicotine fix of mountain bikers?  I don’t try to make too much sense out of it.  The next decent piece of swag I find is a set of watercolors.  Finally–something real, something you can make something with.  I don’t notice the company who gives it away to me.  I didn’t forget either, just never noticed.  They aren’t noticeable, and neither is their location in the convention center.  Something to do with art.

Back in the tradeshow I find the best swag of the whole conference, a little blue plastic Hohner harmonica, given away by the Mississippi Blues Trail, which I assume is some heritage thing drumming up tourism for the folks back home.  I excitedly grab and praise one of the little harmonicas.  I don’t know how to play one, but it inspires me.  The kind people running the booth, Mississippians all of them, ask me to repeat my praise as they record it with an iphone.  I try.  They are nice, and call me by my first name, and I want to please them.  But I am a reactor and not an actor and my repeated praise is self-conscious and phony and forged.  And herein is the whole problem with the whole conference.  There is nothing new here, just a repackaging.  If even the kind tourism people from Mississippi are doing it, repackaging my words, the second phony go-round, that tells us something.  There is nothing new here this year, only digital spin.  But they like my forced performance.  They like it.  And herein lies the rest of the problem–nobody but a lurking sulking few seem able to see the phony forged garbage that is the bulk of the display here at SXSWI, in the tradeshow and on the panels and uttered by the speakers.  It is the national metaphor too–we are a nation that repackages last year’s crap in vinyl covers made by Chinese children who will dance on our graves as old men and women.  And I’m beginning to think, good for those kids.  They’ve earned it, and we’ve thrown away any right not to have our graves danced upon.

Men outnumber women here at SXSW Interactive at least 4 to 1, and it’s no more obvious than at the tradeshow, where thousands of manboyfanboys wander, and where almost every corporate booth is womanned by, well, a hot woman, the better to tractor beam in the geeks with.  One attractive anchor-type woman demonstrates a desktop greenscreen software program that very truly impresses, but it’s clear that she is the draw.  At another booth, in the high end tradeshow end-of-aisle real estate, college intern PR girls scamper in tight yellow dresses.  The dresses are tennisballfuzz yellow, tight as stockings, and cup just around the PR girls’ asses, just below that bottom half of the cheek.  They don’t seem to mind.  Here in the tradeshow flourescence the nerdkingoverlords slaver over the PR girls, who bubble on unphased about database-this and rendering-that and trending-whatnot.  They, judging by their false smiles and the contorting veins in the foreheads of the overlords, won’t sleep with the slavering technocratfratboys of the tech future.  They may be nerdkingoverlords, but they haven’t figured out how to assert their medieval kingly prerogatives just yet.  I can’t help but wonder if the tangible sexual frustrations of the manboy innovators is necessary.  If these kids ever win over the PR girls then even the cheap trend imitations passing themselves off as innovations at SXSWI this year will cease, and the national economy will take yet another collective punch to the crotch.  The PR girls will wear the little logo-ed, yellow, ass-cupping dresses, but they won’t sleep with the geeks.  They didn’t come here to degrade themselves.

An itinerant shrink with a circus tent and his own team of PR girls could make a killing here.  Or maybe not, for the fanboys dart quickly, caffeinated beyond any chance of self-reflection.  Surely, it’s part of the problem.  Weirdly shamanistic caffeine concoctions are promoted everywhere, and, weirdly, the nerdserfs are drinking them by the fistful.

It is all a bit too much.  My primary mistake is not simply slinking into one of the film venues to sit in the dark, for hours at a spell.  This is my mistake.  I try to capitalize on the free booze, but it isn’t enough.  I think of a grand experiment for next year–conduct careful surveys and calculations, see how many light-up frisbees wil equal the expense of a Gold Badge.  Call the Chinese factories, find out the real value, do the calculations.  I imagine at the end of the week a great pile of plastic swagtrash, photographed in scale-telling piles for the final reportage.  Perhaps I’ll try it.

In the terminal during the layover on my way back to the mountain province I talk to an old man about the book about Mickey Mantle that he has in his lap.  I hate the Yankees, but I love DiMaggio and Mantle too.  What’s not to love?  Seated, later, on the last flight, the last leg of SXSW Interactive 2011, the images of technogeekhipsters and Mantle coalesce in my brain.  I imagine a young Mantle, drunk and in uniform, stalking the Austin Convention Center, smashing people and computers with his wooden bat.  Somebody complains about the noise and violence.  Mantle stops and considers the complaint, then picks up a yoga mat wafting to the floor from some exploding courier bag and wraps it around his bat.  He resumes, alternately whomping on geekflesh and ipads with the now quieter bat.  He continues down the convention center gallery, whomping, the thumpwhomp sounds growing fainter as he recedes down the gallery.  This is the image in my mind as the plane ascends, and I drift to sleep as Mantle’s whomping grows quieter.

This may be my last opportunity to lecture the nerdkingoverlords before they take total technological, economic, and cultural control in their rumpled collars.  So I’ll just say this: real men carry collar stays in their sundries bags, gentlemen.  Stop acting like you’ve been here before–none of us have, really.  It is not really the conference that offends, but its hangers-on and fanboys.

Goodbye, SXSW Interactive.  See you next year.

[serious reflection in SXSW Interactive to follow]