San Francisco Bound

Well, children, it's happened again.  November rolls around and it is time to head off to the National Communication Association annual conference.  This year, it's in San Francisco, the city by the bay.  And I am so looking forward to visiting the town and seeing old friends in my profession.

Here's what I will be up to:

• Presenting a paper on doing environmentally-themed solo performance.
• Presenting the Christine Oravec Research Awards in Environmental Communication.
• Participating in a four-year-out planning roundtable discussion for Performance Studies
  
• Contributing to a panel on thinking beyond the digital frame, co-sponsored by the Performance Studies Division and the Visual Communication Division.

More on that last one.  Several of my friends and colleagues at different universities got this crazy idea to see what you could do with a digital picture frame.  Thinking outside the box, so to speak, of what these increasingly ubiquitous image tools might allow.  In my case, I have worked with two and the random slide show function to create an ever changing poem (there are 170 possible combinations of images and words -- below and above are three possibilities.)

In and around the presentations will be the usual school recruitment parties (the recession hit ours pretty hard this year), meals with old friends and colleagues, and the occasional opportunity to go see the city.

Since the conference butts up against our Thanksgiving Break, I will be sticking around for a few extra days.  But this Pomo Homo Nature Nut isn't planning on spending the extra time (sans partner) in the Castro.  Instead, I am heading down to Big Sur for a little backpacking and Kerouac. 

All of which is simply to say that I will likely not be posting to the blog next week, but I will follow the week after with a full report of my adventures -- intellectual and wild and all the wonderful possibilities of combining those two.