Program for the day!

Our html version of the program is now available here.

Keynote Speaker!

We are delighted to announce our keynote speaker for the conference: Kate Flint.

Kate Flint is Professor of English at Rutgers, and has published widely on the art and literature of the Victorian era and the early twentieth century. She has edited and introduced numerous books, including the Oxford World’s Classics editions of Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room, D.H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow, and Anthony Trollope’s Can You Forgive Her? , and is the author of The Woman Reader: 1837-1914 (Oxford UP, 1993), The Victorians and the Visual Imagination (Cambridge UP, 2000; recipient of the Rose Mary Crawshay Prize of the British Academy), and the just-released The Transatlantic Indian: 1776-1930 (Princeton UP, 2008). Kate’s work has been tremendously influential within Victorian studies and has been hailed as a model of interdisciplinary scholarship, combining formidable research and theoretical acumen with an engaging writerly touch.

Finis

It looks like we’re still picking up some traffic from teh nets, and I’m in a procrastinatory mood, so I’ll do one last post, unless, Holmes-like, I decide to return from the dead. I’ve actually been meaning to do some kind of wrap-up post, but I’ve put it off. Leila and I have both been knocked out of commission by a vicious cold, made all the more vicious by pre-conference stress, and I’m still coughing, which is just annoying. And I’ve been feeling all post-partum from the conference. It happens to me at the end of pretty much every semester too, which is hella annoying.

I’m not feeling up to any commentary on the conference. I spent pretty much the whole day terrified some disaster would happen, but I’m glad that other people seemed to be having a good time. Instead, I thought I’d share how this whole damn thing began. I had just come back from T-Dot (are they still calling  Toronto that?), where I was at my first away conference, a three-day affair, in April of last year. We had our long 19th century group meeting soon afterwards, and I was pretty delirious, especially since it felt like it was the 90th consecutive hour I’d spent with Anne McCarthy, my roommate at the conference, bvff (v is for victorianist), my plane mate on the trip home. After the meeting, I was blabbing about the conference, and mentioned a paper about a secret society that made arrangements for interplanetary travel via astral projection. Leila thought it would be a good idea to have a whole conference on astral projection. I agreed. Somewhere along the line the astral part dropped out, projectile vomiting entered the picture, and I learned how to do mail merge.

GBCW!

New Spot for Registration Desk

Our registration will now be set up in the C Level foyer, which is the first room you’ll walk through on the way to the conference rooms after exiting the elevator. Breakfast and coat rack remain in room C-205.

See you tomorrow!

You know things aren’t going well…

when people stop buying beer.

If during the run-up to November 2008 straight girls everywhere openly declared their crushes on Rachel Maddow, queer girls confessed their hots for Nate Silver, the dude who runs www.fivethirtyeight.com. Okay, so maybe that latter is a slight exagerration, but his electoral projections were scarily accurate and his breezy explanation of sexy graphs and numbers would charm the sensible shoes off of all of us bespectacled types. His site continues to run, and he’s still blogging all those sultry, seductive statistics. A recent post showed a rather alarming trend: Q4 of 2008 showed a 9.3% decrease in purchased-off-premise alcohol revenue, which is waaaay more than anything since 1959. There could be a million explanations that don’t involve an apocalyptic scenario (although 2.5 hours of gmail downtime does not encourage my belief in the world’s continuation), but our planning of this conference certainly isn’t one of them. And, we hope, if you’ll be at the conference in whatever capacity, you’ll raise a glass to fighting this disturbing new trend. Alright, I’m off to the bodega to do my part in saving the world. After I write a page of the paper I’m working on. I promise.

Mismatched and weird, duh…

 

I wonder what the abstract looked like?

xkcd #541

Enoch Soames on Projection

Posterity! What use is it to me? A dead man doesn’t know that people are visiting his grave, visiting his birthplace, putting up tablets to him, unveiling statues of him. A dead man can’t read the books that are written about him. A hundred years hence! Think of it! If I could come back to life then–just for a few hours–and go to the reading-room and read! Or, better still, if I could be projected now, at this moment, into that future, into that reading-room, just for this one afternoon! I’d sell myself body and soul to the devil for that! Think of the pages and pages in the catalogue: ‘Soames, Enoch’ endlessly–endless editions, commentaries, prolegomena, biographies…

From the private correspondence of the famous poet.

I Am Projecting an Awesome Weekend for You

The very same weekend as our conference, Trevor Paglen is showing some of his strange astronomical photographs at the Bellwether. Paglen’s past projects include an installation of signatures from people who exist only in the CIA’s imagination, and he has authored Experimental Geography and Blank Spots on the Map: The Dark Geography of the Pentagon’s Secret World. His exhibit at the Bellwether, “The Other Night Sky,” documents 189 classified American satellites orbiting the Earth. The combination of secrecy, photography, and objects frequently mistaken for UFOs might make this the most fantastically nerdy event (besides our conference!) this spring.

omg i had sex with shane!!!!!!!

Now that it’s in its final season, and I’ve decided to at least make an effort at not being the world’s worst lesbian, I’ve caved and finally started watching The L Word. On my other group blog, Anne McCarthy did a post on literary identification. What literary characters, Anne asked, do you identify with, and why? Onto whom do you project yourself? My answer was typically perverse and not altogether facetious:

Sometimes I feel like my inner Jekyll and Hyde is like Cynthia Kirkpatrick and her mom [of Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters]. And when I first read Wuthering Heights, I first thought that I was like Catherine, but by the end of the novel I realized that I was really mainly like Linton Heathcliff. And in case I haven’t revealed too much of myself already, I really identify with The Clown in The Tragedy of Sir Richard Calmady [I bet the only way you’d know what book I’m talking about is if you’ve ever taken a class with Talia Schaffer]. What can I say–my strongest identifications have been with characters in Beckett novels and Breillat films–which is a good reason why I should be studying mid-Victorian novels…

Isn’t the whole point of literature to show you that everything you hate is merely a projection of yourself? When I was a silly undergraduate who actually enjoyed reading, I only got into a book if I felt it was about me — not just something I related to, but something that described a side of me to myself that I had not quite verbalized or narrativized. Now I have more fun with self-projection, and make it into something like an experiment. What if I acted as if some character were really me in the gushy adolescent kind of identification, but that character really wasn’t like me at all?

If you watch The L Word, you probably hate Jenny, and have perhaps been traumatized by last night’s episode. (My co-chair informs me that straight girls are more upset than lesbians, since sleeping with crazy roommates is par for the course for us.) I haven’t met anybody who hasn’t hated Jenny. So, contrarian that I am, of course I have to identify with her. And whenever I hear somebody talk shit about Jenny — played by Torontonian-by-birth Mia Kirshner — I have to say “That’s just because you’re prejudiced against Mias from Canada!” Self-projection is so much more fun when it’s based on something totally meaningless. And it’s even more fun with you get to sleep with the hottest chick on The L Word! And everybody else in your incestuous circle of friends gossips about your sex life! I guess you’d have to be a poor misunderstood Mia from Canada to know what I mean…

Are we, and everything around us, all projections of the cosmological horizon?

The January 15 New Scientist (I swear I’m not affiliated with them) featured a cover article titled, “Our world may be a giant hologram.” Those of you who are card-carrying nerds like Leila and me might have known about the string-theoretical concept of the insanely multi-dimensional universe for some time. While the universe might actually contain up to 26 dimensions, these extra dimensions beyond the 3 space dimensions and 1 time dimension are compacted under normal conditions, so we’re left with the 3 + 1  dimensions we know and love.

The holographic principle, however, proposes that the three space dimensions in the universe we’re used to actually exist as projections from the two-dimensional horizon of the ever-expanding universe. This is analagous to the idea that the entropy of a black hole (i.e. its information content) is proportional not to its three-dimensional volume, but its two-dimensional surface area. There’s a great, mind-blowing lecture by Raphael Bousso of UC Berkeley explaining this:

What the New Scientist article is suggesting, though, is that there might be experimental evidence that the universe we live in is actually a hologram, in effect. If I understand things correctly, and that’s a big if, according to quantum theory for a non-holographic 3-d universe, things shouldn’t get grainy until you approach the Planck length, which is about 10^-35 m. (A proton is about 100 000 000 000 000 000 000 Planck lengths in diameter, so it’s a pretty small unit.) However, if our world is holographic, things’ll get grainy at around 10^-16 m. There’s actually an instrument, the GEO 600,  which is designed to measure differences in distance down to 10^-21 m. (It was built to try to directly detect gravitational waves, which is a whole other headfuck.)  The scientists operating it, however, have had problems with noise (which might be because the gravitational force of a passing cloud overhead messed things up). According to Craig Hogan, though, this noise might very well be due to the graininess caused by the projectedness of the world we see. If we weren’t projected, the noise wouldn’t be there. Cool, eh?