The Blog gets
results! Dave Chalmers very kindly sent me a copy of the Salon article about
the Buffy conference, and, surprisingly, it turned out to be much better than
expected. The important point seemed to be that everyone there was a fan of the
show. The genuine enthusiasm this produced more than made up for the potential
sterility of some of the academic approaches. The journalist from Salon
(Stephanie Zacharek, who I think is quite a good
journalist, at least by Salon standards) even seemed won over to the idea that
one can take ideas and approaches generated in the academy, and apply them in
unexpected ways to the outside world.
So now the obvious conclusion is that we
need a pop culture conference that is (a) run by analytic philosophers, or at
least by people who can refrain from verbing nouns,
and (b) about something that the participants are genuinely fans of. Unfortunately,
most of the obvious suggestions, most clearly Star Trek or sci
fi more generally, but perhaps something
sports-oriented, especially baseball or basketball, are the subjects of quite
enough conferences as it is. In Central NY it seems theres a high proportion
of philosophers with a minor addiction to computer games, especially first-person
shooters, but Im not so sure we want to make that the subject of a conference.
Maybe well have to conclude that were just not capable of running better
conferences than the APA Eastern