Friday: Ivan Large Speaks

I started Friday by attending the presentation called "Relevance Optimization in Search Algorithms: A Systems Approach". It was kind of interesting though a bit technical. It was attended mainly by the type of people Mr. Phillips likes to call "tech gurus".

The next event was Ivan's speech, which was officially titled, "What Can It Possibly Mean?: Thoughts on the Future of Literature". When Ivan appeared on stage, he took the microphone in his hand and leaned casually against the podium. He started off by saying, "Good morning. I hope you all are enjoying the conference so far. I just came from a seminar called 'Maximize the Potential'. I have no doubt that your esteemed colleague Mr. Jackson had some really wonderful things to say about that, but I have to admit I couldn't understand a darn thing the guy was saying. Went-- [he moved his hand swiftly over his bald head and made a swooshing sound] -- right over my head. Right on over it. Anyway, I've been invited here today to say something about the future of literature. Now why they chose me to speak on the future of literature, I don't know, but I'll try to make my best guess as to what that future might be."

And so on from there. His speech was largely (no pun intended) incomprehensible, almost as much as his novels, and I'm sure many librarians in the audience were wondering who this guy was and why he got invited to speak at the conference, and, most of all, what the heck he was talking about. Here are some choice snippets:

Writing, as I'm sure you all know, implies a sort of underlying linguistic plenum, as though we--which is to say the collective reader/writer/auditor/speaker--were awash in a sea of endless symbols, infinitely combinatorial and permutational in its ever-changing array of interrelationships, mutations, and symbioses of meaning and indefinite levels of meta-meaning.

When we speak, we assert the efficaciousness of ideation and articulation in the project of establishing an epistemic base from which we may then proceed to act as knowing agents in a determinately knowable world-space.

The production of meaning-centered taxonomies is the fundamental project of the human species, and it cannot be argued that there is anything more essentially human than this.

You get the idea. At the end, the audience clapped politely. I don't think anybody was sure what they had just listened to. I know I wasn't. And I'm sure they were all wondering, as I was, what any of it had to do with the future of literature. Books went pretty much unmentioned.

Later that afternoon I attended the presentation "Ontology and Description: Orienting Metadata with Global Classificatory Schema". This one was even more technical than the first session, but I found it more engaging, perhaps because the subject matter--classification--held some interest for me. Ivan Large attended this one, too. He told me that he had convinced the judges to enter my idea into the contest.

"No way," I said. "They accepted it?"

"How could they not? Like I told them, it just makes sense!"

I don't know if Ivan Large is the most trustworthy expert on things that make sense, but whatever. My "system" (or perhaps it would be more accurate to call it an anti-system) was in the running!