strange note from a previous incarnation of myself

For the next three days, my main task is to get together the paper I'm presenting at the Society for Phenomenology and the Human Sciences next month. This always happens. I send an abstract to a conference, then turn out to have to write something. You'd think I'd learn.

Anyway, the subject is the ambiguous form of community that takes place online, understood from a phenomenological position. This evening I've spent some time digging out some previous work I'd done on similar subjects, and reading it, aloud, in as stentorian a voice as I could muster, here alone while my sweetest sings in Motown. What I read tonight was a paper from the 2003 Canadian Smarties Confab (their annual congress of learned organizations, in which hundreds of academics descend upon a suspecting burg/campus and engage in the most disturbing and learned orgy imaginable for a week). In the paper, I argued that online communities were communities only in a strange, equivocal, indeed virtual sense, in which there could be no real others.

I was someone else then. Oddly, the notion of being in a community with previous versions of oneself is an example in the paper. My words feel alien.

That doesn't matter. I'm writing something new about online community, wondering if there's something between the community rooted in intersubjective empathy that phenomenologists go on about, and the postmodern notion of community as a performance or imaginary. My guess is there is, that the performance of community by online communities is not merely performance, but not independent of empathic community... in a sense which will be named later... I hope..., by, say, Thursday.

OH, OH OH OH! Right! The reason I've got three days mid-week to work on this is that Cow State Santa Claus observes something called "Columbus Day" on Wednesday, which, given my Monday-Wednesday-Friday schedule, gives me a week with only two class days. That Wednesday is neither Columbus Day, nor that California actually observes Columbus Day, nor that Columbus Day is traditionally October 12, seems to have made any difference in the arrangement of the academic year calendar.

I suppose this makes sense on some level.