The Conference as Medium
HUO And the book you are doing?
HB It’s a collection of papers by twelve different people in fields like ethnomusicology, musicology, art history, literature, economics, you know. The main thing is they are all friends of mine! [Laughs] This was one of those things where the Social Science Research Council in New York had some money to have a conference, and I know that most conferences are a waste of time, so I said, ‘Will you do it this way? I am going to invite these people, they will prepare a paper well before the conference, they will circulate the papers to each other, everybody will read everything. Then we’ll have a meeting. We’ll talk, everybody knows what everybody is doing so the talk will be interesting. Then everyone will go home and re-do their paper.’ I, with two other people who were there, decided we would write a long introduction based on the discussion we had and that was the book, so we didn’t have to wait for someone to finish the paper that they hadn’t written yet, or any of that. It’s quite coherent.
HUO Agreement of the conference as a medium of some sort; it’s a desperate medium, the conference, a desperate medium. Are there conferences that you have participated in in terms of changing those desperate rules of the game, which have been interesting? Are there rules of the game?
HB Mainly what happens with conferences is that people are trying to do four things at once: they are trying to invite all the people they feel they should invite and right there is the death of the thing; they hope they can make a book out of it; they want to make a public event that they can invite the public to so that their university will feel that the money isn’t wasted. There’s all these things of that kind. I know that the way to do it is to make one thing the most important and in this case it was the book we were going to create and then it’s not a problem. Including that I tell people, ‘Well, if you don’t get your paper in a month earlier, then we won’t pay for your plane ticket’. So that’s that. And since I do this only with my friends, they all know me and they understand.