• the profession

I attended the first biennial public address conference at the University of Wisconsin in 1988. My oldest son Nick was here in utero with Miriam (her last academic conference attendance ever). The surroundings then were somewhat squalid (especially the university housing), and State Street was still pleasantly hippie-ish. That conference was still about public address finding its way after some years in the doldrums, with a heavy focus on close reading of single texts and no little bit of theory-bashing. For those of you want a sense of that conference, including a rather odd paper by me, you might look at the Leff/Kauffeld edited version of the conference, Texts in Context, which has some definite classics in it--Chris Oravec's paper on Whig versus Jacksonian rhetoric in fact jump-started my own research.

This weekend, with a much larger crowd (about 130 registrants), in quite sumptuous surroundings (god bless business schools for their facilities), I have returned. Two highlights so far: John Murphy's keynote address on JFK and modern liberalism (versus republicanism), which was truly inspiring. And Lloyd Bitzer was here, responding to two papers by Gerry Hauser and by Steve Lucas in honor of the 40th anniversary of "The Rhetorical Situation." One thing I noted in Lloyd's response was that he was able to cite correspondence back to that time from critics of his essay--I realized I now no longer keep emails after about 6 months. I wonder how our collective memory and our archives will fare in the age of email. Kind of sad, really.

Very little controversy, other than in my panel on religion and the republic. There was potentially a pissing contest between me a, um, former colleague during the question period that perhaps was wisely avoided by our intrepid panel chair. I love it when conservative Christians play the victim.

More tomorrow--I'm sure Josh Gunn will entertaini and/or shock the crowd tomorrow, so I'm looking forward to that. It is amazing, even though I don't precisely identify myself as a public address person, the sheer breadth and quality of our interests as they have evolved over twenty years.

• Jim Aune's blog
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