I had a bit of trouble forcing myself out of bed this morning, but there was absolutely no way on $DEITY’s green earth that I was going to miss a talk by Isabel Allende. No way, no day, nohow.
Sra. Allende turned out to be a slim, dark-haired, lovely woman dressed in a loose, elegant plum dress, whose every gesture held grace and whose stream-of-consciousness talk ranged from Thurberesque family anecdotes to uninhibited (if self-deprecating) raunch to frank sharing of personal and political pain. It was a bravura performance by a brilliant talent who speaks as lucidly as she writes, and I’m privileged to have been there.
I won’t mention which presentation I stopped in at next, because, um, it actually wasn’t very good—it’s rather shocking, how little information can be spun out into over an hour’s talking. Part of it is (again) the lowest-common-denominator pitch necessary at non-specialized conferences (my presentation is no different; it assumes nothing), but part of it, I’m afraid, was just plain laziness on the presenter’s part.
If nothing else, I do try to prepare well, and be engaging without wasting too much precious presentation time on gimmickry.
So I skipped out early and hit the exhibit hall, which I found more than a little intimidating, though not at all uninteresting. After that, I went to Suzanne Sears’s govdocs talk, which was chock-full of all kinds of crunchy information goodness. The University of North Texas is indubitably lucky to get her; she’s my kind of librarian, smart and passionate and au courant.
Hadn’t eaten all day, so I popped across the street to the food court again (in preference to vile overpriced nothing-vegetarian exhibition-hall concessions). I was flagging a bit by then, so I didn’t make it all the way through the Texas Bytes talk, but I did get to hear Bill Moen, who’s a good advocate and an engaging speaker.
After a brief nap-collapse in my room, I wandered down to the Riverwalk for dinner, getting through some fine manicotti and another seventy-five pages of the book I’m due to review. Up over my head I heard some bird fussing; looking up, I saw half a dozen neat-footed gray herons with red eyes and prominent yellow blotches on their heads who turned out to be Yellow-crowned Night Herons, close cousins to ol’ Nycticorax at the National Zoo. They’re nesting; I counted two nests, and there may well have been others I didn’t see.
’Twas a good day, and if I sleep better tonight than I did last night (which I daresay I will; I laid off the caffeine today), I should be in good shape for tomorrow’s talk.
