Book(s) Session at APA-Pac

I am very much looking forward to the author-critics session at APA-Pacific tonight on my Pragmatism and Genealogy books.  It’s quite an honor to have a chance to open both books up to public scrutiny together (in part because the two books were really written together as ‘one idea’ as it were).

I owe an enormous thanks to Brad Stone, Noelle McAfee, and Paul Patton for being my scrutinizers.  There are, of course, many others to whom much gratitude is owed in addition.  Both books are products of a series of ongoing conversations in which I am just one locale of many — the books are thus in may ways not entirely of me though I am of course the site at which these specific interventions have been articulated.  They are both not ‘mine’ but also mine.  In any event, the occasion tonight will be a welcome opportunity to have a chance to submit these locales in the conversation to criticism, in the sense of that word according to which it is an achievement.

I am trying to think of a funny joke as part of my response but nothing good is coming to me.  Perhaps the tone will just have to be very ultra-serious.

(By the way, if you happen to be at apa-pacific and can’t make the session, which will be in the kent room of the conference hotel, but want to come out after for a little book-criticism celebrating, then just send me a txt or an email to find out where some of us are heading.)