Digging through notes and receipts (expense report style):

• Out of sixteen time slots with sessions, I attended eight panels,
  including my own. Spread across those panels and also the Opening
  General Session, I listened to 26 talks.
• Twelve of those talks were accompanied by something visual beyond the
  person presenting (i.e., a slideshow, an overhead).
• 5/26 provided a handout. Just one dealt in both: a handout and a PPT.
• Some of the slideshows were what
  Garr Reynolds calls "slideuments"
  (text-heavy rather than letting the visuals be picturesque). Just one of the
  slideshows was, at the last minute, withheld from the audience, even though
  the presenter continued to look at it and describe for us what we weren’t
  seeing because a projector wasn’t available.
• Out of those 26 presenters, fourteen were people I’d met before, and I
  would describe several among them as friends. None of the eight panels
  consisted entirely of people I hadn’t met.
• I ate lunch or dinner with someone from each of the following
  institutions: Wisconsin, Western Illinois, Syracuse, Purdue, Pepperdine,
  Missouri, Saginaw Valley State, Duke, and North Carolina. I was alone
  for every breakfast in New Orleans; every lunch and dinner was with one or
  more people. On the shuttle rides to and from the N.O. airport, I chatted
  with conference goers from Minnesota State, California-Santa Barbara, and
  Kent State.
• Bloggers I finally met:
  George, Dan,
  Michael, and
  Cheryl.
• I had coffee, Coke, and Bedford h’ors doeurves with folks from my MA
  program (some of whom are now elsewhere, such as Ohio State or Western
  Carolina).
• The cheapest meal I enjoyed was $7.87; the most expensive, even if the
  food wasn’t especially titillating, cost considerably more.

There were many highlights, good conversations, etc. As for my own talk
and presentation, I was, as I
have already said,
pleased with the turnout and also with the unplanned synch of the presentations.
I was also happy that I stuck with one small gamble:
whether or not I would be able, upon arriving in N.O., to find and photograph
the apartment buildings that grace the cover of Stewart Brand’s book How
Buildings Learn. I could have gotten by with out this reference, and I had
been
warned that it might seem as though I’d written my paper while at the conference
if I included a day-before photo of those buildings at
822 St. Charles Ave. But
I went ahead with it, even scripted my talk so that the paragraphs where the
buildings came up could be trimmed at the last minute without the rest of the
spiel folding in on itself–in case the buildings were not there or a photograph
was not possible. Here are the images, first of Brand’s cover,
and then of the same buildings on Thursday morning, just before 8 a.m.

I have a few more photos to post, and a small bundle of uneven
notes to sift through before deciding whether there’s anything more to post
about the conference. I’m sure I’ll get those photos up, at the very
least, and also engage the question grounding C.15: Where’s the "rhetoric"?–a
question that resonates for me with a couple of thoughts on the
Where are
the numbers? puzzle (Where is rhetoric? Wherever you left it.) and also on
the (inter)relationship of rhetoric and composition as gestalt.