(Prelim rough draft) We were late to this remarkable session at the New School (ck) building on 13th St and Sixth, since we wanted to finish listening to Carol Davidson at NYU on the same evening. Tuned out that the attractive Jane Bennett was an ex-chair of her department of political theory at Johns Hopkins, but her talk on hoarders and what objects had to say to them and us was rather different from what we had expected. In the Q and A session she conducted after her talk on her new book, she explained that she had no interest in hoarders or their responses to the objects they piled up. Nor was she suggesting a form of animism, where objects were held to have a spirit of their own. But somehow she felt that objects had their message to give in some way independent of what we thought of them or how we reacted to them.

Exactly how a scientific mind could possibly make sense of this eluded us, and we noticed that the word "crazy" cropped up several times in the course of the requests for clarification and other challenges she received. Both questioners and the speaker seemed to think that their ideas might be "crazy", but none the less worthy of consideration for all that.

So after the session was over and a lot of personal chat had ensued, we took the opportunity to ask her point blank what her colleagues at Johns Hopkins thought of her idea. "They think I'm crazy!" she allowed cheerfully as could be. She delivered this giggly line with such a powerful blast of her charm that one was quite bowled over, and could see immediately why none of her colleagues were going to make an issue of it.

We were left with the impression that academic life has run so short of good ideas for good brains tp pursue which had not already been taken and flattened with repeated examination and extrapolation that it was now necessary in the manner of the Modern Language Association's notoriously untethered presentations to fly kites whether they made sense initially or not, and attempt to keep them up with the kind of linguistic hot air which expert academics in these unscientific studies can use to wrap insanity and make it sound at least acceptable and sometimes persuasive, the manner of the French deconstructionists, bless their soul.

Come back Derrida all is forgiven!

Be that as it may, we are going to offer a dictionary of palliative and evasive phrases drawn from this session for readers to use whenever their latest kite needs a good boost of hot air to keep flying!