Kzoo2014, first thought

by KARL STEEL

La bufera infernal, che mai non resta,
mena li spirti con la sua rapina;
voltando e percotendo li molesta.

Quando giungon davanti a la ruina,
quivi le strida, il compianto, il lamento;
bestemmian quivi la virtù divina.

The hellish hurricane, which never rests, / drives on the spirits with its violence: / wheeling and pounding, it harasses them. // When they come up against the ruined slope, / then there are cries and wailing and lament, / and there they curse the force of the divine. (Mandelbaum trans.)

Like this, but FUN and HAPPY rather than LAMENTING: that is Kzoo and its sessions and its wavings-at-friends-and-admired-correspondents-as-we-whirl-by.

What we need, impossibly, is a conference that's at once more intimate and just as crowded. The impossible word of all impossible words is Kalamazoo.

(background to all this is not Dante but Jeffrey's VORTEX paper for an emotions roundtable, about more later in this place, I'm sure)