Forensics never sleeps (Forensics never sleep? Forensicians never sleep? Whatever.)

I made a note to myself over the weekend while I was doing nothing remotely forensical to get in touch with RJT about the Montwegian tournament. Members of the VCA are well aware that I see this as a real possibility for Academy Debate. It’s almost the perfect weekend for something exclusively for Sophomores and Juniors, following on the heels of the Pup and right before the horror awesomeness of Big Jake. Sophomores at least get their own division in LD at Yale, but for everyone else, it’s a bloodbath. Unless you’re God or His second cousin, you’re not going to break at the Bronx as a sophomore, and more likely than not you’ll hit talent from across the country in the presets who made it to semis at last year’s TOC and has flown in at great expense supported by a dozen private coaches. You have a little bit of a better chance at Yale because of a marginally less strong national draw, but not much. Wouldn’t it be nice to have something you might be able to win on the September-October topic? Throw in a little bit of academic training, maybe units on Nov-Dec in LD, Nov in PF and just the topic in general in Policy, plus a nice welcoming tournament at a reasonable price with good food, and I think you’ve got a winner. I’ve been rather saddened by the abandonment of Monticello by a lot of schools over the years. The tournament itself hasn’t changed much; it’s been a relatively regional event since the beginning, even when it had bids. If we keep pushing that Academy concept, maybe the region will wake up and remember to support itself, especially a school like Monti that supports everyone else week after week after week. If there is an award for Debate Citizenship, Monticello has earned it. I want this tournament back where it used to be, with nice big fields in every division. Anyhow, we’re working on it.

Last night a couple of freshman Speecho-Americans strutted their pre-States stuff over at the Chez. I was impressed. Granted, one of them was doing Dec, which normally would have had me jumping out the window (which isn’t all that big a deal, being that we were on the ground floor), but in this case, it was eye opening. We were already starting to work on moves and see direction for interp events in the future. The other S-A was doing OI, so that meant both prose and poetry, with some real drama in the former that rather blew me away. We are looking good for the future! Plus, of course, I provide a bit of a fresh eye on the pieces, like the judges they’ll perform for this weekend, and that doesn’t hurt. And I got to explain how we vague things at the DJ. That is, I do a lot of cutting of novels, which is like cutting a piece only way longer and they pay me to do it. One big issue in what we do is not to leave clues to what is gone, especially in the passage of time. Perhaps in the original text, five days pass very clearly. In my text, I have all the important action, but the passage of time is now inherent rather than clearly marked (things like, “the next morning”). I have to make sure to eliminate all the markers, so that the reader will know that time has passed, but won’t get hung up on the number of days, which means that things won’t seem to be going by too quickly. It’s a subtle business, and you’ve got to keep an eye on it. Similarly, anything complicated that has been eliminated or that is explained in eliminated text needs to be handled delicately. “He took the third match from the box” makes you wonder about the other two; “He took a match from the box” lets you wonder what he’s going to do with the match. Never give your audience anything that can distract them. It’s a good lesson for freshmen.

We’ve got a strong contingent going to the States tournament, which I have come to see as our local Speech finals. The whole birth of the NYSDCA, chronicled here over the years in excruciating detail, resulted from what some of us feel was an out-of-touch approach to Debate in the existing state league, as compared to their strong in-touch work with Speech. Go figure, but then again, lots of people are Speech and lots of people are Debate, but how many are truly bilingual? Around here, as often as not entire schools only speak one language or the other. There’s nothing wrong with that, but at some point, people who don’t speak Debate should not be legislating Debatism, and people who don’t speak Speech should not be legislating Speechism, and they should know better than to try. There are a few of us who harbor a vision of some grand reunion of the state constituents where everyone is happy, but that will require a little give and take on both sides. Will it ever happen? I don’t know. Maybe we need a whole new generation of regional leadership to affect real change. At the moment, I don’t see that generation rising up, but they’ve got to be there somewhere. As we used to say at an old job I had, you want to feel their hot little footprints on your back. (Actually, back then we didn’t want to feel their hot little footprints on our back, but that was business and this is debate, and they should not be quite the same thing.) Personally, when it comes to the next generation, I’m looking for people who want to tab more than they want to judge, who are actually capable of learning to tab. (There is no dearth of people who simply want to get out of judging.) Of course, the developing system at tabroom.com may eventually remove some of the tedium, but at some point you still need an underlying understanding of pairing and judge assignment beyond just staring at what a program does (especially when the program fails).

Oh, well. As I say, they’re out there somewhere. The reason I want time travel is mostly just to skip ahead a bit and see how everything works out.