I was going to put together something rude about Big Bronx, just to get the season going, but my heart wasn’t in it. I was thinking of mocking up a page that looked like TripAdvisor but rating the tournament. I just couldn’t get myself to do it.
Maybe I need to see the doctor or something. Maybe I need a colonoscopy. Maybe just a semicolonoscopy. Whatever.
I did go to the meeting of the Speecho-American Sailors last night. When I got there they weren’t doing much, just admiring one of the finer specimens who happened to be wearing a What Would Menick Do? shirt. The lad knows his threads. There were also five or six new faces, which is sort of crazy because we haven’t done the recruiting yet. A couple were little sisters, which I guess I understand, and the rest were that army of faceless gray novices that one sees early in the year before they realize that, wait a minute, there’s work involved in this!? I didn’t sign up for no work!!! We went over this and that, and Spons told me who her Coca Ptains are this year, which is good. Panivore Junior told me he was looking forward to my “You don’t exist” speech next week, which made me realize that my brain is completely hardwired for certain things. I don’t write down anything more than bullet reminders for speeches and then I extemporize, but somehow I manage to extemporize the same thing every time, year after year. It’s sort of like an Oliver Sacks case. Next thing you know, I’ll start mistaking my hat for a PFer.
I see that O’C has created the Vassar tournament on tabroom. There doesn’t seem to be invitation or website, though. I’ll be curious about this one. If you look at the each weekend in the season as having a personality, having to fit in with all the other personalities, then November around here becomes an escalation process, at least in terms of $ircuitry, progressing from Vassar to Bump to Glenbrooks. As a short month, most people get only two chances to debate, three at most. The Sailors always head up to Wee Sma Lex on Glenbrooks weekend, because I need a place where my young ‘uns can get some experience, since they will not, of course, have gotten any at Bump. I do sorely miss the old days, when NFA was Bump (or vice versa) and I got to send my novices into their first two-dayer somewhere else. Anyhow, Vassar competes with Apple Valley, and we also have an MHL for the youngest, so its identity remains to be carved. And that’s key. Tournaments do need an identity. Who is this sucker for? Who will benefit from it? And will it be enjoyable? With O’C running things, enjoyability won’t be an issue (as in, it’s guaranteed, not that it’s never gonna happen). But who will come, not this year but five years from now? That’s the big question. It will be fun to watch it find itself. Honestly, there are some tournaments around here that really haven’t found themselves, and they suffer for it. The most grievous mistake is thinking that all tournaments need to attract the region’s top circuit types, thus somehow making the tournament less, in debate language, random. This is predicated on the belief, first of all, that having a lot of circuit debaters is a good thing, and second, that we have all these circuit debaters sitting around wishing for a tournament. What we do have is all these not-so-circuit debaters, second-years for instance, and third-years who have never been to a debate camp and are aiming only for local success, not TOC or NDCA but simply their state organization of choice. These are the people we most often shunt aside, but these are the tournaments I try to support as much as possible, often selfishly, in that I have a lot of these sort of folks on my team. But so does everybody else. The National Circuit Delusion (which I’ve never named before but which I’ve gone on about in one way or the other for generations now) is powerful, and harmful. Oh, well. We do what we can.
And Saturday is the fun moderators’ meeting of the NYCFL. Apparently a lot of newcomers to the region will be showing up. This means we’ll have an opportunity to dispense more bad advice and misinformation than normal. I’m looking forward to it.
No comments:
Post a Comment