Echoes of self

I’ve never had to edit a tran­script of a talk I gave for pub­lic­a­tion before. The AGMC (mul­ti­cul­tural queer con­fer­ence) has sent me the text of both the talk I gave over six months ago and the Q&A ses­sion after­wards. Apart from the shock­ing punc­tu­ation (pauses aren’t marked in any way; quo­ta­tions aren’t sep­ar­ated out well) I’m find­ing it incred­ibly com­pre­hens­ive and quite uncanny. Noth­ing has made it more clear to me that sub­jectiv­ity is fluid than read­ing this: where the tran­scriber has marked (indis­tinct) because they could­n’t hear me on the tape, I can some­times guess at what ought to be in the gap based on con­text but it’s cer­tainly not based on memory. Other times I have no idea at all what should be there and that’s very dis­con­cert­ing. I have very little sense that what I’m read­ing was uttered by me, yet all the cul­tural codes and his­tor­ical mark­ers are accur­ate. It’s like read­ing a speech by someone with an identical his­tory: I want to say “Wow! That’s incred­ible! that happened to me too’. And the speech pat­terns are odd to me. I recog­nise parts of the speech more because they are para­phras­ings of my thesis than because they are things I remem­ber saying. And the Q&A is even more spooky because that was extem­por­ising and I have no recol­lec­tion at all of the state­ments. Thank­fully, I’m quite impressed with what I said! 

I’ll post a link to the text from my site at some point when I’ve edited it, I guess.