---
title: 'A Moment of Unrepentant Horn Self-Tooting'
date: '2006-03-05T11:29:00-05:00'
permalink: /a-moment-of-unrepentant-horn-self-tooting/
tags:
    - conferences
---

So I walk into a session after lunch on Friday, a workshop entitled [“An Economy of the Gift”: Should Scholarship Be Available for Free?](http://www.cmstudies.org/conferences/2006program.htm#F4), where I am handed a handout. Said handout has, at top, a summary of the workshop’s purposes, which begins as follows:

> In *Cinema Journal* recently, Kathleen Fitzpatrick notes the “insupportable economics of the current publishing system.” She argues for a “return of intellectual labor to an economy of the gift.” This workshop explores the practical and theoretical issues of a gift economy of academic publication.

It’s the first time I’ve really encountered myself in the third person like this. The world is suddenly a very strange place.