Continental Eclecticism: an idiosyncratic report

Friday was a good day. I listened to some talks, I met some new people, I realised that you cannot plagiarise if you do not understand. There was a conference at my university (organised, in part, by Glueboot, if I am not mistaken). We had the honour of a keynote speech from a Paris professeur.
In the bar afterwards, I asked him what he thought of an American student's presentation, which covered his area of expertise.
"Shall I be honest? Well, since I wrote on this material ten years ago, I felt a little surprised and annoyed that she didn't appear to know my work! That is my narcissistic answer. Otherwise, I was glad that her attempt wasn't as good as mine."
A little later, I suggested to him that, if I had been her, I would have been very nervous, since he is the leader in this field of research (ie: go easy, man).
"I don't look terrifying do I? Ok, ok, I was a bit hard, but only because she seemed to have all the answers - 'you want ontology, I'll give you ontology; you want epistemology, I've got it too' - so I thought I would ask a difficult question, concerning external relations, which should cause Deleuzians some difficulty..."
A fascinating character, though I admit that I am easily seduced by French philosophy teachers (and, increasingly, French philosophy students). An alarming trend, I have noticed, is the wish for continentalists from the continent to come to England to work on continental philosophy. All is not peaches and cream t'other side of the channel after all.

Friday was also remarkable in that I had one discussion about Heidegger and technology, and one discussion about Husserl and 'doing phenomenology'. Tome had just read Barbaras' Desire and Distance, a short book which I am using for the Bergson/Merleau-Ponty endeavour. We had a long discussion about whether it is worth embarking on the vast project of trying, not to read, but to do, phenomenology.
I also had the opportunity to talk to Fargone the Farsi. It is funny - every time I speak to him he seems to be going through a 'Lacan phase'. A year ago, he was talking about mirrors and development, and the other evening his catchphrase was 'nom du père'. We had a short discussion about Nietzsche, but didn't get far since he was trying to talk about complexity in psychoanalytic terms, and I wasn't. It was interesting nonetheless.