Thank you, Colette, for your very thoughtful reply to my comment about conventional books (in Invitation to PD), and to my call for Proprioceptive Dialogue. Maybe I went a little too far in expressing my disenchantment with the usual kind of book distributed in the usual kind of way. As I know you realize, I wasn’t simply dismissing such books as being of no value. How could I have done that without undercutting four decades of my own hard labor?! It’s possible, of course, that a shadowy force at play in my psyche does want to undercut my own best efforts! This is a subject for PD…. I do agree with you that conventionally produced and distributed books are certainly transformed by their readers in radical ways. I guess what I was saying is that—without simply abandoning conventional books—we need to develop new channels of communication that can provide more intimacy, immediacy, and embodied dialogue between author and readers. (I’m still hard at work on the e-book I mentioned in my earlier post–a book that allows me to speak to you more directly than in written text alone.)

Another reason I appreciate Collete’s post is that it injected some life into this long neglected web page. It’s hard to believe that so much time has passed since the previous post. Then again, maybe it’s not so surprising, given the ambivalence I expressed in that post about moderating the page. Stating my own misgivings as I did certainly could not have sparked much excitement about the process I was inviting people to take part in. It’s true though that I also expressed a strong commitment to the process, and I still feel that commitment despite the absence of activity in this venue. We’ll see what happens going forward…