As I write this, superstorm Sandy is just under 2 weeks in the past. The spacious world headquarters of Burrowing Wombat Press, situated in Yonkers a mile inland and 200 feet above the surface of the Hudson, was spared direct damage from the storm. We didn’t even lose our power, in large part because the trees in our neighborhood have been pruned of dead limbs by a long sequence of violent windstorms and late fall snowstorms over the past several years. We did lose landline phone service and cable/broadband internet for three days; in a brilliant instance of the LivingInTheFuture experience, we were able to limp around both of these by routing calls and connectivity through my smartphone for the duration.
Especially over the past fifteen years, the terms “liminal” or “liminality” and “interstitial” have become increasingly popular in discussion of the arts. Some of these discussions, such as the mission statement of the Interstitial Arts Foundation, seem to use the term primarily in terms of work that crosses the borders of, and/or exists in the interstices between, different genres and art forms (also see Gordon 9). The conference on “Liminality in the Humanities” at the University of Utah takes the term a bit further, presenting papers at the borderlands and interstices of various disciplines. However, that conference also uses the term as it will be used in this study. So, even more strongly, does The International Seminar on Liminality and the Text and its associated journal and books published by Gateway Press.
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