Random bullets of Kalamazoo

-- There are cygnets in the pond this year! And Hans Christian Andersen was quite wrong about them: they are not in the least ugly. They are very cute, little grey-white balls of fluff.

-- Pink wine-in-a-box is even worse than white wine-in-a-box. (I think it may border on undrinkable, even by my own very-not-picky wine standards. Thank goodness for the mead and ale tasting tonight, and for various publishers' receptions, and the study-abroad-in-Glasgow people handing out samples of Scotch.)

-- So, apparently I caused an edited collection to happen, without actually meaning to do anything of the sort. Discovering that sort of thing makes one feel oddly powerful.

-- I finally made it to the Friday evening how-to-use-an-astrolabe session, only to discover that I really, really do not have the sort of mind that can understand astrolabes. But now I have a pretty souvenir cardboard astrolabe! I am not sure whether to hang it on my nonexistent Christmas tree, or name my nonexistent kid after it, or what.

-- Why does the medievalist conference always feature a singalong of '60s songs? I do not know. But apparently, one of the aftereffects of having gone to a hippie preschool is that I can't resist that sort of thing, even though my singing voice is, um, best drowned out by other people.

... Oh yeah, there were some papers. One of them was even mine.

SAA envy

Have fun, everybody who's at SAA! I keep seeing posts about it all over Facebook and blogs, and I'm a bit envious, while at the same time aware there are all sorts of reasons why it wasn't a particularly good idea for me to go this year. Will DEFINITELY be at the next two, which are both local-ish.

A thought: conferences are a totally different experience when you're grown-up faculty than when you're a grad student. Back then, it was all about building the CV, and I went to a lot of random conferences, and didn't enjoy most of them very much because I always felt weird and wallflowerish. My real peers were at home, where there was always a lively cohort of other grad students, and no shortage of early modernists, whether grad students or faculty.

Now, I don't give a damn about building the CV, I go to SAA (sometimes) and Kalamazoo (most years) and that's about it, and conferences are all about 1) hanging out with one particular cohort of friends; 2) being around other people who are geeky about the same kinds of things I'm geeky about; and 3) being immersed in medieval / early modern stuff, and learning odd and random things about it. When you're the lone early modernist on campus, the immersion is a rare and unexpected pleasure; in grad school, it was something I took for granted.

The grown-up kind of conferencing, need I say, is SO much more fun. Only six weeks to Kalamazoo!

SAA 2012 roundup

So, another SAA come and gone. I got to see Bardiac and Flavia, whom I've met before, and I also met Fie Upon This Quiet Life and Moria (briefly). So, yay.

My seminar was kind of odd, as people spent most of the time debating the merits of one particular National Theatre production that I hadn't seen, and nobody really had much to say about my paper. Well, at least that means nobody had much bad to say about my paper, which is always a relief.

I went to a session today that had a really good paper about doublets in Othello. (In the rhetorical sense, I mean, not in the sense of what fashionable Renaissance dudes like Mike Cassio are wearing.) I hope I can remember some of the examples when I teach Othello in the fall, because the whole paper was an incredibly sharp demonstration of why close reading matters, and how words shape character and vice versa. (I always feel like I'm swimming against the stream when I try to teach close attention to language; most of my colleagues apparently don't, and the students sure as heck are not getting it in high school like I did. I've been having students memorize and recite passages in the Shakespeare class these last few semesters, which seems to help a bit. At least that way they have to look at every word.)

I saw a rather weird film of Pericles being acted out with toys, and a very enjoyable production of A King and No King (which wasn't actually part of the conference, but the student group performing it wisely timed it for this weekend). I remembered only three things about AKANK from grad school: that it was about a king who falls in love with his sister but she turns out not to be his real sister (accurate); that there was a joke about someone confusing "peace" with "peas" (also accurate); and that it wasn't very good (this turned out to be quite wrong -- I mean, I won't say it's a particularly deep play, and it certainly isn't a plausible one, but it is a heck of a fun romp).

what I did at medievalist camp

Back from my first-ever Kalamazoo. First off, it was lovely getting to meet so many bloggers face to face, and I'm sorry I missed the blogging panel (my own talk was at the same time). Actually, I missed a fair number of panels that I would have liked to hear; there was just so much going on at the same time, including a fair assorted performances and other fun stuff. (Call me unscholarly if you will, but given a choice between attending an academic talk and watching a performance of The Tournament of Tottenham which consisted of a bunch of grad students hitting each other with Styrofoam flails and falling about the room histrionically ... bring on the flails. Every time.) So anyway, apologies for not making it to most of y'all's talks.

So. I totally get the Kalamazoo thing, now. I started grad school as a medievalist but realized I was a mismatch for the field long before I became confident enough in my own abilities to respond to calls for papers, so I'd been hearing about this legendary conference for ages, but had never actually experienced it before. And it really is as much fun as people say it is. I mean, flails and mead. And books! All of these books that I wish I had read before attempting my first upper-level medieval lit course! It is, alas, too late now; but I do have a shiny new recording of The Second Shepherds' Play on CD, which is making me excited about the prospect of teaching it again. (I had almost decided to drop the mystery plays from my syllabus for next semester, as gen ed students really seem to struggle with them, but I think I'll give them one more shot.)

One of the panels I did attend was a roundtable on teaching medieval studies at minority-serving institutions, although unfortunately, I didn't find it as useful as I'd hoped. A couple of the papers were interesting but not particularly applicable to my own institutional context; some of the others were just weird; nobody seemed to be talking about the question that really interested me, to wit: why the English major, and early English lit in particular, so often seems to be an exclusive club for white upper-middle-class students, and what if anything we can do to change that. So that was a little disappointing.

I went out for dinner on Saturday with a bunch of other University of Basketball alumni; apparently they have a sort of reunion at Kalamazoo every year. As it happened, several of them were people I had met for the first time as a prospective, Lo These Many Years Ago, and hence the people who had attracted me to my graduate program in the first place. (Being twenty-one, I didn't know to ask any questions about graduate programs that were more penetrating than "Will they give me money?" and "Do I like going out drinking with these people?"; and since two programs had offered me fellowship packages, it really came down to the second question. In hindsight, I think this was actually not a bad way to make a decision. One of the real strengths of my graduate program -- we talked a lot about this at dinner -- is the fact that most of the students genuinely liked and wanted to cooperate with each other; and perhaps my wide-eyed twenty-one-year-old self saw the importance of this when an academically savvier student would have stumbled.)

On another reminiscent note, I am continually amazed at how many of my undergraduate professors still recognize me when they see me at conferences.

I think that is about all. It was a hell of an intense weekend, and I didn't get a chance to talk to half the people or go to half the panels that I wanted to, but I'm hoping I'll be back.

my first SAA

Cool stuff:

-- Getting to meet up with Bardiac and Flavia! It was very nice, in Bardiac's case, to finally be able to put a face with the name, and in Flavia's case, to have an actual conversation, which we didn't really have time to do the last time we met.

-- My seminar group did not say anything horrible or terrifying about my paper. This was, admittedly, mostly because they didn't have time to say very much at all about my paper, but several people told me afterwards that they liked it, and some of the other topics of conversation gave me ideas about ways this essay could be expanded / folded into the larger argument I'm making in the dissertation book manuscript.

-- Free exam copies! (And a couple of other books that were very expensive even with the last-day discounts, but I figured the expense was justifiable since they are both Useful Reference Texts and Books That Can Be Lent Out To Students. I am slowly building a library of Books To Lend Out To Students, because our actual library is woefully inadequate for just about everything.)

-- Being around several hundred other Shakes-geeks. This does not happen often enough, and I'm starting to feel like I have an actual cohort of people to hang out at conferences, thanks to the miracle of the Internet.

-- Papers about gangster Othello. There really need to be more papers about the myriad ways that YouTube enhances one's appreciation of Shakespeare.

-- Getting to say hello to Advisor and Youngest Committee Member, although I fear that I may have been unintentionally rude to Youngest Committee Member, despite her assurances to the contrary. (YCM is one of those scary-brilliant young female faculty members who always make me go tongue-tied and feel like I'm perpetually wrongfooting myself, although she's quite a decent person who always comes across as very human and genuine in front of grad students, so I'm not sure why she intimidates me so much.)

Not-so-cool stuff:

-- Being gladhanded by the Annoying E---n M----n Representative. (Blanking out the press's name because I'd prefer that this blog not turn up on Google searches, not because it is the academic publishing equivalent of Lord Voldemort, although come to think of it, the latter may actually be true.) Note to publishing reps: using the phrase "peer review and all that crap" does NOT help your press project an air of academic rigor; also, when you approach potential authors, it is better not to use manners that you learned on a used car lot. (Actual quote: "Do you have a father? Do you have a grandfather? Well, I'm the granddaddy of academic publishing." Yes. Really.)

-- Not having the nerve to approach other, less alarming publishing representatives, people whose scholarly work I admire, etc. Really, I suck at this networking thing, and being around masses of Senior Scholars always makes me feel like a jittery bundle of social awkwardness and an intellectual lightweight.

-- The sound system guy at the Lucrece reading. Trust the text, please. Trust your actors, because they're good. You don't need all the fancy reverb and sonic distortion. Honest.

Cross-dressing! Pirates! Double bed-trick!

Conference paper went over decently well, I think. I must admit that at least three minutes of it were devoted to explaining the exceedingly complicated plot of The Fair Maid of the West, and I didn't even get to the part about castration (that will be my next conference paper, I think). But the rest of it had some semblance of an argument, and I met some Other People Who Are Excited About Heywood, which is such a rare experience that it makes me very happy indeed.

It's sort of weird being at a conference where I know next to nobody, and of the handful of names I do recognize, most of them are members of search committees that have rejected me, or are about to do so. (I haven't gotten the official word from my most recent campus visit, but the SC member who's here didn't even look me in the eye when I passed him, which is damning.) One of my office-mates from grad school is presenting tomorrow, and I'm going to her panel session if I can get up early enough, but I have yet to run into her.

I seem to have landed a nearly-impossible assignment for the teaching demo at Last Chance Saloon College (it is something highly specific, involving an author and a historical event that are way outside of my field, AND the instructions were incredibly confusing). Ugh. Since I seem to strike out even with schools that request teaching demos on topics that are right up my alley, I'm not holding out much hope for this one. (Also, why -- WHY -- does every school request something completely DIFFERENT for the demo class? Wouldn't it be great if the MLA could mandate that all teaching demos be, say, forty-five minutes long and on a short story, poem, or scene from a play of the candidate's choice?)

MLA

So, I'm home. And trying to catch up on four days of Internet deprivation. Random bits 'n' bobs of MLA commentary, in no particular order:

-- First off, it was great meeting so many other bloggers, although I'm a little intimidated at how smart and witty and charismatic y'all are in person (I always worry that I am not really interesting enough to have a blog, but I'm pretty sure no one else at the table had this problem). Many thanks to Dr. Crazy for organizing the meet-up, and I'm sorry I couldn't stay later, because it was quite fun.

-- I did not go to any panel sessions this year. I feel kind of guilty about this, but they all seemed to be taking place while I had interviews, or too early in the morning, or during the blogger meet-up or my grad department's party.

-- Interviews. Tolerably OK for the most part, except for the Catholic SLAC where one of the search committee members grilled me for half an hour with highly specific and argumentative questions about my dissertation description, and then moved on after he had reduced me to a gibbering wreck but before I had managed to produce an adequate response to his latest objection to something I said, and I had to keep glancing at my watch the whole time because I had another interview an hour later, so I probably came across as horribly disinterested. Those Jesuits, man, they're tricky. Actually, this was the first year where a significant number of interviewers wanted to talk about research in any depth, and I don't think I talk about research nearly as well as I talk about teaching (I've had more practice at the latter), but it was kind of flattering to meet people who seemed to be interested in my work, even when they were a shade too interested.

... Oh yeah, and there was the one where I knocked on the door too early and they were still finishing up with the last candidate, who happened to be an AP scoring buddy of mine. I think I handled it reasonably well ("He's a great guy, and if you don't hire me, you should hire him"), but it was still kind of awkward.

... And the one where I went to the wrong hotel. I mean, seriously, who the hell puts TWO Embassy Suiteses (Embassies Suite?) right around the corner from each other, and THEN calls them the "Embassy Suites Downtown" and the "Embassy Suites Downtown - Lakefront?) That's just asking for trouble, especially when only one of them is marked on the map that comes with the conference brochure, and it is the wrong one.

Apart from that, they were OK, and I don't think I really choked on any of them, although my energy was definitely running low for the late-afternoon ones.

-- I can't believe they put the interview area in an actual pit! Really, going down that second escalator was like descending into Hades. Whose idea was that?

-- Yay for deep-discounted and free books! And free wine. The book exhibit is the Best Amenity Ever. Pretty good haul this year -- I splurged on my own copy of Deloney's The Gentle Craft and Approaches to Teaching Renaissance Drama, which looks really awesome. And the freebies included advance proofs of the new Ursula LeGuin, as well as something called How Not to Write a Novel, which was hilarious (and gives me hope that my own unfinished magnum opus might not be too awful, after all).

-- The University of Basketball had its usual crowded hotel-room party (this time in a room with a mini-fridge, which feels like a step up in the world; usually they keep the beer in the bathtub). A bunch of the current grad students were there, as well as 3/5 of my dissertation committee (and let me tell you, it is weird being hugged by former committee members, especially if they are male). It's also kind of weird being asked over and over when you're going to turn the dissertation into a book, and told it would make a great book, when you don't actually have the slightest inclination to do anything of the sort. I mean yeah, it's good that they think well of my work, but I had the hardest time explaining to Committee Member Hosting the Party that I like having a job with a 4-3 teaching load and no expectation that I will ever write a book unless I feel like it, and I consider this lack-of-expectation a perk. I get the sense that they do understand I'm happy with the new job, and they're happy for me, but still slightly bemused.

Going a-conferencing

So, the conference is over. It was good. I think my paper went over reasonably well, apart from the bit in the q-and-a session when someone asked me a question that I really, really should have known the answer to, and I hadn't the foggiest. Apart from that it was fine. Now I need to polish it up and submit it to Proceedings of Conference while it's still fresh in my mind.

There were a few University of Basketball people there -- two professors, one grad student -- which was nice, because I hadn't seen anyone from grad school since I moved. (Which was, of course, only two and a half months ago, but it seems like an age.) Yay for familiar faces. It made me realize how much I lucked out when I chose a grad program, because they were all sincerely congratulatory about my one-year job at an obscure little liberal arts college and wished me luck in my bid for the t-t job at New SLAC. While I think my graduate program could have done a better job preparing people to interview for small-teaching-college jobs, no one on the faculty ever acted like those jobs were somehow lesser or unworthy, and in general, there was a lot of support for grad students with young children or other complicated family situations. (Of course, I knew nothing about this when I chose a grad school. I was twenty-one, and I picked the U. of Basketball because they offered me money and the people there seemed friendly. Which they were. Maybe those weren't such bad reasons, after all.)

They also fed us well, which is always a nice feature in a conference. Mmm, chocolate walnut pie.

I'm here till tomorrow, so I guess I'll do some exploring. (Not that I really need to be exploring instead of prepping for class, but what the hell.)