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.

on mad leaps of faith

So a couple of months back, I was e-mailing Freshman Shakespeare Prof about the Fraught Political Situation at the Beloved Alma Mater (which now seems to have settled down), and he somehow talked me into sending him the entire dissertation. This was a rather scary thing to do, scarier than the defense, really, since the general culture of my graduate program is very Southern and polite, and Freshman Shakespeare Prof is like pure, unreconstructed Essence of Brooklyn; he does not mince words or tolerate lousy writing.

For about two weeks, I was on the verge of writing again to say "no, on second thought, DON'T bother reading this, it's a piece of crap and anyhow, I don't have the slightest reason to think I'll be employed after this semester, and I don't want to waste your time." Which I didn't do, because of course, that would be the very definition of an e-mail that wastes time.

Finally heard back from him yesterday. The verdict (I'm condensing a page-and-a-half-long e-mail into its essence, here): 1) Needs a whole lot more work with primary source material; 2) For God's sake, stop shying away from talking about the Big Name Canonical Texts, because people want to hear about those; 3) This is really a pretty impressive diss, and could be a rockin' book.

Oh yeah. It will. Because if I'm going to make an undergrad prof who volunteered out of pure disinterested generosity spend a month and a half reading the damn thing, I've sort of committed myself to turning it into a rockin' book, haven't I?

Never mind that I still don't have the slightest reason to think I'll still be employed after this summer, and thinking in terms of long-range scholarly projects feels like a mad leap of faith. I think I might just need a mad leap of faith at the moment.