Long and rising road

"May the road rise to greet you" runs the well-known Irish blessing, but I did not feel at all blessed this weekend when the road kept looking as if it was about to rise up and slap me in the face.

I blame my new glasses. I picked them up just before leaving for my trip to Pittsburgh, and my prescription has changed so much that I was a bit disoriented at first when everything below eye-level kept trying to tilted toward me.

I got sort of accustomed to this tendency during the three-hour drive (which would have been a two-and-a-half-hour drive if I hadn't taken a wrong turn on a one-way street that introduced me to a larger swath of the city than was strictly necessary), but then I had to get out of the car and walk--first on city sidewalks and then on garish hotel carpet covered with geometric prints. The road was rising up to greet me all right, and it hurt.

But that's not the only reason I spent much of the weekend feeling disoriented. This was a peculiar conference. I attended six sessions, and only two of them had more people in the audience than on the panel. (The largest audience I saw--12 people--attended a session on blogging inside and outside the classroom.) Gathering a semi-huge assemblage of scholars together to deliver papers to virtually empty rooms seems an immense waste of time, energy, and resources, especially when so many of the papers I heard were (sorry, folks) pretty superficial: no theoretical foundation, little in-depth consideration of ideas, vast billowing clouds of vague generalizations delivered in smug, self-congratulatory tones. Why do we do this to ourselves? Is a line on a vita really worth all this fuss?

And let's not even talk about the state of the academic wardrobe. No job interviews were being conducted at this conference, and yet at fully half of the sessions I attended, every presenter was wearing a black or dark gray suit. One panelist livened up an otherwise somber ensemble with red patent-leather shoes, but aside from that, the entire experience was swathed in blah. I would have been happy to see some navy blue--and I was delighted that I'd decided to wear my new goldenrod jacket, which made me feel like the sun breaking through a storm-darkened sky.

Frankly, Pittsburgh looks as if it could use a little sunshine right now. I remember when my father used to come home from work and open his briefcase to release the distinctive odor of Pittsburgh's steel mills into our house in the northern suburbs; today the mills have left and taken their pollution and stink with them, but the city still feels dark and bleak, dressed in black and shades of gray.

But maybe that's just me. I was, after all, experiencing the conference and the city through lenses that made me frequently fear for my life. Maybe I ought to try again after the road loses interest in rising up to greet me.