Cootie alert!

This morning I walked into a room filled with chairs set up for more than 40 people and I was delighted to see many of my colleagues clustering together to chat over coffee. What a contrast to the meeting rooms I entered last week at MLA, where the rows of chairs fill up in a distinct pattern:

The first person to enter chooses a seat at the end of a row of chairs, and so do the next few people. When each row has exactly one person sitting in it, the next people who trickle in will sit at the extreme opposite end of an already occupied row, ensuring that anyone else who wants to sit will have to climb over someone else first.

Next, the interior seats start filling in, with at least one seat left empty between any two attendees. At really popular sessions, eventually someone will have to break down and sit right next to another attendee. That's when it gets uncomfortable.

A more efficient method is for attendees to fill rows starting from the center so that those who arrive later don't have to awkwardly climb over everyone else's feet, but that would never work at MLA because we all want to sit on the end of the row so we have an escape route in case the session stinks. So I can understand the desire to colonize the end of the row, but I have never understood why so many scholars attending MLA prefer to sit next to an empty seat rather than a human being. Would it kill you to sit down next to another scholar? I mean, it's not as if we all had cooties.

The problem is that at MLA, we're all strangers--and we act as if we want to stay that way. This morning at our campus meeting, on the other hand, there wasn't a stranger in the room. Even new faculty who may have come in knowing nobody certainly did stay strangers for long. The room didn't fill up entirely, but I didn't see anyone surrounding themselves with empty chairs.

Maybe that's because at our campus, we don't have cooties.

When the road hits back

We decided to hit the road very early this morning in hopes of beating the snowstorm home, but instead we simply beat the snowplows onto the turnpike. The first two or three hours of travel were pretty treacherous and the rest of the trip was merely ugly and uncomfortable, but we are home now, just as the rain outside is beginning to change to snow and the roads are icing up. New Year's Eve or not, we're staying in.

One of the reasons the trip was uncomfortable is that earlier in the week I hit the road in a more literal sense: on Tuesday I tripped while crossing the street, wrecking my favorite pair of cords and smashing my knee pretty thoroughly. Yesterday I was still sore all over but felt good enough to join my hubby for a lovely walk up Franklin Parkway as the sun was setting. We didn't exactly run up the steps at the art museum, but we made it to the top and joined the crowd of people of all ages doing the Rocky pose. Down by the Rocky statue we overheard a little boy asking, "But why is he called Rocky?" Where to begin?

This morning I felt much better but all those hours sitting in the car stiffened up my knee pretty thoroughly. Every time I got out of the car, I had to limp around groaning for a while until it loosened up. I'm thinking a hot bath might feel really good, driving from my mind all memory of slush, ice, and snow-covered roads that insist on hitting back.

What I've learned at MLA

1. There's such a thing as "Affect Studies." I don't know what it is or how I feel about it; in fact, I'm trying to maintain a profound lack of affect in reference to this emerging field.

2. There's such a thing as a "Fatsion blog," on which fat women post photos of themselves in their daily outfits and write comments on how their clothes make them feel. Moreover, it is possible to get a Ph.D. by studying Fatsion blogs.

3. I don't intend to post any photos of myself in today's outfit, but the purple scarf is certainly attracting attention. Hurrah for brilliant color!

4. No one will notice your brilliant ideas if you speak softly, lean away from the mike, and employ a sing-song rhythm that lulls listeners into snoozeland.

5. It is important to study foreign languages. Who knew?

6. "Virtual research communities" promise to prevent the proliferation of "unrelated silos of data." Are data silos more like grain silos or missile silos?

7. "Backlash" can now be used as a verb. How long has this been going on and why didn't anyone inform me?

8. It is possible to present a paper at MLA decrying "the soullessness of critical discourse" and the academy's "bias against human inwardness." Moreover, even if you give that paper at 8:30 a.m. on the final day of the conference and hide it in a panel titled "Poetry and Prayer," it will provoke interesting conversation among an ample number of attendees.

9. No matter how many times I give conference papers, I still get nervous. An hour from now I'll be doing my song and dance, and I just hope someone cares to come and listen. I promise not to sing anyone to sleep.

A little medicinal entree

I'm just being a good cancer patient, I swear.

My recent blood test suggested that I need to boost my protein intake, so for lunch I ingested some pure, unadulterated protein.

Well, mostly unadulterated, if you consider rice, soy sauce, and wasabi adulterations to raw fish.

Yes, I ate sushi for lunch. I had to, really. Doctor's orders. It's a very efficient way to absorb protein.

And it was really, really good.

Paging Roy G. Biv!

Decorators at the Philadelphia Loew's made an interesting choice: in the hall outside the Regency Ballroom, the walls and floor are covered with warm, welcoming earth tones, browns and taupes and greens that make the stark white artificial holiday wreaths dotted with cobalt blue and silver decorations stand out sharply.

Of course, at MLA, any color stands out. Of the more than 40 people attending one MLA session last night, only four were not wearing black. The presenter in the orange sweater looked like a tangerine tossed into a box of black socks. Given the whole visible spectrum available, why do so many academics dress monochromatically?

Of course, I have to admit that I'll be wearing a black skirt and sweater when I present my paper Wednesday...but I'll top it off with a brilliant purple sweater and scarf. Someone has to bring a rainbow into the room.

Aimless at MLA

Today we drove across Pennsylvania the long way--and it is a very long way, but probably easier and certainly cheaper than trying to find a flight to Philadelphia from our little corner of nowhere. We drove a rented red Chrysler Sebring featuring a cushy-mushy ride, wretchedly uncomfortable seats, the pervasive scent of cigarette smoke, and a blind spot the size of Detroit. But at least it's cute. Cute has got to count for something.

I saw only one deer carcass along the highway, suggesting that either Pennsylvania's crack carcass-removal crew has been hard at work over the holidays or else the deer herd is a bit thin this year. Last time we drove to Philadelphia, we couldn't count the dead deer we saw along the way.

And now here we are at the downtown Marriott, where many MLA attendees have that deer-in-the-headlights so look common at academic conferences, particularly among those interviewing for vanishing jobs. We arrived in time for me to change out of my traveling clothes (which absorbed the cigarette-smoke smell from the rental car!) before dashing down to see the screening of the new Zora Neale Hurston documentary. But every chair was already full and the crowd was overflowing into the hall, all those bodies clad in black wool generating enough heat to send me into instant nap mode. So I decided to skip it.

I wandered around the book exhibit (and no, I don't need any more free tote bags) and came up to the room to zone out for a bit before attending the next session. I'm still up in the air about which panel I'll attend tonight: translation, digital Whitman, or Henry James? I'm a little aimless right now, but after spending most of the day aiming due east at 70 miles an hour, a little aimlessness feels just about right.

Put a fork in it

I could go on fiddling with my MLA paper until the end of time, but when I can no longer see the words, it's time to stick a fork in it and call it done.
My paper is missing one bibliographic reference and a page number and I need to sharpen the focus throughout and beef up the conclusion, but right now the whole thing looks like mush to me, so I think I'll hit "print" and walk away.

Of course I'll need to revisit the manuscript again before I present it on Wednesday, primarily because it's about three pages too long. The paragraphs in which I genuflect to every scholar who has every said anything, interesting or otherwise, about these poems are ripe for chopping. I'd rather have too much material than too little, and there's nothing like an emergency paragraph-ectomy to reveal the deadwood in a paper.

Now that the paper is done (or as done as it's going to get this year), I can focus on the fun part: planning, packing, getting the show on the road. Philadeliphia, here I come!

Better not forget to pack my paper.