Telegram from DC #1

My laptop has given its last gasp (again), so I'm down to borrowing Vanessa's kindly lent computer or my machine at work, which means that until I'm up and running again -- god knows when in the dark future that will be -- blog updates will be few and far between. Still, at the risk of being uninteresting, I wanted to transcribe the notes I took while in DC. The MLA was kind of amazing. I met a ton of our recently published authors, almost all of whom I liked and who seemed to like me. Maybe it was because I suddenly became the perfect saleswoman and smiled like my teeth were going out of style. I also saw a bunch of Columbia professors - my cuddly Austen professor, who lamented the posturing and costuming of the whole enterprise - some of whom I hadn't even spoken to on former occasions, but who seemed delighted when I introduced myself as a former undergrad. Nothing like college affiliations to bring out the parental instincts of a university professor -- to be honest, they seem so much more friendly and sincere when they know that you're not trying to get anything out of them, not trying to win favor and to sneak into their precious seminar lists.

The grad student enclave, however, was a whole other story. Seeing herds of young, fragile-looking academic types, with sallow faces and ill-fitting first suits, made me a bit nauseous. The whole thing is so staged for disaster. I mean, all these professors were talking to one another about the interviews they held for 'one' position, commenting on how their individual prodigies were faring at other universities, and generally decrying the job market. It's a pretty dreary thing; the kind of event that leaves battle scars trailing in its wake. I guess it was much easier to be on my end of the affair, selling books and talking about ideas and prospective submissions with eager new PhDs or ambitious young professors. Academics, with their blazers, unnecessarily obscure jargon, and generally weak social instincts, are still one of my preferred crowds. It's just weird to see the business of trading ideas and theories (though theory is dead, apparently) as a genuine business, one that grows more and more corporate in its rituals and protocol.

I went to two very cool panels - one on the idea of 'celebrity' as appropriated into a literary context, and one on the fate of New Americanism in the post-9/11 era. The latter was really intense, with DP and JA, two of the movement's 1983/1985 originators likening the historical backdrop of New Americanism's birth to our present cultural climate. They got very passionate about the whole thing, but the younger speaker on the panel - an assistant professor or PhD, presumably - was easily the most eloquent and rational. He abandoned ornate language and irrelevant terms, all those -isms and -ists that I found so annoying. I mean, honestly, I'm not the most learned person out there, but if you can't get me to understand the main point of your argument, who on earth can? The 50 specialists in your field? There's no better way to project intellectuals as being an isolated and snooty bunch than to encrypt simple ideas in grandiose terms. After all, why have a 10-minute speech when you can deliver an endless and obscure dissertation on cake decorating...

Anyway, the panel was really exciting, especially when a member of the audience took a speaker to task, dismissing New Americanism as an "imported" phenomenon, whereupon the speaker went red in the face and shrieked, "imported? what do you mean by that? are you a nativist?" It was better than watching Richard III. What fantastic entertainment.

Overall, I really enjoyed the whole thing, exhausting though it was. Plus it was great to stay in a hotel room, with a big, cozy bed and a private bathroom. I know there are all those disenchanting shots of people looking lost and lonely in sparse hotel rooms, but what's to bemoan about a well-made bed, good lighting, room service, and a functioning bathroom geared for your pleasure? I love my house in Princeton, but I'm always cold there, have a narrow bed with my old college comforter, the floorboards creak when anyone moves, and our shower is essentially a bathtub with three shower curtains draped around it. It's not quite luxury.

So all in all, MLA was a really great experience: eye-opening, exciting, funny, and demanding. Having people so delighted with our book display, asking questions about our upcoming list, and authors bringing their friends over to squeal over how 'well-designed the book on marxist revolutions in poetry' was, made me really happy. I guess I'm willing to forgive a great deal when it comes to peddling books and thoughts around; I think that both the people and the texts are rather a neat bunch.