In with the new

MLA was a bit of a waking dream, but not a bad experience. I caught up with some of my best and oldest friends, and met their twin ten-month-old spawn. I caught a Lakers game and explained to my department chair who Kanye West was. I stayed off the Shuttle of Sadness from the hotel to the convention, and mainly avoided the contact anxiety of people interviewing for what jobs there are. I even went to some sessions, for once, including an excellent round table on Shakespeare and Phenomenology, after which a lovely lunch with my professional brothers-from-another-mother (i.e. contemps from another grad school) was diverted by news of Arizona's first Jewish representative being shot through the head. (Is Arizona the new Florida? Discuss.)

The MLA's Delegate Assembly had a mercifully short meeting, but one in which "The member is out of order" was shouted repeatedly and entertainingly. I went to a colleague's truly excellent round table session, which consisted of four African American novelist/editor/exploitation victims from the heyday of Holloway House in the '70s telling stories about pimps, pornography, and the manufacture of Black zeitgeist. I was so bored in a session on professional blogs that I set up a Twitter account. I'm still not sure what Twitter is for. I got lots of book club reading done — Freedom, by Jonathan Franzen, which as you may have heard, is OK, but no Corrections — and I managed in the interstices to read an article about Jonson and Cicero and to send off a letter of recommendation. All in all not bad, though I have to admit it was difficult to leave the post-partem-suffering M for five days.

And now I'm back, and insanely busy (but apparently not too busy to blog). If any of you has advice on how to teach late medieval drama to undergrads, I'd be more than willing to entertain it. I have a feeling that 2011 is going to be momentous, but whether in a thrilling, contact-with-friendly-aliens way or in a horrific, rough-beast-slouching-toward-Bethlehem way, I'm not sure.