I’ve returned from the MLA adventure, and the Louisiana adventure before that, and the London adventure before that.  I’m not, as Liz is, the kind of person who ordinarily prefers sleeping in her own bed, but after the better part of three weeks on the road, it’s mighty nice being home.

MLA was alternately arduous (long hours of interviewing) and fun (meeting up with colleagues both old and new [and newer], and extending the ongoing tenure celebration).  I made it to precisely one panel during the four days I was in San Diego, and even had to run out on that one before the discussion ended in order to get back before my next interviewee showed up, so it didn’t feel much like a conference to me this year, but rather just a lot of people milling in and out of a lot of hotel rooms, occasionally enlivened by martinis.

After four such days (during which I got no time alone, due to the unexpected presence of one of my colleagues in my hotel room), I was more than happy to get back home, and not especially eager to make New Year’s Eve plans.  And so I went grocery shopping yesterday, did organizational nonsense today, and have settled in this evening with a big pot of gumbo on the stove and a pile of DVDs to watch.

And I may even go to bed before midnight.  Just because I’m tired.

In the spirit, though, of Liz’s call for year-end blessings-counting, a brief rollcall:

First and foremost, the love of my life, who will be back from London in a few days, and who plans to spend most of 2004 with me.  After more years than really seem possible, he’s still more interesting to me than anyone else in the world.

Second, the fact that I’ve got a job I actually want to keep for the rest of my life.

My family, who are mostly only nutty in fun ways, and who always manage to make me feel cared for.

My friends, who, though scattered across the country (and around the world), always manage to pick up right where we left off when we get together.

My colleagues, who keep me energized.

My students, who keep me honest.

My cats, who keep me on a rigorous petting schedule.

And—not least, by any stretch—my health, which has been better these last two years than ever before.

May all of you be so blessed into the new year.

Mabel, pack up the kids.  We’re outta here.

Okay, not really.  But this was nonetheless my first reaction when I picked up the USA Today left on my hotel room doorstep this morning.

Right on the first page, below the fold, is the following headline and subhead:

FREEWHEELING ‘BLOGGERS’ ARE REWRITING RULES OF JOURNALISM
Objectivity?  Not here—and the masses eat it up

Why am I so unnerved by the discovery of blogging by USA Today?  Why does it seem so much like a harbinger of doom for the form?  Undoubtedly there’s some elitism not-so-buried in my response, some vision of the AOL-ification of blogging, but it feels like there’s something more than that, too.  Something that has to do with the annoying interpretations of blogging that the article puts forward.

Such as:

Bloggers get their name from Web logs, a new form of publication on the internet. A blog is a cross between an online diary and a cybermagazine, aggressively updated to draw readers back. Just a few years ago, blogs were relatively rare. Now there are millions. They’re devoted to every topic imaginable, from knitting to dating to homelessness. But those who have had the most impact write about politics.

Is it true that those bloggers who write about politics “have had the most impact,” or is it simply that politics captures the mainstream media’s attention in a way that little other subject matter does?  I also have to wonder where on the “knitting to dating to homelessness” scale this site falls.  Are blogs of necessity either about politics or about silly personal matters?

As for the updating of this site—well, I’m leaving San Diego today, headed back for a couple of weeks of quiet in Claremont before the start of the spring semester, so I’ll hope to be posting more aggressively(?) in the coming days.

I’ve apparently gone on another hiatus, without really intending to do so; the hubbub surrounding the MLA issues discussed here caught me a little by surprise.  Once that died down, and I cleared out a bit of head-space to ponder other things, it was time for the next leg of the holiday journey, so the pondering got consumed instead by the negotiation of airplanes, airports, and airport hotels.

On that last:  if the reservation agent you speak to at your airline ever tells you that an hour and fifteen minutes is a sufficient span of time between the arrival of your international and the departure of your domestic flight, please feel free to tell them, under my authority, that they are lying.  Particularly when said international flight routinely departs an hour late.

I am now safely here in Louisiana, however, where everyone is eagerly anticipating the holiday celebrations to come.

(What’s that you say?… Oh, yeah, sure.  Folks here like Christmas fine.  But there are more important festivities in the offing.)

My schedule gets increasingly complex over the next few days, and further posting seems unlikely.  I’ll look forward to seeing some of you in San Diego, however, and will take this opportunity to wish all of you happy holidays.

Yesterday, on Invisible Adjunct, a post referencing an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription required, alas), entitled “Signifyin’ at the MLA,” which documents the many hi-larious paper and session titles contained in this year’s program via the device of a new prize competition:  The Chronicle‘s “First Annual Awards for Self-Consciously Provocative MLA Paper Titles (also known as the Provokies).”

IA’s post about this article has resulted in a welter of comments about the ridiculousness of the conference and its many attendees—the pretension, the painful enforcement of theoretical hipness, the self-consciously crafted pose of transgressiveness coupled with the absolute absence of any actual, um, sex.

Alright.  Yes, perhaps I’m just oversensitive about this issue.  I’m a regular MLA-goer—though not often a presenter—and am simply tired of celebrating “let’s make fun of dorky literature professors” season. I’ll acknowledge finding much of what takes place at the conference every year to be personally and professionally repugnant—yes, the horrible clothes! yes, the ridiculous papers! yes (and it seems to me revealing that no one really mentioned this, given the usual focus of IA’s forum), the miasma of angst and self-satisfaction created by throwing together desperate grad-students and job-seekers with the creme-de-la-creme of rock-star professordom—but despite my own feelings about the annual trek to the Slough of Despond (TM), well, nobody can talk bad about my mama except me.

Each year, we all anxiously await the conference city’s local newspaper’s “Gee, Look at How Silly These Academics Are!” article, and each year, we are not disappointed. Each year’s version recounts the same old nonsense busily being recapitulated at IA—ridiculous paper/session titles, bad sartorial choices, no sex. Each year’s article could be cribbed from the last, and no one would ever really be the wiser.

The point, as far as I’m concerned, is that these articles are nothing more than a recycled, sneering, hipster version of the same old intellectual-bashing exercises that mainstream US culture is perennially embarked upon. Is it too much to ask that the freaking Chronicle—our own paper-of-record, one would have thought—resist getting in on the action?

Yes, ridiculous, yes, sexless, yes, dorky. But who isn’t?

(And on that note:  I’ll be at the MLA from the 26th through the 30th, though I’ll be spending the greater part of the 27th, 28th, and 29th trapped in various hotel rooms conducting interviews.  If you’ll be there as well, drop me a comment.  I won’t have much panel-going time, but would love to hit a few, so let me know if you’re presenting.  And I’ll definitely be in need of an end-of-the-day martini, which perhaps we can arrange…?)

[UPDATE, 12.19.03, 12.27 am PST:  The article that began all the hoo-ha (and it’s really turned into hoo-ha over at IA) is now available without subscription.]

Always on the hunt for a way to be of greater service, Planned Obsolescence hereby brings you The World’s Worst Newspaper-Headline Pun Ever, which, I kid you not, was the teaser above the masthead on the front page of yesterday’s London Times:

SISTERS ARE DOING IT FOR THEIR ELVES.

No, no.  Don’t thank me.  I’m just happy to share.

I’m back in London, this week, and so this marks my fourth experience of the bone-crushing Los Angeles-to-Europe time-zone-change in the last six months.  Complaining about such a set of experiences would be unseemly, of course; let me be clear that I am not complaining.  Merely observing:

That the experience of such jet lag—a feeling of disorientation that manifests at a most basic physical level, as though some percentage of the molecules that go to make up me either got strewn along in the jet’s wake and are taking their own merry time catching up, or as though some percentage of said molecules, having spent ten hours traveling at 550-miles-per, are having a hard time stopping—is the one phenomenon that actually makes me buy the whole “biological clock” metaphor, as it’s evident that the result of the discontinuity between internal and external clocks at the moment is that my body has No Freaking Idea what “time” it “is” (and in fact finds the entire concept so confused that scare quotes are a necessity);

That such jet lag only manifests for me in west-to-east travel, as the eight-hour change from L.A. to London easily requires eight days to adjust to, but the opposite change takes only one good night’s sleep;

That no combination of home remedies (x number of glasses of water per hour during travel; Gatorade before, during, and after; the entirely laughable notion of shifting one’s sleep schedule to the new time zone in the days before traveling) has ever done me a damned bit of good in making the adjustment;

That today, on the centenary of the Wright Brothers’ momentous twelve-second gravity-escape, is a good moment to reflect on the changes in the world that their invention hath wrought, and the ways that the human sensorium is still struggling to catch up.

This is a difficult post to write.  Every post after an unintended hiatus is hard—how to explain the absence; how to rediscover momentum—but this one carries its own peculiar difficulties.

When last I wrote anything of substance, I was basking in the glory of tenure—now official, incidentally, blessed and toasted by the trustees themselves—and marveling at the fact that I was still unreservedly happy, still celebrating, still un-undermined by the world, a full 48 hours later.

I was only a little ahead of myself.  It took 72 hours.

Tuesday morning I got the dean’s voicemail.  Friday morning—five minutes before I had to go teach—I got the email telling me that the publisher that had been reviewing my manuscript for the last ten months, the publisher that had solicited and received two very positive readers’ reports, the publisher whose literary and cultural studies editor was extremely enthusiastic about the book, would not be extending me a contract.  For financial reasons.

I’ve been unable to post since then—except about the joys of being a Tiger fan at this moment of the world—in no small part because I had no idea what to say.  I began a deeply whiny post a couple of hours after getting the message—and then took a moment to look around me, and discovered what had befallen Liz’s family.

In the scheme of things, an unpublished book is nothing.  A non-problem.

And, as a wise friend pointed out to me in the days following, the two messages arrived in the right order.

And everyone who has read the manuscript raves, and says it’s bound to be published somewhere good.

And so I feel guilty, deeply Catholicly guilty, for being angry about this situation—for resenting the fact that I finished this manuscript a year and a half ago, and am still shopping it around to academic publishers who seem intent upon understanding interdisciplinary work as a marketing neither-nor rather than both-and.  For hating that I write for a market in which it’s perfectly acceptable to tie up a manuscript for ten months (simultaneous submission making one persona non grata) and then just let it go.  For dreading having to start this whole process over again, with no sense of its eventual outcome and a complete inability to move on until this project is finally, completely, put to bed.  For hating the knowledge that circumstances that one can’t control—the economic health of academic publishing being completely outside my ken—can nonetheless leave one feeling like an abject failure.

For being so concerned about my bruised ego when I’ve just been given a prize that any number of folks would happily trade publishing histories with me for.  When my loved ones and I are happy, and healthy, and alive.

And so I haven’t posted, because I just haven’t known what to say.  But in order for me to get back to writing, it’s got to be said.

The good news:  It’s been over 48 hours, and I haven’t yet fallen into the “oh, sure, I got tenure, but what have I done for me lately?” that usually develops mighty quickly.

The bad news:  It’s pre-registration week, and the last week of classes, and I’ve been so busy that I haven’t found a minute to glow, much less celebrate.

It is possible that these two things are not unconnected.  A celebration deferred is perhaps a celebration prolonged.

Anxiety is a phone that doesn’t ring when it’s supposed to.

Anticlimactic is discovering that the message was left on your office voice mail last night.