Some random bullets from the Narrative Conference in Ottawa:
• So I got to the Pittsburgh airport plenty early for my flight, but forgot my birth certificate. Which meant that after driving 80 minutes to the airport, I had to drive 80 minutes back home, and then another 80 minutes to the airport. 5 hours after leaving home for the first time, I boarded my flight. I arrived tired.
• The paper went fine, but was so not the highlight of the conference.
• Spent time with old friends: Hung out with 2 grad school friends, one of whom, Cathy Romagnolo, is clearly being courted as an up-and-comer by the heavy hitters in the narratology community; the other was Eric Berlatsky, a dissertation partner and very smart guy, with whom I had a very nice dinner Saturday night. I also got to see Elouise Oyzon (aka Weez) give a paper on first person narration in blogs, which generated both newbie and technophile conversation alike. Looks like we missed each other for a photo op the next day.
• Janice Radway gave a really excellent talk on Bridget Jones, chick lit, and girls' zines. I have been thinking a lot about blogging, and particularly feminist academic blogging, as an outgrowth of zine culture growing up. I wonder how many of the people on my blogroll were ever connected with a zine, and I wonder if blogging, with its uniform visual and orgnanizational format, is actually a more circumscribed writing activity in some way.
• Made new friends…For whatever reason, Cathy and I ended up hanging out with a group primarily from Freiburg, Germany, and a few from University of Helsinki that gave me a really stunning perspective on how good we really have it comparatively. One man had already translated a bunch of Derrida into Finnish (Finno-Ugric languages are related neither to German nor Romance languages, nor any Indo-European language for that matter, to give you a sense of that challange) and was essentially seventh in line for one of two tenure track positions in his department. This was an education, to be sure.
• Nothing will renew your faith in humanity more than a dance at a conference. Suddenly, and magically, all of the anxieties attendant with appearing smart seem to melt away, and grad students and junior faculty and named chairs all do the same bad white-folks dancing to new wave, disco, Motown, and hip-hop. It was a blast. Who knew that seeing Brian McHale dance (who’s not half bad) could change your whole sense of the profession for a night?
• Crap, this conference was expensive.