I Went to Play at the MLA--Part 2

So, what goes on at the MLA? Lots and lots of panels. Panels consist of about three or four speakers who are selected based on topic who then present their individual work as it relates to the topic. El Hijo presented his work following a person from the Revolutionary War and how he had been memorialized through time (quite good, really, but then, I'm biased) alongside a Rockstar Professor and a guy from MIT. I was really proud of him. I saw a few other panels--the ones he wanted to go to--and ended up actually exchanging information with an Assoc. Dean of another university about service learning, of all things. Anyhoo. Panels are kind of hit or miss. One panel might be great, and then some panels have that one pompous asshole who came in thinking "Twenty minutes? Psh. I'm more important than that," and proceeds to blather on until the moderate jerks the microphone away. You know you're good if 1) there are more audience members than panelists and 2) when someone from the audience says during the Q&A after you just presented your work, "In light of that last presentation, I now have a question about your work..." to some other panelist in attack dog/you're a dumbass mode. If you can make the whole lot of them look bad, you really know your shit.

The big draw was, well, I don't know how else to explain this, but an academic catfight between an old hand and a rock star group of respondents. That old hand was Stanley Fish, a man who was absolutley brilliant with his first book, but now seems to simply be playing the role of provocatuer, not really making a statement, just irritating for irritation's sake. Stanley Fish was a rockstar professor before there where other rockstar professors. I guess he is the Elvis Presley of English. I'll let you think about that for a minute. Anyway, the fuss was about his latest book, "Save the World on Your Own Time," which basically pissed off everybody to the right and the left. To respond to Fish's new book, MLA put together a rather ferocious attack dog panel--three other rockstar profs (which should tell you how influential Fish really is, if they need three people to combat one). Most of my readers wouldn't know any of the panelists, but I'll mention one by name, just for JP & B!. She was Judith Butler. Yes, she of the Precarious Life, she who sat next to Stellarc and the Prosthetic Impulse. JB herself. I have to say, she presents quite differently than she writes. She looks/moves like the female Richard Dawkins (which caused me to have an immediate crush on her), and her presentation is out-friggin-standing. The other two people gave great rebuttals, but really the panel didn't need them. They could've just put Judith Butler up against Fish, and it would've been over. He spent most of his time responding to her accusations, anyway. It was, all in all, kind of cool. In a geeky, English kind of way.

In other rockstar professor news, I saw the goddess of composition, Andrea Lundsford, sitting alone by herself, unattended, looking at some notes. Seems like that should be a foul, somehow. She should have an entourage of some kind, after all, nearly all the universities in existence who teach composition use her books. She is truly THE goddess of composition. I don't know where her satyrs were. I also ran into another rockstar prof in his field, whom El Hijo actually had met before. That guy is a grade-A asshole, to quote Cheney. His initials are Glue Huffer. What a dick. And to make it worse, he was totally sucking the ass of the guy in our university who is an Elite Rockstar Professor--who later apologized for Glue Huffer's behavior. Jerkwad.

That in a nutshell is the business that we were supposed to attend.

Oh, and the line for the Starbucks in the lobby was perpetually long. I found that kind of funny and ironic somehow.

-- DV