So,
cognoscenti, here it is. The long-awaited, eagerly-sought-after, heavily-hyphenated post-Kalamazoo post. Having finally attended a Grownup Conference (as opposed to some of the bullshit Louisiana ones I've gone to), I feel a lot of different ways, the major one being
educated. Going to Kalamazoo was extremely educational. It was fun sometimes, dull sometimes, generally stupid sometimes, and weird a
lot of the time, but it was definitely a learning experience.
For those not in the know (i.e. the majority of the world), Kalamazoo is the site of one of the largest conferences on medieval studies in North America. It could even be the biggest, I don't really know. But I am told that as medieval conferences go, it's the more laid-back, sort of the sloppy but bright cousin to stuffier, more conservative conferences. Not having attended any of those, I couldn't say.
Rather than trying to organize any coherent narrative to cover all the various things I learned, here's a list, in no particular order, of stuff I know now that I didn't know May 3rd (the conference was the 5th-8th of May).
- Jokes in Latin are funny only in a very few places on the globe. Kalamazoo is one of them. My bedroom is the other, but I'm usually the only one who laughs.
- Medievalists can't dance to save their souls. God love them, at the dance (yes, cognoscenti, there's a dance, I kid you not - I went in morbid curiosity but had to leave after about 40 minutes due to extreme pointlessness), they resembled a convention of well-meaning epileptics more than scholars.
- You have to bring the party with you. This year, I and my traveling buddy (a grad student in French medieval lit) were Unknown Students-Of, affiliated with one of our professors who was presenting there but otherwise completely unremarkable and beneath notice. Which had its plusses, I'm not complaining. But knowing a total of three other people (Traveling Buddy, Our Prof, and a friend of mine from Toronto) cuts down
on your socializing possibilities. - White socks go with everything, and pant hems should ideally fall right above the ankle. No, it's true, or at least that is the dominant sock discourse at Kalamazoo.
- My God, the books. There were rooms and rooms of publishers there with table after table of books; it was like heroin for the bibliophile. I restrained myself admirably, since I knew if I bought very many books I would have to sell my brother to the Gypsies, and they don't typically buy until at least October.
- People seem to stick within their very tiny fields religiously. And I don't just mean the religion scholars. I went to sessions on art history, technology, French literature, and hagiography, and nary a cross-over session-attender was to be found. I wonder why that is? I know one can only attend a limited number of session, but if you sit in rooms and have people tell you things you already know, what's the point?
- The quality of papers was very spotty. There were some that blew my skirt up (not literally, although wouldn't that have been fun), and there were some that I feel like my sofa could have written and delivered more effectively. For example, I went to one session on digital advances and stuff to know about being a wired medievalist, and I came out shellshocked, my ideas about how we ought to study material culture totally revolutionized. Or at least, they were smacked with an ideological shovel. But I went to another session and heard four papers on the same Old French romance, all of which came down to the stunning conclusion: gender is socially constructed and sometimes, people do things that support the status quo, and sometimes, they do things to subvert it. Shut up. You're kidding me. Seriously, congnoscenti, we covered this romance in class this term, a French class with loads of people who knew crap-all about the Middle Ages, and I am quite sure that a lot of the papers they wrote by the end of the semester were better than the tripe I heard.
- A lot of Famous People are disappointing. Expecting to hear pearls of wisdom, or at least semi-precious stones or good-looking paste jewels, I showed up at a couple sessions with Big Names. But many of them phoned it in, presenting papers that contained, oh, maybe one or two interesting sentences and a lot of filler.
- One of the most interesting things to watch was all the horse-trading that went on. Book deals, job offers, slightly sketchy flirtations (and watching medievalists flirt is something only for those with strong stomachs, let me tell you), gossip, and general wheeling and dealing was, in some ways, more interesting than the papers presented.
- I don't like the Midwest very much. I lived in Iowa for a few years when I was younger, and I didn't like it then. Nothing has changed.
- I could have attended three, count them, three (3) separate sessions on medieval brick. I attended zero out of three. But I expect they probably looked a lot like this:
This is not a medieval brick.So. There were other things I learned too - for example, asking questions is really scary but it turns out that I knew just as much about some of this stuff as other people. Which was reassuring and disappointing, at the same time. I feel better about going to grad school and eventually on the job market because, my God, some of these people have jobs and they are hideously stupid BUT at the same time I feel a whole lot worse about it, too, because I don't know seventeen languages and haven't edited six manuscripts and probably never will. I guess what it comes down to is that I was reminded, first and foremost, of the importance of having ideas. All the papers I really liked had something to say, as opposed to just listing information that I didn't know. Saying something does not seem to be that common. Or maybe it is and I am stupid. The latter is entirely possible, since I am, in fact, still pretty clueless about all of this.
