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d_aulnoyFantastic Genres was cool, cool, cool. The conference was in New Paltz (best description: west of Poughkeepsie and half as cool (which is glib, but maybe not true, 'cause New Paltz is cool enough to have two tattoo/piercing places, lots of little hippie incense stores, a used book store that netted me Tanith Lee's _The Gorgon and Other Stories, which I've been searching for for years, and the second-best sushi place I've ever been too - I just have this *thing* about small towns with many motels, they creep me out)). I ended up staying in the "mid-range" motel out of the three motels recommended by the conference organizers with V., who is deeply, deeply cool (as I was a pseudo-goth in my youth, she says that she was a pseudo-punk ... being that she still has pink-and-balck hair and I still have a big problem with eye-liner abuse, I think that we should use "recovering" as a prefix instead of "pseudo"), and studies fairy tales in Philly. We got there and thought ... "Well, we can hack it," as we looked at the shag carpeting and the peculiarly damply-textured duvet-covers and the cracked and browning tiles in the bathroom. And then we realized ... this place hadn't been recommended with an asterisk sayin "*Just for graduate students." This place had been recommended to everyone ... so we thought about how that meant that *real people,* people with agents and tenure and salaries and houses would be staying there, and we let out anguished howls of laughter, the adjective being unusually heartfelt - 'cause, they don't deserve it, but the mental image of someone who doesn't have an "I'm-a-graduate-student-and-I-live-in-penury-so-everything-always-sucks" mentality really is kind of funny.
The conference itself was lovely - again, I'll skip the name-dropping, 'cause it'll just annoy everyone else and make me feel more pretentious than I am, but many of the people whose work, and personalities, I love best were there, reading off-the-wall subversive stories, and positing really brilliant theories about genre and fairy tales and Dianna Wynne Jones, and generally having a good time. I was there for two purposes: to be on the latest IA panel, and to read a paper on Balzac, Barthes, and fairy tales.
The paper was ... interesting. I had half an hour all to myself, and a 13 page paper (already cut from 29). You do the math ... I had five minutes for questions, and that was if I hurried. So I hurried, and people laughed in all of the right places, but when the time came for questions, a deathly silence filled the room. I still can't figure out if that meant that I'm brilliant, and said it all, or that I was completely incomprehensible and no-one wanted to hurt my feelings (being that this was the conference where I literally saw presenters being handed their own derriers by audience members, I don't know if that was it). But two girls who are currently in theory-boot camp came up to me afterwards and said that they'd loved it, and that I was *so right,* and that *they* hated Barthes *too* ... maybe when I e-mail them the paper, I'll also e-mail them the "motherfucking Derrida" poem.
And the panel?
I'll post more about that later - right now, I have to go to my folks to pick up my cat, and talking about the panel might take a whiiiiiiiiiiiiile.
The conference itself was lovely - again, I'll skip the name-dropping, 'cause it'll just annoy everyone else and make me feel more pretentious than I am, but many of the people whose work, and personalities, I love best were there, reading off-the-wall subversive stories, and positing really brilliant theories about genre and fairy tales and Dianna Wynne Jones, and generally having a good time. I was there for two purposes: to be on the latest IA panel, and to read a paper on Balzac, Barthes, and fairy tales.
The paper was ... interesting. I had half an hour all to myself, and a 13 page paper (already cut from 29). You do the math ... I had five minutes for questions, and that was if I hurried. So I hurried, and people laughed in all of the right places, but when the time came for questions, a deathly silence filled the room. I still can't figure out if that meant that I'm brilliant, and said it all, or that I was completely incomprehensible and no-one wanted to hurt my feelings (being that this was the conference where I literally saw presenters being handed their own derriers by audience members, I don't know if that was it). But two girls who are currently in theory-boot camp came up to me afterwards and said that they'd loved it, and that I was *so right,* and that *they* hated Barthes *too* ... maybe when I e-mail them the paper, I'll also e-mail them the "motherfucking Derrida" poem.
And the panel?
I'll post more about that later - right now, I have to go to my folks to pick up my cat, and talking about the panel might take a whiiiiiiiiiiiiile.