New York!!!

I had planned to blog from New York but I was too caught up in the NCAA games and too tired once I made it back to my room. Conferences are always so exhausting. Still tired I will give a quick recap by category:

Not expected: an engaging conversation with a cabbie from Ghana coming in from JFK. Turned out he was taking night classes and currently writing a paper on polygamy so we talked through strategies he might use to convince an American audience that polygamy is integrated with Ghanaian culture and is about more than sex.

Funniest: From the opening lines/song “What Do You Do with a BA in English?/It Sucks to Be Me” performed by the aptly named character Princeton to Trekie Monster (yes, based on Sesame Street’s Cookie Monster) interrupting a “learning” type Sesame Street song about the benefits of the Internet by piping in “For Porn” every few minutes, the Broadway show Avenue Q was hilarious.

Most insightful: Doug Hesse’s, Chair of CCCC’s last year, contention that compositionists have “bungled” it rhetorically by responding to critiques of education and writing teachers with piles of theory and words of anger, which makes us seem “aloofly self-interested.”

Blast from the past: I met up with a good friend from my undergrad days at BYU. We talked and talked, never quite able to catch up on decade plus of history. Still, it was worth the effort. Amazing how connections to people remain intact after years of disconnect--my mind was flooded with 15 year old snippets of conversations, camping trips, and Wayne C. Booth debates.

Most Angry: In a panel discussion about who owns English, one of the panelists, Jack Selzer, suggested that in order to come together (CCCC, NCTE, MLA, etc.) we need to reorient English degrees to composition and dislodge MLA domination. This was met by white men in suits (I kid you not) taking the “stage” to restore order: “Let’s not criticize; let’s be productive.” What a bunch of hypocritical bullshit! It was scarily familiar: the same move administrators at our college make when faculty raise issues about adjunct working conditions and faculty pay: “Oh, let’s not argue now; let’s get along and work together (you with your 30K, me with my 110K) so we can find a working solution. But above all let’s stay positive.” I guess the MLA thugs forgot about the decades of literary theory dedicated to post-modernism and dislodging the Canon.

Most nostalgic: Seeing Times Square and remembering my first trip to NY when I was 18. Somehow I got it in my head I was going to go to NY (maybe the numerous New Year’s eves at my grandmothers watching the ball drop or maybe Woody Allen films) while attending Methodist College in NC. I went by myself—none of my friends could afford it--even though I’d never been in a taxi and hadn’t the slightest idea how to negotiate NY. Back then the ½ price tickets for a Broadway show were sold right in Times Square—I saw Fences, Cats, and some show I can’t remember. I even ran in Central Park by wearing a back pack and then changing in a nearby museum bathroom and then running with the backpack on. I just can’t quite believe I pulled it off. My favorite memory was sipping one of my first cups of coffee in an expensive restaurant after having been dosed with rain—I ordered lobster which the waiter had to show me how to eat. Unbelievable.

Best food: An Italian desert—freshly cooked little doughnuts holes with a pile of cream and grapes.

Pleasant Surprise: Dream Girls on the long flight home—quite a performance by Jennifer Hudson. Man, do I hate flying but this innovative musical full of great acting made it go by quicker.