Back in the Habit

So the German conference about which I was so apprehensive turned out to be really awesome. In a way that’s almost sad: confronted by increasing evidence about the impossibilities of the job market (I just heard a story about a bright young literary critic who was forced to take a job in Omaha and lives in snow-shoveling misery), I’ve been thinking recently that I wouldn’t mind leaving academia that much, if it came down to it. But the reason so many people are drawn to it is that it can sometimes be pretty great: everyone at this conference was extremely bright and fun and nice, I got to go for free, etc. I felt like one of those people playing their violins while the Titanic sank.

The monastery was pretty cool and, as expected, a bit creepy. The nuns were nothing like my only other experience of nunnery:

When I first showed up I barged in the front door with my bags expecting to find, I don’t know, a lobby or something, but it was actually the front door of the church and there was a gaggle of nuns chanting. It’s not really a hotel in the normal sense; there are just a few rooms that are, I’ve since learned, primarily for pilgrims. Each room is complete with a large crucifix. Nuns care for your every need with fearsome efficiency. Once I left my room and walked about three minutes before realizing I’d forgotten something and went back. In this 6-minute interval, a nun had been in my room, cleaned everything up, given my new towels/sheets, and disappeared. Maybe she was hiding in the closet. It did seem, though, like the kind of place where there might be a murder which would be covered up by the crooked town police in cahoots with the wicked head nun (the town, which has under 20K people, was quaint in that sinister kind of way).

The conference itself—my first in Germany—was pretty different from an American one. Instead of having a panel of several papers that would then have a response and questions addressed to the group, people presented one at a time and then stood up there all alone while people fired questions at them. When this firing is taking place at rapid speed in a language that is not your own, this yields maximum stress. Thankfully, there was not much actual question and answer; usually the handful of prestigious older professors would make a long-winded comment that did not require response. I was hoping that nobody would ask me an actual question, and I almost lucked out. The first two talked quickly, and while I got the gist of what they were saying, I was not sure whether or not it was taking the form of a question, but they finished with a declarative and not an interrogative ending so I was spared. The last guy, who talked at such a blistering pace that I actually had no idea what he was talking about, unfortunately ended his babbling with an interrogative lilt and a look of expectation. When I responded with only a look of horror and shame, he caught himself and repeated himself slowly, and overall the whole thing was less humiliating than expected.

My favorite part of the weekend was this one older guy who stood behind the Powerpoint screen while his introduction was being read (you could see his little legs sticking out the bottom). And then he tottered out when the chairperson said his name. I thought this was so funny. I expected a burst of steam and “ARE YOU READY FOR THIS?!!” Also an older woman who came up to me and said, “It was so nice to hear a real Boston accent!” As she had clearly been prepping this sentence (in English) in her head for some time, I didn’t have the heart to tell her that I had only been to Boston for about 48 hours in my life.

And another thing: I am currently in the Munich airport where, loyal readers might recall, I have written before (the Munich airport is my cork-lined room, you might say). I got here two hours early, sailed through security, and was feeling pretty good that I had bested the airport that had so destroyed me a few months ago. But this was hubris. What I did then, in my ecstasy, was enter the wrong terminal: the one for true international departures, and not intra-EU travel. I thought it was a little weird that I was getting my passport checked, but EU regulations are mysterious to me so I didn’t think much of it. After wandering around the duty-free shops for a while, I noted that my gate was not there. So, 30 minutes after legally exiting Germany, I had to legally enter it again, and explain this to the passport man and get a new stamp. This then spat me out in international baggage claim so I had to rework my way through the whole airport and go through security again. And this time the line was long, there was a large family w/ baby in front of me that seemed to have bones made of metal, and the kid right in front of me: a) had a Zippo lighter, which had to be completely disassembled by a squad of Lufthansa people for some reason; b) was trying to travel with some kind of big metal thing that is used to soup up car engines. I don't know what it was, but it looked just like a bomb from a movie and is definitely not the sort of thing that belongs in one’s carry-on luggage. This caused a great to-do. So anyway, despite all my precautions, I almost missed my flight.

Damn you, Munich Airport! You may have won this time, but we will meet again!

[update to the above, which was written at the gate: Actually, Munich Airport was not done with me yet. The flight was delayed by two hours, I was seated next to a violently ill ten-year-old, and the train into Paris was closed for repairs, so everyone had to wait in the rain for a very long bus ride]

Masses of fun

One of the perks, I guess, of studying Catholics is that you get to stay in weird Catholic places like that place I wrote about earlier, next to the Church in the middle of nowhere. Tomorrow I'm going to another place in the middle of nowhere for a Catholic conference, in Germany this time. The organizers have booked me a room in a monastery. On the website is the following photo:
Is that creepy or what? What is that nun doing? Maybe she comes with the room.

I've been careful thus far to restrict myself to events that are about Catholics in an academic sense, instead of the infinite number of events that are actually for Catholics, and are more religious than purely academic occasions. Judging from the other papers, and the nun in my room, I think that this time I have misjudged. I am slightly alarmed about this because my paper is about conceptual links between Catholicism and Nazism. Might be a tough crowd.

linguistics part deux

The same phenomenon is not unknown when speaking in your mother tongue. For instance, I was speaking on the phone the other day with someone (let's call him or her "Larry Paddocks"), and this person fell asleep briefly, had a micro-dream, woke up, and said, "One million pictures of Gerard Depardieu."

For bandwidth reasons, here's just one:

linguistics

One thing that happens when you are uncomfortable with a language is that, when people tell you something weird, you assume that you are misunderstanding even when you're not. This has happened to me twice recently.

1. Today, an old man came up to me in the library, where I was using a microfiche machine. He held up his library card and asked me where to put the card to use the machine. I stammered that I didn't understand, because microfiche machines do not require you to insert your library card. They are extremely primitive; essentially it's just a piece of glass and a flashlight. And then he made a quizzical face and started, like, rubbing his card on the machine to find the slot.

2. A few days ago, my roommate/landlady was telling me something very complicated and then asked, "Do you understand?", and I did not, but I said yes anyway because normally these things aren't important, then I felt guilty and asked for more clarification. It turns out I was right the first time; the message was, "Next week a scientist is going to come and measure the angle at which the sunlight hits your window. This is on account of a lawsuit being waged against the neighbors and their outdoor movie screen."

Snomageddon

In a thousand years, aliens will visit our planet and, upon seeing the tips of golden arches peeking out of the glacial mass covering the remains of Florida, will wonder what could have happened to such a civilization. Then they will see the following video, and they will think, "Oh, that's what."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MRvxvl8ZYi4

Justin Bieber, for those who do not use Twitter, is some sort of teen heartthrob.

Dissertators, of the world, unite!

We have nothing to lose but our fellowships!


"It is not enough to declare a political commitment for or against capitalism. One has to declare one's theoretical commitment also. One has to choose: either to regard the whole history of society from a Marxist point of view, i.e. as a totality, and hence to come to grips with the phenomenon of imperialism in theory and practice. Or else to evade this confrontation by confining oneself to the analysis of isolated aspects in one or other of the special disciplines. The attitude that inspires monographs is the best way to place a screen before the problem the very sight of which strikes terror into the heart of a Social-Democratic movement turned opportunist."
--Lukács, History and Class Consciousness [emphasis added; that sentence was obviously a nightmare for the poor translator]

Even more guilt-inducing than Tony Judt. Does this explain the special love of monograph-writers, myself included, for Barack Obama? Is there petty-bourgeois opportunism hiding in the form of my academic specialization?

But, as sagely observed in the NYT, "The library is a place. A learning place." Not a place for staging revolutions!

Paris in the the winter

Short update for those keeping score at home. Paris is pretty nice, much better than Munich in almost every way. My roommate is a highly mysterious but very nice Argentinian woman, who manages to both be a psychoanalyst and write a book about Borges without, so far as I can tell, ever leaving the apartment. My room itself is more of a cell or a garret than a room, but it is not without charm.

Although human contact has been minimal, compared to my month in the wilderness (January) I have been a social butterfly. Today, in the library, a young woman across the table handed me what I thought was a note. I got excited about this, thinking that it was some admirer from afar giving me her number. I've heard tell of this kind of thing happening, although it has never happened to me. I was all prepared to let her down gently and was actually composing this in my head in French when I realized that it was not a note at all, but a Kleenex. Because, you see, I have been kind of sick recently and had obviously run out of Kleenex and my face was covered in snot. So what I read as attraction was pity and/or disgust. Story of my life!

Speaking of which, one of the quirks of Paris is that at the swimming pools everyone is required to wear a Speedo. It's a regulation. This seems so stereotypical to me that I couldn't believe it. It's almost like a policeman came up and said it was against the law to bathe, or to not wear striped shirts and red kerchiefs. And if you don't have a Speedo, or have left your Speedo at home, every swimming pool is equipped with a Speedo-brand Speedo vending machine! It's just like the sort of machine that usually dispenses M&M's, but it dispenses Speedos. You can also buy bathing caps there, which are another requirement.

In other random news, I thought that "In the Air" was horrible. I can understand, though, why it has been so praised: it has a twist (the ending), but it's a false twist because what's really different about this movie is the OPENING, so the twist just brings us back to convention and normality. So it gives us the sappy feelings we want re: the economic crisis, but the movie pretends that's not what it's doing.

This review (http://www.tnr.com/book/review/gulag-humor) is going to give me nightmares. Why would The New Republic pick out a random academic press book, and then review it and say it's too academic? Is this going to become a regular thing? I mean, it's good for academic books to get press but not if they are going to be criticized for being academic! This is like when Pitchfork sometimes picks completely random bands nobody has ever heard of and gives them a terrible review. What's the point except to make other bands/academics nervous?