Home again for the first week of classes -- still enjoying the memories of Cambridge and Philly and NYC. Thanks for the excellent company and the super find on the cheap B&B, S.! And thanks to M. for giving me the whirl of many fantastic NY experiences in a few short days, even as I was watching historians do their thing during all the daylight hours. I wish I could have stayed up even later! As it was, I did kind of-almost-barely-there fall asleep during the presentation of, naturally, my former professor on Sunday afternoon. I blame all those cake mix drinks Saturday night.
Watching historians do their thing reminds me of my favorite random quality of these conferences: the inspiration. And I don't mean that I get inspired by the amazing level of the papers (though some were quite good, of course, but many are sort of ho hum), but that there's some psychic impact to being surrounded by a bunch of really smart people who are doing work that's both different enough and similar enough to yours to get your wheels turning. I feel this much more at the OAH, less at the AHA where it's every kind of field. It reminds me of my law school years with the brilliant and crazy and beautiful and terrible folks from my section and beyond, and of my recent time in the history department with my staggeringly intelligent cohort and the adopted members thereof, Trust in Steel and Dolce Vita. Now, it's a little more...distant. Everyone's so spread out! So there's something to be said for the gathering together to talk about some stuff, and this is true even though I knew barely anyone at the conference. I have all these jotted-down notes on my own research or my own project that I took during various paper presentations at the conference, most of which had no relation to my momentary inspiration. The papers on adoption after the Korean War or whatever were conduits for my brain to briefly channel a few seconds of the combined group historical intelligence in the room and apply it to my own work. Seriously, I think that's how it works.
And now I go back to the East Coast to present my own paper at a conference! Well, maybe I can give someone else some random inspiration on 19th century cultural studies or something else completely unrelated to what I'm doing. I have to say I'm looking forward to not flying anywhere for a few months after this trip!
Also -- check out LinkTV. Interesting stuff.
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2 comments:
You're right on the conferences. I went to one last weekend, but it wasn't the same as the OAH. I would really like to go next year....
And I feel the same about all of us who are too spread out. I think we need to plan a strategic reunion - Santa Cruz is a good, central location, I think.
Have fun with the presentation! It's great to hear your getting these opportunitites for your brain to soak up even more knowledge. I've been so overloaded lately, I feel I need to defragment or check for updates on my brain in order to try to gain some additional KB's of storage capacity. Maybe I need to scan for viruses or purge the system entirely.
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