When I got to my hotel room at 8:00 AM and looked in the mirror, I got a lesson in why they call those flights "red eyes." I also learned, as part of my continuing education in Starbucks anthropology, that a "red-eye" is a cup of black coffee with a shot of espresso.
I guess the good people at the Philadelphia Mariott feared that after two previous MLAs in recent years we might have grown tired of the venue; things had been moved around quite a bit since our last visit. The bar, most particularly, had been moved and enlarged. I suppose they've been reading their newspapers and figured we had a lot to drink about.
The conference itself was great this year. While I had to miss all too many sessions (including some of my own Poetry Division's panels) due to varied pieces of business that obliged me, the talks I did get to hear were uniformly non-uniform.
I started out at the panel on Radical Poetics and Secular Jewish Culture (where I learned just how universal Catholicism may be), and I closed out the conference listening to presentations on Langston Hughes. In between, still more poetry -- In posts to come I'll be sharing photos from the readings in Philadelphia.
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