Spring, Take Two?

I'm almost afraid to say it and jinx it, but I think (knock on wood with crossed fingers) that Spring may finally be returning. After all the weird April snow last weekend, today we are up to +12C and I actually felt the sun beating down upon and warming my skin when I emerged from the metro this afternoon. The forecast predicts 19, 20, and 24C this Sat, Sun, Mon, and I can't wait. It's especially weird for there to be snow on the ground now because, for me, SAA usually marks the beginning of spring. Every year, I dig my suitcase out of the closet in order to pack for SAA, and in doing so I pack away my hat, scarf, and gloves, secure in the knowledge that when I return from SAA, spring will have arrived. This year, that didn't happen. It was profoundly disturbing and depressing. SAA = Spring. That's the way it works. If that's not the case, something is wrong with the world.

I'm glad that the sun is finally out though because I've been itching for a few weeks now to update my sidebar To-Do list, but I didn't dare change it from Winter to Summer (term) until the sun actually began to shine. Far be it from me to delay the arrival of Spring any more than it already has been by my wishful thinking. I think--hope--that we are finally, finally in the clear though.

Facebook

First, I started this blog. Then, I got Google Reader (which is wonderful) so that I could read everyone else's blogs as soon they were updated. And, now, I've really taken my procrastination and frittering away of valuable work time to a whole new level. Yes, I signed up for Facebook. I don't even know what possessed me. I did it last Sunday night, after midnight!, when I had just gotten off the plane and home from SAA. It must have been the combination of the fact that it was late enough to go to bed but I was still on California time and therefore didn't feel tired. That first night when I signed up, I ended up surfing the site until 4:30am! I don't even want to think about adding up all the hours I spent on the site last week. Since this weekend, I've been doing much better. The novelty has worn off. I only check it once or twice or day, or when an email alert arrives. I can now go a whole 24 hours straight without checking it in fact. But this site is very, very addictive. Who would have thought that it would be so interesting to catch up with people that I've lost touch with since my undergrad or my MA degrees, or even with people for whom it's only been a few years, like all the MAs who were in my PhD classes a few years back. It is though. And it's amazing to see how spread out all over the world these people are. They are all across Canada, the US, and the UK.

Facebook might be the latest hot craze for undergrads--and University Affairs wrote just over a month ago that apparently undergrads these days consider email to have gone the way of the dinosaur and they now prefer Facebook and text messages as their primary mode of communication--but I think this might also soon become the latest craze for faculty too, at least junior faculty. Judging by the impressive amount of grad students who are on it, it's only a matter of time before they get jobs and expand the ranks of faculty on the site, and I have seen some more technologically minded profs on the site already. Personally, I envision it as a great tool for chatting amongst ourselves between conferences. I've already searched to see if any of my SAA conference buddies were on the site (none are, but I encourage them to sign up!). What better way to stay abreast of what others are up to without composing a slew of individual emails when we're already busy grading papers and writing articles? And like blogs, it seems to me to be a great way to break down the isolation that is inherent with our jobs and to socialize and build communities in between expensive, annual conferences. Don't you think? Try it out...

SAA: Post-Mortem Post

Well, I'm back from SAA in San Diego, and it would be remiss of me not to blog about it, especially given the great blog discussions already going on over at Blogging the Renaissance. SAA is my favourite conference of the year, but it's also the most stressful for various reasons too personal to get into here. Generally though, I look forward to it as a chance to catch up with old friends, network, and meet new people. It's always a good experience overall from which I've always come away enriched either academically or personally.

This worst part of this year's confernce was my seminar discussion. It was non-existant. We had a 15 minute monologue from our seminar leader, then everyone summarized his or her own paper, and after 17 summaries of papers I'd already read on the plane, the 2 hours were up. No discussion. No comments. No critique. Zip, zero, zilch. The seminar itself was a complete and total waste of time. I pity the auditors, of which we had quite a few.

The highlight of this year's conference was also my seminar. The written papers were great, by far the best group of papers that I've gotten in the 5 years that I've been attending SAA. This was the first time that I wasn't in a seminar that was overloaded with tons of performance papers about productions that I haven't seen and don't really care about. I signed up for a more historicist-oriented one in an effort to build up my early modern cred, since I'm one of those not-very-early-modernist Shakspeareans who doesn't normally do that stuff, or at least I haven't done it much since my grad classes many moons ago.

Which leads to an even bigger highlight. Out of my seminar of really great papers, apparently a book volume is going to be published, and I was asked to be in it! I wasn't planning to revise and submit this piece to a journal for quite some time, as I've got another article and a couple book proposals to be working on instead, but the editors want this piece by the end of the year, so I guess I'm going to have to start revising it a lot sooner, but on the other hand I won't have to wait as long for it to appear in print, nor go through the long process of submitting it to bunch of historicist journals which would no doubt rule that it's not historicist enough. This will be quicker and easier, and quite frankly I'm not complaining!

The other big event at SAA (since I didn't bother going to the dance) was the screening of Kenneth Branagh's As You Like It, which was set in Japan. It was awful!!! Worse than the unexplained discrepancy between the opening Samurai culture and the complete absence of any traces of Japan in the forest, the actress playing Rosalind/Ganymede did a terrible, just terrible, job of passing as male. Long hair, girly hips, swooning, fainting, and what in the world was up with that scene when she's bathing naked in the river?! Or for that matter the epilogue?! An epilogue to AYLI that keeps the line "if I were a woman" makes no sense if it's not played by a boy, so why keep the line, or why do the epilogue at all, especially with a meta-cinematic approach, given that the film completely failed to suspend anyone's disbelief about Ganymede's gender?

In other random SAA comments, I'm glad that I looked at a map before I booked the conference hotel out by the airport. I booked downtown instead. While I'm sure that the SAA hotel was a welcome relief to those who had just endured RSA, I found it very dark and depressing. There was never adequate lighting anywhere in the hotel. The marine-themed bar was always way too noisy to talk and too crowded, although the Tapatini martini bar was great. Nothing beats a margarita in SoCal!