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!