Thursday, May 17, 2007

K'Zoo Envy

Am I the only person floating around the blogosphere with Kalamazoo envy? It's bad enough that virtually half of my favorite humanities bloggers are Medievalists, but they also get a kick-ass conference that they all seem excited to go to, complete with a dance (which may be a mixed blessing), and a huge blogger meet-up, one even bigger than our little one at MLA, which is supposed to be for the whole field (granted, there was that nifty little panel, but we got hustled outta there so quickly that it was hard to make any new connections at all).

So, ok, partially I'm just wishing I could go to the K'zoo meet-up. Because, you know, I like people and I like to meet them. I am also, however, wishing that my field had a conference like this, one that regularly attracted a wide range of folks who shared these interests. The Narrative Conference comes close, I'll confess, and a couple of years ago, I enjoyed the dance as much as many seemed to enjoy the K'zoo dance. But few bloggers. Very few bloggers.

What I really want is a regular modern drama conference, one that attracts major scholars in the field, many graduate students, and a core of folks who will go again and again. And it'll have a dance. We modern drama folks can head off to ATHE (the big theatre conference) or ASTR (which is also theatre, but more theory oriented), and there's the lovely Comparative Drama Conference, which has a limited modern drama presence. But several years ago, the journal Modern Drama hosted a great conference (which I know only from the excellent volume published as a result: Modern Drama: Defining the Field) that I wish a) I'd been in on, and b) repeated annually. That's what I'd like.

Or maybe, just to be a fly on the wall (or an actual real person) at the Kalamazoo blogger meet-up. I'd like that, too.

7 comments:

Dr. Virago said...

Wait, there's another conference with a dance?! How dare they! :)

If you were going to be at K'zoo, Horace, we'd let you come to the blogger meet-up. Hmm..maybe the Medieval and Renaissance Drama Society should do some outreach to modern drama folks and do a cross-temporal panel. (Ha! Like that's going to happen! The MRDS as it's currently consituted is a bit, well, stodgy. But things are changing...so maybe.)

Meanwhile here are some things not to be envious of: the sweltering heat in the meeting rooms in the unairconditioned cinderblock dorms (which is also where the book exhibit and the wine hours are held); the dorm rooms themselves and the fact that the nearest hotels necessitate driving or shuttle-catching; new shoes rubbing your feet rare as you tromp all over campus to get from panel to panel; the invariable fact that you want to see paper #1 on panel A, paper #2 on panel B, and paper #3 on panel C, but they're all scheduled at the same time in three different parts of campus.

Dr. Virago said...

Er, rubbing your feet *raw*, not rare. Ew.

Bardiac said...

Medievalists were always the best partiers in grad school, too.

When I was an undergrad, it was the geologists. Now it's the medievalists. I can't win.

New Kid on the Hallway said...

Wow, and to think that most of the non-medievalists I know seem to view Kalamazoo with serious trepidation! ;-)

Seriously, though, I do always pretty much enjoy Kzoo, and when I compare notes with folks in other fields, they do sometimes express envy that we have a conference full of such interesting things. I have a number of colleagues who profess not to enjoy conferences, and from what they say about them, I'm not sure I'd enjoy their conferences either.

Sisyphus said...

Yes!!!!! Completely agreeing that I have envy that medievalists are such energized bloggers (maybe due to isolation at their Unis? We only have two here) and that the blogger medievalists are going to take over that conference in just a few years, as they discover that everyone has a blog or is about to retire.

I don't do drama, but I _can_ think of an annual conference (sans dance though) you might fit in well with, and is really interdisciplinary and interesting, and if you came on out here this year I bet we could _find_ some bloggers and meet up... (beckons enticingly) come ... come ... you are getting sleepy ... you want to create another meet up ...

Chaser said...

Yep! I'm jealous, too!

Flavia said...

Incidentally, SAA (the Shakespeare Association of America) also has a dance. So THERE.