Briefly: good panels, papers, etc., and a no-more-tedious-than-usual annual luncheon.
I'm not hugely in favor of the SAA leadership's new plan to archive personal conference memories (can't all those memorialists just get blogs? which I can choose not to read?), and I did not love the speaker's repeatedly dissing the location of his first job and telling the crowd (a large number of whom were, as he noted, grad students) about the awful hardships of the 1970s and 1980s job market, and how it forced his generation to go to ridiculous jobs in ridiculous places. (Because--cry me a river.)
But then I went home to recoup for a few hours, and all was well.
2 comments:
No more a fan of the dissing than you. Especially since that's the location of my current job (and many of my colleagues here remember the speaker fondly and maybe wouldn't appreciate the public slam, even without mention of the campus name).
Fun to see you--sorry I missed the dance
Lara
Lara:
Oh! I didn't know that it was your institution (though I knew it was in the same state). Super-tacky. It's always depressing when people who should know better think that everyone shares their own regional snobbery--and for someone who made such a big deal out of how diverse and inclusive the SAA is not to realize that there are people in the audience who happily live (or grew up or were educated or have family) outside of the Northeast is breathtakingly ignorant.
Great to see you too! We'll hit the dancefloor together next time.
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