(no subject)
For those playing at home, I came up with the clever title part for my fairy paper: Fairy Elves by the Forest Side. It's a quote from Paradise Lost; I figure you can't get much more English major-y than Milton. So, that proposal is sent.
My Cold Mountain paper went well. Pretty much everyone at this conference just read their papers, so I, too, read mine; it took 20 minutes to read my 12 page paper, which is standard. There were only 5 people in the audience for my and another person's paper; there also was no moderator. The Southeastern Women's Studies Association conference was not nearly as well run as the Appalachian Studies Association, though the tote bags were better. Nevertheless, Boone, NC, is really cool, and Mark and I had a really good time. If you haven't seen on facebook, Mark got me fun presents while I was attending panels (though he attended mine)--besides some lovely jewelry, he also got me a very fun "Teacher Barbie."
We took the Blue Ridge Parkway home for a nice, leisurely side trip, pulling off frequently to look at mountains or follow trails. We stopped in Spruce Pine for some fabulous barbeque. The place had many markings of quality barbeque: the police were eating there, there were NASCAR decorations, there were free Christian newspapers, and "Gunsmoke" was on tv.
We went through Black Mountain, which my Aunt Julie and Uncle Rick were always fond of going through. Black Mountain was the home of the Black Mountain poets in the 1950s, and is still a cute little town (without a college anymore, though UNC Asheville's only about 20 miles away). Very Yellow Springs in the mountains. We went to Asheville, too, and I bought more bubble bath and yarn, which seems to be a requirement when I go there. When I went in the bubble bath store where I'd purchased my "elemental equinox" a few weeks ago, Heather, the woman who had mixed my previous scent, remembered me and that I had be looking for the scent that I'd bought in Yellow Springs called "Zen." She'd actually researched the scent, and thought she could do a reasonable fascimile. Apparently, the key ingredient is freesia.
I love Asheville.
While I enjoyed parts of this last conference, I was rather annoyed by parts of it. I'm annoyed by the very essentialist "men are like this, women are like this" themes I heard a lot, and I'm also annoyed by people using ideas which they apparently don't completely understand. More specifically, I was really annoyed by the talk on why math is sexist that I sat through--according to the student presentation, more men than women are drawn to math because they enjoy dominating struggling abstractions. No kidding. It was absolute crap. I politely expressed my skepticism, and moved on to the enjoyable talk by Marilou Awiatka, one of the people I was looking forward to hearing.
Having last weekend's Appalachian Studies Conference to compare it to, I found it much easier to strike up conversations with strangers at ASA than at SEWSA. I think part of it was due to having more to talk about at ASA--hey, look at that quilt, did you see the band last night, doesn't that chocolate fountain smell divine...SEWSA seemed to have more people there in groups, and when I did the exact same thing I did last weekend to strike up conversations, found people to be less willing to talk to me, someone they didn't know. I overheard many more political or strategic conversations, about someone introducing someone to someone important, or about how they're going to get whoever elected to the something caucus...I'm just not that interested in such things. It's funny--in Asheville this afternoon, I got involved in long conversations with people in the bubble bath store and in the place that sells yarn and spinning wheels and stuff--though it sounds obvious, I find it much easier to talk to people with whom I have stuff in common.
Now that I've been to three women's studies conferences, I realize that I'm not actually that interested in generic women's studies--I'm more interested in feminist theory, which is not the same thing. I really enjoyed the two literature panels besides mine that I attended--the paper on Woolf's use of the female artist in her work was really interesting, though I could probably sit and listen to people talk about Woolf all day. My panel turned into an interesting q&a about magical realism and the global South, which is another thing I could talk about all day. I guess that right now I'm just not that interdisciplinary; I just want to talk about fiction and poetry.
So we are home now and have a day to recover, and then a blessedly short week. Now, to my real homework!
My Cold Mountain paper went well. Pretty much everyone at this conference just read their papers, so I, too, read mine; it took 20 minutes to read my 12 page paper, which is standard. There were only 5 people in the audience for my and another person's paper; there also was no moderator. The Southeastern Women's Studies Association conference was not nearly as well run as the Appalachian Studies Association, though the tote bags were better. Nevertheless, Boone, NC, is really cool, and Mark and I had a really good time. If you haven't seen on facebook, Mark got me fun presents while I was attending panels (though he attended mine)--besides some lovely jewelry, he also got me a very fun "Teacher Barbie."
We took the Blue Ridge Parkway home for a nice, leisurely side trip, pulling off frequently to look at mountains or follow trails. We stopped in Spruce Pine for some fabulous barbeque. The place had many markings of quality barbeque: the police were eating there, there were NASCAR decorations, there were free Christian newspapers, and "Gunsmoke" was on tv.
We went through Black Mountain, which my Aunt Julie and Uncle Rick were always fond of going through. Black Mountain was the home of the Black Mountain poets in the 1950s, and is still a cute little town (without a college anymore, though UNC Asheville's only about 20 miles away). Very Yellow Springs in the mountains. We went to Asheville, too, and I bought more bubble bath and yarn, which seems to be a requirement when I go there. When I went in the bubble bath store where I'd purchased my "elemental equinox" a few weeks ago, Heather, the woman who had mixed my previous scent, remembered me and that I had be looking for the scent that I'd bought in Yellow Springs called "Zen." She'd actually researched the scent, and thought she could do a reasonable fascimile. Apparently, the key ingredient is freesia.
I love Asheville.
While I enjoyed parts of this last conference, I was rather annoyed by parts of it. I'm annoyed by the very essentialist "men are like this, women are like this" themes I heard a lot, and I'm also annoyed by people using ideas which they apparently don't completely understand. More specifically, I was really annoyed by the talk on why math is sexist that I sat through--according to the student presentation, more men than women are drawn to math because they enjoy dominating struggling abstractions. No kidding. It was absolute crap. I politely expressed my skepticism, and moved on to the enjoyable talk by Marilou Awiatka, one of the people I was looking forward to hearing.
Having last weekend's Appalachian Studies Conference to compare it to, I found it much easier to strike up conversations with strangers at ASA than at SEWSA. I think part of it was due to having more to talk about at ASA--hey, look at that quilt, did you see the band last night, doesn't that chocolate fountain smell divine...SEWSA seemed to have more people there in groups, and when I did the exact same thing I did last weekend to strike up conversations, found people to be less willing to talk to me, someone they didn't know. I overheard many more political or strategic conversations, about someone introducing someone to someone important, or about how they're going to get whoever elected to the something caucus...I'm just not that interested in such things. It's funny--in Asheville this afternoon, I got involved in long conversations with people in the bubble bath store and in the place that sells yarn and spinning wheels and stuff--though it sounds obvious, I find it much easier to talk to people with whom I have stuff in common.
Now that I've been to three women's studies conferences, I realize that I'm not actually that interested in generic women's studies--I'm more interested in feminist theory, which is not the same thing. I really enjoyed the two literature panels besides mine that I attended--the paper on Woolf's use of the female artist in her work was really interesting, though I could probably sit and listen to people talk about Woolf all day. My panel turned into an interesting q&a about magical realism and the global South, which is another thing I could talk about all day. I guess that right now I'm just not that interdisciplinary; I just want to talk about fiction and poetry.
So we are home now and have a day to recover, and then a blessedly short week. Now, to my real homework!