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Gary D. Malaney - Univ. of Massachusetts Amherst
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Notes from the 2003 MLA Convention
By Brian Cremins
My first bit of advice to those graduate students planning
to attend the MLA convention next year in Philadelphia is simple: bring your
laptop. I left mine at home this year for several reasons, though two
days into the conference I regretted my decision. My reasons for leaving
my computer at home with my cat, at least to my mind, were sound. First
of all, I had no room for it in my luggage, nor did I want to stuff it into my
suitcase for fear of wrinkling my new Italian suit––the first suit I have had,
by the way, since the the plaid blue-and-white polyester one my mother bought
for me to celebrate my graduation from kindergarten in the late 1970s.
Had I been older, I could have worn that suit to an audition for the role of
John Travolta’s kid brother in Saturday Night Fever, but it was just not
to be, and I had to go to first grade instead. Next, my computer is, let
me admit, memory-challenged, and at the moment holds the final draft of my
doctoral dissertation. Though I have other spare electronic copies of my
dissertation in various places all across the state and the country (just in
case my laptop spontaneously combusts), I did not want to risk losing my iMac
and its precious contents (precious to me, anyway, as well as to a couple of my
friends, and to my dissertation committee). The lack of space on my hard
drive has had other consequences––namely, that I am currently unable to check
my e-mail or do much of anything on my computer, a fact which has put me at the
mercy of friends and colleagues who lock their doors when they see me passing
in the hallway and grumble to themselves (“Why won’t he just buy a new
one?”). Given what I have told you about my computer, it should come as
no surprise to you how speechless I was when the young woman across the aisle
from me on the flight to San Diego placed her laptop on her tray table, pulled
a DVD from her briefcase, and started watching Martin Scorcese’s The King of
Comedy. I’d just watched the film myself just a few weeks
before. On VHS. When I arrived in San Diego, I was still dizzy from the
turbulence we had experienced over the Rocky Mountains, turbulence so severe
that for a couple of moments I started hallucinating and thought I saw
elephants standing astride the engines on the wing of the plane (why
elephants? I don’t know, but I suspect it had something to do with the
music I was listening to on my CD walkman––Hendrix’s psychedelic masterpiece Electric
Ladyland––and the drowsy-formula Dramamine I had ingested before
take-off). I suddenly realized that I had no way to contact other friends
attending the conference or, worse yet, members of the search committees from
the schools for which I would be interviewing. What if the committee
members had to reschedule an interview time and meeting place? What if I
missed an important call while visiting those meerkats at the Zoo or hunting
for Doc Savage paperbacks at Wahrenbrock’s Book House downtown? It was at
that moment, as I waited for the shuttle which would take me to my hotel, that
I realized just how nervous I was––I’d survived the flight, but now I had to
take my Italian-suited self and survive the interview process. The next morning, while leafing through the program for the
convention, I found some relief. Computer terminals were available at a
number of places in the convention hotels, most notably at the publisher’s book
exhibit. After carefully mapping each of the places I needed to be during
the four days of the conference, and idly stirring a $6 bowl of oatmeal at the
hotel restaurant (which prompted me to ask myself two questions: why had I just
paid $6 for a bowl of watery oatmeal, and why had I ordered oatmeal in the
first place when outside it was a bright, 70 degree, Southern California
morning?), I made my way to the book exhibit and encountered the LINE.
Actually, I should revise that and talk about the LINES of people waiting to
check their e-mail. Junior and senior faculty members, graduate students
and lecturers, editors and publicists, the LINES contained members from each
branch of the extended Modern Language academic family tree. Some wearing
tweed, others wearing leather, each one carried a mixture of fatigue,
distraction, and barely contained expectation on their faces. Only six or
seven computer terminals were available, and each one included a desktop image
of a blissful scene of blue skies and rich, green pine forests. As we
stood there, each one of us stared at the screens and waited for those who’d
gotten in LINE sooner to check their mailboxes and move along. Each time
I walked to the back of the line, however, I waited patiently for a few
moments, then lost interest, and found myself dreaming about the blue skies and
the trees and the pastoral loveliness of those desktop images. There was
only one thing to do, I decided. Time to visit the meerkats. It was
at this point in my convention experience, just before a trip to the zoo, that
I began to study the haunted hotel. The imagination plays wonderful tricks on us, especially
during periods of great stress, fatigue, or uncertainty. Having given up
on the idea of checking my e-mail, which seemed impossible given the power of
the LINE, its length, and its sloth-like movement, I began to prepare for my interviews
and, in order to do so wandered to the bus stop just outside my hotel.
The bus to the zoo and, therefore, to my beloved meerkats, would be along in
twenty minutes. (I should pause here and admit that I know next to
nothing about the meerkat, other than the fact that I once saw a TV special on
a family of the prairie-dog like creatures being hounded by a pack of wild
dogs. Their habit of sitting upright and quietly studying the movement of
the sun across the horizon appealed to me and I thought I might learn something
from their patience). While at the bus stop I noticed an old, abandoned
hotel, probably built in the 1950s, just across the street from the highrise
where I was staying. Although it appeared to have been boarded up years
before, what I found curious––and a little disconcerting––was that none of the
air conditioners or curtains had been removed from any of the rooms.
While the doors and windows at street level had been covered with white slabs
of plywood, the windows on the upper floors had not been touched. Inside
many of the rooms, the dim outlines of lampshades were still visible. One
or two of the windows were open, and ragged curtains danced on the cool ocean
breeze. As a friend of mine later pointed out while studying the building,
it looked as though everyone who’d been inside one day just disappeared,
leaving only the furniture behind. How many conventions had the hotel
hosted? Think of all the hotel’s former visitors, with their excitement,
their nervousness, their insecurities, their passions, their upset stomachs,
their fears and their dreams. And what was left now? Curtains,
lampshades, and a few lightbulbs which glowed faintly in the darkness. Did I mention the lightbulbs? Later that day, after my visit with the meerkats, who were
just as placid, shaggy, and contemplative as I had expected, I made my way back
to my hotel just as it was growing dark. My interviews were set for the
next morning so I had decided to eat a hearty meal with friends and then review
my notes and perhaps study a series of sample questions. Just before I
made my way back into the lobby, I thought again about the abandoned hotel and
glanced at the upper windows. On the top floor, in a corner room, I saw a
light. Not one of the table lamps I had noticed earlier in the day, but
an overhead light. At first I thought it must be the reflective surface
of one of the windows, but, no––the light was not coming from outside the
room. It was coming from inside. On the ceiling. The
light filled the entire room, but there were no shadows on the walls, no sign
of movement, no hint of life or activity of any sort. Squatters, I
thought. Trying desperately to escape the cold ocean breeze which had
picked up since my visit to the museum. The winds were so sharp they
reminded me of the cold back home in the east. If someone had managed to
enter the building, however, why were there no shadows on the walls? And
where was the electricity coming from in the first place if the building had
been boarded up and neglected for years? Someone, out of necessity and
ingenuity, had found a way to put the beautiful, wasted building to good
use. I stared for a moment longer, then wandered across the lobby to the
elevator. I could see the old hotel from the window of my room. The
light on the top floor, right-hand corner, was still clearly visible. I
drew the curtains of my room and dressed for dinner. The abandoned hotel––its empty rooms, its mysterious lights,
its homeless squatters––is emblematic of a culture so enamored with change and
progress that what was once new and innovative soon grows old and
obsolete. It had been discarded in favor of the massive steel and glass
hotels which dot the marina. This old place, which forced all of those
who walked past it (including several of my friends and other academics I had
met at various social functions at the conference) to pause and wonder.
Standing within the zone of the old hotel, time slowed to a crawl, moved
backwards, peeling back layers of “progress” and “urban planning.” The
old hotel looked just as strong, just as sturdy, as its state-of-the-art
counterparts, but somehow, like a computer just out of date, someone had
decided that it no longer served its purpose. In the midst of the sound
and fury of the MLA Convention, the abandoned hotel was a sobering reminder of
the harsh, cold world outside the supercharged confines of academia, a symbol
of our desire to move so quickly and efficiently that we often neglect to meet
the demands of the present. Too often we spend so much time theorizing
and inventing the future, that we ignore the evidence of things not seen
looming before us. Standing in the shadows of the old hotel and those now
forced by circumstance and neglect to live inside its once lavish confines, the
concerns of those like myself waiting on LINE at the book exhibit are as unreal
as the blue skies and green pine trees of those desktop images. Printer Friendly Version |
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