Early this month, I went through the schedule of papers to be given at the annual convention of the Modern Languages Association, held in San Diego next week. We head off to it right right after Christmas. The program was the usual mixture of the intriguing and the merely resume-padding, the sublime and the ridiculous. The latter inspired a brief, tongue-in-cheek piece. 

 

My intent was, in part, to make fun of the predictable nature of each year's crop of newspaper articles about the MLA. The idea of the red carpet being rolled out for the Provokies might even short-circuit the feedback loop between cliched journalistic coverage of the convention and the deep yearning of some literature professors to appear sly and frisky.

 

It took about 15 minutes to write. Several people who read the article before publication told me that it made them laugh out loud. Which seemed like a good sign. Given that it was, you know, a piece of satire.

But oh! how very naive. Or rather, how heartlessly vicious. The weeping, the wailing, the gnashing of teeth, the rending of tweedy garments!

I should have known better than to get involved in the online discussion. (New year's resolution: Gnaw off own fingers before ever typing a response to disgruntled readers who call you insulting, then begin to insult you.) It appears that I have whizzed upon an entire profession. Never had it occured to me that I possessed such power. Nor, indeed, such aim.

About my interventions in the discussion, one blogger proclaimed: "The author of the Chronicle story weighs in ....and cannot be said to distinguish himself." He may have a point. Then again, the fellow turns out to have once written a dissertation which referred, in its title, to "t(y/o)pography." (See my forthcoming paper "Vested Interest and Interpellation in the Discursive Register of 'We Are Not Amused.'")    

My deep hatred and envy of the academic profession is, it seems, the fuel driving my neoconservative agenda of forcing English profs back to the study of the silent vowels in Chaucer. Who knew?  

Be that as it may, I somehow managed to write a sympathetic profile of Bill Ellis, who studies aspects of popular culture that even the pop-culture folks tend to ignore. That piece, which appeared in the same issue of the Chronicle as my little MLA squib, demanded quite a bit of work. Making things look clear and simple means going through a process that is anything but. 

Naturally, that article has generated scarcely a peep nor murmer of response, while something dashed off in a few minutes ended up becoming an affair to remember. Absolutely par for the course.