First, the fun, social stuff. I hadn't been to San Francisco for the better part of a decade. I'd always had fond memories of the place, and I enjoyed myself thoroughly this time around, but I was surprised at how I'd somehow conveniently forgotten about the myriad panhandlers in the city. Some were creative and funny (I couldn't help but smile when I passed the guy who asked for a contribution to the "United Buy a Negro a Hamburger Fund"). Most were unobtrusive. But a few were really aggressive. I shared with my MLA roommate how the experience made me feel like a complete bourgeois asshole ("They should really do something about all these panhandlers!").
And in the spirit of sounding like a complete bourgeois asshole, I'll add that I enjoyed some amazing food in San Francisco. Had two wonderful and relatively inexpensive meals at Sakana, and some downright cheap, yummy food in the Tenderloin. The real lowlight was at the aptly named Sushi Man, where one sole sushi chef took an hour to get our decent but unmemorable food out to us (even though the place was mostly empty).
The real highlight, of course, was hanging out with great friends--some of whom I only get to see a few times a year. This kind of interaction might lead to binge drinking (multiple outings to the Chieftain, a quasi-dive "Authentic Irish" pub next door to our hotel), but cirrhosis is a small price to pay for some serious bonhommie, no?
Miltonista is sorry to report that he certainly didn't live up to his name when he missed the first two Milton panels. But he did make it to the panel on Lycidas on the final morning. John Rogers started off with a pretty lively talk; especially illuminating was his discussion of St. Peter's speech that erupts from the heart of the poem. Doug Trevor followed with a talk about the figure of Damoetas, and Jeff Dolven filled in for an absent Gordon Teskey. The session left Miltonista feeling pretty frisky, so he went to the seventeenth-century panel. Unfortunately, two of the talks were more or less repeats of talks delivered at the Milton Symposium in London: Paul Stevens on the topic of nationalism and Catherine Gimelli Martin on Milton's view of Venice. Christopher Warren gave a fine talk that was related to but considerably different from the talk he gave at the Symposium--he spoke about the legal status of early modern diplomats, and related such concerns to figures like Raphael and Michael in Paradise Lost.
To be perfectly frank, Miltonista originally envisioned much more elaborate summaries of and responses to some of the talks mentioned above. But see above re: alcohol's effects on the hippocampus. Happy in the haze of a drunken hour, &tc.--maybe next year, I'll have to write my MLA field report as the event unfolds.
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2 comments:
Let's not call it bourgeoise assholery; let's call it helpful tips for fellow travelers.
Ahh yes, that sounds a lot nicer.
Speaking of helpful tips for fellow travelers, my longest lasting memory of this trip to San Francisco may very well be of a street saxophone player with a curious habit of adding tons of vibrato to each and every note. Everything he played sounded ridiculously warbly, as if it were music played underwater in a cartoon. One night, we heard him play the theme to The Godfather, and as we got progressively drunker, we kept humming it to each other. A night or two later, we heard the same guy play "Memories."
I'd recommend that anyone visiting the Union Square area pitch the fellow a buck or two for his efforts.
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