Multiple Out-of-Town Weekend Activities Make Me Tired

We left on Friday afternoon and headed for Davis, CA where I was dropped off to attend a grad conference on "the long 19th century" hosted by The Dickens Project. We were given a free hotel and relatively delicious meals to reward us for our hours of attentive presentation listening.

The attendants, most of whom I remember from last summer's affair, are really sweet, smart people who, judging from their papers, are also eloquent writers. But, I gotta say, this is going to have to be my last Victorian-related lit conference. Although, in the past, I have enjoyed reading Middlemarch, Pride and Prejudice, Bleak House, Vanity Fair, etal -- I haven't spent much time thinking about them, or even remembering their finer plot points. Becky Sharpe was inticingly bad, Elizabeth Bennett fell in love with Darcy, Esther jangled keys. Beyond this, the books live a fuzzy existence in my head.

Aside from the fact that I don't remember the Vic. lit. of which they speak, they also speak about books differently than I do. Whereas I am looking at how an idea or figure, in this case a room, interrupts a certain discourse (psychoanalysis) or text (ie Mrs. Dalloway) as a kind of symptom, bringing with it a particular rhetorical history, "they" (as a reductive, general category) were speaking to and within a very particular field of criticism that was concerned exclusively with George Eliot, or Jane Austen, or Charles Dickens. Although I am interested in reading "Woolfian" criticism, I wouldn't call myself a Woolf scholar, or even say I'm interested in disrupting or re-evaluating conventional Woolfian discourse. Then again, I am only on page four of my dissertation, so maybe my comparative non-specificity has something to do with that.

I left the conference a day early to hang out in Sacramento with the in-laws, get some baby-time in with little Scotty, and watch the Oscars with the Mahoneys and company. Here is my review of the affair:
I thought Catherine Heigl was cute, all shaky-voiced as a presenter.
Why did Bourne Ultimatum win all those awards, thus depriving me of my Oscar-pool triumph?
Daniel Day-Lewis won, which everyone thought he would, which would make sense since he was the only memorable actor in the movie. I liked the movie (in fact the more I think about it, the more I do), I liked him in it, but as stated below, the whole thing seemed heavy on the DDL-worship.
Whereas "No Country" was really beautiful in its collaboration.
Tilda Swinton is a readhead.
Javier Bardem speaks Spanish real good.
That song from "Once" really got stuck in my head for a while there.

Hunkered Down in the Bunker

I've holed myself up in the Grad Lit computer room, affectionately called "The Bunker," or "The Bomb Shelter." Windowless with cement walls and absurdly enclosing cubicles, it's much nicer than my cramped apartment. Or, at least it's a nice change of scenery. I'm trying to edit my conference paper -- and, by god, I will get it done! Eventually.

Some lunch would be nice though . . .

Lincoln's Birthday

Some friends came down from S.F. to help celebrate D's Birthday. We went to Soif and ordered much wine and many "small plates," but we never managed to feel well-fed. Which is a pity, since the food was good. But it seemed kind of ridiculous to keep ordering plates, our table would have looked like some crazy medieval banquet for small children. And I can't have that.

So we had wine and then we went to another place for a few more cocktails, which were unnecessary but delightful. We had cheerful, laugh-filled conversations and everything was just swell. And then we went home, our friends were to stay the night. I got it in my head that more drinks must be had, a 100% false belief. Not a single person needed another drop of anything, save water, and Dave promptly took the misguided drink from my hand. A wise move that led to a peaceful night's sleep.