20150111.0720

I continue to be in attendance at the MLA convention in Vancouver, BC. It has proven to be an interesting experience, and not only because it is only my second trip out of the United States. (Although that is not so bad. The exchange rate is in my favor, if nothing else.) I have gotten to hear a number of good presentations (and I will be listening to a few more today). It has pointed out some places where my knowledge is lacking; it helps to know where remediation is needed when seeking to enact it.

The peril of such revelations, of course, is in their implications. Those who have terminal degrees operate under some expectation of *knowing* things, so that to have gaps in knowledge, natural and inherent to bounded mortal life as it is, registers as a failure in some ways. I have to think that those in the academic humanities have it somehow worse. The nature of our research admits of little room to falter, somehow, perhaps because so little "real" work is involved in its conduct and production.

Too, the excellent work that some are doing prompts or threatens to prompt a round of self-rebuke. "Why am I not writing such papers?" I ask myself. "Why can I not come up withgood ideas and develop them? Is that not the work I have trained to do? Is it not the work I love? Why, then, do I not do it, or do more of it (since I *do* write and deliver conference papers--but I need to make articles or books of them)?" As a source I cannot presently cite (for which I apologize, but the limitations of facility and equipment I currently face are as they are) notes, I should be writing.

And I will be writing. The conference wraps up early this afternoon, and I will see about finishing the transcription of my notes into my journal afterwards (it is where I keep the conference notes I use in later papers). Some adjustments of how I present myself online and in the classroom will follow. And once I am back with my books and notes, I will get right back to work on the projects that have too long needed my attention, as well as one or two others that have come to my attention as needing my work on them *now.*