There's a guy behind me who reminds me of the line that Bob Goldwaith had in Scrooged about the flatulating butthead. I wish he'd shut up. He has a voice like the host of Inside the Actor's Studio, and he knows it, so he's giving a memorial pontification about how time marches on and you lose touch with people. I'm going to poke out his eyes and see if he wants to tell me about that.
Sorry. He just said the word "magnesium" and I almost lost it.
Right now, I'm in a Borders in Louisville, Kentucky, an otherwise happy fourth wheel at the South Atlantic Modern Language Association Conference. This is what your professors do when you aren't looking. They leave the state and talk to other professors about the minutia that they've spent years studying. And frankly, I love it. These folks spend all their free time thinking and learning and debating stuff so I can get the 30-minute version in a panel or lecture. It's a great system. It is America at its finest. (Thank you, Barack!)
At the Baylor University Press table, they're hocking books like, Sacred Terror: Religion and Horror on the Silver Screen, and Gospel of the Living Dead: George Romero's Visions of Hell on Earth. AND… there's a 40% for being at the conference. Those are easy to like—who wouldn't?—but I got all hot and bothered when I saw Quoting God: How Media Shape Ideas about Religion and Culture. I swear, y'all, if I had the funds… While that's rad and all, dig on some of the lectures going on here.
Love and Failure in the Rough South of Larry Brown.
Gothic Pleasure: Joanne Baille's "The Moody Seer" and John Keats' Lamia.
Defining the Margin as Affirmation: An Example of Empowering Cultural Difference and Effective Learning.
"Yon Fart Doth Smell of Elderberries Sweet": South Park and Shakespeare
"You Taste of America": Talledega Nights, Deliverance, and Southern Studies
"For the Sake of the Song": Townes Van Zandt and the Ballad Tradition
Bootlegging Narratives in the LAWS Corpus
A Sorority Girl Gone Bad, Bootleggers, and Thieves Like Us: 1930s Southern Noir in Print and Film
The Artist's Coda in Cormac McCarthy's The Road
And… Everyone Poops: Children's Literature and the Bathroom
Some of these I've already missed and can't experience, but the rest are pretty much on my agenda. Though just barely. See, Louisville is not only home to the University of Louisville, but also a beautiful River Walk and magnificently restored historic buildings in their downtown area, which happens to be exactly the area I'm in right now. Though I haven't found a copy of the LEO (the Louisville Eccentric Observer, their free paper), I can tell they've got plenty to write about. According to their website, they were a bi-weekly for the first three years of their life and then went weekly. We're in our sixth year, but we're not in Louisville, either. Wow. We're not in Louisville. Never would've thought I'd make that comparison. (It ain't that big a place, y'all.) There are blocks of new construction, like Fourth Street Live! which is some hellish food court/mall thing, that must be pretty appealing to tourists. It's not that bad, I guess. The two-storey Borders is cool.
Anyway. We stopped in Nashville, my first non-Macon love, and had dinner at Rotier's. It'd been about two, maybe three, years since I had one of their famed grilled cheeseburgers and an order of hot fingers. Milady correctly noted the hint of lilting nostalgia in my voice as I pointed out some of my favorite things. Lord have mercy, what a place. And then we moved along.
By the way, the Hyatt sucks ass. That's where we're staying. It costs for Wi-Fi. A single liter of water costs $4.75. Not Fiji or something nice. Fucking Pepsi Co-Aquafina bullshit. And for a bowl of seasonal fruit? $9. They're charging $7.50 for a pot of coffee and $13 a day to park. Meanwhile, there's an Econolodge down the street with more amenities. I know because I'm picking up the free Wi-Fi from them right now.
Oh hell no. That's it, bubba! He just said, "To the winners go the spoils." Where's my fucking spork?