« Leavin' | Main | Home again... »

May 13, 2007

Me and the Kalamazoo/Battle Creek Airport

I survived another Medieval Congress - what a week. However, as per usual, I'm in airport hell. Last year Delta cancelled my flight - on a weekend when there are 3,000 extra academics in Kalamazoo, all of whom need to leave on Sunday, Delta canceled a flight. This year I got bumped (of course they're all overbooked - see the above # of academics) and am now waiting until 1:30 or so to leave. Wireless helps - and I'll be here long enough to finish my grading.

We were session #236 out of 632:

Medieval Humor: Laughter in and Laughter about the Middle Ages
Organizer: me
Presider: Simon Trafford, Institute of Historical Research, University of London

Playing the Fool on Misericords - Paul Hardwick, Trinity and All Saints, Univ. of Leeds
Laughter: Breaking the Silence - Darren Trongeau, DePaul University
Objects of Adornment? Detached Body Part Pins and Pilgrimage Badges - me.


The session went very well - there were more than 30 people in the room, they all stayed, they clapped enthusiastically, and they asked lots of questions! All 3 papers were quite good - Oz Hardwick talked about foolishness and the Fool on misericords in England. He had great slides. Darren Trongeau talked about Merlin's bizarre laughter in Silence - a 13th century romance. Merlin wouldn't tell anyone why he was laughing and it drove everyone around the bend. I talked about the anthropomorphized body part badges again; I've figured out what I think about them now - it's no longer an exploration. In the q&a after the talks someone asked if I knew of any British examples of parodic version of the Vigin Mary and I said that I didn't. Luckily I own my copy of Brian Spencer's Pilgrim Souvenirs and Secular Badges, so I didn't feel nervous about saying "to the best of my knowledge...." Afterwards a curator from the British Museum came up, gave me his card, and told me that they're currently preparing a catalog of their several thousand badges, that they do have one, that the metal tests make it conclusively English, that it's never been published (so I wouldn't have known), and that he'll email me an image!

That's one of the best reasons to go to conferences - the things you learn from people who you'd never meet otherwise.

I was also part of a roundtable discussion of blogging - Weblogs and the Academy: Pedagogy, Professionalism, and Technical Practices. I enjoyed seeing and talking about blogs with some of the folks on my link list! Lisa Spangenberg had some great advice (the link in the right column goes to the top page, I think - I'm linking here to her IT site given what we were talking about). There was a pseudonymous blogger on the panel who lives with a particularly strict IT department and campus human experimentation protocol; she couldn't have shown us her class blogs even if she wanted to without redacting names, which is way more trouble than it's worth! Scott Nokes convinced me that I need to set up a parallel all-medieval-all-the-time blog (see my Flickr Gothic Revival group for an attempt to do some medievalist outreach)). Here's his take on the panel - I agree it was poorly attended compared to the breakfast, and compared to last year. Maybe blogging isn't hot any more? There were two non-blogging-but-high-technology-course folks from Western Michigan University, Kim Laing and James Ryan Gregory. I've always wanted to try an online course - Kim had some interesting speculations about who persists in them (the non-technophobic, to put it simply).

Thanks to Elisabeth Carnell and Shana Worthen and for organizing.

I heard lots of great papers, saw some amazing images, drank some spectacularly cheap wine at the expense of publishers, and danced the night away in a carnivalesque dissolving of barriers (I hope folks post some of those cameraphone shots of the break dancing Cornell grad student). Medievalists may be stodgy, but we're not stuffy!

Posted by CrankyProfessor at May 13, 2007 9:10 AM