Diary of an academic conference
Notes from the American Comparative Literature Association Conference in Montréal
Wednesday
Wake up at 6AM to catch train from Union Station. Read Ocean Vuong on the train and eat leftover marble cake, care of a friend who visited for tea yesterday. Arrive in Montréal in the early afternoon and walk to hotel in Centre-Ville. Seek lunch at Olive et Gourmondo near Old Montréal. Café is named after two cats. Graze the outskirts of heaven while eating grilled cheese with carmelised onions. Wander, stopping at Maison Simons and oggling homewares, before picking up pad thai to share for dinner from Sésame. Re-watch the first hour of Aftersun in bed. Try to sleep but begin rehearsing all worse-case-scenarios for my presentation. Fall asleep but wake up when loud neighbour decides 3:30AM is the appropriate time for a loud and jovial phone call.
Thursday
Enjoy chocolatine, yogurt, and bananas for breakfast. Take the Metro to Marché Jean-Talon and spend a long time looking at food. I love food so much. Pick up strawberries, a fridge magnet, coffee, and some maple candies. Wander Little Italy, stopping at a bookstore and at Louise for more chocolatines. Catch Metro to Rosemont and walk to Librairie Drawn & Quarterly, and for perhaps the first time in my life, exercise restraint by exiting a bookstore empty-handed (though with a list of titles to circle back to: Mbembe’s Brutalism, Tanner’s Worry, that giant volume of Dionne Brand’s collected works). We eat our pastries in a park and pick out favourite houses—mine is white with black windows and looks like an old converted church with a steep roof and arched doors and windows. Walk hungrily to Bar Henrietta in time for opening and indulge in one of the best meals I might have ever had—honey-roasted cauliflower with mint and lime sauce, manchego popcorn, scallops served on buttered cabbage, and a cheesy gnocchi topped with pickled squash (no notes). Pick up conference lanyard and branded-pen-that-doesn’t-work on the way home. Finish Aftersun, weeping at that final scene (consequently, I fail to sleep again as I am now planning a possible project on the film’s use of dance as form).
Friday
Watch an 8:30AM panel on “Surface Effects” with presentations about Rachel Cusk, David Wojnarowicz, and Frank O’Hara (sort of a dream dinner party, no?). Surprise myself by asking two questions, because usually I need time to let things marinate before I can think of anything to say. Get an email from one of my favourite undergrad professors at NYU who has found my name on the program—a delightful surprise!—and we get coffee. She meets my mom and tells me about her book manuscript. I unsuccessfully try to nap between panels, iron my shirt, and fix my hair. The next panel I watch is “(Dis)embodied Forms” and I am struck by the generosity of the two professors who are presenting and how they keep trying to include the grad student who is on the panel with them.
4PM—time for my panel, “Feminism and the Uses of Guilt.” Meet my very friendly panel chairs and present my paper, in which I am thinking about appropriations of feminism that defang it of political commitment and turn identification as a feminist into a means of making all decisions innocent or beyond reproach. I draw this out through a discussion of what Namwali Serpell has called the “hit me novel,” a genre that focalises young, cis, white women harbouring deep desires for heteronormativity, marriage, and patriarchy; to me, this genre is anxious to disavow guilt and foreclose understandings of desire as situated, historical, and compromising—the protagonists want license to safeguard traditional gender and sexuality, without admitting or working through what this attachment might mean. I talk about how the use of feminist choice as “innocence-making project” shows up in Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You and Lillian Fishman’s Acts of Service, before thinking about the more complex approach to guilt, interdependence, agency, and unevenness in Raven Leilani’s Luster (my close-reading is of the final painting tableau). I get a series of interesting and supportive questions, and then our panel goes out for a drink. Pizza for dinner in the hotel room.
Saturday
Sleep in, at last. Walk through Old Montréal in the drizzling rain. Buy a homemade lilac room spray. Go for brunch at Olive et Gourmando again—the weekend special is French Toast with carmelised banana, mint, and whipped labneh. Go to the panel on “Postcolonial Formalism” to see one of my favourite professors present on Toni Morrison’s novel Paradise, and then meet again with my panel for our second discussion (one of the lovely things about ACLA is that, in contrast to most conferences, your panel meets 2-3 times in order to facilitate more thorough conversation and collaboration). Rush to keynote address by the legendary Gayatri Spivak, who is eager to answer questions over Zoom and eat the pizza she has ordered off-camera. Queue up for noodles at Nouilles de Lan Zhou, which is busy enough to have a 30 minute wait even at 9PM. Absolutely worth it.
Sunday
Still exhausted, so rest up a bit before heading to the Musée des Beaux Arts to see the show they have on right now staging a conversation between Georgia O’Keeffe and Henry Moore. Am struck by the uncanny resonances between their work, especially that which uses bone. Also note how Moore’s reclining figures began with studies of civilians sheltering in the London Underground during the Blitz. Note O’Keeffe’s use of photographic framing (optics of the crop, zoom) to stage a painterly mise-en-scène, including glimpses of landscape seen through the hollows of found bones. Think of Gertrude Stein: “there is a way to see in onion and surely very surely rhubarb and a tomatoe.”1 Split a salmon poké bowl at Le Blossom for lunch, nap and read in the afternoon, and enjoy Peruvian ceviche and crab at Bar Tiradito for dinner.
Monday
Seek crêpes in Old Montréal before it’s too late. Devour said crêpes. Pack up hotel room and catch train at Gare Centrale. Send thank-you emails on the train and finish Vuong. Pick up Wojnarowicz’s Close to the Knives and eat a bagel.
I’m not sure that most pilgrimages to academic conferences involve this much time doing tourist-y activities and eating, but you’ll have to forgive me for being excited to get out of the house and out of my own head for a while.
Otherwise, I have been enjoying: the revival of my Fujifilm Instax camera, warm socks, the Love is Blind Season 6 reunion episode, Le Cinema Club’s series on dance film, planning my summer travels, and only having 4/90 books left on my Special Fields exam reading list (which means that soon I can start to read for pleasure again for the first time since July).
See you for another dispatch in two weeks…
Tender Buttons.
You are making my dream towards a literature phD so much bigger <3 thank you.
Your trip plan glamoured Montréal. Bag pattern perfectly matching the scarf!