The rest of the day was an exercise in relocation: a sociable drive from Kalamazoo to Indianapolis with SmithKatie and co. A quick flight to D.C. which arrived early. Dinner in the U.S.'s largest Vietnamese strip mall, featuring hundreds of stores and restaurants.
Overall, it was the most thematically-unified experiences I've ever had with the conference. I mostly only attended sessions related to Avista or to weblogs, only broadening my scope on Satuday. Thus, for perhaps the first time ever, I didn't even make it to a literary or art historical session - no Dante sessions, no Venetian sessions, nothing on publishing or pedagogy which I hadn't organized myself. One of the pleasures of Kalamazoo is dabbling. With up to sixty-or-so simultaneous sessions, it's a goldmine of tangential material. It has been regularly the case in the past that the best papers I've attended were from sessions I attended more on whim than need. Caught up in long strings of related events, however, it's very easy to attend one of the mini-conferences which effectively occur within the behemoth. This meant I ended up spending more time catching up with fewer people more effectively, but met fewer new people overall than I might usually at this conference. (Hello,
eulistes!)A last note: I have never experienced such consistently clement, gorgeous, blue-skied weather at Kalamazoo as the conference offered this week. It was perfect.
