I cleared out after some freak announced that there is no difference between academia and the military in Israel because IDF paid for her nephew’s education. If that’s the logic professors are using, what can we expect from students?

[Anthony Kwame Appiah is moderating and doing a very good job]

A Sikh gentleman said he’s very ambivalent. 

A professor said he has many Hispanic students, so he’s in favor of the boycott.

A prof said he’s against Bibi and against settlements but it’s counterproductive to single out academics.

A young woman repeated I, I, I, me, me, me so many times that I don’t know what she thinks about the boycott.

A disabled gentleman showed great erudition gathered in his 53 years of MLA membership.

[Gayatri Spivak left and I’m following because I’m about to pass out. I’ve reported much of it bravely, though.]

A prof thundered that this is a bait and switch discussion. Grad students should ask professors why they care so much about this issue and not about them. The strongest statement so far. 

Somebody cited an obscure point of law. It seems that SCOTUS doesn’t allow for this boycott or we’ll lose our tax exemptions. 

A fellow came out carrying a puppy. Not shockingly, he supports the boycott. Everybody who opposes the boycott is uneducated, said this very young boy to a room full of older academics without furry pets in their arms.

[Gayatri Spivak is sitting next to me and giving me the evil eye because I clap in the wrong places.] 

A woman said that many Palestinians are terrified of Hamas as much as of the IDF.

Another colleague brought up apartheid and told us we are complicit in segregation and apartheid and made a weird semi-pornographic comment. 

An older colleague says it’s urgent to help the people in Gaza but self-congratulating American gestures don’t help. We have no right to put people of Israel on trial at the MLA. Let’s advocate for policy changes instead. 

A colleague asked if the resolution would force us to boycott just the Jews or everybody. 

A colleague responded that the point of the boycott is to enable everybody to work under conditions we take for granted. I have no idea what her point was.

A prof reminded that 90% of our members have no interest in the boycott. This boycott is a distraction from real issues.

This boycott is advanced by servants of imperial interests and lovers of American exceptionalism, said a young female colleague. A bunch of old angry men tried to shut her up but she stood her ground. 

A prof mumbled on about his hate mail.

A fellow called us to discuss the issues that are actually relevant to us instead. 

A disheveled man whined that anti-boycotters had an unfair advantage. 

A woman spoke about some pamphlet that means a lot to her but forgot to mention where it can be found. 

A fellow informed us that he supports the boycott because he once met one Israeli who supported the boycott. 

A lady suggested we boycott New Zealand instead.

An angry man compared Israel to Nazi Germany. He looks like a self-hating Jew, so it’s all ok. 

A calm man said the boycott would prevent him from supervising a grad student from Haifa and he’s against that. 

A speaker brought up his brave boycott of South African apartheid and started talking about “Israeli dungeons.” This boycott will somehow defeat Trump, he said.

A confused speaker said that he doesn’t support political correctness. 

An American gentleman said he wants to speak for Arabs which he is entitled to do because he lived for 13 years “in the Arab world.” Plus, somebody’s mamma is 90 years old. 

A woman asks why we should endorse politics of exclusion. Sexism and racism, something something. 

At the colonial Latin American literature session, a colleague said that the Philippines should be included in colonial Latin America because that will allow to bring up US imperialism and that would make the field interesting to our students. 

So I asked whether it was really that productive to cater to the narcissistic woundedness of Americans that prevents them from accepting that anything outside themselves merits attention. 

The colleague responded that Americans are not prepared to acknowledge the massacres for which they are responsible.

I wasn’t given a chance to respond but I was shocked at the colleague’s naiveté. Americans love to acknowledge massacres, schmassacres, and bombassacres as long as they are the protagonist in absolutely any capacity.

And now please excuse me for I have to witness a bunch of Americans make themselves feel important by wagging their fingers moralistically at Israelis. That the people who foisted Trump on the world should lecture anybody at this point in time beggars belief but here you have it.

My guiding principle for deciding whether a conference session was good is whether it would be of interest to my blog readers. I believe that if a group of intelligent, curious people have no use for what you are saying, that’s a problem. 

The session on anti-theory I attended would definitely not bore you. I hate conference talks where people drone on without ever lifting their eyes from their papers and use copious amounts of jargon to mask the weakness of their arguments. The anti-theory presenters did none of it. There were 7 people and each of them spoke for 7 minutes. The talks were fun and funny, intelligent and intelligible, useful and thought-provoking. Everybody poked vicious fun at the 1980s – 1990s with their “dead white men”, intersectionality, anti-colonialism taken to bizarre extremes, obsessive denouncing of hierarchies, and fear of reason and theory as oppressive, male, and Western.

I feel very intellectually invigorated. It was a great idea to come here. 

I just found something called a terminal market which sounds creepy but there is a cool used bookstore inside and a place that sells shawarma. I hope the shawarma doesn’t prove to be terminal. 

I’m sitting at a real city café! The coffee costs so much that when the cashier told me the price I thought she was selling me an annual membership. The seats are super uncomfortable wooden blocks that make me bless my weight because bony asses must suffer hellish tortures on them. But it’s a real city café in a real city with people actually passing by. I haven’t seen as many people in a year as I have already observed from the café. 

The mirror showed me such an unexpectedly rosy face that at first I praised my new semi-liquid blush from Benefit. But then I realized that I’d just taken an hour-long walk outside in winter, and that’s what chased away my prison parlor.

I love wearing my convention badge. It must make me look very weird since I’m not at the convention and haven’t been yet. I don’t care, though, because wearing my name on my chest makes me feel important. 

These people won’t quit making total asses out of themselves until Trump is elected to his second term:

Call your representative, and politely ask them not to ratify the Electoral College results–it won’t stop Trump, but at least Congress will own his election as well. As importantly, it will make Republicans look even more ridiculous when they claim voter fraud.

People hate losers. As Tolstoy pointed out, the taint of losership is so threatening that people turn against a loser like he’s a mangy, wounded dog and tear him to pieces. Which is why walking around with a banner that says SORE LOSER is a horrible idea. There will be other elections in the future. The most recent election was lost, to a huge extent, because Democrats couldn’t build an appealing image. Maybe it’s finally time to start doing something about that. 

By the way, I’m wondering if anybody in the Dem leadership is working on a slogan that could challenge the genius “Make America Great Again” or if they do nothing but pout.