The Beauty of the Bad Conference Presentation
A worthwhile pursuit caught in its heyday
I don’t really go to academic conferences anymore. And, like many, my future in academia is uncertain. Back in my PhD wonder years, however, when Queen’s University (now apparently on the verge of bankruptcy) seemed happy to shell out $350 for me to read a quarter of a dissertation chapter in Milwaukee or Indiana, boy, did I get around. I proudly read my Restoration Drama seminar paper in London, Ontario; I discovered the work of Robert Lax at a friary in Alleghany, New York; I gave a paper with a preposterously alliterative title at MLA in Austin, Texas; my then-girlfriend and I broke up at Brock; I threw up at a Comfort Inn in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. The possibilities seemed limitless.
During this golden age of complimentary hotel breakfasts and mid-career profs scribbling their papers over a mini-bottle of WestJet wine, I saw a lot of conference presentations. The vast majority were mediocre, or worse. Still, they fit the format, conjuring some questions, some notes—even the occasional thoughtful hmm from one of the few audience members. Some of them were great—enthusiastic (almost always) graduate students who really had something to contribute and really cared about doing so in a way that connected with people. Returning to what’s apparently my repressed Restorationist, I saw a fantastically unique take on how irony worked in Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal.” Who’d have thought anything new could be said about that text?!
The problem is that I remember only a little of what was said. Alas, I can’t even remember the guy’s name. The other good ones? Those would take some searching. But here’s what I do remember: the real stinkers. Not the boring ones, or the ones that sounded like a conference paper but had no real argument, or an argument that didn’t quite make sense. I mean the spectacularly horrible ones. These I will remember for whatever time I have left, however far that time stretches beyond the twilight of the Regional MLA Conference Heyday of the 2010s.
With as few identifying details as possible, here are the greatest hits:
-a presentation on mythological tales and figures, in which it was argued that it’s important to “keep digging for the originals”
-a dude’s piece on whichever Cormac McCarthy novel, with dude’s response to every question being “McCarthy’s work is just so complex that I can’t possibly answer your question”
-a talk about how each of Margaret Atwood’s stories was an experiment, and that, in another of Atwood’s works, a new variable was subsequently added to said experiment; the presenter casually admitted toward the end that she didn’t know the sequence in which any of these works were written or published
-“the text is a mandala—I’m sorry, excuse me, you don’t know what a mandala is?”
-*shuffling through flashcards* “this talk is about Salman Rushdie’s synonyms… or, wait, was it pseudonyms...?”
-airports as liminal spaces
The latter wasn’t one talk, but many. (A mandala, perhaps.) Fads come and go, etc. One presentation in this genre sticks in my mind because the presenter passed around a blank sheet of paper at the end, asking attendees to write down examples of fiction that featured airports as liminal spaces. I never really saw how the airports/liminality takes went beyond “it’s an airport.” This stuff should have been obvious to any of those grad students whose $350 let them squeeze in a couple $8 airport beers (those were the days). It would even have been obvious in some way to any ten-year-old whose parents could afford to fly them to Fort Lauderdale or wherever for the family vacation. When lots of families could do that, I mean. And when flying for three hours to read a paper about Cormac McCarthy seemed like a worthwhile pursuit.
Maybe there was something to that liminality stuff after all. And the hugely variable speed at which my writing is published (or still isn’t) means that the order in which my articles appear has nothing to do with the order in which I wrote them. I’m thinking of all these things now, even as I cringe at McCarthy brah and flashcards guy. I wonder now how chronic notes-on-the-phone presenters compare with that good-natured, print-era fumbler.
Such is the beauty of the bad conference presentation.