A Festering

The endowed chairs come bearing expensive overcoats, a studied ennui, and a secret hope that at least ten people will point at them in a whisper, the way people do in supermarkets in Van Nuys or Palm Springs when the famous actor du jour stands eyeing the tortilla chips.

The tenured faculty come bearing overcrowded schedules, the nagging feeling that after eight years interviewing the brightest young things in the country they are never going to land the hottest one (or even the hemidemisemi hottest one), and the gnawing suspicion that they are no longer young enough to show up at the Marxist cash bar without making a spectacle of themselves.

The untenured faculty come bearing hastily finished manuscripts, a bad hangover, and the guilty knowledge that they’d be far happier curled up in a good armchair with a novel that has nothing — NOTHING — to do with their field of research.

The university publishers come bearing crates of their new offerings and many more crates of backlist, hoping like the tenured faculty for the hot new thing over whom so many are salivating, bracing themselves for the onslaught of hastily finished manuscripts that will all end up in one of the crates that may or may not make it back to their press (but that will certainly never make it back to their desks).

The graduate students come bearing slightly dishonest resumes, enough clothes to ponder interview garb over four hours, and a permanent rictus that results from the awareness of their being on display to potentially any of the above categories in any venue: in the cafeteria, in the bathroom, in the dismal hotel corridors, in the seminar rooms, in any one of a number of good or cheap or trendy restaurants within fifteen miles, and above all in the exhibition hall where the publishers await them with a mixture of terror and vague hope.

What they all bring—without exception, from the four corners of the globe and the many cities and via the many airlines and taxis and buses and subway trains, given what time of year it is and where they’ve just been—is viruses.

This post is dedicated to all those who had, for one reason or another, to go to San Francisco this past weekend for the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association, and even more so to those who were supposed to go but decided, wisely, against it. (Here’s looking at you, Liz.)