The wake of the conference

12 Oct, 2026

When the trip to a conference involves missing your flight and then your hotel, you'll always have a little trepidation about the return. Thankfully, my flight back to Colorado was much less eventful. Sure, I forgot my headphones in the hotel lobby, and got epically drenched by a sunshower that followed me shadow-close for ten miuntes. The phone charge situation was also an exercise in realizing how phone-dependent city life can be¹. But other than a numinous and frankly yearn-worthy encounter with a trans gal on my plane (who liked my "WE WILL NOT GO GENTLE" trans flag sticker), my ground transit and flight were uneventful.

The conference itself was fantastic. I won't give the full tournament report, but suffice it to say that I enjoyed most of the panels I attended. It was nice being around academics in person, getting to overhear things and strike up conversations. Also, I loved the number of languages just casually present (even though they were mostly the languages I didn't speak). There's a joy to watching people code-switch; dare I say, the whole thing made me miss Tucson.

Academic talks are sort of the opposite of Anna Karenina — this isn't a situation where "all happy families are alike", where each defective family suffers for a different reason. On the contrary, the academic talks I find boring tend to be variations upon a single ur-boring-talk:

1 min — Statement of broad, agreeable thesis (e.g. "You can apply the well-known Theory T to show that Object O is rhetorically effective"). 6 min — Historical background of Object O. 9 min — Overly detailed explanation of Theory T to crowd that's likely familiar with it. 3+ min (until time is called) — Rushed, shallow analysis of Object O wrt Theory T.²

There were a few of these. The worst part of a boring panel is the Q&A, where people can't come up with questions that are relevant to the talk at all, and thus settle to ask questions tangentially related to Object O. To wholly fabulate an example, if the talk is "You can use Burkean rhetorical theory to analyze the political cartoons about Obergefell v. Hodges", the questions would be mostly unrelated takes and thoughts about gay marriage. Suffice it to say, there was one panel that was this sort of thing in triplicate, and that was the low point of the conference for me.

This is all forgivable, though, because there were many more great talks:

• The ecopoetics panel, the first one I went to, was three straight bangers. Exegesis of the Sisyphus myth, writing about being laid off by DOGE, and questioning how to think about the scope of the Panama Canal: the whole gamut.
• The luncheon keynote was a historian who wanted to complicate the view of the Middle Ages as a happy whirlpool where everyone traded all their ideas across cultures (not in a "clash of civilizations" way but in a "lionizing text circulation and translation over people making decisions is gross" kind of way).
• A Victorianist close-read the poem "Dolores", with special attention to its meter, from a BDSM perspective.³
• My conference bestie did an excellent presentation analyzing an anthropodermic book (i.e. a book bound in human flesh) from a kink perspective This ranged from analysis of the text itself to an autobio component about her own bibliophobia. She also read my favorite poetry of the night; I could gush on and on, but suffice it to say the top of my notes simply reads "SIMONE WEIL??????" (punctuation original).
• My copanelist put forward a really sharp theory that metaphor and modular arithmetic correspond to the same hyperobject.

Speaking of which: despite some boring scheduling mishaps, my Literature & Science panel was lovely! Here's an abstract for my paper, not as I submitted it but as I'd put it at the time of writing⁴:

Dominique Christina’s 2018 book Anarcha Speaks: A History in Poems describes J. Marion Sims, the “father of gynecology”, commodifying and medically experimenting on enslaved women. One poem ends with a startling address from Dr. Sims to the reader: “Every time you see a black girl bleeding / Think: Progress.” This paper examines this line for its unique syntactical form — a command to the addressee to associate a stimulus and a response. We close-read this poem with a special eye toward objectification, drawing on Edit Gálla’s readings of Sylvia Plath (2019) and Haque and Waytz’ theories of dehumanization in medicine (2012). We also figure Sims' objectification as fundamentally metonymic, and reconsider its atomizing and teleological qualities through this lens. Ultimately, we show that in the poem, the relationship between chattel slavery and Sims' medical practice is not merely that one supports the other, but a deeper and more damning category relation.

I definitely benefited from being next to the other ex-mathematician at the conference, and vice versa; both of us were making moves that I think only math weirdos would make. I also benefited from choosing to do a presentation-ass presentation instead of a paper reading — I was really in the mood to talk in a way that felt sharp and immanent, and the audience responded well. We had a reasonably sized audience, including some grad students who adopted me for the following dinner, and they all had rave reviews. In other words, my work paid off — and what a privilege that is, to have people thinking deeply about something you say. More importantly, I feel like I got some good feedback, made some good connections, and learned the ropes for the next conference in November. Not bad for a first time. Time to crash in my own bed for 24 hours.