Murdoch Conference in Kingston UK

It's an odd feeling.

My paper on Murdoch and Irigaray is accepted to this kickass conference, organized by a kickass scholar, Anne Rowe, in a town near London that is so damn adorable I might never go into London while there. I'll run up to Cheltenham to visit with A and work on the Murdoch anthology for a few days, and likely meander about in the oh-so-soul-feeding English countryside, plus the happy goodity of A's company. She's such a big-sister/mom type with funky cool edges and a razor of a mind (she digs Ricoeur, I dig Ricoeur, it'll be fun to talk about his work too) that I always feel totally relaxed around her. Last I saw A was in Dublin with Lioness.

The conference: Intertextuality and Interdisciplinarity: Iris Murdoch. And here's where you can gaze pics of the town. Just the sort of place I like to be. Kinda like my little town, only British and older and cuter and smack on the banks of the Thames. Some of the local propaganda, too. And they brag about their shopping and food and coffee and beer, with which I have no quarrel what so ever. Several of the authors in the Murdoch anthology are attending, so I'm excited to get to meet them and visit. If their writing is any indication of their persons, this will be a lovely time indeed.

Normally, I would be buzzing-excited about this. But, here comes the odd bit. In composing the conclusion to the poetics book yesterday, I wrote a sentence that let the Whole Thing Go. It said that here at the end of this project, I see that the collateral goal (a real job at a real school) is no longer my concern. Yep. Just like that.

I now wish that I had written the whole book under that assumption because the conclusion is turning into a personal essay about many things, most them having to do with what all the several hundred pages before have to do with living life in this world under these conditions. A whole study on Irigaray and these poets written in a more affective mode would have been more fun than even this was (and it was Fun), and probably would have been more honest about the deep reasons literary scholars do what we do. It turns us on. Everything lights up.

That after scrapping a 20 or so page conclusion that tended in this direction but had lots to say about irony (chez Rorty) and the freaky way that the bad relativisim the conservatives used to bash PoMo intellectuals for is now their favorite tool, and then some stuff I'm keeping about love and bell hooks and disobedience and White. But, really, who in their right mind would want to read that? How many literary studies end with this summary-implications conclusion that makes you wonder why it was ever committed to the corpses of trees better left standing? Gah.

But something just gave out. Not hope really. Just, something akin to need, to identity. To an idee fixe whose time had run out.

So, here I am, fixin to go to England, to another conference, and I'm just about ready to get my soul out of the whole game. Maybe write stuff, but only because compelled, not because I'm knocking on the door of a club I likely cannot enter for reasons the MLA people know allllll about concering the cancer in our profession. And there's this book that people like a lot, and this conclusion turning into a exercise in non-attachement, and a sense that I have no other plan for my life.

Between now and my birthday in November, there will be another plan. In fact, that's my birthday present: I'm going to ask all my sharp, loving friends to help me dream up my new plan. What does PRSC do next?