This past weekend I had the pleasure of road-tripping down to New Orleans for the Pop Culture Association of the South conference, where I and two of my colleagues presented papers on Shakespeare, Performance, and Feminism. It was a whirlwind trip — we arrived at 7:30pm on Thursday and were on the road back home by 1:30pm on Saturday — but a trip well worth my time, as an academic and as a lover of adventures.
Canal Street at night. We went on a culinary walking tour of the french quarter. The air felt like damp socks and the streets were filled with revelry. Tourists, drunkards, musicians, artists, people, throngs and clusters of people everywhere. Crescent City feels like a delicious mixture of many other cities I’ve visited or lived in before. It has a hint of London, a heavy dose of Paris, and a dash of certain parts of New York City. Crossing streets I smelled car exhausted, cigarette smoke, piss and beer, trash and pizza, occasional wafts of pot and other herbs mixed with liquor and sweat.
It’s a good city for a conference, even if our panel only had two attendees. I can’t say I blame the rest of the PCAS people — there were eight other panels going on at the same time, and even I would go see a talk about zombie videogames over feminist shakespeare studies – and it was an intimate conversation I wouldn’t have gotten anywhere else. My presentation (which discussed the problematic aspects of Joss Whedon’s Much Ado About Nothing – which deserves a separate post in and of itself) went well, as did my colleagues’ presentations. For my first conference, it was definitely a success.
After attending other panels, I went for a walk in the French Quarter. Saw some more sights, treated myself a little, took in the sights and enjoyed my vacation. Don’t get me wrong, it was a working vacation, but it was definitely still a vacation.
My love of the Bard is fairly incomparable as far as literature goes – I’ve loved Shakespeare ever since my parents took me to see a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the open air theatre in Regents Park growing up. Even though my academic focus is new media, I don’t let this rule out old media at all, and I think Shakespeare will continue to be relevant to academics and theatre and storytelling until the end of time. So, I took this opportunity to get a tattoo that was a long time coming:
Kevin at Electric Ladyland Tattoo did the work, the quote is from Act 3 scene 1 of Midsummer. I couldn’t be happier with it.
It was a whirlwind trip and now I’m back to reality. There are papers to grade, midterms to write, and a thesis chapter demanding my attention, but for a little bit, it was fun to get away from it all.
Thanks for the memory, New Orleans. With a little luck, I’ll be back for the PCA conference in April of 2015.
New Media Mayhem 