APA Eastern Division Meetings: A.K.A. The Meat Market

I am recently back from what was probably the least pleasant APA Eastern meeting I have ever attended. Friends should note that I enjoyed catching up as usual. However, the fact that I spent most of the meeting fending off a stomach bug and conducting job interviews combined for a less than optimal couple of days. On the up side, I was able to catch up with a number of folks I knew from graduate school as it seems we were all hiring. There were at least 9 jobs this year with Memphis grads on the interview team. Not bad given that the program only started cranking out PhDs in 1995. The evening receptions were painful to the agaoraphobes among us--too many people in too small a room. But all is well that ends well--I'll know which when it ends.

Dinner and Derrida, or foody Foucault

How can you NOT read a restaurant review with the teaser tag:

"The non-testicular offal on the plate provided context for the gentle, white rooster's doodles"

And a passage like this:

"I am, after all, an English graduate. But that is the tragedy of it. For by the time I got to university, in 1988, books were no longer in fashion, and no matter how many books I read, the powers that were, the tutors, the examiners, did not want to hear about them.

They wanted to hear about Critical Theory. They wanted to hear about Marxist, Feminist, New Historicist, Cultural Materialist, Psychoanalytic, Structuralist and Post-Structuralist approaches to the critique of literature. But they did not want to hear about literature.

They wanted to hear about Jacques Derrida and Roland Barthes, about Foucault, de Man, Althusser, Lacan, and the tools they brought to the reading of books. But they did not want to hear about books."

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