I may be away from my blog through the weekend, as I'm trying desperately to carve out some writing time. So far I've knocked off 54 of my 60 survey papers (unfortunately, 15 papers from my comp students have arrived in the meanwhile), so I'm hoping I'll be able to spend all day Saturday working on my talk for that upcoming conference in European City.

You remember that conference? The one for which I'm leaving in nine days? Yeah, that one: the one where I'm supposedly giving a forty-five-minute talk on Neglected Author, while being witty and charming and--I don't know--all Promising Young Scholar and shit.

I've alluded to this in the past, but this is the deal: completely serendipitously, and through no real merit, I wound up being asked to give a keynote address at this conference. It's something that I feel weird mentioning, since it sounds a) self-aggrandizing, and b) as though I'm actually secretly a superstar and I just haven't been letting on to that fact here on this blog--and since the whole thing just makes me feel weird, period.

On the one hand, I think that I have fantastic and revolutionary things to say about my subject (a relatively well-known work, the scholarship on which is piss-poor and the standard reading of which is, in my humble opinion, complete bullshit--my talk is coming from what is probably the strongest chapter of my dissertation). I also think that I can give an engaging and entertaining talk when the spirit moves me. But on the other hand . . . I was a last-minute substitute (for my ADVISOR, as I found out later); the invitation was issued by someone who was, at the time, drunk off his ass; and said person may well have thought that I was faculty at INRU, rather than a grad student. And, fundamentally, who the fuck am I to be giving this kind of talk, anyway?

I'm excited, but I'm also feeling rather opressed and freaked out. I know that it's not actually that big of a deal (it's a small conference; I'm not the only keynote speaker; there aren't even that many scholars from the States who will be attending), and that one way or another it'll be a sweet line on the C.V., hopefully a useful connection or two, and a trip to a country I've never visited. But of course, I kinda want it to be a big deal, at least if I pull it off--and, yeah. It's stressing me out.

(But at least I know what I'm going to wear!)