Off-Topic Notes from NASSR

At my professional blog, I’ve posted some notes and impressions on this year’s conference for NASSR (North American Society for Studies in Romanticism). But I ended up taking maybe more notes in general on the trip to North Carolina and the Duke U campus.

21 May 2009, 3 pm: The Al Buehler Cross Country Trail just showed me how out of shape I am: its 3.1 miles of unpaved, hilly forest trail required a few walking breaks; and before I finished its circuit, I got lapped by some speedster Olympian type. (I think I ate a few gnats as well.) Not that all the walking breaks were due to exhaustion. The trail steers through pretty pine and oak woodlands: carpets of dry red needles fragrant underfoot; a snapping turtle nosing the surface of a pond; a thumb-long black beetle; the unreconstructed remains of ancient iron aqueduct; unfamiliar birdsong in the canopy, sometimes nearly as voluble as Point Pelee last weekend, amply competing with the ambient surf of the adjacent highway. It’s the birdsong more than anything else so far (except maybe the “First in Flight” license plates) that tell you you’re somewhere different.

I’ll make time for this trail again, with a camera. To hype it for NASSR delegates, you might think of it as a “suggestive conjunction of the pictureseque and the technological sublime.” (There, now the entry’s topical.)

22 May 2009, 2:30-3:15 pm: Back to the trail for another run with some snaps, as promised.

 
Here’s a snippet of birdsong in the Carolinian forest:

But wow, is today ever hotter than it was yesterday. Maybe these aqueducts pipe water to the drinking fountains along the trail.

 
I thought this would get easier, not harder, the second time around. (Yeah, I got lapped again, by a different runner.)

 
23 May 2009, 2:30 pm: I went sightseeing on the Duke U west campus, dressed in my tourist best: hawaiian shirt, camera in hand, and still I got asked twice for directions. Maybe a game was on, definitely another conference was. I found the central green and the big ol’ Gothic cathedral everybody’s mentioned. A wedding was starting; the white dots going in are soldiers in dress uniform.

And singing its tame little heart out in a tree nearby was one of these ubiquitous birds that it occurred to me must be a mockingbird.

Listen to the variety of its singing — or is it sampling? — in just this short clip.

I found the Duke U centre and stocked up on souvenirs, including two postcards (which seem a bit moot as I write this). Amidst all the original and nouveau Gothic buildings on campus (even the parking garage stayed true to the weirdly unified style), there are also apparently spectular gardens I didn’t have time to see. As well as this artistic oddity, which I did.

Don't blink

And this:

signed by George W and Jay-Z, apparently

And, gardens aside, there were plenty of botanical oddities to see from the sidewalks:

 Okay, am I at a literature conference or a biology one? A brown thrush escorted me back to the hotel.

3 pm: I had separated my recycling and trash but the housekeeper told me they don’t recycle. Come on.

11 pm: The banquet was thankfully free of the line-up for drinks that had congested the Thursday reception. Ended up having a micro-conference with a UWO colleague and his partner on kids, traveling with kids, and other adventures in parenting. Maybe the most important thing I learned while here was this — to keep the lines open with your kids, be sure to ask them these three questions every day:

1. Who did you play with today?
2. What was the best thing that happened to you today?
3. What was the worst thing that happened to you today?

I normally like to keep the personal and the professional distinct, but as we talked, I had to remark it was no coincidence I got interested in Frankenstein while expecting to become a parent.