Just returned from the conference in Syracuse. Great all around - good work, good art, good excursions, good company. Anne Demo and her colleagues and grad students at Syracuse put on a marvelous conference. The conference was not only interdisciplinary, it was also international, with scholars from Europe and South America in attendance. Here's a bit of what we heard, saw, and talked about.
Then there was the bizarre juxtaposition, visual and otherwise, between our group and the other group that gathered Saturday in the same conference center. When we arrived Saturday morning the hallways were crowded with young girls, maybe 11-15 years old. The girls, each one heavily made up and dressed um, fancy, waited in line to register at a small table where an equally made up and fancy young woman checked them in by consulting a huge, hot pink three-ring binder. The sign on the door to their meeting room said "Barbizon." I flashed immediately to these commercials I used to see on TV in the 70s for the "Barbizon School," which, according to the ads, would help you start an "exciting" career in modeling. Sure enough, walking by the room later in the day, I observed an older woman instructing a roomful of young girls how to enter a room properly. Several of us joked that we should organize some sort of radical feminist intervention whereby we would rush in to save these girls from the "whoremakers" at the Barbizon School. But then I figured they'd probably the signs on the doors to our meeting rooms, signs advertising panels on things like "Visual Memory, Trauma, and Death." Maybe they thought we needed a little intervention too. And definitely a little mascara.
On to Copenhagen, where there will also be interdisciplinary and international goings-on. And Carlsberg. LOTS of Carlsberg.
Loved the blurb on modeling. Since you are the younger "sissy" you probably don't remember that I dabbled in a little modeling in my youth. What did it teach me? I never go out of the house without my eyebrows and my attitude. Love, Sissy 1
Posted by: Sissy 1 | 07 October 2008 at 06:39 AM
And boy do you know how to enter a room! Va va voom!
Posted by: caraf | 07 October 2008 at 07:46 AM