Uren Blog 7

On the scholarly side of my nascent little career, I have—though I don’t much now—follow the Penn CFP list. Through it, I’ve found a couple of conferences to which I submitted abstracts and at which I presented scholarship and read fiction.

I remain passingly interested in comedy—its relationship to critical engagements with mediated texts and especially the opportunity it presents to analyze psychical economies. Sean McCarthy runs a site, The Comic’s Comic, where he shares and discusses much about popular comedy, all centered around stand-up, the medium with which I’m most preoccupied as a researcher. A site like The Comic’s Comic points the way to a lot of popular material that supplements research in comedy. For the scholarly resources necessary to conduct inquiry in humor studies, I have joined the Popular Culture Association. As Miller says in the module, the conference is, in fact, a whole lot of fun; I helped the topics run the gamut by presenting a psychoanalytic reading of shit in Louis CK’s Chewed Up.

At the PCA/ACA conference in San Antonio last year, I was most committed to attending sessions about TV. You find a bunch of people at least tangentially interested in the stuff you’re interested in. Conversations ensue. While my interest in TV is waning, I still keep tabs on Jonathan Gray’s The Extratextuals, Jason Mittell’s Just TV, and Christine Becker’s News for TV Majors. A good example of why I don’t get excited to participate in online communities: some time ago I posted a comment on Gray’s blog that I now find annoying. It was cool to directly communicate with a scholar whose work I’ve found interesting and who works in a program I would covet were I to jump ship for a Communications department. But I’m a bit too self-conscious to actually enjoy those kinds of exchanges.

Finally, as a creative writer, I have also presented at conferences. I’m pretty sure that if it isn’t AWP, it doesn’t count. Although, maybe not. At the Arkansas Philological Association conference, of all places, I read some short shorts that started a conversation with Trudy Lewis, who’s a real-deal writer and professor at Missouri. Nice, too. (I also got to hear Padma Viswanathan read her superb story "Transitory Cities".) At PCA/ACA, I read a story to two friends and three strangers. So it goes. We grabbed drinks after and talked about influences and so on.

Beyond these loosely strategized endeavors, I’m probably far too insular a scholar. More so now than before, too. I’ve lined up a couch in Chicago for AWP, though.