NeMLA Conference, 15-18 March, 2012Rochester, NY

Almost 200 pages of offerings... different languages, special readings, etc.
Hosted by St. John Fisher College.

A Sampling...Will I remember much about :
”Dissecting the Lower Sensorium: smell, taste and touch in the Renaissance” (p. 38 of the 191 page catalogue)... well... I can look up my notes on smell, taste and how to tongue kisses, but I rather think it isn’t a priority...

Object Lessons: The Thingly Realm in Modern Literature (and fetishism)
the Ambiguous Prose poem... and how the prose poem's muscles work without line breaks with edginess... and humor, words as moments in air... “Verse, Prose and Vertigo: Crossing Common –Rooted Parallel Roads in the Slot of Meanwhile”. (Bergson’s idea. Time is rolling. not chopped into instants.)
A delightful dialogue between the personnifications of Prose and Poetry by Joseph Scapellato, Jaime Walburton's pantoum, where things are repeated, but not quite in the same way.

The highlight for me was "Art and American Literature: informing perceptions".
The yellow Wallpaper as modern art; Futurism and E.E. Cummings; White Noise and the Supermarket Aesthetic. Another entry on all this another time.

A little French rejuvenation with L'encre et l'ecran a l'oeuvre: learning the vocabulary of all the "diegetique" or voices used for narration -- perhaps a speaker overlaid on the character, an echo, a thought, etc. role of Bande Dessinee and sound, film as rolling novel... the visual and aural interplay in Marcel Pagnol
and how film adaptation pushes theatre and words to new dimensions by visual support that goes beyond the stage... but that meant missing p 117 21st century identities, experiences, landscapes, landscrapes, apostrophes, odes, ekphrasis...

Novel as Threat, Therapy : 3 articulate presentations on the novel, accused of harboring imagination, Gide's "anti-roman" and the problem of truth-bending...

Wonderful poems read by M.J. Iuppa, Sarah Freleigh; B.K. Fisher with art by Alice Neel. Steven Huff's prose poems.



Then there are all the sessions I didn’t attend:
Language contact; something imagined, not recalled; Aphorism in the moment and across time; Burrough’s “Poetics of Sampling”; “My ‘pen’ is my “tongue”: the voice of Jane Grey Swisshelm in the Pittsburg Saturday Visitor”; comparitive praxis in the humanities;
making sense(s) of William Blake; “Are the Tulips Angry: modernism’s nature;

Image and language: Godard and the problem of expression.

Oh. how to feel quite small. It would be nice to read Calasso "La Litteratura e gli Dei" - about the vedic sense of the syllable, ces molécules sonores dont est dit que "ce qui est un nombre pour les hommes, pour les dieux est une syllable". "La syllable (aksara) est une vibration irréductible ,qui précede la signification, mais ne se laise pas absorbée en elle". Elle seule peut établir la continuité du temps, sans laquelle on "se retrouve dans un état de dispersion irréductible dont la peur est plus radicale que la peur de la mort".

Play Brahms Piano Quintet the way we heard it last night ... early music applications of attack, metrical license… subtle and exquisite


so much more.