modern asecs Day one

Modern Asecs Day One by cobrunstrom One thing I hadn't realised yesterday is that the Conference Hotel is in fact the very hotel used by Frederic Jameson to describe the postmodern condition. It truly is a city unto itself - perhaps a world unto itself. I was joking about the idea of the definitive 'Hotel California' but this really is a place 'you can never leave'. It loops back into itself. It's designed by Escher The first early morning session was very wonderful. We learned of how Rape of the Lock is defined by a very gendered argument about matter, motion Vitalism and late 17th century philosophy. We learned about the masculinisation of domesticity, the paradoxes of tomahawks made on Sheffield and the passionate jealousies that defined Lawrence's  paintings of the Siddons sisters. His sketchy rendering of Maria Siddons depicted a bunnyboiler of a scorned woman- an image of that will haunt my dreams The second panel I was chairing. It was on George Farquhar, the best anglophone dramatist of the long 18th Century.  And we talked about how Irish he was and how Orange he was and the way he stages ways in which people sell out their own freedom. In the next panel I gave my paper so I'm l not the best judge of it.  It wa about the queering of Richardson and the relationship between transgressive sexualities and result long baooks. I got to learn about the implications of s household that runs like clockwork, whether pleasure undermines or reinforces an improving narrative and most of all how to Ask The Big Question - did Lovelace love Clarissa. After a Korean lunch in a food court that was still part of the hotel, I went to learn about the Minerva Press, women's fictions, anonymous publication and pseudonymous publication. This was a panel that unravelled any lazy assumptions about timidity, reticence or conservatism associated with how authors wanted to announce themselves in the 18th century. Then we had a round table devoted to disability studies which was hugely informative about how the differently abled were described and theorised, sometimes in quite generous and imaginative ways that served to deprivilege  the ocular sensorium. Is 'Antiocularnomativity' a word? It should be.  And the final paper of the day described the physical deformities that informed successive retellings of a seventeenth century Japanese ghost story. Then up to a gallery for quaffing and chinwaggery and the sudden LA sunset and gazing at a city whose ambition and creativity is qualified by peculiar desolation. A bunch of us questing for food traversed streets devoid of humanity. This at the supposed epicentre of one of the world's great metropoli. I knew this before I came here of course but it still manages to shock. Sleep deprivation and postmodern architecture had fried my senses by this point but I have a recollection of Jerk Chicken Pizza and an ale called Arrogant Bastard. I remembered no more.