The Whole World is Watching

The session is part of the conference of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics, which is sometimes called the cultural right's counter-institutional equivalent of the MLA. I'm not really sure this description is valid at any level.

A few years ago, I signed up for the ALSC listserv to get a feel for whatever the group might be offering as an alternative to the MLA. I then spent months trying to get unsubscribed. This had nothing to do with politics.

Discussion on the list consisted solely of personal feuds with no substantial content whatever. It was an endless, lackidasical, and utterly pointless round of exchanges in a pissing match between two or three guys who might have wanted to blame their problems on Marxist-feminist deconstructive nihilism, at some point, but seemed to hate each other at least as much as they did those Marxist-feminist deconstructive nihilists.

I had signed up expecting something like the conversation you could imagine between Russell Kirk and Hugh Kenner about T.S Eliot. Instead, it was pretty much Beavis and Butthead for people who'd read Dante.

At that point, I started entertaining the idea of joining ALSC to form a radical caucus. We could hold sessions on Lenin's essays on Tolstoy, maybe. The idea that the MLA is full of left wingers is, from what I have seen of things, a joke, unless you confuse certain forms of etiquette and demeanor with politics. And the notion that ALSC is some kind of right-wing alternative to it is not much more credible, since it has no power and, worse, no real program.

The only thing the group has going in its favor is that it has somehow turned into an appendage of The Valve. Frankly that blog does more for ALSC than ALSC could ever do for it.

Man, do I wish I were in Chicago.