Dead Letter Office (II)

Life really is stranger than fiction, as it turns out; below is a letter I just sent out withdrawing my paper from the conference at the swishy hotel in Eastern Europe (sigh).

The letter makes apparent most of the story, but the precipitating event was my responding to a mass email that one of the conference attendees sent out asking a couple of questions about housing and the content of last year's conference. Now, last year's conference was the first conference of this kind that was put on by this particular organization--an organization which, it turns out, is not affiliated with any academic institution but is a "non-profit" that encourages "interdisciplinary exchanges." I responded to the email offering some advice about housing, and then proceeded to ask a couple of questions of my own: first, whether the conference fee seemed high to anyone, and second, whether the administration of the conference seemed a bit "odd." I also voiced my concern that many of the abstracts from last year's conference looked "awful."

I was then contacted by the head honcho of the organization--the only individual whose name appears on any of the organization's crappy, stilted website--who voiced his great displeasure at the "unprofessional nature" of the email, and moved to "suspend my registration with immediate effect." He then sent out an email to the other conference attendees which included this paragraph:

The delegate concerned has been suspended from the conference with immediate effect pending investigation of the email concerned by the Steering Group. I am now in possession of that email and will be looking into this incident further. I can only offer my sincere apologies that some email addresses appear to have somehow managed to find their way into the public domain. We do take your privacy and and security with the utmost seriousness - and all information supplied to us is governed by the British Data Protection Act. We do not, and will not release any information supplied to us without first gaining your written permission to do so.

My response follows.

Dear Dr. X,

Thank you for your email. I must first apologize for the effect that my email has had; it really was not my intention to make a stir, but to ascertain information. I have apologized directly to [the fellow conference attendee who had attended last year's conference, and who took offense that I might have called her abstract "awful"], and I would extend my apology to the other conference attendees, but think that that would only exacerbate the situation.

I must say, however, that I did not wonder about the legitimacy or professional stature of the conference without reason. First, from my perspective, there have been some real hitches in administration. After not having received your first official acceptance letter, I was sent a letter that seemed to assume that I had been accepted, and I emailed you directly to determine whether the second email had been sent in error, or whether I had indeed been accepted. You never responded. With the due date for the booking slip approaching, I contacted Dr. Y, who confirmed my acceptance, and promised that he would send the information I had missed on Monday. But he never did.

These facts led me to examine the conference website and [the organization name] a little more carefully, and I must say that this did not allay my fears. When I responded to J's query about last year's conference, I did not make any "allegations," as you put it, but simply asked questions, questions that I still believe are legitimate. The only "allegation" that I made, if you can call it that, was that some of last year's abstracts looked "awful;" and as I've said, I do regret this remark. Had I had my wits about me, I perhaps should have described them as "uneven."

Regardless, I find it surprising that such a characterization in a private email, an email that was itself a response to another, would be cause for my "suspension with immediate effect."

One cause of frustration seems to be that, how did you put it, "some email addresses appear to have somehow managed to find their way into the public domain." I would suggest not only that they "appear" to have "somehow" been made public, but they actually have been made public, and that email addresses do not "find their way" into the public domain, but are given out or negligently displayed. Your absolute denial of responsibility for the leak, while conceivably legitimate, strikes me as premature at very least.

I suppose that the email snafu, as well as your response to this entire situation provide yet further evidence that [name of organization] is at best a very odd and not very well-run organization that has some peculiar ideas about conferences and the administration of them. I do wish you the best, however, and hope that the conference on [the conference theme] goes well. Rest assured that I will be more careful in the future about looking into who is actually running the conferences to which I apply. Please take this letter as official notice of my withdrawal.

melancholic

Of course, the real moral of the story has nothing to do with looking into the organizations that run one's conferences, but rather with keeping one's mouth shut; one sees more exotic places this way.

Hold On to Your Hat

Well, I've been commenting on a couple of conservative sites, and one of the proprieters has threatened to pass out this address to his friends in the conservative blogosphere and "troll me into the ground." So if things get a little crazy around here, that's the reason. Otherwise, things are looking up; my hike did me a world of good, as did the fact that I got into that conference in Eastern Europe, and the writing, indeed, is getting better. Thanks to all for their well-wishes; more soon to follow.

Depression (I)

Since the presentation of my paper in DC, I've been knocked pretty low, and into a depression; my writing, which before had been elegant, playful, incisive, and even masterful at times, is now slow, sluggish, mouth-breathing, and forced.

My closest circle of friends is beginning to tatter here, a process fueled by the awareness that we should be getting more out of our lives, that given our gifts and strengths we should be flourishing, but are not, and that the solace we have taken in each other is no longer enough to make up for an increasing awareness of our own inadequacies. All of us are gifted in our own ways, and driven, but although many would agree that we should be running our various tables, they also would concede that we are not, and where before we served as confirmation to the others that to be stuck here in this place is not an indictment, we now look upon each other with a growing awareness that however noble or brilliant or dedicated we are, we seem unable or unwilling to win ourselves free from our various and sundry predicaments.

A friend of mine once joked how we could at least take satisfaction in the fact that we are the carpenters of our own scaffolds. More haunting is Proust's claim that we all determine the ways in which our lovers will leave us.

Time for a hike; need to clear my head.

Snowing

Things to do today:

1. Find a coffeeshop that's still open (I live in a place where they declare a state of emergency every time it snows, and it is snowing hard now)
   
2. Wake up, get my brain going (sluggish this morning)
   
3. Collate my notes for the DC paper revision as well as the rest of the chapter from which it was taken (four hours)
   
4. Translate important sections from Ovid's Metamorphosis (my Latin is less than supurb, like, much less) (two hours)
   
5. Revisit a couple of important texts, and read them carefully, really for the first time (three, four hous)
   
6. Organize trip north to pick up stained glass for course (Youghiogheny glass is the finest in the nation, and worth the drive) (an hour)
   
7. Try to figure out how to play a coffee date I've set up--more coffee than date? (Sigh; these things were so much easier in my twenties, when everything moved much faster) (all day)
   
8. Get myself ready for a reception at the College at which I hold an administrative post (ten minutes/one hour)

The snow is falling in thick clumps outside, and all I really want to do is sit, and watch, and not think anything, and not enter into my life.

But it's time to be going.