madrid

in spain for the CAAR conference. i am staying at the hotel sofitel just off calle de princesa. i arrived yesterday and promptly slept and then ordered a cheese plate and a chicken sandwich just before midnight. i watched anderson cooper on cnn and tried to adjust to the time zone.

i have been having premonitions that something wrong or bad is going to happen to me during this trip. i think that i probably am living with this sense of impending doom because things have been going so well for me? i hope so. that is, i hope that's all. i get this way when i travel on my own. and we all know why. i am fine and nothing bad has happened or likely will happen, but still.

madrid is so unfamiliar. that is, when i have travelled in francophone or germanphone, it has felt familiar. not so here.

i saw many of my european colleagues today at the meeting and they were generally very excited for me. a defended dissertation and a tenure-track job in hand: it's not every day that that's conference conversation.

i heard a good paper today on black barbers at the turn of last century that opened up some ideas for me. i heard two other papers that attempted to think about black modernism vis a vis time and temporality in speculative fiction. and magda's paper on baldwin in turkey was good. i like her very much and it's good to see her and coleman here together.

fyi: alberto gonzalez looks like a weasely prevaricator from here too.

i would like a tri-pod for my camera. it would make things easier. steadier. better.