cccc 2008 in new orleans: the bullet points

CCCC-2008: the crayfish

Last week, I attended my first meeting of the College Conference on Composition and Communication. Herewith, some random bullet points:

  • I gave a paper in which I outed myself as someone who suffers from (and receives medical care for) sometimes debilitating anxiety and depression. And whaddya know? I guess I’m outing myself here, too.
  • I joined the CCCC special interest group devoted to disability studies and volunteered to develop the website.
  • I learned a lot. (Don’t laugh. I’ve been to conferences where that wasn’t the case.)
  • I talked a bit with Jeff, Jenny, and Derek at the hotel bar. I chatted briefly with Donna at the airport. I saw Clancy and Byron from afar but did not get to chat. I know other bloggers attended, but I did not see them…I fell down on the job at arranging meetups, and for that I feel somewhat guilty.
  • I attended the Bedford/St. Martin’s party at the NOLA Aquarium and couldn’t stop thinking about how much my students pay for their textbooks…and felt more than a little guilty about the free food and drink those textbook prices make possible. I’m pretty sure I’m going to stop using textbooks in my composition classrooms.
  • I ate two oyster poboys, gumbo, jambalaya, and a lot of Abita beer.
  • I spent a lot of time with UMKC people, who I miss. But I returned home happy to be where I am now.
  • I did not spend enough time in the interesting places right at the outskirts of the French Quarter, in which Bourbon Street remains a kind of Disneyland filtered through Larry Flynt’s eyes. But I was glad to find those interesting places.

I’m tagging the links I find related to the conference. If you’ve written about it, or know of relevant links, go ahead and add them to del.icio.us using the tag cccc-2008. And I hope to write more about the conference as well as bloggers’ reactions, time permitting. However, the days are pretty busy here at the end of the semester in Sparkletonia. In a perfect world, I’d post an mp3 of my talk. We’ll see…

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

2 thoughts on “cccc 2008 in new orleans: the bullet points

  1. you rule george. i’m glad you enjoyed the conference.

    one of my summer tasks is to wean my intro to media studies class OFF OF A TEXTBOOK. i’ve been building a collection of readings via delicious and hope to never go back to textbooks. maybe we can brainstorm and talk more about this over summer.

    oh, and “oyster poboys, gumbo, jambalaya, and a lot of Abita beer” … yum.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *