Academe's Woodstock

I am running back and forth to MLA, the Modern Language Association's conference, for a few days; this year it's in downtown Chicago on the river, too near to get a hotel but far enough to bemoan that fact when it's snowing.
This conference is the biggest thing in literary studies, and most of the job market opens fire here. I lack time and energy to blog if I want to make myself look presentable, so instead, I point you towards the Chronicle of Higher Education's blog. MLA is a big crazy show, and I am actually very fond of it because you can see so many out-of-town acquaintances and friends. It occasionally draws sardonic fire from newspapers with some pretensions to intellectualism; I recall a piece a few years ago when it was in New York that attempted to make my old professor Stephen Greenblatt sound like some kind of playboy Hollywood mogul equivalent.