Some red lanyards and name badges are still there - but not very many. The strain of being at the registration desk - aka the where-is-the-Madera-room/where-is-the-Plaza-room desk, the where-are-there-more-chairs-for-our-room desk, the how-do-I-get-the-computer-to display-my-power-point desk can be seen in that sad remains of a muffin, that empty cardboard container of coffee ... But that is the end of my churlish venting! It's great to see people having fun here, and I've heard some great papers when I could sneak off to academic life from the equivalent of being behind an information desk in an airport, and John Plotz's plenary was - as I knew it would be - an absolute blast, and had be thinking about what community in Victorian fiction means - what being human means - in a whole new way. In a way, indeed, that doesn't have any space for the grumpy misanthropy of my opening comments - unless, of course, one recognizes (and quite rightly so) the rhetoric of grumpiness offering, in a space such as this, a particular, specialized form of rhetorical connection-making ...
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