Back when Dr. Partner was Partner, M.A., we attended an interdisciplinary conference at Duke University (she to present, me to see what conferencing was all about). Most of my favorite times related to conferences happened at this one, and all of my conference encounters with famous others happened there (except for the time that Ray Charles was staying in the hotel where a region conference was being held. Anyway, I don't think that my field has produced anyone actually famous). Anyway, here is the funny or memorable stuff that happened:
Graduate students picked us up at the airport (the conference was on campus, but the hotel was sort of far away). I don't know if they were supposed to pick us up (we being brand new doctoral students ourselves), but we somehow got lumped together with this postmodern novelist named Ronald Sukenick. He insisted that we be taken with him, as we were oblivious to who he was and the grad students were fawning all over him (in a rather gratuitous and embarrassing way). We kept running into Ron and he kept insisting that we stick with him and drink together.
Another strange author named Mark Amerika kept trying to hit on Dr. Partner.
Frederic Jameson bummed a smoke from me [I have been totally smoke-free for several years now], grunted at me, ripped the butt off of the smoke I gave him, and crankily sulked around.
The only person whose work I was closely familiar with (Michael Hardt) was there. He was so kind and generous as a respondent/discussant that I vowed to be that way with young scholars if I ever made it through my program.
On the last day, having missed a makeshift shuttle full of "lesser" conference participants, I was sitting outside the hotel despondent and bored. A grad student chaufeur pulled up to get his charge, a spunky, gritty, short-haired woman. Much to the chagrine of the fawning, star-struck grad student, Kathy Acker asked me if I wanted a ride in to campus with them. We chatted all the way in, making people-observations and joking around, while the litearture grad student tried in vain to ask critically astute questions about the author's work.
The insight I gained riding with Kathy Acker is that I never want to be someone who people suck up to. I think that Acker, like Sukenick, liked being met conversationally as an interesting person, not as an important author.
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Michael Hardt was the keynote speaker at a grad-organized conference at the U where I adjunct and my husband is a grad student. At the big evening reception, he was swamped the whole night by eager, fawning grad students trying to outdo one another with astute observations and questions--until my husband asked him about Duke basketball (it was tournament time). To the chagrin of the other students, some of whom have complained openly that sports are a hopeless bourgeois distraction, Hardt jumped on the question, grabbed my husband by the elbow, and pulled him out onto the porch where they just shot the shit about the NCAA for a long time.
I haven't had as much experience with the phenomenon as you seem to have, but yeah, it seems only the most pretentious of superscholars would want to be treated like a star all the time. And who wants to talk to the pretentious ones, anyway?
It's interesting how the important learning opportunities at conferences aren't necessarily the ones we expect (i.e., panels, keynotes, etc.).
Oh, so much of what happens a conferences happens outside the sessions.
I was at an interdisciplinary conference at Duke last fall and I was standing with a friend in the lobby when he announced (not quietly):'I'd like to meet Donna Haraway." The woman sitting on a chair behind him immediately flipped her name badge over so that you couldn't read it. She was, of course, Donna Haraway. We did get to meet her later on, but at that time I think she was probably looking for some quiet time to recover from her flight and prepare for her talk.
I no longer feel anxious about meeting famous people because they always turn out to be normal people. One of the first famous people I got to see up close was environmentalist David Brower. I was in such awe of him, but when I met him for an interview, he was so nice and normal and friendly. And I kept asking him all kinds of stupid questions (far after the actual interview was over), and he was so patient with me ....
great stories...esp since I know some of the folks involved...but I'm not telling who...
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