Five nights in Vegas

I don't know about you, but I'm still having dreams about Las Vegas -- and not the pleasant kind. A little context: I bought a netbook so I could keep in touch with loved ones (hooray for Google Video Chat!) and blog the conference -- and then found out that there was no such thing as free wireless in the Riviera or the Circus Circus (where your faithful Geoclectica bloggers stayed). So I took notes in Notepad instead. And, with only minor edits, here they are.


23 March 2009 - Day One: Disorientation.
Flew into Las Vegas last night. They say Paris is the city of lights, but I suspect Vegas could give it a run for its money.

First impressions: It is impossible to walk in this city. It's surreal and disorienting in a carnivalesque kind of way. It's a city that makes its living by being somewhere else, or by being nowhere in particular. It is a city of space, not place.

There is no free wireless internet, and nowhere to sit in any of the hotel walkways. I long for cafes and plazas.


24 March 2009 - Day Two: Settling In.
Yesterday brought with it the usual mix of paper sessions, in which I found myself alternating between being grateful I'm attending and wondering why I bother. Paper quality varies so much -- and there seems to be little in the way of reliable variables for predicting it. Age, student vs. professor status, topic, gender -- none of these provide any insight into quality.

I missed Peter Jackson (much to my dismay) in part because the availability of food establishments is slim outside the hotels, and our noon lunch ran long due to a backed up kitchen. I did see the session that followed, though, and witnessed Stephen Daniels defending Denis Cosgrove's work against the injustice of years of misinterpretation (I am not convinced that his co-panelists are in fact guilty of such misinterpretation, but I am a mere mortal and not fit to comment on such things).

It is good to be in the company of my fellow bloggers again, now that we are off in our respective doctoral programs. We have less reminisced than caught up and picked up more or less where we left off. It is interesting to see how our little network, begun with some trepidation in our master's days, is expanding as we make friends at our new institutions and in our respective specialties.

It is also refreshing to be able to get involved. Globalfreak and I attended the GSAG meeting last night, and the spark of purpose was in the air. These are exciting times and I am glad to be here to witness them.

Day two, as always, is markedly different experience. Having endured the disorientation of day one, we suddenly find ourselves able to navigate the maze of hotel, casino, and conference space. It's no less unpleasant, however. The casino-goers enter with an air of cocky expectation and leave wreathed with the stench-cocktail of alcohol, tobacco, and desperation. Casinos are depressing places -- even more so when I see children (not teenagers, but children, for Pete's sake) trailing behind their parents, like I did last night.

Last night's international reception was an exercise in patience. It began well enough with short lines to the bars and plenty of browsing at the exhibitors' tables, but by the time we left for the GSAG meeting, it was wall-to-wall people -- a who's who of geographers growing increasingly intoxicated. I had a lovely chat with one of them, though, which more than made up for the crowds.


25 March 2009 - Day Three: The Halfway Point.
The view from our room on the 35th floor of the Circus Circus verges on spectacular, though I have a sneaking suspicion that the mountains are getting larger and closer every day. I ran this past Globalfreak, who agreed, comparing them to the Langoliers. One day, toward the end of this conference, we will wake up and the mountains will have swallowed half of Las Vegas altogether and they'll just stand there, looming right outside the hotel.

It is already 3:30 and I have yet to attend a single paper session today, though I had planned on seeing several. I seem to have hit the dreaded midpoint of the conference, where I just want it to be over. And the truth is (and we all know this), many of the papers that get presented here are of mediocre quality. This is due in part to the fact that fifteen minutes is not enough time to get into the interesting aspects of our research, in part to the fact that most of us have fallen into the same droning PowerPoint rut, and in part to the fact that most of us have to rush to put these presentations together. We become frazzled over our fifteen minute performances -- we place so much pressure on getting the ideas across with as big a sledge hammer as possible. And we have to, because this is our opportunity to sell our work to the community.

In a fit of academic doubt, I took a few moments yesterday to do some rough calculations. If the average session has five papers (we'll be conservative and say four for the sake of argument), and if we manage to attend three sessions a day for five days, that means we see sixty papers. Let's call this number the Potential Paper Intake (PPI). Now if one tenth of the papers we see are of exceptionally high quality (i.e., they provide new information and insights, or they just have that "wow" factor to them), that means that we can expect to walk away having seen around half a dozen papers that have a substantial impact on our thinking and/or research. Let's call this number the Significant Paper Intake (SPI). I want to say that so far I've seen four or five that caught my attention in terms of content or significance. Given that this is Day three, I figure I'm doing pretty well, as my PPI to SPI ratio is a good one.

This doesn't stop me, however, from feeling a) guilty about not attending any sessions yet today, and b) burnt out on wading through the thousands of papers listed in the program to find the ones that are potentially interesting to me.

It doesn't help that I really dislike Vegas. I'll be frank here for a second: I have yet to encounter a single attendee of our illustrious conference who is truly happy about this year's choice of venue. In fact, I've heard an absurdly high number of complaints (and this doesn't include my own) about the lack of free wireless, the exorbitant fees for using the business center, the lack of reasonably priced restaurants, the constant objectification of women as sex objects, and the depressing nature of casinos in general. Now, to be fair, I know that conference planning is a very demanding job. Having worked for another academic member organization (the AAG equivalent for another discipline), I've seen what conference planners deal with firsthand. However, it seems to me that there is a distinct lack of awareness on the part of the AAG's staff and/or planning committee of the level of graduate student involvement. If I had to guess, I'd say that maybe 50% to 60% of the conference attendees are graduate students who simply can't afford to pay $12 a day for internet access (as we do here at Circus Circus), and who don't have time to stand in line for one of the four laptops the AAG has generously provided for free internet access due to commitments to paper sessions and the desire to improve their PPI:SPI ratio as much as possible.

Okay, I'm going to set my soapbox aside here for a moment and remind myself that I am glad to be here. These conferences are hard, but they are worth it. I think there is room for improvement in the institutional awareness of the role that graduate students play in the organization, but the AAG is generally doing a good job with most of the other logistical aspects of the conference.

It is 4:00 pm. Maybe I'll just hang out in the room for a while and rehearse tomorrow's presentation one more time.


26 March 2009 - Day Four: Sleep Deprivation.
Let me begin with this: departmental parties are weird things. They reflect the character of the department sponsoring them in very interesting ways. There's this strange dynamic of open versus closed parties, drink tickets versus cash bars, bar space versus hotel space, casual versus formal space, faculty space versus graduate student space. I am sad to say that I enjoyed the Wildcat party far more than my department's party, even though I was only at the former for a short time. Maybe I'm just partial to parties dominated by graduate students where the faculty feel like guests. There's just too much formality in faculty-dominated spaces. I'm a bit of a wallflower anyway, but it's hard not to feel like the friend-of-the-friend who was invited with a certain amount of discomfort by the host -- even when that host is my own department.

I have decided that Day four is really about sleep deprivation. The effort it takes to string together a coherent sentence has increased exponentially. And so woe to anyone (like myself) who is presenting today. Let's hope I can keep it together enough to make it through my talk without falling asleep or answering questions incoherently.


27 March 2009 - Day Five: The Home Stretch.
Presenting toward the end of the week is ridiculously stressful. Especially when the presentation day happens to be Sleep Deprivation day in the conference-going cycle. But I managed to present my paper well enough -- I went into partial autopilot and only forgot one thing that I had intended to say. Luckily it was the kind of point that works well as a throw-away question. It was unintended in this case but I don't feel bad about it, because it's a great tactic: you can anticipate that someone will ask about it, and it kills time during the Q & A, preventing people from asking the more difficult questions. Sadly, my second questioner did manage to ask one of the more uncomfortable questions, and I had a tough time answering it. Luckily I didn't recognize the questioner at the time, because it turns out this was a pretty major figure in my area. The embarrassment of not being able to address this person's question more substantively (hooray for sleep deprivation!) would have been far greater in the moment, had I realized who it was. Anyway, it turned out okay -- doomsday averted, as the song goes.

In contrast to Wednesday, I spent most of yesterday in paper sessions. While I took fewer notes, I still managed to take away some good information. And like many of us, I tried to get the best PPI:SPI ratio by ducking in and out of sessions for a paper here, a paper there. There's a funny etiquette involved in all this, but I'm just too tired to recount it here.

Last night I went with Globalfreak and Katie to dinner at a tapas place across from the Wynn. It really is remarkable how different the Riviera/Circus Circus area is from the newer part of the Strip (I'm hoping to explore this a little more today). The levels of seediness and sexual objectification drop dramatically, and it actually doesn't feel like an awful place to be. That said, I'm astounded by the constant development, the number of structures being built, the expanses of vacant lots all around.

James Kunstler criticizes Las Vegas for not being built on the human scale, and he's right on: it's not just not-human, it's utterly colossal -- you have to have the stride length of the Colossus in order to traverse the distance between the Riviera and the N100s in the Convention Center in even a remotely timely fashion. I love cities, but only when they're walkable -- which Vegas, even in its nicer sections, is not. Conclusion? Vegas has its finer points, but, as Spider Jerusalem would say, I hate it here.

As for the conference itself? A quick count reveals that I attended a grand total of one panel, one business meeting, two parties, and 33 papers. I would classify seven of those 33 as significant (in the terms I described above). This puts my PPI:SPI ratio at 33:7 -- meaning that about 20% of the papers I saw had a high level of significance for me. That's pretty good if we're figuring a baseline of 10%. I'm disappointed that I missed an additional eight papers I wanted to see on Wednesday, and there were a couple of other panels, business meetings, and parties I would like to have attended, but all in all, having met some nice people doing interesting research, and having begun to forge alliances with students at other universities, I have to conclude that this meeting was a success.

And as for the rest of today? Explore, pack, relax, and look forward to going home.

Guess whose back from the atmosphere

Picking up on Placemaker's call, I shall be more attentive to our little corner of the blogosphere. Particularly since I as well am plagued by doubts - of life, the times we live in, our discipline of geography and how I can even begin to contribute. But this is why we are here, n'est pas?

I have been reading Agamben's 'State of Exception' as a follow up to his work 'Homo Sacer' that I read last semester. It is brilliant. I have been thinking about how I am going to frame my paper for the AAG conference, in terms of the material from my thesis, new material, and the ties that bind it all together, when along cam Mr. Agamben. I know have what I think is the glue for not only this paper but for the future. Before it was Foucault, and now it is he - and Benjamin. Everyone should read something by all three of these men, and then something by Judith Butler to earn your fem-cred (is that even a saying? If no, Ill copyright it tomorrow and ye shall all have to pay me if you use it). So I am reading Agamben and his main concept is this 'thing' called the State of Exception, which is basicaly a politico-juridical process where by the 'norm' is replaced or usurped, usually in the face of war or a disaster. The text which bears this as its title was written in 2005 and reflects Agamben's tackling of the issues surrounding the Bush Administration and the global war on terror. Tied all up together in this State is power, law, sovereignty - all kinds of issues that Agamben skillfully ties back to ancient, medieval, and early 20th century historical events and laws.

So, for discussion, a nuggest of Agamben:
"President Bush's decision to refer to himself constantly as the 'Commander in Chief of the Army' after September 11th, 2001, must be considered in the context of this presidential claim to sovereign powers in emergency situations. If, as we have seen, the assumption of this title entails a direct reference to the state of exception, then Bush is attempting to produce a situation in which the emergency becomes the rule, and the very distinction between peace and war (and between foreign and civil war) becomes impossible". (pg. 22, 2005).

Are we not already seeing the products of these sown seeds? Are we already at the impossible?

Extreme regionalism: the new sport

It started when Igor Panarin decided that the United States is going to disintegrate into six separate regions in 18 months. That made the front page of the Wall Street Journal. BLDBLOG picked up on it and commented. Cartophilia and The Map Room joined the chase, but the bloggers aren't the only ones interested in Panarin's prospects for geopolitics. No less than "Nine Nations" Joel Garreau himself has stepped up to the plate, with this piece in the Washington Post.

I'm not going to repost the map here, because it's been all over the place. And I won't spend too much time rehashing the arguments about the particular boundaries he drew (really, will the breakup actually follow state lines? We think not.). But I will ask one question and make one comment and leave it to you, the reader, to mull over.

The comment -- an observation fueled by having read Don Mitchell's landmark piece questioning the existence of culture (for no less than two separate and unrelated classes) this semester -- is that this is what happens when we allow economics, politics, or some other social factor to run rampant in our predictions without thinking about culture and subculture. As others in the blogosphere have no doubt already pointed out, if Panarin knew anything about US culture and regional subcultures, he never would have drawn the boundaries the way he did.

Is it unthinkable for the United States will eventually fall apart? No. The Roman Empire didn't last forever, so why should the US? But is it likely? Not in 18 months. Surely this country has experienced regional tensions since its inception (witness the Civil War), but that said we're no worse off now than we were thirty years ago, or even eighty years ago. But if and when the US does split, it's not going to look like that map. Why? Because that's just not how this country rolls, culturally. There is such thing as culture, kids, and it has a lot to say about how places change over time -- and why.

And the question: Where the hell have the geographers been in all of this? We've had plenty of bloggers who could be in the discipline (I don't know whether my respected colleagues out there are actually geographers or cartographic enthusiasts, to be honest) comment on this incident. The WSJ seems to represent economics as a discipline. And Joel Garreau is a fine journalist. I have no quarrel with any of these good people commenting on the issue -- the more the merrier.

But for Pete's (Pete Gould's? Dick Peet's?) sake, folks. We're geographers. This is what we're trained for. This is what we do for a living. We're that group of oddball academics who think about things like space and place and territory and geopolitics. And where the hell are we in all of this? Who among us has stood up and said with any sense of authority, "I'm a geographer and I study these things, and here's what I think"?

We complain ceaselessly that no one knows what we do. Yet given a prime opportunity to insert ourselves graciously, effortlessly, and -- heaven forbid -- appropriately into the scene, we're nowhere to be found!

Wake up, geography! Your people need you!