Personal Revelations Of Invasion Of MLA In Hopes Of Making Off With Knowledge. Failure As A Possibility Looms Heavily. by Richard Benyo Semi-Special Corrspondent Territorial Enterprise

Rich Benyo as Mark Twain

Part Two

MECHANICS-AIN'T-US

We realized that we had been remiss in keeping up with the maintenance of our car. We pulled over outside a neighborhood saloon whose golden glow bravely buttered the sidewalk in front.

We approached the dirty figure holding the WILL WORK FOR BEER sign, encouraged that the grease on his hands must indicate that he worked at least part-time as a mechanic and were further encouraged by the obvious good humor in his sign. "Is ale as good as beer?" we inquired as we jauntily flung ourselves inside the saloon.

"Yeah," replied the mechanic, as he followed us inside.

"Two pints of ale," we declared. "We'll be right back to quaff them." We were attempting to get into the higher-brow of literature unbridled by an MTV world, hence the effort to roll the seldom-employed word "quaff" off our thirsty tongue.

We turned on our collective heel and rushed outside, sucking the mechanic and his sign behind us. He appeared to be the style of strapping young man who, under more favorable circumstances, might have matricilated at a prosperous university, played football, and have researched a book on Sam Clemens' manly bachelor days in Nevada.

We stood in front of our decade-old car. "Help us rotate the tires," we said.

The snort that came from the faux-mechanic was unmistakable. He snorted again and strode off, muttering words that we shall not reproduce here since we have not yet exhausted the first four precepts we accepted as semi-special correspondent. We were forced to return to the saloon and consume two pints of ale before circling a half-mile square section of the downtown attempting to unearth a parking garage that did not require a second mortgage to park our humble car, still embarrassingly the victim of unrotated tires.

We parked seven blocks from the Hilton and threw ourselves into the bloodstream of Holiday shoppers and literari sporting MLA nametags the size of placards who filled the sidewalks like an embolism.

After allowing the MLA staff to extort membership dues and convention fees from us and hiding our nametag in our pocket in order to test the security, we indulged in a turkey club sandwich and a very tall cup of coffee, determined to get our editor's money's worth by attending a session in advance of the Mark Twain presentation in hopes of getting up to speed for the good stuff.

IRONICALLY MISSING THE IRONIC.

While indulging in the game solo diners often enjoy, i.e. creating complete lives for other diners while waiting for one's order to arrive, we also perused the MLA catalog: PMLA (Publications of the Modern Language Association of America), Volume 113, Number 6, November 1998. As scholars research and journalists dig, we mined the contents of the nearly-400-page publication attempting to ferret out some theme, some underlying meaning to this gathering. What we found was a mine shaft salted with the contents of an apothacary's shop. There seemed to be three themes woven through the 888 sessions:

1. Everyone is homosexual whether or not they admit it, and they should be proud of their difference--or their similarities; take your pick.
2. Everyone is either a woman or should be a woman and every word in every language should reflect that.
3. Everyone who wants to advance in the academic world must first take a crash course in being obscure and/or obtuse, the better to peck out a nest in the academic cactus. (This is not meant as a criticism of the MLA; for nowhere in the MLA credo does it state that the object of the organization is to be clear, concise, and succinct.)

While on the third (of four, ibid. turkey club sandwich) piece of sandwich, it occurred to us that in order to more efficiently use the money invested in this convention and in order to get up to speed with the academic mind, we should attend one of the 46 7:00-8:15 p.m. sessions before attempting to experience the 9:00 p.m. Sam Clemens session. We asked our waiter for our check, and noticed that he was particularly solicitous, and interested in what we were about. He admitted to knowing of Sam Clemens, although he also admitted to never having met the man personally. Could he be contemplating writing a book about not knowing Sam Clemens?

CHANGING ROOM AT THE INN
We found our way to the appropriate room(s) after allowing ourselves to be herded into an over-filled elevator after failing to find the stairs. The sharp plastic edges of MLA badges poked and jabbed soft body parts. Inside the low-ceilinged sanctum, where two small meeting rooms had been combined into a larger one by pulling aside the divider, four presenters faced an audience whose numbers during the presentation went up and down as wildly as the yen, from 15 to 14 to 15 to 16 to 17 to 18 to 17 as throughout the hour seekers of knowledge arrived and then fled, banging the door on the way in and out. The four presenters sat at a table in the front and although there was a PA system and podium available, they did not avail themselves of either, turning the session into a hearing test.

One young scholar read his research on Stephen Crane's "The Monster," which also included theories on Crane's concept of masculinity and his ideas on imperialism as they related to reporting from the Spanish-American War. In the course of 15 minutes we learned that Crane's take on masculinity was that masculinity was overblown (Yet during the Spanish-American War, as a correspondent, we recalled that Crane sat atop foxholes smoking, inviting snipers to take potshots at him.), that even the noble and sympathetic whites in the tale weren't really so, that Crane's reference to the ladies of the village wanting "the monster" removed was not to be taken literally (as though the scythes of feminine approbation are duller than a baseball bat wielded by a male), and that America has traditionally been terribly imperialistic while other nations have been less so, in spite of the fact that America has little more than Puerto Rico to show for its rabid imperialism.

We were impressed by the presentation. In a mere 15 minutes, our featured scholar managed to merrily commit treason to his sex, his race, and his country--and, ironically, to ignore the freighted irony in Crane's work, i.e. "War Is Kind." In "The Monster," we wondered, who is truly the monster? We are still wondering. We rushed to find the nearest drinking foundtain to refresh and rehydrate ourselves.

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Email: Rich Benyo at dvdick@metro.net

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