Lowell, MA

So, I've been procrastinating blogging about my trip to Lowell, MA, for a long time now because I'm having camera problems. The morning I left (on October 4), I couldn't find my camera, so I borrowed my dad's and took lots of pictures. He burned a CD of these pictures for me, but it was blank. And I just keep forgetting to get them. Josh found the camera while I was gone, but the case (which has the USB cord in it) is still AWOL. So, Halloween party pictures of me in a black widow costume recreated from my youth and skeleton Josh will be forthcoming.

In the meantime, I give you the Lowell report sans photos (for now).

I was invited to Lowell to read a shortened version of my article on Kerouac's On the Road at the Jack Kerouac Conference on Beat Literature. Kerouac was born in Lowell, which is roughly an hour outside of Boston. BYU fully funded the trip, so I thought--why not?

I loved seeing MA. Right outside of Logan airport were the row houses, the sports teams playing on a lit field, the guys in matching shirts rowing boats, the fall colors--all of these images I associate with New England but didn't think I'd actually find. The drive to Lowell was delightful. We passed the most stately houses nestled into wooded alcoves. There were trees everywhere! It actually made my slightly claustrophobic, but it was beautiful nonetheless.

I made it in on time to get to the second panel of the day, which was held in an old cotton mill turned museum. Cool setting. Next door was the actual scroll on which Kerouac wrote On the Road. (If you haven't heard the story, he wrote the first draft in a matter of weeks on a continuous scroll of paper.) I was equally interested in the museum itself, which contained hundreds of the actual looms that immigrants labored over. The noise of them all going is deafening.

I delivered my paper the next morning to a good crowd of scholars and students. There were some serendipitous connections between my paper and another woman's--she was Greek and there all the way from the UK. We were both talking about Baudrillard and hyperreality as it relates to race in the novel, though we didn't actually overlap too much in our readings. After the panel though, there was an INTENSE Q&A session. We're talking a half hour at least and me answering almost all of the questions (for lack of anyone else jumping in). Going in, I knew that I would be talking to a defensive audience. As one scholar put it, Kerouac conferences tend to be as much fan-club convention as scholarly forum. Plus, it was the 50th anniversary of a novel that many scholars have had to fight tooth and nail for in order for it to be accepted in the academy. Plus, it was Kerouac's home town (and the same week as the Lowell Celebrates Kerouac! festival). All of those plus-es equaled an audience not wanting to hear about the problematic ways in which race is dealt with in the novel. Actually, the ironic thing was that I wasn't even passing judgment on the main character, Sal, and his racial attitudes. But I was getting questions/comments like--well, you sure are talking a lot about Sal in the paper... ...um, yeah, he's the main character. It was pretty funny. This is not to say that I didn't get any valid questions. I did, and I think I held my own, but some of them were just ridiculous. Afterwards, the panel's moderator told me in private that he's been in other panels where race has come up and people just freak out. It's like they don't think Kerouac can handle being talked about in that way. So that was interesting. The good news is that the people who really mattered--i.e. the keynote speaker and others--complimented me several times on the essay, so I know it went over well among those who I respected. And it's being published.

I was genuinely surprised by the back-biting nature of many folks in the older generation, whom I ate dinner with because we were all staying at the same hotel. They were so catty in tearing down the younger scholars, who were more theoretical and--at least in my opinion--much more rigorous in their approach to the novel. Maybe it's that way at all single-author conferences, since people have devoted a lifetime to studying just one person and can easily feel threatened by others doing the same thing. Bizarre.

Anyway, the Greek restaurant we went to was divine and made even better by the fact that we had a Greek native there guiding us through the menu. Lowell has a large Greek population due to the mills.

Saturday I walked around and took a zillion church and house photos. I was obsessed with the houses. I also went to a really great quilt museum. What a cool, female, history-laden art form.

And then it was home! I was disappointed I didn't get to spend time in Boston, but that city is high on Josh's list of places to go, so I look forward to a future trip there together.