Many years ago I was given some sage advice concerning conferences: if you listen to one really shit paper and get one new idea, it has all been worth it. This SBL has offered a slight variation on that rule of thumb.
Let me start with the lowest moment – the book display. The books? It has always been a great pleasure to persue, meet, wrangle and get hold of books you never intended to buy in the first place. And I have been told – although never actually experienced it – that the entrance to the book display is a great pickup spot … Anyway, why was it the lowest moment? There are massive displays by all those wonderfuly broadminded presses such as Intervarsity Press (IVP), Baylor, Baker, Zondervan and Hendrickson. Not that long ago, these guys – who make Attila the Hun seem like a Marxist – would have small, wayside displays with the occasional passerby (like me) dropping in because we felt sorry for them. Now they have massive displays and the stands are crowded with people snapping up books.
The high point: in a recent conversation I encountered a fantastic term – Buttfuck Bible College. Not that it needs much explanation, but this is a college one wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole. Apart from the curious obverse of a Freudian wish fulfillment such a statement may suggest, BBC is located deep in some fundo wasteland where they believe Obama is a Muslim and socialism has overtaken the good ol’ USA. Fucking brilliant!
And so to the nightmare: one is in the midst of a conference like this, in massive hotels quarantined from the streets, and some cataclysmic event takes place. As a result we are quarantined to the conference venue for the foreseeable future, perpetually attending paper sessions, pissing people off (for some reason beyond, some of the SBL people give me cold, hostile looks), eating shit food in a never-ending SBL conference full of people from BBCs.
The only entertainment would then be the following, at the front of the hotel, originally ‘erected’ for the Atlanta Olympics:
Makes one think of Aaron’s rod, or maybe a certain bible college … (ht to WJL)
29 November, 2010 at 12:45 am
Nope, you’ve got this one all wrong. First, the book display should be treated as a good sign. These publishers used to do marginal stuff whose major purpose was to bolster preconceptions. Now they are actually engaging the larger world (although they haven’t got around to your stuff yet. Get over it).
Second, BBC is your ally, and deserves none of your condescension. It pays your bills and sells your books by keeping alive a society that thinks about the Bible (at all). Without them as foil, you’d be unemployed. Further, they might even be an interested discussion partner if you lost your rock-star attitude and wrote in a manner that brought more understanding than confusion. These are people who genuinely care about the Bible, on average no more or less mindlessly sycophantic than Marxists, and certainly no more or less mindless than your average group of profs in any field.
Never shoot potential allies.
29 November, 2010 at 1:01 am
Wes, thanks for your spirited response! I’ve never been called a rock star before, so I am not quite sure what you mean. But as for the books, that argument is often made: in widening their profit margins, they have widened their publishing programs. True enough, but the core of the publishing remains with their conservative roots. Further, I have absolutely no investment in SBL, as I have mentioned in earlier posts. I care not whether it survives or falls or becomes seomthing far different, for like a church or a university, its very nature as an institution means that it cares little for individual members and primarily about its own survival. It certainly doesn’t ensure I have a job, for notonly is that always a precarious situation, but most of my writing takes place outside biblical studies. Finally, it was a joke which shouldn’t be taken too seriously. I have always argued that real conservatives ask most of the right questions but offer the wrong answers, for within a properly conservative position (as in my own much appreciated background in Calvinism) lies a deeply radical position.
1 December, 2010 at 4:03 pm
[...] at SBL weren’t quite in that league, but Roland Boer (Stalin’s Moustache) observes that book stalls which in earlier years had been hidden in the shadows were now occupying center-stage. With his tongue firmly in cheek (metaphorically speaking), Roland [...]