Hmph! I thought for sure that writing about the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference would bring potentially nasty and dangerous viewers to my site but appoarently that hasn't happened. Good then, I will keep on with my report on the conference.

I found the conference to be more emotional socially than I had thought it would be, namely because I was expecting the participants to be (as they are often portrayed by authors who don't like writers' conferences) a bunch of timid, cowering losers seeking escape from the realities of life amongst whom I would possibly be one of the more normal and better-adjusted people. In reality I would say most of the people there were quite accomplished and successful in some demanding area of life, as well as reasonably attractive and personable. There were almost no overweight people there, and none who were grotesquely so such as one sees at least ten times a day in ordinary life. I was one of the few people there--especially in my age range--who had a lot of trouble joining in conversations and intimated to others the possibility that I might be seriously pondering suicide. I was not, but by the middle of the conference I felt that my persona as a somewhat strange and depressing figure was so well established that I didn't really meet any new people after that point, and there were actually quite a few people that I think I might have liked to have met, simply because I generally don't get to meet a lot of intelligent and humorous people. I also probably drank too much in proportion to any other activity, but in social settings one's instinct is to do something, and preferably something one does well, to at least establish some purpose for being there. Later in the conference I bought some cigarettes, though I as I have never been good at smoking this, if it did anything, probably drew more negative attention upon me than if I had stuck simply to alcohol. But my inability to connect on a broad scale had made me nervous and melancholy. I did have a couple of very lovely conversations which salvaged several days from ending in a kind of despair, but even these required great generosity on the part of my interlocutor to bear with me, because there often long periods of silence while I thought of something to say. I have really become like the poor letter-writer in Spectator 362 (April 25, 1712):

"I am a Person who was long immured in a College, read much, saw little; so that I knew no more of the World than what a Lecture or a View of the Map taught me. By this Means I improved in my Study, but became unpleasant in Conversation. By conversing generally with the Dead, I grew almost unfit for the Society of the Living; so by a long Confinement I contracted an ungainly Aversion to Conversation, and ever discoursed with Pain to my self, and little Entertainment to others."

He later develops a passion for a lady of his generation named Belinda which appears destined for a Platonic resolution.

There was a reasonable amount of parties/drinking at the conference compared with ordinary bourgeois life though it doubtless pales in comparison to what went on 30-40 years ago. You can probably double or triple that latter comparison where sex, at least for anybody over 25 is concerned (Do educated people over 25 even acknowledge the possibility of sexual tension any more? I have no expectations of ever touching any woman ever again but can't there be an occasional signal that maybe, just maybe we would if we could?). It seemed in those halcyon days to be pretty de rigeur for the established writers at least to make their offers to the attractive women on hand, in the name of inspiration and all that, proprieties, marriage vows, 30-year age differences, all that kind of nonsense be damned, what is the bloody point of being an artist in the 1st place anyway? To be fair, there were a couple of real men, 40ish or so, who showed a little of the old gallant spirit with the (young) ladies and went down firing all their bullets; alas, however, go down they did.

The 22-23 year old women who were at the conference, for the benefit of you younger males who are looking for an excuse to apply, were generally attractive, were quite good writers, were ready to party and were a hell of a lot friendlier than I remember comparable women being 12 years ago or so when I was that age.

A lot of the under-40 contigent were graduates of the same kind of small, fairly prestigious, eastern, very white upper middle class liberal arts colleges that I attended. Lots of Middlebury people of course, but also places like Bowdoin, Colby, Skidmore, etc. Although sometimes one reads articles complaining that the world is being overrun by people from these types of antiquated schools with useless humanities degrees, in most of real life they are quite rare, I think about 2 percent of all college graduates attended this type of traditional liberal arts school. The point I am getting to is that it was for me very invigorating to be back among people who had somewhat similar schooling and young adult experiences to what I had, even though this composition of similar people is one of the most common (and probably most valid) criticisms of such conferences. With regard to such racial diversity as there was, it was most prevalent, and interestingly most distinct, among the faculty. Among the people paying their way the distribution was overwhelming white, and among the men in that group almost entirely white. This last difference I find quite interesting, as there were at the conference, and seem to be in American writing in general now, a decent number of women writers of Pakistani, Indian, Korean, Chinese, etc, descent, but very few or no men from these groups (though this is not the case in the Britain; is it because literature is still a pursuit that carries substantial, real esteem there in comparison with the U.S.?) There was a decent amount of exhortation from the professional publishing people to this mainly white crowd to get out of their private agonies and domestic ghettoes and demonstrate some awareness that they lived in and perhaps even made part of a dynamic, multicultural world, but of course that is the fundamental problem with we bourgeois authors, the most dynamic multicultural family in the world could move in next door and we cannot see them for thinking about the stout, freckle-faced cheerleader who taunted us in seventh grade for not being as well-muscled and handsome as the quarterback of the 8th grade football team.

All right I am tired but I think I have one more Bread Loaf post to pour out before I can leave the matter alone.