Good Lord

Ye Olde Dorm Room

The rooms are as spartan (uh, medieval) as ever, the geese are still here (terrifying), and I've already heard one scholar opining vigorously about Byzantine porridge.  Ah, it's Kalamazoo. 3000 medievalists on the Western Michigan University campus. But good Lord, how did I not realize this: it's my twentieth Kalamazoo.  May 1992 was my very first one, with beloved Michael Camille and his bright red dancing shoes.  I miss him every year (and oof, it's been ten since he died).   Meanwhile, as per every Kalamazoo, it is too late considering the meeting at 8:30 a.m. tomorrow, but you get excited, you know? Tomorrow at 10 a.m. I am speaking on a roundtable filled with every intellectual crush I have - these are phenomenal people - generous, brilliant, phenomenal people - and I can't quite sleep to think of it. I chose the term "hewn," a boundless word, I now think. And then at 3:30 p.m., I'm giving a full fledged paper on an "Art and Devotion in England" panel - that's the one in which the geological conditions of alabaster call the shots.  And my beautiful friend of almost twenty years is here - we met in Siena on a Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi trip (that's when all the stained glass scholars of the world unite - on two buses - and go see stained glass in situ).  Saturday, we're going to steal away to the alabaster show. Full report on the magical stone, I promise.