Sunday, March 06, 2005
(4:17 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Seattle
I am breaking my resolution not to blog this entire weekend. My reasoning is simple: I have walked halfway across Seattle, and sitting in the library allows me (a) not to be walking and (b) not to be carrying my backpack. After three nights of "crashing" in the rooms of my fellow conferenciers whose schools actually provide funding for those who represent them in scholarly forums, I woke up, ate at the grossly overpriced breakfast buffet, and declined the "courtesy shuttle." First of all, I was never officially a "guest" at the hotel; second, since I have an 8PM flight, I was in no hurry to get much of anywhere. I resolved, instead, to conquer the city of Seattle on foot, and I have been remarkably successful. Armed with my tacky tourist map, I have seen the Space Needle (ooh! tall!), the Sci-Fi museum, a non-Starbucks coffee shop, the Seattle Museum of Art (whose exhibit of contemporary Chinese avant-garde is highly recommended), stopped in several bookstores, read a little Frege, and generally worked my way southward. Seattle is a remarkably hilly town, and for those who wish to follow in my footsteps, I would recommend packing tennis shoes, rather than being aggressively minimalistic and bringing only a pair of casual dress shoes.The conference went well. I met David Dault as well as Joshua Davis, members of what some would call the "Vanderbilt School." I met the Radically Orthodox Tony Baker and his friend Doug. I heard two excellent papers in my own session, enjoyed Ryan Hansen's creative reading of the Sodom story and Chad Maxson's anti-communitarian plea, and was very glad I decided to take the shitty flight so as to hear the Vanderbilt trifecta. All three papers were brilliant, and although I referred to Nate's Christo-centric paper as a "foreign body" in the Q&A session, it might be that I am simply skipping a step from recognizing, with Josh Davis, that theology has come to derive its authority from an ecclesial body of its own imagining and calling, with David Belcher, for a neo-Methodism radically oriented toward the poor. We shall see -- in the eschaton, if not sooner. Hopefully all of the papers mentioned above, along with my own, will be published in the Wesleyan Theological Journal; if not, I will try to find some way of simultaneously making my paper publicly available and getting two lines on my CV out of one piece of writing.
My only goal now before heading to the airport is to have some sushi, which Melinda and others have strongly recommended. (Melinda is a friend of mine from high school who lived in Seattle for a year and is soon moving back to the area to work for Microsoft; her blog is "nein09.") I have not seen a single sushi restaurant, which I find hard to believe, especially since we saw like five when we were looking for the Owl and the Thistle on Thursday night. But I shall find some raw fish, even if I must die in the process!
(This post was brought to you by the letter K.)
