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News & ArtsTuesday, January 17, 2012
Books I'll Show You the Life of the Mind
Posted by Paul Constant on Tue, Jan 17, 2012 at 8:25 AM
At first glance, these thousands of people gathered at the Washington State Convention Center could be there for pretty much any kind of convention—for life insurance, say, or for manufacturers and sellers of flat-screen TVs. They are all dressed in business casual, wandering from room to room while staring intently into their phones, making awkward, flirtatious jokes amongst themselves about how rainy it is here in Seattle. It's only when you sit down in one of the rooms and hear a man who curates the self-proclaimed "largest collection of prison writing in the country" praise the convention for welcoming "marginals like me" that you begin to get a sense that this isn't a place for people who want to sell mass quantities of wrenches in bulk or sketchy swatches of real estate in Florida. Instead, it is the largest collection of language-minded brainiacs you've ever seen in a single location.
This is the first-ever Seattle edition of the Modern Language Association Convention, put on last weekend by the scholarly organization devoted to the teaching and exploration of language...(Keep reading.)
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