I wear blue jeans and write about New York City.

"Lastly, a writer dressed in blue jeans and a dress shirt, read from his book Fight for Your Long Day. He said in his introductory comments, “If I want to sell the book, I guess I need to let you know who I am. My name is Alex Kudera.” The audience clapped enthusiastically. His reading described a day in the life of a very tired adjunct in New York City. So much of what he dealt with Heather could relate to: trying not to leave anything behind, rushing in and rushing out of the classroom, the students desperately trying to talk while you are trying to make it to your next gig and don’t have time to listen, the colleagues and chair who say demeaning things to you but are impervious to the way they talk down to you. It felt good to laugh about it instead of the daily grind of dealing with it, day in and day out."

~~ from Adjunct Headquarters, "Subconference of the MLA" by Lydia Field Snow

12/27/1968: Kazin Eyes SDS at MLA

"MLA convention at the Americana. A bunch of over-age SDS's broke up the American literature meetings repeatedly with utterly phony, trumped-up charges of police terror. How these guys like the atmosphere of confrontation. I'll not soon forget the line of young instructors forming before the stage while old, gray, bald Henry Nash Smith made his weak remarks. Pour la reste, I listened to Dick Poirer reading the bad, new critical prose over the question of Chicago and thought, what a phony.

"This was a wholly provoked incident, based on a few posters in a hotel lobby, and leading to deliriously self-righteous rant on the part of Lauter and his wife Florence Howe and the others. I watched all this with the greatest contempt. My soul cannot live on this pseudo-revolutionary fare."

~~ from Alfred Kazin's Journals, Selected and Edited by Richard M. Cook