It’s two days after Christmas and I’m driving to San Diego with Charlie, the punk professor, across southern Arizona. It’s a long drive, we’ve never met before, and there’s not much to look at—the landscape is mostly desert with the occasional supermax prison—but thankfully the awkward pauses have been minimal. We stop in Yuma, on the California border, so I can get a cup of coffee and he can get some Cheetos; Charlie’s wife thinks it sets a bad example for Skylar, their five-year-old, when Charlie eats Cheetos, so they’ve decided that he’s only allowed to eat them when he’s more than a hundred miles from home. Charlie’s talking about Marxism and Foucault and it’s not easy to follow. I used to be able to talk about this stuff fluently, but right now most of it is just rocketing over my head. A road trip with someone you’ve never met—more specifically, a road trip across a prison-clogged desert with an English professor you’ve never met—is a delicate thing, and we both want this to go well, because he’s about to be my guide and interpreter for four days at the 119th Annual Modern Language Association Convention.

In 1883, humanities professors in American universities had approximately two acceptable curricular options: Greek and Latin. Shakespeare, both in English and enjoyable, was decadent. Guided by some expatriated German and French colleagues—who claimed that modern German and French literature weren’t just elaborate nineteenth-century fads—forty professors got together to form the Modern Language Association. Their victory was quick and decisive, and the curriculum was modernized. Shakespeare lost his stigma. The members of the Association, newly untethered and excited to roam the expanded frontiers of their profession, scheduled an annual convention.

Charlie—Assistant Professor Charles L. Bertsch of the University of Arizona—picked me up at the Phoenix airport. The University of Arizona is in Tucson, as is Charlie’s home, but Charlie had assured me on the phone that the two cities were right next to each other, they might as well be twin cities, really, and he insisted that it wasn’t a problem to pick me up. He would just swing by on his way to the convention. Charlie called after I arrived to let me know that he was running late: he had to wait for the post office to open early on a Saturday morning so he could resend some grad-school recommendations that might have gotten lost in the mail. While waiting, I looked at a map of Arizona; Tucson, it turned out, was 116 miles away, of which perhaps 50 could be construed as “on the way” to San Diego. Charlie showed up about ninety minutes later and we headed west on Interstate 8.

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