The Modern Language Association Convention, First Held in 1883, is an annual gathering of teachers and scholars in the field of language and literature study. The convention enables members of the profession to share their ideas and research with colleagues from other universities and colleges. The many sessions present a range of approaches and examine a variety of languages and literary and critical traditions. Meetings will be held in the Los Angeles Convention Center (most foreign language and comparative literature sessions and exhibits) and the J. W. Marriott (most English sessions and the Job Information Center). Sessions begin at 12:00 noon on 6 January, with job-related workshops at 8:30 and 11:45 a.m. The last sessions will end at 3:00 p.m. on 9 January.

What the public gets to see of museums is in the exhibitions in which their holdings are presented; beyond the archival functions of conservation, categorization, and restoration, this presentation is at the heart of museums as cultural institutions. Until a few decades ago, exhibitions were predictable in format and structure. Visitors attended monographic and period exhibitions to be instructed and to enjoy themselves according to the old adage of utile dulci. Every exhibition was an episode in a traditional conception of the management of art's relation to the public. Curators were also conservators; they studied, preserved, and categorized art objects and presented a selection of these according to the knowledge acquired. The space in which the objects were presented was kept as neutral as possible, so as not to disturb the viewer.

How Liquidare We? the Metaphors Defining Contemporary world systems can be thrillingly fluid. Dark pools is the mysterious term financial traders use to describe outsize transactions hidden from ordinary investors. Liquid modernity describes a post-Fordist world where the site-intensive factory machinery and fixed capital of “heavy modernity” dissolve into outsourcing, batch production, and hypermobile capital (Bauman 1-90). Arjun Appadurai defines global “flows” as forces of transglobal acculturation and communication that exceed the boundaries of localities and states: a metaphor that supersedes the core-periphery model (which imagines sharp cultural differences between haves and have-nots). Global flows invites scholars to reconceptualize far-flung geographies as multiply connected via techno-, media-, idea-, ethno-, and finance-scapes (6-7).

Ecological criticism and queer theory seem incompatible, but if they met, there would be a fantastic explosion. How shall we accomplish this perverse, Frankensteinian meme splice? I'll propose some hypothetical methods and frameworks for a field that doesn't quite exist—queer ecology. (The pathbreaking work of Catriona Sandilands, Greta Gaard, and the journal Undercurrents must be acknowledged here.) This exercise in hubris is bound to rattle nerves and raise hackles, but please bear with me on this test flight. Start with the basics. Let's not create this field by comparing literary-critical apples and oranges. Let's do it the hard way, up from foundations (or unfoundations). Let's do it in the name of ecology itself, which demands intimacies with other beings that queer theory also demands, in another key. Let's do it because our era requires it—we are losing touch with a fantasy Nature that never really existed (I capitalize Nature to make it look less natural), while we actively and passively destroy life-forms inhabiting and constituting the biosphere, in Earth's sixth mass extinction event. Giving up a fantasy is even harder than giving up a reality.