The Return from Manchester and the AAH

The AAH conference was satisfactorily interesting, although as my session took up both days, I didn't feel as though I could roam around investigating papers on all sorts of topics as I normally do at conferences. The only time I ventured out of my own session was to hear a paper on Toyen's collaboration with Radovan Ivšić, which was quite interesting in its discussion of the relationship of image to text. Otherwise, I was ensconced in the surrealist and surrealist-legacy camp, where we had a fair amount of Toyen already. (But there can never be too much Toyen, or at least not unless she becomes a figure of adulation like Frida Kahlo, and it may be that Kahlo's astounding celebrity is passing, given how few of my students have heard of her.)
Manchester looks like a place worth visiting, especially given that I didn't really have time to look around the museums where the various receptions were held. The town hall, where we were welcomed by the Lord Mayor (who has bright green hair and exhorted us repeatedly to sample the local nightlife), is an impressive gothic-revival building with a fine set of murals by Ford Madox Brown. I was hoping to see his Work, given that I had just shown it in class, but that was elsewhere and I was too tired to hunt it down.
The Intro to Modern papers have been duly turned in (most of them) and I have begun grading them. Thus far they're excellent and I feel vastly pleased. No one has gotten less than an A. Of course, that will not hold true for the entire class, but it would be nice if only it could.