Each August among the redwoods of the sprawling campus of UC Santa Cruz, academics converge to discuss and celebrate a novel by Charles Dickens. This year that novel was … Middlemarch. Between Victorian afternoon teas, costumed dances, and nightly themed parties, people find the time to say some incalculably diffusive things.
1. Speaker: “And now it is time to announce the 2018 Dickens Universe focal novel …”
Audience Member [chanting under breath]: “Barnaby Rudge! Barnaby Rudge!”
2. “I hope the post-prandial potations feature the Key to all Mixologies.”
3. “Maybe we should go to the History of Consciousness crepe dance party featuring DJ Smooth Delicate.”
4. Person 1: “I love Mary Garth. She’s the complete woman.”
Person 2: “Sorry, but the question was, ‘Whom do you most identify with from Middlemarch, warts and all?’”
Person 1: “Yes, correct, Mary Garth.”
5. “That professor requested the DJ play ‘Wuthering Heights’ again.”
6. Man: “This comment might make me sound sexist …”
Woman: “WELL …”
7. “I can’t read your proposal this week. I’m too fucked up.”
8. Person [on phone]: “No, yeah, it has been really great, we are all experiencing these really intense interpersonal connections, but none of them are sexual.”
9. [Speaker reads the famous squirrel’s heartbeat passage from Middlemarch aloud]
Audience member: “That’s some pretty good writing, huh?”
10. [Lecturer walks offstage to applause]
Audience member: “Oh, she is good. I’m gonna find her on email.”
11. “People are claiming that the conference is more hierarchical and cliquey than before. I just want to say that I am aware that I am in a clique, and that I do feel bad about it.”
12. “You know … I never read Wittgenstein … but he was my good friend.”
13. Person 1: “The intensity of the metonymy seems almost reckless.”
Person 2: “Shut up.”
14. “I hated Middlemarch the first time I read it. I read it again, and I still hated it. And then when I read it for this, I hated it more than ever before.”
15. Person 1: “What fantasy polyamorous relationship would you construct out of Middlemarch characters?”
Person 2: “So, like a thruple?”
Person 1: “Yeah.”
Person 2: “Can I pick four?”
Many thanks to Andrew Forrester, Will Glovinsky, and Yumi Dineen Shiroma for their assistance in overhearing. 
