The "MLA 2010 Mankini" is one of the creations for the Modern Language Association meeting that "never was nor will be."

The association's December 2009 meeting was the last one to be held between Christmas and New Year's Day. The MLA doesn't reconvene until January 2011 in Los Angeles, leaving 2010 as the year without an MLA meeting. Horrors!

Some unknown scholars have created an MLA 2010 Web page that clearly differentiates it from most of those at the real meetings with these three bullets:

• We are fun
• We are not stressed
• We’d prefer to be independent scholars than worry about jobs

And beyond the bullets, they also introduce the MLA's first (we believe) mankini. And some new publications, such as The MLA Cookbook for Eaters of Research Papers and Trashing Contemporary Theory With Undergraduates.

With the (real) MLA increasingly embracing social networking, the 2010 site of course has a Facebook page and a Twitter account. On the former, you can learn about the special session called "Teachers Travesty: The Best of Professorial Invective from 2010" and perhaps get an early shot at buying MLA jackboots. On the latter, the organizers of this new comedy effort deny that they are the same people who produced other MLA parodies.

Rosemary G. Feal, executive director of the MLA, shared her thoughts on the new Web site via this e-mail: "It looks like the nostalgia for the December MLA convention dates is already beginning. I know people are going to miss meeting between Christmas and New Year's, so I'm glad they have the Facebook page to distract them as they prepare for January 6-9, 2011 in Los Angeles. Last I heard on Twitter, 2011 convention attendees were going to do a stopover in Las Vegas on 27 December and work their way westward. Just so long as no one is confused about the real dates for the Modern Language Association convention, I look forward, along with the MLATwentyTen humorists, to celebrating the convention that wasn't."