WTF, MLA?

In standard American English, that is, why is there not ONE panel of interest to me at the 2013 Modern Language Association convention?! 

MLA is the "it" conference in literature, and so I've been scouring the calls for papers page for the past month or so, but with next to no success thus far. There have got to be 80 cfps listed, and yet not a single thing I am genuinely interested in. Even more than that, there have got to be 15 on authors I've never even heard of! 

A friend of mine from a school I attended previously applied last year to seven panels. Of course, he hadn't written these papers in advance; he waited to get accepted to something (which he did) and then wrote the paper for that one. But still: seven?! 

I submitted a single abstract last year (also for an unwritten paper; it did not get accepted), and I'm not convinced I'll even submit that many this year. I've found only one thing that looks like a semi-maybe-possible possibility. And that's a lot of hedging. 

Arggggggggggggh. This is beyond frustrating. I mean, it's not like getting into MLA is easy - because it definitely is not. At all. But as far as I can tell, it's impossible to get accepted to a conference that you don't apply to . . . .