Improbable Questions

Brit Lit II this semester is taking an odd turn.

Things are going well, overall--don't get me wrong. We've analyzed Romantic poetry half to death and are on to Pride and Prejudice (although I always find the first day of a novel difficult in the largish survey--it feels like we're leaving so much out, and it's hard for me to be organized. Whatever, though; it'll sort itself out).

But it seems like every day I get one of those left-field questions. Or at least quasi-left-field. Like, okay, I can see why you'd want to know that, but I don't know everything, people.

This isn't necessarily a problem. But someone in Brit Lit I wrote on hir evals last semester that "sometimes when a student asks a question, [I] say 'hm' and ask the rest of the class what they think, which makes [the student] think that [I] don't know the answer" (not hir exact words, but very close). So, pedagogical blindness of the comment aside, I'm feeling a little sensitive about revealing ignorance.

Examples:

• What, exactly, does the word "plastic" mean in the context of [a particular Coleridge poem]? Yes, I should know this. But we read like ten pages of poetry for that day, and I read past the word with a sense of what it means, and it didn't occur to me to look up exactly how he was using it. In hindsight, I should've used this as an opportunity to demonstrate OED online, but they were in small groups and time was almost up. I should also call myself out on having a "sense" of something's meaning and actually look it up, especially when I'm teaching close reading. Lesson learned.

• To what extent is [that recent quasi-biographical movie about the author we're currently reading]* based on her real life? Dude, not much, I expect, but maybe a little. It doesn't really matter. I don't go in for biographical criticism, okay? And you shouldn't either.
  *edited to avoid Googling, since I did tell the student to find out and let us know.
  

and finally,

• How common was wolf's-bane in late eighteenth-century England? I sincerely hope that my ignorance of THIS doesn't reflect badly on me, but who knows.

Anyway, I'm actually NOT an 18th/19th-century specialist, and I wish that I could tell them that, sometimes, without totally undermining my legitimacy. Because really, I am legitimate in here, even if I don't know [author's] biography in full and don't know the etymology of "plastic," or have a working knowledge of pre-Victorian botany. And yes, I will admit that I don't know, but it'd be nice not to have to do that like every day, right?

On the other hand...

I am, indeed, delighted about the R&R. But--oddly enough, sort of--I also heard today about that article that was accepted to Very Good Journal more than two years ago, the publication of which (due to a backlog) was likely to conflict with the book's publication. If you recall, there was some talk by the editor of pushing up the publication date, but with a "why bother?" kind of subtext. Not even a subtext. A supratext, if you will. By which I mean that this message was pretty openly declared.

So I wrote to the editor today, not having heard back following my response (this was before I heard from Trifecta Journal--hence the coincidence), and the situation has been decided, and not in my favor. In short, Article Accepted More Than Two Years Ago will not be published, but I am invited to submit new work.

(Of course, I'd like to see that backlog dealt with first.)

Okay, there's nothing I can do here, and my disappointment is not tragic. I shall finesse my CV to accurately reflect the situation in such a way that does credit to Truth and Ambition, both. And the world keeps spinning. Yep.

Disappointed, though. But the situation is beyond my control; what can you do, eh.

Besides, everything pales beside this:

[The scene: Bazarov has unexpectedly left his parents, Vasily Ivanovich and Arina Vlasevna, at the end of a three-day visit, following a three-year absence. Bazarov is a bit of a jerk, but his parents adore him, as parents do. Vasily Ivanovich has ceased his cheerful waving from the back porch and sat down, allowing his head to droop down to his chest.]

Then Arina Vlasevna went up close to him and, leaning her grey head against his grey head, said:

"There's nothing for it, Vasya! Our son's cut off from us. He's a falcon, like a falcon he wanted to come and he flew here, then he wanted away and he flew away. But you and I, we're just a couple of old mushrooms, we are, stuck in the hollow of a tree, sitting side by side and never moving. Except that I'll always remain the same for you for ever and ever, just as you will for me."

Vasily Ivanovich took his hands away from his face and suddenly embraced his wife, his true friend, more tightly even than he'd been used to embrace her in his youth, for she had comforted him in his misery.*

Tears, people. Tears. (Especially if you know what happens to Bazarov.)

*Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons, trans. Richard Freeborn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 136.

R et R

A few months ago I sent out that Hellacious Article, and hey--revise and resubmit, baby! And it's from one of the Journals of the Medieval Trifecta (and no, not the gynecological instrument journal; I am not yet so bold as to have pretensions there). Hurrah!

I haven't read the reports yet, and of course I won't for at least a day or two, because that's always a sickening experience. I'm frankly surprised that I opened the email right away--so quickly, without thought, like a band-aid. If only all potentially painful experiences could be confronted in such unthinking haste.

I am still such a timid wimp

This week I'm calling references for a couple of our short-listed candidates for the search for which I'm the non-departmental committee member.

(That was a cumbersome sentence. I will let it stand.)

I am not a big User of Phones. Really not. In fact, my cell phone only rings about four times a month--and two of those will be from the fellow whom I call "My Captain," because when he calls, I first hear a foghorn and then a recorded message saying, "Hello, this is your captain speaking," and am offered a free trip to somewhere (I hang up before they get to the destination. Or maybe I've just forgotten). Apart from My Captain, I sometimes get a call from CVS telling me that my prescription is ready to be picked up, and occasionally my alma mater (undergrad) calls me to ask for money.

And this is my fault, really, because I never call anyone. Before TM and I lived together, I did get some more calls, but now I basically pay $50 a month for an alarm clock and time-keeper for my seminar (where there is no clock. Oh, and most of my calls come through during that seminar, too).

Annnnyway, all this is to say that I don't like calling people whom I don't know. I get very nervous. And these calls in particular made me very nervous--like, I was having flashbacks to waiting for telephone interviews a couple of years ago. Jittery and sweaty and whatnot. I had to go into TM's office and ask him to talk me down--he was so baffled by me that he couldn't say much to help, but his very bafflement did in fact help.

Of course the calls are going perfectly fine. Lovely, in fact. Everyone is happy to talk about his or her grad student/visiting colleague. They say delightful things and now I really want to meet, and then hire, both of these people. I've completed five out of my six calls.

But I was really especially nervous about calling some of the references, I think, because they're tenured faculty at Big Fancy Universities, and here I am pretending to be, like, a colleague of theirs. So the whole time we're talking, they don't know how old I am! They don't know that I'm not dressed particularly well (because my office is freezing, seriously, so yes I am wearing a bright red zippered cardigan over a dark red button-down, and yes I do have on long underwear)! They don't know that I'm not a senior person, and when I say things like, "We want our faculty to feel that they can continue to pursue their research," they don't know that I'm a junior professor who has no business saying things like that! In fact, they don't know that I have no business calling myself a professor at all, ha ha ha ha ha!

See what I did there? Yep, that's the crux of the anxiety, I think. Most days--at least in the context of Field--I have no real impostor syndrome anymore. I inhabit my role quite comfortably. But when I come into contact with certain contexts...well, let's just say that I do not radiate unflappable confidence.

Teaching Update

This week, I am teaching Wordsworth and Coleridge and Keats and Lermontov.
Next week I teach Austen and Turgenev.
Then we're up to Byron and Stendhal.
Still on deck for the FIRST HALF of the semester are (C.) Bronte and Dostoevsky. For, across my two courses, I am teaching 7 novels in the first 8 weeks of the semester, along with a pile of poetry.

And yes, I am a medievalist, thanks for asking!


Dude, none of this is a complaint. It was lovely to lie around reading Pride and Prejudice all weekend. I've managed to work up a couple of syllabi that, while entirely outside "my" field, mean that I get to engage in sustained pleasure reading all semester. (And much as I love medieval literature, it isn't...pleasure reading. Sorry.)

It helps that the seminar is terrific fun. I've got ten students, and fully seven of them can be counted on to talk at length about interesting things--to ask questions, answer questions, get frustrated, argue. There's Off the Wall Question Guy, Snarky Aside Girl, at least two Very Hardworking And Industrious Women, a couple of Rank Geniuses, more than one Poet, and plenty of Interesting Brains. They talk to each other, saying things like, "I appreciate the way that you phrased that, and that helps me to understand what you're saying, but I think that Emily was right when she said [X] because of [Y]." They're the kind of class that comes with pre-established inside jokes, who already know and like each other (and me, which helps), who are (for the most part) not at all shy. And now, a couple of students have volunteered to bring us food and/or coffee once in a while. So there's a little silliness, plenty of laughing, and a good bit of very smart discussion. Every meeting leaves me joyful. It's a pretty sweet business, indeed.

Seventy-Seven Thousand Dollars

...is what my "procedure" cost.

Imagine if I'd had to spend two nights in the hospital.

Nah, we don't need health care reform.

Please Be Nice to Graduate Students

I just got caught up on the kerfuffle at Tenured Radical's. (Is "kerfuffle" now the official term for academic blogosphere dust-ups?) I read through the comments, of which there are many, and was struck--as most readers were, I think--by the animosity shown by various factions. In particular, there were some grad student commenters who were furious by what they saw as the tenured writers' disdain and disrespect for people of their status.

I do not think that tenured (or tenure-track) faculty are the appropriate target for such vitriol; they a) have almost no say at all in the structure of academia as a whole, b) mostly probably do in fact feel a lot of compassion for the disappointed job-seekers, and c) in TR's case, actually expressed little that I construed as disdain or disrespect in her post or in the subsequent comments.

However.

Remember what it's like, people--especially people who had a long period of not-having-a-job prior to having one. Remember that it is January, the time of year when you're not getting campus interviews, and have to give up on the thin hope that those schools that didn't interview in Round 1 will suddenly see your glory and give you a call. It's the time of year when you're realizing, really and truly, that those cautionary tales do after all apply to you, and that, even though you thought you knew that, you never really believed that you wouldn't be one of the Chosen. The time of year when the only person you hear about getting an offer is that asshole who irritated you with her pomposity at the grad conference two years ago. When the wikis are populated by a handful of delighted, crowing new faculty and your phone is silent.

It's the time of year when the friendly, encouraging queries by junior faculty at your institution about how the market is going strike you as hideously condescending, when your gut response is easy for you to say, getting an ivy job when you were still ABD. When the thought that you wouldn't care whether you got a job or not because what was really important was having 5-10 years to explore interesting ideas suddenly doesn't seem compelling, and you realize that you actually are basing your self-worth on something that is entirely beyond your control. When the encouragement that you've received for years--of course you'll get a good job! you're so well situated for the market!--sounds like lies (although they aren't) and you recall them with a bitterness bordering on rage. When the depths of your envy and self-loathing appall you.

So I can imagine how I would feel, when I was going through all this (for yes, the above is autobiographical! Why do you ask?), if someone said to me, Hey, you knew going in that the odds were slim; what are you complaining about? Maybe you just shouldn't have gone to grad school at all. And I can imagine how TR's post and the one at Dean Dad's could sound like that to a job seeker in this position, even though I--as someone a little more detached--can see that that is not what they actually meant.

So maybe some people are a little, well, tetchy. But hey, let's remember what a huge number of our fellow scholars are going through right now, and remember the emotional hideousness that is the unsuccessful job search (and even many successful job searches), and let us be, well, nice.