time delay

Long pause. Such is life, particularly with new endeavours. So, as I've made it fairly clear, I went 'on the market' this year with a freshly-minted, freshly-printed PhD. Such a dreadful phrase, that, redolent of the meat-market that academic hiring is. Which is a different rant. The point being, there are some obvious steps to take to change the result in the next round, namely publish more and teach more.

Coming, however, from a UK institution that's just beginning to realise that 1) it's unethical to over-admit, and thereby over-produce, graduate students, 2) is dogmatically, defiantly anti-professionalisation for its students, 3) offers nothing in the way of post-completion resources, as it is wholly devoid of a sense of obligation to its grads, I find myself in a bit of a quandary. As the solutions to the problem of not 'making it' in a hiring round typically require the time and resources provided by institutional affiliation. Alternately, as a friend of mine who is recently tenured at a large second-tier state university on the West Coast with a 4/4 teaching load must confront, he simply doesn't have the time to accomplish the work of which he's capable. Admittedly, his income, as paltry as it may be, derives from teaching, whereas mine comes from a combination of ever more improbable and ever less satisfying sources. Beyond that, though, the differences are peculiarly minimal.

The teaching question, for me, at least, is more problematic. I'd love to teach. I'd teach for food+benefits at an institution of any size or quality. But my degrees are from Big Research Universities, and it seems almost impossible to convince Small 4-Year College that they're what I've been dreaming of - even for a terminal adjunct position. It's one thing for a tenure track job, but perhaps the whole 'adjunct' dead-end track might be a place where hiring to the cookie-cutter mold is less than brilliant. I and many others like me can bring passion and talent and effort to a wide range of institutions, yet aren't given the chance for looking 'wrong' on paper.

Again, trying to steer clear of sour grapes, but the advice is nearly unanimous: publish more, teach more, wait more - most folks don't get jobs straight out. True, but most Big Research Universities have bolt-holes for their grads to linger in for that extra year or two, or encourage non-completion until there's a position in hand, or simply have adjunct-ships and lectureships to offer to tide their own over. And, as I'm not anybody's 'own' over here, well, how to crack the nut, break the cycle, stop writing in trite cliches?

The (other) 'I' Word

Not the self-involved and self-obsessed that plagues me today. Nay. It's that most horrifying of terms to contemplate: "Independent Scholar". If adjuncts are invisible, how much further down the food chain is the Independent Scholar? At large job-acquiring-conference not long (enough) ago, and, in fact, at conferences generally, there's the namebadge phenomenon. Not that any given academic from any given institution is necessarily elitist, nor would I consider myself to be institutionally elitist (that is, I don't care where your degree is from or where you teach, but I'm a bloody snob when it comes to the quality of your work, your thoughts, your words). But there is, of course, a certain set of assumptions that get prompted by the institutional affiliation displayed proudly in black on white for all to see. And read. And judge. Much like mating plumage or the card game 'war'...

(Speaking of which, someone should really get around to a searing analysis of the psycho-social rituals of name-tag placement, name-tag-reading-etiquette by gender, age, level of myopia, etc. Plus, always, name-tag-typo-fun!)

Which is a roundabout way of getting to my anxiety: if academic unemployment continues, how long until I need to replace my institutional affiliation of freshly printed PhD with "Hung Out to Dry, Probably 3rd Rate, Approach with Care, Read Label Carefully Before Washing, and May Have Other Unsavoury Habits"? And is the stigma a construction born largely of my own fear? Or snobbery? Sigh.

desire

'The truth is that men can have several sorts of pleasure. The true pleasure is the one for which they abandon the other. But the latter, if it is apparent, or rather if it alone is apparent, may put people off the scent of the other, reassure or mislead the jealous, create a false impression. And yet, all that is needed to make us sacrifice it to the other is a little happiness or a little suffering. Sometimes a third category of pleasures, more serious, but more essential, does not yet exist for us, its potential existence betraying itself only by arousing regrets and discouragements'. --Proust, Soddom and Gomorrah.

Ah, but the pleasure inherent in abandoning one pleasure for another. Not the prioritisation of a pleasure as enacted, nor a comparison of pleasures as, in fact, comparable on any scale. Not the added sweetness of the loss created by the choice to follow the other path, thereby altering the terms upon which the decision was first made. Rather, that delectable moment in between the renunciation of the one and the taking up of the other. A space surrounded by 'pleasures', a delicate transition rich with the knowledge of pleasure past and pleasure future. A precarious moment, as well, in the possible breakdown of the transition, steeped in the knowledge that the pleasure renounced in favour of the pleasure sought may well have been a proverbial bird in hand. Thus an element of regret, as well, not only for the loss itself of the past pleasure, but for the loss of the decision to be made. The regret which, in turn, can only magnify the focus, the construction of fantasy in the anticipation of the (chosen) future pleasure. Perhaps a pleasure chosen, then, for the moment in between, and not for itself...

Proust is speaking of misdirection, here, and indirectly of Charlus's homosexuality - a comment on his 'passing', of sorts. And it's not particularly a mind-blindingly passage of genius. But something resonated. And though this may be absolute rubbish, it's better than what I was doing just before I wrote it...

grooming

I had a coffee with a senior professor in my field, spending his last years before retirement at a prestigious university here. I'd worked with him, to some extent, whilst completing my degree in England, so it wasn't totally out of the blue. It was, nominally, a 'good to catch up' coffee, although it was clear from the outset that I wouldn't have contacted him if there hadn't been a fairly transparent agenda on my part - the need to re-establish, cultivate, and refine a professional network here in the States. Thus, despite our having not seen eye to eye at times, we had a long talk yesterday.

One of the main topics addressed was the stark difference between the training I received in England and the American graduate student experience. Specifically in terms of professionalism. He actually used the word 'grooming' to describe the coccoon of support and feedback in which American graduate students are nurtured for the giving of talks, prospectus reading groups, peer thesis groups, mock MLA interviews, mock job talks, etc. The pedophile overtones were probably not present intentionally, but they did rather strike a chord - how much of the training received by graduate students in American institutions is, in fact, infantalizing? Which is not, of course, to dismiss the value of having the sorts of training processes he described, but rather to question the parallels between the overprotective trends of child-rearing in the last 30 years and the 'raising' of graduate students.

Admittedly, I'm trying hard to keep the sour grapes out, something I was largely successful at in yesterday's conversation, though perhaps less so here. Not having had the grooming, the opportunity to 'practice' interviews and job talks, the learning process with regards to such things has instead taken place without a safety net. Which I don't regret - the giving of talks and interviews is not something I feel I struggle with greatly, yet these are skills I learned against the cold glare of audiences or a panel of interviewers facing me down across a table (or in a posh hotel suite). Feedback on talks before they're actually presented, on mock interviews conducted by those who have and will conducted them over the years, is clearly an asset for those who receive it. But the construction of a certain homogeneity strikes me as less than ideal. Hiring committees clearly hire on 'chemistry' as well as other factors: they are, after all, selecting someone to be a colleague - potentially quite an intimate relationship - for years. Yet I wonder to what extent the homogenizing of the presentational aspects of talks and interviews (as you've undoubtedly notice, I've left the question of substance, of quality of work, entirely aside) has led to a self-fulfilling replication. And also whether the transition from infantalized, groomed graduate student to 'adult' professor is so carefully midwifed as to occlude, perhaps preclude, different processes of maturation.

Hmm. What sorts of wine can one make from sour grapes?

the letter

Despite primary job season in my field being over, there remain two outstanding markets. One is the drips and drabs of small and local US institutions. Second, of course, are the English institutions, who post positions for next fall as and when they feel like it - typically between now and late May. Which, on the one hand, puts those of us with bi-pond-ite interests in a bit of a quandary, as it's impossible to know 'what's out there' when making decisions about US jobs. However, as almost all of my rejections from US schools are now explicit rather than tacit, there's rather less uncertainty about my availability for English positions.

Before I began writing this, I'd thought there was only one position to fret about, a post-doc, essentially, an AHRB funded research project that's all too perfect for me. Books and computers combined in such a way as to make for a fairly rare skill set. Added to the list, though, is a sort of open-call at Oxbridge, likely to be an exercise in futility, but required suffering, somehow. But that's neither here nor there.

Tailor-made job is the real issue. (Wow. Bitchphd's 'pseudonymous kid'-speak is indeed infectious.) As it involves mustering the perfect application letter, to express how perfectly I fit their requirements, and how, in a perfect world, we'd get along so perfectly as to make perfect AHRB, RAE-boosting music. Which means that the 'cut and paste' approach that is the application letter genre is not wholly appropriate. Cut and paste. How many times, and in how many different and compelling ways, can we summarise our work? Frame it so it seems that extra bit apposite for a particular institution, project, opening? Are the subtleties (and agonies) of these letters actually valuable, or merely the accepted terms of a process that borders on hazing?

Yes, there's an element of bitterness behind some of this. Rousing myself mentally and emotionally for yet another round of "Will Teach for Food+Benefits" (or, in this case, Food+NHS) fairly soon after the last, long-protracted round is somewhat daunting. And with application exhaustion syndrome, played against the walking bassline of the application-blues, cut-and-paste, recycle and reuse, become ever more appealing - necessary even, precisely when labour and finely crafted nuance is in order. A unique, and uniquely inhuman process this...

penguin rights

OK, I started a far more sophisticated post on alone-ness, urban space, a slick reading of a Bob Haas poem that nods to both Gary Snyder and The Who, with some Interpol references thrown in for good measure. But it wasn't quite coming together, so instead we have this fine tidbit from the Beeb - 'Gay groups insisted that penguins had a right to form couples without human interference'. So suddenly I find myself firmly in the penguins' rights camp: Beeb article. This, my non-existent readers, is why I tend to articulate all of my beliefs negatively. As it's much easier to state that I don't believe in interference than I do believe that penguins have a right to couple and/or mate in pairings of their choosing, regardless of species, gender, or sexual orientation. Which, given that we're talking a zoo here, is obviously rubbish.

Wow. Penguins. It reminds me that the Regents Park Zoo, with its flashy Art Deco penguin house (now rather dilapidated, but somewhat seductively charming as a hubristic monument to that very fine line between penguins and a dated futurism), had penguin issues too. Not gay penguins, though - wasn't that New York, a few years ago? The London Zoo moved their penguins from their architecturally distinctive lairs to a far less elegant corner of the zoo (fence, mud, pond) only to find the little buggers suddenly started breeding and nesting at much higher rates than had happened in years. There's a moral here, something about Art Deco housing provided free by the government and fertility, but I'll leave it to others to tease out. Or not.

qotd-idian

Quote of the day? Seems a tiresome possiblity, in some ways, and there is (sigh...) a fine quotation I've encountered somewhere regarding quotation as a useful substitute for intelligence (or wit, but I'm fast and loose with the obscuring of serial numbers, re-packaging, and re-purposing (ugh) as necessary). But the inimitable Charlus, in Proust's Soddom and Gomorrah, had me laughing out loud on the subway this morning, 'I see, though, that you are deaf to metaphor and indifferent to French history'. So roundly and soundly damning, what's not to love?

Christo's Gates: Passing Through

An experiment, then, suppressing the urge to write the 'I' and, despite lit fag and red wine to hand, write this instead. Christo's Gates were unfurled though not unveiled in Central Park today. Which was, of course, a mob scene: ars brevis, vita longa, as it were. Thousands of them, all scrabbling to the high points to try and get a sense of the installation. Which, of course, removes them from the paths along which the gates are installed. At first I was fundamentally disappointed in the fabric - rip-stop, very plastic, seemingly inert. But the wind picked up, and once in motion, the gates very much overcome the rigidity of their 3-beam construction. The colour somewhat remiscent of the Golden Gate bridge. The placement is both playful and predictable, but ambitious as only Christo seems to have ever carried off.

But to go through them is to be in them, to be in them is to be amongst them, and to be amongst them is to be missing something. To walk with the knowledge of the incompleteness of the view. My friend remarked, knowing that the piece is meant to be taken in as a pedestrian, that she nonetheless very much wanted an aerial view, to capture the entirety of The Gates. Which rather precisely captures the enormity of the sense of the incomplete induced by the gates - their staggering spread, numbers, almost numbing repetitive-ness is very much in contrast to the emphatically local experience of them. Even the vistas offered by the hills and swells of the park never provide more than the isolated subset of gates that momentarily make up the totality of the experience. To take in the vastness of the project is precisely to imagine what's out of sight, what's out of site, what's unimaginable about where they 'all' are. For they are, of course, finite in number, as the Park is finite in space and the piece finite in time. Although undoubtedly some intrepid and yet rather tedious fuckwit will walk 'all' of the gates, clicking a counter as s/he goes.

The gates themselves aren't inhumanly large, the fabric stopping perhaps 7 1/2 feet above the ground - easily touchable (and, should any NBA-sorts go walking through the park (?!), bloody annoying). The simplicity of their construction is decidedly accessible, a child balancing a brick on top of two others. Something about the tension between the isolation inspired by the gates, the incompleteness of the piece without the participant, the incompleteness of the participant's ability to accept the incompleteness of his/her perception, and the thronging art tourists today, was compelling. (Graffitti, seen scrawled on a wall in Barcelona c. 1999: 'Turismo = terrorismo'. Elsewhere, same hand: 'Trabaho=muerte'.) En masse, the tens of thousands visiting today are rendered more ephemeral than the gates themselves: an almost cruel twist. The very inertness of the posts against the motion of the hanging fabric, the motion of walking through the Park, a reprimand, somehow. To pass through one, to pass through many, is in fact devoid of, detached from, progress, accomplishment. The possibility of the infinite variation in how one experiences the gate an insult, but not a challenge. So many of us confronting a reduction to the abject subject...

Did I mention they're fucking beautiful? That Central Park is beautiful? Nevermind the nutcase woman handing out leaflets, as we first entered, shouting about the 'desecration of Central Park'. A wholly different type of sacred space, promising passage to whilst delivering only process. But a process, a journey, saffron-tinged, towards the ultimate indistinctness of mortality.

zeitghast

Although the caffeine/nicotine balance remains precarious, a reminder to myself that not all English television is shite: Nathan Barley. Chris Morris at it again. Alas, as I'm not currently in the UK, I missed the show itself, but the write-up in the Guardian linked above perfectly evinces the Morris aesthetic at its most perfect. He captures not only the surreality of the every day (is it possible to imagine The Office without the office sketches of Brass Eye?), but the herd mentality of viva-la-youth, viva-la-difference 20-something and 30-something alterna-culture. Although technically, generically speaking, I suppose it's parody, the write-up itself is masterful. The neologisms, sounding perfectly like the buzz-words of hipsterism (berk?), the blend of acidity and co-dependency that marks the culturati (uggh) as trapped - lovely. Genius, even.

the ivory blog

I don't think this will consciously be an academic blog. For a number of reasons. Having just bailed/failed on the job market, I don't have students, grading, etc. at the moment to whinge about, so I don't tidily fit in the category. Moreover, I'm an academic-without-portfolio, as it were, and thus the invisible adjunct phenomenon that seems to have given rise to a group of blogs prominently self-identifying as academics doesn't appeal to me. (Though BitchPhD seems to have sparked a host of those emulating her 'pseudonymous kid' dead-pan. And a corner is tempted. Delivery is everything.).

More importantly, though, my interests are greater than the sum of my degrees. Which, of course, is hardly a contentious or unique statement. But 'intellectual' perhaps better captures that to which I aspire than does 'academic'. Eclecticism, even, whilst maintaining professional credibility. Thus, although it strikes me as likely that the odd post will be concerned with my primary field (literature; you'll see...) the self-imposed challenge here is precisely to find a writing voice in a middle space, both free of the constraints of professional accountability, and more constrained than self-analysis. (Have I mentioned I'm the King of Krap Jobs? I have rather a lot of office time on my hands at the moment.)

One wonders about the rise of the academic blog, however. I recall, going back about a year or so, there being a small core of a few dozen blogs, many of which were DOA, written by academics. (I'm not a compulsive linker, so I'll avoid referencing them individually). Now, though, even a quick scroll through, say, crooked timber shows how much the 'community', as it were, has grown. In reaction to the isolation of academia? There is something amazingly isolating about what we do/aspire to do. Even inasmuch as teaching is inherently a social activity, the power dynamic is such as to ensure - to some extent - that the solitary aspect of the academic life is preserved. Research is inherently isolating, toils in libraries and laboratories as we become ever more specialised, working to successfully communicate with ever fewer people about the details of our findings, thoughts, ideas. And admin, of course, being such a great way to form a sense of unified purpose... The academic triumvirate, isolating with its ivory fist.

Writing without 'I'

Not in the sense of that oh-so-charming French novel written a decade ago without the use of the letter 'e'. Nor, mind-numbingly, the English translation. Rather, almost all of my writing tends to two extremes: writing with semi-colons (read: academic prose), or 'i'-text, which is essentially overly self-indulgent musings, babblings - variations on the narcissistic. Thus this is an attempt to stop writing about myself, or strictu sensu academically.

A friend of mine emailed me earlier today, asking if I could identify the meaning behind Tsvetaeva's description, in a letter to Rilke, of him as 'the fifth element'. Google, understandably enough, has a single opinion on the matter. But it did lead to intriguing musing on the phrase, ranging from understanding it as time, or spirituality/metaphysicality, to things more theoretically inflected. Taken historically, the four elements are, of course, meant to represent the constitutent building blocks of the entirety of the physical world. A fifth element both emphasises the totality of the four whilst simultaneously undermining the possibility of completeness - very Goedelian, in some ways. That is, a fifth element suggests an instability in the bases of reality in the four-element model, being at once supernumerous and yet participating in the paradigm. A destructive overtone, even, encapsulating the incompleteness of precisely that which it (implicitly) completes. Derridas' abuse of Plato's pharmakon works nicely on the idea, a supplement that is at once poison and cure, completing the quaternion by exceeding it. Excess, complement, supplement. I should incorporate something appropriate Pauline here, to be au courant. "Saul, shmaul, I'm Paul already." But my Badiou is infantile, and my Zizek rusty, as I've been taking time out to re-read Proust.

What Tsvetaeva meant? Poets writing letters are still poets. It could have meant a fifth column, for all I know. But it intrigues sufficiently that I'll take this as a starting point for eliminating the almost everpresent gaze of the 'I'...