Finis

I'm done. Last night in the hotel and I have no more preparation to do. My interviews went, for the most part, smashingly. I didn't punt any questions, flub my lines, make any atrocious gaffes.

All of them, in fact, were really enjoyable conversations, and I'd be happy to work with 28 of the 31 people who I met. It was a lot of names to remember, though. Kanbrashoma had seven people interviewing me, including (and this is just weird) two grad students. Seems like a great department and a good job, despite the location. The interviews are already starting to run together, and indeed they did so during the interviews. I had to ask my New Amsterdam interviewers if I had already mentioned the senior seminar in Ventriloquizing Renaissance Women. I had. Lots of young male faculty with the same haircut, lots of interchangeable queer theorists, lots of polite and polished feminist department chairs. Some things that stand out:

• The genial medievalist at Cowpoke State who looks like a gently shaking Santa Claus, and who asked me "what on earth could possibly induce you to move here?"
• The intimidatingly brilliant and poshly British bloke at Pipedream College who had read my writing sample already, when it came out in the journal;
• The extremely tricky question posed by the Slalom State chair, "Tell us about a difficult roadblock in your research, where you had to change course or abandon your thought process, and how you made that productive;"
• Trying desperately not to let out a mozzeralla fart in my best interview;
• Running into a friend coming out of the interview room I was about to enter (that thing they tell you can sometimes happen, but doesn't ever really seem likely)

As I said, they're starting to run together already. Which school requires its MA's to take Shakespeare? Which of them have a two-part British Lit survey? How many times can I possibly summarize my as-yet-unwritten book? How many times can I make it seem as if my talking points have just occurred to me? Was this a drama job or just a Renaissance job? Is your name Judith or Sharon or Joy or Janet?

Doesn't matter. It's out of my hands now until mid to late January, and that's a good thing. There will be celebratory room service for breakfast.

Inside the Beltway

Happy Feast of St. John, everyone. It's Day One of the MLA conference, and I'm overpreparing for my first interview (Cowboy State), going over all the received wisdom -- don't badmouth anyone, shake every hand, keep the questions moving, etc. The Job Info Center just opened downstairs, but they have no real information yet, and most of my interviewers haven't even checked in yet. I've got nerves, but just wearing a tie makes me feel more like a professional, as does milling around in hotel lobbies with hundreds of people more nervous than I am. And after all, I am a professional.

It's the only time I ever do certain things, like order room service, iron my trousers, obsessively eat Altoids. Just like the smell of crayons puts you in kindergarten again, the taste of peppermint mixed with club sandwiches means "MLA."

Off

First of all, my thanks go out to George for showing me this, one of the greatest works of art ever conceived. Mr. Pibb + Red Vines = Crazy Delicious.

M and I finally rolled out of Nowhere this morning, after having successfully negotiated all the holiday parties without making my planned holiday job search explicit to anyone in my department. This in itself is a feat in the claustrophilic atmosphere of the College. But we hit the road to Beloit and M's ancestral pile (an overdetermined word, considering the strip-mall-speed-bump nature of Beloit, Wisconsin). We're looking at four days with her (literally) insane family. I may need strength. I'll let you know how it goes.

Success!

I'm having an exceedingly good job market so far. A few predictable rejections, but I'm getting enough interviews that I'm facing the pleasant problem of a full MLA dance card, and from schools that I'd be almost, though not exclusively, ecstatic to move to (listed by blog alias):

• Pueblo State University, the decent and largely hispanic southwestern research university;
• Holy Bostonia College, the teensy Catholic liberal arts college in suburban New England;
• The University of Kanbrashoma, the windblown prairie state university;
• Cowpoke State, the geographically isolated northwestern school;
• Colonial College, the snooty and ancient (by American standards) school established by some founding father or other;
• New Amsterdam University, the stolid Dutch-built school on the Lon-Gisland expressway;
• Eastopia College, the Progressive and Green intellectual escape pod for eastern seaboard urbanites;
• Slalom State University, the Rocky Mountain resort; and
• Pipedream College, the ideal place, which is interviewing me solely because my director used to work there and browbeat them into giving me an interview.

I'm feeling humble and fortunate, but it is a really good year for Renaissance Literature jobs. Prayers, finger-crossings, and general good vibes are welcomed and encouraged.

Counter-bitching

I complain about my job and my students so much that I feel as though I should swing the karma the other way for a bit. Today, I was thanked by a first-year student for pushing her so hard, after I congratulated her on coming from an insecure student and a bad writer who was prone to weeping unnecessarily and uncontrollably in my office to a confident, talented reader of poetry and a rigorous critical thinker in one semester. It was a pleasant post-semester exchange of academic back-patting.

And yesterday, an undergrad who wrote an excellent, possibly original pipece on The Faerie Queene came to ask my advice for working it into a conference paper or a publication. She wants to do independent research! She wants to do more than is expected of her! What the hell?

So it's not all bad, even at Nowhere College. Six of my students failed and not many got A grades, but sometimes surprisingly encouraging things do happen.

That said, I have more hilariously awful bits of student writing to show you all.

Red State Blues

The two activities I'm engaged in right now are combining in a sort of Hegelian synthesis of professional anxiety in me. I'm listening to a podcast lecture by Thomas Frank, author of What's the Matter with Kansas?, while browsing through the English department website at the University of South Kanbrashoma, one of the majestic state research universities that rises out of the Republican prairie. Their search committee just today rang me to set up a job interview at MLA, and I'm looking at the very real possibility of moving from just-barely-blue Wisconsin (which carried Kerry only because Madison, the Berkeley of the North, had an 85% voter turnout) to one of those red bricks that make up the middle of the U.S. map.

It's not as though I'm in a stronghold of progressivism at the moment; W'04 bumper stickers and WWJD bracelets are the norm in my patch of dairyland. But the idea of moving to a more systematically backward area like Colokotassouri is scary for me. I fought my way out of the quagmire of idiocy in which I was raised with some difficulty, and I still associate the pain of that with growing up in Wichita. I want to move to a research university, but I do have a sense that the prairie's tentacles are stertching out for me, like the pit of the immortal Sarlac.