Off to Cowpoke State

I've been preparing for campus interviews rather than blogging. I know; what could possess me to make such a warped decision?

Thursday morning I fly to the land of big skies, the land that A River Runs Through, for my first interview, a three-day affair for some reason. Cowpoke State wants me to have a meal or a half-hour meeting with absolutely everyone associated with the English Department, teach a class on Twelfth Night, go sightseeing, look for houses, have two dinners and a reception, and give a presentation of my research. They're nothing if not thorough. So I'm cancelling two days of class and preparing to visit what I hear is "the hippest little city in the Big Square States."

That's a phrase that has a pleasant, Gilbert-and-Sullivan sort of scansion to it, even if it's not true. One can easily imagine a chorus of petticoat-clad, deck-swabbing Japanese bureaucrats singing "The Hippest Little City in the Big Square States."

S06

The semester has started again, and teaching has taken over my brain. Three class preps is a bastard of a situation, especially with an entirely new course, a book to write, and three job talks of different lengths to plan. I find myself string into the middle distance and saying "wibble" quite frequently, when my brain locks up. And today I was lecturing on the comparative two-dimensionality of the characters in Richard III and I realized that I was completely on autopilot, marvelling at how I was managing to form intelligent sentences with no conscious thought behind them.

Adding a comical touch to the start of the semester, the building in which I have my office and teach all my classes has acquired a mold problem which makes a stink and will require us to move our classes temporarily so they can fix it. Walls are expanding in odd places; doors don't shut properly. Cleaqrly something has to be done; I just hope I won't have to move the office. Just something else I don't have time to do.

Rrrrg. And Tottenham is still ahead of Arsenal in the Premiership table. What the hell is going on? The center cannot hold.

Avanti

After spending one (1) day entirely vegetating with a hand-me-down copy of STAR WARS: Knights of the Old Republic (I managed to get my very own light saber before going to bed, but I think I'll make a terrible Jedi), I am ready to move forward again. The tasks aren't insurmountable, just manifold. And most of them just feel like wastes of time. For example, instead of putting my bill on my credit card, the hotel in DC put it on my bank card not once but twice. So even once they refund one of those, my checks will be bouncing until I get paid again on January 27th. Stuff like that. Not a disaster, just a time-wasting problem.

But today I have lots of incentive to work on various bits of the book, because I've got to cut them down to 20-minute presentations for my campus visits, of which, praise the All Thing, there are now two! My two absolutely worst interviews were apparently the most impressive ones, and they might be my last choices, but I have two campus visits. Maybe this means there'll be more, and maybe not, but at least I've made the second-to-last cut at Cowpoke State and New Amsterdam. The former wants me there for four days, the latter is going to scoop me off to JFK for half a day of informal howdies.

The fact that these were really my worst interviews gives me pause. The New Amsterdam interviewers alternated between bullying me about my writing sample, gushing about productions of Merchant of Venice, and staring at me stonily. The hotel room door was scarcely shut before I muttered "that sucked ASS." But apparently they found me very impressive both on paper and in person. What the hell? I'm not complaining, but how can we ever gauge the effectiveness of our interviewing techniques if the horrific ones bear fruit? I've come more and more to think that a good (or bad) interview has less to do with the interviewee's performance than on the interviewers' preparation and mood. These two were interviewing their replacements, which is not a good idea. It just makes everyone grumpy. Still, it got me a campus visit, so maybe grumpiness and ill-preparedness are good things. I still haven't heard from the interviews that I thought I rocked.