And here we go again

The dog's food bowl almost made M puke today. A few days ago she was lamenting her backne and her breast sensitivity. Recently she asked me to bring her an orange and a pickle. She is become, in other words, a hilarious caricature of someone about six weeks pregnant. So I gently suggested that she take a pregnancy test, even though she very recently had both a negative blood test and a period. You know, to be sure. So she got a positive result on the pee stick, of course, and we went for a run to ignore it, then she got another positive result on another pee stick.

Last time, this made my knees go wobbly and prevented me from thinking straight. This time, I just said, "Huh. Looks like you're pregnant." I think the difference has something to do with the last positive pee stick being followed by M almost dying nine days later, but maybe it's also an indication that my attitude toward fatherhood has changed for the mundane. We'll find out soon whether it's another ectopic pregnancy and then maybe I'll start getting scared or excited again.

In other news, I had a great conference last week. I chaired a seminar attended by both my PhD advisor and my current PhD student, which was quite touching. I found out my tenure is approved, finally. And I've been awarded a distinguished professorship that, among other things, will make having a bairn easier to do.

In the negative column, though, the current round of my state's barbarism -- unwilling to tax corporations, perfectly happy to destroy the state infrastructure -- means that my university may be cutting French, Philosophy, Theater, and Dance. Soon we'll have to start calling it a "university" instead of a university.

In with the new

MLA was a bit of a waking dream, but not a bad experience. I caught up with some of my best and oldest friends, and met their twin ten-month-old spawn. I caught a Lakers game and explained to my department chair who Kanye West was. I stayed off the Shuttle of Sadness from the hotel to the convention, and mainly avoided the contact anxiety of people interviewing for what jobs there are. I even went to some sessions, for once, including an excellent round table on Shakespeare and Phenomenology, after which a lovely lunch with my professional brothers-from-another-mother (i.e. contemps from another grad school) was diverted by news of Arizona's first Jewish representative being shot through the head. (Is Arizona the new Florida? Discuss.)

The MLA's Delegate Assembly had a mercifully short meeting, but one in which "The member is out of order" was shouted repeatedly and entertainingly. I went to a colleague's truly excellent round table session, which consisted of four African American novelist/editor/exploitation victims from the heyday of Holloway House in the '70s telling stories about pimps, pornography, and the manufacture of Black zeitgeist. I was so bored in a session on professional blogs that I set up a Twitter account. I'm still not sure what Twitter is for. I got lots of book club reading done — Freedom, by Jonathan Franzen, which as you may have heard, is OK, but no Corrections — and I managed in the interstices to read an article about Jonson and Cicero and to send off a letter of recommendation. All in all not bad, though I have to admit it was difficult to leave the post-partem-suffering M for five days.

And now I'm back, and insanely busy (but apparently not too busy to blog). If any of you has advice on how to teach late medieval drama to undergrads, I'd be more than willing to entertain it. I have a feeling that 2011 is going to be momentous, but whether in a thrilling, contact-with-friendly-aliens way or in a horrific, rough-beast-slouching-toward-Bethlehem way, I'm not sure.

Tenure

I'm not sure how I feel about academic tenure anymore. Mark Taylor from Columbia, the guy who wrote that Op Ed in the Times, "End the University as we Know It," makes many good points about, among other things, the disconnect between the institution of tenure and what it's ostensibly supposed to do.

On the other hand, most critics of higher education, especially now, have a ridiculous and blinkered sense of what a university professor does. We're filthy rich layabouts who justify our existence by publishing worthless shit that no one will ever read. We're out-of-touch elites corrupting the country's youth, etc. On the less ideological side, I'm really tired of explaining what I actually do and why to my family and to strangers who, possibly out of recession stress, feel more and more inclined to disparage my profession to my face. Teaching is 40% of my job description, and more like 70% of my actual work. For every hour of class time I spend from six to eight support hours -- planning, reading, advising, supervising graduate students, etc. Another twenty percent of my job (the description is more accurate here) is helping the department, college and university run, in small, committee-based, and mostly democratic ways: at the moment, that's supervising paperwork for new courses, advising the faculty senate on salary and benefits issues in the wake of the bone-cutting state budgetary crisis, planning the course rotation for my department, recruiting visiting scholars, advising the department chair on scheduling issues, consider me some sort of parasite, working four hours a week, taking summers off, making obscene money while real workers can't get jobs.