From Adjunct Serf to Independent Scholar

I had to go up to Grad School Campus today to return a library book. It had been recalled, due tomorrow, and since the fines for overdue recalled items are $2.50 a day and things in the office were slow, I figured it was a good time to go.

I haven't been on campus since I started this secretary gig back at the beginning of February, but being there today motivated me to write down some things I've been mulling over for a little while now:

• Holding onto an adjunct gig because you consider yourself a scholar and feel that you need to retain your ties to academe by whatever means possible in order to pursue your research projects is limiting rather than liberating.
• Teaching is hard work, and can be stressful. And if you're doing too much of it and not being justly compensated, you don't have the energy to pursue your research project(s). At least that's how I felt adjuncting this past summer and fall, my first terms post PhD. Combined with the anger and frustration of a second futile attempt at the tenure-track job "market" (come on, you all know it's a lottery and not a market), I had no interest in putting time and effort into the dissertation-to-book project. 
• And yet that project has been at the back of my mind since I defended a year ago, and it is now time to more actively set out upon the task.
• Why? Well, unlike many in the postacademic community, I rather like my project. And I have something original to say (and this isn't just my ego asserting itself -- there's more concrete evidence), and, of what I've said already, a great deal of it will remain intact. 
• Although I refuse the terms of academic employment currently available to me, I'm not really and truly a postacademic. I have simply chosen to divorce my intellectual life from the restrictive bounds of institutional affiliation. As long as I maintain library privileges (and I always will to a greater or lesser extent here because I'm an alum of 3 different places in this area), I'm free to think and write as I please. Who needs a teaching affiliation? I have more than a decade of experience, should I ever choose again to pursue a teaching position. It's not like you forget how to do it.
• Why not get going on it, then? What have I been waiting for? How much revising is there? Well, that's what I'm gearing myself up to do, but the question of how much revision and what to revise is a good one. Depending on who you talk to, I should have sent my "book" off months ago, without any revision, OR , while I can leave much intact, there is a chapter missing that needs to be written from scratch and another, currently the first chapter, that needs to be broken up into at least two separate parts/chapters (possibly three), one part/chapter left more or less intact but the other(s) substantively developed. That's a fair bit of work, especially given that there is some research I will need to do before the writing. It's hardly an inconsequential amount of work but very much manageable.
• I am personally of the opinion that my "book" needs revision and would be almost certainly rejected if I sent it out as is, especially since an editor at Very Fancy Press, for whom I did a peer review back in January, has expressed interest, indeed has invited me to send hir my "manuscript" in terms that were VERY encouraging. Do I have a shot at being published by Very Fancy Press? Yes, I believe I do, but only after I've put solid time and effort into well-planned, careful revision. I haven't been mentally prepared to do this until very recently. And yet, when I think about what I have to do, while not insignificant, it is much less than what I've already put into the project.
• If I were adjuncting right now, I wouldn't even be having these thoughts. I'd be buried under a mountain of end-of-semester grading. I'd be exhausted. I'd be burnt out. And I'd be waiting on pins and needles to find out if Scheduler of Adjuncts would condescend to offer me a class or two during the summer, no doubt something I hadn't taught before, if I were lucky enough to get anything -- and likely offered, if at all, a week or two before the summer term started, hardly enough time to plan and prep properly without considerable stress and overwork. That's how it was last summer. I took one day off between spring and summer terms, the day I "commenced" in a sweaty, pseudo medieval robe. Everybody clapped and took pictures. Felt like a whole lot of bullshit to me, because nothing at all changed.
• But, so here I am a year later, sitting in a nice, quiet, air-conditioned office. All by myself next to a big picture window. Oh, there are things to do, but they rarely fill the whole day. And there are no papers to take home and grade at night or on weekends. No planning and prepping to drain the energy of my every waking thought. No students' whiny, grade-complaining emails to answer. No distractions.

So, it's time to move ahead, finally, time to say goodbye to a "complete dissertation" and hello to a "book in progress." I'm in no hurry. I have no tenure clock to subject myself to. Might take me a few weeks to get my thoughts organized about how to proceed. Might take a few months to get the research done, a few more months to write.

A year from now, I'll have a book.

Quotte of the Daye

Comradde PhysioProffe writes,

The academic's utopia of "kill all the administrators and dissolve all the committees" is nothing but a petulant piggish child's fantasy no different than those of delusional anti-government Randite fuckebagges

 I don't always agree with CPP, but he does have a way with words.

Adjuncts Arrested

I've got a few things I'm mulling over for "real" posts (been thinking especially about research and writing lately and where to take those next as I continue to evolve into an "independent" scholar), but, in the meantime, lest you fear I have forgotten you playing sold-out shows and stumbling over decomposing rats (yes, it was still there this morning after five days...but then, would you move it?), here is some food for thought. Just last week:

University Police Arrest English Adjunct

And lest you think this a onetime occurrence, a few months earlier, just last semester, at this same institution, English Instructor Arrested and Charged with Murder

Perhaps a coincidence. Perhaps a sign of things not right? 

Neither of these stories was well publicized and came my way only by chance. Of course, when someone really goes off the deep end and heads to campus with a gun, like that former University of Alabama biology professor, everyone does hear about it, but what about these "lesser" incidents? What about the domestic disputes that result from the stress of too many years working at a job that requires a great deal of training yet offers shamefuly low compensation and no prospects for career advancement, despite good performance? Even at Starbucks, if you do a good job, you can move up from barista to management in less time than it takes to earn an M.A., let alone a Ph.D., and the longer you stay in academe, the more angry you are likely to become as it becomes increasingly clear to you that you have no power over your fate.

As I've said before, you can "do everything right," including publishing in respected journals, landing book contracts, and even publishing your book (I personally know more than one person with a book published, not merely forthcoming, who is still stuck in adjunct hell), not to mention building a strong teaching portfolio. Your department(s) will be more than happy to hire you again and again, paying you by the course a fraction of what they should be based on the salaries of their tenure-track faculty, but they will never offer you anything more, as along as they know they can have you for less.

The lack of agency -- that your only two choices are to stay and subject yourself to this exploitation or leave and give up doing the things you're good at and care about -- isn't good for mental health. Depression, anxiety, sleep disturbances, eating disorders, and alcoholism are all common among grad students and adjuncts. But what about the kinds of serious breakdowns that lead to violence?

How many incidents like the ones I've linked to -- not large-scale enough to warrant major media coverage yet disturbing if part of a trend -- are there out there? How many other institutions have had more than one adjunct arrested -- adjuncts like these, BTW, who are in good standing professionally -- in a single academic year? Which departments do they come from? Are these incidents indeed part of a trend or merely a coincidence?

Well, maybe this did turn into a "real" post. An interesting subject for research anyway (that will probably never get done)...

Band $hit

Seriously, don't tell people to show up at 4:00 p.m. on a Saturday for a volunteer/charity "block party" show and then change the time to 9:30 in the morning for soundcheck and expect people not to be pissed. For a show that then starts, supposedly, at 1:30 but not actually until 2:30? And band members have to pay for beer?? And WTF is with the children and balloons???

I think we may be losing our drummer...

Rat Carcasses

One of the beauties of living in a city and walking to work every day is the number and variety of pleasant surprises that greet you along your path. I almost stepped on this lovely prize on my way in today, and I knew y'all would appreciate if I shared:

And there you were reading my post title and thinking I was gonna say something all metaphorical and intellecktualle! See, this is what happens when you say fuck you to the "life of the mind" and start looking down instead of up.

Except, ya know, not to beat a dead rat into the ground or anything, but given this week's adjunct wars (oh, don't bother linking. you already know if you've read my last two posts), I'm not sure the view's all that different. Looking up seems a whole lot more like looking up your a$$, when it seems to entitle you to the privilege of ignoring the working conditions of the majority of your colleagues.

'K. I'm officially done with this subject for this week. And for those of you considering getting off the adjunct track and joining the nonacademic rat race, your employer might give you a Blackberry, too, and then you, too, can use it for all sorts of fun extracurricular projects, like photographing the wildlife in your neighborhood.

Have a great day, everybody!

We Are All Waldo

Back in my hootenany days, one of our perennial favorite songs to cover was "The Gift" by The Velvet Underground. That's some sick shit, friends! Waldo's girlfriend leaves him supposedly just for the summer, pledging fidelity while she's away. He has doubts:

Visions of Marsha's faithlessness haunted him. Daytime fantasies of sexual abandon permeated his thoughts. And the thing was they wouldn't really understand how she really was. He, Waldo alone, understood this.

Lacking good communication on her end, he decides to pack himself up in a cardboard box and ship himself to her because "he had made her smile, and she needed him." The box arrives as she's with a friend discussing her casual exploits with another guy the night before. Waldo's quivering with excitement inside the box, but Marsha's just pissed off that she's having trouble opening it. She goes for a box cutter, which her friend, Sheila, then stabs

through the middle of the package, through the middle of the masking tape, through the cardboard through the cushioning and (thud) right through Waldo Jeffers' head, which split slightly and caused little rhythmic arcs of red to pulsate gently in the morning sun.

Poor Waldo (complete lyrics here). When we used to play this song, taking perverse and angry pleasure in it, I used to think it was just a form of venting over our collective romantic failures.

But we were also grad students and adjuncts, some of us many years into an entanglement with academe that some have already described as a bad relationship -- you know, abandoning yourself to an abusive partner who doesn't give a shit about you but whom you've convinced yourself you love no matter what, for whom you would move across the country despite their infidelity, for whom you would sacrifice your well-being and your rage at their exploits just so that they might let you stay a little longer.

Sounds familiar, doesn't it? Not altogether unlike the advice Tenured Radical offered up yesterday and today that launched a $hitstorm of righteous rage from commenters.

Hmmm. Imagine telling Waldo to "get a grip"! True, Waldo's a dumb schmuck and could use some sensible advice, but if you've spent any serious time on the adjunct track recently, as I have, you know where Waldo's coming from. You've been there. And TR's advice ain't the advice he needs -- or that we need, as deceptively sensible as it may sound (indeed, did sound even to me at first) on the surface.

Anger. Cultivate it. Nurse it like a good whiskey ('cuz you won't be buying any of that except on credit).

And get out while you can, friends, because once you pack yourself up in that box, you're depending on other people -- people who don't care about you, who hold you in contempt, who don't appreciate what you unwillingly do to enable their privilege because you feel you have no other choice in the pursuit of a career you imagined would be more than just a job -- you are depending on them to set you free.

They don't love you, not any more than Marsha loved Waldo. And they'd just as soon stab you in the head, too, even if they didn't realize quite what they were doing.

Here's the song. Sorry no video -- none of the live performances I could find sounded as good as this version (turn it up nice 'n loud):

Abandon All Hope Ye Who Enter Here

Over at Tenured Radical today, there's a post offering up TR's advice to adjuncts for surviving adjuncthood. It's mostly sound advice (e.g. finish your dissertation if you're still ABD, stay out of student politics, continue working on your research if you have your degree). Regarding adjuncts' career prospects, TR also sagely advises adjuncts to be wary of senior colleagues who tell them there is soon to be a tenure-track line opening up in their field and that they are ideally positioned for it (idealistic bullshit, of course, to make everyone feel better about a bad situation) and suggests broadening horizons when it comes to what kind of work in academia you're willing to do (e.g. consider admin positions) to get off the adjunct track.

However, what TR understates -- as do many on the tenure track who offer well-meaning advice but have difficulty putting themselves in the shoes of an adjunct -- is that no one on the adjunct track wants to be there permanently. No one sets out to make a career of being an adjunct. And very few people currently on the adjunct track are not seeking an exit -- that is, unless they have unusual life circumstances (e.g. a wealthy partner or spouse who makes it possible for them to teach for the love of teaching).

Yet, the reality is that very few of those currently employed as adjuncts will ever find tenure-track employment. They'll stick around until they can no longer stand it or afford it -- or until they finally realize it's a dead-end -- and they'll move on, after they've already given away too many years of their lives to thankless administrations.

Now, to be fair, TR would probably say, "Well, of course, of course. No one wants to be stuck on the adjunct track, but contingency has become the new normal. Adjuncts should find ways of dealing with their lot without losing their sanity and while doing everything they possibly can to make themselves the best possible candidates for those few positions that do come up."

Except that this advice, as sane as it sounds, only holds up under the premise of hope. You've got to hold out hope that you've got a reasonable shot at something better in order to put up with the shitte that is your current lot as an adjunct. But the odds are against you. Even if you landed a VAP this year, the odds are greater that you'll be back to adjuncting again next year rather than working on the tenure track.

What TR misses is that if you're an adjunct, hope is not your friend.

Indeed, your exploiters are benefiting from your hope because your hope is preventing you from seeing the reality that you most likely will never leave the adjunct track for the tenure track. Instead of walking away and finding something else to do with your life, you are bound by hope to stick it out. And as long as y'all are willing to stick it out and sacrifice yourselves for hope, well, the powers-that-be will be happy to continue exploiting you, and the system will never change.

But start walking away in large enough numbers, and it will have to change, as I've been saying for a while now...

Rather than figuring out how to survive, the question you should be asking yourself if you're currently an adjunct is the following: "If I could look into a crystal ball and see that -- no matter how hard I worked, no matter how much I published, no matter how well I networked -- I'd never get off the adjunct track, how long would I be willing to stay on it?"

What would your answer be? One year? Two years? Five years? Ten years? What the hell are you waiting for? The odds are against you, and TR's current advice, though it might help you survive today, won't help you in the long run.

The question you should be asking yourself if you're on the tenure track and would like to offer some helpful advice to adjuncts you know or who work in your department is the following: "If I could have looked into a crystal ball and seen that I would never land the tenure-track job I have now, how long would I have been willing to work as an adjunct?" Asking yourself this question before offering advice will give you some perspective. However bad the job market was when you did your search, it's exponentially worse now. Don't encourage anyone to believe otherwise -- or to believe that working harder, making great personal sacrifices, and surviving within the system long enough will ultimately lead to better results. It won't. If you're an adjunct, you have no control over your fate. Period. You can leave, and that's about it.

Good people like this, with book contracts and outstanding teaching records, can't get off the adjunct track and are punishing themselves with the false hope they've internalized that does nothing but perpetuate the system. For crap's sake!

So, what is the point of my rant today? Adjuncts, be wary of advice that is premised on hope -- no matter how well-intentioned. I remain a loyal reader of Tenured Radical and respect her for always speaking up on behalf of contingent faculty -- and for having the courage to talk about problems with the system that many  in her position are unwilling to talk about. But this particular offering of advice is not radical enough.

Adjuncts, you are living in the Ivory Tower's equivalent of hell . Abandon the hope that's preventing you from clearly seeing and evaluating your choices. Without much hope for something better, why the heck are you staying?

Backstage

Alas, my phone camera does not do justice, but, all in all, we had a good show last night. One song trainwrecked towards the end, but we rescued it and no one in the audience seemed to notice. Fifteen minutes before we went on, the place was empty, and we were expecting to play to about five people. But then something happened, and by the time we were ready, the house was packed! Here are some pictures, although, of course, by design, pictures of people are limited and insdistinct. Mostly inanimate objects willl have to tell the story.

Peaches took this one during the show, which somewhat illustrates how we pack a stage (not even everyone is in the picture):

Backstage, Chairman Mao with jaundiced eyes peers down. I'm not sure what his message to musicians is supposed to be, but he always reminds me of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg from The Great Gatsby, gazing from his billboard out across the Valley of Ashes:

The picture here doesn't do justice to the color of this old chair, which is much more golden and plush textured, although still -- how shall we say? -- full of "character" that comes only with age and abuse (you may well wonder, as we did, what's been done to and on this furniture -- and then you might wisely think better of it, especially if you are ensconced in it yourself). Picture somebody with a guitar sitting here, as many with many different guitars have:

The party was mellower than Halloween. No absinthe:

And these towels were a new addition. Perhaps for those who get extra sweaty onstage? I can't figure out what else they're doing here:



Now, this wall is full of color, and I'm disappointed how poorly the camera picked it up. The posters are full of dark yet bright details that offer a happy contrast to Chairman Mao's somber gaze. Someone with a real camera took a picture for me, which I'll post if he sends it. The couch underneath is a muted red velvet. Picture too many people sitting on it, laughing, holding insturments and drinks, a violist putting her make-up on as she tries to convince one of the boys he should wear a tie AND some eyeliner...



Peace out, everybody. Have a great weekend!

Random Stuff I LIke About Being in a Band

Tonight, we have our first show since Halloween. As I mentioned in an earlier post, we took a hiatus to record an album, now in its final stages of production, but we are now more or less ready to start performing again. The show tonight came up by chance -- not something we sought out (we wanted to wait until we had the album or at least the Kickstarter ready to go before actively promoting ourselves as a live act again)-- and is at a venue we've played a number of times before. We've headlined there, and, in fact, the Halloween show was there. It'll be a fun night -- being onstage is fun, as I've said before, and hanging out with the group is fun, too.

For your amusement, here's some random stuff I like about being in a band:

• Wearing crazy clothes I bought while still in college and never thought I'd wear again. Nevermind that after the Halloween show, to which I brought a bottle of absinthe to share backstage, I barely made it home before barfing all over my vintage green velvet mini skirt. For tonight's show, I've got a gothy little wine-colored dress that I can't believe still fits.
• Seeing the look on the sound engineer's face when he realizes there are 15 of us performing. They know what to expect at the venue we're at tonight, though there's one sound guy we like better than others and we don't know if he'll be doing this show or not. Admittedly, it is really challenging to get all of us a proper mix that balances the different instruments. Somebody almost invariably gets drowned out.
• Seeing the look on the faces of musicians in other bands playing the same show when they see how many of us are performing. In the words of one artist we opened for, speaking to the audience at the opening of her set, "Let's give it up for The _________, everybody! Weren't they great? And holy shit, I've never seen so many fucken people onstage at a show!"
• Hanging out backstage. Not every venue has a cool place to relax before and after performing, but the venue we're playing tonight has a killer green room. Tattered plush antique couches with broken legs (so the couches are closer to the floor so you can slouch and sprawl with greater ease), a tall ceiling, muted lighting, posters galore, coke (er, make-up) mirrors on the coffee tables. The predominant colors are red, black, and beige. It's very atmospheric.
• Hanging out backstage with bandmates. We're an eclectic bunch -- engineers, writers, artists, retail workers, bureaucrats, teachers, accountants, a few professional musicians. We don't get together that much outside of practices, shows, and the occasional birthday party, so catching up with everybody and shootin' the shit over the free food and beer that come with performing make for a good time.
•  Twenty-something, thirty-something, whatever. I'm not the only thirty-something in the group, but I think I may be the oldest one. And there are more twenty-somethings than thirty-somethings -- and a few of them are quite young. But I guess what I like about getting together at shows is that I don't have to pretend to be a grown-up (which I'm convinced I will never become) or anything else. 

Well, it's a slow day, so there might be another post coming later, but I'm going to go grab some lunch for now. Maybe we'll be on tour and visiting your town one of these days!

(Image: A performance a while back, before I -- and several others -- joined)

Oppression (Not!)

Well, kids, I hate to spoil a beautiful day (and it is a picture perfect spring day over here!) by bringing up unpleasant subjects, but I just can't help myself. Waiting in my inbox here in Think Tank Land this morning was an essay (forwarded to everyone) by libertarian thinker Tibor R. Machan entitled "Republicans Are Disarmed." The gist of it is that Democrats win points for having greater moral ground in public debates over fiscal procedures but that Republicans could beat them if they reframed their own arguments for cutting taxes and spending in moral terms as well. Machan writes:

If the Republicans took a principled stand against extortion and defended the idea that it must be those who own the resources who decide what should be done with them—whether to give it to the needy or invest it in productive endeavors, for example—then there would be a chance for them to win this argument.  For, while people often sympathize with compassionate intentions and policies, they generally do not sympathize with coercing others to make them compassionate.  Indeed, they sense that one cannot make other people do what is right—they must choose to do the right thing, whatever that happens to be.

Oh, OK. I forgot that taxes that fund things like food stamps and Head Start and services for the mentally ill and disabled were a form of extortion. Oops! Oh, and taxes that fund public education and police and fire departments -- yeah, wait, I really feel like I'm being coerced into paying for those things!

Hmmmm.  This whole idea bears greater and more serious reflection. If it is only "those who own the resources" who should get to "decide what should be done with them," does that mean that the more resources you own, the greater say you have in how the government spends "your" money? Isn't that sort of the same thing as buying votes?

Man, and here I was thinking it was those Barak Obama socialists whose ideas weren't compatible with democracy!

Where does a mere working person with limited means like me fit into Machan's picture? I guess in the grand scheme of things, what I earn and what I pay in taxes is pretty small, comparatively speaking. Maybe I shouldn't even consider myself one of "those who own the resources." After all, it's only wealthy people who "own the resources," because if you're merely an employee (public or private) who works at a job rather than an employer who creates jobs, you ARE a resource but you don't "own the resources."

And if you don't own the resources, then you must be one of those in need of compassionate policies -- you know, like laws that permit you to organize with your fellow employees and collectively bargain for even more compassionate policies from "those who own the resources." And, surely, those who do own the resources will choose to do the right thing and extend to us the largess of their sympathy. Surely, "those who own the resources" will know what the "right thing" is, "whatever that happens to be." Surely, they won't simply choose to do whatever the right thing is, relatively speaking, only for themselves. Above all, whatever they may choose, we cannot -- through laws and taxation -- ever compel them to contribute to society against their will, for they would resent our demands rather than sympathize. And then they would resist and rebel...maybe even revolutionize, just like the Founding Fathers. Ah, voila, the Tea Party!

Comrades, is it really sympathy that you seek?

But I digress before I've even gotten around to the primary subject of this post. The paragraph of Machan's piece that stood out to me the most was this:

The entire history of political oppression rests on the theme that important goals, like helping the needy, require oppressing people, forcing them to labor for the greater good, for society, for the public interest.  It has almost always been a ruse, of course, but it is difficult to rebut unless one has a sound alternative, namely, insisting on everyone’s right to decide how one’s labor and resources should be made use of.  It isn’t about wealth but about choice! 

 Read that first sentence over one more time, folks.  Yes, overcoming political oppression (like what? slavery? poverty? sexism? racism?) requires "oppressing" other people by forcing them to give their resources -- that they earned with no help from anybody else -- to the greater good of "compassionate" policies that assist those less fortunate.

Now, there are any number of things wrong with this paragraph, but what caught my attention was the circular way in which "oppression" is used. The term is usurped and used against people who are actually oppressed -- in the traditional way the term is defined -- by those whom one could only laughably describe as such.

The OED defines "oppressed" as "dowtrodden; unjustly kept in a position of subjection and hardship; persecuted." Going all the way back to the 16th c., the term is almost exclusively associated with the poor or otherwise unfortunate, as in these examples from then to the present: "Ovirredyn with a carte-wheel, The chyld oppressyd lay in the streete deed" (1500); "The Hollanders were one hundred years since a poor and oppressed People" (1687); "Who protects the Fatherless, or supports the oppressed Widow?" (1726); "The injured and oppressed representative of the lower orders" (1840); "The feelings of the oppressed people have never been more bitter" (1952).

I don't know about you, but when I think of oppression, I might think about: America's history of slavery and the legacy of that history that lives on, reflected in today's race-marked socioeconomic patterns .Or I might think about what it's like to be a woman or girl in Afghanistan. Can you even imagine? Or, I might think about child labor, what it's like to be working in a factory 12 hours a day before you've reached your tenth birthday. I might even think of the working poor right here in the U.S.

The jarring contrast between these examples of real oppression and the image below of the "oppressed" conjured up by the Machan paragraph speaks volumes:

Image credit: CMT 2011, from Celebrity Apprentice)

You may not be as wealthy as Donald Trump, but if you live in the United States today, you are not "oppressed" because you have to pay taxes for programs and services you find objectionable -- even if you're paying ten times my current salary in taxes. You're no more oppressed than I am for having to pay taxes out of my modest salary -- indeed, I would argue, felt more keenly -- to fund foreign wars I find objectionable.

You may be unhappy, but you're not oppressed. And you're damned straight neither sympathetic nor compassionate if you think about yourself in this way. Why should anyone trust you to "choose" to do the "right thing"?

Just as Well...

That I didn't make it to NeMLA. I woke up with a nasty cold Saturday morning (really, I felt it coming on Friday after dinner) and would have spent the day holed up in my hotel room. Probably, I would have made it worse by staying up late and drinking Friday night ('cuz, you know, what else is there to do of an evening at a conference when the job market is as bad as it is but commiserate over drinks?).

Anyway, this evil bug has had me sneezing and coughing all weekend and seems to be abating just in time for the work week to begin. Awesome!

(Image credit: Hal Mayforth, The Wall Street Journal, March 3, 2009: "There Are No Simple Answers to Beating the Common Cold")

I Should Be Presenting at NeMLA Right Now

I was supposed to present but had to bail because of transportation complications created by the event on Cupcake Heap yesterday.

Bleah.

Literally, I should be presenting right at this very moment, but, instead, here I am at the office blogging away. I could have left early, but it's raining and I'm meeting Peaches (my partner) for dinner in a little bit. Didn't seem to make sense to head out wandering around in the rain...

When I realized that I probably wouldn't be able to make it to NeMLA, my first thought was, "Hey, I have a blog! Why not post a few excerpts here?"

But I've thought better of that (to my own disappointment because I'm really excited about what went into this paper and want to share it). Aside from the issue of preserving blogger anonymity, about a year ago, I had what I fear may have been an encounter with academic poaching involving another conference paper I gave, a senior scholar who heard it, and some subsequent work that person did. Even after a year, I'm not sure how to process this incident, not even enough to blog about it, though that may happen in future posts.

What I took away from that incident was that you have to be careful about protecting your intellectual property. I don't know about you, but I'd never even thought about what might happen to ideas (indeed your exact words) that you presented at a conference, words and ideas you were excited about but that were unpublished and uncopyrighted. 

The upshot is that I'm not sharing in this format, nor -- though the panel chair offered -- am I letting parts of my paper be read or cited during the discussion part of the session. The paper will have to wait for another conference or some form of publication.

Those of you at NeMLA right now, have a drink for me (or maybe some poached fruit).

Wish I were there.

What's Happened to Your MLA Interview Suit?

Alas, I never got to wear mine to MLA interviews either this year or last, but my suit has been getting some wear nonetheless.

I don't look nearly as classy in my suit as a tough old broad might, or as good as this savvy youngish one does:

But my suit has done well at swathing my boredom at this morning's event on Cupcake Heap:

Snoozing at the registration table as the well-heeled scuttled past through the Corridors of Power, I joined the caterer (also snoozing until it was time for lunch) and the homeless people lining up, paid to be placeholders, for the event following ours. I wouldn't have minded listening in to What Was Said Behind Closed Doors, but I had to hand out programs and collect business cards.

Actually, the event wasn't so secret. No one was trying to hide anything. We publicized widely, and the press was invited but didn't show -- and so no one will know what was bought and sold:

So, readers, what's been the fate of your MLA interview suit?

"The fiction of the natural is homologous with the discourse of the gendered body."

Over at Stuff Academics Like, the latest addition to my blogroll, you will find much to entertain you. For example, "The Guessing Game" is a regular feature listing a bunch of real conference paper/article titles and one fake one (readers have to guess the fake), but I've been entertaining myself today with the Academic Sentence Generator, linked to in this post.

Hence the title for today's post. The way it works is that you have four categories, each with a predetermined set of terms. You choose one term from each category, and, bingo!, you're on your way to generating outstanding academic prose, as confoundingly obtuse as it gets. Here, let's generate some more (all I did in these gems was change one word):

The fiction of the natural furnishes a provisional lens for the analysis of the discourse of agency.

The fiction of the natural is virtually coextensive with the discourse of power/knowledge.

The fiction of the natural is strictly congruent with the discourse of the public sphere.

The fiction of the natural clarifies the position of the discourse of linguistic transparency.

The fiction of the natural replays (in parodic form) the discourse of the nation-state.

The fiction of the natural is always already participating in the discourse of print culture.

The fiction of the natural asks to be read as the discourse of the image.

The results get a little repetitive after a while, but I swear I could write a paper around one of these suckers -- if someone wanted to pay me. But that's the thing about academia: We've all swallowed the shitte-covered lie that our work is worthless to society beyond the Ivory Tower, that we should generate sentences and lectures and original research all for free, all for luuuuuurv and not money, because if it's "academic" it can hardly be "useful." How many things can you find wrong with that logic?

Yeah, so here's what I say: The fiction of the natural has been coopted by anti-intellectual forces in our society to make decisions about what should "naturally" be funded or defunded. Naturally, higher education is at the top of the list, because, why would you want a majority of educated voters capable of asking embarrassing questions about who and what DO receive funding? Naturally, you want a populace as dumb as possible in order to get voters to vote against their own best interests. Naturally, you don't want too many people around who can tell the difference between fact and fiction, and you certainly don't want anyone around who would attempt to make meaning out of computer generated gibberish sentences.

Naturally, the capacity to make sense out of nonsense is dangerous.

But if you lack the basic capacity to recognize that to be human is to live in a world always and forever mediated by language and that language remains an imperfect medium, you easily become a pawn in the power games played through political, social, economic, and cultural discourses by those who very well know how to use language to their own advantage by telling you what you want to hear.

Damned English professors! How dare they train people to recognize where meaning lies!! (pun intended)

Now, go on over to the Academic Sentence Generator and figure out a title for your next conference paper. Your department may not have the money to fund your trip to that conference (aw, aren't budget cuts the best?), but, hey, at least you can call your paper anything you please. And no one will be the wiser.