Don’t Let’s Start

Today I was going to offer you a colorful and illustrative anecdote, one that struck me as symptomatic of a) the way humans behave, b) the way businesses behave, and c) the way my life is trending, but over the course of showering and dressing and securing coffee for the morning, the gears got gummed up.  One of the reasons I chose the anecdote was because at first blush it seemed utterly innocuous.   Although the effect of the incident itself on me was significant (a sudden surge in blood pressure coupled with wintry dryness yielded a relatively comedic if gory Bill-Wandless-as-Andrew-W.K. photo opportunity), it took me all of thirty seconds to recognize it for what it was:  a memorable yet ultimately trivial index of The Way Things Are.  A bit of thoughtlessness was magnified by predictable corporate imperatives, leaving me short of a reward that I was definitely due but do not particularly need.

Vague enough for you?  That’s mostly the point.

These days I find myself paralyzed in an expressive sense, which rather defeats the purpose of most kinds of writing.  Habits of self-censorship developed over a lifetime, amplified and abetted by new administrative habits that prompt me to err on the side of the politic, tend to interfere with candid expression.  The fact that the composition of this very sentence has involved more than a half dozen false starts–beginnings deleted that I might avoid hurting the feelings of some imagined reader or revealing more or less than I would wish about my own states of thought, feeling, or belief–tells me (and may tell you) how things stand.

The beauty and peril of language is that it affords the wielder infinite options for working around such problems.  I have never been unable to write, only unwilling.  These days, that unwillingness arises from a reluctance to do the dance, to circle around what it is I actually wish to say for the sake of temperate, measured expression.  I’d rather just keep my mouth shut.

So I will.

One Nothing

Mine tend to be modest holidays; when things go well I err on the side of insipidity.  Like good poison, I reckon my Christmas ought to be odorless, colorless, tasteless.  All my attempts at festivity otherwise end in tragedy, and I would rather not be the rain on someone else’s holiday parade, as I have been so often before.  Some folks just aren’t wired for joy.

The trouble I anticipate this season is a matter of metaphysical drift, which is not quite as exciting as Tokyo Drift but probably feels just about the same.  While I like to give myself a few days off, ones essentially free of responsibilities, I also like to turn toward those projects and prospects I might wish to entertain in the spring.  Traction is hard to regain, however, and the void is accordingly difficult to fill.  The good news?  The metaphors are surprisingly simple to mix.

Of course I have no lack of work to tackle, but honestly, who cares?  I always have a superabundance of work to tackle; it will still be there when I turn toward it.  The only pressing bit of business is likely to be the dissemination of letters of recommendation, but I am a ninja when it comes to that particular genre.  Most are already written, so I only need the prompts for various programs.  Nothing else seems especially imperative.

Do I have life and leisure stuff to tend to?  Not really.  Much of what ought to be meaningful has fallen by the wayside, and I don’t anticipate anything new that I would choose to cultivate at the moment.  I feel disinclined to write right now, though those phases seldom last for very long.  What I will write when I begin again remains an open question as well, one for which I have no ready answers.  I have innumerable options and no audience, which means I’ll have to double as my own reader.  I’m disinclined to do that, too, as I have an appallingly low tolerance for me.  I probably need a hobby, but anxious pragmatist that I am, I’m reluctant to commit to one that I can’t pursue just as avidly when my administrative commitments start to accumulate.  My capacity for infinite deferral is deserving of mockery, and one of the many reasons that reasonable folk justifiably find me contemptible.    Fixing the way I think, of course, is another matter that will keep for the time being.  The irony is not lost upon me.

The near term is difficult for me to envision, which is something of an oddity for a man who lives his life in the future perfect.  The further term is equally murky.  In the absence of realistic expectations–the few things I would wish for are wildly impractical, if not impossible–the only thing to do with my time is fill it and kill it.  That, at least, I can manage.

Respite and Nepenthe

Well, neither respite nor nepenthe, technically, but there’s no harm in wishing.  Unless you own a monkey’s paw.  I should probably be explicit about that.

We’re in the home stretch here at Central.  I’m taking a break from grading at the moment, and I stand a fair chance of wrapping up my class tomorrow morning.  Most of my colleagues and students have already vanished (exam week ended on Thursday, and while Friday involved a significant meeting, I assume that most folks scattered to the four winds shortly thereafter), and Mount Pleasant is a little more spectral than usual.  I still have a solid week of administrative business to attend to–the fall schedule awaits me, alas–but only one more scripted meeting this semester.  My Christmas shopping is finished, and all gifts are wrapped and mailed.  While there’s not much real downtime ahead for me–the pile of books I need to read in order to prepare for the spring semester actually stacks up to my knee, and I’m 6’4″–I think I’ll be able to squeeze in a few hours of decompression each day.  The reading will probably bleed into those hours, but in existential terms that tends to be a gray area.

As usual, idea generation outpaces execution.  Realistically speaking, I’ve got six long projects I’d like to tackle and myriad bite-size efforts that could use my attention.  With some luck I’ll be able to use my break to finish up one or two short pieces and put a few others into (or back into) circulation, and I should have the wherewithal to begin principal research on the project I’m scripting for the summer.  My summer plans have been somewhat complicated by the uncertainties of July/August teaching (there’s a class I might take up in the second summer session, which will involve some spontaneous preparation around spring break if I have measured time aright), but it all looks manageable in prospect.  And when I say “manageable” I really mean “tragically futile and deeply depressing,” but I’m not one to quibble over semantics on a Saturday morning.

The nice thing about administrative work (and when I say “nice” I mean “tragically futile and deeply depressing”) is that my view of the horizon is generally obscured by all the objects ready at hand.   There may be other things worth seeing out there, but I suspect it may be best not to think about them overmuch.

 

Wavelengths

With the end of the semester coming up fast, I find myself beleaguered and bemused, disordered and disoriented.  During yesterday’s constitutional, however, I arrived at something like a thimbleful clarity.

When my time is entirely my own, I prefer to imagine my work in terms of lines and compartments; this is why I’m universally despised.  I will take up one task, complete it, then take up the next. Stuff gets done, and all the intellectual energy and focus that I’ve directed toward the project so completed can hypothetically be detached and redirected.  I can maintain an infinite number of expectant cathexes as I wait for responses from colleagues, editors, and students; so long as my own responsibilities have been properly addressed, I can keep on truckin’ like the finest of mudflaps.

Since taking up the chair here at Central, however, I’ve been obliged to develop a higher tolerance for waves and shingles.  Most of my obligations more vividly ebb, flow, and overlap now, and I’m coming to realize that the linear, compartmental analogy was never an especially good descriptor of the way I do things.  In the past week, for example, I had to manage three imbricated faculty searches, bringing one to a close (well, close to a close), clearing the middlemost hurdle of a second, and setting the third in motion.  (I speak in managerial terms here, by the bye; I am the least important cog in these searching machines, but crucial nonetheless.)  We just wrapped up the curricular schedule for summer on Monday, all the while trying to reconcile the scheduling consequences of the past fall in terms of our budgeting; in the coming week I’ll start work on the schedule for Fall 2012.  I knew that administrative work would involve this sort of happenstance helplessness, since most of my work is contingent on the efforts of others.  I imagine my own writing in different terms, but to be frank it pretty much involves the same goldurned thing.

When I was walking yesterday I suffered from one of my odd associative seizures.  Goaded by the most common of inspirations (a commemorative etching carved when concrete was poured for a driveway), I was able to flesh out a full story structure in about 45 minutes.  That would normally be a delight, especially when I’ve got the time to strike when the impression is fresh.  At this juncture, however, that story concept is contending with a premise for a poem that I started on Monday and a new story notion that occurred to me this morning (which I’m struggling to recall right now, alas, thanks to an intervening writing obligation).  As much as I would like to envision a stately parade of my circus animals, the work under the best of circumstances would seem to involve something more akin to a hunt in a jungle.  I can only catch one critter at a time, and I know full well that the rest are running away with a speed I can never hope to match.

Half Life

Today’s post is brought to you by Maxwell House instant coffee and liberal use of my Daylight Savings debit card.  I will be, in effect, writing a temporal check that Bill Wandless circa 5:00pm cannot cash.  That guy should have budgeted better.

The past week was a peculiar one, as it seems the opening stretch of every month is unevenly be-meetinged.  The system shock of becoming chair and going from about 20 meetings per semester to 200 has largely worn off, but a week in which Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday could all conceivably be spent at home (answering plenty of e-mail, of course, but still) is a heady, giddy thing.  I accordingly logged a half day on Tuesday finishing up a pile of preparatory paperwork (a response to the response to our departmental bylaws, a write-up of our position on academic prioritization, and a series of similarly expansive administrative tasks), but then I resumed work on a story I started at the tail end of October.  Thursday was devoted to the same, and I carved out a considerable chunk of my weekend to finish it off.  Chipping away at the story was gratifying in the way that chipping away at stories always is, and it was with some regret that I put it to bed, consigning it to the folder I keep for cooling.  I’ve mailed it off to a single reader, but the document will linger in the folder for a week or three, after which I’ll revisit it with fresh eyes.

If I staggered into Sunday, it was largely because I confronted a new episode of my Partitioning Problem, the wiggedy vivisection that characterizes my professional days and ways.  (The halves and halve-nots are approximate, but most weeks will find me cut up pretty cleanly on the floor of my two offices.)  About half of my time is devoted to administrative business (theoretically, at least), while the rest is ostensibly devoted to the work of professoring.  The administrative business is divided more or less cleanly between the reconciliation of past activities and preparation for future ones (happily, my practice has never depended on the present tense), and I also spend a goodly portion of my day balancing departmental ambitions with institutional initiatives.  The professoring gets split into teaching and academic production, which itself involves elaborate acts of slap-choppery.  Teaching is both prospective and retrospective, trying to remain mindful of what we’ve done while anticipating what we’ve got to do; it’s also divided between the execution and evaluation of student-generated and self-directed content.  (I’ve got a really excellent class this semester, so I’ve been oddly if merrily positioned:  I often overprepare, with notes and commentary that might reflect on any number of historical, technical, or thematic threads, but then our classroom conversations set off in some fascinating new direction, which I am equally happy to follow.)  My teaching this semester is also subdivided into the present and future tense, with some work unfolding (an independent study with student working on an essay she’s committed to a collection, a Master’s thesis or three) and some work just now coalescing (one or two independent studies in the spring and a few more theses).

The writing life?  That gets just a bit bloodier.  For my own mental health I need to balance scholarly and creative work (and doing so probably makes me a more imaginative administrator and more versatile teacher), but the equipoise is not as even as I might like it to be as a result of similarly self-dividing inclinations.  My scholarly work always centers on the 18th century, but the gestation time for period projects is necessarily longer:  I know more about the ins and outs of ongoing debates, so the work of wrinkling and refining ideas is much more deliberate and elaborate.  While I’m building those bridges, however, prospects near at hand often appear in my field of vision.  Half of my scholarship is therefore devoted to the long range, and half is preoccupied by the short term.  Because my teaching informs my research to an exceedingly meaningful degree, I would also characterize my scholarship as half-scripted and half-serendipitous.  I’ve been fishing for a white whale these past few years, but I’ve pulled up some nibblesome fish in the interim.  Venturing out of area has also made some novel connections suggestive, so I routinely find myself conducting clinical trials on odd subjects at hand while my primary patient is still being prepped for surgery. ( This metaphor could go to a gruesome place; let’s move on.)  In essence, I find myself writing in and out of area by halves, with half of those projects purposely plotted and half improvised on the spot.  It’s a heckuva way to do business, but so long as business gets done I’ll keep my mouth shut.

The creative work does the last and the finest of the slicing and dicing.  Like my scholarship, it involves both some proactive planning (sizable projects are gradually coming together) and some impulse management:  when I find the notion for a poem or a story ripe, I either have to pick it straight away or let it drop.  About half the work turns into fiction, the other half verse; what will happen to me if I venture into creative nonfiction is anyone’s guess.  Half of the fiction belongs to the genres, while half is harder to categorize.  The poetry tends to fall into two categories as well:  either I envision new work as part of an existing whole (I have two collections in mind, my progress on them governed entirely by my readiness to tackle the topics), or else I see it as occasional, meeting some more immediate imperative.  Again, work gets done, but I would be hard pressed to tell you exactly how.

It looks like I’ve got another half and half day in front of me, with the morning committed to administrative maneuvers and the afternoon devoted to teaching tasks (A Study in Scarlet indeed!).  Since I’m only half-ready for it, I’d better get moving.

20,000 Visitors?!

Aw, shucks.

And what search term, you might ask, brought the threshold-crossing visitor here, obliging rhetorical setup creature that you are?

“Orange mocha frappuccino.”

And really, at bottom, that’s what I’m all about.

The Academic Job Market: One-Stop Shopping (2011 Edition)

Given a sudden uptick in searches for job market postings, I thought it might be wise to dig this up and locate it front and center.  The text below is pilfered from my 2009 edition of the same name, but I hope most of the information will still apply.  Though the academic landscape is a-changing, it hasn’t gone so far as to make these basics obsolete.

If you’ve stumbled upon these posts for the first time, please know that they represent a) one person’s perspective, a perspective informed by a few go-rounds on the market as a job seeker and a few as a member of sundry search committees, and b) they were originally written at a time (2008-09) when the job market was unusually unkind.   The coming year seems slightly kinder, though much will depend, as always, on your specialization and ambitions.

The string of posts corresponds approximately to the contours of the long search season–the first offers some preliminary thoughts, and the last offers some recommendations on handling the aftermath.  I’ve fielded occasional questions in the comments section, and I’ve embedded some links that may lead you to other resources you can use.  (The links should be updated; my apologies for any errors or omissions.)

• Part I (preparatory overview)
• Part II (one search committee member’s point of view)
• Part III (recommendations for the cover letter)
• Part IV (the curriculum vitae)
• Part V (more search committee insights)
• Part VI (the MLA interview)
• Part VII (the MLA aftermath)
• Part VIII (the campus visit in general)
• Part IX (the teaching presentation)
• Part X (the research presentation)
• Part XI (negotiation)
• Part XII (at search season’s end)
• Addendum (a few stray thoughts on the 2008-09 search season)
• Various and Sundry (notes on search term queries)

I hope that makes life a bit easier on the keyword searchers.  Also be sure to visit the English Literature Job Search Wiki, but be forewarned:  more than a few folks have noted that the wiki experience can be a little obsessive, a little addictive.

It goes without saying that you’ll want to pay weekly visits to the MLA Job Information List (which should punt you over to ade.org; the season officially opened a few weeks ago), and don’t forget to keep tabs on the list over at The Chronicle of Higher Education, which often features gigs that go unadvertised on the MLA site.

Good luck in your searches; here’s to hoping this year will be friskier than the last.

The Academic Job Market: Letters of Wreck

We’re knee-deep in the job season here at Central, with three searches underway and their deadlines drawing nigh at October’s end.  Like many universities, we are cryptically betwixt when it comes to our search procedures and collections of the usual materials.  We may well take advantage of two different methods for our three searches, approaching our quest for a postdoctoral fellow a little bit differently than our tenure-track hunts; we have not yet determined if candidates for those two tenure-track searches (one for a linguist, one for a specialist in English Education) ought to be interviewed at MLA in Seattle or at NCTE in Chicago (the costs of the former may be problematic, the timing of the latter prohibitive); we still find ourselves assembling application packets from several sources, since some materials arrive via our PeopleAdmin system, some documents are mailed physically by sundry Registrars and offices (transcripts and recommendations, mostly), and some final items arrive via e-mail to our hub address.  I generally field 5-10 questions from candidates each week, since the language of the ad cannot cover every variation or contingency.

In terms of the conventional package of credentials, the curriculum vitae is usually thought to be the best bellwether of a candidate’s promise.  More importantly, the CV lends itself readily to apples-to-apples comparisons.  Cover letters, prose samples, and statements of teaching philosophy/proofs of effective teaching tend to be scattered all over the map, with various applicants schooled in various practices and tactics; one candidate might submit three years’ worth of evaluations to substantiate her classroom zazz, for instance, while another might instead mail in a thumb drive chock full of syllabi, lesson plans, and PowerPoint presentations.  (I’ll try to write a post about those choices a little farther down the road.)  The CV, at least, belongs to a conventional genre with reasonably conventional expectations.  A search committee member can set several academic resumes side by side and get a feel for how applicants stack up in terms of scholarship, teaching, and service.  It’s by no means an objective assessment, but it tends to be a defensible one:  when three to five searchers sit down to talk about a pool of applicants, the most solid variables (X scholarly conferences, Y publications, Z years of teaching) are the ones they’ll cite first when they begin to make their cases.

In some ways letters of recommendation are betwixt and between themselves.  They are a stable genre like the CV (or at least they tend to be), normally involving two pages, two pro forma framing paragraphs, and three or four paragraphs of indicative filling, yet they also involve myriad variations on personal and professional themes.  I have seen a five-page whopper in which the writer (in rapturous detail) particularized and contextualized all the finest qualities of her chosen candidate, and I’ve also seen a whopper nearly as long in which a well-intentioned recommender tried to explain away the myriad shortcomings for which his chosen candidate was apparently renowned.  I’ve seen a compelling two-paragraph recommendation, as well as another shorty that read more like impressionistic flash fiction (it was not, alas, a search for a creative writer).  With those degrees of variation in mind, I thought I might address a few questions about letters of rec a little more fully.  I touched on those issues once upon a time, but it seems a few (hundred) questions went unanswered.  Let’s see if a few can’t be fielded.

1.  Schlep and prep.  As most job candidates can tell you, the ritual wrangling of letters can be the most difficult part of the application process.  The cover letter, CV, proofs of teaching excellence, and other stuff are, after all, in the applicant’s hands:  he knows when they’ve been written, he knows when they’ve been mailed, and (if he’s obsessive enough to write the department hourly for confirmation of receipt) he often even knows when they’ve arrived.  When it comes to letters, however, candidates are at the mercy of profs with overstuffed dockets, ones who will need to squeeze in recommendations when they’re not teaching, writing, serving on myriad committees, or (if they are the immoral sort) attempting to live non-occupational lives.  To make sure letters make it into the mailbox, I generally recommend giving writers 4-6 weeks of lead time if at all possible.  If you run into the recommender regularly, gently nudge; if you don’t, write her periodically to make sure that she’s on the case.  One rather fascinating phenomenon I have observed is the double-edged dilemma:  a candidate one week away from a deadline will inquire; the embarrassed prof, who hasn’t tackled the letter yet but feels as though he should have, will insist it’s in the mail; and the same prof will get swept up in those last few days by other obligations and forget entirely despite a sincere intention to write.  For that reason I would recommend a regular schedule of bepesterment (reminders at four weeks, two weeks, and one week, for example) that continues until delivery or receipt can be confirmed.  Because I am ethically dead and have no principles, I also advocate the use of a group e-mail in which the applicant pretends to have accidentally cc’ed all his letter writers on one last request.  Those who have already written will kindly confirm, while those who are genuinely delinquent will tend not to feel as though they’ve been harangued or accused.  If you are asking for a letter with less than two weeks of advance notice, of course, you should probably lower your expectations.  Rather than writing an especially zesty letter, the writer will probably take an old recommendation on file and adapt it quickly to your needs.  Remember, the two weeks you imagine as ample time to write actually translate into a week for writing, a couple days of exchange (if the writer asks you to review the letter), and a few days in the mail.  It’s harder to personalize and particularize the paean to your mad skillz when that’s the case.

2.  Numbers and thumbs.  If the advertisement does not specify a number of letters you should feel welcome to write the search chair or the office staff, but generally speaking the search committee will be looking for 3-5 recommendations.  As a rule of thumb, three tends to be the given.  It’s not a bad idea to tuck away a list of professional references somewhere, perhaps at the end of your CV; that list will let the committee know what letters to expect, and they will often do some checking for you if there is a perceived omission.  Depending on where you stand in your career, you’ll want either a) a batch of letters from three profs, those who know your work best, if you’re a minty-fresh Ph.D.; b) a batch of letters from two or more profs and your immediate supervisor (or a colleague who has observed your work in the classroom) if you have a couple of years of fixed-term teaching under your belt; c) a batch of letters including one from your dissertation director (if your degree is of reasonably recent vintage), one from a current colleague, and one from an immediate supervisor (maybe a chair, maybe a dean) if you’ve been professing for a spell.  On general principles it’s nice to see a set of letters that comments on the whole applicant:  her scholarship, her teaching, her collegiality.  Those batch guidelines can (and should) be waived if you can get more effective commentators in other positions of academic authority (your boss on a major scholarly web project, for example, or an established scholar with whom you’ve worked regularly yet unofficially), but be sure to imagine the reaction of your probable audience before you request or send the letter.  If you apply to a private Christian school it would not be wrong to include a fourth letter from your priest or pastor, but that recommendation may not be the finest lead-off letter for a state university.

3. Prep for depth.  Once you’ve identified writers, be sure to supply them with all the evidence they will need to comment on where you stand in the profession at the time of writing.  Periodically in a batch of letters one will see dated references (or mistaken dates, or even altogether inaccurate information), and those issues can be damaging or damning.  (I’ve done it myself:  to accommodate a rush job I mailed out an old letter in support of a new application, and while I remembered to adjust several details, I mucked up the tense in the last paragraph, making it sound as though my work with a student was just starting when it was already done.)  Since we all tend to be migratory, opportunistic critters, placing our work where we can when we can, it’s critical for writers to know exactly what we’ve been up to.  Accordingly, make sure your writers have at least a current CV, and it wouldn’t hurt to offer them a list of classes taught, an offprint of your most recent article, or any other bits of business that will help them convey their familiarity with your agenda as a scholar and a teacher.  It’s useful to bear in mind that the work of a search committee is largely differential:  instead of simply checking for credentials and qualifications in the raw, members will be making fine distinctions by digging up details that make a candidate’s peculiar gifts explicit.  Memorable letters typically dwell on those details, while boilerplate letters tend to leave little more than a general impression.

4.  Remember the members.  With that theme in mind, I’ll state again my preference for a vivid letter by a knowing writer rather than a generic letter from a name-brand scholar.  When I need to decide if a candidate is a good fit for a gig,the perspective of someone who’s read her writing, seen her teach, or worked alongside her is far more valuable than a Mad Lib-style recommendation in which a few proper nouns (the candidate’s name, the name of his shiniest publication, the name of the writer’s own university affiliation) are sprinkled among more general accolades.  This is especially true given the vagaries of sectional scholarship and the diversity of search committees.  If you’ve got a standard team of 3-5 folks, often only one or two will be experts in the area, and many search committees involve an array purposely selected to avoid congestive critical mass.  Accordingly, landing a big fish in your field as a writer may not serve your turn as well as you had hoped:  some (or even all) of the searchers may not recognize the name, and even those who know it may find themselves commingling their thoughts about the writer with their sense of your credentials.  If that name-brand scholar can comment on your work in great depth of detail, she of course is a person to whom you should refer; if you hope the name-brand cachet alone will grace and elevate your application in the eyes of the searchers, however, I’d encourage you to give more local folks a longer look.  They are the ones who will often know your work best, who will have a greater investment in your success, and who will make the time to write as well as they can on your behalf.  Among the scads of indifferent letters of rec, that added depth and perspective can make all the difference.

Daze in the Life

Fun fact:  the chairing of things is not the fiesta of frivolity they make it out to be in the brochures.  Who knew?

Alas, in good sooth, I knew.  I gave the decision to enter the lists a good, long think, and I–kindhearted critter that I am–would say that my reasons for making the attempt were not entirely jackassinine.  Admittedly, matters like imminent faculty contract negotiations did not figure in my thinking all that much, and perhaps they should have.  But the support of several colleagues, a frank assessment of my abilities and deficiencies, and a consideration of where my life was and where it might have been going all persuaded me to enter the fray.

I also had the advantage of a good, long preparatory jaunt over the summer.  My predecessor was extraordinarily gracious, talking me through the ins and outs of budgeting, reporting, and scheduling (oh! the scheduling!) over the course of several weeks in May and June before fleeing on the first of July.  (The best index of the pleasures of being a department chair may well be the relief and glee that attends the relinquishment of the gig.)  I was able to jump right in, making up the spring semester schedule all by myself, reviewing the annual report for 2010-11 before turning it in, and handling the day-to-day fusillade that comes with inhabiting the big office.  My colleagues are a kindly lot, and our office staff is really extraordinary; getting my legs under me took only a week or three.  (It doesn’t hurt that precious little of moment happens during the summer months and that for 45 days I was officially unofficial, occupying the liminal space in between the close of one fiscal year and the commencement of my own contract.)  The first month of the semester, however, has given me a foretaste of what the next 3-30 years will be like.

The early going was perhaps more frenetic than it needed to be, if only because we anticipated a work stoppage of unknowable duration.  Our Faculty Association contract expired on June 30th as well, which meant that most faculty folk quite reasonably adopted a policy of personal conservation.  In a climate of uncertainty (the contract had never been allowed to lapse before), many of my colleagues opted to dispense with the extras that so often characterize our work:  we do quite a lot on the record, but its what we do off the record that gets things done speedily.  Accordingly, my desire to set job searches in motion, for example, found me peppering my peers with messages and responding to their replies in the same day (and often in the same hour) in order to improve our chances of having all the advertisements finalized and all the search data entered in the administrative system before August 22nd.  Thanks to the patience and perseverance of several parties it all got done, and done well, but the start of the semester brought with it the usual frenzy, aided and abetted by our very short stoppage.

The first three weeks of the semester (which followed hot on the heels of a summer class and the completion of my pending writing projects) hewed pretty close to caricature.  Students are suddenly faced with emergencies–crises that were once merely annoyances in April or May–and require imaginative executive resolutions; scads of colleagues check in for the first time since spring, burdened with their own lingering questions and concerns and anxious to flesh out plans for the coming semesters (the annual return to Capistrano is pretty dramatic when you realize we harbor 80-odd bodies in our department); administrators set in motion their initiatives for the new year, most of which are thorny and pressing.  I spent the better part of three weeks fielding singles on the first hop and firing them home.  With the exception of class preparation time that I carved out of my schedule (complicated somewhat by pinch-hitting as a substitute professor in order to create space for a colleague’s maternity leave), I am not exaggerating when I say that every moment the office was open involved action-packed wrangling with one administrative fuss or another.  Nor were my lunch or leisure hours secure:  despite my resolution to treat my downtime as sacrosanct, neither the faculty lounge nor my home office have proven to be safe havens.  For three weeks chairing the department is an all-consuming gig, and the nibbling doesn’t slacken all that much when the semester has settled in.

I’m hopeful that the midsemester stretch will afford me a little more leisure.  I anticipate handing off the survey class to its proper professor when September ends, and the deluge of spontaneous paperwork that marks the start of the session should diminish to a more predictable trickle.  As an administrator I enjoy a handful of existential advantages (a ceratorhine temperament, a disinterestedness that verges on sociopathy), but the teacher/writer/humanoid that dwells within me will need some exercise in the near term.  An hour of decompressive recreation per week really doesn’t cut it, especially when the balance of it tends to get expended on endeavors just like this.

Musing and Bruising

It’s 5:40 am here at the Cabana of Despair, and it promises to be a long, long Sunday.  Friday was unnecessarily frenetic (what should have been a straightforward two-meeting day spiraled into something else entirely), and Saturday found me helping a friend move, grading, and fielding a few dozen stray e-mails I didn’t get to during the week.  My list of junk to do is a tangle of haphazard slapdashery (featuring items as straightforward as “read Vathek” and articles as insidious as “set in motion Infernal Machine B that will lead to Unpleasant Consequence Y come June”), and I’ll probably need about 3.5 Sundays to address it properly.  For the next 45 minutes I’m off the clock, in any case, so let’s see what prospects percolate before 6:30 comes around.

The good news is that I put some poetry in circulation, which was long overdue.  I have one or two more envelopes to mail once the 9/15 reading window opens, but it was nice to build that stack of envelopes and watch it vanish.  It looks like my three encyclopedia entries are more or less squared away as well, which is heartening.  My third entry was a beast to write–something about shoehorning a couple millennia of scholarship into 2500 words–but I got it done well in advance of the deadline.  The bad news is that I now find myself faced with the Terror of the Next, which is as daunting in prospect as ever.   I anticipate a smidgen of writing time when September ends, since I’ll be giving up my Tuesday/Thursday teaching obligation.  What that writing will involve is anybody’s guess.  I have a half dozen undercooked stories that deserve to be finished and a pair of articles that have been sketched and circumspectly vetted (lest I run afoul of the secret Swedish dissertation, as I did last time around); I also may roll the dice and see what calls for papers are out there in the aether, since I find that an occasional sidelong jaunt into unexplored, unexpected territories tends to invigorate my thinking, prompting me to imagine avenues I never thought to map.

The bruising, alas, comes from my sense that Long Projects A and B are no longer viable and my suspicion that Recreational Plans Ψ and Ω (since I’m running low on unassigned variables) will not fly.  Long Project A involves existential sensibilities that no longer obtain; while I wish I were in the place to make the attempt, I ain’t.  Long Project B is likely to run aground because of the sustained effort it would require.  My schedule these days allows me to chip and chisel, giving short works shape over time, but my tendency to reread what I’ve written from start to finish in order to engage the brainspace prior to writing precludes compiling dozens or hundreds of pages at a time.  Conceptual compartmentalization might yet get me there, but I’d like to see things here more settled before giving those notions a go.  As for the recreational options, time and expense are the enemy.  Plan Ψ involves nothing more than a regular schedule, which I no longer have; Plan Ω, which I scripted not so long ago, once satisfied the Wandlessian ratio of cost to promised pleasure but has since nearly tripled in price.  For the time being, then, I think my recreation will likely consist of reading books for studies and theses a little bit further down the line.  Pretending that work is not work is one of my tricksier imaginative knacks.

And now it’s Coffee O’clock.  See you next week.