Sitting On the Edge of a Cliff, Hanging Out

So I didn't really do anything today, except go to my part-time job. And one of my colleagues there asked me about my article (yeeee!) and my book project. I told said colleague about the revising and then the re-revising and then the proofing of the article, and how, sadly, the book project went into a stall and then languished and I haven't done anything at all with it. Mostly, I said, I've been applying to and being rejected from the spring academic job market, with a large sprinkling of attempts to break into administration in there too.

And then I did a bunch of errands, got my dry cleaning, registered some bureaucratic stuff, etc, and went home, and felt like my day was done. Somehow, this has become my life.

Except it isn't, because now that I am down to my one part-time job I am losing money each month and it won't be long until I have nothing and can't even pay my rent.

So obviously I need to be applying out to jobs, right? Sigh. I don't know if I can do this anymore. I have a long list of jobs culled from last ads week, and I think I am not going to apply to any of them. They are lectureships for comp that are advertised as one-year or term positions, and they are all over the country ---- Florida, Wisconsin, NY, etc. The salary plus the temp nature of these jobs, plus the fact that there will be a huge applicant pile even for these, has all combined to put me off. I'm not saying I wouldn't relocate across the country for a t-t job, I'm not saying I wouldn't relocate for a comp job, and I'm not saying I wouldn't relocate for a visiting or limited term position, but put all of those together for about 30K and I just don't see it as worth it. Hell, if that theoretical comp job was a permanent lecturer position instead of a limited term one, I'd be all over it. But it's not.

And the next step then is to go back to the nonacademic job thingy, but I am so not excited about that. I was whining to my sister a few weeks ago and ended my speech with, "I don't know what I want to do when I grow up, waaaaaa! Figure it out for me!" She laughed and said that of course I knew what I wanted to do, but I couldn't find anyone that would pay me for it. She said I had a real calling but it wasn't being properly appreciated. And I guess that's true --- unlike a lot of people I have talked to who ended their PhD burnt out on research or sick of teaching, I still really love it all. To the extent that I have a hard time applying to or even understanding the point of many of these nonacademic jobs.

I have tasked my sister with figuring out what I should be doing now (was on the phone with her again today). She will get back to me. Right now I'm waiting ---- I have academic applications out, but they are recent enough that I don't expect a response quite yet. Or maybe, any minute now. Or, maybe this deafening silence will stretch on long enough to make it clear that they are all going to fill their positions without contacting me. Sigh. It's this total lack of certainty that's the real killer. Ideally I could hear back from them soon and get hired for something and move off to some new place.

Or, less ideally, I could move back in with my parents or sister (still haven't negotiated that cat thing, though!) or my cousin and start over and really throw myself into the nonacademic local job search. I don't feel like doing this yet, because of the previous idealistic paragraph. But then again, I have been in this holding pattern for---? I was going to say since January, but really, let's count the fall job market too. Argh.

My sister suggested I might have to move twice and that I should just get on with it. But then when I asked if she would help me move (baby sister whining alert!), she said yes but then took it back for until after my niece graduates. So I'd stay here until the end of spring semester then throw myself on the charity of whatever family member I can. I can handle that, I think.

That leaves now until mid-June here in GradSchoolLand. What should I be doing with myself? I could continue on as is --- acting as if my pt job was a regular full time job and just hang out the rest of the time, while trying to spend as little money as possible. Or I could apply for those damn temp lecturer positions. Or...? What? Revise my book? Apply to crappy nonacademic jobs even though I don't live in the area yet? Watch a lot of movies? Start a hobby? I don't know. I'm open to suggestions.

Molten Lava? Freakin' AWESOME!

In honor of the current volcanic eruption in Iceland, and because I think molten lava is beautiful, I am watching volcanoes explode on YouTube.

Here is some cool footage from an old 70s documentary. Check out those plumes!




And here's one with lava and explosions and cool sound effects, shpluck shpluck, gloop gloop hiss. And French, should you know any French.



This one, of the actual current eruption, just shows a big plume of smoke. Kinda boring. Proof why I am not a scientist, if you needed any --- I just want the flashy stuff and don't care how it works.



What I really want is for a cameraman to be engulfed by the flowing lava so I can understand just how hot it is. Surely that's not too much to ask? Maybe we can draft unemployed humanities PhDs for the purpose --- prove that we can be educational and entertaining at the same time. (Lions in the Coliseum are just too too passe.)

Now I am off to find videos of volcanoes exploding underwater. I was looking for them a couple years ago but YouTube didn't have very much. I watched a documentary once back in high school and loved it. I could just loop the footage and stare at it all day and meditate. I think you have to search under some variant of "popcorn." Ahh, beautiful! With a properly arty classical music soundtrack, it becomes like kinetic sculpture.

A Fable

A moth and my cat are having a tragic affair. Every night, the moth flutters up against the living room window and piteously batters against it. The cat leaps from its perch and reaches as far as it can stretch, hissing at the pane that divides them. Like prisoners they press the glass as if in hope that touch can be communicated through it. Made despondent by the obstacles to its love, the moth eventually flits away, only to return at the same time the next night. This continues on for some time. One night my cat is weary and does not notice the arrival of the moth. It strikes the cold class, first hard, then gently, but no figure mirrors its actions from within. Perhaps more heartbroken at the loss of unattainability than of love, the moth leaves. Such are the ways of love.

Tale of a Shirt

Meh. Can't figure out why, but I couldn't sleep last night. I ended up hitting snooze and sleeping right through my workout. But I just went to another session and showered, so that makes up for it a little. I hope they don't charge me the "no show fee." It's not like I can afford it.

I need coffee and to figure out what I actually need to work on today. I did not apply to jobs over the weekend and I must get back on that horse again soon.

Also, I am very angry at the ETS people --- I was supposed to grade for them in their CSU early application program but could not get certified by the deadline. Those bastards! Their online program uses a version of Java that is five years old and that will not download and work right on my computer. I couldn't get it to work on the department computers either (although I was instructed not to use a public computer, but now the point is moot, hey?) Grr! I could have used that money, too. Don't know what I'm going to do about that now.

And remember how I suggested we label each grad post? And wondered if that would be the equivalent of the Scarlet Letter? Well, here's an article all about literary t-shirts, if you are so inclined. My only complaint is that the scarlet letter one is not scarlet:



It says there is a Poe one too, with team number 13. I might prefer that one, actually. I'll have to go check them out.

ETA: Ooh! A tell-tale heart with "Poe 13" on the back??? I must have it. Unless the raven one is better. Ooh ooh, raven or heart, raven or heart...

Weekend Despair

I hate weekends, because nobody calls job hunters about their applications over the weekend. That means I have to sit around and wait, and since I'm down to one part-time job right now, I have nothing to take my mind off stuff.

I did a huge gob of staff and adjunct apps and the last of the CCs at the end of March. I feel like I should have heard from them if I was a contender by now. Sure, I know it takes everyone a long time to close a search, months and months ---- but I still think that people who actually are desired candidates and get interviews and move on to the next stage hear much faster than the rest of the pile, you know? And so I feel like all the stuff I sent out is probably moving on to stage two without me. Sigh.

I think it's going to rain today. I should go out for my coffee snack before it does that.

And a couple postdocs have opened up recently, which I hate. I mean, of course I will apply for them, but I expect those to take even longer to close and they will be due at the end of April or even later, so I could prolong this waiting period, this sense of floating in limbo, across almost the whole year. I was just talking to a friend about how I had noticed the rents dropping a bit on Craigslist and how I was thinking about moving somewhere with a roommate so that my rent would be more manageable, but that I was also expecting any of these jobs I've been applying to to pan out any day now, so why move if I have to move again? I'm afraid to look back through my old posts and figure out how long I have been on the cusp of moving away at any moment. I will depress myself.

My health troubles have started up again. It doesn't match up quite with the food theory or the idea of stress. So that's one more thing I'm dealing with.

Another thing is that this friend who I ate dinner with (fun!) is the same one who worked at The Weird Hippie Place, if you remember my old posts. She was fired. Ok, now you could say I was fired too, but I was hired to teach during first period for one year and then they let me go at the end and pointed to money troubles. She was asked to leave in the middle and to bring back all their proprietary materials. (It's the equivalent of cleaning out your desk when you don't have one.) Much good gossip there, but I won't tell you about it.

Anyway, she still talks to people there, I guess, and she said that one of the old guard had recently walked out --- just retired himself and stopped showing up. (I know; it's a crazy place. What does that tell you about it?) This had actually happened a few years back but it was a bit more understandable: this older guy had suddenly up and left, without much explanation, and the administration went and checked up on him and turned it into a health leave and then an early retirement, and then he died abruptly from long-term alcohol-related problems. It made a lot of sense to me that he somehow knew he was getting very sick but was dealing with it in a poor way, because of the damage that alcoholism had done to his brain. This was before I got there, but soon enough before that people still talked about it. It happened probably a year before I came there, so my pt status was probably partly to fill his absence.

So, to make a long story even longer, when another person ---- Extremely Neurotic Tinfoil Hat Hippie ---- took a health leave that became permanent last year, I sent some very polite and nice emails to the principal saying how sad it was that she was having health problems and I was very sympathetic and would love to teach for them again or do whatever I could to help out. No answer. They hired a couple young and competent people, who I know, and pulled in another grad student to do the same first-period thing I had done. But their funding is also precarious enough ---- and their reaccreditation shaky enough ---- that I could see them closing this side of the program outright in the next few years.

So now that I know someone else is leaving, I'd really like to apply there again, except there is nothing official to apply to and sending a subtly worded plea for consideration didn't work the last time. But it could have been as much about lack of funds tying the principal's hands as anything else; I don't know. What could I do, how could I "apply," in a more effective way this time? Is there any better way I could get my "in"?

If you remember, I said I loved to work there and I hated it. I would loooove the chance to go in there and radically change it so that it actually fulfilled the vision of the school. And I'm sure that having young and new people in there already is changing a lot about the place. And the old guard is on the way out; they have gone from from 6 people who probably were at Woodstock and think and move and talk like they have pot-induced dementia down to 2. On the other hand, I did hate a lot about that place and this mass exodus plus a rocky financial situation may mean that I don't want to work there. I dunno! I don't know how to get that (potentially nonexistent) job! Any suggestions?

Or, you know, someone could actually invite me on an interview or offer me a job or something. I'm getting pretty tired of doing the same thing over and over and over again and not actually seeing any results. I'm going to have to move somewhere in a few months, though, as my little hoard of spare money I've scraped together rapidly dwindles. I would like that next place not to be my parents' basement, or the equivalent thereof. But I guess that would be better than moving out under a bridge somewhere.

More Weird Junk Mail

It's not the "free cremation!" coupons I got a while back, nor is it the industrial/medical supplies catalog I got once but didn't blog about (need rubber tubing in thirty different gauges in packs of a thousand? Have I got the catalog for you!), but this is still pretty weird.


Why would anyone send a catalog for press-on carpet squares to an apartment dweller? And why have the designers ruined that gorgeous high-ceilinged wrought-iron view with those ugly mod purple and orange and brown squares? I do not understand.

"The Sisyphus T. Cog Chair of Graduate Study" --- A Thought Experiment

I'm still pondering the suggestion I linked to in my last post: what if we changed how we admitted grads into English programs and used a "one in, one out" model? By this, I mean that you, the department, don't get to have a shiny new graduate student until you have successfully had the old graduate student defend and file. (If we wanted to be really evil, then we could make that until the old graduate student lands a job.) So I want to play with this idea a little bit, a thought experiment if you will, since it doesn't actually harm any graduate students, use dangerous chemicals, or cost any money this way.

I thought to myself, what if we named each slot in a grad program, kinda like how they name distinguished chairs? Ooh there's a lot of interesting ramifications of this. At first, I thought the slots would be named for the field of study --- the Dickens Graduate Chair? The Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama Chair? Ooh, the Foucault Chair of Textual Perversion? (I don't care if that grad slot guaranteed you'd never get a job; I would pay for a title that cool!)

Of course, this causes as many problems as it resolves: these grads can't change their minds? Would it reinforce canon formation? Marginalize or hold open one guaranteed slot for minority literatures? How would interdisciplinary or cross-historical projects fit in here?

Would the name of the chair determine what TA assignments you get? I, for example, TAd Shakespeare every quarter they didn't have enough people to cover the massive lecture, my own research specialization be dammed. And that didn't really bother me, since I like eating and having them pay my fees. (Ten weeks, you can suffer through pretty much any topic or professor, not that I don't enjoy Shakespeare. But I haven't liked everyone I TAd for.) But would that mean that my program would accept grads based on the TA availability, or just expect everyone to become "well rounded," as they do now? Fascinating.

The advantage to naming each slot is of course that it makes it easier to keep track of. You can't "accidentally" let more 18th-century scholars in and forget about your struggling stragglers if they have a labeled slot set aside for them and go every where with a big sign on them, or their cv (although I like the literal big sign idea too --- a scarlet letter? a leprosy bell? What is metaphorically more appropriate?). Another plus would be that you could tell by the turnover who was pushing their students through or what fields are doing marginally well. (There's no such thing as a "hot" English field any more.)

I can tell you that a couple professors here would still be on their first set of grad students from before my time ... they have a track record of, I don't know whether it's they are perfectionists or they attract perfectionist students who stick around ABD for 8 or 9 more years before suddenly vanishing from the program entirely. So if you can't be arsed to mentor your grads into finishing or bluntly telling someone that s/he isn't cutting it and needs to go, well you just don't get any new grad students, and that means you are messing with fewer people's lives.

Furthermore, you usually endow these named chairs for professors, which would be interesting at the grad level. What if you funded them during the year through your TAships or writing program assistantships (the real reason most English departments have grad students, let's face it), but you got donors to name grad slots by covering, say, summer funding? While I would hate to have the Ethel and Herbert T. Lamprey Grad Chair (and I'm sure that's what I would get), I would have loooooved to get some summer funding, which our department has never done. And I think ---- you can correct me in the comments ---- that all the UCs have chopped summer stipends recently so we're all in the same boat now. Anyway, the ability to write our dissertations and do archival research and publish and prep for the job market for a few months while not working would just be fabulous, and do a lot for the profession's terrible completion rates.

You could announce the upcoming graduates who were going to file and walk in spring on the department web site and that would determine who was getting accepted ---- several of the big postdocs and fellowships already do something like this. Each fall you log on to their web site and they say "English and Italian language scholars will be supported this year. In the academic year of 2011-2012, candidates will be chosen from the fields of art history and film studies." It would make it clearer to potential grad students whose applications were going to be considered, which is also to the good.

And now that I'm thinking about it: what if we kept separate literature departments, but rotated grad admissions around them? You know, this fall we are accepting a German literature cohort, and next year we are accepting a French literature cohort. Have the grad classes be parceled out across departments so that everyone had to teach grads from these different backgrounds --- that would make everything much more interdisciplinary and multilingual! We'd have a dozen different languages spoken in seminar, and grads might actually do cool transnational dissertation projects! I wonder if you could work it so that you cycled the literatures grads in and out of the English/writing classes as well, or if there's too much demand for those beginning language classes. Huh.

Another advantage to my named-chair-one-in-one-out program would be the idea that in a bad year or if people went on the market and didn't get anything, you just kept them around to continue teaching. Why not keep the trained and experienced person to teach the freshmen rather than induct more fresh new innocents into a process with a crappy outcome? Now I realize that time-to-degree limits are often imposed at the school or division level rather than the department, but I still like this way better. You get tired of having them around, pressure them to finish their diss and file and go their way, or if they get sick of it because the low wages outweigh the job stability, they can always file and leave. Besides, on the professor side, everybody held on for a year or two after the stock market crash instead of retiring; why don't the people competing for those few replacement jobs get the same option?

And really, if we're going to have a horrible bottleneck of scholars, I'd rather it came pre-grad school rather than after the huge emotional and financial investment of grad school. Seriously: 22-year-olds being denied and disappointed and having to figure out some sort of career back-up-plan? Oh darn! They're going to have to work a job and get real-world experience for a year because their field interest isn't opening up this year? Darn, they're going to pay down their debt while becoming much savvier about the business world, oh, whatever will we do?

Wait, that may be the whole point of why bring 'em in when they're young and hero-worshiping and stupid. Ugh.

Come play along! What do you think? Can you invent another model? Or give me some snazzy names for the grad chairs.