I couldn't resist:

He is still hanging in there, and even finished a book (as well as scoring a speaking part in the next Star Trek movie)--
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~pausch/news/index.html

Firstly, thanks to the candidates we met at MLA. The upside of the job market, at least if you are an interviewer, is the consistent high quality of the people you see for most of the specialties we would be hiring in modern languages, and this search is no exception. While the MLA experience tends to be non-optimal as groused about below by myself and others, that part of it does give you confidence and satisfaction that at least, our profession is doing something right.

Today's theme, though, is unsolicited advice (and by the way, I am full of it, and happy to share at any time). A sabbatical, assuming you are on reduced pay and traveling, is likely to be a financial disaster, but the upside is that nearly all associated costs are deductible. The reason is that one was granted the non-teaching partly-paid leave for the purpose of working on the research project that one applied for leave to do; accordingly, you are being paid to do that, and uncompensated costs incurred along the way are deductible work expenses, if properly documented. That means travel, food, laundry, housing--pretty much everything that is incurred in the course of getting to and living in the locations where you work on it. And, the living costs can be per diem'd rather than itemized, so long as the receipts to back that up are on hand.

I bring this up simply because not many faculty seem to understand this, and their tax people can't be blamed (much), since this is a unique wrinkle that doesn't come up in the world outside academe, except for freelancers and self-employed perhaps (and even in our world--in my case--has only now come up for the first time in a decade-plus of professoring, since sabbaticals don't happen every day).

While you can, and should, take my word for it on this and indeed all things, you don't have to. Though there is a baffling shortage of publication about sabbaticals--one topic that has huge pan-disciplinary professional self-interest--this angle is discussed in Ralston, Jayne and Tony, The Sabbatical Book (Buffalo: Roylott Press, 1987), and also to some extent in tax guides tailored for educators. And on a more up-to-date note, my own reliable tax person has validated this philosophy also.

Since I used to work in the financial industry, I of course must pop off the usual disclaimer that I am not a licensed financial or tax advisor, and you should check with someone with professional credentials before taking anyone else's word for anything. (For a more entertaining financial disclaimer covering any and all liabilities, see the parody of a high-tech business plan presented in Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon).

A side note: if traveling extensively, don't forget the savings to be had by turning off electricity hogs like your refrigerator, and by cancelling subscriptions such as cable TV and internet. It's a minor inconvenience when you visit home during the period, but the savings add up--and you may end up wondering if you need to pay for HBO when DVDs are free at the local (and college) library anyway.

That's enough useful advice for one day. Next time, we will aim for more docere et delectare (though we are not sure academics enjoy anything much more than saving money!).

Looks like I'm going to MLA after all, having played hooky since 2000. Do we all still wear black pajamas? . . . oops, flashback. Odd, considering I was not quite 15 when the war ended--but there it is.

If you are a 20th-century Americanist on the market, "Be seeing you!", as "The Prisoner" used to say--



"Rover" (the Prisoner's enigmatic white-balloon sentinel, above) will be stashed out of sight in the hotel suite bathroom. Don't make us use it.

If you have no idea what that is all about, herewith the opening credits to this great show, from Youtube. It has a certain level of applicability to MLA, IMHO.

The Virtual Keyboard:


It even makes (customizable) typing sounds as you pound on an empty surface . . . see Youtube clip for more.

This is possibly the coolest piece of furniture I have ever seen:
(It would probably be most effective if, when confronting your would-be assailant with this, you also screamed "This Is SPARTA!!!!!")

The Hollywood hacks referenced below should make a film of the life of Randy Pausch--but the farewell video lecture he has given, only a few months now before his inevitable death of cancer at age 46, is better than anything they would be likely to come up with.

• Chronicle article with video link
• abcnews.com story with video links

Rejoice, for we are not bound forever to the circles of this world, and beyond them is more than memory.       --Aragorn

Death is nothing more than a doorway, something you walk through.    --Dr. George Ritchie

BTW, a good recent article on the vicious, negative stereotype of the American college professor that keeps recurring in formula-film after formula-film: William Deresiewicz, "Love on Campus" (in Phi Beta's The American Scholar). (Didn't any of these hack writers, directors, producers, etc. go to college, and study and socialize with some good professors while they were there?)

--Regarding today's title. As to the debate that seems to exist in the blogosphere about whether the Kalamazoo conference is a Good Thing or a Bad Thing (see 1066 And All That for definition of terms), I can only speak from my own experience--after conceding the glorious entertainment value of Herr Professor Doctor Korncrake (see blog list on the right of this page).  I first walked into the lobby of Harrison-Stinson, which used to be the registration lobby for the conference, in May of 1992. The first event that transpired in front of me was that a prominent Chaucerian, whose name will be kept in confidence (although it is C. David Benson), whipped out a mini-super-soaker pistol and proceeded to irrigate those present in the assembly.

This caused me to think two things: one, this wasn't the MLA; and two, this was my kind of place.

Some of the denigration of the conference may stem from a lack of awareness of its origins. Kalamazoo started as a grad-student conference; since it preserves that aspect to this day, and is open to papers from grads, faculty (among whom I include librarians), undergrads, independent scholars, Monty Pythons--

                                             

and even administrators, it follows that the papers' quality varies from stellar to beginner-level. IMHO, there is not much wrong with that, once one learns to navigate the conference program and fish out the most promising sessions (or, usually, speakers) to attend. The only real problem is that as the conference has grown, it seems inevitable that we will have to start imposing some steps to restrict the scope of the operation; evening and Sunday-morning sessions are already a sign that we are hitting the wall.

I've been back every May since 1992, and can't imagine missing even one year. Not only did my first visit cement for me the determination that I am, and should be, a career medievalist, but in subsequent years the conference sustained me not only through the uncertainty of the job market (and then, through the miseries subsequent to actually getting my first job), but provided a gravitational draw that helped keep me in my field of interest, rather than becoming isolated in the comic-opera struggles that demand so much of one's attention at the typical institution (e.g., explaining, over and over again, that the bookstore should stock some actual books, beside textbooks; or, that the doctorate has in fact been expected of permanent faculty for gosh, some little time now; or, that four-year colleges are generally expected to teach foreign languages, plural; ad nauseum). This is all apart from having made and kept the best group of friends ever to come my way since undergraduate days--people of all ages, many former walks of life, nationalities, and what have you.

These results might, arguably, have come about by regular attendance at other conferences--but other major conferences can't come close to Kalamazoo's grad-friendly price, which draws both students, junior faculty, and overseas visitors in plenty. It's conveniently located to most of North America, and the weather in early May is nearly always some form of bearable.

Since some of the antiZooian heresy seems to imply the subtext "I think MLA is much better," let's unpack THAT notion here. Although I feel like Jon Stewart at this point: "Do I really even have to do the rest of this bit?" Most of you already know what there is to say about MLA . . .

"A Superhero's Perspective on the MLA"
"Conference Man Returns to the MLA"
"The Scary Place"

Disclaimers need be made first. For one thing, the MLA bibliographers, and their product, are stellar, and give literary studies a major research edge over some other humanities fields. For another, in just the last couple of months I have both served as a manuscript reader for MLA, and had a letter accepted for publication in their Newsletter--so, I am hardly "against" the MLA, and would not like to be read as such. None of the following criticism should be taken to apply to the regional MLAs, which get consistently high grades from attendees, nor the scholars on the various MLA interest groups or in officer functions, who obviously work hard to do a good job. But:

MLA is generally located on/near one coast or another at the peak of the holiday season. Because we have usually boycotted the southern states due to someone's idea of a political consensus, we also tend to meet above the freeze line, in winter. The hotels are major city conference venues, where coffee starts at $2 and the drinks are rarely free (you don't hear people gripe about that aspect of Kalamazoo much--only the quality of the free beverages on offer, generally while sucking them down like a drought-stricken cornfield). Contrasted with Kalamazoo's inconsistent paper quality, MLA's tend to be consistently dull in too much of my experience, with few if any questions, or time allotted for discussion--people are consistently allowed to go overtime, a conference faux pas that all of us who preside at Kalamazoo sessions take great delight in terminating. The field of modern languages and literature is so large that, inevitably, barely any sessions are scheduled on any given topic in which one has a specialist interest--likewise for the book display.

Some of the antiZooian heresy snipes about hierarchy, and people's awareness of status distinctions. At Kalamazoo? Compared to MLA? Puh-lease! Two years ago, the 'zoo registration had a computer glitch and printed most people's badges with name only, no affiliation; after a brief period of disorientation, most of us assumed it had been intentional, to help conference-goers relate more readily as individuals--and we went on to do so, with gusto. (Here's a Gedankenexperiment for you: try to imagine an MLA without affiliations on the name badges . . . now there's a mission for an academic hacker with a taste for mischief! A different form of badging was imagined by my late professor David Fowler, of the University of Washington, who always shuddered at his recollection of MLAs past. When there, he visualized the scholars he saw walking down the halls as characters from Renaissance morality plays, with placards around their necks reading "Wrath," "Envy," "Lust," etc.)

But all of that is small potatoes; I myself have been known to enjoy some or much of MLA, with the chance to see old friends, catch up on whatever the modernists think is important this week, and so on.  The biggest negative at MLA is the obvious one, which MLA can do little or nothing to ameliorate: the thrice-cursed job market. I am not referring to the sweats one has as an interviewee, nor to the different but also great stress of being the interviewer, hour after hour and day after day--both of those, roles I have played before and may well again. I mean the manner in which the anguish of the job market pervades every meeting, every room, every conversation, every dinner party, and everything. No-one who has the compassion of an irate Velociraptor can bear, with equanimity, the suffering all around one of scores of brilliant, hard-working young people--people astronomically more able than many of their employed predecessors--who do not have, and never will have, much of a chance at secure employment in a profession to which they have already given their all. And all the conversations at MLA seem to come down to jobs, jobs, jobs--who's interviewing, who's not, who's on a search committee, and on and on and on.

At Kalamazoo, it happened a few years ago that some well-meaning people (friends of mine, in fact) arranged to interview for a specialist position for a medieval scholar. Logically, it was a sensible and cost-effective thing to do; but it has never happened again in any formal way far as I know, and my impression was that a nearly-instant consensus came about: one of the good things about the Zoo is that we don't want to deal with the job market there, and don't want interviews held there, ever (although May is a good time to find out who's retiring--but that information fills aspirants with happy thoughts, rather than the other kind). Employed or not, for a few days all of us rejoice in our common cause, and our little band of brothers and sisters---and, if someone starts to mope about anything, you can just hustle them off to the next reception for a hands-on demonstration of what "malt does more than Milton can."

John Gravois' recent fine piece in the Chronicle (subscribers can read at chronicle.com, "Knights of the Faculty Lounge"--don't forget the podcast, which is the best part) gives a pretty decent idea of what the event is like, for one who has never been there. And that is true even though my insightful commentary and rather "Saturday Night Fever"-esque photo on the dance floor ended up on the cutting-room floor. (But I bet I can cajole a copy out of the photographer--stay tuned.)

The Chron did, however, give me a nice write-up when they dubbed me "the Evangelist of the AAUP." You will be hearing more about that sort of thing in due course.

A reference to the delightful book by that epitome of the thespian arts, Bruce Campbell, entitled If Chins Could Kill: Confessions of a B-Movie Actor. Have you guessed that my thinking is largely conditioned by le cinema? (Not that that makes me much different from any other medievalist, or English professors of the current generation in general . . . )

The parallels between teaching and theatrical performance have been noted more than once in recent books and articles. An analogy I have pondered in that vein is between

(a) how graduate-school training is aimed at making each of us into high-octane scholars working in a (preferably) private-university doctorial program--while, in fact, most of us (and nearly all of us from state doctoral programs, at least in English) find employment in smaller, fiscally-challenged 4-year teaching-intensive undergraduate colleges

and

(b) the way that Juillard, etc. trains every violinist to be a first violin--whereas, if one finds full-time employment, it is almost certainly as a second or third violin in an orchestra.

The seeming disconnect in this system is, in fact, no such thing. This kind of training is the best way to produce the best possible candidates to fill those respective jobs. It is true that the practitioner often needs to assess, then re-assess, their view of their own capabilities, competitive standing, and progress or lack thereof--and, the adjustment to the eventual reality is more or less bumpy, depending on the person's emotional capabilities and maturity. Some people move up, some move sideways or down; most of us probably end up at the level that an educated prediction might have foretold in the first place.

While it would perhaps be helpful for doctoral programs in English to teach just a little bit more about what the typical graduate will, in fact, end up doing all day for a living (although this would necessitate the presence, either permanently or visiting, of faculty who had solid and recent knowledge of that world), it's a slippery slope that could lead to neglect of scholarship, and eventually of maintenance of current competence in one's field. It is for this kind of reason (I surmise) that the 1960's US "Doctor of Arts" degree failed to catch on: the notion was inherently flawed that all a career teacher needs to do as preparation is to take courses on a subject from the best and brightest, with no need to do original research and make a tangible contribution of one's own.  It is true, admittedly, that in this way, professional preparation for academics asks more than that of lawyers or medical doctors--but there it is (it does no harm for us to have some distinction to take satisfaction in, since those professionals' pay continues to outstrip ours farther and farther with each passing decade--the average US college professor's pay has risen only 1/4 of 1% after inflation in the last 20 years, compared to 18% for lawyers and 34% for physicians. Of course, unlike them, our profession is actually disappearing in the US: see the graph on page 1 of this issue of the AAUP Footnotes).

The point of this lengthy disquisition circles back to the title. Bruce's book is an indispensable meditation on what it takes to succeed and prosper as a resident of the second (or third) tier in those fields where very few make it to the top; it has many lessons that can profitably be applied to academic life for the rest of us, as well.

The reason for that point, in turn, is to forestall any gripes about the currently low-tech and ad-ridden form that this blog takes. As a faculty member at a church-related undergraduate college, my pay is and will remain in the basement of US faculty comparisons--something also true of home-institution support for one's projects (though not, for some reason or other, of administrative pay raises). That is: the only reason I have this page is because I was already paying for the Bravenet hosting of my Tolkien pedagogy page, and the other pages I will post there--so, in its current form, it is free. That price is right.

A very sensible grad-student acquaintance said the other day that most desirable careers can offer the inducements of free time or of money, but not both (thanks for the quote, Angela!). Since I am currently on a year's sabbatical at half-pay from my already-church-mousey employment, I have time for some blogging. But I will be doing it on the cheap as long as possible--which is how faculty in my position tend to do most things.

Come on in; the water's fine. (But bring your own air mattress, sunscreen, beer, sunglasses, etc. etc.) It's almost as if grad school never ends . . . if you can see the good side of that.

This blog, of course, is not secret--the title, an in-joke about one of the funniest Tolkien sites on the web (Cassandra Claire's "The Very Secret Diaries of the Lord of the Rings").

As a relative pioneer in web-medievalism (first saw email in fall of 1979, and first had it in 1984; member of the Ansaxnet mailing list by 1990; present at the conference session where Deborah Everhart and Martin Irvine introduced the seminal Labyrinth website in 1993), great was my consternation to learn just now (July, 2007) that many of my fellow medievalists have been blogging like mad about medieval studies and about being professors for rather quite some time. People are supposed to tell me this kind of stuff. Yes, this may well mean you. The fact that I never really started reading blogs in general before now is no excuse (for you, that is).

Some have even dared to take the name of the Kalamazoo conference in vain, and to heap abuse on the Saturday dance, the most entertaining of all human festivities. (Although I admit that the Hindu festival of Holi may be a strong contender. On a related note: you need to see the film "Outsourced." (poster here) The Seattle Int'l. Film Fest just ran an extra screening on the last night of the festival due to the demand, and it filled up. I will say just one thing about this film: "Monkey pulls the turnip!")

Of course you realize this means war.  Or at least a blog with my own checkered perspective on life, the universe, and everything. In the immortal words of Lloyd Bridges as Mandelbaum: It's go-time.