Today’s binge

Date: July 7, 2009

Written: 3000 words

Deleted: 500 words

Consumed: 1 cup yogurt
32 oz. coffee with soy milk
1/2 cup stale trail mix
handful of chocolate-covered pretzels
hot green tea
1 cup leftover macaroni and cheese
an entire bag of microwave popcorn
tepid green tea

Phoned: Mom, who, upon hearing about my formidable accomplishments today, did not ask about my prospects for making her a grandma.

Done

Not quite ten hours ago, I returned from my twenty-third conference presentation. Moments thereafter I added the line to my CV. It will take me about a week to unpack my luggage, a small, non-hipster messenger-type carry-on.

Call it superstition, but I do not list presentations on my CV until I have actually presented or moderated—I mean, suppose my plane had crashed on the way to Mighty Land Grant University? Yet I have no qualms listing “forthcoming” publications or even invited talks I haven’t yet given. Yeah, call it superstition, because it is not rational at all.

What is rational, however, is my decision to quit presenting at conferences, at least for now. I’ll still accept invitations to chair panels, and I will attend conferences to peddle my book once I shepherd the cursed thing into print. This decision saddens me, because I used to love presenting at conferences.

That love, such as it is, has been supplanted by a vicarious one. So far, I have never failed to be thrilled to meet my grad students as they return from their first conferences, aglow with excitement and ambition. Unshackled from TA duties and my oppressive nitpickery, they are free to parry questions, to hear their own voices in the conversation, to shine as scholars in their own right. (This last, by the way, is why I do not drag students with me to my conferences.) After two years of guiding grad students as they convert conference papers into publications, the thrill shows no sign of abating.

I remember vividly what it was like to experience that thrill firsthand. Eight years ago to the day next week, in fact, I presented my first paper. It was an absurdly specialized international conference. I knew not to run the proposal by my advisor, who—being an introvert who loathes conferences and is unimpressed by them on the curricula vitae of even very novice scholars—was indifferent when I delivered the post mortem.

Still jet lagged when I arrived overseas at this conference, I discovered that the other two members of the panel were senior scholars, whose publications have been the occasion of quite massive deforestation. Our panel was in the first set of sessions. Therefore, the audience was standing room only. Good thing, then, that I was so anxious about sharing my dissertation with people outside my grad department that I learned my paper by heart, so that I could do the police in different voices. I mades their flesh creep. Just kidding. But I did leave with a pocketful of business cards and a much more modest bunch of invitations to publish the paper. (For what it’s worth, I regret having accepted one of them, since, once the dissertation was all said and done, I no longer accept the argument of my first article.)

What was so empowering about that first paper, however, was neither my hammy delivery nor my mad research skillz. Rather, it was dealing with a hostile question.

Just as my copanelists were eminences, so were many members of the audience. One of them, who didn’t wear a nametag because she had arrived late, plus everyone else already knew her on sight, directed the first question to me. It was, basically, “So what?”—only more elegantly phrased and uttered in a quaint accent. She crossed her arms and seemed to scowl. The room fell silent. I smiled, reiterated, and elaborated. She grudgingly assented when I asked if I had answered her question. And then the conversation flew. It was collegial and informative. It was awesome.

I learned the identity of my interrogator over lunch with some senior scholars who had deigned to let me join them. One remarked that it was bad form to treat a student that way, and that he was particularly surprised that my interrogator, whose scholarship analyzes power, would behave in that manner. As it turns out, I knew her scholarship well. Let’s just say that I was immeasurably grateful that its author wasn’t wearing her nametag. Had she done so, I would have ended my career right there.

As it is, we’re all cordial and stuff now. Since we, like, live in different countries, it’s not like we’re BFFs, though we do meet up if we happen to be attending the same conference. I’ve seen my name share bibliographies and syllabi with hers.

Much more importantly, the “hostile” question was a fundamental, if obvious one: out of habit now, I try always to foreground, in both my research and my teaching, what is at stake. Like a religious fanatic, I want to tell you and tell you and tell you.

As I’ve become a faculty member, however, I find myself feeling less and less challenged, and learning less, from not only the papers I’m hearing, but also the responses to my own research. This is a shame, since preparing for and going to conferences takes such time and energy. What’s more, I really believe what I tell students on the rare occasions that I need to miss class to attend a conference: that, like all professors, I am a super-nerd, and that conferences are one of our ways of going to class.

The sorts of questions I get these days are along the lines of asking me for suggestions on what to read, in addition to invitations to publish in non-refereed essay collections that have not found publishers. (These are a special kind of purgatory.) The most common question, however, is “when and where can I get this book?”

That’s an excellent question. Actually, I wish you’d say, “That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. Have you even thought of approaching the question through Q and R?” Then we can have a conversation. Thank you, all the same. But I think I’m done here.

Banned from the blog cocktail:

Bacardi products.

Yesterday I blogged about my hypothetical blog cocktail: a cucumber-and-vodka concoction by Kingsley Amis that I would probably never drink, and a mint- and citrus-enhanced version by Martha Stewart that I’m quite less unlikely to drink. The comments revealed a unanimous preference for gin, a preference I of course share.

I wanted to clarify, however, that while the only gin in my house is a more-or-less full bottle of Rear Admiral Joseph’s from Trader Joe’s, I never drink Bombay Sapphire, despite its charming bottle. (So maybe, for all my pretensions about literary aesthetics, my tastes are really leaden.) I’m also not keen on vodka, so I certainly never got sucked into the Grey Goose hype among people claiming discriminating palates of princess-and-the-pea precision. (Numerous taste tests have revealed that most people cannot pick “their” vodka out of a lineup.)

Both Bombay Sapphire and Grey Goose are owned by Bacardi, which has manufactured for them a heritage that they don’t possess: Bombay Sapphire, for instance, originated in 1987, when Victoria, Empress of India, who figures prominently on the label, had been dead for the better part of a century. The advertising folks at Bacardi are geniuses. I mean, it’s as if they walked straight out of Mad Men, only really from the early 60s. Here’s why:

This is from an ad campaign recently launched in Israel. And there’s much, much more where that came from. Well, actually that’s not true: the promotional site has been pulled down, presumably because of the outcry.

As one might imagine, the campaign is getting lots of coverage. I first read about it on Copyranter, which pictures the other “ugly girlfriends.” There’s also a typically long and pointless thread about it on Jezebel, and Michelle Koenig-Schwartz has done a set of parodies.

Still, I’ve got to wonder: Who drinks Bacardi Breezers? Are they the same people who used to drink Zima? Is this stuff being marketed to women? Really? And why did these women—whom I consider attractive—consent to be pictured thus? Did they consent? If so, whyyyyy?

So many questions. No wonder I need more coffee.

It’s 7 in the morning. Do you know where your Stoli is?

Today is the second anniversary of this blog. Its namesake is perhaps obvious: Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim, arguably the ur campus novel. It is also a novel awash in booze. These two details are not a coincidence. They even coincide in a drink, the recipe for which I am sharing with you today.

As Britain’s poet laureate of liquor, Amis was also the author of On Drink, in which directions for the Lucky Jim are set down. I do not approve of his suggestion to use it as “an excellent love-philtre to press on shy young ladies, if there are any of these left.”

The Lucky Jim (serves six)

• 2/3 bottle of vodka
• shot of vermouth
• 2 cucumbers (leaving skin on one, slice thin)
• ice in a pitcher

Chill six glasses. Combine vodka and vermouth in pitcher. Stir. Slice the unsliced cucumber into 2″ chunks and squeeze through a citrus juicer. Strain and pour into the vodka-vermouth mixture. Stir. Pour into chilled glasses. Garnish with thinly sliced cucumber. Serve.

I have never made this drink, but I imagine it would look like this picture, which originally appeared in Martha Stewart Living and accompanied a recipe for lemongrass chicken. Martha adds mint to her cucumber-and-vodka cocktail. I’m not crazy about mint, but I suppose I could add it to the Lucky Jim by crushing some leaves along with the cucumber chunks. Et voilà: blog cocktail!

If your blog had an official cocktail, what would it be?

Sharper than a serpent’s tooth

Earlier this week, as I was contemplating how to celebrate my freedom from debt and whistling while I worked on my off-contract summer service, I was hit with an emergency: I had to shop for a Father’s Day card.

Ordinarily, I would have sent one from my copious greeting card stash, of which I am perhaps inordinately proud. It contains cards acquired at Pound Stretcher and Everything’s Less than a Pound! shops—as well as the typical museums, the British Library Bookshop, and Oxfam—in the UK, and of course shops big and little all over the US and Canada. Since I travel mostly to places with universities, the typical eclectic indie establishments staffed by hipsters wearing ironic nerd glasses whom (and which) I despise have sold me reams of “edgy” cards. The dazzling bounty of my card stash has recently dispatched cards from India, Israel, Italy, and Ireland, as well as countries that don’t begin with “I.” Despite their plenitude, I never bought indiscriminately: every card in the stash looks special. The stash occupies the largest drawer in my ostentatiously Gallic bombé lingerie chest, which goes with none of my other furniture and contains no lingerie. Have you just gotten divorced? Had your kitty put down? Lost your job? I am so sincerely sorry, but have I got a card for you!

No wonder, then, that I was numb from disbelief—no, horror—as I pawed through my stash, only to come up empty on Father’s Day cards. I already had my quirky yet secretly impersonal gift. The lack of a card to accompany it constituted a crisis.

Preprinted cards for Father’s Day, Mother’s Day, and parental birthdays are extremely problematic for me. Shopping for these is always a depressing ordeal. Like everyone else’s parents, my parents are not normal. Yet the cards that you can nip into the supermarket for describe parental characteristics completely alien to my upbringing.

The most common motif on Father’s Day cards is a tie. My dad is retired, but he never wore a tie to work, where he was reportedly (via an intern at the company whom I met coincidentally years later) an underachiever who somehow lucked into a salary sufficient to support an enormous brood in an expensive part of the country. I’ve never danced with him, and he has never held me aloft on his shoulders, as so many of those cards marked “From Daughter” suggest are common occurrences. My dad has never said a word of encouragement to my face, and he has the unfortunate gift of saying the most devastatingly wrong thing at the worst possible time. Still, he does share with other people’s fathers a penchant telling awful jokes. He neither plays nor watches sports—not even golf—though he has all sorts of mysterious trophies from before he met my mother. Ever since all we kids moved out, my parents have used a service for yard work. My dad isn’t handy. He doesn’t barbecue. He doesn’t read. He has no hobbies.

Shopping for a Mother’s Day card is even more trying. Throughout my formative years, my mother was perpetually pregnant. From what I can gather, she was always seeking the approval of my grandparents, on both sides, through abundant parturition. Though each of her children has undergone therapy, she doesn’t believe in it, but I am convinced that she suffered from decades of postpartum depression. Therefore, so did the rest of us. She went on sadistic rages whose fury could be sated only by humiliating others: to this day I shudder at wedge espadrilles because they were the fashion when my mother was fond of stuffing hers in my mouth for asking too many questions. (None of these questions was “Why are wedge espadrilles so ugly?”) She also regaled us with stories about her former beaux and my dad’s latest failings. Every other week, it seemed, she wanted a divorce; she kept the family together for the sake of the children, she said. For our sake, too, she turned away Child Protective Services, which apparently sent out a case worker based on odd things I was doing in kindergarten. (I have never done anything odd; this case worker must have been sent out in error.) She will be sixty this year, so she came of age at the height of the women’s movement, yet she has never worked outside the house. She is intelligent and has great aspirations. I think she would have been a lot less unhappy had she earned a living of her own.

I love my parents, but I have never liked them. We talk every weekend. Rather, they complain about each other while I listen. The complaints are variations of the ones I heard throughout my childhood. Now, as then, I never take sides. I grade papers or, if I’m feeling ambitious, request interlibrary loans online while “talking” to them. I don’t anticipate my Father’s Day call will be much different.

Over three decades, my parents have changed remarkably little. That troubles me. We are supposed to overcome our anger at people who have outgrown the behaviors that angered us: they are no longer the people who angered us. As far as I can tell, neither of my parents has outgrown their behaviors, but I’ve outgrown my anger, for the most part.

After all, they will not be around forever, and given the stress they have put each other through, they are not in the best health. Imagine if Homer Simpson had wed Amanda Wingfield, the faded, delusional Southern belle from Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie, and you’d have a decent approximation of my parents. As a child, I fantasized about having been switched at birth and being reunited with my kind, clever real biological parents. I long ago abandoned that fantasy. I am every bit the child of the parents who brought me up. As I age, I discover myself embodying their worst qualities: the complacency of my father and the dissatisfaction of my mother make an unfortunate cocktail. Whatever. I’ll get over it.

All this occurred to me as I replenished my card stash. I had to veto the cards on offer at four hipster indie gift shops: they were either too allusive or too risqué. The Father’s Day cards I bought have, as they must, minimal text. They are not blank inside, because then I would have to supply the sentiment. A card meant to be “given” by an infant or a pet will do. The front must not be representational. Something abstract, or maybe a droll yet accessible cartoon: these are my safest bets, as they give me something to work with in a way that seems thoughtful, in an affectionate way.

Such was the case with the card I sent Wednesday—along with my quirky yet secretly impersonal gift—with love.

Guess what?

I’m debt free. This fact quite pleases me. Thought I’d let you know. Toodles!

* * *

Just kidding. What I really want to do is shout from the rooftops that I paid off $47,508.63 in forty-four months, having even overcome an eleventh-hour fit of profligate spending on gifts and coffee in April. In fact, I owed substantially more than the figure above if you count what I paid off from three years’ worth of job searching and moving. I have no idea what that number was, because I paid it off sort of haphazardly, but, as I say, I suspect the figure was substantial.

So what’s stopping me from shouting from the rooftops? Well, for one thing, my roof is all pointy, and I’m not exactly gifted with a fine sense of balance. That and no one who knows me in real life knows how much I owed.

I recall reading that most people are more comfortable talking about their sex lives than about their finances, but I suspect academics might be even more reluctant to talk about money. In all my experience on search committees, I can remember exactly one candidate asking about salary. And while whining about our risible stipends was practically required for admission to candidacy in my grad program, no one I knew ever talked about how much they were in hock, despite the ubiquitous unopened credit card statements on everyone’s kitchen tables. Even—or perhaps especially—now, my colleagues downplay their reasons for teaching summer school: they’re doing so to test-drive a different set of assignments or texts, not because their HELOCs or their kids’ student loans dried up. I suspect this reticence is a vestige of the gentlemen’s-clubby origins of academia. The life of the mind is expensive. Aspirants to it must be to the manner born. As for the manor, well, that goes without saying.

I wish I could say I do not regret having borrowed so much. After all, Sallie Mae enabled me to get a delightfully elite education, and really, had I to do it all over again, I would have chosen the same program. Never mind that Sallie Mae reminds me of a character out of Faulkner, one of those grotesque shrews who wear their hair in iron-gray screws.

Moreover, Sallie and her passive-aggressive little friends Amex and Visa have shaped my career in ways I don’t like to acknowledge. In fact, it is partly because of them that I am at JPU rather than a more glamorous place, which had offered a marginally higher salary but was located in the most expensive city in the country. There I would have had easy access to dazzling library collections. Would my second book have lived up to the hopes I’d had for it? It’s impossible to say, of course, and I’m careful to avoid contemplating other people’s greener grass or what could have been. I chose my own adventure. So what’s next?

As the song goes, I-I-I just wanna celebrate. I could call Dave Ramsey, a financial guru whose acolytes call in to his radio and TV programs and announce their debt freedom over the audio from the climactic scene in Braveheart. Women in particular sound endearingly silly. I disagree with Ramsey’s conflation of credit and debt, though I guess for the weak willed or stupid, it’s just better to remove temptation altogether. I can handle credit. It was financing the Profession that I couldn’t handle. So I won’t be calling Ramsey, but I still need to commemorate the present occasion.

How, oh 2.5 readers, shall I do so? In the years I’ve been paying off Sallie I’ve learned I can get by on very little, and I’ve lost the inclination to acquire stuff. Last summer it occurred to me that, for what I was paying Sallie I could buy two new iBooks, an iPod, and an iPhone. Each month. That was a depressing realization. But, then again, what would I do with them? When my next paycheck deposits, I’ll feel rich. Sure, I’ll be kicking the former payments into retirement and house funds, but meanwhile, I can’t decide what else to do. Perhaps blogging about it will suffice. Or maybe I can finally get that pony.

Repeat after me:

I do not hate this.

I do not hate this.

I do not hate this.

I do not hate this.

I do not HATE this.

I do not HATE THIS.

I do not

I do.

Envy

Once upon a time, I was just beginning my teaching adventures. The course, of course, was composition. For some reason, such as unoriginality, a great clump of us teaching neophytes had assigned an “advertisement analysis.” The students’ task was to find an advertisement, to figure out some question about the appeals made, and then to write an argument resolving the question. The assignment was pretty straightforward, yet still, I felt kind of dirty: I mean, wasn’t this assignment the province of our much-touted School of Business, whose material I was teaching without a license?

So one student brought in an advert for Gucci’s Envy, which he had ripped out of Maxim. This was so long ago that I can’t find an image of the advert on the internets, but basically it pictured a green-tinted bottle of aftershave on a black background, and the caption read, “Be Envied.” My initial response was “What a dumb ad. What’s the point?” But, congratulating myself on my self-restraint, I kept this sentiment to myself and said, “I don’t get it.” The student explained, “It says, ‘Be envied.’” Like, duh. He wound up writing about how everyone wants to “Be envied,” and that Gucci was tapping into some universal longing. The essay contained no evidence from the advert, and was atrociously written besides. If I recall correctly, the dear lad went on to work on Wall Street, mastering the universe.

I still don’t get that ad, or the product it was peddling. If I wanted to smell like a deadly sin, I’d choose wrath. Wouldn’t you like to smell like wrath today? Everybody would make way for you! I suppose people would get out of the way for sloth, and maybe gluttony, but wrath would be toxic—and intoxicating! Wait, where was I?

The point is: for a long time, I never understood envy. I understand bragging: you tell your chair that Hotshit UP has requested full-monty submission of your MS because you want to remind him that you’re not slacking. And I certainly understand feeling inadequate. I also understand Schadenfreude, though I am always puzzled by a friend who reminds me that he tries to find a little Schadenfreude in everything. I even sort of sympathize with my mom, whose sisters are all becoming grandmothers, while I determined in my teens that I would grow up to be a fabulous spinster. What she feels is envy, but that’s not my problem. My lack of concern (and fabulousness), far more than my thanklessness, must be sharper than a serpent’s tooth.

But recently I realized that I’ve been sanctimoniously kidding myself all along. I envy undergrads. There’s a lot they don’t know, a lot that does not encumber them.

The other day I received a note in my campus e-mail. I’ve rearranged its clauses and removed its identifying information, but here’s a fairly accurate representation:

Dear Jane,

I am an English Literature undergraduate at Oxbridge University. I have been reading your book, *Musings on Extreme Obscurity, Only with an Even Longer Title than This*, in preparation for my finals.

I am contacting you to express how deeply helpful, illuminating, and interesting I have found this study to be. I shall be recommending it to the English Faculty for inclusion in the recommended reading list for ‘Obscure Literature in English for Enthusiasts of Obscurity’, as I have found it to be an invaluable insight into what strikes me as a neglected area of critical study.

I hope your work receives the recognition it deserves.

Best regards,
Nigel Smith-Smithers

Since my book’s publication a couple of years ago, I’ve had only a trickle of correspondence about it—in addition, of course, to the royalties statements for $0.00, the first of which I framed. Until now, most of the correspondence I have received has been from faculty, along with a couple of grad students, all of them with specific questions regarding their own research. Self-serving questions make the global academic community so cozy, no?

What I find striking about young Nigel’s message is its self-assurance. Perhaps his message exemplifies the snowflaky arrogance of a generation attached to its I-Pods, on which it broadcasts itself via YouTube. Notice how the subject of each of his sentences is “I.” Not only does he address me as an equal (if not less), but clearly he’s also comfortable making “recommend[ations]” to his professors.

It’s been a long time since I’ve felt I had the authority to decide what is “invaluable” and “deserves recognition.” If I ever had this kind of self-assurance, I had lost it by the time I began corresponding with authors of books that influenced me. Nigel asks no questions, but I’ll reply by inviting him to send along any he might have. Really, though, I do have some unbidden advice: hold on to your self-assurance, even if it makes people think you’re just an arrogant fuck. Don’t ever change, Sunshine.

Eeeeeeeuuuuuwww!

Like virtually all of my colleagues, I have tried to personalize my Soviet-issue office. This task is no small one, when you consider that the furniture is Soviet-issue, too. Well, no, I exaggerate: it came right out of Dilbert. The environs are an ironic challenge for humanists, who like to think of ourselves as being, to some degree, aesthetes.

So it is a test of the imagination to mitigate the severe uniformity of the decor. Maybe I’ve succeeded. Maybe not. I’ve assembled stuff from my travels into complementary shadow boxes and collages. I’ve acquired a squashy chair. I keep chocolate in a colorful bowl. Even my Kleenex (the real thing, even in these grim times—heh) box coordinates with my decor. Wow, how special am I?

This effort was made, it goes without saying, on behalf of my students. Less-ugly surroundings also make being there for sixteen hours on some days considerably more tolerable. I’m not surprised, therefore, that the overnight cleaning staff use my office. How do I know? The furniture is shifted around a bit. Thanks to my never-to-be-diagnosed OCD, I notice such things right away.

But this morning, I am appalled. In my wastebasket, there’s a huge pile of Kleenex (the stuff I buy for students and hope I don’t have to use)—damp—an empty Aquafina bottle, and. . .

a used Q-Tip. Crusty. Discolored. Definitely used.

Eeeeeeeuuuuuwww!

Here I must note that, over the summer, maintenance never enter our offices even to empty the wastebaskets. Hell, regardless of the season, my office has been vacuumed exactly once in the three years I’ve been here. I do not begrudge anyone the use of my office—it’s not even my property—but I am extremely squicked out by the prospect of bodily fluids mouldering away in my wastebasket all summer and diffusing throughout my 8′ X 8′ patch of purgatory.

Now I notice grime on my office computer’s mouse, which I always wipe down. When I fill in a form to register for a hotel room at an upcoming conference, I notice that the ZIP and phone number that autofill volunteers are not mine. I don’t conduct personal business from my office, and I would hate to think that I’m taking such precautions only to be busted for the personal business someone else is conducting from my office.

I have put my office computer on password protection, but I haven’t figured out what to do with the wastebasket. I don’t want to get anyone in trouble, and I’m more than a little uncomfortable with the class implications of my revulsion. For all I know, whoever has been borrowing my office at night is a child, drowsily tagging along with a parent who works lousy hours for crappy pay at the pleasure of a capricious employer.

But these reactions are balanced by utter bewilderment: I mean, who the hell carries Q-Tips with them?

Note to self

Next year, carry—don’t wear—your regalia to your soon-to-be-former students’ commencement ceremony.

Why? Well, when I walk the few blocks between my office, where I keep my regalia, to the jumbotron-fitted site of JPU’s festivities, I am inevitably congratulated by a dozen or so misty-eyed parents and assorted other well-wishing fans of pomp and circumstance. Never mind that my regalia look nothing like JPU’s (my Ph.D.-granting institution’s colors are even more unfortunate); only a highly initiated nerd can distinguish those details, anyway.

I used to get flustered and stammer—in the way Hugh Grant was typecast until he got busted with a prostitute—some explanation about how I’m actually faculty, and actually I’m on my way to celebrate my students. Actually, um, the congratulations belong to them, actually. . .

But this morning, I accepted the congratulations. I am as proud of my students as their parents are.

Besides, before long, I will look old enough that no one will offer congratulations anymore. That shift will be sudden. At the rate I am aging at this job, the change may well occur next year. And then it won’t make any difference whether I wear or carry my regalia. Congratulations to me, then.