Butterflies

As if in response to our incoming president’s call to commemorate MLK Day through service, I spent the evening performing an act of departmental service that doesn’t even count as service. That’s right: as much as I would have liked to stay home under a pile of woolly sweaters and eiderdown, sipping green tea, prepping for the class I didn’t cancel, and grazing on bread I baked this morning and slathered with butter made by agitating some fresh cream (wow, I have become quite the hippie off the grid these days), I hosted a job candidate for dinner.

Note that I began with “as if”: indeed, the sadistic routine of the academic job search has no place in the same breath as Dr. King’s memory. Also, I’ve been on the hook for this dinner for over a week now, so it wasn’t prompted by any holiday exhortation to Americans’ better instincts. So my “as if” was nothing but a cheap rhetorical flourish. Sorry.

Over trendily deconstructed peasant food, the candidate was dazzling and hopeful, as job candidates must be, graciously parrying my apology for the lateness of both the flight and the meal on a snowy holiday evening. If the candidate felt butterflies, I did not detect them. Between our conversation and my futile attempt to catch up on blogs, I am acutely reminded of why I stayed away from the market last fall. Sisyphus’s candid, eloquent chronicle of her job search, for example, leaves me speechless (as well as feeling like a shit for entering whatever conversation there is so belatedly). In the current economic climate, there are even fewer jobs, and those who are hiring probably share my department’s obsession with the sure thing, the candidate more than certain to attain tenure: either people with tenure-track jobs and reams of publications or ABDs with scheduled defense dates, solemn oaths from multiple rockstar committee members, and reams of publications. In uncertain times, a failed tenure bid could mean the loss of a faculty line. The same would result from departures for other reasons.

For years now, I have been contemplating one of those departures. My job is pleasant, but I do have serious reservations, about which I will remain cryptic. And then the grass is always greener. In retrospect I can congratulate myself for my loyalty and restraint inertia, since the searches for five of the eight jobs I would have considered have been suspended. Back in September, however, I was disgusted with myself. Is this all I am going to become? Of course, we are not our jobs, but, as the old saw goes, academia is like the clergy and the military in that its constituents are socialized not to regard their jobs as merely jobs. Hence the special, vague connotations we ascribe to that most pretentious of phrases in the language, “My Work.”

From the beginning, this work is romanticized in a way that makes it more difficult than ever necessary, as I remember all too clearly. After being admitted to candidacy, I organized a dissertation-writing support group, which was only fitfully supportive. Tipsy on what was probably Lindemans cabernet, I joked that we dissertators were all grubby, fuzzy caterpillars that would soon be transformed into butterflies. We all snorted simultaneously, spewing cheap cabernet from our noses, like an overeducated fountain with many fonts.

But for a while thereafter, every occasion occasioned a quasi-ironic gift of the Dollar Store’s best Whatever that happened to be emblazoned with a butterfly motif. For birthdays, Hanukkah, Valentine’s Day, and National Dental Hygiene Month, we exchanged butterfly toothbrush cases, butterfly mugs, butterfly scrunchies. I shuddered to think of the Chinese children imprisoned in factories, churning out these trinkets with their nimble little hands. Their handiwork endures in the soapstone candle holder from which a l’Occitane rose-scented candle is making this room smell pleasant. (Seriously, l’Occitane must scent their stuff with the olfactory equivalent of crack.) As for the candle holder, it emits a faint light from a butterfly and the word “believe” cut out of it. And yes, I have been given a wodge of faux beach glass—it’s etched with “hope,” which is not all that different from “believe”—that would look pretty in the dim, credulous candlelight.

Apparently, only half of us believed enough. As for the others, most have left the profession, either quitting the program or finishing and deciding that academia wasn’t for them. (A colleague in another department and I recently joked that these people were the smart ones, but we weren’t really joking.) The believers who haven’t finished are seeing many of their searches canceled and marching forth to campus interviews with the remaining schools. The other believers are, like my dining companion last evening (and, not secretly enough, me), looking to move, to keep alive the hope that This is Not All There Is, or perhaps to negotiate a higher salary. I am nervous for all of them. All of us. The butterflies—they make me anxious.

WWJD?

That is: What will Jane do? C’mon, you didn’t think I was really asking WWJD! I’m far from a New Testament scholar, but I’m pretty sure Jesus never got himself into such a ridiculous and trivial, yet nerve-wracking, predicament.

So I’ve been congratulating myself for not having been conscripted onto my department’s interview committee at MLA, at the same time that I’ve been second-guessing myself for not having applied for any jobs. Never mind that the openings in my fields are geographically undesirable (to me) and/or carry higher teaching loads at probably lower salaries than the job I have. I’m also not on a panel this year, because I entrusted our proposal to someone who put together something too indescribably diffuse and weird even for MLA: never send a girl to do a woman’s job.

But suddenly I find that my holiday plans are taking me to Chicago, which is hosting that orgy of evil mojo this year, as always during 27-30 December. I’ve always wondered why celebrants of Kwanzaa don’t put up any protest, but that’s just me.

As I’ve described on this blog, I spent the summer drafting (very draftily) a book that moors a trendy topic to a phenomenon with enduring, even “universal,” interest. In fact, I began this blog to chronicle my progress. (Since I can’t really talk about my scholarship without revealing my real-life identity, we know how that plan went.) Anyhow, the proposal has interested editors at two well-regarded university presses. Relax: they know about each other. More recently, however, my informal readers have asked why I’m not hitting up a hotshit press like Oxbridge that would make my dean wet himself. Apparently it wasn’t sufficient explanation that I published my first book with a hotshit press that churns out books like sausages, and that the process made me feel kind of like hot shit, only much colder.

So, should I go to MLA after all—that is, go through the rigmarole of registering and setting up coffee talks with hotshit editors who will be constantly looking over my shoulder for someone more eminent to walk into the room? If I’m going to have to reorient my argument as I revise, it makes sense to get more editorial opinions, right? Yeah, and as if this plan weren’t unreasonable enough, I’m likely to run into at least one of my colleagues there in the book exhibit, if not the bar. While most of them would be supportive of my moving “up,” to others my presence at MLA would be suspicious. Were I to explain that I was there just to chat up editors, I’d run the risk of being pressed into service interviewing.

And all because I was innocently musing about how I’ve wanted to eat a rice-paper menu from Moto, after lunching on noodles and egg custard tarts in Chinatown, and then gazing at the city in a huge mirrored bean, I may have made my relatively relaxing and fun holiday into something less so. Moto, noodles, a big bean: to be honest, I think I was just hungry. Told you Jesus would never have gotten into such a stupid situation that, I suspect, is all too common among our sort. So I guess the lesson is: never make holiday plans on an empty stomach.

Mental health days, false consciousness, and something approximating a recipe

Although I have grading to do and a talk to prepare for, I spent pretty much all day Friday in my beautiful, comfortable bed, where I read a couple of novels while sipping homemade chai from an enormous, insulated carafe.

Sure, one of the novels was one I’m trying to shoehorn into one of my chapters, while the other was one that I’d assigned to my grad seminar. I read both with pencil in hand and notepad on my belly, commenting on comments I wrote in the margins the previous times I’d read them. Good grief, I teach some fucked-up shit—though, if you stop and think about it, it’s all fucked-up shit. Work though it is, I couldn’t help thinking what a luxury it is to have a teaching schedule that allows me to decompress in this way.

Until now, I’ve taught MWF all my professorial life. In those three years, I’ve canceled class only once, and that was during my last year as a VAP. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was under considerable stress between on-campus interviews. With my packed overnight bag and briefcase (which contained color-coded folders for annotated copies of articles by people I might be meeting, extra copies of my CV, syllabi, my job talk, handouts for my job talk, and so on) stowed in my office, I would teach my classes. Afterwards, an indulgent colleague would be waiting, ready to whisk me off to the airport. Because my classes were back-to-back in the morning, I was able to make the informal, “non-interview” dinner interviews with each of my prospective employers. On Tuesday or Thursday I’d run the gauntlets of deans, lunches, library tours, meetings with students and/or search committees, teaching demos, and job talks; then I’d take the last flight back to VAP city, where I would arrive hours before the next morning’s classes, ready enough to teach, with no one the wiser. I repeated this routine four times, and, though I say so myself, I got pretty good at it.

The day I canceled classes, I was so exhausted and anxious that I was hyperventilating and nauseated to the point of dizziness. Meanwhile, all the time I’d been spending in airports meant I had papers to hand back: these I put in separate interoffice-mail envelopes to appease the powers of FERPA and left in a crate outside my office. Then I staggered home at the crack of dawn and sent e-mails to my students, cryptically explaining my condition, apologizing for the inconvenience (which of course they thought it was), and directing them to their papers. The moment I hit “send,” I suddenly felt lighter and calmer. I took a nap. Then I baked cupcakes and read my e-mail, which contained a few messages from students who hoped I was feeling better. The next time my classes met, I learned the early one had met before most of the students had checked their e-mail, so they held a discussion anyway. “That reading was hella hard, Professor,” they reported. I commended them on what they puzzled out, marched them through the reading, and fed them cupcakes. All was right with the world, but I felt guilty, having played hooky.

So that was my first mental health day. It wasn’t the last, but then there haven’t been many.

As I said, I’ve never canceled classes at JPU, though I’ve come close. Only recently have I learned that my first schedule here was a customary “hazing” schedule, which had me criss-crossing campus from discussion to lecture to discussion, meeting over 200 students from morning to afternoon, with all new preps, MWF. WTF. And that was just the teaching portion of the show. Still, I didn’t want anyone to think I couldn’t handle it, because what anyone thinks matters much more on the tenure track than in a temporary appointment, so I soldiered on.

This term, I guess I’ve earned my MW schedule. Like my fellow junior colleagues, though, I’m in the office MTWRF and one or the other of the S’s. Not going in on Friday, I felt decadent but not guilty. Yet I have “life” things (such as renewing my passport, seeking an adjustment to my water bill, salving my mange, convincing the IRS that I’ve lived in a different state every year for four years because I’m an academic and not because I’m fleeing authorities, and so on) in addition to the “work” things demanding my attention. Still, I didn’t leave the house; I seldom even left bed. But I was productive, and I was grateful to have so many days “off” from which I could snatch a mental health day or two. Why throw it all away by going on the market, where I would risk repeating the panic that had triggered my first mental health day?

Momentarily forgetting how overwhelmed I was, I felt lucky. If it wasn’t false consciousness talking, then it must have been the chai. It is like soma, of which a gramme is better than a damn.

To make some, bring two quarts of water to boil with a teaspoon of peppercorns, a teaspoon of cardamom pods, a half teaspoon of cloves, a 1.5″ knob of peeled and sliced ginger, and two sticks of cinnamon. Add a half cup black tea leaves (I used Darjeeling) and simmer for five minutes, followed by milk until the mixture looks, uh, like chai. Simmer some more. Sweeten the lot with sugar. As so often the case in this life, strain first, and only then enjoy.

Good girl.

So not Schadenfreude

In the course of a modern, nomadic academic career, one accumulates a set of far-flung, long-distance friends who used to be colleagues. Either that or I’m a special kind of loser who, in person but not via telephone or e-mail, has been alienating people at one non-tenure-track appointment after another. OK, just humor me.

When I’m catching up with those who still work for my former employers, the gossip tends to stream in one direction. I know whom and what they’re talking about, but JPU and la dolce vita here in Funky City are pitifully unworthy of gossip, so I talk about me me me. It’s a fair exchange. And by the way, we look just like the pictures above, even the men, except we’re more scantily clad and surrounded by elegant, book-lined walls. What? You say academia didn’t make you glamorous?

Anyway, yesterday I was delighted to get a call from a tenured buddy at a SLAC where I used to work. (Its administrators insistently compared it to Williams, so I’ll call it Notwilliams.) At Notwilliams, smug and anxious self-aggrandizement goes on as usual. Those who drank the Kool Aid are still under its influence. The rest are on the market, it seems. Same old same old. But one item of gossip has me speechless, so I’ll just have to blog about it—in silence, of course.

When I arrived at Notwilliams as a Visiting Assistant Professor with my brand-new Ph.D., one of the first people to welcome me was another VAP who had been hired as a sabbatical replacement two years earlier, but who was so beloved among the students and so useful to the department as to be retained for a third year. This colleague has been renewed every year since—until now.

Last fall, Notwilliams ran a tenure-track search in this person’s research area, but wound up hiring someone more exotic, with a degree from a much posher place and a long list of publications (most of which I find dodgy, but no one asked me). The new hire’s profile is just so much fancier. Printed up in Notwilliams’s spiffy catalogue, it will impress the wallets off the parents ponying up $45,000 per year to keep Snotleigh IV in beer. Moreover, the dizzying distinctions on the new hire’s CV will surely propel Notwilliams to greatness, maybe (gasp!) even a top ranking in U.S. News. Real Williams, watch out!

After five years of being so visible, so dependable as a VAP, my former colleague was kicked to the curb, to start over as a VAP at a much larger, substantially different kind of school. Though we socialized pretty often, I never knew this colleague at all well, but I did pick up on the exhaustion of always performing the role of Colleague You Want to Keep Around.

I could have been projecting, since Notwilliams was the most difficult place I have ever worked. I’m sure my problems had much to do with adjusting to faculty life and managing my first full-time appointment. Then there was also the precariousness of “visiting,” which produced no small amount of anxiety. However, I found the (justified) expectation among the students that faculty were there for constant hand-holding to be the most trying part of the job by far.

Could the demands of Notwilliams have accounted for my rejected former colleague’s modest publication record, irreparably damaging this person as goods in the academic marketplace? It’s impossible to say. Having served on search committees, I would have found this person’s CV an easy call: someone with a Ph.D. dated 2002, one article in a decent but niche journal, and one short online publication is far behind schedule for tenure and would pose too great a risk for us. Next!

Thing is, when I was not chosen for version 2.0 of “my” job at Notwilliams almost three years ago, well, that sucked. The interviews and the hire-me! collegiality they necessitated absorbed a disproportionate amount of time and energy. And to this day I’m not even certain they were not courtesy interviews. It was somewhat comforting that I started with a large cohort of VAPs, almost all of whom were jettisoned after one year, some not even interviewed for the longer-term appointments for which they had applied. We are scattered all over the place now, with disturbingly few on the tenure track.

For us, however, the sting was quick. We’d been there only a year. Actually, by the time our betters were hired, we’d been there only a little more than a semester. If we felt like Dead Professors Walking, we also commiserated and found strength in the cliché that success is the best revenge. I want to call my former colleague and say what is in this rambling post, to say, “There, there, everything will be alright.” But if this person told me to fuck off, I’d understand. Rejection after such a long time—after such devotion—must feel like a tenure denial or a divorce from someone who refuses to work things out and is seeing someone else, anyway. No, I don’t know what I’m talking about. But I do know it isn’t Schadenfreude: oh, there is plenty of Schaden, but the Freude? I’m still working on that.

A sign! A sign!

Should I stay, or should I (attempt to) go now? If I go there would be trouble, but if I stay it could be double. The Job Information List continues to offer little to tempt me, but it’s still just so hard to decide. Like the Puritans, I’ve been taking signs for wonders, and let me tell you: the allegorical life ain’t easy.

The latest of these wondrous signs struck me as I was counseling a student who, despite my hellfire-and-brimstone admonitions, insists on soldiering on to a Ph.D.

Now, when I applied to grad school, the web was in its infancy, and English departments congratulated themselves for being cutting edge if they had a departmental page that provided little more than faculty contact information. (I remember many animated GIFs and liberal use of the <flash> tag: nobody said that people who care about the beauty of language necessarily develop a sense of visual decorum.) The practice back then was to request, via letter or postcard, information packets from the departments that interested you, and the Peterson’s Guide to Graduate and Professional Study was the one-stop shop for basic information, including contacts. Going on my third year working for The Man, I remember leaving the office after 6 each evening for the better part of a week and heading for the reference section of my public library, where I would study Peterson’s until the library closed. I also photocopied entire entries—including not just information on degree programs and fellowship support, but also random stuff like which programs’ students were overwhelmingly female. I was especially captivated by where the faculty did their Ph.D.’s. It’s important to know what your pedigree will be, after all.

Paging through Peterson’s a decade later, I wonder if my whole career isn’t some ramshackle shack shacked up on a pile of nuclear waste dissolving and disintegrating from under it. OK, that’s hyperbolic. But if I got all my initial information from Peterson’s, I should hope that it used to be much more attentively put together than it seems to be now. You’d think they could at least hire someone to copy and paste info from departmental websites, but no. The entry for my department randomly lists adjuncts and emeriti. It gives degree dates for half the senior faculty and most of the adjuncts, for some of whom only a B.A. is listed, and who of course would not be teaching grad students, anyway. I’ve never met nine of the people listed. On the other hand, a newly wed colleague is listed under her new name. The colleague who was hired along with me is also listed, as is our newest colleague, in addition to someone who was denied tenure three years ago.

I, however, am not listed.

And if I’m not here, then there can’t be any trouble (let alone its double) with me leaving, can there? It’s a sign, a sign, I tell you!

Mystery!

For the past month or so, something strange has been happening to my department’s communal copy of the Chronicle of Higher Education!

By the time I’ve gotten to it, its job adverts have gone missing! Is someone trying to prevent the rest of us from finding out that there are other jobs out there? (That’s censorship!) Or is someone looking to jump ship and hoarding the ads? (Hey, no fair!) Is this “someone” the student worker who distributes the mail? (Unlikely!) Or is “someone” our department chair, who only seems ‘gruntled? (Shudder!) It could be anyone! The possibilities are endless!

And here I was, thinking this place wasn’t thrilling! Heh.

Well, now that was easy

The academic job season seems to bring out my most rational self. Last week I posted about how, when I was on the market, I used to consult my Magic 8-Ball for news on my applications. Yesterday I posted about my ambivalence about going back on the job market. Now, however, after reading my horoscope, I think I have my answer:

Things always get a bit intense around this time of year. It is something to do with the approaching equinox. Your mood begins to alter and your mind gets made up. Suddenly you feel ready to fix whatever you have been previously putting up with patiently. You are no longer willing to be backed into a corner or trapped by awkward circumstances. You may not make much of a fuss, but in your own sweet way you start to move the goalposts and rewrite the rulebooks. Some years you make a few small adjustments. Other years you reach life-changing choices. This year, you are being brave. You will not regret this.

Uh, OK. This “forecast” is probably the written equivalent of an ink blot. Yesterday I guess I whined about what I “have been previously putting up with patiently.” And the people who go on about early tenure and whether I’m a happy camper provoke my babbling by literally “back[ing] me into a corner.” And this is a year for not “a few small adjustments” but “life-changing choices.” What does it all mean? Is it really “being brave” to sniff around on the sly for greener pastures? ‘Cos there’s no way to do this the right way—that is, with a recommendation from my chair, who, if I cross his consciousness at all, probably thinks I’m perfectly content here, and who would be disappointed and inconvenienced at best at my departure. I’m not even certain my line would be kept open. Yet I “will not regret this,” whatever the antecedent of “this” really is.

But my horoscope does seem certain. Simply amazing, isn’t it? I don’t know why I don’t consult it more often.

Listless about the list

So the online MLA Job Information List went live on Friday. I pictured millions of job seekers with their browsers pointed to ade.org/jil at the stroke of midnight and hitting “refresh” every other second or so. Stay on the line. Your call will be answered in the order in which it was received.

Out of something somewhat more deliberate than habit, I still check the job ads. A wise colleague told me—and continues to tell me—that there’s always a better job. Meanwhile, I’m being pressured to go up for tenure early. Even I am surprised by the alacrity with which I change the subject, citing excuses that are diplomatic but don’t make much sense even to me. When I shepherd visiting writers and scholars around campus, they ask me if I’m happy here, and all my charming, knowledgeable, witty banter suddenly gives way to stuttered, rambling platitudes.

OK, I’m not in my dream job, but then again I am feeling more comfortable here all the time. Which is not the same thing as being happy and feeling fulfilled, though I’m not unhappy, either. JPU could do a lot of things better. Boy howdy could it.

At this time last year I was desperate to move, but I had been appointed to a search committee (yes, in my first year), so interviewing would have been tricky had I been that fortunate. And I probably wouldn’t have been, because search committees are understandably wary of people who want to jump ship that quickly, not least because of the effort that goes into a search. Thinking back to reading files in the office after midnight during the busy last weeks of classes last year, I would seriously consider breaking my new colleague’s kneecaps if I learned there was any JPU-leaving hanky-panky afoot this year. So far, Professor X seems to be a happy, productive colleague, whom I and my more senior colleagues have campaigned to protect from lecture classes and onerous service. And then also, it’s nice to have one’s kneecaps intact.

For various reasons, my knees are deteriorating, and I’ve been treated since my arrival like a more senior person. Could it be the senior knees? Last year I taught more students and served on more committees than anyone else I keep in touch with from grad school. My research has suffered, and the short cuts I take make me feel like a slacker and a fraud. Still, I publish at a decent clip, so I’ll never persuade the powers-that-be that I’m not handling the workload that well.

So why does searching the job list seem so tedious to me? My dream schools are not hiring in my areas, and I’m meh about the places that are. It’s early yet, but there seem to be a healthy number of jobs (particularly for people who do Renaissance, Shakespeare, eighteenth-century British, and multiethnic American lit), of which I’ve chosen only eight to look at further. All of them carry a maximum teaching load of 2/2 and are located in places I’d like to live. Yet I can’t remember a single one of them.

I’m reminded of an episode in Jerzy Kosinski’s macabre The Painted Bird, in which a man domesticates rabbits by repeatedly forcing a tarp over them. It’s been awhile, so if I remember correctly, they’re terrified and struggle to get out from under the tarp, but before long, they seek the tarp themselves. I wonder if I haven’t just been domesticated.

Better not tell you now

The Ivory Towered ghetto of the blogosphere is beginning to ready itself for the job season. Unlike normal people, we can apply for jobs only in the fall. Winter and spring are the seasons for waiting. That and rejection. If you don’t have anything lined up by the end of March, well, then April really can be the cruellest month. They’re all pretty cruel, though.

When I was on the market, did I seek the advice of my advisors and employed friends, with all their smarts and experience? Nah! I had a much more reliable—not to mention completely confidential—guide to the vagaries of the academic job search. It was not a book or a web site, but my Magic 8-Ball.

It knows everything!

Should I send this writing sample? Concentrate and ask again

Or that one? Signs point to yes

You get the idea. I used to keep my Magic 8-Ball on my desk, so that it would always be handy for important consultations. It saw its heaviest use during the interview season, which for my field begins in December and, for most tenure-track jobs, ends in February. (My previous jobs were not tenure track, and it was not until well into May that I received either offer.) Without a doubt, the question I most frequently asked it was: “Will I have any calls or e-mails for job interviews today?” Without a doubt, the answer I found most reassuring was “Without a doubt.” In fact, I recall one morning when I was about to leave for classes after the Magic 8-Ball yielded just this prediction, so I nestled it in a basket of fruit with the prediction facing up, greeting me “Without a doubt.”

I imagined that, if my house had gotten broken into, the burglar would spot the Magic 8-Ball among the apples and scurry out, fearful the place was inhabited by a crazy person.

Now, apart from thus waiting out the information drought of the job search, I’ve never been superstitious. (Even the parodic numerology at left is just my attempt at a cheeky play on my clever pseudonym: I am so witty, yes?) And given the all-consuming, soul-crushing disappointment always hovering over my job-seeking self, it was a tremendous comfort to be able to hold onto something—anything—that asserted such confidence. When I was a VAP, I socialized with what I now realize were enormous packs of junior faculty, most also in non-tenure-track appointments, who were therefore also seeking “real” jobs. We encouraged each other as well as we could, but I could always detect doubt in them, an unease that ranged from their own self-doubt to Schadenfreude. Hence the Magic 8-Ball.

Out of habit, I still occasionally check the job lists. Nothing has tempted me thus far. But the MLA job list comes out in a week, and, for all I know, my doubts about JPU may turn out to be mutual. As a wise former colleague once said, “It’s good to have a job, but there’s always a better one.”

So I ask the Magic 8-Ball, should I. . . well, you know?

Spooky, eh?

Foucault’s bundt pan, or, the logic of selling out

Like millions of academics around the world, I am scrambling to publish at least one Least Publishable Unit by summer’s end. Like most humanist academics, I’m also trying to make headway on something less Least—namely, a book manuscript.

Though I say so myself, the project I’m working on has decent prospects as a (sotto voce here) trade book. The topic is crazy accessible, the organization downright gimmicky, with primary texts ranging from contemporary fiction and film to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries’ equivalents of pop culture artifacts. When I started working on this project in grad school, one of my buds, who’s now professorin’ in the Rust Belt, declared it “the book that will get you tenure and sell at Barnes and Noble.”

I like to think so, but as I draft it, I must acknowledge that such a result is (like, duh) easier said than done. To play it safe, tenure-wise, I’m targeting university presses exclusively. The editors I’ve chatted up have been superbly encouraging—I puffy-heart them all—and at least one has remarked on the book’s “crossover” potential. I’m not naïve enough to be shocked that university presses are businesses that would welcome a title that sold more than few hundred copies, to people who aren’t buying on behalf of a library, but I can’t help being concerned about the potential consequences of a trade book on my immediate career.

I’m pretty certain that I would regret not pursuing this project to its gaudiest, Oprahfied (well, maybe not) potential. My next project, which I’ve been inflicting on the conference circuit, might also appeal to a wide readership, but, by comparison with the current project, is decidedly academic. And then there’s the matter of my writing style. Academese has gotten so entrenched in it that I am no longer capable of writing accessibly. For me, at any rate, the academic/trade binary is an either/or, not a both/and.

Now, no more than five people will ever read my first book, the one that my dissertation became, so I guess it has the proper sort of cultural capital. But the fact remains, I don’t have tenure, and it would be stooopid hubris to try to go up early. In any case, I do not want my chances jeopardized by even the perception of frivolity. At the moment, Jumbo Public University seems happy enough with me. The powers that be might even welcome publicity from a book that sold at Barnes and Noble. Anything to raise the school’s profile. But it’s always possible that they could tire of me and use the lite book to justify 86-ing me. Likewise, while I appreciate (and am often humbled by) the lengths to which JPU has gone in effort to do well by me, and I can imagine spending the rest of my career here, I do have a wandering eye, of which I’m not altogether guilty. If something better comes along, how portable is a trade-y book?

And in the spirit of portability, I should get ready for a day at the coffee shop, where I will grind this movie and that novel through some Foucault. Shouldn’t be too hard, since I’m likely to be surrounded by donuts, bagels, maybe even a bundt cake. Good thing the coffee shop itself doesn’t resemble a panopticon, unlike the tenure and promotion system.