to love that well which thou must leave ere long

"Have I told you this before?"

"No, we only met about half an hour ago."

"So little time to pass?" said Merlyn, and a big tear ran down to the end of his nose.

-- T. H. White

So it is April again. A chillier sort of April than the ones they have at home, with barer trees, but recognizably spring.

Three weeks of classes left. Two and a half, actually, since I have another campus interview coming up (apparently the phone interview on Tuesday did not go as badly as I thought it did), but at this point I have had SO many unsuccessful campus interviews that I'm not holding out a lot of hope. There is still a possibility of good news from the Last Chance Saloon (now the Second-Last-Chance Saloon, I guess), or I might be able to score a VAP or lecturer position somewhere. I was, after all, in exactly the same position this time last year. Late-season miracles seem to be my specialty.

If not -- well, I have a tentative offer of a summer adjunct position back in Parental City; the pay is peanuts, but the class sounds interesting, and it will, at least, delay my unceremonious exit from the profession by a couple of months. This is starting to seem like a good enough reason to take it.

For some reason, all the uncertainty seems to remind me, all too sharply, of how many things I love and value about this profession. I remember feeling this way last year, as well. I ought to know better. I know by now that the system is badly screwed up, that it's a lot of work for little reward, and that the compulsion that keeps desperate jobseekers checking the MLA list is not so very different from a gambling addiction. I know, also, that I'm not a particularly brilliant or inspiring teacher, although I hope I'm at least competent, and I have never cherished the illusion that anyone is interested in my scholarship except myself (and that's on a good day).

But, but, but. An uncertain and precarious future sharpens your focus. You notice the here and now, even in April (and I am used to April being a blur of paperwork and imperatives). Three students from the Honors seminar talking excitedly about their final project. Clusters of violets along the paths, and mornings that begin late enough to notice them. Showing Branagh's rendition of the St. Crispin's Day speech to students who have never seen it. If I never work in academia again, I want to remember these things.

If I never work in academia again, I'll be glad I had them.

post o' random opinions

1) Two-hour freshman comp classes are the worst idea ever. I completely suck at teaching them, but even if I didn't, they would still be a lousy idea. I don't think I have an attention span that long, at least not for freshman comp.

2) Phone interviews after four hours of teaching two-hour freshman comp classes are also a bad idea. And I really wanted that job, too. :(

3) It is April. There should be leaves on the trees already. I COMMAND YOU TO LEAF, DAMMIT.

4) Going to see a Shakespeare play with your students = awesome. Traveling six hours to see a Shakespeare play and assorted other Big City Things with your students = completely exhausting. Grading papers while away for the weekend with your students = SO not happening.

5) It is a really, really good thing that I can teach Henry V from memory. It is also good that I have lots of beer in the house. I think I may start drinking before class by the end of this week. I wish you could get Duck-Rabbit beer in this part of the country, because that would be completely appropriate.

6) If you type "appropirate" by mistake, you have probably already had too much to drink. And an unhealthy fixation on pirates in Renaissance drama.

7) If a student refers to a character named "Mistress Dollhouse" in the proposal for the final Shakespeare paper, or proposes to compare Shakespeare to soap operas, this cannot end well.

Cross-dressing! Pirates! Double bed-trick!

Conference paper went over decently well, I think. I must admit that at least three minutes of it were devoted to explaining the exceedingly complicated plot of The Fair Maid of the West, and I didn't even get to the part about castration (that will be my next conference paper, I think). But the rest of it had some semblance of an argument, and I met some Other People Who Are Excited About Heywood, which is such a rare experience that it makes me very happy indeed.

It's sort of weird being at a conference where I know next to nobody, and of the handful of names I do recognize, most of them are members of search committees that have rejected me, or are about to do so. (I haven't gotten the official word from my most recent campus visit, but the SC member who's here didn't even look me in the eye when I passed him, which is damning.) One of my office-mates from grad school is presenting tomorrow, and I'm going to her panel session if I can get up early enough, but I have yet to run into her.

I seem to have landed a nearly-impossible assignment for the teaching demo at Last Chance Saloon College (it is something highly specific, involving an author and a historical event that are way outside of my field, AND the instructions were incredibly confusing). Ugh. Since I seem to strike out even with schools that request teaching demos on topics that are right up my alley, I'm not holding out much hope for this one. (Also, why -- WHY -- does every school request something completely DIFFERENT for the demo class? Wouldn't it be great if the MLA could mandate that all teaching demos be, say, forty-five minutes long and on a short story, poem, or scene from a play of the candidate's choice?)

department of amusingly specific calls for papers

From the UPenn list:

I'm seeking contributors for a GEMCS 2008 panel on gluttony (broadly defined).

This could include gluttony in the morality tradition, gluttony as a character attribute in drama or prose, gluttony as a theological concept, gluttony in nondramatic art, or gluttony in any other situation your imagination, material, and relevance will allow, e.g. gluttony in the surprisingly numerous broadsheet ballads about providentially significant monstrous London swine, 1550-1640.

Clearly, I need to read some of these ballads. (I wonder if monstrous swine are only providentially significant if they are in London? Are there ballads about, say, providentially significant monstrous Norwich swine?)

on going home (maybe)

This was a good day. We had a rockin' discussion in the Shakespeare class, all about Falstaff's speech on honor, and whether there's ANY way to see the king's actions as honorable, and the implications of Hal's "if a lie may do thee grace" line, and whether Hal actually likes Falstaff. And a few people who haven't spoken all semester piped up. And I had a phone interview that led to an almost immediate invite for a campus interview, at a place I'll call Last Chance Saloon College.

I'd want the job in any case, since it looks like it will be positively my last shot at a tenure-track job this year, but Last Chance Saloon College also happens to be in the great state of ... uh, Basketball. In fact, it is only an hour-and-thirty-minute drive from the University of Basketball, and not that much farther from the Beloved Alma Mater.

I don't think I realized I was homesick until this very day, but I am. I miss crape myrtles and Virginia pines and homemade pecan pie from the farmer's market and the smell of the University of Basketball library, and I want it to be short-sleeve weather already instead of endless cold and rain. And I have a grand total of about four actual friends in the entire Midwest, as opposed to moderately friendly work-related acquaintances. That didn't bother me so much when I was hoping to be here for life and expecting that my new colleagues would eventually turn into friends, but for the last month it has felt very isolating.

So I want this job very much. And yet I have mixed feelings about wanting it so much: partly because I've had so many hopeful-seeming interviews that haven't led to anything, and partly because one of the reasons why I chose an uncertain VAP over a nice safe postdoc was that I'd lived my whole life in two adjacent states, and there were always people I knew from high school at college, and people from my college at grad school, and I'd never had the experience of starting over in a totally new place. And I wanted that adventure, and I've mostly enjoyed it and I'm glad I have had it. But I meant to make a go of it for longer than a year. So I think I'm discovering that I'm more of a homebody at heart than I thought I was, and I'm not sure I like knowing that, especially since I know this job is as yet only a very uncertain hope.

Well. Wish me luck at the Last Chance Saloon.

on teaching the history plays, and teaching uncertainty

So, I've finally got an opportunity to indulge my Great Scholarly Passion in the classroom and teach a whole tetralogy. (Pentalogy, really, since in my world The Merry Wives of Windsor is an inseparable counterpoint to the others.) It probably goes without saying that my students do not completely share the said Great Scholarly Passion, although some of them are at least willing to play along.

In an attempt to find out why the others were so silent, I asked them all to write down a question (or questions) that they wanted to talk about. Most of the ones that I got from more than one person were the ones I expected: how is everyone related to each other, how historically accurate are the history plays, why is Hotspur such a jerk? One trend kind of threw me. With varying degrees of critical sophistication, students asked: "How do you know who is the bad guy?" "Essentially: Who are the good and who are the bad guys in this play? I really don't like any of them." "Who are we, the audience supposed to sympathize with? At times it appears that Henry IV is the 'bad guy' because he deserted those who helped him to power. At other times, though, it seems like Hotspur is the 'bad guy' merely using the present situation as an excuse to rebel. Who is supposed to be the 'bad guy' here, or are we even meant to draw distinct lines between the 'good' and the 'bad' guys?"

To which my first instinct, of course, was to say "Dudes, this is Shakespeare! Mr. Negative Capability himself! The whole point is that there isn't a bad guy!" I think I ended up saying something less abrasive, to the effect that Shakespeare isn't going to tell you: this is a group of plays that grabs you by the throat and asks you what your values are.

And that happens to be why I love the histories; though I can, of course, see why students who were raised on high-stakes testing and trained to look for certainties find this sort of thing frustrating. Another student claimed not to have any questions, but asked for "a more lecture based class, maybe with powerpoints ... I think that would show more what is expected of us to be known." And yeah, I wanted to say, "Dude, this is Shakespeare!" to that, too, but I think I do owe it to her to take her frustration seriously, even if all I can do is explain why I don't think it is appropriate to teach literature via PowerPoint, and why I'm expecting them to learn skills rather than a specific body of facts. And one of those skills -- one that comes hard, I think, for most undergraduates -- is learning to embrace ambiguity and nuance.

I'm not sure how one teaches this, save by modeling, and I wish I knew how to be the sort of model my grad advisor was. I found my way to Advisor in my second year of grad school, not because I was particularly interested in his sub-sub-field (I'm not) or because his name had cachet (I didn't realize that it did until quite late in the game, when we were at a conference together and I suddenly discovered that he had groupies), but because he taught a terrific seminar on the history plays. I realized halfway through a class that I'd only taken because it filled a gap in my Shakespeare knowledge that I loved this stuff -- it was twisty and complicated and subtle, and Advisor is the sort of person who knows instinctively when not to push an interpretation, when to stand back and let his students tease out the subtleties for themselves. But at the same time, he was damned good at asking the right questions at just the right moment, pointing out the nuances the students might not have noticed. I don't have those instincts yet. Maybe I never will; one has to be, I think, a great listener as well as a great scholar. But I think I want to try.

wherein I avoid writing my conference paper

A Mathematical Formula, by which the Awesomeness of a piece of Renaissance Literature may be Calculated:

1) Count up the total number of times the following elements appear: cross-dressing, pirates, unusual ways to poison people, bed-tricks, invisibility, sexually ambiguous kings, space travel, unexpected appearances from Roman gods, ghosts, zombies, cannibalism, Robin Hood.

2) Multiply the resulting number by 1 + the number of severed body parts appearing in the work. Severed heads count double if they talk.

3) Add five points if there is a hippogryph. Hippogryphs are inherently awesome. Other fantastic beasts may be worth a point or two, but not if they are named Error.

4) Add two points for every character who sings a totally inappropriate song; e.g., if four men going to the gallows decide to treat the audience to a rousing rendition of "Three Merry Men Be We," you would then add eight points.

Hamlet, for example, has pirates, two appearances of a ghost, and three really weird ways to poison people; it would score 6 + 2 x (however many of Ophelia's songs you deem totally inappropriate). Orlando Furioso would score off the charts, as it rightly should.

Maybe I should just go to this conference, say "Cross-dressing! Pirates! Double bed-trick!" and then sit down.