Job Tracking - Week 18

I just realized I almost forgot about this post. I must've been so busy dozing off during the season finale for "Lost, Season 4." Honestly, they made three seasons of people on an island fly by, and the season finale feels like six hours in a life raft with Ben Stein?

Anyway, job stuff: more rejections this week but not much else. Committee members, let me say this about rejections: if you demand everything and the kitchen sink be sent to you, including copies of undergraduate transcripts, then pony up the first class stamp for a written rejection letter. As the kids on Fat Albert would've have said: "E-mail rejection letters? NC. NO CLASS!"

And applicants, since we're doing a search here, let me offer you a piece of advice, too. If the call for applications asks for documents to be sent to a particular person, send the documents to that person. And whatever you do, don't just copy and paste all the information in those documents into the a single e-mail and then send them to the wrong person. And if you're going to copy and paste it into one e-mail and send it to the wrong person, at least write the person a note rather than just sending an e-mail with all your documents cut and pasted. Stop and say hi. Or explain why you shouldn't have to follow instructions. Give me a salutation or something.

I'm at that point in the job market where silly things are making me superstitious. Yesterday, I had to renew my car registration, good for another two years. As I drove away from the DMV, I thought to myself, "Well, that should guarantee me a job so that I'll have to pay multiple expensive fees to register my car this year." And then, of course, I immediately thought, "Oh crap. I just jinxed myself." So if I don't get a new gig this year, now we'll know why.

Anyway, as I said, not much change from last week:

Total # of academic jobs applied for/# of jobs identified: 23/25
Total # of non-academic jobs applied for/# of jobs identified 0/0
COST OF THE SEARCH
Total spent in U.S. dollars on applications: $192.90
Average cost in U.S. dollars per applications: $14.95
Total spent in U.S. dollars on travel, etc: $150.99
Total amount in U.S. dollars reimbursed: $0
WHERE THE CALL CAME FROM:
The Chronicle of Higher Ed: 9
HigherEdJobs.com: 0
Other online service (listserv, etc): 14
Friend/Colleague: 2
Personal Research: 1
THE JOB IS IN THE DETAILS
Total number of paper submissions: 19
Total number of e-submissions: 4
Total weight in pounds of application packets: 22.13
Total number of recommendation letters requested: 48
Total number of requests for references: 5
Total number of "proof of teaching excellence" packs : 9
Total number of requests for Teaching Philosophy :11
Total number of research packs: 13
Total number of transcripts requested: 3
WHAT THE CRITICS ARE SAYING
Total number of acknowledgments of receipt: 21
Total number of confirmed reference contacts: 0
Total number of phone interviews: 2
Total number of conference interviews: 0
Total number of on-campus interviews: 2
Total number of offers: 0
Total number of rejection letters: 9
Total number of canceled or unhired positions: 1

There are still a few job announcements trickling in - actually more than I recall from the search last year. But a lot more of them are listed as visiting now. Last year, it didn't feel like the visiting and one-year positions started to hit until around the end of March.

More later!

Frag(ments), Son of Scraps

The deadline is coming, and I hope I am Chicken Little about it falling on my head. Still no time for a real post, I think, so random thoughts have been collecting here for days. So read it, because suffering is good for the soul.

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Even in the office on weekends, I can't work here. The printers here don't like my word processor. I'm pretty computer savvy, and I've done the tweaks and surfed the help forums (fori? is forum its own plural? fuck it. but remember to do a search and replace in the manuscript.) Really, it's probably another configuration problem on the part of the network, the way my e-mail client can no longer access the mail server here, forcing me to use Microsoft Exchange.

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I'm sick of hearing people explain why the Barack Obama cover is fine. I get it.

What I want to know is why haven't we heard from the comedians, explaining why we can say for sure it isn't funny. Anybody who has ever been on stage can tell you there's a simple way to tell if something is funny: check if the people you intended to are laughing.

You can call it satire, and dress it up in First Amendment considerations, and whatever you like. But at the end of the day, if you made a joke and your audience didn't laugh, it was a bad decision. But for the record, if you want to satire a group's view, you need to reference the group in your satire, not just their bogus view.

Of course, maybe it is our mistake, though not the way it's being spun. Perhaps the New Yorker cover is a signal about just who the magazine is targeted to. Let me admit up front that I've done my time with New Yorker subscriptions. They have some great writing and some great insights. But at the same time, I can say definitively that the New Yorker isn't a magazine for whom I'm the key demographic. And in fact, academics and liberals, let me suggest that most of us aren't. Look at how much of the magazine is given over to things that will never have relevance to your life even if you actually lived in NYC. And I don't just mean ads, though these are a pretty big hint in and of themselves. Bulova watches? Nights at the Met?

If you, like me, didn't like the cover and found it questionable at best and poor taste at worst, let me offer up a new thought. Maybe the cover isn't funny because it's not meant to be funny to us.

I'm just sayin'.

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Incidentally, I'm also sick to death of anything to do with Brett Favre. I don't know why, particularly since I don't pay attention to the NFL or MLB or much of any sport that isn't basketball, why I keep hearing stories about this. But they need to stop.

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Neighbors: putting your trash in the hall to take out "later" is not a good solution. I'm tired, full of cabin fever, and if you keep it up, I might let the air out of your tires.

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Getting set for Season 2 of "Mad Men" and Season 3 of "Lost." For those of you considering either, here's my big thought.

"Lost" and 'Mad Men" are nice contrasts. "Lost" is so awash in daddy issues (and notice that, particularly in the first season, the only characters who get real relationship oriented bask stories are the males) that Freud would have to invent a new complex for it. In contrast, while "Mad Men"'s lead character is a male, some of the most interesting stories in it have to do with sexual/office politics for women.

"Lost" still frustrates me in some ways. I feel like there were a few moments in Season 2 where the writers completely forgot how they'd written characters just an episode or two back. And there is a constant character as deus ex machina shtick that will wear completely through shortly if it hasn't already. But for all of that, there are a couple of the lesser characters who I enjoy enough to continue.

"Mad Men" was a little slow for me initially, but one of the things I liked about it is that even when I knew something was coming, it always was used in a way that surprised me. I'm a big fan of anything that can take something that's nearing cliche and make me think "well, that was new!"

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It was an interesting moment when I realized, as I was advising incoming freshmen, that every moment I have to do something that is institutionally supportive (helping with incoming freshmen, strategic planning, etc) that I'm looking for ways to game the system. Not for my benefit exactly, but to find a way around some imagined and inevitable poor planning by someone above me.

Maybe worse, maybe not, I found myself explaining the visible portion of that iceberg to the incoming freshmen as part of their orientation.

It's going to be a good year, for real.

Thoughts from a "Lost" newbie

So, I'm sitting here watching the first part of the pilot to "Lost." I've not seen the show before, I'm not convinced I'll like it, and I'll fuck you up if you reveal anything about the plot to me because I'm not one of those people who is okay knowing the details of shows/movies/plays/books that I might be interested in seeing. This is directly contradictory to the story I told my best friend years ago about always reading the end of a book as soon as I get it so that if I die, I'll at least not have missed the ending.

Believe it or not, it was the only way to get him to stop telling me crucial plot details. He's my best friend: it was lie or kill him. Besides, he should have known better. I'm a fast reader, and if the book's good enough, there's no way I wouldn't finish it, death or no.

But that is all beside the point.

Having managed to avoid anything "Lost" related for ages, it occurs to me that the big mystery to it must be that it'll all be a dream in which someone copes with their fears of flying following September 11. I know. That's all so "Bobby Ewing" (for you kids, that's an old TV reference: go look it up - it'll be useful pop cultural knowledge for relating to your aging superiors and will help you understand why they distrust anything that smacks of dream sequences. Take your time. We'll wait.) .

Back? Good.

It seems to me that the mystery at the heart of the last twenty years of "big reveal" media is this: at the end of it, it's all about how there's something we distrust within ourselves. For ages, our stories were about how we battled nature. Or how we battled each other. Or how the things we created made us vulnerable. And, of course, us versus ourselves isn't new. It's the pervasiveness that fascinates me. So how do you make a disaster show a mystery if you don't make it about trust in ourselves? In the case of "Lost," what I find interesting is the start where we're thrown into the story immediately. And we're instantly confronted with a broken airplane, flames, screams, disaster. And disaster is a word that's taken on a different definition, a different meaning for most of us in the last seven years.

In the show now, there's a noise - maybe music, maybe something creepy in the forest in the dark. No one's sure what they saw. It sounds like a howl. Were I the sort to talk to the characters and offer them advise, I'd remind them that we always confront ourselves when we walk into the forest.

I like that in this show - as in "Heroes" - they've taken a chance and had characters speaking in a different language, that we're forced to grapple with another language. One of the things that was so compelling about "Heroes" to me was the brave choice to try and make us identify with people - by making us follow their story lines - who don't speak our language. Sure, eventually they gave in and had them learn the language, but they held out for awhile in the first season. And Season two, whatever else was wrong with it, made us grapple with multiple languages. That's worth commending, particularly when we can still read reviews that suggest it's laughable that contact with other cultures might make us smarter (it's true - check out the (admittedly out of full context) review from Cynthia Fuchs on Rotten Tomatoes.com of the movie "The Visitor" (a movie that is well worth checking out).

Anyway.

A colleague of mine commented that most of his students don't have the visual fluency to view a movie with subtitles because they can't keep up with reading and watching at the same time. He claims - and I've no real reason not to believe him other than hope - that most of the students in his class have never seen a foreign film. But beyond providing some additional skills to students, I like the use of multiple languages because it makes things a bit more like the world I live in. Now if we could just get subtitles for all those accents I don't understand plus all those languages, TV might be awesome. Even better when there are scenes with no subtitles - just language and intent and the need to muddle through it.

So anyway, what I think is this: you start a show with an unexplained plane crash, survivors are left to make sense of it, there's not only a looming threat but there are people you're not sure you can communicate with who your survival may well rely on. How is this not a microcosm for the world we live in now? How could America not deal with its fears but through media?

I ventured a theory in high school, in the midst of a short story we had to write, after reading "1984" and "Brave New World" that asked us to venture our own utopia/dystopia for the future (awesome assignment, Mrs. Hall!) and what I wanted to write about - and maybe I did, though I remember thinking that I couldn't pull it off then - was about a future world where all America could do was produce entertainment. It was all amusement parks and studio backlots; it's what we did best and what we valued most. And now I think it's where we think things through. This is why I'm so distressed by reality TV and "American Idol." If media is where we think things through, then reality TV represents our worst "what were they thinking" moments.

Anyway, I'm assuming members of the group must betray each other. That they'll have to turn on each other. If my metaphor will hold, then the lesson becomes not just that the Others (yes, I've heard much about the show) must be wrestled with and made familiar and understandable, but that we must as well.

Anyway, I should really pay attention to the show. This pilot episode - part I - is long. But I suppose thought provoking.