Professional privilege

There's been something going around the academic blogosphere these past few months, with many long-time bloggers of roughly my generation wondering aloud about the purpose of their blogs now that their professional status is more secure. I've had those questions, too. A lot of us started blogging when we were grad students or were just starting our first full-time academic jobs, when we were growing into our professional identities but still felt pretty marginal. The period of becoming--the story of how one builds a life and fashions a self--is, after all, a traditional subject for narrative.

But now that we're done struggling upward, or have at least hit a significant narrative plateau (and now that we have enough buy-in that we're not going to be writing with complete candor about a specific obnoxious colleague, a gossipy scandal, or a potentially disastrous institutional initiative), then what's the point for those of us whose blogs are mostly life chronicles? Who wants to read about the relatively low-stakes struggles of the tenured?

I don't know the answer to the last question, but I suppose my answer to the first one is that, first of all, the story isn't actually over--and secondly, we were never fully candid and never really that marginal to begin with. Graduate school and the job market may have traumatized us, and we may even have spent a year or two as contingent faculty, but let's face it: those of us who went to fancy Ph.D. programs weren't ever in the belly of the academic beast (though we may have spent some time caught unpleasantly in his esophagus). So if we're more privileged now than we were then, it's only a matter of degree.

My point isn't that only the most marginal deserve our sympathy or have stories worth telling, but the opposite: academia can be brutalizing even for the relatively privileged, and as long as we're not conflating our lot with that of those further down the privilege chain--and as long as we're listening to them, too--writing honestly about our professional lives is a service no matter where we are or how much good fortune seems to outweigh the bad. (That guy we all know who didn't get tenure at Harvard or Yale or Chicago a decade ago, and who retells the story every year at the the conference hotel bar? Yeah, he's annoying as hell. But his story about the profession is a real one too.)

In the comments to my last post, I mentioned that I was striving to write both honestly and ethically: I want to tell the truth, including the emotional truth, of my professional life without being merely emotional and reactive, in a way that maintains the privacy of those who haven't signed up to be blogged about, and also in a way that at least implicitly recognizes my own privilege.

We'll see how it goes. But I'm hopeful that my life post-tenure is still worth writing about, and worth reading.

Getting It Published: Part 7

I was hoping that this post would be the final one in this series--to be followed, perhaps, by a few posts on the process of publication itself (from contract to bound copies), but alas: the news from my once-prospective press is not good.

As you may recall, I'd been working with this press for two years. They first sent the manuscript to one outside reviewer, who had stern but encouraging words, so I revised according to her suggestions. They sent it to her again, and she was very happy with my revisions and recommended publication. Then they sent it to a second reviewer, who read the entire MS in three weeks and was highly critical--but he also seemed confused about the basic parameters of my project; he made lots of suggestions, but most of them were, at best, tangential to my topic. I was asked to address "at least some of" his concerns, and I did so to the extent that I felt I could while maintaining the integrity of the project. I also told the press very clearly what I had done, what I had not done, and why.

So after winter break they sent it back to him. . . and after more than four months he submitted a one-paragraph review, most of it cut-and-pasted from his previous review, saying that I hadn't engaged sufficiently with his criticisms.

And that means that's it for that press. The editor was quite apologetic, but explained that such a negative review tied the press's hands and would make it hard for the editor to make a case to the publication board--even if the editor were to find a warmly receptive third reader.

And though I know that this is just one obtuse reader and that this is just one press, I haven't felt this crappy about my scholarly identity since grad school. I've been working on this project, in one incarnation or another, for ten years. At this point, I'm pretty much done. I want it to live somewhere other than my own head. Readers can like it or dislike it, but I want it to be other people's to grapple with, not mine.

I know that it will get published elsewhere, and maybe even at an equally good press. I'm not doubting the project's intrinsic worth, but right now I am feeling pretty demoralized about how goddamn long it will now be before it sees the light of day. And although I knew that this was a risk I was taking by sticking with one press for so long, I'm still surprised by this outcome and I still feel like I've failed. Moreover, being in Italy means I can't do what I'd normally do, which is send out another half-dozen proposals immediately. But I don't have a printer here and I don't have RU letterhead, so all I can do for the next three weeks is stew.

*

Well, that's not quite true. The silver lining, I guess, is that now I have to get on with the rest of my scholarly life. For the past four months, waiting for this review, I've felt paralyzed, unable to work on the article I'm half done with, unable to start strategizing about the next book (even though I'm excited about both), and unable to do more than desultory work on my scholarly edition. It just hasn't felt worth it, when I knew that I might hear back any day about this book and need to turn quickly to any final revisions.

And to be honest, I've been worried, over those past four months, about whether I was losing steam and losing drive, and maybe becoming complacent (about getting tenure, about the idea of having my book come out with this particular fancy press, and, generally, about all the things I've done rather than being energized by what lies ahead). If my book isn't coming out imminently, well, that feels shameful. But a sense of falling behind or of having something to prove has always been useful to my productivity. Having the book in limbo means I absolutely have to get that article out the door this summer. And I need to start applying for some external fellowships, maybe even a few big ones, in order to write the first couple of chapters of my second book and in the hopes of taking a year-long rather than a semester-long sabbatical in 2013-14.

I suppose it will all work out in the end; the race is not always to the swift, etc. But this sure wasn't what I'd hoped to hear.

When you think dumb thoughts you like dumb people

As I struggle along with my Italian here where I'm surrounded by it, I realize what a comfort, what an absolute joy, the boring, the conventional, the formulaic, and the repetitive are. Bad detective shows and their stern, furrowed-browed heroes and bumbling sidekicks? Awesome. I've seen 'em all before. Glossy women's magazines with their rhapsodies over lipstick and dollops of personal-life wisdom? Even better. I love commercials and print advertisements, the stupider the better. (Really bad not-quite jokes? I get them! It's fantastic!)

As Cosimo has observed, the people you'd most avoid if they were speaking your native language--the loud, slow-talking, pedantic ones--are those you're most grateful for when you're trying to work up your language comprehension. Whining children? Pretty great! That guy opining loudly to his buddies outside the tabbachi shop? Also great! Ditto for old ladies narrating their purchases aloud at the supermarket, couples breaking up in public, and angry dudes with bad cell phone connections shouting the same sentence over and over. We went to mass at a local church (itself awesome, since the formulae are the same and lots of the terms are cognates and/or Latin loan words), and I briefly thought I'd been granted the gift of tongues when I was able to follow most of the sermon. But no: the priest was just a tedious young guy, fresh from the seminary, giving a deliberative, repetitive, and essentially theological sermon. It was terrific.

I guess I look forward to the day when I dislike tedious Italians as much as I dislike tedious Americans and Britons. But for now I embrace them. Eloquent, original, and complex thinkers just ain't for me.

Fare come fanno i romani

So we made it to Rome, and with the exception of the mosquitoes, who have given us an overly-enthusiastic welcome, everything here is pretty near perfect: the weather, the apartment, the neighborhood.

If this is how the Romans do it, I'm sold. Check it:

A corner of the kitchen, opening onto the terrace

The back of the terrace

The view from the living room

Another view from the living room














So who knows how much I'll be blogging. Unless you're more interested in my adventures in verb conjugation than I imagine--or have a very high tolerance for hearing about bad Italian t.v., the many bottles of wine, prosecco, and limoncello already lining my fridge, or how tiiiired my feet are, there may not be much to report.

Antioch U: where "flexible" and "individualized" mean cynical and exploitative

Over the weekend I got an astonishing request: a student at Antioch University* emailed me to ask whether I'd be willing to adapt one of my existing courses to a distance-learning format and allow her to take it for credit toward an M.A. degree at Antioch.

It's not the student's email that astonished me; she was polite and professional and obviously following the guidelines given her by the university itself. It's Antioch's educational model--if you can call it that!--that blew my mind. They're a low-residency, mostly online program, with five campuses and apparently only a few faculty employed full-time. Most of the courses are taught by faculty found by the students themselves and paid $125 per credit hour. The payment is officially designated as an "honorarium," I presume to skirt any rules the faculty member's home institution might have against moonlighting. Here, read the full instructor guidelines for yourself.

Nice racket, huh? Antioch is fully accredited and its tuition even seems pretty reasonable--until you compare it, credit hour for credit hour, with the price at a state institution: Antioch students pay $331 per undergraduate credit hour and $497 per graduate credit hour. By contrast, in-state students at RU pay between $146 and $220 per undergraduate credit hour and between $295 and $370 per graduate credit hour (the higher price is for part-time students; the lower price is for full-time students who are taking the maximum course load).

So Antioch students are paying more and getting a vastly lower-quality education, cobbled together on their own, by trial and error--and presumably taught either by desperate adjuncts or by cynical tenure-line faculty based elsewhere who are willing to make a few extra bucks now and again.

Yeah, sure: it's a free country and students can choose to enroll anywhere. But that doesn't make Antioch's educational model anything but a scandal. (Which is what I told the woman who emailed me--albeit rather more nicely and with a few words of encouragement about her intended area of study.)

Shame on you, Antioch.

------------

*The complicated relationship between Antioch University and Antioch College is partly unraveled here, here, and here. I'm not an expert on this history, and would welcome more information.

Multi-tasking, obviously, is not my thing

My intensive two-week Shakespeare class has just ended. And like last year, I'm torn between thinking that this is the wost schedule EVAH--four hours a day! five days a week! A new play virtually every day!--and thinking that, just maybe, this is how college should be: just twelve to fifteen students, all taking only one class at a time, with a professor teaching only one class at a time. The schedule is simultaneously brutal and leisurely, and while I dislike the brutality for obvious reasons, the leisure (four to six hours of class time on every play is a real gift, when you're used to barely three) and the focus that comes from that leisure is delightful.

So I'd get rid of the every-day part. But if all college classes met for four hours a day, two days a week, and each class lasted for five or six weeks--and we kept the small class size and the one-class-at-a-time thing for both students and instructors? That might just be heaven.

Pseudonymity and its discontents

So it looks like I have tenure: I returned from a quick weekend trip to NYC to find a letter from RU's prez stating as much--and outlining such things as the effective date, the amount of my raise, and so forth. I'm not sure I'll truly believe it until I get the letter from the chancellor and/or see the raise reflected in my take-home pay, but since I was never really worried about getting tenure I'm not really worried now; I'm just waiting to feel different, I guess.

This month also marks my seven-year blogiversary: I started blogging as I was wrapping up my dissertation and preparing for my first full-time teaching job; a year later, after being offered my current job, I moved to this site. And here I am still.

I've never actually grown bored with blogging, though I've often figured that I would, someday: surely I'd eventually run out of things to say, or my audience would drift away, or I'd find a newer and more satisfying form of navel-gazing. None of that has happened yet, though it still might. I might also start blogging differently, or about different things, though I have no specific plans to do so.

The one change that I do expect to make in the near future is to link my blog identity more closely to my real-life one. That doesn't have to do with tenure, though getting tenure is a nice symbolic point at which to make this shift; it's been at least five years since I wrote anything in the expectation that my pseudonymity was secure or anything that I'd be uncomfortable having linked to the real me. I assume that anyone who doesn't already know who I am--but who wants to--could pull up most of my biography in 15 minutes on Google.

And many people have: I've made numerous professional connections through this blog over the years, and my blog has also helped to strengthen many pre-existing real-world friendships; some readers became friends and some friends became readers. (Hell, I even got to know my eventual spouse better as a result of this blog). But when I started blogging, all the academic bloggers I read were pseudonymous. For a very junior academic, pseudonymity was thus both personally comfortable and socially normative.

The newer generation of Early Modern bloggers and tweeters, however, mostly write under their own names. I have no intention of making this a specifically Early Modern blog, but I'd like to be more active in those conversations elsewhere on the internet and have my peers know who I am. Moreover, while my blog was once my primary link to my larger professional community--the place where I'd ask for advice, share conference gossip, and that sort of thing--I now use Facebook or Twitter for most such crowdsourcing and professional chit-chat. But my Facebook account is under my real name. And my Twitter account is under this name.

I haven't figured out exactly how I'm going to fuse my identities; maybe I'll just put up a link to my department profile on the sidebar and call it a day. But at this point, the pretense of pseudonymity feels like more trouble than it's worth.

Oh those girls and their books!

This New York Times article from a few days ago has been making the rounds on my social media sites: lowly book technician discovers an engraving by Paul Revere! And, yeah, the part about making an unusual find is nice (the engraving isn't the first known copy of the image, though it's very rare). But the article itself is stupendously bad, written in a voice of sentimental condescension. Here are some early paragraphs:

Day after day, a tall, shy woman weaves her way unnoticed through the earnest and learned campus swirl of Brown University. She enters the hush of a library, then promptly vanishes from sight.

[. . . . ]

Ms. Malchodi is more spiritually attuned to books than her Orwellian job title might suggest. She came to Brown as an undergraduate in the early 1980s, but life wound up demanding her study. Soon she was working in a College Hill bookstore rather than reading in a college library, and making cabinets rather than writing papers about her beloved Romantics.

One day she saw an advertisement for a bookbinding and conservation job at the university. She has been here ever since--though mostly underground--inspecting old books, submitting to their long-ago stories and vanishing to where now is then and then is now.

In the ensuing 20 years, gray has come to her hair and a husband and twin girls have come to her life, yet wasn't it all just yesterday? When Wordsworth thrilled her heart? When Wordsworth lived?

So okay, that's some bad prose right there, and it's on the writer, not the subject. But I wonder whether the two aren't related, for this is the way that lots of educated people talk about old books: in terms of rapturous sentimentality. Books are precious things! Oh, the dust of ages! Oh, the tooled bindings! They connect us to the past! Why, who knows who leafed these pages before us?

It's also worth noting the way that book-loving is so often feminized. It's a charming, quirky, unpractical, feminine habit, this ability to get lost in books and to have a passionate emotional relationship with them as objects. It's not that there aren't male book-lovers in the world or in popular culture, but as I noted some while back, the relationship that gets drawn between men and books tends to emphasize their deep thoughts and their pursuit of knowledge. Male book-lovers are writers and scholars. Female book-lovers may occasionally be imagined as writers and scholars, but more often they're simply readers--and the kind of readers who go into misty raptures over that old-book smell, and touching the past, and all that shit. Their thoughts about books don't matter; it's their relationship with books. They're books' most most devoted acolytes, and perhaps by extension the devoted acolytes of (mostly male) writers.

Don't get me wrong: I love books, too. And I own a couple from the seventeenth-century and get a little thrill from them. But I wish female book-lovers weren't so often portrayed as passive daydreamers, for whom books are just another form of daydreaming.



(This portrayal is rather better.)

The arm bone's connected to the shoulder bone

I think one of the reasons my colleague's departure has me feeling so shaken has to do with the way that networks of affinity work within academic departments. Even in happy and collegial places, like my own, not everyone is equally close--and in fact "closeness" isn't even the issue, if by that we mean social and emotional intimacy. We all, I think, have our own private and not necessarily conscious sense of who makes the department for us: those people whose values or commitments most line up with our preferred vision of the place. Sometimes those people are bona fide friends, but they needn't be. If I were a theorist, for example, my most theoretical colleagues--those who incorporated theory into their classes most energetically and whose writing reflected their own engagements--would likely be crucial to the department I believed in and wished to preserve.

Maybe this is less true in larger departments, but most of the people I know in mid-sized ones (say, fifteen to thirty tenure-line faculty) feel similarly. I've had friends at other schools say things like "I like my job, but if X and Y left? I'd probably leave, too." My departing colleague isn't my closest friend in the department, but if a successful workplace is like a toy building made of blocks, then s/he's a pretty strategically located one. Lose a second block nearby, and others start tumbling, too. Few blocks are so important that their removal affects the whole structure--but any one can weaken some part of it.

There are two things to note about this. First, these networks of dependence and self-definition aren't necessarily obvious (in fact, if they ARE obvious, it's usually because they've taken the more or less destructive form of cliques or factions). I can only guess who the triggering figures would be for some of my colleagues, but I'm sure they have them, as I have mine. This means we may be slow to recognize how weakened another area of our shared structure has become, or how unhappy or alienated a colleague we value might feel. We don't actually all live in the same department, even when we think we do.

Second, academia strikes me as unusual in the degree to which bonds of affinity among coworkers affect not just day-to-day happiness, but the actual mission and identity of a place. Sure, co-workers are key to almost everyone's job satisfaction, no matter the industry, and it's common to hear remarks like, "the best thing about this place is its people." But because academic departments are relatively autonomous, and because they're also pretty egalitarian--everything is done by committee--the things your coworkers want and believe in become what the department does and who it is. When my department overhauled its curriculum and the shape of its major, we did it ourselves, over nearly three years and lots and lots of conversations. We looked at many other models and the whole thing had to be approved at the college level, but it wasn't imposed by anyone in a "leadership" role. It was shaped by us, collaboratively, junior as well as senior faculty.

This is an excellent thing. It's wonderful to have control over the specifics of one's job and it's wonderful to have colleagues one likes and believes in. But to the extent that the values and goals of our workplace are determined by our colleagues and our specific networks of allegiance and affinity, the structure is also very fragile.

Decline and fall

One of my colleagues is leaving RU. This isn't actually the first of my tenure-line colleagues to take a job elsewhere, but it feels like it: the others were people I wasn't close to, and they weren't here long, and neither their presence nor their absence materially affected my sense of my department's identity.

This colleague, on the other hand, turns out to have been pretty integral to my sense of my department's identity, which is maybe a way of saying integral to my own sense of identity. We were hired at more or less the same time, we have similar training and research ambitions, our teaching interests overlap, and s/he has been an admirably dedicated member of the department. We're also personal friends.

And though we are friends and though it's normal to regret the loss of any cherished coworker, I'm surprised at how shaken this colleague's departure has left me and how much it's destablized my feelings about my department.

There's no reasonable reason for this: my colleague is moving in order to be close to family--not because of any dissatisfaction with our department--and we're almost certain to get a replacement hire. Indeed, I've argued before that it's actually a sign of health for a department occasionally to lose a talented person. It means we're hiring well, that we provide our faculty with opportunities for growth, and that we're remaining competitive. Obviously no department wants to be a revolving door, but a limited amount of turnover is to be expected.

So why has this felt, at occasional moments since I got the news, like it might be The End of Everything?

Well, the thing about hiring talented people is that they can leave. And I look around my department, and it seems possible that, if the stars aligned in just the right awful combination, we could lose three or four people in a two-year period. Those of us with seemingly intractable two-body problems are likelier to leave than others, but who's to say? Any one of us could leave even if most of us aren't planning to.

And the prolonged jobs crisis means that even those of us who have been spared haven't been spared. My department has hired something like fifteen tenure-line faculty in ten years, many of them for entirely new positions. Even in the depths of the recession we've had continuous cost-of-living raises, as well as a pool of competitive merit raises. And our institution's financial picture is only improving.

But it still feels precarious, probably because it is precarious. We're okay now, but for how long? We might stop getting replacement lines, nevermind new ones. We might lose the upper-administrator who has been most enthusiastic about promoting the humanities. And as education jobs dry up in this state, we might lose English majors (since a great many of our majors are also pursuing their teaching certification). And then what?

Losing this particular colleague may not be a tipping point--in fact, it almost certainly isn't. But it's made me feel anxious and vulnerable, reminding me that nothing is forever and that bad news is more likely than good in higher education.

I'll get over it. But it's hard to believe that things are getting better at one's own institution when they're getting so much worse elsewhere.

Autres temps, autres moeurs

My first year in grad school I was invited to a casual dinner at the home of one of my professors. I don't recall what we ate, but it was something easy, served buffet-style, and the eight or ten of us sat companionably around a couple of coffee tables and end tables, some of us on sofas and chairs, others on the floor.

This particular professor was a WASPy New England gent (who wasn't actually a WASP, but with his patrician features, full head of white hair, and marvelous honking voice he might as well have been), and his home suited him: an exquisite old place that managed to be homey and elegant at the same time. There were many things to remark on there--those Oriental rugs were obviously really old! and who painted their entire downstairs Wedgwood blue?--but the thing that blew my mind was when his wife gestured toward the sideboard and I saw two long ranks of wineglasses laid out, both white and red.

I was astonished, first, that anyone owned that many wineglasses. But I'd also never realized that having separate kinds of glasses was a thing: no one in my family owned two sets of wineglassses, nor could I remember ever going to a house where they'd been in evidence; to me, they were the special province of restaurants. The fact that my professor and his wife had laid them out for us grad students, in our jeans and our sweaters, strongly intimated that they hadn't thought twice about it. They just lived in a world where each beverage demanded a dedicated glass.

But I'll tell you what: when you get married, you throw a bunch of things on a wedding registry. And even when you say "no gifts," half your guests still buy you gifts. And someone, inevitably, buys you those sixteen white wine glasses and sixteen red.

And when you get home at 10 p.m. from a long day of teaching and you put on your flannel pyjamas and you eat your dinner of cold pizza standing up at the kitchen counter, you'll be drinking your red wine out of a proper red wine glass. Because a person's gotta have standards.

Still feeling fraudulent after all these years

Last week concluded the lecture series that a colleague and I have been organizing all year. It's been great, and we've had some awesomely smart people out, but it's also been a lot of work. Though looking after a visitor always involves some anxiety (will the plane be on time, will the hotel be okay, will the audience be big enough), all the previous speakers were people with whom I or my co-organizer were friends, or at least had warm professional relationships. So amidst the hassle and anxiety we were also just really looking forward to hanging out with them.

This final speaker, however, was someone neither of us knew and whom I invited in a fit of ambitious optimism. She's genuinely famous (or at least famous-for-academia) and arguably the most important scholar in my subfield. This means that, as her visit approached, I was consumed with anxiety--and not only about the practical details. I was also experiencing a total failure of imagination when I tried to picture her having dinner in my house or even having a conversation with me. (And two days = lots of conversation time.) For one thing, she's intimidatingly learned. And for another, she's a full generation older than I. And just as my students are often astonished to see me at the grocery store or to learn that I know who Lady Gaga is, it can be hard for me to believe that someone so far above me in the profession is, like, a regular person: someone who tells jokes and does funny voices and has favorite time-wasting sites on the internet.

There may also have been another reason the whole idea of her visit freaked me out a little: I'd long believed her to be the reason that I didn't get a particular post-MLA campus visit. It was a school I was already keen on, and the hiring committee was warm and lovely, seemingly very interested in my work, and mostly pitching me softball questions. Then someone asked, "So is [Scholar X] important to your work?"

And I said, "No."

Here's some free advice to the job-seekers out there: this is never the right answer to that question. And in fact, it wasn't even quite true; I just panicked. I'd read a few of her articles on one of my authors--and even had strong opinions about them--but in the moment all I could think was, "Shit. I haven't read Book Y or Book Z. Why did I never get around to them? OBVIOUSLY I'm a fraud."

This episode wasn't scarring or even anything I've thought much about since it happened; there are funnier and more mortifying stories from my other MLA interviews. But I do think that the interview established a link in my brain between Scholar X and my sense of my own intellectual inadequacies. I've now read several of her books and I could easily have a conversation about them, but her name still registers with me emotionally in a key different from the names of other scholars of comparable stature.

But her visit went fine; of course it did. She was charming and gracious and gave an excellent lecture, and I think my colleagues and institution showed to advantage as well. And hey: now she knows I exist! At least one thing has changed in six years.

The big book of shadenfreude and self-loathing

It turns out that someone else is as fascinated by this phenomenon as I. (And of course, that "someone" is the New York Times Style section.)

Conference-going on the eve of tenure

This year I went to both RSA and SAA, which I vow never to do again--or at least not when they're only two weeks apart. Yes, they were both in great cities, and yes, I saw people I love (and made useful new connections), and I heard great papers and ate & drank well, and I got to trot around in some pretty clothes. And this year I even had Twitter, which definitely beats a blog as a vehicle for catapulting conference observations and irritations into the internet. But it was exhausting.

What I love about conferences is their energy and their serendipity, and this applies as much to the social realm as to the intellectual. But as I get older there's less serendipity and I have less energy. My first year or two after getting the degree, seemingly every conference dinner involved between ten and fourteen people. This was because I'd plan to have dinner with a couple of friends, and they'd each invite someone else along, and those people would already have promised a few friends to dine with them--and we were all so young and so thrilled to be getting to know more people in the profession that OF COURSE everyone was welcome! We'd all get sushi together! And we'd have to wait 45 minutes for enough tables, drinking and gabbing throughout, and by dinner's end we'd all have promised to attend each others' panels (even the ones at 8.30 a.m. the next morning), and we'd leave the conference knowing another dozen people well enough to call friends.

Now, however, I know so many people that I often don't bother to make plans at all. It's impossible to prioritize, for one thing, so unless there's someone I haven't seen in a long while and have specifically been looking forward to seeing, I'm content to let chance do the planning and just see who I run into at the right moment (or who I turn out to be most excited to see, when I see him or her). And I'm not interested in groups larger than six: I want to talk to the people I'm with and I don't want to waste time trying to figure out where to go, or trying to get a table. Everyone else I figure I'll see at the bar.

The bar, too, is a problem: I may still be there every night until the lights go up, but I can't drink (or more to the point, I can't recover from a hangover) like I used to, and it's getting so even the drinking feels necessary, feels like social work: I have to stay there until I've made the rounds and talked to everybody I know, and that means I keep drinking even if I'd be better off in bed.

The other problem with knowing so many people is that I have to consciously try to meet new ones--especially new ones who are not already friends of friends, and especially grad students. It's easy to get lazy and to forget that having any kind of reputation and any kind of stature entails professional and social obligations. My position in the profession isn't a glorious one, but it's secure enough that my opinion actually does matter to a few people, and it's secure enough that I sometimes get read as slighting someone or being high-handed when really I'm just being a moron.

This happened at one of my past two conferences. After one panel a scholar, basically of my own generation, but with an acclaimed first book and an extremely fancy second job, came over to where I was standing chatting with a mutual friend.

I'd been looking forward to an opportunity to meet him, so I immediately stuck out my hand. "Oh!" I said. "We haven't met. I'm Flavia Fescue." And I may have added something about admiring his work.

"Actually," he said, "we have met. At Conference X last year."

"No," I insisted, smiling. "I'm sure we haven't."

He repeated his certitude, I repeated mine--and then he produced a whole conversation we'd apparently had. Based on its specifics, it had to be true, but I had no memory of it. And because I couldn't very well say, "wait, was this at a bar? maybe I was drunk?" instead I said, "oh, huh. I guess we have met."

Someone else came over then, and the scholar drifted away, awkwardly, and I realized that somehow I--who felt like the nobody--had come off as the self-absorbed jackass who couldn't be bothered to remember a person like him.

*

I'm sure I'll always enjoy conferences, but I expect they'll continue to be less purely fun than they were in those few first years. We have less to prove, professionally, and more to distract us: we have to run back to our hotel rooms to deal with departmental crises by email, or to nurse an infant, or to grade papers or work on grant applications. And if we're good members of the profession, as I hope to be, a lot more energy will be expended just trying to stay current: meeting people younger than ourselves, taking an interest in their work, and offering what advice and assistance we can.

Keeping up takes work; it would be easier if conferences were only about hanging out with one's friends for three days straight. But if what I like best about conferences is their energy and their serendipity, I guess it's well not to get too comfortable, to take it too easy, or to stick with the people and the things already known.

Promissory note

Apologies for my extended bloggy silence--but two conferences in two weeks, followed by playing host to a famous visiting scholar, have not been conducive to longer-form writing.

Rest assured, however, that I have Things to Say: about both my recent conferences and a fascinating wealth of other subjects.

Stay tuned!