Asides

It’s campus visit season for job seekers, so I’ve been busy with travel, writing and presenting job talks, and attempting to be dazzling for nine hours at a stretch. I got turned down for my dream job, which is a disappointment, but it was a bit of a reach for someone in my situation. Still, I really, really like the institutions with which I’ve been lucky enough to have visits — each, in their way, nationally known — but for very different reasons. Everybody always says the visits are grueling, which I guess they are, but there’s also something genuinely pleasant about talking to a bunch of super-intelligent people about the dissertation upon which you’ve been chipping away in solitude for so long.

(He says, crossing his fingers, knocking on wood, hoping they liked him.)

It looks like The Happy Tutor and crew have decided to hang things up. It’s too bad: Wealth Bondage was the best damn satirical website out there, bar none; at once funny and brilliant and provocative, with the smartest bunch of commenters since The Invisible Adjunct shut down. You’ll be much missed, Phil.

In my inbox today: a beyond-the-grave email from none other than the eminent Austrian himself.

FROM: Freud

What did the good doctor want? Why, to sell me some VIAGRA FOR AS LOW AS $1.62 A DOSE, of course, because I apparently NEED 15 MINUTES TO BE READY FOR ACTION. Who knew?

Pfizer couldn’t ask for a better spokesman, I suppose. One blue pill, and — well — the ego is not master in its own house?

Grades went in Thursday morning; gifts got wrapped Thursday night. After Sunday — happy holidays! — it’s a one-day break before I’m off to MLA and The Serch.

And the MLA Job Information Center is in the Ballroom of the DC Omni Shoreham, which is a room I haven’t seen since my senior prom was held there, years and years ago.

Yeah. Tell me about it.

One student to another, upon seeing the project she’d prepared for class today: “That’s so cool!”

For the company who shared my table tonight, and for friends and family and colleagues.

I was worried when my oven broke a few days ago. My landlords, though, when they couldn’t get it fixed in time, gave me the key to the restaurant they run downstairs, and let me use the kitchen there. So I’m thankful to them, as well.

We inaugurated my mom’s china and silver — since I have it now, there seems to me no sense in not using it on special occasions — and the food, cooked collaboratively, came out well.

There’s the cut-up turkey, roasted and then stewed for the last 40 minutes in the manner of doro w’et; the giblet gravy; ayib be gomen, an Ethiopian side dish with chopped collard greens and spiced cottage cheese; the turkey stuffing; the mashed potatoes; and a salad of lamb’s lettuce, tangerine slices, roasted pistachios, and pomegranate seeds, with a vinaigrette made from orange juice, rice vinegar, shallots, and pistachio oil. Not pictured: for dessert, a honey-pecan tart with bittersweet chocolate glaze.

Reader, I hope your Thanksgiving was fine, as well.

The guys at the always brilliant Penny Arcade propose “The Merch” as a critique of the system of capitalist circulation that operates within their field.

I’m thinking I’d like to write a grant to get some money to hire Gabe and Tycho. We’d draft some CVs, some teaching philosophies, some writing samples. We’d get them on the MLA job list. And, yeah, we’d do the October and November thing. We’d hit MLA in December.

To what end, you ask?

Easy enough: I’d love to see how Penny Arcade might do “The Serch.”

O the fun we could have.

Zeugma’s still working on her costume, but Tink’s ready for some trick-or-treating.

I’m hoping, for the girls’ sake, that at least a few of the neighbors will be handing out tuna and kibble in addition to the usual chocolates and candy corn.

Two things happened on the season finale of “Over There” that I’m sure everyone saw coming. First: in a fine nod to the sluggish pace of Army bureaucracy, Bo finally got his Bronze Star. Second: Lieutenant Underpants got fragged. What was masterful, for me, was the pacing of the cuts between home and war, the fine use of v-mail as a narrative device to increase the emotional affect of the distance between home and war, and the bookending of the episode with Angel’s hymn and Dim’s atheist prayer. And the funereal last five minutes were nothing short of brilliant: the coffin-echo implicit in the attention to the placing of empty beer bottles back into the empty case, and the use of entrenching tools to shovel dirt onto the light around which they’d all said Amen.

Two of the schools to which I’m thinking of applying for jobs ask for a Department of Defense form 214, a record of active-duty service. Mine’s on file with the credentials office. And I have to wonder whether those schools would be happy with me, and whether I’d be happy with them. I’m thinking about the training sessions I gave as an NCO for soldiers on the Geneva Convention and Laws of War, and some of the stupid lieutenants I encountered in my career (plus, to be fair, three good ones, as well as one sergeant major who I’ll never forget, and one lieutenant colonel who was the finest officer I ever met), and I wonder: could I make a difference? Do I want or need to? (I could, I think. I might.)

Two ways to think about this. One: I did some temporary duty at one of the schools — in fact, I got my corporal’s stripes pinned while I was there — and loved the place for its architecture and location and history, and for the cadets’ huge enthusiasm.

Two: it’s obvious from my research agenda that Marxist economists influence my theoretical perspective. I’m thinking there’s a chance some institutions might scowl at that, however clear it might be from my experience that when I was in, I loved the Army and the soldiers with whom I worked.

And I’m looking forward to “Over There” season two.

My cousin Jess, knowing the thing about my birthday and Halloween, mailed me a gloriously campy and awesome Halloween CD. Delighted, I figured I’d try my hand at making one too, ’cause, well, it’s the time of the season.

1. Philip Glass, “Koyaanisqatsi”
2. Mike Oldfield, “Tubular Bells (Opening Theme)”
3. Nick Cave, “Red Right Hand”
4. Shivaree, “Goodnight Moon”
5. Pram, “Track of the Cat”
6. My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult, “Confessions of a Knife (Part 1)”
7. Ministry, “Cannibal Song”
8. Slayer, “South of Heaven”
9. Foetus, “Cirrhosis (Amon Tobin Mix)”
10. Marilyn Manson, “Doll-Dagga Buzz-Buzz Ziggety-Zag”
11. DJ Shadow, “Stem / Long Stem / Transmission 2”
12. Secret Chiefs 3, “Horsemen of the Invisible”
13. Skinny Puppy, “Reclamation”
14. Carmina Burana, “O Fortuna”
15. Richard O’Brien, “Science Fiction Double Feature”

At first I didn’t think it would cohere well, the lyric-focused stripped-down rock of Nick Cave and Shivaree (She whispers! I love that. How many singers besides her and PJ Harvey can get away with that in a song?) with the dirty, percussive on-acid techno of Foetus and Secret Chiefs 3 with metal (nothing says Halloween, after all, like a Dave Lombardo drum fill) with classical, but the segues are mostly OK. I tried to avoid going too over the top — I mean, it would’ve been easy and obvious to just make it all Skinny Puppy, or Skinny Puppy plus sludgy death metal — because that would’ve tipped that all-important Halloween balance between fun and dark.

Thanks, Jess.