Now it is the weekend, and we are stomping our feet with Henry Gray and the Cats. If I were another blogger, I would be Stephen Bess, because he goes to the most galleries, readings, bookstores, cool cafés, and interesting urban corners, and he has the best records. When I still lived in town, and the town still was as it was, I had a life to rival Stephen Bess’. Here in the country I mostly paddle around in my little pirogue, but tonight, channeling Stephen somehow, I have seen and heard Henry Gray.
Henry Gray is now 83 years old with flashing wicked eyes, and he tears up the keyboard. Stephen would have taken a picture, but I was taken by surprise. “I wanted to write this in monument, but I only had ink. I wanted to write this in diamond, but I only had blood.” (Alice Fulton, Feeling as a Foreign Language: The Good Strangeness of Poetry.) Here, fictionalized for discretion, is how I came upon Henry Gray.
6 AM: Wake up, get up, look at notes for the day, remember what it is I am to do and where to put my intentions, decide how to manage the fact that I have not finished typing up notes and handouts for my third class.
8 AM: Pick up job candidate at hotel, have breakfast, take to campus, deposit with department chair.
9:30 AM: Teach. Fortunately I am giving a midterm and I can grade essays while students write.
11 AM: Pick up job candidate in department office, show him special collections in library, deposit with dean. Buy coffee and a sandwich at a roadside stand, walk back.
12:30 PM: Teach. Fortunately students are presenting their papers. Fortunately they are ready and I comment, but do not have to fully talk.
2 PM: Teach. Fortunately my morning meditation on the novel at hand has worked. I can lecture and lead discussion without notes.
3:30 PM: Set up room and equipment for candidate’s talk.
4 PM: Candidate’s talk.
5:30 PM: Walk in park.
7 PM: Meet department and candidate for dinner in the stuffy restaurant which, for reasons I have never understood, we always attend on these occasions.
9 PM: Take candidate toward hotel, suffering somewhat from the gloom of that restaurant. Dream of fresh air while driving and talking. Think, with a slight tinge of desperation. This is a good enough candidate and I want to hire. It is the end of March and if we are to hire anyone, we must do it soon. But he has come from a provincial, but sophisticated foreign city, he is at least ten years younger than any of us, and it is his first time in the United States. After the incredibly stilted and stuffy day he has spent, he has got to have doubts.
PZ to Candidate: This is an unorthodox invitation for an American job interview. We ought to sit in your hotel bar, have a whiskey, and talk. But it has been a long, bureaucratic day and I was thinking that after leaving you, I would go out, to a rather informal place on the north side of town. There is music, sometimes good and sometimes not, but we could take a look. The whiskey will be bad and there will only be domestic beer, I am warning you.
Candidate (he really said this): I have read Poet in New York. García Lorca went to such places. I would be enchanted to see one.
PZ (turning around, crossing her fingers, hoping there really is music tonight, because if not the wandering barrio with houses all askew will only make a possibly bad impression worse): It’s a helluva good universe, and it’s right next door. Let’s go.
Once we clattered across the train tracks I heard music spilling out of a barroom and was much relieved. I couldn’t place the sound, though – who here now has that old Chicago edge? Inside rolling and tumbling was Henry Gray, with red beans and rice served in the back.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
Way to go for the hard sell. Seriously, though, I wish I would get offers like this when I go on job interviews. Then again, my subject suggests to people that I am white, stuffy, and conservative, so they probably assume I would not be interested in diversions from the path.
I don’t know why people make these assumptions or run interviews in such a conservative manner. On the other hand, I was really shocked, in my first job, to see how the other new hires, 29 year olds like me, were so suburban and senior citizen-y.
Still, I don’t know that I have done this guy a favor. Years ago I was seduced down here the same way. I don’t regret it as it was the best offer I had anyway, and all the cultural activities we went to during the interview (there were many) were a great introduction/orientation to the place. But more recently someone else from my same graduate school (other department, I only met her later) was seduced down here this way. She resents it because it caused her to turn down really good offers in favor, she thought then, of having a life. She had no idea how unsophisticated we really are! 😉
It’s really weird how old you have to become as soon as you accept a tt job. (Especially in light of how infantilizing the entire ass’t prof experience is). For me it felt a little like aging 15 years overnight.
It’s always hard to know how to feel about candidates you end up really liking: I always wonder if the people who turn us down aren’t making the best decision.
Whatever happens, he had one really interesting evening!!
I always want to tell the ones I really like, “Look, don’t do this to yourself,” but I don’t. I do give warnings like “remember that Xyz Studies is not an administrative unit here, do not expect it to have the power of one.” Some people disagree with me on this, but I always hate it when people interviewing me try to pretend the programs they had are larger than they are. It is so transparent, and it makes them look so provincial.
Isn’t it the truth about how middle aged one is supposed to suddenly be? And you are quite right about the odd combination of infantilization and geriatrization. Maybe this is the recipe required for the formation of bourgeois identities and the inculcation of conformity.
I experience all our junior faculty as much older than myself and my nonacademic friends my age, although in fact they are mostly quite a bit younger. I don’t identify with them any more now than I did with my peers when I was new … I was in graduate school with sophisticated people but since then I find faculty are not as sophisticated as regular people.
I wonder if the combination of infantilization and geriatrization could explain my parents. When my age was in the single digits I could not understand why both my parents seemed at the same time younger and more immature than I, and older and stiffer than my grandparents. Perhaps this was caused by my father’s assistant professorship.
(Laugh.) I think there is a factor of university life that makes one artificially young–because one spends so much time among 18-24 years olds, and maybe because one puts off property ownership and buying insurance policies for an unconscionable length of time. But then, all of a sudden, one must speak as the voice of authority.
I can’t live up to this standard. In my current job I can be anonymous, but in my first one, I lived in a small town where the college was the main thing. It was not considered ok that I rented instead of buying a house because renting meant that I didn’t have enough gravitas and stability and signaled that I didn’t think of myself as permanent. (And this is a huge mistake, ass’t profs take note: you have to find a way to signal that you are there to stay or people will feed on your self doubt). It was not considered ok that I ordered pizza, because students could see me in my inadequate for a professor rental setting and so on. But I couldn’t pretend to be old very well, either. Mostly because the only models for being old were my many old male colleagues.
I think you can console yourself with the knowledge that even if you said “don’t do this to yourself” you wouldn’t be listened to. If reading blogs has taught me anything, it is that the knowledge gap between the advanced ABD and the tenure track professor with 2-3 years of experience is about three times the actual chronological difference between those career stages.
Knowledge gap – I know. Graduate students are convinced anyway, it seems, that they know more about what it is like to be an assistant professor than an assistant professor does. I don’t know why.
The looking permanent thing is true too although I wouldn’t sacrifice my identity or anything for it.
It sure is true how destructive it is not to be able to lead an adult life (in certain ways) for so long. Although, again, the error academics seem to make is to think they should *act middle aged* when really what they need is some adult style power.
HMMM: more of the simulacrum: instead of *having* appropriate adult style power and authority, people *act* middle aged – could it be?
HMMM: more of the simulacrum: instead of *having* appropriate adult style power and authority, people *act* middle aged – could it be?
The palpable lack of an adult style of behaviour in adults was one of the first things that really threw me when I arrived in the West. It’s like we’re all meant to be children — or as Nietzsche said, patients and nursemaids. I liked my short stint in the army because it held people to much more difficult standards. I think it is difficult for people here (those not into martial arts of adventure sports, which also holds people to more difficult standards and forces a kind of maturity) to realise that I by no means have the kind of childish sensitivity that would enable me to participate in the delibitating group sport that is now referred to as Western society.
Patients and nursemaids, I like that. It’s interesting – the do-not-be-an-adult thing is something I associate with Reaganism, from my perspective it started to be fomented around then. I was away from 1980-81 and then again from 1985-87. When I got back in 1987 it was really consolidated.
This is why I like people who have been in the army – they are always more grown up. That is odd as I am anti-militarist and all, but ex-military do tend to have character and this is what I like.
Western society as debilitating group sport, that’s good. I actually walked into my department office the other day and found two different types of staff people and an assistant professor having a “group hug” – literally. Do they teach that cloying behavior in training seminars, or do people just absorb it out of the air?
Do they teach that cloying behavior in training seminars, or do people just absorb it out of the air?
I actually think that this kind of behaviour is a test for detecting in-group and out-group motivations. The emotionality of Western culture is a very effective control device, requiring people to extravert whatever is inside, and put all their cards on the table.
“The emotionality of Western culture is a very effective control device, requiring people to extravert whatever is inside, and put all their cards on the table.”
That’s astute. I struggle with this: I know how to put all the cards on the table and think this should be a solution, but also feel put upon that I should have to.
I also note that it isn’t required, or isn’t required to be sincerely done by, people in the traditional elites. Note how Obama, for instance, has to keep saying all these heartfelt things, whereas McCain (I think) is allowed more interiority and Bush is allowed utter insincerity.
Yes, I noticed that (your last paragraph).
Although maybe the interiority is allowed at times because people mistakenly project their own characteristics onto a good old boy, and therefore believe him to be intrinsically known, whereas the outsider identity is considered to be inscrutable in his or her interiority and therefore more dangerous.
I know that there is something in myself that does not accommodate the pressure to be perpetually in touch in ways that gush. I can attempt to do so (as when I was trying to do my dip. ed.) but what happens is a greater and greater inner distancing from this kind of performance, to the point that it takes enormous and unsustainable energy. Thus I do not pass the test in terms of selling myself out.
Mistaken projection, I’m sure that’s true (your second paragraph).
I can’t do the performance insincerely – either I’m real with it, or I’m distanced and all business (although I do like to converse). I much prefer the latter mode.
I can’t do the performance insincerely – either I’m real with it, or I’m distanced and all business (although I do like to converse). I much prefer the latter mode.
Yes, well, since I became mature in an entirely different cultural context, I got into the habit of expecting that unless I can be somebody else, then I’m not even going to have the minimal risk of success within this culture. So at the time, I was still thinking in this way — and rightly so (in terms of chance for social success), I believe. The problem was that I couldn’t change my culture enough to pull it off.
It is very white and middle class, though. The first time I encountered it full on was when I worked for an elite New England SLAC. My God, it was strong. There was no chance at all of success, social or other, if you were not all gush. Absolutely amazing. Elsewhere people are more sophisticated. Much more.
There was no chance at all of success, social or other, if you were not all gush. Absolutely amazing. Elsewhere people are more sophisticated. Much more.
This seems to be the particular emphasis in Perth (and perhaps Australia as a whole). It is much less a requirement for males, but if you are female you are supposed to put all of your cards on the table, and so open yourself up for both the possibility of acceptance and the likelihood of censure. If you do not do this, it is considered to be “failure to communicate”.
The latter terminology caused me a great deal of confusion wayback, in the workplace bullying situation, because I thought the communication was something different. I didn’t realise what it meant was, “we resent you because we are unable to read you like a book.”
This is a good – very accurate – description of the workplace bullying situation I am dealing with at this very moment.
How fortunate your candidate was to have you shepherding. And how fortunate you were to have to be shepherding — because otherwise you might not have known Henry Gray was playing. The Universe does smile on occasion, doesn’t it? I wish I had been there. I could use a little Henry Gray live about now.
Wow! My life sounds exciting when it’s put into words. 🙂 Thank you. I wish I could’ve been there. I know that it was cool.