a wolf angel is not a good angel

Reduplication!

Get your own Meme Meme!

This is supposed to track how the meme moves, or something. Whatever, I’m just bored with packing.

There’s been a discussion going on over at Crooked Timber over whether the philosophy job market is as bad as everyone complains the humanities job market is (there’s the same post with different comments at TAR). Let’s ignore that — do we really care if Princeton, Rutgers and NYU (the top 3, last I heard) place all their students? That’s great, but there are far more than 3 institutions granting degrees.

This turned into a discussion of the Invisible Adjunct. What if her scholarship was good but her teaching wasn’t? What if her teaching was good but her scholarship wasn’t? Why didn’t she adjunct longer? Why was she only looking in NYC? I answered the last two, because they were based on misinformation. But then, how can we judge her scholarship?

Rana says we can’t, we’re not supposed to be; Chris says she’s a *person*, not an archetype, so just move on already.

Why did I respond? I didn’t need to fix the misinformation — IA herself comments on blogs occasionally, and could have fixed the information had she wanted to.

As I said in my (last) comment there:

The problem is that IA has become the face of the job market. If her story is such that it was her fault she didn’t get a job (gave up too early! wasn’t willing to relocate! wasn’t good enough scholarship!) then the problem is after all not in the way academia is working but just one individual who’s bitter, but really just wasn’t up to our standards, you know. And then we can all move on, safe and secure in knowing that it works just like it should, all on merit.

Like it or not — and due in part to her anonymity, I think — she is the example of the person who couldn’t get a job and left academia. It was a public leavetaking, on a site that had become many many people’s first read. (How did she eviscerate *this* Chronicle article?)

And so although she is first and foremost a person, her story, or her handle, has also become the archetype for leaving academia, and her reasons for failing are *the* reasons. This is of course untrue.

If you want to believe that merit is what gets you there, you need to also believe that lack of merit is the reason you fail. Merit takes lots of forms, including putting in your time trying to get a TT job, and being willing to go wherever should you finally get one (why would anyoen care where they live, right?).

I want to believe that the job market isn’t very good, since this is one of the reasons I left. Aeon Skoble, the person I was responding to, is (possibly) a philosophy professor who has been granted tenure as of Sept 2004. Believing that he got his job solely on merit is something he’d prefer to believe. Now, there may well be a difference between the history and the philosophy job markets (though I know someone at Michigan, and I was given the impression that it wasn’t any better than any other field). But that difference is largely ignored.

We have people arguing about world-views, in essence. What factors are the biggest factor in success? I don’t deny that merit plays a role, and I’m sure that Prof Skoble doesn’t deny that luck has a part in it. If merit plays a big enough role, then the field isn’t broken. And it’s always more comfortable to believe that.

I’ve also noticed that the “merit! All the way merit!” story comes out from not-yet-tenured faculty much more than tenured faculty. They have, presumably, seen more job searches where they have hundreds of qualified candidates, even for a job that was posted in April.

IA has become the field on which this argument plays out. I apologise to her for using her & her story as such, though I appreciate the chance to think things through that this has given me.

Apparently my job description was incorrectly described, which means that this job won’t be about 50 more hours but 60-65. Which would be fine, except it is the world’s most boring task. Luckily the additional hours are actually interesting, so it’s fine. And my boss promises me I won’t need to tag search engine queries again in the near future. (Porn, porn, Paris Hilton nude, porn, cheap domain hosting, porn, gay chat, porn, porn, xxx movie, porn, though porn could be either a porn site or a porn star.)

And I do have work for the indefinite future, and my boss has offered to sit down with me some lunch and work through what I should be doing now to move in the direction I want to. Or to introduce me to one of the big machine learning dudes at UdeM, which would be cool. Learnability is fun; this would be, too. So I really do need to get on learning to program better. I was offered a copy of Visual C++, which will be useful.

Packing is not moving so quickly. It could be because I’m not doing it so effectively. I’ve packed almost all my clothes and books and papers, but there’s just so much other *stuff*, and I don’t know what most of it is, but there’s loads, and no, I can’t get rid of it, I’m a packrat.

Kitchen stuff will wait until the last day (I have no clue how I’m going to pack it), but that means everything else needs to be done tomorrow. I have two sets of errands to do, one north of me, one south, so I’ll do one tomorrow (N) and one Thursday (S).

Must sleep now. I’m not tired, but I can’t concentrate on packing, and I need to wake up early tomorrow to get stuff done.

Sigh. At least I worked 4 hours today. 40 hours in May so far. As of Saturday, I’ll need to work superoverfull time to get this project done. I’d really like to hit 100 hours in May, which would be just feasible, maybe. It’s so hard, because this job is so *boring*. Still, the next one won’t be. The joys of constantly changing tasks.

Also I found out that there *will* be proceedings from the conference I went to. Crap. I’d like to write a paper, but (q) how likely is that? (a) not very. Still, maybe this will energise. I *still* think I’m on the right track.

It’s not Sunday anymore, but, as a response (sort of) to Rana, which comes just a bit later:

The Healing Time

Finally on my way to yes
I bump into
all the places
where I said no
to my life
all the untended wounds
the red and purple scars
those hieroglyphs of pain
carved into my skin, my bones,
those coded messages
that send me down
the wrong street
again and again
where I find them
the old wounds
the old misdirections
and I lift them
one by one
close to my heart
and I say holy
holy.

–Pesha Gertler

My trackbacks aren’t working properly for other TypePad users — I can ping non-TypePad users, though.

Are other people having this or related problems?

Although I’ve said (in real life and online) that I want my identity to be more than just what I do, I realised that I have been thinking of myself as a grad student, or a linguist, sometimes. I’m not the first, and, at the moment, not really the second either (though I hope to be again).

I’m quite bad at describing people, which irritates friends a lot. Describe your new boy, they ask, and I say “Well, he’s tall.” Then I qualify it by saying taller than me (5′3″), and I end up saying (well, recently) he’s a grad student at (school) studying (subject). And that says something, whatever set of qualities you associate with a graduate student, or an academic.

So it’s not surprising that I’m not very good at describing who I am, except for in the broad stereotypes, and sometimes in opposition to whatever I’m not.

Now I say I’m an ex-grad student, or a Canadian (which identity is always half-predicated on being not American) . . . I’m dangerously right-wing to people in the sole women’s studies class I took, left-wing loonie in the US, centrist in Quebec, slightly left-wing in Canada . . . I don’t even know how to continue this.

I intended not to be defined by my job/school. I did. And then I found it was all I had left of me.

You can blame this on me, and that’s fair. But there’s something to be said, because I worked so hard to try to do more, or be more, and I still failed. As is often mentioned, there is a feeling in academia that only peopole who are willing to subordinate everything to their research are real academics. When I look at the most successful people in my department . . . well, they’re real academics.

I can’t do that. It drives me insane(r).

Writers, for instance, have to experience live in order to write. Artists can’t sit and paint their studios again and again. But academics — your research is better if you have no outside context to look at it in? I doubt it. I firmly believe that if you can’t explain your work to some random person with no background (except for my father), then you’re not a very good researcher. Obviously you can’t explain all the *subtleties* of your work, but you should be able to give them an interesting account of it. (I’ve worked hard at being able to do that, and I think I’m successful at it, except for with my father.)

And it’s very hard to do that when you’re so surrounded by your field and only your field that you don’t have any other referents. It’s very hard when the people who get the most help and funding over the summers, the most support — are all the ones who’ve said “yes, I’ll give up everything but this”.

I ended up doing that, to a large extent, but less successfully. When I was travelling in Hawaii with people I had just met at a conference there, we spent time in the ocean arguing about different theories of morphology. Less of that was done in Berlin, for whatever reasons. (The arguing linguistics, not the being in the ocean, of which less was also done, but the reasons are clear.)

And now — now I feel some bit of emptiness because who I ended up defining myself as (almost by default) is no longer true. I’m still a good cook. I guess it’s time to build.

This movie is quite something: More. (I love stop-action.)

What Finding Nemo Character are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

and

obsessive compulsive

Which Personality Disorder Do You Have?
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(Although schizotypal fits far better.)

Talking about personality disorders, today my roommate decided that people who go on antidepressants are crazy. In one way, this is accurate, but argh. (I actually don’t take them; I respond really badly to them. But, obviously, I have.)

Every winter I fight off wearing a coat — wear a sweater well into the minuses, shiver, refuse to concede it’s cold out. Eventually — December in Montreal, almost never when I’m 400 miles further south — I give in, put on my winter coat (huge and poofy and purple, so warm I took it off in the metro, so soft at first I used to fall asleep in it like a large pillow), try to stay inside instead.

I don’t zip it up. Drives my friends crazy. I’ll shiver — having, as always, forgotten a hat (not a huge deal, I have thick long hair) and a scarf and mitts — and the wind will come into my open coat and up the jeans I never remember to wear long underwear under and they’ll look at me and shake their heads. I’m stubborn. Phil used to stand still until I zipped it up. Sometimes I got so cold I couldn’t zip it myself.

I always wear warm boots, though, and waterproof ones.

5ive minute stories

(Thanks LiL.)

The Blank Book

     The book was blank, all the words had fallen out.
     Her husband said, the book is blank.
     His wife said, a funny thing happened to me on my way to the present moment. I was shaking the book, to get all the typos out, and all of a sudden all the words and punctuation fell out too. Maybe the whole book was a typo?
     And what did you do with the words? said her husband.
     I made a package and mailed it to a fictitious address, she said.
     But no one lives there. Don’t you know, hardly anyone lives at fictitious addresses. There’s barely enough reality there to provide even a mailing address, he said.
     That’s why I sent them there. Words all mixed up can suddenly coalesce into rumors and malicious gossip, she said.
     But don’t those blank pages also present a dangerous invitation to rumors and malicious gossip? Who knows what anyone might write in his absent-mindedness? Who knows what chance might do with such a dangerous invitation? he said.
     Perhaps we shall have to send ourselves away to some fictitious address, she said.
     Is it because words keep falling out of our mouths, words that could easily start rumors and malicious gossip? he said.
     It is because, somehow, we keep falling out of ourselves, like detached shadows; shaking as if we could get all the typos out of our lives, she said.
     Well, at least, if this doesn’t hurt reality, it does, in fact, give reality a well earned rest.

Russell Edson