You Won't Find This on The Edge of the American West

Unless Ari and Eric get seriously into Tim Burke or Rob MacDougall territory. What am I talking about? Click here! Hey, just doing my part to help my favorite blogging historians broaden their horizons. And trying to make CitizenSE just a little bit fun again.

Hawthorne Society CFP and Announcements

Got this over the transom from Leland Person and thought I'd do my part to spread the word.

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1) The 2008 Hawthorne Society summer meeting at Bowdoin College is scheduled for June 12-15, 2008.

2) We have extended the deadline for submitting paper and other proposals for the Bowdoin conference until January 30th. Here’s the “Call”:

Nathaniel Hawthorne: Starting Over

The Hawthorne Conference organizers offer this wide-ranging rubric to include such topics as: Hawthorne's new start at Bowdoin, his beginnings as a tale writer; his "new" career as a novelist; his new (and constantly renewed) reputation; his interest in the beginnings of things (biblical, historical, personal); his new friends; his sense of the "new" vs. the "old" world; his definition of the "new" woman--and new man ("New Adam and Eve"); Hawthorne and the New Romanticism; Hawthorne and the New Classroom; Hawthorne and the (new) State of Maine; Hawthorne and the (new) structure of allegory; and Hawthorne in the new (21st) Century.

Please send paper topics by January 30, 2008,to Sam Coale, 39 Pratt Street, Providence, RI 02906 or samcoale@cox.net

3) We announce topics for ALA 2008 and MLA 2008:

ALA
Teaching Hawthorne
Hawthorne and the Performing Arts

MLA
Hawthorne as Story-Teller
Hawthorne and Emerson

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Pass it on!

Do Not Taunt Super Wacky Fun Ball Mostly Harmless Jinx

OK, so I've had a lot of fun with the notion of a Mostly Harmless Jinx this past year, but things are getting out of hand. I mean, wouldn't it be ironic if the penultimate post here was on death and we happened not to make it to Syracuse for Thanksgiving Dinner later today thanks to the season's first real winter storm? For you all, that is. Or maybe not. Who know what irony means these days?

A WINTER WEATHER ADVISORY REMAINS IN EFFECT FROM 4 AM TO 4 PM EST THURSDAY.

OCCASIONAL RAIN WILL GRADUALLY MIX WITH...THEN CHANGE TO SLEET AND SNOW DURING THE WEE HOURS OF THE MORNING. THE CHANGE OVER WILL TAKE PLACE FROM NORTH TO SOUTH WITH NIAGARA AND ORLEANS COUNTIES THE FIRST TO EXPERIENCE ANY WINTRY PRECIPITATION. IT IS NOT OUT OF THE QUESTION THAT THERE COULD BE A PERIOD OF FREEZING RAIN AS WELL OVER THE HIGHER TERRAIN SOUTH OF BUFFALO AND ROCHESTER TOWARDS DAYBREAK.

THE PRECIPITATION WILL COMPLETE ITS CHANGE OVER TO SNOW THURSDAY MORNING. THE SNOW SHOULD THEN TAPER OFF TO SNOW SHOWERS BY MIDDAY THURSDAY AND ACCUMULATE JUST AN INCH OR TWO...BUT THE COMBINATION OF MIXED PRECIPITATION AND TEMPERATURES FALLING TO NEAR FREEZING WILL RESULT IN VERY SLIPPERY ROAD CONDITIONS FOR THE THANKSGIVING DAY HOLIDAY. THIS WILL BE THE FIRST BOUT OF WINTER DRIVING CONDITIONS OF THE SEASON FOR MOST OF THE REGION...SO EXERCISE CAUTION IN YOUR HOLIDAY TRAVELS.

A WINTER WEATHER ADVISORY IS NORMALLY ISSUED FOR A VARIETY OF WINTER WEATHER CONDITIONS SUCH AS LIGHT SNOW... BLOWING SNOW... SLEET... FREEZING RAIN AND WIND CHILLS. WHILE THE WEATHER WILL BE SIGNIFICANT... THE WORD ADVISORY IMPLIES THAT SEVERE WINTER WEATHER IS NOT ANTICIPATED.

A laugh a minute that Weather.com is, is what I say.

What with imoto learning how to walk down stairs by herself and repeat whatever everyone around her is saying, letting a little winter storm stop us would be a real let-down. So in honor of our upcoming drive, a little dialogue from a trip to Buffalo the other weekend.

Onechan [interrupting the tsuma and I]: Daddy, talk to me now!
Imoto: Dada!
Onechan: No, imoto!! It's my turn to talk to daddy!!
Imoto: Dada!
Onechan: No, imoto!!! It's my turn to talk to daddy!!!
Imoto: Dada!
[repeat, adding exclamation points as you go]

Hasta la vista, baby! Happy Thanksgiving, from the Constructivist and the Full Metal Archivist....

Who Wants to Be a Tenure-Track Professor? Part I: The Letter

Not everyone does, first of all. But as that's a personal preference--and likely a temporary one, at that, as long as life off the tenure track in the U.S. is less like a Fulbright Lecturing Grant in Japan and more like what non-Japanese adjuncts go through there--I'll focus today (and in this CitizenSE series) on the search for a tenure-track job in my field, English. Since every discipline is different, this'll only be of interest to people outside English for comparative purposes, and even for people in English it'll be most useful for those contemplating applying for a job at an institution like mine, a public regional university. Bardiac has a series going already on this exact topic, while Tenured Radical provides an instructive contrast from the liberal arts college side. (I'm looking forward to The Little Professor, Dr. Crazy [now that her book manuscript is done], and Dr. Virago [now that she's decided not to go on the market herself] also picking up on it). But for what it's worth, here's advice on the application letter from a recently-tenured professor who's been closely involved a good number of searches in his first decade on the job.

Should you write it in the first place? You don't have to apply for every job in your field. In fact, fresh out of grad school you shouldn't even apply for a job with a heavy teaching load--4/3 or higher is pretty much the norm in the public "satellites"--unless you love teaching, can speak and write cogently about your experience and approaches, and can realistically finish the dissertation before you start the job. Or unless there's something about the school and/or the location that make that job too attractive not to take a shot at it before it's snapped up. Keep in mind you'll be going up against people struggling to escape the adjunct track or another tenure-track job/place. Unless you can seriously imagine yourself living and working there, save yourself the time, money, and anxiety and focus on the jobs you care the most about.

Do your research. It took me three searches before I landed a tenure-track job. For all of them, even the last one, I was mostly focused on Research I universities and liberal arts colleges, at which I was getting to the MLA interview stage at a decent rate but no further. My three on-campus visits (the first during the second search) were all at public satellites, so by the last one, I kind of figured out how to handle myself in them, and lo and behold, that's the one that resulted in an offer. The irony is that even though the school that hired me was in my home state, I had never heard of it before I saw their job ad. So I actually had done a fairly serious amount of research on the place to help me decide whether to apply in the first place. Which brings me around to the point of this paragraph. Since the "academic job market" has gotten even more competitive while information about universities and departments has become so much easier to get over the past decade, it's imperative to figure out something about your audience before you customize your standard letter. And if you aren't motivated to customize your letter, maybe you shouldn't be applying to a school you've never heard of in the first place.... I can't tell you how many letters by people from top-notch grad programs ended up in the reject bin over the past ten years b/c they were obviously composed with a much different kind of institution than ours in mind--but it's a big number. And an hour or two of research could have made the difference for a lot of these people.

OK, so given how unknowable your actual audience is, how do you customize your letter? It's true, at most a few people from the personnel committee will be reading your letter the first time around, although if it's good everyone will eventually have read it, as will those interviewing you at MLA (several of whom are likely not to be on the personnel committee). The literature searches I've been closely involved in all involved hundreds of applicants, too many for any one person to read. So we would try to ensure that each letter had two sets of eyes on it, and three if there was a serious disagreement between the original pair. In practice, however, unless the letter and c.v. screamed "top candidate," it was unlikely to survive the first cut--narrowing the several hundred down to the 25-50 top candidates for the 8-12 MLA interview slots. In some searches, we asked for a full dossier--evidence of teaching effectiveness, a writing sample, letters of recommendation, and sometimes more--from this pool. Other times, we asked for less. More on that stage later--the key issue now is how to increase the likelihood that your letter makes the first cut. Well, this is where your research on the school/department comes in.

• Clearly you're applying to a teaching institution, so make the case from the start that you're ready to step right in and step up as a teacher. If you must discuss your research early, do so in a way that sets up your teaching paragraph well. A bit on your overall approach (to course design as well as pedagogy) is fine, but well-chosen specifics (like teaching awards, experience with designing your own courses, patterns in your teaching evaluations, the kinds of courses you're looking forward to designing at the school) can help show the personnel committee that you've thought seriously about what you can contribute to the department.
  
• From looking at the list of faculty and their teaching and research interests, you can make a quick approximation as to what kind of search this is: augmenting a department strength, filling a "coverage" gap or otherwise balancing or diversifying the department, moving the department in a new direction entirely.... You can also get a rough sense of how much hiring they've been able to do in the previous decade. The key thing to look for is how many colleagues in your fields and sub-fields you can expect to have, not least as a quick estimate of the likelihood that the personnel committee will have anyone in them on it. Reminding yourself that you're writing for non-specialists will do you a world of good--not just in describing your research and suggesting how it matters, but also in framing your teaching and the kinds of courses you could (and most want to) offer. This will also come in handy as you decide what other material to send the school and prepare for the MLA interview (if all goes well).
  
• You can also learn a lot by looking at the requirements of the major and whatever course descriptions you can find (online syllabi, catalog, etc.). Does everyone teach comp regularly or occasionally? What kinds of introductory-level courses would you be expected to teach and how are they organized--as introductions to the discipline, surveys of British and American lit, genre-based world literature courses, criticism- or theory-or "teaching the conflicts"-based courses, or what? On a 4/3, you'll get plenty of opportunities to teach in your specialties, but you'll also be pitching in on the required courses. If the catalog tells you how often the department's courses are supposed to be offered, it'll also give you a pretty good sense of where faculty and student interests lie at that school.
  

OK, so I know something about the place, the school, faculty, and department...is there anything else I can do to show my interest in a place besides customizing my teaching and research paragraphs? Yeah, since capital-starved institutions--and you can bet that public regional universities fit this bill--rely so much on adjunct labor, the service responsibilities on tenured and tenure-track faculty are very high. So any experience you have in helping create or sustain or improve an academic institution is worth describing. Also, your last paragraph is a good place to drop any hints you feel need to be dropped. Often faculty at public satellites (especially older ones not familiar with any job market since the 1970s) are wondering (with various levels of anxiety, self-deprecation, paranoia, and cynicism) why you are applying for the position in the first place. If you can close with any honest and specific answers to this question, do it.

When we're reading letters and c.v.s, we're not just judging the quality of the candidates in the abstract, we're also trying to figure out how seriously they're interested in us and what kind of colleagues they'd be. We don't want to waste an MLA interview on someone for whom we're just a "safety school" or a "practice run." We want to be in a position where we'd be excited to work with any of the MLA interviewees. Given how much time and energy goes into the search on our side, we don't want a failed search. And given that we're competing with other teaching institutions and often research institutions for our top candidates, we have to be prepared to move down our list quickly if our first offer gets turned down. While a great letter alone won't get you in our top 10ish, it can either open or close the door. Taking the extra three hours to research us and revise your standard letter accordingly is time well-spent. And if you think otherwise, it's better not to send the letter at all.

[Update (10/21/07): undine has joined in.]

On Leaving Academia

For those wondering what life after leaving the tenure-track can look like, I'll briefly note that one of my best friends who did this is working on an investigative documentary TV series that just won an Emmy for this episode. Watch them all!

On Devi and Rowling

Remember when I said it would take about, oh, a month to start some Deathly Hallows blogging? Me neither. Let's just say that never happened, shall we? Why? Well, I'm ready with Harry Potter 7 spoiler #1, of course! Are you sitting down?

Too bad I have no idea how to put things "below the fold," because this one's a doozy. I'll be as coy as possible in case anyone's even further behind the fantasy zeitgeist than I am. (You know, besides the three-quarters of my students in my Postcolonial Hawthorne class today, my dad....) The good news for you is that you don't even have to go back to my now-7-months-old-and-more Devi blogging to get this one. Quite the opposite--it's actually one where Rowling clarifies Devi.

Let's put it this way: remember how The Boy Who Lived lives up to his name towards the end of Deathly Hallows? How he's unexpectedly (if you're anything like me, that is) empowered by his acceptance of his own death and transformed by his courage in acting on it? Assuming you do, you'll appreciate how weirdly similar this is to the acceptance and transformation Devi details for the Nagesias in "Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay, and Pirtha." That is all. A cross-cultural structural parallel that may well top my Douglas Adams-Salman Rushdie one. You may go.

[Update: Uh, wait! Before you go, check out the slyly disguised Harry Potter 1 reference in paragraph 3 of this otherwise deathly serious article. My year will be complete if Martindale owns up to it here!]

Abe Out

Back in the day, I did a number of political posts at Mostly Harmless that looked critically at the ties between right wingers in the U.S. and Japan. (Yes, March feels like "back in the day.")

I never came out with a prediction that Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe would resign, like I did for then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez (ok, so I was off by a few months there--sue me!), and now I'm wishing I did, because he just did!

Now I'm wondering which party is in more trouble, Japan's LDP or the U.S.'s Republican Party? Given that the Republicans have already lost both legislative houses and neither Cheney nor Bush has offered to step down, I'd have to say it's the LDP. But there's still time for the Republicans to catch up with the LDP. Go for it, y'all!

Itai vs. Dame: On Conversations with a 16-Month-Old

Imoto's first language, to the extent she uses language, is Japanese. I'll be writing about onechan's adjustment to life in English tomorrow, but today I want to look at imoto's. Unlike her older sister, who started using words like "wan-wan" (the sound a dog makes in Japanese, but also the name of the lead character on Inai Inai Ba, both girls' favorite toddlers' show on Japanese tv) and "atta" (that--often in reference to a dog she spotted in the distance while we were driving around) from a very young age and built up quite an extensive vocabulary of complaints in Japanese in the first half of her first year, imoto has been much more what we expected from a toddler hearing both Japanese and English at home. She's a real listener and in Dunkirk has gone back to doing what she was doing our last month in Fukuoka--repeating a lot of words and sounds. (For a stretch there in Chiba, she was talking in phrases and sentences in a language mostly of her own invention.) Every once in a while she'll pull out the right word in the right contest ("ohayo" to baba one morning, "owata" when she finished breakfast this morning), just to show off what she knows. But she's found she can get around all day mainly using only two words: "mama" and "itai."

At first, I thought she was calling me "Mama" mistakenly, or out of a desire to tease me (this is actually quite plausible, given her sense of humor--she started doing "inai inai ba" [peekaboo] to other people and giggling uproariously at the drop of a hat before she was 6 months old, if memory serves [and it usually doesn't]), but then I realized that she uses "mama" to let someone else know that she wants something from them. When pressed, she'll throw in another word--like "gigi" for some kind of drink (again confusing, because that's the baby word for grandpa, really)--to specify what it is she wants. But in most circumstances, she'll repeat "mama" until someone figures out what she wants.

"Itai!" is what you say when you're hurt in Japanese--like "ow" or "ouch" in English. But imoto uses "itai" for anything she doesn't like. She'll throw herself on the ground and repeatedly scream "itai" if stop her from doing something she really wants, for instance, which got us all kinds of looks when she did this in public in Fukuoka, Chiba, and Tokyo. Nothing like the sight of a gaijin carrying around a gaijin-looking toddler who's screaming "itai" into his ear in a supermarket to get the concerned looks....

Imoto's gone from being the Happy Science Girl to being the Fearless Stunt Girl. Thanks to onechan and her friends, imoto is all into climbing everything, "because it's there." So the words she most often hears from the tsuma and me are ones like

• "dame!" [dah-meh]: stop it!
  
• "abunai": that's dangerous!
  
• "kyotskute": be careful!
  
• "yasashii": be nice/gentle!
  

That last one usually comes up when onechan's throwing a tantrum of her own and of course becomes an easy target for pinching, poking, and hair-pulling.

These last two weeks, on Tuesdays and Thursdays, imoto has been going with her big sister to the day care place onechan went to most of the year before we left for Fukuoka. From next Tuesday on, however, she's on her own. Onechan is graduating to my university's children's center (more on this tomorrow). Oh, and did I mention that as much of a daddy's girl onechan is, imoto is a mommy's girl, and more? So of course we're more worried about how she's going to adjust to day care in a second language than onechan, for whom our anxieties are more diffuse and complex (on which more tomorrow).

As we were getting ready to leave Japan, I kind of figured that imoto would have the easiest transition of us all, but now I'm wondering if hers is going to be the most difficult, and by how far. It's hard enough for onechan to get her head around the fact that the way she talked to her friends in Japan will be incomprehensible to her friends in Fredonia and Dunkirk, much less the idea that most adults in the U.S. have even less Japanese than her dad (whom she's been teaching about a word a day)--what imoto will make of all this, I have no idea. I know she'll adjust and adapt eventually--but in what ways and with what effects on her personality and her Japanese, I just don't know.

The folks in Buffalo we are just starting to get to know who organize or use the yochien-like day care arrangement on Saturday mornings and Japanese language classes for older kids all emphasize that once the kids hit elementary school, it's tough to get them to keep speaking Japanese at home. But we haven't heard so much yet about 1-year-olds' adjustments. If you have, please let us know--thanks!