Monday, December 28, 2009

My So-Called Career, or, Tales of MLA Past



This week, believe it or not, is the annual convention of the Modern Language Association in Philadelphia. That august professional group for college teachers has been meeting the week between Christmas and New Year’s since the dawn of recorded literary criticism.


The popular story is that the men who taught Literature needed to get away from the wife and kiddies after Christmas and meet in some cosmopolitan area to exchange ideas with each other (and body fluids with local tarts). I’m just saying it’s the popular notion of the timing. In recognizing today’s more “family friendly” university and the more diverse nature of the modern professoriate, the convention is being moved by about a week. 


Next year’s convention will be in January. In Los Angeles. Callooh! Callay!


I’m not in Philly this year. But earlier today, I started following it on twitter (#mla09). This was after being alerted by my publisher that my book was on display next to Isherwood’s A Single Man.



Mine's the little white one on the left.



The twitter feed has been kind of fun: especially a guy called “samplereality,” who is there, and a woman called, “amandafrench,” who is not. (I think that’s probably her real name, not some Bart Simpson phone prank: “I need a man to french!”) She’s been “tweckling” from Brooklyn. These are the geeks, man. 


My last MLA conference was in 2006—the last time the association met in Philadelphia. It was one of those times I went thinking I might have a job interview then didn’t get an interview but went anyway. I hung out a lot with my friend, Laurie, a scientist from Philly. She liked mingling with the literary types, who at least dress better than her scientist friends. 


The best part of the convention for me was the Gay and Lesbian Caucus party, held at the gay bookstore in Philly, Giovanni’s Room. I ran into an old friend from graduate school days, Bob, who had just had his first book published. By Routledge. (Book envy.) There it was in a nice stack in the bookstore. He had also achieved tenure at a private university on the east coast—the place he had taken a lowly one-year appointment about nine years earlier. So: book, tenure, prestige. 


Meanwhile, I also had a book coming out, although it wasn’t ready for that MLA. And it was my third. But I hadn’t achieved the kind of job he had, the kind we all think we’re going for when we work on the Ph. D. Along the way, we teach composition, the occasional literary survey course, and eat beans and rice.


Along my path, I also wound up working in the TA Development office at the University of Minnesota for my last two years as a graduate student. That turned into something of a specialty for me, and since then I’ve found myself more “marketable” as an administrator than as a teacher. I’ve held a series of administrative appointments since then, including my current job as Dean of This and That at a community college in the California desert.


Bob and I chatted while I watched a very Handsome Fellow browse books. I’d seen Handsome Fellow the previous day at an MLA session. 


At this point, readers, I had been single for about six months. The relationship ended after 13 years, and the ex-bf and I were still friendly. But my dating, nay, my meeting-people skills, never very strong, had severely atrophied. So when I saw Handsome Fellow at the MLA session I made a split-second decision that went contrary to all previous similar situations: I sat near HF and well within eyesight. Yes, I ogled him. I think he noticed. (No, I didn’t TALK to him!)


Back at Giovanni’s Room: as Bob and I are chatting with our lit crit and lambrusco, I actually took HF by the arm and brought him into the conversation. I learned his real name. I learned he was working on a dissertation, although he was already an attorney. I learned he would start a guest teaching stint at a college in Bob’s city. I learned a lot, dear reader. 


Bob, HF, and I continued the conversation at a nearby swanky restaurant. For HF and me, the conversation continued the next morning. But that’s another story.


This was meant as a tale of my career, as seen through the lens of the MLA.


I don’t remember the first time I went. I do remember my dissertation advisor telling me later, “Oh, MLA’s a bore.” I wish I had said to him what I had thought: “It depends on whose cash bar you go to.” For I had discovered, as he had plainly not, the GLBT Caucus and it’s frabjous cash bar. 


Through the GLBT Caucus, I got on my first MLA panel. Except it was cancelled. The panel was going to get me an interview. Also through the caucus, I got my first chapter in a published anthology. Except that they cut my chapter at the last minute. The chapter was going to get me a job. 


And so it went, the promise of MLA interviews (I had one for seven at-bats) leading to the drowning of sorrows at the cash bar in anonymous hotel ballrooms in great, and not so great, cities. 


However, however...


MLA 1996 (Washington, DC) proved to be all it was supposed to be. Dr. Freeman and I proposed a panel that was accepted and was not cancelled. The panel led to our first edited collection, which was actually published (in 1999) and won a prize. That book led to the next, which led to the one after that.


The first book by Berg and Freeman.



All this publishing—academic work, most of it—did not lead to the dream job that I had envisioned for myself. It did not even lead to the dreary job I half expected: teaching writing to lunkheads at some fourth rate college in some conservative state. 


Instead, I have a difficult, unexpected, academic and well-paying job in a place I like, and might actually grow to like more (can’t say “love” yet). The literary scholarship continues as a non-paying activity. Like blogging.


I expect to attend the MLA2010 in Los Angeles next year. Dr. Freeman and I are pitching two ideas, and we expect one of them at least will catch hold. 


And who knows, maybe HF will be there as well.

Friday, December 25, 2009

Not a Christmas Blog

I was writing a longish Christmas blog, one like the Christmas letters y'all used to send out. But writing about mushy holiday stuff has never been my thing, so I ditched it.

Instead, I offer you the only kind of Christmas carol I ever really liked: the classical choir stuff.



Although there is no good visual to go along with this music, it's the best recording I could find on YouTube of the Coventry Carol.

By the way, YouTube doesn't know the difference between "classical" and "classic." So when you search for "classical christmas music" you're likely to get the Taylor Dane Taylor Swift new country kind or Bing and Bowie doing "Little Drummer Boy," which some people consider a "classic."

Peace on earth would be nice.

Sunday, December 13, 2009

This Is Not a Food Blog

My closest brushes with the hard sciences in the last few years have been sitting next to a physics teacher in meetings. The social scientists I see and talk to all the time. That stuff rubs off, man, and I can talk about sociology until the cows come home in groups and organize themselves into social networks.


Previous to my current job as Dean of This and That, I was Dean of Nearly Everything at College on the Lake, Duluth. There I palled around with the geologist and the gym teacher (exercise science, if you will). Before I worked at COLD, I had many conversations with college teachers of all disciplines about their work. (Nothing gets an academic going better than the generic, “and what do you do?”)


So, to put my science knowledge into song (and who wouldn’t want to?), I’d have to say, “I know a little bit about a lot of things.” I give you Miss Diana Krall, or Mrs. Elvis Costello, depending. (Play the vid while you read the rest of this post.)





She's lovely but don't we all wish she would do something with that hair?


So when I say that I’m convinced that my new diet has a sound scientific basis, I’m going on my humanities-based knowledge of science. You say “physiology,” I say “wha??”


However, I am stubbornly persistent in asking people why they want me to do something. Not just in the “what’s in it for me” sense. But I have a trained academic’s insistence on some kind of logical connection between the solution you’re proposing and the problem at hand.


Ask Sean, My Tormentor how often I say to him, “and this will do what for me?” before I actually do the crazy thing he’s asking me to do. (My second most frequent question to SMT is, “What now?”) He gets all bio-mechanical, my eyes glaze again, and I do it. It often hurts later, so it must be working.


Thus my logic tells me Dr. Gundry’s Diet Evolution makes sense. The science, I’m a little sketchy on.





Really, who does know the intricacies of how enzymes turn on our hormones and react in our brain to trigger or turn off our hunger pangs? Do we really know that much about the brain? My eyes glaze a bit when I get to those parts. It seems to make a certain sense to me, though, so I’ve been following this diet for about six weeks.


With or without fully understanding the science, I do believe processed foods are killing us. Such things at Triscuits—not to mention McDonalds—did not exist one hundred years ago, and neither did childhood obesity. W. K. Kellogg invented the Corn Flake because he was a corn flake. To our everlasting regret, breakfast cereal is now a staple in most American kitchens. Over-processed, “enriched” with vitamins we should be getting elsewhere, conveniently boxed and overpriced, who needs it?



Good movie about that nut job, Kellogg.


(When I had braces five years ago—my family couldn’t afford orthodonture in my youth—I stopped eating breakfast cereal. Shredded Wheat and granola got caught in those tracks. I lost ten pounds in a month.)


So this diet has turned my world a little askew. For years I read and used recipes from Jane Brody’s Good Food Book, which stressed a high carbohydrate (and whole grains) approach. In fact, when I moved to California, hers was one of three cookbooks I kept. Jane has been a hard habit to break. I’m sad to say goodbye to bread, pasta, beer, bread, pancakes, and bread.


But I’m very pleased to have a set of guidelines to help me in the grocery store. Formerly a what-am-I-in-the-mood-for shopper, I now know how to choose greens, vegetables, and proteins, and I use them up before they go bad.


And, oh, yes, I lost weight.


Like electricity, I don’t have to understand how it works, it just does.

Tuesday, December 8, 2009

The Dead Poet Project Advances

One of the reasons I started this blog was to talk a little bit about the process of writing. Specifically, the fracking difficulty of it.

Seriously, I’ve been stymied by some aspects of my Dead Poet Project, as seen in a previous post.

Having called in reinforcements in the person of sometime collaborator, Dr. Freeman, I am happy to report that progress is being made. In fact, the good doctor and I have taken the next step in the research process by going to The Source.

(Now you Buffy fans might be thinking of The Source of All Evil, but really, is this a Buffy Blog? No. Thank you. Back to our regular programming.)

In this case, I mean one of the only primary sources left to ask questions about the relationship between Christopher Isherwood and W. H. Auden. Yes, it’s true. We interviewed The Widow, also know as Don Bachardy, an accomplished visual artist and writer.

Considering Dr. Freeman and I have known Bachardy for about ten years, this is not in itself a great feat. We’ve each interviewed him on numerous occasions. He’s provided help and support for our previous Isherwood projects.

And we’ve each been painted by him. A portrait of yours truly was even on display in an exhibit of Bachardy paintings in the fall of 2007, shortly after I moved to California.


The author, the painter, and the painting, October 2007.


Scholars of recently deceased writers will warn you about Reliance on the Widow. One famous poet, now also sadly deceased, even wrote as much to us about our first Isherwood project. We thought him catty.

Literary widows can have their own agenda, and sometimes this is hard to manage. Often, however, they see themselves as Keepers of the Flame. For some, that takes a lot of energy and time. And fanning.

So what makes this most recent conversation significant?

Mr. Bachardy was very forthcoming about the relationship between the DP and Isherwood. He was also informative about his own relationship with the DP and the DP’s longtime lover, Chester Kallman.

In the fifteen years or so since Isherwood died, Bachardy has done extraordinary work to keep Isherwood’s work available and to encourage scholarship on that work. He has made Isherwood’s papers available at the Huntington Library in San Marino. Through the creation of the Christopher Isherwood Foundation, he has established a fund for scholars to visit the Huntington to view the archive.


The Japanese garden at the Huntington.

So, given all the caveats about Reliance on the Widow, without the good intentions and deeds of this particular widow, we would know much less about Isherwood than we do now. And that would be a shame.