Crows again.

Another day appears to be creeping by without any requests for interviews at MLA.  If I go two years in a row without even getting an interview, I don't know. . . well, I don't know a lot of things.  It throws my whole career into question -- the only life I've ever tried to make, for which I've given up a lot of things I would really like to have had.  Proceeding out of that question mark, a lot of other serious problems: do I keep trying; if so, do I go back to adjuncting, looking at $24k a year, if I can even get full-time teaching, possibly without benefits, leaving myself very little time or energy for an independent creative or scholarly agenda, with my loans coming into repayment; if I don't keep trying, what do I do; can I handle not trying again; can I handle trying again.

There's time -- a little -- MLA doesn't start til January 5 and a decent number of my applications only had deadlines of Nov 15, 28, 30.  A very few had Dec 15 deadlines, and all that group but one were poet positions, so they may be interviewing at AWP at the end of February.  I've been told that people get interview requests a matter of days before the conference sometimes, and it at least used to be traditional for Yale to make their calls on Christmas Eve.  Not that Yale was hiring, at least not in my field, but the point might bear considering.

All the same: I now have two terminal degrees and a book out.  I've successfully applied for international research grants (well, fine, one), have a scholarly article coming out next year, have tons of teaching experience -- and I'm not even getting interviews.  I'm not alone, either; the discipline has vastly oversold its seats, and has been doing so for years and years.  Someone should tote up the number of new PhDs awarded in English each year for the past, say, ten years, and the number of job postings in the US for English professors.  It's got to be on the order of hundreds to one, and every year a new batch of PhDs floods out into a world without jobs for us, pushing everyone that much farther away from our intended careers.

If we think like capitalists, it's not even in higher ed's interest to improve the situation for the deeply indebted, un- and underemployed people it's producing.  Colleges and universities get very highly-trained people to teach their shittiest classes, and they get them cheap.  We're beat down, we're scrupulously trained to live poor, we're naive about other options and how to make any of them work, and we're really, really dedicated to students and teaching.  If you don't have any one of those traits, you won't make it through a PhD anyway.  Our being extremely intelligent, creative, and capable of teaching much more advanced, specialized, lively classes is somewhere between a nice lagniappe to irrelevant.  In some situations, it may be a liability, because as with any other low-end job, if you look like you might (and might be able to) jump ship, places may not hire you anyway.  Because adjunct and instructor positions are all one-semester or, if you're lucky, one-year contracts, though, fortunately our better abilities are rarely a detriment to securing insecure and exhausting employment.

It's even to a school's advantage to overwork its contract work force, because if you can pay us so little that we have to take on 4, 5, 6 classes just to get by -- and I've known people with families and kids who somehow teach 7 and 8 a semester -- we have nothing left to devote to advancement.  I remember a friend who was on a fiction-writer search several years ago, going through CVs while I was on the phone, and saying about one, "Wow, this guy hasn't done anything in six months.  I wonder if he sent us an outdated CV or something."  The person hadn't published a new story or given a reading in all of six months, and that was so deviant that it put the document itself into question, along with, of course, the applicant's candidacy.  Readings are not easy to come by, even with the blessing of a major city that happens to have a relatively thriving literary culture.  You have to go to a lot of readings, most of which will be awful; you probably ought to organize some and invite other people, to incur favors; you have to walk a very fine self-promotional line between making an ass of yourself and vanishing -- and even with all that, you still have to be right place/right time lucky.  Publications are at least as rough.  And six months out, you already start to look like someone who doesn't know enough about what s/he's doing for a committee to take you seriously.  Once you move beyond the assured poverty of working as a graduate teaching assistant into the uncertain and even worse poverty of adjuncting, keeping your CV up takes herculean dedication and a willingness to do without other interests, including a social life.  It's more to ask of oneself than the psyche is built to sustain, and a lot of us fall into that pool and never wade out -- which is only to many institutions' advantage.

In some ideal world -- in the world where I'd like to live -- college and university administrators understand how important the humanities are; humanities faculty make the importance of their fields clear.  There's a culture that encourages and, oh goodness, requires students to take literature, history, languages, philosophy, so classes can fill and departments can justify real hiring lines.  There are some schools where that culture still has a good hold, and on one hand they're elite as hell, but on the other, they're they places where I am probably best suited to teach based on my strengths.  They're by far the exception, though, and plenty of other equally well-qualified people, plus, probably, plenty of better-qualified people are applying.  Here I am, then, with the last 10.5 years of my life over and nothing yet to move on to.  I always look forward to the winter solstice, like it's going to mean something, and it never does.  It ought to.  If the universe were ordered, it would; when the universe appeared to be ordered, it did.  Sun coming back to us and all that.  Not today.

I wish humanities departments would get themselves out of the job-training trap.  What we do does not prepare students for careers, at least not careers doing anything different what we ourselves do, and it's not even ethical at this point to encourage bright young people to go to grad school in literature.  As long as we accept job training as a rubric by which to judge the worth of an aspect of education, we're fucked.  What we need to be talking about is joblessness training.  Resourceful, informed critical thought; the inquisitiveness and optimism that founds positive cross-cultural, cross-gender, cross-class interactions; the same inquisitiveness and optimism that helps you adapt to totally unexpected situations like radical career changes, or straight-up unemployment; the knowledge and attitudes you need to enjoy free or nearly-free things like having really intelligent discussions about books.  These are the things that, sometimes, make our miserable lives tolerable, and while of course one hopes the world will be kind to one's students, there's not enough kindness to go around.  They would make others' miserable lives tolerable, too, if we'd get up the rhetoric to secure the resources to provide the classes in a context of institutional respect, and get students taking them.

State universities will never go for joblessness training.  The ivies might, but it'll still be a long while before their student body has to face these pressures.  Small private colleges, maybe, depending on their values, and, well, their donors' values.  Let me tell you, I would love to get to one of these places and go to town on establishing why these programs that aren't money-makers and that don't produce money-makers deserve serious support.  As much as I loathe meetings, those, I'd go to and I think I could do real good advocating for this cause that's deep in my heart.

They'll have to interview me, though.  At the very least.  Meanwhile, it's just the anxious emptiness and the desperation.