Ten days ago I saw the worst academic talk I've seen in a very long time. It is the nature of academic talks that the bad talk you're listening to right now is by its very presentness likely to seem like the worst one that you've ever heard, but still, I insist: the talk I saw ten days ago was really very bad. (I should say that I judge academic talks on a formula that involves multiplying the quality of the talk by the fame quotient of the sp...

This past weekend I attended MSA8 in Oklahoma. Yesterday I spent 14+ hours in airports trying to get home, and am very tired. Instead of the kind of hard-hitting thoughtful and intellectual journalism you've come to expect from printculture, I offer you some thoughts and observations about my first big academic conference:

After much sexier isms (for example that mixed bag “cultural criticism”) and theory (with or without a capital T) have come on the scene, most tend to find the New Critics, simply put, boring (most likely with a capital B). I'm working on a conference paper on the New Critics and critical history currently, and I've been become captivated by Richards, Ransom, Vivas, and other figures behind the “practical” and “ne...

“It is a truth universally acknowledged that an academic, even one given a clothing allowance, will dress like a schlemiel.” So says Regina Barreca in her essay “Why We Look So Bad.” It's no new observation that academics get slammed often for bad fashion. To steal a quote from Bérubé (and follow this link to check out his sweeeeet suit): Dressing fashionably in academia is like clearing the four-foot high jump. The ...

A surprisingly large amount of it involves being locked in a metal box with strangers for hours. I can fall asleep in trains or planes but upon waking I always remember that I’ve been asleep in a group of strangers, and feel a little strange myself. In planes especially you just end up being much closer to other people than you ever do otherwise, barring a rush-hour subway experience of some kind (or getting shoved into the car of a Japanese b...

Last week, I attended the MLA Convention—the annual professional meeting for not just English professors, but all literature, language, and writing professors--held this year in Washington D.C. I use the word "attended" loosely. It's been years since I've gone to the conference as an official participant, either to give a paper or to interview for jobs. For the past five years, I went to the convention to accompany my husband, to see fri...

We try in general here not to just post links to interesting items, but in keeping with the MLA interview advice I posted a couple months ago, I want to point readers who might need the help to this thread at the Chronicle of Higher Education's website. Two priceless don'ts: I heard about one interview dinner in which the interviewee finished his meal and then started forking food off the plate of the faculty member seated across from him. B...

Over in the articles blog, I'm going to occasionally post documents that don't fit with the general feel of the daily blogzine (like the guide to using Nucleus) simply as a way of creating an archive for useful things. Today's is a guide to interviewing for academic jobs at the Modern Language Association.