mise à jour

So here's what's up...

had job offer from Canadian school, turned Canadian offer down, listened to Candadian plea, turned down again, went to U.S. for job interview in AR, had interview, returned home, other candidate interviewed at same school, waited 9 days w/o hearing anything, sent email last night asking for time frame for decision (indicating that i have another opportunity for a one-year position that is about to expire), had no response in my inbox this a.m.

otherwise...MB and baby are fine, snow is falling, we saw fireworks last night for carnival in our little town, i am tired, i am ready to be finished with the job search.

however, MB is still sending applications, new jobs ads will come out on Monday, we have six weeks or so until all of the searches will probably be over.

posted by Chris at 4:32 AM

check it out

the mrs and i are about to put a bid in on this little looker



it's a 3/1 with a dinning, living, screened in porch and nice back deck

hope it works out...will keep you posted

posted by Jeremy at 1:20 PM

Der Passion of der Market

So over the weekend I get this beautifully compact bit of marketing:

Subject: Making "The Passion of The Christ" a success:

As most of you know, Mel Gibson's movie THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST opens on Wed., Feb. 25. If you're planning to see it, I want to encourage you to make sure to see it before SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 28. When you go to a movie opening weekend, it's as if you're casting a vote for that movie. And the ballot box closes on Saturday night. If you wait a week or two to avoid lines, you are throwing away your vote. Hollywood will already have decided whether that movie is a hit or a flop by the time they count the Saturday night grosses. And later business will not change the first impression. Some of you, of course, know this already. But please, if you want to see THE PASSION open huge (as it has every chance of doing), if you want to see it rock Hollywood back on its heels in surprise....Then please FORWARD THIS E-MAIL on to everyone you know whom you think wants this movie to do well.... Especially forward it to the folks who might not realize the importance of going to the theatre ON OR BEFORE SATURDAY, FEB. 28th.

...And then won't it be fun to see the box office numbers in the news on Monday, March 1st?....Thanks for reading.

In all thy ways acknowledge Him and He shall direct thy paths. PROVERBS 3:6

And I continue to be amazed at the grass roots Mel Gibson has grown. As much as the Anti-Defamtion League has worried about this film, they've actually been thinking along the wrong lines and should have employed a word they invented: This movie's all about chutzpah! Consider the value of this one simple email. Go to the movies, it says, before the weekend's up because if you wait, it may be too late. So we Christians are in a quandary. We testify to Jesus's resurrection in three days, but three days is all we've got to ensure that the movie about killing him remains alive. Kill Jesus a lot for these three days so Hollywood will know that we want to kill Jesus for all the Easter season!

Who wrote this email, anyway? I do not know what to hope for: was it a conscientious, but extremely na?ve Christian who doesn't know what it is he asks for, or was a scheming marketer who knows exactly what it is he asks for? Because the question must be asked: what is it that Hollywood is supposed to learn by seeing this film do well, and do well quickly? It seems to me that Hollywood always, and only ever learns the bottom line: We can make money by marketing to evangelicals! But even Eric Cartman knows that.

I'm thoroughly amazed, and I don't know whether my amazement is dismay.

posted by Greg at 10:21 AM

Games

It's time for "Name those Stomach Contents!"



(Hint: No, it has nothing to do with this guy.)

posted by Greg at 10:22 AM

everyone has congratulated me and is proud

my profs are all proud. i've passed the test; chosen the right school; my career is off to a good start; i can be the poster boy at the next recruitment weekend. "come here! we get you into schools! meet a real, live employed abd!"

all of this, of course, depends on my receiving my degree in august. the chair of the department at the school i will now be working for has no doubt that i will, he tells me. and coming from him, it isn't flattery. he is a wonderful man...who unfortunately will stepping down completely after this semester. yet, in order to do this, there will most likely be silence from me.

today i checked my messages at work. i've been too busy accepting jobs and declining jobs and searching for houses to check them. i had a message from the president of the ky school on my machine. he was telling me how, though the spanish section had not yet met to discuss who they would bring in, he still looked forward to having me on his campus for many years to come.

by now, water under the bridge is water under the bridge. but i wonder...why didn't i take that job? was it the work load that scared me? was it the fact that i might never leave that place...and what if the fundamentalists took over? was it that i have been indoctrinated into a culture that only values research institutions? was it that i wanted to please my professors and my dad, who, of course, is tickled pink but i don't think that he would have been that color had i accepted the ky job?

i know that life goes on whether one is there to play a part in it or not. i also do not necessarily think that i am necessarily all that smart. (at this level all are really smart...and some are freakin' brilliant. i am simply smart.) but, there is a way that small colleges like the ky one live and die on the hiring of good professors...professors who can teach and somehow find the time to stay relativly current with the field. they need young blood. a school like the one i have accepted an offer, a solid school, doesn't need me in the same way as the other one. they need me so that i can fill a slot...the teaching of colonial latin american literature...not because the success or failure of their school depends on having professors who will exite, challenge and motivate their students.

though, maybe the other school just thought that they needed me. no doubt their second candidate is just as qualified. however, having been a missionary kid and having attended a similar, though much more conservative school, and having a dissertation topic that engages religious literature might have made me just slightly more attractive.

this whole job search thing has been rather disconcerting to me. to have been seriously wanted by as schools as i was is strange to me because i've never thought i was all that interesting a person. what makes it all the stranger to me is that i have a rather good friend in english who has a finished dissertation, is one of the friggin' brilliant people, and one of the nicest guys to boot and he hasn't gotten jack.

i sent out 27 applications. by now i think he might be at 50. he got one interview at the mla; i got 11. he has received no call backs; i received 7. i've got a job; so far, he's got none. i am only now getting my punctuation under control; there's never been a time in his life when he hasn't written flawless sentences on the first draft.

and last of all what makes it strange is that those other schools will go on without me. but this whole job search, especially if one is courted, is about oneself and how good one is, and how this or that school won't be able to function with out the specific talents and skill-sets that one brings with one. and then one turns them down... a better offer has come along... and they move on to another candidate... and all that talk about oneself gone... and the realization that in a year or two or three, they won't even remember one's candidacy and that they will be just peachy. in fact, 3 years into my graduate career, none of the schools that i applied to for graduate studies even remembered me.

posted by Jeremy at 12:53 AM

von boyage

we wish the belgium pilgrims safe passage. may your trip, like that of our ancesters, oh so many years ago, land you in a safe harbor with a small little rock that you plant your feet on and begin your colonization of academia. of course, we wish you a much higher life-expectancy and much lower death rate than the mayflower...but then again this is february and the only flowers blooming are hothouse flowers.

here is the update...we've been torn.

i turned down the va school, despite it being a solid school. we couldn't live on that salary and the place itself wasn't very exciting, even though it was 50 miles from d.c.

i will probably turn down the ky offer and that is because the local place made me an offer yesterday.

i have cancelled the other four campus trips i was offered (however, before people get their britches in a tangle, two of my offers were from xian institutions...thus, 3 of my seven invites were xian schools...an option that many people in academia don't have)

pros about the local offer:

1-it's local
2-the pay is the highest
3-it's a research institution, thus if things don't work out no doors are closed as to future employment
4-it has an MA program
5-the first 3 years are a 2/2 load (which translates into a 35/50 split in terms of students, instead of 75-100 per semester)
6-i only need to be around on the days that i teach class
7-a lot of $ for travel
8-possibility of summer $ so i can get my diss into a book
9-we've got lots of friends in town
10-the students rock! in a class of 24, there were 5 international students, 2 40 year old students, an even mix of caucasian and african american, and a spread between 21 and 28. they formed opinions about what they read and defended it and talked. i was very impressed.

con's
1-this is a very expensive city and we can't afford the kind of house that we could if we were in lexington
2-t will most likely have to work...though, it will most likely be part time (and, i don't want to presume, even with kids, i think she wouldn't like not working, but who knows)
3-i need to publish. however, with the kind of work load, etc. i think that i can find things that i'm interested in. the only thing is to get over my own fear of failure.

so that's the situation. big house with good friends in bucolic ky, where i never write a thing in my life but have decent students with whom i have a lot of interaction. or big city with friends, (maybe the need to find a new church, even though we teach bible class), in an urban school and a rather more open future.

posted by Jeremy at 10:19 AM

Just in case you haven't yet had your fill of Howard Dean's beautiful caucus-night exhortation two weeks agoor, in case you didn't see it enough because you live in Belgium,check out the prolific remix industry that has spawned at www.deangoesnuts.com. I highly recommend the "Tom Harkin mix," as well as "Dean's Aggression."

kl & I went to see Edward Albee's "The Goat" (2002), which, we thought, the New York Observer's John Heilpern notwithstanding, was a nifty little exploration of love triangle between a man, his wife, and a goat. The goat gets the shortest shrift, though the very premise of the goat is that it is rather absurd to be a goat in a play. The play's absurdity is the kind of absurdity that requires you to try to reconcile it. How is a happily-married man who falls in love with a goat different than a man who has an affair with a womanor with another man? Yet it's an absurdity that can't be reconciled. Men just do not have affairs with goats, or if they do, they certainly do not call them affairs. It's also a play as much about the sinned-against as it is about the sinner: the wife is incredible, violent, disgusted, reviled, disbelieving. Moreover, it's the only that I can think of that has in its vocabulary, goatfucker. If I still lived in Arkansas, I'd have never known "The Goat" existed. My entire dramatic life would be wrapped in new renditions of medieval morality plays and "Peter Pan." I imagine people in Arkansas would probably tell me that it's just as well, since as how nobody really needs to see a play about bestiality anyway. But that's the sad part about it. It's not about bestiality. It's a tragedy about love.

posted by Greg at 12:58 PM