Oh, the humanities!

Awwww. Idnit cute? It’s her first Modern Language Association Conference. You can tell by the self-important grey suit, the modestly-heeled couture shoes and the faint whiff of vomit about her. She must be on her way to an interview, poor thing.

So I know that there are all these amazing scholars giving presentations all over my hotel right now, but I’m too giddy to possibly listen to what they have to say. In fact, I am here for one reason and one reason only: the MLA happens once a year, and it’s where hundreds of universities interview for tenure-track faculty. Me needs a job!

The interviews are a bit like speed-dating. Each university has a little table in a huge room, and you check in at the front and proceed to your school’s numbered table, then interview right in front of Gayatri Spivak and everybody. The interviews are scheduled in advance, last about half an hour and seem to be largely about the universities communicating to you whether or not you’re about to become a colleague of a bunch of pompous windbags. While it’s far from the end-all be-all of finding a job in Academia, it’s probably the A-number-one most important schlep-fest in the biz.

De rigeur for interviewees this year was the Important-looking Black Bag. I guess I missed the memo on this crucial aspect of interviewing, and found myself wondering what I would put in an Important-looking Black Bag if I had one. My travel companion’s oh-so-savvy boyfriend had supplied her with one in anticipation. Just between you and me, she used it to store her dress shoes so she could trudge through the snowy Chicago streets without dirtying them. I suspect the other folks I saw probably did the same, or else had the good sense to leave in the paper stuffing from the manufacturer so that their Important-looking Black Bags appeared to be overflowing with evidences of their professional and academic superiority, the better to psych out the other candidates.

I’m happy to say I leave my one (modest) interview feeling chuffed. If I got this job it appears I would not be surrounded by douchebags, but instead by young, dynamic people, of whom one at least bears a striking resemblance to Matthew McConaughey {sic}. Except with corduroy patches on his elbows. I’d have to really eff up my campus visit in January to take myself out of the running for this one.

And even if I don’t get that job, the search continues, and meanwhile I got to catch up with some old friends from “el Máster”. Last night I successfully navigated us to my favorite Chicago restaurant, Café Ibérico, where we reconnected over authentic (cheap!) Spanish food and wine. Nothing like old friends and a toothsome dinner to diffuse the unfamiliar, competitive feel of vying for a lousy gig with 1500 colleagues, all of whom you know to be qualified and any one of whom could be your best friend under other circumstances.