I. Hate. Applications.

Selected Truths From The Academic Job Search:

• The higher the quality of the school, the less likely they are to demand a transcript along with your initial application materials. Corollary: anyplace that wants you to fill out a general employment form in order to apply for an academic position is not worth your time unless community-college jobs are your bliss.
  
• Somewhere a little south of the Mason-Dixon Line, department chairs go from being "Professor So-and-So" to "Dr. So-and-So." Of course, you have to make allowances for transplanted Yankees.
  
• Undergraduate institutions which refer to themselves as "colleges" are usually much more secure in their identities and have larger endowments than undergraduate instutions which refer to themselves as "universities." (When it comes to endowments, by the way, size matters.)
  
• Judging from their websites, every institution of higher education in America is located on a sunny, scenic campus populated by concerned, involved faculty and a diverse, energetic, highly committed student population.
  
• On a related note, humor is dangerous, especially in print.
  
• Karma is alive and well in academia. (That's karma in the non-technical Western sense of universal payback for good or bad deeds; properly speaking, karma only works if you buy into reincarnation, or at least metempsychosis.) The patronage system works even better, but it's difficult to get properly hooked into that before you get a job.
  
• If you can't be with the one you love, love the one you're with. At least until next year.
  

Chapter One is finished -- well, as finished as it's going to get, printed out, and securely in a FedEx Letter Pak on its way to my advisor. (Once again, I ask, how did people survive in academic before the 90s? I couldn't do without email, FedEx, my cell phone, my laptop, or half a dozen web-based databases, not to mention all the resources on CD-ROM. Yes, I am a techno-weenie. Now, back to your previously scheduled kvetching.) Before I go home tonight, I merely have to get out the Dec. 1 applications...as well as the materials for this other possibility which popped up today and which I don't want to jinx by discussing. (No, not a job consulting for the Angel writing staff. They couldn't afford me. ;) Gee, I wonder when I'll have time to go to the grocery store. Sunday, perhaps?

It's been weeks since I posted a good Lego Art Link. This is more of a Lego engineering link, but it's still amazing: a Rubix Cube Solver Robot rendered in the timeless Danish medium.

My ignoring-the-cold-until-it-goes-away-while-popping-Vitamin-C-pills strategy seems to be working -- I feel significantly less Living Dead than I did yesterday. (Almost all of yesterday's monster post about Angel was written on the plane Monday afternoon, you see.) Now I just have to check a handful of footnotes, send off this chapter -- yes, I have been saying that for the last three weeks, but this time I really mean it -- then do the half-dozen job applications with December 1st deadlines and polish my job talk for the upcoming Campus Visit. On the plus side, someone brought doughnuts into the office this morning. Doughnuts are an important part of a healthy breakfast, along with assorted forms of hot tea. And I'm so very, very glad that my mother (the health nut) doesn't read this journal.

As part of the occasional feature on Why Judaism Is Fun, I present this excerpt from the Weekly Halachah list at Torah.org, addressing some finer points of the rabbinic prescription to utter a blessing before/upon smelling a pleasant odor:

A cup of coffee is poured for the purpose of drinking. No blessing is said over the aroma since the purpose of pouring the coffee is for drinking and not for its aroma. If, however, one specifically opens a fresh jar of coffee in order to smell it, a blessing is recited. No blessing should be recited over instant coffee.

I left out the footnotes, and I don't regularly think to say any of the three forms of that particular blessing (although it's a pretty darn good idea, as rabbinic prescriptions go), but...isn't it great that there's a religion enlightened enough to recognize that instant coffee is fundamentally NOT the same as regular coffee? In fact, instant coffee is usable only as a very occasional food additive (in, say, mocha-chocolate-chip cookies, although instant espresso powder works better) or in cases of dire caffeine emergency. I'm sure there's a halakhic decision somewhere to this effect.

What’s the matter with Angel this season in a one-liner: “Apocalyptic prophecies aren’t exactly a science.”

There are many contenders, but that line is almost definitely my all-time favorite Angel quote. It comes from “To Shanshu in L.A.,” a strong contender for my all-time favorite Angel episode; if you’re familiar with that episode, you can probably guess that it’s spoken by Wesley Wyndham-Pryce as he tries to assure Angel that the Prophecies of Aberjian don’t necessarily predict his imminent demise, obvious translation notwithstanding. If you just started watching Angel this season, though, you’d have no idea who the speaker could be. And therein lies my beef with the show’s current season: apocalyptic prophecies, and virtually everything else, are being presented as “a science” in the most limiting possible sense of the term. (Warning: the following diatribe will be unintelligible unless you watch Angel, and will contain some general spoilers for the entire run of the show so far.)

Most native English-speakers don’t spend a lot of time thinking about what “science” means; we know that it denotes a certain method or procedure by which knowledge is gained, and we assume that the paradigmatic science is something like, say, physics. “Hard” science, as opposed to “social” science. Metaphysics doesn’t even enter the picture. If you happen to have studied French or German, on the other hand, you may be struck by the fact that science in French and Wissenschaft in German are much broader in meaning. If you happen to have studied nineteenth-century American or British intellectual history, you might even have noticed that the distinction between “science” and “theology” which we take for granted is a creation of the late nineteenth century. But most of us haven’t. The writing staff of Angel, all too clearly, have not.

I hate to even put this in writing, but I think “Happy Anniversary” was a portent. “Happy Anniversary,” in case you have sensibly blotted it out of your memory, was the extremely underwhelming S2 episode in which the Host recruited Angel (then in the midst of his Beige Period) to stop a depressed physics grad student from using his new time-stopping invention to freeze himself and his about-to-break-up-with-him girlfriend in, er, medias res. Of course, the student -- Gene -- was being aided and abetted by a group of demons who wanted to end all human life and who considered Gene their prophesied Messiah; they had provided Gene with the breakthrough equation and were stationed in his building’s laundry room with computers in order to expand the time-stopping field across the entire planet. (Don’t you just love all those positive depictions of organized religion on Angel? But I digress.) Naturally, Angel stopped them just in the nick of you-know-what. There was also a teeny-tiny B plot involving Wesley, Cordelia, and Gunn which should really have been the A plot; the whole business with Gene was ripe for the sort of parody that occurred in Buffy’s “The Zeppo.”

Unfortunately, "Happy Anniversary" was played dead straight, and I emphasize “dead.” Apparently, Science -- as defined here by some wacked-out equations, a Rube Goldberg contraption, and some mildly geeky “physics” researchers whose research fields included carpet mold (!) -- has the power to end the world if used improperly. Ooooh. Aaaah. Does anyone else feel sudden nostalgia for the subtlety and ideological sophistication of Buffy’s S4 Initiative arc? Actually, there’s a key distinction: the Initiative repeatedly demonstrated that their “scientific” methods of demon identification and capture were less effective than Buffy’s Giles-led historical research and highly individualized strategies. “Happy Anniversary” indicated that religious/cultural/historical beliefs, not to mention those dratted prophecies, can be reduced to hokey plotlines based on a remarkably narrow and frequently mistaken definition of “science.” Welcome to the sillier fringes of the late nineteenth century, everyone! (We’ve been here before. Think gender issues.)

The only real advantage “Happy Anniversary” had was that it came right after “Blood Money” and featured only garden-variety plot holes instead of gaping portals into other dimensions. Speaking of which…remember Pylea? Remember how the dimensional portals turned out to be controlled by Fred’s equations, so that the Pylean prophecies of a Messiah were eventually fulfilled by some garbled nonsense intended to indicate “physics”? When it came to getting back, the Angel Investigations team (by which I really mean “Wesley”) was inexplicably dumbed down and had to rely on two outside sources of information. On the one hand, we had the Pylean priests’ “trionic books,” which provided the ooh-ahh moment of spelling out “wolf-ram-hart” (a completely abandoned plot point, if it was ever intended as such) and nothing else concrete; on the other, we had Fred and her oh-so-scientific expertise with dimensional portals. Which of these made it back to L.A.? Pylean cultural insights and theology: 0; warmed-over Star Trek physics: 1.

There seems to be an ever-more-persistent trend towards disenchantment and demystification within the Angelverse this season, centering around this narrow version of “science” and thus directed against phenomena which might qualify as religious but which are definitely supernatural. I might not mind this so much if it weren’t so, well, shallow: science is, once again, defined very narrowly by meaningless equations, Rube Goldberg contraptions, and a mildly geeky “physicist.” Cordelia’s visions operate via energy waves and can be faked or intercepted by “some kind of psychic hacker” (“That Vision Thing”); it’s been a long time since they were set on fast-forward by a prophesied “warrior of the underworld” and cured only by a magical incantation (“To Shanshu”). Billy’s demonic powers can be identified by looking at his blood under a microscope and draw on male “primordial misogyny” in, one presumes, the brain (“Billy”); contrast, if you must, the far cheesier extradimensional demon chicks who attract and then burn up human men but whom nobody ever thought to ask for blood samples (“She”). Wolfram & Hart is proceeding against Angel via building-code violations and illicitly bugging his office (“Over The Rainbow” through “Quickening”) rather than, say, resurrecting his vampire ex-girlfriend in order to turn him to the dark side for a final battle (“To Shanshu” through “Reprise”). The complex and expensive spell maintaining Caritas as a violence-free zone is turned off by a word from the utterly pointless and silly Transuding Furies in “That Old Gang Of Mine” and turned on, even more bafflingly, by a demon electrician in “Lullaby”; in both episodes, the spell turns out to be too literal to fulfill its intended purpose. Fred (who is about as much of a physicist as I am) uses a computer to decode the calendrical references of the Nyazian prophecies (“Offspring”); Wesley got the date of the beast of Amalfi right without a computer (“To Shanshu”), and we won’t even go into Giles’s abilities to explain prophecy timing (Buffy S1 and a few other places). The computer, by the way, is only a research tool; unlike the computers of Buffy S1-2, there are no demons trapped inside, no global e-mails about prophecy coming through it, and no rituals required after it is used to create a new spell. (The last decent ritual we saw on Angel -- Lilah signing a contract in blood doesn’t count, people! -- was the ridiculous goat-sacrifice Angel interrupted wayyyyy back in “Reprise.” Compare and contrast to S1.)

Even those prophecies have become remarkably mundane: back in S1, you’ll recall, the key word was shanshu, and it turned out to legitimately mean “life,” “death,” and “the state in which one can experience life and death, i.e., humanity.” The key word in the November 2001 sweeps was tro-clon (is it just me, or does that sound like a Transformers refugee?), and there’s relatively little ambiguity: after a few initial mistakes, Fred and Wesley conclude that it refers to a confluence of extremely specific events. Lilah, among others, has no doubt that there is a single accurate translation of the relevant passage. Has anyone on the Angel writing team ever tried to translate even the most prosaic and literal possible passage from one language into another? Has anyone given some thought to the fact that words -- especially in what I gather is supposed to be a sacred or at least inspired text of some sort -- usually have more than one meaning? Is anyone familiar with the reams of pages expended across a host of world religious traditions on how to determine which parts of a prophecy are trustworthy, and how to interpret those parts? Apparently, the answer is “no.”

I’m just waiting to find out that Angel knocked up Darla as a result of a miracle drug Holland Manners slipped him in the elevator back in “Reprise” and that Angel will eventually become human thanks to the transmogrifier Fred will build in S7. I’m almost starting to miss the Oracles. And I really wonder what Wesley’s going to do with himself, since the show seems to be making him “unnecessary” the (very, very wrong) way they made Giles progressively less necessary on Buffy. Recently, he’s turned into a combination of Fred’s sidekick and Darla’s ob-gyn, which…um…no. Just no. Yes, I’m still watching the show. I even like Fred. I’m just…not entirely satisfied.

Also, I have a really bad cold and lots of work to do. Some of it, ironically, involves translating prophecies, although Not Like That. I don't have a physicist to help me, but if I did, I'd send him or her out to the drugstore for some zinc lozenges and a bottle of V8 Splash.

Another day at home, and the thrill of being around my family is starting to wear off. I love being near my family, but living with them may not be practical at this stage in my life. Or, to put it less obliquely, my environmental allergies are kicking in, I'm sick of sleeping on the sofa, I'm going to scream if I have to move Mom's soy-shake paraphernalia (you don't want to know, trust me) off the kitchen table one more time, and I'm running out of interesting books with which to distract Dad when he threatens to discuss the job search with me. But I did, remarkably, get some work done today, made the trip to my grandmother's, and bought some pansies which I'll set out first thing tomorrow. (My parents, aided and abetted by extremely dry weather, have managed to kill the sedum, at least for this season. Do you have any idea how difficult it is to kill sedum? I should probably just give up and plant crabgrass, but I feel sorry for our neighbors, all of whom are at least decent gardeners and have to look at our house during seasons when the dogwoods aren't in bloom.)

You thought I was kidding about my great-uncle's band, didn't you? You thought that it was impossible for anyone to play a solid hour of songs at a nursing home all about going home to Jesus and losing your one true love and...well, it might not have been just the song selection, because they did play "Keep on the Sunny Side." With accordion accompaniment. And it still sounded pretty depressing. It probably didn't help that they changed "She'll Be Coming 'Round The Mountain" to "He'll Be Coming in the Clouds," either. (Yes, that'd be the Second Coming of Jesus of Nazareth. The adapted lyrics weren't as imaginative as they could've been, though; "we will have the wedding supper when He comes" is all very well and good, but why not "we will bind again the dragon" or "we will all achieve the rapture"? I mean, if you're going to do Christian apocalyptic, do Christian apocalyptic. Think "Battle Hymn of the Republic," people. "I have read the fiery gospel writ in burnished rows of steel / As ye deal with My contemners, so with you My grace shall deal / Let the hero born of woman crush the serpent with his heel / Since God is marching on." The Left Behind books are pretty dull by comparison.) I'm not quite as cynical as I sound, though; I teared up when my great-uncle -- who lost his wife to cancer last year -- started singing a song about meeting his true love again in heaven. Also, he does an awesome job of playing his fifty-plus-year-old dobro; I'm starting to think that I need to get one for Dad for Christmas so that I -- er, he -- can learn to play it. Yes, I'd still like to be near my family.

Tomorrow: soup-making, Shabbat services if I get up in time, possibly Christian rock at night, and a little light shopping somewhere in between. Yardwork, otherwise known as Opportunity To Catch Up With All The Neighbors. More turkey. (I don't even like turkey all that much!) Pumpkin pie with cheddar cheese for breakfast. (I do like pumpkin pie.) Also, another attempt to download Netscape onto my parents' antiquated computer so that I can get the dratted proxy server to run properly and gain access to Unspecified University's proprietary databases. *sniff* Oh, and I need more Claritin. Home sweet home.

So...I made it to my conference. I went to some wonderful panels and a few not-so-wonderful ones, exchanged business cards, said hello to grad-school friends and acquaintances, fit in dinner with non-grad-school friends, did a really pathetic job of eating regular meals, and had my two interviews. I only really wanted to curl up under the covers twice during the weekend. My flights all worked out, thank goodness, although I spent more time in airports than I really wanted to, and there's more on the way -- one of the schools wants me to come visit their campus shortly (this, by the way, is a Very Good Thing), and there's Major Professional Conference #2 a month and a half away, not to mention assorted holidays. But right now I'm home, as in permanent-address-on-my-driver's-license home, where my parents and my perennials live. It's not particularly cold. I had a nice supper with my mother -- okay, we got Chinese, but tomorrow I'm going to be fixing huge vats of stuffing (er, technically dressing, but down here we call it stuffing) and a couple of turkey breasts for the Extended Family Gala on Thursday. I'm also taking my grandmother out to lunch tomorrow, and then maybe we'll do something wild and crazy like run errands or buy pansies. I like being near my family. Pity it doesn't look as if it'll be happening regularly anytime soon, but I'll enjoy it while I can.

I did watch Angel in my hotel room, boldly skipping a publisher's reception. And...stuff happened, finally! (Very, very oblique spoilers follow.) It wasn't absolutely amazing, and the characterization of everyone except Angel and Darla was nil (except that I very nearly want someone to kill Wesley -- and given that I love Wesley, this is not at all good), and Holtz is still kind of eh, and the plot required so many people to act so stupidly that I won't even go there. (Except to mention that at least they kept the Plot Device of Aberjian in a damn safe, and that both Lorne and Lilah apparently have death wishes.) Moreover, I am firmly in denial about all sorts of offensive stereotyping, and especially about Darla's sudden goopy maternal instinct having been anything other than soul contamination, because that way I can keep Darla as some sort of warped icon. (Maternal instinct is fine. Goopy maternal instinct annoys me.) But...damn, Darla's last scene was amazing in some respects. The mention of the alley gave me the shivers (and not just due to awful Angelus Flashback Hair). The rain even made sense, and not just in terms of homage to "Five By Five," either. The visuals...well, it really worked for me. And, y'know, I'd considered the dim possibility of where Darla's storyline could go (as well as the bit involving little Sarah), but I wasn't at all expecting them to have the guts to do either of them the way they did. So that means "Lullaby" is, at least, the best of the November 2001 sweeps episodes so far.

In my fantasy world, by the way, Angel and Fred will go off to Norway with the baby and live a happy suburban life while Cordelia, Wesley, and Gunn stay back in L.A. battling evil and enjoying worthwhile storylines and sustained character development. In my fantasy world, all the women are strong, independent, and un-stereotyped. So are the men. And the prophecies are lovingly researched and a hell of a lot more ambiguous.

It's just a thought.

Okay, so my Evening in the Buffyverse turned into half an hour of watching Angel, then fifteen minutes of catching up with the tape later that night, fast-forwarding through commercials, while taking a break from the dratted job applications which were supposed to have been finished last Friday. I'm behind schedule. I dislike being behind schedule about as much as I disliked mandatory gym classes back in grade school, and I can't just fake a sprained ankle or spontaneously develop exercise-induced asthma (no, I have no shame about this), but I can work... um... well, now, for instance. Or as soon as I finish this post. I did work until 2 am last night, get to the office at 6:30 this morning, and get all but one of the applications out before the 9 am mail pickup; I deserve a few minutes off.

As you might guess from the fact that I was able to tear myself away halfway through last night's Angel, I wasn't too enthralled -- mildly interested, and not too deeply annoyed, but this episode didn't stand on its own all that well. The demon lord's voicemail was hilarious -- I know my credit-card company has something like that buried in the options somewhere -- but it's getting a little too convenient the way all the bad guys keep disposing of each other. Also, my desire for Darla to rip the heads off of any officious men who tell her what to do with her pregnant body is conflicting with the fact that I'd like Wesley's head to stay on his shoulders. But don't you wish they'd provided a throwaway line about how Wesley's suddenly an expert on the process of labor in human females (why they think any of this should apply to Darla is beyond me) and the use of ultrasound imaging technology? I mean, did he go undercover as an ultrasound technician during one of those months he was hunting demons alone? Does Watcher training include all this information (in which case I can only assume that Slayers get knocked up a lot more often than those of us not writing saccharine Buffy-centric futurefics had guessed)? Or -- most likely -- had he taken advantage of Darla's nap between "Offspring" and "Quickening" to rush out, buy copies of What To Expect When You're Expecting and A Practical Guide To Ultrasound in Obstetrics and Gynecology, and read them? And, hey, did anyone else respond to that line about events being controlled by "a power greater than any of us" (or something along those lines) with shouts of "sweeps month"?

Oooooh. Turns out my officemate wasn't around yesterday because her boyfriend proposed to her last weekend and they were doing parent-calling, preliminary wedding planning, etc. Every time she tells someone, she gets this really silly grin. I can feel my job-search-paranoia vibes being chased out of the room by happy-engaged-person vibes. Definitely an improvement.

A tip for anyone who happens to be writing job ads: be specific. Really, really specific. Telling a candidate to enclose "teaching materials" isn't especially helpful, although it's more helpful than requesting a "dossier" (which can mean, like, five different things in an academic context alone). Telling a candidate to send along a transcript positively begs the question of whether or not the candidate has to shell out for an official one, and if you think job candidates will cheerfully pay five to ten bucks without asking, you're obviously living in a different world from the rest of us.

Gosh, can you tell I'm feeling sort of cranky? ;) I haven't read anything fun in days -- although I have to swing by the library tomorrow to return the latest batch of books, so maybe I'll get a few things and try to save them for all the airplane flights I'll be taking next weekend. The fanfic I'm currently beta-reading is making me want to think way too much about the Wishverse. I don't have time to tinker with HTML the way I need to for this page. And I'm in my office late on Sunday night swigging Diet Dr. Pepper and trying to figure out what these dratted jobs actually want. Judging from some of these adds, the answer seems to be "telepathic abilities." Failing that, it looks like I'll be making some calls first thing tomorrow morning, and I really wanted to get these silly things out of the way tonight so that I could spend the next three days playing with my dissertation. Hmph.

Major Professional Conference #1 is coming up in exactly one week, and before it does I need to finish the draft of Chapter One and turn it in to my advisor, send out another six job applications, prepare for any interviews I wind up with, do some laundry, drop off and pick up my suits at the dry cleaners', teach a class tomorrow, pick up my business cards from Office Depot, pay my bills, figure out the taping schedule for Buffy and Angel while I'm gone (I think I'll have to trust my parents to tape "Lullaby" for me, and goodness knows what they'll make of it), return some library books, eat and sleep at semi-regular intervals, and water the plants at home at least once. Plus some other things I'm probably forgetting about. Well, the November 15 job applications are going out by Priority Mail first thing Monday morning. That'll just have to do.

Despite all this, I was late to work this morning, because my beta-reading duties require me to tape and watch "The Wish" and I had to make a quick run to the drugstore to buy new videotapes. By the way, has anyone come up with a convincing explanation for how it is that the Master rises in the Wishverse without opening -- or apparently being able to open -- the Hellmouth, since Giles's library is still undisturbed? Surely someone has penned a weird, dark, retconned saga of forgotten and ultimately futile heroism to explain it? Surely...no, I don't have time to cope with emerging plotbunnies. Someone remind me of this in January, or at least the week after next, okay?

Still, I just can't resist a quick response to some words of wisdom from Sheila, whose Wesley characterization I simply adore: "The underlying message of Angel, as with X-Files, is that most men are entertainingly stupid." Amen, sister. Only...I think I'd find this message much more palatable, or at least amusing, if I didn't know numerous men who aren't. Also, she posed some questions about Wesley's background, and because I've actually thought about this more than I care to admit: I'd assume that Wesley studied something like comparative philology on the graduate level, because there's a practical limit to the number of languages he'd have a chance to learn formally, and it's much easier to read texts in languages you don't really know if you have a firm grasp on the principles of how languages change over time. (So, yes, a linguist, but the old-fashioned pre-Chomskyan sort with an attachment to history; they're virtually impossible to find in the U.S. nowadays. Oxford, on the other hand, does have an interdisciplinary graduate program in Comparative Philology and General Linguistics. I'd bet that all Watchers-in-training have to do their undergraduate course in Ancient and Modern History, though -- there's no other way to get that breadth of knowledge, and they let you toss in archaeology and what-not if you like.) Whether or not Wes has a D.Phil is more up in the air; I'd guess yes, and probably at an abnormally young age, judging from his characterization in Buffy S3, but a lot depends on how heavily academic you think the Watchers' Council hierarchy is (most of them go by "Mr." and "Ms.," don't they?). Whether Wesley wears briefs or boxers...someone with a tape of "Blood Money" and a VCR with freeze-frame might be better suited to answer that; I can think of philosophical arguments on both sides, and characterization reasons to have the answer change over time. And he is indubitably a dangerous mofo, but he doesn't entirely realize it; that may be the only thing "Billy" got right.

As soon as Blogger wakes up enough to accept some template changes, Reblogger will be gone; in its place, we have cgicomments, graciously hosted by www.dymphna.net. Use them in good health!

At some point this morning, I had a brilliant idea for a post in here, but Blogger was mysteriously unreachable and my thoughts seem to have scattered along the unrelated axes of "must apply for jobs with Nov. 15th deadlines now" and "whee! manuscripts! commentary traditions! medieval teaching texts!" (See, medieval teaching texts are the ones with the big blocks of authorized text in the middle -- typically things like Scripture, certain rules for organized religious life, authoritative collections of canon law, or foundational documents for the various areas of study in the medieval university -- surrounded by a commentary or gloss. They look rather like the Talmud layout I keep going on about, but only the central portion is fixed, whereas in printed Talmud volumes there are multiple commentaries, several with fixed positions on the page. Obviously, modern Talmud layout is itself derived from medieval antecedents; modern academics, unfortunately, went with the footnote instead, although the effect in particularly footnote-heavy publications is nearly the same. And all of this makes me want to return to trying to redesign this dratted page.)

I don't generally bother posting about Buffy syndicated reruns in here -- I tape most of them, I occasionally get home in time to watch them, they're uneven but generally of higher quality than S5 or S6 (I'm not convinced that S4 was so much the root of all evil, just really draggy and missing some potentially interesting material towards the end), and I don't fully grasp the idolization of Faith so far. But I got home in time to catch most of "Homecoming" last night. Can I just note in passing, thinking ahead through "Lover's Walk," that Xander so totally did not deserve Cordelia, nor Willow Oz? And what is it with infidelity storylines in all these high-school-age shows, anyway? (Don't tell me that anyone in the U.S. who watches Angel regularly -- especially last year -- isn't subjected to Dawson's Creek and Felicity promos. I predict a Smallville infidelity storyline by next season at the latest.) I mean, yes, teenagers don't always have great control over their emotions or actions sometimes, but I remember being 17 or 18. I was immature in many ways at that age -- no doubt I still am in some respects -- but I had a pretty firm grasp on the concept that it was wrong and hurtful to be smooching someone while in a committed relationship with someone else. There are bad choices, especially ones made on impulse, and then there's a series of bad choices shrouded in sustained deception. And, yes, I withstood the occasional temptation along those lines, whether I was the one in the relationship or the one out of it (because, really, dating someone who you already know cheats? Even Ann Landers, Queen of the Obvious, will tell you that's a bad idea right before she suggests counseling). As it happens, I've never been in a relationship where the other person cheated on me either; there was one instance of suspiciously close timing, but I chose to overlook it once I realized how incredibly relieved I was that I was rid of him. So I have no particular animus here, just bafflement. Perhaps there's some kind of truism behind all these portrayals -- after all, my two best friends the year we were turning 18 started sleeping with one another while Best Friend A was still in a long-distance relationship. Perhaps, even though I don't think of myself as having an especially inflexible moral code, I'm particularly stubborn about this one point. But...still. Jeez. How could fans still like or trust Xander and Willow for most of S3? I plan to cheer Cordelia on through her every insult of Xander up through "The Prom," when he finally demonstrates enough maturity to be a worthwhile acquaintance again. And she definitely did the right thing by not getting back together with him and by moving to L.A. If the Angel writers turn her much further into Saint Cordelia, of course...well, I won't think about it unless it happens.

Oh, about Buffy S6, which I no longer watch but stay caught up on thanks to MBTV and assorted blogs? Valeria unquestionably has the best possible one-paragraph review of the musical episode -- scroll down to her Nov. 7 entry. Unfortunately, LiveJournal won't let me post comments there unless I get an account; in the unlikely event that she finds her way here, I'd just like to suggest that a trio of Norns (perhaps borrowed from Angel?) would've really added to the experience. Especially if they alternated between discussing the shattered Runespear and singing "Mmmmm, Giles." While you're thinking about the possibilities of the genre, I urge you to make some connections between the cast of Buffy and the cast of characters described in Opera for the Culturally Illiterate. (The parallels between the different types of tenors and Buffy's assorted canonical love interests are particularly strong.)

I actually did get off a whole new set of job applications yesterday, and I'm moving forward (albeit rather slowly, because I have all these other things to do) on the revision of Chapter One. I mention this so that you, my faithful readers, realize that I do not spend my entire life thinking about silly things.

That said, I spent about an hour this morning playing The Fool's Errand. Does anyone else remember this game? It's basically a multi-puzzle game with an elaborate (and moderately inventive) backstory featuring the entire Tarot deck. I remember playing it on DOS back in the...hmmmm...late '80s, maybe? But I never owned it, and I never finished it. I may never finish it this time, either; there are a few puzzles which require arcade-style mouse clicking on a moving target, and that's nigh-impossible with a reasonably fast modern PC. Still, it's such a cool concept! You can download a zipped version for PC from Abandonware (just scroll down). And while I'm wallowing in game nostalgia, does anyone remember playing an Apple ][something single-person RPG-ish game based on the Epic of Gilgamesh which I think might have been called "Rivers of Light"? If so, can you please confirm that I'm not making it up? I should probably look up the childhood friend whose computer I played this on, because it's the only game I remember fondly that I can't find any online documentation for.

Speaking of epics...I, Naomi, am a sucker for epics. What do I mean by "epic"? As far as I'm concerned, an epic can be in any literary genre (although I have a long-standing weakness for most forms of poetry), but it must necessarily involve "a continuous narrative" and "one or more heroic personages," in the immortal words of the OED definition I just looked up. I'm fuzzy on the idea of "national epic," because a good half of the so-called national epics date from the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European obsessions with nationalism and folklore, but I'd suggest that an epic ought to represent the totality of a culture (whether historical, fictional, or both), emphasize issues of genealogy/history, and profoundly affect the development of self-proclaimed successor cultures. It's a fairly broad definition. (The requirement for profound affect saves me from having to explore my beliefs on the question of objective aesthetic merit, although this means that Thomas Dixon's horrific The Clansman -- most famous in the film version, The Birth of A Nation -- probably qualifies as an epic for the postbellum, pre-civil-rights white American South. Of course, apart from its ludicrously ahistorical and unbelievably prejudiced premise, characters, and plot, I enjoyed reading that too -- proof positive that I'm uncritically attracted to epics.)

At any rate, I read some English-language version of most of the things most people would think to call "epics" -- not to mention "mythology," a category which I dislike but which I use anyway and which has a hefty overlap with the above definition of "epic" -- before I got out of elementary school, thanks to some peculiar books left lying around my house from my parents' combined graduate studies, the fact that I had free run of our public library system, and my teachers' attempts to turn me into less of a discipline problem. I distinctly remember staying up late or waking early to read everything from Edith Hamilton's Greek Mythology to C.S. Lewis's Narnia series, Lattimore's Iliad and Odyssey to an odd retelling of the Persian legend of Sohrab and Rustam, Howard Pyle's Robin Hood to a comic-book version of the narrative bits of the Hebrew Bible. I also wound up with the gigantic volume of over 800 Grimms Brothers tales, the reasonably complete Arabian Nights, half a dozen versions of Arthurian legends, Shakespeare's attempts to create a Lancastrian/Tudor epic cycle, and, of course, Bulfinch's Mythology, which is apparently available online but which I remember fondly in a blue paperback edition. I didn't read the Song of Roland at that age, but I did have a book of the related stories of Ogier the Dane, and I wound up reading Evangeline Walton's and Lloyd Alexander's very different adaptations of the Mabinogion. Obviously, I missed a lot of great things because nobody in my childhood acquaintance knew from non-Western culture: I didn't read excerpts from the Mahabharata or the Ramayana till high school, and I know good and well that I should someday sit down and investigate the epic of Sundiata. But the fact remains that I was exposed to scads of epic-type literature at a very young age, and it took. Oh, boy, did it ever. Struggle and betrayal and quests and romance and gods and monsters and growing up and mortality.

Nostalgia aside, I have provided the above account not to indicate that I was a humanities geek at birth (I probably was) and not to imply that I possess some sort of superior taste in literature (I really, really don't), but to explain why I have trouble understanding the many intelligent, creative people I know who do not like The Lord of the Rings. Quite apart from the philological in-jokes, some of which I now understand, LOTR plays right into some of my earliest and most enduring tastes in entertainment. The problem is not that it has no other attractions; the problem is that I'm unable to think beyond the initial one. Also, I'm not sure what it's like to read the trilogy for the first time as an adult, because I didn't: I was seven or eight years old. I still remember how it happened: I read and enjoyed The Hobbit on a librarian's recommendation, then I checked the card catalog for other Tolkien works (my mother's a librarian, okay? I thought that way) and ventured into the high, endless stacks of the (adult!) Humanities section of the Main Library one night just before closing to find the LOTR trilogy. No, it did not change my life. I did, however, get a boxed copy for Hanukkah and read and reread and reread it, inadvertently memorizing some of my favorite parts to the extent that I can still recite quatrains in Quenya. I also read and enjoyed The Silmarillion. Yes, all of it. (And yes, I'm looking forward to the movie, although I'm sure I'll notice and resent changes from the book -- not necessarily for themselves, because goodness knows Middle-Earth could use a few strong female characters who don't have to dress in drag to accomplish anything and parts of The Fellowship are kinda dull, but because many of those changes are bound to be ill-considered and/or commercially driven.) I was never precisely fanatical about the cult of Tolkien, I will not slavishly defend every word of the LOTR trilogy as divinely inspired, and I never learned to write in Elvish (yes, I knew people who did that), but...gosh, it's The Lord of the Rings. I don't even know where to start with people who don't like it. Maybe I should suggest the Iliad first? I mean, I also don't get why people who grew up on comic books think the X-Men are nifty despite all evidence to the contrary which they themselves will cheerfully cite. Obviously, I am a person of limited understanding. Still, I should be able to articulate this problem better.

Any suggestions?

Phooey. Look, in the unlikely event that any of my readers need to order single-color business cards from Office Depot: the store can get them for you in 5-7 business days. OfficeDepot.com, however, won't guarantee them in less than 10 business days. (Can I point out, as an aside, that the concept of "business day" is increasingly meaningless in contemporary American society, and that the precarious alliance of nineteenth-century labor-rights organizers and religious activists which led to the "work week" running from Monday through Friday went the way of the passenger pigeon at about the same time?) Of course, I needed my cards by the 15th, and the local Office Depot is kind of out of the way, which is why I wound up spending way too much of my afternoon on the phone with the nice people at the store and then faxing over the layout I'd put together on the computer. I'm going to have lovely cards to hand out for MPC#1, but I couldn't use the coupon I had for ordering over the Internet. Also, I have to get around to picking up the dratted things at the store next week.

Oh, the joys of the job search! I miss my dissertation. Now excuse me while I put together Yet Another Slight Variation On My Research Proposal for the next two to three years and thrill to the significantly less exciting aspects of academia. "We see in Authors, too stiff to recant / An hundred controversies of an Ant." (That's Donne's emphatic capitalization, not mine. I wonder if it's catching?)

I hear tell that some people actually work on Tuesday mornings, instead of cruising discussion boards complaining about the previous evening's Angel episode. Go figure.

(Spoilers for Angel, "Offspring." Eventually. Not for awhile, in fact.)

Well, it wasn't quite as offensive as Billy. Gee, how's that for a rousing recommendation? Actually, if we ignore the offensive gender politics -- oh, heck, read Sarah's take on it -- most of it was fairly good. There were some hilarious lines, and I still find myself cheering for Darla, who did a great job of disproving the stereotypical idiocies other characters wanted to fit her into. (Unfortunately, I fear for future episodes, unless super-powered and utterly unrestrained Darla does something sensible like massacre the inhabitants of the Hyperion. Well, Angel and Cordelia, at least.) Now, the vaguely spoiler-y parts: I'm really, really bitter about the near-total lack of continuity on Wesley's character development -- I kept reading these "Wesley copes with the events of 'Billy'" fanfics, most of them fairly predictable, and thinking "I know the show will do better than that." Well, I was wrong. That creaking sound you hear is my expectations being lowered.

I'm also bitter that Fred babbles even when she's sane (note to Angel writers: one Willow is enough for the whole Buffyverse), that Cordelia's brains and survival instincts have apparently been placed in storage along with Angel's savoir-faire and any angst whatsoever from the all-too-clearly secondary characters, that the Fashion Nazi had Fred wandering around in the world's shortest skirt for no obvious reason, that nobody got mad at Angel for risking the reappearance of Angelus, and that Gunn still doesn't get enough good lines. On the plus side: I loved Wesley and Gunn's scene together. I love Wesley's overall snarkiness toward Angel. There was lots of debate over translations of prophecy, and the writers finally managed to demonstrate that they've heard of languages other than Latin. (Okay, the other languages they've heard of are all in the West Germanic family and therefore fairly close to English, but still -- they tried.) Holtz almost definitely has no business being an eighteenth-century Catholic with a German name, English accent, and English wife, and I don't think people in scarlet cassocks are usually addressed as "Monsignor," but at least the 1770s were the right decade for suppressing religious orders. (Look, a rare Buffyverse appearance from organized religion...which turns out to consist of a banned order of vampire-torturing priest-inquisitors. Gosh, it's nice that Angelus and Darla are now sympathetic characters; otherwise, that could've gotten ambiguous or something.) And darned if I know why a heartbeat signifies a soul, but at least we haven't gotten a bad (well, any) explanation for Darla's baby yet.

I haven't given up on Angel S3 -- it's still entertaining, if wrong-headedly so, and at least they haven't brought in any fat jokes -- but I think Kate's plan for the season is a strong contender, too. ;)

Oops. I sat down after lunch, prepared to plunge back into my chapter with renewed vigor, then remembered that I had an email to answer. A grad-school friend of mine whose academic progress has been somewhat slowed by having a baby and moving cross-country (within three months of one another -- brave woman!) had written to me with a few questions relating to my field, in which she will be taking a doctoral qualifying examination shortly. I, of course, love to talk about my field -- the less kind would describe this as "pontification" -- and I love to talk about qualifying exams, because I studied the format of those suckers in-depth (an early manifestation of my love for meta-academia) and have strong opinions on how to go about studying for them. Her questions were fairly broad; one of them dealt with periodization, which I am honor-bound to care deeply about, and I somehow couldn't resist explaining not only the standard options but How Periodization Would Run If I Were Galactic Empress And Why. In case you're curious, I would break up the last 2000 years of Western civilization in approximately 325 (sub-break in 632), 800 (sub-break in 1054), 1198 (sub-break in 1378), 1648 (sub-break in 1789) and 1918. Unfortunately, I spent something like two hours explaining this in email. Bad Naomi.

On the plus side, I just got my first call for my first conference interview (from the first job I applied for). Since very few readers of this blog will ever meet me in person, it's probably safe to tell you that my victory dance basically consists of jumping up and down as hard as I can for two or three minutes while emitting shrill yips ending with a rebel yell. (If you don't know what a rebel yell is, find someone from the southern United States to demonstrate, but be warned that there's wide regional and individual variation.) It's a really pathetic victory dance; I should probably try to cultivate a new one that involves less vertical and more horizontal motion. But...hey, it works. And I can now justify the huge amount I've already shelled out for airfare and hotel room for MPC#1. ;)

If I could tell whether or not I was getting comments, I'd know whether or not Reblogger was working. Hmph.

Yesterday turned out to be really enjoyable -- teaching in the morning, listening to academic papers in the afternoon, going out to a really pathetic "Irish pub" and having dinner with a group of colleagues (note: little green strands of lights, while entertaining, do not make up for an establishment that doesn't have cider on tap and serves poulet française and Caribbean jerk chicken), then returning with some of said colleagues to Large Midwestern University Town and heading for the combination wine bar/dessert cafe. Strictly speaking, they're separate businesses in the same building, but you can order from one while seated in the other, especially if the waitstaff likes you. I concluded that red zinfandel goes nicely with hot-fudge sundaes. So we spent several hours eating, drinking, and being merry in the way of emergent academics, which is to say that we're all worried about getting jobs (and all competing for overlapping ranges of jobs, something I simply choose not to think about too hard, because what the heck else can you do?). It was fun. I clearly need to get out more.

Having said that...here I am in my office on a sunny Sunday afternoon. I may not be here for long, but I wanted to check email/voicemail, and I had this pathetic belief that it should be no problem. Hahahahaha. Yesterday was a Home Game Day (an excellent reason to spend the day elsewhere), and the detritus is still around campus. I was interrogated suspiciously by a couple who were entering my office building just as I realized that my ID card was inexplicably not being read. Now, this building is open from 6 am to 10 pm on weekdays, with basically no security; I have no clue why they even bother to restrict weekend access. And even though I was wearing a leather duster over blue jeans and a grey T-shirt, I think I looked remarkably harmless, because I pretty much always do. (Me: curly dark-blonde hair, brown eyes, rosy cheeks, about 5'3" barefoot, in my twenties. There's a reason I wear suits and heels when I want to impress people.) But this couple -- academics, from the look of them, decked out in plaid-flannel-casual style -- had to see my ID before they'd let me in behind them, then told me in hushed voices that "it only takes one incident" and that "some people, clearly not students, were bicycling around campus last night." Bicycling?!? Ooooooh, I'm scared. Not to mention the obvious fact that most of the people who would've been roaming around here last night were certainly university ID holders if not students and, one hopes, would have at least been sleeping it off by 1 pm the next afternoon. What a load of biased claptrap. Of course, I didn't say any of that; I just gave the couple my best "you're idiots, but I'm too polite to come right out and say it" smile. This sort of expressiveness can be tricky for those brought up in traditions of forthright behavior (e.g. Midwesterners, Yankees), but it's easy enough to learn. Just turn up the corners of your lips, arrange your face as if you just smelled something bad which you're trying to ignore, and -- to add that crucial spark of insincere sunniness -- think, "When I become High Empress of the Galaxy, your new assignment will involve shoveling alien poop." Voila!

This blog is mostly about the more interesting things I deal with in everyday life: reflections on my career, mentions of nifty facts I've run across in said career, discussions of my hobbies, even the occasional mention of my exceptionally dull schedule. I don't so much talk about World Events; on the one hand, I'm not really qualified to do so, and on the other, I don't think I necessarily have anything exceptional to contribute. What's going on now makes me feel sad, angry, resentful, occasionally frightened, and disconnected from the government which allegedly represents me -- but I'm fairly sure that that's commonplace, and I'm grown-up enough to realize that sharing relatively trivial angst trivializes more important problems. I mostly save those I-feel-icky-how-are-you thoughts for what I consider the appropriate venue: conversations with friends and family (mostly family); I try to post things here that people will find entertaining. The following may or may not qualify. If you want something funnier, skip down to here, okay?

So, last night I was on the phone with my dad, discussing the American response to this war -- okay, discussing the fact that CNN was once again interviewing Chandra Levy's father even as we carpet-bomb Kandahar, and that there's something seriously wrong with that. Dad has a history of counseling conscientious objectors during Vietnam, extensive training in American history, and has lived through quite a bit more of the twentieth century than I have, so he often has some useful insights, although we disagree strongly about the basis of religious fanaticism (but that's a post for another day). I don't remember how we got around to this topic, but we were discussing the rhetoric of war and the myth of "strategic bombing." Dad suggested that I check out Woodrow Wilson's speech on America's entrance into World War I for a relatively clear-eyed perspective on what happens when Americans go to war. Well, he said "relatively." Compared to the non-Chandra CNN coverage, for instance.

Woodrow Wilson, as you may know, was the last U.S. President to write his own speeches. He was also the only career academic to become President. He won re-election in 1916 on the slogan "He Kept Us Out Of War." Despite Wilson's many personal flaws (most notably racism), I've always kinda liked the guy, but the point here is that he wrote one hell of a speech. Compare and contrast Dubya's latest effusions with Wilson's 1917 War Message, in which he requested that Congress declare war on Germany and hence on the Central Powers. (Bear in mind that the U.S. was ticked off with Germany because it had discovered that the Germans were encouraging the Mexicans to invade the U.S.) I'll even excerpt my favorite parts:

Wilson wrote one hell of a speech, and he acknowledged that there would be "distress," "sacrifice," and "blood" involved in war, but he was a lousy prophet. He was also ignoring his training as an historian. I sometimes think World War I may have been the saddest war in history, if that's even a meaningful statement. For fairness's sake, and because I think the quality of rhetoric as well as the effort to speak truthfully has declined on both the pro- and anti-war sides, let me also include a few excerpts from anti-war speeches in response to Wilson, the first from Senator Robert LaFollette:

And then, from the closing of Senator George Norris's speech:

I will leave it as an exercise for the reader to decide which excerpts best fit the current U.S. military action. There is nothing new under the sun...and I feel icky. How are you?

Hey, it's All Souls.

I like All Souls' Day better than All Saints' Day, possibly because it's easy to translate across many religions. The observance of All Souls seems to have started in what is now Germany, and was probably some sort of Christianized pagan custom; in 1048, Abbot (later Saint) Odilo of Cluny extended the tradition to all the Clunaic monasteries across Europe and hence into the Western Christian tradition, where its most enjoyable variation is the Latin American Día de los Muertos. There seems to be nothing particularly inevitable about this date: other groups of Christians commemorate their dead at Whitsuntide, or on the evening before Pentecost, or on the day after Easter. In my own Jewish tradition, Yizkor or remembrance services are held on Yom Kippur and on the last days of Sukkot, Pesach, and Shavuot – none of which come very near November. But up here in USDA Climate Zone 5 -- well, okay, the Middle-to-Upper Midwest of the United States -- it's clear that summer's gone. The days are noticeably shorter, the leaves are falling, and the landscape looks browner every day. So if we needed something to mourn, nature is cooperating with us. This year...I'm just as glad we got sunshine today.

On a totally unrelated topic, my dissertation is so damn cool. And I say this not solely because Chapter One is almost finished -- just another ten pages or so to edit. I wrote the chapters out of order on purpose, you see; some of the early order had to do with when I'd promised to give conference papers on various subjects (deadlines are your friend!), but I figured it was best to get the toughest part over first, and so the final chapters are the ones I'd already written for a massive seminar paper two years ago. All the remaining original-source research was basically done by the end of this past summer. Chapter One and Chapter Six are mostly projects of rewriting, editing, and adjusting, as well as incorporating a few new scholarly developments which have appeared in the last two years. Which explains why I think I can finish this dissertation before the end of 2001. ("I think I can"? What am I, the Little Engine that Blogged?) Of course, it'd help if I got Chapter One finished by early next week.

I am, as usual, preparing to teach class by thinking about Darla. The funny thing about my ephemeral liking for Darla is that I am not (nor have I ever been) a big fan of vampires qua vampires. I don't think evil is sexy (although it is important for narrative purposes), I don't think blood is anything special (beyond the obvious symbolic valences that have dogged Western culture since Leviticus), and I don't even get the appeal of leather pants (give me well-worn jeans on my sex objects any day). I cheered when Darla was offed for the first time, and I couldn't enjoy the last half of Buffy S2 properly because I kept getting annoyed at Buffy for not immediately staking Angelus. As for the Schmoopification of Spike...well, I have a theory about this. I like to call it the Marshmallow Theory. As intelligent people with modern historical consciousnesses who were probably exposed to Star Trek in one form or another, we know that retroactively inserting Dawn into Sunnydale history must've made some changes, right? One of them must logically have come in Buffy S3 "Lover's Walk," when Joyce offered Spike some cocoa and a shoulder to cry on -- but in the Dawnverse, Dawn would've been hanging out elsewhere in the house doing her math homework, and Joyce would never have gotten up to check on the existence of marshmallows, since Dawn's evident distaste for them had resulted in a massive marshmallow-bag-emptying fight the previous evening. As a result, Spike would've gotten the jump on Angel and Buffy, turning the standoff with Joyce into a tense hour-long hostage crisis. The situation could only have been resolved by Dawn's resourceful summoning of Aloysius Snuffleupagus, the vengeance demon in charge of imperiled children, who granted her wish that Spike would have always behaved like her then-idol of masculine behavior, Taylor Hanson (of Hanson/"MMMBop" fame). I theorize that Spike immediately apologized to Joyce for invading her personal space and left Sunnydale a few days later, humming along with "I Will Come To You" on the radio and wondering if he had done the right thing in offering Buffy and Angel gift certificates for couples therapy. You can all fill in the S4 and S5 storylines from there, right?

Oh, right, I was talking about Darla. Well, I probably like Darla because I enjoy strong, independent female characters who aren't constantly getting caught up in romantic entanglements or acting as damsels in distress. I kind of like Lilah, too. And, thank goodness, Darla's current plot arc doesn't provide a Broad-Ranging Social Message (beyond, possibly, "sex with an ex is almost always a bad idea," which I'd have to agree with). So, despite the distant and horrific (if highly improbable) potential for a May sweeps episode in which Angel Jr. develops demonic diaper rash while Gunn is babysitting him, I'm looking forward to this next set of Angel episodes.