Ordinarily, I avoid giving precise locations in this journal -- anyone who knows me has a fighting chance of guessing my identity anyway, and anyone who’s curious enough could probably run a few Web searches and figure out which conferences I attend, but I see no reason to encourage stalkers or students. However, I’m going to make an exception this morning, because otherwise this entry won’t make sense. (Oh, and you should know that I'm writing this in mid-morning, although I won't post it to Blogger till much later today.)

I’m in Washington, D.C., at the Library of Congress. While getting up at 5 am to catch the ride to catch the train to catch the subway that brought me here wasn’t my most joyful moment of 2002, I’m glad to be here. Libraries -- especially the grand old kind, with wooden reading tables and brass lamps and ladders and upper galleries and mosaics (mosaics!) on the floors and ceiling -- make me feel as happy as the proverbial clam (whatever that means). I quite literally grew up in libraries (my mother’s a librarian); I have used libraries extensively throughout my schooling and assorted careers. I can offer an extemporaneous yet spirited defense of Our Nation’s Public Libraries in my sleep. There’s something soothing about books that appeals my brain and at least three of my senses (sight, smell, and touch). Finally, I just plain love being around lots of books, and while open stacks are nicer than closed stacks, even closed-stack libraries usually have open reference sections. This one is a case in point.

Still, the Alexandria I’m thinking about is in Egypt, not Virginia. That library was the ancestor of mandatory-deposit libraries everywhere: for centuries, one copy of pretty much everything written in Greek was required to be deposited there, and any ships which passed through Alexandria were liable to have any scrolls or codices they carried copied for the library. Mandatory (or legal) deposit libraries -- as you may or may not know; there’s no special reason why you should -- are the class of libraries which must be sent a copy of every book published in that country. Most First World countries have national libraries which serve as mandatory deposit locations. So now we have the Bibliothèque Nationale in France, the Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid, Die Deutsche Bibliothek in...Frankfurt, maybe? You get the idea. The United Kingdom, in what I consider a sign of extremely good national sense, has one mandatory legal-deposit library (the British Library in London) and five optional legal-deposit libraries (at Oxford, Cambridge, Dublin, and someplace in Scotland and Wales, I think). And, of course, the Library of Congress is the national mandatory-deposit library for the United States of America. National libraries are especially fascinating in the ways they choose to limit access (they all do somehow, trust me) and display what they perceive as their nation’s foremost qualities. They offer an unparalleled opportunity for very literal “armchair anthropology" -- or, more precisely, an ethnography based on exactly how you get into the appropriate armchair.

To use the Bibliothèque Nationale, for example, you have to locate the correct office for getting a reader’s card, present state-issued I.D. (in my case, a passport), pay a modest fee, provide the (highly multilingual) attendants with information so that they can fill out a form, and -- if you’re a graduate student, as I am, and need access to manuscripts as well as books -- bring along a letter from your dissertation director. Then you go to a reading room and fill out little slips to request books, selecting a numbered seat to which the books are delivered. In order to actually get a manuscript, there is an even more elaborate system in which you exchange your reader’s card for a green plaque (I think; it’s been awhile) in order to get into the appropriate salle des manuscrits, your green plaque and a little request form for an orange plaque when you request a manuscript or a black plaque when you leave the room temporarily to locate bathrooms or vending machines, and your orange plaque for a delivered manuscript. (There’s something even more complicated about using a microfilm reader, but I’ve erased that from my brain so that I can remember chunks of Buffy episode dialogue. The plaque might have been blue.) At any rate, the staff are all very polite and well-trained in deciphering marginal French, although they do encourage you to at least attempt French before switching into something else. Each plaque has an assigned seat number on it, and you do not have a choice about the seat number in the manuscript reading rooms, at least not during the summer when all the academic types are there. If you want photocopies or microfilms, you fill out a form and take it to a completely different office where they may be able to finish your photocopying in a week if you’re lucky.

To use the Library of Congress, you also need a reader’s card; this is a fairly recent innovation, and one which the LoC still seems rather apologetic about. It seems that too many good Americans were availing themselves of the open reading rooms and cutting illustrations out of books to sell. (Since I object to the death penalty, I suggest that such individuals be sentenced to a lifetime of penal servitude in book binderies without parole.) You must be over 18 or have a letter from a teacher, present a form of state-issued I.D. (I’d guess that a non-U.S. citizen could use a passport) and go back to a computer, where you fill out the form yourself. The process is free and fairly simple; the attendants are, again, polite, although I have no idea how they’d react if I broke into, say, French. (Given the state of my conversational French, howls of laughter are a distinct possibility.) The reading rooms are less formal than the French variety, with no assigned seating and no plaques; in the room where I'm sitting today, you use a computer workstation to request your book and check at the front desk until it arrives -- nobody will deliver it. But the staff is extremely pleasant and helpful, and chattier than the ones at the BN -- or perhaps it’s just that we all like to chat in our native languages. If you want photocopies, you have to find a copy-card machine, buy a special LoC copy card, put money on it, find a machine, and do your own heavy lifting. You can also make “reader prints,” which are not unlike page-by-page microfilms. I’m sure there’s a process for microfilms somewhere, but I haven’t encountered it.

Utterly non-startling conclusions: the French enjoy hierarchy and order; the Americans privilege accessibility and convenience. Librarians are nicer people than the stereotype would imply (although I may be showing familial bias here). Photocopies are overpriced no matter where you go. Further revelations are left to the reader, although you might reasonably deduce that I loathe microfilm.

Of course, the fundamental reason why I take the time and trouble to get into these libraries is that they have such incredibly cool books. And I need to get up and check at the desk to see if mine has shown up yet.

I. Got. Work. Done. Today.

It's going to be such a relief when this dissertation is complete. I've been at the stage where there's not much new to learn for a few months now, and I just have to rearrange all my knowledge into lyrical paragraphs, keep up with all the latest secondary literature, and adjust semicolon usage to suit my committee. But I hadn't realized how much not accomplishing anything for the last two weeks has been weighing on me. I'm nowhere near finished, of course, but I did some rearranging and editing, then made a list of all the books I want to look up tomorrow at the good university library downtown from where my aunt and uncle live. Chapter Six is going down this weekend. No, really -- I need to spend Monday through Wednesday assembling my presentation for Major Professional Conference #2 (which I leave for on, er, Thursday), and a few of the books I need for that are nowhere near this part of the country. I'm thinking through my options, most of which play heavily on the fact that one need not have especially good footnotes in a conference presentation. Still...I hate not having the right editions. And I love getting work done.

Tomorrow: library trip, Chapter Six...and possibly shoe-shopping, which is a valid use of my limited time for reasons I haven't entirely worked out.

"For lo! the days are hastening on,
By prophet bards foretold,
When, with the ever-circling years,
Shall come the Age of Gold...."

(Yes, I know. "Prophet bards." Hee hee hee.)

You can tell I'm Jewish because I spend pages and pages spouting off about Hanukkah, and I simply smile and accept Christmas as a nice time to play with new toys and do all the things I may not be able to do this time next year. My grandparents' generation is nearly gone, and my parents' generation is aging; every year there's another family member or neighbor missing when I come home for the holidays. So Grandmother is dozing in front of our Yule log and I'm typing some useful family-history details she gave me into the computer.

In other news, I still haven't made it to FOTR. I have, however, baked somewhere in the vicinity of eight dozen oatmeal-everything cookies in the past 24 hours, and I won't feel up to creaming butter and sugar again for weeks. Ack. Thpt.

Merry Christmas!

(The title quote is from the fourth-season Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode "Pangs," and the preceding line is "But that's whipped cream in a canister." I thought it might be wise to provide context, just in case.)

I do not, as a rule, sympathize very strongly with the character of Buffy. She's a little too blonde, a little too popular, a little too thin, a little too obviously central to her universe. Also, I never had a brooding vampire boyfriend, so I have very little patience for Buffy/Angel dramatics. I appreciate her quips and I'm willing to cut her a lot of slack in the Buffyverse; I just don't think of myself as a soul sister to the Chosen One. But I do sympathize with her recurring unwillingness to settle, and "Pangs" may well be the one episode in which Buffy could have been channeling me, or vice versa. Holidays are fun and chaotic and, look, world-saving is important, but fresh peas are superior to frozen. "Over bickering and confusion, I'll take pie. We will find a solution. And we will have a nice dinner, OK? Both. End of story."

Of course, I don't have any vengeful Native American spirits to battle. I'm just bitter because my parents don't remember to either use up or replace their baking soda every year, and because I didn't remember to check this before making pumpkin bread. It's actually perfectly tasty, just...somewhat flatter than usual. I doubt it'll show up when the bread is sliced and arranged, but perhaps I'll make another batch tomorrow for the Utterly Non-Religious Friday Night Display of Culinary Ingenuity and let my parents polish off this batch. Or perhaps I'll just stick with brownies, pound cake, oatmeal-cranberry cookies, and grapes. That's one recipe from each side of the family, one from the oatmeal box with a few extra things tossed in, and one fresh from the vine with a little help from selective breeding and a pair of scissors.

Then, once the Jewish side of the family is happy for a moment, I have to turn to the Not Jewish side and finish trimming the tree, sending out cards, maybe even do a little shopping....it's possible that it'd be easier to battle vengeful Native American spirits. Only it's the wrong holiday (any of them) for that. And we're doing it all.

Perhaps it's just as well we don't celebrate Kwanzaa.

Answering lots of business email, profitable though it may be, does not make for interesting reporting. Neither does making split-pea soup or running errands for my grandmother. And we still haven't gotten around to decorating the Christmas tree.

Sooner or later I'm going to have to explain why a nice Jewish girl celebrates Christmas, right? Okay, the short version: my father isn't and has never been Jewish; although I don't think he'd call himself a Christian any longer, Christmas is his favorite holiday, so we do a full-on family-centered secular version complete with tree, stockings, gifts, dinner, and the occasional party. It helps that I love celebrations in any case. Of course, I have trouble entirely ignoring the religious aspects of Christmas -- and it's a beautiful story -- but that doesn't make for interesting journal entries either. I may well be the only person who finds it mildly entertaining that Christmas Day falls on the tenth of Tevet in the Jewish calendar this year. (The tenth of Tevet -- Asarah b'Tevet -- is a fast day, and a day of mourning for those whose place of burial or date of death is unknown. Of course, like all the destruction-of-the-Temple-related fast days, it's supposed to become a day of feasting when the Messiah shows up. What I'd like to know is whether Messianic Jews, a.k.a. Jews for Jesus (and no, I'm not one) bother to draw the obvious conclusion.)

Meanwhile, more people -- more of my friends, even -- are probably calculating how quickly they can make it to a showing of Lord of The Rings than when the Jewish and Christian calendars converge. (I won't make it until sometime next week or perhaps a bit after.) And isn't it nice that they've given Arwen an actual personality of sorts? Those of you hurrying to see LOTR may, in honor of the Advent season I'm not technically observing, wish to compare Tolkien's portrayal of Galadriel to that of the Virgin Mary (specifically, in medieval English and French lyric and devotional literature, but use what you know). Or you may prefer to simply sit back and enjoy.

Whew. There's nothing that shakes off an overly introspective mood faster than subjecting it to Yet Another Web-Based Quiz. Either I'm really easily amused, or this one's funny -- possibly both. Link courtesy of Mechaieh.

If I were a Dead Russian Composer, I would be Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. Considered the leader of the 19th Century Composer group "The Mighty Handful," I am indeed the teacher among them. My orchestration skills are superbly colorful, and are explained in my book on the topic, but works like "Scheherezade" explain my mastery better. Who would you be? Dead Russian Composer Personality Test

Phooey. I was going to post earlier, but Blogger was "down for maintenance" until just recently. Now it's late, and I'm too tired to say anything meaningful. "Fire bad, tree pretty." (I miss new Angel episodes -- and, for that matter, new-to-me Buffy reruns, which I just can't enjoy with my father kibitzing over my shoulder. I don't think I dislike Buffy S4 as much as most people do, but I haven't quite watched it all through, and I admit that the Initiative could have been much, much better realized. To be more precise, I think Oz got rescued way too easily, and I can't help reflecting on how much more interesting it would've been had Adam skewered Riley instead of Maggie, or had Giles put the pieces together and decided to go rescue Ethan. Also, on purely ethical grounds, Riley's dating Buffy while he's still her TA is wrongwrongwrongWRONG. But otherwise...I'm a lot more disturbed by various plot distortions and mischaracterizations from S5.)

In other news, I just found myself wishing I were back on Central Time and defending the Midwest against a die-hard East-Coast snob in the same twenty-four-hour period. I think I'm being assimilated.

A few technical notes:

(1) If you're experiencing as much trouble accessing this page on Tripod as I've been having lately...my apologies. I should probably look into moving it. Eventually.

(2) Some time back, after I whined about not being able to respond properly to assorted LiveJournal posts because I'm not an LJ member, Sarah was kind enough to offer me a free account. I've finally gotten around to using my new LJ account for commenting here and there, and in a burst of misplaced energy, I even managed to upload an image and construct a friends' list (very much off the top of my head). The problem is that I can't figure out what to do with the actual, er, journal. I'm still not entirely convinced that I need one journal, much less two. Any ideas?

(3) When on a plane, always order lots of ice with your can of Bloody Mary mix.

I'm currently debating whether it's worth lighting Hanukkah candles here at my office with my handy-dandy travel menorah, since it's more or less sundown, or whether my officemate will have hissyfits at the idea of open flame anywhere near her desk and I should wait till I get home. (Please note that next year I will have my own office at Wonderful University.) It's a little tedious to have to worry about this either way -- you'd think that with the popularity of candles in the home, Judaism's tendencies towards lighting up twice a week plus holidays would only get more popular. Of course, I may be ambivalent about this because Hanukkah's not necessarily my favorite holiday in any case. I mean, I'm pretty much a sucker for any form of holiday, and Hanukkah features wonderful music, candles, games, gifts, fried foods and carbohydrates a-plenty. (One of the nice things about being a Southern Jew is the ability to claim, with a completely straight face, that Krispy Kreme doughnuts qualify as sufganiyot, the traditional fried-dough dessert of Hanukkah. This became easier when they stopped frying the little suckers in lard.)

The problem is that Hanukkah is all about...well, let me tell you the story and see what you think. Once upon a time -- back around 170 B.C.E., as a matter of fact -- Judea and most of the Middle East were ruled from modern-day Syria by Antiochus IV Epiphanes. (He was descended from Antiochus I, one of the three generals who divvied up Alexander the Great's empire; Judea was on the border between the Antiochus line (the Seleucids) and the Ptolemies, so it changed hands several times in the third century B.C.E. Before that, Jerusalem had been ruled by Persians, Medes, and Babylonians, going backwards, with varying degrees of local autonomy.) Antiochus Epiphanes ("the Manifest" -- a divine title) was apparently a hands-on monarch; he concluded (correctly, as we shall see) that strict observance of the Jewish religion was obstructive to his rule and issued edicts banning Temple sacrifices, Sabbath observance, and circumcision; he further proceeded to bring swine and other unclean animals into the Temple and erect statues of various deities, probably including himself, in Jerusalem. Part of the Jewish people revolted against the tyrant, created the first ever martyrdom narratives, won a series of highly improbable battles, and eventually managed to secure a kingdom led by the descendants of the rebel leaders for a little over a hundred years. So far, so good. We're all in favor of revolt against religious oppression and tyranny, right?

The tricky part has to do with the circumstances of the rebellion. The most "canonical" source about this is in fact the Greek text of the four Books of Maccabees -- to be located in your Catholic Bible, or here under "Apocrypha". It didn't make it into the Jewish Bible; in fact, we don't have extant Hebrew text for all of it. As a result, Jews don't spend a lot of time reading it. But it's really pretty instructive. I Maccabees starts with Alexander and takes a few paragraphs to bring us to the succession of Antiochus Epiphanes, then we get a little surprise:

In those days lawless men came forth from Israel, and misled many, saying, "Let us go and make a covenant with the Gentiles around us, for since we separated from them many evils have come upon us."

This proposal pleased them, and some of the people eagerly went to the king. He authorized them to observe the ordinances of the Gentiles. So they built a gymnasium in Jerusalem, according to the Gentile custom, and removed the marks of circumcision, and abandoned the holy covenant. They joined with the Gentiles and sold themselves to do evil.

(In the next few paragraphs, Antiochus kicks Egypt's butt and feels good about himself, then returns to Jerusalem where there's some resistance to his rule (explained much more clearly in II Maccabees), destroys both the resistance and the town, and parties using the Temple's dishes. This last, as careful readers of Second Temple-era historical works will realize, is the equivalent of someone in a horror movie saying "Let's go down one by one to investigate that strange noise in the basement!")

Then the king wrote to his whole kingdom that all should be one people, and that each should give up his customs.

All the Gentiles accepted the command of the king. Many even from Israel gladly adopted his religion; they sacrificed to idols and profaned the Sabbath. And the king sent letters to Jerusalem and the cities of Judah; he directed them to follow customs strange to the land, to forbid burnt offerings and sacrifices and drink offerings in the sanctuary, to profane Sabbaths and feasts, to defile the sanctuary and the priests, to build altars and sacred precincts and shrines for idols, to sacrifice swine and unclean animals, and to leave their sons uncircumcised. They were to make themselves abominable by everything unclean and profane, so that they should forget the law and change all the ordinances. "And whoever does not obey the command of the king shall die."

When II Maccabees goes over the same story, it identifies Antiochus's repressive legislation as the outcome of a running political contest in which various candidates manage to bribe or fool Antiochus enough to get himself named High Priest. So I Maccabees is probably the most "pious" account we have, and although its author clearly isn't trying to be objective, we can tell that there's a significant party of Israelites who are happy to adopt Greek cultural and eventually religious practices. I don't believe we have a lot of contemporary testimony from this party -- the "Hellenists," they're usually termed -- so we're not sure how they thought of themselves or identified religiously. Certainly, it's possible to locate Hellenized Diaspora Jews, in later centuries, who combined identification as Jewish and some Jewish practices with some Greek practices. Or maybe they really were trying to assimilate all the way. At any rate, I Maccabees goes on to inform us that the rebellion began in a town called Modi'in, with a family of especially stubborn kohanim, or members of the priestly (but not High-Priestly) caste, who had moved there from Jerusalem:

The King's officers who were enforcing apostasy came to the town of Modi'in to see that sacrifice was offered, and many Israelites went over to them. Mattathias and his sons stood in a group. The King's officers spoke to Mattathias: "You are a leader here," they said, "a man of mark and influence in this town, with your sons and brothers at your back. You be the first now to come forward and carry out the King's order. All the nations have done so, as well as the leading men in Judea and the people left in Jerusalem. Then you and your sons will be enrolled among the King's friends; you will all receive high honors, rich rewards of silver and gold, and many further benefits."

To this Mattathias replied in a ringing voice: "Though all the nations within the king's dominions obey him and forsake their ancestral worship, though they have chosen to submit to his commands, yet I and my sons and brothers will follow the Covenant of our fathers. Heaven forbid we should ever abandon the law and its statutes. We will not obey the command of the king, nor will we deviate from our forms of worship."

As soon as he had finished, a Jew stepped forward in full view of all, to offer a sacrifice on the pagan altar at Modi'in, in obedience to the royal decree. The sight stirred Mattathias to indignation; he shook with passion, and in a fury of righteous anger rushed forward and slaughtered the traitor on the very altar. At the same time, he killed the officer sent by the King to enforce sacrifice, and pulled the pagan altar down.... "Follow me," he shouted through the town, "every one of you who is zealous for the law and strives to maintain the Covenant!" He and his sons took to the hills, leaving all their belongings behind in the town.

Am I the only person who finds this slightly disturbing? Not only have "the leading men of Judea and the people left in Jerusalem" gone with Antiochus's decrees, but so, apparently, have some of the population of Modi'in. Mattathias the Hasmonean ("the Righteous") wants to follow his own form of worship. He enforces this by killing another Jew -- and I obviously missed the bulletin about how those rules forbidding members of the priestly caste to come into contact with dead bodies still functioned. Then Mattathias and his merry men (should we hope they took their wives with them?) go up into the hills to continue the fight. So do some other groups: to give Mattathias his due, he seems to have struck a nerve. One group, identified as including women and children, are trapped in a cave by Greek forces but refuse to fight back or even block the door because it's the Sabbath. They are all killed, and Mattathias's group takes a lesson from this:

And each said to his neighbor: "If we all do as our brethren have done and refuse to fight with the Gentiles for our lives and for our ordinances, they will quickly destroy us from the earth." So they made this decision that day: "Let us fight against every man who comes to attack us on the sabbath day; let us not all die as our brethren died in their hiding places." Then there united with them a company of Hasideans, mighty warriors of Israel, every one who offered himself willingly for the law. And all who became fugitives to escape their troubles joined them and reinforced them.

They organized an army, and struck down sinners in their anger and lawless men in their wrath; the survivors fled to the Gentiles for safety. And Mattathias and his friends went about and tore down the altars; they forcibly circumcised all the uncircumcised boys that they found within the borders of Israel. They hunted down the arrogant men, and the work prospered in their hands. They rescued the law out of the hands of the Gentiles and kings, and they never let the sinner gain the upper hand.

Still following me? Mattathias and his bad boys, along with what the RSV calls "Hasideans" -- that is, the purity-minded reactionary party in Israel -- and anyone who happens to dislike the present government, take to the hills and start twisting the Mosaic Law just enough so that they can become extremely effective guerilla fighters. They hunt down people and places who are not sufficiently observant, forcibly circumcising (ouch!) and striking down "sinners." They tear down altars, and presumably statues and any other forms of religious art or architecture they dislike. I'm probably going to get hate mail from someone here, but which side of the conflict in Afghanistan do the Hasmoneans most remind you of?

Just so you know I'm not leaving critical information out, here's how I Maccabees ends: Mattathias dies, his son Judah Maccabee ("the Hammer") takes over, they get Jerusalem and the Temple back through a series of victories and ambushes from their camps in the hills, and they manage to reconsecrate the Temple and burn the first offering three years to the day after Antiochus had profaned it. Here's how the rabbinic tradition continues the story several hundred years later: the Maccabees search for consecrated oil with which to light the Temple's ceremonial candelabra (that's what menorah means), but they can only find a tiny jar that would last one day, and it'll take eight days to prepare and consecrate new oil. They light the menorah anyway, and it miraculously stays lit for eight days, so they declare a new holiday (totally unprecedented for Judaism, but in line with the prevailing Hellenistic culture). Here's how the historical record continues the story: after a loss in popularity, Judah dies in battle within a year or so; the Seleucids go in and out of power; Judah's youngest brother declares himself both High Priest and King (again, unprecedecented in Judaism but common elsewhere); after several further decades of high-attrition warfare, Judah's nephew John Hyrcanus emerges as a relatively independent, expansion-minded theocrat who conquers several regions around Judea and forcibly compels them to be circumcised and observe the Mosaic Law. The Hasmonean Dynasty lasts for about a hundred years and features the usual intermarriage, sectarian infighting, and mass slaughter of internal opposition. Eventually, internal political struggles allow the Romans take over under Pompey, and the Hasmonean Dynasty formally ends in 63 B.C.E. Nobody much appreciates the multiple ironies in the fire.

So...I'd have some problems with Hanukkah even if I weren't the liberal Jew with Christian relatives and American habits that I in fact am. As it is, though, I kind of doubt I'd've been on Mattathias's side back in the day. Does this pose a religious dilemma? Well, sort of. But I've paid close attention to the words of the prayer over the candles -- the second one, especially for Hanukkah. "Blessed are You, Lord our God, Ruler of the Universe, who performed miracles for our ancestors [okay, it says "forefathers"] in their days at this season." The prayer doesn't say which miracles, you see, and the miracle most people have in mind, the whole menorah-staying-lit-for-eight-days business, only shows up 400 years after the fact. So I've decided that the miracles I have in mind are connected to the survival against all odds of a Jewish spirit of tolerance, liberalism, and give and take with the surrounding cultures. Tomorrow night I'm going home to my family, frying up latkes, and eating Krispy Kremes. Happy Hanukkah, everyone!

My campus visit to Wonderful University was marked by sunshine and weather which the locals told me was unseasonably cold. Coming from Large Midwestern University Town, it felt just dandy. Now that I'm back at LMUT, the weather is reminding me that I still have to spend the winter here: cold weather, grey skies, frequent precipitation hovering between rain and snow (at least the snow is pretty). Of course, I have cleverly planned to avoid the beginning of Serious Snow Season by hopping on a plane home tomorrow, weather permitting. But that means I need to assemble all the books, articles, and computer parts required for spending three weeks away from the office capped by Major Professional Conference #2. On the plus side, getting together the articles has resulted in a flurry of filing and unusually large amounts of clear space on my desk. I even made room for my portable ZIP drive, which I would use to back up the laptop were it not for the fact that I forgot to bring ZIP disks to the office. Well, I was planning to swing by here tomorrow morning anyway -- I also forgot to bring in my officemate's Christmas present, and my flight doesn't leave till early afternoon.

I have more to say, but I think it needs its own post. Hang on....

I got the job. Since I'd been thinking through all the possibilities for the past three weeks, and since they ceded all the things I'd thought to negotiate for in the initial offer...I accepted it. Indecision is not among my character flaws.

What this means is that next summer I'll be packing up and moving to a lovely mid-sized city; next fall I'll be starting as an assistant professor at Wonderful University. (At some point, I'll come up with a different name for it, but that'll do nicely for now.) I figure I have about a fourteen-hour window remaining in which to call distant acquaintances and gloat. The key thing is that said acquaintances must be immersed in the subculture of academia in order to understand the full impact of the announcement. You, dear readers, will simply have to take my word for it that this is pretty damn amazing, especially in terms of timing. And you will no doubt be thrilled to realize that you won't have to hear about this bizarre academic job search business any longer and that this journal can return to its usual prattling about pop culture and the humanities.

Now, I'm really not kidding about finishing my dissertation, although that last chapter won't be done till somewhere closer to Christmas than Dec. 18th. But first I have some more people to call. :)

Back from the trenches. The job interview was surprisingly pleasant -- the city seems nice, the people are welcoming, I have some friends in the area, and it's not as cold as it is here. I'm afraid to hope too strongly, but I think it went well. Further updates will be provided if anything actually happens. Me, I just have to finish this dratted dissertation on time, preferably before I head home for the holidays. We're already technically into the holidays -- I brought a teeny-weeny menorah and birthday candles along on my interview and lit up in my hotel room, using the matches they supply -- but the academic calendar does not, shockingly, adjust to fit even a modified lunar cycle. Also, Hanukkah isn't exactly the world's greatest holiday on purely ideological grounds, but I'll get into that some other time. It's got songs, candles, consumerism, and fried foods. I'm ignoring the whole anti-acculturation motif (she said, humming along with Christmas music).

I'm deliberately ignoring issues on Angel, too, since I managed to catch "Dad" on Monday night after all, and I kind of enjoyed it. (Very oblique spoilers follow.) I've decided that even though the baby (now, apparently, known as "Connor") has no conceivable role in a plot not built around him, even though I'm going to spit nails if anyone makes another remark about a "woman's touch" that isn't clearly a joke, even though the MoG should be much more internally divided than they are, and even though Angel just has no business turning into Full House (even if Fred and Cordy are sort of reminiscent of Kimmie and D.J., and their potential infantilization is deeply disturbing, and my little cousin used to watch Full House obsessively, so my familiarity with its characters is entirely involuntary)...well, he's cute. Connor, I mean, not Angel. Cute baby. Awwwwwwww. Thanks to some quirk which is in no way a biological imperative, I happen to be a sucker for babies, so I don't want him to die a horrible death or anything. Those of you laughing as I momentarily privilege cuteness over characterization and plot may wish to check your houses for glass walls (hint: boybands, Smallville). On a less compromised note (well, for different reasons), I want more of Wesley's being snarky and wielding a flamethrower -- entirely in character. I want Lorne to stay the heck out of the plots for several consecutive episodes. Finally, I want Holtz to trip over his own pretentiousness and impale himself on it. And I want world peace, too, but I don't think I'm gonna get it.

Back to work.

In connection with a not-especially-well-thought-out scheme to justify paying for cable this year, I am currently dashing off a "Buffy Studies" article of sorts. (Yes, it has a home in a forthcoming volume, and I've scheduled in a conference presentation on it, too; I'm not that out of it. One of the commandments of modern academia is to let no good -- or even passable -- thought go unpublished.) I had a clear idea of my thesis when I started writing, but I'm finding it surprisingly difficult to distinguish between everyday snark and thinly veiled social critique. For example, we can be reasonably sure that Buffy's referring to sex with Riley as "Bible study" in "Into The Woods" isn't a serious remark about the applicability of organized religion to her lifestyle (I hope), but what about that great exchange in "The Freshman," where a passer-by asks if she's accepted Jesus as her personal savior and she responds, "Uh, you know, I meant to, and then I just got really busy"?

Any suggestions about standards, or a general rule, for distinguishing one from the other? I can't cite "common sense" in a semi-academic article. Well, I could, but I'd have a heck of a time footnoting it.

Apparently, my Viking name is "Loki the Vicious." (My favorite weapon is in fact the mace: not only does it fit in with all those priest-class characters I played in RPGs back in my geekier formative years, it also happens to be the weapon of choice at academic graduation ceremonies. I will leave the connections between these facts as an exercise for my readers.) Also, I am a borderline romantic on the Romantic Personality Test. Something about these results, taken together, amuses the heck out of me.

The university where I have an on-campus interview coming up has sent me no fewer than four videotapes (along with program materials, brochures, and course catalogs). Do they seriously expect me to review all this stuff before I visit? Because I've still got a serious backlog of Buffy tapes from the first three seasons to watch. I did wind up catching most of last night's Angel rerun, "That Vision Thing," in part because I needed to re-record the teaser (there was an accident the first time 'round) and in part because, well, I don't especially love Raymond, I don't care about whoever it was playing Monday Night Football, and all the good ACC basketball games were on Sunday night. The episode plays fairly well the second time, plot hol^H^H^Htwists and all, but I keep realizing how much more annoying both Fred and Wesley's hair were at the beginning of the season. I'm also increasingly baffled by the question of Gunn's character continuity. Originally, as I understand it, "That Old Gang Of Mine" was supposed to be the second episode of S3 and "That Vision Thing" the third, which would've made better sense in terms of Fred's gradual emergence from the Hyperion and given us more widely spaced hints about Darla's situation. But I'm sort of lost as to how Wesley and Gunn were supposed to have gotten from betrayal and threats of reprisal at the end of "TOGOM" to peacefully eating Chinese together in the "TVT" trailer. It almost makes their lack of meaningful interaction in "Carpe Noctem" seem like a smart choice. Almost.

(Title shamelessly stolen from Brenda Brasher's recent book, which I haven't gotten around to reading. But it's a brilliant title.)

Gosh, yesterday was boring, wasn't it? Today I, er, got a whole lot done, none of which allows me to cross any single item off my to-do list. But at least I didn't get locked into or out of anywhere. So instead of telling you about my administratively empowered day, I'll just offer some fun links I've run across lately.

Apocamon is both hilarious and profoundly disturbing. It's pretty much what you think it is. (It's also very handy for anyone else who has trouble keeping up with all the dramatis personae in the original Revelation to John the Divine. I can hardly wait until they finish it so that I can assign it as supplementary class reading.)

In the Weird Manifestations of Religion on the Internet department, Demonbusters is...um, fascinating. Warning: annoying insta-music with no apparent shut-off. Please note that "the Lord is our source. If the Lord puts it on your heart to publish this site in book form, you will be Blessed by the Lord for being obedient. This would not include the Moody Deliverance Manual since there already is a hard copy." For a satisfying moment of "Real or Buffyverse?" consider the following quote as well: "Have you ever looked right in the eyes of a demon and told the thing to take a hike? I have! Have you ever been growled at by a demon when you walk by them in a restaurant and church? I have! When you get to the point where you can say "I have!", you will not doubt any of the things you read here."

Well, yeah.

Even more...intriguing...is Not Human: How I Discovered That I Was Angelic. Highlights include "it is only now that I know that Jesus was carrying my chicken," "On the Ascension mail list I was on there were a few highly physic people there who could see the energy flowing through me. One of them suggested that I was the Archangel Michael , this I rebuffed and said I was called Jerondo Melchizedek," and -- for cheap humor -- "I can recall during that session having so much energy flow through me that my mussels quivered." You may also wish to check out the related pages in which our author explains that he is the reincarnation of the Apostle Andrew. It's moments like this that make me realize that if I can't find a job in academia, I can always become a cult leader.

Yikes. Spending three hours doing full-on academic listening/talking/networking after two and a half hours of teaching is...tiring. Not to mention the train rides. Usually, I enjoy chatting with people on the train, or casually listening to conversations around me as I try to work. Yesterday, however, I got stuck in the back of a car with a foursome of middle-aged women who were discussing ad nauseum -- and I mean that literally -- the most disgusting things they'd seen on "Fear Factor," some kind of reality show or other based on the premise that People Will Do Just About Anything For The Dim Hope Of Money. (Why this qualifies as entertainment is beyond me -- most reality shows make me embarrassed and slightly queasy. And those are the ones that don't involve eating crickets or all the other appealing things I had to hear about. I'm not easily grossed out, but I am easily disgusted by bad behavior from people over the age of ten.) It was all I could do not to get on my cell phone and exclaim "Gosh, Mom, these people around me are trying to gross each other out with absolutely no consideration for the fact that they're in a public place with a captive audience! Isn't that weird? I wonder if they do that on a TV show somewhere!"

I also had the treat of hearing a group on the way up emphasize the belief that women can't properly work point-and-click cameras and a group on the way down emphasize the belief that men can't tear themselves away from their TVs to fix supper ("just like a man"). Ugh. It's possible I'm being too hard on the Angel writing team; they are apparently reflecting truisms from the heart of Middle America. It's also possible that I'm never going to achieve wedded bliss because my view of male-female relationships is just too damn nuanced. Or it's possible that I'm right, they're wrong, and I should really remember to bring my CD player and headphones along next time I take the train.

Once I got home, I flipped through channels on the TV while changing from Power Clothes into Comfy Clothes. Lo and behold, there was Willow having a bad trip. No, really -- for reasons I have never fully understood, my local UPN affiliate runs Buffy on Saturday night. Now, I don't have much interest in watching Buffy any more, but it's still a huge improvement over other Saturday-night fare ("Nash Bridges" reruns, anyone?), and I thought everyone who described last week's episode as an ABC After-School Special was just showing off their disaffection/nonconformism/pop-culture-trendiness/bitchiness. I apologize to all of you. It really was that bad, in precisely that way -- at least, judging from the five minutes I managed to watch before I turned the TV off and got up to fix supper. Obviously, it's too much to hope that Dawn, Amy, and Willow all died horrible deaths before the end of the episode, but it's not a good sign when you catch yourself thinking that an hour-long Buffy/Spike porno flick would have more potential for subtle characterization and plot twists. (For all I know, that's what's on tap next week.) I'm perfectly happy for all the nice people out there who still enjoy the show, but I'm thinking I may have made the right decision when I stopped watching Buffy.

This entire post sounds unconscionably bitter, which is odd, since I'm in a fairly good mood today: it's sunny, I have one interview confirmed already for Major Professional Conference #2 a month away, and my class went really well yesterday. Also, the vending machines downstairs hold junk food, which is good, because my body is signaling a rare but serious Doritos deficiency which must be remedied before I can get to work. Or something like that.