This Explains Everything

Above: Graphic representation of my Dissertation, in its formative stages (I hope). Circa 2005.

South Padre Island, MA

Last year a friend and colleague of mine at Amherst told me that although the first year of a new faculty position is stressful, the second year hits you like a ton of bricks. He was right.

I'm halfway through the second semester of my second year, it's Spring Break, and I'm going to use this week to pick myself up off the ground, dust myself off, shake off the haze and get ready to power through the rest of the year.

What would I rather be doing this week than reading Spanish major comprehensive exams, sending out book proposals, reading for my classes for next week, making a list of books the library should buy before they run out of money, editing a senior's thesis chapter and starting to work on a conference paper for this summer? Lots of things.

Maybe I'll just post some inane stuff on my blog, though, and pretend it's a vacation.

California One

My triumphant return to California last week felt like 7 years packed into 8 days. I hit many of my old Berkeley haunts (Picante, the Albatross, Jeremy's, Moe's, Strada, Inspiration Point), tried out a few instant Bay Area classics (Bake Sale Betty's, Yank Sing, Everett & Jones in a restaurant, the Blue Bottle, the Fleuvog store), devoured tacos in Santa Cruz, mutilated crab in Pismo Beach, spotted whales off the Pacific Coast Highway, gorged on In 'n' Out in Goleta, brushed with fame in LA (the cast of HIMYM, Billy Bob Thorton at the Griddle, Ione Skye outside Largo), and caught up with my CA peeps along the way.

The trip was great, with one caveat: I arrived at the UC Registrar's office a mere 10 minutes after it closed before a long weekend, preventing me from claiming my hard-earned diploma and enjoying a Rocky-esque moment of jogging down the steps of Sproul Plaza, parchment paper in hand. Somehow mailing off $12 and waiting 6 weeks for a tube isn't quite the same.

Anyway, here are some photos of the trip.

It's actually 11:36

Overheard in the classroom next to my office: "Wake up everyone! It's 11:30! It's the middle of the day! So start talking!"

This strikes me as a heavy-handed way to spur classroom discussion, but hey, we do what we gotta do.

Faculty Meeting Breakdown

Spring 2008 by the numbers

Weeks in the semester: 14
Total students: 19
Courses taught: 2
Total class meetings: 69
Times I was mistaken for a student in the library: 2
Times I told them I was actually faculty: 1
Corncob pipes gifted to me with the express purpose of demonstrating my advanced age to library staff: 1
Dinners eaten at the student dining hall, and approximate time of meal: 1; 5 p.m.
Packed lunches eaten in office: 3
Packed lunches eaten in department lounge: 24
Lunches at the faculty dining hall I was dragged to because the French department found my lunch-eating habits too pathetic: 1
Swings to piñata at end-of-year department party: 3
Direct hits: 2
Papers graded: 114
Oral presentations attentively listened to: 37
Novels taught: 5
Films taught: 13
Evening film screenings: 4
Evening film screenings canceled for lack of an audience: 1
Spanish majors who chose me as their adviser for next year: 4
Percentage of them named Sara(h): 25%
Theses read: 4
Combined total pages of theses: approx. 433
Performances of Don Quijote involving shadow puppets and trapeze artists seen: 1
Faculty meetings: 3
Faculty meetings that ran over the 2 allotted hours: 3
Faculty meetings scheduled during key Tuesday primary contests: 3
Tears shed in my office: 0 (whoo-hoo!)
Total F'07-S'08 regalia wearings: 3
Academic years as Assistant Professor down: 1
Academic years as Assistant Professor to go: TBD

Diagnosis: Senioritis

The scene: a student wrapping up a 25-minute discussion of his final paper, due in one week
Where: Seated around a seminar table, in a classroom on campus
When: 5 minutes before the end of class on the Monday of the last week of classes
Who: a notorious senior, witnessed by five classmates and the professor

[Translated from the original Spanish by SJB]

Profa SJB: And, by the way, "fall in love" is English usage. It's "enamorarse" in Spanish.
student: Oh, really? "Caer enamorado" is all over my paper.
Profa: Right. So you should fix it before you turn it in.
student: Really? But it's already finished!
Profa: No, actually, it's not. That's why we've been doing this workshop. I highly recommend that you edit your paper taking into account what we've talked about in class today.
student: But there's so much to do this week... there's the Senior Cocktail party!

Things I would rather see on the live AmhCam

This is a video of the main quad of campus, where you can stalk anyone walking between the Chapel and my building, it looks like. Entertaining, but I'd rather see a live streaming video of:

• Parking spots still available around the quad.
• Students lurking outside my office.
• A scanning view of the lunch specials at the faculty dining hall and the salad bar situation.
• The inside of the classroom I'm about to enter, with the number of students who've shown up and their relative energy level (eye-level close-ups would do).
• The outside of my building and anyone who's standing there smoking.
• The workout room at the gym, including whether there's a line for the treadmills and which students or colleagues I'm going to run into there.
• My mailbox and its contents, so I know if I should bother to check it.
• The circulation desk at the library, to see if that woman who thought I was a student is working today (so I could either avoid her or find a pipe and a tweed jacket so she doesn't make the same mistake again).
• And also: the inside of the Red Room, just prior to any faculty meeting I must attend there, with a reading of the temperature inside the room on the bottom left-hand corner (so I can bundle up) and a best guess estimate countdown clock of how much longer the meeting's going to go on (so I can properly numb my mind in advance) in the bottom right-hand corner.
  

Bueno, bueno, bueno

What goes around really does come around: I'm teaching La familia de Pascual Duarte by Camilo José Cela in my Postwar Spain and the Novel course right now. I first read this book in Sr. Zintel's Spanish 5 class in high school, and remember being scandalized by the pig that eats little Mario's ears before he falls into a jug of olive oil, Lola and Pascual gettin' it on on Mario's grave, and Pascual shooting his dog in cold blood and later stalking and killing his mother, among other cheery moments.

I've read this book a couple of times since then, but it never fails to transport me right back to that second floor classroom of West High, where generations of necios would sing "Lola, la la la la Lola" (by the Kinks, although I didn't know that at the time) to Sr. Zintel's goofy-tied delight and mock-horror. SKBK (né SKB) and I would follow that up with a rousing round of the Police's "Sending out an Eso es," while dl004d and Leo countered with "Too legit, la tía Tula legit." Good times.

Anyway, now I get to be the one reveling in delight and mock-horror. Not a bad gig.

Fall 2007 by the Numbers

Weeks in the semester: 14
Courses taught: 2
Total students: 24
Individual classes taught: 61
Oral presentations: 31
Oral presentations in which the presenters threw candy at the class as a motivational tool: 1
Essays graded: 92
Essay re-writes graded: 31
Final papers yet-to-be graded: 24
Movies shown: 5
Video projects created by students: 3
Catalan folk songs played: 1
Inopportune moments the photocopier broke down: 2
Packed lunches I was organized enough to bring to campus: 0
Lunches at the faculty dining hall: 28
Lunches at the faculty dining hall in which all the food was named after Red Sox-related minutia: 1
Free lunches attained at the faculty dining hall through frequent diner card: 1.91
Appearances at the Spanish Table: 1
Faculty meetings attended: 2
Faculty meetings canceled: 3
Faculty meetings almost skipped to see Bruce Springsteen: 1
Clandestine visits the dog paid to my office: 3
Number of times tears were shed in my office: 3
Emails or meetings I had with students who had missed class but wanted to prove that they'd still done the reading: 2
Times this happened at Berkeley: 0
Students with perfect attendance: 4
Combined absences of everyone else: 54.5
Hawks spotted outside my building: 1
Percentage of time I biked, drove and walked to campus (approx.): 32%, 59%, 9%
Department scandals averted, generally speaking: 2
Times I locked myself out of my office after hours: 1
Buildings on campus I can reliably identify: 21 of 89
College sporting events attended: .5
Times I was almost beaned by a puck: 1

How I Blew My Students' Minds Today

After having been set adrift as I flit in and out of Berkeley these past few months, my Spanish class settled down this week to read Miguel de Unamuno's classic Niebla, an existencial romp in which Unamuno himself (student comment: "He looks like Freud!") enters the novel (actually, he calls it a nivola so he can break all the rules of genre), meets the main character, Augusto, threatens to kill him, gorges him to death (or maybe Augusto kills himself...), then kills his dog, too.

At one point Augusto tells Unamuno that maybe Unamuno is really only a fictional creation, and not actually in control of the novel he's writing. Moreover, he says, maybe the novel's readers are fictional creations, too. So, if that's the case, I told my students, it follows that we, this Spanish 107B class, are also fictional creations, and perhaps we're even being written into the narrative of Niebla, as we speak, by Unamuno himself. Dude!!!

P.S. Does anyone know how to translate "blow your mind" into Spanish? The best I came up with was os estoy rompiendo las mentes, which doesn't quite work. Just for future reference, for the next time I blow their minds.

5 out of 100 Years

One of the Main Events at my campus interviews this year and last year has been the teaching demonstration. Now, the term "demonstration" is misleading, because it makes it seem like you're in a hermetically-sealed room teaching to a classroom of crash test dummies while a committee in white lab coats and pocket protectors takes notes on clipboards from behind double panes of glass.

This is not what happens. Teaching demonstrations use real students as guinea pigs, and in many cases this is just another day in the semester for them. They may or may not be expecting to learn something, but you're nevertheless expected to teach them something, even though you may be regarded as a being one notch higher on the rung of respectability than the average middle school biology sub.

In the course of my on-campus teaching demonstrations, I have been asked to teach a wide range of subjects, from "your research" to "The Transition" to "this paragraph about Picasso" to "the Mexican mural movement." Now, the latest challenge: Amherst wants me to teach chapter five of Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. First of all, there is no chapter five in OHYoS (or CAdS, its Spanish acronym), because the chapters aren't numbered. Secondly, whereas I taught the Mexican mural movement in an introductory literature class, I'm expected to teach a foundational work of 20th-century literature to 45 students in a senior seminar normally taught by a highly-regarded Latin Americanist.

As a friend observed today, while jovially buying five Cal mugs at the Cal student store, I've got my work cut out for me.

It's early January...

...and I have one more week before classes start and before the phone might start ringing again, and before I get an inch closer to knowing where I'll be next year. So, instead of working and waiting, what am I doing?

• Instead of reading about the political upheaval in 18th and 19th century Spain, I am making a very involved Marinated Lamb Tajin from my new Regional African Cookbook.
• Instead of getting ahead on my reading for this semester's class, I am erasing all the pencil marks out of the copy of "La deshumanización del arte" (Ortega y Gasset) that I got out of the library.
• Instead of fine-tuning my job talk, I am listening to this kick-ass CD mix of the best rock/pop/etc. from 2006 I was given and feeling very cool, indeed.
• Instead of looking at the evaluations my students from last semester wrote about me, I am running into one of my students from last summer in the citrus fruit aisle at the Berkeley Bowl and exchanging very pleasant pleasantries.
• Instead of re-reading my dissertation, I am watching Spanish movies (see photo) and Spike Lee documentaries and Veronica Mars episodes.
• Instead of starting one of those new Spanish novels I keep telling myself I should crack open, I am reading New Yorkers and The Secret Life of Bees and Amy Sedaris' warped hostess book.
• Instead of reading the Bible (how many times have I told myself I should read the Bible?!?), I am hanging a framed copy of my grandmother's cherry pie recipe on my kitchen wall, and knitting a scarf, and hiking from my front door to Tilden Park with Addison, and throwing out old T-shirts that I love but are three sizes too big for me.

Library Moebius Moment

Earlier this week on a reconnaissance mission to the library, I tried to recall a book from myself.

Me: "I want to recall this book."
Library dude [looking at computer screen]: "Ummm... do you have this book?"
Me: "No, I want to recall it."
Library dude: "Ummm... you have this book."
Me [doubting]: "I do? Wow. Huh." [now sheepish] "Oh yeah, I do."

Only later did I realize I could have chalked it up to secretly trying to test the accuracy of the library's computer system. This is my visual representation of the entire exchange, for you math nerds out there.

It's hard out here for a Ph.D.

Culled from the job listings for Spanish positions in academia, here are some of my favorite actual job requirements (institutions have not been identified to protect my ass) and a few snide remarks about them:

The Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 requires the university to inform you that we can only employ U.S. citizens and aliens lawfully authorized to work in the U.S. Each new employee is required to present documentation verifying identity and right to accept employment. Members of protected class groups are strongly encouraged to apply.

The first part of this sounds like it was drafted by Dick Cheney. But then: protected class groups? What, like, bald eagles?

Responsibilities include teaching all levels of language classes, developing a linguistics track, ... directing and teaching in overseas programs; and participating in Spanish chapel. Interested candidates should send a letter of application, a curriculum vitae, a short statement of teaching philosophy, a response to [the Institution's] Christian mission.

We enjoyed this one last year, too. I wonder what would happen if you sent a diatribe against the Institution's mission. Hey, it's a response!

[Institution] is committed to employment equity and diversity in the workplace and welcomes applications from women, visible minorities, aboriginal people, persons with disabilities and persons of any sexual orientation or gender identity.

Visible minorities? What is this, "Soul Man"?

The applicant may be required to teach courses through alternative delivery methods.

I love this. Can you can teach in Klingon, or balanced on your head? Or maybe by playing the Telephone game? ("Psst! Cervantes is trying to subvert common notions of truthful narrators here. Pass it on!")

All faculty are required to abide by the standards of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Preference is given to members in good standing of the sponsoring Church.

I'm not sure why this is even listed on the MLA Web site, since most of us would fall under the category of serious heritics according to this institution's guidelines. This institution in the state of... uh... wait... I can figure this one out...

Background check will be conducted on the applicant selected for the position.

This is actually a job I'm applying for. I hope they can't check out my middle school record. That would be embarrassing.