Ex In White Satin

So my ex is getting married this weekend. I only know this via the grapevine from my ex-ex-ex, or like, my ex to the fifth power. One of those girlfriends from so long ago you forget you actually once knew what they looked like naked, or cared, and now they're more like your sister, only less fucked up. So you care a lot more, or at least, a lot more comfortably. She calls to tell me my ex is getting married, which she knows NOT because she was invited, though she should have been, since she helped ex leave academia and get into publishing, where ex is now reportedly making a mint. Meanwhile, I declare bankruptcy, but I digress.

So ex to the fifth knows because ex has invited mutual friends of hers and ex(5), because ex has a habit of stealing friends, though eventually they figure things out. So ex(5)'s friends, stolen by ex briefly, were invited. But not ex (5), because of the perception of loyalty to me. Do I have to tell you we are in a dyke drama here, or would you know just from reading this? Immediately know? There are condos involved in Provincetown, just to let you in on how really gay this soap is. So ex (5) tells me ex is getting married, but not, for some reason, in Massachusetts, where ex actually now lives and works, and where it makes a smidge of sense, but in Maine, where ex's woman lives. Why, Lord, why?

Let's consider this closely. When you say the words "gay wedding," and mean them to describe an act you are about to perform upon yourself and all those unfortunate enough to be sucked into your orbit, you are already 95% sure of looking ridiculous. Straight people think we're just pathetic wannabees, most states don't validate the sentimental ceremony with legal status, and worse, most weddings are tacky affairs pulled together on a shoestring budget masquerading as "classy" minimalism. Straight weddings are like this, right? Cash bars, pale blue bridesmaids' dresses, grooms hell-bent on a "let's relive the prom" tuxedo, brides in white getups, looking like JonBenet Ramsay in a computer-aged photo. Gay weddings are even more sincere, even shakier in their dignity, desperate to shore up legitimacy under assault from all sides. And lesbians, mostly, are poor. Or at least, not so rich.

I'm just saying that the chances of lameness are extraordinary.

So the ex isn't getting married in Mass. Why? And they've decided to have a Quaker wedding, even though they were both raised Catholic. Maybe BECAUSE they were both raised Catholic. But the clincher is that they are supposedly going to all sit in a circle and read the Massachusetts high court decision out loud. While choosing not to get married in Massachusetts.

I'm not sure why I care. Maybe I just suspect the ex is getting railroaded. After all, the person I knew shared a suspicion of marriage but an appreciation of the open-bar, huge banquet blowout, complete with swing band and endless martinis. Maybe she's capitulated to someone else's tastes. Or maybe, worse, she's changed. She's gotten more sincere, less ironic, more idealistic, less bitter. And maybe that's the hard part. Maybe I still want to protect her from embarrassment, from people smirking who in reality have no right even to polish her shoes, much less pass judgement. Maybe I'm jealous. We were together 11 years through graduate school and the job market and cross-country relationships, but we never got a wedding, or took one for ourselves. My family seemed to take eight years to accept us as a couple, and by the time we broke up, family disapproval on both sides just seemed too hard on top of everything else. Sure we threw many Christmases, but our relationship meant no grandchildren in my mother's eyes. Sure we babysat her mother through a lonely widowhood, until she met another man and married again, but then we became inconvenient and illegible, a difficulty for the new husband. When we split up, it seemed to me that her mother, who had always been very kind to me, was actually relieved, thinking maybe Mary would marry late in life, as she had. That hurt.

Well Mary is getting married at 40, though not to a man. Somehow she has stayed out, stayed alive, found love, been successful. She is probably quite happy. She will try to have a meaningful ceremony because her life matters, and whether or not her family gets it, she knows she matters. So here's to you, faraway ex. Good for you, for standing up for yourself enough to look ridiculous, or to have dignity, which are sometimes the same thing. Sit in a circle of your friends, think about a place for love in this world, eat good food, and play for hours through one of summer's long golden days. This weekend, which is gay pride in many cities around the country, you are going on with your life, and your dreams, and your vision of what love and family mean across the miles, and political divides, and bitter religious disputes. Have sex. Go for a walk. Make a big dinner. Get tan. Drink a whole bottle of wine--or better yet, champagne. Dance. Be proud. Live long, as Tuvok says on Voyager. Live long, and prosper.

Unemployed

Greetings from the world of curlers, cold cream, fuzzy slippers, soap operas and secret afternoon drinking. Though these days, unemployment consists more of anxious internet searches than it does the melancholy consumption of bonbons and whiskey sours on the couch at two pm. Still, the depressed housewife image is kinda fun. I've been sending out applications for adjunct teaching and avoiding packing up my office, an avoidance made possible by the wealth of online shopping opportunities, not to mention downloadable music, available via high speed DSL. I've also been racking my brain to try to figure out how it could possibly make sense to borrow 40K a year to attend a law school whose graduates average a starting salary of 50K working for the city and public interest. Unfortunately, it does not make sense, hence the adjunct applications. I'm willing to borrow 20K a year and go/work part time, which sucks because it is hard on both ends, but a girl has to draw the line somewhere.

Thank God for the newspaper. The New York Times, in case you haven't figure this out yet, is a fantastic way to spend hours a day pretending you are actually working. Makes for great conversation, too, when you go out with people who are actually too busy working to read the ENTIRE paper every morning. Get them to confess in shamed tones that they only have time to read the 20 Most E-Mailed Articles, and you've won a small victory for the bohemian lazyass lifestyle you'll be wallowing in (between bouts of anxiety and feelings of worthlessness) until some of those letters and cvs and transcripts from 20 years ago bear fruit, and you find yourself facing row upon row of doubtful faces once more, all of them waiting to see if you're stupid or smart, nervous or confident, easy or hard, just another bullshit shrill pathetic attention-hungry geek or a sensible person with a clue. You get to be visible to them but invisible to other faculty, a discrepancy you leave them to figure out. You get to stretch your paycheck and fantasize about the job list and mull over your life choices and change-of-career possibilities. You get to explain to your girlfriend why being unsuccessful with dreams is better than being successful with none. You get to face another year as you, as the person you were becoming and still might be, whoever that is.

Until then there's June, July, and August (the "Three Best Reasons to Teach," remember?). There's the internet, and maybe the beach, and always, always the New York Times. And so we dream on, we bonbon bohemians, drifting through the whiskeycherried afternoons of summer.

Blanche gets out

I finally went for my first outdoor run of the year. My girlfriend decided I was getting agorapobic (which is true, I am), and suggested that I accompany her to the beach for a run. Outside. In actual sunlight. With people around. Feeling like Dracula about to take a swim in holy water, I agreed. I put on black shorts, a black t-shirt, and tried to find black socks (no luck). I turned my ipod up loud enough to drown out the sound of snickering bystanders, my labored breathing, and the staggered thud, thud of my slow slow feet. I walked from the car to the path, took a deep breath, and tipped myself forward.

Fortunately, almost nobody was around. There was the usual dog walker trying not to tangle up eight separate leashes. There were the running pairs--thin girl or boy-girl couples bouncing effortlessly along the sand. A few teenagers dry-humped each other in the grass. An older woman walked purposefully towards the dream of a longer life.

Early on, it became clear that my bra was not taking its duties seriously. My thin shoes and thin feet seemed unable to withstand the pounding of two-hundred plus pounds slamming down on them over and over again. Yet we pressed on, the body parts swinging in crazy spirals, careening towards fitness.

It's always nice when it's over. The sky is blue, the lake is cool, the grass ripples, and the sun dries your salty sweat tears, leaving the faintest white footprints down your cheek. I thought about doing this again soon, then remembered the Memorial Day onslought just around the corner, of families and hibachis and the smell of grilled meat and the smoke so thick it chokes you. I felt agoraphobic again, then looked down and admired my calf muscle. Was it just me, or did it already look bigger and more defined?

SuperFake Fun

Today I bleached my hair. My haircutter lady will not like this, so I may have to go AWOL from her salon for a while. I bleached it because I want to own my own head. I bleached it because it looks queer and festive. I bleached it because otherwise I look like an overweight lesbian version of my mother. With a nose ring.

When my girlfriend and I first got together, I was getting 10-dollar hair cuts at Big Hair in Roscoe Village. It's one of the scummiest places you will ever contemplate from a barber's chair, but it is fairly impersonal and always cheap. As their name does NOT suggest, "stylists" at Big Hair go fast and heavy with the clippers. One slip and you've got a month to explain that you are not in fact shipping out to Iraq.

My femme girlfriend thought I deserved the luxury of a real salon, so she took me to Art and Science in Evanston. It's one of those places where you put on a smock and consult seriously with your hair professional about what you want BEFORE you even get shampooed.

The problem with places like this, besides the fact thay they are expensive, is that they are not particularly diverse when it comes to gender. Woman plus hair equals feminine, in other words. What's a butch girl to do?

I love my hair lady, though. Her name is Cindy, and she's from Michigan. SHe's the breadwinner in her family. She likes to have real conversations about real things. She's got progressive politics.

But like all hair professionals, Cindy wants control of my hair. She's got a vision. She wants it dark, au natural, cut short in front like Eddie Munster. I like her scissor work, but I think I look like a big triangle with a dark tip. In a strong headwind. The face looking out of the mirror where mine should be looks pale, haggard, and slightly surprised.

So today, I took back my head. I bought a 10 dollar box of Feria extra bleach blonde, divided all the ingredients by half, and gave myself a double process in my very own home. The chemical smell alone drove the cat away. I put the bleach on, wiped my ears, and put Glad Wrap on my head for heat activation. After 45 minutes, I washed it out, my hair the color and loft of Heat Miser's kewpie doo. I let it dry, then put in batch two. This time I also used the hair dryer to boost the chemical reaction. After I washed it out, I put in purple toner shampoo, taking everything down to a nice silvery white.

I still look like a big triangle, but now I'm all Giza, my pyramid top leafed with gold, gleaming in the sun. I look intentional. Punky. Fun. There's nothing accidental or timid here. You won't walk by and not see me. I will not bow before my hair professional. I may not be free, but I'm free enough to nuke my head with scary toxic junk on my own terms. I may have no idea what in hell I will be doing three months or a year from now, but I know tomorrow, and the next day, and the day after that, I will be blonder than blonde. Malibu Ken blonde. Titanic iceberg blonde.

The great thing about making yourself look ridiculous is that nobody can really look ridiculous if they try hard enough to look that way. But my haircutter lady can't know for sure. Not now. At least, not till I've grown my roots out.

80s hangover

Just finished Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty, and I feel strange, like I gorged myself on dessert (or cocaine, which is maybe the point). The writing is beautiful, though I can't say as much for the characters. Not to be a moralist, but I couldn't like any of them.

Nick Guest--the shallower, faggotty-er Nick Carroway of Hollinghurst's ode to 80's Britain--never grows or changes, except in the intensity of his asskissing and firmness of his commitment to eradicating of all symptoms of his own interiority, reflection, self-criticism, and compassion. The AIDS part of the plotline seems inevitable yet gratuitous. The narrative brilliantly evokes the homophobic shame and hedonistic moral relativism of a protagonist more interested in knowing the right people and being surrounded by nice things than in thinking for himself or doing anything about anything. Yet the twin plot developments of AIDS, on the one hand, and Nick's expulsion from the Garden of Eden he has enjoyed as the lodger of a wealthy political family, on the other, both serve to reinforce one's sense that Nick has gotten what he deserves, and that, in turn, all the apolitical, shallow, coked-up, parasitic, hard-hearted, and exploitative gay men that surround him, of which he is a representative clone, reaped what they sowed. I'm sure we are supposed to cluck cluck at the end of the novel about how these guys should have been more critical and less unctious towards the conservative system that would eventually sell them out without a thought, but really, in the end their wrecked lives seemed more like a fate they brought on themselves.

Is this hateful story really the way, or even a way, to think about the 80s? Is this rehashing of every gay stereotype you ever heard (except for the effeminacy part--Hollinghurst gives us pompous little men instead, perhaps because queens would evoke too much sympathy) really deserving of the Booker Prize, for Christ's sake? Yikes.

His writing is absolutely gorgeous, but the whole thing left a really bad taste in my mouth. I have a headache-y sad feeling, one similar to what you feel the morning after overdoing alcohol and drugs all night. The self-recrimination accompanying this hangover as it is figured in the novel may be a good thing for the vacuous Nick Guest, but I'm not sure it is at all deserved by the novel's larger gay readership, many of whom--unlike Nick--worked hard, took care of their friends and lovers, became politically active, and contracted HIV anyway, too. Despite the ugly logic implied by The Line of Beauty, they didn't "deserve" HIV. Nobody does.

In short, though Hollinghurst sets out to satirize a conservative era, he seems rather to be paying moral tribute to it. Anyone else who has read this novel, I would love to know what you think.

Packing

Lucky me, I get to actually pack up my office. Some people in corporations just get their pink slips one morning and a box for the stuff in their desks. So now it's time to pull down the books from the shelves and guage how petty I feel about my office furniture. If I can think of a grad student with an actual office, even shared, I'd rather donate my Ikea rug and comfy Poang chair to them. But put stuff in the furniture pool for redistribution at the end of the month? No way.

Where do I leave this university? When I came, this was a school for first-generation college students from the city and older people going back for affordable degrees. Many of them couldn't write a five-page paper, even in advanced classes. Our graduate students were getting degrees in creative writing, high school certification, and rhet/comp. Department meetings were jolly, social things run by a benevolent patriarchy. Everyone got their say. We discussed curriculum, hiring needs, graduate oral exam formats. Nobody got paid very much, so everybody that could got into administration as soon as possible. The atmosphere was democratic, workmanlike, communal.

Where do I leave it? The department is full of ivy types bent on transforming the curriculum into Duke Lite, a program heavy on American Studies and Milton. These men--and with few exceptions, they are all men--fit a profile. They married their graduate or undergrad students and ratcheted their salaries up by flirting heavily with counter-offers. In some cases, they are so high-priced that they will never be able to find comparable jobs elsewhere. They in turn would rather hire a male ivy-league assistant professor than anyone anywhere else, though female ivys of any stripe are also desireable as hires. They create a climate heavy on testosterone and light on diversity. They run meetings by telling everyone else what is going on, with no desire or expectation of feedback. Faculty sit, mute, their opinions as welcome in these meetings as a genuine critique is welcome at a George Bush "Town Hall." Both are charades of self-governance; both are related in creepy ways.

After intimidating senior faculty with threats about resource scarcity and wage and hire freezes, our famous--or infamous--Dean is retiring, leaving his prison bitches to count the myriad ways they have prostituted their own ideals. There is no community here, unless you count all the men who are just like each other and therefore feel comfortable and affirmed as "community." Formal reviewers in the department fail to recognize queer sexual diversity as a thematic category of scholarship. Junior faculty canned at other institutions for exceptionally bad teaching boast in the copy room about the condos they have bought. Women who are some of the best teachers in the University are denied tenure despite extensive publication records and international reputations. Graduate students apply to work with these women on topics of class, sexuality, and international modernism, and are not told that they are no longer here--are not told that these women have most likely been driven out of academia's soft job market for good.

The students remain. They are smart and beaten down, but hopeful. They are tolerant and convivial. Their minds are hungry, and they fill me with hope. Some of them fail--too many, actually. Their family troubles or financial hardships eventually sabotage their chances for an education, and there is little institutional support for them. Others persevere, and they are proudly graduating right now. They don't care about prestige. They are triumphant because they have done a difficult thing, worked hard, and succeeded despite the politics of higher education. They should be saluted. They are the ones who quietly read during their shifts at the multiple jobs they work full time while they attend school. They are the ones who finish the whole novel because they couldn't put it down. They are the ones who bring their friends to class because the discussions interest them so much. They refuse to countenance intolerance of any kind, and they are incredibly fun to teach.

I will miss them a lot.

Retro Shuffle

This is the kind of music I got to listen to when I was a kid. My dad liked The 5th Dimension, Roger Miller, Johnny Cash, Petula Clark, The Seekers, Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazelwood, and Peter, Paul, and Mary. The local radio station in our patch of 1960's rural New Hampshire, WLNH, couldn't decide what its demographic should be, so they played music that would offend as few people as possible. Their aesthetic was muzak-y movie themes, smoothed-out covers, and, inexplicably, Tom Jones. I added others to the list just for fun: Tammy Wynette is always good, and Neil Diamond just makes me happy, as does Dolly Parton and her awesome guitar playing.

When we were little, my sister and I liked to sit next to my dad's stereo, one of those wood-cabinet deals with speakers in the front and a top that opened to play records or the radio. If you looked in, you could read the record labels in the bright light of the slide tuner. We liked to lean against the speakers, with the backs of our heads or one ear at a time against the soft fabric webbing, and let the music vibrate our little bodies with its big stereo sound. We didn't always understand what the songs meant, but we loved the way those voices and orchestras wrapped around us. I sent this playlist to my sister the other day so my 3-year-old nephew can blow his little ears out on the same stuff we did.

Up Up And Away /The 5th Dimension
King of the Road /Roger Miller
Help Yourself /Tom Jones
Color My World /Petula Clark
Dr. Zhivago (Laura's Theme)
Jolene /Dolly Parton
Ladybird /Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazelwood
Stand By Your Man /Tammy Wynette
Georgie Girl /The Seekers
Theme From A Summer Place /Percy Faith
If I Were A Carpenter /Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash
Cherry, Cherry /Neil Diamond
Sundown /Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazelwood
It Ain't Me Babe /Turtles
Don't Think Twice /Peter, Paul and Mary

after tv

You know the feeling. You've done it a million times. Your show is over and it's time to turn off the tv. It's not as if that would be a bad thing. You know that. You could read. Write. Check email. Sleep. Write up a list of things to do. Yet you can't turn it off. You don't want to. The shallow interiority it pretends to provide feels better than the abyss of thinking. At least, that's what you think when the tv is on. So you surf. The guide tells you what's on. The info button explains in greater detail. It is hypnotic, this enfolding of knowledge in a multicolored menu. You could follow its trail forever.

When it's off, if you can bring yourself to do it, everything feels better. You feel your lungs expand and the sullen resentment at the back of your head dissipate. It's quiet. You can be critical now. You can feel generous. That creativity you watch other people use to sell you things? You have it too, buried in a sleepy mind. A mind looking for a way out of the day. For rest and the blur of checking out.

The sounds of the night filter in the open window. The slam of a car door, the voice of a girl and the windy sound of tires on a wet street. Far away, a siren wheeling like a cicada. And the sound of your heartbeat, and your lover typing in the next room, and the soft whirr of the cable box, and the stir of the living poised, yearning.

It's been real

At first I decided that it was just too boring to have another sad post about my miserable job, now ex-job. Then I thought I should at least say what the day was like. So here goes.

My last day came and went with little fanfare and just enough bullshit to piss me off. I set myself a deadline to get grades in by telling my undergrads that I would hand back papers yesterday at noon in my office. Students rarely come en masse to these hours, but the good ones who want closure on the class usually show up to say how much they enjoyed things, and to say goodbye. This time five or so showed up to say goodbye, this time for good. That was fine. I appreciated their sweetness, and even thought it was comical when one of the students most upset about the university not tenuring me said the name of Famous Dean at the exact moment that Famous Dean walked by. His head swivelled uncontrollably for a moment, drawn to the rare spectacle on our hallway of an open office door. The student kept talking, he kept walking. The student left. Other students hovering near came and went. Eventually it was time to close up shop.

I checked my email one more time and saw that the Assistant to the Head wanted to see me briefly. I stopped in to her office, expecting her to tell me where to drop off keys, or something like that. The first thing she asked, discomfort writ large in every gesture of her body, was when did I think I might be moving out? No hurry, no hurry, she reassured me. She asked about keys, equipment, whether I had let the pension system know I was leaving. Then her voice trembled, and she told me she was really sad I was going, and that she'd miss me. I saw tears in her eyes. I was flummoxed.

Fortunately Crazy Poetry Lady blew into the room at that precise moment to demand the time of a meeting she had forgotten. When she stopped short, Staff Lady told her she was saying goodbye, and Crazy Poetry Lady offered me her hand, almost as if I should kiss it. "Goodbye, goodbye!" she trumpeted. Then added, surprisingly, "Best prose writer in the department!" I couldn't help it. "Too bad everybody else didn't agree with you!" I shot back. "I was on leave!" she protested, too much. She had never said anything before, not in the two years since my tenure decision when I'd passed her in the hallway at least once a week. Ah, collegiality. It seems always to require an audience.

It was definitely time to go. Even as I knew I had to drag in one more time to get an incomplete grade done for a dawdling grad student, and thought with a sigh how tedious it was going to be to pack up my books, most of which belong to my ex in Boston and need to be sent back to her, yesterday felt like the end of something.

And really, when you consider what a truly shitty place to work it has been for the last four years, and that I'm getting paid all summer to figure out what I want to do with my life, and that my health insurance continues through August, that's fine. I looked up at my door, with its "Professor Dirty Lesbian" flier still on it, and closed it behind me.

who cares

The hardest thing about blogging is feeling like you have the energy to care. Like, it's 1030 at night. Do I feel like caring? Or would it be easier to get drunk and watch the Family Guy? Followed by Will and Grace, then Dharma and Greg?

My friend who teaches at Elite University in town forwarded me the latest Chronicle thing by Famous Dean, where he bitched and moaned about retiring. Talked about working in a laundromat, or selling pencils. So sorry that it's hard to care when I, too, am leaving my job, perhaps to sell pencils on some corner next to him in a Florida beach town.

Imagine our conversation. He'd maybe ask how long I had been there, because he wouldn't remember seeing me or meeting me or sitting in meetings with me at our university. I'd be tan by then, so he'd assume I'd been in Florida a while. I'd tell him that I was an artist doing a performance piece, selling pencils to call attention to the commodification and devaluation of creativity. He'd tell me that he was selling pencils to prove that creativity was meaningless. We'd argue, but it would trail off quickly, becaue the sun is so hot and Stanley is so disinterested in ideas now. He'd tell me he was too old and too rich and too tired to care, that he had made messes everywhere he'd gone and it still hadn't made him happy. I'd tell him I'd tried not to make messes everywhere I'd gone and it hadn't made me happy either. He'd snore, slumped over on the brilliant sidewalk, a little person in summer clothes, waiting for his wife to fetch him. Meantime wife is running wild through Parrot Village, leading a charge of 19-year-olds earnestly trying to follow her directive to throw off civilization while writing papers about it. She's stripped down to her bra, and made up some kind of war whoop that resembles a mourning dove being sodomized. People stare, but no one will stop her--not with the demographic galloping at her heels. Especially if she tells them she's doing research for her book.

Both of them are collecting pensions, and both of them face the days stretching long and empty before them, towards forgetfulness, warm hours in the sun, death. When I was in grad school I taught his wife's essays to my freshmen comp students and wondered what places like their hip private university were like, where Famous Dean gathered together a cast of stars, where all those theoretical minds lived and thought and breathed in one place. I remember what it felt like to hope you could someday be in a place like that, talk to people like that, be someone like that thinking with those people. It seemed like heaven. Like Paradise.

Now we are all selling pencils, in some way or another. This makes us equals. Oddly, we both turn and trudge slowly away from this world we have in common. He has lived here a lifetime; I've moved more ambivalently in and out of it for 20 years. If I had the energy I could think about what this really means, and what the significance of the whole enterprise is, academia at the twilight of itself, the end of the century, this point in my life. But it takes so much energy to care. The TV has been off for a whole half hour, my glass is empty, and I'm weary of talking, writing, my job, Famous Dean, the state of civilization, the Florida beaches. Will and Grace is on, and I'm feeling languid, lazy, and so deliciously tired.

Compulsive Astrology

Most of my time on the internet involves the virtual version of compulsive mailbox checking. I realize I'm in a sick sad loop but there's nothing I can do about it. It begins, of course, with email. My aol 'cause it's friendly, mostly, except for the occasional threatening note from my ex ex girlfriend, asking me why I haven't yet paid off a mutual credit card. That's not so fun. but mostly aol is friendly, banal, spammy. Calls for papers from my days as an enthusiatic graduate student, for conferences and collections I'll never attend or read, let alone submit papers to. Solicitations for mortgages. I don't know what I'm checking for, but I think I hope I'll see an email that says "You've been accepted to Northwestern law School!"

After I check my aol mail I go to my UIC mail. I think I hope for a message that says, "We paid you twice as much this month and you don't have to pay it back."

Then it's time for compulsive astrology. That's when your horoscope is going to tell you what's going to happen and why you should be happy about it. First Jonathan Cainer. I want my Week Ahead Forecast to say that this is the week when all my fortunes turn around and I finally get started on the career that will make me happy and enable me to buy a house. And own a car that's less than 10 years old. I want my today forecast to say that I'm smart successful, and soon to be rich. And that today I will get the phone call that will turn my life around. For the better.

Then it's on to Astrodiest (my girlfriend calls it Astrodentist). This scope usually charts celestial influences. I want it to say that I am entering a period of prolonged prosperity, the likes of which I have never yet seen. I want it to talk about talents recognized, opportunities realized, employment verified, worries on the back burner. I want Astrodentist to give me a clean bill of artistic, intellectual, financial, and carnal health.

After the horoscopes, it's on to the job lists. I want academic jobs on the MLA list, lucrative corporate jobs in laid-back companies on the aol jobs list, publishing jobs that want me on Monster.com, creative jobs that want to train me on Craig's List. There are so many careers with bright prospects. How can I possibly check all these lists? But I do.

By now I might have missed important emails, so I have to check again. Unfortunately I still know the horoscopes. I could check various love match sites to see if my girlfriend and I are suited and will last. Netscape has the best browser for procrastinating because it has lots of weight loss tips, morbid stories, and tips about sex. Granted that I always read the men's tips on how to please a woman. Then it may be time to shop for shirts or light jackets on sale, and then hit the shoe sites. Eventually I might dream by looking at real estate for sale, which brings me to wondering again if I'll hear whether or not I got into any law schools. At that point it's time for a bath, and maybe something the least little bit productive.

Later in the day, though, the European astrology sites will change to tomorrow's forecast. It's best to check as soon as possible.

You never know.

Kinda Creepy, Like a Eulogy

It's weird to write acknowledgements for your academic book when your job ends in three weeks.

Last Orals

Yesterday I sat in on my last oral exam. I was dreading it all last week, and I woke up with a sick feeling. One of the people on the committee is a guy who reportedly told an outraged undergraduate that the reason I didn't get tenure was because I didn't get my work done. So when my orals student asked me a few weeks ago whether or not they had decided to reopen my tenure case, and I told her that Chair has decided it was just too hard and my book wasn't smart enough to meet his standards, she volunteered to tell Didn't Get Work Done accuser that I had a book contract. I was glad he would have to know that I had in fact been working all along. I wanted to look him in the eye to see if he knew that his stupid attempt to justify his department's homophobia and general hostility and lack of support was bullshit. But really I dreaded having to see him, make nice with him, be civil for the sake of the student, like one parent in a bitter divorce trying not to vomit her rage at the other in front of the children.

Didn't Get Work Done accuser never showed to the orals, so my fantasy of telling him off in person never had to face the test of nerve I had set for myself for that day.

The good part was that I had no idea how much the other members of the committee respected me. They were kind, solicitous, and appreciative of my comments about the writing phase of the orals candidate's work. The sad part was that I had no idea how much people like this were really supportive. Why are departments such as this one so terribly alienating? Floors of offices in a high-rise building, each side of the hallway cut off by a large middle room either for meeting or, more often, for cubicles of grad student offices (the Fishbowl, they call the one on my floor). Even worse, that day I did the typical orals thing of not reading any of the answers to the other questions, figuring I'd pick up on the conversation as it took off. Why should I care what they thought? Why should I lift one finger more than I had to, at this point? That's what I was thinking the day before, anyway. When I got to the exam room, however, the committee told me she had failed to adequately answer at least one of the questions, maybe two, and what did I think?

Oops. Caught in a "What are they gonna do, fire me?" moment, I regretted being less than professional. Then I realized that everyone on the committee only knew about the bad question from the guy who had asked it, who had just at that moment told the head about his reservations. The head remarked that since my question had been the one she had done the best on, everybody figured I was fine with her answer in my case. I remember nodding vigorously. I made some comments about the nature of the candidate's writing as unfocused in particular ways, and they nodded vigorously back. Phew. Off the hook, with points for perceptive analysis!

In the debate over whether or not to pass her, I told my story about nearly failing my orals because I had thrown The Country of the Pointed Firs across the room in frustration, only to be asked question after question about that one paltry book, which one member of my committee had thought another member of my committee would be delighted to talk about. Given my current state of approaching unemplyment, I realized that story now lacked the gentle irony it once possessed, not to mention the self-congratulation disguised as self-mockery that had made it a favorite for years in my arsenal of grad school foibles. Luckily the story went off pretty much as it usually did, with chuckles all around and no throat-clearing or hard stares, proof of what I pretty much always suspected, that in truth nobody is really thinking very much about me or what is happening or will happen to me, which actually for the sake of simple everyday painless interaction is fine. Desireable, even.

When I left the room, though, after everyone finally agreed to pass her under the condition that she work on American Transcendentalim a bit more with her interlocutor, after the head thanked me and suggested I leave early to get to the class I had to teach, after the student thanked me, I felt weak. I groaned in relief as I clicked the door shut and hurried down the hall to the elevator. Later that day when my girlfriend asked on the phone how things had gone, I only said It Went Fine. And it really was fine. One more step in the countdown to failure. One step closer to something new, or at least different, away from those hollow flourescent hallways stacked one on the other in a dark pyramid, mute against the gray and empty midwestern sky.

Legacy of Homophobia

Thank you, John Gallagher, for saying what nobody else seems to want to say about the vigorous homophobia of this pope. Thanks to his efforts, the world feels comfortable vilifying gay people as selfish and immoral. We need to remember a time before him, when it seemed as if the world might really become a kinder and more tolerant place, and institutions such as the Catholic church seemed almost ready to acknowledge the centuries of service performed by gay men and lesbians in its ranks. Thanks its the perpetuation of homophobia and sex-phobia, we have a culture of emotionally-thwarted pedophiles and secret coverups instead. What a great legacy.

On a brighter note, now that Terry Schiavo and the pope have died, we can all get back to watching the Michael Jackson trial.

When Prez and Laura Pray for Pope,

what do they pray for, exactly? Do they pray that he will die, and die soon, to end his great physical suffering? Or do they pray that he will miraculously recover, as they insisted Terri Schiavo could recover, though that recovery would be, to such an ailing man, hell on earth? Do they hope politicians will grandstand in front of the Vatican to put him on life support? Or do they look to his next of kin to make medical decisions for him? Do they hope his successor sees the error of keeping women out of the priesthood, of perpetuating the stigmatizing of gay men and lesbians, of turning a blind eye to birth control in the face of poverty and despair? Or do they hope for a successor who will help the church preach the second-class citizenship of women, the pathology of gay men and lesbians, the necessity of rigid and unyielding positions around abortion and birth control, endangering the lives and futures of millions of women and their already extant children? Do they really pray for the future, or do they hope for a new pope who will help them and their evangelical cronies usher in another dark era of barbarian ignorance?

I only ask because this man is the Clinton of popes, the guy who seemed progressive but proved hell-bent on rolling back hard-won reforms, such as Vatican II, rather than looking to the deep spiritual yearning of millions for a better, kinder, more just world. This pope was popular because he could get liberals to make excuses for his conservatism, much as Clinton did. Salon magazine simply prints a story that the pope's end is near, and that the Bushes are praying for him. Please. In the wake of the Schiavo debacle, this hands-off journalism seems timid at best. I want the nitty gritty details. If Bush is praying for the pope, I want to know what exactly he's praying FOR. ANd what about Laura? Is she praying for the same thing as W? Why? Why not?

In its efforts to be respectful, Salon has gotten spineless. Let's not forget that the pope is a political figure, and that the Vatican is officially a state. He may have been a man of his convictions, a man who tried to live up to his beliefs and those of his followers, but he was a conservative who denied a woman's right to choose, a gay person's right to sexual and emotional dignity, and a mother's or father's right to feed the children they have without fear of starving the whole family with more dependents than they can possibly care for, or provide a future.

I wanna know what the Bushes are praying for. I wanna know the text, the exact terms, of their prayers. Because I think THAT would be real news, Salon.

Bush: Even though the pope is Catholic, and I'm not much for Catholics, I do believe that men are better than women, and I see the pope as an ally in our continuing fight as Christians to keep women quiet, compliant, and useful to men. Also, he's against gay marriage, and that makes him real important in the fight to keep marriage as a sexist institution with benefits to those who slave away, men and women, at meaningless jobs in order to bring the next generation of workers into being. So I'm praying for him right now, praying that he lives to fight another day, or if not, that he dies peacefully and another man as patriarchal and backwards as he is takes his place.

Laura: I don't think the Catholic church's stand on women is so great, but I'm not Catholic, so hey, who cares? I'm praying for the pope because I long ago gave up any integrity or individuality as the price of my husband's sobriety. He's successful now, so I take my valium and read books: lots of long, lovely books. Sometimes I masturbate, but the valium makes me tired, so I forget why it is I should care about the reasons why I'm masturbating in the first place. Mostly I'm praying for the pope because he's a nice man who like mothers, and I'm a mother, right? Those ARE my kids, aren't they? I didn't make that up, or read it in a novel, right?

Come on Salon. Tell us what the Bushes are praying for. Inquiring minds want to know.

We are not married

Republishing an old journal entry about gay marriage made me want to talk a bit about how the "dyke life" issue of queer love interacts with living on the "wrong side of the tenure tracks." As the countdown begins to the end of what is probably my last semester as an English Professor, I experience sensations of terror on a daily, hourly basis. Mostly this is not about the end of teaching. I look sadly at my perfected course materials for Queer Theory, Modern British Literature, and my great course on Thatcherism and Contemporary Brit Culture. I have stacks of file folders from graduate school, from my dissertation, from my book research, from courses in Women's Studies and Critical Theory, all to go in the trash as I make way for a new life. But this does not fill me with terror. I cruise the job listings, wait for news from law schools, and find, to my delight, that there are actually jobs on the internet for people with writing and teaching skills like mine. It strikes me that maybe I won't have to clerk at Whole Foods after all.

No, the terror comes from lack of support. Not money, but support. For example, domestic partner benefits. My relationship is not recognized by the federal government, my state government, or my domestic partner's employer. When my health insurance runs out in two months, the university she works for will not cover me, nor can I retrain at her school for reduced tuition. We cannot have a child unless she bears it, because only then will there be access to prenatal care, childbirth coverage, and health care for the baby.

Then there are less tangible issues of social support. We are not married. I live with my partner at her pleasure, and she at mine. A mere lease is our only officially shared financial responsibility. If my situation becomes too much for either of us to bear, one of us can simply leave, or kick the other out. Together almost two years, we are seen by our families as girlfriends, not spouses, or affianced, or potentially affianced. Our families are kind; they recognize that we love each other. But we are not married. If we split up, we will not have been divorced.

When I was in graduate school, it took years for my then-girlfriend and I to be recognized as a couple. At least five, I would say. Even so, nobody in either of our families blinked, or expressed worry, or offered support when we were forced to take our first jobs hundreds of miles away from each other. Initially my new department in Florida promised my partner, a director in the writing program at Grad School, a job directing composition studies. My partner quit her job, but then, just before summer, my new department rescinded its promise to her. Word was that some members of the department thought it wasn't fair to treat my girlfriend more preferentially than other faculty wives with Yale PhD's, wives who wouldn't be considered for spousal hires. And yes, it was mostly wives. Even worse, my new school had no domestic partner benefits. Unlike the "wives," she couldn't have babies or go to law school as part of my job perks. When my new department hired someone else to direct composition, my domestic partner of eight years took a one-year job a thousand miles away, and we divided up our stuff in August. I remember watching Princess Diana's funeral while sitting on a beach chair in my empty, roach-besieged apartment in Florida, waiting for the movers to arrive with my half of our things.

That was the beginning of the end of our relationship. I took a job in Big Midwestern City the next year and we moved back in together, but she left academia and eventually moved to Boston to pursue a publishing career. My new university didn't have domestic partner benefits either. We never were a couple in the eyes of my job; if you're gay, it's every man for himself.

These are the kind of things that fill me with terror. My girlfriend took me to Paris last week--a present from her to help me get through the months of uncertainty this spring. Paris was warm, full of history and culture, and unbearably straight. Boys and girls, men and women kissed each other on bridges, in church gardens, in restaurants, in the middle of the street. Sometimes they kissed each other for hours, standing or sitting in the same place. No one cared. My girlfriend and I walked through Paris, afraid even to hold hands, and were still stared at, whispered about, looked at oddly by teenagers, tourists, fellow diners. Once I heard a women say the word "lesbians" to her boyfriend, pointing us out, though more out of curiosity than anything more menacing. We were oddities. Sometimes we were "madamoiselles," though she is thirty-five and I am forty-two years old. While I liked the implication of youth, I sensed more the lack of status in the address to us as unmarried women in a sea of heterosexual couples, all trudging, as Virginia Woolf characterizes them in Orlando, side by side, bound inexorably together.

In the airport a man interrogated us sharply at the ticket counter when we went up together to get our bording passes. "Are you related?" he asked pointedly, in a voice that implied he knew the answer. "No." As if to say, I thought not.

I think maybe we are pilgrims. Like the voyagers in Watteau's "Embarcation to Cythera," we set sail as often as we can to that sunny island where a statue of Aphrodite, garlanded in flowers, presides over all the couples in the grass who have made the effort to come and see her. All of them look happy. They seem reluctant to leave. One suspects, looking at their enchanted smiles and the tender way they touch each other as they prepare to leave their paradise, that none of them are married.

The marriage thing

Thought I would re-post this from an old live journal entry, since some of my (very kind) friends liked it the first time, and because it's important to emphasize the "dyke life" part of my blog subtitle as much as, or maybe much more than, the "on the other side of the tenure tracks" part. Although they are both so related, actually. Hmm. Maybe I'll write more about that thought in my next post.


From a December, 2004 Live Journal Musing:

A few days ago my girlfriend announced to me over breakfast that she was against getting married. It wasn't that she didn't love me, or that she didn't want to be with me forever. It's just that she had already been through the humiliations of getting divorced once and she never wanted to go through it again. We could be together in a cool, Susan-Sarandon-Tim-Robbins kind of way. No marriage. No divorce.

Cool, I said. I pointed out that most people only get married for benefits anyway, like my brother and his girlfriend, who own a house together and are only getting married to share her cheaper health care. I tried to sound accomodating, agreeable. I think I wanted to BE accomodating, or in perfect agreement. Besides, we have already been lovers a year-and-half, and there is no reason to believe things won't go on pretty much as they are. But the conversation made me feel sad nevertheless.

See, my girlfriend WAS married before, for four years in her early twenties to a Mormon man. They were both virgins, married in the Temple. Accounts of their sexual life vary in her telling, which is fond but always dispassionate. Their secrets, the deep intimacies between sexual partners, are theirs alone, as they are with most lovers. She started graduate school at BYU while he finished up the degree that had been interrupted--as is customary--when he took two years off for his mission. They had a reception, a honeymoon, a house together. They had friends and took people in. When she had to go across the country for a PhD, he went with her. They loved each other. But it was time to have children. She wanted a career, and was beginning to question the church, her faith, the inevitability of her life as a Mormon wife and mother. One night, she slept with a friend from BYU, a woman. She left him. Members of the church showed up to help him move. She moved alone, on her own out into the unprincipled world.

When I held her in my arms in those first passionate days of ours together she was still with that woman, leaving her in her heart, leaving Mormonism finally and for good, but still with her. I was with someone, too. We were both tired, though. We turned to each other one night, and with substantial surprise, kissed and promptly fell out of our five-year friendship into a steamy, urgent love. I remember holding her in my car, the way lovers do who are social outsiders for some reason or another--they are too young, their parents don't approve, they are gay, they are married to other people. She wanted to promise me things in the furtive darkness then--marriage, children. Things she had wanted for so long, or thought she had wanted, but had renounced, or thought she had to renounce, because she was a lesbian. I was surprised, but thrilled. Women still can't get married most places, but I liked the compliment of being thought worthy. I hadn't imagined ever being with someone who wanted children, either. The idea was attractive. I felt suddenly serious, grown up, masculine. Her femininity filled me with the desire to be strong, to be worthy.

Fantasies are good for relationships. In those early days of the trauma of mutual breakups, of different residences, separate finances, hostile friends, guilt, sexual bonding, my shaky job situation, her shaky job situation, we comforted each other with dreams of belonging and foreverness. She enjoyed the game of what she would be wearing when we danced together at our wedding. I started planning dance lessons, outdoor venues, musical options. She came home with me to New Hampshire and decided we would be married there. I went home to meet her family in California and knew them immediately as members of my family I hadn't met until then. We spun our dreams between us and when I lost my job, we introduced a new element in the romantic narrative: a house of our own. Losing my job meant the possibility of finding a new career that would pay better, demand more from me, make possible things I couldn't have imagined us having. I could go to law school. We could build a bigger life together than i had ever imagined for myself alone.

I don't know when the narrative started to change, but it did, gradually. I think it was when same-sex marriage became legal in Massachusetts, and we stood together for the first time in a church in Boston singing hymns as part of the celebration. For me the celebration was matter-of-fact, neither stirring nor alienating, mirroring my lifelong indifference to the mainstream Protestantism within which I was raised, and which always felt more civic than spiritual to me growing up. But I could feel her discomfort. I heard the duty in her voice when she tried to sing the hymns, a duty that I felt turning into resentment, and then, in the quavery edges of her muted verses, the faintest stirrings of horror and despair.

We have talked a lot about gay marriage since then. Sometimes we talk about her marriage, the disappointing wedding night, the attempt to build a relationship between strangers, the kindness that can be between even two people who have nothing in common. She used to speak of these things often; now she is slowly burying them again. This is probably inevitable. She still looks for gay and lesbian couples in the Times Sunday Styles section of the paper, hoping to find that the paper has finally picked one for its "featured couple." They never do. Sometimes when we talk about these things I remember my friends Jim and Lisa from graduate school, their beautiful wedding where the rabbi exhorted us all to support them, support their love together, help them be strong and loving in the face of the world's temptations and disappointments. I remember he said a marriage should be like a tent that shelters but is open on all sides, as the huppa is open, to all who seek their love and friendship. I wondered then what it would be like to stand up with my lover and be supported, but we were not supported, and she is gone now these many years. I wonder now what it would be like to stand up with my lover and be supported, have those words said for us, look into the faces of friends and family who wish us well.

I think you can be together in a Susan-Sarandon-Tim-Robbins kind of way for a long time, forever even. Haven't gay people always done this anyway? I like that they choose each other every day. I like that so many people wish them well even though they have never been legally married. I like that they hold out for love, for outsiderness, for freedom and flexibility. I like that they eschew a certain kind of heterosexual privilege, even though they mostly get it anyway. I like that there are models out there of lovers who make something strong together without the state's blessing, models that help all of us who want to be in a couple imagine something strong and healthy that can be made with another person. I imagine them holding up their own tent without the blessing of a rabbi, or a JP. Their hair is always tousled and they look casual and fabulous together.

But I also imagine a wedding that is ours, a honeymoon we go on together, bringing our disparate friends and family together at a big party for us, for love, for believing in dreams and living in dreams that nourish us whether or not they come true. I imagine the celebration of happiness, of daring to hope in a public way that love can last. I imagine my father and aunt and my parents' friends who live nearby and who I grew up with shyly, awkwardly wishing me well, understanding that while I have made my life mean something on my terms, my meaning also resonates in ways they can recognize with the responsibilities and choices they have shouldered and made. I imagine a reception in the horse field at my childhood home, and I picture myself tripping across the gravel road a few short yards to my mother's grave nearby to bring her a glass of champagne. I imagine shedding a few tears that my mother and my lover never met. I imagine in this moment remembering the loves I have had, the life I have lived until now. I imagine feeling suddenly happy for even the heartbreaks and setbacks that have brought me to this place in my life, this milestone, this happiness. I can see the blue twilight, the white tent with light and music spilling out into the August night, the flushed faces of partygoers enjoying the open bar. I look around at my family and feel supremely old, and as young as someone still in high school. I look down at my lover, and she is laughing in my arms, and we are dancing to a song that suddenly seems perfect, both wishing that this night could last forever.

Paris

Paris is really the straightest place I've ever been, and that includes growing up in rural New Hampshire. It's still pretty though. Notre Dame is a giant beast, maybe alien, maybe dead, whose vast carcass broods over one side of the city. One night walking by we saw the waxing moon shining through long thin gargoyles on the towers of the church. We found a Canadian bar that serves Molsons and burgers. Some churches are small and dark and holy, mostly because the Virgin hangs out there, and she gets lots of candles. Other churches are big and official and not so special. Notre Dame and the Pantheon, both so beautiful, manage to coexist in this city of contradictions, one so long and dark and medieval, one so tall and rational and full of light.

Prof. Dirty Lesbian

Just in case you're wondering whether or not a climate of intolerance is alive and well on our campuses, I have two gems to report today live from my University. The first is graffiti scrawled on a picture on my door of George Bush. The picture was given to me by a student. Below the picture is a close-up of the ring on his finger, which is a picture of the ring from the Lord of the Rings. Underneath the ring is the slogan, "Frodo has Failed." You may have seen this circulating on the internet last year. I believe it is supposed to be funny. This weekend someone drew a halo on Bush and scrawled the words "Prof. Dirty Lesbian" underneath his picture. I'm not sure whether or not this means Bush is indeed a professional dirty lesbian, or whether some Republican out there is objecting to my hygiene. But I would like to ask, is this much different from a swastika?

Second, a senior faculty member in the Gender and Women's Studies program here asked a graduate student getting advice about a Queer Theory orals reading list, "How do you expect to get a job?"

That's all for today. More hilarity will surely follow!!!!

Livewood

What does it mean to be really alive? Not living in the motions of liveness, but really, really alive? An op-ed piece in the NYT today bemoaned the end of analogy as a section on the SAT, and the demise of logical analogy generally in U. S. thought. And it got me thinking that it's not as if other kinds of thought are alive and well right now, either. The world is full of deadwood--the kind academia defines as resting on one's laurels, or promise of laurels, someone who gets paid to be an intellectual but who has decided for one reason or another to stop working. Academics are pretty generous about deadwood; to them, this means you have stopped publishing. But it's possible to publish and still be deadwood, to produce the appearance of thinking but never say anything really challenging or new. At its most benign and ridiculous, deadness produces a Baby Jane Hudson show on the beach, an obvious caricature of an outmoded greatness posing as itself. At its worst, deadness sadistically terrorizes the colleagues who are its captive audience, desperately extracting protestations of its continued relevance via the academic equivalent of a baked rat entree--non-renewal, reappointment, hiring, promotion, letters of recommendation, salary increases, or dissertation sign-offs.

Anyone who knows anything about art history knows that "academic" painting is synonymous with safe, staid, bourgeois notions of the proper themes and techniques for art. Nineteenth-century french painting is full of very good academic paintings--and brilliant and innovative works that never made it into academic shows. The Orsay museum in Paris, divided as it is into great paintings on both sides of the divide, testifies to the inability of institutionalized creativity to accurately distinguish greatness.

English departments--bastions of institutionalized creativity--are full of "Sixth Sense" scholars, the kind who don't know they're dead because they continue to get invitations to do keynote addresses so they can say the same thing they've been saying for the last ten or twenty years. It is difficult in such anti-intellectual times as these to critique what looks to be intellectual exchange, even when it becomes glaringly obvious that no such exchange is really going on. The rise of the pre-fab conference in post- 9/11 times is a testament to this, its star-studded showcase characterized less by an open call for papers than by a rigidly hierarchical display of yesterday's lineups. The demise of queer theory owes at least as much to these faux forums, where big-name professors are carefully selected by big-name universities to provide the illusion of vibrant intellectual community. These conferences are mainly for the students and professors of said institutions, paid for by them and advertised to almost nobody. These forums are depressingly similar: academic "stars" deliver formulaic talks to awestruck audiences. Audiences some to see the stars, and crane their necks every time somebody opens the door to a conference room. I used to be in those audiences, looking around.

A friend of mine who is one of these "stars" tells me she has lost faith in academia. I believe she believes she has lost some faith, and feels solidarity with the women and queers and disabled Marxists who are getting denied tenure for making the old white guys feel uncomfortable. I think she is feeling the institutional belt tightening around her neck, cutting off her words. I had lunch with my Marxist friend today. She is still angry about what happened to her. She is right to be angry, but I couldn't help thinking as I was listening to her how much better it is to be away from people who not only control your job, but also want to control your thoughts, to make you control your thoughts, to wear down your capacity for resistance by making you help them produce their Potemkin villages of so-called free intellectual exchange. As my father used to say, "You'll eat it and you'll LIKE it." It's bad enough to eat it, but why in the world must we LIKE it?

Just before our ex-provost left our school for a presidency elsewhere (where she has since resigned), she hired a celebrated provocateur to come in as Dean of Liberal Arts and Sciences. I spoke with her one day at a new faculty reception. The conversation lasted maybe a half-hour, but it made me feel important. She was extremely proud of herself. She couldn't believe how clever she had been to hire him. She went to a Seven Sisters school. We talked about that too. She was extremely proud of that. I went to a Seven Sisters school. She made me think I belonged in her world because I was sortof like her. I really liked that. I decided I liked her.

By the time Famous Dean actually arrived at here she was long gone. But the land mines she had planted with his hire were live ones. I remember the newspaper sunday magazine did a survey of area professors to see what they thought about the Famous Dean hire. They interviewed people from the top-tier private schools in the city. There were no faculty from my school in the piece. It's as if there were no faculty to ask, or they weren't worth asking. I wrote to the newspaper to say this. They published my letter. A colleague of mine came up to me and said he heard I had written a letter about not liking Famous Dean. I told him I hadn't said anything about not liking him. What I didn't like was the newspaper. I didn't know Famous Dean. I had no reason to care about him one way or another.

What a difference a couple of years makes. Dean came to campus and immediately started to lure stars to come to here by offering them large--some might say, overly large--salaries. He hired friends. I remember one friend delivered a job talk rife with scorn for identity politics. His talk quoted Faulkner, and the many quotes he cited seemed unusually fond of the "N" word. Undeterred by the presence of several faculty of color, who in their dumbfounded disbelief were more respectful than they should have been, he said the whole word. A lot. As if Faulkner's use of it at the height of Jim Crow somehow justified its ventriloquism, over and over.

Say a racial or sexist slur over and over. Listen to it. Listen to the message it sends. It says, you are never safe. It says, you don't belong in my world unless you leave your identity behind you. It says, the price of the ticket is my price, will always be, my price.

I didn't worry, though, because I figured the department would object to someone who thought it was provocative to say the "N" word so many times in a forum. Friend airily dismissed objections. His arrogance during the question-and-answer session and at later social gatherings clearly implied that anyone who disagreed with him was simply too stupid to get his point. Many people found this insensitive and disturbing. I found it disturbing. This was not intellectual exchange. This was provocation and hostility masquerading as intellectual rigor. It was nasty. It felt really, really nasty.

When faculty objected to this hire, this climate, at a meeting that Famous Dean attended, Famous Dean pulled off the gloves and flexed his iron fists. He said we had to eat it. He said that if my department refused to endorse the hire he wanted, he didn't know what more he could guarantee for said department. But the best part was, he said we had to LIKE it. He said that if we voted to bring Friend and co. here, we had to be supportive of them. I couldn't help admiring his unabashed blackshirt tactics. He was a fascist, to be sure, but an honest fascist. The baseball bat was on the table. And the senior faculty, for the most part, crumbled and scattered like leaves in a winter wind.

Last fall the AAUW told us all--surprise--that sexism was rampant in the universities. Now the right wants to eliminate even the pretense of liberal thought that masquerades as politics in academic discourse. I say, let 'em take over. Let the rich Republicans (and Democrats) come in and work for no money and teach kids from bad high schools how to care about reading. I'm all for it.

The snow is melting. It's time for this dyke to get the hell out of this conference room, this paper-mache village, this one-horse town. Somewhere out there, people are starting to wake up, maybe.