Heave Yourself a Merry Little Christmas

Hello there. How was your Christmas (or Hannukah, or Kwanzaa, or secular solstice celebration)? Did you eat well? Did you get everything you wanted? They're saying gift-giving around the country was quite constricted this year, what with the poor economy and all. I hope that didn't keep you from enjoying the holiday(s). In fact, I hope it enhanced your enjoyment. By forcing you and yours to focus on the essentials (family, baby Jesus, candelabras, Africa, the earth's rotation on its axis, etc.) rather than the getting and giving of stuff, that is.

Me? My Christmas was lovely, thank you. I got to visit family and friends, I ate quite well (that Kentucky bourbon pecan chocolate pie I bought in Louisville was outrageous), and I actually did get some nice gifts. Mostly utilitarian things that I needed (e.g., boots), plus some great books, some pajama bottoms with penguins on them (I get at least one pair of pajama bottoms every Christmas - I now have enough to open a sizeable, if somewhat narrowly-focused, boutique), and plenty of consumables. I love consumables. In particular, I was happy to receive from my father a 1-lb bag of dark chocolate M&Ms, which was a great improvement over the 5-lb bags of regular M&Ms my brother and I have received in the past (my father belongs to an exclusive club called Sam's Club, which provides him with access to regular consumer items in large quantities - you should see the container of Kraft Parmesan Cheese in his fridge: it's the size of a nuclear warhead). 5 lbs is a lot of M&Ms - so much, in fact, that I could have made it to April last year eating nothing but M&Ms - so I was happy that this year we made a shift to quality over quantity.

But let's face it, some Christmas gifts just suck. Maybe it's a gift certificate to a store you would never shop at, maybe it's a crappy t-shirt, or maybe it's a pecan log from Stuckey's, but whatever it is, a bad gift is not just something you don't want or like - it's something that actually injures you in some way. It wounds your pride ("So this is what they think of me?"), it lends tacit support to an entity that you despise ("Hey, thanks for the Ann Coulter book!"), or it burdens you with something that you cannot discard without offending the gift-giver (think of the pink bunny pajamas in A Christmas Story). Or maybe, just maybe, it makes you vomit uncontrollably for an entire morning. That's right. This year my brother, stepsister, and stepniece all got together and gave me a stomach virus for Christmas. They gave one to my father as well, but mine was much more robust. Luckily I didn't actually unwrap it until Boxing Day (the traditional gift-giving day in Britain), so I was still able to enjoy Christmas itself - visiting family and unwittingly infecting them, eating copious amounts of Christmas food that would soon find its way back up the way it came.

Now, I know some of you have had this thing already. As with most things, Oklahoma has lagged behind the rest of the country when it comes to stomach viruses (the same could be said of hairstyles, popular music, using Craigslist to buy and sell things), and it's undoubtedly the great holiday influx of people from out-of-state that has finally brought us up to speed. So forgive me for being behind the times here, but man oh man, this thing is terrible, isn't it? It feels a bit like a giant hand is reaching inside of you and ripping out anything that's not nailed down, and a few things that are. It also feels a bit like what I imagine waterboarding must feel like, only you're afraid of drowning in fluids that are pouring out of you rather than fluids pouring over you. Am I being too graphic? Sorry.

I don't blame my relatives for getting me this crappy gift. I know they got it from someone else and they obviously didn't want it, so they did what I would do myself - they regifted. And I'm happy to report that I'm on the mend, enough that I can actually contemplate going to Ingrid's German Kitchen for brunch today. The nice thing is that I have virtually no appetite, so I'll probably not get as fat this holiday season as I was afraid I would. The other nice thing is that it's forced me to stay home and get some work done, which was something that really needed to happen. Which only goes to show you that even the worst gifts are not without their redeeming qualities. And redemption, after all, is what it's all about, innit?

Road Trips Make You Smahtah

Things I learned on my most recent drive from Washington, DC to Oklahoma City, OK (in order of appearance):

1) Fairmont, West Virginia, is the pepperoni roll capital of the world. It may or may not be legal to produce one anywhere else in the state.

2) There is a cheap periodical sold in at least one West Virginia convenience store called MugSHOTS that consists entirely of mug shot photographs arranged in a grid pattern on every single page. I'm not sure if the purpose is to allow the locals to learn whether the guy who moved in across the street is a sex offender, to enable them to discover the whereabouts of that uncle who hasn't called in several weeks, or simply to provide cheap entertainment by spotting people they know ("Hey! There's Roscoe!" "Naw, that ain't Roscoe. See how that one eye opens all the way? That's Roscoe's cousin Lugnut." "Dang, you're right. Lugnut shore does look like Roscoe from the side") I greatly regret not forking over the $1.50 for a copy of this periodical.

3) Pepperoni rolls are kind of gross, and eating one may lead you to believe you're having a heart attack.

4) Drivers in the Midwest are very slow. Like, at-or-below-the-speed-limit slow. This may account for the almost total absence of speed traps between West Virginia and Missouri.

5) In a pinch, cookies and clementines make a perfectly suitable dinner. Provided there are enough cookies and clementines.

6) 7 degrees fahrenheit is cold. 7 degrees fahrenheit with 40mph winds is very, very cold. Eye-freezing cold. Tongue-shrivelling cold. Very, very cold.

7) Like everybody else in the world, British-voiced GPS systems have a hard time pronouncing Louisville. Unlike everybody else in the world, they pronounce it "LOW-iss-vill".

8) If, by some strange twist of fate, I were to end up living in Louisville, KY, I would be just fine. For two reasons: Lynn's Paradise Cafe, easily the most whimsical restaurant in the country (seriously, follow the link), and the Homemade Pie Kitchen. In truth, I'm not entirely sure about the merits of the latter, but I'm expecting great things from the Kentucky Bourbon Chocolate Chip Pecan Pie I bought there.

Lynn's looks like this (I took this last year when I was there):

9) There is a town called Santa Claus, IN.

10) Toasted ravioli is a famous St Louis delicacy, and, even though the eponymous ravioli is not toasted but fried, it is also delicious at a place called Hodak's ("A St Louis Tradition Since 1962") and best enjoyed with good friends and family.

11) Ahab had Moby Dick, Dante had Beatrice, Monty Python had the Holy Grail, and I have the St Louis City Museum.

12) Missouri has an abnormally large number of adult superstores. Abnormally large. Almost all of them have yellow signs, yellow being the international symbol for "seedy".

13) No matter what you're expecting, it will always take about twice as long to drive through Missouri as you're expecting.

14) My brother really likes to drive at night, while I really like to drive during the day.

15) Quite a few bands put out CDs this year that are not as good as their previous CDs. These include: Wolf Parade, Jenny Lewis, and Okkervil River. The new Silver Jews, on the other hand, is quite good. Ditto TV On The Radio. (I may do an end-of-the-year music wrap-up in a few days.)

16) Arriving home to a welcoming mother and a slightly hysterical but adoring dog after a 20-hour drive is a wonderful feeling.

Hello Ninja in the Snow

Longtime readers of this blog know that there's a ninja living in my driveway. He is, to all appearances, a harmless ninja, and back in October when I wrote about him I indicated that it made me feel safe to know that he was out there guarding me from the denizens of NoHo who might attack me in the night.

Well, after I posted that the ninja went into hiding. I don't know if he sensed that his presence was being publicized and, fearing that his mission might be compromised, decided to go underground for a while. Or maybe he had been called away on some urgent errand in another part of the Valley, some troubled corner in more need of his vigilant eye than my humble Submarine. Whatever the cause, the ninja had disappeared, and I had begun to despair.

But I needn't have worried. This afternoon the first major snowfall of the season began - it's still coming down as I write this, and the city is beginning to close down - and, as I stepped out a few hours ago to run some errands, I saw him again. At first I didn't recognize him, dressed as he was in a Smurf-blue down coat with the hood pulled tight and a rainbow-colored scarf wrapped around his neck. I was a bit perplexed, though, as I ducked out of my hobbit-door and saw a person standing with his back to me, staring thoughtfully at a line of footprints running to the middle of the driveway and back. This, of course, was the ninja-path he had created for himself as he charged up and down the driveway, and as soon as I heard his telltale "Hey! Hey-yay-yayayayayayeeeeeeeeiiiii!" I knew he had returned. I was caught off-guard, though, and before I had time to retreat back through my door he saw me. We exchanged glances, and then we said hi. I walked quickly past him and didn't hear the battle-cry again as I turned the corner onto the street. When I returned about an hour later he was gone, and his footprints had been all but buried by the falling snow.

I'm afraid I may have scared him away for good.

NoHoHo!

Sadly, I'll be leaving NoHo on Saturday and won't return until after Christmas. But I managed to pop out today and snap some photos of the place before I go. They're here.

Have I mentioned how charming this town is?

J Mascis Is Living All Over Me!

So I'm sitting at the Green Bean today (the Green Bean is one of my favorite brunch spots in the Valley - which is saying something in a valley that is, for some reason, stuffed to the rafters with great brunch spots) (I know valleys don't have rafters, but it'd be funny if they did, no?) and who walks in but J Mascis, lead singer of influential alternative rock band Dinosaur Jr. He was accompanied by a lady whom I assume was his wife and a baby whom I assume was his baby.


How do I know it was J Mascis? Am I some sort of obsessive Dinosaur Jr fan who knows not only what every band member looks like, but also where they live, what they drive, when they graduated high school, and what time they take their dogs for a walk? No. In fact, I don't even own a single Dinosaur Jr album, although I'm familiar enough with their music and keep meaning to get around to downloading their highly-regarded album You're Living All Over Me. No, I know it was J Mascis because I once saw a picture of him, and he looks like this:



Mascis is the one in front


This, you will agree, is not a look that one encounters very often, and, having seen it once, it's pretty hard to mistake him for anyone else. Even in hippie-saturated NoHo.


The funny thing is, this is actually the second time I've seen Mascis since I moved here, the first time being a couple of months ago on the very same block as he scanned the menu of the new noodle restaurant in town. I'm convinced that J Mascis does nothing but wander back and forth along the same block of downtown NoHo, eating at the same three or four restaurants, pushing a stroller containing a baby that may or may not be his, and remaining completely unrecognized by his fellow NoHoites. Of course, he probably thinks the same about me.


The Valley, in fact, is awash in celebrities, past and present. Robert Frost lived here, of course, as did Emily Dickinson, Calvin Coolidge, and Sylvester Graham (inventor of the Graham Cracker). Since I moved here, I have also run into Jonathan Harr, author of A Civil Action and The Lost Painting, in NoHo - also twice, both times in coffee shops. I have yet, however, to come across the Valley's newest celebrity, MSNBC's Rachel Maddow, although I remain hopeful.


In fact, I'm hoping to run into Mascis, Harr, and Maddow all at once, perhaps all out drinking at the Dirty Truth or getting burritos at Bueno Y Sano. I would walk up to them without a hint of fear or trepidation and invite them over to my place for cookies and board games. Which reminds me - I need to get some cookies. And board games.

If the Tweed Fits

I often struggle to explain to people what I do for a living. This is partly because I don't actually do much of anything, really, but partly also because my income is not tied to any specific service I perform. When most people say "job," what they really mean is "activity performed on behalf of another for which one is compensated monetarily." At least, this is what they would mean if they had the vocabulary of a lawyer or a government bureaucrat. But that, most emphatically, is not what I'm doing right now. In the past I have been able to explain that I make my living by teaching, and, while this is actually only a portion of what I understand my "job" to be, it's usually enough to satisfy my interrogator - a new barber, say, or a distant relative I happen to bump into at a funeral or wedding. Even now, if I'm cornered, I'll still tell people that I teach, even though this is a complete falsehood. It's just so much easier than explaining to people that the college that employs me expects nothing more of me than that I show up for a free lunch on Thursdays (though not all Thursdays) and give a brief talk twice a year about my research. When I have taken this approach, I'm usually met with a slight pause, a blank stare, and then a question along the lines of, "So, like, what do they get out of it?" And then I have to explain that, well, they don't get much out of it at all, apart from a slight enhancement of the intellectual atmosphere on campus and the opportunity to support promising young scholars in the early stages of their careers. "So," my hypothetical questioner might ask, "they're paying you for the privilege of supporting you in the early stage of your career?" "Yes," I will say, and then quickly change the topic to sports or farting.

You can see why I usually just lie about it.

I'm similarly coy about admitting to people that I have a PhD. Twice in the past month I have been reduced to blushing embarrassment by well-meaning relatives who have introduced me to acquaintances as "My son/grandson, the doctor/professor" or something along those lines. I know that they're doing this because they're proud of me, and they're probably accustomed to bragging about me when I'm not around, and, yes, I probably ought to be proud myself. And I am. But still I'm loath to bring up the topic on my own, and then only slowly and reluctantly. Why? Several reasons (and sub-reasons) come to mind:

1) Modesty. I don't want people to think I think I'm better than them.

1a) I actually do think I'm better than most people, and I don't want it to show.

2) Where I'm from, being smart wasn't something to be proud of, but rather something you hid away, like an embarrassing birthmark or a gay uncle. If you wanted friends, if you wanted to be cool, if you wanted the girls to like you, for heaven's sake you couldn't let them know you were smart.

2a) When people learn you're smart, they're liable to say something like, "Oh yeah, you're smart, huh? Well, then, say something smart, fag." And then you're stuck.

3) When I tell people I have a PhD, I invariably have to tell them what I have a PhD in, and this often leads to one of the following scenarios:
a) They tell me all about how their own family came over from Ireland and how they just went over there last summer and tracked down some of the old relatives and oh but that beer over there is dark and the grass is so green and the music is so great and have you studied much about Celtic mythology and my isn't that Riverdance fascinating....
b) They ask me what my dissertation's about, and then I have to try to boil down what, to me (because I've been so close to it for so long) is an intricately constructed argument about the emergence of a tradition of violence in mid-Victorian Belfast, into terms that my barber can understand. And doing that causes me much mental pain.
c) They ask me why I decided to study Irish history, and I then have to launch into a very long story about how, no, I'm not actually Irish, but I lived there for a year and took this amazing class with this great professor who made us do research in the National Archives and I came upon this batch of letters written by peasants to other peasants threatening them with violence if they didn't stop paying rent that was too high and on and on and on... I don't mind telling this story, actually, but it's not nearly as pithy as I'd like it to be, and that bothers me somehow.

The funny thing is, you don't actually have to be all that smart to get a PhD in history. What you need to be is persistent and determined. If you were really that smart, you'd have figured out a way to use that great big brain of yours to go into a profession in which there were actual job opportunities or in which you might have some control over what part of the country you'd live in. This is why you'll find very few genius historians: geniuses are innovative, they take risks, they shift the goal-posts. Historians (and other sorts of academics as well, I should add) get where they get by playing by the rules, by treading well-trodden paths. Don't get me wrong, writing a dissertation is a bitch, and it takes lots of very highly developed mental resources to get it done - but more than anything it takes self-discipline, hard work, and a willingness, at times, to place interpersonal relationships somewhat lower on your list of priorities than most doctors would recommend (not that doctors have any room to talk).

For most historians, I believe, the allure of the profession is to be found in the persona that comes along with it. Many are the young, freshly-minted PhDs who can't wait to rush out and buy that first tweed jacket and naugahyde valise the day after their dissertation defense - and many are the pedantic blowhards who simply thrive in front of a classroom but who, in any other profession, would be swiftly dispatched to some back-office, pencil-pushing job away from clients and customers. Indeed, it's impossible for me to imagine most historians that I know as anything other than historians: they're born with a predisposition toward becoming one, and that predisposition is reinforced and solidified once they start upon the path.

It makes me happy when things find their natural level like that. If the tweed fits, wear it - that's what I always say.

But if the tweed doesn't fit? Well, it probably will before long. Even if you don't want anyone to see you in it.

Winter Comes to the Valley

According to the electronic thermometer hanging on my wall, it's 17.2 degrees fahrenheit outside right now. That, my friends, is cold. That's almost as cold as it is in Fargo, ND (16 degrees), colder than Billings, MT (22 degrees), and much colder than Oslo, Norway (where it's 32 degrees right now, in the middle of the night). Snow is forecast for tomorrow, rain the next day, then more snow on Thursday. Winter, it seems, has arrived.

New Englanders love to complain about winter. In fact, complaining about winter is something of a regional pastime, like rodeos out west or Civil War reenactments down south. You can usually tell how long a person has lived in New England by the scale and complexity of their complaints: newcomers will focus primarily on the cold temperatures and abundant snowfall, but natives (especially older natives) can spend hours dwelling on the travails of shoveling the walk, the astronomical cost of heating oil, the iniquities of the municipal snowplowing regime, the dangers of falling icicles, which roads to avoid and which to stick to, and memories of winters and blizzards past. As in any society subject to extreme changes in the weather New Englanders have devised a number of folk methods to predict when the bad weather will arrive. It's said that a light-colored breastbone in the Thanksgiving turkey indicates a mild winter ahead, whereas a purple or blue one portends snow and bitter cold. A warm Christmas supposedly means a cold Easter. If a month starts out warm, it is sure to end cold. And if your pigs start squealing, get ready for a blizzard.

Most of this, of course, is pure hogwash (pardon the pun), but it's a fair measure of how seriously winter has shaped the patterns of life here. Yet New England winters are hardly the worst in the country: the upper midwest stays much colder for much longer, and areas around the Great Lakes get much more snow. Moreover, the winters in New England have been getting much milder lately - average winter temperatures have risen about 2.5 degrees in the last 40 years, and this is having serious negative consequences for local industries such as ski resorts and maple sugaring. I can remember watching in amazement two Januarys ago when an extended stretch of warm weather caused the trees to bud outside my Somerville apartment while confused birds hopped around chirping and blinking in the sunlight. Rivers and lakes are staying frozen for shorter periods or (like the Charles in Boston) failing to freeze at all.

Most natives I know delight in these warmer winters, but I don't. Maybe it's because I prefer being cold to being hot - you can always get more bundled up, after all, but you can only get so naked, and anyway my internal thermostat is set somewhat higher than most. Maybe it's because, as a non-native, I'm still charmed by the novelty of waist-high snowfalls and single-digit temperatures, as I am by the beauty of a snow-blanketed meadow or glistening forest. The shortness of the daylight hours and the sludgy grossness of a city several days after it snows are depressing, it's true, but this can be slightly offset by a warm, cozy room and a piping mug of cocoa or mulled wine. I suppose it also helps that, this year at least, I'm not paying for my heat, so I can keep The Submarine as cozy as I like and only feel slightly guilty about it.

But mostly I like New England winters to be cold because that's the way they're supposed to be. This is not some hidebound traditionalism on my part, nor is it abject sentimentality - it's simply a function of my deep unease about what we're doing to the climate. I know this is going to open me up to all sorts of ridicule from my New England readers, but seriously, folks, how can we enjoy a 60-degree February day when we know what it means for the polar ice caps, ocean currents, sea levels, or worldwide rainfall patterns, all of which threaten the livelihoods (and lives) of billions of people? Not concerned about people? Then go watch March of the Penguins or some clips of Knut the Polar Bear or that saxaphone-playing walrus they've got over in Istanbul. Seriously, these things are frigging cute. Surely a slight twinge of guilt is in order under the circumstances?

None of this means that I won't indulge in the great New England sport of winter-bitching in the months to come, but it does mean that, when I do so, my heart won't really be in it. In fact, if we break any snowfall or temperature records this winter, I will probably rejoice a little bit - but quietly, so as not to spoil the fun for my neighbors.

From Joey

Turn the volume way up and give yourself a quick fright with this Christmas greeting from the Oklahoma GOP.

I think I just vomited a little.

I Sure Am Fat (2)

I am not a picky eater, but I am picky about where I eat. For reasons that are partly political and partly aesthetic, I normally refuse to eat at large national chains like Applebees, Chilis, or The Olive Garden, nor will you ever find me darkening the door of a McDonald's, Taco Bell, or Burger King (unless I happen to be needing a restroom - I have absolutely no problem peeing into a McDonald's urinal). Most of the time this isn't a problem - cities like Boston and Philadelphia offer plenty of local, non-chain culinary options, as does the Valley, and when I travel I'm usually pretty good at sniffing out idiosyncratic diners and burger stands. This is usually accomplished with the help of a guidebook of some sort, but it still counts.

My restaurant snobbiness gets much harder to maintain (and, consequently, much more visible) when I'm visiting my family in Oklahoma City. Like most middle American cities - if "city" is even the right word here - OKC is a gargantuan postmodern wonderland of prefabricated, low-rise, high-volume fast food and "family dining" outlets strung along four-lane, 45-mph secondary roads like beads on a rosary: for every nine fiberglass-and-fake-stucco franchises there's at least one gigantic Wal-Mart or comparable big-box monstrosity - put them together and you've got what rosary-kneeders call a decade. There are a few small, locally-owned places struggling here and there against the corporate onslaught, but it takes great effort to seek them out, and effort is not really part of the local dining culture. I, of course, am willing to make that effort, as are most members of my family (both because their preferences tend to coincide with my own, and, in those instances when they don't, because they are sensitive to my peculiar fussiness on this point), but for most other (normal) people around here the default choice for a meal out is usually the local KFC, Red Lobster, or IHOP. On those rare occasions when I find myself unable to escape an invitation to dinner at one of these places, I'm usually pretty good at resisting the temptation to engage in some sort of self-righteous grandstanding (as the younger me would have done), and instead grit my teeth and go along - but I'll be damned if I'm gonna enjoy it.

One partial exception to the corporate casual-dining hegemony in middle America is the prevalence of buffets. Country-style, Chinese, Indian, or Mexican, buffets have many of the supposed virtues of the national chains - they're convenient, the portions are as massive as you want them to be, the prices are relatively low, the food is low-risk predictable - but they tend, for reasons that remain slightly obscure, to be locally owned and operated. Nevertheless, most buffets are quite a few notches higher on my Scale of Depressing Dining Experiences than even the shabbiest and dirtiest Whataburger or Subway. Do I really need to explain why? Okay, I'll be quick:

1) Though buffets offer a vast array of different types of food, buffet food sits out in the open getting cold, congealed, stale, or polluted in one way or another from the moment it's brought from the kitchen.

2) I always feel that, to get my money's worth, I need to get as many different types of food as possible onto my plate. This normally leads me to eat a wide variety of cold, congealed, stale, or polluted food in great quantities, and I usually feel quite sick afterwards.

3) A good portion of one's fellow buffet patrons will often be grotesquely overweight. Should the food itself fail to ruin one's appetite, the sight of a trailer-sized father-of-four ladling a fourth helping of baked macaroni and cheese into his gaping maw, like cement into a mixer, will usually do the trick.

4) I have to get up and get my own food.

For a long time, my father's family frequented a Chinese buffet about a mile from his house, and I would get dragged along more often than I cared to. Everyone agreed that the food was terrible - the desserts were particularly abysmal: stale store-bought pink cookies and runny soft-serve ice cream (I can't tell you how sad I get around bad desserts) - but it was relatively inexpensive and close to the house, so it became an easy meal when there wasn't any food in the fridge. To my mind, the worst thing about this particular buffet was the large-screen television that sat in the corner and showed, at top volume, whatever reality TV show or cable news channel the proprietors decided to turn it to that day. Invariably the four people in our party would be seated right in front of the TV, and we would then spend the rest of the meal feeling self-conscious under the stares of our fellow diners, many of whom would position themselves at their tables to watch the TV while they ate. I'm talking about married couples sitting side-by-side at their tables, eating their slimy chop suey in perfect silence as they stared at the large talking screen. If not for the swarm of Asian waiters busily refilling their Diet Cokes, you'd think they were in their own living rooms eating from TV trays. It was, in a word, horrifying.

Luckily, when I was home for about three weeks last summer I managed to break the hold of the horrifying Chinese buffet on my family. Any time the question of where to eat dinner arose, I quickly brought up the Chinese buffet in order quickly (and perhaps a tad self-righteously) to dismiss it. This seemed to have the desired effect, and I can now happily report that it's been at least a year since I've bitten into one of their stale pink cookies.

There is one buffet, however, at which I still manage to find myself every time I come home, and, what's more, I don't object to it in the slightest. This is the Sunday brunch buffet at Ingrid's Kitchen, a German restaurant in the older part of town that's been there for about 30 years (that's several lifetimes for an OKC restaurant). Ingrid's is the very soul of quirky, unselfconscious authenticity, a sort of old-fashioned deli/restaurant that wouldn't be out of place in New York or Boston but that is completely without parallel in OKC. It's tacky and slightly grubby (water-stained drop-down ceilings, cheap wooden trellises above the cash register); it loudly proclaims its Germanness in the best ethno-American fashion (bathrooms wallpapered with clippings from German magazines, cheap 1970s German pamphlets and children's booklets strewn across a shelf against a wall); it serves wonderful German food (wiener schnitzel, sauerkraut, sausages) and delicious desserts (tortes, cakes, cookies, pies); and both the clientele and staff are unlike anything else you'll see in this city. On Saturdays they have a small band - elderly retirees backing a middle-aged woman singing golden hits of the 1940s and 1950s to a crowd of silver-haired customers - and on Sundays they have a large buffet of standard breakfasty stuff and nonstandard Germany stuff, along with salads, bread, pasta, and a large dessert table.

Last Sunday, after I sat down with my first plate from the buffet, I looked at the table next to us and saw an outrageously large Asian priest dressed all in black. He was perched on a small chair across an octagonal table from a slender, bald white man with glasses and a grey beard. The slender man wore a large wooden cross around his neck, a red-and-black flannel shirt about three sizes too large for him, and matching red-and-black cowboy boots. They were gossiping about church matters, but they looked like characters from a Graham Greene novel. And then there was the guy whom we've dubbed Roast Beef, after what is clearly his favorite food. He strolled in shortly after we arrived and beelined to the buffet counter, showing no hesitation whatsoever, clearly a regular. He was a tall man of about 60 with a black leather jacket, a head of frizzy, shoulder-length, brightly bleached hair, and a savage fondness for roast beef, which he piled in great heaps atop two plates that were already full to overflowing with eggs, sausage, bacon, and waffles. I was both appalled and overjoyed. The other patrons - several young couples, a table of women with hair like newscasters, and a few other solitary male regulars - were too busy eating eggs and sauerkraut to notice the strangeness of it all. Or to notice the lack, anywhere in the dining room, of a single television.

And me? I had one plate of breakfast food, one plate of German food, and one plate of dessert. My dessert was a slice of chocolate-strawberry cheesecake, a scoop of warm bread pudding (smothered in butter sauce), and a scoop of warm chocolate gooey cake pudding. Just a week ago that amount of food would have lasted me for days. Now, as I slowly become a rotund piece-of-crap academic, it barely saw me through the afternoon. An afternoon that I spent reading and watching Lord of the Rings.

This is how it begins.

I Sure Am Fat

In grad school I had a reputation as something of a mimic. Pour a few beers in me, and, if those beers happened to make me merry rather than morose (about a 50-50 chance), I would happily roll out impressions of one professor after another. There was the American legal scholar for whom I TA'd for a couple of years, whom I would conjure by flinging my arms out wide, tucking my chin into my neck, looking from side to side, and shouting a perplexed "Gah!" There was the Indian historian whose ability to talk while simultaneously inhaling and swallowing I had mastered pretty well - so well, in fact, that a certain administrative assistant forced me, one drunken department Christmas party, to perform the impression before one of my advisors, who subsequently failed to guess who it was I was imitating. In fact, I did a pretty good impression of that advisor - whose "I'm listening" face invariably came across, to us insecure grad students, as a "who farted?" face - as well. But my best imitation by far was that of another of my advisors - if "advisor" is an appropriate word for a person who maybe, maybe read my dissertation chapter drafts once in four years and who dispensed very little in the way of actual advice. But, just as he wasn't an advisor, strictly speaking, this wasn't really an impression. Instead, it was me sticking my arms out around my stomach in a circle and saying, in my own voice, "I sure am fat! What a worthless piece of crap I am!" over and over. Pretty mature, I know, but it was always greeted by howls of laughter, and (then as now) I would say pretty much anything for a laugh.

As I lounged around my father's house this morning, having a peach torte, a sausage biscuit, a glass of orange juice, and three cups of coffee for breakfast while spending several hours reading a novel called An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England (an irresistible title for someone who feels the way I do about historic home tours), I began to feel certain pangs of sympathy for my fat, worthless piece of crap advisor. For what have I done over the past week but eat recklessly, without heed to the internal processes I'm disrupting or damaging, while lazing about watching TV, reading novels, talking on the phone, driving (never walking or biking) from place to place, and slowly working my way through the seven greatest stories ever published in Esquire Magazine (despite what you may think, they're actually good, serious stories)? In years past, when I was more productively employed, I would have felt guilty about this and would quickly have intervened to force myself into reading one of the library books I brought with me or plotting out an impending research trip. The guilt is still there, but it's become distressingly easy to brush aside - perhaps it's the false promise made by the holiday season. the idea that nothing you do right now has any consequences in the real world; perhaps it's because finding a job has removed whatever urgency I felt about working on the next book; or perhaps it's just that after a pretty solid month of interviews and presentations, I'm a little burned out. All of these things may be true, but I'm still beginning to worry slightly. If all men grow up to resemble their fathers, perhaps all PhDs grow up to resemble their advisors. If someone doesn't stage an intervention soon, I'm going to end up looking like this guy and raising geese on a farm in Connecticut.

More soon.

The Post-Postdoc Post

I've been offered the job in Tennessee. I have also, after a brief negotiation, accepted the job. It's possible that the next few weeks or months will present other opportunities for me to pursue, but right now the most likely scenario is that I'll be moving to Nashville next August and finally, finally merging onto the tenure track.

My friends - particularly my academic friends, who know how hard it can be to land a decent, permanent job like this - have been uniformly warm and congratulatory. My advisors are proud and probably thrilled not to have to write any more recommendation letters for me (at least for now). My parents, whose confidence in my abilities has been slowly outstripped by anxiety over my future employment prospects, are relieved. And I - well, I'm responding with caution-verging-on-ambivalence. This is not too surprising: I would respond to winning the lottery in precisely the same way ("Whoopee! 125 million dollars! Mustn't spend it all at once, though... I should prioritize my purchases and probably invest most of it. But wait, where am I going to invest it? Hmm... bonds are relatively safe, but I could get a higher return in a money market account... but those have become really risky lately... and there's all the taxes I'm gonna have to pay..."), so let me delineate a few of my thoughts/emotions on getting a tenure-track job, more or less in the order they came to me, though rendered much more eloquently here than when they first appeared:

On hanging up the phone with the dept chair: Yes!

Immediately thereafter: Wow, their other candidates must have really bombed.

Then: Maybe there were no other candidates?

Then: I dunno. As Woody Allen says in Annie Hall (quoting Groucho Marx), "I wouldn't want to belong to any club that would have me as a member." Maybe their judgment is unsound.

Then: I need a burrito.

After eating the world's messiest burrito: Mmm.. messy burrito. Now, where was I?

Then: Must text people with the news. They'll be happy for me!

A few cellphone beeps later: I knew it! Yay!

Then: Wow, it's only November and I already know that I'm going to have an income next year. That hasn't happened in a very long time.

Then: And god but the job market's brutal this year. Schools advertising positions and then withdrawing them once budget cuts are announced, hundreds of unemployed historians clamoring for even the crappiest and most temporary of jobs, and next year it's only going to be worse.

Then, while washing burrito juice off my hands: Assuming this isn't a hoax, and assuming the department did interview other people, and assuming that their judgment is sound, then this is quite an accomplishment. (Are there no frigging paper towels in this bathroom?) It's the first time since I got that job at Borders that I've actually been offered a job after interviewing for it in person. Guess I did pretty well.

Then: Of course I did. I'm very good at what I do - in fact, I'm kind of a big deal. I've got a book coming out, a handful of great fellowships/awards on my cv, my students love me. Wait, am I too good for this job? I wonder how my applications at NYU and Northwestern are doing...

A few days later, after sending emails to NYU, Northwestern, and a handful of other schools, inquiring about the state of my application: Really? You won't be making a decision for several months still and "strongly advise" me to accept the offer I've been given? Hrmph.

Then: Guess I'm not such a big deal after all.

Then: Nashville! I get to live in Nashville! I wonder how much houses cost in Nashville...

After a bit of googling: Golly, that much, huh? Maybe I'll just rent for a year or two. I really hope they offer me the higher salary I've asked for.

On getting an email from the department chair about my salary: Hmm. Well, I guess I could always get a second job...

On reading the rest of the email: Man, I'm gonna be busy...

Then: Stability! I'll finally have some stability! No more moving somewhere for a year, making friends and putting down some tentative, shallow roots, and then moving on. I can join clubs, buy lots of furniture, become involved in the community, get a dog!!

Then: Dog dog dog dog dog dog dog...

Then: But wait, dog or no dog, I do believe I'm going to miss The Valley terribly. I was just settling in and getting a bit comfortable, and while I always knew I'd be leaving, it's only now becoming a concrete reality.

A few wistful moments later, after pondering white kids with dredlocks, farm stand pumpkins, apple crumbles, fall foliage, Suburu station wagons plastered with bumper stickers, big white Congregational churches, lesbian couples with Asian babies, ninjas, bike trails, anarchist book stores, tobacco barns, Herman Melville, Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson, and Calvin Coolidge: Damn!

A few moments more, after pondering sweet potato pancakes, Nathan Bedford Forest, Charlie Daniels, Ernest Tubb, meat-and-threes, Andrew Jackson, Dollywood, southern accents, Civil War reenactors, and the prospect of living in one of the few blue counties in a ruby-red state: Well, hmm.

Then: At least I won't be on the west coast, where I know almost nobody. And I'll be a day's drive from my parents in Oklahoma and my brother in Virginia.

And then the following image flashed before me: Charlie Chaplin, clutching his hat and stumbling into a rickety cabin, seeking shelter from a raging blizzard. The movie, of course, is The Gold Rush, and the symbolism should be obvious to anyone paying attention to the grim economic news that keeps getting grimmer by the day. A job, after all, is a job, and this job is a pretty good one. It's Thanksgiving tomorrow, and, while I'm not normally given to much sentimentality during this holiday - it's almost all about the eating, as far as I'm concerned - I know enough to be extremely thankful that I have a shelter in which to weather this storm. It's not a palace, but it'll do. And I'll do my best to make it cozy and warm.

And that, more or less, is where I am right now.

Tales of A Postdoc Muffin

[I've been waiting two months to use this subject line.]

If you're like me, you're likely to find yourself cooking in an unfamiliar kitchen this Thanksgiving. You may be at your great aunt Ruth's house dusting off a canister of ground cloves that looks like it was last opened during the Eisenhower administration. You may be scouring your bachelor friend Ethan's cabinets for something basic like olive oil or a can opener. You will probably bang things, drop things, spill and break things, look like a fool and curse and stomp and pitch a minor fit. The owner of this foreign kitchen, should they be nearby and conscious and sober, may regret ever having invited you to Thanksgiving dinner and resolve that from now on they will make everything their own damn self. But this year's holiday is already underway, and there you are, with your good intentions and fair-to-middling culinary skills, and all of you are just going to have to muddle through.

So, for everyone planning to cook in someone else's kitchen in the next few weeks, allow me to offer three lessons that I have already learned this holiday season, all of which came to me while attempting to make some pumpkin muffins in my father's kitchen today.

1) Buttermilk is no longer a commonly stocked item in American kitchens. Whatever may have been the case during, say, the Great Depression, most American refrigerators do not have a carton of fresh buttermilk sitting around ready for you to use in your baked goods. Your great grandmother may have regularly kept some buttermilk on hand, and you may have internalized this fact and simply assumed that buttermilk was one of those things - like mustard - that is always there but normally overlooked until needed. Wrong. Halfway through preparing your muffin batter only to realize that the buttermilk you need is several minutes away at the local ice cream store? Tough luck, Chuck - hop in the car and go buy you some, while the batter slowly congeals.

2) Flour and confectioner's sugar look a lot alike. When in doubt - when, say, the canisters you're working from are not helpfully labeled - it is very important that you taste the item you are about to use. Otherwise, you are likely to realize your mistake much too late - for example, after you have made the batter, painstakingly distributed the batter evenly into the muffin pan, baked the batter for the required 20 minutes, and taken the muffin pan out of the oven. Are your muffins suspiciously concave in shape? Do they jiggle when you shake the pan? Well, maybe that's because you used sugar instead of flour. Time to scrape the pan out and start again.

3) [This warning is not specific to those cooking in someone else's kitchen, but it's useful information nonetheless.] Pumpkin seeds, when purchased at a Mexican market, may be covered in some evil spicy pepper powder. If this is not a taste you desire in the items you're baking - pumpkin muffins, say - it's best not to put them in the items, even for a little while. Take it from me: having messed up the first batch of muffins today, I decided that I would go ahead and add the shelled pumpkin seeds that the recipe called for and that I hadn't included in the first, flourless batch. This required driving down to the more, um, culturally diverse part of town and buying a bag of pepitas, which jumped out at me right as I walked in the door. I raced home, whipped up a second batch of batter like I'd been doing it my whole life (by this point, I practically had), and confidently sprinkled a tablespoon of these little fiery diablitas into the bowl. Then, moved perhaps by some force greater than myself, I decided to pop a handful of them into my mouth. As my eyes slowly filled with tears and sweat beaded on my forehead, I frantically began plucking the seeds, already beginning to sink out of sight, from the batter, carelessly abandoning all dignity and decorum. And then, hands dripping with pumpkin seeds and spicy pumpkin batter, I slid the muffins into the oven and prayed that the residual pepper powder wouldn't make the muffins completely inedible.

20 minutes later I took the muffins out and they were... fine. No, better than fine. They were: okay.

Perfectly, wonderfully, okay.

Happy cooking!

NOTICE: Next Saturday's Wall-Licking Party Has Been Postponed

This just in from The Commonwealth of Massachusetts Executive Office of Health and Human Services, Department of Public Health, Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention Program:

NOTICE TO TENANT OF LEAD PAINT HAZARDS

Lead in violation of the Lead Law (Massachusetts General Laws, chapter 111, sections 189A-199B) and the state Department of Public Health's Regulations for Lead Poisoning Prevention and Control (105 Code of Massachusetts Regulations 460.000) have [sic] been found apartment __[not mine]__ in this building. Children exposed to lead hazards are at risk of becoming lead poisoned. This disease can affect all parts of a young child's developing body, and in particular, can seriously and permanently hurt the brain, kidneys and nervous system. Even at lower levels of exposure, lead can cause children to have learning and behavioral problems. ...

Since lead violations have been found in an apartment in this building, it is quite possible that your unit may have lead violations too. If you have a child under six years of age, you should ask the owner of your building about having your apartment inspected for lead paint. ...

[And it goes on like this for a few more paragraphs, telling me about the deleading procedure, etc.]

---

Three thoughts on the discovery of lead paint in my building (and potentially in The Submarine itself):

1) Does lead paint poisoning only affect children under 6? If so, can I continue flinging pizza dough and pie dough and cookie dough at the walls and then baking and eating that dough in relative safety?

2) What will happen to the young child who has suddenly taken up residence upstairs in Stompy's apartment, and whose darling little voice and pitterpattering feet can now be heard at all hours alongside those of Mr. McStompstomp himself? Will the little dear have to move out? Will he suffer "learning and behavioral problems" as a consequence of the lead dust kicked up during Stompy's all-night furniture bowling parties? As always, it's the children who suffer most in these situations.

3) What if the noun "lead" were pronounced like the verb "to lead" (i.e., LEED)? Suddenly lead paint would be lead paint - that is, paint that one leads with, or, alternatively, the paint that is ahead of all the other paints in some sort of contest (a child-poisoning contest, no doubt). Lead poisoning would be lead poisoning, which could either be interpreted as a command (Poisoning! Get out there and lead! Show some initiative!) or something that might happen were one accidentally to swallow a dog's leash, also commonly known as a lead. The comic implications of this homography are, you will have gathered, moderate in the extreme.

Five Reasons I Hope I Get to Live in Nashville

If my recent on-campus interview went well - well enough for them to offer me the job, that is - there's a very good chance I could find myself living in Nashville next year. A year ago I would have balked at this. I had driven through Nashville several times on I-40, always on my way from Oklahoma to some blue state along the eastern seaboard, and I knew very little about the city. I did know several things, though:

1) Andrew Jackson, the genocidal monster who brutally uprooted tens of thousands of Native Americans and forced them to relocate to my home state (killing many thousands in the process), lived in a mansion outside of Nashville called The Hermitage. It's a beautiful place, with a lovely, Indian-free, tree-lined avenue; pleasant, Indian-free meadows; and a comprehensive audio tour that, as I recall, was also Indian-free. I do not like Andrew Jackson, and Nashville has always suffered, in my mind, by association.

2) There is a gigantic building dominating the Nashville skyline that looks, to me and many others I've discussed the matter with, like a gigantic cell phone. Batman's cell phone, actually, by virtue of its two "antennae." It used to be the Bell South building and now belongs to AT&T, thus making the resemblance stronger. The first time I saw this building was at night, and, with the whole thing lit up like a cell phone, particularly the part of the building that would be the digital screen on an actual cell phone, the effect was powerful and unsettling. Imagine driving down the highway, minding your own business, and then turning left to look out the window and seeing a gigantic toaster dominating the skyline of a major American city. It was a little like that. Here's what the building looks like during the day:

Trust me, it's much scarier at night.

3) Country music comes from Nashville. Once upon a time, this was a good thing - George Jones, Dolly Parton, Johnny Cash, Emmylou Harris, Patsy Cline, Buck Owens, Loretta Lynn, Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, Hank Williams, etc., all made names for themselves in Nashville, and our culture is much the richer for it. But contemporary country music - that reactionary, cloying, saccharine, Joe-the-Plumber idiot music that exemplifies everything that's wrong with this country - also comes from Nashville. Now, country music has always been politically right-of-center ("Okie from Muskogee," anyone?), and popular music of all sorts is often aesthetically revolting, and it is, moreover, supremely unfair to blame an entire city for the crimes of its principal industry, but I have to confess that the prominent association between Nashville and folks like Toby Keith and Kenny Chesney imbued me with a deep prejudice against the place.

I began to revise my opinion of the city this summer, when fate brought my brother and me to the city for a day. Well, it wasn't exactly fate - he was driving east and I was driving west and we decided to meet up there - but I still think fate had something to do with it. So allow me to enumerate several of the reasons I now think Nashville would be a pretty good place to live, Andrew (and Alan) Jackson notwithstanding.

1) Meat-and-three. This is a type of meal at which Nashville restaurants excel: your choice of meat (chicken dumplings, say, or fried chicken) with three sides. Sides include things like mac & cheese, mashed potatoes, corn, green beans, and turnip greens. This might not sound too exciting, but oh-my-god! you have to try these sides. At the Elliston Place Soda Shop, a Nashville institution near Vanderbilt University, I had some of the most exciting turnip greens in history - exciting because cooked in some sort of heavenly pork juice that took the bitter edge off the greens and replaced it with exciting pig flavor. My brother had these along with a deep-fried pork chop, and I'm happy to report that he's still living. Here's what it looked like:




2) Anywhere you can put a band in Nashville, there's a band. Seriously. Restaurants, hotel lobbies, parking lots, meat-and-threes. Last week I had to yell across the table at one of my interviewers because there was a band playing in the student dining hall while we were trying to eat lunch. Most of these bands are several orders better than the lunatic drivel you'll hear on a country radio station - which means, of course, that they don't stand a chance of getting a record contract.

3) The Pancake Pantry. This is a breakfast spot not far from Vanderbilt where it's not uncommon to wait outside on weekends for up to an hour before being seated. We had a slight wait, but it wasn't that long. And then we were rewarded with heaven-on-a-plate in the form of sweet potato pancakes. The good thing about this is that we can both now die happy. The bad thing is that all other pancakes can only ever be disappointing. Here's what they looked like:

4) The Charlie Daniels Museum. Okay, so this choice is a little tongue-in-cheek, but if you've got the right attitude it is possible to spend a very long time in the Charlie Daniels Museum, which is free, open to the public, and located right in the heart of downtown Nashville. By "right attitude" I mean, of course, the willingness and ability to laugh at the small-minded, flag-waving, chest-beating over-the-topness of it all. Charlie Daniels loves three things: guitars, NASCAR, and the US military, and his love of these things is loudly proclaimed throughout the museum in photographs, commemorative items, awards, and souvenirs from Charlie's seventeen decades in the music business. I have several favorite items, but the best might be the photo of Charlie and his wife with Vice President Dick Cheney and his robot bride:

The gift shop at the Charlie Daniels Museum is also notable for its large number of racist knicknacks, from Confederate-flage bikinis to Aunt Jemima figurines. Say whatever else you will about it - that takes balls.

5) The Ernest Tubb Record Shop. Just down the road from the Charlie Daniels Museum, this Nashville institution was founded in 1947 by the "Texas Troubador" Ernest Tubb, stalwart of the Grand Ole Opry and pioneer of honky tonk music. It specializes in classic country records and memorabilia, and serves as a standing rebuke to the travesty that country music has become. While there I bought two Buck Owens CDs and a bottle of - no kidding - George Jones bottled water. My one regret is that I did not buy the bumper sticker that says "What Would Ernest Tubb Do?" If I get the job, however, I'll have a chance to rectify that error.

There are several other features that make Nashville a desirable place to live, but these will do for now. Watch this space for future developments, y'all.

So You Think You Want to Be a Historian - The Campus Visit

[The following post is a composite picture of on-campus interviews drawn from the author’s four years on the academic job market. It is not an accurate description of his most recent interview below the Mason-Dixon line: to post about an interview whose results are as yet unknown is not only bad luck, it is also extremely poor form. And the author is nothing if not attentive to form.]

Let’s say you have a PhD in history. Never mind why, how, or where you acquired this PhD. You wrote a pretty good dissertation, have a book coming out with a pretty good press, and have been riding the postdoctoral carousel for a few years while attempting to find a steady, tenure-track position at an accredited college or university. You’re not picky, but you’d rather not end up somewhere like Shreveport. Sometimes the idea enters your head to chuck the whole thing and just go to law school or take a job with the State Department, but you haven’t given up yet.

Unless you are a complete basket case (and you’re not), you will at some point be offered what’s known as an on-campus interview at a school that’s hiring someone who does roughly what you do. Let’s say it’s British history. Or Irish. Or both. Really, they’re pretty much the same place. Anyway, the offer of this interview will normally have come after a preliminary interview either via telephone or at the annual historian party in January. Let’s say it happened after a phone interview.

The first challenge you will face in preparing for this on-campus interview will be to explain to your civilian friends and family (that is, people who are not academics) why it is that you have to travel across the country and spend anywhere from 24 to 72 hours interviewing for this position. They will scratch their heads when you explain that, apart from the hours when you will be asleep, you will be interviewing almost the entire time you are away. This includes trips to and from the airport, meals, informational sessions, coffee breaks, bathroom breaks, and informal presentations. They will insist that surely this is excessive – what’s wrong with a normal interview in which you sit across a table from a person or group of people for an hour or so and talk about your qualifications and experience? You will reply that there are several reasons for this: the people hiring you will potentially be your colleagues (and, in most cases, an important part of your social circle) for decades, so they want to be sure that you have that elusive quality known as “collegiality,” that you are not only qualified but also someone who will be a good “fit” for the department. You will also point out that academia is much different than the corporate world: the people running the search are not professional human resources managers but mostly shlubby, brainy people like yourself who have no business training and, in most cases, fairly idiosyncratic interpersonal skills. As a last resort, you will explain that, for the people running the job search, on-campus interviews are not only about hiring new people but also about getting a sense of what younger historians are up to these days – they are, moreover, opportunities for these faculty members to have some pretty expensive meals on someone else’s dime.

Your next task will be to decide what to wear. This should be easy, but many of your peers will begin going astray at precisely this point. They will overdress, digging out their ill-fitting weddings-and-funerals-only attire, and end up looking like depressed bankers. The important thing to bear in mind when packing for your interview is that you will, almost without exception, be better-dressed than the people interviewing you. Because these are historians and it is winter, this means you will be seeing lots of sweaters and tweed, often worn over slightly threadbare blouses and shirts. All you have to do is dress at a slightly higher level, throw in perhaps a bit of youthful flare, and you will be fine. If you are a man, consider not wearing a tie, at least on the second day. If you are a woman, consider primary colors.

Because you will be nervous about not getting enough sleep the night before the interview, you will not get enough sleep the night before the interview. This is normal. Let's say your interview is far away and you are flying there. You will be greeted at the baggage claim by someone whose picture you weren't able to find on the department's website. You will, nevertheless, be able to spot this person easily because s/he will be looking just as nervous about meeting you as you are about meeting them. Let's say your airport greeter is a man. He will immediately begin telling you in great detail everything he can think of about the airport, local tax laws, local politics, zoning codes, and the economic/demographic/social conditions of the city you are visiting. Do not be alarmed - you will not be required to remember all of this information and, should you take this job, you will not be required to acquire it. This is largely a maneuver intended to break the ice and to avoid talking too soon about the position, the department, etc. See if there's something in what your guide is telling you that you can latch onto or expand upon. Offer similar or contrasting information about places you have lived or spent time in. Be creative!

After a tour of the area, during which you will have been offered much new information but retained little, you will be brought to your hotel. The hotel may or may not offer you a free cookie upon checking in. Should you be offered a cookie, resist the urge to eat it immediately. You may need it later - you will undoubtedly be well fed during your stay, but not always on the schedule to which you are accustomed (remember, every second of your stay is very tightly scheduled), so it's not a bad idea to have some snacks tucked away for emergencies. In fact, instead of rolling around in bed the night before and being unable to sleep, you would be wise to use that time locating and packing power bars, trail mix, cheesy crackers, and fruit for your visit, being sure to place these items strategically in different bags, briefcases, and pockets.

Once you get checked into your room, you may have anywhere from 10 to 40 minutes to yourself before you are to be picked up for dinner. Use this time to sit quietly and enjoy not being evaluated.

You will then be taken to dinner by a different faculty member than the one who picked you up at the airport. This person will tell you pretty much the same things, often in the same words, as your airport ride told you about the city, local politics, zoning codes, etc. Having already practiced responding to this information once today, you will be well prepared for this conversation - this time your responses will come out much more smoothly and quickly than they did before.

Dinner will be at a nice restaurant that members of the faculty only visit when they are hosting job candidates. There will be seven or eight of them present when you arrive. If the university is picking up the entire tab, then many of them will be drinking expensive drinks, and some may already be drunk. They will, of course, all know one another and will be talking about things/people/places that you don't know anything about - principally departmental politics, but there may be other local topics thrown in from time to time. The people you are dining with will normally fit one of the following descriptions: a) they will all be substantially older than you, leading you to reflect that these people seem more like your grandparents than potential colleages; b) there will be a mix of ages, but for some reason the younger ones seem scarier than the older ones; c) they will remind you of the minor characters that appear in many Coen Brothers movies - you know, the quirky local shopkeepers and hairdressers who, if they're in a funny Coen Brothers movie, get some pretty good one-liners, but who, if they're in a violent Coen Brothers movie, get murdered; d) they will be perfectly warm and lovely and interested and welcoming.

During dinner you will not have to say much, since everyone else will be talking to one another about those things that they have in common and you will have nothing to contribute. At some point, however, the conversation will die and someone - usually the one designated, officially or unofficially, as the attack dog - will ask you something for which you are completely unprepared. You will probably be slurping soup at this time or chewing a large piece of pork, and so you will splutter a bit before coughing out an answer that neither you, your guests, nor the waitstaff could possibly find remotely satisfactory. Things will continue in this vein for a little while before the conversation drifts back to those topics to which you can't contribute. You will then be free to complete your meal and begin thinking about dessert. Dessert will, in fact, be offered, and - even if you are completely stuffed - you will order some. Because, hey, free dessert!

After dinner you will be taken back to your hotel, where you will fail to sleep soundly for a second night.

The next day will be the big day. You will be picked up at a very early hour by yet another faculty member, who will proceed to tell you exactly the same things about local politics, zoning codes, demographics, etc, that you have heard at least twice already. Anticipating the topics that will come up, you will now be able to ask leading questions that will prompt this person to continue talking at some length, while you sit silently and try to wake up. Around this time you will become extremely grateful that so many people in your chosen profession are incorrigible talkers, and that the kind of talking they do (i.e., lecturing) requires very little in the way of two-way interaction. In fact, they seem to prefer it that way.

Once you arrive on campus you will muster your strength and embark on an extensive series of meetings, tours, and presentations. You will meet with the department chair, graduate students, and deans. You will act professional and ask all the right questions of the department chair, but you will feel more comfortable with the graduate students, with whom you will share one or two off-color jokes and maybe drop an f-bomb. The dean may or may not look like Paul Newman, he may or may not have memorized all of your personal details before your meeting (up to and including your current address), and he may or may not be a priest - but at least one of these three variables will undoubtedly be present, and you would do well to prepare for any of them. If the university has a religious mission then you will express great interest in that mission and a desire to carry it forward through every means at your disposal, up to and including sacrificing yourself on a cross, should it come to that. If the university is a state school you will extol the virtues of providing affordable education and the excitment you feel when you have a chance to teach less-privileged students. If the university is an elite liberal arts institution, you will tell the dean how grateful you are not to have to teach poor kids or religious kids.

At some point during the day you will have lunch, probably at the university dining facility. This will be less satisfying than your dinner last night, but there will be fewer opportunities for you to choke on your soup, principally because the soup that day looks really gross.

You will now be expected to give one or maybe two presentations. The so-called "job talk" consists of a vastly oversimplified description of your dissertation, and is best done with the help of colorful pictures and Power Point images of historical figures with little cartoon speech bubbles containing important quotations coming out of the mouths. The so-called "teaching demonstration" will either involve you standing in a room full of faculty and pretending they are students while you deliver a lecture on the Irish Famine, say, or it will involve you teaching an actual class full of actual students about, say, the Irish Famine. In either case the situation will be completely contrived and nothing like what it's like when you're actually teaching, but you'll be too worried about the upcoming question and answer period to focus too much on that. The question and answer period, it goes without saying, will be much more easily handled if you are teaching an actual class than if you're pretending to teach a classroom full of faculty.

By now you will be ready for a little alone time, but nothing along those lines has been written into your schedule. You will then have the brilliant idea of excusing yourself and going to the restroom. You will sit on the toilet for fully 10 minutes, not talking and not being evaluated, and that will make all the difference.

At some point during your visit the administrative assistant who has been coordinating much of your visit, a youngish person of the opposite sex who is obviously too smart for his or her job and feels it, may develop something of a crush on you. S/he will begin flirting with you and suggesting ways s/he might sabotage the other applicants to ensure that you are offered the position. Whatever you do, DO NOT DISCOURAGE THIS. The administrative assistant might not have any real power over who gets hired, but you could use all the allies you can get. And besides, should you get the job, you never know...

The remainder of your day will consist of a tour of campus (given by another faculty member who will begin telling you all about local politics, demographics, zoning codes, etc - by this point you can safely tune them out), another meeting or two to fill out some paperwork, maybe a visit to the library, and another dinner. This second dinner will be smaller and less intense than last night's dinner. By now you will have dropped all pretense of professionalism or maturity - after handily dispatching the stock questions asked by your dinner companions (who will not be the same people you had dinner with the night before), you will proceed to treat them like graduate students, telling the occasional off-color joke and dropping more than a few f-bombs. You will drink a little too much wine and begin a subdued but steady tirade about the evils of a) college sports; b) public schools; c) Republicans; d) Freemasons; or e) all of the above. Your dinner companions will begin gossiping about the other members of the department, letting slip vital clues about the internal workings of the search committee, the high-handedness of the department chair, the shortcomings of the other candidates they've interviewed, and the difficulties of getting some of the older codgers to just give up and retire already. You will form a special bond with this second group of dinner companions that will convince you that they, at least, will be in your corner when the time comes to decide whom to offer the job to. You may or may not be right about this.

Finally you will be brought back to the hotel where you will sleep the sleep of the angels for about 12 hours before waking up without an alarm, springing out of bed, feeling sharper and more focused than you have all week. Unfortunately, these qualities will be completely wasted as you are shuttled to the airport by the one remaining faculty member you have not yet met, who will tell you for the thousandth effing time everything you already know about local politics, zoning codes, economics, etc. You will spend the rest of the day traveling back home, and then the next 4-12 weeks waiting for the phone to ring - and maybe secretly hoping it won't.

While you wait to learn your fate, you will at least be able to take comfort in the fact that you are not applying for a job in the Obama administration.

Some Surprising Things I've Seen in the Last 24 Hours

1) A young woman with very short-cropped hair walking through NoHo with a long, blue, woolen military jacket like this one over blue tracksuit bottoms like these.

2) A very small man in a very old hat driving a very old black car through the center of NoHo. It felt a bit like a scene from the French Connection.

3) A guy about 10 years younger than me and a woman about 10 years older than me (so ca. 21 and 41, respectively) sitting side-by-side at the Montague Book Mill and flirting outrageously. At one point they appeared to be engaged in an intense discussion about the lady's breasts. It was a bit like a scene from Harold and Maude.

4) A remarkably good, if sometimes painful (but in a good way), film called Rachel Getting Married in which Anne Hathaway, of all people, turns in an astonishing performance as a troubled recovering drug addict attending her sister's wedding. Apart from Hathaway (who easily outshines her earlier career-best performance in The Devil Wears Prada), the movie is noteworthy as the first film successfully to integrate track one from Neil Young's beautiful Harvest Moon album into a wedding sequence.

5) Gigantic, gooey, glorious chocolate cupcakes slathered in mint icing, also encountered at the Montague Book Mill. Not only did I see these items today, I devoured one of them without a hint of guilt. I'm slowly becoming a cupcake convert.

[incidentally, the Montague Book Mill is one of my favorite spots in the Valley. It's a large used bookstore/cafe in an old mill (built in 1842) in Montague, MA, about half an hour north of NoHo (thanks to Lindsay for introducing me to it). It looks a little like this:

]

5) A video of Louis Armstrong and Johnny Cash (two of my all-time favorites) performing a song together in which Armstrong appears to go slightly insane.

6) The following sentence: "So let us not over-egg the pudding." This is my new favorite sentence, and it appears in a typically cantankerous article by Christopher Hitchens over at Slate. Hitchens' adoption of a contrarian position relative to Obama's election is perhaps the least surprising thing I've seen in the last 24 hours.

7) The disappearance of the sun at 4:30 pm. This is the one surprising thing I've seen in the past day that I wish I hadn't seen.

Reason #1 Barack Obama Will Be A Great President

What kind of president will Barack Obama be? Before the election, the New York Review of Books ran a story by Mark Danner outing our new president-elect as a total pie fiend. It's a longish story, but so worth your time (in addition to the pie thing, it's a pretty good analysis of the two campaigns' styles and supporters).

I knew there was a reason I voted for this guy.

You Already Know What This One's About

I'm usually pretty clearheaded about things. Sure, I have my lacunae like anyone else, and lord knows I've made bad decisions and demonstrated woefully poor judgment from time to time. But for the most part I'm quite realistic in my outlook: neither an optimist nor a pessimist, I don't see the glass as either half-full or half-empty, but I might be inclined to ask why the glass is there in the first place, what the likelihood is that it will remain there for a certain period of time, and perhaps, if I'm thirsty, if I might have a drink from it. For the most part this character trait has served me well, I think, insofar as it keeps me on an even keel, and, if it sometimes means I can't quite muster the giddy enthusiasm that others feel when things are going well, it also means that I rarely plunge into despair when things go poorly. It takes a lot, in other words, to get me worked up.

This is especially true with respect to my outlook on politics, society, etc. One possible definition of what I do for a living is that I study and teach about the awful things that humans do to one another. This is not because I have a morbid fascination with violence and death, but, rather, because I think that by understanding these things we can begin to take steps toward minimizing them. Still, it is undoubtedly true that humans frequently do really terrible things to one another and that, on balance, the really terrible moments in human history appear to outnumber the really wonderful ones. At least this is true with respect to what we might call History-with-a-capital-H - that is, the sorts of big historical events that make it into history books. I remain agnostic as to whether history-with-a-small h - e.g., the daily lives of ordinary people that go unrecorded and unremarked-upon - is also filled with more badness than goodness.

So believe me when I tell you that I was as surprised as I have ever been when, driving home from Philadelphia this afternoon and reflecting on Obama's victory last night, my eyes began to well up with tears. Right there on the Garden State Parkway.

Kind of like they're doing right now.

The people who elected Obama have done something extraordinary, and it will take some time for the reality of it to sink in. Listening to his acceptance speech last night, I couldn't believe that the same country in which I have lived for most of the past 8 years - the country that twice elected George W Bush, that so gleefully bounded off to war with a people we don't and can't understand, that has shown so little consideration for the damage we do to the planet and the people inside and outside our borders who suffer to make our lives comfortable - that this country, with its anti-intellectualism and its lowest-common-denominator popular culture, with its apathy and selfishness, with its lack of imagination, its suspicion of outsiders, its crippling resignation - that this country had just done this great thing. It has already become a cliche to argue that this election has shown the world what's best in America, that the lofty ideals we espouse are still alive and well, awakening as if from a long slumber. I don't know if that's true. But what does appear to be true is that ordinary people made this happen - that democracy, despite all the structural obstacles to its proper functioning in this country, is still possible and, moreover, is capable of yielding great things.

Yesterday Meagan and I pounded the pavement deep in West Philly, knocking on doors and asking people if they'd made it to the polls yet. This was deep-blue Obama territory - mostly working-class, mostly black - and there wasn't any question of having to persuade people not to vote for McCain. The point was to ensure that people knew where they were supposed to vote and to remind them to do so. Most of the houses we (along with an older woman whose name I never caught, but who once shook hands with Bobby Kennedy) visited were empty, and nearly all of the people we did speak to had already voted or were just about to, so we didn't really manage to enhance turnout in the neighborhood directly, apart from giving directions to one guy who pulled over in his car to ask us where the polling place was. But nearly everyone I spoke to, after an initial hesitation, smiled when they saw I was with the Obama campaign - and when they did that I glimpsed excitement and determination, a feeling of solidarity with neighbors and family, a sense that this time the system might actually work for them. Most of the people we saw yesterday, whether the people in their homes or the volunteers at the campaign venues, had probably never been politically involved before, had perhaps never even voted before, but here they were trying to make the world a better place. And this is how he won.

Part of joining a movement like this means submerging your ego a little. I know my contribution was so miniscule as to be almost nonexistent - indeed, I probably cost the campaign more in hot dogs, donuts, Fritos, coffee, and gasoline than I contributed yesterday - but the cumulative effect of these miniscule contributions has been astonishing. Obama's right when he says this campaign wasn't about him, but about us.

It's inevitable that the glow of yesterday will fade, that Obama's halo will fall. The troubling compromises, moral and otherwise, will probably begin before he even takes office. Utopia is not around the corner, more bad things will keep happening, and America will undoubtedly go on being its exasperating self. But what happened yesterday is something that can't un-happen. Whatever happens next, this thing that we did has already been done. This morning as I got in my car, I saw a black mother leading a little girl down 46th street on her way to school. The girl was all in pink, the mother was walking briskly, and I thought: that little girl's world is going to be much, much different than her mother's has been. And then I got in my car and drove home.

In the Belly of the [Irish-American] Beast

On Saturday I talked to a group of Irish-American retirees about Northern Ireland. At least, I'm pretty sure they were retirees - AARP membership wasn't required to attend the talk, but I've done enough off-season traveling at national parks and historic sites to spot a retiree couple when I see one. The talk was under the auspices of an Irish-American cultural organization based out of southern Connecticut that was putting on a one-day seminar on Irish culture and politics, and I was invited as a last-minute replacement after their original Northern Ireland speaker cancelled. My job was to give a 40-minute lecture on developments in Northern Ireland since the signing of the Belfast (or Good Friday) Agreement of 1998.

Now, if you know me, you know I don't exactly look like a professor. I'm youngish and young-looking, and it's not until you get to know me that you realize that I'm actually like 70 years old at heart. People with whom I have occasion to exchange small talk - barbers, for instance - usually assume that I'm a college student, until I tell them otherwise (if I tell them otherwise), and I blend in well in the sorts of student-dominated environments in which I often find myself. I'm normally not too self-conscious about this, and am, in fact, quite happy that I look younger than I am, but there are times when I feel like my youthful appearance can prevent people from taking me seriously. Not that I usually feel like I need to be taken seriously, but sometimes I do. This was the subject of a bit of apprehension on my part heading into this lecture on Saturday, based primarily on the following (somewhat paraphrased) exchange I had with the organizer, whom I'll call Phyllis, via email:

Phyllis: I'm so glad you'll be able to join us on Nov. 1. Would you mind sending us a photograph of yourself so that we can include it with the promotional material?

Me: [having searched my hard drive for a single photo in which I am a) not making a silly face, b) not making a mock-angry face, c) wearing something other than a t-shirt with cartoon characters on it, and d) not sticking my toungue out] Sure thing. Here you go! Let me know if the resolution is too poor, etc. [I then upload a picture of a smiling me wearing my only white button-up collared shirt]

Phyllis: Thanks for the photo, but do you have anything slightly more professorial looking?

Me: [feeling like a complete fool, I put on the same white shirt, a tie, and a black sport coat, stand in front of an antique map of Ireland hanging on my wall, and take about a dozen photos of myself with a variety of facial expressions until I find one that looks like what I think Phyllis must mean by "professorial"] Okay, sure. How's this one?

Phyllis: This is great! The map of Ireland in your face! [these are her exact words]

So this was what had happened before I showed up in Connecticut on Saturday. Preceding my talk was a talk by a guy from the Irish consul-general's office (maybe the consul-general himself? Anyway, a very nice guy), and following me was the editor of one of the country's largest Irish-American newspapers. And in between, following lunch, was little old me, who - it's true - has written a book about 19th-century Belfast and lived in Belfast for a few months, but who otherwise doesn't know much more about contemporary Northern Ireland than anyone who looks periodically at the Belfast Telegraph website might have. So, naturally, I vastly overprepared, compiled about 10 pages of notes and a detailed (and, if I do say so, quite amusing) Power Point presentation drawing on the latest social-science research into the economic and social situation in Northern Ireland over the last 10 years.

When I arrived, the guy from the consul's office was just wrapping up his talk and was fielding questions from the audience. Most of the questions had to do with Irish citizenship laws and why they weren't more liberal. While he somewhat defensively explained that Ireland actually has some of the most liberal citizenship laws in the EU, it dawned on me that the chief attraction for many of the attendees was the workshop being offered later in the day on how to get your Irish citizenship (which is available to anyone with an Irish grandparent). Then we broke for lunch and I sat down and ate my turkey sandwich at a table full of middle-aged folks, several of them wearing green sweaters or other Irishy clothes, and listened while they discussed the merits of Ellis Island and the counties from which the different parts of their families derived. It was quite cute, and I surprised myself by not feeling as dismissive and condescending as I often do when sharing the same air with laymen whose ideas about Ireland are derived primarily from what they've gleaned from Riverdance and PBS specials devoted to The Irish Tenors. Maybe I'm becoming more tolerant in my old age, or maybe I'm just becoming more secure in my professional identity.

In any case, after lunch I did my thing, and it went quite well. They laughed in (almost) all the right spots, and afterwards I had several nice compliments from folks in the audience. One older Irish gentleman - a man actually from Ireland - told me that I'd done the best job he'd ever heard an American do when discussing the North. I didn't "romanticize" it at all and seemed to have the "inside track." One dramatically-coiffed lady, one of a group of three ladies seated at the back who appeared to have fallen out of a Talbot's catalogue, told me that I'd helped her understand much better what was going on in Northern Ireland and, by the way, when I got back to Massachusetts would I mind looking up her daughter who's in school there and telling her hi? I said of course I would. And then the newspaper editor told me that I should send him a copy of the book when it comes out and he'd "give it some ink." I believe that means they'll write about it.

So in all it was a most successful trip, on a personal/professional level. So what if I was introduced as a "postdoctoral student" and Phyllis did once call me "kiddo"? Who would notice such trivial things? Anyway, that's not the point. The point is that the kelly-green heart of Irish-America is still alive and beating. There are still rooms in which well-dressed, affluent men and women share information with one another about the best way to look up their ancestors at Ellis Island. There are still pockets of America where a well-told anecdote about Ronald Reagan's visit to Ireland will be greeted with hearty, appreciative laughter. And there are still people who will make a point of distinguishing between the "Celtic" influence in North America and that of the "Scotch Irish." These are the people who fund the Irish Studies programs that have been my bread-and-butter for much of the last 9 or so years, and, once the book comes out, these will be the only people apart from my family and a few very large research libraries who might buy it. They are lovely and friendly and generous and good. And they all have great big Irish heads and massive helmets of Kennedy-esque hair. Even the women.