Sunday Scattershot

A few unconnected things that may or may not be of interest to anyone who may or may not be reading this:

1) It was gorgeous in the Valley today, and it was, consequently, probably the last chance I'll have to ride down the Norwottuck Rail Trail to Amherst. Everyone else, their dogs, their children, and their elderly grandparents seem to have had a roughly similar idea, and this, along with the copious debris littering the trail as a result of last night's rain, made for a fairly perilous journey. It's sad to abandon the trail for the winter and to have to rely, instead, on the Buddhamobile or the bus to get me to campus, but I'm consoling myself with the thought that this was probably how the pioneers did it, back before the bike trail was there.

2) I have a phone interview on Tuesday with a large state school outside of Nashville. This is potentially a sign either of good things to come or of bad things, or both. Good because I've got an interview at a decent school located in a decent part of the country (I recently visited Nashville with my brother and was quite taken with it) and because it suggests that other schools might also be interested. Bad because the reason MTSU is jumping the gun and conducting their interviews way ahead of the normal historian-job schedule is that they're afraid a hiring freeze might be introduced next year and so they're trying to get someone locked into this position before the end of the year. Part of the reason I went into academia was that I fondly imagined it might insulate me from the boom-bust cycle of late-period capitalism, but developments such as this are revealing that to have been an embarrassingly erroneous calculation. Dark mutterings about budget cuts, hiring freezes, and even failures to meet payroll are filling the halls of higher education these days. Just today I learned that Brandeis University, which had advertised a position I was planning to apply for, had suspended its search owing to financial difficulties. I understand some 900 colleges had large chunks of their endowments invested in some Wachovia fund that they can no longer access, owing to the crisis at Wachovia, and the suspension of the Brandeis search may be a consequence of their inability to get at their own money. Colby College, I hear, also had its money in Wachovia and recently sent out communications to its faculty reassuring them that they will make payroll this month - how's that for a reassurance that can only fail to reassure? These developments are slightly troubling to me.

3) Pumpkin update: in happier, if not exactly lighter news, I can now report that, in addition to the pumpkin items discussed in a previous post, I have now had pumpkin-apple-curry soup, some pumpkin-chocolate-chip bread, a piece of pumpkin cheesecake, and yet more pumpkin beer. The pumpkin cheesecake was the sole disappointment of the three: spiced exactly like pumpkin pie, but much much richer, all I could think of while eating it was how it wasn't pumpkin pie, but instead something that might ensue if you mixed pumpkin pie up with a bunch of egg nog. I didn't finish it.

4) The band They Might Be Giants played the Calvin Theater the other night. I'm not a huge huge fan, but it just so happens that their seminal 1990 album Flood was one of the first CDs I ever owned (this was during the period of my life when I listened to nothing but novelty records - my other early CDs were from people like "Weird Al" Yankovic and Tom Lehrer), and the band will therefore forever have a place in my heart. To my shock and delight, they opened the show by playing, in sequence, all the songs from Flood. If you have even the slightest acquaintance with TMBG, or even if you don't, you probably know at least one song from Flood: "Birdhouse in Your Soul", "Istanbul (Not Constaninople)", "Particle Man". Several of these songs even made it into an episode of the wonderful but short-lived animated series, Tiny Toon Adventures - here's the "Istanbul" segment. Anyway, hearing these songs again - many of them for the first time since I was a teenager - had a powerfully transporting effect, reminding me of things like sitting around playing video games on my friend Brian's computer and wondering what it might be like someday to talk to a girl. I was giddy with nostalgia, wondering at my brain's ability to remember all the words to even the most obscure cuts on that album. Do I wish that that brain space had been filled with more productive knowledge lo these many years? No. No, I do not.

5) I'm reading a collection of George Orwell essays at the moment and lurving it. Everybody thinks of Orwell as this prescient political novelist who constructed powerful critiques of governments and ideologies, which he was, but he was also deeply, cuttingly funny. My favorite quip so far comes from the essay "The Lion and the Unicorn", in which he characterizes Stanley Baldwin (British PM in the 1920s and 1930s) thus: "As for Baldwin, one could not even dignify him with the name of stuffed shirt. He was simply a hole in the air."

That's all for now. Next time I think I may talk about Shakers.