Pimpgnosis

When distributing an “unrequired ego-disclosure sheet for varlets” to “help with overseeing the heterogeneity of our varletry…in compliance with relevant jurisdictional mandates” it would be helpful if:

a.) the form were easy to access.  I could not fill out the form online, because (i) you buried the form 3 levels deep within the HR hierarchy of the bureaucratic “self-service” website, but also because (ii) I am apparently “unauthorized” to view my own HR materials on said “self-service” website.

b.) the form were easy to return, when completed.  There is a low probability that this will occur, since hard copies apparently need to go to the HR office.  Which, logically, is only open during regular business hours.  Which, unfortunately, means diddly squat to me, since I am a lowly adjunct who teaches in the evenings and works full-time somewhere else during the day.

c.) the form were actually to comply with the relevant jurisdictional mandates in question.  Since, at the top of your form, it states that the bureaucracy is committed to the behavioral disregarding of: race, color, religion, national origin, ancestry, physical or mental disability, medical condition, genetic information, marital status, sex (including gender identity), age (over 40), sexual orientation, covered veteran status, or any other protected status…(take a breath), I assumed that the survey would be somewhat lengthy.  It was not.  It asked only two questions, one about race, and the other about something that doesn’t quite map onto any of the above-named categories.

As someone with a professional interest in closely-related topics, I would dearly appreciate it if you would publish the results of this survey.  Assuming, that is, that you get any data whatsoever.  Which, given that this is the second time you’ve had to put out a call for participants, must remain at open question at this point.

In any case, congratulations on complying with the letter, but completely torturing the spirit, of the “jurisdictional disclosure mandates.”

With all due respect for your solicitousness in this matter, I remain,

Yours sincerely,

Some Non-Hispanic White Dude (whoops, I almost forgot: you don’t actually care about my gender, do you?  Which is to say, it wasn’t on your survey).

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Conferences are a sort of Vanity Fair, a….

Wait a minute.

I should here acknowledge that, like almost everyone I know who uses this piece of cultural shorthand, I have never read the Thackeray novel.   Though maybe at least a few have seen the recent Reese Witherspoon movie based upon it.  Which I should also admit I have not done.  Most people probably assume I’m making some sort of reference to the magazine and leave it at that.  Probably only one person of my acquaintance – my father-in-law – knows that Thackeray was referencing Bunyan.  And, as follows logically, he is the only person I know who has actually read the latter.

Which I have done, because if I learned nothing else in undergrad, it was that reading shit in the original is always, always, worth it.

Anywho, although the connection to the magazine is not exactly false, it does mean that the moral opprobrium of the statement “conferences are a sort of Vanity Fair” may not come across with quite as much damning force as I really mean it to.

Because the original Vanity Fair, you see, the Vanity Fair of Bunyan, was a carnival of flesh and glamour.  A place where anything and everything was for sale: material goods, ideas, relationships, offices, bodies, souls.  A place deafening with the pachinko clink of money changing hands, the hue and cry of barkers, the bells and whistles of the midway cons.  A place crowded and alive, writhing and stinking with the press of humanity:

“Then I saw in my dream, that, when they were got out of the wilderness, they presently saw a town before them, and the name of that town is Vanity; and at the town there is a fair kept, called Vanity Fair.  It is kept all the year long.

Therefore at this fair are all such merchandise sold as houses, lands, trades, places, honors, preferments, titles, countries, kingdoms, lusts, pleasures, and delights of all sorts, as whores, bawds, wives, husbands, children, masters, servants, lives, blood, bodies, souls, silver, gold, pearls, precious stones, and what not.

And, moreover, at this fair there are at all times to be seen juggling, cheats, games, plays, fools, apes, knaves, and rogues, and that of every kind.

Here are to be seen, too, and that for nothing, thefts, murders, adulteries, false swearers, and that of a blood-red color.”

So when I say “conferences are a sort of Vanity Fair,” you see, I am not saying something nice.  I am saying something intended to be acidly mean.

This insight into the nature of conferences occurred to me recently when I attended one in Atlanta.  Now, normally the conferences I attend are in…shall we say, more interesting cities: Chicago or San Francisco.  Boston or New York.  Montreal or, to draw a very fine-grained distinction, Philadelphia.  But this time it was held in Peachtree City, the showcase of the New South, the Jerusalem of America’s black bourgeoisie, a city “too busy to hate” to quote some cracker or other, the “best city in the South” to quote some Yankee with more than a little knowledge of the matter.

This latter, learned, Yankee, who shall remain nameless, has observed on more than one occasion that going to conferences with me is rather like watching a reunion of the mean girls.  You know the type: the people (of either gender, actually) who were picked on in middle school (and perhaps later), the late-blooming socially awkward kid whose gawky frame at the tender age of 16 transforms 10 years later into the kind of body for which (ahem) readers of Vogue and Instinct yearn, the inconfident ignoramus of brands who becomes overnight a clotheshorse sporting linen pants and Thomas Pink shirts, the geek who discovers (sometime along about sophomore year of college) that the investments made four years prior in extra-credit book reports, cramming for AP exams, and rote memorization of the major schools of artistic expression in the Western tradition are now paying dividends out the wazoo, and not just academically for (say), larding their essays with carefully-crafted cultural references designed specifically to impress the professoriate.

No, they also discover that these dividends are useful socially, for all the finer arts of introduction, impression, negotiation, seduction, and, it must be acknowledged, exclusion.

Academic conferences are where such a person is totally, wholeheartedly, unabashedly in their element.

And in a city where the attractions are many and delightful, where there are restaurants to recommend, bars to which to slip away, coffeehouses in which to work, neighborhoods to “know,” parks to promenade, hotels – it should go without saying – other than the conference site at which to stay, museums with special exhibitions to take in, regionally-reputable houses in which to see a play, etc. etc., in a city where all the mad whirl of urban glitter is on display and all the bells and whistles of the midway cons are especially seductive, in such a city it is easy, so deliciously easy, to wade right in and start to trade at the Fair.  It is tempting to play the games, drop the names, let oneself believe that buying and selling in the academic market is fun, wickedly fun, with something real, worthwhile, even perhaps valuable, at stake.

This is not so easy to do, however, in Atlanta.

In Atlanta the attractions are few, and not so dear.

This is something that becomes clear not so much when one realizes that the best restaurant options – both of them – are (a) only reachable by cab, or worse (b) actually in the conference hotel.  Nor when one realizes the same is true of any decent bar – of which there are, again, perhaps two or three at most.  Nor when it dawns, horrifically, that the (one) museum is a piece of shit, the theatre not worth the price of admission, and the coffee execrable.  Even the lack of “local knowledge” of where to go, what to eat – either on one’s own part, or on the part of others – only fits into the puzzle later, as a very roundabout indicator that no neighborhood in the city is worth getting to know, at all.

No.  In fact, the underlying destitution of amusements in Atlanta only becomes clear – as most truly heretical things in life do – not in isolation, but rather through hushed social agreement.

It becomes clear late at night, after the party is over, walking home on deserted downtown streets past the places where the sidewalks end, when the only other person you know with any real connection at all to the South, lets slip that Atlanta fucking sucks.  That it may be the best city in the Old Confederacy, that it may be the only big city in the only state really and truly transformed by the civil rights movement, and so it may even therefore have a strongest black business class of any place in America, but it is still and yet a racist little jumped-up railroad junction.

It becomes clear after the second glass of wine with the admission that there may be (one or even two) bars with distressed brick walls and “gourmet fries” and decent $11 per glass pinot grigio (or PBR  on tap) but that still, the only thing worth remembering about Atlanta is the boy (26, and yet a boy for all that) one picked up the last time the conference was here, seven years ago.

It becomes clear after the third glass of wine with the statement made sometime later, on the ride home from the distressed-brick bar in the middle of what used to be the main street of Atlanta’s black business core but is now a burned-out wasteland, that the only reason why the association is even in Atlanta this year is because it didn’t fill its quota of hotel rooms seven years ago, and it was either this or pay a fine to the chain with which we have an iron-clad decades-long agreement.  But that since we filled our quota, we never have to come back to Atlanta again, and thank Christ for that (this from a Jew, natch).

And finally, it becomes clear with the realization an hour later as the buzz wears off, circling the block looking for parking because the nice man at valet discreetly suggested that one could save up to $30 by doing so, that the three ladies and their male friend standing on the corner at 11:30 on a Monday night one block off of West Peachtree Street in Midtown are peddling their wares just like you and me and everybody else at this fucking Fair.

And it is at precisely that moment that one realizes that the price of being a mean girl is never, ever worth it.

So.

Here’s to marginality.  To being close enough to the edge of the merry-go-round that one can finally feel how creaky the whole structure really is.  To scratching at the dross underneath the glister, seeing the pockmarks through the pancake, hearing the bitter sound of desperation behind the hard wall of irony.  Here’s to finding out how to laugh when the coins you brought to the Fair are refused at the change-booth.  Here’s to walking away before midnight before your rented Kia turns into a pumpkin.

And, of course, as always, here’s to Joan, who said it first, and best.

But here’s also to hoping that I can remember this moment next year, when the Fair goes to Chicago.

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It is an accepted fact that academic status depends upon the exchange of published research findings.  Which is a complicated way of saying that people think you’re a big deal when (and where) you get an article published in a peer-reviewed journal.  It is also why so much of academic life revolves around conferences.  Conferences, see, are basically great big status-bazaars: you submit a paper, which is then doled out among a hierarchy of panels and sessions (invited, regular, special, section, roundtable, poster, etc.), whose function consists entirely of structuring a space in which people accept, comment on, and discuss the “value” of the paper.

It is the acceptance (more on which later) of a paper, and the resulting comments which go with the acceptance of a paper, which create market-value (as opposed to “research” value, whatever that is).  Thus the importance of citation rankings, and book reviews.  In all of this, the person(s) who “owns” the paper accrues merit: the more prestigious the panel (invited vs. roundtable, say), the more laudatory the book review, the higher the circulation of the journal in which a paper is accepted for publication, the more times it is cited in later papers, etc., the more value “in the bank” the author accumulates.  This is in turn exchangeable in other sectors of the academic market for things like jobs, fellowships, editorships, positions on committees, whatever.*  It is even, in some cases, exchangeable for cold hard cash, as happens when people’s work gets picked up by the trade press (e.g., Barbara Ehrenreich, Malcolm Gladwell, Richard Florida, etc.).

This has all kinds of implications and nuances discussed by people who have made their career out of circulating and publishing papers making precisely this point.** There is, for instance, the sometimes guiltily-acknowledged fact that, like most markets, the academic status system is rigged in various ways: there are rent-seeking gigs, vertical monopolies, protected sub-markets, corrupt gatekeepers, etc. etc. There is also the less-often – which is to say, almost-never – acknowledged fact that most of the coin in the academic market is pretty debased stuff, with very little exchange-value elsewhere.  Which is a fancy way of saying that a lot of what’s presented at conferences (and, for that matter, published in peer-reviewed journals) is not just thin, it’s basically dross.  Wooden nickels, if you will.  Or even plain horseshit, in some cases.  And yet people accept it, thus granting it value, circulating it, keeping the whole status-economy running at a fine tick.

That’s not really what I want to talk about, though, in part because making such observations is usually what whiners do when denied the opportunity to extract rent, benefit from a bounded market, be let through the gate that bars the entry of others, whatever.

Though I will say this: this insight, I think, explains why so much of what goes on in conferences is so obviously kabuki theatre: many panels are ill-attended – even the high-status ones like invited and regular sessions – because the audience is the least important part of the system of value-creation.  As pointed out by a colleague of mine, no-one goes to a conference to actually go to the sessions – I believe the words she used were “was I ever so young that I came to these things actually intending to take in a panel?” – precisely because doing so means that, like Holly Golightly, we are simply gawkers at the shop-windows of other people’s gewgawgery.  The “value” of the papers, after all, was determined long before the actual presentation is made.  It was determined, in fact, the moment it was doled out within the whole semi-corrupt system of program committee chair-gatekeepers.  There could be nobody in the audience, and the papers would still have value, because they were accepted, and commented upon.  And it’s that moment – which is usually hidden behind a great big curtain called the “electronic submission system” –that’s really what I want to talk about.  The micro-sociology of the market, if you will: the key act, the exchange moment, when value is created (or conversely, credit is denied).

It happens something like this:

Professor Sensible Smarty-Pants: RBL!  There you are!  I was hoping to run into you.
Me: Oh, hey SSP – great to see you!  So you’re back – I wasn’t sure if I’d see you here.  How are you?
SSP: Great, great.  Have you met Nonentity #1 or Nonentity #2?
Me: No, no I haven’t – it’s a pleasure.  What was your name again?
N-E1: I’m Nonentity #1.  I’m finishing my dissertation at Tier-1 Public Institution B.
Me: Very cool.  And you?
N-E2: I’m Nonentity #2.  I’m working with Professor SSP on their new project; we’re presenting tomorrow at an invited session.  I’m sorry…where are you at?
Me: Oh, this? (indicating my badge) I totally should have spelled it out.  I’m an adjunct at Second-Tier Public Institution S.  So really I should just have put down the Emily Dickinson lines about “I’m nobody, who are you?”  But also I’m flying under a second set of colors: I also work full-time at A Large Government Bureaucracy.
N-E2: [momentarily put off, quickly regaining his/her composure:] Prof. SSP, what time should we have breakfast to prepare for our session?
Prof. SSP: (turning to me) Are you going to the Protected Network Party?
Me: I was headed there just now – it’s upstairs, yes?
Prof. SSP: (dismissing the two Nonentities)  Yup.  I will see you both tomorrow at 7:30 at Le Cerf D’Etoile  for breakfast, yes?
N-E1: (taking the hint): Of course.  See you then.  Come along, Non-Entity #2.  It’s just the pair of us, it looks like.
Me: [winking at NE-1 before they/it turn away:] Don’t tell!  They’ll advertise, you know?
Prof. SSP: What was that all about?
Me: Hmmm?  Oh, nothing.  You clearly have great students.   So: you know my report is out, yes?
Prof. SSP: Which report is that?
Me: The one I jokingly refer to as my second dissertation, for A Large Government Bureaucracy.  The one that includes the mail survey with an Absurdly Large Number of Respondents, the qualitative interviews because I Am A Mixed-Methods Badass, the Almost Absurdly Complicated Statistical Procedure Which I Had to Teach Myself…
Prof. SSP: I had no idea!  Wow, sounds great!
Me: Would you like a copy?
Prof. SSP: [laughing, and not even pausing, curtly:]  No.

Or, maybe it happens something like this:

Professor Ruby: RBL!  Wasn’t that a great Protected Network Party?
Me: Yes – it was awesome seeing everyone.
PR: [turning to a colleague] You know RBL, don’t you?  He was a couple years ahead of me at Protected Network U.
Recent NPR Interviewee: Of course, I do.  We’re on a committee together.  [turning to me].  I hope it’s okay to use your blurb for that award; it’s so beautifully written.  I was thinking I’d start out with something like “in the words of RBL,” but I was worried that they might wonder why they gave the award to The Coolest Dyke In the World and not to you.
Me: [befuddled at this elaborate compliment] Oh, please don’t worry about me – the emphasis should be on TCDITW – it is, after all, an award for her.  But I’m glad you liked what I wrote – it was a great book, after all!
RNPRI: Of course.  You were the only one who got their reviews in on time, by the way.
Me: No problem.  As I tell my students, 90% of life is showing up, and getting your shit in on deadline.
RNPRI: So true, so true.  Well, I shall see you at the award reception, yes?  Oh, what year did you start at PNU?
Me: 199X
RNPRI: Ah, that’s when I defended, so we didn’t really overlap.  But I’ve heard your name since then, of course.
Me: Why, thank you.  Will you be on the book award committee again this year?
RNPRI: No, no.  I’m taking a break this time around, I think.
Me: [turning to PR].  Oh, you remember that report we talked about last night?  Would you like a copy?
PR: Sure!  It sounds really impressive!
Me: [pulling it out] Here ya go.
PR: Oh.  Oh wow.  [taking it briefly.  Reconsidering:].  I can’t accept this.
Me: I’m sorry?
PR:  I don’t mean to insult you, I mean…I really don’t mean to sound like that, but…no.  [handing it back].  It looks great, though.

Or maybe it happens something like this:

Me: Julia!  I was hoping to run into you.  I have a surprise for you…
Professor Julia: Is it your report?  [a twinkle in her eye and smile on her face]
Me: [pulling out the report]  Yes.  [handing it over]
PJ: Oh, thank you!  This is awesome.  I can’t wait to share it with my students.
Me: Please do.  You have my e-mail, yes?  If they have questions about working for a public agency, please have them contact me.
PJ: Absolutely!  Thank you.  This is really great.  [motioning to her colleague]  Have you met my colleague?
Me: No, it’s a pleasure.  You’re at Standing U. as well?
PJ’s Colleague: Yes, just finishing my dissertation.
Julia: RBL works for A Large Government Agency.  He’s written this amazing report, with qualitative interviews, and Some Really Crazy Statistics, and a Whopping Big Mail Survey – this is what I’ve been trying to tell my students about Sociology In the Real World!

Or maybe it happens something like this:

Me: Neuberg!  I’m so glad to run into you.  So I have a question for you.
Professor Neuberg: Sure.  What’s up?
Me: Are you interested in a copy of my report?
PN: Uh, you gave me one already.  I even read it.
Me: Good.  That was a test, you know.  Which you passed.
PN: What, to see if I’d remember that you gave me a copy?  Or that I’d actually read it?
Me: No, neither actually.  More to see if you’d accept a copy at all.  Some people don’t.  By the way, did I ever tell you I assigned your book my last year at Escalades and Boob Jobs U.?
PN: No, you didn’t.  Thank you.
Me: No, thank you, for reading my report.   And for passing the test.

I do not have a clear idea why some individuals are willing to grant me credit in the academic market, and others are not.  It is…a not inconsequential matter.  All of these people were invited to my wedding, for instance – a different, but no less weighty moment of ritual gift-exchange, with all its attendant Maussian implications.  All of us have recently exchanged other sorts of academic value-objects (committee appointments, introductions to colleagues, appropriate levels of attention to spousal achievements, etc.) – and yet still some of them clearly, and quite sharply, refused to accept my paper.  There are probably many perfectly plausible reasons why they might do so, beginning with the lack of room in their luggage on the way home for a two-volume work on a subject somewhat distant from their own core academic interest.  But, as I have faithfully tried to reproduce in the above dialogue, they offered no fig leaf for their refusal to create exchange-value for my research, and I asked for none.  Because, in point of fact, none was really necessary: the point-blank denial of credit is its own bald statement, understood by anyone and everyone in academia.

Or to put it more simply: people at conferences think that having a badge from an obscure institution means you’re a nobody.  This is not really the case, though it may be a proxy for the real sign of being a nobody, which occurs when people refuse to read your work.

The real sign of being a somebody, in case you were wondering, occurs when a manuscript you co-authored earns a notice in A Journal of Somesuch, and a different manuscript you co-authored is accepted for publication in A SomethingOrOther Review.  Which I wouldn’t know anything about.  Not one blessed thing.

*It should thus be clear, Stanley Fish’s recent column notwithstanding, why plagiarism is such a crime in academia.  It’s not really that you’re stealing someone’s “idea” (although that’s part of it), it’s that you’re stealing the credit (literally) associated with the idea.

**This is what is sometimes called “sociology of knowledge,” or even “sociology of professions.” We see a lot of “meta”-this and “meta”-that in my discipline, a once-rare type of note that is sadly now being minted into near-worthlessness.  This is not so much the tragedy of the commons as it is the vulgarity of commodification.

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So, by now I have lost thirty pounds.  A nice round 15% of what I used to weigh.  This elicits various kinds of comments:

a.) From the 20-something young Filipina with a GED who works behind the counter at the cafeteria of a Large Government Agency: “what do you mean you don’t want the burrito?  You too skinny!  You not need lose any more weight!”

b.) From a co-worker, a 40-something South American woman with an MA from a middlesy public institution who lives in the suburbs: “have you lost weight?  I thought so!  What’s your secret?”

c.) From the painfully chic 30-something white lesbian professor who studies “embodiment” and who lives in a loft on the near West Side of Chicago: “there’s something different about you since the last conference — are you wearing product?”

Proving, yet again, that people who make their living with words are usually the ones most constrained by social convention when trying to say what they really mean.

*Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality.

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So.

When I was hired on to my current position, I was given an assignment.  Specifically, I was told to produce two documents, analyzing the results of a large-n quasi-experimental project.  This project was designed and, in its initial stages, brought to fruition by a certain someone — call him “Fuhtawg,” for no particular reason — who was shown the door right around the time things were going into production.  At that time Fuhtawg was told, in no uncertain terms, to not let the door hit him in the ass on his way out.  This was around the time that he asked a third someone, who shall remain entirely nameless, whether or not he (Fuhtawg) could watch while the third man’s wife breatfed her child. 

I am given to understand that the involuntarily retirement of Fuhtawg had nothing to do with this rather unorthodox proposition.

There was also, it might be added, a fourth someone — call him Senior Valle de Hierba, again for no particular reason — who was asked to take responsibility in the period between Fuhtawg’s depature and this author’s arrival on the scene.  Senior Valle de Hierba did not last long, and now works for another agency in a position with equivalent pay but far less demanding requirements.  The last time I saw Senior Valle de Hierba, he was shitfaced and gawking at a go-go boy at Faces, his petite asian girlfriend pleading with him to go to a different bar where they could “talk.” 

Anywho.

I have recently submitted for publication the first of the two documents for whose creation I was given responsibility upon joining state service.

This document is bigger and, in many respects, more sophisticated than my dissertation.

It pains me somewhat to admit that, by the way.

But that’s not what I wanted to talk about. 

What I wanted to talk about is this: when one submits a dissertation, even at a fancy East Coast school like the one I attended, one knows that at best, it will be read by an even dozen people. 

When one submits a report for publication under the aegis of “a large government bureaucracy,” it is submitted, as a matter of policy, to every depository library in the country.  In addition, a letter of interest is sent to a mailing list — with somewhere north of 500 names — of persons well placed in every government bureaucracy and major (public) university in the Anglophone world.

Public service has its advantages, I must say.

But no, I have absolutely no idea how or why I ended up as the recipient of gossip that included such juicy tidpits as breastfeeding and go-go boys.  I think it may have something to do with being nice and keeping my mouth shut (well…except for blogging, that is).

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And sometimes you hit the number.

This time?  Sessions on cage-fighting and vaginoplasty.

Plus an organizer who was only barely on his meds: a 20-minute erzatz- Tourette’s ramble that included references to Judaism, Aztlan, Wallerstein, and Foucault.

Dude.  I love my discipline.

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So I volunteered to be on a committee.  Basically for the purposes of maintaining my reputation and credentials, mind you.  Certainly not out of any high-minded ethic of “giving back to my profession” or some other such horseshite.

And for this what is my reward?  To be saddled with reading not one, but two Loic Wacquant books. 

Ay madre de dios.

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You volunteer for an awards committee, and then it turns out that you know personally at least two of the nominees.  This may require recusal on my part.

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Twice.

Because even though I’m not a professor, I can still pull the absent-minded professor trick.

Yes, that’s right.  I mis-read the program for a conference and made my ticket for the wrong weekend.  And since making a new ticket was only an at-this-point trifling amount different from changing the original ticket, I will now the have the pleasure of seeing my old haunts two weekends in a row.

The arms of my father’s house are open Hilton-wide, etc.

Though as to that, I think I’ll be staying at a Kimpton.  I hear they have a fierce happy hour.  At which I will only indulge in white wine and/or tequila.

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“It is very evident what mean and sneaking lives many of you live, for my sight has been whetted by experience; always on the limits, trying to get into business and trying to get out of debt, a very ancient slough, called by the Latins aes alienum, another’s brass, for some of their coins were made of brass; still living, and dying, and buried by this other’s brass; always promising to pay, promising to pay, tomorrow, and dying today, insolvent…”

It is bizarrely cheering in its own way, to think that perhaps I ought to thank the fucker for having taking my credit cards.

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