I don’t even understand why we need to have a discussion about whether job interviews at the MLA make sense. The moment Skype was invented, the definitive answer to this question was given.

The MLA interviews inconvenience and disturb the lives of everybody except maybe a couple of exceptionally rich, lazy and completely lonely folks. Nobody else wants to sacrifice the last week before the beginning of a new semester to being stuck in a hotel room (even a really fantastic and free one) doing something completely useless. Several people who interviewed candidates at the MLA complained to me that there were conference talks they really wanted to attend but couldn’t do so because they had interviews scheduled back-to-back all day long. When scholars attend a scholarly conference and don’t get to engage in any scholarship, something has gone seriously wrong.

I have interviewed people through Skype as part of a search committee and at no point did I think, “Gosh, I so wish I were sitting in an enormous, loud ballroom somewhere in LA or Cincinnati surrounded by 100 tables with hundreds of interviewers and a crowd of terrified interviewees. I totally hate it that after this Skype interview is over I will go home to spend time with my husband, work on my new article, and sleep in my own bed.”

Notice that I have only addressed the suffering of the interviewers here without even touching on the much more major suffering of the interviewees.

Has anybody heard a single argument anywhere as to why interviewing cannot be conducted through Skype?

People, I know you mean well and I love you for trying to promote my wisdom among the masses. However, there is a group of people out there in the blogging world who kind of scare me. I once participated on one of their blogs, got accused of being a man, and was banished with undeserved derision. Since then, I never went back. Still, years later, people would lash out at me at completely unrelated blogs in extreme rage over that insignificant little discussion at a blog I only visited once in my life.

Another one of them (this blogger will not be named because I really, really don’t want to bring her or them here) blogs under a double name (or maybe there are two of them) and is a very angry, really disturbed individual who sometimes comes to this blog with absolutely no provocation on my part to leave scary, unhinged comments that terrify me. I’m seriously fearful of this person and really hope she (or they?) will eventually forget about my existence. I will never understand what can possess a person to keep reading a blog that enrages her to this extent. This kind of self-torture is incomprehensible to me.

These people hang out together at their blogs where I never go, and I avoid all of them like the plague. If I participate in a comment thread and see one of them there, I leave immediately and never come back. They scare me not because they write angrily or passionately (I’m obviously in no position to criticize anybody’s anger) but because I don’t understand what provokes it. In order to disagree, you need to speak the same language and share a frame of reference. With these people, though, I can never guess what provokes them and why.

I am not suggesting, of course, that people are only entitled to the kind of  rage that I can understand. Far be it from me to dictate to anybody what should or should not make them angry. All I want is not to be part of a dialogue that confuses and scares me. If I and these bloggers exist in vastly different universes, then the best thing for us is not to intersect. Nobody here is better than anybody else. We are simply too different, that’s all.

This is why I’m asking everybody to do me a favor and not link to me or mention me in any way in the presence of these people and on their blogs. I most sincerely wish them the absolute best in all of their undertakings and encourage everybody to read their blogs and discuss things with them if that’s what they want to do. I just want never to be brought to their notice, if possible.

Finally, there appeared on Mad Men a character I like – the gay artist from Europe, Kurt Smith. It’s a good show but it really lacked at least one non-pathetic character with at least some self-respect.

I also like the comedian (the one of the Utz chips) but he is still pathetic. Not as much as other characters, but still.

Do you have a favorite character on that show?