There are several things that symbolize “the good life” for me. One of them is a clock that projects the time onto the ceiling in huge red numbers:

(I took the photo from my bed last night).

Many people would freak out if they had the time hovering above their faces in red all night long. I, however, achieve bliss when I see it. The ceiling just doesn’t look as good when there are no red figures on it:

The funny thing is that my sister has the same clock and she feels exactly the same about it. There must be a psychoanalytic explanation for this obsession with seeing the time hover above one’s bed but I’m too lazy to look for it.

OK, so I’ve now had time to look at the MLA Job List on detail and here are the results. I only looked at tenure-track positions and didn’t count double appointments like “French and Spanish.” There is such a plethora of positions that nobody really needs these weird suckers. I skipped the joint positions between foreign languages and Women’s Studies or other fields. I also didn’t count the jobs in Canada because there are so many I got tired.

So here are the TT positions offered. I might have missed a few because there are so many but I only chose the ones that specifically offered tenure-track positions and didn’t leave any room for doubt.

Spanish leads, of course, with 160 job offerings.

French comes second with a whopping 105 TT jobs.

German is doing well with 33 positions and Russian follows with 32 tenure-track openings.

Italian is the smallest field with 19.

I don’t know what everybody is whining about with such a robust number of positions.

Just one small thing, though. This is the MLA job list published in the Fall of 1989. I chose it completely at random not knowing what the results would be. And now I kind of wish I kept not knowing.

If anybody wants to see the numbers for 2014, please go here.

P.S. The numbers for 2014:

German – 9
Russian – 9
Italian – 3
French – 15
Spanish – 57
Chinese – 5
Arabic – 5