My advice to job candidates is to dress to fit in with the best-dressed folks at the professional conference where they’ll be interviewed.  After all, you’ll be spending more time on average hanging out in the book exhibit and lobby and attending sessions than you will be spending in interviews, and you’ll want to look and feel reasonably comfortable all day long.  And fitting in is what you want to convince your potential future colleagues you can do.

At the American Historical Association conference, where many History departments conduct first-round interviews, stylish but simple dresses or stylish separates are the way to go:  women can safely skip the suit in favor of nice skirts or slacks with a professional blouse or sweater (or other combo on top.  Scarves are a nice touch and may serve to keep you warm in the usually drafty interview “pit.”)  While men may want to go the suit route out of habit, in my view the best dressed men at most history conferences are wearing good quality shirts and jackets, but not suits.  (And if you’re really stylish and think you can pull it off, you can even ditch the tie, but hang out near the job register and get a handle on what other guys are doing.  Keep a tie in your briefcase just in case.  You might feel a bit naked if you walk into an interview and all of your male interviewers are wearing ties.  I personally love the no-tie look, but you really must have a top-shelf shirt.  And keep in mind that I’m a lot more fashion-forward than most historians.)

Fashion don’ts:  Above all, inappropriate footwear.  Heels that are too high will make your feet hurt and may lead you to trip and/or fall, which is something that works against one’s dignity and competence.  Open-toed shoes are usually out of place in wintery locations.  Cowboy boots are risky outside the West–be sure it’s a good look on you before you leave home.

Be sure to read the comments on Bessette’s article to get a sense of the variety of people’s opinions on this point.  I’d like to second the commenter who reminds job candidates to look tidy and to clean their glasses before an interview.  Dirty, smudgy glasses are a real turnoff–they do not make me want to shake your hand.  (And of course, these rules go for interviewERs as much as interviewEEs!

What do the rest of you think?  (Am I too latitudinarian on the tie issue?  Maybe some men should weigh in on this for the benefit of interviewees, to be sure I haven’t led them astray.)

On Friday, September 28th, participants will gather at the A.D. White House for a series of sessions inspired by distinct aspects of Professor Norton’s scholarship and teaching. That evening, attendees will continue the celebration at a catered reception at the Johnson Art Museum. The conference will conclude with a morning roundtable and brunch on Saturday, September 29th. If you are interested in contributing a brief paper to one of the sessions, please email Molly at mwarsh@tamu.edu or Susanah at ssromney AT gmail DOT com.

The conference is being organized by two of Professor Norton’s former students (and now historians), Susanah Shaw Romney, PhD ’00, and Molly Warsh, BA’99. The event has received generous support from Cornell’s History Department; Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; Society for the Humanities; and numerous other on-campus and off-campus entities.

You can go to the conference blog and sign up for updates by entering your e-mail address.  I hope that Mary Beth will get a good audience for this event–she has always been among the most enthusiastic of women’s historians, and a very generous mentor and colleague to junior scholars like me.  I remember that she answered a snailmail letter I had written her as a newly dissertating graduate student, back in the early 1990s when we wrote letters on paper and sent them through the U.S. Postal Service.  She didn’t have anything to gain from helping me out–but that’s the kind of thing she has done for the community of early American women’s historians.  I also remember running into her at the Maine Historical Society in the late 1990s when we were both researching the Northern New England frontier, and being struck by her enthusiasm for archival research (an enthusiasm I share, of course!) 

Spread the word!  Thanks to Susanah and Molly for organizing this.  It should be quite the party.

*UDATE, 1:17 MDT:  MBN e-mailed me to report that “Rumors of my retirement are greatly exaggerated! I have made no decision about when to retire.”  But, I think it’s a fine idea to celebrate her career now in any case.

One colleague mentioned that ze is shocked to see this behavior not just among eminent senior scholars–who were traditionally (if still resentfully) permitted more leeway than junior and/or more obscure scholars, but among very junior scholars and even among graduate student presenters.  Ze wonders, “Is anyone training graduate students in professional conference etiquette any more?”  But, to be clear:  the erosion of etiquette is not something my friends and colleagues or I are blaming on graduate students–this is an observation about the overall decline in conference etiquette by people at all levels of the historical profession.

I’ve always thought that one needed to respect deadlines (or at least communicate to your fellow panelists if you must miss a deadline) and time restraints in deference to one’s audience.  (NOTE:  I’m not claiming a perfect record here myself.  But, I don’t think I’ve ever been egregiously late!  At least I’ve never been publicly scolded by the commenter at the conference with the totally reasonable remark that “Professor Historiann’s paper didn’t get to me until very late, so I don’t have prepared remarks on her paper.”  Commenters have the right to refuse commenting on very late papers.)  If an audience has assembled to hear what I and some other scholars have to say, we owe it to them 1) to complete our remarks in a timely fashion, and 2) to permit them plenty of time, after sitting politely for an hour and a half, to add their thoughts or ask us questions.  Indeed–even when I’m on a conference panel or roundtable, it’s the audience discussion that is always the most interesting and most dynamic part of the session.  In short, you’ve got to give people a reward for showing up to hear your talk, and you just might learn something.  Right?

(Do any of these offenders ever worry about getting a reputation as a crashing bore?  Or are they so socially inept that this isn’t even on their radar as a legitimate concern?  This is academia after all, full of “nutty professors” who are almost by definition socially inept.)

What do you all think?  Is this something you’ve observed over the past few years?  If you too think there’s been an erosion in conference etiquette, what do you think is the cause?  If you’re not a historian, tell us if this is something you’ve seen in your field, too.  If you are a graduate student who’s been encouraged to participate in professional conferences, do your advisors talk to you about professional expectations for your performance?  Tell me!

[S]ome history departments like mine have tried Skype to do initial screening interviews, and I think that it is a much more humane and effective method of seeing who is best for the job. At first, I thought that using Skype was useful because it is free, but that we should return to the AHA when the economy improves. But now I feel that interviewing via Skype is a better way to find the best job candidates.

Why? Because job-seekers are not required to travel across the country and the world to pay for the opportunity to be interviewed, and they have more control over the presentation of self. Instead of all the candidates appearing relatively the same in a sterile environment, the job candidates interview in their own offices or even kitchens, taking the opportunity to position themselves to best advantage.

I’m with her entirely–using Skype saves everyone’s time, money, and carbon emissions to boot.  And I think the arguments about the greater economic justice for using Skype make it an absolute slam-dunk.  I’ve been on search committees that wanted to inteview people at the American Historical Association’s annual convention, but because of a candidate’s recent surgery, recent or impending childbirth, or perhaps because of plain ol’ poverty, some prospects were unable to meet with us there.

But with respect to Lubamersky’s last point about the charm of seeing people in their home or work environments–I’m a little whingy about considering that at all when considering someone for a job:

It was striking how beautifully some of the candidates communicated with us, filling the screen with their laughter and wit, and showing real enthusiasm and capacity to bridge the digital space between us. I think that students today prefer to communicate via their electronic devices rather than in person, so these candidates showed that they were already doing that in a big way. Some of the candidates staged their interview so appealingly — with artfully placed key titles in the background — that their image gave the impression that it was the book jacket photograph on their first published book. Other candidates were interviewing between classes, standing before 12-foot-high European casement windows of their university offices while gray northern light streamed through, projecting their competence and professional experience. And one candidate who was living in an 18th-century farmhouse delightfully scanned the camera 360 degrees so that we could enjoy a view of the rustic space in which she was living.

I think her major point here is that more of a candidate’s personality can shine through, and that Skype makes interviewing candidates a more varied and enjoyable experience for the search committee.  But, really:  who cares about the experience of the search committee?  As a once and future member of faculty search committees, I sure don’t, and I would work hard to avoid making judgments about candidates who needed to go to a coffee shop or sit in a sterile, cinder-block office (much like my own!) instead of staging their interviews with carefully-selected books arrayed in the background, or gothic revival windows lighting their performance.  What about the candidate who just gave birth and who decides to hike on down to her local cafe to focus on her interview and make sure it won’t be interrupted by a crying baby?  What about the Road Scholar adjuncting at two institutions who is squeezing in his interview in-between classes and has to borrow a proper office for an uninterrupted 45 minutes?  Here’s where the invisibility of good, old-fashioned phone interviews seem to have an advantage over the video link or Skype interview:  it makes it harder to discriminate by the appearance of the candidate and/or by the appearance of hir interview setting.

The search committee’s number-one priority is making a good hire, and making a good hire means making job candidates feel as comfortable as possible and treating them generously and thoughtfully through the whole process.  The advantages of the Skype interview for the majority of job candidates are clear and obvious, and democratizing access to the screening interviews seems like a no-brainer to me. 

But then, I’ve never conducted an interview by Skype in my life since we haven’t hired anyone for tenure-track positions for four years!  Please share your thoughts and experiences with video link and/or Skype interviews, from both the perspective of the job candidates and from the perspective of the hiring departments.  Here’s a question I have:  how would this change the nature (not to say the attendance) of big conferences like the AHA and the MLA?  I think they might get smaller, and that this change might be much for the better in terms of amping up the intellectual life of the conference.

I’m back!  In light of Historiann’s absence from the Berks – and needless to say, she was missed by many – her faithful conference reporter Classy Claude is happy to offer readers a snapshot of one conference-goer’s experience. Obviously a conference is different for different people, depending on sessions attended and so forth, but I will recount some highlights. 

This Berks quite literally got off to start with a bang.  There was a crazy thunderous storm on Thursday afternoon (hail in some places!) as the first sessions were getting underway, as many attendees were taking advantage of tours through local historical sites, and as Classy Claude was doing a little work at the Sophia Smith Collection at nearby Smith College.  All of these opportunities had been coordinated with, or organized by, the conference planners.  Thus, one real highlight of the conference was the opportunity to take advantage of these nearby historic sites and local archives. 

The conference was located on the UMass-Amherst campus, primarily in the Campus Center, which itself houses a hotel (where many of us stayed, though rumor has it that rooms booked up quickly) and was connected via various passageways to the Student Union and a parking garage.  Because the weather was rainy on a couple days (Saturday also), this had the effect of making sessions not in the central complex more sparsely attended.  I found this to be so in a session I chaired and one I attended about young women and premarital pregnancy (which included Historiann’s blogging pal, Knitting Clio). 

The first night featured a reception on the top floor of the Campus Center, which offered a panoramic view of the campus itself.  Berks President Kathy Brown welcomed all attendees as we sipped our drinks (two complimentary with registration) and gave shout-outs to all former Berks presidents (a number of whom were present) and current officers, a number of whom are finishing out terms this year. Mary Maples Dunn also appeared in a streaming video loop on JumboTron talking about her experience with the Berks and women’s history.

Friday was all about the sessions, as attendees scattered across campus to sample the variety of panels on women’s history.  I did hear some grumblings from premodern historians that the conference was a little light on offerings relevant to those studying medieval history.  I know that conference organizers in the past (including Historiann herself) have gone out of their way to encourage panels on premodern history, so my question is this: are conferences like the Berks light on premodern offerings because historians start to think that they will be so and don’t apply?  Is this a self-fulfilling prophecy, especially if we know that organizers are trying to encourage these historians’ participation? Or does something more need to happen in order to ensure it?  Discuss amongst yourselves.  (Ed. note:  See also Another Damned Medievalist’s posts on this question–her answer is that more premodern scholars need to get involved!)

Friday night featured a plenary on the sex of geopolitics (more on this below) and a wild performance of the Down and Dirty Show, a cabaret troupe from Minneapolis of drag kinging and burlesque and all kinds of gender-bending fun! I also was fortunate enough to swing an invite to the post-performance party at Berks President Kathy Brown’s campus hotel suite. I even got to chat with Historiann blogging pal Tenured Radical, who was roused out of bed just to attend.  Lots of fun was had by all present, I can assure you, so much so that we got noise complaints.  There was drinking and chatting and carousing, and maybe some burlesque spanking of certain Berks conference officers who shall remain nameless.  Who says that feminist historians don’t know how to have fun?!?

I would now like to address the one real problem I experienced at the Berks this year, though one that almost all academics will recognize is not particular to the Berks: People do not know when to shut up.  When we are told that we have 10 minutes, or 15, or however many we are told by our session chairs, it is quite simply the height of arrogance to assume that we can talk for as long as we want.  Not one among us is going to be the first to fit 20 pages into 15 minutes; it’s not possible.  And editing one’s paper as one stands behind the lectern is not a strategy that can be endorsed by this reporter. This applies to roundtables as well as traditional sessions, to discussants and panelists.  It was the rare session I attended where there was anything close to ample time for discussion and where a majority of panelists did not exceed the allotted time.  The most obvious example of this was the plenary on geopolitics, where there was no time for a comment or discussion.  At all. I also attended a really fascinating roundtable on legal history that was expressly designed to be discussion-oriented and actually included but 10 minutes of Q&A!  (Ed. note:  Claude, ADM was way ahead of you on this.  Panel and roundtable Chairs–did you lose your watches?  Were you all MIA like me?)

For many, the highlight of the Berks, at least socially, is the famed dance.  And this one was super fun!  (see the picture above)  Featuring a DJ from the Down and Dirty Show, attendees danced it out to classics (“Runaround Sue!” “The Twist!”) and more recent musical fare in the Student Union Ballroom.  (It had grown cold by Saturday so both the BBQ – which didn’t seem to include any food that had ever seen a barbecue – and the dance were moved indoors.  A big tent sat forlornly unused on the lawn.)  The dance did not actually wind down till 1:15, I am told; Classy Claude and his entourage departed around 12:30; he had a session to attend in the morning.

Sunday morning was devoted to seminars and workshops, an innovation that was carried over from the last Berks, though somewhat differently, it seems to me.  Last time the seminar themes and chairs were announced in advance and hopefuls applied directly to those chairs in order to be admitted.  This time many of the sessions seemed to have been composed by the program committee itself (sometimes by converting regular panel applications into Sunday seminars) and were sometimes a little disjointed.  Some participants also did not upload their papers to the conference website beforehand, which meant that audience members couldn’t read them.  In short, the purpose remained the same: coerce conference attendees to stay for Sunday morning.  But the method was perhaps less effective: not the same emphasis on applying to do a workshop with a big-name figure in the field and gaining her expertise.   This was certainly my experience, and that of two others who participated in two different seminars, but may not have been universal.  Other readers’ thoughts?

I’m going to sign off here, because I’ve already gone on for far too long.  All in all, it was a great time in a truly lovely setting.  The conference organizers clearly worked hard to make it that way, and they succeeded admirably.  I very much look forward not just to the next Berks (I heard rumors of Toronto in 2014) but to many beyond that, with Historiann around to participate!

Thanks so much for your faithful reporting, Claude.  I’m sorry I missed seeing you and catching up at the Berks–have a terrific summer and we’ll talk soon! 

For those of you who will be joining us at the Berks:  watch for the cowgirl boots, and say “hi” if you feel like it!  (If I’ve pi$$ed you off, you can just ignore me.)  Don’t forget about our meetup tomorrow afternoon after the last sessions ends, 5:30-6:30 at the Grad Lounge of the Lincoln Campus Center.  Apparently, TR will also be kicking it in cowgirl boots, but hers are a more city-appropriate black.  She went to grad school and lived in NYC for a spell.  My boots are the color of the high plains dust I rode in with.

I once gave a conferece paper titled “Fields of Screams,” after an Itchy and Scratchy cartoon on an old episode of The Simpsons.  It was about borderlands warfare and masculinity, and although I discarded the specific argument in that paper it helped me work out some ideas about space and gender.  Recently, I’ve been having fun shocking people with Judith Bennett’s “lesbian-like” interpretive frame for understanding eighteenth-century Ursulines.  I’m not sure where this idea is going, but it’s fascinating to see some people react so strongly and so negatively to the use of the word “lesbian” to talk about the eighteenth century!  (Bennett’s lesbian-like women is in fact a very nuanced concept.  It’s not so much about a particular sexuality but more a critique of the heterocentricity of women’s history, and an argument about creating space for imagining women-centered women’s communities in the distant past.  Still, many people can’t get beyond their very fixed notions of what “lesbian” means.)

One of the things that I think was so desctructive of the controvery surrouding Michael Bellesiles’s book Arming America a decade ago is that it fed the popular notion that professional historians dig up allegedly objective facts and simply report them.  We do that–but anyone who has worked in an archive and thought for about 4 seconds about hir sources knows that there’s no such thing as an “objective fact.”  And furthermore, the art of history is in the assembly and interpretation of problematic individual facts.  I think it’s perfectly fine for historians to be wrong, and that it’s not evidence of professional misconduct to make an argument that the consensus of our peers judges incorrect. 

I like Bennett’s idea of experimenting with interpretations of history in “playful, wise, and careful ways.”  Why shouldn’t we?  What do the rest of you think?

Howdy, folks!  I made it to Austin, Texas last night for an intense conference here over the next two days, Centering Families in the Atlantic World co-sponsored by the Omohundro Institute and the Institute for Historical Studies here at the University of Texas.  And then Thursday afternoon, I’ll be talking about this here blog at the Symposium on Gender, History, and Sexuality in a talk called “Cowgirl Up,” in which I’ll address some important eternal questions of the academic feminist blogosphere, such as 1) does blogging hold the promise of keeping academic more honest and true to its own professed values of meritocratic inclusiveness, and 2) is blogging a huge waste of time?  (I kind of think I’ll give a provisional yes to both questions–let me know what you think in the comments please, friends!)

The folks at the University of Texas made me feel welcome even before I arrived with extra lunch and dinner invitations to keep me entertained on Wednesday and Thursday before my talk, and the Omohundro Institute knows how to throw a party, so I’m looking forward to some interesting conversations.  (Some of you may already know that there’s a new and important research center here called the Historical I’ll check in tonight, but in the meantime, have a good Monday and play nice!

Also: I watched a bit of the Academy Awards last night in the hotel bar over dinner with friends. There were differences of opinion, but I think Halle Berry had the prettiest dress of any that I saw. We wondered: what was with all of the peachy/ivory/champagne/glittery dresses, especially on the overwhelming majority of light-skinned actors? Where was the color?

SFHS President Joelle Neulander and her Program Committee did a great job of showing the conferees the town and sponsoring institutions.  There was a fascinating (if depressing) roundtable up at the Citadel Friday afternoon on “The Present and Future of French History and the Humanities.”  The Citadel, with its boxy and generously crenellated architecture, was a fitting place for this conversation because we all feel besieged as a profession.  The panel members were affiliated with various institutions in the U.S. and England and featured both mid-career and nearly-retired scholars, and they all had interesting insights about what they’ve observed locally and over the past twenty to forty years in French studies.  Many of the older scholars reminded us that there never was an imagined Golden Age for the Humanities in the U.S., and that they’ve seen other crises come and go.  Other panelists and audience members were more alarmed.

The star witness on the panel was Brett Bowles, a French professor at SUNY Albany and therefore an eyewitness to the “deactivation” of his department along with the Italian, Russian, Greek and Roman Studies, and Theater majors.  He was understandably quite gimlet-eyed on the future of French studies and the humanities because as he reported, 20 full-time tenure-track and tenured scholars are facing the end of their employment at SUNY Albany in another 16 months.  Bowles urged everyone in the audience to be proactive and aware of what’s going on in their universities and to make alliances across disciplinary boundaries.  He encouraged larger humanities departments like English and History to stand up for the smaller majors because he warned that “this is where we’re all headed.  We’re headed to the end of tenure.” 

Some of the discussion amongst the audience after the panelists had their say was rather limited, and focused more on ideas about pitching our teaching more broadly or trying to make arguments that our courses teach valuable and marketable skills.  I don’t think the value of our teaching or the courses we offer in the humanities is at all in question, because we know that universities and departments are happy to hire adjuncts and casual labor to cover them when we resign or retire.  Clearly, universities need someone to teach these courses–it’s our roles as humanities researchers and generators of new knowledge that are under attack.  That’s what makes us different from K-12 teachers–those of us on the tenure-track are contractually and professionally required to conduct research and publish peer-reviewed articles, chapters, and books.  That’s what the wider public doesn’t understand or care about, and what universities don’t want to support.  They’re perfectly happy with our work as teachers–in fact, many members of the public don’t understand why we don’t do more teaching.  We need somehow to make the case that ongoing research in the humanities is worthy of public investment and private support both in its own right, and as something that continuously feeds and nourishes our teaching. 

Where do we get ideas for new courses, new books, new kinds of assignments?  The answer, 9 times out of 10, is either directly related to or an indirect byproduct of our research, and if universities fail to support their faculty as active researchers, the curriculum and the quality of teaching will suffer directly.  Moreover, universities and the general public have a broader responsibility to the culture of our nation to support humanities research across a variety of fields and disciplines:  think of the cost to our other cultural institutions like museums and the arts if university faculty were required just to teach, and never learned new languages, never went to archives to look at ancient or recently unclassified documents, or stopped providing expert advice on preserving old buildings and on city planning and development questions.  Would archives survive if there were no scholars to visit them?  What about libraries?  Would they survive without new scholarly books or journal articles?  Are we really prepared for scholarship to become the pursuit of dilettantes again, as it used to be, or do we think that access to a great education and productive faculty scholars is important to fulfilling the promise of our democracy?

Flash:  The Union still holds Fort Sumter.  Will America defend her great democratic institutions, or should we all just fold up the chairs and go home?

*       *       *       *      *       *      *       *      

If the French historians and the free airport wifi connection isn’t enough to get you down here for a visit, there’s a lot more to say about Charleston.  I’ve eaten extraordinarily well here–it turns out that the restaurant I ate at with my BFF ej on Friday night was written up in the New York Times recently as the hottest place to eat in Charleston with the dernier cri locavore chef-du-moment.  It’s a good thing I planned ahead and snagged a reservation in January, which is very uncharacteristic of me!  We almost blew it too, because we were at the plenary session and cocktail party that was up at the Citadel, a few miles northwest of downtown, and our cab never showed up.  It was like a screwball comedy:  we got to the restaurant with a combination of a tour bus ride and pedi-cab (a first for me), and the friendly folks at Husk held our table for us, and quickly served drinks to us in their adorable speakeasy next door when we arrived.  Try the Corpse Reviver #2 or the Monkey Gland–tell them Historiann sent you (but you can settle the bill your own selves.  That’s Colorado hospitality for you!)  For dinner, I had the butter roasted catfish, ej had the duck, and we shared the hummus and the BBQ duck sausage appetizers.  Yum!

Here’s a question:  how long has it been since you went to a restaurant–not even the fanciest restaurant in town–and saw almost every man in a jacket (and many with ties?  I have to think back to the last funeral I attended, I’m afraid, and count the corpse.)  Nice jackets and ties, too, and all of the men were freshly barbered and even looked like they might smell good.  All of Charleston dresses to impress–black and white, men and women.  This is a town with a lot of uniforms in it, too–we saw Citadel cadets everywhere in their boxy grey-with-navy trim uniforms, and actual Navy sailors on the waterfront.  Snappy!  I almost started humming “Anchors Aweigh.”

No posts! (How am I still upright?)

Howdy, friends!  I’m still (mostly) on holiday break here, but I thought you might enjoy some thoughts from bloggers more energetic than I am right now.  I hope to be back later this week–I just don’t seem to have any original thoughts to share at the moment.  So, herewith are my recommendations for your bloggy perusals:

• Suzie at Echidne offers a Swiftian satire after Julian Assange’s comment that Sweden is the “Saudi Arabia of feminism,” as in, ”Feminists run Sweden like wealthy sheikhs run Saudi Arabia.”  As if!  What a tool.  Once again, we see that so-called leftists are just as disgusting as right-wingers and just as opportunistic in their alternate deployment of feminist arguments and contempt for feminism and/or actual women.  (Even George W. Bush said we needed to invade Afghanistan because the Taliban were horrible patriarchal despots and we had to liberate women from their burkhas!  Remember that convenient feminist argument?  Bueller?  Bueller?  Anyone?)
• Tenured Radical is doing some quality pre-American Historical Association 125th Annual Meeting blogging these days, with a few posts for those of you fortunate enough to be interviewing for jobs this year.  (That is, fortunate enough either to be in a department that is hiring, or fortunate enough to have interviews lined up.)  “Tell Us About Your Dissertation:  And Other Commonly Fumbled Interview Questions” is a good primer for what to expect and how not to blow it.  I will just add my two cents:  first, assume that the people interviewing you have read your file but in the rush of interviewing have forgotten 90% of what you sent them.  They’ll be grateful to be reminded of a few key facts about your work and training if you can do it crisply and without fuss.  Secondly, pay particular attention to the comment by Comrade PhysioProf about how interviews are opportunities to present yourself as a colleague and peer to a wider professional network.  (He’s also posted a version of his comment on his blog here.)  Finally, it is a truth universally acknowledged by those of us forty and older that the ease of finding information on the web about hiring departments is apparently still a convenience of which most job candidates don’t avail themselves.  Do yourself a favor and get to know the department interviewing you and the individuals on the search committees.  You don’t need to read their books or kiss their a$$e$ by saying you’ve read their books–just know who’s who and who in the department teaches most closely to your field.  Ask an informed question or two.  Pretend like you’d like to be seen as a future colleague.
• Here’s a one-word nightmare of teevee-induced insanity:  “Bridalplasty.”  (Twisty explains it all.)  I thought it was annoying enough to have my Joyous Year of Affiancement 1997 mostly characterized by hearing dumba$$ questions about why my last name wasn’t changing, why I didn’t want an engagement ring or a big wedding, and why my job rather than his determined where we lived.  (And what were we going to call the children???  If they ever might exist.)  And the biggest irritation of all:  no one ever asks dudes these questions!  How lucky I was not to be badgered about which “procedures” I planned to endure in my unending quest for physical perfection!
• GayProf has a funny post about Christmas giving and receiving.  If you’re in the mood to give to GayProf, I suggest either bourbon, a vintage 1930s Tom and Jerry punchbowl, or bourbon.