Solving the Two-Body Problem

For years now, my spouse and I have had what academics call the "two-body problem": two careers at two universities in two places. It's a common problem for our professional generation, and we have an easier version of it than most. My spouse (the more accomplished blogger Flavia) works at a school about 250 miles away from mine. We maintain two homes and commute between them. We have been lucky that we are not farther apart, and that we can travel by car rather than plane. But like most of our generation, we have had no visible or easy solution for our problem. Professorships are very hard to come by, and job mobility after one's early career is almost nonexistent except for a handful of stars. We have always promised each other that we would  live together full-time some day, but we have never been able to promise when or how that day would come.

Now we know. As Flavia has announced recently, we have completed a busy and complicated season of job searches. The result is that she will be moving to my university in the fall of 2015 with a position befitting her accomplishments. This, as she points out, is mostly the result of outrageous luck: both of our schools unexpectedly listed a job in just the right sub-field this year. That not only meant that we could apply to each other's departments, but that each department understood that it might lose us to the other. We never planned for this, because we could not have planned for this.

The particular version of a happy ending we got is the one I least expected. It's not just that I viewed it as the most unlikely result; I have operated for years under the assumption that it was not possible. I thought my employer would never offer my spouse a job, and was absolutely certain that they would never offer one she could afford to take. I was wrong. But that wrongness was the basis of my career strategies for years; that is how little I planned this.

So how to solve the two-body problem? My advice is worthless, in normal academic-job-advice terms. I could not have made this happen, nor could Flavia. Most of the key events were entirely beyond our control. But that is true of every academic job search. You cannot make someone offer you a job. You always have to be lucky. All you can do is be ready when the lucky break comes.

One of Flavia's old friends once asked us, "So what is the strategy for you two?" and we had to say there was no strategy, because there was no obvious endgame. The only strategy was to keep doing our jobs as well as we could and to build our professional value as best we were able. But that is a strategy, too: the only strategy you can really follow. The last few months and weeks have been exceptionally busy and superficially eventful, but most of what Flavia and I did to make this happen, the things that were about our efforts instead of about luck, happened over the four or five years before those jobs were ever posted.

The real success here is Flavia's. The ultimate resolution of our problem was a job offer to her, and I will  enjoy the privilege of living and working with my spouse mostly because I am lucky enough to have a talented and ambitious spouse. 

The conventional wisdom is that it is easier to find a second job for a less accomplished partner. If one of us were clearly junior to the other in career terms, or did not have a serious research agenda, the usual thinking goes, it would be much easier for a department to find a starter gig or to create a non-tenure-track job. It's harder and more expensive to find a job for a professional peer. So, on paper, marrying an intellectual heavyweight like Flavia should have been a big mistake; she is nobody's trailing spouse. And nobody moves back down to an entry-level job the same week her book comes out.

But that "wrong move" turned out to be the right move for me. My colleagues and my institution saw a chance to hire someone who, because of the nature of the profession, would not otherwise be applying for this job at this stage of her career. (Every academic job search gets an abundance of applications from talented new PhDs, but since the market is poorly structured for mid-career job-seekers only a few places get many talented mid-career applicants.) This was not about credentials that Flavia scraped together after this job opening turned up. She didn't write that book over Thanksgiving weekend. This was about qualifications she has been steadily building for years, before she had any notion that this job opening would exist.

My ultimate role was to strengthen Flavia's negotiating hand. The decision to offer her a job was about her qualifications. The decision to make her an offer reflecting those qualifications was almost certainly about both the opportunity to hire her and the possibility of losing me. Hiring Flavia is a bargain at virtually any price, but passing up a bargain is easier than giving up something you already have. My school could have saved money by hiring one of those promising-but-inexperienced applicants for less money, but only at the risk of losing one of their established faculty members.

I am sure that my colleagues believed that I might leave; I have spent the last five years working under the assumption that I would eventually have to. And I have tried to be aboveboard about external job searches, telling my department chairs when I was applying and keeping them up to date about the progress of outside searches (including telling my chair promptly when I was eliminated). That included being transparent about my application to my spouse's school. 

I have also worked hard on publishing my research over the last five years, because it's a publishing record that is most likely to help you change jobs. My annual reports have made it clear that my supervisors consider me productive. So the idea that I might leave my job in order to be closer to my wife wasn't a new concept introduced in the midst of negotiations. I didn't actually say anything to my bosses during negotiations. My institution had already spent a few years thinking about the chances that I might leave, and the chances that I could.

But I also spent the last five years trying to be a good citizen of my department and university. This should also have been the wrong move, because I didn't expect to be able to stay, but it almost certainly turned out to be the right one. The conventional wisdom when you want to change jobs is that you should focus as much of your energy on research and publication as you can, and as little on service or committee work as you can get away with. I've written before about research as hard currency and service as local scrip. Publication is valuable to outside employers, while service is mostly valuable to the place you're serving. One keeps its value wherever you go, and the other can only be spent on-site. Amassing local scrip has no purpose if you're planning to leave. More importantly, I didn't believe that my institutional scrip could ever be put toward what I really wanted, because I didn't think "Mid-career Job for Spouse" was something they carried in the company store.

But I've spent the last few years doing a lot of administrative work. I have told my department that I needed to look for other jobs, but I have also told them that I was committed to doing my job properly for as long as I was here. That means working for the school's long-term future whether I intended to share it or not, doing some serious administrative chores inside my department and also becoming one of the department's public faces to the rest of the university. I did those things for the same basic reasons that baseball players run out ground balls: not because I thought it would get me anywhere, but because I would feel bad about myself if I didn't and because I was afraid if I stopped doing things the right way I would develop bad habits and lose the ability to do my job properly. But today I see the last few years differently. If I had used my weekly commute as an excuse to slack off, I'm not sure my colleagues would have worked so hard to end that commute. And I don't think they would have focused on keeping me if I had focused on trying to leave, at the rest of the department's expense. This could not have possibly happened if Flavia were not so very qualified. It likely would not have happened if my department did not think I could, and would, eventually leave. But they also had to believe that I was worth keeping.

The other reason they teach ballplayers to run out hopeless ground balls is because occasionally it does actually get you somewhere. Sometimes you hit the ball and don't seem to have any chance at reaching base. But then some piece of unexpected luck, some fluke, gives you an unforeseen opportunity. Players are taught to run hard for first base, no matter what, so that they have a chance to be lucky. You need to put in the work before there is any apparent hope; if you don't turn on your full speed until something surprising happens, you're probably too late. If you ever get a sudden bit of good luck, you need to be running as hard as you can.

cross-posted from Dagblog

Dead Man's Name Tag

I've been away at an academic conference for nearly a week, leaving blog posts unfinished, e-mail unanswered, and campus office untenanted. I had a wonderful time with a bunch of scholars and actors at the American Shakespeare Center's reproduction of Shakespeare's Blackfriars playhouse. (If you'd like to see some excellent theater, a trip to see the ASC's company in Staunton, Virginia, is a great idea.) But I also bumped up against a small problem that's began to follow me wherever I go professionally: the problem of my (real) name.

I am not the only Shakespeare scholar with my name. That's not surprising. My real name is quite common, not "John Smith" but a dirt-common first name with a vanilla-ethnic surname, so I bump into nominal doppelgangers all the time. I've gotten other people's phone calls and in one memorable case another person's subpoena. For years I went to a father-son barber shop, right across the street from my workplace, where both barbers shared my name and the younger barber, the one who cut my hair, even shared my middle name. So I wasn't surprised to discover that there was an older Shakespearean with my name, someone who began university teaching while I was still in grade school. And I knew what to do about it.

I have always been careful to use my middle initial in my academic byline, especially in my publications but also when registering for conferences, so that conference programs and name tags identify me as "Cosimo P. Cleveland." This is the simplest (and likely the only) way to differentiate myself from the earlier scholar who published as plain "Cosimo Cleveland" or, occasionally, "Cosimo T. Cleveland." Using the middle initial feels a little fussy and overly-formal, and it wouldn't be my preference in an ideal world. I certainly don't introduce myself with my middle initial when I'm shaking hands; in fact, I use a less formal nickname, equivalent to "Cozmo" or "Coz." But leaving the initial out of my byline would be sloppy and disrespectful. It would also verge on filial disrespect for my own father, a published spy novelist whom we can call "Cosimo C. Cleveland," but there's not much chance my work will be confused with Dad's; books by that Cosimo Cleveland tend to be about fearless Mossad agents and books by this one tend to be about Elizabethan actors marking up their scripts. In any case, the middle initial is on my book and on all my published articles so far, so there's no changing it. My byline is now my byline.

But when I go out in the professional world, that fussy little middle initial has been increasingly dropping away. The problem isn't that people confuse me with the other Cosimo Cleveland. The problem is that he's getting erased from history.

Cosimo T., who got his first job teaching college a quarter-century before I got mine, published much less than I have. This isn't a reflection on him, and certainly isn't a reflection on me, but an indication of how much our profession changed between his generation and mine. Professors hired in the seventies did not publish nearly as much as professors must today, because professors then were not expected to publish the way we are today. I published more articles before I got tenure than Cosimo T. published in his entire career, not because I am smarter or more industrious than Cosimo T. was, but because one of the requirements for me to get tenure in the 21st century was to publish more than Cosimo T., who taught at a somewhat better school than I, published over his three-decade career. If I hadn't out-published him by the end of year five, I would have been fired. This is true everywhere. All academics of my generation have to produce much more research than the older generation did. Those are just the facts of our business.

And, unlike Cosimo T., I have published a book.  That's partly about generational expectations as well. But it means, inevitably, that more people have heard of the younger Cosimo than of the elder. So they don't necessarily see the point of my fussy little middle initial, except as something pointlessly fussy. They don't see it as differentiating me from the other Cosimo Cleveland, because they don't know there ever was another Cosimo Cleveland.

So I unfailingly send in my conference registration paperwork as "Cosimo P.," but sometimes I show up and open my program to find "Cosimo Cleveland" on the schedule. Not always, of course, but twice in the last month.  And I get a name tag identifying me as simply "Cosimo," so that I have walked around a conference hotel for a long weekend wearing a retired man's name, and now, I have come to fear, a dead man's name. I googled the other Cosimo Cleveland this morning and saw an ambiguous reference to his death. But when I search "Cosimo Cleveland Shakespeare obituary" google just gives me a bunch of links that refer to myself. "You've totally eclipsed that guy," one of my conference friends told me six months ago when I explained this problem. "Everyone who talks about 'Cosimo Cleveland' means you." But being part of someone else's eclipse, even unintentionally, is not a good feeling.

And while I can usually insist on the middle initial in print, I can't make people remember it when they cite my work. It's very common to leave out middle initials by accident, or to misremember the initial, when writing footnotes. I've made both mistakes myself, meaning no disrespect to the scholars I was quoting; before I had any work of my own to footnote, I had not thought about why people might prefer a specific form of their names. (I apologize to those scholars here, and will happily do so again in person.) There's no great conspiracy at work, but the error is clearly related to the earlier Cosimo falling out of academic memory. If my name were Stephen X. Greenblatt, I would not be having this problem.

There's no way to insist on the middle initial or to make any kind of fuss when it gets dropped. That wouldn't revive Cosimo T.'s reputation, but would surely give Cosimo P. one. All I can do is to scrupulously use that initial myself, because the fact of that earlier career deserves to be acknowledged. History is part of my work. If I spend much of my time trying to retrieve lost details four centuries gone, I should not consent to forgetting the recent history of my own guild. And as someone who will die someday, I find it sad to see another person's life being forgotten. Devouring time may blunt the lion's jaws, but it is also devouring the memory of one Cosimo Cleveland, a dedicated teacher and scholar, and in due course it will come for me. There isn't even malice involved. People simply stop knowing. The name tag hanging around my neck in this or that hotel ballroom gives no testimony to that earlier Cosimo's work or life, but I have to read it as a reminder: memento mori.

cross-posted from Dagblog

Seeing the Headlights

Six years ago today, in the early morning hours of April 5, I hit a patch of highway ice while driving to the airport in an unexpected snowstorm and spun out sideways. My car was totaled, with all of the damage to the driver's side door. I survived unscathed. I did not get whiplash. I did not miss my plane.

My car turned around 180 degrees so that I was looking back at an 18-wheel truck coming toward me out of the snow while I was sliding sideways into its lane. There was nothing I could do in that long moment but watch the headlights coming toward me. Either I would slide in front of those headlights, and that would be the end, or I would slide just slowly enough to miss the truck.

In the end, I was almost slow enough. The metal step on the truck's cab gouged into my driver's-side door, buckling it inward and sending me caroming in another direction until I finally spun to a stop in the middle of the highway. Snow was falling through the foot-wide gap that the crumpling door had left between my window and the car roof. The difference between life and death had been two or three feet. I was alive.

After the wreck had been towed away and the cops had taken their report, they dropped me off at the airport with my bags, and then some time later I was standing in the California sunshine at an academic conference. Later that afternoon, California time, I took part in my scheduled seminar. Our death always follows close behind us, just over our shoulders. For a brief moment I was forcibly turned around so I could see its headlights, and see them pass, and then it was back behind me again, hidden from direct view.

Because hindsight creates the illusion of order, it looks to me as if the seeds of the last six years were already around me on that day. The seminar I took part in, and the response to the paper I had written for it, formed a turning point that began the last six years of my career. That paper became my most-cited article, and part of my book. When I went off to the same conference this year, the book was freshly out in paperback and the colleague who was covering my graduate class decided to assign my students that article. I had allowed myself to stall professionally; the jump-start came on the day I lived through the accident.

And that weekend in California I also happened to see, for the second time in my life, a person whom I later married but who was then only an interesting but skeptical stranger. That weekend was nowhere close to a beginning for us, but was a chance for me to make the all-important second impression, persuading her that I was at least not a full-time jackass. (The second impression is pretty important if you're me.) I suspect that it was on the last day of that conference that she decided I was socially tolerable. I suspect this because she has repeatedly informed me that it is so. And the last remnant of that early-morning trauma, a lurking anxiety about driving in the snow, began to dissolve later as our commuter marriage gave me strong reason to travel winter highways again.

The six years since I saw those headlights have been full: a book, a career, a house, a marriage. Six years of things I would have left undone. Six better and fuller years than the six that came before it, surely. I don't think my accident was providential, or that the last six years have been specifically part of any plan. Two or three feet further to my left and there would have been no planning left to do. But seeing the headlights puts some things in sharp focus. What you want, and what matters to you, become very clear. A couple hours after I had almost been killed, what I wanted most in the world was to go to my Shakespeare conference. (On the other hand, I absolutely did not want to go home to my apartment and spend the weekend there without structure. That idea would have been terrifying.) That may be a sorry truth about me, but it is the truth, and apparently pointless to deny.  For better or worse, that is who I am.

I don't believe that things happen to me, personally, for a reason. God's plan is not focused on my career. But seeing the headlights can put you in touch with what you want from your life. And if you glimpse the Angel and it passes you by, you should take that as a reminder. It's worth it to live.

cross-posted from Dagblog

Dividing My Books

cross-posted from Dagblog

This summer I've moved house three times. My job and my partner are in two different states, a common problem for my generation of college professors. I count myself lucky that our jobs are only a few hundred miles apart, which means the highway and not the airport. But keeping a one-person apartment in each place has stopped making sense, so we've bought a house in one city and rented a professional's bachelor pad, a short walk from my office, in the other. Voila! Three moves: from my partner's old place to the new house, from my old apartment to my new one, and from my old apartment to the house. If anyone needs some spare boxes, I'll leave them in the comments section.

And yes, I have the carbon footprint of a brontosaurus. Any time someone wants to put some money into high-speed rail, or simply stop beating up on Amtrak, that would help me turn the guilt into something practical.

Although it's definitely a first-world, luxury-box problem, packing for more than one destination turns out to be slow and complicated. The two great questions of moving, "Should I keep this?" and "How do I fit it in the box?" have picked up a dilatory and nagging third, "Which place should this go?" Should this pot or pan go to the kitchen I share with my partner, or become part of the bachelor-pad cooking set? Which umbrella goes where? You can't simply stow it all in boxes and load it into a truck; every individual object needs to be considered. Again, this complication, like so many other wastes of energy and time, grows from luxury. Could there be a more privileged question than "How do I divide my overly numerous possessions between my multiple homes?" (Except of course, "How do I get this done before my trip to Europe?")

The big problem for me, as always, is my books. I have far too many and, of course, not nearly enough. Even after I part with some, there are hundreds and hundreds to sort. Faced with so many books, and so many different places to keep them, I'm forced to consider why, specifically, I keep each book, what I'm likely to do with it, and why I find myself in the various places I keep them. At the very least the problems of privilege should make you think about your privilege. Why have I amassed all of these objects?

Some I need for work, which usually passes as a bullet-proof excuse in our culture. I couldn't do my teaching, my research, or my professional writing without a whole lot of books. In fact, my job requires more books than I could ever personally own. No one can teach college literature without a college library, and no one can write a scholarly book without a serious library AND inter-library loan. But there are plenty of books that I either use all the time or am likely to need unexpectedly. I want to be able to check them when I need them, and I don't want to hog the library's copies for months or years. A few are old and relatively valuable, things I've tracked down on the used-book market over the years, and I've often been grateful for those purchases. Those books have helped me out of more two-in-the-morning research puzzles than I should be having at this age, and saved the day when I needed to fact-check something right before a deadline.

Some books I have for personal and sentimental reasons. Some are beloved favorites, which I've read and reread over the years and expect to read again. Some are by friends or members of my family. A few are autographed by someone famous, or soon to be famous. A few others are collectible for one reason or another, and a bunch of old science-fiction paperbacks are collectible in the sense that I collected them because those particular books have gotten hard to find. Some I have because, frankly, I feel like should have them. (Yes, Moby Dick is surely available in the public library and no, I won't reread it over the next two years, but I have it in the house for the same reason I have a copy of The Federalist: I'm an American.) And of course, there's a pile of books that I have because I'd like to read them.

Some of the division is easy. The personal keepsakes and collectibles, the books by friends, and the inscribed gifts almost all go to the house. Who knows what my autographed copy of Blowing Smoke will be worth some day?

Other books obviously go to my campus office: textbooks and student anthologies, books I often consult while planning lessons, works about teaching methods and about academia itself. The "advice for new faculty" books are no longer for me to read but to lend out to new colleagues, and belong close at hand in my office.

But things get complicated fast. I occasionally use those expensive old reference works to plan lessons, but mostly use them for research and writing, so they stay at the house in my study. I almost never get much writing done in my campus office, where I'm generally busy with teaching tasks or committee work. And I expect to do more of my writing at the house than I get done in the new apartment, where I will probably only manage to get one solid block of writing time a week. So every book in my academic field has to be examined. Is this a teaching book, or a writing book? If it's both, how often do I use it for one and how often for the other? In the meantime, dividing the books involves planning my weeks, plotting out which of my tools will be in this or that place at this day or that hour. This collection of essays will be in my office, which means using it while I am on campus. This invaluable research tool is shelved in my house, which means using it for research early on weekend mornings, or on Sunday afternoons. This is what I hope or expect to get done in my apartment near campus, and these are the books I need to leave there in order to accomplish that.

The new working week apartment is the part I don't quite have in focus yet, the place where I can't quite imagine myself. I have very few work-related books there, since I will almost always be just coming from or about to go to one of the other two places. It holds several books that I can read one section at a time (essay collections, back issues of McSweeney's, superbly organized works of non-fiction). It has enough fuller-bodied works to keep me from being bored when I eventually, inevitably, get snowed in for an extra night or over a weekend. (In some ways, the bookshelf there is like the bookshelves in summer homes, except that it's the winter non-vacation home.) And since almost all the bookshelves there are in the living room, where visitors can see them, those books need to look minimally respectable. Although I hate to admit it, one of the reasons I own books is to display them, and thereby to display certain things about myself: education level, personal tastes and interests, things like generation and background. So the books in my living room don't necessarily need to be impressive (because the most impressive ones are in another living room), but they can't make me look like a mess either. It's a truth that I don't like, but books are partly about the face I show to others, and the face I show myself.

My books feel to me, on some deep and irrational level, like my most important possession, my patrimony. "Books constitute capital," as Jefferson said. Some people own land, and I own a library. They are the visible embodiment of the educational and cultural privileges I've been given, which can otherwise seem evanescent. Degrees are abstractions; books are solid. Slowly mastering the particular intellectual training demanded by my field is a much less tangible achievement than amassing hundreds of well-chosen volumes. It's not so much that I have the books to show other people what a scholar I am. It's that I have them to remind myself. Years ago, when I drove across the country to start Ph.D. work, I left behind all of my books except the ones I would actually need for my specific academic work (just a milk crate or two loaded into the car). And that was a reasonable decision, but a depressing one in the long run. After a while I slightly felt cut off from the world of reading and writing that my work was allegedly about. Why study English lit if it means not having your favorite novels with you, and not owning any poetry that you wouldn't write an essay about? I don't have that problem today, with a dozen boxes still left to unpack. But the sorry truth is that I only feel at home when I've put books on the shelves. They are a physical connection to my chosen work, and to all the reasons that I chose it.