At the MLA

“It was as if we had arrived after the fact — not in the midst of an event, but long after some catastrophe, the story of which we could tell only through fragmentary evidence”: in The Washington Post, Jacob Brogan writes about a visit to the Modern Language Association convention.

An excerpt that brought back memories:

Even in the good years, the convention was a bad place for graduate students searching for work. In a custom now officially discouraged by the association itself, interviews were traditionally conducted in hotel rooms, often with the interviewee sitting awkwardly on the bed as the tenured interviewers perched around them, a flock of judgmental ravens peering down from the eaves.

Even worse, perhaps: a hotel-room interview with just one interviewer.

I wrote out the story of my MLA job-seeking in this post: Fluke life.