No Person Land

The title of this blog entry stems from a conversation I had last friday at the campus pub. I was sitting around a table with a professor in sociology at hamilton, a professor in comparative lit at Hamilton, and Janet Halley. Halley (http://www.law.harvard.edu/faculty/jhalley/ ) is a professor of law at Harvard, and was giving lectures at Hamilton last week. Anyway, we were engaging in small talk when Janet turned to me and asked, "so, what do you do here?" I said that my status/position was complicated as I am a PhD looking for that elusive tenure track appointment, currently occupying a fixed, administrative appointment. We talked about spousal hires, being in a two PhD relationship, etc etc - all the bullshit that has been my existence for more years than I care to think about.

After batting around that disturbing subject, Janet asked where we lived in Clinton. To continue the topic of my previous post, we informed her that we lived on Dwight ave., in Fred Wagner's old house. Turns out Janet used to be on the faculty at Hamilton, and has been to parties at Fred's house, I mean, our house. So many people in this community have been to our home - before we set up residence. Anne and I then began to wonder if other former Hamilton professors, such as Eve Sedgwick or Chandra Mohanty had been in our (Fred's ) home. Interesting to wonder......

Anyway, I'm getting off topic. The point of this is, as Janet left the table to go back to her room and nap, she said to me "you have to get out of no person's land."

damn straight.

with a little luck and perserverance maybe someday I will.

jb