me to sue, sue to chickens, chickens to pecking. i think revelation is around the corner...

over at SAIC, they're doing a new line of hirings, balleyhoo to new folks. for each of the four people they're bringing in to interview, they start with an informal luncheon (rock on free food), then bring the teacher in to a class to lead a workshop for a piece they had access to ahead of time, and then this is followed by a semi-theatrical presentation of their work and philosophy and vision (45mins-hour).

the current steering committee is talking about doing two hirings from this batch, which is a group of people hopefully interested in either teaching mixed-media classes or facilitating interdisciplinary collaborations, a far too under-emphasized feature in our writing department, which strangely enough stays separate and floating away from other SAIC departments despite all the visual-textual stuffs going on in general. we really need new people in the department who have energy to spare towards bringing together different artists and introducing nervous writers to more spatial medias, and so i'm sort of attentively paying attention to this round... being interested in this stuff, anything that makes my brain quiver in ignorance really... and so i'm hitting as many of meetings as possible. in addition, this dealio's highly informative about the hiring process, and how to put your best foot forward in addition to being brilliant, famous, and well-credential'd.

anyhow, they've brought in two folks so far--X and MB (no sound piece link available at this time).

Prior to the meetings, I heard nothing but good stuff about X, and afterwards word on the street from folks who have worked with X before was that X was having an "off day." But shoooooosh and shitinelia, was X ever having an off day. My impression was that X was a bit of a jerk with little flexibility towards different approaches to writing, thinking, seeing, or media. I'm pretty sure X called Beth Nugent "Becky," which is fucked up on so many levels (I thought they used to work together?), and X also employed every cliche about Carveresque writing that you might imagine. You know, whatever, there are different modes and I appreciate them, but X was really really negative about the workshop piece and if it had been mine I would have either been crushed beyond approaching it ever again, or I would have (having some moxxy on occasion) simply walked out fuck you and i'll go look down a gopherhole for some kind of shadow. Hmph. Should I say again that I wasn't pleased?

X employed charm to smooth over X's approach, but I couldn't find myself even starting to lean into the slightly sweet-snarky humor. Regardless, and part of this charm not to be missed, the highlight of the interactions I was party to was X saying that in order to "really get to know a character," one "should go down on" said character. "You have to go down on them until the idea comes." "You have to get inside the head of the character." And "Going down on a character is hard work."

X initially started this intertextual rumination via a comment on "vertical - horizontal" (terminology I also use in the classes I teach, but to distinguish spatial and temporal meanderings on a vague, non-binary plane), but once X realized the charm of X's sextextualization, X kept on in a straight-faced way, clever, funny, made me snicker, but not enough to assuage the prejudices of my hopelessly mixed-media-wannabe playaround and love everyone's true honest endeavors romanticism.

MB, on the other hand, was a friggin weirdo in an awesome way, I'm pretty sure. You can see one of his pieces just to the left. Bald-headed, he mentioned masturbation and nether regions and thanking and generous-giving-towards- text in his presentation, and artistically crosses multiple genres (initially from a painting background, moved towards sound, but has always employed text, short text, weird text, fragmented poetry texts). I thought he was extremely present and aware, and so much about him projects attentive flexibility. I don't think he'd be the mojo-man in terms of helping folks with narrative, but I do think he'd be a mojo-man in terms of helping love of language, nuanced political social and ethical approach to manyformed words. I would consider working with him, and as a picky fickly-focused beast, that's saying quite a bit.

Anyhow, I'll talk about the two others in the pool next week, but for now, that's what I think. Yep yep.