Continued from yesterday, the MLA in all its carnivalesque quasi-splendor, as seen through the eyes of an anonymous contributor:

Friday, December 28, 2001: Sitting in the foyer of the Sheraton New Orleans, his stomach pleasantly full of beignets and chicory coffee, Erwin R. Sackville burped discreetly, took from his inside breast pocket a gold Cross pen, opened the fat glossy convention program, and prepared to plan his itinerary for the day.

Scanning the list of morning talks, Erwin R. Sackville slid his jaded eyes past panels entitled "Food," "Sex with Aliens," and "Stalking the Mouse: Doing Disney Studies." Disney Studies? The Franz Kafka Professor of Metamorphosis Studies paused to ruminate.

It was early. Only those who could not afford to rise more slowly were there. Erwin R. Sackville took special pleasure in these MLA mornings. They allowed him to gather his thoughts, and they put on a show that many who attended the MLA never bothered to see. Early mornings at the MLA staged a striking companion piece to the gay pageantry that dominated the convention, a special style of absurdist theater more commonly known as The Job Market. The Job Market was well under way at the Sheraton New Orleans on the morning of December 28.

Around Erwin R. Sackville swarmed the annual sea of clamorous barely contained lemmings, the jobless anonymous masses who came in droves to interview, whose ill-fitting new clothes stuck out at odd angles and whose cheap shoes occasionally creaked, who spilled overpriced cashbar cocktails on themselves as they made excruciating smalltalk in cramped hotel rooms, wearing eagerness like a bright desperate badge. He felt them ebb and flow around him as he reclined in his cushioned chair, felt their hurried breezes caress him as they rushed by, felt their aftershave and perfume and coffee breath and nervous sweat creep up his nose and linger. They were clad in bruise tones, browns and blacks and muddy greens and dismal deep purples. The men's faces looked stark and sore, their skin unused to close shaving. The women's faces looked worse, some garish with the lines and blots of poorly applied makeup, some simply naked and raw. These last always reminded him of dead cut flowers, their anemic limp heads sticking anomalously out of shiny expensive vases. Stalking the lobby and watching the minute hands on their watches, the jobless were like something out of Beckett or Ionesco, racing in hordes toward a career that would never be there.

Erwin R. Sackville shifted in his chair and turned the page. Here was a talk called "Stevenson's Pajamas," and another called "Dryden's Stutter." And here was a panel called "Reading Rape: Relocating Violence, Victimization, and Empowerment in Recent Feminist Literary Criticism." This last made him think of his student, Chelsea Lain. Very few of this year's lemmings, he noticed, had nice breasts.

He watched as pallid jobseekers converged on the elevators. By a fine MLA tradition, interviews were conducted in the hotel suites of department chairs. Each year, a new herd of hopefuls came to them as to assignations, riding marble lifts to maze-like floors of identical halls, knocking surreptitiously on doors, slipping into rooms like so many cheap women, wary and ready, primed to jump at an offer, any offer. Sometimes the bed would be unmade in the interview suite. Sometimes breakfast dishes were strewn about, egg congealing on plates, coffee drying on cups, crumbs carpeting the floor.

Erwin R. Sackville loved the seedy senseless feeling of it, took pleasure in the manifold discomfiture of the young and tender candidates, had once even indulged himself during an interview by adjusting a slender blonde in her chair just so, that the warm yellow light from the window would fall on her hair and flood her face from the side. She made such a fine Vermeer that he heard nothing she said; such a fine Vermeer that he fought to hire her, and won. Privately, he thought of her as Girl in Regulation Black, though he had eventually discovered that her real name was Carol Mann.

Returning to his program, Erwin R. Sackville placed a check by a panel entitled "The (Dis)Abled Subject: Rhetoricity and Identity." It was to be chaired by Michael Berube, whose outfit must not be missed.

to be continued