Since the publication of simulacres et simulation (1981), Jean Baudrillard's analyses of technologically advanced societies as existing in a state of hyperreality—a condition marked by the alleged inability of our collective consciousness to differentiate reality from the simulation of reality—have inspired both caustic criticism and zealous support. One of Baudrillard's most famous dicta, the assertion that shopping malls, theme parks, and video games have produced “sublimations” of a real without origin or density, suspended in a condition of “hallucinatory resemblance” to itself, generated apocalyptic conclusions: we, postmodern denizens of the hyperreal, have become inept at experiencing and interpreting the world, which has been emptied of meaning (Simulations 23). In Travels in Hyperreality, Umberto Eco mirrored Baudrillard's posture but avoided the caustic pessimism Baudrillard displayed when, for example, he argued that the replicas of settings in the United States at Disneyland are more real than their real-world counterparts, with the consequence that America has become “more and more like Disneyland” (Best and Kellner, Postmodern Theory 119). In Europe as well as the United States, we were told that we lived in a world doomed to inertia and entropy, where all distinct hermeneutical systems and stable theories of knowledge had dissolved into a vaporous vacuum without substance and depth.

George Lillo's play the london merchant (1731), one of the most popular tragedies of the eighteenth century, makes the case for the respectability of men who have accumulated wealth through work. Lillo takes every opportunity to display the honor of a London merchant named Thorowgood. In the opening scene, the merchant describes how he persuaded his international colleagues to withhold a loan from Spain, leaving that country unable to attack the English fleet. Thorowgood's action, from which the merchant makes no profit, is unrelated to the plot and serves only to establish his character and patriotism. In another demonstration of his honorable nature, Thorowgood insists that his daughter should marry the man she loves without regard to his fortune or status.

On the one hand, the gift presents itself as a radical Other of the commodity—and therefore also of work, insofar as the latter is understood as an investment of time and energy made in the expectation of wages or profit. On the other hand, the idea of the gift seems constantly to be drawn back under the horizon of rational exchange, and to be thus endlessly re-revealed as a secret ally of both work and the Work.

—Scott Cutler Shershow, The Work and the Gift

I have put together all these details to convince you that this recommendation of mine is something out of the common.

Quae ego omnia collegi, ut intellegeres non vulgarem esse commendationem hanc meam.

—Cicero, Epistulae ad familiares, book 13

LAST FALL I FOUND IN MY OFFICE MAILBOX AN ENVELOPE FROM A SOPHOMORE ENGLISH MAJOR WHO HAD ASKED ME DURING THE SUMMER for a last-minute letter of recommendation for a scholarship competition. The envelope contained a handwritten thank-you note—and a gift certificate for a local restaurant. I e-mailed the student to thank her and to tell her that I couldn't accept the gift certificate since the letter I had written for her was part of my job as a teacher. She insisted; I insisted. She said that several teachers had turned her down before I agreed (from a hotel in Germany) to write for her. I felt rueful, as well as grateful to her for the token of gratitude that I couldn't accept. Eventually she won the debate: I accepted the printed piece of paper and took my daughters out to a free lunch.

Whenever i have occasion to pause in the course of my chock-full schedule as a professor of english and comparative literature to consider the nature of the work I do beyond research and classroom teaching, journal refereeing is not at the top of my list of things that fill my day or fulfill me. Beyond research and teaching, my efforts in assisting students, friends, and colleagues as they attend to their own research and teaching usually take priority over journal refereeing. I suspect this is true for many of us—except, of course, for journal editors. In the academy, when we scholar-teachers are not doing scholarship and teaching, we are likely shaping the conditions that allow others to do research, teach, and learn.

What work does mentoring do in the academy? to answer this question, we first have to establish what mentoring is. the university of Michigan published a detailed handbook called How to Mentor Graduate Students: A Guide for Faculty, available online. One is expected to read a guide and to perform accordingly. But this guide confronts us with the difference between theory and practice and remains silent on the issue of how much time we spend mentoring.

In memory of my mentors, who were without peer: Howard T. Young, Andrew P. Debicki, and E. Inman Fox

When athena wished to advise telemachus on his quest for his long-absent father, odysseus, she slipped into the guise of mentor, the tutor in whose care Odysseus had left his son and household. Respected, wise, war-savvy Athena preferred to counsel her mentee or protégé in the form of a human male rather than as a female goddess. The Greek story suggests the matters of hierarchy, selection, approach, relationships, and gender addressed in the proliferating literature on workplace mentoring. Athena's maneuvers behind the scenes also remind us that, compared with teaching, doing research, writing, advising, serving on local and national committees, editing, applying for grants, and evaluating colleagues and manuscripts, mentoring is perhaps the least recognized and least rewarded aspect of our academic work. The related but substantially different work of advising has achieved a more formal place in academic reviews. Although journals, books, and articles devoted to mentoring attempt to codify the practice and assign it a formal place in the constellation of our working lives, mentoring continues to be elusive, difficult to define, and unevenly carried out. I argue here that this ragged, catch-as-catch-can situation is not necessarily a bad thing. Overinstitutionalization could stifle the vitality of mentoring relationships, which flourish optimally when they are spontaneous, mutual, and open-ended.

Early in my probationary period at the university of wisconsin, madison, long before my department (spanish and portuguese) began assigning mentors to junior faculty members, I found myself in a work situation that would shape my career profoundly.

Discussions about academic work often tangle with the seemingly bifurcating demands of teaching and research. occasionally, they celebrate how the two endeavors nurture each other. These professional divisions, which George Levine a decade ago called a “combat” scenario between “two nations” (9), have not been reconciled since then. Despite that persistent tension, when I shifted my professional energies to the academy after several years of community-based social work with not-for-profit organizations serving Hispanic populations, the challenges of balancing teaching and research were not my only concerns. I also wondered how I could incorporate community service into the multiple demands of academic life. Would there be time to devote to the community? Would I find academic work in an area where I might have something to contribute beyond the campus? Aside from location and time constraints, would I find a way to integrate into my faculty identity an engagement with the wider society, or would those endeavors be relegated to a separate self, dissociated from my academic world? I anticipated that extensions of my teaching and scholarship might connect with realms outside the academy. Accepting the challenge, I patiently observed my campus and surrounding community, searching for opportunities for interaction.

In 1982, a year after i was appointed director of the center for twentieth century studies at the university of wisconsin, milwaukee (I had just received tenure), I met with a program officer at the National Endowment for the Humanities in Washington, DC. “Aren't you a little young to be the director of a humanities center?” he asked. Notwithstanding the inappropriateness of the question, my point is that thirty years later I'm still in the same position, albeit at the Simpson Center for the Humanities at the University of Washington, Seattle. In a sense I haven't moved. I have consistently chosen to remain at this level in university administration, refusing the hierarchical ladder (chair, associate dean, dean, provost, president) in order to stay close to faculty and graduate student research, including my own, and relying on building networks across the campus and the country in order to have influence at my university and beyond. Two anecdotes—I think of them as short stories—illustrate why.

I remember the devastating irony of a new york times frontpage photograph on thanksgiving day 2011 depicting a row of people who had pitched tents outside a Best Buy department store in Mesquite, Texas. Alas, the campers were not staging an Occupy Best Buy but positioning themselves at the head of Black Friday's mad rush. At any other time, the photograph would have been unremarkable, perhaps not even newsworthy. This itself shows how extensively consumerist desire is internalized in the American psyche. Black Friday (what a cynical name!) is so ingrained in American life that it occupies its own slot in society's calendar. Some years ago a person died on Black Friday, trampled in the mad storming of a Walmart palace in New Jersey. I argued then that charges should be brought against President George W. Bush for instigating a homicide, since on the day after 9/11 he had commanded the American people to respond to the catastrophe by going shopping.

The question of what occupy wall street wants has been a hard one to answer—despite or because of Adbuster's founding call for “one” “simple” and “uncomplicated” “demand.” This is partly because the Adbuster candidate, “Democracy without Corporatocracy,” was a little vague and partly because the many specific demands that followed it—from reinstating Glass-Steagall to reforming campaign finance to establishing an “Office of the Citizen”—didn't really capture the radical spirit of the movement. What emerged as most characteristic of OWS was something like a critique of the very idea of demands: we refuse to make any because we refuse to acknowledge that anyone has the authority to accede to them, or we will make only demands that cannot be met. But this strategy, not unlike the mechanism of occupation itself, has obvious limitations: going someplace just because you're not supposed to be there and asking for something only as long as you can't possibly get it doesn't look like a recipe for changing the world.

When my berkeley colleague the poet robert hass wrote for the new york times an account of the occupy cal event of 9 november 2011, he described the “strange contingencies” that struck his mind (even as the police baton struck his body). Since that day, when I was arrested (the police used a technique they call a hair-pull takedown) for linking arms with students to protect tents erected in solidarity with Occupy and in defiance of the campus's no-tents policy, I too have felt those contingencies. My decision to participate was no accident; I wanted to resist the conceptual and practical attenuation of the ideal of education as a res publica. But at the time of my arrest I had not yet recognized how much Occupy resonates with issues I have made the center of my scholarly life: vagrancy, mobility, freedom. This brief essay considers the new inflection Occupy has given to my understanding of the work of education. To exercise freedom of thought is not merely to engage heterodox ideas; it is to make thinking take place and take its time. It is to refuse attempts to constrain, by regulations concerning time, place, and manner, the public exercise of thinking.

I appreciate Harold Fromm's emphasis on the diverse approaches found in the ecocritical field and on the relevance of ecocriticism to the goals and activities of the MLA because this was the future envisioned by the early scholars. Ecocriticism is an expansive, interdisciplinary field of study that arose from a shared desire for a new literary theory and practice. This shared interest has made ecocriticism a robust field that continues to grow, as seen in the newest ecocriticism program in the United States: the literature-and-environment program that started in the fall of 2012 in the English department at the University of Idaho, spearheaded by Scott Slovic, Jennifer Ladino, Erin James, Janis Johnson, and Jodie Nicotra. The field is also becoming rooted as an academic discipline around the world, in countries such as China, India, Brazil, and Australia, to name only a few.

I am chagrined that I forgot to mention the 1991 MLA convention session that Harold Fromm organized and on which I presented. Fromm's idea of proposing a special session on ecocriticism at the convention to raise interest in the topic and perhaps to garner essays for the anthology bore fruit, and thanks to him The Ecocriticism Reader features essays by three of the panel's participants: Alison Byerly, Cynthia Deitering, and William Howarth, the respondent. (The third presenter was Sean O'Grady.) Now that my memory is jogged, I recall the madcap scramble for a bigger room and the impromptu collection of people's names and addresses. The resulting mailing list was used to announce the formation of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) less than a year later, at the 1992 Western Literature Association (WLA) conference in Reno.

Readers of Marit J. MacArthur's “One World? The Poetics of Passenger Flight and the Perception of the Global” (127.2 [2012]: 264–82) may be interested in W. H. Auden's poem “In Transit,” written probably in 1950, which has something to say about every one of the issues that the essay explores. The abstract of the essay (424) could almost serve as a summary of the poem. “In Transit” may be found in any edition of Auden's Collected Poems; it was first published in his book Nones (1951) under the title “Air Port.”

I am grateful to Edward Mendelson for drawing attention to W. H. Auden in connection with my essay. There is in cultural-literary history an inherent risk that, caught up in the larger stories we are trying to tell, we may overlook the subtle insights of individual works of literature. To my own work in this area, I also try to bring the strengths of author-centered close reading. In this regard, the expertise of scholars like Mendelson is invaluable.