So, welcome back to the Career Hacking Village. One thing that's always interesting in our community is that we tend to think that recruiters are evil and they're not human and they don't know what they're talking about. So I decided to bring a few of my friends together for some drinks and we're going to talk about finding jobs in this community and also just sort of what is the human side of a recruiter. So I'm going to start off. You guys can't see the gallery screen because I'm just going to keep the speaker view but pass it on over to everyone. I'm going to have my friend Pete with his Iron Maiden shirt on to tell me about what he recruits for and what he's drinking. Yeah, thanks. So I'm Pete. I am a senior recruiter at AWS. Most of what I focus on there is primarily high level architecture for distributed systems, software as a service, anything that has to do with the cloud that's not the kind of pure infrastructure side of the house. And I am drinking as always at about this time on Fridays a Manhattan with an extra splash of cherry juice, which is sort of my signature exclamation point on my drink. Sounds great. And I'm going to invite our Southern Bell, Rachel Boseman to share with us what she's doing and what she's drinking. Absolutely. So I get to help manage our town acquisition program. So we support at CenturyLink. We're hiring everything from finance into the nitty gritty. You name it. We're probably hiring for it. So I am drinking a red wine, one, because they say it's good for your heart, and two, because I'm normally a redhead and I just feel like it, you know, it's a good vibe. So cheers. Next we have Matt Durin, who has been my besides buddy for seven, eight years now. He was the only person that I knew out of besides sort of it took me under his wing and made sure that no one accosted me at my first besides Las Vegas. We've been the bane of each other's existence and good friends ever since. So Matt, what, what do you recruit for and what are you drinking?   So you just, one of these things just doesn't belong right now. I'm kidding, everything belongs to besides and in this community. So thanks for having having me. My name is Matt Durin. I'm a senior manager of talent acquisition at Tenable. And I also handle a lot of our employment branding and recruitment marketing type stuff too. But things that I recruit on or my team recruits for is everything from our platform software engineers. So cloud based stuff, but also on prem building on prem devices. If you've ever heard of Nessus, we build that security center and things like that. Also our researchers, zero day stuff, our, our plug-in writers, things of that nature, back office IT, even a technical support team as well. Just to name a few things.  I'm drinking a old Forester 1910. It's a very good one. Why I chose that one is it's affordable. And it's not an everyday drinker, but it tastes good, neat. And that's how I take my, my whiskey. So that's me. And that's one thing that I have yet to do is learn how to drink whiskey, even though everyone around me drinks whiskey. So when I was at that first besides Las Vegas first hacker summer camp, about seven, eight years ago, 10 years ago, someone said earlier today that was 10 years ago. And I know that wasn't the case. I met this guy with this really cool accent. And I invited him to come and be on a panel along with Matt. So Chris rides. Thank you for being on the journey with me throughout all of the B sides. What are you recruiting for? And what are you drinking? Thanks, Kathleen. So I've got a cybersecurity staff in a professional services company, Tyro Security. So we staffed just cybersecurity. So I've got a team of people and they focus only in the area in terms of why I'm drinking. You guys were talking about whiskey. I was this close to grabbing. I like Woodford Reserve is my go to bourbon. And I was this close to going for a nice Woodford. But then it was so sunny out here. And I thought I'd do this on my balcony that I went down to the farmers market this morning and got this amazing blood orange juice goes great with some vodka. Thanks. Woo. That sounds great. It goes with that whole decor in the background there, man. It does, doesn't it? Right? You're in a cabana somewhere in Hawaii. Don't lie to us. I wish. I really wish. You need an umbrella in there to really just set it off. I do. Yeah, cherry on top or something. Yeah. Yeah. Well, he's trying to still sort of do the bachelor thing. Even though he's a new dad. So I'm going to give him grief about trying to do all of that. And me, I'm drinking my red wine. I'm drinking a nice Chianti and you can do the silence of lambs. If you want to, I'm drinking it out of my crystal glasses from a little crystal blower up in Halifax, Nova Scotia family run. They went out of business and then a woman came along and said, this needs to be saved. So I am very proud to drink from her glasses. Anyway, so we're all drinking, we're all having a good time. We're all human beings. I'm going to throw a question out that no one's been prepared for. So Matt, how has recruiting changed since the pandemic came around? Wow. So I think there's a few things. I think the pool got a little bit bigger, right? I mean, the Canada pool and the ability to reach out to somebody and have them respond to that fairly quickly. But I think a lot of the companies out there that, you know, like a LinkedIn or something, they've allowed you to put that open to work on your profile. So it's not as hidden as it once was. It's plain as day right there on the screen and it allows folks to know who's really looking. And a second thing, and hopefully I'm not taking something else's answer, is I think the understanding of why somebody was let go and no longer working is kind of hard to argue these days. In the past, it's always been a bit of a red mark on somebody. You were laid off. So you had to have been on the lower echelon of the team. I think that's kind of been myth busting. Rachel, for a big firm like Century Link, you know, obviously you were always ramping up for projects and stuff. What's going on now for you? Are you slowing down or ramping up? A little bit of both in there and I would agree with what Matt shared. I mean, the pools have gotten bigger, but I've definitely had to seek some guidance and some help. My feelings have been a little hurt as of late. So while the pools are bigger, we're getting ghosted a lot. So we've seen an uptick of folks that are applying with really no intent to follow through. So we've been trying to make a lot of friends that really don't want to be friends. So it's added that complexity of just trying to really find the ones that are genuinely looking for work and not just applying just because it's the vogue thing to do. And Pete, you've got, you know, a lot of ramping up going on with AWS and Amazon and everybody needs the cloud. Everyone needs the cloud. So, you know, how have you changed your strategies? And what are you seeing different in the field right now? Yeah, so my my search strategy has completely changed. There's no there are no more city parameters on my searches. It's wherever I can find a good engineer at that level. I'm going to continue to do that. But I think that the most market thing I've seen is and I've been banging the drum for 10 years on this, that it's an engineering gig. Have code will travel like you do not need to sit next to 10 people in an office to write fantastic code.  We have finally started to come around to the fact this is going to be a tipping point. I think of companies saying, you know what, we actually can have remote workers and maybe you can be a little more competitive on pay when you're not spending it on, you know, buildings to house all these people. So, Chris, what's going on for you?  You're helping companies. You're supporting as a service. What's going on in the staffing firms these days? Yeah, it's been interesting. I think initially there was, you know, specifically within cybersecurity, there was an assumption with some companies that the pool was going to get much bigger and that the skills gap was almost going to be bridged. And I think what they've realized is the areas and the industries that were really affected, you know, like the airlines, the cruise lines, people that did make big layoffs and had to lay off their cybersecurity people, they got snapped up really quickly and they were in huge demand, multiple offers. And so we've actually had, we've actually built a lot more new clients. We've had a lot of new clients come to us asking us to help them fill their positions. The thing we're seeing is some companies are really struggling with like it's taking them time to get their their interview process down remotely. It's taking them time worrying about how are we going to all of a sudden we're going to have to onboard some of these people and and how are we going to onboard them? And so it's almost like slowing down a lot, a lot of the parts of the process. So it's been an interesting change. The demand is still there and candidates are I think Rachel talks about ghosting that the candidates are in this strange situation where they might see a few people leave and they start getting worried, so they start talking and then they don't want to. They're worried about moving and being the last person in, you know, in the first person out if something changes. So it's a bit of an unknown. It's a it's a still a strange situation at the moment. Great. So one of the things that we wanted to share is sort of the back end irreverence, the worst case scenarios that a lot of us have seen when we've been talking to job seekers. And one of the the panelists submitted this question.  Oh, boy, I can't believe you came to me first. I was I was trying to think I was trying to think of a specific one. I've seen ones with political references in them and religious references in them, neither of which I think is particularly good when you're applying to jobs and using that email address. I don't think I've seen anything. I don't think I've got any funny email stories of all the stories I've got. I don't think I've got any funny email ones, to be honest. I don't think I can't think of any in particular. Maybe talk to the others and I'll continue to think a little bit about that. So the one the one that I've seen a lot is my spam field folder. I've seen those. Yeah, I've seen that one. So Rachel, Rachel, have you seen any funny? I do work in the South. So if we do one thing well, it's let's screw up email addresses. And so this particular one, and I remember it. I remember it so clearly because I took pictures of it and sent it to everybody I knew thinking who in the Hades would send this out. But it was I get down 69 at gmail.com. Super classy and they're free. So please create a free one. You know, Yahoo, Y mail, Gmail.  Don't get down on your resume with an email. It still lives in infamy. I'm going to borrow your story. Your story is not my story. Absolutely. But I get a lot of big mamas, hot mamas, sexy lady, you know, a lot of those where I'm like, again, they're free. You can just do first name, dot last name at Gmail is free, friends. It's free all day, every day. Yeah. And in that case, you don't have to be, you know, whatever that was 69 dash one or dash two. So if I see it, I know you've attended the hand where we'll talk. I get down 69 job search. You said it was OK to OK to share that story, right? Yeah, yeah, I don't probably be the tamed story that OK. Conference sees I didn't want to break the ice too bad. It's funny. So Pete, you got one? Oh, yeah, I will never forget one of the last agency resumes I got when I was still in the agency side of the house was a Captain Brown, I at Yahoo.com. I will never for as many days as I'm left on this planet, I will never forget that email address. Well, jealous that I can't steal it from my own personal use, but it was pretty great to see on a resume. So so Chris, I'm going to say I don't think you can pass these up. Can you? No chance. These are me. These are my stories like I'm taking these now.  And then I say, if you've got any email address, and I say, actually, somebody I know, and that'll be you guys. Let me write that down. Captain Brown. I may have been an excite.com domain. So it's probably available again. Do you know? Do you know? MySpace, maybe that's still around. I don't know. So another great question that we had was, what is the weirdest LinkedIn request for connections that you've ever got? So, Pete, that's a good question. I don't know that the message itself was weird, but I was a little was a little taken aback to get a message where the profile picture was like on a beach in a bikini. It wasn't a complaint, but it just was a little shocking that that was the LinkedIn I expected on Twitter, expected on Instagram, I expected on Facebook or whatever, but LinkedIn was a little bit of a unique place to get it. I mean, turn out to be an extraordinarily qualified candidate who just really chose poorly for their picture. Chris, do you have any interesting ones? This literally happened months and a half ago. I actually had somebody try to connect with me. And when I looked at their profile, they were working for my company. For any mind, my company's pretty small. So they set up a fake profile and were working for Tyro Security. And so I sent them a message saying, congratulations on getting a job. I hadn't even realized that normally I'm involved in that process. And the person actually replied back. They replied back saying like laughing and basically just telling me that worth a try or something like that.  So then now I'm thinking it's one of my friends or somebody sort of, you know, having a joke, but that was probably the weirdest one. They changed that they changed their profile. I tried to report them and I reported them and they just changed their profile to say that they were working for Amazon after that. Oh, good. Yeah. So, you know, I guess it's easier to hide, at least, right? When you've got that many employees. Indeed. Yeah, the fake employees is great. We have three janitors in India. So that's always interesting. And I think we've got a window washer in the Ukraine. And we've filed the complaints for a long time. But hey, wow, you have the cleanest offices ever. Yeah, especially since we've been remote for 20 years. You know, that's very interesting. They obviously haven't done their OSINT enough. With that kind of staff, though, you could be cleanjobs.net. Oh, what you did there. Bit of a bump. 730 is different from the 930. Try the Veiltipi waitress. So, Matt, what what is the weirdest one you've gotten? Can I change the question a little bit and the weirdest one I've sent? Oh, sure. I sent one to myself one time. Not sure if I feel sad for you or if I want to know about the story. I found my picture on on on a profile. And and and so I sent I sent there. It wasn't my name. It was just my picture, which I thought was weird. And so it's weird, though. I mean, let's be honest before this is it was before it was this was, you know, this was like six months ago. No, I'm kidding. No, this was this is a long time ago. And and I wasn't even working at Temple at the time. And I found my own picture on on a profile. And I just send a connection request to it. I said, you're a good looking guy. Brilliant. I don't I don't think they ever responded, but I just thought it was funny, you know, it'd be great if you could send that request now with your beard to you without your beard. Yes. There's like a weird back to the future reference there somewhere. So clean cut back then it's a movie. Well, considering that that I've known you since your beard was this long. That was back when you worked with the the what was it that little crocodile thing? It was the gecko. That was when my hair was this long. It didn't happen here. It was this long here. Yeah. And I haven't had the beard yet. So yeah. Yep. Yep. You had that anyway. So, Rachel, this was your question. What was the weirdest LinkedIn request you got? So it started out. We'll take you through the journey. It started out genuine request about a job. Turned into, can I meet you at the bar at 7 p.m. And it just it got creepy real quick, real fast and needless to say, didn't get a job, didn't get a date. That never happens to me. No, no. I know, it's shocking. Use Matt's profile picture. I think it's working out for everybody. You know, I thought I thought I'd got lucky when I got a I got a request from it looked like it was baby spice. I was like, no way. Just like she did when she was there. And it turned out it was and this you're going to find this amusing. I put a post on LinkedIn about it because it was baby spices picture. It was a male name and they were working at Amazon. Sorry, no, they were working at Microsoft on AWS. Amazing. It's really, I mean, if that's a good gig, if you can get it. Yeah. That's probably a little harder to explain than like developing in Java and .NET at the same time. I imagine mixing clouds is, I don't know. Yeah, I can't imagine. I mean, I'm sure that they're probably messing around with AWS as much as they can. But I don't think officially they've got a department. You know, maybe they do. The weirdest, the weirdest request I get. And it's just it's just really sad. But people drop their entire resume in a LinkedIn request to me and I'm seeing some head noddings. You know, like, here, here's my resume. Find me a job. I'm like, sorry, not the best approach. You definitely need to look at someone's profile and find out what they are. Ninety nine nine percent of the community thinks that I'm a recruiter. I'm not. I will tell you how bad your resume is. But please don't drop your resume and, you know, in there. So I really like this question that, again, Rachel put together, because I didn't think people gave gifts after an interview. So it must be something in the south. So Rachel, tell us about your other hospitality. Come on, friends. So this again, maybe it's just me. I don't know what I'm doing wrong in life. But the one that I remember so clearly, I had everyone, you know, I had just left my office and come back in and everyone's like, have you seen it yet? Have you seen it yet? And I couldn't imagine what I hadn't seen yet. Only to find out I had a whip put on my desk with a note that said, hope you call me daddy. Wow. Yeah. And it was an internal employee who then I had to fire for for this afterwards, who had interviewed for a job. So it's still and I kept the whip for years in my office. And then it became kind of a weird thing in HR, like with a whip. But it was just always a reminder of things not to do and things not to give. So thank you notes. Super great whips, not so cool. So just, you know, not not a great thing to leave a recruiter. It's just it didn't work out for anybody. New rule on this panel. Rachel goes last. Don't invite Rachel. No, no, no, no, she goes last every time. She has the back cleanup for us.  I'm sorry. I'm finishing that question right now because no one is going to be able to beat that one. No, no, no, I'm disappointed. I thought somebody else was going to have it. Maybe maybe I'm doing something completely wrong and very right. It sounds like you're doing very right to me. OK, so new question. Yeah, well, at least they didn't give you a poll or something, you know? Well, you didn't you haven't got to that question yet. Let's get a move on. Rolling halfway through. Hey, I know Meg is going to miss the fact that she was not part of this. So one of our panelists put in a question.   Oh, my goodness, it's come to me first. Yeah. Well, I feel like and when you say recruiter pick up line, what do you mean, Pete, sorry for clarification?  Yeah, their hook line. Well, I guess being an external agency like that, I mean, we're normally going out to them most of the time, right? We do get them to come into us. I don't think we really get we don't get really that many, you know, because we're we're the agency, right? They're always wanting to but for us, we're going out to them. So they usually just reply and I haven't got, oh, my goodness.  I'm going to say to you, Kathy, you have to stop coming to me first. I'm maybe I take inspiration from everybody else's amazing story. At least we're starting to flesh out the order of who should answer the questions, right? Rachel's going to go. Right. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, but I need more. Chris, you know, so many other agencies. Come on, you've got to see. Doesn't have to be one subject line out there. I'll tell you. OK, I'll tell you a subject line, an outgoing one. I'm going to slightly change the story and it's completely true story. It's the company I worked for before this and it was somebody in their London office and they used to get a good candidate in and mail them out. And they had a candidate. And again, diversity wise, you know, it was a tech IT. We don't get many women in IT and we used to have like really, really high ratios. If you had a good female candidate, you knew you were going to place them.  Now, you'd hope people would do that respectfully. And one of the consultants sent out an email and it was the lady's name was Debbie and she was a desktop support candidate and the entitled the email outgoing Debbie does desktop. Yeah. Final written warning for that one. Maybe a dated reference. I don't know. I mean, people under the age of maybe 30 or. Yeah, watch it, Matt. Watch it. Yep. Yeah. OK, Matt, I'm going to go to you. Any any good sort of pickup lines, subject headers? I'm going to disappoint you on this one. I don't I don't have one. I haven't I haven't heard one. I know there's there's a bunch out there and I couldn't think of anything before we got on here, but I would I would say anything in all caps is probably the worst thing ever if we're going to get real about advice, if that's what we're here for. All caps, something is is just bad. I've gotten a couple of those and it's I don't know. It's odd. I don't like it. So I wish I had a better story for it, but I don't. So I'm going to get me a job now. Yeah, I get a lot of those. I am job, so that's the worst. So, Pete, and then we're going to have Rachel wrap it up with what is the best pickup line, so Pete. So the best one that I can think of is one that I got from an agency when I was working. One of my old companies may have first gone to the corporate side of things. It was from an agency and it was I want to be inside you. Was the subject line dot, dot, dot. And then I opened the email because of course it could have opened the email. And it said dot, dot, dot. It had an R. Headquarters walking my employee in for their first day.   I was a little disappointed when I opened it up. I was really hoping for something a little bit better. But again, clearly, I don't get all these really good ones that some of you guys get. OK, Rachel. Well, first, I'm judging. So let me get off my judgment seat that Pete opened that email. And second, you obviously don't know Pete that well. I was behind the safety and solitude of a VPN at the time. So there you go. OK, you were safe. Well, then my judgment is I will postpone my judgment for later. No, I don't really have I'm kind of with Matt. I don't have anything fantastic.  I mean, I don't really hear too many of the I mean, I haven't seen any just other ones that just convince you, oh, I'm so sorry about your loss. You open it up and it's how can we help you fill it?  So I'm sorry. I am probably going to be demoted to like third in line now. Now, you're the store is going to carry you all the way through. Yeah, I wish I still had it. Well, that's another story. OK, next question.  Who wants to go first? I mean, that was my question, so it'd be really easy for me to. It's one of the few ones I can go first on. I've got an answer. I've got an answer. I've made the question, so I should have really. I am to probably two of them. One one person we rang and rang and they didn't just didn't turn up for their interview, rang them to confirm before like in the morning, didn't answer us. Rung them again, warned the client. We haven't managed to get hold of them. They might not be able to. They might not be turning up, but we spoke to them yesterday. Fine. Got a phone call in from his from the candidate's brother saying that unfortunately passed away. Then. Week and a half later, that candidate's resume was applying for another job and somebody spoke to them. And it was the same candidate. He'd resurrected. His name wasn't Jesus, but he's resurrected himself in a week and a half and was denying all knowledge of having an interview. Even with like it was such a weird conversation. So we had the resurrected candidate and then also did have a candidate who didn't miss the interview, but and I will say these date back quite a bit. So I feel like I'm dealing with more professional people nowadays. And he celebrated his last day as a company. He had an interview the next day, couldn't get hold of him in the morning. And then he rang us back an hour before his interview and said, oh, I'm really sorry. I had too much to drink last night and I'm running a bit late, but I am going to make make it and I will make it on time. Is there any way you can tell the client I'm a bit disheveled because I'm in last night's suit. So he said it was my last day and I was like, well, honestly, we can delay it. Well, we can delay it. We can do something about it. No, no, I don't want to miss out now. I really want to go. And then I said, or is there anything else we need to tell them? And he said, yeah. So I've got I've got a little bit of claret as we call it. It isn't wine in England, it's blood. I've got some claret down my suit, is what he said. He would actually spent the night in the jail with drunken disorderly and he cut himself and he had blood all over his suit. And he was trying to convince us he still wanted to go to the interview. We needlessly didn't didn't go ahead. So we pulled that one back and changed it. We got a higher determination, though. Yeah, yeah, I mean, he wasn't going to drop out. I mean, at least he really liked the job. Yeah. So Pete, more excuse. So I want to curve ball a little here. Like this person didn't miss the interview. They made it to the interview. It was during college recruiting season and they had they had come in late the night before and had gotten there and so they didn't get a chance to eat. And came in in the morning and they sat down for the interview and was clearly having some discomfort part way through the interview and visibly squirming in the seat, not really able to to maintain their composure, started to sweat a bit and realize that like there was going to be an incident relatively soon if we didn't do something. So that poor person, it turns out, picked up some Taco Bell for breakfast on the way in that day and on the way, making it to the fortress of solitude, if you will, where they would have been safe to do their business. Unfortunately, didn't quite make it to the room where you do that first and had a little bit of an accident all the way down the hallway leading up to was so disheveled in there and the clothes were so ruined that they couldn't leave the bathroom and what happened is that he had to call out for help so that somebody could hear him in the bathroom, which ended up long story short because this could go on for hours. You could actually find it's on Reddit. You called out, wound up long story short. Our CTO had to go and go to the gap and buy him new pants so that he could come out of the bathroom. He came out of the bathroom and out of sheer nicety, they said, do you want to finish the interview? And he's like, no, I'm I'm I'm pretty sure I'm not getting this job. Or would ever take it if you got it. Even if you get offered, are you going to take it? Yeah, but you could find it on Reddit. It was it was an amazing, amazing story. OK, does anyone want to top that or at least equal that? No, but there's one I want to share. I want to show one that we had and it's it's it's in the same guys. It was not because they missed the interview. They didn't even get where I used to work. We used to do a recruiter just a pre interview discussion.  And this didn't happen to me. It happened to a co-worker. Again, college recruiting. So young folks, please, please know what you're doing and how to accept bad news, she showed up with. Yeah, this was kind of early 2000s, but it looked like she came right out of like a grunge band concert, right? Just the red flannel shirt tied up around, you know, and. It's like, all right, that's we'll talk to you a little bit. But we did. She ended up we ended up not letting her go any further, right? We were like, look, you're not ready for this. I think you need to learn a little bit about interviewing and being ready for interviews. This is not the job at, you know, Walmart or whatever. She said, OK, well, I appreciate that. Can I drop off some flyers for my band? We're playing up the street in a couple of weeks. I'm like, and she left the whole stack of flyers with us for her band. Like, it's the weirdest thing we ever saw. It's not it's not pooped down the hall. Sorry, Pete, but I don't have crap either, but I do have blood.  OK, you got you got to share that, Rachel. She beat her ex-husband with a golf club because found him with another woman ended up in jail and called from jail her one phone call to let me know she was going to be late, but she would be bailed out. Wow. So the moral of the stories here is that if you go to jail, you clearly want the job. And you make sure you have your recruiter's number as your only phone call. Just saying. Yeah. That is the number one like role of that story. And she didn't she didn't get the job. Oh, come on. Wasted phone call.  She forgot she only had one phone call. She was supposed to be calling to get her bail. Thank you. And then she was stuck. Thank you. And it was it was a precious moment. Needless to say, this is another candidate that I followed in the news and continued to beat her husband. So great story. I don't know. Welcome to Louisiana. Got to have a passport. Rachel would be a great addition to this team. Yes. So. OK, I am going to move on to our next question, which is, what is the worst interview faux pas you have ever seen? Rachel, I'm going to kick it off with you so that you set the standard for everyone else. Well, I am afraid I am going to set this bar low. But I'm going to try real hard of probably the one that sticks out so much in my mind was an interview that I was participating in. And the gentleman was angry at Laugh. He was angry that he woke up in the morning. He was angry that he drove his car to the interview. He was angry about everything to the point where he was coming across the table at us with anger about everything. And then at the end of the interview, wanted to talk a lot about how much the job was going to pay and everything else. And we were like, we are fearing for our lives at this moment because there was a threat against us if we didn't hire him, a threat against the company. If we didn't hire him and everything else. But then he wanted to make sure that we were very clear on what his salary expectations were and when could he start? So that was probably the one that sticks out the most was just the sheer anger talking about the things he wanted to do to his former employer and how he was going to execute these very vivid conversations about how that should have ended. So we did have to call the police afterwards because there were very visible threats against his previous employer. And I didn't want to walk out to my car by myself that night. So it was not a great time. And again, moral of the story, he didn't get the job. So, Chris, any any good ones to tell? I mean, a couple of times we've seen that couple of times we've had managers actually interview people for the completely wrong job. And that's so like we get this feedback and it doesn't make any sense. And then we speak to them and it's it has happened more than once.  I got them mixed up with this other candidate.   Can you imagine you're getting asking all these questions and it's not even for your job, you can't answer any of them.  And you know, why did I even ask him? It is. Yeah. So that was that's probably the biggest faux pas. And I see it doesn't happen just once, unfortunately. Yeah, that's probably that's probably the most awkward one to deal with. Pete. I think the weirdest thing I've seen happen in an interview that I sort of shook my head out as I was interviewing somebody. So it's an experienced person. I mean, good solid 15, 20 years of experience.  Just fine. Like Don Johnson did it. You do your thing. But he took his shoes off in the middle of the interview and like put his leg up, you know, crossed his legs. And I mean, I might have been OK with it if you'd had like a manny petty that day, but that was that was not the case. And it was not pleasant. And I actually had to stop things.  But you got to put your shoes back on because we were in a nine by nine room and it was it was getting a little raunchy in there. So I'm just going to say I was in the same boat, but the person was picking their toenails. Yes, I had one of those. That was going to be one of my stories. I was going to ask if they if they picked their toenails while I did it. Yeah, go for it, Matt. No, I won't go there because he told the story. Just change the cross their legs to to pick their toenails the whole time. But so I'll I'll I'll do another one. And this is on a hiring manager side. You know, our level and hiring managers are real quick on on getting that feedback back to us. And when you got a hiring manager who knows how to use the applicant tracking system and knows what the buttons are and what they do, I love that. All right, just just for hiring managers out there, I really appreciate when you know how to use the system. I just wish that you would wait more than 15 minutes after the interview. And maybe even after the person's driven away from the building to reject them and to know that you can actually send the rejection yourself because we had that happen. And the person got the rejection letter.  I'm like, why would you do that? The person came back because he hadn't even left the parking lot yet. Hadn't left the parking lot yet and came back upstairs and asked to talk to me. I'm like, yeah, I just got this email from from your system. And it says I was rejected. But it was just I had to sit there and I haven't even had a chance to debrief with the person yet. I didn't even know what I thought the guy came back because he was he forgot something or or whatever it was. And yeah, he wanted to know right then and there why he was rejected. And I had to actually go find the manager and find out what the reasons were. And they weren't really good reasons either. So I had to kind of figure out what it was that I could say to this person. And it really put me in a bad spot that day. Nothing like tap dancing for somebody else's mistake. Yep. So we've talked a lot about what candidates have done wrong. We've talked a little bit about sort of our processes that might not go well. Just wanted to go around the room and sort of talk about, you know, the other is Matt was kicking off there that the hiring managers who are the people that sort of do the final interviewing. What are some of the mistakes that you have seen them make? Matt had a really good one.  You guys, you internal guys must have some good ones. I mean, my interview is right. Yeah, my interviewing that, yeah, I think just interviewing the people for the wrong jobs is always like that's always the worst than the worst one I've had to deal with. Yeah, you got you internal guys must have some good ones. Surely I definitely talk about yeah. Yeah, I worked for well, I work for a company if I give too much details, it'll give it away, but it's not my current company. But I worked for a company where I had a candidate. I'm fairly senior level candidate. Call me after the interview, like two hours after it was over. And I said, OK, well, I don't have the feedback. And he's like, I don't care about the feedback. He's like, I just have to ask you a question. So OK, is it possible that insert hiring manager's name here was drunk during my interview? I said, I'm not sure how you mean. Like my mentality went, I'm not sure how you mean. It was a 10 o'clock AM interview. Like, what do you mean? He's like, no, no, no, no, I come from a long line of alcoholics. And I'm pretty sure I know what somebody who's been drinking looks like. And I'm like, oh, I said, well, yeah, me too. But like it's 10 a.m. And he said, no, about four weeks later, we did let that hiring manager go because apparently for weeks on end was showing up to work drunk and just masquerading through the day on that. So note to self, like don't interview people when you're drunk. We did not like we won't be interviewing anybody right now is what you're saying. Yeah, hopefully not. No interviewing. Got it. So, Rachel, any any good hiring manager? You know, I love the ones that really want to pull back the layers and better understand the candidate by asking questions about. So when are you do and the person is not pregnant? That was a super fun one. Or, you know, tell me more about why you can't work because of your children or all of the things that we're like, you said what?  And even sitting in with hiring managers on interviews, I'm always taken back at the liberties sometimes of just, well, I just I have it in my gut. And I'm like, no, it's actually written down. You just need to read it. That's what we need your gut to be. And so I think that's the piece that's always the most interesting for me is the gut questions that come out that completely put you in a litigious spot in a spot where you're like, we're just not making good decisions right now, friends. And so I think those are the ones that stick out the most. But the one that was clearly not pregnant and asked when she was due, I had to deescalate that one. And that was not fun. So don't ever ask, even if you think don't don't ask. It sounded it sounded vice to make sure hiring managers know, like, don't type anything out that you don't want to repeat in court. Thank you, but it does not stop at the hiring manager.  Because we let's say we this is before for tenable, somebody was was diagnosing somebody like mentally in their feedback evaluation form. And it was in the wreck in writing. Yeah. As you read it, you're like, help me understand. That's the question that always comes up. Help me understand what you were thinking when you wrote this down. But but can they code? Right. Crazy all day. Just got a code. So guys, they're hearts. Bless their heart. I actually have the gardening gun. Bless your heart trivia. So Rachel, we might have to play that. Yeah, we're both drinking red wine. We're we're good kindred spirits here. We're good there. So guys, ladies, lady, we're done.  But I want each one of you to give a top tip to the job seekers in the community on what they need to do in their job search. So Chris, you're first. Be honest. Don't bother lying. That's it. Matt, just be honest. Know what you're applying to.  I understand you want a job and you need a job or you're trying to find something so you're not the last person in a sinking ship. But apply to something that you know you can you can do most of the job with. You have most of the skills to do the job and just be interested in. Pete, just have somebody get a second set of eyeballs in your resume. None of us are published writers to my knowledge. So get a second, you know, set of eyes in your resume just to get it looked at to make sure everything looks the way that it should. It's hard to write a document like that and stare at it after a while. It all starts to look the same. So, you know, just, you know, once over, I think is helpful. And Rachel. Simple. We're going to spend a little bit of time looking at each resume. When you put your pictures and there's colors and there's too many cutesy tootsies on there, we get lost. So just keep it simple. Tell us what you can do and what we're applying for and or what you're applying for. And everyone's life is much simpler. So I want to thank all of my friends, Pete, Rachel, Matt and Chris for coming together on a Friday night to have a few drinks and share that recruiters are humans too. They want to be your best friends, want to be your advocates. So take the time, reach out to a recruiter. Make sure you have recruiters in your network because they are the people that are going to advocate for you to find the next best job. And remember that we have recruiters in resume review and we have people who are in career coaching that can help you. So thank you, everyone, for coming to Career Hacking Village and have a great evening. Cheers. Thank you.


Hi everyone, Joe for jaspyscasebrakes.com. This is all the the extra stuff We got to do for the random number blocks if you took a take a look at the rules there We're gonna have to separate the non someone's gonna get the non numbered cards for each number block group and Then there were some there were some teams that had non numbered hits we'll do that in a new list and The number law group did not win a wax party spot so that part we don't have to worry about So we're just gonna go one at a time I'm gonna use the same dice roll for all of the lists, but I'm gonna clear out the lists each time We get to a new group. You'll see what I'm doing here So you can see on the bottom of your screen random number block one and So that group and actually I'll show you the List right here as well, you know, let me print out a new list for that all right, so This is actually alphabetized by by first name so you see the number blocks are all up on the top So the first number block Carolina then Ravens Vikings Texans Brown Steelers Bengals Jaguars Now so I also marked them in the top right hand corner right there, so Carolina also had Two non numbered hits that was the first one hit number one and that was the second one hit number two So there'll be two different lists for this one, but same dice roll for everything So let's go to number block one. Let's gather everybody's names So the first one will be for the non numbered card the second one will be for the hits and Again for all of the number blocks. It's gonna be three and a three six the hard way non numbered cards Like the inserts and rookie cards and whatnot one two three four five and six So that'll go to David. So look at the non numbered cards David and Then the second separate list for the two hits one two three four five and six and David definitely have the odds with them. You'll get those two cards as well Awesome. That's done Group two Baltimore did not have any non numbered hits. So this randomizer will be just for The non numbered cards, so let's gather everybody's names here six times one two three four five and six So Jesse you'll get all the non numbered cards So no vet common shipped in that break But of course there's like rookie cards that are not numbered inserts that may be not numbered Even short prints that are not numbered So Jesse you'll get the non numbered cards for Baltimore All right, Minnesota had a had a couple once a name on top. We'll get that second name down. We'll get that So let's go back to group three So we need two lists for this one same dice roll six times non numbered cards for Minnesota one two three four five and six could be some nice rookies in there David with that one So non numbered cards for Minnesota and then the second list will be for the top two one two three four Five and six and final time after six we got mark and David So mark you get hit number one and David you'll get hit number two. All right onwards. Let's go to group four Group four was Houston for didn't have anything extra. So this is just for the non numbered cards Name on top after six one two three four five and Six and then it'll be for Carl last bot mojo Could have been some did we have any 2016 boxes? Were there any Deshaun Watson's in there? That's a possibility rookie cards non numbered rookie cards Plus inserts and whatnot Alright next group is group five and that does have a couple extra things here There's group five Watson's 2017 We had some 2017 boxes, huh? All right. So we had that one extra Cleveland hit for group five So let's gather everybody's names here So name on top for both lists after three into three six times. This is for the non numbered cards two three four five and six After six Matthew look at the non numbered cards For Cleveland and the Terence West relic Three into three six times for a separate list one two three four five and six and That is for Trent my next group We had three hits for Pittsburgh Which was number block six so that'll go the name on top second name down and an autograph for the third name down So let's grab group six That's this group right here. You can see the tab highlighted in them on the bottom of your screen So three and a three six times name on top for the first list Non-numbered Pittsburgh cards and the second group will be for the hits here the non numbered hits one two three four five and Six so James you'll get the non numbered cards and now for the three hits So those are being split up in the order that they were that they were pulled three and three six times top three after six one two three four Five and sixth and final time. We've got Carl Josh and James So Carl you'll get the hit on top Josh Melton, you'll get the second hit and the autograph Will be for for James just two more to go Cincinnati group did not have anything extra. So this will just be for the non numbered cards So this could include Joe Burrow rookie cards That were not numbered three into three six times one two three four five and Six and final time Steve Birch on top. So Steve We'll get the non numbered cards for Cincinnati. All right, and last but not least group eight Let's flip back over here. Let's gather group eight final group and this one's interesting because This includes That's one. Let's flip back over here. This includes a Travis Etienne autograph right here So we'll do that in the second list And again using the same dice roll three into three six times Name on top on this list will be for the non numbered Jacksonville card in the Trevor Lawrence rookie cards to one two three four Five and sixth and final time after six Corey. There you go Corey All non numbered cards going your way including rookie cards and the second list will be for the Travis Etienne autograph Which was not numbered Once again three into three six times one two three four Five and six and final time and it's Alan Murdock last spot mojo helping you out this time You'll get the Travis Etienne hopefully he'll be Healthy right raring and ready to go There you have it. I'm Joe for Jasper's case rakes calm That was the random number block non numbered card randomizer video for random number block one all the way through eight I'll see you next time for the next one. Bye. Bye


You went off grid in the blazing heat to get this shot our gear was overheating We were running low on water and this happen. No, but my friend said it was okay And we wouldn't give up not until we got this shot. It's mine


Hello, and welcome. I'm Esther Allen, a professor at City University of New York, and I'm here with Alison Mark and Powell, who translates Japanese literature, works with the Penn Translation Committee, and has been a driving force co-organizing Translating the Future, which is the conference you're now attending. Thank you, Esther. And thank you all for joining us for the eighth installment of our weekly program. Today is Queer Literature, Queer Legacy. We'll be listening to a conversation between Achi Obeja and Sean Bai. Achi is an author, poet, and translator based in California, and Sean is a translator of Polish literature based in New York. You can read their full and glittering bios on the Center for the Humanities site. Unfortunately, Liz Rose, the translator who organized this panel and who was meant to moderate it, is unable to be here today. But we do have these words of theirs to share. Let's take a moment to acknowledge that it's Pride Month, and there is important work happening right now in the U.S. toward black liberation, and queer liberation is interconnected with black liberation struggles. The Stonewall riots were led by queer and trans women of color, and it's essential to consider queer history, and the queer legacies that have created the context for the work we are doing, as LGBTQ writers translating queer literature. This series of weekly one hour conversations is the form that translating the future will continue to take throughout the summer and into the fall. During the conference's originally planned dates in late September, several larger scale events will happen. We'll be here every Tuesday until then with conversations about the past, present, and future of literary translation, and its place in the world where we find ourselves. Please join us next Tuesday at 1.30 for 21st century translation, What Has the Future Brought Us? We'll be joined by Gabriella Page-Fort of Amazon Crossing, Samantha Schnee of Words Without Borders, and Chad Post of Open Letter, as well as possibly one other participant. And we'll hear about the ways they've used data and technology to raise awareness and determine what and who gets translated. Please check the Center for the Humanities site for future events. Translating the Future is convened by Penn America's translation committee, which advocates on behalf of literary translators, working to foster a wider understanding of their art and offering professional resources for translators, publishers, critics, bloggers, and others with an interest in international literature. The committee is currently co-chaired by Lynn Miller-Lachman and Larissa Kaiser. For more information, look for translation resources at penn.org. Today's conversation will be followed by a Q&A. Please email your questions for Sean Bai and Achi Obe has to translating the future 2020 at gmail.com. We'll keep questions anonymous unless you note in your email that you would like us to read your name. And if you know anyone who was unable to join us for the live stream, a recording will be available afterward on the HowlRound and Center for the Humanities site. Before we turn it over to Achi and Sean, we'd like to offer a sincere gratitude to our partners at the Center for the Humanities at the Graduate Center, CUNY, Martin E. Siegel Theater Center, the Coleman Center for Scholars and Writers of the New York Public Library, Penn America, and also to the Masters of Dark Zoom Magic at HowlRound, who make this live stream possible. And now, over to you, Sean and Achi. Am I here yet? I can hear you, but I can't see you. You can hear me, you can't see me. Oh no, wait. There we go. This is live internet streaming here. Hi, Achi. Hi, Sean. Well, do you want to start with a reading? Yeah, why don't we start with a reading. All right, let's do that. You go first. Me first? Okay. I think, so I, I'm going to read something from a book that I have coming out in the spring, called Foucault in Warsaw by Remy Ryzinski, it's a translation of mine. And it's a book that takes the year that Michel Foucault spent as a diplomat in Warsaw in 1959-1960 as a starting point for an exploration of queer life in the city and in Poland in that era. And so I'm going to read, I thought I'd start with something outrageous. I'm going to read something about cruising. The cruising in Warsaw in this time happened often in public urinals, which the characters in this book refer to as mushrooms. So you're going to hear two different, two different real people. This is a nonfiction book talking about, talking about cruising in this period. Different methods of cruising. So queer life happened on a sort of trail, the mushroom on three crosses square, another one on Jeleniecka Street, and a third on Dombrowski. But they all wiped that out capitalism came and it was over. It's a story that's impossible to tell because it was, it was like a peacock of paradise or unicorn, or both. And they tell the story. I picked up this handsome guy on the street. I said something and he said something back and now we're walking along together and talking. I open with, you know, you're such an outgoing great guy I'd love to take you for a coffee.  And that opened my eyes that if somebody's on the ball and not interested, they'll say no. I also got this personal theory that every good looking guy in Warsaw must have had a brush with gayness because there were so many gays cruising in all kinds of situations, and the only way to avoid it was by being ugly. You get lots of different situations with cruising. One of my girlfriends did it where she pretended to be a TV director. She had a lot of nerve she go to the beer stand on Chiantoksha Street, and promised the boys a career in television, which put her in very high demand. And one rule never mess around with vodka. All my friends who died it was because of vodka. It's really dangerous if you're into trade, because you never knew why he kept meeting up with you. There were different methods of cruising. There was no buying site unseen you'd know right from the get go which was an advantage. That's why everyone liked hitting up the tea rooms. There were tons of urinals and so the queers would do a circuit of the mushrooms moving from one to the other. The metal barrier around them was high enough off the ground that you could count the legs underneath. The police would drive up and if they saw legs grouped together they'd storm in from both ends and hunting. They'd arrest one guy and the rest would get at all. What was the era was like.  And second of all there was no normal way of meeting people and murders were the order of the day. Well I found it all incredibly exciting because come on, these were hardly everyday experiences to give you a little flavor of the time. Love that. Thank you. Yeah. What's the word in Polish that you chose to translate as queers. It's Chotka Chotki, which is related to the word for aunt or auntie. You know, like a like a relative like your father.  There's a lot of that. There's a lot of that gender play in in this book there's a lot of men referring to one another as girlfriends or as her.  And in fact it's one of the things that the characters in the book talk about reflecting on how gay life in Poland has changed that some of them even sort of lament the like masculinization of gay male culture in Poland.  Yeah. I do use girls in certain places and they do use Jeff China Jeff Chinky girls. The word that I translated as queers is like, I felt like it has that kind of specificity of queer in English, I felt like it's something that has kind of a bit of a bit of valence and is a bit of and can be a bit disparaging in certain contexts like I felt like it was a pretty close semantic fit but it was tricky I did wonder for a while whether just to keep it in Polish. That would have been an interesting. Yeah, it was something I thought a lot about with this book, I am. I sort of made a decision to do my best to root the way they spoke in English in in actual like sort of American gay male manners of speaking in the 50s and 60s and I did a whole lot of research with materials from that era and stuff so that I could really put my ear to that. But in the back of my head there was also this voice going well actually no they need they maybe they should sound Polish maybe they should be speaking some completely new type of English with lots of Polish words kind of intermixed with it. And I think I don't know. I think I'm a better mimic than, than anything. And so I think I was more comfortable trying to replicate a way of speaking that I was maybe more familiar with and that I could research rather than trying to invent something completely new, if that makes sense. I mean I'm still, I'm still very fascinated by the use of the word quit I don't want to keep like camera on this but it's because that my experience with the word is that when I was a kid. You know, like in the in the 60s, which is not that terribly far from 50s. It was a very mean word. It was, there was no positive connotation to that that I can recall. And it, there was a period of transformation with that word in English. I mean I remember being in college and that word, starting to become something that we use ironically, but still not positively, you know, it was in, you know, within the, the, the coven of lesbians. We, we would, you know, sort of mockingly refer to ourselves as being quiz the $3 bill or, you know, or, but it was, but it was very domestic and familiar and incitery. And only, I think later, like in the 90s during the AIDS crisis that I feel like that word. Got retaken and recharged and, you know, I think of it as very much as a 21st century word, even though I think it's roots are before that but I think it really sort of blossoms and flowers in this period. I also think it's really tricky to do stuff from other periods because ultimately your reader is still reading in this period. Yeah. So how far can you go, you know you mean you have to give them something to hold on to right. Yeah, and the, you know, the voices in this book. Again, it's a nonfiction book. And they're, he's interviewing people who today, the authors, you know, the book came out in Poland a few years ago and they're reflecting back on this period. And so they have, they have a somewhat old fashioned way of speaking and they're using old fashioned case slang in some cases and there was lots of stuff I had to look up or didn't know. But it isn't really authentic to that period per se, it's sort of like transformed, you know, through the years. I spent a lot of time thinking about, you know, my older gay friends that I have been the United States, you know, and people who grew up in, you're not quite the 50s, but maybe in the 60s and the early 70s and sort of the way that, you know, the way that they talk has changed but it's still inflected by older types of slang and so on and so on. Yeah, is it, what is it like with Spanish? I'm curious. There's also so many different Spanishes, right? That's just the thing, right? I mean, the thing about Spanish, I mean, I think there are two things that really sort of separate Spanish in a way. One is that there's this multiplicity of Spanish.  You know, I remember I used to, I used to go out with this Cuban girl who stayed in Cuba.  And the first time she came to Chicago where I was living in where there are a lot of Mexicans and the Mexican community is sort of wonderfully present. And we were looking for something to eat and it was very late at night and we found this Mexican place and there's a huge neon sign outside that said tortas. And, you know, we all know, you know, we understand what the food is, but in Cuba that very much means like dike but in a really gritty way. So she insists that we take many photos under the neon sign that said tortas.  There's also the issue of the fact that Spanish is a very familiar language to English readers, you know, I'm like Eastern European languages where, you know, not a single word you said was anything that I recognize and again, you know, I spent 30 years of my life in the largest Polish population outside of Warsaw but you know, but you know, you people use Spanish words all the time in English without even thinking about the fact that they're using them so how you play with that is, is, you know, both it makes it easier in some ways, and also makes it harder in some ways. I also think that there's a fictional Spanglish, I think there's real Spanglish, and I think there's a fictional Spanglish. I think that the real Spanglish is again very regional, you know, the way people use Spanglish in New York is different from the way people use Spanglish in, in Miami and very different from the way people use Spanglish here in the Bay Area where I am now. But I think that there's a kind of a literary fictional Spanglish where characters use Spanish a great deal more than they do in real life, you know, I mean when I pick up a book and I see somebody saying No, senior, it's to the left.  You don't address people in Spanish who you know don't speak Spanish. And so that really complicates the notion of queerness because then it's like a sub language within a sub language within a sub language you know it's it all changes so very dramatically I find that queer speak if you want to call it that can be very different in the Caribbean from the continent from the southern cone. And then within those spaces, it's very different you know in Peru. When I was in Lima. I was completely blown away by the fact that drag queen seemed to have like their own language. It was so different from everything else and you know the dykes that I was hanging out with were almost as mystified and as left out of it as, as I was, which I was like, come on, but this is amazing, you know. So yeah, it's, it's, it's a different ballgame and you're also challenged I mean, you know with the gender issues. Yeah, Spanish that can really mess you up with a translation because sometimes very important obviously to avoid the gender markers, but sometimes the gender marker is the point of the exercise. And then you can't bring it into, into English in the way that it, it's really meant to be. Yeah, it's a struggle, but it's tremendous fun, obviously. Yeah, I mean it's similar with gender and Polish Polish is super heavily gendered it's really, it's really really difficult to get away from using gendered language in Polish. And it's interesting, I, in some of my research before doing this, I was looking up non binary language in Poland and gender neutral language and sort of like how did non binary people in Poland talk about these cells. And I was just finding these sites that were like just like articles in Polish, describing the debate about gender neutral pronouns in English, and then giving the English examples and saying these are how you use them in English, and then kind of not, and then just sort of saying like well we need to come up with our own solutions in Polish and then like not quite getting there. And I thought that was really interesting because I sort of, I think I was saying this the other day. I noticed this thing in Poland where it's almost like the center of gravity of the discussion around queerness is getting pulled towards an American Anglophone framework, you know where they're like quite familiar the queer community there seems to be quite familiar with the debates that we're in the United States, and are sort of exploring ways of applying those debates to their realities and their conditions but are maybe like not quite there yet necessarily. Yeah, you know I'm by no means an expert in Polish queer culture so I don't necessarily draw any conclusions from that but it's just sort of a head trip as a translator into English working with queer language from Polish where it sort of feels like I'm conscious of like potentially operating in this weird kind of loop, you know. This happens with Latin America to where a lot of the discussion is dominated by what's happening in the United States but I think that it might be different for us because there's a long history of the US presence in Latin America I mean there's a gigantic gap that falls on Latin America from the US and the struggle for the non binary thing actually is is is actually a real for me it's a real example of that. You know, I'm sure you're familiar with the term Latin X, which is the very sort of ubiquitous non binary Latino term that's being used in the US. And it's not a popular term in Latin America in Latin America it's very in fact it's a very problematic term because it's absolutely unpronounceable in Spanish.  I've been a move, especially in Southern Cone, especially in places like Buenos Aires and Montevideo to move to, you know, the non binary, you know, instead of Latina or Latina Latina. And in fact, I think I mentioned this the other day too that the president of Argentina recently gave us a whole speech using the E instead of the X which was monumental really in a lot of ways. The problem with with also with the Latin X is that, you know, it comes from here it comes from the US, and it may be coming from Latinos in the US, but it's still the US. Yeah.  Yes, this is a good point but dammit that you know it this is the thing that that you know we need to do by ourselves and also there. We don't want to let go the gender that the gender thing, I think especially among a lot of women who feel that, you know, lesbians have a history of invisibility. A history of invisibility not just in general but a history of invisibility within the queer community. And so that the, the a and the feminized gender forms are actually, you know, emphatic for them, you know, it's it becomes something that a holy different ball game. That's much closer to the trends that I see happening in Poland actually is that if there's any kind of change in the way that gender is being dealt with in Polish it's like a reassertion of the value of feminine endings like particularly for things like job titles and areas where the masculine was taken as neutral, and these kinds of things. There was one of the main women's magazines in Poland I remember did a sort of top 50 list of you know the most influential people in Poland, and making a point of using feminine endings on every single one of their titles you know even like your Prime Minister as I'm yet to call which you would never really say. But just like, you know, asserting the presence of women in in these roles. Yeah, so that's interesting.  So as a translator. How do you think about whether or not to tap into those ways of speaking that kind of language that's used those cultural references. It's, it's tricky. I mean, a lot of the stuff that I've translated actually originates in Latin America, like, and Cuba and in the Dominican Republic. And so what I've done, you know what what limited amount of stuff I've done that originates here has not necessarily been queer but it's also been that question arises what do you do with this Spanish that is, let's call it for lack of a better term native to the US, but makes no sense in the rest of Latin It happened a lot with Juno Diaz when I was translating him a lot of the Spanish that we read in his books is not anything that makes any grammatical or, you know, lexical sense in the rest of Latin America and so in some cases, you know, it depended what was going on We left it alone I left it alone. And in some cases it was imperative to to to make it make sense to the Spanish readers so we had to play with it we had to correct it if you want to call it that, or to, you know, at least make it less incorrect, you know, realign it in some ways so that the reader could ultimately understand I mean I think one of the differences might if he had been a queer writer, one of the ways that that might have played out differently was to sort of consider how much of that terminology was about queerness and how then important it was to keep it exactly that way. Yeah, whereas, I mean, you know, there's, there's a school of thought that you know the most important part of this whole translation is, you know, the reader the reader the reader they have to make sure that they, that they understand but there's also this. I think other school of thought which is, well you know you, you work together the reader and the writer and the translator you're all working together, and if you really want to get a flavor of what the writer is trying to say, you might just have to come over you might just have to surrender to not necessarily understanding this term in your own language but understanding it in terms of how it sounds in terms of how it feels in your mouth, in terms of, of, you know, the expression on your face after you say it, you know, like a lot of stuff in Spanish, especially in the Caribbean Spanish is in vowels.  And so you have to, that's part of it that's part of translation to. It's it's funny it's it's this old foreignization versus domesticization. Absolutely. But it's like, but it's like taking queerness as the foreign part, which is another sort of head trip like I don't do is queerness far I mean I think this whole debate is nonsense. Anyway, you know, but it's like, I don't know I was like well in terms of audience right I definitely as I was translating this book. I was definitely translating it with a queer audience in mind and I was expecting that they were going to have certain queer cultural touchstones and that was sort of a conscious decision on my part I'm very happy to translate for queer people and pay no attention to what the states are going to think about it. Absolutely. You know, but you know I that's that's sort of a luxury that that I have I think in some ways and is maybe not always that I don't know Polish queerness is also not a million miles removed from American queerness. Right, you know it's still in a in a European Western continuum. I mean, you know conditions under communism, when this book is set were very different. The specifics, the specific history is different the kind of cultural dynamics are different, but the overall points of reference, I think are more or less the same because you were still. There was still this history of thinking of homosexuality as illness there was still this history of like Freudian analyses there was still the whole like 19th century structural homophobic like intellectual edifice that was just as operative in Poland as it, as it was in the United States so I didn't feel like I was explaining anything that was all too alien. And for Latin America that all that you just said applies beautifully to the southern cone, where there's a session with Freudian psychology where there's, you know this very sort of cosmopolitan, you know, arrogance about, you know, the intellectual superiority blah blah blah blah connections to Europe and we're really not Latin America blah blah blah blah blah. And the rest of the continent for a variety of reasons.  So, and it's a history in which, you know, no one's ever apologized no one's ever taken responsibility for it. So it makes it makes it in a very strange way. So the whole country is vaguely obsessed with with homosexuality, and for example fears back the Cuban book Institute decided to put out its first ever anthology of a Cuban stories about gay people. Well, one of the things that just absolutely floored me was that the editors included a whole slew of stories by straight men. And I was like, excuse me. I just, I have just a little thing I want to talk about here. And they just didn't, they were like, no, no, no, no, everyone, you know, we all talk about it, you know, and of course, and I knew that, duh.  On the other hand, you have, you know, a lot of, you know, a lot in the on the continent you have a lot of very isolated queer people, you know, in rural areas in places in small towns. I mean, it, you know, a lot of Latin America is still very, very, very rural.  Yeah, absolutely.  Right. Who's he saying it to. So it's, it's, you know, it's a very, you know, the story really whatever the story is really sort of demands it's its own sort of rules and its own sort of approach because, again, so vast.  Yeah, the thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then are you conscious of how your translation into English sort of feeds back into the country today. Absolutely.  Yeah.   So yeah, you know you have to really make some important decisions along the way you know who's going to come to this book and why are they going to come to this book. And that was a really interesting question with a lot of Rita Indiana's work because she, she attracts a lot of people by virtue of being this very charismatic, you know, music rock star person that has nothing to do with literature but everybody who's queer right so she puts out a book oh my God I want to read it. You know, and yet, you know the book is based, and you know, all of her stuff eventually always goes back to the through your dictatorship in some way. And to, if not the dictatorship itself the inheritance from that dictatorship. So much of that. Do you. Do you have to backtrack to, to make people understand that this is a legacy that this is not. And that it's also not just her imagination that this is actually a real thing that happened this is actually a take off on history, not a take off on this wild crazy thing she thought up, you know, so it's those those are questions that are always sort of popping up and also because so much of course of the horrors of Latin America, regardless of how it's played out involves us intervention in some way and here we are feeding it back to American readers and so do you want to, how much do you want to implicate, you know, the reader in this and I mean, or educate you know there's a lot of play there I mean I know that there's the reader has its own demons, its own historical demons, or it does yeah I mean and it's interesting with in terms of Poland's queer history, I think, probably the single event that people are most aware of. In terms of queer history under communism was this big sort of secret police crackdown on gay people that happened in the 1980s, and that was called operation Hyacinth and the Polish secret police archives are are open now and they're one of the main sources for this book and the secret police were super interested in queer people, and part of what the book is about is how like queer life was kind of inadvertently extensively recorded by the secret police, you know, and so it turns out we know all about where people went and you know who they were and who knew who and so on and so on. So operation Hyacinth, the files have never been found. And so it's sort of stayed in and the rumor is that there were just huge amounts of material. So it was either, you know, the stuff is badly catalogued in the archive so maybe it's just been lost but maybe it was deliberately destroyed or something else going on, you know, so it's sort of a shadow in people's memory, but it was also around the period of solidarity, you know, in international terms it was around the period of the AIDS crisis so it's it's sort of like, it's sort of subsumed by these other things. One of the things I thought was wild translating this book speaking of dictatorships is that the secret police were interested in queer people mostly gay men admittedly, partly out of just this like usual thing about like homosexuality is a vice and sort of like prostitution and drug addiction and you have to stamp it out, you know, whatever else. But they also recognize the ways that queer people were building informal networks and informal institutions and informal communities to support one another. And they were afraid that those networks could be used as the framework for a political uprising at some point. It was sort of like this whole like underground infrastructure that under the wrong set of circumstances could be leveraged against the regime and of course in the totalitarian regime. Part of the point is that like all of society all of civil society all of these kinds of organizations all exist kind of within the framework of the party and end of the state. And so this was a framework that they didn't control.  And the government is convinced that it's that it's this political conspiracy that's trying to overthrow them and so they'll arrest people arbitrarily and interrogate them and torture them.  And yet queerness sort of demands that you step aside and apart I mean queerness demands that at some point you say okay I am different. Yeah.   And so that is inherently philosophically I think very very threatening. I think, you know, in terms of of Latin America there's a lot of that I think Cuba in particular is a is a very complicated place because pre revolution. Havana was a very sexually liberated wacko place.  And the thing about a brothel in that sense is that it isn't just heterosexual, you know, by definition, I mean you can do whatever and whatever.    And it wasn't that my uncle was particularly liberal, or particularly tolerant I mean I'm sure that if he were alive and unfortunately he would probably voted for Trump last time around you know just because you know Cubans do that in Miami. So reflex. But, but, but there were ways of being tolerant there were also, I think. And not defined as such but sort of like, hey, you know, that's hot. It's the Caribbean. We're all doing it and whatever you know, I mean trying not to let us did it with chickens for God's sake. You know, and with treat, you know, so I think it's, it's a different kind of mentality. Anyway, I think we're running out of time so I was going to try to read one short piece. Yeah, yeah, I was going to say we should definitely close with another. Yeah, and I'm going to read it in English and I'm going to read it in Spanish. It's very short. This is actually from a book of poetry that beacon is as publishing next year and it's my work. And one of the, one of the challenges here for me was trying to decide how to present the fact that I sort of exist in both these languages, and that sometimes the languages interact and sometimes they don't. And, and, and sometimes the poems are very queer and sometimes they're not, but this one absolutely is. It's called the public place, and it's actually inspired by a lesbian poet named Olga Brumas, whom I have loved for a very long time. Anyway, here we go, the public place. I have been watching her for a long time. I've been watching this woman the small frame on the grass in a public place. I've been watching the long dark hair fall like a web on her shoulders the neck, the fine slender arms the way she senses I'm here watching her. I am a spy. I am exploring mouth open, the hard ribs of her body, the hips hidden in denim, the creases the creases, the muscles that stretch under dark blue team patches so tight. My tongue the ship rising with the storm of each movement. I'm inside her. I'm watching inside her from behind the brown iris I'm spying. I do not know her. I am her lover. I do not touch her. She rises she stands in the grass in the public place she is barefoot soft feet on a custom to be so naked those feet. The white feet moving away from the grass the public place, the imprint of her of her still fresh on the grass the public place, taking the intersection against the light with a vengeance, a dare and her white steps she is barefoot. I am her lover. I'm the woman she goes to going home. Thank you. That was really wonderful. So, where are we? Esther, are you there? Yes. Thank you. All of you else and Esther welcome back. What fantastic bookends to your conversation. The two reading. Beautiful. Beautiful. That was a really nice interview. Thank you. conversation, the two reading. That's beautiful. Beautiful. That was a really nice interview. All right. Well, we have Liz, who would have been moderating. We will still manage to send in some questions. And I'm going to read the first part she has. The question is for Sean. I'm going to read the first part. I'm going to read the first part. In considering the translation of the feminine, of the feminized word anti in Polish translated as queer. They're wondering if you considered using the word queen, or if the word queen appears at all in your translation of this text.  I'm going to pause there and let you, if you want to respond to that first. Okay. Thank you. I sort of came across. Queen, maybe a little belatedly in my research process. And I think if I, if I'd started thinking about it earlier, maybe I might have considered it more strongly. I think queen.  And I think it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's like a stronger evocation of the atmosphere in the, in the United States. I, I'm trying to remember if I actually did use the word queen at any point. In the translation. I can't quite remember. But yeah, it's, I mean, it's, it's, it's a tricky problem. And I, you know, I'm very conscious that it's a, it's a, it's, it's a very difficult question. I'm trying to understand it in my own way. In my way. And I'm not even, I can't remember exactly, but I'm not sure that I can translate it. It consistently one way or the other. I tried to. When I'm trying, particularly when I'm translating character voices, I try to be led by the voice. I try to have sort of a crystallized idea in my head of what this person or a person like this sounds like in English. And I try to let that image lead me in my translation. I know I'm not in a good mood to get into the original text or so on, but I was trying to keep these characters really rooted in, you know, people that I knew, people that I knew about people, you know, real people who, who I felt were sort of who reminded me in real life of the people I was reading about in the book. All right, which for both actually, and Shawn brings us back to thinking about how we might impose or not US queer culture on texts from other literary traditions. And related I wonder about interrogating this notion of authenticity. What is possible or not when we're considering authentic queer slang across languages cultures and decades. Perhaps we should let go of notions of authenticity since creating translations of queer texts for a different cultural context in a different language creates its own sense of authentic authenticity. Wondering how this relates to fictional spanglish shachi, the X ending used in Spanish in the US versus nine but non binary E which you spoke of, and more generally how we use language in different ways in different contexts. Wow, that is a loaded question. The question of authenticity is really tricky. I think it's a, I think it's a trap, and yet I also think it's something that we really can't get away from, because I know that, you know, if, if something doesn't sound authentic, whatever that is, you know it and it takes you out of whatever it is you're doing, you know, I remember years ago reading a book that I'm not going to mention the title of. That was, it was not a translation it was a, it was a was written by an American and white woman who lived for many years in Mexico, and she was writing from the point of view of a Mexican character and I must have been 100 pages into the book and very delighted with how well it seemed she was doing with that I thought wow this this might be like a book to teach, because she obviously researched it so well. And then there came along this little scene in which a character a little girl pulls and you know has to pee desperately and she goes into an alley, and she pulls down her panties and to pee, but she, the author chooses to refer to her panties, and this is a word that's only ever used to mean boys briefs, and it threw me out of the story so dramatically. It was interesting because you know here she had spent years in Mexico, she'd done her research, she, you know had managed to really gather things, and the way that sounded real authentic, if you will. And yet this one tiny authentic in authentic moment. Absolutely blew up the whole book for me. So, you know, how much of it is something that I mean I think we we need. Yes, authenticity is important. No authenticity is not important. Because, ultimately, we also have to create languages for some of this stuff you know. When, when I translated Juno Diaz, there was so much invention involved in that.  I mean it's everywhere.  There is no such word in Spanish. What to do. You know, so we ended up I ended up coming up my reasoning being everybody in Latin America knows this word. Because everybody in Latin America goes to the movies. And when they go to the movies they watch American movies. So of course they know the word clock. And so I just spanglesized it I just made it fucking.  So this was invention. You know, it does that word actually exist in Spanish of course not. Not necessarily as ubiquitous as it appears in that particular text. Absolutely not. But it is true to the character that he was writing. You know, he uses that word that character so much so and to eliminate that word or to use the Spanish Spanish equivalent would have completely undermined. You know, his voice and I literally mean his voice not just meaning but his voice the rhythm, the sort of pounding the musicality the way I wanted to be real to that too. Because the thing about Juno as a writer is that he does that right he creates these soundscapes as much as he creates meaning and as much as he creates seen. I don't know if that answers you in any way with. I'm feeling good about that answer. I want to build on another question that Liz had asked in another context, where you both talked about the impact of US queer culture on your respective regions, Poland and Latin America. Liz was actually asking about the opposite as you translate Latin American texts for audiences in the US. Is there any sense in which that too can become an attempt to shape US queer culture through the impact of these other places and these other experiences. And has either of you seen it go in that direction as well. Well, I mean, do American readers actually in any way shape or form. Give a cultural dam about anybody else.  I don't know.  You can see from Cuba from the Dominican Republic from, you know, Uruguay, whatever. You know, it's important to reflect some of that. Do I think about how this might influence American culture in some way. No, I never think about it because because here's the thing. I think, like I was saying earlier, we're already so in Latin America we're already so drenched in American culture. We're already such a very complicated place I mean there's nothing authentic about Latin America in the sense that we're fused we're constantly fused. You know, the Italian influence is phenomenal in Argentina it's non existent in Cuba. You know the the indigenous presence in Mexico is, is amazing and an extraordinary and it's absolutely, you know, non existent in, you know, the Dominican Republic, in terms of popular culture right. You know, we're, we're so different and, and, and we're, we're such a mix of things already that it's very hard to talk about authenticity. I think it's, it's, it's a very problematic term you know it like I love when people try to talk to say about authentic Cuban cuisine what the hell is authentic Cuban cuisine.  So, um, I mean obviously I came from somewhere else you know I mean, you know, when, when we make to stone is, you know, that's not from there either, you know, I mean that came from Africa. You know, I, I, it, and the notions of, of who we are is also very perverse I mean I, the, the, here's an example that the Cuban capital building the capital building in Havana is the exact replica of the US capital building slightly smaller. Every Cuban on the planet will tell you ours came first. And historically, we know that's not true. And the whole explanation of it from the architects is that it's based on some French thing. I mean it's nuts. You know there are all these myths that we have about ourselves, in part because we're such a mix and we know very little about, you know, so much of the, of how we all got here or, or we don't want to talk about how we all got here because it involves rape and conquest. And it's funny that you mentioned the capital, it looks very different now because the Russians gilded the dome. Right away that resemblance. Pretty evocative, pretty evocative. And that adds a whole other thing, right. Oh, totally. I have four questions that have come in. Allison, do you want to. There's so far we have one short question and one rather long question so I'm going to go with the short one first in the hope of getting both of them in. This one is for Archie. How do you translate the food slang used in Spanish to refer to lesbians. That is very, very complicated. You know, I've only done that with poetry and so that gives me a whole lot more license to play. And also I keep a lot of it and in in Spanish, even though there might be English equivalents. You know, it.  It's a little bit longer. You know, and I think the orality, the oral aspect of language, the food and sex stuff and especially in the Caribbean. It's really tough, but it's also really fun. I think you can, you can use a lot of food terminology I think a lot of the. Like I said, I think a lot of the ingredients necessarily stay in Spanish for me, not because they're necessarily specifically understandable words, but because sound wise. It's more sense. You know, that I mean, I'm sorry, but subversive just is not the same as one that one. One that one sexy. So here's another question this one is from Jeffrey angles who was one of our conversationalist last week. And who translates and writes in Japanese. His question is Carol Dinshaw has pointed out the one of the reasons that we gay people translate is because we're reacting to the paucity of the archive of information about gay lives in the past, trying to mobilize more resources for our own personal well being and our fight against compulsory heteronormativity in choosing text for translation how much do you take these thoughts into consideration. To what degree are you consciously trying to heal yourself or the field of queer literature by trying to overcome the historical suppression of queer work. Great question. Yeah, I mean that was something I thought about very concretely with with this book, especially because it's nonfiction it is a historical book. And I'm not, I am not a queer historian but I'm also not mega aware of history books in English about pre Stonewall life behind the iron curtain. And so I felt like there was a gap and it was something that people would be interested in reading about regardless of whether they're interested in Poland. I mean, I, as far as choosing texts, I always say to people I don't choose the text the publisher chooses the texts, ultimately, you know, and, and I think with queer literature there's another dynamic which is that the amount of queer literature that's being produced in a given country is not you know it's not the same everywhere it's very dependent on what the political situation is in that country. Poland for a place that's pretty homophobic is do it does okay in terms of producing queer literature but it's not as though they're swimming in it, you know, and it's something that I'm always on the lookout for you know it's I try to pitch around but whether people are going to be interested over here or not I was very lucky that you know open letter was interested in publishing this book and it is something that I hope you know historians will get their hands on, as well as just ordinary readers. But I do in terms of my own healing that part I'm not I'm not so sure about at least not in the context of this book.   I never think about the notion of healing through any of this stuff in part because I that presumes a condition that I don't embrace. And, and I, I am a big reader of history and a big lover of history and I, if I had life to do over again I think one of the things I would probably do is skip journalism and study history. I'm always drawn to it and, and my, my, my own personal work is always filled with historical stuff I'm always, especially the little weird stuff in history the the stuff that you, you know, that's always sort of fascinating. But, um, I think. I mean, I'm with Sean I mean usually the publisher chooses. Sometimes I very much want to do something I very much wanted to do and I will see us. I don't see Portela's work 100 bottles on the wall, which we ended up calling just 100 bottles I, I, I very much, you know, through that at the University of Texas and, you know, I thought it was a brilliant not just around issues of queerness but also in terms of sex in general and in terms of the Cuban Revolution and in terms of how people operate when they're in isolation and they're trapped and they're crowded and it's also very funny, very sad and tender book it's also very violent in some ways. And, you know, I, I'm drawn to the story. I'm drawn to language I'm drawn to, to how writers convey particular things, you know, I mean there's some writers who I think may have more interesting historical work to offer. But if the story itself doesn't rock me, if the language doesn't grab me and I tend to be less interested, you know, you know, right now if I if I had a choice of projects. I'm not the right translator for it but if I had a choice of projects I would, I would really want to do Carolina de Robertis cantoras, which is actually an English novel. But it's a, it's a, it's written in English, but it's about Uruguayan dykes, it takes place in Uruguay. She's Uruguayan, she wrote it about a time under dictatorship where these women had to create their own lives and figure out who they were in all these different ways. And it's a brave book. But I don't know Uruguayan Spanish, well enough to really pull it off. And it needs a translator who, who will love it in, in, you know, in, in its natural tongue, you know, but I mean, what an amazing book. And I wish in terms of queer literature right now that book just sings to me in all these very important ways. Maybe it will find its translator because maybe somebody out there in Europe.  We are out of time. This was amazing. Thank you so much. Thank you for putting it together. Lastly, we'd like to thank our partners again how round Penn America, the Center for the Humanities at the Graduate Center CUNY, the Coleman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, and the Martin E. Segal Theater Center. Thank you. We hope to see you next week. Bye.