Acephalous

Pun Not Not Not Intended

Revising the draft of my chapter on Twain and fingerprints, it dawns on me that my favorite idiom, on the one hand ... on the other hand, reads like awful pun.  ("On the one hand, if the locus of racial distinctiveness is identified on the fingertips ... on the other hand, if it is in the palm that ...")  Worse still, the frequency of its appearance makes me seem like the belligerent comic, convinced his audience didn't get the joke, who then repeats unsubtle variations of it the rest of the evening. 

But I can't come up with anything better.  Seeing how I've tried to help you out before, maybe you could return the favor? 

I Don't Understand Second Life

Or maybe I understand it all too well.  When something terrible happens, a small part of me—both in the mental age it represents and its proportion relative to my overall response—wishes Superman were real.  Ongoing humanitarian crises in Myanmar?  Load Kent like a pack mule and send him in.  Thousands of Chinese slowly suffocating in rubble?  Have the Man of Steel put his X-ray vision to good use.  Who doesn't harbor the childish desire to live in a world where the laws of physics can be violated in the interests of justice? 

Especially when you read an article like this:

According to Zeke Poutine, officer in the "Not on Our Watch" Darfur activist group, [a vandal] shouted racial slurs while he trashed [Camp Darfur]. The Camp was rebuilt, but copycat attacks by others followed.

But if Camp Darfur has its janjaweed, it has its guardians, too. For shortly after the raids began, a Better World visitor who’d learned a lot about Sudan’s genocide from the Camp called a group of his to the island, to offer their protection.

Because the Camp exists not in our world, but in Second Life, the group that came to the aid of the refugees looks like this:

Math for English Majors

In the University of California system, your Spring Quarter fees cover you through the summer.  The fees cover health insurance.  The second I file my dissertation I'm no longer a graduate student and lose my health insurance.  So I can:

1. File in June, be done with the dissertation, but have no health insurance.
2. Finish the dissertation by June, file in September, and spend the summer insured.

I'm working with the math here, but it consists entirely of numbers.  Suggestions?

MAN-BOOKS FOR MAN-MEN!

WHO WANTS TO BE A MAN?  YOU DO!  SO READ THESE BOOKS THEY ARE MANLY!  BUT HOW WILL THEY MAKE YOU MORE MANLY?

I WILL TELL YOU!

THIS ONE WILL CHALLENGE YOU ON MANY LEVELS AND WORK YOUR BACK AND BICEPS!  THIS ONE IS MARKED BY EXTREME VIOLENCE AND CONTAINS MANY RELIGIOUS REFERENCES!  IN THIS ONE THE AUTHOR IS JUST THERE!  YOU WILL BE TOO!  THIS ONE WILL BE RELEASED AS A FILM NEXT YEAR AND IT WILL MAKE MONEY!  MONEY IS MANLY READ IT READ IT READ IT!

Internalizing Other's Marms May Be Hazardous To Your Health

Consider the following sentence from George Levine's Darwin Loves You:

"Who," asks Max Weber, "who—aside from certain big children who are indeed found in the natural sciences—still believes that the findings of astronomy, biology, physics, or chemistry could teach us anything about the meaning of the world?" (33).

It summoned my Inner Soltan.*  Did Weber really write:

Who who—aside from certain big children ...

Of course he didn't.  But I'll be damned if that second "who" didn't trip my alarms.  Why?  Because it doesn't exist!  Levine has committed academic fraud!  He inserted into the sentence a word which did not appear in the original!  I know what you're thinking: "Scott, he did it for the sake of elegance."  I agree.  The correct version is ugly:

"Who," asks Max Weber, "[w]ho—aside from certain big children ... "

But it has the benefit of being correct.  The incorrect version is merely superior prose and that's something for with up which I'll never stand put.

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*I recommend an Inner Soltan to anyone in a field in which the deportment of words is important.  It pre-analyzes your prose and suggests the revisions required to keep the actual Soltan at bay.  Very handy. 

Philosophers Are Useless

Dear Dr. Hegel,

I'm finishing a screenplay and the other people in my class don't think it's funny enough.  One of them said it seems like I took you for my model and recommended I contact you for suggestions about how I can punch it up.  What do you think is funny?

—The Bringer Of Funny

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Dear The Bringer Of Funny,

Comedy is concrete instantiation of the Unhappy Consciousness in the universal tragedy of History.  The truth of Comedy is that all great big essential fixtures that stand over against self-consciousness are really products of, and at the mercy of, self-consciousness. 

Comedy has, therefore, above all, the aspect that actual self-consciousness exhibits as the fate of the gods.  These elementary Beings are, as universal moments, not a Self and are not equal.  They are, it is true, endowed with the form of Individuality, but it is only in Imagination and does not really truly belong to them.  They are entangled in actual existence merely through the pretensions of the Self. 

When the gods deem it necessary to alter the identities, for example, of children in possession of similar gaits and countenances, such that the mistake of their mothers is codified by the mechanism of Law, the immanent dialectic of the Self is evident in the mutual recognition of the Self in the Other.  They, the children, each observe in their counterpart the fundament of Self which they have taken as their own.  Their mistake is the essence of Comedy.

P.S.  Concerning the most appropriate mode of representing situations pregnant with conflict—the final result of the issuing from the entirety of the interthreading and conflicting skein of human life, movement, and accomplishment—it is asserted and maintained that flatulence never fails to work out tranquil resolution.

How Professional Literary Critics Address Ambiguity in a Text (with Visual Aids)

My current problem is deciding which of the two conclusions I've written I'm going to append to the Pudd'nhead Wilson chapter.  I don't mean "conclusions" as in "concluding paragraphs," either.  I mean "conclusions" as in "what I think Twain is up to in the final chapter vis-a-vis race and American culture."  On Tuesday, I found a pessimism tinged with commonplace racism more convincing.  This morning, I'm inclined to consider his racism idiosyncratic and profound.   To aid others who may be in a similar plight, I thought I might diagram my pain for general amusement edification.

Coming to a conclusion in an academic essay is very much like looking at the red square pictured below.  Stare at it until it pops:

Now focus on the other red square until it does:

Then first again:

And the second:

Now both simultaneously:

Until it turns into one of these things:

This would be your argument.  It is unique and critical and it is genius.  Your timely interrogation of "box" will not go unnoticed.  The market rewards incisive interventions and yours will be no exception. 

Please Direct Your Eyes to Our Quality Website

We really need the ad revenue.

(What?  The only alternative is that the BBC decided to fire its editors overnight.  Can you think of another scenario in which that slips through?)

RE: RE: Iron Man

Since this isn't an Iron Man blog, I'll restrict my continued kvetching to the comments over here. 

RE: Iron Man

Now I want to see a film in which:

1. Robert Downey Jr. has lines.
2. Black people aren't tools.
3. Women aren't secretaries.

I forgive comics more than their fair share of trespasses, but when the best moment in a film consists of post-rehab Robert Downey Jr. addressing a bartender,* someone's misspent $150 million.

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*"A scotch please, I'm starving."

Quick Note to Former and Future Female Students

If you spy me from the feminine hygiene aisle, refrain from hailing if you'd rather not interpellate me that way. 

I'm just saying.*

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*With permission, of course.

Because I'm All Out of Clever Titles, I Christen Thee "History & Literature"

Eric and Ari's discussions about how to best incorporate literature into history classroom inverts the problem I face when designing a syllabus: "How do I demonstrate the significance of a novel outside the context in which it acquired its importance?"*  I feel compelled to contextualize for reasons best understood by the example of Huck Finn.  Consider Huck's classic epiphany in Chapter XXXI.  He's written a note informing Miss Watson where she can find her runaway slave, only to

get to thinking over our trip down the river; and I see Jim before me, all the time, in the day, and in the night-time, sometimes moonlight, sometimes storms, and we a floating along, talking, and singing, and laughing. But somehow I couldn't seem to strike no places to harden me against him, but only the other kind. I'd see him standing my watch on top of his'n, stead of calling me, so I could go on sleeping; and see him how glad he was when I come back out of the fog; and when I come to him again in the swamp, up there where the feud was; and such-like times; and would always call me honey, and pet me, and do everything he could think of for me, and how good he always was; and at last I struck the time I saved him by telling the men we had smallpox aboard, and he was so grateful, and said I was the best friend old Jim ever had in the world, and the only one he's got now; and then I happened to look around, and see that paper.

It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a trembling, because I'd got to decide, for ever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself:

"All right, then, I'll go to hell"—and tore it up.

The reader's annoyance with Huck dissipates because Twain allows them to participate in his recognition of shared humanity.  Twain yokes together those clauses with semi-colons, crafting a sentence like a cartoon snowball on a mountaintop.  With a gentle nudge, he tips it down the mountainside, and minutes later everyone cheers as two stories of packed snow smashes into prevailing wisdom.   

Students cry when they read this passage.  They talk of Huck's heroism in voices trembling with patriotic pride:

"How brave!  For this boy to forsake the only moral order he has known!  'And a child shall lead them!'  How brave of Twain to condemn the South in this manner!" 

I allow them to talk in this vein for a couple of minutes, then ask them to open their book to the title page and read what it says below the title:

Then I ask them when it was published.  They don't know what to make of any of it.

"It was written twenty years after the end of the Civil War," I say.

Blank stares.

"That means slavery had been abolished two decades earlier."

Blank stares.

"How brave would it be to condemn Hitler now?"

Little bulbs appear above a few heads.

"How brave would it have been to condemn slavery after it had been abolished?"

Now they get it. 

How a work relates to the historical moment it represents is crucial interpreting its meaning.  Huck Finn would've been a different novel had it been written in 1844.  It would've been the braver novel the students ardently desire it to be.  It would be another novel still were it written in 2004, especially if it kept the conceit of having been written in 1884 about events that took place in 1844.  The question I would pose to Ari and Eric—the one I fumbled here—would be whether they're more concerned with how a work represents or embodies the ethos of a particular historical moment.   

The Killer Angels says more about what people thought about Gettysburg in 1975 than the battle itself: its representation of the battle tells us about what passed for realism in the 1970s, i.e. how the grit of 19th Century American English was presented, how much of the ubiquitous grime of 19th Century America was preserved, &c.  [Edited because it'd been a long, long day.]

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*Table questions about The Great Western Canon for the moment.

If a Maine Coon Could Write a Dissertation, Evidence Suggests He Would Do So in Russian

From my Twain chapter:

êéèêéèęŗřśŝşşşşşşşşşşşşşşşşşš ōõôğĝĝĝĝĝĝĝĝĝĝĝĝĝĝġ ььььььььььęŗřś ğĝōõôôôôôôôôôôôôôôô

What is he trying to tell me, Mikhail? 

Concerning the Fine Line Between Literary Criticism and Rank Paranoia

It's not so fine.  Bad readings often resemble paranoid ravings because the critic draws specious connections between irrelevant topics.  Ninety-two percent of Pynchon criticism never escapes the paranoid orbit of his novels for a reason.  When you inform someone his analogy borders on criminal infelicity—e.g. the presence of shoes in the novels of Jane Austen and Kathy Acker represents an irrational fear of hormiga brava and thus constitutes an implicit indictment of European imperialism—the ideal response would be a frank acknowledgment by this person that the intensity of his research may have skewed his perspective. 

"I have read too closely," he should admit.  "I sound like a belligerent wino."

Under no circumstances should he declare his professional credentials authorize the paranoid ravings of a belligerent wino.  Which brings us to the case of Priya Venkatesan.  Those who seek background or a serious discussion of Venkatesan should consult Margaret Soltan and Timothy Burke.  I simply want to register my disgust with her pedagogical and interpretive skills.  From her interview with The Dartmouth Review:

TDR: There is one specific incident where I heard from one of the girls in your class who was pretty outspoken, and one day she hadn’t spoken for a while and you said, “Could we have a round of applause for this girl, she hasn’t spoken in ten minutes?”

PV: She was probably the most abrasive, the most offensive, the most disruptive student. She ruined that class. She ruined it. She ruined it. That class actually had a lot of potential, there were some really bright kids there, but every time she would do a number of things that were very inappropriate.  [...]  Then what happened was, I was lecturing on morals and ethics and she just gave me this horrible look, and I was pretty disturbed. I just said what is going on here? The problem with [girl x] is that she can’t take criticism. She can’t take the fact that there is something wrong with her work. Now, some people are like that, a lot of people are like that, unable to take criticism, but the fact of the matter is that I have the PhD in literature, I make the assessment if someone has talent for philosophy, literary theory, and literary criticism. A student might say, well, the hell with you I’m still going to become a literary critic, I had to do that, there were people who criticized me while I was a student, you’re not a good writer or whatever, but I said well I’m still going to go ahead with my goals, but I never made any personal attacks on them or made life difficult for them or was rude to them. I just did the socially acceptable way of dealing with criticism, and [girl x] is the kind of student who does not know the socially acceptable way of dealing with criticism. She thinks the way to go about doing it is to go to my superior or to try to undermine my ability to teach the class. One of the things that she did, this is also really interesting, was that she would always ask me how to spell things. That was her thing. She would say how to do you spell this? How to you spell that? I mean—what am I supposed to do?—so I would tell her. One time Tom Cormen [Chairman of Dartmouth's Writing Program] was sitting in the class, and she asked me, how many T’s are in Gattaca. This was the kind of question she was asking, “how many T’s are in Gattaca?,” and I was about to answer her and Tom Cormen pre-empted me, “two t’s.” I’ll leave you to interpret it.

TDR: No.  No, I don’t understand that.

PV: I have to tell you: it means tenure track.

TDR: Oh, okay.

PV: Because I wasn’t tenured track.

TDR: Oh, okay, yes.

PV: They were trying to intimate that I wasn’t ready for tenure track.

TDR: Yes, okay, I didn’t realize that’s what that meant.

PV: I’m kind of making this leap because this is the kind of subversiveness that was going on in that environment. That [girl x] would ask how many t’s are in Gattaca and that Tom Cormen would respond, “two T’s” as if I had no grasp on tenure track.  But with [girl x], something’s going on with her. I’m not a doctor, but she’s not all there.

First, encouraging the class to applaud a student's silence is appalling.  That the students later applauded when one of their number challenged her claim about the benefit of Enlightenment science for women is not, as she would have it, a sign of unconscious racism, but an indication that they'd been paying attention.  She created a classroom in which the silencing of certain opinions demanded applause, and only complained when her silencing brought down the house. 

Second, the interpretation of Cormen's direct response to the [girl x]'s direct question is a masterpiece of irrationality.  For it to work as a reading one must believe the student knew "TT" refers to "tenure-track," otherwise Venkatesan had no cause to list it among the further annoyances of "[girl x]."  The odds that a freshman knows what the abbreviation "TT" means are long.  The odds that [girl x] intended to provoke Cormen's response are longer.  The odds that Cormen responded to [girl x] with a wink and a nudge are longer still. 

The only way Venkatesan's reading might obtain would be if "Gattaca" were spelled "Gataca" and Cormen had just presided over Venkatesan's review.    Then I might buy it. 

That said, I'll close with a bit of advice for The Dartmouth Review.  Publishing unedited interview transcripts to make her sound more unsettled?  Not cool.  Everyone sounds like a lunatic when their speech is transcribed directly.  Just ask Errol Morris.   

I Seem To Be Out Words

I've acquired a bad new.  As bad habits go, I don't doubt there are.  But the problem isn't that I'm leaving out words, but that I'm dropping the most ones.  The ones the entire sentence relies to be meaningful.  Initially, I thought I could stem early onset senility with a judicious application of.  Now, it seems I'm destined to drop a phrase and a word there.  Whole sentence units. 

What galls me is that they disappear multiple drafts.  I read my aloud.  I should catch these.  Yet here they are in what I purport to be my final.  These drafts are.  I've months polishing them.  There's reason for dropped words.  What is on here?  It's like my brain is fixing to.

I can't anymore!

What Is "Gainfully Employed," Alex?

Yesterday Broke My Brain

Otherwise I would've posted something sooner.  There's no way people can think like that.  It's blogging as inducement to intellectual stasis.  It's jogging across the country on a treadmill while watching CNN then showing friends pictures of landmarks downloaded from Flickr. 

It has all the trappings of thought without, you know, any actual thinking. 

Then again, what do I know?  I only get about 1/250^th of Glenn Reynolds' traffic.  As we all know, on the Internet hits are like money, and ...

IT WOULD HAVE ENDED SOONER were it not for big government supporters advocating intervention: "And thus began an era of unfettered white supremacy in Louisiana."

Heh?  Indeed!

MORE: Reader Bing Smith emails:

I attended the Midvale School for the Deceptively Unreflective.  The weather there is pleasant in the springtime.  I like cookies and am also a fan of butter.

MORE MANUFACTURED CONTROVERSY: "'This is just a great opportunity for me to witness,' he said, referring to his message and his Christian belief."  This is what happens to the "tolerance" of the left when a Christian is involved.

RUMBLE ABOUT THE JUNGLE: "And because I think the situation was symptomatic of ongoing problems within the feminist movement, and ended up as a textbook example of how we talk past each other and white feminists just miss the point."  Only the white ones do?

MORE: Reader Jim Bunch emails:

If you read the comments you'll see the blacks and browns miss just as many points as the whites.  Point-missing seems to be the norm over there, if you know what I mean.

EVEN MORE: Reader Randolph Cromwell adds:

White, black, brown, blue, purple.  Who cares?  All these women talking about points makes me horny. 

MORE STILL:  Jonah Goldberg points out:

Scholars untainted by the fascism of liberal bias have long argued that the feminist need to "stick it to the man" represents nothing more complex than penis envy.  I'm not sure I'd agree.  In my experience, women would like you to believe they want dicks when, in fact, they really want a deep and tender dicking.  Damn it, Glenn, now I'm horny too.

Indeed.

THE CLASSICS ARE CLASSICS FOR A REASON: "The basic premise of both colonialism in Africa and contemporary development rhetoric was and is that modern society must be created out of the void, a worldview in which tribal society is not an alternative."  It will be if a Democrat wins in November. 

"THE ONLINE PHOTO-SHARING SERVICE FLICKR makes claims to a particular kind of public rhetoric by using the trope of the 'photostream' to establish some of the norms of the user community."  Heh.  I use it to share pictures of my car. 

EUROPE'S PRIME EXAMPLE OF A POSTMODERN PHILOSOPHER: "In his free time, Žižek likes to surf the internet for child pornography and teach his small son how to pull the legs off spiders."  Indeed.

Post Like Glenn Reynolds Day

I hereby declare Monday, April 28th to be Post Like Glenn Reynolds Day.  Why would I inflict such horrors upon you?  Why would I force myself and encourage others to condense everything into a single sentence and a judgmental exhalation? 

1. Laziness.
2. Lack of time to read people I dearly love to read.
3. Profound wonder what happens to thought when you carve it up like that. 

I'm serious about the third reason up there.  I don't think disjointedly.  Digressiveness is a disease, certainly, but my digressions tend to epic irrelevance.*  I never stop thinking about something seconds after I've started.  Granted, my conclusions range from the painfully obvious to the shockingly mundane more often than not, but my stupidity is hard-scrabbled. 

Tomorrow I'll discover whether Glenn Reynolds has found an easier path to rank folly.  The results should speak for themselves.  The rules are simple:

1. Posts must consist of no more than three sentences.
2. The first and second sentences must be descriptive. 
3. Their should approximate what the willfully naive mistake for objectivity.
4. The topic should be indicated
5. The third sentence must be evasively judgmental and no longer than two words. 
6. These words must ooze pomposity even if they consist of nothing more intellectual than the ambiguous grunt of a sheepish atavism.

Should any of you care to inflict my experiment upon yourself, send me a line and I'll collect your dread menagerie in a post tomorrow evening.

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*Does the Wharton chapter really benefit from a prolonged discussion of John Payne Collier’s 1835 New Facts Regarding the Life of Shakespeare in a Letter to Thomas Amyot, Esq. F.R.S. Treasurer of the Society of Antiquaries? 

A Silly, Oversimplified Theory of Mind for You to Challenge and Me to Refine

I think other people think processively.  Today I learned most other people don't.  They neither think processively themselves nor do they think other people think processively.   What do I mean? 

The Short Version

You are more knowledgeable today than you were yesterday.  I'm not characterizing the knowledge you've acquired as academic.  You might only know more about the North Ryoshima Coast in Okami.  That counts.  No matter how hard you try to learn nothing, you acquire more knowledge every day.  You have a view of the world modified by the circumstances you encounter in it.   

If you think X about politics and then watch CNN, Blitzer will confirm or deny the validity of X.  Even though Blitzer confirmed or denied X yesterday, and even though the khokhem will continue to confirm or deny X indefinitely, every independent confirmation or denial strengthens your belief in X.  Your feelings about X have changed with the acquisition of new knowledge. 

Happens every day.  So when you write about someone else's ideas it only makes sense to treat them developmentally.  To wit: "He believed Y on the morning of 2 January 1900, but that afternoon read a book about Z which modified his feelings about Y.  Thus when he awoke on 3 January 1900 his belief is best characterized as Y + Z."   Every day brings new modifications.

Note that I write "modifications."  I'm not claiming we'll all be smarter tomorrow for having lived today.  The knowledge we acquired might have made us dumber by lending further credence to confirmation biases.  (Tell a person the media covered a Bush initiative unkindly and they'll glower at Brian Williams for a night.  Teach them to ignore evidence and they'll howl against the MSM for a lifetime.)  Our knowledge develops without necessarily progressing. 

This is why professors cringe when you say you read their article and point you to the revised version of it in their book.  Or when you say you read their book they cringe and point you to their latest article. 

Yet we commonly encounter and produce statements which deny this basic fact.  We read that so-and-so thought such-and-such and write about this another so-and-so who thinks his predecessor disowned such-and-such and embraced this-and-that. 

We ignore lived perturbating in favor of artificial pat. 

This is my implicit theory of mind.  It's why every one of my chapters tells the story of a confused person who figured it out only to lose it in the subsequent tumult. 

I sing of surety and its inevitable failure.

The Long Version

It involves Darwin and Lamarck and Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior and as the above strongly witnesses I lack the wit to tackle heady matters today.  I'll try again yesterday.   (When I will have been smarter.) 

Interview with a Candidate for Many Jobs (but Winner of None)

SEK:  Thanks for agreeing to this despite it being such a stupid idea.

ANON:  It's on your blog.  They'll know it's you.

SEK:  Except I'm not on the market this year.  I'm sure you'll reveal yourself unwittingly somehow and end up on the streets.

ANON:  Giving handjobs for crack?

SEK:  If you must. 

ANON:  I must.  So what do you think your readers want to know about failure?

SEK:  How to avoid it.

ANON:  Don't go to grad school.

SEK:  Granted. 

ANON:  Because once you're in you're doomed.

SEK:  Granted.  But I think people would be more interested in the particular failures they ought to avoid.

ANON:  Complete with revealing details?

SEK:  They will be curious.

ANON:  I would be too.  But I'm not into gratification.

SEK:  We've been trained.  I hear a bell and look for a lever.

ANON:  So should we riff behaviorist or tell the people what they want to know? 

SEK:  The latter.

ANON:  We should start by having you ask me a probing question.

SEK:  If you had once piece of advice for people about to hit the market what would it be?

ANON:  Perspective.  Never travel without spare perspective.  For me it came from reading Junot Díaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.  Not the book, which I started when I was next to death with pneumonia, and put down immediately upon recovery to continue reading journals relevant to my field.  It's the quotation that opens it:  "Of what import are brief, nameless lives ... to Galactus??"

SEK:  So your advice to candidates is to take consolation in the fact that the entire planet isn't being devoured by The Eater of Worlds?

ANON:  The alternative requires an absurd calculus of merit and need that no human will be able to fathom short of the Singularity. 

SEK:  I'm not sure how follow Galactus.

ANON:  You can't.  That's why he's King of Perspective-Bringing.

Love In An Elevator

Nick Paumgarten's piece on elevators and the dull peril of being trapped in them stops just short of literary journalistic brilliance.  Not that there's anything wrong with the article per se.  It just fails to capture the existential horror of elevator entrapment.  How would I know?

Glad you asked.

Three years ago, I spent the better part of an hour trapped in an elevator.  I'd rushed to the Humanities Instructional Building to make some copies before an 8 a.m. class and so instead of bounding up four flights of stairs I chose to take the elevator.*  The elevators in HIB have a hitch.  They overshoot every floor by about an inch and then ... hang ... there ... for a few beats before settling down.  You get used to it.  So I pressed the button, flew up four stories and was hanging there for a few beats ... and then a few more ... and then a few more ... and so with great annoyance (feigned ostentatiously for a nonexistent audience) I pressed the "Door Open" button.

But nothing happened.

Then I tried to go to the second floor and pressed the button and it lit up.

But nothing happened.

So I hit the button with the fire and the ax on it.  The one that requires a key to work.  Because maybe if they knew someone was fucking with important buttons in the elevator they would send someone to reprimand them. 

But nothing happened. 

At this point I was about five minutes into my own hanging.  The damn thing wouldn't settle and so I panicked.  I started pacing frantically and I checked my watch and I knew I would be late for class because you know and why am I still hanging inches above my point of egress but then wait a minute I'm an inch from the floor I want to be on but am in fact floating in an elevator shaft four stories up with a two-thousand pound counterweight aimed at my head and maybe I ought to take a breath or two and consider the seriousness of my predicament and so with great consideration I jumped in the air and slammed my feet into the floor.

I stomped and stomped thinking that I might loosen what normally unhitched and allowed the elevator to settle.  Twenty minutes later I stopped.  I figured the noise I'd made would alert someone that something was wrong with the elevators. 

It didn't. 

I resigned myself to skipping class on account of having the best of all possible excuses shortly after dismissing the possibility that there's only so much air in an elevator and there was no chance I'd suffocate and that the worse case scenario was that I'd drink my water and eat my granola bar and have to evacuate savagely into or onto an improvised something but despite the calm I convinced myself I felt it dawned on me that I was breathless and hyperventilating and that if this fucking elevator didn't fucking settle in the next fucking minute I'd fucking fuck decorum and press these useless fucking buttons like a rat with an orgasm-lever because I wasn't about to die in an elevator and then for no reason I could discern the damn thing settled.

With a pleasant ding. 

The doors opened and five or six very annoyed people were looking at me.  Seems they'd been waiting for the elevator.  I like to imagine I snarled menacingly upon egress but I have a feeling my face registered my inchoate insanity. 

I'd been trapped in the elevator for a little more than an hour all told but if you'd asked me then I'd just harrowed hell.  Paumgarten's article doesn't quite articulate the sheer horror of being stuck in an elevator, which is less like a litigious inconvenience than an existentialist nightmare.

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*I'm not that lazy.  Check out this picture of HIB and imagine having to run from one side of it to the other to reach each staircase.  The elevator goes up.  The staircases crisscross the building in a beautiful but  maximally inconvenient manner.

The Spoils Of Empire Are Not Tax-Deductible

The phrasing is a wee misleading.   The settlement's neither on behalf of nor against the Ottoman Empire.  The culprit is the insurance company New York Life, but its legal and press teams thought it best to name the settlement after the Ottomans.  New York Life merely refused to disburse life-insurance payments to the families of the 2,400 NYL policy-holders killed in the Armenian Genocide. 

Who would want to claim "New York Life Insists It Need Not Honor Policies Purchased By The Victims Of Genocide Settlement Payments" when they could appear imperial?  Certainly not this California tax-payer.

I Need Help

There won't be a hair left on my head (or an unfrayed nerve in it) if I can't figure this out:

In which famous slave-narrative is a fugitive slave passing as a white woman discovered by dint of the calluses on her hands? 

I've looked through my collections of slave-narratives and scoured Google Books, Project Gutenberg, JSTOR, &c. and turned up nothing.  As you might imagine, the reference links to recent talk of heredity and fingerprints:

1. Did people believe calluses, or the propensity for developing useful ones, a  heritable trait?
2. Did they, following Galton, think fingerprints could be "obliterated" by calluses?

The forgotten slave-narrative connects these questions to larger issues of race and passing in Pudd'nhead Wilson.  It's been the linchpin of this section of the Twain chapter since I first outlined it.  Only now I can't remember which one it is and will no doubt deprive myself of sleep until I do. 

For The Record: I normally resist the urge to ask for help by soldiering through deep waters alone.  But I'm so frustrated now I can't even keep my metaphors strait.  Or my homonyms.  Plus my mistakes all reference drowning.  It's not like last Tuesday when I spent four hours utterly incapable of remembering anything about Randolph Bourne except he was disabled and died young.  That passed.  This won't.