Acephalous

If I'd had some foresight, I would've charged each of you a penny per visit.

Because then I'd have a million pennies.  This tiny academic blog managed to sucker 1,000,000 pairs of eyes to stare at it for (on average) 1 minute and 45 seconds a pop.  That is some kind of accomplishment.  I mean that literally: I don't know what kind of an accomplishment it is.  But I do know that I never had to stoop to the shameless tactics of relentless self-promotion espoused by hacks who want to draw attention to themselves despite having nothing to say.  (Not that I have that much to say: I've merely been saying nothing regularly for awhile now.)

Recipes from the Headless Chef: Chorizo Cilantro Chili

The one thing even long term readers might not know about me is that 1) I do all the cooking and 2) am quite good at it (if I do say so myself).  (And I do.)  I am not, however, good with following recipes or remembering how I improvise on them.  In order to preserve how I prepared meals worth making again, I'm going to share them with you.  They're largely variations on recipes from the only cookbook that's also an education: The Professional Chef by the Culinary Institute of America.  It weighs in at 7.8 lbs. and is every bit the beast an almost eight-pound book should be.  In it you learn what equipment to buy (one good chef's knife can replace an assortment of space-cluttering gadgets); how to use that equipment in the most effective way possible (the time people spend cooking can be cut in half by the knowledge of how to cut an onion); how particular flavors are produced (both in terms of spicing and preparing dishes); how certain textures are achieved (especially important in soups and with meats); and I could go on but you see my point: this is the book to purchase should you want to learn how to cook.  I'm going share recipes in its spirit: not only will I tell you what to do, I'll also explain why I'm doing it.

In that moment, I knew I'd be accused of sexual harassment again.

Two of the "acquire an alternative skill set with real world application" assignments that we teach in composition are 1) how to build and manage a wiki and 2) how to compose a PowerPoint presentation that doesn't cause your audience to slit your throat or their wrists.  I combine them into a single assignment in which students choose the text they found most compelling, develop a wiki based upon its rhetorical situation (author/auteur, historical context, themes, signature features, symbols and motifs, etc.) and then share their results with the class.  On Tuesday, I stressed that their presentation must not consist of reading their wiki aloud (by virtue of emphasizing the difference in media, e.g. "How do you speak a link?") and we discussed strategies they can employ to prevent us from mass-suiciding on Thursday.

Yesterday, midway through an already engaging presentation, one of my students paused during her discussion of the contextual allusions present in her text. 

"Also," she said as she made to forward her presentation, "I think there's an allusion to tentacle porn."

The class gasped. 

Her mouse clicked.

I sat mute.  Horrified into silence.

Time dilated as we approached the horizon of this career-ending event.  I held that diphthong in "Wait!" so long it slid into a schwa.

Her mouse clicked again. 

The screen brightened and . . .

Tea-V-Parties

It must have been difficult to be a conservative last night. On the one hand, you threw your muscle behind your perfect candidate and he lost a district which last went Democratic back before the Half-Breeds and the Stalwarts fought for control of the GOP; on the other, you got a television show made especially for you! The remake of V is an exercise in allegorical drift-correction: the original series was supposed to be based on Sinclair Lewis's novel about creeping government fascism, which was itself an allegory about demagogic dangers posed by the likes of Huey Long and Father Coughlin, who were themselves perceived to be homegrown Hitlers, but then Star Wars happened and the network demanded Space Nazis, so the fascists became lizards and, instead of wanting to rule America, they wanted to eat Americans, meaning they cured diseases for the same altruistic reasons we pump cattle full of antibiotics. That, as they say in the business, is some mighty powerful drift, and it requires some equally unsubtle mastery to correct course.

In the original series, the Nazi parallel was made palpable via regalia and youth groups; in the remake, they do so via a Maddow-esque Scott Wolf asking the leader of the Visitors if they offer universal health care. Note the slight shift in the assumption required to move from alien to fascist? The expert in fictional fascisms did:

I simultaneously loved the "universal health care" line and thought it was a bit hamfisted. I do like that it all bothers Jonathan Chait so much, but I think they could have been a bit more subtle. However, it's worth recalling that the visitors in the original series promised to cure diseases as well. I think Chait goes overboard too when he says the show is a loveletter to the Tea Party movement.

Jonah Goldberg is, it goes without saying, wrong, but in this case his error is understandable because he was instrumental in creating the conditions that made it possible. The only people for whom universal health care signals a creeping fascism are 1) people who were convinced by the "arguments" proffered in Liberal Fascism, and 2) people who believe Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin are the future of the Republican Party. Granted, there is a substantial overlap between those camps, but my point is that unless you share core beliefs with, broadly speaking, the Tea Party movement, that reference fails to refer. The allegory only works if universal health care is a link in the chain that secures space lizards to fascism.

UPDATE: todd. makes a suggestion and (with one minor revision) I heartily agree. From now on, "JGIGWOSIW" it is. (If only because that's the noise my brain makes when I read something he's written.)

Dear CALPIRG,

You may be a fine organization and worthy of my support, but as an English teacher and human being, when your representative approaches me and says that you "work with the destruction of the environment and poverty," my first response is "To what ends, man?  To what ends?"

Not surprisingly, what I saw in my flashforward wasn't me watching Flashforward.

If I were to tell you that a television series in which John Cho (a.k.a. the Harold who went to White Castle) consistently steals scenes from Joseph Fiennes (of the Acting Fienneses) exists, you'd likely laugh at me.  But it does.  Every Thursday night brings us another bizarrely-paced episode of Flashforward.  Loosely based on the Robert J. Sawyer novel (which I haven't read) of the same name, the show follows a team of FBI agents investigating the origin of a worldwide loss of consciousness.  For two minutes and thirteen seconds, everyone on the planet lost consciousness and (as per the title) caught an exclusive showing of their lives six months in the future (29 April 2010).*  The premise is interesting enough, and when the narrative focuses on the secular equivalent of arguments about predestination, the show works. 

For example, because so many people seemed to have obscenely meaningful flashforwards, even those people who saw themselves walking into an unfamiliar parking garage imbue theirs with meaning.  The parking lot, after all, may only be unfamiliar now because a character hasn't been fired from one firm and hired by another.  The characters mostly know this, but watching them struggle against the inevitability of the mundane makes for compelling television; however, the motor of the show is the drunken memory of Fiennes's Agent Mark Benford, who saw himself in his office 1) struggling to make sense of the whiteboard on which he and his team are collating the evidence of what caused the blackout  and 2) being hunted by a team of assassins.  The first element of his flashforward presents clues worthy of a Robbe-Grillet novel, in that Agent Benford is a recovering alcoholic trying to make sense of a half-seen evidence board while being pounded by the guilt of drinking after seven years of sobriety.  He knows himself to be an unreliable narrator—is burdened by the fact of it—and yet he struggles to recreate the whiteboard as he remembers it from his flashforward. 

It's the second element of the flashforward that troubles me, not because I have qualms about David S. Goyer works featuring assassins (perish the thought), but because such action threatens to overwhelm the legitimately compelling high-conceptual quality of the show.  This is not to say the two can't be combined: in one episode, for example, none of the FBI agents involved in a shootout bother to take cover because they know they're going to be alive six months later.  But unless the writers veer into Longshot territory and have characters jump off buildings for the thrill of learning the strained chain of happenstance to which the universe must resort to keep them alive another six months, they run the risk of turning half of each episode into a tensionless exercise in faked foolhardiness.   (The law of diminishing returns actually kicked in before that first action sequence ended.)

You might object that viewers have been so thoroughly conditioned by a lifetime of televisual convention that they'll find such scenes compelling even though they know they shouldn't.  I'm not sure I'd disagree.  Still, that the writers find it necessary to insert action sequences into a series driven by a complex premise smacks of pandering to an audience who will never watch the show.  Such viewers are more interested in the caliber of the gun than the life of the person shooting it, and as such will never devote an hour a week to a show half-occupied by characters discussing whether their attempts to circumvent the inevitable are responsible for it coming to pass.  The actions of the characters frequently remind of "The Opposite," the episode of Seinfeld in which George decides that since he's spent his entire life doing what he thought was right and ended up himself, his only chance at happiness would be to go against his instinct and always do the opposite.  The wrinkle on Flashforward, obviously, is that they maybe ended up wherever they did on 29 April 2010 because they decided to do the opposite, so the only way to prevent their flashforward from happening would be to go with their instincts.  That's the show's strength: a premise that compels its characters to constantly reevaluate their decision-making processes and reinterpret what they think they thought they knew.

As for the show's weaknesses, in addition to the bizarre directorial decisions and resultant pacing problems, Flashforward suffers from some unexpectedly poor performances.  Joseph Fiennes pulls a reverse-Costner, clearly burdened by the labor of producing his spotty American accent; and Courtney B. Vance, formerly serviceable in the role of a legal-minded bureaucrat on Criminal Intent, clearly forgot how to act.  Unlike Fiennes, Vance is beyond redemption.  (I believe the purpose of the frequent allusions to Fiennes's previous roles—a recent episode tossed off lines about him being a Shakespeare of one thing and a Luther of another—is a deliberate attempt to remind him that he's talented.)  Should the show succeed, it will be (as the most recent addition to the cast demonstrates) despite itself.  In point of fact, the main purpose of this post is to memorialize its potential before it turns into irredeemable dreck, that way when it's canceled with high irony six month hence, I can justify why I stuck around for its inevitable decline.

*The show-runners either haven't decided whether these events are witnessed, as if by a third party, or experienced through the character's own eyes.  Olivia Benford, the wife of Fiennes's character, sometimes remembers her flashforward from the perspective of the other person in it; but she also remembers it from her own perspective, as well as one in which she can see both herself and the other man.  This could be sloppiness, but it could also be a fairly sophisticated statement about the non-iterative aspect of persistently recalled memories ... but I'm not a betting man.

I cordially invite you to my stoning; or, the most offensive Halloween costume I've ever worn.

Not that I did it on purpose.  As those of you who've befriended me on Facebook can attest, my goal last night was to wear "100 percent period-authentic grunge-wear."  I raided my own closet and, after suiting up, declared "I ought to be auditioning for Pearl Jam."  When I looked at the pictures my wife took of me last night, I shrunk back from the screen in horror.  I didn't do this on purpose.  I wouldn't do this on purpose.  And yet:

By that standard, we're all already everybody else.

I understand from all my email that Jack Cashill has posted another Obama/Ayers article. I wonder what non-tendentious conclusions he'll draw this time?

1. Ayers and Obama both describe the crisis in the Chicago school system as "perpetual."
2. Ayers and Obama both complain about increasingly larger educational bureaucracies.
3. Ayers and Obama both criticize the "status quo."

In short, the liberal politician and the liberal academics both air liberal grievances. For some reason, Cashill finds this compelling. The reason, of course, is that Cashill's not that bright. Need more proof?

1. Ayers and a '60s radical in Obama's book both bitch about the Man.
2. Ayers and a '60s radical in Obama's book both think education is a tool belonging to the Man.

Cashill is actually shocked by the fact that Bill Ayers, a '60s radical, makes statements similar to those made by '60s radicals. He believes the fact that Bill Ayers, a '60s radical, and other '60s radical use the same language to be incriminating.

He must be the only person to watch a Cheech and Chong movie sober and wonder, on account of them talking so similarly, whether they weren't actually the same person.

Life imitating art irritating life imitating art.

The premise of Curb Your Enthusiasm, according to James Kaplan's 2004 profile of Larrry David in The New Yorker, is that:

David's character is a semi-retired sitcom mogul who ambles through his inordinately comfortable life, routinely managing to annoy or infuriate everyone around him. This season, some of those people will include the blind, the physically handicapped, and the mentally challenged ... David has a sardonic, slightly depressive presence onscreen, and is quite natural playing his worst self. Some of his finest moments are when he gets into arguments—arguments that he always loses—with children.

In this week's episode, David accidentally urinates on a picture of Jesus, the urine is mistaken for a tear, and in the end, he manages to annoy and infuriate everyone around him. So it goes ... or would have, had he not also managed to annoy and infuriate conservatives who don't watch the show. The Anchoress wants to know:

Would he piss on an image of Obama?

Absolutely. Next question.

Would he piss on an image of Obama?

Absolutely. Crying guy, would you like to say something?

Good people hurt innocent people every day.

Larry David's not good people.

Eventually, their better nature takes over.

He doesn't have one.

They think about how such a cruel and disrespectful act might hurt those they know.

Are you sure you're talking about Larry David here? Because I'm not. Anyone else?

I’ve never seen this show, does anyone know if the assistant is recognizably ethnic? Is this “brave” comedian also taking a swipe at Hispanic (or for that matter Italian or Irish) piety?

First, when you assume that a housekeeper's Hispanic, that makes you the racist. Second, if you want people to respect what you say, don't tell people that your speculation is based on unadulterated ignorance. Third, if you think anyone other than Larry David would be the punchline of an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm, you've proven the validity of my previous sentence.

Moreover, if you've been horrified and offended by what Larry David did then congratulations, he just suckered you into participating in an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm. You're no longer the audience: you are, in effect, on the show.

Laedit te quaedam mala fabula, qua tibi fertur valle sub alarum trux habitare caper.*

Because the world needs more parodies of Victor Davis Hanson:

Morituri te salutant

The Victory Column and vero possumus megalomania of 2008 have now led to the deification of Obama as our new Caesar, man of letters (who, in the ancient tradition, enslaved a million in Gaul), and to his communications czar’s praising the embattled Mao (her favorite “political philosopher”) for leading China’s Communist legions to glorious victory over those running-dog Nationalists. Add in the classical-column props at the convention and the Moses-like talk about the seas’ receding and the planet’s cooling, and I think this administration assumes we have a Holy Man in the White House. And when you consider the depiction of Fox News as heresy, Rush as the anti-Christ, and the NEA as the medieval church, it all gets, well, sort of creepy.

The above, of course, is renowned military historian and classical scholar Victor Davis Hanson obliging the world. He leads with a Latin quotation so esoteric only people who have studied classical Latin oratory for decades seen Gladiator can recognize the import of its implied "Ave Obama." Or not. Trotting out some of the only Latin his readers know means he needs a shoehorn to make his metaphor relevant: who are the "saluting" folks "about to die"? They are saluting Obama and are about to die for his entertainment, so they can't be Joe Lieberman and the rest of the Democratic Party, as that wouldn't entertain the President. They could be Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and Newt Gingrich, but Victor Davis Hanson doesn't belong to the group of people currently enjoying that particular spectacle (that would be us).

See, this is the problem with trotting out random bits of Latin in the service of a hopelessly muddled metaphor: you think you're impressing people who know more than you, when in truth you're only impressing people who don't know Latin.

*cf lines 5 and 6

On informing your students that they're murderers

(Being another post in this vein.)

In a famous (and surprisingly controversial, for reasons I will tackle later in the week) section of Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud defines the act of moving from one panel, through the gutter (the white space between panels), and into the next as "closure."  Unlike film, in which closure is made unconscious by the persistence of vision and the limitations of our perceptual apparatus (such that twenty-four frames per second is automatically perceived as motion), closure in comics is a collaborative effort between author (or artist) and reader.  Take a scene in which one person threatens to shoot another:

What happens (at least in my tweaked-for-maximal-classroom-efficiency sequence) between the second and third panel there?  Put differently: in order to achieve closure between the second and third panel, what do Moore and Gibbons compel the reader to imagine in order to make the transition through that gutter make sense?  The answer, of course, is that they force the reader to imagine murdering a pregnant woman.  That is, they make the reader a silent accomplice to the Comedian's crime per McCloud:

Just in case the awful complicity of the reader failed to sink in, McCloud draws himself hugging his knees in a dark corner (and undoubtedly near tears behind his grandma glasses):

Students absolutely loathe the possibility that McCloud might be correct.  They claim they are the victims of a sick manipulation on the part of the author; that they were tricked into imagining this terrible crime and therefore aren't culpable; that they never knowingly sin in their hearts unless someone forces them to do so; etc.  I then show them the omitted panel:

And after they express how much better they feel for not being an accomplice to a fictional murder, I ask them why witnessing a crime is better than imagining one and we turn to a slightly more thematic discussion of Dr. Manhattan's culpability here.  But they remember McCloud's point, which was why I implicated them in the Comedian's crime in the first place.

THIS PAGE WILL ALWAYS BE UNDER CONSTRUCTION

Tomorrow's deletion of GeoCities from the Internet means that future generations of digital historians will lose unmediated access to another grossly coded, crudely animated, and provocatively pointless early online environ.  Back in 1990s, the internet was not yet the Internet, i.e. a land of constantly updated sites dominated by an online encyclopedia: it was a slapdash city populated by websites that were perpetually "under construction," the implication being that they would one day be completed.  The idea behind GeoCities in particular, with all its imagery that came straight from the mind of a square city planner, was that everyone who crapped out viable HTML was erecting something permanent, an edifice of human knowledge that ranged from Star Wars trivia to guitar tabs for 2112.  But people quickly saw the potential of a page that could be updated (if not always accessed) at will and started affixing to the bottom of their pages one or another of the aforelinked animations, thereby informing the world that although it might seem as if the comprehensive Shadowrun fan site would never (on account of its comprehensiveness) need an update, it was still "under construction." 

As I learned this morning, GeoCities still hosts a site I built—a site that, until it goes dark tomorrow, I'm ostensibly still building.  I'm not.  But now the world will never know the real truth behind the plot of The Crying of Lot 49 because that intensive bit of textual exegesis (and many others like it) will soon be wiped from the annals of what would become the Internet.  In forsaking both what it was and the metaphors that once governed how its users thought about it, the Internet furthers its ascent into the place of perpetual presentness it now is by denying it was ever anything else.  Which is fine.  But there is something stolid and quaint about the thought of being done with something, which I reckon is what those scholars and authors who think in books think about people like us.

Because being ignored is the exact same thing as being muzzled.

The attacks on the administration and its allies for deciding to shun Fox News are so cute. This is my favorite:

In [Obama's] America there is no Constitution, there is no First Amendment, there are no principles of free speech or free press.

As all good children know, the silent treatment renders the person to whom it's administered incapable of saying anything. They can't run around shouting, "Why are you ignoring me?" or "What did I do? Please tell me!" because their tongue has been silenced by the mystical power of the treatment. It makes a person wonder what Fox will air now that their hosts have lost their words. An hour of Glenn Beck sobbing uncontrollably while pointing at a chalkboard on which the links between ACORN and his muted mouth-hole have been arranged into a misspelled anagram? Granted, they were ready to go with the sobbing and pointing before the Plague of Silence zipped his mouth and pocketed the key . . .

Wait—is that supposed to be a bad thing?

One of you lot emailed me bits of a Warren Ellis script for one of the various X-titles—the perfunctorily racy "Emma" can only, I think, refer to Emma Frost—but given some of the email I received concerning my discussion of the ALL CAPPED verbosity of Alan Moore in this post, I felt I should share:

We're doing the steam-punk neo-Victorian thing, so we're doing corsets, gloves, chokers, boots, but we're also going to be doing long skirts (though, this being Emma, I'm sure she'd slit hers if need be). Let's have a teak carriage-clock type thing with a blank glass face (instead of a clock face) on the occasional table next to her, as she lounges and reads a hardback copy of Story of the Eye by Georges Bataille. (Actually, she might read it in the untranslated French, so that'd be histoire de l'oeil). JESUS FUCKING CHRIST I'M TURNING INTO ALAN MOORE.

Meanwhile, on another blog ...

I attempt to get back on the horse:

First, the infinite monkey theorem isn't a scientific aphorism, it's a probabilistic theory with a mathematical proof; second, for someone as knowledgeable as [Ben] Shapiro in what he would call The Art of Writing Prose Such That The Mellifluousness Of Which It Is In Possession Cannot Be Contested, that is one ugly sentence. If he wants to write about typing monkeys, he needs to read his Borges . . .

Damnable confabulation.

I'm presently torn between two alternative means of interpreting the uninterpretable.  Because I'm a lit-git, I'm tempted to go with the unscientific advice Gertrude Stein belatedly offered her mentor William James:

[Y]ou do not really believe yourself why should you, you know so well so very well that it is not yourself, it could not be yourself because you cannot remember right and if you do remember right it does not sound right and of course it does not sound right because it is not right. 

That I'm the sole source of that seminal articulation of the grit that chokes the gears of our cognitive grind to a halt is a national tragedy . . . because how are there no modernists whose Steinian veins have bled out and into Google more stainingly than mine?  (I'm not even a modernist anymore you know.)  Now where was I? 

I do not really believe myself why should I, I know so well that it is not myself, it could not be myself because I cannot remember right and if I do remember right it does not sound right and of course it does not sound right because it is not right.

That would be where I was.  But keeping in mind my abiding interest in things neurological—I did write a chapter on the Founding Father of American Neurology after all—you probably won't be surprised to learn that I've spent the past few days researching why it does not sound right and of course it does not sound right because it is not right.  Then Jonathan Dresner damn near channeled Stein in his comment the other night:

Memory is a funny[.]*

It is.  Jonathan's story of seeing a pink bow in a black-and-white cartoon is a poignant funny that also happens to be relevant, as I'm currently seeing things that I couldn't have seen, e.g. I remember seeing the car slam into the semi's trailer even though, as I mentioned in the original post, the fog was so thick I couldn't even see the semi once it passed me.  So why do I think I saw what I couldn't have seen?

My brain did the math.  It calculated what must have happened between the time I last saw the car in my mirror and where it landed and then turned that understanding of what must have happened into a memory of having witnessed it happen.  So even though I couldn't have seen the crash occur, I'm burdened by a nightmare-inducing memory of it.  Intellectually, I know this to be the result of garden-variety non-pathological confabulation, indicative of nothing more than the procedural drills required to produce an unbroken experience of consciousness; emotionally and ethically, however, it feels wrong to bear witness to a tragedy that I did not, in fact, witness. 

Put differently: I know my eyes have two blind spots (punctum caecum) because there are no rods and cones where the optic nerve exits the eye and that the brain fills in details to occupy that absence; however, I've never felt betrayed by this perceptual white lie before, or that there was anything ethically dubious to the claim that I "saw" something that was actually in a blind spot.  My brain behaved no differently in reconstructing my memory of the crash than it does when it allows me to experience an unbroken field of vision, yet there does seem to be something ethically dubious about its behavior here.  Moreover, the fact that it performed this reconstruction in order to torment my sleep with visions of it strikes me as an appalling cosmi-cognitive joke.

*Had he been less concerned that his words accord with the dictates of English, I don't doubt that Jonathan would've embraced his inner lesbian modernist and went with the impactively tacky "Memory is a funny" over that grammatical sentence he actually wrote.

Before I continue being shocked, self-absorbed and somber ...

I'll share something that's made me inexplicably happy eleven times today on one condition: you must wait for it. It will arrive. Failure to wait for it will result in the formal termination of our friendship.

So:

Nonfictional lies.

These are difficult words for me to write: I lied about what happened yesterday.  The road did turn into a parking lot.  I did spy a car crest the hill behind me as I crept into an impenetrable fog alongside a semi. 

But I never "braced for impact," as I first wrote. 

So as not to be branded a liar, I replaced "braced" with the more accurate "readied."  However, in clear violation of The Trivialities of Deportment as Required by the Guardians of Best Online Society, I made this emendation silently.  There's no indication that the word "readied" occupies the space originally reserved for "braced." 

Why'd I do this, and why am I telling you about it?

The title of this post is an awful pun grounded in the reality of traumatic experience.  Talking to the wife last night, I remembered that after the car crested I'd remembered reading that human bodies are more likely to survive brutal demonstrations of differential inertia when they go slack.  After I remembered that, I relaxed my neck and attempted a deep breath before the sedan changed course.  I did what is rightly called the opposite of bracing: I made like an abandoned marionette and begged the Laws of Physics to commute the inevitable.  When the sedan buzzed by, I was draped limp on the driver's seat awaiting a cascade of concussive pains as my car endeavored to save my life.

Why am I telling you this?  Because people who deal with people like me for a living have told me to control what I can control.  I can't stop the sudden intrusion of the inexplicably awful into previously pleasant dreams, but I can edit the written account of the experience responsible for the trespass.  I understand that violations of decorum in the name of therapy might offend the finely-wrought sensibilities of some of you, but I currently value my mental health more than my reputation.  (Without the former I could never rehabilitate the latter.) 

Not that I'm worried.  My shudder of a pun describes a process I'm not ashamed of being victimized by.  The unintentional stuttering of memory results in nonfictional lies . . . in moments misremembered as time dilates in expectation of bright death.  They're the pare shavings trauma whittles from memory and they are inevitable.  In order to nonfictionalize that post, I'll need to replace some nonfictional lies with others, and the thought of being called out on account of altering inconsequential details is too much to bear right now. 

I'm not changing my story: I'm nonfictionalizing it.

To give another example, when I said I was listening to NPR when I noticed the car, I think I maybe lied.  I didn't think I had until when I was talking to my brother and let slip that I'd been listening to Big Star's "Life is White" when I noticed the other car.  Given that I couldn't have been listening to NPR and a track from Radio City at the same time, I suppose I must have lied when I said that in my panic I'd ignored the former's chatter.  I must've been listening to Big Star when it happened. 

But on the way to campus today, I received an autonomic knee to the nuts followed by a fulsome horripilative event and had to slam the stereo silent and pull over.  What brought it on?

"Percussion Gun."

The violence of the dueling floor toms didn't do it: it was the frank beauty of its soaring midsection that primed me for fighting or alighting.   I turned the stereo back on and restarted the song and was awash in fresh panic again.  I think my body might be remembering something I don't . . . or it might be another nonfictional lie I need to process. 

I can't say.  But it feels more true tonight, and if it still does come morning, I'll edit the post to better reflect the reality I'm presently remembering. 

There are words for this, but they're meaningless.

After the toll booth, a wall of fog appeared. Traffic crawled, then halted. I idled in the middle lane, flanked on the right by a semi-trailer. We breached the fog at about the same time, but the truck slipped a few car-lengths farther forward. On NPR someone said something about some pressing issue, but I couldn't pay attention because in my rear-view mirror a luxury sedan was barreling into the fog-bank at a speed I can't estimate but knew was inadvisable.

I made every effort to become visible despite the fog. I laid into the horn, turned on the hazards, and at the last moment, as I readied for impact, I was seen.

The sedan switched lanes, slammed into the semi, spun some and, irrevocably crushed, fell from the road.

I pulled over and jumped from the car, ran to help, as did someone else, maybe the driver of the semi, but someone from that direction. We reached the sedan at about the same time, him dialing 911, me pointing at the car, us running toward it together to help, but there was no one to help.

What was there, in the car, was beyond help.

I must've stumbled, or leaned forward, because the vomit was over my right arm, as if I'd braced myself beforehand. I took off my shirt, looked at the other man, who either puked first or reacted to me, and we stared, not at each other so much, but still, we stared and I felt that he felt the act was mutual. Was a recognition.

I made my way to my car.

I drove to campus.

Bought a sweatshirt from the bookstore and ran into a friend on the way to class. His "How are you?" loosed a torrent of unprocessed words punctuated by profanity, words that made what happened mean, in the basest sense. I went to class, set the kids to writing, walked out of the class. Called the wife, who talked me into telling them what happened. I did. Said they could peer review what they'd written and I'd let them go.

Then I didn't. Said instead that I would teach the class, that it was better than the meaningless pacing, the nothing I could do to erase what I'd seen, the nothing I could've done to have done something. I fell into the rhythm of the class, lectured more than I usually do, but forgot, for those minutes, what I'd seen, what I'd done but couldn't do.

Now I'm in the library writing this. Writing helps. It's the process. It's what makes the word mean what they mean. I still have another hour and fifteen minutes until my next class, and now that I've written this, I'm not sure what to do. I think I might describe a circle around the campus, sate hunger with weary, because food is not a viable option at the moment.

By request: my visual rhetoric course

As requested in the comments to my last post and via a couple of emails, here's a general outline of the course I teach on visual rhetoric. (If you find it interesting or just want to give me money, the book I'm co-writing with my course director should be available early next summer.) I'm more than happy to debate the merits of teaching rhetoric and argument through popular culture or the validity of any of the particular readings I put forward; however, keep in mind that those readings are presented in the classroom and, as such, are designed to be arguable instead of definitive. I want them to argue with particular statements because I'm teaching them how to argue, so there are moments (particularly in the readings of the films) that I'm deliberately wrong. Those moments will likely be obvious to you, but you're not an 18-year-old undergraduate on the short end of an institutional power imbalance who's afraid that, should they contradict me, they will fail the class, lose their scholarship and spend their days toiling away in the service industries.

That said, here are links to the analytic portion of the course:

1. I introduce them to the idea of the overdetermined image, because nothing is accidental in an Alan Moore script.*
2.  Nor, for that matter, is anything accidental when it costs $80,000 per second to film it, which is why we then discuss how Christopher Nolan turns Batman into classic horror monster in Batman Begins. The point here is get them fluent in the language of film, so that they might make arguments about how directors manipulate the camera in order to appeal to the audience. (We also discuss what is and isn't in the diegetic space, e.g. music, which is heard by the audience but not the characters.)
3. Then it's on to The Dark Knight. That link goes to a reading of the interrogation scene; this one leads you to a similarly thorough analysis dedicated to proving the controversial thesis that Batman is really fast—because demonstrating that even the simplest of claims require evidence and careful argument to be taken seriously is the point of the course.
4. Now that they're relatively fluent in the language of film, we try to prove something a little more complex; namely, that Superman Returns is very much about 9/11. First, I take them back to September morning; then we analyze the action sequence that's about planes slamming into NYC landmarks, lest they think I'm reading too much into the anxieties the film taps into.
5. Now that they're comfortable with film, I get them to apply that knowledge to comics via the comic that's about the conventions of comics and is therefore utterly unfilmable, Watchmen. I begin by reminding them of the overdetermined nature of the image, then we discuss panel transitions and word-picture relation, move on layout and narrative flow, then I try to prove what I stated in the second sentence about Watchmen being a meta-comic. My argument's deliberately argumentative, because Dr. Manhattan can also function as a figure of the reader as well the author, but that's an argument I want to have. From there, it's onto the unfilmable film itself.
6. Now that they can break film and comics into their constituent parts, I re-orient them in an explicitly rhetorical direction. We talk about the rhetorical situation, which is, of course, a triangle. (For the record: that silliness is me teaching myself to manipulate images in Photoshop for my book on teaching visual rhetoric.) Then we situate the rhetorical context in the historical context via Warren Ellis's Planetary/Batman: Night on Earth.
7. From there on out, it's all about the writing.  I teach them about paragraph burgers, which, while silly, is the single most effective means I've found to teach paragraph structure. Students intuitively understand that you don't call a pickle with and a piece of a cheese a "hamburger." For the remainder of the quarter, we use the tools from the beginning of the course to make sophisticated arguments about the rhetorical stakes of what they'd otherwise dismiss as pop culture ephemera. 

*I've never written up my notes on getting them to think about structure via punchlines, which begins, not surprisingly, here with The Killing Joke. The gist of it is that jokes don’t work if you only provide the punchline, which is my way of introducing them to the notion of process: this shot in a film or panel in a comic or argument in an essay only works as a punchline if the joke's been properly set up. Basically, I try to get them to think about argument in terms they intuitively understand.

"Mordre wol out, that see we day by day."

During an extended discussion about the formal mechanics of the word-picture relation comics, I coined what I called "Scott's Rule #23":

[T]he percentage of time spent lecturing other people about how awesome you are is inversely propotional to your actual awesomeness.

Which is to say, the decision to have one of the characters in your comic praise the cleverness of what another one said is supremely lame. At the time, I didn't think I needed to post Scott's Rule #22, what with it being so obvious, but today Chris Muir forced my hand:

Or not. I think the lameness of having one of your characters enthusiastically egg on the lunatic rant of another requires no further definition. Toss in the fact that "You're really cookin'" is a painfully awful pun, and you're left thinking that Chaucer fellow I quoted in the title was onto something. If only someone would do something about Muir's crimes against the English language, freshmen logic, comedy and the comic form . .

The increasingly forgettable work of Malcolm Gladwell

G.D. pointed out the latest Gladwell article to me, and now that I’ve read it, I’m at a loss for words: rarely in the history of long-form journalism has the pitch been more obvious or the product more strained. Gladwell decided to write an article on violence in the National Football Leauge, went to his editor with his Vick-topical article and was told to run with it. The problem, of course, is that the entire article boils down to this question:

Is [football] dogfighting or is it stock-car racing?

And that question, I think we can agree, makes little sense for the simple reason that its analogy isn’t analogous. I know that blunt counterintuitive statements are a hallmark of literary journalism, but they need to be founded on something more substantial than this:

[I]s the kind of [tau deposit-induced dementia] being uncovered by McKee and Omalu [in former NFL players] incidental to the game of football or inherent in it? Part of what makes dogfighting so repulsive is the understanding that violence and injury cannot be removed from the sport. It’s a feature of the sport that dogs almost always get hurt. Something like stock-car racing, by contrast, is dangerous, but not unavoidably so.

The relevant analogy is right there—preventable injuries in Nascar versus the NFL—but had Gladwell went with that, he would have to ditch the dogfighting angle.* The problem, then, is that the once venerable New Yorker would rather be clever and topical than deeply informative. Consider, for example, the career of the go-to literary journalist for me and Ari, John McPhee. His first book was about A Sense of Where You Are, was about the professional basketball player, long-tenured Senator and former Presidential candidate Bill Bradley, but was written before Bradley graduated from Princeton. McPhee did a superlative job outlining what would make Bradley successful, but he didn’t write about him because the New Yorker wanted an article about the Senatorial or Presidential candidate.

Similarly, after Katrina the magazine saw fit to print McPhee’s brilliant (and to my students, hilariously unpronounceable) essay “Atchafalaya,” which was first published in in 1987, long before most people outside of Louisiana cared about the state of the levees. My point, as you probably guessed, is that the odds of the New Yorker dipping into their archives and pulling out a Gladwell essay on the strength of its reporting or the depth of its intelligence decrease with every superficially clever, patently topical article they allow him to write and consent to publish. This isn’t to say that Gladwell is incapable of strong reportage or intellectual depth—only that that people can’t seem to convince him to slow down and write something with heft enough to be as relevant twenty years down the line as it is this week.

*I have nothing against clever analogies when they actually, you know, work. My friend Barry Siegel combined a thrilling narrative of a crashing B29 and a legal case that led to . . . something else both topical and relevant which I won’t spoil. (If you want spoilers, consult Ira Glass.)

On the style of Octavia Butler's Patternist novels

People routinely slam the prose styling of Octavia Butler (as I would demonstrate with citations and quotations were the new TypePad editor not so averse to material copied from OpenOffice documents), but reading the Patternist novels according to the chronology internal to them has me appreciating the gentle relentlessness of her prose.  However, sometimes I think the critics have a point:

"What does the white animal follow?" asked Anyanwu's grandson loudly enough for Doro to hear.  "What has he to do with us now?"

"My master must pay him for you," said Anyanwu's grandson loudly enough for Doro to hear.  "What has he to do with us now?"

"My master must pay him for you," said Anyanwu.  (Wild Seed 41)

That just scans something awful.  In all seriousness, though, rarely is the reason behind an editorial error so obvious or so indicative of an author's stylistic tics.  In Wild Seed, Butler wed her characters to her prose, such that the latter's stolidity became evidence of the former's hard-fought restraint.  (It is, after all, a novel about two people who spend their unnaturally long lives finding excuses not to murder each other.)  She did so deliberately because, at this point in her career, she could.  The novels were published in this order: Patternmaster (1976), Mind of My Mind (1977), Survivor (1978), Wild Seed (1980), Clay's Ark (1984); but they move through narrative time in this one: Wild Seed (1980), Mind of My Mind (1977), Clay's Ark (1984), Survivor (1978), Patternmaster (1976).

I'll discuss how her interest in evolution is, fundamentally, a narrative one (and in so doing, discuss how this interest's inherent in all evolutionarily-inflected narratives, including Darwin's) at some point in the near future.  For the moment, what fascinates me is how the elder Butler crafts the prose of the later novels in such a way that it "develops" into the style of the earliest one (Patternmaster).  Were she actually a Dickian hack ("sophisticated ideas communicated in pedestrian prose," as Consensus Q. Amalgam would have it), such a feat would be beyond her; but comparing the occasionally dense and ornate prose in Wild Seed (which shares formal concerns and historical content with 1979's Kindred) to the more direct, straightforward prose of Clay's Ark—written nearly half a decade later—it is difficult to imagine that the latter's resemblance to Patternmaster is anything other than intentional.  When she was young, she couldn't help but write of the future in spare and quotidian manner; but by 1984, she could adopt a transitional voice, something that approximates in complexity the difference between 1977's Mind of My Mind and 1976's Patternmaster. 

While it may seem odd to call attention to the refinement of her narrative voice, it is essential to understanding the refinement of the thought processes it develops alongside: the series is unusual in that, as Butler said, she invented a society that was conceptually fascinating, but instead of going on to invent another, she became interested in how that one could possibly have come to be.  The fact that eugenics and alien invasion were, for her, the answer is troubling, but I'll leave the how and why of that for a later post. 

Meanwhile, on another blog ...

He is, in short, the obnoxious kid from down the block who would ask what you and your friends were playing and no matter what you were actually doing, you would always answer, "Hide and go seek." After he took off and hid, you and yours would resume whatever it was he interrupted, while he would spend the rest of the afternoon in a tree stump glowing with yet another confirmation that no one could hide better than him.

Only now he has a blog and shares his daily humiliation with the world ...

Dear Google,

On behalf of one of the classiest blogs out there, I urge you to please try harder:

I somehow doubt Abbas Raza appreciates the irony you forced upon him. 

Now we know who one of Andersen's anonymous sources was.

Who anonymously told Christopher Andersen that Bill Ayers wrote Dreams From My Father?

Bill Ayers.

Probably confessed it in the same sneering manner, too ... which tells us more about Andersen's credibility than anything else.

"We would have defeated them, but for the power of their art."

The wake of the NEA non-scandal is about as deep and dispersed as that of drifting rowboat in mid-Atlantic chop . . . unless that's your boat and you have a telescope trained on your trail like Michael van der Galien and the folks at Big Hollywood,* in which case you'll mistake the chop for wake and start praying you hold out better than the Andrea Gail. Once you regain your composure, you will write a post much like the one van der Galien—whose Big Hollywood archive proves something or other about how profoundly white people feel about everyone not one shade shy of albino—wrote and make claims like this:

Federal agencies are turned into propaganda tools. This is something we haven’t seen in the U.S. since, well, ever.

Technically, van der Galien is correct: even though the Federal Writer's Project, Federal Theatre Project, Federal Music Project and Federal Art Project not only existed, but had the word "Federal" in their names, if "we" were a 25 year-old Dutch conservative, "we" never would've "seen" anything like that "in the U.S. since, well, ever."

Because "we" aren't—and because we don't believing that having "seen" something is the only valid evidentiary standard—we're not overly concerned with the grievous threat Kalpen Modi and his ilk pose to the future of the American Republic. We should, however, concern ourselves with the fact that van der Galien wants to steal our artists and force them to create conservative propaganda:

[T]here is a reason the administration spoke to artists on the August conference call and was willing to take the risk of exposure: artists influence the people. The effect isn’t always immediate–it may take years for artists to truly influence society as a whole–but it’s there. If you want to “transform” society you need artists on your side ... Breitbart has taught us that the strategies the left has used to discredit the right can be used against them. We have to act on that, continue to do what Breitbart and some here at Big Hollywood have been doing. But we have to do more than that: we have to destroy and create.

If you didn't chuckle at the phrase "Breitbart has taught us," you have no soul. That said, the fact that the art or culture even exists only occurs to conservatives when politics are involved. When Harold Pinter won the Nobel Prize, for example, conservatives were saying things like "[nobody] takes this stuff seriously anymore" and "I can't remember the last time I read a literary novel by a living writer or attended a play by a living playwright." Pinter winked into conservative consciousness long enough to be summarily dismissed, then faded back into the staticky irrelevance of the living.

Had he lived long enough to have participated in that conference call, though, he would've blitzkrieged his way into their tactically fearful hearts and onto their lying lips like Hitler on Poland.

*By "folks," I mean everyone who's written about the NEA non-scandal except for Jayne "Animal Mother" Cobb because he lives fifteen minutes down the 91 from me and I value my life.

Jonah Goldberg and the Case of the Haphazard Harking

(Regular readers won't find anything surprising here, but if you're new, you might could be entertained.)

Steven Hayward's Washington Post article on the brain death of the conservative intellectual movement damns the nearly-departed with the faintest of all possible praise:

The bestseller list used to be crowded with the likes of [Milton] Friedman's Free to Choose, George Gilder's Wealth and Poverty, Paul Johnson's Modern Times, Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind, Charles Murray's Losing Ground and The Bell Curve, and Francis Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man . . . About the only recent successful title that harkens back to the older intellectual style is Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism, which argues that modern liberalism has much more in common with European fascism than conservatism has ever had.

Considering the heft Hayward requires of the phrase "harkens back," I thought it would be instructive to figure out exactly what it means. To the OED!

b. hark back. Of hounds: To return along the course taken, when the scent has been lost, till it is found again; hence fig. to retrace one's course or steps; to return, revert; to return to some earlier point in a narrative, discussion, or argument.

Significantly, both to my mind and Hayward's argument, the OED says nothing of what happens after the hounds recapture the scent. Hayward believes that Goldberg harked back his hounds until they caught the "very serious, thoughtful" scent of a Bloom or Fukuyama, then had his hounds track it till they produced an argumentative quarry "that has never been [treed] in such detail or with such care."

The only non-fantastical element to that is the part where Goldberg takes credit for the labor of his dogs, because in truth, even if Goldberg did hark back his hounds to an intellectually serious scent, he chose not to trust the tug of their leashes and instead struck out in some random direction. How do I know?

I was one of those hounds. I answered Goldberg's infamous plea for a Herbert Spencer scholar, the result of which was an email exchange that, sadly, lives on the dead drive of a desktop currently being used as furniture, but the gist of which went something like this:

Goldberg: I believe Spencer said this.

SEK: That's a common misconception. He actually said this.

Goldberg: But some people who aren't Spencerians said he said that.

SEK: They did. But it's a nineteenth-century caricature based on a misunderstanding that's been thoroughly discredited by 110 years of scholarship by people whose work is based on reading Spencer instead of repeating rumors about him.

Goldberg: You are not providing me with the citations I need to substantiate those rumors. Please don't write back.

All of which is a roundabout way of saying, as Scott noted, that if Liberal Fascism: Two Words Next To Each Other is what your leading lights produce when they hark back to your intellectual tradition, not only do you need brighter bulbs–you might want to have the whole house rewired.

Exactly how long is a "coming year"?

I only ask because this plus this could make for quite the combination.

Failure for thee, but not for me.

Remember when An American Carol inspired conservatives to shout that its inevitable success would prove that Americans wanted patriotic films that mock liberals more than dour, realistic films about the realities on the ground in Iraq? I certainly do. "[I]t'll change everything," said one of its stars, Kelsey Grammer. Reiterating a prediction she made two weeks earlier, someone named Erin said "An American Carol will be a success at the box office, because the American people are sick of the Damons and Afflecks."

And succeed it did: after a concerted effort by the conservative media to let the market's invisible hand work its magic, An American Carol took it in $3,656,000 in its first weekend, and was declared a success because it barely grossed more than Religulous despite being screened in a mere 1,137 more theaters nationwide.  Using the same standards by which An American Carol was deemed a success, John Nolte gloats that Americans voted with their wallets and declared Michael Moore's new film a failure:

[T]he biggest disappointment of the weekend is Michael Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story (Overture). After a $57K per theatre average on 4 screens last weekend, the picture broke to a wider 962 locations with terrible results. The "documentary" only sold an estimated $1.3M in tickets to start the weekend, and it will finish at about $3.9M for a PTA of less than $4,000. That soft opening will almost certainly make Capitalism Moore’s weakest-grossing movie since 2002’s Bowling for Columbine ($21.5M domestic gross).

Did I say the same standards?  Because this chart I carved by hand from the finest quality HTML would seem to indicate otherwise:

Title	Gross	Theaters	Avg.
An American Carol	$3.656M	1,639	$2,231
Capitalism: A Love Story	$4.850M	962	$5,042

I suppose numbers also have a liberal bias?

"Just saw the cover of her book, I'm super excited!"*

All the talk about how Sarah Palin's magnum opus opera mictilis is already a bestseller flubs the basic math behind its "unprecedented sales." Palin's target audience already has a Bible, meaning Going Rogue will be the first book they've bought since 2007. If liberals want to wage ideological war via the bestseller list, we need to stop dividing our loyalties and only purchase one new book every two years. Our minds might atrophy, sure, but no one ever said talking points were cheap.

*What? Can you think of a better way to tell the world that you judge books by their covers than a comma splice? Didn't think so.

That's not a Doctor of Journalism. This is a Doctor of Journalism.*

Our arrival was badly timed. Most of the pigs from The American Spectator had already arrived. I saw this at a glance. They were just standing around trying to look casual. It was a terrifying scene.

"I thought you should know about this," the boy said finally.

"Know? Me? Know about what?" I asked.

"Nothing. Nothing at all. Just that this guy . . . this white supremacist guy . . . he says he's you."

My brain locked up. I couldn't think. The drugs were taking over. "Is he?"

"No . . . I don't think . . . but he did say something about guns and booze."

"Guns and booze? Guns and booze? Must be me." Jesus. What a terrible thing to lay on somebody with a head full of acid. Alright, I thought.

"Alright," I said. "This Nazi me with guns and gin, where . . ."

"No gin . . . he's just talking about gin like you talk about it when you . . ."

"Look," I said. "I'm a Doctor of Journalism. If I can't minister to my own sober self, what good am I?" I demanded the boy take me to myself.

He led me to a dense thicket of birches fit for Frost and introduced me as Manuel. "Well," I said. "Pleasure to make my acquaintance."

That me looked at this me confused. Something there is that loves a wall, I thought, and ain't that bastard something.

There he was, talking about my Samoan attorney, and here I was, looking at myself talking about my Samoan attorney . . . but what white power me said made no sense.

"Wherever you find guns, cigars and whiskey, good-looking womenfolk are sure to be flocking 'round, and I had my camera handy for the occasion."

"Flocking 'round"? Sounds nothing like me. Strange memories of nervous nights on who knows what I can handle . . . but this was an impostor. No . . . a robot.

I was being impersonated by a robot. Programmed to say what I say but like I was Rhett Butler. To trick it would require saying something it wouldn't expect me to . . .

"All this white shit on my sleeve is LSD," I heard myself say. Shit. I stole a glance at myself and saw his face turn white. I noted the effort it took for him to keep up my façade. Not that he didn't try.

"Folks around Sperryville won't go anywhere near the place at Pig Roast time, what with the rumors of cannibalism, human sacrifice, bizarre pagan rituals and so forth."

"And so forth?" I asked. "And so forth?"

"Wherever you find guns, cigars and whiskey, good-looking womenfolk are sure to be flocking 'round, and I had my camera handy for the occasion."

"You already said that you fucking robot!" I threw myself at the robot but must have licked my arm on the way there because the next thing I remember I was in a bathtub surrounded by six angry pairs of Dockers.

"You shouldn't have done that," one said.

"Stacy is delicate," said another. Fuck, I thought. I'd attacked some poor girl.

"Sorry," I said. "I went after the robot." They shot me looks I deserved. Calm down. Learn to enjoy pain. The important thing now is to leave with my balls intact.

"Stacy is not a . . ."

Intact and where they should be. My balls. Fuck would I miss them.

"Stacy wants you to apologize."

"Send her in." Don't run, I thought. They'd like an excuse to shoot you. Menacing vibrations . . . I felt them all around me. The door creaked open and there she was . . . there he was . . . there I was . . .

"Some fucking robot you are!"

"Get back here!" he shouted, but I knew she couldn't catch me.

---

*Written in honor of the lamest Thompson impersonation I've ever read . . . and I spent four years teaching literary journalism to starry-eyed undergraduates who idolized Thompson, so I know of what I speak.

(x-posted.)

I'm going to spend the rest of my life apologizing to Jack Cashill, aren't I?

Because today he interviewed journalist Christopher Andersen (who, like him, writes celebrity biographies) on The Mancow Show and Andersen announced that "he had two separate sources 'within Hyde Park' [who claim William Ayers wrote Dreams From My Father] but, understandably, would not elaborate."  Two anonymous sources from, as they say, the neighborhood is the tipping point for me: when combined with the credibility Andersen has earned by dint of a "highly successful career as a celebrity journalist" and the evidence gathered during Cashill's "textual sleuthing," no intellectually honest person could doubt that there's a there in there.  How could there not be?  Andersen "interviewed some 200 people for the book," which is a whole lot.  Here is a list of them drawn from the back matter and organized by chapters:

"I'm not a racist, I just wish black people were more white."

Listen closely to outrage manufactured over an utterly innocuous NEA conference call and you can almost hear Pat Buchanan regaling the Republican faithful with tales of brave white soldiers taking "back the streets of Los Angeles, block by block." Fearful his symbolism might prove too subtle, he charged the overwhelmingly white audience to "take back our cities, and take back our culture, and take back our country." He never specified exactly who they would be taking back their cities, culture and country from, but he didn't have to—one look at the army that'd be doing the taking said it all. None of the current crop of complaints are explicitly about race any more than Buchanan's speech at the 1992 Republican Convention was, but now as then, one look at the enemy they fear and the forces they align against it and the identity of their antagonists becomes obvious.

The question, then, is whether this is a story we want told twice. America, conservatives insist, bought a false sale of goods, and the only way Obama can sustain his popularity is to pull the wool before our eyes via the political equivalent of an atomic wedgie: overt propaganda. Attacking the National Endowment for the Arts comes straight from the '90s script: every dollar the NEA disburses will be tracked by the likes of Andrew Breitbart until the perfect moment to introduce the world to the next "Piss Christ" arrives. They've already begun to remind the troops of all the old tropes, but their attempt to preemptively undermine the institutional credibility of the NEA indicates that this generation of conservative critics might be more media savvy than their '90s counterparts. Tim Slagle's response to a recent MoveOn campaign is a sign of smears to come:

It looks like the NEA’s call for artists to promote health care initiatives has been heard by some comedy artists.

MoveOn was not a party to the infamous conference call, but because it involves actors, and actors are artists, it's a party to the propaganda agenda established during that call. As a consequence of that call, all artists—whether they shoot a crucifix in urine like Andrew Serrano or urinate on themselves like Will Ferrell—will be seen as complicit in a conspiracy to undermine America so grand even Goebbels would blush.

But while they may be savvy, they're far from smart. In the article quoted above, Slagle offers a "prize to anyone who can name all eight [actors in the MoveOn video] without using Google," includes the name of all of them in his tags not once, but twice, and his commenters are still stumped. And the one and odious John Ziegler calls for a return to "the Golden Age of television (the 70's and 80's)," when Americans came together to laugh at black people for the wrong reasons, before he realized—or was told—that he should be laughing at Archie Bunker, not with him.

That his list of programs excludes The Cosby Show is no surprise. He prefers Sanford and Sons because its humor was a function of its characters' blackness, whereas the comedy on Cosby was situational, and Ziegler found its situations implausible. How could a black obstetrician treat white women without race becoming an issue? The specter of miscegenation may not, I confess, be responsible for him preferring Golden Age shows with majority black casts, but his vision of American unity is undeniably odd:

The major networks used to create a de facto “team photo” of our nation which (after a slow start) eventually included everyone in the picture. Now, each race, gender, and age group has their own “team” and tends to watch programming that is built to only appeal to them. In short, we end up living in very different realities with almost nothing in common[.]

So in the Golden Age, when Norman Lear was adapting the BBC sitcoms Till Death Us Do Part and Steptoe and Son for American audiences, television became "a de facto 'team photo' of our nation [that] included everyone in the picture." First, white and black do not a photograph of America make; second, in Ziegler's photograph there are shows with majority white casts and shows with majority black casts, but none, like Cosby, with what could be called integrated casts. Ziegler further complains that his inability to find Tyler Perry funny represents "a net loss to the strength of the fabric of our country," because once upon a time he could laugh at the scheming of Fred Sanford, but now that black people have shows built to "appeal to them," they appear to be "living in very different realities with almost nothing in common."

He seems not to realize that they did then and do now. A commenter who named himself after Dane Cook does his damnedest to embody the plain racist underpinning of Ziegler's argument:

For the most part, blacks on television have assimilated into the mainstream of society and no one thinks much about it any more.

The mainstream of society . . . they assimilated into the mainstream of society . . . now what would that be again?

(x-posted.)

I should probably explain . . .

. . . this.  But as I like this definition by Tom better than mine, I'm running with it instead:

Since SEK eventually writes at any given blog I happen to read,* if I start reading, say, The Corner on a regular basis, it is inevitable that one day SEK will be blogging there. Which means that we can—simply by reading conservative blogs—turn the entire wingnut blogosphere in a bastion of literary criticism interested in Darwinian rhetoric, comic books, and dismantling incredibly dumb arguments made by those very same conservatives. Go, Scott, go!

*What I will now call SEK'S Law, a variation on Godwin's Law: "As a blog's lifespan grows longer, the probability of SEK becoming a regular contributor approaches 1."

Because I only value decorum up to the point at which its violation makes me feel better about myself...

. . . I will now post some of the emails Jeff Goldstein has sent me over the years.  After all, as one of his own commenters wrote, "[he] has it coming."  And he does.  Still, for the better part of two days I clung to the high road.

Then I realized that I'd never stop crying myself to sleep every night if I let this stand.  Goldstein had left me in a bind: either I spend the rest of my nights choking back sobs, or I do something that disgusts decent people and have the sycophants who comment on my blog write insulting things about Goldstein on my behalf until I cared even less about the opinion of someone whose opinion means nothing to me.  What choice did I have?

Goldstein's not some random internet someone—he's someone whose opinion I claim not to value and he is out there, right now, writing critical stuff about an issue I claim not to care about.  If ever a situation called for an uncalled for breach of etiquette, it is this one.

So, without further ado, here's the email Jeff sent on 29 May 2006:

How not to get what you want via email.

This one will forever remain the locus classicus for e-futility, but the four I received in the last sixteen hours make for a mighty strong undercard.  In sum:

You are a liar and a fraud.  And I don't give a rat's ass what anyone who respects you may think of me, because I haven't any respect for anyone who would respect a disingenuous lying weasel like you to begin with.  Can you do me a favor?

Because I can't help but be polite, I even responded to these emails by telling my interlocutor how he could secure the information he needed to launch another baseless attack against me.  Why did I tell an intellectually dishonest person how to contact an agent who could put him in touch with the author he believes has information that undermines my argument?  Because that's what disingenuous lying weasels do: they provide their critics the means to suss out any truth that begs for sunlight.  Don't believe me? 

You should.  I have independent corroboration of my good faith gesture.  That evidence of my good faith comes from the very person who would cast me as a world-historical tool should elicit a few cheap chuckles . . . as should the fact that said person attempts to prove my iniquitous nature by publishing a private email in which I wrote the following: 

Turns out I owe Jack Cashill an apology.

Because I was wrong, wrong, wrong about the identity of the author of Dreams From My Father. Independent confirmation of Cashill's claim that William Ayers penned the President's memoir comes in the form of a book by celebrity biographer Christopher Andersen. Cashill is right to be excited—it's not every day you blunder to the plate, close your eyes, swing for the fences and have your prayers answered. That's what the arrival of corroborating evidence in Andersen's book amounts to, and no researcher who's found corroboration of the sort in independently researched materials will begrudge Cashill the tone of unreserved glee and grammatical abandon evident in his latest post:

In his new book, "Barack and Michelle: Portrait of an American Marriage," Best-selling celebrity journalist, Christopher Andersen, has blown a huge hole in the Obama genius myth without intending to do so.

Who cares that book titles are traditionally underlined or italicized, capital letters belong at the beginning of sentences, or that he uses, commas, like an undergraduate when independent research has provided a factual basis for his speculative argument:

Relying on inside sources, quite possibly Michelle Obama herself, Andersen describes how Dreams came to be published—just as I had envisioned it in my articles on the authorship of Dreams. With the deadline pressing, Michelle recommended that Barack seek advice from "his friend and Hyde Park neighbor Bill Ayers."

Only a killjoy would complain that Michelle Obama couldn't be a source, "quite possibly" or otherwise, because Andersen wrote an unauthorized biography—which, by definition, is a biography whose subject or subjects did not participate in its composition. That those "inside sources" who knew of Michelle's purported recommendation are not named, i.e. sourced, is the sort of thing that, despite being true, only someone who hated joy would point out.

Andersen continues, "In the end, Ayers's contribution to Barack's Dreams From My Father would be significant—so much so that the book's language, oddly specific references, literary devices, and themes would bear a jarring similarity to Ayers's own writing."

Even though Cashill jettisons the very pretense of formatting book titles here, and even though Andersen's claim is couched in a conditional clause ("would be significant") of the sort favored by authors who learned their libel law from the wrong end of many lawsuits, we should not let such quibbles diminish the importance of this independent, corroborating evidence—especially when, even though Cashill doesn't identify him in his post, these claims come from a named source:

In the end, Ayers's contribution of Barack's Dreams from My Father would be significant—so much so that the book's language, oddly specific references, literary devices, and themes would bear a jarring similiarity to Ayers's own writings . . .

"There was a good deal of literary back-scratching going on in Hyde Park," said writer Jack Cashill, who noted that a mutual friend of Barack and Ayers, Rashid Khalidi, thanked Ayers for helping him with his book Resurrecting Empire. Ayers, explained Cashill, "provided an informal editing service for like-minded friends in the neighborhood."

Your eyes do not deceive you. Against odds of astronomical grandeur, Cashill's independent, corroborating evidence for his theory that William Ayers wrote the President's memoir is also named Jack Cashill. But, as Cashill—the one who first made the claim, not the independent researcher who verified it—might say, sometimes the world can be as small as the city of the Chicago.

A New Literary History of the United States in Literature

The publication of A New Literary History of the United States will likely strike a few chords familiar to the participants in the debate that followed Rohan’s latest post.  Written neither in the Emory Elliot mode—a history of items both literary and American—nor that of Sacvan Bercovitch—a history all items written by Americans that can be yours for the low, low price of $299.29—editors Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors instead decided to write a cultural history of the United States in a self-consciously literary voice.  As Laura Miller at Salon* writes, the two

have pitched the biggest tent conceivable, pegging each of the chronologically arranged essays in the book to “points in time and imagination where something changed: when a new idea or a new form came into being, when new questions were raised, when what before seemed impossible came to seem necessary or inevitable.” With this in mind, they’ve produced a compendium that is neither reference nor criticism, neither history nor treatise, but a genre-defying, transcendent fusion of them all. It sounds impossible, but the result seems both inevitable and necessary and profoundly welcome, too.

This is, then, an anthology seemingly written to drive J.C. Hallman to drink, because it doggedly focuses on cultural significance over the literariness of the literary.  However soul-deadening he might consider its subject matter, the manner in which most of it is written would likely meet with approval.  Though idea-driven, the prose in Jonathan Lethem’s entry on Thomas Edison—in which he exclusively discusses the inventor’s place in film history—still sings: 

Conservatives are outraged over an actual outrage? Color me impressed.

It may have taken awhile, but thanks to Patrick Courrielche’s exposé at, of all places, Big Hollywood, conservatives are positively fuming over the Bush Administration‘s decision to funnel $2.2 billion through the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives into programs that specifically support the President’s ideological and policy commitments, like the Abstinence Education Program, designed to “enable states to provide abstinence education and mentoring, counseling, and adult supervision to promote abstinence from sexual activity.”

Conservatives are rightly upset with a speech Bush delivered at the 2004 White House National Conference on Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, in which he said “[i]t’s hard to be a faith-based program if you can’t practice faith [and] the message to you is, we’re changing the culture here in America.”

“It’s hard to read his comments as anything but a call for groups to engage in a partisan campaign on behalf of the Bush Administration’s policy agenda,” argued John Hinderaker. Nick Gillespie agreed, saying that “[i]f you’ve ever wondered—and worried—about where government support of the arts leads, look no further than the full transcript of an August 10, 2009 telecon[ference call] between an official at the National Endowment for the Arts and a group of ‘independent artists from around the country.’”

Wait wait wait—I thought conservatives were upset because the White House created an office, installed it five federal agencies, then used them to fund a clearly partisan policy agenda to the tune of $2.2 billion. You mean to tell me all those links are about an August 10^th conference call that tried to wrangle up support for the current President’s National Day of Service—a call in which not one cent of the NEA’s $155 million budget was dispensed or even offered?

They are.