Acephalous

William A. Jacobson likes making my points for me.

Which is unfortunate, because I'm about to call him illiterate. He claims that I argued that Sarah Palin and her supporters are "racist because there were so few non-whites pictured in the available photos." I did nothing of the sort. My claim, as you can tell by the words I used to write it, was that the "images she and her people have decided should represent her mass-appeal on a mock-presidential bid launch" demonstrates that "her own handlers consider her appeal limited to white people." I even emphasized that first statement in the post, which as we all know is the online equivalent of burying it under a rock behind the fire-pit in someone else's backyard. ("Officer, you can search my property, absolutely, but I assure you that you won't find any claims here.") You would think that a law professor would be able to recognize an argument when he saw one, but apparently not, which is why he provides evidence that bolsters mine. He quotes a reporter from MSNBC:

"I can tell you this crowd today was very, very diverse, a lot of people from different races, ages, all coming to see Palin and wanting get a glimpse of who this lady is that says that she's going rogue."

If this is true—and for the moment, I grant that it is—then Palin and her handlers are deliberately not posting pictures of the many non-white people who attend her events. That, Mr. Jacobson, is the sort of evidence that someone like me would use in support of my claim that the pictures posted to her page are designed to appeal to a specific audience. Because I don't trust you with logic, I will draw the obvious inference for you: Palin's people are excluding photographs of the non-white people who attend her appearances because those photographs aren't intended to appeal to a non-white audience.

Which was my original point.

You do realize that you're helping me out here, Mr. Jacobson, don't you?

He also claims that I "maliciously and falsely referred to one conservative blogger as a 'noted racist.'" But—no doubt for some reason other than it demonstrates that Riehl's a racist—he doesn't reproduce the link that I included to a post demonstrating that Riehl is, in fact, a racist. He also makes the classic debating mistake of assuming facts not in evidence when he claims that I only did so "because this is the internet, and no one is held accountable," his assumption being that were I to meet Riehl on the street, I wouldn't call him a racist. Of course, being that these words are also on the internet, I can't prove to his satisfaction that I wouldn't; however, in a different context, he would point out the fact that because I'm an academic who hangs out with folks like this, I spend all day calling everybody I pass on the street a racist, and since Riehl belongs to that category—how about a little freshmen logic, Mr. Jacobson?

SEK calls all people who are on the street a racist.
Dan Riehl is a person on the street.
Therefore, SEK calls Dan Riehl a racist.

I would say that syllogism puts him in a bind, but I think we can safely assume that someone who believed my earlier posts were intended "to smear the crowds at Palin book signings" probably never took freshmen logic, and thus isn't even aware that he's in one.

Gobble? Gobble gobble; or, gobble gobble gobble.

Gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble, gobble gobble gobble gobble.[1]  Gobble gobble gobble gobble—gobble  gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble—gobble  gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble.  Gobble gobble gobble, gobble  gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble.  Gobble gobble, gobble gobble:

Gobble gobble gobble gobble  gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble.  Gobble gobble gobble.  Gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble, gobble  gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble  gobble gobble gobble.  Gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble,  gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble. [2]

Gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble.  Gobble gobble gobble: gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble.  Gobble gobble gobble gobble.  Gobble, gobble gobble, gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble.  Gobble  gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble;  gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble,  gobble gobble.   Gobble  gobble gobble gobble,  gobble gobble gobble.

[1] Gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble, gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble.  Gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble.  Gobble gobble. 

[2] Gobble gobble gobble.

You only notice I'm white because you're a racist, Part II

Instead of playing "Count the Non-White People!" with Sarah Palin's photographs of her appearance at Fort Bragg, I will present some statistics about the base and surrounding community:

If you don't take the shovels away from those racists, they'll never quit digging.

Should you like more proof of the dynamic I described in the previous post, you can find it (and my substantial response to it) here.

You only notice I'm white because you're a racist.

In the comments to a long, inaccurate attack on those who consider Palin evidence that the conservative movement is trending stupid, Darleen Click claims that those who point out the extreme whiteness of Palin supporters "reveal a great more about [themselves] than Palin." Because such people notice race at all, they're insufficiently colorblind and therefore more racist than Click, who merely advocates creating and maintaining structural inequalities that disproportionately affect people who just happen to not be white.

Set aside for a moment the fact that Click labors under the delusion that noticing people of color is more racist than harming them and remember that 1) the figure she defends, Sarah Palin, is using her publicity tour as a prelude to a 2012 presidential bid launch, and 2) candidate Palin is posting photographs of the people she meets on her Facebook page, meaning that these are not images produced by a liberal media elite out to make her look like her appeal is limited to white people but images she and her people have decided should represent her mass-appeal on a mock-presidential bid launch. Time to play "Count the Non-White People"!

Manga recommendations, anyone?

Because it makes little sense to write a book about visual rhetoric and ignore the fastest growing sector of the market, but as my reading experience follows the typical trajectory of Claremont X-Titles (X-X?) to Sandman and Vertigo books to Fantagraphics lust, my experience with manga comes almost exclusively from some mid-90s flirtation with Ghost in the Shell.  I know about manga and its many varieties, but I lack the sort of fluency with its conventions that I have with American mainstream and independent books.  My question to you is this:

What should I read to acquire a robust, intuitive working vocabulary with manga?

"And there still would have been the Holocaust..."

Few write on the history of evolutionary theory as compellingly as John Wilkins. (Had his Species: the History of an Idea and Defining Species: a Sourcebook from Antiquity to Today been available in 2002, I could've avoided years of thankless legwork and finished my dissertation with normative time to spare. Not that I'm bitter.) So I can think of no better way to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the publication of the Origin than to listen to Wilkins speculate about what would have happened had it never existed. My only qualm is with this paragraph:

Lamarckism, by which I mean the progressivist view of evolution, not the “acquired inheritance” version that has little to do directly with Lamarck and anyway is set up as a contrast with Weismann not Darwin, would have played an even greater role in people’s thinking than it did. It may still be with us now—we would be trying to figure out how progress occurs out of necessity, rather than it being the rather odd view of people like Conway Morris.

I think scholars who focus more on the scientific literature underestimate the popular appeal of what amounts to quasi-Lamarckian thought both then and now ... but then again, as I'm the person who wrote my dissertation, I would.

You don't need to know what the science means to establish what the words mean to scientists.

Global warming skeptics are attacking climate scientist Phil Jones for encouraging trickery in an email recently stolen off the webmail server at the University of East Anglia in which he wrote:

I've just completed Mike's Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline.

Over at RealClimate, the skeptical response to the word "trick" is to treat it as a colloquial:

Literal Symbolism: The Commonsense Conservative History of American Idiocy, from Reagan to the Politics of Nonsense

The following exchange between Bill O'Reilly and Sarah Palin would, were we talking about any other politician, mark the end of a career. The emphasis is mine:

Truly, academics live enviable lives.

Proffer theories as to the avocation I undertook presently. You guessed it! I spent the day marking papers, which, means I had, many reminders of why teaching Writingstudents, even at the Universitylevel, can make even the most mild-mannered academic want to JAB IN EYES JAB IN EYES.

(Actual posts to recommence when the noises in my head resemble English more than English as she is spoke.)

ALSO: Because it's always best to make this plain from the beginning [SEK says to the readers at LGM], on the issue of whether my students know what I'm writing:

With the exception of the text adventure, [what I post is] written to be used in class, then repurposed for the blog. I show them videos of Shatner and ask them if that's what they want to sound like; I have them write blog posts (for their course blogs) in which they're required to substitute every noun and verb with suggestions from Microsoft Word's thesaurus, etc. Whenever I write about conversations in the classroom (for example), I ask the students if they're alright with that ... and as I'm typically the butt of those posts, they always are. In fact, by the end of the quarter, they're actually demanding I write up what happened in a given class (for example). Even the most notorious bit of student writing I've parodied was done with the student's consent. (It was years ago, and he wrote me out of the blue to apologize for writing it.)

How big is too big? Let me tell you.

My old monitor was issuing death rattles—taking three days to turn on without flickering and the like—so with the money you people so generously provided by buying stuff I recommend from Amazon, I purchased a new one under the impression that it was the same size as my current one. 

It is not. 

It is oppressively large. 

It looms over me. 

I moved it further back on the desk and am slouching in my chair not because I have good eyes and bad posture, but because I am frightened by the monstrosity in front of me.  I can now fit three formerly maximized windows on my screen at the same time, or (and this might not be a bad thing), maximize a single window and become more creative through the power of bilateral symmetry. 

Shpadoinkle! Sarah Palin endorses cannibalism.

From the NRO's new shrine to Sarah Palin:

If any vegans came over for dinner, I could whip them up a salad, then explain my philosophy on being a carnivore: If God had not intended for us to eat animals, how come He made them out of meat?

Because He wanted everyone to have a shpadoinkle day? More seriously, Palin is calling Him a rank hypocrite, because He also said "You must not eat bats" and yet he made them out of meat.

Ignorance of the Original Testament hypocrisy is, I admit, the easiest hypocrisy to spot, but it's the least effective to mock on account of its profundity. If someone were to inform Palin that her beloved moose aren't kosher because they weren't properly shekhted and porged, she'd complain about "gotcha journalism" and question your love of America on account of her profound ignorance of the book she claims to live her life by.

Fortunately for semi-professional mockers such as myself, Palin set the standard demonstrably lower by claiming that God intended humans to eat anything made out of meat.

The Dwight D. Eisenhower Bowing Hour!

(Apparently TypePad timed out and didn't post this yesterday, in case you're wondering why it only went up now.)

Seems someone forgot to tell Ike what everyone on the right knows (but oddly never cites a source for): the President never ever bows. Because as even a cursory search of the AP Image archive indicates, the man could not stop bowing. Hello there, Pope John XXIII!

Once upon a time, her crazy had more bite.

As I'm catching flack from, among others, two of the three co-panelists from my MLA panel on academic blogging concerning the title to my Camille Paglia post, I feel the need to have Molly Ivins clarify it for me (courtesy of Ahistoricality) :

You think perhaps this is a cheap shot, that I have searched her work and caught Ms. Paglia in a rare moment of sweeping generalization, easy to make fun of? Au contraire, as we always say in Amarillo; the sweeping generalization is her signature. In fact, her work consists of damn little else. She is the queen of the categorical statement.

There was a period in which Paglia could be counted on to be write with force and clarity, i.e. before she began writing disorganized columns brimming over with self-aggrandizing allusions and mindless repetitions of right-wing talking-points. In 1991, she even possessed prescience enough to predict her own rightward drift:

[I]f people are trying to critique from within the academic establishment, and they're getting tarred with the word "neoconservative," you keep on doing that long enough, people will get used to hearing it about themselves, and they will become conservative.

Case in point: Camille Paglia. Did her ready-made anti-feminist statements predispose her to drifting so? Without a doubt. Were her arguments about the inability of woman to create truly great art always as absurd as they seem now? Absolutely. However, she would not have become the media sensation she was in the early '90s had she not packaged her faux-feminist critiques in a language understandable to the general intellectual culture. There were (and are) many anti-feminst thinkers who rivaled Paglia in virulence but not prominence, and the point of my title was that she now resembles those muted, vainglorious misogynists more than the contrarian firebrand she once was.

"These trials will be a stunning blow to the rugged image of the abstract American."

Until recently, the phrase "transnational Left" only appeared in print every once in a while (and then only in articles that also granted the existence of global Jewish banking conspiracies). Lately, it seems impossible to read an article by a mainstream conservative that doesn't assume Obama is a figurehead for this amorphous child of the First International. For example, the very serious Blane McDonnagh Andrew McCarthy argues that Obama's decision to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in accordance with the laws of the land

will provide endless fodder for the transnational Left to press its case that actions taken in America's defense are violations of international law that must be addressed by foreign courts. And the intelligence bounty will make our enemies more efficient at killing us.

Obama and Holder are not trying to reestablish the rule of law, they are engaged in a game of political chicken with their real constituents (the transnational Left) and, because they blinked, they owe a tribute of American lives to their overseas masters. The problem with such paranoid stylings is that 1) Mohammed and his compatriots were tortured and 2) the entire world already knows that. What can these men say against the United States that hasn't already been published by international news syndicates?

These trials will not be a farce intended to give the bogeyman that is the transnational Left the leverage it needs to prosecute the previous administration. Former Presidents are only kidnapped and tried overseas in spy novels and Chile, and I doubt conservatives want their icons compared to Pinochet. Central to this deluded argument is the notion that the current administration would prosecute these terrorists for reasons other than being terrorists:

[T]he great hope of the terror-backing neo-communist left, at home and worldwide, is that the Obama administration will continue to build a case for torture trials for former Bush administration officials.

Suffice it to say that when a professor of political science conflates American liberals and most of the rest of the world with communist revolutionaries, he should be taken very seriously, especially when said professor happens to be "an umatched competitor whose tactical elan would make Machiavelli proud." Because a political science professor who compares himself to the colloquial mascot* for the scorched earth method of maintaining political power is exactly the sort of person who would never argue in bad faith were it expedient ... except when the professor in question is Donald Douglas, in which case it's best to assume he's a tendentious braggart.

Simply put, there is no singular "terror-backing neo-communist left" that the administration seeks to appease with these trials, and those who claims otherwise are being disingenuous in the service of a small-minded version of what constitutes "American interests." Rehabilitating our reputation as a just arbiter in world affairs might compromise the masculinity of the American brand, but it'll also make the world a safer place for living, breathing Americans.

*Machiavelli was a far more interesting figure than his contemporary caricature would suggest. See the section on authorial duplicity and The Prince in Gale Carrithers and James Hardy's Milton and the Hermeneutic Journey for more on that.

Dan Riehl? Still a racist, only now a homophobic one.

Last month, I documented Dan Riehl's reaction to the perceived threat posed to him by, in his words, "pretty young, not that big [black] kids" who never confronted him. He responded, as conservatives of his stripe do, with some juvenile homophobic "humor." Point being, because I'm not inclined to give demonstrably puerile racists the benefit of the doubt, you can imagine my reaction when I read the following in his recent post about ACORN:

Breitbart's video busts told us what they do best. The pathetic part in all this is that they were not just allowed, but encouraged to run wild on taxpayer funding by corrupt liberals, including Obama. They should all hang together if you ask me. How long will it be before corrupt Democrats find a way to back door them the money? I bet they're accustomed to the back door. Maybe Barney Frank should spearhead the effort?

In the two short sentences I emphasized, Riehl manages to 1) invoke the language of lynching against the first black President and a predominantly black organization, and 2) equate illegal activity with the sexual practices of homosexual men. He will protest that the latter doesn't make him a homophobe (despite the overt association of homosexual sex with a criminal act) any more than his call for a metaphorical posse to host a metaphorical lynching is evidence of racism. He will be wrong: the fact that the first metaphor that occurs to him when criticizing blacks is a hanging party tells us that when he disagrees with blacks, he couches his disagreement in terms of stretched necks and strangled bodies. People for whom that is an instinctive response are people who are racists. Therefore ...

Once upon a time Camille Paglia could be counted on to write with force and clarity.

That time has passed:

The solipsistic members of Congress want us peons to be ground up in the communal machine, while they themselves gambol on in the flowering meadow of their own lavish federal health plan.

Jack London would have looked at that sentence and deemed it overwrought. Then he would've reconsidered, thrown in a few King James-quoting cavemen and declared it a masterpiece. But Jack London was not a serious scholar like Paglia, who proves her seriousness by paraphrasing Palin:

The brutal abandonment of the elderly here is unconscionable.

Death panels! Her keen attention to the language of a bill that, at the time, did not yet exist served her well. But if there's one thing we can count on from Paglia, it's that she pays attention to her prose:

One would have expected a Democratic proposal to include an expansion of Medicare, certainly not its gutting. The passive acquiescence of liberal commentators to this vandalism simply demonstrates how partisan ideology ultimately desensitizes the mind.

If "gutting" is the new "vandalism," does that mean taggers are now murdering or murderers are now tagging? I only ask because a scholar of Paglia's self-professed stature would never mix a metaphor or lazily appropriate the language of someone whose partisan ideology ultimately desensitized his mind?

Obama has dithered for months about a strategy for Afghanistan.

Dick Cheney? Really? Besides, weren't we talking about health care?

On other matters, I was recently flicking my car radio dial and heard an affected British voice tinkling out on NPR.

Apparently not.

On science, Dawkins was spot on—lively and nimble. But on religion, his voice went "Psycho" weird—as if he was channeling some old woman with whom he was in love-hate combat.

That metaphor doesn't even deserve to be called mixed. I'm sure it makes sense to her and would to us, had she be bothered to explain it. But that would require her to remain on topic for more than a few sentences:

Continuing on the theme of overrated male writers, I was appalled at the sentimental rubbish filling the air about Claude Lévi-Strauss after his death was announced last week

I always tell my students that if you begin too many paragraphs with some variation on "another example of," you're either proving something you've already proven or are trying to slap a signpost on a non sequitur, and that in either case, you're not developing an argument. Paglia might benefit from sitting in on my class:

Now on, with relief, to pop!

Non-ironic exclamation points! They are signs of a great writer! By "pop," I'm sure she means "current popular culture" and not "a reference to Madonna to prove beyond all doubt that this column is an exercise in unwitting self-parody."

Now, come on, people, do you really believe that Lady Gaga is 23 years old?

Praise Jesus, she at least avoided—

And now Madonna is trying to resuscitate herself, body and mind, by taking transfusions from Brazil!

You have got to be kid—

Is it true, according to press rumors, that Madonna is vacationing with her boy toy Jesus Luz in a house in Bahia in the far northeast of Brazil?

I have no idea what she's talking about, but at least she's not patting herself on the back and taking credit for—

It's kind of what I had in mind in my epic Salon column last year negatively comparing Madonna to Daniela. As a teacher, I will certainly take credit for this leap forward, if it occurs, in Madonna's much-delayed self-education.

That sound you hear? That'd be Harold Bloom choking back sobs as he considers the fate of his once promising protégée.

Let the circle be unbroken.

From a thread about Michael Steele's "white Republicans are afraid of me" remarks on Sunday:

I’m terrified of Michael Steele the same way Mary Jo Kopechne was terrified of Teddy Kennedy.

This ride is flat scary, and I want off.

In less than 30 words, this commenter compresses the conservative response to white liberals and all blacks into the singular image of a threatened white woman. I would stop and note that the white female martyr in question worked with the man who supposedly terrified her and willingly entered a vehicle with him on that unfortunate evening, but that would be beside the point. It is not the woman herself to whom conservatives appeal when they utter her name, but what happened to her as imagined through their eyes.

Their horror at Kopechne's death (and their subsequent insistence that in it can be found the root of all ideological evil) reminds me of nothing so much as the origin story of Rorschach in Alan Moore's Watchmen. (Such obsessions happens when writing a book.) His moment of decision—the moment he became, a la Bérubé, outraged by Chappaquiddick—was when he discovered some fabric that had been purchased by Kitty Genovese shortly before her murder:

What turns Rorschach into the misogynistic psychopath deplored by a witless Anthony Lane but beloved by many a conservative? The seventh and eighth panels tell you all you need to know. They are not presented from Genovese's perspective: the scene-to-scene transition from panel six to panel seven clearly indicates that they're Rorschach's reconstruction of the indifference she witnessed as she bled out before the eyes of friends and neighbors. She is no more a person to him that Kopechne is to those who claim to speak for her and yet, like conservatives, Rorschach claims her death for his own purposes.

I would continue, but I don't feel comfortable speaking for the dead. Would that others shared my discomfort ...

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.)

UPDATE.  If McCain sent you here, I urge you to 1) scroll down the right sidebar and tell me the number you see there, 2) consider what it means that he knows more about my traffic than I do, and 3) know that I've already dispatched the man more soundly than I can by responding to some petty traffic dispute.

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.)