Acephalous

And the Award for Missing the Point goes to…

. . . Brent Bozell, of the ironically named “Media Research Center,” who refuted Oliver Stone’s comment that “Nixon always said Reagan was a dumb son of a bitch” by quoting a number of prominent figures in Reagan’s administration who thought Reagan was really smart:

I turned to Frank Donatelli, the White House Political Director under President Reagan from 1987 through 1989 . . . Richard Allen, Reagan’s National Security Advisor . . . [and] Gary Bauer[, the] Domestic Policy Advisor under the Gipper for two years[.]

All of them agreed that real “dumb son of a bitch” was Stone, who—according Bozell in a letter addressed to Stone—is an historian because he once claimed to be:

Some producer [of Comedy Central's Politically Incorrect] really thought in extremes when they pitted Oliver Stone and Brent Bozell for one episode. I have to say that you were gracious, charming, engaging, and we enjoyed ourselves—except for that moment when I chastised you for claiming you’re an historian. You bristled and denied ever claming that moniker. I cited the source, an interview in some West Coast paper (I can’t recall which one now).

Even though Bozell can’t remember the name of the paper, he somehow managed to re-read the article later and

[i]t turns out that you were right (in the article) and I was wrong.

So Bozell was wrong, Stone never claimed to be an historian, but that doesn’t mean Bozell wasn’t also right:

You are an historian whether you believe it or not. You make films about history and historical figures. You record history, and that makes you an historian.

Now that Bozell, through the cunning use of italics, has transformed Stone into an historian, he can finally slam him good and proper:

Being an historian is not the problem. It’s that you’re a lousy historian.

In short, Stone isn’t what he never claimed to be, but is what Bozell says he is, and a lousy one at that.  The evidence:

“Nixon always said Reagan was a dumb son of a bitch,” you said, and the audience laughed, and you smiled and decided to take that statement further by agreeing with it. So you said, “You know, I think that he was,” and the audience now cheered and hooted and applauded.

See what I mean when I say you’re a lousy historian?

There are two claims being made here: one, that Nixon thought Reagan was a dumb son of a bitch; two, that Oliver Stone thinks Reagan was a dumb son of a bitch. Unfortunately for Bozell, Nixon illegally taped every conversation he ever had, and when we consult his conversations with Henry Kissenger on the morning of November 17, 1971 [620a.mp3], we learn that while Nixon didn’t use those exact words—about Reagan, at least, since we know he used that particular phrase about everyone from the Canadian Prime Minister, Pierre Trudeau, to the Director of the Secret Service, James Rowley, to one of his own White House aides, Tom Charles Huston—he didn’t think too highly of the Gipper’s wits:

(beginning at 1:33:02)

President Nixon: What’s your evaluation or Reagan after meeting him several times now.

Kissinger: Well, I think he’s a—actually I think he’s a pretty decent guy.

President Nixon: Oh, decent, no question, but his brains?

Kissinger: Well, his brains are negligible. I—

President Nixon: He’s really pretty shallow, Henry.

Kissinger: He’s shallow. He’s got no . . . he’s an actor. He—When he gets a line he does it very well. He said, “Hell, people are remembered not for what they do, but for what they say. Can’t you find a few good lines?” That’s really an actor’s approach to foreign policy . . .

Admittedly, Kissinger lands the harder blows, but Nixon obviously agrees with him, so we can say with certainty that Nixon thinks Reagan’s “brains are neglible” and that he’s “really pretty shallow.” That’s not quite “dumb son of a bitch,” but it’s close. If only that tape continued . . .

(beginning at 1:46:19)

President Nixon: Back to Reagan though. It shows you how a man of limited mental capacity simply doesn’t know what the Christ is going on in the foreign area. He’s got to know that on defense—doesn’t he know these battles we fight and fight and fight? Goddamn it, Henry, we’ve been at—

Does calling Reagan “a man of limited mental capacity” amount to saying he’s a “dumb son of bitch”? Oliver Stone seems to think so, and I’m inclined to agree. So, as to the first claim, Bozell is clearly the lousy historian here.

As to the second claim—that Oliver Stone thinks Reagan was a dumb son of a bitch—given that Bozell spends the majority of a letter addressed to Stone trying to prove that Reagan was the second coming of Thomas Aquinas, he’s not well-positioned to argue that Stone doesn’t think Reagan was a dumb son of a bitch.

In other words, the person who misremembered what Stone said in an article somewhere, but doesn’t remember where, who then re-read the article from he-doesn’t-remember-where and promptly forgot where it was again—this person thinks Stone is a lousy historian because he correctly cited Nixon’s sentiments about Reagan and correctly stated that he agreed with Nixon’s assessment. If I were Bozell—and could remember that I was Bozell long enough to cite myself—I wouldn’t be knocking people who don’t claim to be historians for being lousy historians when those same tables could so easily be turned on, say, a “lecturer, syndicated columnist, television commentator, debater, marketer, businessman, author, publisher and activist” who fancies himself qualified to judge who is and isn’t “a real [historian].”

(x-posted.)

Dear Readers of the Washington Post,

Not only am I someone "who says he has a PhD in English from the University of California at Irvine" (emphasis mine), I actually do! 

On an unrelated note, I'm not sure whether the Google Image results for this blog are representative or insulting, but they certainly are something.

Infinite Summer: Morbid? Culturally Imperial? Morbidly Culturally Imperial?

Am I alone in finding the whole idea of Infinite Summer a little morbid?  The renewed interest in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest is an obvious Good Thing—a first step toward popular as well as academic canonization—but having lived through the recent Michael Jackson Media Event, I can’t help but wonder whether the desire to read Wallace’s novel is akin downloading Thriller because Some Important Someone died.  Do I sound like I’m thwacking some straw man with shovel?  Because I’m not:

I have a confession to make. I don’t even like David Foster Wallace. And I don’t mean that I found Infinite Jest too lengthy on the first run-through. I mean his accessible stuff. His tales from cruise ships and lobster festivals and tennis matches and radio studios . . . So why am I here?

The short answer is that David Foster Wallace died.

That’s Ezra Klein, writing at A Supposedly Fun Blog.  I’m not complaining because famous bloggers (Matthew Yglesias and Julian Sanchez among them) are horning in on my territory—although I will note that the first thing I ever published online was a mediocre seminar paper titled “Demand and the Appearance of Freedom: The Role of Corporate Media in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest,” but only just to note it—nor, despite the above, am I really even complaining that Klein’s interest was piqued by Foster Wallace’s suicide, as a more charitable excerpt shows his interest to be far less morbid:

The slightly longer answer is that David Foster Wallace died and I cared. That was, to me, a surprise. Lots of people die. Just the other day, Ed McMahon died. It hardly registered. But Wallace was different. I read everything I could about his final days. I posted a memoriam on my site. I watched readings on YouTube. It affected me. I don’t know if it’s because he was a young writer who was felled by the violent bubble and froth of his own mind and that a small part of me relates to that. I don’t know if it’s because he was, in some way, unique to my generation, and as such, one of my own.

In the end, what’s interesting about the 25-year-old Klein’s post about the 46-year-old Foster Wallace’s novel is the notion that someone who was 18 years old when the Clash first performed in America and someone who was 18 years old the year Joe Strummer died can be said to belong to the same generation.  How does that work?  I’m tempted to blame it on the Internet:

Once you could identify someone’s taste by the cut of their concert tee—London Calling vs. Combat Rock, The Clash vs. Operation Ivy, Operation Ivy vs. Rancid, &c.—now that all these these bands (mostly) belong to the past tense, they’re part of that enormous cultural pool from which more recent generations sample freely.  For example, someone Klein’s age will never experience the pain of the endless, fruitless search for something like the first Clash album (which, contrary to that link, has not been in print continuously since 1979), as CDNOW was in decline during his formative years.  To people for whom almost everything has always been immediately available, the idea of what constitutes a culturally-determined generation is bound to be a little fuzzy. 

Note that I’m not criticizing Klein for being born in a time of cultural plenty—I would rather not have spent the better part of a decade searching for this in vain—I’m merely pointing out that his inclusion of Foster Wallace among his contemporaries dumbfounds me . . . unless I chalk it up to the novel instead of the man.  Wallace might not be Klein’s contemporary, but Infinite Jest could be.  Now that I’m reading it again, I’m struck by how contemporary it feels.  Everything that annoyed me about it in 1996 still annoys me now—the footnotes, subsidized time, the too-frequent self-indulgent sentence—but everything that felt new in 1996 still feels new now.

Given how we imagine ourselves into an intimacy with our favorite authors, it makes sense for people twenty-five years younger than Foster Wallace to feel a generational affinity for him on the basis of his novel; but that doesn’t really work, now does it?  I mean in the academic sense, the means by which we identify Author X as belonging to Period Y and analyze his or her work in light of the aesthetic of Period Y.  We don’t, in other words, seriously consider historical feelings of contemporaneity the way we experience our own, inasmuch as I’m fourteen years younger than Foster Wallace but, like Klein, count him as “one of my own.”

(x-posted.)

“Polygraph-level scholarship may suffice for harmless speculation about the authorship of Midsummer’s Night Dream, but not for Dreams From My Father. Too much is at stake.”

(by request.)

As all actual, practicing literary critics know, few sentences in critical works scream tendentiousness louder than:

What should be transparent to any literary critic is that . . .

Literary matters are only "transparent" when they're not properly literary. If something is transparent, you don't need a literary critic to ponder the depths it doesn't have—any old idiot will suffice. And that's exactly why Jack Cashill, author of the above and an idiot of long-standing, is just the man to prove that Bill Ayers wrote Obama's autobiography, Dreams From My Father. For Cashill and his mysterious contributors ("[t]he media punishment that Joe the Plumber received" requires they remain anonymous), the case against Obama is a compelling one:

What Mr. Midwest noticed recently is that both Ayers in [A Kind and Just Parent] and Obama in [Dreams From My Father] make reference to the poet Carl Sandburg. In itself, this is not a grand revelation. Let us call it a C-level match. Obama and Ayers seem to have shared the same library in any case . . . Ayers and Obama, however, go beyond citing Sandburg. Each quotes the opening line of his poem "Chicago" . . . This I would call a B-level match. What raises it up a notch to an A-level match is the fact that both misquote "Chicago," and they do so in exactly the same way.

So both Ayers and Obama misquote the opening line of Carl Sandburg's "Chicago," substituting "hog butcher to the world" for "hog butcher for the world." This mutual error would be significant (an "A-level match") if Ayers and Obama were the only two people who ever made it, but according to Google Book Search—a secret search engine to which only I have access—the same mistake has been made by Nelson Algren, Alan Lomax, Andrei Codrescu, H.L. Mencken, Paul Krugman, Perry Miller, Donald Hall, Ed McBain, Saul Bellow, S.J. Perelman, Nathanaël West, Ezra Pound, Wright Morris, Allen Ginsberg, Langston Hughes, and the 1967 Illinois Commission on Automation and Technological Progress. (To name but a few.) According to Cashill, I have now proven that Dreams From My Father was written by many a dead man of American letters, a living mystery writer, a New York Times columnist and the 1967 Illinois Commission on Automation and Technological Progress. That bears repeating:

I have an "A-level match" that proves that Obama's autobiography was written by a "study of the economic and social effects of automation and other technological changes on industry, commerce, agriculture, education, manpower, and society in Illinois" when Obama was only six years old.  If that somehow fails to convey to the dubious merits of Cashill's argument, perhaps this will:

Returning to the exotic, in his Indonesian backyard Obama discovered two "birds of paradise" running wild as well as chickens, ducks, and a "yellow dog with a baleful howl." In [Ayers'] Fugitive Days, there is even more "howling" than there is in Dreams . . . In [A Kind and Just Parent], he talks specifically about a "yellow dog." And he uses the word "baleful" to describe an "eye" in Fugitive Days. For the record, "baleful" means "threatening harm." I had to look it up.

You did read that right. Cashill did cite as "A-level" evidence the fact that Ayers and Obama used a word he didn't know, despite his being the Executive Editor of Kansas City’s premier business publication, Ingram’s Magazine; despite his having written for Fortune, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The Weekly Standard; despite his having authored five books of non-fiction; and despite the word "baleful" having appeared in print 342 times in the past six months alone. Granted, all those appearances were in high-minded literary publications like Newsday ("[w]ith his baleful countenance, wild hair, sonorous baritone and sage pronouncements") or leftist rags like The Washington Times ("warn them in baleful tones if they've forgotten, say, the Constitution"), so it would be unreasonable to expect Cashill to have been familiar with the word . . . or would be, were it not for the fact that it also appears 19 times in the pages of the American Thinker, the publication for which Cashill penned this tripe. (Seems he can begin his careful literary analysis of the other 848,000 potential ghost writers closer to home.)

I do believe it all makes sense now (and if you don't agree with that you're a pretentious Martian from Venus).

Via The Guardian, a testament to my taste making sense:

The escape valve of the exotic Negro*

A friend forwards this old solicitation from writers to readers about what they want to see more of in comics:

Pure ridiculousness.  Everybody knows that "City Problems" are "Black People" . . .

---

*Via Lorraine Hansberry in The New Negro.

Iranian dissidents are still in the process of . . .

. . . BURNING SHIT DOWN, which must be why neither the Los Angeles Times nor Twitter will load. I admit that watching the social media site come into its own in response to an international crisis makes me wonder whether I ought to be a little less cynical of the political power of new media and the political engagement of the online generati—what?

You have got to be kidding me.

Somewhere in Tehran, an Iranian protester's desperatetly punching his jerry-rigged mobile device trying to figure out what the fuck happened to Twitter.

(x-posted.)

Do [conservatives] dare to eat a peach?

Two groups of people are annoyed that the administration collaborated with the Huffington Post’s Nico Pitney on a question about Iran: seasoned pool reporters invested in the pecking order who believe Pitney jumped the line, and partisan hacks whose concern for Iran disappears the moment an opportunity to denounce the media arrives.

As to the former, they are, to paraphrase Tim Crouse, journalistic Prufrocks who measure their lives in handouts, and Pitney had the audacity to receive more sooner than this collection of easy tools thought prudent. More significant, or at least more revelatory, is the response of those who have spent the past week full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse on the subject of Obama’s refusal to condemn Iran. They pressed Obama to use the word “condemn” itself, because any condemnation that doesn’t sets off their Neville detectors. No mere objection, they argue, no matter how strong, can rise to the level of a condemnation.

Now, in their mad rush to demonstrate the pervasiveness of liberal bias, they ignore the rather obvious symbolism the Obama administration employed here. At a moment in which the Iranian regime is doing its damnedest to prevent information about the situation on the ground from leaking, Obama grants an Iranian dissident the primacy of place in a news conference that will be broadcast the world over. Moreover, he calls attention to the fact that he’s breaking protocol in order to give voice to the very people the Iranian regime wants silenced.

With the whole world watching, Obama took a moment to humiliate Ahmadinejad and Khamenei. But because conservatives are compelled to follow their tedious argument of insidious intent to its tendentious conclusion, what should be a story about the regime being humiliated on the world stage becomes yet another media pseudo-scandal.

(x-posted.)

And then the signifier collapsed into the signified of which it was a referent.

SEK: Did you realize they customized horns now?

COLLEAGUE: What do you mean?

SEK: Car horns.  They customize car horns now.

COLLEAGUE: Like the General Lee?

SEK: Sort of.  I was waiting to cross the street, the light turned green, but the lead car didn't move, so the one behind it went "HONK!  HONK HONK HONK!"

COLLEAGUE: That's customized how?

SEK: You don't get it.  It went "HONK! HONK HONK HONK!"

COLLEAGUE: That's what my car does.

SEK: You're still not getting it.  It went "HONK!  HONK HONK HONK!"  Like h-o-n-k "HONK!"

COLLEAGUE: You mean like it honked the word "HONK!"

SEK: Exactly.

COLLEAGUE: So the car said the word "HONK!"

SEK: I wouldn't go that far.

COLLEAGUE: It was a talking car.

SEK: No.

COLLEAGUE: But it spoke.

SEK: No.

COLLEAGUE: You just said it said the word "HONK!"

SEK: I didn't say it said it.  You know, Wordsworth on Martian beaches and what-not.

COLLEAGUE: Jesus fuck, I understood that.  I need to get away from you English people.

How to use Twitter to make anyone look like a morally odious lout.*

Cruel_Cruel_death:

SEK:

Cruel_Cruel_death:

SEK:

 

Cruel_Cruel_death:

SEK:

 

Cruel_Cruel_death:

SEK:

Cruel_Cruel_death:

SEK:

Cruel_Cruel_death:

SEK:

Cruel_Cruel_death:

SEK:

Cruel_Cruel_death:

SEK:

---

*Because when I call something a cheap rhetorical trick, I don't just mean when other people do it.

Two hypothetical questions:

1. How many hilariously public blog break-ups are required before the line "it's not me, it's you" rings hollow even to yourself?
2. Who runs a blog fundraiser in one post while threatening to quit blogging altogether in another?

Conservatives would respect Obama more if he took a principled stand against a corrupt Iranian regime by doing its bidding.

The same conservatives who mere months ago applauded their candidate’s rendition of “Barbara Ann” are now criticizing Obama for refusing to meddle in internal Iranian affairs: “[He] has only a smidgen of a chance left to get on the right side of history—either he starts acting like the leader of the free world, or he’s a quisling of thugocracies everywhere.”  To say that Obama risks putting himself on the wrong side of history suggests that you know enough about that history to distinguish between its sides, even though you don’t even know there are always more than two of them. Consider how incoherently conservatives have responded to official Iranian propaganda:

Iran accused the United States on Wednesday of “intolerable” meddling in its internal affairs, alleging for the first time that Washington has fueled a bitter post-election dispute . . . The Iranian government summoned the Swiss ambassador, who represents U.S. interests in Iran, to complain about American interference, state-run Press TV reported. The English-language channel quoted the government as calling Western interference “intolerable.”

That government forces accuse America of meddling in the face of Obama’s tepid public statements is not, as conservatives would have it, evidence that because the accusation will be made, we might as well meddle. It indicates that the Iranian government recognizes how politically efficacious the accusation of American intervention in Iranian electoral politics is, which means Victor David Hanson and like-minded conservatives are urging Obama to take a principled stand by playing directly into the hands of the Iranian regime. Ahmadinejad and his supporters would love nothing more than for Obama to read the lines they scripted for him.

But why are conservatives encouraging Obama to do exactly that? Because, unlike him, they are deeply and proudly ignorant of the weight of history. This ignorance is what leads Karl to complain that German Chancellor Merkel and French President Sarkozy beat Obama to the moral high ground, even though he quotes the reason the French and Germans can condemn the apparent electoral fraud and America cannot:

“Either way we are going to be dealing with an Iranian regime that has historically been hostile to the United States,” [Obama] added.

Because Germany and France do not have a history of meddling in Iranian electoral politics, they can criticize the election results without creating the appearance that they have a vested interest in their outcome. The Wall Street Journal is similarly clueless:

Yesterday he invoked the CIA’s role in the 1953 coup against Iranian leader Mohammad Mossadeq to explain his reticence. “Now, it’s not productive, given the history of the U.S.-Iranian relations, to be seen as meddling—the U.S. President meddling in Iranian elections,” Mr. Obama said. As far as we can tell, the CIA or other government agencies aren’t directing the protests or bankrolling Mr. Mousavi.

The issue isn’t whether America’s actually bankrolling the opposition party, but whether it appears to be; if it does, it undermines the legitimacy of the same movement the conservatives ostensibly support. The editorial staff at the WSJ doesn’t understand the depth of Iranian mistrust of American policy especially on the issue of Iranian elections. But the most eloquent proponent of elevating ignorance to the status of fact is the de facto voice of American conservativism:

And he said yesterday, “[i]t’s not productive, given the history of US-Iranian relations, to be seen as meddling.” We have to know what this means, “given the history of US-Iranian relations.” What history? Is he talking about the coup when we put the Shah in there in ‘53 that he apologized for? Is that what he means? Is he so handcuffed to defend liberty and those who seek it because of what happened 65 years ago? What’s holding Obama back from standing up for freedom? Standing up for freedom is “meddling”? It has to be understood. What was he talking about? What is this history? What is it?

That Limbaugh’s argument moves by dint of unanswered rhetorical questions is damning enough—neither he nor his audience knows the answers to those questions—but the fact that, even if he knew what had happened, he would still consider it irrelevant because it happened 65 years ago.  This claim that history can expire is indicative of a strain of stupid to which those who regularly complain about the “re-FDRing of America [via] the New New Deal” should be immune. Limbaugh fears nothing more than the revival of policies more than 65 years old, yet is incapable of understanding why the Iranian people may harbor a grudge against a nation that took liberties with its internal governance until 1979?

Limbaugh’s questions amount to little more than magical thinking thrust into face of empirical evidence.  We know that Ahmadinejad and his allies believe the appearance of American meddling is a powerful political cudgel; to this fact, conservatives respond that 1953 was a long time ago.  We know that Ahmadinejad and his allies are actively working to manufacture evidence of American meddling; to this fact, conservatives reply that Obama should do their work for them.

(x-posted.)

According to an actual Iranian in Iran, the administration’s silence helps the cause.

A former student of mine from Iran heard from his brother for the first time in a couple of days. When my student bemoaned the cautiousness of Obama administration’s statements, his brother confirmed one aspect of Spencer Ackerman’s account of the administration’s behavior, saying that government forces are already accusing protesters of collaborating with the U.S., and that protesters are actually worried that Obama will make an explicit show of support, as that would restore some credibility to what the government has said about the election and, more importantly, could undermine a reform coalition in which some factions are none-too-fond of America. 

Everyone prematurely condemning the administration’s apparent silence on this matter may want to rethink the offensive idea that he’s merely "voting ‘present.’"  I’m not saying we should take my student’s brother’s word on this as definitive, but it does make one point absolutely clear: most of the people complaining about the administration’s response are more concerned with playing American politics than the situation on the ground in Iran.

(x-posted.)

Mother Jones and the National Review on the dubious quality of Sotomayor’s prose: “This apple’s the worst orange I’ve ever tasted.”

This past week, the attacks on Sotomayor have turned from what she’s said to how she’s said it.  Conservatives began by hammering away at the “weird, unidiomatic constructions and errors of punctuation and grammar [in] her infamous 2001 ‘Wise Latina’ speech.”  Now, I advocate writing conference papers that “contain few expensive words and no Faulknerian feats of subordination” on the grounds that no human being—not even the academic ones—can parse grammatically complex arrangements of jargon on the fly, so I’m more attuned than most to the fact that what passes for grammatical in English as she is spoke doesn’t pass muster in English as she is wrote.  You can imagine, then, why I chafed at Heather McDonald’s criticism of Sotomayor’s unscripted speeches for containing errors endemic to spoken language.  Just because an unscripted speech is transcribed after the fact doesn’t make it written; or, as per my talk, just because it can be put to paper doesn’t mean it was meant to be read there.

Judging the quality of her prose from her speeches, as McDonald and fellow Bench Memos writer Ed Whelan did, is an intellectually dishonest exercise for the simple reason that nobody (outside of Henry Louis Gates, Jr.) speaks in paragraphs. Not that this stops the other member of the Bench Memos team, Matthew J. Franck, from claiming Sotomayor “writes” sentences that were clearly spoken aloud; or that those sentences “begin with a thought and trail off without saying much of anything after all, or double back and contradict themselves,” i.e. that the transcription of her unscripted speech transcribed sentences that were clearly spoken aloud.

When I taught literary journalism, I always included Mark Singer’s profile of Errol Morris on the syllabus because it works both as an introduction to New Yorker-style profiles and a meta-methodological essay on how to approach transcriptions critically and responsibly.  Here’s Singer transcribing Florence Rasmussen’s speech in Morris’s Gates of Heaven (1978):

If I could only get out. Drive my car. I’d get another car. Ya . . . and my son, if he was only better to me. After I bought him that car. He’s got a nice car. I bought it myself just a short time ago. I don’t know. These kids—the more you do for them . . . He’ s my grandson, but I raised him from two years old . . . I don’t see him very often. And he just got the car. I didn’t pay for all of it. I gave him four hundred dollars.

Singer responds to her outpouring by noting that

[w]ith an arresting instinct for symmetry, Florence Rasmussen manages to contradict most of what she has to say. It seems that she knows certain things, but then, in the next moment, she trots out contrary information[:] I’d like to drive my car; but I might not even have a car any longer, might have to buy a new one. I bought my son—O.K., he’s not my son, he’s my grandson—a new car; well, I didn’t pay for the whole thing, I gave him four hundred dollars, but anyway I want my money back.

As viewers of The Fog of War (2003) know, this technique works as powerfully on former Secretaries of Defense as elderly Floridians, not because either is particularly muddleheaded, but because Morris takes advantage of the infelicitous glitches that accompany the spontaneous production of spoken language.  McDonald, Whelan, and Franck seem not to understand how language works.  They scoured “virtually all [Sotomayor's unscripted] speeches on the Senate website” and discovered damning evidence that they were, in fact, unscripted speeches; then, they lambasted those transcripts of her unscripted speeches for failing to meet the standards demanded of the written word, which proved to them that Sotomayor is “a mediocrity as a writer.” Whelan even suggests she’s a hypocrite for “present[ing] herself as a stickler for good grammar” when her speeches contain constructions that would be ungainly, if not outright ungrammatical, on the page.  How about we hoist Whelan by his own petard?

Well, it’s an unguarded moment where she says what folks on the left think which, their job is to use judicial robes to make sound policy and the law is largely a vessel for them to fill with their own preferences.

Sure, very much along the same lines, talking about what he calls the criterion but which selecting judges.

Well, how is that honoring people who put their lives at risk in public service and, look, at 9/11 we understood for a while what firefighters do.

Whelan clearly offends Franck’s standards: he “writes sentences that begin with a thought and trail off without saying much of anything after all.” The first sentence subordinates a clause about as clunkily as you can imagine; then you read the second sentence, observe that it doesn’t even include the subordinate clause it introduces, and marvel at the paucity of your imagination.  I suppose that second sentence meets Franck’s standard on a technicality—the sentence defies the laws of grammar and stops before it has a chance to trail off without saying much of anything—but that third sentence turns on a dime “and, look,” informs us that we know “what firefighters do.” Does that count as “much of anything”?

They do eventually get around to criticizing Sotomayor’s prose on the basis of what she’s actually written: they find that while it’s not “ungrammatical,” it is “tedious and ‘impenetrable.’” That link leads to Stephanie Mencimer’s article in Mother Jones, in which she pings Sotomayor’s prose for “rarely hit[ting a] sort of breezy cadence [because she] devotes the bulk of her legal analysis to quotes from statutes, regulations, and other opinions ad nauseam[.]” How she’ll legislate from the bench when she’s busy citing dull precedent is as mysterious to me as, for example, how a prose-scold could write “quote” instead of “quotation” in the middle of a complaint or believe Diane Wood’s summary of Merchant of Venice signifies much of anything in the Age of Wikipedia.

In the end, the case against Sotomayor basically amounts to this: on the one hand, her speeches betray all the ungrammatical tics common to spoken language, and if you treat those speeches as prose, you must conclude that she’s a poor writer; on the other, the prose of her legal opinions isn’t ungrammatical, but because it betrays the tedious tics common to lawyerly prose, you must conclude she’s a poor writer.  You see where this is headed.  If word leaked out that “Ed Whelan” was actually Sotomayor’s pseudonym, the Bench Memos team would argue that, because Whelanmayor did all that I documented above, you must conclude that s/he’s a poor writer.  Were it then revealed that Whelanmayor did Diane Wood one better and actually wrote Merchant of Venice, the Bench Memos team would claim that, in light of the difficulty of Shakespelanmayor’s prose, the Western Canon requires immediate revision and you must conclude s/he’s a poor writer . . .

(x-posted.)

The Book (obscenely condensed version)

Because who am I to ignore interested lurkers?  What follows is the section on comics and rhetoric I wrote for The Student Guide to Writing at UCI.  The book I'm co-authoring this summer is a vastly expanded version of the same (only with panels from actual comics instead of examples drawn from my none-too-fertile imagination).

The basic unit of analysis when dealing with a comic is the panel.  The visual elements of a panel can be described using the same vocabulary used to describe a frame from a film: background and foreground, diegesis, high or low key lighting, etc.  Pointing to the similarities between film and comics highlights what makes comics unique as a medium: the interaction of these visual components with the written word.  The word-picture relation can word specific, in which the words convey the meaning and the images merely illustrate it, as in a children's book; duo specific, in which the words and images both convey the same meaning, as when a picture of an irate man yelling is accompanied by a caption box that tells you the irate man is yelling; and interdependent, in which the words and images combine to convey a meaning neither is capable of conveying alone.  Most of the comics you will read in this course will rely heavily on interdependent word-picture combinations.

Comics are also unique in the manner in which they relate to time.  No matter how the words in the panel interact with the visuals, there is a tension between the static image and the words in the caption box.  Picture a panel that depicts a medium close-up of a young man in a bright orange shirt.  A caption box extrudes from his open mouth and occupies the space above his left shoulder.  The text inside it reads: "The bride?  You wanna know about . . . the thing it is that happened to her?  Because sure, I can tell you, but . . ."  All these words didn't spill from his mouth in the open-mouthed moment depicted in the panel.  The words propel the narrative forward in time in such a way that we cannot be sure which word the panel depicts the man enunciating. (It may not even be a word: the panel could be depicting the pause indicated by the ellipses.)  This tension between static image and narrative progress exists not only in panels but between them.

The empty area between panels is the gutter, and it is where the reader is called upon to become an active participant in the creation of the text.  Unlike a film, in which the twenty-three imperceptible gaps between the twenty-four frames flashed per second create the illusion of movement, the gutter produces breaks in the narrative that require interpretation to repair.  If the panel following the one of the man in the bright orange shirt is a medium-long shot of a different, shabbily-dressed man in a prison garden holding an open stenographer's notebook and saying, "Yes, I want to hear about the bride."  What inferences must the reader draw for those two panels to make sense?  To begin with, the bright orange shirt in the first panel likely belongs to a prison-issue jumpsuit and the man across from him (as the reader infers from the comic equivalent of a shot/reverse shot) is a journalist interested in what this prisoner did to the woman they both refer to as "the bride."  The act of making that inference -- of bridging the gap between the first and second panel -- is called closure.  In this case, the closure is achieved via a subject-to-subject transition. 

However, were the second panel to depict not a journalist, but a long shot of the man in the orange shirt unfolding a lawn chair next to a grill, the "prisoner" would be transformed into a man at a barbeque discussing an unfortunate incident at a wedding.  If the third panel showed that same man placing a steak on the grill while continuing to discuss the wedding, closure between the second and third panels will have been achieved via an action-to-action transition, i.e. one in which consecutive panels depict the same subject undertaking a series of actions.  If the next three panels track the path of the steak from the man's tongs to the grill's surface, the reader will be compelled by this moment-to-moment transition to create closure by associating the steak's slow-motion descent with whatever it was that happened at that wedding, such that it would not be surprising if in the fourth panel the steak was replaced by a bouquet of flowers of the sort brides toss at weddings.  Because the reader knows that steaks don't often turn into flowers, it is safe to infer that the narrative has shifted to another place and time via a scene-to-scene transition.  But the assumption that this airborn bouquet is on its way into the arms of a single woman attending the wedding is not necessarily a safe one -- an author could be exploiting this conventional image to confounds the reader's expectations.  In a subsequent panel, the "empty" space behind the falling flowers could be revealed to be the white satin of the wedding dress worn by a woman whose pained expression informs the reader why she dropped the bouquet.

If that panel were followed by another in which a younger, tuxedo-clad version of the orange-shirted man from the barbecue perches on the edge of a bed with his head in hands, then another panel depicting leaves falling outside a bustling travel agency, then another still of two empty chairs beneath an oversized umbrella on some Hawaiian beach, the reader is presented with a number of interpretive decisions.  The transition from the jilted bride to her cold-footed fiance could be interpreted as a scene-to-scene transition, as could the transition from the fiance to the travel agency.  However, because these panels depict the same moment in a series of different locations, closure can be argued to have been achieved via an aspect-to-aspect transition.

The interpretive burden required to understand the intent of the author/rhetor of a comic is, as the previous paragraphs indicate, quite heavy -- even though the experience of reading comics is so intuitive that many otherwise intelligent readers consider the medium juvenile.  That so many comics chronicle the adventures of impossibly-muscled specimens of post-humanity in tights that reveal more than they conceal helps sustain this misperception.  But as the story of the prisoner and/or the man who left his wife at the alter demonstrates, the content of a comic is not determined by the medium itself.

Researching the competition; or, why other books about visual rhetoric & composition demonstrate the necessity of one like mine.

When demonstrating the importance of historical context, it's considered bad form to get it wrong.  For example:

• Hal Jordan?  Not the first Green Lantern.
• Sinestro?  Doesn't appear in Emerald Dawn.
• Doctor Doom?  Not the ruler of Latvia.
• Wolverine?  Not HIV positive.  (How would that even work?)
• "Raz Alcor"?  Liam Neeson has two names in Batman Begins and neither one of them is that.

Since I'm not sure where to begin with this—I could just as easily complain about shoddy research and methodology as go full nerd—I'll come to a full stop and change the subject.  A student essay addressed an offhand remark I made in class, about Dr. Manhattan being busted by Dateline NBC for sexing up underage woman, and inspired me to produce this:

If this is what it’s like to be, get it over with already and me now.

Last, I noted that I increasingly left the most important out of sentences. What began as a seems to be getting worse and. Looking over what I today, I can't help but at how deliberate it seems, as if I'm trying to make it impossible to edit what I. Granted, with every passing I'm a little older, but honestly, this can't be what it's like to be? Crafting sentences that only lack the most element required to understand them? On my list of fates worse than, this probably takes the.

Now that I about it, if I'm to run out of words, maybe I should in the sciences, where words don't seem to be required:

(x-posted.)

People who aren’t already the President of their things should keep their traps shut.

You know who should be allowed to blog?

Photo reference at the National Review

Liberals think the cover of the new National Review is racist, but as Rich Lowry explains, they’re simply oversensitive and humorless:

You gotta move fast when you’re competing with your fellow hair-trigger PC cops on the left! I take it the theory is that we don’t think Latinas can be wise so we had to make her look somewhat Asian. Or something like that. What these people don’t understand is the entire concept of caricature (or of a joke). Caricature always involves exaggerating someone’s distinctive features, which is all that our artist Roman Genn did with Sotomayor.

He even includes what is, presumably, one of the reference photos Genn used. When someone else points out that it’s odd that they depicted her as Asian, Lowry shot back:

An outraged Huffington Post says we “perplexingly” depict Sotomayor in an Asian manner—apparently not entirely getting the Buddha reference, or Buddha’s association with wisdom. Can they really be this clueless?

The painting in the Google link is, I think we can say with certainty, the one Genn referenced for his cover.  (Compare everything from the neck down.)  In visual terms, then, Lowry’s argument is thus:

Are announcers with degrees in broadcast journalism better in the booth than former players?

In the early days of radio and television, baseball announcers fell into their jobs. Mel Allen, "the Voice of the Yankees," was a lawyer by trade; his partner, Red Barber, caught his break while working as a janitor at a college radio station. (A professor scheduled to read "Certain Aspects of Bovine Obstretics" never showed, so Barber picked up the microphone and read it himself.) Jimmy Dudley majored in chemistry, got drafted and, like Harry Kalas, began his broadcasting career calling intramural games in the South Pacific during WWII. Although all four of them belong to the Baseball Hall of Fame, they were amateurs.

The first great professional announcer, Vin Scully, studied broadcast journalism at Fordham. Following Scully's success on both coasts, team owners and network executives decided that games were best called by people whose sober, understated delivery betrayed an intimate knowledge of the technical limitations of their equipment. No matter where in America you turned on your radio or television in the 1960s, you were listening to a college graduate whose vocal coach had taught him to speak the smooth, unaccented English of an imaginary Middle America.

With the exception of a few token athletes, like Joe Garagiola and Bob Uecker, by the early 1970s the voices that spoke for the game weren't the voices of the game. Because the game on the field is so different from the one observed from the booth, I think it best that there be someone up there who, for example, understands in his bones that the depth of field required to keep both the pitcher and the batter (60 feet 6 inches away) in focus makes a 67 m.p.h. curveball look slow even though, were it a car, it would have exceeded the interstate speed limit in ninety-percent of the country.

I would hope that a wise former baseball player, with the richness of his playing experiences, would more often than not reach a better conclusion about a game situation than someone who hasn't lived the life. But I'm not so myopic as to believe that others of different experiences or backgrounds are incapable of understanding the game. Many are so capable. Gary Cohen could only play in Soviet Russia—when he picks up a bat, it swing hims—yet he is a tremendous announcer.

However, for someone who didn't play the game to understand its nuances takes time and effort, something that not all people are willing to give. Personal experiences influence the facts that announcers chooses to discuss. But this is not to say that only former players can understand the game. Sometimes they emphasize their own experience to the exclusion of others, as is the case with Tim McCarver, for whom baseball has not changed one iota since the day he retired in 1979, and Joe Morgan, whose greatness on the diamond is inversely proportional to his awfulness in the booth. For a former player to become a good announcer, he must extrapolate from his experiences into areas which with he is unfamiliar. Because what comes naturally to white, colleged-educated, broadcast journalism majors might not come easy to a poor kid from Oakland nicknamed "Mex."

This is why the best Supreme Court broadcast team working today consists of Gary, Keith, and Ron.

AROOGA! AROOGA! AROOGA! AROOGA!

As those of you on Facebook already know, a couple days ago I noted that "after months of recommending I befriend strangers, Facebook now thinks I know people I actually know."  New algorithms and what-not.  But here's the kicker: not only does this new algorithm identify people I actually know, it definitively pins down the identity of my stalkers:

This time with arrows:

John Casper has been outed by an algorithm.  I now know who he is, where he lives, where he works, and I'm in a mood.  Talk me down from the ledge, dear readers, before I go and retaliate something stupid.

Don't kill me until I'm dead, alright?

The Associated Press reports that

David Eddings, the acclaimed fantasy novelist and author of such series as The Belgariad and The Malloreon, has died at the age of 77.  Eddings was predeceased by his wife and writing partner Leigh two years ago.

When I worked at a used bookstore, I shelved all fourteen thousand, two hundred, and forty-three of his novels more times than I care to remember.  But I never read any of them.  Even so, I want to go on the record and declare that he deserved better than to be killed by his wife two years before he died. 

(Need I remind you that grammar matters?)

“The Young Cons believe the Bible is relatively silent on issues relating to supply-side economics.”

Laughing at the “Young Con Anthem” because neither “Serious C” nor “Stiltz” have skillz is all well and good, but there’s more to their awfulness than the sort of schadenfreude you get watching the first two weeks of American Idol. For the uninitiated:

This breed of rap is all about establishing and maintaining identity, which you do by asserting your authenticity and questioning that of other rappers—either by attacking it whole cloth (coastal feuds) or its legitimacy (street credibility). The Young Cons talk up their own game like some white Wu-Tang. Ideally, these assertions of identity should be such that when they “manufacture poems to microphones, bones fracture.” (Let that play while you work and your dull life will turn into a Jim Jarmusch film.) What makes the Young Cons so tellingly awful is that they sat down to forge a statement of identity, produced something entirely incoherent, then looked upon their words and declared themselves ready for battle. Their awkward juxtapositions and clumsier delivery foreground conservative schizophrenia:

Bail out a business, but can’t protect an infant.

My conservative view is, drill baby drill,
You can say you hate me, but I’m praying for you still.

The Bible says, we’re a people under God,
AIG was hooked up by Chris Dodd.
A classy gift ain’t an Ipod.

Then there’s the lyric people have held up to the most mockery:

Three things taught me conservative love:
Jesus, Ronald Reagan, plus Atlas Shrugged.
Saving our nation from inflation devastation,
On my hands and my knees praying for salvation.

They’re not talking about coalitional politics here—the necessity of compromising with constiuency X despite their outlandish positions on Y in order to get disappointed by someone new—they’re claiming as their authentic identity the ideological incoherence of political coalitions. They haven’t put the cart before the horse so much as glued the horse to its side and demanded it be pulled down the mountain; then later, as they sift through the gore and gristle that had been their horse and cart, they turn to us and say, “We meant to do that.”

One last thing: is Scott Johnson “almost certain that this is the first time the word ‘inherently’ has made its appearance in hip-hop” because he can’t understand a word black people say or because he’s never even tried to?

(x-posted.)

After G.I. Joe decided to take him down, his decline was swift. By Tuesday, he was on the phone telling a stranger to "Choke on [his] . . . !"

It was a quiet Sunday afternoon when I became an enemy of the state.  I was doing laundry, as you do, and was carrying a load of towels up three flights of stairs when suddenly the landing turned all "GO JOE!"  As I crushed Snake Eyes Eyes with my left foot and tumbled head first into a hamper of clean towels, I thought to myself, "If you're going to fall head first into something, you could do a lot worse than towels fresh from the dryer."  My head was safe, but with his dying breath, that wee plastic Snake Eyes rolled over and took my ankle with him.  I scream into clean laundry as my ankle pivots in ways God never intended. 

Knowing that I have to teach on Tuesday, on Monday I contact the people with the little carts and ask for a lift to class.  "No problem," a helpful person tells me.  "That's what we're here for," she says.  She takes down some information and assures me we're all set.  Someone will be at my place shortly before 7:00 a.m. to pick me up and take me class.  Fast forward to Tuesday morning.

SEK:  (looking at his watch)  I'm ten minutes early.  Nothing can possibly go wrong.  (ten minutes pass)  Probably just running a little late.  (five more minutes pass)  Maybe I should call to check up.

PERSON WHO ANSWERS THE PHONE:  What?

SEK:  I'm calling about a ride to campus.  Someone was supposed to pick me up so I could teach.  (shuffling sounds can be heard)

DIFFERENT PERSON:  Can I help you with something?

SEK:  I'm calling about a ride to campus.  Someone was supposed to pick me up so I could teach.

DIFFERENT PERSON:  Right.  We can't do that.

SEK:  You can't do that? 

DIFFERENT PERSON:  Right.  We need a doctor's note and you didn't provide one.

SEK:  I'm seeing the doctor tomorrow.  I can bring a note in afterwards.

DIFFERENT PERSON:  Right.  That's not how it works here. 

SEK:  So how am I supposed to get to class?

DIFFERENT PERSON:  You live on campus.  Why not just walk?

SEK:  (rage)  If I could walk, I wouldn't have requested your services.

DIFFERENT PERSON:  Right.  We can't do that for you.  (the shuffling sounds associated with hanging up a phone can be heard)

SEK:  (Rage)  Better don't hang up on me.  (more shuffling)  How am I supposed to teach today if I can't get to class?

DIFFERENT PERSON:  Like I already said, you live on campus.  Just walk.

SEK:  (RAGE)  And like I already said, if I could fucking walk, I wouldn't have requested your fucking services.

DIFFERENT PERSON:  There's really no need to say "fuck," sir.

SEK:  CHOKE ON MY FUCK, ASSHOLE!

The upside is that I solved one of life's little mysteries: every quarter I teach the Warren Ellis piece linked there, and every quarter I'm rebaffled by that expression. 

I'm baffled no more. 

But you know what the best part is?  Guess what I see as I slowly limp my way to class?  A group of guys in a fraternity using one of those carts to haul around one of their gigantic Greek letters. 

I take requests: "Remember that post you wrote about playing in the outfield and writing a dissertation? I'd love to read it again, now that I'm a week away from filing my dissertation."

(Considering the alternatives, I love the fact that this post is the one I might be remembered for.  As I noted at the time, I'd had this half-written for ages but never could quite finish it.  This post is as close to naked as I get—so much so I deleted it two seconds after I'd posted it before reversing course.  I've received emails thanking me for this post from struggling grad students in chemistry, physics, political science, geography, geology, English, Spanish, French, Russian, education, mathematics, astrophysics, statistics, philosophy, biology, molecular chemistry, history of consciousness, and dance departments.  It is, as the person who requested I repost it tonight said, an academic version of "You Are Not Alone," which would be much more awesome if it didn't analogize me into Michael Jackson.  That said, I'm more than happy to oblige this request, and apologize for the overlong introduction.  But before I get to the post itself, I should say that [1] the reason my interlocutor couldn't find this post is because my category for all things baseball is the Spanish "béisbol," and [2] if you read my post without reading Wally's comment, you've done yourself a disservice.)

"Good passage in French on what dogs dream when awake."

That being what I wanted to name my contribution to the book event on Jenny Davidson's Breeding: A Partial History of the Eighteenth Century, not because it's relevant, but because it's my favorite entry in the Darwin notebook I cited in the post.  You're welcome to comment on the post here or at The Valve, but I don't want to reproduce it over here and risk confusing the search engines as to the location of the event.

Week 9 of Spring Quarter.

I sit down with a salad in the crowded food court.  I leave the strap of my shoulder-bag around my neck.  A fidgety kid sits down next to me, looks around, and fidgets.  Ten seconds later, he decides he's had enough of that seat.  He stands up, grabs my bag and starts to walk away.

"Excuse me," I say.

"WHAT?"

The room goes dead silent.  I point to strap around my neck and say, "I think that's my bag you have there."

"FINE."

Then he drops my bag and walks away.  He was loud, but it was an empty roar.  No malice to it.  Nor do I think he was trying to steal my bag.  If pressed, I'd say the kid probably had no clue where or even who he was.  He was toast.

All of which is only to say, people who have never worked in the quarter system have absolutely no idea what those last few weeks of Spring Quarter are like, because there's nothing comparable to them in the semester system . . . and I think that's probably a good thing.

The dissertation you were destined to write.

For some reason, I kept on hearing the name "Lambert" repeated recently.  Every time I did, the theme from my favorite childhood cartoon took up residence in my head for hours on end:

Watching "Lambert the Sheepish Lion" as an adult made me realize that the reason I always remembered Winnie the Pooh narrating it was because Winnie the Pooh narrated it; more importantly, I learned that my fascination with nature vs. nurture debate started early.  I can graft so many elements of that cartoon onto arguments in my dissertation that it makes more sense to say that those arguments were rooted in it.  

"Lambert" tackles the notion that we essentially are what we are, but can choose to be otherwise.  So too does my dissertation.  It addresses the fact that superiority is dependent upon environment, and that environment encompasses both the social (the lambs) and natural (the wolf) worlds.  So too does my dissertation. 

I would go on, but I can barely see for all the irony: a cartoon I loved as a child in which the premises of deterministic thought were challenged likely determined the topic of the dissertation I would write as an adult.

I built excitment!

Monday!  Spent three hours on the tarmac in Houston waiting for the Continental mechanics to fix something!  Drove myself nuts trying to figure out what that something was!  Forgot that my sister's almost-fiancé is an airplane mechanic!  For Continental!  In Houston! 

Tuesday!  Earthquake!

Wednesday!  Locked the doors so the strange man with the rifle couldn't shoot my eye out!

Wednesday night!  Scott McCloud commented on my post about Scott McCloud!

Late Wednesday night!  My cat Sigmund had a hairball!

One minute later Wednesday night!  That's not a hairball!  Siggy's coughed up blood!

Twenty minutes later Thursday morning!  I hate the only late night emergency care clinic around here!  Reminds me of Rachel!  Spent seven hours I should've been asleep waiting for test results!  Found out Siggy's problem is he's swallowed a branch of evergreen needles that he can't seem to cough up!  Doctor fixed Siggy! 

This morning at 7:15 a.m.!  Jumped in shower!  Thought water would defeat exhasution!  Was wrong!  Spent the morning teaching!  Spent all afternoon doing mandatory student conferences!  Arrived home!  Fixed drink!  Fell asleep while writing this po—

So I take it the new Sherlock Holmes movie is a parody?

Because, I mean, seriously. Just because. I'm not still off my blogging game here, I don't think, because that's genuinely the very definition of someone getting something obscenely wrong, isn't it? (Unless, of course, it goes gloriously right.  Given this, however, I don't see much chance of that happening.)

Scott McCloud learns to follow the advice he'd later dole out.

(You stop blogging for five days and you forget how to write a draft.  This was near enough to what I intended its finished form to be that I'll let it stay up.  One last bit: I meant to segue that last bit into a comparison between experimental comics in the '80s and early '90s and modernist literature in the '10s and '20s.  There's something in the compulsion to manifesto on the one hand and proto-structuralism on the other that warrants fleshing out.)

The last time I read Scott McCloud's Zot!  must have been a few months after the final issue came out in 1991.  (I made the mistake of all lame Lotharios: I lended them to a woman hoping she would be impressed by my ability to appreciate the wit of some third party and never saw my beloved books again.)  Because I'm leaning on Understanding Comics and Making Comics like a vaudeville drunk on hat rack, giving McCloud's creative output a chance to work its charm on me again seemed like a good idea.  So I picked up the collected Zot! in Baton Rouge and now I'm not so sure re-reading it was a good idea, because now I want to write a non-composition oriented article on the tangled relationship between aesthetic theory and creative works when they're both produced by the same person

Re-reading Zot! after having read Understanding Comics and Making Comics makes it painfully obvious that McCloud spent its run becoming the critic he now is.  The early issues are clumsy combinations of manga conventions (his admission) and Hernandez brothers stylings (the unacknowledged but obvious influence).  He quickly outgrew his concept but refused to abandon it, leading to a comic whose bittersweet (and before their time) coming of age stories never can quite get grounded.  He stumbled onto the animating metaphor of Buffy—high school as Hellmouth—but for whatever reason couldn't bring himself to embrace it.  Why not?  That's unclear. 

But even if we can't know the "why" readers of the originals can certainly date the "when," but because of a silly convention, those who read the collected Zot! cannot understand what the original audience knew: McCloud was the last person to realize what it was he'd become.  If only graphic novels contained the letter pages that accompanied the original issues, McCloud could've spared himself the pains of sitting in judgment over his own work:

Letters like this were my introduction to theories of genre, mode and medium.  I suppose they don't need to be reprinted, what with Understanding Comics and Making Comics being explicit statements about the issues raised in letters like this, but learning while being taught feels educational no matter who's doing the teaching.  In the back pages of Zot! I learned without realizing I was learning, and I think stuff sticks better that way. 

(Or maybe I'm just justifying using hamburgers and teaching The Dark Knight and my every last pedagogical strategy again.)

What trivial event was so blown out of proportion that I won't be able to understand the internet from this point forward if I'm not I'm familiar with it?

Because I'm exhausted and the odds of me catching up on 3,000 or so posts at this point in the quarter are slim to none.

YOU MUST COMMENT.

Seems my good for nothing sister somehow actually managed to earn herself a degree, so I'm flying across the country to be very bored hearing the names of 3,000 people I'm not related to be mispronounced by someone who clearly has better things to do.  (Can you tell I didn't walk?  Can you?)  So if you comment and I don't reply or seem to be sending email into an abyss, it's only because I won't have regular internet access until next Monday.

But you have to congratulate my sister.  Her name is Sarah.  She's not a natural student but struggled her damnedest every semester and is graduating tomorrow.  So congratulate her already.  Because damn it, she deserves it.

Fringe and Star Trek and now it all makes sense.

Two stray lines in the Wired review of Star Trek and my befuddlement at the season finale of Fringe ("There's One More Of Everything") disappeared:

Abrams, with his go-to writers Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman (Fringe, Mission: Impossible III), came up with a clever enough solution.  Using the well-worn Star Trek gimmick of time travel, they would establish a new universe for the old characters to play in—while preserving the adventures of Gene Roddenberry’s original series in their own time line.

Orci and Kurtzman wrote Star Trek and the season finale and the season finale of Fringe.  Not only did both feature a Leonard Nimoy cameo, both relied on the same narrative device to introduce him into the plot: contiguous universes and the ability to travel between them.

(Here there be spoilers.)

Brief synopsis: Two Harvard lab partners (John Noble's Walter Bishop and Leonard Nimoy's before-this-episode unseen-but-frequently-mentioned William Bell) experiment on children and give them the ability to locate the weak points between contiguous universes.  They also devise a means of traveling between these universes.  Walter Bishop accidentally kills an assistant and loses his mind.  Couple of decades of institutionalization follow.  His son Peter (Joshua Jackson) eventually coaxes him out of the asylum and into the employ of the FBI.  By this time William Bell has become the CEO of a very successful company called Massive Dynamic.  The Bishops wrestle with events ranging from improbable and impossible.  These events are directly and indirectly connected to Massive Dynamic. 

The season finale revisits a character with the ability to teleport (Jared Harris' chilling David Robert Jones), only now he seems to be able to throw open the barn door between continguous universes.  Looks like this:

As the episode opens he drives a truck through one of those and shoots people.  The Bishops and the FBI track Jones to a lake house they once visited before Walter's institutionalization.  They are told that Walter once lost some precious thing there that is crucial to stopping Jones from popping back and forth between realities.  Walter cannot remember what that is but makes an offhand remark that the last time he and Peter were in that lake house Peter was very sick.  Peter responds, "I don't remember being very sick."  Why not?

Because as we learn when Walter goes to the cemetary Peter died when he was seven years old.  That would be the precious thing Walter lost the last time he went to the lake house.  Then who is the Peter Bishop who hasn't been dead the past quarter century?  Best I can figure, he is a Peter Bishop from a contiguous universe who was kidnapped by Walter sometime after his Peter died.  (Thus answering in the oddest way possible the eternal custodial question of whether you can kidnap your own children.)  How can I be sure? 

Because we finally get a glimpse of another America when the Bishops' FBI liaison Olivia Dunham (Anna Torv) is stood up by William Bell.  As she leaves the restaurant where they were supposed to meet she receives a phone call.  She is told to come to the Massive Dynamic building.  She enters the elevator and about halfway up people suddenly appear and disappear because Bell punched the elevator through one of those portals.  She is escorted out of the elevator into an office.  She spots this on his desk:

Obama's still President but what's this about a new White House? Dunham and Bell have a brief conversation before the camera pans through the window to reveal where this meeting is taking place:

I think we know what happened to the old White House now.  The implications of this scenario are as improbable as anything on the show to date: Orci and Kurtzman expect us to believe that a competent Bush administration read the "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US" memo and acted upon it, thereby postponing the 9/11 attack into the Obama era.  No dice.  I prefer to believe they want us to think that it took awhile to rebuild the White House after it (but not the Twin Towers) was destroyed on 9/11. 

But that's neither here nor there.  What bothers me about the season finale is that it means I watched the same gag be played by the same people twice on the same day. 

"By God, Jim, it's a giant red ball of . . .

. . . phlebotnum." 

That being what Bones would've said had he taken a look at the "red matter" in Spock's ship.  Which is fine because, as Russell Arben Fox notes, the new Star Trek film manifestly works.  I don't share the qualms Timothy Burke and his commenters are expressing over the continuity issues raised by the film, because I care more about quality than continuity.  Moreover, I think what Abrams did there was damn clever. 

(If you ain't seen the film but will this is where you should stop reading.)

How to structure a paragraph with a hamburger.

Someone requested an explanation of what I cryptically referred to as "my paragraph burger" earlier, but I can't seem to find the original comment.  I should also add that it's not my paragraph burger really, as the idea for it came from an image circulated in a staff meeting.  That said, I did mock up this particular paragraph burger on my own, so maybe I can call it mine.  Here it is:

(Click to enlarge.)

Those arrows are color-coded to make doing this easier.  (Before you ask: I'm well aware of the fact that I'm a very silly man sometimes.  But you know what?  Silliness works.  Once you start talking about the paragraph burger, the students have a model in their heads they're not likely to forget.) 

Be the first on your block to collect them all!

And that concludes my "Best of" series for another year. I tend to think that self-selected lists work better than random category clouds.  (I don't myself, nor do I know of anyone, who rigorously tags all posts all the time according to the same criteria, though Lord knows we try.)  Over the next few weeks I'm going to continue cleaning up those lists (the first three all look hideous) as well as the posts linked in them, so if you want to see what real-time behind-the-scenes editing looks like, you know where to go.  (And if that's your bag, I'll be repainting the apartment any week now and can set up a webcam for you.)

To address Adam's comment, I did link the funny posts in "DISSERTATION ACCOMPLISHED" in what I consider to be the descending order of their humorousness.  (Talking about funny things in such mangled clauses should be illegal.)  But one of the great things about blogging is that people can tell you when your self-evaluations are off-base.  I think it's great that Adam thinks that this is funnier this or this, because that means that someone I've never met before has a strong opinion about my writing . . . which, when you think about it, is all sorts of awesome.

(And now it looks like the blog's won Connect Four twice over.  Time for me to stop while I'm ahead.)

The Best of Acephalous 2007

Chronology Be Damned, That Which Is Not To Be Missed:

• How to remove a ring stuck on your finger.
• This hard work, it frightens then crushes me.
• That damnable Library.
• Further damnation.
• The Ur-Troll.

January

• Writing about talking about blogging.
• Imitating Montaigne.
• Helping out.
• Irritation.

February

• Teeth.
• In a book.
• Something from that probably.
• Unexamined "the."
• Cerebus, Cerebus, conservatives, Cerebus.

March

• Uncomfortably redacted (in verse).
• PROFANITY.
• Cerebus, conservatives.
• n+anger.
• Have system, will profit.

April

• Michel, Michel, from whence craig.
• Help!  Stop!  Policing!
• Purpose.

May

• Picketing.
• Lawyers win.
• Talking pictures.

June

• Iceberg?
• Uh-oh.  Like, seriously.   Is he insane?  (Yes.)  (This one too.)  (And him.)  (This one?  A good egg.)
• Boobs from nothing.
• WHARTON!
• More lawyers winning.
• Him?  No way.
• Reader-generated content.
• Headless Lenin speaks, dances.

July

• Cute bunnies avoid terrible violence.
• The many faces of Hillary Clinton.
• Who is to be breaking up with whom in a parking lot?
• Enthusiastic banging inside [his] skull.
• Emily Dickinson did it.
• "It was only then, on the night before we shipped out to Iraq, as I reviewed my troops that I would be leading into battle, that I began to have doubts about the declining standards of the National Guard. Yes, we hit the enrollment targets, sure. But with what sort of men? A guy so inordinately proud of his chest bush that he refused to wear his fatigues, an ape from the San Diego zoo, a Star Wars nut who was scared to appear in public without his R2D2 getup, and an illegal Mexican wrestler who went by 'el vaquero secreto'? It was, in short, the moment when I should have known that les jeux sont faits. We were well and truly fucked." [via CR]

August

• How to win your heart into hot undergrads pants.
• Obama has always already won the nomination.
• Now we elect the MAYOR OF SEXYTOWN.
• Cookies!

September

• My suicide attempt.
• Violations of listserv etiquette.
• Egregious violations of listserv etiquette.
• Work Bird sees your thumbs twiddling.
• I'm less mad about you than enraged at you.
• The wheat.  Adam Roberts loves the wheat.
• Self-referential wormhole.
• Pity poor David Duke.
• Minority literature?  Scum on the barrel bottom's blistered backside.
• Behave!

October

• O to strangle that nagging feeling!
• I am (not) becoming intimidating.
• Uppity little snots be damned.
• Don't be an asshole.
• I dream the lameness heroic.
• All ur functions r under erasure.
• Learn to format.

November

• Everybody come laugh at the doofus.
• Springsteen in the classroom?
• "MY NAME IS EXOTIC TO YOU. By Exotic To You. (Smith, Johnson, White and Smith, $25) This is a powerful book about a powerful brown person who lives a powerful life in America."
• Who chooses whom again?
• The Munch Paradox.

December

• Why you won't deserve the job you land.
• Why I won't deserve the job I land.
• Liberal Fascism: two words next to each other.
• Foster Wallace's future of politics and advertisement.
• How SEK hid cancer from his wife.
• "I have been bested," SEK said.  "Commence my hilarious penance."

The third installment wasn't divided by months.  This one is because I'd half-finished a version of it earlier and besides variety is the spice of life.  There's also some overlap with the second installment here, because I wasn't organizing by years the first two times.  I'll sort it all out soon enough though.  (Also, you may notice some slight alterations on the posts linked in the "Best of" series.  That's because I figure these are the ones strangers will read and I want to make sure they don't mistake me for an Yglesias or a Klein.)

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and Yglesias and Socialists and Communists

roy edroso is clearly an intelligent man, but in this case he couldn't be more wrong.  He quotes one of the geniuses from Big Hollywood (who, incidentally, just learned what the word "satrap" meant):

In their neverending quest to wrest more power by creating what H. L. Mencken correctly characterized as an endless series of hobgoblins requiring a socialist elite’s powers to destroy, the socialists and their media satraps continually raise fears of everything conceivable . . .

Then argues that:

Naturally he doesn't link; this is from Mencken's In Defense of Women, and the passage from which it comes doesn't mention socialists at all, and is explicitly about the starting and conduct of modern wars, which Mencken attributes to modern civilization "especially under democracy." But I don't think Karnick was purposely misleading his readers . . .

Because Mr. Word-of-the-Day wasn't misleading his readers.  roy doesn't seem to realize that conservatives only discovered Seth Graeme-Smith's Pride and Prejudice and Zombies earlier this week and that this Big Hollywood-style satrap is merely playing along.  Just like Graeme-Smith improved upon Austen by inserting zombies into scenes in which they clearly don't belong, conservatives are now inserting socialists and communists into diatribes in which they clearly don't belong. 

For example, Donald Douglas complains that people find the idea of him being a professor beyond belief, but then he writes this:

I saved a classic example of the "I can't believe you're a professor" slur from a post last year," Matt Yglesias, Jennifer Palmieri, and the Third Way." As some readers know, Matthew Yglesias is an American communist. There is no position that's too far to the left for that man.

Clearly, anyone who thinks that there "is no position too far to the left for [Yglesias]" deserves to have his credentials questioned.  Off the top of my head, I can list fifteen comments on every one of Yglesias's posts going back seven years as evidence that lefter positions than those he's staked exist.  Douglas duct-taped the evidentiary bar to his ankles, so he shouldn't be surprised that people are incredulous when he claims that his day job involves teaching impressionable youths how to hurdle. 

But it's all a ruse. 

Douglas is merely playing the zombifying game with socialists and communists.

He doesn't believe Yglesias is a communist anymore than Graeme-Smith thinks Austen really wrote about zombies.  He's not hilariously obtuse—he's just playing the communitizing game.  It's like zombies, only with communists and socialists.  I'm surprised (and frankly disappointed) roy didn't pick up on this.  Does he seriously believe conservatives have been so traumatized by three months of a painfully centrist presidency that they're spying pinkos in the hedgerows?  

As if.

(x-posted.)

The Best of Acephalous 2008

I want to keep the preface short and snappy because I'll be linking to it in the sidebar someday, but for the record, I can't believe how much I write (do it daily and it just accumulates) nor how much happened to me last year.  For some reason, I thought last year was largely drama-free, and it was . . . except for all the drama.  (I'll save my meta-thoughts about Proust and journals for another day.)

The Funny:

• Elderly Jews deserve our scorn.
• HA HA HA not funny.
• IT IS ALWAYS ALREADY CURTAINS FOR ME!
• In what follows I will be writing about signposts.
• I am become Hunter S. Thompson.
• This a finely crafted I wrote.
• What is it, with students and, with commas?
• Dawg, we is underscrewed.
• The Great California Earthquake Drill of 2008.
• Who will weep for the ugly duckling?
• "He longs longingly at his creation, his only wish that he could experience its birth again."
• Cylons have to eat too.
• "It is a descriptive word.  Its description is emotional and resonates to people who have emotions."
• .edoc eht kcarc ot sdrawkcab ti daeR
• Why this blog isn't good anymore.
• Nothing is ever merely anything.
• ASCII is too awesome.
• Interview with a candidate for many jobs (but winner of none).
• Never has the ding been so pleasant.
• Tell me everything I need to know to be an expert.
• "fine i dont hear from u soon u reget it[.]"
• A brief history of bobulates.
• Never let cats chat.
• A goal accomplished.
• SEK is hating Facebook.
• Then Socrates admits it was always about the hats.
• Who among us doesn't aspire to be the Manny Ramirez of academia?
• "I devoted my life to that study for nearly three weeks, but when I re-read it, I realized I was utterly full of shit."
• My best Charles Atlas imitation.

The Serious:

• This day in (fictional) history.
• Because who ever saw a black person swimming?
• Can anyone justify teaching Huck Finn?
• Liberal Fascism is a rank stupid book.
• No, really, Liberal Fascism is a rank stupid book.
• That thing I did with the voter registration data that got linked everywhere but was stupid dull writing-wise.
• The fine line between literary criticism and rank paranoia.
• That would be pretty damn important.
• Who really wrote that book the with the pResident's name on it?
• The first ever time I mentioned Watchmen on the blog.
• His death still bothers me.
• John Ziegler is an asshole.
• Two bits on The Wire.

The Still Seriously Sad:

• "."