You Are BANNED! or The Spectors of Identity Politics

An explanation of the first half of the title can be found below the fold.  As for the second, well, I've been too busy dissertating to think too deeply about what to blog about today, but while I've worn myself out dissertating today, I don't want to stop thinking entirely--I see you, Tom Glavine, but I'm busy thinking--so I'm going to share some of the--quiet, Tom Glavine, sit down--some of the more interesting--TOM GLAVINE!--some of the more interesting things I've, oh, Jesus H. Christ--TOM GLAVINE SIT DOWN AND SHUT UP SO I CAN FINISH THIS SENTENCE!  What?  THAT'S IT!  I'M TAKING OFF THE BELT!--interesting, where was I, what, oh, some stuff.   I want to share some stuff.  About how identity politics work vis-a-vis ghost stories.  Just like orange or fuschia people can't write all that convincing purple or Napoleonic characters, or something, neither can the living write convincingly about the dead, as the advertisement for Jack London's Before Adam in the Sept. 28, 1906 edition of the New York Times attests:

Did you ever read a convincing ghost story?  You never did, because those who wrote them tried to imagine what a ghost would say.  The only way to write a ghost story which will sound real, which will convince, is to be a ghost and write it from the ghost's point of view.

Jack London, the writer responsible for this tripe implies, can write about "man before he had any of the veneer of civilization, before society was invented," because he "has lived a strange life among men and women whose passions are primeval.  He has seen men in the raw, stripped down to the mainsprings of life, when only instinctive passions were working--hunger, thirst, revenge, joy--the intensities of life--when vocabulary was simply ejaculation!"  Alright...

I've learned a valuable lesson:

When you pretend you're someone else, gigantic flashing signs screaming "I'm pretending to be someone else" won't cut it.  For example: If you say you're "Not the Real President Bush," you're bound to confuse some people.  "Is that the real President Bush?" these easily confused people will wonder.  "It says he's 'NTR President Bush,' but then again, that W.  said there were WMDs in Iraq.  Until I have further evidence that he's not who he says he isn't, I better assume he is."  When they discover that you're not who you say you aren't--"I linked to my homepage, not his," you thought, "surely even children will understand that there's no deception intended"--they'll be hoppin' mad.  "You tricked me!" they'll say.  "I thought you were who you said you weren't!  You're banned!"

Comment #1:

You think you ought to read a book 'fore you write about it? No need! Look how accurate-like a review can be by just assumin' you know what some book's 'bout. Like that one by Dick Wright, Native Son, why I tell you it ain't proper for a good ol' boy to lord it up all over the impov'rished by tellin' 'em how great it is to be born American. Jus' ain't right.

Comment #2:

EDIT: Mr. A. Cephalous-No-Brain-Ass-Kiss puckers up in defense of my characterization of Sean "Kiss My Ass Please" McCann's "scholarship." Mr. A. Cephalous-No-Brain-Ass-Kiss thinks people should only condemn books they've read, but then people would have to read these books before "suggesting" that they're all puffery because the New Deal took place in the '30s. As if! Literature can't respond to the environment in which it's produced. If a book doesn't explicitly mention a topic, it's not in there. Simple as that. Sure, people were concerned about the government's inability to help them in the midst of the Great Depression; and sure, that's when hard-boiled crime fiction populated by individualistic "tough guys" who didn't rely on a government incapable of helping them were popular; but does Chandler ever say "New Deal"? No! The case against this scholar-squirrel and his little ant colony is closed.

Comment #3:

FYI: NTR means...somethin'. 

As for your new claim that you don't criticize McCann's book, only its arguments: the arguments are in the book.  Ipso facto presto chango, you criticize the book.  I've come to expect very little of you, but somehow I still expect a little more. 

More seriously: You have legitimate gripes against the profession. You don't express them well, or knowingly, or accurately even, but you do express them. If you spent a little time learning about the current state of the profession, you'd realize that the people you've chosen to attack are the people whose positions most resemble yours. No patience for cultural studies? Check. No patience for "metatheoretical noodling"? Check. A desire for literature to be central to literary studies? Check. In an ideal world, this would be the start of a constructive conversation; in this one, your B.P.'s climbed 70 pts. per sentence for half a paragraph...

Comments

[Not the Real John Bruce]

You are writing about a newspaper advertisement for a third-rate Jack London novel, when clearly, everyone knows that Jack London's only passable novel is The Call of the Wild. And it's a tale for children. Have you not heard of Emerson? No? Thoreau? No? Melville? No? I thought not.

[Not the Real Not the Real John Bruce]

You yammer, my friend. Not the Real John Bruce--the real Not the Real one--would never yammer as you do. He wrote the "Best non-political blog in The Truth Laid Bear's New Blog Showcase, December 15, 2003"--and like the torn, treasured blue third-prize ribbon, won at the fourth-grade science fair, still tacked to some cork in a house he hasn't lived in since 1972--he displays proof of his victory in plain view. He writes endlessly about the Valve, but he never yammers. Or if he does, his "yammerings" are the divine yammerings of a mind too sublime for you, with your pathetic tendency to yammer, to understand. They redefine the very concept of "the yammer" such that you can not even be said to "yammer" anymore. Now you "bloviate." And, my friend, how ever do you bloviate...

[Really Not Not the Real Not the Real John Bruce]

Reading your post is like watching a goldfish, swimming in circles inside the same small bowl. It swims here. It swims there. It eats a bit of food that Sean McCann throws its way. Then it puckers up to kiss his ass, if a fish in a bowl could kiss an ass, which it can't. Every day it leaves a little dropping, which it hopes Sean McCann will clean out of the rocks below.

Yes, you, sir, are a fish. And I smell something fishy about everything you do.

[Some Guy]

Personally, speaking, I must say that I find /all/ specific intellectual projects a bit fishy. The smell of rigor turns my stomach like nothing else. My only solace when I get a whiff of an idea is to plug my nose and immerse myself in the intrinsic literary merits of *Walden*.

[Not the Real A. Cephalous]

Thank you, my chorus of Not the Real John Bruces...I now have the same fishy headache in the same fishy place that reading the Real the Real John Bruce always causes. You've out meta'd me. I give. Uncle, you fuckers, uncle.

[the little womedievalist]

You know, there's something incredibly fishy about being co-banned from posting to a site you've never visited before today. In fact, it suggests an inability to defend one's own position, unless protected by a giant wall of "I shall have the last say". But as a medievalist, who (by this guy's reasoning) should be teaching more than the 900+ years I'm already expected to cover, I have little room to complain; after all, my dentist works nights as a proctologist...

[The Real A. Cephalous]

Little Womendievalist,

According California State Law, half that ban does belong to you, so you're welcome to enjoy it alongside your share of the bed, the pancakes and this piece of gum which...aw, so sorry, no gum for you. As for that giant wall of "I shall have the last say," I'd erect one here to prevent you from posting here anymore, but then I'd also be banning myself...so I guess that'd be our own "nuclear option."

[the little womedievalist]

Don't you mean "nucular" ?

The times are changing, guy, as are the spellings of the words we use to describe them.

[The Real A. Cephalous]

Not only are the times and the spellings a-changing, so are the meanings. As George Orwell put it in "Politics and the English Language" (1946):

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism., question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them. Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, "I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so." Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:

While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigors which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement.

The inflated style itself is a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as "keeping out of politics." All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer. I should expect to find -- this is a guess which I have not sufficient knowledge to verify -- that the German, Russian and Italian languages have all deteriorated in the last ten or fifteen years, as a result of dictatorship.

[Not Really Really Not Not the Real Not the Real John Bruce]

I see you've changed the topic, no doubt to avoid out of control controversy which could lead to you being fired from your cozy job as a professor of journalism, the FBI investigating your finances, and all of your cats being rounded up and sent to the pound. How very convenient.

[John Bruce]

Your little "clique and claque" routine might seem harmless to you, but I already got Jonathan Goodwin's Bradley Foundation summer grant frozen. Don't you remember what I wrote the other day? Don't mock me because 1) I've got a "little man," 2) I don't "get" irony, or 3) I think boulet is the coolest word ever. If you want to mock me, do it because 1) my opinion of myself is so inflated I believe I could be responsible for Jonathan Goodwin losing his summer grant, 2) because I attack people for, among other things, "mix[ing] UK and US spelling" even though I mix UK and US rules on the correct placement of commas and periods relative to quotation marks--like I did in the very same post in which I criticized Miriam Jones for "mix[ing] UK and US spelling," something I'd think ironic if I could identify irony when it isn't putting its boot to my neck, demanding I scream its name (and even sometimes when it is)--or 3) because I can't stop talking about how many hits I get, you know, because I spend hours watching that hit-counter click higher and higher, even though it's probably more people popping on by to have a laugh at my expense.

[A. Cephalous]

Not Really Really Not Not the Real Not the Real John Bruce,

Trying to determine who you really are makes me feel like John Bruce did when I told him "Dude! You are so smart!" I can no more parse your nested identity than he could my childish irony.

[language hat]

"It took me till I was lying among the Rats and Vermin, upon the freezing edge of a Future invisible, to understand that my name had never been my own,— rather belonging, all this time, to the Authorities, who forbade me to change it, or withhold it, as 'twere a Ring upon the Collar of a Beast, ever waiting for the Lead to be fasten'd on...."