Acephalous

The Consistency Fetish: The Per Serritslev Peterson on London & James Berger Edition on Sacks Edition

Per Serritslev Peterson’s “Jack London’s Medusa of Truth” (Philosophy and Literature 26.1) challenges our ideas about the notoriously eclectic and idiosyncratic philosophical thought of Jack London, a.k.a. “The Boy Socialist,” a.k.a. “The Adolescent Nietzschean,” a.k.a. “The College Spencerian,” a.k.a. “The Middle-Aged Nietzschean Socialist,” a.k.a. “The Forty Year-Old Jungian.” Despite bouncing from one hermetically-sealed-but-internally-coherent philosophical system to another for the majority of his short life, Peterson insists that London’s critics misconstrue the nature of his philosophical questing. So he gathers London’s little truthlets and declares

London as philosopher 1) was a Nietzschean dialectician who mastered and negotiated the juxtaposition of conflicting ideas, perspectives, and values in life (the Medusa-Maya dichotomy being a crucial case in point); and who consequently, 2) possessed philosophical authenticity and integrity, or what Nietzsche terms “intellectual conscience."

I generally applaud counter-intuitive readings.  When Peterson identifies his as being such a beast, stating that his “contentions must appear highly questionable in contemporary American academe,” he implicates his article in the storied tradition which, as just noted, I generally applaud.  However, the second clause of that sentence baffles me: “seeing that very few London scholars or critics take the novelist’s philosophy seriously.” Most London scholars not only take one of his philosophical positions seriously, they construct elaborate channels through which they can safely navigate three or four of them. Peterson’s argument is counter-intuitive in an artificial and synthetic fashion...and in this sense resembles those London himself favored.  In short, then, Peterson’s consistency fetish neatly doubles London’s own; furthermore, it blinds him to the inconsistencies of his work much as London’s blinded him to the inconsistencies in his.  That said, Peterson’s performance easily outshines London’s clunky stabs at synthesis; it is, to be frank, a bravura performance on Peterson’s part.  But I still don’t buy a word of it.

Then there’s the case of James Berger, a man I treated unfairly in a brief post about what I (mistakenly) believed to be an (unintentionally) infelicitous pair of sentences.  In “Falling Towers and Postmodern Wild Children: Oliver Sacks, Don DeLillo and Turns Against Language” (PMLA 120.2), Berger discusses the work of Oliver Sacks as a singular body of thought, consistent throughout, be he writing for a popular audience in The New York Review of Books or the scientific community in Neurology. (Now, I admit that Sacks is not the best example, since as I’ve skimmed some of his scientific writing he seems more consistent than someone like Steven Pinker.  But bear with me, since I’m not here to bury Berger, but praise him.) For Berger, Sacks’ theory of a pre-linguistic subjectivity--accessible through interaction with highly acculturated aesthetic objects like symphonies and modernist poetry--exists in equal measure in his popular and scientific thought. 

I would argue that a savvy rhetorician like Sacks would recognize the ideological investments of his audience and pitch his presentations to them: hence his references to patients cured by Beethoven, pains ameliorated by Mahler and people reborn through Brahms.  I doubt those staples of NPR appear as frequently in his scientific papers like, say, “Cycad Neurotoxins, Consumption of Flying Foxes, and ALS-PDC Disease in Guam.” Those references say as much about the audience a popular science writer like Sacks keys his performance to please as it does about his own thought on the matter.  (Or not.  This is why Sacks is a bad example of this general phenomenon.) Here’s the thing: Berger’s argument would be strenghtened were he to turn from what Sacks believes to what Sacks’ audience believes.  He need not worry about Sacks, or whether Sacks’ scientific work jives with his popular, because the rhetoric of his popular work--in which he appeals to an idea of a pre-linguistic subjectivity accessible through highly acculturated aesthetic objects--proves Berger’s point more powerfully by dint of its popularity.  He need not focus on Sacks’ personal beliefs to deliver his argument convincingly.

Concerning Psychoanalytic "Truths," the IWW & Gangesa's Tattvacintamani

[Note: an update for interested parties.]

The area below contains some very typical sophistry which, for reasons I can't entirely explain outside of a general sense of annoyance, I took some time I don't have to respond to.  You can see the original (as well as other objects worthy of hearty ridicule) by putting your eye to glass and peering deep into the heart of faux-liberatory dogmatism. 

I should add: although this thinker belongs to the Long Sunday collective, he belongs there as much as Eugene Debs would have "belonged" on the current Cabinet (if you reversed the political valences such that Debs were neoconservative and the Bush Cabinet composed of Wobblies).  I may've squeezed more volatile political history into that sentence than the rest of everything I've ever written in my entire life combined.  So proceed, if you dare, and place your eye firmly 'gainst the glass:

The Criterion Beneath the Criteria We Profess

Everyone thinks this all the time, but rarely in public, much less the pages of American Literary History (Spring 1998):

Neither Hendler, Klein, nor Nackenoff treats the issue that most interests me about [Horatio Alger's] Ragged Dick. 

(To be fair, the issue that interests this reviewer is interesting: "Why does nobody notice that this model of boyish honesty is lying all the time?")

The Horatio Alger Hoax; or, Why Dissertations Like Mine Ought to Be Written

In 1928, Herbert Mayes published Alger: A Biography Without a Hero.  The young journalist had discovered the lost diary of Horatio Alger, in which the famous author recounted the marriage to Patience Stires his fathered initially opposed and ultimately quashed; one affair with a Parisian café singer and another with a married woman (which, when revealed, forced him from the pulpit); and the adoption and tragic trampling of a Chinese toddler named Wing.  The lost diary provided Mayes with irrefutable evidence of that Alger was a Freudian study in repression, his novels of “luck and pluck” little more than pathetic exercises in psychoanalytic wish-fulfillment. 

In 1938, Kenneth Lynn’s The Dream of Success counted Alger alongside Theodore Dreiser and Jack London as frustrated (in the psychoanalytic sense) little men who pour “out all [their] dammed-up ambitions and repressed desire into more than a hundred novels and countless short stories about adolescent boys who, beginning in poverty and obscurity, took the fabulous city…by storm.”  Lynn’s source was, as you may suspect, Mayes. 

In 1959, Norman Holland followed suit in “Hobbling with Horatio, or the Uses of Literature.”  Holland considered Alger “an emotional cripple” for whom the writing of books was a means of surpassing his father while avoiding direct competition with him.

In 1963, another psychoanalytic critic, John Tebbel, praised Mayes in the introduction to From Rags to Riches: Horatio Alger and the American Dream, saying “it is a tribute to the research he did at twenty-eight to note that it can hardly be improved upon nearly four decades later.  The primary sources of Alger material are meager, indeed, but Mr. Mayes appears to have examined all of them, and no new original material has turned up in the intervening decades.” 

In 1964, amateur collector and Alger enthusiast Ralph Gardner published Horatio Alger, or The American Hero Era, in which he declared that, given the paucity of biographical information, “some situations were dramatized and dialogue created, but always within the framework of existing facts.”  Reviewers discredited Gardner’s speculative biography, calling it a “whitewash” and noting its patent inferiority to Professor Tebbel’s stylishly Freudian account.  Tebbel’s academic credentials are significant: because Gardner was “an admirer,” Cecil B. Williams argued in American Literature (March, 1965), “he includes only what suited the image he wanted to present, omitting Patience Stires, Wing, and the illicit affairs, but emphasizing young Alger’s standing in his Harvard class and the prizes he won for Greek prose.”  The coup de grace: “Tebbel’s book is indexed; Gardner’s is not.”  Instead of extrapolation, Williams suggests, it is better to mourn the fact that “no new original material [had] turned up” since 1928.  Except some had.

In 1961, another amateur collector and Alger enthusiast, Frank Gruber, had privately published Horatio Alger, Jr: A Biography and Bibliography of the Best Selling Author of All Time. In it, Gruber noted that he had been “compelled to discard virtually everything in [Mayes’] book with one single exception, the date of his birth.  Even the date of his death is wrong.”  There had been no Parisian café singers.  No married women.  No oddly named Chinese toddlers trampled to death by runaway horses.  There had not even been a lost diary.  And you want “whitewashing”: according to Unitarian Church records, Alger’s sudden departure from his parish was not due to his illicit affair with a married woman but the accusations by two young boys that he had performed “deeds too revolting to relate” with them.  Apparently none of the 750 editions of his book Gruber published made it into the hands of academics.  (And if they had, they would no doubt have dismissed his work with the same air of superiority with which they would later dismiss Gardner’s.) 

Finally, in the late 1970s, Mayes confessed: “As anyone who has read my book is aware, I made Alger out to be a pathetic, quite ridiculous character. I provided him with mistresses. I had him adopt and become attached to a little Chinese boy, and then had the boy killed by a runaway horse.”  By 1985 the first scholarly account of Alger’s life (Gary Scharnhorst and Jack Bales’ The Lost Life of Horatio Alger, Jr.) hit the shelves. 

What should the Alger hoax teach us about scholarship?  First, never trust a biographer who flubs the date his subject died.  Second, when secondary sources eclipse their primary counterparts as the authoritative account of a life or an event, the odds of an error being compounded in perpetuity increase.  Dramatically.  Third, that had Mayes done his research, he would have realized that his subject (an apparent pederast) possessed a far richer vein of Freudian neuroses and psychoses than Mayes suspected…and that I find that irony hilarious beyond the telling.

The Merry-Go-Aground

The past three weeks have consisted in little more than artless rearrangement of claims as I wheel around "the merry-go-aground."  What do I mean?  Witness:

I decide that Claim 87 belongs before Claim 63.  After moving Claim 87 there, I realize the cogency of Claim 87 requires Claims 73-86 immediately precede it.  I proceed to front Claim 87 with Claims 73-86 and it is a full seventeen seconds before I remember Claim 76 sounds ridiculous when not preceded by Claims 69-72.  Out come the cranes again (dropping dreadful claims like they're heresy, dropping dreadful claims into the ocean) and Claims 69-72 now precede Claim 76 again.  Claim 69 then draws my attention.  Logic demands I prove points before assuming them proven: Claim 69 relies on the point I establish in Claims 63-68.  I deposit Claims 63-68 before Claim 69 and out comes the shame again (pouring from my mouth as profanity, pouring from my mouth like obscene devotions).

And there I am.  Back where I started.  Only more frustrated.  More annoyed.  And a couple hours older.

Unwitting Tuesday Hatred II; or Susurrus from a Broken Bullhorn

Yesterday Michael Bérubé (Michael Bérubé!) declared

If I came across a job candidate with a blog like this or this, or this, or this, or this, or this (jus t to take a half dozen at random), I’d be impressed, and if the rest of the candidate’s materials looked as good, I’d want to interview him or her ... because I’m very, very partial to people who write smart stuff.

(Click on that first "this" and experience instant déjà vu.)  So I'm the sort of scholar Michael would not not hire if I applied for a position at Penn on the condition that "the rest of [my] materials looked as good."  This contingent stamp of approval is a little alarming because, to be frank, I don't know how the rest of my materials look (and am a little confused as to what my "materials" would be).  I have one potentially forthcoming essay...but it's been "potentially forthcoming" since I sent in revisions well over three years ago. 

Last year I mustered gumption enough to email the guest editor of the issue my essay would've appear in and heard back almost immediately.  Not from him, mind you, but from an automated messaging service letting me know that Dr. _____ is currently vacationing in France and will return my message promptly upon his return.  That was last November.  Either his position puts the sin in sinecure or he's avoiding me, in which case I should abandon all hope of that article ever being published.  But even if I were to publish it elsewhere, I don't think it'd be part of my "materials."  (It concerns a field I no longer work in and employs an approach I no longer condone.)  So what else is there?

The chapters of my dissertation that I'll eventually publish as articles in the field's flagship journals.  (Some of which, I recently discovered, now syndicate their contents.  That's why the latest issue of American Literary History and American Literature are now available on my left sidebar.)  But all I can count on at this point is a finished dissertation and my teaching experience. 

I've taught or TA'd a variety of courses (some of which were cross-listed with Comparative Literature and Criticism) including Introduction to Irish Modernism (self-explanatory), Modern Youth (a course in which the kids queered 2oth Century bildungsromans after reading a healthy dose of Freud and Foucault), and Covering Elections (a hybrid literature and journalism class concerning the history of election coverage since 1960).  I've also taught numerous lower-division Introduction to the Novel and Introduction to Drama courses, as well as five or six Introduction to Literary Journalisms.  By the time I hit the market I'll also have team-taught The Ethics and Evolution of Literary Journalism (an upper-division course) with Pulitzer Prize-winning author Barry Siegel. 

I strongly suspect none of that will matter when I hit the market because I haven't published anything yet.  Still, in terms of the originality of its research, my dissertation should belong to the stronger class of ones out there.  Others, however, will be far more marketable.  Correcting a half decade drift in Americanist scholarship simply is not sexy.  Necessary?  Certainly.  Sexy?  Not so much.  Since my approach addresses the contemporary impact and future influence of popular literature, I cannot choose (as others can) to focus on works which were obscure then but are now deemed important; I can only focus on works which are obscure now but were then deemed important, i.e. ones no one considers important anymore.

This "recovery" aspect allows me to stand on the shoulders of those feminists who "rediscovered" the most popular novels of the Nineteenth Century.  (The scare-quotes mock the historical absurdity of "losing" track of all the popular novels, not the quality of the archival work done by feminists in the '70s and '80s.)  But that's about as sexy as I can get without my thesis becoming an object lesson in academic pandering...which isn't "sexy" so much as "insulting."  (No matter how gratifying or flattering his gestures, the art of the pander necessarily insults: "But but but I've appealed to your basest instincts!  I've exploited every weakness you insist you don't have!  Why won't hire me?")

I don't want to insult other scholars by parroting their concerns.  (They have their reasons for having their concerns, much as I have my reasons for having mine.)  But trends being trends and outliers being outliers, I sense that I'm not long for academia.  And all boasting aside, that's academia's loss.  Why this sudden upswell of confidence?  Because I'm a damn fine teacher.  A natural.  (If by "natural" you understand "daily chafes his ass on the pedagogical grindstone to improve the quality of his course and increase its impact on his students.")  A teacher like me shouldn't be barred from academia because some fluke of academic fashion renders his work not unnecessary, not insubstantial, not offensive but simply unsexy. 

That's all the bravado I can brave for the evening.  Needless to say, of the many things in my life about which I'm terribly insecure, my success in the classroom isn't one of them.  (Except for that time I lectured three hours after chemo.  In a class taught by my advisor.  During which I barely sounded like a hearing person.  One day I'll hook a mike to the laptop and let you sample what I sounded like before the eight years of speech therapy...because I do a damn fine impersonation of a deaf person who hasn't gone through eight years of speech therapy.  Will wonders never cease?) 

It just dawned on me: I'm manifesting symptoms of Tuesday Hatred.  Had I known that from the get-go I could've vented far more effectively.  C'est la vie.  I can always confess my inappropriate hatred come Friday. 

Cheddar Cheese, B.O. & Cognitive Modulation of Olfactory Processing

"Cognitive Modulation of Olfactory Processing" (Neuron 46, no. 4) has implications for literary theory which, were it not for today's extreme case of density, I would certainly tease out.  The researchers

showed how cognitive, semantic information modulates olfactory representations in the brain by providing a visual word descriptor, "cheddar cheese" or "body odor," during the delivery of a test odor (isovaleric acid with cheddar cheese flavor) and also during the delivery of clean air. Clean air labeled "air" was used as a control. Subjects rated the affective value of the test odor as significantly more unpleasant when labeled "body odor" than when labeled "cheddar cheese."

[...]

The important new point being made in this paper is that high-level cognitive inputs, such as the sight of a word, can influence the activations in brain regions that are activated by olfactory stimuli such as the anterior cingulate and orbitofrontal cortex and the amygdala. Moreover, the high-level cognitive influence can modulate affective ratings of pleasantness and the brain regions such as the anterior cingulate/medial orbitofrontal areas where the activations are correlated with the pleasantness of odors.

I momentarily thought the emphasized phrase above meant that these researchers were familiar with De Man.  That the materiality of the signifier has finally been accepted by the scientific community.  Then:

Use of a word label as the cognitive input ensured that the cognitive input was high level and semantic. If we had used a picture of cheese or of a body part, this could have been a lower level association, in that neurons in the orbitofrontal cortex respond to visual stimuli such as the sight of food.

These neuroscientists clearly have not read their De Man: pictures of cheddar cheese would have created lower-level associations than the words "cheddar cheese."  I imagine this study has implications for any philosophical school which assumes the disconnect of signifier from signified.  I wish I could wrap my head around what those implications would be but I'm having a hard enough time wrapping my head around simple arithmetic today.  Higher-order cognitive functions like "thinking about poststructuralist accoutns of language" are out of the question. 

Everyone Reads Nietzsche Now; or, You Think I'm Antitheoretical?

Adam wants to know what Nietzsche argued.  I want to know how Americans mangled his thought during the "Nietzsche vogue" of 1897-1908.  (Those dates aren't as random as they seem, but I lack sufficient energy to justify my bracketing.)  A Polaroid of this fissure between intellectuals (like Adam) and intellectual historians (like Yours Truly) looks something like this: intellectuals are more interested in the causes than their effects, whereas intellectual historians are more interested in the effects than their causes.  So how did Americans mangle Nietzsche during his very own vogue?  Arthur Allin's review of Alexander Tille's Von Nietzsche bis Darwin (1897) in The Journal of American Psychology neatly captures both the common misinterpretations and the shrill tone with which they were voiced:

Nietzsche, the erratic, the eccentric, the aphoristic and the modern oracular Zarathurstrian, is for [Tille] the high-water mark of the tide which has been rising so steadily since Darwin’s days. Spencer, Leslie Stephen, Wundt, Huxley, Fiske, Williams, Bebel and others are shown to be so many landscapes on the road to Nietzsche. The trend of thought is, of course, biological and evolutionary. The Abermensch, the Beyond-Man, is the continued goal. A race of laughing lions is coming, strong men full of deeds and vigor. The cry is not Repent! but the true Metanoia, change of life and conduct; not so much humility and penance, as Grecian valor and Roman virtus. A high aristocratic Herrenclasse, the product of natural selection is his ideal. Consumptives must not marry. Only the fittest must survive.

On Courseblogging & Constant Processing

A response to the alway stimulating Professor Camicao:  I thought I would talk a little more about the potential of my courseblog.  First, here's how I sold the idea of a courseblog to my course director:

It's the kind of thing that can function both as an "official" course blog--which the students are required to read during the quarter and respond (in the comment section) at least twice a week--and a clearinghouse for future LJ [Literary Journalism] instructors, since I'll be posting LJ-related links, teaching material, advice &c. on a daily basis.

[ ... ]

Obviously those columns need more work: more books, since I just grabbed all the LJ-oriented ones that I've purchased through Amazon the past two years from my Amazon history; more links to more writer's websites, and so on.  But that'll evolve.  One convenient thing about this is that it will 1) spread the workload thin for me this quarter (I don't have to compile massive lists, merely add to the ones I've already made as revisions occur to me) and 2) be a great resource (even further thinning the workload) for both myself and future LJ instructors.  Another thing this format allows me to do is have the students respond almost immediately to exercises or discussions in class ... and have a permanent record of how they went over.  Since I can organize them by categories (like "class discussion" or "activity evaluation"), future instructors can click on that category and read all the posts that concern specific activities and how well they went over &c.

Of course, there's something more topical about a literary journalism course than, say, one I would teach on turn-of-the-century American literature ... but then again, perhaps there isn't, and perhaps what a good courseblog can do is make a course more topical, more immediate to the students' lives. Because one of the things I never can communicate to my students is how I see my research everywhere, how I tend to see everything I read in light of debates about evolutionary theory (even when those things have no direct bearing on evolutionary theory). 

To steal from the language of LJ: the students never acquire the sense of how immersed I am in my work, of how much of my mental space it occupies.  Were I teaching a course on, say, "Science & Utopian Thought in the American Novel, 1880-1920" and had a courseblog, whenever I'm reading online newpapers or magazines or journals I could just hit the "blog this" button on my toolbar, insert a little note and post it to the courseblog.  If I did that enough, the students would see what commitment to an intellectual project means: constant processing, not just something casually thought-about-the-night-before.

Joan Didion on Her Husband's Death

Joan Didion should not be allowed to recall the moment of and days after her husband's death.  I will have more to say about this.  For now I need a drink.

Scholarly Swings and Misses

From James Berger's essay ("Falling Towers and Postmodern Wild Children: Oliver Sacks, Don DeLillo and Turns Against Language") in the latest PMLA:

Why did the wild child cross the highway?  To show his imperviousness to every medium of symbolic exchange[!]

He steps to the plate.  Adjusts his crotch.  Sets himself.  Identifies the pitch.  His hips cock, then rotate, as he pulls the bat through the hitting zone.  He swings clear out of his shoes.   He didn't mean to.  But damn is it funny. 

Addendum: I would've written more on this article--and will in the near future--but I only read it because Holbo wanted to know if I could email it to him.  So I figure it's only polite to let him have the first crack.  But I have the second (on Berger's strange critique of Sacks' popular scientific writing) all lined up.

Friday's Twilight Confessional

I confess that the Ninth Ward once terrified me and that my friends who lived there knew it did.  I confess to concocting excuses to meet them somewhere other than the Ninth Ward. 

I confess that last night I had countless nightmares about my parents or friends being caught in their cars on the Interstate 10 as they fled from Rita.  I confess that the sleeplessness these nightmares caused had a deleterious effect on my ability to welcome and introduce my students to Literary Journalism 20.  (I also confess that a massive overcompensation effort is already underway.)

I confess that whenever I think "the situation cannot deteriorate further" it invariably does and that I feel an irrational irresponsibility for it.

I confess that I am even more tired of thinking and talking and writing about hurricanes today than I have ever been tired of thinking and talking and writing about anything that is not my dissertation.  I confess that this thinking and talking and writing about hurricanes has lowered the odds of my finishing the Jack London chapter by Monday to a pathetic 23 percent.

I confess that this confession began as a comment on Kotsko's "Friday Afternoon Confessional" and that despite my atheism I have found confessing cathartic.  (I also confess that I did not know that outside of Aristotelian literary theory "cathartic" refers to "the evacuation of the bowels."  I confess I find the metaphorical leap disturbing.) 

I confess that I have searched the archives of Adam's Weblog so that I might learn more about his faith because faith confuses me.  I confess that while I wish I could experience faith I am more frequently of the opinion of 19th Century philosopher and arch-evolutionist Ernst Haeckel, who in The Riddle of the Universe (1899) said that modern theology "adores a personal God as an invisible—properly speaking, gaseous—being, yet makes him think, speak and act in human fashion [and] gives us the paradoxial picture of a 'gaseous vertebrate.'"  (I confess that my monism and materialism often depress me ... but that the alternatives depress me even more.)

I confess I want to end this confession with a bang but must settle for a whimper ... because I confess the delirium with which I taught this morning is nothing next to how nebulous my thoughts are now.  Finally, I confess that said bang concerned what I need in my nécessaire and why I find this portrait of a "confessant" compelling. 

On Auteurs, Popular Culture and Misanthropy

The expansive wasteland of American popular entertainment is either less expansive or more densely populated than usual at the moment.  The hostility Hollywood exhibited toward the auteurs of American cinema in the Seventies has withered as the quality of their films has declined.  (Only Scorsese thinks big any longer.)  Over a two month period the major studios will have released:

• Lord of War, penned and directed by the both over- (S1m0ne)  and under- rated (Gattaca) New Zealand-born Andrew Niccol
• The 40 Year Old Virgin, by Judd Apatow, the man responsible for the sublime (but short-lived) Freaks and Geeks
• The Constant Gardener, Fernando Meirelles' follow-up to his brilliant City of God
• A History of Violence, the latest by David Cronenberg
• Oliver Twist, the latest by Roman Polanski
• Serenity, Joss Whedon's feature-length adaptation of the cancelled (but critically acclaimed) television show Firefly

All these films share one common element: they exist only because their directors have clout enough to flip the finger at the contemporary Hollywood system.  The steady decline in box office tallies has created a class of directors who, while producing nothing so sublime as Copolla's The Conversation, will produce the most impressive August and September in recent memory.  Their films may suffer beside qualitative heights of the auteur era, but the quantitative breadth of quality films they've pushed into American theaters is an equally impressive feat.  For the first time in ages the question isn't "Which one will insult my intelligence the least?" but "Which one do I want to see most?"  I haven't had the opportunity to ask that question in quite some time.  And did I mention television? 

Despite Whedon's absence, the major networks have managed to field quite an interesting lineup this year:

• J.J. Abrams' Alias continues on fumes, but Lost is (deservedly) a powerhouse.
• Fox has forgotten to cancel Arrested Development for the third straight season.
• Shaun Cassidy returns to television (ten years after the cancellation of American Gothic) with the intelligent and disturbingly timely Invasion.
• Ricky Gervais' Extras is set to debut on HBO (as are the fifth season of Curb Your Enthusiasm and the third season of Deadwood).
• No one informed Glen Larson the original Battlestar Galactica sucked.

Given all this quality entertainment out there, you may be thinking "Scott claims to be dissertating but he seems to spend an inordinate amount of time watching films and television."  Had I a social life which consisted in more than dissertating all day, pouring myself a drink and collapsing on the couch, your suspicions would be justified.  But I don't.  So they aren't.  Someone once told me "The key to a long academic career is create the appearance of responsibility while behaving irresponsibly."  He neglected to mention that an absolute misanthrope need not keep up appearances.  One can be both.   

Differences without Distinctions: Another Post (sort of) about the Weather

As Summer yields to the inconstant stress of Fall, I want to take a moment to reflect on what I've accomplished and press the muzzle of what I haven't firmly to my temple.  Or maybe I should inhale deeply ... and again ... and again.  Now I feel better.  Crazed but better.  I remind myself that the danger of a Category 4 hurricane with sustained winds of 155 miles per hour differs only terminologically from the danger of a Category 5 hurricane with sustained winds of 160 miles per hours.  As I begin to hyperventilate I remember that Rita is only history's third strongest hurricane and then I realize that I'm still blogging about the weather.  Of all the things I never thought I'd launch into online permanence, the cliché which launched a thousand pointless conversations topped the list.  Yet observe the depths to which I have so eagerly rappeled.[1]  And so I offer Nature the following compromise: I will stop writing about the weather if you promise to stop churning out weather worth writing about.  Deal?

[1] While double-checking that I spelled "rappel" correctly I inadvertantly came across the entry for "rapely," which means "hastily, in haste, quickly."  The chilling irony of the definition certainly offends, but not nearly so much as the selected quotation: "Adam took Gamelyn, And ladde him rapely and anon."  (Even when a footnote flees from hurricane Katrina and her horrible sister I still roll some disturbing die.)

On the Materiality of Evidence; or, Can I Cite Listserv Etiquette?

For awhile now I've subscribed to the Jack London Listserv.  The discussions range from typical fanboy esoterica ("What ever happened to the Snark?") to scholarly inquiries into London's sexual orientation ("Was Jack a pitcher or a catcher?").  I had never looked at the listserv's official homepage before, but needless to say I was shocked by this guide to student submissions to it:

Students doing papers on London are welcome to send questions, however they should be aksed after the research is underway.  Do not ask questions like, "How did Jack London's writings express social Darwinism?" or "Where can I find criticisms of The Call of the Wild?"  Instead, be precise, such as "I'm including the following stories for a paper on London and Social Darwinism ... Have I left any out?"  Or, "X says the following about The Call of the Wild ... Here is my idea.  What do others think?"  In other words, do your own footwork first.

Now those of you familiar with my dissertation know why this amuses me: I'm currently writing a chapter on London in a dissertation devoted to proving illegitimate questions like "How did Jack London's writings express social Darwinism?"  One critical component of my argument is that literary scholars, academic historians and the general public have an unshakeable belief that some thing called "social Darwinism" exists and that popular writers (especially naturalists like Jack London) glean their unflappable faith in some form of pernicious environmental determinism from it.  Only it doesn't and they don't. 

I would love to include that excerpt from the listserv's home page in the list of general misconceptions that necessitate a project like mine.  Somehow I don't think it meets the evidentiary standard for academic papers.  Then it hits me: I would have (and in fact have not had) any problem including similar ephemera from the turn-of-the-century in my dissertation.  (The current version of London chapter itself includes a brief discussion of MacMillan's advertising campaign for Before Adam.)  But for some reason I believe brittle and dessicated 98 year old newsprint to be more substantial than a webpage on a university server which has been up since (at least) 13 June 1997 and which has contained the text about London and social Darwinism since (at least) 15 August 2000.  While I understand that the London site may disappear, the Wayback Machine shouldn't.  (The Wayback Machine is a collaborative project with, among others, the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian.  While based in San Fransisco, it has mirror sites around the world, so even if the unthinkable should happen to the entire United States, the electronic record of the webpages of its former citizens will be safe ... deep in the heart of the Middle East.)  Anyway, why am I reluctant to cite one form of ephemera when I enthusiastically cite another?

Why am I such a technophobe?  I'm not entirely sure, but this is something I should think about more rigorously sometime after 1) the quarter starts, 2) I finish the London chapter and 3) I hear from my parents that they've arrived in Baton Rouge safely.  The next couple of days will be deliriously fun.  (Literally.  I estimate somewhere south of seven hours of sleep stretched over the next week or so.)

Pithy Remarks On Rita

As a friend (and current Louisiana resident) wrote this afternoon:

Once is a catastrophe.  Twice looks like a grudge.

Update: The Washington Post informs us that "Rita Upgraded to 'Monster' Category 5 Hurricane." (CNN confirms.)  Has the National Hurricane Center always applied such adjectives to hurricanes?  Can one Category 5 be "beastly" and another "indifferent"?  Or are all Category 5 hurricanes "Monster" by definition?  (I kid, frankly, because I don't like the alternative emotional responses.)

This Is Officially Ridiculous; or, Rita and The Perpetual Train

Three weeks ago some of my family evacuated to Houston to dodge Katrina.  Today I hear from my family in Houston that they're evacuating to Baton Rouge to dodge Rita.  (But it's about time for another Storm of the Century, now that we're finished dealing with the political, structural and emotional fallout from Katrina.[1])  At least this time all the politicos understand that their careers are on the line, so the people of Galveston (which has seen its fair share of powerful hurricanes before) have already begun evacuating the barrier island off the single road connecting it to the mainland.  (When will the calls to permanently abandon Galveston begin?  How long before Dennis Hastert pens some inflammatory, inappropriate and insensitive remarks?  Galveston, after all, doesn't front the planet's fourth busiest port complex.) 

At this point I'm almost tempted to say that the entire South should be reconfigured along the lines of "the perpetual train" in China Mieville's Iron Council.   Put the whole region on rails.  Instead of evacuating the people, whenever the latest Storm of the Century barrels down on some Southern coastline the South can pick up its skirts, lay down its rails and evacuate itself.  (Given his impressive breakdown of the failure of the federal, state and local governments to respond to Katrina I wonder why he hasn't beat me to the punch.) 

Ugh.  I thought I was finished with this particular panic attack for the 2005 Hurricane Season. 

[1] Because the history of New Orleans (according to Wikipedia) is no longer subdivided into "Colonial Era," "19th Century," "20th Century" and "Hurricane Katrina."

Nude 'Brews, Shiny Zambonis & Sickly Indians; or, What Is This Place?

That this story breaks the same day this one does is your garden-variety coincidence.  That this corruption scandal involves Jack Abramoff (former friend of the upstanding Grover Norquist) interests me less than the cultural politics involved in the various scandals.  (Don't fret, children, I'll double back to the pornography momentarily.)  Abramoff and Ralph Reed worked to shut down a lucrative Indian casino owned and operated by the Tigua tribe.  "We should continue to pile it on until the place is shuttered," he writes Reed.  He refers to the Tiguas as monkeys, troglodytes and worse.  (Lest you think I spout liberal propaganda, be informed that I borrow this information from Foxnews.  They've reported, now I'm deciding.) 

Time passes.  Abramoff convinces the Tigua tribe hire him as a consultant who can help them reopen the casino.  (He is paid to close its doors.  He is paid to open them.)  He then convinces the board of the Eshkol Academy, a Jewish boys school he funded, to purchase life insurance policies on the Tigua elders.  These moneys could be used to purchase an additional Zamboni to add to the rink-less school's growing collection.  (The school had previously purchased two other Zambonis despite not owning a hockey rink.)  It should be obvious to you that Eshkol Academy was, in the damning words of Abramoff himself, a "front group."  About that time Abramoff requested all future unnecessary donations from Native American tribes to his Zamboni-happy Hebrew school go directly through him: "Please tell [the Native Americans] that we are 'using the school as our conduit for some of activities.'" 

Why the tribes simply didn't donate another Zamboni is beyond me.  By now they must have known the terrible truth that Jews love Zambonis.  Their sultry Italian names remind wealthy Jews of forbidden thrusts in bombed out shiksa brothels.  The thought of their shiny hulls resurfacing ice recalls some Old Testament obliteration of enemies of the wandering Jewish state.  The Zamboni symbolizes the Jewish love of slates wiped clean and women whose touch corrupts.  Or so you would think.  It turns out Abramoff simply decided Native Americans didn't need Zambonis any more than he didn't, and that if it came down to who needed-it-less more, than the more less-needy party which deserved it was his own.  And if they complained, his front company was the beneficiary of the Native Americans' life insurance policies.   

Just so this is all clear: a high-ranking Republican lobbyist was paid by one client to shut an Indian casino down, then by another another to reopen it.  The funds from those fees (as well as direct donations) were then used to purchase Zambonis for a Hebrew school without a hockey rink.  Some of them were also used to purchase life insurance policies on the elders of the Native American tribes whose casino had been closed and reopened by Abramoff and whose direct donations were used to purchase Zambonis.  Perfectly intelligible.  In addition to being bizarre beyond the telling, news of this colorful cultural constellation of corruption breaks the same day that Bush officials inform the nation of the newest threat to the American Way of Life:

Pornography.  Not the pornographic material already illegal, mind you, but the kind that depicts and is marketed to consenting adults.  (You!  Put down that Dworkin!  This debate is not that debate but another one entirely!  We can have that debate later if we don't drown first.)  For those of you who may be confused, this announcement is a complete coincidence.  The Administration did not plan to announce the new Department of Hardcore Pornography on the same day the story of the Jew who swindled the Indians in order to buy Zambonis broke.  I repeat:

This.  Is.  Your.  Garden.  Variety.  Coincidence.

Or is it?

Rich on Wolfe

[I swear I didn't post this for the title alone.  Sometimes comments just deserve to be posts, and since Rich doesn't have a blog of his own I'm the one duty-bound to do the elevating.  What follows is the coda to his conversation with Jonathan.  I don't necessarily agree with all of it (to be specific some of Philip K. Dick's hack-work stinks to me of hack-work), but it deserves a showcase.  So on with Rich's show.]

Rather than just respond to Jonathan, I should say what I think of Wolfe directly (although I'll probably be repeating myself from earlier in the thread). It's not that he's a bad writer. He's a second-rate writer, because he sets up expectations that he does not fulfill. Certain aspects of his books are good enough so that I am jolted out of the mindset of reading yet another work of commercial fantasy, and once I am, I discover that too much of the work remains inflected by commercial fantasy. With regard to the New Sun books, commonly regarded as his best series, I've already gone into the problems that I see in it: the classic and transparent plot devices, the puzzle-box authorial fiddling, the careless use of torture fetishism as a character booster.

I think that Scott is right that Wolfe has a single tone for many of his works (I haven't read them all -- just the five New Sun books, some of the short stories, the Swords books, and the Wizard Knight books), and it's a tone that enables him to indulge himself in his weaknesses. I'm sure that he really is interested in heroes who lose their memory, who have died and come back, who aren't who they think they are, and so on, but these characteristics of his protagonists also allow him a free hand with stage management, which he really should avoid allowing himself.

A writer should be judged on his best work, I suppose, and there are certainly writers who I think are first-rate (such as PKD) who have churned out some very inferior hackwork. But when PKD did hackwork, it always seemed like he was at least trying to be worthwhile, and I can't always say that for Wolfe. Case in point: the Wizard Knight books.

These two books are a pastiche, and he attempts to get around this by saying over and over that he knows it's a pastiche, he's doing it on purpose, it's a homage! But, just like Grunge in my quote above, that doesn't really make it any more than what it is. The rest of this comment will take the Wizard Knight books as an example; I don't think there are many plot revelations that you don't encounter early in the first book, but you have been warned.

The basic conceit of the books is taken from Yves Meynard's _The Book of Knights_ (a much better book). Wolfe credits Meynard in the acknowledgements. There is, as with the New Sun books, a creepy element added to increase that reader fascination that Jonathan talks about. In this case the protagonist is changed directly from a pre-teen into an adult so that he can make love to an elf queen, an act that would too obviously turn readers away in revulsion at child molestation if the protagonist was female. The gods are pastiche Norse; the nobility are pastiche Arthurian.

The first book is a mad scramble for plot tokens, collect them all: a bowstring, armor, a sword (it's Moorcock's Sword of the Dawn), a magical dog (it's Glen Cook's Toadkiller Dog), a magical cat (Gaiman), a magical flying horse (Wagner), and a large supporting cast of servants, allies, enemies, and lots of oaths so that the whole second book can be spent fulfilling them and answering people's questions.

And the politics, as always with Wolfe, are bad. It's the boy destined for greatness, the good (though manipulative) guys from above, the celestial and mundane hierarchy.

Basically, every major author has failures. But the very attempt at the Wizard Knight books is a sign that Wolfe isn't really trying.

On The MLA, Google Blog Search, the OED and The Lord's Perfect Game

Since I couldn't very well incorporate these thoughts into the prior post:

1. I will be attending the MLA this year.  Everyone I've met here who will be there should sit down somewhere and have some beers.  I hear Edmund Wilson also wanted to spend the convention on a bender.  Why not help make his dream our reality?  (Shout out in the comment section or send me an email.)
2. Since Google unveiled Google Blog Search this humble blog has been oogled by oodles of googlers desperately seeking gossip about themselves.  I have more hits by Vanity Googlers in the past three days than I've had since I opened Acephalous.  I can only imagine that—having seen the short spot on Google Blog Search on CNN this weekend—they thought that everyone they have ever met in their entire lives has probably published something about them on their respective blogs.  Desperate to gain entry to the Great Halls of Gossip they beseeched the Gods of Google for guidance .... only to end up here. 
3. Someone finally informed the editors of the online edition of The Oxford English Dictionary that a search algorithm which can shuttle even chronic misspellers to the promised land would be an excellent way to circumvent the paradox dogging American schoolchildren: If I knew how to spell it I wouldn't have to look it up in the dictionary!  They still ought to code it such that it don't crash when people look up "algorhythm."  (That is a blank screen you see.  That is my point.  Compare it "algorithm.")
4. I hear thunder.  I see lightening.  I live in Southern California.  (sings) One of these things is not like the other.  One of these things is just not the same. (sheepishly ceases)  What I mean to say is that outside my window it is thundering something so fierce even the Louisianians swear the Lord aims to bowl Hisself 300.