National De-Lurking Week? or Ask Me Anything, I'm Duty-Bound to Answer

An intrepid reader asked why I hadn't demanded lurkers like herself de-lurk, it being National De-Lurking Week and all.  The answer?  I only learned of it while saving some uncertain principles from my (seemingly) bottomless backlog. 

Since I've done a head-count recently enough, I don't feel the need to compel you folks to pipe up, but I do want to offer you the opportunity to make your presence known, so how about this:

For one day only, you may ask me anything you wish and I will answer it.*

* Unless it's illegal, unethical, or likely to land me in trouble with the law, the in-laws or a certain significant other.

Comments

[Andrew R.]

Well, I kind of de-lurked to make a terrible pun a few posts ago, but I do have a question for you:

You were at one time a Lacan fiend and, if I read your blog correctly, eventually came to the conclusion that Lacanian psychoanalysis and post structuralism as practiced by Anglophones are not that methodologically sound. When doing literary criticism, what do you use in their stead? Do you just leap back over the half century of accretions and use the original continental philosophy?

[Patricia L.]

Why do you read comic books when you could be reading literature?

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

Andrew,

What I do now is difficult to categorize, at least difficult when compared to the relative ease with which you can consider yourself a Lacanian, i.e. you can be hostile to every aspect of Lacanian thought, as Zizek sometimes appears to be, yet still think in an identifiably Lacanian way. Call it "the psychoanalytic trap," if you will, but methodologically, it's easy to see someone who either employs and/or goes to great lengths not to employ a Lacanian logic. I don't do that anymore. What I do is, well, it's not quite New Historicism, since I don't buy its liberatory logic; though I'm not quite an Old (a.k.a. "Naive") Historicist either, since I'm indebted to the phenomenologically-influenced criticism of the reader response and reception theorists (Jauss, Iser, &c.).

It's much easier to say that what I do I try to do responsibly, and what I do is entails tracking a particular strain of popular or philosophical (or popular philosophical) thought through a historical period via its various literary (and not-so-literary-but-perceived-to-be, a la Mitchell) transmutations and transmogrifications.

Patricia,

You mean comic books aren't literature? Have I been deluding myself all these years? Has my fascination with a medium which requires a skill-set comparable to (and, to some extent, a combination of) those of the novelist or visual artist, driven me away from literature? Of course not. I do spend quite a bit of time reading lit-TRA-ture, but a man cannot live on Henry James and Thomas Pynchon alone. Breaks are needed -- and by "breaks," I don't mean "intellectual leisure" so much as "a different kind of intellectual activity."

[Jonathan K.]

Did you really catch people having sex in your office?

[Mike S]

Will Acephalous continue once you've finished grad school?

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

Jonathan,

I think I've answered this one before, at least implicitly: all of those subsequent posts, about the legal horrors which awaited me? Either I'm a sham-artist extraordinaire, or it all really happened. And it wouldn't just be me, either, as a number of people from my home institution piped up there. I would've had to have been KING of my own Shamocracy to pull that one off. Of course, on the Internet, maybe I am. (I'm not.)

Mike,

I haven't thought about it, actually, but I don't see why it wouldn't. All those things which prevent tenure-tracked folks from continuing their blogs, well, they don't apply. I'm childless, restless and an insomniac. I don't see that changing if I land a job, ipso facto Acephalous should continue. Then there's the little issue people have been batting around; namely, that if I do land a job, it'll be in part because I'll offer whatever department I join a genuine online presence. Street cred, if you will. If that's the case, then there'd be no reason for me to stop.

All of which is only to say, it's not like I wouldn't jot down my stray thoughts anyway and posting them ain't too onerous, so I don't see why this beast can't stalk indefinitely.

[Kristen]

This is my official de-lurk. I am a second-year Ph.D. student at a large university; I study mostly nineteenth-century America, focusing particularly on slavery and abolition. I am some combination of "an academic blogger" and "an academic who blogs," although my truly academic posts are few and far between since I am currently starting dissertation research and don't have much time to write "academic" posts.

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

Kristen, oddly, the more I work on my dissertation, the more I post, even when I'm in the research stage. (And, let's be honest here, when am I not in some research stage?) It's because, as Rich noted, writing here is different from working on the dissertation; not merely in terms of the formality, but in how I approach material. After a long day of dissertating, approaching the material from a fresh perspective helps me unwind-while-not-unwinding. (There's a German phrase for that: Arbeit Macht Frei, I think it is.)

[Adam Roberts]

... and my question for the 'must answer truthfully' Scott is:

Whilst I can understand the reasons (of acculturation, of national pride and so on) that might lead you to blog about baseball, or whatever, isn't it true, in your heart of hearts (and I might almost say, isn't it bound to be true) that actually you'd welcome the chance to properly express a newfound love for the world's greatest sport?

[Kenneth Rufo]

Adam, you mean curling, right?

[Chance]

Scott,

Why does my heart ache, and a drowsy numbness pain my sense?

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

Adam, you know, now that Posh's husband will play down the road, I just might reconsider. I mean, who needs the suspenseful afforded by the graceful interaction of talent, skill and game theory when we can watch Becks bend it like himself?

Also, you don't have to answer Ken's question. Had he addressed it to me -- "Scott, doesn't Adam mean curling?" -- he could have demanded an answer. As is, you're in the clear.

Chance, because you're the only person who wants to see me spend another two weeks vivisecting a canonical Romantic poem? (Wait, am I allowed to answer a question with a question? Probably not. But I won't tell The Management if you won't.)

[Karl Steel]

Have you considered letting the goatee expand into a full-on Abe Lincoln?

[angela]

That "Arbeit" that "Macht Frei" is Zwangsarbeit. Heil!