Acephalous

Behold! The Internet Provides Me Cookies!

John once wrote about "blogging getting results," but he never imagined this. 

This afternoon, the cookies I so desperately desired were delivered to my door.  Todd. was true to his word, providing the wife and I with delicious chocolate-mint-raisin cookies. 

(Sisyphus can consider her lack of cookies a just punishment for the water which fell from her heavens.  Cookies are divine, but as Todd. and I discussed this afternoon, some weather would be nice.)

I can't thank him enough ... although I feel obliged to apologize for the state of my 1) (patchy) beard, 2) book-littered apartment, and 3)  dissertation-preoccupied mind. 

At three in the afternoon, all my thoughts are belong to Twain. 

The Portraiture of Carl Van Vechten

Carl Van Vechten is as controversial a figure now as he was in the 1920s:  beloved by Langston Hughes, Nella Larsen, and Zora Neale Hurston; hated by W.E.B. Du Bois, Countee Cullen, and Alain Locke.  That Locke would clash with Van Vechten is, perhaps, to be expected—the so-called "Father of the Harlem Renaissance" and the so-called "Patron of the Harlem Renaissance" were bound to come to rhetorical blows.  Perhaps, as Du Bois and Locke complained, Van Vechten bleached the black experience in his attempt to present it to the rest of America.  I don't feel like rehashing those debates right now. 

Why not discuss instead his work, like the best cat book ever written (and the only one to be cited in my dissertation), The Tiger in the House (1922).  A representative sentence:

"When I play with my cat who knows whether she diverts herself with me, or I with her!" writes Montaigne in an essay vindicating natural theology from the objections of some of his opponents.

You'd be hard-pressed to find a more exemplary weaving of ailurophilia and intellectual labor than that.  But I'm not even interested in discussing his written today.  Today, I want to show you a few shots from the veritable Yearbook of American Literature he produced. 

Yes, I do have a Masters in Self-Victimization. Why do you ask?

The aforementioned mensch writes:

Sure, Kaufman might be a master of self-victimizing schemes.  But look at his blog.  Doesn't fit.

Hate to disagree, but a good long gander at this blog strongly indicates otherwise.  Since I began blogging, I've

• caught students having sex in my office and became entangled in a sexual harassment lawsuit.
• received death threats from an unstable and sorrowful troll who lives less than an hour away.
• been cyber-stalked by an insane sports writer from Wisconsin out to ruin my career.
• been accused of criminal pettiness for observing someone else's criminal pettiness.
• had that other thing happen in the comments thread of that other blog, which led to this, among other vile things.

I've brought all this upon myself in two years.  I may be the most successful self-victimizer the internet has even seen.  I attract more (absurd) scandal in a week than the average blogger does in the course of his or her entire blogging career. 

I demand credit where it's due.  I've worked hard, damn it, and deserve a cookie.  I want my damn cookie.  I demand a damn cookie.  If someone don't give me one soon, someone is gonna find himself subscribed to a couple hundred more conservative listservs come morning.

A Brief Note on the Subject of Spam and Petty Crusades

I'm nipping this one in the bud quickly.  Yesterday, I sent KC Johnson an email indicating that someone had signed me up for upwards of 80 conservative listservs.  (This happens all the time.)  To his credit, he immediately posted a denunciation of the person who did it. 

It took me nearly two hours to unsubscribe to all of them.  Needless to say, I have better uses of my time.  Only now, some of his commenters are demanding I prove that I'm not inventing this.  This morning, one asked:

Some Good News on the Honesty Front

I admit that as an academic, nothing bothers me more than plagiarism.  I don't care where or why it happens, it always riles me up.  (Despite my empowering of them.)  When I found that this post had been plagiarized, I wrote another in which I mocked Onika (MAYOR OF SEXYTOWN!) for accepting praise for my work.  Fair enough.  Checking my mail—as always, I'm about a week behind—I find that the plagiarist herself wrote me.  Here's her response:

I just wanted to let you know that I apologize for using your blog. I got my ring stuck on my finger and came across it while I was looking for "advice." I thought it was funny and I changed some stuff and posted it. I should have made it clearer that I took most of it from you but I really didn't think it was that big of a deal. People have taken things that I wrote and done this too.  People have started to write me and implied that I steal your work all the time. I've never seen your blog before. Anyway, I'm sure you'll post this so everyone can laugh at what a shameful loser I am. So have fun. Hope everyone gets a good laugh.

Despite the momentary wavering—"I really didn't think it was that big of a deal"—this is a refreshing admission of guilt.  I'm constantly having that dread conversation with student plagiarists, in which I have their "original" work in one hand, and a hard-copy one of the first two returns in a Google search for the novel/play/poem I've assigned in the other.  Not only will students refuse to admit what they've done, they'll babble complete nonsense like:

• "What do you mean by exactly the same?  Maybe this Henry James plagiarized me?"
• "'The first share of Charlotte Perkins Stetson's intellectual and professional indebtedness was undoubtedly to the Nationalist movement promulgated by Edward Bellamy and his 1887 novel Looking Backward' sounds like something I would write."
• "Of course I know what it means: 'promulgated' means, like, to attack something a lot."

So, Onika, I'm sorry to disappoint you, but we won't be laughing at you for having the guts to admit what you've done.  The stakes may have been close to nil, but that makes it all the more admirable.  You could've done what all those cowering students with they could've: run and hide.  You didn't.  That says a lot about you. 

More on KC Johnson's Durham in Wonderland; or, "Horowitzian," adj.

KC Johnson was bemused by my characterization of his argument as "Horowitzian," because, it seems, one can't share argumentative tics with someone who's publicly denounced you.  But Timothy's comments further down what has turned into quite an exceptional thread have helped me hone my complaint against KC vis-a-vis his Horowitzian tendencies. 

His recent post about Duke University Press provides a paradigmatic example.  He writes:

In looking through the Group [of 88]'s c.v.'s, an interesting pattern emerges: sixteen have published books with Duke University Press.

One of those sixteen is Priscilla Wald—who, as I mentioned earlier, was the impetus behind my first post—as her Constituting Americans: Cultural Anxiety and Narrative Form was published by DUP in 1994.  According to this profile of her, she wasn't hired by Duke until 2000. 

What Johnson considers invidious, then, is that Wald now works for the institution whose university press published her book six years earlier.  That Johnson fails to note that is telling. 

Also omitted is that it's published under the aegis of Donald Pease's prestigious New Americanist series.  While KC would preface half its number with a "[naturally]," the New Americanist series is the series for Americanists.  It published my advisor's book (New Deal Modernism: American Literature and the Invention of the Welfare State) as well as Sean McCann's Gumshoe America: Hard-Boiled Crime Fiction and the Rise and Fall of New Deal Liberalism, both solid works of literary historicism.  Timothy's comment captures why they would want to publish with DUP even if they were currently employed by Duke:

One reason that I think someone might publish with their "home" press is simply that it's the best or most reputable press in the subject area that they're publishing in. Duke is certainly one of the top presses in cultural studies and cultural history, for example. If I were at the University of Ohio, for example, it would be strange not to consider publishing with the very prestigious Social History of Africa series that has moved to that press from Heinemann.

So Wald's crime, KC suggests, is publishing Constituting Americans with the most reputable press in her field a full six years before being hired by Duke.  I sleuthed all these facts in five minutes, but in the course of writing a book, KC somehow failed to come across them?  I don't think so, and this is what disturbs me.  As Timothy writes (again regarding the character of university presses) in another comment:

Different scholarly publishers definitely have an identity, a particular reputation with regard to specialization, and KC knows that perfectly well. At least I hope he does: it's a pretty basic facet of the scholarly world.

The emphasis is mine, because that phrase captures the definition of "Horowitzian."  To wit:

Horowitzian, adj.  (of a writer) belonging to or characteristic of David Horowitz, esp. as regards intentionally withholding profession-specific information when speaking before a general audience in order to incite it to commit acts of rhetorical violence.

This is the Ur-Horowitzian move, and if you make it, it doesn't matter how many times the man himself has denounced you.  You're behaving in a Horowitzian fashion, and should be called out on it.  Given his presence in the post (and in my thinking about it), it seems only fitting that Timothy should have the last word.  Responding to KC:

You're not responsible for your commenters' biases, but you can do a better job at discouraging them from seeing their biases confirmed by the way you're writing ... Read your commenters on Duke U. Press. They're definitely coming away from your post assuming that you are arguing that the number of Duke U. faculty serving as editorial advisors means that the output of the press is effectively valueless, without peer review, a vanity output, and the like. I think you can be a lot clearer about discouraging that reading.

Sad Attempts at (Insider) Humor Rectified (With Your Aid)

A comment on a thread about (this-is-not-a-theme) another The Narrative hits close to home.  Its author, the self-styled "Cowboy," claims "absolute moral authority," because he's an English professor.  I have my doubts, as might you after you read his riff on Jeff Foxworthy's "You might be a redneck if..." routine:

You might be an English Department professor if...

Before I get started, who says "English Department professor"?  None of the "English Department professors" I know would call themselves or their fellows that.  It's the equivalent of a "knowledgeable" baseball fan complaining about opposing teams "sacrifice walking" Barry Bonds.  Cowboy's unfamiliarity with the lingo gives up the game from the start.  But humor him, as he's about to humor us:

You might be an English Department professor if...

You think Marx was reasonable—

Your last article was on the literary value of a grocery list—

You believe Moby Dick isn't worth reading—

But that the Porky's movies are culturally revealing—

Your superpower is the ability to make students hate great literature—

You think Sylvia Plath is anything other than just sad—

You hate, and I mean really hate, Ted Hughes but can't name one of his poems.

You think the culture wars are over ... and you won.

You think a rifle is the same as a shotgun.

You can look in the mirror and say any of these without cracking up:

"Visual rhetoric."

"Cultural studies."

"Technological literacy."

"Gender studies."

"Queer studies."

"I am a specialist in post-Imperialist Jamaican Feminist and Transgendered Literature."

"I am qualified to teach undergraduate survey course to your undergraduate English Majors."

I'm hard pressed to find a decent entry into this mess of stupidity, so I'll start with the obvious: the Porky's movies are culturally revealing, in that they reveal something about the culture which produced them.  A work need not be artistic to be culturally revealing.  Consider the popularity of the equally (if differently) odious Left Behind series.  It's no more literary than Porky's, but it's certainly culturally revealing, given that its popularity accompanied (or pushed, or was driven by) a swell of evangelicalism. 

Of course, attempting to provide an intelligent account of why popular things are popular, now or historically, falls under the rubric of "cultural studies," i.e. the phrase no one but an "English Department professor" can look in a mirror and utter without laughing.  Like "but shrug ant farm," the phrase is inherently funny.  Only, what's so funny about that? 

Granted, Foxworthy's shtick is inherently unfunny.  I only think this because I'm an elitist, obviously.  I don't know from low humor.  I'm all like "if it lacks the pathos of the Sad Clown, it will win no chuckles from me."  Still, assuming there's a universe in which the likes of Jay Leno are funny, "cultural studies" isn't a funny punchline.  I spent ten minutes looking in the mirror saying it, and not only was it not funny, it got progressively unfunnier before teetering into absurdity as I stood there saying "Chet.  Chet.  Chet." 

Then I laughed.

So I thought we'd be able to generate a Foxworthian list that does Cowboy and Foxworthy one better by actually being funny.  I'll start us off:

You might be a current/future English professor if...

No one understands you when you talk about Rimbaud.

My Narrative, Right or Wrong (Relevant or Irrelevant)

Glenn Reynolds peers into the depths of media bias and sighs at the cite before him:

Media credibility takes another hit: Fishbowl DC's [...] contest wasn't on the up-and-up, reports Farhad Manjoo. "What's surprising is not that anyone cheated—online polls are about as trustworthy as Soviet Bloc elections—but how brazen, and how easy, the cheating was," he writes. Friends of this year's two [...] winners built software "bots" that voted thousands of times for each of them on the Mediabistro site.

"I once had a girlfriend who quit journalism and went into P.R. because she said public-relations work was 'more ethical,'" he writes.  I'm inclined to agree.  That an online poll by a media site was so easily rigged is more evidence of pervasive, perfidious liberal bias.  As Michael Silence writes, that the "media [is] caught cheating" is another hit to its credibility, further evidence of its liberal bias. 

One problem with this scenario: I'm not the media.  You heard me right: I actively participated in the rigging of an online poll ... concerning the "hottest" media type in D.C..  I am become Liberal Media. I aided Capps and Andrews.  I admit it.  Other people aided their friends.  They admit it.  So I can only ask:

This is what elicits Reynolds' patented "sigh"?

Then I remember:

It's all about The Narrative. 

Must remind readers of The Narrative. 

Can't let people forget The Narrative.

The Narrative may not obtain—it may even be hilariously irrelevant, as here—but it's still The Narrative.  Its fires must be stoked, its hunger must be slaked, its every need must be fulfilled, lest it wither before the face of its fundamental untruth.   This reminds me of the old joke:

How do you get to be a popular blogger? 

Hit the bottom of the barrel, then keep on going.

I'll Be Damned

Remember that lunatic who sang-song that nonsensical phrase into my head last month? 

Turns out it wasn't "nonsense" so much as "prophecy." 

According to National Geographic News, there is a hole in the sky.  And it's gaping:

Null Post

Null content.

Ignorance of the Internets is no Excuse

Step #1:  Have your work plagiarized.

Step #2:  Mock the plagiarist.

Step #3:  Racist!

No, No, You've Heard Wrong. No Mere Plagiarist Could Leave Them ROTFLMBAO

(Be sure to read the the update.)

Onika is the MAYOR OF SEXYTOWN!  She is hilariously funny too![*]  Reviews don't lie!  nefarious jackson as stix (think sparkle) writes:

u crazy sun. & eye think this is whi we luvs yah!

TLBG aka L.Blogsy is RIKI TIKI TAVI only fiercer agrees:

LMAO

Super Princess concurs:

This was wonderfully written and throughly entertaining but damn those steps sound painfull as hell. There has to be a better way babygirl! There has to be.

Ok but now that I know you are okay I am ROTFLMBAO!

Kermit the Blog...formerly Big Perm loves the details Onika is the MAYOR OF SEXYTOWN! includes:

suet, ghee, tallow or smaltz...oh my goodness...you are so beautiful to me. I'm weak over here...and needed a laugh.

HI, MY NAME IS MANNY MANN AND I'M A BLOGAHOLIC loves the diagrams Onika is the MAYOR OF SEXYTOWN! uses and thinks she is "the bestest!":

You reading this to me was great, but it's even better with the diagrams, LOL.

My cheeks still ache from laughing.

Maybe I should've caught onto this bit of plagiarism because she linked to my images in her post, but I don't check the site stats often enough. 

That said, I think I've found a brand new way to blog.  Below the fold, you'll find this thing I just now wrote like tonight.  It is so funny and I am so original!  Please find some way to give me kudos for my brilliantly hilarious post which I wrote myself because I am so original and funny!

On K.C. Johnson's Durham in Wonderland and Until Proven Innocent

(The second installment can be read here.)

With all due apologies to Ralph, Scott, Timothy, Miriam, and the rest of the good folk at Cliopatria, I've got to say: keeping K.C. Johnson on the roster does the rest of the contributors a disservice.  He divined the truth of what happened in Durham on the night of March 13th long before the police announced the results of their investigation.  He was correct.  Those who believed three Duke lacrosse players had raped an African-American women were incorrect.

Granted.

But I spent an hour this afternoon catching up with Johnson's Durham-in-Wonderland.  If the research presented on the blog is indicative of the content of his soon-to-be-published book—Until Proven Innocent: Political Correctness and the Shameful Injustices of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case—then I can only conclude that the book'll be positively Horowitzian in tenor and substance.

Like Horowitz—and clocks twice a day—Johnson occasionally nails his target.  Consider his series of profiles of the "Group of 88."  That Wahneema Lubiano is a tenured associate professor in the Program in Literature with one edited volume on her CV and two monograph that've been perpetually forthcoming since 1997 infuriates me.  It also infuriates every academic struggling for tenure, so the notion that her position is indicative of a general rot in the academic humanities is willfully misleading.

One down, eighty-seven to go.  Only he's not going to get to all eighty-seven.  He's shutting down the blog when Until Proven Innocent's published in September, and as of August 30th had only written fourteen—and even that's being charitable, since the final three were group profiles.  I can imagine the response: "So what?  He's found fourteen intellectual frauds in a group of only eighty-eight professors!  That's a damning percentage."

It certainly is.  Were he a baseball player, he'd be hitting a Ruthian .159.  But he isn't even hitting that well.  Consider his profile of Joseph Harris, the director of Duke's University Writing Program.  He's published three books and numerous articles.  His articles are published in the most important journals in the field of composition studies.  He has what can only be described as a stellar publication record for someone working in composition and rhetoric.

Johnson's dismissive description of the books—"each of which discuss how to teach writing"—is a blatant attempt to minimize the work of the entire field.  (A field, I should add, whose lack of respect is often lamented by conservative critics when they bemoan the reading and writing skills of the contemporary college student.)  What really galls me about Johnson's profile of Harris is his attempt to mislead his readers into believing statements like the following point to the liberal bias of Duke composition classes:

In a 1991 essay, he asserted that composition classes should "teach students to write as critics of their culture," with "teaching itself as a form of cultural criticism, about classrooms that do not simply reproduce the values of our universities and cultures but that also work to resist and question them."

That's about as benign a description of a course devoted to critical thinking as you'll ever find.  But if you conflate "criticism" with "condemnation," as Johnson invites you to, then it seems as if the University Writing Program's a haven for anti-American indoctrination.  To wit:

In another 1991 essay, he opposed using English classes as an opportunity to "pass down and preserve the legacy of high [W]estern culture." Why? Because students "need to use language to question the demands their society makes upon them." 

The first thing to note is that Harris published two articles in 1991.  The second is that Johnson capitalized the "w" in the phrase "high western culture."  The third is that what Harris says here is supremely uncontroversial.  He wants students to develop the ability to think for themselves in a language not borrowed unthinkingly from their parents.  This is not indoctrination: it's teaching.  He doesn't advocate teaching students to draw a particular conclusion, merely their own.

This isn't to say Harris isn't insidious.  I mean, look at him here, opposing the "corporate" nature of the university:

Too many academics, he complained, favor a meritocratic approach, concentrating on their own individual achievements rather than recognizing that they are "mid-level bureaucrats in large corporations." Harris, for one, described himself as "from a union family and . . . troubled by my position as a manager in a system that treats so many of its teachers unfairly."

Anti-corporate is anti-American, ipso facto it's anti-American to oppose the hiring of adjuncts.  That such hirings are deleterious to the departments that do them, the composition programs that rely on them, and the level of instruction university-wide is beside the point.  Johnson wants to improve the quality of education, whereas Harris wants to improve the quality of education.  Wait, what?  When someone pointed this out to him—in a comment which dispassionately, but damningly, condemns the practice of hiring adjuncts—Johnson disingenuously replied:

Given that, it's rather hard to argue that the academy is organized in a "corporate" fashion—that's a pretty big difference between the academy and the average corporation.

Translation: "I've worked in academia for years, yet somehow (wink wink) I'm not aware that the move to hire adjuncts is related to the desire of many university systems to adopt a more corporate model."

Or: "I have no response to your to comment, so I'll just call Harris 'shallow' again and hope you don't notice that I'm willfully donning blinders to make my point."

Both translations point to Johnson's fundamental commitment to making an argument which entails either willful misreading or gratuitous uncharitableness.

Take your pick.

To return to the baseball metaphor, Johnson's not merely hitting .159, he's hitting an empty .159.  He may have hit a double with Lubiano, but if he trawled the Group of 88 for equal bursts of power and stopped shortly after Harris, he has problems.  He had to force Harris into the mold of which he's but one of many exemplars.  What does that say about the other seventy-four professors whose profiles he hasn't posted?

The impetus behind this post was simple: I noticed that Priscilla Wald belonged to the Group of 88, and wondered why he hadn't profiled her—or, for that matter, any of the scholars with whose work I'm familiar.  (Also, why not Michael Hardt?  I mean, really, why not Hardt?  Wouldn't he be Johnson's perfect foil?)  Then I thought about it: if he tried to characterize their work, he'd give his readers the "wrong" impression; namely, that most of the members of the Group of 88 are responsible, well-respected scholars.

That would've been inconvenient.

No "Coloreds" in Our Classrooms: On Segregating Media

Via Warren Ellis, I learn of this request, made three years ago:

I'm going to be teaching a short course at my college next winter called "Comic Book Politics."  The idea is to have the students read the best comics published since the mid 1980s which raise—either directly or indirectly—challenging political issues. I define this pretty broadly—anything from The Authority as a way of discussing the ethics of intervention to Maus as a route for discussing the Holocaust.  I can't do things not collected into trades—just too hard to get enough copies to 15-20 students otherwise.  So here's the problem: I only got back into comics over the last year after not reading them for a decade or so.  I've been doing my best to catch up, but I'm sure that there are great authors, series, or TPB's that I've missed or else haven't fully appreciated. Here's a tentative list of what I want to include: Cerebus, Transmetropolitan, Watchmen, V for Vendetta, Dark Knight Returns, Palestine, [&c.].  Comics blogosphere: tell me what you think I should include in the syllabus, and why.

That sounds like a fine list, but the sales pitch bothers me.  It suggests that funny pages, as a medium, have something particularly important to say about politics.  I don't think they do.  The ideology behind this course seems to be: comic books shouldn't stand alongside the real political novels on a syllabus, because people remember reading them as children.  (Plus, they have pictures.)  That I remember reading Moby Dick as a child is irrelevant.  (As is the fact that it has pictures.)  Any medium with such a low barrier of entry must be inherently inferior and separated from the rest of the books.  We teach "words only" courses. 

We won't stand for having any of them "coloreds" in our classrooms.  That some of those "coloreds" rival the fine words printed on those pristine white pages is immaterial.  This is the way we've always taught courses, all the way back to the days of my great-great-great-grandfather's advisor.  We can't allow these "coloreds" in our classrooms.  They're the last refuge of the most honorable printed word.  We need to honor that tradition.  It's ours.  The only one we've got.  If that means segregating the "coloreds," then it means segregating the "coloreds."  Let them have their own course on the political novel.  Separate but equal's a sound policy.  Only a fool would resist it.

Offensive parallels aside, it seems to me that Timothy Burke's "Department of Everything Studies" offers a better model of how to treat literary phenomenon which aren't (or never were) limited to traditional literary media.  Consider the example of "noir."  In order to present an accurate account of noir as a cultural phenomenon, you might begin with the novels of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, but you'd be remiss if you ignored film noir, as it was not merely a contemporary phenomenon, but a complementary one.  (Many of the early films being adaptations of the novels and/or written by the novelists.)  A serious engagement with works which have enlivened noir's conventions would entail airing the first season of Twin Peaks or having the students read Ellis' Fell more than it would reading novels so formulaic they continue to be written long after the men and women who penned them have died.

Granted, the traditional caveats apply: you're unlikely to find a single instructor sensitive enough to the quirks of each medium to teach the course responsibly.  I'm sympathetic to this line of criticism, but it requires more of an instructor than the current system does.  Example: if I were to teach a course on 19th Century American literature, I'd be duty-bound to include some Melville.  As I said, I've read Melville for pleasure since childhood, and with a month's prep time could pass myself off as a middling Melville scholar.  There are thousands of people more qualified to teach Melville, but since I'm nominally a 19th Century Americanist, no one would bat an eye if I did. 

In an ideal setting, a Melville scholar would teach Melville and I'd glide in to close the century with Wharton, London, and Twain.  In an actual classroom, I teach Melville by proxy, on the basis of what I've gleaned from the Melville scholars no university can afford keeping in the wings.  I'm not the most sensitive reader of Melville, nor would I be the most sensitive critic of a show like Twin Peaks.  But give me a month to immerse myself in the secondary literature, and I'd be sensitive enough to teach it.  This isn't to say I don't sympathize with those who bemoan the teaching of works outside the media of their expertise.  I merely want to draw attention to the fact that we do something analogous all the time with nary a complaint.

Which brings me back to my original complaint: while some phenomenon which are media-specific, "politics" isn't one of them.  Unless you want to teach a course examining the unique contributions to political discourse of funny books as a medium, there's absolutely no need to segregate them from the literary gen pop.

Thank You, God, For the Silicon in My Motherboard, the Carbon Dioxide I Expel, the Paper in My Book, &c. &c. &c.

According to this article, "frozen smoke" or "Aerogel" is a "miracle material for the 21st century."  All well and good.  Until you read the comments.  "Edmund Burke" opines:

If it is produced in the laboratory, it is not a miracle.

"Markangelo," from "Torrance, Amerika," responds:

Why can't "GOD" make a miracle in the laboratory[?]

"CK" of "DFW, Texas" answers his question:

He did.

The Universe that provides the elements that the scientists manipulate to make these wonderful things.

Or, did you miss that?

"AGS," from Chicago, attempts to bring some common sense to the proceedings:

Please note that "miracle material" is not a theological term implying supernatural origin. It simply indicates unusually outstanding properties and applications that exceed the conventional by a wide mark.

He is ignored.  "Eric" of Atlanta merely repeats "CK"'s answer to "Markangelo"'s question:

He made the silica gel, the carbon dioxide, and the brain of the man that has the arrogance to think he can "make" anything.

All glory goes to God.  Humanity arrogantly credits itself for His work in the world.  To be honest, I hadn't noticed this mode of theistic complaint until it was brought to my attention yesterday.  More Twain, again from Letters from Earth:

If science exterminates a disease which has been working for God, it is God that gets the credit, and all the pulpits break into grateful advertising-raptures and call attention to how good he is! Yes, he has done it. Perhaps he has waited a thousand years before doing it. That is nothing; the pulpit says he was thinking about it all the time. When exasperated men rise up and sweep away an age-long tyranny and set a nation free, the first thing the delighted pulpit does is to advertise it as God's work, and invite the people to get down on their knees and pour out their thanks to him for it. And the pulpit says with admiring emotion, "Let tyrants understand that the Eye that never sleeps is upon them; and let them remember that the Lord our God will not always be patient, but will loose the whirlwinds of his wrath upon them in his appointed day."

They forget to mention that he is the slowest mover in the universe; that his Eye that never sleeps, might as well, since it takes it a century to see what any other eye would see in a week; that in all history there is not an instance where he thought of a noble deed first, but always thought of it just a little after somebody else had thought of it and done it. He arrives then, and annexes the dividend.

For "Eric," "CK," and their ilk, nothing is possible without God, therefore all credit ultimately belongs to him.  This is why home-runs lead to hosannahs:

If God had not blessed a particular athlete with the skills required to hit a home-run, he never would have been able to the swing the bat (whittled from lumber of His stock), smack the ball (composed of tightly wound rubber from trees He grew, wrapped in skin of His cows), have it fly threw the air (seventy-eight percent His Beloved Nitrogen), over the dirt (whose sundry particulates He crushed Himself) and the grass (which He so carefully tends), and into the stands (built by people whose skills He gave them, the architect her math, the construction worker his stamina, &c.). 

This is a profoundly religious perspective; so religious I'm tempted to say it's nothing more than a rhetorical ploy designed specifically to shame.  Another way to put this:

No one outside a monastery thinks like this, right?

How to Pay Attention One Stray Period and Thoughtless Typo at a Time

Seems the best way to force myself to pay attention to the text, the whole text, and nothing but the text is to copy-edit it.  It's a truth I rather wish weren't.

Today, I focused on the only online version of Mark Twain's Letters from Earth.  The link'll take you to it.  The next post'll be about it.

The hyper-vigilance required to produce clean-copy forced me to crawl the bowels of Twain's text.  Through tedium, I earned an understanding of it pleasure never produced.  That, however, will be the subject of the next post.  For now, I simply want to ask:

What do you do to focus your critical faculties on a text?  Read it aloud?  Re-read it in different languages?  Re-translate the original into English, or from English into another language you know?  Read it really, really hard?

If You Love Satan, Raise Your Hand

Re-reading Mark Twain's Letters from Earth (1909) provides a bracing reminder of why they turned me into an atheist all those many years ago.  The Letters are from Satan to his fellow angels, and they document humanity's idiotic attempt to understand the God who created them, i.e. The Bible.  Reading it now, two things immediately strike me:

1. The Letters presuppose the existence of God and His Heavenly Host, they simply insist that humans have got the story all wrong.
2. Satan may not be the most reliable of narrators.

These facts overlap invidiously in terms of audience: people who would consider Satan a reliable narrator are not people who presuppose the existence of God.  Short of members of the Church of Satan—not founded until sixty years after the Letters were written—it's not entirely clear who Twain imagines his audience to be within the fiction's framework.  Beyond it, his intent is obvious: he employs Satan as a narrator because it galls those he mocks and delights sympathetic atheists.

But obvious as it is, the text contravenes it at all turns.  For you to buy the legitimacy of Satan's critique, you have to accept that there's an actual Heaven to which the absurd creation of humanity compares.  Quick example:

I recall to your attention the extraordinary fact with which I began. To wit, that the human being, like the immortals, naturally places sexual intercourse far and away above all other joys—yet he has left it out of his heaven! The very thought of it excites him; opportunity sets him wild; in this state he will risk life, reputation, everything—even his queer heaven itself—to make good that opportunity and ride it to the overwhelming climax. From youth to middle age all men and all women prize copulation above all other pleasures combined, yet it is actually as I have said: it is not in their heaven; prayer takes its place.

They prize it thus highly; yet, like all their so-called "boons," it is a poor thing. At its very best and longest the act is brief beyond imagination—the imagination of an immortal, I mean. In the matter of repetition the man is limited—oh, quite beyond immortal conception. We who continue the act and its supremest ecstasies unbroken and without withdrawal for centuries, will never be able to understand or adequately pity the awful poverty of these people in that rich gift which, possessed as we possess it, makes all other possessions trivial and not worth the trouble of invoicing.

Satan knows from profound coitus, so silly humanity err twice-over: once, for the paltry quality of mundane intercourse; then again, for even leaving its meager attendant joys out of its conception of heaven.  The whole work is thus structured around Satan's knowledge of the True Heaven from which he's been temporarily expelled. 

But his knowledge of God's mind isn't even what he implicitly claims it to be.  Consider this bit from the opening narration:

"Yes," said Michael, "and He said He would establish Natural Law—the Law of God—throughout His dominions, and its authority should be supreme and inviolable."

"Also," said Gabriel, "He said He would by and by create animals, and place them, likewise, under the authority of that Law."

"Yes," said Satan, "I heard Him, but did not understand. What is animals, Gabriel?"

I open my chapter with this quotation, and I'm damn close to titling the beast "What is Animals?"  What better title and introductory bit for a chapter which by-and-large addresses Connecticut Yankee and What is Man?  But I digress.  The force of Satan's complaints seem logical in nature; but given Satan's imperfect knowledge, it's difficult to credit the premises from which he draws his sniggering conclusions.  How did Twain try to blindside his readers into assent?

By writing some of the most forceful prose of his career.  He's undone by his own talent here.  To wit:

On the third day, about noon, it was found that a fly and been left behind. The return voyage turned out to be long and difficult, on account of the lack of chart and compass, and because of the changed aspects of all coasts, the steadily rising water having submerged some of the lower landmarks and given to higher ones an unfamiliar look; but after sixteen days of earnest and faithful seeking, the fly was found at last, and received on board with hymns of praise and gratitude, the Family standing meanwhile uncovered, our of reverence for its divine origin. It was weary and worn, and had suffered somewhat from the weather, but was otherwise in good estate. Men and their families had died of hunger on barren mountain tops, but it had not lacked for food, the multitudinous corpses furnishing it in rank and rotten richness. Thus was the sacred bird providentially preserved.

Providentially. That is the word. For the fly had not been left behind by accident. No, the hand of Providence was in it. There are no accidents. All things that happen, happen for a purpose. They are foreseen from the beginning of time, they are ordained from the beginning of time. From the dawn of Creation the Lord had foreseen that Noah, being alarmed and confused by the invasion of the prodigious brevet fossils, would prematurely fly to sea unprovided with a certain invaluable disease. He would have all the other diseases, and could distribute them among the new races of men as they appeared in the world, but he would lack one of the very best—typhoid fever; a malady which, when the circumstances are especially favorable, is able to utterly wreck a patient without killing him; for it can restore him to his feet with a long life in him, and yet deaf, dumb, blind, crippled, and idiotic. The housefly is its main disseminator, and is more competent and more calamitously effective than all the other distributors of the dreaded scourge put together. And so, by foreordination from the beginning of time, this fly was left behind to seek out a typhoid corpse and feed upon its corruptions and gaum its legs with germs and transmit them to the re-peopled world for permanent business. From that one housefly, in the ages that have since elapsed, billions of sickbeds have been stocked, billions of wrecked bodies sent tottering about the earth, and billions of cemeteries recruited with the dead.

Many a passage in Letters from Earth stokes the fire of overblown pathos.  I don't dare list them all.  So let me leave you with a little more typical Twain:

A eunuch is a person whose candle has been put out.  By art.

The accompanying footnote is particularly withering.

 

That Feeling Than Which No Greater Can Be Conceived

The liquor store is emptier than usual.  Scott expects the typical level of casual banter with Pete (cousin of benevolent Mike), the store's new part-owner.

Pete: The usual for you tonight partner?

Scott: You know the drill: kill the liver, heal the mind.

Pete: Tough week?

Scott: You could say that.  Writing and writing and writing and every word of it crap. 

Pete: I've always wondered, what exactly is it you're always writing?

Scott: (his mind a blank)  It's a ...

Pete: You write it all the time and you can't remember?

Scott: Quiet!  I want to cherish this moment. 

Pete: What do you mean?

Scott: I can't remember.  I'm unencumbered.  Frame this moment: I'm free.

Pete: ... ?

S'long as I'm Speaking Comics ...

I stumbled across this the other night, and it's been featured in my nightmares ever since:

I'm not the only one who finds that deeply disturbing, am I?  The portrait's both compelling handsome and profoundly unsettling.  The scars to the cheeks remark equally of STD and the fell deaths of organized criminals.  Simply put, my dreams are haunted now not by words, but by him, with his face.

(I do have an item half-written about the literate dreaming of words, and will post it as soon as I've thought it through more.) 

Google Requests, I Deliver, Part I: "Comic Book Rape; or, What Would You Like Me to Title It?"

(Being the first in a series of reposts being reposted solely because Googlers likes them.  After "My Morning," this is the second most popular post on Acephalous.  Because Googlers want nothing more than to see some "comic book rape," "rogue rape," and, most distressingly, "comic rape."  Because when you get right down to it, is anything inherently funnier than rape?)

This post isn't a direct response to "Comic Book Guys Are Stupid," but it is a response of some kind.  Let me walk you through this one:

The year is 1988.  I'm a recent transplant to Louisiana and am thus a tad on the introverted side.  I spend endless hours reading comic books.  I may have liked some girls at this point, but I see no evidence of it in my fourth grade yearbook.  (My fifth grade yearbook is an entirely different, hearts-encircling-pictures story.) Point being, I distinctly remember not thinking about nor even knowing what rape was.  But I mow my lawn every day—my father having decided to instill the value of hard work by allowing me to earn $4 whenever I want by re-re-re-mowing what my work ethic transformed into a mangy lawn—and so have plenty of money to blow on X-books.  So I'm spending my afternoons blissfully unaware of anything which doesn't involve the X-Men or X-Factor or The New Mutants or, if I was desperate enough, Alpha Flight.

One late October afternoon I'm holding in my hands X-Men #236.  On the cover Wolverine and Rogue are hung by their on a scaffold, flanked on both sides by grinning fools in military garb.  (This picture disturbs me more now than it did then.)  What happened?  The X-Men sacrificed themselves to save the world, only in the end they were granted a reprieve: they would be dead to the world but would live undetected and undetectable in the Australian outback.  They were invisible to all forms of electronic recording devices.  They were able to move throughout the world invisible to all by the naked eye. (You want to privilege presence?  I'll privilege you some presence.)  Then a fascist state called "Genosha" clashes with the X-Men.  Shit hits fans.  Wolverine and Rogue are captured. 

For those unfamiliar with the comics or the films, Rogue has the power to absorb the memories and/or mutant powers of whomever she touches.  So naturally, she doesn't touch anyone for fear of knocking them unconscious and draining them of their "life energy."  (Stop sniggering.  I was in fourth grade.)  Her entire life Rogue has wanted nothing more than to touch someone without hurting them.  To be loved.  But she's come to accept the fact that this will never happen.  This self-sacrifice moves the fourth-grade mind.  I sympathized with her despite having no clue as to what she sacrificed or why.  I only know that it pained her and, being the good sympathetic identifier, felt her pain by proxy.  So without really knowing why I want Rogue to able to touch people. 

After she's captured by the Genoshans, she's stripped of her mutant powers.  Now she can touch people without having to worry about killing them.  For a moment I'm happy for her.  If only she can get out of this jam she'll be able to touch someone!  That's all she ever wanted!  Then I hit this panel:

And I'm confused.  That's Rogue huddled there in the corner.  She's traumatized.  Over the next few issues she'll disappear.  Another personality—and I mean that literally—will emerge.  Rogue will be so hurt by whatever "liberties [were] taken when she was being processed" that she'll cede control of her psyche to Carol Danvers. (Read the link.  It's too complicated to explain briefly.)  Needless to say, despite not knowing quite what those "liberties" were, countless data points began to constellate for me.  I saw "touching" and "forced" and "fascism" and "liberties" circle the pained figure in the panel above and I was confused.  Angry.  Upset.  I didn't know why, but I was.  My sympathies had identified with something they couldn't comprehend. 

When I was hit by that car and the pain plus the medication turned my mind to cottage cheese and the most "intellectual" material I could stomach were comics—i.e. last week until today—I stumbled into a realization: my feminist sympathies were first marshaled while reading a comic back in the Autumn of '88. 

The medium is far from perfect—as noted in the comments to the post linked above—but it is not wholly without value.  I'm not defending myself here so much as describing a stage in my development.  So please don't read this and think "Scott think spandex is progressive?"  I don't. 

Only once upon a time, perhaps, it inadvertently was.

The year is 1988.  I'm a recent transplant to Louisiana and am thus a tad on the introverted side.  I spend endless hours reading comic books.  I may have liked some girls at this point, but I see no evidence of it in my fourth grade yearbook.  (My fifth grade yearbook is an entirely different, hearts-encircling-pictures story.) Point being, I distinctly remember not thinking about nor even knowing what rape was.  But I mow my lawn every day—my father having decided to instill the value of hard work by allowing me to earn $4 whenever I want by re-re-re-mowing what my work ethic transformed into a mangy lawn—and so have plenty of money to blow on X-books.  So I'm spending my afternoons blissfully unaware of anything which doesn't involve the X-Men or X-Factor or The New Mutants or, if I was desperate enough, Alpha Flight.

One late October afternoon I'm holding in my hands X-Men #236.  On the cover Wolverine and Rogue are hung by their on a scaffold, flanked on both sides by grinning fools in military garb.  (This picture disturbs me more now than it did then.)  What happened?  The X-Men sacrificed themselves to save the world, only in the end they were granted a reprieve: they would be dead to the world but would live undetected and undetectable in the Australian outback.  They were invisible to all forms of electronic recording devices.  They were able to move throughout the world invisible to all by the naked eye. (You want to privilege presence?  I'll privilege you some presence.)  Then a fascist state called "Genosha" clashes with the X-Men.  Shit hits fans.  Wolverine and Rogue are captured. 

For those unfamiliar with the comics or the films, Rogue has the power to absorb the memories and/or mutant powers of whomever she touches.  So naturally, she doesn't touch anyone for fear of knocking them unconscious and draining them of their "life energy."  (Stop sniggering.  I was in fourth grade.)  Her entire life Rogue has wanted nothing more than to touch someone without hurting them.  To be loved.  But she's come to accept the fact that this will never happen.  This self-sacrifice moves the fourth-grade mind.  I sympathized with her despite having no clue as to what she sacrificed or why.  I only know that it pained her and, being the good sympathetic identifier, felt her pain by proxy.  So without really knowing why I want Rogue to able to touch people. 

After she's captured by the Genoshans, she's stripped of her mutant powers.  Now she can touch people without having to worry about killing them.  For a moment I'm happy for her.  If only she can get out of this jam she'll be able to touch someone!  That's all she ever wanted!  Then I hit this panel:

And I'm confused.  That's Rogue huddled there in the corner.  She's traumatized.  Over the next few issues she'll disappear.  Another personality—and I mean that literally—will emerge.  Rogue will be so hurt by whatever "liberties [were] taken when she was being processed" that she'll cede control of her psyche to Carol Danvers. (Read the link.  It's too complicated to explain briefly.)  Needless to say, despite not knowing quite what those "liberties" were, countless data points began to constellate for me.  I saw "touching" and "forced" and "fascism" and "liberties" circle the pained figure in the panel above and I was confused.  Angry.  Upset.  I didn't know why, but I was.  My sympathies had identified with something they couldn't comprehend. 

When I was hit by that car and the pain plus the medication turned my mind to cottage cheese and the most "intellectual" material I could stomach were comics—i.e. last week until today—I stumbled into a realization: my feminist sympathies were first marshaled while reading a comic back in the Autumn of '88. 

The medium is far from perfect—as noted in the comments to the post linked above—but it is not wholly without value.  I'm not defending myself here so much as describing a stage in my development.  So please don't read this and think "Scott think spandex is progressive?"  I don't. 

Only once upon a time, perhaps, it inadvertently was.