Acephalous

Demonstrations of Attentive Nostalgia: Thomas Pynchon's Liner Notes to Lotion's Nobody's Cool (and a Gift)

Once upon a time Thomas Pynchon was my world.  (Need I remind you of my disgraceful Honors Thesis?)  This was about the same time music meant something to me—surely you remember?  Before you bored of life and its trappings?  Back when everything radiated raw, brittle vitality? 

(Of course you remember.  You were young once too.)

So you can imagine my elation when I discovered Pynchon had penned liner notes for some band I'd never heard of.  Music and Pynchon?  What could be better? 

Nothing. 

Nothing could have been better. 

So I spent the better part of two months tracking down Lotion's Nobody's Cool.  (This was before the Internet was the Internet we know and love.  The only available options were CDNOW and a plane ticket to someplace with a decent record store.)  I finally landed a copy through a book distributor I'd befriended who lived in New York but was passing through Baton Rouge on his way to a family wedding in Bunkie.  This septuagenarian ventured into some independent shop in the Village for me. 

Only now do I understand his sacrifice.

Point being, eventually I landed a copy of Nobody's Cool and, in my unbiased view, it was the best album ever.   I listened to nothing but it for months and months and then I fell for this girl hard. 

You know the rest of the story.  I lent her the album in a sad attempt to impress. 

She declined my bait. 

I never saw the album again.

In the years since, I've longed to hear it again.  Was it everything I remember it to be?  (Surely not.)  Was I suckered into love by Pynchon's imprimatur?  (Most certainly.)  Is the thing any good? 

I didn't know ... until my best friend from high school visited a few weeks back.  Said he had a surprise for me. 

Can you guess what it was? 

Of course you can.  (My readers are no fools.)  (Although they waste too much time here to be taken too seriously.)  What does it sound like?

Judge for yourself.

I'll refrain from commenting on the album, if only because you'll find Pynchon's comments below the fold ... but if "Dear Sir" or "The New Timmy" seem draped in '90s alternative cliché, try listening to "Juggernaut" or the lyrics to "Sandra."  I'm making no grand claims about the quality of the album other than to say I love it ...

... but I'm all attentive and nostalgic and without fail would.

I Have Production Values: "Is an 'Academic Blog' an Oxymoron?"

I'm reluctant to link to this because I'd rather not be associated with what this fool said ... but I feel I have no choice.  Before you ask: I guestimate readership by adding unique page views to Feedburner subscribers, which seems to me the best way to calculate how many people read your blog daily.  (But I've been wrong before.) 

There may also be some information I didn't share with the class when I first posted some items ... but what can I say?  The truth never appears online, no matter how much we pray Trent Lott left a paper trail.  So without further ado, here's what I said.  (Please don't watch it, as I sound as foolish as I look.) 

Part one:

Part two:

The Q & A can be found here and here.  Be warned: I talk of Casper and the ensuing fiasco, which you'll find dull and should skip.

(Thanks to Liz Losh, without whose sense of professional responsibility I'd still have my dignity.)

Perceived Lack vs. Meaningful Absence; or, Springsteen in the Classroom

The question vexes me: "What does something not in a text mean to a text?"

Because most of my experience teaching literature focused on teaching race in courses with a historical mandate—think from Sophocles to Faulkner—I've come to consider the act of teaching literature as a prolonged negotiation with unsatisfactory answers to that question.  For example:

The perceived lack of African-Americans in Greek drama is an artifact of my course design; ergo the absence of African-Americans in Greek drama is not meaningful.  (I can discuss the process of "othering" or equally vague abstractions, but the racial dynamic at the heart of American literature differs fundamentally from the abstractions intended to explain it.)  The students balk at my distinction: 

"But there are no black people in Sophocles, so there's an absence there." 

"There are also no Martians in Sophocles, so there's an absence there too," I respond. 

At this point it almost sinks in: textual absences differ from perceived lacks inasmuch as they're structural elements of the text themselves.  The perceived lack of African-Americans in Sophocles is the product of the structure of my course, not the text itself.  The absence isn't meaningful.  (Unless you care to indict me for poor course design.) 

Students try to wrap their head around this distinction, but they invariably fail.  The sloppy pedagogy of my peers is partly to blame for this failure: demonstrating the importance of the silenced voices of women, minorities, and homosexuals to sheltered undergraduates often demands the subtlety of a brickbat: 

"But no one here is gay!" 

"Then why do these guys go to such great lengths to establish their heterosexual masculinity?" 

"But they're not gay!"

The burden of instilling nuance often falls on my shoulders and, more often than not, debilitates me.  Long and hard have I sought to find an example of a text which screams its throat raw for the thing not in it.  I may have found my answer. 

It will date me, this I know.

The children, they will laugh ... but they'll get it.  They'll be able to tell a meaningful absence from a perceived lack.  How?

First, they'll listen to Bruce Springsteen's "Thunder Road" (.mp3), from Born to Run, released on August 25, 1975.  (Which, for the record, was a year before I was born.  I'm old, but not that old.)  Then I'll have them listen to "Wings for Wheels" (.mp3), from a February 5, 1975 performance.   

The pedagogical usefulness of the comparison can't be underestimated.  The most obvious (some would say iconic) image from the album version is noticeably absent from the earlier performance.  The song demands the unifying image the album version provides: cars, streets, freedom, escape, loneliness, loudness, bravado, &c.  All the themes are present in the live performance, and they all point toward ... something not there until the album version. 

If they can forgive me the music, I think they'll grab the distinction intuitively.  Or am I merely a wrongheaded fanboy?

The New York Times' 100 Notable Books Awful Blurbs of the Year

Like Jill, I'm a fan of The New York Times' list of "100 Notable Books of the Year."  (I even find the clumsy phrasing of its title charming.)  I'm only a fan because it reminds of a number of books I'd planned to read, but for whatever reason didn't.  Thing is, were I to base my wish list on the blurbs provided by The Times, I wouldn't have planned to read any of them.  Consider this:

 WINTERTON BLUE. By Trezza Azzopardi. (Grove, $24.) An unhappy young woman meets an even unhappier drifter.

Two unhappy people meet for  273 pages?  Quite a meeting that must've been:

An Unhappy Woman: Hullo.

An Even Unhappier Drifter: Hullo.

An Unhappy Woman: Nice to meet you.  I am an unhappy woman.

An Even Unhappier Drifter: Nice to meet you too.  I am an even unhappier drifter.

An Unhappy Woman: How do you know you're unhappier?

An Even Unhappier Drifter: Weren't you listening?

An Unhappy Woman: ...

An Even Unhappier Drifter: I am An Even Unhappier Drifter.

Of course I know the book's better than that, but the blurb does it a disservice.  In truth, every blurb on the list does its book a disservice.  Not a one doesn't surrender to the effusive.  (I count eight "powerful" somethings alone.)  The compression blurbs require transform what may be decent into drab reckonings of white privilege:

MY NAME IS EXOTIC TO YOU.  By Exotic To You.  (Smith, Johnson, White and Smith, $25)  This is a powerful book about a powerful brown person who lives a powerful life in America.

Not really.  But ...

THE BRIEF WONDROUS LIFE OF OSCAR WAO. By Junot Díaz. (Riverhead, $24.95.) A nerdy Dominican-American yearns to write and fall in love.

THE RELUCTANT FUNDAMENTALIST. By Mohsin Hamid. (Harcourt, $22.) Hamid’s chilling second novel is narrated by a Pakistani who tells his life story to an unnamed American after the attacks of 9/11.

Because I'm Hormonal, More "Classic" Acephalous: Who's Important Enough to Write in Your Books ...

(I've written or revised fifteen posts the past two days but lack the nerve to post them.  No doubt I'm developing a complex which will end in utter silence.  But what else can I do?  Adam ain't posted either lately [no doubt for better reason].  I could be introspective about this sudden involuntary reticence, but who knows what I'd find in the heart of fear.  [Certainly nothing worth blogging.]  I'm sure I'll recover soon enough from whatever this is ... unless this is THE END.  You know, THE MOMENT when you can no longer speak for sake of meaning.  But I don't think I'm on the point of silencing myself.  [Yet.]  This probably has more to do with my being hormonal because I've been without levothyroxine for two weeks now [THANKS THIEVING LIBRARY!] and that's three times TMI and I'm going to shut it now.  Enjoy the rewind and pray for rain.)

My copy of Hardt and Negri's Empire has an interesting history.  It begins in 2000, the year of its initial publication, when Jim Ziegler (since tenure-tracked somewhere) and I were discussing it in the "TA lounge," a.k.a. the round table in front of the graduate student mailboxes ... which the faculty use as a short-cut between the main English department office and the primary graduate seminar room.  (And why shouldn't they?  It's their department.)  So Jim and I are idly chatting about Empire when Julia Lupton walks up, pauses, greets us, says something to Jim (I'm deaf, remember?) and then hurries off.  (Julia's an important person around UCI—a model academic whose standards I fail daily to live up to—she's always hurrying somewhere, and with good reason.)  Point being:

Julia and Jim exchange words both assumed I could hear.  I couldn't, but as I often do in such situations, I nodded my head and pretended to hear all.  So when Jim's email arrived later that afternoon asking me what times worked best for me, I had no clue what he was talking about.  I related my schedule.  "Perfect," he responded.  "I'll get right on it."

"Get right on it?" I thought to myself.  "Get right on what?"

Turns out everyone rightly pegged Jim as (but mistook me for) the resident Hardt & Negri expert, and that I was now the co-coordinator of the faculty-dominated Empire reading group.  You heard me correctly: a first year, in his second quarter, was assumed expert enough in the Hardt & Negri corpus to lead a faculty-dominated reading group.  (In retrospect I realize the faith Julia placed in Jim was well-founded, and her willingness to defer to a graduate student on the topic a sign that she practiced the egalitarianism she preached.  But I digress.)  So I participated in this reading group with Jim, Julia and a host of imposing faculty members like Mark Poster and Andrzej Warminski.  One of the highlights of my first year, I tell you.

Time passes.

The year is 2005.  It is Spring Quarter.  I haven't thought about Empire or been all that theoretically inclined for years.  I still own the book, mind you, and it still overbrims with my original marginalia.  I'm invested in every page.  Manic glossing.  Attack this point here, cheer-lead that point there. 

The phone rings. 

"Hello?" I say, assuming the voice at the other end belongs to a machine which desires nothing more than to clean my carpet, lower my mortgage rates or help me refinance my loans.

"Yes, I'm told you have Empire," the voice says. 

"What?  I  have empire?"

"Empire, Empire, Hardt, Negri, Empire."

"The book?"

"Can I borrow it?  Wait, hold on, you talk to him."

On the line now is someone who knew I helped organize the Empire reading group.  He had tried to contact Jim, but Jim had since fled Irvine for fields criss-crossed by tracks of tenure.  So he went to the next name anyone knew.  Mine. 

"Hi Scott.  Spivak needs a copy of a Empire for her class next week and she left hers at home.  Can she borrow yours?"

"Sure.  Why not."

Later that day, my copy of Empire is hand-delivered to Spivak.

Time passes.

The quarter ends.  I check my mailbox after turning in my grades, and there is my copy of Empire. No note.  No nothing.  Just the book in the box.  I put it in my bag and walk home.  When I take it out of my bag, something falls out of it. 

A postcard.  The second strangest thing I've ever found in a book.  Written on it is the following:

I need to excuse myself from auditing your class, as I will need to miss tomorrow's class.  Which is too much to miss in a four-seek seminar. (I will hopefully catch up next Spring if you're back.)  I will, however, attend your lecture the final Friday.

No name.  Signed only "With warm thought."  I think that a strange thing to leave in a book you knew would be returned to someone else.  I wonder if there's anything else in the book, perhaps something more important, something she'd like returned.  Flipping through the pages, I notice unfamiliar handwriting.  Check marks.  Exclamation points. Things I hadn't written.  I start to read this new marginalia.  Next to a note of mine on 181 which reads "empire resides in a world constantly calls it into existence" I find a giant checkmark.  Next to the more cryptic "Hobbes: sovereignty, transcendence, representation" on 84 appears "What?!?" 

My marginalia has been judged.  By Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.  And been found wanting.  I flip through the book and find a running dialogue in the margins.  She approves of some of comments; is baffled by others; and on occasion scribbles corrections.  I realize that my copy of Empire has been glossed.  Not merely glossed, but glossed twice over, first by myself, then by Spivak.  I wonder whether she responds to Hardt and Negri's texts or my comments. 

I wonder what she said in the seminars.  I try to reconstruct what she said about Empire in the public lectures which I had attended and which her anonymous correspondent said he would.  I wonder if he did.  I wonder all of this and realize that I was supposed to finish the two-part series on Foucault and not prattle on and on and on about the books I would use to do so. 

Acephalous's Index III

Number of times Japanese schoolgirls have been featured on Acephalous: 0
Number of times Firefox's spell-checker underlines the word "acephalous" when members of the Kaufman household type it: ∞
Dinginess of the kitchen in said household in units of disgusting: 7,671
Time (in hours) the male of the household requires to clean it: 0.19
Time (in days) before he will do so: 219
Percent of sarcasm in previous item: 78.6
Ratio of promises to clean the kitchen to actual cleanings: 9:1
Guilt (in buckets) the above ratio produces: 17
Number of Asian men currently sitting in the middle of the parking lot drinking beer on plastic lawn chairs: 2
Ratio of affected to actual double-takes Kaufman gave them: 5 to 1
Percent of people in the Kaufman household who spent the past week doing nothing but reading quality Scottish detective novels and watching three seasons of The Wire: 50
Weariness (in soul) attendant the same week: 1,910,382
Number of times Kaufman has mistakenly typed "The Wife" instead of "The Wire": 4
Percent of psychoanalytic critics who would think that very, very significant: 100
Percent who would be correct: 31
Number of Acephalous readers who have purchased Kaufman the fourth season of The Wire: 0
Percent who should if they know what's good for his soul: 100
Percent who should if they know what's good for his career: 0
Number of times Kaufman's danced this dance before: Once or Twice
How much funnier (in joules) those previous attempts were: 1 Yottajoule

According to the US Census Bureau ...

... I possess the most hurtful and terroristic name in American society:

Is it any wonder I haven't posted much of late? 

Statuses

Scott Eric Kaufman

Mean Cat: Still Mean

Blog : Unupdated

Classes : Finished

Dissertation : Unwritten

University of California Irvine : Future Alum

Irvine : Current Home

Orange County : On Fire (Still)

California : Full of Hippies

The United States : Arrogant (Beyond Words)

The World : In Peril

The Universe: Expanding

Sometimes Even the Paranoid ...

Scott opens his car door, adjusts the seat and sits down.  He puts the key in the ignition and Ramona (the car) wheezes to life.  He hears the generic jazz of a NPR segue fading out.

Announcer:  We're here talking to Scott Kaufman ...

Scott:  (looks around)  Who we are?

Announcer: ... about the most important issue affecting student-athletes today ...

Scott:  (seriously freaked)  Who we are what?

Announcer: ... the legacy of Title IX on the thirty-fifth anniversary of its passing.  Thanks for talking to us, Mr. Kaufman ...

Scott: (clearly delusional)  You're welcome?

Announcer:  So how has Title IX changed the way colleges recruit your students ...

Scott: (clinically lost)  I don't have students.

Other Scott:  Our ability to place female student-athletes in top programs ...

(Note: Scott Kaufman—that Scott Kaufman—is the athletic director at Princeton High School.  But Scott Kaufman—this Scott Kaufman—thought the episode too weird for words.)

Your Daily Irony*

My comments on my article on Inside Higher Ed didn't muster past moderation.  I can only assume my vicious indictments of my own position—I tore myself a few new ones and then some—are responsible for this stolid display of commonsense.  But I wish my responses to Jason, A.G., Drew and Jonathan had hit daylight, as I didn't save them and can't remember what I'd written.  I suppose I could write something else entirely ...

*This implies I do this daily.  I don't.  My life is rather unironic. 

The Ur-Troll

The man you're about meet is named Oliver Crangle.  Mr. Crangle is a dealer in petulance and poison.  He's arbitrarily chosen four o'clock as his personal Götterdämmerung, and we are about to watch the metamorphosis of a twisted fanatic, poisoned by the gangrene of prejudice, to the status of someone who wrongly considers himself an avenging angel, upright and omniscient, dedicated and fearsome, despite being a twisted fanatic, poisoned by the gangrene of prejudice.  Whatever your clocks say, it's four o'clock—and wherever you are, it happens to be The Twilight Zone.

Crangle picks up the Internet and begins dialing an email.

School superintendent?  This call is about a teacher in your employ.  His name is ... William J. Farwell.  The man is morally objectionable.  What?  Never mind who this is.  I happen to be giving you facts, and these facts are what are at issue.  You best check on him.  Immediately.

The Cat Post

(Because I am both a blogger and an academic, it is incumbent upon me to write a cat post.  This will be that post.)

In the Spring of 1996, I moved out of my parents' house and into an apartment closer to campus.  My apartment, unlike my bedroom, had many rooms: a living room, a bathroom, a kitchen and a bedroom.  They were all mine and empty and quiet.  The emptiness I could fight: I quickly populated every available surface with books.  The quiet was another story.  I could make noise, but the noise would be either too meaningful (music) or not meaningful enough (automated pot-banging).  What I needed was the pleasant hum of another consciousness, the uncertainty provided by something acting on its own accord.  I had never owned a cat before and decided I needed one.

I drove to the East Baton Rouge Parish Animal Control Center and looked at the kittens.  Most played in cages under their mother's watchful eye.  One litter, exceptionally small and shockingly pink, slept unsupervised.  They had been orphaned, the caretaker told me, and were only two weeks old.  They would require more care than a normal kitten. 

I had told myself on the drive over, "I will not choose the kitten: I will let the kitten choose me."  I didn't know quite what that meant until one of the orphaned kittens stumbled toward me, eyes half-open, and mewed. 

I had been chosen. 

The caretaker asked whether I had ever cared for a kitten before.  I told her I had not.  She struggled to convince me to adopt a more conventional kitten.  I wouldn't budge.  I had been chosen, I told her.  I had no choice.  She went to fetch the paperwork while I played with my new kitten.  When she returned she asked me for the kitten's name.  I told her I didn't know it. 

"What I meant was, what are you going to name her?" 

I told her I didn't know. 

"Well, I have to write something down."

I thought about it.  I was filling out a form, not performing a christening, so the name would only be a placeholder.  I had been reading Thomas Pynchon's V. and so I said, "Her name is Rachel."

"You're naming your cat 'Rachel'?"

"For now," I said and thought I meant. 

The name stuck. 

The kitten was Rachel. 

But the caretaker had been right about how difficult it would be to raise a two-week old kitten: nipples were sterilized with great patience; backsides were massaged with warm rags; tongues were impersonated with aplomb.  Rachel formed an unnatural (but expected) attachment to me and only me.  Kittens separated from their mothers this early form unusually strong attachments to their surrogate mothers.  They are needy and possessive.  Rachel is needy and possessive.  My lap is a Rachel-perch.  My feet are Rachel-warmers. 

My wife is an interloper. 

She must be eliminated.  She must be pounced upon from shelves unseen and cornered in the bedroom.  She must be scratched until she freely bleeds and howled at in the kitchen.

Rachel is a mean cat.  She is so mean that when she's nice we take a picture.  But she is my mean cat and I shudder at the thought that I might spend a day writing or a night reading without a Rachel-ball threatening to suffocate me.

So the past two days have been difficult. 

She stopped eating. 

She stopped stalking. 

She stopped demanding my lap. 

My wife could touch her. 

Something was wrong. 

Two trips to the vet and untold sums of money-I-don't-have later and we still don't know what was wrong.  The past tense is important.  The blood work was negative.  The X-rays revealed nothing more than an overfull bladder. 

But the pain medication and appetite stimulant worked.  Rachel is ravenous.  She wants food and food and more food.  She is no longer quiescent.  She wants to attack my wife.  She is mean again and that means she feels better. 

And I'm more certain than ever that I can never be a parent.  I'm not the Vulcan I was once declared to be.  I'm an emotional disasterpiece when those I love suffer.  (Inveterate pessimism does not play well with circumstance.)

But my mean cat is hungry and I am happy and this has been The Cat Post.

I'm Mysterious

There was a post here.  Now there isn't.  What can I say? 

I'm mysterious.

Milestones, Milestones, Milestones, Part I

The next week will witness Acephalous reach two milestones: my 1,500th post and my 500,000th visitor. 

But one milestone's already been achieved: namely, my 10,000th comment.  To celebrate my 10,000th comment, I'm reprinting my first.  It was written by "Some Gay Guy" and reads thus:

Barrett argues that Rodman intrigues the public because he draws attention to himself "not only on the basketball court but at the site of sexual energy itself with its perilous crush of racial, gendered, domestic, and commercial prohibitions and imperatives."

Since when is Newport Beach a "site of sexual energy"?

Incidentally, let me say as a fag that I do indeed feel guilty every time I have casual fag sex. Like all men, I am a rutting, filthy swine, mired in what I know to be moral squalor and yet pathetically unable to control my vile appetites, and I demand acknowledgment as such!

Do you think that's publishable? I'm feeling some heat from my advisor ...

My second comment's also worth a read. 

Vote for the Boring Literary Grad Student Diarist!

Chuck—resident scribe at From My Position ... On the way!—characterizes Acephalous thus:

Everyday me, life as it happens...  

My husband and I went on our coffee date this morning about 6:00 a.m. We came home and we both did a little blogging and Mike did some chatting while I did some laundry and sat down with my cookbooks. I came up with a menu that would last us until nearly the end of the month (minus the holiday trimmings). I then sorted through our pantry and fridge to see what was there and started writing out our grocery list. For the first time ever, I took the grocery list and sorted it by aisle ...

I couldn't find the post he quoted—a polite competitor would've included a link—nor do I remember a 6 a.m. coffee date with a man named Mike (or doing his laundry) (or reading his cookbooks) (or coming up with menus) (or sorting through my pantry), but I like this idea I had about sorting the grocery list by aisle.  Do you know how many calories I waste traipsing back to aisles I've already covered?  The last time I went to the supermarket, I double-backed to the cereal aisle no less than fifteen times.  That's almost 10,000 calories I could've used folding Mike's laundry!

(Why put the coffee with the cereal?  Just because they're both breakfast foods?  Because they're not.  People drink coffee all day.  I'm drinking coffee right now.  I ground the beans myself this morning.  They say there's no coffee like freshly ground coffee, and let me tell you: they are correct.  This is the best cup of coffee I've had since yesterday afternoon, when I snuck a little Kona into my normal blend.  Kona's been my favorite coffee for a long time because it reminds me of Hawaii.  Not that I've been to Hawaii, but I've always dreamed of going, and I imagine when I get there it will smell like Kona.  So despite the chill that settled over Southern California yesterday, I drank coffee that reminds me of what I've long thought Hawaii will smell like.  It was a wonderful day.) 

I'm glad I had the idea to sort the grocery list by aisle.  I only wish I'd remembered having that idea, that way I wouldn't have wasted all the calories I've wasted since I forgot I had it.  But enough about me.  Chuck asked:

Wait, I am in the running with this? Am I this dull?

The answer to the first question should be self-evident.  As to the second: does it get any more exciting than this?  I'm forced to conclude, Chuck, that you are that dull.

Then there's this "Jack's Shack" Jew, who complains about how little smack talk is flying.  This Jew's about as Jewish as they come.  His blog roll consists entirely of Jew blogs: Israel this, Rabbi that, What-to-do-with-the-Blood-of-Christian-Children the other.  (Two of the Jew's links consist solely of the name "Miriam"!)  He writes exclusively about the Jews and what is good for them.  The blog oozes Jew.  Who would want to vote for the Jew?  Don't vote Jew. 

Vote for me instead.  (Remember!  You!  Can!  Vote!  Once!  A!  Day!) 

I know I'll never catch the hippie, but I can at least overtake Chuck.

The Munch Paradox

Frequent commenter Todd. and I spent Saturday afternoon watching [redacted for Todd.'s peace of mind].  The conversation turned to David Simon's Homicide: Life on the Streets, then to the storied history one of Baltimore's (fictional) finest: John Munch. 

Munch, played by comedian Richard Belzer, will make television history when he appears on an episode of Simon's current show, The Wire, as it will mark the tenth separate program in which he has appeared as a character.  In addition to being a principle on Homicide and Law & Order: SVU, Munch has appeared on:

• Law & Order
• Law & Order: Trial by Jury
• The Simpsons
• Arrested Development
• The Beat
• The X-Files
• Sesame Street

What is it about Munch that people find so compelling?  The conspiracy theories?  The serial monogamy?  The counter-culture radical turned cop?  Whatever the reason, the ubiquity of Munch obscures an important fact: namely, that Simon's Homicide is an adaptation of his book of a similar name and that he based Munch on an actual murder police named Jay Landsman.  I've taught Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets before, so I'm familiar with Landsman,

of the sidelong smile and pockmarked face, who tells the mothers of wanted men that all the commotion is nothing to be upset about, just a routine murder warrant.  Landsman, who leaves empty liquor bottles in the other sergeants' desks and never fails to turn out the men's room light when a ranking officer is indisposed.  Landsman, who rides a headquarters elevator the police commissioner and leaves complaining that some sonofabitch stole his wallet.  Jay Landsman, who as a Southwestern patrolman parked his radio car at Edmondson and Hilton, then used a Quaker Oatmeal box covered in aluminum fol as a radar gun.

The pockmarked face and sneering at authority is vintage Munch.  The drinking and fake radar guns?  Reminds me more of this detective from The Wire.  His name? 

Jay Landsman.  He looks like this:

Who looks nothing like this:

And even less like this:

Who is that?  Why, that would be a retired Baltimore murder police by the name of Jay Landsman, playing a character named Dennis Mello on The Wire.  The mind boggles.  For those of you keeping score, it's possible that an upcoming episode of The Wire might now incorporate:

• John Munch, a character inspired by Jay Landsman
• Jay Landsman, a second character inspired by Jay Landsman
• the real Jay Landsman

I should be able to draw some sort of conclusion from this, but honestly, the situation seems unprecedented.  Have there ever been two fictionalized versions of the same guy and the guy himself running around the same television show?  There must be a meta-meta-meta-point to be drawn from this—something more sophisticated than "David Simon, he loves him some Landsman"—but I'm at a loss for what it might be.

The Joy of Things Half-Heard (in Hindi); or, Benny Lava's Loony Buns

(If you'd rather skip the context, the hilarious video can be found below the fold.)

A significant drawback of being deaf is the concentration required to carry on a conversation.  (There are others.)  Since I only pick up have a word here and half a word there, I must rely on my preternatural ability to reconstruct whole words from half-heard phonemes.  I acquired this skill through long hours, hard work, and the normal course of cognitive development: all I'd ever heard are half-words, so my brain developed to hear half-words.  So how would I know that conversing requires more concentrating for me than the hearing world?  Simple:

When I'm tired, stressed, or otherwise not paying close enough attention, words break down into their constitute phonemes.  (Poetry often has the same effect.)  These phonemes typically migrate: the first phoneme of one word because the final of another and vice versa.  Consider a previous example:

One day I went to meet with my advisor.  He inquired into the state of my "current tree search."  I stared, frozen and mute, wondering how he'd learned of my plans to purchase a potted lemon tree for the porch. 

"I'm thinking about lemons," I blundered.  Now it was his turn to stare, bewildered by my admission that I'd been considering lemons a valid object of literary study.  He asked why I'd been thinking about lemons, to which I sensibly replied "because there's not much room on the porch." 

"For your work?"

"What?"

"What?"

"What are you talking about?"

"What are you talking about?"

"Planting a lemon tree on the back porch."

"Why would I care about that?"

"Then why did you ask?"

"Then why did I ask what?"

"About my current ..." 

I trailed off exactly when my mouth, prepping to repeat the absurdity, clued my brain in to the nature of the misunderstanding.

Sometimes, as with the lemon tree, these migrations fold neatly into the English language.  Note how my brain tried to find a suitable context for my mistake: I had been planning on purchasing a tree for the porch, so my brain thrust my advisor's statement into that context.  But more often than not, I'm thrust back into language with a shock of incomprehension:

"Did you just say—you didn't just say—did you?  What?"

Most of the time, I don't have a plausible context ready-to-hand, so my confusion results in absurd, context-less statements.  I hear words, but they're not arranged into sentences.  Or I hear sentences, but the sentences make no sense.  I'm hard-pressed to provide examples of what this experience is like ... or was before I learned about Benny Lava's Loony Buns. 

The video below the fold consists of a Bollywood musical number sung in Hindi but transliterated into English.  The author of the subtitles breaks the Hindi down into phonemes then reconstructs those phonemes as English words.  The result?  The closest approximation to the shock of incomprehension so common among the tired half-deaf:

I spend most of my weekends in the desert doing the things people do in the desert like communing with Nature.  I do this all the time.  Nature and I are practically Communists.  (We're that close.) 

When I'm in the desert I remember being Communists in the desert before: like this one time when I was thirsty and I needed water and saw this cactus and I ate it.  Then there was the time I was thirsty but didn't see a cactus and was thirsty for a long time.  I remember that time fondly.

I walked up a trail and had a vision.  It was moving and I was moved and then I moved along.  I took my thirst with me.  There was a rabbit on the path ahead that didn't look thirsty.  It was a fine rabbit.  I followed it.  Two hours later I saw it commune with other rabbits and a man who looked suspiciously like Michael Bérubé.  I asked this man for water and he brandished a hockey stick and said:

"What about ice?"

I said: "Ice would be fine."

"Because I play hockey on ice with rabbits who aren't thirsty."

I said: "I envy those rabbits."

The man who looked like Bérubé shot me a glance like Ira Glass and I was scared of rabbits and ran away thirsty.  The hair on the back of my neck stood up as I ran down the path willy-nilly and very thirsty and then I tripped and fell down a deep magnificent hole. 

As I plunged to certain death I admired my hole's depth and thought "What a wonderful bottom to splat on!"  I fell and fell and then when I felt I could fall no more I noticed I wasn't falling.  The rock I'd tripped over had tripped too and landed where my head fell. 

My ears were ringing and I could see on my laptop that I could not be The Best 2501-3000 this year.  It was then that I realized that Chris Clarke should win and that votes for me were taking away from his commanding lead.  I looked in the mirror and saw my Inner Nader and pledged something importantly Communist for the common good of the desert and the rabbits and my thirst.

(Note: If this makes no sense to you read this and this.)

How to Write a Dissertation, Part MCMXCVI

Option #1:

Spend weeks skimming seventeen volumes of Mark Twain's letters for references to Darwin, Lamarck, evolution or social development.  Collect all relevant references into a single file.  Collate according to potential usefulness.  Accidentally delete one or twenty of them.  Copy them again.  Feel confusion.  Know that you had that one reference.  Remember that it was right there.  Right there. 

Skim letters again for the phrase "unfortunate development."  Picture where you were and what it was like when you wrote it down.  Think: "It was overcast that day ... which was when I looked at Volume IV!"  Skim Volume IV. 

Fail. 

Cry. 

Leave library.

Drink.

Option #2:

Put off starting Twain chapter for a month.  Feel pure bliss when the Mark Twain Project launched this week.  Search Mark Twain's letters for "Darwin," "Lamarck," "evolution" and "social development."  Save relevant letters to "My Citations."  Feel "Happiness!"

Drink.

Option J:

Not an option.

Vote Acephalous for Best 2501-3000

I want pointless awards.  You want me to win them.  Vote for me. 

My campaign lacks a slogan.  I have one, actually, but it needs improving:

A vote for me is like a kiss from your mother.  (And you like that, don't you?)

Did I say "improving"?  I meant "replacing."  Help would be appreciated.