Acephalous

More for voyeurs: On panel transitions and narrative speed

Just like the title says.  And before anyone asks, it should be obvious that this is not the only thing I'll be doing in class on Thursday.  It's the pump I'm using to prime a more interesting (and necessary) discussion about the rhetorical triangle—which, given how much fun I'm having image-manipulating right now, might just look like this:

 

Because there is ethos and then there is ethos.  But enough assorted silliness from me today.  I have serious papers about Ok, Big-Tooth, Afraid-of-the-Dark and Earnest Everhard to revise. 

I give you permission to indulge in your basest voyeuristic urges...

. . . but only if you promise not to comment on my shiny new course blog.  I'm experimenting this quarter with placing all my lesson plans online before I teach and requiring my students comment on them the night before class.  My thinking is that all my classes will traffic in reinforcement instead of introduction.  This idea could be genius and lead to more rigorous and intellectually stimulating classroom discussions . . . or it could make for painful dull classes in which I reiterate what they've already read.  I'll keep you posted. 

Standards? Who needs them? Or, Thomas Urquhart & That Which Is Infinitely Superior to Cricket.

Teaching composition exclusively leads to (1) a greater appreciation for the pedestrian complexity of correctly subordinated clauses and (2) a bone-tiredness for the unmerited praise of student peer reviews.  As someone with a penchant for paragraph-length sentences, I find (1) wholly salutary; but (2) irks me endlessly.  Why?  In one of my undergraduate History of the English Language course, the professor handed out slips of paper on which he had written a single sentence and told everyone to decipher what it meant, because he wanted us to present the sentence and the paraphrase to the class in ten minutes.  My sentence read:

Another thing there is that fixeth a grievous scandal upon that nation in matter of philargyrie, or love of money, and it is this: There hath been in London, and repairing to it, for these many years together, a knot of Scotish bankers, collybists, or coine-coursers, of traffickers in merchandise to and againe, and of men of other professions, who by hook and crook, fas et nefas, slight and might, (all being as fish their net could catch), having feathered their nests to some purpose, look so idolatrously upon their Dagon of wealth, and so closely, (like the earth’s dull center), hug all unto themselves, that for no respect of vertue, honour, kindred, patriotism, or whatever else, (be it never so recommendable), will they depart from so much as one single peny, whose emission doth not, without any hazard of loss, in a very short time superlucrate beyond all conscience an additionall increase to the heap of that stock which they so much adore; which churlish and tenacious humor hath made many that were not acquainted with any else of that country, to imagine all their compatriots infected with the same leprosie of a wretched peevishness, whereof those quomodocunquizing clusterfists and rapacious varlets have given of late such cannibal-like proofs, by their inhumanity and obdurate carriage towards some, (whose shoe-strings they are not worthy to unty), that were it not that a more able pen than mine will assuredly not faile to jerk them on all sides, in case, by their better demeanour for the future, they endeavour not to wipe off the blot wherewith their native country, by their sordid avarice and miserable baseness, hath been so foully stained, I would at this very instant blaze them out in their names and surnames, notwithstanding the vizard of Presbyterian zeal wherewith they maske themselves, that like so many wolves, foxes, or Athenian Timons, they might in all times coming be debarred the benefit of any honest conversation.

That would be from the EKΣKYBAΛAYPON of Thomas Urquhart, best known for his translations of Rabelais.* In Urquhart, Rabelais found less a translator than a kindred spirit; but in Urquhart’s prose, I found an unparaphraseable wall of words, before which I stood befuddled but impressed.  Granted, I should have been impressed, so the analogy to peer reviews is imperfect; but my comprehension and subsequent paraphrase of Urquhart amounted to what I abhor in peer reviews: salivation at the sight of a dependent clause containing multiple polysyllabes and a “Good!” slapped in the margins—as if knowing big words and including them complex sentences means someone’s saying anything meaningful.  But now that I teach composition exclusively, I see similar instances of unmerited praise everywhere:

When most former major leaguers write memoirs, you wonder why they bothered; with Ron Darling—Yale graduate, former New York Met and Oakland A, and current Mets broadcaster—you wonder why it took him so long. What other former athlete could write a sentence like this even with assistance from a professional writer (Daniel Paisner): “This right here [his legendary college pitching duel against St. Johns star Frank Viola**] was one of the great epiphanies for me as a competitive athlete, only it took a while for it to resonate.” Most former pitchers can’t resonate even with help.

Just so you know, my love of béisbol knows no limits; moreover, my love of the Mets generally, and Ron Darling in particular—both as a player and announcer—is unimpeachable.  But for the San Fransisco Chronicle to praise a Yale graduate who double-majored in French and Southeast Asian history and who speaks both Chinese and French fluently—to praise him (if it was him and not his co-writer) for using the words “epiphany” and “resonate” makes me want to quodlibetificate into demission this clusterheaded intelligentry, the miserable baseness of whose expectations ought to debar them from the profession of letters. 

(x-posted.)

---

*But who should be remembered for titling the second volume of his Logopandecteision; or an Introduction to the Universal Language thus: Chrestasebeia; or, Impious Dealing of Creditors Wherein the Severity of the Creditors of the Author’s Family is Desired to Be Removed, as a Main Impediment to the Production of this Universal Language, and Publication of Other No Less Considerable Treatises.

**The bracketed link takes you to 95 percent of Roger Angell’s “The Web of the Game,” a contender for the best essay about baseball ever written.

So long as I'm complaining . . .

Google Reader?  None too bright:

No more Seinfeld re-runs for me.  I over-identify with cranky Jews.

Where does spam come from?

As you may have noticed, the amount of spam scrolling down my sidebar has increased dramatically of late.  This morning, for example, I deleted 22 comments consisting of:

• how to get young guy to do [something in/with the Cyrillic alphabet]
• very good teenagers that cut themselves
• cannoli ["margarina vegetale, farina di manitoba, acqua, sale, malto, zucchero"]
• I like iTouch myself
• help them ebony bikinis
• tiny cartoon porn videos
• very interesting monster of cocks
• fables to funny qwerty dreams

Given the uptick, I thought I'd try to see where the spam came from.  I tried to correlate the time the comment was posted with the reference in my site stats, but the result was meaningless.  Take the cannoli comment, posted at 9:59 p.m. last night.  Accounting for random lag (five minutes earlier and later), the people who could have posted that spam came from:

• a syllabus linking to my Dark Knight posts [which, by the way, very cool]
• moria's post on experimentation in seminar papers to my homepage
• my 271 notes post to my Five Year Rule post here
• urbino's link to My Morning
• a sundry links post livejournal to my post on that kerfuffle
• another link post via livejournal to DISADVENTURE! et al.
• a post on Watchmen to my posts on Watchmen
• Scott Madin's linking to the same at Shakesvilles
• a couple of random pilgrims worshipping at the Shrine of Hello Kitty

All of those links and search results seem legitimate.  (Unless I'm wrong about the livejournalers, but they seem like actual people.)  Moreover, the comment itself was on this post.  How did it get there without registering in my stats?  I see no hits to that post in the entire hour before or after.  Where did it come from that it can do that? 

The Republican Road to Recovery

(x-posted.)

Country-moving-to avoidance device enabled:

(The lag's on purpose. I wanted it to have that "maybe this is the last time she'll open her mouth again" feeling.)

I'm moving to the country.

SEK sits at his desk working.  THE NEIGHBOR exits her apartment to smoke a cigarette on her porch.

SEK: (working quietly)

THE NEIGHBOR: OH HAI HAD MANICURE TODAY WUZ AWESOME HAHAHA U NO WHEN U HAZ MANICURE AND LADY IZ LIKE ALL YOU HAVE NICE HANDS OR WHA-TEVAH? 

SEK: (quietly bangs head on desk)

THE NEIGHBOR: WELL LADY IZ ALL LIKE THIS NOT HURT BUT OMG IT HURT LIKE U NOT NO FROM PAIN HAHAHA SO I WUZ LIKE HOW HARD IT IZ 2 B SEXY AND SHE WUZ LIKE AND U NEVER BELIEVE!

SEK: (continues to bang head on desk)

THE NEIGHBOR: AND I WUZ LIKE WHA-TEVAH HAHAHA U KNOW LIKE WHA—TEH—VAH.  BUT I BE TOTALLY SEXY NOW HAHAHA SO LIKE IZ OK.  O U HAZ TO GO WELL OK THEN BY!

SEK: (to HIS WIFE)  Do we still live in graduate housing?

HIS WIFE: (groggily what with the hours of head-desking herself) I believe so.

SEK: What department do you think she's in?

THE NEIGHBOR: SO MY OTHER BFF HAHAHA HAD TO GO SO WE CAN TALK NOW GOOD SO U KNOW WHEN YOU GET A MANICURE 2 BE SEXY AND—

SEK walks onto the porch and looks at THE NEIGHBOR.

SEK: I hate to interrupt, but the sound just bounces off the stucco here, so do you think you could try to keep it down a little when you're talking on the porch?

THE NEIGHBOR glowers at him.

THE NEIGHBOR: Sure.

SEK: Thank you.  I appreciate that.

SEK walks back inside.

THE NEIGHBOR: U WILL NEVER BELIEVE WHAT JUST HAPPENED!  O U HEARD THAT!  I NO!  I WUZ LIKE WHA—TEH—VAH HAHAHA BUT CAN U BELIEVE THAT THE NERVE LIKE HE IS SO IMPORTANT OR SOMETHING SO I WUZ WHERE?  O I KNOW I WUZ LIKE GETTING MANICURE FOR 2 B SEXY HAHAHA WHEN LADY SAID O U HAZ DATE TONIGHT?  OK I CALL OTHER BFF BY NOW!

SEK and HIS WIFE is like no able to think u no what with u no HAHAHA and u shoot SEK and HIS WIFE now please b4 infection spread ok HAHAHA—

(Possible solution?)

You think you know what you mean? I’ll tell you what you mean.

Jeff Goldstein is upset at Patterico. The reason is too inside baseball to rehash here, but it involved someone poking fun of him, him reframing it into an assault on his family, threatening an anonymous commenter, threatening to out an anonymous commenter, said commenter telling him to bring on the lawyers, him responding with threats of physical violence, then actually outing the anonymous commenter and being banned shortly thereafter after making a crack about a hanging-tree which — while not a death threat per se — certainly qualifies as ban-worthy in light of the earlier escalation.  Goldstein disagrees:

Once he’d established the pretext for disallowing me to defend myself — and giving his commenters the freedom to attack me without my having recourse to respond directly to them (something I’ve never disallowed him to do on my site) — he then encouraged people to support his “honor” at the expense of mine. He set up a lynch mob and then pretended to wash his hands of the whole thing.

Patterico banned him, then set his readers upon him. The nerve! That said, remember when I wrote this on 13 October 2008? Goldstein responded:

SEK tried to link back here with yet ANOTHER exegesis on his having be WRONGED by my anger . . . So let him have that last word . . . He just ain’t gonna be having that last word here.

He then deleted the automatically-generated WordPress trackback I’d so callously lobbed and banned me. I know what you’re thinking: Goldstein wouldn’t be so hypocritical as to ban me, thereby “disallowing me to defend myself — and giving his commenters the freedom to attack me without my having recourse to respond directly to them,” would he? On 16 October 2008, Goldstein wrote:

I shouldn’t have to point this out, but what the hell, I’m feeling kinda engaged this evening. First, IF ANY OF THIS IS TRUE (hi, SEK!) . . .

He merely mocked me in the forum from which he’d banned me, thereby “disallowing me to defend myself — and giving his commenters the freedom to attack me without my having recourse to respond directly to them,” and that’s completely different from Patterico banning him, thereby “disallowing [him] to defend [himself] — and giving [Patterico's] commenters the freedom to attack [Goldstein] without [Goldstein] having recourse to respond directly to them,” what with the names and pronouns in the brackets being different — nay! significantly different. In the first case Jeff is doing something to someone else, whereas in the second someone is doing that same something to Jeff. That changes everything.

Because everything comes down to intent:

GRADING!

Copyright (c) 1980, 1982, 1983, 2009 Sekocom, Inc.  All rights reserved.
GRADING! is a registered trademark of Sekocom, Inc.
Revision 28 / Serial number 8940728

West of Apartment Complex

You are standing in an open field west of a white apartment complex, with a boarded front door.  There is a small mailbox here.

> go inside

It is such a beautiful day out.  Why not explore awhile?

> go inside and grade

You throw caution to the wind and amble aimlessly around fields bathing in inspirational pastels swaths that compel poets to compose poetry and—

> kill kinkade

Your inability to access the adumbral profundity of—

> kill alliteration

You are exploring a verdant meadow whose vertiginous pleasures verily—

> stop crap poem go inside and grade

You reluctantly return to the white apartment complex and—

> damn right hippie

And decide you would rather not grade so you—

> hippie must grade now GO INSIDE

So you begin to skip to the blessed beat of some auscultated thrum—

> hippies made for dying

Idle threats will do you no—

> hippies good at dying

I said—

> inside and grade or else

You enter the white apartment complex and begin to grade your students' final papers.  The good ones are predictably good.  The poor ones are predictably poor.  The hours drag like sleds pulled by drunk slugs.  You think you fall asleep when in fact that is what your student thinks language is.  You grab a pen and—

> JAB IN EYES JAB IN EYES

You must grade or el—

> JAB HARDER MAKE SELF DIE

If these grades are not turned in by—

> NO CARE WANT DEATH 

You try to ignore your responsibility to your students but—

> NO BUTS BRING DEATH BRING DEATH BRING DEATH

The grue devours you before you have a chance to scream.

(Previous installments can be found in these four previous posts.  Thanks to Joran Elias for reminding me how much I enjoy venting via text adventure.)

Brutalism brutalized my blog.

I have no idea where the left column went.  Will try (and likely fail) to correct.  Then cry (most certainly) and email someone who can.

Embrace your inner brutalist.

Brutalism may be “underloved,” as Christopher Shea recently described it, but you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone at UC Irvine who would argue against the notion that brutalist buildings come “across as oppressive and dreary.” How oppressive are they? Remember my earlier post about where the grade inflation study was performed? You know what else happened there?

I am, as the kids say, seriously:

So if you don’t know why brutalism feels oppressive, ask an ape.  Why do I point this out?  To prove that my campus runs brutal circles around Ari and Eric’s.  How much more brutal is it?  Here’s a picture of the statue they erected in my backyard last week:

I imagine they sat down and said:

“You know, Irvine’s already pretty darn brutal, but it’s not brutal enough.  What can we do?  Jenkins!”

“Statue of a pony, sir?”

“Ridiculous.  Ponies aren’t brutal.  Smith!”

“What about an orc, sir?”

“An orc?  I don’t know what that is, Smith, but it sounds Anglo-Saxon.  I think I like it!”

“What if we stuck an orc on a pony, sir?”

“What is it with you and ponies, Jenkins?”

“If I can interject, sir, Jenkins might have a point.  What if we mount the orc on a Volvo-sized wolf?  Wouldn’t that be pretty darn brutal?”

“Could we show it eating Jenkin’s pony?”

“I don’t see why not.”

That’s some hardcore brutality.

(x-posted.)

I don't even know what I'm writing about anymore.

Not only has Ambien^® cured my insomnia, it seems I now write and publish material I don't even understand in my sleep!  To wit:

It follows, implausibly, that nobody (else) prior to SEK had any justified beliefs!

Why would they have?

In addition to previously mentioned qualms, I find three additional problems for SEK's position.

You would.

First, there is a striking disunity in the treatment of a priori and a posteriori justifiedness. Only the latter is coherentist in contour, and only the latter features a metajustification requirement.

Keep telling yourself that.

Second, SEK assumes that justifiedness arises purely from logical and probabilistic relations between propositions, ignoring the causal process of belief production.

Whatever gets you through the day.

Third, SEK is insensitive to issues of psychological realism.

Am not!

SEK fails to address the significant category of stored beliefs, or the extent to which stored belief contents are accessible.

Did not! I totally addressed the extent to which stored belief contents were, you know, accessed by significant categories of themselves . . . and do you need me to tell you I don't actually take Ambien^® and am not sure how I accomplished this impressive feat of publication when I was nine years old? 

THESIS: You become the heroes whose exploits you teach.

It is 6:45 a.m.  A not-quite-awake-yet SEK exits his third-floor apartment to teach.  As he plants his left foot on the ground floor, he notices THE MAN with an over-large screwdriver trying to pry the screen off a window.

SEK: Need some help?

THE MAN: I've got it under control.

SEK: (suspiciously) What's going on?

THE MAN: Lost my keys. (shrugs innocently) I live here.

SEK: (drowsily) No you don't.

THE MAN with the Costco-sized screwdriver locks eyes with him.  For the first time SEK understands what sleep deprivation may have wrought . . . but the thought twinkles out of consciousness as quickly as it had entered when a door on the floor above slams shut.  THE MAN and SEK look at the landing above and listen to the footsteps.

MAN: (sheepish-yet-somehow-still-threateningly) Seems I got the wrong apartment.  I live (points in a direction roundaboutly away) over there.

THE MAN ambles menacingly away and SEK resumes walking to class.  Seconds later it dawns on SEK that he may have confronted AN ARMED BURGLAR because he'd been half-asleep.

SEK: (aloud) He may have just done what now?

271 notes (two hundred and seventy-one) from a novel I don't remember reading.*

Before I could return The Damnation of Theron Ware to my beloved library, I had to remove all the notes I'd stuck to its pages. It took me a while:

The resulting note wheel is as lovely as it is meaningless, because I remember absolutely nothing about The Damnation of Theron Ware. From my notes, I can almost reconstruct why I read it:

Theron enjoys the "primitive" pleasures of Catholic picnics; contrast to earlier (235-6) image of it as orderly machine; no, from sociological & intellectual perspective it's orderly, from internal is primitive

If only I knew the antecedent of "it" I might be able to reconstruct my reason for reading the book. Am I the only one for whom the Five Year Rule applies? (And do I really want that question answered?) (x-posted.)

---

*Notation borrowed from a letter Joyce wrote to his mother after arriving in Paris: "Your order for 3s 4d of Tuesday last was very welcome as I had been without food for 42 hours (forty-two)." How's that for passive-aggression?

A very short clarification:

I'm an idiot.

That is all.

Sunday night is Cohen night at Acephalous.

There are two kinds of Cohenim: those who like everything up to and including Songs of Love and Hate and those who prefer everything from Songs of Love and Hate onwards. That particular album divides fans because it's the last one with real instruments; it's the last one with backup singers who complement the song from the background; it's the first one in which the now-patented Cohen-growl appeared. It's actually my favorite album for the last reason—the voice matches the songs and the instrumentation matches the voice. For example:

But as his voice grizzled, his production values soared: shiny synthesizers and slick studio singers who were mixed as loudly (if not louder) than Cohen himself. It was almost as if he were trying to compensate for the rasp with the musical equivalent of a sickeningly sweet cough syrup. I like the songwriting on the later albums, but the songs are better when performed by other people. To the extent that the dead can own things, Jeff Buckley owns "Hallelujah."  (Do yourself a favor and lick on that clink.)

Recent Cohen concerts are dangerous affairs: they could be like that Austin City Limits appearance from a few years (decades?) back, when he sat there with a guitar and a Lyle Lovett and sang songs both old and new in the simplest way. Or they can be like that other appearance on Austin City Limits, when he had a full complement of backup singers and some fifty-year-olds whose synth-stylings scream how into Depeche Mode they were back in the day.

(You can all thank/blame the Modesto Kid for this post.  He's the one who inspired me to think about Cohen again.)

You thought I was going to mock the title, didn't you?

Via Savage Minds, I came across this article from the July 2008 edition of Qualitative Inquiry:

I know everyone wants to cry Sokal and loose the hounds of sense, but the title is what the title is.  I’m more curious about this:

I was fortunate to be mentored by Corrine Glesne, an absolutely wonderful ethnographer (Busier et al., 1997; Glesne, 1989, 1998, 2003; Martin & Glesne, 2002).

Do my eyes deceive me, or are those citations meant to substantiate the absolute wonderfulness of Corrine Glesne?  Is this a cheap scheme to up the number of times people are cited in professional indexes?  If so, how is it nobody’s—wait a minute.  I just had an idea. 

Have I ever told you how awesome you are?  I haven’t?  Well then, it’s about time that I did.  It is my professional opinion that you are awesome.  By the authority invested in me by the University of California, I hereby declare that each and every one of you possess more awesomeness than anyone has any right to.  You can quote me on that.  In fact, I insist that you do.  Every time you appeal to your academic ethos, I’d like to see some variation of “Lest you doubt my authority, remember that reputable scholars have attested to my awesomeness (Kaufman 2009).” Feel free to practice in the comments.

For obvious reasons, I will x-post this everywhere.  The more citations I score, the more reputable I become; and the more reputable I become, the more my stamp of approval’s worth.  I think we have ourselves a win-win scenario here.  So what are you waiting for?  Start practicing already!

Peer into the dark heart of a troll.

In the comments to this post, Paul argued:

The reader's attention when reading a comic book is NOT drawn to the center of the panel, but rather to the text and the portions of the image immediately surrounding the text (Lachey et. al 1997). Do your homework before you start spouting such nonsense!

I searched for the reference.  Couldn't find it.  Why not?  I'll let Paul explain:

I'm sure you don't have anything riding on this "argument," but I'm bored at work and wanted to drop in and tell you that, on reflection, I see that you're correct about pretty much all of it.

(Certainly correct about using McCloud over Lachey et. al since that was an invented citation. Hey, what can I say. All's fair in love and being a troll?)

I ought to be more annoyed, as I did spend some time trying to dig up an invented citation.  But had Paul not trolled me, I would've been denied this opportunity to speak with thunder.  So all is fair.  (Just don't do it again.)

More evidence Zack Snyder's Watchmen misses Moore's mark.

Hunting around for an item required to address the comments on the previous post, I came across a still from Watchmen's credit sequence:

As Meredith Woerner writes:

The opening shot, with Nite Owl giving a fist full of justice[,] has a big Batman reference.  First, check out the posters to the right.  Look familiar?  And isn't that Mr. and Mrs. Wayne at the back entrance of the opera, being saved from a bloody death?  And . . . the opera bills say: "Die Fledermaus" (The Bat).  So can we safely come to the conclusion that the original Nite Owl stopped Batman from popping up in their universe?

No.  If we could, there wouldn't be a poster for a comic book? film? play? radio serial? starring Batman in the background.  There is Batman-themed entertainment in this universe.  (And if the opera being exited by the Waynes is Die Fledermaus, Snyder alludes not to Batman lore but Batman Begins.  Scratch that.  The opera in Batman Begins is Mefistofele.)  The larger problem with this scene neatly encapsulates the larger problem with Snyder's aesthetic.  He is faithful in act but not in spirit.  His heart sins.  In Watching the Watchmen, Dave Gibbons says outright what every careful reader of the novel already knew:

I mentioned to [Alan Moore] the idea of pirate comics, reasoning that a world with real superheroes would have no need of them in comics.  Alan later took that throwaway idea and constructed an entire allegorical narrative from it within the main story.

So why did Snyder include an advertisement for some sort of Bat-themed entertainment in the credit sequence?  Because it would be cool.  Who cares if it violates the fundamental narrative logic of the work Snyder purports to love?