Acephalous

Infinite Summer: Morbid? Culturally Imperial? Morbidly Culturally Imperial?

Am I alone in finding the whole idea of Infinite Summer a little morbid?  The renewed interest in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest is an obvious Good Thing—a first step toward popular as well as academic canonization—but having lived through the recent Michael Jackson Media Event, I can’t help but wonder whether the desire to read Wallace’s novel is akin downloading Thriller because Some Important Someone died.  Do I sound like I’m thwacking some straw man with shovel?  Because I’m not:

I have a confession to make. I don’t even like David Foster Wallace. And I don’t mean that I found Infinite Jest too lengthy on the first run-through. I mean his accessible stuff. His tales from cruise ships and lobster festivals and tennis matches and radio studios . . . So why am I here?

The short answer is that David Foster Wallace died.

That’s Ezra Klein, writing at A Supposedly Fun Blog.  I’m not complaining because famous bloggers (Matthew Yglesias and Julian Sanchez among them) are horning in on my territory—although I will note that the first thing I ever published online was a mediocre seminar paper titled “Demand and the Appearance of Freedom: The Role of Corporate Media in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest,” but only just to note it—nor, despite the above, am I really even complaining that Klein’s interest was piqued by Foster Wallace’s suicide, as a more charitable excerpt shows his interest to be far less morbid:

The slightly longer answer is that David Foster Wallace died and I cared. That was, to me, a surprise. Lots of people die. Just the other day, Ed McMahon died. It hardly registered. But Wallace was different. I read everything I could about his final days. I posted a memoriam on my site. I watched readings on YouTube. It affected me. I don’t know if it’s because he was a young writer who was felled by the violent bubble and froth of his own mind and that a small part of me relates to that. I don’t know if it’s because he was, in some way, unique to my generation, and as such, one of my own.

In the end, what’s interesting about the 25-year-old Klein’s post about the 46-year-old Foster Wallace’s novel is the notion that someone who was 18 years old when the Clash first performed in America and someone who was 18 years old the year Joe Strummer died can be said to belong to the same generation.  How does that work?  I’m tempted to blame it on the Internet:

Once you could identify someone’s taste by the cut of their concert tee—London Calling vs. Combat Rock, The Clash vs. Operation Ivy, Operation Ivy vs. Rancid, &c.—now that all these these bands (mostly) belong to the past tense, they’re part of that enormous cultural pool from which more recent generations sample freely.  For example, someone Klein’s age will never experience the pain of the endless, fruitless search for something like the first Clash album (which, contrary to that link, has not been in print continuously since 1979), as CDNOW was in decline during his formative years.  To people for whom almost everything has always been immediately available, the idea of what constitutes a culturally-determined generation is bound to be a little fuzzy. 

Note that I’m not criticizing Klein for being born in a time of cultural plenty—I would rather not have spent the better part of a decade searching for this in vain—I’m merely pointing out that his inclusion of Foster Wallace among his contemporaries dumbfounds me . . . unless I chalk it up to the novel instead of the man.  Wallace might not be Klein’s contemporary, but Infinite Jest could be.  Now that I’m reading it again, I’m struck by how contemporary it feels.  Everything that annoyed me about it in 1996 still annoys me now—the footnotes, subsidized time, the too-frequent self-indulgent sentence—but everything that felt new in 1996 still feels new now.

Given how we imagine ourselves into an intimacy with our favorite authors, it makes sense for people twenty-five years younger than Foster Wallace to feel a generational affinity for him on the basis of his novel; but that doesn’t really work, now does it?  I mean in the academic sense, the means by which we identify Author X as belonging to Period Y and analyze his or her work in light of the aesthetic of Period Y.  We don’t, in other words, seriously consider historical feelings of contemporaneity the way we experience our own, inasmuch as I’m fourteen years younger than Foster Wallace but, like Klein, count him as “one of my own.”

(x-posted.)

“Polygraph-level scholarship may suffice for harmless speculation about the authorship of Midsummer’s Night Dream, but not for Dreams From My Father. Too much is at stake.”

(by request.)

As all actual, practicing literary critics know, few sentences in critical works scream tendentiousness louder than:

What should be transparent to any literary critic is that . . .

Literary matters are only "transparent" when they're not properly literary. If something is transparent, you don't need a literary critic to ponder the depths it doesn't have—any old idiot will suffice. And that's exactly why Jack Cashill, author of the above and an idiot of long-standing, is just the man to prove that Bill Ayers wrote Obama's autobiography, Dreams From My Father. For Cashill and his mysterious contributors ("[t]he media punishment that Joe the Plumber received" requires they remain anonymous), the case against Obama is a compelling one:

What Mr. Midwest noticed recently is that both Ayers in [A Kind and Just Parent] and Obama in [Dreams From My Father] make reference to the poet Carl Sandburg. In itself, this is not a grand revelation. Let us call it a C-level match. Obama and Ayers seem to have shared the same library in any case . . . Ayers and Obama, however, go beyond citing Sandburg. Each quotes the opening line of his poem "Chicago" . . . This I would call a B-level match. What raises it up a notch to an A-level match is the fact that both misquote "Chicago," and they do so in exactly the same way.

So both Ayers and Obama misquote the opening line of Carl Sandburg's "Chicago," substituting "hog butcher to the world" for "hog butcher for the world." This mutual error would be significant (an "A-level match") if Ayers and Obama were the only two people who ever made it, but according to Google Book Search—a secret search engine to which only I have access—the same mistake has been made by Nelson Algren, Alan Lomax, Andrei Codrescu, H.L. Mencken, Paul Krugman, Perry Miller, Donald Hall, Ed McBain, Saul Bellow, S.J. Perelman, Nathanaël West, Ezra Pound, Wright Morris, Allen Ginsberg, Langston Hughes, and the 1967 Illinois Commission on Automation and Technological Progress. (To name but a few.) According to Cashill, I have now proven that Dreams From My Father was written by many a dead man of American letters, a living mystery writer, a New York Times columnist and the 1967 Illinois Commission on Automation and Technological Progress. That bears repeating:

I have an "A-level match" that proves that Obama's autobiography was written by a "study of the economic and social effects of automation and other technological changes on industry, commerce, agriculture, education, manpower, and society in Illinois" when Obama was only six years old.  If that somehow fails to convey to the dubious merits of Cashill's argument, perhaps this will:

Returning to the exotic, in his Indonesian backyard Obama discovered two "birds of paradise" running wild as well as chickens, ducks, and a "yellow dog with a baleful howl." In [Ayers'] Fugitive Days, there is even more "howling" than there is in Dreams . . . In [A Kind and Just Parent], he talks specifically about a "yellow dog." And he uses the word "baleful" to describe an "eye" in Fugitive Days. For the record, "baleful" means "threatening harm." I had to look it up.

You did read that right. Cashill did cite as "A-level" evidence the fact that Ayers and Obama used a word he didn't know, despite his being the Executive Editor of Kansas City’s premier business publication, Ingram’s Magazine; despite his having written for Fortune, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The Weekly Standard; despite his having authored five books of non-fiction; and despite the word "baleful" having appeared in print 342 times in the past six months alone. Granted, all those appearances were in high-minded literary publications like Newsday ("[w]ith his baleful countenance, wild hair, sonorous baritone and sage pronouncements") or leftist rags like The Washington Times ("warn them in baleful tones if they've forgotten, say, the Constitution"), so it would be unreasonable to expect Cashill to have been familiar with the word . . . or would be, were it not for the fact that it also appears 19 times in the pages of the American Thinker, the publication for which Cashill penned this tripe. (Seems he can begin his careful literary analysis of the other 848,000 potential ghost writers closer to home.)

I do believe it all makes sense now (and if you don't agree with that you're a pretentious Martian from Venus).

Via The Guardian, a testament to my taste making sense:

The escape valve of the exotic Negro*

A friend forwards this old solicitation from writers to readers about what they want to see more of in comics:

Pure ridiculousness.  Everybody knows that "City Problems" are "Black People" . . .

---

*Via Lorraine Hansberry in The New Negro.

Iranian dissidents are still in the process of . . .

. . . BURNING SHIT DOWN, which must be why neither the Los Angeles Times nor Twitter will load. I admit that watching the social media site come into its own in response to an international crisis makes me wonder whether I ought to be a little less cynical of the political power of new media and the political engagement of the online generati—what?

You have got to be kidding me.

Somewhere in Tehran, an Iranian protester's desperatetly punching his jerry-rigged mobile device trying to figure out what the fuck happened to Twitter.

(x-posted.)

Do [conservatives] dare to eat a peach?

Two groups of people are annoyed that the administration collaborated with the Huffington Post’s Nico Pitney on a question about Iran: seasoned pool reporters invested in the pecking order who believe Pitney jumped the line, and partisan hacks whose concern for Iran disappears the moment an opportunity to denounce the media arrives.

As to the former, they are, to paraphrase Tim Crouse, journalistic Prufrocks who measure their lives in handouts, and Pitney had the audacity to receive more sooner than this collection of easy tools thought prudent. More significant, or at least more revelatory, is the response of those who have spent the past week full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse on the subject of Obama’s refusal to condemn Iran. They pressed Obama to use the word “condemn” itself, because any condemnation that doesn’t sets off their Neville detectors. No mere objection, they argue, no matter how strong, can rise to the level of a condemnation.

Now, in their mad rush to demonstrate the pervasiveness of liberal bias, they ignore the rather obvious symbolism the Obama administration employed here. At a moment in which the Iranian regime is doing its damnedest to prevent information about the situation on the ground from leaking, Obama grants an Iranian dissident the primacy of place in a news conference that will be broadcast the world over. Moreover, he calls attention to the fact that he’s breaking protocol in order to give voice to the very people the Iranian regime wants silenced.

With the whole world watching, Obama took a moment to humiliate Ahmadinejad and Khamenei. But because conservatives are compelled to follow their tedious argument of insidious intent to its tendentious conclusion, what should be a story about the regime being humiliated on the world stage becomes yet another media pseudo-scandal.

(x-posted.)

And then the signifier collapsed into the signified of which it was a referent.

SEK: Did you realize they customized horns now?

COLLEAGUE: What do you mean?

SEK: Car horns.  They customize car horns now.

COLLEAGUE: Like the General Lee?

SEK: Sort of.  I was waiting to cross the street, the light turned green, but the lead car didn't move, so the one behind it went "HONK!  HONK HONK HONK!"

COLLEAGUE: That's customized how?

SEK: You don't get it.  It went "HONK! HONK HONK HONK!"

COLLEAGUE: That's what my car does.

SEK: You're still not getting it.  It went "HONK!  HONK HONK HONK!"  Like h-o-n-k "HONK!"

COLLEAGUE: You mean like it honked the word "HONK!"

SEK: Exactly.

COLLEAGUE: So the car said the word "HONK!"

SEK: I wouldn't go that far.

COLLEAGUE: It was a talking car.

SEK: No.

COLLEAGUE: But it spoke.

SEK: No.

COLLEAGUE: You just said it said the word "HONK!"

SEK: I didn't say it said it.  You know, Wordsworth on Martian beaches and what-not.

COLLEAGUE: Jesus fuck, I understood that.  I need to get away from you English people.

How to use Twitter to make anyone look like a morally odious lout.*

Cruel_Cruel_death:

SEK:

Cruel_Cruel_death:

SEK:

 

Cruel_Cruel_death:

SEK:

 

Cruel_Cruel_death:

SEK:

Cruel_Cruel_death:

SEK:

Cruel_Cruel_death:

SEK:

Cruel_Cruel_death:

SEK:

Cruel_Cruel_death:

SEK:

---

*Because when I call something a cheap rhetorical trick, I don't just mean when other people do it.

Two hypothetical questions:

1. How many hilariously public blog break-ups are required before the line "it's not me, it's you" rings hollow even to yourself?
2. Who runs a blog fundraiser in one post while threatening to quit blogging altogether in another?

Conservatives would respect Obama more if he took a principled stand against a corrupt Iranian regime by doing its bidding.

The same conservatives who mere months ago applauded their candidate’s rendition of “Barbara Ann” are now criticizing Obama for refusing to meddle in internal Iranian affairs: “[He] has only a smidgen of a chance left to get on the right side of history—either he starts acting like the leader of the free world, or he’s a quisling of thugocracies everywhere.”  To say that Obama risks putting himself on the wrong side of history suggests that you know enough about that history to distinguish between its sides, even though you don’t even know there are always more than two of them. Consider how incoherently conservatives have responded to official Iranian propaganda:

Iran accused the United States on Wednesday of “intolerable” meddling in its internal affairs, alleging for the first time that Washington has fueled a bitter post-election dispute . . . The Iranian government summoned the Swiss ambassador, who represents U.S. interests in Iran, to complain about American interference, state-run Press TV reported. The English-language channel quoted the government as calling Western interference “intolerable.”

That government forces accuse America of meddling in the face of Obama’s tepid public statements is not, as conservatives would have it, evidence that because the accusation will be made, we might as well meddle. It indicates that the Iranian government recognizes how politically efficacious the accusation of American intervention in Iranian electoral politics is, which means Victor David Hanson and like-minded conservatives are urging Obama to take a principled stand by playing directly into the hands of the Iranian regime. Ahmadinejad and his supporters would love nothing more than for Obama to read the lines they scripted for him.

But why are conservatives encouraging Obama to do exactly that? Because, unlike him, they are deeply and proudly ignorant of the weight of history. This ignorance is what leads Karl to complain that German Chancellor Merkel and French President Sarkozy beat Obama to the moral high ground, even though he quotes the reason the French and Germans can condemn the apparent electoral fraud and America cannot:

“Either way we are going to be dealing with an Iranian regime that has historically been hostile to the United States,” [Obama] added.

Because Germany and France do not have a history of meddling in Iranian electoral politics, they can criticize the election results without creating the appearance that they have a vested interest in their outcome. The Wall Street Journal is similarly clueless:

Yesterday he invoked the CIA’s role in the 1953 coup against Iranian leader Mohammad Mossadeq to explain his reticence. “Now, it’s not productive, given the history of the U.S.-Iranian relations, to be seen as meddling—the U.S. President meddling in Iranian elections,” Mr. Obama said. As far as we can tell, the CIA or other government agencies aren’t directing the protests or bankrolling Mr. Mousavi.

The issue isn’t whether America’s actually bankrolling the opposition party, but whether it appears to be; if it does, it undermines the legitimacy of the same movement the conservatives ostensibly support. The editorial staff at the WSJ doesn’t understand the depth of Iranian mistrust of American policy especially on the issue of Iranian elections. But the most eloquent proponent of elevating ignorance to the status of fact is the de facto voice of American conservativism:

And he said yesterday, “[i]t’s not productive, given the history of US-Iranian relations, to be seen as meddling.” We have to know what this means, “given the history of US-Iranian relations.” What history? Is he talking about the coup when we put the Shah in there in ‘53 that he apologized for? Is that what he means? Is he so handcuffed to defend liberty and those who seek it because of what happened 65 years ago? What’s holding Obama back from standing up for freedom? Standing up for freedom is “meddling”? It has to be understood. What was he talking about? What is this history? What is it?

That Limbaugh’s argument moves by dint of unanswered rhetorical questions is damning enough—neither he nor his audience knows the answers to those questions—but the fact that, even if he knew what had happened, he would still consider it irrelevant because it happened 65 years ago.  This claim that history can expire is indicative of a strain of stupid to which those who regularly complain about the “re-FDRing of America [via] the New New Deal” should be immune. Limbaugh fears nothing more than the revival of policies more than 65 years old, yet is incapable of understanding why the Iranian people may harbor a grudge against a nation that took liberties with its internal governance until 1979?

Limbaugh’s questions amount to little more than magical thinking thrust into face of empirical evidence.  We know that Ahmadinejad and his allies believe the appearance of American meddling is a powerful political cudgel; to this fact, conservatives respond that 1953 was a long time ago.  We know that Ahmadinejad and his allies are actively working to manufacture evidence of American meddling; to this fact, conservatives reply that Obama should do their work for them.

(x-posted.)

According to an actual Iranian in Iran, the administration’s silence helps the cause.

A former student of mine from Iran heard from his brother for the first time in a couple of days. When my student bemoaned the cautiousness of Obama administration’s statements, his brother confirmed one aspect of Spencer Ackerman’s account of the administration’s behavior, saying that government forces are already accusing protesters of collaborating with the U.S., and that protesters are actually worried that Obama will make an explicit show of support, as that would restore some credibility to what the government has said about the election and, more importantly, could undermine a reform coalition in which some factions are none-too-fond of America. 

Everyone prematurely condemning the administration’s apparent silence on this matter may want to rethink the offensive idea that he’s merely "voting ‘present.’"  I’m not saying we should take my student’s brother’s word on this as definitive, but it does make one point absolutely clear: most of the people complaining about the administration’s response are more concerned with playing American politics than the situation on the ground in Iran.

(x-posted.)

Mother Jones and the National Review on the dubious quality of Sotomayor’s prose: “This apple’s the worst orange I’ve ever tasted.”

This past week, the attacks on Sotomayor have turned from what she’s said to how she’s said it.  Conservatives began by hammering away at the “weird, unidiomatic constructions and errors of punctuation and grammar [in] her infamous 2001 ‘Wise Latina’ speech.”  Now, I advocate writing conference papers that “contain few expensive words and no Faulknerian feats of subordination” on the grounds that no human being—not even the academic ones—can parse grammatically complex arrangements of jargon on the fly, so I’m more attuned than most to the fact that what passes for grammatical in English as she is spoke doesn’t pass muster in English as she is wrote.  You can imagine, then, why I chafed at Heather McDonald’s criticism of Sotomayor’s unscripted speeches for containing errors endemic to spoken language.  Just because an unscripted speech is transcribed after the fact doesn’t make it written; or, as per my talk, just because it can be put to paper doesn’t mean it was meant to be read there.

Judging the quality of her prose from her speeches, as McDonald and fellow Bench Memos writer Ed Whelan did, is an intellectually dishonest exercise for the simple reason that nobody (outside of Henry Louis Gates, Jr.) speaks in paragraphs. Not that this stops the other member of the Bench Memos team, Matthew J. Franck, from claiming Sotomayor “writes” sentences that were clearly spoken aloud; or that those sentences “begin with a thought and trail off without saying much of anything after all, or double back and contradict themselves,” i.e. that the transcription of her unscripted speech transcribed sentences that were clearly spoken aloud.

When I taught literary journalism, I always included Mark Singer’s profile of Errol Morris on the syllabus because it works both as an introduction to New Yorker-style profiles and a meta-methodological essay on how to approach transcriptions critically and responsibly.  Here’s Singer transcribing Florence Rasmussen’s speech in Morris’s Gates of Heaven (1978):

If I could only get out. Drive my car. I’d get another car. Ya . . . and my son, if he was only better to me. After I bought him that car. He’s got a nice car. I bought it myself just a short time ago. I don’t know. These kids—the more you do for them . . . He’ s my grandson, but I raised him from two years old . . . I don’t see him very often. And he just got the car. I didn’t pay for all of it. I gave him four hundred dollars.

Singer responds to her outpouring by noting that

[w]ith an arresting instinct for symmetry, Florence Rasmussen manages to contradict most of what she has to say. It seems that she knows certain things, but then, in the next moment, she trots out contrary information[:] I’d like to drive my car; but I might not even have a car any longer, might have to buy a new one. I bought my son—O.K., he’s not my son, he’s my grandson—a new car; well, I didn’t pay for the whole thing, I gave him four hundred dollars, but anyway I want my money back.

As viewers of The Fog of War (2003) know, this technique works as powerfully on former Secretaries of Defense as elderly Floridians, not because either is particularly muddleheaded, but because Morris takes advantage of the infelicitous glitches that accompany the spontaneous production of spoken language.  McDonald, Whelan, and Franck seem not to understand how language works.  They scoured “virtually all [Sotomayor's unscripted] speeches on the Senate website” and discovered damning evidence that they were, in fact, unscripted speeches; then, they lambasted those transcripts of her unscripted speeches for failing to meet the standards demanded of the written word, which proved to them that Sotomayor is “a mediocrity as a writer.” Whelan even suggests she’s a hypocrite for “present[ing] herself as a stickler for good grammar” when her speeches contain constructions that would be ungainly, if not outright ungrammatical, on the page.  How about we hoist Whelan by his own petard?

Well, it’s an unguarded moment where she says what folks on the left think which, their job is to use judicial robes to make sound policy and the law is largely a vessel for them to fill with their own preferences.

Sure, very much along the same lines, talking about what he calls the criterion but which selecting judges.

Well, how is that honoring people who put their lives at risk in public service and, look, at 9/11 we understood for a while what firefighters do.

Whelan clearly offends Franck’s standards: he “writes sentences that begin with a thought and trail off without saying much of anything after all.” The first sentence subordinates a clause about as clunkily as you can imagine; then you read the second sentence, observe that it doesn’t even include the subordinate clause it introduces, and marvel at the paucity of your imagination.  I suppose that second sentence meets Franck’s standard on a technicality—the sentence defies the laws of grammar and stops before it has a chance to trail off without saying much of anything—but that third sentence turns on a dime “and, look,” informs us that we know “what firefighters do.” Does that count as “much of anything”?

They do eventually get around to criticizing Sotomayor’s prose on the basis of what she’s actually written: they find that while it’s not “ungrammatical,” it is “tedious and ‘impenetrable.’” That link leads to Stephanie Mencimer’s article in Mother Jones, in which she pings Sotomayor’s prose for “rarely hit[ting a] sort of breezy cadence [because she] devotes the bulk of her legal analysis to quotes from statutes, regulations, and other opinions ad nauseam[.]” How she’ll legislate from the bench when she’s busy citing dull precedent is as mysterious to me as, for example, how a prose-scold could write “quote” instead of “quotation” in the middle of a complaint or believe Diane Wood’s summary of Merchant of Venice signifies much of anything in the Age of Wikipedia.

In the end, the case against Sotomayor basically amounts to this: on the one hand, her speeches betray all the ungrammatical tics common to spoken language, and if you treat those speeches as prose, you must conclude that she’s a poor writer; on the other, the prose of her legal opinions isn’t ungrammatical, but because it betrays the tedious tics common to lawyerly prose, you must conclude she’s a poor writer.  You see where this is headed.  If word leaked out that “Ed Whelan” was actually Sotomayor’s pseudonym, the Bench Memos team would argue that, because Whelanmayor did all that I documented above, you must conclude that s/he’s a poor writer.  Were it then revealed that Whelanmayor did Diane Wood one better and actually wrote Merchant of Venice, the Bench Memos team would claim that, in light of the difficulty of Shakespelanmayor’s prose, the Western Canon requires immediate revision and you must conclude s/he’s a poor writer . . .

(x-posted.)

The Book (obscenely condensed version)

Because who am I to ignore interested lurkers?  What follows is the section on comics and rhetoric I wrote for The Student Guide to Writing at UCI.  The book I'm co-authoring this summer is a vastly expanded version of the same (only with panels from actual comics instead of examples drawn from my none-too-fertile imagination).

The basic unit of analysis when dealing with a comic is the panel.  The visual elements of a panel can be described using the same vocabulary used to describe a frame from a film: background and foreground, diegesis, high or low key lighting, etc.  Pointing to the similarities between film and comics highlights what makes comics unique as a medium: the interaction of these visual components with the written word.  The word-picture relation can word specific, in which the words convey the meaning and the images merely illustrate it, as in a children's book; duo specific, in which the words and images both convey the same meaning, as when a picture of an irate man yelling is accompanied by a caption box that tells you the irate man is yelling; and interdependent, in which the words and images combine to convey a meaning neither is capable of conveying alone.  Most of the comics you will read in this course will rely heavily on interdependent word-picture combinations.

Comics are also unique in the manner in which they relate to time.  No matter how the words in the panel interact with the visuals, there is a tension between the static image and the words in the caption box.  Picture a panel that depicts a medium close-up of a young man in a bright orange shirt.  A caption box extrudes from his open mouth and occupies the space above his left shoulder.  The text inside it reads: "The bride?  You wanna know about . . . the thing it is that happened to her?  Because sure, I can tell you, but . . ."  All these words didn't spill from his mouth in the open-mouthed moment depicted in the panel.  The words propel the narrative forward in time in such a way that we cannot be sure which word the panel depicts the man enunciating. (It may not even be a word: the panel could be depicting the pause indicated by the ellipses.)  This tension between static image and narrative progress exists not only in panels but between them.

The empty area between panels is the gutter, and it is where the reader is called upon to become an active participant in the creation of the text.  Unlike a film, in which the twenty-three imperceptible gaps between the twenty-four frames flashed per second create the illusion of movement, the gutter produces breaks in the narrative that require interpretation to repair.  If the panel following the one of the man in the bright orange shirt is a medium-long shot of a different, shabbily-dressed man in a prison garden holding an open stenographer's notebook and saying, "Yes, I want to hear about the bride."  What inferences must the reader draw for those two panels to make sense?  To begin with, the bright orange shirt in the first panel likely belongs to a prison-issue jumpsuit and the man across from him (as the reader infers from the comic equivalent of a shot/reverse shot) is a journalist interested in what this prisoner did to the woman they both refer to as "the bride."  The act of making that inference -- of bridging the gap between the first and second panel -- is called closure.  In this case, the closure is achieved via a subject-to-subject transition. 

However, were the second panel to depict not a journalist, but a long shot of the man in the orange shirt unfolding a lawn chair next to a grill, the "prisoner" would be transformed into a man at a barbeque discussing an unfortunate incident at a wedding.  If the third panel showed that same man placing a steak on the grill while continuing to discuss the wedding, closure between the second and third panels will have been achieved via an action-to-action transition, i.e. one in which consecutive panels depict the same subject undertaking a series of actions.  If the next three panels track the path of the steak from the man's tongs to the grill's surface, the reader will be compelled by this moment-to-moment transition to create closure by associating the steak's slow-motion descent with whatever it was that happened at that wedding, such that it would not be surprising if in the fourth panel the steak was replaced by a bouquet of flowers of the sort brides toss at weddings.  Because the reader knows that steaks don't often turn into flowers, it is safe to infer that the narrative has shifted to another place and time via a scene-to-scene transition.  But the assumption that this airborn bouquet is on its way into the arms of a single woman attending the wedding is not necessarily a safe one -- an author could be exploiting this conventional image to confounds the reader's expectations.  In a subsequent panel, the "empty" space behind the falling flowers could be revealed to be the white satin of the wedding dress worn by a woman whose pained expression informs the reader why she dropped the bouquet.

If that panel were followed by another in which a younger, tuxedo-clad version of the orange-shirted man from the barbecue perches on the edge of a bed with his head in hands, then another panel depicting leaves falling outside a bustling travel agency, then another still of two empty chairs beneath an oversized umbrella on some Hawaiian beach, the reader is presented with a number of interpretive decisions.  The transition from the jilted bride to her cold-footed fiance could be interpreted as a scene-to-scene transition, as could the transition from the fiance to the travel agency.  However, because these panels depict the same moment in a series of different locations, closure can be argued to have been achieved via an aspect-to-aspect transition.

The interpretive burden required to understand the intent of the author/rhetor of a comic is, as the previous paragraphs indicate, quite heavy -- even though the experience of reading comics is so intuitive that many otherwise intelligent readers consider the medium juvenile.  That so many comics chronicle the adventures of impossibly-muscled specimens of post-humanity in tights that reveal more than they conceal helps sustain this misperception.  But as the story of the prisoner and/or the man who left his wife at the alter demonstrates, the content of a comic is not determined by the medium itself.

Researching the competition; or, why other books about visual rhetoric & composition demonstrate the necessity of one like mine.

When demonstrating the importance of historical context, it's considered bad form to get it wrong.  For example:

• Hal Jordan?  Not the first Green Lantern.
• Sinestro?  Doesn't appear in Emerald Dawn.
• Doctor Doom?  Not the ruler of Latvia.
• Wolverine?  Not HIV positive.  (How would that even work?)
• "Raz Alcor"?  Liam Neeson has two names in Batman Begins and neither one of them is that.

Since I'm not sure where to begin with this—I could just as easily complain about shoddy research and methodology as go full nerd—I'll come to a full stop and change the subject.  A student essay addressed an offhand remark I made in class, about Dr. Manhattan being busted by Dateline NBC for sexing up underage woman, and inspired me to produce this:

If this is what it’s like to be, get it over with already and me now.

Last, I noted that I increasingly left the most important out of sentences. What began as a seems to be getting worse and. Looking over what I today, I can't help but at how deliberate it seems, as if I'm trying to make it impossible to edit what I. Granted, with every passing I'm a little older, but honestly, this can't be what it's like to be? Crafting sentences that only lack the most element required to understand them? On my list of fates worse than, this probably takes the.

Now that I about it, if I'm to run out of words, maybe I should in the sciences, where words don't seem to be required:

(x-posted.)

People who aren’t already the President of their things should keep their traps shut.

You know who should be allowed to blog?

Photo reference at the National Review

Liberals think the cover of the new National Review is racist, but as Rich Lowry explains, they’re simply oversensitive and humorless:

You gotta move fast when you’re competing with your fellow hair-trigger PC cops on the left! I take it the theory is that we don’t think Latinas can be wise so we had to make her look somewhat Asian. Or something like that. What these people don’t understand is the entire concept of caricature (or of a joke). Caricature always involves exaggerating someone’s distinctive features, which is all that our artist Roman Genn did with Sotomayor.

He even includes what is, presumably, one of the reference photos Genn used. When someone else points out that it’s odd that they depicted her as Asian, Lowry shot back:

An outraged Huffington Post says we “perplexingly” depict Sotomayor in an Asian manner—apparently not entirely getting the Buddha reference, or Buddha’s association with wisdom. Can they really be this clueless?

The painting in the Google link is, I think we can say with certainty, the one Genn referenced for his cover.  (Compare everything from the neck down.)  In visual terms, then, Lowry’s argument is thus:

Are announcers with degrees in broadcast journalism better in the booth than former players?

In the early days of radio and television, baseball announcers fell into their jobs. Mel Allen, "the Voice of the Yankees," was a lawyer by trade; his partner, Red Barber, caught his break while working as a janitor at a college radio station. (A professor scheduled to read "Certain Aspects of Bovine Obstretics" never showed, so Barber picked up the microphone and read it himself.) Jimmy Dudley majored in chemistry, got drafted and, like Harry Kalas, began his broadcasting career calling intramural games in the South Pacific during WWII. Although all four of them belong to the Baseball Hall of Fame, they were amateurs.

The first great professional announcer, Vin Scully, studied broadcast journalism at Fordham. Following Scully's success on both coasts, team owners and network executives decided that games were best called by people whose sober, understated delivery betrayed an intimate knowledge of the technical limitations of their equipment. No matter where in America you turned on your radio or television in the 1960s, you were listening to a college graduate whose vocal coach had taught him to speak the smooth, unaccented English of an imaginary Middle America.

With the exception of a few token athletes, like Joe Garagiola and Bob Uecker, by the early 1970s the voices that spoke for the game weren't the voices of the game. Because the game on the field is so different from the one observed from the booth, I think it best that there be someone up there who, for example, understands in his bones that the depth of field required to keep both the pitcher and the batter (60 feet 6 inches away) in focus makes a 67 m.p.h. curveball look slow even though, were it a car, it would have exceeded the interstate speed limit in ninety-percent of the country.

I would hope that a wise former baseball player, with the richness of his playing experiences, would more often than not reach a better conclusion about a game situation than someone who hasn't lived the life. But I'm not so myopic as to believe that others of different experiences or backgrounds are incapable of understanding the game. Many are so capable. Gary Cohen could only play in Soviet Russia—when he picks up a bat, it swing hims—yet he is a tremendous announcer.

However, for someone who didn't play the game to understand its nuances takes time and effort, something that not all people are willing to give. Personal experiences influence the facts that announcers chooses to discuss. But this is not to say that only former players can understand the game. Sometimes they emphasize their own experience to the exclusion of others, as is the case with Tim McCarver, for whom baseball has not changed one iota since the day he retired in 1979, and Joe Morgan, whose greatness on the diamond is inversely proportional to his awfulness in the booth. For a former player to become a good announcer, he must extrapolate from his experiences into areas which with he is unfamiliar. Because what comes naturally to white, colleged-educated, broadcast journalism majors might not come easy to a poor kid from Oakland nicknamed "Mex."

This is why the best Supreme Court broadcast team working today consists of Gary, Keith, and Ron.

AROOGA! AROOGA! AROOGA! AROOGA!

As those of you on Facebook already know, a couple days ago I noted that "after months of recommending I befriend strangers, Facebook now thinks I know people I actually know."  New algorithms and what-not.  But here's the kicker: not only does this new algorithm identify people I actually know, it definitively pins down the identity of my stalkers:

This time with arrows:

John Casper has been outed by an algorithm.  I now know who he is, where he lives, where he works, and I'm in a mood.  Talk me down from the ledge, dear readers, before I go and retaliate something stupid.

Don't kill me until I'm dead, alright?

The Associated Press reports that

David Eddings, the acclaimed fantasy novelist and author of such series as The Belgariad and The Malloreon, has died at the age of 77.  Eddings was predeceased by his wife and writing partner Leigh two years ago.

When I worked at a used bookstore, I shelved all fourteen thousand, two hundred, and forty-three of his novels more times than I care to remember.  But I never read any of them.  Even so, I want to go on the record and declare that he deserved better than to be killed by his wife two years before he died. 

(Need I remind you that grammar matters?)