Acephalous

What cover letters look like to the people who write them.

Dear Dr. PLEASE LOVE ME PLEASE,

I am writing to apply for the position of Associate Professor of AWESOME.  I completed my Ph.D. in AWESOME at the University of California, AWESOME, where I specialized in AWESOME and AWESOMER.  In addition to pursuing my interests in AWESOMENESS—the generic history of AWESOMER and AWESOMEST and the historical development of AWESOMOSITY—during my tenure at UC AWESOME, I cultivated other AWESOME interests that, over time, became EVEN AWESOMER.  Early in my graduate career, I helped develop the AWESOME curriculum for the AWESOMEST undergraduate program in the UC system; more recently, my course director, Dr. AWESOME, invited me to coauthor a manuscript on AWESOME rhetoric for AWESOME Press.  My effort to share, by teaching AWESOMELY, the complexities of an AWESOME discipline in an AWESOME manner dovetails with my desire to provide, by teaching EVEN MORE AWESOMELY, the critical tools required to understand an increasingly AWESOME world.  Together, they point to my AWESOME commitment to the improvement of AWESOMENESS.

The content of a eulogy is a function of the life being eulogized.

After I linked to his post about Ted Kennedy’s funeral, Patrick asked what I’d think were the grandchild of a hypothetical conservative to say this at the funeral:

Dear God, for what my grandpa called the causes of his life, the privatization of social security and the construction a robust missile defense shield, we pray to the Lord.

My response, as indicated by the title, is that funerals are about the lives of the deceased, and if the deceased was a Senator who devoted his life to privatizing social security and constructing a robust missile defense shield, I’d have no problem with those issues being raised at his funeral. But it would sound tacky, not because I disagree with those policy initiatives, but because this hypothetical conservative dedicated his life to wonky policy initiatives. Were those initiatives less wonky, the prayer would sound less tacky. Consider:

Dear God, for what my grandpa called the cause of his life, the eradication of hunger in Africa, we pray to the Lord.

When prayed for, big and noble causes sound big and noble. So, too, do some specific issues concerning otherwise wonky initiatives. Consider:

Dear God, for what my grandpa called the cause of his life, the preservation of the Santa Ana sucker fish habitat, we pray to the Lord.

Praying for the preservation of a land and species to which the deceased felt great affinity sounds respectable, if a bit silly, because of our reverence for outdoorsmen like Henry David Thoreau and John Muir, who are themselves respectable, if a bit silly. The more wonkish the issue to which the deceased committed his life, the more likely it is that intercessionary prayers on his or her behalf will sound tacky. But as it was the deceased who chose to devote his or her life to an issue that will make for some tacky intercessionary prayers, the living can do precious little if they wish to remain respectable.

If I spent my life rewriting the tax code, and if, on my deathbed, the rewriting of the tax code was imminent, I would hope that my relatives thought enough of me to say a prayer on my behalf that represented my fondest desire at my funeral. It would sound tacky, but so what? My funeral should be about me, my life, my accomplishments, and my dreams, and if I wore a grey flannel suit, amended the tax code around the edges, and dreamt of a complete overhaul, I would hope that my friends and family would mention it, what with it having been so important to me.

Finally, to those who claim that no Republican would ever use someone’s funeral as a platform to forward their own agenda, I remind them of the law and order politicking of Nixon at J. Edgar Hoover’s funeral:

Yet again, Jack Cashill proves why the country needs more actual literary critics.

Jack Cashill, who received a Ph.D. in American Studies in 1982 then promptly forget everything he learned earning it, has returned with more evidence that my assessment of him ("an idiot of long-standing") was correct.  He accuses Michiko Kakutani of plagiarizing his 2008 blockbuster, "The Improvised Odyssey of Barack Obama," and begins his defense of this claim as one does: by demonstrating that William Ayers is familiar with Homer's Odyssey.

Ayers knows his Homer. In his 2001 memoir, Fugitive Days, for instance, he specifically identified the Odyssey's "Cyclops" as a metaphor for the "doomed and helpless" United States. "Picture an oversized, somewhat dim-witted monster, greedy and capricious," Ayers wrote in his uniquely patriotic way, "its eyes put out by fiery stakes and now flailing in a blind rage, smashing its way through villages and over mountains."

If, as Cashill hopes to establish, "Ayers knows his Homer," it would behoove him not to quote Ayers saying that Odysseus put out the eyes of the famously one-eyed monster Polyphemus.  That Ayers speaks of a stereoscopic cyclops speaks ill of him; that Cashill attempts to establish both his own and Ayers's classicist credibility via a quotation about a two-eyed cyclops only proves that neither should be trusted with Homeric parallels.  (Leave that to the experts.)  Then, as if he anticipated the complaint of the previous sentences, he politely offers evidence of their validity:

In Dreams, Obama confronts his own menacing one-eyed bald man, a Savak-loving Iranian.

Obama once spoke with a one-eyed man, Cashill argues, therefore this reference to a one-eyed cyclops in Dreams From My Father corresponds with Ayers's reference to a two-eyed one in Fugitive Days.  Granted, my summary of his point may be uncharitably literal, even though Obama's one-eyed man had, to all appearances, two eyes ("an older balding man with a glass eye," the "drift of [which] gave the Iranian a menacing look"); and even though the point of Obama telling this story is that, despite one of the man's two eyes giving him "a menacing look," he "was a friendly and curious" person; and even though, unlike the Odyssey, in which the curse of the one-eyed cyclops Polyphemus results in his father, Poseidon, to unleash contrary winds and furious storms, thereby extending the travels and travails of Odysseus, all that resulted from this conversation was that someone else quoted Malcolm X; even though all those parallels break down, maybe I am being uncharitably literal.  Once the sentence I quoted above is inserted back into its context, the parallels between Homer's epic and Obama's memoir become clear:

In Dreams, Obama confronts his own menacing one-eyed bald man, a Savak-loving Iranian. Before he completes his heroic cycle, he also confronts many of the other distractions: green-eyed seductresses, blind seers, lotus-eaters, the "ghosts" of the underworld, whirlpools, and about a half dozen sundry "demons."

Obama, as scripted by Ayers, lived the most Odysseus-esque life of anyone ever. I never even knew he went to the underworld!  But our President is even more Homeric than that because, in Cashill's estimation, Obama

assumes the role of both Telemachus and Odysseus, the son seeking the father, and the father seeking home.

This novel statement—no variation of which has appeared in the 2,800 year history of criticism on one of the foundational texts of the Western tradition—was later brazenly stolen by the chief literary critic of the New York Times:

“Dreams From My Father,” written before [Obama] entered politics, was both a searching bildungsroman and an autobiographical quest to understand his roots—a quest in which he cast himself as both a Telemachus in search of his father and an Odysseus in search of a home.

Kakutani should have known better than to borrow such a unique insight into the structure of the Odyssey.  Did she really think no one would notice her thievery if she included it as an afterthought to a sentence with which it bears an organic connection?  If Cashill's larger argument is correct—if, that is, "Ayers leaves scarcely an Homeric trope unturned in his mining of the Odyssey to describe Obama's 'personal interior journey'"—then any literate person who reads both the Odyssey and Dreams From My Father would pick up and comment upon the Homeric parallels, meaning his sentiment is too mundane to be plagiarized. 

Of course, Cashill's larger argument is not correct.  Just because Ayers and Obama both use words that relate to the sea ("fog, mist, ships, seas, boats, oceans, calms, captains, charts, first mates, storms, streams, wind, waves, anchors, barges, horizons, ports, panoramas, moorings, tides, currents, and things howling, fluttering, knotted, ragged, tangled, and murky") doesn't mean that Ayers ghostwrote for Obama or that either are directly indebted to Homer.  Cashill predicates his complaint against Kakutani on her having stolen the substance of his argument while denying its conclusion.  She did nothing of the sort.  She tossed off a nifty parallel that fit organically within a larger framework; Cashill erected a larger framework in order to draw tendentious parallels between Circe and Diana Oughton on the grounds that she dated Obama for a year and lived in a nice neighborhood.

UPDATE. It turns out I was wrong—Cashill’s claim that William Ayers wrote Dreams From My Father has been independently confirmed. Should you desire to see a man eat his hat, here is a link to my formal apology.

Next week, George Nash will bemoan the fact that we’ve never had a white President.

I ignore those who insist that there’s something untoward about discussing the life’s work of a man at his own funeral—they can begin with his 1970 Health Security Act and work their way forward to the Kennedy-Dodd bill of 2009 on their own. I decline, that is, to say that had I insisted on codifying my ideological commitments in a Senate bill a month before my passing, I would have done so because those commitments were so important to me in life that I wanted them to define my death. Because, in the end, giving one’s natural death to a cherished cause differs from dying for it only by dint of circumstance and timing: to accomplish with one’s death what one fought for in life is the wish of the true believer, and there is nothing untoward in that.  But, as I said, there will be none of that.

Instead, I will marvel at the stentorian stupidity of George H. Nash, who received a degree in History from Harvard in 1973 then promptly forget everything he learned earning it.  To Nash, the death of Edward Kennedy represents an opportunity to bemoan “a disconcerting historical trend: the royalization of American politics.” Strangely, he does not begin his investigations with the many powerful branches of the Adams or Walker family trees (despite the former being the most prominent and the latter being the most recent). Instead, he claims that from

Theodore Roosevelt to Franklin Roosevelt to the Kennedys and Camelot, American liberalism has repeatedly succumbed to this phenomenon. It begins in a cult of personality, extends to the leader’s wife and children, and then to a “court” of retainers and apologists.

The royalists, then, are not the ones descended from the state representative of Massachusetts’s 7th district—they are the descendants of the impoverished Irish immigrant that man represented from 1849 to 1851. That bears repeating: the son-in-law of William Walker, Julius Rockwell, represented Patrick Kennedy in the U.S. House of Representatives from the moment Kennedy disembarked in 1849 until Rockwell resigned 1851 and the only worrisome political royalty Nash can locate here are the Kennedys?

Granted, the family to whom he extends this cultish devotion is direct, “the leader’s wife and children,” so emphasis on the children of the Joseph Kennedy, Sr. is warranted: Joseph Jr., John, Robert and Edward are all direct descendants of a single powerful personage, as are the relatives in his other example, the pair of fifth cousins connected by a great-great-great-great-grandfather, Nicholas Van Rosenvelt, upon whose death in 1742 the family splintered into the Republican Oyster Bay and the Democratic Hyde Park Roosevelts.

Wait—now I’m confused.

Not only are the Roosevelts distant cousins instead of sons or brothers, they also belong to opposing factions of a family that’s been at political odds since before the Revolutionary War. How exactly are Republicans who voted for Theodore and Democrats who voted Franklin Delano symptomatic of American liberalism? Moreover, since Nash wants to talk about cults of personality extending to wives and children and courtiers, how could he not mention the two-term Connecticut Senator, Prescott Bush, whose son, George Herbert Walker Bush, and grandson, George Walker Bush, were both President? Does he believe the royalist inclinations of American liberalism are responsible for the Bushes?

Probably not, because this insidious royalism “starts in hero-worship and ends in nostalgia,” and beloved as both Bushes are, neither are afforded the “disturbing” and “disconcerting” treatment “that for nearly a century has afflicted American liberalism.” Anything that “starts in hero-worship and ends in nostalgia” threatens the body politic with an idiot malignance . . . as Nash himself proves when he starts the first paragraph of his essay with some hero-worship and ends it with nostalgia:

On March 30, 1981, Pres. Ronald Reagan was nearly assassinated. What if he had died that day, before he had persuaded Congress to enact his signature program of tax cuts? Would his liberal opposition on Capitol Hill have given up their philosophical opposition to his agenda? Would they have stood silent if militant conservatives had tried to rush through sweeping tax-cut legislation as a monument to Reagan’s legacy?

Translation:

“What if the Great Hero had died in 1981? Would the Golden Age for which I now pine have ever come to be?”

I believe he was better off pretending two of the four most recent Presidents weren’t immediate kin—at least then he made my job a wee bit difficult.

(x-posted.)

Where does the new plagiarism come from?

By which I mean: what specific sites/forums/IRC chat rooms do students use to find people willing to produce "original" works of scholarship?  When I search for such services online, all I find is an endless sea of spam.  There must be somewhere—perhaps localized at the level of individual schools—that students go to make these sorts of arrangements.  Would it not be incredibly useful for instructors to know what those sites/forums/IRC chat rooms are? (And isn't it odd that there hasn't already been some sort of collective effort to create a list of this type?)

If you know the locations of some of these sites, I would love it if you left the address in the comment or send me an email (scotterickaufman at gmail dot com).  Anonymous is fine.  I want to create a sort of master list so I can play Leverage in my spare time because I'm curious.

UPDATE 1. The answer, from my initial investigations, is that it's not craigslist.  I found a few ads there, but after a brief investigation, learned that they were all spam.

It probably is.

Thankfully, Netflix says I'm only 23 percent similar . . .

. . . to the person who claims the Pang Brother's 2006 film Re-Cycle is "THE most EMO movie EVER" as if that were a good thing. The film, though, is THE most SOMETHING movie EVER, but I'm not sure what. The list could include:

• THE most BIZARRE film about the unintended consequences of writer's block EVER
• THE most IMPRESSIVE film by twin brothers who, according to Wikipedia, "are in a relationship and rumored to be engaged" EVER
• THE most LIKELY FIRST film to equate throwing away a sheet of paper with aborting a fetus EVER
• THE most UNNECESSARILY SUBTITLED film EVER
• THE most OSTENSIBLY APOLITICAL Asian horror film to take its cues from the American conservative movement EVER

As I said: THE most SOMETHING movie EVER. I'll start with the minor complaints and work my way forward:

THE most IMPRESSIVE film by twin brothers who, according to Wikipedia, "are in a relationship and rumored to be engaged" EVER

Either those two are a little too close, or Wikipedia entries sometimes need editing.

THE most UNNECESSARILY SUBTITLED film EVER

Unless you're being intentionally thick, as Scott McCloud is in the (center) panel from DESTROY!!! below, there is absolutely no reason for subtitles to be duo-specific:

If I can see that the aborted fetus of the protagonist, Tsui Ting-Yin, is screaming and hear its banshee-keening, there is no need to have a subtitle inform me that [TSUI TING-YIN'S ABORTED FETUS IS TELLING ITS WOULD-HAVE-BEEN MOTHER HOW IT FEELS ABOUT BEING ABORTED VIA A HIGH-PITCHED SHRIEK THAT WILL LIKELY CAUSE TINNITUS]. To prove this point, I will continue reviewing the movie in the manner of its subtitles.

THE most BIZARRE film about the unintended consequences of writer's block EVER

 

THE most LIKELY FIRST film to equate throwing away a sheet of paper with aborting a fetus EVER

&

THE most OSTENSIBLY APOLITICAL Asian horror film to take its cues from the American conservative movement EVER

 

A new post (and surprisingly substantial, for a link harvest) at Feministe.

"Surprisingly substantial" because, as you well know, I occasionally have a problem shutting up.

Mandatory online office hours:

SEK: It looks like everyone is here.  How about we begin by introducing ourselves.  I'll start: Hi, I'm Scott, and I grade your things.

princesshotpantz: I'm Sally and you probably hate grading my things.

SEK: I don't discriminate: I hate grading all things.

chompchompchomp: i'm pho and i just woke up five minutes ago to join this chat

WrAtHyKhAn: I'm Lou and I hate writing things.

chompchompchomp: seems like we're all in agreement we hating writing and you hate grading so we shouldn't write anything for this class

SEK: I suppose you think I should just give you all A's too.

princesshotpantz: No . . . maybe B's.

WrAtHyKhAn: We can pick any topic?

SEK: So you don't want to write anything, but you want to start writing it now?  I see.

princesshotpantz: I just need more guidance on my topic so I can start thinking about writing.  I like the discussion in Chapter 2 so far though.

SEK: So you like Chapter 2.  If you want to write on the topics discussed there, where should you look?

chompchompchomp: foottoes

SEK: Are connected to the . . . ?

WrAtHyKhAn: Ankle bones.

chompchompchomp: *footnoses

SEK: Now you're doing it on purpose.

chompchompchomp: *footNOTES

chompchompchomp: sorry just woke up

princesshotpantz: So I should look at the footnotes?

SEK: That's where the citations live.

WrAtHyKhAn: Is it dumb that I want to do a little research before I actually choose my topic?

SEK: Not at all.  That is, in fact, what I'm trying to trick you into doing.

SEK: Did I type that out loud?

WrAtHyKhAn: Your jig is up.

princesshotpantz: Don't jig up Scott.  He's the one who grades our stuff.

SEK: Are you still with us Lou?

SEK: I know you're in here.

SEK: I CAN SEE YOU TYPING!

chompchompchomp: yeah my bad i'm thinking

SEK: Thinking's your good, not your bad.  I just wanted to make sure you weren't dead.

chompchompchomp: i'm thinking for a question but then i got shot.  seems i am dead.

SEK: NO ONE DIES ON MY WATCH!

princesshotpantz: Where should we find those articles from the footnotes?

SEK: I'll give you a hint: those library tutorials weren't busywork.

chompchompchomp: the library website!

SEK: Someone is finally awake and has his head in the game.

chompchompchomp: ><

SEK: Are you tweaking now Lou?

chompchompchomp: wait . . .

chompchompchomp: tweaking?

chompchompchomp: are you saying what I think you're saying?

SEK: South Park.  Tweek.  Too much caffeine: ><

chompchompchomp: then maybe i am tweaking. i don't know south park tweaking though.

princesshotpantz: Can anyone answer these questions or are you asking a specific person about the library?

SEK: Anyone can answer any time.

SEK: It's a party!

SEK: So what does Ben-Shahar mean by flow?

SEK: Feel free to answer any day now.

SEK: You people type like old people.

chompchompchomp: like old people what?

SEK: Simmer down now. What are you people doing anyway?

princesshotpantz: "Flow is a state in which one is immersed in an experience that is rewarding in and of itself."

chompchompchomp: i was just about to type that

SEK: Paraphrase is your friend.  Otherwise we'll be here all day and we've already lost Lou again.

WrAtHyKhAn: Sorry.  I was over here not flowing.

SEK: Why aren't you flowing?

WrAtHyKhAn: Talking about flowing doesn't make me flow.

SEK: What does make you flow?

WrAtHyKhAn: Video games.

SEK: I'm sure there has been academic research on why and how people enjoy video games.

chompchompchomp: you should talk to fatal1ty.

WrAtHyKhAn: I shall google that.

SEK: Or you could consult the library.

chompchompchomp: fatal1ty won't be in the library.

SEK: Shut up n00b.

chompchompchomp: exactly

SEK: I mean EXACTLY.

princesshotpantz: So what time will Roy be getting here?

SEK: Roy?  Who's Roy?

chompchompchomp: not i

princesshotpantz: Sorry sorry wrong window.

SEK: Are you cheating on us with another online office hours?

WrAtHyKhAn: I feel used.

chompchompchomp: don't worry scott we still love you.

princesshotpantz: I do too!  Sorry sorry sorry.  I'm here now again 100 percent and ready to flow!

SEK: We talked while you were off with Roy and decided that we'll forgive you just this once.  Cheat on us with other online office hours again and . . . how about we get back to the topic at hand?

This Day in Actual Communist and Real Nazi History

On this day in 1940, an actual Communist leader, Leon Trotsky, was stabbed in the head with an ice pick by Ramón Mercader, who was himself not only an actual Communist, but an agent of Stalin, who awarded Mercader’s mother an Order of Lenin for her part in the plot.  Upon his release from prison in 1960, Mercader moved to an actual Communist country, Cuba, and then to another, the Soviet Union, whereupon his arrival he was awarded a Hero of the Soviet medal from the head of the KGB, Alexander Shelepin.

On this day in 1944, an actual Communist country, the Soviet Union, launched an offensive against a real Nazi country, Hitler’s Germany, over the fate of Romania, which would end the day either a real Nazi or actual Communist coutry, but not both, because real Nazism and actual Communism are such different beasts that Hitler’s Germany went to war against Stalin’s Soviet Union over whose distinct sytem of oppression the Romanian people will be compelled to live under.  The actual Communists won the day, routing the real Nazis and installing an actual Communist government that would survive until 1989.

On this day in 1991, actual Communist tanks pulled in front of the actual Communist parliament building, the White House, in preparation for Operation Grom, a KGB-orchestrated coup against an actual Communist government led by Mikhail Gorbachev.  Within two days, Gorbachev would resign his position as General Secretary of the the actual Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and by Christmas of that year, the hammer and sickle—the actual Communist flag of the Soviet Union—would be lowered from the Kremlin for the last time.

For the latest breaking news about mock communists and ersatz Nazis, keep it turned to FOXNews throughout the day.

(x-posted.)

The Monolexical Man on the Street.

A conservative woman, Pamela Pilger, yells "Heil Hitler!" at Samuel Blum, an Israeli immigrant, as he's being interviewed by a local television crew.  She's unthinkingly and ignorantly odious.  Even were Blum not Jewish, shouting "Heil Hitler!" at a political opponent is never an acceptable option in civil discourse.  (Different standards no doubt apply at official Hitler Youth mixers.)  Although she's the one berating a former Israeli citizen while wearing an Israeli Defense Forces shirt, the more interesting party is the man to her left.  There she is, with her IDF shirt on, and when the Blum mentions that he served the required three years in the IDF, the man to her left leans in and says:

“Certain lives are not worth living. Certain people, we should not spend the money to keep them alive…”

Consider this a bookend to Ari’s post, as those are the words of Hitler according to this protester:

According to her and those like her, Hitler didn’t actively conspire to murder millions of people in the service of a racist eugenics, he passively refused to “spend the money to keep them alive.”  Who are “they” here?  Because she claims that “limiting Medicare expenditures in order to reduce the deficit . . . is the T-4 policy of the Hitler—of a Hitler policy in 1939,” she must be talking about those killed under the auspices of the Aktion T-4 Euthanasie: the lebensunwertes Leben, or “life unworthy of life,” i.e. the elderly, the mentally disabled and the otherwise infirm. Par for the course for those who believe in “death panels.”

However, if people like this protester possessed a perspective of more depth and extension than the Wikipedia Brand Knowledge currently bandied about conservative discussion boards and listservs, they would know, for example, that the T-4 initiative was prohibitively expensive. Its predecessor, the Gesetz zur Verhütung erbkranken Nachwuchses, or “Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring,” which mandated the sterilization of the physically and mentally disabled, had been scaled back because it was too expensive. That is, they stopped, not started, the ideologically-based murders of those they considered defective because it would save Germany a few million Reichsmarks.

This should go without saying: the Nazis wanted to kill these people, they simply couldn’t afford to. In fact, it was only in 1939, after they’d planted a war on both horizons, that Hitler could justify the expense required to expand the T-4 initiative into the concentration camps.

In short, whatever Obama’s policy will be, if it is, as this protester claims, designed to reduce the national deficit, it won’t resemble Aktion T-4 one whit. Moreover, the category of lebensunwertes Leben wasn’t limited to those with mental or physical handicaps as we currently understand them: opponents of Nazi policy were routinely deemed to be insane and euthanized, meaning that so long as this protester and those like her are free to berate Barney Frank with patent nonsense, Godwin’s Law is still in full effect.

(x-posted.)

Asterios Polyp

Stop what you're doing right now and click on this link.  I can wait. 

Back?  Good. 

Now go buy it.  

I'll have a comprehensive review of it completed whenever I locate my scanner, because explaining how the book works requires you see the interplay between David Mazzucchelli's words and hyper-stylized artwork.  (I know this is always the case, but you clicked on that link, didn't you?  So you can see that it's even more the case here.)

For those unfamiliar with Mazzucchelli, he illustrated Paul Auster's City of Glass [.pdf] as well as Frank Miller's Batman: Year One.  High quality material, that is, but nothing that hinted he was capable of something like Asterios Polyp. 

Precisely the disappointment we were prepared to feel.

All the noise from the right about Obama being a not-so-crypto-socialist or communist or Marxist has had its desired effect: Obama now seems willing to drop the public option from his health care reform package. But everyone who always saw Obama for what he is—a dogged centrist who knows how to game the system—already knew that the public option would likely be off the table during the initial rounds of reform. Thoughtful folks knews that Obama would play politics—that he would float a plan far more ambitious than he could push through Congress—that his concessions would be scripted from the start, consisting of provisions that he knew to be untenable in the present political climate but which, after becoming familiar through repetition, would sound less extreme the next time they became fodder for public discussion.

Such are the dictates of his technocratic fancy.

What makes the conservative response to his policies particularly dumbfounding is that he’s flashed his incrementalist credentials numerous times—most saliently in his treatment of the GLBT issues—and yet conservatives respond like he’s always playing for the whole pot when, in fact, all his talk of high stakes is intended to distract them from the fact that he’s penny-anteing them into poorhouse. In short, conservatives are giddy because they’ve “prevented” him from winning as big as he talks even though he’s the only one leaving the table with anything in his wallet.

Tempted as I am to expand on all the apt metaphors here—deaths accomplished by a thousand cuts that produce ghosts who proudly crow about not being beheaded, or defeated generals bragging about transitory victories in a long war—but as conservatives have provided me (and Obama) with better material, I can cut to the chase. Consider what the conservative movement currently considers a win:

Suboptimal office design solutions.

One of the joys of moving into a spacious new apartment is that furniture that had been dismantled and ingloriously stuffed in a closet can rejoin the family.  Case in point: I have a La-Z-Boy Pinnacle Recliner that, for reasons of space and decor, had been broken down and forced to live in a storage closet.  But now that the wife and I have a spacious new office, it rides again:

On James Joyce, who is very important, and Jacques Derrida, who is also very important, though more to other people than myself, but nevertheless is still more representative of this blog's content than a picture of two dirty-minded Muppets.

As a few people have expressed interest (and because Inside Higher Ed chose to link here on a day in which a picture of Bert and Ernie ogling a young woman has primacy of place), I thought I'd share a bit of the soon-to-be-published essay that will knock the socks off anyone who loves James Joyce or is passionate about newspapers and tramlines. 

Of particular interest to longtime readers is the deft and not-the-least-bit-overcompensatory inclusion of Derrida halfway through the paragraph,  because when I began my graduate career, I could barely write a paragraph without dropping an Important Name; but by its end, I managed to write an entire dissertation without ever mentioning a single theorist.  If you think that last bit constitutes evidence of an overcompensation as powerful as the earlier one that drove me to lard every paragraph with one luminary or another, you probably wouldn't be wrong.  But enough about that.  Here's the excerpt:

References to [William Martin] Murphy’s tramlines bookend “Aeolus,” a chapter [in Ulysses] that structurally and thematically criticizes the workings of the Irish press.  Although the majority of the chapter occurs in and outside the Freeman’s Journal and not Murphy’s Irish Independent, the coincidence of these two industries is significant.  As in “A Painful Case,” a tramcar stoppage is recounted through a narrative structured as a newspaper article: in “A Painful Case” it was an actual article, in “Aeolus” a sequence of headlines. Importantly, the headline that prefaces the first mention of Murphy’s tramlines, and in fact the very first headline, is “IN THE HEART OF THE HIBERNIAN METROPOLIS” (7.1).  Immediately below that headline we learn that “[b]efore Nelson’s pillar trams slowed, shunted, changed trolley, started for Blackrock, Kingstown, and Dalkey, Clonskea, Rathgar, and Terenure, Palmerston Park and upper Rathmines, Sandymount Green, Rathmines, Ringsend, and Sandymount Tower, Harold’s Cross.  The hoarse Dublin United Tramway Company’s timekeeper bawled them off” (7.3-8).  In “Devant la Loi,” Derrida claims “that the power and import of the title have an essential rapport with something like the law” (132), that is, that a title has a determinative effect on the “meaning” of the text that follows it.  The title cordons the play of signification in the text below it in such a way that, despite its exclusion from the text proper, it becomes an integral part of the text.  In another Joycean anticipation of Derridean thought, the relationship of titles to texts is deconstructed in “Aeolus” (if not in the novel as a whole, as the obsession with the Homeric parallels present in each unofficially named chapter demonstrates).  The title of this first section, “IN THE HEART OF THE HIBERNIAN METROPOLIS,” literally cannot contain the text beneath it, which describes the movement of tramcars away from Nelson’s pillar towards the remoter areas of Dublin.  (In fact, the tramcars are bound for Kingston, as were those that struck Mrs. Sinico at the Sydney Parade Station, and Sandymount, where Bloom alighted from the Haddington Road line [the so-called “little Sandymount”] and Stephen from the Dalkey line.)  We may be in the heart of the Hiberian metropolis, but the tramcars are only passing through.  This undermines the connection between the metropolitanism of Dublin and Murphy’s tramlines that this title unsuccessfully attempts to forge.  The tramcars are not representative of the static heart of the Hiberian metropolis, that which is essentially Irish (whatever we take that to mean).  They represent an active interference traversing that static heart.

Not only is that a single paragraph, there are still two more sentences to go.  I would add them, but at that point I start transitioning to a discussion about adulterers, plums, and masturbation and then what would have been the point of bumping down Bert and Ernie?

Even if Obama did it (which he didn’t), at least he did it discreetly.

In a belated comment on this post, David Brewster links to a photograph he took that neatly brings the conversation back to the subject of [that other blog where they always post about Muppets]:

This image also debunks one of those vicious smears about the pair.  (This other one?  Not so much.)

The market will never know what hit it.

When I try to secure a position as a 19th Century Americanist at the MLA in December, my most prestigious publication will be about:

• James Joyce, an Irish expatriate
• the novel Ulysses, which was not published in the 19th Century
• Fredric Jameson, who is American, on imperialism in Ireland, which is not America
• Walter Benjamin, who is not American, on flânerie in France, which is also not America
• Jacques Derrida, also not American, on how titles are like the law, which is neither here nor there

I am become a bill of goods.  (Or so it seems to me.)

The New Stupid passes it on.

Conservatives are outraged that members of the Service Employees International Union were allowed to attend Representative Russ Carnahan’s town hall, but conservatives were turned away. Similarly, liberals were outraged when they were denied entry to Representative Kevin Brady’s town hall, but the ninety conservative doctors whose hospital sponsored the event were allowed in. I would link to those outraged liberals, but I invented them. While I’m sure many liberals would complain if the sponsor of an event had seats reserved for its members, I can’t find them. I can, however, find many conservatives who know that the SEIU is sponsoring these town halls, but still write that “the [SEIU] union thugs had already been quietly ushered in through the back door, and had already taken seats that were reserved for them in the front.”

They are upset, first, that the sponsor of an event reserved seats for its members; and second, that when protesters prevented members of the group that sponsored the event from reaching the seats reserved for them, the group sponsoring the event might resort to ferrying its members to their reserved seats by an alternate route. Even without the excessive italics, that much should be obvious—only it isn’t, and while the quality of mainstream political discourse has never been that high, rarely has it been this low.

My standard for quality is not based on civility so much as the that of forensic debate. The rule to which all debaters abide is, plainly but multitudinously, “Never say anything they can use against you.” If you lack the reflexivity required to know whether your words will return to haunt you, you will lose often and spectacularly. That’s why, when the stakes are high, it’s best to be attacking what you believe or defending what you don’t. Your beliefs only impair your argument, because what matters is not what you know, but what you can prove. The last thing you want to do is hand your opponent the ammunition they need to accomplish your execution. In the 1990s, mainstream conservativism understood this well enough: it distanced itself from the Foster dramatics and focused on an affirmative offensive, be it about a Contract with Certain Americans or marital infidelities.

Absurdity mattered less than strategy, because as frustrating as those absurdities were, they sat well in the stomach because we knew that they were merely strategic: the machinations of Newton Leroy Gingrich were clearly machinations, and although we could and did call the man who married his high school math teacher two days after he turned eighteen a hypocrite, we never doubted his ability to excuse our dear Aunt Sally, nor did we care how exactly he pleased her, because we understood that no matter how or where he chose to do so, he knew order of her operations—uterine surgery in ‘78, another in ‘80, and four-hundred and forty dollars a month to provide for an ailing woman, his two children, and a dry cleaning bill for one. Whether or not he ever said his wife was neither “young enough or pretty enough to be the wife of a President, and besides, she has cancer,” we never doubted that he was capable of such a calculus. He was a pure political animal, predictable, and when he spoke stupidly, he did so to inflame his enemies into breaching super-dense patches of stupid that corrupted their every communiqué: “We are approaching bluster tape,” their communications officer would relay. “Permission to canister the light and holder the cup with scrap medicine?” As soon as the words left our lips, we understood the nature of the con in which we had cast ourselves as marks.

My nightly vice (is inherent, and made of Pynchon).

It took three pages, but then he made it, and it was good (enough for government work):

He walked her down the hill to where she was parked.  Weeknights out here weren't too different from weekends, so this part of town was already all ahoot with funseekers, drinkers and surfers screaming in the alleys, dopers out on food errands, flatland guys in for a night of hustling stewardesses, flatland ladies with all-too-grounded day jobs hoping to be mistaken for stewardesses.  Uphill and invisible, traffic out on the boulevard to and from the freeway uttered tuneful exhaust phrases which went echoing out to sea, where the crews of oil tankers sliding along, hearing them, could have figured it for wildlife taking care of nighttime business on an exotic coast. (4)

Of course, I have suggestions about how to make this more Pynchonian—paragraph break before "[u]phill and invisibile"; eliminate the comma after "out to seas"; remove the indefinite article before and pluralize "exotic coast"—but for the most part, this is pure unforced transport, unlike Against the Day, which felt like Pynchon doing his damnedest Pynchon after having forgotten that he was, in fact, himself and could don the pig-suit and write:

Under a cold umbrella of naked light bulbs are gathered a crowd of Army personnel, American sailors, NAAFI girls, and German frauleins.  Fraternizing, every last one of them, shamefully, amid noise which becomes, as Muffage and Spontoon reach the edge of the gathering, a song, at whose center, with a good snootful, each arm circling a smiling and disheveled young tootsie, ruddy face under these lights gone an apopletic mauve, and leading the glee, is the same General Wivern they last saw in Pointsman's office back at Twelfth House.  From a tank car whose contents, ethanol, 75% solution, are announced in stark white stenciling along the side, spigots protrude here and there, under which an incredible number of mess cups, china mugs, coffeepots, wastebaskets, and other containers are being advanced and withdrawn.  Ukuleles, kazoos, harmonicas, and any number of makeshift metal noisemakers accompany the song, which is an innocent salute to Postwar, a hope that the end of shortages, the end of Austerity, is near[.] (593)

If I can find the time, tomorrow I'll explain the power of that "[u]phill and invisible" and describe the telescopic glory of the prose of those who fiddle with the dials, zooming in and out in an anti-willy-nilly, but who don't, as I do, sound like bad imitations of the Beats when they do it.