Acephalous

Adam Roberts' Yellow Blue Tibia

Let me begin by agreeing with Kim Stanley Robinson: 

[T]his year the [Booker] prize should probably go to a science fiction comedy called Yellow Blue Tibia, by Adam Roberts.

I say this not because Adam's a personal friend (although he is), and not because I've edited some of his other novels (although I have), but because it actually is the most intriguing novel I've read this year. Admittedly, I can't say whether it's the best novel published in 2009, because I only read three novels published this year (The City and the City, Inherent Vice, and Asterios Polyp), so I'm limited to saying that Yellow Blue Tibia merely outpaces the latest by Mieville and Pynchon, as well as David Mazzucchelli's decade-in-the-making masterpiece. A quick plot summary before moving on to what makes the book sing.

In 1946, Josef Stalin ordered Konstantin Skvorecky, Ivan Frenkel, and a few other Russian science fiction writers to create a new threat against which the Soviet people could unite (as they had against Germany). They concoct a plot in which invisible radiation aliens invade the U.S.S.R., but it opens when "The Americans launch a rocket to explore space [and the] aliens destroy it with a beam of focused destructive radiation ... Then the aliens blow up a portion of the Ukraine, and poison the ground with radiation" (25). Before they can sketch the invasion out in greater detail, Stalin disbands the group. Years pass. Frenkel accidentally reconnects with Skvorecky shortly before the Challenger disaster. The plan they concocted for Stalin seems to be coming true. Skvorecky, a translator, meets two American scientologists and a Muscovite taxi driver named Ivan Saltykov. There is a murder. Someone or something threatens Chernobyl. Love happens.

That is not, I grant, the most conventional summary of the novel—if they're more your bag you can try here, here or here, or if you're feeling more adventurous, here—but for me to say more would not despoil the novel so much as ruin the pleasure afforded by Adam's narrative gamesmanship. I'm more than happy to spoil a simple plot point, but I would prefer to avoid ruining the interpretive tension created by the contradictory accounts of those simple plot points. Were I to concretize any one of them, I would not only be usurping the role of a character within the novel, I would be reproducing the book's ingenious structural conceit.

Unlike a A Scanner Darkly, in which conflicting realities are focalized through the muddle of drug-induced paranoia, the narrator of Yellow Blue Tibia is fully aware that he lives in a world structured by other people's understanding of reality. From the obsessive-compulsive taxi driver, Ivan Saltykov, who returns to the scene of the crime because he must retrace his path exactly, to the UFO enthusiasts who mistake Skvorecky's denial of the existence of extraterrestrials for an exercise in dialectical thinking, the characters in the novel influence the narrative less through their actions than their rationale for engaging in them. Dramatic irony is both deployed and undermined, resulting in a comedy of ideological errors that ranges from the subversively slapstick (Krapp's Last Tape as performed by an inept Moscow detective) to the deeply structural (the evisceration of Scientology's theoretical and psychology underpinnings).

But, because I'm a blogger and bloggers are narcissists, I want to call attention to the rude portrait Adam drew of me in the novel. In a comment attached to a post from 2005 that has since been rescinded—it was a little too revealing about someone in my department and thus fell into the category of material I wrote as "A. Cephalous" that's not suitable for publication under my own name—Adam posted a link to what he referred to as "a portrait of Mr. Non-Capo." Five years later, he included in Yellow Blue Tibia the following:

The lift door creaked open, and a fantastically shrunken and wrinkled old woman shuffled out, carrying a string bag bulging with provisions. Her head was located in the space directly in front of her torso, as if her neck fitted into the centre of her sternum rather than between her shoulders[.]

Make of that what you will. I choose to be offended. Offended!

FYI, Part II

Remember Work Bird?  Well:

Get on it, people!

RE: Racism and Race-baiting

Update. If you came from over here, you need to note two things: first, that Patrick's only talking about the title of my post, which is odd, because in the body of the post the sarcasm of the title becomes absolutely clear.  So clear, the clarification below is really only for people who only read the title of my original post. Second, Patrick completely ignores the argument of both the original post and this one.  Make what you will of his silence as regards anything other than the sarcastic title of the original post.

Update 2. My oh my, but is Jeff Goldstein an idiot.  He believes that this post is a response not to the post linked to and discussed at length in it, but to something Darleen wrote.  (I suppose he doesn't know what "a side note" is.)  Also, in another bit of proof of him having quit me, he stops posting get-rich-quick schemes and writes a diatribe against someone or other.  (No link, though, to avoid generating an automatic trackback.) 

Via an email conversation, it's come to my attention that if you only read the title of this post, you'd come away with the impression that I was slagging Ed Morrissey for race-baiting.  Because that charge is so loaded, I want to make it absolutely clear that I wasn't.  As the body of the post makes plain, I was pointing out that conservative bloggers are in the unenviable position of race-baiting by default, because no matter what grounds they criticize Obama on, a vocal portion of their commentariat will respond with unveiled racism. 

The example in that post was how a debate over the definition of "diagnosis" devolved into 1) a series of racially-charged remarks about the appearance of Michelle Obama, and 2) a series of complaints that such remarks were being deleted by a moderator eager to distance himself from the racism of his readers. 

By virtue of the fact that anything Ed Morrissey and his ilk write will bait racists into revealing themselves in the comments, every post of his is race-baiting.  I mean that not as a condemnation of Morrissey, but of the vocal subsect of the conservative commentariat who force writers like Morrissey into the unenviable position of race-baiting by default.  Were I forced into a situation in which every word I wrote required a strongly-worded caveat about not responding like a racist, I'm not sure what I do (or even if I could continue to write). 

It goes without saying that not every critique of the administration is racially motivated.  Nor am I even saying that every critique made by openly racist groups is racially motivated—a devout klansman might object to the stimulus on sound philosophical principle—but I am saying that a swath of the conservative commentariat is increasingly annoyed that other conservatives are muzzling their brazenly recidivist reasons for criticizing the current administration. 

On a side note, I found a video of Darleen Click and William Jacobson refuting my previous posts on race:

Can I compel people to commit suicide?

(Because I can't seem to stop automatic trackbacks from automatically tracking back anymore, the answer to that question can be found in the comments.)

William A. Jacobson likes making my points for me.

Which is unfortunate, because I'm about to call him illiterate. He claims that I argued that Sarah Palin and her supporters are "racist because there were so few non-whites pictured in the available photos." I did nothing of the sort. My claim, as you can tell by the words I used to write it, was that the "images she and her people have decided should represent her mass-appeal on a mock-presidential bid launch" demonstrates that "her own handlers consider her appeal limited to white people." I even emphasized that first statement in the post, which as we all know is the online equivalent of burying it under a rock behind the fire-pit in someone else's backyard. ("Officer, you can search my property, absolutely, but I assure you that you won't find any claims here.") You would think that a law professor would be able to recognize an argument when he saw one, but apparently not, which is why he provides evidence that bolsters mine. He quotes a reporter from MSNBC:

"I can tell you this crowd today was very, very diverse, a lot of people from different races, ages, all coming to see Palin and wanting get a glimpse of who this lady is that says that she's going rogue."

If this is true—and for the moment, I grant that it is—then Palin and her handlers are deliberately not posting pictures of the many non-white people who attend her events. That, Mr. Jacobson, is the sort of evidence that someone like me would use in support of my claim that the pictures posted to her page are designed to appeal to a specific audience. Because I don't trust you with logic, I will draw the obvious inference for you: Palin's people are excluding photographs of the non-white people who attend her appearances because those photographs aren't intended to appeal to a non-white audience.

Which was my original point.

You do realize that you're helping me out here, Mr. Jacobson, don't you?

He also claims that I "maliciously and falsely referred to one conservative blogger as a 'noted racist.'" But—no doubt for some reason other than it demonstrates that Riehl's a racist—he doesn't reproduce the link that I included to a post demonstrating that Riehl is, in fact, a racist. He also makes the classic debating mistake of assuming facts not in evidence when he claims that I only did so "because this is the internet, and no one is held accountable," his assumption being that were I to meet Riehl on the street, I wouldn't call him a racist. Of course, being that these words are also on the internet, I can't prove to his satisfaction that I wouldn't; however, in a different context, he would point out the fact that because I'm an academic who hangs out with folks like this, I spend all day calling everybody I pass on the street a racist, and since Riehl belongs to that category—how about a little freshman logic, Mr. Jacobson?

SEK calls all people who are on the street a racist.
Dan Riehl is a person on the street.
Therefore, SEK calls Dan Riehl a racist.

I would say that syllogism puts him in a bind, but I think we can safely assume that someone who believed my earlier posts were intended "to smear the crowds at Palin book signings" probably never took freshman logic, and thus isn't even aware that he's in one.

Gobble? Gobble gobble; or, gobble gobble gobble.

Gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble, gobble gobble gobble gobble.[1]  Gobble gobble gobble gobble—gobble  gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble—gobble  gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble.  Gobble gobble gobble, gobble  gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble.  Gobble gobble, gobble gobble:

Gobble gobble gobble gobble  gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble.  Gobble gobble gobble.  Gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble, gobble  gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble  gobble gobble gobble.  Gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble,  gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble. [2]

Gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble.  Gobble gobble gobble: gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble.  Gobble gobble gobble gobble.  Gobble, gobble gobble, gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble.  Gobble  gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble;  gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble,  gobble gobble.   Gobble  gobble gobble gobble,  gobble gobble gobble.

[1] Gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble, gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble.  Gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble.  Gobble gobble. 

[2] Gobble gobble gobble.

You only notice I'm white because you're a racist, Part II

Instead of playing "Count the Non-White People!" with Sarah Palin's photographs of her appearance at Fort Bragg, I will present some statistics about the base and surrounding community:

If you don't take the shovels away from those racists, they'll never quit digging.

Should you like more proof of the dynamic I described in the previous post, you can find it (and my substantial response to it) here.

You only notice I'm white because you're a racist.

In the comments to a long, inaccurate attack on those who consider Palin evidence that the conservative movement is trending stupid, Darleen Click claims that those who point out the extreme whiteness of Palin supporters "reveal a great more about [themselves] than Palin." Because such people notice race at all, they're insufficiently colorblind and therefore more racist than Click, who merely advocates creating and maintaining structural inequalities that disproportionately affect people who just happen to not be white.

Set aside for a moment the fact that Click labors under the delusion that noticing people of color is more racist than harming them and remember that 1) the figure she defends, Sarah Palin, is using her publicity tour as a prelude to a 2012 presidential bid launch, and 2) candidate Palin is posting photographs of the people she meets on her Facebook page, meaning that these are not images produced by a liberal media elite out to make her look like her appeal is limited to white people but images she and her people have decided should represent her mass-appeal on a mock-presidential bid launch. Time to play "Count the Non-White People"!

Manga recommendations, anyone?

Because it makes little sense to write a book about visual rhetoric and ignore the fastest growing sector of the market, but as my reading experience follows the typical trajectory of Claremont X-Titles (X-X?) to Sandman and Vertigo books to Fantagraphics lust, my experience with manga comes almost exclusively from some mid-90s flirtation with Ghost in the Shell.  I know about manga and its many varieties, but I lack the sort of fluency with its conventions that I have with American mainstream and independent books.  My question to you is this:

What should I read to acquire a robust, intuitive working vocabulary with manga?

"And there still would have been the Holocaust..."

Few write on the history of evolutionary theory as compellingly as John Wilkins. (Had his Species: the History of an Idea and Defining Species: a Sourcebook from Antiquity to Today been available in 2002, I could've avoided years of thankless legwork and finished my dissertation with normative time to spare. Not that I'm bitter.) So I can think of no better way to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the publication of the Origin than to listen to Wilkins speculate about what would have happened had it never existed. My only qualm is with this paragraph:

Lamarckism, by which I mean the progressivist view of evolution, not the “acquired inheritance” version that has little to do directly with Lamarck and anyway is set up as a contrast with Weismann not Darwin, would have played an even greater role in people’s thinking than it did. It may still be with us now—we would be trying to figure out how progress occurs out of necessity, rather than it being the rather odd view of people like Conway Morris.

I think scholars who focus more on the scientific literature underestimate the popular appeal of what amounts to quasi-Lamarckian thought both then and now ... but then again, as I'm the person who wrote my dissertation, I would.

You don't need to know what the science means to establish what the words mean to scientists.

Global warming skeptics are attacking climate scientist Phil Jones for encouraging trickery in an email recently stolen off the webmail server at the University of East Anglia in which he wrote:

I've just completed Mike's Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline.

Over at RealClimate, the skeptical response to the word "trick" is to treat it as a colloquial:

Literal Symbolism: The Commonsense Conservative History of American Idiocy, from Reagan to the Politics of Nonsense

The following exchange between Bill O'Reilly and Sarah Palin would, were we talking about any other politician, mark the end of a career. The emphasis is mine:

Truly, academics live enviable lives.

Proffer theories as to the avocation I undertook presently. You guessed it! I spent the day marking papers, which, means I had, many reminders of why teaching Writingstudents, even at the Universitylevel, can make even the most mild-mannered academic want to JAB IN EYES JAB IN EYES.

(Actual posts to recommence when the noises in my head resemble English more than English as she is spoke.)

ALSO: Because it's always best to make this plain from the beginning [SEK says to the readers at LGM], on the issue of whether my students know what I'm writing:

With the exception of the text adventure, [what I post is] written to be used in class, then repurposed for the blog. I show them videos of Shatner and ask them if that's what they want to sound like; I have them write blog posts (for their course blogs) in which they're required to substitute every noun and verb with suggestions from Microsoft Word's thesaurus, etc. Whenever I write about conversations in the classroom (for example), I ask the students if they're alright with that ... and as I'm typically the butt of those posts, they always are. In fact, by the end of the quarter, they're actually demanding I write up what happened in a given class (for example). Even the most notorious bit of student writing I've parodied was done with the student's consent. (It was years ago, and he wrote me out of the blue to apologize for writing it.)

How big is too big? Let me tell you.

My old monitor was issuing death rattles—taking three days to turn on without flickering and the like—so with the money you people so generously provided by buying stuff I recommend from Amazon, I purchased a new one under the impression that it was the same size as my current one. 

It is not. 

It is oppressively large. 

It looms over me. 

I moved it further back on the desk and am slouching in my chair not because I have good eyes and bad posture, but because I am frightened by the monstrosity in front of me.  I can now fit three formerly maximized windows on my screen at the same time, or (and this might not be a bad thing), maximize a single window and become more creative through the power of bilateral symmetry. 

Shpadoinkle! Sarah Palin endorses cannibalism.

From the NRO's new shrine to Sarah Palin:

If any vegans came over for dinner, I could whip them up a salad, then explain my philosophy on being a carnivore: If God had not intended for us to eat animals, how come He made them out of meat?

Because He wanted everyone to have a shpadoinkle day? More seriously, Palin is calling Him a rank hypocrite, because He also said "You must not eat bats" and yet he made them out of meat.

Ignorance of the Original Testament hypocrisy is, I admit, the easiest hypocrisy to spot, but it's the least effective to mock on account of its profundity. If someone were to inform Palin that her beloved moose aren't kosher because they weren't properly shekhted and porged, she'd complain about "gotcha journalism" and question your love of America on account of her profound ignorance of the book she claims to live her life by.

Fortunately for semi-professional mockers such as myself, Palin set the standard demonstrably lower by claiming that God intended humans to eat anything made out of meat.

The Dwight D. Eisenhower Bowing Hour!

(Apparently TypePad timed out and didn't post this yesterday, in case you're wondering why it only went up now.)

Seems someone forgot to tell Ike what everyone on the right knows (but oddly never cites a source for): the President never ever bows. Because as even a cursory search of the AP Image archive indicates, the man could not stop bowing. Hello there, Pope John XXIII!

Once upon a time, her crazy had more bite.

As I'm catching flack from, among others, two of the three co-panelists from my MLA panel on academic blogging concerning the title to my Camille Paglia post, I feel the need to have Molly Ivins clarify it for me (courtesy of Ahistoricality) :

You think perhaps this is a cheap shot, that I have searched her work and caught Ms. Paglia in a rare moment of sweeping generalization, easy to make fun of? Au contraire, as we always say in Amarillo; the sweeping generalization is her signature. In fact, her work consists of damn little else. She is the queen of the categorical statement.

There was a period in which Paglia could be counted on to be write with force and clarity, i.e. before she began writing disorganized columns brimming over with self-aggrandizing allusions and mindless repetitions of right-wing talking-points. In 1991, she even possessed prescience enough to predict her own rightward drift:

[I]f people are trying to critique from within the academic establishment, and they're getting tarred with the word "neoconservative," you keep on doing that long enough, people will get used to hearing it about themselves, and they will become conservative.

Case in point: Camille Paglia. Did her ready-made anti-feminist statements predispose her to drifting so? Without a doubt. Were her arguments about the inability of woman to create truly great art always as absurd as they seem now? Absolutely. However, she would not have become the media sensation she was in the early '90s had she not packaged her faux-feminist critiques in a language understandable to the general intellectual culture. There were (and are) many anti-feminst thinkers who rivaled Paglia in virulence but not prominence, and the point of my title was that she now resembles those muted, vainglorious misogynists more than the contrarian firebrand she once was.

"These trials will be a stunning blow to the rugged image of the abstract American."

Until recently, the phrase "transnational Left" only appeared in print every once in a while (and then only in articles that also granted the existence of global Jewish banking conspiracies). Lately, it seems impossible to read an article by a mainstream conservative that doesn't assume Obama is a figurehead for this amorphous child of the First International. For example, the very serious Blane McDonnagh Andrew McCarthy argues that Obama's decision to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in accordance with the laws of the land

will provide endless fodder for the transnational Left to press its case that actions taken in America's defense are violations of international law that must be addressed by foreign courts. And the intelligence bounty will make our enemies more efficient at killing us.

Obama and Holder are not trying to reestablish the rule of law, they are engaged in a game of political chicken with their real constituents (the transnational Left) and, because they blinked, they owe a tribute of American lives to their overseas masters. The problem with such paranoid stylings is that 1) Mohammed and his compatriots were tortured and 2) the entire world already knows that. What can these men say against the United States that hasn't already been published by international news syndicates?

These trials will not be a farce intended to give the bogeyman that is the transnational Left the leverage it needs to prosecute the previous administration. Former Presidents are only kidnapped and tried overseas in spy novels and Chile, and I doubt conservatives want their icons compared to Pinochet. Central to this deluded argument is the notion that the current administration would prosecute these terrorists for reasons other than being terrorists:

[T]he great hope of the terror-backing neo-communist left, at home and worldwide, is that the Obama administration will continue to build a case for torture trials for former Bush administration officials.

Suffice it to say that when a professor of political science conflates American liberals and most of the rest of the world with communist revolutionaries, he should be taken very seriously, especially when said professor happens to be "an umatched competitor whose tactical elan would make Machiavelli proud." Because a political science professor who compares himself to the colloquial mascot* for the scorched earth method of maintaining political power is exactly the sort of person who would never argue in bad faith were it expedient ... except when the professor in question is Donald Douglas, in which case it's best to assume he's a tendentious braggart.

Simply put, there is no singular "terror-backing neo-communist left" that the administration seeks to appease with these trials, and those who claims otherwise are being disingenuous in the service of a small-minded version of what constitutes "American interests." Rehabilitating our reputation as a just arbiter in world affairs might compromise the masculinity of the American brand, but it'll also make the world a safer place for living, breathing Americans.

*Machiavelli was a far more interesting figure than his contemporary caricature would suggest. See the section on authorial duplicity and The Prince in Gale Carrithers and James Hardy's Milton and the Hermeneutic Journey for more on that.

Dan Riehl? Still a racist, only now a homophobic one.

Last month, I documented Dan Riehl's reaction to the perceived threat posed to him by, in his words, "pretty young, not that big [black] kids" who never confronted him. He responded, as conservatives of his stripe do, with some juvenile homophobic "humor." Point being, because I'm not inclined to give demonstrably puerile racists the benefit of the doubt, you can imagine my reaction when I read the following in his recent post about ACORN:

Breitbart's video busts told us what they do best. The pathetic part in all this is that they were not just allowed, but encouraged to run wild on taxpayer funding by corrupt liberals, including Obama. They should all hang together if you ask me. How long will it be before corrupt Democrats find a way to back door them the money? I bet they're accustomed to the back door. Maybe Barney Frank should spearhead the effort?

In the two short sentences I emphasized, Riehl manages to 1) invoke the language of lynching against the first black President and a predominantly black organization, and 2) equate illegal activity with the sexual practices of homosexual men. He will protest that the latter doesn't make him a homophobe (despite the overt association of homosexual sex with a criminal act) any more than his call for a metaphorical posse to host a metaphorical lynching is evidence of racism. He will be wrong: the fact that the first metaphor that occurs to him when criticizing blacks is a hanging party tells us that when he disagrees with blacks, he couches his disagreement in terms of stretched necks and strangled bodies. People for whom that is an instinctive response are people who are racists. Therefore ...