Acephalous

FYI, Part II

Remember Work Bird?  Well:

Get on it, people!

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.

In that moment, I knew I'd be accused of sexual harassment again.

Two of the "acquire an alternative skill set with real world application" assignments that we teach in composition are 1) how to build and manage a wiki and 2) how to compose a PowerPoint presentation that doesn't cause your audience to slit your throat or their wrists.  I combine them into a single assignment in which students choose the text they found most compelling, develop a wiki based upon its rhetorical situation (author/auteur, historical context, themes, signature features, symbols and motifs, etc.) and then share their results with the class.  On Tuesday, I stressed that their presentation must not consist of reading their wiki aloud (by virtue of emphasizing the difference in media, e.g. "How do you speak a link?") and we discussed strategies they can employ to prevent us from mass-suiciding on Thursday.

Yesterday, midway through an already engaging presentation, one of my students paused during her discussion of the contextual allusions present in her text. 

"Also," she said as she made to forward her presentation, "I think there's an allusion to tentacle porn."

The class gasped. 

Her mouse clicked.

I sat mute.  Horrified into silence.

Time dilated as we approached the horizon of this career-ending event.  I held that diphthong in "Wait!" so long it slid into a schwa.

Her mouse clicked again. 

The screen brightened and . . .

By request: my visual rhetoric course

As requested in the comments to my last post and via a couple of emails, here's a general outline of the course I teach on visual rhetoric. (If you find it interesting or just want to give me money, the book I'm co-writing with my course director should be available early next summer.) I'm more than happy to debate the merits of teaching rhetoric and argument through popular culture or the validity of any of the particular readings I put forward; however, keep in mind that those readings are presented in the classroom and, as such, are designed to be arguable instead of definitive. I want them to argue with particular statements because I'm teaching them how to argue, so there are moments (particularly in the readings of the films) that I'm deliberately wrong. Those moments will likely be obvious to you, but you're not an 18-year-old undergraduate on the short end of an institutional power imbalance who's afraid that, should they contradict me, they will fail the class, lose their scholarship and spend their days toiling away in the service industries.

That said, here are links to the analytic portion of the course:

1. I introduce them to the idea of the overdetermined image, because nothing is accidental in an Alan Moore script.*
2.  Nor, for that matter, is anything accidental when it costs $80,000 per second to film it, which is why we then discuss how Christopher Nolan turns Batman into classic horror monster in Batman Begins. The point here is get them fluent in the language of film, so that they might make arguments about how directors manipulate the camera in order to appeal to the audience. (We also discuss what is and isn't in the diegetic space, e.g. music, which is heard by the audience but not the characters.)
3. Then it's on to The Dark Knight. That link goes to a reading of the interrogation scene; this one leads you to a similarly thorough analysis dedicated to proving the controversial thesis that Batman is really fast—because demonstrating that even the simplest of claims require evidence and careful argument to be taken seriously is the point of the course.
4. Now that they're relatively fluent in the language of film, we try to prove something a little more complex; namely, that Superman Returns is very much about 9/11. First, I take them back to September morning; then we analyze the action sequence that's about planes slamming into NYC landmarks, lest they think I'm reading too much into the anxieties the film taps into.
5. Now that they're comfortable with film, I get them to apply that knowledge to comics via the comic that's about the conventions of comics and is therefore utterly unfilmable, Watchmen. I begin by reminding them of the overdetermined nature of the image, then we discuss panel transitions and word-picture relation, move on layout and narrative flow, then I try to prove what I stated in the second sentence about Watchmen being a meta-comic. My argument's deliberately argumentative, because Dr. Manhattan can also function as a figure of the reader as well the author, but that's an argument I want to have. From there, it's onto the unfilmable film itself.
6. Now that they can break film and comics into their constituent parts, I re-orient them in an explicitly rhetorical direction. We talk about the rhetorical situation, which is, of course, a triangle. (For the record: that silliness is me teaching myself to manipulate images in Photoshop for my book on teaching visual rhetoric.) Then we situate the rhetorical context in the historical context via Warren Ellis's Planetary/Batman: Night on Earth.
7. From there on out, it's all about the writing.  I teach them about paragraph burgers, which, while silly, is the single most effective means I've found to teach paragraph structure. Students intuitively understand that you don't call a pickle with and a piece of a cheese a "hamburger." For the remainder of the quarter, we use the tools from the beginning of the course to make sophisticated arguments about the rhetorical stakes of what they'd otherwise dismiss as pop culture ephemera. 

*I've never written up my notes on getting them to think about structure via punchlines, which begins, not surprisingly, here with The Killing Joke. The gist of it is that jokes don’t work if you only provide the punchline, which is my way of introducing them to the notion of process: this shot in a film or panel in a comic or argument in an essay only works as a punchline if the joke's been properly set up. Basically, I try to get them to think about argument in terms they intuitively understand.

On the style of Octavia Butler's Patternist novels

People routinely slam the prose styling of Octavia Butler (as I would demonstrate with citations and quotations were the new TypePad editor not so averse to material copied from OpenOffice documents), but reading the Patternist novels according to the chronology internal to them has me appreciating the gentle relentlessness of her prose.  However, sometimes I think the critics have a point:

"What does the white animal follow?" asked Anyanwu's grandson loudly enough for Doro to hear.  "What has he to do with us now?"

"My master must pay him for you," said Anyanwu's grandson loudly enough for Doro to hear.  "What has he to do with us now?"

"My master must pay him for you," said Anyanwu.  (Wild Seed 41)

That just scans something awful.  In all seriousness, though, rarely is the reason behind an editorial error so obvious or so indicative of an author's stylistic tics.  In Wild Seed, Butler wed her characters to her prose, such that the latter's stolidity became evidence of the former's hard-fought restraint.  (It is, after all, a novel about two people who spend their unnaturally long lives finding excuses not to murder each other.)  She did so deliberately because, at this point in her career, she could.  The novels were published in this order: Patternmaster (1976), Mind of My Mind (1977), Survivor (1978), Wild Seed (1980), Clay's Ark (1984); but they move through narrative time in this one: Wild Seed (1980), Mind of My Mind (1977), Clay's Ark (1984), Survivor (1978), Patternmaster (1976).

I'll discuss how her interest in evolution is, fundamentally, a narrative one (and in so doing, discuss how this interest's inherent in all evolutionarily-inflected narratives, including Darwin's) at some point in the near future.  For the moment, what fascinates me is how the elder Butler crafts the prose of the later novels in such a way that it "develops" into the style of the earliest one (Patternmaster).  Were she actually a Dickian hack ("sophisticated ideas communicated in pedestrian prose," as Consensus Q. Amalgam would have it), such a feat would be beyond her; but comparing the occasionally dense and ornate prose in Wild Seed (which shares formal concerns and historical content with 1979's Kindred) to the more direct, straightforward prose of Clay's Ark—written nearly half a decade later—it is difficult to imagine that the latter's resemblance to Patternmaster is anything other than intentional.  When she was young, she couldn't help but write of the future in spare and quotidian manner; but by 1984, she could adopt a transitional voice, something that approximates in complexity the difference between 1977's Mind of My Mind and 1976's Patternmaster. 

While it may seem odd to call attention to the refinement of her narrative voice, it is essential to understanding the refinement of the thought processes it develops alongside: the series is unusual in that, as Butler said, she invented a society that was conceptually fascinating, but instead of going on to invent another, she became interested in how that one could possibly have come to be.  The fact that eugenics and alien invasion were, for her, the answer is troubling, but I'll leave the how and why of that for a later post. 

Exactly how long is a "coming year"?

I only ask because this plus this could make for quite the combination.

A New Literary History of the United States in Literature

The publication of A New Literary History of the United States will likely strike a few chords familiar to the participants in the debate that followed Rohan’s latest post.  Written neither in the Emory Elliot mode—a history of items both literary and American—nor that of Sacvan Bercovitch—a history all items written by Americans that can be yours for the low, low price of $299.29—editors Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors instead decided to write a cultural history of the United States in a self-consciously literary voice.  As Laura Miller at Salon* writes, the two

have pitched the biggest tent conceivable, pegging each of the chronologically arranged essays in the book to “points in time and imagination where something changed: when a new idea or a new form came into being, when new questions were raised, when what before seemed impossible came to seem necessary or inevitable.” With this in mind, they’ve produced a compendium that is neither reference nor criticism, neither history nor treatise, but a genre-defying, transcendent fusion of them all. It sounds impossible, but the result seems both inevitable and necessary and profoundly welcome, too.

This is, then, an anthology seemingly written to drive J.C. Hallman to drink, because it doggedly focuses on cultural significance over the literariness of the literary.  However soul-deadening he might consider its subject matter, the manner in which most of it is written would likely meet with approval.  Though idea-driven, the prose in Jonathan Lethem’s entry on Thomas Edison—in which he exclusively discusses the inventor’s place in film history—still sings: 

Concerning the murder in Verano Place last night.

"YOU ARE NOT TO BE BREAKING UP WITH ME IN A PARKING LOT," he shouted.  She means what the fuck. 

Graduate school, it goes without saying, is a stressful time.  You spend every waking hour toiling away in a hyper-competitive environment.  There is no opportunity to relax because there are no weekends.  Holidays are an excuse to do the work your adviser mistakenly believes you already turned in.  There are always grant applications and dissertation chapters to be written.  You would drown your sorrows, but your university offers you a monthly stipend that is only seven dollars more than the rent in university housing and three bottles of two-buck chuck only go so far.  There are conference presentations to write and student papers to grade.  Because your stipend barely covers the rent, in addition to everything the university requires of you, there are commitments to other employers to be met.  

Domestic disturbances in graduate student housing are a common enough occurrence.  In addition to the two linked above are the many more I never wrote about: the argument on the landing that ended with a woman on the ground slipping in and out of consciousness, or the Indian couple on the ground floor whose fights began with the slamming of things and bodies and ended with a woman sobbing out an open window.

Even knowing all that, the murder in UCI's graduate student housing community last night still shocked me:

 

That's not my old apartment building—mine is immediately to the left.  I'm not sure what else to say.  Now is not the time to be making larger sociological arguments about income and violence.  But there is something to be said about it.  For the moment, I'll conclude by offering my condolences to the families and friends of Rebecca Benedict.

This is not how I learned how to learn.

Despite having sidestepped into specializing in rhetoric of the visual ilk, I'm a profoundly nonvisual thinker—meaning I work best when surrounded by sloppily piled, outrageously annotated books—so when I see someone I'm married to organize her thoughts into maps of obscene complexity, I'm baffled as to how they might be useful to her.  For example:

Were I to try to write alongside that, I simply wouldn't.  There'd be much in the way of wide-eyed staring and incipient panic, but as for words and prose, the former'd only be mangled into the latter with great violence.

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.

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.

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.

Thanks to Adam Roberts, even academics writing books about comics are insufferable elitists.

If you hadn’t noticed, one of my esteemed co-bloggers recently exploded the internet, such that people are saying things like:

Oh, I see. Popular is bad. Common feeling among self-defined elites.

That would be Kevin Standlee, responding to Rich Puchalsky and I on one of Adam Robert’s many other blogs.  The three of us are, in Standlee’s estimation, elitists who hate science fiction:

Oh, I see, you’re saying that anyone who likes SF is stupid.

Those words were written in response to a post that argues:

[T]he very heart’s-blood of literature is to draw people out of their comfort zone; to challenge and stimulate them, to wake and shake them; to present them with the new, and the unnerving, and the mind-blowing. And if this true of literature, it is doubly or trebly true of science fiction. For what is the point of science fiction if not to articulate the new, the wondrous, the mindblowing and the strange?

I would frame that argument differently: when I read science fiction, I want to replicate the wonder my nine-year-old self experienced when he first read Frederik Pohl’s Gateway.  I had never considered the possibility that the universe might be littered with the archeological remains of civilizations snuffed out before the proto-pre-dawn of human history.  The thought of it was so sublime that, a decade later, I watched five seasons of Babylon 5 trying to recapture it.  Not that I’ve stopped, mind you, but when you consider the sheer volume of science fiction I’ve consumed in the twenty years since I read Gateway, I think you can see why that experience is increasingly illusive: more often than not, what I read contains ideas I’ve already encountered, so the only avenue to awe is through the quality of execution.  There are exceptions—Perdido Street Station being the one example, Adam’s conceptually audacious novels being another—but they merely apply meat to Adam’s claim that the nominees for the 2009 Hugo Awards fail to engender what proper science fiction should; namely, Schopenhauer’s sublime: 

The telos of the back cover

I can imagine no more frustrating a reading experience than the one I just had with Iain M. Banks' Excession.  Is it a great novel? 

I don't know. 

Is it a good novel? 

I don't know. 

Why don't I know?

Because I didn't—because I couldn't—read the novel on its own terms.  I spent the entire time awaiting the arrival of a plot that never materialized.  Why did I do that? 

Because of the back cover:

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.

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.)

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.)

After G.I. Joe decided to take him down, his decline was swift. By Tuesday, he was on the phone telling a stranger to "Choke on [his] . . . !"

It was a quiet Sunday afternoon when I became an enemy of the state.  I was doing laundry, as you do, and was carrying a load of towels up three flights of stairs when suddenly the landing turned all "GO JOE!"  As I crushed Snake Eyes Eyes with my left foot and tumbled head first into a hamper of clean towels, I thought to myself, "If you're going to fall head first into something, you could do a lot worse than towels fresh from the dryer."  My head was safe, but with his dying breath, that wee plastic Snake Eyes rolled over and took my ankle with him.  I scream into clean laundry as my ankle pivots in ways God never intended. 

Knowing that I have to teach on Tuesday, on Monday I contact the people with the little carts and ask for a lift to class.  "No problem," a helpful person tells me.  "That's what we're here for," she says.  She takes down some information and assures me we're all set.  Someone will be at my place shortly before 7:00 a.m. to pick me up and take me class.  Fast forward to Tuesday morning.

SEK:  (looking at his watch)  I'm ten minutes early.  Nothing can possibly go wrong.  (ten minutes pass)  Probably just running a little late.  (five more minutes pass)  Maybe I should call to check up.

PERSON WHO ANSWERS THE PHONE:  What?

SEK:  I'm calling about a ride to campus.  Someone was supposed to pick me up so I could teach.  (shuffling sounds can be heard)

DIFFERENT PERSON:  Can I help you with something?

SEK:  I'm calling about a ride to campus.  Someone was supposed to pick me up so I could teach.

DIFFERENT PERSON:  Right.  We can't do that.

SEK:  You can't do that? 

DIFFERENT PERSON:  Right.  We need a doctor's note and you didn't provide one.

SEK:  I'm seeing the doctor tomorrow.  I can bring a note in afterwards.

DIFFERENT PERSON:  Right.  That's not how it works here. 

SEK:  So how am I supposed to get to class?

DIFFERENT PERSON:  You live on campus.  Why not just walk?

SEK:  (rage)  If I could walk, I wouldn't have requested your services.

DIFFERENT PERSON:  Right.  We can't do that for you.  (the shuffling sounds associated with hanging up a phone can be heard)

SEK:  (Rage)  Better don't hang up on me.  (more shuffling)  How am I supposed to teach today if I can't get to class?

DIFFERENT PERSON:  Like I already said, you live on campus.  Just walk.

SEK:  (RAGE)  And like I already said, if I could fucking walk, I wouldn't have requested your fucking services.

DIFFERENT PERSON:  There's really no need to say "fuck," sir.

SEK:  CHOKE ON MY FUCK, ASSHOLE!

The upside is that I solved one of life's little mysteries: every quarter I teach the Warren Ellis piece linked there, and every quarter I'm rebaffled by that expression. 

I'm baffled no more. 

But you know what the best part is?  Guess what I see as I slowly limp my way to class?  A group of guys in a fraternity using one of those carts to haul around one of their gigantic Greek letters. 

I take requests: "Remember that post you wrote about playing in the outfield and writing a dissertation? I'd love to read it again, now that I'm a week away from filing my dissertation."

(Considering the alternatives, I love the fact that this post is the one I might be remembered for.  As I noted at the time, I'd had this half-written for ages but never could quite finish it.  This post is as close to naked as I get—so much so I deleted it two seconds after I'd posted it before reversing course.  I've received emails thanking me for this post from struggling grad students in chemistry, physics, political science, geography, geology, English, Spanish, French, Russian, education, mathematics, astrophysics, statistics, philosophy, biology, molecular chemistry, history of consciousness, and dance departments.  It is, as the person who requested I repost it tonight said, an academic version of "You Are Not Alone," which would be much more awesome if it didn't analogize me into Michael Jackson.  That said, I'm more than happy to oblige this request, and apologize for the overlong introduction.  But before I get to the post itself, I should say that [1] the reason my interlocutor couldn't find this post is because my category for all things baseball is the Spanish "béisbol," and [2] if you read my post without reading Wally's comment, you've done yourself a disservice.)