Acephalous

Once upon a time Camille Paglia could be counted on to write with force and clarity.

That time has passed:

The solipsistic members of Congress want us peons to be ground up in the communal machine, while they themselves gambol on in the flowering meadow of their own lavish federal health plan.

Jack London would have looked at that sentence and deemed it overwrought. Then he would've reconsidered, thrown in a few King James-quoting cavemen and declared it a masterpiece. But Jack London was not a serious scholar like Paglia, who proves her seriousness by paraphrasing Palin:

The brutal abandonment of the elderly here is unconscionable.

Death panels! Her keen attention to the language of a bill that, at the time, did not yet exist served her well. But if there's one thing we can count on from Paglia, it's that she pays attention to her prose:

One would have expected a Democratic proposal to include an expansion of Medicare, certainly not its gutting. The passive acquiescence of liberal commentators to this vandalism simply demonstrates how partisan ideology ultimately desensitizes the mind.

If "gutting" is the new "vandalism," does that mean taggers are now murdering or murderers are now tagging? I only ask because a scholar of Paglia's self-professed stature would never mix a metaphor or lazily appropriate the language of someone whose partisan ideology ultimately desensitized his mind?

Obama has dithered for months about a strategy for Afghanistan.

Dick Cheney? Really? Besides, weren't we talking about health care?

On other matters, I was recently flicking my car radio dial and heard an affected British voice tinkling out on NPR.

Apparently not.

On science, Dawkins was spot on—lively and nimble. But on religion, his voice went "Psycho" weird—as if he was channeling some old woman with whom he was in love-hate combat.

That metaphor doesn't even deserve to be called mixed. I'm sure it makes sense to her and would to us, had she be bothered to explain it. But that would require her to remain on topic for more than a few sentences:

Continuing on the theme of overrated male writers, I was appalled at the sentimental rubbish filling the air about Claude Lévi-Strauss after his death was announced last week

I always tell my students that if you begin too many paragraphs with some variation on "another example of," you're either proving something you've already proven or are trying to slap a signpost on a non sequitur, and that in either case, you're not developing an argument. Paglia might benefit from sitting in on my class:

Now on, with relief, to pop!

Non-ironic exclamation points! They are signs of a great writer! By "pop," I'm sure she means "current popular culture" and not "a reference to Madonna to prove beyond all doubt that this column is an exercise in unwitting self-parody."

Now, come on, people, do you really believe that Lady Gaga is 23 years old?

Praise Jesus, she at least avoided—

And now Madonna is trying to resuscitate herself, body and mind, by taking transfusions from Brazil!

You have got to be kid—

Is it true, according to press rumors, that Madonna is vacationing with her boy toy Jesus Luz in a house in Bahia in the far northeast of Brazil?

I have no idea what she's talking about, but at least she's not patting herself on the back and taking credit for—

It's kind of what I had in mind in my epic Salon column last year negatively comparing Madonna to Daniela. As a teacher, I will certainly take credit for this leap forward, if it occurs, in Madonna's much-delayed self-education.

That sound you hear? That'd be Harold Bloom choking back sobs as he considers the fate of his once promising protégée.

Because, of course, Jack London sucks harder than many comics, Part II

(My commenters wrote my first response to Bill's post for me.  They nailed it so accurately posting what I'd originally written seems unnecessary.  I'm neither kidding nor, it seems, necessary.  So in the [likely] event of a [hilariously hi-jinxed] tragedy, Acephalous can [and should] live on.)

Let me start with a statement that will annoy everyone: if a close-reading reveals that a work flirts with the formal elements of its genre or genres—whatever they may be—that work should be canonized.  Not that works that fail to engage the formal limitations of their genre are uncanonizable, mind you, but works that succeed both as an example and a critique of a given genre deserve canonization.

But canonization into what? 

In an age of inexpensive and practically limitless storage, the question of canonization need not be hidebound to the idea of preservation.  Within its first month of operation, Google digitized the 99 percent of the Western Canon, and even though some of those works are too recent to be viewed, they'll all eventually be released as copyright expiration rolls forward.  When I began my Mark Twain chapter in late 2005, for example, only the 1894 edition of Pudd'nhead Wilson was available through Google Book Search; by the time I began revising the chapter in the summer of 2008, I could track revisions of the novel over the span of two decades.  Because Twain is culturally significant and canonical, the saturation of Google Books with variant editions of his most important works was inevitable.  

This was not.

When I began working on The Youth of Washington (1904), I had to order it through interlibrary loan.  It took three months to arrive.  Henry Cabot Lodge's George Washington (1889), Paul Ford's The True George Washington (1896), Woodrow Wilson's George Washington (1896), Worthington Chauncey Ford's George Washington (1900) and Norman Hapgood's George Washington: A Biography (1901) trickled in.  Had I held off on writing my chapter until I'd looked over all 140 of the novels of English Colonial or Revolutionary America published between 1895 and 1908, I'd still be waiting for interlibrary loan.  Now all those Washington biographies are available, as are most of the historical novels I wanted to read for deep background. 

Are those novels good?  No.  Do they deserve canonization?  No.  Is it significant that as tensions between Spain and America strained and Americans became uncomfortable with the imperial pretensions of their leader, an appetite for works relating to Revolutionary figures or set in the Revolutionary period become incredibly popular?  Might that not have something important to say about what Americans thought it meant to be American at the time?  Is that not a viable object of study?  Do I not ask a shitload of rhetorical questions when I get polemical? 

For a few of generations, English professors claimed that cultural knowledge was the provenance of the literary (what with perceptiveness being the core feature of literary sensibility).  So when a scholar wanted to know how things stood between America and Europe at a given time, they would not turn to any of the countless travel narratives written by Americans in Europe and Europeans in America, but to the most acutely literary accounts of the current state affairs.  To wit:

The problem with Lucy's account of the canon and cultural knowledge should be obvious: however you define the literary, it is not the same thing as cultural knowledge.  An alternate canon, based on how a text registers and reflects the conventions of its time, is required; a subset of that canon would include texts that fought against their cultural constraints in order to articulate something convention had difficulty accommodating.  No matter what you call those texts, they are the ones deserving of close-reading.  

Note that I slipped from speaking of genres in the first paragraph to cultural conventions in the last.  I did that on purpose.  Genre focuses too intently on what a thing made from words looks like.  ("My novella's a long short story in 10-point Times Roman and a short novel in 14-point New Courier," says the aspiring writer.)  From the get-go, however, these things made from words contained stuff like this.  Texts have always had visual components, and while those components are sometimes abstracts (as with the afore-marbled page), the introduction of visual representations of the world into the textual economy of a novel alerts readers to the presence of a realist ethos.  But remember: 

Verisimilitude is not an end.  It is an always imperfect—because always filtered—means.  What matters is not the presence of supplementary gestures of verisimilitude but the manner in which they interact with the text.  For example, this comic sucks:

The image of Red-Eye (from Jack London's 1906 novel Before Adam) adds nothing to the description provided by the text; in fact, it looks like what a sketch artist would draw if provided the description in the text.  Now compare that to this or this or this or this or this.  Why do I have to justify studying the subject of all those thises but can write about Red-Eye with nary a care?  Is it because Before Adam was written by London?  Because he wrote it a century ago?  Because a quinquagenarian with Ivy credentials stretching four generations back wouldn't feel mortified if caught reading it on the subway?

(x-posted.)

This post will have been written by my commenters (all of whom must contribute or risk pain of death).

I wrote a long reply to Bill's post about comics and canonization, but editing it this evening realized that I'd written the exact post regular readers would expect me to have written.  So how about we do an experiment to determine precisely how predictable I've become?  The title of the post is:

"Because, of course, Jack London sucks harder than many comics."

What do you suppose I was going to argue? 

London could do with a little more London

Characters Discussed in My London Chapter Whose Names, in Aggregrate, Infantilize Me

1. One-Eye, a wolf
2. White Fang, a wolf-dog
3. Buck, a dog-wolf
4. Earnest Everhard, a porn star dead socialist revolutionary
5. Big-Tooth, a hominid
6. Lop-Ear, his companion
7. Red-Eye, an atavism
8. Ab, a man of the Age of Stone
9. Uk, a paleolithic literalist
10. Oan, an early Shakespearean hack
11. Wax-moth, an agent of creeping socialism
12. Long-Beard, the sole survivor of a capitalism
13. Afraid-of-the-Dark, one of his three nephews
14. Deer-Runner, another
15. Yellow-Head, the last of them
16. Fith-Fith, failed chief of Long-Beard's ruined tribe
17. Three-Legs, inventor of agriculture
18. Pig-Jaw, father of domestication
19. Big-Fat, née Twisted-Lip, discoverer of God
20. Crooked-Eyes, corn liquor magnate
21. The Bug, first minister of propaganda
22. Tiger-Face, chief of the jointed staff
23. Long-Fang, obviously doomed socialist revolutionary
24. Split-Nose, professional scapegoat

No real punch-line here, other than I'm amazed I'm able to take myself seriously writing about these folk.  (Or, possibly, an explanation as to why I really can't.)  Sadly, this is my strongest chapter, the one that should be my writing sample and/or job talk, but I'm thinking I should go with something else, like the one in which I prattle on about a fish. 

Crap.  I'm never going to land a job, am I?

What is the Regnant Theory of Naturalism, Anyway?

As there's confusion over basic procedural issues like how long a dissertation abstract should be (one single-spaced page, two single-spaced pages, five single-spaced pages), I figure there's no harm in asking a basic intellectual question:

What do you consider the dominant theory of naturalism?

If I'm to be redefining it, I ought to know what the majority of scholars think it is.  I'm tempted to follow Lisa Long, who, in her review of three recent attempts at defining naturalism, threw up her hands in defeat:

In the end, naturalism turns back on itself, becomes the uncategorizable category, precisely because the taxonomic and evolutionary tendency of literary history is naturalist in and of itself—concerned in its own way with determining what nineteenth-century critic Hippolyte Taine theorized as the ubiquitous "race, moment, and milieu" that have produced literary naturalism and other generic categories. American literary genres emerge as living, breathing, and ever-changing entities in these texts and in critical history as a whole; much collective scholarly energy has been spent, like that of biological taxonomists, looking for similarities between genres/"species" of literature, and hierarchicalizing those groups based on evolutionary relationships.

She identifies the current attempt to define naturalism as one more lost battle in a long, unwinnable war ... which means the best I can accomplish in my introduction is another pointed setback in an unending campaign of failure.  Of course, I could really surrender and claim, as one critic recently did, that naturalism is "less a movement than a jumble of proffered peculiarities."  The mind rails against the brutal honesty of that definition, but I admire its bravado.

So which naturalism should I be redefining?  The most current consensus?  The most powerful? 

Get Out Your Red Pencils: a Dissertation Abstract Awaits

For those curious as to what literary historicists do (Anthony) and those convinced I do absolutely nothing at all (Emerson), I present my dissertation abstract. 

Behold! 

Everything I've slaved over lo these many years, condensed into five paragraphs ... thereby ensuring that what I've written makes absolutely no sense.  See, I've been over this thing so many times—made so many piddling changes, emphasizing so many stakes here, dropping so many arguments there—I can no longer read the words before me. 

I don't know what they mean.  So invested am I in the history of its revisions—the agonizing decision to delete this, the writhing that accompanied the diminishment of that—I'm unable to judge whether it even makes any sense.  Are the stakes of my argument apparent?  Can you tell how necessary my corrective is to the health of the discipline? 

Does it even make any sense?

(Note: The final version of my dissertation contains a chapter on Twain which is, at the present moment, too excreable to include in the abstract.  Also, my fifty-five page intellectual history of evolutionary theory at the turn of the last century will likely become my first chapter, thus necessitating the writing of an introduction which resembles my abstract and, you know, talks about literature.)

Accelerating Evolution; also, More on the Talkiness of Talks, and the Terrible People Who Read Essays Aloud

I've posted a copy of yesterday's talk—"Accelerating Evolution: Social Reform and the Baldwin Effect in Jack London's The Iron Heel and Before Adam"—for interested parties to read/discuss/mock. 

The usual caveats apply: when I write talks, I write talks; I don't simply read aloud something meant to read alone. 

So you'll find simplification—in particular as regards the physiological basis of the Baldwin effect, as pointed out by Vincent Fitzgerald in the Q & A—and the frequent repetition of characters introduced and concepts established earlier. 

It doesn't sit well on the page.  I know that.  You can't keep as much in your head listening as you can reading.  You can't control the pace of a speaker.  You can't re-read or linger over paragraphs.

More and more, I'm convinced that people who read essays aloud are doing so to satisfy their own intellectual vanity:

"My work is difficult and impressive.  You're going to find it difficult to understand.  That is because I am impressive."

And difficult.  Don't forget difficult.  Because if you're one of these people, you're being difficult for the sake of being difficult.  You think it makes you impressive.  It doesn't. 

It makes you impolite.  It betrays your indolence.  If you want to communicate with your audience, you have to format the points you make in your written work to the media in which you're presenting them.  If you don't want to communicate, you're rude (wasting the audience's time to feel the hum of your ego inflating) and likely lazy (as politeness takes effort). 

More on the conference itself shortly.

A Sign More Revision May Be Necessary

Shortly after five this afternoon, I sat at my desk re-revising Saturday's talk.  I  remember being satisfied with my re-wording of the final sentence of a paragraph, but unsure how to effect a transition to the next. 

I leaned back, considered my options ... and promptly fell asleep. 

Friends, the situation is dire.  My own talk lulls me to sleep.  I'm the most receptive audience alive for my material, yet even I can't resist its soporific spell.  I have no choice but to "jazz it up."  Cue the music [.mp3] and start the show:

... You Edit Nightmare Down, You Edit Nightmare Up, You Edit Nightmare Down, Then You Shake It All About ...

For those who'd like to attend my panel, please consult the official program.  Or show up in Garden Room I of the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Newport Beach at 2:00 PM this Saturday.  Either will work. 

As for what you'll be treated to should you choose to come, well, remember what I wrote yesterday about condensing forty-five pages into fifteen?  Remember the hubris implicit in my declaration that it'd be easy to whittle those fifteen pages down to eight? 

The Gods certainly did, as today I received my comeuppance: over the course of six hours, I managed to edit fifteen pages "down" to sixteen ... but only after casting aside of the rules of evidence, the laws of logic, and the integrity of my argument.  Just as you can only fold a sheet of paper so many times, there's only so much you can nstrip from an argument before it resembles Ann Althouse.  (In seriousness, not literally.)  I'd hit that point around 14 pages.  No matter how many times I took out this bit about Lamarck necessary to understanding Spencer or this bit about Spencer necessary to understanding London, I found myself confronting the same thing:

Utter nonsense.  Without A there could be no B.  Without B, C and D make no sense.  Since C subtends E and D's foundational for F, I could no more remove C or D than A or B and ... then, like an Angel from Heaven, a heavenly angelic email descended upon my inbox informing me that one of the participants will not be able to make my panel, leaving the remaining two panelists an hour and twenty minutes to work with. 

Life is good.  See you Saturday. 

(Or not.)

Impulse Control Issues; or, the Sum Total of Fun Had Today

It seems turning a forty-five page chapter into an eight page talk is easier than I thought it would be.  Remove the questionable material—the argument you're still not altogether satisfied with, the claims you think a little too bold, &c.—and you're left with about twenty pages of solid material to choose from. 

Of that twenty pages, about five of them contain material that won't work without the expunged bits ... which leaves you with about fifteen pages to re-sculpt into something talk worthy. 

Tomorrow begins the process of repeatedly reading the thing aloud in order to slough some dross and smooth the rougher bits. 

However, what I really want to talk about is The Nightmarish Frog Thing. 

Hold on—that's not right. 

What I really want to talk about is disbanding all theology departments everywhere. 

Wait—that's not right either. 

What I really want to talk about is this brilliant mash-up of the old Batman series and Frank Miller's ridiculous All Star Batman and Robin; in particular, I want to talk about this one:

American Literature and Evolutionary Theory II: Portrayal and Constestation

Returning to our regularly scheduled programming, the details of my upcoming panel were sent to me this afternoon.  It's part of the American Literature Association Symposium on Naturalism, October 5-6, 2007, at the Hyatt Newport Beach Hotel.*  There'll be two panels on evolutionary theory and American literature:

American Literature and Evolutionary Theory I: Exploration and (Inter)play

Chair: Jeff P. Turpin, University of Texas-San Antonio

1. “Re-imagining “The Terrible Embrace”: Cooperation and Community in McTeague and The House of Mirth,” Aimee Woznick, University of California Santa Barbara

2. “The Flipside of Evolution: Frank Norris’s Vandover and the Brute and Ernst Haeckel’s Biogenetic Law,” Vincent Fitzgerald, Notre Dame de Namur University

3. “The Epigenetics of Literary Darwinism,” Ian F. Roberts, Missouri Western State University

American Literature and Evolutionary Theory II: Portrayal and Contestation

Chair: Jeff P. Turpin, University of Texas-San Antonio

1. “Accelerating Evolution: Social Reform and the Baldwin Effect in Jack London’s The Iron Heel and Before Adam,” Scott Eric Kaufman, University of California, Irvine

2. “The Demise of the Fittest: Martin Eden as Spencerian Antihero,” Stephen Armstrong, Kingsborough Community College, CUNY

3. “The Politics of Evolutionary Naturalism,” Paul J. Ohler, Kwantlen College

Attendance is mandatory.  I need to build on the "Kaufman panels are extremely well-attended" impression created at the MLA.  So come or stop reading.  Or continue to read with the knowledge that you've angered me or made me cry, depending on whether you find fear or guilt the better motivator.  Seriously though, all the papers look interesting, Armstrong's especially so, if only because he followed through on an argument I abandoned in frustration.  (I'd been unable to coordinate London's shifting beliefs into something resembling a coherent philosophy.  I'm eager to see how Armstrong hashes it.)

* For those unfamiliar with the area, this means my first ever non-blogging conference presentation will be held within walking distance of the very apartment in which I blog.

Can a Life be Bipolar?

Because mine certainly seems to be of late.  From the heights of drafting a publishable paper, to the depths of white supremacy, and now back to the heights, as a paper I proposed has been accepted.  The best part?  The paper is not about blogging.  Someone actually wants to hear me talk about my dissertation.  Admittedly, it's from the same recently praised chapter, so there's a chance this is the only decent bit I'll ever write—the highlight of my unspectacular career.  So be it.  If you find yourself at the American Literature Association's Symposium on Literary Naturalism come October, drop by the panel on Darwinism and Evolution in American Literature, where I'll be saying something about this:

Accelerating Evolution: Social Reform and the Baldwin Effect in Jack London’s The Iron Heel and Before Adam

Jack London was branded by association the moment Richard Hofstadter’s Social Darwinism in American Thought hit the shelves. One of the earliest reviews recounted a session of the American Sociological Society devoted to Social Darwinism. The reviewer notes that “none of [the participants] went in for any such vociferous and belligerent discipleship as did Jack London.” Readers of London’s youthful exchanges with his friend Cloudesley Johns would consider this association appropriate: a twenty-four year-old London declared himself “An Evolutionist, believing in Natural Selection, half believing Mathus’ ‘Law of Population,’ and a myriad of other factors thrown in, [who] cannot but hail as unavoidable, the Black and the Brown going down before the White.” According to William E. Cain, this sentence—first published Joan London’s Jack London and His Times (1939) and a longtime staple of the London industry—is evidence that “London is quick to express his social Darwinism.” Such assessments overestimate the coherence of evolutionary theory during what Stephen Jay Gould has called the “decade of maximal agnosticism and diversity in evolutionary theories.” Strictly speaking, social Darwinism did not exist. The evolutionary zeitgeist is more accurately called “social Spencerianism,” for it is the teleological thought of Herbert Spencer, not the radical randomness of Darwinian natural selection, which informs the politics and literature of the period. Absent from most accounts is the teleology inherent in Spencer’s dictum that development marches from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous. 

In “Telic Action and Collective Stupidity” (1902), London describes how “the individual is capable of, and does perform, telic actions—that is, adjusts his acts to remote ends; a thing which society never does.” He laments the stupidity of the crowd, here functioning metonymically for society at large, which despite being composed of individuals capable of telic action, en masse behave as if such feats of foresight are impossible. Although he posits no solution to this problem, he strikes one optimistic note: it is possible for “two or three individuals, or a score, [to] organize a company or corporation and collectively perform telic actions.” Telic actions cannot be performed by acephalous organizations; democracy is hamstrung by “by the arrant idiocy of political organization.” Such actions can only be undertaken by undemocratic organizations whose leaders are chosen not because they represent society at large, but because they do not. They are superior, and will influence society by means of what is called “the Baldwin Effect,” according to which Lamarckian inheritance works alongside natural selection in the human population. Great leaders accelerate the teleological process London believed was already at work: namely, that “from the facts of [human] history…the trend of [social] development is toward greater and greater collective wisdom.” For him, the amelioration of suffering via socialism could not happen soon enough. During this talk, I will demonstrate how London’s impatience with the pace of evolution compels him to advocate Baldwinian logic in the two novels he wrote during 1906, The Iron Heel and Before Adam.

Seems I'm a Poor Judge of my own Character

Not only is the London chapter not by leaps and bounds the worst thing I've ever written, with a mere two days of revision it will be ready to send to prestigious journals.*

Click for larger

Click for color

Quick Question Supertastic-Happy-Fun Game!

I'm frequently amazed by what people don't know.  When my first chapter was returned to me, I was shocked to discover that my committee found my discussion of the Weismannian theory of germ-plasm perplexing in the extreme.  Wait—did I write "discussion"?  Because I didn't discuss it so much as parachute the concept in, figuring its relevance would be immediately apprehensible. 

It wasn't.  In an effort to avoid this situation from arising again, I submit the following questions:

If I say the word "atavism," do you know what I'm talking about? 

Your answers will dictate whether I include a very, very detailed explanation of atavism in its various guises or briefly mention it on my way to a fulsome discussion of its place in Before Adam and The Iron Heel.  Just think, this is your chance to determine the fate of an entire paragraph in a document very few people will ever read.  Use your power wisely.

Of Course He's a Blacksmith; a Giraffe Would Have Been Unsubtle

The title refers to Earnest Everhard, the protagonist of Jack London's The Iron Heel.  I reckon the novel's structured by Lamarckian evolutionary theory; but, as you well know, I'm reluctant to press any issue without some solid evidence.  While I would have preferred discovering Everhard had been a giraffe, I will gladly settle for blacksmith. 

What am I talking about?  Why, only the two most prominent examples of Lamarckian processes in the late nineteenth century.  We all remember the giraffe's neck from high school.  From Lamarck's Système des animaux sans vertèbres (1801)*:

It is interesting to observe the result of habit in the peculiar shape and size of the giraffe: this animal, the tallest of the mammals, is known to live in the interior of Africa in places where the soil is nearly always arid and barren, so that it is obliged to browse on the leaves of trees and to make constant efforts to reach them. From this habit long maintained in all its race, it has resulted that the animal's forelegs have become longer than its hind-legs, and that its neck is lengthened to such a degree that the giraffe, without standing up on its hind-legs, attains a height of six meters. (122)

You may not be familiar with the blacksmith's arm, however.  As I've written in some five-odd different forms:

Later Lamarckian thinkers—Herbert Spencer foremost among them—departed from this theory of subtle fluid excavation in favor of ostensibly more scientific theories of germ- and body-cells.   According to it, as the parent’s body developed, it created germ-cells which possessed the traits it had acquired; those germ-cells would become the body-cells of their off-spring, thereby transmitting an acquired characteristic.   To borrow one of the period’s favorite examples—found, in this instance, in Vernon Kellogg’s Darwinism Today—a Lamarckian believed that the son of a blacksmith would inherit a genetic predilection for larger, more powerful biceps.  A predilection is no guarantee, however, that the son’s biceps will ever rival his father’s.  He could spend his life in a bank instead of a smithy, in which case his biceps would no more formidable than those of fellow clerks.  But should he ever exercise his arms, he would build muscle at a pace likely to astonish his coworkers; even if he does not, his son—the blacksmith’s grandson—would still inherit a diminished faculty for superior bicep-building, a genetic testament to his family’s social origins.  His son—the blacksmith’s great-grandson—would inherit a talent for what [Silas Weir] Mitchell calls “brain-work,” as well as the nimble fingers required of a teller.  Whether the great-grandson’s stronger predilection for quick fingers qualifies as an improvement over his grandfather’s predilection for sinewy arms, depends entirely on the observer.  A locksmith who values a quick mind and agile fingers over brute strength would consider it progress.  A stevedore would not.

Given the ubiquity of the blacksmith example, for my purposes, Everhard is a giraffe.  Just the one I've been searching for, too.  (If you'd like to visualize me at my desk, papers and books flying as I desperately seek the novel in which the socialist revolutionary is a giraffe, by all means, go ahead.  You ought to be as amused as I am relieved.)

*I love the mysteriousness of the full title: Système des Animaux sans vertèbres, ou Tableau général des classes, des ordres et des genres de ces animaux; présentant leurs caractères essentiels et leur distribution d’après les considérations de leurs rapports naturels et de leur organisation, et suivant l’arrangement établi dans les galeries du Muséum d’Histoire naturelle, parmi leurs dépouilles conservées; précédé du Discours d’ouverture de l’an VIII de la République.  Nothing like leaving a little something to the imagination.

Rendering Google Useless, One Post at a Time

So I'm desperately trying to remember the title of the influential late-nineteenth century book arguing that evolutionary theory favors socialist (or socialistic) cooperatives.  After fruitlessly scanning my bookshelves and skimming my notes, I decide to put the matter to Google. 

"'Evolutionary theory socialism' should cover it," I think to myself. 

Wrong.

(I'm consoled by the fact that this post served its purpose.  By distracting myself with its composition, I allowed the answer—Pyotr Kropotkin's Mutual Aid (1902)—to bubble up from the depths.)

The Worst of All Possible Moments in Popular Film

I think I speak for everyone when I say that the titular moment is, without question, the titular line.  The only sure way to prevent a titular line from being laughable is to have a short title named after a central character (Napoleon Dynamite, Donnie Darko) or a primary location (Chinatown, Manhattan).  Otherwise, you risk committing an Independence Day ("We're going to live on!  We're going to survive!  Today we celebrate our Independence Day!") or Back to the Future ("Next Saturday night, we're sending you back to the future!").  That both of those are examples end with exclamation points is fitting, because it is the emphatic quality of such statements which rips you from your comfortable suspension of disbelief and reminds you that you are, in fact, watching a movie.  Terrible moment, that is ... although there are some exceptions.  In Michael Mann's Heat, for example, Robert De Niro's McCauley twice says:

Don't let yourself get attached to anything you are not willing to walk out on in 30 seconds flat if you feel the heat around the corner.

In Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket, Vincent D'Onofrio's effectively pulls  off

Seven-six-two millimeter.  Full.  Metal.  Jacket.

But those exceptions only go to prove the rule.  For the most part, you wince when Sir Ian McKellen informs you that these nine shall be the fellowship of the Ring.  Where in this continuum does the following paragraph (ripped from my current chapter) fall?

In a recently discovered essay written shortly after returning from England in 1902, “Telic Action and Collective Stupidity,” London describes how “the individual is capable of, and does perform, telic actions—that is, adjusts his acts to remote ends; a thing which society never does.” He laments the stupidity of the crowd, here functioning metonymically for society at large, which despite being composed of individuals capable of telic action, en masse behave as if such feats of foresight are impossible. Although he posits no solution to this problem—concluding somberly, that humans “are as individually wise as [they] are collectively foolish”—he strikes one optimistic note: it is possible for “two or three individuals, or a score, [to] organize a company or corporation and collectively perform telic actions.” Telic actions cannot be performed by acephalous organizations; democracy is hamstrung by “by the arrant idiocy of political organization.” Telic actions can only be undertaken by undemocratic organizations whose leaders are chosen not because they represent society at large, but because they do not. Such leaders will accelerate the process London believes already at work: namely, that “from the facts of [human] history…the trend of [social] development is toward greater and greater collective wisdom.”

I'm the only one likely to find that cheesy, right?  (Observant readers will find that first sentence there familiar.  I swear I'm not cramming all my poor prose/excessive corniness into one paragraph.  Trust me, the rest of them are equally embarrassing.)

What If I Just Call Him Jack?

A sentence discovered during latest re-re-re-revision of the London chapter:

In a recently discovered essay London wrote upon returning from London ...

Checking the tracked changes, I discover I'd already corrected this sentence, which earlier read:

In a recently discovered essay he wrote upon returning from London, London ...

Looking a little more carefully at the tracked changes, I learn the above was itself a revision:

In a recently discovered essay London wrote upon returning from England ...

I can see why I changed it to something dreadful and ungainly: England is not nearly specific enough.  Had to specify London, lest someone get the impression he frolicked with other lily-white folk in Berwick-upon-Tweed.

The lesson?  No more arumfartzen with tracked changes.  A writer need never be reminded that his present blockheadedness is but an extension of his past.