Acephalous is Six Months Old! or Praises Be I've Survived!

[Note: Amardeep's comment prodded me to finish this post.  Since its continuation sounds as indulgent as I thought it would, I've left it there in the comment section.  But if you really want to you can read it.]

In eleven days Acephalous will have been around for six months.  Happy Birthday Acephalous!  What can I say?  You began as a necessary distraction during a year in which I accomplished almost nothing.  That angered me, and that anger confused me because it had been years since anything had pinched the nipples of my soul.  I hadn't sweat the small stuff since high school and couldn't be bothered to nearly a decade later.  So what did I do with my anger?  I started you!  I wanted to channel all these useless afflictions into something productive.  I had tired of the typical existential wallowing that follows any brush with mortality and I hadn't written a damn thing in months.  I would prepare for class and teach and return home exhausted.  Then you came around.  I haven't been the same since.

When you were first conceived you were nothing but an outlet for the unabated anger of a recent cancer survivor.  You've since become so much more.  You invented yourself an author by the name of "A. Cephalous" who posted hither and thither.  "A. Cephalous" earned himself a reputation and then was subsumed into He Who Is Scott Eric Kaufman.  (He became the guy in the middle unworthy of the women to his right, your left.  Before you ask, he also became the guy whose mother is more Irish than Irish and the guy whose beard grows in bright Irish-Red despite his otherwise stereotypically Semetic features.  He also knows how silly this genetic essentialism is.  But his beard's still bright red if allowed "philosopher-length.")

This post began with a point.  It was to be a retrospective of the evolution of the way in which Acephalous has mattered to me, but it will have to settle for knowing that without it my cancerous anger at universal injustice may've vented itself in far less productive directions.  I could say that one of the reasons I groped for The Valve-preservers was because at that moment anger and argument were all I had.  That and Wilco.  But Jeff Tweedy could only inspire me.  He could do nothing for the doldrums that had parked themselves on my jet stream.  So I waited-out the weather but the weather did out-wait me. 

And here I am.

Six months later.

No longer "A. Cephalous" but myself.

No longer chock-full of cancer but filled to the brim with healthy cells.

And now you have pictures.  Happy birthday Acephalous who is not "A. Cephalous."  Thank you for the survival. 

(Tomorrow night we'll resume the serious arguments about Zizek, Knapp and Theory.  Tonight we eat cake.)

Comments

[Amardeep]

Congratulations to you on six impressive months!

It's weird how blogging can cause one to subtly remake oneself, both professionally and personally. Some of the stuff one writes one might have said/thought anyway. But a good deal of it is of a species all its own. (But what is it? I'm never quite certain.)

And incidentally, I was moved and a little shaken to hear about the cancer. I'm glad to know, at least, that it's behind you. I hope the cake was good, and there are leftovers (leftovers are essential).

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

Thanks for the kind words and concern, Amardeep. I had intended to be much more introspective, but then I realized that there's a thin line between introspective and indulgent...and that I didn't want to cross it. I initially used Acephalous as a break from academic work: an opporunity to make every evening a Dada evening by spoofing and/or criticizing Call For Papers, but I tired of that quickly. So I turned to posts that traced those odd lines in inquiry we all encounter in our research but never follow. Strange as it may sound, it wasn't until I turned Acephalous into an exercise in solipsism that people started to read it: the "How to Open an Academic Essay" series--which began as a series of cheap shots at other critics but became a way for me to think through my own work--proved to be as enjoyable for others to read as it was for me write. And then, as you say, the blog started to influence the way I think about myself both personally and professionally.

First and foremmost, I joined the ranks of "bloggers." (Do you hate that word as much as I do? It's so, I don't know, ugly.) But it's impact on my style--both generally and in my academic writing--is substantial. I not only write much more now than I once did, but since it's not all of a piece I have an opportunity to study and improve the quality of my prose in a way that I can't when I revise and re-revise my dissertation. I'm so invested in the ideas that I can't see the style at all...but now when I return to revise material, I have an ear for my own prose that I didn't have before. I can think about the pacing of my sentences as I move towards a point, ask myself questions like "Should I build momentum in this sentence, lengthen it for effect, so that my reader's impatience corresponds to the impatience I describe?" That seems like a minor point, but it's all part of the rhetorical puzzle that makes for successful prose. I suppose all I'm saying is that I think differently about the language of intelligent critique than I did before I started blogging, and I believe that's for the better.

The cancer? Funny story: I can talk about it now, but when I was diagnosed and underwent radiactive iodine treatment, I didn't tell anyone. In retrospect, I realize that one reason for my crazed behavior is that when the thyroid's out of commision, your body has difficulty regulating hormones and you end up a little, well, crazed. You do crazy stuff like not tell your wife, your mother, your father, your friends, or your advisor--when you are his T.A. that quarter--until months after you've completed the chemotherapy. And then everyone becomes very, very concerned/wrathful. The reaction was the same every time: "I'm so glad you're alive you stupid motherfucker how could you not have told me you fucker fuck I'm overjoyed you survived you stupid motherfucker..." It would last for a while, and I'd feel intense guilt, and they'd feel intense guilt. I like to tell this story because it reflects so poorly on my state of mind at the time; or because I can barely believe I did it and hardly fathom why I did it. I had a litany of reasons--many of which boiled down to a desire to not be burden--but my behavior at the time is still, for the most part, inscrutible. I write this in the hope that one day when I tell this story, it'll click into place. Hasn't happened yet. One day it will.

Maybe.

In the meantime: Cake!