"Some modern travellers still pretend to find Acephalous people in America."
Ephraim Chambers, Cyclopædia; or, an universal dictionary of arts and sciences, 1753
- When people who are my Baby Sister (21 years old but still forever Baby) call to tell me that they're putting my beloved dog down tomorrow, they must include all relevent qualifiers, foremost among them "may," "if this medicine fails," "to treat a common ailment," and "is ninety-percent effective." Because Baby Sister, minus those qualifiers my mind tends morbid.
- If you're from Baton Rouge, reached here by Googling my name and spent over an hour and a half reading through everything I've written in the past seven months, comment on something or send me an email. You must be someone who knows me and wants to know what I've been up to .... which means you must be one of the four people who mattered in high school. We should catch up. Shoot the shit. I can tell you about my rise to these dazzling heights. You can tell me about the eleven kids you bore über-stud Lance Mayeux and we can have entertaining conversations about all the people you didn't sleep with while we were dating. We can discuss what it means to be passive-aggressive and how entertaining we find such cold cruel displays. Or maybe you're that unfortunate soul who thought people would respect him if he brought a briefcase to class. If you are, well then, we should catch up! You're the reason I only returned home a bloody pulp twice a week. I owe you recompense.
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Sir, I Need You to Keep Your Hands Away from Chapter, Sir, Away From the Chapter When I earned a summer dissertation fellowship last May, I felt as if a burden had been lifted. I would have the time to finish "This Damnable London Chapter: Radical Frustration and the Dissertating Subject" by the end of September and spend the Fall Quarter hard at work on evolutionary romance. I had reason for optimism: 36 pages of distilled prose from 129 pages of notes and an entire summer in which to refine it further. Only no refining happened. Instead I decided to dig deeper into the historical record in order to verify (according to what I now realize may have been an enthusiastically embraced but utterly unreal standard) the claims that I had made. First excised from the original 36 pages: an essential but highly selective account of Haeckel's influence on London. I hadn't read enough Haeckel—I hadn't even read all the Haeckel London presumably had—so the strength of those claims could be considered suspect. Note the infected language: "enough," "presumably," "could be considered," "suspect." So I read more Haeckel and more American reaction to Haeckel. I accumulated another 76 pages of notes. The tally? May 1, 2005: 36 pages polished, 129 pages of notes June 1, 2005: 32 pages polished, 205 pages of notes So I put aside the chapter for a week and focused on reading Theory's Empire and producing an account of the early years of Critical Inquiry. Exactly the healthy distraction I required to refocus on writing. Reading the rigorous but a- or anti-historicist accounts of literarture liberated me to chance tangents I wouldn't have in May. I expanded material I'd thought polished a month previous and finished June with 48 pages of polished prose and barely three more pages of notes. June 1, 2005: 32 pages polished, 205 pages of notes July 1, 2005: 48 pages polished, 208 pages of notes I put it down again and focused on reading for pleasure. Spent a day with China Mieville, another with John Clute; one week re-reading Octavia Butler and another the articles and books I'd be teaching in the Fall. I returned to my chapter refreshed but unprepared to encounter this steaming pile of unsubstantiated leaps of a logic unrecognizable to Man or Beast. (Not all Beast, mind you: a literate house-cat island-hopping shelves in a campus bookstore would recognize the "interdisciplinary" nature of my disaster.) I could hardly stomach my own complacency. I had though this deserving of reward? After seven solid hours of prodigious hyperventilation I managed to lift the pencil and make the first incision. Four days later, the patient was alive but paralyzed from the governing logic down. An intralineal drip nourished it, but as I looked at it in that bed I knew that unless it could someday manufacture evidence of its own, it wouldn't matter what I placed between its lines. I knew I could rebuild it. Better. Faster. (a rehabilitation montage—complete with uplifting '80s quasi-hair metal anthem, frantic but purposive-seemingly displays of vigor, and a fade out,...
I hope everything goes well with your dog's treatment. I send him or her my love. I recently had to put my beloved dog of ten years to sleep, and I'm about to break down just reading about the possibility here.
You're from Baton Rouge? My girlfriend is from Baton Rouge as well. Judging from your post, you may have known each other.
Posted by: Kevin Andre Elliott | Thursday, 20 October 2005 at 07:17 PM
Eek. Good luck with the dog thing. Almost had to make that decision last week myself. "minds tend morbid" indeed.
Posted by: Adam Robinson | Friday, 21 October 2005 at 01:30 PM
Kevin, if she's anywhere in the vicinity of 28, I may very well have known her. There was such a limited circle of reasonably cool people in high school that most of "us" knew or knew of each other.
Adam, thanks for the kind words. I read about Thunder last week, and I'm deeply sorry for your loss.
Posted by: Scott Eric Kaufman | Friday, 21 October 2005 at 02:25 PM