Acephalous

The moment you really and truly believe you finished . . .

. . . is when you search for something in your field and find this among the results.

271 notes (two hundred and seventy-one) from a novel I don't remember reading.*

Before I could return The Damnation of Theron Ware to my beloved library, I had to remove all the notes I'd stuck to its pages. It took me a while:

The resulting note wheel is as lovely as it is meaningless, because I remember absolutely nothing about The Damnation of Theron Ware. From my notes, I can almost reconstruct why I read it:

Theron enjoys the "primitive" pleasures of Catholic picnics; contrast to earlier (235-6) image of it as orderly machine; no, from sociological & intellectual perspective it's orderly, from internal is primitive

If only I knew the antecedent of "it" I might be able to reconstruct my reason for reading the book. Am I the only one for whom the Five Year Rule applies? (And do I really want that question answered?) (x-posted.)

---

*Notation borrowed from a letter Joyce wrote to his mother after arriving in Paris: "Your order for 3s 4d of Tuesday last was very welcome as I had been without food for 42 hours (forty-two)." How's that for passive-aggression?

Meet the New Scott, Same as the Old Scott

I tried to file today.  Woke up early.  Did one last read-through.  Handed it into the printer by 10:00 a.m.  Specified paper weight and margin width.  They said give them half an hour.

I walk across the bridge to campus with my signature page.  Try to get Second Reader to sign it.  He won't sign it until my chair signs it.

I email my my chair.  He says he can't sign it until he arrives home at 4:00 p.m.  Says I should drive up to his place and he'll sign it.  I say I'll see him then.  Third Reader's signatures are in the mail but didn't arrive with it.

The department secretary immediately phones Third Reader.  He assures her he'd sent it UPS.  Not campus mail.  Not FedEx.

The library archives—housed in that library—close at 5:00 p.m.

It is now 12:00 p.m.

I walk back across the bridge to the printer.  They handed me two copies of my dissertation in boxes.  The boxes say "Copy Paper" on them.  The woman behind the counter rings me up.  My total comes to $41.00.

Or approximately nine fewer dollars than the cost of a box of the specified 20-lb 100 percent cotton bond.

I open one box.  It is my dissertation.  Yay!  Printed on copy paper.  Boo!  I mention the error.  Show the woman my copy of the order.  She needs to talk to her manager.  He is exasperated.  Says to do my order again.  Says this order will come out of her next paycheck.  She says it will be about half an hour.

It is now 1:00 p.m.

I return to the department and check the mail.  Nothing from Third Reader.  Department secretary says not to worry.  The UPS guy arrives late.  I don't worry much.  I still have four hours.  I double-check my paper-work.

I FORGOT TO PRINT OUT MY EXIT QUESTIONNAIRE!  IT IS ALL OVER!

Department secretary says not to worry.  Says I can walk to Graduate Studies and print it out.  I do.  I can.  I return to the department.  Still no mail.

Wait a minute—we still may have mail.

No!

It is now 2:00 p.m.  I return to the printer.  I am handed two boxes.  They say 20-lb 100 percent cotton bond on them.  I open one up.  It is my dissertation.  Yay!  Printed on the proper paper.  Yay!  With new margins.  Boo!  I mention the error.  The woman denies it.

I show her my table of contents.  Show her where it says CHAPTER TWO begins on page 81.  Pull out the first page of CHAPTER TWO.  Point to the page number at the bottom.  Ask her whether 76 and 81 are the same number.  She needs to talk to her manager.  He is exasperated.  She is exasperated.  She is told to be exasperated at home.  The manager apologizes.  Explains he charged her for the mistake.  That she must have widened the margins to keep down her costs.  Says I still need to pay for the paper.

I laugh at his hilarious joke.  He is exasperated.  Says I still need to pay for the paper.  I laugh again at his hilarious joke.  He is exasperated.  Says I must pay for the paper.  Says he would rather not call security.  Reminds me he has my home address.

I make eye contact with the other man behind the counter.  He looks at the manager then back at me.  His eyes say the manager is a prick who will do this.  His eyes express sympathy.  I look at the clock.

It is now 2:45 p.m.

I politely inform him where to insert his precious boxes of 20-lb 100 percent cotton bond with my dissertation in them.  He says he would rather not call security.  His eyes say he rather would.  I pay him $140.  I tell him I know lawyers.  He laughs.

It is now 2:50 p.m.

I walk back across the bridge to the department.  Still no mail.  Tell the department secretary what happened.  She offers to let me use her printer if I can find the appropriate paper.  I bolt across a different bridge to the campus bookstore.  I bolt back to the department.  I print my dissertation on the proper paper with the correct margins.  I look at the clock.

It is now 3:35 p.m.

I run back across the bridge.  I pass the printer and scowl at its tinted windows.  I jump in my car and head up to the house of my chair.  I am about to turn when I hear a sharp whoop.  I check my mirror and see that the whooper is a motorcycle police.  He asks me if I know why he pulled me over.  I say I do.  I show him the paperwork from the DMV indicating that I have paid my registration.  He walks back to his motorcycle and shoots shit with dispatch.

It is now 3:55 p.m.

He writes me a ticket to appear in court before December.  I say that is nice of him.  It is.  He says he hates the DMV.  Hates the lines.  Hates how they make his life hard for him.  How people like me who pay their registration spend weeks waiting to receive their stickers.  I agree.  He tells me to have a nice day.  I slam on the gas and arrive at the house of my chair.

It is now 4:05 p.m.

I hand him my Ph.D. II form.  He signs it.  I hand him one signature page.  He signs it.  I hand him my ticket.  He says there is nothing he can do about that.  I say I wanted him to know how hard this was.  No I don't.  I say my mistake and hand him my other signature page.  He says congratulations I think.

I was already sprinting back to my car.  I park near the library.  I run to the department.  There may be mail.

THERE IS MAIL!  Papers are signed.  I return to my Second Reader.  He is reluctant to sign it.  He says he never saw the final versions of my chapters.  I am confused.  I had been led to believe that Second and Third Readers read drafts and make suggestions.  Revisions are made and submitted to the chair.  He either approves or disapproves of them.  I say as much.

He says how does he know what he is signing off on.  Says I am very unprofessional.  I stare a stare of exhaustion and confusion.  I have run across bridges for hours.  I say I had revised my chapters in accordance with his criticisms and that my chair had read and approved the revisions.  I said I was revising until yesterday.  He says a professional would have submitted those revisions to his Second and Third Readers.  That a professional would have submitted the revisions I made yesterday to his entire committee.

I try to say but even if I had I would still have been revising until the last minute but he cuts me off and says I should stop digging.

He signs the paper.  He says good luck but his tone tells me not to submit any future revisions to him.  I try to explain but he turns back to his computer.

It is now 4:30 p.m.

I am escorted downstairs by the department secretary.  The Dean signs his name and congratulates me.  I say thank you.  He says something about the license plate of the truck that hit me and the department secretary visibly winces.  She tells me to run upstairs and I hear her explain her wincing.

As I climb the stairs my right shoe almost slips off.  I look down.  I am no longer Oedipus.  I am dehydrated.  Dehydration does wonders for swelling.  I have no time to appreciate those wonders.  I flop flop flop up the stairs and grab my dissertation.  I flop flop flop across campus to the library.

It is now 4:45 p.m.

I see a friend of mine reading new fiction in front of the elevators.  I consider stopping to chat but dart into the elevator instead.  I enter a purgatory of sluggish ascension.  I am between the first and second floor.  Hours pass.  I am between the first and second floor.  I slump against the wall and pass out.  I wake to find apes in charge.  They throw me into an office in which undergraduates once copulated.  I begin to weep when I hear a shrill ding.  I am on the roof of the library.

It is now 4:50 p.m.

I sprint across the roof and into the archives.  I am met by a smiling man.  He says I just made it.  Tells me to sit down and take deep breaths.  Assures me we can finish this.  I hand him cash money for my fees.  He says the library likes cash money.  I say I know.  He looks at me and smiles.  Says it looks like you had a hard day doctor and offers me his hand.

This time the tears come.

Gigantic Favor

(This post will self-destruct shortly.)

Will some generous soul read over my Twain chapter for 1) typos and 2) egregiously stupid statements?*  I wouldn't ask, but I have to turn this thing in on Wednesday and have the editorial near-sightedness which comes from being too close to a text.  The chapter is barely this side of awful—fitful pacing, signposts everywhere, ghastly prose—but at this point I'm more worried about done than good.**  I'm trying to avoid this is all. 

You can download it here.  I found me a mensch.  If you would like to read it, send me an email.

---

*Cut-and-paste errors mostly: lack of transitions, re-introducing something already introduced, not introducing something I seem to be referring back to, &c.

**That's not false humility.  The chapter is truly awful for reasons which I could (and will in the future) describe.  But it is not good.  Nor is it representative of my work generally.  (In conception, maybe, but not in execution.)

You wouldn’t like me when I feign anger for rhetorical effect.

(x-posted.)

(Quick note: if you think someone is being self-congratulatory when he conjures up an image of himself with floaties, you may want want to have your tone-o-meter examined.  Just saying.)

I’ve a long history of wading into hostile waters without floaties and I’ve no intention to stop doing so, but if I ever did, it’d be because of statements like “I see no difference presently between the terms democrat and progressive.”  Or claims that almost-imperceptibly-left-of-center candidates are socialist, communists, Marxists, &c. On the entire internet, this conceptual sloppiness is the only thing that ever threatens my equilibrium.  Stupidity I can handle.  Ignornace doesn’t bother.  Willfully ignoring what I’ve said will only earn you my titular faux-Hulk.  But play fast and loose with categories and you’ll piss me off so much I’ll have no choice but to ignore you.

Revising my dissertation, I think I’ve come to understand why: in my “professional” life, that’s all I do.  I define, re-define, pre-define, counter-define, retroactively define, retroactively re-define, retroactively pre-define, retroactively counter-define, &c.  The dissertation has taught me to put items in proper boxes because almost no one will be able to tell when you don’t. Items and boxes entail a responsibility people who put Obama in the Marxist box (or Ayers in the Leninist box and Obama in the Ayers box) don’t understand, except unlike shifting London from the Darwin to the Spencer box, the actions of irresponsible bloviators have a measurable impact on our lives.  Stuffing Palin in the feminist box allows a host of anti-feminists in as well, as evidenced by the past week of Republicans in deep dudgeon over the “sexist” attacks on the VP candidate.

My metaphor, on the other hand, teeters on actual sexism, so I’ll stop while I’m behind.  Wait, can’t stop there either.  I don’t mean to say that there were no sexist attacks on Clinton, or that there haven’t been sexist attacks on Palin.  I’m simply saying the hypocrites who crow about “sexist” attacks on Palin care not one whit about sexism per se — that is, had McCain not tapped Palin, conservatives would’ve avoid women’s issues for the forty-fourth Presidential election in a row.

too much writing + insomnia = the following sentence in your acknowledgments page

Were it not for his inspiring seminar in the fall of 2002, this dissertation would have been about James Joyce and devoid of snakes.

Consider yourselves warned.

Copyrighting dissertations?

So I'm performing all the piddly tasks attendant to filing while I wait for word of signatures when I come across this:

You may choose to copyright your manuscript by including the copyright notice but not formally registering your copyright. However, to fully protect your rights in a copyright dispute and to be eligible for damages caused by infringement, you must register your copyright. You can register your copyright at any time within its term.

If you are submitting a Ph.D. dissertation, you may have the copyright registered for you by UMI Dissertation Services (a division of ProQuest Information and Learning Company). To do this, submit the UMI form and required fee (certified check or money order—UMI does not accept personal checks) to the University Archives when you submit your manuscript. UMI will register your copyright and submit your manuscript to the Library of Congress.

I'm no copyright lawyer—nor do I understand commonplace copyright law all that well—but it seems excessive to have to pay someone else a fee to secure the rights to my own dissertation.  I'm inclined to slap a Creative Commons license requiring attribution, noncommmerical use, no derivatives and share alike and not pay anyone anything. 

I'm not about to Doctorow the thing—no one's likely to translate my dissertation into Romanian—but I'm fairly certain free copyright protection is better than expensive copyright protection.  Were I in the sciences and my research might one day mint some pharmaceutical company a forture I could see doing it.  But in the humanities?  Is it really necessary?  In other words:

Is my Jew showing or am I just being practical?

Those pictures? They would be my dissertation.

Good news:  My final chapter's been approved.

Bad news:  My advisor's email continued, "[b]ut please put an 'and' in the first sentence."  I thought comma splices were in this season. 

My "Mitchell" contains an adequate amount of Mitchell

Compound sentences, in which I only ever poorly, and even then but barely, compose in clauses of a clarificatory directness which (that?) doesn't (don't?) consist (consists?) of tentative qualifications such that their—

—their being the sentences, the compound ones to whose (witches!?!*) qualifications I am currently referring in reference to—the meaning of them a-and their misplaced prepositions, they are all of the lot of them lost, not only in the aforementioned revisions to the which (witch!?!) of which I then thus alluded to and because in the title of this post, whose** intentions vis-a-vis matters grammatical annoys in a manner distinctly circumlocutory.  In short and sum, that is to say, to put it another way only more succinctly:

Editing may be life, but editing ain't living. 

---

*(which's?)

**(witches!?!)

Inane questions of outrageously disproportionate importance (as written by the boxered interviewee of a hideous man)

• If you are, were, will or want to be an American and were writing a dissertation in MLA format, how would you cite Figure 2 on Plate 3 floating after page 26 of Galton's Finger Prints [.pdf]?
• If you are, were, will, want or sometimes pretend to be an American from a South haunted by slavery, sharecropping, and Just Plain Racist Nonsense and were talking about the "corroborative [lynchpin/linchpin]" of something or other, which of these two equally correct spellings would you use?
• If you are, were, will, want to sometimes pretend to be or ever hope to land a job as an Americanist who publishes on racial ambiguity in Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson, wouldn't you die a brutal social death every time you introduced yourself as "Mrs. Wigger"?

Some times I feel sorry for the high school coach who cut Michael Jordan from the JV squad because, quote, "He would never cut it on varsity."

Others, I laugh at anonymous reviewers of such limited imagination their predictions have become Monuments of Wrongness.  To wit:

 

What it's like to Write a Dissertation

(A repost mired in optimism but apropos of nothing.)

In "On Sad and Joyful Passions of Academia," Anthony Paul Smith writes:

I get that people are unhappy with their advisors, with the lack of support from the university, and from the seeming glacial pace of publishing ... But the complaints, especially from those fully funded at institutions I would imagine are very exciting, foster a different sad passion within me.  They even foster a kind of resentment that they have been given this opportunity while I have to scratch out a future ... yet they seem to enjoy nothing about academic work.

The best way to talk about academic work is baseball.  This goes without saying. 

I played third base and shortstop.  I played them well.  I had sure hands and quick feet.  When the ball screamed off the bat, there was no time to think.  There was only time to react. 

Move the quick feet.  Catch with sure hands.  Throw the ball. 

In between pitches, I would look to the man to my left to make sure we knew our assignments.  Then the ball would leave the pitcher's hand.  Then the batter would swing. 

Move the quick feet.  Catch with sure hands.  Throw the ball.

In the infield I felt like part of a team.  I could look to my left and catch the second baseman's eye.  I could look across the diamond and catch the first baseman's eye.  I was a player among players.  We all knew how to react and how to react together. 

Then one year my coach wanted me to play center field.  Being a team player, I consented.  I'd shagged flies during practice, and was better than most at going back on a ball.  So why not?

I left the dugout and jogged past my teammates.  Then I kept jogging until my teammates looked like toy soldiers.

I stood there.  I was still playing baseball.  Only alone.  Three hundred and ninety feet from home plate.  Two hundred feet from anybody else. 

Short screaming or semaphore, I couldn't catch anyone's attention.  I was alone. 

See home plate in the shot above?  No?  Click on the picture to enlarge it.  See it now?  Focus your attention on the tiny white dot near dead center.  There's another to its right.  Either will work. Zoom in on them.  Those tiny dots are twice the size of a man's head. 

Now imagine something an eighth that size come shooting from the crowd. 

You track the ball.  You run intuitive quadratic models.  You run where you think it will land.  You compensate for drag.  The wind blows it to the left. 

You run intuitive quadratic models.  You compensate for drag. 

Or the right. 

You run intuitive quadratic models.  You compensate for drag.

Or further behind you. 

You run intuitive quadratic models.  You compensate for drag.

You adjust course.  You adjust speed.  All the while you track the ball.  All the while you calculate.  The ball hangs in the air for seconds.  You spend every last one of them calculating. 

This is not about reaction. 

This is not about moving the quick feet.  This is not about catching with sure hands.  This is different.

And you are alone.

And everyone is watching you. 

All eyes follow your eyes following the ball.  You feel them.  The weight of them.  They're relying on you to know how wide and fast to stride.  They trust the calculations you've made.  They trust in the ones you will.  Sometimes that trust is well-placed. 

Sometimes not.

Writing a dissertation is like playing center field: 

Your eyes light on something small launched at an incredible distance.  Time slows.  You calculate where it will land.  You compensate for drag.  You track it as it flies.  While sprinting.  You adjust your course. 

You are alone.  Everyone is watching you.

Fear overtakes you.  You will lose the ball in the lights.  You will lose the ball in the high glare of a slate sky.  You will trip.  You will stumble.  You will fail.

You compose yourself.  While tracking.  While sprinting.  Your chest hurts.  Your legs ache.  Then:

The satisfying recoil. 

You close your glove around the ball.  You gather your wits.  You throw the ball back to the infield. 

Writing a dissertation is like playing center field with one difference:

No satisfying recoil. 

The fear is there.  As are the calculations.  And the gasping.  And the aching.   Sometimes you exhilarate in your own breathless grace. Certainly.  And sometimes you admire the ball descending its clean arc.  Of course.  But:

There is no satisfying recoil.  There is no salutary smack of ball on leather.  Not yet. 

You are the outfielder problem (Chapman, 1968; Dienes & McLeod, 1993; McBeath, 1990; McLeod & Dienes, 1993, 1996; Montagne, Laurent, & Durey, 1998; Oudejans, Michaels, Bakker, & Davids, 1999; Todd, 1981). 

You await your solution.  But:

You're still playing baseball.  You're still having fun.  But:

You are unsolved and you are surly. 

I know I am.

BONUS (5 POINTS): How do Scott's career anxieties manifest in dream?

(A repost mired in optimism but apropos of nothing.)

In "On Sad and Joyful Passions of Academia," Anthony Paul Smith writes:

I get that people are unhappy with their advisors, with the lack of support from the university, and from the seeming glacial pace of publishing ... But the complaints, especially from those fully funded at institutions I would imagine are very exciting, foster a different sad passion within me.  They even foster a kind of resentment that they have been given this opportunity while I have to scratch out a future ... yet they seem to enjoy nothing about academic work.

The best way to talk about academic work is baseball.  This goes without saying. 

I played third base and shortstop.  I played them well.  I had sure hands and quick feet.  When the ball screamed off the bat, there was no time to think.  There was only time to react. 

Move the quick feet.  Catch with sure hands.  Throw the ball. 

In between pitches, I would look to the man to my left to make sure we knew our assignments.  Then the ball would leave the pitcher's hand.  Then the batter would swing. 

Move the quick feet.  Catch with sure hands.  Throw the ball.

In the infield I felt like part of a team.  I could look to my left and catch the second baseman's eye.  I could look across the diamond and catch the first baseman's eye.  I was a player among players.  We all knew how to react and how to react together. 

Then one year my coach wanted me to play center field.  Being a team player, I consented.  I'd shagged flies during practice, and was better than most at going back on a ball.  So why not?

I left the dugout and jogged past my teammates.  Then I kept jogging until my teammates looked like toy soldiers.

I stood there.  I was still playing baseball.  Only alone.  Three hundred and ninety feet from home plate.  Two hundred feet from anybody else. 

Short screaming or semaphore, I couldn't catch anyone's attention.  I was alone. 

See home plate in the shot above?  No?  Click on the picture to enlarge it.  See it now?  Focus your attention on the tiny white dot near dead center.  There's another to its right.  Either will work. Zoom in on them.  Those tiny dots are twice the size of a man's head. 

Now imagine something an eighth that size come shooting from the crowd. 

You track the ball.  You run intuitive quadratic models.  You run where you think it will land.  You compensate for drag.  The wind blows it to the left. 

You run intuitive quadratic models.  You compensate for drag. 

Or the right. 

You run intuitive quadratic models.  You compensate for drag.

Or further behind you. 

You run intuitive quadratic models.  You compensate for drag.

You adjust course.  You adjust speed.  All the while you track the ball.  All the while you calculate.  The ball hangs in the air for seconds.  You spend every last one of them calculating. 

This is not about reaction. 

This is not about moving the quick feet.  This is not about catching with sure hands.  This is different.

And you are alone.

And everyone is watching you. 

All eyes follow your eyes following the ball.  You feel them.  The weight of them.  They're relying on you to know how wide and fast to stride.  They trust the calculations you've made.  They trust in the ones you will.  Sometimes that trust is well-placed. 

Sometimes not.

Writing a dissertation is like playing center field: 

Your eyes light on something small launched at an incredible distance.  Time slows.  You calculate where it will land.  You compensate for drag.  You track it as it flies.  While sprinting.  You adjust your course. 

You are alone.  Everyone is watching you.

Fear overtakes you.  You will lose the ball in the lights.  You will lose the ball in the high glare of a slate sky.  You will trip.  You will stumble.  You will fail.

You compose yourself.  While tracking.  While sprinting.  Your chest hurts.  Your legs ache.  Then:

The satisfying recoil. 

You close your glove around the ball.  You gather your wits.  You throw the ball back to the infield. 

Writing a dissertation is like playing center field with one difference:

No satisfying recoil. 

The fear is there.  As are the calculations.  And the gasping.  And the aching.   Sometimes you exhilarate in your own breathless grace. Certainly.  And sometimes you admire the ball descending its clean arc.  Of course.  But:

There is no satisfying recoil.  There is no salutary smack of ball on leather.  Not yet. 

You are the outfielder problem (Chapman, 1968; Dienes & McLeod, 1993; McBeath, 1990; McLeod & Dienes, 1993, 1996; Montagne, Laurent, & Durey, 1998; Oudejans, Michaels, Bakker, & Davids, 1999; Todd, 1981). 

You await your solution.  But:

You're still playing baseball.  You're still having fun.  But:

You are unsolved and you are surly. 

I know I am.

BONUS (5 POINTS): How do Scott's career anxieties manifest in dream?

Coalitioning?

So I’m mini-hiatus bound — dissertation to be “finished” this week, whatever that means — but I’ve run face-first into a vocabularian’s nightmare. I need to talk about disparate political interests uniting under a common banner a la the Republican Party, but because I can’t slip into German I’m hard-pressed to find a verb that adequately accounts for “the processual quality of coming together for pragmatic political reasons.”

The word I need is “coalitioning,” but that’s not a word so much as a monstrosity.  The root of “coalition” is “coalesce,” i.e. “to cause to grow together, to unite, combine.”  Only “coalesce” doesn’t connote the unhardy politics of “coalition” my argument requires.

I think I’m stuck re-verbing a previously nouned verb to get my point across.  Next thing you know, I’ll be redeconstructionating the phallologodiscursive elementalariness of das Ding and then why haven’t you shot me already yet?

Suggestions as to how I might forestall death please?

As Abish attests, all American art is alliterative.

(x-posted.)

Not really, of course.  Only if it’s postmodern or romantic, and today it’s romantic.  Edwin Markham’s The Real America in Romance (1909) sought to blend “authentic history and romance … to their mutual advantage.”  His rationale:

Here are set before us the examples of great men of earth, men great in their patriotism and self-sacrifice; and side by side with them are romantic characters typical of the times, men and women only less great in their kindliness and unselfishness, all affording a high expression of the art of Anglo-Saxon romance. Instead of reading about historical characters and events, we see the persons themselves in action, and live with them through the events of their day and generation. The reader loses himself in the irresistible fascination of the story, and the impressions resulting are made on the heart as well as on the intellect.

You do not merely read about Columbus: you endure with him his hardships, share with him his disappointments, rejoice with him in his achievements. You actually feel the thrill of discovery when the New World swims into his vision. Not content with telling you merely that Washington wintered and suffered at Valley Forge with his army, the author takes you straightway into the camp, shows you the torn and bleeding feet of the soldiers, and makes you stand watch with the half-fed sentries, with little to warm your blood except a fiery determination to die of cold, hunger, or British bullets, rather than give up the fight for your country.

That’s a single paragraph in the original, but I’ve sliced it up 1) because it’s overlong, and 2) to emphasize a rhetorical shift from “the reader” to “you.” What opens as a theory of literary affect quickly pivots into admonishment — the reader who doesn’t endure, share, rejoice, winter, suffer or stand watch isn’t merely a bad reader but unpatriotic.  “If you have fail to empathize with those who fought ‘for your country,’” Markham as much as says, “you’re a terrible American.”  He never considers a reader might withhold sympathy not because he or she possesses a paucity of patriotism, but because his bathetic prose betrays an ear unworthy of enthused encomium.  Consider the first sentence of Volume IX, The Stars & Stripes:

A band of boys was abroad in the streets of Boston.

But Scott, you say, happy accidents have happened heretofore! Granted.  Now consider the first two sentences of the second paragraph:

But it was not mirth nor mischief that brought them forth to throng the streets.  So much might have been inferred from their eager and excited talk as they hurried over the flagging, covered thinly with snow.

Those alliterative pairs — “mirth nor mischief” and “eager and excited” — bespeak a deliberately alliterative aesthetic agenda.  Still don’t believe me?  Turn to the twenty-first page and proceed to ponder this passage:

Then the people, or such of them as did not feel the restraint of the more orderly element, rose in riot.  The answer to the riot came in the shape of red-coated soldiers, two regiments of them, under Colonel Dalrymple; and the appointment of hated Hutchinson, Tory townsman, as lieutenant-governor.  [...]  Now the tension of nearly two years had been drawn taut within three days, and peace thus strained had snapped.

The last phrase — “peace thus strained had snapped” — demonstrates why authors aim alliterative for effect.  (My last sentence, not so much.)  It is, in fact, a rather awesome example of alliterative effect: the initial “s” links both words, but the long diphthong of “strain” enacts a straining snapped by the short monothong of “snapped.”  However, since Markham’s every sentence subsists on said diet, this felicitous phrase fails to find favor.

The reader turned off by Markham’s abusive alliteration isn’t unpatriotic per se, merely in possession of refinement and taste.  But if the above hasn’t convinced you of Markham’s “talent,” try this:

With a whoop, the band broke toward the sentinel.

“Kill him!” they cried.  “Kill the bloody-backed scoundrel!”

They fell to pelting him with snowballs.

“The lobster is going to fire!” cried the lads, pressing closer.

What happens when you pelt lobsters with snowballs?  Death or Fafblog.

Handcrafted in solid 24-karat FAIL

(x-posted nowhere!  Totally original Acephalous content!  Must cite me!)

To counter recent accusations of poetry and overcompensation, an example of what the inmates write when the guards clock out:

[In the chapters to follow,] I will demonstrate the pervasive influence of these non-Darwinian theories of evolution on late 19th and early 20th Century American literature, paying particular attention to how the haphazard traffic of scientific ideas in intellectual circles alters our understanding of theories of romance, realism, and naturalism.

To build on the traffic metaphor, picture an account of these three novelistic modes as an interstate traveling in two directions: north represents a progressive commitment to social betterment through science, south a conservative commitment to the agrarian ideals of the early Republic.  In the conventional account, realism and naturalism occupy the northbound lanes, romance the southbound.  The realists responsibly drive Honda Accords north, five miles per hour below the posted speed limit; the naturalists muscle Ford Mustangs between them—one hand on the wheel, the other on the stereo—thirty miles per hour above the limit; while the romancers, they plod south, in aggressively polished Bentleys, driven by the help.  The forced homogeneity is meant to be instructive: not all Japanese cars are Hondas, nor are they all driven impeccably; not all American cars Fords, nor do they all careen by whim of inattentive hand; and not all European cars Bentleys, nor are they all piloted with soft disgust by the help.

But my metaphor's limitations parallel those of the conventional account, inasmuch as both betray an underdeveloped appreciation for detail and an overweening urge to categorize.  A more accurate metaphor of the cultural scene, circa 1900, would have all three modes traveling north, as all three are equally committed—albeit distinctively, as will be demonstrated in the chapters to follow—to a broad conception of social development via applied science.  In this account, self-proclaimed realists sport makes and models from across Japan and Southeast Asia: a Honda Civic jockeys with a Toyota Tundra for inside position until a naturalist in a Pontiac Grand Prix emerges from the shadow of a Chevy Silverado and cuts the corner and secures the lane occupied by a southbound-facing romancer in Rolls Royce who slams into reverse and proceeds north, backwards, as best he can.

This final image—a menagerie of law-abiding Southeast Asian imports hurtling north alongside masculine American machines as both dodge Old World status symbols whose terrified drivers mistakenly believe everyone else wildfires north in the southbound lane—this final, chaotic image closely approximates the bounded diversity of turn-of-the-last-century American culture.  Generalizations remain, certainly, but unlike the conventional account, they exist in a manner suitable to and for further differentiation.  All Japanese and Southeast Asian cars are not Accords or even Hondas, nor are all American cars Fords, and so on.  Moreover, while the driver of a speeding American SUV shares some beliefs and dispositions with the cautious driver of a American coupe, he may share other, more important ones with the driver of a Rolls Royce convertible: the drivers of the coupe and the convertible may be headed for the same exit; the driver of the convertible may share an entrance with the SUV; the driver of the SUV may share an exit with the with the driver of the coupe; or the driver of convertible may be cuckolding the driver of the SUV.  Point being, any or all of these distinctions may be critical to understanding their choice of vehicle, preferred entrance and exit, and behavior on the road; shouldering them into a model whose perceptual threshold cannot account for idiosyncratic decisions and behaviors will produce results which say more about the model builder than the thing being modeled.

Although some generalizations still obtain in my account, I embrace the inevitable jams, accidents, pile-ups, and rubbernecking, because the alternative—excluding historical contingency for the sake of conceptual clarity—insisting a southbound facing car is a southbound traveling car—entails the unnecessarily imposition of contemporary norms on a period best characterized by the deliberative nonsense of its maximal diversity.

To enumerate every the sin committed above would be demoralizing, but five grievous ones bear mention:

1. The metaphor does not explicate a complex matter so much as muddle one with additional complexity.
2. The idea is too apparent in the execution.  I literalized the metaphorical traffic of intellectual exchange because the final image—a southbound facing car traveling north in reverse—struck me as a compelling analogue for the hypocritical claims of historical romancers. 
3. The passage is overwrought.  Who allowed me unfettered access to semicolons and em dashes?  Why does he still work here?
4. Cars?  Seriously?
5. I mean for seriously seriously?

My complaints notwithstanding, I still believe in this passage for the simple reason that the image in my head works: it organizes numerous (often conflicting) theories of literary tradition and historical causation into something I can easily manipulate in my head.  (Plus I can mentally forward 5:10.20 seconds into this clip and Be The Dissertation I Want To Write.)  As written, however, it seems deliberately designed to confuse. This is a problem a better writer might know how to solve, but who has time to consult better writers when his dissertation is due in a little more than a month? 

UPDATE: Maybe I just lack the right ingredients? 

Brain-damaged historians

(x-posted.)

Somewhere in Silas Weir Mitchell's voluminous correspondence on the brain damage of Civil War veterans—my notes are in California, I'm now in Texas—is an account of a Confederate soldier whose bullet-struck head recoiled into a dry-stone wall and performed a fortuitous auto-trepanation.  The insult to his brain had been mitigated by the hole in head, but Mitchell feared the soldier would never regain normal cognitive function.  As time tripped over nothing, cursed in tongues, begged passersby for aid and, roundly rebuffed, stumbled on, the soldier slowly found himself again.  Eventually he could move, see, speak, form new memories and remember the old ones.  He was as he'd been before the war, but for the brutal fact he saw in still life:   

The dog is across the room curled before the fire. 

Blink. 

The dog is on its hind legs staring out the window. 

Blink. 

The dog is in the middle of the room facing him. 

Blink. 

The dog is sinking its wet nose into the crook of his arm. 

Blink.

The dog is across the room curled before the fire.

The soldier suffered what we now call akinetopsia or motion blindess.*  The effect represented by crude blinks above is better, if more crudely, represented about 5 minutes and 14 seconds into this clip, which captures the fear and paranoia Mitchell assumed would accompany akinetopsia.  Items like fans would be particularly disturbing because they produced a constant impression upon the skin by a process undetectable to the patient, for whom the blades would jump—jump—jump instead of spinning.  But Mitchell was less concerned with akinetopsia itself than one of its side-effects: the ghostly motion trails produced by items in motion. 

Stand before a motion-blind person, do a jumping jack, and he will describe two scenes: a first in which your arms are at your sides, and a second in which your arms stand solid above your head, but are followed by a faint trace of the space they traveled, like the long exposure photograph on the right (original) only far less pronounced.  Mitchell believed these traces might be related to what would have been his crowning achievement were it not for Charlotte Perkins Gilman: phantom limb syndrome. 

Normal brains need not speculate as to how your arm moved from Point A to Point B because it registered Points A.001 up through A.999; that is, it receives sequential sense impressions of your arm as it travels from hips to head.**  A motion-blind brain only receives sensory impressions from Points A and B, but because it knows arms must move through space, it compensates for what it can't perceive by drawing diaphanous snow-angels in the air.  It does so, Mitchell believed, because even damaged brains know how they ought to behave.  They know what stimuli they should be receiving and, in their absence, choose to receive them anyway.  For Mitchell, the brain is but a forlorn lover refusing to acknowledge its loss: lop off an arm at the elbow and it will insist on clenching former fingers in an invisible fist; chop off a leg above the knee and unreal calves will burn with the exertion of a marathon completed. 

The ghostly trails seen by the motion-blind are simply a different manifestation of the same stubborn insistence Nothing has Changed and Everything is Under Control.  The brain insists on stasis while compensating madly, all the while praying the mind never notices its frenzied machinations.

Sometimes it does. 

Every time it steps into the city it does.  Imagine being motion-blind on a bustling street corner with hundreds of vehicles teleporting blocks, their trails overlapping and intermingling with those of trucks turning left, cabs turning right, pedestrians hustling, pigeons scattering, garbage flying, dust rising, wind whipping, rain falling.  The mind becomes exhausted by the brain's exertions.  Put differently:

The brain finds it difficult to confabulate in real time when presented with minimal stimuli.  Offer it a highly trafficked Philadelphia street corner and it performs like a self-taught cook in a trendy restaurant: the first few orders trickle in and go out fine, but as more people arrive and more orders come in, less time is spent preparing more food until what little goes out tastes of shit.  Given foreknowledge of what would be ordered by whom when, our home-schooled chef might could prep himself into something resembling competent; that is, if presented with a narrative, an adequately prepared amateur might survive evening service by remembering the broad strokes. 

Because for Mitchell, narrative is all that stands between us and tastes of shit.  The historian is kin to our overwhelmed chef, our motion-blind pedestrian, our auto-trepanned soldier attempting to relate what happened without the benefit of an overarching narrative.  The historian not only tries to document Points A.001 through A.999, he interleaves a marching causality of the insignificant and irrelevant until the Real Reasons and True Character of historical actors are swamped by waves as pointless as they are ceaseless.  What does a person learn from such history?

If it looks and sounds like a horse, it's probably a zebra. 

The only way to be sure people recognize a horse when they see one is to tattoo the concept on their brain in stirring historical romances of crystalline moral intent and transparent moral purpose.  The historian who subdivides unto infinity produces a history equivalent to the blurred image of the motion-blind.  Why recreate in prose the muddle of a brain insulted?  To try and replicate the exertions of a healthy brain is to court inevitable failure. 

Better to replicate the brain-smoothed illusion of movement lost to the motion-blind via a historical romance about How Great George Washington Was.***

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*Current medical literature focuses on "L.M.," whose infamous daily horror is knowing when to stop pouring liquids.  She sees (1) a full pitcher, (2) the pitcher titled over a cup, an icicle suspended from its lip, (3) an empty pitcher, an overfull cup, and a table covered in quiet puddles.  I didn't say it was infamous because it was particularly compelling.  Because it isn't.  (Even though everyone cites it as if it were.)

**I know A.0011, A.0012, A.oo13 and their infinite kin prevent turtles from ever crossing finish lines, Achilleses from ever overtaking turtles, puppies from ever escaping alligators or whichever mammalian-reptilian mathematical NASCAR you fancy, but bear with me.

***Before you berate me for my conclusions not following my premises; my science being applied here in this way, there in that; or my nonsensical application of early neuroscientific theories of mind to judgments concerning the relative merits of history proper and historical romance—before you cudgel me for all that, remember Mitchell was a gentleman given to public pontification, not Hegel.

The Etiology of Nightmares; or, You Be My Freud!

Last night I dreamt I couldn't move.  My dream began and ended with me prostrate and paralyzed on an unkempt dirt floor.  I've never had a dream half so dull or  claustrophobic before.  For uncountable hours I spit up the turf I'd otherwise inhale.  The tang of organic compost permeated my every thought ... all of which were hummed to this tune, causing me to wonder whether I wasn't dreamily demanding you recognize me.  I float on!  Float on!

Because I'm William Blake:

Don't you know my poetry?*

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*If this post makes no sense, it's only because I couldn't find video of the closing scenes of Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man.  Why did I fail?  Because Johnny Depp thought it'd be a good idea to star in another movie prominently featuring the words "dead" and "man" in the title, thereby rendering Google more useless than useless.

Dear John Carlos Rowe: SHUT UP!

Some of us don't have tenure yet.  This is completely uncalled for:

In Connecticut Yankee, Twain warns the reader that the United States is already following the lead of the European imperial powers, a message he would repeat with growing volubility in his anti-imperialist writings from 1898 to 1905, most of which require little interpretation.  (Literary Culture and U.S. Imperialism, 139, emphasis mine.)

You are an evil liar, John Carlos Rowe.  You may have total recall.  You may be right charming.  I may even respect you mightily.  That changes nothing.  This is beyond the pale.  Don't believe me?  Ask anyone without tenure and brace yourself for a brutal what for.  Fact:

Everything requires loads of interpretation.  All of it.  (Even that.)

Just because you have tenure doesn't mean you can give up the gig.  Some of us still have to slog through six sets a night.

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?