Acephalous

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?

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.

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