Acephalous

What AM I Trying to Say? or, Henry James DID Do It, So Why Can't I?

In the comments to the first of Ogged's two posts about "serious reading," A White Bear writes:

One of the reasons I think it's important to teach pre-1800 texts is that it takes practice to tease out long sentences if all you've been reading is Chuck Palahniuk. Long, well-crafted sentences are more likely to offer examples of subtle, careful rhetoric. I've said before that I'm really attracted to dudes who know how to use a subordinate clause—not because I like Ivy-League dudes who are way into Milton, but because it's a sign that the mind is supple and sees in more colors than black and white.

Later, JL quotes Donald Hall on late Henry James:

Late James is the best prose for reading aloud. Saying one of his interminable sentences, the voice must drop pitch every time he interrupts his syntax with periphrasis, and drop again when periphrasis interrupts periphrasis, and again, and then step the pitch up, like climbing stairs in the dark, until the original tone concludes the sentence. One's larynx could write a doctoral dissertation on James's syntax.

Sandwiched between these two statements are numerous complaints about Twitter, text-messaging, and how they rob one of the ability to discern the subtleties of long sentences generally and late James specifically.  When AWB or Hall praises complex sentences, they do so because such sentences require an ear for subtlety the dessicated literalism of a pay-per-word culture deafens one to, i.e. you wouldn't catch James resorting to ALL CAPS for emphasis, because his readers could tease the emphasis from contextual clues.

Only as the transcription guide [.pdf] to "Dear Henry James" attests, James frequently employed the nineteenth century equivalent of ALL CAPS: the underline.  When his letters are transcribed, his underlining is preserved using ALL CAPS or italics for single underlines, ALL CAPS for double, UNDERLINED ALL CAPS triple, &c. 

So James' famous exhortation to Edith Wharton usually looks like this: "DO NEW YORK!"  The ALL CAPS is understandable there, as it marks the exhortatory nature of an exhortation; however, James regularly underlined words which are already emphatic, such as the emphatic do: "DO be so far as possible his Lady Ripon."  Happens quite a lot.  Perhaps this double emphasis is conventional, and that in the course of one of his long, winding late-period sentences he would include no twitter-markers.  Here's his 1907 account of a car accident (from a letter to Wharton):

Apropos of smashes, two or three days after we had crossed the level crossing of Caianello, near Caserta, SEVEN Neapolitan "smarts" were ALL killed dead—and this by no coming of the train, but simply by furious reckless driving and a deviation, a SLIP, that dashed them against a rock and made an instant end. The Italian driving is CRAPULOUS, and the roads mostly not good enough.

I don't think anyone would accuse Wharton of being an unsubtle reader, yet James writes as if his emphasis couldn't be gleaned from contextual clues.  All of which leads me to believe that such DEVIATIONS and SLIPS might not represent the DECLINE of comprehension so much as the continuation of a traditional emotional register of no small communicative import, INDEPENDENT of standards of literacy; such that the comprehension of READERS should not be thought the worse for merely reading what AUTHORS want to express with a VEHEMENCE unrelated to understandability. 

A.E. Housman & The Latin for Ass; or, the Kool Moe Dee to Our Busy Bees

Hunting down the source of the Latin maxim with which Wharton closes "The Descent of Man"—"labor est etiam ipsa voluptas" ("toil is itself a pleasure")—I came across numerous articles by A.E. Housman, best known to high-schoolers as the author of "To An Athlete Dying Young."  Regrettably, before tonight I knew little more about Housman now than I did in high school; by which I mean, it could've been summarized "'we chaired you through the market-place' taught me how to verb."  Now that I've become acquainted with him as a classical scholar, however, that's certain to change.  If the below's indicative of his professional correspondence, I can't wait to read his letters.

Perhaps this is well-known to all them what ain't rubes like me, but Housman tore his contemporaries new ones faster and harder and bigger than anyone this side of Stanley Fish.  Strike that.  His is the withering to which Fish-wit aspires.  Consider his introduction to Juvenal:

Frailty of understanding is in itself no proper target for scorn and mockery ... but the unintelligent forfeit their claim to compassion when they begin to indulge in self-complacent airs, and to call themselves sane critics, meaning they are mechanics.  And when, relying on their numbers, they pass from self-complacency to insolence, and reprove their betters for using the brains which God has denied them, they dry up the fount of pity. (xiii.)

W.M. Lindsay's shriveled riposte?

If [Housman's] preface, in spite of the unfortunate¹ style in which it is written ...

¹ I suppose it is useless to express a wish that Mr. Housman would cease to speak about veteran scholars of eminence ... in that fashion.

Fortunately for us, Lindsay's wish was useless.  In the preface to his translation of Manilius' Astronomica, Housman first lights into Elias Stoeber of Strassburg, "a city still famous for its geese":

"Stoeber's mind, though that is no name to call it by, was one which turned as unswervingly to the false, the meaningless, the unmetrical, and the ungrammatical, as the needle to the pole." (xix)

A later translator, Friedrich Jacob, fairs no better:

Not only had Jacob no sense for grammar, no sense for coherency, no sense for sense, but being himself possessed by a passion for the clumsy and the hispid he imputed this disgusting taste to all the authors whom he edited; and Manilius, the one Latin poet who exceeds even Ovid in verbal point and smartness, is accordingly constrained to write the sort of poetry which might have been composed by Nebuchadnezzar when he was driven from men and did eat grass as oxen. (xxi)

As to how Jacob and Stoeber compared:

In [Jacob's] short book, if only its vices are considered, is a scarce less woeful piece of work than Stoeber's: the difference is that while Stoeber never reminds one of a rational animal, the fog of Jacob's intellect is shot through, and not that seldom, by flashes of conspicuous and startling brilliancy. (xxii)

Of the conservative critic, Housman opined:

His trade is one which requires, that it may be practiced in perfection, two qualifications only: ignorance of language and abstinence from thought. (liii)

My admiration aside, I don't covet a return to this sort of scholarly interaction.  However much I may yearn for the passion of the craft, I can't countenance this sort of open insult.  But there are moments—deny it if you will, but you lie only to yourself—when you wish you possessed license and skill to roast your contemporaries as finely as Housman's roasted his.  Who doesn't want to decry a laurel-rester as Housman did, claiming that this book offers readers "perpetual contact with the intellect of an idiot child" (xxiii), or that this scholar's

eyesight was evidently feeble, and did not serve him well in collating MSS or correcting proofs; but that is not enough to account for the bucketfuls of falsehood which he discharged on an ignorant and confiding public. (xxiv)

Much as we hate to admit in polite company, we all share Housman's sentiment sometimes.  We merely lack wit and gumption enough to act on it.*  As for the title of this post: one half's an homage to a legendary rap battle; the other's a reference to Housman's essay on "The Latin for Ass" (1930).  Setting aside the joke others would've cracked at its appearance, you can't help but love the opening paragraph:

In English, down to the 19^th century, the beast which carried Balaam was generally and almost universally, both in speech and in writing, denominated the ass.  It is no longer: the name ass, except in metaphor as a term of contempt or insult, has disappeared from conversation and from most kinds of print, and survives only in serious poetry and in prose of some solemnity.  The name donkey, first printed in 1785 in a dictionary of slang, has usurped its place.

Henry James & Fletcherism; or, "The Gospel of Much Chewing"

Reading through Wharton's correspondence with Henry James, I came across a passage in which he extols the virtues of "the Fletcher diet."  According to L.F. Barker in The New York Times (8 March 1907), its inventor, Horace Fletcher,

was refused a few years ago on applying for life insurance because of stomach trouble.  That frightened him, and he began to think over the question of what he ate and should eat.  He came to the conclusion that food swallowed before it is dissolved is very much in the situation of clinkers in a furnace—likely to cause trouble and the loss of a great deal of energy in getting rid of it ... So he decided to chew everything he ate until it had thoroughly dissolved in his mouth. 

"The Gospel of Much Chewing," according to the Massachusetts Ploughman and New England Journal of Agriculture (27 February 1904), came to Fletcher when he realized

that the malassimilation which causes ["most, if, indeed, not all, of the ills to which humanity is supposed to be heir"] must arise from some voluntary violation of nature's laws, since subconscious action is of necessity in accord with them.

As the action of the stomach and lower digestive tract is involuntary, he reasoned that the difficulty must be in the mouth ... and he began at once to study its office in connection with digestion.  He soon discovered, among other untabulated physiological facts, that, after he had formed the habit of so thoroughly insalivating his food, both liquids and solids, that it became tasteless, he swallowed it without voluntary effort, and also that he experienced a curious inability to swallow food not so thoroughly masticated; finding that the throat through no act of will closed against that which had not been reduced to the consistency of cream.

While making these experiments Mr. Fletcher found that a young garden onion required 722 bites before it disappeared by involuntary swallowing, but that when this was accomplished it left no odor.

Simply put, Mr. Fletcher's contention is that the office of the teeth is so to reduce food that each particle can be acted upon by the saliva, which is freed by the action of the mouth for this purpose.

By practicing this thorough insalivating of his food, Dr. van Someren ["a practicing physician in Venice"] says that he has been cured of inherited gout and of eczema, frequent boils and severe headaches when all remedies known to the medical profession failed to give him relief ... In fact, he declares that most diseases would disappear if this method of eating was a universal habit.

In sum: Henry James praises a method of eating which entails sitting down to a delicious dinner and chewing, chewing, chewing, chewing, chewing until the food loses all flavor and is the consistency of cream.  Can you resist the temptation to analogize his post-1900 diet and his post-1900 prose style?

I, for one, cannot.

Pennies from Heaven, Fall into My Lap

When I set my new chapter-per-month schedule, I knew I'd socialize less, sleep less, watch less television—but I also knew I'd be unable to produce quality work without some dumb luck.  No researching for months and months before finding the best quotation in the history of everything; I'd need critical evidence self-glomerating into compelling arguments at breakneck speed.  You can understand, then, why I'm demoralized by my discovery of the isolation of New York "society" from American society at large.*  You can also understand why I'm elated that Edith Wharton underlined the following passage in Haeckel's The History of Creation:

Individuals can transmit, not only those qualities which they themselves have inherited from their ancestors, but also the peculiar, individual qualities which they have acquired in their own life.

Now, underscoring is no more of an endorsement than, say, linking, but it means establishing her familiarity with the neo-Lamarckian strain of evolutionary thought will be a cinch.  All I need do now is determine where she stands on these issues, and I'll be set.  I'll have this thing done in no time flat.  Already half-finished, it will be, sometime soon, I hope.

*The upper reaches barely even considered themselves American.  Wharton wrote of her friends, "we are none of us Americans, we don't think or feel as the Americans do, we are the wretched exotics produced in a European glass house."  The emphasis on "we" and use of the phrase "the Americans" point to future difficulties in establishing her take on social evolution, but as that milk's yet to be spilled, I'll save my tears for now.

Reason 7,379 Not to Make Predictions

From Wood Hutchinson's Handbook of Health (1911):

Within fifty years from now the habitual use of alcohol will probably have become quite rare. It is already becoming "good form" among the best people not to drink; and the fashion will spread, as the bad effects of alcohol become more generally understood.

The title page identifies Hutchinson as a "Sometimes Professor."  Normally, I'm not sure what that means.  This time, I think I understand:

Sometime Professor of Anatomy, University of Iowa; Professor of Comparative Pathology and Methods of Science Teaching, University of Buffalo; Lecturer, London Medical Graduates' College and University of London; and State Health Officer of Oregon.

Close-Reading Exercise: A Good Bad Reading of Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn"

In The Structure of Complex Words (1951), William Empson prefaces his discussion of Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn" with a complaint about looming unreadability:

It seems clear that we have to imagine what went on in the mind of Keats, as he wondered what the pot can have meant—we, it is understood, being those who have lost our innocence in the matter by reading the contradictory babble of the critics.

Fifty-five years later, the contradictory babbling of the critical brook has grown into a rushing roar of deafening rapids whose brutal churnings hoist screaming scholars from their tiny boats and into the water, under the water, out of the water, rumbling them here then tumbling them there and pushing them forward, forward, forward, so when they gain, for good, the surface, breathe a breath, or two, and find, their bearings, they have just enough time to see the end they share with the cascade as it launches them over the falls—ascending, soaring, falling, plummeting—and they slam with fury on the surface of the lake below, where their battered bodies drift here, then there, until they join, join the others, on the shore, another academic casualty, half-drowned, half-broken, bloating in the hot sun.

Such is the fate of those fools dull enough to venture into criticism of what W.J.T. Mitchell calls "the ritual example" of ekphrastic poetry.  Interpret "ritual" as a hazing cruel hazing gratuitously cruel hazing and you'll begin to understand the pleasures attendant upon entering the Murray Kreiger  Memorial "Ode on a Grecian Urn" Wing of the critical canon.  Unfortunately, I need to produce a specific, sophisticated reading of the poem in order to finish my Silas Weir Mitchell chapter: specific, because it must conform to Mitchell's notions about art and history; sophisticated, because contemporary literary scholars must be more sophisticated than the dim brutes they study.  I can handle the former—I'm likely the only person alive who can—but I could use some help with the latter.  Otherwise I'll spit nonsense about how some ekphrastic moments are "considerably less stable than [those] maintained by a model ekphrastic text such as 'Ode on a Grecian Urn,' [in which] Keats' speaker has direct access to the urn."  (No, I will not provide a citation, thank you very much.)  Anyhow, on to the interpretation:

Most critics agree that the urn is a composite, equal parts Elgin Marble, Townley Vase, Portland Vase, one of Josiah Wedgwood’s jasperware duplicates of the Portland Vase, &c.  It's only indirectly ekphrastic, because it does not describe a particular object so much as create in readers' minds the object it describes.  So Keats' infamous ignorance, which I will discuss shortly, must be feigned—one cannot not know what's represented on a nonexistent vase.  Keep that in mind as I weave—sometimes deftly, sometimes like a drunken sailor—through Keats' poem, the first line of which reads:

Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness

The speaker addresses the urn here, so we can't say for certain whether he's describing the poem or imposing upon it qualities it doesn't have.  This potential for unreliability compounds the poem's already problematic status as an ekphrastic work.  If the speaker's words can't be trusted, we're forced to shift our perspective from the vase to the character of the person describing it.  Imagine, though, that we can trust the speaker, that the urn is an unravished bride of quietness.  What does that mean?  Is the bride married to quietness, or is she a quiet bride?  Given that the speaker speaks for the urn, I'd contend the urn's a quiet bride.  If she could speak for herself, she would.  But since she can't—or is reluctant to—the speaker must speak for her.  Is this intentional?  An accident of ekphrasis?  Ekphrasis demands ventriloquizing, after all, so is it even significant that the speaker speaks for the urn?

Probably, I would argue, for reasons inherent in the poem.  Since it can't speak for itself, the speaker must impute meaning to the urn.  So any interpretation teeters on the critic's evaluation of his honesty.  In most criticism, this evaluation occurs covertly, by attributing the speaker's words to Keats or an analogue thereof.  Since I'm interested in the model of history provided by the poem, I want to keep this covert attribution as close to the surface as possible.  Even if the vase is a "Sylvan historian," the history it tells is mediated by the speaker who relates it.  But I'm getting ahead of myself. 

I haven't even discussed whether the poem is "still," as in "not moving," and "unravish'd," or "still unravish'd," as in forever awaiting the consumation of the marriage bed.  If the former, you would expect a comma between "still" and "unravished"—"Thou still, unravished bride of quietude"—so I incline to the latter ... which conveniently accords with the rest of the poem thematically.  So as the first line ends, the reader learns that the speaker considers the urn roughly analogous to a shy bride whose marriage still hasn't been consummated.  Fair enough—only what does that mean?

Thou foster-child of Silence and slow Time,

The OED cites the poem as a "fig." exemplar of "foster-child," but that doesn't help much.  The urn, the OED would have us believe, is the figurative "child as related to persons who have reared it as their own."  Wonderful.  Only, are "Silence" and "slow Time" the urn's birth- or foster-parents?  Contemporary usage would suggest that they're the urn's foster parents, which means that its birth parents are, um, give me a minute here—wait, wait, I know the answer to this one, would it be—no, that can't be right—I know!  Bigmouth!  (Keats and Yeats are on my side.)  Which means the other parent is—The Present!  Is that right? 

I don't know.  I mean, why did I dance directly to the antipodes?  Why can't the urn be the product of the short but tumultuous affair of "Speaks When Not Spoken To" and "New York Minute"?  The antipodal explanation seems to be the best, though, so I'll run with it.  Whatever the urn may have meant to its parents, after a few years with "Silence" and "slow Time," it means something different to the new parents who shape the speaker's, not to mention the reader's, understanding of it. 

In other words, the urn is an object worthy of study not because of who it is or what it meant when originally thrown, but because of who it is and what it means now, as an aesthetic object worthy of investigation despite having no specific historical context.  Not that it doesn't contain an abundance of historicity—it clearly does, and is clearly valued in part for that.  But its historicity relates to its original context in the same way truthiness relates to the truth.  To wit:

Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
  A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme

The speaker values the urn for the superior manner in which it can tell the tale, not for the accuracy with which it does.  The urn's a "Sylvan historian," alright, but the only reason the speaker "listens" to it is that all the other Sylvan historians are dull as dirt.  As becomes abundantly apparent in the next few lines, the urn's content matters far less than the felicity with which it relates it.  The speaker, well:

What leaf-fringed legend haunts about thy shape
  Of deities or mortals, or of both,
    In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?
  What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
    What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?

Translated:

What's the title of this thing anyway?
  Is it about them?  Them?  Both?
    It takes place where?
  Which one of them are these?  Who are they?
Where are they going and why are they in such a rush?
    What is that?  Guitar?  Xylophone?  Why so loud?

Despite knowing the answers to none of these questions, the speaker still values the urn.  I know I promised to produce a close-reading of the entire poem, but I want to stop hear for the night and hear some feedback before continuing.  As you can probably guess, I think the poem is less about the timeless value of aesthetic objects and more about how things only become aesthetic objects once they've lost whatever they once meant.  In other words, aesthetic objects are not created without regard to the historical moment in which they're produced, but become aesthetic objects only after the particulars of that moment have been lost to history.  The speaker possesses a transformative ignorance—he finds meaning in the urn precisely because it has none for him.  I need to figure out why Keats would choose to dramatize this ignorance—because if this or something resembling it obtains, I think I know why S.W. Mitchell's attracted to it.

For those who want to read the entire poem so that you might better refute my noodlings:

You Can Tell by the Way They Hunt the Rest

From Silas Weir Mitchell's The Youth of Washinton (1907):

He was the only black man I ever saw who could handle bees, for these industrious little insects have a great enmity to negroes.

Mitchell stuffs these words in George Washington's mouth and is lauded as the most patriotic American novelist ever by no less than three national newspapers.  The Washington Bee wasn't one of them.

Go figure.

American Unexceptionalism; or, Claybaugh's "Towards a New Transatlanticism"

When you work on evolutionary theory in America during the 1890s, you can't help but notice how many of the folks you're reading aren't American: Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (nope), Charles Lyell (nope), Charles Darwin (nope), Alfred Russel Wallace (nope), Herbert Spencer (nope), August Weismann (nope), Thomas Huxley (nope), Louis Agassiz (nope), &c.  When writing about the influence of evolutionary theory on American literature, you sign a bloody compact with the discipline:

I, _________, swear to write only about American literature and American literary history.   If I, _________, choose to write about any thought originating beyond these blessed shores, I promise to relate it to American liteature and American literary history.   Under no circumstances will I, _________, write about the influence of foreign literatures upon American, unless it be the pernicious influence of French naturalism, in which case I will coyly hide my hatred on this heart emblazoned on my sleeve.

I could prattle on about "American Exceptionalism" and its legacy in American literary studies, but I'd rather accentuate the positive here.^[1]   By "the positive," I mean Amanda Claybaugh's brilliant new article, "Towards a New Transatlanticism: Dickens in the United States" (Victorian Studies 48.3).   In it, she discusses the importance of treating Anglo- and American literatures in English as belonging to—though by no means being equal partners in—a literary culture which cared little for national boundaries. 
As I mentioned earlier, I'm by necessity a proponent of this idea; after all, it is difficult to talk about the influence of evolutionary thought on American culture without recognizing that the majority of contributions to both come from England, France and Germany.   We have our homegrown thought—our Emersons and Thoreaus, our Hawthornes and Melvilles, not to mention our most uniquely American minds, the Douglasses and Stowes—but for the most part American writers aspired to write homegrown thought transplanted, roots and all, from foreign soil.

Treating American literature as a tradition unto itself severs its from those roots and that soil in ways this historicist thinks unnatural.   So when I read Claybaugh's essay, I couldn't help but admire how skillfully she articulated my unspoken reservations:

Amended Because Others Have Been Found

From Philosophical Transactions, Vol. 1. (1665 - 1666), 43.

The Trouble With Diversity: A Valve Book Event

For those of you who read me here but not over there, I should warn you: I'm the ringleader of The Trouble With Diversity book event, so posting may be heavy elsewhere, light here this week.  I'll x-post what I write, but I'd prefer you comment on the Valve, as we want to keep the conversation humming.  That said, I want to repost what my prelude over here, so those who want some background but don't read the Valve can follow the conversation (if they so desire).  So, without further ado:

The Trouble With Diversity: A Prelude

As a prelude to next week’s discussion of The Trouble With Diversity, I’m providing some links to recent articles by and about Walter Benn Michaels and the conversaions they elicited.  I’ll follow those with links to scholarly articles about the two books from which The Trouble With Diversity draws its arguments, Our America: Nativism, Modernism and Pluralism and The Shape of the Signifier: 1967 to the End of History.

Articles by Michaels concerning The Trouble With Diversity:

• “The Trouble With Diversity,” American Prospect, September 12, 2006
• “Class Fictions,” Boston Globe, October 9, 2005
• “Diversity’s False Solace,” New York Times, April 11, 2004
• “Overrating Diversity,” Huffington Post, September 15, 2006
• “Plots Against America: Neoliberalism and Antiracism,” American Literary History 18.2 (2006) [Project Muse]
• “Autobiography of an Ex-White Man,” Transition 73 (1997) [JSTOR]

Commentary on The Trouble With Diversity:

• “Ideology Instead of Identity,” Jennifer Howard, The Chronicle of Higher Education, September 22, 2006
• “Liberty, Equality ... Diversity?,” Scott McLemee
• “The Trouble With Prosperity,” Ezra Klein
• “The Diversity Plutocracy,” John McWhorter
• “Getting Your Priorities Straight,” Unfogged
• “A Peculiarly Bifurcated Book,” University Diaries
• “Benn There, Done That,” Discriminations
• “Colorblinded," The Boston Globe, September 3, 2006
• “Against Zero-Sum Logic: A Response to ["Plots Against America"]," Michael Rothberg, American Literary History 18.2 (2006) [PM]

Articles by Michaels concerning The Shape of the Signifier:

• “The Shape of the Signifier,” Critical Inquiry 27.2 (2001) [JSTOR]
• “Posthistoricism," Transition 70 (1996) [JSTOR]
• “Political Science Fictions,” New Literary History 31.4 (2000) [PM]
• “Empires of the Senseless: (The Response to) Terror and (the End of) History,” Radical History Review 85 (2003) [PM]

Commentary on The Shape of the Signifier:

• “The Shape of the Signifier or, The Ontology of Argument,” Davide Panagia, Theory & Event 8.2 (2005) [PM]
• “Post Post-Identity,” Michael Millner, American Quarterly 57.2 (2005) [PM]
• “Review," Henry Staten, Modernism/Modernity 12.2 (2005) [PM]

Articles by Michaels concerning Our America:

• “American Modernism and the Poetics of Identity,”  Modernism/Modernity 1.1 (1994) [PM]
• “Race Into Culture: A Critical Genealogy of Cultural Identity,” Critical Inquiry 18.4 (1992) [JSTOR]
• “The No-Drop Rule,” Critical Inquiry 20.4 (1994) [JSTOR]
• “The Vanishing American,” American Literary History 2.2 (1990) [JSTOR]

Commentary on Our America:

• “Introduction to Our America and Nativist Modernism: A Panel,” Robert Von Hallberg, Modernism/Modernity 3.1 (1996) [PM]
• “Modernism Without the Modernists,” Marjorie Perloff, Modernism/Modernity 3.1 (1996) [PM]
• “Whose America is Our America,” Charles Altieri, Modernism/Modernity 3.1 (1996) [PM]
• “Literature and History: Neat Fits,” Robert Von Hallberg, Modernism/Modernity 3.1 (1996) [PM]
• “Response," Walter Benn Michaels, Modernism/Modernity 3.1 (1996) [PM]

I would’ve included more on these lists, but I feared overwhelming contributors and commenters alike.  By no means must you read all those links—many of which are available only through subscription—to comment on The Trouble With Diversity.

Torture, Inc.: The Future Is Then

In his 1892 American Anthropologist article, James Welling observes "that the employment of torture as an engine of justice belongs to an advanced stage of mental evolution" (194).  "Advanced," that is, when compared to judicial ordeal, such as

a wager of battle between the litigant parties; trial as to which of two or more parties can longest hold the arms extended in the form of a cross; which can thrust the arm with impunity in water boiling hot; which shall sink and which shall float when cast into pool or stream with the hands and feet appropriately tied—the right hand to the left foot, the right foot to the left hand; which shall walk over burning ploughshares, laid at irregular intervals on the ground, and escape with the soles of the feet unscathed; which shall pass through fire and flame with limbs unscorched, &c. (193)

Compared to that, torture represents an advance.  One from which we, as Americans, backslid.  Over the past six years, we have come back to the fold.  First, we re-familiarized ourselves with and re-desensitized ourselves to the trials competitive humiliation.  The stakes may have been lower, but our hearts were pure and the ratings were fantastic.  Slowly, however, it lost its appeal.  Didn't matter how irregularly they laid the burning ploughshares on the ground.  They could've tied one litigant's right foot to the other's left hand, set them on fire, threw them in a pool or stream, fished them out and saw whose rigor more closely resembles a crucified Christ and we still would've flipped to something else . 

However loosely defined, judicial trial didn't cut it anymore.  We knew we wanted something else.  Something more advanced.  So, in full compliance with the law of social evolution, we had no choice but to re-advance our backwards, backslid backsides.

Initially, and to the annoyance of many, we niggled like our more advanced forebears, drawing "fine-spun distinctions" left, right and Right:

while the intervals between no proof at all and a proof half complete, or between a proof half complete and a proof complete, [distinctions] were graduated into still more spectral segments of proof, such as proof less than complete, but nearer complete than half complete; proof less than complete, but further from complete than half complete; probatio which might be rated with its evanescent values from bona to optima, from evidens to evidentissima, from aperta to apertissima, from dubia to indubitata, from idonea, legitimata, and sufficiens through all the ascending scales of the evidential gamut to liquida, dilucida, perspicua, luce meridiana, clarior, &c., &c. (196)

Our ancestors probably didn't know how easy it would be for terrorists to stuff a dirty bomb in an et cætera.  Had they, there wouldn't have been any trifling with "proofs less than half complete, but to closer to half incomplete than half complete depending on the curve."  They would have known that expediency demanded, and would settle for no less than, "proof now."  Who has time to fiddle with veracity when there's a bomb in that kid!  ("We're truth-seeking and he ain't truth-speaking," says the dashing hero, pointing an unsteady finger at the babbling infant.)  Our decision to dispense with fussiness of Sebastian Guazzini's ponderous Tractatus ad Defensam Inquisitorum, Carceratorum, Reorum et Condemnatorum super Quocunque Crimine (1612) would be applauded.

They wouldn't have minded the elimination of unmanly "legal prerequisites for torture" restraining the when, where, why and how high we amp the 'trodes.  Nor would they have cared that judges wouldn't face public reckoning when they couldn't demonstrate that all "forty-three indications for torture" have been met, appealed, re-presented, and re-appealed in a legally transparent manner.  That's the kind of backward-thinking forethought you'd expect from some inquisitor in 1612, but you and I both know Guazzini'd race us to water-boarding chamber first chance he got. 

After all, he's not that different from the guys who want to pick up his baton and beat the truth from someone with it:

The seventh requisite is that inspection be made of the person of the accused, to ascertain whether he is privileged or not, because a privileged person cannot be tortured even with legitimate presumptions precedent. (202)

---

For a serious analysis of the source of my redirected aggression, check out Timothy Burke or the links zuzu compiled.

Dissertation Arcana #9,871: In Coincidences, My Head Swims

[This is the second installment in a series on the unaccountable appearance of chess-related arcana in my dissertation researches.  The first installment can be found here.  Unlike that one, however, this one happens to be true.]

In 1857, two unsigned articles appeared in Chess Monthly explaining how the infamous chess automaton known as the Turk worked:

The chest was divided into two apartments above, and a drawer beneath.  In the smaller apartment, occupying about a third of the longitudinal dimensions of the box, was placed a number of pieces of brass, made very thin, and designed only for the purpose of deception .... Behind this movable back of the drawer, there was therefore left an unoccupied space of the whole length of the chest, and rather more than a foot in breadth.  In this through was fixed an iron railroad ... upon which was placed a low seat.

So shiny knobs, bells and whistles above; below, a cramped seat into which tiny grandmasters could squeeze their emaciated selves.  That's the "mystery" of the Turk, according to these anonymous articles.  However, given that they were published in 1857 and the Turk had been destroyed in a fire in 1854, I'm not sure what would incline a person to trust those anonymous articles. 

After the death of Maelzel, its inventor and operator, on route to Cuba in 1838, the Turk had been auctioned off to "a noted professor of medicine."  Sometime thereafter, it had been sold or gifted to the Chinese Museum in Philadelphia, where it would burn with the rest of the building.  Curious, I started digging around. 

The obvious place to start would be Edgar Allen Poe's "Maelzel's Chess Player" (1836).  As one of The Obvious' biggest fans, I went for it.  Learned quite a bit about how Poe supposed it worked, but not much in the way of proof.  So I started digging through his letters.  Found this one, dated 29 February 1840:

Dr Sir,

It will give me great pleasure to accept your invitation for Feb: 29th—this evening.

Edgar A. Poe

To whom was this letter addressed?  Dr. J. K. Mitchell.  I could barely contain my excitement.  Four years after Poe writes about automaton and two years after it had been purchased by a "noted professor of medicine," Poe accepts the invitation of a Dr. J.K. Mitchell.  You see, I'm very familiar with a particular Dr. J.K. Mitchell, one who, though born in Virginia, spent his adult life practicing medicine in Philadelphia—where, you'll remember, the Turk ultimately meets its fiery end.  What could Poe and this Dr. Mitchell have been discussing on that cold February evening?  More to the point, what mechanical contraption could they have been jamming their too-tall frames into? 

I can't be certain, but I feel like I can hazard a guess.  I know, I know, guess-work doesn't befit an historicist.  Thing is, I went back and looked at those articles.  Sure enough, they're unsigned ... but flip to the index and you'll find your attribution:

"S.W. M."

Will he be my Itchell?

Proudly Giving You Wings for 116 Years

Were I not an historicist who knows tone shold always be contextalized, my mid-morning coffee and this passage from F. Savary Pearce's "A Clinical Report on the se of Testiclar Flid Injections" (1896) wold've been the death of my keyboard:

B.S. injections* made him feel stronger and checked his rolling gait.  At the end of twelve days, the marked beneficial action obtained.  At this time a violent syphilitic explosion occurred and a roseolar rash appeared with absolutely complete alopecia.

* "B.S. injection" both totally does and most certainly does not mean what you think it does.

Why the South Lost; or Maybe, Why the North Didn't Win Sooner

From Silas Weir Mitchell's letter to Mrs. A.G. Mason (5 June 1911):

[Stonewall Jackson] had at one time the insane belief that his right leg was hollow and made of glass, and that everything he ate went into it.

Four Reasons a 28-Year-Old Pulls an All-Nighter

Dissertation Fear #1: What you're writing is stupid.

Dissertation Fear #2: What you're writing is stupid and someone else said it first.

Dissertation Fear #3: What you're writing is stupid, someone else said it first and the both of you are wrong.

Dissertation Fear #4: What you're writing is stupid, someone else said it first, the both of you are wrong and they're all laughing at you.

The Very Best of Acephalous 2005

YES, I'M HUMORING YOU

• My Morning: A Play in One Uncomfortable Act
• Disadventure, Disaddendum, Dismoralized, & Disinsomnia: A Play (thus far) in Four Acts
• A Day in the Life of your Average Academic
• Acephalous' Index: Part I,  Part II
• Fuck Act Theory: Part I, Part II
• An Undergraduate Honors Thesis Gone Terribly, Terribly Wrong (Now with Annotations)
• How to Open an Academic Essay: The Series
• Theory Comics: Freud, Derrida
• Lying at 30,000 ft.
• Course Descripton: Piracy Studies 100
• Anatomy of a Troll
• Guidelines for the Proper Defacement of Other People's Stuff
• [email protected]: An Epistolary Romance
• Well, Who Would Conservatives Have Us Footnote?
• Lord Stanley and the Catapult Gambit
• Keith Herandez Up-Ends a Century of Feminist Progress
• A Lexigraphical Lament About Probationer Prosody
• Save Academic Freedom: Expel Hippies, Communists from UCLA
• "Running Amok, 368"
• Building Communities through Hate
• Graduate Students Love Fun Too
• Dude. Dude?  Dude. Dude. (Annotated)
• Live-Blogging Super Bowl XXXX
• A Thanksgiving Prayer
• The Impossible James
• Bosoms & the Aesthetic Faculty (circa 1885)
• Life in the Kenning Factory
• Woe unto Ye Beetles of South America!

 

NARCISSISM UNLEASHED

• How Acephalous Lost His Head
• Why He's the Last Person you oughta Respect
• How He Was Nearly Flattened Headless
• How He Fared Under the Knife
• Why He Puts the "der" in "Derridean"
• Why He's in Favor of Stumbling
• Why He "Did Theory"
• Why He Doesn't "Do Theory" Anymore
• Why Deaf Men Are Breast Men (& The Novelizaton)
• What the Five Year Rule Is
• Books He Lives With, Dies By
• His Day, In Haiku
• His Life as a John Hughes Film
• His Bookshelves, Described in Excrutiating Detail
• How He Coerces Congeniality
• How He Handles New Data, Old Certainties, & Familiar Places
• How the ANALOGICAL :: THE PERSONAL
• How the Personal is Etymological:

appaumy

bebaste

loppard

placula

hymnicide

neoconocon

 

PEDANTIC, BUT EFFECTIVE

I.

GENERALLY

• The Theory of the Tyrrany of the Regime of Meaning
• Citational Difficulties & What They Say, Suggest, Identify or Aver
• No, You Weren't Thrown a Curve
• A Xenotheological Romance
• History of the Great American Novel
• Live-Blogging the MLA: 

1. The Prelude
2. These Walls are Paper-Thin 
3. Lindsay Waters Count 
4. Contemporary Fiction & The Novel of Ideas 
5. The Random Example Who is that Guy? 
6. Book-Browsing & Bird Shit I Can't Believe I'm Telling You This 
7. Mistaken Assumptions 
8. With Nary a Whisper Blogging & Creature Comforts

II.

THEORETICALLY

• Ersatz Theoretical Ecumenicalism: Argument in the Age of Mechanical Interaction
• Historicisms Old & New
• New Historicism: A Reader's Guide
• My Hatred of Chiasmus and My Chiasmus of Hatred
• Useable vs. Historicial Pasts
• Père Foucault Stomps Fils, Gloats
• Theory & Literary Modernism

III.

POPULARLY

• Festivus and Literary Modernism
• Deadwood and to Whom its Dialogue is Beholden
• House as Bizarro-Quijote
• Teaching Melville in Madrasas
• Good Grief: Peanuts and Postwar Ennui
• Philip Roth, Sinclair Lewis & The Detail Hounds
• The Mirror of Flebotinum
• Rape in Science Fiction
• Comic Book Rape

IV.

DISSERTATIONALLY

• Stick it to the Historians
• Doubling London: History Is Become Narrative
• Grit for Future Gears!
• Super-Adequate Structural Homologies
• Historians, Start Your Engines
• The Consistency Fetish
• The Horatio Alger Hoax

V.

SERIALLY

THE STONING OF ADAM ROBERTS 

Part I

Part II

Part III

THEORY'S EMPIRE

 Deaf Culture

It's the Erudition, Dumb Ass

Fact Checking Fukuyama

LITERARY INTEREST

 Part I

Part II

Part III

 

YELLING FIRE IN CROWDED THEATERS (BECAUSE WHY NOT?)

• KING KONG
• THE GENE WOLFE EXPERIENCE

1. On Terrible Neologisms & Stylistic Inconsistency
2. Rich on Wolfe
3. Stupid, Cretinous Cancer Boy

• PSYCHOANALYSIS: THE MOVIE

1. Psychoanalysis as Idee Fixe
2. How much more Lacan before Someone Resorts to Violence?
3. Take Pill, Lose Memory, Gain Bliss
4. The Iatrogenic Follies
5. The Psychoanalytic Unconscious?  A Terrible Idea
6. The Adaptive Unconscious?  Not a Terrible Idea
7. Psychoanalysis is Dead!  Long Live—Wait, Nevermind
8. The Power of Psychoanalytic Theory

• THE PASSION OF DE LILLO

1. DeLillo, Pillow. Pillow, DeLillo
2. Sermon on the Mound

• GENERAL RELEASE

1. On Being Cowed by an Identitarian Critique
2. Fighting Fire with—The Aisles! They're Both on Fire!
3. Non-Eclectic Eclecticism
4. Spake Heech or Honest Mistake?
5. So Now You Care About Literature
6. Aggressively Masturbatory Fiction
7. Another Maginot Line?

"WRITING" THE DISSERTATION

• The Merry Go Aground
• How to Drink the Dissertation Away
• How to Revise the Dissertation Away

UNFINISHED BUSINESS

• Modernist Autobiography
• Blogging Derails Unpromising Careers Too

 VERY IMPORTANT THING TO KEEP IN MIND: POSTS ON THE VISUAL RHETORIC OF FILMS AND COMICS HAVE THEIR OWN SPECIAL PLACE AND ARE THEREFORE NOT INCLUDED IN THIS LIST. YOU MAY FIND THEM HERE:

Festivus; or, The Other Holiday Born of High Modernism

[x-posted from the Valve]

While noodling around Wikipedia last night, I discovered that not only did I share my birthday with a visionaries (Nostradamus, Joseph Smith), politicians (Helmut Schmidt, “Dan Quayle’s Brain”), famous singers (Bruce Hornsby, Victoria Williams, Eddie Vedder) and a Corey (Haim)—but that it falls on Festivus. Reading this detailed account of the origin of and rituals associated with a fictional holiday, I learned, to my surprise, that not only is it not a fictional holiday, but that it’s based on a work of high modernism.  Can you guess which one from the following description?  (Video is also available.)

After learning of the holiday from Jerry and Elaine, Kramer calls George’s father.  The elder Costanza explains the holiday’s origin (1:16):

Frank: Kramer, I got your message. I haven’t celebrated Festivus in years! What is your interest?

Kramer: Well, just tell me everything, huh?

Frank: Many Christmases ago, I went to buy a doll for my son. I reach for the last one they had—but so did another man. As I rained blows opon him, I realized there had to be another way!

Kramer: What happened to the doll?

Frank: It was destroyed. But out of that, a new holiday was born. “A Festivus for the rest of us!"

And its traditions (1:47):

Frank: And at the Festivus dinner, you gather your family around, and you tell them all the ways they have disappointed you over the past year.

Kramer: Is there a tree?

Frank: No. Instead, there’s a pole. It requires no decoration. I find tinsel distracting.

Later, Frank and Kramer arrive at the coffee shop carrying a pole and a tape recorder.  They approach George and Jerry (3:09):

Kramer: Well, Happy Festivus.

George: What is that? Is that the pole?

Frank: George, Festivus is your heritage—it’s part of who you are.

George: (sulking) That’s why I hate it.

Kramer: There’s a big dinner Tuesday night at Frank’s house—everyone’s invited.

Frank: George, you’re forgetting how much Festivus has meant to us all. I brought one of the casette tapes. (Franks pushes play, George as a child celebrating Festivus is heard)

Frank: Read that poem.

George: (complaining) I can’t read it. I need my glasses!

Frank: You don’t need glasses, you’re just weak! You’re weak!

Estelle: Leave him alone!

Frank: Alright, George. It’s time for the feats of strength.

Figured it out?  The answer (and overlong-but-still-inadequate discussion of its significance) is below the fold.

It Should Be a Crime

Browse, browse, browse ...

Nor is there any evidence that implanting sexual images in cake icing increases sales.¹

Flip flip flip flip flip.

¹ For reviews of research on subliminal influence, see Moore (1992); Pratkanis (1992); Theus (1994).  A review by Dijksterrhuiis, Aarts, and Smith (2001) is more sanguine about the possibility of subliminal influence, but acknowledges that even effects found under controlled laboratory conditions tend to be small in magnitude.

On The Adaptive Unconscious & It Not Being a Terrible Idea

[I should dedicate this post to Ray Davis, without whom I couldn't have written it.  But who dedicates posts to people?  That said, one item he linked to deserves special consideration, as it proves stuff written years ago possesses commensurate quantities of wit and intelligence to things posted within the past 24 hours.  Also, I remember now why I miss him, and regret again whatever part I played in driving him away.  But enough of that.  To the post!]

Today is one of those rare days I regret not being a "professional" blogger.  I have so much on my plate—so much which seems urgent—that I hardly know where to focus my attention.  So I'll let someone else decide:

Following Ray's links, I stumbled on Jonah Lehrer's lukewarm defense of Malcolm Gladwell's Blink.  Unbeknownst to you, dear readers, I wrote a very similar account not only of Gladwell's book, but of all popular neuroscience, in which I declared sublime those

"meta-" moments that only books about human consciousness provide.  For example:

Picture in your mind the face of Marilyn Monroe.  Ready?  You just used your fusiform gyrus. (219)

Blows my mind every time.  I love books that produce the physiological effects they describe in the act of describing them.  Steven Pinker's explanations may be just-so stories, but the processes for which they account are solid science.  When he says "when Y, then X," you can be certain that when a guy confronts Y, his brain explodes with X—even if X didn't develop because a greater percentage of monkeys who could scuttle up trees one-handed in the rain survived than didn't.

Now, thanks to Lehrer, I can trumpet Timothy D. Wilson's Strangers to Ourselves too, only without all the caveats Gladwell inspired.  For one, the complaint about the dearth of footnotes evaporates.  Wilson documents the studies he cites, and I've spent the past couple of hours browsing through those articles.  I'm surprised by what I've found. 

More often than not, the claims the authors propound are far more radical than those Wilson attributes to them.  He tones them down, renders them more palatable to the regnant orthodoxy.  Which is odd.  Most popular science writers inflate the importance of the research they cite in order to grab the reader's attention.  (Norman Holland and Steven Pinker spring to mind.)  Why does Wilson take the opposite tack?

I'm not sure.  It may be constitutional.  Anyone who can "teach the conflicts"—that is the first non-paywalled link I could find—the way Wilson can possesses the rare talent for fairness in the face of vicious intellectual bluster.  He presents all arguments—the psychoanalytic included—in their strongest forms and that, apparently, entails deflating the work of contemporary cognitive science while inflating the importance of psychoanalytic "findings."  With the exception of Occam's Razor's appearance on page 79 —there is "no need to introduce additional theoretical constructs"—psychoanalysis seems a viable, if frequently problematic, alternative to contemporary cognitive theory.  (Which, of course, merely validates the "scientific" quality of Freud's intuitions.  Not that Wilson says that, mind you, only that he doesn't refute it vehemently enough.)

In short, Wilson's book is diplomatic, albeit devestatingly so.  What do I mean?  His rhetoric aside, one cannot read the first 130 pages and not immediately dismiss psychoanalysis.  While some of the mechanisms of the modern brain resemble their psychoanalytic counterparts, they share neither their power nor etiology.  And etiology is of fundamental, foundational importance to psychoanalytic thinking.  Does this mean that the psychoanalytic model is wholly irrelevant to the study of cultural or literature?

No.  (Although this may convince you otherwise.)  I'll write more once I've finished the book and have time to sort through my new theory of the importance of the obsolete philosophies of mind to study of literature.  (Sure, I sound dismissive, but the strange thing is, I'm not.)

UPDATE: I included no accounts of the fascinating studies Wilson cites in his book.  I'm not sure why, other than the vanilla excuse that I am, on occasion, not all that bright.  So I present those tomorrow, after I've finished the book.  (It only arrived around 3 p.m.  Who can read a 300 page book in two hours?)

In Favor of Stumbling

[Note: Contrary to appearances, this blog is about things other than Walter Benn Michaels.  The thing is, the other interviews in that issue were a little more self-aggrandizing—one of them was with Stanley Fish—and therefore less illuminating on the phenomenon I describe below.  That said: I think it's time for a WBM morito—What?  You're kidding me?  A new essay?  Crap.]

Reading the Richard Hofstadter intellectual biography sparked an interest in how other academic stars—or "academostars"—stormed the academy.  Needless to say, I've been surprised by the bumbling.  Here's Walter Benn Michaels:

When I was in graduate school, no one with any intellectual ambition would have wanted to become an Americanist. God knows I didn't. There were some good things I've discovered retroactively, but it was not a high-tech field in the 60s and it was not (in my view anyway) an intellectually ambitious field. I became an Americanist by accident; I was trained as a modernist, which was to me much more attractive. I was trained by Hugh Kenner, who was certainly influential and whose writing was ambitious, interesting, and brilliant literary criticism. I became an Americanist just because I went on the job market and there was a job at Hopkins and I was working on Henry James. But the James I was working on was the James out of modernism. I actually started reading Henry James because of my work on Pound—Pound had written a very important essay on James—so I thought I'd sit down and read through James. I thought this would be a good thing to do over the summer, which was no way near long enough. I got much more interested in James than I was in Pound, but it was still in the context of modernism, of European modernism. But the job at Hopkins was for an Americanist, and at one point the then-chair Ronald Paulson called me up and asked me, "So is your Henry James Hawthorne's James or Turgenev's James?" Well, it was obvious what the right answer for that job was—"Hawthorne's James." In fact my James was Turgenev's, but I said Hawthorne.

Remarkable.  He spent the summer studying what he was hired in the Fall to teach.  I would chalk this up to Michaels' overweening brilliance, but the Hofstadter biography compels me to think about this differently.  People stumbled into prominence back then.  Alongside the cutthroat culture so lovingly described by David Lodge existed the picaresque narratives of "professionalization." 

How did Michaels become interested in Derrida?  Coincidence:

So I was staying at Santa Barbara and didn't know what to do. Herb Schneidau, who was also a Poundian and had been at SUNY-Buffalo, was a lifesaver for me in the sense that he knew what was going on in the academic world. He showed up in 1970 or 1971 and he had a hardcover book called "The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man," which was later retitled The Structuralist Controversy. He had been blown away by Derrida's piece in the book ["Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences"]. Herb didn't speak French and hired me as his research assistant to read this book, De la grammatologie, and to write up a synopsis of the argument. I spoke French and had made a living off doing translations from French. Well, writing a synopsis of the argument of Grammatology is not that easy. It took me a long time, and I really got into it.

That was the moment that made it clear to me that there was a kind of writing that I could do that I was attracted to. First Hugh had been an interesting example of what a literary critic might be, and I imitated him for a year or two, but I could never do what he did. So reading Derrida at that point made it clear there was a whole set of issues out there that I was very interested in.

If Herb had spoken French, Michaels wouldn't have been familiar with Derrida.  What interests me most about Michaels' intellectual development is how its contingencies have been routinized.  The people he happened to encounter at the places he happened to encounter them have been transformed from arbitrary events in one man's intellectual history into a program of study 99 percent of literary scholars follow. 

That "one man" bit may be overplaying it.  Expand that to "one generation" and the charges stick.  The moribund state of literary theory may result from the fact that each new generation of graduate students is asked to recapitulate in anthologies the seminal moments in the lives of a previous generation.  Nothing intrinsic to the thought which falls under the heading of "theory" is responsible for the current state of affairs.  What's responsible is that we're being asked to "experience" a previous generation's adventure.  Only instead of the ideas being alive in the mouths of their representative, they sit there dead on the page.  This generation isn't allowed the freedom to stumble the way Michaels and Gallagher and Fish's was. 

Good Lord.  That would be disastrous.  We need immediate professionalization.  We have to follow the path blazed by our betters.  That's insufficient.  We have to do it by finding the footprints they embedded in the snow and follow them up the mountainside.