Acephalous

"Wikipedia informed Roth that it would require 'secondary sources' to verify his assertion that his novel was not inspired by the life of Anatole Broyard"

That seemingly innocuous statement is from the “Inspiration” subsection of the Wikipedia entry on Philip Roth’s novel The Human Stain. I write “seemingly innocuous” because it points to problems central to both Wikipedia’s operating ethos and literary analysis. Speaking to the latter first: this isn’t a case about what a text means or what its author intended it to mean so we can avoid the hairier arguments about whether meaning resides within a text or is communicated through it. This argument is about source material. Where something came from instead of what and how it means. According to a Wikipedia-approved secondary source, Michiko Kakutani, The Human Stain

is the story of a black man who decided to pass himself off as white. This premise seems to have been inspired by the life story of Anatole Broyard—a critic for The New York Times who died in 1990—at least as recounted by Henry Louis Gates Jr. in his 1997 book 13 Ways of Looking at a Black Man.

Kakutani’s review meets all Wikipedia’s criteria for a “reliable source.” Except it isn’t. She said the “premise seems to have been inspired by the life story of Anatole Broyard,” which indicates that she’s no more familiar with the source material than anyone else. Charles Taylor’s review of the novel at Salon constituted the other “secondary source” for the Broyard connection and made its way into the Wikipedia entry thus:

Taylor argues that Roth had to have been at least partly inspired by the case of Anatole Broyard, a literary critic who, like the protagonist of The Human Stain, was a man identified as Creole who spent his entire professional life more-or-less as white.

But as with Kakutani, Taylor’s evidence—mistakenly identified in the Wikipedia entry as an argument—is also pure supposition:

There’s no way Roth could have tackled this subject without thinking of Anatole Broyard, the late literary critic who passed as white for many years.

Given the “strength” of the “evidence” provided by these secondary sources, there’s no need to perform a detailed literary analysis to determine that the connection to Broyard didn’t warrant inclusion in the Wikipedia entry. Since no one else would the task fell to Roth’s biographer:

Only, there's no such thing as Social Darwinism.

Erik's posts (here and here) on the seemingly Darwinian politics of modern conservativism aren't wrong about the lilt of these contemporary thinkers, but they do a bit of injustice to the historical ones, because there was no such thing as "Social Darwinism" during the Gilded Age. There was such a thing as William Graham Sumner, and his collected essays bear the title Social Darwinism, but those essays were collected in and published in 1963. The editor of those essays was following the lead established by the historian Richard Hofstadter, whose Social Darwinism in American Thought (1944) identified Sumner as the brains behind the social Darwinist movement in the Progressive Era. The problem is that there wasn't a social Darwinist movement during the Progressive Era. I'm not just kicking against the pricks here—as people writing dissertations are wont to do—as will become clear if you ask yourself a simple question:

When was the Modern Synthesis formulated?

The Modern Synthesis, if you don't know, is the combination of Mendelian genetics with Darwinian evolutionary theory, and represents the moment when the previously theoretical Darwinian model finally found itself a mechanism of transmission. Darwin's theory of natural selection was elegant, but prior to the Modern Synthesis scientists lacked a means of proving that it could exist in nature. When was it formulated? Between 1936 and 1942. Why is that significant?

Because prior to the Modern Synthesis there was little consensus as to the driving force behind the development of species. Russian scientists, for example, were working under Lamarckian assumptions about the heritability of acquired characteristics well into the 1960s. (The had an ideological commitment to keeping the Lamarckian faith after the Modern Synthesis, but eventually even they relented.) Point being, during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, Darwinian thought wasn't the dominant strain of evolutionary theory. It lacked the evidence required to back up its elegance, and so its status in the scientific community was as tenuous then as its competitors are now. Vernon Kellogg, then president of Stanford (or not?), wrote a book entitled Darwinism Today (1908) that basically argued that there really wasn't any. It devoted itself to explicating "the various new theories of species-forming with ... names, such as heterogenesis, orthogenesis, metakinesis, geographic isolation, biologic isolation, organic selection, or orthoplasty." So why do we associate Darwinism with this period?

Because of the Whigs and their history. The aforementioned Hofstadter wrote Social Darwinism in American Thought in 1944 in order to create a bogeyman whose existence would justify the policies of the New Deal. From what Stephen J. Gould called the "maximal diversity" of evoultionary thought during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, Hofstadter selected those thinkers whose work contained implications dire enough that politicians in the 1940s could point to them to frighten the masses. Darwinism, as I demonstrated above, wasn't regnant during the period, much less the social application of it, but Hofstadter had handed New Deal liberals their bogeyman and they weren't about to give it up.

Ironically, the scientific community bolstered Hofstadter's claim during the centennial of the Origin in 1959. In a book titled Darwin's Century, Loren Eiseley and his fellow scientists created a teleological narrative of Darwinism's development in which all evolutionary thinkers were groping their way towards the Modern Synthesis. Which is ironic because the key insight of Darwinian thought is that development isn't teleological—that natural selection isn't based on forethought and doesn't working according to a plan. Eiseley and his colleagues transformed the development of Darwinian thought into the stuff of Intelligent Design, and when that narrative was welded onto Hofstadter's, the result was the impression that Darwinism reigned supreme during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.

It didn't. It only seems to have because people have forgotten all the other evolutionary theories that were in play at the time, the most prominent of which was Lamarckian, not Darwinian, prompting prominent medical thinkers (and popular novelists) like Silas Weir Mitchell to declare:

I have sometimes been led to think that over brain-work tends not only to stunt the body and to contract the pelvis, but, by the law of evolution, to develop bigger headed offspring, or at least offspring with heads relatively disproportioned to the pelvis of the mother.

That's correct. The most prominent neurologist in America opposed educating women because they would become smarter, pass on their larger brains to their children, then die during childbirth. Outside of giraffes, it's difficult to find a more classic formulation of Lamarckian thought. I could go on for ages—or pages, hundreds of them—but I think I've established that "the Social Darwinism movement" is an ahistorical construct designed to justify policies and theories with which I otherwise agree.

The New Conservative Orwell is, Finally, Consonant with Conservative Values

I’ve decided to get out of the academia game while the going’s so abysmal there's a chance that hope might peak behind a horizon, and like many a former liberal turned charlatan, I’ve decided to leave academia an albatross trove of intellectual history that’ll include “so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant.”

The first component of my donated library of significant foretelling is a study in modesty, entitled simply Dinner Party One. The book consists of the first time its hostess, Laura Stoddard, embellished her “lovely hand lettered type” with charming watercolors that depicted Laura’s own unique brand of humor. No stockpile, no matter how fanciful it’d rather now be, could survive a nuclear winter without the cards and invitations outline in Dinner Party One.

Now that everyone is inclined to be excessively polite despite the caffeine coursing through our theirs veins, it is time to turn to more serious matters. Back in 150, W. Bernard King was us of the dangers of Chemistry, elementary (The New Littlefield college outlines), but did we listen? Not only didn’t we listen, we refused to read its slim 216 pages despite the fact they were in English. The fact that not a single “intelligent” “liberal” bothered to read any of the forty books he read says all you need to know about what goes on in those colleges your so-called betters want your children to attend.

That time can be better spent reading Alphonse Daudet–not the crank who wrote all those awful French novels–but the English author who’s Letters to my mill, to which are added Letters to an absent one. Some men are capitalists, and as such should be applauded for their obvious commitment to our cause. But there are others who send today’s mill a bouquet of her beloved peonies while lining absent’s deck with lavender enough to mind the headwinds of a whorehouse.

But perhaps no single book in my new library belongs as much as in yours as Richard M. Fenker’s Where Rainbows Wait for Rain: The Big Bend Country. As the saying goes, possession of this chestnut makes one healthy, wealthy, and more able to forgive a national debt than most countries in human history. It is a must have for anyone who’s every been afraid of anything.

Now, I want everyone to line up behind those links and Do The Reynolds!

Da Da Da!

Click Click Click!

Da Da Da!

Smith Smith Smith!

Hey! Don’t be naughty Glenn, your rainbows won’t be waiting for my rain much longer … so long as that colorful brat from Big Bender Country keeps her distance.

Scott Eric Kaufman's Visual Rhetoric Compendium Now Easier than Ever to Find!

It's a permanent fixture in the right sidebar now, and I'll continue to update it regularly. 

Now if you'll excuse me, I have a terrible cold to attend to. (Stupid midterms wreaking havoc with stupid students' stupid immune systems ...)

Claustrophobia, as Wolfgang Petersen recognizes, is a cumulative effect.

(The continuation of the previous post which, like this one, is yet another one of those posts.)

I was going to jump right into the episode of Doctor Who I'm teaching tomorrow, but due to a non-Whovian coup, I'm going to prove my point differently first. To that end, I asked my however many Facebook friends I have the following:

Please name the five most claustrophobic films and/or episodes of a television show you've ever seen. If your nominee is chosen, I'll honor you by naming you by name in the post I'm going to write this afternoon. (Not much of an honor, but hey, it's better than nothing.)

Patrick Slaven, Kyler Kuehn, Carrie Shanafelt and Gary Farber all recommended Das Boot, and since I own a copy of said film, Das Boot it is. Short plot summary: back when Wolfgang Petersen had talent, he directed a film about a German U-boat and its discontents, and because the majority of the film took place on the boat, it had plenty of shots that approximate the "coffin shots" I discussed yesterday. (Being stuck in a metal tube leagues and leagues below the sea is roughly equivalent to being buried alive.) But unlike the frames discussed yesterday—in particular, the awkward image of Reynolds in his coffin—Petersen relies on standard scaled shots to create a claustrophobic atmosphere for his audience. So long as the audience grants him the conceit that the men in his film live precariously in a long metal cylinder, he need not 1) employ conventional "coffin shots" nor 2) improve upon convention or go whole hog (as Rodrigo Cortés did in Buried).

Petersen's audience knows that these men are confined behind a brittle shell of metal and will miles below the sea, so the enclosed atmosphere of the film is implicit. But that's not enough. As I mentioned yesterday, audiences key in to conventions in ways that subvert their effectiveness. A director can put a person in a closed coffin, but because so many have done so previously, the effect is merely communicative. The simple fact of being entrapped comes across, but the sympathetic feeling of entrapment doesn't. Das Boot is different. It lacks any of the obviously constricted shots and opts instead for a directorial ethos of tight framing (much as I discussed in my counterfactual Bones yesterday): 

That'd be a typical dinner shot. It lacks the ostentation of Reynolds in a coffin, but by framing this medium close-up as he did, Petersen's use of shallow focus indicates that there's little more to the room than what's seen here. Typically, shallow focus emphasizes a face (or faces) and blurs the unimportant background into a hazy nothing; here, however, the shallow focus reveals that the walls behind these folks abut them so closely that they can't be excluded from the shot. There's simply no way for them to be in focus and the walls around them not, which an audience will realize (even if it doesn't consciously understand) means that these men are very close to their walls. (Or vice versa.) It's not a "coffin shot," merely a medium close-up with a depth of field that reveals, in its entirety, how little there is to see. Stack a few hundred similar shots together and the claustrophobic intent of every director who's ever buried an actor for effect can actually be realized. Just to prove my point, here are some other shots from the film:

That shot of the living quarters need not be perfectly centered in such a way as to create a frame whose composition is so damn mathematical as to be oppressive, but Petersen's got an agenda. Also: 

There are many ways to depict a man amongst his crew, but framing his head as Petersen has (in a close-up) and situating it in the composition against many other similarly framed heads limits the scope of the frame to this head and these other ones. The face, again, is in shallow focus and yet because every other head's within the depth of field the constricted effect is only heightened. Imagine watching a film composed thus for 209 minutes (if you spring for the director's cut): the knowledge of the predicament of the crew is augmented, visually and viscerally, by the manner in which Petersen frames them.

All of which is only to say that a claustrophobic effect isn't bound to a claustrophobic situation. Certainly, both coffins and U-boats lend themselves to a claustrophobic treatment, but the reason Das Boot succeeds where yesterday's episodes and films failed has nothing to do with the narrative situation. It's all about the mechanics of how such a situation is filmed.

Tomorrow, I promise, I'll address this within the dictates of my class and discuss Andrew Gunn's direction of "The Victory of the Daleks."

Archaeology of the Impossible

Given that I have all of four days to wrap up the Winter quarter and vault into the Spring, lesson-planning's taken the bulk of my time of late.  I'm thinking, as per the tentative title of this post, of delving into meta-fictional accounts of the origin of comic "heroism" this quarter, and have come up with the following (largely other-side-of-the-pond) syllabus:

"The Origin of Batman" (excerpt from Batman 47) - Bob Kane

You begin with the almost-begin: this is the first time Joe Chill's mentioned, by which I mean implicated, in the death of Wayne's parents.  There's an earlier reference to their murder in Detective Comics 39 (November 1939), but it's abridged in a way that makes the story itself unrecognizable.  (Which is, yes, the very opposite of the point I make below about Morrison's All-Star Superman, but that's because you can't already assume an audience is familiar with a story before it's ever been told.)

Batman: Year One (comic) - Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli

See what I did there?  In terms of comparative styles, now I can introduce Asterios Polyp.  To wit, Mazzucchelli in Year One:

Compared to Mazzucchelli in Asterios Polyp:

Those aren't as different as I thought they'd be.  ("I have a hole in my cape," you can almost imagine Mazzucchelli's distraught Wayne saying.)  But outside the cleanliness of the lines, there's little to make you believe that the person responsible for the first image would later be responsible for the second ... and that's a belief I'm going to try to disabuse my students of.

Batman Begins (film) - Christopher Nolan

Because you think I'm capable of teaching this course without bringing up Nolan's film?  I didn't think so.

Planetary/Batman (comic) - Warren Ellis

This'll be the fourth re-telling of the Batman origin myth, only this time endlessly looped.  The point, rhetorically speaking, in having them encounter four versions of the same story is 1) to emphasize that there's some inherent appeal there, but 2) to demonstrate that even if a story has inherent appeal, the manner in which a given rhetor presents it actually matters.  The raw stuff is all well and good, but the power's in the telling.

Planetary #1 -10 (comic) - Warren Ellis

They're billed as "the archeologists of the impossible," after all, and Ellis's engagement with both the history of the genre and its conventions could hardly find a more suitable course to be taught in.

All-Star Superman (comic) - Grant Morrison

I'm thinking of teaching only the first page of the first issue, as it's the most brilliantly compact origin story ever, and after that Morrison's metafictional games might be a bit too much for students to handle.  There's a genius to its concision, i.e. the manner in which it boils down a story everyone already knows to its barest bones, and then presents them to a knowing audience in a way that is, quite frankly, moving.  (Sorry, sorry, I couldn't help myself.)

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Volume One (comic) - Alan Moore

Introducing students to old-school, public-domain heroism ... plus plenty of opportunities to talk with my largely Asian-American classes about how "The Yellow Peril" is depicted.

Hellboy: Seed of Destruction (comic) - Mike Mignola

Being an origin story that involved someone other than Batman, so the students can reevaluate their premises about mythos in American culture at the end of the quarter, etc. etc.

Hellboy (film) - Guillermo Del Toro

Etc. etc.  That's quite a bit of material for a composition class, and textually speaking—i.e. despite it being all film and comics—it's historically and allusively dense to boot.  But it seems doable.   That said, if there's anything very obvious I'm missing, feel free to point it out ... until Tuesday, because believe it or not, that's when the Spring quarter starts.

How not to help your cause

Turns out one of Goldstein's brood took exception to my previous post and attempted to refute it by making a series of patently idiotic claims.  For example:

But Scott could at least have had the sense to not admit profound ignorance on what Beck ever says. I’m not surprised, though, because I know that for Serious People like SEK, admitting that he pays attention to the likes of Glenn Beck would collapse any credibility he may have among those whose good graces he desires to be in.

Your eyes don't deceive you: the argument is, in fact, that criticizing Glenn Beck would "collapse any credibility [I] may have among those whose good graces [I] desire to be in."  Because we all know left-leaning academics who criticize far-right lunatics are shunned by their colleagues.  Further depressing my credibility is my intellectual honesty, which here takes the form of my admission, up front, that I'm not a regular viewer of the show.  Note, though, that the claim is that I admitted a "profound ignorance on what Beck ever says," which is strange because I did no such thing.  I wrote:

I try not to pay attention to Glenn Beck, but even when I have, I never really paid attention to him.

That's "passing familiarity," not "profound ignorance," and the difference between the two should be obvious, and is, unless your refutation of my post continues thus:

You see, all of the topics that Glenn addresses–the dots that Scott attempts to connect–are topics that Glenn has has talked about at length in the past, so when he mentions this or that, he’s harking back to discussions he’s already had, discussions that most of the people watching have already heard.

Translation: "All the dots Scott connected have been connected in the past, and this refutes his argument somehow."  How exactly?  Like so:

"How" and "Why" trump "When"

Conservatives are extremely amused by the fact that Markos Moulitsas et al. apparently didn’t know that the Boston Tea Party took place in 1773 but Sarah Palin did. Not mentioned so often is that she knew it because it was written down on a sheet of paper in front of her. Like Sarah Palin, I can appear very knowledgeable about almost anything when I’m reading a speech written by someone who actually knows something. The larger irony here, though, is that a group of people who have no idea why the Boston Tea Party happened are crowing because a few liberal bloggers aren’t exactly sure when it did. Such is the legacy of No Child Left Behind: they memorize the dates, but have little or no idea why they’re actually memorable.

I see what you did there.

Wendy A. Goldman took to Big Hollywood today and unveiled her new production company like a student communicating in her introduction that her entire essay will be filler:

Movies have the power to make us laugh or cry, to anger or inspire us, to move us, or just to provide escape. And, sometimes, they have a power beyond simple entertainment; they can influence new ways of thinking, feeling and pursuing our lives.

Those are the kinds of sentences that you write when you’re not trying to say anything, not when you’re trying to introduce your new production company to the world. Her second paragraph is a marginal improvement, as it at least indicates why she feels the world needs another generic person to start another pointless production company:

Movies are also one of the primary arenas in which the so-called “culture war” is fought, where the battle for the hearts and minds of the public, and the conflict between values considered traditional and conservative, and those considered progressive or liberal is played out—reaching people in a profound, instinctive way.

What a precise and crisply written sentence. If she thinks as clearly as she writes, she deserves the seed money required to battle the conflict between traditional and conservative values and reach people in a more profoundly instinctive way. In short, despite all her talk of battles and conflicts, hers is a peaceful company whose conflict battlers will be merely metaphorical:

It is with this in mind that we have launched Crusader Pictures. Crusade means the vigorous advancement of a cause, and the cause at the heart of Crusader Pictures is to produce entertainment which stands up for individual liberty in a manner that will appeal to a wide audience.

She thinks “crusade” means what now? Because according to the final authority on the matter, the Oxford English Dictionary, it means:

1. a. Hist. A military expedition undertaken by the Christians of Europe in the 11th, 12th, and 13th centuries to recover the Holy Land from the Muslims.

b. transf. Any war instigated and blessed by the Church for alleged religious ends, a ‘holy war’; applied esp. to expeditions undertaken under papal sanction against infidels or heretics.

2. fig. An aggressive movement or enterprise against some public evil, or some institution or class of persons considered as evil.

3. A papal bull or commission authorizing a crusade, or expedition against infidels or heretics.

4. Span. Hist. A levy of money, or a sum raised by the sale of indulgences, under a document called Bula de la cruzada, originally for aggression or defence against the Moors, but afterwards diverted to other purposes.

5. a. A marking with the cross; the symbol of the cross, the badge borne by crusaders.

b. fig. (with allusion to ‘cross’ in the sense of trial or affliction).

Note the common thread there? “Crusade” does not mean “the vigorous advancement of a cause,” but

1. a. the vigorous advancement of a Christian cause against Muslims,

b. people like Muslims,

2. or people generally considered evil;

3. it can also refer to the document that authorizes the above,

4. the money that finances it,

5. a. the symbol that justifies it,

b. or the suffering all of that entails.

That is what “crusade” means, so her “subtle” attempt to strip it of that context and transform it into some innocuous synonym for political engagement will—wait, she included a picture with this post? I can’t view images through the RSS feed, but I’m sure it’s just some patriotic pablum to distract non-dogs from the shrill of her whistle:

What makes death matter (to immoral idiots)

Today is a better day than most to remember how odious Marvel comics were in the early 1990s.  Why so?  Because of the cavalier attitude Rob Liefeld, Todd McFarlane, et al. took not only to the history of the characters they inherited, but to humanity in general.  Consider the X-Force and Spiderman crossover from 1991, in which the ridiculous Liefeld creation "Cable" and the ridiculously re-purposed McFarlane Spiderman fight some Scottish terroist and the Juggernaut in the streets of New York City.  Did I write "streets"?  Because I meant backgroundless-space-Liefeld-is-too-lazy-to-draw:

This is why I "support" majoritarian rule.

As a means of registering my discontent with conservative claims that the fact that 70 percent of Americans abhor the idea of the "Ground Zero Mosque" means it should be abandoned, I hereby present other things that 70 percent of "certain" Americans once hated. For example, consider the responses to this question from a Gallup Poll reported in the Los Angeles Times on 14 July 1963.*

I snipped the June numbers because at that point only 62 percent of respondents had decided that the Civil Rights Movement was moving "Too fast." I also have other, less inflammatory, examples. To wit:

That would be from the Los Angeles Times four days earlier.** I did say I was only referencing "certain" Americans, however, and because I'm an honest chap, I'll tell you that Gallup calls them "Southern Whites." You heard that correctly: the same conservatives who illegitimately claim the moral high ground Martin Luther King, Jr. struggled to capture have the same high regard for Muslims as Southern segregationists once did for blacks. To put it finely:

Those who oppose the building of Park51 are justifying their opposition on the fact that the same percentage of Americans are currently as bigoted as Southern whites demonstrated themselves to be when asked how they would "feel about a law which would give all persons—Negro as well as white—the right to be served in public places such as hotels, restaurants, theaters and similar establishments." All of which is only to say that insisting that this "is" should be enshrined in history as an "ought" makes a person as big of a bastard as a Southern white who couldn't brook the thought of sharing his or her establishments with an African-American.

It's a rebellious stance to be sure, but in the end they'll be standing in a field screaming "Wolverines!" while the world passes them by.

*Gallup, George. "Views Revised on Rights Push." Los Angeles Times (14 June 1963): M2.

**Gallup, George. "Slim Majority Backs Accommodations Bill." Los Angeles Times (10 July 1963): C18.

You'll learn nothing at all from thems et al.

Do you know what happens when you allow “scholars” like Jonah Goldberg to invent historical movements and monsters?  You end up with uncited statements of obvious provenance that mask sheer lunacy behind the rhetorical scrim of conventional wisdom:

[T]he principles that inspired the American founding were always viewed as universal principles, which applied to all of mankind. Curiously, it wasn’t until the introduction of Historicist and Darwinian philosophy (which gave birth to Progressivism) that some Americans began to argue otherwise.

I wrote a dissertation about popular adaptations of evolutionary theory during the Progressive Era and have long styled myself an historicist* and I have absolutely no idea what that second sentence could possibly mean.

Does its author, Joseph Philips, mean to argue that Darwinism—which was neither the only nor even the dominant evolutionary paradigm of the Progressive Era—gave birth to “Progressivism”?

Does he mean to argue that the New History movement—inaugurated in 1912 by James Harvey Robinson’s The New History and abetted by works like Charles Beards’ An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (1913)—gave birth to “Progressivism” fifteen years after it’d been born?

Or does he mean nothing at all—but learned from the likes of Goldberg et al.—that the best way to prevent people from criticizing the seriousness of an assertion is to pretend its “knowledge” so common as to be above reproach?

Care to place bets as to where I fall on this one?  I didn’t think so.

*Before someone objects: writing “an historicist” is too correct.

The Internet occasionally reminds me of how different life is because of it.

I noted on Facebook that, from a statistical perspective, what makes baseball such an amazing sport is that you can watch it your entire life and still see, on a daily basis, something you’ve never seen before.  (It’s a truism, I know, but it has the benefit of actually being true.)  In this case, the something in question was watching the wonderfully named Angel Pagan hit an inside-the-park home run and initiate a triple play in the same game.  John Emerson responded with some humbug about it not being an inside-the-park grand slam, which made me remember that I had seen an inside-the-park grand slam at some time in the remote past.

I remember being six or seven years old and watching the Mets play the Cardinals in an afternoon game at Shea Stadium, and thanks to the miracle of the Internet, I can definitively say that at approximately 4:30 p.m. on 9 June 1985, I watched Terry Pendleton hit an inside-the-park grand slam off Joe Sambito in a game the Cardinals would go on to win handily.  The fact that I can verify vague memories of events that occurred twenty-five years ago astounds me in a way I sometimes forget the Internet is capable of doing.

This realization is obviously not of world-historical importance, merely a reminder that this thing whose existence we take for granted daily represents a fundamentally weird complement to human memory.  The fact that at some point in the future I can know who I rode in an elevator with on 28 December 2005 is less weird because I chose to write about riding in an elevator with Grimace.  That I can access detailed information about events I have no right remembering in detail is another matter entirely.

A list of people whose deaths I have permission to mourn.

An annoying anonymous person writes:

Why is it any time anyone hipsters or academics are supposed to like dies, they just so happen to be very important never-before-mentioned influences on your life? Are you really so needy that there's no death you won't use as an excuse to call attention to yourself?

Although this comment belongs to the tedious category of "complaints about bloggers having blogs and writing about stuff on them," it nevertheless struck a chord: first, because the size of the community grieving for Alex Chilton surprised me; and second, it seems to be a dangerous time to be a living artist or academic who changed my life.  That said, this annoying anonymous person is reading in bad faith: not everyone who influenced me did so greatly or uniquely, which is why I noted Kurt Vonnegut's passing in passing, as a "Vonnegut phase" is required to join the community of readers.  The same cannot be said of those academics and artists with whom I shared an intimate relationship over many years, which is why I wrote individual remembrances of Octavia Butler, David Foster Wallace, Howard Zinn, or Alex Chilton. 

If I seem to be too familiar a type, blame central casting: academics play the part because that's the part they've been asked to play.  That there seems to be a wider community of similarly interested intellectuals is, to my mind, a sign that while academic disciplines may be irrevocably balkanized, something resembling a larger intellectual culture still exists.  Whether this cultural homogeneity is a good thing depends on what it actually contains, and given how surprising Chilton's inclusion image was to me, I probably should refrain from saying much more about it. 

However, in light of the recent proliferation of lists like this, I think I'll take a moment to silence future scolds by listing all living authors, musicians, and filmmakers with whose work I feel a deeply irrational kinship.  They may not still move me as they once did, but they once did and when they die a little bit of me will too.  

Stuff White People Like Stealing

Considering that

• two Jews from the Bronx, Bill Finger and Robert Kahn (Bob Kane) created Batman
• two Jews in Cleveland, Jerome Siegel and Joseph Shuster, created Superman
• a Jew from Washington Heights, Mortimer Weisinger, created Green Arrow and co-created Aquaman
• another Jew from Washington Heights, Stanley Lieber (Stan Lee), teamed up with a Jew from Brooklyn, Jacob Kurtzberg (Jack Kirby), to create the Fantastic Four, the X-Men, the Avengers, the Hulk, the Silver Surfer, the Black Panther, Galactus, Doctor Doom, and Iron Man
• a few decades earlier, a Jew from Rochester, Joseph Simon, had also partnered with Kurtzberg, and together they'd created Captain America
• another Brooklyn Jew, William Eisner, is possibly the most important comic artist ever (dayenu); arguably invented the graphic novel (dayenu); wrote two of the most influential theoretical books about comics (dayenu); and has the award for creative achievement in the medium named after him

would it be fair to say that white people stole superheroes from the Jews the same way they'd stolen rock 'n roll from black people?*

*Not really.  This is territory is trod plenty and well, but it's worth rehearsing: Elvis Presley borrowed rock 'n roll from black people, and always returned as much of it as he could promptly and with gratitude.  But he could never give it all back, because from the perspective of white America, it tainted him: anyone that the New York Times could call, as it did Elvis in 1956, a "blues shouter ... imbued with the spirit and style of those Negro singers" clearly had dangerous and unsavory associations. That same year, the Chicago Defender pushed the issue of this affinity to the fore in articles like "Arrival of Elvis Presley No Puzzle to T-Bone Fans," in which Presley's speech was rendered in Negro dialect: "Yew-oo ain't nuthin but a houn' dawg," the paper has him singing; later, he explains his style by saying "Ah'm jus' singin' the only way ah know how."  Claiming, as Eric Lott did in Love and Theft, that Elvis was no better than a Nineteenth Century minstrel; or, as people generally do, that he stole rock 'n roll from black people, misses the point: many black intellectuals, following the lead of black musicians, not only praised Elvis for respecting their tradition, they loved the fact that, via Elvis, that tradition had been embraced by the sons and daughters of die-hard Dixiecrats.  One editorial in the Defender (that I can't relocate at the moment) was a series of winks, nods, and nudges about ceremony in Tupelo at which John Rankin, reputed to be the last white man to utter the word "nigger" in anger at a black man on the floor of the United States House of Representatives, was forced to bestow some sort of honor on Tupelo's most famous son.**

**I'm not sure why the footnote is that much more substantial and academic than the post it qualifies, but I figure that if I can get away with it in a dissertation, I can get away with it on a blog.

Paris Hilton : Bruce Wayne :: Roosevelt : The Bat-Man

Timothy Burke's post on how characters who originated during a particular cultural moment in the first half of the Twentieth Century are incapable of escaping it is compelling:

Batman (and most other comic-book and pulp characters from the time of his original appearance) draws a lot of his basic storytelling and setting from a moment when middle-class and working-class Americans were enmeshed in a complex national encounter with crime, law enforcement, corruption and Prohibition: a helpless frustration that the state couldn’t control organized violence and illegal commerce combined with a thrill at the lurid spectacle of gangster criminality and in more than a few cases, direct participation in an illicit economy of leisure that exposed the ludicrousness of middle-class respectability. One of the commenters on the Varney article very incisively observes that the result is that the Batman character is forever trapped fighting “Italian-American gangsters in pinstripe suits and crazy circus folk.”

However, drawing on expertise I can't legitimately claim, I think it's wrong. "The Bat-Man" (as he was then called) first appeared in Detective Comics 27, published in May of 1939, six years after Prohibition had been repealed, but two years before military mobilization would help the American economy recover the losses of the Recession of 1937.  The economic situation was bleak, but the violence associated with Prohibition had so abated that even Dick Tracy was being re-purposed to fight threats abroad.  The pulp aesthetic still appealed to the popular imagination, but its villains had become more myth than menace, which is why I would argue the appeal of Bruce Wayne in 1939 had more to do with the "helpless frustration" created by the depressed economic climate.  Wayne is, after all, introduced to the reader as that most pointless and contemptible of people:

He may be the dullest socialite ever, hanging out with Commissioner Gordon deep into the night, but he still represents the only upper-class figure commonly reviled by anyone with any political affiliation: the idle rich. Even the feigned ennui in these panels is designed to play upon a deep annoyance with people who have no cares and care about nothing:

Did the Bat-Man become a popular character because the largely middle-class children who read comics wanted to see a wealthy man beat up, down, and upon common criminals?  Not really.  I don't think we can underestimate the potential appeal of believing that the Paris Hiltons of the Great Depression secretly deserved the air they breathed.  Roosevelt's popularity was due, in part, to the image of him as a patrician who cared.  He could have weathered the Depression on the strength of his family's fortune, but he believed in social responsibility (or so the story went).  The socialite-as-secret-hero narrative almost reads like a deliberate attempt to cure a literary-naturalist hangover: the robber barons and their idle children had been savaged for the better part of three decades, but with the Roosevelt's rise to national prominence, a new mode for what had become an archetypal villain became possible. 

But something would have to motivate this rehabilitation, and in this case, that something was the scion of one set of villains being victimized by the figure of another: for these models to pass into history, they would have to be dispatched.  So while Bruce Wayne's parents were shot by a gangster, we first learn of that in a brief flashback in Detective Comics 33, an issue in which the majority of the story concerns the Bat-Man destroying a laser-armed "Dirigible of Doom" that killed thousands of New Yorkers (i.e. one stock villain guns down another in order to cultivate narrative space for weaponized blimps).  Five issues later, the Bat-Man acquires a Boy Wonder and begins his long descent into Adam West. The dark, brooding figure from the early issues would not return until Dennis O'Neil and Neal Adams took over Detective Comics in January of 1970, so it seems strange to ascribe, as Timothy does, the 30 years of popularity enjoyed by the character's camp incarnation to "the lurid spectacle of gangster criminality."

In fact, the deaths of Thomas and Martha Wayne are, for long stretches, the only lurid spectacles associated with the character; but they are, I would argue, the enduring source of his appeal.  Every time the franchise enters the doldrums, Thomas and Martha are dug up and shot down again, because their deaths are the Greek tragedy responsible for the character's malleability.  Although we speak of the character in the singular, as Warren Ellis demonstrated via Planetary in 2000, doing so makes little sense.  The only thing all these characters have in common is a pair of dead parents; other than that, each iteration is retrofitted to suit the particular needs of a particular historical context.

All of which is only to say that while the criminals he fights may still look like gangsters, they only do so superficially.  As to Timothy's larger point:

So where is our contemporary Batman or Shadow or Doc Savage or Dick Tracy to counter Dennis Kozlowski, Kenneth Lay, or Joseph Cassano, our 21st Century Prunefaces and Jokers, a character born not from the trauma of a street crime mugging but of a family or town destroyed by unaccountable individuals and institutions? It’s time for a new cycle of mythmaking even as we continue to enjoy the recycling of old ones.

I think someone really needs to start watching Leverage.

On the significance of J.D. Salinger and Howard Zinn.

Learning that J.D. Salinger died a day after learning that Howard Zinn had qualifies as a sufficiently surreal experience for that type of person who very much resembles me.  Catcher in the Rye taught me how to channel my anger into antisocial behaviors—reading books in my bedroom foremost among them—but as I read it with the same critical acumen that led me to wear out not one but two VHS copies of Pump Up the Volume, the less I say about the book the better.  (That and it violates the Five Year Rule three times over.) 

Within two years of reading Salinger, I'd affected all the trappings of The Young Punk Who Would Be Vegan and read A People's History of the United States, but unlike Salinger's novel, Zinn's history resonated with me until my sophomore year of college, when I was disabused of its importance by the man himself.  I had attended a lecture of his and somehow weaseled my way into a dinner that followed.  I told him how significant A People's History had been to my political and intellectual development and that I had read it four or five times and that I was about to start it again when he stopped me short:

"My little book has served its purpose," he told me.  "Perhaps it's time you started on the bibliography." 

He smiled and was about to say something else when he was whisked away by some other sycophant eager to bend his ear, but after talking to other people who had very similar conversations with him, I think I know what he was going to say: namely, that his "little book" was meant more as a point of departure than a destination.  Treating it the way Matt Damon's Good Will Hunting character did (and every newly-minted hipster firebrand does) violates the spirit of its polemic, because the book isn't meant to replace traditional histories so much as supplement them. 

For example, if the significance of the Christian tradition is given short-shrift in the book, it isn't because that tradition's unimportant to the development of the nation, but because a robust canon addressing that issue already exists.  Zinn never intended his book to be an education in itself, but many readers—especially non-serious ones involved in any of a variety of Zinn-friendly scenes—inflated its importance until it became the definitive source for the entirety of American history.  The extensive bibliography in the back-pages indicates that it had no pretensions of being anything of the sort.  

I could prattle on about its faults—foremost among them, Zinn's subscription to a dualism so powerful and pervasive that his accounts of internecine conflicts on the left border on unintelligible—but it is impossible to deny the attraction the book has for young adults whose knowledge of American history comes from the skeletal outlines of a public education.  The simplicity of its dualistic worldview appeals to the adolescent in the first throes of rebellion because that worldview is itself adolescent.  That sounds like an insult, but I mean it in the same sense that Zinn meant what he said to me: A People's History represents a stage in one's intellectual development. 

It was never intended to arrest it.

By request: my visual rhetoric course

As requested in the comments to my last post and via a couple of emails, here's a general outline of the course I teach on visual rhetoric. (If you find it interesting or just want to give me money, the book I'm co-writing with my course director should be available early next summer.) I'm more than happy to debate the merits of teaching rhetoric and argument through popular culture or the validity of any of the particular readings I put forward; however, keep in mind that those readings are presented in the classroom and, as such, are designed to be arguable instead of definitive. I want them to argue with particular statements because I'm teaching them how to argue, so there are moments (particularly in the readings of the films) that I'm deliberately wrong. Those moments will likely be obvious to you, but you're not an 18-year-old undergraduate on the short end of an institutional power imbalance who's afraid that, should they contradict me, they will fail the class, lose their scholarship and spend their days toiling away in the service industries.

That said, here are links to the analytic portion of the course:

1. I introduce them to the idea of the overdetermined image, because nothing is accidental in an Alan Moore script.*
2.  Nor, for that matter, is anything accidental when it costs $80,000 per second to film it, which is why we then discuss how Christopher Nolan turns Batman into classic horror monster in Batman Begins. The point here is get them fluent in the language of film, so that they might make arguments about how directors manipulate the camera in order to appeal to the audience. (We also discuss what is and isn't in the diegetic space, e.g. music, which is heard by the audience but not the characters.)
3. Then it's on to The Dark Knight. That link goes to a reading of the interrogation scene; this one leads you to a similarly thorough analysis dedicated to proving the controversial thesis that Batman is really fast—because demonstrating that even the simplest of claims require evidence and careful argument to be taken seriously is the point of the course.
4. Now that they're relatively fluent in the language of film, we try to prove something a little more complex; namely, that Superman Returns is very much about 9/11. First, I take them back to September morning; then we analyze the action sequence that's about planes slamming into NYC landmarks, lest they think I'm reading too much into the anxieties the film taps into.
5. Now that they're comfortable with film, I get them to apply that knowledge to comics via the comic that's about the conventions of comics and is therefore utterly unfilmable, Watchmen. I begin by reminding them of the overdetermined nature of the image, then we discuss panel transitions and word-picture relation, move on layout and narrative flow, then I try to prove what I stated in the second sentence about Watchmen being a meta-comic. My argument's deliberately argumentative, because Dr. Manhattan can also function as a figure of the reader as well the author, but that's an argument I want to have. From there, it's onto the unfilmable film itself.
6. Now that they can break film and comics into their constituent parts, I re-orient them in an explicitly rhetorical direction. We talk about the rhetorical situation, which is, of course, a triangle. (For the record: that silliness is me teaching myself to manipulate images in Photoshop for my book on teaching visual rhetoric.) Then we situate the rhetorical context in the historical context via Warren Ellis's Planetary/Batman: Night on Earth.
7. From there on out, it's all about the writing.  I teach them about paragraph burgers, which, while silly, is the single most effective means I've found to teach paragraph structure. Students intuitively understand that you don't call a pickle with and a piece of a cheese a "hamburger." For the remainder of the quarter, we use the tools from the beginning of the course to make sophisticated arguments about the rhetorical stakes of what they'd otherwise dismiss as pop culture ephemera. 

*I've never written up my notes on getting them to think about structure via punchlines, which begins, not surprisingly, here with The Killing Joke. The gist of it is that jokes don’t work if you only provide the punchline, which is my way of introducing them to the notion of process: this shot in a film or panel in a comic or argument in an essay only works as a punchline if the joke's been properly set up. Basically, I try to get them to think about argument in terms they intuitively understand.

A New Literary History of the United States in Literature

The publication of A New Literary History of the United States will likely strike a few chords familiar to the participants in the debate that followed Rohan’s latest post.  Written neither in the Emory Elliot mode—a history of items both literary and American—nor that of Sacvan Bercovitch—a history all items written by Americans that can be yours for the low, low price of $299.29—editors Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors instead decided to write a cultural history of the United States in a self-consciously literary voice.  As Laura Miller at Salon* writes, the two

have pitched the biggest tent conceivable, pegging each of the chronologically arranged essays in the book to “points in time and imagination where something changed: when a new idea or a new form came into being, when new questions were raised, when what before seemed impossible came to seem necessary or inevitable.” With this in mind, they’ve produced a compendium that is neither reference nor criticism, neither history nor treatise, but a genre-defying, transcendent fusion of them all. It sounds impossible, but the result seems both inevitable and necessary and profoundly welcome, too.

This is, then, an anthology seemingly written to drive J.C. Hallman to drink, because it doggedly focuses on cultural significance over the literariness of the literary.  However soul-deadening he might consider its subject matter, the manner in which most of it is written would likely meet with approval.  Though idea-driven, the prose in Jonathan Lethem’s entry on Thomas Edison—in which he exclusively discusses the inventor’s place in film history—still sings: 

Next week, George Nash will bemoan the fact that we’ve never had a white President.

I ignore those who insist that there’s something untoward about discussing the life’s work of a man at his own funeral—they can begin with his 1970 Health Security Act and work their way forward to the Kennedy-Dodd bill of 2009 on their own. I decline, that is, to say that had I insisted on codifying my ideological commitments in a Senate bill a month before my passing, I would have done so because those commitments were so important to me in life that I wanted them to define my death. Because, in the end, giving one’s natural death to a cherished cause differs from dying for it only by dint of circumstance and timing: to accomplish with one’s death what one fought for in life is the wish of the true believer, and there is nothing untoward in that.  But, as I said, there will be none of that.

Instead, I will marvel at the stentorian stupidity of George H. Nash, who received a degree in History from Harvard in 1973 then promptly forget everything he learned earning it.  To Nash, the death of Edward Kennedy represents an opportunity to bemoan “a disconcerting historical trend: the royalization of American politics.” Strangely, he does not begin his investigations with the many powerful branches of the Adams or Walker family trees (despite the former being the most prominent and the latter being the most recent). Instead, he claims that from

Theodore Roosevelt to Franklin Roosevelt to the Kennedys and Camelot, American liberalism has repeatedly succumbed to this phenomenon. It begins in a cult of personality, extends to the leader’s wife and children, and then to a “court” of retainers and apologists.

The royalists, then, are not the ones descended from the state representative of Massachusetts’s 7th district—they are the descendants of the impoverished Irish immigrant that man represented from 1849 to 1851. That bears repeating: the son-in-law of William Walker, Julius Rockwell, represented Patrick Kennedy in the U.S. House of Representatives from the moment Kennedy disembarked in 1849 until Rockwell resigned 1851 and the only worrisome political royalty Nash can locate here are the Kennedys?

Granted, the family to whom he extends this cultish devotion is direct, “the leader’s wife and children,” so emphasis on the children of the Joseph Kennedy, Sr. is warranted: Joseph Jr., John, Robert and Edward are all direct descendants of a single powerful personage, as are the relatives in his other example, the pair of fifth cousins connected by a great-great-great-great-grandfather, Nicholas Van Rosenvelt, upon whose death in 1742 the family splintered into the Republican Oyster Bay and the Democratic Hyde Park Roosevelts.

Wait—now I’m confused.

Not only are the Roosevelts distant cousins instead of sons or brothers, they also belong to opposing factions of a family that’s been at political odds since before the Revolutionary War. How exactly are Republicans who voted for Theodore and Democrats who voted Franklin Delano symptomatic of American liberalism? Moreover, since Nash wants to talk about cults of personality extending to wives and children and courtiers, how could he not mention the two-term Connecticut Senator, Prescott Bush, whose son, George Herbert Walker Bush, and grandson, George Walker Bush, were both President? Does he believe the royalist inclinations of American liberalism are responsible for the Bushes?

Probably not, because this insidious royalism “starts in hero-worship and ends in nostalgia,” and beloved as both Bushes are, neither are afforded the “disturbing” and “disconcerting” treatment “that for nearly a century has afflicted American liberalism.” Anything that “starts in hero-worship and ends in nostalgia” threatens the body politic with an idiot malignance . . . as Nash himself proves when he starts the first paragraph of his essay with some hero-worship and ends it with nostalgia:

On March 30, 1981, Pres. Ronald Reagan was nearly assassinated. What if he had died that day, before he had persuaded Congress to enact his signature program of tax cuts? Would his liberal opposition on Capitol Hill have given up their philosophical opposition to his agenda? Would they have stood silent if militant conservatives had tried to rush through sweeping tax-cut legislation as a monument to Reagan’s legacy?

Translation:

“What if the Great Hero had died in 1981? Would the Golden Age for which I now pine have ever come to be?”

I believe he was better off pretending two of the four most recent Presidents weren’t immediate kin—at least then he made my job a wee bit difficult.

(x-posted.)