Acephalous

Listserv Etiquette VI: KILL CUT CUT STAB STAB STAB KILL

Thursday (February 5^th)

To: [departmental listserv]
From: [organizing committee members One, Two, and Three]
Subject: Announcement: [interesting-sounding talk]

Mark you calenders for [interesting-sounding talk]:

Date: Friday, February 13^th
Time: 1:00-2:30 p.m.
Location: [on campus]

Light refreshments will be served.

Best,

Organizing Committee Members One, Two, and Three

Tuesday (February 10^th)

To: [departmental listserv]
From: [Organizing Committee Members One, Two, and Three]
Subject: Reminder: [interesting-sounding talk]

Just a reminder of the [interesting-sounding talk] coming up this Friday. 

Date: Friday, February 13^th
Time: 1:00-2:30 p.m.
Location: [on campus]

Light refreshments will be served.

Best,

Organizing Committee Members One, Two, and Three

Thursday (February 12^th)

To: [graduate student listserv]
From: [Organizing Committee Members One, Two, and Three]
Subject: Last Reminder: [interesting-sounding talk] tomorrow

The [interesting-sounding talk] is tomorrow. 

Date: Friday, February 13^th
Time: 1:00-2:30 p.m.
Location: [on campus]

Light refreshments will be served.

Best,

Organizing Committee Members One, Two, and Three

Friday (February 13^th): 9:21 a.m.

To: [departmental listserv]
From: [Organizing Committee Member One]
Subject: Last Reminder: [interesting-sounding talk] is TODAY at 1 p.m.

The [interesting-sounding talk] is TODAY at 1 p.m.. 

Date: TODAY
Time: 1:00-2:30 p.m.
Location: [on campus]

Light refreshments will be served.

Best,

Organizing Committee Member One

Friday (February 13th): 9:46 a.m.

To: [graduate student listserv]
From: [Organizing Committee Member Two]
Subject: Last Reminder: TODAY is the [interesting-sounding talk] at 1 p.m. [on campus]

TODAY is the [interesting-sounding talk] at 1 p.m. [on campus]

Date: TODAY
Time: 1:00-2:30 p.m.
Location: [on campus]

Light refreshments will be served.

Best,

Organizing Committee Member Two

Friday (February 13^th): 11:01 a.m.

To: [departmental listserv]
From: [Organizing Committee Member Three]
Subject: THE [interesting-sounding talk] BEGINS IN ONE HOUR AND FIFTY-NINE MINUTES

THE [interesting-sounding talk] BEGINS IN ONE HOUR AND FIFTY-EIGHT MINUTES

Date: ONE HOUR AND FIFTY-SEVEN MINUTES
Time: 1:00-2:30 p.m.
Location: [on campus]

WE WILL BE SERVING LIGHT REFRESHMENTS IN ONE HOUR AND FIFTY-SIX MINUTES.

Best,

Organizing Committee Member Three

Friday (February 13^th): 4:22 p.m. (?)

To: [graduate student listserv]
From: [Organizing Committee Member Two]
Subject: Last Reminder: TODAY is the [interesting-sounding talk] at 1 p.m.

TODAY is the [interesting-sounding talk] at 1 p.m. [on campus]

Date: TODAY
Time: 1:00-2:30 p.m.
Location: [on campus]

Light refreshments will be served.

Best,

Organizing Committee Member Two

Friday (February 13^th): 4:47 p.m. (!?!)

To: [departmental listserv]
From: [Organizing Committee Member One]
Subject: Last Reminder: [interesting-sounding talk] is TODAY at 1 p.m.

The [interesting-sounding talk] is TODAY at 1 p.m. 

Date: TODAY
Time: 1:00-2:30 p.m.
Location: [on campus]

Light refreshments will be served.

Best,

Organizing Committee Member One

(Previous installments available here.)

Listserv Etiquetter V: In which nothing is ever "merely" anything

Every department houses one person who doesn't understand the purpose of the departmental listserv.  What is, for the majority of its recipients, a simple means of alerting interested parties to talks, job offers, and other relevant departmental business is, for this person, a public confessional.  If an email opens:

LGBT Event at Cross-Cultural Center

This person's outraged response will look like this:

LGBTQ Event at Cross-Cultural Center

Or perhaps like this:

GLBTQ? Event at Cross-Cultural Center

Point being, this person will find fault with whatever the first email said because the entire department must be constantly reminded that his or her devotion to justice entails questioning of any potentially privileging statement.  If the "G" follows the "L," the author replicates—and in replicating legitimizes or, even worse, appears to legitimize—divisive structures of representation within the queer community (as broadly as the word can be defined). 

Such grievous offense requires a brave crusader to parse every last permutation and then decide, in the end, that since every possible combination privileges something, the only thing to do is consider the sending of any email ever a pregnant "teaching moment" and append something like the 5,000 words he or she has just written to every one of them ... for great justice.

Should someone respond to this email with a sarcastic recommendation that the letters be stacked, so as to avoid the any possibility of untoward LTR directional privilege, this person will write another 5,000 words, this time about how unfunny the resulting mess would be:

Only it is not merely unfunny—nothing is ever "merely" anything for this person—it is also symptomatic of the desire by hegemons to obliterate the unique identities of the various groups represented by each letter by transforming their hard-won bonds into an amorphous blob of non-identity, thereby effacing the personal struggles of people, like this person, some of which he or she will now share with the entire department no matter how inappropriate discussing the loss of your virginity on a departmental listserv might seem.

Positive responses to this cathartic effusion will be deemed patronizing; negative, evidence of insensitivity born of privilege; silence, a vile attempt to shame this person back into closet in which the queer-uncomfortable majority clearly believes he or she belongs.  Any attempts to pull this person aside—via email, in the break room, it matters not—and convince him or her that no offense was offered or intended will result in yet another 5,000 word missive about the conspiracy to silence him or her.  Were someone to pipe in with a reminder of listserv decorum, complete with a lengthy quotation of its charter, the conspiracy becomes institutional and still another 5,000 word letter must be written, this time only CC'd to the listserv as a courtesy when it is sent to the Office of Equal Opportunity and Diversity.

When this person finally leaves the department, he or she will write a lengthy email reminiscing about how crucial the listserv was to development personal and professional and apologize if exchanges were ever unnecessarily heated.  Sooner or later, word will come through grapevine or the Chronicle of Higher Ed that this person has moved up in the world—what was once limited to interdepartmental listservs is now featured on the local news. 

And I will laugh at the poor television producers who have no idea what they've gotten themselves into.

Previous Installments:

1. What they must think when they read it
2. My CFP is infinitely more important than your email
3. Does anyone know if Marx wrote anything substantial on capital-qua-capital?
4. From the desk of Dr. Elderly Jew Deserving of Scorn

Dearest Colleagues, Do You not See I am Tired and at Front of Research?

(Being the fourth in what I did not expect to have become a series on listserv etiquette and violations thereof: Part I, Part II, and Part III.)

Dearest Colleagues,

Today on the Internet I found a very reputable site indicating that a medical procedure impossible to perform prior to the discovery of antibiotics in 1928 may have been widespread in Victorian England.  I was wondering if members of the list could point me to scholarly books, articles, dissertations, abstracts, indexes, bibliographies, errata sheets or, alternatively, contemporary newspaper clippings, fictional accounts, poems, songs, tragedies, diaries, daydreams, larks or fancies in which this procedure plays a vital part?  In my forthcoming manuscript, I demonstrate gross ignorance of basic medical fact and speculate that Victorians could have performed this procedure, so any mention of it will confirm to my satisfaction the validity of my speculation.  (Or, if not confirm, it will prove the procedure haunted the Victorian imagination by means of its terrifying potential, which for scholars of my caliber amounts to the same thing.)

I would be particularly interested in accounts demonstrating the procedure not only done to beast and man, but from beast to man.

Warmest Regards,

Dr. Elderly Jew Deserving of Scorn

More Listserv Etiquette 101

I thought I'd made this plain. 

Miriam had my back. 

The material'd been covered. 

We'd moved to the next chapter.

Yet I had to read this tonight:

Does anyone know if Marx wrote anything substantial on capital-qua-capital?  (I'm not so concerned with his writing on money, although if something about it seems relevant to capital, I'd be happy to hear about that too.)  If so, in what text might I find this?  Thanks so much for extending your not inconsiderable expertise to suborn my project.  I'll consider slapping your name in my acknowledgments page for fifteen seconds before deciding I'm a self-made man who never needed your help anyway.

Thanks!

All y'all who ask the obvious of experts, let me whisper some sweet somethings in your ear: 

Were I an evil telepathic narcissist, you'd think yourself the dynamite of my PROJECTED FUSE.

Were I an angry giant robot, I'd evaporate your people with my devastating RAY STAR.

Were I some folk who had tell of Internets, all my YAHOOS would ASK JEEVES who OGLED the cripplingly obvious answer to your question and we would laugh and laugh and laugh and laugh at your inability to locate the most basic of source material and the gall required to broadcast your shortcomings to everyone who knows you because it would be funny.

More on Listserv Etiquette

When I am king:

• If you send an 8 MB .pdf file to the listserv, you will be dragged behind the woodshed and shot.
• If the listserv is departmental—making subscription mandatory—justice will also be visited upon your immediate family.
• If you receive an 8 MB .pdf file and immediately forward it back to the departmental listserv, you and your immediate family will be dragged behind the woodshed and shot very slowly—with bullets made of pain—by a hydraulic device of unknown provenance.

This is how the world will be, when I am king.

What They Must Think When They Read It

Dear My Betters on this Academic Listserv,

I seek the most basic information about an event so important you are stunned I advanced to candidacy—much less almost completed a dissertation—without acquiring intimate knowledge of it.  As I have limited my interaction with the internet to the sending and receiving of emails, I am unable to consult any of the staggering number of sites devoted to the cause of the event, its significant players, or the deep repercussions it had on the culture in which I am ostensibly an expert. 

My refusal to avail myself of any online source—be it an encyclopedia entry or a site built by academics, containing thousands of links to first person accounts of the event, the original newspaper editorials written about it, and the current scholarly work being done on it—extends to the researching of the event in books, as they contain indexes strongly resembling the coordinated collation I would encounter online. 

Considering these circumstances—over which I only possess dictatorial control—I wonder whether you might neglect your work, spouse or child for an hour or two and explain, in considerable detail, the event indolence bars me from researching myself. 

I understand my ignorance strongly suggests global incompetence, but banish that thought for the moment: I need to inconvenience you soon, as I am preparing to go on the market in December and must finish my dissertation quickly. 

Thank you,

Colossally Weak Candidate
Department of Questionable Scholars
Institution of Dubious Credentials
Inappropriately Risqué Email Address
Link to Personal Blog

P.S. Ask my adviser about the compromising photographs of him Reason dictates I possess.