Acephalous

Piracy Studies

The joke isn't even mine.  But someone has ventured over here from Long Sunday approximately too-many-times-to-count tonight so I'll venture a reprint.  Jodi suggested the creation of Department of Piracy Studies.  I provided some ink for their brochure:

Scholars of Piracy Studies explore and develop theoretical models to analyze, critique, and plunder cultural forms and social relations in order to create geographically transgressive symbolic categories of race, gender, and ethnic identity. The goal of the Piracy Studies Institute is to promote the study of shared assumptions, problems, and commitments of the various piratanical discourses. Begun largely in response to extraordinary changes in the 'humane sciences,' both in terms of methodological complexity and interdisciplinary orientation, the PSI seeks to bring about a confrontation among the disciplines with the aim of furthering the figurative and literal rape of all land-locked peoples irrespective of race, class, or gender. The PSI sanctions methodological and murderological diversity in the critical reconsideration of the rearticulations and recombinations of all them put to the knife. The PSI also sponsors two mini-seminars each year, given by scholars from outside the PSI who invite students to participate in their raids-in-progress in a series of a one- to two-week seminars at undisclosed locations up-and-down the Eastern Seaboard.

Now you can get your Piracy Studies right from the secondary source and Bob's your uncle!

Beloved? Meh. It Could've Been Important

[Now new and x-posted!]

The New Republic's "This Week in the Arts" mailer suggested that since "The New York Times recently proclaimed Toni Morrison's Beloved to be 'the single best work of American fiction published in the past 25 years,'" I should check out how TNR reviewed back in 1988.  A quick dip in the archives and I was reading "Aunt Medea."  It opens with a misguided slam of James Baldwin.  In stunning prose, Baldwin claims

people who cannot suffer can never grow up, can never discover who they are.  That man who is forced each day to snatch his manhood, his identity out of the fire of human cruelty that rages to destroy it knows, if he survives his efforts, and even if he does not survive it, something about himself and human like that no school on earth—and, indeed, no church—can teach. 

Baldwin may not always be correct, but few sound so good being wrong.  According to TNR's reviewer, with Baldwin

the claim to martyrdom, real or merely asserted, began to take on value.  One on longer had to fear the charge of self-pity when detailing the suffering of one's group.  Catastrophic experience was elevated.  Race became an industry.  It spawned careers, studies, experts, college departments, films, laws, hairdos, name changes, federal programs, and so many books. 

Then came the feminists.  They exposed the patriarchial assumptions of black male protest literature. 

But exposing the shortcomings in protest writing by black men didn't automatically make writing by black women any better.  Writers like Alice Walker revealed little more than their own inclination to melodrama, militant self-pity, guilt-mongering and pretensions to mystic wisdom.

Enter Toni Morrison:

With Song of Solomon, which appeared in 1979, she became a best-selling novelist, proving that the combination of poorly digested folk materials, feminist rhetoric, and a labored use of magic realism could pay off.

Beloved is no better:

It is designed to placate sentimental feminist ideology, and to make sure that the vision of black woman as the most scorned and rebuked of the victims doesn't weaken.

For Beloved, above all else, is a blackface holocaust novel.  It seems to have been written in order to enter American slavery into the big-time martyr ratings contest, a contest usually won by references to, and works about, the experience of Jews at the hands of Nazis.

That Morrison chose to set the Afro-American experience in the framework of collective tragedy is fine, of course.  But she lacks a true sense of the tragic.  For all the memory within this book, including recollections of the trip across the Atlantic and the slave trading in the Caribbean, no one ever recalls how the Africans were captured.  That would have complicated matters.

That's not a bad point.  Erasing the role of Africans in the slave trade is a matter of political pragmatism which does strip some formal element of tragedy from the slave trade.  Wouldn't it be far more tragic to be sold into slavery by your cousin.  Better yet:

A young African woman gives birth to a baby boy who, it has been augured, will one day lead her tribe to victory over the rival tribe to the east.  During a raid, she is wounded and disoriented.  When she comes to the boy is nowhere to be found.  He is presumed dead.  He isn't.  The tribe to the east kidnapped him and for the next ten years raise him as one of its own.  The mother eventually becomes the queen of her tribe.  She takes revenge for the "death" of her son by ordering an assault on the tribe to the east.  In the course of the attack, her son, the greatest warrior in either tribe, is taken prisoner.  After the battle, she orders all the prisoners sold to a Portuguese slave trader bound to America.  A few years later, the tribe to the east launches a successful attack on her tribe.  The leader of the tribe to the east spares the queen's life long enough to confront her: "Why did you sell your son, the greatest warrior in either tribe, to the white slaver?"

Now that would be a tragedy.  The book could continue following the son's brutal life as a slave and then he could die a heartwrenching and properly tragic death.  Does Morrison do that?

In Beloved Morrison only asks that her readers tally up the sins committed against the darker people and feel sorry for them, not experience the horrors of slavery as they do.

Apparently she can't even get the heartwrenching part right:

Morrinson, unlike Alice Walker, has real talent, an ability to organize her novel in a musical structure, deftly using images as motifs; but she perpetually interrupts her narrative with maudlin ideological commercials.

She could write a heartwrenching novel were it not for her desire to insert bold ideological statements in her book.  In classic creative writer's argot: she tells instead of showing.  "Beloved reads largely like a melodrama lashed to the structural conceits of the miniseries."  Ouch.

Were Beloved adapted for television (which would suit the crass obviousness that wins out over Morrison's literary gift at every significant turn) the trailer might go like this:

"Meet Sethe, an ex-slave woman who harbors a deep and terrible secret that has brought terror into her home.  [Adolescent sons are shown fleeing.]  Meet Paul D, who had a passion for Sethe when they were both slaves, but lost her to another.  [Sethe shown walking with first husband Halle, smilin as Paul D looks on longingly.]

The parody continues on far longer than its enabling conceit actually allows.  The reviewer's point is that "Morrison almost always loses control" and that "she can't resist the temptation of the trite or sentimental."  The stuff of miniseries.  The final evaluation?

Too many attempts at biblical grandeur, run through by Negro Folk rhythms, stymie a book that might have been important.

Yet to render slavery with aesthetic authority demands not only talent, but the courage to face the ambiguities fo the human soul, which transcend race.  Had Toni Morrison that kind of courage, had she the passion necessary to liberate her work from the failure of feeling that is sentimentality, there is much she could achieve.  But why should she try to achieve anything?  The position of literary conjure woman has paid off quite well.  At last year's PEN Congress she announced that she had never considered herself American, but with Beloved she proves that she is as American as P.T. Barnum.

STANLEY CROUCH

Stanley Crouch?  STANLEY CROUCH?  I knew this argument sounded familiar.  However, this little exercise says something favorable taking arguments seriously.  That bit in the middle about Morrison's failure to face the larger tragedy of slavery strikes me as somewhat compelling.  May even account for why I prefer Charles Johnson's Middle Passage to Beloved.  The reductio of Crouch's argument could be entertaining:

THE HORROR!  (points to the east)  THE HORROR!  (points to the west)  THAT HORROR TOO!  (points to the south)  AND THAT ONE!  (points to the north)  ALMOST FORGOT THAT ONE!  (points to the southeast)  NO DOUBT!

Caleb Crain on "Academic Criticism," Only Not Really

[X-posted to environs Valvular.]

Radiating delight, I read Caleb Crain‘s article on “Academic Criticism” in the new n+1. According to the prelude to “American Writing Today: A Symposium,” Crain’s article addresses “the conditions of production of new [academic criticism]; its character and traits; and the figures and creators who have most influenced each field” (63). 

It didn’t; it didn’t; and it didn’t. 

I Am Become Plagiarism

Bailiff:  Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God?

Scott:  I do.  (Assistant District Attorney John Wells strides forward and begins to question Kaufman.)

Wells:  Is it true that on the tenth of May you wrote a post on your blog called "What's the Word I'm Looking For?  The Opposite of 'Disgruntled'"?

Scott:  I did.

Wells:  And did said post contain the sentence "Today, for some apparent reason, I had my first choate idea in weeks"? 

Scott:  It did.

Wells:  Now refer to Government's Exhibit 643.  Read the highlighted section.

Scott:  "But then, all at once, for some apparent reason, she looked in my direction and smiled in a way that I could make heads and tails of."

Wells:  Notice any similarity?

Scott:  The phrase "some apparent reason" appears in both.

Wells:  It certainly does.  Now could you read the next highlighted part?

Scott:  "The conversation become more and more choate, and we spoke at length to much avail."  I know what you're thinking, but I'm no plagiarist!

Wells:  Will the court please instruct Mr. Kaufman to only answer the questions asked?

Judge:  Consider yourself warned.

Wells:  Thank you.  Now please read the rest of the highlighted words.

Scott:  Gruntled, nomer, shevelled, kempt, godly.

Wells:  If I were to tell you all those words appeared in your blog post of 10 May, would I be correct?

Scott:  They're all there, but . . .

Wells:  You'll answer the questions I ask with a simple "Yes" or "No." 

Scott:  Yes. 

Wells:  The State enters Exhibit 644 into evidence.  (hands an oddly shaped box to Scott)  Mr. Kaufman, will you please tell the jury what you have in your hands?

Scott:  A copy of The Complete New Yorker.

Wells:  What would happen if I handed you a laptop and asked you to do a search for an article in the 25 July 1994 issue written be a man named Jack Winter?

Scott:  Nothing.

Wells:  Nothing? 

Scott:  I stare at its outrageously complicated search interface for a couple of minutes.  Then I'd type in his name and be taken to a screen which listed the articles he'd written.  I'd try to access them, but would fail miserably. 

Wells:  And why would you do that?

Scott:  Because it's designed so counterintuitive that you need a doctorate in Computer Science to navigate it.

Wells:  You want this court to believe that someone as technological proficient as you is unable to operate The Complete New Yorker's search function?

Scott:  It's true.

Wells:  (looking flustered)  So what you expect this court to believe is that despite you teaching articles from The New Yorker on a regular basis, you had no idea of the existence of Jack Winter's "How I Met My Wife"?

Scott:  Yes sir.

Wells:  And that the numerous identical "words" in the two text appear through sheer coincidence?

Scott:  Not by coincidence.  We—Mr. Winter and I—were both aiming for the same effect.  There aren't that many words in the English language with the strange usage patterns we both exploited for humorous effect . . .

Wells:  "Yes" or "No" will suffice.

Scott:  Yes then, I suppose.

Wells:  If a student of yours turned in an article with as many "coincidences" as are found in your post, what would your first reaction be?

Scott:  It depends.  If I'd seen them through four or five drafts and watched as they appeared via revision, I'd think it a coincidence.

Wells:  And what would Turnitin.com think it?

Scott:  Plagiarism.  But it can't account for process . . .

Wells:  Thank you, Mr. Kaufman.  That's all.  I have no more questions for this witness . . .

What's the Word I'm Looking For? The Opposite of "Disgruntled"?

Searching for words costs me hours daily.  Today, for some apparent reason, I had my first choate idea in weeks:

Write "gruntled" and move along.  I abused myself of the notion that placeholder words work fine.  Thanks to my inelegant new nomers, searching for words became a tame goose chase.  I sat there at my desk, my clothes shevelled, my hair kempt and in a state of utter array.  I was completely capacitated even if my prose wasn't fully-baked.  Writing became a bominable task. 

I was off the lam.  When I advertently saw my advisor, I wore a short face and he gave me the warm shoulder.  He told me I've spent my time to much avail.  "You've finally brought a gun to the gunfight," he said.  It was concerting.

I returned home and stopped working at a godly hour.  And now that I look at it again, what I've written is really quite trocious.  I'm at my wit's beginning now that I've bitten off only as much as I can chew.  This really was an easy nut to crack once I woke up those sleeping dogs. 

[I blame this book for this post.  Handler has a quietly self-conscious style which makes the world of words a strange place.  Hence tonight's offering.]

A Day in the Life of a College Student, Circa 1928

Jim:  Andy was lit up like a church last night!

Jim #2:  Was he?  I can't remember.  I'd wet my goozle with some hard knockout drops soon as the sun dropped.

Andy:  (stumbling in)  So I drank some corn juice, I remember that much . . .

Sam:  'Pifflicated, you were!

Andy:  I was at that.  I was seeing snakes for sure.  What happened to Mary?

All:  Let's not talk about the after-date.

Andy:  Why not?  She was strong for lovin' last I recall.  (a confuzzled look crosses his face)  I was . . .

Sam #2:  You're no big butter and egg man from out West anymore.

Andy:  What's your insinnuendo?  I showed some mean stuff and now she just gives me air?

Jim:  You shouldn't have told her 'bout your surety.  She thinks you a chicken duster now.

Andy:  I'm no . . . I suppose it's not worth discussing.  I'm not sloptimist enough to think I can open her gate now. 

Jim #2:  Plus Jim over there told her you were a chest-pounder.

Andy:  Why'd you go and do that?  Drift, brother, and close the door behind you.  (Jim leaves.  Andy turns to the Sams)  What happened last night?  Which slicker brought panther-sweat to our private tunk?

Sam:  You did.

Andy:  I did?

Sam #2:  You came blustering in about not cookie-pushing for any more high higs and how you were coming to this and every future rub stag. 

Andy:  She was a knock-out and a darb, but my father isn't paying this grill four thousand a year for me to be some rare lady's tea hound.  I mean, she knows her oil . . .

Jim #2:  She is full of vinegar.

Sam #2:  And she never breaks a wing.

Andy:  But she gives a lot of house. 

Sam #2:  That's not what I heard tell. 

Andy:  Where's your muffler?

Sam #2:  Sorry.  I can be such a sock.  You want to join our cram tonight?

Jim #2:  You should.  You're on the mat and Sam really knows his onions.

Andy:  I should.  I don't want to get a letter from His Highness.

Sam:  You're next invite to the Dean's formal will be your last. 

Andy:  (slumps)  This Jewish engineering has me down on all fours.  Don't get me wrong.  The professor's pretty hot.  When we chum he has the oil and keeps cramming.  But I thought his would be a pipe and now it's all whip and over.

Sam #2:  Just be sure to bone and you won't get a footing.

Jim:  (runs in)  C'mon, peaches, here's your can!  (Jim #2, Sam, Sam #2 and Andy give chase.  Homosocial hilarity ensues.)

The Position; or, We Can All Go Home, Now...

[Soon to be X-posted at the Valve.  Would've been already but I didn't want to bump this beauty from its deserved position of prominence.]

. . . that Stanley’s figured it out.  Don’t get me wrong: I love reading Fish with a passion equal in intensity to the vehemence with which I disagree with him.  But how can any intellectual brawler dislike a man whose very titles “betray” aggressive condescension? 

“Wrong Again,” opines the title of Fish’s 1973 article in the Texas Law Review.  Still don’t understand?  Stanley will say it again “One More Time” (CI 6.4).  Is it any wonder the likes of Walter Davis suffer from an acute “Fear of Fish” (CI 10.2)?  (If you think this fear related to his stature, a smiling Fish will enumerate the reasons “Why No One’s Afraid of Wolfgang Iser” [Diacritics 11.1].) 

I don’t mean to suggest that his prose never misfires.  For example, the regular appearance of “my italics” in his parenthetical citations demonstrate—in direct opposition to the rationale behind the quotations themselves—how manipulative Fish is.  Fortunately, his manipulation quickly becomes visual, what with every other word of the other fellow’s prose being italicized.

That said, his 1972 omnibus review of “Recent Studies in the English Renaissance” is the only viscerally enjoyable example of the genre I’ve ever read. His deliciously causidical prose is worth its weight in bandwidth:

Why Deaf Men Are Breast Men

[Two posts written while Typepad writhed: "Get Your Pretty Tired Act!" and "I Don't Speak Neanderthal, But . . ."]

Tonight I want to talk to you about staring at women's breasts.  I do it all the time.  I'll be standing there talking to a woman only to be stricken by the sudden and irresistible urge to stare at her breasts.  She'll register her discomfort by pulling her lapels close or yanking her plunging neckline chin-high.  Then she'll become intensely interested in objects in the general vicinity of her feet.  But I won't let that deter me.  I'll continue to stare at her breasts until she won't be able to take it anymore and informs me in tones of suppressed outrage that she had some important elsewhere to be fifteen minutes ago.  Then she'll never talk to me again.

Such is the experience of the deaf man in America today.  When the eyes of a hearing man break contact and wander south, the obvious conclusion is the correct one: he is staring at her breasts and she is justifiably uncomfortable.  When a deaf man who relies on verbal cues and lip-reading to converse lets his eyes drift south of his conversant's, he stops at her lips.  (You can tell because if he didn't—that is, if he actually stared at her breasts—he would have no clue how to answer whatever it is she would have said to him while he indulged in some "covert" sexism.) 

Why mention this in the one forum this commonplace of deaf life will never make anyone uncomfortable?  Because I've acquired another rude habit:

Talking to people while wearing headphones.  People who know me—for example, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Barry Siegel—won't bat an eye when I talk to them with my headphones on because they'll know that I'm reading their lips and not paying attention to the music.  They'll know that I'm so invested in the conversation that I've forgotten that I have the headphones on and have merely neglected to remove them.  But other people—for example, the inimitable Gay Talese—will look at me horrified as I chat with Barry without removing my headphones.  His eyes will rebel against the solipsistic impertinence of youth culture he detects in my actions. 

I register his discomfort but, blinded by reputation and desperately trying to impress him, I won't understand what it is I've said that so offends him.  I'll rifle my brain for the offensive statement the entire walk home and come up empty.  Only later that night, as I force myself to stop thinking about the events of the day, will I realize what I've done.  And then?

So much for sleep.

Joan Didion: A Tribute Which Will Read as Parody (Because I'm No Joan Didion)

This afternoon I attended the Joan Didion talk at the Los Angeles Times Book Fair.  A friend and I waited in a long line.  It snaked from the entrance to Royce Hall around one building and half of another.  When it finally crept forward we were greeted by a large security guard who could have been an extra in a film about a corrupt Los Angeles police force.  Or New York.  I made a list of things I would observe.

I would observe: the capacity of Royce Hall.  I would observe: the characteristics of the audience.  I would observe: Didion's hands as she spoke about the death of her husband.

In two minutes Didion would take the stage.  Almost all of the 1,834 seats had been filled but people still shuffled in.  Royce Hall had been modeled after the San Ambrogio Church in Milan.  Construction on San Ambrogio began in the 4th century.  A south tower was added in the 9th.  A north in the 12th.  The 12th century oversaw a interior remodeling in the popular Romanesque style.  The rolling terrain of the young UCLA campus suggested northern Italy to the architects.  Three years later they had completed their Romanesque basilica.  Of the Westwood campus' original four buildings it is the only one which stands unrenovated. 

In the 15th Century Cardinal Ascanio Sforza ordered Bramante to add cloisters to the church.  Sforza belonged to the ruling family of Milan.  Its founder is rumored to have bent metal bars with his hands.  Ascanio wanted to create what the 19th century American philosopher Josiah Royce would call "a community of hope."  The community would be "constituted by the fact that each of its members accepts, as part of his own individual life and self, the same expected future events that each of his fellows accepts."  The UCLA Fellows agreed with Royce and named a building after him.

The building was filled to near capacity.  In the audience were many older Californians, fans of her work in the '60s and '70s and naturally sympathetic to the lose of a spouse or a child.   They too would have lost someone, or soon will.  There were also many younger women finding seats, asking men who had rolled joints in Berkeley in the '60s if they could squeeze by.  Her long blonde hair brushed his arm as she passed and you knew from his face he didn't mind.  He could imagine her in an iconic yellow bikini as the Vietnam War raged.  He could remember when he read in 1979 that Didion was not "the society in microcosm [but] a thirty-four-year-old woman with long straight hair and an old-fashioned bikini bathing suit and bad nerves sitting on an island in the middle of the Pacific waiting for a tidal wave that will not come."  You could almost see him sniff the air in her wake.

That these young woman came to hear Didion speak initially surprised many.  When Didion took to the stage she related how The Year of Magical Thinking had found her a new audience.  "People would come up and speak to me in the airport now," she said.  "They were younger than I expected, more interested in my marriage than his death."  As she said this none of the young women present looked embarassed or disturbed.  None of them shifted in their seats at her statement.  None of them were more interested in Didion's marriage than her loss.  "We are not allowed to dwell on death," she said.  Some of them did.

During the Question & Answer segment one stepped to the microphone.  "I was friends with Quintana Roo in high school.  She was a beautiful person.  Will you write a book about that too?"  "I hadn't thought about that," Didion lied.  When asked by the New York Times whether she would change The Year of Magical Thinking to reflect her daughter's death, she had said "It's finished."  Her lie seemed more a product of surprise than deliberation.  She had not expected to see a young woman, one Quintana may have brought home one day, one who if she thought long enough she could remember, or imagine she remembered, streaking through the kitchen to inform her daughter of some urgent triviality.  She said "I hadn't thought about that."

Of her craft and life she said "I stopped caring about hiding things.  My style is about withholding information.  Or it was.  Now I wanted to be direct."  When a woman in the Q & A informed her that "I have a severe learning disability, I can barely read, but I love your books," she smiled kindly and said "It must be the very large typeface.  They want me to write in a very large typeface."  Unless the typeface is unusual publishers will not inform their patrons of its name.  Play It As It Lays is "Designed by Guy Fleming."  "Book design by Iris Weinstein" graces the copyright page of Political Fictions.  On back cover you find "Author photograph © Quintana Roo."

The death of her daughter will figure more prominently in the stage adaptation of The Year of Magical Thinking.  Despite being known "as a journalist, playwright, essayist, and novelist," this is "the first stage play I've written."  She has collaborated with her late husband on numerous screenplays, but this is different.  "There is no investment," she says of writing screenplays, "because you know someone else will come and ruin it."  The only screenplay she still likes and could, but never will, re-read is for Ice Queen.  It was never filmed.  The Year of Magical Thinking will be a one-woman monologue.  She hopes, but doubts,  it will find an audience. 

"I never even go to the theater." 

Murglarizing American History the Reginald Kenneth Dwight Way

Two posts about The Battle of New Orleans on one blog?  Insanity!  And yet:

As I watched the underrated Elizabethtown recently, I made a mental note of the fact that Cameron Crowe has now had two films in which Elton John songs figure prominently.  Like every kid who came of age after Say Anything premiered, I fancied myself "a Lloyd" and sought out heartbreakers so I too could hoist a stereo above my head and "serenade" my Diane with "In Your Eyes."  Alas!  Instead I ended up heavily medicated in a tree outside my first love's window alternately bawling and asleep.  (I had an excuse . . . and a head swaddled such that I had a gauzy half-leia thing going on.  How could she have resisted?)  But I digress. 

The First Day of Class & Last Day of "Vacation"

I pre-season this post with an unnecessary—given the new sidebar item top-right—admission that "My Morning" didn't win a Koufax Award.  To be frank: I like the  image of the probable kvitcherer I created better than any shot of the smooth Koufaxian delivery of Evelyn Lichtenstein's menscheleh.  (On purpose, people, on purpose.  C'mon!  I ain't that lapsed.  What?  You!  In the peanut gallery.  Yeah you.  That's right.  I did hear.  Now shut it!  Don't make me take off this belt.) 

I open by acknowledging that this quarter will be the last I ever teach literary journalism.  I won't be hired to teach it . . . and UC requires I stop teaching after I teach, um, as many quarters as I've taught at UCI.  This saddens me.  I'd like to keep teaching this course indefinitely.  Jonathan once accused all teachers of deluding themselves into thinking they're both well-liked and tough graders.  He's surely correct.  Only not so much in my case.  In the past three weeks I've learned that four of my former students will be attending the prestigious Columbia School of Journalism.  Another two will enter the equally elite Northwestern School of Journalism.  I know what you're saying: "Scott, if you've been teaching literary journalism so long that you're placing your kids in graduate programs, it's time to move on." 

And it is.

But that doesn't mean I have to be happy about it. 

On a different note entirely, I'd hoped the "Best Introduction To" post would've gone viral already.  Alas!  It seems to affect only Americanists, Medievalists and Theory buffs.  I solicited some links for it yesterday and that seems to be doing the trick.  (Check out this conversation for instance.)  I think there's something to what Craig and Matt and Laura argue in the comments; but I also think there's something to be said for an introductory text which allows someone with little more than interest to acquire something resembling knowledge.  I would love someone to pick up the baton and run with it.  In particular, I'm still sorely lacking in all things pre-Revolutionary American but not Medieval.  This includes all things Analytic and Philosophical . . . some Existential stuff . . . and a whole slew of traditions based on the outlandish idea that it's acceptable to write in languages other than English.  As if. 

On Grading; or, I Don't Want It All & I Certainly Don't Want It All Now

Oh the endless unrevised sentences of highly motivated and easily panicked students who during finals week—which seems like it should be possessive but which I believe to be adjectival, in that the word "finals" in its plural form modifies the word "week" in its nominal—neglect such simple things as common sense and reasonable sentence length in a desperate (but ultimately futile) attempt to stuff every last thought they have about this, that or the other topic into a single sentence for fear that, if they do not, the person responsible for grading their final essay—be he a lowly T.A. like myself or a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist like Barry Siegel—will decide that since the entirety of their thinking about this, that or the other was not contained within a single sentence that the aforementioned highly motivated and obviously outrageously caffeinated students will fail this class, lose their scholarship, be forced to attend community college while working 70 hour weeks at In-N-Out Burger and thus never amount to anything in life because they decided that thoughts must be contained in sentences much like they are contained in minds—that is, completely and wholly—with nothing pertaining to the thought they have corralled into the sentence being allowed to exist outside it lest their instructors (myself and Barry) mistake their decision to end a sentence with a desire to end all thought per se and embrace the life they have worked so hard for so long to escape, which they desperately do not want to do but which their instructors (Barry and I) never really think about when we read their essays since we are more concerned with other, more important, matters like whether a student knows how to end a sentence.

One Vicious Whinge . . .

. . . can be found below the fold. 

I really need to take a deep breath and just not post some nights.

A Lexigraphical Lament about Probationer Prosody

All scribes utilize lexicons.  Roget's regnant tome monopolizes the matriculant market.  Neophytes congregate in monograph outlets to procure a reprint.  They disembark at their domicile and allocate Peter Roget's linguistical treatise a bearing on a transversal above their desktop computer.  There it hunkers until a pedagogue implores them to formulate a polemic.  Then the prentice wordsmith extracts it.  The pupil employs it to ameliorate his pedestrian prose.  With hubris he asseverates the eminence of his phraseological aptitude:

"My profiency with palaver is unparalleled.  Scrutinize my incomparable prose if you don't accredit me!"

The ensuing evening his educator ensconces himself at his trestle to assess his august pupil's critique.   After he appraises it he thrusts his extremities on his coutenance.  He again cognizes that graduands should not be sanctioned to retain Roget's opus because proprietorship of aforementioned reprehensible receptacle of lexical surrogates elicits maximal keening from all preceptors. 

"Why!" the mentor declaims at his articulatory apex.  "Why must charges importune their prose with exorbitant diction?"

Saturday Self-Indulgence I

So last night was a total disaster.  Everyone stared at me wondering who I was mocking.  I seemed to be a raving anti-everythingist of the worstest sort.  I only meant to mock neo-Nazis though.  It went so terribly terribly wrong because my typical mode o' mockery is inhabitation and infiltration.  To insult from the inside with complete disregard for what others think of you is my modus operandi.  I watch The Office and consider Gervais a god among men . . . because His is The Only Way to deprive 'em of all dignity.  Only it takes a surer hand or steadier set of fingers to pull it off. 

So I apologize.  I really only meant to belittle some Nazis by turning them into old Jews.  I'm on a roll this week though.  I'm offending everyone I otherwise agree with for no particular reason.  I could examine in detail the reasons for my failures . . . but I'd rather not tonight.  Instead I'm throwing you what I christen "Saturday Self-Indulgence."  Because no one reads blogs on the weekend.  Most of you are too busy leading your weekend lives.  The ones you dream about as you do all you can to keep your head off your desk and your boss off your back.  You know . . . the days you sneak a second to see what I had to say about something important.  Weekdays my words wash away the daily drudge for select sacred moments.  Weekdays I'm the violent fantasy life you don't want your therapist to know about. 

Weekdays I'm modest to boot. 

So I'll spend Saturday "sharing."  The first thing I'll share is that today's my brother's birthday.  He won't answer my phone calls or reply to emails or even respond to my comments on his blog . . . but I wish him a happy birthday nonetheless.  What can I say?  I put the "big" in "big brother."

I've been listening to the newish Fiona Apple album.  The cover disgusts me in ways I can't explain.  They have to do with this photoshopped image of a human and a lotus plant which was ostensibly a woman who'd been infected by some parasite . . . and I'd link to it but I don't want that image back in my head.  If I said that that image stole countless sleeping hours from me I wouldn't be exaggerating.  Sometimes images lodge in my head and I can't fight them out for the life of me.  Even my patented sleep technology* can't defeat it.  So no link.  But you can see an unhealthy approximation on the Fiona Apple album. 

Kevin's nominated me for "Worst Soon to be Professor."  That's only fair.  I'm the force responsible for Michael's dangerous terribility.  Without me people'd think Chomsky a greater danger. 

Two of my three Honors Dissertation advisors have emailed drafts of their current work this week.  Sadly this makes me feel like an adult.  But it also makes me feel like an undergraduate again.  I've commented on both Pat McGee and John Protevi's latest work . . . but I can't send them my comments until I'm absolutely positively convinced that what I've written isn't complete crap.  I'm sure this is something I'll overcome someday.  But for now I still idolize those two and can't bring myself to send my impressions.  Soon though.  (I'm fairly certain both read me regularly.  I hope they get this far and understand why I haven't responded yet.)

Finally, Belle took the bar exam this week and thinks she passed.  Congratulations are in order!  So cough 'em up!  (What can I say?  I'm a believer.  If people as intelligent as she manifestly is think they passed then they passed.  The exceptions to this rule are so rare they only prove it.)

*One time at baseball camp they brought in an instructor to help us "visualize" our swing.  They'd taped us swinging from three angles, stuck us in front of a VCR and told us to memorize what we were doing and the order in which we were doing it.  "Lift front foot and begin to slide it slowly" &c.  Then a hitting instructor finds the flaws in it, tells us how to fix them, and informs us that we're to "visualize" our "perfect" swing over and over and over again.  To this day it knocks me out after about four iterations.  Sometimes I vary it by thinking about my jump shot, but really, the swing is solid gold. I'm like Wolverine: thirty seconds (alright, more like three minutes) and I'm out like a light.  But only if I can concentrate. If I'm sick and/or drunk, I'm lifting my right foot, releasing my left hand, launching the bat instead of the ball . . .

jimy666izstoned@gmail.com & Scott Eric Kaufman: An Epistolary Romance

9:39 a.m.

yo,

i want to take yr literary jornalism class but i'm not on campus tues.  would it be alrite if i came on thurs?  cuz last qtr my comp teacher let me do this and said i wuz a great writer.  i read all the time and would be an assett to yr class on thurs and woundnt talk to much cuz i wouldn't be there any tues.  u wont regret it.

12:01 p.m.

Dear Jimmy (?),

You really do seem like a great writer.  Who was your instructor last quarter?

Best,

Scott

12:02 p.m.

thx for the fast reply.  i would tell u who my teach wuz last qtr but he said i shouldnt tell any body about our deal.  cuz if it got out he would be fired for helping me out.  but i'm not lyin he did let me skip tues.  so can i be in yr class?

3:48 p.m.

Jimmy,

Normally I don't respond so quickly but your email compels me to.  Are you sure you can't tell me who your instructor was?  I promise not to tell.  If I let you in the course he and I will be in the same boat.  I have good reason not to tell.

Best,

Scott

3:49 p.m.

dude i would love to u but maybe after im in the class.  im so happy u think my emails r compelling.  i told u i wuz a great writer.  so can i be in it?  cuz i need to know so i can arrange my work sched.

8:14 p.m.

Jimmy,

What do you mean "i wuz a great writer."  I thought you said you are a great writer.  I'm not sure the class can afford a student whose best days are behind him.  Also: Why can't you attend class on Tuesdays?

Best,

Scott

8:15 p.m.

cuz i have to work.  and i didnt mean im not great anymore.  my friends laugh at what i right all the time.  everyone says i should be a writer.  so can i be in yr class.

9:36 p.m.

i really need to no soon so i can figure out my sched.

10:01 p.m.

dude if ur tryin to decide maybe i can tell u who my teach wuz last qtr.  shes not at uci anymore she got a job somewhere in the south like colorado. 

10:45 p.m.

i have to go out now but if u can call or msg me at XXX-XXXX.   thx dude.

12:41 a.m.

sry 2 txt u bt i trnd fon off fr acidnt.  did u call.  GBTM sn as u gt ths.

1:51 a.m.

wuz dat u GBTM sn.

2:47 a.m.

dude we came home cuz my firend said he should tell u how i can write great shit and

6:21 a.m.

so can i be in yr class r not?  i sent my teacher from last qtr an email and she said she doesnt know u so she cant trust me to tell u.  but i need to no soon about the class.

7:36 a.m.

yo i have to go to work u can msg me at the other number.

8:21 a.m.

Dear Jimmy,

I'm afraid I can't let you in the class if work is the reason you cannot Tuesday sessions.  If you had a legitimate medical reason (like Tuesday chemotherapy treatments) I would have made an exception.  But I cannot accommodate every student whose work schedule conflicts with their classes.  If I did I would have to hold class at 3:00 a.m.

Best,

Scott

8:22 a.m.

sux.  cnt mk 3am clss.  hv thngs 2 do thn.  8am m th wrks 4 me.

9:01 a.m.

cud do 9am 2.

12:09 p.m.

Jimmy,

I'm sorry.  I didn't mean to give you the impression that this was a negotiation.  If you cannot make the scheduled hours you will not be able to take this course.

Best,

Scott

11:36 p.m. [from ocbadazz949@gmail.com]

fuck u i herd u wuz terrible teach last qtr.  u cant teach 4 shit asshole.

7:03 a.m. [Scott replies to jimy666izstoned@gmail.com]

Jimmy,

Who told you I did a terrible job teaching?  I didn't see any poor reviews in my evalutions. 

Best,

Scott

7:04 a.m.

u wouldnt know him.  he jus came to ur office hrs 1 time.

[The inspiration.  And if you must know, I think these people pretty much nail it.  PunditGuy?  Not so much.  ]

No. More. Online. Child. Pornography. Please.

Observe the list of articles my students could have written about.  It didn't occur to me that one-third of them would choose Kurt Eichenwald's "Through His Webcam, a Boy Joins a Sordid World Online."  Maybe I should have foreseen it.

I didn't.

Now I've spend all weekend reading about "camwhores" and the ethical issues involved in writing about them.  Before assigning this article I should've considered whether I wanted to spend two or three days thinking about thirteen year old Justin Berry's descent into a world of online pedophilia and molestation and Mexicon hookers.  Because if I had I may have balked at assigned this particular article.

Instead I find myself writing sentences like "As you note, Eichenwald regularly suggests that Berry wasn't responsible for his decisions, that from the moment he turned on his webcam he was doom to masturbate in front of it for pedophiles."  Not that the topic is unimportant or that, as has been recently suggested, I'm a prude.  I work on evolutionary theory.  I think about sexual reproduction all the time.  I've T.A.'d for courses which examined questions of normative sexuality.  I'm not the least bit uncomfortable with the material.

But . . . ugh.

"The Kids' Papers"

I woke up this morning with an idea in my skull. 

I'd dreamed I was sitting on a bench, in Baltimore, facing the tumbling fountain in Harlem Park, beside a woman who wore a veil. 

I had come there with her.  She was somebody I knew well. 

But I had suddenly forgotten who she was.  I asked her if she had finished grading the papers.  She answered me, but the roar and swish of the tumbling fountain smothered her voice, and I could hear nothing.

The dream ended there.

I walked into the kitchen, opened the top of the refigerator and attacked the ice tray.  The girl stood in the doorway and asked questions.  I didn't answer them while I put ice, lemon juice and seltzer together in two glasses. 

I put my glass on the table, sat down facing it, and complained.  She reached across the table and patted my hand.  Her eyes were uneasy.  She smiled too softly and spoke too indulgently:

"You exaggerate so, honey.  Those kids deserve all they get."

I grinned, picked up the glasses, and went out to the kitchen for more seltzer.  When I came back she frowned at me over anxious dark eyes and said:

"The trouble with you is your nerves are shot.  You've been through too many papers in the last few days.  Keep it up and you're going to have a nervous breakdown."

I held up a hand with spread fingers.  It was steady enough.

She looked at it and said:

"That doesn't mean anything. It's inside you.  Why don't you sneak off for a couple of days' rest?"

"Can't sister.  Somebody's got to stay here and grade the papers."

Her eyes got large and then narrowd to black-fringed slits.  She leaned toward me, upsetting her glass with an elbow:

"Then let's talk scratch."

I grinned at the greed in her eyes and said:

"Not just yet.  We'll have to see how you work out before we start scattering pennies around."

She called me a damned nickle-nurser.  I grinned and handed her a paper from the stack.  She pretended it took her nearly five minutes to read the fifteen hundred words the kid had written.  I gave her my fountain pen and held a notebook under the paper, to stiffen it while she scribbled her comments at the bottom, and to have it in my hands as soon as she had finished.

I looked it over and said:

"You can't tell some kid that.  Where were you raised?"

"I was raised in a convent," she told me.  "I won the good behavior prize every year I was there.  I thought little girls who put extra spoons of sugar in their chocolate went to hell for gluttony.  I didn't even know there was such a thing as profanity until I was eighteen.  The first time I heard any I damn near fainted."

She let me look her over, having all sorts of confidence in her belief that, like a lot of people, she looked most honest when she was lying. 

"I'm not lying to you, Scott."

"Like hell you're not," I said and stood up.

She leaned forward, made her eyes small, and said:

"The next best thing for you to do if you won't let me mark them and you won't go away is to get plastered and forget everything for a few hours."

I turned and looked at the clock.  Ten minutes past nine o'clock. 

I left princess at the table and got into a tub of cold water.  It braced me a lot, and I needed bracing.  At eighteen I could get along on gin as a substitute for sleep, but not comfortably. 

I'm not eighteen anymore. 

When I had dressed I walked back into the kitchen.  I made and drank two cups of coffee.  With the sigh of a tired child I picked up the top paper on the stack and started grading . . .

[EDIT: The Key to All Mythology.]

EXTRA! EXTRA! READ ALL ABOUT IT!

The following is an email The Acephalous Sun recently acquired:

Dear SmartPodiums "Я" Us:

We here at the Instructional Resource Center would like you to modify the Model-T51789 SmartPodium previously installed in HIB 110.  The specific alterations we request are:

• When an instructor presses the "up" button on podium touchscreen the cursor should move down and when "down" is pressed it should move up.  Similarly when the instructor presses "right" the cursor should move left and when "left" is pressed it should move right.
• Every time an instructor touches the touchscreen it should emit a shrill "beep" to inform the students that their instructor has touched it.  If possible we would like it to randomly emit multiple beeps despite being touched only once.
• That "beep" should not correllate to the cursor moving in the opposite of the desired direction.  The cursor should only move when it wants to.  But the SmartPodium should beep everytime the instructor touches it.  And sometimes when he doesn't.
• We also request a camera with video capability be secreted in or next to the touchscreen.  It should be programmed to record whenever the touchscreen is activated.  Once completed the SmartPodium should automatically email the recorded video to the email addresses specified in previous correspondence.

We hope these modifications can be completed before 16 February 2006.  Thank you again for your willingness to go the extra mile for the IRC. 

P.S.  If you would like your email added to the aforementioned mailing list we'd be more than happy to oblige.  Watching these idiots cajole then threaten your quality podiums is all the meaning we can muster from our tiny  little lives.

Herr Loves a Good Joke . . . er. (Groan.)

Few would dispute the claim that Michael Herr's Dispatches stands somewhere near the summit of journalistic achievement.  You have your Capote boosters, your Mitchell partisans and your rabid Joan Didion fans . . . but even they would admit that while Herr lacks their beloved's body of work, Dispatches alone earns Herr the right to be mentioned in the same breath.  Unless you ask Herr, who now insists that Dispatches is a novel with all the trappings one expects from fiction in which the author writes "what he knows."  The vivid characters are composites, the dramatic moments were invented &c.  I'm tempted to dismiss his claims to having invented these characters as part of what had been (before the memoir craze of recent years) a structural bias against the literariness of literary journalists, the best of whom only filter the brilliance of others.  Who wants to filter genius?  More to the point: Who can't?  Anyone can filter.  Only geniuses are geniuses. 

Such seems the reasoning behind Herr's '80s argument and his subsequent struggle to have Dispatches declared fiction.  I don't buy it.  My main objection is that it dehumanizes the grunts he lived with in Vietnam.  My secondary one is that it suggests that Vietnam couldn't do to kids what everyone knows it did.  Some of the more sensational scenes in Dispatches do seem invented . . . but so do commonplace accounts of daily life during the Vietnam War.  In short: Herr wants credit for what historical context created.  I don't want to give it to him.  At least not for Dispatches.  But I'll give it up for Full Metal Jacket. 

"Wasn't Full Metal Jacket was based on Gustav Hasford's The Short-Timers?" 

I admit: The first half of the fim was lifted verbatim from "The Spirit of the Bayonet" section.  But the second half of the film contains numerous reworkings of material from Dispatches and, more importantly, doesn't end with Cowboy's death like "Grunts" did.  The novel concludes with Joker killing Cowboy  after he's been mortally injured by a sniper.  Then they return to base.  In the film the Lusthog squad tracks down the sniper.  Rafterman shoots her down . . . but let me step back and let the ironies compound.

In the screenplay for the film Herr creates a composite of Hasford's "Joker" and Michael-Herr-working-journalist-in-Vietnam.  Hasford's Joker is a combat correspondent like Herr . . . only Joker went through BT and is actually a Marine.  Herr was a combat correspondent for Esquire.  But when Herr adapted Hasford's novel he had Joker experience much of what Herr did and wrote about in Dispatches.  He grafted Dispatches onto The Short-Timers.  Thus we see Dispatches' most memorable dialogue crop up in Full Metal Jacket.  To wit:

DOORGUNNER: Anyone who runs is a V.C. Anyone who stands still is a well-disciplined V.C. You guys oughtta do a story about me sometime.

JOKER: Why should we do a story about you?

DOORGUNNER: 'Cause I'm so fucking good! That ain't no shit neither. I've done got me one hundred and fifty-seven dead gooks killed. And fifty water buffaloes, too. Them're all certified.

JOKER: Any women or children?

DOORGUNNER: Sometimes.

JOKER: How can you shoot women and children?

DOORGUNNER: Easy. You just don't lead 'em so much. Ain't war hell?

That exchange is a "famous story" Herr reported in Dispatches.  A "famous story" transferred from the mouth of an anonymous doorgunner and anonymous reporter to an anonymous doorgunner and Private Joker.  And that's but one example of many such incorporations.  My general point here is that in Full Metal Jacket we see Herr attempt to transform his journalism into fiction by "writing what he knows."  And "what he knows" is what went on in Vietnam . . . because he was there and reported on it in Dispatches.  I could elaborate on the paradox Herr would have us accept in order to claim the title "novelist" but instead I want to point to his crowning achievement in Full Metal Jacket.  Which brings me back to the film's final scene: 

The sniper corners Joker.  Joker's rifle jams.  His photographer sidekick Rafterman shoots the sniper then celebrates his first confirmed kill.  Only the sniper isn't dead.  She's alive . . . and just a kid.  The unit stands in a circle around and watches as she prays.  They argue about whether she deserves the mercy of a quick death.  Joker shoots her in the face. 

What interests me about this scene—which contra the above description is brilliant beyond words—isn't that it's not in The Short-Timers.  What interests me about it is that it is in Dispatches.  Only the soldiers aren't soliders but journalists.  And the dead Vietnamese isn't a sniper or a woman but a body.  In Dispatches Herr watches the reporters look at the dead body and the photographers shoot pictures of it.  I don't want to belabor the analogy but it obviously meant something to Herr.  The photographers shoot the dead in Dispatches but in Full Metal Jacket the photographer fails to kill.  Rafterman can intervene but it's up to Joke-Herr to finish the kill.  (Terrible pun but one which neatly captures my point.)  I could continue with a full bore literary analysis of what Herr has done here . . . but I don't know how I would do so without psychologizing this decision.  I'm much more comfortable pointing to an obvious moment of creative struggle than I am outlining why it ended as it did.  I don't know why Herr did this but I know that he did.