Acephalous

An end of the quarter treat: "Batman Is My Boss."

2009-12-04T17:15:14-08:00

The final assignment of my visual rhetoric course is called Rhetoric in Practice (or RIP). It has two components. To paraphrase the rubric: the students create their own rhetorical performance, explore questions of how to target an audience, follow the conventions of a genre, choose the medium for their message, and all the while, use the critical tools they’ve been learning all quarter to develop their ideas. They then perform a rhetorical analysis of their own work via a detailed writer's memo.

The pedagogical theory behind this is sound: by forcing them to do something fun at the end of the quarter, ~~I get better evaluations~~ the tools I taught them over the course of it become more solidly ensconced in their brain-space. Only this time, instead of deducing the rhetorical intent behind someone else's decisions, they must decide how to communicate their message to their target audience most effectively. Over the years I've had many successful projects, including

a Batman-centric version of The Game of Life that opens with pegs for two parents and one child already in the car and an Alfred peg in the wing awaiting the inevitable
a pop-up book of Watchmen, in which the first page consisted of pulling a tab that sends the Comedian crashing out a window and into the reader's lap
a scored and recorded soundtrack to Alan Moore's The Killing Joke
a New York Review of Books style review of the novelization of Batman Begins, in which the book is slammed for its Ludlum-lite car chases and unconvincing fisticuffs
an adaptation of this issue of Planetary by Cormac McCarthy
a Master Legend-type recruitment video for a superhero academy

This quarter it looks like I'll be adding a few more to my personal hall of fame. One of them is so conceptually brilliant in its timeliness that the idea alone sent my head spinning: a comic in which a super-heroic University of California student punches a certain unpopular university president in the face repeatedly (this idea elicited cheers from classmates when the student first shared it). The second is a web-comic by this student entitled "Batman Is My Boss." Here's a sample page in which she uses moment-to-moment transitions to great effect:

She plans on updating it both for the class and, with encouragement, after it ends. Go encourage her already!

THIS IS EXCELLENT NEWS!! FOR AL GORE!!

2009-12-03T18:10:15-08:00

With the Climategate scandal freezing the bloom to anthropogenic global warming's rose, what will become of the those whose careers were based on the lie that the planet will soon become inhospitably hot? If only the scientists at East Anglia had a hacker of their own who could—

Not quite what I expected, but I suppose it'll do.

The Mazzuchellization of mainstream titles?

2009-12-02T15:44:38-08:00

So long as I'm talking about Tony Stark, I want to point out the Asterios Polyp-y greatness of the cover of the most recent edition of The Invincible Iron Man:

The color scheme alone would have been a dead giveaway, but the head of the suit seals it:

Or am I simply imagining a beneficent relation between one of the most important books published in the past decade and mainstream comics?

On ideological incoherence in Iron Man.

2009-12-02T15:15:02-08:00

I feel vindicated by the revelation that Iron Man went into production without a shooting script, if only because now I know the reason Robert Downey Jr. had so few quality lines is that he and director Jon Favreau were making up the dialogue as they went along. This approach works when you can endlessly re-shoot uninspired or botched takes on the cheap, i.e. when you're not filming a $200 million film on someone else's dime. Favreau delivered all that could be expected working under such constraints: a serviceable plot that relies heavily on the many charms of its actors and the explosiveness of its explosions. The lack of a shooting script accounts for the ideological incoherence of the film Spencer Ackerman noted shortly after its release. It is difficult for any film to have a singular vision in an age of studio-groomed auteurs and homogenizing test audiences, so one in which there is no script is bound to wander off the message it never had. No matter how much attention Downey Jr. and Favreau paid to the lines to be delivered on a given day, they had no written substrate on which to base their improvisations. There are no lines that resonate outside the immediate moment in the film because no one sat down and labored over the text in the manner required to create such resonance.

In short, the ideological incoherence of Iron Man can be attributed to the material conditions of its production. The same cannot be said of The Dark Knight. Its ideological incoherence is a function of its script ... as I will discuss at some length in a forthcoming post in which I demonstrate that the film is all about dogs.

Adam Roberts' Yellow Blue Tibia

2009-11-30T16:27:32-08:00

Let me begin by agreeing with Kim Stanley Robinson:

[T]his year the [Booker] prize should probably go to a science fiction comedy called Yellow Blue Tibia, by Adam Roberts.

I say this not because Adam's a personal friend (although he is), and not because I've edited some of his other novels (although I have), but because it actually is the most intriguing novel I've read this year. Admittedly, I can't say whether it's the best novel published in 2009, because I only read three novels published this year (The City and the City, Inherent Vice, and Asterios Polyp), so I'm limited to saying that Yellow Blue Tibia merely outpaces the latest by Mieville and Pynchon, as well as David Mazzucchelli's decade-in-the-making masterpiece. A quick plot summary before moving on to what makes the book sing.

In 1946, Josef Stalin ordered Konstantin Skvorecky, Ivan Frenkel, and a few other Russian science fiction writers to create a new threat against which the Soviet people could unite (as they had against Germany). They concoct a plot in which invisible radiation aliens invade the U.S.S.R., but it opens when "The Americans launch a rocket to explore space [and the] aliens destroy it with a beam of focused destructive radiation ... Then the aliens blow up a portion of the Ukraine, and poison the ground with radiation" (25). Before they can sketch the invasion out in greater detail, Stalin disbands the group. Years pass. Frenkel accidentally reconnects with Skvorecky shortly before the Challenger disaster. The plan they concocted for Stalin seems to be coming true. Skvorecky, a translator, meets two American scientologists and a Muscovite taxi driver named Ivan Saltykov. There is a murder. Someone or something threatens Chernobyl. Love happens.

That is not, I grant, the most conventional summary of the novel—if they're more your bag you can try here, here or here, or if you're feeling more adventurous, here—but for me to say more would not despoil the novel so much as ruin the pleasure afforded by Adam's narrative gamesmanship. I'm more than happy to spoil a simple plot point, but I would prefer to avoid ruining the interpretive tension created by the contradictory accounts of those simple plot points. Were I to concretize any one of them, I would not only be usurping the role of a character within the novel, I would be reproducing the book's ingenious structural conceit.

Unlike a A Scanner Darkly, in which conflicting realities are focalized through the muddle of drug-induced paranoia, the narrator of Yellow Blue Tibia is fully aware that he lives in a world structured by other people's understanding of reality. From the obsessive-compulsive taxi driver, Ivan Saltykov, who returns to the scene of the crime because he must retrace his path exactly, to the UFO enthusiasts who mistake Skvorecky's denial of the existence of extraterrestrials for an exercise in dialectical thinking, the characters in the novel influence the narrative less through their actions than their rationale for engaging in them. Dramatic irony is both deployed and undermined, resulting in a comedy of ideological errors that ranges from the subversively slapstick (Krapp's Last Tape as performed by an inept Moscow detective) to the deeply structural (the evisceration of Scientology's theoretical and psychology underpinnings).

But, because I'm a blogger and bloggers are narcissists, I want to call attention to the rude portrait Adam drew of me in the novel. In a comment attached to a post from 2005 that has since been rescinded—it was a little too revealing about someone in my department and thus fell into the category of material I wrote as "A. Cephalous" that's not suitable for publication under my own name—Adam posted a link to what he referred to as "a portrait of Mr. Non-Capo." Five years later, he included in Yellow Blue Tibia the following:

The lift door creaked open, and a fantastically shrunken and wrinkled old woman shuffled out, carrying a string bag bulging with provisions. Her head was located in the space directly in front of her torso, as if her neck fitted into the centre of her sternum rather than between her shoulders[.]

Make of that what you will. I choose to be offended. Offended!

FYI, Part II

2009-11-30T12:25:11-08:00

Remember Work Bird? Well:

Get on it, people!

RE: Racism and Race-baiting

2009-11-29T15:27:21-08:00

Update. If you came from over here, you need to note two things: first, that Patrick's only talking about the title of my post, which is odd, because in the body of the post the sarcasm of the title becomes absolutely clear. So clear, the clarification below is really only for people who only read the title of my original post. Second, Patrick completely ignores the argument of both the original post and this one. Make what you will of his silence as regards anything other than the sarcastic title of the original post.

Update 2. My oh my, but is Jeff Goldstein an idiot. He believes that this post is a response not to the post linked to and discussed at length in it, but to something Darleen wrote. (I suppose he doesn't know what "a side note" is.) Also, in another bit of proof of him having quit me, he stops posting get-rich-quick schemes and writes a diatribe against someone or other. (No link, though, to avoid generating an automatic trackback.)

Via an email conversation, it's come to my attention that if you only read the title of this post, you'd come away with the impression that I was slagging Ed Morrissey for race-baiting. Because that charge is so loaded, I want to make it absolutely clear that I wasn't. As the body of the post makes plain, I was pointing out that conservative bloggers are in the unenviable position of race-baiting by default, because no matter what grounds they criticize Obama on, a vocal portion of their commentariat will respond with unveiled racism.

The example in that post was how a debate over the definition of "diagnosis" devolved into 1) a series of racially-charged remarks about the appearance of Michelle Obama, and 2) a series of complaints that such remarks were being deleted by a moderator eager to distance himself from the racism of his readers.

By virtue of the fact that anything Ed Morrissey and his ilk write will bait racists into revealing themselves in the comments, every post of his is race-baiting. I mean that not as a condemnation of Morrissey, but of the vocal subsect of the conservative commentariat who force writers like Morrissey into the unenviable position of race-baiting by default. Were I forced into a situation in which every word I wrote required a strongly-worded caveat about not responding like a racist, I'm not sure what I do (or even if I could continue to write).

It goes without saying that not every critique of the administration is racially motivated. Nor am I even saying that every critique made by openly racist groups is racially motivated—a devout klansman might object to the stimulus on sound philosophical principle—but I am saying that a swath of the conservative commentariat is increasingly annoyed that other conservatives are muzzling their brazenly recidivist reasons for criticizing the current administration.

On a side note, I found a video of Darleen Click and William Jacobson refuting my previous posts on race:

I'm not exactly sure why they thought doing that would undermine my argument; then again, as they still think I argued that Palin's audience was composed of racists, there's no reason to expect them to behave like rational people do.

Can I compel people to commit suicide?

2009-11-27T16:32:06-08:00

(Because I can't seem to stop automatic trackbacks from automatically tracking back anymore, the answer to that question can be found in the comments.)

William A. Jacobson likes making my points for me.

2009-11-27T11:34:48-08:00

Which is unfortunate, because I'm about to call him illiterate. He claims that I argued that Sarah Palin and her supporters are "racist because there were so few non-whites pictured in the available photos." I did nothing of the sort. My claim, as you can tell by the words I used to write it, was that the "images she and her people have decided should represent her mass-appeal on a mock-presidential bid launch" demonstrates that "her own handlers consider her appeal limited to white people." I even emphasized that first statement in the post, which as we all know is the online equivalent of burying it under a rock behind the fire-pit in someone else's backyard. ("Officer, you can search my property, absolutely, but I assure you that you won't find any claims here.") You would think that a law professor would be able to recognize an argument when he saw one, but apparently not, which is why he provides evidence that bolsters mine. He quotes a reporter from MSNBC:

"I can tell you this crowd today was very, very diverse, a lot of people from different races, ages, all coming to see Palin and wanting get a glimpse of who this lady is that says that she's going rogue."

If this is true—and for the moment, I grant that it is—then Palin and her handlers are deliberately not posting pictures of the many non-white people who attend her events. That, Mr. Jacobson, is the sort of evidence that someone like me would use in support of my claim that the pictures posted to her page are designed to appeal to a specific audience. Because I don't trust you with logic, I will draw the obvious inference for you: Palin's people are excluding photographs of the non-white people who attend her appearances because those photographs aren't intended to appeal to a non-white audience.

Which was my original point.

You do realize that you're helping me out here, Mr. Jacobson, don't you?

He also claims that I "maliciously and falsely referred to one conservative blogger as a 'noted racist.'" But—no doubt for some reason other than it demonstrates that Riehl's a racist—he doesn't reproduce the link that I included to a post demonstrating that Riehl is, in fact, a racist. He also makes the classic debating mistake of assuming facts not in evidence when he claims that I only did so "because this is the internet, and no one is held accountable," his assumption being that were I to meet Riehl on the street, I wouldn't call him a racist. Of course, being that these words are also on the internet, I can't prove to his satisfaction that I wouldn't; however, in a different context, he would point out the fact that because I'm an academic who hangs out with folks like this, I spend all day calling everybody I pass on the street a racist, and since Riehl belongs to that category—how about a little freshman logic, Mr. Jacobson?

SEK calls all people who are on the street a racist.
Dan Riehl is a person on the street.
Therefore, SEK calls Dan Riehl a racist.

I would say that syllogism puts him in a bind, but I think we can safely assume that someone who believed my earlier posts were intended "to smear the crowds at Palin book signings" probably never took freshman logic, and thus isn't even aware that he's in one.

Gobble? Gobble gobble; or, gobble gobble gobble.

2009-11-26T08:18:25-08:00

Gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble, gobble gobble gobble gobble.[1] Gobble gobble gobble gobble—gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble—gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble. Gobble gobble gobble, gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble. Gobble gobble, gobble gobble:

Gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble. Gobble gobble gobble. Gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble, gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble. Gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble, gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble. [2]

Gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble. Gobble gobble gobble: gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble. Gobble gobble gobble gobble. Gobble, gobble gobble, gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble. Gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble; gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble, gobble gobble. Gobble gobble gobble gobble, gobble gobble gobble.

[1] Gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble, gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble. Gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble. Gobble gobble.

[2] Gobble gobble gobble.

You only notice I'm white because you're a racist, Part II

2009-11-25T17:37:29-08:00

Instead of playing "Count the Non-White People!" with Sarah Palin's photographs of her appearance at Fort Bragg, I will present some statistics about the base and surrounding community:

White Non-Hispanic (52.9%)
Black (25.2%)
Hispanic (15.8%)
Other race (8.3%)
Two or more races (4.5%)
American Indian (2.1%)
Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander (0.9%)
Filipino (0.6%)
Korean (0.5%)

Having noted that 47.1 percent of the base and the surrounding community are non-white, I will now post a photograph her handlers thought would appeal to her constituents:

Noted racist Dan Riehl notes that "[i]f you're a Democrat [these pictures] have to give you pause," and they do. Riehl just fails to realize what that pause presages. (That would be laughter, Dan.) I'm sure Click and her claque will call me a racist for pointing all this out, but that's how their knees jerk these days.

If you don't take the shovels away from those racists, they'll never quit digging.

2009-11-25T11:22:34-08:00

Should you like more proof of the dynamic I described in the previous post, you can find it (and my substantial response to it) here.

You only notice I'm white because you're a racist.

2009-11-24T16:17:30-08:00

In the comments to a long, inaccurate attack on those who consider Palin evidence that the conservative movement is trending stupid, Darleen Click claims that those who point out the extreme whiteness of Palin supporters "reveal a great more about [themselves] than Palin." Because such people notice race at all, they're insufficiently colorblind and therefore more racist than Click, who merely advocates creating and maintaining structural inequalities that disproportionately affect people who just happen to not be white.

Set aside for a moment the fact that Click labors under the delusion that noticing people of color is more racist than harming them and remember that 1) the figure she defends, Sarah Palin, is using her publicity tour as a prelude to a 2012 presidential bid launch, and 2) candidate Palin is posting photographs of the people she meets on her Facebook page, meaning that these are not images produced by a liberal media elite out to make her look like her appeal is limited to white people but images she and her people have decided should represent her mass-appeal on a mock-presidential bid launch. Time to play "Count the Non-White People"!

Image #1: 0
Image #2: 0
Image #3: 0
Image #4: 0
Image #5: 0
Image #6: 0
Image #7: 0
Image #8: 1 (a mall security guard)
Image #9: 0
Image #10: 0
Image #11: 0
Image #12: 2 (but only one identifiably of her own volition)

In all those photographs, there is one non-white person who can be positively identified as having come of their own accord. To Click, pointing out that Palin's own handlers consider her appeal limited to white people makes me a racist. Over in the increasingly diverse place known as the United States, this is why people like Click should hunker down for a long run of political disappointment.

Update. One of Darleen's flock attempts to prove me wrong by being racist.

Manga recommendations, anyone?

2009-11-23T13:22:32-08:00

Because it makes little sense to write a book about visual rhetoric and ignore the fastest growing sector of the market, but as my reading experience follows the typical trajectory of Claremont X-Titles (X-X?) to Sandman and Vertigo books to Fantagraphics lust, my experience with manga comes almost exclusively from some mid-90s flirtation with Ghost in the Shell. I know about manga and its many varieties, but I lack the sort of fluency with its conventions that I have with American mainstream and independent books. My question to you is this:

What should I read to acquire a robust, intuitive working vocabulary with manga?

"And there still would have been the Holocaust..."

2009-11-23T09:30:30-08:00

Few write on the history of evolutionary theory as compellingly as John Wilkins. (Had his Species: the History of an Idea and Defining Species: a Sourcebook from Antiquity to Today been available in 2002, I could've avoided years of thankless legwork and finished my dissertation with normative time to spare. Not that I'm bitter.) So I can think of no better way to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the publication of the Origin than to listen to Wilkins speculate about what would have happened had it never existed. My only qualm is with this paragraph:

Lamarckism, by which I mean the progressivist view of evolution, not the “acquired inheritance” version that has little to do directly with Lamarck and anyway is set up as a contrast with Weismann not Darwin, would have played an even greater role in people’s thinking than it did. It may still be with us now—we would be trying to figure out how progress occurs out of necessity, rather than it being the rather odd view of people like Conway Morris.

I think scholars who focus more on the scientific literature underestimate the popular appeal of what amounts to quasi-Lamarckian thought both then and now ... but then again, as I'm the person who wrote my dissertation, I would.

You don't need to know what the science means to establish what the words mean to scientists.

2009-11-21T18:46:33-08:00

Global warming skeptics are attacking climate scientist Phil Jones for encouraging trickery in an email recently stolen off the webmail server at the University of East Anglia in which he wrote:

I've just completed Mike's Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline.

Over at RealClimate, the skeptical response to the word "trick" is to treat it as a colloquial:

Trick:
“a cunning or deceitful action or device; “he played a trick on me”; “he pulled a fast one and got away with it”
“Something designed to fool or swindle; ”
“flim-flam: deceive somebody; “We tricked the teacher into thinking that class would be cancelled next week”

To which one of the hosts, Gavin A. Schmidt, responds:

Wrong. Wrong and wrong.

The skeptics reply:

[S]ince this happens “often”, it would be good to see a couple of examples of the word’s usage from other fields to understand why it is not problematic.

Schmidt obliges:

Sure. It's mostly used in mathematics, for instance in decomposing partial fractions, or deciding whether a number is divisible by 9 etc.etc.etc.

The skeptics rejoinder:

This is nonsense. Both are examples of teaching or explaining concepts to lay people. The first intentionally places “tricks” in quotations marks to emphasize its non-technical use.

The problem with nonspecialists reading the private correspondence of experts is that their ignorance transforms all the technical points into nefarious inkblots. To continue with the example above, skeptical nonspecialists encounter the word "trick" and ask for clarification. Schmidt provides evidence that the word is innocuous, but because nonspecialists can interpret neither the context of the original nor that of the further examples, they redouble their efforts: now the rhetorical situation in which the word "trick" is uttered matters; now the appearance of quotation marks matters, etc. They are convincing themselves that those black blobs represent what they insist they represent, and when experts inform them that those are not Rorschach blots to be subjectively interpreted—that they are, in fact, statements written in a language that skeptics simply do not understand—the nonspecialists look over them again and declare that it could be a butterfly, or maybe a bat.

To my mind, the only way to convince them that the word "trick" operates innocuously in the particular linguistic community of climate scientists would be to demonstrate that the word "trick" operates innocuously in the particular linguistic community of climate scientists. Show the skeptics that on 11 July 2001, Jean-Charles Hourcade wrote:

This passes first through ... a macroeconomic framework insuring the consistency between prices and quantities at any point in time without necessarily resorting to the modeling tricks relying on the conventional neo-classical growth theory; these 'tricks' assume indeed perfect foresight, efficient markets and the absence of strategic or routine behaviours; new conceptual frameworks about endogenous growth theory allow for such a move, but there is a gap between advances in pure theory and empirical modeling[.]

I don't know what that means any more than I know the science behind Phil Jones's statement, but I do know that this email demonstrates that the word "trick" is used both with and without quotation marks in this particular language community. Moreover, I know that even though the information leaked was designed to be do maximal damage to that community, there is still evidence internal to it that resists attempts to mischaracterize the intent of its members. Should skeptics insist that "trick" doesn't mean a quick-and-dirty way to explore some possibility, show them that on 12 January 2008, John Lanzante noted that

a quick-and-dirty way to explore this possibility using a "trick" used with precipitation data is to apply a square root transformation to the rejection rates, average these, then reverse transform the average. The square root transformation should yield data that is more nearly Gaussian than the untransformed data.

If, by some miracle, that satisfies them on the matter of "tricks," they will start complaining about the phrase "hide the decline," which was, of course, the real object of their objection in the first place.

Needless to say, I don't envy climate scientists the tsunami of stupid they're about to suffer.

Literal Symbolism: The Commonsense Conservative History of American Idiocy, from Reagan to the Politics of Nonsense

2009-11-21T11:49:48-08:00

The following exchange between Bill O'Reilly and Sarah Palin would, were we talking about any other politician, mark the end of a career. The emphasis is mine:

PALIN: With Israel, we cannot get into Israel, for instance, and say we're going to tell you whether the Jewish community can expand or not expand within your borders. Instead, what we need to do is tell Israel that we will—we'll go to bat for them.
O'REILLY: Well, what does that mean though? Look, say Israel, say Netanyahu says—calls you up and says, I'm bombing them, I'm bombing Iran, they're too close, I'm not going to let it happen. What do you say? You say go ahead, Netanyahu, go bomb them? What do you say?

PALIN: Oh my gosh, any kind of war strike is the absolute last option.

O'REILLY: All right, so you, you say no.

PALIN: That anybody would …

O'REILLY: But he's saying to you, you guys aren't going to be able to stop him.

PALIN: That's why we cannot let the world get to the place that you're talking about right now.

O'REILLY: Well, we're already there.

PALIN: No, we're not. We're not quite there yet. There is still hope. But what we have to do is exert the pressure that America can put on our allies and on those who are not so friendly.

O'REILLY: Obama says he's doing all that.

PALIN: He's bowing to world leaders and I think any other president in our country …

O'REILLY: Do you mean that literally, the Japanese emperor?

PALIN: I mean that literally.
O'REILLY: Do you think Obama's weak abroad?

PALIN: I believe that his approach to diplomacy is not what history has shown us works. What works in my mind, reading the history book, is what Reagan did.

As to the first embarrassment—her insistence that symbolic gestures are literal—all I can say is that I believe her. She honestly has no idea that she literalized a cliché and then condemned Obama on account of it. She honestly believes that Obama can no longer exert political pressure on reluctant allies because he bowed to the Japanese emperor. She sees not symbolism but causality there. That symbolic gesture is literal proof that Obama is not "exert[ing] the pressure that America can put on our allies and on those who are not so friendly." The mind boggles.

As to the second embarrassment—her belief that there is one history book and it conforms to her ideological predisposition—that is the sort of statement only uttered by people who never read books.* I'm not making a judgment here: I'm saying that the locution "reading the history book" is grammatically foreign to anyone who has read more than one book.** If you ask anyone who regularly reads any question at all that requires reference to a source, you would receive a response that indicated an engagement with a scholarly community. It might be vague ("some have argued"), or it might indicate ignorance of the larger conversation ("the only book I've read on the subject"), but it would acknowledge the existence of competing ideas and conflicting opinions. Put differently: even Jonah Goldberg talks this way.

*That or no one told her Reagan isn't in the Bible.

**The one exception would be Tom Tango, Mitchel Lichtman and Andrew Dolphin's The Book were the title itself not an arch reference to 1) conventional baseball wisdom and 2) the decades the authors spent talking about their unwritten book.

Truly, academics live enviable lives.

2009-11-18T18:25:16-08:00

Proffer theories as to the avocation I undertook presently. You guessed it! I spent the day marking papers, which, means I had, many reminders of why teaching Writingstudents, even at the Universitylevel, can make even the most mild-mannered academic want to JAB IN EYES JAB IN EYES.

(Actual posts to recommence when the noises in my head resemble English more than English as she is spoke.)

ALSO: Because it's always best to make this plain from the beginning [SEK says to the readers at LGM], on the issue of whether my students know what I'm writing:

With the exception of the text adventure, [what I post is] written to be used in class, then repurposed for the blog. I show them videos of Shatner and ask them if that's what they want to sound like; I have them write blog posts (for their course blogs) in which they're required to substitute every noun and verb with suggestions from Microsoft Word's thesaurus, etc. Whenever I write about conversations in the classroom (for example), I ask the students if they're alright with that ... and as I'm typically the butt of those posts, they always are. In fact, by the end of the quarter, they're actually demanding I write up what happened in a given class (for example). Even the most notorious bit of student writing I've parodied was done with the student's consent. (It was years ago, and he wrote me out of the blue to apologize for writing it.)

How big is too big? Let me tell you.

2009-11-17T18:04:32-08:00

My old monitor was issuing death rattles—taking three days to turn on without flickering and the like—so with the money you people so generously provided by buying stuff I recommend from Amazon, I purchased a new one under the impression that it was the same size as my current one.

It is not.

It is oppressively large.

It looms over me.

I moved it further back on the desk and am slouching in my chair not because I have good eyes and bad posture, but because I am frightened by the monstrosity in front of me. I can now fit three formerly maximized windows on my screen at the same time, or (and this might not be a bad thing), maximize a single window and become more creative through the power of bilateral symmetry.

Shpadoinkle! Sarah Palin endorses cannibalism.

2009-11-16T14:58:21-08:00

From the NRO's new shrine to Sarah Palin:

If any vegans came over for dinner, I could whip them up a salad, then explain my philosophy on being a carnivore: If God had not intended for us to eat animals, how come He made them out of meat?

Because He wanted everyone to have a shpadoinkle day? More seriously, Palin is calling Him a rank hypocrite, because He also said "You must not eat bats" and yet he made them out of meat.

Ignorance of the Original Testament hypocrisy is, I admit, the easiest hypocrisy to spot, but it's the least effective to mock on account of its profundity. If someone were to inform Palin that her beloved moose aren't kosher because they weren't properly shekhted and porged, she'd complain about "gotcha journalism" and question your love of America on account of her profound ignorance of the book she claims to live her life by.

Fortunately for semi-professional mockers such as myself, Palin set the standard demonstrably lower by claiming that God intended humans to eat anything made out of meat.

The Dwight D. Eisenhower Bowing Hour!

2009-11-15T13:44:24-08:00

(Apparently TypePad timed out and didn't post this yesterday, in case you're wondering why it only went up now.)

Seems someone forgot to tell Ike what everyone on the right knows (but oddly never cites a source for): the President never ever bows. Because as even a cursory search of the AP Image archive indicates, the man could not stop bowing. Hello there, Pope John XXIII!

Howdy to you, wife of Italian Prime Minister Giovanni Gronchi!

Hi again, Archbishop Iakovos of New York, Primate of the Greek Orthodox Church of North and South America!

Long time no see, Charles De Gaulle!

By their logic, I believe that last bow means we have all been French since 2 September 1959. Eisenhower clearly demonstrated by that bow that the American President is a subordinate of the French, which means that for the past 50 years America has been a French territory with pretensions of sovereignty. Mon Dieu!

Once upon a time, her crazy had more bite.

2009-11-13T16:36:23-08:00

As I'm catching flack from, among others, two of the three co-panelists from my MLA panel on academic blogging concerning the title to my Camille Paglia post, I feel the need to have Molly Ivins clarify it for me (courtesy of Ahistoricality) :

You think perhaps this is a cheap shot, that I have searched her work and caught Ms. Paglia in a rare moment of sweeping generalization, easy to make fun of? Au contraire, as we always say in Amarillo; the sweeping generalization is her signature. In fact, her work consists of damn little else. She is the queen of the categorical statement.

There was a period in which Paglia could be counted on to be write with force and clarity, i.e. before she began writing disorganized columns brimming over with self-aggrandizing allusions and mindless repetitions of right-wing talking-points. In 1991, she even possessed prescience enough to predict her own rightward drift:

[I]f people are trying to critique from within the academic establishment, and they're getting tarred with the word "neoconservative," you keep on doing that long enough, people will get used to hearing it about themselves, and they will become conservative.

Case in point: Camille Paglia. Did her ready-made anti-feminist statements predispose her to drifting so? Without a doubt. Were her arguments about the inability of woman to create truly great art always as absurd as they seem now? Absolutely. However, she would not have become the media sensation she was in the early '90s had she not packaged her faux-feminist critiques in a language understandable to the general intellectual culture. There were (and are) many anti-feminst thinkers who rivaled Paglia in virulence but not prominence, and the point of my title was that she now resembles those muted, vainglorious misogynists more than the contrarian firebrand she once was.

"These trials will be a stunning blow to the rugged image of the abstract American."

2009-11-13T15:38:00-08:00

Until recently, the phrase "transnational Left" only appeared in print every once in a while (and then only in articles that also granted the existence of global Jewish banking conspiracies). Lately, it seems impossible to read an article by a mainstream conservative that doesn't assume Obama is a figurehead for this amorphous child of the First International. For example, the very serious ~~Blane McDonnagh~~ Andrew McCarthy argues that Obama's decision to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in accordance with the laws of the land

will provide endless fodder for the transnational Left to press its case that actions taken in America's defense are violations of international law that must be addressed by foreign courts. And the intelligence bounty will make our enemies more efficient at killing us.

Obama and Holder are not trying to reestablish the rule of law, they are engaged in a game of political chicken with their real constituents (the transnational Left) and, because they blinked, they owe a tribute of American lives to their overseas masters. The problem with such paranoid stylings is that 1) Mohammed and his compatriots were tortured and 2) the entire world already knows that. What can these men say against the United States that hasn't already been published by international news syndicates?

These trials will not be a farce intended to give the bogeyman that is the transnational Left the leverage it needs to prosecute the previous administration. Former Presidents are only kidnapped and tried overseas in spy novels and Chile, and I doubt conservatives want their icons compared to Pinochet. Central to this deluded argument is the notion that the current administration would prosecute these terrorists for reasons other than being terrorists:

[T]he great hope of the terror-backing neo-communist left, at home and worldwide, is that the Obama administration will continue to build a case for torture trials for former Bush administration officials.

Suffice it to say that when a professor of political science conflates American liberals and most of the rest of the world with communist revolutionaries, he should be taken very seriously, especially when said professor happens to be "an umatched competitor whose tactical elan would make Machiavelli proud." Because a political science professor who compares himself to the colloquial mascot* for the scorched earth method of maintaining political power is exactly the sort of person who would never argue in bad faith were it expedient ... except when the professor in question is Donald Douglas, in which case it's best to assume he's a tendentious braggart.

Simply put, there is no singular "terror-backing neo-communist left" that the administration seeks to appease with these trials, and those who claims otherwise are being disingenuous in the service of a small-minded version of what constitutes "American interests." Rehabilitating our reputation as a just arbiter in world affairs might compromise the masculinity of the American brand, but it'll also make the world a safer place for living, breathing Americans.

*Machiavelli was a far more interesting figure than his contemporary caricature would suggest. See the section on authorial duplicity and The Prince in Gale Carrithers and James Hardy's Milton and the Hermeneutic Journey for more on that.

Dan Riehl? Still a racist, only now a homophobic one.

2009-11-12T17:35:53-08:00

Last month, I documented Dan Riehl's reaction to the perceived threat posed to him by, in his words, "pretty young, not that big [black] kids" who never confronted him. He responded, as conservatives of his stripe do, with some juvenile homophobic "humor." Point being, because I'm not inclined to give demonstrably puerile racists the benefit of the doubt, you can imagine my reaction when I read the following in his recent post about ACORN:

Breitbart's video busts told us what they do best. The pathetic part in all this is that they were not just allowed, but encouraged to run wild on taxpayer funding by corrupt liberals, including Obama. They should all hang together if you ask me. How long will it be before corrupt Democrats find a way to back door them the money? I bet they're accustomed to the back door. Maybe Barney Frank should spearhead the effort?

In the two short sentences I emphasized, Riehl manages to 1) invoke the language of lynching against the first black President and a predominantly black organization, and 2) equate illegal activity with the sexual practices of homosexual men. He will protest that the latter doesn't make him a homophobe (despite the overt association of homosexual sex with a criminal act) any more than his call for a metaphorical posse to host a metaphorical lynching is evidence of racism. He will be wrong: the fact that the first metaphor that occurs to him when criticizing blacks is a hanging party tells us that when he disagrees with blacks, he couches his disagreement in terms of stretched necks and strangled bodies. People for whom that is an instinctive response are people who are racists. Therefore ...

Once upon a time Camille Paglia could be counted on to write with force and clarity.

2009-11-11T17:52:31-08:00

That time has passed:

The solipsistic members of Congress want us peons to be ground up in the communal machine, while they themselves gambol on in the flowering meadow of their own lavish federal health plan.

Jack London would have looked at that sentence and deemed it overwrought. Then he would've reconsidered, thrown in a few King James-quoting cavemen and declared it a masterpiece. But Jack London was not a serious scholar like Paglia, who proves her seriousness by paraphrasing Palin:

The brutal abandonment of the elderly here is unconscionable.

Death panels! Her keen attention to the language of a bill that, at the time, did not yet exist served her well. But if there's one thing we can count on from Paglia, it's that she pays attention to her prose:

One would have expected a Democratic proposal to include an expansion of Medicare, certainly not its gutting. The passive acquiescence of liberal commentators to this vandalism simply demonstrates how partisan ideology ultimately desensitizes the mind.

If "gutting" is the new "vandalism," does that mean taggers are now murdering or murderers are now tagging? I only ask because a scholar of Paglia's self-professed stature would never mix a metaphor or lazily appropriate the language of someone whose partisan ideology ultimately desensitized his mind?

Obama has dithered for months about a strategy for Afghanistan.

Dick Cheney? Really? Besides, weren't we talking about health care?

On other matters, I was recently flicking my car radio dial and heard an affected British voice tinkling out on NPR.

Apparently not.

On science, Dawkins was spot on—lively and nimble. But on religion, his voice went "Psycho" weird—as if he was channeling some old woman with whom he was in love-hate combat.

That metaphor doesn't even deserve to be called mixed. I'm sure it makes sense to her and would to us, had she be bothered to explain it. But that would require her to remain on topic for more than a few sentences:

Continuing on the theme of overrated male writers, I was appalled at the sentimental rubbish filling the air about Claude Lévi-Strauss after his death was announced last week

I always tell my students that if you begin too many paragraphs with some variation on "another example of," you're either proving something you've already proven or are trying to slap a signpost on a non sequitur, and that in either case, you're not developing an argument. Paglia might benefit from sitting in on my class:

Now on, with relief, to pop!

Non-ironic exclamation points! They are signs of a great writer! By "pop," I'm sure she means "current popular culture" and not "a reference to Madonna to prove beyond all doubt that this column is an exercise in unwitting self-parody."

Now, come on, people, do you really believe that Lady Gaga is 23 years old?

Praise Jesus, she at least avoided—

And now Madonna is trying to resuscitate herself, body and mind, by taking transfusions from Brazil!

You have got to be kid—

Is it true, according to press rumors, that Madonna is vacationing with her boy toy Jesus Luz in a house in Bahia in the far northeast of Brazil?

I have no idea what she's talking about, but at least she's not patting herself on the back and taking credit for—

It's kind of what I had in mind in my epic Salon column last year negatively comparing Madonna to Daniela. As a teacher, I will certainly take credit for this leap forward, if it occurs, in Madonna's much-delayed self-education.

That sound you hear? That'd be Harold Bloom choking back sobs as he considers the fate of his once promising protégée.

Let the circle be unbroken.

2009-11-10T19:02:03-08:00

From a thread about Michael Steele's "white Republicans are afraid of me" remarks on Sunday:

I’m terrified of Michael Steele the same way Mary Jo Kopechne was terrified of Teddy Kennedy.

This ride is flat scary, and I want off.

In less than 30 words, this commenter compresses the conservative response to white liberals and all blacks into the singular image of a threatened white woman. I would stop and note that the white female martyr in question worked with the man who supposedly terrified her and willingly entered a vehicle with him on that unfortunate evening, but that would be beside the point. It is not the woman herself to whom conservatives appeal when they utter her name, but what happened to her as imagined through their eyes.

Their horror at Kopechne's death (and their subsequent insistence that in it can be found the root of all ideological evil) reminds me of nothing so much as the origin story of Rorschach in Alan Moore's Watchmen. (Such obsessions happens when writing a book.) His moment of decision—the moment he became, a la Bérubé, outraged by Chappaquiddick—was when he discovered some fabric that had been purchased by Kitty Genovese shortly before her murder:

What turns Rorschach into the misogynistic psychopath deplored by a witless Anthony Lane but beloved by many a conservative? The seventh and eighth panels tell you all you need to know. They are not presented from Genovese's perspective: the scene-to-scene transition from panel six to panel seven clearly indicates that they're Rorschach's reconstruction of the indifference she witnessed as she bled out before the eyes of friends and neighbors. She is no more a person to him that Kopechne is to those who claim to speak for her and yet, like conservatives, Rorschach claims her death for his own purposes.

I would continue, but I don't feel comfortable speaking for the dead. Would that others shared my discomfort ...

If I'd had some foresight, I would've charged each of you a penny per visit.

2009-11-09T16:11:41-08:00

Because then I'd have a million pennies. This tiny academic blog managed to sucker 1,000,000 pairs of eyes to stare at it for (on average) 1 minute and 45 seconds a pop. That is some kind of accomplishment. I mean that literally: I don't know what kind of an accomplishment it is. But I do know that I never had to stoop to the shameless tactics of relentless self-promotion espoused by hacks who want to draw attention to themselves despite having nothing to say. (Not that I have that much to say: I've merely been saying nothing regularly for awhile now.)

UPDATE. If McCain sent you here, I urge you to 1) scroll down the right sidebar and tell me the number you see there, 2) consider what it means that he knows more about my traffic than I do, and 3) know that I've already dispatched the man more soundly than I can by responding to some petty traffic dispute.

Recipes from the Headless Chef: Chorizo Cilantro Chili

2009-11-08T17:12:54-08:00

The one thing even long term readers might not know about me is that 1) I do all the cooking and 2) am quite good at it (if I do say so myself). (And I do.) I am not, however, good with following recipes or remembering how I improvise on them. In order to preserve how I prepared meals worth making again, I'm going to share them with you. They're largely variations on recipes from the only cookbook that's also an education: The Professional Chef by the Culinary Institute of America. It weighs in at 7.8 lbs. and is every bit the beast an almost eight-pound book should be. In it you learn what equipment to buy (one good chef's knife can replace an assortment of space-cluttering gadgets); how to use that equipment in the most effective way possible (the time people spend cooking can be cut in half by the knowledge of how to cut an onion); how particular flavors are produced (both in terms of spicing and preparing dishes); how certain textures are achieved (especially important in soups and with meats); and I could go on but you see my point: this is the book to purchase should you want to learn how to cook. I'm going share recipes in its spirit: not only will I tell you what to do, I'll also explain why I'm doing it.

Chorizo Cilantro Chili

Mexican (pork) chorizo (or substitute with soy chorizo)
Unripe (green) serrano chilis (for back heat)
Ripe (green) jalapeño peppers (for front heat)
Chipotle peppers in adobo sauce (for round heat)
Gebhardt's Chili Powder
2 bunches of cilantro
1 bunch of green onions
2 medium yellow (or 1 large Vidalia) onions
4 cloves of garlic
8 Roma tomatoes
3 cans of pinto beans (12 oz.)
Molasses
Brown sugar
3 cups chicken (or vegetable) stock
Kosher salt
Pepper

Prelude: A word about those peppers.

I didn't specify how many you'll need because that depends on what kind of heat you desire. If you prefer your tongue and the roof of your mouth on fire immediately, go heavier on the jalapeño peppers because they have front heat. Front heat also overwhelms all the other flavors in a dish, meaning a bottle of quality hot sauce can make mediocre food edible or mask an off-note in what would otherwise be a ruined dish. (I like Cholula. The pequin [30,000 to 60,000 Scoville units] and arbol [15,000 to 30,000 Scoville units] chili combination provides pure flavor-masking front heat.)
If you want to taste the flavor of your ingredients before you taste and feel the heat, go heavier on the back heat-providing serrano peppers. One word of caution when producing back heat: when you taste the progress of your dish, you need to taste a little more than you normally would to fully register the back heat. If you fail to feel its full effect, you can easily produce a dish that tastes wonderful in your mouth but burns holes through your throat and stomach.
I designate chipotle peppers as "round heat" because they are, in fact, jalapeño peppers that have been smoked and packaged in adobo sauce. They provide a sweet initial warmth before leavening into a surprising back heat. If you're not accustomed to working with fire, I recommend starting with one chipotle pepper, because unlike jalapeño and serrano peppers (which need to be sweated), you can add chipotle peppers and adobo sauce after the initial sweating of the vegetables. Before we do that, though, we need to cook the chorizo.

Step One: Cook the chorizo

Because chorizo contains so much fat, there is no need to oil the pot before cooking it. (I cook this all in this hard anodized sauce pot because the non-stick surface means I need less fat to sweat the vegetables.) Just squeeze the chorizo from the tube and cook it over medium heat until it has released some of its fat content and has the consistency of slightly runny scrambled eggs. Then remove the chorizo from the pan and set it aside, but leave the fat in the pan because we will be using it to sweat the vegetables. (If you opt for soy chorizo, you'll need to add a little olive oil to the pan after you cook it.)

Step Two: Sweating vegetables (onions, garlic, peppers, tomatoes, green onions, cilantro)

Sweating vegetables is like sauteing them, only the point isn't to brown them but get them to release their juices. They will do this more quickly if you apply a dash of salt to them in the pot. (The salt helps break down the vegetable cell walls.) You will be cooking this at medium heat.

Dice the yellow onions and coarsely slice the first three inches of the green ones (cutting thin small strips from the root bulb up). You want to aim for a medium dice so the yellow onions are recognizable when the chili is served. Add the all the onions into the pot in which you cooked the chorizo and add some salt. Because there isn't much fat in the pot, you want to work the onions around until they're coated in the chorizo fat. Stir occasionally to avoid browning. Set the remaining green stalks of the green onion aside for later.

Mince the garlic and your peppers. You want to mince them finely to distribute their flavor so as to avoid having someone bite into a chunk of unadulterated heat. Add them to the pan with the onions and let them cook for about a minute. Taste the mixture to determine whether you achieved the desired level of heat. I prefer back heat because it allows you to taste the other ingredients before it hits you. So I use 1 jalapeño pepper, 2 serrano peppers and 1 chipotle pepper. I opt to do the heat test here because because if you screw it up early, you can toss the mixture without having wasted too much time or money.

Roughly dice six tomatoes and add them to the pot. Add another pinch of salt to help release the liquid from the tomatoes and stir. Your ingredients should reduce to the consistently of a thick salsa.

Last but not least: coarsely mince one entire bunch of cilantro. I like to use the stems and the leaves because the stems are flavorful and they remain crunchy and I like a little crunch in my chili. Throw it in the pot and stir it around for about a minute. Now begins the boring stuff.

Step Three: The boring stuff

I call this the boring stuff because it involves adding stuff the to pot and letting it sit.

Add the beans to the mixture and stir them in.

Add two cups of stock (chicken or vegetable) and about a tablespoon of molasses. Stir it around and then give it a minute. The molasses will initially provide a bitter taste before mellowing into something more semi-sweet. In order to prevent that bitterness from being overwhelming, cut it with one tablespoon of brown sugar. (Which is sweeter than molasses but also has that slightly burnt taste.) If you so desire (and I usually do), you can add some of the adobo sauce into the mix here too.

Add a teaspoon of Gebhardt's Chili Powder. (I like Gebhardt's because it provides a lot of depth but very little heat, so any mistakes can be corrected with a few drops of honey. [Did I mention that honey cuts heat? Because it does.] Now where was I?) Stir it in.

Reintroduce the chorizo into the pot from whence it came. Stir and reduce the heat from medium to low. You are now playing the wait-and-tweak game. You can continue to tweak the flavor using the Gebhardt's, adobo sauce, lime juice, molasses, brown sugar, salt or chicken stock. Just be sure you thoroughly mix the chili and let it settle before tasting it.

Cover and let the mixture reduce until it reaches your optimal chili consistency. (I like mine a little soupier than most, which translates into about an hour of reduction.) Now on to the optional stuff.

Step Four: Prepare the (optional) late additions and the garnishes

Remember those greens onions and two tomatoes you set aside? They go in about five minutes before you serve the chili to provide little bursts of freshness to your chili.

Slice the onions into small strips. Place half into the chili and half in a little bowl for garnish.

Dice the tomatoes and place one into the chili and the other aside for garnish.

Coarsely mince the leaves of the other cilantro bunch and set them aside for garnish.

Step Five: Eat some chili

Serve it in bowls alongside the garnishes and a little cheese of your choice. I like a cheddar-type one like queso menonita, but some people prefer the creamier, more mozzarella consistency of Oaxaca. Apologize to anyone who thinks cilantro tastes like soap because they will not like your chili.

In that moment, I knew I'd be accused of sexual harassment again.

2009-11-06T14:57:28-08:00

Two of the "acquire an alternative skill set with real world application" assignments that we teach in composition are 1) how to build and manage a wiki and 2) how to compose a PowerPoint presentation that doesn't cause your audience to slit your throat or their wrists. I combine them into a single assignment in which students choose the text they found most compelling, develop a wiki based upon its rhetorical situation (author/auteur, historical context, themes, signature features, symbols and motifs, etc.) and then share their results with the class. On Tuesday, I stressed that their presentation must not consist of reading their wiki aloud (by virtue of emphasizing the difference in media, e.g. "How do you speak a link?") and we discussed strategies they can employ to prevent us from mass-suiciding on Thursday.

Yesterday, midway through an already engaging presentation, one of my students paused during her discussion of the contextual allusions present in her text.

"Also," she said as she made to forward her presentation, "I think there's an allusion to tentacle porn."

The class gasped.

Her mouse clicked.

I sat mute. Horrified into silence.

Time dilated as we approached the horizon of this career-ending event. I held that diphthong in "Wait!" so long it slid into a schwa.

Her mouse clicked again.

The screen brightened and . . .

Tea-V-Parties

2009-11-04T13:53:09-08:00

It must have been difficult to be a conservative last night. On the one hand, you threw your muscle behind your perfect candidate and he lost a district which last went Democratic back before the Half-Breeds and the Stalwarts fought for control of the GOP; on the other, you got a television show made especially for you! The remake of V is an exercise in allegorical drift-correction: the original series was supposed to be based on Sinclair Lewis's novel about creeping government fascism, which was itself an allegory about demagogic dangers posed by the likes of Huey Long and Father Coughlin, who were themselves perceived to be homegrown Hitlers, but then Star Wars happened and the network demanded Space Nazis, so the fascists became lizards and, instead of wanting to rule America, they wanted to eat Americans, meaning they cured diseases for the same altruistic reasons we pump cattle full of antibiotics. That, as they say in the business, is some mighty powerful drift, and it requires some equally unsubtle mastery to correct course.

In the original series, the Nazi parallel was made palpable via regalia and youth groups; in the remake, they do so via a Maddow-esque Scott Wolf asking the leader of the Visitors if they offer universal health care. Note the slight shift in the assumption required to move from alien to fascist? The expert in fictional fascisms did:

I simultaneously loved the "universal health care" line and thought it was a bit hamfisted. I do like that it all bothers Jonathan Chait so much, but I think they could have been a bit more subtle. However, it's worth recalling that the visitors in the original series promised to cure diseases as well. I think Chait goes overboard too when he says the show is a loveletter to the Tea Party movement.

Jonah Goldberg is, it goes without saying, wrong, but in this case his error is understandable because he was instrumental in creating the conditions that made it possible. The only people for whom universal health care signals a creeping fascism are 1) people who were convinced by the "arguments" proffered in Liberal Fascism, and 2) people who believe Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin are the future of the Republican Party. Granted, there is a substantial overlap between those camps, but my point is that unless you share core beliefs with, broadly speaking, the Tea Party movement, that reference fails to refer. The allegory only works if universal health care is a link in the chain that secures space lizards to fascism.

UPDATE: todd. makes a suggestion and (with one minor revision) I heartily agree. From now on, "JGIGWOSIW" it is. (If only because that's the noise my brain makes when I read something he's written.)

Dear CALPIRG,

2009-11-03T09:36:57-08:00

You may be a fine organization and worthy of my support, but as an English teacher and human being, when your representative approaches me and says that you "work with the destruction of the environment and poverty," my first response is "To what ends, man? To what ends?"

Not surprisingly, what I saw in my flashforward wasn't me watching Flashforward.

2009-11-02T17:49:32-08:00

If I were to tell you that a television series in which John Cho (a.k.a. the Harold who went to White Castle) consistently steals scenes from Joseph Fiennes (of the Acting Fienneses) exists, you'd likely laugh at me. But it does. Every Thursday night brings us another bizarrely-paced episode of Flashforward. Loosely based on the Robert J. Sawyer novel (which I haven't read) of the same name, the show follows a team of FBI agents investigating the origin of a worldwide loss of consciousness. For two minutes and thirteen seconds, everyone on the planet lost consciousness and (as per the title) caught an exclusive showing of their lives six months in the future (29 April 2010).* The premise is interesting enough, and when the narrative focuses on the secular equivalent of arguments about predestination, the show works.

For example, because so many people seemed to have obscenely meaningful flashforwards, even those people who saw themselves walking into an unfamiliar parking garage imbue theirs with meaning. The parking lot, after all, may only be unfamiliar now because a character hasn't been fired from one firm and hired by another. The characters mostly know this, but watching them struggle against the inevitability of the mundane makes for compelling television; however, the motor of the show is the drunken memory of Fiennes's Agent Mark Benford, who saw himself in his office 1) struggling to make sense of the whiteboard on which he and his team are collating the evidence of what caused the blackout and 2) being hunted by a team of assassins. The first element of his flashforward presents clues worthy of a Robbe-Grillet novel, in that Agent Benford is a recovering alcoholic trying to make sense of a half-seen evidence board while being pounded by the guilt of drinking after seven years of sobriety. He knows himself to be an unreliable narrator—is burdened by the fact of it—and yet he struggles to recreate the whiteboard as he remembers it from his flashforward.

It's the second element of the flashforward that troubles me, not because I have qualms about David S. Goyer works featuring assassins (perish the thought), but because such action threatens to overwhelm the legitimately compelling high-conceptual quality of the show. This is not to say the two can't be combined: in one episode, for example, none of the FBI agents involved in a shootout bother to take cover because they know they're going to be alive six months later. But unless the writers veer into Longshot territory and have characters jump off buildings for the thrill of learning the strained chain of happenstance to which the universe must resort to keep them alive another six months, they run the risk of turning half of each episode into a tensionless exercise in faked foolhardiness. (The law of diminishing returns actually kicked in before that first action sequence ended.)

You might object that viewers have been so thoroughly conditioned by a lifetime of televisual convention that they'll find such scenes compelling even though they know they shouldn't. I'm not sure I'd disagree. Still, that the writers find it necessary to insert action sequences into a series driven by a complex premise smacks of pandering to an audience who will never watch the show. Such viewers are more interested in the caliber of the gun than the life of the person shooting it, and as such will never devote an hour a week to a show half-occupied by characters discussing whether their attempts to circumvent the inevitable are responsible for it coming to pass. The actions of the characters frequently remind of "The Opposite," the episode of Seinfeld in which George decides that since he's spent his entire life doing what he thought was right and ended up himself, his only chance at happiness would be to go against his instinct and always do the opposite. The wrinkle on Flashforward, obviously, is that they maybe ended up wherever they did on 29 April 2010 because they decided to do the opposite, so the only way to prevent their flashforward from happening would be to go with their instincts. That's the show's strength: a premise that compels its characters to constantly reevaluate their decision-making processes and reinterpret what they think they thought they knew.

As for the show's weaknesses, in addition to the bizarre directorial decisions and resultant pacing problems, Flashforward suffers from some unexpectedly poor performances. Joseph Fiennes pulls a reverse-Costner, clearly burdened by the labor of producing his spotty American accent; and Courtney B. Vance, formerly serviceable in the role of a legal-minded bureaucrat on Criminal Intent, clearly forgot how to act. Unlike Fiennes, Vance is beyond redemption. (I believe the purpose of the frequent allusions to Fiennes's previous roles—a recent episode tossed off lines about him being a Shakespeare of one thing and a Luther of another—is a deliberate attempt to remind him that he's talented.) Should the show succeed, it will be (as the most recent addition to the cast demonstrates) despite itself. In point of fact, the main purpose of this post is to memorialize its potential before it turns into irredeemable dreck, that way when it's canceled with high irony six month hence, I can justify why I stuck around for its inevitable decline.

*The show-runners either haven't decided whether these events are witnessed, as if by a third party, or experienced through the character's own eyes. Olivia Benford, the wife of Fiennes's character, sometimes remembers her flashforward from the perspective of the other person in it; but she also remembers it from her own perspective, as well as one in which she can see both herself and the other man. This could be sloppiness, but it could also be a fairly sophisticated statement about the non-iterative aspect of persistently recalled memories ... but I'm not a betting man.

I cordially invite you to my stoning; or, the most offensive Halloween costume I've ever worn.

2009-11-01T18:34:56-08:00

Not that I did it on purpose. As those of you who've befriended me on Facebook can attest, my goal last night was to wear "100 percent period-authentic grunge-wear." I raided my own closet and, after suiting up, declared "I ought to be auditioning for Pearl Jam." When I looked at the pictures my wife took of me last night, I shrunk back from the screen in horror. I didn't do this on purpose. I wouldn't do this on purpose. And yet:

In trying to look like myself more than ten years ago, I unwittingly dressed up like ... let me put it this way, when I showed my wife this picture, her response was "Wait, who is that?" Slap my glasses on me and gah. I think I'm done with Halloween at this point. Even when I'm not trying to offend, I'm succeeding.

By that standard, we're all already everybody else.

2009-10-31T11:54:07-07:00

I understand from all my email that Jack Cashill has posted another Obama/Ayers article. I wonder what non-tendentious conclusions he'll draw this time?

Ayers and Obama both describe the crisis in the Chicago school system as "perpetual."
Ayers and Obama both complain about increasingly larger educational bureaucracies.
Ayers and Obama both criticize the "status quo."

In short, the liberal politician and the liberal academics both air liberal grievances. For some reason, Cashill finds this compelling. The reason, of course, is that Cashill's not that bright. Need more proof?

Ayers and a '60s radical in Obama's book both bitch about the Man.
Ayers and a '60s radical in Obama's book both think education is a tool belonging to the Man.

Cashill is actually shocked by the fact that Bill Ayers, a '60s radical, makes statements similar to those made by '60s radicals. He believes the fact that Bill Ayers, a '60s radical, and other '60s radical use the same language to be incriminating.

He must be the only person to watch a Cheech and Chong movie sober and wonder, on account of them talking so similarly, whether they weren't actually the same person.

Life imitating art irritating life imitating art.

2009-10-29T19:12:33-07:00

The premise of Curb Your Enthusiasm, according to James Kaplan's 2004 profile of Larrry David in The New Yorker, is that:

David's character is a semi-retired sitcom mogul who ambles through his inordinately comfortable life, routinely managing to annoy or infuriate everyone around him. This season, some of those people will include the blind, the physically handicapped, and the mentally challenged ... David has a sardonic, slightly depressive presence onscreen, and is quite natural playing his worst self. Some of his finest moments are when he gets into arguments—arguments that he always loses—with children.

In this week's episode, David accidentally urinates on a picture of Jesus, the urine is mistaken for a tear, and in the end, he manages to annoy and infuriate everyone around him. So it goes ... or would have, had he not also managed to annoy and infuriate conservatives who don't watch the show. The Anchoress wants to know:

Would he piss on an image of Obama?

Absolutely. Next question.

Would he piss on an image of Obama?

Absolutely. Crying guy, would you like to say something?

Good people hurt innocent people every day.

Larry David's not good people.

Eventually, their better nature takes over.

He doesn't have one.

They think about how such a cruel and disrespectful act might hurt those they know.

Are you sure you're talking about Larry David here? Because I'm not. Anyone else?

I’ve never seen this show, does anyone know if the assistant is recognizably ethnic? Is this “brave” comedian also taking a swipe at Hispanic (or for that matter Italian or Irish) piety?

First, when you assume that a housekeeper's Hispanic, that makes you the racist. Second, if you want people to respect what you say, don't tell people that your speculation is based on unadulterated ignorance. Third, if you think anyone other than Larry David would be the punchline of an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm, you've proven the validity of my previous sentence.

Moreover, if you've been horrified and offended by what Larry David did then congratulations, he just suckered you into participating in an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm. You're no longer the audience: you are, in effect, on the show.

Laedit te quaedam mala fabula, qua tibi fertur valle sub alarum trux habitare caper.*

2009-10-28T18:32:19-07:00

Because the world needs more parodies of Victor Davis Hanson:

Morituri te salutant

The Victory Column and vero possumus megalomania of 2008 have now led to the deification of Obama as our new Caesar, man of letters (who, in the ancient tradition, enslaved a million in Gaul), and to his communications czar’s praising the embattled Mao (her favorite “political philosopher”) for leading China’s Communist legions to glorious victory over those running-dog Nationalists. Add in the classical-column props at the convention and the Moses-like talk about the seas’ receding and the planet’s cooling, and I think this administration assumes we have a Holy Man in the White House. And when you consider the depiction of Fox News as heresy, Rush as the anti-Christ, and the NEA as the medieval church, it all gets, well, sort of creepy.

The above, of course, is renowned military historian and classical scholar Victor Davis Hanson obliging the world. He leads with a Latin quotation so esoteric only people who have ~~studied classical Latin oratory for decades~~ seen Gladiator can recognize the import of its implied "Ave Obama." Or not. Trotting out some of the only Latin his readers know means he needs a shoehorn to make his metaphor relevant: who are the "saluting" folks "about to die"? They are saluting Obama and are about to die for his entertainment, so they can't be Joe Lieberman and the rest of the Democratic Party, as that wouldn't entertain the President. They could be Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and Newt Gingrich, but Victor Davis Hanson doesn't belong to the group of people currently enjoying that particular spectacle (that would be us).

See, this is the problem with trotting out random bits of Latin in the service of a hopelessly muddled metaphor: you think you're impressing people who know more than you, when in truth you're only impressing people who don't know Latin.

*cf lines 5 and 6

On informing your students that they're murderers

2009-10-26T18:23:32-07:00

(Being another post in this vein.)

In a famous (and surprisingly controversial, for reasons I will tackle later in the week) section of Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud defines the act of moving from one panel, through the gutter (the white space between panels), and into the next as "closure." Unlike film, in which closure is made unconscious by the persistence of vision and the limitations of our perceptual apparatus (such that twenty-four frames per second is automatically perceived as motion), closure in comics is a collaborative effort between author (or artist) and reader. Take a scene in which one person threatens to shoot another:

What happens (at least in my tweaked-for-maximal-classroom-efficiency sequence) between the second and third panel there? Put differently: in order to achieve closure between the second and third panel, what do Moore and Gibbons compel the reader to imagine in order to make the transition through that gutter make sense? The answer, of course, is that they force the reader to imagine murdering a pregnant woman. That is, they make the reader a silent accomplice to the Comedian's crime per McCloud:

Just in case the awful complicity of the reader failed to sink in, McCloud draws himself hugging his knees in a dark corner (and undoubtedly near tears behind his grandma glasses):

Students absolutely loathe the possibility that McCloud might be correct. They claim they are the victims of a sick manipulation on the part of the author; that they were tricked into imagining this terrible crime and therefore aren't culpable; that they never knowingly sin in their hearts unless someone forces them to do so; etc. I then show them the omitted panel:

And after they express how much better they feel for not being an accomplice to a fictional murder, I ask them why witnessing a crime is better than imagining one and we turn to a slightly more thematic discussion of Dr. Manhattan's culpability here. But they remember McCloud's point, which was why I implicated them in the Comedian's crime in the first place.

THIS PAGE WILL ALWAYS BE UNDER CONSTRUCTION

2009-10-25T16:52:49-07:00

Tomorrow's deletion of GeoCities from the Internet means that future generations of digital historians will lose unmediated access to another grossly coded, crudely animated, and provocatively pointless early online environ. Back in 1990s, the internet was not yet the Internet, i.e. a land of constantly updated sites dominated by an online encyclopedia: it was a slapdash city populated by websites that were perpetually "under construction," the implication being that they would one day be completed. The idea behind GeoCities in particular, with all its imagery that came straight from the mind of a square city planner, was that everyone who crapped out viable HTML was erecting something permanent, an edifice of human knowledge that ranged from Star Wars trivia to guitar tabs for 2112. But people quickly saw the potential of a page that could be updated (if not always accessed) at will and started affixing to the bottom of their pages one or another of the aforelinked animations, thereby informing the world that although it might seem as if the comprehensive Shadowrun fan site would never (on account of its comprehensiveness) need an update, it was still "under construction."

As I learned this morning, GeoCities still hosts a site I built—a site that, until it goes dark tomorrow, I'm ostensibly still building. I'm not. But now the world will never know the real truth behind the plot of The Crying of Lot 49 because that intensive bit of textual exegesis (and many others like it) will soon be wiped from the annals of what would become the Internet. In forsaking both what it was and the metaphors that once governed how its users thought about it, the Internet furthers its ascent into the place of perpetual presentness it now is by denying it was ever anything else. Which is fine. But there is something stolid and quaint about the thought of being done with something, which I reckon is what those scholars and authors who think in books think about people like us.

Because being ignored is the exact same thing as being muzzled.

2009-10-21T17:12:24-07:00

The attacks on the administration and its allies for deciding to shun Fox News are so cute. This is my favorite:

In [Obama's] America there is no Constitution, there is no First Amendment, there are no principles of free speech or free press.

As all good children know, the silent treatment renders the person to whom it's administered incapable of saying anything. They can't run around shouting, "Why are you ignoring me?" or "What did I do? Please tell me!" because their tongue has been silenced by the mystical power of the treatment. It makes a person wonder what Fox will air now that their hosts have lost their words. An hour of Glenn Beck sobbing uncontrollably while pointing at a chalkboard on which the links between ACORN and his muted mouth-hole have been arranged into a misspelled anagram? Granted, they were ready to go with the sobbing and pointing before the Plague of Silence zipped his mouth and pocketed the key . . .

. . . but seriously, because this is serious, serious stuff, otherwise Jake Tapper wouldn't be on the case:

Tapper: But that’s a pretty sweeping declaration that they are “not a news organization.” How are they any different from, say—

Gibbs: ABC—

Tapper: ABC. MSNBC. Univision. I mean how are they any different?

I will answer this question, both for Tapper and the conservatives who think the Obama administration is politicizing news coverage, via another childhood staple:

One of these [Presidents of network news divisions] is not like the others. One of these [lives] is just not the same.

Jonathan Klein (CNN), worked for WLNE in Providence, R.I. before becoming a broadcast producer for CBS News.

Steve Capus (NBC), worked for WCAU and KYW in Philadelphia before becoming an executive producer for NBC News.

Sean McManus (CBS), worked for ABC News before managing sports broadcasting for CBS.

David Westin (ABC), clerked for Nixon appointee and dogged moderate Lewis Powell before working as in-house counsel for ABC.

Roger Ailes (FOX), served as a political consultant for Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Rudolph Giuliani.

I'm sure Tapper and company will continue to claim the administration playing politics by excluding the network chaired by a Republican operative, but honestly, I'm not sure why anyone thinks a Democrat should talk to representatives of a network whose president has devoted his life to championing Republican causes. I suppose the Democrats should also let Republicans strategists produce their campaign ads, as that would eliminate some of the dishonest viciousness of elections—after all, there's no need to Willie Horton a Democrat whose campaign you already drove off a cliff.

(x-posted.)

Wait—is that supposed to be a bad thing?

2009-10-20T18:00:10-07:00

One of you lot emailed me bits of a Warren Ellis script for one of the various X-titles—the perfunctorily racy "Emma" can only, I think, refer to Emma Frost—but given some of the email I received concerning my discussion of the ALL CAPPED verbosity of Alan Moore in this post, I felt I should share:

We're doing the steam-punk neo-Victorian thing, so we're doing corsets, gloves, chokers, boots, but we're also going to be doing long skirts (though, this being Emma, I'm sure she'd slit hers if need be). Let's have a teak carriage-clock type thing with a blank glass face (instead of a clock face) on the occasional table next to her, as she lounges and reads a hardback copy of Story of the Eye by Georges Bataille. (Actually, she might read it in the untranslated French, so that'd be histoire de l'oeil). JESUS FUCKING CHRIST I'M TURNING INTO ALAN MOORE.