Acephalous

I read conservative blogs so you don’t have to

(UPDATE: See below for details.)

I write a post about reverse torture porn and not a day later we learn Christopher Hitchens waterboarded himself. Coincidence? Of course it is. But we can use the conservative commentary on Hitchens to test my, um, pornographic thesis. We begin, as you do, with Michelle Malkin:

I can see agreeing to waterboarding for an article like the one Hitchens was writing.

I believe Mrs. Sade and Sacher-Masoch could weigh in here, but I’ll skip the overtly randy stuff in favor of the more substantial material produced by her commenters. To wit:

The question will always be, and there really is no avoiding it until we develop a true mind-reading technology: is our moral revulsion against torture justified that when weighed against the possible number of deaths we can avoid by using it, we will always argue against its use? [...] But what if the object in question we are seeking is a nuclear bomb hidden in our city? Suddenly we are on the receiving end of the blast and the calculus changes drastically.

You can’t lead those horses into these waters any faster.  See?

They probably think they're so clever.

Because they are:

From Penguin's Great Ideas series, designed by David Pearson, Phil Baines, Catherine Dixon and Alistair Hall.

Reverse Torture Porn

(X-posted over the Edge of the American West.)

I challenge anyone currently being critical of Wesley Clark to disprove his point on its face.  I don't want to hear anything about Clark's own military record or Barack Obama's lack of one.*  I want you to list the specific executive qualities cultivated by twenty-three bombing missions and five years in a POW camp.

Yes, I'll hold.

Zoom zap a do do walla do dop diddly do dum dum dum dap da dap da doom—

I hate Barack Hussein Obama because he makes me uncomfortable with his words and what he says

(Hearing Obama's remark about respecting those who "make us uncomfortable with their words" got me thinking: what would happen if my irate former student got his hands on Roget's regnant tome and started bloviating about Obama on the Internet?)

First in the foremost if you are stimulated by new ideas because you are the kind of person like me and you can think for yourself rather than simply accept what Obama says as ultimate truth I think you will find this post importantly of interest to you. 

I guess I should start by saying that what Obama thinks is not what he says and even what he says he thinks only provides cover for an incoherent agenda of sorts.  Even if we overlook the logistical impossibilities of such ideas as the ones Obama has profligated the underlying premise of all of them is flawed and you can tell this is the ontological truth of the matter because of the insults he employs like raucous scoundrel and pugnacious.

But if you look soberly and carefully at the evidence all around you on the television you will obviously see Obama's grandisonant effusions are not pedantic treatises expressing theories or extravaganzas dealing in fables or fancies they are substantial sober outpouring from the very soul of demagogism. 

Now stay with me for a moment here because I am making a point.  Specifically that there may be nothing we can do to prevent Obama from making good on his word to destabilize and undermine the already volatile social fabric he purportedly aims to save.

When we compare this disturbing conclusions I have drawn from the premises presented we can only conclude that the comforting picture purveyed by his conspirators and feel what is called by experts cognitive dissonance from it.  Our only recourse is to kick ass and take down names.

If his attempts to perpetuate what we all know is a corrupt system have spurred us to challenge his uncouth libidinous assumptions about merit then Obama may have accomplished a useful thing because if we are to set our sights on eternity then we must be guided by a healthy and progressive ideology not by the salacious ornithological ideologies Obama promotes.

It is possible that Obama does not realize this because he has been imbibed by so much of the propaganda of quislingism and if that is the case as I believe it to be then I tremulantly recommend we halt the malmish adulation heaped upon wretched misfits.  If anything Obama has hair in his brain and even though we all are to some extent as hairy Obama sets the bar on the curve that much higher up the mountain.

Does Obama have trouble living with himself knowing that he gets perfervid about unilateralism because whenever that question is asked Obama and his conspirators run and hide.  I suspect that that is precisely what they are going to do now so as to avoid hearing me say that Obama's bloodthirsty ipse dixits leave the current power structure untouched while simultaneously killing countless children through the starvation of disease.

ARE THE CHILDREN HIS ENEMIES? 

As you know doubt realize by now that is a particularly timely question because in fact I just half an hour ago heard someone express the opinion that Obama may be reasonably cunning with words and what he says even though he is nerdy with everything else.

Obama believes that ageism resonates with the body's natural alpha waves but unfortunately as long as he believes such absurdities he will continue to commit atrocities. 

Let us not sink to his level and let us combat plagiarism by exercising our right to speak out and denounce his publicitiy stunts as totally unrepresentative of the valuves of this society and let me conclude by stating that Obama's brain must work very differently from mine because it is black.

You can quote me on that.

P.S.  He is a Muslim and not a citizen and has horns on his head when they take pictures of him.

Knowing the rest of the story is half the battle

The reason I'm an historicist instead of an historian—besides the obvious, like being in an English department—is because I'm a bit of a romantic when it comes to my history.  For example, to appropriate a line from (of all things) Elizabethtown, I'm a connoisseur of first looks.  When, I ask myself, did this figure of future historical significance first enter the national consciousness?  Who, for example, is buried in this paragraph from the 30 July 1967 edition of the LA Times?

The flames quickly spread to the hangar deck ... setting off bombs, rockets and other ordnance, while touching off many jet planes, all of which were fully loaded with fuel and heavily laden with ordnance. 

You can almost picture him in one of the "many jet planes," "bombs, rockets, and other ordnance" exploding around him; but as of 30 July he has no name, no face.  For the moment, this anonymous pilot sits alone, as yet undisturbed by history, on the burning pitch of an aircraft carrier in the middle of the Tonkin Gulf. 

The next day, the New York Times provided a fuller, albeit tentative, account of the fire that took the lives of more than 130 US sailors:

For some unknown reason, a plane parked near the carrier's island, midway up the 1,045-foot flight deck, experienced an "extreme wet start."  This malfunction, comparable to what happens when a cigarette lighter is ignited after having been filled too full, occurs about once a week on attack carriers, but almsot never so severely as as it did yesterday.

A thick tongue of flame lashed backward from the parked jet, igniting a missile on one of the dozen or so planes parked near the fantail, their engines turning over in readiness for a strike launching scheduled for 11 A.M.

The rocket "shot across the deck," Captain Beling said, "and by a quirk of fate smashed into a fuel tank under a plane on the port side."

No one aboard the Forrestal seemed to know today which plane the missile had hit — but it was probably either the Skyhawk whose cockpit was occupied by Lieut. Comdr. John S. McCain 3d or the one immediately to his right.

He is become historical, mentioned by name in the paper of record. 

Not that this is the first time his name has appeared, as the father and grandfather with whom he shares it appear regularly in Vietnam and WWII reportage; but this is our first glimpse of the man who will lose to Obama in November—alone, almost exploded, surrounded by the agonized screams of the likely dead.

What can I say?  I'm like Paul Harvey.  (Only macabre.)

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

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

LGBT Event at Cross-Cultural Center

This person's outraged response will look like this:

LGBTQ Event at Cross-Cultural Center

Or perhaps like this:

GLBTQ? Event at Cross-Cultural Center

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Previous Installments:

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

False advertising

I’ve been thinking quite a bit about book covers lately — less because I’ll produce anything worthy of one than how dreadful the covers of most academic books are.  You’d think the book-designing avant-garde would be thrilled to work with people unconcerned with sales or money, yet the best cover I’ve seen in ages still falls prey to put-a-giant-fingerprint on-a-book-about-fingerprints logic.

That said, it could be worse:

Had I access to my old laptop and its surplus of image manipulation software, you’d be treated to covers of novels entitled POISONED! featuring drowned bodies. 

Or something like this.  (Only better.)

I have just finished this and now I do want to die

You might be thinking this is a theme. 

It isn't. 

But I have just finished this and now I do want to die.

It's brilliant. 

Excellent addition to the families-falling-apart genre. 

About which it seems I've never written. 

Which is odd. 

Because I know I have.

Only I haven't.

Ulysses is but one example of this despised genre. 

Books and films which also belong to it include:

1. The Ice Storm
2. The Myth of Fingerprints
3. Kicking and Screaming
4. What Happened To Us In The Dark
   
5. The Terrible Secret We Only Half-Remember But Made A Pact Never To Speak Of Again Or Else
6. Summer Camp
7. What He Built In There
8. Neighbors Might Be People Too But
   
9. How Mom Ignored Us Because She Liked To Guzzle The Booze Like I Like To Eat Free Candy And How It Ruined Our One Last Shot At Happiness With An Unattainable Woman Who Would Have Left Us For Mr. Hot Shit In A Week Anyhow
   

But you can't tell the pre-digression it (again for the lazy) is brilliant from this excerpt because it (being the excerpt) lacks the clues required to decode this. 

Kill me hard until I die, please

I recently received an irate email complaining I'd unfairly slagged The Shack.  It went something like this:

You CLAIM to be a TRUTH CHRISTIAN but you deny this manifest vehicle of TRUTH its rightful place in Christian bookstores?  What kind of TRUTH do you tell your doctors to tell their patients to console them for the consolation of the Lord whose TRUTH is undeniably a consolation to them AND their doctors in their time of ADVERSITY if you cannot recognize the TRUTH of this spiritual vehicle for consoling TRUTH?  THE SHACK CONTAINS THE LORD'S SPIRIT WHO ARE YOU TO DENY IT TO PEOPLE?

Except the email LOUDLY ambled through another 11,391 variations on the words "truth," "consolation" and "spirit."  It was a curious email, and not just because I've never mentioned my hobby of ministering to medical professionals before on the blog.  Unlike the occasional emails I receive for some other Scott Kaufman, this one addressed me as "Scott Eric Kaufman," the name I adopted because

1. I'm beyond pretentious.
2. I wanted to differentiate myself from all the other Scott Kaufmans out there. 

There's another Scott Eric Kaufman in Southern California, but I don't think the guy who worked on Chicks with Sticks would ever claim to be a TRUTH CHRISTIAN.  I gave this mystery wrapped in a puzzling enigma of troubling complexity the five seconds it deserved and reported it as spam to Google. 

Time passed. 

This morning I receive another, even more irate email, which opens by chiding me for lacking the courage to answer the first.  It accuses me of being unworthy of ministering to the medical community, an effete unchristian man tainted by my contact with the Godless world.  (I concede the latter point.)  Then it called me childish in my faith and quoted something I'd written to back it up:

You wrote, "Without a doubt, The Shack subversively undermines key doctrines of the Christian faith."  DOES NOT DOES NOT DOES NOT [...] DOES NOT DOES NOT DOES NOT [...] DOES NOT DOES NOT DOES NOT [...] DOES NOT DOES NOT DOES NOT!

Armed with the sentence I'd written, I quickly found the reason behind the misunderstanding and the title of this post.

Did someone famous just die?

What was he famous for?  Any possible way the entire Internet could answer my question by linking to the same grainy clip from 1972? 

Much obliged.

I surf with a just and noble heart

When it is called into question, I defend my honor with pictures:

Pity the poor supremacists

You would assume women would love to date someone who calls himself "The Great White Elf" and writes poetry like:

I am howling all night
and prowling till the early light.
I hunger for blood and desire the fight.
I am the alpha male seeking my mate
and for her alone I will wait.

That's from "Werewolves Are Everywhere."  More evidence—not that we really needed any—that white supremacists don't know from meter.  What?  We do need more evidence?  Really?  How about this, from "I've Got Relatives in Mexico":

Each time I’ve fought back anger
At the stupidity of their race
Who think a white man wouldn’t know
From where this infestation takes place

Convinced yet?  No?  Have you read "Vote for Ron Paul"?

This’ll make you mad
At least I think
But the guy you love
Will make things stink!

In this election
None of the candidates are good
Except one, that’s all
Who every freedom lover loves
And that’s Ron Paul

But I digress.  This isn't a post about the inability of white supremacists to grok meter. 

This is a post about white supremacy and the contemporary dating scene. 

I will be your whore, but you will give me money

If you're the kind of person who likes to open 423 articles in JSTOR so as to bring the CPU of his relatively new computer to its knees, you should download Firefox 3. 

Right now, I have 78 tabs open.  More than half of them are JSTOR articles—for those without access, that means gigantic memory-hogging images—and Firefox is currently occupying 298,732 K of memory.  Yesterday, it would've easily engorged 1,400,000 K and had my CPU in tears. 

Short of extreme protestation, I'm not sure how to make this endorsement sound earnest at this point. 

But it is.

This has been a public service announcement from the good people at SEK Industries. 

Quelle autre interprétation proposer?

Scott McLemee may bite his thumb at Valentin Temkine, the French schoolteacher who claims to have cracked the Godot code, but I think he’s onto something:

Godot, whom Vladimir and Estragon are waiting for, is a Resistance smuggler, who is supposed to smuggle them out of occupied France into the Italian zone. The two of them are Jews on the run who come from Paris’ 11 arrondissement. They are probably waiting to be rescued in the spring of 1943 on the dry, limestone heights of the Southern Alps, somewhere like the Plateau de Valensole.

My French is terrible, but here, roughly, is what Temkine says:

Waiting for Godot is very nearly a fable of the occupation. People sleep in ditches and aren’t surprised to be beaten. A man and his servant, laden with possessions, are in flight from somewhere to somewhere. Everything was different “a million years ago, in the nineties.” And two people are to meet a third whom they know only by a single name, a code-name as it were; they don’t know why they’re to meet him, but it matters. If the assignation fails they’re to try again in 24 hours, meanwhile hanging about as inconspicuously as possible. It takes little insight to recognize details from some tale about Resistance groups[.]

Like I said, my French is terrible … which is why I quoted Hugh Kenner recapitulating the argument he first made in 1973’s A Reader’s Guide to Samuel Beckett.  Few understand the compulsion to “make it new” better than Kenner—his best work embodies the ethos it describes—but enlivening moribund themes, forms or arguments entails more than mere repetition.

Because, as we all know, repetition breeds zombies.  (The unenlivened dead arise, chase away the interlopers and hold mandatory office hours, &c.)  Grouse away about Google eating brains, it should have a beneficial effect on the duplication of scholarly arguments.  See?

[I planned on writing about someone declaring they can prove Homer was a woman, complete with links to Samuel Butler's The Authoress of the Odyssey (1897), but it turns out someone has already staked claim on my insufficiently absurd example.  I'm not sure whether I feel chastened or depressed, but I do know that I don't know how to finish this post now.  I should just stop.  I can't go on. I'll go on.  Or not.]

.peed os toN ?suoicsnocnu ym fo shtped ehT

.siht ekil gnitirw saw I esuaceb denialpmoc irA tmaerd I thgin tsaL.

.dias I, "werbeH ni gnitsop em dnim d'uoy kniht t'ndid I."

".sdrawkcab s'tahT"  .deilper eh, "werbeH ton s'tahT"

gnorw saw eh dna thgir saw I, yas ot sseldeeN.

His father is a novelist

So I’m not cracked to be thinking this Yglesias post was a poem, considering how it rendered in Google Reader. The first two lines are easy enough to improve — drop the “that” and “and energy to,” or maybe “time and … to” — but the third and fourth are a mess, but one with potential. I’d love to find a way to squeeze the bureaucratize of “official gatherings of descendants of Thomas Jefferson” into a single line, but alas, I’m doomed to failure.

So not a well-crafted poem, but a poem nonetheless. 

Only not. 

(And yes, I need new glasses.)

Today in History

At 8 a.m. on the morning of 16 June 1904, two men woke up.  One shaved for class and breakfasted with his usurper and an anti-Semite.  The other, a Jew, purchased a pork kidney and serves it to his wife in the same bed in which she cuckolded him.  He left to pick up a letter from his secret sweetheart and chatted with the people he met on his way to the baths.  Once clean, he attended a funeral and saw a mysterious man. 

After the funeral, he tried to place an advertisement in a local newspaper but decided more research was required, so he scooted off to the library where, unbeknown to him, the first of our two men was disquisiting on Shakespeare. 
Many people walked around, including our Jew, who decided to follow his morning kidney with an afternoon liver.  He ogled the barmaids and thought about his wife who, if his suspicions were correct, would soon be cuckholding him again.  So he exited the bar with the pretty reminders of his pain and entered another full of anti-Semites.  Fists and cans were thrown. 

Troubled by thoughts of wife and ancient grievances, he wandered seaside way and publicly co-masturbated with a cripple.  He later attended the birth of a child and the English language before following our first man into the red-light district.  He caught up with him, himself, himself-in-drag, his dead grandfather, Nobodaddy, a giant green crab, a talking hat-stand and ducked out when the police arrived.  Chastened, the two men entered a dive and met a drunken sailor.  They absconded to the home of the Jew and bonded while urinating under the stars. 

As 16 June 1904 came to a close, the Jew returned to his troubled marital bed and asked his wife to serve him breakfast in it tomorrow. 

She considered his request but never decided one way or the other.

(Happy Bloomsday.  Sorry about the spoilers.)

The Lessons of Insomnia I: MTV Obliges Jameson

(Being the first in what I pray will not be a series, as I like my sanity and would prefer to keep it intact.)

The Real World holds the dubious honor of being first in the post-1990 tsunami of reality television.  The premise was simple: seven strangers were picked to live in a house &c. &c. &c. and start being real.  The show never tried to live up to its name.  Canny viewers could watch the manufactured controversies being produced in the booth weeks before hostilities spontaneously erupted. 

But!

The pretense of the show was that it was unscripted and unrehearsed.  It was not some sitcom filmed in a West Hollywood back-lot in which a middle-class family dealt with generic adolescent, senescent, menopausal and mid-life crises to the pitch-corrected laughter of the ideal studio audience.  It was real. 

So you can imagine my surprise when I flipped on the latest installment of The Real World and discovered it was being filmed in a West Hollywood back-lot.  In a move forever granting Fredric Jameson the right to claim he told us so, The Real World: Hollywood is filmed in the same building in which CBS once shot I Love Lucy. 

Should we tell him this?  What are the odds he watches The Real World?  It's not like he even values empirical verification ...

"Sleep is for the weak."

So said my former roommate as he stumbled home at 5 a.m. three years back.  An assistant to the regional manager of the fondue restaurant my friend ran fancied himself an American Gordon Ramsay, so he decided to spring a kitchen inspection fifteen minutes after closing.  If you've ever worked in a restaurant—even one where the customers cook for themselves—you know what kitchens look like when service ends.  Even the most conscientious chef clips what must be tackled tonight and finishes honest the next morning. 

But the assistant to the regional manager to whom my roommate reported had seen an episode of The F-Word and demanded the tiles in the employee bathroom be regrouted before the illegal immigrants his boss had hired under the table began chopping the raw vegetables customers would cook for themselves tomorrow night.

"Urine is bad enough," he seemed to be saying.  "But Mexican urine?  For fuck sake, we employ white women here."

And so the great cleaning commenced.

My friend stumbled home high on Comet and Camels that night, but he didn't complain.  The resignation in his eyes brought tears to mine, but he is a proud worker.  Work means everything to him.  When he tripped forward and folded like a lawn-chair across the arm of the couch, I placed a blanket over him and waited to make sure he could breathe while jack-knifed over furniture like a drunk yogi.  The second his foghorns announced unconsciousness, I congratulated myself yet again for being awake so early and did something unmemorable for a few hours. 

I have no idea what I did that morning because I immediately fell asleep at the desk.

However, I distinctly remember pretending to be fully awake as he peeled himself off the arm of the couch to greet me good morning.  I muttered something about him getting in awful late last night. 

"Sleep is for the weak," he replied.

Apropos of absolutely nothing whatsoever, I want it on the record that I can't express in words how much I agree with said assessment about sleepers.  If you've had more than three hours of sleep in the past four days, your flouncy constitution needs manly emboldening. 

Because sleep is for the weak. 

Don't believe me?  Maybe these photos (NSFW) will convince you:

SPYWARE VIRUS!

(Previous installments of this silliness include Disadventure, Disaddendum, Dismoralized, & Disinsomnia.)

Copyright (c) 1980, 1982, 1983, 2006 Sekocom, Inc.  All rights reserved.
SPYWARE VIRUS! is a registered trademark of Sekocom, Inc.
Revision 23 / Serial number 8940726

In Apartment Complex

> go to library website

Before you is the UCI Library website.  To your left are the crumbling remains of an ancient civilization.

> really?

No.

> open newspaper database asshole

Firefox will not open crap links to spoofed addresses.

> is library is safe open newspaper database

Firefox declines invitations to virus orgies on principle.  Perhaps a more gullible browser would be more to your liking.

> open internet explorer

You feel more vulnerable already.  Before you is the UCI Library website.  To your left is the a visual representation of what is about to happen to your computer.

> what?

Nothing. 

> open newspaper database

YOU HAVE A SMALL PENIS!  WOMEN LAUGH AT IT!  VIEW PORNOGRAPHY!  STAY HARD FOR HOURS!  YOU MIGHT ALREADY BE A WINNER!

> what?

INVESTMENT OPPORTUNITIES ABOUND!  YOU COULD BE HARDER LONGER!  SUBSCRIBE TO THE WALL STREET JOURNAL!  YOUR PENIS IS SMALL!

> is not

IS TOO!  INVEST IN GOLD!  WHO IS THIS FAMOUS PERSON NAMED PRESIDENT BUSH!  IDENTIFY HIM CORRECTLY AND WIN A FREE IPOD! 

> thanks but no what about those newspaper articles

YOU WENT TO HIGH SCHOOL WITH THIS PERSON!  NOW THEY ARE HOT!  SHOW THEM YOUR HARD PENIS!  THEY ARE CHRISTIAN SINGLES!  WIN A PLASMA TV!

> close internet explorer

Your attempt to close a window spawns seven others.  They collectively inform you—

> yes i know small flaccid penis on poor jew with normal tv

You confront your inadequacies with admirable resignation.  You should consider a career in academia. 

> har har close internet explorer

As you reset your computer you remember you have not saved the work you did today.

> NO RESET

You watch Windows reload.

> UN RESET

You fear everything you wrote today has been sacrificed to a security hole.  Sweat drips down your face onto YOUR SMALL PENIS!  DO YOU REMEMBER HER?  NOW SHE HAS A HARD PENIS! 

> open twain chapter

I don't know what you mean.

> open twain chapter NOW

You mean the one with webcams?

> no with words

I don't know what you mean.

> thing i write with words for future

YOUR THING!  YOUR THING IS TOO SMALL AND NOT HARD!  VIEW THIS WOMAN WITH BREASTS!  YOU WENT TO HIGH SCHOOL WITH HER!  SHE IS THE PRESIDENT!  IDENTIFY HER AND WIN AN IPOD!

> i hate you

GENERIC PROZAC DELIVERED TO YOUR DOOR!  BUY MORE NOW!

> open uci library page

Through the dense thicket of ads trumpeting your lameness you are just able to make out the form field for ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

> search ny times articles from 1898 for mention of galton book

FREE EBOOKS FOR LIMP PEOPLE WHO ARE SAD AND WENT TO HIGH SCHOOL WITH IPODS!  CHEAPER ONLINE AND WITH BREASTS!

> kill self

Then the unscrupulous Russians win.

> dont care want death

You would.

"The Ugly Duckling," by Hans Christian Anderson

In the midst of the sunshine there stood an old manor house that had a deep moat around it. In this wilderness of leaves, which was as dense as the forests itself, a duck sat on her nest, hatching her ducklings. At last the eggshells began to crack. 

"Peep, peep!" said the little things, as all the ducklings but one poked out their heads.  The duck looked at the intact egg.  "It takes a long time with that one egg," said the duck on the nest. "It won't crack, but look at the others. They are the cutest little ducklings I've ever seen. They look exactly like their father, the wretch! He hasn't come to see me at all."

The summer months passed.  At last the big egg did crack. "Peep," said the young one, and out he tumbled, but he was so big and ugly.

The duck took a look at him. "That's a frightfully big duckling," she said. "He doesn't look the least like the others. Into the water he shall go, even if I have to shove him in myself."

So off went the duckling. He swam on the water, and dived down in it, but still he was slighted by every living creature because of his ugliness.

Autumn came on. The leaves in the forest turned yellow and brown. The wind took them and whirled them about. The heavens looked cold as the low clouds hung heavy with snow and hail. It made one shiver to think of it. Pity the poor little duckling!

Then from the thicket before him came three lovely white swans. They ruffled their feathers and swam lightly in the stream. The duckling recognized these noble creatures, and a strange feeling of sadness came upon him.

"I shall fly near these royal birds, and they will peck me to bits because I, who am so very ugly, dare to go near them. But I don't care. Better be killed by them than to be nipped by the ducks, pecked by the hens, kicked about by the hen-yard girl, or suffer such misery in winter."

So he flew into the water and swam toward the splendid swans. They saw him, and swept down upon him with their rustling feathers raised. "Kill me!" said the poor creature, and he bowed his head down over the water to wait for death. But what did he see there, mirrored in the clear stream? He beheld his own image, and it was no longer the reflection of a clumsy, dirty, gray bird, ugly and offensive. He himself was a swan! Being born in a duck yard does not matter, if only you are hatched from a swan's egg.

Thus ennobled, he lit into the air with the elegance expected of his kind and drifted majestically until ...

The Etiology of Nightmares; or, You Be My Freud!

Last night I dreamt I couldn't move.  My dream began and ended with me prostrate and paralyzed on an unkempt dirt floor.  I've never had a dream half so dull or  claustrophobic before.  For uncountable hours I spit up the turf I'd otherwise inhale.  The tang of organic compost permeated my every thought ... all of which were hummed to this tune, causing me to wonder whether I wasn't dreamily demanding you recognize me.  I float on!  Float on!

Because I'm William Blake:

Don't you know my poetry?*

---

*If this post makes no sense, it's only because I couldn't find video of the closing scenes of Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man.  Why did I fail?  Because Johnny Depp thought it'd be a good idea to star in another movie prominently featuring the words "dead" and "man" in the title, thereby rendering Google more useless than useless.

“Silence, Investigation Propaganda in Process”

(X-posted from yonder at the insistence of blood relations.)

I’m embarrassed to admit I never considered visiting the myth-making factory before my friend Todd offered a guided tour. (Cheap shots on the house!) As often as conservatives bemoan the liberal media’s manipulation of plain fact — there are only so many scare quotes in the world, no need to waste them all in one sentence — you think they’d know better than to house their dishonest edits in an online terrarium. But you know what would be awesome?  If the person who kept deleting the passage in which Obama is vindicated was the son of a conservative icon like Phyllis Schlafly.

What!?!

Dear John Carlos Rowe: SHUT UP!

Some of us don't have tenure yet.  This is completely uncalled for:

In Connecticut Yankee, Twain warns the reader that the United States is already following the lead of the European imperial powers, a message he would repeat with growing volubility in his anti-imperialist writings from 1898 to 1905, most of which require little interpretation.  (Literary Culture and U.S. Imperialism, 139, emphasis mine.)

You are an evil liar, John Carlos Rowe.  You may have total recall.  You may be right charming.  I may even respect you mightily.  That changes nothing.  This is beyond the pale.  Don't believe me?  Ask anyone without tenure and brace yourself for a brutal what for.  Fact:

Everything requires loads of interpretation.  All of it.  (Even that.)

Just because you have tenure doesn't mean you can give up the gig.  Some of us still have to slog through six sets a night.

Meanwhile, Over the Edge of the American West ...

• "Congratulations on your win."
• Obama to blow up Israel

(I would've cross-posted, but they need the traffic.)

You Can Only Hope To Contain Me

Because you can't stop a man when hypergraphia grips him.  Briefly:

• If you're into dissertation pangs, Acephalous is where you'll find me writing about them. 
• If literary theory tickles your fancy, you can find me on The Valve.
• If you like the historical arcana and/or the political posts, feel free to join me, Ari and Eric on The Edge of the American West. 

As I mention here, I think this move makes sense.  Feel free to disagree.  But before you do, consider this: whenever I write about politics here, I feel like I'm violating the spirit of the place.  [Insert Ivory Tower crack]  This seems to me the best way to keep all my readers satisfied.

But I've been wrong before.