Acephalous

The only way to make that argument convincing is not to.

Scott’s already addressed this nonsense, but since I’m the visual rhetoric guy, I thought I’d take a whack at the Erick Erickson’s contribution to We Are The 53%:

First and foremost, Erickson’s point is that he works three jobs, and then something, something, something, and something else.  Whatever his point is, he doesn’t particularly care whether or not he communicates it.  An illegible image of some scribbles isn’t likely to inspire a movement.  It’s akin to a child screaming for attention for attention’s sake, because without legible words the only message Erickson can communicate is that he wants to communicate a message.  His incompetence has rendered his point beside itself—because his point is that he is making a point, damn it, and he is making it on the Internet.

He actually states his argument over at Red State, but I think he had a better chance garnering sympathy with his non-message:

[A critic] wants you to fixate on the new house and ignore the old house. My wife and I bought it for $110,000.00 in March of 2001. It is appraised, for taxes, at $119,000.00. We’re having a tough time selling it. My student loans payments are more each month than the mortgage. But with the new house? It was originally for sale for over $600,000.00 and we benefited from the misery of others in the market downturn. It was tasty misery at that.

The man owns two homes—one of which is worth upward of half a million dollars—and clearly enjoys exploiting the market conditions he and his fellow-travelers created.  Revels in it.  Hence the significance of the non-message he communicates: when he tells people what he truly believes, they’ll understand that Erickson is as odious as the policies he supports.  Your average human being tends to be better than the worst consequences of his or her political beliefs.  For example, most conservatives champion the free market, but when they meet someone who lost everything when the housing bubble burst, they respond sympathetically because, for them, the consequences of their belief are systemic.  They take no personal joy in someone else’s homelessness.

Erick Erickson, however, is not an average human being.  He’s a spoiled man-child devoted to an ideology so despicable not even he can bring himself to communicate it directly.  Yet he feels compelled to because he knows there are other terrible people out there who share the-sentiments-that-shall-not-shared and genuinely seeks their approval.  So what does he do?

He artfully arranges some books on the desk behind him, takes off his shirt and scribbles his foul screed.  He performs the very act (“whining”) he condemns in blissful ignorance of his unintentionally ironic statement.  The man can do nothing but whine—and he proves as much by whining an unintelligible criticism of whining.  If there’s a market for shirtless men who loudly say nothing, I suppose we ought to thank Erickson for cornering it for us.  Somebody had to, and far better him than us.

Heroic Abeyance (On Donner's Superman)

[The complete list of my visual rhetoric posts can be found here.]

Richard Donner knew that Superman needed a powerful entrance in Superman (1978), but he also knew that the one element that it would necessarily lack was surprise.  The audience knows who Clark Kent is and knows that Lois Lane won't actually plummet to her death, and Donner knows that the audience knows that.  Because he can't rely on the narrative to carry the weight of the scene, he must resort to using spectacle to carry the weight of the narrative.  The scene begins innocently enough, with an extreme long shot (in deep focus) of Lois Lane approaching a helicopter parked on a skyscraper:

Why go with the extreme long shot?  Because he needs to establish the relation of the helicopter to this mischievous cable:

How do we know it's mischievous?  Because he cut to a close-up of it.  The audience may not know why they are being asked to pay attention to this cable, but they know it will play some role in the narrative about to transpire.  Donner then cuts back to the original shot to show Lane entering the helicopter:

Note the deep focus here: even though the camera remains positioned exactly as it had been in the first shot, the scale of this would be considered medium long.  Why?  Because the most important element of a shot helps define what a shot is.  It could be argued that the helicopter is more important in the first shot, in which case it would have been a medium shot of a helicopter with Lane visible in the background.  But I'm going to argue that Lane is more significant than the helicopter 1) because she occupies the central position in both shots and 2) because her yellow jacket contrasts both the black to the left and the red to the right.  Besides, if Donner wanted the helicopter to be the central element, he would've just done this:

An even more extreme long shot of the helicopter pad works as a re-establishing shot.  Because of its scale and the lack of on-screen movement, this shot imparts a calmness to the proceedings.  Everything is going according to plan.  It is now safer for the audience to join Lane in the helicopter:

Donner situates the audience immediately behind Lane, but the shallow depth of field results in the back of her head being out of focus.  This shot is uncomfortable because it's contradictory: her centrality indicates the very same importance the focus diminishes.  Everything may not be going according to plan:

Some days I love my job.

For example, today, as I've been given permission to teach a course I'm calling "Alien Saviors," whose syllabus looks like this:

• Action Comics #1
• Superman (1978)
  
• Superman Returns (2006)
• Umberto Eco, "The Myth of Superman"
• Doctor Who, "The Eleventh Hour"
• Doctor Who, "The Beast Below"
• Doctor Who, "The Victory of the Daleks"
• Doctor Who, "Don't Blink"
• Doctor Who, "Time of Angels"
• Doctor Who, "Flesh and Stone"
• Doctor Who, "The Vampires of Venice"
• Doctor Who, "The Fires of Pompeii"
• Fiona Hobden, "History Meets Fiction in Doctor Who, 'The Fires of Pompeii'"
• Doctor Who, "Amy's Choice"
• Doctor Who, "The Hungry Earth"
• Doctor Who, "Cold Blood"
• Doctor Who, "Tooth and Claw"
• Torchwood: Children of Earth

I'm tackling historical context with the explicitly historical episodes, but if anyone can suggest some Baker-era episodes that would make sense to teach alongside the Smith, I'd be obliged. 

An Auspicious Beginning to the New School Year

SEK is departing from an undisclosed location in the Pacific Northwest. He saunters up to the Alaska Airlines counter.

SEK: Hi! I'm four-and-a-half hours early for my flight to Orange County.

TICKET AGENT: Can I see your ID? (SEK hands it to her.) Here you go sir, enjoy your time in Seattle.

SEK: Seattle?

TICKET AGENT: You better hurry up, sir. Your flight's already started boarding.

SEK: But I'm not going to Seattle. (Checks his boarding pass.) Why am I going to Seattle?

TICKET AGENT: Your flight was overbooked, sir.

SEK: So you're sending me to Seattle?

TICKET AGENT: Yes sir.

SEK: You realize that's in the opposite direction of Orange County, don't you?

TICKET AGENT: I'm sorry, sir, but you need to hurry or you'll miss your flight.

SEK stands there, dazed, in front of the Alaska Airlines counter. Right there, completely flabbergasted, in front of the Alaska Airlines counter.

SEK: Will I be able to find a flight to Orange County from Seattle?

TICKET AGENT: It will cost $100 to transfer the ticket, but you can take care of that when you get there.

SEK: You can't just send someone somewhere and then charge them a transfer fee. What kind of airline is Alaska Airlines anyway?

TICKET AGENT: Sir, if you miss your flight, you'll need to transfer two tickets.

SEK considers his options. The flight to Orange County from his undisclosed location is overbooked four-and-a-half hours before check-in. Seattle has a more robust airport ... so he rushes to and through security and boards a tin-can-of-death to Seattle, where he currently sits typing this on free Google wifi. Will he make it home? Only time will tell.

 

There is something so very, very wrong with this image:

Baby steps to return to blogging.  Here's to hoping it sticks.

London, My London

I’ve stayed my pen about the riots in London because they’re happening in what I consider to be my London.  What I mean is: when that Eyjafjallajoekull erupted andtrapped me in England, I spent about 80 percent of the time staying with a friend in Crouch End, and while my friend taught or held office hours or sat through faculty meetings, I would wander the streets of North London.  So strong is my affinity for the area that I ended up supporting Tottenham—and you can see where this is going.  I’ve invested in the area in the way that only an idle victim of circumstance can: fully cognizant of the illegitimacy of his claim upon it, but feeling an abiding connection to it anyway.  Knowing this, Michael Sayeau—who wrote eloquently about his experience for n+1—recommended I follow the riots via Twitter, and so I spent an anxious evening reading about the destruction of a place I have no right to care for as greatly as I do.

One of the most surreal aspects of watching the riots unfold on Twitter and a grid of Twitpics was that it quickly became apparent that people weren’t simply commenting on the looting, they were actively coordinating it.  ”We should hit this shop next,” one person would write, only to be shouted down by a group of people who thought it more prudent to hit another shop instead.  It quickly became apparent that an unusual organization had emerged through the clutter of social media: it operated openly and encouraged criminality, all while imposing order on a what otherwise would’ve appeared to be the random development of a conflagration.

This use of technology to outwit and outstrip a government’s ability to react to escalating unrest should have immediately struck me as familiar, being that it’s the premise of Adam Roberts‘s novel New Model Army—a book in which I’m not only thanked in the acknowledgments, but in which I believe I make an appearance.  (Adam denies it, but if the crazy academic in a brown suit and a Watchmen t-shirt isn’t me, he at least belongs to my tribe.)   Point being: the connection between the acephalous organization of Adam’s radically democratic military organizations and what I was witnessed on Twitter last week speaks to the power of speculative fiction and, more frighteningly, the pace at which contemporary society makes good on its speculations.

No one would attend them if I could.

SEK is meeting with a FORMER STUDENT at his apartment complex to discuss a letter of recommendation.  Because SEK's porch occupies his office while his complex paints his porch, the student and SEK decide to take advantage of the weather and discuss medical applications out by the pool. 

SEK: Med school won't be easy blah blah blah you need to demonstrate your work ethic blah blah bl—

POLICE CAR: WHOOP WHOOP!

SEK: I recognize that voice.

Indeed he does.  Three POLICE CARS pull up next to the pool, followed by a FIRE TRUCK and an AMBULANCE.  He and his student watch as the POLICE rush into an upstairs apartment while the FIREFIGHTERS remain by the ground with a stretcher.

FORMER STUDENT: That happen a lot here?

SEK: First time since I've moved in.  Wonder what happened?  

A group of CHILDREN approach the FIREFIGHTERS down by the stairs for autographs.  SEK didn't know FIREFIGHTERS gave out autographs.

SEK: I didn't know firefighters gave out autographs.

The FIREFIGHTERS each take out a business card, autograph the back, and hand them to the CHILDREN.  The CHILDREN exit.

SEK: But they obviously do.  

The FIREFIGHTERS grab the strecher and carry it up the stairs.  SEK and his former student sit transfixed.  More POLICE begin to mull about the bottom of the stairs.  Ten minutes pass.  Suddenly, the door of the apartment slams open and the FIREFIGHTERS carry the stretcher back down.  On it is a WOMAN HANDCUFFED TO THE STRETCHER.

WOMAN HANDCUFFED TO THE STRETCHER: But!  But!  But!

That is all SEK and FORMER STUDENT can hear from their position.  The POLICE and FIREFIGHTERS escort her to an ambulance, and as quickly as they all arrived, they're gone.

FORMER STUDENT: What just happened?

SEK: I have no clue.

FORMER STUDENT: But it did.  We just saw that.

SEK: That we did.

FORMER STUDENT: You just can't hold "normal" office hours, can you? 

Rumors of the reason behind my "demise" have been greatly exaggerated.

Sorry to lapse into silence again, but this time, I have reasons unrelated to untimely deaths:

• I'm revising two dissertation chapters for publication/future job talks, as I'm hitting the market hard at the MLA this year. 
• I'm still working on Seeing Rhetoric, but as the material I'm currently working on consists of revisions of the lesson plans I've already posted, I'm bereft of new material to post.  As soon as I'm finished revising and back into the production of new material, I'll be posting it.
• Like everyone with a doctorate in English, I believe I have a novel in me, and the only time I can indulge in that fancy is during the summer.

Those are the only three reasons posting has slowed to a crawl here and elsewhere, and anyone who says otherwise is engaging in what Twain once called "wrong and damnable conjecture."  

I Hear the Noise about Thy Keel*

Apologies for the silence, but it's been a long, very long, year capped off by a tragedy, and I've had difficulty getting the motor going again.  The words burn to write them, but about a month ago my friend Alan died.  This is him, at a party, wearing a stupid shirt back in 1992:

When a friend posted this photograph on Facebook, I joked that I remembered that party—and I do—but that I must've been fourteen when it was taken, and turns out I was a year off:

Because there's Alan shooting me a dirty look for some wise-ass comment I must've just made and I didn't have a beard until I was fifteen.  The thing of it is, I knew Alan primarily online: we met on a BBS, corresponded through early iterations of the Internet, and reconnected on Facebook a few years back.  Much has been written about online culture and the nature of "friendships" that're maintained solely online, but none of them quite get what it was like in those first days. 

I've been trying for more than a month now to find some way to capture just that, and have failed miserably, miserably, and miserably again.  Nor will I find success here.  But that look on Alan's face and that shot from across the room as I cover my mouth to hide whatever words just escaped it, that's a bit of it.

I'm not the best at being human—by all conventional standards, I'm an abject failure—but I always could find a place with words, and that place has been, for most of my life, online.  I ended up teaching literature for much the same reason, obviously, but I wanted, and have wanted, to acknowledge this debt to our shared pioneer frivolity for some time now.

And now, maybe, just maybe, I'll find my words again, because as anyone who knew him knows, the last thing Alan would've wanted was for his death to shut me up.

*Alan would've smacked me for titling this post thus—or for even using the word "thus," or perhaps for not using "thusly"—but this time, I get the last words.  (Even if they're not my own.)

This must be the world's way of telling me it's time to rejoin it.

They made this just for me, put it on in Los Angeles and everything, yet somehow I missed it:

Via Scott McCloud. 

That's right: The Doctor as Batman via Scott McCloud. 

And I missed it. 

This is why, in an ideal world, they provide teachers with three month's paid vacation.

A STUDENT who disappeared in Week Four appears during the office hours SEK is holding in Week Ten.

STUDENT: Hi Scott!

SEK: Do I know you?

STUDENT: I'm from your afternoon class!

SEK: I know everyone in my afternoon class.

STUDENT: I may not have been there in a while.

SEK: Define "while"?

STUDENT: Some stuff that happened.  Also things.

SEK: How many classes did stuff and things cause you to miss?

STUDENT: I was there for that class about how cameras work.

SEK: Which one?

STUDENT: The directors'?

SEK: Which one's?

STUDENT: Camera?

SEK: Is that a quesiton?

SEK can feel it coming in the air tonight, oh Lord, he only wishes he couldn't.  It's just that some complaints are as inevitable as Phil Collins bringing bombast to fanfare, and this particular complaint most certainly pulls a pure Phil Collins.

STUDENT: I don't know.  I'm confused.

SEK: As am I.  Who are you again?

STUDENT: I'm in your afternoon class!

SEK: Then why don't I know you?

STUDENT: Because some stuff and things happened and I stopped attending in Week Four.

SEK: I'm sorry you had to go through stuff and things.  Life is tough.  What can I help you with now?

STUDENT: What do I need to do to pass the class?

SEK: Which one?

STUDENT: Yours.

SEK: The one you didn't attend?

STUDENT: But I have a draft of my Rhetorical Analysis that I wrote to make it up to you.

SEK: Make it up to me?  This isn't about you making it up to me.  It's about—

STUDENT: Can you at least take a look at my draft?

STUDENT hands SEK a draft of her "Rhetorical Analysis."  As he thought, it was a "Rhetorical Analysis" as performed by someone who had no idea what a rhetorical analysis is.

SEK: This isn't a rhetorical analysis.

STUDENT: It's about a horror movie.

SEK: That wasn't really the focus of the class.

STUDENT: It was called a horror class.

SEK: The emphasis was on the creation of suspense.

STUDENT: Saw II was suspenseful.

SEK: Suspenseful torture porn, which if you were paying attention during the few classes you actually attended, you'd have remembered that that's a genre I repeatedly specified we'd be avoiding.

STUDENT: But I heard you talking about it so it still meets your requirements.

SEK: No, it doesn't.

STUDENT: Yes, it does.

SEK: How?

STUDENT: I analyze the effect of a horror film.

SEK: One I explicitly banned.

STUDENT: That was the assignment.

SEK: That was not the assignment.

STUDENT: But it was!

SEK: Then how come no one else in this class produced a similar document?

STUDENT: You'd have to ask them.

SEK: But they're not here now, so I'm asking you: how did twenty-four students aim their arrows at the same side of the same barn and strike it (with varying degrees of thump and wobble)?

STUDENT: Some teachers don't push 'em hard enough.  Who has 'em aiming at barns and all when they could be shooting at aliens and shit?

SEK: Just so I have this straight: in Week Four you decided to up the rhetorical ante by chasing aliens and what you captured were the barely legible fears of a child forced to rewatch SAW II until someone produced an essay you deemded "college enough" to turn in.  Am I missing something here?

STUDENT: But is there still something I could to do pass the cl—

SEK: No.

STUDENT: But what if I—

SEK: No.

STUDENT: I have a friend—

SEK: You're going to need one—

STUDENT: And she said when you do this two quarters in a row they have to pass you.  She said I'm on "Bemusement Leave" now and can only—

SEK: You're on "Bemusement Leave"?  I suggest you take it.  Now.

CAR vs. OFFICE HOURS, ROUND ONE

SEK is driving CAR up a dangerous hill you no doubt remember at a rate of 70 miles per hour.  He is on his way to office hours.

CAR: YAAAAAAWN!

All of the electricity in CAR disappears and now SEK and SLEEPING CAR are coasting uphill at the speed of impending panic.  SEK depresses the gas pedal and wakes CAR up.

CAR: Did you say something?

SEK: What was that back there?

CAR: What was what back where?

SEK: That yawn and—

CAR: You mean CAR's micronap?  CAR does that now.  Micronaps are cool.

SEK: Micronaps are not co—

CAR: YAAAAAAWN!

All of the electricity in CAR vanishes again and again SEK and SLEEPING CAR are coasting uphill at the speed of impending panic.  SEK depresses the gas pedal and wakes CAR up.  Again.

SEK: You did it again!

CAR: Did what?

SEK: Fell asleep!

CAR: Did not!

SEK: One more word from you and I'm pulling you over!

CAR: But—

SEK: Enough!

SEK pulls CAR over and looks at it sternly.  After a few minutes, SEK reenters CAR and looks at its lying dashboard with a crooked eye.

CAR: You know you're gonna be late for office hours.

SEK: I know that.  Shut up.

CAR: Those kids are gonna think you let them down.

SEK: I KNOW.

CAR: Go ahead.  Turn CAR on.

SEK: I'm not turning you on.

CAR: Just slip your key in CAR's ignition and—

SEK: SHUT UP.

 CAR: You know you wan—

SEK caves to CAR's inappropriately expressed demands and carefully drives to campus.  Once there, he locates a mechanic who can set CAR straight and informs his students that office hours will be delayed until 2 p.m.  It is now 2:30 p.m. and SEK is talking with a MECHANIC.

SEK: I thought you said CAR would be ready by 2 p.m.

MECHANIC: CAR?  No, CAR needed a part, so I had it towed to Riverside.

In the background, unseen by SEK, CAR moves across the stage from right-to-left, emphatically waving goodbye to everbody. 

SEK: You towed CAR to Riverside?

MECHANIC: We thought it'd be more convenient for you, since you live in Corona.

SEK: How am I supposed to get back to class?

MECHANIC: We can call you a cab.

SEK: And what about after class?

MECHANIC: Just get your wife to pick you up.

SEK: But CAR is our only car.

MECHANIC: CAR is your only car?

SEK: CAR is.

MECHANIC: You want I should tow CAR back now?

SEK: Very much so, thank you.

In the background, unseen by SEK, CAR moves across the stage from left-to-right, emphatically waving hello to everybody.

MECHANIC: Here CAR is, good as exactly the same!  Try not to drive CAR up steep incline between now and tomorrow when part from Riverside arrive.

CAR: (to SEK) CAR was gonna go on a field trip!

SEK: Your services were needed elsewhere.

CAR: (despondently) Back to campus then, are we?

SEK shoots CAR a wilting look, and CAR deflates as best as 3 tons of metal can.  SEK returns to office hours late, commits to making up the three lost hours by staying an hour late on Wednesday and Thursday and coming in an hour early on Thursday.  SEK's not sure how CAR will feel about getting to campus at 9 a.m. on Thursday without employing the toll roads, but from the steely look on his face, it seems he really doesn't consider CAR's feelings to be relevant at the moment.

Busted!

[The following post was written for mature audiences.  Reader discretion is advised.]

The Donalde caught me cursing, which as we all know I never do.  Well, actually, the Donalde caught my student cursing, which as we all know they never do either.  Then he proved I've cursed before by linking to an unformatted comment in a post that deemed me "insufferable" for writing those visual rhetoric posts you love—or at least the ones that receive the most random positive feedback.  Because he's the Donalde, he fails to realize that I was being purposely insufferable because I'd been called "insufferable," and that I sarcastically answered the question "What the fucking fuck?" with "Q.F.E.F.D."  But alas!  It is not in the Donalde to recognize such things.

However, it is in the Donalde to end a post in which he castigates me for cursing by calling me an "asshat."  He does as well with irony as he does sarcasm and Google: he suggests that I use the word "cocksucker" in private, when I not only use it quite publicly, I think it can be fucking poetry. 

I have just received a very "disturbing" email from a very "prominent" conservative blogger...

...who informs me that my "true" identity is Batman John Casper.  I kid you not: I'm now accused of being the very same John Casper who, a few years ago, tried to destroy my academic career.  I'm not currently privy to the "evidence" against "me," but I look forward to confronting it with great gusto, if only to have the opportunity to reprint this letter from an African-American scholar, because I enjoy white-hot displays of scorn as much as the next historian.

I've got a tremendously busy week ahead of me, so please feel free to update me about future "developments" in comments, via email, or through Facebook. Because this should be entertaining.  

UPDATE: As far as anyone can tell, something like this or this happened. What either or those things may be, your guess is as good as mine.

Teacher to the World, Teacher to None

SEK walks past the library on Ring Road and hears  a student hawking banana splits.

RANDOM STUDENT: BANANA SPLITS! WE HAVE THEM! BANANA SPLITS!

SEK momentarily thinks about how refreshing a banana split might—

RANDOM STUDENT: B-A-N-N-A-S-S! BANANA SPLITS!

SEK does an admittedly grumpy double-take.

RANDOM STUDENT: B-A-N-N-A-S-S SPLITS! BANANAS! YOU KNOW YOU LOVE THEM!  WE HAVE THEM!

SEK does his damnedest not to do what you know he's going to do, but in a moment of predictable weakness, turns around and confronts the hawker anyway.

SEK: You have what now?

RANDOM STUDENT: BANANA SPLITS! ONLY FOUR DOLLARS! B-A-N-N-A-S-S SPLITS!

SEK: (politely) Are you sure that's what you have?

RANDOM STUDENT: BANANA SPLITS, DUDE.  I'VE BEEN SELLING THEM FOR HOURS.

SEK: Successfully?

RANDOM STUDENT: YES SUCCESSFULLY.  BANANA SPLITS! B-A-N-N-A-S-S SPLITS ONLY FOUR DOLLARS!

SEK considers whether he wants to go full-on Larry David, decides against it, and begins walking away.

RANDOM STUDENT: ALL THAT TALK DUDE AND YOU AIN'T EVEN GONNA BUY ONE SPLIT? IT'S FOR A CAUSE.

SEK chomps down on his tongue, lowers his head and continues walking away because him being exhausted and it being Spring Quarter is no excuse for what would otherwise inevitably follow.

Conversations with former students in food courts

FORMER STUDENT: Hey, Scott!

SEK: Howdy, FS.

FS: I miss your class, man.  This [next one in the writing sequence] sucks ass.  I got a fucking [non-passing grade] on the first paper.

SEK: Did you [do everything SEK taught him to do, e.g. revise, revise, revise]?

FS: This prof doesn't make us revise.

SEK: But what led to you earning an "A" in my class?

FS: All the revising.

SEK: So what do you need to earn an "A" in this next class?

FS: I told you, though, this prof doesn't make us revise.

SEK: But how did you earn an "A" in my class?

FS: Revising.

SEK: So how can you earn an in this next one?

FS: I don't know, Scott, that's what I'm asking you.

SEK: But—

FS: You gotta help a brother out.

SEK: One more time: How did you earn an "A" in my course?

FS: I already told you, this prof isn't telling us to revise.

SEK: (shrugs)

FS: (shrugs back)

SEK: (emphatically shrugs while repeatedly overturning invisible cups on an invisible table)

FS: (stares for a minute, turns, walks away) Right, dude, I see what you're saying.  Cups it is, man, cups it is!

SEK: "Cups"?  Come back! (FS moves briskly through the food court)  WHAT IS "CUPS"? 

SEK realizes that standing alone in the middle of a food court yelling "WHAT IS 'CUPS'"? leaves an odd impression on bystanders and walks away muttering something, most likely "What is 'cups'?" under his breath.

I AM PAYING THEM TO DRINK THEIR MILKSHAKE.

Once upon a time, as most of you know, SEK had cancer.  His cancer requires he take thyroid replacement hormones for the rest of his life, but this January his Primary Care Physician informed him that he could not, in good conscience, continue to prescribe said hormones unless SEK saw an endocrinologist at least once a year, so he referred SEK to one who works at the UCI Medical Center.  Because the United States has the best health care system in the world, three months later he arrives at the UCI Medical Center for his appointment.

SEK: I am here for the appointment I have been waiting three months to have the pleasure of attending.

NURSE: Do you have a referral?

SEK: My doctor referred me, otherwise I would not have the appointment which I waited three months to have the pleasure of attending.

NURSE: Let me call your Primary Care Physician.  (dials phone, provides my name and information, listens)  They have no record of a referral.

SEK: Then why am I here?

NURSE: (shrugs)

SEK: Why did I receive an email reminding me to be here today at this time?

NURSE: (shrugs)  We can always restart the process—

SEK: And I can wait another three months to be told there's no record of my referral?

NURSE: Or you can see the doctor (which was becoming a pressing necessity, as SEK was experiencing some of the same symptoms that led to the diagnosis of cancer in the first place—most notably, an uncontrollable urge to nap) and pay out of pocket, straighten things out with your insurance company and be reimbursed.  

SEK:  Fine, fine, this is why the Good Lord invented credit cards.

SEK sees the endocrinologist, who is really quite extraordinary, has a few tests runs and leaves the office to get three gallons of blood work drawn at the lab.

SEK: I have this long sheet of paper covered in X marks and this pad of stickers.  Please steal my blood.

LAB ATTENDANT: Gladly!

The LAB ATTENDANT rolls up SEK's sleeves and withdraws three gallons of blood from SEK's arms.  As the LAB ATTENDANT's affixing the stickers to all the tubes, he says

LAB ATTENDANT: Wait a minute—these stickers have your Primary Care Physician's name on them in addition to the endocrinologists'.  

SEK: And this is a problem?

LAB ATTENDANT: You needed to get this blood drawn at your Primary Care Physician's lab, otherwise you'll have to pay for these tests out-of-pocket.

SEK: (sighs) How much out of pocket?

LAB ATTENDANT: $1,800.

SEK: Fine.  I'll just take these tubes and stickers and drive them to the other lab.

LAB ATTENDANT: You can't do that.  You need a special license to transport blood.

SEK: My blood?  I believe it's called a "Driver's License," and I used it—

LAB ATTENDANT: It's the law.

SEK: (feeling the effects of losing all that blood) So what you're telling me is that I need a special license to transport my blood—

LAB ATTENDANT: As soon as it's outside of your bod—

SEK: THEN BY GOD MAN JUST PUT IT BACK IN.

LAB ATTENDANT: What?

SEK: PUT IT BACK IT IN.  Did I need a special license to drive it here?

LAB ATTENDANT: No.

SEK: But it'll cost me $1,800 to transport it to the other lab in those little tubes?

LAB ATTENDANT: Yes.

SEK: THEN PUT IT BACK IN ALREADY.

The LAB ATTENDANT is surprisingly unpersuaded by the logic behind SEK's argument.  SEK leaves the lab minus the $1,800 pound of flesh they stole from him and THE END FOR NOW.

When Faculty Attack!

A conservative sent me a passive-aggressive email concerning University of Iowa professor Ellen Lewin’s intemperate response to a passive-aggressive email the College Republicans sent about “Conservative Coming Out Week.”  Instead of completing the Circle of Irony by responding to that conservative in an equally intemperate fashion, I would like to spend a moment pointing out the obvious:

The professor’s response (“FUCK YOU, REPUBLICANS”) is clearly inappropriate, but in her defense, the College Republicans were just as clearly trying to be “provocative” by appropriating the language of the causes they oppose.  They claim, for example, that they can host something called “Conservative Coming Out Week” without ever stopping to think about who exactly kept homosexuals afraid to exit the closet.  Thin as liberal support for gay and lesbian causes frequently is, it is safe to say that the people who currently wish “those people” were back in the closet weren’t the most ardent supporters of them exiting it.

Similarly, I’m sure the College Republicans chuckled to themselves when they first saw the phrase “Animal Rights BBQ” because they’ll be asserting their rights to barbeque animal … while simultaneously demonstrating their commitment to punning ungrammatically.  I should add: that latter commitment extends to all matters ungrammatical, as evidenced by their decision to host the discussion “Whose Conservative Anyway?  Guess which athletes, movie stars, and performing artists are Republican.”  This is not to say that Dr. Lewin’s response was appropriate, even if

In 2010, Lewin’s salary from the University of Iowa was $94,800.00 plus benefits.  In her spare time, [she] was written books entitled, Inventing Lesbian Cultures in America, and Gay Fatherhood: Narratives of Family and Citizenship in America.

My annoyance at the grammar of these proponents of English as an official language aside, the strange juxtaposition of Dr. Lewin’s salary and what she does “[i]n her spare” times speaks to the fundamental misunderstanding about what academics do and what their responsibilities are that snakes through the article and the comments below it.  Professors don’t write books in their “spare time” because they have no spare time.  Academics devote what these conservatives are calling “spare time” to professional duties these same conservatives would call “was written books.”  Obviously, the implicit claim is that this professor on the public dole has enough “spare time” to “was written books” about gays and lesbians instead of how awesome George Washington was, because as Dr. Lewin herself pointedly noted, this is all about conservatives’ tactically “delicate sensibilities.”

Were the College Republicans actually offended that a professor responded to their offensive provocation in a manner that demonstrated she was provoked by their offense?  Absolutely not.  As their faculty advisor (and fellow devotee to writing English good) wrote:

It’s not my place at this point to debate the merits of whether the CR message was offense, but let me remind you that they have First Amendment rights as much as you do[.]

The point can’t be the merit of a conservative student organization openly mocking homosexuals and animal rights activists, because so long as they do so without explicitly saying “FUCK YOU, HOMOSEXUALS” and “FUCK YOU, ANIMAL RIGHTS ACTIVISTS,” they’re merely exercising their right to implicitly say “FUCK YOU, HOMOSEXUALS” and “FUCK YOU, ANIMAL RIGHTS ACTIVISTS.”  In short, the point can’t be about the merit of the College Republicans’ argument because it has no merit: it’s all about the tactical employment of rhetorical legerdemain in the service of a hateful ideology.

My students just think they're so funny...

The winner of the Caption Scott McCloud Contest is:

Well, she wishes to remain anonymous, but agreed that her brilliant interpretation of McCloud's textless panels ought to see the light of day.  As I said in class: "Congratulations!  I hate you!  You're awesome!  (Damn it.)"

Every quarter I present my students with five panels from McCloud...

...and have them compete to see who can come up with the most hilarious narrative.  Here are the panels:

They need to add narration or dialogue (or both), as well as specify what the word-picture relations are and how the transitions between the panels work.  Every quarter I learn a little something about my students with this exercise, and this quarter is no exception: I've learned that they're either high, horny, heart-broken, violent, menstruating or some combination thereof.  Should be a fun class tomorrow.

How do you take your average orphan and turn him into a lunatic in a fetish-bat costume?

The Joker, of course, has a theory:

But his version, from Alan Moore's The Killing Joke, is only technically correct.  Bruce Wayne did have "one bad day," yes, but it was different from the "one bad day" the Joker had:

The difference could be that wives and children can be replaced—for tax purposes, if not in our hearts—whereas birth-parents cannot, but while that's true, that's not the most significant difference.  The most significant difference—the one that, despite not knowing the secret identity of the Batman, the Joker deeply understands—is that "one bad day" is far worse when, instead of being told of a death secondhand, you witness it yourself.  Hence, his plan:

"But what I DOOOO want to know is, what will I DOOOO in this writing class?"

SEK is substituting for his co-author/course director, so he when he walks into class, he doesn't know which students are supposed to be there and which aren't ... and there's one that certainly isn't.  SEK doesn't know that yet.  It is imperative for the reader to read said student's voice like this:

 

SEK walks to the Smart Podium and begins to open the images and videos he will be projecting on the wall during class.  MR. HELLO! approaches him.

MR. HELLO! HELLOOOO!  Will YOOOOU be doing the teaching of THIS writing class today?

SEK: I'm the sub.  I was told you were expecting me.

OTHER STUDENTS: We are.

MR. HELLO! I am not INNNN this writing class, I am considering adding a writing class to my portfolio this quarter.  May I add THIS writing class? 

SEK: I'm just the sub.  You'd need to ask the teacher.  

SEK explains course policy about adding this deep into the quarter.  

MR. HELLO! But I am thinking of adding THIS writing course THIS quarter.

SEK: Even if I wanted to, I couldn't add you to this class this quarter, because I'm not the teacher.  I'm just the sub.

MR. HELLO! But what I DOOOO want to know is, what will I DOOOO in this writing class?

SEK politely informs MR. HELLO! of what generally goes on in the composition department.  The other students—the ones actually enrolled in the class—begin to fidget.

MR HELLO! So what YOOOOU are telling me is that when I add THIS writing class, I will be DOOOOING writing.  How much writing will I be DOOOOING in THIS  writing class, counting by WORDS.

OTHER STUDENTS: At least two thousands words a week.

MR HELLO! So what YOOOOU are telling me is that when I add THIS writing class, I will be DOOOOING more writing than it is normal to DOOOO.

SEK: I can't add you to this writing class, because I'm just the sub, and it's already a little too late in the quarter to add.

MR HELLO! So what YOOOOU are telling is that when I add THIS writing class, I will be—

SEK: I can't add you to this class—

MR HELLO! But when you DOOOO—

SEK checks the clock and sees that it's about a minute after class should've started.

SEK: I'm sorry, but I'm going to have to ask you leave.

MR HELLO! So what YOOOOU are telling is me is that when I DOOOO return on Monday to add this class, YOOOOU will be adding me to it.

SEK: I'm just the sub, and I'm subbing for the course director, but I can assure you, she's not going to let you add this late in the quarter.

MR HELLO! But when I DOOOO see you on Monday, YOOOOU will—

OTHER STUDENTS: Enough already!  Just leave!

MR HELLO! (addressing SEK) I will be seeing YOOOOU on Monday.

SEK: Alright then, you do that.

MR HELLO! leaves.  SEK stands in front of the class that isn't his with his mouth agape and his eyes agog.

SEK: I didn't get the best night of sleep last night, so I'm just wondering did I just nod off or did that actually just happen?

Batman is always Beginning again

(I never thought I'd dip back into this well, but then life happens and there you go.)

Heath Ledger notwithstanding, I think it's fairly obvious that Batman Begins is the better of recent reboots.  Nolan structures the first film not around an admittedly ingeniuous performance, but around a modified classical dynamic, by which I mean, he abides by his Aristotle.  It opens with the most incentive of incentive moments—a boy watching his parents murdered before his eyes—then proceeds to a classic peripeteia*—that moment of reversal when the boy who witnessed his parents' murder decides to forsake revenge and fight all crime instead the responsible criminals.  It need not bear mentioning, I don't think, that the deus ex machina, which Aristotle would otherwise despise, in this case fits within "the unity of action," because it has "an air of design" that's well-nigh indisputable. 

The real crux is the film's anagnorisis—or "revelation" in the I-murdered-my-father-made-kids-with-my-mother-sense—which occurs at a time Aristotle would've approved of, but not in the way he'd prefer.  You'll remember that, early in Batman Begins, the recently returned Bruce Wayne takes his horny butler's advice and invites some models to go swimming in a restaurant with him:

Nolan's use of a medium-long shot there is deceptive, as these aren't really women so much as beards:

I'm not saying they're all legs and hair, the cropped medium shot notwithstanding—but for the purpose of the plot, Nolan certain reduces them to as much.  (We're just going to skip over the scene of them skinny dipping, you know, for the kids.)  The point is that these women are props, mere things Alfred suggests Bruce Wayne should acquire should he not want to be discovered as the Batman.  So, then, anagnorisis avoided ... except:

The love of Wayne's life can't even look at him—and not just because I caught  bad capture.  She's just watched him escort two soaking models from a hotel she's about to learn he bought, so she shouldn't want to look at him.  But when she does, he makes a plea:

Archaeology of the Impossible

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

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

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

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

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

Compared to Mazzucchelli in Asterios Polyp:

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

Batman Begins (film) - Christopher Nolan

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

Planetary/Batman (comic) - Warren Ellis

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

Planetary #1 -10 (comic) - Warren Ellis

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

All-Star Superman (comic) - Grant Morrison

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

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

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

Hellboy: Seed of Destruction (comic) - Mike Mignola

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

Hellboy (film) - Guillermo Del Toro

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

Despite being one of the world's most ardent Alan Moore fans, I've no clue what's going on Neonomicon.

Which has the strange result of making some of its most disturbing moments read as unintentional comedy.  To wit:

I mean, if you were an anthropomorphic fish-penis hybrid and the woman you'd been raping for a week asked "What the fuck is wrong with you?" you'd answer with an emphatic "HOORNGH!" too.*

*I wasn't kidding when I said I don't understand this book one bit.  I hear tell the fourth and final issue's just come out, so maybe that'll make sense of it ... then I remember how Promothea concluded and entertain some serious doubts.  All right, enough "fun" reading for me, I'm back to work on the Clowes post.

RE: Clowes and I

Just wanted to say that I'll be addressing the Clowes comments as soon as I'm done grading papers, and sincerely apologize for the delay.  Y'all provided some high quality objections, so it'll take my undivided attention to obliterate them, which I'll be able to bring to bear in the next day or two.  So, more shortly.*

*I've spent the past week pulling 14 hour days in my office working with my students, so I hope you can forgive the delay ... and if you can't, what sort of person are you?  (A terrible one, is what.)

Enid and Rebecca aren't winning Ghost World

Given that I already related my attempt to make the final day of my "Slow Horror" course memorable, it only makes sense to do the same for the "Confessional Narratives."  The final works we studied were the print and film versions of Daniel Clowes' Ghost World, both of which I hate with a pre-critical vicerality that—to pat myself on the back for being responsible—doesn't prevent me from acknowledging their importance and teaching them anyway.  That said, I find the book far more unlikeable than the film.  Consider the scene in which Enid and Rebecca first meet the waiter they dub "Weird Al" in the novel:

It's not that they mock the decor of a restaurant they patronized solely to patronize, but the manner in which they treat Allen.  Enid responds to his "Hi! My name is Allen" with "Hi, Al!"  If he had wanted to be called "Al," presumably he would have introduced himself as such.  Enid renames him on the spot, and without getting all pop-philosophical about the significance of the act of naming something, her behavior here is indicative of her general belief that she's superior to people who look and are employed like him.  But Rebecca's response is even more indecorous: the insult that had been implicit in Enid's renaming is explicit in Rebecca's question, "Can we call you 'Weird Al'?"  That she asks whether "we" can call him "Weird Al" is significant, because throughout the book she's only emboldened to behave in this manner when Enid initiates such encounters.  In short, then, Enid's culpable both for her own statement and for Rebecca's, because Enid's responsible for the dynamic that makes Rebecca feel perpetually, if not always consciously, egged-on.  

At this point in the analysis, it's possible for readers to attribute the pair reveling in their unearned sense of superiority to an authorial critique, i.e. that Clowes is representing their reprehensible behavior, not endorsing it.  But as I noted in my earlier post, Clowes' own—albeit earned—sense of superiority infects most of his work, in this case in the fifth panel above.  Despite my formalist tendencies, I don't normally place too much stock into matters like the placement of speech bubbles, but between teaching this and Alison Bechdel's Fun Home, I'm compelled to ditch my insistence that where the text is placed on a page matters less than whether readers can quickly ascertain the manner in which it was intended to flow.  

So, for example, in the second panel above Enid's conversation-stopping "Whatever" is separated from the mock-Fifties banter not only for the pragmatic reason that it wouldn't fit, but because it's meant to indicate a distinct break in the established conversational rhythm.  Clowes could've drawn the panel in a manner that placed it immediately beneath Rebecca's question, but that would suggested that Enid responded immediately; instead, placing it beneath the table suggests that she paused a beat before humiliating Rebecca for playing the language game Enid herself had initiated.

Apply the same logic of placement to the fifth panel's "You loser!" and you have a speech bubble that doubles as a caption, in effect branding the server what the pair's entitled renaming of him already indicated they thought him to be.  The difference here is that it's not Enid who chooses where her remarks are placed on the page, but Clowes, and if Enid's partly culpable for Rebecca's question, Clowes is wholly guilty for Enid's "captioning" of the server here.

Of course, Clowes can only accomplish this little feat if Enid and Rebecca frame the server as they do in the panels above.  His occupation of the central area of the frame is fundamentally ironic: he's not a person so much as a function of a restaurant they're only there to mock.  They (and Clowes) can dehumanize him because, as a "loser" who sacrificed his social mobility for a regular paycheck, he doesn't number among the human race anyway.  

Now, consider the same scene in the film.  It opens with a pan-out from a close-up of a radio playing decidedly non-Fifties music to a medium shot of Rebecca and Enid seated in the booth:

How to ruin thirty days in a night (by violating the Dayenu Principle)

On the last day I teach in a quarter, I like to leave the students with a memorable example—something so memorable they'll hold the lessons of the class close long after they leave.  For my "slow horror" course, I chose to remind them that the purpose of a film is to manipulate its audience, and that this is readily apparent when films falter.  The film in question is the David Slade (of Twilight: Eclipse fame) helmed 30 Days of Night.  But being a good professor, I had them read the Steve Niles and Ben Templesmith books first.  Here are the final panels of the first series, in which—spoilers abound from here on out—the protagonist, Eben, and his wife are sitting on a hill after having toughed out thirty days of Alaskan night in a town, Barrow, overrun by vampires.  It's a clever premise—vampires select a town that far north in order to feast undisturbed for a month—but they're defeated when Eben injects himself with vampire blood, becomes a vampire, and defeats them.  He saved the town, Jesus-style, but now must die, Jesus-style, as the sun's about to rise and turn him to ashes.  Here are the final panels:

Notice the quiet beauty here: he dies a dignified death, off-panel, in the arms of a wife who loves him, and then she cries.  It's a fitting end for a man who's sacrificed his life to save the woman and the town he loved, and Niles and Templesmith handle it with class.  Here are the same moments represented in the panels above as David Slade would have them, starting with an establishing shot:

The unintended consequences of partying with tea

SEK is at the Norco DMV in the "appointment only" line after having stood at an unmanned counter with the word "appointment" over it for much longer than he'd like to admit.  He blames the mislabeling, but that's beside the point, which is that a woman who looked an awful lot like this, only older, cut to the front of his line.

ANGRY WHITE PATRIOT LADY: I DON'T HAVE AN APPOINTMENT!

DMV EMPLOYEE: Then I'll have to ask you to step to the back of the line.

ANGRY WHITE PATRIOT LADY heads toward the end of the "appointments only" line.

DMV EMPLOYEE: Ma'am?  The other line.

DMV EMPLOYEE points out the window to the line that's snaking from her counter and around pretty much the entire building.

ANGRY WHITE PATRIOT LADY: YOU WANT ME TO WAIT THERE!

DMV EMPLOYEE: That's the line for people who don't have appointments.

ANGRY WHITE PATRIOT LADY: THEN I HAVE AN APPOINTMENT!

DMV EMPLOYEE: (issues a blank, well-practiced stare)

ANGRY WHITE PATRIOT LADY: I'M A PROUD WHITE AMERICAN!  YOU CAN'T MAKE ME WAIT IN LINE WITH THEM!

EVERYONE ELSE IN THE ROOM, THE MAJORITY OF WHOM AREN'T WHITE AND CAN'T BELIEVE SHE JUST SAID THAT: !?!

To placate ANGRY WHITE PATRIOT LADY, DMV EMPLOYEE gives her a ticket and tells her to sit down.  ANGRY WHITE PATRIOT LADY sits down visibly satisfied in her exercise of X-treme privilege.  SEK, whose ticket reads "B 047," is called to Window 12 after about another an hour.

SEK: (to DIFFERENT DMV EMPLOYEE) Why'd you give that lady a ticket?

DIFFERENT DMV EMPLOYEE: Oh, we gave her a ticket.  She's T 099.  When they pull that, they all are.

This isn't the least bit disturbing.

I’m digging out from beneath a pile of student papers at the moment—as well as the consequences of holding the majority of my office hours at the end of the quarter, when the students are revising and can benefit the most—so it took someone else sending me an email to learn this disturbing fact:

Every time the Donalde thinks about sex, his next thought is about me.

TIME TO WORK! (SAY WORK BIRDS!)

They eye you cautiously:

THEN SOUND THE ALARUM!

REINFORCEMENTS ARRIVE!

THEY TAKE YOU DOWN!

START TYPING!  START TYPING!

Scott Eric Kaufman's Visual Rhetoric Compendium (as of 9/26/2011)

By request, below are the links to all of the visual rhetoric exegeses (a.k.a. McCloud or Bordwell-inspired "lecture notes") I've produced in the past few years.  I would say I'm surprised there aren't more of them, but then I remember 1) how labor-intensive they are to compose and 2) the number of drafts I've deemed insufficient for public consumption that linger unfinished in assorted folders.  So here goes:

Films:

• Batman Begins (classic horror) - Christopher Nolan
• Blow-Up (I) - Michelangelo Antonioni 
• Blow-Up (II)- Michelangelo Antonioni
• The Dark Knight (I) - Christopher Nolan
• The Dark Knight (II) - Christopher Nolan
• Fight Club - David Fincher
• Ghost World - Terry Zwigof
• Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind - Hayao Miyazaki
• Superman - Richard Donner
• Superman Returns - Bryan Singer
• 30 Days of Night - David Slade

Television Shows:

• Avatar: The Last Airbender - "The Ember Island Players"
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer - "Hush"
• Doctor Who - "Time of Angels"
• Mad Men - "The Grown-Ups"
• Mad Men - "Shut the Door.  Have a seat."
• Mad Men (I) - "The Rejected"
• Mad Men (II) - "The Rejected"
• Mad Men (I) - "The Chrysanthemum and the Sword"
• Mad Men (II) - "The Chrysanthemum and the Sword"
• Mad Men (I) - "The Suitcase"
• Mad Men (II) - "The Suitcase"
• The Walking Dead - "Days Gone Bye"

Comics:

• American Born Chinese - Gene Luen Yang
• Blankets - Craig Thompson
• Fun Home - Alison Bechdel
• Ghost World - Daniel Clowes
• Kick-Ass (I) - Mark Millar
• Kick-Ass (II) - Mark Millar
• Planetary/Batman: Night on Earth - Warren Ellis
• 30 Days of Night - Steve Niles
• The Walking Dead (word-specific panels)
• The Walking Dead (picture-specific panels) - Robert Kirkman
• Watchmen (panel construction) (I) - Alan Moore
• Watchmen (panel construction) (II) - Alan Moore
• Watchmen (responsible film criticism) - Anthony Lane
• Watchmen (unfilmable film filmed) - Zak Snyder vs. Alan Moore
• Watchmen (students as murderers) - Alan Moore
• Watchmen (Dr. Manhattan as a figure of the reader) - Alan Moore

 

Check out that face! (Being lecture notes on the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode "Hush")

After re-watching the infamous silent episode from the fourth season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, "Hush," I am compelled to conclude that Joss Whedon loves him some tracking shots.  Unless the camera is tightly framed on someone's face, it's either panning or tilting or both.  If this were my only encounter with his work, I'd probably draw the conclusion that because the majority of the episode contains no spoken dialogue, Whedon felt the camera work had to be dynamic enough to sustain audience interest.  But that's not the case: Whedon's camera is consistently active, only a bit hyper in "Hush."  For example, when Buffy finishes her ablutions and enters the hallway, the camera pans with her:

Concerning those elections and their consequences

It seems impossible for a conservative to write anything about Wisconsin without noting, for their records, that elections have consequences.  The original context of Obama’s statement, you’ll remember, is a conversation he had with Eric Cantor on his third day office.  Having been handed a helpful list of deficit-reductions suggestions by the Representative, the newly minted President responded “Elections have consequences, and at the end of the day, I won.”  At which point, as you well know, the Republican faithful graciously bowed out of public life and allowed the President to impose his will on the nation, which is why Guantanamo is now closed; the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are now over; single-payer healthcare is the law of the land; and the Caliphate is nearly installed.

Because that’s how conservatives are using this phrase: “Union members of Wisconsin,” they say, “Scott Walker was elected, and elections have consequences, so quit bitching and go home.  We won, and now we’re going to do whatever we want.  You lost the right to complain when you lost.”  The problem with their rhetoric is plain to anyone who noticed—which includes all those linked above—that the Tea Party held a counter-protest yesterday, i.e. the Tea Party exists precisely because they didn’t accept the very same logic they’re launching at the protesters.  ”Elections have consequences” doesn’t mean, as they’re currently construing it, “Roll over and die.”  It means what they thought it meant two years ago, which is that they’re in for a political fight.

There is, of course, one more crucial difference: conservatives protested over fictional abuses of authority—czars, death panels, long-form birth certificates, etc.—whereas the protesters in Wisconsin are fighting against the bill as stated both by the person who drafted it and every conservative cheering on the union busting.

 

Reifying memory in Alison Bechdel's Fun Home

Alison Bechdel's Fun Home fits neatly into the last third of my "Confessional Narratives" course for all the obvious reasons: it's intensely autobiographical; it's told from an emotional and temporal remove from the events narrated; those events are of indisputable significance to the life of the confessor; etc.  In particular, it resembles Craig Thomspon's Blankets and Art Spiegelman's Maus in that its focus is on the narrator's relationship with someone particular; however, unlike Thompson's relationship with God or Spiegelman's with his father, Vladek, Bechdel's interested in a fundamental reconcilation with her closeted father.  

I'm not claiming that Spiegelman was uninterested in understanding his father better, only that his attempt was doomed to failure because the unknowable horror of the Holocaust made it impossible for him to either share that experience or even understand the gravity of its effects on his father, e.g. these non-consecutive panels from "And Here My Troubles Began":  

There is something non-universal about the way in which the Holocaust altered Vladek Spiegelman, and as much as Art attempts to divine the particular from the universal or vice versa, he never succeeds.  The nightmare of history is such that his father's story can only ever be that: his father's story.  The same doesn't logic doesn't hold for Bechdel's Fun Home, not only because the horrors of discovering you're gay aren't comparable to finding yourself in Aushwitz, but because Bechdel's lament is that her father, Bruce, didn't live long enough to experience life outside the closet.  It's no coincidence that Bechdel has "a hallucinogenic memory" of accompanying her closeted father to retreive her mother from the city:

The irony of this memory occupying an hallucinogenic space "a few weeks since the Stonewall Riots" in Bechdel's memory should be obvious.  I'm not saying she's lying or even misremembering, only that she's making history meaningful in a way that's similar to what Vladek performed on the first-order and Art did on the second.  The difference between her performance and Art's is that she's doing so in order to make sense of his life in a way Art could never duplicate.  

Again, not faulting anyone for anything here, merely acknowledging what Art himself does above: the inability to understand, however tenuously vicariously, someone else's experience will prevent you from ever sympathizing with or being able to offer anything but sympathy to this other person.  That's not the case in Fun Home, which is less concerned with communicating the attempt to reach an inreconciable understanding than the act of coming to an understanding you can live with.

Put in the starkest possible terms: Art fails to understand Vladek because he can't comprehend the Holocaust, whereas Bechdel tries to understand herself through her father's life and succeeds because the attempt is a thing in itself, e.g. the book's Proustian returns to Proust:

Fun Home reifies memory via narrative, but it does so in a way that reminds readers that human beings aren't made of words.  Granted, the above panel is about as word-specific as word-picture relations come, but in a graphic novel it's panels like this one that are intruding on the conventions of the medium.  People typically think of their memories as feelings and images punctuated by what others said, but outside of graphic novels the only means of communicating them without recourse to someone else's interpretation of them is through words.  This difference is figured in the book as the relation between Gatsby in the novel and Redford's portrayal of him onscreen: the former remains closer to Fitzgerald's vision of him because there's no other mind translating, via performance, Gatsby for the audience.

A Better, Purer Science

As someone who wrote a dissertation entitled “Maximal Diversity: Non-Darwinian Evolutionary Theory in American Fiction, 1895-1910,” I can’t help but lend my full support to this bill:

Oklahoma state Rep. Sally Kern wants to make it clear that her new legislation protecting the rights of science teachers to “teach all science instead of just the Darwin model” is in no way an attempt to introduce creationism or Intelligent Design into the classroom. It is, in fact, just an attempt to let teachers teach “pure science” about “all of evolution”

No student in Oklahoma can possibly understand the modern world without a firm grasp of heterogenesis, Lamarkian inheritance, kinetogenesis, orthogenesis, metakinesis, geographic isolation, biologic isolation, the Baldwin effect, organic selection, and orthoplasty, to name but a few. To stick to those strains of evolutionary theory that Morse Peckham called “Darwinisticistic” is a travesty against science and democracy that can only be rectified by the State of Oklahoma commissioning to write a textbook for many moneys.

How, exactly, do you film someone being stalked by a statue? (Being lecture notes on the Doctor Who episode "Time of Angels," obviously.)

Something lumbering as quickly as a zombie wouldn't seem to pose much of a threat, so it goes without saying that turning them into something threatening would entail speeding them up or increasing their numbers unto ubiquity.  In the former case, their uniqueness is reduced and they become just another movie monster; in the latter, they're horrifying because our inability to grasp the greatness of their numbers approaches the sublime.  But how would they pose a threat if they were unable to move at all?  I'm teaching the episode of Doctor Who entitled "Time of Angels" because the answer to that question is that they move via film cliché.  More on that in a moment.  First, let me introduce you to the Doctor:

He is a funny old man with a magic blue blox whose Wikipedia entry is longer than New Hampshire's, so I'm not sure I'll be able to briefly sum up who and what he is.  Suffice it to say he's the English equivalent of Superman, only intellectualized instead of strong.  You don't really need to understand the Doctor to understand this episode or my post, though; more important for the present are the Weeping Angels, a malevolent race of statues created by the current show-runner, Steven Moffatt.  Let me say it again: they are a malevolent race of statues.  How do they demonstrate their malevolence?  When you're not looking.

There's a purity to the concept of creating a monster whose movements perfectly (and can only, because they must) match the cinematographic vocabulary of horror.  Every time the camera is on them, they must be statues, meaning the audience must actively infer their off-screen movement.  The audience must be attentive because they won't be able to sit back and observe the proceedings (and because if they do there won't be any proceedings to sit back and observe).  The challenge for Moffat and director Adam Smith is to take this ingenious metaphor for horror films and turn it into something genuinely horrifying.  What follows is how they do it in the beginning of the episode. 

First, they place the Doctor's companion, Amy Pond, in an enclosed space:

This is a fairly long shot, the purpose of which is to provide the audience with a sense of both a character and that character's status relative to his or her environment.  It's also uses deep focus ironically, keeping everything in focus so that the audience can see just how much of it there isn't.  Additionally, the tight framing of the shot is similar to this scene from Mad Men, except here those lines are both imagined and actual because she's in a metal tube.  The result is a claustrophic atmosphere, but a bit menacing, too, because the audience knows the cheat cut is effected from the position on the wall occupied by the recorded image of an Angel:

Note that Smith eschews a point-of-view shot and instead places the camera equidistant between the recording and Pond.  The previous shot established that these are extremely tight quarters, and zooming in to this eyeline match makes them feel even tighter.  This is espeically true because the series often consists of the camera following the Doctor as he whirls about in his magic blue box, which is itself whirling about through space and time.  The entire series is predicated on an escapist conceit, which is why "it's bigger on the inside" is so critical to the show's appeal—not to mention why a box that isn't bigger on the inside is such a terrifying concept to this audience.  To return to my point: this is a bad box.  A confining box.  Only bad things can happen in a confining box, and Smith is framing these shots in order to heighten the impression of confinement.  Both shots above are impressively framed themselves, but more significantly, the shots and reverse shots within the bunker use the same angle of framing.  The level of framing shifts as Pond approaches the image, but not the angle, which results in the scene feeling very constricted: can't look up, can't look down, only straight ahead:

Note that the camera seems to have zoomed slightly when it reversed, resulting in aggressive frontality as Pond's eyes directly address the audience's.  But not only does she not see us, she sees straight through us.  She's staring at the image behind the audience, and there's an unsettling disconnect between the directness of her address and the audience's knowledge of its actual recepient.  It's also disorienting because shot sequences of this sort often signal that a character is paying more attention to an element in the scene, as the next shot, a close-up of the Angel, seems to suggest:

As Pond becomes more interested in the image, the camera zooms in to communicate that interest to the audience.  Why is the next shot disturbing?

Because it suggests that the image is staring back, and images shouldn't be capable of staring back.  Moreover, the zooming in suggests that the image is paying an increasing amount of attention to her, and images ought not be able to express increasing interest.  It's almost as if the audience becoming uncomfortable because the episode is telling them, in filmic terms, something they know can't be true.  Pond then leaves for a moment to ask the Doctor a question, and when she returns so too does the camera, first to its original position:

Dave Sim's relationship to literary modernism and Dear Lord whose prose is that?

I'm revising the paper for the Cerebus collection I mentioned earlier and, to be frank, I'm not sure I recognize myself.  Too much blogging and writing a pedagogy book instead of revising the dissertation must do that, I suppose, because this doesn't even sound like me:

Linking Sim to Pound by reference to their similarly developing relationship to form and to Joyce by their analogous material circumstances may seem like an attempt to shoehorn Sim into a canon in which he does not properly belong.  However, Sim's inclusion and ventriloquism of another notable Irish modernist, Oscar Wilde, in Jaka's Story requires at the very least that the book be considered an homage to, or possibly a parody of, Wilde's high modern aesthetic.  Whether the book partakes of that high modern aesthetic depends upon an estimation of the success of the ventriloquism, but even if it is unsuccessful, the inclusion alone is enough to warrant numbering Sim among academic modernists like Pound and Joyce.  Because there exist as many definitions of “modernism” as scholars of it, for the purposes of the current argument—not to mention general relevance—these competing modernisms will be defined specifically by the attitude they strike to history.  In this respect, the high modernism of Wilde can be characterized by its rejection of mimesis and the attendant distancing from history that that rejection entails, whereas the academic modernism of Joyce and Pound seeks to, as the latter urged, “make it new,” with the “it” in question being the nightmare of history from which the former struggled to awake. 

That Sim lifts Wilde from history and employs him as a narrator in Jaka's Story is not merely an irony seemingly designed to irritate the author of The Decay of Lying, but in “making Wilde new,” Sim demonstrates a formal and aesthetic solidarity with the academic modernists.  The highest irony of Wilde operating as a narrator is that he is not narrating Sim's book, Jaka's Story, but one that exists within Sim's titled Daughter of Palnu—meaning, in short, that not only does Sim's imitation of Wilde violate the principles of high modernism, but he employs the imitation to write a book which itself violates the principles of high modernism by relating the actual story of an exiled princess named Jaka.  The word “actual” is not meant to imply that Daughter of Palnu is factually accurate, merely that because her story is related to Oscar by her husband, Rick, no matter how fantastically Oscar embellished the novel would still be one in which, to paraphrase Wilde in The Decay of Lying, art would be imitating life.

I feel like, I maybe need, a few more, commas.  Also, this is, or may be, my most boring, post ever. 

Establishing the tone of AMC's The Walking Dead

The first few minutes of the first episode of AMC's The Walking Dead need to establish the tone of the entire series, but they need to do so without boring the audience.  Given that the comic on which it's based alternates between menacingly quiet moments and long stretches of extreme chattiness, it may be a mistake to think about the tone in a singular fashion; however, the fact that these two tonal elements could be characterized as "opposites" means that the opening scene of the series will have to choose one or the other.  Director Frank Darabont not only decided on quiet menace, he emphasized the future significance of silence by turning down the diagetic sound and eschewing non-diagetic sound entirely.  The result?  The series introduces itself to the world with a unusually quiet establishing shot of a car approaching the camera on a deserted road:

As the car nears, the camera tracks it and Darabont uses the resulting tracking shot to create the impression that the person behind the camera is hiding behind the car.  The camera pulls back until the burnt wreck in the foreground nearly obscures the patrol car, only to pan right at the conclusion of the long take and reveal that its "hiding place" has been compromised.  In short, the camera seems to be hiding from the patrol car, which strongly suggests to the audience that there's something to hide from and that it may be in that patrol car.  As if to emphasize that potential danger in the car, Darabont moves the camera-spy-without-a-hiding-place further away from the patrol car before cutting away:

Even after the cut away, the camera still behaves as if the mind behind it wants to remain hidden while scoping out a better hiding place.  It begins behind and to the right of the burnt wreck and tracks to the back and to the left as Rick Grimes moves toward it.  The resulting shot keeps Rick occupying the center of a long shot until the camera knows he can be trusted:

On teaching racially fraught literature in racially diverse classrooms (American Born Chinese)

The two problems that confront any author attempting to write a confessional comic are likely best summarized in these two sequences from Art Spieglman's Maus:

In short: how are painful memories and painfully stereotypical people best represented in a medium associated with childishness?  I'll discuss Spiegelman's answer to this question in more detail when I teach Maus in a few weeks.  For now, it is enough to pose it and identify it as a critical problem faced by all non-white authors, including that of American Born Chinese, Gene Yang.  Unlike Maus, in which an already assimilated Art Spiegelman is depicting his decidedly unassimilated father, American Born Chinese is very much concerned with the process of assimilation: what is gained, what is lost, etc.  For example: