Seven Red

In addition to my many other Annoying Writing Quirks, I always find myself starting off these posts with “So,…,” as if we’ve been having a conversation. But the conversation’s been sparse of late, I’ll admit. It was the summer, and I’ve been – despite that – pretty busy, but also feeling pretty drained. This combination yielded this result: I slogged through all the work I had to do, and really couldn’t bring myself to get to the stuff I want to do. One of which, of course, is updating all my fine reader. Ahem, readers. Also, our digital camera broke, so both kidpics and Graffiti Fridays became undoable. Ah well. In any case, now that the school year at Unnamed Employer Institution is kicking up again, I’ve decided that I will commit to frequent updates here, as it keeps me sane and let’s me spout off without spouting off on stuff that I shouldn’t be spouting off on, identifiably speaking. Pure semi-ano0nymous outlet, in other words. Part of that means that there will probably be a lot of posts like this, in which I essentially say nothing of interest, but simply post to post. Eh, it can’t all be wedding cake. Expect the Evil of Banality series to multiply substantially.   I do like the word “uninteresting,” though. In my line of work, I think it may be the supreme insult, even worse than saying something’s dumb. Something can be smart, but uninteresting, and that’s really the killer. I’m reclaiming uninteresting!

Ellie says hi to her grandmother, who presumably doesn’t visit this site to read my rants and ramblings. So, from time to time she gets a giant, blue-eyed smiley face for her troubles.

But, on the same note, a pet peeve of mine. I’m fine with calling grandparents “granny” and similar such endearments. Ellie calls her grandmothers “Granny” and “Nonna.” (Ellie’s “Nonna,” by the way, is 100% Irish, but that’s another story). That’s great. I had a grandma and a nonna (my nonna was 100% Italian, while my grandma fled Ireland in the 1920′s). But when I refer to either of my grandmothers in conversation with people outside my family, I always use “my grandmother.” I get totally weirded out when I’m speaking to some adult about something and I hear “Oh, my gramgram used to make that dish.” Your gramgram? Really? It’s a little familiar. But this strikes me as a very strange rule I’m applying. So, say Ellie is talking to me, twenty years hence. It would be perfectly fine for her to say “Is Granny back from her waterskiing junket yet?” If, on the other hand, she was talking to her med school colleague, she should say “My grandmother is waterskiing in Antigua.” Not “My granny is waterskiing in Antigua,” cuz that’s just weird. Hell, when I talk to my brothers I still refer to my mother as “Mommy.” But I don’t refer to her as Mommy to anyone else in the entire friggin’ world – not even to her. I remember making this case once to a woman from the South, and she got all sniffy like “It’s a Southern thing.” OK, maybe. Am I the only one bothered by this? Am I the only one who cringes when otherwise reasonable adults tell me about their Nanna or their Pop-pop?

Yaargh. Curmudgeon! Yaargh!

Or barely, hereby, in the form of the most improbable signature. - Jacques Derrida, “Signature Event Context”

For the last week or so we’ve been working more with babygirl on her letters. She was really resisting writing anything before now, but somehow she managed to interest her in producing letters rather than just identifying them. She’s been pretty good with the alphabet for awhile. For some reason, she really shrank from having to make letters, so we’re happy that this week she finally got into it. Every day that I picked her up from daycare, I saw that she was practicing her letters along with her coloring. She even had her full name written out on one of her coloring pictures.

So, anyway, I’ve been debating whether to scan and post one of these attempts, because all she writes is her name (it’s only three distinct letters), and that would give up the whole anonymous blog gambit, at least as far as babygirl is concerned. She now wants to write her full name, so we’re just going to go ahead and unveil babygirl’s recent (and, to my mind, best) creation. I think it’s pretty tight, less than three weeks before her third birthday, but I’m the daddy, so I get to puff everything up like that.

We’ll work on getting it inside those lines, but there are worse problems one could have, I suppose!

Since a very young age, I’ve been fascinated by the alphabet, which I think explains a lot of my subsequent activities. But watching her struggle with letterforms, slowly improve, and then just grasp them – it brings back all that old wonder. She was making A’s today as part of her quest to write her full first name, and the most difficult part seems to be connecting the lines at the top, bringing them to a point. She draws parallel lines and then cuts across them with a curve. But she’s really tough on herself. She says, “No, that’s not an ‘A.’” Keep working on it, Ellie. You’ll get there.

I declare to my antimacassar if you took up a straw from the bloody floor and if you said to Bloom: Look at, Bloom. Do you see that straw? That’s a straw. Declare to my aunt he’d talk about it for an hour so he would and talk steady. - James Joyce, Ulysses

In which I offer an analysis of the subject lines for the last three spam messages I’ve received.

1) Tired of people laughing at your small tool – The initial meaning of this statement is clear enough, with “tool,” serving as a common metaphor for penis. So, on a quick reading, one might think that the author is asking the reader a rhetorical question, the answer to which would be, well, yes. But, oh, so much more interesting. In the first place, simply on that initial reading, the subject line writer is being gender neutral: he or she doesn’t specify whether these “people” who are thus laughing are men, women, or both. The spam message seems, in other words, intent on avoiding any heteronormativity. It’s also quite complimentary in a strange way, since the reader would have had opportunity for more than one person to laugh at his small penis, and, in fact, one would even think that many such people have laughed, since the whole operation has become tiresome. So the implied reader for the rhetorical question seems to be somebody who is extraordinarily good at inducing others (of indeterminate sex and orientation) into a situation of nakedness, with the only downside being their eventual laughter at his small penis. This is a persuasive courter, but with one little flaw. In a more extended form, the question could be restated as “Aren’t you tired, dear reader, that all these people you’ve successfully convinced to go to bed with you only end up breaking up in hysterics when they catch sight of your very small penis?” But that’s just the initial reading. If we look more closely, we should notice that there is no question mark at all. The subject line, while missing any closing punctuation, could thus read as a declarative sentence rather than a rhetorical question: it is the subject line’s author who is tired of people laughing at the reader’s small tool. This is a strange sort of statement indeed. In order to buy into it, we’d have to assume that the writer, a third party, neither one of the laughers nor the small penised reader, has had access to the laughing, and has grown tired of it. Was the writer in the room on several of these occasions? Hiding in the closet, wincing? Is the writer a friend of the recipient who has had to endure many sad, alcohol-soaked tales of this recurring problem? And what would those conversation have been like? Why would the writer himself be tired of other people laughing at the reader’s misfortune? Is the writer merely compassionate? Or is there something else going on? This is very curious stuff. Of course, we are also authorized, I think, to read the statement literally, and to ignore the cultural metaphorics of the tool. Maybe there really is a small tool, like, say, a tiny little screwdriver used for detailed electronics work, and the writer is sick and tired of all the people who immediately break into penis jokes whenever the small screwdriver is removed from its delicate carrying case. Maybe the writer is a manager named Ernest in a small accounting office, and this email is not spam at all, but a misfire, meant for the tech guy, Kevin, who comes around to the office from time to time and breaks out the small screwdriver, and everybody in the office starts laughing, because Dave, the office jokester, says “Hey, that’s a pretty small tool you got there, Kevin,” and Gina the New Girl laughs and laughs, and Ernest loves Gina the New Girl, and wonders some nights if he hired her because he loved her the very instant he saw her, and the ethical problems that would entail, and he has seen her talking to Dave at Rumours Lounge after work, talking up close and giggling at his jokes, and he now fears that Dave will win her over with his humor, so he’s writing this email pleading with Kevin not to bring that damn tiny screwdriver around again, in order to deprive Dave of the opportunity for yet another knee-slapper.

2) Don’t be embarrassed of your little one every again – On its face, this subject line would seem to have the same general message as #1: the implication is that by opening the message, you will learn of some technique or process by which to enlarge your penis. But a closer reading reveals several characteristics that distinguish it from #1. First, the reader is not openly laughed at by people, but rather experiences a subjective state of embarrassment. This is a key distinction, because we’re not assured that the implied reader ever does manage to get anybody in bed. This embarrassment may precede any partners, and may even prevent the reader from approaching possible partners in the first place. While the reader in #1 would thus experience the cruelty of others, the implied reader for this subject line could be thought to be at the root of his own problem in socializing. Or, alternatively, the reader may have one or more partners who do not laugh, but the reader imagines that the partner(s) may be laughing, and thus suffers a state of embarrassment. Whereas the reader for #1 experiences an objectively verifiable reaction, the reader from #2 can only refer to an inner experience, either before, during, or after the exposure of said small penis to others. I will leave it to my own readers to determine which is a sadder story: the master pick-up artist who suffers the supposed cruelty of his partners (itself a cruel irony), or the self-conscious subject who merely imagines such cruelty, and is tortured into inaction because of it. But again, we might read the subject line another way. Specifically, the term “little one” is often used to refer to one’s children; indeed, as I learned when she frequented new parent bulletin boards after babygirl’s birth, it is the common phrase, and even often abbreviated as LO. So, this subject line, like the last one, may not be about penises at all, but about parents who are embarrassed by the behavior of their own children. What does the subject line promise? Behavior modification for small children? Or some method for parents to get over themselves and allow their kids to just be kids? And really, we might ask again which version is more tragic: the shy and humiliated man who cannot meet people because of his embarrassment over his penis, or the parent who recoils at the behavior – perhaps innocent – of his or her own child? The subject line tells a sad story, in any case. And we also might attend to the error – presumably a typo – of “every again.” The substitution of the non-standard “embarrassed of” rather than the more common prepositional usage of “embarrassed by” would suggest that the error really is an error, in which case, what a rich and meaningful mistake it is! Or is it a mistake? Did the writer mean to include a noun after “every,” rather than actually meaning to write “ever.” Was this a verbal tic that was never corrected in revision? Could it have said “Don’t be embarrassed of your little one every morning play date,” or “Don’t be embarrassed of your little one every time you hire a hooker.” Maybe the writer didn’t want to specify, and decided to use “again” instead, but simply forgot to delete “every.” We’ll never know, I guess. Finally, I think we should note the imperative form. It is, of course, common sales practice to use the imperative (Don’t spend too much on car insurance!), but might not the imperative here signal an actual order, and, indeed, an order that the reader could not possibly comply with? Might it not be an ironic commentary on the limits of subjective freedom? For how does one prevent in advance one’s own embarrassment, where embarrassment constitutes an almost involuntary affective state? Might not the author of this message be commenting on the impossibility of controlling particular affects, these states that come from outside, that cannot be controlled by the subject that experiences or endures them? Isn’t this really a bit like saying “Don’t love her anymore!”  or “Don’t love him any more!” – the worst advice given to the moping teenager by his or her friends – but really an introduction to adulthood, as we learn the boundaries of the will: Don’t love her anymore, as if one could control through sheer will one’s fallingness, one’s loves? Don’t be embarrassed of your little one every again! Oh, the reader thinks, would that I could turn it off!

3) RE: Q&A Doctor Anita Graves – Since I have never – to my knowledge – attended any discussion by Doctor Anita Graves, nor written any follow-up email regarding the Q&A that presumably followed such discussion, you can imagine my surprise when  I read this subject line, which takes the form of a response email to a follow-up to a Q&A session. Did I attend any such lecture? Did I send any such response to the Q&A? These questions struck panic into me when this subject line popped up in my inbox: could such a thing have happened without my remembering it? And so I examined the subject line more closely. In the first place, I’m struck by the form of responsiveness that’s imputed. First, there must have been some discussion. Following the discussion, there must have been a question and answer session. Following the question and answer session, the implied reader felt the need to either inquire or respond further. And following that response or inquiry, the writer of the subject line presumably provided yet another response. “RE: Q&A Doctor Anita Graves” can thus be read as a dense sign of these much more extensive relationships of response and counter-response, information and courtesy. We can go further. The initial speaker, Doctor Anita Graves, retains her title, though whether she is a medical expert (who studies, say, the relative size of male sexual organs), or a professor of some kind is left to the implied reader’s memory. Certainly, a good argument can be made that Dr. Graves is, in fact, a medical doctor, since the use of the full term “Doctor” is much more common when referring to medical doctors than it is with regard to PhDs. So, for the sake of argument, let’s assume that Anita Graves is a medical doctor. That adds a new layer to this richly woven subject line. The initial contact was with a professional, an expert. The expert is at the heart of the questioning; all the responsiveness and dialogue that follows is premised on the expert opinion of Doctor Anita Graves, the font of knowledge. In this small subject line we can detect the social structure of scientific, medical, and perhaps even expert discourse as a whole: the expert speaks, then allows additional clarifying questions; the implied reader seeks more, ever more truth from our expert, who gamely replies, as is the expert’s duty to both layperson and peer. Or perhaps I’m wr0ng about all of this! Perhaps Doctor Anita Graves has refused to do a Q&A in her pending lecture, absolutely refused to take questions from these jerks, and has stated so in no uncertain terms, and the administrator insisted that Q&A was a condition of the stipend, as follows: “Q&A Doctor Anita Graves…is a condition of the stipend!” Using her whole name and title thusly spelled out – the email equivalent of your mother calling you by your full given, middle, and last name when she catches you outside writing in the wet cement or catching a drag from a cigarette, and all your little hoodrat friends take off running because they know you’re so fucking busted when the full on name comes out. Doctor Anita Graves! Is that you writing in that cement there! Get in here this instant! And then this email, Doctor Anita Graves’ response to the completely inappropriate tone of the administrator’s admonishment, something like “RE: Q&A Doctor Anita Graves…It may be a condition of the stipend, but you can take your stipend, your lecture, and your fucking Q&A and shove it! I will not – NOT – be questioned by the likes of, etc. Yrs, Anita Emily Graves, MD”

I read a lot of 70′s era computer stuff, mostly magazines and hobbyist newsletters and the like. I’ve noticed this phrasing over and over, and it’s curious, because nobody really says it anymore: “that really puts people uptight.” So, to put uptight, meaning, roughly, to make nervous. People still use “uptight,” but they don’t really mean it as “nervous” so much as “overly reserved.” I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone use “to put uptight.” My Google searches have only turned up the lyrics from the Byrd’s song “Mr. Spaceman” (those saucer shaped lights put people uptight), but it was otherwise a fairly common phrase during most of the 1970′s. I like it. I’m bringing it back, like, this Fannie Mae business really puts people uptight. Yeah.

I read with interest Booga Face’s analysis of The Pursuit of Happyness, a film I haven’t seen, and actually actively avoided. One of the themes that came up in the analysis was the strange placement of efficiency and innovation, and I want to comment on that a bit here. Specifically, BF demonstrates that TPOH expends considerable ideological effort to locate efficiency and innovation as qualities of the entrepreneur rather than complex social networks (on which any autonomy is built). This is certainly the neoliberal doxa, and it saturates the discourse even where it would seem least likely (such as, for example, in the discourse of micro-finance and the like). But I’m more interested in the transposition of efficiency into a quality of the multitude.

Efficiency has always occupied a strange position in Left theory, which is not surprising given that efficiency was usually encountered, concretely, as intensification of exploitative relationships.  Even where efficiency became the watchword of the hilariously named “really existing socialism” (in the awful, if remarkably effective, five year plans and rapid industrialization schemes), it subsequently became precisely the point of attack for those identifying real socialism with its capitalist twin. When efficiency is grouped under the broader category of instrumental reason, it becomes the hinge that allows a whole range of mid-twentieth century thinkers to identify the two while also drawing both into a more general destiny of practice. When Ellul says technics, for example, he almost always means efficiency rather than any concrete technology; it is a mode of encountering the world shared by both capitalist and “real socialist” forms of production. And Ellul is only the most obvious case. You could run the gamut of thinkers who focused their energies on instrumental reason – you pick ‘em: Arendt, Adorno, Habermas – and see the horror of efficiency played out again and again, not, of course, efficiency in itself (as it operates in Ellul), but efficiency as the primary concern of praxis rather than one form of approach among others. One need not invoke Bataille’s fascination with productive excess and waste or Heidegger’s “creation of a standing reserve” to see how else this discourse plays out.

But I think that Booga Face is quite right that efficiency suddenly takes on a positive value in what I’ll repeat – tongue in cheek – as the Italian Ideology, or at least in Negri. Which is an interesting reversal. On the one hand, from the perspective of Marxist theory, it’s quite clear why the category of efficiency escapes the logic of exploitation within this discourse. In traditional Marxist theory, you find two primary forms of capital: constant capital and variable capital, where constant capital is (and this is a very simplified, blogified version) the “means of production,” such as factories and machines, while variable capital is (simplified again) living labor, or the potential of workers to produce. In a nutshell, barring innovation, you can’t squeeze any more “value” (which is to say, profit) out of constant capital: it actually degrades, of course, as Marx describes in some of his funnier passages. But you can squeeze more out of variable capital, it being, well, variable. Concretely, this is the horror of efficiency from the perspective of the worker: increased quotas, extension of the working day, maximum use of every available second of work time, etc. In terms of experience, this is the process through which capital attacks the body (or better, life) most viciously, as even a cursory reading of Taylor’s “experiments” would show you. It’s also the site around which class struggle organized itself from the industrial revolution onward (work slow downs, sabotage, agitation for the eight-hour day, etc.). If variable capital is the site of exploitation, then  efficiency is nothing but the techniques of extruding ever more value from variable capital. That it also requires a particular subjectivity that forgets the Being of beings (or whatever) is only gravy for critique after that. So, this is an old story, and hardly worth this oversimplified retelling at this point.

But the story is necessary to grasp the reversal proposed by the notion of the General Intellect, a concept that serves as the real engine for Negri, Virno, and others. If production has become primarily “immaterial,” which is to say, cognitive, communicative, and affective, then – and this is the strong claim from Negri, as I take it – living labor is transposed with constant capital, because what is constant is the not a factory or a machine, but the totality of cognitive, communicative, and affective practice. It’s not a mistake, in this sense, that the very concept of the General Intellect is taken from Marx’s “Fragment on Machines.” If, for Marx, the machine (that is, constant capital) was a concretized instance of general social knowledge for industrial production (in other words, any given technology is a materialization of the whole of technoscientific knowledge), the emergence of immaterial labor simply bypasses the “material” of the machine. But when it does so, nobody really owns the (non)machine of the General Intellect any more. In effect, capital, in its development, gives away the means of production - in that “constant capital” is no longer materialized in an “ownable” machine,” but distributed to the entirety of the social field. This is why capital, for Negri, becomes absolutely parasitical when it comes to immaterial labor: it is not simply relatively parasitical anymore (Marx’s vampire), since it doesn’t even provide production with a set of means or organizational techniques.

Of course, this is a fiction to some extent; it’s a fiction that does a better job of explaining the frenetic insistence on intellectual property rights over the last 30 years than any liberal explanation I’ve seen. Even, however, if we grant that what immaterial labor really means is that capital overtakes the whole of social life (i.e., that real subsumption doesn’t structurally empower anybody, or that play becomes work rather than the reverse), Negri is still correct that work in such an arrangement is immeasurable from the perspective of surplus value, or that variable capital becomes an extremely troubled category, since production occupies a different “temporality.” The only time of innovation (or of comforting, caring for, and other affective labor) is the time of kairos, which lacks the quantitative dimension that would allow measure. And if variable capital no longer maintains a body-time consistency that can be worked on by the industrial engineer or the mid-level manager, then you need something else to ground value. How about a ridiculous “retreat” to pump up your subjective enthusiasm for the work process? It’s as reasonable and impotent a response as any other (and maybe as terrible as the Taylorist subdivision of the worker’s body). Better yet, how about an entire discipline devoted to teaching workers the subjective experience of kairos as a means of training for the (new) immaterial work process.  Something else to measure value, see?

For Negri, this something else is the financial markets; he’s also correct that finance is a laughable substitute as a measuring device, as the recent confusion relating to the “sub-prime” or “credit crisis” amply demonstrates. Everytime Citigroup or some other bank writes down another $8 billion in CDO losses, they proclaim again that the financial markets have no idea how to measure value – they literally don’t know the value of the assets they even hold. But the other result is that efficiency, which was constituted concretely by techniques of extruding surplus value from variable capital, fails to hit the same object: the body and life of the worker. Certainly, there are no shortage of contemporary organizational theories that promote messy inefficiency as a management strategy; as Virno notes, the old factories used to say “Quiet! Men Working,” while today the mantra is “Network! Talk! You’re at Work!” (The worries that employees in information sectors waste too much time surfing the Internet and IM’ing always seem decidedly half-hearted). But this just indicates a slackening of efficiency as it is classically understood. What’s more interesting is whether efficiency itself is transformed in this process (in its operation and concept) to lose the character that actuated so much critique in modernity. To get to this, I want to work through why Hannah Arendt’s work becomes so central in the “Italian Ideology.” Maybe tomorrow…

Talk about an identity crisis! Just a little something for a Saturday night. First, Ray Gelato doing the Renato Carosone classic. You may remember it from the classic scene in The Talented Mr. Ripley, below. The Italian Ideology, indeed. Enjoy.

Now that Part 1 has managed to alienate everyone in my field (as part of my unending quest to begin a second career), it’s time to turn to the Top 20 CCCC Presentation Mistakes, Part 2. Just so you know that I know, this list demonstrates that I am a remarkably ungenerous jackass who probably doesn’t belong in any teaching situation, since the cynicism disease has apparently eaten my nurturing gene. Or something. I get it. And yet, here we go:

11. The Concept Stew – This presentation is usually not bad, and can’t really be characterized as a “mistake.” It just is what it is; I’m just still trying to figure out what it is. The Concept Stew is really a content issue, and goes something like this:

We all know X set of concepts that we usually use to think about Y subject. Definition of concept X1, definition of concept X2, definition of concept X3. These are derived from acknowledged theorists in our field. However, they are actually inadequate for thinking about Y because blah blah blah. Luckily, these other people in a thoroughly unrelated field have developed Z set of concepts that might help us. Definition of concept Z1, definition of concept Z2, definition of concept Z3. Look what happens when we apply concept Z1-3 on Y case study A. We should consider using these Z concepts to think about Y in the future.

There’s something endearing about The Concept Stew, and I’ll admit that I’ve done a bit of stewing myself. It’s even lovely, and often smart, and it’s far better than almost anything else on this list. I guess my only complaint is that it seems pretty easy, and that Z set of concepts often fits so neatly that it seems suspicious, a level of suspicion that generally increases with the distance of rhetoric and writing instruction from the field that produces the Z concepts. I’m quite sure that the economic concept of the information cascade has rhetorical cognates, so to speak, so it’s not clear why we need one and not the other. That and nobody ever follows through on the use of Z concepts but perhaps the presenter, which makes it essentially advertising.

12. The Technophile – I see you there messing around with your brand new MacBook Pro. You’ve got the A/V hook-up working, and you’re testing out the video. You even brought those portable speakers so that we hear the audio clearly. Good. I’m the last person to complain about a little tech stuff at the presentation. But why, why I ask you, must the video be longer than your explanation of why I’m supposed to care about it? Why must it be a video that I could have easily seen by checking my Digg RSS feed last week? What does it tell us about writing, rhetoric, communication, language, or culture? Let me explain something to you, friend. At its very heart, our entire profession is predicated on the notion that the thing does NOT speak for itself. Like, ever. By the “thing,” I mean your video of the guy riding the BMX bike around a city I presume to be Miami while Biggie’s “Juicy” thumps in the background. Prefacing the video by saying “I want to show a video of vernacular literacies” doesn’t help me. You might be awed by the multimodality of it all, but I’m here wondering why Christmas missed us. I’m perfectly happy to see kickass demonstrations of what the MacBook can do. There’s an Apple store on Michigan Avenue. Hell, there’s one in Skokie.

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So, this year I went to the “big” conference in my field, here in New Orleans. Every year after this conference, you get a debate of sorts on the field listservs, and it always goes like this: Do you prefer when people read their papers or speak them without reading? Or, do you prefer some other more discussion-based presentation? Advocates for whatever position – call them readerly, speakerly, and teacherly – present their cases, some counterarguments ensue, and the then the whole thing dies, only to be replayed in more or less the same form one year hence. It’s a pointless endeavor, as is so much. I thought I’d try an equally pointless classification of the different presentations, so here are the Top Twenty CCCC Presentation Mistakes.

I will, of course, have to present two caveats. First, many of the presentations I saw this year were very good. This is a list of problem presentations, not a list of all presentations. Second, I have been guilty of one or more of these myself. Maybe even most people have. Take it in the spirit of fun and don’t go getting all sniffy. Without further ado:

1. The Professional—The Professional is in some ways the best kind of talk, in the way that the high-end hit man is somewhat admirable. Or, like the Terminator is kinda cool. The Professional is written and read, but aims toward very speakerly prose. The presenter has picked it over and revised it 30 times for short sentences and clear signposting. If you look at the actual paper, it includes speaker-cues like “Slow Down Here,” and “Emphasize this Point with a Gesture,” and other such stage directions. In terms of delivery, the Professional is almost always delivered from the podium, at a steady and naturalistic rhythm, with some painfully transparent attempts at voice modulation (“Emphasize this Point with Voice Modulation!!!”). It never, ever goes overtime, because it has been practiced in front of a mirror 300 times, and timed to the half-second. Content-wise, the talk is meticulously crafted, going something like this:

Scholar Muckity-Muck 1 has written that such-and-such, while Scholar Muckity-Muck 2 has added blah blah blah, but very few people have considered yada yada yada, which is a problem (for knowledge) because yada yada. I will discuss a completely unmemorable case study (see accompanying handout for quotations) that allows us to think of this neglected yada yada yada thusly; then I’ll make some very obvious inductions thereto, because this research, while methodologically perfect, lacks any manner of creativity, courage, or insight. Thank you.

After listening to the Professional, you feel a mild glow of pleasure/pain. You learned nothing, and likely even got stupider, but at least you weren’t abused in the process.

2. The Excitable Speech—The Excitable Speech is largely a graduate student operation, although you’ll occasionally see very senior scholars do it as well. All but the most pathologically earnest junior faculty are far too jaded to give the Excitable Speech. This version of the conference presentation requires that the speaker have an almost preternatural interest in a relatively mundane subject; this level of interest requires that the subject matter be described in a manner that would make a Revival Tent preacherman blush, like “Ohmigod can you believe how cool and complicated this all is? I mean, can you believe it????” A few years ago I saw a woman gushing about the historicity of citation systems or some other such obvious notion. Apparently, the Chicago Manual of Style has not been a perpetual presence on the Earth since Creation. Who knew? The speaker’s fetish for the subject, needless to say, almost never translates, so the surfeit of enthusiasm just seems embarrassing and weird. The Excitable Speech will tend to go over time, but luckily, the graduate student’s advisor is sitting in the now largely uncomfortable audience with a hook, frowning, and will pull the excitable speaker down for a gentle, head-patting, talking-to later.

3. The Library Database—The Library Database is not so much a scholarly presentation as it is a piece of conceptual art. It asks a basic question: How many proper names of people in my field might I fit into my 20 minute talk without merely reading a list of names? Given such a question, most reasonable people would err on the side of fewer names; the Library Database rather shockingly errs toward more names—tending toward the limit of the list. Still, the presentation is impressive, simply because the Library Databaser must include a near infinite variation of signal phrases, since using “according to X” 150 times would give up the game.

4. The Body Poet – The Body Poet presentation involves a thoroughly quirky performance during which the speaker flails about or otherwise makes gesticulations similar to some sun worship ritual. Under the cringe-inducing impression that academic prose is “too rational and tied up in Western metaphysics,” the speaker has instead opted for a weirdly arranged set of poetic vignettes that also involve The Body ™, it being well-known that Western metaphysics has ignored and debased The Body ™ as a general proposition. Therefore (although the speaker will never use this hideously linear term), the speaker will “foreground” The Body ™ through the presentation, and depend on the variable associations of the audiences’ own Bodily experiences, since the space between the speaker’s and audience’s “differently located Bodies” is where “meaning actually happens” anyway. Perhaps not surprisingly, the “content” of the presentation—supposing we were authorized to accept such a loaded and conflictual term—generally involves an experimental class that the speaker taught, and the ideological baggage that caused his or her students to absolutely despise it.

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It’s fitting that David Simon and Co. would leave the most intense speech of The Wire‘s last episode to the least likely character. A review of the blogs and entertainment magazines (which I’ll leave to you) suggests that the key speech – even the key moment in the episode – belongs not to Marlo, or McNulty, or Bunk, nor is it really the eloquent encomium put forth by Landsman at McNulty’s fake wake. Rather, it comes from Cheese Wagstaff (ahem, Melvin), played by the inimitable Method Man.

Out on bond, Cheese is looking to take the lead in the drug consortium; he pledges $900,000 to a general fund for buying Marlo’s contact with the Greeks. When the other dealers express surprise at his offer, he notes, “We sellin’ dope and coke in Baltimore…any y’all who ain’t got that kind of money need be ashamed.” It’s the set up. There’s something eloquent in the delivery of even this line, but the killer move is coming: “There ain’t no back in the day. There ain’t no nostalgia to this shit here. There’s just the street, and the game, and what happen here today.” And then Slim Charles offers a rebuttal. Apart from nailing Cheese’s character as the perfect post-industrial opportunist (when Joe was on top, he was with Joe, when Marlo was, with Marlo, etc.) – a pretty consistent portrayal, I might add – it’s also the real moment of nihilism, a kind of nihilism that (even in Cheese) is almost attractive: the cow with no memory. A man’s gotta have a code, Omar tells us. Cheese has no code other than this: we sellin’ dope and coke in Baltimore. That’s it. It’s a perpetual decoding. At first glance, Omar’s version – which is also, of course, Bunk’s – seems the more admirable; they’re men of principle, ultimately. Cheese’s version – which more closely reflects McNulty’s (“They don’t get to win. We get to win.”), however, may be the more interesting. Here’s the preview clip: Cheese’s speech appears at the end here too:

I also want to tip a hat to Method Man for his performance throughout the series, which this speech illuminated for me in some ways. Cheese might seem like a one-dimensional character, a pure sociopath (supposing one believes in that category), and would therefore seem not too distant from the kind of character Method Man might have played in his Wu Tang role. I think it would be interesting to go back and follow out the performance in light of this speech. For my money, Method Man was never the best lyricist in the WTC. That would be RZA and Inspectah Deck, although he’s definitely a close third, and probably with better delivery. But I think he was always the most charismatic and just plain interesting of the crew; there was always something extra and off that made his verses strange and memorable. So, for example, this from “Protect Ya Neck” (which was, amazingly, an independent single, pre-record deal):

And like fame, my style’ll live forever
N*ggaz crossin over, but they don’t know no better
But I do, true, can I get a zuuu
Nuff respect due to the one-six-ooo
I mean oh, yo check out the flow
like the Hudson or PCP when I’m dustin
N*ggaz off because I’m hot like sauce
The smoke from the lyrical blunt make me *unh*

It was that last line that got me way back in 93 or 94, the line that made me say “Hey, what is this we’re listening to?” Because it’s a brilliant little transformation and twist on the rhyme. The way it’s supposed to work is AABA: “N*ggaz OFF because I’m hot like SAUCE/ The smoke from the lyrical blunt makes me COUGH.” That would be perfectly fine as a lyric. But Method doesn’t do that. Instead of saying the word “cough,” he actually coughs, like “unh.” This twist not only substitutes the sound for the word, but also ends up rhyming the sound with “blunt,” thereby changing the rhyme scheme to a totally unexpected AABB. It sounds ridiculous trying to explain it, I know. It’d make a good parody skit to have a tweedy English professor doing some New Critical close reading of th Wu. But that is goddamn good stuff. Take a listen instead, starting at about 1:05: