RIP RAMMELL

"The letter music notes and weather notes that were done down there reached a point where you didn't need to kill a person. The piece itself became a weapon: the letter itself. So fame was the most interesting to take out. How do you know George Washington? You know him through a name. You shoot the letter on the train at the other name and it takes out that name. So therefore homeboy has no identity. Why should I kill him? He'll just be dead anyway because nobody will know who he is. He'll just be a walking zombie."

-Rammellzee, interview with Greg Tate in The Wire

Inception – The Paper Maze

Last night I caught Inception, the new Christopher Nolan movie. I was a huge (HUGE) admirer of The Dark Knight, and Nolan here seems poised to deliver a similar mix of brainy contemplation and extreme action (spoiler alert). Inception asks the profound question – what if this is all just a dream? Whoah, dude, I know. As a core question, this would compare poorly to The Dark Knight's ideas about law and order, chaos, and the nature of human motivation (“Some men just want to watch the world burn.”) Luckily, the whole 'dreaming' thing is more a premise, and Inception puts its intellectual focus on DiCaprio's tortured relationship to the memory of his dead wife (as much as I like Leo, I notice the word 'tortured' captures pretty much all of his performances). Ultimately, even though that takes up easily a quarter of the movie, those issues make up a subplot that never quite ties into the main thrust of the action. And it's a convoluted, borderline nonsensical subplot at that – if something is this complicated, it's hard to make it resonate emotionally.

By contrast, the actual motive for the film's events is dispensed with in, no joke, about three sentences. DiCaprio's character, using dream-manipulation technology, must convince the young heir of an energy empire to break up the company to prevent it from gaining a monopoly. The sad irony is that, if Nolan were less clearly obsessed with becoming some kind of auteur, that's all we would have needed, because at its best, Inception is an incredibly fun and radically inventive action film. The comparisons to The Matrix are inevitable, but while The Matrix got nonsensical real fast, the joy of the action in Inception is that Nolan sets up some fairly clear rules about how things work, rules that come into play in absolutely dizzying ways as the film heats up. These are, mainly: A person's subconscious generates aggressive 'projections' that will defend against mental intruders. In order to get out of the dream, you have to be given a 'kick' by someone in the real world (or, as we proceed, whatever dream level you're sleeping in), something to trigger the sensation of falling. And finally, the deeper you dream, the faster your brain works, and thus the slower dream-time moves relative to real world time.

These don't correspond to anything we know now about dreaming, but they end up being their own reward. What all this means (I get giddy just describing it) is that as DiCaprio's team move through the multiple levels of their target's dream, each level is interacting – as they sit in a bar on a lower dream-level, they can feel the turbulence of the van they're sleeping in, one dream-level up. It also means that years can pass in the lowest dream level, in the space of real-world seconds. I'll admit, not all of this is crystal-clear enough to be totally satisfying, and there are some really disappointing omissions (if these people are lucid dreaming, why can't they fly? Or at least do some neat tricks?). But the last hour of the movie still manages to be one of the most amazing action sequences I've ever seen – there's simply nothing else like it out there.

Ultimately, what cripples Inception is the emphasis on Leo's love life. In Dark Knight, the emotional and the explody were intertwined (nothing gets to the conceptual heart of Batman like the image of Bats grappling the Joker, fighting his urge to kill). In Inception, while there's an initial promise that the dark enemy within will actually become a violent opponent, we never get the satisfaction of a climactic showdown – a truly massive blunder. I can imagine a different, probably better movie that ditches the lost-love subplot entirely and focuses on the movie's actual center – the desire of a young man to please his titanic father. Like the movie itself says, the most powerful ideas are the simple ones.

Are We all Daniel Plainview?

I'm watching "There Will Be Blood" tonight, and being reminded just how deeply I identify with Daniel Day Lewis' lead character.  All of the terrible things he does are driven by the uncontrollable rage that lashes out from his terror of loneliness, his fear of never having a real connection with anyone.  I grew up with some of those same terrors.  I've left simple teenage angst behind me, but I've found it at least partially replaced by the overriding power of careerism, always threatening to cut one off from people.  This is a film about the alienation that lies at the heart of a success-driven society.

How to Stop The Oversupply of Bad Publications

The Chronicle provides some sensible suggestions for holding journals to higher standards - primarily placing the emphasis in the hiring and tenure processes on relevance and quality of writing, rather than volume.  I think that almost inevitably the increase in time and care that would follow from this would also result in better, more readable writing among published papers.

Academic Cliche Watch: " . . . In particular ways."

Note: As of 8/3/2013, I'm out of academia!  Temporarily! Maybe!  Check out my new blog, focused on my interests in weird fiction, experimental music, and generally all things so post-academic that they're not academic at all, over at Blownhorizonz.com.

I consider myself almost as much a "writer" as I am a "researcher." I do a lot of journalistic writing on the side, and have accomplished some moderate to big things in that world, including being selected for a major non-academic collection (which you should totes purchase). This makes me at best an oddity in the academic world, which is broadly and justifiably notorious as a haven for bad writers and writing. Let me briefly pre-empt the inevitable line about how academic writing is necessarily bad because philosophers are trying to "challenge the language." I acknowledge that some writing seems 'bad' mostly to people who haven't bothered to learn the specialist language, but it's undeniably true that there are many specific bad habits and lazy gestures that have infected academic writing (as well as some institutional structures that help foster them).  As people whose job it is to increase human knowledge, we should be ashamed of these professional failures, and rather than falling back on boilerplate defenses, we should be working, as individuals and as a community, to improve the level of our writing.

One big way we can do this is to become more conscious of the cliches that litter academic writing. These are distinct from jargon, which needs to be used carefully but is nonetheless an important part of writing within any specialty.  (For my money, Lacanians are the most frequently and undeservingly bashed for using a necessarily dense jargon.) Jargon condenses a whole discourse into a single word, and when used judiciously, and with a consciousness of audience, makes writing richer.  A cliche, by contrast, is the performance of a conventional linguistic gesture that has actually lost whatever original meaning it might have had, a verbal twitch that has more to do with sounding like an academic than actually thinking carefully.

So, this is the first installment of an ongoing series highlighting specific cliches of academic writing that I think deserve to be banned from the lexicon forever. There's a wealth of these that enrage and frustrate me, utterly empty phrases that cloud minds and swell word counts to absolutely no effect. Since the journals are providing new bad writing all the time, I'm hoping the topic will keep me angry and productive basically forever.


First on the chopping block: “X does Y in particular ways.”

Richard Serra / Awesome Decay

(Photo from a thoughtful post on Vortex at Olds Road Blog)

I'm in Fort Worth visiting family for a few days, and I'm on a sudden art kick, so it only made sense that I stop by the excellent Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. It's close to the doctor's office where my aunt goes on Mondays, so I had the bright idea to combine the two today – except I forgot that, like most museums, the Modern is closed on Mondays. There's nothing more frustrating than being primed for some ART and finding the doors locked on you. But there ended up being a big fringe benefit. Standing out front of the Modern is Richard Serra's Vortex (2002), a five-story monument constructed of six sheets of corroding metal that meet and overlap like a closed blossom.

Should I Go to Grad School? Perspectives from a Fresh Humanities PhD.

About a month ago, I successfully defended my dissertation. Two weeks ago, I walked in my university's graduate commencement, and I'm guessing in about six months I'll be shipped a copy of my actual diploma. Predictably, I'm less interested in celebrating this achievement than asking the awkward question - Was it Worth It? Going to grad school probably seems like a very attractive option for some in the currently dismal job market, but there are a lot of travails to the process. At the root of many of the problems confronting current grad students are some big issues that will, if anything, be even more acute for future students, issues that are or will hit the humanities hard. So, what follows is a not-too-brief introduction to a few things to consider before you make a life-altering decision.