Is it absolutely necessary for the image gracing the cover of the most recent issue of the official mouthpiece of my professional organization to depict something that, when seen on my desk by a colleague from another department, compelled her to ask where a viper fish would even get a detachable penis to whack off against a shrimp-wielding toucan? Do other departments not laugh at us literary folk enough already?
Why does this same issue contain a write-up of a forum from the 2007 MLA convention? Did it really take two years and change to transform that panel into something print-worthy? So I take it the first sentence is supposed to read:
In contributions to this 2007 panel of the division on Comparative Studies in Romanticism and the Nineteenth Century, titled “Untiming the Nineteenth-Century: Temporality and Periodization,” periodization, a venerable mainstay of comparative literarature safeguarded by its apparent neutrality, is critically arraigned.
Lest you think I’m mocking the author of this sentence, Emily Apter, let me make this absolutely clear: Apter’s introduction is lively and interesting—historicists like myself tend to be interested in arguments about or against periodization even when we disagree with them—but how well is her intellectual project of two years previous served by appearing so belatedly? How well is her intellectual integrity represented by an error so basic only a typesetter could have made it? These are the standards against which necessarily inconsequential (because) online conversations should be judged?
Maybe I’m still in a foul mood, but I don’t think so.
The Edge of the American West 
8 comments
April 27, 2009 at 8:43 pm
Buster
If you really want to feel grumpy, add this one to your case about the non-superiority of what makes it to print:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/28/opinion/28douthat.html
April 28, 2009 at 5:48 am
rea
I thought you were joking, but it aparently really is a viper fish with a detachable penis wacking off agaisnt a shrimp-wielding toucan. “one finds similar things in prayer rooms in Buddhist monasteries” . . .
April 28, 2009 at 8:36 am
Megan
Your discipline is odd, SEK. We never see that on our trade journals.
April 28, 2009 at 12:21 pm
saintneko
Much like the flat-earthers and the vatican, some people will always cling to 400 year old technology as “the only way to do it” because it’s the only way that’s been done. It’s tradition!
Then again, in some cultures it’s tradition to eat your dead relatives.
April 28, 2009 at 2:51 pm
Vance
That Douthat column really is strange. I can understand writing a waffling, inconsequential piece when the drudgery of cranking out columns twice a week overwhelms you — but surely your first effort on the prominent new weekly gig should make a forceful point that you really mean.
April 28, 2009 at 7:15 pm
adamarenson
1) Apologies that I will continue to participate in the comment-jacking of a post that made me laugh out loud. Historians will always appreciate historicists, even when their disciplinary journal let the copyeditors go.
2) As Douthat’s former editor (when I ran the college opinions page, and hired him as a columnist), I thought the first effort was nicely done — a fanciful counterfactual, grounded in his “expertise” (given his Grand New Party book), and aiming to show what conservatism might offer if it could kick the talk-radio addiction. Perhaps a bit close to David Brooks’s territory, for someone brought in as young, hip, and more conservative, but I thought an admirable enough start.
My main thought about it was — Wow. To get paid to write one column once a week.
April 28, 2009 at 8:57 pm
Vance
Well, I’m not the intended audience, so I should recuse myself. In an abstract way, I would like there to be a conservative I enjoyed reading. Back to Ruskin, I guess.
April 29, 2009 at 3:46 am
Ralf Heinritz
But the cover looks absolutely gorgeous, eaten penises or not!. —There must be much more nonsense published on paper than sense, not only deridada, but on the other hand see the enormous amount of idioticity, ideology, falsefictions on the net, even/esp. on sainted Wikipedia! It is just beyond belief (there also are good people working there, on philosophy in the german W….).