Primrose Road

Last week, I ordered some Vanilla Rooibos tea (which I became addicted to thanks to The Coffee House in Lincoln, Nebraska). My 40 bags o'tea -- plus samples of other flavors like raspberry and honey -- were just delivered to my door. Amusingly (or maybe laughably), the package included a two-page, double-sided handout detailing the health benefits -- not evaluated by the FDA and not intended to diagnose, treat, or prevent any diseases! -- of Rooibos tea, including:

* Reducing the risk of tooth decay;
* "Extraordinary anti-allergenic properties which inhibit the release of histamines on exposure to allergens, so reducing the symptoms of hay fever";
* Lowering blood pressure and serving "anti-thrombotic" functions;
* Treating the symptoms of "colic, diverticulitis, diarrhea, vomiting, indigestion, and irritable bowel syndrome";
* Easing pain from prostate inflammation and ovarian cysts;
* "A well trusted remedy for many skin conditions ... such as eczema, acne, psoriasis and [diaper] rash";
* Relieving itchy scalp.

The package also includes a brochure for Rooibos-based skin products, including a "regenerating tissue oil." Excellent.

PublishAmerica's website (which I'm not going to link to) makes for some great procrastinating on a Saturday afternoon when one should be composing next semester's syllabi, preparing for a capstone oral exam, reading Renaissance "theatre wars" pamphlets, and/or reading books about the phenomenology of theatre.

I don't intend to ridicule PA 'published authors' with the excerpts below; I just want to use them to point out how ridiculous their "publish anything" model is, and how they take advantage of young and inexperienced aspiring writers.

(For the uninitiated, Miss Snark offers a nice outline of PA's 'business model.')

So as I began my procrastination-fest through the site, I first came across the following on the "Author News" page:

Upon "ORIGINAL" release of his historically accurate-short western fiction novel, ISBN No. **********, the author purchased 75 copies of his own, in-which many relatives,friends, and business associates, have come to the forefront. Yet now, especially with the Holiday-Season he is finding himself turning allot of people away and towards P.A. and as well the many fine book-stores. The reason for this is so they can order the revised copy which sells for the same price.The general consensus according to three notable historical societies is, 'For the history and mystery slueths alike, Coping With In-Laws And outlaws is an interestingly good read.'

Dude. If you have to buy 75 copies of your own book, something's rotten in the state of Denmark. Ten points (payable in chips from the Atlantic City casino of your choice) to anyone who can point out everything that's wrong with this blurb, not including the grammar.

Unfortunately, a search for "Shakespeare" didn't turn up anything too hilarious. There was, however, a novelization of the sonnets: Shakespeare's in love with Mary Wriothesley, Southampton's mom, and when she cheats on him, he apparently berates her with lots of word-order-reversals, thees, thous, arts, and cansts.

Then there's the book in the "Philosophy" section with the following (rather straightforward, no?) description:

Twelve-year-old boy meets Life and loses his innocence.

I'll let that one speak for itself.

Most icky are those book descriptions that remind me of my own juvenilia:

Eva is a happy college student. She enjoys her classes, loves her friends, and enjoys an active social life at Montgomery University. A self-proclaimed “serial monogamist,” she hops from one boyfriend to another, never taking anything too seriously. That is, until she meets Peter, a law student who manages to turn her world upside down. Debut author Melissa Brown takes us into the college experience of Eva and her two best friends, McKenna and Grace, as they sort through all of the frogs in their lives, each hoping to find her prince. Will Peter be the right one for Eva? Or is he just a frog in disguise? As these three friends search for attention and love, they end up learning a lot about themselves: what they are capable of, and what they truly want from their lives.

Here, PA has apparently "acquired" a totally unmarketable book, because as the person who finally convinced me to stop writing fiction once told me, nobody wants to read a book about a group of friends to whom not much happens. Chick lit books, love 'em or hate 'em, have plots and plot twists.

According to legend, there were four women who founded the religion of Wicca long ago. Each of them hid her secret, and when the time came they called upon their respective elements to keep that secret. Today, there are four teenage girls who are descended from those women. Paiva Cerron could never have imagined that her mother was a Wiccan, and that she was the last of the Fireflint line, but now she must. Now there are evil witches being sent to kill her to keep the four girls from uniting to put an end to Marguerite, the Queen of all evil witches. If they cannot stop Marguerite, then the world will be plunged into darkness, and the line of Wiccans will end. Paiva must do what she has to in order to save her race. She is not just any Wiccan, but the Wiccan.

The fact that Wicca is not an ancient religion and was in fact developed (possibly out of ancient British stuff and handed-down traditions, but also out of some faulty anthropology and what we'd today call History Channel history) in the 1950s suggests to me that the above novel was inspired not by, say, Gerald Gardner, but by the TV series Charmed.

For anyone still considering publishing with any "publisher" whose website is directed not at readers, but at 'new authors', please see 101 Reasons To Stop Writing.

I should unprocrastinate right now and get back to phenomenology, but I also want to take advantage of what could be my last MLA-free Christmas break for a while (unless I get a job without a completed dissertation in hand, in which case you'll want to be sure to carry an umbrella at all times due to the less-thought-about complications of swarms of flying pigs).

When will the world learn?



PENGUINS CAN'T FLY. (Especially not penguins wearing Santa hats.)


Merry Christmas and a very happy new year, everyone.

This began when I asked my brother if there were any grounds on which I could legally tithe him, i.e. take 10% of his annual income.

B: "As my beneficiary, your only option is to kill me. But you'd have to wait four more years to do that, because that benefit won't apply until then."
Me: "But what if you get married before then and make your wife the beneficiary?"
B: "Then you'd have to kill her too."
Me: "Okay, great."
B: "Just remember, though, you have to kill her first, then me. That's the only way you can collect."
Me: "Of course! If there's anything I've learned from Shakespeare, it's the correct order in which you need to kill people in order to collect an inheritance."

If I flip a coin fifty times, that coin could land heads-up fifty times in a row. The Law of Truly Large Numbers reminds us that events we perceive as unusual/impossible/miraculous are actually more commonplace, and more possible, than we might think. It would thus be rather narcissistic for me to ask why a coin has landed heads-up fifty times in a row, or to ask whether that series of events was a sign designed personally for me or anyone else.

Last night, I attended a Limmud salon (a Jewish learning event) that explored the ways in which we could "interpret" everyday life using the same methods that Torah scholars use to interpret the Torah. I go to these events even though I don't believe in anything supernatural; they're interesting cultural experiences and they allow me to play fun ideology-critiquing games in the grad student brain that I'm pretty sure I wear outside my head nowadays.

The teacher leading the session identified two views of uncanny repetitions in everyday life:
(1) the Biblical, which says that the spiritual is in everything from food to writing to toothpaste to coin-tosses, and that everything happens for a reason;
(2) the academic, which says "shit happens."

Here is what I did not say: "Those views both sound awfully complacent."

I also did not say that I don't know of many academic types who would shrug their shoulders, say "shit happens," and walk away. Instead, many might examine how and why we tell ourselves that everything happens for a reason as a way of keeping ourselves complacent. And if we seek to identify repetitions in life experiences for the purpose of interpreting those repetitions as though they were repeated words in a verse from the Torah, perhaps it's because we narcissistically dream of a personal god and a world that exists for us, a life that is meant to be read, interpreted, annotated like the Bible or a closet drama.

Let's talk Hamlet for a moment now (since, after all, all life experience and knowledge is contained in that play ... or not): After witnessing Ophelia's burial, which I suspect crushes him, our favorite Nice Danish Boy tells Horatio that he's sleepless, torn apart over what's happened. But then, he once again proves himself entirely self-absorbed: "There's a divinity that shapes our ends," he (famously) says, "Rough-hew them how we will" (5.2.10-11). Hamlet turns to God, Providence and destiny in order to absolve himself of the specific, fatal failures that lead to Polonius' and Ophelia's deaths. If there is a fatal flaw in the character of Hamlet, it is his willingness to attribute his failures to fate, suppressing what he knows in favor what what can all-too-easily be believed.

After grading a stack of research papers written for a 200-level class, I have compiled a list of crucial talking points to address with the 100-level research paper writing class I'll be teaching next term:

1) If you can Google it, so can I. The only thing worse than plagiarism is lazy plagiarism (i.e. copy-and-paste plagiarism).

2) Inserting, um, "statistically improbable phrases" at random points in your paper as if to test whether or not your teacher actually reads the paper all the way through will not get you into said teacher's good graces.

3) Essay mills don't lend themselves to specific, original research paper assignments.

4) Essay mill essays are not considered credible scholarly articles.

5) A works cited list should not consist merely of a list of websites you visited the week before the paper was due.

6) "Peer-reviewed" does not mean "I asked my best friend if this was a credible source and she said yes."

7) If you can Google it, so can I.

I could have gone to Israel for my birthday this year, but comp-exam-exhaustion made that not-so-feasible. For now, I will share some of my favorite Wacky Holy Land Photos:


In the spirit of the season: SANTA in a flea market booth.


Near the Western Wall: cat eating a potato chip.


One of several photos in my "Plastic Spoons in Roman Ruins" series.


This one captions itself, no?


The goat wants to know if you need cash.


"HaGadol Kova" = The Big Hat. You know, in case anyone ever asks you what they call the Whopper in Israel.


All right, one non-wacky one. Sunset on the Mediterranean Sea, May 2006.

Mark Anderson, author of "Shakespeare" by Another Name, an Oxfordian biography of Shakespeare (or Shakespearean biography of Oxford?), references Indiana University's Arden Project on his blog this week:

As this month's Technology Review reports, a $250,000 project (funded by the MacArthur Foundation) to adapt the Shakespeare canon into a multiplayer video game has ended in failure. "Arden"'s founder, Edward Castronova, told TR that the problem was simple. "It's no fun," he said.

While the Technology Review article is indeed rather pessimistic about the project's future (Castronova seems to suggest that this was only an early phase of the project, and that they're going to try again), Anderson's suggestion as to why Arden failed is a little bit disconcerting, mainly because he (as many Oxford-was-Shakespeare proponents do) tries to relate every problem we face in Shakespeare studies back to Oxford. Alas, if only we knew the truth, that Edward de Vere wrote the plays of William Shakespeare, we would all be saved.

My own sarcasm aside, here's what Anderson has to say:

I've never designed a video game before, so I'm sure there are complexities here that I'm missing out on. But if all that we have of "Shakespeare" is a practically random assortment of plays and poems, without a real, discernible human being that links them together, then it's no wonder "Arden" never took off.

Here's a counter-proposal: The life story of the author "Shakespeare" and the works he produced are intimately and intricately interwoven. The reason 20,000 hours and $250,000 can't put "Shakespeare" back together again is the same reason American and British publishers have pumped out some 20 traditional Shakespeare biographies in the past decade alone.

The reason why Shakespeare is so "fragmented," he claims, is that "history has stuck [us] with the wrong guy." I've written before about why the 'one guy wrote another guy's plays' argument is ahistorical in terms of how Early Modern authorship worked, I've discussed how 'traditional' scholars actually don't believe that every word written under the name of William Shakespeare was written by William Shakespeare (in fact, a recent discovery suggest that Thomas Middleton wrote parts of Macbeth), so I won't rehash those arguments now.

But I will note once again that pseudohistory is genuinely dangerous.

When the gentleman caller of Primrose Road told me this story about political-correctness-become-eggshell-walking, I thought he was kidding, but alas, it is true (at least according to the Associated Press): Santas in Sydney, Australia have been told to say "ha ha ha" in place of "ho ho ho".

"One disgruntled Santa told the newspaper a recruitment firm warned him not to use "ho ho ho" because it could frighten children and was too close to "ho", a US slang term for prostitute."

I like that the problem they have with the Santanic catchphrase is not merely about the slang term, but the fact that it could "frighten children." I wonder sometimes if some children are being raised to believe that there is nothing scary in the world and that no one will ever do anything to offend them.

Though I do have to admit that I received one present from Santa every year on Christmas Day because my parents didn't want me to believe that Santa was anti-Semitic. :)

An article called "The Shakespeared Brain: A Theatre of Simultaneous Possibilities" describes an experiment that tests the effects of reading certain Shakespearean turns of phrase on the brain. My linguistics and educational psychology buddies will appreciate this one.

Philip Davis and colleagues used an electroencephalogram (EEC) to look at what happens when we read "functional shifts" in Shakespeare's plays. (A functional shift occurs when one part of speech serves as another, i.e. verbing a noun.) Davis sees each Shakespearean functional shift as "a small instance of inner drama."

Because, it turns out, functional shifts do have a profound effect on the brain, Davis goes on to label the functional shift one of Shakespeare's "dramatic tools." Okay, but this experiment only looked at what happens when we read these functional shifts. Since Shakespeare wrote for the stage (though there are debates about the degree to which he was concerned with print publication), it might be interesting to also explore what happens when we hear functional shifts.