Never Mind the Buttocks: Eco's "Sports Chatter" and the Roger Clemens Saga

I don't disagree with the findings in the Clemens Report; I don't agree with them either -- as I (embarrassedly) revealed today, I don't really follow baseball much. But I *do* find the rhetoric of the Clemens Report to be weak -- and this is a weakness which the Freakonomics/NY Times bloggers exploited. If the Clemens Report writers had handled their writing better, they would be less vulnerable to attack. In other words: a clear analysis of rhetoric, even a critique, can *strengthen* an argument -- by airing out and fixing its weaknesses before they can be exploited.

This goes double, at least according to some, for Clemens's conduct during the trial -- a recent Times article actually (surprisingly) defends him, by showing that he isn't handling "spin" that well (and in doing so, sends some helpful spin his way):
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/13/sports/baseball/13clemens.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Michael McCann of Sports Illustrated has a different spin on Clemens's conduct: http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2008/writers/michael_mccann/02/13/clemens.hearings/index.html
(a very well-written article, in my opinion).

Anyway, more to come on this -- but I'm posting this email to the blog, and I invite response, discussion, full-on debate on the subject (it will be good practice for your next essay assignment).

Kenji's Outline -- what do you think?

Kenji's looking for input, all -- please put in!

(Kenji -- I'm sorry I couldn't post this earlier today, when I received the email -- but the grad computer lab wouldn't let me post to Blogger. I hope this post still helps, or that it at least gets a good discussion going. And good work on putting your stuff out there. From what I can see, this work looks very good.)

Outline:

1. Dodgson and Rackin demonstration of Carrol’s need to find order behind reality’s seemingly random nature.
• “…daytime corroborations of their worst nightmares: a chilling panorama of the pointless, mindless, amoral, and inescapable mechanisms in which science has now placed them firmly and forever.” Pg 399 (Donald Rackin)
• “ ‘Where do you come from?’ said the Red Queen. ‘And where are you going.’” (Pg 124 Carrol)
• Understanding these basic questions are at the base of human understanding of nature and much of human institution is a way to assign order and control to nature.
• Rackin illustrates how religion an even science is just an attempt to explain the chaos and immorality of nature.
• Assigning order and control ultimately is about forcing a final meaning or logic from something.
2. Both characters clearly express their desire for order in their exchange in the garden.
• Alice expresses the extreme desire to become part of the game.
• In entering the game she is inherently assigned an identity and a starting location from which she approaches the rest of the game and a direction in which to head. She is the White Queen’s Pawn in the Second Square and therefore can only head straight in front of her and has the ultimate goal of becoming a queen.
• By operating within the game she exists within a diversion reality guided by a system of strict rules. She knows where she came from and where she is going and she has only one way in which to accomplish her innate task in the game.
• As the creator of the looking glass world Alice is able to determine her powers. She demonstrates desire for strict rules and order by assigning herself diminutive the role of a pawn.
• The Queen also demonstrates a desire for order.
• By correcting Alice’s speech and manners the Queen shows how even etiquette is a way of controlling and forcing even the smallest detail such as twiddling fingers.
• The Queen also demonstrates how time is an important aspect of assigning order because she indicates that it is Alice’s turn to speak after checking her watch.
3. Through their dialogue and illustration both characters show a desire for order however they perceive this order differently.
• Alice steps into the garden and steps outside of reality. She enters “a great huge game of chess that’s being played—all over the world—” (Pg126).
• While Alice looks upon the Queen as part of the game the Queen sees Alice as part of nature.
• In the photograph on page 124 the Queen and Alice is face to face with the Queen.
• Behind the Queen in plane sight of Alice lies neatly organized forest with all the trees growing straight up.
• Also Queen’s hair has embedded in it a strict grid and is tightly bound and organized.
• The Queen divides the picture because of a white border around her separating Alice’s view of the scene from her own.
• Behind Alice, with hair that falls all around her shoulders with no particular order, and in the Queens line of sight is a wilderness in which the trees grow with no particular pattern or direction.
• The Queen sees the natural world around her including Alice as chaotic; however, the Queen exists within Alice’s dream and is therefore exists as part of the game in which players operate according to rules.
• The Queen asserts, “… ‘all ways about here belong to me’” indicating that within the scope of the looking glass world she possesses the ability to choose which direction she wishes to travel.
• Alice as the creator of the looking glass world sees order in the form of a neat garden with vertically ascending trees. (Carrol 125).
• It is not directly stated that the Queen is older than Alice; however, because of the connotations of the word Queen and the Queen’s stature and visage in the illustration it is clear that the Queen is older than Alice.
• This difference in age also plays a roll in the characters’ awareness of order.
• As a child, and a mere pawn, Alice sees only “the hill she had been so long aiming at” directly in front of her.
• She can only move vertically across the board and is not concerned with anything else.
• The Queen has the wisdom associated with age and the ability to see the disorganized nature of the garden.
4. The Queen both explicitly expresses a desire for order by asserting herself over Alice by patting Alice on the head after Alice conforms to the Queen’s rules for proper etiquette, and expresses an understanding of the arbitrary nature of order by drawing attention to how even language is established to maintain a perception of reality.
• When Alice rejects that a hill being anything like valley and the Queen makes the point that things are only what you allow them to be because the nonsense that a hill could be a valley is just as sensible as the dictionary, which defines a hill or a valley.
• The animated “ca’n’t” directly before the clause “you know” grabs the reader’s attention and then demands the reader to question the rest of the Queen’s statements.
• The Queens first counterpoint in which she argues that she has “… ‘seen gardens, compared with which this would be a wilderness,’” illustrates, again, how the characters perceive their free will within the looking glass world.
• The word wilderness can be defined both as an uncultivated tract of land and as a region within a park or garden in which trees are ornately arranged often in the form of a maze. OED
• Using the definition involving a maze of trees, the Queen, like Alice, has an ultimate goal; however, because she has the ability to choose in which direction she would like to move, while Alice’s next move is completely compulsory, the Queen’s next move and ultimate goal may be less apparent.
• The Queen’s ability to choose even manifests itself in her ability to choose how she defines words.
• In this way even language is a human institution created in order to better understand nature.
• The Queen directly asserts that “you may call it ‘nonsense’ if you like”(pg 125).
5. Within “The Garden of Live Flowers” Carrol establishes that the characters both desire order and at the same time by illustrating how even how words are defined is essentially an arbitrary machined function to describe reality, Carrol shows that it is ultimately up to each individual to assign order to their environment.
• In the same way, by actively addressing the reader and challenging the reader to play with the definitions of words and struggle to understand the character’s exchange, the text invites the reader to assign order to the passage.
• The seemingly randomly spaced pauses—force the reader to stop and question.
• Each character and the reader desires and therefore must create their own order for the looking glass world.
• A more experienced reader will see that the text is full of twists and confusing wording and attempt to struggle through a maze in order to discover meaning; a child might follow a more structured path choosing to ignore or just play along with the absurdities while marching systematically through the narrative as a pawn moves across a chessboard.

The Book of the Duchess: Follow the White Whelp

Any responses or interesting thoughts on Chaucer's Book of the Duchess? I'm particularly interested in the interplay between Duchess and Alice -- especially in light of the conversation below about things happening between texts over centuries... hm. But please do throw other lines of inquiry out there.