Strike flat the thick rotundity o' the world

The fat man appears to be airborne over the ship's deck, hovering with arms stiffly extended forward and down like landing gear. His cushiony, shock-absorbing hands appear to be huge, but perhaps that's an illusion produced by foreshortening. In his image, outlined by a rectangular frame of decayed photographic emulsion, he is strongly foreshortened at every point.

 "W. N. McMillan." G. G. Bain collection, Library of Congress. http://www.loc.gov/pictures/resource/ggbain.18560/  

Click to enlarge.

At and around the man's hands, further decay has accentuated the contrast between the image's light and dark areas. The decay has done an artist's job: it has shaped an outline.

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An outline is usually a line of demarcation which an artist lays down between his creation and the rest of the universe. Here, however, outline is an index of decay. The universe has invaded the physiology of this image like a virus and set it to manufacturing a counterfeit of the artist’s death-defying gesture of separation from time.

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And the optics of photographic image-making have bloated the man into an incipient sphere: a fruit rounding as it ripens toward decay.

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The rounding has been preserved in its incipience, however. It comes to us educationally, preserved through natural history as if it and we had been destined from the beginning to face each other from opposite sides of a vitrine.

Surrounded by the Library of Congress’s explanatory words, the image is a fat mute struldbrug surrounded by volubly signifying youthfulness. The words singing in the surround are a choir of still unravished brides.

Teaching aid for an election year

July 29, 2010: Interviewed by Greta Van Susteren of Fox News,

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jctte9Zzu9g

Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina discusses his proposal to update the Fourteenth Amendment. Senator Graham represents a state whose heritage is proudly agrarian,

and when he explains his proposed edit, his vocabulary becomes the technical language of agricultural economics.

Here's a parallel economic proposal that I sometimes use toward the end of freshman comp, when we talk about what to expect in sophomore lit and I introduce the concept of irony.

Click to enlarge the lower right corner of the text.

Swift published "A Modest Proposal" in 1729, and even in the twenty-first century I get some interesting reactions from freshmen who have read the projector's phrase "a child just dropt from its dam" for the first time, and then looked up the agricultural terms "dam" and "drop." Senator Graham's additional example wasn't really necessary; our classroom dictionary had already shown us what those words mean, and some events are hard to repeat except in the mode of "the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce."

Still, it's the thought that counts. So thanks for "drop," Senator Graham, from a grateful constituency: me, my class, and (if I may speak on his behalf) the late Captain Gulliver.