So the four most common searches this site gets correspond to the four "all time" most popular posts to the left.

Just within the last 48 hours, for instance, people have reached here by searching:
Silas Lapham,
mimetic desire
McTeague, and
Walter Benn Michaels new historicism (though I get a lot of WBMs without the "new historicism").

Now, I'm especially unhappy with what people find when they search for Silas Lapham, so forthcoming will be my paper from ALA on that novel.

But also, I suspect that people searching for Michaels often are looking for information about his newest book. Since I've reviewed it for Rhetoric Society Quarterly (Spring 2007), here's a preview and a link to the review:

This is really just an excuse, recognizing how much I'd written in an email predicting the AI winner, to make my energy a little less wasted. Somehow.

So in a rant against American Idol, I emailed Doug to say:

Since I still have a conference paper to write before Thursday, I'll confine myself to short scathing commentary: Since America has voted...and once again has shown that it has no appreciation for talent, but does have its finger on the pulse of sales--or rather, has its sense of voting precisely calibrated to sales, which is precisely what consumer capitalism has made available and ineluctable--my guess, very much to my disappointment, is that Jordin sells better in the American Idol format than Blake. Now that's not to say that (a) the American Idol format is the same as record sales format (which is why Daughtry, e.g., has sold better than Taylor Hicks--and why this week's results will tell us little about who will sell the most records), (b) that I'm happy about my choice, or (c) that I'm sure about my choice.

I sorta think Blake's a punk, but I find him a helluva lot more interesting and talented than Jordin. And I sorta blame her for Melinda's departure because I think given two singers of the same genre, America chose (1) the whiter of the two and (2) the prettier of the two. And I know America chose the more mediocre of the singers.

But I think Jordin will prolly pick up nearly all of Melinda's votes--and that she's prolly already picked up all of LaKisha's votes. And given that she's never been in the bottom three, Blake wouldn't seem to stand a chance. Though I'd be highly surprised if Jordin's even in the same league as Blake when it comes to entertainment value Tuesday, sadly, that won't matter, if I'm right.

Walter Benn Michaels, "Plots Against America: Neoliberalism and Antiracism." American Literary History. Summer 2006. 288-302.

Michaels continues his project, begun in The Shape of the Signifier, not of pointing out the incoherency of identity-based antiracism (that was Our America) but of observing the "political attractiveness" of "our commitment to the primacy of the subject position" (300), a commitment very much in the service of (neo)liberal capitalism. The texts which open up his critique are Philip Roth's Plot Against America and Charles Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition, both of which are antiracist statements, but the difference between which is that the former (for Michaels) exaggerates American anti-Semitism at a time when antiracism is the (public) norm, whereas the latter "was, in its time, not only a brave gesture, but a critical and commercial failure" (295-96).

Some notes on Michaels's method and argument in The Gold Standard

I have been reading Michaels along side Slavoj Zizek's Sublime Object of Ideology, and several things about this juxtaposition strike me as noteworthy. Initially, Michaels's use of William James's psycho-philosophizing of the self seems jejune--if only because of James's historical position near the beginning of psychology--next to Zizek's use of Lacan (whose greater "sophistication" is probably mostly explicable by his more arcane writing). But of course, Michaels has deliberately chosen a contemporary of naturalism to illustrate his points. (For the same reason, he will use Josiah Royce in chapter 6.) But he never says anything like "these ideas were in the air" or refers to a sense of zeitgeist, so we have to wonder just what are "his points" in using by now outdated intellects to articulate the "logic of naturalism." I think the best answer to this question is to see that not insisting upon any universal status for his claims is merely a way of qualifying his argument. Nevertheless, he is articulating a logic of naturalism, and clearly William James is more useful for this purpose than is Jacques Lacan. Michaels's project is, after all, historicist, and thinking through this difference in method (between Michaels and Zizek) has helped clarify what should have been an especially familiar notion to me by now: what distinguishes the project of new historicism.