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Tuesday, September 14, 2004

Conference report

Thanks, everyone, for your patience with this new site.  I’m sorry about the formatting problems with the posts in the archive—for some reason, Expression Engine reads dashes as question marks and ?’s not at all.  But I don’t have the time right now to go back and fix every one of 250+ posts to this thing.  So I appreciate your patience.

Thanks also for filling me in on the events of the past few days.  But how come nobody asks me how my weekend went?  A conference on “Blogging and Forgery,” hell, you’d think that would be a hot topic around these parts . . . but I suppose you all think that an academic conference is just wall-to-wall jargon punctuated by “questions” that are really comments.

Let me assure you that this conference was different.  Some of you might even have enjoyed it.  It was held on the labyrinthine campus of the University of Tlön and co-sponsored by the International Kerning Society, which was holding its gala fiftieth annual convention in the same hotel.  I can already hear some of you snickering: the International Kerning Society, my ass, you say, they didn’t even have kerning in 1954, so there’s no way they could have a “gala fiftieth annual convention” today. Well, my smug imaginary-interlocutor insta-specialists, you would be wrong.  The International Kerning Society was originally founded to ensure that the music and lyrics of famous Broadway songwriters would be transcribed and archived in both pica and space-proportional fonts, so that there would be no doubt about their authenticity in the decades to come.  The Society has recently been in the news, what with all the speculation that certain officers in the Texas Air National Guard, who were apparently also aficionados of Broadway show tunes (though their families deny this), ordered and used the very same IBM typewriters favored by the Kerning Society for their archival project.  Well, let me put some of that speculation to rest if I can.

The day I arrived at the conference, happily enough, was the very day that an anonymous Freeper apparently—and I stress apparently—created a computer-generated facsimile of the so-called “Killian memos,” thus launching the now-widely-circulated charge that the memos were forgeries.  Terrified that I might have to rewrite my own paper on “Simulation and Simulacra: The Indeterminacy of the Text in the Age of Electronic Transmission,” which was originally all about Tristero, the Weekly Standard, and my recent personal experience at Madison Square Garden of Forking Paths, I spoke to some people in the Kerning Society to get their take on things.

I don’t have time right now to go into all the relevant details, but here are the highlights of our conversation:

One: according to my sources, the Freepers are right about the Killian memos—more right than they know.  The “facsimile” conjured up by their anonymous contributor is not a facsimile at all—it is the original copy of one of the memos sent to CBS.  The likeliest scenario is that Karl Rove travelled back in time with Microsoft Word and composed the memos in 1972 or 1973, stored them in the Vatican Library in the folio of an obscure edition of Wharfinger’s Courier’s Tragedy, then had them mysteriously “discovered” last month and sent to CBS so as to destroy CBS’s credibility on the eve of the Ben Barnes interview on 60 Minutes.  Another theory has it that John Kerry composed the memos himself in 1968-69 on the very same IBM Executive he took to Vietnam (more on this below), and postdated them four years as part of his long-term plan to run for President against George W. Bush in 2004.  But that seems to be a bit of a stretch.

Two: the paperwork authorizing Kerry’s wartime medals consists of forgeries from start to finish.  It’s not merely that Kerry typed up the paperwork himself—the telltale initials “JKW” are the giveaway on this, precisely because they are not Kerry’s initials and are not proportionally spaced—but that the documents themselves could not possibly have been produced by anything other than WordPerfect 12, which (a) did not exist at the time and (b) which has since produced exact copies of Kerry’s alleged “after-action” reports.  Moreover (and this should be dispositive), during the period 1967-71, Kerry routinely and repeatedly forged his own signature on letters, contracts, and checks, eventually inspiring Jacques Derrida to do the same at the end of his essay “Signature Event Context.” Thus, recent right-wingers’ references to the textual machinations of “ink-stained Derrideans” are, again, more right than they know.

Three: it turns out that Iraq really did try to buy yellowcake uranium from Niger after all.  The “forgery” in that case was in fact a cleverly planted ruse, using typefaces available only in the southern Iraqi region of Uqbar and containing obvious giveaways (such as the famous opening, “DEAR SIR OR MADAM I REQUEST YOUR IMMEDIATE ASSISTANCE IN HELPING ME MOVE A GREAT DEAL OF NUCLEAR MATERIAL OUT OF MY COUNTRY") that were meant to discredit US intelligence and divert world attention while Iraq sneakily sought to buy yellowcake on eBay (in order not to leave a paper trail, naturally).  In fact, some people believe this “deliberate forgery” scheme is what gave Rove the idea to travel back to the early 1970s and plant the Killian memos.  But right now there isn’t enough evidence to establish the connection, and besides, the jury is still out on those memos, as I’ve already mentioned.

Whew!  Deep breath, everyone—it’s a lot to take in at once, I know.  Still, I hope I’ve cleared up some things that have been troubling everyone lately.  Who knew that the 2004 campaign would involve so many intricate textual minutiae?  And things are just getting interesting—after all, as one of the conference speakers said in the plenary session, “The methodical fabrication of electronic texts is performing prodigious services for archaelogists.  It has made possible the interrogation and even the modification of the past, which is now no less plastic and docile than the future.”

I hope the conference proceedings will be published soon.

Posted by Michael on 09/14 at 09:31 AM
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