“He’s having a seizure, we must hold him down!” Captain Stagg exclaimed and surged toward me. Jones put out his arm so that his pipe-bearing hand held back the overenthusiastic Captain, an act for which I was most grateful.

“No, no, Captain, no seizure, no attack of any kind,” said the man whom I did not recognize as he cleaned and then re-applied his spectacles to his nose. “The boy is merely waking up. Aren’t you, son?”

I attempted to nod and felt I was generally successful in doing so.

“One’s name,” Father would intone, leaning against the mantle and speaking to a wall perpendicular to my brother and I, “can be many things. A stepping stool. A crutch. A truncheon. A comfortable chair. A SWORD!” And here, my father would suddenly yell and point at us, to make sure we were still attentive to his words.

“I apologize,” Jones said to me, handing me my hat (which had been dislodged in the activity) and examining the back of my skull. “That could have gone very badly. Lucky for you, it was just a glancing blow.” Jones reached down and retrieved the implement. The tool was a length of iron about two feet long, curved at one end and notched at both.

“On the good side, you found the crowbar,” Jones said.

“That was indeed lucky,” I said, wincing. “A inch or two and I would have been struck stone dead!” I laughed at the miraculous timing of my walk, and then my head hurt.

Therefore, even as I felt an uneasiness begin to flutter in my chest as the scratching within the widow’s cabinet became not only more insistent, but more rhythmic, I welcomed this new happenstance and its accompanying fear as an opportunity, rather than cursing it as misfortune. “Let this mysterious box be an enlightening candle, not the torch that will ignite the brambles at my feet as I am wrongly burned at the stake for witchcraft!” I thought, and perused my surroundings for avenues of escape.

If you are a human with a functioning scalp, you most likely engage in some activity to preserve and style the strands of dead protein that hang off the top of your head. Though the shaping and sculpting of hair can serve many practical purposes (shielding the eyes during inclement weather or while welding; creating a large cranial fin or sail to better accumulate solar radiation; lowering one’s radar profile), follicular manipulation is primarily semiotic, a means of non-verbal communication between and among various individuals, groups and contexts signifying allegiance, status, and general aesthetic temperament. Whatever its motive, human hair modification provides unique insight into both individuals and the cultures which they inhabit. In an effort to both document and analyze the signs and signifiers of a universal human endeavor, we provide this selection of observed hairstyles, with accepted nomenclature.

5

Whatever ailments afflicted him, Captain Stagg was punctual and enthusiastic. Only the faintest tendrils of rosy light had pushed their way through the eastern clouds when I arrived at the pier, yet he was waiting for me at the top of the gangplank, holding an open golden pocket watch and beckoning me to embark in a most voluminous fashion.

“Come on, my boy, come on!” he yelled. “You’ve wasted forty-seven seconds. The day outpaces us already!” Then the Captain barked out a rough and mighty laugh that so startled a passing laborer he fell off the pier.

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Often in the days before I began my travels to the earth’s most distant and often inhospitable regions, I had heard preposterous tales of the remote and mysterious Land of R______, and could not determine if the nation was the victim of serial embellishment by scores of seafaring glory-hounds, or merely the product of drunkards’ fancy. And later, once my wandering had started in earnest and my own home was a distant hazy memory, the tale of R_______ grew no more consistent. The stories were sensational, hyperbolic, and seemed to describe forty different countries rather than one. The people of R_______ had eyes on the back of their heads, or nestled in the palms of their left hands, or they each carried lizards on their shoulders that saw for them. They were nine feet tall with blue skin, or four feet tall with silver skin, or of exactly average height with skin of beige or taupe, depending on the quality of light at the time.

1

I was shipwrecked, and nearly drowned; I was swallowed by dense tropical forest, and nearly consumed; I was trapped among spires of jagged, sun-beaten rock, climbing ever upward because behind me, below me were the murderous seas and insatiable jungle. I climbed and scaled and split my feet and hands on the stony shards until I reached a plateau, where I stopped, and fell, and lay on my back, a rack of a man draped in rags and tatters. I could not pull enough air into my lungs. The sun tried to blind me, even through my eyelids,  appearing as a radiant whiteness in my skull I could not block out. The whiteness would swallow me too, as the seas had, as the jungle had, and I had nothing left in me to resist this whiteness, nor did I have a clear path of escape, so I relented and became as nothing.

Then, later, I opened my eyes and saw a dark shape looming above me, and heard a woman’s voice. “Who are you?” she asked.

“I am Gulliver,” I said. “I am Crusoe and Candide and Arthur Gordon Pym.”

The shape said “No, you’re not.”

My temperament ablaze, I clutched at the shape. Gentle pressure stilled my hands. “Tell me!” I wailed. “Will you be my long-sought deliverance from peril, or are you yet another grim spectre sent to drag me unto the grave?”

“Oh brother,” said the shape.

I raised my head to ask again, and fainted.

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Faculty, honored guests, family members, and of course, graduating doctoral students of philosophy for 2011.

Why are you here?

I hear you chuckle, and am fractionally gratified by it. You have heard me start off this address by hacking up a tired old philosophical joke, kicking off this inspirational oration with a twist of a Great Question (capitalized). And you have responded in kind, with meta-laughter that conveys acknowledgment of the referent but no true amusement, except, perhaps, in some of the hardier fools among you, for it was a sad sad shade of a joke, like so many things in our noble field of study. And here, by “noble”, I mean “resembling neon”, or helium, or any of the other gases notable for their inertness and non-reactivity.

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The Boom-Boom Era:
• the craft-paper period
• the papier-mache period
• the epoch of unmortared brick
• the cinder block period (including both non-rebar and rebar construction)

Just before the installation of rebar:

Martin Powell barges into the mayor’s office, Mavis close behind. The mayor, on the couch and flanked by cheerleaders, allows his head to loll forward and acknowledge Powell’s entrance and Mavis’ distress, greeting both with a dopey yet charismatic smile. The mayor’s face is scratched and abraded, but retains a significant portion of the handsomeness it possessed when he entered office.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Mayor, but he just wouldn’t wait–” Mavis says, and the Mayor makes conciliatory gestures with his hands, gestures which would be much more effective if they weren’t obscured by the cheerleaders.

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