Python v. Alligator

I didn't read Chris Bachelder's Bear v. Shark: the Novel, nor will I. It's got one of those titles that the novel itself could never top, like Mark Leyner's My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist, which I actually did read, and which I kind of wish I had just told people I had read instead of actually reading. Anything the mighty N. Katherine Hayles has to say about the latter novel is ten times more interesting than the novel itself. It consists mostly of a series of linked vignettes written in an absurdist, hypertrophied prose style. What happens doesn't quite matter, really. It's cool for about six pages, and then you start getting impatient, which is pretty bad for a novel that clocks in at 160 pages.

But the important thing is the title. Like one of my lit profs told an honors seminar, "Think about Judith Butler's Bodies That Matter. Well, just think about the title. The hell if I know if what the rest of the book has to do with it." This post started in the direction of somewhere besides titles, but it seems as if titles is where I'm going. (Yes, "Titles is where I'm going." Quote me on it.) Titles are sort of precarious things. They work best when they're incorporated as a formal aspect of the thing they title. Some famous examples of this are Duchamp's Fountain and, more recently, Hirst's over-publicized (or "seminal" if you prefer) but cool-looking The Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living. Think of the difference between a title and a heading. A title is both a name and something that creates context (like "Lord" or "Marquis"). Or think of when someone tells you that the picture is both two faces looking at each other and a goblet.

Sometimes you don't need context, though. Sometimes the thing is better left without a title. Sometimes things are like this:

I know what this is because I saw it's title. Apparently, though, it was spotted from a helicopter. And even though I I can't tell exactly what's what, I get the gist. This entire entry was an excuse to put a picture of an alligator bursting through a python on my blog.