Issue #336: Dissertation Defense Scene Report
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What Do the Celtics Championship and My Dissertation Have in Common?
Joe Mazzulla told a story in an interview with Zach Lowe about an assistant coach celebrating before the final buzzer of their NBA Finals win. The way Mazzulla tells it, with about five minutes left in the game, that assistant started calling down his wife to the floor, anticipating they’d be celebrating a win in five minutes of game time. The score was 102-78. But Mazzulla flipped out, shouted down the assistant, “[lost] it on him,” and told him it was too early to celebrate. It’s hard not to hear shades of Kobe Bryant’s post-game interview after Game 2 of the 2009 NBA Finals, where he impresses upon the interviewer the appropriate affect given his circumstance, a 2-0 lead in those 2009 Finals:
What’s there to be happy about… job’s not finished. Job finished? I don’t think so.
Of course, Bryant’s Lakers won those 2009 Finals 4-1. In the more recent circumstance, Mazzulla’s haranguing of his assistant coach, the Celtics also wrapped up a 4-1 series win (as you no doubt know, and have been reminded for several weeks as a Paradox Newsletter reader). It was only minutes later, in fact, that Mazzulla would let his assistants, his players, and himself celebrate. With two minutes and twelve seconds left on the clock, the Mavericks made substitutions to remove their star players from the game. They waved the white flag. Even with two minutes left on the clock: job finished.
I have been very hesitant to celebrate any milestones related to my dissertation for the same reasons as Mazzulla and Bryant. Job not finished. I turned in a completed draft to my committee the week of June 17th. It felt like an accomplishment to have the writing and revising done, but there was still an important task in front of me: the defense. Joe Mazzulla’s motivation for keeping his assistant coaches from celebrating comes from an Oregon long distance runner, Tanguy Pepiot, who began celebrating his win before crossing the finish line and then got passed at the last minute.
My dissertation advisor, Lee Edelman, shared a similar word of caution when congratulating me for submitting my draft. The last words of his email:
You’re almost there (but then that’s what Achilles said to himself while pursuing the tortoise!).
Here, Lee is referring to one of Zeno’s paradoxes, Achilles and the Tortoise. Nick Huggett describes the paradox1:
This paradox turns on much the same considerations as the last. Imagine Achilles chasing a tortoise, and suppose that Achilles is running at 1 m/s, that the tortoise is crawling at 0.1 m/s and that the tortoise starts out 0.9m ahead of Achilles. On the face of it Achilles should catch the tortoise after 1s, at a distance of 1m from where he starts (and so 0.1m from where the Tortoise starts). We could break Achilles’ motion up as we did Atalanta’s, into halves, or we could do it as follows: before Achilles can catch the tortoise he must reach the point where the tortoise started. But in the time he takes to do this the tortoise crawls a little further forward. So next Achilles must reach this new point. But in the time it takes Achilles to achieve this the tortoise crawls forward a tiny bit further. And so on to infinity: every time that Achilles reaches the place where the tortoise was, the tortoise has had enough time to get a little bit further, and so Achilles has another run to make, and so Achilles has an infinite number of finite catch-ups to do before he can catch the tortoise, and so, Zeno concludes, he never catches the tortoise.
While it’s easy to conclude in the abstract the intended meaning of the message is, as my friend Kelly suggests, “the ‘I’m almost done’ phase of a project tends to drag on a comically long time,” Achilles never reaches his objective in the logic of the paradox. There is a Lacanian valence to this sentiment too, considering desire’s relationship to the objet a, its object cause, is one of indeterminate, infinite orbit rather than circuitous, eventual approach. Considering Achilles and the ill-fated Oregon runner together, then, this postscript does induce some anxiety. They are both runners, after all. And Achilles’ failing is not a question of hubris, but one can easily imagine (and I did imagine) Achilles’ premature celebration in the style of Tanguy Pepiot as the tortoise crawls out of his reach. Job not finished.
So, I needed to keep myself motivated. Yet another sports personality, Michael Irvin, served to assist me in that regard, lest my PhD traverse the infinitely subdivided paradoxical space that, according to Zeno, would prevent me from obtaining it. Irvin was a professional football player, with over a decade as the wide receiver for the Dallas Cowboys before retiring and becoming a commentator for ESPN and FS1. He is known, particularly, for spirited encouragement directed to the Dallas Cowboys from his on air post. One brief pep talk for which he is best known (I would normally transcribe it, but it wouldn’t do it justice):
It is as much Irvin’s delivery as the words he says that motivate. But here, he doesn’t deliver traditional encouragement as much as a reminder: when attempting to overcome a challenge, one must face it with the same effort regardless of whether others believe you can overcome said challenge.
Here’s another, lesser known but equally good, Irvin oration:
It’s longer and biblical, adding yet another context to our series of motivating and demotivating parables. Irvin says, providing his analysis of God’s motivation for setting in motion the encounter between David and Goliath:
I use great moments to pull greatness out of great men. I did not send David to slay Goliath. I sent Goliath to prove to David that what resides within him is a giant slayer … This giant that sits before you today, he is not for your destruction, it is for your construction.
That’s a pretty good line. So, if we are all still following, my dissertation defense is the giant: not for my destruction, but for my construction.
Irvin was a stalwart companion in the weeks leading up to the defense. But I got great advice from friends who had been through it, too. Each of my committee members, Lee included, assured me I had nothing to worry about. My friend Jared recounted his own defense and was among many who told me that my defense would not have been scheduled without the near certainty that I would meet the criteria for success. And my fiancé, Erin, read the entirety of the dissertation and provided invaluable commentary. Erin is among one of five people to read this version of the dissertation from cover to cover.
When the day finally came, I was nervous. But I had a good time during my defense. Along with Lee, my committee comprised Jess Keiser, Joe Litvak, and Todd McGowan. I wouldn’t say a dissertation defense is easy, though. It’s not a formality, either. Maybe my handling of the defense exceeded expectations, but my committee really put the screws to me. I received contentious, uncompromising questions related to some very specific theoretical arguments in my dissertation. Some of them I anticipated and had notes on, others I had to respond to on the fly.
I’m glad that it felt difficult and rigorous. Anything else would have seemed like a bit of an anticlimax. The committee only deliberated for about a minute or two before congratulating me as “Dr. Rivera,” a very surreal moment. Among their closing comments, the committee commended me for actually living up to the title of the defense and defending my arguments from the criticism rather than simply conceding the point to my interlocutor and committing to make revisions.
Now, I feel like I am in the two minutes and twelve seconds of NBA Finals Game 5 where the opposing starters are out of the game. I still have some surveys and paperwork to file and an upcoming date of degree confirmation, but I have fulfilled every academic requirement for the PhD. This part of my academic career, and life, is over. I don’t think even Joe Mazzulla would take exception to me celebrating now.
Kinnikuman is Back
Like a lot of people who grew up in the United States, my first exposure to the legendary Kinnikuman (1979) is an Americanized iteration called Ultimate Muscle (2002), adapted from Kinnikuman sequel manga Kinnikuman II Sei (1998). It’s pretty surprising that the extremely unusual adaptation would capture the imagination of its viewing audience. Ultimate Muscle was by no means a failure. Bandai even localized the tie-in game, Ultimate Muscle: Legends vs. New Generation (2002), for U.S. audiences. And there was precedent for this kind of adaptation, of course. Dragon Ball Z (1989) was a smash hit despite being, in the U.S., a sequel to a work the vast majority of its viewing audience had never seen. But Dragon Ball Z took fewer liberties with the source material than Ultimate Muscle, perhaps contributing in part to its enduring success.
Instead of continuing to develop the character of Kid Muscle and the second generation angle of Kinnikuman II Sei, manga author Yudetamago revived the original Kinnikuman serialization in 2011, picking up after the original 1987 conclusion but before Kinnikuman II Sei. Today, Kinnikuman is still publishing new chapters.
Last week, Kinnikuman: Perfect Origin Arc (2024), premiered on Netflix, the first animated adaptation of Kinnikuman since 2006 and picking up in the same place Yudetamago restarted the manga in 2011. It is being unusually simulcast on Netflix, with the service adding episodes weekly after their Japanese television air date.
So far, so good. Perfect Origin begins with an episode zero recap, covering most of the events of the original Kinnikuman manga to get new viewers up to speed. The plot is just as ridiculous as I remembered. There is no manga more guilty of having its character use the power of friendship to turn foes into friends. Death is just a temporary ailment, too, and not a very severe one. The first actual episode involves a twist taken straight from the pages of… a ton of older Kinnikuman arcs, where an enemy faction secretly has a stronger, more authoritative part of the same faction that emerges seemingly without any foreshadowing or logic.
That’s the trademark of Kinnikuman, plots that are logically incoherent but follow a certain pattern such that they’re predictable even if they aren’t foreshadowed by the events that immediately preceded them. The idea of “Perfect Chojin,” this arc’s villains, has something to do with scientific racism and prejudice. And there’s a sly commentary, in plain sight, about the function of international law and the legitimacy of representatives to make decisions for groups.
Aside from some extremely questionable characters pulled straight from the old style racial caricature school of superhero design, the Perfect Origin arc is a good time for those who like the absurd, endless escalation type of shounen anime. Gurren Lagaan (2007) is a pretty effective satire of this kind of story writing. But if you want the real thing, Perfect Origin is unadulterated, devoid of self-awareness, and totally ridiculous.
Weekly Reading List
https://zeonic-republic.net/translation/high-streamer_vol01.pdf — Yoshiyuki Tomino’s Mobile Suit Gundam: High-Streamer (1987) is the original novel sequel to Mobile Suit Gundam (1979), Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam (1985) and Mobile Suit ZZ Gundam (1986). Eventually he’d revise the plot of High-Streamer into the more well known Beltorchika's Children (1988) novel and finally as the feature film Mobile Suit Gundam: Char’s Counterattack (1988). This first version of the story is a great one in its own right.
Conner O’Malley has been busy. In his new short film, Coreys (2024), he collaborates with director Dan Streit (previously only credited for music videos) in a nightmarish melding of his comedic aesthetic, David Lynch, and Shinya Tsukamoto.
The premise is simple enough. Corey, a disaffected and sexually repressed suburbanite, is plagued by a terrifying double, “realcoreygenius.” The other Corey, diametrically opposed to the domestic Corey. The domestic Corey looks at “realcoreygenius” with envy, the online postings of “realcoreygenius” ostensibly everything Corey wishes for but sees as out of his reach.
This is a familiar setup, with films like The Double (2013), Enemy (2013), and Doppelganger (2003) approaching the relationship between two phenotypically indistinguishable figures as that of conscious and unconscious. The lacking protagonist, the supposed genuine article, is threatened to be displaced by his uninhibited and self-motivated alternate self.
Coreys upsets this paradigm in a number of ways. “realcoreygenius” has little interest in Corey’s humdrum suburban life. His taunts are to his entire viewing audience, “If you’re watching this and you’re not here, you’re a fucking loser,” rather than attempting to unmoor Corey from his quotidian existence. Instead, it’s suburban Corey who seeks out the dark proxy to end the indirect incitements. The relationship between the two characters is closer to that of the subject and ideal ego, with Corey’s aggressive posture toward “realcoreygenius” indicative of the subject’s own hostility toward the fantasmatic ideal to which they aspire.
It is clear, just as is the case with Lacan’s account of the ideal ego, that “realcoreygenius” isn’t leading a life that’s all its cracked up to be. And excluding some close reading of truly fascinating turns of a film that only released eleven hours ago, Coreys has an anodyne conclusion that affirms the ideology of the nuclear family. It is the memories of Corey’s child that ultimately plague “realcoreygenius” and expose his own dissatisfaction and envy toward Corey. And Corey triumphs because of these memories, insofar as he can reintegrate himself into the usual patterns of his humdrum life.
If there was any question as to whether or not O’Malley himself was a genius, this film should put an end to that line of inquiry. Supplanting even the genius of his creation of the other Corey, this film does more in twelve minutes than most do in their entire runtime.
Until next time.
Huggett, in turn, describes the paradox according to Simplicius’s recounting in On Aristotle Physics (1992)