"Edward M. Lerner - By The Rules" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lerner Edward M)

“Brian. Rule One,” Dad would call parsimoniously, without glancing up from his newspaper. I was left to
translate for my uninformed friends: if it shakes the house, don't do it. Rule One actually made a lot of
sense for little boys. It had no loopholes.

Rule Two, which is what had me reminiscing about childhood regulations, had been pretty much ignored
at the recent party. Thinkbefore you do things. Rule Two was promulgated long before I was of an age
to drink, so Dad had never derived the obvious corollary: avoid important decisions while drunk and
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unable to think. (He would surely have shortened that. “Don't drink and think,” sounds about right.)

The paper I'd envisioned, in thatsaki -sodden stupor, involved those whose interests werereally
multicultural. As in: enticed by cultures that weren't even human. I'd somehow been egged on in my
drunken state to propose a sociological analysis of UFO, pardon the judgmental expression, nuts. There
were more than enough Internet chat rooms in which such people congregated for me to easily do a
study. The problem wasn't a lack of raw data, but the probable consequences of publication. The mind
reeled at how such a paper would be received by my fellow academics. Yes, a few sociological papers
did exist about UFOs and, excuse me while I throw up, Ufologists ... but those were by safely tenured
faculty. My thesis advisor slash mentor was not yet tenured; my highest priority was not being laughed
out of renewal of my paltry fellowship.

Retracting my proposal could only draw more unwelcome attention to myself. Plan B, once panic
receded, was the old switcheroo. I'd produce a paper that, while nominally consistent with my mercifully
brief emailed abstract (how desperatewere they for material?), was largely off the UFO topic. I'd
reference the nuts, I decided, far less for what they believed than as a population across which to study
the dissemination of ideas. My spirits lifted as the paper took form in my mind's bloodshot eye: stolid,
stilted, unassailably academic and unremittingly boring—as removed as could be from the sensationalism
implied by the drunken abstract. With luck, the full paper would be rejected. Even without luck, I was
going for something wholly forgettable.

My field and my passion is discourse analysis, a perspective at the intersection of literary studies, history,
and traditional sociology. (Dad once made mention of roadkill at said intersection, but I refuse to go
there.) The little-green-men believers were as valid a population as any for the study of vocabulary
propagation and transformation. That is, I could extract trends and patterns in metaphors, themes, and
figures of speech, then extrapolate to the social forces causing and caused by that imagery. Or I could go
all simple and mechanical (and, truth be told, more safely dull). That would place the prospective paper in
the entirely traditional and non-controversial sociological mainstream of content analysis: categorizing the
topics within the text samples.

A few nights spent lurking in chat rooms yielded plenty of themes to be examined. Skinny gray men, it
turned out, rather than little green ones. Evolutionary convergence, to explain ET's humanoid appearance.
Alien secrecy. Government cover-ups, usually involving men in black. (Why always men? Sexism among
Ufologists could be another paper. I sternly dismissed that thought as an avoidable distraction.) Flying
saucers: disk-shaped vehicles, when posturing to sound objective. Solid light—can you say oxymoronic?
The ever-popular, if hard to justify, abduction claims. Ridicule factor, a self-fulfilling rationalization for the
paucity of credible evidence. Luminous energy display. Arguments among proponents of saucer-borne