On the passage of time.

My very first week in college, before I had even turned eighteen, I was asked what my favorite movie was (crowd of strangers seated in a circle, ice-breaking). After a moment I offered "La Strada" and "A Hard Day's Night." An appreciative murmur went up as a couple dozen college kids kicked themselves for not having thought of Fellini.

I can no longer remember what I saw in it. It must be still there (as it were), but I've lost it.

I still think "A Hard Day's Night" is a great movie.

On logos and magic in Plato's presentation of Socrates.

Plato's Socrates was not a normal human being. He went barefoot in winter and in battle. He stood motionless for hours, even a day, on end. He gave up his craft -- presumably stone-masonry, his father's craft -- to stand in the market-place or at the baths asking people questions about truth, beauty, goodness. Though hemlock is a miserable death and a long process of loss of functions, he died with dignity and quietness. He associated with strange people: Pythagoreans, priests with odd beliefs, boys, slaves, aspiring tyrants, future tyrants; yet somehow the dully respectable and practical Xenophon became a devoted follower (of the historical Socrates, not Plato's), too. Other pupils and friends of the historical Socrates included the hedonist Aristippus and the devoutly ascetic Antisthenes, and perhaps Aristophanes, whose brutal mockery in "The Clouds" Plato's Socrates claims in "Apology" set the stage for his later condemnation, yet who is given the most beautiful speech of the "Symposium." He moved in aristocratic circles -- Plato was descended from Solon and other legends of Athens, Alcibiades, Nicias, Laches, and later Xenophon were important generals, the famous sophists he conversed with and their wealthy hosts hardly made it a practice to invite members of the laboring classes to their speeches and soirées -- which does not sound so strange until we reflect and realize that we can't think of a single other classical Athenian who demonstrated even that degree of social mobility. Later came others like him -- court poets and philosophers, and a very few -- really I can only think of Cleanthes (the second head of the Stoic school, 4-3c BCE) at the moment -- who succeeded as figures of culture and learning without patronage or private wealth; and Cleanthes gardened for a living even when he was a prominent philosopher, and is condescended to for his manners and appearance and intelligence (!) in our ancient sources. (He was nicknamed "the Ox.") -- The Stoics and Epicureans actively embraced outsiders of various sorts, it is true. Epicurus's school received the only female pupils we know of in any school but the Academy, which supposedly took on two female pupils under Plato's rule (Axiothea and something with an "L") one of whom was reputed to dress in male garb while the other wore women's clothing. The Stoa was founded by a foreigner of dubious pedigree -- for, as Cicero points out repeatedly in his Tusculan Disputations (isn't it?), Zeno was from Cyprus, and therefore not necessarily of Greek descent -- and headed next by Cleanthes, though from Chrysippus to Marcus Aurelius most of its spokesmen are high-hats. The important late exception is Epictetus, who began his philosophical studies as a slave and later was freed, in middle age I think. But that was at Rome, and the Roman Empire offered dramatically better chances for social improvement than Athens ever had at its peak. There, the classes simply did not mingle. Yet Socrates did.

Certain words that characterize the oddness of Socrates recur throughout Plato: atopia, or being out of place, bizarre, absurd; eironia, "irony," which really meant "dissembling" (Socrates is rarely simply sarcastic), or preparing a face to meet the faces that you meet; epo[i]de -- incantation (lit. "sung over")-- and other words of magic spells and charms. Reversal too is a constant theme. In the "Apology," Socrates proposes as the alternative to the death penalty that he be given a state pension. In "Euthyphro," he stops a moment on the way to his trial for impiety to point out that well-regarded priests know less of piety than he. In "Protagoras" he engineers such thorough confusion that by the end he and Protagoras have switched their positions on all the issues they were considering. In "Gorgias" he acknowledges that by Athenian standards he is politically powerless and a poor speaker, then redefines politics and rhetoric so that he is the only person in Athens with any grasp of either. Further he cites the Pythagorean (and perhaps Heraclitean -- cf. "immortal mortals, mortal immortals") teaching that "who knows whether we the living are really dead, while the dead have life?" In "Phaedo" he asks his friends to offer a thanksgiving offering to Aesclepius the healer god after his death. And more, and more and more, climaxing, surely, in Alcibiades's drunken rant in "Symposium" about how ugly old Socrates refuses to play the part of lover but instead others woo him as if he were a beautiful young boy. His is the last speech. The dialogue ends with Socrates -- alone sober after the night's revelries -- trying to persuade the tragedian Agathon and the comic playwright Aristophanes that the true poet should be able to compose both tragedies and comedies, at dawn, while they struggle not to join the rest of the company in sleep. The echo of Socrates's night with Alcibiades, when too Socrates seemed simply not to see the physical temptations to which everyone else succumbed, and to which Alcibiades frantically endeavored to rouse him, is unmistakable. Alcibiades thinks that Socrates must have bewitched him to make him act the fool so, while remaining himself teasingly unaffected.

Charmides and Phaedrus (?) too accuse Socrates of witchcraft, and Meno compares his effect to the sting of a puffer-fish. Thrasymachus in "Republic" i and Callicles in "Gorgias" have nastier words for it: they feel not enthralled but bullied. In one important way Plato clearly sides with them against the charmed. For they recognize that Socrates has only his words for a net and a spell, and that he traps them and catches them with just words. They are not special, magical words unique to Socrates. On the contrary, he draws them out of every interlocutor, from famous sophists like Protagoras and Hippias to teenagers like Charmides and Theaetetus to Meno's innumerate slave. The words are theirs, not Socrates's. Famously he calls himself a midwife in "Theaetetus," because he can only help others nurture and deliver the babies conceived (if we accept "Symposium"'s account) in encounters with the Forms. "Symposium" suggests that we fall in love because we are already pregnant and wish "to give birth in beauty" -- that is, to express the goodness and truth and beauty we feel certain we have within us -- and for that we need others' help. Socrates helps through talking with us, through asking questions and worrying our replies until the weak spots show. His magic is speech and reasoned argument (both central meanings of the Greek "logos"), not a mumbled spell or sacrificed bird or buried curse-tablet. His wizardry and his bullying aggression are partial views of his midwifery.

Socrates was strange. He moved in social circles beyond his class, he sought out beautiful boys and then ignored their bodies, he humbled great speakers and arguers with simple questions, he sometimes felt no effects from cold and alcohol, he refused to take money for what he considered to be the most valuable service of all, his aid in the care of souls. Other contemporaries tried to explain him as magical. (The pseudo-Platonic "Theages" suggests the astonishing claims made for him when one of its characters claims to become wiser and better through mere physical proximity to Socrates.) Xenophon mostly ignores such claims, fearing perhaps that they come too close to the critiques that led to his trial and death. Plato, on the other hand, as is his wont, does something more ambitious and more audacious. He acknowledges the magic of Socrates, but offers a revisionist account on which it is nothing more than logos -- something we all have -- and on which any special talent or might of Socrates's lay in midwifery -- a profession of poor women (including Socrates's mother, he says in "Theaetetus") that no one powerful would dream of pursuing. It's true, Plato tells us, that Socrates is different, bizarre, dissembling, magical. In a culminating reversal, those very qualities only show the more clearly what is universally human in him.

On the applicability of philosophy to "real life" so-called.

I am methodologically a moderate skeptic, an enthusiast by temperament. I do not believe in philosophical conclusions that are sepable from the process by which one has attained them (for if the question can be answered so simply, it's hard to see that we needed philosophy for it, really). I have no qualms about ascribing falsity and many about ascribing truth -- though fewest of the three to ascribing insight. My beloved Stoics had some crazy views -- I don't hesitate much about applying that term, either -- but much understanding.

Epictetus tells us that life is a game precisely in the respect that seems to distinguish the two, namely that in a game the outcome is not very important while adherence to the rules is imperative -- since inconsistent adherence means playing the game ill, or, at some point on the spectrum, ceasing to play the game at all. Now we are used to thinking that life is not like this. We are used to thinking that whether you win or lose within the game of life has quite a bit of importance to us the agents concerned, and should have. Clearly it makes a difference to one whether one's aorta bursts or not, and whether operations on our hearts are successful or not. ("Successful" -- it's built in already there.) Yes, this matters. But Epictetus (following his Stoic forebears) tries to show why it needn't matter in the way we might antecedently have assumed. This involves lots of high philosophy, naturally enough -- axiology (=consideration of what value is and of what is valuable), theology and metaphysics to ground value, logic including epistemology (as they divided it) to keep us from error and guide us towards understanding on the way. It is all very fascinating and largely the subject of my dissertation and not at all suitable for this sort or level of explanation.

Instead let me assume it all, and hint at some consequences.

Epictetus argues that if this is so, then we haven't anything to regret when we act correctly yet fail to attain our objective. This is so because nothing has been lost by our losing it that could determine whether our lives are happy or not -- I think by "happy" he very nearly means "meaningful, in such a way as to be worth living." So: failing to get a job does not eliminate the chance for a meaningful life. Dying destroys us, but not our lives, not the sense we'd learned to make of things. Losing a child, even, cannot mean losing all the worth one might ever have attained to -- though I would imagine it makes most things look very unworthy of the time we give to them.

Is this true? I wouldn't know how to answer that question. Certainly Epictetus relies on false beliefs to get to it, and not incidentally, not separably. Certainly the Stoic view is so radical as to be hard to understand. (What would it mean for a life to disappear yet for its happiness to match a god's?) Certainly such points can be hackneyed to death with the large axe, or is that a carriage, of Hollywood fairy tale treacle. All I can add is that learning to think of the ways in which merely doing something right in itself constitutes succeeding at it, no matter how all occasions do conspire against us, i.e., how external features cooperate with our efforts -- that exercise, that learning, that reflective choice to change perspective -- is not a matter of books, but of how books can change and shape our lives.

On canonicity (with respect to the sexuality of Sherlock Holmes).

H&I were watching a bit of "Young Sherlock Holmes" over dinner (lentil stew with ras el hanout, and brioche. multicultural!) and were shocked to find that Holmes is portrayed therein as actively heterosexual. Now, it's explicitly not inspired by any of the stories (though the deerstalker hat, and Watson with his pipe, and even the fascination with obscure pre-colonial ritual are clear nods to the canon as popularly construed, and Holmes's interest in fencing may nod to his literary pugilism). And it's perfectly plausible -- even, in the genre conventions of contemporary tales of Victorian manhood, likely -- that a young man could have been interested in young women and only later frustrated or simply bored out of such pursuits. I do not ask a children's movie from the eighties, produced by Steven Spielberg, to break cinematic ground in the depiction of adolescent sexual ambivalence. Yet surely no other depiction of Holmes has had him actively motivated by a romantic attachment to a woman. Even people who think he had an affair with Irene Adler (of which Nero Wolfe was the product -- obviously) don't take this to have been a life-changer; on the contrary her importance lies in the uniqueness of the incident.

Now, the Holmes canon is especially complex, for a number of reasons. One is about the author. Arthur Conan Doyle was so patently, and avowedly, commercially motivated at various points -- e.g., famously he hadn't intended to bring Holmes back from the Reichenbach Falls, but the public outcry and the dribbling diminution of funds in his account altered his constancy; besides which most devotees believe that he sometimes simply incorporated other material into Holmes stories so it would sell. Meanwhile, Doyle was writing the stories for so long that inevitably (?) they changed dramatically in tone, theme, and content. (The early stories are mainly ordinary domestic dramas whose characters act for clear, usually financial or romantic, reasons; while the international intrigues, supernatural debunkings, criminal conspiracies, and ... uh ... World War One ... come later.)

Another is about the character: that Holmes has so many blanks in his life, so many puzzles. Some of the major ones: why does Holmes think he needs Watson? what is Holmes's attitude towards women? what is Holmes's background (besides the existence of Mycroft) and what was his life like before (besides that he attended Oxford)? why does he do detective work at all? what are we to make of his drug use? his chemical experiments? his violin-playing? his extended bouts of melancholia punctuated by periods of intense activity -- the alternation of listless ineffectuality with what must feel from the inside like omnipotence? why is he such a devoted and accomplished actor, a master of make-up, accents, and class-crossing manners? how contemptuous is he of other people, really? of Watson? of the audience of the stories? how important is Irene Adler to him? Moriarty (+Moran et al.)? Mycroft? Watson?

A third is that adaptations (mainly on screen, but also literary sequels) were so free from the beginning that fanon has always been a major part of the canon. Basil Rathbone defined Sherlock Holmes for forty years. Before him multiple options existed -- in fact h tells me that, though now audiences complain that Nigel Bruce's dullard Watson is quite unlike Conan Doyle's, until he played Watson for comic relief many adaptations saw no reason to include Watson at all. Unthinkable -- post-Rathbone, that is! -- In the seventies was "The Seven-Per-Cent Solution," a lovely film and one of only two I've seen that contain a pivotal duel in the form of a tennis match, and also a drastic revision to the self-possessed, self-controlled man of reason we thought we knew. Nicholas Meyer's (I've only seen the film, but he's the novelist) Holmes is a broken addict and a monomaniac, who needs Watson more or less to stay alive. It's terribly funny, and terribly important to the way people see Holmes. To me Billy Wilder's mutilated and partly lost "The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes," even earlier (1970), is even better; not a zany farce (which I love) but a real attempt to solve the puzzles of Holmes, originally segment by segment but in the version that's come down to us in rather choppy, episodic, but thematically united format. Of course there are dozens (hundreds?) of others, but these are the ones I'll focus on.

Rathbone-Holmes is strictly orthodox as a character, and he's quite uninterested in sex. The films on the other hand depart more from the stories than almost any other versions. (Except "Hound of the Baskervilles." There you have to go to the Hammer Films version -- starring Peter Cushing as Holmes and Christopher Lee as Baskerville -- whose innovations include attempted ritual sacrifice, an entirely different female Stapleton, a tarantula in a mine shaft, and webbed feet.) As I recall, "The Five Orange Pips" has almost nothing to do with the story, and also, in later ones Sherlock Holmes fights Nazis. Nazis! (But how can you blame them, when Conan Doyle had Holmes patriotically collaborate with the British Secret Service in WWI?) Anyway, Rathbone-Holmes keeps Watson around because he's amusing to the audience, he acts and does science because he can do anything and why shouldn't he, and he has essentially no character flaws other than extreme isolation.

S-P-CS-Holmes offers very different solutions to the puzzles of the series. Holmes keeps Watson around because he's severely mentally incapacitated and essentially would die without him. He's maybe interested in women, if they fall into his lap and owe him their lives; what he really wants is a vacation.

Wilder's Holmes is gay. Not recent-Robert-Downey,-Jr.-Holmes endless-yearning-in-his-eyes, physically-intimate,-pettily,-sabotagingly-jealous-of-Watson-and-hostile-towards-anyone-who-might-take-him-away gay. Explicitly, completely, painfully, and -- again unlike in the recent version -- to Watson's blissful ignorance, gay. (Again -- in 1970!) Jude Law Watson loves Holmes back but can't deal with him, either, and clearly considers himself capable of having another relationship as dominant in his life. The Watson in "Private Life" just doesn't think in those terms. While Holmes is politely, spitefully declining a prima ballerina's demand for insemination on the grounds that "Tchaikovsky is not an isolated case" (T being another failed inseminator -- "how shall I put it? -- women not his glass of tea"), Watson is enjoying the chorus line, and quite horrified to hear that the ballerina now takes him for Holmes's lover. (When they get back to Baker Street: "I hope I'm not being presumptuous, but Holmes, HAVE there been women in your life?" Pause. "The answer is yes ... You are being presumptuous." And: "Watson, this is a very small flat. We don't want to clutter it up with women." And: "When rebuffed at the front door, one's only option is to try the tradesman's entrance." -- !) As in the stories Holmes uses cocaine because he is bipolar (?) and self-medicating. As in the stories Holmes mistrusts women, with the additional explanation (common enough) of early failure. As is not in the stories, Watson is so devoted to Holmes and so concerned about his drug use that he goes to absurd lengths (like, making up a case and nailing a lot of things to the ceiling) to keep him intellectually engaged.

This is a long way of explaining why the boarding school alternate universe and the goofy drugs-and-ancient-Egypt plot and the "let's winkingly show our hero taking up all the clichés of his later career, just like in 'Indiana Jones 3'" and even the rivalry with a stupid irritatingly-impossible-not-to-read-as-Draco-Malfoy-now posh blond boy -- bothered h&me less, or surprised us less, than the romance with a girl. Who, by the way, looked at least eight years older than he was, in a move of dubious legality on the part of the imagined trysters.

By the way, I've often wondered whether Conan Doyle had been reading the Nicomachean Ethics (Bekker pages in the 1120s) when he came up with Holmes, because with the exception of the elements that require massive wealth he's Aristotle's great-souled man to a T --

On "The Room."

I don't even know how to begin talking about "The Room."

On libraries and taste.

The line between decaying splendor (good!) and dreary grandeur (not so good!) is a fine one. I can confidently place the Bod on the former and the Widener on the latter side. Loveliest of all is Sterling, which is as old-fashioned as either but not so campily as the Bod (those portraits of forgotten scholars everywhere) nor so creakily as the Widener (all that marble and gold). I do like modern libraries too (the Seattle Public Library and the Beinecke are two of my favorites, and the Wellesley library's intimidatingly "designed"-looking chairs that turn out to be excellent of their kind remind me of Seattle), and I rather like the British National Library as well) and some comfily elderly ones, including many smaller university or college libraries and my local public libraries where I was raised.

I don't know, it's hard to say what makes one person appreciate this imperfection and another dislike it. (I discussed this a bit in the bad movies post.) My inclination is toward a weak aesthetic Platonism: I believe that many or most of the good things people see in anything are really there and really good. On this sort of account the hard work is not saying what is really good and not good, but prioritizing: since we are not big enough to get all of the good things, and because it is not unusual for appreciation of one good to detract from our capacity to "get" others, whether because of internal tensions or simply because we have not world enough and time. So for example I believe that there really are the good things that others see in songs or books or films that I would normally, casually call "horrible." That doesn't mean I regret my inability to appreciate, oh, reggae music and Nicholas Sparks and Wes Anderson, or professional football either. Nor when picking tastes to acquire would I make an effort to cultivate those in particular. But I have no problem with people filling in the blanks in art differently than I do and I have no problem accepting that what is salient to each of us on each occasion is not of necessity the only feature of that thing that could be important. I love enough clichés myself that I could never claim to occupy some Archimedean outside point. I can't criticize those who find "Brief Encounter" classist and sentimental; so it is; but I should be very sorry to watch it again and find that those features and aspects dominated my perception in place of its delicately intense emotional fidelity. I would be sorry to lose what I have seen in it. Naturally I cannot have the same investment in "The Royal Tenenbaums," and so I am neither sad nor ashamed to declare it trite, strained, arbitrarily sentimental, somewhat sexist, and dull. But I would be sad and ashamed to find myself trying to argue someone else out of her (well, realistically ... more likely his) love of Wes Anderson.

On founding moments.

In the context of a discussion of the literary tropes and cultural assumptions Aristotle deploys in setting out his project at the beginning of the Politics, to many of which he never returns again in the book:

"Founders were very important to the Greeks. They all have stories about the first person who founded their city and wrote its laws. -- Well, not the Athenians; they sprung from the ground -- that is what 'autochthonous' means. But founders were very important to other Greeks. -- Athena gave the Athenians olive trees. So that was important."

-- the dry, but relaxed, but sharp, but never mean, but terribly blunt Gisela Striker, who was one of my favorite philosophers for years before she became one of my favorite people as well

On empathy, in scattered, conversational format.

H&I have been talking Hume of late, and sentimentalism of other stripes. H says he is dubious that empathetic sentiments -- that is, sentiments of identification with another -- are as natural and automatic and unreflective as Hume assumes; I say that babies above say three, or certainly six, months respond palpably to the moods of those around them. H says that Hume is thinking of something stronger -- not merely natural proclivity towards others' stances and status, but positive feeling as if it were happening to you, and belief that it could happen to you. I say I can go along as far as feeling as if it were happening to you, that it is natural to blush for your friend who has got mud all over herself, and to be afraid for your friend who is going to a war zone, and to cry for Baptiste et al. in "Children of Paradise." He agrees but considers the further requirement false and onerous. Aristotle sometimes seems to say such things in the Poetics, I say, and there too it is a bafflingly unnecessary restriction. It is true that the characters must be somewhat like us to evoke our pity (and fear?): I cannot pity a character in a noh drama, whose language and affect and gestures and appearance convey little to me; I know I lose something from the nineteeth century social dramas because I cannot really understand the stakes in the bizarre reputation games they are always playing. It is not true that I have to consider myself very likely to encounter the character's situation, else no one would appreciate Euripides's "Medea" or Sophocles's "Oedipus the King." It is not clear how important the thought that if I were in this situation, I might think it through like them, let alone that I would respond as they do, is. Surely it makes some difference. Surely we empathize more when we identify more closely, and surely we pity more when we empathize more. The issues are of thresholds.

I do always think of what Chesterton's Father Brown says: I understand criminal behavior because I am a criminal, too. It is not a stretch for a human being to imagine herself coming to cause unnecessary harm.

On the demon of migraine.

When I was young and foolish, I held two beliefs so false that I wonder I wasn't disillusioned earlier:

(1) that there was something romantic about suffering and incapacity, perhaps about desperation, something artistic;
(2) that migraines were a species of headache.

Now I know that migraines are radically heterogeneous. I also know that any way you slice it, they steal a whole day from you: the episode itself may last as little as fifteen minutes, but you're too drained for anything else. I have had blind-vision migraines (by far the least bad kind in my experience), extreme sensitivity to light and sound migraines, aphasic migraines, abdominal migraines; migraines that overcome me with premonitions of death, and migraines that lack that shred of panic; migraines in class, at friends', on the street, at home, at all times of day and year in various patterns of frequency on three continents. I have lost nearly a month running to migraines, at one time. I went on anti-migraine medication after that, and it helps -- sometimes I think something will become a migraine, and then it doesn't -- but they are still migraines when they come. I have had migraines that lasted less than half an hour, all-day migraines (more rarely, thankfully; but this is one), interrupted migraines that resume later in the day or in the week, migraines whose full onset I was able to stave off until I got to a safer place, migraines whose onset came at an incredibly inconvenient time (they can be induced by stress, you know), migraines of whose onset I was unaware until I tried to speak and my interlocutor responded with concern as if to some garbled gobbledygook, tried to look and realized my unfocused eyes saw nothing but bright light wormed through with threads of still brighter light, heard a telephone ring down the hall and wept with the pain. I had my first migraine, blind with vision, only a few hours before my Greek class read Acts (4:19??) on Saul's blind vision onthe road to Damascus. I have been able to conduct conversations during a migraine and been felled in the middle of a thought. I have returned obsessively to the same thought and been unable to maintain any train of thought at all, and also I have had lulls during which my brain is less affected. I have told people it was nothing and I did not need their help, and begged them not to leave me. I have not been improved. I have learned only the two things, that suffering is pain, not art, and that migraines are not per se headaches. The first I already knew and the second Oliver Sacks could have taught me.

On my misspent youth.

H&I went out to see "Ruddigore" tonight at the Harvard Gilbert&Sullivan Society and I noted every flub & commented on the unusual choice to make Dick Dauntless rather self-aware and intelligent & cooed with praise over their choice to let Rose sing her verse of "Happily coupled are we" & delighted in the comic lead getting the happiest ending for once instead of the principal tenor & sang all the songs to myself all the way home. Next week: "Patience" at MIT Gilbert&Sullivan, I hope. And in the spring "Yeomen" here, and perhaps in winter something in New York, if we can catch it.

One of my students (an astrophysicist with whom I've discussed grad school applications) was violin section chair. I felt very proud of her.

On Renoir and the unwitting personalization of class politics.

1. H&I saw "La Marseillaise" last week, previously having been exposed only to (multiple viewings of both) the most famous ones, "Grand Illusion" and "Rules of the Game." Surprises: overtly -- even propagandistically -- patriotic, pro-revolutionary tone, and hokiness thereof; amount of time devoted to "ordinary people"; no blood until the end and then suddenly a fair bit; is that really what Swiss French sounds like?; Louis XVI the individual portrayed by far the most sympathetically. Not surprises: non-trivial amounts of time devoted to depiction and discussion of hunting and poaching; women come in three flavors: simple country girl (even in the city), devoted wholly to country or son, haughty soulless aristocrat (Marie Antoinette is not so different from the lady at the center of "Rules"); men fall hopelessly and causelessly in love instantly and/or dominatingly anyway; the only revolutionary who approaches having a character is depicted and repeatedly described as "a gentleman." Renoir doesn't much like aristocrats, but he can't see his way to attributing an inner life to anyone else. The scene of the maudlin aristos exiled in Prussia dreaming of restoration has more human-scaled emotion, more everyday detail, and quite possibly despite the cartoonish cliche of the pining post-revolutionary aristocrat more naturalistic dialogue than the whole rest of the film.

2. I sort of don't like "Rules of the Game" as much as everyone else (including h) does, but isn't Renoir wandering around in a bear suit desperately seeking someone to unzip it and let him out the most poignantly self-abasing director performance in film, basically? Andrew Bujalski, eat your heart out. (N.B. I'm not counting big directors acting in others' films, à la Lang in "Contempt" or von Stroheim in "Sunset Boulevard," just directors acting in their own films. Hitchcock as the before-and-after in a weight loss advertisement in a drifting newspaper during one of his thin periods in the '40s -- which is that from, "Foreign Correspondent?" or conceivably "Rope?" -- is rather good, too.)

3. Watched "Le Cercle Rouge" for the first time in, oh, more than eight years the other week, and was quite blown away at how much more I got out of it this time now that I was able to focus on things other than Alain Delon's hideous moustache. I'd like to say something about Melville too one of these days. Maybe even a tiny bit about his commonalities with Ozu! (Okay, mostly that they both practice the sort of monastic self-restraint that eventually displays themselves all the more vividly -- not that I consider them frauds for it as I do Saint Francis, since they never claimed to be effacing themselves for the greater glory of God! -- but also the surprising and touching love both have for America. Oh, I listened to an old radio interview with Melville on the Criterion DVD of "Bob" one time, and the man was a one-man imdb of Hollywood under the studio system -- plus anyone who lists great American directors of the '20s and '30s -- maybe he was talking '40s, too, can't remember -- and starts with Lubitsch, makes space for Clarence Brown and Sam Wood, but forgets about Capra -- is a lost soulmate to me.)

On generosity in story-telling, and the Lubitsch Touch.

H & I watched "Trouble in Paradise" again the other day -- h's second, and my perhaps dozenth or twentieth, viewing. Although I remember all the jokes and can recite them along with the characters still in between viewings I always forget what an uproariously funny movie it is. We were watching it in the theater -- my first time since I first saw it, in 2003; h's first time full stop -- and it does make a difference to have the other people there. In my case it makes me nervous, because I usually start laughing before anyone else and feel foolish. And it is always interesting to hear what gets the biggest laughs (not always what I laugh hardest at, naturally). But the general benefit of having other people there is that it lets you see things through their eyes a bit -- through your knowledge that their eyes are watching, anyhow. That is why watching a favorite film with a respected and admired acquaintance who hasn't seen it is so nerve-wracking: because watching the other person watch verges on overwhelming watching. But with a friendly or anonymous crowd, it lets you see things you might have missed. Sometimes it lets you see a scene or hear a line as new. -- Incidentally, this is one of the underrated pleasures of "MST3K," too -- not just that they notice more details because they have watched the movie six times, but that they remark on different details because different things really are salient to them, because a string of scenes in which people look at hands adds up to something for them in a way it never would have for me on my own. And now -- on occasion -- it points to something outside itself to my eyes, too. This is why people repeat catch phrases; they represent the hollowed-out version of our wonder at the fact of shared, and more miraculous yet -- transferred or transmitted, experience.

Lubitsch never lost this wonder. His films are full of the details people absorb from other people, or details that they share without knowing it made marvelous by our knowledge that they share it. That's the meaning of Lily and Mariette (Miriam Hopkins and Kay Francis) separately waiting till a companion looks the other way to dunk a croissant into coffee. It's the meaning of the montages in which we see first Mariette and then Gaston (Herbert Marshall) responded to by an array of subordinates, and at least a part of the meaning of the (riotous) early scene in which the concierge mediatess between Italian-speaking police and English-only Filiba (Edward Everett Horton, whose absent-mindedly benevolent affect Lubitsch subverts both here and in "Trouble in Paradise"'s near-Siamese twin, "Design for Living"). There's a kind of trust offered the viewer here too: I'll show you their absurdities if you acknowledge how common they are; I'll show you their faults if you promise to forgive them. Even the smallest of characters are bathed in the director's gentleness and wonder and generosity: the butler (Robert Greig, recognizable nine years later as the butler in "The Lady Eve") whose mutters and eye-rolls summarize weeks of Mariette and Gaston's flirtation, the waiter who highlights how comical Gaston's grandiosity is by studiously taking down the order "moon ... in champagne ...," the maid whose single appearance is a five-second blushing "Maybe, M. Lavalle." They say it's because Lubitsch was an actor himself, and not so talented that he got beyond bit parts, that he made sure to distribute the fun a bit more widely than some others. Even the gondolier garbageman whose operatic solo opens the picture is Lubitsch telling us: look at us -- bringing beauty and grandiosity to the most ordinary, sordid tasks! Isn't it touching? But aren't we funny?

I've muddled it up by presenting two distinct kinds of generosity together. One, not so significant except for its link to the second, is formal: the generosity to let other people speak. Not just the camera, not just the script, and certainly not just the lead actors. (Lubitsch never has only one or two lead actors, either, that I can think of. Perhaps in "Bluebeard's Eighth Wife," which I can't remember well beyond the pajama scene at the very beginning? Or "Cluny Brown," which I haven't seen at all?) I always think of this as Chekhovian, because of the way Chekhov uses different perspectives to show that what moves us most can be invisible to others (think of the cut away to the little boys sneaking cigarettes in -- "The Lady with the Dog," perhaps?, and the famous shrinking of the central incident of "The Kiss" in the recounting to others), but also to show how we can learn to find the poignancy in small things. (Time to mention again that I hope to write more about Ozu some time ... )

The second generosity is substantive, and it's Chekhovian too. It's a way of interpreting the formal generosity, really: as a sign that they too are human beings, they are parties to meaning and sorrow beyond ours -- and they are party to ours not because we are so special but because of their own humanity. The idea of "the Lubitsch touch" must go back more than seven decades now. Billy Wilder is known to have kept a sign on his desk reading: "how would Lubitsch have done it?" (A sort of prophetic parody of those "WWJD?" bracelets, I like to think. Wilder was no slouch at empathy himself; forget that he wrote "Ninotchka," and forget the exceptional sensitivity in the face of opacity that defines "The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes," and just remember that it is not a coincidence that one of his two best-known movies ends with the line: "Nobody's perfect!" Even a trifling light comedy like "Sabrina" includes the sublime moment when Audrey Hepburn is charmed by Humphrey Bogart's record of "Yes, We Have No Bananas," thinking it a sign of what she missed while away in Paris, rather than what she missed because she was not born yet when he went to college. What is that but an admission of the silliness of the storyline -- one intended to show how to take the story's silliness to the movie's advantage. "The Major and he Minor"'s nutty vista of dozens of teenaged schoolgirls at a dance with Veronica Lake haircuts is along the same lines: the absurdity of the plot can no longer be read as contemptible-pathetic, it has to be seen as touching-pathetic.) Anyway, critics have focussed on sophistication -- or, more crudely -- sex as the essence of the Lubitsch touch, but that's at best partly right. Part of the beauty of "Trouble in Paradise," and "Design for Living," too, comes from the acute awareness that sophistication without generosity and wit is worse than useless -- indeed, contemptible, if it allows us to think better of ourselves than we deserve; and that deChristianized sex is also a moral matter, not per se or because of special metaphysical properties of human genitalia but because of the special properties of human character; and that the proverb is wrong, that folly and forgiveness are both human, that we ought to expect both of the same people, that a fool who can forgive is still a fool, but wiser than one who can't forgive.

On prophecy.

I am a rationalist and a naturalist. I do not expect such things as an afterlife (what reason have I to believe that the soul could be separated from the body?) or a messianic era (what evidence suggests that human beings are perfectible? -- anyway the messianic era is, by its nature, perpetually in the future), and I am quite sure that there couldn't be such a God as in the Bible, talking to human beings and listening to them. I don't believe in prayer as request and I don't believe in divine vengeance or punishment. But I believe in holiness, and in a way I might say I believe in prophecy. Some works simply have an insight and a beauty that is beyond human. Not that it does not come from humans -- of course it does; what could a prophet be if not human? Rather that it does not seem to come from that human being alone. It does not seem possible that one person did this, or several working together in the normal way either. It seems to express something beyond what one human being could say by herself.

Yesterday was Yom Kippur. I spent a lot of time with the Prophets: Ezekiel, Hosea, Joel, Obadiah, Amos, Jonah. I could not understand Ezekiel or Joel very well, though I have read them before. I think that I understand Jonah less the more I read it. The story seems shorter every time. But Hosea was wonderful.

Hosea is the story of a man who asks God why God does not abandon Israel since it is constantly straying. God tells him to marry a prostitute and have children with her, and to name them symbolically. Hosea becomes committed to his wife and treats his children as his own without regard to biology. To divorce her would be too painful, nor can he abandon them. The rest of the book is full of prophesies that Israel's sufferings are only temporary, but that God still cares for us. Its final chapter (read as the Haftarah last Shabbat, and giving the Shabbat its name: Shabbat Shuvah, the Sabbath of "Return O Israel") asks us to speak to God with our lips instead of bulls, and we will flower again. That is, it's the story of God teaching a human being to understand what human beings are like, and of the human being learning.

Jonah is meant along the same lines, only Jonah doesn't seem to learn: God has the last word, not Jonah, and even so God is reduced to pleading for the lives of the innocent animals of Nineveh rather than its guilty-but-repentant people. Jonah ends in aporia, in suspension between divine acceptance and human rejection. (I read in one of the prophets yesterday, though already I cannot remember where, God saying: of course I forgive you; I am not a human being, to cherish a grudge. The commentary pointed out that in Numbers 23 [? Bilaam's prophecy, anyway] God says: I am not a human being, to change my mind.)

On September 11th.

My godmother was there. I didn't know for sure until the weekend, when she still hadn't been seen. Aleha hashalom, requiescat in pace.

My father was there the first time. By 2001 he worked in midtown. My mother and sisters were up in the East 70s and 80s.

My cousin was working at the Woolworth Building. She got out of the subway at Park Place or Chambers, saw the crowds flowing away from the surface, and got right back on the train.

My high school best friend hadn't started school yet and was going to Century 21, but she wasn't hurt.

And I was in Connecticut, in class, not understanding, even when a girl whose father worked at the Pentagon got up in the middle of class and walked out. Not understanding, I thought it was a movie at first (yes, just like the Onion says); I couldn't think what it meant. I was ashamed not to be in New York. I was only two weeks gone and going back the next week for Rosh HaShanah. I did go back, by then with extensions on all my papers and a never-taken-up invitation to group therapy. I got so much dust in my lungs over three days in Brooklyn Heights I was sick through Yom Kippur. It was everywhere. You could practically see it on the melted candles and missing persons signs all over the Promenade and all over downtown Manhattan. I walked the Bridge like a pilgrim among pilgrims, some in facemasks for protection as we got closer to the site. Everything was closed. The closest to feeling better I've ever come was walking home over the Bridge (the car side!) during the blackout two years later, when the crowds of strangers -- to each other, too -- were all talking and laughing, inviting each other to spontaneous who-knows-how-long-the-freezer-will-be-out barbecues and corner singalongs with guitar. Then too nobody could reach anybody, but it was all right.

*

Tuesday, September.

Tuesday.
September -- starting school.
I was reading: Plato,
Thucydides, and the
Iliad.
Living in them, really,
since I never wanted
anything but that, but
that one pure and simple
freedom to live in books.

I was thinking: men don't know
what they want, and so they
put up shapes in the sky,
because they've seen the shapes
that are already there,
that the gods, perhaps
that God has put up there,
in the stars.

But men again
perhaps didn't know what
they wanted, perhaps knew
and acted as they did
out of purest malice --
I cannot say, I am
no moral theorist --
and took them right back down --

the shapes --
not understanding
that they were already
back up there in the stars:

the Twins.

(Jan. 14 and 16, 2005)

After.

Newish movies have become old movies,
Instantly dated by catastrophe.
The skylines of their cities look so young -–
Subtly unrecognizable, solid
In a way that suggests nothing so much
As a sublimation. You can't believe
You didn't see it coming, looking now.
They were so ripe for it. Asking for it.

I had forgotten how they used to be
All in one piece like that, all in one place.

Anaxagoras says nothing ever
Comes to be or passes away, but has
Its elements reapportioned. The earth
In them has settled back into the earth,
The water into the river, the air
Has risen through the air we breathe, their fire
Returned unto the everlasting fire.

(November 10, 2005, during the commercial breaks of a movie ("When Harry Met Sally ..." yet) filmed partly in New York between 1970 and 2001)

Still.

Without comprehension
I cry every time I remember
or hear mentioned
even elisions
and mere allusions
to collusions
that bore collisions
into buildings
(decidedly,
suicidally
lily-gilding)
that September.

(January 5, 2006)

On the beauty of Plato's Gorgias.

I have been kidnapped by a sadistic genius. He knows that what I like best is to read. He is licking his lips to look at my sadly overflowing bookshelves.

"Classicist," he begins, finally -- "classicist, you have misunderstood me deeply. You take me for a sadistic psychopath, but in truth I am kind and generous. You'll have Stockholm Syndrome by the time I let you go." I raise my eyebrows. "Here -- " and he releases my hands and lets me spit out my gag. "I am a nice man," he reiterates. "I didn't have to do that."

"But I'm still tied to a chair that is nailed to the floor."

"I never promised you a rose garden. In any event" -- he gives the room one more sweeping glance -- "I am going to do you a favor."

"Thank you."

"I may let you go some time, or I may not. You won't know until I do -- or don't. But in the interim, I'll leave one book within your reach. Any book, whether you have it here already or not. -- No cheating, now: you can't have a compilation, no full Bible or the complete works of Shakespeare: if you want Jeremiah, you can have Jeremiah, if you want Beatrice and Benedick pick them, but you can't have Jeremiah and Genesis, or Beatrice, Benedick, and Hamlet. -- By the way, when my assistant gets here, he's bringing my recently perfected selective amnesia device, and he's going to remove the memory of every other book besides your choice from your nervous system. So." He fixes his gaze on me. "What can I do for you?"

********************

In this circumstance it is hard for me, at this juncture in my life, to imagine picking anything other than Plato's Gorgias. (If I had to pick the edition I'd say E.R. Dodds's Greek text with commentary.)

It breaks my heart to pick; it breaks my heart to imagine a life without the rest. It is cruel of him even to make me think of it. Nevertheless I can say with confidence that I would pick the Gorgias.

I have been writing about courage lately, its awkwardness as a virtue and ways philosophers have found to revise it, to reenvision it as a virtue central to our moral lives. Ultimately I suggest that a late Stoic conception of courage as a sub-species of greatness of soul, "the virtue that puts us above those things that happen to good and bad people alike," can help us out of the problems raised. From this perspective, writing about the problems for courage in Aristotle is easy (though getting my adviser to accept that I've made any good points against Aristotle is a different matter, hard-won and cherished), but writing about the problems for courage in Plato is hard, because the Laches, Protagoras, and Gorgias -- not the Republic, which is again easy to criticize from a Stoic perspective -- all embrace something like what the Stoics mean. The Stoics read Plato closely and responded to him carefully (we know that the two most important early Stoics, Zeno and Chrysippus, both wrote book-length responses to Plato's Republic), and in their account of courage they are building on Laches, Protagoras, and most of all Gorgias.

Gorgias is the dialogue in which Socrates is most ironic and most passionate. Tyrants celebrated as the happiest of men are really in the worst condition, if they are truly tyrannical. Cooking and rhetoric belong to a single art, the art of pleasing others, while medicine and philosophy belong to the opposite art, which is oriented towards truth and goodness. No one willingly does wrong. A life of desire satisfaction is less happy than a life without desires. It is better to be wronged than to do wrong. He insists that he does not know for certain what the truth is about that last thesis, but that he has never heard and can no longer imagine anyone arguing against it without ending by looking ridiculous. He is unskilled at the Athenian style of politics, yet turns out to be the only true teacher of politics in Athens.

What does this all have to do with courage? -- Socrates's last and most interesting interlocutor, Callicles, rejects the Socratic theses of the previous paragraph. Justice and temperance, he says, are for the birds; they are imposed by the many weak men upon the few strong, but the course of nature, which we might even call "natural justice," is for the few strong to rule. These strong men -- what qualities suit them to rule? It is their intelligence and their courage. And from Callicles's embrace of courage, Socrates argues him into accepting all of the other theses.

Callicles has embraced a rhetorical and political model of courage, rather than the standard military paradigm. By the end of the dialogue, we have come to understand that this is the right model, only Callicles has erred as to what constitutes a true rhetoric and a true politics. A proper rhetoric ought to subjugate itself to truth -- that is, it ought to become philosophy, or dialectic. So for all the choppy simplicity of his argumentative style, Socrates turns out to be a better rhetorician than Gorgias of Leontini, one of the most famous and highly-paid speakers of the era.

A similar paradox awaits in courage's other special arena. Socrates is inept at Athenian politics, yet by wise standards he is a true politician; and both of these features put his life in danger. The ending of the Gorgias is haunted by Socrates's eventual conviction and execution on charges of impiety (399 BCE). We know, when he says that he would rather die for acting justly than live having acted unjustly, that he means it. Why should he live humiliated and in bad condition? And why should he fear to die, when he has no special reason to believe that death is an evil? Either it is nothing, as he suggests seems likely in the Apology, or he will be happy in the afterlife if he has lived justly in this life, a thesis he elaborates mythically here and in Republic and Phaedrus (and cf. the Laws' claims at the very end of the Crito).

Socrates is not afraid to die because he is not persuaded that life is a very great good or that death is a very great evil. Something that he can find in himself or make for himself -- justice, wisdom, temperance, courage; virtue, goodness, happiness -- is more important even than life. This is the radical self-sufficiency of Socratic courage, and it is one of his most important bequests to his Stoic heirs.

The language of the Gorgias is beautiful, its structure a fortification to argument and to beauty alike, its thought important and profound, its characters vivid and engaged. To Plato, writing it must have seemed to discharge a sacred obligation.

On correct use of prosody.

Here is "Life and Love" by the Earl of Rochester:


All my past life is mine not more
The flying hours are gone,
Like transitory dreams given o’er,
Whose images are kept in store
By memory alone.

What ever is to come is not,
How can it then be mine?
The present moment’s all my lot,
And that as fast as it is got
Phyllis, is wholly thine.

Then talk not of inconstancy,
False hearts, and broken vows,
If I, by miracle, can be,
This live-long minute true to thee,
‘Tis all that heaven allows.


I love the way he uses rhythm to build impatience here. It's perhaps intrinsic (at least natural) to the abaab stanza, all the more so if you tease the reader by speeding up the "b" lines to trimeter from the "a"s' four-beat structure. He really makes the most of the flexibility of English iambic meters, too: the patient lecture in four strict iambs of "Whatever is to come is not" followed immediately by the three beats -- a petulantly insistent trochee and two iambs -- of "How can it then be mine?"

Sorry, terminology note: trimeter = 3 beats per line, tetrameter = 4 beats per line, pentameter = 5 beats per line. The metrical units are just as simple. They're defined by beats, that is, more particularly, by patterns of stressed and unstressed syllables. An iamb is unstressed-stressed, like "again." A trochee is stressed-unstressed, like "chocolate." Hence iambic pentameter = a line based on the rhythm u-s u-s u-s u-s u-s: "My other loves have been ethereal." But substituting in other feet -- especially trochees (s-u, remember; in iambic meters it is exceptionally common for a line to start with a trochee, which is typically followed by a chain of strict iambs: "Fear fills the chamber, darkness decks the bride," or indeed "How can it then be mine?"), dactyls (s-u-u, or oom-pah-pah if you prefer) or anapest (u-u-s or pah-pah-oom: "For fear it would make me conservative when old"), and the occasional spondee (s-s; when used in iambic meters usually complemented by a pair of unstressed syllables: "to a green thought in a green shade") -- is not only acceptable but expected. Truly all-iambic verse becomes tiresomely monotonous and sing-songy ("The flying hours are gone") very quickly. Even that can be used to advantage by a skilful meter reader: it's a major source of the child-like feel Frost sets up in the first few stanzas of "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," and perhaps even more important to the way the final stanza forces us to slow down with a suddenly crippling weariness. -- You see how the technical terminology is just a way of getting at what moves us about these lines.

Anyway, Rochester uses form to give his argument emotional and logical momentum. That's all. Very simple point. I should have something to say about the Epicurean legacy to Renaissance carpe diem poems, since I'm sure the resurgence of a sort of tragic-minded hedonism, after the rediscovery of Hellenistic texts and the concomitant rise in the popularity of Epicurean philosophy, is not entirely coincidental. Where by "tragic-minded hedonism" I mean roughly the argument from the claim that (1) we will not always exist, certainly not in this current format, via (2) pleasure is a pretty excellent thing, to (3) I am not sure what else there could be for us to take into consideration when we deliberate about the future besides the goodness of pleasure and the fact that when death comes we will cease to be persons. This is an Epicurean argument, thoroughly, -- though they left it to Marvell & Rochester & al. to add the corollary (4) sleep with me. I don't know how much more I have to say about that. The presentism ("What ever is to come is not") is interesting, perhaps, since it's neither Epicurean nor intrinsic to the carpe diem genre. (You don't have to deny the existence of any moment other than the present in order to feel a certain urgency about it: think of Marvell, before whom lie deserts of vast eternity.)

Oh -- and "Phyllis" is a Greek name conventional to the pastoral lyric. This isn't a pastoral, of course, but there's some relationship between this and that sort of seduction.

On the Rod Blagojevich of movies.

H & I watched "Troll 2" the other night. (We'd heard of it but not rented until receiving some inspiration.) "Troll 2" is not the worst movie I have ever seen. It's not the best bad movie or the most bad-good movie I've ever seen. (One wonders whether all those acolytes have also seen "Final Sacrifice?") But it was good. Enjoyed.

General spoiler alert, as if that really mattered.

The thing is that on a lot of counts it isn't bad at all. It was edited competently and (assuming that the weird decisions about where to put the camera and when to do close-ups were made by the director) filmed well enough, as well. It doesn't feature a terrifyingly perky, ambiguously-gendered corporate shill or a truck painted black, given teeth, and labelled "Megaweapon" [N.B.: Megaweapon is by FAR the best part of that movie] or sex scenes more upsetting than you'll find in Pasolini. It doesn't suddenly switch genres between, say, racing film, teen cool-crowd film, musical, murder mystery, and teen romance or even shift main characters between greedy questing truckers, in-feuding rock-and-rollers, and a boy and his E.T. knock-off. It wasn't ridiculously boring when it attempted to titillate or frighten. It doesn't abuse the authority of science. It has enough classic lines ("you don't piss on hospitality!") and utterly unexplained moments (the boys waking up in bed together shirtless??) to be enjoyable. But really what I liked was its undeniable auteurist provenance.

Let me explain my tastes and standards a little more clearly -- if only by way of further example.

I don't care about the silly goblin costumes. Better that than CGI that doesn't look like it's actually in the same space as the actors, or animation that flirts with the uncanny valley. Old high-tech special effects can be beautiful or poignant even when they look kind of amateur now. Sometimes they're even still extremely effective, or at least cool.

I don't care about the near-uniformly terrible acting. (Exception: the creepy general store owner who tells one of the boys that coffee is the devil's drink is pretty compelling. The actor says in "Best Worst Movie" that he doesn't remember any of the filming because he was in a bad, messed-up, drugged-out place at that point and had just been released from a mental hospital. "I wasn't acting.") Valentino wasn't a brilliant actor, but he lights up the screen; the children in "Good Morning" aren't necessarily even acting, yet they are the center of one of the more emotionally delicate movies I've seen. (Someday I'll do a post on Nicole Holofcener's inheritance from Ozu, maybe.) I'm not a connoisseur of acting anyway.

I do care about tonal issues and weird inconsistencies.

"Troll 2" moralizes to no end and little more purpose. (Cf.) That isn't necessarily a mark of an auteur at work (again cf. "Reefer Madness," which has rather the feel of a bad-movie-by-committee), but it can be. The scary creatures -- by the way, they're referred to throughout as "goblins," not "trolls." In other non sequitur news, "Troll 2" has nothing whatsoever to do with the earlier horror film "Troll" -- hector and lecture the humans constantly. (We'll come back to this.) They present their way of life as superior, and find the humans' behaviors tacky as well as immoral. They even all attend goblin church together every Sunday to nod solemnly at their goblin pastor's lectures.

It also provides just about no explanation of any of the relevant background. I mean, any. (Cf.) How and why did they decide to house-swap with a family in Nilbog (yes, Nilbog)? Why can't the sister's boyfriend ever leave his friends behind for more than one second? Why does the (dead) grandfather know so much about the goblins and why does he materialize just when and where he does? Why do the family want to eat and drink the nauseatingly bright green goblin-food? Why do some people turn immediately into green goop upon eating goblin food and others petrify over the course of days into still-human plants? What on Earth is the connection between the goblins and Stonehenge (!)? And most centrally of all: WHAT KIND OF A VEGETARIAN TURNS HUMAN BEINGS INTO PLANTS SO HE CAN EAT THEM?

In "BWM," the screenwriter tells us that at the time she wrote the film a lot of her friends had become preachy vegetarians, so she decided to write a horror movie in which the bad guys were vegetarians. Hectoring vegetarians, who brag about the "organic additives" in their chlorophyll goop, seduce a teenaged boy with corn on the cob, and can be warded off with a baloney sandwich. She and her husband -- the director -- and the actress who played the mother of the family are all still arguing that "Troll 2" is a good movie. Not bad-good. Normal-good. The screenwriter thinks it's sophisticated satire. The director thinks he captured the live speech of American teenagers masterfully. (This despite the fact that he barely spoke any English at the time -- he and his wife are Italian -- and the actual American teenagers who acted in the film kept begging to be allowed to change the lines.) He's appalled, upon attending latter-day screenings in America, to find that "they laughed at the funny parts. But they also laughed at the parts that were not supposed to be funny." The actress thinks it's a movie with important things to say about relationships and family. She compares it to "the old movies like they don't make anymore, with Katharine Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart." (Because "The African Queen" isn't a boring, six-ways-saccharine film remembered more for the difficult circumstances of its filming than for its merit.)

"Troll 2" really believes in itself, despite all the evidence against it. (Cf., or rather cf..) While you're watching, it puts on a pretty good show. Before you've seen it and afterwards, you have a headache just thinking about whatever convoluted message it's trying to put out. But it is trying, desperately, to put out a message. It thinks of itself as a plucky outsider come to fix the system, to teach us a little something about life, and love, and hope. Maybe it doesn't quote stilted classic poetry (ahem), but "Troll 2" is definitely the Rod Blagojevich of movies.

On self-sufficiency, non-technically and non-ethically.

As I've mentioned, much of my work concerns self-sufficiency. It's a fascinating thread to trace through the history of ancient ethics -- and also ancient theology and metaphysics, in ways that connect back with ethics.

For instance: pre-Socratic philosophical cosmology often begins with inquiry into the basic substances of the universe.* But what Thales (6 century BCE), Anaximenes, &c. &c. mean by substance is really: something that doesn't depend on anything else for its existence. They made self-sufficiency a basic concept of natural philosophy. (The term "natural philosophy," not much in use now, is meant to encompass theoretical and speculative levels of the natural and physical sciences, and also some other philosophy -- as, of course, do the sciences themselves.) When Thales (maybe) argued that water was the most basic component of the universe, he was saying that water was what could exist without anything else -- that it was self-sufficient. He was also adding something not strictly implied by self-sufficiency: that this basic thing is also productive of other things, even of everything else. This will become a theme in the intellectual history of self-sufficiency.

Meanwhile self-sufficiency was developing an explicit association with divinity. After all, what could be a better candidate for independence of external causation than a god? And Zeus, like water, is taken to have some productive or creative powers. Are they in virtue of his self-sufficiency? The power to influence things outside oneself seems to get mixed up with the power to sustain oneself when the self-sustainer we are discussing is taken to be ultimate: the most basic substance or divinity.

It's an interesting issue to raise with regard to any conception of self-sufficiency that we encounter: is it tied up with creative or productive capacities? If so, do they involve creating, producing, or sustaining something outside the self-sufficient self or not? -- It'll be especially interesting for later ethicists, especially those who accept a kind of analogy between virtue and the crafts, and also wonder whether that entails believing that virtue aims at producing something outside itself (like the craft of making musical instruments) or occupies itself only with the craft-activity itself (like the craft of making musical instruments).


* Ignoring the way Aristotle regularizes their terminology by applying his own. "Substance" is his term for something that exists independently. (Actually "substance" -- rather, "substantia" -- is Cicero's [I assume, since he invented about all Latin philosophical terminology] translation of Greek "hupokeimenon." Both mean roughly 'what lies beneath.' I know, it sounds like a horror movie.)

On finishing a paper.

They say that parents report unhappiness at just about every moment during the day, but complete satisfaction and even joy at the end of the day. Writing a paper is just the opposite: no matter how often one is pleased by the expression of a thought or delighted by a turn of phrase, at the end of the day misery and exhaustion.

I have thoughts about the importance of time and of the "shape" or trajectory of experience for thinking about happiness (it comes into the final section of my dissertation, on the self-sufficiency of happiness), but I'll leave them for later.

On what I do.

I thought it might be time for a post that at least alluded to ancient philosophy, so here is a very brief introduction to What I Do, pitched to the intelligent layman with more patience than experience with philosophy.

I am a graduate student in ancient philosophy, writing primarily at the moment about the ethical system of the Hellenistic (3rd-1st centuries BCE) Stoic school. My dissertation considers some aspects of self-sufficiency in the Stoic understanding of happiness.

The Stoics are extremists on many issues, and fond of paradox; they believe that knowledge is sufficient for virtue and that virtue is sufficient for happiness.

I'll have to interrupt here for a terminology note on "sufficiency." Take the conditional "p-->q," which should be read: "if p, then q," where p represents a proposition such as "Lindsay is older than Sam" and q represents a proposition such as "Sam is younger then Lindsay." In this instance, "p-->q" is all right, since it really is true that if Lindsay is older than Sam, then Sam is younger than Lindsay. Anyway, the terms "necessary" and "sufficient" are defined as follows:

If "p-->q," then: p is sufficient for q: that is, p's being the case is sufficient to ensure that q is the case -- not causally, but logically. And q is necessary for p: that is, if p is to be the case, then q must be the case.

So if virtue is sufficient for happiness, that means that where virtue is present, there too must happiness be. But that's crazy, isn't it? -- Can they really mean to say that a virtuous person being tortured on the rack with no obvious way out is happier -- not just better, but happier -- than a wicked person who is healthy, wealthy, comfortable, and content?

They do! This is where self-sufficiency comes in. An orthodox Stoic would tell you that only your mind -- Epictetus emphasizes especially the faculty of decision -- is within your control, and not anything outside of your mind; further, that nothing that isn't within your control can ultimately affect your happiness. So the virtuous person on the rack has the internal resources to remain happy, while the content wicked one lacks them.

If you haven't spent a lot of time with the Stoics, or maybe if you have too, you probably want to get off the boat here. I know I was repulsed when I first read Epictetus, towards the end of my Introduction to Ancient Philosophy class, as a freshman in college. I was fascinated with the Pyrrhonist Skeptics, fired up to defend Epicurean hedonism and atomism, willing to reread Plato over and over again. Aristotle and the Stoics left me cold.

I'm not exactly sure when or why this changed. Probably my enthusiasm for early Plato, whose theses are defended more steadily by the Stoics than by middle-period Plato, had something to do with it. The Apology* changed my life when I first read it, a very long time ago now. Perhaps I'll post about that some time.

Anyway, that's enough for now.



* Apologies for the fussy, stilted, dating-to-Teddy-Roosevelt-times Jowett translation. If you're at all interested, pick up the excellent Hackett Five Dialogues, translated by G.M.A. Grube, which you can find used for under five bucks but shouldn't run you more than fifteen or so even full price. Thank God for Hackett Publishing Company.

On the disappointments of Mansfield Park.

I thought I was reading Persuasion and then it turned out I was reading Sense and Sensibility.

On the cruelty of Leo McCarey.

I have seen many, many American movies of the 1930s and early '40s. Last summer I was reading Stanley Cavell's book about what he calls "comedies of remarriage," Pursuits of Happiness. Cavell is a brilliant analyst with whom I have many and profound disagreements. I don't understand the importance of "having grown up together" to his understanding of the relationships in question, especially since it is a stretch and a metaphor (incestuous at that) to apply it to almost any of the movies he discusses. I can't see what he sees in Clark Gable's performance in "It Happened One Night," or what he and the friends he mentions missed in Claudette Colbert's. But my main blindness, or his, concerns the deep cruelty of many of the films he celebrates.

Here are the movies to which he devotes chapters: "The Lady Eve"; "It Happened One Night"; "Bringing Up Baby"; "The Philadelphia Story"; "His Girl Friday"; "Adam's Rib"; and "The Awful Truth." This last (Leo McCarey, 1937) he considers especially fundamental. ("On certain screenings, I have felt The Awful Truth (1937) to be the best, or the deepest, of the comedies of remarriage" [231].) As to me, I can barely watch it. Not because of Irene Dunne's brittle, mannered, frankly irritating performance as Lucy: I have accepted enough Hepburn (K.) movies that I have no right to complain on that basis. Not because the emphasis, throughout the movie, is on Lucy's purported dalliance with her music teacher when "their car broke down" on the way home from a trip and they spent the night together at an inn, although Cary Grant's Jerry seems at least as likely to have strayed, given that we know and Lucy knows that his two-week "trip to Florida" at the beginning of the movie was nothing of the kind, and we aren't told what it was. I have forgiven that sort of guiding double standard for men and women in more movies than I can count. It mars them, but need not ruin them. (Though perhaps I would love "Trouble in Paradise" a little less if Lubitsch hadn't revisited the theme of a beloved choosing between two lovers the following year, in "Design for Living," with a woman, one of the lovers in "Trouble in Paradise" in fact, as the chooser.)

Not because the movie argues explicitly and implicitly throughout that the basis of marriage is trust, and that the protagonists had lacked that at the beginning but have built it by the end, although the events of the film hardly give either or the viewer any reason for trust -- though that's getting close. (More specifically, the mantra is that a marriage is based on faith, but I'm not interested in McCarey's aggressive Catholicism here.) What the film offers instead is a sequence of pratfalls and humiliations, dealt out to Lucy and Jerry and to any poor innocent who happens into either of their paths. What brings Lucy and Jerry back together by the end of the film is a combination of two things, both represented by Mr. Smith, the dog because of whom they met and whose custody they share after the divorce: the nostalgia raised by their time apart, and the recognition that after all they can put up with each other (and the increasing recognition that no one else can). In other words, they deserve each other. Not they've earned each other, as McCarey and Cavell propose, but they deserve each other.

Each relishes nothing more than embarrassing the other: this is the main substance of their bond. McCarey conceives of romance as a hazing ritual. But let me show rather than tell -- though the showing be in the manner of my telling.

Jerry's attempt to show Lucy that he's got a shoulder as warm to lean on as she's found in Ralph Bellamy ends when the showgirl he's picked up performs at the night club they are all at. Lucy and Jerry look away from the distasteful spectacle of a gust of air blowing up her skirt at regular intervals (when she reaches the line "my dreams are gone with the wind"), though Ralph Bellamy's Daniel Leeson assures them that it "would go over big out West!" Of course, the showgirl's stage name (Dixie Belle Lee or some such) and Southern accent (which she tells Jerry she's exaggerated for the sake of business) are meant to have alerted us from the first instant that she is unworthy of our main couple. Leeson's Oklahoma roots, his appreciation of Dixie Lee's dance, his enthusiastic, gussied-up, jitterbuggy waltz with Lucy later at the same club, and the awful list of rhymes he calls a "poem" to her are sufficient proof of his unsuitability, though we know that he is, actually, kind and decent and devoted -- and, since it matters so much to the characters, terribly wealthy as well. For a supposedly moralized account of love, this is not very rational or charitable.

After a while Jerry (with the unwitting help of the despised music teacher) engineers a spectacle that sends Leeson back to Oklahoma. Lucy has already told her aunt that she's realized she couldn't have married him anyway, as she's "still in love with that crazy lunatic." So it is Jerry's turn to find another option, and Lucy's turn to intervene jealously.

Since Jerry's new paramour is a Manhattan debutante, she can't be disqualified immediately on class and regional grounds. Therefore, and also perhaps because he has no judgmental aunt, Jerry will not realize his error on his own. Therefore Lucy must help him. She chooses familiar mechanisms. First, pretending to be Jerry's sister (in from Paris), she pops in on his fiancée and family, acts like her idea of a vulgar showgirl, drinks ostentatiously, implies that their father had been a groundskeeper at Princeton, and performs the same "gone with the wind" number ("there were wind effects, but you'll have to imagine them for yourselves") as Dixie Rose Lee (who, incidentally, had seemed "like a nice girl" to her earlier). When Jerry tries to take her home, she gets them pulled over by the police and then pushes the car off the road, so that they have to stay at her aunt's cabin (not, as with the music teacher, an inn: because Jerry is part of her family, you see). And that's it. There they reconcile and decide to be remarried. They become officially divorced, after the ninety-day waiting period, only that night at midnight, after the remarriage has been assured.

****

And this is a romance? The protagonists are awful people -- I complain not of this, but because they are awful people with no redeeming features. (Was Grant ever otherwise so charmless in his black-and-white days? One can't blame Dunne but only the person who cast her in the first place.) The film ends with conversation about whether things are different or just the same as before -- Jerry's declaration that "you're wrong about things being different because they're not the same. Things are different, except in a different way. You're still the same, only I've been a fool" -- and their joint resolution to make it "the same again ... only a little different." Admirable enough, if we had only been given a smidgen of reason to believe that either of them had changed a bit or learned a thing beyond the depth of each other's schadenfreude. But now McCarey wants to have it both ways: all those pranks, all that embarrassment, and now they're ready to be a little different -- only, really just the same again.

Here "The Awful Truth"'s close cousin "His Girl Friday" (Howard Hawks, 1939) is more honest, and consequently more brutal and more persuasive. Hildy (Rosalind Russell) comes back to Walter (again Cary Grant) and the newspaper he edits and she reports for not because either of them has changed but because she has realized that she is a more awful person than she had imagined -- that is, closer in character to Walter than to her fiancé (Ralph Bellamy as another simple, decent, rich hick). That self-knowledge is Hildy's gain, not Walter's, and it is her choice to come back to him: she is the one with alternatives (Bellamy and a quiet life outside of New York), the one who is able to imagine herself living a different life, the one for whom learning about herself is painful and for whom staying is a sacrifice. Walter can't imagine any other way. He expresses no regret and only superficial apology for the repeated humiliations he's imposed on Hildy, for his disrespect of her stated choices and decisions, for his neglect, for the way he uses her for the sake of the paper (and thus for his own sake), even for having her taken prisoner by his mob connections and leaving her alone with an armed convict on death row. Hildy has already divorced him for his neglect and exploitation and the instability of their life together, and repudiated him again because of his delight in humiliating her and deceiving the guileless, hapless, and feckless Bellamy. Over the course of the movie she learns that she is not much bothered by humiliation and doesn't much need stability, so long as she has excitement and power; and that she will have to find other ways of getting Walter's attention. She learns that she would rather be married to Walter and have to do all the work of the relationship, than not.

"His Girl Friday" is a difficult movie because Hawks asks us to accept that nevertheless marriage to Walter and to the paper is the best choice that Hildy can make for herself. What should we say of a movie that asks us to imagine that the best and truest marriage -- "based on faith" -- is a marriage between two Walters?