On personality in philosophy, and once more on not liking Aristotle.

One of the things I've always loved about philosophy is how personal it is -- I mean that we all feel as though we knew many of the authors with whom we spend so much time. Some are naturals for perceived intimacy: the eloquent and prolific correspondent Seneca; Plato, arguably the single greatest contributor to literature ever; Augustine who puts his mind on display and practically pleads with you to riffle through the pages. Others offer themselves via a mysterious mix of writing style and idea patterns. There's dry, haughty Aristotle who only talks about aristocratic pastimes and occasionally says something that's not really a joke but you're pretty sure he thought it was; and airy, cocky Hume; Hobbes how self-satisfiedly sour; Spinoza whom you can see packing his straw-frail, ecstatic mysticism into bricks of theorems to build castles in the air ...It does prejudice one, though. Of course, thinking that women and non-Greeks are naturally slavish since congenitally missing the rationally commanding part of the soul -- when you've spent twenty years with Plato, who explicitly argues that slaves learn in just the same way as Socrates, whose republic contains no slaves and a ruling class whose women are on an absolutely equal footing with the men (though he does expect them to be fewer in number), whose Academy (supposedly) admitted female students! -- will tend to leave a bad taste in people's mouths regardless of their prior feelings towards you.

On ways to look at Nellie McKay, in 13 parts.

Nellie McKay is an NPR listener's idea of what a young person should be like.

When I saw Nellie McKay perform in Seattle in the summer of 2008, she came onstage an hour late, alone with a ukulele, and played "Mother of Pearl." Then -- still solo on ukulele -- she played "Feed the Birds" from "Mary Poppins." There were tears in audience eyes.

Nellie McKay went to sleep in 1936 and woke up, confused but reenergized, in 2003.

I had always just assumed that Nellie McKay had attended Columbia, because she's so New York, and so smart, and so broadly educated, and her song "Columbia Is Bleeding" is so great. At some point I realized that I had no actual evidence for this claim.

Nellie McKay told us, at that same concert: "You guys, don't not vote for John McCain because he's old. Don't vote for him because he has f---ed up views on policy. But don't not vote for him because he's old. That's f---ed up." On at least four occasions through the evening, she complained of the heat, swayed dangerously, or gave signs of suddenly coming to consciousness after a lapse. She was wearing a red, fringed flapper dress and just coming off a stint in "The Threepenny Opera."

When Nellie McKay was born, three wise men made a pilgrimage to offer her mother gifts of frankincense, myrrh, and a well-thumbed edition of The Collected Witticisms of the Algonquin Round Table Set.

If Nellie McKay had a large enough lever and an outside vantage point, she could turn everyone on Earth into a vegan.

Nellie McKay has never met a piece of wordplay she can't find a place for.

If Nellie McKay and Stephin Merritt had babies together, they would be the people whose irony was least stably detectable ever.

Nellie McKay occasionally appears in completely bland Hollywood romantic comedies. No one knows why.

Nellie McKay goes too far because she can. Then she mocks you for thinking she's gone too far. Loser.

Nellie McKay's fourth album is a Doris Day tribute album. It's fabulous.

Nellie McKay thinks a work of art isn't finished until it's been sabotaged. Preferably by the artist.

On an oddity of Georgian and Regency prose.

A grammatical oddity of Georgian and Regency English literary prose, that is. Namely: they do weird things with comparatives and superlatives.

Jane Austen is incredibly careful to put solecisms in the mouths of the John Thorpes and Lydia Bennets of the world and never into Catherine Morland's or Fitzwilliam Darcy's. Incredibly attentive to colloquialism, and scornful of those who depend on it overmuch -- think of Thorpe's "famous" this and that, of Maria Lucas and Lydia Bennet starting every other sentence with "La!," of Mrs. Elton's being always quite excessively shocked, and of the occasional "power of" xyz (where we would be more likely to say "heaps of"). Her narrators don't speak like that. Sometimes they speak strangely to us who would never use "eat" as a past participle ("when they had eat and were done..." and such), but perfectly grammatically for the time. Yet her fine speakers don't seem to distinguish comparatives and superlatives clearly as such. Oh, sure, comparatives are still used to compare -- you see "A is better than B" and not "A is best than B" -- it's not all the way to speaker incompetence. But over and over, "which [of two] was the handsomest," "whether A or B were tallest," when comparisons of two just can't take a superlative as we speak, not without a context strongly suggesting generalization they can't. You could say, "Which do you like best?" of two things without paying or drawing attention to their number, but "which of these two do you like" will always end in "better." Not so for Jane Austen. Very interesting!

And on the other hand the narrator of Pride & Prejudice definitely says "either of A, B, and C," when for us "either" can never branch into three, no matter the context. Very odd!

And for the Georgian:

"On the 16th day of June, 1703, a boy on the top-mast discovered land. On the 17th, we came in full view of a great island, or continent (for we knew not whether;) on the south side whereof was a small neck of land jutting out into the sea, and a creek too shallow to hold a ship of above one hundred tons."

That's from the Brobdingnagian section of Gulliver's Travels. So for Swift "whether" was the right way to say "which (of two)" in more cases than we would say it in. We'd say "do you know whether you are going or not?" or just "I don't know whether you are going?" And we'd say "do you know which of those you want?" or "which do you want?" or "I don't know which." But we would never say "I don't know whether." In Greek or Latin you can do that with the "whether"/"which (of two)" words, so perhaps that's the source of his comfort. But Gulliver's Travels is pretty far from fussily written. So maybe you could actually say that then! Wouldn't that be interesting?

On dance as acting in Hollywood musicals.

I don't know anything about dance. I barely made it through the obligatory years of childhood ballet, and I can't tell a rumba from zumba. But I go to the ballet from time to time, and I have seen a lot of musicals -- some on the stage, some independent, some foreign, some more recent, but mostly, as with my movie knowledge in general, Hollywood productions from before 1960. I was raised to. My little sister claims to have thought, in the first grade (c. 1995), that Fred Astaire was the biggest movie star in the world; certainly she earned a laugh at Madame Tussaud's by asking where they kept their waxen Fred Astaire. ("In the basement, maybe, if it's still around ...") I've seen most of the movies whose songs reappear in "Singin' in the Rain," and been baffled on Broadway to see numbers from "Gold Diggers of 1933" (I think ... I think "We're in the Money") appear in a production of "42nd St." Of course I have seen movie musicals from the '60s and '70s -- the memorably bad "Daddy-O" (MST3K), "Don't Knock the Rock," and "Don't Knock the Twist" (TCM) besides "Jailhouse Rock" and "A Hard Day's Night" and "The Producers" and "Cabaret." But "musical" isn't a genre, unless (and maybe this is so) a single formal constraint can make a genre. Maybe any book whose plot depends on a crime is crime fiction, whether it's spooky, cozy, or lurid in tone, whether the prose is lush, spare, unprepossessing, funny or not, demanding or not, whether the story revolves around plot or character or atmosphere or message or something else, whether we know whodunit from the start or not until the last paragraph on the last page, whether it's an investigator's-eye or perpetrator's-eye-view, whether the end frightens, unsettles, baffles, or reassures us. And maybe "Duck Soup" and "Some Like It Hot" and "The Umbrellas of Cherbourg" and "Team America: World Police" do belong to the same genre in the way relevant to this discussion. Maybe "The Long Goodbye" is sufficiently haunted by its theme music, or "Psycho" and "The Graduate" and "The Big Lebowski" sufficiently dominated by their soundtracks, to count, or border on counting. It's okay with me. But I'm talking about Hollywood musicals of the so-called Golden Age. The kind that flourished under the studio system, and at MGM in particular -- from "The Jazz Singer" through "The Bandwagon." The kind Busby Berkeley choreographed, the kind that produced long-term star pairings like Maurice Chevalier/Jeanette MacDonald, Jeanette MacDonald/Nelson Eddy, Ruby Keeler/Dick Powell, Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers, Gene Kelly/Cyd Charisse. The kind you associate with Lena Horne and Judy Garland and Howard Keel, with Cole Porter and Irving Berlin, with Warren & Dubin and Rodgers & Hammerstein or Hart. The kind whose lavish choreography and intimate musical confession we most often see, now, in Walt Disney products. The kind "Singin' in the Rain" epitomizes and glamorizes. You'd know it when you saw it.

Well, although I am not especially interested with dance I find myself entranced by the dancing in many of these musicals. Of course I could never say no to a surreally symmetrical Busby Berkeley lady-flower transforming into an electrically-lit lady-guitar via overhead, underwater, and upskirt shots, of course, but what I want to think about here is dancing as acting, not dancing as auteur-ial vision. Berkeley has this way of using body parts, including even very close close-ups of faces, to distract from the humanness of wholes. When the dance does focus on a single individual, even she will be not whole and single but distortedly mirrored everywhere, as Ruby Keeler is in "I Only Have Eyes for You" from "Dames." There's something profoundly actor-undermining at work there. I'm sure the people who work on Berkeley's influence on the brilliant Nazi documentarian Leni Riefenstahl have lots to say about it. Charming as Keeler is, and as good a dancer as she is, her dancing is dispensable. Not so with the kind of dancing I mean.

There is one paradigm of indispensable dancing in a Busby Berkeley movie: Jimmy Cagney in "Footlight Parade." He's featured in only one number, but while he moves Cagney is never not dancing. That his character is a workaholic dance creator is utterly plausible, since he seems even whilst immobile never not to be thinking of dancing. His dancing isn't as athletic as Gene Kelly's and it isn't as natural as Fred Astaire's. It isn't as abstractly expressive as Kelly's or as emotionally integrated as Astaire's. But it's extraordinary. As Garbo seemed simply to have more muscles in her face than other actors did, and finer-grained control of every visible bit of her, Cagney appears to have a double-jointed waist, if such were possible. His shoulders, hips, and feet can stand firm while everything in between jumps out. I once would have described the intense, effortless smoothness of his motion as "liquid." It isn't. Nor willowy. There's too much power there. He would clearly not bend with the remover to remove, nor alter when he alteration finds. He moves as though he were a set of muscles on an impossibly flexible skeleton. It's not liquid. It's serpentine.

I'm curious that he doesn't seem like a dancer when he plays a gangster. He's versatile enough, of course, but that kind and that degree of freedom of motion don't come and go with roles. And he did intersperse dance and criminal roles a bit throughout his career. But he doesn't seem interested in presenting dangerous grace in either sort of film. That might be a very great pity.

On "Psycho" (dept. of first thoughts).

Alfred Hitchcock thinks of Freudianism as a substitute for psychology.

On passion and starvation in middle-period Plato.

Not sure yet what to make of thus, but I noticed today that Plato's two sustained examinations of rhetoric and love -- the Symposium and the Phaedrus, both thought to date from his Middle Period -- both contain myths in which groups of people die out through becoming so absorbed in some other activity that they forget to eat.

In Aristophanes's speech in the Symposium, the people Zeus has split in two, frantically seeking reunion with their other halves, languish in each other's embrace until they die of hunger. Now Zeus has already expressed his commitment to keeping the human race viable, so as to continue receiving the gifts and sacrifices only people lavish upon gods. So he changes the way humans reproduce: earlier, we had "spilled seed in the ground ... like cicadas," but now he has made us reproduce sexually (like the Greek gods themselves); so that our natural yearning to be joined with each other will not stifle but promote the continuation of the species. Fascinating myth, brilliant speech, mysteriously placed in Aristophanes's mouth, often taken to be very romantic (as in the linked clip from "Hedwig and the Angry Inch," which do check out if you're unfamiliar). Comic -- really, farcical -- and mournful at once, silly and profound. Further intriguing for its stubbornness in BOTH tying sex to reproduction AND insisting that procreation is posterior to the main point of love -- and continues so past the origin story, for there were three sexes originally -- man-man, woman-woman, and man-woman -- and only people split from the last of them perpetuate the species without further activity, but their love is not the more valuable for it. (The others are satisfied with the "fullness" or "completeness" (πλησμονή) of reunion.) And premised on the idea that people can en masse become so involved in other things that they forget to eat, indefinitely.

The relevant bit of Phaedrus is shorter and simpler: there once was a group of people who -- existing before the Muses had come into being -- had never heard song. But when the Muses arrived, they were so enraptured that they spent quite all of their time in song, forgetting to eat and drink and "they did not even notice as they died." They were changed to cicadas, who sing all day and do not need to eat or drink; and now they praise the Muses constantly after their own fashion.

In both stories gods transform and preserve human beings, in both stories seeking humans' prayers, sacrifice, and praise. In both stories cicadas appear. In both stories an entire group of people is overcome and then consumed by a shared passion. I'm certain that's important, that they aren't like Narcissus gazing at his reflection until he pales and shrinks and fades into a flower by a lake. In both stories the passion grows in response to major changes in their circumstances: devastating, destabilizing loss and the introduction of art, respectively. Neither is affirmed as such; the first story is in Aristophanes's mouth, the second Socrates tells Phaedrus, as a myth, in a complete digression of less than obvious purpose. I don't know what it means.

On not liking Aristotle (sexual equality edition).

Cleanthes the Stoic wrote a book titled "on the fact that virtue is the same for a man and for a woman." His teacher Zeno, his rival Aristo, his successor Chrysippus, and the later Stoic Epictetus also (with varying enthusiasm) accepted this view. The doctrine is Socratic (see in particular the beginning of the Meno and Xeno's Symposium) and middle-period Platonic (think of the female guardians in the Republic, less numerous but quite equivalent to the males); Plato is also supposed to have accepted two female students in his Academy, of whom one wore women's and the other men's clothes. It is also, naturally, a Cynical doctrine, an important illustration of the ways in which living socially perverts our basic natures. Cynics and Cyrenaics, the schools that identified philosophy most closely with ways of living and teaching most closely with performance and demonstration, both featured prominent women teachers. The unmarried Cynic couple Crates of Thebes and Hipparchia of Maroneia became a model of the highest ideals of love as enabler of life; the Cyrenaic leaders are Aristippus of Cyrene, his daughter Arete, and her son Aristippus, known as "metrodidakter" or "mother-taught." The Epicureans were not especially tempted by virtue-talk but they certainly thought that both sexes would live well according to the same principles, and we know of three (I think) female members of the Epicurean community. (Possibly they thought the same of non-human animals as well, who nevertheless were not capable of pleasures as great as humans can have.) The other schools of ancient philosophy -- various brands of logicians and skeptics, mainly -- were by design unwilling to make claims of such a nature. (The Pythagoreans are a more difficult case.)

But Aristotle thought that women were -- biologically, rationally, psychically, virtue-wise -- defective men. True, this was (and implicitly remains) a common view even among "civilized" people, the ones he engaged with. But he spent twenty years in the Academy surrounded by people who thought otherwise -- including presumably the two women there. The idea must have occurred to him. It must have been treated as a respectable if controversial view in at least those circles. Yet he never seems remotely tempted by the thought. He never mentions it as a view that one would uphold only paradoxically, as he does some of Socrates's other unconventional views (such as that no one willingly does wrong). (I am told, however, that Straussians have taken the proclaimed in principle equality of souls of differently-sexed individuals as a sign that the surface meaning of the book is intended to draw us by its patent absurdity towards another sort of reading.) The issue doesn't seem to bother him.

My point is not that all ancient philosophers were feminists but Aristotle. That's not true. Later in the Republic Plato has nasty things to say about particular kinds of mothers, and in the Timaeus he makes us almost a separate enough species -- occupying a separate space on the ladder of reincarnations, below men and above the rest of the animals. Two of the three female Epicureans we hear of are given only insultingly sexualized nicknames ("Mammarion," which Martha Nussbaum briskly translates as "Tits," can hardly have been the woman's real name). When Cynics and Stoics and Epicureans ask "should I marry?" the question is always "should I, as a man, marry?" Chrysippus discusses the meritoriousness or lack thereof of virtuous behavior whose alternative is not tempting under the rubric of "abstention from ugly old women." They weren't feminists. They had, in general, no special concern for women.

But they were humanists; they believed that the human soul or mind or self was first and foremost human. (Again, perhaps not the Cyrenaics or, in some ways, the Epicureans.) They thought that the ways we lived in society needed to be plumbed very deeply before we could pretend any confidence as to whether and what they showed us about what human beings are.

The same dynamic shows up with regard to poor people: the other schools accepted poor people in principle while making little effort to accommodate many of them. (I know of three notable exceptions: Socrates, born into the middle class, self-ruined through failure to work, and supported by aristocratic friends; Cleanthes, who supported himself by manual labor even while heading the Stoic school -- and was rewarded with the insulting nickname "the Ox"; and Epictetus, a slave not freed until middle age, by which point he was already a notable Stoic lecturer.) And the same with regard to non-Greeks. Pythagoras, like many of the natural philosophers of the sixth and fifth centuries, was an Italian; the Cyrenaics are named for their home in northern Africa; Zeno, as a Cypriot, may have been either Greek or non-Greek, we do not know which (though Diogenes Laertius and Cicero in the Tusculan Disputations preserve some charming ethnic slurs against him as a Phoenician); Socrates and the Cynics explicitly self-identified as citizens of the universe in contradistinction to Greeks, as did most of the Stoics. But Aristotle -- not Plato or Chrysippus the aristocrats, but middle-class, Macedonian (the Macedonians think they are Greeks, but other Greeks do not think they are Greeks. They're the Mormons of the ancient Hellenic world), disenfranchised Athenian resident Aristotle -- thinks that all non-Greeks are natural slaves and that any important kind of virtue is impossible without the leisure that comes with wealth.

I would not object to calling Aristotle the most important philosopher of all time, nor perhaps to calling him the most brilliant. And there is much good in his embrace of convention. But it is not a coincidence that the same man is both the ancient philosopher most dismissive of skepticism and the ancient philosopher most oblivious to alternative possibilities of social ordering. It makes him very hard to read sometimes.

On moving.

Moving is like a really big birthday, except you have to open all the presents before you can find the plate or the knife and then you find out you left the cake in another state.

On Mike Leigh on Gilbert & Sullivan.

Before my mom and I went out to see "Topsy-Turvy" in ... January 2000? ... I never went to the movies, but afterwards I finally realized both that people were still making things worth watching and that other people's attempts to sort through it all could be of serious help to me in deliberation, not just to follow what was going on. Even if I hadn't remembered it clearly I would have remembered it very fondly. Therefore, having seen in the Journal that Criterion was putting out a sparkly new disc, h&I checked it out some time ago. I loved it when I first saw it, but I got a lot more out of it this time. More than ten years have passed, and I did not remember the sequence of events; but the scenes and themes I remembered were subtler and much more closely integrated than I had first experienced. I've only seen one other Mike Leigh film, because I can't deal with depressing movies, which seems to be his forte, but both of these are special, individual, wonderful movies, and I'll have to take the plunge into the harsher works some time.

What "Topsy-Turvy" gets right is double.

(1) In re: William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Seymour Sullivan, it forgives them individually their unpleasantness and -- harder in narrative art -- their unhappiness, and it convincingly depicts a relationship between two men who as people could hardly be less in sympathy, who don't much like or -- except qua artists -- respect each other, yet whose tense and volatile working relationship produces works (leaving aside entirely their very high quality) of miraculous collaborative coherence.

(2) With regard to everyone else, it accepts them. It is clear and harsh on their failings -- Grossmith and ... whichever character plays the Mikado (the actor's named Timothy Spall, I think. Oh, the character's Richard Temple) sarcastically wave away Durward Lely's anti-imperialist comments, Lely throws a fit when asked to perform without a corset under his Japanese robe,* Jessie Bond and Leonora Braham date as cynically as a Caitlin Flanagan nightmare, practically everyone is using alcohol or drugs and showing other signs of not quite keeping it together, there are the usual prigs and sycophants. They aren't exemplars of Victorian hypocrisy and they aren't emblems of universal human character types. They're just people we recognize well enough that we only need a few glimpses of each.

As to G&S ... Sullivan is the very type of the anguished Victorian hypocrite. He courts respectability and the aura of high art with an energy and insecurity second only to that he exhausts on gambling, lewd music hall entertainments, prostitutes, and occasionally but vigorously his girlfriend. The only things that rouse him from his harrumphing fog are a woman on the couch and a good review in the paper. Gilbert is a quiet, bourgeois family man, in love with his wife but unable to be satisfied with love, any more than he is satisfied with his success. The outstandingly good reviews of "The Mikado"'s premiere, which send Sullivan into a frenzy of delight, seem only to confirm his mistrust of others' opinions. He is workmanlike and Sullivan acts like a Romantic artistic genius, even though it is Gilbert who recognizes that the work they are producing will last; Sullivan's anxiety to be recognized for his "serious" work still permits him an ecstatic satisfaction in popular acclaim, but Gilbert is like a lifelong astronaut whose tickertape parade only highlights his hollowness when not working. Sullivan lives with the atemporal, unplanned intensity and volatility of a child; Gilbert with a caretaker's weary wariness.

All their interactions are awkward. Each thinks he is constantly sacrificing his own ideas upon the altar of the other's genius. Except that when Gilbert reads his new manuscript to Sullivan -- with a furrowed brow and a dark, dry tone -- Sullivan is overtaken by innocent joy. His pretentious side is far enough in check that the child laughs and laughs at the adult's pretensions skewered, gleeful to see arbitrary conventions exposed as unworthy the attention that in his ordinary life he lovingly and anxiously bestows. When he is by himself it is not obvious that Sullivan would enjoy Gilbert & Sullivan operettas, or if he was inclined to enjoy them that he would allow or admit it. When he is laughing at Gilbert's jokes we can suddenly see that his perennially last-minute inspirations come late because he is just that type of person, but come as inspirations because Gilbert brings to him something he loves and can't find in himself without help.

Of course Gilbert comes across as more sympathetic. Gilbert is more sympathetic. He lived soberly and responsibly and lovingly to his wife (not to his estranged mother), without buying into the particular moral and social system of his time and place. A shockingly high proportion of his wit remains clever, and, more shockingly still, some decent proportion passes the further test of -- well -- saying something. He's endlessly quotable and really something of a philosopher -- anyway, a brilliantly attractive formulator of unsound arguments (see: the entire plot of "Patience"). Sullivan is harder. We don't have his words, and by all the evidence he wasn't that great a person. (Who is?) It's hard to come to see them as people making evitable decisions amongst alternative possibilities. At three or four I was horrified to learn that Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers hadn't actually been in love. When we get past that, the next step is to focus on the bitterness and failure below the surface -- to treat every pretty face as a mask. It's common enough to stop there. The power of "Topsy-Turvy" grows from its rejection of that dichotomy.


* His prettyboy affect is especially amusing to those of us who, looking back, recognize the actor, Kevin McKidd, as the rough, angular, temperamental soldier struggling towards the middle class that he played in the blood-and-sandals-and-camp-and-soap HBO series "Rome," the pattern for subsequent TV historical melodrama series stuffed and overstuffed with blood and nudity -- a further amusement by contrast with Leigh's technical restraint and imaginative interest in bringing us to the Victorians, rather than showing us the Romans as ourselves.

On the customs of country (music).

I've been listening to a fair bit of country music lately, including not only long-time favorites like the Carter Family, the Everly Brothers, Patsy Cline, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash, and the alt-country I'd begun to learn about in the past couple of years (Miranda Lambert, Shelby Lynne ...), but for the first time some contemporary pop country: the ones you see in commercials or gossip pages, Brad Paisley and Shania Twain and those. Now, I claim no expertise on this. Zero. I've barely begun to delve; all I have is one boxed set (here's the track listing). But two traits have fascinated me: the musical indistinguishability (often) of country pop from "mainstream" pop, and the utterly distinct rhyming patterns of contemporary country pop lyrics.

About the first I haven't much to say. I'm sure it's been said: Sugaland sounds like the easy-listening music I heard when accompanying my mother to get a haircut when I was a kid, Martina McBride sounds like remastered seventies hits. The very idea of "a country beat so strong" (Jasmine Rae, "Country Singer") came as a shock to me. That's not there in the country I'm used to, which is mostly from before it had crystallized as a genre -- so really, regional folk music -- and from the late sixties country-rock boomlet. The heavy, often slick, production is unfamiliar, too -- since I don't even listen to the pop music it's drawn from. Yet half the songs explicitly self-identify as country, and most of the singers sing with a Southern accent. Explicit self-reference returns with an obsession barely heard in rock and roll since the Beatles and no longer a focus in hip-hop for many, many years. The titles alone: "Country Singer," "Little Miss Honky Tonk," "Planet Country," "Where I Come From," "Maybe It Was Memphis," "Giddy On Up," "Chasin' Rodeo," "Redneck Woman" ... I don't know whether it's defensiveness, or acknowledgment that the division between country and "mainstream" popular music is sociological and commercial rather than musical; and that even the divided intermingle closely. I'm not really sure what qualifies Brenda Lee ("I'm Sorry" -- that song from the diaper commercials) or Ryan Adams as country even sociologically.

So that's one thing. It prompts me to comment also that some of this is wonderful music. Almost all of these people are technically accomplished performers, some with charisma that survives delocation. Some of them are exceptionally talented singers and a few appear to be exceptionally talented songwriters. Most of them have probably deserved their success in one way or another, insofar as people can be said to deserve success. No attacks here. (Speaking of defensiveness ... )

The second thing, about the rhyme: I've never heard other kinds of pop so thoroughly embrace such loose, assonance-based rhyme patterns. "Commitment/ Someone who'll go the distance" and "Commitment/ And everything that goes with it" aren't rhymes if Gaga or Britney or -- perhaps more likely -- Beyonce sings them. They just aren't. But Leann Rimes takes them seriously as rhymes. "All of my life I've spent hoping/ That I could give someone-a such devotion" isn't a rhyme except when Kenny Chesney sings it.

Of course hip-hop has a long and illustrious tradition of stretching rhyme -- but that's because the extraordinary rhyme density demanded wouldn't be possible without it, and further the performers make a lot of effort to make things rhyme. "Stepped out the house and stopped short -- oh no! Went back in, I forgot my Kangol" wouldn't rhyme if it were me saying it, but Slick Rick doesn't say it, he raps it, and there you have it. Compare further:

Take a little trip, hater, pack up your mind
Look forward not behind, then you'll see what you find
I caught a sucker dyin' 'cause he thought could rhyme
Now if his momma is a quarter, daughter must be a dime
I gotta meet her, don't take no shorts. I don't use abbrevi-
-ation, I don't even play the radio neither,
Only if I need to know the sports or the weather

(yes, fine, I also only know old and famous hip-hop) with

Heads Carolina, tails California
Somewhere greener, somewhere warmer
Up in the mountains, down by the ocean
Where it don't matter, long as we're goin'
Somewhere together -- I've got a quarter
Heads Carolina, tails California.

"Quarter"/"daughter" isn't a perfect rhyme, but it's a lot closer than "quarter"/"fornia." Besides which, obviously, Andre 3000 is propelled forward by the rhymes, unevenly and in unforeseen directions, whereas Jo Dee Messina uses them to circle back to her opening line. They're both trying to say something more complicated than can be easily done with "When the moon hits your eye/ Like a big pizza pie"-style rhyming; so JDM takes some liberty with bourgeois rhyming conventions, and Andre takes some liberty with bourgeois conventions of linear speech. Really interesting.

Just one more example of the creativity of country rhyming:

I was chasin' sun on 101 somewhere around Ventura
I lost a universal joint and I had to use my finger
This tall lady stopped and asked if I had plans for dinner
Said, "No, thanks, ma'am, back home we like the girls that sing soprano."

That's from Allan Jackson, "Where I Come From," and he really is doing what Andre (and Big Boi; not so much Killer Mike) and Slick Rick did in the cited songs. He's taking words whose assonances and consonances you wouldn't even notice -- Ventura, finger, dinner, soprano (pronounced "sopranner") -- and stringing them into a loosely told story whose point is the perspective of the singer more than any particular tale being told. He's using delivery to create rhyme, and from those rhymes emerges a character. Good stuff.

On housesitting.

There is no plausible array of products you can have in your bathroom such that a housesitter will not be put off by at least one.

On feline cognition.

H&I are catsitting two lovely Siamese cats for a few weeks this summer, and I'm fascinated by their brains. They have incredibly vivid and distinct personalities -- A is shy and B is proud, A is neurotic and B is prickly, A looks to B for guidance, A has more bursts of friendliness than B ... But not complex. Just a few character traits on display, the way babies are placid or anxious, inquisitive or content, bold or shy.

Here's the major difference: cats think they are totally aware of all the relevant factors in their situation, and even that they're pretty much in control. That's why cats are happy and babies aren't, because babies keep learning that there's more they can't understand, and keep learning how helpless they are. Breaks your heart either way, really, babies or cats, semi-conscious or delusively blissful lack of control.

Lots of adult humans have pretty clearly laid down their tents in one or the other camp, too, when it comes to that.

On retail.

1. Dear Momofuku Milk Bar cashier,

If (a) you can hear; and
(b) you can read; and
(c) a customer says "I am a vegetarian. Please tell me what has gelatin in it so I can avoid it"; and
(d) you no longer sell non-packaged food, and the packages contain ingredient lists; and
(e) that same customer asks "what is in the grasshopper pie?"; and
(f) you answer that it is "just a minty brownie"; and
(g) the customer finds, having already purchased and left, that the thing contains marshmallows and the package clearly indicates that it contains gelatin: then
C. you're not doing it right.

Sincerely,

Implacable Logic

P.S. When you were still selling unpackaged goods the cashier I spoke to could tell me what had gelatin in it.


2. Dear dried fruit guy at Sahadi's,

It is not acceptable to respond to successive requests for cashews and wasabi peas with "Ooh, nice and naughty. I like it." Nor, when the customer replies that the peas are for her husband, to respond: "You're always doing things for others. You need to do something for yourself."

It is not acceptable repeatedly to refer to a customer as "my love." Nor to give her free samples because "you need to be spoiled, my love." Nor to suggest that the dried apricots purchased will help her to win kissing contests (!). Nor to ask as she is walking away: "What's your secret?" and when she says in flusterment "uh, to what?" to continue: "Your secret to being so beautiful. You're gorgeous, you know. ... Well, whatever it is, keep up with it and stay beautiful."

None of this would have been acceptable if you had only done it once and not then reminded this customer why she'd been doing without Sahadi's exceptionally good dried fruit for months. None of it would be acceptable if you were less than twice my age. Even flirting-to-sell can be dubious. This is far beyond dubious.

Sincerely,

The Laws and Customs of Society as a Whole

On babies.

My niece is nearly five months old, and every time I see her (usually every few weeks for a few days) her cognitive capacities are transformed from where they had been. Her body has changed, too: she grows, her legs thicken in preparation for eventual use, she makes new sounds, she sleeps through the night. (I.e. one six-hour stretch in the midst of one-to-two-hour chunks.) But even her bodily developments are in tandem with cognitive leaps and bounds. When my brother says "she's just discovered her legs this week," he means: her legs have come under her more direct and willed control. When she makes sounds that sound responsive, we know she isn't near speech yet, but also that this is how she becomes ready: she moves the muscles of her throat and jaw and tongue and sees what happens, and learns from it. That she has begun the years-long stage of grabbing at things means not that the muscles of her fingers and wrists have developed and not that her bones are stronger -- not mainly -- but that her brain has developed acces to new means of interacting with the outside world.

I won't say as much about the tiny teeth she can feel still perhaps months from breaking through the gum, but most of her development is in coordination and control. Her nerves are still learning to connect her muscles and vessels and organs and brain. She is in the process of what Descartes describes in Meditation Six, the pervasion of body by mind. No wonder that the older philosophers thought the soul had to be infused into the body, watching a small child; only that they believed it could be infused all at once.

On space and spaciousness.

I grew up in Brooklyn and have mostly lived in urban areas, and when I am away I notice how my sense of space has been formed by that experience. In Chicago and Toronto the streets seem impossibly broad, there are no tall buildings in Paris, any place not on the water feels lonely and stranded. I don't know how to look at a field; they all look the same to me, though trees and flowers don't. I hate the way farm animals smell and the centralized planning (via zoning laws, community boards, and community pressures) of practically every American suburb.

I have lived in smallish towns of ~20,000-30,000 and found them more congenial: a small walkable area, streets and structures grown up haphazardly, reflecting their centuries; quiet spaces discovered only by the diligent; people of different ages passing and mingling on the streets; real neighborhoods, different in feel from block to block; and much else that is inaccessible but impressive. Distinctly, an overall devotion to pleasant liveability -- by my parochial urbanite's standards, anyway.

These towns (college towns, I should note) have accepted the principle of organized space and spontaneous growth. That is the city principle -- the suburbs are arranged so as to ignore unintended consequences, but cities live and die on the unintended, the planners outwitted by time. When I say that cities grow spontaneously I of course do not mean that they have wills of their own, but that order simply can't be imposed thoroughly for long on such a large number of people and such a large number of groups of people. You can't control all of the changes all of the time.

So the spontaneity of urban growth after all has something of freedom in it. Like weeds bursting through the cracks in a sidewalk the citizens reshape what was given to them.

On being upper-middle class.

H's starting salary next year will be more than either of his parents ever made in a single year over the course of their careers. Another friend tells me the same is true of her and her mother. (All of the parents in question are public school teachers, both the young ones college professors.) We may almost feel rich, until next we stop by New York City.

Of course, we've spent much of our twenties poorish -- I mean cash-poor but with middle-class banking and saving habits and middle-class expectations -- but now we can finally catch up to the people who finished law school three years ago or med school a bit later. I'm kidding.

On privacy as power.

Rather, on the power that comes with publicly unquestioned presumption of privacy.

When I was small I hated to put on a coat. I hated to do things because others asked it of me, and I was not cold, and I was proud, very proud of my resistance, in the manner of a republican Roman -- Catiline who subjected himself to cold and hunger to train himself in case he should be subjected to cold and hunger, Scaevola ("Lefty") who acquired the name after having plunged his right hand into a fire just to show (off to) his barbarian captor that he could not be pressured. I was not quite that -- I did not harm myself for the sake of showing that harm meant nothing to me, or my body -- but I was closer than I now think right: I would not put on a coat when I felt cold because they (not my parents, others) would have me put it on even when I was not cold. That is perversity, and I appreciate that my parents let me work through it for myself.

Others were not so inclined. For instance the strangers who said: "Excuse me! Do you know that your daughter is not wearing a coat!" as if my father had not been holding my hand. I learned from this how easy it is to forfeit the presumption of privacy.

Violation of norms of etiquette -- though not of moral norms per se -- constitutes forfeiture of the presumption of privacy. Hence: "your child is screaming." "Did you dye your hair that color on purpose?" "What happened to your tights?" "Is that a man or a woman?"

Being with child or with a child constitutes forfeiture of the presumption of privacy. Hence: "Can I touch your stomach?" "Can I see your stomach?" "Your child is screaming." "I don't know why some people let their children leave the house looking like that."

Being beautiful constitutes forfeiture of the presumption of privacy; or being with someone beautiful. Hence: a man rolling down his automobile window to shout at my sister, approvingly and mockingly, "Yeah! White is right!" (!) A driver telling my other sister in Arabic that she is a camel (jimal), to her great puzzlement; and when she tries to extricate herself with a pun -- "not jimal but jamila, beautiful" -- responding: "Yes, you are very jamila"; and later resuming the subject with her to assure her that he had called her jimal qua "a very beautiful animal." (But this was in Jordan.)

Sometimes just being a woman is enough or sometimes just being with a woman; and often enough just being out with someone of the same sex in a possibly romantic context. Hence: walking down Spring Street one summer day I have been whistled at by not one nor two but a whole group of sailors together. And: standing with me on a street corner late one Saturday evening after a movie, a friend was accosted by an approving shout from a light-stopped car of "Yeah! Take that ----- home, bag her, and ---- the ---- out of her." Really. (Yes. Really.) And: no one needs my help to come up with instances of people harassed for the appearance of less than fully heterosexual romantic activity or inclinations.

Being fat constitutes forfeiture of the presumption of privacy. Hence: "Hey, big guy." "I have a terrible sweet tooth, and -- oh, well I'm sure I don't need to tell you!" And -- remarkably -- in the souk in Marrakech, a man managed to combine this with several of the above by bodily poking h in the stomach and declaring: "Couscous! Tagine!" and then looking over at my ashen face and adding (in English): "She is so beautiful, but she never smiles!"

Being exceptionally small or exceptionally tall constitutes forfeiture of the presumption of privacy. Hence the awkward caught-gawking "....how tall are you?", hence the "Sorry ... I've just never seen someone that size," even "Are you a midget?" and "I bet you're really good at basketball." Other unusual bodily features, too: "Where'd you get that scar?" "Can I sign your cast?" "Are those real?"

We don't decide to harass other people -- well, not in all of these cases -- but because we see them as different, or as natural wards of the state, or as our natural inferiors, we have to teach ourselves to respect their privacy -- since we are not taught so from the beginning.

On irrational feelings of warmth towards the academic job market.

Oh, I still know how cruel and arbitrary you are, abstracted apostrophized Job Market. Don't think I've forgotten. Still, for the moment, I forgive you.

On victory.

This doesn't bring anyone back, and I don't know that it directly prevents any harm or death. But for the discouragement to those who would ruin themselves and harm others in pursuit of error, and for the hope brought to those who would bring change of a better sort, I rejoice.

Nevertheless. If I can spill drops of wine at the Passover seder in regret over the death of Pharaoh's armies chasing my fleeing ancestors, I should be able to mourn the necessity of Osama bin Laden's death, even if not the death itself. I have not yet taught myself to shed a tear for the death of the wicked as of the righteous; but God's midrashic rebuke to the angels celebrating at the Red Sea is with me today: "My creatures suffer, and you rejoice?"

On Passover prep.

The worst part isn't hands-and-knees scrubbing, nor the sweep-vacuum-mop-and-still-have-to-clean-again-the-next-day process, nor even throwing out food and sequestering things. It isn't dealing with gallons of boiling water for kashering and it isn't shopping and feeling pretty certain you're getting grifted for shopping at a kosher butcher. It isn't renouncing rice and beans and soymilk and peanut butter, though protein is a much bigger task during Passover than otherwise, for a vegetarian anyway. It isn't that there's always more that you could be doing. (How is this night different from every other night in that respect?) It isn't that you become aware of how much kitchen stuff you've accumulated, and are reminded that you're pretty accustomed, even attached, to a lot of more or less useless objects.

No, the worst part is that when you actually clean everything, you become intensely aware of how badly it's all needed cleaning all this time. *shudder* You never want to be looking that closely at the inside of a microwave or an ancient, inefficient, non-self-cleaning oven.

On the image of God.

Κύδιστ’ ἀθανάτων, πολυώνυμε παγκρατὲς αἰεί,
Ζεῦ φύσεως ἀρχηγέ, νόμου μετὰ πάντα κυβερνῶν,
χαῖρε· σὲ γὰρ καὶ πᾶσι θέμις θνητοῖσι προσαυδᾶν.
Ἐκ σοῦ γὰρ γενόμεσθα, θεοῦ μίμημα λαχόντες
μοῦνοι, ὅσα ζώει τε καὶ ἕρπει θνήτ’ ἐπὶ γαῖαν·

Noblest of immortals, many-named, omnipotent,
Zeus, First Cause of nature, helmsman by law --
Greetings. Appropriately I address you though mortal,
For we are born of you; we possess the image of god
Alone who live, and crawl earthbound, and will die.

-- Cleanthes, "Hymn to Zeus" ll. 1-5 (3rd century BCE)


I have been thinking a lot about what Cleanthes -- the second head of the Stoics -- can mean when he says we have the image of God. He doesn't mean what Genesis 1:26-27 means, whatever one makes of it: "And God said, 'Let us make Adam [or: "a man"] in our image, after our likeness ...' And God made Adam in his* image: in the image of God he made him, male and female he made them." The surprising plural (the verb for "said" is singular, as usual with that grammatically plural term for the divine, and Hebrew has no "royal 'we'"); the image and likeness, and then "likeness" dropped in the following parallelism; the juxtaposition of biological sex with the image of God -- they are not the same as Cleanthes' mysteries. Yet the question is the same, and comparison may illuminate. In any event it is impossible to read Cleanthes without hearing the Bible, so we may as well put that to work.

In one way his version should be easier to fathom, for he has more explicit ideas about what God is made out of than does Genesis -- so that it should be easier to understand what an image or likeness or representation (the Greek "mimema" can mean all of those and more) might be. Genesis often speaks as though God had a body, but never -- except here? -- gives any clue as to what such language might refer to. On the other hand, Cleanthes, like all orthodox Stoics, is a pantheist: he believes that "God" and "the universe" do not name or describe distinct entities, he believes that there is no piece of the universe that is not God -- not only not divine, but not God. So the initial clarity gives way immediately to fog. Cleanthes's God does at least have a clear material content, the sort of thing of which a likeness could exist -- but by virtue of the very same thesis, that God is the universe, we lose sight of what it could mean to single out a part of that universe as specially divine.

As Cleanthes was clear where Genesis said nothing, so oppositewise Genesis tells more than Cleanthes about what it means that Adam is made in the image of God. For the ellipsis above covers the omission of a sentence about ruling birds and beasts and land and so on. The plan is clear, if not the execution: God intended Adam to mimic the divine insofar as Adam was intended to rule Eden.

So far we have three options, none of which suits Cleanthes' purposes as stated:

(1) "The image of God" refers to God's physical pattern or shape. Our bodies -- both male and female -- reflect God's body because they resemble it.
(2) "The image of God" refers to God's material composition. As God is made of [body and spirit? spirit only?], so too are we -- and we alone.
(3) "The image of God" refers to God's role in the natural hierarchy. As God rules the universe, we rule our patch of earth.

Genesis endorses (3) and, at least on the face of it, (1). (2) is a part of the way it is often taught among the traditionally religious, in my experience: not that as God is body and spirit so too are we (though perhaps Christians, who do believe that God has been mortal flesh, accept this), but that we have some special divine feature not shared by e.g. table lamps, or cobras. There is also a non-corporeal way of taking the patterns mentioned in (1): as God is merciful, so must we be merciful, as God is just so must we be just, as God feeds the poor and clothes the naked we too must do all we can to leave the world better than we found it. I do not include this as an interpretative option since "image of God" has given way to "imitation of God"; but anyway it is a famous midrashic interpretation. (See Talmud Yerushalmi Peah 15b; Sifre Deuteronomy 11:22; Bavli Sotah 14a; Genesis Rabbah on 23:19; probably more places.)

A fourth option is suggested by the more macabre invocation at Genesis 9:6:

"Who spills a man's blood, by a man shall his blood be spilt, for God created man [or: a man; Adam] in his image."

(4) "The image of God" refers to a special relationship between God and humanity. As we have obligations to God [the passage's context is God reexplaining to Noah how he is to live after he emerges post-diluvian from the Ark], so we have obligations to other human beings, for which God holds us accountable and expects us to hold each other accountable. (This interpretation of Genesis gains some support from its connection with Leviticus 19:2 -- "You shall be holy, as I the Lord your God am holy" -- and Deuteronomy 13:5 -- "After the Lord your God you shall walk.")
****************

With these options on the table, back to Cleanthes. He means a little of each of these, I think, but none of them as stated.

(1) "The image of God" refers not to God's physical pattern or shape but to the shape of a divine life. We participate in God's image insofar as what we require to succeed in life is to resemble God more and more.

(2) "The image of God" refers not to God's material composition (which of course we share, along with everything else in the universe) but to God's nature, which is reason. We are made in God's image insofar as our perfected nature reveals itself too as reason.

(3) "The image of God" refers not to God's role in the hierarchy of nature but to God's unequivocal embrace of nature. We have God's image insofar as we embrace the totality of things, which is God.

(4) "The image of God" refers to a special relationship between God and humanity, of obligation as well as of love -- hence Cleanthes's paternal language. But what this itself can mean, I do not know.

Further things I do not understand in the first lines of Cleanthes' "Hymn to Zeus":

-- the repeated allusion to our mortality -- is it defiant (of death, using divinity as shield)? humble? merely contrasting us with God?
-- "helmsman by law" (or "lawful helmsman") -- what can he mean by law, if not the law of nature that God is meant to embody? and if that, then what does it mean to acknowledge that God rules by law? merely to restate that the law is the true embodiment of everything that's excellent -- it has no kind of fault or flaw -- and God, our lord, embodies the law?
-- "born of you" -- ??????
-- and I still don't understand the meaning of "image of God," or its significance, or the use to which he's putting it here -- though I have my own thoughts on that, for another time.


*Personally I make it my practice to avoid assigning sex or any other attribute, and in particular physical attributes, to the divine; but I cannot misquote a source.

On reversal and appropriation.

1. Several weeks ago my father and I were reading Horton Hears a Who to two small children of our acquaintance. I mentioned afterward that I had forgotten how political Dr. Seuss could be. He said that yes, he had been a vocal liberal.

"But surely 'a person's a person, no matter how small' is an anti-abortion message?"

He was shocked. My father is a veteran of various civil rights and anti-war campaigns in the sixties and he said that it had been obvious at the time that this was civil rights language. I said that in my experience the only people who spoke that way were pro-life activists. Segments of the pro-life movement have also appropriated the language of civil rights in some other ways.


2. Proponents of what used to be called "the New Modesty" -- Wendy Shalit and a whole bunch of Campus Crusade for Christ members, mainly -- speak of themselves pointedly as sexual revolutionaries along the lines of Brook Farm or Greenwich Village 1912. Of course they are right insofar as their values are no longer legally mandated or culturally assumed, but you will not be ostracized for wearing a promise ring,* and you cannot be put in prison for engaging in heterosexual relationships or declared an imbecile and forcibly sterilized because you restrict your childbirth to marriage.

One instance in which the analogy is not necessarily as strained: laws against the veil, which are not only religiously inflammatory, typically anti-immigrant and/or racist, and distressingly paternalistic -- but also inappropriately treat Muslim women's sexuality as the property of the public so-called, rather than their own. (Put more coarsely, "white men saving brown women from brown men.)

(Myself I am inclined to view the way fat people are treated as analogous to the way women -- especially women who are attractive and/or pregnant -- are treated: strangers assume they have a right to comment on the bodies of all these groups.)


3. Forget Protestants who consider themselves marginalized in America.** Forget white people for whom only liberals and non-whites can be racist or racially aggressive or oppressive. Turn instead to the very rich who consider themselves slandered and powerless in the public discourse. Their defenders raise the specter of the tyranny of the majority -- a good Madisonian concern in some circumstances, but not those in which we live. Yet they're perfectly sincere. Jamie Dimon of JPMorganChase is sincere when he compares the "vilification" of big banks unfavorably to Lincoln's rhetoric about the Confederacy (!). The AIG people who felt like the real victims during the bonus uproar, and the people who tell the Times and the Journal that making $500,000 a year doesn't make them feel rich, and the ones who complain that Democrats just want to "punish success" and "soak the rich" are sincere. Okay, Lloyd Blankfein is being sarcastic when he says Goldman Sachs is doing God's work. But they really think that the deck is stacked against them and sometimes the little guy just can't win.


4. It is not incidental to the above cases that they involve reactionary appropriation of the language of causes that have "won." It is, however, quite incidental to them that the reactionaries in question are in the main politically conservative. For one, I am in sympathy with them on several of the issues even if I think their language choice is naive-sophisticated (sophomoric?), too clever by half, and altogether blinkered. For another, everyone is defensive, every group is defensive, when feeling under attack. The editors at Harper's try to break strikes with the fervor of a Frick, albeit without the violence. Unions run cartels, and professional licensing groups run cartels (e.g., doctors and dentists waste vast amounts of time and money by insisting on being present and getting paid for nurses' and hygienists' work), and universities are run as cartels (adjuncts being paid less to do more with no job security than tenure-track and tenured professors -- with attendant lack of status and loss of academic freedom; economists extracting higher salaries because they could make so much more money in the private sector; &c.) All of these groups use language that suggests the highest purest motivations when from the outside they seem clearly to be protecting their own and getting what they feel is their due. It's just the way things are.

Cf. this and that: we aren't intimidating, we're protecting from intimidation. People want to be in the right.


5. W.S. Gilbert finely satirized the Victorian literary convention of reversal in which the poor are valorized and the wealthy condemned by putting in the mouth of an Earl (in "Iolanthe") the following lines:

Spurn not the nobly born with love affected,
Nor treat with virtuous scorn the well-connected.
High rank involves no shame;
We boast an equal claim
With him of humble name
To be respected ...

and further

Hearts just as pure and fair
May beat in Belgrave Square
As in the lowly air of Seven Dials

-- as one might say now,

Fine morals flourish will
As much in Beacon Hill
As in the confines chill
Of Roxbury, or even Southie ...



*Although people may be weirded out if your father brags about making you wear a promise ring. That is absolutely incompatible with the New Modesty; the New Modest speak in terms of self-assertion and self-respect, not paternal ownership of daughterly genitalia.

**I suppose it doesn't seem relevant to them that Sunday is not everyone's day of rest, and no other group's holidays are recognized by the United States government, and that no one has ever been lynched in America for being a Protestant or formed a political party to protest the mass arrival of Protestant immigrants, or argued that Protestantism is not protected under the First Amendment because Protestantism isn't a religion, it's a cult, or subjected Protestant public figures to ridicule over their weird religious texts and rituals, and so on.

On Wisconsin, and legitimacy.

Q: Why is union dysfunction taken as a reason to abolish collective bargaining, while it couldn't be suggested in polite company that similar forms of corporate dysfunction (rigidity, inefficiency, delusional budgeting, stubborn self-interest masquerading as public-mindedness) be taken as a reason to dramatically change corporate structures and/or legal attitudes toward said institutions?

A(1.0): Why are so many people willing to believe that Sarah Palin thought Africa was a single country, while it was considered in poor taste to mention George W. Bush's public floundering and flubbing of foreign policy facts during his first Presidential campaign? Grant the latter having been far better documented, during his campaign for POTUS, and he having had no special reputation for command of the facts (of the sort that probably explains people's tolerance of exaggerations and misstatements from e.g. Obama on the campaign trail), on the contrary presenting himself as a brash anti-elitist whose favorite philosopher was Jesus.

A(1.1): Because George W. Bush came from money and manners and fancy educational institutions and large private endeavors, obviously, and because he was a man, obviously. And perhaps because his (adopted) Texas twang was more familiar than her (native) MatSu Valley sort of Upper Midwestern Scandinavian thing, so that he sounded "folksy" while she sounded strange, like a backwoods hunter.

A(1.2): Equally obviously, people didn't compare the evidence on the two, weigh and sift carefully, and decide to judge them differently in these ways. Even people who explicitly analogized the two didn't tend to draw it out in this way. No, people just saw and heard him one way and her another way.

A(2.0): Here are other versions of the same question:
A(2.1): When a random Muslim or Arab or Persian man beats or kills his wife, why is it newsworthy, when domestic violence almost never gets much press? Why do people claim that al Qaeda proves that Islam is inherently a savage religion when people have done the worst possible things in defense and behalf of every sort of cause? (Flip side, for the leftists: why does the persistence of violence an unbundle conditions show that the nation-state in general, and often enough Israel in particular, ought to be abolished?)
A(2.2): Why do missing black children go unreported while a blonde girl will be in the news for weeks? Why was the drug bust of a black girl at Harvard several years ago -- which included violence perpetrated by someone she'd let in and culminated in her expulsion, not nearly as widely reported as the arrest of half a dozen white Columbia boys who turned out to be wholesale-level drug dealers?
A(2.3): When Haley Barbour sanitizes his memories of how integration went down in Mississippi in the sixties, why do reporters write blog posts about it? When a man molests a boy, why does that say something about how men who are attracted to men are in general, but a man's molesting a girl shows nothing about what men who are attracted to women are like? If the latter does show anything, why is it taken to show that the longstanding differences in the way we -- meaning people of European descent, in particular -- treat male and female sexuality are based in or even determined by biology?
A(2.4): Why is one anecdote about China sufficient for a columnist to prove a point when the same sloppiness would be laughed off if one person were taken to stand in for the whole of say the UK, which has maybe a fifteenth of China's population and is much more geographically concentrated (in and around London) and is much more linguistically and culturally homogeneous than China?
A(2.5): Why is it that hostile male students try to intimidate me and assume a female friend knows no physics, and friendly ones treat me as their guidance counsellor, feel free to go over my head to the professor (female students probably do this too but they haven't to me), and describe me to a professor in a complaint as "incredibly caring and giving ... That said ... [any and all classrooms silences were the TA's fault]?"
A(2.6): Why do people assume that any so-called "dark" or "cynical" Beatles song is pure Lennon?

A(3.0): Naive epistemic realism is utterly untenable, because there just is no way we "perceive" things that's separate from and prior to our interpretation of events; and that perception-interpretation process depends very much on shortcuts that certainly are cognitively useful (I don't want to have to reason out every night whether I should expect the Sun to rise tomorrow and bread to be nutritious) but by the same token are very much in need of examination and questioning.
A(3.1): Given that Socrates encourages interlocutors to examine separately their underlying assumptions and the systematic interconnections between them, while Aristotle assumes we can more or less rely on heretofore-accumulated human wisdom: Socratic epistemology is much, much closer to how we ought to deliberate than Aristotelian epistemology.

On frozen perceptions.

Have you played Beatles RockBand? (What? You can't write a dissertation sixteen hours a day.) If you have, you know that certain "accomplishments" -- primarily earning three or five stars on individual songs -- win you certain rewards -- mostly photographs of the Beatles. These reward photographs are meant to be apt to the accomplishment you earn them for, and they come with a few lines of text to explain how. One of the photographs earned for "Getting Better" gets you an anecdote with a moral: the story that while Paul was the main songwriter, John decided on his own to reply to Paul's "Got to admit it's getting better" with a harmony part of "Can't get much worse." Supposedly, Paul loved the way John's "cynical side" and "dark humor" served as a counterpart to his own sunnier personality, and often cited the anecdote as an exemplary instance of their song-writing partnership.

However, it's total nonsense.

Not that that didn't happen; I expect it did; harmonizers, like people playing any part in a rock band, often have a great deal of leeway with their parts. (The notable exception being, of course, anyone working with Brian Wilson, who wanted to be an auteur composing "pocket symphonies," and who also was an exceptionally talented songwriter working with less ambitious popsters. His vision led him to choreograph every sound he was responsible for, to the point that the Beach Boys apparently spent six months in the studio recording "Good Vibrations." Understandably, most harmonizers prefer getting to sing whatever they want to sing.) So probably John heard Paul singing "Got to admit it's getting better" and responded more or less spontaneously with "Can't get much worse."

But look, "Getting Better" is not a happy song. The lyrics "I used to be cruel to my woman/ I beat her and kept her apart from the things that she loved/ Man, I was mean, but I'm changing my scene/ And I'm doing the best that I can" are not sunny lyrics. What I'm saying is, of course Paul loved John's addition. It brought out exactly what Paul intended for the song.

Why does this matter? Well, really, it doesn't. But I never cease to be amazed at the way people read the then-future back into the past. After the Beatles broke up, John became a "serious" person: a political activist, a performance artist, someone whose devotion to his wife sort of scared people -- and a murder victim. His hits had lyrics hoping for "nothing to kill or die for" and "giv[ing] peace a chance." Paul retained the pop star persona and failed to scare anyone with his devotion to his non-threatening wife or their activism in behalf of animal rights. His hits had lyrics about liking silly love songs and included a James Bond theme tune.

So people remember them that way as the Beatles, too. "Helter Skelter" is taken to be somehow less "typical" of Paul than, I don't know, "Here, There, and Everywhere." Because "Here, There, and Everywhere" sounds more like "Maybe I'm Amazed" and "Yesterday." So they miss that Paul rocked the hardest of the Beatles and sang the shoutiest.* They forget that he wrote funny ("Back in the USSR," "Martha My Dear," "Honey Pie," "Get Back," "Maxwell's Silver Hammer") and also terribly emotional songs ("I've Just Seen a Face," "For No One," "I Will," "Golden Slumbers," the exquisite and never-commercially-released-by-the-Beatles "Goodbye"). And they forget that John wrote tripe like "Mr. Moonlight," the Beatles' worst song by a very large margin. (Granted, "The Long and Winding Road" is pretty unlistenable too, album version at any rate, and that's Paul.) And trivialities like "Ask Me Why." Also maybe they forget that "Imagine" is in fact a terrible song, and so are most of his other post-Beatles songs. (That one track on which George and Ringo join him and the lyrics are all about how spiteful he feels towards Paul sometimes, I remember enjoying.)

Anyway, my point isn't that John Lennon was not a great songwriter. He wrote some of the Beatles' absolute greatest songs, that is, some of the greatest Anglo-American popular music of the twentieth century: "She Loves You," "In My Life," "I'm So Tired." My point isn't that he wasn't a witty guy with a sardonic streak. Anyone who's seen "A Hard Day's Night" knows that Paul projected the least strong personality of the boys. (They say he was supposed to have an independent scene, too, but it got cut for lack of excitement. Contrast George's brilliant turn discombobulating a television executive who fancies himself an expert on hip, John's sparkling nonsense conversation with a woman who thinks she recognizes him, and of course Ringo's soulful solo adventure. Paul comes across as the leader of the group, in a Leonardo-from-"Teenage-Mutant-Ninja-Turtles" way: he's the one who worries for them.) And of course it's not wrong to note Paul's interest in music hall songs and that influence on e.g. "Your Mother Should Know." And sometimes when Paul tried to write emotional, serious stuff, it went wrong, either salvageably or not so. It's just strange to me that people insist on reading so much back into the music. Perhaps because I discovered the Beatles through my parents' old LPs rather than the radio or "The Ed Sullivan Show," and was born after Lennon's murder, I am missing the way it really looked at the time. But I don't think so. I think the people who were there then were also there later, and later always has a way of seeping back into then.

I see the same sorts of things in ancient and early modern philosophy all the time, but that's an impassioned rant for another day, and a different hang-up.


* No, "Twist and Shout" is not as shouty as "Helter Skelter" or "Birthday." I don't even think it's as shouty as "Got To Get You into My Life." It might be shoutier than "Wild Honey Pie" (otherwise distinguished mainly as the only Beatles song one can imagine the Pixies covering) and "Why Don't We Do It in the Road?," though.

On the forms of akrasia, discussed and under-discussed.

The Greek word "akrasia" is often translated "weakness of will." Literally it is "powerlessness"; the range of common meanings for its adjectival form "akratos" is wide -- unmixed or pure, esp. of wine (cf. "akratizomai: drink neat wine, hence breakfast, because this consisted of bread dipped in wine"; this sense comes from an entirely different verb, "kerannumi," mix, rather than "kratew," have power); uncontrolled or undisciplined; violent (cf. Latin "inpotens," which shares the surprising dual meaning "without strength/violently aggressive"). In an action theory or moral psychology context -- that is, in plainer English, when we are talking about how it is a person makes decisions and acts on them -- usually it means something closer to "not being in control." There is no reference to some special faculty "the will," or to any particular mechanism of control or uncontrol. "Weakness of will" suggests a ditherer or a guilty self-indulger, but akrasia is broader: it covers any case of acting against a decision one has made and continues, in some reasonably strong way, to accept. This is important: problematic akrasia should not just be changing one's mind. The decision is meant to remain firm, yet circumvented. But how can one accept a decision -- think "this is good, this is right, this is what I want," and yet "the good thing that I want I do not do, but the bad, which I do not want -- that is what I do" (as the Tarsian put it)?

The cases most often discussed in the modern literature are of two families. First, the ditherer, as above. This actually doesn't present much of a mystery. In most such cases, the deliberator clearly has just changed her mind -- not necessarily in the words she applies to things, but in how she conceptualizes and evaluates them. For instance she says "I do not want to sin; I want to be good," meanwhile at the first opportunity going against her stated desire and intention, perhaps by worshiping idols or coveting her neighbor's things. -- Notice that, because of its dependence on the decisions and desires of the agent in question -- where "agent" just = "person, considered in the role of someone who acts" -- akrasia is not actually meant to track any objective or external right and wrong. It is solely a matter of an agent's apparent internal consistency. That's why changing your mind isn't akratic -- any more than it is inconsistent for a clock to read "five o'clock" at one time and "five-oh-one" at another. (Puzzles of time are out of our area here.)

The other much-pondered family of cases do present genuine puzzles. These are the instances of "clear-eyed akrasia" so-called: when you the agent really do, as far as you can tell, want x and really have decided on x -- no "I didn't realize"s, no "oh just this once"s -- and yet you pick not-x. Euripides's Medea, deliberating whether to kill her children before the audience's very eyes, is often taken to represent clear-eyed akrasia. People who read her so say that she knows it is wrong but allows herself to be overcome by her anger against their no-good cheating father. (This passage in the play is actually the subject of a fascinating debate between Stoics and Platonists&Aristotelians, on which see Christopher Gill, "Did Chrysippus Understand Medea?".) This is the kind of case in which one seems consciously to go against one's better judgment. People have lots to say about this, and I won't go into any detail. I'll just mention that Aristotle and the Stoics both class this as essentially a branch of the first, unproblematic sort of akrasia, and want to solve its puzzles in the same way. Plato had been troubled by such solutions (also offered by his teacher Socrates), and felt he had to recognize apparent cases of internal conflict as real: to make this possible he divided the soul into three parts, rational, spirited, and appetitive, and assigned each part enough independence to permit for genuine conflicts. Plato literalized the metaphor of the "divided self." (In this he has his modern adherents.) Each part of the soul has its own impulses and aims. The problem with this view is that it becomes difficult to explain what, exactly, makes them add up to one self at all. (When such as Bloom say "two selves," they don't mean it rigorously.) The answer certainly presumes that "add up" is the wrong metaphor there, but what's better, and what can we say beyond metaphors about the larger union of warring selves?

So we do see how clear-eyed akrasia points us towards other issues in moral psychology. They are important and interesting and I'm glad people work on them. But I do wish people spent more time on negligent akrasia. That's failing to act upon your decision because you just didn't think of it, you just didn't put the information together in the right way. This can be very simple: you didn't realize that leaving at two wouldn't get you to the zoo on time even though if you'd thought of it, you would have. But that description conceals at least two different cases. First, you planned to leave at two and did so, and only later realized that that was not the correct way to act upon your decision to get to the zoo on time. Second, you planned to leave for the zoo at one-thirty, but didn't notice when one-thirty came around. Third, you made no specific sub-decisions as to how to execute your decision to get to the zoo by two-thirty, and all morning and early afternoon you felt confident of your decision, absolutely meant to get to the zoo -- and yet failed to make the connection between having that aim and making plans (or just forming intentions) that would instrumentally aid or partially constitute fulfillment of your goal.

That last is the most mysterious to me. Perhaps I'll have more to say in a separate post; meanwhile, this is far too long as it is.