On SuperPACs.

Which is more inefficient: (1) the SEIU leaving me the same flyer about the governor's race every day, and sometimes more than one copy (2) Crossroads GPS sending one mailer about the Massachusetts Senate race a week to New Hampshire addresses? (And I don't live in Nashua, or by the border at all; no Boston commuters up here.) (2a) Crossroads GPS sending warnings against "Professor Warren" to, not only a college town, but faculty housing in a college town. (To be fair -- I have also received solicitations from community colleges urging that I consider going back to school whilst living in faculty housing.) It's become some kind of a metaphor: how ridiculously obviously inefficient the pro-Democratic messaging, vs. how ridiculously ill-conceived (but decently put together!) the pro-GOP messaging is. How lurid it all is. That the pro-Dem literature has been almost entirely devoted to local races -- for Gov, Congress, even State Senate -- and one of the two national things I received was a reminder that I can still register to vote even at the last minute; while the pro-GOP stuff has all been either Romney-Ryan or Scott Brown. -- This last is evidence as well that both operations must have me pegged demographically as likely Dem in local races -- hence, that they are using some targeting information, because the less competent less engaged people are still high-tech enough to be a little creepy. -- Like I said, a metaphor in the making.

On teaching and on appropriateness.

I am an open, enthusiastic person. I make a lot of jokes without pausing for a laugh (this style seems particularly liable to misunderstanding by the Midwestern-born. I'm not sure why). I have something to say in response to most questions and comments, and generally I take everything to be related to everything else. So it happens, naturally enough, that I am just that way as a teacher. I discipline myself mainly with syllabi and prepared notes. The occasional self-injunction little avails; like Jane Eyre picturing herself as a missionary in India married to St. John Rivers, I can do it for a little while and without noticing revert to being as I am and acting as I act -- and like Jane Eyre I'm sensible enough to accept that, however deeply I may wish to change, and however much I admire those who do things in another way, that way is too foreign to my nature to figure in my long-term plans. Efforts to enshrine it there end, soon, in self-reproachful reversion. Jane Eyre considers the constant effort of will required, and realizes that even if to live so would be finer than to live according to her nature, she could not succeed, certainly not without a stronger force (St. John Rivers would do nicely) heating and beating and hammering her metal always into that other shape. So it goes. Jane Eyre is choosing how to live her own life. But my decision directly affects many more people than myself, and perhaps impacts some of them more than it does me. So it is particularly incumbent upon me to ensure that I do my best not just as I conceive it, but according also to standards that are set by others and not engrained in me, by which I have agreed to work. I do. I put a lot of work into syllabus, I prepare material thoroughly before class and write out notes for at least the most important points I would like to get to, I solicit conversation and try to manage the debate. That last is in fact not a part of -- though not incompatible with -- the usual standards for teaching such a class as I have been teaching. In a class of up to -- oh -- twenty, perhaps thirty students, student participation is very much the norm. In a larger class, like mine, too large for us to all face each other, it is not so common to devote most of the class to discussion. The students determine the shape and ambiance of any class that is not pure lecture or nearly, and the more students, the harder it is for the teacher to give them all voices. I have been lucky enough to teach remarkably good students always, so far, throughout my brief career. This term in particular they were lovely (though I suppose I say the same nearly every term). Under my supervision, the students built a running conversation. It did absolutely require my supervision, and on occasions when I let control out of my hands I erred. But it was their conversation. I was more than just another participant, but I wasn't on high or separate, either. I was trying to create a space where we could say anything (relevant); and then trying to manage the process of figuring out collectively what counted as relevant. Here is where we come to the topic of the title. I am always eager to let students know they should not be embarrassed to speak: that their comment is likely not "stupid," since if they are unsure of something probably several other people are, but also that a stupid comment is nothing to be ashamed of -- only something to be ashamed of repeating over and over without learning from it. To this end I used my nature, and showed by example that you can do something silly at one moment and be clever and helpful the next. So I made up silly examples, and used my students in them.* I brought in occasional props. I cold-called and told them just to say if they hadn't done the reading. Twice or three times I asked them all to close their eyes and raise their hands if they believed this or were persuaded by that. I often took attendance by having them call out their own names, so that they would learn each other's names and perhaps get more used to speaking in front of each other. I made jokes constantly (that is, I articulated at least half of the jokes that I wanted to make). I declared "Experimental Fridays" and changed things from time to time. And I told them stories. I told them stories about myself, sometimes true, sometimes untrue or elaborated, sometimes patently, outrageously false. I performed the just-linked monologue for them one Experimental Friday, and finished to an ovation, lots of questions, lots of "great class!"es, and came home to four additional, e-mailed "great class!"es. I would never, ever have felt comfortable doing that with a class that hadn't already been interested and willing and comfortable. (Of course I told them at the end that Daniel Dennett had really written the story and not me.) I let my guard down. That, in itself, is what I have struggled with. No particular possible inappropriate behavior. That I let my guard down so with them. That I told them things about myself when they asked me, or for the sake of examples. I wanted to open them up to talking about what they cared about, and to a large extent I succeeded. Several students have told me that this was their favorite class, and one said that writing the final paper had been the most intellectually engaging project of their freshman year. But I don't know. Socrates made himself the show and managed to draw people in to philosophy. It can be done. But I am no Socrates. I do not regret this, not knowing it's so because I do other things besides initiate challenging conversations with people I encounter. (For one, I go home to h, while Socrates does not appear to have been an exemplary family man.) But even Socrates sometimes was too much the show. Think of the view, crudely expressed in the pseudo-Platonic Theages and sophisticatedly in any number of Plato's dialogues -- the Apology and Alcibiades's speech in the Symposium -- that Socrates is magic. Plato rationalizes his magic to logos, to reason, to argument, to things in principle accessible to all of us by our humanity. Or think simply of the terrific differences between Xenophon's and Plato's Socrates. Xenophon's Socrates is magic mainly in being so outstandingly in self-control, in his being so temperate, so moderate, so tolerant of hardship. This isn't unrelated to Plato's view -- both present him as exceptionally the master of himself and his circumstances. And Aristotle's casually proposing him at Posterior Analytics 97ab? for an archetype of greatness of soul suggests that mastery and majesty remained dominant impressions of him. This is sort of drawing people in, but sort of only drawing them to oneself. And even if Socrates succeeds, surely there's something amiss. It might possibly be effective to interest people in a discipline by showing that some people engaged therein are interesting; would that justify it? It was never my intention to do that. But I worry that I may have depended too much on my nature in teaching, and to some students made myself a sideshow, when I only meant to be a ticket-taker. * Along the lines of "Now, S believes in witches, and I don't. So when the crops fail and my sheep are stricken down, and S says it must be because of a spell or a curse, I don't consider that an adequate explanation. But why not? How could S convince me? Well, he could bring me records of all the alleged curses laid on by witches and of all the agricultural problems in the neighborhood, and pick out patterns of similarity. Or he could show me a witch casting a spell, and hope I learn from experience what I wouldn't believe based on testimony. He could point to a particular witch who is now casting a particular spell, predict that it will be fulfilled, and point out when it is. Or he could show that the presence of witches helps us explain other phenomena, too. For instance, on my account, the crop failures have resulted from unexpected weather patterns, the sheep illnesses from bad luck, and the concurrent phenomenon of many local young women acting suddenly quite different than usual in similar ways, I attribute to a trip the girls took together that frightened them or some water they drank that was poisoned. S explains them all with witches. His explanation is certainly simpler and more elegant than mine, and it coheres perfectly well with all the facts we've given ... So should I start believing in witches?"

On the subtle delights of teaching.

One of my favorite moments is always the moment when I can shrug and say, "Well, one man's modus ponens is another man's modus tollens and have my students get it.

On the similarity of the mind-body problem and the fact-value gap.

Let c stand for the thesis that human beings should live according to human nature -- that facts about human nature are not idle, but have normative (action-guiding) force.

Many twentieth-century philosophers scoffed at premises along the line of c, and more than enough still do in the twenty-first century: What? How can an "ought" ever follow from an "is?" haven't you heard of the fact/value distinction, and the unbridgeable gap between them? For Pete's sake, haven't you people ever read Hume?

I have little to say to this; it strikes me as superstitiously and gratuitously mystery-making. Many of these same people, if you had asked them:

"How could Descartes have thought both that:

(1) minds and bodies are completely separate entities, of completely different kinds, with completely different natures, incapable of overlapping at any point -- and that
(2) the mind and the body are utterly intermingled, such that mind pervades body?

How could those both be true?"

-- would have replied with a laugh that even smart people used to believe unaccountably foolish things. Obviously, if (1) is true, then mind and body simply can't have anything to do with each other. You couldn't attach a mind to a body any more than you could attach a triangle (not a triangle-shaped piece of paper, but a triangle, the abstract object) to a blackboard eraser. Why can't you do that? Because the blackboard eraser doesn't have a mind to hold the triangle, and the triangle doesn't have a body to touch the eraser. And by the same token, you can't attach a mind to a body, because the body would already have to have a mind to be able to interact with a mind, or the mind would already have to have a body to be able to interact with a body. To believe both (1) and (2) simultaneously is frankly bizarre.

Some of these people have been willing to assert nevertheless both that

(1') facts and values are completely separate entities, of completely separate kinds, with completely different natures, incapable of overlapping at any point; and that
(2') facts and values are utterly intermingled, such that values pervade facts.

Some have accepted (1') and therefore rejected (2'), and more than (2'): rejected the very idea that value could be in anything. All there are are facts; facts are incompatible with values; hence there are no values.

Most people don't want to do that. For obvious reasons: we routinely take facts to have normative implications and values to have factual implications. Here's a reasonable argument from fact to value-judgment:

There is no Santa Claus. Therefore, to represent Santa Claus to a child as the source of his Christmas bounty is to lie. All other things being equal, it's bad to lie. Therefore, all other things being equal, you shouldn't tell children that their presents come from Santa Claus.

Here's a reasonable argument from value-judgment to fact:

This marriage is illegitimate. (For instance, the bride and bridegroom have concealed prior marriages or blood relations.) Therefore, no marriage has taken place.

To give up (2') on the grounds of (1') means rejecting these arguments as monstrously ill-formed. That's quite a sacrifice, and requires large changes to the ways we are used to thinking through problems. Sacrifices just about as large as would be required if we were to give up (2) because of (1). To say that there exist only facts but no values is not less strange than to say that there exist only minds but no bodies, or bodies but no minds.

The obvious solution is to reject (1) and (1'): minds and bodies aren't made out of different stuffs so fundamentally as all that, facts and values aren't made out of different stuffs so fundamentally as all that. Not everyone wants to take that route. But people who take it in regard to (1) and (2) really shouldn't have to take out the smelling salts in the presence of someone who takes it in regard to (1') and (2').

On bizarrely specific subgenres and/or typecasting.

Maybe you knew Peter Lorre starred in a movie about hands that take a man over and then are revealed to have murderous capacities and inclinations -- "Mad Love," which not only is fabulous on its own account but (so they say) was the film that convinced British censors finally to give up on film by film, scene by scene work and simply ban horror movies altogether, thus eliminating at one blow such a chunk of the market, and setting such a precedent for other wary censorship boards, that the justly celebrated Universal Horror pictures unit was shuttered.* BUT did you know that ten years later, in 1946, he played the English (!) private secretary of an eccentric composer living in Italy who, after his employer's death, becomes fixated on the idea that the composer's hands have survived him and are wandering around committing murders on their own? It turns out he's crazy and he's been the murderer all along. Nevertheless the Addams Family's The Thing has nothing on ... "The Beast with Five Fingers". Everything in the movie except Peter Lorre is more or less pointless. But the beast is cool.

This became a whole subgenre of horror movies, made as recently as the eighties to my knowledge, in which hands he wasn't born with and that seem to operate independently of the rest of his system bend a man (it is always a man, I think) towards depraved violence. Mostly newly-attached, à la Orlac, but certainly The Thing testifies to the continued amusement to be found in the disembodied sort as well. I believe there are a dozen or more horror movies based on this premise, or element.

I bring this up because I've just now seen Dennis Price, known mostly as Louis Mazzini in "Kind Hearts and Coronets" in 1949, playing quite a similar character eight years later in a movie known alternatively as "The Naked Truth" or "Your Past Is Showing." Louis is an amoral striver bent on revenge against the relatives who disinherited his mother for marrying an Italian, ambitious for their rank and wealth. After much thought and study he is able to conceive and smoothly execute the murders of enough d'Ascoynes (all incarnations of Alec Guinness) to inherit it all. The movie ends ambiguously: he's certainly done better than the universally hapless and largely wicked and idiotic d'Ascoynes, but he has barely escaped a death sentence, albeit for the one death in the movie for which he isn't responsible, and seems less than half a step from returning under its shadow. It seems impossible that he should escape, but improbable that he should fare so much worse against this round of obstacles than against previous; and we aren't sure what to wish for, in several different ways. ("Kind Hearts and Coronets" has the rare distinction of combining farcical serial murder with a subtle exploration of the emotional and practical dilemmas of being in love with two people, who bring with them two sorts of lives and two visions of what he could be. It's like "Arsenic and Old Lace" with a touch of "Trouble in Paradise." And no, I can't think of a higher compliment I could have paid by comparison.)

"The Naked Truth" also ends with Price's character escaping from the frying pan (in this case a blimp) to leap, evidently, straight into the fire (the ocean, 200 miles from England). But it doesn't get so far as "Kind Hearts" in any direction. Price's part in it is large, but he is not, as in "KH&C," the center of every plotline and the narrator of every sequence. Still, the film begins with a series of visits his character -- Nigel Dennis -- makes to a series of prominent people who subsequently evince alarming levels of desperation. A scientist shoots him(?)self, an MP collapses on the floor during a speech, a model tries to gas herself (but only succeeds in blowing up her apartment), a novelist jumps from her window but lands safely in the grocer below's fruit barrels ... As in "Kind Hearts" Price's character wreaks more havoc and inflicts more pain than his social and financial ambitions require, without ever telling the wealthy, famous, and/or powerful people he blackmails -- that's how he sows his mayhem: after much thought and study he's conceived and executes a flawless strategy of blackmail unpunishable under British libel laws -- without ever telling them how he feels about them. Perhaps without fully admitting to himself how he feels about them. One can't maintain resentment and contempt in such exquisite balance for the long term without slipping in one direction and another: usually, for Louis and for Dennis, resentment. But revealed resentment is an open wound, and they bandage it with what is after all quite justified contempt for "their betters." (Dennis's brief but leisurely glance around Lord Mayley's large and expensively-furnished house, right after Dennis has mentioned that he inhabits a tiny and decrepit barge on the river, surrounded by condemned properties -- that glance, the accompanying slight motions of brow and lip, the almost-visible shrug of self-conquest, of restoring contempt to its rightful place as his ruling passion -- ah ... !)

I suppose the plots aren't quite similar enough to constitute a subgenre: it does make a difference whether you blow up a man's darkroom with him in it or just threaten to expose the follies of his youth. But the character is so similar -- just a little older, a little puffier, a little quieter, a little harder-bitten -- that it's hard to imagine it wasn't built around, or heavily tailored to, Louis Mazzini. Allusions to a well-known earlier role are a long tradition, but this isn't quite the same as Cary Grant playing a nasty sophisticated newspaper editor chasing Ralph Bellamy away from his (Grant's character's) ex-wife two years after having played a nasty sophisticated socialite chasing Ralph Bellamy away from his ex-wife. Cary Grant is always Cary Grant; his characters in "The Awful Truth" and "His Girl Friday" form a natural pairing, but they're not very different from the nasty sophisticated powerful people he plays in "Suspicion," say, or "The Philadelphia Story." Similarly if Dennis Price had been cast as a conscienceless, resentment-driven, brutishness-abhorring, poor, clever, malicious man -- well, that's typecasting, but it's also the reason why types are cast: it works! An actor who can do xyz can do xyz again for you, if she's a professional. But this is like asking Cary Grant to partner with Katharine Hepburn to catch an escaped domesticated panther in Connecticut, and then sending him off to capture an escaped domesticated tiger on Long Island in another movie -- making this the main mover of the plot, but also the only thing importantly in common with the earlier depiction. I don't have any analysis to offer, just interest.


* Maybe you even knew that "Mad Love" was linked not only to the earlier, silent, German adaptation of the novel "The Hands of Orlac" -- but also to James Whale's famous (but not that great) "Frankenstein" and Tod Browning's notorious (and pretty okay!) "Freaks." Colin Clive, who as Frankenstein had stitched together disparate human parts into a monster of melancholy temperament and violent disposition, plays Stephen Orlac, a young composer and concert pianist who loses his hands in a train accident; brilliant humanitarian surgeon and secret torture porn fetishist (you think I'm exaggerating? Look at those Grand Guignol plays some time. The sample they show us involves a man interrogating his wife about her lover by applying burning hot pokers to her genitalia) Dr. Gogol (Peter Lorre), in love with Orlac's Grand Guignol actress wife, for her sake performs a double hand transplant -- stitching the hands of newly-executed Rollo, a homicidal knife thrower -- played by Edward Brophy, who if you click through you will find played a knife-thrower named Rollo in "Freaks," too. With hands attached but not reconciled to their new master, Orlac becomes a Frankenstein's monster, the unwitting subject of a horrifying experiment in playing God that we know can only end in violence and misery for both creator and creature. Later, Gogol pretends to be a revived Rollo, whose head Dr. Gogol has reattached to his neck, and who comes to warn Orlac about his hands.

... you didn't know all that? Well, it's neat, isn't it?

Oh, you did know it. Okay, good for you. You're a black-and-white horror film rock star.