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 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.

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 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 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 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.