Showing posts with label philosophy is everywhere. Show all posts
Showing posts with label philosophy is everywhere. Show all posts
Thursday, May 31, 2012
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?"
Wednesday, April 18, 2012
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').
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').
Thursday, July 7, 2011
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.
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.
Tuesday, May 24, 2011
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.
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.
Monday, April 11, 2011
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.
"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.
Thursday, March 3, 2011
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.
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.
Monday, January 31, 2011
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.
Wednesday, November 17, 2010
On libraries and taste.
The line between decaying splendor (good!) and dreary grandeur (not so good!) is a fine one. I can confidently place the Bod on the former and the Widener on the latter side. Loveliest of all is Sterling, which is as old-fashioned as either but not so campily as the Bod (those portraits of forgotten scholars everywhere) nor so creakily as the Widener (all that marble and gold). I do like modern libraries too (the Seattle Public Library and the Beinecke are two of my favorites, and the Wellesley library's intimidatingly "designed"-looking chairs that turn out to be excellent of their kind remind me of Seattle), and I rather like the British National Library as well) and some comfily elderly ones, including many smaller university or college libraries and my local public libraries where I was raised.
I don't know, it's hard to say what makes one person appreciate this imperfection and another dislike it. (I discussed this a bit in the bad movies post.) My inclination is toward a weak aesthetic Platonism: I believe that many or most of the good things people see in anything are really there and really good. On this sort of account the hard work is not saying what is really good and not good, but prioritizing: since we are not big enough to get all of the good things, and because it is not unusual for appreciation of one good to detract from our capacity to "get" others, whether because of internal tensions or simply because we have not world enough and time. So for example I believe that there really are the good things that others see in songs or books or films that I would normally, casually call "horrible." That doesn't mean I regret my inability to appreciate, oh, reggae music and Nicholas Sparks and Wes Anderson, or professional football either. Nor when picking tastes to acquire would I make an effort to cultivate those in particular. But I have no problem with people filling in the blanks in art differently than I do and I have no problem accepting that what is salient to each of us on each occasion is not of necessity the only feature of that thing that could be important. I love enough clichés myself that I could never claim to occupy some Archimedean outside point. I can't criticize those who find "Brief Encounter" classist and sentimental; so it is; but I should be very sorry to watch it again and find that those features and aspects dominated my perception in place of its delicately intense emotional fidelity. I would be sorry to lose what I have seen in it. Naturally I cannot have the same investment in "The Royal Tenenbaums," and so I am neither sad nor ashamed to declare it trite, strained, arbitrarily sentimental, somewhat sexist, and dull. But I would be sad and ashamed to find myself trying to argue someone else out of her (well, realistically ... more likely his) love of Wes Anderson.
I don't know, it's hard to say what makes one person appreciate this imperfection and another dislike it. (I discussed this a bit in the bad movies post.) My inclination is toward a weak aesthetic Platonism: I believe that many or most of the good things people see in anything are really there and really good. On this sort of account the hard work is not saying what is really good and not good, but prioritizing: since we are not big enough to get all of the good things, and because it is not unusual for appreciation of one good to detract from our capacity to "get" others, whether because of internal tensions or simply because we have not world enough and time. So for example I believe that there really are the good things that others see in songs or books or films that I would normally, casually call "horrible." That doesn't mean I regret my inability to appreciate, oh, reggae music and Nicholas Sparks and Wes Anderson, or professional football either. Nor when picking tastes to acquire would I make an effort to cultivate those in particular. But I have no problem with people filling in the blanks in art differently than I do and I have no problem accepting that what is salient to each of us on each occasion is not of necessity the only feature of that thing that could be important. I love enough clichés myself that I could never claim to occupy some Archimedean outside point. I can't criticize those who find "Brief Encounter" classist and sentimental; so it is; but I should be very sorry to watch it again and find that those features and aspects dominated my perception in place of its delicately intense emotional fidelity. I would be sorry to lose what I have seen in it. Naturally I cannot have the same investment in "The Royal Tenenbaums," and so I am neither sad nor ashamed to declare it trite, strained, arbitrarily sentimental, somewhat sexist, and dull. But I would be sad and ashamed to find myself trying to argue someone else out of her (well, realistically ... more likely his) love of Wes Anderson.
Tuesday, October 5, 2010
On generosity in story-telling, and the Lubitsch Touch.
H & I watched "Trouble in Paradise" again the other day -- h's second, and my perhaps dozenth or twentieth, viewing. Although I remember all the jokes and can recite them along with the characters still in between viewings I always forget what an uproariously funny movie it is. We were watching it in the theater -- my first time since I first saw it, in 2003; h's first time full stop -- and it does make a difference to have the other people there. In my case it makes me nervous, because I usually start laughing before anyone else and feel foolish. And it is always interesting to hear what gets the biggest laughs (not always what I laugh hardest at, naturally). But the general benefit of having other people there is that it lets you see things through their eyes a bit -- through your knowledge that their eyes are watching, anyhow. That is why watching a favorite film with a respected and admired acquaintance who hasn't seen it is so nerve-wracking: because watching the other person watch verges on overwhelming watching. But with a friendly or anonymous crowd, it lets you see things you might have missed. Sometimes it lets you see a scene or hear a line as new. -- Incidentally, this is one of the underrated pleasures of "MST3K," too -- not just that they notice more details because they have watched the movie six times, but that they remark on different details because different things really are salient to them, because a string of scenes in which people look at hands adds up to something for them in a way it never would have for me on my own. And now -- on occasion -- it points to something outside itself to my eyes, too. This is why people repeat catch phrases; they represent the hollowed-out version of our wonder at the fact of shared, and more miraculous yet -- transferred or transmitted, experience.
Lubitsch never lost this wonder. His films are full of the details people absorb from other people, or details that they share without knowing it made marvelous by our knowledge that they share it. That's the meaning of Lily and Mariette (Miriam Hopkins and Kay Francis) separately waiting till a companion looks the other way to dunk a croissant into coffee. It's the meaning of the montages in which we see first Mariette and then Gaston (Herbert Marshall) responded to by an array of subordinates, and at least a part of the meaning of the (riotous) early scene in which the concierge mediatess between Italian-speaking police and English-only Filiba (Edward Everett Horton, whose absent-mindedly benevolent affect Lubitsch subverts both here and in "Trouble in Paradise"'s near-Siamese twin, "Design for Living"). There's a kind of trust offered the viewer here too: I'll show you their absurdities if you acknowledge how common they are; I'll show you their faults if you promise to forgive them. Even the smallest of characters are bathed in the director's gentleness and wonder and generosity: the butler (Robert Greig, recognizable nine years later as the butler in "The Lady Eve") whose mutters and eye-rolls summarize weeks of Mariette and Gaston's flirtation, the waiter who highlights how comical Gaston's grandiosity is by studiously taking down the order "moon ... in champagne ...," the maid whose single appearance is a five-second blushing "Maybe, M. Lavalle." They say it's because Lubitsch was an actor himself, and not so talented that he got beyond bit parts, that he made sure to distribute the fun a bit more widely than some others. Even the gondolier garbageman whose operatic solo opens the picture is Lubitsch telling us: look at us -- bringing beauty and grandiosity to the most ordinary, sordid tasks! Isn't it touching? But aren't we funny?
I've muddled it up by presenting two distinct kinds of generosity together. One, not so significant except for its link to the second, is formal: the generosity to let other people speak. Not just the camera, not just the script, and certainly not just the lead actors. (Lubitsch never has only one or two lead actors, either, that I can think of. Perhaps in "Bluebeard's Eighth Wife," which I can't remember well beyond the pajama scene at the very beginning? Or "Cluny Brown," which I haven't seen at all?) I always think of this as Chekhovian, because of the way Chekhov uses different perspectives to show that what moves us most can be invisible to others (think of the cut away to the little boys sneaking cigarettes in -- "The Lady with the Dog," perhaps?, and the famous shrinking of the central incident of "The Kiss" in the recounting to others), but also to show how we can learn to find the poignancy in small things. (Time to mention again that I hope to write more about Ozu some time ... )
The second generosity is substantive, and it's Chekhovian too. It's a way of interpreting the formal generosity, really: as a sign that they too are human beings, they are parties to meaning and sorrow beyond ours -- and they are party to ours not because we are so special but because of their own humanity. The idea of "the Lubitsch touch" must go back more than seven decades now. Billy Wilder is known to have kept a sign on his desk reading: "how would Lubitsch have done it?" (A sort of prophetic parody of those "WWJD?" bracelets, I like to think. Wilder was no slouch at empathy himself; forget that he wrote "Ninotchka," and forget the exceptional sensitivity in the face of opacity that defines "The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes," and just remember that it is not a coincidence that one of his two best-known movies ends with the line: "Nobody's perfect!" Even a trifling light comedy like "Sabrina" includes the sublime moment when Audrey Hepburn is charmed by Humphrey Bogart's record of "Yes, We Have No Bananas," thinking it a sign of what she missed while away in Paris, rather than what she missed because she was not born yet when he went to college. What is that but an admission of the silliness of the storyline -- one intended to show how to take the story's silliness to the movie's advantage. "The Major and he Minor"'s nutty vista of dozens of teenaged schoolgirls at a dance with Veronica Lake haircuts is along the same lines: the absurdity of the plot can no longer be read as contemptible-pathetic, it has to be seen as touching-pathetic.) Anyway, critics have focussed on sophistication -- or, more crudely -- sex as the essence of the Lubitsch touch, but that's at best partly right. Part of the beauty of "Trouble in Paradise," and "Design for Living," too, comes from the acute awareness that sophistication without generosity and wit is worse than useless -- indeed, contemptible, if it allows us to think better of ourselves than we deserve; and that deChristianized sex is also a moral matter, not per se or because of special metaphysical properties of human genitalia but because of the special properties of human character; and that the proverb is wrong, that folly and forgiveness are both human, that we ought to expect both of the same people, that a fool who can forgive is still a fool, but wiser than one who can't forgive.
Lubitsch never lost this wonder. His films are full of the details people absorb from other people, or details that they share without knowing it made marvelous by our knowledge that they share it. That's the meaning of Lily and Mariette (Miriam Hopkins and Kay Francis) separately waiting till a companion looks the other way to dunk a croissant into coffee. It's the meaning of the montages in which we see first Mariette and then Gaston (Herbert Marshall) responded to by an array of subordinates, and at least a part of the meaning of the (riotous) early scene in which the concierge mediatess between Italian-speaking police and English-only Filiba (Edward Everett Horton, whose absent-mindedly benevolent affect Lubitsch subverts both here and in "Trouble in Paradise"'s near-Siamese twin, "Design for Living"). There's a kind of trust offered the viewer here too: I'll show you their absurdities if you acknowledge how common they are; I'll show you their faults if you promise to forgive them. Even the smallest of characters are bathed in the director's gentleness and wonder and generosity: the butler (Robert Greig, recognizable nine years later as the butler in "The Lady Eve") whose mutters and eye-rolls summarize weeks of Mariette and Gaston's flirtation, the waiter who highlights how comical Gaston's grandiosity is by studiously taking down the order "moon ... in champagne ...," the maid whose single appearance is a five-second blushing "Maybe, M. Lavalle." They say it's because Lubitsch was an actor himself, and not so talented that he got beyond bit parts, that he made sure to distribute the fun a bit more widely than some others. Even the gondolier garbageman whose operatic solo opens the picture is Lubitsch telling us: look at us -- bringing beauty and grandiosity to the most ordinary, sordid tasks! Isn't it touching? But aren't we funny?
I've muddled it up by presenting two distinct kinds of generosity together. One, not so significant except for its link to the second, is formal: the generosity to let other people speak. Not just the camera, not just the script, and certainly not just the lead actors. (Lubitsch never has only one or two lead actors, either, that I can think of. Perhaps in "Bluebeard's Eighth Wife," which I can't remember well beyond the pajama scene at the very beginning? Or "Cluny Brown," which I haven't seen at all?) I always think of this as Chekhovian, because of the way Chekhov uses different perspectives to show that what moves us most can be invisible to others (think of the cut away to the little boys sneaking cigarettes in -- "The Lady with the Dog," perhaps?, and the famous shrinking of the central incident of "The Kiss" in the recounting to others), but also to show how we can learn to find the poignancy in small things. (Time to mention again that I hope to write more about Ozu some time ... )
The second generosity is substantive, and it's Chekhovian too. It's a way of interpreting the formal generosity, really: as a sign that they too are human beings, they are parties to meaning and sorrow beyond ours -- and they are party to ours not because we are so special but because of their own humanity. The idea of "the Lubitsch touch" must go back more than seven decades now. Billy Wilder is known to have kept a sign on his desk reading: "how would Lubitsch have done it?" (A sort of prophetic parody of those "WWJD?" bracelets, I like to think. Wilder was no slouch at empathy himself; forget that he wrote "Ninotchka," and forget the exceptional sensitivity in the face of opacity that defines "The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes," and just remember that it is not a coincidence that one of his two best-known movies ends with the line: "Nobody's perfect!" Even a trifling light comedy like "Sabrina" includes the sublime moment when Audrey Hepburn is charmed by Humphrey Bogart's record of "Yes, We Have No Bananas," thinking it a sign of what she missed while away in Paris, rather than what she missed because she was not born yet when he went to college. What is that but an admission of the silliness of the storyline -- one intended to show how to take the story's silliness to the movie's advantage. "The Major and he Minor"'s nutty vista of dozens of teenaged schoolgirls at a dance with Veronica Lake haircuts is along the same lines: the absurdity of the plot can no longer be read as contemptible-pathetic, it has to be seen as touching-pathetic.) Anyway, critics have focussed on sophistication -- or, more crudely -- sex as the essence of the Lubitsch touch, but that's at best partly right. Part of the beauty of "Trouble in Paradise," and "Design for Living," too, comes from the acute awareness that sophistication without generosity and wit is worse than useless -- indeed, contemptible, if it allows us to think better of ourselves than we deserve; and that deChristianized sex is also a moral matter, not per se or because of special metaphysical properties of human genitalia but because of the special properties of human character; and that the proverb is wrong, that folly and forgiveness are both human, that we ought to expect both of the same people, that a fool who can forgive is still a fool, but wiser than one who can't forgive.
Friday, September 17, 2010
On prophecy.
I am a rationalist and a naturalist. I do not expect such things as an afterlife (what reason have I to believe that the soul could be separated from the body?) or a messianic era (what evidence suggests that human beings are perfectible? -- anyway the messianic era is, by its nature, perpetually in the future), and I am quite sure that there couldn't be such a God as in the Bible, talking to human beings and listening to them. I don't believe in prayer as request and I don't believe in divine vengeance or punishment. But I believe in holiness, and in a way I might say I believe in prophecy. Some works simply have an insight and a beauty that is beyond human. Not that it does not come from humans -- of course it does; what could a prophet be if not human? Rather that it does not seem to come from that human being alone. It does not seem possible that one person did this, or several working together in the normal way either. It seems to express something beyond what one human being could say by herself.
Yesterday was Yom Kippur. I spent a lot of time with the Prophets: Ezekiel, Hosea, Joel, Obadiah, Amos, Jonah. I could not understand Ezekiel or Joel very well, though I have read them before. I think that I understand Jonah less the more I read it. The story seems shorter every time. But Hosea was wonderful.
Hosea is the story of a man who asks God why God does not abandon Israel since it is constantly straying. God tells him to marry a prostitute and have children with her, and to name them symbolically. Hosea becomes committed to his wife and treats his children as his own without regard to biology. To divorce her would be too painful, nor can he abandon them. The rest of the book is full of prophesies that Israel's sufferings are only temporary, but that God still cares for us. Its final chapter (read as the Haftarah last Shabbat, and giving the Shabbat its name: Shabbat Shuvah, the Sabbath of "Return O Israel") asks us to speak to God with our lips instead of bulls, and we will flower again. That is, it's the story of God teaching a human being to understand what human beings are like, and of the human being learning.
Jonah is meant along the same lines, only Jonah doesn't seem to learn: God has the last word, not Jonah, and even so God is reduced to pleading for the lives of the innocent animals of Nineveh rather than its guilty-but-repentant people. Jonah ends in aporia, in suspension between divine acceptance and human rejection. (I read in one of the prophets yesterday, though already I cannot remember where, God saying: of course I forgive you; I am not a human being, to cherish a grudge. The commentary pointed out that in Numbers 23 [? Bilaam's prophecy, anyway] God says: I am not a human being, to change my mind.)
Yesterday was Yom Kippur. I spent a lot of time with the Prophets: Ezekiel, Hosea, Joel, Obadiah, Amos, Jonah. I could not understand Ezekiel or Joel very well, though I have read them before. I think that I understand Jonah less the more I read it. The story seems shorter every time. But Hosea was wonderful.
Hosea is the story of a man who asks God why God does not abandon Israel since it is constantly straying. God tells him to marry a prostitute and have children with her, and to name them symbolically. Hosea becomes committed to his wife and treats his children as his own without regard to biology. To divorce her would be too painful, nor can he abandon them. The rest of the book is full of prophesies that Israel's sufferings are only temporary, but that God still cares for us. Its final chapter (read as the Haftarah last Shabbat, and giving the Shabbat its name: Shabbat Shuvah, the Sabbath of "Return O Israel") asks us to speak to God with our lips instead of bulls, and we will flower again. That is, it's the story of God teaching a human being to understand what human beings are like, and of the human being learning.
Jonah is meant along the same lines, only Jonah doesn't seem to learn: God has the last word, not Jonah, and even so God is reduced to pleading for the lives of the innocent animals of Nineveh rather than its guilty-but-repentant people. Jonah ends in aporia, in suspension between divine acceptance and human rejection. (I read in one of the prophets yesterday, though already I cannot remember where, God saying: of course I forgive you; I am not a human being, to cherish a grudge. The commentary pointed out that in Numbers 23 [? Bilaam's prophecy, anyway] God says: I am not a human being, to change my mind.)
Saturday, September 11, 2010
On September 11th.
My godmother was there. I didn't know for sure until the weekend, when she still hadn't been seen. Aleha hashalom, requiescat in pace.
My father was there the first time. By 2001 he worked in midtown. My mother and sisters were up in the East 70s and 80s.
My cousin was working at the Woolworth Building. She got out of the subway at Park Place or Chambers, saw the crowds flowing away from the surface, and got right back on the train.
My high school best friend hadn't started school yet and was going to Century 21, but she wasn't hurt.
And I was in Connecticut, in class, not understanding, even when a girl whose father worked at the Pentagon got up in the middle of class and walked out. Not understanding, I thought it was a movie at first (yes, just like the Onion says); I couldn't think what it meant. I was ashamed not to be in New York. I was only two weeks gone and going back the next week for Rosh HaShanah. I did go back, by then with extensions on all my papers and a never-taken-up invitation to group therapy. I got so much dust in my lungs over three days in Brooklyn Heights I was sick through Yom Kippur. It was everywhere. You could practically see it on the melted candles and missing persons signs all over the Promenade and all over downtown Manhattan. I walked the Bridge like a pilgrim among pilgrims, some in facemasks for protection as we got closer to the site. Everything was closed. The closest to feeling better I've ever come was walking home over the Bridge (the car side!) during the blackout two years later, when the crowds of strangers -- to each other, too -- were all talking and laughing, inviting each other to spontaneous who-knows-how-long-the-freezer-will-be-out barbecues and corner singalongs with guitar. Then too nobody could reach anybody, but it was all right.
*
Tuesday.
September -- starting school.
I was reading: Plato,
Thucydides, and the
Iliad.
Living in them, really,
since I never wanted
anything but that, but
that one pure and simple
freedom to live in books.
I was thinking: men don't know
what they want, and so they
put up shapes in the sky,
because they've seen the shapes
that are already there,
that the gods, perhaps
that God has put up there,
in the stars.
But men again
perhaps didn't know what
they wanted, perhaps knew
and acted as they did
out of purest malice --
I cannot say, I am
no moral theorist --
and took them right back down --
the shapes --
not understanding
that they were already
back up there in the stars:
the Twins.
(Jan. 14 and 16, 2005)
September -- starting school.
I was reading: Plato,
Thucydides, and the
Iliad.
Living in them, really,
since I never wanted
anything but that, but
that one pure and simple
freedom to live in books.
I was thinking: men don't know
what they want, and so they
put up shapes in the sky,
because they've seen the shapes
that are already there,
that the gods, perhaps
that God has put up there,
in the stars.
But men again
perhaps didn't know what
they wanted, perhaps knew
and acted as they did
out of purest malice --
I cannot say, I am
no moral theorist --
and took them right back down --
the shapes --
not understanding
that they were already
back up there in the stars:
the Twins.
(Jan. 14 and 16, 2005)
After.
Newish movies have become old movies,
Instantly dated by catastrophe.
The skylines of their cities look so young -–
Subtly unrecognizable, solid
In a way that suggests nothing so much
As a sublimation. You can't believe
You didn't see it coming, looking now.
They were so ripe for it. Asking for it.
I had forgotten how they used to be
All in one piece like that, all in one place.
Anaxagoras says nothing ever
Comes to be or passes away, but has
Its elements reapportioned. The earth
In them has settled back into the earth,
The water into the river, the air
Has risen through the air we breathe, their fire
Returned unto the everlasting fire.
Instantly dated by catastrophe.
The skylines of their cities look so young -–
Subtly unrecognizable, solid
In a way that suggests nothing so much
As a sublimation. You can't believe
You didn't see it coming, looking now.
They were so ripe for it. Asking for it.
I had forgotten how they used to be
All in one piece like that, all in one place.
Anaxagoras says nothing ever
Comes to be or passes away, but has
Its elements reapportioned. The earth
In them has settled back into the earth,
The water into the river, the air
Has risen through the air we breathe, their fire
Returned unto the everlasting fire.
(November 10, 2005, during the commercial breaks of a movie ("When Harry Met Sally ..." yet) filmed partly in New York between 1970 and 2001)
Still.
Without comprehension
I cry every time I remember
or hear mentioned
even elisions
and mere allusions
to collusions
that bore collisions
into buildings
(decidedly,
suicidally
lily-gilding)
that September.
(January 5, 2006)
I cry every time I remember
or hear mentioned
even elisions
and mere allusions
to collusions
that bore collisions
into buildings
(decidedly,
suicidally
lily-gilding)
that September.
(January 5, 2006)
Saturday, September 4, 2010
On correct use of prosody.
Here is "Life and Love" by the Earl of Rochester:
All my past life is mine not more
The flying hours are gone,
Like transitory dreams given o’er,
Whose images are kept in store
By memory alone.
What ever is to come is not,
How can it then be mine?
The present moment’s all my lot,
And that as fast as it is got
Phyllis, is wholly thine.
Then talk not of inconstancy,
False hearts, and broken vows,
If I, by miracle, can be,
This live-long minute true to thee,
‘Tis all that heaven allows.
I love the way he uses rhythm to build impatience here. It's perhaps intrinsic (at least natural) to the abaab stanza, all the more so if you tease the reader by speeding up the "b" lines to trimeter from the "a"s' four-beat structure. He really makes the most of the flexibility of English iambic meters, too: the patient lecture in four strict iambs of "Whatever is to come is not" followed immediately by the three beats -- a petulantly insistent trochee and two iambs -- of "How can it then be mine?"
Sorry, terminology note: trimeter = 3 beats per line, tetrameter = 4 beats per line, pentameter = 5 beats per line. The metrical units are just as simple. They're defined by beats, that is, more particularly, by patterns of stressed and unstressed syllables. An iamb is unstressed-stressed, like "again." A trochee is stressed-unstressed, like "chocolate." Hence iambic pentameter = a line based on the rhythm u-s u-s u-s u-s u-s: "My other loves have been ethereal." But substituting in other feet -- especially trochees (s-u, remember; in iambic meters it is exceptionally common for a line to start with a trochee, which is typically followed by a chain of strict iambs: "Fear fills the chamber, darkness decks the bride," or indeed "How can it then be mine?"), dactyls (s-u-u, or oom-pah-pah if you prefer) or anapest (u-u-s or pah-pah-oom: "For fear it would make me conservative when old"), and the occasional spondee (s-s; when used in iambic meters usually complemented by a pair of unstressed syllables: "to a green thought in a green shade") -- is not only acceptable but expected. Truly all-iambic verse becomes tiresomely monotonous and sing-songy ("The flying hours are gone") very quickly. Even that can be used to advantage by a skilful meter reader: it's a major source of the child-like feel Frost sets up in the first few stanzas of "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," and perhaps even more important to the way the final stanza forces us to slow down with a suddenly crippling weariness. -- You see how the technical terminology is just a way of getting at what moves us about these lines.
Anyway, Rochester uses form to give his argument emotional and logical momentum. That's all. Very simple point. I should have something to say about the Epicurean legacy to Renaissance carpe diem poems, since I'm sure the resurgence of a sort of tragic-minded hedonism, after the rediscovery of Hellenistic texts and the concomitant rise in the popularity of Epicurean philosophy, is not entirely coincidental. Where by "tragic-minded hedonism" I mean roughly the argument from the claim that (1) we will not always exist, certainly not in this current format, via (2) pleasure is a pretty excellent thing, to (3) I am not sure what else there could be for us to take into consideration when we deliberate about the future besides the goodness of pleasure and the fact that when death comes we will cease to be persons. This is an Epicurean argument, thoroughly, -- though they left it to Marvell & Rochester & al. to add the corollary (4) sleep with me. I don't know how much more I have to say about that. The presentism ("What ever is to come is not") is interesting, perhaps, since it's neither Epicurean nor intrinsic to the carpe diem genre. (You don't have to deny the existence of any moment other than the present in order to feel a certain urgency about it: think of Marvell, before whom lie deserts of vast eternity.)
Oh -- and "Phyllis" is a Greek name conventional to the pastoral lyric. This isn't a pastoral, of course, but there's some relationship between this and that sort of seduction.
All my past life is mine not more
The flying hours are gone,
Like transitory dreams given o’er,
Whose images are kept in store
By memory alone.
What ever is to come is not,
How can it then be mine?
The present moment’s all my lot,
And that as fast as it is got
Phyllis, is wholly thine.
Then talk not of inconstancy,
False hearts, and broken vows,
If I, by miracle, can be,
This live-long minute true to thee,
‘Tis all that heaven allows.
I love the way he uses rhythm to build impatience here. It's perhaps intrinsic (at least natural) to the abaab stanza, all the more so if you tease the reader by speeding up the "b" lines to trimeter from the "a"s' four-beat structure. He really makes the most of the flexibility of English iambic meters, too: the patient lecture in four strict iambs of "Whatever is to come is not" followed immediately by the three beats -- a petulantly insistent trochee and two iambs -- of "How can it then be mine?"
Sorry, terminology note: trimeter = 3 beats per line, tetrameter = 4 beats per line, pentameter = 5 beats per line. The metrical units are just as simple. They're defined by beats, that is, more particularly, by patterns of stressed and unstressed syllables. An iamb is unstressed-stressed, like "again." A trochee is stressed-unstressed, like "chocolate." Hence iambic pentameter = a line based on the rhythm u-s u-s u-s u-s u-s: "My other loves have been ethereal." But substituting in other feet -- especially trochees (s-u, remember; in iambic meters it is exceptionally common for a line to start with a trochee, which is typically followed by a chain of strict iambs: "Fear fills the chamber, darkness decks the bride," or indeed "How can it then be mine?"), dactyls (s-u-u, or oom-pah-pah if you prefer) or anapest (u-u-s or pah-pah-oom: "For fear it would make me conservative when old"), and the occasional spondee (s-s; when used in iambic meters usually complemented by a pair of unstressed syllables: "to a green thought in a green shade") -- is not only acceptable but expected. Truly all-iambic verse becomes tiresomely monotonous and sing-songy ("The flying hours are gone") very quickly. Even that can be used to advantage by a skilful meter reader: it's a major source of the child-like feel Frost sets up in the first few stanzas of "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," and perhaps even more important to the way the final stanza forces us to slow down with a suddenly crippling weariness. -- You see how the technical terminology is just a way of getting at what moves us about these lines.
Anyway, Rochester uses form to give his argument emotional and logical momentum. That's all. Very simple point. I should have something to say about the Epicurean legacy to Renaissance carpe diem poems, since I'm sure the resurgence of a sort of tragic-minded hedonism, after the rediscovery of Hellenistic texts and the concomitant rise in the popularity of Epicurean philosophy, is not entirely coincidental. Where by "tragic-minded hedonism" I mean roughly the argument from the claim that (1) we will not always exist, certainly not in this current format, via (2) pleasure is a pretty excellent thing, to (3) I am not sure what else there could be for us to take into consideration when we deliberate about the future besides the goodness of pleasure and the fact that when death comes we will cease to be persons. This is an Epicurean argument, thoroughly, -- though they left it to Marvell & Rochester & al. to add the corollary (4) sleep with me. I don't know how much more I have to say about that. The presentism ("What ever is to come is not") is interesting, perhaps, since it's neither Epicurean nor intrinsic to the carpe diem genre. (You don't have to deny the existence of any moment other than the present in order to feel a certain urgency about it: think of Marvell, before whom lie deserts of vast eternity.)
Oh -- and "Phyllis" is a Greek name conventional to the pastoral lyric. This isn't a pastoral, of course, but there's some relationship between this and that sort of seduction.
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