On being a child of one's generation, redux.

I hate the way Sir Thomas Malory writes Gawain. I am used to Chretien de Troies's easy-going, charming Gawain -- "the Ladies' Knight" because he acquires a new lady-love in each story he appears in -- who occupies the position of Top Knight in King Arthur's court by virtue of being Arthur's sister's eldest son,* of being the best fighter out of the normal members of the court (as I recall, he is once knocked off his horse by Perceval in "Perceval, ou le Conte du Graal"; once battles Yvain to a weary sundown truce in "Yvain, ou le Chevalier au Lion"; and otherwise handily defeats all rivals), of being both brave and level-headed (brave enough to join Lancelot's quest to save the Queen in "Lancelot, ou le Chevalier de la Charrette" (sp?) without Lancelot's ulterior motive, level-headed enough not to charge the preoccupied Perceval but speak to him. In both these instances, Kay plays the rasher, more anti-social reflection of Gawain's good impulses, and is rewarded by being kidnapped himself in the first and having his arm broken in the second). He is the Compleat Knight, pious in measure and worldly without corruption, a fine fighter who fights without regret and so bold a lover, he is the only knight willing to woo a woman with dark hair (the marvelous Lunete, first adviser to Yvain's wife in "Yvain")! He is not always right -- his advice that Yvain leave his wife immediately after the wedding to go questing is obviously foolish, and nearly leads Yvain to lose her altogether -- and he is not always successful (each tale must have its own hero, and he is the hero of none). But he is clearly, and appropriately, Top Knight. And he is a terrible charmer to boot. Chretien wrote in the fourth quarter of the twelfth century. By the Prose Lancelot Gawain remains Top Knight at Arthur's court, but has been thoroughly displaced in the heart of the reader by Lancelot, who to this day is enshrined as Official Top Knight in popular culture. The triangle between Arthur, Lancelot, and Guinevere is central to many modern depictions (as to the third section of the Prose Lancelot, the section I read many years ago under the title The Death of King Arthur in Penguin, unless I'm totally mixed up), and "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" mentions the name "Gawain" only to offer him to one beast or another -- the ravenous rabbit, I believe. To Malory in 1475, Gawain has nothing of the Top Knight about him at all. He is viler than anything in Chretien's world, even the enemies. He is probably about the tenth-best fighter, but easily and plainly outclassed by Lancelot, Tristan, Lamorak (!! Perceval's older brother; in Chretien's tale, Perceval's elder brothers all died when he was a child and achieved no great fame), Palomides (Tristan's self-declared rival, the pagan knight who also loves Yseut la Blonde), and probably several others including his own younger brother Gareth, whom he doesn't fight directly, at least as far as I've gotten. (Somewhere not so very far into Book II.) He is called "the Ladies' Knight" not because all the ladies love him but because at nineteen he swears a special oath of protection to ladies after having accidentally chopped off a lady's head in a chapel instead of her lover's/. Chretien's Gawain is patient enough to suffer abuse at the hands of ladies who pronounce him a merchant wearing armor to avoid taxes because he does not fight in a tournament as a true knight would, and not fight at the tournament because it would be foolish to risk a wound when he is on a quest; Malory's Gawain is so angered by others' acknowledged superiority that his brother ends up killing their mother.** And on, and on. I have little patience with the elevation of Tristan (and less with the spelling "Tristram") to a high place at Arthur's court; I love Tristan and Yseut but they are a different story. I have other quarrels with Malory: even so strange a tongue he can render samey and sing-songy. But my real problem is how he treats Gawain. And this is where the title of this post comes in. Upon being struck by how difficult this actually made it for me to keep reading at a certain point, I thought: "So this is how it feels to have a headcanon." * Sister's son has long been recognized as a place of special honor in Arthurian legend: Tristan is also Mark's sister's son, and his maltreatment at Mark's hands is rendered especially bitter by the expectations his narratively special place has set. ** Lamorak's tourney victory enrages Gawain who believes Lamorak the killer of G's father Lot, so G persuades his brother Gaheris to follow Lamorak -- it turns out, to a tryst with their mother Morgause, where Lamorak denies having killed Lot. Gaheris announces that it would be unchivalrous to murder a naked knight and promptly kills his mother instead.

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

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

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

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

"How could Descartes have thought both that:

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

How could those both be true?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On dance as acting in Hollywood musicals.

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

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

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

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

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

Alfred Hitchcock thinks of Freudianism as a substitute for psychology.

On Mike Leigh on Gilbert & Sullivan.

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

What "Topsy-Turvy" gets right is double.

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

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

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

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

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


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

On the customs of country (music).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Just one more example of the creativity of country rhyming:

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

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

On feline cognition.

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

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

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

On privacy as power.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On reversal and appropriation.

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

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

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


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

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

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


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


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

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


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

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

and further

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

-- as one might say now,

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



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

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

On Wisconsin, and legitimacy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

On frozen perceptions.

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

However, it's total nonsense.

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

On the passage of time.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On libraries and taste.

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

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

On the demon of migraine.

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

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

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

On Renoir and the unwitting personalization of class politics.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On prophecy.

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

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

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

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

On the Rod Blagojevich of movies.

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

General spoiler alert, as if that really mattered.

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

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

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

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

I do care about tonal issues and weird inconsistencies.

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

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

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

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