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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On an oddity of Georgian and Regency prose.

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

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

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

And for the Georgian:

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

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

On dance as acting in Hollywood musicals.

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

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

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

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

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

Alfred Hitchcock thinks of Freudianism as a substitute for psychology.

On passion and starvation in middle-period Plato.

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

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

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

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

On not liking Aristotle (sexual equality edition).

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

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

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

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

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

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

On moving.

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

On Mike Leigh on Gilbert & Sullivan.

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

What "Topsy-Turvy" gets right is double.

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

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

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

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

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


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

On the customs of country (music).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Just one more example of the creativity of country rhyming:

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

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

On housesitting.

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

On feline cognition.

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

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

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

On retail.

1. Dear Momofuku Milk Bar cashier,

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

Sincerely,

Implacable Logic

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


2. Dear dried fruit guy at Sahadi's,

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

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

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

Sincerely,

The Laws and Customs of Society as a Whole

On babies.

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

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

On space and spaciousness.

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

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

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

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