The genre of the romantic comedy is long lasting and stable, reaching back to Menander, and currently available in great numbers in contemporary screening services. The basic idea of all of them is that a couple meets cute, which can also mean conflicted or troubled by their natures or their circumstances, the two becoming emotionally involved, amd then the story concerns how they deal with or unravel the conditions of how they met so that they can live happily ever after at least until they die, which in “Romeo and Juliet” not all that long after they met, and so treated as a romantic tragedy rather than a romantic comedy. That love obtains, and often triumphs, over the corpus of literature, suggests that love is a deep thing and that alterations in this perennial story reveal a good deal about how cultural ages themselves alter, love given as the standing parameter, not altered until very late, in Jane Austen’s time, when love becomes a mutual appreciation and involvement of personalities and not just a matter of sexual attraction, as that happens, as best we know, of Paris and Helen and Samson and Delilah.
Read MoreDaydreams and Reality
Fantasy or daydream is a kind or structure or story that is more primitive than are the kind of stories that are associated with Aristotle as having a beginning, middle and end, those that build suspense to a climax and then offer an emotional release or completion. Aristotle had in mind the sophisticated performances in drama, which are aimed at an audience who will get pleasure and meaning from having mimicked reality in their productions, requiring its audience to see how the performance is similar and different from reality, how gestures and words are like what real people say and do, and create a mood which is different from what one has felt and contemplated than what they had experienced. The audience, whatever their walks of life, only intermittently suspend their disbelief. The nature of the story is to go in and out of it so as to continually refract on the differences between reality and illusion.
Read MoreFeminism in Astaire and Rogers
William Hazlitt said that comedy arose at disjunctions in society, when people saw people as strangely juxtaposed. He might be thinking of the humor Samuel Johnson found in a woman preacher Johnson had compared to a dog walking erect: managing it but not very well. People a hundred years ago might find amusing minstrels or white people in blackface, though in present times that seems very offensive rather than an expression of artistic freedom in that blackface allowed people to be more uninhibited. Similarly, comedians in vaudeville found that the comedy was funnier if they used foreign accents or adopted foreign identities, such as Jewish or German or Chinese.. Such features can illuminate the culture and structure of the moment rather than simply provide a way to disdain it. The same is the case with the plots in Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers movies, meant to be amusing fluff and just interludes between seeing the heavenly and always uplifting dancing, when what they do is make funny the moment when men and women banter with one another about their situation, as it was for the moment, about how men and women could engage one another in courtship. So let us look at the comedy as sociology, particularly in “Top Hat” and “Swingtime”, those musicals produced respectively in 1935 and 1937, long before the first women's march in the Seventies, and also by counterpoint in “Follow the Fleet”, a service comedy in 1936 and directed by the same Marc Sandrich who had directed the other two.
Read MoreMorality is Overrated
Even if you think that every “should” is a command, as Kant thinks, and that “should’s” are ubiquitous in everyday life, as when you should mind your mother and grant favors to friends and comply with reasonable requests by employers, and ubiquitous as well in collective or political life, as when Jesus commands that people be kind to one another, or that Martin Luther king, Jr. commands that we look to people’s character rather than their race, that does not mean that the moral life is neither the only life or even a predominant aspect of life, even though religion feels that it has accomplished and made more powerful and attractive the association of religion with morality, something that emerges with Abraham, who criticizes God for not meeting a higher standard of morality by imposing conditions whereby God will forego the destruction of Sodom and Gemorah, and where the charismatic power of Jesus is wedded with a morality of compassion. Rather morality, as a whole, is just one of the affective affinities and has to be properly placed within the passions, however much religion has stated otherwise.
Read MoreClutter in Art and Reality
All around us is clutter, these objects right at hand because they are functional in that you may need any one of them to help move along the day, but items thought so insignificant unless they are misplaced that you forget how important they are and so we dismiss them as clutter, whether a person surrounded by clutter is the kind of person who organizes the mess or lets it find itself, a person knowing where to reach to find it in its disorganization, such as a book not catalogued, or a hand lotion on the bathroom sink rather than in a medicine chest. Some of the clutter places its historical provenance while others do not. Women had sachets because people smelled bad, but there are still perfumes and room deodorants. But paper clips seem to me to have been of a time in that people needed to clip together single sheets of paper when those could be separated or mislaid, while today you just print off another copy of numerous pages from your computer and the printer staples the copies. Think of all these objects as a museum that offers time and place and general functions and so an entry into life, akin to the artists that make collages of objects atop one another so as to provide the mood of a person or a place. I have in mind Picasso and Braque and let us learn something from them before turning to the clutter of real life.
Read MoreStratification Is Everywhere
Equality means that the social order is based on each group or person having universal rights that guarantee that they can each act independently and are not be subordinated to one another. Individuals and ethnic groups are equal even if their average wealth or modal prestige are different but because none can claim moral superiority one from the other as was the case when Blacks and whites were separated as castes into superior and inferior kinds of people. Under equality, everyone can take pride in their ethnicity and everyone can take pride in their occupations, or in their own individual pursuits of happiness, only some of those occupations, like prostitution or drug dealing, seen as dishonorable. There was a time when actors and actresses were regarded as disreputable and perhaps their celebrity makes them stand out as exceptionally honored, but all an occupation needs to be considered as an honest living to be considered a worthy occupation by politicians and preachers is that it is lawful. In the light of equality, an individual can cultivate his garden or write his essay or support his family or live off his rents, and each can be thought a free choice as a way to live one’s life. Authority, on the other hand, is that the social order is marked by ranks all of them under command of hallowed leaders, whether as persons, such as God or charismatic figures,or captains of industry, or by invisible forces, such as norms or traditions, which require people to know how they are to behave in the subordinate ways of life to which they are assigned. There is always an external instruction and one cannot very well see how it could be otherwise, for then would come chaos.
Read MoreGetting Through to 6ers
The New York Times, in a front page article a week or so ago, could not understand what was so upsetting to large parts of the population of Enid, Oklahoma, and neither could I. It seemed to be about mask mandates, but how could the local populace be so energized about what was a practical and usual public health measure of the sort that had been in place for hundreds of years so as to avoid pestilence? There had to be something more about the matter and the anti-maskers said it had to do with liberty, which is a very big deal concept not to be invoked so cavalierly. So the Times and others tried out alternative explanations which I, for one, found wanting. The article noticed that local residents were concerned about uncertain sexual identifications, but those people have been going on for thousands of years. The article also mentioned that there are more diverse populations in the area, but how does that demographic change impact on a particular person rather than serve as a background for the entire group, and how masking and sex orientation and government distrust are all tied together even though the issues are so different from one another? Masks are a pretext for outrage, but about what? The experts cited said that it had to do with emotions about conflict, but that does not tie it down very much. I will give it a try.
Read MoreHumanist and Scientific Formats
Literary journalists rely on tired tropes to hold together the points they make as the themes of essays about one or another of the subjects they decide to write about . They need to have points because their high school English teachers said so, even though newspaper type reports or encyclopedia entries or recipe books may not have them, nor do memoirs or diaries or clinical records. But literary journalists do make points and those therefore can be obligatory references to a theory or a touchstone that lets the reader know how the writer is placed among the ideologies and interests and pursuits that define the writer, or else just to provide some apparatus to help hold the thing together. I am reminded of this by my catching up with past issues of the New York review of Books and finding that so many of its ideas are unnecessary or simply canned. There is an article that reminds the author that she is a Feminist, or else that imperialism was a bad thing, or that an author was underrated when all that was meant in the claim was that an author was not properly rated rather than was upped higher on a ruler presumed previously ranked.
Read MoreConservatives, Liberals, Radicals
Soon after the Second World War, in the early Fifties, Hannah Arendt and others formulated a three part typology to describe political regimes. There was the totalitarian type, something new under the sun in the past twenty years, where the individual citizen, all of them, were subject to such intimidation and terrorism that the very psyche of an individual was shattered, everyone subject to a leadership out to restructure humanity into a new kind of person in keeping with its new ideology and disregarding usual constitutional procedures of law and order. That happened in countries controlled by Nazi Germany and countries controlled by the Soviet Union and inappropriately applied to militant Japan because it was part of the Azis and because the Army and Navy were independant of political institutions even though free speech, for exaample, continued in the press and radio until the last few years of the war. The second type were authoritarian regimes where only political opponents were terrorized and tortured while the rest of the population was allowed to move apace, quickly or slowly to modernize. Authoritarian regimes included Fascist Spain and Portugal and Italy and most of the underdeveloped countries in Latin America and Africa. The third type were the democracies in Western Europe and North America and influenced by British colonialism, including Australia, New Zealand, Chile and India. These countries had free speech, the rule of law, and the other parts of a liberal democracy even if India had gained its independence only recently. A key idea of this three part theory was that there was not much difference between Left and Right totalitarian societies. Ideologies might differ but the structures of terrorism as a cause and a consequence of such regimes was the same. No need to quibble about whether Hitler was more or less worse than Stalin. In both cases, projected utopias had become dystopias.
Read MoreA Spielberg Masterpiece
Before turning to why Stephen Spielberg in his new version of “West Side Story” has created a gem and is successful at, once again, reviving movie musicals, after a considerable lapse, all the way back to “Chicago”, from 2002, because “LaLa Land”, from 2016, was a failure whether because the two stars had no chemistry or because the music was so poor, or because the genre of musical comedy, like the genre of the western, is just dead, the movie audience not relating to such vehicles, a more general point needs to be made. The first decade and a half of the talkies presented musicals as spectacular and artificial events and included futuristic mock resorts, such as in the Astaire-Rogers movie, “Top Hat”, from 1935, where the two played the Picolino, or else used the production of a musical as the excuse for offering up to the audience fanciful sets and costumes and masses of chorus girls and boys, as happens in dance number in “Gold Diggers of 1935”. Perhaps the last of these was Astaire dancing with Eleanor Powell in “Broadway Melody of 1940” where the set for the biggest event was said to have been the most expensive movie set manufactured up to that time, unless one includes from 1946 “Till The Clouds Roll By” a biopic about Jerome Kern which uses the starpower of MGM to do a medley of Kern’s greatest hits, topping it off with Frank Sinatra singing “Ol Man River” while wearing a baggy double breasted white suit with overly large lapels. Later renditions of that song sung while wearing formal wear rather than the dress of a stevedore became something of a joke. Something different was already available in the 1943 ”Meet Me in St. Louis” but it was a period piece and so might overlook that a convention of movies had turned the corner.
Read MoreReal Time Politics
Politics occurs in real time. That means that its procedures and events take place in the time it really takes to accomplish those things. That is different from other procedures and events that take place in vicarious experience, such as drama or movies or history books where time is foreshortened so that people as observers do not have to indulge in seeing everything unfold, cuts made in the film so that a walk in the woods is long enough to provide a sense of what it is like to be in the woods but not the entire time it takes to make the trip while real walks in the woods last so long as it takes to get from one place to another, to cover the distance. Vicarious experiences are allowed to be made more dramatic or presented with symbols and stereotypical characters so as to grasp what is happening in a thrice. But politics is vicarious in that except for a few events actually seen, like JFK as a Presidential candidate visiting the Bronx, politics is seen on television however much the issues or emotions that motivate politics are items of interest or not, impassioned or not, for deeply held or perhaps superficially arrived at because the slogans of the media make them seem appealing. It is a mistake to think that what Republicans believe are responses to their interests or their values rather than what they learn on the tube or could dispense with some slogans and adopt others with aplomb if there were a fashion to do so, as seems to be the case with people saying the 2020 election was rigged. They know that only vicariously; somebody told them that. That is different from watching sports, which last as long as they last and so critics have to come to understand why there is drama even in baseball, where there seem to be longueurs when what is happening is that people get beer and hot dogs and conversations while appreciating the ballpark and the crowds and the characteristic noise and pay attention when something important is happening. Color commentators, for their part, tie the television audience to what is broadcast on the field. That is why exhibiting a television broadcast of a football game without sportscasters proved unrewarding. There was an experiment where a New York Jet game some forty years ago was broadcast without the commentators, either play by play or for the color commentator, just to see if it would work. Viewers quickly signed off. All they could do was see their own living rooms to accompany the game while commentators brought the viewer into the picture, the talk from the television regularly updating what had transpired and what might happen next. So much for treating vicarious sports as in unalloyed real time. It needs dramatic emphasis to make it palatable. But politics is different and so its slow paced reality explains a lot about its dynamics and makes it always problematic how the viewers, the voters, are to make sense of what they experience, and so pay attention to its structured and emphasized drama and with less regard to the standby of demographics and policy as the engines of the engagement with the electorate and the political process.
Read MoreAnti-Abortion Rubbish
There is only one major policy or political decision about which I have changed my mind in the course of my life, and that is abortion. Moving from a Liberal, from Robert Kennedy, to a centrist, like Obama and Biden, doesn’t count because it was just recalibrating the spectrum and remaining rooted in the New Deal philosophy that big government and entitlements were a good thing. (Biden seems radical because his legislative agenda is so ambitious but its principles of expanding entitlements is part of the long time Liberal agenda.) And I am still a believer of the principles of the Civil Rights Movement even if the generations since then have altered the way to proceed to a more equal union. And i did move from supporting Head Start to opposing it, always having always been skeptical, but mainly in response to the scientific reports showed that it didn’t work as the way to improve education, though I like Biden’s initiative to fund all children below five year olds because it means allowing women to go to work and let kids get away from baleful home circumstances. Abortion was the great change because I shifted from seeing a zygote as a human being to responding to social circumstances because my daughter went off to college and I assured her that I would give money and support and arrangements if she got into trouble despite my outspoken beliefs about abortion despite the opposing views in my Liberal circles because I didn’t want to be a hypocrite. If abortion would have been gppd enough for my daughter, then it should be available to any woman. The philosophical argument was replaced by the social argument that women alone took the burden of childbearing while men only provided insemination and so women had to decide now that medical science made abortion safe, because someone had to decide when to terminate pregnancies, however dubious I thought of the claim that women were always wise about making that decision. My position became and remains what Bill Clinton said, that abortion should be legal, safe and rare, and I still think so in that abortion is a bad thing, like an execution, but a necessary thing in some circumstances.
Read MoreKant and Marx: Should We Hate Jessica?
Here Is a radically different approach to describe morality, which is usually thought of as adding something to the descriptions of the world so as to provide a fuller picture of life. Kant put that usual view clearly and succinctly. It was inevitable, he thought, that people came up with the word “should” to describe the fact that people chose to do one thing rather than another out of obligation rather than just custom or taste or else people would not have real choices and that was clearly part of the nature of the world. I am saying otherwise. People use moral categories for a particular reason, which is to blame people, and they do so by noticing the aggregation of individuals into types or roles that are in opposition to one another and find that satisfying, which means that morality is in most cases unnecessary even if blaming people, including oneself, is an easy thing to do to explain people, as when one says that all people are subject to original sin or that some part of people can be clumped together as deficient morally because of their poverty or race. Aggregation is a useful device for illuminating the social world but it is a dangerous one because it breeds unnecessary anger and allegations and, like a good medicine, should be attributed only advisedly. The significance of this proposition is that morality is an attribute for manipulating language to different purposes rather than a discovery about morality as an inevitable feature of the universe that is.
Read MoreAlan Furst: Fiction and Theory
The protagonist of Alan Furst’s most recent novel “Under Occupation”, set in occupied Europe in 1942, is a mystery writer and he offers how to go about constructing a novel and the reader can infer how Furst does the deed himself. The fictional writer says that there should be invented characters who are types or contrary to types so as to make the characters interesting and that there should be added local color, such as the colors of streetcars, so as to provide an authentic atmosphere. First applies his own prescriptions into this novel. Some women are portrayed as experienced, some less so, and he shows how it rains on a November Paris street, doing particularly well how a train filled with Germans and civilians are strafed by the RAF. That makes a novel engaging and moves a story along. But what is important in a novel are not these mechanics which provide some entertainment but also what might be called the themes of the novel which give it some moment, the sense of the meanings that a novel captures as the way life itself, here and everywhere and not just in the Occupation work, and so raise a novel to being more than an entertainment, if the way the world works is distinctive and clear enough, so that the reader gets an Alan Furst novel, or a Joyce novel, or a Morrison novel, it having created world distinctive in its own at the same time as an insight into the overall metaphysical world to which it has entered. These structures or ways in which being exists, are not as easily replicated as the schoolbook rules about how to create a novel. They have to do with the wisdom the writer may or may not know about the metaphysical and actual worlds are structured and can be inherent in the way the writer composes or thinks, Hemingway having always known ever since his early stories that his sentences added up to his pointillism style while Mann accumulated learning and history to add to his fluid style, his best work, in my opinion, during his most mature work, with Joseph and His Brothers rather than in Death in Venice, just as the mature Dickens had a dark complexity from “Great Expectations” on that made minor the comic romps of “David Copperfield” and “Oliver Twist”. So let us see what Furst does and not mind that he may not say what it is that he knows what he is doing.
Read MoreComfort and Irony
Consider the related emotions of pleasure and satisfaction to begin a way to summarily dismiss the Utilitarian and the Kantian theories of morality. In short, the idea of comfort replaces the idea of pleasure and the idea of irony replaces the idea of obligation. Moral philosophy, after all, is a partial and recondite way of dealing with what can be described as the way emotions work. A description observes what just is, and is thereby shorn of moral values about what should be done, and so can be dealt with by what is either called the sociology of everyday life or the sociology of emotions. Reducing morality into descriptions rather than proscriptions was the point of Spinoza’s “Ethics”, nothing left of ethics except descriptions.
Read MoreSt. Anselm and the Indivisibility of God
Nowadays, most people who consider themselves to be religious rely on faith rather than reason. That means that they do not explain what results in the belief about the doctrines or liturgies of a religion, as is a proof of God or a miraculous cause that people believe was true, such as the Resurrection, but rather in a belief about a proposition about doctrine and liturgy that does not require explanation and so a believer refers to the confidence of one’s beliefs rather than for the proof or demonstration of one’s propositions. The believer looks at the consequences of beliefs rather than as the causes of belief and shows those consequences in the most flattering light, belief believing the cause of morality or decency or industriousness or happiness, putting aside the question that full blooded Christians, for example, can believe in a variety and even contradictory things, as when some Christians believe that Blacks and whites are to be forever separated or, on the other hand, melded into the greater single humanity. Believers cannot avoid making judgments or reasons aside from their faith as to what inferences to make about their faiths and so are on their own, like everyone else, independent of faith as to what to make of the consequences of faith. That is an inherent paradox of religion, which is that its beliefs are volitional even as they seem to be enjoined by the premises and we shall look into the most abstract way of having discussed that, by St. Anselm in his proof of God, to clarify that as best he can.
Read MoreClose Votes
It was both exciting and moving for a politics buff like myself to see at around midnight on the night of Nov.5-6, the House of Representatives passed the Infrastructure Bill and passed a procedural hurdle for the Build Back Better Act, paving the way for the passage of that in two weeks time. The elaborate parliamentary procedures which assure that bills passed into law are properly legislated meant that the procedures are ceremonial and repetitious and for that reason all the more dramatic. I watched on live television to see the vote build up, the “yes” votes staying close to twenty votes ahead of the opponents until it became clear that the bill had passed because there were not enough votes left so that the margin of winning could not be overtaken even if all the remaining representatives had voted against it. Then, because this was an important bill, there was a vote on whether to table the bill, and that was defeated, that requiring the process of voting to happen all over again, the tallies going up on the electronic devices for voting as well as requiring members for a second time to announce to the Speaker that they are informing the body that so and so is voting although absent as either yea or nay. This new rule was adopted by the House so that members who are sick from Covid need not be present in the body in order to vote, something that previously had not been allowed. So we saw the same faces saying again that the same names would say yes or no, and that was dramatic for its repetition as if someone might change their mind or if the tallies would be different, and in fact the bill to override tabling the bill did have a different result than the bill itself. The tabling resolution was a party line vote while the original bill passage had some Republican and Democratic crossovers. Then there was a procedural vote for the Build Back Better bill that passed though the Democrats passed it by only nine votes, which testified how hard it was to corral all of the Democratic Caucus to agree to it if it were to pass. What an observer of these proceedings could see was the majesty of Article One of the Constitution, which describes the powers of theCongress, that it can move legislation, as unwieldy and slow as the proceedings may be to accomplish a vote. The power of the Constitution to get things done is actual and visible, despite, as I have said in a previous blog post, there are claims that congresspeople are marionettes whose strings are pulled by elsewhere and by sinister powers. It seems to me that the good and the bad of Congress is right out there: hard negotiations behind the scenes to get narrow majorities on the floor.
Read MorePower Is What It Seems To Be
What is power? Max Weber defined it as the ability to get people to do what they don’t want to do while influence is to be defined as the ability w to convince people to do what it is you want them to do. Employers have power over employees because they can fire them and so those who have unequal power will do what the boss wants because the employee wants his or her paycheck. A priest has power because a member of the laity believes there are serious consequences if the churchman decides the member to be engaged in sinfulness. On the other hand, a charismatic churchman can lead a follower to prefer to do what the churchman thinks is the right thing. That is influence rather than power. So far so good. The difficult question about power is whether all the different kinds of power are versions of the same thing or process, to be known properly as power itself, or whether each form of power is independent of one another and arises out of the particular process under observation. In that case, and here I follow Weber in his view of power, there is no need to even any longer use the term “power” except as a metaphor for some of the consequences of deploying some of the traits of the process under examination. An employer has power because he or she can fire someone when firing people is just an aspect of being in an employment arrangement in the first place just as social power is just a fanciful way of saying that men will disparage ugly women and so in this way men have power over women. Moreover, whether to think or not that there is an essential quality called power has consequences for understanding how society operates and also taking sides on particular controversies.
Read MoreLoud and Quiet Screams
Some people are loud in that they talk a lot or have a high pitched or full throated voices and so people who are usually quiet but occasionally say a good deal are thought as unusual and deep. Other people are quiet in that they say little and that can also be inferred to be people who are deep or maybe simple. Whatever the case, these conditions are considered matters of character, the kind of person a person is, rather than a superficial matter and so not at all obvious as it sounds, but something inside the personhood, some avenue into the sanctity of minds ever imprisoned in their skulls. But people who are sometimes loud and sometimes not are not regarded as another form of character but as an aberration. People are inferred to be disjointed or out of sorts, and so inferred, at the least, as a clue of disquiet, even if it might seem just as ordinary a state of things as the other more consistent tones or characters. In particular, people who scream are thought to be particularly distraught, and it is worth examining a scream as a social phenomenon.
Read MoreLe Carre: The Secret and the Ordinary
A standard distinction between the English and the American novel from Defoe to E. M. Foster and from James Fennimore Cooper to F. Scott Fitzgerald, before the categories got changed by Modernism, is the subject matter. English novels are about family life while American novels are about social problems: the frontier for Cooper, organizations purposeful and purposeless in Melville, slavery and inequality for Twain, Howells about labor and Wharon is about the status of women and Fitzgerald is concerned with Jazz Age ambitions. Another way to deal with those novelists writing in English is their ideology or point of view. Dickens is a Christian conservative, George Eliot is a Christian liberal, and Wilkie Collins is a liberal secularist, while Twain is also a liberal secularist but Hawthorne was concerned with sin and salvation and Melville was bitter about the failure or death of God. Here is a third way to sort out the English language novelists and it has to do with the characters of people as open or closed. The major strand is that people are open in that people are what they seem to be. The reader is able to get enough cues to figure out what a person is all about and, presumably, can read real people in that way too. Defoe thought everyone was rational and so understandable. Elizabeth Bennet thought she was outspoken and so some people found her difficult while everybody, including himself, thought Darcey to be arrogant. We know who Fagin is and not to trust his scheming and we know Pip is pliable but carries a torch for a very long time. No secrets are unrevealed in that strand of the English-writing novel. Ahab has mysteries the reader can’t penetrate but we know that itself to be the problem, his secrecy a concern for everyone around him. Wharton’s Lily Bart in “The House of Mirth” knows what her problem is, that she is getting old without having secured a position. On the other hand, there is a minor strand of writers who are difficult to phantom. Twain makes mysterious all the people in Hadleyville without using much of a gimmick, which makes that story a very striking work of art, while the idea that people are not visible is so strange a perception in art as well as in life that their authors have to often adopt a deliberate role by which people act to make themselves cloaked. Melville adopts a confidence man so as to see the mysterious and labyrinthian ways through which people can avoid and attract themselves to Christianity, and so do Conrad’s anarchists and those who follow into the world of espionage: Graham Green also to find his way to Christianity, and most recently, and the subject of this present occasion, John Le Carre. Let’s elaborate on how he does that.
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