That Delightful Rest

The philosophy of Aristotle lacks little, but a gaping omission is a human face. There is no smart aleck Socrates with whom we may laugh and grow irate, nor can we spy a troubled soul, like Marcus Aurelius, behind the words. If there was a character, real or imagined, in the lost works of the Aristotelian corpus, the "rivers of gold" according to Cicero, then we are all the more at a loss, for Aristotle's work is decidedly not that of the mechanical, technocratic mind. His philosophy is not cold and calculating, and we'll find it warm and lived in if we peer behind the notational style. This is nowhere more evident than in the chapter of the Ethics on friendship where he defines a friend, in part, as someone before whom you might do something foolish and still not blush. Yet if this man from antiquity is largely lost to us, there as another face for the philosophy.

Cicero's own philosophical works make no boast of originality, the non plus ultra to the modern mind, but who wouldn't be content, christened "Rome's greatest Aristotelian" by Dante, of all? Unlike their Aristotelian origins, many of Cicero's works are structured not as treatises but dialogues, which give human faces to the dense and often obscure discourses which they summarize or critique. Still there are moments of genuine and unique revelation in Cicero's philosophy when he sheds a new light, filtered by years of study, personal suffering, and the struggles with nation he strove to save, on philosophy.

For me the most poignant of these moments comes toward the end of de Amicitia, written in the summer of 44 BC just before Cicero returned to Rome to launch his famous Philippics against Marc Antony. Here the statesman-philosopher re-imagines Platonism and Aristotelianism, especially the Lysis and penultimate books of Aristotle's Ethics, as a dialogue centered around Gaius Laelius the Wise, the preeminent author and orator of the generation preceding Cicero's. Laelius remembers his friend Scipio Aemilianus, i.e. Africanus the Younger:

Numquam illum ne minima quidem re offendi, quod quidem senserim, nihil audivi ex eo ipse quod nollem. [de Amicitia, 103. The Latin Library]

It seems innocuous enough, obvious even, but there's so much insight in these few words, insight only gained by personal experience. There's so much substance under that polished parallel style.

On the surface, sure, Laelius is saying the obvious that his good friend never said anything which offended him in the least, which he would have noticed, nor vice versa, but this is something we overlook today, I think. With our legal system which functions on the premise that the contest of contrary opinions will reveal truth, a pluralistic polity, and the economic necessity of competition, we perhaps let variety and rivalry get the better of us.

Of rivalry we often consider speaking our mind more than a right but a duty. How quickly do we feel that we'll be implicated if we don't speak up for, or against, something. How quickly do we offer unsolicited opinions simply because they're relevant, even if they're unnecessary. Who doesn't feel the urge to pile on when someone is being dragged through the mud? Laelius' point is of course that he and Scipio didn't offend one another, but surely some of that accord resulted from the prudential application of silence, or at least deferred judgment.

Of variety, how often do we hear platitudes about having rights to opinions, and rights to be heard, and so on. We forget, and Cicero reminds us, that the soul finds rest in the harmony of friendship.

The dialogue contains also in that euphonious and compact relative clause, quod quidem senserim, a subtle nod to the empathy implicit in friendship. Simply, we have to pay attention to how the other person feels, what hurts and delights our loved ones. We need to know that look in their eyes, they way they shuffle in their seats, the way they grow quiet, that tells us we've hurt them, and we have to care enough not to do it again. The very thought of that look, of that quiet, has to pain us so much that we need to avoid it. The dialogue of course is idealized, and it's unlikely anyone has not hurt his friend at some point, but we see the tempered wisdom of Cicero behind the ideal.

Finally, Laelius draws attention to the littlest things, minima, which always need our attention. How our friends cater to our little pet peeves, and how easily we take their considerations for granted. Maybe they let us tell the same story over and over, or they avoid a certain topic to which we are sensitive, maybe they curb their playful teasing, or perhaps they simply stopped slurping their soda for us, but the absence of these irksome bits gradually becomes an environment in which we can find ease, and ourselves, in each other. It's a rest so consoling, so powerful, that we feel it, moreover we can exist in it, even when the activity of friendship is broken off by distance, whether by travel or, as Laelius says about his lifelong friend, by death.

So in but a small sentence Cicero through the voice of Laelius reminds us what restraint, consideration, and appreciation are necessary to make, find, and keep that delightful rest we call friendship.

Classroom Nightmares

A new season of Gordon Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares is under way and this season I'm struck by how many problems these chefs and owners share with people in other professions, namely academics. Therefore a list, not meant to embarrass or admonish teachers, but to jolt them out of their complacency by outing the most common foibles in the profession.

1. Welcome to the Junkyard

Classrooms become warehouses for all of the junk teachers don't want to throw away: old furniture, microwaves, bookends, sets of old books, posters, globes, you name it–and always in dilapidated condition. Never mind old tests, piles of papers, and answer keys all jammed into folders and plastic organizers. Finally don't forget antiquated text books jamming the shelves. It all has to go. You don't want to eat surrounded by someone's junk, so don't presume your students want to learn surrounded by yours.

2. Purge and Clean

Yes, the custodians clean the building, but keeping the classroom clean and orderly is the equivalent of managing front of house at a restaurant. The room has to look kept and academic. The walls shouldn't be festooned with tape and decrepit posters, cork boards shouldn't be covered in staples, and your own desk shouldn't be covered with a decade of academic detritus. Some teachers like to post student work on the walls, a practice which suits only visual arts. Otherwise please realize the absurd fact that you're stapling tests to the wall, and desist. 

3. Nova et Mira

When was the last time you made something new? I don't mean slapping the test from the publisher onto the copy machine, I mean composing a new test. How about new lecture notes, worksheets, or quizzes? You're definitely not photocopying the same old originals again and again, right? 

It's not possible to remake everything all the time, but judiciously reuse, retype, and re-imagine old work. You're not the same teacher who made that material and the students it helped are long gone. Try something new, or at least update something. The more organized you are, the easier the task of revision.

4. Study Your Peers

Teachers abhor being observed and are perhaps the least competitive of professionals, whereas in every other field everyone clamors to observe and improve upon their betters. Chefs learn others' recipes, lawyers study each others' briefs, and everyone in technology viciously dogs each other.

There's always a bigger fish, someone from whom you can learn even if he teaches in a different discipline, and there's always something you personally can improve upon. If you think you've perfected something, you're stagnating. 

5. Poll for Feedback

Students are your pupils and parents are your patrons, so it might be a good idea if you ask whether they're getting what they want. Teachers feel accused and insulted when questioned, and no doubt many students and parents will try to game your system for points and prestige, but you have to address to their expectations to some degree. On the one hand the student has to meet the demands of the curriculum, of which the faculty is custodian and expert, and on the other hand the students and parents only chose your class or school because they thought it was worthwhile, so why would you want to disappoint them? You can have standards without refusing to accommodate students with different goals, expectations, and interests.

Sanctus

Holy is one of my least favorite words in our beloved English tongue. To start, the word has an undignified ring, for both wholly and holy are merely 'oly without that oft-unheard puff of air. It sounds like it should be a suffix, not a word of great philosophical and spiritual import, and listen to those sounds next to one another: oh-lee. Say it nice and quickly and it sounds like a siren! Holy is also considerably debased by its position in a variety of common curses and epithets, and for my money there's something unpleasant about a word so frequently appended to the likes of cow and mackerel.

Yet, sanctus, is word which looms large in my mind. Aside from its aesthetic superiority what a panoply of perfect meanings swirl about it: sacred, venerable, pious, ordained. How sanctus seems to contain all the other virtues. It is what we call sanctus that defines not just ourselves, but everything.

One musical setting of the liturgy's trifold sanctus bring out all of these meanings.

–

The Sanctus from Beethoven's Missa Solemnis emphasizes the mystical power of the word from Isaiah 6:3, its centrality and the reverence it summons from us. Beethoven achieves this in a few ways. First, his indication is mit andacht, rapt and with devotion. Second, he's returned to D, the home key for the whole mass. Third, he's eschewed bright strings for the more austere basses. Fourth, in m. 9-12 Beethoven creates a novel, solemn color palette of horns, trumpets, and trombones. Finally, the theme itself is intimate, with its own internal motion, that step and leap, that generates the whole piece.

We begin then not with confidence, but with the reverence which precedes confidence. Only gradually does that germinal theme, working its way up, graced by a trifold repetition in the brass, finally say in the four soloists, Sanctus. Beethoven repeats not just sanctus three times but the whole phrase, Sanctus Dominus Deus Sabaoth.

In the first repetition, the polyphony emphasizes the unexpected spreading of the word. From one to the other the delicate word spreads from voice to voice. Also, by the musician's power, the melisma, he's made san-ctus, of two syllables, now of three and thus equal to the tri-syllabic do-mi-nus, to which it naturally now seems cognate.

In the second repetition with their crescendo on the first dominus and sforzato on the second, the voices seem to realize the possibility of this momentous development, but back off with the somber, darker piano repetition of Sabaoth. Can our Lord be the Lord of Hosts?

In the third an final repetition, the syllabic pronunciation is timid declaration, as quavering ninths in the violas and cellos fade away over a drumroll. The ensuing movement comes an emphatic yes in the form of an ecstatic fugue on pleni sunt coeli et terra gloria tua.

Book Review: Ten Latin Anthologies

Teaching Latin literature courses always runs into several conundrums. Chief among these, perhaps, is whether the course will be structured around one or a few large works, or shorter selections. The former approach has the advantage of encouraging in-depth discussion of an author, genre, or work, but it's easy to get mired in a long text which students cannot move through with great speed. The latter choice necessitates a compilation of texts, and so enters the anthology.

A few notes and exceptions. These are all aimed at the high school, or perhaps undergraduate, level, and thus do not any of them contain an apparatus. I exclude anthologies dedicated to specific collections, such as sacred, medieval, or historical works and likewise omit any text books even if they have a great deal of literature as does Keller and Russell's Learn to Read Latin. Finally, I've surely not compiled an exhaustive list and any recommendations are most welcome

I. An Anthology of Latin Prose [Amazon]
ed. D. A. Russell

This is one of my favorites of the bunch. Russell's compilation gives in selections of about fifty lines each a useful sample of Latin authors and genres. The text's chronological arrangement gives the reader a good sense of evolving style and the brevity of the selections highlights the variety. Russell's notes are minimal, and mostly confined to translating Greek quotations, pointing out omissions and contracted forms, and explaining idioms and less common meanings. There's no help with complex clauses and no glossary, but Russell's introduction is a good one to prose periods and rhythms. Its generous helping of Cicero covers the author's philosophy, legal speeches, public speeches, and letters.

The quantity, brevity, and variety of the selections suits a survey course for proficient students.


II. Cambridge Latin Anthology [Amazon]
ed. Ashley Carter and Phillip Parr

This more slender reader provides equal measures of prose and poetry, with both sections providing a few long selections and then a number of smaller ones grouped by kind. For example, the editors provide four 60-line selections of Ovid and Vergil, and then group a variety of Horace, Martial, and Catullus into categories of love, leisure, and so forth.

The organization chaffed at first, but it's a not imprudent compromise. The lengthy sections provide opportunity for in-depth study while the topically-arranged groups give room for comparing genre, style, author, and content. Unfortunately, none of the poems are numbered and there is no identification of the prose selections, a decision which strips the literature of context, especially given the scant introductions and nonexistent notes. There is bountiful help with vocabulary though, with long-marks, facing-page vocabulary, and a glossary. A teacher's handbook is available that contains notes and commentary. It's not so necessary for teaching these texts, but it might be useful for students who can't read without a little help. The teacher's handbook doesn't contain any translations.

Overall, this reader is a good compromise between poetry and prose, and lengthy and short selections, but its lack of notes (without the handbook) limits its utility for the neophyte and lack of quantity limits its use to the sophisticated reader. Also, the layout is relatively inefficient and with all the dead space, this 180-page volume doesn't have that much Latin.


III. Oxford Latin Reader [Amazon]
ed. Maurice Balme and James Morwood

This anthology succeeds the three-part Oxford Latin Course and is best viewed as a sampler of the most notable sections from the most notable Latin authors: Cicero, Caesar, Catullus, Vergil, Livy, and Ovid. The text offers copious historical introductions and extremely generous notes which quite often translate the Latin outright. There is plentiful vocabulary and a small appendix on scansion. This reader would suit a class of weaker students in which you wanted to focus less on the Latin, to some extent, and more on history, culture, and such, while still getting the students to work in the canonical texts.

On Cleaning

Among foibles and vices I've been fortunate to find pleasure in much that seems to plague modern man. I enjoy moderate, healthy, simple meals, eating being a burden so constant for man that I'm sure he would contract it out if he could. Ask anyone, though, and it's always the cleaning which attends the cooking that sends people to the convenience of restaurants. This seems to me quite absurd. Why is cleaning so bad?

The Need to Clean

Cleaning is in essence an extension of cura corporis, man's need to care for his body. It is as appropriate that a man care for his surroundings as it is he care for his person, and no less preposterous that he hire out someone to clean his home than, excepting infirmity, he contract out care of his arms and legs. The case of infirmity, though, we except precisely because it is undignified, and therefore there is dignity in caring for oneself. There is much to chastise in modern life' cosmetic primping and excessive fitness routines, but at least health and appearance are responsibilities we acknowledge. Life itself is the fulfillment of the responsibility (spondeo, to pledge) to care for oneself. Neglect is the default.

Yet why is there dignity in caring for oneself when one can certainly fulfill the responsibility without personally attending to them. It matters, though, that one sees to them himself because pledges cannot be contracted out. To pledge is not merely to agree, consent, or promise to fulfill, but to vow to be a sponsor, a commitment that cannot be offloaded to another. When someone contracts out this work we look at him in both pity and disdain, whether he's left to another the raising of his children or the comforting of his wife. With some less severity we look askance at the man who trusts his bodily health  tofitness gurus, vibrating belts, and diet pills, for he looks just as ignoble as the Roman, remembered by Seneca, who asked the slaves carrying him from his bath to his sedan chair, iam sedeo, "Am I sitting?"

Such is indeed decadence, a falling away from one's pledge.

It is likewise improper, though, to admit strangers into one's intimate world. Most of us recognize this applies to the body, although we can see the line shifted by the increasing popularity of fitness trainers, masseuses, and the like, to say nothing of sexual mores. As less and less is retained private, that is, deprived from the public sphere, and as we admit more people as intimates, it's not unsurprising that the personal element of personal property is lost. The home is more and more a mere place for stuff, and why should it be any more than that when the body of its owner nothing more either?

Beside obligations, though, hiring people to clean up after you, or clean you yourself, is an implicit admission of defeat, namely that you have failed at frugality. If you have more than you can yourself care for, you have too much. If you're so unhealthy you need help, you're sick. The Roman frugalitas and severitas go hand in hand, as do their opposites.

The Joy of Cleaning

There is another less admonitory justification for cleaning, though, and it's that cleaning is invigorating and exciting. Marcus Aurelius wrote, in Meditations 3.2, that the curious man takes a peculiar pleasure in everything, even in the humble and ungainly parts of nature. I never find this more so than when cleaning. How intricately all the parts of the car click and fold together, how gently curving the cool metal. Move the clutter from the desk and find the rich grains of the timber. Watch the spirits soak into the woody flesh, and even take delight in the little dings, remembrances of accidents and maybe a moment or two of frustration. Cleaning the bathroom might be the most inglorious of tasks, but watch a droplet of water bead on porcelain, the liquid clinging itself into a clear little dome over the smooth surface that holds the incipient sphere in suspension.

To make such observations is still to ignore the exciting paraphernalia of the cleaning trade. What a fun time in which to clean, with all measure of gadgets. What's not to like in vacuuming? These beastly machines, and not just shop vacuums but domestic ones too, have massive airflow, rotating brushes, HEPA filtration, extension hoses, and dirt sensors. Don't forget about all of the miracle solvents we have today, too. Ajax: not just for killing Trojans anymore.

Most of us can hone only a few special skills, but cleaning is an opportunity to sample the invigorating variety of nature and take pleasure its systems as we try to maintain our home among them. Nature might like to hide, but cleaning our little corner of this messy world makes an enlightening education of a necessity.

Movie Review: Frenzy

Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. 1972.

Frenzy is remembered today as Hitchcock's next-to-last and most explicit film, but in our era of endless recycling and dulling overstimulation, we ought to praise its vigor and restraint. The septuagenarian Hitchcock brings, if not a new plot, a mature synthesis of dark comedy, suspense, and pathology which holds us more rapt than the all the gory whiz-bang special effects we can generate today.

Hitchcock keeps us interested by engaging, not overwhelming us. In every scene we are prompted to think: interpreting context, predicting motives, and even questioning our own reactions. At every step we evaluate, not in a struggle to comprehend but out of a desire to act, and in being so active are entertained by Hitchcock's masterful manipulation of our senses and expectations.

Frenzy has the thee cardinal traits of Hitchcock, the violent, the comic, and the suspenseful. The film is violent, but because of what understand, not simply what we see. It is comic not by levity, but by irony. Finally it is suspenseful not because of what happens but because of what we expect to happen. Extraordinary for a film of this genre, Frenzy requires an attentive and appreciative viewer, not to figure out the trite plot, mind you, but to experience the effect, which is that of grappling with the evil in man.

It owes to Hitchcock's genius, not banality, that such a lofty premise is explored by a murder mystery and not a tragedy, for not all murderers make principled stands on grand stages like the scaffolds of the guillotine and Pompey's theater. Some men, the pathological, make frenzied and inglorious evil in flats and the backs of trucks.

Hitchcock's subversive opening sets the tone with a jarring contrast of the grand and obscene. We soar along the Thames to a majestic score of regal pomp and we soon swoop down to a political rally. Here a politician, betokening the progress of his day, promises to rid the river of pollution and contamination. During his speech the crowd slowly peels away and turns to the river, lured by the sight of a dead body floating face down and with the noose of a necktie around her neck. The sight is a morbid reminder that not all foes can be conquered and that civilization coexists with barbarity. We should have known, though, for on our flight over the Thames a tug chuffed past us billowing black smoke, a nod to the director's introduction of evil in his 1943, Shadow of A Doubt. It's more than a nod, though, for the note gives the director's first and last great works a cautioning symmetry.

It won't do to discuss the plot of a movie whose genius lies in technique, other than to summarize it as the hunt for a rapist-murderer in London and the authorities' doubts as to which of two men is committing the crimes. It's Hitchcock's style and context that bring the story to life.

I. Characters and Psychology

First we meet Richard Blaney, a down-on-his-luck bartender who is promptly fired as the movie opens. Blaney is curt, boozy, and irritable. We want to sympathize with him, but he's just so damn rude, and with an air of exasperation about him as if he just can't muster manners any longer. All sympathetic bets are off, though, when he visits his ex-wife Brenda at her matchmaking business and resumes his old abusive habits. Verbally he's loud and accusatory, re-hashing old issues. He hulks around, pounding his fist. Still Brenda takes him out to dinner, to her club even, where he starts up again and even breaks a glass in his anger. The contrasts here, with Brenda in financial and social control and Blaney in physical control, is a disturbing one which will have a more disturbing parallel. After dinner we naturally wonder, especially when Brenda lets him bunk on her couch for the night, whether she'll regret it. After all it's a half-hour into the movie and there's nary a murder or murderer in sight, right?

The next day in Brenda's office Blaney's friend, Robert Rusk, enters seeking a match. Rusk is no longer the chummy chap who loaned Blaney money, though, smiling down over his flowery window box. We learn that he's a regular whom Brenda won't help because of his sexual predilections for women who submit to his violence. When she turns him down again we see in his posture frustration and in his movement aggression, a loathsome figure at once pathetic and fearsome. After she rejects his embarrassing come-ons, Rusk forces himself upon her and in the rape, the director plays out those contrasting tones. Rusk is physically dominating and yet feeble, and as he repeats the word lovely over and over again during the rape, it reminds us both of his power as aggressor and weakness as a slave to desire. Hitchcock also only ever shows us Rusk's shadow during his crime, on the one hand a trick to avoid the censor's cut, but on the other a subtle belittling of the man, as if he's somehow incomplete. At the same time as Brenda is violated, though, she maintains composure. She retains power and dignity as she recites prayer during the rape, with her calm and controlled votive contrasting Rusk's lusty and desperate repetition of lovely. Likewise she remains physically composed, still, as we see Rusk's shadow move up an down over her, contrasting again his power and impotence.

This is a frightening scene which lingers in the memory, and has perhaps forever soured me on the word lovely and the sight of actor Barry Foster's face, but it's the psychology which disturbs most. Subsequent generations have squandered and dulled our sight for horror, but Hitchcock's visual style, restrained by today's standards, tells a story which it forces us to finish in our minds. It demands apprehension, and therefore interest and sympathy, even more than the explicit.

Of the men, what's the difference between Rusk and Blaney? The more successful and seemingly adjusted is quite the opposite, and what keeps the unlikeable Blaney from turning into Rusk? Morality, nature, fear? In the end, both men are frenzied, Rusk during his crimes and Blaney always, although to a lesser degree. Only one is heinous, though. An unflattering verdict for man.

II. Major Details

Details make or break a movie, and anything which reeks of cliche, artifice, or falsity is the death-knell for suspense. In order to hold our breath we need to fear we might drown, and anything that strikes us as inauthentic sends us back to the safety of reality.

We've already discussed the examples of the opening and the scene of Brenda's attack, but there are others, the most curious of which takes place when Blaney, before he's accused and before any murder at all, steps into a pub and the camera shifts focus to two men talking at the bar. They banter about the crime and the killer's psychology and when they ask the waitress for her thoughts she replies, "He rapes them first doesn't he?!" It isn't fear we hear in her voice, though, but a lurid fascination we also see in her widening eyes and her lips just unashamed enough to purse into a weak smile. That would have been enough, but then the two men lampoon her response and call the fact a "silver lining," and then Hitchcock raises the bar again, with the waitress getting a good chuckle out of the man's naughty response. This scene of the everyday person's cavalier attitude toward the violence they don't see or experience is more interesting, and off-putting, than most other whole movies and constitutes a theme throughout the movie.

In another scene, Rusk has dumped the body of his latest victim in the back of a truck hauling potatoes, but realized it holds a piece of evidence which might incriminate him. His realization is a work of directorial brilliance, a scene merely utilitarian to the plot–all it has to do is toss out a maguffin to get the antagonist to do something–which Hitchcock elevates to psychological horror. After disposing of the body Rusk reaches for his tie pin but can't find it. In fact he can't find it anywhere. Now Hitchcock could have shown Rusk's realization of where it was by showing him snap his fingers or some such gesture, or just having him remember and go find it, but Hitchcock shows us a sudden and brief flashback to the rape, from Rusk's perspective. We're suddenly and violently thrust into not just the mindset but the mind of the murderer, behind his eyes. We see in his perspective her desperate eyes, clawing hands, and the tightening tie, and are discomfited by being put into his position. The visceral impact, though, is heightened by the fact that these are Rusk's memories that we see. What a horrible thought Hitchcock forces us to think: imagine living with the fact and images of having raped someone. Imagine having those memories. Worse still, to Rusk those are just some of many memories.

III. Subversion of Expectations

It is ultimately Hitchcock's mastery of sub- and perversion which keeps us most hotly involved, though. There are numerous examples in the movie, but the most famous is in fact a whole scene taking place inside the aforementioned potato truck. Here, Rusk needs to reclaim the tie pin or risk being exposed. He makes his way into the truck and a scene of dark comedy ensues as he empties bag after bag of potatoes looking for his dead victim. When he finds her, naturally he has to get her out of the bag to reach her hand which contains the pin, and so he tugs and pulls on her body as potatoes fly everywhere. This sight unsettles by its juxtaposition of the morbid and ridiculous, fiddling with a cadaver in a pile of potatoes. Yet Hitchcock doubles down on the tension, for when Rusk gets to her hand, its rigor mortis clenches the pin in an unbreakable grip. The gross sight is then topped when Rusk decides to cut the pin out. In a classic Hitchcock twist, he tries to cut her finger off but fails, a fact which elevates the scene's 1) morbidity by exploiting the fact that we already pictured what we expected would happen when we saw the knife, 2) suspense by not letting our expectation get fulfilled, and 3) humor by the sight of the preposterous situation.

The most disturbing twist comes when the truck starts and pulls away. Now we begin to sympathize with Rusk as we would any underdog even as we see before us a constant reminder of his horrific crime.

–

The best testament to the maturity and success of Frenzy though, is that these three elements of characterization, contextual details, and subversion are so integrated. We don't see his technique or tropes, rather they disappear into the film's effect and therefore our own emotional response. Frenzy is an ingenious weave of the expected and the unexpected, with Hitchcock managing to engage us with both.

Like many late masterpieces of great artists, its story was fashioned conservatively in the old mold while the artist shaped it into something much greater than the sum of its plot. This is not to say that style has trumped substance, a charge often and easily hurled, but that style can produce substance. In the case of Frenzy, we see the form of a traditional murder mystery but the effect is a psychological chase which haunts long after the crime.

Central Park in Spring

Yesterday was the first of the vernal season on which the sun and wind could both agree to warm us in their springtime hands. The Central Park promenade teemed with travelers and citizens alike, all teased out of doors by the sun and sweet air. The trees, though, more budding than blooming, were not yet persuaded from their winter seclusion and so the lively mall at the heart of the city bathed in unhindered light.

Cyclists streamed through, dodging pedestrians, dogs, and strollers. The restful natives sunned themselves on the lawns while cameras, occasionally attached to fleshy humanoid stands, snapped pictures of the germinal fauna. Blowing about were bubbles of all sizes, vast but short-lived ones emanating from the sudsy ropes of the professionals and thousands of tiny spheres flitting up the woody canopy from the soapy plastic pistols of little kids. One squirrel, who had the distinct air of having overslept and whom I named Phil, scampered about the daffodils beneath a tree for twenty minutes before concluding, I assume, that his winter store had been stolen. Cave furres!

Down by Shakespeare and Columbus, violinist Susan Keser, The NY Violinist, played with aplomb a crowd-pleasing selection of romantic and baroque pieces with generous helpings of Bach and Vivaldi. She even played the solo to some recorded concerti, bringing a big ensemble sound around her fine playing. I also caught quite by chance a few magic routines by The Magic Bald Guy, aka Mick Stone, who brings hilarity to polished and delightful legerdemain. It's easy enough, I hope, to appreciate good technique and fun magic at a theater, but when the performer has also to woo and charm a crowd who can walk away at any moment, tune out passers by, and improvise humor, well you have to applaud that beyond the usual. Talented performers like these, whose work lights up the city with fun and flare, deserve not only thanks but a little coin too for so liberally sharing the fruits of thousands of toilsome, lonely hours perfecting their crafts.

Certainly I can't forget Willie G., The Poet of Central Park, self-proclaimed poet, I believe, who sells his poems in the park. With regrets I didn't have enough cash to afford one of his books, but I gave a small donation to his poetical cause and in thanks he gave to my girlfriend a poem about happiness. I haven't read the poem yet, but I'll be pleased to find it half as charming as its author. And kudos to Flicker photographer Pete Considine for his great shot of Willie.

So that was Central Park in yesterday's spring, at least in my corner. Squirrels and daffodils. Sun, music, and magic. Happiness.

Thanks for All the Fish

New York is supposed to be a rough and tumultuous place. In my experience it has not been so and in these twenty eight years of Big Apple citizenship I can count on one hand the times I've been rudely treated. This number excludes, it goes without saying, curses and epithets hurled from vehicles en passant. Of course you never see an object with so much clarity as when it stands in relief, and hence these instances figure prominently in my mind.

I found myself amidst the third of these spasms of rudeness today, surprisingly at the venue of the city's great gem, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. In retrospect my surprise seems unreasonable, for the unruly exist everywhere, but I like to think that great art has a humbling effect on the disposition, and what is rudeness of not the affectation of superiority? It was perhaps a naive thought, but I didn't expect Ugolino to be the most tortured in the museum today. Nonetheless today's experience, in which the group sales associate accused me of lying and threatened to inform my employer that my party hadn't given them sufficient warning for my party of ten, conformed precisely to the pattern of my previous encounters with exemplary rudeness.

The first shared trait is the presence of the raging party's inability to control the outcome. Today's ticket taker knew she couldn't turn away so few students with three chaperones and, as is often the case, impotence in one area expresses itself as aggression in another. The military strategist Sun Tzu struck upon this fact when he wrote that violent language is a presage not to attack, but retreat. As our inevitable entry pressed upon her, the taker grew more imperious, you were told, and admonitory, they'll be contacted, and scolding, as I just said, until at last she grudgingly acquiesced.

The second trait is that the affair was altogether frivolous. Even the dullest people know, it seems, when to be serious, but the timid heart makes a stand when the stakes are low. They plant flags on nameless molehills for petty glories, not Iwo Jima and the Hot Gates. In this case our party, which was barely large enough by their own standards to qualify as a group, could have easily split up into three small groups of four. What havoc would we have wreaked, we little platoons!

The third common element was the breaking not of morality, but policy. Policy, what the managerial mind confuses with law–ius, the fruit of jurisprudence–is quite handily defined as a definite course of action adopted for the sake of expediency or facility. Unlike law which is inviolable because it is grounded, theoretically, in morality, policy exists for the sake of another cause. It can be broken if upholding it will contradict a higher cause or if breaking it won't undermine the cause for which the policy was adopted.

Take a few examples from my own profession, teaching. Having office hours saves me from constant interruption, but students are welcome to drop by. A grace period of two days prevents students from copying returned material, but I don't turn down good work from good students. As Aristotle shows, 1374b, these are circumstances of prudence, in which we arbitrate by equity and do not judge by law, considering more the man than the law, more what is meant than what is said, and the big picture rather than one detail. The museum's policy is obviously designed to prevent the exhibits from being swamped by large groups, a threat which we didn't pose.

I'll leave it for you to determine whether flash mobs of patrons are plaguing large museums today or whether the third largest museum in the western hemisphere can't handle facilitate, say, a few thousand patrons per hour. If the Met cannot, perhaps its custodians can contact the thousands of arenas, theaters, and schools which do this every day, most without two million square feet of real estate. I'll also not consider whether the inconvenience, and it's nothing more if it's anything at all, of showing up in a group warrants mandatory appointments and, by charging a mandatory special fee, an abdication of the museum's founding principle. Passing over that naturally necessitates I not inquire just how if at all the surcharge is spent to compensate for the alleged inconvenience of being part of a group. In charity I won't even wonder why school groups need appointments and other groups do not. Too I'll put aside–because I'm not agitated at all–a fact esoteric to this episode, how the same individual had previously informed me that she realized giving advance warning wasn't always possible and that it would be acceptable simply to show up a tad before the group and pay at the separate counter.  Finally, I won't in generosity even wonder about what mind would with such tenacious gusto and disregard for the obvious cling to such a policy. But I digress...

The final characteristic common to these outbursts was a sense of righteous indignation. These folks all felt entirely justified chewing out your humble blogger, a fact which should cause any balanced individual to pause. Mature people tend to react with moderation because they harbor some doubt about whether they're justified to react as they wish. There's a reason, though, that shooting first and asking questions later is called being trigger-happy, and that's because, as the phrase suggests, there is a mania attendant the abstention from use of senses and intellect. The Greeks had ἔκφων, literally out of one's φήν, or mind, but also carried away, without usual senses, or frenzied. (Speaking of which, a review of the brilliantly-titled late Hitchcock masterpiece, Frenzy, is forthcoming.)

We would be remiss to ignore the Latin origins of rude though, which are plentiful and revealing. The adjective rudis means both uncultivated and in its natural state. Of animals it means unbroken and of skills it means ignorant of. Is not the rude man, or woman, all of these things? Inattentive or ignorant of convention, unshaped by experience and thought, stuck in bad habits. The verb form rudo can refer with no small measure of humor to both the bellowing of an orator and the braying of an ass.

With no doubt the museum could issue an expedient and exculpatory explanation as to why their policy is both necessary and sufficient. With even less doubt will any external independent party be unable to corroborate their justification. The bottom line isn't museum policy, though, but that staff there, and in many places, have changed from old timers who judged by common sense over to the degreed, pantsuited, professionals who flashing their plastic badges prance through the morning line of patrons on their way to serve as the lesser stewards the greatest treasures, they less the patrons of culture than the patronizing custodians of peremptory bureaucracy.

Movie Review: Mr. Peabody and Sherman

Directed by Rob Minkoff. 2014.

A simple test will tell whether Mr. Peabody and Sherman is a movie for you. The evaluation has nothing to do with whether you can get your head around the sight of a talking dog or time travel or such, but rather tells taste in humor. Imagine this: Peabody and Sherman find themselves amidst the French Revolution and, after Peabody executes a slick escape from the guillotine by use of a melon, an outraged Robespierre picks up the sliced fruit and exclaims, "Tricked by a cantaloupe, the least of fruits!" If that qualification, the least of fruits, which is impossible to explain or understand, doesn't tickle your funny bone by its absurdity and resistance to reason, then neither Mr. Peabody and Sherman, nor any of the classic Jay Ward cartoons, may be for you.

If you chuckled, though, then welcome aboard.

Mr. Peabody, a dog, is a brilliant scientist and father to Sherman, his adopted boy. The clever twist to this reboot is recasting Peabody from a wily historian into a genius sophisticate, as at home splitting atoms as he is regaling guests with witty banter and mixing his classic drink, the Einstein on the Beach. He can also whip up a Baked Alaska while he plays the piano, electric guitar, and didgeridoo, before he cures your backache. There are two keys to Peabody's success in this picture, though. The first is Ty Burrell's voice acting, which imbues to Mr. Peabody a maturity, charm, and paternal concern which win us over. The second key is that Peabody's many skills are introduced mostly in the service of the story. We don't get many cutaway moments like the opening in which Peabody shows off just for laughs, but rather jokes built into the plot.

That plot could scarcely be less substantial, but it's enough to hold the jokes together; Peabody has to entertain an irascible couple who is threatening to have Sherm expelled for fighting with their daughter. During dinner, Sherman and that classmate along with Peabody are whisked through time. Slight as it is, though, the script takes enough time to set up Peabody's relationship to Sherman as tutor and mentor. Mr. Peabody educates him himself, tells Sherman how to succeed at school, and finally dropping him off there, gives him a little dog whistle to call home. What a splendid little touch.

The script even takes enough time and thought for a touching little montage in which Peabody, after tucking Sherm in after a rough first day at school, reminisces about raising the orphan he found one rainy night. Set to John Lennon's Beautiful Boy, Peabody's look back at raising Sherm wisely starts in the present and works its way back, a brilliantly simple way of avoiding montage conventions. Similarly, and with a touch smart for the film and sensible in the plot, Peabody via his WABAC time machine has raised Sherm throughout other eras–there's a cute picture of him with Gandhi–letting the montage add variety to the film's visuals while avoiding the tendency to cram too much into the main story. Little details and efforts like these make a difference.

Speaking of that time travel, Mr. Peabody and Sherman have a funny blast through history. In one episode of the classic original Schubert runs out into a street of motor-vehicular traffic. Eek. I realized I was in good hands here, though, when Sherm proudly exclaimed that the story of George Washington cutting down the cherry tree was apocryphal. And bless him, Sherm actually used the word apocryphal. The time traveling scenes are a hoot and I laughed my tail off. Agamemnon is a muscle-head psyching up his Greek troops, who get duped into letting Peabody's miniature wooden horse into. . . their wooden horse. The writers even exonerate, though perhaps accidentally, Marie Antoinette by showing us the terrible misunderstanding in which she became known as the queen who said, "Let them eat cake." It's not just the historical sets, setups, and gags that make Mr. Peabody and Sherman funny, though, but the movie's off-kilter tone which gives everything a charming, comic bent. It's a note seldom sought or struck today, but when it's hit, it's deliriously fun, and that tone is zany. Sometimes that tone is set by dialogue, other times by a character's eyes or walk, but somehow it's always there, making us look at everything cockeyed, and laugh.

The script also does a slick job of working Peabody's historical descriptions into the plot so they don't feel like lectures. Yes, Peabody tells us about King Tut, but it's only to tell Sherm's little friend that given the young king's fate he might not make the best husband. Sure this is whimsical and silly, but it's not dumb. There are puns aplenty, too–I guess I'm an old Giza!–and even a running joke in which Peabody and Sherm repeatedly chuff out the rear ends of various animal-shaped vehicles. And that's the running joke! Wacca wacca!

Anyway, Peabody gets a laugh out of Mona Lisa, the kids take a flight in Leonardo Da Vinci's flying machine, Beethoven plays Dance Dance Revolution and Robespierre gets tasered. If that doesn't make you want to take a quick spin through history with this charming polymath and Renaissance dog. . . well who am I kidding, of course it does.

Be Vivaldi.

Sometimes I wonder whether I actually like to read. Many of my friends read voraciously across all genres, authors, and topics. To be frank with you, dear reader, I most often look at writing and think, "Who wants to read all that?" Take for example this beast in The Atlantic. It's fifteen pages in 12 point font, single-spaced. Is all of this necessary?

It's pretty presumptuous to write at length. First, the time and patience of the reader is limited. Try to get to the point. Second, yes, many great works are long or big, but the length of Parsifal is not license for others to write tomes. In fact, very few people should be writing anything so long as a book.

Don't imitate Wagner, imitate Vivaldi. Get in, make your point, and get out. See that smile above? That's the smile of someone who isn't wasting his or your time with the perfunctory.

Writing 101

Nothing stupefies the amateur so much as what liberties the experts take with impunity. The amateur toils away in obscurity, following the rules, while the expert tosses them to the wind amid approbation. Harrumph! Yet the grammatical misdemeanors of Ciceronian hyperbaton, of Catullus' elisions, Shakespeare's neologisms, and Eliot's poetical periphrases are not mine to forgive but the Muses', and the beauty of such works is the vindication and celebration of genius over grammar. Of course not everyone billed as an expert owns the name, and it's the venerated balderdash that irks most. The trend today is ostensible authors publishing middlebrow fare  to whoop for their books. Alas, since the passing of its founder, Arts and Letters Daily seems to specialize in promoting this aggrandizement.

Today's Arts and Letters docket brings us the case of Katie Roiphe in The Financial Times. Forthwith I would like to throw the FT editor under the bus with the author. Second, I want to postulate and hopefully demonstrate beyond its exemplarity as bad writing that the piece is a failure to persuade

–

Even the sloppiest authors usually get the first sentence approximately right.

Do you know someone with insomnia who wakes up at 4am and ends up working and reading novels and cleaning closets and cycling through anxieties until the sky turns pink? I know her and sometimes I am her.

The purpose here is to introduce the character of an insomniac and make her sympathetic and engaging. The detail first, though, that plenty of people wake up at the wee hour of 4AM, or thereabout, to go to work. No pity points there, and while I comprehend that the point is she loses sleep, regardless of when it is, few but the literati elite will sympathize with her pre-sunrise wakeup. Lesson: know your audience.

The author is trying to convey the desperate meandering from task to task that is the torture of the insomniac seeking sleep. The problem is that she hasn't chosen examples which exemplify the condition or linked them, i.e. written, in a way which conveys the condition. She uses polysyndeton, extra conjunctions, which conveys quantity, but quantity is neither the only nor the most important characterization of the experience of insomnia. She doesn't write to convey the variety and often frivolity of the tasks, her desperation, or the interminable duration of the sleepless hours dripping by. There is a substantial disconnect between style and content in which the former betrays the latter to languor.

Now I've relaxed about using the objective case in English, even to the point where "than me" doesn't up by dander, at least when used without a linking verb. Still: I am her? The author doesn't make the mistake later so the possibilities remain that the paragraph was not edited or that the author, or editor, thinks the correct alternative would cause more confusion or grief in its uneducated audience. In either case, unfortunate.

The next paragraph:

I often hear friends and acquaintances talking about being up in the middle of the night, worrying, whirring, working. It’s not a boast but there is, to a certain extent, a personal mythology being advanced. There is a sort of counter-intuitive esprit de corps these anxious friends are tapping into. There is a definite and possibly weird element of pride.

Talking about being up in the middle of a lousy sentence. What a prepositional participial mishmash. The asyndeton and alliteration of worrying, whirring, working here is the same mistake as in the first paragraph and is whirring the right onomatopoetic word here? Insomniacs fly quickly about? Before she was cycling and reading. What mixed, unclear imagery. The remainder of the section is a confusion of indecipherable phrases:

• advancing a personal mythology
• sort of counter-intuitive esprit de corps
• a definite and possible weird element of pride

Their tales of insomnia are stories about how they came into existence? The morale is sort of counter-intuitive? The pride is definitely present, and possibly weird? The next paragraph, which desperately needs a concrete thesis, hypothesis, or at least definition of something, doubles down on the sophomoric adjectives:

• pretty universally
• bad thing
• possible that certain segments
• strange level
• common mystery

Then we read about the "tremendous artifice" of the energy via an example about coffee-drinkers craving more coffee, without explaining how it's related, but she keeps describing "energy" and so we don't know if she's talking about the coffee-drinkers or something else or anything at all.

Oh, and how can you be jangly? By clanging pots and pans? Perhaps she uses the less common meaning of upset, but coffee and/or insomnia now makes you irritable or upset? When? How? Please, dear writer, help me!

The next paragraph is cheap piece of rear-end covering, admitting that some people may be clinically anxious, meaning I don't know what exactly but presumably that in some cases anxiety is objective, involuntary, or a disease. This is just a cheap bow to science and reason as she plunks ahead without investigating how the science might impact her argument. Then she goes on to use the word addictive, so whatever.

There is a particular vitality in anxiety, a sort of nervy power that one can’t say is fun, exactly, but is nonetheless slightly addictive. It can be productive, in a crashing way. It gives us a feeling of motion, of momentum, of wheels turning. One gets used to it, maybe seeks it out. One inhabits it, sets up camp.

This is a noteworthy paragraph because it both demonstrates how not to depict an idea and is the point at which I get annoyed. She keeps using delimiting words like particular, sort of, feeling of, used to without actually following up with a definition, giving use the illusion of explanation. The style is vexing to serious readers and pleasing to the soft-minded. The next sentence is a cake-taker.

The power is not fun (but it is in some way, we're supposed to gather, I guess), but nonetheless slightly addictive? So something which may or may not be fun is anyway addictive. Slightly. Perfectly clear. It's also productive, in a crashing way. What exactly about the act of crashing is meant here? The energy give us a feeling of motion. So is there any actual motion? One maybe seeks it out, but if he doesn't, then does he accidentally set up camp there? 

The next is a sad spectacle that makes you long for a real writer:

She used as an inspiring example an employee who successfully battled stress by stopping to gaze at a tomato plant in the concrete, urban nightmare of his life.

Aside from its Oprah-esque you-can-too tune-in-at-11 mentality, it leaves out a relevant detail: how often did the man gaze: regularly, or once? Makes a difference, no? 

Anyway, you can read on if you want more phrases like invented a thing called, usually sort of blah, and pretty much, but writing like this is frustrating enough when it's about nonsense, but aggravating when it's about something good. It cheats you of both knowledge and experience. A sentence of G. K. Chesteron accomplishes the feat Ms. Roiphe missed:

One of the deepest and strangest of all human moods is the mood which will suddenly strike us perhaps in a garden at night, or deep in sloping meadows, the feeling that every flower and leaf has just uttered something stupendously direct and important, and that we have by a prodigy of imbecility not heard or understood it.

He lures is in with a long unrolling of simple words, grabs our attention with suddenly strike, slows down again to set two locations, and then slows down more as if asking us to lean in for a secret. Halfway he masterfully shifts to the perfect tense, making us feel as if we've missed the point, but rushes on about the importance of that point, finally calling us a fool for having missed it. The experience of reading the sentence is the topic of the sentence. 

It's not unlike Ms. Roiphe's piece with talk of "strange moods" and apparent simplicity, except it works and is beautifully brief, clear, and specific. We are curious about the experience and eager read it again, and it's a pity when you can't say that about writing. I sympathize with Ms. Roiphe's premise and so acutely feel the piece's lack of cogency. How frustrating it is to see just the glimmers behind the words instead of the idea in full radiance. 

Movie Review: If You Don't, I Will

or Arrête ou je continue. Written and directed by Sophie Fillières. 2014. 

*spoilers*

Every movie begins with a promise to its audience: to make good on the premise of its opening scene. The movie has until the final shot to make good on that commitment. Some finales fulfill in a grand gesture, a la 2001, others, like Mr. Hulot's Holiday, trot off in quiet, and some very few disguise their exits, prompting us to wonder whether we've been cheated or have missed something. If You Don't, I Will fits into the latter, smaller category. It opens with a gesture grand in implication but subtle in presentation: a couple looking at a painting that bears the line from Matthew's gospel, "God calls us to be perfect." Pomme is skeptical while her husband Pierre is outright offended, judging God presumptuous.

We don't know or even sense it at the time, but the call to perfection is the struggle of this troubled couple whose every exchange is a strain on both partners. Something, and we never find out what, has come between them and in every quarrel their reconciliation seems to ebb away. The movie drops a lot of hints as to what it might be–financial strain, a lack of children, infidelity, distance after Pomme's surgery–but these are all red herrings. We don't need to know why they're apart because we've been given the key at the beginning: perfection. Perfection for Pierre lies in loving his wife once again, and Pomme's salvation lies in reuniting with her husband. Or does it?

Throughout If You Don't, I Will Pomme suffers wound after wound. Sometimes they're emotional, such as the slights and chills of her husband, but they're as often physical. She falls in the shower, gets paper cuts, gets pestered by ants, loses of a button off her pants, has to dash for the bus, cuts her lip on glass, and on and on. The continuous barbs against her body magnify the emotional thorns her husband drives in every time he rejects one of her endless prompts for mere kindness. Sometimes she gives him a chance to compliment her, other times just to do things the way they used to, and always in response, rejection. In a bittersweet moment Pierre compliments Pomme by calling her honey, and she looks up ready to take the olive branch only to discover by his confusion that he endeared her by accident. The simple moment reveals that if Pierre would simply let go of something, his inclination to love Pomme would take over. Instead he willfully closes himself off.

Mathieu Amalric's performance of Pierre is a little masterpiece. Pierre is so closed off that at every turn he looks as if about to collapse in on himself. All of this implosive energy, in each gesture and word, looks as if it wants to burst forth in either love or hate, yet always retreats back in. We sense a resolve, a guarded barrier between what wants to come out and what willfully repressed. Pierre's gaze even seems ever to look past the Pomme he sees to find something terrible from which to retreat. His emotional disconnection climaxes in impotence when in a scene of poised eroticism Pomme exposes her breast to him, hoping to entice her husband, or perhaps test him. At the voluptuous sight Pierre is stolid, and a moment later Pomme cuts her lip on a glass.

The couple finally parts while hiking in their old wooded haunt, to which Pomme all but has to drag her husband. We assume that in leaving she's trying to teach him a lesson and that she'll soon come home, until night passes, and then the following day, and then day after day. In time we realize Pomme is wondering whether to return at all, wandering the primordial grounds to test whether she wants to return to life before Pierre, who back at home represses his fear for her by resuming their old routine. In fact Pierre sets out to find his wife only when Pomme's son tells him that something is gravely wrong. Brief and unsuccessful, the search is another impotent gesture. Back in the forest, Pomme meanders a long while, and don't we all when making a grave decision? We engage a little, and run away, tiptoe down one path, and then turn back for another. I think I can forgive Pomme her lengthy searching.

Two scenes in the woods symbolize the potential ends of Pomme's search. In the first, getting hungry, Pomme approaches a brace of hares, a couple in fact. She tells the male as she approaches, "Kill yourself. Cook yourself. Your wife will be safe." He might as well be Pierre, and we realize that Pomme is, or thinks herself, strong enough to get along without him. In the second, a chamois (a goat-antelope) stumbles into he hole where Pomme is spending the night. She watches him, and watches and watches, of course to no reply. It gets dark and she lights her lighter, resolved to see him. Pierre again? In the morning she helps the lost creature out of the hole. Can she do the same for her husband?

Pomme's choice, which I won't spoil, will invariably seem unsatisfactory insofar as it seems simultaneously decisive and arbitrary. After all, we know neither what separated the couple nor what might reasonably reunite them. Her decision, though, does not neglect the film's promise. We may not like Pomme's choice, but it forces us to ask where, in what, or in whose love we find our perfection.

Some Classics Whimsy: Coloring Pages

Some will tell you it is debt, corruption, and slackening moral standards that threaten the prosperity of today's children. I, however, point to a different scourge sabotaging childhoods throughout the land: inferior coloring pages. Oh yes, it's the high point of hot June afternoons and days when teacher just can't stiffen the sinews enough to teach, but what kind of pages are we giving our kids? Coloring should be a joy not bound by cheap photocopies.

Ah coloring. Whatever the means it's pure delight to open that box and take in the polychromatic splendor, watching one color fade into the next. There's no bad tool either. Who doesn't love the smooth roll of the crayon and its waxy sheen on the page. What a treat to watch a marker's ink slowly bleed into the paper, tincting it fiber by fiber. Pencils, though, were always my preference, with their superfine points you can nudge into every nook of the page. How soothing too their scratchy scraping on the paper.

Whatever your choice, you budge the little stick from its special rank and file and you're ready to color. Still we ought to support the joy of coloring not just with quality implements but worthy subjects.

I came across today, then, an old book of paper dolls, although both ignorant and indifferent to just what a paper doll is, I continue to refer to my findings as coloring pages. I noticed immediately their fine quality, especially the varying thicknesses of the lines which delineate the areas. More noteworthy though are their historical subjects, still more they're so far from the beaten path, and most of all that they're not simply generic drawings but sketches or composites of ancient artifacts. Take this page of Sappho, modeled off actual korai:

click to enlarge

To my astonishment its publisher, Bellerophon Books, is still in business and selling a variety of similar books which I hope are of similar quality. While Bellerophon offers a number of classically-themed books, their medieval alphabet looks perhaps the most fun to color. Imagine filling those swirling letters intertwined with their figures, bramble, and borders.

Here's another page from the volume I have, Great Women. Refreshingly it's not another bland picture of a leggy goddess frolicking in a tunic or toga. It's Boudicca, complete with authentic torc and carnyx.

She comes with a helmet and shield too, and Cleopatra with an array of headdresses. Again for you classicists, the Infamous Women volume includes Messalina and Agrippina.

Yes, these are probably too difficult for the wee ones, but better they scribble over Boudicca a bit, and perchance wonder about her, than fill in time-wasters. I should warn you, though, that these are definitely not for adults. It's not at all fun to look up the original art and artifacts and meticulously color in these pages. They're available on Amazon for about $5 each. Think of the children!

Movie Review: 300: Rise of An Empire

Directed by Noam Murro. 2014.

It's wisely observed that solemnity is a breath away from stupidity. Take, for example, the following pair: "The borders of Lacedaemon will mourn the death of a king descended from Hercules." vs. "The Greeks were betrayed by a hunchback." The former, reported in Herodotus, retains even in translation a sense of grandeur whereas the latter, written by Zack Snyder for 300: Rise of An Empire, invites chuckles. Now it may seem strange to begin the review of an action flick with quibbles about writing, but the movie was so heavily narrated and the action scenes so spectacularly forgettable that this 300 comes off as a drab, talky, slog.

In fact, I've forgotten all of the movie's sword-and-sandals action except for one part where the Greeks were fighting with big bronze axes. The highlight is of course the naval battle at Salamis, but an utter lack of environment dulls this climax. Without a sense of size, scale, strengths, topography, and geography, we're just watching activity in which any result is possible and therefore don't invest in the action.

I'm not at all opposed to set-piece battles and even whole movies revolving around one climactic brawl, whether The Two Towers or Waterloo, but you need to prepare the audience so we can wrestle with expectations and possibilities and, hopefully, engage the story. There are a few notable shots of ramming triremes, although the movie's best shot is of them still, and a great big Persian oil barge goes Exxon Valdez and then kaboom, but the action here is unremarkable.

The script doesn't redeem this 300 either, following up an interminable prologue by confusingly bouncing among 1) narration over Thermopylae, 2) flashbacks of Thermopylae 2) narration over Marathon, 3) Themistocles in the past trying to persuade the Spartans to commit ships, 4) Themistocles in the present fighting at Salamis, 5) Persian General Artemisia talking to Xerxes at various points in time, and 6) Artemisia fighting at Salamis. The plot is intelligible, but the sequence of events is confusing and enervates the momentum.

To its credit the script attempts to sketch two opposing characters in Themistocles and Artemisia, but it would be nice if it had ventured something beyond the fact that one loves Greece and the other hates it. The smoldering cool of Eva Green's Artemisia is the more interesting, but it wears over the course of even 100 minutes. She doesn't change or have any cause which might be refuted, and while she does bring about her own downfall, it's predicated off actions which are but hastily recounted, neither taking place during nor developed in the movie. Themistocles on the other hand is flat and dull. In truth I can't recall a thing he said. And then the two knock boots on Artemisia's barge because Zack Snyder is writing the script.

Given how much the film leans on Spartan Queen Gorgo's narration and how she's driven for vengeance like Artemisia, the two women should have been cast opposite instead of Artemisia and Themistocles. Since I can't resist speculating...

You could give parallel arcs to the two wronged women in which Gorgo, who lost her husband to a cause she didn't believe in, achieves justice in contrast to Artemisia, the victim of rape, who is consumed by her desire for vengeance. Then you could oppose Themistocles and Xerxes, in which beside the obvious theme of liberty opposing tyranny, Xerxes could chide Themistocles with the taunt that the fickle Athenian mob will turn on him. That would have been something.

I appreciate that both 300 flicks tried to flaunt a brash bravado and an unapologetic purity of purpose, but if a film's going to be so simple it needs to be flawless to be effective. The alternative is an adolescent mishmash from which we walk away stolid instead of stirred, hostile even to a scant script that can't support cheesy dialogue, lackluster pacing, flat acting, and dull, clumsy visuals. To be fair, I enjoyed bits of 300, but it's a shame such a source should yield anything so terribly forgettable.

Switching Off vs Switching Over

It's a trite saying of the self-important that sometimes you just need to relax. The claim isn't even tough to justify, for just about everyone feels either that he works hard or hard enough and even the most leisured seem to find themselves at the edge of exasperation. One can find plenty of intellectual confirmation for the cause too, with just about any school of thought or philosophy making room for a little rest and relaxation. Yet the key component to relaxation is in fact the work itself. You don't realize how pleasant and restorative is relaxation until you've pushed yourself to the limit.

Teaching this academic school year has been instructive for your blogging educator. The early years of teaching, one hopes successful teaching, follow a familiar path. First you learn to establish order and organization, then you find the ideal presentation of the curriculum as you have found it, then you slowly perfect the curriculum, finally learning to adapt it to students, time, and place. All along the way you develop and find your own voice, style, and teaching demeanor. Occasionally an upheaval at one step sends you back a few, but the process seems reliably sequential. It also seems like many professional endeavors, to accelerate. This year I've gotten pretty carried away, and I won't out my hubris by suggesting at which step I find myself.

Re-designing tests, scanning articles, making projects, I'm progressing to the point where work is my default activity. It is swallowing everything. Weekly Shakespeare? Gone. Online and mail-order lectures? Poof! The fruits of my leisure reading are found on my bedside desk, on which reside half-a-dozen or so books, opened but plopped text down a few pages in.

Worse, even my interest for other things seems to wane. Less often do I anymore awake on Saturdays yearning for Bach than do I rise to find my mind turning to tweaking yesterday's work. Instead of the old postprandial hankering to write a new blog post, I've found it easier just to tackle the next test or assignment coming down work's pike.

There's no villain in this story, though. I like my job, respect the material, and honor the agreement with my students and patrons. I can do no differently than I do. The curiosity is that even exciting, challenging, and valuable work, including intellectual work, can be stultifying. Man is multifarious. I recall still the tremendous indignation I felt toward the musicologist who wrote that, and I paraphrase, Mozart's musical abilities were developed radically beyond his other skills. (Emphasis mine.) Indeed they were, though, and the trio of interest, skill, and effort tend to amplify each other and resonate to the deafening of all other desires. We're often encouraged to be well rounded, but seldom reminded how difficult it is to keep that pleasing, burnished bent.

Again there's no villain here, except the extremities in which some virtues consume all of the oxygen, extinguishing others. It's easy to praise rest and moderation as well, but it's in fact even easier when you can feel the coarsening effect of immoderation. Naturally, to notice the effect you need to stop and reflect, which is tough to do when you're tired. One cannot reflect or meditate in exhaustion.

Of course, it's a trite saying of the self-important that sometimes you just need to relax. It's an easy enough claim to justify, for just about everyone feels–so what to do? It's easy to cry for moderation, but how exactly can one champion mediocrity? Anyway, effort is preferable to indolence, and tepid work means tepid relaxation.

It seems a prudent start to view relaxation not simply as the absence of work, but also as calling for the cultivation of other virtues; the slackening of one line to pull on another. I ought to note that here by work I mean anything done by necessity or disposition, i.e. something which inclines toward extremity. In this way one cultivates an interest which opposes the other to balance. In the alternative, either the lacuna of inactivity swallows up work or the wave of work fills the crevices of your mind. By an opposed arrangement vigor is checked so that it neither dominates nor collapses into sloth, and instead of relaxation as idleness, we have purposeful repose which repairs and permits the exercise of all virtues in quiet, humble balance.

How Not to Write, Think, or Be

All artists strive for a connection between form and meaning and I'm always happy to point out when they succeed. Take this condemnable Salon piece which is as intellectually confused as it is syntactically jumbled. Now Salon's suffered from political dysentery for years and it's apparent willingness to hire anyone on the left has liquefied the once esteemed publication into a chowder of cheap ingredients. Still this article makes me wonder: do they edit their pieces to make them worse? If not this is a shockingly inept display from an author and editor.

Let's look at the choice grammar first.

I am going to start with three beloved movies of my childhood, and end with a suggestion of why liberals will probably never be able to come to grips with what they winningly call “inequality.”

Start what? Discoing? It's probably not a great idea to leave out the main verb of the first sentence. Then he sets up his thesis as a conclusion. "Will probably never be able to come to grips with what they" is one of those phrases that would vanish had the author read it aloud even once. What a clunker. Next, we wonder what "winningly" could possibly mean here. Charmingly? Successfully? Now we wonder why "'inequality'" is in quotations. I'll give a pass on the referential use of "of" but boy is it awkward. It's best to restrict that use to idioms.

Then we get this work of brilliance:

Well, no. And with that acknowledgement, let me advance to my bold hypothesis: The dick joke is not always what it seems to be. The dick joke is not always your friend.

First, is this a hypothesis or thesis? Is an experiment going to follow or are you laying out argumentation? Choose the proper word, please. Worse, though, we realize the statement isn't even the "hypothesis," because the phrase "what it seems to be" explains nothing but rather refers back to the previous paragraph. It's always nice when the author can't be bothered to explain his idea in one clear sentence.

Alright, I'll drop the grammatical dissection. The article is badly written. What about its content?

Let's look at his three points:

1. Animal House isn't liberal because its protagonists are like liberals' bad guys in real life.
2. Caddyshack isn't liberal because conservatives make fun of country club grandees too.
3. Ghostbusters isn't liberal because in it one government official is bad and the good guys run a business. 

Well guess what, you verbally incontinent intellectually costive fool: the movies aren't political at all. The frat boys of Animal House aren't heroes, but we rally around them because they're enthusiastic and frank. Nobody likes stuck up country club blowhards, and finally, the right doesn't have a monopoly on entrepreneurship. The Ghostbusters aren't right wingers because the EPA dweeb lets the ghosts out. Neither party has a monopoly on any virtue, and to taint any by claiming it for one ought to mark any man the fool as much as heedless ordination into political file.

Oh, and whence this cheap shot?

Drink, take and lie: translate it into Latin and it could be the motto of the One Percent.

Yeah I hear there's a really active Eta Sigma Phi over at Bear Stearns. Try this one on for size:

Quam recitas meus est libellus: sed male cum recitas, incipit esse tuus.

The Joy of Contrarianism

A great deal of philosophical, scientific, and broadly intellectual investigation involves the search for universal truths: A is A, force equals mass multiplied by acceleration, murder is immoral. Yet man has always had a fascination with the aberration, be it bad boys or black pearls. There is often pleasure in variety, even in anomaly. As applies to human action, the maxim may simply Grouch Marx's that no one wants to be part of the club that will have him as a member, a predilection which can take an unhealthy turn into oikophobia and hatred of the familiar. Whatever the condition, I hope it's not serious, because I've got it.

How else can I explain the contrarian joy I find in not watching the Oscars tonight? And major sporting events, and the darling shows of the critics, and so on down the populist line. It's so pleasant to walk another path and remain in ignorance of the vulgar, and for once I don't wholly mean vulgar in a pejorative sense but merely common. Of course it's always hard to tell whether I don't like the subject or simply its popularity. I suppose if the whole nation were suddenly glued to Don Giovanni that I would join in.

Maybe not, though. Maybe I'd put on The Magic Flute out of spite. Childish perhaps, but possible, for popular success confuses the two most cherished elitist beliefs: that great art has universal relevance and that the majority is always wrong.

Perhaps that's not the appeal of contrarianism, then. Maybe it's the way standing out, even if in some infinitesimally small way, seems to magnify the deliberate nature of the change. Just the teensiest bit of effort makes one feel less the lemming and more the individual, even when the change is of no other consequence. The slightest choice seems to liberate one from the torpor of conformity and to energize my studies. I'm doing no great work this evening, I don't think, but how precious it seems, how much more mine.

I also feel, quite foolishly perhaps, that I'm getting a jump on all the rubes when I'm walking out of step during popular events. In fact I've often imagined I could best Lex Luthor and take over the world in a cinch were I to play Don't Stop Believin' in every American bar during the World Cup, which I figure would incapacitate most of the our humble globe's population.

World domination aside, I'll have to make do with that comforting ignorance of bourgeois boobery. I don't know a lick about any of the frippery which adorns tonight's spectacle. Such are the joys. Sure, I'm missing out on dishing some facile ridicule, and who doesn't like that, but they're fish in a barrel. What non-Congressional body could possibly be more ripe for insult?

No, I'm just going to sit with my tea, T. S. Eliot, and Bach in this corner of civilization which is tonight especially private.