Author: Gil

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Monday Morning Montaigne: Of coaches

As near as I can tell, this is Montaigne’s progression in Of coaches (pp. 831-849):

  1. I don’t like riding in coaches; I’m much more comfortable on horseback.
  2. Some ancient kings and emperors sure used some strange and extravagant means of conveying their coaches.
  3. Kings and emperors tend to spend their subjects’ money liberally and ostentatiously.
  4. People sure were inventive in the days of old, and the past is like a million foreign countries.
  5. Boy, have we committed some awful atrocities on the natives in the Americas.
  6. The king of Peru never used a coach, but was borne in a throne of gold by his subjects.

It’s that second-to-last section that M. focuses on, detailing a number of grotesque abuses that the Spanish inflicted on the natives in the new world. Reflecting on the ill treatment of the natives, he laments that America wasn’t discovered in the time of Alexander, who could have brought out the better aspects of their souls, rather than push them into darkness and war as the explorers did. I was caught up on that point, as it seemed to indicate that M. thinks the world would have been better off without a Catholic church.

Moreover, I was fascinated by the notion that, in his time, the Americas  really were a new world. I’m not sure I ever considered how Columbus’ discovery was understood in that era (the first century or so after 1492). M. writes:

Our world has just discovered another world (and who will guarantee us that it is the last of its brothers, since the daemons, the sibyls, and we ourselves have up to now been ignorant of this one?) no less great, full, and well-limbed than itself, yet so new and so infantile that it is still being taught its A B C; not fifty years ago it knew neither letters, nor weights and measures, nor clothes, nor wheat, nor vines. . . . If we are right to infer the end of our world, and that poet is right about the youth of his own age, this other world will only be coming into the light when ours is leaving it. The universe will fall into paralysis; one member will be crippled, the other in full vigor.

I’m sure there’s some cutting remark to be made here, contrasting America with Europe, but I’m not the guy to make it.

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What It Is: 1/26/09

What I’m reading: The Alcoholic, a boring comic book by Jonathan Ames and Dean Haspiel, and The Hot Rock, by the late, lamented Donald Westlake. Otherwise, same as last week: Montaigne and Clive James.

What I’m listening to: Bebel Gilberto records

What I’m watching: The last episodes of Arrested Development.

What I’m drinking: Plymouth & Q Tonic

What Rufus is up to: Playing with his new squeaky toy, a big plush pheasant. It’s holding up remarkably well to his chomping, but he’s gotten crazy-possessive about it.

Where I’m going: To Philadelphia next Saturday to visit a pal.

What I’m happy about: Since dropping Instapundit, Vodkapundit and Andrew Sullivan from my rotation, I’m able to read my daily RSS feeds much more quickly!

What I’m sad about: That the last season of Arrested Development fell so flat.

What I’m pondering: How much weight Portia de Rossi dropped from the beginning of the series to the end. We might have to go back and check out the first few episodes just to see.

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Location, Location, Location

Why New Jersey rocks:

New Jersey’s small size has a lot to do with both its much-inflated deficiencies and its virtues. A lot is packed into limited territory. Urban squalor is squeezed up against dairy farms; picturesque villages right out of a New England landscape are a sneeze away from sulfurous factories and malodorous highways. For a lot of people, caricature of the state’s deficiencies is an efficient way to reduce its multifaceted nature to a clear meaning.

The jumble of contrasts is, on the contrary, the source of Jersey’s remarkable harvest of talent. It drives certain people to either build a unified artistic sensibility out of the divisions around them, or to create art unhindered by a narrow identity.

and why Billy Joel sucks:

I decided to make a serious effort to identify the consistent qualities across Joel’s “body of work” (it almost hurts to write that) that make it so meretricious, so fraudulent, so pitifully bad. And so, risking humiliation and embarrassment, I ventured to the Barnes & Noble music section and bought a four-disc set of B.J.’s “Greatest Hits,” one of which was a full disc of his musings about art and music. I must admit that I also bought a copy of an album I already had — Return of the Grievous Angel, covers of Gram Parsons songs by the likes of the Cowboy Junkies and Gillian Welch, whose “Hickory Wind” is just ravishing—so the cashier might think the B.J. box was merely a gift, maybe for someone with no musical taste. Yes, reader. I couldn’t bear the sneer, even for your benefit.

And I think I’ve done it! I think I’ve identified the qualities in B.J.’s work that distinguish his badness from other kinds of badness: It exhibits unearned contempt. Both a self-righteous contempt for others and the self-approbation and self-congratulation that is contempt’s backside, so to speak. Most frequently a contempt for the supposed phoniness or inauthenticity of other people as opposed to the rock-solid authenticity of our B.J.

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To a Boyle

I was listening to The B.S. Report — the podcast by Bill Simmons, a.k.a. Sports Guy — in my car yesterday. Simmons was talking with “Cousin Sal” about the weekend’s football games, when the talk turned to the recent spate of Oscar-worthy movies they’d seen.

On over-the-air sports radio, which I haven’t listened to in several years, I would get pretty incensed when Mike & the Mad Dog would spend 20 minutes talking about last night’s episode of The Sopranos, John Wayne flicks, or why the remake of Sabrina was much better than the original.

(I’m not making up that last one. It led to the immortal line by Chris “Mad Dog” Russo, “I don’t see why people were so ga-ga over Audrey Hepburn,” confirming my suspicion that a too-excessive interest in sports is clearly a symptom of repressed homosexuality.)

With Simmons and his cousin, on the other hand, I was interested in their opinions and their looser takes on the movies. Also, both of them have worked as comedy writers for Jimmy Kimmel’s show, so I figured they may have funny stories about some of the flicks.

While they praised The Wrestler pretty highly — Sal watched a DVD screener of it with his new pal Roddy Piper — both men considered Slumdog Millionaire the best movie they saw last year.

And that’s when it struck me: I’ve been watching Danny Boyle’s movies for 12 years now, through the ups (Shallow Grave, Trainspotting) and downs (A Life Less Ordinary, The Beach) and a lesser-seen gem (Millions). At no point did I ever think he was headed for some sort of mainstream approval.

And now he’s made a movie that a couple of sports-betting maniacs from Boston consider the best flick of the year. This world is full of wonders.

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Pardon the Interruption

I was happy to see that our new president made the same flub in his oath of office that I did during my marriage vows, speaking before the officiant finished his first line. I’m also happy that our officiant did a better job of keeping his composure than Chief Justice Roberts did.

I thought his inauguration address as a bit flat, but I suppose it makes sense: Obama’s high-flying rhetorical style is more fitting for a campaign, and yesterday’s event was an occasion for letting the American people know what challenges lie ahead, or something like that. Marc Ambinder at The Atlantic did a pretty good job of rhetorical annotation of the address here and here.

Anyway, the subject that interested me in the last days of the Bush regime was that of pardons. The previous president, we recall, got into some hot water with the late pardon of Marc Rich, which turned out to be of a piece with the Clintons’ “it’s all for sale!” regime.

Pres. Bush’s final pardons — commutations, to be exact — were for a pair of border patrol agents who shot an unarmed man in the back and tried to hide the evidence. Taking a stand against mandatory minimum sentences — in a drug crime, no less! — the president determined that the two men had served enough time for shooting an unarmed man in the back and trying to hide the evidence.

The fact that Pres. Bush issued fewer pardons and commutations than any other two-termer should come as no surprise, given his record on executions while governor of Texas. But I admit that I was curious about whether he would revisit the case of the American Taliban, John Walker Lindh.

I have a fascination for people who have gone so far from “normal” that they become nearly unrecognizable. Lindh is one of those personae, having followed a path from a comfortable suburban life to a fetid basement of a prison in Afghanistan, at the age of 20. How does someone get alienated from his life that he winds up in a world so far from his ken?

A year or two later, Lindh was in the Supermax prison, having taken a plea agreement in which he agreed to make no public statements for the duration of his sentence (17-20 years, depending on good behavior), and to drop any claims that he’d been tortured after he was captured. (He’s in a medium security facility in Indiana now.)

And it’s that aspect of the case that made me wonder if the former president would commute Lindh’s sentence. It’s not that I think he should be excused for what he did; it’s more a question of what was done to him. I think Lindh’s case provided an   early example of how the War on Terror could lead to rampant abuse of rights, a blurring of the duties of the departments of defense and justice.

I didn’t really expect our departed president to engage in any degree of introspection about Lindh’s case, or about the bigger issues that it presaged about our government’s abuse of law in the past eight years, but it would’ve been an interesting signal if he’d chosen to revisit that case. It’s not like we’ve been dealing in nuances this decade.

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Lost in the Supermarket: Whiter Teeth . . . Chicago-Style!

I always find it sad/funny when companies suffer font blowouts on their marketing materials. It’s a shame/riot to see a print ad with super-high-end photography and a tagline that renders in Courier. So my attention was caught by the packaging for something called “U SMILE”, an “advanced tooth whitening system” that employs Chicago, a Mac font that hasn’t been seen in the wild since around 1997:

Given the fact that I can’t find a website for this product, I’m inclined to think that it actually does date back to the days of that font.

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Monday Morning Montaigne: On some verses of Virgil

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I had some trepidation going into On some verses of Virgil (pp. 774-831 in the Everyman’s edition), because it’s more than 50 pages long and I’ve, um, never read Virgil. My fears were unwarranted; “some” verses turned out to be 8 lines, and those 8 lines turned out to be the launching pad for a fantastic essay on love, sex and marriage. I should know better by now.

The actual verses he quotes are:

The goddess [Venus] ceased to speak, and snowy arms outflung

Around him faltering, soft fondling as she clung.

He quickly caught the wonted flame; the heat well-known

Entered his marrow, ran through every trembling bone.

Often a brilliant lightning flash, not otherwise,

Split by a thunderclap, runs through the cloudy skies

[. . .]

He spoke,

Gave the embraces that she craved; then on her breast,

Outpoured at last, gave himself up to sleep and rest.

With age and ill-health are wracking him, Montaigne uses those verses to explore the passions of his past, and sums up early that erotic love has no place in marriage. Not if you want your wife to keep her wits about her. “I see no marriages that sooner are troubled and fail than those that progress my means of beauty and amorous desires,” he tells us. “It needs more solid and stable foundations, and we need to go at it circumspectly, this ebullient ardor is no good for it.”

That said, M. doesn’t portray women as scheming, evil creatures. If anything, he finds them to be victims of the rules set up by men. His women have needs, desires, and sometimes make decisions as irrationally as his men do. By essay’s end, he contends that men and women “are cast in the same mold; except for education and custom, the difference is not great.” It’s a wonderful journey to this point, as M. uncovers the parts we keep covered and shows how we’re all prisoners of sex.

What makes this essay such a joy to me isn’t just M.’s hip take on gender issues, but his explanation for why he needs to write about the topic.

I am annoyed that my essays serve the ladies only as a public article of furniture, an article for the parlor. This chapter will put me in the boudoir. I like their society when it is somewhat private; when public, it is without favor or savor.

[. . .] What has the sexual act — so natural, so necessary and so just — done to mankind, for us not to dare talk about it without shame and for us to exclude it from serious and decent conversation? We boldly pronounce the words “kill,” “rob,” “betray”; and this one we do not dare pronounce, except between our teeth. Does that mean that the less we breathe of it in words, the most we have the right to swell our thoughts with it?

It’s as if he’s building Howard Stern’s platform, four hundred years early. Later in the essay, he even complains to Nature about being unable to satisfy a woman because his penis is too small: “Certainly she has treated me unfairly and unkindly, and done me the most enormous damage.”

In Howard Stern fashion, he explains his openness:

I owe a complete portrait of myself to the public. The wisdom of my lesson is wholly in truth, in freedom, in reality; disdaining, in the list of its real duties, those pretty, feigned, customary provincial rules; altogether natural, constant and universal; of which propriety and ceremony are daughters, but bastard daughters.

[. . .] Our life is part folly, part wisdom. Whoever writes about it only reverently and according to the rules leaves out more than half of it.

I wish I had time and space to write more about M.’s character. I feel like that’s my biggest failure with these writeups: an inability to convey the joy of meeting this man through his essays.

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What It Is: 1/19/09

What I’m reading: Re-reading Montaigne’s “On some verses of Virgil” and a few chapters of Cultural Amnesia. Clive James just dropped the unmitigated smackdown on Walter Benjamin. (Boy, I really oughtta start watching these sometime.)

What I’m listening to: Pretty random stuff on my iTunes, as I think about compiling another Mad Mix.

What I’m watching: The 3rd season of Arrested Development, which is godawful. It’s incredible how off-the-rails the show got.

What I’m drinking: Bluecoat & tonic. And some Pacifico Clara.

What Rufus is up to: Entertaining my pal’s 3-year-old daughter, and missing another Sunday hike, thanks to the snow.

Where I’m going: Nowhere special. Although I may take today off to celebrate my black heritage, and drive into NYC to catch Synecdoche, New York.

What I’m happy about: My wife has her first commercial photo shoot today! (Also, the Eagles lost in the NFC Championship game. Again. And my wife & I had a great belated birthday dinner at Chef’s Table on Saturday.)

What I’m sad about: Will nobody think of the poor birds? (Just kidding: awesome job on landing that Airbus in the Hudson, although it would’ve been even more amazing if he could’ve landed on the deck of the Intrepid.)

What I’m pondering: Selling my 15″ Macbook Pro and using this 13″ Macbook Air as my laptop.