"Stop playing Beethoven!"

Two notes: First, the movie under discussion is violent and profane; don't see it unless you're comfortable with that. Second, spoilers follow, and I wish the context clue of "it comes very late in the movie" were enough to tip everyone off to that, but might as well follow Internet etiquette on this one.

There's a scene from Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained that's sticking with me. It comes very late in the movie. The plot to that point: King Schultz is a German bounty hunter working in the American South. As a German, he finds slavery distasteful and racism ridiculous, but he's an ironist rather than a radical. He's fond of casually comparing the violence of his job, which he does with skill and panache, with the violence of slavery. He and his ex-slave protege Django have spent the middle third of the movie infiltrating a horrifically corrupt plantation in order to buy and rescue Django's wife; their plot involves pretending to be fully amoral slavers. Django, because of his great love, plays his role fully; Schultz finds it increasingly difficult to keep his poker face in the presence of cruelty. Eventually, Schultz and Django's scheme fails, and the pair is exposed.

So here's the scene: the furious plantation owner, Calvin Candie, has decided to humiliate the intruders by terrifying them into a financially ruinous deal, so that they'll escape with their lives and little else. While Candie draws up the papers, Schultz stews in a sumptuous parlor. A harpist plays Fur Elise. Schultz sees memories flash before him of the day's terrors. For the first time in the film, he loses his composure, lurching angrily toward the harpist. He can't abide this refinement and beauty in a place just outside of which slaves can be murdered by dogs. "Stop playing Beethoven!"

Candie, noticing Schultz's outburst, first shrugs it off as the bitterness of a man bested in intellectual combat. But it's not shame, it's moral contempt. And when Candie understands this, he decides to complete the humiliation, saying that the deal can't conclude without a handshake. He offers his hand, so that Schultz must visibly signal accommodation with and hence submission to a system of racism and slavery that now disturbs him to the core. And Schultz has reached a point where he can no longer ironize his morality. He cannot cross this line. Some things are more important than survival. Schultz shoots Candie through the heart. For this he's quickly shot down by a henchman, and... well, the movie is really Django's story, and I won't ruin any more of it.

For those of us that thought the meta-concerns of Inglorious Basterds blurred out the moral realities required for a consideration of Nazi Germany, this moment of moral clarity is a blessed relief, and a challenge. Which hands are we shaking? And must we refuse?

The movie's not perfect. It's troubling how what is badass crowds out what is good in so many American movies, and this line of thought applies to Django Unchained. But it should also be known that Tarantino's taken the old trope of the out-for-only-himself gunslinger's self-sacrificial awakening (see also: Han Solo) and deployed it more than just convincingly, with the special help of Christoph Waltz's acting. I can't get the scene out of my mind.

Logic.

I should also mention here that I wrote two posts about logic for First Thoughts:

• "In Defense of Symbolic Logic"
• "More on Symbolic vs. Aristotelian Logic"

Writing about logic made me wish I could set everything aside and actually do some research on current schools of thought in mathematical and philosophical logic, but there's only so much time.

Warning.

Warning: This blog might be turning into a tech blog. I'm at a stage in my career where I need to set the "read at whim" philosophy aside for a while and make myself a little more generally useful. This will probably mean more blogging: if I'm denying myself pleasure reading, I'll probably do some writing. I don't know what the balance of content will be, and I may do some of the following:

• change blog platforms
• spin off a secondary blog, if I'm clearly writing in two categories
• choose a less public way of getting writing to people (e.g., e-mail)

I'd also like to put some work into making it a little bit faster for me to get finished posts posted. Right now I do almost all of my writing in Notepad++, a free Windows text editor with some nice extra features. Then I copy what I write into a browser window and fuss around with formatting for a while.

It'd be great if I could submit posts directly from the draft files on my hard drive, and even better if I could just write in Markdown and have it work on the blog, but this may be tricky with Blogger. (Another thing I really should have done by now is install the spell-check plugin for Notepad++... I'll do that after I publish this post.)

How to deal with free time.

Life after college has been much more pleasant than life during college. And yet I never blog! I'm thinking I should chalk that up to the fact that when I don't have anything else to do, I'd always rather read something new than write about something I just read. Back at the university, I had classwork hovering over my free time, and I knew I shouldn't pick up that novel, but if I just write a quick blog post... The day job doesn't intrude into my reading time like that.

The good news, maybe, is that I'm trying to put aside most or all of my pleasure reading so that I can teach myself how to do new things with computers. If I don't have a book at hand, I may end up writing when I don't want to study.

Hmm. I guess I could have made a tweet of this after all: "Life's so leisurely that I don't have time to procrastinate."

Sing one for the old times.

What has happened to me? Have I forgotten about this blog's most fundamentally annoying feature? The Mountain Goats have a new album out, and I haven't done a week-long feature or a song-by-song analysis. Have I consigned another band to the used-to-be-my-favorite pile, along with Pearl Jam and Wilco?

Perhaps, and Transcendantal Youth is actually a nice album to mark the shift. In retrospect I can tell I was trying a little too hard to enjoy the last few Mountain Goats albums (Heretic Pride, The Life of the World to Come, and All Eternals Deck), and if I wrote up those albums now I think I'd be more likely to call out the clunkers, of which there are definitely a few on each album. But now I'm feeling a certain distance even from the stronger songs, so let's talk about why.

I can't get into details here, but I had some bad times in 2004, and to me it seemed like the evangelical Christianity I'd grown up with didn't have the resources to help me make sense of what I was going through. So I spent a few years trying to cobble together a new way of looking at the world. This involved a lot of intellectual posturing, as any long-time reader of this blog will have seen quite clearly, but it also involved some emotional reconstruction. And there's this running theme in Mountain Goats song of compassion for people who are struggling to get free of trouble that overwhelms them, even those who thrash about in really counterproductive ways. See "The Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton" and "You Were Cool" for the classic examples of this. Or, from the new album, "Until I Am Whole":

On a picnic bench alone,
Watch the sky go dark.
Dig my nails into my hands,
Hope it leaves a mark.

I think I'll stay here,
Til I feel whole again.
I don't know when.

I mean, the exact details aren't mine, but...

How could you live, being this raw all the time? I've managed to get a job, an apartment, various bank accounts, and so forth, nothing special, a fairly standard social role, and it seems like you just have to close your mind to these things to function. Perhaps I could put my headphones on and listen to "In Memory of Satan" (a song about the weeks or months when you've had to cut yourself off from all your friends to be alone with your soul's darkness) and feel about it the way I used to feel about "Distant Stations" from All Hail West Texas, but the song is about a past self now, and as a rule I don't like my past selves. In your late twenties, you can't let stuff like that cut through.

None of this is to say that I don't enjoy Transcendental Youth; I'm a sucker for these horn arrangements and the band doesn't sound like it's just trying out random genres in the studio like they have on some other albums. It's just a long way of saying that this is probably this blog's last long Mountain Goats post.

Clark's Nutcracker.

I really don't have time to elaborate on this, but one thing you may not know about me is that I am kind of a fan of corvids, and this post about the Clark's Nutcracker's seed-gathering habits as related to the life of a reader... well, I liked it.

Peaceful depravity.

"Mr Bulstrode was conscious of being in a good spiritual frame and more than usually serene, under the influence of his innocent recreation. He was doctrinally convinced that there was a total absence of merit in himself; but that doctrinal conviction may be held without pain when the sense of demerit does not take a distinct shape in memory and revive the tingling of shame or the pang of remorse. Nay, it may be held with intense satisfaction when the depth of our sinning is but a measure of forgiveness, and a clenching proof that we are peculiar instruments of the divine intention. The memory has as many moods as the temper, and shifts its scenery like a diorama. At this moment Mr Bulstrode felt as if the sunshine were all one with that of far-off evenings when he was a very young man and used to go out preaching beyond Highbury. And he would willingly have held that service of exhortation in prospect now. The texts were there still, and so was his facility in expounding them. His brief reverie was interrupted by the return of Caleb Garth..."

-from Middlemarch, chapter 53

Top fifty.

Oblique thoughts on a controversy too silly to link to.

I have been reading some poems lately, never mind by whom, and I've been a little sad to notice how strongly I react to the gender of the author. A man writes well about women, and I ask: "Would I say that about someone?" A woman writes well about men, and I ask, "Would she say that about me?" See when I identify with the speaker? So you ask me to make a list of the albums that have meant the most to me, and I have to admit, it's probably going to have a lot of men on it. More often than I'd like to admit, I've gotten into a book or an album or a movie because its perspective on the world was mostly similar to mine.

It's a sign of cultural privilege, I think, that I wasn't more often made (or even asked) to reckon with perspectives different from my own. It would be a sign of maturity to more deliberately seek out such perspectives. To the extent I've done this, it actually hasn't been so bad.

All this is to say that a list of my favorite music, it would reflect a lot of things about the culture I come from, in ways that even self-awareness can't efface.

(If you must know the context, I can provide this link without feeling irresponsible.)

Civility.

Brandon Watson expresses it well:

Civility is the practice of maintaining civic good relations, where civic good relations are those relations that make society 'work' in some sense. (The old Aristotelian name for them would be civic friendships.) Society is a way in which we live together, and civic good relations are those relations among the people in society which make living together possible and viable, either because they are pleasant, or because they are useful, or because they are good for us. In this sense you can have civic good relations with people you don't really like at all; in such cases you simply recognize that, whatever problems you have with them, you have to live with them to achieve certain good things, and you act accordingly. 

[...] 

All the mechanisms of democratic politics depend for their success on reliable venues for rhetorical communication; good rhetorical communication will often require argument. But you can have a pretty successful democratic politics based less on argument than on human sympathy, and one finds in fact in democratic politics that resolution of serious disputes is very often resolved not by argument but by compromise or by mutual sympathy or by a live-and-let-live approach. We should certainly be thankful for that; otherwise our societies would have failed long ago.

Of course it's election season again, and there have been a few uncomfortable culture-war flare-ups already. I'd lament the intensity of the polarization, but I'm actually not convinced that we're anywhere near a high-tide of civic division. On the other hand, social networks do give us new modes of engagement, and it's not clear that the old practices that sustain a civil society transfer easily to the highly performative world of social media.

UPDATE: Read the good comment.

Joys of used books.

Two characters discuss a scholar:

"'He has got no good red blood in his body,' said Sir James.

"'No. Somebody put a drop under magnifying-glass, and it was all semicolons and parentheses," said Mrs Cadwallader."

-from Chapter 8 of Middlemarch

In the margins of the copy I got from a used book store, written in pencil:

Gha!
Sickle-
cell

Vibrant.

Thomas Frank tackles vibrancy:

Every city is either vibrant these days or is working on a plan to attain vibrancy soon. The reason is simple: a city isn’t successful— isn’t even a city, really—unless it can lay claim to being “vibrant.” Vibrancy is so universally desirable, so totemic in its powers, that even though we aren’t sure what the word means, we know the quality it designates must be cultivated. The vibrant, we believe, is what makes certain cities flourish. The absence of vibrancy, by contrast, is what allows the diseases of depopulation and blight to set in.

This formulation sounded ridiculous to me when I first encountered it. Whatever the word meant, “vibrancy” was surely an outcome of civic prosperity, not its cause. Putting it the other way round was like reasoning that, since sidewalks get wet when it rains, we can encourage rainfall by wetting the sidewalks. But to others, the vibrancy mantra is profoundly persuasive. [...] Specifically, vibrancy transforms communities by making them more prosperous.

-Thomas Frank, "Dead End on Shakin' Street"

Some thoughts:

1. Well, now that I've read this, "vibrant" has gone into the category with "quirky" as words I can only use with implicit reference to marketing campaigns.
2. This is of course an attack on city- and corporation-subsidized vibrancy, not actual urban life. Baltimore has a big foundation-funded street fair called Artscape ("America's largest free arts festival," whatever that means). For five years or so, a local artists' collective ran an independent DIY festival called Whartscape as explicit counterprogramming. It's the nation's Artscapes that are under consideration, not our Whartscapes.
3. How much money is actually going towards vibrancy efforts? Frank talks about "blowing millions setting up gallery districts and street fairs": at a representative event, where does the money come from? How much does the Station North Arts District in Baltimore actually cost the city? Probably the answer varies a bit from city to city.
4. Even if vibrancy as a whole can't be measured, particular events are perfect fodder for pie charts and presentations. It's way easier to report "we got two new galleries" or "festival attendence was up 11%" than it is to tackle the problem of public schools or build consensus for a bigger policy change. Which doesn't excuse going for the easy path.
5. If foundations are trying to solicit donations from corporations and rich businesspeople, wouldn't you expect them to lean pretty hard on the idea of attracting a big base of yuppies for corporations to hire? Whereas if in practice a lot of money gets put toward smaller-scale community efforts, they wouldn't make that the main part of the pitch, would they? It'd help to see some numbers on where arts funding goes.
6. Throughout the article there's an assumption that cities are using vibrancy efforts to compete with each other. What if they're actually trying to compete with their own suburbs?

Too good for Twitter.

I know I'm going to want to remember the wording of this at some point in the future and I'll never recover it from Twitter:

christ, weakened by scandal and floundering in the political fight of his life, ignores advisors' advice and plays the grace card

-@markleidner

Mark Leidner, if you're wondering, is a poet who's written, among other things, a great little book of aphorisms. I'm not sure if he's just after the "grace" pun or means something more serious. That dissonance of meaning is probably the point, but what do I know.

Progress.

Pritcher had watched the phenomenon of Lens Image expansion before but he still caught his breath. It was like being at the visiplate of a spaceship storming through a horribly crowded Galaxy without entering hyperspace. The stars diverged towards them from a common center, flared outwards and tumbled off the edge of the screen. Single points became double, then globular. Hazy patches dissolved into myriad points. And always the illusion of motion.

-from Second Foundation by Isaac Asimov

There's nothing like old science fiction to make you feel like you're living in the future. Here, Asimov has a character in the far, far future be unnerved by what's basically that old Windows starfield screensaver.

Transcendental Youth news.

I've been failing to bother people with excessive Mountain Goats posting. That used to be a big part of this blog, and now all I can do is collect a few things related to the forthcoming album.

As the Convergence of All that I Love* continues, John Hodgman's written an appreciation of the Mountain Goats as part of the Transcendental Youth album press release. In part:

These are the consolations; and if some of his songs suggest that there are real hells on earth, other songs remind that the heavens are equally close at hand. 

(Sometimes they are even the same songs.) 

It is my impression that this is the ecstasy John Darnielle is feeling: that thrill of having survived, escaped for even a second to enjoy those small transcendent delights, and to sing of them.

And then there's a new single, "Cry for Judas":
The Mountain Goats - Cry for Judas by MergeRecords

UPDATE: Horn arrangements are by Matthew E. White, whose music, it turns out, is ear-grabbing:
Matthew E. White "One of These Days" by Matthew E. White

*Superchunk, the Mountain Goats, and John Hodgman all used to be separate pop-culture obsessions for me. But then the Mountain Goats hired Superchunk drummer Jon Wurster, and soon enough Mountain Goats singer John Darnielle was appearing on Superchunk albums and releasing records on Superchunk singer Mac MacCaughan's record label. As these three merge (so to speak) into a single entity, I'm finding you can get to most of the other things I dig in just two or three steps.

Batman.

If you want a good perspective on Christopher Nolan as a filmmaker, read Richard Brody's review of The Dark Knight Rises:

Nolan doesn’t hang dollar signs on his screen; he’s not looking to impress viewers with the colossal scale of his project, but, rather, with his own grim and relentless labors. “The Dark Knight Rises” is not a movie of conspicuous consumption but of conspicuous production, with Nolan himself playing the unfortunate Atlas who bears a cinematic world of dour doings on his lonely shoulders, all the while needing viewers to know how hard he’s working for them. The problem with the movie isn’t any lack of warmth or humanity (qualities that don’t need to be displayed because they’re often effectively evoked through cold and inhuman means) but a lack of wonder. Nolan never seems to surprise himself, and his own inventions have little inspiration but, rather, a sense of a problem solved.

But for the sake of the kid that read the whole Knightfall series over a series of summer Saturdays spent not buying anything in Borders, I'll say I enjoyed the way they handled Bane in this movie.

But, hey, everybody's got a review of this movie. I've got a theory about Christopher Nolan's artistic past and future. Inception was a movie about making movies, right? What if we read Nolan's whole career this way? Here's what I'm thinking:

• At some point in the hazy past, the Nolan brothers wrote a script for a romantic comedy. It would have been their All the Real Girls. It would have summed up all their hopes, dreams, and joys. The writing retreat was perfect, idyllic even. They were sure that this would be their classic.
• Something went wrong. Perhaps a professor critically eviscerated the screenplay in cold blood, or perhaps it was just a tragic accident. Or maybe it turns out that Christopher Nolan DESTROYED IT HIMSELF AND CAN'T EVEN REMEMBER.
• The Nolans, tormented by the loss of the screenplay, turned their anguish towards the obsessive creation of clockwork thrillers about obsessive men trying to solve the problem of the past by mastering some dark technique.
• However, several years ago, Christopher Nolan found a new idea for a screenplay. Perhaps it's not the story of young love he wrote and lost as a young man. But it involves children somehow. He wants to write a movie about parenthood. (We see the first hints of this turn in The Prestige, where one of the men obsessed by his craft far beyond the point of reason has a child and thereby gets a little perspective on life.)
• But he's in too deep with the studios. They won't let him get out. Desperately, he takes on one last big-budget blockbuster. This one's the toughest of all. He puts together the best team he's got, but there's just not enough time. The script doesn't make any sense. They improvise. They have to. Because if they can just make a gazillion dollars for Warner Brothers, Christopher Nolan can go free.

So that's the coded message here. Nolan, like Bruce Wayne, needs to put the thriller business behind him. The question is, what kind of movie is he going to make next?

My money's on a comedy about two zany suburban couples each trying to secure their respective toddlers a spot in an elite preschool, starring Tom Hardy, Marion Cotillard, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and Scarlett Johanson, and featuring Michael Caine as the quirky headmaster. But there's also some chance it's a story that follows a married couple (Christian Bale and Marion Cotillard) for two decades as they raise a family in a weird composite of Chicago and London, featuring Michael Caine as the husband's dad or publisher. The possibilities are endless, but the actors are few.

Two reviews.

No doubt faithful readers noticed that I abandoned this poor blog for Twitter. But if there are dark days ahead for Twitter, maybe I should take a look back at ol' Blogspot.

Anyways, since it's nice to have links that stay up at the top of the page a little longer and are properly archived, here are two reviews I've recently written:

• Review of The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides, for Fare Forward - My friend Peter's starting a Christian review of ideas, aimed at millenials, and he asked me to review this book for the first issue. (My favorite essay from the issue, by the way, is Margaret Blume's "Beauty and the Beast.") I think that if I ever review another novel, I need to do more to preserve my first reactions. By the time I started writing this particular short review, I'd read the book three times and had lost all sense of perspective. But I think the space constraints kept me from messing it up too badly.
• Review of Precious Remedies against Satan's Devices, by The Welcome Wagon, for Mockingbird -  I got to see The Welcome Wagon's CD release show in Brooklyn, and enjoyed it quite a bit. Spent a few e-mail paragraphs dissecting the songs with friends, and so I had some ideas rattling around in my head. Then, when I was down in Charlottesville catching up with DZ from Mockingbird, he was interested in a record review, so it worked out nicely. I'm happy with this one. I usually try to keep my guard up about day-to-day faith when I'm writing online, aiming instead for the objective tone, but I didn't worry about that so much here.

I'm working on another book review, and if it gets published I'll post about that one as well.

Controvers scriptores.

Attention Brendan:

"Some controverters in divinity are like swaggerers in a tavern, that catch that which stands next to them, the candlestick, or pots; turn everything into a weapon: ofttimes they fight blindfold; and both beat the air. The one milks a he-goat, the other holds under a sieve. Their arguments are as fluxive as liquor spilt upon a table; which with your fingers you may drain as you will. Such controversies, or disputations, (carried with more labour, than profit) are odious: where most times the truth is lost in the midst, or left untouched. And the fruit of their fight is that they spit on one another, and are both defiled. These fencers in religion, I like them not."

-Ben Jonson

I recently found out what Twitter is for.

I was on Twitter for a long time before I had any idea what it was for. I don't think it's quite this...

Freddie deBoer:

"I am angry, because Avent didn't just dismiss my essay without argument. He instead decided to attack my field. [...] This is what Twitter is for, and this is indicative of the entire operation of prominent bloggers: socially and professionally connected people who defend each other no matter what, excluding and marginalizing dissent, ignoring unpalatable arguments that they can't answer, and in every way undermining as illegitimate criticisms that don't operate from a position of privilege and social authority."

To blame this all on Twitter is a little much. It's less "what Twitter is for" and more "what prominent bloggers and media personalities use Twitter for."

What I'm using Twitter for:

1. Sharing links, punning, and brief inspirational quotes can all be done comfortably within the space of a tweet. I could put these things on the blog, but I think it saves time for everyone if I just drop them in the
2. Short, troll-free conversations with bloggers. Easy questions and further links are easy to get, and unwanted, uninteresting, or unhelpful responses are easy to cut out of the conversation, and even blocked if need be. This is as opposed to comment sections on blog posts, which get flooded to the point of uselessness on websites of any size. It's also nice to have all these conversations in one place, rather than distributed across a bunch of websites you have to hold open in tabs.
3. As for the troll filter: yeah, this cuts both ways, and can be used to exclude unpopular perspectives, especially if you've got a ton of followers. But, oh my goodness, the spatial metaphor is so much nicer. I've really grown to hate the entitlement complexes of trollish commenters on unmoderated blogs. Would you come into my house and say these things?

In summary, I use Twitter to cover functions of the RSS reader and the comment box, and I do my best to stay positive. It works all right.

From a James Wood review.

James Wood writing about the protagonist of Adam Gordon's Leaving the Atocha Station:

Adam--at once ideological and post-ideological, vaguely engaged and profoundly spectatorial, charming and loathsome--is a charming representative of twenty-first-century American Homo literatus. He is a creature of privilege and lassitude, living through a time of inflamed political certainty, yet certain only of his own uncertainty and thus more easily defined by negation than by affirmation, clearly dedicated to poetry but unable to define or defend it (except to intone that poetry isn't about anything), and implicitly nostalgic for earlier, mythical eras of greater strength and certainty.

If the book is sufficiently savvy about this guy, it's probably worth reading. I sometimes think that if not for the Holy Spirit, I'd turn into a character like this.

(Though maybe Christianity just keeps me from being either too charming or too loathsome?)

Why are shows about bad people so popular?

The Sopranos, Mad Men, and Breaking Bad are popular television shows about people who do terrible things. I haven't seen Deadwood or The Shield, but perhaps those also fit in this genre. If you read the websites I read, you'd think that these are the most popular television shows; in fact, they're niche entertainments compared to NCIS or the various CSI franchises. They're shows for young Bobos, more or less. Two hypotheses:

1. Deep down, we see ourselves as morally compromised. We know that we have and use more than we deserve, and we don't want to give it up. We tell ourselves that we're avoiding our just deserts for the sake of our families.
2. We like badassery, but we also need an excuse for our interest. The psychological angle gives us the illusion of moral distance. So we can tell ourselves that we're not interested in evil, but rather in the analysis of evil's effects.

There are two motions here: there's a larger structure of judgment, within which the characters' bad choices are shown to be harmful, but scene-by-scene the viewer's enticed by the allure of the anti-hero. I suspect that this is not moral seriousness, but rather the sense of it.

UPDATE: Should have given credit where credit's due. I started on this line of thinking after reading something Freddie wrote on G+.