Frankenstein? More like Frankenmeh.

Pan's Labyrinth, dir. Guillermo del Toro
Frankenstein
(why not?) Pacific Rim

Pan's Labyrinth is a movie that is a classic in the sense of being exactly, and only, what the director wanted it to be. I don't even know that I have much to say about it, except that it is not really a horror-adjacent movie (the horror only involves the humans). It has the ring of a fairy tale, not accidentally. It exists in close relation to lots of other stories but is not exactly like any of them. 

Frankenstein is perhaps an idea del Toro sat with for too long, which he's too close to. It is almost a good movie. But the addition of the rich financier changes what it is that Victor sets out to do: in the book, the sense I got was that it remains unclear to him whether any of his experimentation will actually work. He rejects the monster in part because he never contemplated what might happen if he succeeded and that he might not be happy with the success. In the movie, the financier shifts the question: it is no longer really a question of whether the experiments will be successful--that's what the money is for--and Victor finds himself with something that will not immediately bend to his will, so much the worse for the monster. And so much of Victor's actions, and the monster's self-understanding come to mean different things. The ending really just makes no sense given all of what came before.

Pacific Rim is, well, a good reminder that life cannot be composed only from asking deep questions about the nature of humanity and belonging: sometimes you gotta get the visceral thrill of big machines fighting monsters. 

Currently Reading, Roman Poetry edition

Metamorphoses, Ovid
Eclogues, Virgil
Odes, Horace

The loudest voices for 'classical culture' or 'the Western Tradition' have usually spent the least time engaging with it. I know someone has not really read the Iliad if they do not mention the catalogue of the ships, everybody's least favorite part that stops the narrative propulsion of Book I dead in its tracks. There's a sense, usually false, that there's something nobler or better in old things just because they're old. Ovid attempts to fold Egyptian gods into Roman myth while simultaneously denigrating Cleopatra and the weird icky foreignness of Egypt, how dare those people think they could control Rome? Even the people who know each other and are friendly--Horace and Virgil, as an example--are often enough writing to completely contrary purposes for different reasons. As I approach 35 years of reading in the canon I become more convinced than ever that it is only the effort to make a canon that allows one to exist, not unlike making a sandcastle: just enough to hold them together provided you don't stress any of the connections too much.

More pointedly:

My edition of Ovid from the library is a midcentury Signet Classic edition, where the translator includes a half-page precis of each book with many contemporary allusions to work now mostly unknown; whether this indicates the shortsightedness of the translator or the general decline in educational standards is left as an exercise to the reader. But the one insightful thing he points on, on Book XV, is that the political aims of the Metamorphoses fail: all cannot be integrated into the Roman ideal; Augustus is praised for the peace he brings, but as we know, the subsequent fall of Rome begins with his death. In this way it's not unlike Plato, except one wonders how much the failure of the poetic project's political aims is intentional.

Virgil's Eclogues are superior to the Aeneid as a subject of interest, unless you want to read about people being killed in gruesome ways, and yet they are clearly a minor and inferior work of art. The tone, though, is interesting--conversational in a way Roman poetry is not usually represented as being.

Horace is great, but one can only read so many "hey man, it's gonna be okay, just try to take things as they come" poems in a row. 

Blaming the algorithm

At some point, years ago now, recommendation algorithms (YouTube especially) switched from recommending things similar to what you were already listening to and instead now recommend what you already have listened to. So listening to "The Rubberband Man" no longer suggests songs like it, by different musicians, but instead a mix of completely unrelated things you have listened to recently and perhaps a few other songs by the same artist. If your music taste is capacious enough and you have enough sources to recommend new things otherwise (I do) this is a minor issue. But it's really annoying, and it makes it hard to find genuinely new music: I am trapped in a prison of my own preferences, and Alphabet would prefer that I never make it out. (They'd also probably prefer I don't use ublock origin and could serve me ads.)

Worse, though, is that occasionally YT will tempt me with a button: "generate new recommendations different than you normally get". Friends, it is 100% racist, base right wing slop, every time; there is never any music. "You recently listened to Fela Kuti. Perhaps you'd like an hour-long talking head video about how people from Africa are genetically inferior?" Perhaps not.

Adventures in Reading: Well, he's not *my* friend Edition

Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend
I agree with the old critics of this particular novel that the plot is a shaggy dog that makes little sense. I agree with the newer critics of this novel that the characters, as always, are sharply drawn and generally good. Everybody's keeping secrets and trying to get over on other people, but there's no point in keeping any of the secrets except to get over on the other people. The legal issues were tolerably clear from the get-go, and known to the (good) main characters. The only real purpose of any of it seems to have been to test whether the main female character was a good person or not. One might be disposed to think of this as cruel.

Far more interesting, and not commented upon in the limited range of criticism I have available to me, is Dickens' insistence at the end of the book that it is part of his (ongoing, in other novels) attempt to reform laws around poverty in part by showing plausibly that poor people can be good, too. There's a thread to analyze. 

Adventures in Museum-Going

The NC Museum of Art is currently running an exhibition on Esther in the Age of Rembrandt. This is the ideal of a museum exhibition for me: I know the art movement's major figures and approaches; I know the Biblical story (thank you Sunday School); and on account of my grad school experience, I know the Dutch 17th century very well. As a result, I can just roll in and enjoy the art.

In the middle of one of the rooms was a manuscript with frankly unreadable handwriting. The pages had a library header, typewritten, reading "GROOT", which taken along with the bad handwriting meant it was certainly written by Hugo Grotius, onetime dissertation subject of mine, as indeed it turned out to be. The manuscript, from 1615, was placed after a bunch of (deserved) paeans to Dutch tolerance, and written to imply that these draft instructions limiting the times and places of Jewish worship in the Netherlands were backwards and restrictive. My first thought was the typical apologia for John Locke, that building liberalism out of illiberalism is not a neat process and involves a lot of things that look rather backward now.

On further reflection, there's a century of Dutch history that's truly remarkable. In, say, 1560, one runs the risk of death or exile in Catholic Holland for simply not being Catholic. Once Spain is overthrown, say 1590-1610 or so, one again risks death or exile for being the wrong kind of Protestant. (Grotius himself risked both.) In 1615, you're preparing to fight Spain yet again and probably well aware that having a large Jewish population that has fled Spain and Germany makes you more of a target. And by 1660, people everywhere in Europe understand that the Netherlands is the place you go when you're not safe at home for reason of your beliefs, because you will be tolerated there. (Does this liberty rise and be abetted by colonial exploitation that eases tensions because everyone is richer? It sure does.)

The point of all the forgoing, I think, is that it was never exactly the Dutch intention to become a haven of tolerance. But it proved advantageous in some respects, and the ratchet of liberty seemed to only go one way. Which is also to say that now we might be making strategic agreements or concessions that seem unwise, or even wrong, but whose longterm effects will be positive. 

In re: Dick Cheney

I get most of the sentiment here, I really do. The world is vast and people are small, and there are just not that many people of whom you can say the world is a worse place because of them, but yeah, Dick Cheney's on that list. He's not Bill Kristol, whose moral standards and ethics have always been clear, but those standards lead to good or bad outcomes depending on the rest of the world; nor is he George W. Bush, who could have been a good man but was, fatally, weak.

But this brings me back to a question and a concern I've had since the good old days when I was on the inside of some conservative circles: do people on the right actually believe the things they say? So you have, among things I've seen, on the one hand, Bill Kristol in a conservatives-only conference defending no-fault divorce and gay rights. Pretty clear that he believes that one. 

But I have also seen prominent conservative intellectuals joking before a talk about how they're going to put on a performance to meet the crowd's expectation, which didn't seem to be consistent with their reflective judgment--i.e., they were going to complain about an academic work that they actually thought was either good or acceptable within academic standards. Pretty clear he didn't believe that one, or not entirely. However, I was in the room when the same person endorsed, unprompted and at some length, the "homosexuals infiltrated Catholic seminaries in the 60s and 70s to bring down the church" theory. 

And there are some more cases like that, in my experience: sometimes it's putting on a show for a "conservative" view to a mixed or liberal-leaning audience; sometimes it's kayfabe for a supportive audience, in the "we gotta pretend like every Republican candidate is a good one" sense; sometimes it's a deeply held belief. I think all of the people I've known in this category know whether they believe the things they're saying or not, but it can be terrifyingly unclear.

And look, I'm no longer an academic, I don't need to keep to a neutral pose. I'll save my interpretive energy for things along the lines of "why do Herta Müller's books all have great, exciting premises and terrible execution?" I've come around to the view that it's the words out of your mouth that matter, and your actions, and it's not worth the energy to figure out if you mean it or not. 

This is of course reductive and opens me up to exploitation, but here's another thing I've learned in my time as an HR person: the racist who wishes to act on it will eventually tell you they're racist. You might think that's an insane thing to do in front of your HR rep, and it is, so much the worse for those people, but the people who think they're being clever and putting one over on you will eventually need to make sure someone knows what clever people they are. So the odds are pretty good over a long enough period of time that someone will reveal their real thoughts and beliefs. Especially now, when there seem to be so few sanctions for being an awful person with awful beliefs.

Just Out Here Making Friends

I was out at the end of my driveway, to keep the trick-or-treaters from having to climb up to our house, and to keep the dogs from barking at everyone. I was also reading because it was still light out. A group of adults was assembling on my street (we are apparently now a destination neighborhood) and one of them, looking at me, says "are you just, like, reading Beowulf for fun?" Indeed I am, friend.

Beowulf, tr. Heaney
I read this in 10th grade or so, when I started in on the classics but before I made it to Dante and subsequently turned in the first of many particular directions. There are apparently a lot of arguments about it, since there's only one source manuscript. It reads to me as purely Roman with Christian elements added as an afterthought. I say Roman rather than Greek (or European) because the violence is vivid and detailed, not unlike the Aeneid, and the interpersonal relations are something of an afterthought. The Christian lines are pretty basic and reveal little or no theological content, nor are they woven into the text. As for Heaney, it's pretty clear he's not attempting anything like a direct translation. Unlike a lot of critics when the translation first came out, I don't really mind the clear anachronisms and Irish-isms; I've read too many translations that do this to mind, and I do follow Borges in the idea that a strong enough story should be able to withstand and overcome any number of errors by a translator.

Metamorphoses, Ovid
Ovid's reputation as an explicit or crass poet made its way down to me, but gotta say, I don't see it at all. There's no shortage of moments that verge on the carnal--hard to talk about Jove without it--but it's mostly golden lights and implications of what happens with the cow or bull, but very direct detailed accounts of, say, Pentheus being ripped to pieces by the Bacchae, or what happens when Jove is not allowed to tone in down when he's with a human woman. Lurid violence and very little actual sex for all the sex that's supposedly happening--very 21st century.
On a larger level, the famous stories are all famous if you know anything about mythology; my childhood book of "Greek myths" was almost entirely from Ovid. The obscure ones are obscure for a reason.

Our Mutual Friend 
There are *at least* two different traps being set right now, where a character is attempting to hold out on information they have to gain an advantage over people who are trying to hurt them. I cannot decide whether this violates my rule of "read no book where the central mystery goes away if the main character just directly talk to each other". I have a real problem with John Rokesmith/Harmon's plot to pretend to be poor, get fired, marry a woman who he was concerned was a gold-digger, and put her through her paces before revealing that he's actually rich. If I were that woman, I'd be pretty mad about this whole thing.

Musil, The Man Without Qualities, vol 2
I did not anticipate so much abstract theorizing about the roles of men and women being carried on by a brother and sister who appear to be kinda into each other? I knew that last bit, but didn't expect it to be so explicit. That's on me, I guess. Only 1000 pages to go!

Benjamin, Arcades Project
"Boredom" is an excellent convulute, every entry a banger. 

Joni Mitchell in brief-ish review

Joni Mitchell, Ladies of the Canyon
Blue
For the Roses
Court and Spark
The Hissing of Summer Lawns
Hejira

Joni Mitchell has always existed on the edges of the music I listen to. Court and Spark was commonly played as I finished my dissertation; I liked Blue sometimes very much. But that was 15 years ago when my life was very different. In the spirit of giving things that have fallen out of my favor another chance, and in the grad school spirit of ingesting a lot to get the arc of a career or a mind, I've listened to all of the classic-ish Joni Mitchell albums in order over the last couple of days.

We should take as a starting point and a given that the musicianship is excellent and the compositions intricate. It also is a world unto itself--a Joni Mitchell song announces itself immediately and could be nothing else. You can listen to a lot of modern shoegaze or hip-hop producers in the vein of The Alchemist and think, not unfairly, that it all kind of runs together after awhile. (A standard I have long had for a Good Album is that each of the songs should be independently identifiable very early in your listening history; a song being a discrete unit with an identity is a sign of a higher level of artistry.) 

And as something of a recovering contrarian, it's important to note that her best known songs are known best for a reason: they are all very good, if not always an emotionally easy listen. You'll get no argument from me on "Big Yellow Taxi", "Woodstock", "River", "Both Sides Now", "A Case of You" etc. 

There's a directness to the lyricism whose appeal is pretty clear and meant a lot more to me when my own feelings were less readily available to me, but now it reads to me as a precision of observation that excludes as much as it opens up. "The Last Time I Saw Richard" is exactly what a song named that would lead you to believe it is. Like reading a short story, in a way: if it is for you, then it's a world; if it's not for you, the specificity ruins the ability for it to mean much.

On the music, one can say that the most important thing is the reminder that an acoustic guitar is as much a percussion instrument as anything else: other instrumentation comes and goes, but the songs have an internal structure that doesn't require anything else to move, and in this it separates itself out from a lot of other singer-songwriter albums that have trouble maintaining a pulse.

In the end, these days, I require a little more heft and variation. The most intriguing song on any of these albums, by a lot, is "The Jungle Line", where the synthesizer creates a more dynamic world than the rest of her music allows. It has no sequel. Hejira also rang in an interesting way, the songs being longer than normal and with more presence of bass and groove than in some of the other albums. 

Time passes, things change: I could not find in Court and Spark whatever I once did, and Joni Mitchell's music as a whole feels flatter than it has in the past. Whether that's a phase or not, I don't know. I don't think it's a "female singer-songwriter" thing, since Allegra Krieger's Art of the Unseen Infinity Machine and Faye Webster's Underdressed at the Symphony have gotten plenty of play in the last year.