Turning 90 has had an unexpected effect on me. All my life, I have struggled against my limitations and against my tendency to veg out. I have not really worked very hard save for a few moments in my life, but I have done a lot of worrying about whether I am doing enough. I have been struggling with my Parkinson’s disease for several years now and as I grow steadily less able to move around or even to walk very well at all, I have fretted about it and struggled against it. Being 90 years old seems to have given me permission to relax and accept my limitations. In effect, I say to myself, “you are 90 years old, of course you cannot do as much as you used to, it is all right.”
Right now of course all my attention is focused on the study
group I will be starting to teach at the beginning of February. Since I will be
talking about things that I have been working on for 40 years, I do not really
need to do much planning but I lie in bed giving lectures in my head, sorting
out what I want to say and in what order, enjoying the fact that I am being
given this one last chance to teach, which is what I most love to do.
Meanwhile, I will take great enjoyment from watching the
so-called originalists and textualists on the Supreme Court struggle to find
ways to avoid applying the obvious meaning and intention of article 3 of the 14th
amendment. These days, you must take your pleasures where you find them.
49 comments:
When you have some time, would you care to share memories of Julius Lester? I have just started his Lovesong after a writer to whom am I close read it and mentioned the beauty of his writing. I see from Wikipedia that you joined the AA studies program after he, er, um, left it, but I imagine that you must have known him. Not looking for any dirt, not asking you to dish; just asking for your impressions of the man and any memorable anecdotes.
I met Julius Lester once. I was a grad student at UMass, and after a talk he gave on his conversion to Judaism, I introduced myself. I had written my senior thesis on the poet Robert Hayden, whose student he had been, and I expressed my appreciation for what he'd written about Hayden.
Lester was well known on campus for his class on the Holocaust. It was apparently quite an experience to take that class from him. Alas, I never had the opportunity.
I haven't been following the Claudine Gay story (recently the topic of a post and much commentary here), but I just read yet another admirably intelligent and insightful piece by Kenan Malik that probes it. I hadn't known that Gay was bred for Harvard by the Orwellian 'Such, such were the joys'-type meat factory of the Phillips Exeter Academy. And there's the familiar statistic that "[t]here are almost as many students in Harvard from the highest earning 1% of society as from the poorest 60%." https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/07/tribalism-and-hypocrisy-dog-claudine-gay-furore-neither-tackle-issues-it-raises
JR
Thanks for the link to Malik. I probably wouldn't phrase everything exactly the way Malik does, but he is right, of course, that equality and diversity are not synonymous and that DEI doesn't really get at issues of class (though whether DEI "entrenches class privileges" is likely more debatable). Btw, Gay went to Stanford for undergrad, Harvard for grad school.
John Rapko,
Your commentary on Taylor Swift a few months ago has been bugging me, but leaving those concerns aside, are you aware that Swift is re-recording her early albums because some capitalists bought her catalogue from her original label. The new versions of her work are far superior to the originals and as a result the value to the purchasers has undoubtedly dropped by a substantial amount. Pretty smart move on her part. How her songwriting changes over time remains to be seen.
I am a musician (keyboards, guitar, trumpet among others) and perhaps that influences my attitude to her work. You are obviously correct in noting she doesn't have the sophisticated word play of Irving Berlin and others of that era. Berling was influenced by his times and she by hers. On the other hand, I do hope she starts using more than 4 chords!
Christopher J. Mulvaney, Ph.D.:
I'm in a way pleased that my capriccio on Taylor Swift stimulated reflection, but I'm genuinely sorry that it bugs you. Maybe I could just make one remark about the "Berlin was of her times, Swift is of ours" thought: Baudelaire remarked that 'you have no right to despise the present.' I've always taken this to mean in part that any critical thoughts one has about the present are themselves also part of the present, and so 'the present' is nothing simple, nothing well-defined or exhaustively characterized by a single phenomenon, and the present includes self-reflection and self-criticism (albeit limited and positionally conditioned like any thought). I've never been tempted by the thought that prominent aspects of mass culture definitively characterize their times, and have largely ignored and occasionally despised corporate mass culture since I was 14. Perhaps in a few years people will think of 2023 as the year of Taylor Swift in the same sense that we think of 1975 as the year of the pet rock. In any case what struck me in advance to actually listening to anything by Swift was how easily one finds heated rhetoric but how hard (really, impossible) it was to find some analysis. So I tried to analyze the songs qua songs. Part of what this involves is making relevant comparisons; exemplary instances of earlier pieces in the art form are usually relevant. In Swift's case, since I regularly saw references to her as truly great songwriter, I started to think how her songs might compare with those of the greatest 20th century American songwriters (Irving Berlin, Hank Williams, Bob Dylan). I couldn't find any point whatsoever in such comparisons that would redound to Swift. In my blog piece I used a penetrating remark by George Gershwin as a springboard that allowed me some way into the limited virtues of her song-writing.--I would like to correct one of my remarks on Swift in light of new evidence: in my blog piece I characterized her songs as undanceable. Recently one of my favorite popular dancers, the Japanese popper Ringo Winbee (who can make anything highly danceable), took on Swift's 'Shake It Off', here starting at 2':52": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QcDi8l4y20w
After giving this pressing matter due consideration (including a close evaluation of her fetching Golden Globes ensemble), I’ve decided that Taylor Swift is rich and beautiful, such that demanding that she be a good lyricist and musician into the bargain seems like asking a little too much. As it stands, her music leaves no impression at all, which is probably something to be thankful for. As for her (inexplicably rapturous) critical reception, Elizabeth Hardwick addressed a closely related problem in 1963.
John Rapko
No musician I know would ever describe Shake It Off as undanceable. It is, after all, the reason the song is a huge hit. Highly syncopated and very danceable.
Now the question of pet rocks: if you want to be rude and gratuitously mean that's one thing. If you want to make a useful comparison why not pick the hit song you like the least from 1975.
It appears we have completely incompatible views on music, mass culture, etc., something along the lines of Adorno dissing jazz while European composers were flocking to the U.S. to hear ragtime and the syncopation of the Caribbean/Cuban influences in New Orleans piano jazz.
I don't think there is anything productive to be gained by pursuing this particular discussion. I think it is much more interesting and important to focus on the upcoming SCOTUS rulings and the political violence that that will ensue no matter what decisions are made. Look on the bright side, Swift is encouraging her concert goers and fans to register to vote and young women are among the most liberal of all demographic groups.
@ John Rapko,
thank you for the quote from Baudelaire. I didn't know it but it really expresses something that one should always bear in mind. Of course, it leaves open the question of which attitudes towards the present are still permissible. I can remember my parents' reaction when "Soul Sacrifice" by Santana was playing in my room at a volume that absolutely belonged to the song. At the time, I promised myself that their attitude could not be an option for my own in old age. Of course, I had no idea how challenging this resolution would turn out to be.
However, "the present" really is an all-encompassing term and I think Baudlaire would agree that the restraint of contempt cannot apply to every element in it. How should we live if we look at the world as an amorphous mass of indistinguishables? It seems to me that for some of these elements of the present, contempt is the only possible option. This is all the more true the more fellow inhabitants of this present claim to know with certainty and precision what the case is. If you present yourself to these people as someone who emphatically warns of the unknown unknowns that perhaps shape every present more strongly than what we think we know, then you run the risk of being labeled a "postmodernist".
Let's be honest, it is simply a shitty job to have to differentiate and reflect again and again and again in order to do some justice to what we call "our present", while in this present more and more theories are already emerging that bear the term "realism" or "new realism" in their name.
At some point you run out of time for differentiation and reflection, those necessary prerequisites for the demand for "sapere aude". Then there is a danger that one's own attitude towards the present will turn into contempt.
Jimmy Kimmel is right to be upset that some famous sports star accused him of being on Epstein's A list. He is not on the list, by the way... Will cancel culture ever end? What is cancel culture but another form of one-way ad hominem attack about our past? For each one of us it starts in grade school & never lets up afterwards. She's a predator who is never satisfied with stalking & wounding her kills just as long as those fangs of her's don't rogue-out and turn their razor sharpness back on her.
For a man it takes just one woman to ruin you but also one woman to save you.
First the latter. Arnold S was running for Governator of California and a whole slew of women came forward to accuse him of sexual harassment & misconduct. Tia Carrera bravely stepped forward & said he was a perfect gentleman to her. So he won the election.
Mr. Kimmel went bonkers for ten minutes on his show this week: returning the ad hominem attacks back onto his false accusers. Maybe they very well deserved the Wrath of Kimmel. But it just takes one woman to accuse him of a real sex crime against her to put him back on the defensive and a possible cancellation of his entire show.
My advice to any person who wants to get into political office or show business (another form of political office) is to do nothing wrong your entire life. I learned this from watching lots of television social media, but not from other pundits.. If this is too hard then be just like Socrates. Of course, you may want to pray for that Devine Sign that corrected him his entire life.
If Machiavelli's Scipio Africanus The Elder were to live today, the entire world would be under his sway.
Since music has come up for discussion, just to mention that yesterday on the radio I heard the recording of a live performance of Les McCann's "Compared to What?" at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1969. That thing rocks.
Googling “1975 Hit Songs“ brings up at least nine solid classics by my count, as well as a few good-bad numbers (e.g., Captain and Tennille, “Love Will Keep Us Together”). No doubt sentimental history plays a role in what we enjoy listening to, but still. What I need is a young, musically literate person to explain the music of today … but every youngster I’ve ever asked is completely inarticulate on the subject, and comically so. They like what they like, they can’t explain the first thing about it, and moreover they don’t want their weird uncle annoying them by asking them to THINK about pop music (sigh). I seem to be on my own in this. John Seabrook, in the course of writing his many articles on the subject has failed to make the simple now-vs-then analysis.
For an enjoyably Dionysian-pessimistic take on the musical sausage factory that is Nashville (whence Swift came and where talent mostly goes to die), Robbie Fulks wrote a song called (spoiler alert) “Fuck This Town”:
Well, I came down to Nashville In 1993
'Cause my friend Jimmy said Nashville
“Had money growin' right on the trees!”
So I thought I'd go pick some
(And I don't mean mus-i-cal-ly)
Now it's three years later
And I'm a-wonderin' where I went wrong
I Shook a lotta hands, ate a lotta lunch
Wrote a lotta dumbass songs
But I couldn't get a break in Nash-ville
If I tried my whole life long!
So fuck this town!
Fuck this town!
Fuck it end-to-end!
Fuck it up-and-down!
Can't get noticed, can't get found
Can't get a cut, so fuck this town!
Hey, this ain't country western
It's just soft-rock feminist crap!
And I thought they'd struck bottom
Back in the days of Ronnie Milsap
Now they just can't stop the flood of ass-holes,
There ain't a big enough ASCAP
[cont’d]
Robbie Fulks, “South Mouth” Bloodshot Records, 1997
Oh dear: "rude and gratuitously mean". I've really got to make time to get a tattoo that says 'Joking DOES NOT WORK on the Internet'.--A few anecdotes about whether one has to get on board with 'the present', or whatever it is that the corporate media and/or the smart folks tell you is the present: #1. In the mid-90's I was chatting with my dissertation adviser about academic fads. He said: 'John, one of the good things about aging is that you realize that you need not be impressed by fads. When I was in graduate school in the late 60s everybody worshipped Lévi-Strauss.' [For what it's worth, I continue to think that Tristes Tropiques is one of the very greatest books in the 20th century, and that the opening chapter of La Pensée Sauvage is likewise one of that century's most stimulating works]. #2. On the topic of artistic fads (like Swift worship), Richard Wollheim once said to me: 'Well, yes, John, you should keep in mind that in 1960 the burning question was whether Bufano is the great artist of our time'. #3. On the 1970s and exemplary pet rocks: Around 1985 at a party a folk-singer said to me: 'You've got to admit that Jackson Browne was the paradigmatic musician of the 70s.' Me: 'The 70s weren't THAT bad'.
"Taylor Swift is rich and beautiful"
Well, rich anyway.
That is a very un-gallant thing to say about a girl, but I'll take it as an obvious reference to those one-hit punk/pop wonders “The Monks” and their 1979 hit, “Nice Legs, Shame About Her Face”:
Met her on a blind date, helping out an old mate
Waiting at the corner, she’d be dressed in black
There was I expecting a really tasty bird
He said she was good looking, I should have doubted his word
When I saw her there she was a real disgrace
I thought “nice legs shame about the face”
* * *
When I took her home we hardly said a thing
I walked her to the door, expected to go in
She looked me up and down and really put me in my place
She said “nice legs shame about your face”
Guys.... this is turning into a Youtube manosphere site....
Enough with the misogyny.
Since DZ has brought up the subject, the “Man-O-Sphere” is (or rather was), like Taylor Swift, a mass culture phenomenon of which, until recently, I had only been dimly aware. But in October I was laid low on the sofa for a week with covid. So I decided, as a dedicated amateur sociologist, that now was the time for me to finally investigate—so I put on my rubber boots and waded in …
(I do this sort of thing so YOU don’t have to. YOU’RE WELCOME!)
The bad/good news is there is almost nothing to report. I will explain for the ladies in the audience (I now know you’re out there) who won’t have had any experience with this that the manosphere is simply the attitudes and behaviors of the junior high school boy’s locker room transposed into the “virtual” (i.e., fake) world of the internet. Note that it’s JUNIOR high, not even high school or college. Moreover, it’s not even the varsity locker room, nor is it the junior varsity locker room, it’s the THIRDS locker room. That’s not to say that it doesn’t have a detectible crypto-fascist vibe of the Himmlerian sort.
To John Pillette:
You are certainly right about the utterly puerile nature of the "manosphere" of the Andrew Tates and their ilk.... but that does not make them any less dangerous.... as role models for the likes of incels and as the spewers of vile misogyny.
Let us not allow that bile to creep into The Philosophers Stone.
I’ll submit that, in order to properly assess the danger presented by these morons, we need to properly understand them. As was discussed here some time ago, one of the striking things about 01/06 (on which the Ken-Surrection in “Barbie” was clearly modeled, and which the Keystone Kops seemingly provided strategic modeling) was how mind-bogglingly incompetent it actually was. To extend my metaphor, it was like watching the thirds lacrosse team take the field and utterly embarrass and seriously injure themselves, by tripping over their shoelaces and blocking shots on goal with their (cupless) crotches … and YES I’ve actually seen these two things happen, in the same game!
So, we can see that the motivating factors are envy, ressentiment, a knowledge of one’s self as inadequate, and so on, all buried under a thin veneer of bogus machismo … but the question is, what do we do about it?
At the very least, we keep it out of The Philosophers Stone--- No more reproducing the lyrics of sexist songs.
I otherwise do not remember the context (it's from Psychology: The Briefer Course, in this chapter), but Prof. Wolff's first paragraph reminded me of a certain passage from William James, which has really stuck with me:
"There is the strangest lightness about the heart when one's nothingness in a particular line is once accepted in good faith. All is not bitterness in the lot of the lover sent away by the final inexorable 'No.' Many Bostonians, crede experto (and inhabitants of other cities, too, I fear), would be happier women and men to-day, if they could once for all abandon the notion of keeping up a Musical Self, and without shame let people hear them call a symphony a nuisance. How pleasant is the day when we give up striving to be young,—or slender! Thank God! we say, those illusions are gone. Everything added to the Self is a burden as well as a pride. A certain man who lost every penny during our civil war went and actually rolled in the dust, saying he had not felt so free and happy since he was born."
--
I also want to second Prof. Zimmerman - all in all, best to keep the "locker room talk" out of this blog. Regarding the manosphere etc., Wikipedia is there for the morbidly curious.
"...how mind-bogglingly incompetent it actually was..."
Of course, had a the Senate staff not had the presence of mind to secure the ballots from the several states and/or Pence got in the car and/or officer Goodman not diverted the rioters. Contingency.
II’ll wager the election interference on the state level will be more widespread and planned, and with an insurrection’s speaker of the house all bets are off. There at least 250 organizations around the country. Any pro democracy demonstrations will be met with armed counter demonstrators . We stand a good chance of looking like Ecuador. I would also note that the cesspool of big lie delusional thinking is just getting bigger . Not necessarily the N of fascists.
W/r/t Professor Grundy’s request, I’m afraid that banning “sexist” lyrics from discussion eliminates most of what’s worthwhile not just in the Great American Songbook, but in literature (and life) in general. I also suggest that you read a little closer before assuming lyrics are “sexist”; you seem to have skipped the last line of the second song.
In the first song, are you saying there is no valid distinction to be made between, say, Buck Owens and the contemporary product put out by Nashville, which in fact may be accurately described as “soft rock feminist crap”? I am of course assuming that you actually know who Buck Owens, or Robbie Fulks, or Ronnie Milsap, or the Monks, or Taylor Swift (or, inter alia, Mark E. Smith, or Fela Kuti) are, because it would be pretty silly to label entire subgenres as “sexist” without doing the reading and listening FIRST.
Anyway, even if we assume, arguendo, that any particular work referenced is indeed “sexist” (whatever that actually means in 2023), isn’t it worth bearing in mind the use/mention distinction?
One can of course simply object to discussions held (and descriptions made) in the demotic, and not in elevated, euphemistic “academic” language, but that also seems silly.
In any event, we are a long, loooooooong way from being a part of the manosphere here.
I don't think the song John Pillette quoted by 'The Monks' (on 1/9 @5:19 p.m.) is particularly sexist, given the second stanza.
I would note however that certain of J. Pillette's comments sort of flirt -- pun intended -- with the "objectification" of women (or at least of Taylor Swift at any rate). I myself, to be frank, am not deeply offended by that, but I'm not a woman.
FFS! Being afraid to describe attractive women as such is like being afraid to describe LeBron James as “tall”. For Taylor Swift (who let’s agree is at least “attractive”) or Margot Robbie, or Jennifer Lopez, or Penelope Cruz, or Charlize Theron, or the girl from out of town at Schwab’s Drug Store, being good looking is the CORE part of the JOB. They’re actresses, not junior partners at a law firm. If this amounts to problematically flirting with sexism, then the problem lies with how “sexism” is defined.
@ John Pillette
First, I didn't say you were flirting with sexism; I said you were flirting with objectification, which is a little bit different, I think, or at least more specific.
Second, it's not clear that looking good is THE core part of an actress's job, just as it isn't clear that it's THE core part of an actor's job. The fact that the 25-year-old or 30-year-old Keanu Reeves was exceptionally good looking doubtless helped advance his career in Hollywood greatly, but he had to develop at least a modicum of acting ability (though he was never going to be the next Olivier or Brando). Much the same could be said of, say, Charlize Theron -- for all her good looks (and she is indeed very good looking), she had to have the acting ability to get through her role in The Cider House Rules, even though she was never going to be a great actress à la Meryl Streep or Judi Dench etc.
Let me just say for the record that if someone had said Harry Styles (or Shawn Mendes) is rich and gorgeous, I would have said the same thing.
Wrt superannuation, the Biden admininstration is discussing the future of the Palestinians of Gaza with a man who is 88 years old (and who is despised by most of them).
https://twitter.com/SecBlinken/status/1745082168001310973
Regarding the core part of an actress’s job, I feel we should defer to Alfred Hitchcock’s judgment as an expert on the matter. He observed that it is much easier to teach a beautiful woman to act than it is to teach an ugly actress to be beautiful … unless Hitchcock has been retroactively cancelled for objectifying Madeleine Carroll, Grace Kelly, Kim Novak, Tippi Hedren, Doris Day, and Janet Leigh in which case forget what I just said.
The strange thing is that Charlize Theron—who is not merely “very good looking” but is legitimately in the movie-goddess category, and shares with Michelle Pfeiffer the talent for only getting better and better looking as she ages, can make herself appear ugly (see “Monster”).
I’ve long since given up trying to understand the ways in which contributors to this blog wander off in strange directions. My guess is that for many of the regulars it’s become a kind of home from home, their local coffee shop or bar in an age of attenuated relationships. But that aside, I thought the following review might be of interest to those who have been vigorously pursuing the most recent diversion:
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/decadent-masculinity-on-pierre-drieu-la-rochelles-the-fire-within/
Anonymous,
That's an interesting piece. All I knew about Drieu la Rochelle before reading it is that he was a French fascist, so I learned something. I will refrain from further comment, at least for the moment.
Speaking of nonagenarians, I see that Roman Polanski has a new film out.
For the record, on further consideration my position on the Claudine Gay affair/matter has changed somewhat. I now lean to the view that she should have stayed in office while a full and transparent review of the plagiarism charges was undertaken -- transparent in the sense that the identity of the scholars reviewing her work would be public and all the charges would be laid out publicly in a widely accessible way. Of course that did not happen, but it should have.
LFC, it was never about plagiarism, it was about collecting a scalp.
aaall
For Rufo, yes.
But what allowed him to do that? The charges of plagiarism.
So it was very much "about" plagiarism, in addition to a lot of other things.
Also about a small, rather insular group of mostly wealthy people, the Harvard Corporation, who at first backed her and then decided not to.
You may be getting your take on this from Lawyers Guns & Money, which has applied its generally manichean frame of reference to a situation that required a little more nuance for its accurate analysis, imo.
Bill Ackman in a new interview:
"I don't know today whether Claudine Gay committed plagiarism or not, because I, you know, I haven't done a six-month assessment"
And he throws in a bit of praise for Giuliani's fascistic policing policies as mayor, for good measure.
https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1746182817300529315
Obvs Ackman is being sarcastic in the first statement.
Everything I've read about him (or by him) confirms my low opinion of him. He has billions of dollars -- he can travel anywhere he wants, buy anything he wants, prob write a book and find someone to publish it, and yet he chooses to waste his time in this way. As Timothy Burke said in a recent Substack post, it's a reflection of the billionaires' rage that they haven't yet been able to control academia completely. It's part of a quasi-pathological desire to control every institution in society. Ackman appears to be bordering on some kind of breakdown. It's a mixture of repulsive and pathetic.
My personal view for decades has been that, as individuals become wealthier, they tend to want to destroy all of the institutions they relied on to become wealthy, in order to protect the wealth they have, and to move towards unrestrained power to control everything else for which they lack expertise their ego demands.
Hitch liked to work with beautiful actresses, but he would never have said anything as dumb as this: "being good looking is the CORE part of the JOB [of an actress]." He would have recognized that the claim is easily counter-exampled.
In what seems to me the one really outstandingly insightful book on the philosophy of acting, Tzachi Zamir's Acts: Theater, Philosophy, and the Performing Self, Tzachi claims that acting is "an aesthetically controlled embodied imaginative transformation" (p. 12), which has as its aim an 'existential amplification' whereby the actor amplifies her own life and elicits the attention and fascination of the audience. So, following Tzachi, one might think that 'being good looking' as such is neither here nor there, but the issue is what the actor does with her looks. And of course there are limits, though not easy to limn, as to what an actor may do; for example, it would be difficult for an exceptionally unattractive actor to play the part of a great captivating beauty. A good actor may use any of her physical characteristics to good theatrical effect, although some may lend themselves to particular uses. Consider, for example, the magnificent uses to which Jack Black and Kyle Gass put their corpulence: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sfz9jQ3KI5k
More to the point of Prof. Wolff’s original post—which had nothing to do with actors or university officials—it seems it isn’t just the S. C. that might get tied in knots. I’d appreciate guidance on that story out of Georgia:
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/fulton-county-da-fani-willis-nathan-wade-trump-election-case_n_65a1ca67e4b0351062f1e7dc
Is it H P just going bananas?
anon.
I hadn't heard about this before, but I haven't been following Trump's legal travails all that closely. So I don't know what to make of it exactly, but it appears to be more of a delaying tactic by Trump than anything else. As the piece points out, he's hoping to delay this and some other things past the November election, hoping that he wins and becomes immune from prosecution as a sitting president. W.r.t. the case brought by Jack Smith and his team, however, that trial seems set to start before the election, because Trump's appeal on (supposed) immunity grounds is being fast-tracked by the D.C. Circuit (which heard oral argument on it recently) and probably will be fast-tracked by SCOTUS, I'm guessing. But as I say, I haven't been following these matters that closely.
P.s. Or the D.C. Circuit could be the end of that appeal, if Trump can't get 4 Justices to vote to grant cert. (i.e., take the case). His position there is so extreme -- his lawyer told the D.C. Circuit panel that a former president who had ordered the assassination of a political rival while in office can't be criminally prosecuted unless he has been impeached and convicted by Congress -- that I don't think there's any chance the D.C. Circuit is going to buy it.
LFC, "what it's about" is the evergreen wing nut war on the Ivies in particular and higher education in general that predates things like "God and Man at Yale" and "Keynes at Harvard." Nothing new here.
What should have been a piece or so in the Cambridge locals somehow made the front page of the "paper of record" multiple times so something besides "plagiarism" and best citation practices is going on (why should some geezer in the far, far rural west even know about the fate of an Ivy administrator - is there anything more petty then academic politics). CNBC goes off the rails a couple of hours after the markets close and the guy doing the 4 PM (PT) slot is a total wingnut. Friday he had some guy kvelling about this and Ackman's larger project. If it wasn't plagiarism, it would be something else.
Loomis seems to be going off the rails over Gaza and Lemieux needs to research basic physiology but LGM usually agrees with moi so...
On an earlier topic, have you seen and heard Trump lately? Biden merely looks ancient while Trump is clearly deteriorating mentally and physically..
aaall
I don't want to discuss the Claudine Gay matter any more. I'll just say that there should have been (and in fact was) a medium spot in terms of media coverage between the NYT's obsessive coverage and "a few Cambridge locals [i.e., local papers]."
Also, the fact that you've put the word "plagiarism" in quotation marks strongly suggests that you don't understand what went on here. Rufo and Ackman are complete jerks and a********, but if it hadn't been for the anonymous professor who provided his/her pdfs to the Washington Free Beacon, Rufo and Ackman would have had nothing. There should have been a full and transparent review of the allegations (preferably before Gay was forced out), which there wasn't.
I don't really know what Loomis is saying about Gaza, but what Bernie Sanders said about it today on 'State of the Union' (which I heard on C-Span radio) was very much to the point.
I haven't been paying very much attention to Trump's appearance etc., to answer your last question.
P.s. I don't think "academic politics" is the correct phrase here. When an academic department is divided over whom to hire, for personal or ideological reasons, that's academic politics. When a professor resents what a dean has asked him/her to do and spreads gossip about the dean, ditto. Etc. In other words, "academic politics" usually denotes something strictly internal to the institution. This whole thing was something else.
P.p.s. There is a difference between a position and an analytic style or a writing style for that matter. So I can agree w a particular blogger's position on something and still dislike the way they write about or approach it. This is a general point, but, at the risk of sounding a bit condescending (which is not my intent), I think it may be worth mentioning.
I’ll revise my statement. The core part of an actress’s (or an actor’s) job is to be charismatic, or “existentially amplified”. This typically has a great deal of overlap with physical beauty. And on screen (as in life) the two sexes are subject to differing standards.
Considering the distaff side for the moment, there are of course various categories: leading ladies, character actors, and so on. Let’s consider Carrie Coon. She must have a good publicist, because in the last few years, the New Yorker and the NYT Magazine have both anointed her as the new Meryl Streep. I don’t really see it myself, but the point is that she is widely and officially celebrated for her acting chops and not her looks. But compared to the rest of us, she’s nevertheless exceptionally good looking.
Let’s also consider that Charlize Theron, Julia Roberts, Isabella Rossellini, Catherine Deneuve, Jennifer Lawrence, et al. have all been contracted to use their beauty to sell perfume and whatnot in print advertisements, so “existential amplification” doesn’t even need a stage or a movie camera. Cindy Crawford and her ilk are certainly so “amplified”.
Finally, “eliciting the attention and fascination of the audience” doesn’t require a proscenium arch. Over the holidays I saw Elizabeth Hurley walk through a restaurant and sit at her table. She did indeed have the attention and fascination of everyone in the room. The amusing thing was, 10 minutes later an exceptionally beautiful young lovely took the same route through the restaurant and sat down at the table next to Ms. Hurley. She was well aware that (1) she had everyone’s attention and fascination, and (2) that she was upstaging the actress. My sister-in-law, who was seated next to me, said “Oooooh, Liz Hurley is NOT amused.”
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