The Consolation of Philosophy

If you wish to know a subject well, undertake to teach it. Until I taught an Introduction to Philosophy class to high school seniors this fall, my knowledge of the history of philosophy was somewhat scattered and unsystematic. Now I think I have a firm grasp of it. It's as if I was taking my own course, and I think it was a pretty good one - probably the best I've taught since a class on Nevada History at Las Vegas College in the spring of 2000 (which I also had to work up from scratch).

I had read D.W. Hamlyn's excellent A History of Western Philosophy and primary texts such as Plato's Republic, but a long while ago. I didn't have the Hamlyn volume at hand as I prepared this course, so I relied instead on Bryan Magee's The Story of Philosophy and Brooke Noel Moore's and Kenneth Bruder's Philosophy: The Power of Ideas (6th Edition). William James Earle's Introduction to Philosophy and Pierre Hadot's What Is Ancient Philosophy?, both of which I read cover-to-cover, were invaluable, and of course I did a lot of digging around on the Web. One of my side-projects was to create two chronological lists, one of philosophers and thinkers at least mentioned in the course, another of background figures in the history of thought (including not just philosophy, but also science, mathematics, psychology, sociology, theology, etc.). The first list includes about a hundred names, the second is now well over 900. I haven't done much work on integrating non-Western traditions yet - the existing design of the course only included one class on Eastern philosophy and religion - but I hope to do more.

My teaching notes, which I revised at the end of the semesters, now take up more than 200 pages in a binder. I used video a lot in the course - there is more philosophy on YouTube than you might imagine - and I have complete details of all those supporting materials.

Toward the end of the course, I had a lot of students missing classes because of end-of-term projects, academic trips, and so on, so I hit on the idea of turning my class presentations into podcasts which the absentees could listen to, which I did for the last six of about 45 classes. Those podcasts are here for anyone who is interested:

http://markharris.podbean.com/

I enjoyed doing these and may eventually make the whole course available in this format. If you should happen to listen to the "Eastern Philosophy and Religion" podcast, the section on Taoism is weak, but will be improved. Otherwise, I'm reasonably pleased with the results.

Now that I have the entire course constructed, it will be a pleasure to continue to tweak it in the future. Certainly I will have more time to read primary texts, a number of which I'm already working on. There is always the danger of over-enriching the course past its status as an introduction, and I've probably already done that to some extent. It's a characteristic of mine as a teacher - to leap up in level. On the other hand, I can only stand so much over-simplification, and I'm painfully aware of how much of that there has to be in any introductory course. I always tell my students in such courses that they are getting a 1.0 version of the subject because it's what they can grasp initially; the 2.0, 3.0, and 4.0 versions can come for them later, and they may look back and say, "My intro teacher had it wrong!" But their intro teacher knew it. You can't start with nuance; you have to start with the broad strokes.

Commonplace Book: Satisfaction

There is no "having it all." The choices we make require sacrifices. Whatever we do, we're always missing something. The key to not feeling cheated is to settle for less than everything while making the most of what's in front of us. This may be what the much-divorced Saul Bellow meant when he wrote, in The Adventures of Augie March, of "the refusal to live a disappointed life."

Stephen Kessler

Frida and Remedios

At one point during my stay in Korea, I had four pets. My older Birman cat, Claire, had come with me from America (and traveled and re-acclimated very well). A few months after I arrived, I succumbed to the charms of a Korean department store bunny whom I named Benjamin; he was with me for only a few months before dying quite suddenly of what seems to have been rabbit hemorrhagic disease, which is borne by insects and can take a healthy rabbit off in a day. That was the case with Benjamin; he was a fireball of energy on a Thursday night, a little mopey and uninterested in food at mid-day on Friday, and when I came back from work on Friday evening, he was gone. I had planned to take him to the vet on Saturday morning if he didn't look any better, but the illness worked too quickly.

In the meantime, I had added first a hedgehog, Tugger, and then a cockatiel, Wordsworth, to the family, both quite charming. When I realized that I would not be staying in Korea for a second year (which had been my plan, to work at a Korean university), but instead would be relocating to Mexico, I did a heavy amount of research on how to bring the animals with me from one country to the other. Unfortunately, Mexican animal import regulations had recently changed to make it exceptionally difficult, expensive, and time-consuming to get any species besides dogs and cats into the country. Only those were considered pets; the rest were all categorized as livestock or zoo animals. So transporting Claire was not going to be a problem, but bringing the others proved to be beyond my ability. In the case of the cockatiel, perhaps this was just as well; birds are pretty delicate, and I would have hated for Wordsworth to be hurt during the travel - breaking a wing in panic or something like that. Tugger, though, was a hardy little guy who was perfectly capable of making the trip, and I deeply regret not being able to get him into Mexico.

Luckily, I was able to re-home Wordsworth and Tugger successfully, so it was down to Claire and me. But then my sweet cat took ill about a month before our flight, her renal system starting to shut down. Perhaps it was her way of telling me that she was not up for one more adventure. I had to have the vet put her down, but that was preferable to her suffering or dying en route.

So, from four pets to none! - it was all sort of weird and distressing. Knowing I would have a nice two-bedroom apartment in Mexico, I began to think about adopting a pair of kittens or young cats, preferably girls from the same litter - and wouldn't you know, a little contact with the local adoption agencies in Culiacan and Mazatlan in the month after I arrived turned up just such a pair. I named them Frida (Kahlo) and Remedios (Varo), after the great Mexican painters.

Frida

Remedios

Remedios, the slightly larger of the two (but neither is very big), is the high-energy cat, somewhat prone to mischief and knocking stuff down. Frida is more relaxed. They are very good together and love to play with each other. They are incredibly gratifying to buy things for: they love every single toy - they go crazy for their new toys, but never stop loving their old toys - they love their cat beds, their climbing tower, their balls, their plush mice, all of it. They are not finicky eaters either. Life seems to be pure pleasure for them, and naturally that makes them a total joy to be around; they are both very affectionate with me besides.

It is amusing that Remedios is the musical cat, who will plop down in front of the speakers whenever I play a Mozart CD, while Frida is the cineaste, who is always up for watching a movie with me (and who looks straight at the screen). As felines, they naturally both have an affinity for books. I couldn't ask for better companions.

Sideways

Over the past couple of nights I watched Alexander Payne's Sideways for the first time (a recent DVD pick-up; all my viewing now is DVD-based, as streaming video doesn't work too well with the spotty Internet service here in Mexico). Of course, this is a charming, well-written, beautifully acted film, which I truly enjoyed, but something about it was a little depressing, too (as is often the case when I watch Woody Allen dramedies, as well). I guess it comes down to the fact that, Virginia Madsen's Maya aside, I wouldn't want to know or hang out with any of those people. I looked up my friend Robert Kennedy's review at his Cranes Are Flying site (distinct from his Cranes Are Flying blog):

SIDEWAYS (B+) (90)
USA (124 mi) 2004

Breezy, mostly feel-good, relatively mainstream American comedy that parallels the excruciating care needed to produce great wine with the foibles of being human, requiring a bit of the same tender loving care, with moments of hilarity alongside slow moments of isolated anguish, much of it in recovery from the resulting hangovers from nights of excessive drinking. The story follows two single guys, one recently divorced, Paul Giamatti, who is something of a loner, a failed would-be writer, probably a better wine connoisseur, and his former college roommate, Thomas Haden Church, who is about to get married over the weekend and wants one final fling before he loses his bachelorhood. While they couldn’t be more opposite, they have an amazing antagonism, which is brilliantly funny, largely due to the appealing, easy-going manner of Church, whose performance is simply magnificent.

The film turns into a buddy movie where the two visit the California wine country, visit a few vineyards, and due to Church’s incessant charm, pick up a couple of wine savvy girls, Virginia Madsen and Sandra Oh (at that time, Payne’s real-life wife), who they take for a ride, never realizing that by withholding the inevitable about the impending marriage, they were only fooling themselves. With bits of slapstick thrown against a quiet realism, it’s an effective film style, and has a fairly seamless feel to it until the abrupt end, which reminded me of the dilemma Tom Hanks faced at the end of CAST AWAY. The constant indulgence of food and wine, and who, might I ask, is paying for all this, mixed with the constant unfulfilled needs of the two guys leads to a middle class void that suggests nothing but trouble ahead. The boyish charm of Church and the meticulous pessimism of Giamatti makes for some scintillating dialogue in their scenes together, however, this seems overly pointed towards people with the economic means to indulge themselves like this. Most of us still have to work for a living. The concept of responsibility was nearly completely absent in this American middle class portrait. While this is a critically acclaimed and much awarded film, I’m not sure it shares international themes, as it seems overly concerned with strictly American consumerism and our own shallow values. And to make matters worse, as if relating to those suffering with a hangover, the over-indulgent musical score sounds very much like some piano-led classic light station, just one step up from Kenny G.

The comment "who, I might ask, is paying for all of this" is telling, because it certainly looks as if the men are blowing a lot of money in this pre-wedding week, but maybe Thomas Haden Church's Jack is picking up most of the tab. The film does not avoid economic realities, actually is rather attuned to them, so that most of the characters live in apartments (unusually for an American film) and Giamatti's Miles talks about his life specifically in terms of economic failure ("By my age, if you don't have money, you're nothing"). Although that observation could be made anywhere in America, I think it's telling that the movie takes place in Southern California, where residents' judgments of each other on economic grounds are particularly acute. (It's also delicious that Jack is marrying into a Kardashian-style Armenian family, years before the Kardashians took America by storm.)

It is funny that, since the movie was shot on location in the Santa Ynez Valley and used actual locations - the Hitching Post is a real restaurant - there are now Sideways tours like the Vertigo tours in Northern California:

The 2004 film Sideways was set (and shot on location) in the Santa Ynez Valley. Since then, visits from tourists looking to recreate the experiences of the fictional characters Miles and Jack, have become common. Fans of the movie can often be seen making a pilgrimage from the Buellton Days Inn to the Hitching Post restaurant.

Reading about Mexico

Living in a new country, I of course want to learn everything I can about it. Just before I came to Mexico, one of my ESL colleagues in Korea gave me Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory as a gift - I read it immediately and naturally was very impressed. The other Greene novels I've read are Brighton Rock and The Heart of the Matter. Greene is a very appealing figure to me; in an email to a friend, I spoke of "channeling my inner Graham Greene" as I adjusted to living internationally.

After I arrived, I wanted to get a handle on the wave of drug trafficking violence that has bedeviled Mexico for a number of years - especially since the city I live in, Culiacan, the capital of Sinaloa state, is one of the centers of that traffic and that violence. So I ordered Elijah Wald's Narcocorrido, about the genre of Mexican popular music that chronicles the exploits of the traffickers; John Gibler's To Die in Mexico: Dispatches from Inside the Drug War; and Charles Bowden's Murder City: Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields. Locally, I also picked up Javier Valdez Cardenas's Los morros del narco: Historias reales de ninos y jovenes en el narcotrafico mexicano and Sergio Ortega Noriega's Sinaloa: Historia breve; my reading Spanish is not quite up to getting through full-length books at any kind of speed yet, but with grammars and dictionaries, I'm pushing it along.

I finished Narcocorrido the other day, and recommend it highly; Elijah Wald's adventures in pursuit of corridos, which took him all over Mexico and the southwestern United States, are entertaining and informative. He wisely doesn't bother with any kind of moralistic tone, which would have been worse than useless in dealing with his subject. Going back to medieval times and probably well before, criminals have been celebrated in songs (sometimes because they commissioned them); there is a natural historical affinity there that is highly worthy of investigation.

I've started on Gibler's sharp To Die in Mexico, and on Ortega Noriega's history of Sinaloa as well. Gibler has already proven very helpful with subjects such as "la nota roja, the crime beat or blood news," which is very noticeable here; both the serious and the more scandalous newspapers run tons of coverage of drug crime, including all the gory and gruesome photographs a crime ghoul could demand.

Of course there is (thankfully) a much more pleasant side to Mexico too - the landscape, the biodiversity, the fascinating history, the colonial architecture, the good spirits of the people. A couple of years ago, I read Joseph Wood Krutch's excellent book about Baja California, The Forgotten Peninsula, which was published back in 1961 when that beautiful area was a good deal less developed than it is today.

One of the items in my new blogroll, Jim & Carole's Mexico Adventure, is a delightful photo-blog that captures much of the enchantment of the country, which given all the current difficulties, it is very good to be reminded of:

http://cookjmex.blogspot.com/

I have scarcely started on Mexican film, either contemporary or classic, although I am on the lookout for DVDs of those movies that have English subtitles, and I have found a few.

Latin American fiction in general is a terrible weak spot of mine, so I need to start taking care of that.

Mexico is a huge subject that I will continue to make notes on here.

Classic British Fiction

For the past few years, one of my projects has been to read or re-read classic British novels of the 1775-1925 period. I would consider it an impertinence to "review" these books; the acknowledged classics are pretty obviously great - which is partly to say, within 20 pages I usually know exactly why they are classics - and even the lesser volumes are cherishable. I concentrate on these books as experiences, not as objects to be assessed (with new books, both those dimensions are in play). It is especially good to encounter them now, in my fifties, when the life-adventures they describe are all much clearer to me than they could have been in high school or college. My early readings of some of these novels were not without value, but the later readings are incomparably richer.

Here is a list of the completed volumes in the current project, in the order read:

Charles Dickens, Martin Chuzzlewit
Anthony Trollope, Can You Forgive Her?
George Eliot, Middlemarch
William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair
Jane Austen, Emma
Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native
Charles Reade, It Is Never Too Late to Mend
Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent
Charlotte Bronte, Shirley
Sir Walter Scott, The Antiquary
Anne Bronte, Agnes Grey
Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White
James Hogg, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner
George Gissing, The Whirlpool
Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights
W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage
Bram Stoker, Dracula
George Meredith, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel
H.G. Wells, The War of the Worlds
Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

Currently I have two more books in progress in this project, Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, which I am about to finish, and James Joyce's Ulysses.

There are all too many novelists I have not covered yet, but intend to. Some of the biggest names on that list are R.D. Blackmore, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Samuel Butler, William Carleton, Benjamin Disraeli, Maria Edgeworth, John Galt, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Kingsley, Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Sheridan LeFanu, Charles Lever, Frederick Marryat, George Moore, Margaret Oliphant, Thomas Love Peacock, Mark Rutherford, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Robert Smith Surtees. It's not as if one could ever run out - it's an abundant period.

Thai Film

Wise Kwai blogs on Thai film at Wise Kwai's Thai Film Journal (now in the blogroll):

http://thaifilmjournal.blogspot.com/

He writes about his favorite Thai films of 20ll, including Pek-ek Ratanaruang's neo-noir Headshot, here:

http://www.nationmultimedia.com/life/Flooded-with-films-30172921.html

Diablo Cody

I am not knowledgeable about the work of Diablo Cody beyond hearsay, having seen neither Juno nor Young Adult. But I found Jeffrey Sconce's blog post about the "Codyverse" of interest:

http://ludicdespair.blogspot.com/2011/12/diabolical-codyism.html

Sconce suggests that "three basic questions...inform the narrative progression of both films" I mentioned above:

1. Why are there no "normal adults" anymore?
2. What is the proper relationship for a "normal adult" to have with popular culture?
3. Who shall and shall not be granted proximity to a precious, precious baby?

Of course, the territory of the first two questions was staked out a long time ago by Nick Hornby and cannot be considered fresh, so it's the third that provides the twist, "how profoundly invested the Codyverse is in maintaining rigorous moral parameters related to proper suburban breeding." It wouldn't be the first time a hip surface has masked an underlying conservatism.

POSTSCRIPT: I have no yearning toward babies myself, and I'm very glad that I have never been responsible for one (in any sense). But I should check out some of the works related to that yearning, such as Henry Jaglom's film Babyfever and John Sayles's film Casa de los Babys. I will admit that I have tended to shy away from those, as well as all comedies in the Three Men and a Baby tradition.

Back from Hiatus

The blog is back from a seven-month hiatus during which I relocated from Korea, where I was teaching ESL at a private adult academy, to Mexico, where I'm teaching in the humanities department at a subsidiary campus of a major university, mainly in the "prepa," or university high school. Before I left Korea, my beautiful 15-year-old Birman cat Claire passed on - what adventures we had together! - and when I arrived in Mexico, I adopted a pair of beautiful shorthair female cats from the same litter, whom I named Frida (Kahlo) and Remedios (Varo) after the great Mexican painters.

My living arrangement in Mexico, a spacious two-bedroom apartment in a nice neighborhood, is very much more comfortable than my tiny square one-room provided apartment in Korea, and I am grateful for that.

I shut the blog down for a while in part because I was spooked by what is happening with blogs in general - more and more of them are moving to commenting systems that do not allow people to comment unless they have and are willing to be identified by a Facebook account. Since (paranoia alert!) I consider Facebook to be a surveillance tool pure and simple, I find this unacceptable, and I have stopped commenting on those blogs.

I have never been active at Facebook, MySpace, or Twitter, and I got off LinkedIn (although that is a much better service). I don't much want to be found by the people who might find me at those sites. Even this blog is under my Web pseudonym (and always has been). About the only "social networking" site where I am active, and I really use it more for cataloguing, is LibraryThing, also under the pseudonym:

http://www.librarything.com/profile/PatrickMurtha

So why have I revived the blog? Mainly as an overflow space for material that I don't mind sharing with my correspondents, but don't want to inundate them with, either. I have made the blog unsearchable by Webcrawlers, so it should hardly ever show up in search engines. I'm not interested in a wider readership, but rather in communicating with those whom I already trust, who include old friends and the members of the three web discussion groups I participate in regularly: the private Yahoo Group I founded, Confabulation; 19thCenturyLit, also at Yahoo Groups; and the erudite film noir board, The Blackboard. Visitors from LibraryThing are welcome as well - book people are great!

This blog has consistently morphed and changed its approach over the years, since I'm kind of a restless guy. The first big change I have made this time is to add a blogroll that consists of all the blogs whose feeds I receive in my Google Reader, and I will keep this up-to-date, which means that blogs will frequently come and go. I'm constantly trying out new blogfeeds to see how much useful information I get from them, but there are also old stand-bys that are consistently terrific and that I would never abandon unless they stop publishing.

The blogroll is not a perfect picture of my interests by any means - ideally there would (and probably will) be more art, architecture, music, history, philosophy, beer, and clothing blogs. Literature and film blogs dominate because there are so many of them generally, and therefore inevitably more good ones too. Lord knows I've tried hundreds!

It's good to be back, and I look forward once again to posting material that captures my interest. Some of it may be meaningful primarily to me, but you never know, which I why I want it all to be available to the few dozen people I am interested in communicating with. I am definitely not trying to be a commentator who has a broader influence; whatever ambitions (and delusions!) I have ever had of that kind are hopefully behind me. The competition for attention is too fierce, and I don't want to be a politician-type spending my life pointing at myself; we live in a world where far too many people are doing that already.

Giving Cinephilia a Bad Name, Part Two

Sam Juliano cannot contain himself:

Allan Fish has now officially launched the ‘Mother’ of all film lists, a project that is as remarkable in its audacity as it is in sheer comprehensiveness. Allan is arguably the most authoritative film connoisseur online (or anywhere for that matter) and this list is far more than a labor of love, but written proof that this eccentric, outspoken and utterly brilliant Brit has travelled further than his peers in terms of scope and discernment. The project is merely a prelude for the intended publication of his long-awaited film book, and encompasses the posting of the 3,000 greatest films ever made, with 600 a day through Thursday of this week. The endeavor was urged upon Allan from early last year, and he has complied with approximation, even while admitting the arbitrary nature of such a listing was stifling. Still as a resource, there isn’t a better and more valuable film list available anywhere. And that revelation is perhaps Allan’s most untouchable claim to prominence in the film world. Bravo, Allan!

Oh, I give up. What point is there in denouncing the follies of your times when the objects of your complaints not only fail to respond cogently to your criticisms, but really haven't got the foggiest idea what you are talking about? It's as if we were raised on different planets. Admittedly, this Fish list is a minor folly in the big picture, but I am a minor writer; it represents a perfect target for my pipsqueak outrage -- I'll leave the bigger subjects for masters of outrage such as James Howard Kunstler, Camille Paglia, and Niall Ferguson (to pick a diverse bunch). But no matter how small the target, its (psychological) defenses can still be surprisingly impenetrable. So there is probably no particular ground to be gained by enumerating these facts:

1. It's just a list, and a mish-mash of a list at that. Given a few days lead time, I could put together an approximation of this list myself, without having seen the films. No one would know the difference. Once you come up with the names of 3,000 films that have had some acclaim -- a few hours work on the IMDB and other sites -- the order of the items beyond the first 200 or so is of scant significance. You could throw darts. And I hope that is what Mr. Fish did, because the thought of him wasting hours of his life on contemplating "Should Jacques Rivette's Duelle be #2,467 or #2,468?" is rather depressing.

2. It is not a list of "the 3,000 greatest films ever made," nor even an approach to a consensus about such -- how could it be, if it merely represents one fanatic's taste at a single moment in his viewing history? The notion that this enterprise could be "authoritative" or "comprehensive" is daft. The Sight and Sound decade polls are interesting because they represent a cross-section of established critics and directors with enormously different agendas. I am sorry, Allan, but like me, you are just some guy. Nice try at getting your buds to claim greater significance for you, but believe me, that gambit has been tried many times before in cinephilia, both online and off.

3. If the "arbtrary nature" of making such a list was "stifling," why take it on? I perceive this bit of lame excuse-making as the only visible attempt to counter any of my objections, but the fact is that Mr. Fish, like others I could name, is so deep in his OCD-fueled list-making hell that he not only repeatedly foists his lists on the world, he turns them into damned countdowns. Oh my God, what will Allan's number one movie of all time be? This will be definitive! Actually, it's rather less definitive than a countdown of Paris Hilton's bed partners, which is at least a bounded class that only she can comment on.

4. Stop with the adjective pile-on already, Sam -- eccentric, remarkable, audacious, comprehensive, brilliant, outspoken, authoritative, "further than his peers in scope and discernment," revelation, untouchable, "merely a prelude," valuable, prominent, "far more than a labor of love." We get it! You're killing me here! It is the most amazing list ever -- I bow before its staggering listiness. Now will you please go away?

5. It is odd, since criticism is their thing, that many cinephiles deal very poorly with criticism at the level of the enterprise -- not "Was this executed well?" but the more important prior consideration, "Was this worth doing in the first place?" To them, the enterprise is somehow sacred and beyond criticism, a fact I discovered long ago when I bad-mouthed the emphasis on the making of top ten lists in a certain circle -- it was as if I had ritually murdered a puppy, you have seldom seen such a vehement repudiation (of my argument, my motivation, my character, the works). My friend Robert Kennedy, who truly is adding to our knowledge of film at his Cranes Are Flying website and blog, has rightly pointed out that it does no purported critic any good -- not a Pauline Kael, not an Andrew Sarris, not a Mike D'Angelo, not an Allan Fish -- to be surrounded by yes-men. It is very telling that, in the Wonders in the Dark comments, Sam Juliano said he stomped on me "to spare Allan that kind of unfair attack" -- as if any questioning of the concept of the list was utterly beyond the pale. Fill in your own "They can dish it out, but they can't take it" comment about many online film critics; you won't be far off.

6. It makes me sad to conclude that cinephilia makes some people stupid(er). But it does seem to. This is not a phenomenon unique to this obsession, I hasten to add -- sports fanatics are frequently completely la-la -- but by some logic I cannot get to the bottom of, it is worse for certain enthusiasms than others. As an obsessive myself, I live close to the edge, and perhaps for that reason I sometimes react with an especially pronounced horror to people who I think have gone over the edge. It is not a future I want for myself. Anyone who reads my critiques as being a kind of self-checking mechanism is approaching the heart of the matter. As Hermann Hesse wisely wrote, "If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn't part of ourselves doesn't disturb us."

Giving Cinephilia a Bad Name

Warning: bad-tempered fit of spleen ahead.

A dimwit named Allan Fish at the occasionally useful filmblog Wonders in the Dark has decided to grace humanity with an un-annotated list of his top 3,000 films, just the titles, countries, release years, and directors, in order, counting backward from 3,000 to 1. I could not resist taking a potshot at this, in the form of a comment which may or may not get published at the blog. If it doesn't, I get that; I'm not fond of insults, either, and I've moderated some comments of that type out of existence here. However, I will archive my reaction at my own blog, because I truly want to record my objections to such an exercise:

Well, since you said you need to have your head examined…you do understand that this is exceedingly childish, right? That this is the sort of thing that gives cinephilia a bad name? That the dedicated study of movies needs fewer people such as yourself, who would undertake such a cockamamie project, and more who are past the adolescent, High Fidelity-esque “art-house fanboy” stage? You do know all this, right?

Am I being as childish as Mr. Fish? Quite possibly, and without a doubt I am also being unkind. But this sort of intensive, labor-heavy trivialization of something that matters a great deal, the history of film, will never sit well with me, at least not coming from someone over the age of 20. And a top 3,000...yikes. Come back, all my prior betes noires; none of you can begin to compete with this. Fish has out-fished you.

POSTSCRIPT: In the interest of cultural sanitation, I'm not linking to the list; it's easily found. But here is a representative sample of ten films:

2965 Michael Clayton (US 2007…Tony Gilroy)
2964 Ormen (Sweden 1966…Hans Abramson)
2963 The Assassin (Italy 1961…Elio Petri)
2962 Cutting it Short (Czechoslovakia 1980…Jiri Menzel)
2961 An American Werewolf in London (US/UK 1981…John Landis)
2960 Troy: director’s cut (US 2004/2007…Wolfgang Petersen)
2959 Hamlet (UK-TV 2009…Gregory Doran)
2958 My Sister, My Love (Sweden 1966…Vilgot Sjöman)
2957 Let George Do It (UK 1940…Marcel Varnel)
2956 Never Let Me Go (UK 2010…Mark Romanek)

What could this possibly mean? That Mr. Fish has diverse tastes, that he has seen a lot of obscurities, that he neither privileges nor dismisses Hollywood movies? Welcome to the club(s). That Troy is ever so slightly better than An American Werewolf in London in the cosmic scheme of things? If the order of these ten films were scrambled, or they were placed elsewhere in Mr. Fish's 3,000, or he removed them all and replaced them with roughly equivalent titles not currently in the list, would that add to the sum of the world's knowledge? It wouldn't even add to our knowledge of Mr. Fish.

UPDATE: Did I not understand, Sam Juliano of Wonders in the Dark huffed, that Allan Fish was one of the most acclaimed film bloggers and that he has seen "over 8,000 films in his life"? I'll assume that Mr. Fish is not an old man, so if he has seen 8,000 films in his life, he has done very little else; he has not actually lived a life, and what he has to say about the films in question is highly unlikely to be of much interest. Of course, in the case of this list, he isn't saying anything.

Mr. Fish himself picked up the volume theme. "How many of this 3,000 have you seen? Once you have seen them all, and the several thousand that missed out, then you can come back here and start insulting me...Now go get an education!" You know, Mr. Fish, it is quite possible to get a more balanced education than watching 8,000 movies. That you and Mr. Juliano are all worked up over the numbers merely underlines my point about the fanboy mentality. Someone could have seen no prior films and still have more pertinent to say about Citizen Kane than a cinemaniac.

I suffer from OCD myself, I recognize the symptoms, but with assistance I have learned when OCD is simply not relevant. The assessment of art is one of those occasions. Mr. Fish, psychological help is available!

(500) Days of Summer (2009)

Enjoyable, but ultimately disappointing. I like Joseph Gordon-Levitt very much, and the concept and (by and large) the execution of the time-shuttling structure are fine. But much of the content feels too cutesy to me. Robert Kennedy correctly notes the cop-out of the ending in his review:

After spending the entire film deconstructing the typical Hollywood love story, basically reprogramming the audience’s expectations by refusing to allow the couple to succeed, something only hinted at in the disappearing memory play and disoriented editing structure of Charlie Kaufman and Michel Gondry’s ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND (2004), but here does the director lose his nerve and retreat back to a safe and formulaic ending, something that could just as easily have been chosen by an audience poll, as it lacks the refreshing originality of the rest of the film.

http://helenshepard.com/cranes/wx.htm

I think the retreat to formula starts earlier than that, actually. The appealingly unreal version of Los Angeles feels a lot like Woody Allen's appealingly unreal versions of New York (Gordon-Levitt = Edward Norton in Everyone Says I Love You), and the greeting-card company setting is all too obviously a movie writer's TV-sitcom-mediated idea of a "workplace." Tom Hansen's best buddies are standard-issue guy-comedy characters. Zooey Deschanel's Summer is in a long line of kooky (to greater or lesser extent) romcom girls. The big musical number looks to be a crib from the method of the Allen film and the (superior) television series Eli Stone, which premiered seven months before filming for (500) Days of Summer began. Tom's corporate breakdown has been done a thousand times. The voiceover narration is, as Robert Kennedy again correctly notes, weirdly stentorian, without offering any reason for being so; by contrast, the rather similar narration in the unknown (and also superior) Canadian indie One Week, with Joshua Jackson, pays off very cleverly indeed in the end.

Despite my sympathy for Gordon-Levitt's Tom Hansen, I couldn't work up any feeling of wistful lost romance because Deschanel's Summer Finn seems calculatingly sadistic from the get-go (or is it just that Tom is remembering her that way? Not clear). It is one thing to acknowledge in your heart of hearts that romance is always contingent and often fleeting; quite another to remind your current squeeze of that unpleasant truth at every possible opportunity. 500 days of that would be way too many.

Mammal Watch: Siberian Weasel

I am an enthusiastic mammal-watcher, which is harder to be than a bird-watcher because mammals are more visually elusive. Last night as I was walking through Yongji Park in Changwon, I saw a mustelid mammal that I thought might have been a feral ferret. But the coloration also matched the Siberian Weasel, which is indigenous to Korea. Here is a picture of the Siberian Weasel that I lifted from the Web:

I got a really good look at this mammal, since it was not particularly fearful and the lighting in the park was good. After I got home, I posted queries at the forums at Animal Rescue Korea and MammalWatching.com (an excellent site). Respondents confirmed that the Siberian Weasel has adapted to urban environments in Korea and China, and is seen in Seoul, Busan, and Shanghai, also on Jeju Island off the South Korean coast. So I was able to confirm my sighting as this species, which excited me considerably. There is not much mammal action around here; I’ve only seen Red Squirrels a couple of times locally. And I've never seen any mustelids in the wild before, so this was a great experience.

In the Shadows

Have you ever noticed how in biographies, a fringe character who pops up periodically but about whom little is known is always described as a "shadowy figure"? Well, that guy is me. It's not so easy to be mysterious in our electronic era as in earlier times, but I am doing my best. This blog, of course, is written under a pseudonym (one of several handles that I use online). I have never been on Facebook, MySpace, or Twitter, and recently deleted my LinkedIn account. I have been scrubbing a lot of my Internet presence elsewhere as well. I have moved rapidly from city to city and lately from country to country, and am about to make another such leap. Usually when I leave a place, the vast majority of people I knew there never hear from (and perhaps about) me again. I want to be hard to find, except for that small group of family and friends that I keep apprised of my movements.

Our worldwide social movement towards oversharing of information, total personal transparency, and constant surveillance both overt and covert, appalls me, and whatever little I can do to resist it, I will. I rather expect that a small but vigorous counter-movement will form around this notion of renewed privacy and semi-visibility; Mark Zuckerberg et al. have swung the pendulum so far in their "We Live in Public" direction that an opposite if not equal reaction is probably inevitable.

The surveillance society, a development of Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon concept employing all the latest modern technologies, is especially troubling to me. Lately I have noticed how about half the visual content on local television news programs in Korea is made up of hidden camera videos. Blaise Pascal once said that "the sole cause of man's unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room"; but we may all have to do that if we wish to have any personal zone whatsoever.

We are not only over-watched, we are over-identifiable. It used to be that you could remake your identity fairly easily. Crossing borders without papers was common. Then, as Paul Fussell discusses in his wonderful book Abroad, passports and visas became required burdens and avatars of modern identity. You could still gallivant around in your own country without much fuss as late as the Fifties and Sixties, the time of On the Road and The Fugitive. The premise of The Fugitive, that Richard Kimball could move from state to state without ever having to produce a picture ID, open a bank account, or obtain a driver's license -- without ever having to prove who he is -- is unthinkable nowadays. We are demanded to produce such proof all the time.

It becomes harder and harder to say, as Frank Sinatra sings in "Angel Eyes," "Excuse me while I disappear...." But I think that when the ability to disappear, to not be known, is lost, something fundamental has been taken from us. And yes, I admit that when that ability does exist, people will misuse it to evade taxes, to escape from the consequences of their crimes, to bail out on responsibilities -- naturally they will. There is no benefit without that kind of corresponding deficit. But it is a trade-off I would happily return to. A world without shadows is glaring, frightening, and Orwellian.

David Foster Wallace

With David Foster Wallace's unfinished novel The Pale King coming out, there has been a surge of essays and articles about the late writer, and one of the most interesting is this account in The Guardian (those British newspapers strike again!) of a visit with his widow, artist Karen Green:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/apr/10/karen-green-david-foster-wallace-interview

I love this bit about Wallace's friendship/rivalry with Jonathan Franzen:

Franzen was one of very few literary figures with whom Wallace kept in touch. They had both been beset by similar doubts about their work, and about the future of the American novel, which they had attempted to resolve in different ways; Franzen committing himself to "old-fashioned" storytelling in The Corrections, Wallace persisting with his sense that fiction had to be frenetically alive to the way "experience seemed to barrage me with input".

Green recalls their rivalry with a smile. "They were really great together, you know like two kids in the back seat of the car, squabbling, it was really delightful to see them together. Jon has lost that neck-and-neck competitor, his soccer-field pal."

In one corner of the room where we are talking is a beautiful guitar given to Green by Franzen, which she is learning to play: Leonard Cohen and Rufus Wainwright. "Jon was one of David's very, very few writing friends," she says. "He was sort of like a god to David and I think Jon maybe felt something the same about David. And he has been an incredible friend to me since [Wallace's suicide] happened. He feels like a brother."

At the end of the article, there is a nice little annotated bibliography of Wallace's writings.

RIP Sidney Lumet

What a great film-maker he was (and by every report I have ever read, a fine and thoroughly decent man). Roger Ebert has put up a thoughtful obituary:

http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20110409/FEATURED/110409988

Lumet's output is equally rich in accepted classics, and re-discoverable neglected films. He started out performing on the Broadway stage as a child, and always had a marvelous touch with actors, who revered him. He is underrated as a visual artist because he created a separate style appropriate to the needs of each movie. And as a dramatic director, keeping the audience involved in every scene, very few are in his league.

I am partial to so many of his films, but would give special shout-outs to Prince of the City, probably his most complex movie, and in my view a masterpiece; the stunningly tense Fail-Safe, under-appreciated because of its proximity to the identically plotted Dr. Strangelove; and Network, in which Lumet, brilliant screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky, and an incomparable cast, foresaw the world we live in now.

POSTSCRIPT: Jeffery Wells at Hollywood Elsewhere is with me on Prince of the City:

To me Lumet's masterpiece is Prince of the City ('81) -- a nearly three-hour-long drama about the morality of finking out your friends in order to find your morality, and entirely about New York cops and mob guys and district attorneys and junkies, most of it set in the offices of this or that prosecutor with guys dressed in suits and shirtsleeves with cold takeout food and tepid coffee on the desk.

POSTSCRIPT: I found an interesting tidbit in a tribute piece by Clint O'Connor at the Cleveland Plain Dealer:

http://www.cleveland.com/moviebuff/index.ssf/2011/04/sidney_lumet_an_appreciation_g.html

When I asked about some of his all-time favorites, he wouldn't bite. "I'm not going to tell you that," said Lumet. "If I tell you about the ones I feel good about, it makes orphans of the other ones."

Robert Altman made a very similar comment in an interview once: The films are all my children; whatever one you say you don't like, I'm going to stick up for that one and say it's a favorite.

No orphans.