On Theme In Literature: A Response To A Friend

First of all, for Aristotle plot, the causality among events,  which I previously suggested is, as causality, an aspect of my conception of theme as world view--theme NOT BEING a moral or homily to be ascribed, tacked on, simple-mindedly to a text, as in an Aesop fable-- is more important than character. That's against you saying: ...  I follow the fortunes of characters, sympathizing, mocking, admiring, puzzling over motives, but with the expectation that it will lead somewhere significant.... And what you say, now that I've considered it, seems in fact inconsistent with an Aristotelean notion of plot. 

I think Aristotle is right that plot is more important than character. I may not understand what he meant, only having in my mind what has been said commonly about him, but it makes sense in the context of what I mean. 

Character doesn't exist outside world. It is a function of world. It is in a good book an effective representation of people so that we are interested, affected, aroused, moved, sometimes overjoyed, sometimes distraught and so on. That's what responding to literature involves. But moving from response to critical response means to think through one's feelings, which itself involves necessarily asking what it all means. That involves understanding character in light of what it all means. For that, what you "follow," which is of course fine, is inadequate to critical understanding, I'd respectfully argue.

And it is in the context of this understanding that "Trust the teller..." Is to be understood. The issue is of course the tale itself as contra-distinct from some external stated intention. But that trust needs a refinement beyond what you say you follow. The tale itself in its literary properties, in all its complexities, in understanding why sometimes just what you feel about say one character  is insufficient when seen against the whole, is what engenders resolutionary meaning, even if ambiguous and paradoxical--those qualities part of the essence of good literature.

Not to cavil, but saying stories are different from life, to escape truism, must mean that stories represent a vision life. For a God based writer, that representation may be of a universe determined by a God. His fiction may cleave to that. If the author wants to project a world of chance, of contingency, he will represent that. And one more point, your distinction between life--as chance, "no coherent pattern"-and literary art--as presumably constituted by "coherent patterns," my very argument in fact--needs the addition of the complicating fact that we in life see the world in coherent patterns, however things impinge on us, and literary art is of a piece with us in the nature of things seeing what's around us as world, as coherent pattern.

It's in these terms that I'd speak about the theme of Lear, or, more to immediate hand, Gatsby. For Lear, I'd have to give it some thought. For Gatsby, which I've been thinking about lately for obvious reasons, I'd conceptualize it as a matter of intellectual shorthand as something like irretrievably blackened idealism. 

I don't agree at all with your notion of theme, needless to say.

The Place Beyond The Pines

I thought it was great. For all its length I didn't want it to end. It had me from the first long opening shot to the final lingering shot of the place the kid rides away from, leaves the place beyond the pines behind to get to a place beyond the place beyond the pines.

I've heard people say the third part is a let down. Not to me. I think it's a fitting complement to, and resolution of, the movie's themes as they expand in scope, complexity, intensity and depth from part to part to part.

I'm going from imperfect memory here.

I ask myself what's the movie about, as well as how it's about what it's about, as Ebert used to say. I think it's about a great many things but a central and rather slapping-one-across-the-face thing is the theme of fathers and sons and the generational consequences of fathers' acts and omissions. So Gosling's father, absent as one, leaves a drifting wayward son. Gosling is determined, partly in reaction to that, to do right by his son, who is some of the wages of the drift of his life. 

He's so elemental that unnuanced linearity is of his laconic  essence. He will do right by his son. He quits his job. He tells Eva Mendes to be with him. She asks, trying to maintain and ascend a more complex linear path, how will he take care of them. Bourgeois stability, the opposite of what he has been in his life, is important to her even if she struggles with her deep attraction to him: she has a man, a house, a job, schooling she's doing. Her return fling with him is mostly that. So now he sees he needs more money than his bust out job can possibly provide him, seeing materially with what he needs to compete for her. So he cottons on to Mendelsohn's original suggestion of robbing banks, which he does with his own extreme, fear-induced excitable, flair.

Now he feels he can get Mendes and his child to be with him. He thinks it will just happen. And we expect, at this point not realizing how tis movie goes, that he will confront her new man, and beat his time. His simple mindedness has him unable to understand propriety. He just shows up at her house, owned by her partner. He in effect busts in to her house with a crib and starts assembling it thinking nothing of it. Her man confronts him, with due shock at his mindless temerity, just coming in, thinking to turn their lives upside down, just like that. And the new man's more bourgeois stability, house, job, providing for his "family" proves no match for the muscled, outlaw, outlier strength  and violence Gosling wreaks of. But just at the point that one might think he's done what he needs to to dispose of the competition, Mendes is utterly shocked and repulsed by him and lovingly tends to her man.

As we ascend class to the next part of the movie, we move into greater moral murkiness and complex ambiguity. Cooper, a bar passed patrol cop, the son of a well regarded judge, who he's driven to react against in his life, is of his essence a morally divided man, so restlessly ambitious he rips off his hospital tubes and aids and tries immediately to get out of bed. His shooting of Gosling is, *to my mind,* his attempt to jet himself ahead in his career. He had no need to enter the home, having called for back up. He probably broke protocol by doing so. He knew Gosling was upstairs. He needn't have entered the room as sirens signalled other police arriving. He made a desperate lunge for the career propulsion of heroics. He burst into the room shooting first.

The scenes between him and Bruce Greenwood, especially the first one, are marvels of nuance and levels of meaning consistent with ambiguous morality. Greenwood ambivalently investigates him in that first interview while signalling explicitly to him what to say. 

Then the intensity of Cooper's desire to one better his father is steeped in naïveté when he tells his commanding officer he wants to be made Lieutenant and the head of a squad. And his simmering reaction against his father is evident when he says in his speech, with his father watching, that he wishes to act to serve justice rather than sit and talk about it.

His marriage fails and his overweening ambition and guilt ridden moral ambiguity seem to be part of what wrecked it and in seem in significant part to have yielded his complex, morally deficient son, who is so self-alienated that, in his absurd wiggery, he can't be any kind of authentic self. Gosling's son, absent a biological father, a source of some inner emptiness, still has the benefit of a father in Mendes's partner, who's shown as an uncomplicated good man who has made a stable good life for Mendes, their daughter, and Gosling's son. In Gosling's conception of family, Mendes, their child and his motorcycle all have pride of place.

Generational circles start to close in the complicated relationship between the sons and in Gosling's son's growing realization of who his biological father is and was, learning of it from Mendelsohn--note the bike riding as an echo of his father's motorcycle riding--the kind of brilliant outlaw, outlier gifts Gosling had, his outlawry itself, and how he died at the hands of Cooper. 

But lineage isn't destiny, though virtually necessary to, but not sufficient for, the kind of man a son will be. So transcending any necessary fate, that aided by the fathering he's gotten from Mendes's partner, Gosling's son murders neither Cooper, who is both politically triumphant and abject when kneeling before Gosling's son in his grief out of his love for his son who he imagines has been shot, nor murders Cooper's son. 

And in the end, lighting out, Gosling's son, on his motorcycle, literally and metaphorically leaving the place beyond the pines for a place beyond that point, sets out to seek to make his own new destiny out of the soil of both his complex past and who he understands himself to be as evidenced in not getting imprisoned within the enclosing of the generational circle around him. In leaving and riding he is both his fathers and he is own young man too.

David Mamet's Phil Spector

I watched David Mamet's Phil Spector. I thought it great.

The difficulty of formulating of a defence theory and the lavish celebrity trial preparation, easily afforded by the ghoulish Spector, set the context for the evolving lawyer client and person to person relationship between Spector and his understated lawyer.

Pacino, 10 pounds ham to 90 pounds real character, is tremendous as Spector, illuminating his psychic fragility, his utter whacko creepiness, his manic brilliance, his hermetic wealth, his musical accomplishment, his unwieldiness, and generally his spectacular, irresistible (partly as in you-can't-turn-away) outsizedness.

The crazy finally overwhelms the brilliant in Spector when he shows up for trial wearing a Jimi Hendrix wig, (which he claims isn't a wig.) His lawyer decides that that day she can't put him on the stand. ( I haven't been able to find out if he ever testified at either trial.)

Mamet is exceptional in extrapolating the tension from two bookends of the facts-of-the-case spectrum: the sheer outlandishness of the notion that Lana Clarkson would that particular night kill herself or even put a gun in her own mouth and the mysteriousness of the lack of blood splatter on Spector given the prosecution's theory of the case.

In that tension, within what is depicted in the film, I was left with reasonable doubt.

I thought Mirren really effective in her subdued playing of Spector's lawyer. And while Mamet initially makes a strong point of how expensive she is, we see her, payment having presumably been made, working the case agonizingly slowly, deliberately, self-questioningly, and conscientiously, all sotto voce to Spector's (via Mamet) Shakespearean, larger than life presence, a continuous mix, as noted, of brilliance and craziness.

That mix is shown particularly in the powerful scene when Spector breaks down in rage at the mock cross examination, understanding the rehearsal for what it is, as he keeps saying, while regardless of that understanding being unable to control the mock affront he perceives. In that we see what a ticking time bomb he embodies.

His lawyer's calm quieting him down, almost as if talking to a child, punctuated by Spector needing to gloat, even here, that he was right, Lennon was wrong in that particular orchestration of Lennon's record, and Spector's regaining, temporarily, his self possession are simply amazing film making, a great tribute to Pacino, Mirren and especially Mamet.

There's a lot of great meat in this film, all underlain by Spector's music and I'll be thinking about it and wanting to talk about it for some time to come.

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Some Thoughts On Ray Charles's Genius Loves Company

This may be slightly contrarian.

The tremendous Ray Charles's best selling record was his last, posthumously released, so close was it recorded to his end, a series of duets nicely titled Genius Loves Company. Joining him are such stalwart singers as Norah Jones, Michael McDonald, Diana Krall, Elton John, Bonnie Raitt, Willie Nelson, a few others. 

Some singers lose their chops with age and Ray Charles, sick at the end of his years, lost his. The sad result is that to a singer his duetting partners tend to carry him. He just, understandably , didn't have it anymore. So why is it his best selling record: nostalgia , sentimentality, genuine reverence for Charles, the popularity of his duet partners, hyping of the record, wanting one last bit of Charles, lack of discernment? Likely all of these reasons and others along their lines. 

When I bought it a few weeks ago, downloaded from iTunes, I had no idea it was Charles's last record. I had never heard of it before, but heard one track of it that I liked and decided to get it, only to be disappointed musically by it overall. 

Still had I known how the entire record played, had I found it musically unprepossessing, I would've bought it in a heartbeat regardless for most of the reasons I briefly just speculated about, save, I hope, for lack of discernment, so much do I love Ray Charles.

One final thought: I'm often in mind of Billie Holiday's last record, Lady In Satin, recorded near the diseased end of her drug shattered life, with only raspy traces of her voice left. But hers is a record of astonishing emotional power, owing, I think, to her channeling her fraught experiences and fraught state of being into her interpretation of what she sang and conveying all that emotionally and dramatically. You feel her pain. 

Not anything close to that in Genius Loves Company. There, at best, we get Ray Charles trying hard to sing up to the songs, but sounding light voiced, not quite up to them, and, as noted, needing the help his duetting partners give him, as though he were leaning on them while they walked together.

A Short Theory On Love

A SHORT THEORY ON LOVE AS CHOICE.

Experience has taught me this: for adults "falling in love" as a romantic matter is a choice. The usual preconditions have to be in place, sexual attraction in most cases, soul to soul compatibility in all cases. But feelings of love need, I'd argue, some recognition in mind, usually evident in saying so, to oneself, to another, to the chosen other. 

Articulation is a commitment to those feelings, their relative implementation. 

Romeo and Juliet is English literature's classic depiction of young romantic love. That state of being for the "star crossed lovers" emerges without choice. Their attraction to each other, soul to soul, overwhelms them. It's foregone in their first encounter. 

The comedic complement to that mysterious operation in Shakespeare is A Mid Summer Night's Dream, where the emotions woken up with are the workings of fairies and spirits and magic dust, with no accounting for, with the sheer repudiation of, rationality. 

The adult answer to Romeo and Juliet in Shakespeare is his mordant tribute to mature love, perhaps the thematic template for Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Antony and Cleopatra. They each give up kingdoms and ultimately their lives for their adult, tarnished love for each other but as matters, I'd argue, of mature choice.

Evidence for my thesis exists in the very rituals leading to marriage or to its non institutional equivalent, proposal, acceptance or rejection, then in marriage at least the formal repetition of choice in the completion of vows. 

And to my mind a classic illustration of the operation of choice lies in the spurning lover seeking to reengage with the spurned lover. The spurned lover will be working on getting over the grief in being spurned, or may have accomplished it. Now confronted by the importuning to resume affection, the spurned may plead, "Why are you doing this? I've just gotten," or "I'm just getting, over you." Now he or she has to decide whether to cap dormant or latent or subsisting feelings, if still there--they may not be--by the assent to them. Unassented to, love will not find love; reciprocity will be denied.

On Friendship

There's a so so book review in TNR,http://www.tnr.com/book/review/friendship-better-romance, on friendship. It makes one point I like and that is this: the "scientizing," my neologism, of folk psychology: "This tendency to repackage the obvious carries over to citation, with professional identifications giving false authority to anodyne comments." And it speaks briefly though inadequately about the power of friendship:

...We all have friendships, premonitions about friendships and regrets about friendships. The best friendships seem to activate our best—usually dormant—parts. They can end in betrayal or outrage or in that more tragic..

and refers to a brief example from the book:

...'For the past forty years, Richard Levinson has spoken on the phone with his friend and fellow trial lawyer John every single day'...

I had such a best friend, my law partner in fact, James Rose, who died too young two years ago and a bit, in December 2010. From September 28, 2004 to the day he died, December 23, 2010, to be exact, he practiced law in Bracebridge, Ontario, and I practiced law in Toronto, both under the banner, Basman Rose. Before that for about 15 years, we were partners in a larger downtown Toronto law firm, where our friendship formed and cemented itself. 

What didn't we do together but everything, traveled--an annual tradition inaugurated by a last minute decision to fly from Toronto to Little Rock to be there for Clinton's winning the presidency first time round, fought cases, fought each other, got drunk a million times , ate a million meals, sat it out in a million bars, listened how many times to the blues, saw each other through all our relative crises, got pissed off with each other, laughed about it after. 

It's said people are as sick as their secrets. Well on that score we were healthy. We talked about everything and everyone, the glorious and the shockingly inglorious. No secrets. 

From the time we became friends till the day he died, we kibitzed and laughed at everything. Always, and more than anything else, we were laughing. 

The trial lawyer daily phoning his friend put me in more intense mind of my friend--he's always on my mind, more or less. I had dinner with one of my best friends last week and told him a long story about certain experiences I'd been having.

He asked me who else I'd told or would tell this story to. I mentioned a few people who were our mutual friends and ruled some in and some out and said the reasons why. He then asked me if I would have told this story to James Rose. "Oh my God," I said, "in a heart beat. We thrived on sharing these kinds of stories with each other. This kind of story was so us."

And in thinking about it, though I've had the same thought innumerable times, as I lived through the experiences forming the story, complicated, bittersweet, enlivening, making-life-worthwhile experiences they are, I was again struck but even more forcefully, like a hammer to the head, how much of each other's lives we shared and in a way lived, and how we in our friendship lived a certain life together, like a marriage but it was a friendship between two men who believed at bottom they were forever kids.

Him dead is like living without something, say one of your senses, or an arm or a leg. It's living with a certain kind of irreparability. You keep on. You keep having a relatively full life. But too you live that life with a sizeable hole in it and there is, ultimately, nothing to fill it in. But at least there is the poignant and intangible concreteness of memory and the deep thanks to the way things sometimes go that I had such a friend.

Is Friendship Better than Romance?

www.tnr.com

<​p>Last month, I went on a very successful “friend date.&rdquo

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On Atheists And Agnostics And Faith

Atheism means without belief in god, just as atypical means without typicality or amoral means without morality, the prefix “a” meaning without. An agnostic is therefore someone without Gnosticism, which is to say, without spiritual knowledge, an epistemological proposition, that we can’t know what is beyond materiality.

So there is some confused thinking about agnosticism.

Those who doubt God’s existence but hold themselves open to the possibility of his existence are not agnostics even though their disbelief is tentative. They are not agnostics because their tentative disbelief renders them without belief in God’s existence and therefore atheists. Doubt here constitutes disbelief, and the militancy or tentativeness of this disbelief doesn’t go to an analytical distinction between agnosticism and atheism. So if there is virtue in open minded disbelief, atheists can have it.

As noted, agnosticism is an assertion about what we can know: that we can’t know what is beyond nature. Therefore the claims of agnosticism don’t go to belief or disbelief in God. And in this sense, it follows, that theists can be atheists because they can say that they cannot know the supernatural but believe as a matter of faith in God’s existence.

So my question is what is the faith that necessarily marks atheists? Is it faith in the proposition that God does not exist? If faith is belief not based on proof, then what does it mean to say that the assertion of god’s non existence is a matter of faith? Does it mean that the assertion of non existence of anything is a manifestation of faith, like unicorns or cosmic tea cups, or the existence of any number of gods, (why just one?)

This reasoning seems absurd. So until someone can persuade me of the difference in principle between disbelieving in unicorns not implicating faith and disbelieving in God not implicating faith, I’d contend they can’t make a case for atheists as necessarily marked by faith.