Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

  No, I'm not going to do a review.  Haven't seen the movie.  But I did read a review by Owen Glieberman that struck me as fascinating. Glieberman says the problem with the recent movie Odyssey, is that Christopher Nolan kept the gods out of it.  The gods are primordial forces, and Homer without his gods is a much less interesting story teller. BUT ... he continues, if you do want to see the embodiment of primordial forces, creatures very akin to Homer's gods, on a movie screen:  THAT is what Godzilla movies are for. The puny humas trying to avoid destruction in a world like this are, well ... very much like Odysseus and his men seeking to sail between rocks and a whirlpool because of the anger of Poseidon. Fair point, Mr. Gleiberman     Godzilla Minus Zero Review: An Even Grander Clash-of-the-Titans Sequel

 Not for the first time, I am thinking today about this odd song. The lyrics tell a story about two people, a couple, who are so bored with each other that they try to cheat on each other but, through lucky happenstance, end up making a rendezvous with ... each other.  Oh, what jolly fun. It is tricky to figure out the logistics, though. Our (male) protagonist is reading a poem placed in the personal ads. He replies to it, with a poem of his own, that ends, "I've got to meet you by tomorrow noon and cut through all this red tape/ At a bar named O'Malley's, Where we'll plaaaaan our escape." So, on the day this second poem appears in the newspaper, our two discontented settled-down folks must both see it.  Or there would be no meeting at O'Malley's.  They take the day after THAT to be the relevant "tomorrow."   They live together (that is obvious from the opening lines, where the man is lying in bed reading the paper while his wife lies besides...

  I said something in my September 25th entry into this blog about THE WEIGHT. Specifically, I spoke about the movie's back-story, and the underlying reality of FDR's confiscation of privately held gold in a determined demonetization of the historically value-measuring metal.  And I said that I enjoyed the movie.  But I didn't say much more about what happens in the movie, or what I liked about it (other than the subject matter). Here are some further points.  First, the back story didn't really matter all that much to the action.  A gaggle of sympathetic convicts had to get gold from point A to point B in order to win their freedom.  Without knowing or caring about the history you can 'get' that.  The distance between A and B was in rugged terrain, in the mountains of Oregon.  Our heroes encounter and overcome obstacles to their success, both natural and human, and the movie's style is half-way between prison break on the one hand and heist movi...

The newly released movie THE WEIGHT, starring Ethan Hawke, Russell Crowe and Julia Jones looks at an aspect of the Depression in 1933 now largely lost to history --the off book and sometimes violent machinations over gold as the Roosevelt administration both de-monetized and confiscated the stuff.    What usually IS remembered is that the administration de-monetized gold. The shiny stuff would no longer back the Federal Reserve notes. (Eleven years later, the Bretton Woods Accord introduced some backdoor re-monetization -- but that is another story.) More to the movie's point, or at least to its backstory and a couple of expository speeches, Roosevelt figured he could not allow a lot of gold to remain in private hands. Had it stayed there, it could have been freely exchanged and it could well have become a de facto money, or at least a dangerous competitive risk to the fiat paper money by which it was supposed to have been replaced.  So, private persons were ordered to tu...

"The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry." -Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms ------------------------------------ I won't try to explain it but I think the phrase "the world" as used in this lovely quote means something other than "everything that is the case."  I think the sentiment is simultaneously Platonic and anti-Platonic.  The world means "the cave." To be "broke" means to agree to take an interest in the trivial shadow-show on the wall of the cave. To "be brave" is to insist on searching for the light of the sky.   "The cave breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.  But those that will not watch the shadow show it kills. It kills the ...

Looking over a pamphlet produced by the Secretary of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, William Galvin, concerning 2026 ballot questions. One here is fascinating, and not something of which I have heard in any of the press coverage of the coming vote. Question 7, "Single Family Homes." Apparently, there is a view that local zoning has been too restrictive for the construction of single family residences on small lots, and this is contributing to the housing shortage in general. So, enough yes votes on question 7 will create a new law that will instruct municipalities not to ban, or require a special permit for, the use of land or structures for a single-family residence in any zoning district that allows residences, with some caveats.    The idea is that in affluent suburban communities in general, families with Big Homes and Big Lots of land around them don't want neighbors with smaller homes on smaller lots.  It ruins the property values.   If the zoning ordin...