Green Dresses.3

A themed green dress post: green dresses with a print.

My goal: to own all of the green dresses.

I Like This Bridge

Today: Trying on hats with Stearns and Mama Hale in Eclectic Threads, a vintage dress shop. Also: Stearns put together a classy outfit comprised of a fur hat, a fur stole, and a sheer black bathrobe...

I Love Technology

I wrote the assignment on the board, but the kids wanted it in an email. So, genius students that I have, they took a picture of the board and emailed the picture out to the class.

Twitter

Cantaloupe for breakfast! After the horror that is grading.

Spoiler Alert!

Orson Welles's A Touch of Evil was recut by the studio in a way Welles hated, and so was later recut. That's what I watched. The story is about a cop who plants evidence at crime scenes in order to convict those he's certain are guilty (because his wife was strangled when he was a young cop and he couldn't avenge her death). There's another cop, who's Mexican, who finds out what Welles (the first cop) is doing and works to expose him. In the meantime, this second cop, Charlton Heston, has just gotten married and his enemies are terrorizing his wife, and Welles is trying to plant evidence on him and his wife to get rid of them. The film is set in a border town between Mexico and America.

So--Leon Kass's response to this story is that it forces us to take seriously the problem that we face when legal justice doesn't line up with natural justice. Since I was just teaching my kids Book V of Aristotle's Ethics, I just realized that this is straight out of Aristotle. There's space for this vigilante (the decent man) who rectifies situations in which the law doesn't work, since law is by nature universally applicable. Okay, maybe that's a stretch, but more or less...

Kass also played up by the fact that this is a border town--a very interesting place for law, because two systems of law collide and flow into one another.

Whigwham adamantly disagreed, appealing to Aquinas and the impossibility of justice when separate from the process of law (or something like this, I'm probably misconstruing his position). And he thought the border theme didn't make much of a difference.

Wystan thinks that watching films for a theme and applying philosophical categories compromises our ability to appreciate them as art. Or, in his words: "One must first appreciate a work of art on its own terms, and, if that isn't done, any appropriation of it is suspect."

A dizzying array of opinions, I know.

And now: Emily Hale on A Touch of Evil and Philosophy and Art (I'm fairly muddled up on this point, but here are some rather disconnected thoughts):

Clearly we should attend to the work of art itself as a whole and consider what categories come from the work. But it seems to me to be legitimate also to consider what philosophical categories shed more light on the work of art, while considering both similarities and differences between the philosophic categories and the work of art itself. Obviously, you shouldn't just co-opt things and twist them into what you what to say unless you admit that that's what you're doing.

But, insofar as the work of art and the philosophy correspond to the truth (and poetry is going to correspond to truth in a different way from the way in which music does) then they should be able to say something to each other. Plus, I think it's appropriate to see works of art in terms of themes. For instance, A Touch of Evil lends itself very well to being considered in terms of the theme of crime and punishment. In fact, how else would you talk about this film?

A Touch of Evil does, I think, ask us to explore the question of why we must choose the rule of law over the rule of man. The film comes down on the side of law, but it allows that Orson Welles had a possibly good urge for vigilante justice, although the means he chose (working within the law to subvert it) had even more potential to be really dangerous than trying to undermine the law from outside of it is. It seems to me that justice is not reducible to law (there are other ways that justice would be possible), although the film, in the end, gives us arguments for the rule of law over any other sort of justice.

One more point: Etienne Gilson in The Arts of the Beautiful argues that "Of itself, a work of art is neither true nor false. Art is such that the notion of truth does not arise in connection with it." Clearly, true and false in the strict sense aren't relevant (plenty of art is fiction). But, I'm not sure that truth in a fundamental sense (truth of being) isn't relevant to art. Possibly this has something to do with Hegel's thought: according to Hegel, most art is no longer absorbed; now it is self-conscious and theatrical. It is also often philosophical and so lends itself well to philosophical readings. But I'm not actually sure that beauty commenting on being is a modern development. It seems to me that art can be an argument for a version of truth that we can either accept or reject.

Jacques Maritain in Art and Scholasticism writes that "the beautiful nevertheless is not a kind of truth but a kind of good." He also writes about the similarities between a search for truth and the beautiful: "There is a curious analogy between the Fine Arts and wisdom. Like wisdom, they are ordered to an object transcending man and of value in itself, whose fullness is without limit, for beauty is as infinite as being." So even Maritain, while saying that the beautiful is not truth but a good, allows for some similarities between wisdom and art.

From the Inestimable Fr. Schall

A reflection on his travels to California:

"we went to an indian casino for lunch. they have a very good buffet and if you only eat it and not gamble, it is fine. i had a multicultural lunch, the only thing i missed was mexican and thai. you can pretend it is thanksgiving. i did have a la chesapeake bay oysters on the half shell. i am not sure what the gastronomological etiquette is here, but this is what it is about. food from every land except american indians, though they did have corn."

Bonnie and Clyde

Clyde struck me as possibly having a disorder--he couldn't see any life outside of stealing. More or less a kleptomaniac.

Bonnie, on the other hand, I found to be a very compelling character. Things that I like about her: her hair, her clothes, her constant smoking, her love of drama and excitement, the fact that she writes bad poetry, the fact that she gets very moody.

My Latest Obsession in Men's Clothing

Blue and white checked shirts. Oh, so summery. I like them in every shade of blue, with red or purple mixed in, with big or small checks. Any which way. I like them best with khakis. They remind me of picnics and sitting outside at restaurants and smoothies (gosh, I miss smoothies, Myrrh).

"You're the best after-midnight hostess ever." --Brian (that's right, Stearns, your Brian, to me, last night)

But actually, it was the guests who were the best ever: I fed them swiss cheese and basil (also identified as bay and mint leaves) and tomatoes and crackers and grapes and one brownie, and they loved it.

I Have a Pet Basil Plant

Mostly I eat it in a little sandwich:
1 leaf basil
1 slice tomato
1 slice cheese, any sort

I thought it was dead when I came back from Durham, but once I watered it, it came back to life! And so I will name it: The Great Resurrecting Basil Plant.

Things I Love.1:

pink wine in the summer (preferably outside in the evening)
the sun/being warm
ice cream with lots and lots of chunks mixed in
Boston Legal (namely Denny Crane and Alan Shore)
taking walks
talking about Aristotle
eating odd things at odd times
Kitchenaid mixers
berries, except blackberries, and possibly especially blueberries
reading poetry
jazz in the sculpture garden

Twitter

Why do my students all have blackberries? I object to this.

Teaching

I am very, overflowingly happy about teaching. For the record.

Oh, Texas...

HT: Percy.

Notes from France

Where Brother O.P. is learning French (no, Ilana, I still don't know French).

He writes about this vaulting: "It's from Les Jacobins, the 13th-14th C. priory of the Dominicans in Toulouse. The Dominicans prayed under that vault every day, that is, until the Revolution. Almost every story about the Church here in France begins 'Until the Revolution, this was ...' Sad."

Hospitality

...thy name is Hopkins.

Marriage and Travel

I arrived home at 5 a.m. last night after driving home from Boston following Myrrh and Warren's wedding (may they see their children to the third and fourth generation!). I am very proud of myself--even in my old age, I didn't even get tired (although I was shaking), and I cut a half an hour off of the google maps projected time even with a 20 minute gas stop at 2 a.m. in New Jersey (the lines were so long since they have to pump it for you) and a 20 minute stop of me driving around some small town in Delaware at 3 a.m. looking for an ATM so I could get cash to pay the next several tolls.

There were too many goodbyes and changes for me yesterday: Percy's off to Phoenix, Elizabeth Bennett's off to Maine, and Myrrh is lamentably leaving Little Gidding to be the perfect and very happy Mrs. Second Lieutenant Warren. I'm looking forward to heaven, where people won't be leaving.

The wedding definitely had a hint of a Jane Austen wedding to it, especially as everyone walked together in the plentiful sunshine, following the bagpiper and the children carrying flowers sunny day from the church to the old New England town hall for the reception. At the rehearsal dinner, the singing chef sang a patriotic medley. When Warren stood at attention during the Marine anthem, I was definitely crying.