R.I.P. Dick

Dick, my adviser at Cornell, has died.

An obituary.

Cornell’s memorial notice, with reminiscences.

Brian Leiter’s notice, with a few more reminiscences in the comments.

Dick wrote on a wide range of topics. I’ll just mention some of the political ones.

He became known, early on, for his work on Marx.

His final views on economic justice can be glimpsed in:

this online profile …

this Washington Post opinion piece (he was always listening for wisdom from libertarians, utilitarians, and other sirens, but wasn’t seduced by those philosophies) …

and the 2019 article “Social Democracy and Free Enterprise” (listed with other writings here).

When I was at Cornell, Dick was writing Globalizing Justice: The Ethics of Poverty and Power and conducting seminars on war, foreign aid and trade, global warming, and the rise of China.

His research into the last topic is another good example of how he would listen to lots of people as he formulated his views. He studied the Chinese language and got to know Chinese scholars and non-scholars. He even directed this documentary film about a provincial migrant to Beijing.

He also learned to cook delicious Chinese meals, which Karin & I enjoyed during our stay in his house. That was four years ago. I intended, later, to travel to Ithaca for a conference planned in his honor. The pandemic struck; the conference was put on hold. As far as I know, it was never rescheduled.

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I arrived at Cornell in 2005 expecting to focus on metaphysics or something comparably Laputan. Alas, I had a miserable first semester. In Dick’s political philosophy class, too, I was making a fool of myself; but at least I was learning. (Note: It’s not always good when your remarks cause the other graduate students to snigger into their sleeves.) Nevertheless, Dick treated my ideas with greater seriousness than anyone else ever had. I started to treat them more seriously, too.

The next semester, I was surprised when, at a departmental function, Dick impishly asked under whom I wished to write my dissertation. It took me another year to choose him. I wonder if he’d have been so nice about it if he’d known that the project would take more than a decade to complete. He retired the day after I defended the thing.

I used to bump into him at the Cornell Cinema, where he’d make some wry comment. Once, we both happened to come out of Scorsese’s The Departed. Boom, boom, boom, was all he said. His light reading was Honoré de Balzac and George Eliot. He hated lewdness. And greed. But he was willing to give people the benefit of the doubt when they decided that nice clothes and gourmet cooking really would significantly improve their lives. He was committed to stamping out poverty and injustice, but he was no ascetic. He wanted people to be empowered to discover their own meaningful projects and direct their own lives.

He was a good man. I’m still absorbing the lessons he taught me. Above all, I’m grateful for his kindness.

He was an atheist. He used to tell how his wife, who had lost her religious belief, would visit the nuns who had schooled her. They’d ask how her prayer life was going. He liked that about the nuns. I hope non-Catholics won’t mind if I pray for his soul. I’m sure he wouldn’t mind.

A mighty dump truck; Sally Rooney, pt. 2; body-text fonts, pt. 8: Photina

Happy birthday, tomorrow, to Samuel. He’s about to turn three years old – a sufficiently sophisticated age for eager gift-getting. Tonight he opened a gift that was too large for Karin & me to hide: a Tonka “mighty dump trunk.” What enjoyment he is obtaining from this heap of cold metal!

Daniel, meanwhile, happily plays with the truck’s empty cardboard box. He turned eight months old today.

Samuel has been taken to a corn maze and to various trunk-or-treats. Exhausting events, trunk-or-treats. Last night, we attended one at our church, saw how many cars were in the parking lot, and didn’t even try to join in. The event was good publicity for the church, though.

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I finished reading Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends. It’s the best of her three novels. Frankly, I was amazed. Her characters are good at talking but bad at living. Do they make any progress? That’s debatable. Frances, the narrator, a precocious university student – and homewrecker, and bad friend – takes a religious turn. Unfashionably, she reads the gospels; even less fashionably, near the end of the book, she goes to church; less fashionably still, she begins to pray. Well and good; this is what ought to come of hitting rock-bottom. Then the novel ends with a gut-punch comparable to that of Wilfred Owen’s “Parable of the Old Man and the Young.” At least, that’s how it felt to me; other readers will feel differently. The characters and, I suspect, many of Rooney’s readers are enthusiastic moralizers who basically just do what they want to do.

Rooney is famous, notorious even, for being a well-to-do bourgeois Marxist, and so this month’s body-text font, Photina, which looks good on cheap paper, is featured in a passage about Marx from a reference book’s analytical table of contents.

1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 42: La cérémonie

I’m in no hurry to watch all the movies of Claude Chabrol, fascinating though they are. His is a nasty sort of oddness, a peculiarly repulsive amorality. The characters’ depravity is very gradually drawn out, with an effect less horrific than disgusting, as if we’d been led through a well-tended garden to be shown a dead rat.

The other day I saw, on some train tracks, a raccoon’s body neatly sliced in two. Chabrol’s movies feel like that. They even have titles like “A Girl Cut in Two” and “The Butcher.”

La cérémonie, elegant, streamlined, is no different. As Roger Ebert tells us, “The French have a name for the events leading up to death by guillotine. They call it ‘the ceremony.’”

So, in this movie, we have: (A) the exploiters: an industrialist, his pampered wife (an art-dealing ex-model), and their privileged, complacent children; and (B) the proles, played by two splendidly inscrutable actresses: Sandrine Bonnaire as the family’s quiet housemaid, and Isabelle Huppert as the postmistress, the housemaid’s aggressively disreputable friend. Chabrol has said that this is a “Marxist” movie. To what extent should we agree? Yes, there is a revolution; but are these revolutionaries the properly Marxian sort? If the housemaid and postmistress do belong to any Marxian category, they must be lumpenproletariat – the lowest of the low, the bottom-out-of-sights – even though they have jobs and don’t look down-and-out. They are antisocial criminals, rejected by and rejecting everyone else. Marx had little use for such people.

So, yes, Chabrol may be sneering at the upper classes, but perhaps he also is sneering at Marx and at other proponents of revolution. In this movie the rich are condescending and snobbish, but those who overthrow them have even less human feeling, and their actions are monstrous. If Chabrol is taking a side, which is it? Or does he just like to wallow?

Reviewers acknowledge the class conflict to dismiss it. The key dynamic, they insist, is psycho-sexual: the brash postmistress takes over the will of the weakminded housemaid.

I am not convinced. The housemaid may be illiterate, but she is no pushover. In the source novel, Ruth Rendell’s A Judgement in Stone, the housemaid clearly is the stronger figure.

In both the novel and the movie, the postmistress is pretty silly, but the housemaid is about as silly as a cancer.

The novel (set in Britain, not France) begins like this:

Eunice Parchman killed the Coverdale family because she could not read or write.

There was no real motive and no premeditation. No money was gained and no security. As a result of her crime, Eunice Parchman’s disability was made known not to a mere family or a handful of villagers but to the whole country. She accomplished nothing by it but disaster for herself, and all along, somewhere in her strange mind, she knew she would accomplish nothing. And yet, although her companion and partner was mad, Eunice was not. She had the awful practical sanity of the atavistic ape disguised as a twentieth-century woman.

Interpreted psycho-sexually, the movie fits into the tradition I discussed in my review of Normal Life. Interpreted in terms of class struggle, it is more like Parasite.

Only, Parasite is more straightforward and, in a way, more hopeful. It’s understandable enough for the classes in Parasite to exploit each other for their own gain. This is a problem that can be addressed.

The vengeance in La cérémonie is much bleaker.

Reading report

For the third time, I’m trying to read Rebecca. Some passages are very good. Some could have been trimmed down a bit. In general, the book emits a nice, festering scent of dread.

I was inspired to try out Rebecca again because I’d just finished a du Maurier-like James Bond novel: The Spy Who Loved Me. What a weird little book. Its narrator, a young woman, juxtaposes her sordid past with her terrifying present, in which two monstrous goons pursue her through a nightmarish landscape. Toward the end, James Bond becomes the narrator’s life-saver and lover. (I haven’t spoiled the plot, most of which can be discerned by reading the table of contents.) Bond behaves like a douchebag.

In the Bond novel, the haunted past is, for the most part, linearly recounted – not woven in along with the present terror, a technique that du Maurier skillfully employs in Rebecca. Ian Fleming should’ve written a second draft. But, apparently, he never did that with his novels. Not surprisingly, The Spy Who Loved Me was poorly received: none of the book’s plot was incorporated into the movie of that title, and Fleming made the book unavailable as a paperback for as long as he could.

These two fantastical novels have been something of a break from the realism of Sjöwall’s & Wahlöö’s police procedurals, of which I’ve read five in the last two months. I’m halfway through that series. I now have no trouble identifying the funny parts. When certain characters appear – especially the unrefined inspector Gunvald Larsson and the lazy patrolmen Kristiansson and Kvant – it’s a signal that humor is forthcoming. It’s the despairing kind of humor that says, “On such pillars as these, society rests.” The Swedish welfare state is criticized for allowing the lower orders to distract themselves with drugs, drink, and sex while the upper orders squirrel away the crucial assets. It’s a criticism from the Left: it explains why the workers of the world aren’t uniting.