Internet round-up: the Psmiths on class; Harper’s on Oklahoma universities; Leiter on ChatGPT

My favorite Substackers have reviewed Paul Fussell’s Class and applied its principles to today’s political landscape (and other things).

I get the vibe they’d read Class before.

If you haven’t read Class, you really ought to.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

From Harper’s’s “Weekly Review”:

Lawmakers in Oklahoma introduced a bill mandating that every state college erect a statue of [Charlie] Kirk in a “highly visible and easily accessible” plaza that bears the activist’s name.

The bill is here.

Just one more example of politicians trying to control what colleges say.

Kirk may have debated on campuses, but he wasn’t a faculty member or even a degree earner. And his work wasn’t scholarly. It didn’t try to adhere to the standards of any guild of experts.

I’d hope that no professional academic would wish to flaunt him as a symbol of what colleges and universities do.

Then again, a lot of schools are happy to put up statues of their football players. The state doesn’t even have to enforce that.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Brian Leiter posts about how a colleague of his got a chatbot to write an “alarmingly competent” philosophical essay.

“How much trouble are we [academic philosophers] in?” Leiter asks.

I’ve never seen any undergraduate writing with the chatbot’s precise style, but (*shudder*) I’ve seen lots of PhD- and journal-level prose just like it.

So, yes, we philosophers – or, at least, those who aspire to a livelihood based on the production and evaluation of scholarship – are in big, big trouble. Because, with just a little input, robots can do those tasks now (or, if not now, soon). Not superlatively well, but well enough to impress the profession’s gatekeepers.

Worse: readers of philosophy are in trouble, and have been for some time, because so much scholarship makes the grade even though it sounds like it rolled off a conveyor belt. The prose is undistinguished, and stock “-isms” (contractualism! particularism!) are opposed or combined almost mechanically.

1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 87: Eye of God

Last month, I reviewed a sad movie. This month’s movie is sadder.

The director, Tim Blake Nelson, paints a bleak picture of his home state. Eye of God (1997) is set in Kingfisher, a real town between Enid and Oklahoma City. The streets, houses, public buildings, and parks are neither beautiful nor hideous. They’re authentic.

It’s curious that the movie is based on a stage play. Yes, one of its strengths is theatrical: its use of extended, intricate dialog. But much is gained from filming the actors’ speeches at close range.

In one tender scene, a young woman removes her glass eye, passes it over to a young man, and asks him to reinsert the eye into her face. I suppose that the actions of this scene could be performed on a stage. Photographed up close, however, they’re immeasurably more intimate.

Rythmically, also, the story benefits from cinematic reconfiguration. Brief sequences are spliced into longer ones, as asides or interjections. (The dialog of a “main” scene often continues, as voiceover, during these “asides.”) Action glides forward and backward in time. Tragedy and violence are insinuated or foreshadowed, then brought into present actuality, then made to recede as the scene returns to a tranquil earlier moment – to the calm preceding the storm.

My theory about the title, which probably isn’t quite right, because it leaves out God, is that it’s meant to evoke the “eye” of a storm. Turbulence occurs before and at the end of the story. In between: doldrums.

If Kingfisher is quiet – downright boring – it’s a false calm. Tension is unrelenting. Everyone is waiting for the next dust storm or tornado or blast of wickedness.

(It counts against my theory that the movie has no dust storms or tornadoes.)

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

An emotionally disturbed fourteen-year-old boy (Nick Stahl) is found wandering the town, covered in blood. Whose?

A young woman (Martha Plimpton) meets a young man (Ken Anderson). He has just been released from prison. They’ve been writing to each other. She is nervous. She wants to leave. He is scrupulously polite but subtly, fiercely insistent. She stays. They arrange to meet again. These early meetings are sweet. We have misgivings.

The young man goes to his parole officer (Richard Jenkins). The parole officer is alternately brusque and chummy. He tells his charge that he and his wife have been trying to get pregnant, that he has to wind up the meeting to go and have another try. Who in his right mind would say such a thing at work, let alone at a first meeting, and to a criminal? The cause gradually becomes clear. It plagues everyone in this town. The parole officer is so lonely that he can’t discern whom not to involve himself with.

Even the most guarded townspeople – e.g., the disturbed, all-but-silent youngster – succumb to this affliction. It’s what drives the young woman to look for love where she does.

The parolee and the young woman see more of each other. They get to know each other better. He is religious. She, less so.

As the situation deteriorates, we become acquainted with an old sheriff (Hol Holbrook). We already know the type. He tries to make sense of the sad things he’s witnessed; in so doing, he hearkens forward to the famous opening monologue of Tommy Lee Jones’s sheriff in No Country for Old Men. Eye of God, too, begins with its sheriff’s voice. The sherrif recounts the Genesis story of Isaac’s binding. God had His reasons; Abraham had his. The sheriff is especially interested in Isaac’s point of view. How was life for the boy, after that moment of terror? The sheriff is concerned for the youngster who has been found, covered in blood, wandering the town. It’s not the youngster’s first encounter with violent death.

Other pieces are added to these, and in time the puzzle reveals its picture. We don’t mind that not all is explained at once: every scene is interesting. The parts are, perhaps, superior to the whole. Certain images and themes are less-than-satisfactorily fitted together: religious devotion, seeing and unseeing eyes, loneliness, childlessness, fertility. When I write these reviews, I am guided – goaded – by the urge to reconcile disparate themes. No interpretation obviously suggests itself on this occasion. I don’t mind. The actions, the characters, the feelings are compelling. I’m happy to be carried along on an episodic tour of this sad town. I would watch this movie again, and soon.