Eric The Blue

Moving days

William Pritchard, describing the fiction of John Updike, writes:

. . . he is arguably the most significant transcriber, or creator rather, of "middleness" in American writing since William Dean Howells. Falling in love in high school, meeting a college roommate, going to the eye-doctor or dentist, eating supper on Sunday night, visiting your mother with your wife and son—these activities are made to yield up their possibilities to a writer as responsively curious in imagination and delicately precise in his literary expression as Updike has shown himself to be.

Yes, or maybe, but, so far as I know, moving one's geriatric father from his assisted living apartment to a memory care unit is not anything that, anywhere in the Updikean oeuvre, is made to yield up its possibilities. I'm here to report that in dementia cases it does sometimes happen that the brain's inhibition centers short circuit. Despite innumerable instances where he had just cause, it took my dad more than 63 years to swear at me for the first time, but this last week, when I've actually been trying to do right by him, he's been making up for lost chances. I assumed he knew all those words but I'd never heard them on his lips before. We had some really tender father-son moments—so tender that I just started ignoring his outbursts while I moved his stuff into heaps meant for different destinations and then carried them out the door. Once, when he hadn't said anything for awhile, I looked over and saw that he was crying. I put my arm around him, told him I loved him, that we'd get through this, that everything would be ok. 

"Oh, go to hell," he replied.

I went back to work as he expressed the opinion that my optimism was "a line of shit." He's intermittently lucid and always unpredictable. When I visit him in the new place, I never know whether I'll be greeted like the prodigal son or with a scornful, "Now what?" I don't tell him I'm coming because he forgets before I get there. Everything is a surprise.

Well, if I asked him to play catch with me ten million times, a decent approximation, he said Yes ten million times. Never even, "In a few minutes." Just dropped whatever he was doing and got his glove. Very good at high school algebra, too. 

Updike would not overlook the way in which the memory care unit is an image of what I've heard called "rising America": uniformly white residents, near their end, being cared for in their infirmity by patient, cheerful, young immigrants of color who speak accented English. In the evening, they all watch cheesy TV shows together in the communal room and laugh, probably for different reasons. 

Pauline Kael: life as a (New Yorker) film critic

I may have read this before, possibly the last thing Pauline Kael wrote for publication in The New Yorker, but if I have it was long enough ago and enough forgotten so that I could enjoy it again when I stumbled across it recently. She was the long-time movie reviewer at The New Yorker and I, as a long-time subscriber, had taken note of how different she sounded from the rest of the magazine—almost the only regular contributor whose voice you could never imagine belonging to Eustace Tilley, the magazine's lorgnette-wielding mascot. Someone said something like she marched through the magazine's elegant copy in mud-spattered combat boots, and in the most enjoyable parts of this article she pulls back the curtain:

My life was especially hectic during my first years at The New Yorker, because I (literally) spent more time and effort restoring what I'd written than writing it. The editors tried to turn me into just what I'd been struggling not to be: a genteel, fuddy-duddy stylist who says "One assumes that. . ." Sometimes almost every sentence was rearranged. The result was tame and correct; it lost the sound of spoken language. I would scramble for nine or ten hours putting back what I had written, marking the galleys carefully, so they couldn't be misread, and then I would rush to see William Shawn to get the galleys approved. Since he was the person who had instigated the finicky changes, the couple of hours I spent with him were an exhausting series of pleas and negotiations. He had given me a handshake agreement when he hired me that no word would be changed without consultation, and he stuck by his word, but I had to fight for every other contraction, every bit of slang, every description of a scene in a movie that he thought morally offensive—not my description but the scene itself. He didn't see why those things had to be mentioned, he said.

William Shawn was the magazine's editor and you can imagine him wincing while holding up a lorgnette to Kael's copy. (By the way, he was, in addition to finicky, the father of Wallace Shawn, known to many as a writer and actor in such films as My Dinner with Andre, Clueless, several Woody Allen movies, more.) In another of these "editorial meetings," one concerning her pan of a Terrence Malick movie, Shawn said to her, mournfully, "I guess you don't know that Terry is like a son to me." Kael is said to have replied, "Tough shit, Bill"—what's for sure is that the magazine published the review as she'd written it, no punches pulled.

I read her avidly not for the reviews of foreign films I'd never see—though I read those, too—but rather for the takedowns of beloved movies that she thought did not deserve popular adulation. After her long reviews were published, they were then excerpted in the Movies section of Talk of the Town, at the front of each week's issue. I remember, or at least think that I remember, a couple of these. In her review of Dances with Wolves, she quoted something portentous the Costner character says, like how he'd never known who he really was till he began living with Native Americans, before commenting, dismissively, summarily:

This is a kid's daydream of being an Indian. Costner has feathers in his hair and feathers in his head.

The Talk of the Town condensation of her Beverly Hills Cop review read, in its entirety:

Eddie Murphy tricks the white dumbos. For some reason, audiences love it.  

Doesn't make me feel less creaky and old to think of all her reviews of current movies I read and that this piece, a kind of swan song, was published 28 years ago now. She died, of complications from Parkinson's, on September 3, 2001, a Monday (since 9/11 was a Tuesday), a different era when I already qualified as middle aged. 

Biden nominee to federal bench faces the loyal opposition

Nina Morrison is President Biden's nominee to be the new federal judge for the eastern district of New York—that's Long Island, including the New York City boroughs of Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island. She's in her early 50s and, until she was in her early 30s, had the kind of resume you'd expect of someone nominated for a federal judgeship: father was a law school dean, Yale for her BA, law school at NYU, clerkship for a judge on the US Court of Appeals, associate at a big law firm where she worked for three years, mainly on civil rights cases. Then in 2002 she quit the firm and went to work for the Innocence Project, a nonprofit that represents prison inmates seeking to show, usually through DNA evidence, that their convictions were unjust and should be vacated. Morrison rose through the ranks to become senior litigation counsel and then executive director of the organization. Wikipedia notes that, "[a]s an attorney at the Innocence Project, Morrison has been lead or co-counsel in cases that have freed more than 30 innocent people from prison and death row." The Vetting Room supplies a summary of some of those cases, here. A few excerpts:

Morrison represented Ledell Lee, an Arkansas death row inmate seeking a stay to permit DNA testing to prove his innocence. Lee was ultimately executed after the US Supreme Court rejected an appeal. Four years after the execution, new DNA evidence emerged linking a different man to the murder that Lee was executed for. . . .

Morrison was an advocate for Brandon Moon, who was convicted of rape in 1988 largely based on the expert testimony of blood testing expert Glen David Adams. The case led to Moon's exoneration and the exposure of flaws in Adams' methodology, with the El Paso district attorney publicly apologizing to Moon for the time he had spent in prison. . . .

Morrison represented Michael Morton, who was convicted of killing his wife in 1987 despite evidence showing that she had been killed by an intruder. The case also drew attention because exculpatory evidence, including statements by Morton's toddler son, who was home at the time of the murder, were not properly disclosed to defense counsel. The withholding of evidence eventually led to the conviction of prosecutor Ken Anderson for contempt of court. 

Morrison got her hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday. You might think there'd be bipartisan approval of exonerating innocent convicts, but these are partisan times! The Republican senators appeared deeply skeptical of any activity suggestive of sympathy for criminal defendants. Their logic, if that is what you want to call it, is apparently that someone who works for the Innocence Project cannot be trusted to be "tough on crime." Well, if being tough on crime entails prosecuting and convicting the wrong people, then call me a softie, too. I wonder whether it's occurred to them that, when the wrong person is prosecuted, a criminal goes free. The line of questioning pursued by Sen. Tom Cotton, Republican of Arkansas and a graduate of Harvard Law School, seems to adopt the logic that the ghastly details of a crime prove that the defendant did it. I wish I could say that the other Republicans on the committee acquitted themselves better. I'll paste in the clip of Cotton questioning Morrison below. It's representative of the distaste with which the Republican senators regarded her, and is interesting also because, for reasons that are obscure to me, he must have thought he could discredit the nominee by pursuing her about her representation of Ledell Lee in the first case described briefly above. See if you think he succeeded.

 

 

Domestic issues

 

Making my valentines a roast with onion, potatoes, and carrots for supper—originally planned for the Super Bowl but the day got away from us, I mean from me. The house is full of the good smell and news of troop movements on the Ukrainian frontier. Then 11-year-old arrives home from school.

Her: What's that smell?

Me: The roast we didn't have last night. It's in the oven.

[Silence]

Me: Smells good, huh?

Her: It smells like something, I'll give you that.

She gets her protein from peanut butter. Also on the domestic front, I googled today, for the obvious reason, "Minneapolis recycling peanut butter containers," and was soon reading, here:

Food containers, like those for yogurt, peanut butter or spaghetti sauce should be pretty well cleaned out, but it doesn't have to be perfect (95 percent is good, Kish said). (This is mostly because humans have to do some of the sorting and that food gets gross.)

I'm afraid this is like an Escher sentence in the respect that it has the form of a precise and meaningful speech act without being particularly helpful. Does "95 percent" refer to the part of interior surface area that is clear of food residue? It's weird, in that case, that peanut butter containers are grouped with those for yogurt and spaghetti sauce, which with a rinse and a swish easily meet the standard. A peanut butter jar is in a different category. You can devote to them a lot of time and material without getting to 95 percent, a circumstance that must detract from the marginal utility of recycling them. Is it ecologically sound to use a quart of water and your least serviceable sponge to get the Jif jar in the neighborhood of 95 percent?

If I knew this Kish guy, I think I'd give him an ultimatum: just 50 percent for peanut butter, or it's going in the trash. 

More people have written about Escher sentences than I

What linguists call "Escher sentences" at first seem sensible even though, on inspection, their apparent soundness dissolves. A common example is:

More people have been to Berlin than I have.

Maybe the way to approach the weirdness of this sentence is to note that there is an implied ellipses at the end, and that the common way to clarify the intended meaning would be to understand:

More people have been to Berlin than I have [been to Berlin].

But this isn't helpful—in fact, it's easier to see that there's something wrong with the "clarification."  Two things are being compared but what are they? If more people have done X than Y, then you should indicate what X and Y are. In this case, though, there's only one thing mentioned—"been to Berlin." If "been to Berlin" is not what belongs in the placeholder at the end, then anything goes:

More people have been to Berlin than I have [knocked up].

If it can mean anything, then it means nothing, and no one will understand.

Yet no one on the receiving end of

More people have been to Berlin than I have

is apt to object or even experience confusion. Ordinary language rules may decree that the sentence has no meaning, but everyone thinks they understand, and they probably do—which is also pretty weird. The leading candidate is 

Some people have been to Berlin more often than I [have been to Berlin].

There are other candidates—for example:

I'm not the only person who's been to Berlin. 

The first interpretation makes the assumption that the comparison at issue is not quantity of people but rather quantity of trips. The second interpretation makes the assumption that the issue at hand does not pertain to any kind of quantitative comparison at all. The way you settle on one option or the other, or some option I haven't thought of, probably depends mostly upon context, which is the main reason linguists are interested in Escher sentences in the first place. It seems there’s a lot more to language comprehension than grasping language rules. Consider these two sentences:

(A) No head injury is too minor to be ignored.

(B) No head injury is too minor to be taken seriously.

These sentences must have opposite meanings, right? Which one means that a minor head injury should be taken seriously, not ignored? By ordinary language rules, there's a case to be made for (B), the import of which might be clarified and amplified:

Is the injury too minor to be taken seriously? Then it's not a head injury.

Since the sentences have opposite meanings, and (B) means that even minor head injuries should be taken seriously, it follows that (A) means that minor head injuries can be ignored. But doesn't everyone agree that (A) says the opposite of that? It seems that we might be able to agree that (A) and (B) mean the same thing, despite the fact that "ignored" is the opposite of "take seriously." I'd tell you what's going on here if I understood it myself. Do ordinary language rules require (A) to mean the opposite of what everyone "feels" it means? I don't think that's clearly the case, but I will note that if you try to clarify the meaning of (A) in the same way I clarified the meaning of (B)—

Is the injury too minor to be ignored? . . .

—you introduce a problem that didn't arise before, since the meaning of something "too minor to be ignored" is known only to Yogi Berra and a few other philosophers. 

Senior citizens get mail

One of the things my dad no longer remembers to do is get the mail, which is fine, because my sister has arranged for it to be sent to her, and dad's "correspondents" who have his address, not hers, are mostly scumbags, like the people behind the above "urgent" plea that I retrieved from his mailbox today. The scam is so thin it's almost funny—this "D. Singleton" guy in the role of Santa Claus, checking his list, seeing who's contributed and who hasn't. I'll include below a picture of the "Inner Office Routing Envelope" referred to a couple of times. Presumably the name of "Matt Davies, Chairman" is crossed out because he's forwarded this important envelope to my dad.

It's just a bad joke until you consider that the intended recipients are elderly and in decline, including most particularly in their cognitive functioning. They're diminished to the point that it gives them pleasure to send D. Singleton a check in an important inter-departmental mailer. It seems my dad has sent them money in the past, which kills me: 48 years ago he wasn't falling for the more plausible line of b.s. I'd feed him about where I'd been and what I'd been doing on Friday night. But now that the beneficiary is a crook, he can't tell excrement from shinola. 

It's fun—not really—to think of the money trail, elders collecting their social security and then donating some of it to a scam that scares them about The End of Social Security. I wonder whether the "National Campaign to Guarantee Social Security, a project of the Federation of Responsible Citizens," does enough "lobbying" to stay on the right side of the law. If you google their name, the first return is not their organization's website—I doubt they have one, it's a mail scam—but rather a forum with the web address www.scampulse.com. 

While getting my dad's mail, I helped one of his neighbors, an old woman with shaking hands, open her box. She was trying to work the key with the teeth down and they had to be up to fit in the lock. Imagine struggling to get your mailbox open and the only thing in it is the day's collection of fraud. It's a crime to mug a senior citizen out on their daily constitutional, but if you can use the mail to get them to send you their money themselves—I guess that's private enterprise. Entrepreneurs!

Bill Belichick fat fingers the Bs

 

Brian Flores' lawsuit against the NFL combines the serious with the farcical in a way that generally agrees with my view of life on earth. Flores, who's Black, was the head coach of the Miami Dolphins until he was recently fired, even though his coaching record appears to have been, like the white children of Lake Woebegone, "above average." Every season, the league's overall winning percentage is .500, same number of wins as losses, but the Dolphins, in the ten seasons before Flores took over in 2019, had posted just one winning record. Then in Flores' first season they were 5-11 before rebounding to 10-6 in 2020 and 9-8 in the year just finished. They narrowly missed making the playoffs in both of the last two seasons and Flores was fired. Tough business! The Vikings just fired Mike Zimmer, who in eight seasons as the team's coach compiled a record of 72-56-1 while qualifying for the playoffs three times. 

The precipitating event for Flores' suit, which claims racial discrimination, was the above text message exchange between him and Patriots' head coach Bill Belichick. It doesn't make a ton of sense without some context. Flores formerly worked for Belichick as an assistant and the two are apparently on good terms. The NFL has, at minimum, a "perception problem" arising from the fact that more than two-thirds of the players are Black but now, after the firing of Flores, only one Black head coach, Mike Tomlinson of the Steelers, remains. There are 32 teams, so about 3 percent of the head coaches, but about 70 percent of the players, are Black. While these numbers have gone up and down, moderately, from season to season, the league has recognized an ongoing problem, and to address it has adopted something called the Rooney Rule, which requires teams with coaching vacancies to interview minority candidates. The New York Giants just hired a new head coach, Brian Daboll, who is white. It seems that Belichick, thinking he was texting Brian Daboll, congratulated him on the (inside) news that Daboll had been selected. But he was actually texting a different Brian, Brian Flores, whose interview for the Giants' coaching position had not yet taken place. Flores was at first confused but then concluded that his upcoming interview was a sham, an exercise meant only to comply with the Rooney Rule. In due time, of course, the Giants announced that they had hired Daboll. Belichick's information was correct. Flores hired a lawyer.

There's been a lot of commentary about the case, because all the details of the complaint are known—the above screen shot of the text messages is from page 7 of 58 in the handiwork of Flores' lawyer, which is filed with the court and a public record. There's a lot more of interest besides Bill Belichick's inattention to detail when consulting his phone's contact list. For example, Flores alleges that during his first season his bosses in the Dolphins' front office offered to pay him extra to lose games on purpose in order to improve the team's position in the draft. When he declined, and the Dolphins won games the brass wanted to lose, he landed permanently on their bad side. Some lawyerly commentators have suggested that his case is incoherent. Is Flores saying he was discriminated against because of his race or that he lost his job because he coached to win? But this is not an argument the NFL is apt to find attractive—it's too much like, "At the time you say I was robbing a bank in Minneapolis I was actually trying to kill a guy in St. Paul." 

There might be a strategy to the "incoherence." The NFL's recent record with Black troublemakers—I'm thinking of Colin Kaepernick—makes it likely that Flores won't work again in the NFL. He at least should consider that possibility, and maybe he doesn't care. He's pissed, he knows things, and he's going to put them out there. It could be the kind of a case that the defendants don't want to defend, even if they think they would prevail, and the result of that calculation could substantially enrich the plaintiff. The NFL has very deep pockets.

Some of the commentary critical of Flores tends to support this view of the case. "That the players are mostly Black and the head coaches almost all white doesn't prove anyone discriminated against Flores—or against anyone else, either." Right. But what would prove it? Most likely they aren't going to put on hoods and attend a KKK rally. They're saying that they don't discriminate, it's just that a Black guy is hardly ever best for the job, and oh, by the way, the purpose of the Rooney Rule is to make it look like good will is oozing from their every pore—actually, it's a complete sham. We know this because Bill Belichick seems to have fat fingered the Bs in his phone contacts.

Legendary Coach as chubby old guy overchallenged by his technology devices—a farce, like when Black guys are interviewed for head coaching jobs in the NFL.