a thaumaturgical compendium

“Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.”

Our seven-year-old guest was literally on the edge of his seat, watching The Princess Bride for the first time, and seeing Inigo Montoya fulfill his lifelong pursuit to avenge the death of his father at the hyperdactyl hand of Count Rugen.

“This is an excellent scene,” our young guest said precociously.

When we considered movies we had on hand that were PG-rated–his requirement–we came up with two, this one and Flushed Away. Afterward, he said both were good, but he much preferred Princess Bride; why? “Obviously, more chaos.” Was a bit puzzled by this, but his mom let us know that “obviously” and “chaos” were two of his favorite words lately.

Watching Princess Bride with a kid makes you recognize that it has some messages that were common in films of the period that were intended for younger audiences, but not so common today. While the arch villain is left by the hero to live with his own infamy, Montoya seems in many ways to be more heroic in his quest and in its completion. The theme–call it Count of Monte Cristo light–seems largely absent from youth literature today, and perhaps even to my own surprise, I find that unfortunate.

There is something in Montoya’s righteous indignation, his passion for justice, his sense of honor, that is comforting and wholesome. The idea that vengeance is always wrong, an idea that runs through much of modern Christianity, seems misplaced to me, just as misplaced as assuming that revenge is always just. French moralist Joseph Joubert wrote, “Revenge is an act of passion; vengeance of justice. Injuries are revenged; crimes are avenged.” (He also wrote “Children have more need of models than of critics.”) The standard escape these days–played so often as to be a cliché–is that the hero captures the villain and allows him to live, only dispatching him when the villain makes a last effort to kill the hero when his back is turned. This is present somewhat in Princess Bride I suppose; If Montoya was not seemingly mortally wounded early in the scene, I’m not sure it would play as just.

I realize that there is something in my core personality that sympathizes with Montoya, and I suspect this was installed in me at about my guest’s age. Seven is traditionally referred to as the “age of reason” among Catholics, when people start becoming responsible for the morality of their actions. Seven is also a pivotal age for many developmental psychologists; Piaget marks this as the onset of “concrete operational thinking” and the close of egocentric thought.

It seems somehow retrograde and old-testament, these ideas of vengeance and honor. But I’ve always liked those imperfect characters who nonetheless were honorable in their own way. I’ll take Montoya over Wesley, Solo over Skywalker, Batman over Superman. I am pleased, therefore, that a pervading sense of the avenger is present in the first book I am reading to my unborn son, Cory Doctorow’s new Little Brother. We are going through it slowly, a few chapters a week, and of course I like the way it introduces a hackerish ethics to issues of surveillance, but I also like its revival of the vow of retribution. No spoilers please–I hope Doctorow does not cave to more recent sensibilities, and dampen the release (or noble tragedy) of retribution.

I was curious what folks would make of a list of the “The Top 100 Liberal Arts Professor Blogs.” KF writes about it here, and yes (phew!) I made the cut. But it seems to be the perfect mutual admiration society, and the only credence the list receives is in the quality of its in-links. Now, a fairly large number of reputable folks have linked to it, and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. A prophecy with ads.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m certainly happy to be included, just as I’m happy to be in Who’s Who, and the like. And having assembled lists of academic bloggers myself, I know someone had to put a bit of work into writing out the list. But the commercial nature of the list makes it suspect: or it least it would if those on the list didn’t seem to endorse it.

And I’m not against awards or top X lists. I’ve made the point before that indicating the good stuff is a worthwhile venture. It’s just that this serves as an example of when peer review can get to be a bit self-serving. I actually read a bunch of these blogs, and they are good stuff. Heck, most of them were on the Crooked Timber blogroll before they did some recent paring, and no one complained about that. So what’s the problem?

Maybe it’s a question of method. No one voted. There is no citation analysis. (Actually, it might be interesting to run this against Technorati. Or maybe create an index from this list that included who they linked most heavily.)

Overall, I get this uneasy feeling that this case says something about how online trust works, including in places like Wikipedia and in major journals. I’m not sure what it says, exactly. I certainly wouldn’t suggest that any one of the blogs on that list doesn’t deserve to be there. But it makes me a bit uneasy in a non-specified way. Maybe it’s no more than the suspicion that they are wheezing the Googlejuice.

The spousal unit and I went to see Eddie Izzard’s show Stripped at Radio City Music Hall on Friday to celebrate our 15th anniversary. Before the show, Jamie said she hoped it was decent, and I warned not to set expectations too high. It was, I think, absolutely brilliant, far better than any of his other shows. Here’s a bootleg recording, but it doesn’t give a good feel for the show:

He didn’t read Wikipedia for our show, but Wikipedia and the Macintosh played a central role. He also did a bit on religion, intelligent design, and evolution (including a bit on Darwin’s famous book Monkey, Monkey, Monkey, Monkey, You! We are at the tail end of the tour (headed to the west coast from here), but if you get a chance to see it, definitely go.

I was a big fan of the Wire, on HBO, from its first season, but didn’t keep up with it, and decided to wait and watch it on DVD instead. It’s a complex soap opera of a plot–one of the creator’s former colleagues referred to him as the “Balzac of the newsroom” in a conversation on the excellent Bryant Park Project, a complement guaranteed to induce snickering–and if you miss an episode, it’s easy to get lost. The characters are complex, engaging, and believable. The structure of crime, the police, and the politics certainly feels real, and although I don’t have enough experience to judge, those who do have suggested that it provides a good portrayal of the real operation of drug gangs.

Which makes me all the more excited about the new season, which tracks how the drug trade plays in the newsroom of the Baltimore Sun. Obviously, this is of more than merely entertainment interest to me, since we train journalists at my school. Others have already noted that the series is a great way to explain economic models (one of the characters attends econ classes at night, and deploys his new knowledge in his trade), I suspect that the upcoming season would make for a great organizing text on crime reporting. The question is always how much you can ask students to watch, depending on the density of teachable scenes. Perhaps a better way to go would be to teach a class on the Wire and on drugs in the community. Either way, I think it would be fun.

For now, I am watching the previous seasons to catch up–no spoilers in the comments please!

Audio: The Wire as Teaching Tool

Update: I suppose I could just watch all four seasons in four minutes, but I’m not sure that’s any less confusing, and I’m sure it’s not as fun.

That’s the question Richard Corliss, Time film critic, asks. He reports on the New York Film Critics Circle’s picks this year, and laments that some of the top grossing films this year did not make the list. He complains that films like No Country for Old Men, There Will Be Blood, and Away From Her, movies that few actually saw, led the list. That this made him “realize that we critics may give these awards to the winners, but we give them for ourselves. In fact, we’re essentially passing notes to one another, admiring our connoisseurship at the risk of ignoring the vast audience that sees movies and the smaller one that reads us.”

He goes on to ask rhetorically whether The Diving Bell and the Butterfly or The Lives of Others will win out, and then goes on to suggest that these “obscure” films make readers restless. The thing is, these are obscure only because they show up in the art house theaters and not on the main screens. I agree that Ratatouille and Enchanted were very well made, entertaining films. But not everybody gets an Oscar just for making good cinema.

I understand that Time has a particular anti-intellectual stance on some issues, but I am convinced that the main reason No Country doesn’t pull in huge numbers of dollars is that distributors decide in advance how much money it is going to make and where. Critics play an important role in pushing people to see good movies, even when those movies don’t have a huge buy in television commercials and “soft” advertising (making rounds on the Daily Show, Letterman, etc.). The Oscars tend to do this as well; movies that are runaway award winners at the Oscars are now re-released and actually draw audiences. In other words, critics perform a correcting function for the industry.

Instead of complaining that critics like movies that most people have never heard of, perhaps we should be complaining about an industry that relentlessly pushes Transformers, while relatively ignoring a little gem like Juno. In sum, I don’t mind film critics’ connoisseur orientation toward movies. Why should people who love movies dumb down their opinions to match a public that uses movies as distraction? The industry already serves (and serves to inculcate) a movie-going audience that doesn’t want very much from their films; critics form a counterweight to that, even when they can be accused of their own groupthink.

I’ve always joked that my aim in academia is getting a walk-on part in a Woody Allan film, like McLuhan in Annie Hall. No luck on that yet, but Derek sent along this trailer for Truth in Numbers:

Yes that’s me at the beginning of the trailer, in pretty good company, even if I still wince at the sound of my own voice on tape. When I saw this today, I figured that if they were going to make me a μceleb, the least I could do was donate a little–and I do mean little–cash to making the film. That means I have now invested in two motion pictures! (I was also one of the early Swarm of Angels contributors.)

This blog is rated… PG?

That doesn’t quite explain why I’m blocked by major filters. The rating changes depending on what is on the main page. I have a feeling that if it slurped up my archives, it would get a different rating, but even my cyberporn category only gets us down to an R. I’m not sure that a blog that fails to reach NC-17 is really playing to its full potential. (via Froomkin)