Her Scalloped Shore --

A meditation for Becket's Day on James Joyce, Santiago de Compostela, and the death of Pope John Paul II

"There is one story
     and one story only
That will prove
     worth your telling....

...of the undying snake
     from chaos hatched,
Whose coils contain the ocean,
Into whose chops
     with naked sword he springs,
Then in black water,
     tangled by the reeds,
Battles three days and nights,
To be spewed up
     beside her scalloped shore...."

-- Robert Graves,
   "To Juan at the Winter Solstice"

Kindred Spirit

On the late film director Robert Mulligan, who died early Saturday [Dec. 20, 2008] at 83:

Mulligan received a best director Oscar nomination in 1963 for "[To Kill a] Mockingbird"....

While some debated whether he had a discernible personal vision in his films, Mulligan was known for his casting and direction of children, including "[Up the Down] Staircase," where he personally interviewed more than 500 New York high school students.

Sensing a kindred spirit, Francois Truffaut was a vocal champion, particularly cognizant of what he perceived as undue criticism of Mulligan's work for lacking a particular "style." Mulligan himself was dismissive of critics/cineaste talk: "I don't know anything about 'the Mulligan style,' " he told the Village Voice in 1978. "If you can find it, well, that's your job."

-- Duane Byrge, The Hollywood Reporter

Thanks to desconvencida for a trailer of "The Man in the Moon" (1991), Reese Witherspoon's first film and Mulligan's last.

Mulligan also directed Natalie Wood in a personal favorite of mine, "Love with the Proper Stranger."

Prominent literary intellectuals often like to make familiar reference to the technical terminology of mathematical logic or philosophy of language. A friend of mine overheard the following conversation in Cambridge during l'affaire Derrida, when the proposal to grant an honorary degree to that gentleman met serious academic opposition in the university. A journalist covering the fracas asked a Prominent Literary Intellectual what he took to be Derrida's importance in the scheme of things. 'Well,' the PLI confided graciously, unblushingly, 'Gödel showed that every theory is inconsistent unless it is supported from outside. Derrida showed that there is no outside.'

Now, there are at least three remarkable things about this. First, the thing that Gödel was supposed to show could not possibly be shown, since there are many demonstrably consistent theories. Second, therefore, Gödel indeed did not show it, and neither did he purport to do so. Third, it makes no sense to say that an inconsistent theory could become consistent by being 'supported from outside', whatever that might mean (inconsistency sticks; you cannot get rid of it by addition, only by subtraction). So what Derrida is said to have done is just as impossible as what Gödel was said to have done.

These mistakes should fail you in an undergraduate logic or math or philosophy course. But they are minor considerations in the world of the PLI. The point is that the mere mention of Gödel (like the common invocation of 'hierarchies' and 'metalanguages') gives a specious impression of something thrillingly deep and thrillingly mathematical and scientific (theory! dazzling! Einstein!) And, not coincidentally, it gives the PLI a flattering image of being something of a hand at these things, an impresario of the thrills. I expect the journalist swooned.