1206

Tuesday, December 6, 2022

In bed at @ 10, awake at 3:30, up before 4, unk. pss, one B&B.  No PP overnight.  Woke up thinking of Jeanne Dielman, wondering if the 3 day structure of the film intended to parallel the Triduum, Jeanne a Christ figure, whoring a crucifixion sacrifice for her son, Day 2 in the grave, all the fastidious, repetitive rituals a way of masking pain, Day 3, the resurrection from the grave, starting with the partially-buttoned robe, ending with the murder, the long contemplative meditative scene at the dining table.  32 degrees, high of 39, cloudy all day.

Western Wisconsin's small-town voters fear for America     JSOnline:

"They are farmers and business analysts. They are stay-at-home mothers, graphic designers and insurance salesmen.  They live in communities where crime is almost nonexistent and Cub Scouts hold $5 spaghetti-lunch fundraisers at American Legion halls.  And they live with something else.  Sometimes it’s anger. Sometimes sadness. Every once in a while it’s fear. . . And weapons are a big part of their self-proclaimed “patriot” movement. The Second Amendment and the belief that Americans have a right to overthrow tyrannical governments are foundational principles.  “I’m not a big gun guy,” says Carlson, whose weapons include pistols, a shotgun, an AR-15 rifle, 10 loaded magazines and about 1,000 additional rounds. “For a lot of people that’s just a start.”  That cocktail of weaponry and politics concerns plenty of people outside of their circles. . . But news in this world doesn’t come from the Associated Press or CNN. It only rarely comes from major conservative media, like Fox News.  Where does it come from?  “The internet,” said Scott Miller, a 40-year-old sales analyst and a prominent local gun-rights activist. “That’s where everybody gets their news these days.” . . . It’s hard to overstate how much cultural changes have shaped the right wing of American conservatism.  Beliefs about family and sexuality . . ."

Add "about race" The sentence about guns and the right to overthrow tyrannical governments reminds me of the eerie feeling I experienced stopping off at a local bar in Tigerton, WI, during the heyday of the Posse Comitatus movement in this state.  I was on the way with fishing buddies to Three Lakes on one of our annual muskie early Fall muskie adventures and we stopped at the bar for I'm not sure what reason.  I have no recollection of it now, many years later, but recall the news items of Posse members refusing to pay taxes, to recognize the legitimacy of all levels of government, and suing and filing liens against the property of government officials.   I wonder whether we may have underestimated the extent of rural radicalism in the state and the country, then and now -perhaps not now when the red-blue lines are so clearly drawn across the country.  In any case, it's hard for me to believe that there won't be some killing, arson, and bombing growing out of the right-wing anti-government movement afoot in our countryside.  A lot of anger, a lot of hate out there beyond the burbs.

Writing and Thinking

Read a piece, an advice column actually, in The Atlantic today about the challenges of writing.  It reminded me of my teaching days and reviewing students' writing with them, remembering how astounded I was in my first year of teaching Legal Writing to a class of about 120 1Ls at the poor writing ability of students generally.  Also remembering how abusive it was of the dean and the faculty to place that burden on me right out of law school myself.  A baptism by fire, or better yet by ordeal.  I reviewed writing assignments with students individually, dividing the large class into 5 groups, one for each morning of the week.  It must have been 10 groups, so I would meet with 12 students individually each morning.  I also was teaching a 4 credit-hour Property Law class and, I think, a 3-hour course on Agency and Partnership Law.  I may be wrong about the Agency class which may have been in the second semester.  What I do recall is working day and night preparing for the next day's class(es), reading and marking up student papers, and meeting with students every morning to go over the papers.  After a couple years of this, the faculty must have agreed that it was cruel and unusual punishment to inflict that teaching load on a young newbie so they spread the Legal Writing load among several members of the faculty for a year.  That adjustment worked, as I recall, for all of one year because it consumed so much time of my senior faculty.  The course went through some other permutations to get to the point many years ago where the school appointed a small cadre of Legal Writing Instructors which is the situation that obtains now.  In later years, I taught courses in Pretrial Litigation focused on pretrial discovery: interrogatories, RPDS, and depositions.  I advised the students in the first class that my goal was simply to help them to learn how to ask a question.  When reviewing their assignments of drafting written interrogatories, the usual challenge was to address circumlocutions and legalese.  "What do you want to know?" I would ask the students and they would answer in plain English.  "Then why not ask that?"  All those experiences over so many years taught me that writing - and thinking - don't come all that easily to most of us. And that writing is a crucible for thinking clearly and speaking clearly.  I recall students after classes telling me "I know [this or that legal concept or doctrine] I just can't express it" and  my suggesting to them, 'If you can't express it, you don't really know it."  The problem for most of us is that words come too easily to us when we speak.  They have no persistence; they are spoken and they are gone.  When we write them down, however, they stare back at us and cause us to wonder "is that really true or accurate?"  "Is that what I really mean?" "Is that word too broad, too inclusive, too blurry?"  and "Have I buried a diamond of a thought or perception in a dungheap of unnecessary verbiage?"  I violate my own teachings in these daily journals (do you want the word "daily" modifying "journals"?  "Jour", root word of "journal" means "day" in French.  Is "daily" necessary?)   But (do you really want to start a sentence, as you so often do, with the conjunction "but'?) journal writing, if not very careful writing, is still writing, still trying to express a thought with some accuracy even when the thought itself may be a very blurry one.  C'est la vie.

Saute Ma Ville, the precursor of Jeanne Dielman, is on the Criterion Channel.  It's 13 minutes long.  I watched it today and saw it was not only the precursor of Jeanne Dielman but it also in its way foretold Akerman's death by suicide.  It also may have answered my question in an earlier entry about whether Jeanne Dielman is a comedy or a tragedy, indicating the latter, i.e., that the protagonist was essentially ending not just her way of life, but her life itself.  A big difference in the 2 films is that in the shorter one, the death is almost slapstick, and lighthearted.  In the longer film, it's quite the opposite.

And speaking of suicide  . . . ]

What Euthanasia Has Done to Canada   Ross Douthat had a column in this morning's NYT about euthanasia and assisted suicide in Canada.  He's against both and calls Canada a dystopia because both are legal there.  He mentioned but did not expatiate on my biggest concern: pressure on terminally ill patients to voluntarily end their lives.  He wrote of "health care workers allegedly suggesting euthanasia to their patients" which is a real concern but perhaps not as great as family members suggesting euthanasia to preserve the value of the estate they will inherit, or the patients wanting it for the same reason.

Trump Corporations Found Guilty on All Counts of Tax Evasion  Oh frabjous day, calool allay.