Thursday, April 30, 2015

I don't mind the plates so much





    It's the clank they
    make, that wears on
    one.

    Gone for a few days.
















Wednesday, April 29, 2015

"Pangs of death and pangs of birth"






Over an entrance to the quadrangle
of the Yale School of Law, one can
make out an inscription carved al-
most a century ago. The law is a
living growth, not a changeless
code. Still the most illuminating
guest lectures in the school's fa-
mous Storrs series under this ae-
gis, were given in the 1920s by a
Columbia Law School grad, working
in New York, Benjamin N. Cardozo,
a descendant of Portuguese Sephar-
dic Jews, and a self-effacing bach-
elor, all his life. Those lectures,
on the Judicial Process, were met
with such respect that when the
Republican Herbert Hoover nominated
Cardozo to the Supreme Court of the
United States, they were cited in
his support even more strenuously
than his brilliant career on the
New York State Court of Appeals.

But he had second thoughts on his
Storrs Lectures; so he gave a sec-
ond series, which are bedrock tes-
taments in the life of the mind.


              I have become reconciled to uncertainty,
              because I have grown to see it as inev-
              itable. I have grown to see that the pro-
              cess [of jurisprudence] in its highest
              reaches is not discovery, but creation;
              and that the doubts and misgivings, the
              hopes and fears, are part of the travail
              of mind, the pangs of death and the pangs
              of birth, in which principles that have
              served their day expire, and new princip-
              les are born.





Justice Anthony Kennedy's candid
confession of trepidation, in yes-
terday's oral arguments at the Sup-
reme Court, in rendering a decision
he would perceive as at odds with
"millennia," called to mind the pangs
Cardozo not only felt, but explained
to him, and to all people within the
purview of our hybrid legal system.

Benjamin Cardozo is gentle, but he
is unfailingly not vague. Here, in
fraternal advice to Justice Kennedy,
he is saying there are times when
incremental redistributions of em-
pathy can no longer defend the af-
front of decrepit, incongruous rule.
The duty to act is not paradoxical,
it is preservative. 

I turned to his voice last evening,
and rested not on bedrock, but on
polishings of its grain.


              We may say that in the everyday trans-
              actions of life the average man is gov-
              erned, not by statute, but by common
              law, or at most by statute built upon
              a substratum of common law, modifying,
              in details only, the common law founda-
              tion. Failure to appreciate this truth
              has bred a distrust of a creative activ-
              ity which would otherwise have been seen
              to be appropriate and normal. A rule
              which in its origin was the creation of
              the courts themselves, and was supposed
              in the making to express the mores of
              the day, may be abrogated by courts when
              the mores have so changed that perpetua-
              tion of the rule would do violence to the
              social conscience .. If abrogation is per-
              missible in cases of extremity, still more
              plainly permissible at all times is con-
              tinuing adaptation to varying conditions.
              This is not usurpation. It is not even
              innovation. It is the reservation for our-
              selves of the same power of creation that
              built up the common law through its exer-
              cise by the judges of the past.


Who could make a secret of the
call to justice in one's time?





























Benjamin N. Cardozo
The Growth of the Law
Yale University Press, 1924©

Henri Cartier-Bresson
Arrival of displaced persons
  New York
1946







Tuesday, April 28, 2015

Choatie in a room with Shaw




      I'm gettin' married 
        in the morning
      Ding, dong, the bells 
        are gonna chime
      Pull out the stopper, 
        we'll have a whopper
      But get me 
        to the church on time







      I got to get there
        in the morning
      Spruced up and lookin'
        in me prime
      Girls come and kiss me
        say that you'll miss me
      But get me 


































George Bernard Shaw
Pygmalion
1913

Alan Jay Lerner '35
  lyricist
My Fair Lady
1956

Crane Brinton
The Anatomy of
  Revolution
Vintage Books

Edmund S. Morgan
The Stamp Act Crisis
University of North
  Carolina Press

Thomas S. Kuhn
The Structure of
  Scientific Revolutions
University of Chicago Press

James Obergefell
  plaintiff
Obergefell v. Hodges
Supreme Court of the United States
28 April 2015







Monday, April 27, 2015

427 Only Avenue







 Unlike, say, Bertrand Russell,
 who turned to philosophy with
 hope of finding certainty where
 previously he had felt only doubt,
 Wittgenstein was drawn to it by
 a compulsive tendency to be struck
 by .. questions. Philosophy, one
 might say, came to him, not he to
 philosophy. Its dilemmas were
 experienced by him as unwelcome
 intrusions, enigmas, which forced
 themselves upon him and held him
 captive, unable to get on with
 everyday life until he could dis-
 pel them with a satisfactory 
 solution.


























Ray Monk
op. cit.


Alex Godart
Edward Wilding




Sunday, April 26, 2015

Happy Birthday, Handsome


1889-1951





    A man will be imprisoned in a room
    with a door that's unlocked and o-
    pens inwards, as long as it does
    not occur to him to pull rather 
    than to push.

    One might say, genius 
    is talent exercised 
    with courage.

















Ludwig Wittgenstein
rowing in the year at
his fjord in Skjolden,
1913, his refuge from
Cambridge and Vienna,
before his enlistment.

Remarks in his note-
books, 1940 and 1941.

Ludwig Wittgenstein
Culture and Value
Peter Winch
  translation
University of Chicago Press
op. cit.





Plane sensibility






  I think of Ozu
  and of Valéry 
  Lorenzo, such
  elegant and
  penetrating
  masters of the
  plane in visu-
  al craftsman-
  ship, as I re-
  turn to this
  still from a
  student movie,
  a coming of age
  project within
  a coming of age
  project. I know
  little of the
  narrative but I
  know this is an
  eloquent eye,
  in this probing 
  application of
  several senses to
  a fluid partition,
  as they simply are.



























Mees Peijnenburg
  director
Netherlands Film Academy
Stephan Polman
  cinematography
Ko Zandvliet
2013