"Ilsa was only 19 when she went gaga for Lazlo, who was 37. That's how she ended up married before she understood mature adult love..."

"... which she found with Rick. Now Rick is 37 when Yvonne is 19 and she's got a crush on Rick, but he rejects her. Maybe that's not just his wounded coldness. Maybe it's more he's not a sexual predator like Lazlo."

That's a prompt I wrote to Grok, after watching half of "Casablanca" last night while Meade was downstairs watching Purdue lose its "Elite 8" game.

"Of course, with a broadcast social network like X, everyone is both a patron and an owner of sorts."

"Followers can feel like a kind of currency, built up over years: Some people don’t leave the bar, because they’re invested and don’t want to dump their shares. Other people don’t leave, because the alternative hangouts aren’t enticing enough. Some simply don’t want to give the Nazis the satisfaction of successfully driving them out. There is plenty of commentary, even among users of other platforms, about how Threads is bloodless (and owned by Mark Zuckerberg), Mastodon is inscrutable, and Bluesky is humorless.... If a billionaire bought one of your local haunts... brought back many of the people who’d been banned for harassing other regulars, eliminated basic rules of decency... taking your business elsewhere would be perfectly rational. This is essentially what’s happened on X.... A critical mass of the nation’s politicians, news outlets, and major brands regularly post content for free... This platform is owned by the world’s richest man, a conspiracy theorizing GOP mega-donor who still holds a position in the Trump administration.... Let’s pause to sit with the absurdity of these facts...."

I'm sitting with the Atlantic article by Charlie Warzel, "What Are People Still Doing on X? Imagine if your favorite neighborhood bar turned into a Nazi hangout." 

Here's how I'd act when my favorite neighborhood bar turns into a Nazi hangout:

"Madeleine Lebeau, Last Living Cast Member of Casablanca, Dies at 92."

"Though she had several small roles in other American films, as well as Fellini’s 8 ½, she’s best remembered for her emotional proclamation of 'Viva la France!' at the end of the ensemble performance of 'La Marseillaise' in Casablanca. Lebeau.., was, like many of her co-performers, a real-life refugee forced to flee from the Nazis...."

"I can't help noticing that Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker picks beautiful young women to be the spokespeople for his administration and his campaigns."

"By my count there's Laurel Patrick, Alleigh Marré, Jocelyn Webster and Ciara Matthews. Matthews, you recall, is the one who made headlines for being a former Hooters waitress. It reminds me of Fox News, which uses super-sexy women as on-air talent rather than a normal range of women who just happen to be good journalists. As with Fox, it's hard to believe that the most talented females available to fill Walker's frontline jobs also look like models.... What does it say to the young girls of Wisconsin who hope to do important work when they grow up, regardless of their looks? In my opinion Walker's approach sets women back 50 years, to the pre-feminist Mad Men era."

A letter to the "Tell All" column in the Madison, Wisconsin alternative newspaper Isthmus.

Here's an article in the Cap Times from 2012 about Matthews: "Walker's Hooters connection and other fun facts about campaign spokeswoman Ciara Matthews."

“Are you guys doing a story on this, really?” she asked Friday when asked to confirm the rumor.

But to the direct question: Were you a Hooters girl? She said, “I was.”

Matthews said she waited tables for the popular restaurant chain -- which features tasty chicken wings and waitresses in short shorts and low-cut tops –- while attending college at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas.

“So you guys want to write a story that I waited tables in college,” she said. “I’m confused as to why that’s a story.”

Imagine taking a shot at a young woman for waitressing?

ADDED: Back in 2009, somebody wrote to Isthmus "Tell All" with this thing about me:

"Time may be running out for U.S. fugitive Edward Snowden to get out of Russia."

"The former National Security Agency contractor has been holed up in the transit area of Moscow airport since Sunday, but Snowden may only have been given a Russian transit visa valid for three days...."

"Transit passengers who have a ticket for a connecting flight and documents necessary to enter a third country can get a Russian transit visa.... If Snowden has these documents, then he has the right to apply for a transit visa right in the airport, in the consular point, and could well have done that."

This sounds like the boring part of the movie "Casablanca." Why can't he get another transit visa?

"A Self is interesting to oneself and others, it acts as a sort of rudder in all the vicissitudes of life..."

"... and it thereby defines what used to be known as a career," wrote Jacques Barzun to his grandson, the lawprof, Charles Barzun, quoted by my son Jaltcoh here. The grandson had asked for help with what he called "a genuine crisis of identity... "brought on by the events of 9/11 and partly by my own discovery that I could not have cared less about my job." The grandfather assured him that he would find his way, which would look "like a path marked on a map" and "you will have made a Self, which is indeed a desirable possession."

The elder Barzun likens identity to a path and then to a rudder. Life is a journey. That's a very widely used metaphor. All these people who think of life as a journey: What are they picturing? Do they see a wilderness where you can find — or break — a path? Or do they see a map where you can mark a path? Or is it a journey over the ocean, in which your body is a ship, and what you want is a rudder?

The seafaring image implicit in Barzun's "rudder" made me think of that popular old poem that ends "I am the master of my fate/I am the captain of my soul." I haven't heard that poem — "Invictus" — quoted in a long time, perhaps because it was overquoted to the point of triteness and nowadays people don't read poetry — other than in children's books. They'll listen to poetry, including the endless doggerel of rap (which is, perhaps, inspired by many childhood readings of Dr. Seuss books). But there was a time when lots of ordinary people knew the last verse of "Invictus" by heart.

I'm reading the Wikipedia page for "Invictus," scanning the long list of items under the heading "Influence." It begins with "Casablanca" (where "I am the master of my fate" is used ironically). The next item features Ronald Reagan:

In the 1945 film Kings Row, Parris Mitchell, a psychiatrist played by Robert Cummings, recites the first two stanzas of "Invictus" to his friend Drake McHugh, played by Ronald Reagan, before revealing to Drake that his legs were unnecessarily amputated by a cruel doctor.

Next, another President, FDR, at least the FDR of the 1958 play Sunrise at Campobello. Further down we encounter Nelson Mandela, who recited the poem to hearten his fellow prisoners. There's also Aung San Suu Kyi. And then... it's chilling to encounter this after beginning this post with the crisis of identity brought on by 9/11:

The Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh quoted the poem in its entirety as his final (written) statement.

The terrorists are out and about on their own ships in the seafaring journey of life, and they've got their rudders. Emergency inspiration available here.

"I believe death is the ultimate freedom."

"So I’d rather have my freedom as soon as I can get it."

ADDED: Meadhouse dialogue:

MEADE (on reading this post): So when she killed the guy, she was setting him free.

ALTHOUSE: Liberating his soul from his body. What's that line in a movie — "Go ahead and shoot, you'll be doing me a favor"? Casablanca!

MEADE: I hope you never murder me.

ALTHOUSE: I won't.

MEADE: Just for the record, I don't consider death the ultimate freedom.

What do you say to the woman who consciously loathes Scott Walker, but has sexual dreams about him?

Well, the Isthmus advice columnist "Tell All" told her:

Clip out the sexiest Tom Barrett photos you can find in newspapers or campaign literature. Scatter them around your house, and save the best one for the bedroom. Look at it every night before you go to sleep. With any luck, your subconscious will do the rest by supplying you with a more suitable sexual partner in your dreams.

And then Meade stopped by the comments. Noting first her line "I should mention that I'm happily married, with an attractive husband," Meade said:

Man, talk about damning with faint praise! Dear Violated: First of all you have not been violated. You have been the violaTOR... of your marriage, of your husband's due respect, and of your own fantasies.

Photos of Tom Barrett? Tell All needs to turn in his newspaper-advice-columnist badge. And the last thing you need is to waste your time with a psychotherapist.

What you need to do is to practice sweet surrender to your husband so that, with any luck, he will discover his manhood and learn that what his wife and most heterosexual women want more than anything is to be sexually dominated by a man who will stand up and be strong, decisive, and confident.

Try this, Violated: Everyday, tell your husband that you approve of him, that you love everything about him, and that he has your open consent and carte blanche in your sexual relationship. Together, just the two of you, over and over again, watch scenes like this one from the movie Casablanca where Ilsa tells Rick that he will have to do the thinking for both of them.

Good luck, Violated. Try to give up thinking of yourself as a victim and remember, if things don't work out in your private love life, you will always have Scott Walker.

Background reading: a column from "Tell All" from April 4, 2009, titled "Should UW law prof Ann Althouse marry her commenter Meade?"

ADDED: Instapundit says: "MEH. CHICKS DIG THE BAD BOYS... In her measly little world, he’s the ultimate bad boy." Exactly.

"There are also aspects of her that make me think of spirited Katharine Hepburn in Holiday, elegant Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca..."

"... wise and proud Greer Garson in The Valley of Decision, and adventurous Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday. Michelle Obama is not any of these characters, of course, but bears traces of the universal characteristics these women brought to life."

She ranks with the iconic and trailblazing Ruby Dee, Lena Horne and Suzette Harbin because she is a woman who simply knows how to be.

Now, there will be 10 nominees for the Best Picture Oscar.

It's pretty obviously a bid for TV ratings:

In a question-and-answer session that followed the announcement [Sidney Ganis, the academy’s president] said, "I would not be telling you the truth if I said the words ‘Dark Knight’ did not come up.

IN THE EMAIL: Christopher Althouse Cohen writes:

The most obvious pros and cons for either decision is that 5 slots are probably not enough to nominate every great movie in a given year, but on the other hand 10 slots is almost certain to lead to some pretty crappy movies getting nominated. Also, having 10 best picture nominees sort of lowers the value of a given nomination. A movie getting nominated at all right now seems like a really big deal for that movie, but it might not if there were 10. But you will be a lot more likely to see your favorite movies nominated with 10 slots.

Here were the nominees in 1943, the last time they had more than 5 nominees:

Casablanca
For Whom the Bell Tolls
Heaven Can Wait
In Which We Serve
Madame Curie
The Human Comedy
The More the Merrier
The Ox-Bow Incident
The Song of Bernadette
Watch on the Rhine

I don't know enough of those movies to know if they deserved it (I think I've only seen two), but the fact that they were nominated doesn't make me want to run out and see all of them. Kind of looks like one really major classic, and then a long list of pretty good movies.

Now, here are last year's five nominees, which apparently will be the last time, at least for a while, that there are only five (along with their box office grosses before getting nominated):

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button ($104 million)
Frost/Nixon ($8.8 million)
Milk ($20 million)
The Reader ($8 million)
Slumdog Millionaire ($44 million)

Only one had a significant gross pre-nominations, and that one wasn't even a box office success given its $150 million budget. And here is an overview of the ratings for the Oscars since 1990 from Wikipedia. The ratings peaked with 57 million viewers the year Titanic came out, and has had somewhere in the 30's each of the last four years, so it's in a low streak.

And, coincidentally, the two best-reviewed movies of the year in 2008, based on Top Ten lists, were also the 1st and 5th highest grossing movies of the year: WALL-E and The Dark Knight. Both had some Oscar hype but failed to get nominated, and both would likely have been nominated if there were 10 slots. They were also big budget, ambitious movies that had fans who were really excited about those movies.

It seems pretty clear that this is a response to the decline in ratings and the possibility that its ratings decline has something to do with the fact that the small prestige movies have been getting all the nominations.

I do think the bigger movies are also more likely to win the award with 10. People push for their favorite little movie and put it in the #1 slot on their list when they vote for the nominations, because they want to help it and the big movies already have plenty of attention. Maybe a lot of those people who voted for The Reader and Frost/Nixon for nominations would have voted for The Dark Knight for the actual award if there were more nominees. So, I could see a movie in 6th-10th place for the nominations actually winning for this reason.

You'd also probably have some really unworthy prestige movies sneaking in without living up to their hype: movies like Rachel Getting Married, Doubt, or Che. But then you might have some little movies that deserved it but normally wouldn't have a chance, like Frozen River or Vicky Cristina Barcelona. That would be nice. It could go either way.

"Citizen Kane," "The Godfather," "Casablanca," "Raging Bull," "Singin' in the Rain," "Gone With the Wind"...

The new AFI top 100 American movies list is out. I've seen all but 9. How about you? I'll reveal the 9 I've managed to miss later, but I will see if you can guess. I'd be surprised if anyone (other than my sons) can guess more than 2. I have already blogged about the fact that I haven't seen one of these movies.

ADDED: Only 11 of the films (by my count) are centered on a female character:

6. "Gone With the Wind," 1939.
10. "The Wizard of Oz," 1939.
16. "Sunset Blvd.," 1950.
28. "All About Eve," 1950.
34. "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs," 1937.
35. "Annie Hall," 1977.
40. "The Sound of Music," 1965.
44. "The Philadelphia Story," 1940.
47. "A Streetcar Named Desire," 1951.
63. "Cabaret," 1972.
83. "Titanic," 1997.
91. "Sophie's Choice," 1982.

UPDATE: I list the movies I haven't seen here. And it's actually 11.

"Effort to 'Humanize' Clinton Is Underway."

That's the hilarious teaser on the home page of the Washington Post, leading to this article.

The effort to "humanize" Clinton, as her advisers have put it, was in full swing just two days into her presidential campaign.

Oh! So it's her advisors who are supplying the term that implies that she is not human. Wouldn't want the WaPo editorializing. But since it's her advisors... well, let's just have a laugh at the ineptitude of political advisors. Come on, you fools, just humanize her. Don't tell the press you're trying to humanize her!

Dressed in the same pastel jacket for all her appearances, Clinton sat on a sofa against a soft backdrop of bookshelves and a yellow curtain for her Web chat. She was joined by her campaign's blogger, Crystal Patterson, who read viewer questions aloud. Almost all of the inquiries were from women, and nearly one-third were from New York. One question was about the role Chelsea Clinton will play in the campaign (unclear, her mom said).

She hedged on her favorite movie, saying that, as a child, she had loved "The Wizard of Oz," only to discover "Casablanca" in college and law school, watching it so often that she memorized the lines. (Her passion for the Meryl Streep-Robert Redford classic "Out of Africa" came later, she said.) But she was clear about her own conviction that she can become president.

Can't you just picture the robotic brain gears turning, trying to think of a movie that would say just the thing she needs said? Oh, why didn't she have a "favorite movie" planned before she went into this on-line chat to humanize herself? "Wizard of Oz," can't go wrong there.... except it's childish, and not very imaginative or distinctive. "Casablanca"! That's a great movie everyone loves. Possibly more sophisticated than "Wizard of Oz." But anyone could think of "Casablanca." I need something that would have at least some individuality to it. Was there ever anything that ever stirred me? Damn it, I've been busy. I haven't been sitting around like you cookie-bakers staring at screens, waiting for some damned moving image to stir some -- what is it you people have? -- emotion. Oh, hell, there was that thing.... "Out of Africa"!

Plot summary (with spoilers):

Karen Blixen [Meryl Streep], a Danish woman, marries a friend for the title of Baroness and they move to Africa and start a coffee plantation. Things unfold when her husband begins cheating on her and is away on business often, so she's at home alone, working on the farm and bonding with two men she met in her first day in Africa. She eventually falls in love with the one, Denys Finch-Hatton [Robert Redford] and goes on safari and whatnot with him. Later, she begins to want more from him than the simple friendship/relationship they have and pushes marriage, but Denys still wants his freedom.

No, no, damn you, bloggers! You're so eager to bring up my problems with Bill. Don't you be digging up my problems with Bill. Don't you bastards say that I picked "Out of Africa" because I empathized with Karen Blixen! Who the f*ck do you think you are? How dare you dredge up this scurrilous suggestion that I am............................. human.

The Bastille Day post.

Over in the comments at Sheila Variations, they are discussing the ending of "Casablanca":

Sadly, I think if I was on that tarmac, I'd go with Rick Blaine. If his WORK is so important to Lazslo, then let Lazslo marry his work!! Let me have my grand passion and leave me alone!! Greater good, my ass. We only live once, and I want to gather ye rosebuds while ye may.

Then the discussion gets sidetracked to whatever anyone feels like saying about the movie or whatever (including a half-eaten grilled cheese sandwich), and someone writes:

One of my favorite moments in the movie is Bogie giving the subtle head-nod across the bar to the orchestra - for them to pick up Marseillese ... member that? Apparently, they did that shot before they knew how the scene would go - so in real life, Bogie had no idea what he was nodding to. Feckin' amazing - it is such a moving moment. Bogart, the "I stick my neck out for nobody" cynic - giving Lazslo and the orchestra permission to drown out the Nazis. But Bogart was just told "Okay, we need a shot of you nodding - So nod." Bogie, man. He blows me away.

And someone else says:

That whole scene - Henreid upping the ante on Strasser, paying the band, the bandleader looking at Rick, the nod, the whole crowd scene - is the most gloriously manipulative scene ever! I laugh and cry and sing along and wriggle with schmaltzfreude and watch it over and over...

And then:

that scene of the orchestra rising to the occasion - and the crying French woman (the one who was wasted in the first scene and had to be escorted out of the bar) - she KILLS ME!! Crying and singing along to that song with all her might.

And all this talk of the Marseillaise reminds me that it is Bastille Day and that I wanted to link to Nina's post exposing the alarming words of the French national anthem (which begins with an innocent enough call to children to come along):

The howling of these fearsome soldiers
They are coming into our midst
To cut the throats of your sons and consorts...

Let impure blood
Water our furrows

Reveling in cutting the throats of the impure? A bit like our modern terrorist enemies, isn't it? But a national anthem can be a call to arms, and it worked brilliantly as a call to arms in "Casablanca."

Those 100 AFI quotes.

Okay, I'm game. I'll TiVo-blog, numbering each entry. Watch for continuous updates. Ah, it's good to be simulblogging again!

1. “Life is a banquet and most poor suckers are starving to death.” That's the first one that made me want to type it out. That's # 91. Hmmm… I’m seeing a theme. Life affirmingness. “Nobody puts Baby in a corner.” “Carpe diem.” “I’m the King of the World.” It’s all so damned positive… so far.

2. I singled out a few quotes in my post on the original 400 nominees, and coming it at #84 is one of my favorites: "Oh, no, it wasn't the airplanes. It was beauty killed the beast."

3. File under: movies no one feels any compunction about spoiling. "Soylent Green is people." (#77) Ray Romano: "Not a day went by when someone didn't yell that out in the school cafeteria."

4. "What a dump." (#62) The line everyone knows without seeing the movie. The movie is "Beyond the Forest," which I'm not going to recommend to you because I don't want to hear your bellyaching when you discover it's not a good movie. But I love this movie! I love when Bette Davis finally gets out of her damn little town and makes it to Chicago -- Chicago! of all places -- and she goes to a bar and, because she's a woman alone, she's perceived as a prostitute, and they kick her out. And then there's the part where she's pregnant, but she doesn't want the baby, so she just hurls herself down a hill. And all those great scenes where she stands by the window and looks at the smoking factory right outside and just burns with unexploded sexual passion. That is a movie! Oh, they scarcely tell us anything about this film, they just segue quickly to "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf," with Elizabeth Taylor saying the same line. The line doesn't get counted a second time. The point seems to be it was such a line that it got quoted in the movies, quoted by a big, big movie star. But "Beyond the Forest," that's on my personal list.

5. We're getting into doubles for the same movie. A second quote from "Streetcar Named Desire." ("Stella" beat "kindness of strangers.") A second quote from "Casablanca." ("We'll always have Paris" beat "Of all the gin joints..." I'm predicting at least one more from "Casablanca.") A second quote from "The Graduate." ("Plastics" beat "You're trying to seduce me.")

6. Okay, enough baseball already! We're at the fourth or fifth baseball quote, including the mushy-headed "If you build it, he will come." (#39) "Luckiest man on the face of the earth" follows at #38.

7. Yes, another "Casablanca" quote: "Round up the usual suspects." (That must get extra credit for providing the title for another film.) Ah, now they tell us the total for "Casablanca" is going to be six. So three more to go. "Here's looking at you, kid" -- I assume. And "Play it, Sam." And, maybe the "hill of beans" quote. Or the final "this is the beginning" quote? Not sure what the third one left is.

8. "That movie is about so much. I think that it is so much about God...." So says Jennifer Grey about -- what else? -- "The Wizard of Oz." The quote at #23 is the dopey "There's no place like home." Aren't there 23 better lines in that film alone?

9. Another "Casablanca" at #20. Oh, it's "Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship."

10. "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore." Now, that's a catchphrase. Remember when Peter Finch went on "The Tonight Show" to promote that movie -- "Network" -- and for some reason got to talking about how some of the people watching the show that night would be dead next week, and then he proceeded to die within the next week? Am I getting that right?

11. "Love means never having to say you're sorry." That's #13. Ugh! Pure crapola!

12. "Napalm in the morning" ... "Failure to communicate" ... "You talkin' to me?" ... "Fasten your seatbelts, it's going to be a bumpy night."

13. "May the force be with you." George Lucas tells us he meant that to sum up and represent all religions and save us from the difficulty of scrutinizing the details that make them different.

14. "All right, Mr. DeMille, I'm ready for my closeup." #7. I approve!

15. The final "Casablanca" quote is "Here's looking at you kid." #5. (Doesn't Ingrid Bergman have the most beautiful lips?)

16. At #4: "Toto, I have a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore." Only line on the list addressed to a dog.

17. Three left, and we're told one actor said two of them. Clearly, it's Marlon Brando, and as we see the first one is "I coulda been a contender," we know that "I'll make him an offer he can't refuse" is either number 1 or number 2.

18. Second place goes to Brando, for "offer ... refuse." Why am I not thinking of the top quote? It should be obvious, right?

19. Oh, it's "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn." Somehow, I had the feeling we'd already hit that one. So, sure. I would have put that first... in the world of American movie catchphrases.

20. Okay, that was three hours of slogging through the quotes. Three hours well spent? Who knows!

21. During the show, they pointed us to the AFI website to read a quote from "Mrs. Miniver" that wasn't on the list, but that, we were told, FDR had printed up and dropped from planes on Nazi-occupied Europe.

This is the people's war! It is our war! We are the fighters! Fight it, then! Fight it with all that is in us, and may God defend the right.

Of course, the war quote that made the list was the cynicism-promoting "I love the smell of napalm in the morning."

22. In the first entry to this post, I noted that the quotes seem to have been selected for their life-affirmingness. But toward the top of the list, things got darker. The top quotes are all pretty sad or cynical or nutty or negative. They stowed all that sunny stuff at the bottom of the list.

23. Adam at Throwing Things has some observations including the count of lines spoken by nonwhite actors: 3. All by men, I note. Two of the three make the speaker look bad ("Show me the money" and "stinking badges"), Adam notes. I note that the other one -- "They call me Mr. Tibbs" -- is too pretty. Why not one of Samuel Jackson's lines from "Pulp Fiction"? Adam asks. Which reminds me: how about Quentin Tarantino? Not a single line from him. Well, most of the lines they had drew attention to the actors that delivered them, not the person who happened to write them. This was not a celebration of screenwriters.

24. Here's the whole list. I took the trouble to figure out the percentage of quotes spoken by women: 25%.

"Try to survive a tornado with a post-structuralist."

Camille Paglia in Madison.







I show up early for the Camille Paglia reading at Borders this evening. The place is packed. I find a seat and then, here’s Chris, sitting with Nina, and they’ve saved me a seat in the second row. There are a lot of saved seats. Next to me is a seat saved with a copy of a book called “Wicca – a Guide for the Solitary Practitioner… over 400,000 copies sold.” At first, I think, 400,000? So we’re screwed... And then, I think, well, apparently not. Two women show up and claim the Wicca seats. One says, looking at the book, “Oh, cool. I’m kind of interested,” and the other says, “Me, too.”

A bookstore guy comes out to read us a bunch of rules from “Miss Paglia.” No photos until the signing session. No large bags at the signing. Don’t try giving Miss Paglia any manuscripts or presents. She comes out. She’s quite tiny, even in three-inch heels. She reacts, animatedly, to each line of the introduction. She takes the mike and says she’s avoided Madison until today. In the early 90s, it was “a bit too P.C.” (And now?)

She launches into a 40-minute rant. Films today are “a blizzard of fast editing,” they’re “crap.” Not like when she was young. Soap operas have gone way downhill since when she loved them, when she was young. Young people have migrated to the web, where nothing can be trusted, and everything lingers forever, “like space junk.” The whole culture has Attention Deficit Disorder. We need to “stabilize kids’ eyes,” and that’s the point of her new poetry book. Read some poems, kids. Focus!

She rants against post-structuralism, which, she says, can only -- at most -- be aimed at long, narrative, European texts. It’s hopeless in America and hopeless with poetry. She’s against that theoretical, academic blather and wants to talk to ordinary people and get them to care about art. Actually, she’s a lot like a generic high school English teacher who just wants everyone to pay attention to art, to appreciate it.

Writers need to experience things and not live the bland, featureless life of the writing program grad student. Like this guy who wrote a poem about surviving a tornado. “Try to survive a tornado with a post-structuralist.”

In the question session, one young man asks what she thinks of blogging. She says, “I’m worried about blogging.” There’s “decadence” in the web. Once you’re “swept up in the blogosphere,” you become self-referential. (Afterwards, my colleague expresses amusement that she said other people were being self-referential.) Instead of blogs, she prefers on-line magazines. Mainly, Salon. Do you know she’s returning to Salon? There’s also Slate, but Slate’s “a little bit more wonky,” though it has “some good wonky articles now and then.” Who knows which blogs to read? There are so many! What bloggers need to do is join together and make on-line magazines. Like Salon. Did you know she’s returning to Salon? On Salon, years ago, she was developing a style that was “all about her,” but she was “an established writer” already, and she’s worried about people now trying to start becoming writers through blogging. But, she admits, if she were just starting out now, she’d be blogging.

But those blogs! Some are just “snark, snark, snark,” and others are very pedestrian. But maybe “blog style will mature,” maybe a “blog master will emerge.” Then, shifting position, she says “bark bark bark yap yap yap – I like that!”

A teacher in the audience recounts his difficulty getting his students to watch the movie “Casablanca.” Paglia thinks he might have had more luck with “Ben Hur,” but then moves into a rant that gets her back to her point about how awful post-structuralism is, and she extends this to a criticism of the left. The left “has become spiritually empty.” It has no connection to art and religion. And the right gets art wrong too: it thinks there should be a moral message.” Art for art’s sake is what needs to be taught. Art appreciation is what this country needs today.

Time for one more question, one that can be answered in two minutes, which is a really funny thing to say, considering Paglia’s propensity to take any cue and spin out ten minutes of material. A man asks what she dreams about. She does a whole thing about the importance of dreams, but finally comes around to an answer. She dreams of natural disasters: the sea rising and tornados.

UPDATE: Kate Marie at "What's the Rumpus" just wrote a poem titled "Surviving a Tornado With a Post-Structuralist." It's really good -- and hilarious!

ANOTHER UPDATE: A commenter senses that I didn't really like Paglia all that much, and I want to respond. I greatly enjoy her form of expression, but I think there's a lot less content than you might think. She loves art and wants other people to love art because art is important and she loves it. Nothing she said made me want to read poetry, which was ostensibly the point of the book she spent five years writing. She didn't even read us or quote us a single line of poetry.

Like a lot of people, she hates post-structuralists, but her attack on them is largely an expression of disgust. There's no detail to her critique. Take her word for it: that stuff's terrible. But exactly why? Are we not to analyze art in an intellectual way? Should we just be close-reading enthusiasts? Paglia always falls back on her life story: she's Italian, she's working class, she was raised Catholic, and she had trouble advancing in academia because she would not do post-structuralism. Fine, that's all interesting and entertainingly stated, but it doesn't make me want to read poetry, and it doesn't explain why I should reject post-structuralism. (Not that I don't.)

Finally, she acts as if she was the only one circa 1970s who embraced pop culture as a worthy part of art and that her troubles in academia had to do with this. But this was the great era of Pauline Kael, who was all about making movies part of what intellectuals talked about. We were all about pop culture then! The Introduction to Poetry class I took in college around 1970 included Beatles lyrics -- I still have the anthology -- and one of the main papers topics was to pick a rock song and analyze the lyrics -- I still have my paper. (I did "Maggie Mae"/And got an A.) The blurring of the line between high and low culture was scarcely something she started and suffered for daring to do.

AND A BIT MORE: That was the Rod Stewart "Maggie Mae" ("Wake up, Maggie, I think I've got something to say to you") not the Beatles' little snippet of a song ("Oh, dirty Maggie Mae, they have taken her away").

AND THIS TOO: Kevin Drum has a funny link to this post.

Great Movies.

My son, Christopher Althouse has made this List of the Great Movies. It's not my list, but I like a lot of these movies, and I think it's a good list:

1. Rashomon
2. 8 1/2
3. Intolerance
4. Persona
5. L’Avventura
6. The Cranes Are Flying
7. The Bicycle Thief
8. Cries & Whispers
9. Andrei Rublev
10. Seven Samurai
11. Battleship Potemkin
12. Contempt
13. I Am Cuba
14. Children of Paradise
15. L’Atalante
16. Juliet of the Spirits
17. Annie Hall
18. Wild Strawberries
19. Weekend
20. Picnic at Hanging Rock
21. Tokyo Story
22. Sunrise
23. Vertigo
24. Dr. Strangelove
25. The Passion of Joan of Arc
26. Jules and Jim
27. Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie
28. Imitation of Life
29. Nights of Cabiria
30. Rosemary’s Baby
31. The World of Apu
32. Ran
33. Some Like It Hot
34. Mulholland Dr.
35. Playtime
36. Breathless
37. Diabolique
38. The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari
39. 2001: A Space Odyssey
40. Alexander Nevsky
41. My Life To Live
42. Aguirre, the Wrath of God
43. Wisconsin Death Trip
44. Chinatown
45. Repulsion
46. Kwaidan
47. Ugetsu Monogatari
48. Pather Panchali
49. Two English Girls
50. Story of the Last Chrysanthemums

Here are the next 56, in alphabetical order:

Aliens
Amarcord
Amores Perros
Aparajito
Belle de Jour
The Birds
The Birth of a Nation
Blowup
The Bride of Frankenstein
The Bride Wore Black
Casablanca
Citizen Kane
City Lights
Cleo From 5 to 7
The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover
Dancer In the Dark
Das Boot
Fanny & Alexander
Fantasia
The 400 Blows
Frankenstein
Full Metal Jacket
The Godfather
The Gold Rush
Gone With the Wind
Grave of the Fireflies
The Great Dictator
Greed
Hannah and Her Sisters
Heavenly Creatures
Hiroshima mon amour
Horse Feathers
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)
Ivan the Terrible Part I
Ivan the Terrible Part II
La Dolce Vita
Last Year in Marienbad
La Strada
Manhattan
Modern Times
Network
Night of the Living Dead
Nosferatu
Orphans of the Storm
The Phantom of the Opera (1925)
Psycho
Rear Window
Rebecca
The Searchers
The Seventh Seal
The Shining
Sleeper
Spirited Away
The Story of Adele H
Sunset Blvd
The Terminator
Throne of Blood
Titanic
The Wizard of Oz

Feel free to copy the lists--link to this blog and give Chris credit--and boldface the ones you've seen or resort the list with your top 50 or whatever. Note that documentaries have not been taken into account. I'd like to see his list of top 25 documentaries.

UPDATE: I went through Chris's lists, and here are the ones I haven't seen: (of the top fifty) Contempt, Sunrise, Imitation of Life, Playtime, Alexander Nevsky, My Life To Live, Two English Girls, Story of the Last Chrysanthemums; (of the next 56) Amarcord, Fanny & Alexander, Greed, Last Year in Marienbad, Orphans of the Storm.

DVDs that have been sitting around the house for ages that are on that list and I've been meaning to watch: Contempt, Alexander Nevsky, Two English Girls, Amarcord.

Additional films on the list that I would actually like to see: Sunrise, Playtime, My Life To Live, Story of the Last Chrysanthemums; Fanny & Alexander, Greed.

Films I will probably never see: Last Year in Marienbad, Orphans of the Storm.

Of the films on his list I've seen, these are the ones I especially like (but I can't put them in order): The Bicycle Thief, L’Atalante, Annie Hall, Vertigo, Dr. Strangelove, The Passion of Joan of Arc, Nights of Cabiria, Some Like It Hot, Breathless, The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari, Aguirre the Wrath of God, City Lights, Cleo From 5 to 7, Grave of the Fireflies, Heavenly Creatures, Modern Times, Psycho, Spirited Away, The Story of Adele H, Sunset Blvd.

My favorite film that's not on the list: My Dinner With Andre.

Scenes From a Marriage. I've been watching the DVD of the Ingmar Bergman TV series Scenes From a Marriage, which had been edited down to feature film length for theater release in the US back in 1974. (Of course, being DVD, the film version is included. It's a beautiful Criterion release.) It is so exciting to get a chance to see the original form of the material, because the film itself was incredibly good and one had to assume the TV version was better. I saw the film when it came out, and one scene in particular had made a big impression on me, which I had remembered very clearly for 30 years. Liv Ullman plays a woman who, as presented in the first scene, is happily married. She's a divorce lawyer (so put this on those lists of films about law), and in another scene, which occurs in the second TV episode ("The Art of Sweeping Things Under the Rug"), she's interviewing a woman who is seeking a divorce after 20 years of marriage, a woman who told her husband 15 years ago that she didn't love him and wanted to leave but then agreed to stay until the children had grown. Now, describing her feelings about the marriage, she starts to speak of her feelings generally: all of her senses have diminished and the whole world lacks feeling and seems "puny" and insignificant. There's a closeup at this point that I waited to see once again, just the woman's fingers touching the wooden table next to her, as she describes having lost her sense of feeling. Then there's a closeup of Liv Ullman's face, the professional demeanor combined with the horrible fear that the same thing is happening to her. Liv Ullman's face at that point, which for some reason I didn't remember as much as the hand on the table, is my candidate for best closeup of all time (oh, along with Ingrid Bergman--another Swedish actress--at the end of Casablanca).

Scenes From a Marriage made an interesting contrast to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, seen earlier yesterday, and written about below. Sunshine is all about how you'll regret leaving, but Scenes is all about how you'll regret staying. In Sunshine, you stand to lose the love of your life. In Scenes, you stand to lose your own senses. There was a different zeitgeist then! Anyway, if that partner you're trying to leave took you to see Sunshine to prove to you why you should stay, you can argue the other side with Scenes, which is designed to stun you out of your complacency. No one wants to be that woman 20 years into a relationship who can't even feel the reality of the table under her hand. I think she might be the most frightening character in the history of film.