A DELIGHTFUL WASTE OF TIME

Surfing the web aimlessly and pointlessly, I came on this list of high brow jokes.  I think some of them are hilarious.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/how-many-surrealists-does-it-take-to-screw-in-a-light-bulb-a-fish-the-most-highbrow-jokes-in-the-world-8691191.html

RDW, RPW, RFD, RIP, AND SUCH

Rick Wolff and I were colleagues for many years at UMass, and I learned a great deal from him.  He is a bright and learned man, and also a very charming fellow.  I have not kept up with what he has been writing, so I do not want to try at all to comment on his views, but I would like to suggest why Rick, or anyone else steeped in Marx's economic theories [like me, for example] might want to try to separate judgments about the personal moral character of capitalists from an analysis of capitalism as an economic system.

Marx's central thesis, with which I wholly agree [and with which I imagine Rick also agrees, whether he thinks it is Marx's central thesis or not] is that capitalism rests on the exploitation of the working class, an exploitation that is built into the structure of capitalism and is quite independent of the knowledge, intentions, or motivations of the individuals who function in that system as the owners or managers of capital.

Marx spends a good deal of time in Volume I of Capital explaining where profit comes from.  It is, he says, the money form of the surplus labor extracted from  the workers in the production process.  [See my lengthy tutorial on the Thought of Karl Marx, or my various books and articles, for my analysis and partial reconstruction of this claim.]  He goes to great lengths to rebut any suggestion that the capitalists make a profit only by greedily extracting more labor time from the workers than they have contracted for.  In the great Tenth Chapter, On the Working Day, he cites numerous examples of capitalists who go so far as to fiddle with the clocks in their factories in an attempt to wring a few extra minutes of labor time from the workers, but he insists -- quite correctly in my view -- that even if the capitalists were pillars of Puritan rectitude and kept their bargains with the workers to the last jot and tittle, they would still exploit the workers.  Even those storied capitalists, much beloved by modern apologists, who befriend their workers and give them Christmas turkeys and ask after their workers' children, exploit their workers.  That is to say, they extract more value from the labor of their workers than is embodied in what they pay their workers.  This is a structural fact about capitalism.  No moral education or religious uplift for the capitalists can eliminate exploitation from capitalism, because capitalism rests necessarily on that exploitation.  No exploitation, no profit.

Now, the case of racism is quite different.  Capitalism is not inherently racist, nor is it inherently sexist, nor is it inherently homophobic.  Indeed, capitalism is a liberalizing forced in the modern world.  The reason is quite simple, Marx thinks [and, with a great many historical complications and caveats and qualifications, he is right, in my judgment.]  Capital seeks labor at the lowest price it can get it for, and any non-economic, hence irrational, prejudices -- against African-Americans or against women or against gay men and women or against non-Christians -- will have the effect of distorting the labor market and driving labor prices up.  Capitalism does not depend structurally on prejudice; quite the contrary.

So my wry observation, a few days ago, that an enormous number of Americans are just hateful bloody-minded bigots, is not at all meant to suggest that the personal beliefs and attitudes of capitalists are somehow the cause of the exploitation of workers.  This last election cycle has been quite useful in revealing the stupid and despicable beliefs of many capitalists and their defenders.  Mitt Romney did us all an enormous favor by blurting out, over and over again, his true beliefs -- beliefs that any prudent candidate would have kept under wraps.  Romney behaved like someone whose deepest ambition was to appear on the public stage as an Edward Arnoldesque bloated capitalist.  There were times when I thought he might appear in the old Thomas Nast cartoon garb as The Capitalist with top hat and a dollar sign on his vest.

But even if all the capitalists in America were to become enlightened philanthropists, it would not change the fact that capitalism itself rests on exploitation.  By contrast, it is perfectly possible [albeit not at all likely] that Americans should shed their racist, sexist, and homophobic prejudices and work industriously to eliminate the last vestiges of institutional or structural bigotry from this great land.  At which point -- Oh Lord, let it happen before I die! -- it will still be the fact that capitalism rests on the exploitation of the working class.

AT THE MOVIES

Idly channel-surfing the other day, I stumbled on a Turner Classic Movies screening of Let Freedom Ring, a 1939 Nelson Eddy vehicle.  Eddy plays a Harvard man who returns to his native Montana mining town where reliably wicked Edward Arnold is trying to push through a railroad that will deprive the workers of their jobs and take away the homestead of Eddy's father, crippled Lionel Barrymore.  Victor McLaglen plays a bully with a heart of gold.  Eddy does a Scarlet Pimpernel, pretending to go along with Arnold while secretly writing exposés for a crusading little newspaper, The Wasp.  While rallying the workers and foiling Arnold's plots, Eddy takes time to sing several operatic numbers, as the movie audience of those days had come to expect.

The movie is hopelessly corny, despite having been written by Ben Hecht, but it brought tears to my eyes at the end as the heroine turned the workers around by starting to sing "My Country, 'Tis Of Thee."  Now, I admit that I am, as Jude Law says to Cameron Diaz in Holiday, "a weeper."  But as I slouch along to my eighties, my heart yearns for the days when a movie would unabashedly appeal to workers and the college educated alike against barracuda capitalism.  Young people must find it hard to believe that there really was such a time in this country.

Don't get me wrong.  There is plenty to dislike about the old days -- for starters, no Black faces, and women consigned to supporting roles in any serious political story.  But at least everyone understood that the enemy was the capitalists, and that the secret to overcoming them was solidarity.  That is not s subtle message, nor is it at all original, but it is true, damn it, and that ought to count for something!

Josh Boone mentions TFIOS in another interview - Script is "very true to the novel"

Moveablefest: "Stuck in Love" demonstrates an obvious admiration for writers and your next film is adaptation of John Green's "The Fault in Our Stars." Though it was scripted by Scott Neustadter and Michael Weber ("The Spectacular Now"), has it been interesting to interpret someone else's work? 

JB: I still can't believe they are letting me make that movie, but Fox, the studio that did it, and John Green, who wrote the book really liked ["Stuck in Love"] and liked my take on the material, so I hope I can do it justice. The script was done before I ever came onboard, but [Scott and Michael are] such good writers and John was so happy with the script that I think fans will be really happy. It's very true to the novel. Then as soon as I'm done with "Fault in Our Stars," I'm going to make another movie with Judy Cairo, who produced "Stuck in Love," called "Pretenders" with Michael B. Jordan from "Fruitvale Station," Imogen Poots and Anton Yelchin.

We're so happy everybody involved seems as excited as we are!! 

Read the rest of the interview about his movie "Stuck in Love" at the source / via

photo credit

Josh Boone mentions TFIOS in a recent interview with Shockya - reveals shooting location

SY: In the future, would you be interested in both writing and directing films you work on?

JB: Yeah, I’m getting ready to make a movie for Fox right now, called ‘The Fault in Our Stars,’ which is based on a best-selling novel by John Green. I wrote the script for ‘Pretenders,’ which I’m going to do after that. I wrote the script with Judy Cairo, who produced ‘Stuck in Love.’ So I’m booked for two, and hopefully I get to keep working after that.

‘The Fault in Our Stars’ is a young adult novel by John Green, who’s a very famous novelist, and has a very strong online presence. He does YouTube videos with his brother that millions of people watch. He wrote this beautiful book about two teenagers who meet at a cancer support group and fall in love. It’s very snarky and cynical and funny, and says interesting things about life and death. We cast Shailene Woodley from ‘The Descendants’ in that. We’re going to shoot that in Pittsburgh, staring on August 26. 

When I came to this one, the script was already on the table. The guys who wrote ‘(500) Days of Summer’ (Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber) adapted the script. It was such a beautiful script, I really wanted to do it. I was really lucky that Fox liked the movie, and let me do it.

Read the whole interview at the Source / via

HOME AGAIN

A long plane trip is an oasis of enforced guilt-free idleness.  During much of our flight from London to Raleigh-Durham, I simply sat and thought.  I reflected sadly on the striking ugliness of contemporary American public discourse -- the hateful things said about Obama, the nakedly hysterical and despicable remarks about gay men and women, the vicious, unrelenting assault on the reproductive rights of women, the astonishingly ignorant, juvenile statements about rape, abortion, contraception, the emergence into the light of appalling beliefs and attitudes to which the catchall term "racist" hardly does justice.

I found my musings merging with the reaction I have been having to the doctoral dissertation being written by Megan Kelly Mitchell, a very promising young doctoral student at UNC Chapel Hill who has worked for me on several book projects as a research assistant.  Seven weeks ago, I suggested that Ms. Mitchell start writing her dissertation with page 1, and that each day she send me one page, which I would read immediately and to which I would reply by return email.  I have just read page 46, and we are nearing the end of chapter one.  [This method -- "a page a day" -- is one I have used with other students over the past ten years or so as a way of helping them to complete their graduate studies and avoid the doldrums of the endless ABD.]  Megan plans to ramp up to two pages a day shortly, and by the end of September, she should have a complete first draft.

Megan's topic is "institutional racism," a subject much discussed these days and about which I have myself written [in my little book, Autobiography of an Ex-White Man.]   Intellectuals like the concept of institutional racism [or structural this and that] because we make our living from complexity.  It is really not interesting, not challenging, to explain what goes on in the world as the result of the sheer hatefulness of so many people.  So we talk endlessly about "socially constructed categories," or explain with great sophistication that the increasing impoverishment of workers is the result of objective features of capitalism rather than a consequence of the greedy amorality of the bosses.

But from time to time, it is useful to take notice of the fact that a very large proportion of the people in this country [and others, heaven knows] are just hateful.  What is interesting, and worth reflecting on, is why all those hateful people feel so much less constrained about expressing views and attitudes that they know will be judged offensive.  The saga of Paula Deen is a case in point.  I had never heard of Paula Deen until she found herself in serious trouble for girlishly giving voice to her unreconstructed views about Black people.  Deen was apparently the star of the Cooking Network, on which, until the world fell in on her, she was the host of a very popular show about Southern cooking. 

I know, I know, I must try to understand that they feel threatened by the loss of the world they grew up in, a world in which they felt comfortable and at home.  But that was a world in which people sneered about niggers and queers and spics and took as their birthright the deference that their servants were forced to pretend they felt for them.

Perhaps I am simply suffering from moral exhaustion as I grow ever closer to my eightieth birthday, but as I read Megan's really very well done discussion of the concept of Institutional Racism, I find myself just wanting to say, "No, they are flat out bigots, structure or no structure.  They have just been keeping their mouths shut for a while."

Josh Boone reveals that Isaac & one other character has almost been cast

A blogger for PageToPremiere recently met Josh Boone, director of the movie, at a screening for his first movie "Stuck in Love" and tried to find out some things about TFIOS. This is what he had to say:

I tried to pry a little more information from Boone, but he could not say much for legal reasons. The biggest hint he dropped was mentioning they are close to casting the role of Isaac and another character. Boone spoke highly of author John Green, who he speaks to frequently about the movie’s progress. He also mentioned they want to involve the Green as much as possible, but he is not an overbearing presence in the process. Boone also praised the screenwriters Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber, who co-wrote (500) Days of Summer and The Spectacular Now, and Nat Wolff agreed TFIOS script is great.

Sounds exciting! Also we're very glad John Green is very involved in the making of the movie.
We'll see who it will be. Just last week Nat Wolff hinted that he may be in negotiations for the role of Isaac.

Thanks to PagetoPremiere for article & picture