Lyceum Ad Nauseum

Course Evaluations

Hello participants of the Lyceum classes and events. This is the place for you to make helpful comments to us about your experiences so that we can improve our offerings to the community. I had thought of a questionaire format but have decided rather to have y'all just comment freely on any area on which you wish to give us feed back. Just click on comments and let us know what you experienced at the Lyceum. Thanks, David O'Donaghue, Director of the Lyceum

Jungle Fever

A question was debated in the discussion after the Spike Lee movie, "Jungle Fever," as to the use of stereotypes in portraying cultural groups and whether Spike was particularly sensitive or aware of women's issues in this and others of his films. I would like to quote from an article written by Yvonne Tasker in her article on Lee in "Fifty Contemporary Filmmakers."
"A longstanding feature of Lee's work is an awareness of the work performed by stereotypes together with a willingness to mobilize such types to his own ends."
And this from bell hooks:
"No matter how daring his films, how transgressive their subject matter, to have a predictable success he provides viewers with stock images. Uncompromising in his commitment to create images of black males that challenge shallow perceptions and bring the issue of racism to the screen, he conforms to the status quo when it comes to images of females." Any reactions to these views?

The Alchemical Blog

Ok, so I had an experience of Calcinatio I wanted to share with everyone. I recently experienced a moment of clarity(at least as perceived in myself) about a denied issue in a friend that had irritated me and seriously impacted our relationship (again, at least on my end) so I confronted this person on it and, though this person did not acknowledge its validity, I felt I was burning off the dross of a soggy complex so that we could get to some clarity. Now will I move into a solutio? That feels unlikely and unnatural at this point. It may be that the alchemical operations sequence themselves in a very personal way. Anyone else have any alchemical experiences in waking or dreaming life since the beginning of the class? David

Betty Blue Movie

I am going to reflect a bit on what is left with me after many days after viewing "Betty Blue." I lived through the wild and wonderful 70's and early 80's and this movie took me back to my youth and free-wheeling sort of life-style that perhaps many of you are living now. It was a time of not having a lot of possessions or personal commitments and being a sort of "traveling man." It was also a time of sensual and erotic intensities. This was certainly brought out clearly in the film from its first scene. I said in our discussion that I felt the film was more about a sort of mythological landscape of intensities. Betty's erratic behavior was not so disturbing to me in this second viewing, since I was seeing it as a sign of a lifestyle that all the characters were participating in. No one was the victim of Betty's rage; rather all sort of danced with it in an effort to keep the volume high in life. Does anyone else relate to this? (I've got Iron Butterfly's "In-a-gadda-da-vida on in the background as I type this).

The role of aesthetics in film

Last night we viewed "The Night Porter" and today I am thinking about why it so strongly pulled me into it. It "worked" for me because I was stimulated and affected erotically by the main characters. It's elegant portrayal of the high mark of Germanic culture created a complex dialectic when juxtaposed with the scenes of the concentration camp, so that one could not just read " German Nazi=bad guy." I think Cavani was trying to create a constant fluctuation between attraction and repulsion so that the viewer would experience what the main characters experienced. I'm interested in the politically incorrect inquiry about what, deep down, might be attractive to any of us about the vision of National Socialism: its cleaness, its discipline, order, purity, refinement and control. It just not enough for me anymore to see the same story told again and again with the same programmed reactions, like in the "B" westerns where Native Americans=savages and Frontier Families=civilization. We have since deconstructed that destructive myth, but it was bought hook,line and sinker by viewers in that period. And we better start asking ourselves what is attractive about National Socialism if, as many suggest, we are moving closer to it each day in this country.
On a more cinematic note, just telling a good story is not enough, we also need some kind of interest, sympathy, eroticism, or repulsion towards the characters. This post-modern distrust of means of desire and its turn to anti-aesthetics leaves me in a much too cognitive/analytic detached stance by failing to arousing my unconscious desires and emotions. I don't care much for the characters or the story that seems to be shot in such a stylized fashion that I am constantly reminded "this is only a movie and I am a spectator." (Moulin Rouge and Dogville are good examples of this). Many contemporary films are just plain boring to me. So we have a politically correct distrust of methods to arouse the spectators' desires and a huge rise in the pornographic industry where its all about desire. So all we have done is to create a split in what we are after in film viewing. I think the French have done a better job of merging the two and contine to do so, so that I feel many times more integrated in watching French films than in trying to figure out what Hollywood is after these days. In our last film series we showed "Stranger than Paradise" and "Lost Highway" and neither of them moved me at all, even though they are considered by many to be brilliant and well-made.
The time that a movie may also be a critical factor in determining filmic pleasure in that it captures a certain cultural matrix at the time of our most profound development. The late 60's and early 70's was the time of my identity formation and so films of that period often resonate with me personally (such as Women in Love, Carrie, Harold and Maude, Equus, King of Hearts) while films from the 80's and 90's might resonate with the developmental stage of younger viewers.
The making of the Night Porter pulled on many conventions that were designed, I believe, to help us leap to the unbelievable, to accept that someone could fall in all consuming love with one's torturer. I think it did this admirably. David

When is a person truly free?

We had our first philosophy cafe at the Iron Rail Bookstore in the Marigny and considered the question whether we are truly free. A definition we came up with is that freedom is being or acting without constraint. A followup question is what counts as a constraint? An assailant or an enemy. Our own government. Our own desires. Our own ignorance. All options. Each of these options leads to interesting discussions.

Another option is that we are simply causally constrained. Like, if you consider that you are a natural organism, and that everything you are is dependent upon this natural organism which follows physical laws, then any action you perform is an event having some cause explicable by physical laws, so that the sense of choice you had in performing that action is perhaps illusory.

Another option is that values constrain freedom. The value of not killing determines your action away from murder. But in our conversation about values, there arose the paradox that in acting on values you may actually be considered to be in a freer state than if you, say, acted on mere desire or even chaotically or ambivalently.

Thinking about it after the philosophy cafe, I'd say I more fully experience freedom when I fully accept what is bound to happen. I see that it is going to happen and I say "great". This goes for both things done to me and things I do. What's odd is to be able to think that my own action is bound to happen and yet feel free in letting it happen. I'm thinking of experiences like playing a sport or a musical instrument that you're good at and being "in the zone". It's like what you're doing happens before it happens.

That seems to me the epitome of the experience of freedom and even if all my action is "constrained" by neural firings in my brain, if I could take a look in my brain and see that a particular firing were correlated with a particular effect which I'm happy to see will come about, then great! How liberating!

So, I don't think that a true sense of freedom comes from "being able to do otherwise" as it's often framed. This seems to me like a greedy sense of freedom, a sense of freedom which dooms itself. - Drew

What is adventure & where does it take you?

Adventures are more than just fun. They seem to have seem deeper meaning and some deeper necessity and that's what we talked about in this philosophy cafe. In an adventure, there seems to be some discovery one is after, a mystery one is tracking down - some sort of leap into the unknown, in whatever respect. Whether it's travelling to Argentina, trying out an entirely new kind of toothbrush or sitting in a counseling session to discover yourself. The adventure also takes you out of your comfort zone, not in a completely threatening way, but in a way that seems to hold some promise of growth.

Which leads into the question of "where adventure takes you". We nearly came to some consensus that, speaking generally, no matter where the adventure literally takes you, it brings you to yourself, but a self that's expanded in potentiality and courage as a result of the adventure. Sometimes we need adventure, and if there is this need it would seem to be a need for growth, which may be a basic human impulse. Then again, not everyone is so adventurous and even the greatest adventurer appreciates down time. This weariness from adventure may point to something deeper than just physical or emotional limits - it may be that one has to gather together "what I am", or re-integrate, after an adventure in order to better see the next growing edge, the launching point for the next adventure.

But are adventures always positive? Most of us were thinking that if the outcome is not positive, we can't consider the experience an adventure. Like if you die before you reach the top of the mountain, what started out as an adventure turns into a tragedy. It's hard to talk about the adventure of dying from cancer, unless that experience does in some additional way lead to personal growth.

If it is an adventure, it leads to a good story. Adventure may even be the basic story of human existence, tragedy being the denial of a good ending and comedy the absurdity or mishandling of the journey (and realism may be the denial of the story). Thinking of cycles of adventure and integration, I'm reminded of the subtitle to Tolkein's adventure story *The Hobbit*, which is "There and Back Again". But can you ever go back again? - Drew

Week End and Antonin Artaud

Our viewing of Godard's "Week End" was painful but like true cinema fans we got through the absurdist film and tried to understand why this flick is so important for film studies. I have thought about how the film does anticipate the deconstructive work of Derrida and the "post-modern-condition" by taking material out of any narrative sequence or familiar context and shuffling the images and dialogues into a stream of consciousness flow with a decidedly dystopic tone. In other words, a really bad trip. We did notice an allusion to Lewis Carroll and wasn't Alice's journey equally disorienting and disturbing? I am also reminded of the work of the wildman of French theatre, Antonin Artaud, who originated the "theatre of cruelty" which presented the audience with very assaultive, revolting and terrorizing presentations that were to work on the unconscious in some kind of liberating fashion. Anne challenged the claim that this could in anyway be therapeutic since, unlike the catharsis in Greek drama, for instance, Week End does not allow for any identification or empathy. By blocking us from the normative ego functions of plot, causation or meaning we are thrown into the nightmarish condition of images that tear apart "thinking" rather than aid in its implimentation. Last night I would have said this all seemed like a waste of time but I must say that many of these images have become more powerful in my memory due to their decontextualization. Maybe there is something to the notion that creativity can be liberated when meaning hungry desire is foiled.

Greetings from Argentina

Hola Lyceum bloggers! I am now in central Argentina, staying with a friend I met is Peru last year while doing shamanic work. He is the director of an addiction program and wants to include the use of the sacred shamanic plants such as ayahuasca and san pedro in his work. It is very interesting staying with an Argentine family in a small town. My Spanish is non-existent and English is rare, so I muddle by and am confused and open, like a child, to lots of help. And the people are generally very kind, friendly and patient. Buenos Aires was a surprise - a very modern, cosmopolitan city with reams of bookstores. It is definitely the cultural hub of South America. Uruguay (Montevideo) contrasted starkly to this, being poorer, more traditional and more intimate. An interesting custom is the drinking of mate (a yerba tea - not the mate de coca of Peru) out of traditional cups with silver straws as strainers that everyone seems to pull out at about 5:00. Ando of course the notorious custom in Buenos Aires of beginning to think about dinner about 11:00 and having the meal at midnight and then dancing Tango 'til 3 or 4. (not me) But I did see some fine tango and heard wonderful guitar music. Tonight I take a 16 hour bus ride across the Andes for my last week in Santiago de Chile. See yall soon, David O

The Grifters

What's grifting? It seems to be something like con-artistry and breaking the rules to your advantage with the object of purely personal gain. If you're such a crook, you're "in the grift". If you're bad at it, you should "get out of the grift". So, that's basically what this movie is about, three people in the grift, Roy, Lily & Myra, and it's about their various ways of grifting, and it's about Roy's desire to get out of the grift. Oh, and it's also about incest.

At first, that may seem like a strange thematic overlay. But then you see the two themes - hustling & incest - running parallel, and they seem to work together seamlessly. The story: Lily is Roy's mom, she had him at age 14, and brought him up in this grifting milieu. There were hints in the movie that she had sexual relations with him before he left home at 17, and then she definitely approaches him sexually at the end of the movie.

More on grifters, then I'll get back to the incest theme: A grifter works purely out of self-interest. Grifters respect each other for not giving a damn about each other and for even besting each other. When Lily in the movie finally revealed to her cruel (but griftingly rational) boss Bobo that she had a (now 25 yr old) kid, he asked "What in the hell are you doing with a kid?" It doesn't make sense to have a kid in the grift-world, because you have to be so intensely self-interested (which ostensibly means you're money-interested, but it seemed in the movie that more important is that a grifter have the "upperhand", to "be the wiser").

Why doesn't it make sense to have a kid in the grift? Because (I'm guessing - I'm not a parent) good parents put the interest of their kids before their own. This is impossible in the grift world. And when Lily approaches Roy sexually at the end of the movie it is purely out of self-interest, so that he'll give her his money. And her doing this sorta thing made sense, when you looked at it from Lily's perhaps blinkered point of view.

Okay, that's part of the movie. Others can comment on other aspects of the story if they like, but the movie got me to thinking about incest. I wonder about our intuition that parent/child incest is bad - what makes us think this? If it is *always* (or almost always) the case that approaching someone sexually is more in *one's own* self-interest than the approachee, then maybe that's why it seems bad for a parent to sexually approach a child whose interest the parent should consider over the parent's own interest. A parent shouldn't be self-interested over a child like this.

And it's often said, when we try to explain what's bad about incest, that the child can't understand what's going on (if the child is young), and in that case it's hard to say sexual approaches are in the child's interest.

In any case, don't have a kid if you're in the grift. - Drew

Du Bois & the Souls of Black Folk

For more information on the African-American Authors reading group this is in reference to, click here then click on "Offerings" in the menu bar. The reading group is listed among the offerings.

In the Souls of Black Folk, du Bois writes that he has two selves at war in him: Negro & American. We talked about how du Bois describes the causes of this split and we also talked about what du Bois thinks should be done about the split (and of course we talked about many other things!). While reading his book, I took du Bois very seriously that he had these two selves in him and found myself going along with him that this sort of split is the "problem of the 20th century". But it came out in the conversation that not all of us, not even those of us who are African-American, necessarily treat our identity as a race or nationality as the most important. Perhaps these are still self-identifications you have the freedom to accept and to treat as important. Is there really this freedom? Why didn't du Bois feel this sort of freedom?

As I mentioned in the discussion, I was also struck by how, in his chapter on the Reconstruction & the rise & fall of the Freedmen's Bureau, du Bois says little about the "necessary reparations" to former slaves. And elsewhere he describes the labor expended during slavery as "gifts" to America. If he's really treating slave labor as a gift, he doesn't seem to be speaking reparations rhetoric. If it's true that du Bois is not a big reparationist (I'm not sure if he is or not), that seems to me to go along with his striving to overcome his split self for a more unified self. As long as reparations are demanded, doesn't that lead us into an us vs. them mentality? If so, wouldn't that promote the inner split du Bois felt between being Negro & being American?

I also noticed that du Bois seemed to be working with two concepts of America: "white America", on the one hand, and then, on the other hand, a fuller concept of America which includes as part of its essence America's Negro population & culture. He noted more than once (if I remember correctly) that America would not be America without the Negro. In the struggle with his two selves, du Bois said he did not want to be "bleached" by America (white America), but wanted to merge his two selves, to be Negro and American. If America really already is essentially Negro, then what exactly is required for this merger? What is the nature of the challenge?

Alright! That's just some thoughts on my mind. Thanks everybody for coming and comment on whatever you like, even if I didn't mention it above and even if you didn't come to the discussion. This is all in relation to a reading group: "African-American Authors". Contact me, Drew, for info on the next meeting, when we'll be reading Marcus Garvey. My email is chastain@tulane.com or go to www.lyceumproject.com. - Drew

philo-cafe on stereotypes

We had a lively discussion on the use or misuse of stereotypes to characterize groups of people, especially in racial or ethnic categories at Philo-cafe this Sunday. Although no one advocated the banishment of all use of "types," we did distinguish some that could be limiting due to their simplistic nature. It was generally agreed that it is denegrating to reduce a person to a type who can then be dismissed as, "oh yeah, one of them..." But we also saw that national and ethnic characteristics can open up possibilites of new identies for the person, like in my case of embracing my Irish heritage and finding many meaningful links to the culture, the people (both normal size and the wee ones), and the land. One of the most useful books for me in my psych-training was by Carter and Magoldrick entitled, "Ethnicity in Family Therapy." It helped me understand the possible meanings associated with life events which I would not have dreamed of by only considering "normal" American families. Though I liked very much the freedom of self-creation advocated by Henry and Jerry, I do ascribe to the notion that we carry ethnic structures that may go back many generations. Any comments on this claim?

Gazing at Peeping Tom

Though we had a rich and lively discussion of Michael Powell's (1960) film "Peeping Tom, " I wanted to contunue in my ponderings. I want to come back to why Mark only attacked women, when his anguish as a child was brought on by a male figure, his father. As was brought up in the discussion, many psychoanalytic themes are brought up in this movie and one of them is displacement. Displacement is the psychological operation in which the affects felt towards the original object are transferred to another object that is less threatening. Mark formed a reaction formation around his father that idealized him and repressed his rage. His father, as the renowned, published psychologist, was beyond reproach. Mark protected his introjected father from his rage because, as in so many cycles of abuse, the father would show affection and warmth to the son after torturing him with the experiments in fear. This form of reinforcement is very powerful. Mark's rage then gets displaced on to the secondary object which is the vampy intruder that took Mark's mother's place six weeks after her death. He focused his vengeance on representatives of the secondary object and, by filming them like his father, performs the Oedipal feat of identification with the father (and with the aggressor) thereby incorporating his power.

The Explanation & Probability of Cowinkidinks

Being a philosophy lover, it's no coincidence that I like to ponder coincidences. Not that I think the cosmos is literally talking to me when I encounter the word "onomatopoetic" in three unrelated contexts in one day. Not that I think God is affirming my lifestyle when the bus shows up in 10 seconds and all the lights are green. And it's not that I believe I'm actually influencing the world directly with my thoughts when I remember an old friend in California a few minutes before he calls. People do like to explain coincidences in such ways (as did some in our philo-cafe discussion), but I don't think it's necessary to explain a coincidence in order to appreciate it. Me, I just like to ponder the personal meaning of such wondrous coincidences (which isn't the same as "explaining" a coincidence exactly, maybe), and sometimes I just like to bask in the wonder. Interpreting things with an attitude of wonder - sounds like philosophy at its best to me.

Why are coincidences so wondrous, I wonder? At the philo-cafe, we seemed to agree that the improbability of two or more events occurring together is almost always the culprit. With improbability comes the feeling that, really, someone or something must be responsible for the otherwise unlikely occurrence (you maybe even be responsible, if unconsciously). It's at this point that explanation rears its (I think) ugly head. As I discovered in the conversation, there's at least one sort of coincidence-explanation which I don't like, and which I termed "finite explanation". And that's the sort of explanation which closes off further interpretation (and so closes off further wonder).

Like, say that I explain the event of my friend calling a few minutes after I think about him in this way:

"Well, there are mind waves (call them 'psych-waves') which move quite fast, as fast as light, and whenever I think of someone, my mind sends out psych-waves to the object of my thought. If the object of my thought is a person, that person will be reminded of me."

Let's say this is true. It may be novel to humanity at first to discover there are psych-waves which behave in this manner, but once science figures out how psych-waves work, the event of my friend calling, which earlier seemed a wondrous coincidence, will be about as interesting as water boiling because you turned the heat up on the stove.

I call this the "psych-wave" explanation a finite explanation because it closes off further interpretation of the original event. Once it's all explained, the wonder's gone. If there's no real coincidence, loss of wonder is okay, I suppose. But I think a lot of wonderful coincidences get ruined with unsupported finite explanations.

I could say more about that, but this is a blog, not an essay. Ultimately, I'm a skeptic of coincidence-meaning who still wonders at a good coincidence. You may tell me: "But how do you explain extremely improbable sets of occurences?" Like this: "I'm sure that, in all probability, everyone's due for a good number of improbable occurrences in life." Improbable coincidences would for that reason be probable. Probably. - Drew

The Misfits

David asked us to think about whether there was some existentialism in The Misfits. Such a theme came through clearest for me in the question (wondered by both Roslyn & Gay - Monroe & Gable, that is): Is marriage "it"? Which seemed to mean: are you secure in life from then on out? Their answer: no, there is never an "it" in life, in this sense. There is only change, "the next thing" I think Roslyn called it.

Which leads me to wonder if the movie had a happy ending, and, if so, if it was appropriate (something else we wondered about in the discussion). I think the *movie* ended happily, yes, and that this was appropriate (the last view seemed to have put me in the minority). The movie had ups and downs throughout, and the *movie* ended on more of an "up", at least for the main characters, Roslyn & Gay. What's wrong with that? Why is it so important that the movie end on a "down"? (I could guess some things, but I'd like to hear what people say.)

I'd add that, although the *movie* ended happily (and abruptly, too), the movie suggested to me no guarantee that the *story* ended happily. The movie suggested more powerfully that life has ups and downs and you never know what the next thing will be. Once you get this from the movie, why is it important that the movie end on a down rather than an up?

Finally, anyone who'd like to help clarify the meaning of the paddleball scene, please comment right away. ... 14, 15, 16 ... - Drew