On rewatching The Rockford Files

So I’ve been at home suffering from a bad cold and feeling up to doing little except watching daytime television, including episodes of one my favourite shows from years past, The Rockford Files.  All about Jim Rockford (James Garner), the somewhat smart-alecky private detective and his sleazy friend Angel (who everyone loves even though he’s, well, sleazy) and his father and the attorney he sometimes works for.  Oh, and Dennis, the grudgingly helpful cop.

Mostly the cops aren’t helpful in this show; very few people are helpful in the show as Rockford tries to get to the bottom of crimes.  There’s corruption and incompetence and just a sense that the whole universe is against him.  I think there’s an appeal in that, which comes across better in the earlier years of the series.

In some of the later episodes (and I was surprised to see they kept making them till 1980) the focus seems to drift away from the crime solving to the lives of Rockford and his friends.  This seems to be an occupational hazard of crime series: they begin by focusing on the people who commit the crimes but eventually switch to telling us about the crime fighters (in CSI, Law and Order, or whatever).  Boring, and anyway you learn more by the indirection of the early episodes.

So in the early episodes it’s easier to identify with the tough (but kind underneath) Rockford who has to go it alone with no one to help him.  Or almost no one.  In the episode I saw today his father comes up with a useful insight which in a way puts Rockford in his place.  It’s a memorable scene, at least to me, in which when Rockford says a guy in a semi tried to kill him, his father quizzes him about the type of semi and then declares that they weren’t trying to kill him, just scare him to death.

Who knows if Rocky (the father) is right?  But Jim doesn’t argue with him, and it’s almost comforting in a way.  Here is someone (Rocky) who knows and who is providing the knowledge to help.  Maybe that’s why I remembered the scene: because it’s nice to think that there’s someone out there in the indifferent, sometimes confusing universe who both knows and cares.

On getting one’s wishes enforced

Today on the bus a young, apparently healthy student got on at the university bus loop, waited for the bus to fill, then as soon as it took off, rang the bell and promptly got off at the next stop, a mere five minutes walk away.

I sat there shaking my head (well, not literally), thinking why couldn’t he just walk?  I was ready to grumble and mutter about the laziness of today’s youth  --why, in my day we didn’t have any universal bus passes and we walked two blocks when we had to.

I was ready to grumble, but I held back.  And why after all was I grumbling?  The young man’s departure didn’t hurt me; we were stopping anyway to pick up more people before the bus began the express part of its route.  Is there an urge to grumble and criticize others?  I know Confucius would disapprove: When someone does something you think is wrong, he says, think, Do I ever do something like that?  And then work to improve yourself.

So Confucius wouldn’t hold with this grumbling, and I did stop myself mid-grumble, but not because of him.  I was remembering a similar incident from a week before.

That time a whole pile of young students did the same thing, and not only that, pushed their way out the front door, disrupting passengers who were trying to get on.  The bus driver seemed annoyed, but said nothing … then.  However, right after that a girl got off, still at one of the preliminary stops before the express route started, and he lit into her.

“Next time don’t use an express bus as local drop-off,” he said.  The girl said nothing, just meekly departed.

That time I’d also been grumbling internally about the pack of guys who found it necessary to ride for one stop and then got off at the wrong door.  I was ready to grumble about the girl too; this time there was no one getting on at her stop; we wouldn’t have stopped, except for her.  We could have been getting going into express mode.

I was perhaps thinking that sort of thing, and that’s what the bus driver basically said aloud.  But as soon as he did, I recoiled.  I thought, There’s no rule saying how long you have to stay on an express bus.  She rang the bell for an actual stop.  Where did the bus driver get off telling her that?

And yet I felt like telling her myself – except I wouldn’t have.  Not out loud.  I might have thought it, grumbled to myself, but never have spoken up.  And if someone else had spoken up, not just the driver but any passenger, I would have cringed.  I’m not entirely sure why.  Perhaps it would seem like bullying.  From the bus driver it seemed like abuse of authority.  I suppose my dislike of those two things outweighs my displeasure over laziness or misuse of the express service.  Perhaps there are things I want to grumble about but not have anything done about.  People are strange.

On having one’s past leap up in one’s face

On the weekend I had a bizarre experience.  Imagine a world where all your experiences, and everyone else’s, can be broadcast worldwide for all to see, where things that happened decades ago can be brought back to life as if they were happening all over again.

Oh, wait, we live in that world.  There’s video and the Internet and …

As I’ve mentioned, I’m studying The Tale of Genji this term, partly because of a developing interest in Asian studies and perhaps because years ago I once attended a public lecture on it.  A Vancouver Institute lecture, offered by that very interesting Vancouver institution which offers free public lectures, sometimes by quite eminent authorities.

It occurred to me to look up that lecture now that I’m taking the Genji course, by which I meant checking to see if the Vancouver Institute had listed it in its history of past lectures – and it certainly had.  There it was, in November 1987.  But more than that, much more than that.  This was a list with links.

I clicked on the link, and suddenly I was back attending the very lecture on the Genji that I’d been at so many years ago.  It turned out that the guest lecturer was a leading figure in the field, someone mentioned on our course syllabus.  I gaped at my computer screen.

And more than that even, there were shots of the crowd, the audience who had come to hear.  I was in that audience.  Never mind the guest lecturer, I thought: show me me.  Where am I in the crowd?

But I didn’t see me.  If only I’d asked a question or something.  Caused a disturbance.   Perhaps that’s what we need to do to be noticed.  But I hadn’t.  Not that I can recall.

And if I had seen myself, what then?  Could I have reached out and spoken to that younger me and said, This is what will happen to you …

How odd.  Who knew that there was a recording that would be made available in another century, a recording that would almost show me myself?  I see a science fiction film in this somehow, but perhaps that’s just because I’ve seen too many movies.

That expert lecturer is dead now.  Perhaps a lot of the audience members too.  And it’s not exactly the same experience, watching it on video.  I wasn’t sitting where the camera was.  I couldn’t zoom in and see the speaker’s face so clearly.  And most of all I am not now what I was then.  You cannot step twice in the same river.

But you can watch the video.

Sheldon goes back to school (again)

 

The air was crisp with early January hints of snow, and expectant with the hopes and anxieties of the first day of classes.  It was almost like being 19 again.  Almost.

Off I went to Buchanan D, fearing I’d left it too late, and I’d be the one stumbling into the classroom after the prof had begun to speak, interrupting everything.  Or worse find myself in the wrong classroom: Isn’t this Asian Studies?  No, Physics 360.  Oh.

But I was on time and in the right place, though perhaps too far away.  Others had filled in the choicer spots up close, and I was up and to the right, at a bad angle and, most worrying, not entirely sure I could hear everything that was being said.

I was certainly not the last to arrive, however.  Someone slid in ten minutes late and sat beside me; I let her look at the printed syllabus that had already been distributed, and she smiled, but she seemed to lose interest and played with her iPhone and then was gone quickly before the class had quite adjourned.  I somehow doubt she’ll be back.

It should have been obvious, I suppose, since this is a class on a Japanese novel written by a woman (no more philosophy courses for me), but I was surprised to realize that the vast majority of the students were young Asian women.  Oh, well, I will be the token old white guy.

But whatever such minor issues, the thought of engaging with a new field of learning (for I know virtually nothing about ancient Japanese literature) makes me feel good, intrigued.  It is the excitement of the beginning, the start of the journey.  Some like to finish, to make an end, but I like beginnings best, when the world is all before you and you don’t know where exactly you’ll end up.

You may be ill or lonely, or bored with other aspects of your life, but let a new intellectual adventure beckon, and then all else (well, almost all else) can be forgotten.  I look forward to the voyage into 11^th-century Japan.

Alice B. Toklas, Woody Allen, and Heaven

I’ve begun reading The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas for a new book club I’ve joined, and have been reminded that she appeared in Woody Allen’s recent movie about midnighting in Paris.  Or was it just Gertrude Stein that we saw, along with Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and the whole lot.

I remember thinking at the time how much Scott Fitzgerald looked like Scott Fitzgerald.  Or was it that when the Woody character meets him, it seemed obvious that was Fitzgerald.

But why?  I’m not really old enough to have met the author of The Great Gatsby; even if I was, we really didn’t move in the same circles.  Yet how real he and Zelda seemed: the best moment of the film, I thought.

Other parts were tiresome, notably when the young Hemingway started spouting lines from his own novels.  I think another character did something similar.  I mean, really.  I’ve written novels; I don’t spout lines from them.  The art that produces fiction is quite different from the art that produces conversation.  The person that I am when I write a novel (or a blog post) is quite different from the person who goes to parties (well, there is no such person) or who has conversations in real life.

But I suppose this device allowed Woody Allen to create a little frisson in moviegoers: oh, that’s a famous line, we could think.  But does Woody Allen go around spouting lines from his movies?  Or movies yet to come?  I’d bet not, but then I don’t move in his circles either and have never met him.

I mostly winced when the famous lines came, but I did have that frisson of recognition when “Scott Fitzgerald” first appeared on screen.  For a moment perhaps I was swept up in the fantasy of meeting famous people I grew up reading.  Woody Allen must have enjoyed making this film, I’m thinking; perhaps it is his vision of Heaven, a place where you could hang out with famous literati and artists.

I remember when I read Dante’s Inferno thinking that the first level of Hell would actually be quite pleasant.  That’s where Dante put Plato and Aristotle, Homer and Cicero, all the virtuous pagans.  And they’re in a pleasant green field.  What could be better?  Certainly not Dante’s Heaven, with its boring angels and hallelujahs.

Bedbugs and the creation of life

Earlier in the week I read the following headline in the paper: "Bed bugs linked to sleep loss, anxiety."  It prompted me to write the following letter to the editor:

“ 'Bed bugs linked to sleep loss, anxiety,' ” the headline said. Oh my God, I thought. Can sleep loss and anxiety somehow produce bedbugs? How can that be? Does anxiety attract bedbugs, like flames attract moths? Does it create bedbugs? Have we finally found out how to create simple forms of life?

"Then I read the article."

The article, of course, simply said that the presence of bedbugs can create anxiety, not the other way around, but we live in a psychosomatic age, we all know the power of our psyches, so why not?

(I'm joking, I think.  But who knows how life began?  Maybe God was anxious one day.  It would explain a lot.)

Conservatism, Philosophy, Economics, and the Meaning of Life

A friend of mine in our Aristotle reading group accused me of being a conservative the other day.

“What do you mean?” I said.

And he said for him the world was divided into conservatives and progressives.

“What if you consider yourself a moderate?” I said.

“Then you’re just confused,” he said, adding that conservatives generally think things are okay the way they are while progressives think things needs changing.

“What if you think some things need changing while others are okay the way they are?” I said, and he modified his position to say of course everyone thinks that …

So there are no conservatives or radicals, I said, and he said No, it’s a question of emphasis.

I thought about that.  I guess on the whole I think life is pretty good in Canada, so perhaps that makes me a conservative, by my friend’s definition, though I don’t hold with much of what passes for conservative thinking today: I’m against capital punishment and for gun control, I don’t like American intervention in foreign countries (of course, there are some Pat Buchanan-type conservatives who don’t like that either).  I have little interest in economic issues, the deficit, whatever … which perhaps disqualifies me from being either a radical or a conservative.  Perhaps I am just confused.

Or perhaps my friend’s categories need reshaping.

There was a time when I was interested in economic issues, back in my radical days when I believed the Marxist theories about economic forces being the key to everything and thus, aiming for consistency, decided I should study some economics, particularly Marxist economics, meaning that, at the age of 17 I sat down and read volume one of Das Kapital.

(The local library in my well-to-do suburb may even have my name down still on the card for their copy of Marx’s classic, since I didn’t have the capital to spend on purchasing a copy and kept on borrowing theirs.)

Anyway, that was a boring summer.  To all you 17-year-olds out there who might be tempted to do this: don’t spend a summer reading about surplus value and the labour theory of whatever …

Why are radicals so angry, by the way?  They posit a better world (or at least that’s what the Left wanted in my day), but to get there they mainly want to yell at people.

I was never very good at yelling at people, though I dutifully attended a few demonstrations in the day, but shouting slogans, I mean, really, it was a bit too much groupthink.

So the groupthink and the economics, along with reading The God that Failed and realizing that the Marxist theory of history didn’t accord with the facts, made me abandon the follies of my youth …

I was speaking to a young lady of my acquaintance recently, who told me she was thinking of studying economics.  I instinctively grimaced, which upset her.  “Is it better to study history and just learn a bunch of dates?” she said.  Studying economics can explain human interactions, she added.

That gave me pause.  I’m interested in humans.  Maybe I should give economics a chance.

But I wonder.  I am studying philosophy this year, hoping to understand the meaning of life or at least the meaning of philosophy.  It promises to explain some very basic things, but maybe I’d rather not study basic things.  If the economy is like the furnace driving everything in society, that’s all very well, but who wants to study furnaces?

Maybe I should go back to studying history, learn a few more dates.  Though the most interesting course I’ve taken lately was in Chinese philosophy.  That Confucius, he was a cool dude.