What Does a Turtleneck Mean?

A passing reference to turtleneck sweaters in this blog post by William M. Briggs has me thinking about this sartorial feature.

I've never warn a turtleneck myself, to my recollection. But I've always been intrigued by them. They seem to signify something, but what is it?

(They were generally called polo-necks in my childhood, but turtleneck seems to be the favoured term today.)

Briggs mentions them in the context of the 1970s, with particular reference to Leonard Nimoy in the 1978 film Invasion of the Body Snatchers. He also wore them frequently on In Search Of..., an unsolved mystery show he presented. (It's gloriously corny, and available on YouTube.)

Another famous turtleneck-wearer from this time is Carl Sagan, popularizer of science and presenter of the TV series Cosmos, in which he spread the lie that the Great Library of Alexandria had been destroyed by Christians.

Our third fan of the turtleneck is Michel Foucault, superstar of Francophony philosophy and purveyor of various weird and out-there theories, particularly the idea that Everything Boils Down to Power (perennially popular with the left, and some on the right).

We all know about Steve Jobs, although to be honest his turtleneck is kind of minimal.

Then there is John Shaft, that bad mother-- (shut your mouth!), and  the protagonist of one of my favourite films.

Admittedly, I have no ladies in the above gallery. They've become more a male accessory in recent decades, but they were also popular with the ladies in the seventies. (Come to think of it, I have heard many complimentary references to female necks-- white, swan-like, etc.-- but never such a reference to a male neck, which might have a bearing on this.)

Some years ago, I became friends with an elderly gent who habitually wore a turtleneck. He's since passed away, God bless his soul. He was a cantankerous dude, but an entertaining raconteur and self-mythologizer. His turtleneck seemed a part of his persona.

Perhaps it's significant that turtlenecks have never become common, per se. Even at their height they were a minority choice, or so it seems to me.

So, what does a turtleneck signify?

Well, more than anything, I associate it with big and mind-bending ideas. If you have big and mind-bending ideas, you might wear a turtleneck. Why, I don't know. Perhaps because it's unconventional.

What do you think a turtleneck signifies?

Five Star Films

My last post was about the film My Dinner with André, which I've been watching again recently. It's grown so much on me over the years that I've decided to give it my ultimate accolade: five stars out of five on my legendary "Films Seen" Excel sheet. (Legendary to who, you ask? Legendary to me, that's who.) I also decided to bump Inception up to five stars, which seems long overdue.

At the same time, I demoted some other films to four-star status, such as A Hard Day's Night, The American President, and The Chronicles of Riddick. There's only one criterion for a five-star film: that I want to watch it over and over again, that I never get tired of it.

Here is the list as it stands. Out of 1378 films, only twenty-three get five stars!

Shaft
Pulp Fiction
Munich
Kill Bill
The Aviator
Hot Fuzz
The Dukes of Hazzard
Cromwell
Shadowlands
The Way, Way Back
Groundhog Day
This Is Spinal Tap

The Naked Gun
Naked Gun 2-and-a-Half: The Smell of Fear
Naked Gun 33-and-a-Third: The Final Insult
Trading Places
Dead of Night
From Beyond the Grave
Scream
The Wicker Man
The Breakfast Club
My Dinner with André

Inception

My Dinner with André

In my last post, I mentioned the 1981 film My Dinner with André. It's an almost two-hour film which consists of two old friends having a long conversation. It sounds like a gimmick film, and I suppose it is, in a way. But it's also very absorbing and entertaining. I actually wish there was a whole genre of such films.

Additionally, some of the subjects touched on have become even more relevant in the intervening decades, as a thousand clips circulated on social media attest.

You can watch it all on YouTube here, at the time of writing. Actually, the film has been freely available on YouTube for years, which I always take as an indication that the copyright holders don't really mind too much.

It's also the film that introduced me to one of my favourite pieces of music, Erik Satie's Gymnopédie Number One.

What Should We Talk About? What Should We Think About?

This increasingly seems to me like a major and timeless human problem. Human beings need activity-- they need something to do. They need a focus. They also need something to talk about. We require interaction with other human beings, for its own sake as much as for any purpose we might put it too. So what form should those interactions take?

T.S. Eliot famously wrote that modern man is "distracted by distraction from distraction". It's a valid point, but...surely people need some kind of distraction, or at least some kind of occupation. What is it we're supposedly being distracted from, anyway?

The Christian might say "worship". The socialist might say politics, or the improvement of the human species. The hippie (I think that we still have hippies even if they aren't classic hippies) might say "love" or "human connection" or some such thing. Or perhaps we come down to the ideal of pure being-- whatever that is. Whatever anyone might say, people who complain about modern distractions must believe we're being distracted from something.

I'm very sympathetic to the argument made by Wally in the wonderful movie My Dinner with André, when he reacts against his rather hippie-ish friend, who is talking about various workshops he's led and which seem similiar to Sixties "happenings" or modern mindfulness exercises.

Wally says: "The whole point, really, I think, was to enable the people in the workshops, including yourself, to somehow sort of strip away every scrap of purposefulness from certain selected moments. And the point of it was so that you would then all be able to experience, somehow, just pure being. In other words, you were trying to discover what it would be like to live for certain moments without having any particular thing that you were supposed to be doing.

"And I think I just simply object to that. I mean, I just don’t think I accept the idea that there should be moments in which you’re not trying to do anything. I think, uh, it’s our nature, uh, to do things, I think we should do things, I think that, uh, purposefulness is part of our ineradicable basic human structure, and…and to say that we ought to be able to live without it is like saying that, uh, a tree ought to be able to live without branches or roots, but…but actually, without branches or roots, it wouldn’t be a tree, I mean, it would just be a log. Do you see what I’m saying?"

I tend to agree with Wally. We all have moments of pure euphoria or contentment or contemplativeness. But...we can't live like that. We have to do something, to think about something, to talk about something.

(And honestly, for me, those moments have been moments of plenitude rather than moments of pure simplicity.)

No matter how much you believe in the primacy of some particular activity, there's still inevitably lots of time left over. It's impressive and moving to read about great Christian saints who could spend hours on end in prayer. But few of us have that kind of purity, and even those saints seemed to have time and energy left over. Similarly, even the purest aesthete can't really live just for art, even the purest workaholic can't live just for work...

Besides, most art needs to be about something, all work needs to be about something...it has purpose inherent to it. So it can't really be its own purpose, ultimately, although it can to some extent.

And then there's the other problem, the one I started with. What do we talk about? And where can that talk go?

It seems reasonable to me to hold this belief: we should organize society and organize our lives in such a way that there's more rather than less to talk about. We should deliberately avoid simplifying and rationalizing things in such a way that there's less to talk about. Or think about.

(One of my personal bugbears in this regard is the "live and let live" philosophy of life. It's tolerant, yes. But it's very boring. Surely there's a happy medium between the Salem witch trials and all those depressing modern proverbs: "You do you", "Whatever floats your boat", "It's all good"...I don't want to be ruled by bigots. But I'd rather have coffee with a bigot than the sort of person who extends the zero aggression principle to not even criticizing anybody else's choices.)

Ironically enough, I have a great deal more to say about this, but that might be enough for now.

"We're All Adults Here"

This phrase is an interesting one because it's only ever used because people aren't behaving like adults, or because we anticipate that they won't behave like adults.

So how "adult" are adults if the phrase is such a common one?

Sources of the Sublime

This morning, I watched this discussion between Peter Hitchens and a pantheist philosopher. Peter Hitchens has settled firmly into his "grumpy old codger" phase and now regularly turns up to interviews but refuses to defend his beliefs, insisting that he's not trying to convince anybody of anything. It reminds me of Fr. Fredrick Copleston's famous retort to Bertrand Russell, when Russell denied that the universe needed an explanation: "If you refuse to sit at the board you can't be checkmated."

But that's by the by. The part of the inteview that prompted this blog post was where the philosopher claimed that various highly secularized society have been shown to be the happiest, while many religious societies are less happy.

This is the sort of statistic that used to bother me when I was an agnostic seeker. It doesn't really bother me anymore, for several reasons:

1) I'm increasingly sceptical of these findings. Social science is incredibly ideological and I simply don't have faith in its claims. I would have to examine the methodology of every single study to accept them, and even then, how can I know that the results weren't faked? Should the citizens of the Soviet Union have believed the social science produced by their universities?

2) Even if it's true, what is happiness? It's a big question. Hitchens opposes happiness to pleasure in his own answer. That's one criticism. I think there are others.

I like Nietzsche's line: "Man does not seek happiness. Only the Englishman does". (This was  swipe at English utlitarian philosophers.)

Obviously, misery is not desirable and people need a base level of happiness for any kind of human flourishing to be possible. But I think that there are a lot of things which we believe we would be happier without, but whose loss would actually grieve us-- over time.

Which brings me to my actual point-- the sublime. I think that many conservatives (myself included) are motivated by a desire for the sublime-- for themselves and for others.

(The sublime is actually difficult to pursue on your own. The achievement of the sublime is generally collaborative, both in the present and over generations).

I think that many of the things that liberals are now seeking to erode are sources of the sublime:

1) Organized religion, even for non-believers. Liturgy, feasts and fasts, hymns, ceremony, hierarchy, religious taboos, the sense of the sacred, all of that.

2) Masculinity and femininity.

3) National traditions and national identity (as well as ethnic traditions, regional traditions, etc.)

4) Marriage and the family.

5) Childhood innocence.

6) Inconvenience. Society is, in many ways, becoming ever more convenient and the gain in convenience is often outweighed by the loss of the sublime, even if it's a mild form of the sublime. Think of how people get nostalgic about camping and all the discomforts attendant upon that. Or how some streaming services have gone back to releasing TV series through weekly episodes, rather than all at once, to retain the pleasure of a communal experience rather than individualized binge-watching. (Admittedly, it's not really liberals who are pushing for this one, and they are often on Team Tradition in this case.)

7) The reading of poetry, and the enrichment of ordinary language and thought which is brought about by lots of people being familiar with a substantial corpus of poetry. (Again, conservatives are just as much to blame as liberals here.) 

Here's a simple example. In old books one frequently comes across this line from Browning: "But a man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for?". It's one of dozens or perhaps hundreds of lines of poetry which it was simply assumed the reader would recognize.

Another example. On a long-ago episode of The Late Late Show, Ireland's oldest TV programme, I remember the host Gay Byrne talking about some old department store and saying: "Generations have trod, have trod, have trod." He could simply assume that a large amount of viewers would recognize this was a quotation from Hopkins. It added a certain elevation to his patter. I can't imagine the current host doing this.

Is it possible I'm projecting my own sensibilities onto other people? Yes. But I'm increasingly convinced of the opposite: that everybody really does care about the sublime, and become very nostalgic and regretful when one of its sources are removed.

A Lame Joke

A: Have you heard of the Mandela Effect? It's a phenomenon where people swear they remember something differently to how everybody else remembers it.

B: Wait, isn't that called the Gorbachev Effect? It was yesterday.

Personally, I think the Mandela Effect might explain artificial intelligence "hallucinations". The timeline is being altered too quickly for humans to notice it but computers are quick enough to catch it.