Thanks to the Glom for inviting me back! As Gordon indicated, I’ve got quite a bit going on this summer, and I’m hoping it will prove fruitful blogging fodder.

First off, yes, I’m teaching Law, Literature, and Business. The backstory: my generous associate dean, Paul Kurtz, okayed a course with this title even though he knew that I knew that I had no idea what I was going to teach in it. Every third year, we at Georgia teach a 2-credit “floater course” on a subject that flows from our research. This topic has been on my mind for a while. I hope the course will work as kind of pre-reading, to get me up to speed to be able to write an article next summer.

As I started reading (ok, skimming) my way through law and lit articles and books, I realized that the subject could be broken into at least 2 strands, one focusing on content—trials and lawyers in literature (i.e., To Kill a Mockingbird)—and one on applications of literary theory. I’ll focus on the content side in this post.

The content approach is problematic for the transactionally-minded. I just haven’t found many deal lawyers or transactions depicted in literature. The dazzling exception that proves the rule? Herman Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener. Subtitled A Tale of Wall Street, it is close to ideal: short, beautifully written, wry, and weird. The narrator is a transactional lawyer, and although the tasks of scriveners are obsolete, I suspect that for many a corporate associate the drudgery of Bartleby’s life, and the narrator’s choice never to “address a jury or in any way draw down public applause”, but instead “do a snug business among rich men’s bonds, and mortgages, and title deeds,” may resonate.

At the suggestion of colleague Paul Heald, I read Richard Power’s novel Gain, which traces the history of a soap making empire from family business through public company conglomerate, interspersed with a very personal narrative of a woman’s struggle with cancer that may have been caused by chemicals from the self-same soap company. It’s not as anti-corporate America as that juxtaposition suggests, and it nicely captures the drama and desperation of business-building. It's on the list.

But novels tend to be long, and I want to cover several depictions of business in literature. So I decided to assign at least 2 movies. One seems to have to be Oliver Stone’s Wall Street. The other? I’m currently thinking about the Insider (which I haven’t seen yet), or Glengarry Glen Ross.

Am I wrong about the dearth of transactions and business lawyers in novels? Are there movies I’m missing? Please tell me.

Unless, of course, you’d prefer not to.

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Last fall, I received an invitation to teach a class in Barcelona this summer. In a fit of madness, I declined. Here is a photo of Barcelona that I found on Flickr, using Seth Godin's tips on searching for the "Most Interesting" HDR images.

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I'm embarrassed to admit that I lived in the Philly area for six years before I finally visited the The Barnes Foundation.  As the official website says, the Barnes Foundation holds one of the world's finest private collections of Impressionist, Post-Impressionist and early-Modernist paintings.  There are literally dozens of masterpieces by Renoir, Cezanne, Matisse, and Picasso.  The paintings, by themselves, are amazing, but equally intriguing is the unique way in which the paintings are displayed.  You probably won't see anything like this in any other museum:

Kind of wild, right?  These "ensembles" were created by Dr. Barnes as an educational technique.

More recently, the Barnes foundation has gotten fair amount of press because it looks like the collection will be moving from Merion, PA (a suburb of Philadelphia) into Philadelphia itself.  This decision is controversial because it contradicts the express terms of Dr. Barnes's trust, which states that the collection must remain in its original gallery in Merion.  The Barnes Foundation trustees were able to break the trust, citing financial necessity.

You trust lawyers out there will probably find the details of the case interesting, and you can read about some of them in this article from the New York Times.  As you'll see, the story is even more interesting because apparently there's lots of juicy local, Philly, and state politics going on. 

Right now, it looks as if the Barnes collection will be moving into their new digs sometime in 2009, so if you happen to be in the Philadelphia area any time soon, you might want to make a point to visit the Barnes in its original location.

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It's Friday, so I hope you'll forgive a light digression.  After Gordon's favorable review of yesterday's "Conchords" clip, perhaps readers will endure just one more to help raise the profile of antipodean comedy:

All this contemplation of the far down under forces me to confess something of an enduring respect for the hardy New Zealanders.  Not only did the Europeans who settled there travel to the farthest ends of the earth to do so, they went voluntarily, not at the end of a criminal's shackle.  These Kiwi forbears happened across the Australian continent en route, evidently deemed it too crowded or cosmopolitan, and kept going a few hundred more miles.  And now the four million of them comprise the world's greatest sailors and rugby players.

In this year's America's Cup, both the teams competing in the final were captained and manned by New Zealanders.  (The "Swiss" winner, Alinghi, who defeated Team New Zealand, are in fact predominantly mercenary veterans of Team New Zealand.)

In world rugby, no team inspires more fear than the All Blacks, who start each game with the haka, this Maori war chant (here reciprocated by their fellow Polynesian overachievers, Tonga):

For some specific flavor, here's a highlight of Jonah Lomu, a 6'5", 250-pound menace who runs the 100 in 10.89 seconds:

And for the people who invented bungee jumping, apparently the effete diversions of whitewater rafting can't compete with their version of aquatic lunacy: blackwater rafting.  Strap on a spelunking helmet, form up a chain of chums atop inner tubes, and launch yourself hurtling through underground rapids.

Finally, we discover that, in addition to all this athleticism, they're also big into epic cinema (featuring small Hobbits) and musical comedy.  Oh, how the gods shine upon the Land of the Long White Cloud!

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when Elvis died?  On August 16, 1977, I was in the car with my mom.  She must have just changed the channel because we heard the DJ saying something like, "and after the break, more on Elvis' death."  Being the conciliator that I am, I suggested that the DJ had said "deaf."  Maybe Elvis had merely gone deaf, like Beethoven.  My mom cried.  Did your mom cry?

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According to Eric Wilson (NYT), "Nature is so in." And:

Nature — or the appearance of embracing nature — is chic these days. Judging by the direction of fashion and home décor and of-the-moment restaurants and shops, you might mistake Manhattan for Montana. The raw concrete floors and white walls of 1990s minimalism have been swept away. In their place, new boutiques and cafes in the city’s glossier neighborhoods resemble overdesigned hunting lodges — dark and moody, with uneven floorboards to trip over and, almost inevitably, a set of antlers hanging from the rafters.

It appears that I really missed an opportunity during my recent house-hunting trip to Utah. When we realized that homes near BYU were priced at a premium, we decided to explore some options further from campus. On one of those trips, my son looked out the window and sighed, "antlers." He had spotted a rack mounted over a garage door.

Not that there's anything wrong with antlers. It's just that I spent most of my childhood with antlers-mounting people (read: my family) in rural Wisconsin, and I run with a different crowd now.

So I told the real estate agent that we could head back toward the campus -- not that Provo and Orem are antler-free -- but she had made appointments at several houses. And doggone it, we were going to see those houses. Well, the first house after the antler sighting featured a large buck's head in the entry way. By the time we stopped laughing about that, we were walking down to the basement, which was organized around a taxidermied bear cub.

So ended our Mapleton adventure.

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Here.

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Here.

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For those who are just fed up with their mates or mating rituals, some folks at Slate offer an alternative to marriage:  Playstation.

[O]n average, people adapt very quickly and completely to marriage. As anyone who's ever consumed seven pumpkin pies in one sitting knows, we quickly get used to our favorite new things, and we just as quickly tire of them. As Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert artfully puts it, "Psychologists call this habituation, economists call it declining marginal utility, and the rest of us call it marriage."

We submit that a relationship with a PlayStation 3 is worth at least $100,000 a year in happiness for all individuals. Unlike a nagging spouse, the PS3 doesn't care about your income or your level of education—it loves you just the way you are.

The authors note the high costs of mating rituals:

[Y]ou can't discount the vast amount of money it takes to woo a spouse. The costs of daily grooming—calculated at the minimum wage—run into the tens of thousands of dollars over a lifetime, not counting the costs of soap, water, Gillette Fusion cartridges, and Old Spice. Then there are the birthday presents, the anniversary presents, and the occasional meals at popular chain restaurants, not to mention the incalculably expensive psychic toll of accommodating your schedule to the increasingly unreasonable demands of your "partner." Compare with the PS3, which does not demand that you bathe or slather yourself in cologne and is available for guilt-free sensual pleasures 24 hours a day.

Myself, I never got the fever over video games (ok, maybe a little Asteroids, but that's it). 

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Organizers of the fifteenth annual Cultural Studies Conference at Kansas State University "hope to attract a diverse range of inquiries, methods, textual analyses, and historical perspectives," but if you want to be on this panel, you have your marching orders:

Papers on specific instances are welcomed, and papers considering a variety of issues and concerns:  tabloidization and the neutralization of the political; the personal as political; hypocritical Puritanism; the defense by offense; vast right wing conspiracies; "outing" as a political tactic; scandal amnesia; "spin" and tactical framing; true evil beneath the compassionate, Christian front; why nothing makes a difference; left tactics and despair; the politics of denial and shame; business secrecy vs. personal secrecy; liberal vs. conservative secret lives; sexual dysfunction in conservatives; Laura Bush's private life; scholarly muckraking and shockjocking.

Truly, you have a dizzying intellect.

P.S. I am assured that (a) this is not a joke, and (b) this is not representative of the panels at the conference.

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Alternative Title:  I have partaken from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and now I don't feel so good.

For a week, I have seen references to the unrated documentary The Aristocrats, and how AMC wasn't going to show it, blah, blah, blah.  The movie is always described as a documentary about one dirty joke, which originated in vaudeville and is still famous today, but the articles never tell the joke.  So, I'm curious and want to know the joke.  I thought it would be dirty, but harmless, like the Nantucket limerick.  Nope.  I googled "the aristocrats joke" and got a website with numerous variations of the joke.  I clicked on the most popular.  Yikes.  Imagine a cross between American Psycho and Rodney Dangerfield.

If you are now curious, I would suggest going to Wikipedia, where you will learn that the basic format of this joke is that a nuclear family wants to break into show business and perform their act for an agent.  The variations on the joke are experiments in how disgusting and outrageous to make the "act."  I think the joke that I read must have won that experiment.  The punchline comes when the agent asks what the name of this base, vulgar family act is, and the name is "The Aristocrats."

The documentary apparently focuses on the fact that the joke is like a "game within a game."  On one level, the joke is about how far this family will go to break into show business, but on another level it is how far a comedian will go to shock his audience, usually other comedians.  So, like a guitar solo that is composed mainly to impress other guitarists, but leaves the audience going, "huh?", the punchline to the joke makes most audiences go, "huh?"  But some variations make audiences like me go, "eewww."

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If you are fan of modern art, you probably know about the Louisiana Museum already. If not, you might be surprised to learn of a museum by that name nestled into the eastern shoreline of Denmark. I visited the Louisiana last Saturday, and even though the weather was rainy, it was stunning, both inside and out. The featured artist was American Michael Bevilacqua, whose large, colorful, pop-art creations captivated my children. The permanent collection at the Louisiana also was spectacular, with samplings from Calder, Moore, Picasso, Rauschenberg, and Warhol, among others. But my favorite part of the day was the Jean Nouvel exhibit. Nouvel is a French architect, and I stayed in an apartment near his Institut Monde Arabe while I taught in Paris in 2002. This exhibit offered an opportunity to see his collected works, and they are fabulous.

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Ann Althouse stayed up with the "stars" and live-blogged the 100 Greatest Movie Quotes.  All I can say is "Where is Princess Bride?"  I will take any line from the movie, but I would settle for "As you wish."

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Ann Althouse is asking for readers' saddest songs.  Here's my take:

High brow:  The Dream I Dreamed from Les Miserable (right before she dies of syphillis or TB or something).  In law school, I used to sing that line over and over:  "I dreamed a dream my life would be/So different from this hell I'm living."

Middle brow:  Bonnie Raitt's Love Has No Pride.

Low brow:  Where've You Been, by Kathy Mattea.  Very manipulative, very formulaic three-verse country song, but I had to pull over and wail the first time I heard it.

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Last night, feeling extremely hip, my husband and I went to see Mary-Chapin Carpenter live at the Pabst Theater.  Much to our surprise, we were the youngest people there.  Now, we might have been fooling ourselves that we were younger than some, but we were definitely in the youngest 10%. 

The concert was great, but one of the most interesting revelations was Mary-Chapin confessing that she was addicted to American Idol.  She described it as a car accident that she couldn't help watching.  After much prompting, she predicted that "the little country miss" would win.  She added that Bo did not need to worry about his future, though.

At one point while she was chatting between songs, a beer bottle rolled down the aisle in the audience.  "Well," she said, "this is Milwaukee."

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Saturday night found us watching Crash.  I generally like movies with intersecting story lines, like Short Cuts, Traffic, and The Hours, and I think this movie is one of the better ones.

The theme that I walked away with was the theme of stereotypes, or as we like to say in law school, proxies.  Proxies (stereotypes) are based in some kind of truth, so proxies can be very helpful.  If I see a pit bull, I may steer clear because I have heard stories of pit bulls being violent.  That particular pit bull may be as gentle as a lamb, but I will generally be safer if I treat all pit bulls as dangerous until I know otherwise.

But is it right to use proxies when dealing with humans?

We like to say "no."  Individual humans should not be judged by the statistical characteristics of whatever race or gender they have been born into by chance.  The movie does not make it easy to answer this question.  In one scene (that appears in the trailer), a white couple, Sandra Bullock and Brendan Fraser, are walking on the sidewalk toward two young African American men, played by Ludicris and Larenz Tate.  Ludicris' character mocks Sandra Bullock for being afraid of them, and Sandra Bullock berates herself for being afraid.  However, two seconds later the two young men carjack the couple's car.  So, then Sandra Bullock regrets not using the young men's race as a proxy because it could have saved her the experience of having a gun to her head.  A few hours later, though, she uses the locksmith's race (Hispanic) as a proxy to determine that he will sell the keys to their house to his "homies" who will rob them blind.  Of course, she is mistaken.

In the movie, people live up to their stereotypes (a white police officer is racist, a wealthy white housewife is selfish and spoiled, the young black men are carjackers), then the same people transcend their stereotypes.  In addition, characters who have shunned stereotypes to be more enlightened fall prey to their own fears and disappoint themselves.

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My hometown newspaper (Lubbock, TX) is reporting that the movie theaters there are selling advance tickets for the next Star Wars installment, which will debut at 12:05 a.m. on May 19.  I will have to say that although I'm not any kind of Star Wars freak, I'm interested in this movie.  (I mean "freak" in a good way.)

This movie will answer all the questions of my youth.  If Luke and Leia are really brother and sister, then why were they separated?  How did Darth Vader go to the dark side?  What does Yoda know?  I've had these questions for a long time, but I can probably wait until at least noon on May 19 to hear the answers.

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My husband took the kids to see Grandma in Virginia yesterday, leaving me home alone.  What did I do with myself?  Three other women in my neighborhood came and we worked on our scrapbooks from 4 p.m. until midnight.  I hesitate to bring up scrapbooking because I don't want to be labeled a chick blogger, but scrapbooking is the quilting bee/sewing circle of this generation.  Women used to sew history into quilts, now we tell our stories in our scrapbooks.  I would tell you more, but what happens at scrapping, stays at scrapping.

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This week is Spring Break for my children, and I decided to take my two oldest (and one of their friends) on a semi-spontaneous visit to the Art Institute of Chicago. I have fond memories of the Art Institute from my days as a law student in Hyde Park. It hasn't changed much, but I didn't visit to see how things had changed.

I wanted to introduce my children to some of the paintings I remembered from my prior visits, like these ...

I don't claim much sophistication about art, though I quite enjoy the experience of walking through a fine museum. I tended to read more of the background information than my children wanted, but it was fun to see them react to the paintings, especially (for some reason) the Rothkos.

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