"I’m just thinking: There’s more there! She’s got more to offer. I mean, come on, dudes."

"You know what I’m saying? But hey, sin: It’s not logical, my man. It’s just not logical."

"Duck Dynasty" star Phil Robertson talks about sin and logic. The line before the one quoted above is more graphic (and I didn't want to put it in the post title): "It seems like, to me, a vagina — as a man — would be more desirable than a man’s anus."

I note the ambiguity in what Robertson says about logic and sin. At first, I thought he meant that when he thinks about anatomy, the vagina makes more sense as a place to put a penis, if one has undertaken the reasoning task of determining the most desirable orifice. But there's nothing logical about that. There are unexamined premises: 1. that the penis be inserted somewhere, and 2. that the place should be the most desirable place. Even assuming those 2 premises, there's the obvious problem of the subjectivity of what is desirable, and Robertson admits that by saying "to me" and "I'm just thinking." In this interpretation, the word "logical" is effectively jocose.

Then, I saw an alternate meaning: The prefatory clause "But hey, sin" gives meaning to the repeated phrase "It's not logical." Sin is not logical. What impels us toward sin and what constitutes sin? These are not matters for logic. Perhaps we could reason logically about what sin is, but Robertson's approach is to accept the traditional Christian beliefs and this faith is not acquired through logic. In this interpretation, there's no logic in defining sin, and, too, there's no logic in a person's feelings that draw him into doing things that fit that definition of sin.

Of course, Robertson is getting criticism for these remarks, which are called "anti-gay," but he's rejecting all of what is traditionally understood in the Christian religion as sin, including adultery and fornication. In the process, he talks about his own natural sexual orientation and seems perhaps to concede that it's easy for him to avoid one sin that he knows other people feel drawn toward. But overall, his effort is to call people into traditional religion and to save them from what he believes is sin. Myself, I support gay rights, but I do not like the simple portrayal of traditional religionists as mean or bigoted (even though I do understand that it may be the most effective way to defeat them politically).

Hipster/homeless ambiguity could be very dangerous.

"Not to offend anyone directly, but this photo could quite possibly be of a homeless man, a street person, or whatever term you wish to use. It could also just as easily be an affluent hipster wearing a highly dysfunctional piece of high-fashion. I think the ambiguity of that is very dangerous."

Comment on a photograph at The Sartorialist.

Follow-on comment: "The ‘danger’ here is somehow thinking that this is in the territory of Zoolander’s “Derelicte” Collection. I don’t know if it’s a ‘trap’ … but when reading some of these comments, I’m thinking Brüno and Zoolander :-)"

Something In The Water (Does Not Compute).

That's a Prince song title.

It came to mind today in the context of the Chinese blogger, confessing his computer sins on government TV, including a blog post that wondered whether there were contraceptives in the water.

Meanwhile, in America, First Lady Michelle Obama has a new health campaign with the message "When you drink water, you Drink Up," encouraging people to drink "even just one more glass a day," even though there is no medical reason for pushing people to drink more water. (Drinking too much water could kill you, and normally, drinking in response to whatever thirst you have is all you're supposed to do, though the advice to drink water instead of other things is good for those who want to lose weight.)

And who can forget that the 2012 presidential campaign was — at least some of the time — seemingly all about getting free birth control coverage into Obamacare.

Must be something in the water they drink/It's been the same with every girl I've had/Must be something in the water they drink/Cuz why else would a woman wanna treat a man so bad?

If I were a blogger in China, this post would be a crime, but only if it were deemed a rumor and it was also viewed more than 5,000 or reposted more than 500 times. I could get a 3-year prison sentence, not because of what I wrote, but because of what other people did with it after I wrote it — reading it, retweeting it, and construing it.

One must take care either: 1. not to become too popular or viral, or 2. to write in a manner that deters the construction that this is a rumor.

I'll do anything 4 U, anything/Why don't U talk 2 me?/Tell me who U are/Don't do this 2 me....

"Blue Is the Warmest Color" — that movie about lesbians that won the grand prize at Cannes — is hated by...

... the lesbian who wrote the graphic novel upon which the movie was based. And by "graphic novel," I don't mean that it has detailed descriptions of the sexual act. (The movie, however, has a 10-minute sex sequence that the author calls pornographic.) What I mean is what the NYT is referring to as a "comic book-novel" to avoid the ambiguity that appears in my first sentence.

Here's the Wikipedia article for "graphic novel":

The term "graphic novel" was first used in 1964; it was popularized within the comics community after the publication of Will Eisner's A Contract with God in 1978, and became familiar with the public in the late 1980s after the commercial successes of the first volume of Spiegelman's Maus, Moore and Gibbons's Watchmen, and Miller's The Dark Knight Returns. At the beginning of the 21st century, the Book Industry Study Group added "graphic novel" as a category in book stores.

Oh, but the author-artist of "Le Bleu Est une Couleur Chaude," Julie Maroh, will be stuck with the less respectful terminology as the topic under discussion is porn. Her book has sensitive images like this:



And the movie doesn't capture what she meant to convey.

Noting that the director and actresses are “all straight, unless proven otherwise,” she said that with few exceptions, the film struck her as “a brutal and surgical display, exuberant and cold, of so-called lesbian sex, which turned into porn.”

Even worse, she said, “everyone was giggling.”

Heterosexual viewers “laugh-ed because they don’t understand it and find the scene ridiculous.

“The gay and queer people laughed because it’s not convincing, and find it ridiculous,” she continued. “And among the only people we didn’t hear giggling were” the “guys too busy feasting their eyes on an incarnation of their fantasies on screen.”

But what do you expect when a commercial movie is made from a book? The story is much less about the inner thoughts and feelings of the characters, and what's on the screen are superficial images, particularly beautiful faces and bodies, and the audience is invited to gaze and feel whatever they feel. The movie director,  Abdellatif Kechiche, said:

“What I was trying to do when we were shooting these scenes was to film what I found beautiful,” he said. “So we shot them like paintings, like sculptures. We spent a lot of time lighting them to ensure they would look beautiful; after, the innate choreography of the loving bodies took care of the rest, very naturally.”

So, like many, many movies — perhaps nearly all movies — this movie is about how beautiful women are. Meanwhile, we learn that the actresses were not as naked as they look. "We were wearing prostheses," one says, mysteriously.

"I was raised that if a doctor tells you something, it’s gospel, like the priests..."

"... They know better than we do. Now if I suspect something, I’m definitely more proactive."

About the doctors... or the priests?

"What To Look For In A Husband Post-Divorce."

When I clicked here from Instapundit, I wasn't sure if this title, I had no idea whether the article was about what to seek in post-marriage from the man you are divorcing or the search for a new husband. Turns out it's the latter:

When you're finally ready to remarry post-divorce, you need to know what characteristics to look for in a husband....

Does anyone think like this? Okay, now I'm ready to get married again, what should I want? Somehow you know you want marriage, but you don't want any particular marriage. This sounds like the way some people decide they want to go shopping, and then they try to drum up ideas about something worth buying.

The author of the linked article comes up with 5 traits — e.g., communication skills (strong communication skills) and a sense of humor (a great sense of humor) — that sound like the same list of things she'd put on a traits-for-first-husbands list. 

"Hillary Clinton’s new website keeps speculators guessing about 2016 plans."

Oh, really?

I went to it. Here. Doesn't look ambiguous at all to me. Game on!

"They were both in white, and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house."

I decided to pluck something from Chapter 1 for today's entry in the "Great Gatsby" project. I randomly selected the sentence that appears above. You must believe me that it is indeed random, and yet someone had just emailed me to say he liked the Gatsby project and:

When I was a Harvard Freshman in 58-59, I took the required freshman English class and the instructor was an expert on Gatsby....

At one point while we were reading Gatsby for the class, he remarked "Have you noticed that whenever you see Daisy in the novel, she is wearing white?"

Now, how can my correspondent believe that I randomly picked a sentence with 2 women in white? But, on my purest honor, I did. We're focusing on sentences, so I don't know or care whether Daisy was one of the 2 women. I won't presume, though I will presume that the 2 entities known as "They" are women, given that they are wearing dresses. We must bring our knowledge of what is possible and what is probable to the enterprise of reading, even as we bear down on an isolated sentence. One or both of "them" might be a transvestite male (or a nonhuman), but I'm going to presume 2 women (or girls).

The "they" is perplexing in another, more disturbing way, because it reappears halfway through in "as if they had just been blown back." We're given a simile that asks us to picture the women, in their white dresses, flying around the house at some earlier moment. They — the women — look like they just landed, as their dresses are "rippling and fluttering" from a recent "short flight." But to say "their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back" is to create ambiguity, the possibility that the "they" was "their dresses," and we might feel called upon to picture the dresses, by themselves, flying around the house before getting blown back onto the 2 erstwhile naked women. The flying-around-the-house image is fantastical, so we can't tap our our knowledge of what is possible and what is probable, and yet, somehow we know it was the women in their dresses who seem as if they'd just flown around the house and gotten blown back in.

I think the problem of 2 possible antecedents for the second "they" is a writing error, and this Gatsby project is premised on the greatness of the sentences. I hate to be the one to have to say a good editing eye would have seen that ambiguity, but the greatness of the sentence-writing doesn't require a complete absence of error, and the logic of the sentence precludes the dresses flying around the house on their own because we can't picture the dresses getting back on the women without losing the "rippling and fluttering" action caused by the flight and landing. So enough of that. Stop picturing naked women waiting while their dresses fly around the house.

It was the women, so magical and light, like birds or butterflies, that flew around the house. They could fly, but they didn't fly far, only around the house which they got blown back into. These women don't have much ambition or power on their own. They are housebound, even though they can fly. They do an orbit of the house and then a breeze sweeps them back in. But here they are, so pretty in their fluttery white dresses. And of course, they only look as if they'd taken that charmingly domestic flight. The truth is they are sitting together in the house, and they haven't been going anywhere. But there is a breeze, a breeze that might blow a butterfly into the house, and it ripples their flimsy dresses.