I know that I'm a corporate sell out, but this movie blows me away. I have no way of objectively evaluating it. I just know that I have bitten into it hook, line, & sinker.

Have any readers here ever accessed the Blackmun papers? I.e., if I wanted, say, to look at all of the notes and memos about one particular Blackmun opinion, about how long would it take me to go through all of the procedural and other hoops and so on? I've never been to the Library of Congress, so I'd have to start from scratch. Is this the sort of thing I could do in an hour? An afternoon?

The Day Lady Died
Frank O'Hara

It is 12:20 in New York a Friday
three days after Bastille day, yes
it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine
because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton
at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner
and I don't know the people who will feed me

I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun
and have a hamburger and a malted and buy
an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets
in Ghana are doing these days
                              I go on to the bank
and Miss Stillwagon (first name Linda I once heard)
doesn't even look up my balance for once in her life
and in the GOLDEN GRIFFIN I get a little Verlaine
for Patsy with drawings by Bonnard although I do
think of Hesiod, trans. Richmond Lattimore or
Brendan Behan's new play or Le Balcon or Les Nègres
of Genet, but I don't, I stick with Verlaine
after practically going to sleep with quandariness

and for Mike I just stroll into the PARK LANE
Liquor Store and ask for a bottle of Strega and
then I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue
and the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theatre and
casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton
of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with her face on it

and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of
leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT
while she whispered a song along the keyboard
to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing

Do books of poetry count? After discovering the existence of Brad Leithauser's Alphabet book, Letter Creatures I had it shipped from another library. It is comparatively insubstantial (although it does have a lovely little number on extinct species called Exes). But this seems like the occasion to note that I was quite surprised to see how much the Amazon hoi polloi despite Leithauser's poems, since he is one of my favorite poets (now that Milosz is dead, possibly my favorite living poet). Like all good poets, he is hit and miss, but still--

On The Odd Last Thing She Did: "Brad Leithauser is the worst poet I've read in some time." " (H)is poems have no purpose, not even to delight, and they seem simply smug when they do bother to adopt a tone." "How boring to read a book of poems you know must have bored the poet himself."

On one of his novels, A Few Corrections: "It's like being forced to listen to the bar know-it-all, so in love with his own vocabulary and so convinced that everything he's saying is a gem of great wit, that eventually any sensible person can't help but yell, 'WILL YOU JUST SHUT UP!?'"

On The Mail From Anywhere: "He is a poet the same way Somerset Maugham is a thinker." (Which may actually be intended as a compliment).

At least they liked the (glorious!) Darlington's Fall.

[50 Book Challenge]

Tookie Williams, dubious nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize and brutal murder of four, has been executed.

Doug Berman wonders if Arnold Schwarzenegger was morally required (under the Vermeule-Sunstein thesis). I take it that Vermeule's answer, at least, would be probably not. On the one hand, giving clemency to a convicted murder might prevent rioting, but on the other hand one has to take long view, and it might also encourage murderers to incite riots. So the Vermeule-utilitarian answer to whether one should show clemency in deference to mob rule is surely the same as it would be to whether one should negotiate with terrorists: Sometimes, maybe, but even if so, one should never admit it.

Meanwhile, Chris Bertram wonders if 50-year-old Tookie Williams is really the same person as 20-year-old Tookie Williams, and if not, whether it is fair that one should die for another's crimes. This is an old problem of vice law, but I think the common sense view that the succession of selves occupying more or less the same body and mind ought to be treated as one coherent moral unit is the right one. Let us not confuse time with transmogrification.

Mr. Williams recently said of the death penalty: "We know that it’s not a deterrent. It’s wasted a lot of the taxpayers’ money. The death penalty in a sense is a disguise for vengeance." I am not sure that he is wrong, but I also am not sure what to make of that. As I have said before, I continue to be amazed and slightly puzzled that we spend so many resources on executing so few people, but I am not convinced that there is something inherently illegitimate in saying that it is simply a matter of justice that those who commit awful murders ought to die.

For those of you who are not already sick of the whole question of the "War on Christmas" (or Crescat discussion of same), Amy Uelmen over at Mirror of Justice has written a very nice post on the subject.

Geof Stone and Richard Epstein at the University of Chicago both weigh in on the Solomon Amendment. Both of them share some of my feelings about the fight between Congress, the Department of Defense, and The Law Schools.

Geoff Stone cites the Kalven Report, arguing that educational institutions ought not express messages on issues of simple justice. He supports exclusion of the military as a policy matter, but not as an expressive matter. On the latter point, at least, I agree.

Epstein notes that everybody has acted badly-- there should be no exclusion of gays from the military, no exclusion of the military from campuses, and no invasion of campuses (or conditions on funding) by Congress or the military. I agree too.

Belatedly, I would also like to note David Bernstein's suggestion that law schools ought to be made not at the military, who merely follows orders, but at Congress, who passed both Solomon Amendment and Don't Ask, Don't Tell. It seems to me that this misses the aspect of regulatory statutory interpretation that's going on here. By its text, the Solomon Amendment 1, arguably allows law schools to apply neutral and generally-applicable rules equally to the military and other employers, and 2, arguably requires only de-funding the noncompliant law school rather than every part of the university I am not suggesting that either of these interpretations are required but they are both pretty clearly plausible. And because Chevron deference very likely applies here, that means that the military has some choice about how zealously to implement Congress's mandate here.

Now this doesn't quite address Professor Bernstein's point, which is that the military exclusion doesn't make sense in the first place because Don't Ask Don't Tell is Congress's fault, but the military's decision (which is assuredly its decision, not Congress's) to aggressively interpret the Solomon Amendment does seem to provide retroactive justification to the law schools' choice, or at least to their sense that the military is not on their side here.