Scoplaw

And on a Slightly-More-Serious-But-Rambly Note (with Parenthetical Asides)

I’m going to head into work now, after a day of getting small house-projects done. I’ll be using substandard resources (no one would choose *this* level of resources to defend themselves) in an attempt to defend individuals constitutional rights and freedoms, to say nothing of their basic not-being-in-a-metal-cage-liberties, in front of an increasingly accepting and uncritical public. It’s the best job; it’s the worst job. But what else would I want to do with myself in the early 21^st century America? I hope my (frankly, highly theoretical) grandkid’s kids would not think me too much of a placidly embarrassing exemplar of this particular generation.

A lot of law-school-friend/acquaintance news has just rolled in, given the NY and CA bar announcements, which has sent me wool gathering. The juxtaposition of the reality of my job and my (thankfully fading) memories of law school is just plain scary. I must note, that some-small-bit out of law school, my opinions on the general ridiculousness/ineffectiveness of law school have not changed.  It’s rare that you see someone who brings their heart out of law school indoctrination in the same condition (I know I haven’t), unless, of course, your heart is so shaped that it can always and only hold a faux-race-neutral, empty-Christian, late 19^th Century Capitalism, expressed by combatively engaging others who disagree with you.  Meh. 

Where do we find the robust humanism which must inform both law and justice for us to survive as a moral and loving people? Everywhere I think, but in case-law. It’s certainly found in the small and normal acts of humanity expressed in the face of the very artificial law/law school/bar exam standards.

Thus I wanted to thank all the student blawgers, legal blawggers, and particularly the criminal law bloggers, who share themselves (aspects of themselves) with us. The most grand universal principals are always and only embodied in the particular, not matter how banal those particulars may seem to some. It means a fair bit to hear how you all feel about the profession, even if it’s via the tribulations of dry cleaning.  We all need to be reminded that people do these jobs – and that lawyers, judges, victims and defendants are, above all, people.

Of course, I’m proud of all my fellow law students who kept their soundly-emoting hearts, which is probably the vast bulk of Section 3 (including Section 3’s of the past, and I pray, the future). When professors, intentionally or not, provide a model for one-upmanship and snarky commentary by focusing on (when you think about it) unsystematic legal rationales (sans any equitable analysis) drawn seemingly blindly out of caselaw, AND you’re set head-to-head with your classmates for jobs which depend on your coming out ahead (just ahead) of your fellows in regurgitating those “principles”. . .well, it’s just plain remarkable how the core of Section 3 comported itself in the first year and beyond.  I think we’ll appreciate this more and more as we go. (Of course, one can be in Section Other and not prove yourself an asshole, as so many of our fellows showed.)

And (to continue my ramble by leaping about in quasi-related topics) I am happy to report that nearly  everyone I’ve heard from seems to have passed their various bars. I know a lot of you tried to keep your sanity through it all by actively resisting the BarBri Fear Mongers and the general snarkiness of law students, and (see above) I appreciate that and am glad you survived and passed and can stand in front of judges. I am also hella-glad (I keep saying this, but believe me, the pressure brings out random parts of you. . .) for those who helped us do this. 

Although all these bar-passages are significant accomplishments, I wanted to make a special shout out to the CAnarchist who got her good news yesterday. Although there are many unblogables here, I think I *can* say that there was a point where she really didn’t know if she should spend the money/time on this particular round of the CA bar, which is arguably the hardest bar in the country. She was behind the prep curve and had multiple friends (who had failed the CA bar) cautioning her not to get her hopes up. So, for her to have decided to go forward anyway, then cranked CA, well, that says something.  (We have the same job on different oceans, which kind of tickles me – defending from sea to shining sea. We may soon be joined by the James Bond Watch, provided he does not get assigned to do his JAG defender stuff overseas.)

And to all my friends who may not have (yet!) passed the bar of their choice, let me say that a difficult test is just that – a difficult test. Take a pause. Think about the worthwhile things you’ve accomplished; those non-multiple-choice-testable things like treating people right and being a good person. Have faith in who you are beyond the assessment of a bar examiner. Then take the damn thing again and rock it.

(PS – if anyone is thinking about taking the FL bar, feel free to drop me a line.  Ditto for anyone thinking about interning/interviewing at our office.  I also have a West Palm PD contact who I can refer you to - no guarantees though.) 

Done-L, over easy.

Eggs, black beans, salsa, cheese, toast, black coffee.  I think this is the first time I've fired up my stove in about a month or so.  I've been on the cook-it-in-5-or-not-at-all plan.

Also my body just decided to tell me my back isn't happy with me any more.  It had stayed quiet until now, but it's making it's demands known.  Stretching is called for I think.

And today - nothing to do that I don't want to do.

That's how it should be, every once in awhile.

What I Learned in My Three Years of Law School

I’m tempted to either leave it blank, or launch into an enormous, comprehensive, and water-tight essay. As both responses are exemplary of perfectly acceptable law school mindsets, I will take the difficult middle-ground of doing “some” and thus exposing myself. (Although I may err on the “enormous essay” side as it reflects pre-law school loquaciousness.)

So. Law School is a relatively closed society which thinks it’s a meritocracy; in reality, it is the highly socialized academic community through which you must pass to (attempt to) enter the monopolized and protected legal profession. Here, you’ll learn both legal cant and how to select from balanced sets of conflicting arguments which rest on certain presumptions. The ability to identify (or assume) those presumptions and select the set of arguments that suits the outcome you wish to achieve is what law school basically teaches you. This is sometimes called “thinking like a lawyer.”

At first this new perspective can be overwhelming, but gradually, it recedes. People are still people. They still act in the same ways people do (both inside and outside the legal profession). They still have the same vanities and arrogances, and their societies are still as strictly ordered. There are also those heart-melting generosities, and the people who, when push comes to shove, do the right thing by others.

And yet, the culture you daily participate in seems to be colored by “the law.” It’s all you talk about. It informs everything.  This law school society, the population of lawyers and would-be-lawyers from whom you’ll learn, is a very specific sub-set of the general population that selects for certain skills and backgrounds (some schools more than others). This homogeneity, along with a desire to simply “get the right answer” in a hide-the-ball environment, creates an enormous pressure to conform to a few narrow role models. This dynamic plays out in a grossly paternalistic atmosphere. It’s really like nothing I’ve seen elsewhere. (You think poetic egos are huge?  Please.)

Sometimes you can actually watch people slowly slipping under – in just 1, or 2 or 3 years they’ve adopted a completely different set of goals and standards than they previously held, and somehow convince themselves that their new pursuits are what they’ve always wanted, and always will want. Sometimes you watch people gloriously resist – and believe me, it’s resistance when any show of non-conformity is generally greeted, even by the liberals, with those rapid eye-dart back and forth checks of “this isn’t really how the idealized lawyer/lawyer-student would do things.”

A lot of this pressure gets channeled into how you feel about yourself. For example, at the present moment, I feel like I’ve made more than half a bungle of law school, depending on where I locate myself. From the academic-gpa viewpoint, I did OK, but didn’t study (hard) enough to rise to the top of the class. From the academic-social viewpoint, I know some people but didn’t schmooze enough and hold my tongue enough to really make strong connections with the professorial network. From the social perspective, I didn’t go out with my peers as much as I’d like to, and I allowed my own particular social circumstances to dictate my participation in class activities as a whole. From the clinical perspective, I could have learned more, been better prepared, picked up more clients, etc. From non-law perspectives, I could have written more poetry (instead of working in fits and bunches), I could have biked more consistently, I could have used my limited time to start some kind of seed projects that would have borne fruit by now.

In the end I came out of law school with a bunch of ‘halves’ instead of a solid whole. But that’s OK. That’s who I am. I do a lot of stuff as best I can:  classes for the JD, clinic demands, 2 poetry manuscripts, novel fragments, not regressing physically/health-wise, taking on some difficult situations, and mostly (not always successful) trying to be there for the people who really needed me. That’s enough, right? That’s an OK way to spend 3 years on this planet.

However, it does not really feel “OK” right now. I’m kind of embarrassed I didn’t get a better deal for any one of my clients. I’m kind of embarrassed I didn’t score higher. I’m kind of ashamed at my personal conduct with my peers – getting pressured into being whom-I-am-not in small but (to my mind) significant things. My confidence is moderately shot, my motivation is sometimes lacking, and occasionally I have no idea why the hell anyone would want to employ me or count me as a friend. It seems that my few successes have all been greased in unmeritocratic ways, and my failures are all too plain (ironically taking place in perfectly meritocratic environments).  I feel grossly under-educated and under-skilled to the point where it borders on fraud, and I think that somehow this must be my fault, that I have a (or a complex of) personal flaw(s) that has somehow prevented me from being where I think I ought to be in terms of understanding.

((I know I’m not assessing my own experiences rationally at this point, but that’s how it feels. And I certainly don’t mean to whine or beg for sympathy by writing this; I’m sure I’ll bounce back quickly enough to my usual pain-in-the-ass self. However, I do want to note (publicly) that law school, for me at least, was a grind. A grind that leaves me feeling a bit raw. If others can read this and see something useful in it, so be it.))

But the countervailing point is that to be any one of those “perfect things” I’d have had to make very different discrete and particular choices. And those choices implicate my values. Granted, I screwed up some of them here, as we all do, but the basic drift of my life – the decisions to speak or not speak, to do or not to do – well, I have to come back to the idea that I was actually doing OK (again, not that perfect punkster/poet/biker/jazz-cook saint-like existence the Scoplaw strives for, but OK) *before* I entered law school. I’d like to think that I had spent *some* time thinking about my values, about who I was and what I wanted to do. I’d like to think that I had a clue or two, and one of those clues was that you can't put off your life till later - it must be lived now, as you intend to live it.

Law school, and the situations I allowed to be created around me, led me to doubt some of that more than I should have. And I think that doubt was not the healthy kind of open self-questioning doubt from many perspectives, but rather a kind of snarky-social/intellectual corrosive doubt from a narrow standard, and that doubt manifested itself in a kind of reciprocally corrosive way (sometimes even unintentionally).

The solution, of course, is time, thought, moderate consumption of beer, poetry, biking, cooking, talking with friends, watering my new tomato plant, playing with El Gato Perfecto, appreciating the sunlight, getting decent sleep, and thus decompressing to the point where I do not feel that I have to be looking over my shoulder for the next crisis, every second of the day. While all personal balance/centeredness may ultimately be illusory, some states are closer to that center point than others. We’ll see what it takes to (re)find mine. Although in typing this out, I’m feeling better already.

Skin of my Teeth

There, for the grace of a few professors, go I. And “there” is out of GULC. I passed all my classes and am SO ready to move on.

Graduation is Sunday.

Final Trial (if it goes) is on Monday.

Final Appeal gets reviewed for submission on Tues.

And then, I’m sorta kinda done, except for the Bar Application, the Loan things, Bar/Bri and high tailing my ass down to the land of Oranges.

**

I will try to do a “what I learned in Law School” post from the perspective of, well, me, now. 

But that, as you might guess, must wait a little bit.

 

 

 

Exam2

Again, I blog from smack in the middle of a take-home.  This one is a 48hr take home for Advanced Environmental Law.  Of course, I can't say anything about the content exam itself. 

However the professor publicly e-mailed and posted the instruction pages before the exam period began, so I can tell you what the exam is like, structurally.  (Given that this is public information and cannot aid anyone taking the exam, since, of course, we all know this already).

There are 3 sections to the exam.  Each section has 3 questions.  I have to answer one (and *only* one) question per section, meaning that I give 3 answers for the whole exam.  (Each of these answers is weighed equally in determining the grade.)  The total exam cannot be more than 15 double spaced pages of 12 point font with one inch margins.  We can jigger with the exact amount of pages we want to spend on each answer, we can pick the font type.   

While that might *sound* like a lot, it's really not.  15 pages doublespaced 12 point font ends up in the rough neighborhood of about 5 thousand words, depending on the font type you pick, your word choice, and where your paragraphs end. 

But there's certainly an upper limit on the amount of information you can cram in, even for the most telegraphic and white-space-phobic. As the instructions note: "The page limitation is intended to promote direct, concise writing."   And frankly, if I had to wade through 30 or so exams (that's 450 pages!) I'd want it as direct and clear as could be.

I have 48hrs to do the whole thing (it's due on Sun, 5ish). 

**

And by the way - while I appreciate the sentiment behind what this is trying to accomplish, does anyone besides myself think this is just a little bit creepy?

Midway to Midway

I am in the middle of my first of 3 24-hour take home exams.  This one is the Role of the Federal Prosecutor, and I'm not loving the word limit.

On Thurs I took my last in-class law school exam (knock wood) ever; that was for Criminal Enforcement of Environmental Laws, a class I unreservedly recommend to all you 1 and 2Ls. 

If interested, write me for details.  It was possibly my favorite class I've taken here, clinic aside.  Although it's hard to tell what's valuable when, given one's evolving legal consciousness.  It's certainly a great class to take 3L, if you've explored and are interested in: criminal law, white collar crime, administrative law,  environmental law, criminal/civil process.  And all this view though a practical "what works" lens, as explored in a fact pattern/hypothetical that you track and expand on as new topics are introduced throughout the semester.

On deck - Advanced Environmental Law.

In the hole - the Class Actions seminar.

I really thought I'd be breaking the mold and blogging more as I went, but 3Ler-itis has been compounded by a) job hunt (done, yea!), b) moving/bar prep and thoughts, and c) final crunch of clinic and exams.  I feel like Laura Rosslyn on BSG - "O.K. (pause) Next crisis."

Despite all this, motivation has been my biggest problem.  I want to do small physical tasks, like sorting through all my stuff and deciding what to sell, what to give away, and what to move to FL.  Mostly, I'll be happy to be recycling a LOT of paper.  (I so wish the clinic materials were on CD/DVD.) 

*Things* are so permanent, so easy to deal with.  Words and ideas?  I think I need a small break from them.  The dapper Floridian came by and we converted an old Fuji frame to a fixed gear, replacing his head-tube cracked Bianchi fixed gear (which was really a sweet bike, alas.)  As usual, we grossly underestimated the amount of time it took to get some impacted parts off.  Although we could have done the quick and dirty conversion in about 40 min.

Speaking of which I have to get rid of some bikes, books, and parts.

Sigh.  But for now - back to it.

For Your Procrastination Pleasure

Another example of something that should not work but does.

The Weirdness of Observation and John Milton

Yesterday was bizzay.  Actually the past two days were frightfully busy. 

I got home Thurs night (technically Friday morning) after a full day of classes, memo/motions writing.  The classes were awesome. 

The first was Clinic case rounds for a very interesting/promising case involving sexual touching on a bus (case was disposed of on Friday – we lost (ack!)).  I am consistently impressed with the good suggestions that come out of those sessions; they’re so good you want to smack your forehead and exclaim “Of Course!” every 4 minutes. 

The second was the criminal enforcement of environmental laws which suffered a bit due to late notice of long reading assignments.  It was still awesome though.  I learn best when there are practical/real world/structural challenges laced though the black letter law.  Since the professors in that class are all former prosecutors who are now private defenders, I get plenty of “and here’s how theory grounds into the real world” moments.

Friday was a bit rough also.  The motion I stayed up to write on Thurs sucked and had to be rewritten on Friday, and I owe Tenacious D a debt of gratitude for taking on my last minute motions challenge and hammering the thing into shape.  Again, a good learning experience.  Although that motion was finished very close to the deadline, I think I’m pretty much now caught up on everything.  Things will get easier now that my two heavy reading classes are starting to give me more time to work with the materials. 

Friday also featured a morning witness statement taking (again not the smoothest preparation to the justified annoyance of my investigative partner) and then the final memo touches and filing. 

After the deadlines, I ended up talking with someone about my 1L summer and encouraging her to apply.  It was kind of funny.  She was giving these standard responses to my questions about why she’d be interested in a PDs office and what she was looking for in terms of experiences, etc., when she kind of breaks “interview mold” and says, “I was wondering if I should bring up the fact that [omitted fact] and therefore I [omitted fact].”  Well, this omitted fact was an absolute “must have her” kind of thing.  I told her that if I were doing the hiring, and knew this, she could say the most bizarre stuff for the rest of the interview and I’d still take her as a summer 1L on the sole strength of that one experience and the perspective it gives.   I hope she gets the position, since I think that summer program is one of the best experiences you could possibly have during your 1L year.  In many ways it’s sort of a mini-clinic, and simply I can’t recommend it highly enough, even for people who are not planning on going into criminal law, but are interested in it nonetheless.

Also on Friday, at some point, my heater core in my car cracked.  I think.  It smells like burnt antifreeze and idles roughly (almost surging) whenever I flip the heater on.  With the heater off, it seems to run just fine.  More investigation will be done today.  Arrgh.

I finished Friday by doing a Capitol Hill pub crawl (2 pubs) with some clinic peeps.  On reflection, the whole thing was decidedly odd – not that the whole day wasn’t – but I did have a great time talking with people about cases, fantasy, poetry, law, and the LS experience.  We even had some of the fellows out with us, which is always a treat.  The rumor mill was running full tilt last night, which was also kind of funny.  I probably need to take such things more seriously, but eh.  Case in point – some guy gave me money for chatting with him in the bathroom.  Sounds sketchy, yes? 

Well, I was standing next to some very drunk Russian guy in the bathroom who was complaining about his girlfriend being hassled by skinheads.  Actually, I think it was more of the opportunistic young white trash thing, rather than the hardcore skinhead type.  I’ve done the shaved head and combat boots thing – it causes problems like you would not believe.  Or maybe you would.  Anyway, I made sympathetic noises and asked if I could do anything for him, or if anyone was giving him trouble.  He said no kind of confusedly and staggered off.  So later I see him at the bar with his girlfriend and said skinhead.  The skinhead was doing that sort of opportunistic guy thing, the girlfriend was playing the skinhead for attention, and the Russian guy was obviously not pleased.  He was also, as mentioned, very drunk so couldn’t say much of anything without looking like the overprotective drunk boyfriend.  So I leaned over to him and said – “I’ve been in this situation before.  I’m sorry you’re in it now.”  So he looks at me and slips me a handful of 20s while saying – “You are a good man with clear eyes.”  Then he heads off upstairs.  Decidedly weird, but very Russian withal. So, with the aid of the Sensible Student, I spent the money on drinks for the clinic people.

Another weird point was running into someone who independently recognized me as a poet rather than a law student or a blogger (this is someone I’d never met.)  That’s an unusual random encounter, since my celebrity is small, and those who do recognize me as a poet are mostly other writers, not straight up readers.

Over the course of the evening, the cast of characters were many and at one point the Dapper Floridian (hi!) and his wife (hi!) and I ended up talking about blogging and monikers.  Blogging makes people nervous – who knows the google skills that will be employed looking for information about you? 

But blogging is also kind of difficult to track if you’re just hoping for random information on a person.  While it’s easy (via google) to find a blogger associated with a city or a bar or an institution, it’s much harder to find out a) who that person is, and b) which random person mentioned on the blog is the Xperson (whom you’re actually looking for) and whether or not if, even if you have a likely candidate for Xperson, whatever was blogged about actually happened.  Blogging is, in many ways, like most written communication – people tend to see what they want to see in it.  Meaning their subjective filters encounter only the text on the page, and all the small social things of real interaction which completely color any kind of event or experience are simply absent.

So in many ways the blog’s vision of individuals is a distorting social typecaster *if* the reader forgets that blogs are fictionalized (as all writing is) and reflect, for the purposes of telling a story, only a small sub-section of very rich lives.  It would follow that the doings of third parties mentioned on blogs are even more distorted.  I don’t think the Dapper Floridian was complaining of how I treat (portray) him on the blog, but I think it’s good to remind my dear readers that when mentioning others, we’re always talking about a sliver of a fraction of a story.

**

And the last element in my rambling post shall be John Milton’s Paradise Lost. 

I was chatting with Proto-Abe (I think after a 9pm workout in the gym on Thurs?) about epic poetry.  Apparently few read Paradise Lost anymore.  (Or of The Prelude, or Beowulf, or The Divine Comedy, or The Faerie Queene, or The Nibelungenlied, or the Elder Edda, or Gilgamesh, or the Iliad, Odyssey, and the Aeneid.  ) 

Although I imagine the Odyssey and The Divine Comedy must remain the most popular of this unpopular list.

Anyway, Paradise Lost is an odd and unpopular poem.  It’s dense, allusive, difficult.  It’s a product of a DWM Cromwellian Puritan who went blind and suffered a serious reversal of his political and personal fortunes.  There are disturbing gender implications for contemporary sensibilities.  It talks about God and sin a lot.  It’s in fact so allusive to both classical mythology and the Bible that it will cause your head to burst if you try to integrate its cosmology into your own as you read.  (The best advice I can give on approaching it is to read it as though it’s science fiction and not get bogged own.) 

But it’s also daring and weird.  The protagonist of PL is Satan, and he gets all the best lines.  The next best lines are given to Eve.  Adam is kind of stiff, honorable, but ultimately human, and ultimately (I think) more culpable and weaker than Eve is.  God and Jesus are, well, often insufferable.  But God and Jesus are not really written *as* people within the poem (they’re, um, kind of conceptual), whereas Adam and Eve are portrayed as fully rounded beings.  If you read it you’ll see what I mean. 

It’s also simply great poetry.  The strengths and weaknesses of the poem (for modern ears) are found in the first two sentences:

OF Mans First Disobedience, and the Fruit
Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal tast
Brought Death into the World, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till one greater Man
Restore us, and regain the blissful Seat, [ 5 ]
Sing Heav'nly Muse,that on the secret top
Of Oreb, or of Sinai, didst inspire
That Shepherd, who first taught the chosen Seed,
In the Beginning how the Heav'ns and Earth
Rose out of Chaos: Or if Sion Hill [ 10 ]
Delight thee more, and Siloa's Brook that flow'd
Fast by the Oracle of God; I thence
Invoke thy aid to my adventrous Song,
That with no middle flight intends to soar
Above th' Aonian Mount, while it pursues [ 15 ]
Things unattempted yet in Prose or Rhime.
And chiefly Thou O Spirit, that dost prefer
Before all Temples th' upright heart and pure,
Instruct me, for Thou know'st; Thou from the first
Wast present, and with mighty wings outspread [ 20 ]
Dove-like satst brooding on the vast Abyss
And mad'st it pregnant: What in me is dark
Illumin, what is low raise and support;
That to the highth of this great Argument
I may assert Eternal Providence, [ 25 ]
And justifie the wayes of God to men.

First off – amazing sentences.  Amazing rhetoric.

You can follow it well enough, at first, and might catch that line 4’s “one greater Man/Restore us” must be Christ.  Well enough.  But then there’s Oreb, Sinai, Sion Hill, Siloa’s Brook – what *is* all this stuff?   If you start to play the hunt and peck game within PL, you will read slowly and the poem will sputter to a halt.  Just pretend that there is a shepherd (whether you can name him or not) and move on. 

Milton’s also very daring here.  He invokes the classical muse (a customary move) to aid him in telling his tale.  Then he invokes God to do the same – and how he does that!

Thou from the first
Wast present, and with mighty wings outspread [ 20 ]
Dove-like satst brooding on the vast Abyss
And mad'st it pregnant

That’s just a fantastic image of God, brooding (in all senses of the word) on nothingness and then giving it life.  This is far more radical and organic and tender and maternal (oddly) than the relatively sterile “let there be light.”

Milton’s also (if you didn’t catch it!) full of poetic arrogance.  Meaning he’s willing to try to make the big argument, to attempt things yet unattempted in Prose or Rhime, and to (no small task here!) justify the ways of god to men.  Some wag once quipped “Beer does more than Milton can/To justify the ways of god to man.”  But how can you not read something that *tries* to do that. 

Yet at the same time Milton is humble within the language.  He tucks his fantastic dove image deep within a sentence, making it subordinate to his imploration of poetic aid. 

This is a work rich in contradictions. 

**

So, I thought I’d close with a couple of good snippets from PL to encourage (hopefully) someone out there to read it. 

The first is Eve addressing Adam.  In PL, the mother of our race is revealed to be a great love poet: “With thee conversing I forget all time.”  I am genuinely sorry for anyone who hasn’t experienced that kind of love.    Eve builds up this wonderful list of things she loves, and then, like a rhetorical wave getting pulled back into the ocean, she recalls all these things and simply says that in the absence of her love, none of these are sweet.  It’s a very complex kind of statement when you parse it out; it’s about presence and sharing, and evinces Eve's outward ranging mind. 

From PARADISE LOST
Book IV
lines 639-658

With thee conversing I forget all time,
All seasons and thir change, all please alike.
Sweet is the breath of morn, her rising sweet,
With charm of earliest Birds;  pleasant the Sun
When first on this delightful Land he spreads
His orient Beams, on herb, tree, fruit, and flow’r
Glist’ring with dew; fragrant the fertile earth
After soft showers;  and sweet the coming on
of grateful Ev’ning mild, the silent Night
With this her solemn Bird and this fair Moon.
And these the Gems of Heav’n, her starry train:
But neither breath of Morn when she ascends
With charm of earliest Birds, nor rising Sun
On this delightful land, nor herb, fruit, flow’r
Glist’ring with dew, nor fragrance after showers,
Nor grateful Ev’ning mild, nor silent Night
With this her solemn Bird, nor walk by Moon,
Or glittering Star-light without thee is sweet.
But wherefore all night long shine these, for whom
This glorious sight, when sleep hath shut all eyes?

**

The next is some of Satan’s rhetoric as he tries to rally the banished angels to support him as the ruler of hell.  I’m sure you’ve heard the final line, and I’m sure you’re all familiar with the rationalization, the grasping at straws, the pride, the rage.  It’s all here:

From PARADISE LOST
Book I
lines 254-253

The mind is its own place, and in it self
Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n.
What matter where, if I be still the same,
And what I should be, all but less then he
Whom Thunder hath made greater? Here at least
We shall be free; th' Almighty hath not built
Here for his envy, will not drive us hence:
Here we may reign secure, and in my choyce
To reign is worth ambition though in Hell:
Better to reign in Hell, then serve in Heav'n.

Compare this to his later (private) lament in Book IV, lines 72-78. .

Me miserable! which way shall I flie
Infinite wrauth, and infinite despaire?
Which way I flie is Hell; my self am Hell; 
And in the lowest deep a lower deep
Still threatning to devour me opens wide,
To which the Hell I suffer seems a Heav'n.

   

 

**

The last is a touch of the fantastic in Milton.   Adam and Eve have just finished a day’s labor in “mutual love and mutual help” and have (this is before the fall) laid themselves down naked in their bower.  They observe no religious "rites" except for a simple expression of thanks, but they do enjoy “their Rites Mysterious of connubial Love,” after which they fall asleep in each other’s arms.  (Again, this is pretty radical stuff for the day - Milton labels the anti-sexual as Hypocrites.)   

Satan, disguised in the form of a toad-like thing creeps up on the sleeping Adam and Eve, who, unknown to him, are guarded by the angel Ithuriel.

As a distracted and fascinated Satan begins to whisper in the ears of the sleepers, Ithuriel finds him and is uncertain of what’s going on. . .

From PARADISE LOST
Book IV,
Lines 810-825

Him thus intent Ithuriel with his Spear
Touch’d lightly; for no falsehood can endure
Touch of Celestial temper, but returns
Of force to its own likeness: up he starts
Discoverd and surpriz’d. As when a spark
Lights on a heap of nitrous Powder, laid
Fit for the Tun some Magazin to store
Against a rumord Warr, the Smuttie graine
With sudden blaze diffus’d, inflames the Aire:
So started up in his own shape the Fiend.
Back stept those two fair Angels half amaz'd 
So sudden to behold the grieslie King;
Yet thus, unmovd with fear, accost him soon.

Which of those rebell Spirits adjudg'd to Hell
Com'st thou, escap'd thy prison, and transform'd,
Why satst thou like an enemie in waite?

This is a tremendously kinetic and dramatic scene that Milton renders with great economy – it’s inspired a number of paintings:

The image is:
Satan Starting from the Touch of Ithuriel's Spear (Satan flieht, von Ithuriels Speer beruht) 1779
Henry Fuseli
Oil on canvas, 2305 x 2763 mm

Anyway, I hope this might cause some of you to skim through Paradise Lost. There's a lot of great poetry in there (just don't get put off by the bits that *don't* grab you).

Best,

Scoplaw

Finger on the Play Button

Well, I’ve had a relaxing few hours.  In another life, they’d have counted as life-maintenance-work – i.e., the stuff you gotta do to keep on going.  Dishes, laundry, shopping, bills, those sorts of things. But here in law student land, those become absolute pleasures; you have a physical task to do, you do it, it’s done. 

This is very unlike most elements of my current life, where it’s hard to say whether you’re “completing” something.  Even if there’s some kind of deadline (which is usually mutable), in the time leading up to the deadline you can always do more, prep better (but not over-prep), and then, once the deadline passes, you wait a heck of a long time (usually) to find out what the result is, and/or what the *ultimate* disposition of any legal matter will be.  Sometimes sentencing is only the beginning. 

Law school parallels this as well.  Prep for the class, there’s always more, until the exam is done, after which you’re already deep in other classes before you find out how you did. 

It’s not an environment that allows for easy self-assessment, in that it’s sort of like juggling.  You just concentrate on the next toss, with some idea of what’s coming up.  But the next toss must be done before anything else.  While you’re in that cycle, you’re not spending a lot of time thinking about your last toss – better or worse, it’s done.

Thus, it’s so nice to break out of LS mode and simply do small things and have them go away.  The jacket is sewn, the letter to a friend is sent, the bike tuned, the clothes washed.  Not that there won’t be letters and jackets and bikes and dirty clothes in the future, but I don’t have to wait and find out about the result of my actions.  They’re right here, I enjoy them right now.

I realize this must seem like an odd thing to blog about, but, well, there you have it.

**

At some point last night I got in touch with an old friend, Thinks Before She Speaks, and we did some chilling, some thinking, and some speaking.  She gave, as always, good advice.  Sometimes I worry that I’m too harsh in my assessment of things, so when getting advice, it’s nice to be able to tell your adviser a version of something that’s favored against whatever position you’re actually taking (i.e., you tell the story in a way that exaggerates your biases while minimizing others’ culpability) and then still have someone you respect find that yeah, your “harsh” assessment isn’t so harsh after all.

Is that even a sentence?  I wonder.  But not too deeply.

We now have a pirogue date sometime in the near future.  Her old friend (the Artillery Woman) ‘s mother sent a batch.  So I’ll be drawing on all my western European skills to come up with good preparation ideas. 

**

My apt. has been hopping lately, and it’s caused me to reflect that I’ve now spent the majority of my adult life in non-owned housing (and if we count mortgages as “not owned,” then the amount of time living in owned places is 0). 

The number of places I’ve lived is still greater than the number of years I’ve been doing this (i.e., the average amount of time I’ll spend in a given place is still less than one calendar year.)  A well-off ex of mine used to give me shit about selling off my library, but when you live like this, there’s not much choice. 

Apt. living has an odd dynamic to it.  You’re intimately aware of your neighbors, but often do not know them at all.   I wrote something about it a few year (7) back, and thought I’d repost it, with some small revisions. 

When reading this one aloud, it’s easy to, by inflection, indicate that the first line of he poem means something like - the postcard has “The weather’s fine here,” written on it, and it’s signed “Upstairs.”

The Postcard Pinned to my Door Reads:

The weather's fine here.
– Upstairs.

Now that it's spring, I haven't heard the pipes clang
as you whap your sole against your radiator's regulator,
nor have I heard your evening curses, percussion
of implements in mixing bowls and the crescendo
of pans clattering into your sink
as yet another omelet goes awry.
In fact, it's been rather quiet lately, and I wonder
if your excitable dog is dead, kenneled
or has been educated.

Its been weeks since I've abandoned playing The Clash
at full volume over his yapping, and even then,
five minutes later, I'd just hear The Dead Milkmen blaring back.

How is it we've never met?

I've often thought you might be the blonde
with the terrier, whom I saw one day reading Keats
in the laundry room, and for that alone, never
called management, even during your midnight
Valentine's Day bash – all those hard paired heels clacking. . .
though I suppose, in an odd twist,
you could be the matron with the poodle.

Why are you home alone recently,
always by six, in for the night?

I flip the postcard;  a picture of Roman storied-apartments
recently excavated from under a volcano's flow.
Bright frescoes, some ledges, little clutter.
Plaster cast from an ash hollow, a gecko drapes
his underbelly over a pear in a wicker basket.
In the corner, a ladder leads up, out of the photo.

It's so quiet.  What message are you sending?

Jet Set

Well, I’ve dropped off the blogging map lately.  Lotsa big important news waiting on things tends to make for weak blogging patterns.  Well, for me at any rate.

So, I’ve caught y’all up on the car saga – I’m currently driving a rental and waiting for my car to be fixed.  I spent about 4 hours on the phone with various companies - that kind of thing eats into your week.  However, at least I am mobile.

In skewl news, I’m looking down at that ski-slope of the semester and getting a bit freaked out.  First of all, there are the extra-school commitments: job interviews, MPRE, stuff of life, etc.  Secondly, the clinic certainly looks like just as much work (if not more).   Thirdly, the classes I’m taking look challenging – perhaps too challenging.  In particular, Advanced Environmental Law looks like it has a ton of reading I’ll absolutely have to keep up on.  Say 150 pages a week?  Class Action looks like about 65 a week.  Role of the Federal Prosecutor looks similar.  I’ve no idea what Criminal Enforcement of Environmental Laws holds for me, as I missed the first class to go to an interview.  But people are dropping the class like flies.  While I’d love to be in a 6 person class, I *can’t* carry too much of the conversational weight at this point.  Argh. 

Lest this seem like whining, I’d recall to my readers that it’s possible to spend *vast* amounts of time on few only a few law pages, especially when the classes have strong policy elements where you’re not only discussing “the law” but the various rationales and structures which animate the holdings on the various cases.  I think the only thing I have going for me this semester is some good overlap between subjects, and I’ve had some general exposure to all of these topics.  We’ll see. 

**

On the job front, I just got back from a second round interview at a New England state PD.  I have absolutely no idea how it went.  The initial interviewer (whom I thought I did well with) didn’t seem to care much for me as I was denied a call back.  However, in an unusual turn of events, I was able to talk with someone via phone and had my interview character rehabilitated by that conversation.  Hence the callback, which resulted in my flying up, on *very* little sleep, and interviewing with the committee at 9am.  I felt flat, the committee felt flat, the whole thing felt flat.  That’s the problem with my sleeping patterns.  I can both go without sleep, and often have trouble sleeping in new environments or when I’m traveling; this effectively biases me against sleeping very deeply and fully when on the road.  However, while I’m functional on my minimal sleep schedule, I’m never at 100%, certainly not scintillating by any means.  Oh well, better some shot than none I’d say. 

The interview itself was panel style, alternating questions, with a set trail piece I had to prepare off a fact pattern and perform an hour later.  The set piece was a bit odd since it blended a couple of things that would ordinarily be mutually exclusive.  Actually it was more like blending two very different types of appearances you’d make before a judge.  (Sorry to be vague on the details, but the process is still ongoing.)  It felt kind of weird to break the standard trial rules I’d learned, but it was also a clever and fun exercise.  I’m not sure *why* the committee put together the set piece the way they did, but I approve.  In poetry classes I like to add and remove elements so that students can get a better insight into what the remaining or original pieces do.  This felt something like that.

The questions and questioning style were humane, professional, and not too pushy.  I’ve been grilled on harder fact patterns by even more laid back interviewers, and I think that prepared me well.  But again, there’s an uncertainty that runs through this whole process.  For example, let’s say I’m posed a standard “hard” question, such as “Can you stand up in court and say that a person who is accused of a horrible crime is not guilty, even after that person told you they actually committed said horrible crime?”  Instead of responding briskly, should I have dithered a bit on the “hard” question, which would indicate that I’ve thought deeply about the issues and, while not able to ignore some of the inherent tensions, have solidly come down on an answer that indicates a sustainable commitment to providing indigent defense?  Or was responding briskly the right thing to do, indicating confidence and prior thought?   Or does it just make me look like a shallow and pompous idiot?  Who knows.   Then there are selection proxies – “He’s rich, so he’ll stick around because he does not need money.”  “He’s rich, so he’ll get bored and leave to pursue other interests.”  “He’s poor, so he’ll stick around because he’s used to not living large.”  “He’s poor, so he’ll jump ship at first whiff of a great paying job.”

In some ways these interviews are like the whole body language interpretation debate.  Some people think looking down is a sign of weakness, looking up is a sign of strength and challenge, while crossing your arms is defensive, and keeping your arms at your sides is a sign of confidence.  So what make of someone who crosses their arms over their chest and looks you in the eye – especially when that person thinks they’re taking a belligerent stance toward you?  Or someone who keeps their hands at their sides but looks away when addressing you?

In short I’m suggesting that each interviewer probably has an idea of “what certain things mean” and will select for it, while another interviewer will reach the opposite conclusion.

So, for all of you who have asked, I really have no idea how it went. 

**

As far as the events surrounding my interview, I was able to spend some time (although not much) with Seth and Ginger.  It’s always disappointing to realize that you could talk for days but only have a few hours.