It has come to my attention that John Quincy Adams was not the only ex-president to argue before the U.S. Supreme Court. (Update is here).

Also, his biographer claims that he turned down his Supreme Court seat not because his wife was too pregnant to travel but because the pay was less than half of what he made as a diplomat, and because he thought that being forced to put aside his political views constantly in order to make sound judicial rulings would be too much of a drag. I hope I will not sound overly cynical if I say that the latter reason for refusal is rather quaint.

It's not quite clear when I read Akhil Amar's The Constitution and Criminal Procedure: First Principles-- like most books assigned for class, I read it in bits and pieces, on trains, at parties, and while procrastinating real work. Unlike most books, though, I am actually pretty sure I finished it, or at least read every part of it at some point or another, but it is a little hard to tell when. At any rate, the book is basically spun out of Amar's law review articles on a neo-textualist neo-originalist theory of the 4th, 5th, and 6th amendments.

In a nutshell: The exclusionary rule is wrong, warrants are not a prerequisite to reasonableness, juries are underused, peremptory strikes should be eliminated, there should be no criminal bench trials, the remedy for violating the speedy-trial clause should not be dismissal, defendants should have the right to issue grants of immunity, but both prosecution and defense should issue only testimonial immunity rather than transactional or use-fruits. And something is wrong with confrontation clause jurisprudence, but to be honest I have forgotten what, and will have to bone up on it before the exam Thursday. 90% of it is right, and all of it is interesting. (On what is missing from that 10%, see Michael Stokes Paulsen, Dirty Harry and The Real Constitution, 64 U. Chi. L. Rev. 1457 (1997), (reviewing Akhil Amar, The Constitution and Criminal Procedure: First Principles (1997)).

Well, three hours and seventeen pages later, my Land Use exam is done-- my first graded law school exam. I seem to have survived, although with a very strong cramp in my elbow.

Because there is not enough in my life to distract me, I have also agreed to post a few things over at co-blogger Sudeep's; any posts there will likely be incoherent, sporadic, and pretentious.

And I'm glad to see that Amanda has finally returned to the fold. Now if only we can convince her to return to the eastern half of the country as well.

I went recently to see Noel Coward's classic romantic comedy, Private Lives, at the Pasadena Playhouse (full disclosure: the reason I came out to California was an unpaid reason, so I've been telemarketing in the evenings). It's the story of two honeymooning couples in France. Elyot and Amanda, each out for the very first night with the new spouse, discover that they are both staying at the same hotel. Five years earlier, after much fighting, they had divorced each other, and now each is remarried. But Elyot and Amanda's passion for each other remains (along with their ability to dive quickly into bickering), and appears far fierier than anything either bears for the new spouse.

This play was a shocker when it was first performed 75 years ago---Amanda confesses to having had several affairs between her divorce and remarriage, but nothing really to be jealous of, for they were inconsequential attachments. The second act opens with her and Elyot having run off to an affair together in Paris. The witty insults that marked their first meeting are still flying in between the calm times of lying around in bed. They're the sharp blows that are the mark of an intimate, but somehow---whether because Coward desired an element of absurdity or because the two lovers don't actually want to deliver the lethal cut---always land a few inches to the side. It's very tense but also quite funny. These are the lines that I came for.

Not so funny (for me)*---but still integral to the plot---was the physical violence.

Early on in the play, we learn that Elyot struck Amanda during their previous marriage. She brushes it off, laughing about smashing phonograph records over his head. As the affair takes a turn for the downhill, this extremely physical couple begins throwing real blows on stage. It starts silly, with flung pillows, where only the intent and not the impact could hurt. Elyot's head shatters another phonograph record, but this is still the realm of Wiley Coyote and Road Runner. When he hits her, though, it's a real strike.

How do you stage an old play today in which domestic violence is an important source of humor? One slap is enough to call the cops. It's enough to be referred to anger management. It's enough that friends say, "That's inexcusable."

One slap may not---at least in the context of this play---be enough that these above reactions are what should be done. Amanda hits back. There's no indication that she's afraid to retaliate in kind, or anything less than a fair match for Elyot. It has to be that way. There's no other way around the script. The physical fights must have some tinge of the choreography of a martial arts exhibition, planned strikes where the response is known in advance so that no one gets hurt. But it can't simply be cartoonish, either. For all the comedy, this is a play about a serious passion, one that cannot be contained by years of separation or serious and intended vows made to new parties or real fears, by Amanda and Elyot, of what will happen to the two of them if they remain a couple. They know there's love, but there's also the danger that these two personalities cannot sufficiently control themselves together. Violence fits the destruction because if it were only verbal, holds would be barred, blocking the depths of the pattern the two must overcome.

The domestic violence can't be removed from this play if the production intends to stay true to what Noel Coward wrote. There's not much room in the text to explore why, despite the general truth that one should not strike a spouse, this is a relationship that should not be condemned. That's not the play this is. You grit your teeth, find an Amanda who can hold her own anywhere, and let the audience remain, as perhaps they are, slightly uncomfortable with some of the sources of laughs.

* * *

[*] Ok, so I noticed myself not laughing at times when audience members around me were. Granted, I'm probably sensitive to violence in media the way some people are to blood and guts in ER: it bothers me more than it bothers the average joe. I quit karate because I couldn't get myself excited about going to class to hit and kick people. It was nothing like the thrill of aikido, where the aim is throw---rather, to suggest they throw themselves rather than painfully twist their limbs---attackers twice one's size to the mat. And I watched this play with half a mind as to whether or not I'd be able to recommend it to a friend---a divorced friend whose previous marriage, as it dissolved, did include a 911 call that resulted in an order to attend anger management sessions. I'm not sure I could recommend it.

* * *

Talking in bed ought to be easiest, Lying there together goes back so far, An emblem of two people being honest.

Yet more and more time passes silently.
Outside, the wind's incomplete unrest
Builds and disperses clouds about the sky,

And dark towns heap up on the horizon.
None of this cares for us. Nothing shows why
At this unique distance from isolation

It becomes still more difficult to find
Words at once true and kind,
Or not untrue and not unkind.

-- Philip Larkin, Talking in Bed

Hello. It's good to sign in once again to Crescat and face the questions posed by our fabled broad array of categories (places, names, and where it was you meant to travel). I am still out in Pasadena for an as yet undetermined length of time, but I've finished my temporary position at a place which required me to not blog.

From an old favorite---really, the first blog-like publication I ever read, a site an old boss of mine introduced me to---I ran across a Garrison Keillor piece in The Nation, Confessions of a Listener. He writes, talking of his taste in radio, that he doesn't tune in to hear "earnest liberal English majors" like himself: "I go to church on Sunday morning to be among the like-minded, and we all say the Nicene Creed together and assume nobody has his fingers crossed, but when it comes to radio, I prefer oddity and crankiness."

Essentially, I feel the same about blogs. If someone's going to push a viewpoint to which I'm already mostly sympathetic, I won't find it interesting unless it's connected to facts I'm glad to learn (Oxblog; Registan). Otherwise, I'm going to head back over to Southern Appeal to check out the entertaining rants there and remain utterly unconvinced of the virtues of preserving traditional marriage. Only when it comes with the wit and humor of a writer like Keillor will I enjoy hearing my own views affirmed.

I see that Drezner's invited the liberals of Democracy Arsenal to hold down the fort while he's gone and actually talk, for once, to an audience expected to mostly disagree with them. Now, I don't understand claimed trends that people only read the blogs that reinforce their opinions any better than the claimed trends that women aren't as interested in political blogging than men are, but I have figured that reasoning from my own tastes isn't going to get anywhere. (That level of logic shall be restricted to the occasional recipe-blogging.) I hope that, thanks to my co-bloggers’ general diversity and Will's noted particular political views, whatever I write will reach a heterogeneous audience. Crescat's resident liberal is back.