"But I've often had the feeling that the existential dilemma is a very subjective matter..."

"... entirely depending upon the individual and the circumstances of his life, and that we 'Western intellectuals' with our wrenched and tormented psyches have often imposed the need to find a purpose which may be in the end only an exercise in masochism," wrote William Styron in a letter to his daughter.

A fisherman in the Arabian Gulf finds purpose in life by fishing, a Wyoming shepherder by tending his sheep and remaining close to Nature that big sky. On a somewhat higher level intellectually; a person like James Joyce, a profoundly pessimistic man at bottom, could find reason and purpose through these moments of termed "epiphanies," — instances of intense revelation (through love, or a glimpse of transcendental beauty in the natural world) which gave such a sense of joy and self-realization that they justified and, in effect, ratified the existence of him who experienced them. In other words, the existential anguish becomes undone; through moments of aesthetic and spiritual fulfillment we find the very reason for existence.

Styron suffered from depression and stopped writing novels in the last 27 years of his life. The passage above is from a new collection of letters. His nonfiction account of suicidal depression is "Darkness Visible."

The letter above goes on to talk about his great novel "The Confessions of Nat Turner." He says:

The creative act in art often approaches this, but it can work on humbler levels as well. If you'll pardon my pointing to my own work, I think I tried to render this quality of revelation — "epiphany" in a part of Nat Turner. I'm thinking of the passage beginning on p. 119 of the Random House edition (you may want to re-read it) where Nat as a little boy is waiting on the table during a spring evening and experiences the combined ecstasy of (a) being alive and healthy in the springtime, (b) being appreciated as a human being, and (c) being given some marvelous unspoken promise about the future. For him at this moment all these things were enough. Existence and its joys justify everything and remain sufficient.

That reminds me of the the Dostoevsky quote we've loved so much we have a button:

Unsubtle subtlety you can't get away with on the radio: "If U Seek Amy."

Maybe if you'd written out "you," it could have just been an inside joke. (I doubt it.) But the "U" is the tip that you want the PR.

ADDED: My son Chris notes the poem in James Joyce's "Ulysses":

If you see Kay,
Tell him he may.
See you in tea,
Tell him from me.

"I think it's odd and interesting. It's part of life."

Comments?

ADDED: Bainbridge asks some questions that indicate that he finds this rather funny. I don't. But I have to agree with some of these questions:

Who stashes their porn on the internet? Other than porn stars?

Kozinski long has been regarded as one of the smartest guys on the federal bench. Do we need to rethink that?

IN THE COMMENTS: Simon says:

One would think that so notoriously tech-savvy a judge would be more conversant with the technology - and more careful.

One could deduce that he wanted to be caught ... or got a thrill from risking getting caught. You know, it might be tiresome for a certain sort of person to be a judge. There you are, for life. Well set up, but restricted, restrained, forced to be sober — forbidden to be fully expressive. Oddly, I had a conversation with Alex Kozinski about exactly this subject 20 years ago. Kozinski was only 35 years old when he was appointed, and that was 23 years ago.

ADDED: Patterico says he has the images referred to in the linked article, obtained from the L.A. Times reporter. If you go here, you will be able to read detailed descriptions and click on links to see the images. I clicked on all the links except the one that would have required watching a video. I wonder why the L.A. Times published this article. Why humiliate this man? (I am reminded of this story of unnecessary humiliation from a couple months ago.) What made it news? Is the porn collection of every public figure newsworthy? Or is it special treatment for conservative judges? (I'm thinking of this precedent.)

These are pictures of naked people, all of them funny or interesting in some way, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with wanting to look at them and to show them to other adults. The photograph of the women painted as cows is just silly — nothing to be horrified by. Yes, you can see genitalia in these pictures. It's extremely common to want to look at genitalia. It doesn't do anything for me, but I understand the strong interest many men have in such views — repetitive and predictable though they are. (The transvestite slide show is a little unpredictable, but within an utterly predictable range.)

Now, it should be noted that Kozinski is currently serving as the trial judge in an obscenity case, so there is a special motivation here. One might object to the prosecution of Ira Isaacs. Maybe the government shouldn't be prosecuting such cases, and one might think that it is hypocritical or at least relevant that the judge in the case has his own pornography. I think that is absurd. The judge doesn't make the decision to prosecute, and the sort of material at issue in an obscenity case is quite extreme — far beyond the sort of pictures that we ought to assume many judges and jurors possess.

[Kozinski's] involvement in the case may be a stroke of luck for Isaacs. That is because Kozinski is seen as a staunch defender of free speech. When he learned that there were filters banning pornography and other materials from computers in the appeals court's Pasadena offices, he led a successful effort to have the filters removed....

Isaacs said he would testify as his own expert witness at trial and planned to lecture jurors on how perceptions of art have changed over the years. There was a time, he said, when the works of authors James Joyce and D.H. Lawrence were called obscene.

The point, Isaacs said, "is do we really want to throw artists in jail in America?"...

[The Obscenity Prosecution Task Force] has won convictions in more than a dozen cases, the vast majority resulting from plea bargains....

[Isaacs] said that prosecutors have made several overtures inviting him to take a plea in the case, but that he has refused every time....

"If I get convicted and go to prison now," Isaacs said, "I go as an artist."

I'd like to know what set of events led to the L.A. Times article.

Does the prosecution or the defense have more to gain from the revelation?

AND: The NYT offers more background:

In a telephone interview on Wednesday afternoon, Judge Kozinski ... said the Web site was meant to be private and that several people had contributed to it. “There is a ton of stuff on there,” Judge Kozinski said. “It’s not a porn site. There’s some funny stuff on there.”

Judge Kozinski said his son, Yale, maintained the site, which had the domain name of kozinski.com. Yale Kozinski, a film editor, confirmed that, as do Internet registry records for the site.

“This server is my private Web server,” Yale Kozinski said. “It’s owned by me. The domain is registered to me. The people who have access to put files up there are friends and family.” Among other things, he said, the site contained family photos and a collection of the judge’s articles.

The Los Angeles Times reported that Judge Kozinski had conceded posting some of the offensive materials. In interviews on Wednesday, neither Judge Kozinski nor his son could say who posted what, and Judge Kozinski said he might have uploaded some materials by mistake.

The site was never meant to be public, Yale Kozinski said. “The fact that it was publicly accessible actually is my fault, too,” he said. “I made a mistake in configuring it.”

Judge Kozinski said he was only moderately contrite.

“I guess I should be more careful about access and all,” he said. “I didn’t put anything on there I think would be embarrassing.”

Oh, well, if he doesn't think it's embarrassing, then maybe I shouldn't be critical of the press for publicly humiliating him.

UPDATE: How Appealing has info on the tipster, Cyrus Sanai, who emails (boldface added):

I discovered this information on Xmas Eve, 2007. * * * * I immediately downloaded so much material that his internet provider cut him off. When the site went back up, Judge Kozinski had removed some of the biggest video files. * * * * I pitched it to the Daily Journal, the Recorder, the LA Times and the WSJ through end of January 2008. I was interested in his site because of my renewed misconduct complaint against Judge Kozinski...

The LA Times reporter I contacted, Henry Weinstein (who extensively covered the Manuel Real stuff) said he would get to it, then he took the buyout. I contacted Scott Glover, the reporter on the obscenity trial, last Sunday, June 8, 2008. He knew nothing about my prior contact with the LA Times; but that institution is in disarray because of the well-covered restructuring. Therefore, it would not be fair to say that the LA Times "held it". The institutional knowledge of my prior contact disappeared * * * *

The NY Sun has this:

The judge's trouble with Mr. Sanai began in 2005, when the attorney wrote an article with examples of 9th Circuit judges allegedly ignoring circuit precedents. Judge Kozinski wrote a rebuttal that noted Mr. Sanai's personal stake in one of the disputed issues. The attorney, who had a motion pending in that case, filed a complaint alleging that the judge broke rules barring judges from commenting or lobbying on pending cases. The complaint was dismissed, but Mr. Sanai refiled it after the judge re-posted the article on the same site with the explicit photos.

Here's some analysis of the L.A. Times's journalism standards, from the Carnegie Reporting Program:

The key question is whether it would have been a story if Kozinski weren't presiding over an obscenity trial at the time...

I say yes. Kozinski is a high-ranking judge whose court hears more obscenity cases than the current one. Controversy over the line between erotica and obscenity is legal news, and Kozinski's misfortune provides a teaching moment to explore the current state of the law. Kozinski has a track record as a critic of government intrusion into personal use of the Internet. Publishing a story without the trial as a news hook would be extremely uncomfortable, but I would have green-lighted it and placed the revelations in the context of Kozinski's disputes with Sanai and over Internet use. As for the Times, there should be no question that it did the right thing under the circumstances.

AND: I got some of those links from Above the Law, which has lots of good discussion in the comments.

New ways to get lost in Amazon.

Have you noticed the new features in Amazon? I haven't seen any announcements on their main page, but if you go to an individual book, now, you can find all kinds of new, cool things. I'm not finding it for every book, and it seems as though it wouldn't be possible for books that are not open to the "search inside" function. But take, for example, "Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim." Let's look at the SIPs -- or "statistically improbable phrases":

Amazon.com's Statistically Improbable Phrases, or "SIPs", are the most distinctive phrases in the text of books in the Search Inside!™ program. To identify SIPs, our computers scan the text of all books in the Search Inside! program. If they find a phrase that occurs a large number of times in a particular book relative to all Search Inside! books, that phrase is a SIP in that book.

SIPs are not necessarily improbable within a particular book, but they are improbable relative to all books in Search Inside!. For example, most SIPs for a book on taxes are tax related. But because we display SIPs in order of their improbability score, the first SIPs will be on tax topics that this book mentions more often than other tax books. For works of fiction, SIPs tend to be distinctive word combinations that often hint at important plot elements.

For "Dress Your Family," they've only come up with: "eight black men." If you've read the book, you know what that refers to. If you click on the phrase, you get all the other books with that phrase: here. Useful? Possibly not in this case, though still interesting, in a rather random way.

Then there are the CAPs (capitalized phrases):

Aunt Monie, Monie Changes Everything, Baby Einstein, The Girl Next Door, The Ship Shape, Full House, Nuit of the Living Dead, Blood Work, North Carolina, Slumus Lordicus, Kwik Pik, Great Dane, Puta Lid, Saint Nicholas, Anne Frank, The End of the Affair, Royal Pavilion, Who's the Chef, Apple Pan, The Empire

Each is clickable. You can then see other books that frequently use that capitalized phrase. Well, no one else is using Slumus Lordicus yet, but here are the Anne Frank references.

Then there's the concordance:

Concordance is an alphabetized list of the most frequently occurring words in a book, excluding common words such as "of" and "it." The font size of a word is proportional to the number of times it occurs in the book. Hover your mouse over a word to see how many times it occurs, or click on a word to see a list of book excerpts containing that word.

There are also "text stats," showing you how easy or hard the book is to read. Sedaris, it turns out, is awfully easy to read -- 7th grade level. Doesn't say how funny he is, though.

Let me check another, similarly funny, but much darker book I like, "Running With Scissors." Hey, that's even easier to read! Let's try "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time." Oh, that's easy too. Hmmmm.... that's got a SIP of "bloody dog," so who else is SIP-ing "bloody dog"?

James Joyce! All right, then. Let's get the text stats for "Ulysses." I see that's easy to read too, so they say. According to the Flesch-Kinkaid analysis, it's written at less than a 7th grade level, so if you're not ready to tackle "Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim"...

UPDATE: You can check text stats for blogs at this website. In case you're wondering, this blog has the following numbers:

Gunning Fog Index 10.31
Flesch Reading Ease 66.29 (higher is easier, with 100 being the easiest)
Flesch-Kincaid Grade 7.13

The numbers for "Ulysses" are: 9.0, 68.1, 6.8. Do you find this confusing? Generally, I think it's a good sign if your ease-of-reading stats seem low for the difficulty of the material.

"Cleavage, erotic as it is, does not occur in nature."

In case you didn't read the NYT Style Magazine, here's a link to the article about the hot topic: cleavage — and its dependence on undergarments:

Although brassieres first appeared in the United States around 1904 (the word itself first appeared in Vogue in 1907), it seems the impulse to improve on nature's deficiencies goes all the way back to the Greek goddess Hera. According to Teresa Riordan in her excellent account ''Inventing Beauty,'' Hera wore an early version of a push-up bra, described in the ''Iliad'' as festooned with ''brooches of gold'' and ''a hundred tassels,'' the better to divert Zeus from the Trojan War. With the development of Vulcanized rubber in the 1840's, the idea of pneumatically improved breasts came into being, but they were scoffed at as ''ridiculous contrivances'' by no less a connoisseur than Lola Montez in her ''Arts of Beauty, or Secrets of a Lady's Toilet.'' Inevitably, corsets and the like impeded access to the very delights they served to highlight, leading at least one redblooded male to make witty protest. ''Please leave off that breastplate,'' James Joyce wrote to his future wife, Nora Barnacle, during their courtship. ''I do not like embracing a letterbox.''