Timothy Dexter

Ecuador is mentioned in the first sentence of the main body of the Harper’s Weekly Review.

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The Facebook bots kindly shared a mini-bio, in Spanish, of Timothy Dexter (1747–1806), history’s hombre más suertudo (luckiest man). It was intriguing enough that I went on to read Dexter’s Wikipedia bio. Then I read that bio aloud to Karin.

Certain commonalities with our President suggested themselves. Dexter, however, made money instead of losing it. And he didn’t start out with money from his father; he extracted it from his rich wife, whom he abused.

In business, he seems to have been lucky and devilishly intuitive, e.g. he turned a profit literally “shipping coal to Newcastle” (the proverbial expression for exporting to a saturated market).

I don’t intend to read any full-length biographies of Timothy Dexter. But I went looking anyway. The major ones are from the 1800s. The last notable book, the most recent edition of which is 65 years old, is by John P. Marquand – like Dexter, of Newburyport, Mass. – the author of the “Mr. Moto” fictions and of the Pulitzer-winning, satirical Late George Apley. I wonder how serious his treatment of Dexter is.

1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 95: The ice storm

In A Fish Called Wanda (1988), John Cleese, a midlife-crisis sufferer, paces nervously in his underwear. He’s in a strange house, waiting for his lover. …

Mr. Hood – Kevin Kline, Cleese’s Wanda castmate – does the same in The Ice Storm (1997). Kline doesn’t quite play it for laughs, but the situation is amusing – especially when Mr. Hood goes downstairs and finds his teenage daughter, Wendy (Christina Ricci), fooling around with little Mikey Carver (Elijah Wood).

Wendy has put on a Nixon mask. (It’s 1973.)

Why are you here, Mr. Hood asks her.

Later, he tells his wife what he caught Wendy doing.

Why were YOU at the Carvers’, asks Mrs. Hood (Joan Allen).

Mr. Hood is taken aback. The marriage has gone so stale that he has forgotten to disguise his affair with Mrs. Carver (Sigourney Weaver).

(Mrs. Hood also has a vice: she shoplifts.)

Mr. Hood’s affair is as stale as his marriage. Mrs. Carver tells Mr. Hood that he’s boring. He is, but she’s cruel about it. She leaves him in her bedroom, gets in her car, and drives away.

Humiliating her husband and her lover – simultaneously, if possible – is how she gets her kicks.

Her son, Sandy (Adam Hann-Byrd), a quiet, shy boy, also displays a touch of sadism. (It says something that he is one of the most likeable, or least despicable, characters.)

He blows up toys in the back yard.

Play with the whip instead, his mother tells him.

Mikey, Sandy’s brother, is a gifted student whose mind is in the clouds. He worries about molecules that drift through the air into people’s bodies.

He’s a chip off the old block. His father, Mr. Carver (Jamey Sheridan), a scientist, is like a planet with a huge irregular orbit. Kindly but distracted, he passes near his family once every few earth-decades.

The Carvers and Hoods live in New Caanan – an apt name, what with the regression of morals – on Connecticut’s Gold Coast. Other suburban dramas have been filmed or located there: The Swimmer, Revolutionary Road, and Nicole Kidman’s Stepford Wives.

The scenery is as important as the story. Look at those houses!

(Nowadays, you can tour them on realtors’ websites.)

One character is breaking away from New Caanan: Wendy’s older brother, Paul (Tobey Maguire), who attends a boarding school in Manhattan. He has normal teen misfortunes. He’ll get over them. He reads comic books – and the Russians. He is not trapped in his family’s social circle. He has a broader perspective on families. He’s able to generalize.

One worries more for the other children. Least for Wendy, perhaps, because her choices, while wrong, are deliberate. They’re experimental, not wanton or compulsive or knee-jerk. She even shoplifts experimentally (not desperately like her mother). It may not be nice that she carries on with both Carver boys at the same time. But, one perceives, she’s figuring out that she definitely likes one better than the other.

Ricci suggests all of this without saying much. Actors tend to specialize in either smart or dumb roles. Ricci can project intelligence or abject stupidity, as required. Wendy is shrewder than her deeds. Her face is bland but we can tell the gears are turning.

The other standouts are Hann-Byrd as Sandy, Sheridan as Mr. Carver, and Allen as Mrs. Hoover (the most reflective adult). Oh, and Allison Janney, who does a hilarious and unsettling turn as the hostess of a “key” party. (Men put their keys in a bowl; women draw keys; each woman goes home with the man whose key she has drawn.) Janney is New Caanan’s Ghislaine Maxwell, always smiling, coaxing would-be-sophisticates into becoming companions in degradation. None, afterward, can quite understand how he or she drifted into misery. They’re like their children, making the same mistakes, only they never learned to choose responsibly – as Wendy, in her one-step-backward-two-steps-forward manner, is doing. Perhaps the upheaval of the sixties permanently unmoored the grownups. I don’t know. The movie succeeds less as social commentary than as a rotation of vivid character sketches. Which is all right; that’s what ensemble dramas are for.

I should mention, also, that in the end, an ice storm purifies the air.

The snub

So, Belichick, who won eight Super Bowls (six as a head coach) and got to three others, wasn’t voted into the Hall of Fame.

“What does a guy have to do?” he asked, reasonably.

Brady: “Welcome to the world of voting.”

Amen to that. I mean, if Belichick – as qualified a candidate as there is – can’t get elected by so-called experts, what chance does electoral democracy have?

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I finished Steinbeck’s East of Eden for the group. Taken page by page, it’s quite a good read. Taken all together, it has problems, not least that it’s a replotting and therefore a rebuke of the Cain and Abel story. My objection isn’t so much, How dare Steinbeck?; it’s that the Cain and Abel story really can’t be improved or even riffed on. Change it in any way, and its power is diminished.

Abel is dedicated in church; Samuel’s exactitude; weather; football; “E-learning”; ICE vs. Minnesotans

We dedicated Abel to the Lord this morning. Samuel and Daniel remained in the adults’ church service. Upon its conclusion, Samuel ran up to the pastor and scolded him for mentioning Duolingo, which is not discussed in the Bible. (The pastor, in his sermon on Acts 2, had joked about Duolingo’s provision of the ability to speak “in tongues.”)

I approve of Samuel’s zeal for the truth.

Yesterday I said “shoes” when I meant “boots,” and Samuel flew off the handle.

“I misspoke,” I acknowledged.

He was not appeased. “You and Mom say too many wrong things.”

“Do you think you speak better than your parents?” I asked him.

He does think so.

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Across the nation it’s cold and blustery. Today I watched the Broncos and Pats fail to advance the ball in a Mile High snowstorm. The Pats survived, 10–7. (I’m not keen on any of the league’s semifinalists. The Broncos, Pats, Rams, and Seahawks all have terrible uniforms. Their uniforms were better in the early 1990s.)

It was cold enough on Friday that Samuel was kept home. He attended an “E-learning” session with his teacher and four other students who logged in. Daniel viewed the lesson, too, and greatly enjoyed it. He and Samuel fought on camera. Samuel must do “E-learning” again tomorrow. Karin has urged me to send Daniel to the basement to watch TV.

It has been cold in Minnesota, too, and much sadder. ICE agents murdered another civilian yesterday; at least, the videos sure make it look like murder. As awful as each attack has been, a certain implication is worse: that it could happen to anyone. (To any ordinary person, that is; those who live in gated communities probably are safe.) Even non-protestors have been attacked, people simply traveling from A to B.

If the perpetrators intend to terrify, then what they’re doing in Minnesota is terrorism. And maybe even if they don’t intend it.

Veronika of Austria; Bible reading; time capsules

Cows are smarter than people think, according to the BBC.

Despite about 10,000 years of humans living alongside cattle, this is the first time scientists have documented a cow using a tool.

The researchers say their discovery shows that cows are smarter than we think and that other cows could develop similar skills, given the chance.

I’m too tired to work out the details, but I suspect that trouble lurks here for Hume’s account of testimonial knowledge.

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Bible reading report. I’m caught up reading Acts, but I’m three or four chapters behind in each of Genesis, Nehemiah, and Matthew. It’s not as dire as it sounds. Acts is by far the most thoroughly annotated of these books. The notes discuss every historical character (there’s a surprising amount of information about Sergius Paulus), every city that Paul visits, logistical reasons for travelers’ detours and delays, etc.

How, exactly, were worms involved in Herod Agrippa’s death? The possibilities are spelled out. (Bonus tidbit: the guy used to party with Caligula.)

Fascinating but long.

If I don’t begin reading before Abel wakes in the morning, I don’t finish by the end of the day.

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Less demanding is my re-reading of Jay Bennett’s Deathman, Do Not Follow Me (1968). I read it in 1995, when I was 13 or 14. It seemed dated then. But now more years have gone since I first read it than between that reading and when it was first published. And the book feels, if anything, more fresh.

I had a similar feeling the other day, showing Steve McQueen’s Bullitt, also from 1968, to my family. That movie used to seem antediluvian. Now, its hospitals and airports remind me of my childhood; they look how hospitals and airports should look.