World Cup groups

… have been drawn. Gratifyingly, there are no weak groups: all are groups “of death.” Literal death.

Just kidding. These are not the groups. (Besides, the tournament has been expanded from 32 to 48 teams.)

(I should acknowledge that I didn’t create this image; I found it on the Internet.)

The actual groups are these:

Group A

Mexico

South Africa

South Korea

TBD: Czechia, Denmark, Ireland, or North Macedonia

Group B

Canada

TBD: Bosnia & Herzegovina, Italy, Northern Ireland, or Wales

Qatar

Switzerland

Group C

Brazil

Morocco

Haiti

Scotland

Group D

USA

Paraguay

Australia

TBD: Kosovo, Romania, Slovakia, or Turkey

Group E

Germany

Curaçao

Ivory Coast

ECUADOR

Group F

The Netherlands

Japan

TBD: Albania, Poland, Sweden, or Ukraine

Tunisia

Group G

Belgium

Egypt

Iran

New Zealand

Group H

Spain

Cape Verde

Saudi Arabia

Uruguay

Group I

France

Senegal

TBD: Bolivia, Iraq, or Suriname

Norway

Group J

Argentina

Algeria

Austria

Jordan

Group K

Portugal

TBD: DR Congo, Jamaica, or New Caledonia

Uzbekistan

Colombia

Group L

England

Croatia

Ghana

Panama

Locations and times have been decided, too. Ecuador will play against: the Ivory Coast, in Philadelphia; then, Curaçao, in Kansas City; and lastly, Germany, in East Rutherford, New Jersey (in what will be Ecuador’s first World Cup rematch; the countries first played in 2006).

Our Aunt Linda in K.C. is keen to host any family members who wish to attend the Curaçao game. But tickets are rapaciously expensive. I can’t imagine I’ll attend (unless I win a sweepstakes out of a box of cereal).

Besides, if I travel to K.C., I’ll have to spend precious hours away from the television. I’ll miss Japan vs. Tunisia or some other partidazo.

A note on Curaçao, the smallest nation ever to qualify for a World Cup. This hardly ever happens, but … I didn’t know where Curaçao is on the map . I knew Curaçao is one of the Dutch Antilles, but I would have grouped it among the islands southeast of Puerto Rico. Actually, it’s off the coast of Venezuela – practically in South America.

I am ashamed not to have known this. In my defense, Curaçao became a sovereign nation only in 2010.

Happy birthday to Abel

He turned one. He slept most of the day because the doctor gave him five shots.

More appealing, if less vital, were these gifts:

Cupcakes.

Onesies (i.e., bodysuits).

Wagon, Radio Flyer, plastic, small. For giving rides to stuffed animals. (Did I mention he walks now?)

Dog, white with black spots, plastic, noise-making, profoundly disturbing to Samuel.

Literature: Fortunately, by Remy Charlip. Not really meant for Abel’s age-group (he doesn’t object). Amusing to Samuel. Mildly disturbing to Daniel. Both reactions are correct.

Most of these gifts were from Karin’s dad’s family.

Abel was to have had a little party at my parents’ house, but my mom slipped on some ice and broke her arm. She’ll have surgery later this week. Last night, when I called, she was in high spirits: adequately drugged, surrounded by other progeny.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Here is another quote about the postman Courtney Elliot, from The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole:

Courtney Elliot has offered to give me private tuition for my ‘O’ levels. It seems he is a Doctor of Philosophy who left academic life after a quarrel in a university common room about the allocation of new chairs. Apparently he was promised a chair and didn’t get it.

It seems a trivial thing to leave a good job for. After all, one chair is very much like another. But then I am an existentialist to whom nothing really matters.

I don’t care which chair I sit in.

I don’t think I would leave a university if I didn’t get a Chair, but I might if I didn’t get a chair. Some intellectuals (e.g., Victor Hugo, Sam the Architect) stand before a desk to work, but I’m not so vigorous as to do that.

Not just any chair would do. I would need a sofa, or at least an armchair from Goodwill.

1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 93: Il postino (The postman)

Quintessential small “prestige” picture. Italian-French-Belgian adaptation of a Chilean novel, set on a small Mediterranean island. Scored by an Argentinian (Luis Bacalov); directed by an Englishman (Michael Radford); co-starring a Frenchman (Philippe Noiret) as history’s most revered Chilean: Pablo Neruda.

Released in 1994. Released in the United States in 1995.

Nominated for five 1996 Oscars: Picture, Director, Adapted Screenplay, Actor (Massimo Troisi, who’d died), and Score (Bacalov won).

(Not unusual for Miramax thirty years ago.)

Really, though, the movie’s success is due to Troisi’s tricky performance.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Troisi is Mario, the (fictitious) part-time postman to Neruda, who is in political exile. Mario and Neruda become friends. This is very much at Mario’s instigation. He intrudes at all hours, with or without mail.

I recall Victor Hugo’s remark about his Channel Island years:

What a pity I was not exiled earlier! I could have achieved so many things which I fear I shall not have the time to complete.

Or as Simon Leys (ibid.) puts it:

The poet [Hugo] found himself left with only two interlocutors – but with these at least, he felt on the same footing: God and the ocean. … No wonder these years of solitude and contemplation were the most productive of his life.

Neruda seems determined to follow Hugo’s example. He devotes himself to beauty, politics, and his female companion. He is only pulled away from these things at the insistence of his tactless regular visitor.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Roger Ebert:

The first time we see Mario … we think perhaps he is retarded. He is having a conversation with his father, who seems to be retarded, too, or perhaps just engrossed in his soup.

We realize in the next scene or two that Mario is of normal intelligence, but has been raised in a place that provided him with almost nothing to talk about.

I don’t think it’s the place that makes Mario inarticulate. It’s that what he seeks isn’t easily describable.

The island’s other postal worker (Renato Scarpa) has plenty to say. He has political opinions. He admires Neruda as a famous fellow Communist. Of Neruda’s poetry, he knows almost nothing; he’s utterly mundane. Similarly, Mario’s father thinks only of fishing; and there’s an old widow, an innkeeper, who’s downright suspicious of whatever is purported to transcend daily concreteness.

Mario couldn’t care less about fishing. He doesn’t really care about politics, either. The island must import water; its provision is irregular; the authorities really ought to intervene. Mario understands this problem but shrugs it off.

Practicalities – earning a decent wage, having water to drink – have no grip on his imagination.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

What does?

Not the wider world.

Not whatever must be read about. Mario is more literate than most islanders but deciphers sentences haltingly. He’ll never devour pages of prose.

What, then?

If he knew the term, he might say: Blessedness.

A kind of holiness or beauty. Saintly beauty, but not of deeds. Beauty of being.

And not just any beauty of being – not at first. There’s plenty of natural beauty all around Mario, but scenery leaves him unaffected.

No, it’s supernatural beauty that he’s groping after, although it doesn’t occur to him to say as much, or even to try to formulate the concept.

(And his priest is useless.)

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

The closest thing to Blessedness that Mario knows about – the most exalted thing he can imagine – is Woman. Granted, he knows little of actual women. There are few on the island. His mother is long-dead.

Mario does go to the pictures. But this isn’t the story of a man’s love affair with the screen. There is another famous romance co-starring Philippe Noiret – Cinema Paradiso – in which an older man initiates a younger into the practice of using art to reach out to what is longed for. Mario doesn’t seem much affected by screen beauties, however. Just as he’s indifferent to mountains and seas, he doesn’t pine after actresses. He’s after something more transcendent.

What Mario notices, sorting Neruda’s mail, is that women adore the poet. Not just a woman. Women. He badgers Neruda: first, for autographs that he might show to women; then, for advice on wooing.

You have to talk to women, Neruda tells him. Neruda is deft with metaphor and rhythm. Mario takes note. Together they walk the hills and beaches, discussing the elements of figurative speech. Mario learns to attend to nature, and to use language to evoke feelings and happenings that have no names.

He listens to a recorded message from Neruda’s Chilean comrades. He acquires a sense of duty to his fellows.

He sees the world through his friend’s eyes.

Then Mario meets the prettiest girl on the island: the old innkeeper’s niece (Maria Grazia Cucinotta), fittingly named Beatrice. Here, at last, is Woman. Blessedness. He woos her with words. Some are Neruda’s; some are his own. This is the movie’s most conventional passage.

There is a wedding. Neruda signs the document as a witness. He wishes his friend well. Then, he returns to Chile.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

It’s at this point, in its last half-hour, that the movie reveals its ingenuity. Mario is drawn into politics, and into the daily running of the inn. He recites Neruda’s poetry while slicing onions and tomatoes. The mundane chores, more sensuous to him now that he has learned the language of poetry, recall Neruda to him.

He waits, in vain, to hear from his friend.

The story, hitherto so conventionally sweet, turns bitter.

This is an extraordinary development, and this is where Troisi’s anguished acting is extraordinary. Troisi, in fact, was near death. He put off a heart operation to make the movie and died one day after its completion.

There is a parallel with Mario’s story. The actor and the character both sacrifice themselves doing their respective labors of love.

This isn’t one of my favorite movies, but it has one of my favorite endings. It is very wise and very true. There is the friend who concerns himself with Great Causes, Great Sayings, and Great Deeds, who inadvertently or perhaps deliberately elevates those around him; and then there is the Great Friend, the one who loves his friend not for what he stands for or accomplishes but for who he is.

Happy Thanksgiving

This nightmare got me out of bed:

I was teaching college again and couldn’t get the whippersnappers to hear, let alone listen to, what I was saying – not least because my mother was visiting the class, and her phone kept ringing. It played the overture to Rossini’s William Tell.

I had to ask her to leave the room.

I hope the students understood the gravity of the offense.

Happy Thanksgiving. Karin took Daniel and Abel to her mother’s. I stayed behind with Samuel, who was ill. I cleaned the basement.

I’ve been mystified by a billboard proclaiming KFC’s temporary “festive” pot-pie. How’s it supposed to differ from ordinary pot-pie?

My research has yielded no satisfactory answer – although I’ve read that this pot-pie doesn’t contain turkey (as I thought it might).

Obviously, to find out, I should hike over to KFC and eat one of these new pot-pies.

P.S. Karin wonders if the campaign is a response to McDonald’s’s “holiday” pies.

R.I.P. “Lucy Pevensie”

… according to some. Lewis biographer Alan Jacobs isn’t convinced but happily pays tribute. Lewis devotees will recall the nice girl who lived at the Kilns during the Second World War. It’s good to hear how she turned out.

Her IMDb page.

Here she acts with Jean Simmons.

Some lives are blessed. Lucy’s (in the Chronicles) was even more favored. She reigned in Narnia; sailed to that world’s edge; and then, in her prime, was whisked away to Aslan’s country and the new Narnia.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Speaking of how “Narnians” turn out:

A new Blu-ray collection of the BBC’s Narnia has been released some forty years after the series was first broadcast. Included is a documentary, Return to Narnia, featuring the original cast.

I learned this from the tabloids. (It popped up in various feeds.) The sensational bit is that Narnia was filmed next-door to pedophile Jimmy Savile’s studio. No Narnia actors were harmed.

The afore-linked piece tells that Downton Abbey’s Lesley Nicol was in this series. For completeness’s sake, here are a few other familiar names:

Tom Baker

Warwick Davis

Camilla Power

(Familiar, that is, if you’re a British-telly glutton.)

So far, a different Narnia adaptation has been released every twenty years or so since Lewis’s death.

May each “Narnian,” in time, be brought to Aslan.