Library “storytime”; Ninja Turtles; Chaplin; Fargo; a philosophy teacher

I took Samuel and Daniel to “storytime” at the local library branch. It was our third session. Thirteen or fourteen children attended: the largest number in two years, the librarian told us.

Strangely, there was just one little girl, and she was the first I’d seen at any of these gatherings. 🤷

Afterward, a few parents hung around while their children read, played, colored, or used the library’s electronic tablets.

One friendly little boy showed me a book about the Ninja Turtles. “What are their names?” he asked. I pointed to each in turn: “Leonardo, Raphael, Michelangelo, Donatello.”

He went to his mother. “That grandpa knows who the Ninja Turtles are.”

“Well, lots of people do,” she explained.

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Karin was unavailable for supper, so I put on Chaplin’s Gold Rush (the 1920s version, not the 1940s re-edit). Samuel and Daniel liked it pretty well, especially when the very hungry gold prospectors eat Chaplin’s shoe for their Thanksgiving dinner.

One prospector, who is a little too hungry, imagines that Chaplin is man-sized dinner-fowl. The boys were astounded. “Not a chicken! Not a chicken!” Daniel kept saying.

The wary Chaplin takes the hungry prospector’s rifle outside and buries it in the snow, kicking a few drifts over it like a chicken scratching the dirt. The prospector comes out with an axe and chases him around the cabin. I got déjà vu. This is Fargo, I thought. Chaplin is Steve Buscemi; the other prospector is Peter Stormare; Buscemi buries something in the snow; a person runs out of a cabin, face covered, hands behind her … like a headless chicken. All for a little money.

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Re: the philosopher Charles Parsons (decd.). His student, Peter Ludlow, has written an amazing remembrance. I’d quote my favorite passages, but they would amount to almost the whole essay.

Read it.

Reading report

My reading year has just ended; it goes from May to April, with a day of grace, May 1, because stuff happens.

I had two targets. I met the easier one: completing 51 books. I needed this number to replenish my yearly average, which had dipped.

I almost met the harder target (52, or 1⁠/wk) and was tearing through William Morris’s Wood Beyond the World (1894), a sex-fever of a book, when I fell asleep.

Earlier, I had finished Don’t Tell Alfred, Nancy Mitford’s last novel. This year I’ll read her biographical writings (1/mo): Madame de Pompadour, Votaire in Love, The Sun King, and Frederick the Great. A heavy dose of France-love. (Don’t Tell Alfred also is set in France; the narrator’s husband, an Oxford theology don, is made ambassador.) I may or may not read Nancy’s edited volume, Noblesse Oblige. Then, two books by Jessica Mitford; a volume of the Mitford sisters’ letters to each other; and, if I am still keen, the writings of Diana, one of the Mitford Fascists.

I still read Fielding and Shakespeare in light doses. The Complete Signet Classic Shakespeare, with annotations and critical essays, will be tallied as one book. A volume by Michael Frayn, Plays: 4, consisting of Copenhagen, Democracy, and one other play, is on the docket. It will be counted as one book. I intend to read all of the Little House books in order for the first time. My edition is in two volumes. I’ll record the series as nine separate books. The arbitrariness is obscene.

I don’t count the very short children’s books I read to Samuel and Daniel.

I am some ten cantos from the end of the Paradiso after all these years. I am dragging booty. I get through about a canto a month. The poem seems more and more alien to me, the further up into Heaven I get; Purgatory was more my level.

Learning in protest-time

Whatever you think of the recent campus protests, now is a good time to read about old ones.

I used to hear about old protests at Cornell. “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” But the way the old protests were talked about, it seemed the best of times, morally speaking. At least it was better than the late 2000s and early 2010s, a period characterized by routine alternations of study and debauchery.

Middle-aged, I now see the obvious rightness of the study-and-debauch routine inside a university. (Well, yes, the routine could do with less debauching.)

“A university is a society for the pursuit of learning,” C. S. Lewis says, echoing many, many other university people since the dawn of (at least) the modern university. This is an obvious truth … or was for a long time.

But, but, the present urgency!

Well, there’s always a present urgency; if nothing else, people need their souls saved. (It’s usually other people, isn’t it?) But that’s not what a university is for. “A university is a society for the pursuit of learning.” So, one (a) leaves the university and does whatever seems urgent, or else (b) stays in the university and pursues learning. No distractions, please.

(The old Cornell protests may actually have been justified since they were about how to pursue learning. This is an important point. Alas, it is not a neglected one. “How learning is moral to pursue” has been trotted out as the concern behind much gratuitous scholarship⁠/activism. The result has been the blending of two endeavors that university people, of all people, should take pains to distinguish.)

I do take issue with Lewis’s second sentence: “As students, you will be expected to make yourselves, or to start making yourselves, into what the Middle Ages called clerks: into philosophers, scientists, scholars, critics, or historians.” Fine, if being a clerk is (a) temporary or (b) lifelong but avocational; but a natural reading of the passage, for us if not for Lewis’s Oxford students, is that it’s a career. The truth is, students are not expected to make themselves into lifelong professional students. Well, some are, but very few.

Lewis (p. 49):

A mole must dig to the glory of God and a cock must crow. We are members of one body, but differentiated members, each with his own vocation. A man’s upbringing, his talents, his circumstances, are usually a tolerable index of his vocation. If our parents have sent us to Oxford, if our country allows us to remain there, this is prima facie evidence that the life which we, at any rate, can best lead to the glory of God at present is the learned life.

Good, good. And if one is so excited by the present urgency that one can’t devote oneself to learning or let others get on with it in peace, that is prima facie evidence that membership in the university isn’t one’s vocation – that one should leave. There is wiggle room, of course. Michael Dummett put aside his Frege for a while to decry racism. He kept on decrying racism the rest of his life. He also wrote about tarot cards. But he did get back to Frege, in a big way.

1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 74: Lost highway

David Lynch released The Straight Story in 1999. It told a tidy, linear, almost sentimental tale.

In 2001, he released Mulholland Drive. That puzzle-story was cohesive – even (shudder!) a bit affecting.

The question is whether Lost Highway (1997) belongs with this group or with such perversities as Lynch’s Blue Velvet and Wild at Heart. It does feel different from those earlier movies. Gone is (most of ) the campy cruelty. What remains is … just cruel.

Is that fatal to a movie? “It’s not the violence I mind,” Ebert says in his review of Wild at Heart, “it’s the sneaky excuses.” Lynch, in Lost Highway, seems to have done away with the excuses, but the residue sure ain’t for the squeamish.

Ebert gives Lost Highway half a star less.

What say you, John-Paul? Acquit or convict?

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Much happens in Lost Highway that couldn’t. People inhabit two places at the same time. People disappear from photographs and from small, locked rooms. People change into other people.

It isn’t fantasy or science fiction.

The simplest explanation is that the movie depicts the thoughts of a man whose brain is being zapped in the electric chair. Some thoughts are memories; some are involuntary hallucinations; some, perhaps, are voluntary fantasies. They needn’t perfectly cohere.

Mulholland Drive consists of a similar brainstorm before death. So, for that matter, does American Beauty (1999; not one of Lynch’s movies, but charitably interpreted in that vein). A literary precedent, noted by others who have tried to make sense of Lost Highway, is Ambrose Bierce’s story, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” (1890).

Never mind that in California in the 1990s, condemned people weren’t electrocuted. That sort of licence is permitted because the movie is tipping its fedora to the past. It wants to be like Detour, another movie that takes place inside one character’s thoughts.

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Fred (Bill Pullman) and Renee (Patricia Arquette) have a frosty marriage. Videos arrive on their doorstep. Fred and Renee view them. One shows the outside of their house. Another shows them sleeping. Fred views the third tape alone. It shows him with Renee’s bloody corpse. We haven’t seen Fred murder Renee, but the movie jumps forward, and we hear his sentencing. He is condemned to die. In prison he has headaches. One day (and this is the big spoiler), the guards find another person, instead, in his cell. This is young Pete – Balthazar Getty, who looks like James, the young biker in Lynch’s Twin Peaks – a mechanic with a less serious criminal record. The authorities have no choice but to release Pete. He returns to his job, his parents’ house, and Sheila (Natasha Gregson Wagner), his girlfriend. Through his garage work, he falls in with a gangster and his mistress, Alice (Arquette again, blond, not dark-haired); they are involved with pornographers. Pete has an affair with Alice. She tells of terrible abuse. She asks him to help commit a robbery. They do so (and manslaughter, too) and drive out into the desert to sell the goods … and then things get very strange. They have intense, loveless, arid, desert sex; Alice disappears; a house burns down. Things get even stranger.

It’s generally agreed that Fred imagines most of this and that Pete is his imaginary alter ego. I dunno. Pete, to me, hardly seems the manly sort that Fred is alleged to wish to be. I have a different theory. Pete is Fred, all right – a memory, not an alter ego; and Renee is Alice, who fled the gangster with Pete⁠/Fred, taking the identity of Pete’s dark-haired girlfriend, Sheila, to throw the gangster’s minions off the trail. Sheila is sacrificed (perhaps in the fire). So Fred is guilty of his woman’s murder, but she isn’t the woman we think he’s accused of murdering. Living with Renee⁠/Alice, Fred more-or-less wilfully conflates her personality with Sheila’s (he prefers the tamer girl, it turns out). Meanwhile, one of the gangster’s associates, who has obtained a video of Sheila’s murder, uses it and other video of Fred and Renee to coerce Fred into helping him to murder the gangster; he then lets Fred be blamed. This doesn’t tie up all the loose ends, but it makes sense of some puzzles, like why Sheila is in the movie, why she looks like Renee, and why Arquette plays both Alice and Renee (they’re the same woman, although Renee, in Fred’s thoughts, behaves like Sheila, or as he wishes Sheila had behaved). Why, in prison, does Fred change back into Pete? That’s escapist fantasy à la “Owl Creek Bridge” (back to one’s ancestral home; back to one’s obliging woman). Fred’s other dying thoughts may be distorted in detail, but they’re emotionally and morally true.

This could all be wrong. But if enough of it is right, I vote acquit.

But I don’t think I’d watch it again.

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David saw this movie not long ago. I haven’t heard his interpretation.

Virtually everyone agrees that Fred murders his woman. Lynch has said that he was thinking of the O. J. Simpson car chase while making this movie. What bugs me is: Which woman, exactly, does Fred murder? And does he have to kill her, or would it be murderous enough to replace her, in his thoughts, with someone else?

For a different account that I’m sympathetic to, see this book.

How the sausage is made

(The sausage being flan.)

Look at all that sugar!

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Old Ecuadorian friends came to town. I went to my parents’ and grandparents’ houses and listened to several hours of esmeraldeño Spanish – the best kind of Spanish.

One of these friends recently married a Mexican. This led to many jokes because Ecuador and Mexico aren’t getting along right now.

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Samuel asked me to draw Africa. He then surprised me by adding a very decent Eurasia to it.

He marked out China, India, the Republic of Georgia, Madagascar … and Japan, which isn’t where you’d think; it seems to have joined Russia’s Arctic islands. I asked him if he was sure. He was. “This is Honshu, this is Hokkaido. …” “Japan seems to have migrated,” I said. He thought this hilarious. “Japan migrated! Japan migrated!” he went around shouting.

Unfortunately, he left his map and his pens lying around, and Daniel came along and scribbled over the drawing. Samuel was very sad until I showed him the photo I’d taken. Now he gets such a kick, looking at his map on the computer screen.