Paul’s bedtime reading

Iran’s team has withdrawn from the World Cup. The newspapers are taking it in stride.

Surely, I’m not the only dismayed soccer follower in the West?

Update (March 13): The team has not withdrawn (or been ousted). Headlines and public declarations contradict each other.

I’ll let you know when I know what I’m talking about.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

The war’s death toll has risen. And it’s beyond doubt that the U.S. killed those schoolchildren.

Update: I really hope the news on something so important is beyond doubt.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

I’ve also updated my unchangeable and definite reading list of the next two months. I’ll try to finish not five, not ten, but twenty-four more books before the late-April conclusion of my 2025–2026 cycle. And so it’s particularly cruel of the Web bots to pepper me with ads for the new John Galsworthy PBS show. I just can’t fit all nine of those novels into my schedule. If only Abel didn’t cling to me all day long.

Little suspecting the incalculable consequences that the evening was to have for him, he bicycled happily back from a meeting of the League of Nations Union. There had been a most interesting paper about plebiscites in Poland. He thought of smoking a pipe and reading another chapter of the Forsyte Saga before going to bed. He knocked at the gate, was admitted, put away his bicycle, and diffidently, as always, made his way across the quad towards his rooms. What a lot of people there seemed to be about! Paul had no particular objection to drunkenness – he had read a rather daring paper to the Thomas More Society on the subject – but he was consumedly shy of drunkards.

Frankly, Paul Pennyfeather’s life sounds wonderful (except for that ominous bit about little suspecting incalculable consequences).

The good news is, the Forsyte show looks missable.

March’s poem

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

A song the whilst
BASSANIO
comments
on
the caskets
to
himself

Tell me where is fancy [love based only on the senses, especially the sight] bred,

Or in the heart, or in the head?

How begot, how nourishèd?

Reply, reply.

It is engend’red in the eyes,

With gazing fed, and fancy dies

In the cradle where it lies.

Let us all ring fancy’s knell.

I’ll begin it. – Ding, dong, bell.

ALL

Ding, dong, bell.

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

The Merchant of Venice III.ii 63–72. Text and note from The Complete Signet Classic Shakespeare.

Springtime (pre-equinox)

Loud t-storm; air so warm, we have windows open. When Samuel’s school bus arrived, he paced the aisle, unwilling to disembark in what was then a light rain. I had to climb aboard to coax him out. Earlier, I’d gone with Karin, Abel, and Daniel to meet the boys’ new physician. (The previous one, a Seventh-day Adventist, has moved to Guam for a three-year religious sojourn.) Upon our return to Toad Hall, the alarm was blaring. It took us much time to turn it off. Daniel ran down the block, did a round of hopscotch, and ran back. We’d found the door locked when we arrived, so we probably hadn’t been burgled. In any case, no one would have stayed long. The noise was deafening, and there’s nothing here to burgle but toys and used books.

I’m tempted to try reading Virginia Woolf’s Orlando but the schedule is just too packed.

“He – for there could be no doubt about his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it – was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafters.”

(The opening lines.)

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

I’m reading Adrian Mole and the Weapons of Mass Destruction, set just before Britain’s 2003 invasion of Iraq. Adrian is a die-hard, blind Blair supporter. He believes there will be no war because that’s what Blair tells Britain. Adrian’s seventeen-year-old son Glenn has joined up and trains in Aldershot with other soldiers, running in full battle-dress on builder’s sand. Adrian has just used a Barclaycard blank check (29% interest) to obtain down payment funds (I forget how many thousands of pounds) for his trendy canalside loft, which he is furnishing with store credit (almost £10,000 at 20% interest). Moreover, his parents have sold their property to a developer and bought a pig-sty to convert, by “DIY” methods, into their new dwelling (“The Piggeries”). Meantime they live in a tent.

It’s a cheap trick, relaying what’s in other people’s books, but this stuff is too good to keep quiet about.

Iran at the World Cup?

“Trump to POLITICO: ‘I Really Don’t Care’ if Iran Plays in World Cup”

Again, I wish FIFA would choose a host that did care.

Iran’s withdrawal is likely. Maybe we’ll know more after the U.S. completes the expected four-to-five weeks of bombardment. Because then the war’ll be done-and-dusted, won’t it? Because, as Trump himself professes, Iran already “is a very badly defeated country.”

If Iran does play in the World Cup, this eye-popping scenario will be possible:

Iran is currently scheduled to play New Zealand in Los Angeles on June 15, Belgium in Los Angeles on June 21 and Egypt in Seattle on June 26. If both the U.S. and Iran finish second in their respective groups, the two countries could face off in a July 3 elimination match in Dallas.

The two countries played what were, in effect, elimination matches (in the group stage) in 1998 and 2022. Iran won the first meeting; the U.S. won the second one.

1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 96: Wag the dog

What with the ongoing sex scandal and, now, a war, Wag the Dog (1997) is the obvious choice for this month. (Well, either it or Canadian Bacon [1995].)

Actors:

• De Niro
• Dunst
• Harrelson
• Heche
• Hoffman
• Macy
  

and

• Willie Nelson (who, in scenes reminiscent of Nashville, directs a studio choir that records patriotic music)

Wag the Dog is funny. It ticks a lot of boxes, satire-wise.

Trouble is, it’s not cynical enough.

Nowadays, this is a quaint, almost feel-good movie.

The country, nowadays, is that much worse.

The nineties were a gentler time.