Of toilets

The British famously named one of their scientific boats Boaty McBoatface; in the same spirit, I hereby christen our new toilet Flushton McFlushface – “Flushy,” for short. (Karin’s dad kindly installed it yesterday.)

“Flushy” resided some days in our parlor, inside a big box, and became like a piece of furniture to us – which, I suppose, is what it is. Samuel and Daniel played upon, and inside, the box.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

The Middle Ages weren’t always so-called. Likewise, our old toilet, previously unnamed, is now “Not Quite Flushy” because of its position in the History of Toilets – and because of its chief defect.

We carried it out to the front porch where, due to rain, churchgoing (ours, not the toilet’s), etc., it has remained. With luck, it’ll be immortalized by Google Street View. This afternoon it toppled onto its side. I don’t know if it was pushed by wind, urchins, or stray cats; or if a part of it simply crumbled.

I intend to break it into smaller pieces with a hammer, to fit it into the trash.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Enough of toilets. For the second half of my reading year I’m plotting a march through Dostoevsky. Curious thing. His canon is crowned by the “five major novels.” Russians list them differently than do English speakers. Russians include The Adolescent; English speakers typically don’t. They might include Notes from the Underground (a novella) or reduce the list to four. It’s not as egregious as, e.g., Oregon’s having become the best college football team in the Midwest’s 18-team Big Ten Conference, but it’s gerrymandered, all right.

Anyway, I plan to read Notes, the Russians’ “five,” and probably The Double and The Gambler; so, either way, I’m covered.

P.S. See this useful webpage re: translations.

October’s poem

Ecuador 0, Paraguay 0.

More futility.

The ref and the VAR failed to decree a penalty kick for us.

Such mistakes happen less often in these days of video review. I’ll be interested to listen when CONMEBOL publishes the booth officials’ audio.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

A rather chilling poem by John Keats:

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

This living hand, now warm and capable

Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold

And in the icy silence of the tomb,

So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights

That thou would wish thine own heart dry of blood

So in my veins red life might stream again,

And thou be conscience-calm’d – see here it is –

I hold it towards you.

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

Netflix just released a new Unsolved Mysteries season. One episode shows Britons talking with the dead. These spiritualists, with their fancy electronics designed for listening to bat-calls, first seem nutty … and then, well, they record some strange things.

Most remarkable, to me, is one spiritualist’s less-than-admiring verdict of another: “He’s possessed.”

You’d think they would have considered that risk from the beginning.

Too much

Reading:

• Dante Alighieri, Paradiso (yes, still)
• Isaiah Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty
• **Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked this Way Comes
• E. H. Carr, What Is History?
• *Erskine Childers, The Riddle of the Sands
• John Cottingham, ed., Western Philosophy (this anthology is terrific; if you only ever read one philosophy book all the way through, let it be this one)
• René Descartes, Discourse on the Method
• ***Charles Dickens, Hard Times
• G. R. Elton, The Practice of History
• E. M. Forster, Maurice
• **Elizabeth Gaskell, Gothic Tales
• Homer, Odyssey (this month’s fantasy book)
• Anne Jacobsen, Nuclear War: A Scenario
• C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy
• The New English Bible, M’Cheyne schedule (Kings, Paul, Psalms, Ezekiel)
• Anthony Powell, The Kindly Ones (bk. 6 of A Dance to the Music of Time)
• Sally Rooney, Intermezzo (a library copy, barely begun; time is running out)
• **The Marquis de Sade, Justine, a.k.a. The Misfortunes of Virtue (so far, basically Candide)
• Peter Temple, Truth
• Laura Ingalls Wilder, By the Shores of Silver Lake (bk. 5 of the Little House series)
• Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

Good grief.

* = for fall-time
** = for Halloween-time
*** = “for relaxing times”

My (cat) lady love

Happy birthday to Karin. I found an age-appropriate gift at Goodwill: a volume of James Herriot’s Cat Stories (large-print).

We celebrated at a Mexican ice-cream shop. Nachos, jalapeños, elotes, tortas, paletas, and ice-cream, washed down with mineral water: What could be better?

The shop’s Instagram page has a photo of ice-cream with spicy Cheetos in it.

1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 79: Drifting clouds

“Trams in Helsinki” (Wikipedia).

Things go from bad to worse in Aki Kaurismäki’s “proletariat” trilogy (1986–1990). Owners oppress proles. Proles oppress other proles; they take their misery out on each other.

The “Finland” trilogy, which Drifting Clouds (1996) inaugurates, is happier. Things go from lousy to dire … to hopeful. Most of the characters aren’t vile. They’re downtrodden, lonely souls; but they’re downtrodden and lonely in laconic solidarity with each other.

Maybe Kaurismäki once pined for revolution. Maybe that idealism gave way to bitterness when the requisite solidarity never materialized. Maybe that’s what fuels the rage of, e.g., The Match Factory Girl.

Drifting Clouds isn’t revolutionary. All it asks for is ordinary decency. Politically, it’s an about-face for Kaurismäki: away from vengeance, toward fellow-feeling and dutiful citizenship – even under capitalism.

Not that oppression has ceased in Drifting Clouds. The government cruelly cuts jobs. Big chains drive small restaurants out of business. Employers refuse to employ the un-networked. Banks refuse to lend to the poor. Casinos prey on the desperate. Gangsters swindle and threaten, and then carry out their threats.

But the victims are kinder to each other. That’s the difference. Some of the capitalists and bureaucrats are decent, too.

At the movie’s center is a touching marriage. Lauri (Kari Käänänen) and Ilona (Kaurismäki’s favorite actress, the remarkable Kati Ouitinen) get by via the “rent-to-own” system. Their television, sofa, and bookcase will require years of paying off; once the bookcase is paid for, they’ll be able to start buying books. Then they lose their jobs. They drink, they despair, but they keep going. They’ve already been through the wringer. They got married because they got pregnant. The child has been dead for years.

There are no other children in the movie. It’s a society of oldsters. Even the young adults seem old. Ilona works at a restaurant that is going broke because the aging patrons can no longer drink as much as they used to.

That sort of irony – heavy drinkers who can no longer drink; a child-centered, childless marriage; bookless bookcases – comes up again and again.

The restaurant – “Dubrovnik,” named for an Eastern European equivalent of Palm Beach – goes under. It’s a tragedy for the staff, yes. But the moment is marked by humanity. The owner does what she can for her workers. And, on the last night, clients come dressed up to pay their respects. They give away flowers. It’s funereal, dignified, and moving.

Lauri loses his job driving a tram. I have to eliminate four jobs, the supervisor tells his drivers. I’m not going to decide. I’ll let the cards do it. Lauri draws a low card. It seems heartless. Why not let him stay on the basis of seniority, or merit? But I wonder if the Finns see it differently. The procedure says: Your differences don’t matter. You are all basically equal. You each get an equal chance. Maybe deciding like this helps everybody to get along.

Earlier, I mentioned laconic solidarity. It matters that these are people of few words. One character is a drunk. His friends take him to rehab. When he’s better, he puts on his suit to leave, and his friends arrive to bring him home. They all walk out together without saying a word. Keeping quiet preserves everyone’s dignity and makes it easier to simply do the right thing.

It also makes the movie very funny. There’s something hilarious and winsome about the quiet acceptance of disaster. Who wants a society of whiners? Complaining isn’t endearing; petulance is poison. Much better to live as the Finns do.

In reality, of course, even Finns complain. We all do it. Drifting Clouds is an idealization, then. One comes away thinking, I wish I could bear hardship like that.

People suffer. We see it in their faces. We admire them for suffering quietly. We do what we can for them.

The Finns seem to have become a caring people; maybe they always had it in them. The state now famously encourages and heavily subsidizes child-rearing. Is it a last-ditch effort to escape always being a society of down-and-outs? I don’t know. I do know that today’s policies would have made all the difference to Lauri and Ilona, who can’t afford another child because they can’t even afford books for their rent-to-own bookcase.

P.S. A word on the director’s style, which is instantly recognizable. The action is carefully measured. In contrast, the physical elements are colorful, strikingly arranged, and witty. If the movie were a painting, it’d be a Baltic American Gothic … inside the Nighthawks diner. There are long scenes in which characters listen while live musicians play old pop dirges. I wonder how much of this was borrowed by Wes Anderson, who generates an entirely different – and, to my mind, obnoxious and forced – effect, all too cheery and precious. Closer in spirit to Kaurismäki is Terry Zwigoff (e.g., Ghost World). But his is not a solidaritous impulse. His heroes are irredeemable, unapologetic outcasts. They may be right, they may be noble, but they don’t make society better.