A rough-and-ready distinction

Reading Charlie and the Chocolate Factory to Samuel.

He’s interested in, of all things, its physics: e.g., why a person (or an Oompa-Loompa), having drunk a “fizzy lifting drink,” should rise into the air.

Why does an ice-cube rise in a glass of water?, Samuel asks. It’s the right sort hunch. I’m impressed.

What really blows Samuel’s mind is that, in Charlie, chewing a stick of gum produces the same sensory/​nutritive effect as eating a three-course meal. I’m not sure he realizes it isn’t possible (isn’t it?).

And what gets really him is that at one point during the second “course,” the gum tastes like a baked potato. Why this should affect Samuel so much, I don’t know.

That the gum turns Violet Beauregarde into a blueberry interests him less.

That she could be de-juiced back into near-normalcy interests him somewhat more.

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I once knew a college student who was very interested in The Lord of the Rings for its metaphysics (her word).

Like, why Elves and Men differ as to mortality?, I asked.

Yes, she said.

That strikes me as the wrong approach.

Could this be one way to distinguish fantasy from science fiction? I.e., is physical or metaphysical inquiry appropriate for science fiction but not for fantasy?

Things you couldn’t inquire about in that spirit (at least, not lamely):

Homer

Gulliver

M. R. James

Jekyll & Hyde

The “Curdie” books

Alice

Narnia (I haven’t read Michael Ward’s Planet Narnia)

Harry Potter (too many ad hoc creatures and spells)

The Borrowers

Charlotte’s Web

And, I’d say – despite all the “world-building” – The Lord of the Rings.

By contrast, Lewis’s “space” books more readily invite physical/​metaphysical scrutiny. So does Slaughterhouse-Five. So does A Wrinkle in Time. So too, perhaps, might something like Watership Down (which I haven’t read). So does Dante, goodness gracious; the Divine Comedy is metaphysical SF with all the is dotted and ts crossed. And H. P. Lovecraft goes further down this path than one might expect.

The Charlie books are another interesting case. There are physical explanations for some of the phenomena. These explanations don’t hold up for very long, and they’re articulated with something like the Alice books’ madcap irreverance; but they have a prima facie plausibility. It’s appropriate to try to work out their laws – if you’re a child. Not so much if you’re grown up.

Happy birthday, Sweetie

Abel, Daniel, and Samuel are thrilled with Karin’s gifts:

See Daniel peering over the boxes. He climbed to the top. “I love heights!”

They’re just car parts. Karin’s bumper got smashed up some months ago.

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Terrible things in the news:

(1) Manchester City’s illicit financial dealings (see Wikipedia’s links to reports in the Guardian, the NYT, etc.).

Briefly: the English Premier League’s results since 2009 appear to have been massively distorted by one club’s cheating.

Some say it’s shaping up to be the worst sports scandal of all time. I don’t even think it’s the worst soccer scandal of 2026.

(2) The failed execution of Christa Pike.

“How does that happen?” Trump asks. “Should be easy to do. It shouldn’t be very difficult.”

For once, I agree with the POTUS.

To paraphrase Simon & Garfunkel, there must be fifty better ways to do it. People have been executing each other for thousands of years.

(3) Alleged gang-rape at Cornell’s Chi Phi fraternity.

1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 103: The young poisoner’s handbook

My dear grandpa (R.I.P.) would have disliked this morbid, cynical movie.

It recounts the career of serial murderer Graham Young – or, rather, it embellishes it. It makes it downright funny. Some of the movie’s characters and events are admitted to be fictitious. Other happenings – even some of the murders – are, officially, mere speculation.

For an account that purports to be more factual, if not less sensational, see “The Teacup Poisoner” (Fred Dinenage: Murder Casebook, season 1, episode 2).

The Young Poisoner’s Handbook is more like an inverted morality play.

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The movie is not, as Roger Ebert would have it, “a wickedly satirical view of ambition in a gifted, if misguided, youth.”

Satire and ambition: let’s consider these notions in turn.

The purpose of satire is to correct behavior. It assumes that redemption is possible. This movie appears to take the contrary view. It isn’t satire; it’s the bleakest kind of irony. (I could tell you what kind if I knew Northrop Frye’s literary taxonomy better.)

Ambition isn’t this protagonist’s driving motive; it’s his smokescreen. Graham (Hugh O’Conor) has genuine scientific interests, but his self-portrayal as a scientist is largely a pose. He tries to convince his prison psychologist that, deep down, he’s a sensitive soul who permitted his thirst for knowledge to lead him too far, as if he’d only added heavy metals to people’s food and drink out of scientific curiosity.

Graham tries to convince himself of this, too. But he knows too well that he’s a vindictive little cuss.

Alas, the psychologist decides that Graham is no longer homicidal and arranges Graham’s release from the prison hospital where he has been confined since his teens.

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The movie has three acts:

One: Early misdeeds

Two: Confinement

Three: Release

In each act, the object of satire – or, more accurately, of ferocious contempt – isn’t Graham himself so much as his social environment. Yes, Graham does terrible things, but he does them to silly, grotesque people. They are always the butt of the joke.

Take Graham’s best school friend, who brags about his forthcoming date with the girl that has captured Graham’s attention (a serial flirt). This friend has the habit of asking Graham to swap sandwiches with him. (An outlandishly reckless habit, if you adopt Graham’s point of view.)

Soon this friend is laid up in bed. Graham escorts the girl to a music hall, where she beams worshipfully at the crooner.

But then Graham’s supper-talk is too gruesome for the girl, and she flees. For all her insinuation, she’s disappointingly ordinary, after all.

Next, consider Graham’s family members, who appear to have been dreamed up by Roald Dahl. They park in front of the television while Graham experiments upstairs with his chemistry equipment. These philistines have the gall to complain that Graham’s chemicals have fouled up the tea-set. Even though it’s his sister’s fault! (She has been mixing together face-creams in the teacups.)

Graham puts something nasty in his sister’s eyedrops.

Then Graham’s stepmother – Ruth Sheen, at her most acrid – finds some dirty magazines in the house. Graham’s father guiltily lowers his eyes, but it’s Graham who’s blamed. His stepmother scrubs him down in the bath and destroys his precious chemistry set.

Not long afterward, she’s bent over with stomach pain. Her hair falls out. Never lovely, she becomes hideous and weak.

Graham volunteers to spoon-feed her. Too feeble to protest, she peers out in terror at her family.

It doesn’t end well for the stepmother.

Graham’s subsequent confinement in the prison hospital is not unlike Paul Pennyfeather’s, in Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall. We’re treated to the same bureaucratic dispute of that novel – rehabilitationism vs. disciplinarianism. The argument is rehearsed by hospital officials in front of the the inmates themselves, who, in a really clever scene, are locked up in a row of steam-baths so that only their heads are visible. We’re reminded of Dante and Virgil having it out over self-excusing sinners. (Silver-tongued these souls may be, but they are buried in mud.)

The harshest treatment is reserved for Graham’s victims of Act Three – his senior colleagues in the firm that employs him after he is released. They are ordinary factory workers. Some are cruel; some are kind; all are tawdry.

In one late scene, Graham sits on a grassy bank next to a reservoir, a bottle of poison in his hand. The implication is that he wishes to take revenge on all of society.

What damage might emptying the bottle do? Graham can’t know. It’s one thing to painstakingly monitor subjects one at a time, measuring the dosage slipped into each victim’s tea and finding out and recording each bodily symptom. It’s something else altogether to pour poison into the general water supply. The effects can’t be inferred from the prior experiments. Nor would Graham be able to observe them.

Graham isn’t a sincere experimenter. He just wants to hurt. And the movie comes uncomfortably close to suggesting that his victims – indeed, that all members of society – deserve their suffering.

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Pauline Kael, in her famous review of A Clockwork Orange, says:

The trick of making the attacked less human than their attackers, so you feel no sympathy for them, is, I think, symptomatic of a new attitude in movies. This attitude says there’s no moral difference. Stanley Kubrick has assumed the deformed, self-righteous perspective of a vicious young punk who says, “Everything’s rotten. Why shouldn’t I do what I want? They’re worse than I am.” In their new mood (perhaps movies in their cumulative effect are partly responsible for it), people want to believe the hyperbolic worst, want to believe in the degradation of the victims – that they are dupes and phonies and weaklings. I can’t accept that Kubrick is merely reflecting this post-assassinations, post-Manson mood; I think he’s catering to it. I think he wants to dig it.

It’s an interesting question whether The Young Poisoner’s Handbook “wants to dig it.” Certainly, it presents the victims as “dupes and phonies and weaklings.” What it doesn’t do is glorify the victimizer. Graham is vicious, but, unlike A Clockwork Orange’s protagonist, he’s not a tough person; he wouldn’t instigate a physical fight. His choice of weapon betrays his cowardice. Nor does he dress or speak boldly. He’s essentially an overly formal, petulant little boy brandishing a chemistry set that has all the awesomeness of a model train.

Does this difference make the movie less or more misanthropic? At least in Kubrick’s Clockwork Orange, there’s one alluring character – even if he is a ruthless Nietzschean “overman.” The protagonist of The Young Poisoner’s Handbook has considerably less attraction.

There’s one way to avoid interpreting this movie as an expression of pure misanthropy, and that is to insist that since Graham is the narrator, everyone is seen through jaundiced eyes. The key is to look for details that Graham doesn’t emphasize in his narration. Graham, we observe, is a Nazi enthusiast. But very little is made of this. We just know it because of some pictures on his wall. An obsession with Hitler was a large part of the historical Graham Young’s life. But when Graham tells us his story, he leaves it out. It’s as if he’s back with his prison psychologist, eliciting sympathy, omitting details on purpose, making his victims seem worse than they are.

What the movie shows us, then, is a weakling who tears down other people, in his thoughts and with his deeds – but always at some remove – to compensate for his own smallness. This leaves us with one contemptible figure, not a wholly contemptible world. But, wicked though he may be, since he’s just one small person, he can’t deprive us of the magnanimity or the resources to pity even one such as himself, should we choose to do so.

An alleged fallacy

I’ve been enjoying Part One (“Ancient Philosophy”) of Anthony Kenny’s four-part New History of Philosophy. The selection and arrangement of themes is pretty tidy, and in one passage – the conclusion of the epistemological chapter – it’s almost breathtaking how the dominoes topple over.

The study of ancient epistemology can teach us much about the nature of knowledge and the limits of scepticism. Several insights became part of the patrimony of all future philosophy: knowledge can only be of what is true; knowledge is only knowledge if it can appeal implicitly or explicitly to some kind of support, whether from experience, reasoning, or some other source; and one who claims knowledge must be resolute, excluding the possibility of being rightly converted, at a later stage, to a different view.

However, ancient epistemology is bedevilled by two different but related fallacies. Both of them are generated by a misunderstanding of the truth that whatever is knowledge must be true. One of the fallacies haunts classical epistemology, up to the time of Aristotle; the other fallacy haunts Hellenistic and imperial epistemology.

The first fallacy is this. “Whatever is knowledge must be true” may be interpreted in two ways:

(1) Necessarily, if p is known, p is true

or

(2) If p is known, p is necessarily true.

(1) is true but (2) is false. It is a necessary truth that if I know you are sitting down, then you are sitting down; but if I know you are sitting down it is not a necessary truth that you are sitting down; you may get up at any moment. Plato and Aristotle, over and over again, seem to regard (2) as indistinguishable from (1). Given the necessary connection between knowledge and truth, they seem to think, only what is necessary can be known. From the acceptance of (2) there flows the construction of the theory of eternal and immutable Ideas, and there flows the impossible ideal of Aristotelian science.

If whatever is knowledge must be true, then it may seem that knowledge must be the exercise of a faculty that cannot err. This is the form that the fallacy takes in Hellenistic times. The Epicureans and Stoics, unlike Plato and Aristotle, are prepared to countenance knowledge not just of eternal truths, but of mundane contingencies such as that Dion is now walking. But this, they claim, is possible only if we have faculties – whether sense or reason – that are capable of infallible operation. The Hellenistic fallacy is just the mirror image of the classical fallacy. Let F stand for some faculty. Then it is true that

It is impossible, if F knows that p, that F has gone wrong.

But that is not the same as, nor is it true that,

If F knows that p, then it was impossible for F to go wrong.

The epistemological fallacy, both in its classical and in its Hellenistic form, would cast long shadows through philosophy’s history.

If Plato, Aristotle, the Epicureans, the Stoics, and (presumably, for centuries) their descendents all really were confused on this point, then: Oof.

I raise my sons

Little Abel has been feverish; his napping has been so fitful, he hasn’t remained asleep when I’ve tried to separate my body from his. Today he was less ill but just as unwilling to be parted from me. The household chores have suffered; my reading and writing “projects” have suffered; Abel’s napping “schedule,” insofar as one exists, has suffered. In the afternoons, I’ve had to haul him, at his groggiest, down the block to retrieve Samuel from the bus.

Samuel has brought home a workbook of optional math exercises. Most days, I force him to complete a few pages. He screams bloody murder but then settles down and does them easily enough.

Daniel, the middle child, finds ways to claim attention. He and I discuss the English and Spanish alphabets. He firmly believes in che, elle, and erre, although the Real Academia Española disavowed those letters in the mid-1990s. Alas, Daniel follows YouTube, not his father. His Spanish is therefore overcomplicated. His approach to reading in either language is downright glacial. He can sound out syllables but has to pause to lecture me about every letter. I tell him it’s no way to form words, let alone whole sentences. What would really suit him is a language of pictographs and ideographs. His calligraphy is rather good; he might learn to design type before he can read it.

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Most days, Abel and Daniel are good friends. They play and bathe together. Daniel has given them superhero bathing names: “Soap Man” and “Bubble Man.” Abel likes to pour water out of the tub and onto the bathroom floor.

When Abel is old enough, I’ll take them all outside and force them to run around the track next to the school down the street. The two younger boys, especially Daniel, already like to run around the shed in our yard. They didn’t like to before, but I persuaded them with reverse psychology or some such trick.