More mini-books

School goes smoothly enough for Samuel, who puts on a brave face but still has misgivings (as shown in the third photograph below).

To catch up on my reading, I continue to choose mini-books.

• Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Life Together. For the reading group. I’m also attempting the Ethics (delivered on my porch in an imperfectly sealed package, during a rainstorm).
• Maggie Nelson: Jane: A Murder. Poetry. An earlier treatment of the subject matter of The Red Parts (a memoir).
• Ditto: The Argonauts. A memoir of modern love. Scavanged at Goodwill with Jane: A Murder.
• Alexandra Elizabeth Sheedy (yes, that Ally Sheedy, aged approx. twelve): She Was Nice to Mice. Good Queen Bess’s private moments, as reported by eyewitness palace vermin.
• Arthur Miller: The Crucible. Scavanged at Goodwill. I missed this high school staple when I was younger (I did read Death of a Salesman).

I’m also reading Wilder’s Our Town; later, I’ll read The Skin of Our Teeth and re-read The Matchmaker. These are collected in the same ordinary-sized volume and so don’t count as separate books, mini- or otherwise. But using plays for catching up is one of my better recent brainwaves.

“A monument of misplaced scholarship”

… is how a Guardian reviewer describes a new edition of the diaries of Cambridge don and “Pomp and Circumstance”/​“Land of Hope and Glory” lyricist A. C. Benson (1862–1925).

Having previewed the book on Amazon, I concur.

See, for instance, p. 267, n. 4 (the font is Fournier).

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Samuel will return to school this week. Tonight, he realized that he’ll go to school from August until June every year for the foreseeable future.

I told him I went to school for twenty-two years.

He can count much higher than twenty-two, and he can do other mathematical operations – he and Daniel made extraordinary progress this summer (his teacher will be shocked) – but, clearly, the concept of twenty-two years is beyond his reach.

The concept of an hour is barely within it.

He has the concept of living forever. He’s all for it. Like Wilbur the pig, he doesn’t want to die.

Body-text fonts, pt. 42: Monotype Garamond (or something close)

At the ripe old age of about sixty, Evelyn Waugh published A Little Learning, the first volume of his autobiography. It was his last book. Two years later, he died.

A Little Learning begins like this:

How’s that for eloquent weariness?

(There are Garamonds and Garamonds. I don’t know all of their histories. This is Monotype’s metal-type version or something close enough; the digitization is what everyone recognizes from Microsoft Word.)

Waugh’d be a challenge for me to read chronologically because I’ve gone through his early novels many times and his late works hardly at all. I’d have to make it past Brideshead and The Loved One to get to the really unfamiliar stuff. In the mid-1940s, Waugh began tackling a steeper grade than I’ve been able to climb at the breakneck pace he set in his comical works.

It’s better, perhaps, to try going backwards, to begin with sluggish, morbid despair and retrace the author’s path from initial hilarity (in its way, just as despairing).

Despair usually is a sin, but in Waugh’s case it may actually be a virtue.

Mansfield Park

This novel is more savage than its predecessors. Its matrons and widows are at least as pharisaical as those of Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice; its young gentlemen, at least as dissolute. In addition, the family’s fortune depends on volatile West Indian holdings. Will the slaves generate enough income to make up for the profligacy of the eldest son? And what will befall poor little Fanny Price, the household’s live-in cousin?

I don’t know how this story will turn out. For once, I’m in suspense.

The movie didn’t appear until 1999. I won’t be reviewing it for my “1996” series – at least, not for many years. (Recall that I’ve been casting a wider net, reviewing material that appeared from 1995 to 1997.)

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I’m nine or so books behind my hoped-for reading pace. So, recently, I read two celebrated mini-books: Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These, about Ireland’s Magdalene laundries; and Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny, about Nazi Germany, the USSR, and Donald Trump.

You could argue that they’re basically the same book. To use jargon from my old job as a tutor in IUSB’s first-year writing program: the second book is a “theory” text, and the first is an “example” text; and a student who read both books could write a paper making plenty of connections between them (one connection per body paragraph, of course).

(I wonder how teachers of first-year English at IU are coping with A.I. Not too badly, I expect. The in-house rules for papers are so detailed and peculiar, the bots probably still haven’t learned how to follow them.)

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This is Disney’s best song.

Abel has been standing up next to the furniture.

August’s poem

A favorite poem of Simone Weil’s: George Herbert’s “Love” (III).

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back,

Guiltie of lust and sinne.

But quick-eye’d Love, observing me grow slack

From my first entrance in,

Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning,

If I lack’d any thing.

A guest, I answer’d, worthy to be here:

Love said, You shall be he.

I the unkinde, ungratefull? Ah my deare,

I cannot look on thee.

Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,

Who made the eyes but I?

Truth Lord, but I have marr’d them: let my shame

Go where it doth deserve.

And know you not, sayes Love, who bore the blame?

My deare, then I will serve.

You must sit down, sayes Love, and taste my meat:

So I did sit and eat.

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

Abel has learned to crawl; the tops of his toes have calluses.