My favorite Baskerville specimens from the previous century are in Charles Williams’s novels (e.g., War in Heaven [1930]).
This, too, is representative:
Rose Macaulay The Towers of Trebizond (1956)
From the 2003 NYRB Classics introduction by Jan Morris:
There was a time when the opening line of this book entered the common parlance of educated English and American people. Nearly everyone I knew could quote it, and “‘Take my camel, dear,’ said my Aunt Dot” became a commonplace of badinage or social pleasantry. The line still gets into dictionaries of quotations, but it is years since I have heard it used in conversation.
It’s too bad that we’ve moved from the gracious “Take my camel, dear” to the boorish “Hold my beer.”
(František Štorm’s Baskerville 10 is the font’s closest digital approximation.)
By church’s end, each of my children had received three baskets. Here I’ve arrayed some of our Jesuses and sheep:
We have to keep Abel from swallowing these toys. He also steals his brothers’ chocolates and dissolves them in his mouth – still wrapped.
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Will Michigan win the championship? As I type, the Wolverines lead UConn by nine points. The Big Ten has gone untitled for roughly a quarter-century. Michigan State won in 2000; Maryland, not yet a conference member, won in 2002. Indiana, Illinois, Ohio State, MSU, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Purdue – every turn-of-the-century conference member, that is, except Iowa, Northwestern, Minnesota, and Penn State – lost in the championship game at least once after MSU won.
UConn first won in 1999 and went on to claim five more titles.
There are eighteen Big Ten members now. Loyal to the region, I penciled in Nebraska and Purdue as finalists. It was a bold but not outrageous prediction. Purdue unsurprisingly reached the Elite Eight; Nebraska advanced to the Sweet Sixteen having never previously won a tournament game. Had the Huskers gone far enough, I surely would have claimed Yahoo!’s $25,000 prize. (But it was the Huskies who reached the final.)
(A couple of years ago, I picked Creighton to reach the Final Four. I figure, the state is due.)
I did have Michigan in the semifinal. I achieved 60th-percentile staus this year, which is much better than usual. Yahoo! graded my bracket as “fine.”
My UK wall map – a Christmas gift from my father-in-law – has been framed at last in a heavy, wooden contraption from Goodwill. Karin, the handy one, did the framing. My idea is to hang the map next to the TV so that we can check it when we watch homicidal/agricultural/veterinary programs, e.g. our latest, The Highland Vet.
Current reading: François Mauriac, Genetrix; Sue Townsend, Adrian Mole: The Prostrate Years (the last book in the series). And lots of other books.
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I should discuss the wedding we attended on Sunday. Samuel bore the rings with aplomb. The much younger flower girl lagged behind, so Samuel retraced his steps, grabbed some petals, and strewed them for her. All else went according to script: the brief vowing ceremony; the post-vowing, pre-dining interlude for photos; the popcorn and donut tables; the soda and liquor booths; the dinner rolls, sweet corn, and mashed potatoes; the couple’s dance, the bride’s dance with her father, and the groom’s with his mother; and the Cha-Cha Slide. There was no removing of the garter with teeth – none we stayed for, anyway. When we left, I was dead-tired. I’d held squirmy Abel several hours. It was as wearying as if I’d spent the day moving house.
Samuel and Daniel loved the Cha-Cha Slide; their grandpa danced it with them. That ex-DJ was in his element. I’ve not met a more ardent ritual-relisher.
… “the first feature film to have a fully computer-generated … character in a leading role,” according to the IMDb.
Indeed, when ghostly young Casper is granted a few hours of re-embodiment, his human portrayer is less winsome than the computer-generated spirit. This is a mark of technical virtuosity.
Along with Casper, there are three other principal ghosts: “Fatso,” “Stretch,” and “Stinkie,” Casper’s loutish uncles. Physically, they’re like overgrown soap bubbles. They’re corporeal, but just barely. You can see them – and see through them. If you touch them, they dissipate. (No harm is done; they easily re-form.) Fat or thin, they’re rounded: there’s little angularity, and no severity, in their faces.
The uncles are malicious but jovial. Casper himself would be cuddly were he more than minimally solid. Such is his plight: he can love, but he can’t be embraced by his beloved.
The movie is a child-friendly version of the classic story of a romantic encounter between a human and a god (an angel, a space alien, a sprite, etc.). The themes are inaccessibility and yearning.
The girl is 1990s “Child Scare-Queen” Christina Ricci (The Addams Family; Sleepy Hollow). Casper sees her and falls in love. (That’s also how I felt when I saw her in the mid-nineties.) She is Kat, the daughter of Dr. Harvey (Bill Pullman), a psychologist who specializes in therapy for the dead – or, as he calls them, the “living impaired.” Ghosts, he explains, are people who fail to fully “cross over” because of “unresolved issues.” Dr. Harvey has an unresolved issue of his own, which is that his wife’s death has dialed up his eccentricity to eleven. He drags Kat across the country so that he can talk to ghosts and track down his wife’s spirit.
Dr. Harvey and Kat end up in Maine, in the run-down, Gothic dwelling of Casper and his uncles, at the behest of treasure-hunters played by Eric Idle (Monty Python) and Cathy Moriarty (most famously, Robert De Niro’s chilly wife in Raging Bull). Idle and Moriarty are involved in the movie’s funniest scenes, some of which also benefit from cameos by Saturday Night Live icons – a conceit repeated by director Brad Silverling in his Land of the Lost.
For example:
The uncles delight in frightening people; Casper tries to befriend them. The effect is the same. The living flee in terror. Until the Harveys arrive, that is. They weather the initial storm. Soon, Casper is cooking Kat breakfast, and the uncles are taking a shine to the Doctor. So much so, in fact, that they plot for him to die so that he can join their posse. Kat, meanwhile, is grateful for Casper’s attention, although she’d rather be with the local flesh-and-blood heart-throb (cue Carrie references). Will Casper win her over? In the spirit of Ray Bradbury, yes and no. Carefully attend to Casper’s re-embodiment. It becomes clear that Kat would accept Casper only under conditions that he couldn’t permanently satisfy. And rightly so, perhaps. The movie is bittersweet.
It also has more swearing and gross-out humor than your average children’s movie. (Again, see Silberling’s Land of the Lost, which, wisely, targets an older audience.) Casper’s plight may be at the movie’s center, but the prevailing tone is set by those hedonistic vulgarians, the uncles. Which is just as well; the core is perhaps too sad.
I liked the set design best. The run-down mansion is exquisite. There are lots of visual references to old movies – to Oz, especially. Afterward, I wanted to watch Casper again, to see how many I could count; Land of the Lost, too.
South Korea 0, Ivory Coast 4 (look out for the “Elephants”)
USA 2, Belgium 5 (too soon to gloat, alas)
Tomorrow promises to be grueling; today already was. Lily, Karin’s sister, will be married tomorrow afternoon. It’s the childcare that vexes. Samuel, at least, is accounted for: he’ll bear the rings. He successfully brought the cushion down the aisle during today’s rehearsal.
Abel and Daniel are another matter. The last thing the ceremony needs is a chorus of squawking. I scouted the building today for possible retreating-places. There aren’t many.
Today, before I chased around and, ocassionally, strong-armed Abel and Daniel, I’d already tired myself loading a humungous, old brush pile – which had plagued our backyard since we bought the property in 2021 – into our pastor’s trailer. Pastor Josh and I took the debris to the church and tossed it into the forest next to the parking lot. It’s not every day you get to dump stuff in a forest.
This has been a grueling entry to type, too, because my “shift” key has been sticking.
