“Every flat-earth person needs a globe”

We recently acquired a globe, courtesy of the abuelos (tireless Goodwill shoppers).

Samuel: “Every flat-earth person needs a globe.”

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There are very few living writers whose every new book I look out for. One is Michael Lewis. I have added his name to my St. Joe County Public Library “author alerts” list.

The library did not alert me that Lewis had just published Blockers: Rebels in the Deep State, his third book highlighting the invaluable contributions of unheralded civil servants (its predecessors are The Fifth Risk and Who Is Government?; other books – The Big Short, The Premonition, and Going Infinite – touch on similar issues).

All ten hard copies of Blockers are checked out.

Well, I thought, I can at least find out the body-text font.

I could not. Only e-versions are previewable online, and they use other fonts.

On Faustian impulse, I turned to A.I. Would this demon supply the desired knowledge?

No.

Too Small; Didn’t Enlarge:

AI Overview:

The exact body text typeface for the hardcover edition of Blockers: Rebels in the Deep State by Michael Lewis (published by W. W. Norton & Company) is not publicly specified or documented in available records.

While W. W. Norton books typically include a colophon page at the very back of the hardcover detailing the typeface and composition history, this specific typographical information hasn’t been indexed online.

Uh, huh.

Might someone have uploaded some pages’ images to eBay? I checked. The closest specimen I could find was of the UK edition (Allen Lane). It appears to have been set in Dante.

This copy is being sold as a “signed”:

Were I the buyer, I’d ask for a little more John Hancock for my buck (quid, whatever).

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Happy October 12. Some names for this day:

Día de la Raza, i.e. Race Day (Latin America, superannuated)

Día del Respeto a la Diversidad Cultural, i.e. Respect for Cultural Diversity Day (Argentina)

Día del Encuentro de Dos Mundos, i.e. Two Worlds’ Meeting Day (Chile)

Día de la Nación Pluricultural, i.e. Multicultural Nation’s Day (Mexico)

Día de la Descolonización, i.e. Decolonization Day (Bolivia)

Día de la Resistencia Indígena, i.e. Indians’ Resistance Day (Venezuela)

Día de la Resistencia Indígena, Negra y Popular, i.e. Indians’, Blacks’, and Proles’ Resistance Day (Nicaragua)

Día de los Pueblos Originarios y del Diálogo Intercultural, i.e. First Peoples’ and Intercultural Dialog Day (Peru)

Día de la Interculturalidad y la Plurinacionalidad, i.e. D.E.I. Bandwagon Day (Ecuador)

Fiesta Nacional de España, i.e. Spain Nation Fest, and Día de la Hispanidad, Spanishness Day (Spain)

Discovery Day (Bahamas)

Columbus Day (USA)

Thanksgiving Day (Canada)

Etc.

I’d prefer “Race Day,” “Discovery Day,” “Two Worlds’ Meeting Day,” or “Columbus Day.” (Columbus was a flawed man, but some flaws are worth remembering.) “Thanksgiving” is a nice sentiment, but giving thanks on this day is unseemly.

Kudos to Spain for bravado.

October’s poem

Previewing Autobiography of Red by this year’s Nobel laureate, Anne Carson.

Spare, ironical, mostly beyond me.

Begins with Emily Dickinson’s no. 1748:

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

The reticent volcano keeps

His never slumbering plan –

Confided are his projects pink

To no precarious man.

If nature will not tell the tale

Jehovah told to her

Can human nature not survive

Without a listener?

Admonished by her buckled lips

Let every babbler be

The only secret people keep

Is Immortality.

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

Carson – a Canadian – moved to Iceland, obtained citizenship there, and has been painting volcanoes.

She is the second Icelandic laureate. (Halldór Laxness was first.)

I like to think the Nobel judges viewed, or couldn’t avoid hearing about, Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey; read Emily Wilson’s grousing about that movie; and decided, Let’s reward a more elliptical classicist.

The writer I know best who writes like Carson is Maggie Nelson.

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R.I.P. Mike Ditka.

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 in the air.

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

What 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.

And the detail that really gets him is that, at one point during the second “course,” the gum tastes like a baked potato. Why this should impress 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 to 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?

Authors/​works you couldn’t inquire about in that spirit (at least, not lamely):

Homer

Hamlet

Gulliver

M. R. James

Jekyll & Hyde (but see this paper, which I don’t disparage)

Alice

The Curdie books

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 Watership Down, which I haven’t read.

So does Dante; the Divine Comedy is metaphysical SF with all the is dotted and ts crossed.

And it’s possible to go further down this path with H. P. Lovecraft than one might expect.

The Charlie books are an 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 the Alice books’ madcap irreverance; but they have a prima facie plausibility. It’s appropriate to try to work out the underlying 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, in Wikipedia, links to reports by 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.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

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 has permitted his yearning 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 essentially 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.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

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 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 couldn’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.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

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, everything 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 contemptible whole 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.