Church outdoors and indoors

We went to parking-lot church again. The weather was cooler than last week, and Karin and Samuel and I were shaded under a canopy. This time, I was able to pay attention to the sermon.

Then, during the closing hymn, someone drove a truck into the parking lot and frighteningly charged and vroomed and skidded around the worshipers. Thankfully, it wasn’t an anti-religious terrorist. It was just one of the churchgoers’ relations, bringing her her purse.

There are some unique drawbacks to parking-lot church.

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Meanwhile, at home, we’ve been enjoying the video of the “UK Blessing.” It debuted a month ago, and it’s my favorite thing that has come out of the quarantining period. Samuel has heard it enough times now that when I sing it to him, he stops and looks at me, a little awestruck.

(I’m especially pleased to see Salvationists in the video.)

I can’t but be encouraged by the show of unity of these Christians of different ages and colors and credal flavors – and deeply saddened, as political and racial tensions run high again in the United States.

It would have been good if the quarantining had been an occasion for repentance and reconciliation. Alas, in this country, the opportunity seems to have been wasted.

1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 27: Hard eight

The first movie directed by Paul Thomas Anderson bears less resemblance to his sprawling Boogie Nights and Magnolia than to his focused, enigmatic character study, Punch-Drunk Love. It’s also a bit like an Edward Hopper painting. The characters are lonely souls.

Somewhere between Reno and Las Vegas, an old man finds a younger one slumped outside a diner. The old man offers to buy the young man a cup of coffee.

The young man is broke. He’s been gambling, trying to raise money for his mother’s funeral.

I admire your intention, the old man says. You won’t win enough to pay for the funeral, though.

On the other hand, I can take you to a casino and show you how to obtain a meal and a room.

The old man, Sydney, is played by Philip Baker Hall. He wears a dark suit and measures his words carefully.

John C. Reilly plays John, the young man. John is awkward and, at first, suspicious. He insists on sitting in the back of the car while Sydney drives him to the casino.

Sydney makes good on his promise. He shows John how to scam the casino using a small amount of cash (also, how to obtain food and lodging while doing this). His method is slick rather than miraculous. Still, it’s at least a little reminiscent of Jesus’s multiplication of loaves and fishes.

What is just as important, John feels he’s been treated kindly. He becomes Sydney’s disciple.

Sydney also shows kindness to Clementine (Gwyneth Paltrow), a cocktail waitress and occasional prostitute. As with John, Sydney does more than help her: he involves her in his life.

The story has one other important character, a man Sydney does not take kindly to. This is Jimmy (Samuel L. Jackson).

Jimmy hangs around the casinos and becomes friendly with the impressionable John. John introduces Jimmy to Sydney. Sydney’s contempt is evident. He rebukes Jimmy for uttering crude remarks about women. But this cannot be the only reason for the contempt that Sydney conveys through small disturbances in his otherwise impeccable manners.

Why does Sydney regard Jimmy as he does?

Is it that, unlike John and Clementine, Jimmy panders to Sydney, approaching him and buying him a drink?

Is it that, as a security worker, Jimmy is allied with the casinos in a way that Clementine, the waitress, is not?

When Sydney asks whether Jimmy is a parking-lot guard, Jimmy is annoyed; he works in the casino, he insists. But this may actually get near to the heart of Sydney’s distaste. It isn’t the lowliness of Jimmy’s station that puts Sydney out of joint (arguably, John and Clementine are lower than Jimmy). It’s whose side Jimmy is on. Jimmy is a snake.

This would answer another question, which is how Sydney, who is generous and scrupulously polite, could allow himself to work as a professional gambler, a kind of lowlife who obtains his livelihood by making other people lose. Perhaps what matters to Sydney is what kind of opposition he chooses to go up against. At times, he seems like one of those chivalrous heroes of the hard-boiled genre, a Philip Marlowe of the gambling circuit.

These are conjectures. Sydney isn’t easy to decipher, and there is more to him than I’ve described.

His attitude toward Jimmy is hardly the greatest mystery about him. The most important question is why Sydney treats John the way he does, as a father would treat a son.

This mystery is resolved, at least partly, by a late revelation. But even afterward, questions remain. I’d have to view the movie again to settle on an interpretation.

Not that it would matter. The movie isn’t about any point that it tries or doesn’t try to make. It’s content to observe these characters, to take long looks at them. Especially, at Sydney.

There is a certain pleasure in watching a meticulous person go about his business. Sydney is no fool. He keeps his own life tidy. He tidies up others’ lives, as quietly as possible. I wonder if, to him, other people are like cards in a game of patience (though, of course, they are more than that; they are also creatures with real sensitivities). He is absorbed in the task of putting the cards into order, or perhaps in letting the order come to him, as it will come to a patient gambler who understands the odds. Only rarely does impulse get the better of such a man; and when it does, well, that’s just an impetus for more tidying up.

I am not that sort of person. I am interested in Sydney because he is that way.

Nemesis (Philip Roth); a church service; lawn care

Those with an invigorated interest in plague writing (Defoe’s, Camus’s, Tuchman’s, Preston’s, etc.) should not neglect Nemesis by Philip Roth.

J.M. Coetzee’s review is here, as well as in his collection, Late Essays.

Roth, unfortunately, is an author I’ve disliked to read directly. (This is probably my own fault.) Reviews of his books, and of movies based on his books, I’ve found riveting.

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We went to church for the first time in weeks. The service was held out on the blacktop under a bright sun. The temperature was above eighty (Fahrenheit). We sat on plastic chairs and, after a while, someone brought us an umbrella to hold.

Still, I was uncomfortable and had trouble following along. Perhaps this was because Karin & I were wearing masks, and no one else was.

I don’t blame the others much: the risk of contagion seemed minimal out in the open air.

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After the service, we discussed lawn care. One man had brought his groundhog trap for us.

Another man, the one who’d given us our push mower, said he’d been looking at used riding mowers for us. I asked how cheap a riding mower could be. Two hundred, he said.

If he buys one, with or without our permission, I won’t allow him to bear the cost.

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On Friday night, our next-door neighbor, wearing camouflage, came up our driveway in his riding mower and asked if we needed him to cut our grass. No, I said, I cut it every weekend. (I did, in fact, mow the front lawn the next day.) But I could see his point. The grass had been well watered in the six days since its previous cutting: already it looked tall and wild.

Since tomorrow is Memorial Day – and it promises to be less hot – I’m putting off mowing the fenced-in back yard until then. I hope the soldiers won’t mind. It seems that our yard is the business of the nation.

Anniversary

Karin & I were married four years ago. My grandparents kindly sent a check. We didn’t go out to celebrate tonight, but we did cook one of our favorite meals: potsticker stir-fry.

A good friend – one of Samuel’s namesakes – visited on the back porch and helped us to eat the meal.

Several robins have made nests in our back yard, and tonight we watched them feed their young. We caught glimpses of the little birds as they lifted their beaks.

Tonight, also, we glimpsed Samuel’s first tooth.

The back porch; the back lawn; 1990s NBA

We’ve cleaned up the spacious, shaded, screened-in back porch, and I’ve been trying to spend time on it each day, out of doors but not really out of doors. Samuel is very interested in what he sees outside. Jasper and Ziva also like to explore out on the porch; I must supervise them, however, because Karin keeps a dahlia there, which is poisonous to cats.

On Saturday, we all gathered on the porch with Mary & Martin and Stephen & Edoarda. Each family stayed some ten feet from the others.

Then, on Sunday, I had to mow in the rain.

(It really is a soggy lawn. I understand why on Midsomer Murders the English are always wearing Wellingtons. Everyone says our tree looks like a willow, and then remarks that willows don’t usually grow away from water. I think there’s plenty of water.)

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The outstanding documentary series of the quarantining period isn’t Tiger King; it’s The Last Dance, about the 1990s Chicago Bulls. I haven’t seen a single episode of The Last Dance – we don’t have cable – and yet I know it’s good because every day my Facebook feed is crowded with articles riffing on this or that point it raises. I’ve been inspired to rewatch quite a few old basketball games on YouTube. (Samuel likes them, too.) These are the three conclusions I’ve drawn:

(1) The Chicago Bulls were awesome (pick any year).

(2) The 1994–1995 Houston Rockets were awesome, though they didn’t win many games in the regular season. Hakeem Olajuwon was just tremendous: powerful and very smooth (and a crafty ball stealer).

(3) The 1997–1998 Indiana Pacers were as good as I remembered them (i.e., very good). Would they have beaten the Jazz in the final playoff round? I don’t know.

These impressions are borne out by two fine articles by Sam Quinn: one about the Rockets, and one about the Pacers.

May’s poem

Samuel now often falls asleep to this track (pun intended):

So, it is fitting to recall a poem about a train.

(Also, we live near some tracks.)

(Also, while sleeping today, Samuel smiled and laughed, as if enjoying a hilarious dream.)

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

NIGHT MAIL
(Commentary for a G.P.O. Film)

I

This is the Night Mail crossing the Border, / Bringing the cheque and the postal order,

Letters for the rich, letters for the poor, / The shop at the corner, the girl next door.

Pulling up Beattock, a steady climb: / The gradient’s against her, but she’s on time.

Past cotton-grass and moorland boulder, / Shovelling white steam over her shoulder,

Snorting noisily, she passes / Silent miles of wind-bent grasses.

Birds turn their heads as she approaches, / Stare from bushes at her blank-faced coaches.

Sheep-dogs cannot turn her course; / They slumber on with paws across.

In the farm she passes no one wakes, / But a jug in the bedroom gently shakes.

II

Dawn freshens. Her climb is done. / Down towards Glasgow she descends, / Towards the steam tugs yelping down a glade of cranes, / Towards the fields of apparatus, the furnaces / Set on the dark plain like gigantic chessmen. / All Scotland waits for her: / In dark glens, beside pale-green lochs, / Men long for news.

III

Letters of thanks, letters from banks, / Letters of joy from girl and boy, / Receipted bills and invitations / To inspect new stock or to visit relations, / And applications for situations, / And timid lovers’ declarations, / And gossip, gossip from all the nations, / News circumstantial, news financial, / Letters with holiday snaps to enlarge in, / Letters with faces scrawled on the margin, / Letters from uncles, cousins and aunts, / Letters to Scotland from the South of France, / Letters of condolence to Highlands and Lowlands, / Notes from overseas to Hebrides, / Written on paper of every hue, / The pink, the violet, the white and the blue, / The chatty, the catty, the boring, the adoring, / The cold and official and the heart’s outpouring, / Clever, stupid, short and long, / The typed and the printed and the spelt all wrong.

IV

Thousands are still asleep, / Dreaming of terrifying monsters / Or a friendly tea beside the band in Cranston’s or Crawford’s: / Asleep in working Glasgow, asleep in well-set Edinburgh, / Asleep in granite Aberdeen, / They continue their dreams, / But shall wake soon and hope for letters, / And none will hear the postman’s knock / Without a quickening of the heart. / For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?

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(W.H. Auden)

Mary; Samuel; carrots; Samuel; Samuel

Happy birthday to Mary, who’s, what, thirty-three? Pretty old. Martin bought her a “unicorn” cake with an upside-down cone on top.

In Mary’s honor, Karin took these photos of Samuel:

A few days ago, for the first time, we gave him solid food: a jar of minced carrots.

Then Karin put this on Facebook and got quite a response:

And this just goes to show how, when you have a baby, you can start out writing about one thing (your sister) and end up writing about something else (your darling, darling baby).

Tonight we put the boy to sleep using Ravi Shankar’s Three Ragas. He kicked and cried at first but ultimately succumbed to the hypnosis of the sitar.

Mother’s Day; mowing day; conspiracy theories

I wish a happy Mother’s Day to my own mother – and, for the first time, to Karin. I’m not sure what gifts they’d like. For my mother-in-law, I’m ordering a couple of novels by Wilkie Collins (I persuaded her to read The Woman in White for her birthday, and she enjoyed it). She needs more books because she Marie Kondo’d her house not long ago.

Honorable mentions for Mother’s Day: my grandmothers; my aunts; my cousins; and Ana, my sister-in-law.

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This evening, I mowed the back yard again. The grass was much shorter this week, and so it took about half as long to cut. The air was cooler, too. I didn’t get as tired.

It’s been three hours since I last arose from my chair.

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The friend I blogged about last time has posted the notorious “Plandemic” video to his Facebook feed. Actually, he posted it twice: once with YouTube, and once with Vimeo. YouTube removed the first upload. Facebook tagged the second upload with a “false information” warning and linked it to this useful debunking. (The original video is here.)

My friend had written of the video:

26 minutes. You decide.
Lots of info packed into a short video.
If you’ve watched it, feel free to comment.

I watched it but didn’t comment. It’s very gratifying, now, to read the debunking, which does contain some useful information.

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But this will do little to keep conspiracy theories from proliferating like Hydra’s heads. What’s needed is education about what conspiracy theories are and why they’re bad.

Some friends have shared this essay addressed to Christians, which makes some good points and includes useful links to sources that deal with conspiracy theories about the pandemic.

For a more systematic treatment, I recommend this book by the philosopher Quassim Cassam. It’s brief and clear; I was able to read it quickly. It distinguishes between theories about conspiracies and what Cassam calls Conspiracy Theories with capital initials (I’d prefer the label “conspiracy theories in the pejorative sense,” since, on Cassam’s view, all such theories are likely to be false). I found the book to be intuitively correct and very helpful for starting to think carefully about conspiracy theories. It also attends to psychological and sociological findings.

Unfortunately, not all reviewers have received the book approvingly or even charitably. It turns out that most philosophers who write about conspiracy theories are themselves conspiracy theorists (or are sympathetic to conspiracy theories). Which often happens in philosophy: those who write about a topic are likelier than others to take an unpopular view about it.

Straight-up Communist

As always, to magnify an image, click on it.

What I’m sharing is a screenshot of one of my friends’ Facebook posts. According to my friend, not only are many of the recent quarantining measures “in direct opposition to our constitution,” they’re “straight up Communist.”

By embracing these measures, U.S. citizens “have changed their views on ‘freedom’.”

Instead, they should be holding leaders “accountable.”

Well, I want to know:

Which measures are the unconstitutional ones?

What about them is unconstitutional?

What about them is “straight-up Communist?”

What kind of holding accountable is being urged? Are leaders to be voted out? Are they to be impeached? Are their laws to be disobeyed?

My friend doesn’t say.

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This is hardly the most inflammatory post I’ve seen about the quarantining measures.

Yesterday, another friend, a sweet woman from my church, shared a photo of a Nazi putting a noose around a teenaged resistance fighter.

Socialism! was her accusation.

We need to pay attention to history!

But the history is that courts in the USA have given the federal government and, especially, the state governments extensive leeway to quarantine.

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Reading the two posts between their lines, I think that what’s being advocated is civil disobedience. (It’s a member of the resistance who’s being portrayed as a hero.)

This is a grave position for my friends to take, and not only because civil disobedience, by its nature, tends to weaken the rule of law. It’s especially grave in this context because disobeying the law is likely to result in many more deaths.

Interestingly, my first friend grants this point, saying, “Our opinions about whether or not the current measures are necessary are ultimately irrelevant.”

This position implies that certain freedoms (of commerce? of movement?) are more important than the preservation of many lives.

I wonder if my friend has thought this through.

He has six children. If he considered the measures necessary for preserving lives, would he grant his children the freedom to flout them?

I doubt it.

If his children were adults, would he want them to have the freedom to act so as to disregard the preservation of lives?

If he says he would, he’s more radical than the people who oppose seatbelt laws. The brunt of the harm that results from the choice not to wear a seatbelt is borne by the person who makes that choice. This is much less likely to be true of the person who chooses not to take precautions against COVID-19.

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As it happens, my friend doesn’t believe that the measures are necessary for preserving lives. He doesn’t believe that COVID-19 is especially dangerous. In other posts, he says that COVID-19 probably is much more widespread than the official story claims. He even believes that his whole family had COVID-19 in December, in South Carolina. (I think this is ludicrous.)

But if his disbelief in the measures’ necessity is what’s influencing him to reject the measures, then either (a) he’s confused – that is, he misspeaks when he says that whether the measures are necessary is irrelevant – or (b) he’s arguing in bad faith: he says that the question is irrelevant though he knows that it’s relevant to him.

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Relatedly, I wonder: when my friend says that the measures are “straight-up Communist,” is he confused, or is he arguing (or asserting) in bad faith, using an inflammatory label just for its rhetorical effect?

And if he’s confused, is his shoddy understanding of Communism indicative of willful neglect? Does it suggest that his general argumentative tendencies are characterized by bad faith?

“A man should cut his own lawn”

Most quarantining in Indiana will end soon, but here’s something that may provide solace for those who remain at home:

Champions League classics on YouTube, from B/R Football.

Today’s video is of the final of 2009 between Manchester United and Barcelona.

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An adorable groundhog now resides in a tunnel under our front porch. Everyone advises that we remove it so it doesn’t dig holes in our foundation.

How does one humanely remove a groundhog?

As Karin & I consider this, we enjoy watching the beast frolic out on the lawn. It eats mouthfuls of freshly cut grass. It flees into its tunnel whenever a car drives by.

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The front lawn was cut by our pastor and church board chairman. Like Hank Hill and his Rainey Street friends, they’d do it for fun if I’d let them.

Both of these generous men offered to give me their spare mowers. I ended up accepting the church board chairman’s push mower. Sadly, his riding mower didn’t fit through the gate to our back yard, and so yesterday I had to use the push mower to cut most of that lawn.

But not all of it. This was the lawn’s first trimming of the season, and the grass was very tall. I was defeated by several especially thick clumps of well-watered stalks at the bottom of the slope. The mower would shut off if I cut more than a few square inches at a time. (I wonder if, on those obstinate sections, a reel mower would do better. Or a scythe.)

I’m sore all over, and my hands are raw, but I’m determined to head back out to finish the job. After a sustained period of rain, it seems as if every head of household on our street is out mowing.