1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 46: Maborosi

Some dialog from Michael Cera’s Youth in Revolt:

I think my favorite film was Tokyo Story. I just think Mizoguchi is a great director.

But wasn’t that by Ozu?

Who can say?

I’m reminded of this joke because I, too, must talk about Ozu without having seen his movies.

Does that matter? I know enough about Ozu to understand that, visually and rhythmically (and also, probably, thematically), Maborosi has the style of an Ozu movie.

I didn’t get so strong a feeling when, a couple of years ago, I watched The Third Murder. That movie introduced me to Maborosi’s director, Hirokazu Kore-eda. Maborosi, more than The Third Murder, must be Ozu-like.

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I doubt I’ll review a quieter movie than Maborosi – even if I decide to review Microcosmos (which, I dimly recall, is just footage of insects chewing leaves).

Stuff actually happens in Maborosi, but it barely seems to.

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There’s a wonderful passage in Haruki Murakami’s novel The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. A man describes a brief but sublime experience involving a single beam of light at the bottom of a well. His life, ever since, has been shadow-like.

Like this unfortunate man, Yumiko, the protagonist of Maborosi, has largely stopped living.

In early scenes, she is gloriously happy with her young husband. Then he dies. It is a baffling death. It seems to be a death full of life, if such a thing can be; at the very least, he dies on his own terms.

The life that is snuffed out is Yumiko’s, even though she’s just twenty years old and has a beautiful infant son.

Yumiko remarries. She moves from Osaka to a remote seaside village. Her son and stepdaughter grow up happily together. Her new husband and inlaws are good people. Yumiko has good moments.

But she is not fully present in her life. The memory of the dead husband draws her away from her surroundings. Usually, this is not explicitly commented upon; but everything suggests it. Action is observed from a distance. The scenery is gloomy to look at; meanwhile, this or that person performs this or that movement in some remote corner of the screen. Foreground becomes background.

Life goes on, but only at the edge of Yumiko’s consciousness.

Meanwhile, this or that supporting character is lured toward death. Some characters die; most don’t. Yumiko can’t understand the attraction of death. That’s why she constantly grieves.

I am going to stop now because the New Year is almost here, and I am about to fall asleep; and besides, there is little more about Maborosi that I could discuss. The richness is in the detail with which daily life, or its negation, is observed.

P.S. Another movie Maborosi reminds me of: Lynne Ramsay’s Morvern Callar.

Closing credits

This year, I thank:

First, the people who gave money, advice, or labor to help our family to buy and move into our new house. I love our house. Every day, I am happy to be in it.

Second, our COVID-19 vaccinators.

Third, our TV. These shows stood out:

• Benidorm
• Cracker
• Det som göms i snö
• Mystery Road
• No Offence
• Rebecka Martinsson (especially, the first season, with Ida Engvoll)
• Wire in the Blood

Now that I’ve listed them, I see they’re all police procedurals, except Benidorm (a sitcom). Their seriousness varies. Wire in the Blood is gothic and ridiculous. No Offence is jokey and ridiculous; it’s very near to being a sitcom. Rebecka Martinsson has the saddest murder cases. The saddest murderers are in Cracker, which Karin & I are currently watching. The best investigators to watch are played by Ida Engvoll in Rebecka Martinsson, Aaron Pederson in Mystery Road (and in two movies, Mystery Road and Goldstone), and Robbie Coltrane and Geraldine Somerville in Cracker. Pederson and Coltrane, I daresay, are great, and Somerville is often great (the script doesn’t give her enough scenes). Mystery Road and Wire in the Blood are stunningly photographed, and Mystery Road and Rebecka Martinsson have stunning landscapes. Benidorm is ugly to look at, and that’s the point.

One more show, or YouTube channel, is worth mentioning again: Un mundo inmenso.

For completeness, I’d have to list Samuel’s shows, which certainly have taken up much of my time; but I’ll let him discuss them when he begins to blog. This year he has taken great physical and intellectual strides. I am grateful to YouTube for his intellectual ones. Samuel now knows his colors, shapes, numbers, letters, animals, and vehicles; he recognizes quite a few written words; he repeats interesting phrases; and today, he sang a few lines along with Dua Lipa and Elton John.

This year I’ll have completed the Bible-reading schedule devised by Robert Murray M’Cheyne. It’s the best schedule I’ve used, and the Good News Translation has been a joy to read.

I also passed my eyes over more philosophy than in any year since I lived in Ithaca. I wrote down the title of every article and book chapter I finished. Perusing the titles, I’m dismayed that I remember so little of the content. There’s something to be said for reading less.

(This doesn’t reflect well upon the industry of philosophy, whose practitioners are caught up in a whirlwind of having to publish more and more and more.)

I also wrote down the vast majority of the calories I ate; and, consequently, I lost a lot of lbs.

So did Karin, though she’s been gaining weight again. In February, Lord willing, we’ll have another son.

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P.S. I forgot Clarkson’s Farm. That show was outstanding, too!

R.I.P. Joan Didion

Today, in her honor, I read “The Getty” and “Quiet Days in Malibu” from The White Album. The second item, especially, is moving.

I expect that the Library of America will soon exhibit another piece by Didion as a Story of the Week.

We have a mouse in our mud-room. I saw it dart behind a box. Jasper and Ziva rushed past their food and sniffed at the mouse but didn’t catch it. Later, Karin went into the mud-room and the mouse stared at her with its little brown face. We’d been using the mud-room to store cat food and other non-perishables; now, we must rethink this arrangement.

’Twas the night before Christmas / and all through the house / not a creature was stirring / not even a mouse.

Well, it depends on whether you count the mud-room as a part of the house.

We went to a Christmas Eve party and one of my uncles gave another of his biennial talks about the perils of the hantavirus. Don’t sweep up or vacuum after a mouse, he said. Use a wet cloth. Unlikely as it is that we’ll contract this virus, I figure the advice is worth posting because, who knows, it may save a life. One’s words might do tremendous good down the road. I told this to another of my uncles, who was lamenting that a paper he’d presented had involved a lot of work for a negligible result.

At least I didn’t get beaten up, he said. A group of Caribbean Christian brothers and sisters had been praying and fasting so that that wouldn’t happen.

His paper, which he gave at an evangelical theologians’ conference, argued for racial reparations.

Pre-sleep, pt. 2

Having run laps through the house the previous half-hour – and much of the day – Samuel sleeps. Karin snaps this photo:

He is running laps again this morning; and on his own initiative, he has graduated from the aforementioned biography of Agatha Christie to my prized coffee table book, Agatha Christie: The Art of Her Crimes: The Paintings of Tom Adams. (Adams and the mystery writer Julian Symons comment on Christie in the book; samples of Adams’s cover art are on this Pinterest page.) I have misgivings. The boy handles books rather well, but every month he does tear a couple of pages out of this or that volume. And he always has peanut butter on his hands.

I’ve given up calling him when it’s his nap-time. I simply take a book to another room, put on music, and wait for him to wander over.

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The boy: “Some pizza?”

John-Paul: “We don’t have any pizza.”

The boy: [Cries.]

After this exchange is repeated several times, he comes around to thinking it’s a big joke. He laughs every time I say, “We don’t have any pizza.” Then, more realistically, he says:

“Some beans?”

“Some eggs?”

I am happy to oblige.

Pre-sleep

My wife keeps accusing me of going to sleep while I write this entry. I am not sleeping, I tell her. I am just resting my eyes while I think how to make this entry brief.

We did some Christmas shopping at the mall tonight. Not brilliant of us, I know. The place was crowded with mask disdainers.

What with our still-recent bouts of illness, we would have been immune to most everything but the Omicron variant. Here’s to hoping we didn’t catch that.

A bedtime biography that Samuel enjoys:

María Isabel Sánchez Vegara, Agatha Christie.

This is quite the series. It has books about everyone from Ernest Shackleton to Emmeline Pankhurst to Ayrton Senna. Want to make sure your child grows up loving the right pop figures? Gandhi, Prince, and Bob Dylan, for instance? Read him their biographies (and play him their records, if you dare).

December’s poem

The Omicron COVID variant has hit Cornell hard, CNN reports. Many of the infected persons are fully vaccinated. A good number have been given booster shots.

The latest figures are here. They are worth beholding.

I’d bet that most of us, at some time or another, will get infected with Omicron or something worse.

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Here is the latest video of Un mundo inmenso. It’s about the hipster despot of El Salvador, the one who made Bitcoin a national currency.

I always knew hipsterdom would get out of hand. I just didn’t expect El Salvador to lead the way.

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This poem is by William Blake.

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

Is this a holy thing to see,

In a rich and fruitful land,

Babes reduc’d to misery,

Fed with cold and usurous hand?

Is that trembling cry a song?

Can it be a song of joy?

And so many children poor?

It is a land of poverty!

And their sun does never shine.

And their fields are bleak & bare.

And their ways are fill’d with thorns.

It is eternal winter there.

For where-e’er the sun does shine,

And where-e’er the rain does fall:

Babe can never hunger there,

Nor poverty the mind appall.

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

Emelec 1, Independiente del Valle 1

The home-and-away series’s concluding leg was played last night, and Independiente del Valle became Ecuadorian champions for the first time.

It rained hard in Guayaquil, and the flooded grass made for a hideous but fascinating match. The ball wouldn’t roll. All preparation had to be disregarded; the players could only improvise.

By the end of the game, even dribbles and short passes had to be lifted off the ground. The most skillful players, such as IDV’s Junior’s Sornoza, set the example. Every touch was a neat little aerial chip.

IDV weren’t able to dominate as in the first leg, but even under these weird conditions, it was clear that they were the better team.

Here are highlights of IDV’s first-leg victory in Sangolquí.

Everyone knows that little IDV is Ecuador’s best-run club. The truth is, this first domestic title was late in coming. IDV have my warmest congratulations.

Any year that Emelec and Liga de Quito don’t win is a good year.

Leaves migrating south for the winter

Temperatures got up to the high forties (F) today. Had it not rained, Samuel and I might have kicked a ball around on a field near our house. Instead, we did some napping.

I have told Karin I won’t buy any more books this year, at least not out of pocket (i.e., without gift money).

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The Atlantic has been publishing a special series about U.S. democracy. Online, that is. The articles will reapper in the January/February print issue. That’s why some of them talk as if we already have come to the anniversary of the U.S. Capitol attack, though that attack took place on January 6 of this year.

The Atlantic must not be the only medium that is talking like this. One of my right-wing Facebook friends, who wouldn’t be caught dead reading that magazine, posts:

The fact that January 6th is even a topic of conversation anymore, let alone the object of extensive judicial inquiry, is mind-boggling.

My mind is boggled that his mind is boggled, though by now the mutual incredulity is predictable. I have no great point to make about this. Why mention it, then?

In one of my favorite Peanuts strips, Charlie Brown overhears Lucy explain to a very young Linus that in the autumn, leaves fall off trees because they are migrating south for the winter.

“My stomach aches,” Charlie Brown says.

For many of us, engaging opponents, listening to opponents, has become well-nigh impossible because it’s just too stomach-churning. Not because of mutual contempt, name-calling, etc., though those things are bad, but because facts and plausible interpretations of those facts are treated contemptuously, while ludicrous interpretations and lies are treated as truth.

So, if we want to talk politics, we talk with people who agree with us. Or we attend to those on the other side to get a perverse pleasure from what they say. But, in the long run, those things also are stomach-churning. They’re like eating stale food, or like eating junk food that gives us a quick high and then leaves us ill and out of shape.

Maybe the best course is to be like Charlie Brown and not have any friends, only enemies; to lament that they are our enemies; and to live, as fully as possible, with the constant stomach-ache.

O Christmas tree

Quito, my birth city, turns 513 years old today; its fiestas should be just concluding. Last night, its suburb of Sangolquí observed a great success. Independiente del Valle built a two-goal lead over Emelec in the first of two games that will decide the Ecuadorian championship.

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Karin put up a Christmas tree, and, predictably, Samuel has been knocking it over and taking off the ornaments. Even so, he’s treating it more reverently than I expected. He knows a thing or two about Christmas trees, having familiarized himself with a picture-book version of A Charlie Brown Christmas.

I am so tired of reading that book, last week I broke down and ordered the DVD. I hope it calms his urges.

Fear not, Samuel says, quoting Linus’s recitation about the angel and the shepherds.

Today I saw him paging through a Christmas board book that he never used to look at much. He was talking to himself about the baby Jesus.

Another treadmill

Some church friends who no longer run indoors have given us their old, ornery treadmill. The motor has a mind of its own. It goes faster than I instruct it to do. Yesterday, I had to keep reducing the speed until the display said I was running ten-minute miles; but surely I was going much faster, and when I dismounted, I was so tired I almost collapsed. I have no such trouble when I exercise out of doors.

Still, I’m glad to have this contraption. What with Halloween, Thanksgiving, our COVID quarantine, and the cold, November was the first month since July of 2020 in which I gained rather than lost weight.

Some days, I’m within 15 lbs. of my final target. At least, I think I’m within 15 lbs.; like the treadmill’s display, our scales are inaccurate, probably because the floorboards in this house are not evenly laid out. Each day I must take different readings until I get the same reading several times. Never before, in my personal experience, has the mode of any series of measurements been a more useful average than the median or the mean. Live long enough, and everything happens to you at least once.

Never been overweight? Just wait. Never been overweight and then lost that weight? Just wait.

In the seventh or eighth grade, I wrote a story about a thin man who drinks some delicious chicken noodle soup, decides that his life has been lacking, turns into a glutton, and becomes hugely and famously fat. At the apex of his fame (and size), he stops liking chicken noodle soup. He ends up thinner than before. I was reading a lot of Ray Bradbury when I wrote this story.

Spotify has compiled the statistics of my usage in 2021. I listen to Spotify more hours than 97% of all subscribers. Money well spent. I listen to Vangelis more than all but 0.05% of Vangelis’s listeners. Vangelis is whom I often choose for Samuel’s napping-time.

1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 45: Kansas City

To get Robert Altman’s Kansas City, you have to get its references to 1930s pop culture:

• Amos ’n’ Andy (the radio show)
• Blondie (the daily comic strip)
• Jean Harlow (the actress)

… and, probably, various musicians I can’t identify. The movie is intercut with footage of virtuoso jazz performances, more or less in the way that Nashville has lots of country music. Only, the jazz in Kansas City is all played in the same nightclub.

The pop culture references are hardly obscure, but I’m insufficiently familiar with them. Harlow, especially, was influential; but of her movies, I’ve only seen City Lights (and I had no idea she was in it). Those who wish for a thematic overview of Kansas City had better consult Roger Ebert, who describes Jennifer Jason Leigh’s performance as a kind of jazz riff on Harlow.

The plot is fairly straightforward, although, as in other movies directed by Altman, there are several linked stories. The main story involves the kidnapping of Carolyn (Miranda Richardson), a politician’s wife, by a thief’s wife named Blondie (Leigh). Blondie’s speech, mannerisms, and appearance are copied from the movies she watches. In one amusing sequence, Blondie takes Carolyn to the cinema to view a Jean Harlow picture. Later they debate whether Harlow is “cheap” (low-class). Blondie is shocked that Carolyn should think so.

Blondie: “Her father was a dentist, Dr. Carpenter.”

Carolyn: “Dentist? Doctor? Carpenter?”

Carolyn is pretty loopy because she uses laudanum. Ebert focuses on Leigh’s performance, but I was equally taken with Richardson. She is playing one of Altman’s recurring types, a woman who makes herself seem dumber than she is.

When Blondie first enters Carolyn’s house, Carolyn is in her nightgown, with white cream all over her face. This is intercut with a flashback in which Johnny (Dermot Mulroney), Blondie’s husband, commits a robbery wearing blackface. He provokes the ire of the local Black crime boss, Seldom Seen (Harry Belafonte). Seen has Johnny captured and brought to his club. There, all night and the next day, he subjects Johnny to a lecture that is menacing, grimly humorous, and poignant, all at the same time. Meanwhile, they are serenaded by Seen’s army of jazz musicians.

Seen has a great deal to say about race relations. How well does Johnny listen? Late in the movie, he makes an appeal to Seen that is calculated to flatter; instead, it betrays that his attitude is fundamentally the same as when he put on blackface to rob one of Seen’s customers.

Seen talks and talks. He talks because he is powerful. On the other hand, several Black women in the movie say little but imply a great deal. “Nobody ever asks me,” one of them has to keep telling Blondie when Blondie tries to swear her to secrecy.

As in every Altman movie, social commentary is sprinkled in deftly, with plenty of neat little jokes and sight gags. One of Altman’s favorite techniques is to end a scene by zooming in upon a meaningful prop. And, as in Nashville, the social commentary has music to go along with it.

Samuel loved the jazz. He sat in his highchair eating his breakfast, kicking along with the music.

How the word is passed

I’ve just finished reading Clint Smith’s How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery across America. The author travels to various historical sites – plantations, prisons, graveyards, slave markets. He goes on tours. He talks to the guides and to fellow tourists. All through the book, he repeats how important it is to immerse oneself in the history of racism in the USA and beyond.

I say “immerse oneself in,” not “study,” because the process is experiential. The guiding idea of the book is that there’s a difference between merely reading about racist oppression and (for instance) standing in cramped, dark slave quarters or sitting for a few moments in the electric chair at the Louisiana State Penitentiary.

The goal is to feel the atrocities, or, at least, to approximate the feeling.

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This isn’t to downplay the importance of also reading about the atrocities and conversing with those who witnessed or experienced them. The author welcomes these things. He practices them throughout the book.

(Of course, we, the book’s readers, are reading about another person’s experiences – the author’s – which are experiences of approaching others’ experiences. So, we are doubly removed; still, in reading, we come closer.)

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How does the book’s guiding idea fare? How does the author’s quest turn out?

Well, in some chapters, he responds viscerally to the site he happens to be touring. These are the most stirring chapters to read.

In other chapters, while the author’s response isn’t insincere, he does have to try harder to make meaningful connections between the place, the past, and the present.

And in the trickiest passages, he considers whether he ought to distance himself emotionally from how the site is presented to him. For example, he visits a Senegalese slave port, now a UNESCO World Heritage site. It is commonly said that from this port were shipped millions of slaves (or “enslaved persons,” as the author is always careful to write). Having done his research, however, the author knows that the site was a point of departure for only tens of thousands of slaves. He asks whether this kind of discrepancy should influence the lessons we draw about the past.

He doesn’t quite answer this question, though it’s one that any serious student of history would need to grapple with.

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Rightly or wrongly, “anti-racism” is sometimes categorized as a form of religious devotion. The anti-racist person – at least, the privileged anti-racist person – corrects his or her beliefs, confesses his or her sins, renounces his or her self (or former self), and pursues rectification through evangelism or through social justice work.

I can’t assess this categorization. I am no expert on the recent anti-racist movement, or on what makes a movement religious; and whatever my attitude toward racism is, it doesn’t encompass all these religious elements. But, when it comes to interpreting this book, I think religious categories can be fruitfully deployed.

For all that the book appeals to historical fact, it’s really about affective transformation.

Some transformation is an immediate response to what the senses gather in, in the way that Paul was transformed on the road to Damascus. But, the reasoning goes, lasting transformation is aided by certain (sometimes rather contrived) disciplines. Just as one might pray; serve; sing; read all of the Bible over and over again (even all of First Chronicles); observe the holidays; and take the sacraments – all because these systematic exercises change one’s heart more profoundly than merely reviewing one’s favorite passages and doctrines would do – the pious anti-racist person reads many books; talks to many people; polices his or her utterances and thoughts; recites a common liturgy; and, as in this book, goes on pilgrimages. And not only for the sake of a quick emotional payoff (though it is always tempting to reach for that). The deliberate (“intentional”) anti-racist person strives after a more comprehensive, more lasting, cumulative effect.

Read as a record of this sort of discipline, the book is interesting. Even the passages that drag or overreach serve a purpose, just as a saint’s record of spiritual doldrums and false starts would serve a purpose.

But, I must emphasize, none of this is to say whether the recent anti-racist movement really should be understood as a religion; or, if it should be so understood, whether it is a religion worth practicing. As I remarked, I am not competent to answer the first question. And whether anti-racist religion, if it is a religion, might be understood as an aspect of the Christianity I embrace, and not as an idolatrous or Manichaean rival to Christianity, is not something I can now discuss.

Midlife

As I watch the gentle, rather silly new crime drama McDonald & Dodds, several of the actors seem middle-aged; but when I look them up on IMDb, I learn they are much younger than I am.

What is more disturbing, the actor who plays Detective Sergeant Dodds – the show’s “doddering old man” – is only fifteen years older than I am.

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I didn’t intend to, but I seem to have begun a “philosophy of the stages of life” binge: not only Kieran Setiya’s Midlife, but also Susan Neiman’s Why Grow Up? Subversive Thoughts for an Infantile Age and John Martin Fischer’s & Benjamin Mitchell-Yellin’s Near-Death Experiences.

Perhaps Dante is my subconscious inspiration.

Perhaps it’s just that these books are written for a popular audience, and reading them has been an easy way to meet my daily quota of philosophy.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

I actually think the “stages of life” approach is overblown. Life is less like a journey, more like a series of Peanuts strips, in which each character plays out endless variations of a core individuality. Even the extremes of the natural lifespan – the beginning and the end – are more like waking up and going to sleep, or growing and shrinking, than like starting and ceasing to be. I was in a class in which the teacher surveyed what each philosopher thought happens when you die. What about Leibniz, someone asked. The teacher said, Leibniz thinks that when you die, you get very small. And then, of course, you grow again (Leibniz believed in resurrection). The “oscillating universe” theory of cosmology may not be fashionable these days – I wouldn’t know, I stopped paying attention after Carl Sagan – but an “oscillating self” theory seems plausible to me (until it doesn’t, until it does).

Margie; Somaliland; Western Togoland; Uyuni

R.I.P. Margie, a kindly old woman who went to church with us. She was famous for sending greeting cards. Word has it, before she died she prepared several dozen Thanksgiving cards, and so we may hear from her one last time. We attended her funeral; Samuel was asleep when we arrived, but he soon woke up and had to be taken outside; he and I sat on the front steps and identified passing cars. “Sports car. Truck. S.U.V. Sedan. Truck. S.U.V. Police car.” This kept us busy until the last hymn.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Here’s another fine video from the YouTube channel Un mundo inmenso. This one is about Somaliland, the self-governing northwestern region of Somalia.

I hadn’t known that Somaliland is so stable, or that other countries and the UN refuse to recognize it as an independent state because they’re wary of lending credibility to other secessionist movements.

(The situation may well be more complicated than this. Even so, the video is a good starting-point; also, it got me reading about another “unrepresented nation”: Western Togoland, which has eleven million people and the world’s friendliest flag.)

But Somaliland isn’t as beautiful as “Uyuni, the Most Incredible Landscape in the World”:

One time, with David, I was looking at pictures of Bolivia, and he was like, “I don’t understand why this isn’t everyone’s main interest in life.”

Chile 0, Ecuador 2

Big, big victory for Ecuador in Santiago, in the stadium of Club Deportivo Universidad Católica. We dominated in the early minutes and were rewarded with a well-taken goal by Pervis Estupiñán. Then Chile’s Arturo Vidal committed the red-card foul of his life. To the Chileans’ credit, they rallied hard and played with courage. But Ecuador created the better scoring chances – many of them squandered by Michael Estrada. It wasn’t until stoppage time that Moisés Caicedo struck the coup de grâce.

The Brazilians have qualified for the World Cup. The Argentinians have qualified. We are third, with a six-point cushion over the fourth- and fifth-placed teams, and seven points above the best teams in the disqualification zone. There’s a decent chance we’d scrape through even with four concluding defeats.

Tonight I was running my many laps, in the cold and wind and snow, and it was bleak, and I thought of quitting; but I remembered the pibes – the lads – and was inspired to push on ahead.

World Cup updates; “I love you”; Benidorm; the reader

With just five matches to play, we’re dragging ourselves over the finish line. Last month, in Colombia, we did some heroic time-wasting to earn a 0–0 draw. Kudos to our savvy goalkeeper, Alexander Domínguez, for wasting ten or fifteen minutes during his goal kicks; and to the VAR officials for annulling Colombia’s last-minute goal.

Then, a few days ago, we eked out a 1–0 home victory against cellar-dwellers Venezuela. We were so poor, the result was downright inspiring.

(In fairness, many of our regular players weren’t available.)

Tomorrow night, we’ll play in Chile. The Chileans also have been poor. Even so, they’re on a three-game winning streak and have climbed to fourth place, four points behind us.

If we so much as draw this game, our position will be very strong.

Colombia and Uruguay, the other nearest contenders, also have been struggling.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

The Troggs (on Spotify): “Wild thing, I think I love you.”

Samuel: “I love you.”

He doesn’t say it to his parents; he only repeats what he hears from the TV. When he first said “I love you,” he was repeating a sign-language lesson from Baby Einstein.

Tonight he said, “Love Benidorm.” He really does love Benidorm, the little weirdo.

I think he can read or at least recognize words he’s seen in his books. Today, he recognized the word “summer” when it appeared on the TV; and, yesterday, when the word “Texas” appeared on the TV, he said “taxi.” He’s been doing this for several months.

November’s poem

I haven’t been contagious since Wednesday or Thursday, but Samuel needs me to stay indoors with him (he’s not allowed to go out until Monday). Today, with Karin at home, I left the house for the first time since I learned I had COVID. I ran the usual number of miles, with dismaying slowness. My plan for this afternoon is to visit the library.

I am dealing with my “cabin fever” just in time to endure another bout of it. Yesterday, we had our first snow of the year. More is expected.

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W.H. Auden, “Musée des Beaux Arts” (1938):

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

About suffering they were never wrong,

The Old Masters: how well they understood

Its human position; how it takes place

While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;

How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting

For the miraculous birth, there always must be

Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating

On a pond at the edge of the wood:

They never forgot

That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course

Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot

Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse

Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away

Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may

Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,

But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone

As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green

Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen

Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,

Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

I wonder if Breugel (he had dropped the “h” from his name) painted the landscape first, and then thought, This sea looks kinda Greek; I’d better put something Greek in it. How about Icarus.

Probably not.

I practice archaeology

I’ve been sorting through books that until recently had lain in my grandparents’ shed. Ah, yes. Here is this textbook that I had been missing. And this textbook – psychology, Wadsworth/Thomson Learning – much easier to read than I remember (and even less interesting). Here’s an anthology with some good chapters. Better keep it. And here is a Daniel Clowes comic I’d been thinking of just last week. (Is it my copy or David’s? Both of our names are on the box.) What on earth is this. It’s in German. And this is in Hebrew. I’m middle-aged now. I don’t have time to learn languages.

The finding that most excites me is a short book about the Cane Ridge revival that a Bethel teacher ordered but, ultimately, didn’t assign. I’ll probably read it. Hardly my area, but that’s OK.

Why read history? Dunno, but I continue to do it. If only my approach were more systematic than, how shall I put it, channel surfing.

Samuel is delighted with the really huge, really glossy textbooks. He especially likes the psychology textbook.

Quarantining, cont.

Thursday was rough for Samuel – for all of us, really – as he came down with a fever. We called his doctor’s office and were advised to take him to the emergency room. So that’s what Karin did. (Her time of contagiousness had just ended.) I stayed at home. The emergency room doctor was pretty snippy with Karin until Samuel’s COVID test came back positive. Then the doctor’s tone changed. Samuel was x-rayed, given two doses of strong medicine, allowed to take a long nap in the hospital, and then sent home.

Friday, he again had a fever, but we soon brought it down; yesterday, he was better still.

Friday, also, I turned forty. It was odd to spend all of a birthday indoors. (I may have put a foot out on the front porch, to bring in the mail.)

I did what I like to do on my birthday, which is to subject Karin to one of my favorite movies; this year, it was Barcelona. Here is some funny trivia from the IMDb: “The plot was first suggested to director Whit Stillman when he heard of An Officer and a Gentleman (1982) and thought it referred to two different people.”

If I am not mistaken, Wednesday will be the first day that I can leave the house. Samuel will have to be quarantined several days longer.

Quarantining, 2021 edition

We have cold symptoms, but do we have COVID?

Karin took a home test and got a “yes” result. So, we both took drive-thru tests. Now we await the verdict of the lab.

Meanwhile, Karin stays home from her job.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Tonight we measured our oxygen levels. They’re normal.

Samuel has no symptoms, I’m glad to report. Or, if he does have any, he isn’t telling us.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

The results are available:

Karin, too.

So, first of all, we’re very grateful to have been vaccinated: our symptoms have been mild. And yet they’ve been noticeable enough to warn us not to spend time with other people.

And second, I worry for Samuel, who almost certainly has been infected (though, so far, he doesn’t seem to have suffered).

And I worry for the other people who’ve been around us.

I’m glad that on Sunday we didn’t go to church; but I regret that when I thought I just had a cold, I went to the store to buy medicine.

1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 44: (a) The Canterville ghost; (b) The craft; (c) The Simpsons, “Treehouse of horror VII”

This month, three jolly horror pics: an episode of The Simpsons, and two movies with Neve Campbell.

Scream also came out in 1996. That movie made Campbell famous, but I didn’t mention her in my review of it.

The Canterville Ghost

I think Campbell is better in The Canterville Ghost, a pretty negligible piece of filmmaking. Wilde’s tale has been redone for cinema or TV at least twenty times. A British version was broadcast just one year after Campbell’s was shown on ABC.

Wilde’s material is too slight for ninety minutes. Thirty or forty-five would have been all right. This could have been a chapter in an “anthology” series, paired with some other nice story like “A Christmas Carol.” (The ghost, a wicked old man, ultimately repents and becomes a “friendly” ghost.)

Anyway, Campbell. She’s in little-rich-girl mode, very pouty and naïve. Her character is sixteen; in Wilde’s story, she is thirteen. It’s transparently an act – by 1996, Campbell is well into her twenties, and she looks her age – but the mimicry is good. Campbell gives nary a “wink.” Well, maybe just one. She yells out Sooorrriee with a Canadian accent after the script has mentioned thirty or forty times that her character is from Indiana.

Campbell is Canadian. The actors who play her family are mostly British or Irish.

I wonder if this has anything to do with the story’s satirical purpose, which is to make fun of U.S. citizens who come to live among the English.

Patrick Stewart is the ghost.

The Craft

I said “three jolly horror pics,” but this one gets less and less jolly as it goes along. Basically, it’s Mean Girls before there was Mean Girls, only with better performers (Campbell, Fairuza Balk, Rachel True, Robin Tunney) and with impressive special effects. And these mean girls are high school outcasts, not high school socialites. And they’re witches. They don’t wreak havoc through gossip, social betrayal, etc., so much as by casting spells.

Is anything gained by supernaturalizing the Mean Girls template? I think so.

The witches receive power from a benevolent deity but then use it for vengeful, banal purposes. This isn’t just meanness: it’s blasphemy. I doubt that the movie set out to teach any lesson, but this one is worth noting.

I don’t think viewers would get any vicarious social pleasure from observing the clique in The Craft. This is not a circle anyone would wish to belong to. It is almost contractual: the girls need each other because their magic is stronger when there are four of them. Each girl has her own agenda; none seems to care much for the others, or even to aspire to be accepted by the others.

What is compelling is the fantasy of gaining power over one’s enemies – and over one’s friends.

“Treehouse of Horror VII”

For me, this is the most memorable episode in the “Treehouse of Horror” series. It contains three mini-episodes. (1) Something strange lives in the Simpsons’ attic. (2) Lisa’s science fair project takes on a life of its own. (3) Space aliens abduct Homer. It would ruin these little stories to describe them further. But I will say that the third story is ultimately about U.S. politics – and that it reflects what in 1996 was a common belief: that, regrettably, the two major parties are indistinguishable from each other.

How different things seem today.

P.S. I grew up listening to the show in Spanish, and even then I understood how excellent the translating and voice acting were in that language. Here is a video about the voice actor who played Homer. He seems to have changed a lot of the dialog for his audience.

P.P.S. Look out for the space aliens, who appear briefly in the video.

Sax infusion

Karin has been sick, and she missed a day and a half of work. She didn’t get tested for COVID – no time slots were available at the testing centers. There must be many test-takers now, what with COVID and the flu.

Samuel and I have been fine.

As I type this, it’s his going-to-sleep time.

“Sammy, what music would you like tonight? Saxophone or piano?”

“Saxophone.”

(“Songbird” is good, but the other songs are lousy – and this is supposed to be Kenny G’s best album. More often, I put on Gato Barbieri.)

“Sammy, stop kicking or I’ll put you in your crib.”

A successful threat.

He ends up in his crib anyway, but not before we’ve let him go to sleep near his parents.

The birthday boy

Happy birthday (yesterday) to Samuel, who is two. Here he flaunts his new German trainers, which his Aunt Edoarda & Uncle Stephen gave him.

He also got a set of wooden coasters from his Aunt Mary & Uncle Martin (when he visits their house, he plays with their coasters). … Dear me, if I try to list who has given what, I’ll leave someone out. I’d better just declare my all-extensive gratitude.

Other gifts: cleaning supplies (broom, mop, etc.); tools (hammer, power drill, etc.); clothes; greeting cards; books; pumpkins; candy; and cold hard cash.

We took him to two “trunk or treat” gatherings. Until this year, I was barely aware that people did this. Samuel wasn’t interested in collecting candy, but he did enjoy drawing with chalk in the parking lot.

For the record, he was dressed as a lion – not as a bear, as some 40% of his fellow “trunk-or-treaters” thought. Karin’s friend Nora brought her little daughter, Charlotte, dressed as Madeline. In that series’s fourth book, Madeline and the Gypsies, Madeline and her friend Pepito are forced to wear an old lionskin. Therefore, Samuel also was in Madeline costume. (I can almost feel the collective eye-roll. Well, this is parenting: one’s activities and cultural references become more childish. Before long, I’ll be finding meaning in Chuck E. Cheese.)

Or maybe he was Sam the Lion from The Last Picture Show.

Tonight the rain is heavy. Karin & I were in our basement, watching TV, when we saw one of our window-wells fill up with water (like the episode of Get Smart in which a flooded telephone booth almost drowns Max and Ninety-nine). Underneath the window-well, water seeped out from the wood panelling and onto the floor. We moved some boxes away from the deluge and resolved to seal up that window-well ASAP.

In memoriam

It looks like I won’t be going to the funeral after all.

My dad shared these photos of my grandma and her family. The first was taken many years ago in the Ecuadorian jungle.

(My little mother is in this photo – she is the youngest daughter.)

This more recent photo was taken after the deaths of my grandma’s husband and of her second daughter, Irene.

You can see how cheerful my grandma was.

She also was one of the most studious people I have known. She constantly read the Bible and books about the Bible. Her sight was very poor, and so, using a magnifying glass, she would proceed slowly; and because of the effort it cost, she would read little else – she placed God first. But when I was young and she could see well enough, she made for me a tape recording of all of Charlotte’s Web.

You’ll recall that after my grandpa died, I mentioned the books that he and my grandma had written together. They were narrated from his perspective. But she was not the lesser author.

He was rather legendary – a Great Man, I’ve heard people say. He was a force. But so was she. He would have needed someone like her to keep up with him. I remember watching a presentation that they used to do for U.S. churches. They would speak the Shuar language to each other; and, as was customary in dialog between the older Shuar, one of them would begin to speak before the other had finished his or her sentence, so that there was no pause between the utterances.

I used to talk to her quite a bit. She would listen, and she was not intolerant of my opinions, but there was no changing her mind. She had long before decided which path to take, and she tenaciously continued down it. It is better to be like this, I think, so long as one goes in the right direction.

Which, of course, she did.

R.I.P. Grandma

My mother’s mother died today in a suburb of Kansas City. Because it is almost midnight, I’ll wait until next time to say a few things about my grandma.

My mother has traveled to Kansas City.

I don’t know what sort of funeral will be held – the pandemic complicates everything, of course – but it is not out of the question that I should travel.

October’s poem

Chinua Achebe, “NON-commitment” (1970):

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

Hurrah! to them who do nothing

see nothing feel nothing whose

hearts are fitted with prudence

like a diaphragm across

womb’s beckoning doorway to bar

the scandal of seminal rage. I’m

told the owl too wears wisdom

in a ring of defense round

each vulnerable eye securing it fast

against the darts of sight. Long ago

in the Middle East Pontius Pilate

openly washed involvement off his

white hands and became famous. (Of all

the Roman officials before him and after

who else is talked about

every Sunday in the Apostles’ Creed?) And

talking of apostles that other fellow

Judas wasn’t such a fool

either; though much maligned by

succeeding generations the fact remains

he alone in that motley crowd

had sense enough to tell a doomed

movement when he saw one

and get out quick, a nice little

packet bulging his coat pocket

into the bargain – sensible fellow.

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

Dante puts Judas near the bottom of Hell, with the traitors. Pilate is not brought down so low: he is with the self-centered opportunists (that is, if lines 55–57 of canto III refer to Pilate, which is controversial).

So: is “noncommitment” more like malicious treachery? Or is it more like opportunistic indifference to the good?

Or is “noncommitment” not a single and genuine kind of sin but an artificial, gerrymandered sin?

Or does Achebe (or Dante) simply get the exemplars wrong and accuse Judas, or Pilate, or both of them, of the wrong kind of sin?

I wish I could say these sorts of philosophical questions are slowing down my reading of the Inferno, but, the truth is, I’m mostly ignoring them and plowing on ahead.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

In a recent interview, Michael Huemer says:

In the first day of one history class in elementary school, I thought that I liked history, but I later learned that I’d been tricked. The teacher (Mrs. Denison) had started a discussion of the question, “Who discovered America?” It was traditionally said that Columbus discovered it. But wait, there were already Indians (that’s what people called the Native Americans then!) living in America when Columbus arrived. Also, there was evidence that Leif Erikson had traveled to America hundreds of years before Columbus. Etc. I thought this was a great discussion. But as I was later to learn, that wasn’t typical of history classes, that was really more like a philosophy discussion, and I actually hated what history classes were normally like.

In another elementary school class, the teacher read a story in which a king had promised some big prize to any hero who could save his daughter from, well, something bad that had taken her captive. I don’t remember the details, except that basically three people wound up all contributing to saving the princess. Each one (as I would now describe it) provided a causally necessary but insufficient condition on the rescue. We then had a discussion of the question: Who gets the prize? Again, I thought that was a great discussion. As I much later recognized, that was also a philosophical discussion.

And it continued like that throughout all my years of schooling. All the really good classes that I ever had were discussions about questions that I would later recognize as philosophical questions, or at least philosophy-adjacent. But there was never enough of it. Not until college, when I could have whole classes on philosophy.

I’ve spent a lot of time wondering what the point is of studying literature and history apart from mining ideas (philosophy) from them. It’s a hard question. My inability to answer it was one big reason why I ended up just studying philosophy.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

C.S. Lewis suggests that the point of reading literature, at least, is to mine experiences:

Those of us who have been true readers all our life seldom realise the enormous extension of our being which we owe to authors. We realise it best when we talk with an unliterary friend. He may be full of goodness and good sense but he inhabits a tiny world. In it, we should be suffocated. The man who is contented to be only himself, and therefore less a self, is in prison. My own eyes are not enough for me, therefore I will see through those of others. Reality, even seen through the eyes of many, is not enough. I will see what others have invented. Even the eyes of all humanity are not enough. I regret that the brutes cannot write books. …

Historians, though, tend to eschew this sort of justification of their craft. I’ve heard them talk of “locating” the self in a larger temporal context (or of “busting myths” that misplace the self in some false context – the historian’s version of Lewis’s quip that “good philosophy must exist, if for no other reason, because bad philosophy needs to be answered”). I’ve not heard them talk much of “enlarging” the self through partaking in the experiences of others. This sort of aspiration, they regard as suspect. Whereas Lewis says, “My own eyes are not enough for me,” historians say, “I insist on setting the evidence in front of my own eyes” (which, in practice, amounts to setting just a few links of an unavoidably long and complex evidentiary chain in front of their own eyes).

But perhaps historians don’t generally say this. Perhaps I have been listening to unrepresentative historians. But I doubt it.

Venezuela 2, Ecuador 1

This is the second qualifier we’ve lost to a team at the bottom of the standings.

This defeat is especially galling. We were ahead 1–0 and seemed to have the Venezuelans under control. I guess we were excessively confiados.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Karin & I continue to unpack. Today I cleared out about half of the kitchen and nearly all of the front parlor. It was like a super long game of peg solitaire – I’d clear away one “peg” to make room to clear away another, so I could access yet another “peg” – only, these “pegs” were liquorbox- or bananabox-sized and filled with dishes or books, and the empty spaces were on three different storeys of the house.

I was glad for the workout since I didn’t run. Yesterday, though, I did try out a new route: eight laps around a nearby school. The sidewalk was uneven and hard, and on the last lap I injured a groin muscle. But I toughed it out: I needed to burn extra calories: I was to go to a restaurant with Karin’s dad’s family.

Here is our group portrait, with little Samuel at the end of the table:

After the meal, Karin & I stopped at my parents’ house and retrieved the food we’d left in the freezer. But when we got back to our new house, the power had gone out.

I had to sleep without using my CPAP machine, and so I woke up many times.

Ecuador 3, Bolivia 0

The goals were scored in the first twenty minutes, and the rest of the game was a cool-down session for our starters and then a tryout for various bench players. Énner Valencia broke Ecuador’s career scoring record.

Afterward, Bolivia’s captain, the goalkeeper Carlos Lampe, was interviewed.

He said: We were our own worst enemy – or something to that effect.

Let the scoreline not cause us to forget the solid defending that we did in the second half.

I’m afraid he was deluding himself.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

We’ve moved to South Bend. Kind church friends helped us; so did Sam the architect; so did my parents; so did Karin’s dad & Carol, his girlfriend. Samuel was parked in front of the TV for many hours in a mostly happy state, but he would cry whenever I’d leave to move things into the new house. When I’d come back, he’d hug me and whimper, “Don’t go.”

The new house is crammed with disordered furniture and boxes. The rooms are impassable. Karin’s dad & Carol helped us to tidy up our bedroom, so at least we’ll have a place to sleep tonight.

Jasper and Ziva are distressed, of course, but they have been venturing out from their hiding places in the basement.

More qualifiers

This long day began for me before five o’clock. Then I didn’t get a full meal until after two; a couple of hours later, I was sleeping from sheer exhaustion. Did Samuel sleep today? He did not.

Thankfully, Karin was here to watch him: she stayed at home to prepare for the move.

My parents and I spent much of the day cleaning the new house, and we waited there for a plumber who didn’t come. A different plumber will come next Wednesday … after Karin, Samuel, and I have moved in.

Until this plumber arrives, the bathtub will serve as our all-purpose sink.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Ecuador’s next World Cup qualifier will be played tomorrow night (8:30 ET).

Opponent: Bolivia.

Location: Guayaquil.

This will be our first home qualifier outside of Quito since 1997 (the last one also was played against Bolivia, and in Guayaquil).

Afterward, we’ll travel to Venezuela and Colombia. It makes sense to prepare for those games on the Caribbean coast by playing our home game in a hot, coastal city.

Guayaquil was in the news a few days ago because a particularly brutal prison riot happened there.

Last days in Mishawaka

Happy birthday to Karin, who is thirty.

As she pointed out, our ages start with the same digit. For now.

The grownups’ books – not Samuel’s – have all been transported to the new house, except the 35–40 vols. that I’ve set aside for imminent use. I miss the books that are out of reach. Until lately, I’d never had such an urge to read “The Canterville Ghost.”

The furniture, including the beds, will be moved on Saturday. This will be our last week at my parents’ house.

Like a good addict, I worry about where in the new neighborhood I’ll exercise. I’ll miss Mishawaka’s riverwalk. Its pavement once seemed too hard, but my legs have gotten used to it, and I have no trouble covering an extra mile on little more than a whim. Some mornings, I go incredibly fast, faster than I would have dreamed, because I have to get back to the house before Karin can leave for her job.

1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 43: Escape from L.A.

These movies came to mind while I was watching Escape from L.A.:

• the Rambo series
• Independence Day and The Rock (both from 1996)
• The Day After Tomorrow
• Children of Men
• and, weirdly, Labyrinth

I guess this movie is a kind of a Labyrinth for grownups. But better than Labyrinth.

Kurt Russell reprises his role as “Snake” Plissken, from Escape from New York (1981). Like Ed Harris in The Rock, he’s a war hero who has gone rogue; and like Sean Connery in The Rock, he is captured by the U.S. government and forced to go up against a rebel group that is threatening the nation’s security. I doubt that either movie plagiarized from the other, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they both took these elements from Escape from New York.

As in The Rock, the hero must travel to an island. The island is Los Angeles. It has been cut off from the mainland by earthquakes and tsunamis, and now it is used as a deportation site for misfits who have been stripped of their citizenship by the ultra-moralistic U.S. President. Gangsters rule the island. (The joke is that the dystopia is not so unlike certain common ideas of the real Los Angeles.) The main gangster is “Cuervo” Jones, a “Che” Guevara figure from Peru’s Shining Path. “Snake” Plissken must track “Cuervo” down and retrieve the doomsday device that he has stolen.

“Snake” has a series of bizarre encounters with the inhabitants of L.A. This is what the movie is really about, and the reason it reminds me of Labyrinth – and, for that matter, the Inferno (which I continue to read). A lot of the people “Snake” meets are depicted by classic oddball actors. One of my favorite characters, played by Peter Fonda, is an old surfer who rides the tsunamis; another is played by the haunted-looking, scene-stealing Valeria Golino. She is a beacon of warmth in a mostly cynical movie.

There are chase scenes and fight scenes. “Snake” likes to shoot first and ask questions later. Sometimes, I’d feel a little sorry for the gangsters.

In the following still picture, Golino and Russell are tied up so that their features can be harvested for plastic surgery. (You know: L.A., and all that.)

The visuals are slick, except when they’re obviously meant to be goofy. There are some good laughs. I had a good time.

Still ill

Saturday

Blades of grass I mowed: zero. I’ve been feeling lousy.

COVID test results: negative (Karin’s and mine).

Karin & I went to our new house and cleaned for several hours. I was holding up all right until I swept the very dusty basement stairs and window ledges; afterward, it felt like a gallon of glue was in my nose. I took pills and felt OK. Then I felt lousy again. I took more pills. This illness should continue for a week.

Our neighbor who mows lawns mowed ours without having been asked to. Then he came over and hung around until we paid him.

It won’t be like this after we’ve moved in.

When we left, after dark, our little street was jam-packed with cars. These neighbors party. This will be a change from Mishawaka.

Sunday

Feeling worse. We stayed home from church and watched the service online. Samuel was grumpy all day; finally, I took him out in his stroller, about fifty minutes. He slept the last twenty and woke up as soon as we came home.

He recites passages from his books:

Kite oom
Kite moon
Kite boon
Kite kittens

I have been keeping up with the Dante reading, which is not strenuous, though some nights I don’t finish my canto until it’s time to sleep.

A conference

“John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice at Fifty: An Anniversary Conference” – today and tomorrow, at Notre Dame. Look at the nice lineup of speakers. (Alas, one of them, Charles Mills, died earlier this week.)

I was to have gone with my Uncle Tim. It would have been my first academic conference in several years. But this morning I woke up with COVID symptoms – mild, cold-like ones.

Karin and Samuel have them, too.

It probably is just a cold, what with the changes in the weather. Even so, I have withdrawn from the conference and scheduled a COVID test.

This is the second conference I will have missed because of the pandemic.

If I continue to feel well enough, I’ll mow the grass.

Benton Harbor and Saint Joseph; Sample Street

Benton Harbor, Michigan, and St. Joseph, Michigan – adjoining cities one county to the north of us – are featured in this Guardian report. And not for a very lovely reason.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Fall’s equinox will occur tomorrow. After several bright, hot days, the weather is obligingly misty.

My dad and I moved a carload of books to my new house. We rode along Sample Street, which goes in a straight line forever. One side is bleakly industrial; the other, bleakly residential. The street is dotted with sad little shops and gas stations.

More than any other part of South Bend, this area reminds me of the grim outlands of southern Quito.

When I was younger, I would project a certain romantic feeling onto such places. I guess I still do; but now I face the prospect of spending the rest of my life in one. (Or very near to one; the house’s immediate surroundings aren’t quite like this.) I am a little too old, and too tired, to relish this possibility.

Self-care

Well, here I am out on the porch at five in the morning. This is another of my routines. I’ve been waking two hours earlier than Karin and Samuel: it’s the only quiet time guaranteed to me.

I alternate days of exercise and days of rest; on the days of rest, I sit out on the porch, in the dark. The porch bulb doesn’t work.

I daren’t remain inside the house – I daren’t make noise or inspire the kitties to make noise – I daren’t wake the boy.

The sun rises pretty late (we’re near the time zone’s western edge). Even though it’s dark, I take plenty of reading material with me. Today I have four volumes, and a printout of a philosophy article. I won’t be able to see any of it until fifteen minutes before Karin and Samuel wake up.

I hardly ever watch TV at this hour. All I do, besides pray, is type on the computer, drink tea, and listen to insects and trains.

It’s lovely. No wonder it has become a habit.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

100 Days of Dante (hat tip: Mr. Quiring) – a schedule for those who like to read the same thing as many other people. One hundred days, one hundred cantos.

The philosopher Eleonore Stump has taught a two-semester sequence pairing Dante with Aquinas (fall and spring). That schedule, also, is an intriguing possibility. It is not all bad to be out of collegiate work; I can read whatever I choose.

Now, if only I could change that porch bulb. …

September’s poem (and TV show)

T.S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton” (no. 1 of Four Quartets):

Garlic and sapphires in the mud / Clot the bedded axle-tree. / The trilling wire in the blood / Sings below inveterate scars / Appeasing long forgotten wars. …

Is Samuel too young to watch Wire in the Blood, my favorite serial killer profiling show? Maybe, but it has become our routine: he approaches me when ready to sleep; I change his diaper; we sit together and watch Wire in the Blood until he drifts into unconsciousness.

We have only three more episodes to view. There will be a hole in my life when we have finished with Wire in the Blood.

Karin has stayed away from this show; but not long ago she did join me in watching a rather anomalous episode, in which the profiler, who lives in Northeast England, travels to Texas to solve a crime. The fish-out-of-water plot reminded me of “Paul Bunyan Goes to Texas”; I wrote that story in the seventh grade.

Arrival

My parents are in town. Today they toured their house, which they had never seen. Their next task will be to help Karin & me to pack up our belongings so that we can move into our new house, so they can move into theirs.

This will take weeks to do.

Leading them around their yard, I urged them to buy a weedwhacker and to have their trees trimmed.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

This fall I am reading Compulsory Games, in which are reprinted fifteen “uncanny” tales of Robert Aickman. He seems to have had two great interests: this literary genre, and the conservation of Britain’s canals (he co-founded the Inland Waterways Association). He strikes me as having been an offbeat, fastidious person.

I like his stories very much.

A tragedy

This is an update about the hospitalization that I mentioned a few days ago.

Most readers already know what has happened; in any case, it isn’t my story to tell.

For now, I’ll only say that my family is anguished. I am anguished. Karin is anguished. Samuel doesn’t understand, but I think he knows that we’re sad.

In our family, though, we really do love each other. And many other people love us too. These things have become crystal-clear.

(I know this will sound terribly cryptic if you don’t know the sad news. If that’s the case, feel free to get in touch and I’ll relay what has been announced by those most affected. This isn’t a wholly private matter; it’s just that, as I said, it isn’t my story to tell.)

A song I’ve listened to when I’ve run out of prayer:

The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases

His mercies never come to an end

They are new every morning

New every morning

Great is thy faithfulness, oh Lord

Great is thy faithfulness

🙠 🙢

Ecuador 0, Chile 0

We had the Chileans on the ropes, and then one of our players was ejected for an unlucky foul.

Next qualifier: Thursday, in Montevideo – in Peñarol’s stadium, not in the famed Estadio Centenario.

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Today I mowed one of the lawns and pushed Samuel in his stroller for an hour, which didn’t put him to sleep. He’s been napping less and less. The good news is, he is very interested in numbers. He calls out the numbers he sees in books … and on billboards, keyboards, athletes’ uniforms, etc. He also has been saying color and animal names.

I can’t take credit for this. What has inspired him is Baby Einstein. Let no one disparage that show.

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Today, also, Karin & I cleaned house. Not the house we just bought, but the one we’re living in, my parents’ house.

In Ecuador, my parents loaded their belongings onto a truck and bought plane tickets to the United States. They’ll come to Mishawaka on Sunday. They’ll stay at Mary’s & Martin’s house until their things arrive.

Ecuador 2, Paraguay 0

Hardly a comfortable victory: the goals arrived in minute 88 and in stoppage time. Paraguay defended well but posed little offensive threat. We were devoid of ideas and sharpness until the last quarter of the game; the substitutions helped.

So, due to a couple of goals in less than ten minutes, our streak of winless games – seven, counting the two previous World Cup qualifiers and five games at the Copa América – was ended. Perhaps this will make us bolder.

Yesterday’s other results allowed us to increase our lead over the teams beneath us in the standings.

Our next game, on Sunday against Chile, also will be at home; then we’ll travel to Uruguay for this month’s curtain-closer.

I finished reading Tana French’s In the Woods, which had lain forlornly on my shelf for several years. I didn’t expect it to be such a downer.

Now can we watch The Dublin Murders?, asks Karin.

Well, no. The Dublin Murders relates the stories of In the Woods and The Likeness simultaneously. So, first, I have to read The Likeness.

The weather in Indiana is turning autumnal, which is good for jogging.

1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 42: La cérémonie

I’m in no hurry to watch all the movies of Claude Chabrol, fascinating though they are. His is a nasty sort of oddness, a peculiarly repulsive amorality. The characters’ depravity is very gradually drawn out, with an effect less horrific than disgusting, as if we’d been led through a well-tended garden to be shown a dead rat.

The other day I saw, on some train tracks, a raccoon’s body neatly sliced in two. Chabrol’s movies feel like that. They even have titles like “A Girl Cut in Two” and “The Butcher.”

La cérémonie, elegant, streamlined, is no different. As Roger Ebert tells us, “The French have a name for the events leading up to death by guillotine. They call it ‘the ceremony.’”

So, in this movie, we have: (A) the exploiters: an industrialist, his pampered wife (an art-dealing ex-model), and their privileged, complacent children; and (B) the proles, played by two splendidly inscrutable actresses: Sandrine Bonnaire as the family’s quiet housemaid, and Isabelle Huppert as the postmistress, the housemaid’s aggressively disreputable friend. Chabrol has said that this is a “Marxist” movie. To what extent should we agree? Yes, there is a revolution; but are these revolutionaries the properly Marxian sort? If the housemaid and postmistress do belong to any Marxian category, they must be lumpenproletariat – the lowest of the low, the bottom-out-of-sights – even though they have jobs and don’t look down-and-out. They are antisocial criminals, rejected by and rejecting everyone else. Marx had little use for such people.

So, yes, Chabrol may be sneering at the upper classes, but perhaps he also is sneering at Marx and at other proponents of revolution. In this movie the rich are condescending and snobbish, but those who overthrow them have even less human feeling, and their actions are monstrous. If Chabrol is taking a side, which is it? Or does he just like to wallow?

Reviewers acknowledge the class conflict to dismiss it. The key dynamic, they insist, is psycho-sexual: the brash postmistress takes over the will of the weakminded housemaid.

I am not convinced. The housemaid may be illiterate, but she is no pushover. In the source novel, Ruth Rendell’s A Judgement in Stone, the housemaid clearly is the stronger figure.

In both the novel and the movie, the postmistress is pretty silly, but the housemaid is about as silly as a cancer.

The novel (set in Britain, not France) begins like this:

Eunice Parchman killed the Coverdale family because she could not read or write.

There was no real motive and no premeditation. No money was gained and no security. As a result of her crime, Eunice Parchman’s disability was made known not to a mere family or a handful of villagers but to the whole country. She accomplished nothing by it but disaster for herself, and all along, somewhere in her strange mind, she knew she would accomplish nothing. And yet, although her companion and partner was mad, Eunice was not. She had the awful practical sanity of the atavistic ape disguised as a twentieth-century woman.

Interpreted psycho-sexually, the movie fits into the tradition I discussed in my review of Normal Life. Interpreted in terms of class struggle, it is more like Parasite.

Only, Parasite is more straightforward and, in a way, more hopeful. It’s understandable enough for the classes in Parasite to exploit each other for their own gain. This is a problem that can be addressed.

The vengeance in La cérémonie is much bleaker.

Renovations (cont.)

A really grueling couple of days. A close family member was hospitalized; this has colored everything, and our thoughts and prayers are never far from this person.

Karin & I again visited our new house with Samuel and worked for several hours, mostly pulling up staples and tack strips from the previously carpeted hardwood floors.

Karin’s mom gave us money to pay our neighbor to mow the front lawn.

A few words before sleep

Yesterday, another ludicrous display on the soccer field.

It may be time for me to retire …

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Quite a storm tonight. Rain, loud thunder, brief power outage, etc. The whole family enjoyed it together in bed.

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Today I finished reading the main deuterocanonical books – those accepted by Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Christians, but not by Protestants. I shall go on to read 1 and 2 Esdras and the Prayer of Manasseh (canonical for the Orthodox but not for Catholics). I don’t think I own any bibles with 3 and 4 Maccabees, but I’ll look around.

Sirach (Ecclesiasticus) was the most rewarding book to read, by far. Sirach 44:1 – “Let us now praise famous men, and our fathers that begat us …” – was the only deuterocanonical verse I knew before I started reading these texts. Unfortunately, what came after that verse was less rewarding than the 43 prior chapters.

These are just gut-level reactions. Obviously, I am no scholar; nor do I wish to pose as a connoisseur.

Because of this project, and because of coincidences in my devotional and church reading schedules, I have gone through the book of Esther, in one version or another, four times in the last year.

Sacrilege; renovations; our new neighborhood; the “frankly” book

When I did my little jog this morning, I was not alone. A church was holding a fundraiser. I saw signs for a five-kilometer run and for a one-mile walk. There seemed to be four people running and twenty people walking, the walkers all in one clump.

Messages of inspiration were posted around the course. The most obnoxious message, at a watering station, said “‘I thirst’ (John 19:28)” – as if a 5K fun run were comparable to the crucifixion. This is the sort of sacrilege I expect to see on unbelieving (but biblically literate) British TV, not in the pious middle of the United States.

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Karin left her job early so we could do some renovations in the house we bought. Mainly, we pulled up filthy old carpet downstairs. The underlying hardwood is in good condition. We discovered that one of the (less filthily) carpeted upstairs rooms has bare, unvarnished planks underneath, so we left that carpet in place.

We both got some nasty scratches from the carpets’ staples. Samuel wandered around and got into trouble, as usual, but after a time we were able to distract him with Internet videos (a technician came who set up our Internet connection).

I took a brief walk. Several of my new neighbors were out of doors; quite a few of them were speaking in Spanish. My mission was to return “Frankly, We Did Win this Election”: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost to the local branch of the public library. What I read of that book was entertaining. The back cover has a nice blurb by President Trump, praising the author for his wavy hair. Alas, I didn’t have time to finish “Frankly,” and a hold had been placed on it, so I couldn’t just borrow it again. This is what comes of reading too many different books when I’ve checked out a book in high demand.

The homework machine; “Peruvians live in Peru”; classic toons

I found, on YouTube, a record that I used to listen to when I was a child in Esmeraldas: Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine.

Side 1:

Side 2:

Along with the Hardy Boys novels, this record introduced me to U.S. teenhood. From it I picked up 1950s–1960s lingo (This must be how teenagers talk, I thought) and some regrettable attitudes about doing homework.

The story is told as a musical. When I was a child, I didn’t relish this. Now I think the songs are pretty funny:

Girls are a pain

You know what I mean

They like going shopping

And they like keeping clean

And now I realize that the characters are pre-teens, not teenagers.

The best song is by a girl whose computer-generated report on Peru has been sabotaged; and who, therefore, must “wing it,” Sally Brown-style, in front of the class:

Peruvians live in Peru

Just like you’d expect them to do

Just like Romans live in Rome

And the Finns make Finland their home

Peruvians live in Peru

Just like you’d expect them to do

I like it that her classmates start singing along with this drivel. Then the song morphs into a mariachi or whatever. Wrong country … but this does reflect the student’s predicament.

Samuel was fascinated by all of this – the songs, the disembodied dialog (he hasn’t heard many podcasts or radio dramas), and, especially, the computer noises.

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An even better find: five hours of classic Looney Tunes, gorgeously remastered.

It’s a pleasure to watch old favorites like “A Corny Concerto” (the second cartoon in the video) looking this good.

Samuel liked this pretty well, too.