1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 41: Normal life

Look who visited! Our high school teacher, Mr. Quiring – all the way from his new home in Nebraska. Here he poses with Mary, Stephen, and me.

Mrs. Quiring visited, too. We learned that she used to grade our reading journals (with terrific speed, as I recall). Credit to her.

Mr. Quiring was a good teacher when I was in school; ten years later, when I visited his class – Stephen was his student then – I thought he was even better. Afterward, he must have improved even more (although, now, he hasn’t been a classroom teacher for several years).

Yesterday he was brimming with pedagogical ideas – perhaps because he was in a room of teachers.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Normal Life

This sad movie is in the tradition of Bonnie and Clyde, Badlands, Deep Crimson (also released in 1996), and, later, Monster. The criminal twosomes seem less glamorous and more pitiful with each passing movie. (I am not including The Honeymoon Killers, which I haven’t seen.) The distinctive feature of Normal Life is how mismatched and disconnected from one another the two criminals are. They quarrel their way through a pretty appalling marriage before they begin robbing banks. At first, they don’t even rob together; it’s the straitlaced husband, the ex-cop (Luke Perry), who does it by himself to make up for the spending of his unstable wife (Ashley Judd). But it’s the chilling, heartless wife who’s the adrenaline junkie. Once she learns what her husband is doing, she wants in on the fun, and it’s only a matter of time until each of them goes out in a (separate) blaze of glory. Another good movie that Normal Life reminds me of is At Close Range, with a criminal father-son duo played by Christopher Walken and Sean Penn. Both of these movies evoke a brutal U.S. ordinariness – in At Close Range it’s rural Pennsylvania, and in Normal Life it’s the blander Chicago suburbs. No poetry here – this isn’t Badlands. Normal Life opens with a long drive past suburban housing developments and strip malls. It’s almost painful how similar they are to the housing developments and strip malls of today. The movie was filmed on streets and in parking lots and banks where the real-life robbers operated; the locations couldn’t have been more generic if they’d been scouted.

An emergency

A fascinating interview with the epidemiologist William Foege:

The major benefit of public health in the past hundred years is that it has put science, knowledge and technology into the hands of individuals, even when they don’t trust science. The ability of individuals to get vaccines, stop smoking, diet, reduce alcohol intake, wear seat belts, helmets, drink safe water, eat safe foods, use sun block, monitor their blood pressure and pulse, track exercise patterns has led to better-informed daily decisions by millions of people. It is an awesome tapestry of consequential science practiced by believers and non-believers alike.

(My italics.)

This is my favorite paragraph, but there is much more on the powers and limitations of government and of individual citizens.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Martin took Karin to the emergency room this morning. She was dehydrated from having vomited so much.

I stayed at home with Samuel.

Karin was given fluids intravenously, and new medicine. She came home in the afternoon. So far, she has been feeling better.

Olympic gold

The boy constantly climbs the furniture. Things which once were safe upon high shelves are no longer safe.

The boy also climbs and climbs on his father, who, hours later, must resist the urge to shield himself from being trampled by (phantom) mountain goats.

The boy’s mother drags herself to work most days. When not at work, she is in bed, sick.

This is what has been going on in our household.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Ecuador won its second-ever Olympic gold medal – the first since 1996. The competition was a pretty badass one: the men’s cycling road race.

The winning cyclist, Richard Carapaz of Carchi Province, recently finished third in the Tour de France. His fellow Olympic medalists excelled in that contest, too.

The six-hour Olympic race climbed part of Mt. Fuji.

Here are an Associated Press/Sports Illustrated report …

an NBC highlight video …

and some analysis.

The costs of not conforming

“Ghost World at 20” – an essay in The Guardian about one of the best movies I’ve seen. The hard truth that confronts Enid (Thora Birch) and Rebecca (Scarlett Johansson), two recent high-school graduates, is that in life there are “two basic options: conform or not conform”:

It’s heartbreaking for Enid to learn, over the course of the film, that she and Rebecca don’t share the same answer to that question. When they meet Seymour (Steve Buscemi), a middle-aged record collector with a crummy shared apartment and no romantic prospects, it’s like a visitation from the Ghost of Nonconformist Future. Rebecca recoils in horror. Enid is intrigued.

The movie then details the costs of not conforming. Squalor. Perpetual uncertainty. Ostracism. Alienation. The death of friendship.

Yup, that’s how it is.

I think this is one of the wisest movies, one that understands this basic human predicament.

Roger Ebert’s review.

Clarkson’s farm

A weekend of bone-tiredness. Karin is rather laid up, and I’ve been shouldering some extra burdens which have made my usual chores more difficult. This afternoon, it took an hour and a half instead of the customary hour to mow one of the fields; this was due to the length and dampness of the grass (the rain has wreaked havoc on the mowing schedule). After I returned inside I drank four bottles of water. Samuel wanted to sleep in my arms. Karin was too tired to start watching a new crime series with me, so I put on the first thing that looked interesting: a documentary series called Clarkson’s Farm. I’d never heard of Jeremy Clarkson, but in Britain he’s famous. He kept me thinking of the Kingsley Amis title “One Fat Englishman.” Clarkson is only sixty-one but looks seventy-five because he’s smoked so many cigarettes. In this show he has bought a farm in the Cottswolds, and after years of paying someone else to do his work, he’s decided to do it himself, even though he knows nothing about farming. He buys a huge, fancy Lamborghini tractor instead of a sensible second-hand tractor; it doesn’t fit into his barn. Then he discovers that a lot of farming consists of climbing up to and down from the cab of his very tall tractor. He tills the soil inefficiently. He wears rough-looking farmers’ clothes. Real farmers are summoned to advise him; as often as not, they’ve dressed as if to work in an office. I am not a gentleman farmer, but on a much smaller scale I can relate to all of this.

July’s poem

Luci Shaw, “Sonnet for My Left Hip.”

All poems are copyrighted by Luci Shaw.

To be reprinted only by permission of the author.

All right, then. Here is a link.

My own left hip has been hurting.

A renewed athleticism

Thunderstorms and flash flood warnings tonight: no pickup soccer, despite the fervid wishes of the twenty or so nerds who like to run around on an unpainted, undersized field with lots of gnats. My muscles are getting more used to the sport. Alas, I’ve had a three-game goal drought. That’s what comes of playing fullback while lacking the will to cover more than twenty yards.

Hmm. Facebook says people are playing right now. Well, good for them. I am at home in bed.

I have been running again; that, too, is increasingly easy, though the concrete surface of Mishawaka’s running trail is painfully hard. The trail goes along a scenic riverfront. Unfortunately there are many geese, and the crows have been attacking me.

Tomorrow the building inspectors will look at the house we intend to buy, and so we’ll find out if it’s habitable.

House hunting, pt. 2001, a specious odyssey

We have a winner! And the winner is us! You’ll have noticed that on the real estate websites a certain property is listed as “pending.” That would be due to Karin & me.

Actually, I am more of a winner than Karin, because her commute will lengthen by approximately ten minutes each way. But we’re both winners in terms of price – and in terms of the house itself, which we like.

We’re winners, that is, if the sale goes through.

Samuel also likes the house, but he is less discriminating. Our other friend Sam, Sam the architect, saw the house and said its construction was sound.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

I finished reading The Mystery of a Hansom Cab, which was pretty lightweight despite its frequent allusions to classical literature. It had many funny scenes with loquacious landladies and back-alley women, and a truly horrifying deathbed scene. Marco Denevi, who wrote the excellent Rosaura a las diez, is said to have been influenced by Wilkie Collins; but I shouldn’t be surprised if he also studied The Mystery of a Hansom Cab.

House hunting, pt. 1066 and all that

Karin & I took Samuel to the St. Joseph County fair, and, for the first time, he saw cows, chickens, horses, hogs, goats, and kangaroos. Then we drove across town and walked through a well-kept house with fifties decor. Martin, Mary, and David were with us. Everyone was very positive about this house, and so, a few hours later, we made as handsome an offer as we could; it was refused.

Tonight: two more houses.

Democracy

On this patriotic occasion, this fine NYT essay helps us to remember that the U.S. has not, historically, been very democratic.

This shouldn’t be controversial. We all know about the inequalities in political power that have been brought about through the Electoral College, voting restrictions against women and slaves, Jim Crow, etc. We all know about the undue influence of plutocrats and technocrats (though many of us would, perversely, embrace plutocratic or technocratic rule).

What is rightly controversial – what is philosophically very puzzling – is the more basic question of why democracy is desirable (if, indeed, it is desirable). Chesterton gives a famous (and, it must be said, highly contestable) answer: that what people have in common is much more important than what makes them different; and that aspiring to rule is something that people have in common. (Therefore – I am filling in the blanks for him – each person’s aspiration to rule is very important. Therefore: democracy.) So, contrary to Jason Brennan: governance should not be restricted to experts, for expertise is not what people have in common. And, contrary to Dan Moller (and Thoreau): “governing least” is not a worthwhile ideal; for what people typically aspire to is not to govern least but to govern substantially. The ideal that springs from our common humanity is that we should influence and be influenced by one another. “No man is an island.”

But the ideal in this country is that, inasmuch as we can, we should become self-sufficient, noninterfering islands.

But when we enforce this ideal upon one another, don’t we come perilously close to giving lie to it?