1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 50: Fever pitch

One more hour to go, and it looks like I’m going to miss my reading target by two titles. I would have done just enough, but Karin, Daniel, Samuel, and I were invited out to dinner. This occupied us for six hours.

I am going to be dismayed all year.

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Here is this month’s movie review. I expected that it would be on the short side, but it ended up being rather long and tangled.

Fever Pitch

No, I don’t mean the 2005 Farrelly Bros. movie with Drew Barrymore and Jimmy Fallon, which uses the sport of baseball as its window-dressing. I mean the movie it copies. The one based on Nick Hornby’s book.

The movie with soccer as its window-dressing.

There’s very little soccer in it. As I’ll explain, that’s kind of the point.

Colin Firth and Ruth Gemmell play nice-looking young schoolteachers. She’s very strict and professional and serious. He spends most of his day thinking about Arsenal F.C.

They get on each other’s nerves.

She wonders what makes him tick. He wonders if Arsenal will win the League.

One evening, he drives her home.

She asks if he wants to come upstairs, for some tea; and then, if he wants to stay the night.

It’s not like he hasn’t noticed her, but he stumbles into this relationship without trying to.

She has to will herself into it, with enough trepidation and determination for them both.

I suppose the movie is on his side. I certainly was, while I was watching it.

Karin was on Ruth Gemmell’s side.

He’s behaving like an idiot, Karin said.

She’s the idiot, I said.

This was some weeks ago. In hindsight, I think the Ruth Gemmell character comes off better than the Colin Firth character (though her motives also are questionable). She may expect too much of him, but he expects shockingly little of her; and yet, he ends up getting his way.

This is one of those movies in which the outcome is perfunctory, and what is more interesting is the underlying philosophical dispute.

It is expressed in this bit of dialog:

“It’s only a game,” Ruth Gemmell complains.

“Don’t say that,” Colin Firth tells her:

Please! That is the worst, most stupid thing anyone could say! ’Cause it quite clearly isn’t “only a game.” I mean if it was do you honestly think I’d care this much? Eh? Eighteen years! Eight-teen years! Do you know what you wanted eighteen years ago? Or ten? Or five? Did you want to be Head of Year at North London Comprehensive? I doubt it. I’d doubt if you wanted anything for that long. … I mean I don’t care what it is, a car, a job, an Oscar, the baby … then you’d understand how I was feeling tonight. But there isn’t, and you don’t, so …

There isn’t anything that I’ve wanted for eighteen years [Ruth Gemmell says], ’cause I was a kid eighteen years ago. And if I did still want the same things I’d think I’d gone wrong somewhere, because actually I don’t want to marry David Cassidy, I don’t want bigger tits, I don’t want to do better on my mock-Os. I’ve stopped worrying about that kind of thing and maybe you should try.

Well [he retorts], maybe there’s a big bit of you that’s gone missing somewhere; maybe everyone should want something they’ve always wanted.

His view is that having an object of lifelong loyalty of whatever sort – even one as trivial as a soccer club – is better than not having an object of lifelong loyalty at all.

In other words, lifelong loyalty, regardless of its object, is good in itself.

This is an interesting proposition, but, ultimately, I think it is not supported.

The intrinsic value of the thing would seem to matter to whether lifelong loyalty to the thing is worthwhile.

The movie goes out of its way to point out that Colin Firth doesn’t assume that there is any intrinsic value in Arsenal F.C. He doesn’t even really watch the games, despite all the time and thought he devotes to the club. When he’s in the stadium, he’s too busy chanting and jumping up and down to follow the action; and when he’s at home, he’s too skittish to stay put in front of the TV.

The Colin Firth character is the guy who isn’t in love with a beloved – not even a soccer club – so much as with being in love.

The Ruth Gemmell character perceives this, and she is so irritated by it, she tries to will him out of it.

Either she is a person of tremendous, monomaniacal will; or Colin Firth’s looks and charm are irresistible to her.

Or some combination of these things.

But both these things, arguably, are more substantial, more admirable, than the empty pretend-fanaticism of Colin Firth.

There is another possibility, which is that she, too, is in love with being in love; and that the reason she chooses the empty Colin Firth character as the ostensible object of her love is that she perceives that he is in love with being in love. If she can get him to love her, then she “repairs” him; therefore, symbolically, projectively, she “repairs” herself; she “fills up” the hole in the center of her being.

This, ultimately, is self-centered; but at least there is a person – herself – at the center of this concern. It’s better than only being in love with being in love.

It must be said that Gemmell and, especially, Firth are lovely to watch. The movie is pleasing enough; it overcomes the problem that these characters are (nearly) empty inside. Here are two attractive people who are not on the same page and dearly want to be on the same page (or, at least, the Gemmell character wants this, and, probably, in some dim, reptilian way, the Firth character does, too). It would seem that this is a classic case of “opposites attract.” But this is not enough for a relationship to be a success.

If my foregoing diagnosis of their motives is correct, however, then there is actually a pretty striking affinity between these characters.

I scour my library for small books

Unlike the last entry, which virtually no one read, this entry won’t consist of a long quotation – nor of a long anything. I don’t have time to write; I need every spare moment to pursue my reading goals.

Once again, I arrive at the finish line reading works so puny that they hardly deserve to be called books:

Some Chinese Ghosts, by Lafcadio Hearn;

Night Flight, by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry;

Mrs Henderson & Other Stories, by Francis Wyndham.

This is the first Hearn I’ve read. Three ghost stories so far. Ornate. Determinedly unhorrific. Every ghost is a pretty girl.

[UPDATE: In the fourth story, the ghost is not a pretty girl.]

Mrs Henderson is very good. Try it out.

The writing in Chinese Ghosts and Mrs Henderson is so careful, so exquisite, it’s taking me some time to get through them.

Mercifully, Chinese Ghosts has lots of Chinese words that I just skip over.

Daniel and Samuel had doctor’s appointments this week.

Samuel is “socially behind,” the doctor said. Probably because he bawled his head off when she was in the office with him. He was sociable enough when she was away.

Daniel is quite the growing boy. Today he ate and ate, and he cried when he wasn’t eating.

“Seed”

Here is Robert Alter, introducing The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary.

When … God reiterates his promise to Abraham, the multiplication of seed is strongly linked with cosmic imagery – harking back to the creation story – of heaven and earth: “I will greatly bless you and greatly multiply your seed, as the stars in the heavens and as the sand on the shore of the sea” (Genesis 22:17). If “seed” here is rendered as “offspring” or “descendants,”

– as in recent translations (but not the King James Version) –

what we get are two essentially mathematical similes of numerical increase. That is, in fact, the primary burden of the language God addresses to Abraham, but as figurative language it also imposes itself visually on the retina of the imagination, and so underlying the idea of a single late-born son whose progeny will be countless millions is an image of human seed (perhaps reinforced by the shared white color of semen and stars) scattered across the vast expanses of the starry skies and through the innumerable particles of sand on the shore of the sea. To substitute “offspring” for “seed” here may not fundamentally alter the meaning but it diminishes the vividness of the statement, making it just a little harder for readers to sense why these ancient texts have been so compelling down through the ages.

Some patriarchal thoughts

We never got around to painting the walls in our new house … which is just as well, since Samuel has been drawing on them with crayons.

I read somewhere that the “terrible twos” are a myth. Parents think that their two-year-olds behave worse than at other ages. Their observations confirm this because they already believe in the “terrible twos.” It’s a self-fulfilling hypothesis.

Let the debunking begin, I said. I was ready for Samuel to disprove the myth or at least move the needle in the opposite direction.

Alas, he has not done so.

To his credit, he improves in this or that respect every week. I tell him to put his blocks away, and he does. I tell him to move away from the TV and sit in his chair, and he does. He didn’t use to.

To his discredit, he finds new ways to misbehave. Indeed, he is openly rebellious.

I wonder what example he is setting for his brother.

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I was reading Locke’s First Treatise – his withering response to Robert Filmer’s Patriarcha – when I noticed that Peter Laslett’s editorial references to the latter are to an edition prepared by himself. That edition isn’t easy to find. The most readily available edition, not counting super-old scanned ones, is the Cambridge one; its back cover says:

Recent years have seen a great explosion of interest in women’s history, and in the history of the family and patriarchal attitudes – not least in seventeenth-century England. At that time patriarchalist thinking shaped English ideas not only about the family but also about society and the state. Many thinkers argued that the state should be seen as a family, and that the king held the powers of a father over his subjects. Fathers, they claimed, were not accountable to their wives or children, and the king was not accountable to the people. …

I don’t know if Laslett came to write about Locke because of a prior interest in Filmer; virtually every other scholar proceeds in the opposite direction. But Laslett does try to interpret Locke’s Treatises as a unified polemic against Filmer. And though I previously associated Laslett with Locke above all else, I learned today that his main achievement was a book called The World We Have Lost: England Before the Industrial Age. It begins with a discussion of seventeenth-century bakeries. The idea of the baker’s household or family and the idea of his bakery were nearly coextensive. Fathers ruled all. Workers not related by blood to the patriarch nevertheless received the same treatment his family members received. The baker’s young children were regarded as workers.

(Locke himself, who considered Filmer’s patriarchal argument to be an apology for near-universal slavery, thought that three-year-olds should be put to work.)

And yet, everyone in the household found something like contentment, or meaning, in his or her role.

(Of course, many in the household may have hoped that they, too, would climb the pyramid, becoming bakers or bakers’ wives.)

Viewed one way, the communal ethos was oppressive. Viewed another, it enabled freedom and fulfilment.

I daresay, the picture is pretty MacIntyrean. The book is called The World We Have Lost.

A visit to Mexico; Easter; body-text fonts, pt. 2: Trump Mediaeval

Samuel asked to do an Easter egg hunt. We never taught him this custom. He must have learned it from the TV.

Karin bought the candy and plastic eggs. Her dad and his girlfriend Carol had Samuel over on Saturday to do the hunt. They kept him until Easter morning.

At home, it was very quiet, very peaceful.

Karin & I took Daniel out to a Mexican restaurant that we hadn’t tried. The other diners all knew each other. They also knew the prices, which weren’t written on the menu. I felt sorry to have to ask what the food cost, but it was good that I did: some of the meals weren’t cheap.

We watched a mariachi concert on the huge TV. The singer rode around the arena upon a dancing horse.

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The next day, quite a few people were in church for the Easter service. Three were baptized in a kiddie pool. Then we went to the city of Goshen so that Daniel could meet that branch of Karin’s family. Samuel was a great hit with his second cousins, girls aged eight to fifteen.

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And now, this month’s font, which is Trump Mediaeval.

(Samuel has the qualities of Matilda and the others in the Wormwood family. He is a great reader of books, but he also watches plenty of TV.)

I considered typesetting my dissertation with this font because (a) I was writing about political philosophy, and (b) at the time, Trump was the POTUS. But I chose a different font instead.

April’s poem

Here is Thriftbooks.com’s list of the most popular books in each state in 2021.

A few good books, a lot of “meh” ones, and some stinkers.

I am a little surprised that so many people are reading about birds, plants, and rocks. (See: Maine, Michigan, Montana, Oregon, Virginia, and Wisconsin.)

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This month’s poetry is from the Purgatorio, canto XI. It modifies the Paternoster. The proud recite it while doing their penance.

They circle around, bearing burdens that make them stoop; and they look at sculptures of the humble.

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

Our Father in Heaven, not by Heaven bounded

but there indwelling for the greater love

Thou bears’t Thy first works in the realm first-founded,

hallowed be Thy name, hallowed Thy Power

by every creature as its nature grants it

to praise Thy quickening breath in its brief hour.

Let come to us the sweet peace of Thy reign,

for if it come not we cannot ourselves

attain to it however much we strain.

And as Thine Angels kneeling at the throne

offer their wills to Thee, singing Hosannah,

so teach all men to offer up their own.

Give us this day Thy manna, Lord we pray,

for if he have it not, though man most strive

through these harsh wastes, his speed is his delay.

As we forgive our trespassers the ill

we have endured, do Thou forgive, not weighing

our merits, but the mercy of Thy will.

Our strength is as a reed bent to the ground:

do not Thou test us with the Adversary,

but deliver us from him who sets us round.

This last petition, Lord, with grateful mind,

we pray not for ourselves who have no need,

but for the souls of those we left behind.

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

(Translator: John Ciardi)

A golazo; a band; a recitation

I forgot to share this golazo by Damián Díaz of Barcelona.

Cheeky.

Díaz had just taken a penalty kick, Panenka-style. The goalie had blocked it. This corner-kick goal was Díaz’s revenge.

People are talking about a Puskás nomination. Díaz would be the second Ecuadorian nominee in three years.

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For two days, Karin has been working, and I’ve been at home with the children. Samuel seems a smidgen more helpful, more patient, than before.

And Daniel? He enjoys drinking milk and listening to music. Classical and New Age, mostly.

His favorite band is the German outfit B-Tribe.

Samuel loves B-Tribe, too.

I have taught him to recite this:

“Sammy and Danny: two little boys. Sammy and Danny: best of friends.”

Library statistics

Karin will go back to her job on Monday, leaving me alone with Daniel and Samuel and Jasper and Ziva … and the mice, who seem to have found a passage from the mud-room into the basement, to our dismay. Jasper killed four mice today. Or, I assume, he is killing the fourth mouse; he has it with him under a bed.

The other night, Samuel and I read The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin, which is especially bloody. I felt some revulsion. Not so much after today’s infestation.

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The St. Joseph County library system has just one book by R.K. Narayan: Waiting for Mahatma (an e-book). This, despite Narayan’s sales, acclaim, cultural salience, etc.

Not that I’ve read anything by Narayan. But if I ever do, it won’t be thanks to the SJCPL.

It’s not that the SJCPL is oblivious to Narayan. Its catalog includes the following e-books: (a) three critical studies of Narayan; (b) one book discussing Narayan along with three other Indian authors; and (c) four GALE “study guides” on different titles by Narayan.

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I decided to write down the library branches of every book I found through the electronic catalog from March 8 to April 8. (Hard copies only.)

• Book 1: Francis, Francis, Francis, Main, River Park.
• Book 2: Centre, Main, Main.
• Book 3: Main.
• Book 4: Centre, River Park.
• Book 5: Centre, German, Main.
• Book 6: Main.
• Book 7: Main.
• Book 8: Centre, Centre, Centre, Centre, Francis, Francis, Francis, Francis, German, German, Main, Main, River Park.
• Book 9: Main, Main.
• Book 10: Main.
• Book 11: Main, Main, Francis.
• Book 12: Main.
• Book 13: Main.
• Book 14: Francis, River Park, Western (my branch!).
• Book 15: Centre, LaSalle, Main, Tutt.
• Book 16: Main.

Summary: Centre, 8 copies; Francis, 9; German, 3; LaSalle, 1; Main, 18; River Park, 4; Tutt, 1; Western, 1.

The books that interest me are not kept in the neighborhood where I live.

Of course, I can request just about any book in the system. I simply go to my branch and pick it up after a few days.

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A good blog I found: Down Among the “Z” Movies. Better reviews than mine, though writing about turkeys probably isn’t hard to do. Watching them is hard to do.

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P.S. It turns out, Jasper hasn’t killed the fourth mouse.

Usually he is more prompt.

Karin tired of waiting; she rescued the mouse and took it outside. I don’t believe it will fare very well. It seemed rather dazed.

This week, there has been snow.

The sullied and the pure

A good article by Dan Wetzel of Yahoo! :

“NCAA in a Nutshell: Bill Self, Kansas Win National Title with Infractions Case Still Pending.”

Good game, too. The 16-point comeback was breathtaking.

I’ve always liked the Jayhawks. They’re probably my favorite cheaters.

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Now, a dose of anti-cynicism. These videos are by the hero who unclogs drains.

In this episode, he travels north through New Hampshire, unblocking culverts as the snow melts.

And in this 44-minute video, he climbs into a culvert to clear away a beaver dam.

He is an amazing narrator. His sentences are punchy and staccato. He says his consonants crisply. He wastes no words.

In the first video, he peers out over campers on a frozen lake and describes the peril of driving on it as the weather warms. You can feel the ice melt beneath you.

In the second video, he is silent for long stretches while he clears out debris. The rhythm is lovely. It’s more like Terrence Malick than like Stanley Kubrick.

He concludes the video with scenes of bear tracks and chipmunks.

How to hide an empire

I said I’d review this book if I ever got to finish it. Well, I’ve finished it.

How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States, by Daniel Immerwahr.

Better-written than most history books (and by a scholar, not a mere journalist). Nice, light touch. Frequently funny. This is a merciful quality, since reading about many of these events made me feel like throwing up.

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It’s unusual for an historian to get away with writing the phrase “In a delicious historical irony.”

It comes near the end of the guano chapter, in a digression upon the German-Jewish chemist Fritz Haber. “By inventing ammonia synthesis” – the basis of high-yield farming – Haber “became arguably the single most consequential organism on the planet.”

Nicely put, I thought, but only slightly pertinent to U.S. imperialism.

By the time I’d read the chapter’s last sentence, I was willing to forgive Immerwahr his digression.

And, it turns out, chemical synthesis is a crucial ingredient of today’s scaled-back imperialistic strategy.

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Before I continue discussing the book’s content, I need to say more about its style, which I admire but am irked by. It’s probably the most accomplished specimen I’ve seen of what I call “Young Scholars’ Writing.” By “Young Scholars,” I mean people my age or a little older or younger (it’s hard to be a superb scholar without being at least middle-aged). This writing is learned but studiously un-magisterial and un-avuncular – it’s studiously casual, in other words. It sounds like magazine writing: you could find it in The New Yorker or n+1. (See this representative piece by Immerwahr in n+1; his website has other magazine links.)

The prose is peppered with contractions and throwaway pop-culture references, the sort that erudite, hip up-and-comers would pride themselves on identifying. Recounting the U.S.’s colonization of the Philippines, Immerwahr says:

Building a road to Baguio would became an obsession of the colonial state. The steep slopes and regular landslides turned it into an all-consuming Werner Herzog-style man vs. nature affair.

The offhand allusion to Herzog is wonderful – compact, vivid, precise. In making it, though, Immerwahr signals that he is “preaching to the choir.” He isn’t writing to convert jingoists to anti-imperialism, or even to inform jingoists of the facts about imperialism. He doesn’t expect jingoists to read the book at all. To an old-fogey-minded person like me, that is disturbing.

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All right, I’ll try to set aside my own neuroses. What the book does brilliantly is to inform the anti-imperialist general reader of even more facts about imperialism. Out-of-the-way facts. There is nearly nothing about, e.g., the annexing of Florida and Texas. Theodore Roosevelt, the man, is discussed, but there’s surprisingly little about the U.S.’s early meddling in Cuba (the notorious Platt Amendment is briefly mentioned but not named). Of course, Cuba never was U.S. territory; but then neither were Liverpool (U.K.) or Australia, and they get coverage. There is a lot about the U.S.’s heavy-handed rule over and simultaneous neglect of such places as the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and the Aleutian, Hawaiian, and other Pacific islands; and there’s a whole chapter on the annexation of unpopulated “guano islands.” (And then, near the end, there’s another, James Bond-themed chapter about these and other islands.) The emphasis is on regions outside the “logo map,” the map of the contiguous forty-eight states. There is much discussion of maps. Reading the book is like going to one of those websites with topsy-turvy or weirdly-distorted maps that highlight neglected features of the world.

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A back-cover blurb says:

There are many histories of American expansionism. How to Hide an Empire renders them all obsolete. It is brilliantly conceived, utterly original, and immensely entertaining – simultaneously vivid, sardonic, and deadly serious.

This blurb is not something to fault Immerwahr for, but it also bothers me. It suggests that it’s a virtue of historical scholarship to render other histories obsolete or at least seriously deficient, as if the goal were one-upmanship. Go ahead, look at new books and scan the introductions and blurbs. It’s as if these scholars were laboring to lure people over to the newest, hippest thing – which is ironic when the subject is the past. (Besides, by the time of the writing, the hip idea usually isn’t new: we in the target audience are well aware that People Were More Racist, Sexist, etc. than Most of Us Imagined.)

Anyway, what the blurb says is false. This book doesn’t make other histories of U.S. expansionism obsolete. As I’ve noted, it doesn’t try to tell us much about, e.g., the acquisition of Florida and Texas. For all the nice points it makes about the influence of U.S. military bases upon, e.g., the Japanese economy, it says next to nothing about whether there was similar influence upon the South Korean economy. I could go on.

The book is, however, immensely entertaining. A lot of the vignettes are awesome.