The World Serious

This blog entry’s title is due to Ring Lardner, who, in my estimation, is the all-time greatest Son of Michiana (he was born in Niles and began his reporting career in South Bend). So much lore surrounds baseball, I wish I liked the sport. I try to watch some of the Serious each year, if only to root against the Yankees (or, lately, the Astros); often, I end up rooting against almost everyone in the stadium, but I do cheer for this or that player. A pitcher in his late, late thirties, usually. One who glares like Clint Eastwood.

This year, the Astros and the Phillies have split the first two games. It’s been exciting. (But then, watching homemade YouTube videos of marbles racing each other down the gutter can be exciting.) For reasons of moral decency, I want the Phillies to win, even though that Bryce Harper fellow carries himself obnoxiously and, let’s face it, the city’s reputation isn’t good. But perhaps virtue is irrelevant in the World Serious. The sport is hardly without blemish.

“How did MLB get to [the] point where no African American players on a World Series roster isn’t a surprise to many?” asks a Yahoo! columnist, inelegantly.

The answer: economics. “Baseball is a white, suburban game reinforced by foreign labor.” Clubs can pay to develop players, or the players can pay to be developed (I mean, their parents can pay). And so the players come from two sources: academies in countries like the Dominican Republic, where it is cheap for the clubs to operate; and domestic pay-to-play leagues, which are even cheaper, because the clubs don’t pay. Pay-to-play. What an idea. Not only is it exclusionary, it’s, like, one step removed from giving your money to a casino. There’s a lot of that around South Bend, and not just in baseball.

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South Bend novelist makes it big

Here’s a pretty typical “rags to riches” story for this part of the country. One parent works for a Catholic high school; the other works for Notre Dame. Kid gets free tuition. Skips town as soon as possible. Moves to New York, then Los Angeles. Writes debut novel about how challenging it is in the Rust Belt. Becomes establishment darling.

Back in South Bend, the dozen-plus copies in the library system are all in use. People here love to root, root, root for the home team.

Newpaper profile 1 (The Guardian).

Newspaper profile 2 (Los Angeles Times).

Library event.

A severance; a curiosity

On Tuesday night, we went to a gathering of local Alliance Academy alumni. Most who attended were related to me by blood or marriage. A few others were people I’ve known since childhood.

The school’s director also was there. He announced that the school must move: its land lease will not be renewed.

(The school will have been on that land for just about one hundred years.)

Thus, my last tie to any specific missionary property in Ecuador will have been severed. (I gather that it’s uncertain whether the school will even remain in Quito.)

Most of the Ecuadorian churches I frequented are still in the same locations, as are the Luz y Libertad school in Esmeraldas and the Seminario Bíblico Alianza in Guayaquil.

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You can preview a huge amount of the Amazon Kindle version of Lucy Ellmann’s 2019 Booker nominee, Ducks, Newburyport – probably because so much of that novel consists of one sentence, and Amazon displays a fixed number of sentences; or perhaps because the novel is long and Amazon displays a fixed percentage of the whole.

Is the book any good? Well, if you find out, let me know.

1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 56: From dusk till dawn

Quentin Tarantino, whom my dear cousin, Adam, unfortunately resembles, is the writer of this movie, and one of its stars. (The director is Robert Rodriguez.) The Tarantino character robs banks; takes women as hostages, and then rapes and kills them; lusts after the under-aged; is singled out for a table dance by the most glamorous and dominating woman in the movie (Selma Hayek); and, in general, is perverse, paranoid, vindictive, and disgusting. Eventually, he is turned into a vampire. I wouldn’t be surprised if vampirism were another of Tarantino’s personal fetishes. It’s as if Tarantino assigned all the juiciest vices to himself and then got someone else to direct him enacting them. The Tarantino character and his ruthless but slightly more judicious brother (George Clooney) are on the lam trying to cross from Texas to Mexico. A gleeful reporter (Kelly Preston) details their crimes for the TV. It’s a long and terrible list. This is my favorite scene because the crimes are ennumerated but not shown. One gathers that most of the crimes weren’t strictly necessary. The same could be said of almost everything in the movie, which is a labor of love – love of sin.

Having murdered their previous hostages, the brothers pick up three more: a doubting preacher (Harvey Keitel), his daughter (Juliette Lewis), and his son (Ernest Liu). These hostages have more grit than the others, and so they last long enough to develop a touch of Stockholm syndrome – the fresh-faced daughter, especially. The rogues and the hostages hunker down for the night in a trucker bar. Caligula would have liked this bar. It has lots of table dancers and grotesque lowlifes played by such actors as Danny Trejo and Cheech Marin (who also plays two other characters). Here the rogues’ sins catch up with them. It turns out that the bar is run by vampires. I hope I’m not giving too much away.

In the rest of the movie, the living fight the undead. They use all the standard vampire-killing techniques. Well, almost all of them.

What about silver?, asks one of the characters.

Isn’t silver for killing werewolves?

Well, yeah, silver bullets are, but what about silver in general?

Then the daughter hostage asks the sensible question: Does anyone actually have any silver? No? Then it doesn’t matter.

The vampires aren’t tormented and joyless, as in Dracula; they’re more like the jolly creatures in Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” video. What both sorts of monsters have in common is insatiable lust and a certain diabolical amiability. The awkward, hot-headed Tarantino could never receive a high grade as a vampire. Clooney, more suave, is a better candidate for vampirism. But his character is insufficiently lustful. I already have a wife, he tells the Hayek vampire before he impales her with a chandelier.

See, I am falling into the trap of responding to the nerd-pervert on his own terms: A, more than B, has the authentic qualities of a vampire. That is to accord too much respect to a pretty worthless connoisseurist pursuit. Probably, some gutters are more authentically gutter-like than others, but that doesn’t mean it’s good to play in gutters. I’m not saying that vampires don’t make compelling literary figures. Dracula is compelling. I’m saying that you aren’t supposed to like vampires, and that there’s something wrong with you if you do. The Cheech Marin barman, also, is a vulgar connoisseur; in one speech, he expounds upon the varieties of female genitalia on offer in his bar. He describes them with lurid cheer, as objects for the indulgence of one’s basest instincts. This seems to be Tarantino’s attitude toward a lot of things. Or maybe it’s just his shtick. Take some base pursuit (cruelty, lust, revenge, etc.) and dress it up as slickly as possible to revel in it.

And yet, I didn’t hate the movie. The Keitel character is dragged into a monsters’ funhouse, but he retains his decency. So do the Lewis and Liu characters. Tarantino is capable of respecting the non-fetishists in his movies; his underlying plea, I think, is: See, I can appreciate your goodness; just let me play here, in my own awful little corner. Or, at least, that was his early message. Then, as the years went along, he acknowledged that wickedness bleeds into everything, and he started making movies about fighting fire with fire, about torturing Nazis, slavers, and the like.

See also this textbook.

A mighty dump truck; Sally Rooney, pt. 2; body-text fonts, pt. 8: Photina

Happy birthday, tomorrow, to Samuel. He’s about to turn three years old – a sufficiently sophisticated age for eager gift-getting. Tonight he opened a gift that was too large for Karin & me to hide: a Tonka “mighty dump trunk.” What enjoyment he is obtaining from this heap of cold metal!

Daniel, meanwhile, happily plays with the truck’s empty cardboard box. He turned eight months old today.

Samuel has been taken to a corn maze and to various trunk-or-treats. Exhausting events, trunk-or-treats. Last night, we attended one at our church, saw how many cars were in the parking lot, and didn’t even try to join in. The event was good publicity for the church, though.

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I finished reading Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends. It’s the best of her three novels. Frankly, I was amazed. Her characters are good at talking but bad at living. Do they make any progress? That’s debatable. Frances, the narrator, a precocious university student – and homewrecker, and bad friend – takes a religious turn. Unfashionably, she reads the gospels; even less fashionably, near the end of the book, she goes to church; less fashionably still, she begins to pray. Well and good; this is what ought to come of hitting rock-bottom. Then the novel ends with a gut-punch comparable to that of Wilfred Owen’s “Parable of the Old Man and the Young.” At least, that’s how it felt to me; other readers will feel differently. The characters and, I suspect, many of Rooney’s readers are enthusiastic moralizers who basically just do what they want to do.

Rooney is famous, notorious even, for being a well-to-do bourgeois Marxist, and so this month’s body-text font, Photina, which looks good on cheap paper, is featured in a passage about Marx from a reference book’s analytical table of contents.

My hometown

Samuel, I regret to say, has identified himself with a certain fictional character: Calvin, of Calvin and Hobbes. “Greetings, my name is Calvin,” he proclaims. “GREETINGS, MY NAME IS CALVIN. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!”

They do look alike.

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Aunt Linda – my parents’ oldest sibling – is visiting from Missouri. Samuel and Daniel are turning on the charm for her. My parents are at our house, too.

They reminisce about the Ecuador of the 1950s and 1960s. My dad talks about the night his family’s house in Esmeraldas burned down because a kerosene lamp was lighted with what turned out to be gasoline. After the fire, my dad’s family had to stay over with some missionaries who lived on the plot of land where, eventually, the Hotel Cayapas was built. I don’t envy my dad’s family their ordeal, but I am slightly intrigued. I grew up a block from the Hotel Cayapas; it was one of the fixtures of my childhood; it seemed the height of luxury and class (the grass in its yard was cut silently, with a reel mower, by a starched-shirted worker). I ate in the restaurant once or twice and dreamed of spending a night in the hotel. My dad slept there – or on the same land – during his family’s time of greatest need.

It’s strange to think of the hotel not existing. But, of course, travel to Esmeraldas was hardly easy in those days; vacationers certainly didn’t flock there.

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In theory, it wouldn’t be very hard for me to sleep in the Hotel Cayapas now. I look it up on Kayak: a night’s stay costs a little over $50. The hardest part would be traveling to Ecuador. The second-hardest part would be to avoid being kidnapped or killed. In recent years, Esmeraldas has become a hub for foreign drug cartels and their domestic recruits and conscripts.

When I was growing up, I’d go to sleep listening to the loud music of the discotheques on the beach. Now, because of violent crime, that nighlife has pretty well ceased. In the 1980s and early 1990s, that was unthinkable: that sort of thing only happened in Colombia, and Esmeraldas always would be a party town.

Two R.I.P.s; October’s reading; my children

Two deaths: (1) the wonderful actor Robbie Coltrane; and, in May, (2) the legal, political, and moral philosopher Joseph Raz, whose important but tough-going oeuvre is now helpfully summarized at pp. 148–155 of this year’s Balliol College Annual Record. (Hat tip: Leiter. Included in the piece: an explanation of how the name “Raz” came to be.) I spent most of one semester of graduate school slogging through The Morality of Freedom. It would’ve been nice to have had this memorial essay to start off with.

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I’d intended, this horror season, to try out The Monk by Matthew Lewis; instead, I’m reading Dracula. I’d put it off for a long time. Now, I can report that, unlike Dorian Gray and Jekyll and Hyde, it’s pretty gripping. There’s genuine horror when Count Dracula is on the scene; there’s a lot of (vaguely troubling) hilarity when he’s absent. Karin was the impetus for this reading. She and her friend Nora have been keeping up with the Daily Dracula, a schedule based upon the dates of the letters and diary entries that make up the novel. Karin and Nora began reading in May and have been advancing at a snail’s pace; I’ll finish reading before they will. The story concludes in November.

I learned this amusing tidbit about Stoker:

In August 1894, at the end of a month-long stay to research his embryonic novel, Bram Stoker wrote in the visitors’ book at the Kilmarnock Arms on the Aberdeenshire coast that he had been “delighted with everything and everybody” and hoped to return soon. …

The feeling was not entirely mutual. Stoker, a genial Irishman usually known for his cheeriness, was experimenting with what would become known as “method acting” to get under the skin of his new character, one Count Dracula. … The author’s links with the London theatre inspired Stoker to try inhabiting his character in a different way.

According to his wife, Florence, everyone – including the hotel staff, and the locals – was frightened of him. He “seemed to get obsessed by the spirit of the thing,” she later said. He “would sit for hours, like a great bat, perched on the rocks of the shore, or wander alone up and down the sand hills thinking it all out.”

I got Karin to agree to watch Herzog’s Nosferatu when we have finished reading Dracula. I saw it many years ago. From what I can recall of it, it’s pretty faithful to the book.

I also am going to read The Island of Doctor Moreau.

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“Hi, there!” – Daniel’s first words? He seemed to repeat them to me immediately after I said them to him. (I don’t count Da, da, da, da, da – typical infantile babble.)

He crawls now, and he can pull himself up onto his feet and stand against the furniture. He also tries to steal Samuel’s food, although he has trouble eating it with his two teeth. Samuel also has trouble eating his food, due to his intense stubbornness.

Tabloids

May 6, 2023: coronation day for Charles and his Queen Consort. Mark your calendars. Who knows when another coronation will occur?

Palace insiders told the Mail on Sunday that the Duke of Norfolk … had been tasked with making it a simpler, shorter and more diverse ceremony that reflects modern Britain. “The King has stripped back a lot of the coronation in recognition that the world has changed in the past 70 years,” a source told the paper.

One change reportedly being discussed is for a more relaxed dress code, with peers possibly dressed in lounge suits rather than ceremonial robes.

… the Guardian says.

The government and royal household will be conscious of the scale of the coronation in the light of the cost of living crisis facing the country.

Such backhanded compliments are often in the news. Guardian readers do not esteem the Royals. Even so, they lap up their lives and rituals like cream. Papers like the Mail aren’t the only ones beholden to the monarchy.

The Guardian is happy to quote the King when it wishes to take shots at the Prime Minister. No one expresses withering, casual contempt better than a thorough snob does. That is one of the most serviceable functions of the aristocracy. Just as civilians need soldiers to fight invaders and police to keep criminals at bay, the people need kings and dukes to show the most exquisite disdain for the politicians they elect, for their fellow human beings.

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Barcelona and Inter contested a thrilling Champions League match yesterday.

Meanwhile, I was viewing a mediocre match between Rangers and Liverpool. I turned it off with less than half an hour to play. Liverpool had just gone up 3 goals to 1, and the benched Mo Salah was about to enter the game.

Much later, I found out that he scored thrice in six minutes. The match ended 7 to 1.

A Flickr; October’s poem

The best Flickr I’ve been to.

Ogden Nash, “Kind of an Ode to Duty”:

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

O Duty,

Why hast thou not the visage of a sweetie or a cutie?

Why displayest thou the countenance of the kind of organizing spinster

That the minute you see her you are aginster?

Why glitter thy spectacles so ominously?

Why art thou clad so abominously?

Why art thou so different from Venus

And why do thou and I have so few interests mutually in common between us?

Why art thou fifty per cent. martyr

And fifty-one per cent. Tartar?

Why is it thy unfortunate wont

To try to attract people by calling on them either to leave undone the deeds they like, or to do the deeds they don’t?

Why art thou so like an April post-mortem

Or something that died in the ortumn?

Above all, why dost thou continue to hound me?

Why art thou always albatrossly hanging around me?

Thou so ubiquitous,

And I so iniquitous.

I seem to be the one person in the world thou art perpetually preaching at who or to who;

Whatever looks like fun, there art thou standing between me and it, calling you-hoo.

O Duty, Duty!

How noble a man should I be hadst thou the visage of a sweetie or a cutie!

Wert thou but houri instead of hag

Then would my halo indeed be in the bag!

But as it is thou art so much forbiddinger than a Wodehouse hero’s forbiddingest aunt

That in the words of the poet, When Duty whispers low, Thou must, this erstwhile youth replies, I just can’t.

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So, this is what antiquarianism looks like

I pick up a moldy coffee-table volume from the library’s “for sale” shelf: Understanding Watercolours, by one H.L. Mallalieu.

’Bout time the children learned about paintings and such.

I page through the book. J.M.W. Turner’s name is prominent: that’s all I have to know to make my decision. That’s pretty much all I do know about the subject. I pay the dollar.

At home, I look more closely at the book. It belongs to a series:

• Understanding Watercolours
• Understanding Antique Wine Bottles [😳]
• Understanding Book-Collecting
• Understanding Miniature British Pottery and Porcelain
• Understanding Dolls

Almost every picture in the book has a caption with the word “Christie’s” or “Sotheby’s.” The publisher is the Antique Collector’s Club.

Uh, oh.

Well, this is a first. I’ve never before acquired a “how to” book for collectors. I’ve never desired to have any such thing in my, uh, collection.

Upon further review, the book is very strange indeed.

This book fills a long felt need for a practical introduction to the subject of collecting British watercolour paintings. There is a lot more to collecting than noting the price, the name of the artist and deciding whether or not one likes the subject.

Very true. Indeed, the same principle applies to books about British watercolor paintings.

Many watercolours are either not signed or bear false signatures, or perhaps have been saddled with misleading attributions.

The excellent text and carefully chosen illustrations take the collector behind the formal signature on the picture and show him what to look for in it, the idiosyncrasies of the artist, his style and his individual methods of working.

Yet even when all the technical points are understood there remains the whim of fashion which varies over long periods and has moved round, ignoring or puffing each artist in turn. Without an understanding of the movement of fashion, past collections and ideas on collecting, it would be hard to understand the subject.

This book, one of a series under the general title of ‘Understanding’, will be widely welcomed. There has never been such a practical and informative guide.

Emphasis on “practical.” I’ve never seen anything so concerned with art, that so determinedly disregarded the aesthetic qualities of art – except when these have monetary implications (e.g., A is a more lucrative artist to collect than B, and you can tell that a work is by A rather than B because A paints tree-trunks better than B does). There is a quiz at the back of the book. Question: “These two watercolours are painted by different artists. a. Who? b. Does it matter?” Answer: “a. J.R. Cozens; b. Turner. – It is possible that Turner’s Monro School copy would be more expensive than the Cozens original, but if you said that it does not matter, you have the makings of a connoisseur and should take five extra points.”

Well, that’s good to know: I had no idea about (a) or (b), but I guess I have the makings of a connoisseur.

Karin’s quiet birthday; a mermaid; return to Puffin Rock

Happy birthday to Karin: treasured wife, adored mother, possessor of immeasurable intrinsic value. Witty, dreamy, pretty, kind.

Somehow, Etsy knows that it’s Karin’s birthday and that I’m married to her.

Here, have some ads in your email.

Thanks, Etsy.

Curiously, a lot of the ads have to do with the Zodiac. But the ads don’t seem to know what Karin’s sign is. I don’t think she’s one for embroideries and wall hangings of Scorpio the scorpion.

It’s not that she doesn’t appreciate kitsch. She bought me this skeleton of a mermaid, for the Halloween season.

Tonight, we watched the final episode of Cat Hospital, and then Karin put on Puffin Rock for Samuel (and for the rest of us; we needed a change from Samuel’s YouTube videos). It’s been many months since Samuel watched this show, which used to be his favorite. He seems to have forgotten a lot of it. He resisted it at first, but now he’s deeply invested in the story. He supplies a running commentary.

Oona is so bad!

No, Sammy, Oona is good.

Oona is good. Mossy is so bad!

No, he’s just silly. And hungry.

Mossy is so silly!

Yes.

So, this bodes well. Lately, he’s been downright distressed when we’ve played his old shows or read his old books. He seems to have intense, nostalgic, none-too-happy reactions to things from his past.

But we need him to come to terms with the past, because soon it’ll be time for Daniel to be exposed to these shows and books.

Last night, I went out to buy milk; when I returned, Daniel had learned to raise himself into a sitting position. Since then, he has been practicing sitting up, and tipping himself over onto the floor. Thunk! His poor little head!