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.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
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.
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.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
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.
