O Christmas tree

We erected and decorated our waist-high plastic Christmas tree.

Karin was dissatisfied. The tree stank. The cats had peed on it in the storage-room.

So, Karin’s friend, Nora, lent us a taller plastic tree. Samuel and Daniel decorated it.

Almost all the ornaments now hang from the bottom third of that tree.

(Some have been smashed.)

We put gifts under the tree. Samuel has been tearing off the wrappers.

R.I.P. Grandpa

His obituary.

A few labels to identify him by:

• Hoosier farm boy
• educator
• churchman
• “seagoing cowboy”

Re: the last (and most glamorous) label. He transported livestock, in the 1940s, to war-ravaged Greece.

This portrait is from a 2014 “seagoing cowboy” reunion.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

He was best known as a missionary to Ecuador.

He lived in Esmeraldas and evangelized throughout the rustic northwestern provinces. He’d walk many miles from little town to little town.

The church published this condolence:

(The verse is actually Psalm 116:15. Here, in the Reina-Valera translation, estimada – like precious in the KJV and NIV – means costly. Compare: Mucho le cuesta al Señor ver morir a los que lo aman [this translation is Dios Habla Hoy]. The basic idea is the same as in “Jesus wept.”)

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

He was the grandparent I knew best … the one near whom I lived longest … and the one who took me with him on several long trips (to Panama and Jamaica, and around Ecuador).

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

He was the grandparent who’d discuss literature and movies with me. I’ll dwell on this at some length. Grandpa was a humane man. His Christianity certainly touched everything about him. But his faith wasn’t the only thing that made him humane.

I trust the other tribute-givers to highlight his more overtly spiritual qualities.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

He disagreed – respectfully, if somewhat impishly – with my rather bloodthirsty literary tastes.

Once, having read the Lambs on Shakespeare, I was going on about Macbeth (or whatever). Grandpa was unimpressed.

I think that when Shakespeare makes someone die, it’s because he has no further use for him.

That’s quite a notion to put to a second-grader. I’ve been mulling it over, ever since.

He didn’t care for Agatha Christie, either. The murders were too gleeful.

The detective story that I like best – he meant “A Scandal in Bohemia” – is a sentimental tale, in which the detective falls in love.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

But his was a sin-conscious romanticism. He was keenly attuned to grades of evil and redemption.

I told him, when I was reading Huck Finn, that I imagined Huck’s father to be like the drunkard in Hoosiers.

No, no, much worse, he said.

It was an enlightening correction.

Once, we watched a series of Disney movies together (he was looking after us children while our parents were out of town). He enjoyed the movies’ wit. But, to his own surprise, he was deeply moved by Beauty and the Beast.

I thank you, Father – he prayed with us that night – that you have made it possible for people to change.

He had no use for such movies as Kind Hearts and Coronets, with its casual, cynical violence, or Inherit the Wind, which treats an entire society as contemptibly cartoonish.

Not that he disliked cartoons as such: he relished 1066 and All That, Flannery O’Connor, and Peanuts.

As an adult, I lent him David Michaelis’s biography of Charles Schulz. He returned it with profuse thanks. I enjoyed it very much, he said, that is, until Schulz’s life went off the rails.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

I spent college vacations at his house. I’d catch him sneaking into my room, returning furtively borrowed novels by Kenzaburo Oe or J. M. Coetzee. Some he liked, some he didn’t. I could tell what he thought of a novel by how he put it on the shelf.

Of Coetzee’s Michael K, he said: This book describes a redemption that even a severely limited man can attain.

His own daily life was disarmingly simple. I believe he once seriously considered retiring to a trailer house. For lunch, he’d open a can of beans, or he’d take me down the street to Wendy’s, where he was content to eat a baked potato. His love for the underdog was almost fanciful. Hence his delight in such charmers as The Mouse that Roared and – to his family’s considerable amusement – Baby’s Day Out, which he first saw in Ecuador, on a bus. (I’ve already mentioned Hoosiers.)

He also liked novels that told the story of a life (the odd Dickens or George Eliot) or that described rural societies that preceded or coincided with his own (Stowe, Twain, Tarkington, Stratton-Porter, Rawlings; he was raised in Indiana but also spent time, as a youngster, in Florida). I believe his favorite book in Spanish was a rural idyll called El camino – most likely, the one by Miguel Delibes.

He spoke and wrote beautifully. I was in high school when I began, consciously, to pattern my syntax and cadence after his.

If I strain after a turn of phrase, it’s because I merely imitate, all-too-imperfectly, what came naturally to my exemplar.

The same is true of many of his descendants, in their respective pursuits.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

He died on Friday morning, of a heart attack. He’d turned ninety-seven the previous day. His widow, my step-grandma, is my sole remaining grandparent; my grandma died in 1991.

December’s poems

I conclude this year’s poem series

With poems from the Opies

(pp. 19–25)

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

Masculine, Feminine, Neuter,

I went for a ride on my scooter,

I bumped into the Queen

And said, Sorry old bean

I forgot to toot-toot on my tooter.

∙∙∙

A bug and a flea

Went out to sea

Upon a reel of cotton;

The flea was drowned

But the bug was found

Biting a lady’s bottom.

∙∙∙

Adam and Eve in the garden

Studying the beauty of nature;

The devil jumped out of a Brussel sprout

And hit Eve in the eye with a tater.

∙∙∙

Julius Caesar,

The Roman geezer,

Squashed his wife with a lemon squeezer.

∙∙∙

The sausage is a cunning bird

With feathers long and wavy;

It swims about the frying pan

And makes its nest in gravy.

∙∙∙

The elephant is a pretty bird,

It flits from bough to bough.

It builds its nest in a rhubarb tree

And whistles like a cow.

∙∙∙

As I was going to school one day to learn my A.B.C.,

I fell into a washing tub and sailed the ocean sea.

There came by a Chinaman who said I was a spy

And if I did not talk to him he’d poke me in the eye.

He tied me to a cabbage stalk

And cut my head with a knife and fork,

I grew so fat that I could not walk

And joined the Chinese army.

The captain’s name was Bango,

Bango was his name,

And he played upon his whiskers

Till the clouds rolled by.

∙∙∙

’Twas in the month of Liverpool

In the city of July,

The snow was raining heavily,

The streets were very dry.

The flowers were sweetly singing,

The birds were in full bloom,

As I went down the cellar

To sweep an upstairs room.

∙∙∙

I went to the pictures tomorrow

I took a front seat at the back,

I fell from the pit to the gallery

And broke a front bone in my back.

A lady she gave me some chocolate,

I ate it and gave it her back.

I phoned for a taxi and walked it,

And that’s why I never came back.

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

I learned years ago with Samuel, this track is brilliant for getting babies to sleep.

The cook, the QB, the babe, and their father

We ate dinner at church and everyone got to look at Baby Abel. They sent us home with two trays of lasagna.

Samuel was inspired. During our nap-time, he broke into the fridge and gathered ingredients.

“Today we are making goldenberry lasagna. Fresh and squeezy!”

My subconscious registered this and yanked me out of my slumber. Oh, no, you don’t.

This is what I found:

Ingredients: (a) goldenberries; (b) iced tea.

It could have been worse. It has been worse. Tonight we caught him trying to put something into the oven.

Absolutely not, I told him.

Absolutely yes, he said.

Watching cooking videos with a five-year-old isn’t a good idea.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Right now, I’m watching Monday Night Football, with Eli and Peyton Manning and Bill Belichick. Daniel stands in his diaper in front of the TV and pretends to be the quarterback. He stamps his foot and calls out numbers. One! One! Two! Two! Three! Three!

Abel (cont.)

Hospital pics.

At home. (Fat but pleased.) A shy first meeting of the brothers.

The photostream ends here.

Karin is staying at home with the new child. Today, we all watched Mary Poppins – Abel’s first movie (as it was Daniel’s, as it was Samuel’s).

Abel’s cousins, Ada and George, brought supper.

Of names, etc.

Karin’s colleague: “What’ll you name your baby?”

Karin: “It’s a secret.”

“Another biblical name?”

“Yes.”

“Thomas?”

“No.”

“A name from the Gospels?”

“No, from the Old Testament.”

“Noah?”

“No.”

“Ishmael?”

“No.”

“LOL Cain and Abel ha ha ha ha ha ha …” (leaves).

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Our son was born this afternoon. His name is Abel Barnaby.

Likely nicknames: Abe, Abey, Abey Baby, Abey Barney. His pre-natal name, “Pip,” might stick for a while. His cousin, Ada, is fond of that name.

Anyway, there’s no reversing the decision. The paperwork has been submitted.

Samuel was adamant: His little brother was to be called Abel; he was to be born in December, not in late November as his parents hoped. Oh, how glad Sammy was on Dec. 1 when I told him “Pip” definitely wouldn’t be born in November!

Daniel’s feelings are unknown. He’s a cheerful little boy, though, so I am hopeful.

The two big brothers are at home with their grandparents. Abel is with Karin & me in the hospital. The three brothers will meet tomorrow or the next day.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

“Abel” is spelled the same in English and Spanish. It’s a simple and recognizable name, if not a common one.

The namesake came to grief, but he is honored in the Old and New Testaments.

As for “Barnaby” … well, there’s the biblical Barnabas, another fine person; there’s D.C.I. Tom Barnaby of Midsomer Murders; and there’s Dickens’s Barnaby Rudge, which opens with this sentence:

In the year 1775, there stood upon the borders of Epping Forest, at a distance of about twelve miles from London – measuring from the Standard in Cornhill, or rather from the spot on or near to which the Standard used to be in days of yore – a house of public entertainment called the Maypole; which fact was demonstrated to all such travellers as could neither read nor write (and at that time a vast number both of travellers and stay-at-homes were in this condition) by the emblem reared on the roadside over against the house, which, if not of those goodly proportions that Maypoles were wont to present in olden times, was a fair young ash, thirty feet in height, and straight as any arrow that ever English yeoman drew.

Of the titular character, I know nothing; but the sentence is worthy of commemoration.

It’s late and I’m exhausted. Details and pics will follow. Just know that Karin is well; Abel is well; I love him; and he sleeps peacefully and preciously, wrapped up like a burrito.

1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 81: Midsomer murders: The killings at Badger’s Drift

[D.S. Troy:] “Why would they want to kill her? Unless it was adultery. I suppose it could have been ass bandits.”

[D.C.I. Barnaby:] “What?”

“In the wood.”

“You mean homosexuals, Troy?”

“Well, that’s what I said.”

“You are as politically correct as a Nuremberg rally.”

∙∙∙

[Mrs. Barnaby:] “Was that Sergeant Troy just now?”

[D.C.I. Barnaby:] “Yes.”

“I’d like to meet him one day.”

“No, you wouldn’t.”

Poor Detective Chief Inspector Tom Barnaby (John Nettles) must fight on three fronts: professional, domestic, and, of course, criminal. Bucolic Midsomer County is “the deadliest county in England.” People aren’t just murdered there: they’re speared with pitchforks, beheaded with guillotines and swords, poisoned with mushrooms, locked in freezers, tied down and then bludgeoned with wine bottles launched from catapults. Motives include: incest, ancestral loyalty, class hatred, religious mania, orchid covetousness, and every flavor of vengefulness. One outwardly mild killer, bored with England, murders while hallucinating that he lives in the Old West.

The first episode, “The Killings at Badger’s Drift” (1997), is based on Caroline Graham’s novel. A kindly old spinster, searching the woods for orchids, stumbles upon a person or persons in flagrante delicto. Horrified, she flees … is pursued … is dispatched. Barnaby and young Troy (Daniel Casey) are called to the scene. Troy is eager to conclude that the death was accidental. But a neighbor suspects foul play, and a nosey parker blackmails the killer. Bodies soon pile up.

Barnaby studies a connection with a previous death, the (allegedly) accidental shooting of the first wife of a rich landowner. This odious man is now engaged to his much younger ward (Emily Mortimer), whose casual untruthfulness piques Barnaby’s interest. Her brother, an artist (Jonathan Firth, Colin’s brother), is quarrelsome and perhaps slightly unhinged. But he’s less alarming, and certainly less revolting, than the smarmy undertaker who drives a too-expensive car and lives too harmoniously with his mother. Familial relations in the County are, as a rule, either discordant or perverse.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

It’s with some relief, then, that we also view Tom Barnaby’s utterly bland home life. His daughter, the winsome Cully (Laura Howard), is an aspiring theatre actress who bounces from gig to gig (and, in other episodes, from boyfriend to boyfriend). Tom’s wife, Joyce (Jane Wymark), engages in cultural pursuits of virtually every form. Tom is the casualty of Cully’s and Joyce’s hobbies. In this episode, he complains of the daintiness of Joyce’s cooking: she serves him quail instead of chicken.

Unsurprisingly, then, he relishes eating out of the house – in the pub or police canteen – or would relish it, were he free of that obnoxious greenhorn, D.S. Troy.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Barnaby – English for Barnabas – means something like Son of Encouragement. Grumpy as Tom can be, the name is apt. Barnaby treats suspects with respect, and he gives Troy his due. In time, Troy will earn Barnaby’s trust – and a promotion to Detective Inspector, away from Midsomer County.

Other young sergeants will come and go. (How many of them will fall for Cully?) Tom and Joyce will age into curmudgeonliness. After thirteen seasons, Tom will retire; John, his cousin, will replace him as Detective Chief Inspector. John’s family will replace Cully and Joyce. The parade of sergeants will continue. (Medical examiners, too.)

The body count will rise.

The show has now aired for twenty-four seasons and in twenty-seven different years, lampooning/​celebrating every English trope under the sun. Boys’ schools? Check. Pagan ritual? Check. C. of E. bellringing and grave-tending? Check. River punting? Racehorse breeding? Pub-keeping? Landscape painting? Check.

There’s the occasional sequence in Wales or on the Continent, but the scenery is overwhelmingly Southern English. Picture-postcard settings are preferred. (In the show’s first scene, the doomed spinster happily pedals by a sign commemorating Badger’s Drift’s “best kept village” status.)

Off-camera, cast and crew would rise early and ride trains to far-flung locations. Fed-up regulars would leave the show to escape the grind.

Meanwhile, the nation’s best actors would take turns as guests. Anna Massey, Toby Jones, Joss Ackland, Olivia Colman, agèd Bond girls, members of the sprawling Fox family: all lent their talents to this show, this national institution.

Midsomer Murders is a showcase for cottages and pubs and manors, for lawns and fields and forests, for customs respectable and insane; but also for actors trained in old-fashioned, theatrical, British craft.

Meritocracy isn’t a realistic aspiration

How are penalty takers selected? Conversion rate can’t be the whole story. Messi and Cristiano, who miss often enough, will always be their teams’ first-choice shooters.

We Ecuadorians are no wiser. We keep sending Enner to the spot. Sheer sentimentality, I suspect. It’s been years since he dispatched cleanly.

Mbappé and Salah missed penalty kicks this afternoon for Madrid and Liverpool. The commentators pretended to be surprised. Why? I’ve seen other horrendous misses by both players; everyone has.

Liverpool’s best taker by far, Mac Allister, was playing brilliantly and had already scored. He wasn’t considered for the penalty.

Salah is a good shooter, but Mac Allister is near-automatic.

I’d’ve assigned Madrid’s kick to Lucas Vázquez, another inspired player (he’d won the foul). He routinely delivers in the clutch. The weedy fellow has won five Champions Leagues, for goodness’s sake.

It’s his utter professionalism – in addition, perhaps, to his seniority and nationality – that earns Vázquez the captaincy when he comes off the bench. (Carvajal is injured.)

Anyway, I wouldn’t let Mbappé, that bundle of nerves, near the spot – not with the game on the line.

Ancelotti is no fool. His specialty is “team chemistry.” Stock me with talent, no matter how egotistical, he says, and I’ll combine the elements so they don’t clash. But his wizardry has limits. Madrid’s vaunted strikers can’t all function at once – not yet, anyway. Mbappé, the newcomer, is dead weight. His confidence has plummeted.

I believe that it was for this reason – or, perhaps, to prevent a tantrum or sulk – that Ancelotti allowed Mbappé to take the penalty. Not to maximize the likelihood of immediate success, but to promote the squad’s long-term success.

Even so, what I saw today, and have seen in many other games, shows that pro sport, so often celebrated for meritocratic purity, is in fact far from pure. If cutthroat Madrid and stats-savvy Liverpool defer to their Big Cheeses in big games, what are the prospects for meritocracy in a nation as a whole?

Painful anticipation

Not nice for expectant dads, really not nice for expectant moms: prodromal labor.

When Karin’s contractions started, I cleaned the house and packed supplies; I thought we’d soon leave for the hospital. Well, days have elapsed. We’re still at home. The house is a mess, again, and I’m running out of clothes.

We went to church and received diapers, gift cards, and well-wishes. The pastor & his wife put out a tray of delicious Walmart cupcakes in our honor. Few adult congregants partook. Those who did, were shy to. The pastor, bless him, has slimmed down this year, conspicuously enough that he must work the theme into his sermons. Gluttony is as sinful as lying, he said last week.

Well, I suppose it is. And so this morning our church stood around the cupcake table, not eating, remarking that sugar fuels cancer.

A few of us ate with gusto. The frosting turned our lips and teeth blue.

Colombia 0, Ecuador 1

I recant.

We are AWESOME.

This is the best goal that Enner has scored for Ecuador.

We made a very good Colombian team look ordinary. We did it with the ball, the first half-hour – and without it the last hour, sans one player.

The Colombians created opportunities; but it was evident, early on, that they were going to have “one of those nights.” I sat back and watched them miss their tap-ins, point-blank shots, potshots … every kind of shot.

(I prayerfully sat back.)

We’ve conceded just four goals in twelve games.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Karin and Samuel are ill. Daniel and “Pip” and I aren’t – yet.

The first snow fell last night. It’s time to start my winter reading:

• Dostoevsky, various
• Kafka, The Castle
• Jack London, various
• Christiane Ritter, A Woman in the Polar Night

I already have begun reading The Long Winter from the “Little House” series. The Ingallses endure a South Dakotan blizzard … in October.

Body-text fonts, pt. 33: Century Old Style

The “Century” fonts – ITC Century, Century Expanded, Century Old Style, Century Schoolbook, etc. – aren’t as similar as one would expect. This is explained by font-writer Allan Haley:

Century Old Style (this month’s fêted font)

has more character and personality than the other Century designs. It is the red-headed, freckle-faced member of the family.

And why is that?

Not really an Old Style design [the other “Century” fonts aren’t, either], … it does have … angled serifs in the lowercase and a flavor of Old Style traits.

Ah, yes, I see what Halley means. The font is hardly Centaurish (for instance), but it’s also not abjectly un-Venetian.

Also notable is Century Old Style’s wonky uppercase “C.”

The font’s general plainness and its quirks ensure that it

almost cannot be used in an inappropriate application, and it virtually cannot be overused. Where other typefaces, which have a similar range of abilities, can become commonplace or unexciting (sort of typographic vanilla), Century Old Style maintains a personality and a presence (more like French vanilla).

I couldn’t have put it better myself.

Some pulpy Vintage Black Lizard crime novels (e.g., by Jim Thompson) are set in Century Old Style. Alas, I can’t find a worthy specimen to post here.

Instead, here is a page from a book of old British commercial art. (The author is Robert Opie, the son of those marvelous antiquarians, Iona & Peter.)

Enlarge, please.

And here is a page from a children’s bible.

Different companies issue darker and lighter versions of Century Old Style. I’m partial to this new (absolutely free!) version. Weary of Times New Roman? Use this instead.

Ecuador 4, Bolivia 0

With an eye on their upcoming home match against Paraguay, the Bolivians rested almost all of their starters. They brought a team of youngsters to Ecuador.

One of them committed an atrocious handball in the penalty box.

Not a good strategy in the Era of VAR.

Red card.

Penalty kick converted – barely – by Enner Valencia … who, two minutes later, assisted Gonzalo Plata.

Game over.

This was a cakewalk for us. I’ve never seen a game handed over quite so blatantly.

“Not a real game,” said the Peruvians who narrated my broadcast. I agree.

I had prayed for an anxiety-free contest. Boy, wasn’t it ever. It was dull.

After the fourth goal, and with half an hour remaining, we brought on a handful of subs who ran around like headless chickens, trying to score. They didn’t.

It could have been five, six, seven goals.

We’ve played eleven games; scored only ten goals (four of them last night); stayed comfortably within the qualification zone. Failed to inspire. I’ve yet to enjoy any of our matches. Our defenders are superb. Our attackers are bottomless wells of disappointment. The coaches tried too hard to defend early in the cycle, and we never got into a goalscoring groove.

We’ll play in Colombia on Tuesday. That might be our hardest remaining contest.

“Pip” flips

“Pip” is upside-down, so that’s a relief.

Apparently, he has lots of hair. The latest ultrasound even showed his eyelashes.

Now, we wait. …

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

R.I.P. our wonderful church sister, Donna – another driving force behind our adult Sunday School. She was ninety-two and quite spry, physically and mentally, until this year.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Tomorrow, in Guayaquil, Ecuador will play a crucial World Cup qualifier against Bolivia. We’re shorthanded; the Bolivians, more so.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Lest I neglect them – and before they lose to 2nd-ranked Ohio State – the 10–0 Indiana Hoosiers are ranked 5th in the land, in football. They lead the conference. They’ve brutalized every foe but one (the defending national champs).

Their stadium is packed every week. Their uniforms are simple and good.

I’m glad.

But it is a sign of the Apocalypse.

Nesting-time

From a friend’s Facebook page:

Yeah, well, Trump and Vance reside in counties that went to Harris. So there. 👅

Life goes on. “Pip” is due to be born in three-and-a-half weeks. Fellow churchgoers have been giving diapers and other tokens. At home, the task of the season – instinctive for Karin, imperative for me – is “nesting,” i.e. reconfiguring one’s living quarters for the baby. The most urgent time for this appears to be 10:00 or 11:00 p.m.

Anyway, that’s why I didn’t post last night – I was busy “nesting.”

Physically, things are progressing well, except that “Pip” still needs to flip upside-down. Karin lays frozen veggies on herself to goad him.

My take

Who do you want?

Barabbas!

(24 Hour Party People)

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Happy birthday, yesterday, to me. I watched Liverpool torch Leverkusen. Guy Fawkes fireworks exploded all game long. People like that sort of thing, you know?

My mother was unwell but still brought me a cake.

The weather was how I prefer it. At night, I put on I Know Where I’m Going! for more of the same. The boys wouldn’t let me finish it.

November’s poem

“The Nomad Harvesters,” by Marie De L. Welch:

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

The nomads had been the followers of flocks and herds,

Or the wilder men, the hunters, the raiders.

The harvesters had been the men of homes.

But ours is a land of nomad harvesters.

They till no ground, take no rest, are homed nowhere.

Travel with the warmth, rest in the warmth never;

Pick lettuce in the green season in the flats by the sea.

Lean, follow the ripening, homeless, send the harvest home;

Pick cherries in the amber vallies in tenderest summer.

Rest nowhere, share in no harvest;

Pick grapes in the red vineyards in the low blue hills.

Camp in the ditches at the end of beauty.

They are a great band, they move in thousands;

Move and pause and move on.

They turn to the ripening, follow the peaks of seasons,

Gather the fruit and leave it and move on.

Ours is a land of nomad harvesters,

Men of no root, no ground, no house, no rest;

They follow the ripening, gather the ripeness,

Rest never, ripen never,

Move and pause and move on.

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

I came by this in Carey McWilliams’s book, Factories in the Field: The Story of Migratory Farm Labor in California.

1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 80: Cure

I’ve been stumbling across references to mesmerism – in Poe, in William James. Even this month’s E. M. Forster reading, Maurice, touches on hypnotism, mesmerism’s better-regarded cousin.

This is the key difference between the practices, as I understand them. Hypnotism, to be effective, must be welcomed – or at least not resisted – by the subject. In contrast, mesmerism, due to its eerie basis in “animal magnetism,” is supposed to influence even those who resist.

Mesmerism once was widely feared. After the French Revolution,

major politicians and people in power were accused by radicals of practising animal magnetism on the general population.

In his article “Under the Influence: Mesmerism in England,” Roy Porter notes that James Tilly Matthews suggested that the French were infiltrating England via animal magnetism. Matthews believed that “magnetic spies” would invade England and bring it under subjection by transmitting waves of animal magnetism to subdue the government and people. Such an invasion from foreign influences was perceived as a radical threat.

Not everyone objected to being mesmerized. Desperate people welcomed it as a cure. Scientists lent it credibility.

No longer. Now it belongs to history – and to the horror genre.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

The distinction between mesmerism and hypnotism is blurred in the thriller Cure (1997). Subjects are induced to commit murders they wouldn’t ordinarily commit. The question is whether they murder willingly.

How different, really, are you and I from the “monsters” we condemn? This is the theme of many policing stories, and of such cringe-thrillers as Oldboy. Cure belongs to both traditions.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Bizarre killings plague Japan. The victims are slashed with similar markings. Each killing is done by a different person.

Each killer immediately and remorsefully confesses and is taken into custody. Each killer had never done violence before. Each is baffled.

So are the lead detective, Takabe, and Sakuma, the psychologist he consults.

Even if you manage to hypnotize someone, you can’t change their basic moral sense. A person who thinks murder is evil won’t kill anyone under hypnotic suggestion.

So says Sakuma, a rather naïve figure. His manner conveys that this is the scientific orthodoxy. I don’t know if it is, but the assertion, in this unqualified form, is doubtful. People murder deliberately while believing that murder is wrong; if people act wrongly while aware of their moral beliefs – if their urges aren’t stopped by the safeguard of their own conscious disapproval – why wouldn’t they acquiesce to a hypnotist’s suggestion?

Sakuma’s personal advice to Takabe is better. Don’t let the investigation consume you, he urges; look after yourself. Not all is well with Takabe, whose wife is psychologically disturbed. His own smooth façade has started to crack.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

The investigators learn that a young drifter has been seen near every crime. They track him down. He appears to have severe amnesia.

The scenes with the drifter are, to me, the movie’s most absorbing ones. Do-gooders take him in, try to help him. Police question him. Or, rather, he questions his questioners. Where am I? Who am I? Then, after a half-dozen questions, the sequence resets: Where am I? The drifter is quiet, laconic, apparently uninterested. His failure to supply answers suggests insolence as much as memory loss. As his questioners’ frustration mounts, he imposes his own rhythm on the interrogations. Then, he flips the questions back on the questioners. Who are you? He asks about their lives, their homes. He plants suggestions. In short, he hypnotizes, or mesmerizes. I don’t know how realistic this is. I’ve not seen conversations like this in life, or in any movie. But they’re fascinating; their rhythm is … hypnotic. They’re worth the price of admission.

There are dreamlike locations, too: an empty, wintry beach; an abandoned, old, wooden dormitory; the bowels of hospitals and prisons. There are hallucinatory sequences (the halluciations are Takabe’s).

Here is a long video about Cure’s unsettling techniques – an exposition of how movies use ordinary sights and sounds to subtly re-tune our emotions.

Don’t watch it now if you plan to see this movie; do if you don’t.

Freddie Freeman, pt. 2

John-Paul: “Children, what should I blog about?”

Samuel: “Blog that we’re getting a new brother – ‘Pip’.”

A heartwarming answer.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Let us again salute Freddie Freeman, who has homered in every game of this World Series. (As I type, it’s the third inning of Game 3.)

Freeman looks just like Mike, my next-door neighbor. Talks like him, too.

I mentioned it.

“It’s been pointed out before,” Mike said. “It’d be nice to be him.”

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Is it strange that I want to read a 900+ pp. textbook of British criminal law?

Is my anglophilia/​crime lit appetite out of control?

Today I learned of Lon Fuller’s “speluncean explorers” (1949), which I am a little ashamed not to have come across before. I had read about R v Dudley and Stephens (1884) and Philippa Foot’s “fat man stuck in the cave mouth” (1967), a sort of Lon-Fuller-Meets-Winnie-the-Pooh scenario (see p. 7; Foot says the case is “well known to philosophers,” although I confess I don’t know who previously discussed it).

Similar cases involve the shipwrecked guys who fight over a plank; and, in Candide, James the Anabaptist, whose plight, perhaps not interesting to the theorist, is (I hope) especially poignant to the person on the street.

The sports

You’ll have to enlarge this to read it.

I would choose the sushi, the ham-and-cheese pizza, the pasta salad, the Nutella sandwich, the bologna-and-chorizo sandwich, and the fruit.

(I doubt the authenticity of this. Was there no second fullback?)

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

It’s time for my annual baseball peek: Dodgers vs. Yankees, World Series Game 1. No runs yet. I’ll watch until the Fox Sports app’s free preview expires. We need a TV antenna. … The celebs are out in droves. … It’s nice to see such plain uniforms on both teams. I appreciate the subtle palm trees on the Dodgers’ socks. … Shohei Ohtani sure is … tall. … I like it that so many people in Japan are watching the Dodgers at 9:00am.

Karin: “Sports ads are garbage.”

First run scored: triple, then sacrifice fly. Dude wore a mitten to slide home hand-first. I’d never seen that.

Update: First walk-off grand slam in World Series history:

He is a “sixth-generation Salvationist” (Wikipedia; cf. the source article).

Happy birthday to Samuel

He turns five tomorrow. Quite a ritual awaits him at school. He’s to carry a globe around the classroom five times while his teacher and classmates sing to him and eat granola bars. Photos of his short life will be displayed.

Karin & I worry about the singing, which Samuel doesn’t always take to; but we’ve drilled the expectation into him, and he bears it stoically.

He now seems to like school. He was downright excited at the bus stop this morning after what must have been a too-long Fall Break.

(The driver took the wrong street but quickly turned around and came back for Samuel.)

He’s losing various perks: the WIC vegetables, the books from Dolly Parton, the visits from privately funded social workers. But he wouldn’t eat the vegetables, anyway; and he continues to peruse the books that arrive for Daniel.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

I ought to mention, today I saw one of the brightest “firework displays” of my lifetime: Madrid’s and Dortmund’s rehash of last season’s Champions League final. I have no love for Madrid, but my goodness, what talent, what tremendous self-belief. Pedigree is real.

Body-text fonts, pt. 32: Caslon 224

Benguiat is a fine choice for horror movie opening titles – but not for body text.

Well, what other fonts did Ed Benguiat make?

Hmmm … ah, yes, Caslon 224. Arguably not for body text, either. But I’ve seen it used in this nice little book, Tolkien’s Ordinary Virtues.

A bit eye-watering due to the very high contrast between thickest and thinnest strokes. But – allowing generous spacing between lines – not bad.

Really, it’s a font for benign fairy tales. Hence its aptness for a Tolkien-inspired, quasi-devotional book.

P.S. Cheaper and less eccentric (once certain ligatures have been disabled) is this obscure Serbian font, Bajka. It creates a similar fairy-tale effect.

Movies for Halloween

Catching up on unseen horror movies.

(1) Karin has a friend who arranges “watch parties.” Everyone stays at home, watches simultaneously, and exchanges text messages.

Are they good movies? They are not.

How can a person love camp to the exclusion of all else? How does she persuade family and friends to watch with her, month after month, year after year? It boggles the mind.

Two sub-genres of camp are represented at these parties: Hallmark and horror. ’Tis the season for horror. (Hallmark is for Christmastime.)

I relate this, not to complain, but to admit that last week’s selection was much better than usual. I’m referring to Dario Argento’s Phenomena (1985). (Philomena, I kept wanting to call it.) It’s set in a girls’ boarding school in the Swiss Alps. Jennifer Connolly and other girls climb out of dormitory windows and wander through forests, at night. Some girls are murdered.

Then there’s the little matter of Connolly’s ability to communicate with insects.

Baddie going to slice you open? Just summon a swarm of flies to protect you.

And there’s a hyper-intelligent monkey. And there are turns by Patrick Bauchau and Donald Pleasance.

This is the second of Argento’s movies I’ve seen. Suspiria (1977), an earlier “watch party” selection, was much worse. Karin’s friend loved Phenomena so much, she was ready to watch it again the next day. I might choose to watch it again on an airplane, or in prison.

(2) Midsommar (2019) is a tedious Wicker Man rehash with an awesome performance by Florence Pugh.

It’s sometimes remarked that the character of Hamlet is much too splendid for the rest of the play. Something like this can be said of Midsommar. What if Ophelia (not Hamlet), inarticulate but facially and gesturally exquisite, were to visit a savage (Swedish!) tribe? What if her companions – one of them, her loutish boyfriend – were a bunch of Rozencrantzes and Guildensterns?

That’s what Midsommar is.

It also must be said that the opening scenes, which involve a murder-suicide, are genuinely wrenching. Everything turns silly after that.

Of toilets

The British famously named one of their scientific boats Boaty McBoatface; in the same spirit, I hereby christen our new toilet Flushton McFlushface – “Flushy,” for short. (Karin’s dad kindly installed it yesterday.)

“Flushy” resided some days in our parlor, inside a big box, and became like a piece of furniture to us – which, I suppose, is what it is. Samuel and Daniel played upon, and inside, the box.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

The Middle Ages weren’t always so-called. Likewise, our old toilet, previously unnamed, is now “Not Quite Flushy” because of its position in the History of Toilets – and because of its chief defect.

We carried it out to the front porch where, due to rain, churchgoing (ours, not the toilet’s), etc., it has remained. With luck, it’ll be immortalized by Google Street View. This afternoon it toppled onto its side. I don’t know if it was pushed by wind, urchins, or stray cats; or if a part of it simply crumbled.

I intend to break it into smaller pieces with a hammer, to fit it into the trash.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Enough of toilets. For the second half of my reading year I’m plotting a march through Dostoevsky. Curious thing. His canon is crowned by the “five major novels.” Russians list them differently than do English speakers. Russians include The Adolescent; English speakers typically don’t. They might include Notes from the Underground (a novella) or reduce the list to four. It’s not as egregious as, e.g., Oregon’s having become the best college football team in the Midwest’s 18-team Big Ten Conference; but it’s gerrymandered, all right.

Anyway, I plan to read Notes, the Russians’ “five,” and probably The Double and The Gambler; so, either way, I’m covered.

P.S. See this useful webpage re: translations.

October’s poem

Ecuador 0, Paraguay 0.

More futility.

The ref and the VAR failed to decree a penalty kick for us.

Such mistakes happen less often in these days of video review. I’ll listen when CONMEBOL publishes the booth officials’ audio.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

A rather chilling poem by John Keats:

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

This living hand, now warm and capable

Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold

And in the icy silence of the tomb,

So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights

That thou would wish thine own heart dry of blood

So in my veins red life might stream again,

And thou be conscience-calm’d – see here it is –

I hold it towards you.

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

Netflix just released a new Unsolved Mysteries season. One episode shows Britons talking with the dead. These spiritualists, with their fancy electronics designed for listening to bat-calls, first seem nutty … and then, well, they record some strange things.

Most remarkable, to me, is one spiritualist’s less-than-admiring verdict of another: “He’s possessed.”

You’d think they would have considered that risk from the beginning.

Too much

Reading:

• Dante Alighieri, Paradiso (yes, still)
• Isaiah Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty
• **Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked this Way Comes
• E. H. Carr, What Is History?
• *Erskine Childers, The Riddle of the Sands
• John Cottingham, ed., Western Philosophy (this anthology is terrific; if you only ever read one philosophy book all the way through, let it be this one)
• René Descartes, Discourse on the Method
• ***Charles Dickens, Hard Times
• G. R. Elton, The Practice of History
• E. M. Forster, Maurice
• **Elizabeth Gaskell, Gothic Tales
• Homer, Odyssey (this month’s fantasy book)
• Anne Jacobsen, Nuclear War: A Scenario
• C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy
• The New English Bible, M’Cheyne schedule (Kings, Paul, Psalms, Ezekiel)
• Anthony Powell, The Kindly Ones (bk. 6 of A Dance to the Music of Time)
• Sally Rooney, Intermezzo (a library copy, barely begun; time is running out)
• **The Marquis de Sade, Justine, a.k.a. The Misfortunes of Virtue (so far, basically Candide)
• Peter Temple, Truth
• Laura Ingalls Wilder, By the Shores of Silver Lake (bk. 5 of the Little House series)
• Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

Good grief.

* = for fall-time
** = for Halloween-time
*** = “for relaxing times”

My (cat) lady love

Happy birthday to Karin. I found an age-appropriate gift at Goodwill: a volume of James Herriot’s Cat Stories (large-print).

We celebrated at a Mexican ice-cream shop. Nachos, jalapeños, elotes, tortas, paletas, and ice-cream, washed down with mineral water: What could be better?

The shop’s Instagram page has a photo of ice-cream with spicy Cheetos in it.

1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 79: Drifting clouds

“Trams in Helsinki” (Wikipedia).

Things go from bad to worse in Aki Kaurismäki’s “proletariat” trilogy (1986–1990). Owners oppress proles. Proles oppress other proles; they take their misery out on each other.

The “Finland” trilogy, which Drifting Clouds (1996) inaugurates, is happier. Things go from lousy to dire … to hopeful. Most of the characters aren’t vile. They’re downtrodden, lonely souls; but they’re downtrodden and lonely in laconic solidarity with each other.

Maybe Kaurismäki once pined for revolution. Maybe that idealism gave way to bitterness when the requisite solidarity never materialized. Maybe that’s what fuels the rage of, e.g., The Match Factory Girl.

Drifting Clouds isn’t revolutionary. All it asks for is ordinary decency. Politically, it’s an about-face for Kaurismäki: away from vengeance, toward fellow-feeling and dutiful citizenship – even under capitalism.

Not that oppression has ceased in Drifting Clouds. The government cruelly cuts jobs. Big chains drive small restaurants out of business. Employers refuse to employ the un-networked. Banks refuse to lend to the poor. Casinos prey on the desperate. Gangsters swindle and threaten, and then carry out their threats.

But the victims are kinder to each other. That’s the difference. Some of the capitalists and bureaucrats are decent, too.

At the movie’s center is a touching marriage. Lauri (Kari Käänänen) and Ilona (Kaurismäki’s favorite actress, the remarkable Kati Ouitinen) get by via the “rent-to-own” system. Their television, sofa, and bookcase will require years of paying off; once the bookcase is paid for, they’ll be able to start buying books. Then they lose their jobs. They drink, they despair, but they keep going. They’ve already been through the wringer. They got married because they got pregnant. The child has been dead for years.

There are no other children in the movie. It’s a society of oldsters. Even the young adults seem old. Ilona works at a restaurant that is going broke because the aging patrons can no longer drink as much as they used to.

That sort of irony – heavy drinkers who can no longer drink; a child-centered, childless marriage; bookless bookcases – comes up again and again.

The restaurant – “Dubrovnik,” named for an Eastern European equivalent of Palm Beach – goes under. It’s a tragedy for the staff, yes. But the moment is marked by humanity. The owner does what she can for her workers. And, on the last night, clients come dressed up to pay their respects. They give away flowers. It’s funereal, dignified, and moving.

Lauri loses his job driving a tram. I have to eliminate four jobs, the supervisor tells his drivers. I’m not going to decide. I’ll let the cards do it. Lauri draws a low card. It seems heartless. Why not let him stay on the basis of seniority, or merit? But I wonder if the Finns see it differently. The card-lottery says: Your differences don’t matter. You are all basically equal. You each get an equal chance. Maybe deciding like this helps everybody to get along.

Earlier, I mentioned laconic solidarity. It matters that these are people of few words. One character is a drunk. His friends take him to rehab. When he’s better, he puts on his suit to leave, and his friends arrive to bring him home. They all walk out together without saying a word. Keeping quiet preserves everyone’s dignity and makes it easier to simply do the right thing.

It also makes the movie very funny. There’s something hilarious and winsome about the quiet acceptance of disaster. Who wants a society of whiners? Complaining isn’t endearing; petulance is poison. Much better to live as the Finns do.

In reality, of course, even Finns complain. We all do it. Drifting Clouds is an idealization, then. One comes away thinking, I wish I could bear hardship like that.

People suffer. We see it in their faces. We admire them for suffering quietly. We do what we can for them.

The Finns seem to have become a caring people; maybe they always had it in them. The state now famously encourages and heavily subsidizes child-rearing. Is it a last-ditch effort to escape always being a society of down-and-outs? I don’t know. I do know that today’s policies would have made all the difference to Lauri and Ilona, who can’t afford another child because they can’t even afford books for their rent-to-own bookcase.

P.S. A word on the director’s style, which is instantly recognizable. The action is carefully measured. In contrast, the physical elements are colorful, strikingly arranged, and witty. If the movie were a painting, it’d be a Baltic American Gothic … inside the Nighthawks diner. There are long scenes in which characters listen while live musicians play old pop dirges. I wonder how much of this was borrowed by Wes Anderson, who generates an entirely different – and, to my mind, obnoxious and forced – effect, all too cheery and precious. Closer in spirit to Kaurismäki is Terry Zwigoff (e.g., Ghost World). But his is not a solidaritous impulse. His heroes are irredeemable, unapologetic outcasts. They may be right, they may be noble, but they don’t make society better.

“Another one rides the bus,” pt. 2; R.I.P. two mainstays

Success!

The bus took Samuel to school this morning for the first time.

I’m pleased that we got this sorted out within the month. The bussing in this district is not well thought of.

That said, the half-dozen dispatchers and drivers Karin & I talked to this week were all wonderfully helpful and kind.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

R.I.P. Nevin Longenecker, distinguished high school science teacher. (No, really. Distinguished.) I used to drink coffee with him in the Social Studies lounge before I’d go off to make photocopies for lesser pedagogues.

He ended up coming to my wedding. When it was discovered that his was the longest-lasting marriage in attendance, he was obliged to give a little speech.

I knew teachers in the school who had no idea how remarkable his record was. He didn’t toot his own horn – at least, not to me.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

R.I.P. the iconic Dame Maggie Smith.

“I believe I am past my prime” (The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, 1969).

No: Her prime was just beginning.

The scholar, pt. 5: “Another one rides the bus”

At last, Samuel has been assigned to a school bus route.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

I took him outside this morning. We waited by the curb, in the dark.

Then the bus flew past us on a different street.

Maybe he’ll get to ride the bus to school tomorrow.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

He did make today’s return journey on the bus.

Daniel and I sat in lawn chairs on the front porch and waited for Samuel to arrive. When the bus pulled up, all the windows but one were empty … and there was Samuel’s curly head. There were his big eyes, staring out expressionlessly.

I was so proud of my little son for enduring this ordeal: his first bus ride, his first solo journey.

As soon as he got indoors, he went to his toy cars. He was virtually mute for an hour or so.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Eventually, I learned that other children had ridden with him, and that he had enjoyed looking out at the houses.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

His driver seemed very conscientious. When she stopped the bus, she put on latex gloves and went back to help Samuel out of his seat. Then she waited to drive away until after he’d gone into the house.

The school bus is the safest vehicle on the road – your child is much safer taking a bus to and from school than traveling by car. In fact, students are about 70 times more likely to get to school safely when taking a bus instead of traveling by car. That’s because school buses are the most regulated vehicles on the road; they’re designed to be safer than passenger vehicles in preventing crashes and injuries; and in every state, stop-arm laws protect children from other motorists.

(Indiana Criminal Justice Institute)

We feed our children

Another “dine-in” attempt – this time with Daniel and Samuel, at a Chinese buffet. It was a success. Buttery cabbage on buttery whitefish on buttery, spicy, sugary chicken, on buttery noodles, with dumplings. Daniel ate for free; Samuel’s rate was reduced; the boys mostly stayed in their chairs. You could see the calories rushing through their arteries and veins, draining away their consciousness.

Not the fetus’s, though. “ ‘Pip’ loves this food,” Karin said. “He’s dancing around.”

Daniel heard a very tiny baby crying in the restaurant. He smiled. “Meow, meow,” he said.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

I’m sorry to admit, our sons have terrible eating habits. Daniel wakes up at 6:30 or 7:00 and begs for candy. (No, I don’t give him any.)

He may have finally turned a corner. He’s been asking for meals with more balance: today, peanut-buttered toast, strawberries, and Spanish rice.

Now that Karin is “in pig” (Nancy Mitford’s phrase), our WIC allowance has been raised: At the end of each month, we realize we haven’t claimed anything like our full share of vegetables. So, half-panicked, we go to the store and pick out avocados and other “costly” free items. This month it was dragon fruit, from Ecuador. I wondered if any of the fruit we looked at was descended, nearly or distantly, from Hoku’s parents’ farm.

Body-text fonts, pt. 31: Scala

The font.

Comparisons to Electra and Joanna are apt: not for actual shape so much as for, I dunno, a shared ideal of conspicuous unadornedness.

This early ’90s typeface (in terms of birthday, not heydey) is used here in a collection of writings by an art-history-informed feminist whose “moment” was the early ’90s.

I’m no accomplished gender theorist, but I do think it should count in favor of a theory of gender that it harbors resources to predict, or at least retrospectively explain, the widespread “gendering” of non-persons: words, objects, animal species, topographical features, and so on (in this passage: religion-types).

Typefaces, as designers and marketers often describe them, are manly or womanly.

Scala, Electra and Joanna, if womanly – as their names suggest – are so in a prickly, thorny way.

I’ll post about Electra and Joanna later.

An oddball and I practice civic friendship

Two bang-average but worthwhile true crime docs:

Deadnorth (Tubi), set in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula;

Lover, Stalker, Killer (Netflix), set in Omaha and its environs.

I watched one right after the other, knowing little about either. There was considerable thematic overlap. The true crime genre is, if nothing else, extremely useful as a catalog of behavioral red flags.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Samuel went to the lake with grandparents, grandaunts, granduncles, and second cousins (an inexact tally). He came home this afternoon, sunburnt.

With just Daniel in tow, Karin & I went out for gyros. As we were finishing our meal, a nerdy, headset-clad man one table over, who’d been talking into his phone all lunch long, asked me to look after his food while he ran out to his truck. I nodded. His truck was a semi. I watched through the restaurant window while he fumbled around in the cab. Then he brought out a cigarette and smoked it outside the restaurant.

Finally, he returned to the bits of onion and tomato on his plate.

He grinned and thanked me. I nodded again.

My good deed for the day.

Weil on the Iliad; Nazis everywhere; the scholar, pt. 4; a dialog of trucks

I discussed, with fellow readers, Simone Weil’s essay “The Iliad, or the Poem of Force,” which we all were impressed with.

(Weil gets some details about the Iliad wrong, per the introduction in this edition.)

We also learned about this new book: Our Nazi.

Nazis, Nazis everywhere is the virtual life-refrain of one of our venerable reading-group members.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Rough school day for Samuel, who heard some unsettling noises. He doesn’t want to go back.

Karin bought him some Hot Wheels, out of pity.

Later, she heard him playing with other toy cars – a pickup truck and a food truck.

“Hey, man, give me some sliders.”

“Sure, man. Where do you want them?”

“Just toss ’em in the back of my truck.”

The scholar, pt. 3; September’s poem

We’ve learned a little more about what goes on at school. Samuel’s teacher sent this report:

I should add that Samuel has been swearing more.

Today, after Samuel had returned from school, we went strolling. When conversation lulled I told the boys about the love of God. Samuel stopped in his tracks and became very quiet. Daniel pointed to a statue of the Virgin Mary in someone’s yard. “That is God,” he said.

This month’s poem is by Shakespeare. I’ve italicized the scholastic bit.

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

All the world’s a stage,

And all the men and women merely players;

They have their exits and their entrances,

And one man in his time plays many parts,

His acts being seven ages. At first, the infant,

Mewling [bawling] and puking in the nurse’s arms.

Then the whining schoolboy, with his satchel

And shining morning face, creeping like snail

Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,

Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad

Made to his mistress’ eyebrow. Then a soldier,

Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard [leopard],

Jealous [touchy] in honor, sudden [rash] and quick in quarrel,

Seeking the bubble reputation

Even in the cannon’s mouth. And then the justice,

In fair round belly with good capon lined [perhaps an allusion to the practice of bribing a judge with a capon],

With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,

Full of wise saws [sayings] and modern instances [commonplace examples];

And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts

Into the lean and slippered pantaloon [ridiculous old man (from Pantalone, a stock figure in Italian comedy)],

With spectacles on nose and pouch on side;

His youthful hose [breeches], well saved, a world too wide

For his shrunk shank, and his big manly voice,

Turning again toward childish treble, pipes

And whistles in his [its] sound. Last scene of all,

That ends this strange eventful history,

Is second childishness and mere [utter] oblivion,

Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

(As You Like It II.vii 139–166; text and notes from The Complete Signet Classic Shakespeare)

The scholar, pt. 2

Samuel seemed shell-shocked after his first day.

“What did you do in school?” I asked.

“Work,” he said, grimly.

He wouldn’t say much else. He made a beeline for his toy cars and organized them fastidiously. Then he slept all afternoon.

With Samuel away, Daniel has been extra clingy.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

World Cup-wise, we lost 1–0, in Brazil. We debuted a new coach (Sebastián Beccacece). We wore red (!). Alan Franco, a midfielder, played surprisingly well as a makeshift right-back. Otherwise, it was a forgettable game.

At the same time, in São Paulo, the Packers and Eagles played a regular-season game. Was the NFL wise to promote itself to Brazilians while a World Cup qualifier was in progress? Maybe: the qualifier was such a stinker.

The Bolivians have begun hosting games in El Alto – clearly a savvy choice. They defeated Venezuela 4–0 and leapt back into contention. A lot of bad teams are contenders this time.

The scholar

Samuel’ll endure his first school day tomorrow. Tonight he is being supplied, bathed, dressed, taught to put on new shoes, made to sleep earlier, etc. His backpack is so large and full, he barely can carry it and keep his balance.

What’ll I do at home all day with just Daniel?

Karin disabused me of this worry. I was shocked to learn that Samuel’s classes would end by 10:30. “Just early enough for the students to grab McDonald’s breakfast,” Karin noted.

Samuel’ll be driven to school tomorrow. Soon – we hope – the South Bend schools will assign him to a bus route.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

With David, I have joined a book club. Its reading list is prodding me to brush up on my Homer and my William James.

Apart from this, I’ve finished Forster’s Howards End and moved on to his stories in The Celestial Omnibus; I’ve followed the Ingallses from Wisconsin to Indian Territory and now to Minnesota, where they’re living in a hole in the ground; and I’ve reached, in Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time, a cleverly titled but labored instalment, Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant (which Evelyn Waugh disparaged, his initial enthusiasm for the series having dwindled). The narrator has spent several books detailing his acquaintances’ love mishaps. It’s some relief to think that the Blitz can’t be far off: always picturesque, the Blitz.

Picturesque, also, are the killings in the Iliad, but their sheer numerousness makes the poem tedious.

1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 78: Ladybird, ladybird

What is it about British karaoke scenes that are so moving? Mike Leigh stages a lovely one in All or Nothing. The sitcom Benidorm, about a hotel for British tourists in Spain, concludes most episodes with karaoke. Some scenes are transcendent. (I don’t exaggerate.)

But why is karaoke so effective? The words and notes aren’t the singer’s, but the individuality of the performance is. We glimpse the distinctive person through her appropriation of the music.

Ken Loach’s Ladybird, Ladybird begins with karaoke. We observe several performers. Then the movie stays with one woman. A man in the audience is moved by her singing. He buys her a drink. He is Jorge (Vladimir Vega), a political refugee from Paraguay. She is Maggie (Chrissy Rock). She lives in a shelter. She’s had four children by four fathers. The state has taken them from her.

Hers is a terrible past. In flashbacks, we see the children forlornly trailing her through the streets as she brings home the shopping to an abusive boyfriend (the terrifying Ray Winstone). An accident occurs. The children are removed. Maggie visits them; one son has hung hellish drawings of the accident on his foster carer’s walls. Maggie lashes out at the carer, and at the social workers whose reports will determine the children’s placement. She doesn’t regain custody.

Jorge, the refugee, listens. He is kind. Maggie hardly can bring herself to trust him. But his optimism and good nature are formidable.

Maggie and Jorge make a home together. They conceive a child. Then truly horrific troubles begin. There is a parade of social workers, nurses, police, lawyers, and judges. Each does his or her bit to squash the couple. The neighbors are just as oppressive. There is no solidarity among members of the working class, no tidy escape into Marxian utopia.

Why pile misery upon misery, I wondered. Closing titles supply the answer: Maggie and Jorge are real people. They really suffered these things.

Maggie is not sentimentalized – not by the movie, and, despite his sympathy for her, not by Jorge. “We can see” the authorities’ “reasoning,” Roger Ebert writes: “Maggie explodes again and again”; she chooses imprudently again and again. And yet the authorities are “monstrous precisely because they seem to apply rules without any regard for the human beings in front of them.” Social worker after disheveled social worker looks down upon volatile Maggie and gentle Jorge. Some pronounce judgment without having met the couple. Others, during Maggie’s supervised visits with the children, frown and bury their noses in psychology texts. They choose not to see the person. This is why we can’t leave your children with you, one social worker says after Maggie explodes. Can’t you see, Jorge tells the social worker, this is a person in pain.

Jorge sees Maggie. He’s virtually powerless, but seeing is something he can do. That’s the least we should try to do, the movie argues. Loach has made other movies with this message, the most famous of which is Kes (1969), about a beaten-down youngster whom a kind teacher notices and tries to build up in others’ sight. I respect Loach, and I find his movies absorbing. But I put off watching them. They’re just so sad.

There’s an ethos, or a philosophy, or a family of philosophies, called personalism; Martin Luther King Jr. and John Paul II advocated it. It doesn’t get much discussion in the academic mainstream. I’m not sure whether discussion would clarify it much. Perhaps it’s clearer what personalism is not. It isn’t “identitarian”; it doesn’t consider the Black or the prole or the social worker first; it considers the individual person first. What this comes to is hard to say. How could I see you apart from your social roles?

A good beginning, maybe, would be to listen to your karaoke.

P.S. Chrissy Rock also has a role in Benidorm.