Old Ecuadorian friends came to town. I went to my parents’ and grandparents’ houses and listened to several hours of esmeraldeño Spanish – the best kind of Spanish.
Samuel asked me to draw Africa. Then he surprised me by adding a very decent Eurasia to it.
He marked out China, India, the Republic of Georgia, Madagascar … and Japan, which isn’t where you’d think; it seems to have joined Russia’s Arctic islands. I asked him if he was sure. He was. “This is Honshu, this is Hokkaido. …” “Japan seems to have migrated,” I said. He thought this hilarious. “Japan migrated! Japan migrated!” he went around shouting.
Unfortunately, he left his map and his pens lying around, and Daniel came along and scribbled over the drawing. Samuel was very sad until I showed him the photo I’d taken. Now he gets such a kick, looking at his map on the computer screen.
… are tongue twisters from Dr. Seuss’s Oh Say Can You Say, the pages of which, thankfully, have been falling out. (I love reading Fox in Socks, but not this book.)
I have changed the poems’ titles.
“Vagueness”
⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯
The storm starts
when the drops start dropping.
When the drops stop dropping
then the storm starts stopping.
⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯
“Quiddity” (Seuss’s title is “How to Tell a Klotz from a Glotz”)
⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯
Well, the Glotz, you will notice,
has lots of black spots.
The Klotz is quite different
with lots of black dots.
But the big problem is
that the spots on a Glotz
are about the same size
as the dots on a Klotz.
So you first have to spot
who the one with the dots is.
Then it’s easy to tell
who the Klotz or the Glotz is.
⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯
“Value”
⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯
Upon an island hard to reach,
the East Beast sits upon his beach.
Upon the west beach sits the West Beast.
Each beach beast thinks he’s the best beast.
Which beast is best? … Well, I thought at first
that the East was best and the West was worst.
Then I looked again from the west to the east
And I liked the beast on the east beach least.
⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯
The truth is, he’s the liveliest person in the house.
Two lovely parties this weekend: one, yesterday, for the seventieth wedding anniversary of Dorothy & Gene, from church; and another, today, for the first birthday of my niece, Penelope.
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Two more philosophers have died: Daniel Dennett and Charles Parsons.
There have been several remarks along these lines: Dennett was one of the greatest recent philosophers. I don’t agree, but he was a wonderfully lively writer. He was … opinionated. This is from the first page I looked at, in the preface of the new (2015) edition of Elbow Room:
The varieties of free will worth wanting, the varieties that underwrite moral and artistic responsibility, are not only not threatened by advances in (neuro-)science; they are distinguished, explained, and justified in detail [in the book]. There are other readily definable varieties of free will that are incompatible with what we now know about how human beings control their behavior, such as “libertarian freedom” or “agent causation.” They don’t, and can’t, exist, but although some philosophers still take them seriously, they are of only historical interest, like mermaids and leprechauns.
Now that’s confidence. (Is there much historical interest in leprechauns?)
I don’t know if Parsons was unconfident, but he was no Dennett; lecturing, he’d pause mid-sentence for minutes … then carry on. (Brilliantly, it’s said.)
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Robert Adams advised the dissertation of one of my dissertation examiners (Derk). My recent browsing of Adams’s work inspired me to find out more about my other examiners’ advisers. Nick’s was the formidable Gilbert Harman; I don’t plan to write about him tonight. Dick’s adviser was Rogers Albritton. Now here was a unicorn – a philosopher so great, he barely published; whose few publications read like spillage from a sloshing cauldron of rich, still-brewing philosophy soup ( fanesca, perhaps); whose notebooks have been mined for posthumous publication. (Cf. two interesting obituaries, here and here.)
By the way, there will be a memorial conference for Dick this Saturday. I wish I could attend: to honor and learn more about Dick, and to see my Salvationist friend, Yvonne, Frank’s widow, whose health is failing.
He was my favorite living philosopher of religion. He also wrote about ethics, metaphysics, and the early modern philosophers. The one talk I heard him give at Cornell took issue with Rawls on political disagreement; rereading the article it became, I’m sure it was this work that inspired me to hew certain paths in my dissertation.
– as well as one of his briefs for the divine command theory of morality (which of them, I’d have to check; on this topic, see the first part of “Moral Arguments,” above).
He looked and sounded like a grump, but his former students were devoted to him. Some trekked in from out of state for that talk at Cornell.
See too these remembrances on Leiter’s blog, especially Leiter’s, Zimmerman’s, Brennan’s, and Buras’s.
Notice that Zimmerman regards as a kindness Adams’s evisceration of his ideas on free will. It’s stunning that in 1991 Zimmerman interviewed to work at UCLA having written little more than a four-page proposal for his dissertation. A different era!
Buras reports an experience rather like mine, of not-fully-conscious absorption of Adamsian thinking. I’ve actually never read “Flavors, Colors, and God.” Maybe I should do so tonight, along with David Lewis’s reply. Ah, for the days when so many important papers were short.
Congrats to Leverkusen for securing the club’s first Bundesliga title, in the sixth-to-last round of matches, with a five-zero rout of Bremen. After the fourth and fifth goals the fans stormed the field and had to be shooed back to the stands. My brothers and I are especially pleased for the starting left-back, the esmeraldeño Piero Hincapié. He almost scored what would have been the title-clinching goal, but Bremen’s goalie made a heroic and ultimately pointless save.
Xabi Alonso is the sport’s managerial celebrity du jour. Indeed, this team reminded me of the 2010 Spaniards who, in game after game, would keep opponents pinned back and then eke out a winning goal in the dying minutes (although this match was more like the blowout final of the 2012 Euros).
Samuel has been asking me to (a) “write” (i.e., draw) countries, (b) write down their names, and (c) “write” any “connecting” (bordering) countries. Not so bad when the country is Ireland or Spain; pretty taxing when it’s Russia. Or France, which is much more than just Metropolitan France.
Habilitate the sea borders, and England joins the chain.
All the finalists also form an unbroken land-or-sea-adjacent chain. (Sweden and Germany share sea borders, as do Italy and Croatia.)
So do all the semifinalists but South Korea. (Russia/USSR borders Poland by land and the USA by sea; Serbia/Yugoslavia touches Bulgaria, which touches Turkey; and Morocco, Africa’s sole top-four finisher, borders Spain.)
The moral: If your country is several steps away from the chain – if you’re in, e.g., Malaysia, Australia, or Subsaharan Africa – you won’t get to the last stages, not for a good while anyway. India probably is too far removed as well. Sure, only China lies between it and Russia, just as only one country (North Korea) lies between top-four-finisher South Korea and Russia, but goodness, you’d have to slog over the Himalayas and through Tibet and Siberia and over all of European Russia and make the leap to Kaliningrad just to get as close to the center as Poland, which last played a semifinal in 1982.
These are my profound thoughts this evening.
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Our next-door neighbor, Mike, buys stuff in abandoned storage units and sells it at flea markets and garage sales. Today, he sold to me, for $2, a copy of Janson’s History of Art, which I’d been pining after for decades. I never could bring myself to order that beast of a book through the post.
It may not be the wordiest volume I’ll ever read, but it’ll probably be the heaviest.
I looked at the pictures with Samuel. I left him alone with the book for two minutes, and he started to color in it. He was bitter when I removed it to a high shelf.
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I mowed for the first time this year and now am sore.
N. Mitford’s seventh novel, The Blessing (1951), is about an Englishwoman who moves to France with her promiscuous French husband and their son (and their son’s English, xenophobic nanny, who once was the Englishwoman’s nanny).
France-Britain comparison had been creeping into Mitford’s previous novels and here is “on at full blast.” Mitford lived her last years in France.
The dedication is to Evelyn Waugh.
My reading copy is The Penguin Complete Novels of Nancy Mitford: nearly 1,000 large pages set in teeny-tiny Dante (a font with pleasing apostrophes). What follows is a rather atypical passage for Mitford, since the main speaker is from the USA. The setting is a dinner party. The New Worlders want to talk global politics; the Old Worlders want to forget warring and get back to bedroom politics.
– let me finish –
what they ought to do in the case of atomic explosion, such explosion is robbed of half, or one-third, its terrors.’
‘Thank you, Charlie,’ said Mr Dexter. ‘I for one feel a lot easier in my mind. There is nothing so dangerous as a policy of lassair-aller, and I am very glad that the great American public, if I may say so, M. de Valhubert, without offending your feelings, is not hiding its head in the sand, but is looking the Bomb squarely in the eye.’
(“Heck” – para. 3 – is not an expletive but a British-conceived U.S. diminutive of “Hector.”)
This is hardly my favorite N. Mitford passage. But it goes nicely with this remarkable essay in the Daily Mail, also read by me today, which gives “macabre minute-by-minute detail” about what would happen during a nuclear attack. (Hat tip: Leiter.)
Sobering stuff, even if flanked by links to articles about celebrities, conjoined twins, sea monsters, and UFOs.
Karin has had a cold all week; the boys have been sick even longer. I caught it two days ago. My dad has been watching the Final Four with us; he has a cold, too.
I’ve been ill during many NCAA tournaments. I’m used to watching with blankets and medicine and tea. It must have something to do with the time of year.
My neighbors have been mowing their lawns. It’s warm enough, and our grass certainly is long enough, but I’m just not up to doing it.
Karin had talked of traveling to Indianapolis, into the path of totality. Bad idea, she decided. The highway will be crammed.
As for me, the memory of the 2017 event is fresh. It was a time of joy and solidarity on the IUSB campus. All too brief. The recollection literally pains me; it makes me squint.
Eclipses are better to study, or to read about, or to imagine, than to view. I recently came across one in King Solomon’s Mines; it was the usual rot about science-minded explorers displaying their “magic” in front of savages. It should be noted, however, that the idea of carrying eclipse-mania through “exotic” lands has a basis in the actual history of science.
I read this, yesterday, in Herodotus (Robin Waterfield, trans.):
The war lasted for five years and although plenty of battles went the Medes’ way, just as many went the Lydians’ way too. They even once fought a kind of night battle. In the sixth year, when neither side had a clear advantage over the other in the war, an engagement took place and it so happened that in the battle day suddenly became night. Thales of Miletus had predicted this loss of daylight to the Ionians by establishing in advance that it would happen within the limits of the year in which it did in fact happen. When the Lydians and the Medes saw that night had replaced day, they did not just stop fighting; both sides also more actively wanted an end to the war. Peace between them was brokered by Syennesis of Cilicia and Labynetus of Babylon, who were anxious that the two sides should enter into a formal peace treaty and arranged for there to be mutual ties of marriage between them. That is, they decided that Allyates should give his daughter Aryenis in marriage to Cyaxeres’ son Astyages, on the grounds that strong treaties tend not to last in the absence of strong ties. These people formalize their treaties in the same way the Greeks do, with the extra feature that when they cut into the skin of their arms, each party licks the other’s blood.
Here is the famous picture of my family observing an eclipse in Esmeraldas (perhaps in 1991). David is shooting it with a machine gun.
A distinguished philosopher. More: A servant to philosophy. I wonder how many students have been helped by the website he curated during his retirement. It hosts “versions of some classics of early modern philosophy, and a few from the 19th century, prepared with a view to making them easier to read while leaving intact the main arguments, doctrines, and lines of thought.”
He wrote, among other things, a classic historical study – Kant’s Analytic (1966) – and a classic article, “The Conscience of Huckleberry Finn” (journal version here) which contrasts Huck’s conscience with Heinrich Himmler’s and Jonathan Edwards’s. He especially abhorred Edwards’s doctrine of hell. (To put it mildly: this doctrine sits poorly with my having titled this blog entry “R.I.P.”) (Bennett: “I am afraid that I shall be doing an injustice to Edwards’ many virtues, and to his great intellectual energy and inventiveness; for my concern is only with the worst thing about him – namely his morality, which was worse than Himmler’s.”)
Ray Bradbury wrote a story, “The Miracles of Jamie,” about a boy with a sick mother, who believes that he has the power to heal: indeed, that he’s the second coming of Christ. I thought of it as I was watching Angela; and yet there’s a crucial difference between these stories.
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Down by the bay
Where the watermelons grow
Back to my home
I dare not go
For if I do
My mother will say
Did you ever see a _____ (goose kissing a moose)/(fly wearing a tie)/(etc.)
Down by the bay
Six-year-old Ellie sings this during the opening credits. Perhaps she’s subconsciously thinking of her unwell mother (Anna Thomson – the scarred prostitute in Unforgiven) who alternates between despair and mania. But Ellie could just as easily be singing about Angie, her ten-year-old sister and de facto mother. Angie, too, is perturbed. She has visions of Lucifer, who supposedly lives in the cellar and intends to drag one of the family away with him. To stave him off, Angie and Ellie wander around their town and its environs, performing rituals of purification.
Their father neglects them. He is busy caring for their mother. Not a believer himself, he takes the family to church, hoping that it will have a calming effect. Instead, church provides Angie with the materials for building an alternate reality.
Dread suffuses this movie. Ellie re-enacts one of Angie’s rituals and sets a curtain on fire. Later, she and Angie drift toward menacing strangers: a sleepwalker, and a pedophile prowling a fairground. Angie is convinced that these people are angels. Amusingly, this belief is not unprotective. The pedophile is about to harm the girls when Angie’s religious fervor frightens him away. Angie attends a baptismal service. The baptizer, played by the ghoulish Vincent Gallo, dunks Angie in the river three times. Do it again, she insists. This is too much, even for Gallo.
Angie creates her own symbols, and the movie employs symbols I don’t understand. The girls find a white stallion in a field and lead him through the town. They visit a mechanic’s shop where all the workers are named Frank. Their babysitter suddenly goes into labor; Angie delivers the child. Angie and Ellie visit another family with many children. It’s announced that the cow is about to calve. The other children drop everything and leave to watch – but not Angie and Ellie, for whom birthing is old hat. Much of this is quietly funny. There’s dread, but there’s gentle humor, too. Even Lucifer, pale, handsome, and forlorn, is amusing, because he’s in his skivvies.
The commentary track … works much like a crossword puzzle’s answer key: It gives everything away, effectively ending the interesting part of the puzzle, but it’s still nice to know it’s available to provide closure. The 1995 debut feature of writer-director Rebecca Miller … is more enigmatic and open to interpretation than a crossword puzzle, however, and her decision to clearly lay out all the answers is a little surprising.
Miller is interesting. I enjoyed her performance in Carroll Ballard’s Wind. I’ve not seen Personal Velocity, her most famous directorial effort, but I’ve seen The Ballad of Jack & Rose, in which an isolated girl insists on maintaining a very unconventional life for herself and her sick father.
Angie and Ellie are socially, if not spatially, isolated because their family has to keep moving (the mother keeps getting into trouble). The children may sporadically attend church and pick up some religious ideas, but no one checks whether they’re orthodox; for example, Angie never learns that one baptism suffices. The consequences of not grasping this point are disastrous. (Incidentally, my church held a baptism this morning, and our pastor explained what our church teaches about that practice. It was very clear. The Devil wasn’t mentioned. Curiously, he is mentioned in baptismal scenes in movies, like this one. I don’t know if any actual Christian baptismal tradition refers to the Devil.)
I doubt Miller is trying to say much about orthodoxy, but she certainly cares about making one’s belief system, and one’s way of life, authentically one’s own. The most obtuse adult in Angela is the father. Responsible and genial, he effaces himself to support his family. As a corollary, he placates his daughters and wife without taking them seriously; he ends up breaking promises and exploding in frustration. (Yet it’s hard to see what else he might have done.) His wife, an expressive type who used to perform onstage, may be breaking down, but she’s determined not to go a way that isn’t hers. Slender, sad-faced Thomson gives the movie’s best performance; is she supposed to recall Marilyn Monroe, who was married to Miller’s father, the playwright, Arthur? (I hope this rather crude speculation isn’t downright disrespectful.)
As for the children, Angie seems to be authentically following a vocation, however confusedly: saving her family from Lucifer. It involves real anguish. She fears someone must be sacrificed, and she struggles to accept that she might have to surrender herself; this is where the story differs from Bradbury’s. Finally, Ellie is the person for whom the sacrifice is made; the movie begins and ends with her.
Sick kids today. Right now they’re feeling OK; they’ve been medicated and bathed. Samuel has been granted six more minutes in the tub. I don’t want him to drown, but I don’t want to sit by the tub all that time, either. I’m a busy guy.
Sing to me, I tell him.
(I want him to make noises while I’m out of the room.)
I keep suggesting songs for him, he keeps saying no, and then it’s time for him to get out of the tub. That’s one way to do it.
Now the boys are chowing down on sandwiches. They wouldn’t eat the chicken noodle soup I cooked earlier tonight.
I usually drain the water out of it, says Karin.
Indeed.
Uh, says Daniel.
He means Ziva. He’s picked up the habit of saying only final syllables (or, in some cases, vowel sounds). If I put him to bed, he’ll say er, meaning pacifier. Suppose he’s talking about planets. He’ll say Nus. I’ll have to use contextual clues to figure out whether he means Venus or Uranus. He knows how to say full words; he’s just awfully casual.
Samuel, on the other hand, distinguishes every word, every syllable, every audible letter, with the utmost care. No “Mairzy Doats” for him.
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More Orwell. I’ve reached his Spanish Civil War essays. Not having read Homage to Catalonia – or any survey of that war – I find myself pretty badly out of my depth as to what all the different parties were trying to achieve. But then, Orwell’s point seems to be that the conflict was largely misunderstood outside of Spain, and that the few who did understand it used it for their own ends, as propaganda.
Interestingly, as the volume’s content becomes more complex and abstract, Orwell’s tone gets angrier. Traveling to Spain and fighting with a haphazardly chosen militia must have been a whole other kettle of fish than going, soused, into the clink for a few hours with burglars and embezzlers.
Out go Nebraska and New Mexico, my underdogs. I’ve fallen from ~250,000th to ~400,000th place.
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I saw Beast (2017), set on Jersey in the English Channel. The leads are Jessie Buckley and Johnny Flynn. I was going to say, Flynn is one of the best young actors; but he’s forty-one; he’s been playing good and bad young men for almost two decades. In Beast, he’s a suspected serial killer. Is he guilty? And how is this possibility regarded by the turbulent woman (Buckley, even better than Flynn) who’s drawn to him “as a moth to the flame?”
Critics say this is a Badlands- or Bonnie-and-Clyde-type story. I think it’s more like Chabrol’s La cérémonie or, especially, Le boucher. Anyway, it’s an old story.
Much of Jersey seems manicured for tourists. But there are unkempt places. Buckley and Flynn climb cliffs, swim in the sea, roll in the dirt, tramp through forests, shoot rabbits.
Buckley wounds one. Flynn tells her to finish it off. It’s kinder, he says. As if kindness were the motive.
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I found a cheap copy of the large volume of Orwell’s essays and have been reading through them. He was a fine blogger from the get-go (“journalist,” I guess you’d call him). What essay are you reading, Samuel asked. “The Clink,” about how Orwell gets himself jailed for drunkenness, I said. Samuel built an enclosure with blocks and soon was playing that his action figures were in the clink.
Well, obviously, I picked: (1) UConn, to repeat (one of every three bracket-fillers has done so); (2) Creighton – UConn’s conference rivals – to reach the final; (3) Nebraska, because wouldn’t it be silly if two teams from that state reached the Final Four; and (4) New Mexico, so that the UConn Huskies might compete against other “canines” (it was a toss-up between New Mexico and Nevada).
When these four pieces have fallen into place, the windfall will be mine.
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Daniel tipped himself headfirst off the bed, but I caught him just in time. I had been absorbed in Mitford novel no. 6, Love in a Cold Climate; when I lurched after Daniel the volume flew out of my hands and across the room, landing hard.
“My book!” I cried out.
“See, your father loves you dearly,” Karin told Daniel, “he dropped his book to save you.”
I rushed to my book; the landing had cracked its spine. But not fatally.
More marriage-woes in Mitfordania. Jane Austen has her detractors, notably Mark Twain; I think she’s fine to read, but not by herself (not even within her narrow field). N. Mitford is a necessary corrective.
Warning: oblique spoiler (but no worse than on dust-jackets).
Think of LCC as if the respectable Jane Bennet, not Lydia, were to have run off with Wickham – not Austen’s dashing Wickham but a dowdier one, more like Mr. Collins, with pedophilic urges.
This morning I was lured to a clickbait essay about Microsoft Office’s new default font, Aptos. The thesis: Aptos isn’t bad. The argument: (1) Aptos is wider than Calibri, and (2) the “l” has a curved bottom.
Gratuitous insults were hurled at Papyrus and Comic Sans.
The author, a breezy ignoramus, deserves no greater remuneration for this “analysis” than the cost of one McDonald’s double-cheeseburger.
I’d like to think that my own amateurish font discussions are better. But they, too, probably scrape the depths of witlessness. So I apologize.
Not all amateurs are hacks. John Baskerville was no seasoned pro in 1757 when he printed a book with his new typeface. The work was so good, Cambridge University commissioned more printing by him.
Alas, rival printers denigrated him, and he charged high fees, so his designs fell into disuse. But in the twentieth century, they became ubiquitous. Many variations were developed.
Here is a sample of Güntar Gerhard Lange’s 1961 version for the Berthold company.
The top-heavy “C” distinguishes Berthold’s from other “Baskervilles,” as does the less conspicuous “R” with its beautiful, flowing tail (compare with this later “Baskerville” by Lange).
P.S. The above passage is from Lois Duncan’s Stranger with My Face, the creepiest young-adult novel I’ve read. One could do worse than to work through Duncan’s oeuvre. Beware, Hachette editions from the 2010s have been modernized; the protagonists use e-devices. Not cool.
To see a map of the Olympic Rain Shadow, click here and scroll down. The rain shadow covers Victoria, British Columbia, a place that seemed curiously arid when I visited fifteen years ago; now I know why.
Speaking of Olympian mountains, I learned that Olympus Mons, on Mars, is about as large as Poland.
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We bought a portable fire-pit for burning the wood that accumulated in our yard these last two years, and for placing our lawn-chairs around, roasting wieners in, grilling cucumbers over, etc.
Samuel’s much-studied book, Cooking with Foil, would have been useful had he not torn out the pages.
Not that we’d’ve been guided by it anytime soon. We’re unable to keep a fire going longer than five minutes. Certain twigs and sections of rotten logs burn, and the rest just don’t.
Last night, Daniel wandered off with the poker, and we crept around in the dark, looking for it with our phone-flashlights. No luck. We searched again today and were about to give up when Karin lowered her eyes and noticed it in plain view.
Poker or no poker, we are hapless.
Karin tried stimulating the fire with her breath; she extinguished it. I told her she should never carry the Olympic torch. (Not that I’ve kept the fire going any better.)
Our lawn-chairs sank pretty far down into the mud.
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This aftertoon I watched forty-one-year-old Pepe, of the immortals, in the UEFA Champions League. He played well. He’s a thug, but I like him; as John Huston says in Chinatown, “Politicians, ugly buildings, and whores all get respectable if they last long enough.” I watched through a thicket of climbing, niggling children. Daniel begged to watch “hungry planets” on YouTube, and Samuel, who is susceptible to advertising, kept asking for Heineken.
Warm-ish temps; constant rain patter. There’s nothing quite like reading Beowulf on the sofa, then dozing off, then waking – gradually and painfully – to the 1-2-3 punch of Modern Talking’s “Geronimo’s Cadillac,” “Brother Louie,” and “Cheri, Cheri Lady.” (The other songs in the queue were more soothing.)
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Karin obtained a puzzle with “thumbnail” sketches of the U.S. National Parks. Samuel spent hours gazing at the sketches and deciding which parks to visit. He’s keen on the Channel Islands (California).
I rose in his esteem by telling him which parks I’ve been to or seen from afar:
Acadia
Arches
Bryce Canyon
the Gateway Arch, glimpsed from I-70
the Grand Canyon, glimpsed from aircraft
Joshua Tree
Kings Canyon
Olympic, viewed from Vancouver Island (as in this photo, but not from so high up)
Mt. Rainier, viewed from Seattle (and see, again, the photo taken from Vancouver Island; I didn’t see this mountain during my stay)
Sequoia
Zion
I promised to go with Samuel to the Indiana Dunes. Poor boy, he rarely leaves the house, let alone the city.
He and Karin put the puzzle together last night, and this morning Daniel tore it up.
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ThriftBooks had a Seuss sale, and I bought a few of the immoral, discontinued titles (they were in a single omnibus, hee, hee), as well as I Had Trouble in Getting to Solla Sollew, which I’d been haunted by but hadn’t looked at since age four. It didn’t disappoint. I still don’t know how it concludes, though, because Daniel keeps slamming it shut before we reach the end. But I can guess.
As for the immoral ones, I re-read Mulberry Street and found mentions of a Rajah riding an elephant and a Chinese man using chopsticks.
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I finished The Pursuit of Love (1945), Nancy Mitford’s fifth and best-loved novel. At last, some contrition. Aristocrats celebrated … and punished: not for being aristocrats, but for making un-aristocratic marriages.
It’s time for a long quotation from the philosopher Michael Dummett. I mention him once or twice every ten years.
(I just realized that, as of December, I’ve been blogging for twenty years. I started on Xanga, and when that service became costly I switched to Blogger/Blogspot. I may write a recapitulation soon.)
This is from pp. 3–5 of Voting Procedures (1984), one of Dummett’s excursions into what, for him, is “popular” philosophy.
In view of all this, one would expect that voting procedures and their operation would have been the subject of a considerable amount of intellectual enquiry. One would expect also that the results of such investigations would be well known both to political and social theorists and to all those concerned with practical affairs, and would be applied both by those who have frequently to take part in voting and, above all, by those concerned to devise voting procedures to be as fair and as satisfactory as possible. Of these two natural expectations, the first is indeed satisfied, but the second hardly at all. In the period since the end of the Second World War, a considerable body of theory concerning voting has been built up. This topic was pioneered by Professor Duncan Black, an economist, who published some articles about it in the late 1940s, and a book, The Theory of Committees and Elections, in 1958: an important contribution, not expressed specifically in terms of voting, was made by Professor Kenneth Arrow in his book Social Choice and Individual Values of 1951 [see note 1 below]. Since then, and especially in the last two decades, the theory initiated by Black and Arrow has been extensively developed, principally in articles published in learned journals. One of the most surprising features of all this is how recent this work is. Duncan Black devoted a section of his book to a historical survey. From this it emerged that almost the only serious work on the theory of voting that had previously been done was carried out in France just before and during the Revolution, by Borda, Condorcet, and Laplace; this work had subsequently been almost entirely forgotten, save by a few British mathematicians of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, who made insignificant contributions to it. A minor exception, not noticed by Black, is the unimpressive section devoted to the subject by the German philosopher Hermann Lotze in his Logik of 1874. The only exception mentioned by Black is the remarkable intervention by C. L. Dodgson (Lewis Carroll), contained in three pamphlets which he wrote in complete ignorance of the work of his predecessors, and which were directed at the voting procedure to be adopted by the governing body of Christ Church, Oxford, to which he belonged [see note 2 below].
[Note 1:] See the Bibliography for works by Arrow and Black. Arrow’s possibility theorem (more exactly called an impossibility theorem) is so fundamental to the subject that he is often credited with having been the modern initiator of it, especially since his basic notation has become standard. This is unfair to Black, who was the real twentieth-century pioneer of the theory of voting, as well as a diligent researcher into its earlier history; it may be due in part to the fact that, although Black’s original papers on the subject appeared in 1948–9, his book was not published until 1958, while Arrow’s celebrated monograph came out in 1951. Black was, in particular, the originator of the concept of single-peakedness (not used in the present book), with which Arrow is sometimes credited but which he in fact took over from Black. Single-peakedness is a condition which guarantees the existence of a top. For the case when some preference scales are weak, the condition was weakened by Farquharson and myself in our paper of 1961; alternative though analogous sufficient conditions were later given by Inada, Sen, and Pattanaik.
[Note 2:] See the Bibliography. It is a matter for the deepest regret that Dodgson never completed the book that he planned to write on the subject. Such were his lucidity of exposition and his mastery of the topic that it seems possible that, had he ever published it, the political history of Britain would have been significantly different.
I especially like Dummett’s asides on Dodgson (Carroll) and the also-ran, Lotze.
Once, eleven years ago, I mentioned Dummett by way of griping about George Saunders. Since then, I’ve read and enjoyed four full books by Saunders and zero by Dummett. It wouldn’t hurt to finish Dummett’s trenchant On Immigration and Refugees; completing one of his Frege books, much as I adore them (all too often uncomprehendingly, it must be admitted), is above my pay grade.
John-Paul: “Come here, son. What did you learn in church today?”
Samuel: “I learned about the skeleton.”
John-Paul: “Huh? … well, what person did you learn about?”
Crickets.
John-Paul: “Oh, right! Was it Ezekiel?”
Samuel: “Yes!”
Karin (who’d spent the morning in the classroom across the hall from Samuel): “Yes, they learned about the Valley of Dry Bones.”
John-Paul: “And what did you learn about the Valley of Dry Bones? Will God put flesh on our bones after we die?”
Samuel: “No.”
John-Paul: “Yes.”
Samuel: “Yes!”
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I was going to say: I’m delighted that my four-year-old is learning about Ezekiel 37 in Sunday School, even if he doesn’t understand it; at least the image of the Bones is being paraded before his brain.
Thinking it over, though, I’m not sure I have a firm grasp of the meaning of the Bones.
I doubt I’ve heard the passage preached upon. Nor have I gone far out of my way to read about the Bones (although I’ve read the chapter many times).
Is the passage only about the House of Israel, or is it about the resurrection of all of God’s people? The commentators I’ve glanced at mostly say the former. But it is a vision, after all, and the meaning of a vision can be narrow or wide or both.
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From Wikipedia:
The novelist Anthony Powell named The Valley of Bones, the seventh novel in the sequence A Dance to the Music of Time, for this part of Ezekiel 37. The novel is about the opening days of World War II. The entirety of the relevant part of Ezekiel 37 is read from the pulpit at the end of Chapter 1 by a Church of England padre to a motley group of mostly Welsh miners and bankers as well as some officers from England’s upper classes as they begin to form a company. The padre suggests that not just they, but all of the British army as it prepares for war, should take this image as a way of thinking about how they need to come together.
I think not.
(Incidentally, Powell is on the docket for later this year, after I finish reading Nancy Mitford’s novels.)
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Then there’s the famous song. I like it pretty well on the nursery-rhyme level, better than during childhood when I thought it silly. The same is true of “Father Abraham.” I wouldn’t mind singing these songs in church today if we would all just stand still and not do any motions.
The lyrics of “Dem Bones” are confusing. Why connect the bones to each other first, and then disconnect them from each other? How will they walk around after they’ve been disconnected? Is verse 1 supposed to come after verse 2?
The lyrics of “Father Abraham” are easier to understand: Many sons had Father Abraham; I am one of them, and so are you. Join this idea with Dem bones gonna walk around (as one might, what with the similar body-part imagery), and you get the Christian resurrection.
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“Looked at one way,” says Joel Rosenberg (The Literary Guide to the Bible, p. 203), “the book of Ezekiel is a silent tribute to his deceased wife” (cf. 24:15ff.); “viewed in another way, it is an object lesson in which the prophet’s personal tragedy is but a sign of larger events.”
Jack’s wife, Sarah, has a baby and dies. Jack grieves. One feels for him … up to a point. Is it unkind to describe his grieving as moping? Jack oscillates between episodes of mania and self-incapacitation. Burdensome, both.
One day, while he sleeps, his parents creep into his flat, deposit the infant next to him, and creep away. He snaps out of inactivity and resolves to raise his daughter. He takes her to the office; his colleagues and secretaries watch over her most of the day.
This is unsustainable. He acquires a live-in nanny: Amy, from the USA. (The movie is set in London.)
Romance ensues.
The movie unfolds as you’d expect. There are competing love-interests. Baby Sarah is cute. Amy makes Jack better.
Jack, you may have surmised, is monstrously selfish. He’s successful in his profession; he offloads other responsibilities, especially childcare, upon servants and others he treats as servants. Whether from pity or expectation of gain, people keep on volunteering to serve him. The women in his office eye him keenly. Then there is William (Ian McKellen), who once lived in a garbage bin. He weasels himself, or perhaps Jack weasels him, into Jack’s household and becomes the de facto butler (the terms of employment are unclear).
Amy (Samantha Mathis) is, of course, the exception. She has her foibles. But she is the most candid person in Jack’s life, the idea being that the U.S. is a more plainspoken country than England (cf. Four Weddings, Notting Hill, and Wimbledon; even Bridget Jones kinda works because of, rather than despite, our knowledge of where the actress is from). Jack’s mother and mother-in-law (Judi Dench and Eileen Atkins) try and try but can never get through to him as Amy does. He’s too self-absorbed for subtlety.
(My own experience in the U.S. is that the people aren’t as candid as all that. But maybe the English are desperate to have their near-relations meet an ideal they themselves fall short of.)
The great Richard E. Grant is an unusual rom-com lead. He should have a “sparkling” grin, but his eyes and mouth are terrifying. His frame is too gaunt, and his mane is combed back from too high on his head. He laughs unnervingly. He’s not a lion or wolf so much as a hyena. He makes Jack flamboyant, touchy, and pitiful.
The screenplay … is straight off the assembly line. But by casting against type, by finding an actor whose very presence insists he is not to be disregarded, the movie works in spite of its conventions.
I say “nearly right” (the review really is spot-on about almost everything) because I wonder if the screenplay is trying to do something interesting. Jack’s (and sometimes William’s) actions, in scene after scene, are not just over-the-top, not only unreal, but irreal. One begins the movie thinking, “That would never happen. And that would never happen.” Then it dawns that this is part of the design. It’s like a screwball bit from Golden Age Hollywood, e.g. when the hunting party boards a train in The Palm Beach Story and the jolly old men take out their rifles and blow out the train’s windows and chandeliers. And William, of course, is an obvious throwback: the tramp who becomes a butler. Think of it this way, and Jack is less a monster, more a Preston Sturges temporary nutcase; his self-absorption will clear up once certain hang-ups are dispensed with. Although, in some scenes, he really does seem a monster.
Anyway, that’s how I like to think of this movie: Richard Curtis (or the like) pays homage to Preston Sturges (or the like). Not wholly successful, but worthy.
At first, it seems a subdued, almost contrite work: an about-face from the fervid, jolly cynicism of Wigs on the Green.
It doesn’t stay that way. By the end, it outdoes its predecessor.
It was written in 1939. Nancy’s sister, Unity, the Hitler enthusiast, had just tried to commit suicide. The war had just begun. Heady days.
Dunkirk … the Battle of Britain … the Blitz … all were forthcoming.
The novel mocks Germans, Lord Haw-Haw, aristocratic volunteerism, the Cabinet, the House of Lords, parachutists, and real and pretending spies. The titular pigeons are messenger pigeons. None is actually baked in a pie. Some, bearing intelligence to the Nazis, are shot down over the Channel.
A surprising number of Germans drown underneath London, in the drains.
The heroine is an utter nitwit.
I confess I am very glad to have read this book.
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Daniel went to the physician again today (his own doctor, not the WIC doctor) and got shots. Karin had promised him a treat. She bought him some McDonald’s. They wouldn’t sell her a chicken McGriddle (the best kind). Maybe they don’t sell chicken at breakfast-time anymore. A bore, as the characters say in Mitford. I stayed home with Samuel, who played enthusiastically and in peace.
Since last week, we have had 60-degree (F) temperatures, then snow, then 60-degree temperatures (likely to climb to 70); snow is expected two days from now.
… went the children yesterday. Daniel is in the 99th percentile, height-wise, and Samuel is in the 42nd; when he was Daniel’s age, he was in the 5th or 8th or thereabouts, so he is coming up nicely. We collected our WIC points and, to celebrate, bought McGriddles and hash browns (not with WIC points). Later my parents came over for Daniel’s birthday, and we ate burgers and chocolate cake. Daniel received cards, motorcars, dinosaurs, and books; Samuel, whose birthday it wasn’t, received a road map of Kentucky. And The Hobbit. Today I scolded him for coloring over Tolkien’s maps.
Samuel’s Hobbit is a gift for me, in a way, because I get nervous whenever he pulls my Hobbit off the shelf, which he started doing after he watched the cartoon starring John Huston and Orson Bean. I bought myself an extra Hobbit, too, just in case.
Ours is the latest state to have its universities meddled with.
In John Williams’s novel, Stoner (1965), a young academic ruminates with two colleagues about the purpose of the University:
“And so providence, or society, or fate, or whatever name you want to give it, has created this hovel for us, so that we can go in out of the storm. It’s for us that the University exists, for the dispossessed of the world; not for the students, not for the selfless pursuit of knowledge, not for any of the reasons that you hear. We give out the reasons, and we let a few of the ordinary ones in, those that would do in the world; but that’s just protective coloration. Like the church in the Middle Ages, which didn’t give a damn about the laity or even about God, we have our pretenses in order to survive. And we shall survive – because we have to.”
The speech is recalled later in the book:
“Gordon, do you remember something Dave Masters said once?”
Finch raised his brows in puzzlement. “Why do you bring Dave Masters up?”
Stoner looked across the room, out of the window, trying to remember. “The three of us were together, and he said – something about the University being an asylum, a refuge from the world, for the dispossessed, the crippled. But he didn’t mean Walker. Dave would have thought of Walker as – as the world. And we can’t let him in. For if we do, we become like the world, just as unreal, just as … The only hope we have is to keep him out.”
Is it a good idea to sponsor a refuge for brainy misfits? Maybe; maybe not. But force it to look like the world, and it’s no longer a refuge from the world; it’s no longer a university. It’s just another department of the world, doing the same things the world does (but issuing lots of publications). Which makes it redundant, inefficient, and certainly not worth paying for, doesn’t it? I see what you’re really up to, GOP.
Well, I finished reading the third Mitford book, Wigs on the Green. I kept wondering how it would earn that title.
Chapter 12 hinted that the village festival would be graced by inmates from the local madhouse for peers. (The asylum, in the deepest, darkest, most bucolic Cotswolds, is a replica of Westminster … an inspired touch.)
I thought these doddering ex-members of the House of Lords would initiate the fracas; instead, it’s contested by the village’s rival youth factions: Social Unionists (“Union Jackshirts”) and Pacifists.
One roots for the Union Jackshirts.
The fight scene is a jovial and rousing climax. Alas, the book is mean-spirited on the whole; indeed, distressingly personal.
Who writes a novel mocking one’s little sister? (Even if she is gaga for Hitler.)
A cloistered aristocrat, that’s who.
Still, the book’s scorn isn’t directed against the young fascist heroine – or even her reactionary ancestors – so much as against her cynical hangers-on.
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This is Daniel’s last week before his “terrible twos.”
He’s into planets. He plays for hours with softballs, stress balls, and clementines.
Jupiter Planet.
Saturn Planet.
Mars.
Tune (Neptune).
Key (Mercury).
He loves to remove his pants and diaper and streak through the house. We’ve gone back to dressing him in bodysuits, which he can’t take off by himself. We’ve had to buy larger bodysuits to cover his growing frame. He’s less than a head shorter than Samuel.
After the Super Bowl, Samuel wanted to listen to Taylor Swift.
Taylor: “She wears short skirts, I wear t-shirts …”
Samuel: “I wear t-shirts. And underwear.”
Yes, he does.
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Karin & I spent our Valentine’s outing (yesterday) getting haircuts and eating at Hacienda. Most years, we eat in the mall food court, so this was a step up.
Wheel, Jeopardy!, and How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days played on TV in the restaurant.
I tire of seeing the same teams succeed; but I wouldn’t mind if Reid, Mahomes & Co. kept on winning. This is saying something. I’ve despised the Chiefs most of my life.
I wish Travis Kelce & Taylor Swift all the best. ❤
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Speaking again of Kenneth Branagh: Here is a lovely video contrasting his (2017) and Sidney Lumet’s (1974) versions of Murder on the Orient Express.
I haven’t seen either movie. I don’t like the novel, although I love Christie and this is one of her most acclaimed works.
Cinema – Lumet’s kind, anyway – might be the best format for this story. What distinguishes each of these briskly treated characters is physicality: wrinkles, sex appeal, vigor, accent, clothes, etc. Stuff of cinema.
Christie was a dramatist, too. That’s what those suspects-gathered-in-one-room scenes at the end of her novels really are: theatre.
Watching Branagh’s Much Ado, in installments. Samuel runs around yelling, “Hey, nonny nonny.”
Reading N. Mitford’s Wigs on the Green, a comic novel about an aristocratic teenage fascist. Somehow I didn’t expect this kind of heroine, although I knew about the Mitford sisters: “Diana the Fascist, Jessica the Communist, Unity the Hitler-lover; Nancy the Novelist; Deborah the Duchess and Pamela the unobtrusive poultry connoisseur” (Ben Macintyre’s descriptions, although he qualifies them as “caricatures”).
I can understand why this family has a cult following. But the more I look into the Mitfords’ background, the less fantastical and more soberly realistic the novels seem.
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Is there a name for the déjà vu-like feeling you get when you encounter the less recent past and relive the more recent past (or the present)? I got it today from some toilet-reading: the chapter on Andrew Jackson in Barbara Holland’s Hail to the Chiefs: Presidential Mischief, Morals & Malarkey from George W. to George W.
(The footnote says: “All except non-folks like women, blacks, and Indians.”)
(The footnote says: “ ‘Ignorant, passionate and imbicile’ and ‘fierce ungovernable temper’ were some of the kinder descriptions. Jefferson said he couldn’t possibly think of anyone worse to be President.”)
Notice how the italic letters are just as wide as the Roman letters. This feature is unusual for this sort of typeface. A successor, Sabon Next, has narrower italics.
Stephen shared these photos of the Estadio Municipal, in amazing El Alto, Bolivia (which has rapidly become the country’s second-largest city, with just under a million people).
The stadium’s elevation is 4095 meters or 13,435 feet. More or less. (I’ve seen slightly different figures on different websites.) La Paz’s feared Hernando Siles Stadium is more than a thousand feet lower. The Azteca in Mexico City – itself renowned for altitude – is only fifty-four percent as high.
The stadium’s chief tenant is Club Always Ready, which has enjoyed success in recent years.
The capacity is 20,000 to 25,000 spectators. The grass is fake.
Some people dream of viewing a match in the Bernabéu, the Bombonera, or Wembley. I dream of going places like El Alto.
Have I mentioned that I once rather seriously contemplated working in sports journalism, traveling to Ciudad del Este, Cusco, and Manaus to report on CONMEBOL tournaments for dedicated English-language readers? The demand for that service would have been approximately the same as the demand for what I do now.
An early spring, says Punxsutawney Phil, whose predictive record is mixed (good on temperature, bad on seasonal change). What with yesterday’s fifty-plus Fahrenheit degrees, we led our boys on a long walk through the parking lots of Western Avenue. Karin was carrying a gift card, so we popped into a Dairy Queen, rested in the armchairs of the café section, watched a couple of awful sitcoms on the big TV, and snacked. The boys mostly behaved themselves.
(As I write this, in the sanctity of our home, Samuel lies next to me on the sofa; Daniel climbs up the back of the sofa and jumps on Samuel; then, Samuel twists Daniel’s nose. Rinse, repeat. They think it’s a great game. I think it’s a great way to break someone’s bones. Mine, probably.)
(I should have finished reading King Solomon’s Mines by now, but Daniel threw it from a great height and broke its spine. My new used copy should arrive tomorrow.)
Anyway. We also toured a small African/Caribbean food mart. It sells unusual tubers, legumes, grains, flours, and many kinds of rice and canned herring. Of course I wouldn’t know what to do with most of these foods. I was familiar with certain Goya products: plantain chips; cassava/yuca chips; and malta, which I am curious to see Karin try some day.
I would have bought some chips out of politeness, but the clerk stayed in the back office, on her phone, and I thought it kinder not to disturb her.
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In case you wonder why the fonts look different: The website that provided URW Classico got glitchy, so I switched back to Charter for the body text and to IM Fell French Canon for the blog post titles.
In the fifth and sixth grades, in Esmeraldas, I used to join my Room B classmates in the daily battle against the goons of Room A (and, occasionally, those of Room C, although those boys usually took our side). By “battle,” I mean we’d play soccer, fiercely, in the dirt – school uniforms be damned. I knew some of the boys were getting into trouble at home for this.
A rather rougher feud is the subject of War of the Buttons. The boys of Ballydowse and Carrickdowse, in County Cork, attend different schools; they can’t battle during recess, so they conduct after-hours warfare.
A Carrick boy calls a Bally boy a toss-pot. How bad is that word? To find out, the Bally boys bribe a younger child to say “toss-pot” to the priest. The priest chases the child out of the church.
The Bally boys sneak over to Carrickdowse at night and vandalize a billboard. The Carrick boys retaliate. Soon the two sides are taking prisoners and cutting off each other’s buttons, shoelaces, and neckties. This is hard on the Bally boys, who are poorer; the poorest among them are sure to get thrashed at home.
This only strengthens the resolve of one urchin: Fergus, the Bally boys’ brave leader. He instructs his troops to fight naked to avoid losing buttons; when they object, he imposes a fundraising scheme so they can buy more buttons. This tests their loyalty. Some grumble. Some commit treason. The feud, once two-sided, becomes more complex.
The movie begins with children aping grownups. Eventually, the grownups themselves, with their own resentments, which may have initially inspired the children’s conflict, get dragged into the war. Cutesy entertainment becomes dire parable.
The screenwriter, Colin Welland, won an Oscar for writing the great Chariots of Fire. He also won a BAFTA for acting in Ken Loach’s great Kes, playing a teacher who is kind to an oppressed but spirited little boy. There is a kind schoolmaster in Buttons, too, who looks after the downtrodden Fergus.
Welland himself was a teacher, as was Louis Pergaud, the author of the 1912 novel. A pacifist, Pergaud was conscripted in WW1, wounded, captured, and killed when his own side attacked the field hospital where he was convalescing. His novel was hugely popular in his native France. The French filmed it in 1962 and twice in 2011 – once setting it during WW2, with villagers, Jews, and Nazis.
I don’t know if any Irish strove to adapt the parable to their own society. This seems to have been an English endeavor. I don’t think it matters where it’s set. Like Truffaut’s Small Change, this is a tale of Urchins Everywhere, beginning, predictably, with their gusto and pluck and then slyly turning the spotlight upon their suffering – and on the differences between the boys.
An exam from a class taught by Hannah Arendt in 1955. (Click on the image to make it sharper.)
When I was growing up and aspiring to become an academic (among other things), I read a few books from the 1970s and ’80s – whatever I could find in Ecuador – on how to teach in college. These books had sample exams. One basic type was Arendt’s: Here is your chance to demonstrate what you have learned.
For the student who’d learned little, there was nowhere to hide. For one who’d at least absorbed a few key lessons, arriving at a decent launching point for subsequent, mostly unguided study, this was an arena in which to shine.
I was enamored.
This was not what my exams were like in college or graduate school.
If memory serves, just one exam, a take-home from my second semester of college, was remotely like Arendt’s.
My Google Chromebook – cracked and dented after two years of harsh treatment (Samuel would use it as a stepping-stool, Daniel as an anvil/discus) – gave up its ghost yesterday, so I am blogging with my phone.
We trekked to Best Buy last night. The children gaped at the huge TVs. The computer salesman, who was urging an older couple to buy a higher-end device, may or may not have noticed us hovering (we were in his section some thirty minutes).
I cornered a worker from a different department. Sorry, he’s the only computer guy, he told me.
Amazing, I remarked to Karin as we left the store.
It’s been that way since COVID, she said.
Oh, dear.
I bought a refurbished machine through Amazon. It should arrive on Friday. Suppliers of refurbished Chromebooks receive very low ratings. The company I bought from has an approval rating of 88% – extremely high.
I don’t know how troubling this ought to be. A lot of “one star” raters complain, misguidedly, that they can’t install a Windows OS. How do you take off the Google, they ask.
One fellow quoted fire-and-brimstone verses, concluding: Vengeance is mine, saith the LORD.
Drafting today’s entry longhand before I tap it out may benefit the prose. Or not. Samuel is fascinated; never has he seen such long blocks of handwriting. He stares at the paper, draping himself over me, pinning down my limbs.
Daniel, who has removed his pants and diaper, races through the house.
