Body-text fonts, pt. 27: JY Alia

Rain … all week, pretty much. Last night was dry. I and the neighbors had the same idea at the same time: mow the grass.

Everyone mowed except the guy who works nights.

The guy who works construction mowed his back yard wearing his high-visibility safety vest. It must feel wrong for him, laboring while not wearing it.

The grass was wet, heavy, and long. I mowed my front and back lawns, the latter to the nub (it has been growing too fast this season). Mowing can take as little as forty-five minutes; this took eighty.

I fell asleep two hours earlier than usual.

It rained again today.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

I’m sorry this entry is … underwhelming. The children kept me busy tonight. They are tricky, voracious little creatures, like their father.

It is fitting, perhaps, that this month’s font sample should be taken from Jay Nordlinger’s fine book Children of Monsters.

The typeface, JY Alia, is interesting for being so uninteresting: a nondescript blending of Bembos, Garamonds, and Jansons (in which manner it’s like the more famous Hoefler Text). I might not have identified JY Alia but for the lowercase italic “y”: look at “Daily Mail” above, and compare it to this professional specimen. I’ve never seen JY Alia in anything else.

May’s poem

My precious History of Art by H. W. Janson remained intact for one month. Samuel climbed the bookcase yesterday and hauled it down, ripping off its cover.

Our superglues have all dried out.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Our household, minus kitties, went to the zoo with Karin’s mom, who is making the most of her grandparental season-pass (she went again the next day). In the African section, the wild dogs were in fine form, running laps, in contrast to our by-then-unenthused children. Lions, gators, snakes, and sloths practiced immobility. Kangaroos stirred more than usual.

My favorites are the huge animals: the bison, the rhino, the giraffes. The latter, in zoos, often languish down in some ditch, on the same eye-level as their observers; but at our zoo, one can walk up to their feet and let oneself be towered over.

This month’s poem, in honor of Mother Karin’s Day and our wedding anniversary (May 21), is “Pharaoh Story”; the lyrics are by Tim Rice. I’ve come, reluctantly, during our marriage, to like it.

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

Pharoah, he was a powerful man

With the ancient world in the palm of his hand

To all intents and purposes he

Was Egypt with a capital “E”

Whatever he did, he was showered with praise

If he cracked a joke, then you chortled for days

No one had rights or a vote but the king

In fact you might say he was fairly right-wing

When Pharoah’s around

Then you get down on the ground

If you ever find yourself near Rameses

Get down on your knees

Down at the other end of the scale

Joseph is still doing time in jail

For even though he’s in with the guards

A lifetime in prison seems quite on the cards

But if my analyis of the position is right

At the end of the tunnel is a glimmer of light

For all of a sudden indescribable things

Have shattered the sleep of both peasants and kings

Strange as it seems

There’s been a run of crazy dreams

And a man who can interpret could go far

Could become a star

Strange as it seems

There’s been a run of crazy dreams

And a man who can interpret could go far

Could become a star!

Could be a star!

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

Library “storytime”; Ninja Turtles; Chaplin; Fargo; a philosophy teacher

I took Samuel and Daniel to “storytime” at the local library branch. It was our third session. Thirteen or fourteen children attended: the largest number in two years, the librarian told us.

Strangely, there was just one little girl, and she was the first I’d seen at any of these gatherings. 🤷

Afterward, a few parents hung around while their children read, played, colored, or used the library’s electronic tablets.

One friendly little boy showed me a book about the Ninja Turtles. “What are their names?” he asked. I pointed to each in turn: “Leonardo, Raphael, Michelangelo, Donatello.”

He went to his mother. “That grandpa knows who the Ninja Turtles are.”

“Well, lots of people do,” she explained.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Karin was unavailable for supper, so I put on Chaplin’s Gold Rush (the 1920s version, not the 1940s re-edit). Samuel and Daniel liked it pretty well, especially when the very hungry gold prospectors eat Chaplin’s shoe for their Thanksgiving dinner.

One prospector, who is a little too hungry, imagines that Chaplin is man-sized dinner-fowl. The boys were astounded. “Not a chicken! Not a chicken!” Daniel kept saying.

The wary Chaplin takes the hungry prospector’s rifle outside and buries it in the snow, kicking a few drifts over it like a chicken scratching the dirt. The prospector comes out with an axe and chases him around the cabin. I got déjà vu. This is Fargo, I thought. Chaplin is Steve Buscemi; the other prospector is Peter Stormare; Buscemi buries something in the snow; a person runs out of a cabin, face covered, hands behind her … like a headless chicken. All for a little money.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Re: the philosopher Charles Parsons (decd.). His student, Peter Ludlow, has written an amazing remembrance. I’d quote my favorite passages, but they would amount to almost the whole essay.

Read it.

Reading report

My reading year has just ended; it goes from May to April, with a day of grace, May 1, because stuff happens.

I had two targets. I met the easier one: completing 51 books. I needed this number to replenish my yearly average, which had dipped.

I almost met the harder target (52, or 1⁠/wk) and was tearing through William Morris’s Wood Beyond the World (1894), a sex-fever of a book, when I fell asleep.

Earlier, I had finished Don’t Tell Alfred, Nancy Mitford’s last novel. This year I’ll read her biographical writings (1/mo): Madame de Pompadour, Votaire in Love, The Sun King, and Frederick the Great. A heavy dose of France-love. (Don’t Tell Alfred also is set in France; the narrator’s husband, an Oxford theology don, is made ambassador.) I may or may not read Nancy’s edited volume, Noblesse Oblige. Then, two books by Jessica Mitford; a volume of the Mitford sisters’ letters to each other; and, if I am still keen, the writings of Diana, one of the Mitford Fascists.

I still read Fielding and Shakespeare in light doses. The Complete Signet Classic Shakespeare, with annotations and critical essays, will be tallied as one book. A volume by Michael Frayn, Plays: 4, consisting of Copenhagen, Democracy, and one other play, is on the docket. It will be counted as one book. I intend to read all of the Little House books in order for the first time. My edition is in two volumes. I’ll record the series as nine separate books. The arbitrariness is obscene.

I don’t count the very short children’s books I read to Samuel and Daniel.

I am some ten cantos from the end of the Paradiso after all these years. I am dragging booty. I get through about a canto a month. The poem seems more and more alien to me, the further up into Heaven I get; Purgatory was more my level.

Learning in protest-time

Whatever you think of the recent campus protests, now is a good time to read about old ones.

I used to hear about old protests at Cornell. “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” But the way the old protests were talked about, it seemed the best of times, morally speaking. At least it was better than the late 2000s and early 2010s, a period characterized by routine alternations of study and debauchery.

Middle-aged, I now see the obvious rightness of the study-and-debauch routine inside a university. (Well, yes, the routine could do with less debauching.)

“A university is a society for the pursuit of learning,” C. S. Lewis says, echoing many, many other university people since the dawn of (at least) the modern university. This is an obvious truth … or was for a long time.

But, but, the present urgency!

Well, there’s always a present urgency; if nothing else, people need their souls saved. (It’s usually other people, isn’t it?) But that’s not what a university is for. “A university is a society for the pursuit of learning.” So, one (a) leaves the university and does whatever seems urgent, or else (b) stays in the university and pursues learning. No distractions, please.

(The old Cornell protests may actually have been justified since they were about how to pursue learning. This is an important point. Alas, it is not a neglected one. “How learning is moral to pursue” has been trotted out as the concern behind much gratuitous scholarship⁠/activism. The result has been the blending of two endeavors that university people, of all people, should take pains to distinguish.)

I do take issue with Lewis’s second sentence: “As students, you will be expected to make yourselves, or to start making yourselves, into what the Middle Ages called clerks: into philosophers, scientists, scholars, critics, or historians.” Fine, if being a clerk is (a) temporary or (b) lifelong but avocational; but a natural reading of the passage, for us if not for Lewis’s Oxford students, is that it’s a career. The truth is, students are not expected to make themselves into lifelong professional students. Well, some are, but very few.

Lewis (p. 49):

A mole must dig to the glory of God and a cock must crow. We are members of one body, but differentiated members, each with his own vocation. A man’s upbringing, his talents, his circumstances, are usually a tolerable index of his vocation. If our parents have sent us to Oxford, if our country allows us to remain there, this is prima facie evidence that the life which we, at any rate, can best lead to the glory of God at present is the learned life.

Good, good. And if one is so excited by the present urgency that one can’t devote oneself to learning or let others get on with it in peace, that is prima facie evidence that membership in the university isn’t one’s vocation – that one should leave. There is wiggle room, of course. Michael Dummett put aside his Frege for a while to decry racism. He kept on decrying racism the rest of his life. He also wrote about tarot cards. But he did get back to Frege, in a big way.