Hot today, huh? I mowed this morning: it was only going to get hotter. I left ten percent unmowed. I felt like collapsing.
I lent the mower to our neighbor, and he mowed his lawn and felt like collapsing. When he returned the mower he told us about his recent excursions to Kroger. The security guard there embroiled himself in a dispute, and a half-dozen customers slipped away without paying. Another customer loaded a hundred dollars’ worth of meat into his cart and fled without paying. Our favorite worker got fired for shoving someone in a dispute; he’ll get rehired, our neighbor expects. Our neighbor “almost got into it” with the butcher. Then he “almost got into it” with the deli worker. Then he “almost got into it” with the worker who shelves the sleeves of bread (who’d nearly run him over in the parking lot). “Sounds like you need to chill out,” I told our neighbor. We like him, we get along great, but the better we know him, the more people he tells us about whom he has “almost gotten into it” with. He’s a chill guy, he assures us.
I worry that our Kroger will close down, because that’s something that happens to less-than-upscale supermarkets like ours. Please pray that it doesn’t close down. We love and need our Kroger.
“Based on Dutch Old Style types of the 17th century” (Identifont).
(I have inverted the colors.)
Exiled from Britain, Locke took shelter in the Netherlands. Kudos to the publisher for nodding to this fact with this choice of type. This sample is from the mid-1970s; nowadays, the blandest, “safest” Adobe font would be used: scholarly Quality Control has all but banned panache. Pity, because what other thrill is to be had, reading seven hundred pages of Locke?
My family almost always spends the day with Karin’s dad and his dad, in Goshen. We eat grilled meats, then go out strolling in the heat. Today it was painfully bright if not quite sweltering. We took the boys to a park.
Photos of my progeny: Samuel, Daniel, Abel.
Notice Samuel’s fighter jet: a gift from his grandpa, who, I believe, had just toured the Grissom Air Reserve base. (Daniel got one, too.)
The boys all loved the swings. Daniel fell off his, soon after the pic was taken.
I’m not used to being celebrated. It’s been only a few years since I became a father. Karin asked if I wanted anything. I said an opportunity to mow, a fastfood snack, and a thriftstore book hunt; and that’s what I got.
– but a goalless one – between Peru and Ecuador. The Peruvians are a hairsbreadth from elimination. I’m sorry about that. They play hard but can’t score goals.
Peru: sixteen games played, six goals scored. 😢
Ecuador: sixteen games played, thirteen goals scored, five goals conceded. Three of the five were conceded during the first three games. These are amazing statistics. I wonder if any defense in CONMEBOL’s history has been so stingy (that is, since this qualification format was adopted in the mid-1990s). I’ll find out. Not tonight; after all the games have been played.
No wonder it has seemed so dreary. I should be grateful. This is historic.
Together with Venezuela’s defeat to Uruguay, this draw ensured Ecuador’s passage to the World Cup. Brazil also qualified. Uruguay and Paraguay each need one more point from two games (or else that Venezuela not obtain six). Colombia’s position also is strong. The Bolivians trail Venezuela by a point; either Bolivia or Venezuela will claim the play-in spot.
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Protests this weekend. Stay safe! Better yet, stay home! Some protests are effective. My hunch is, these won’t be. They’ll just embolden the government to crack down further. This is a powder keg, and all it needs is for some cop or protestor to kill or get killed.
It was Abel’s turn to get poked. He glared when Jesús came into the room.
“Children recognize me,” Jesús told Karin. “I was at Walmart, and a child saw me and ran away. His parents gave me dirty looks.”
Jesús is super nice.
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It’s old news, but … Paris Saint-Germain shredded Inter, 5–0, with the best team performance in any final in the history of the Champions League. (I’ve observed just one other comparable performance: Barcelona’s, in 2009, which caused a very good Manchester United team to chase shadows. Milan’s drubbing of Barça in 1994 is supposed to have been impressive, too, but I didn’t see that game.)
Were I forced to choose, I’d name Vitinha as PSG’s standout player:
Willian Pacho started in defense and repeatedly charged into the opponents’ half to intercept or wrest away the ball. He was astounding. They all were, the Parisians.
Pacho has returned to Ecuador to play in Thursday’s World Cup qualifier, against Marquinhos – his club-mate – the captain of Brazil and PSG.
Last month, I reviewed a sad movie. This month’s movie is sadder.
The director, Tim Blake Nelson, paints a bleak picture of his home state. Eye of God (1997) is set in Kingfisher, a real town between Enid and Oklahoma City. The streets, houses, public buildings, and parks are neither beautiful nor hideous. They’re authentic.
It’s curious that the movie is based on a stage play. Yes, one of its strengths is theatrical: its use of extended, intricate dialog. But much is gained from filming the actors’ speeches at close range.
In one tender scene, a young woman removes her glass eye, passes it over to a young man, and asks him to reinsert the eye into her face. I suppose that the actions of this scene could be performed on a stage. Photographed up close, however, they’re immeasurably more intimate.
Rythmically, also, the story benefits from cinematic reconfiguration. Brief sequences are spliced into longer ones, as asides or interjections. (The dialog of a “main” scene often continues, as voiceover, during these “asides.”) Action glides forward and backward in time. Tragedy and violence are insinuated or foreshadowed, then brought into present actuality, then made to recede as the scene returns to a tranquil earlier moment – to the calm preceding the storm.
My theory about the title, which probably isn’t quite right, because it leaves out God, is that it’s meant to evoke the “eye” of a storm. Turbulence occurs before and at the end of the story. In between: doldrums.
If Kingfisher is quiet – downright boring – it’s a false calm. Tension is unrelenting. Everyone is waiting for the next dust storm or tornado or blast of wickedness.
(It counts against my theory that the movie has no dust storms or tornadoes.)
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An emotionally disturbed fourteen-year-old boy (Nick Stahl) is found wandering the town, covered in blood. Whose?
A young woman (Martha Plimpton) meets a young man (Ken Anderson). He has just been released from prison. They’ve been writing to each other. She is nervous. She wants to leave. He is scrupulously polite but subtly, fiercely insistent. She stays. They arrange to meet again. These early meetings are sweet. We have misgivings.
The young man goes to his parole officer (Richard Jenkins). The parole officer is alternately brusque and chummy. He tells his charge that he and his wife have been trying to get pregnant, that he has to wind up the meeting to go and have another try. Who in his right mind would say such a thing at work, let alone at a first meeting, and to a criminal? The cause gradually becomes clear. It plagues everyone in this town. The parole officer is so lonely that he can’t discern whom not to involve himself with.
Even the most guarded townspeople – e.g., the disturbed, all-but-silent youngster – succumb to this affliction. It’s what drives the young woman to look for love where she does.
The parolee and the young woman see more of each other. They get to know each other better. He is religious. She, less so.
As the situation deteriorates, we become acquainted with an old sheriff (Hol Holbrook). We already know the type. He tries to make sense of the sad things he’s witnessed; in so doing, he hearkens forward to the famous opening monologue of Tommy Lee Jones’s sheriff in No Country for Old Men. Eye of God, too, begins with its sheriff’s voice. The sherrif recounts the Genesis story of Isaac’s binding. God had His reasons; Abraham had his. The sheriff is especially interested in Isaac’s point of view. How was life for the boy, after that moment of terror? The sheriff is concerned for the youngster who has been found, covered in blood, wandering the town. It’s not the youngster’s first encounter with violent death.
Other pieces are added to these, and in time the puzzle reveals its picture. We don’t mind that not all is explained at once: every scene is interesting. The parts are, perhaps, superior to the whole. Certain images and themes are less-than-satisfactorily fitted together: religious devotion, seeing and unseeing eyes, loneliness, childlessness, fertility. When I write these reviews, I am guided – goaded – by the urge to reconcile disparate themes. No interpretation obviously suggests itself on this occasion. I don’t mind. The actions, the characters, the feelings are compelling. I’m happy to be carried along on an episodic tour of this sad town. I would watch this movie again, and soon.
No court of the United States may use appropriated funds to enforce
a contempt citation for failure to comply with an injunction or
temporary restraining order if no security was given when the
injunction or order was issued pursuant to Federal Rule of Civil
Procedure 65(c), whether issued prior to, on, or subsequent to the date
of enactment of this section.
“Translated,” Reich tells us, the measure ensures that “no federal court may enforce a contempt citation”:
The measure would make most existing injunctions – in antitrust cases, police reform cases, school desegregation cases and others – unenforceable.
Its only purpose is to weaken the power of the federal courts.
As Erwin Chemerinsky, UC Berkeley School of Law dean and distinguished professor of law, notes, this provision would eliminate any restraint on Trump.
“Without the contempt power, judicial orders are meaningless and can be ignored. There is no way to understand this except as a way to keep the Trump administration from being restrained when it violates the Constitution or otherwise breaks the law …
“This would be a stunning restriction on the power of the federal courts. The Supreme Court has long recognized that the contempt power is integral to the authority of the federal courts. Without the ability to enforce judicial orders, they are rendered mere advisory opinions which parties are free to disregard.”
In other words, with this single measure, Trump will have crowned himself king.
If it is enacted, no Congress and no court could stop him. Even if a future Congress were to try, it could not do so without the power of the courts to enforce their hearings, investigations, subpoenas and laws.
The House approved OBBBA by one vote. Suppose that after debating, revising, etc., the Senate and the House were to turn OBBBA – or some version of OBBBA containing this measure – into law.
Questions:
(1) Could judges strike down this measure as unconstitutional?
(2) If judges were to do this – and here my ignorance really shows – would they thereby strike down all of OBBBA?
Put differently, does a law behave like a logical conjunction that is shown to be false (invalid) if even a even single part is shown to be false (invalid)? Or might a law with some invalidated parts remain valid in its other parts? This is something people oughta know, but I don’t know it.
(3) Last question. If judges strike down a law that restricts judges’ authority to hold people in contempt, then they get to continue holding people in contempt. Right? Legally, they’ve “got the drop” on that law, right?
Call me a casual fan: an embarrassing status to admit to in South Bend, where fans are rabid.
The only book by MacIntyre I’ve read, cover to cover, is After Virtue (summarized here). I’ll say this: the book has staying power. Bits of it recommend themselves repeatedly and in diverse contexts. Many bits are provocative. Many of the provocative bits are silly. More impressive, to me, are the book’s constructive attempts to reestablish contact with forgotten moral traditions; to say what virtues are; to sketch social conditions for tractable attributions of rightness; and to make room for pairs of genuine obligations that genuinely and tragically conflict (e.g., Antigone’s obligations to her brother and to her city).
I’ve read a number of MacIntyre’s papers. I prefer his writing in that less digressive format. (In books he’s relentlessly allusive, and one struggles to keep up with him.) I never set out to read any collection of his papers straight through (e.g., this one, this one, or this one); I’ve taken on his shorter writings “piecemeal,” as this or that issue has arisen. “Is Patriotism a Virtue?” is justly famous. “The Very Idea of a University: Aristotle, Newman, and Us” is a gem. (Whether the book-length treatment improves on it, I couldn’t say.) “Notes from the Moral Wilderness,” which I haven’t read, is “the best starting point for contemporary ethics,” according to the tenth comment in this online discussion; “one might update [that essay] by replacing the name ‘Stalin’ with ‘Trump’.” (My reading group’s next meeting is “Trump Fest”: participants are to report on whatever they’ve chosen to read about Donald Trump. I wonder if it’d be beyond the pale to report on “Notes from the Moral Wilderness” instead.)
… born in – oink, oink – the same hospital wing as – oink, oink – the Duchess of Cambridge’s children. (Reported in the Daily Mail.)
I’m fond of this gentle show.
So were my sons, for two or three weeks. They’ve moved on to “better” things.
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Karin & I have been married for nine years. Today is our anniversary.
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I watched the Europa League final: Potato Tots 1, Manchester United 0. Just abysmal. It wasn’t dull. It was kinda thrilling. But the quality of play was very bad indeed.
The Europa League isn’t a bad competition. Watching this game, I recalled a few teams from last year’s tournament that surely were better than both of today’s finalists:
AEK
Atalanta
Brighton
Leverkusen
Liverpool
Marseille
Qarabag
Roma
Sparta Prague
West Ham
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Habeas corpus: “a constitutional right that the president has, to be able to remove people from this country and suspend their rights” – according to Kristi Noem (U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security; former governor, South Dakota).
The typeface is the ubiquitous ITC Galliard, implemented successfully or not depending on the paper, the ink cartridge, the positions of certain celestial bodies, etc. Just look at all those Library of America volumes with their uniform design. In some, the text is beautiful and legible; in others, it’s too dark or too light.
Compare with this sample from Hammett:
Of course the scan quality also affects these samples, but my point is that the print quality varies greatly – even from page to page. I admire Galliard’s letters but never have been tempted to make them the basis of a printable document. Printing body text set in Galliard would be like playing the lottery.
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P.S. regarding the passage in the first sample:
It’s a joke, of course. But as I age, I find myself agreeing rather often with General Littlefield, especially when I use social media. I catch myself thinking that this or that individual pip-squeak is the main trouble with this country (this church, this fanbase, this social class, etc. – and yes, this university, or universities in general).
As far as I can tell, this attitude is indefensible. But the feeling is so strong, it would be illuminating if some philosopher could put together a half-plausible rationalization for it. (Not for scapegoating, which I take to be primarily concerned with types or groups rather than individuals.)
My father was sleeping in the front room on the second floor next to that of my brother Roy, who was then about sixteen. Father was usually in bed by nine-thirty and up again by ten-thirty to protest bitterly against a Victrola record we three boys were in the habit of playing over and over, namely, “No News, or What Killed the Dog,” a recitation by Nat Wills. The record had been played so many times that its grooves were deeply cut and the needle often kept revolving in the same groove, repeating over and over the same words. Thus: “ate some burnt hoss flesh, ate some burnt hoss flesh, ate some burnt hoss flesh.” It was this reiteration that generally got father out of bed.
On the night in question, however, we had all gone to bed at about the same time, without much fuss. Roy, as a matter of fact, had been in bed all day with a kind of mild fever. It wasn’t severe enough to cause delirium and my brother was the last person in the world to give way to delirium. Nevertheless, he had warned father when father went to bed, that he might become delirious.
About three o’clock in the morning, Roy, who was wakeful, decided to pretend that delirium was on him, in order to have, as he later explained it, some “fun.” He got out of bed and, going to my father’s room, shook him and said, “Buck, your time has come!” My father’s name was not Buck but Charles, nor had he ever been called Buck. He was a tall, mildly nervous, peaceable gentleman, given to quiet pleasures, and eager that everything should run smoothly. “Hmm?” he said, with drowsy bewilderment. “Get up, Buck,” said my brother, coldly, but with a certain gleam in his eyes. My father leaped out of bed, on the side away from his son, rushed from the room, locked the door behind him, and shouted us all up.
We were naturally enough reluctant to believe that Roy, who was quiet and self-contained, had threatened his father with any such abracadabra as father said he had. My older brother, Herman, went back to bed without any comment. “You’ve had a bad dream,” my mother said. This vexed my father. “I tell you he called me Buck and told me my time had come,” he said. We went to the door of his room, unlocked it, and tiptoed through it to Roy’s room. He lay in his bed, breathing easily, as if he were fast asleep. It was apparent at a glance that he did not have a high fever. My mother gave my father a look. “I tell you he did,” whispered father.
… is from the first scene of John Marston’s play, The Dutch Courtezan (c. 1604).
⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯
The darke is my delight,
So ’tis the nightingale’s.
My musicke’s in the night,
So is the nightingale’s.
My body is but little,
So is the nightingale’s.
I love to sleep next prickle 🌵
So doth the nightingale.
⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯
Quoted in Anthony Powell, Temporary Kings (the eleventh novel of A Dance to the Music of Time).
When the play is staged, these lines are sung with recorder music for 2 min. 30 sec. (give or take a minute). Don’t listen; the tune’ll take root in your head.
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The new pope, Leo XIV, is a Chicago South Sider and a naturalized citizen of Peru who lived in the north of that country – in Chiclayo. These places are mere stone’s throws from South Bend and Guayaquil. So, Leo and I couldn’t be much closer to each other, provenance-wise. (I actually know people who used to live in Chicagoland and in Chiclayo; but they’re disqualified: they’re Lutherans.)
I’ve read that Leo named himself after the previous leonine pope. Uh, huh. We all know which Leo he really had in mind. Yes. The GOAT. (Who, it turns out, was named for Lionel Richie.)
The mower has been “serviced” and cuts beautifully. But I’m frustrated. Headless dandelions tower over our lawn not two days after its trimming. The neighbors’ yards also are plagued. Is this how it’ll always be? Will the infestation be worse every summer? Is it caused by the warming of the Earth? Are dandelions mutating into super-dandelions?
Karin’s colleague keeps his dandelions in check. He constantly plucks and re-seeds his lawn. But he’s a childless bachelor with nothing better to do.
It was gusty a few days ago, and our useless, gigantic aerial blew off our house and hung, as if impaled, upon our fence. Our neighbor, Luis, kindly sawed it into bits for us. The weather is fine today, slightly less gusty, and I hope to coax the children out to the back yard.
I’ve begun my “weather disaster” reading with Maclean’s Young Men & Fire.
I intend, also, this year, to read all the novels by Agatha Christie that I haven’t finished: one each month. These include the novels that she wrote as “Mary Westmacott.” The first is Giant’s Bread.
I’m glad to report that I finished reading the principal works of Homer, Dante (not his Vita Nuova), E. M. Forster, Anthony Powell, and Laura Ingalls Wilder. And I finished all I’ll ever care to read about J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth.
I reached my numeric goal, too. But I was forced to rationalize at the eleventh hour. I’d galloped through The White Darkness – David Grann’s little picture-book about antarctic exploration – but was unable to do the same with Michel Foucault’s little picture-book on Magritte. I called it quits. It was almost midnight. I was two books short.
Then I remembered that the three parts of The Origins of Totalitarianism were first published as separate volumes. I’d finished reading Antisemitism and Imperialism. I did some reverse-gerrymandering and included them in the tally. Not without qualms. I appended asterisks.
Last night, I began reading Proust. I joined the long tradition of those who fall asleep reading the “overture” in Swann’s Way, which is about falling asleep.
The spiderbitten little girl peers up at her father as he rides with her to the hospital. With one hand, he calms her; with the other, he grasps a knife to cut her throat that she might breathe, that he might not lose her. The girl survives. She grows up and addicts herself to drugs. Her father effectively loses her anyway. He’d once hoped for happiness with his daughter (and with her mother, from whom he also is estranged).
He thinks of the girl as he travels to a remote British Columbian town. A lawyer, he is recruiting plaintiffs for a class-action suit regarding a deadly schoolbus accident. Courting each household in turn, he trots out tired arguments for holding someone accountable, preferably a deep-pocketed entity, a municipality or a corporation rather than an individual. The more nebulous the scapegoat, the more eagerly the victims’ parents join the suit. They’re angry at a universe that has frustrated their expectations for their children, for themselves. (Just one parent resists this way of thinking. He already has had to grieve for a dead wife.)
Movies about grief are the hardest to watch. This is a hard movie. There are passages of startling beauty – flashbacks. They are not comforting. The camera hovers over wintry mountains and rivers, tracking the school bus as it wends toward disaster. Children play. They sleep. A teenager sings sweetly. The memory of these things is not sweet. All is embittered by the knowledge of how these lives will end.
The most piteous character is the lawyer (Ian Holm). The dark implication of his story, if I interpret it correctly, is that losing one’s children is the norm. They needn’t die; alienation suffices. But then, who’ll pay? Whoever is left to pay. Spouses. Neighbors. One’s town. Those with whom one does business. Anyone. The universe. Harboring vengeful thoughts, one becomes the prey of those who traffic in vengeance. The traffickers themselves are in vengeance’s thrall. This is this lawyer’s affliction.
The movie doesn’t object to vengeance as such. One character obtains it, and perhaps rightly: the teenager who sings so sweetly. The actress, Sarah Polley, performs a remarkable about-face. She is winsome, then ice-cold.
Maimed but not killed in the accident, this girl obtains new clarity about the false hope and love that her father (Tom McCamus) instilled in her. She avenges herself on him – and on the town. Arguably, her victims deserve their punishment. We have seen the town’s loyal spouses and its cheats, its wonderful parents and its abusers, equally bent out of shape by grief, equally desirous to inflict damage on third parties. One suspects that they grieve as much for their own frustrated ambitions as for the loss of their children. He would have been a good man, one townsperson, a sympathetic figure, says of a particular dead boy. Maybe so, but this child’s goodness, his special worth to others, is beside the point. The death of the unattractive “slow” boy is just as grievous.
Grief’s piteous distortions on the mind were previously studied in director Atom Egoyan’s great Exotica (1994). The Sweet Hereafter (1997) is interested in these, and in communal distortions. The movie quotes Robert Browning’s “Pied Piper,” in which a selfish town’s children are lured away, leaving the adults bereft. The poem’s significance for the movie is a complicated question. (Egoyan adds lines of his own.) But one clue is that it’s a poem about a community, not just one parent or family. One’s children, one’s hopes, even one’s grief – these things are not one’s exclusive property. Everyone participates.
Barcelona’s manager, Segundo Alejandro Castillo, preached while riding a bus in Guayaquil:
I guess the city buses have TV now.
The other Barça beat Madrid in the Copa del Rey final, a thrilling foulfest. Just before the game ended, angry Madrid players left the bench, ran onto the field, and pelted the referee with ice chips.
This month’s typeface, the designing of which was begun but not completed by Eric Gill, is one of my favorites. Like Ehrhardt and Plantin, it was a common British choice for typesetting paperbacks during the ’fifties, ’sixties, ’seventies, and ’eighties.
Good times!
Then Pilgrim fell into disuse because of the eclipse of metal type. Its decline made it apt for fancy “retro” productions.
It used to grace the cheap stuff. I assume that its name was meant to evoke the oft-reprinted Pilgrim’s Progress.
Incidentally, if you want to know what fonts are especially good at small sizes on cheap paper, compare reprints of The Lord of the Rings. (Don’t look at bibles; too many are incompetently produced.)
I wish Pilgrim would come back into vogue.
A good digital interpretation is Canada Type’s Bunyan Pro. See this PDF for samples, including a short essay on the suitability of Gill’s fonts for body text.
Perhaps Origins is just so huge, so comprehensive, that no matter what travesty might occur nowadays, it will have been foreshadowed in that book’s pages.
(I suspect that this very nearly is the case regarding some other interminable writings, e.g. Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy.)
Today’s historical parallel is with France’s notorious Dreyfus Affair, discussed in Origins, ch. 4. A mostly ordinary man – a member of an ethnic minority group – is shipped away and imprisoned. Probably, he is innocent; certainly, he is deprived of his basic procedural rights. His imprisoners, caught out, refuse to rectify their mistake. The incident divides society. One faction supports the prisoner. (If his rights are so egregiously disregarded, why trust the state to uphold others’ rights?) The other faction supports his captors. (Who’ll protect the nation if the captors lose face?)
The current travesty is less awful than the Dreyfus Affair in two ways: many politicians and ordinary people already support Kilmar Armando Ábrego García, and judges already have insisted on due process. Whether the righteous prevail remains to be seen. (And if you don’t know which side is behaving righteously, see this.) If the righteous do prevail, this item by Judge Harvie Wilkinson, a Reagan appointee, ought to become a classic. It was written for posterity. It will be anthologized. If highschoolers can still read, they will be made to read it. (A PDF is here.)
Garner, The Stone Book Quartet – this month’s “fantasy” choice: much less fantastical than I was led to believe, but no worse for that
Dante, Paradiso, which I should have finished years ago
Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne, for the reading group
Homer, Odyssey, last month’s “fantasy” choice – and the preceding month’s, and the preceding month’s. … It’s not that I don’t like it – it’s great – I just keep switching, mid-month, to other fantasy books
O’Brien, The Third Policeman, which I should have finished years ago; also fantastical; also brilliant (a book’s quality is no guarantee that I’ll finish it promptly)
Powell, Temporary Kings and Hearing Secret Harmonies, the last two books of A Dance to the Music of Time (a “warm-up” for reading Proust next year)
I’m reading philosophy but won’t finish any titles by the end of the month. (Don’t think I’m neglecting my field.)
Anyway, if certain blog entries strike you as perfunctory, you can guess what is occupying me instead. (Actually, I might be brushing up on titles by Agatha Christie, typing them out for this quiz. I know all the titles but have trouble recalling them in one sitting. Once, I remembered all of them except [a] the novel I’d just finished and [b] And Then There Were None.)
I was finishing books at a regular clip until December, and then Abel was born.
Most people looked at him with terror and with fear
But to Moscow chicks, he was such a lovely dear
He could preach the Bible like a preacher
Full of ecstacy and fire
But he also was the kind of teacher
Women would desire
Ra, ra, Rasputin
Lover of the Russian Queen
There was a cat that really was gone
Ra, ra, Rasputin
Russia’s greatest love machine
It was a shame how he carried on
He ruled the Russian land (and never mind the Tsar)
But the kasachok he danced really wunderbar
In all affairs of state, he was the man to please
But he was real great when he had a girl to squeeze
For the Queen, he was no wheeler-dealer
Though she’d heard the things he’d done
She believed he was a holy healer
Who would heal her son
But when his drinking and lusting and his hunger for power became known to more and more people, the demands to do something about this outrageous man became louder and louder
“This man’s just got to go!” declared his enemies
But the ladies begged, “Don’t you try to do it, please!”
No doubt, this Rasputin had lots of hidden charms
Though he was a brute, they just fell into his arms
Samuel’s first spring break. We didn’t go out of town, but we did take the boys to the local Bricks & Minifigs store. I’d never seen them more excited to be anywhere. It’s a pleasant store: clean; well-lighted; not overwhelmingly full of merchandise; inexpensive, as long as one can keep from going hog-wild.
The cashiers were a couple of sad-sacks. Not just bored: despondent.
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The more time I spend with children, the more I marvel at the lifelikeness of Mary Chalmers’s Throw a Kiss, Harry.
Read it here. This is the bowdlerized version from the ’nineties. It’s the version familiar to our household.
The original version, from the ’fifties, is even truer to life: Harry’s mother casually threatens to spank him.
Whether they actually spank or not, parents’ll recognize how tempting (and gratifying) it is to threaten retribution.
Children are simultaneously so naughty and so adorable, so ornery and so affectionate. These are the truths that Throw a Kiss, Harry understands.
… which I’m sure you were itching to read this morning.
But first, an item of local interest: a graduate of nearby Goshen College is the author of the Library of America’s latest “story of the week.”
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From Origins, chapter 7:
It took the Boers several decades to understand that [British] imperialism was nothing to be afraid of, since it would neither develop the country as Australia and Canada had been developed, nor draw profits from the country at large, being quite content with a high turnover of investments in one specific field [gold mining]. Imperialism therefore was willing to abandon the so-called laws of capitalist production and their egalitarian tendencies, so long as profits from specific investments were safe. This led eventually to the abolition of the law of mere profitableness and South Africa became the first example of a phenomenon that occurs whenever the mob becomes the dominant factor in the alliance between mob and capital.
In one respect, the most important one, the Boers remained the undisputed masters of the country: whenever rational labor and production policies came into conflict with race considerations, the latter won. Profit motives were sacrificed time and again to the demands of a race society, frequently at a terrible price. The rentability of the railroads was destroyed overnight when the government dismissed 17,000 Bantu employees and paid white wages that amounted to 200 per cent more; expenses for municipal government became prohibitive when native municipal employees were replaced with whites; the Color Bar Bill finally excluded all black workers from mechanical jobs and forced industrial enterprise to a tremendous increase of production costs. The race world of the Boers had nobody to fear any more, least of all white labor, whose trade unions complained bitterly that the Color Bar Bill did not go far enough.
The racism described here is race-rule. Boer clans subsisted by forcing native tribes to farm for them. They didn’t want this arrangement upset by the development of industry or bureaucracy. (They got their wish.)
“Mob” in Arendt refers to the agglomeration of misfits: people excluded from the workings of a polity: people fulfilling no communal organizational or economic function. Mere hoarders of wealth; speculators; subsistence farmers; unemployed workers (the individualistic ones, not those moved by solidarity).
As separatist farmers, Boer clans belonged to the mob. So did people involved in the gold rush: investors as well as individual miners. Rich and poor.
Mob-rule occurs when such people use politics to prevent the development of “normal” governance and commerce. For example: Jews
settled down permanently into a unique position for a white group. [Footnote: “Jews constituted roughly one-third of the total immigration to South Africa in the twenties, and … in sharp contrast to all other categories of uitlanders, settled there permanently; their share in the annual emigration is less than a per cent.”] They neither belonged to the “lifeblood” of Africa nor to the “poor white trash.” Instead they started almost immediately to build up those industries and professions which according to South African opinion are “secondary” because they are not connected with gold. Jews became manufacturers of furniture and clothes, shopkeepers and members of the professions, physicians, lawyers, and journalists. In other words, no matter how well they thought they were adjusted to the mob conditions of the country and its race attitude, Jews had broken its most important pattern by introducing into South African economy a factor of normalcy and productivity, with the result that when Mr. Malan introduced into Parliament a bill to expel all Jews from the Union he had the enthusiastic support of all poor whites and of the whole Afrikander population.
The timeless lesson is that it behooves the most speculative and exploitative businessmen – captains of mostly useless industries (extraction of ornamental minerals, space exploration, gambling, luxurious transportation and housing) – to maintain a dysfunctional society: to lord it over desperate, disconnected, disaffected workers and voters. Plodding but sound officials and workers who bring order to chaos are best eliminated. Energetic immigrants who do so are best kept out. You can see how this describes our own moment.
As I read, I’m tempted to draw analogies between past and present, almost to treat Arendt as an oracle. Of course I don’t know enough to judge whether she gets the past right. And the analogies that suggest themselves in certain moods seem farfetched in others. How closely can Obama really be likened to Arendt’s Disraeli? I don’t know.
A slog of a book, with prophetic flashes. Here’s one.
“I would annex the planets if I could” (Cecil Rhodes said this). Arendt comments in ch. 5:
The imperialist-minded businessman, whom the stars annoyed because he could not annex them, realized that power organized for its own sake would beget more power. When the accumulation of capital had reached its natural, national limits, the bourgeoisie understood that only with an “expansion is everything” ideology, and only with a corresponding power-accumulating process, would it be possible to set the old motor into motion again. At the same moment, however, when it seemed as though the true principle of perpetual motion had been discovered, the specifically optimistic mood of the progress ideology was shaken. Not that anybody began to doubt the irresistibility of the process itself, but many people began to see what had frightened Cecil Rhodes: that the human condition and the limitations of the globe were a serious obstacle to a process that was unable to stop and to stabilize, and could therefore only begin a series of destructive catastrophes once it had reached its limits. …
By “Victory or Death,” the Leviathan can indeed overcome all political limitations that go with the existence of other peoples and can envelop the whole earth in its tyranny. But when the last war has come and every man has been provided for, no ultimate peace is established on earth: the power-accumulating machine, without which continual expansion would not have been achieved, needs more material to devour in its never-ending process. If the last victorious Commonwealth cannot proceed to “annex the planets,” it can only proceed to destroy itself in order to begin anew the never-ending process of power generation.
There it is: why Elon Musk wants to colonize space and destroy the U.S. government.
I’d say “there in brief,” only it could be briefer.
I have a friend, a Trump/Musk fanboy, who says he needs the “CliffsNotes” version whenever he’s directed to an explanation of why Trump/Musk’s actions are illegal, repugnant, not in the country’s best interest, and so on. Usually I want to say: Just read the article (the legal document, etc.).
But I admit we need CliffsNotes for Arendt.
Here’s my own summary and application – not so brief, alas, but with plainer language.
It used to be that businessmen driven to make wealth from wealth didn’t involve themselves in national politics. (Arendt goes on about this at length.) If the government kept things stable enough for business, businessmen didn’t care who ruled the country. But countries are too small. Eventually, businessmen would use up their countries’ resources and saturate their countries’ markets. So they couldn’t indefintely keep growing their businesses at home. They’d have to go elsewhere.
Businessmen tried speculating abroad as private agents, but conditions proved too risky – too unstable. So they brought in their countries’ armies to guarantee stability. (And a leg up – although I don’t recall Arendt saying this; anyway, she doesn’t emphasize it.) Deploying armies required businessmen to involve themselves in governing their own countries as well as the new lands where they did business. So, eventually, businessmen came to dominate the business of governing (in no small part, by promoting the myth that businessmen are the best rulers). But, eventually, they’d run into trouble with other countries (ruled by their businessmen). Besides, the planet was too small. Country-scale problems of exhaustion and saturation were bound to recur on a global scale; as it’s shrewdly noted on James Bond’s familial coat-of-arms, “the world is not enough.” So, one “Bond villain,” Musk – possibly with Rhodes’s words in mind, Rhodes having been a big cheese in Musk’s home of southern Africa – tried colonizing other planets. But that was stupid. So, instead, he just took over the world’s most powerful government and destroyed as much of it and the rest of the globe as he could so that he could get more wealth for himself doing what governments used to do. This was less stupid, insofar as it profited him (tabulation is ongoing), but it sure was petulant, and the casualties were enormous.
I want to stress that I’m not endorsing ideas, just formulating them.
A few years ago, I put on I, Tonya (2017) and then quickly turned it off. I couldn’t stomach its “mocumentary” format. A respectful reassessment of Tonya Harding was then in vogue. I’d been impressed by ESPN’s documentary about the figure skater.
I’m not sure if I, Tonya tries to portray Harding’s life any more accurately than, say, Amadeus portrays the life of Mozart. What I am sure of – now – is that stylistically and thematically, I, Tonya is a re-hash of To Die For (1995).
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To Die For isn’t about Tonya Harding, but elements of that movie nod to the Harding-Kerrigan scandal as it was interpreted in the 1990s – i.e., as a specimen of:
(a) ruthless feminine ambition (to take the lurid perspective);
(b) journalistic sensationalism (to take the sober, critical perspective).
(See, e.g., the second verse of Weird Al’s song “Headline News,” which expresses both perspectives.)
To Die For’s source is a 1992 novel by Joyce Maynard. The novel draws from the real-life murder of Gregg Smart by his wife, Pamela.
However, To Die For and the Harding-Kerrigan case do share certain themes. These include:
(a) personal ambition;
(b) the sleaze of media producers, subjects, and consumers;
and
(c) violence performed over long distance.
Imagery is shared, too: especially, ice and ice-skating.
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“First impressions in one word?” says rough-edged figure skater Janice Maretto (Illeana Douglas) when asked to describe her sister-in-law, Suzanne Stone (Nicole Kidman). “Four letters. Begins with ‘C’: Cold. C-O-L-D.”
Janice looks directly at the camera. One gathers that she’s being interviewed for a documentary about Suzanne and that Suzanne has acquired a certain notoriety.
Other characters, including Suzanne, are “interviewed” during the movie, but it isn’t always clear whether it’s for the same “project” or even whether it’s during this life or the afterlife. It isn’t clear whether Suzanne herself is alive or dead.
Her husband, Larry (Matt Dillon) – Janice’s brother – is definitely dead. The movie recounts Suzanne’s role in his demise. It blends “interviews,” other TV footage, and straightforward narrative. The blend disorients, but that’s on purpose.
The general outline is simple enough: ambitious young wife tires of husband, regards him as career obstacle, plots his murder, is found out.
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There’s more to it. The murder isn’t just Suzanne’s means to a career.
No, what’s distinctive about Suzanne – her tragic flaw, if someone so hollow can have one – is her craving for attention. She wants a career in broadcasting because it’s a way to be seen.
The wrinkle is that she’s unable to supress that craving in order to obtain greater exposure in the long run. She has to be noticed at every step. It’s a compulsion.
When she gets a job forecasting the weather for the local cable channel, she inundates her boss (Wayne Knight) with suggestions about how to run the station.
Boss: “Well, Suzanne, I sure pity the person who says ‘no’ to you.”
Suzanne: “No one ever does.”
She recruits three youths to feature in her self-publicizing documentary about the lives of high schoolers. She does more than interview and film them. She becomes their after-school companion. Soon she’s hanging out with them in shopping malls, giving them weight-loss and career advice, trying on clothes in front of them. Training them to depend on her, adore her, gawk at her, hang on her every word.
Her posse consists of three losers: Lydia (Alison Folland), Russell (Casey Affleck), and Jimmy (Joaquin Phoenix). They’re the best thing about the movie. Director Gus Van Sant is on his surest footing here, sympathizing with troubled youth. Phoenix’s performance, especially, is a slam-dunk. It’s as if a dismal cartoon teenager from Beavis and Butt-Head acquired flesh and blood, became a Real Boy. Suzanne soon has Jimmy wrapped around her finger. She plays him against the other two.
Then she coaxes them to murder her husband.
Why? Why not kill him herself? Why involve these sad, incompetent children? Not because Suzanne is a criminal mastermind, but because it’s compulsive for her to play to an audience. Why bother to become a murderer if no one is there to see it?
Lydia, in an interview, explains:
Suzanne used to say that you’re not really anybody in America unless you’re on TV … ’cause what’s the point of doing anything worthwhile if there’s nobody watching? So when people are watching, it makes you a better person. So if everybody was on TV all the time, everybody would be better people.
Then, touchingly, Lydia adds:
But, if everybody was on TV all the time, there wouldn’t be anybody left to watch, and that’s where I get confused.
It’s like someone near the bottom of a pyramid scheme dimly realizing it’s a pyramid scheme.
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But hey, Lydia is on TV, isn’t she? She has made it, hasn’t she? And doesn’t almost everyone in this story appear on TV?
There are a couple of very weird scenes – whether they take place in this world or in the next one, I’m not sure – in which Suzanne’s and Larry’s families answer questions together, for a talk show, in front of a studio audience. Despite the tragedy that has brought them there – that ought to pit them against each other – the families are convivial. They even seem mildly pleased to be interviewed. Could it be that although these ordinary citizens lack Suzanne’s obsessiveness, they share her basic philosophy: that what really matters is to be seen? That, unspeakably, the destruction of Larry and Suzanne is a blessing for them? That scraps of recognition are worth people dying for? If this is so, then the movie indicts not only the outrageous, cartoonish Suzanne, but ordinary people as well, in fact an entire society.
Forgive this lazy entry, but it’s late and this has been a rough day. Here’s an entry by somebody else: Alan Jacobs, who is writing a biography of Dorothy Sayers that I very much look forward to reading.
From The Atlantic. If you can access it, read it. It describes shocking security breaches, callous disregard for human life, reckless emoji use, etc. Also shocking (but not surprising) is the current administration’s hatred of … Europe. Someone should force the Vice President and his cronies to turn off their phones, sit still, and watch some alluring travel videos by Rick Steves. …
This has been the wildest news story of the week.
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I take it back. Wilder, if less consequential, was Ecuador’s decision to start 17-year-old Darwin Guagua against Chile tonight. The boy hadn’t even debuted at the senior level for Independiente del Valle, his club.
The soccer federation appears to be trying to show off young Ecuadorian players so that European clubs will buy them. Federation officials probably are cutting backroom deals with local clubs and then pressuring the national team’s coach to field certain players.
Guagua had been about to enter Friday’s game as a late substitute. But when the Venezuelans scored, our coach, Sebastián Beccacece, left him on the bench. So, tonight, Guagua got to start. (I doubt it was what Beccacece wanted.)
The Chileans ate Guagua alive. We effectively ceded our left flank to them for half of the game.
Apart from that, our performance was … good. Kind of awesome. Unbalanced though we were, we contained the Chileans until halftime and dominated them afterward. The result was a goalless draw. Enner put the ball into the net but was narrowly offside.
We remain in second place. No other team gained ground on us this week, except Argentina.
Incidentally, guagua, in the indigenous languages of the Andes, means baby.
Argentina came within a point of qualifying for the World Cup, defeating Uruguay, who fell in the standings. Ecuador rose to second place. We’d dropped to fifth because Brazil and Paraguay won their games; but then we beat Venezuela, 2–1, in what should have been a cakewalk but became rather fraught when Venezuela scored.
Enner scored twice for Ecuador but missed a penalty kick, as is his way. Other outstanding players were midfielder Pedro Vite and goalkeeper Hernán Galíndez. The latter dislocated his finger; Pervis pulled it back into place.
Five games remain for each team. We’ll play on Tuesday, in Santiago. The Chileans are last.
Karin took Samuel to the emergency room last night because we worried that he had appendicitis. He didn’t, thank goodness. Today we’re all much happier.
(I agree with C. S. Lewis here – enthusiastically – insofar as languages make genuine or at least plausible distinctions. But what if, e.g., loving just is liking? Probably not; but the point is, languages might (a) encode different ontologies or inventories of acceptable concepts rather than (b) differ in expressive facility.
Anyway.)
Bembo is one of the oldest and greatest fonts. It’s common in books but less so in desktop publishing. I believe some text editing programs provide Bembo; if yours doesn’t, consider obtaining one of these free variants of the typeface:
Cardo/fbb is the closest thing to the above sample from Lewis. It’s not bad: I see it in some professionally typeset books, e.g. this book requiring lots of extra glyphs for the author’s (Nigerian) name. Tonight I learned that fbb has added a “swashed” Q to its character set. I once wrote a thirty-page research paper with Cardo, using Google Docs (which I don’t recommend for a paper of that length). The typesetting was arduous but, ultimately, successful; the paper wasn’t.
Yesterday was one of reiterated puking by little Daniel. He has my sympathy, but he’d have more if he’d used his bucket instead of, you know, our best furniture.
The BUCKET and the COUCH
My compatriot, Pervis Estupiñán, scored a nice goal for Brighton today.
Payton brothers: Ernest (d. 2017), Frank (d. 2023), and now George (R.I.P.).
He was the first Salvationist who spoke to me when I visited the Ithaca Corps almost twenty years ago. What a greeting! – warm, inquisitive, utterly genuine. It was the best or second-best first impression ever made on me. (The other was Frank’s, two or three minutes later. You need to meet my brother, George said.)
I spent many good hours with George and his family, but the first moment may have been the most important one. What a gift, to be able to greet strangers in church.
An email I received: “Join the DoorDash Community Today.”
The word “community” is overused.
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The loan officer in charge of our mortgage already sends us Christmas cards and fridge magnets. Recently, he’s begun sending postcards advertising U.S. national parks.
What’s his angle? I asked Karin, who works in banking.
He wants us to take a vacation so we’ll borrow more money from him.
Seriously?
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This has been making the rounds:
The meme varies: 35 years, 30 years.
Masculinity, smoking meats, and WW2 are constants. So is woeful grammar.
But the sociology is sound. As it happens, I’m reading three books about WW2. I also read about that war in December, January, and February; and I expect to do so again next month.
As for smoking meats: the closest thing I do is to boil scraps of leftover KFC, with other ingredients, in the rice cooker.
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I was saddened to read of the death of burger restauranteur “Rusty” Miller, beloved by Quito’s U.S. expatriates. This nice obit gets a detail wrong: it says “Rusty” closed his stores in 1985, but I’m sure I ate in one, just east of La Carolina, in the late ’80s. (I would’ve been very young if it was in ’85.) I knew the mustaches but not the man. I never knew that “Rusty” returned to Ecuador in the 2000s.
R.I.P. Miss Hultberg, school librarian and Minnesotan who loved cows.
R.I.P. Gene Hackman, his wife, and their dog, whose unusual deaths kept fans in suspense for days. Hackman was iconic, all right. Apart from other oldsters like Eastwood, Nicholson, De Niro, and Pacino, there is no comparable living U.S. actor. Cage, perhaps. Cruise is monumental but altogether different from Hackman. (Funny that The Firm, which features both of them, is so ho-hum.) My favorite Hackman performances are in Hoosiers and Night Moves.
