Happy birthday to Abel

He turned one. The doctor gave him five shots. He slept most of the day.

More appealing, if less vital, were these gifts:

Cupcakes.

Onesies (i.e. bodysuits).

Wagon, Radio Flyer, plastic, small. For giving rides to stuffed animals. (Did I mention he walks now?)

Dog, white with black spots, plastic, noise-making, profoundly disturbing to Samuel.

Literature: Fortunately, by Remy Charlip. Not really meant for Abel’s age-group (he doesn’t object). Amusing to Samuel. Mildly disturbing to Daniel. Both reactions are correct.

Most of these gifts are from Karin’s dad’s family.

Abel was to have had a little party at my parents’ house, but my mom slipped on some ice and broke her arm. She’ll have surgery later this week. Last night, when I called, she was in high spirits: adequately drugged, surrounded by other progeny.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Here is another quote about the postman Courtney Elliot, from The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole:

Courtney Elliot has offered to give me private tuition for my ‘O’ levels. It seems he is a Doctor of Philosophy who left academic life after a quarrel in a university common room about the allocation of new chairs. Apparently he was promised a chair and didn’t get it.

It seems a trivial thing to leave a good job for. After all, one chair is very much like another. But then I am an existentialist to whom nothing really matters.

I don’t care which chair I sit in.

I don’t think I would leave a university if I didn’t get a Chair, but I might if I didn’t get a chair. Some intellectuals (e.g., Victor Hugo, Sam the Architect) stand before a desk to work, but I’m not vigorous enough to do that.

Not just any chair would do. I would need a sofa, or at least an armchair from Goodwill.

1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 93: Il postino (The postman)

Quintessential small “prestige” picture. Italian-French-Belgian adaptation of a Chilean novel, set on a small Mediterranean island. Scored by an Argentinian (Luis Bacalov); directed by an Englishman (Michael Radford); co-starring a Frenchman (Philippe Noiret) as history’s most revered Chilean: Pablo Neruda.

Released in 1994. Released in the United States in 1995.

Nominated for five 1996 Oscars: Picture, Director, Adapted Screenplay, Actor (Massimo Troisi, who’d died), and Score (Bacalov won).

(Not unusual for Miramax thirty years ago.)

Really, though, the movie’s success is due to Troisi’s tricky performance.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Troisi is Mario, the (fictitious) part-time postman to Neruda, who is in political exile. Mario and Neruda become friends. This is very much at Mario’s instigation. He intrudes at all hours, with or without mail.

I recall Victor Hugo’s remark about his Channel Island years:

What a pity I was not exiled earlier! I could have achieved so many things which I fear I shall not have the time to complete.

Or as Simon Leys (ibid.) puts it:

The poet [Hugo] found himself left with only two interlocutors – but with these at least, he felt on the same footing: God and the ocean. … No wonder these years of solitude and contemplation were the most productive of his life.

Neruda seems determined to follow Hugo’s example. He devotes himself to beauty, politics, and his female companion. He is only pulled away from these things at the insistence of his tactless regular visitor.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Roger Ebert:

The first time we see Mario … we think perhaps he is retarded. He is having a conversation with his father, who seems to be retarded, too, or perhaps just engrossed in his soup.

We realize in the next scene or two that Mario is of normal intelligence, but has been raised in a place that provided him with almost nothing to talk about.

I don’t think it’s the place that makes Mario inarticulate. It’s that what he seeks isn’t easily describable.

The island’s other postal worker (Renato Scarpa) has plenty to say. He has political opinions. He admires Neruda as a famous fellow Communist. Of Neruda’s poetry, he knows almost nothing; he’s utterly mundane. Similarly, Mario’s father thinks only of fishing; and there’s an old widow, an innkeeper, who’s downright suspicious of whatever is purported to transcend daily concreteness.

Mario couldn’t care less about fishing. He doesn’t really care about politics, either. The island must import water; its provision is irregular; the authorities really ought to intervene. Mario understands this problem but shrugs it off.

Practicalities – earning a decent wage, having water to drink – have no grip on his imagination.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

What does?

Not the wider world.

Not whatever must be read about. Mario is more literate than most islanders but deciphers sentences haltingly. He’ll never devour pages of prose.

What, then?

If he knew the term, he might say: Blessedness.

A kind of holiness or beauty. Saintly beauty, but not of deeds. Beauty of being.

And not just any beauty of being – not at first. There’s plenty of natural beauty all around Mario, but scenery leaves him unaffected.

No, it’s supernatural beauty that he’s groping after, although it doesn’t occur to him to say as much, or even to try to formulate the concept.

(And his priest is useless.)

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

The closest thing to Blessedness that Mario knows about – the most exalted thing he can imagine – is Woman. Granted, he knows little of actual women. There are few on the island. His mother is long-dead.

Mario does go to the pictures. But this isn’t the story of a man’s love affair with the screen. There is another famous romance co-starring Philippe Noiret – Cinema Paradiso – in which an older man initiates a younger into the practice of using art to reach out to what is longed for. Mario doesn’t seem much affected by screen beauties, however. Just as he’s indifferent to mountains and seas, he doesn’t pine after actresses. He’s after something more transcendent.

What Mario notices, sorting Neruda’s mail, is that women adore the poet. Not just a woman. Women. He badgers Neruda: first, for autographs that he might show to women; then, for advice on wooing.

You have to talk to women, Neruda tells him. Neruda is deft with metaphor and rhythm. Mario takes note. Together they walk the hills and beaches, discussing the elements of figurative speech. Mario learns to attend to nature, and to use language to evoke feelings and happenings that have no names.

He listens to a recorded message from Neruda’s Chilean comrades. He acquires a sense of duty to his fellows.

He sees the world through his friend’s eyes.

Then Mario meets the prettiest girl on the island: the old innkeeper’s niece (Maria Grazia Cucinotta), fittingly named Beatrice. Here, at last, is Woman. Blessedness. He woos her with words. Some are Neruda’s; some are his own. This is the movie’s most conventional passage.

There is a wedding. Neruda signs the document as a witness. He wishes his friend well. Then, he returns to Chile.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

It’s at this point, in its last half-hour, that the movie reveals its ingenuity. Mario is drawn into politics, and into the daily running of the inn. He recites Neruda’s poetry while slicing onions and tomatoes. The mundane chores, more sensuous to him now that he has learned the language of poetry, recall Neruda to him.

He waits, in vain, to hear from his friend.

The story, hitherto so conventionally sweet, turns bitter.

This is an extraordinary development, and this is where Troisi’s anguished acting is extraordinary. Troisi, in fact, was near death. He put off a heart operation to make the movie and died one day after its completion.

There is a parallel with Mario’s story. The actor and the character both sacrifice themselves doing their respective labors of love.

This isn’t one of my favorite movies, but it has one of my favorite endings. It is very wise and very true. There is the friend who concerns himself with Great Causes, Great Sayings, and Great Deeds, who inadvertently or deliberately elevates those around him; and then there is the Great Friend, the one who loves his friend not for what he stands for or accomplishes but for who he is.

Happy Thanksgiving

This nightmare got me out of bed:

I was teaching college again and couldn’t get the whippersnappers to hear, let alone listen to, what I was saying – not least because my mother was visiting the class, and her phone kept ringing. It played the overture to Rossini’s William Tell.

I had to ask her to leave the room.

I hope the students understood the gravity of the offense.

Happy Thanksgiving. Karin took Daniel and Abel to her mother’s. I stayed behind with Samuel, who was ill. I cleaned the basement.

I’ve been mystified by a billboard proclaiming KFC’s temporary “festive” pot-pie. How’s it supposed to differ from ordinary pot-pie?

My research has yielded no satisfactory answer – although I’ve read that this pot-pie doesn’t contain turkey (as I thought it might).

Obviously, to find out, I should hike over to KFC and eat one of these new pot-pies.

P.S. Karin wonders if the campaign is a response to McDonald’s’s “holiday” pies.

R.I.P. “Lucy Pevensie”

… according to some. Lewis biographer Alan Jacobs isn’t convinced but happily pays tribute. Lewis devotees will recall the nice girl who lived at the Kilns during the Second World War. It’s good to hear how she turned out.

Her IMDb page.

Here she acts with Jean Simmons.

Some lives are blessed. Lucy’s (in the Chronicles) was even more favored. She reigned in Narnia; sailed to that world’s edge; and then, in her prime, was whisked away to Aslan’s country and the new Narnia.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Speaking of how “Narnians” turn out:

A new Blu-ray collection of the BBC’s Narnia has been released some forty years after the series was first broadcast. Included is a documentary, Return to Narnia, featuring the original cast.

I learned this from the tabloids. (It popped up in various feeds.) The sensational bit is that Narnia was filmed next-door to pedophile Jimmy Savile’s studio. No Narnia actors were harmed.

The afore-linked piece tells that Downton Abbey’s Lesley Nicol was in this series. For completeness’s sake, here are a few other familiar names:

Tom Baker

Warwick Davis

Camilla Power

(Familiar, that is, if you’re a British-telly glutton.)

So far, a different Narnia adaptation has been released every twenty years or so since Lewis’s death.

May each “Narnian,” in time, be brought to Aslan.

Postmen vs. dogs, pt. 2

(Cf. “Dumb Witness,” the entry before last.)

From the second “Adrian Mole” book (The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole):

Monday June 14th
Moon’s Last Quarter

Our usual postman has been replaced by another one called Courtney Elliot. We know his name because he knocked on the door and introduced himself. He is certainly no run-of-the-mill postman, he wears a ruffled shirt and a red-spotted bow tie with his grey uniform.

He invited himself into the kitchen and asked to be introduced to the dog. When the dog had been brought in from the back garden Courtney looked it in the eye and said, ‘Hail fellow, well met.’ Don’t ask me what it means; all I know is that our dog rolled over and let Courtney tickle its belly. Courtney refused a cup of instant coffee, saying that he only drank fresh-ground Brazilian, then he gave my father the letters saying, ‘One from the Inland Revenue I fear, Mr Mole,’ tipped his hat to my mother and left. The letter was from the tax office. It was to tell my father that they had ‘received information’ that during the previous tax year he had been running a spice rack construction company … from his premises, but that they had no record of such a business and so could he fill in the enclosed form? My father said, ‘Some rotten sod’s shopped me to the tax!’ I went off to school. On the way I saw Courtney coming out of the Singhs’ eating a chapati.

Did you know that the first two books made Sue Townsend “the bestselling novelist of the 1980s?” (according to the author bio). (Would that be YA novelist, British novelist, or novelist full stop? No idea.)

November’s poem

Tonight I recall Amy Macdonald’s stirring intonation, fifteen years ago, of “Flower of Scotland” (it preceded a defeat at Hampden Park).

I heard the anthem sung again today before Scotland played Denmark. Too rousing, I thought. Just watch, the Scots’ll come out pistols blazing and then get drubbed again. And, after McTominay scored a chilena in minute 3, Denmark did outplay the Scots, up and down the field – even, from m. 61, a man short. But the Scots, against the run of play, converted a tap-in (from a near-olímpico), then a blast from outside the box, and finally a lob from the center circle. They won, 4 to 2, and qualified for the World Cup. Yes, they were poor, but they clattered over the line. ESPN’s Scottish pundits were delighted.

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

O Flower of Scotland

When will we see

Your like again

That fought and died for

Your wee bit hill and glen

And stood against him

Proud Edward’s army

And sent him homeward

To think again

The hills are bare now

And autumn leaves

Lie thick and still

O’er land that’s lost now

Which those so dearly held

That stood against him

Proud Edward’s army

And sent him homeward

To think again

Those days are past now

And in the past

they must remain

But we can still rise now

And be the nation again

That stood against him

Proud Edward’s army

And sent him homeward

To think again

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

(Roy Williamson, 1967)

Not Robbie Burns, not William McGonagall, just ordinary folk dreaming of having thrashed the English centuries ago and of maybe doing it again some day.

Dumb witness

I may have mentioned that this year, I’ve been finishing the dozen Agatha Christie novels I hadn’t previously read from beginning to end.

My current read is Dumb Witness (1937), a.k.a. Poirot Loses a Client. The hero – apart from Poirot – is a little Scottish terrier named Bob. (Hastings narrates.)

“I don’t know why dogs always go for postmen, I’m sure,” continued our guide [Hastings and Poirot are touring a house].

“It’s a matter of reasoning,” said Poirot. “The dog, he argues from reason. He is intelligent; he makes his deductions according to his point of view. There are people who may enter a house and there are people who may not – that a dog soon learns. Eh bien, who is the person who most persistently tries to gain admission, rattling on the door twice or three times a day – and who is never by any chance admitted? The postman. Clearly, then, an undesirable guest from the point of view of the master of the house. He is always sent about his business, but he persistently returns and tries again. Then a dog’s duty is clear, to aid in driving this undesirable man away, and to bite him if possible. A most reasonable proceeding.”

He beamed on Bob.

“A most intelligent person, I fancy.”

Sometimes, I want to hug Poirot.

A Veterans Day pup

Monday’s and Tuesday’s schooling began two hours late, due to snow. Karin delayed her Monday work to sit with Samuel in her heated car while he waited for the bus. Good thing, because otherwise I’d’ve stood by the curb with Samuel and Daniel and Abel, thirty minutes longer than usual, not knowing whether the bus would come at all. (The bus-tracking app was out of order.)

(Time was, people’d wait for buses in the cold, not having apps to reassure them. Ours is a softer time.)

Tuesday – yesterday – was Veterans Day, so Karin didn’t go to work. She put Samuel on the bus again. When he came home, he was carrying a drawing he’d made of a “Veterans Day pup”:

Daniel and Abel played in the snow. Mormon missionaries stood by our yard and invited our family to church. They were so winsome, I hated to say no. I should’ve invited them to church.

They knocked on doors on our street, then drove away in a Texas-plated ute (my preferred term for that car) (pun not intended).

Reading report

Our first snowfall. Mary is polling the eight siblings and spouses – five of whom work for the schools – as to whether tomorrow’s school hours will be (a) normal, (b) truncated, or (c) canceled. My money is on (a). Not that money has been pooled. The prize is bragging rights.

UPDATE: It’s (b). I won’t have to go out early to put Samuel on the bus.

(I’ll have to drag Samuel and the other children down the snowy block two hours later, since Karin will’ve gone to work and I can’t leave Daniel and Abel at home.)

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

My reading year is half over and I’ve completed just one-third of the intended total. I’ll have to devote the rest of the year to kiddie novels.

Eve Titus’s Basil of Baker Street, a.k.a. The Great Mouse Detective, will be my second “mouse” book of the year.

Later, I may attempt the “Watership Down” series, which is about rabbits.

(It’s time someone wrote a capybara epic. Or does one already exist?)

I also have begun reading the eight-novel “Adrian Mole” series: hugely popular in Britain, neglected in the USA, unknown to me until some months ago. The first book is very proto-Dog-in-Night-Time (there’s even a hapless cur). Except, the narrator isn’t neurodifferent, he’s just an ordinary, awful thirteen-year-old boy. He’s not literally a mole or any sort of vermin. The book also has things in common with Mike Leigh’s movies, and (I suppose) with What Maisie Knew.

I also must read two Agatha Christies/​Mary Westmacotts per month; and I’m chipping away at my second Ed McBain police procedural, Give the Boys a Great Big Hand (a title which, morbidly enough, is meant to be taken literally).

As for the group’s reading, six weeks have been allocated to Uncle Tom’s Cabin and associated texts. I also continue to read Austen and Trollope. In short, everything I’m reading, except the rather acid Mansfield Park, has broad, crowdpleasing, page-turning appeal; all the fiction, anyway.

Birthday bots

From the New York Times:

“Seattle Reign’s Laura Harvey Says ChatGPT Inspired NWSL [National Women’s Soccer League] Tactics: ‘It Said Play a Back Five, So I Did’”

Arise, analog sportsmen! Defeat your tablet-toting foes! Remember Clint Eastwood! (You know, from Trouble with the Curve.)

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

From the Division of Alumni Affairs and Development (at Cornell):

Make a birthday wish, John-Paul! The Clocktower would chime just for you if it could! On your special day, we’re sending you heartfelt wishes from the Hill. Here’s to another amazing year ahead!

*Update your info*

*Stay connected*

I got this more circumspect greeting, too:

We would like to wish you a Happy Birthday from the employees at the South Bend Clinic Pharmacy.

Sadly, I received no messages from fast food restaurants urging me to claim birthday rewards. (Those, I appreciate.)

What the bots didn’t know was that I’d been waiting for this birthday all my life. When I was very young, my favorite number was four. I liked forty-four even better. (Liking something better than one’s favorite thing is a heady concept, like infinity plus one.) I wanted to weigh forty-four pounds; and when I did, I stayed at that weight as long as I could. I couldn’t wait to turn forty-four years old.

Well, yesterday, I did. My dream has come true.

Body-text fonts, pt. 45: New Caledonia

In this month’s font’s sample, Robert Graves discusses memoir-writing:

It’s the line about people reading about food and drink that gets me. I’ve noticed, perusing Madame’s excellent blog, that my pulse quickens at the gastronomic bits.

C. S. Lewis:

There is nothing to be ashamed of in enjoying your food: there would be everything to be ashamed of if half the world made food the main interest of their lives and spent their time looking at pictures of food and dribbling and smacking their lips.

As a teenager, I used to find this passage in Mere Christianity very funny; twenty-five years later, looking at pictures of food is precisely what half the world does.

(Madame, understand, I’m not criticizing your food photos. There’s obscenity, and there’s art. Your photos are on the respectable half of the divide.)

Madame has a second blog – a Substack where she posts excerpts of her memoirs. A word of advice, Madame. Put in all you can about food and drink, and murders, and ghosts or spirits, and the Prince of Wales (not unmanageable for a Canadian) … and tidbits about your children, whom I knew in high school. (I liked the detail about giving birth one room over from the woman who kept screaming, Que me haga cesaria.) My parents dredged up an old chestnut about me just last night. My mom led a Bible study at a church in Esmeraldas. She entrusted me to some youths who lost track of me. Neighbors found me outside the church. Most of my body had been buried in a mudslide. (This was during the Niño of 1982.) I’d heard this story before, except for the detail about my having been submerged in mud. (I thought I’d just gotten dirty.) Bear in mind, this was a Downtown Esmeraldas mudslide, so it would have contained garbage, sewage, etc. And I could have drowned. We’re always just on the other side of death; that fact is more obvious in some places than in others. Robert Graves’s tone may sound frivolous, but it’s a sweetener; his subject is the First World War.

1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 92: Starship troopers

Well, that was a ludicrous display. Palmeiras 4, Liga 0. The Brazilians advance, 4–3 (on aggregate).

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Happy Halloween. This month, I review a 1997 movie with the IMDb description, “Humans, in a fascist militaristic future, wage war against giant alien bugs.”

“Fascist” – or something else? “Advanced neoliberal,” perhaps? That would make the movie a more pointed commentary on its time.

(“Neoliberalism” has several definitions, but the most common one is something like “the pursuit of economic integration on a global scale” – capitalist economic integration, to be precise. Warring doesn’t come into the definition, but it certainly has aided capitalist powers in establishing and maintaining their trade networks.)

Globalist capitalism appears to have triumphed so comprehensively in Starship Troopers that the planet’s cities have become indistinguishable. Our young protagonists hail from Buenos Aires but speak in English and look and act like stereotypical rich kids from Southern California. Most are concerned, not with the polis – the “Federation” – but with personal projects and desires. They aren’t nationalists, racists, or devotees of a “Great Leader”; but the common good isn’t foremost in their thinking, either.

The most ambitious high school graduates are willing to endure privation in order to rule. In the Federation, military service is what confers “citizenship” – roughly, the right to extend one’s influence by other means than capitalist free exchange. (This is my characterization. The movie doesn’t state this rather abstract notion in so many words.)

Hence: voting, governing, teaching, and childrearing are permissible only for the few. The violence-wielders. The warriors.

Domination is the basis of the global order. All pretense to the contrary has been dropped.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

This is made clear during a high school civics lesson:

TEACHER

All right, let’s sum up. This year we explored the failure of democracy: how our social scientists brought our world to the brink of chaos. We talked about the veterans, how they took control and established the stability that has lasted for generations since. You know these facts, but have I taught you anything of value this year?

(To a student)

You. Why are only citizens allowed to vote?

FIRST STUDENT

It’s a reward. Something the Federation gives you for doing federal service.

TEACHER

No. Something given has no value. When you vote, you are exercising political authority, you’re using force. And force, my friends, is violence. The supreme authority from which all other authorities are derived.

SECOND STUDENT

My mother always told me that violence doesn’t solve anything.

TEACHER

Really? I wonder what the city founders of Hiroshima would have to say about that.

(To a student)

You.

THIRD STUDENT

They wouldn’t say anything. Hiroshima was destroyed.

TEACHER

Correct. Naked force has resolved more conflicts throughout history than any other factor. The contrary opinion, that violence doesn’t solve anything, is wishful thinking at its worst. People who forget that always die.

The teacher (Michael Ironside), a grizzled old soldier, delivers his lesson sternly, compellingly. It sounds better than it looks on the page. I can think of a few objections to the argument. But then I imagine the teacher knocking me out cold with his arm-prosthesis: “I refute you thus.”

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Ideological stage-setting occupies the movie’s first half. The second half is given over to Humanity’s war against the Bugs, in scenes that manage to be cartoonish but also, dare I say, sublime.

The troopers land on a craggy desert planet. Most carry only machine guns – mere pea-shooters (the Bugs’ exoskeletons are bulletproof). The slaughter of Humans is terrible but not terribly affecting. Troopers are impaled and burned. Their brains are sucked out. Their limbs and heads are severed. Such things do happen in combat (well, maybe not the brain-sucking). I don’t know if they look ridiculous in real life. They do onscreen.

The sublimity of these scenes comes from seeing Bugs cover the landscape. The troopers’ situation is grave – tragic, even.

It ought to dawn on these soldiers – aspiring citizens, i.e. dominators – that they’ve been brought in as Bug fodder. Being dominated is their lot, as it is that of enemies and civilians. High-ranking warriors dominate their subordinates: they “play God”; they delegate suffering and death to the lower ranks while uttering platitudes about the good of the species. To the audience, these platitudes ring hollow since the species is evidently not very concerned about the common good.

But a curious thing happens. Maybe it happens in real life, too. The troopers – not the lofty generals, colonels, and starship captains, but those belonging to the lowliest infantry ranks – develop something akin to altruism. Faced with likely death, they become intensely loyal to their unit. They assume responsibility for the well-being of civilians – those whom they’d set out to dominate. I say this is akin to altruism because they still have no sympathy for the enemy. But it’s something.

There are viewers who interpret the whole movie cynically, who read the pervasively campy, mocking tone as applying to everything that happens. (It’s well known that the director, Paul Verhoeven, was deliberately subverting the jingoistic 1959 novel by Robert A. Heinlein.)

They have a strong case. Why are Humans and Bugs at war? Not just because the Bugs bombed Earth (but did they? see the last video below). Rather, because Humans first encroached. Encroaching is what Humans do. In particular, it’s what expansionist capitalists do. (Recall Hannah Arendt’s quotation of Cecil Rhodes: “I would annex the planets if I could.”) It’s briefly noted, early on, that a group of rogue Mormons has attempted to settle in Bug territory. Their foray may have been illegal and ill-considered, but the other Earthlings are happy to endorse it – post hoc – with force. Doing so allows them to flex military muscle abroad and at home. By implication, this isn’t the first expansionist war against residents of other planets, and it won’t be the last. The troopers themselves may develop noble, self-sacrificial ideals, but these just serve a regime of mostly selfish, violently competitive individuals doing land grab after land grab.

I don’t say the movie doesn’t intend to make these points, but I’m not sure that it doesn’t regard the troopers’ ideals as something valuable.

There’s a romantic subplot. Johnny (Casper Van Dien) loves Carmen (Denise Richards). Carmen, a selfish careerist, is on track to become a military starship pilot. Johnny doesn’t have the test scores for that, so he joins the infantry; he can at least become a citizen like Carmen. Dizzy (Dina Meyer, from Dragonheart) loves Johnny. She could become a professional athlete, but instead she joins the infantry so she can be near to Johnny. She knows that Johnny loves Carmen, but she pursues him anyway, even if it means dying. Here is self-sacrifice, born not out of servility to dominators or the trauma of war or hopeless nearness to death, but autonomous and unconcerned with death. Here is something good.

The classroom scene:

A relatively tame (still gruesome) battle scene:

One of 10,000 “fan theories” from the Internet:

Scotland 3, Greece 1

I post this effusively-narrated goal in honor of a favorite movie of Karin’s that we saw this weekend (after a wedding, no less): So I Married an Axe Murderer (1992).

Roger Ebert calls it

a mediocre movie with a good one trapped inside. … The good movie involves a droll and eccentric Scottish-American family whose household embraces more of the trappings of Scottishness than your average Glasgow souvenir shop.

“I don’t know if a market exists for feature-length Scots-bashing,” Ebert continues, “but the domestic scenes … had me laughing out loud.”

Not me. I guess the times have changed. What I kept thinking was, more should have been made of the parallels with Chabrol’s Le boucher.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

I wrote an entry called “Gastrointestinal Woes” and read it to Karin. She didn’t veto it, exactly, but her evident discomfort persuaded me to excise most of it.

This paragraph remains. (TRIGGER WARNING !!!)

Karin’s mom gave Samuel a “sensory” swivel chair for his birthday. (A chair like this one – a cheaper one, maybe.) Samuel named it “Mr. Spinner.” He and Daniel had great fun spinning in it until Daniel puked up his breakfast Pop-Tart. I heard the howling and saw the mess and thought it was blood until I noticed the sprinkles.

The excised bits were much worse.

Liga de Quito 3, Palmeiras 0

Hats off to Liga for achieving this result in the home leg of their Copa Libertadores semifinal. Frankly, I don’t see the lead evaporating in São Paulo.

The winner will contest the final against either Flamengo or Racing Club. I wouldn’t be surprised if liguistas outnumbered opposing fans in Lima, the neutral host city. They’d have a shorter journey than Brazilians or Argentinians, and they’re plenty passionate about their club (and platudos).

I just wish they’d bother to fill their stadium when Ecuador plays World Cup qualifiers there.

Қайрат (Kairat) 0, Πάφος (Paphos) 0

In Almaty, Kazakhs and Cypriots both failed to win their easiest match of the Champions League group stage.

Kairat’s failure was greater. (A Paphos defender was red-carded in minute 4.) Happily, the draw allowed the upstart ex-Soviets to leap over respectable Athletic Bilbao, as well as illustrious Ajax and Benfica, in the standings.

The islanders – who, on Matchday 1, had stalemated Olimpiacos (6–1 losers today, at Barcelona) – already were perched above that trio.

Did I watch any of these games? I did not.

Now, a report on some (not all) of my compatriots.

Willian Pacho scored Paris Saint-Germain’s first goal of seven at Bayer Leverkusen. (PSG won.)

A game I did watch: Piero Hincapié’s Arsenal smoked Atlético Madrid, 4–0. Piero didn’t play. He’s easing back from injury. The starting left-back, Calafiori, rested; Lewis-Skelly, Calafiori’s understudy, played brilliantly, assisting on the second goal. Piero also can play left center-back. That position’s occupant, Gabriel, scored, then assisted.

Hardworking Viktor Gyökeres, a Swede – the game’s best player – broke his scoring drought with two goals. He’s not a positional rival of Piero’s. I rooted for him.

October’s poem

Not a horror poem but a love poem.

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,

Enwrought with golden and silver light,

The blue and the dim and the dark cloths

Of night and light and the half light,

I would spread the cloths under your feet:

But I, being poor, have only my dreams;

I have spread my dreams under your feet;

Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

(William Butler Yeats, “Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven”)

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

October is for baseball, too.

Shohei Ohtani enjoyed an historic night in the NLCS. He pitched six innings and struck out ten batters, allowing two hits and zero runs. He batted three times and hit three home runs.

(Very roughly, it’s as if Erling Haaland or Pelé had tended goal for sixty minutes in a Champions League semifinal, stopped several good shots, given up a few corners, kept a clean sheet … and scored three goals.)

Sweet teeth

For the longest time, Abel had just two teeth, and then this week four more broke through the top gum. How long he’ll keep them is anyone’s guess. We trunk-or-treated last night at the school where my brother Stephen teaches, and I was amazed that so many of the teachers tried to give Abel candy. (He’s only ten months old.) Afterward, as we waited in the McDonald’s drive-thru, Samuel told us that children eat McDonald’s at school on their birthdays. I’m skeptical, but it’s within the realm of possibility. (For his upcoming birthday, he’s asked for McDonald’s, chocolate cake with icing, and a piñata.) Daniel ate sweet toast for breakfast today, like most days, and then asked for ice-cream. I held him off fairly comfortably by pointing out that he’d only eaten half of his toast.

Abel’s pediatrician told me that children’ll eat anything until they start eating sugar, and then that’s all they’ll want.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Karin uses Duolingo (an app, if you didn’t know) to practice Spanish, Welsh, math, chess, and sometimes piano. The sentences for practicing Spanish are like a high school/​Almodóvar melodrama.

No saldré con él si usa ropa anticuada (I won’t go out with him if his clothes are out of date).

Todas mis amigas son lesbianas (all of my woman friends are lesbians).

Some Welsh sentences, translated:

Owen is eating parsnips in the rain.

After the dragon had eaten Owen, it went to Cardiff.

See this compilation. A literature grad student ought to publish a paper about national stereotyping in Duolingo. But isn’t that what the app is for? When, really, will we have occasion to meaningfully use Icelandic or Korean? Isn’t mental tourism the point?

Hoyle

Someday I’ll explain why, a decade or so ago, I resolved never to learn another brand-new board or card game – indeed, why I came to loathe the very idea of new games.

Tonight’s post is about why despite (or perhaps because of) this loathing, I bought The New Complete Hoyle, Revised (1991) at Goodwill.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

The book’s subtitle is: “The Authoritative Guide to the Official Rules of All Popular Games of Skill and Chance.”

All popular games. Of skill and chance.

Is this a literally true description of the book? No.

Was it true in 1991? No. There were other popular games than those in Hoyle.

The pretense of officiality also goes too far. See, for example, this admission:

The rules of Go differ somewhat in China, Korea, and Japan. Unfortunately they have not been codified even in Japan, where, in 1928, a championship tournament was interrupted and suspended for a month by a dispute over rules. A commission appointed to clarify the Japanese rules proposed a code in 1933, but it has not been generally adopted.

One might deplore the book’s exaggeration. On the other hand, one might admire its determination to establish a canon of games.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Which brings me to what canonization is for.

Walk down any Walmart games aisle, or visit a specialty shop: new games proliferate like Hydra’s heads. This, at best, is a distraction from the sustained pursuit of excellence. At worst, it’s postmodern absurdity.

One is tempted to commit one of two opposing mistakes. The first is to renounce all gaming. This is the Charybdis of asceticism. The second is to try to keep up with new gaming. This is the Scylla of … well, probably not asceticism’s starkest opposites, wantonness and incontinence. It’s more like an arms race. Or like keeping up with the Joneses.

The sensible middle course is to choose just a few games and to stick with them. Here a canon of games is invaluable. It’s less good to practice something with no stock of wisdom built up around it. (I’m sure Alasdair MacIntyre would agree.)

Adhering to the canon ensures that one is communing, not only with today’s gamers, but also with those of the past, e.g. the Japanese who debated the rules of Go in 1928.

Hoyle is steeped in history, or aspires to be.

(Indeed, its stated pedigree is almost blasphemous:

The only truly immortal being on record is an Englishman named Edmond Hoyle, who was born in 1672 and buried in 1769 but who has never really died.

I imagine my pious grandfather, who refused to play cards, disapproving.)

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Suppose that one is nauseated by the uselessness of gaming and decides that total abstention is, after all, the way to go. Hoyle still is invaluable. What better tool is there for understanding scenes of gaming in old books? I’ve never actually played bridge, but (in some moods) my favorite Christie novel is Cards on the Table. Identifying the murderer in that book depends on knowing about bridge. Then there are the James Bond novels (Casino Royale, Goldfinger  … ). Even Austen’s and Pepys’s people are card fiends. A confirmed teetotaller probably should know a little about boozing, if only for literature’s sake.

Body-text fonts, pt. 44: the Fell types

Abel now climbs stairs.

Too, too soon.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Samuel has thought up a new Agatha Christie novel: Bossy (!).

“It’s about one man who kills another man in the Olden Days.”

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

These fonts are available, gratis, from Google:

IM Fell Double Pica

IM Fell DW Pica

IM Fell English

IM Fell French Canon

IM Fell Great Primer

They’re digitizations, by Igino Marini, of types “bequeathed to the University of Oxford by John Fell in 1686.”

The fonts aren’t especially alike, nor do they work equally well for typesetting just any content. One must use them very judiciously. Their attraction is that they’re VENERABLE-LOOKING and ROUGH.

(DISTRESSED is another word that comes to mind, as in: “distressed blue jeans.”)

Even so, the fonts, when properly sized and spaced, are very legible.

Whenever I see them – or their doppelgängers (more on one doppelgänger in a moment) – it’s in some pretentious children’s book, e.g. The Assassination of Brangwain Spurge by M. T. Anderson and Eugene Yelchin.

(The story is charming; the pretentiousness is due to the number of pages.)

(Spurge, an elfin emissary to the goblin capital – and a spy – is hosted by a goblin scholar, Werfel, who tries his darnednest to be hospitable but can’t help committing faux pas.)

The font in this sample is actually a commercial font that looks like IM Fell Great Primer. It’s surprisingly OK as body text, isn’t it?

Just don’t go hog wild and use Fell fonts in all your documents.

Singing along

The Proclaimers, singing:

“My heart was broken / My heart was broken / Sorrow / Sorrow …”

Samuel: “My heart isn’t broken.”

John-Paul: “Oh, no? Why not?”

Samuel: “Because I always follow the rules of the road.”

Some of his interpretations are rather literal.

(The Proclaimers are wearing good pants.)

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Samuel has finished reading the Babar omnibus and is halfway through Little House in the Big Woods (which I first read only last year). Some days, he reads more than the required amount. He has caught the fire. His abuelo pays him $2 per completion.

He’s a good little (mercenary) book reader, but he’s too hard on the spines.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Abel now stands.

Daniel sings along with my Spotify favorites. Most are wordless, so he has to sing the violin parts (for instance). He has a favorite Beethoven piece: the “Turkish March” from The Ruins of Athens. I’ve known it all my life but only just realized it was Beethoven’s.

The inner ring

It seems these days I have to read the New York Post for good news.

“Woman Rushed to Hospital with Appendicitis, Gets Shock of Her Life: ‘He Just Came Out of Nowhere’”

(She had a baby.)

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

My kindergartener is trendier than I am.

At the library, Samuel started singing “Soda Pop” from Netflix’s KPop Demon Hunters, and some middle schoolers joined in. Glances of mutual recognition passed between Samuel and the middle schoolers.

It was suddenly clear that I was “out” and they were “in.” It evoked a feeling described in C. S. Lewis’s “The Inner Ring” (which I happened to be reading).

I didn’t mind being “out,” but it was all too gratifying to see my child “in” with his betters.

He doesn’t care about being “out” or “in.” He just likes having friends.

He checked out this book because the girl on the jacket reminded him of a friend.

Karin met other friends of Samuel’s today. She took time off from work and joined his class on a field trip.

“It’s my mom!” Samuel told everyone. “And it’s her birthday!”

Happy birthday, Love.

1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 91: A dance to the music of time

“There was no way of stopping Widmerpool. He would have to be heard to the end.”

This synoptic remark is from Hearing Secret Harmonies, the twelfth and final novel of Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time, which is named after this painting:

The books have three hundred-odd characters who flit in and out of the narrative for a half-century and then – almost simultaneously – fall like flies. The last novel reports a death every five pages or so.

No other character makes such an impression as does grotesque, bourgeois Widmerpool.

It’s said that Quijote got away from Cervantes, that his saintliness usurped his creator’s satiric intent. So, also – as an object of horror – Widmerpool gets away from Powell. We track his ruthless career rise, his sordid love life, his paths of destruction. Blaze-like, he overwhelms Powell’s throng of aristocrats, activists, and artists; mystics, military men, and MPs; servants, spies, and scholars.

Widmerpool is the embodiment, one critic says,

in an unusually pure form … [of] the power of the will: … obtuse, pompous, socially inept, and at the same time possessed of an almost demonic energy and an unstoppable urge to succeed.

Embarrassment, that poignant English quality, is what distinguishes Widmerpool from, say, Donald Trump. It’s not that Widmerpool lacks crassness: it’s that he’s furtive about it. It’s not that he isn’t propelled by early experiences of domination and humiliation. It’s that he has just enough self-insight to be nauseated by his past.

Perhaps this is what fixes his gaze upon advancement and little else, until he cracks under the weight of his misdeeds.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

The 1997 TV series consists of four 100-minute episodes, each covering at least a decade. (They’re much too condensed.) Widmerpool, in all stages of life, is played by Simon Russell Beale. He begins as an overgrown schoolboy and turns into a baby-faced old man. As the years pile up, this spiritual teenager accumulates money and power, to the dismay of his social betters.

The most empathic of these – the tale’s narrator – is Widmerpool’s schoolmate, the writer Nick Jenkins (played in his prime by James Purefoy and in old age by John Standing). Nick is fascinated equally by socialites, Second World War enlistees, pederastic painters, and his parents’ servants. (A housemaid, nervewracked from unrequited love, sees ghosts and wanders nude into a tea party.) And, of course, Nick is fascinated by Widmerpool. SPOILERS AHEAD. Others in Nick’s orbit include the eccentric Uncle Giles (Edward Fox) and his companion, Mrs. Erdleigh, a spiritualist with unerring foresight. The great Nicola Walker, in an early role, is Gypsy Jones, a quarrelsome socialist pacifist who sleeps with both Widmerpool and Nick. (Widmerpool, desperate to maintain an appearance of respectability, funds her medical procedure.) Another flame of Widmerpool’s is the nihilist Pamela Flitton (Miranda Richardson), who awakens every man’s lust but Nick’s. He takes up with serial adulteress Jean (Claire Skinner) before settling down with wholesome aristocrat Isobel (Emma Fielding). Nick’s composer friend Moreland (James Fleet) marries the ex-mistress of the capitalist Sir Magnus Donners and then has a fling with Isobel’s sister; he ends up living with shrewish Mrs. Maclintick (Zoë Wanamaker), whose husband has committed suicide. I’m mentioning just a few of the story’s love affairs. These people are connected professionally as well as sexually. Widmerpool becomes Sir Magnus’s henchman; after Sir Magnus’s stroke, Widmerpool tortures the wheelchair-bound magnate by briefing him on administrative minutae. Even as Widmerpool rises in the business world, he spends weekends in the muddy countryside with his territorial regiment. Then war breaks out, and Widmerpool’s painstakingly curated military rank allows him to lord it over old associates who scramble to find places in the army. One of these is another former schoolmate, Charles Stringham (Pamela’s uncle). Once spoiled and dissolute, Stringham has reformed and enlisted as a private; this act of selflessness places him at Widmerpool’s mercy. Another schoolmate – Jean’s brother, the womanizer Peter Templer – also has his fortune changed by war and Widmerpool. I could go on. The web is vast. Widmerpool is the spider – a colonizer, not a spinner. (But when spiders mate, the male loses.)

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

These developments take decades. Widmerpool’s beginning is monied but modest. This scene shows Widmerpool and Nick as insecure young men.

The scene’s other characters are Barbara Goring, Johnny Pardoe, and – who’s the third? That’s the trouble. So many people appear just once or twice. Barbara is memorable because she pours the sugar. The others are just her hangers-on. In the books they and dozens like them serve a purpose not easily translated to the screen. Their names are recalled again and again, perhaps twenty or thirty times. One does get a taste of this, watching the adaptation, but on the page it becomes incantatory.

“Don’t be a chump,” a Guardian reviewer advises:

If you’re going to commit to this box set, you should first read Anthony Powell’s 12-novel sequence. It’s hard enough telling your Buster Foxes from your Tuffy Weedons, your Dicky Umfravilles from your Sunny Farebrothers, even when you’re steeped in this chronicle.

Quite. (And, to my recollection, the witty Dicky Umfraville never appears onscreen, which is a pity.)

Karin watched with me and, after some time, was engrossed. But I supplied omitted material. I honestly don’t know whether someone with no knowledge of the books could enjoy this adaptation.

That’s not to deny that Beale, as Widmerpool, does much to repay the viewer’s effort. Think of Peep Show’s Mark Corrigan (David Mitchell) in period dress: only, a terror, not a loser.

Rules for blogging

“Is this your ‘fall gothic’ blog look?” Karin asks.

Nah, I just compulsively reformat and revise, as regular readers know.

The most significant change is that the section-separating diamonds (♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦) are now tomato-colored, not orange. This would be tricky to implement globally rather than one entry at a time. So I haven’t done it all yet.

Some of my rules for blogging:

• Get the formatting right
• Corollary: learn the necessary HTML
• Get the prose right
• Revise style unstintingly
• Revise substance sparingly
• Post ten times per month (this constrains revision)
• Tell the truth
• Use free fonts
• Don’t try to make money
• Don’t track pageviews (I do see what countries my readers and reader-bots come from, but I can’t distinguish between them)
• Allow comments from human beings, not bots (right now, I’m failing to allow comments at all)
• Don’t worry about who reads (exception: Madame)
• Don’t worry if your wife doesn’t always read
• Don’t worry if people who once read don’t now
• Don’t worry if your content is utterly trivial
• You have almost nothing to say
• This blog is for exercise
• Just follow your very long nose; then retrace and clean up
• Write more like a Briton than like a gringo
• Corollary: some convolution is acceptable
• But emulate your stylist-heroes (e.g., Agatha Christie, Evelyn Waugh)
• If, in overall conception, you must emulate someone, let it be Pepys
• Read more Pepys so you know what you’re talking about
• The Shorter Pepys should suffice
• But it might not

I’ve posted some 1,300 entries here since 2013, and before that I posted on Xanga for almost ten years, so I can speak with some authority.

Internet round-up: the Psmiths on class; Harper’s on Oklahoma universities; Leiter on ChatGPT

My favorite Substackers have reviewed Paul Fussell’s Class and applied its principles to today’s political landscape (and other things).

I get the vibe they’d read Class before.

If you haven’t read Class, you really ought to.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

From Harper’s’s “Weekly Review”:

Lawmakers in Oklahoma introduced a bill mandating that every state college erect a statue of [Charlie] Kirk in a “highly visible and easily accessible” plaza that bears the activist’s name.

The bill is here.

Just one more example of politicians trying to control what colleges say.

Kirk may have debated on campuses, but he wasn’t a faculty member or even a degree earner. And his work wasn’t scholarly. It didn’t try to adhere to the standards of any guild of experts.

I’d hope that no professional academic would wish to flaunt him as a symbol of what colleges and universities do.

Then again, a lot of schools are happy to put up statues of their football players. The state doesn’t even have to enforce that.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Brian Leiter posts about how a colleague of his got a chatbot to write an “alarmingly competent” philosophical essay.

“How much trouble are we [academic philosophers] in?” Leiter asks.

I’ve never seen any undergraduate writing with the chatbot’s precise style, but (*shudder*) I’ve seen lots of PhD- and journal-level prose just like it.

So, yes, we philosophers – or, at least, those who aspire to a livelihood based on the production and evaluation of scholarship – are in big, big trouble. Because, with just a little input, robots can do those tasks now (or, if not now, soon). Not superlatively well, but well enough to impress the profession’s gatekeepers.

Worse: readers of philosophy are in trouble, and have been for some time, because so much scholarship makes the grade even though it sounds like it rolled off a conveyor belt. The prose is undistinguished, and stock “-isms” (contractualism! particularism!) are opposed or combined almost mechanically.

Horror season; Lewis on modern theology; Abel’s accident

My favorite U.S. season begins tomorrow. A few leaves have turned color, and it’s been raining more. I had to mow our front lawn in the rain.

We’ve brought out our horrific mermaid decoration (“mer-skeleton,” Samuel calls it); and I’m reading stories by M. R. James, e.g. “The Mezzotint.”

(Someone’s GIF of that story.)

I used to reserve the spooky reading for October, but this year I’m continuing it all season long.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

One author who loathed horror stories – as a matter of personal taste, not (as far as I can tell) of principle – was C. S. Lewis.

(See The Pilgrim’s Regress’s afterword – or its foreword, depending on the edition.)

The group is reading short essays by Lewis.

These were his words to a cohort of Anglican seminarians:

A theology which denies the historicity of nearly everything in the Gospels to which Christian life and affections and thought have been fastened for nearly two millennia – which either denies the miraculous altogether or, more strangely, after swallowing the camel of the Resurrection strains at such gnats as the feeding of the multitudes – if offered to the uneducated man can produce only one or other of two effects. It will make him a Roman Catholic or an atheist.

(“Modern Theology and Biblical Criticism,” a.k.a. “Fern-Seed and Elephants.”)

I like that.

And later:

All theology of the liberal type involves at some point – and often involves throughout – the claim that the real behavior and purpose and teaching of Christ came very rapidly to be misunderstood and misrepresented by his followers, and has been recovered or exhumed only by modern scholars. Now long before I became interested in theology I had met this kind of theory elsewhere. The tradition of Jowett still dominated the study of ancient philosophy when I was reading Greats. One was brought up to believe that the real meaning of Plato had been misunderstood by Aristotle and wildly travestied by the neo-Platonists, only to be recovered by the moderns. When recovered, it turned out (most fortunately) that Plato had really all along been an English Hegelian, rather like T. H. Green. I have met it a third time in my own professional studies; every week a clever undergraduate, every quarter a dull American don, discovers for the first time what some Shakespearean play really meant.

This too is delightful, perhaps excessively so. I wish I could cackle uninhibitedly at the undergraduates and dull U.S. dons; but I’m afraid that there’s still sorting to be done: for every Aristotle who got Plato right, and (especially) for every Plato who got Socrates right, there was another near-contemporary of theirs who didn’t. And for every Simon Peter, there was a Simon Magus. Also, why think that “what some Shakespearean play really meant” was just one thing? The text may be richer than that. (Of course, supposing that more than one meaning may be true, if a new one is discovered, the old one need not always be invalidated; so, insofar as the moderns do try to invalidate the ancients to advance their own interpretations, Lewis is justified in distrusting them.)

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Abel fell off a bed and got a black eye; now it’s black and blue and green. I once fainted in my bathroom and acquired a black eye. My students asked if I’d been barfighting, and I assured them I had; it was quite a thrill for ten seconds, and then I told the truth.

September’s poem

… is “Strange” by Galaxie 500.

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

Why’s everybody actin’ funny?

Why’s everybody look so strange?

Why’s everybody look so nasty?

What do I want with all these things?

I went alone down to the drugstore

I went in back and took a Coke

I stood in line and ate my Twinkies

I stood in line; I had to wait

Why’s everybody actin’ funny?

Why’s everybody look so strange?

Why’s everybody look so pretty?

What do I want with all these things?

I went alone down to the drugstore

I went in back and took a Coke

I stood in line and ate my Twinkies

I stood in line; I had to wait

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

Quality time with Abel

Karin drove to Cleveland to see Weird Al in concert for the second time in two years. Daniel and Samuel slept over at their grandpa’s. Abel remained with me. I took advantage of the quiet and put on the first half of The Brutalist. At intermission (yes, that’s the kind of movie it is), we went to the neighborhood’s new Popeyes; then, we came home and finished the movie. Abel slept through most of the second part. He slept the rest of the night, too, except for brief awakenings to suck from his bottle. He was lively, early the next morning; when he was hungry, he said Ma, ma, ma, ma, and I knew I was no proper mother substitute.

The Brutalist is long and arbitrarily plotted but has some striking scenes, none better than the “Statue of Liberty” scene near the beginning.

Was it really made for just $10 million? That’s amazing.

I waited for months to see it, but I have to say, Anora is better.

R.I.P. Charlie Kirk

My two cents.

I’m sorry he was murdered, of course. It’s an awful thing, and I can’t imagine that the social repercussions will be good.

Before he was killed, I barely knew about Charlie Kirk. I knew his name and that he was associated with the political right. I didn’t know about his specific views or his way of conducting himself.

I believe I once watched some minutes of a video in which he debated college students. But I don’t remember what was said.

(I don’t spend much time listening to the pundits. For example, I may have been the last person in the United States to become aware of Tucker Carlson and Rachel Maddow. And no, I don’t know if those two pundits are meaningfully comparable; my point is just that I ignore famous talking heads from both sides.)

I didn’t know any details of Charlie Kirk’s personal life: that he was only thirty-one, that he was married and had young children, that he was close to Donald Trump, etc.

I still know little. I know even less about the young man who is thought to have killed Kirk.

Why am I writing, then? I guess to make the (obvious) point that most of us have nothing worthwhile and non-obvious to say. Lamenting is good, because a life has been taken and human life is sacred. But how many of us can responsibly attempt more than that? I’ve noticed a disturbing number of people on social media – friends of mine – issuing or sharing calls to arms. Calls to, like, hunker down with one’s family and one’s guns; or to join in fighting a civil war that, allegedly, already has begun. Which all seems dangerously overblown, especially since the average person can’t be trusted to have understood (a) Charlie Kirk, (b) his killer, or (c) his many and varied admirers and critics. Because I recognize that I understand so little about (a)–(c). And because I see other friends – Ecuadorians who know less than I know about U.S. politics – posting about Charlie Kirk. (Their condolences are unobjectionable; their hagiographic pictures and language are not.) Which makes me think, maybe people are opining because it’s a bandwagon to climb onto. (Which, arguably, I’m also climbing onto, hoisting myself up a little more surreptitiously than most.)

Body-text fonts, pt. 43: Spectral

Last week: Paraguay 0, Ecuador 0.

Tonight: Ecuador 1, Argentina 0.

We concluded South America’s World Cup qualification tournament with:

• qualification
• a victory over the World Cup champions
• a final position as runners-up (trailing only the aforementioned champions)
• a total of five goals conceded in eighteen games – the joint-lowest total in the tournament’s history
• a streak of five “clean sheets” (games with no goals conceded)
• a streak of eleven undefeated games

I think it was after the goalless draw in Uruguay, with eight games to play, that I predicted we wouldn’t lose again.

The bad news is that tonight, Moisés Caicedo received two yellow cards and was ejected. The second yellow card was extremely doubtful. The referee, who’d been obliged to eject an Argentinian, seemed to be trying to even up the numbers.

I’m sure we’ll appeal to CONMEBOL. Let’s pray that no suspension is enforced.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Having recovered from injury and illness, I mowed the shin-high backyard grass. It was slow going, but painless … until, some hours afterward, my hip and ankle began to trouble me.

Then, today, I threw out my back.

Either I get sidelined due to a foot puncture – or sinusitus – and suffer; or I recover, then mow, then suffer.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

The font Spectral is common on the internet, especially on Substack (which only allows, what, four fonts?).

Too small? Click here; read the “Thunder Gun Express” of Substack posts. It’s just a very long summary of Niccolao Mannuci’s very long travelogue and history of Mughal India – the “Thunder Gun Express” of books.

Which I only learned about yesterday. It’s the awesomest book I’ve heard of. I’m not kidding.

Even if the Bible were turned into a wild AI-generated movie, it wouldn’t be as spectacular as this book.

But I doubt I’ll ever read the book, so thank goodness for the Substack post.

A beach day

Not in the best of health. Even so, I spent the day out with my family, at a museum and at a windy, chilly Lake Michigan beach. We were joined by my old schoolmate, Dan, and his family. Funny how bearable an illness can be with old friends nearby. There were billowy clouds and lovely, white-tipped waves; we didn’t bathe, but the children enjoyed the playground. Daniel (my son) was so delighted that at leaving-time, he had to be carried away against his will (mercifully, he scaled the biggest hill himself).

We were mostly in touristy St. Joseph but also drove through Benton Harbor, the poorer twin, which has run-down churches with names like Aún Hay Esperanza.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

I’m reading Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life, which I found in our local library’s equivalent of the Little Free Library. Ursula Todd (1910–1910, 1910–1914, etc.) lives, dies, is reborn, and lives her same life again. And again. Her lifespan lengthens because déjà vu teaches her to avoid mishaps. (It takes her a few tries to figure out how to avoid getting Spanish flu.) It’s like watching a video gamer replaying levels; or Groundhog Day, set in Downton Abbey’s England, not Punxsutawney. Atkinson skewers some characters, especially the loathsome doctor who delivers Ursula (the girl sometimes survives his care, sometimes doesn’t). The repetition is macabre and funny. Working out the metaphysic isn’t easy. Michael Huemer’s theory of reincarnation comes closest, perhaps. But on that theory the déjà vu wouldn’t transmit real memories; and it would be unlikely – or, strictly speaking, rare – that the same siblings should be sired after Ursula.

Limping

I stepped on a fancy Hot Wheels ambulance. It had sharp tail fins. It made a dime-sized crater in the arch of my foot.

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A few recent club transfers involving Ecuadorians:

• Pervis Estupiñán from Brighton to Milan (permanent transfer)
• Piero Hincapié from Leverkusen to Arsenal (loan with purchase option)
• Kendry Páez from Chelsea to Strasbourg (temporary loan)
• Jeremy Sarmiento, Brighton’s last remaining Ecuadorian, to Cremonese (another loan)

It was expected that Joel Ordóñez and Kevin Rodríguez would be swooped up from Club Brugge and Union Saint-Gilloise, respectively; but they weren’t. So, they’ll have to spend another season lighting up the Belgian league.

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Ecuador’ll play in Paraguay tomorrow night. We’ve qualified for the World Cup. Paraguay is on the World Cup’s doorstep.

So, our motivation is low, Paraguay’s is high, and Paraguay is playing better than usual (if nowhere near as well as from 1996 to 2011).

And we’ve only ever lost in Asunción.

Still, I’d wager, we’ll earn our first point there. Our defense just doesn’t let in goals.

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Current mini-book: Ed McBain’s Cop Hater (1956), the inspiration for the novels of Sjöwall & Wahlöö. Inspired by the show Dragnet, which every other cop procedural is indebted to, e.g. the one that goes:

In the criminal justice system

Sexually based offenses are considered especially heinous

In New York City

The dedicated detectives who investigate these vicious felonies

Are members of an elite squad known as the Special Victims Unit

These are their stories

(Dun, dun)

Cop Hater is set in New York, but the place names have been changed.

Wikipedia says the first edition has 166 pp. and the revised edition has 236. I must be reading the text of the first edition. In my omnibus, the novel’s page count is 116.

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Current late-night viewing: Da Vinci’s Inquest (1998–2005), starring Canadians who haven’t crossed over to Hollywood. That, in itself, is refreshing. I’m also enjoying the lingo. Royal Canadian Mounted Police = RCMP = The Horsemen. I keep expecting a guy on horseback to show up and harangue the cops at the precinct in Downtown Vancouver, but no, it’s always a twerp in a suit.

Lots of autopsies are performed. The nude bits are blurred out (unlike on Britain’s Silent Witness, which uses famous guest actors to play the corpses).

Da Vinci streams, free, via various apps.

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I think the weather has started cooling for good this summer. We’re getting a nice rain tonight. The back lawn is about nine inches tall. I would’ve mowed on Saturday, but my foot had a painful gash in it.

1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 90: Green fish

Tagging Green Fish (1997) as a “gangster” flick is like calling Badlands a “spree killer” flick: it ignores the poetry. Beautiful little scenes are interspersed with violent ones. The little scenes carry the movie.

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Ilsan, which lies within commuting distance of Seoul, was once farmland. Now, high-rises stand next to the fields. Mak-dong’s family still lives in a hut. The patriarch has died. Mak-dong’s oldest brother is mentally disabled; another brother, a policeman, is a drunkard; another barely gets by, delivering eggs; their mother cleans houses; their sister does sex work.

Mak-dong has just completed his military service. Riding the train home, he confronts ruffians who are molesting a stylish young woman. The ruffians beat him. He loses his belongings; the woman retrieves them and tries to contact him. He tracks her to Seoul, where he lands himself in another fight, this time with the gangsters whose boss the young woman, Mi-ae, is mistress to. The boss, “Older Brother,” brings Mak-dong into the gang.

Mak-dong’s talent is for taking beatings. His first assignment is to bait a councilman into beating him up after karaoke. The councilman thus acquires a debt to “Older Brother.” Such is the labor to which Mak-dong is put.

I’ll support the family, Mak-dong tells his brothers. He works for their sake – and for Mi-ae’s.

And, paradoxically, he is motivated by genuine loyalty to his exploiter, “Older Brother.” Not just by need or fear.

You might believe such loyalty to arise from a misguided, idiosyncratic compulsion. But “Older Brother” is just as loyal to the older head of a rival gang. Although these men are adversaries, they uphold the same seniority code.

Mak-dong’s fellow junior gangsters are ineffectual louts. The parallel with Mak-dong’s biological family is unmissable: the gangsters also are called “brothers.” Mak-dong outperforms his fellows, as “Older Brother” recognizes. Yet he remains at the bottom of the pecking order. The gang is hardly a meritocracy. Only the boss’s intercession saves Mak-dong from suffering more abuse than he does.

And Mi-ae? Behave how she will – whether she obeys or throws tantrums – she’ll always be the “kept” woman. That’s her fixed place.

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As a genre specimen, Green Fish exhibits the common tropes: police corruption; assassinations; the “kept” woman’s daliance with a subordinate member of the gang.

But these are just pegs from which to suspend the individual scenes. And these, often, are glorious.

(1) Mak-dong’s early encounter with the ruffians has a surprising, satisfying logic of reversal and counter-reversal.

(2) Mi-ae lets go of a scarf. It flutters from her train window and lands on Mak-dong’s adoring face.

(3) Restaurant patrons discuss whether to order the dog soup or the chicken soup. They agree on the chicken and then join the cooks in chasing the condemned bird around the yard.

(4) The egg vendor is pulled over, bribes the police, is cheated, and chases the police in turn.

(A persistent theme is contempt for official authority. All of the police are corrupt or weak. Mak-dong’s policeman brother prefers to describe himself as a public servant; thrown out of a restaurant, he makes no appeal to his badge. Mak-dong, as a soldier, receives no respect from civilians. Is this because every man must take his turn in the armed forces? Or must every man take a turn because soldiering is disdained?)

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I was hooked from the opening credits, which are set against lovely old photographs of Mak-dong and his family in the countryside.

An early scene (below): Mak-dong the ex-soldier comes home. See how indifferently he walks past another fight. (Fights seem very common.) You can get a sense of the movie’s soapish/​noirish music. The mood is of a defeat.

Which, for many rural citizens, was what Korea’s new industrial prosperity was.

Chicken tikka masala

Samuel’s options for school lunch:

• chicken tikka masala
or
• hot dog

He eats the hot dog.

It’s years away, but … should he ever wish to enroll in the high school’s International Baccalaureate program, he’ll have to start choosing the chicken tikka masala. (Surely, its presence on the menu is a sorting device.)

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His teacher has given him a daily homework assignment: twenty minutes’ reading.

We let him choose what to read the first day. During the allotted time, he took up books randomly and flipped through the pages.

Since then, I’ve been forcing him to read the Babar series. In order. After twenty minutes, he puts his bookmark in the omnibus and goes off to play, and we all sigh with relief.

Do you like Babar, I ask him.

No, he says.

Well, stick with it.

He usually reads out loud. Karin, who wasn’t raised on Babar, casts funny glances whenever she hears references to cannibals (for instance).

I give Samuel his Sundays off.

Sexy beast

R.I.P. Terence Stamp, of The Limey (1999). In his honor – more or less – I’m watching another fine movie about aging, expatriated, English gangsters: Jonathan Glazer’s Sexy Beast (2000), starring Ray Winstone and Ben Kingsley (not Terence Stamp). I don’t know why it’s called “Sexy Beast.” This is my third viewing. Once each decade is about right. Winstone is Gal, a genial gangster who has retired with his woman to a villa in Spain. He stretches out beside his pool, drinks his beer, and roasts. Or he potters around the countryside with another retiree and an errand-boy, shooting at rabbits. It’s a good life. There’s the occasional hiccup. A boulder rolls down a hill, almost kills Gal, and wrecks the bottom of his pool. Worse, Don – Kingsley – arrives from England to browbeat Gal into going back for a final robbery. (Gal is a safecracker or some such technician – I don’t quite remember; I haven’t reached the “heist” scene yet; I watch in installments, late at night.) Don is a honey badger. Or a demon. Gal dreams about Satan the night he finds out that Don is coming to Spain. The longest section of the movie shows Gal enduring Don’s relentless abuse. You’d think this would make for lousy viewing, but it doesn’t. Everything about this movie is entertaining. It wouldn’t be so much fun set in a dark den in East London, but this is Spain, specifically the sunlit, garish, hallucinatory, Mediterranean coast: the backdrop for such varied screen oddities as Morvern Callar and Benidorm: where pasty Britons flock to party or lie low or simply turn beet-red. That Gal has opted for the good life is an affront to Don’s frenetic code. It’s amusing that someone as nasty as Don should follow a code; but, does he ever.