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1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 89: Sense and sensibility

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of even a few female relations, who marries into a family in which females preponderate, will be exposed to screen adaptations of Jane Austen’s novels until his conscience compels him to read the source material.

I just read Sense and Sensibility (the working title of which was Elinor and Marianne), and I’m within a hundred pages of finishing Pride and Prejudice. This is a good time to reflect again on Austen.

(See this earlier review of Pride and Prejudice.)

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The movie Sense and Sensibility (1995) clocks in at a mere two hours and sixteen minutes. Necessarily, the story it tells is an abridgment.

Mrs. Dashwood (Gemma Jones) is widowed. Her daughters, Elinor (Emma Thompson) and Marianne (Kate Winslet), are left virtually penniless while their older half-brother, John (James Fleet), inherits everything. (A third and much younger sister, Margaret, is an amusing background presence but adds little to the story.) Mercifully, Sir John Middleton, a distant relation, invites the Dashwood women to live in the spare cottage on his Devon estate. There they decamp, but not before Elinor has grown attached to the brother-in-law of her half-brother: Edward Ferrars (Hugh Grant). Edward is much kinder than John Dashwood’s dreadful wife – his sister – but he is painfully awkward: when he makes social calls, he blushes and stammers, and he struggles to cross the room and to put his bottom into his chair.

The Dashwoods are welcomed to Devon by their boisterous relation, Sir John (Robert Hardy); and by Sir John’s mother-in-law, Mrs. Jennings (played with gusto by Elizabeth Spriggs), who relishes matchmaking. Soon, Marianne has two suitors: middle-aged Colonel Brandon (Alan Rickman); and dashing young Willoughby (Greg Wise), with whom she falls in love. But, to the Dashwoods’ confoundment, Marianne is “ghosted” by Willoughby and Elinor by Edward. Marianne breaks down and almost dies; Elinor bears her own grief stoically but is tormented by devious Miss Lucy Steele (Imogen Stubbs), Edward’s old flame. The main theme of the story is the contrast between Marianne’s self-destructive passion and Elinor’s dutiful restraint. Because there is little doubt as to which husbands Marianne and Elinor ultimately will be paired with, the story’s interest lies in the moral scrutiny to which each party is subjected.

I say this is the story’s interest; the movie’s lies in what each actor chooses to do with this old material. Rickman, especially, delivers his lines with hammy verve. Winslet, whose Marianne strives to maintain high-flown ideals, paradoxically gives the least affected performance: her cry of relief when she sees Willoughby across a London dancefloor is endearing and pitiful. Thompson, meanwhile, projects exquisite, quiet suffering. It’s lovely when, at the movie’s conclusion, Elinor’s reserve is shattered.

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One episode in the book that the movie surprisingly omits is a duel between Willoughby and Colonel Brandon. (“He [dueled] to defend: I to punish,” the Colonel explains.) Neither man is wounded, and the book dispenses with the matter in a few lines. It spends more time on caddish Willoughby’s (not entirely uncreditable) self-justification. Bizarrely, the movie’s nearest thing to a defense of Willoughby is spoken by Colonel Brandon, whose magnanimity is thereby exalted further. (An unprejudiced viewer might suspect that Willoughby isn’t getting a fair shake.)

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Some minor characters are excised from the screen: Sir John Middleton’s wife, who, in the novel, combines flawless manners with an utter lack of interest in humans other than her children; and Miss Anne Steele, Miss Lucy Steele’s elder sister, a gossiping nitwit.

Thus, the movie leaves us thinking of old Mrs. Jennings as little more than a gossiping busybody. Her kindness and good sense aren’t hidden, but they’re less conspicuous due to the absence of the book’s more injurious gossip, Miss Anne Steele. And it’s harder, once we’re deprived of the sedate, self-absorbed Mrs. Middleton, to notice that Sir John’s helpfulness springs from a keen curiosity about his fellow creatures. Take away just a few minor characters, and the others are impoverished.

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Why look to Austen for moral insight today, now that – in theory, at least – we no longer venerate the aristocracy? Do we care so much about her implicit criticisms of that bygone society? No; what affect us are her descriptions of timeless differences between individuals.

For Austen, each person may fit into a slightly different place in the social hierarchy, but the crucial moral ingredient is character. (And if character isn’t determined by position, neither is it a matter of choice; if we’re to believe Mr. Darcy’s old housekeeper in Pride and Prejudice, it’s settled in infancy.) Even so, intrinsic worth of character is judged comparatively, each person against other members of the same family or class. Elinor may be considered on her own; but, for Austen, what really tells is how she compares against Marianne. Similarly, we know that Edward is almost saintly, not because he’s flawless but because his mother and siblings are so awful. Even the conniving Miss Lucy Steele is shown to be worthy when measured against her sister. (Analogous things could be said about many of the figures in Pride and Prejudice; I haven’t read the other novels.)

Austen’s reformist point, then, is that a person is not to be judged by whether he or she comes from a distinguished family or class; social background doesn’t constitute virtue but merely supplies a context for discerning it. The book begins:
The family of Dashwood had long been settled in Sussex. Their estate was large, and their residence was at Norland Park, in the centre of their property, where, for many generations, they had lived in so respectable a manner as to engage the general good opinion of their surrounding acquaintance.
It’s this “general good opinion” attaching to certain families, so coveted in her day, that Austen seeks not to falsify so much as to banish as irrelevant. Why praise the Dashwood family when John Dashwood is far less admirable than Marianne, and Marianne is not as wise as Elinor?

Here love dies

This is the abstract of an article in the most recent issue of the premier journal for the philosophy of religion:
THE AI ENSOULMENT HYPOTHESIS
According to the AI ensoulment hypothesis, some future AI systems will be endowed with immaterial souls. I argue that we should have at least a middling credence in the AI ensoulment hypothesis, conditional on our eventual creation of AGI and the truth of substance dualism in the human case. I offer two arguments. The first relies on an analogy between aliens and AI. The second rests on the conjecture that ensoulment occurs whenever a physical system is “fit to possess” a soul, where very roughly this amounts to being physically structured in such a way that the system can meaningfully cooperate with the operations of the soul.
This inquiry appeals to me not one whit. It might initiate a nice little debate in Faith and Philosophy, though.

Funny thing is, were this in a journal for cognitive or technological studies, the philosophy of mind, metaphysics, or general philosophy, the inquiry still wouldn’t appeal to me, but I wouldn’t be annoyed.

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These are the first two paragraphs of Brideshead Revisited:
When I reached “C” company lines, which were at the top of the hill, I paused and looked back at the camp, just coming into full view below me through the gray mist of early morning. We were leaving that day. When we marched in, three months before, the place was under snow; now the first leaves of spring were unfolding. I had reflected then that, whatever scenes of desolation lay ahead of us, I never feared one more brutal than this, and I reflected now that it had no single happy memory for me.

Here love had died between me and the army.
Here love dies between me and the journal Faith and Philosophy.

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P.S. On the plus side, this book review appears in the same issue.

“Engagement”

This is nicely put by Marco, who was a few years ahead of me at school.


It’s Cunningham’s “Law” (somebody comments). Wikipedia:
[Ward] Cunningham is credited with the idea: “The best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question; it’s to post the wrong answer.” This refers to the observation that people are quicker to correct a wrong answer than to answer an unanswered question.
It’s (kind of?) interesting to ponder the ethics of asserting a falsehood in order to elicit the truth. Lying is wrong. But, plausibly, there are exceptions (e.g., to keep persecutors from finding their murder victims). What about the following case? A lie sparks crowd-sourced inquiry and, thereby, is predictably truth-conducive in the long run. (Ditto for other kinds of dishonesty.)

And mightn’t it matter in what institutional setting the lie is asserted? Police interrogators lie to elicit the truth, with society’s blessing. And if I publish an academic paper that asserts a thesis that’s almost certainly false – so that other scholars in this publish-or-perish economy are spurred to publish rebuttals explaining why the thesis is false – am I doing a bad thing? Don’t I advance respectable epistemic goals? (And is it so terrible if I elicit the truth in this manner for non-epistemic reasons: to get hired, promoted, grant-funded, etc. – i.e., for money – so that I can feed my children and mentor college students, who are as innocent as babes?)

But I see what Marco means. I do encounter the sort of thing he describes. I found a particularly shameless example tonight.


Most of the commenters are like, What happened to the state of New York? The Ivy League is dumb.

They made some troll richer by commenting, is what happened.

A sad realization for the boys

Out strolling, the boys didn’t want to go home just yet, so they begged to go to Kroger. “There isn’t much food there anymore,” I told them. (The store’s final closure is scheduled for this evening.)

They begged to go anyway.

So, we walked up and down the all-but-empty aisles. The boys were shocked. Samuel cried all the way home.

“I’ll only drink water now,” he said.

“Why, Sammy?”

“Because Kroger is closing forever.”

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A few remarks about my other sons, so as to be fair to all.

Daniel was treated to another solo outing (that is, without his brothers). Here he is at the zoo, with his Grandpa Scott. Notice how he’s leashed.


Abel has learned to scoot forward on his belly. When not impeded, he beelines for the cats’ plates. He overturns them and licks the pellet-food.

Today he seized the Trollope novel I was reading and tore its cover.

It was The Warden, which details the misdeeds of churchmen and reformers. A novel of enduring relevance.

I’d turned to it after reading Hatch’s Democratization of American Christianity (for the group).

(Jane Austen is a clergy critic, too.)


Body-text fonts, pt. 41: Aldus

If you’re an Irish novelist publishing a masterpiece, c. 2017–2018, chances are, it’ll be typeset with Hermann Zapf’s Aldus.

Exhibit A (Sally Rooney):


Exhibit B (Anna Burns):


Edoarda & Stephen have returned from Dublin, Aberdeen, and Shetland (where Edoarda took grant-funded knitting lessons). I told Stephen I wanted a tree from Shetland; failing that, a jar of jellied eels, although that’s more of a Londoners’ food; failing that, a tabloid. Stephen found no trees, eels, or tabloids on Shetland. He did bring the July 4 issue of the Shetland Times. Front-page news: “Ponies Draw Crowds from Afar”; “Council Spends £2.4m on Agency Staff for Ferries.” The body text (Miller) is the smallest I’ve seen in any newspaper.

Screwball

I took time off from Tubi murder shows to watch Cannes-/​BAFTA-/​Oscar-crowned Anora. It earned its hype, and then some.

What was the last screwball comedy to win it big? It Happened One Night (1934)?

Another instructive comparison is with Cronenberg’s too-serious Eastern Promises, which also is populated with (less believable) Russians in a Western metropolis. Anora, too, changes gears during a remarkable “fight” scene, albeit one with less lethality and nudity (although Anora is not bereft of nudity). Anora’s “fight” scene is not so different from Viggo Mortensen’s showpiece sauna tiff with Russian gangsters – but it’s hilariously dragged out. Over days. In mansions, clubs, restaurants, private jets, and courtrooms. (Re: anarchic luxury travel and divorce court: see Preston Sturges.)

Mikey Madison is the first Gen-Z Oscar winner. I kept thinking: Kids these days! – absolute savages. But I cheered for her title character, more than for anybody in a while.

Of chainsaws

It’s Prime Day, Prime Day
Gotta get down on Prime Day

Karin bought herself a chainsaw. It arrived a few hours ago and I haven’t seen her since. I wonder what she’s doing with it, out in the yard (rumble, rumble).


I finished re-reading Out of the Silent Planet. I read from this handsome omnibus edition published by Scribner.

I have two complaints about this edition.

(1) The text isn’t always transcribed correctly:
  • some paragraphs aren’t indented
  • terminal possessive apostrophes are written with double quote marks, as in: suns” blood

This must have been due to a “find-and-replace” error.

(Earlier U.S. editions of OSP follow British convention. They use single quote marks to indicate dialog. Scribner must have decided to replace these marks with double quote marks.

Nothing wrong with that. But it seems to have been done in one fell swoop, sans proofreading.)

The error mars this three-book omnibus edition and various single-book editions of OSP issued by Scribner.

I don’t expect to find this problem in Scribner’s editions of Perelandra and That Hideous Strength. Earlier U.S. editions of those books, e.g. those of Macmillan and Collier, already USify the dialog, enclosing it within double quote marks.

(2) My second complaint is that the omnibus lacks the first thirty pages of Perelandra.

Maybe that’s just my copy. Probably not.


I noted, previously, that the baddie, Weston, is a longtermist. He thinks that humans’ most important task – which they should try to fulfill no matter how high the cost – is to colonize other planets before their own planet becomes uninhabitable and humankind dies out.

I wonder, did Elon Musk ever read Out of the Silent Planet?

Should we require all of our governmental officials to read it?

July’s poem

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯
Yankee Doodle went to town
A-riding on a pony
Stuck a feather in his cap
And called it macaroni

Yankee Doodle, keep it up
Yankee Doodle dandy
Mind the music and the step
And with the girls be handy

Father and I went down to camp
Along with Captain Gooding
And there we saw the men and boys
As thick as hasty pudding

Yankee Doodle, keep it up
Yankee Doodle dandy
Mind the music and the step
And with the girls be handy

And there we saw a thousand men
As rich as Squire David
And what they wasted every day
I wish it could be savèd

Yankee Doodle, keep it up
Yankee Doodle dandy
Mind the music and the step
And with the girls be handy

The ’lasses they eat every day
Would keep a house a winter
They have so much, that I’ll be bound
They eat when they’ve a mind to

Yankee Doodle, keep it up
Yankee Doodle dandy
Mind the music and the step
And with the girls be handy

And there I see a swamping gun
Large as a log of maple
Upon a deucèd little cart
A load for Father’s cattle

Yankee Doodle, keep it up
Yankee Doodle dandy
Mind the music and the step
And with the girls be handy

And every time they shoot it off
It takes a horn of powder
And makes a noise like Father’s gun
Only a ’nation louder

Yankee Doodle, keep it up
Yankee Doodle dandy
Mind the music and the step
And with the girls be handy

I went as nigh to one myself
As Siah’s under-pinning
And Father went as nigh again
I thought the deuce was in him

Yankee Doodle, keep it up
Yankee Doodle dandy
Mind the music and the step
And with the girls be handy

Cousin Simon grew so bold
I thought he would have cock’d it
It scar’d me so I shrink’d it off
And hung by Father’s pocket

Yankee Doodle, keep it up
Yankee Doodle dandy
Mind the music and the step
And with the girls be handy

And Cap’n Davis had a gun
He kind of clapt ’s hand on’t
And stuck a crooked stabbing iron
Upon the little end on’t

Yankee Doodle, keep it up
Yankee Doodle dandy
Mind the music and the step
And with the girls be handy

And there I see a pumpkin shell
As big as mother’s basin
And every time they touch’d it off
They scampered like the ’nation

Yankee Doodle, keep it up
Yankee Doodle dandy
Mind the music and the step
And with the girls be handy

I see a little barrel too
The heads were made of leather
They knock’d on it with little clubs
And call’d the folks together

Yankee Doodle, keep it up
Yankee Doodle dandy
Mind the music and the step
And with the girls be handy

And there was Cap’n Washington
And gentle folks about him
They say he’s grown so ’tarnal proud
He will not ride without ’em

Yankee Doodle, keep it up
Yankee Doodle dandy
Mind the music and the step
And with the girls be handy

He got him on his meeting clothes
Upon a slapping stallion
He sat the world along in rows
In hundreds and in millions

Yankee Doodle, keep it up
Yankee Doodle dandy
Mind the music and the step
And with the girls be handy

The flaming ribbons in his hat
They look’d so tearing fine, ah
I wanted dreadfully to get
To give to my Jemima

Yankee Doodle, keep it up
Yankee Doodle dandy
Mind the music and the step
And with the girls be handy

I see another snarl of men
A-digging graves, they told me
So ’tarnal long, so ’tarnal deep
They ’tended they should hold me

Yankee Doodle, keep it up
Yankee Doodle dandy
Mind the music and the step
And with the girls be handy

It scar’d me so, I hook’d it off
Nor stopp’d, as I remember
Nor turn’d about till I got home
Lock’d up in mother’s chamber

Yankee Doodle, keep it up
Yankee Doodle dandy
Mind the music and the step
And with the girls be handy
⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

Transcribed, accurately, more or less, from Wikipedia; resembles this version, more or less.

Independence weekend

It was our most traditional July 4 in who knows how many years. The people next door fed us hot dogs, ribs, and chicken. Then they launched fireworks. The whole neighborhood put on quite a show. Samuel and Daniel twirled sparklers. Samuel dropped his, stepped on it, and burned his foot. What an ordeal that was.

No one displayed much patriotism. The neighbors told me they expect violent upheaval, sooner or later. So, their mood was: It’s party time!

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Today we saw my cousin Matthew and his family. They’re visiting from Montana.

Matthew works in academic support at a small university campus. He worries that his job’ll get DOGE-ed out of existence (or whatever the local equivalent of getting DOGE-ed is).

Not that things are better here: Indiana has passed legislation that’ll axe hundreds of public academic programs.

(See this Forbes report [of limited free access]. And see this list of items for the chopping block.)

Anyway, perhaps Matthew, like me, has caught the apocalypticism bug, because he agreed to read Late Victorian Holocausts with me when the schedule permits. It’s nice when readers of this blog say they want to read things with me.

Here comes the tooth

For Abel:


Karin took Daniel to the county fair.


I was very worried. I thought he’d run away or climb out of the Ferris wheel. He didn’t.

I visited ancestors with Abel and Samuel. Samuel doesn’t like the fair.

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I’m reading Pride and Prejudice.

I’m re-reading Lewis’s Space Trilogy (it’ll be my first time through Perelandra, actually). It’s better than I remember it. Then again, I was twelve or thirteen when I last read Out of the Silent Planet.

I’d forgotten that Weston, the baddie, is a longtermist.

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A good bit from a good Substack:
LARPing as an Inkling is at least 15% of the point of the classical education movement. I say this with only love in my heart.
Samuel: “Dad, what’s LARPing?”

John-Paul: “You don’t need to know, Son.”

1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 88: Insomnia

And this is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil.
(John 3:19)

I should admit, I fell asleep a few times while watching Insomnia. Not that it’s ever boring; I was just tired. Stellan Skarsgård’s portrayal of an even wearier sinner is very entertaining. (The story was transplanted to Alaska five years later, in 2002, by Christopher Nolan, with Al Pacino in Skarsgård’s role; I prefer the Nordic version.)

Skarsgård is Engström, an accomplished Swedish homicide cop banished to Norway because of “improprieties” done with/to witnesses. He travels north of the Arctic Circle to investigate a young woman’s killing. He’s chronically sleepless, and the sun-pierced evenings don’t help; even so, he quickly figures out how to lure the killer into a trap. But during the “sting” the killer wounds a policeman and escapes into a dense fog. Engström pursues and shoots, killing a colleague by mistake.

He tells the other police that the killer fired the shot. Now the killer knows that he’s a killer.

He’s forced to truce with the killer, deceive his colleagues, and pin the blame on someone else.

Forced? Why not just tell his colleagues what really happened? It was an accident, after all. But Engström can no longer think of himself as not guilty. He knows his own depravity. In the Arctic, he continues – compulsively – to engage in the kind of “impropriety” that landed him in exile. And he habitually lies to cover his tracks.

All of this takes its toll. There’s a remarkable scene in which Engström waits near a busy sidewalk. Folk stare accusatorily as they pass by. Engström withers under their view. They’re all judging him. The judgment probably is all in his head. You’d think he was the crim, not the cop. When he meets the real crim, he can’t help looking away, can’t help shrinking, as if he were the guilty party.


It’s like a Poe story. The doubling. The paranoia. The sinning rushed into, to relieve the misery of previous sinning.

Decent people surround Engström. Vik, his southern colleague – the man he accidentally kills – offers wry, bleak comfort, even a sort of affection, while alive; in death, he appears in Engström’s daydreams, alarming but not unfriendly. Less disturbing, almost angelic, is a friendly and pretty hotel clerk; Engström makes a hash of that relationship, too. The local police conduct themselves with sympathy and professionalism. One of them, tasked with looking into Vik’s shooting, treats Engström curteously even as she notes inconsistencies in his statement. Engström can’t look her in the eye.


This isn’t a subtle movie. That’s all right. Sometimes, a glaring metaphor – in this case, harsh, inescapable daylight – is what’s required.

One more metaphor: a highway tunnel, the only truly dark place in the movie. This image is more enigmatic. What does it mean when Engström sees the light at the end of this tunnel? Significance aside, is he fit to drive?

The most dangerous college towns in the USA

Ithaca is no. 6. I used to hear rumors but never thought the town was that bad. I also used to see people getting arrested across the street from where I lived, but that was outside a bar and therefore to be expected. Besides, it was on the same corner where I once saw the Vienna Boys’ Choir climb into a bus. The Choir’s beatific presence brought an overall mildness to the place.

Gainesville is no. 1 in crime. Not too surprising. Now and then, I see Gainesville in crime documentaries. Gainesville even had its own “Ripper.”

I’m inordinately loyal to, even fond of, Bloomington (no. 10). I’ve never been there. Sometimes, I walk along its streets on Google. I hang out in Assembly Hall or outside Scott Russell Sanders’s house; I avoid notorious “Cutter” districts.

At this point, you’re probably asking what counts as a college town. Is Memphis a college town? Is St. Louis? They have universities and lots of crime. Albuquerque? Atlanta? Baltimore? Boston? Chicago? Los Angeles? New York? Philadelphia? Washington, D.C.?

Seattle? (Think: Bundy.) Salt Lake City? (Ditto.) Tallahassee? (Ditto.)

Is South Bend a college town? Maybe not, since Notre Dame is its own city. But see the murder-writings of Ralph McInerny (where there’s smoke, there’s fire). Or this sad movie.

According to the group that did the study,
a total of 26 U.S. college towns were selected based on the following criteria: The institution [the university] is a central feature of the city, meaning it materially influences local demographics and infrastructure.
Top- and bottom-ten lists don’t mean much in a field of just twenty-six.

R.I.P. Western Avenue Kroger

STORE CLOSING

(A sign posted at our Kroger.)

Shoppers are invited to use the “neighboring” branch, seven miles away, on Ireland Road.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Nearer to us, at a distance of just one mile, is the much “Guccier” Martin’s Super Market. It shouldn’t be too miserable to walk to, after the heat dome has dissipated.

(I walked to Martin’s and back, in the heat, on Sunday; and when I got home, I promptly fell asleep.)

But I don’t think I’ll often stroll to Martin’s with the children – not even in good weather. We’d have to scurry over busy Mayflower Road.

There’s a crosswalk, but cars aren’t meant to halt there. They just slow down. And not every time.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

I’ve almost finished reading Sense and Sensibility.

This is my favorite S&S cover painting. It adorns a Penguin Classic – but I’m reading from an old Modern Library omnibus.


A savage read!

Did you know that christianbook.com sells literary classics? (Only certain classics. Not, e.g., Sade or Céline. But still.)

I didn’t know, before today.

S&S is on sale now.

“NOW IS THE TIME FOR PEACE!”


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 shoppers slipped away without paying. Another shopper 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 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 he’s “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.

Body-text fonts, pt. 40: Van Dijck

“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?

Happy Father’s Day

… to all fathers; particularly:
  • mine own
  • mine by marriage (two living, one deceased)
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.

An entertaining draw

– 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.

Average (i.e., mean) scoreline involving Ecuador: Ecuador, 0.8125 goals; opponent, 0.3125 goals.

Average (i.e., mode) scoreline: 0–0.

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.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

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.

Don’t like how things are going? Vote.

June’s poem

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯
Little lamb, who made thee?
Dost thou know who made thee,
Gave thee life, and bid thee feed
By the stream and o’er the mead;
Gave thee clothing of delight,
Softest clothing, woolly, bright;
Gave thee such a tender voice,
Making all the vales rejoice?
Little lamb, who made thee?
Dost thou know who made thee?

Little lamb, I’ll tell thee;
Little lamb, I’ll tell thee:
He is callèd by thy name,
For He calls Himself a Lamb.
He is meek, and He is mild,
He became a little child.
I a child, and thou a lamb,
We are callèd by His name.
Little lamb, God bless thee!
Little lamb, God bless thee!
⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

(William Blake)

A drab draw

Ecuador 0, Brazil 0.


Ecuador and Paraguay – the second- and third-placed teams – have each scored just 13 goals in 15 matches.

Both teams could qualify for the World Cup on Tuesday, with two games to spare.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Re: South America. My reading group’s next book is this classic:


One group member already has pointed out this similarity:



♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Samuel, earlier this week: “I want to be rich.”

And tonight:

Samuel: “What is prosperity?”

Karin: “Having all you need, and more.”

Samuel: “I want prosperity.”

They grow up so quickly.

This blog entry is for Jesús

… the nurse who gives my children their shots.

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.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

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.

1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 87: Eye of God

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.)

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

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.

Were I a lawyer

… I might know what to think of terrifying essays like this one:


… which discusses the following measure in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA):
SEC. 70302. RESTRICTION OF FUNDS.

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?

R.I.P. Alasdair MacIntyre

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.)

A new sister for Peppa Pig

… 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.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Karin & I have been married for nine years. Today is our anniversary.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

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
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

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).

Good grief.

“You are the main trouble with this university”: body-text fonts, pt. 39: ITC Galliard

More Thurber (“University Days,” in My Life and Hard Times):


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.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

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.)

“Buck, your time has come”

From James Thurber, “More Alarms at Night,” in My Life and Hard Times:
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.
A textbook example of “gaslighting.”

Dandelions, again (redux)

I mowed on Saturday. The next morning, when we left for church, the dandelion stems already had perked up.

They were taller at lunchtime. By the day’s end, they were “in flower.”

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Happy birthday to Mary, my sister.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

This year, I’m reading all of Jane Austen’s novels: one chapter each day. It’s almost like reading a daily comic strip, the dosage is so small.

First novel: Sense & Sensibility. Poor, decrepit Colonel Brandon, on “the wrong side of thirty-five.” (Oh, to be thirty-five again.)

Good-night.

May’s poem

… 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.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

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.)

Dandelions, again

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.


My reading year has concluded

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.

1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 86: The sweet hereafter


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.