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.

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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 Sir Magnus in his wheelchair 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 little 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 propositional content 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.

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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.

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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.)

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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.

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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.

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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 around old friends. 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 the 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.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

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.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

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.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

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.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

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.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

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?)

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

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.)

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

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.

More mini-books

School goes smoothly enough for Samuel, who puts on a brave face but still has misgivings (as shown in the third photograph below).

To catch up on my reading, I continue to choose mini-books.

• Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Life Together. For the reading group. I’m also attempting the Ethics (delivered on my porch in an imperfectly sealed package, during a rainstorm).
• Maggie Nelson: Jane: A Murder. Poetry. An earlier treatment of the subject matter of The Red Parts (a memoir).
• Ditto: The Argonauts. A memoir of modern love. Scavanged at Goodwill with Jane: A Murder.
• Alexandra Elizabeth Sheedy (yes, that Ally Sheedy, aged approx. twelve): She Was Nice to Mice. Good Queen Bess’s private moments, as reported by eyewitnesses (palace vermin).
• Arthur Miller: The Crucible. Scavanged at Goodwill. I missed this high school staple when I was younger (I did read Death of a Salesman).

I’m also reading Wilder’s Our Town; later, I’ll read The Skin of Our Teeth and re-read The Matchmaker. These are collected in a single ordinary-sized volume and so don’t count as separate books, mini- or otherwise. But using plays for catching up is one of my better recent brainwaves.

“A monument of misplaced scholarship”

… is how a Guardian reviewer describes a new edition of the diaries of Cambridge don and “Pomp and Circumstance”/​“Land of Hope and Glory” lyricist A. C. Benson (1862–1925).

Having previewed the book on Amazon, I concur.

See, for instance, p. 267, n. 4 (the font is Fournier).

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Samuel will return to school this week. Tonight, he realized that he’ll go to school from August until June every year for the foreseeable future.

I told him I went to school for twenty-four years.

He can count much higher than twenty-four, and he can do other mathematical operations – he and Daniel made extraordinary progress this summer (his teacher will be shocked) – but, clearly, the concept of twenty-four years is beyond his reach.

The concept of an hour is barely within it.

He has the concept of living forever. He’s all for it. Like Wilbur the pig, he doesn’t want to die.

Body-text fonts, pt. 42: Monotype Garamond (or something close)

At the ripe old age of about sixty, Evelyn Waugh published A Little Learning, the first volume of his autobiography. It was his last book. Two years later, he died.

A Little Learning begins like this:

How’s that for eloquent weariness?

(There are Garamonds and Garamonds. I don’t know all of their histories. This is Monotype’s metal-type version or something close enough; the digitization is what everyone recognizes from Microsoft Word.)

Waugh’d be a challenge for me to read chronologically because I’ve gone through his early novels many times and his late works hardly at all. I’d have to make it past Brideshead and The Loved One to get to the really unfamiliar stuff. In the mid-1940s, Waugh began tackling a steeper grade than I’ve been able to climb at the breakneck pace he set in his comical works.

It’s better, perhaps, to try going backwards, to begin with sluggish, morbid despair and retrace the author’s path from initial breakneck hilarity (in its way, just as despairing).

Despair usually is a sin, but in Waugh’s case it may actually be a virtue.

Mansfield Park

This novel is more savage than its predecessors. Its matrons and widows are at least as pharisaical as those of Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice; its young gentlemen, at least as dissolute. In addition, the family’s fortune depends on volatile West Indian holdings. Will the slaves generate enough income to make up for the profligacy of the eldest son? And what will befall poor little Fanny Price, the household’s live-in cousin?

I don’t know how this story will turn out. For once, I’m in suspense.

The movie didn’t appear until 1999. I won’t be reviewing it for my “1996” series – at least, not for many years. (Recall that I’ve been casting a wider net, reviewing material that appeared from 1995 to 1997.)

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

I’m nine or so books behind my hoped-for reading pace. So, recently, I read two celebrated mini-books: Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These, about Ireland’s Magdalene laundries; and Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny, about Nazi Germany, the USSR, and Donald Trump.

You could argue that they’re basically the same book. To use jargon from my old job as a tutor in IUSB’s first-year writing program: the second book is a “theory” text, and the first is an “example” text; and a student who read both books could write a paper making plenty of connections between them (one connection per body paragraph, of course).

(I wonder how teachers of first-year English at IU are coping with A.I. Not too badly, I expect. The in-house rules for papers are so detailed and peculiar, the bots probably still haven’t learned how to follow them.)

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

This is Disney’s best song.

Abel has been standing up next to the furniture.

August’s poem

A favorite poem of Simone Weil’s: George Herbert’s “Love” (III).

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back,

Guiltie of lust and sinne.

But quick-eye’d Love, observing me grow slack

From my first entrance in,

Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning,

If I lack’d any thing.

A guest, I answer’d, worthy to be here:

Love said, You shall be he.

I the unkinde, ungratefull? Ah my deare,

I cannot look on thee.

Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,

Who made the eyes but I?

Truth Lord, but I have marr’d them: let my shame

Go where it doth deserve.

And know you not, sayes Love, who bore the blame?

My deare, then I will serve.

You must sit down, sayes Love, and taste my meat:

So I did sit and eat.

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

Abel has learned to crawl; the tops of his toes have calluses.

Auden’s syllabus

My Uncle John shared a syllabus for a course that W. H. Auden taught at the University of Michigan in the early 1940s. Auden assigned 6,000 pp. of reading, according to The Paris Review.

(I’m not sure if the estimate is for recommended and required reading, or just for the latter.)

The way to complete so much reading on time is to begin before the term. Like, in grammar school. I imagine Auden telling his students: “I’m sure you’ve already read two-thirds of this material.”

I try to read a lot, and not only fluff. But there are just three items on this syllabus that I’ve read from beginning to end. I’ll let you guess which they are. Two of them, I first read in grammar school.

What on earth have I been doing since then?

The Philadelphian writer Joe Queenan has a nice memoir of his reading life called One for the Books. He gets through plenty of books and speaks candidly of their lousiness. You can get an idea from this passage. (Read to the end for a tidbit about Winston Churchill.)

The font is Caslon no. 540, which I’ve discussed.

Later in the book, Queenan makes a disparaging remark about South Bend.

P.S. It seems that Alan Jacobs was the first person to blog about Auden’s syllabus. Today, Jacobs posted another good entry, about early cinema.

P.P.S. When I took A.P. English in high school, students were expected to read 700 pp. every 2 weeks to earn an “A”: not quite Auden’s pace, but not so, so far off it, either. I wouldn’t have come close if we hadn’t been allowed to accumulate pages during the summer and Christmas holidays. Even so, I resorted to dubious measures like counting blank pages and skipping ahead to pages with three or four lines of text – at the end of a chapter, for instance. (I found dozens of virtually text-free pages in my parents’ edition of Walden. I also used a very generously spaced edition of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner that contained hundreds of pages. That book was a godsend because we were allowed to count each poetry page as three pages.)

Darkness and stars at noon

The group is reading Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon (1940), “a book known to the world only in translation” for most of its existence (the German manuscript, which went missing in wartime, resurfaced in 2015). I’m reading the supposedly flawed translation by Daphne Hardy that everyone used for decades. Does the novel deserve its lofty Modern Library ranking? Probably not, but it’s engrossing enough; and it’s not difficult to read, which is lucky because my household has been ill. (I should read more “secret agent” lit. Nothing is so glamorous-gloomy as sad-sacks slinking around European capitals.)

Probably a red herring: Denis Johnson wrote a 1986 novel called Stars at Noon about espionage/​political dissent in Nicaragua. It was moviefied in 2022 by Claire Denis, with a Tindersticks soundtrack and with Margaret Qualley and Joe Alwyn in disagreeable but involving lead roles (I’ve seen the movie, not read the book). Apart from (a) similar titles and (b) the themes of spying and revolution, there’s little to connect this story with Koestler’s. (Well, the movie and Koestler’s book do both feature a mephistophelean interrogator. He’s a Communist in Darkness and a CIA operative in Stars.)

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Martin’s Super Market sent this postcard to gloat about the demise of our local Kroger.

About eight years ago, Martin’s began shrinking its Portage Ave./​Elwood St. store, which served an even poorer neighborhood than our Kroger. It converted a grocery store into a mere meat market; then, in 2020, it closed the store altogether.

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 am 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.)

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

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. To Devon 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 his dreadful sister – John Dashwood’s wife – but, due to cinematic embellishment, 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. Marianne soon acquires two suitors: middle-aged Colonel Brandon (Alan Rickman), as well as 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 grief stoically but is tormented by the 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 does 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 projects exquisite, quiet suffering: it’s lovely when, at the movie’s conclusion, Elinor’s reserve is shattered.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

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 underscored. (An unprejudiced viewer might suspect that Willoughby isn’t getting a fair shake.)

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

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.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

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 detectable in infants.) Character’s worth is intrinsic, but it’s to be judged comparatively, each person against other members of the same family or class. Elinor (for instance) may initially be considered on her own; but, for Austen, what finally tells is how she compares against Marianne. Similarly, we know that Edward is almost saintly, not because he always does what’s right but because his mother and siblings are so deficient in habitual basic decency. 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 acquaintances.

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 good than Marianne, and Marianne far less wise than 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.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

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.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

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. (Ditto for other kinds of dishonesty.) But, plausibly, there are exceptions (e.g., to keep persecutors from tracking down their victims). What about the following case? A lie sparks crowd-sourced inquiry and, thereby, is predictably truth-conducive in the long run.

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 were 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.”

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

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.