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 eyewitness 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 the same 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-two years.

He can count much higher than twenty-two, 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-two 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 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 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.)

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

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.

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!

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

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.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

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.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

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 contributed to the overall mildness of 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:

“A Hidden Measure in the Republican Budget Bill Would Crown Trump King”
(Robert Reich, in The Guardian)

… 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.)