Inflation; remembering the Holocaust; I am a V.I.P.

Karin went to the grocery store. A man in the bread aisle turned to her.

Man: “It’s all so damn expensive!”

Karin: “It’s pretty bad.”

“This is my first time shopping in ten years!”

“It must be bad.”

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

As I type, I am listening to a long phone message from the local superindentent of schools urging us all to think about the Holocaust. Appropriately, my mother-in-law just returned my copy of Maus. I’d lent it to her to read to her current foster son, a highschooler whose plan of care includes being read to. He’d been objecting, reasonably enough, to the children’s books my mother-in-law had been reading to him. I suggested Maus. He liked it at first but later refused to sit next to my mother-in-law to look at the pictures. “And it’s pointless to read a graphic novel to someone who won’t look at the pictures,” my mother-in-law explained.

Some future Holocaust reading (for me):

Our Nazi (reviewed here).

Diaries of Victor Klemperer (hat tip: my cousin-in-law Peter and his Facebook friends).

Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism (this has been scheduled by my reading group).

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Samuel chose me to accompany him to today’s “V.I.P. breakfast” at his school. The scholars ate fruit and cheese. The grownups had coffee and donuts. They sat at cafeteria tables with their children. I stood while Samuel ran laps around me. “Take me to your friends,” I told him. He’d guide me within five feet of this or that child. Then he’d laugh and run away. I couldn’t always tell whether the child was his classmate.

A few parents introduced themselves. “My child often talks about Sammy,” they’d say. Most parents just looked at us as if we were deranged.

One child (not acquainted with Samuel, apparently) had smuggled Lego bricks into the cafeteria. Samuel kept trying to run away to play with those toys. The mother covered the Lego bricks with a jacket. Samuel lifted the jacket to get to the Lego bricks. I dragged him to the picture-taking area. We posed with an inflatable donut. Samuel took me to his classroom. His teacher put him right to work, and I went home.

Behold him watching football, earlier this week, with his abuelos and his Grandaunt Linda (a rabid Chiefs fan).

1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 83: Pride and prejudice

Karin wanted to sit through this BBC miniseries – one of her staples – while on (unpaid) maternity leave. So we did. It was my second viewing. I enjoyed it better this time, probably because we watched 50, not 150, minutes each night.

As you’d expect, the dialog is witty, and there’s lovely scenery, architecture, costuming, etc. But it’s the reaction shots that distinguish this production. Whenever some fool runs his or her mouth, Miss Elizabeth Bennet (Jennifer Ehle) and Mr Fitzwilliam Darcy (Colin Firth) cast exquisitely disparaging looks: Lizzy’s, half-pained, half-amused; Darcy’s, woeful. (Firth, who is always turning to the wall, seems physically ill in two-thirds of his scenes.) Other superior persons – notably, old Mr Bennet (Benjamin Whitrow) and Miss Caroline Bingley (Anna Chancellor, a.k.a. “Duckface”) – are more overtly contemptuous. As for the fools that these higher beings must endure: Mrs Bennet (Alison Steadman) and Mr Collins (David Bamber) are too ridiculous for my taste, but Miss Lydia Bennet (Julia Sawalha) is superb; she isn’t stupid so much as lively, ignorant, and selfish. (I knew a girl at school who looked and acted like Lydia. She was amusing – and rather a dear – at arm’s length; her closer associates suffered. Happily, she did grow up.)

I needn’t rehash the plot of Pride and Prejudice. The themes are matchmaking and, especially, money.

“How long have you loved him?”

“Well, it’s been coming on so gradually, I hardly know. But I believe I must date it from my first seeing his beautiful grounds at Pemberley.”

As for the actors, it might be useful to list some of their other notable performances.

(1) Julia Sawalha (Miss Lydia Bennet): A Midwinter’s Tale, reviewed by me. She’s just as lively in that movie. She has kept on getting parts, but I know of nothing comparable to her mid-nineties work. Her looks haven’t deserted her. Her youthfulness has.

(2) Susannah Harker (Miss Jane Bennet): Midsomer Murders, s12e02, “The Black Book.” The most intriguing murder suspect in that hilarious episode.

(3) Barbara Leigh Hunt (Lady Catherine de Bourgh). Strangled in Alfred Hitchcock’s Frenzy.

(4) Adrian Lukis (Mr Wickham): Blair Toast, Stephen Toast’s insufferable military brother, in Toast of London.

(5) Emilia Fox (Miss Giorgiana Darcy), of the prolific Fox family. Kind-faced, handsome, unremarkable. Such actors are necessary. Typical work: the everlasting autopsy/⁠forensics drama, Silent Witness. Atypical work: Cashback, as a supermarket checkout girl. Most effective work: as one of the blondes in Roman Polanski’s Pianist.

(6) David Bamber (Mr Collins). He is in absolutely everything. My choice is his turn as a harried piano teacher/⁠road accident victim in the miniseries Collision.

(7) “Duckface” (Miss Caroline Bingley): Four Weddings, of course. Honorable mention: Ken Stott’s love interest in the lurid crime series The Vice.

The best tribute to this Pride and Prejudice is this YouTuber’s, who re-enacted it by himself.

I am reminded of Snoopy’s unabridged sock-puppet show of War and Peace, which goes on for days and is viewed, in its entirety, only by Linus.

Correction (29 Jan): Lucy. Give her her due!

Names on the land

(Titled after this book.)

By now you’ve probably heard of President Trump’s orders to rename Mt. Denali “Mt. McKinley” and the Gulf of Mexico “Gulf of America.”

Genius!

He could have done better, though. How about “Mt. ExxonMobil McKinley?” “Gulf Oil Gulf of America?” Or, concessively, “Gulf MX Gulf of America?” For, say, twenty years, with renewal options?

I’ve been looking at maps of various countries’ administrative divisions, translated literally. Here’s Argentina – omitting the Malvinas and the Antarctic claim – with provincial names in English.

(Click to enlarge.)

The provinces’ actual names:

Etymology is fascinating. Did you know that “Mendoza” (cold mountain) is from the Basque language? That the origin and meaning of “Córdoba” are uncertain? (The above translation is just somebody’s guess.)

You may have known that “Formosa” means beautiful. Q: Beautiful, how? A: Shapely.

As for “La Rioja,” it’s not riverland, exactly; the name is for a place in Spain, which is named for the Río Oja. Or maybe it’s for the wine.

Can you feel it

No school for Samuel: MLK Jr. Day, then two “snow days” (temps below zero °F). And he has a stomach bug. He’s lain on the sofa, except to puke. It’s been our day’s work to keep Daniel from harassing him.

During one glorious moment, Samuel ran to the toilet to puke, but Daniel was sitting there already, doing his business, so Samuel puked on Daniel. I was so proud of them both for going where they were supposed to go. We tossed Daniel into the shower.

Abel has done some puking, but that’s normal.

More about the weather. I’ve made a list of books about natural/​ecological disasters, for this coming reading year (it begins in May). One book per month. Some, I’ve already read portions of. The list also is inspired by the SoCal fires.

• Maclean, Young Men and Fire
• Stewart, Storm
• Egan, The Worst Hard Time
• Hughes, In Hazard
• Steinberg, Acts of God
• Krakauer, Into Thin Air
• Grunwald, The Swamp
• Stewart, Fire
• Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts
• Hughes, A High Wind in Jamaica
• Jacobsen, Nuclear War
• Weisman, The World Without Us

This is a manly list. The only woman on it is Jacobsen. Then again, these last couple of years I’ve read the “Little House” books, which feature fire, blizzards, locusts, and tornadoes; Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God; and short disasterpieces by Didion.

One might complain that some of these disasters aren’t so “natural,” that humans are to blame for them. I agree. So would van Inwagen, who minimizes the distinction between natural and freely chosen evil. And so would various authors on the list (especially, I gather, Steinberg and Davis). But the point isn’t to allocate responsibility; it’s to imagine stuff and people getting burned up, or blown or washed away. There’s grandeur and pathos in these disasters. My former tutee at IUSB, an old Black woman, recalled how a tornado hit South Bend and she and the other children were dismissed from school to go die at home. They ran to their houses, into the wind. That’s like something out of Their Eyes Were Watching God, a colleague said, not a little incredulously, when I told him. Yes, exactly.

Body-text fonts, pt. 35: Monotype Baskerville

After three phone calls to city officials, a heavy snowfall, a thaw, and another freeze, the unhappy (or happy?) cat remains in a cardboard box outside our house. We removed it from our curb. The house across the street is for sale, and we don’t want to deter prospective buyers.

Reader, come, buy this house and be my friend.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

I’ve reached the eighth of nine scheduled books by E. M. Forster:

• Where Angels Fear to Tread
• The Longest Journey
• A Room with a View
• Howards End
• The Celestial Omnibus
• Maurice
• A Passage to India
• Aspects of the Novel
• The Eternal Moment

These will be enough for now. Someday, I may read Arbinger Harvest and Two Cheers for Democracy.

It hasn’t been an unpleasant project. And yet Forster has slipped into the perhaps unenviable category inhabited by Stephen King and David Lodge, of novelists whose discourses on the novel are more pleasurable than their novels. There’s some delightful stuff in Aspects, not least the quotations. This one, from Moll Flanders, has me itching to read that book.

Aspects’s above edition (Pelican/​Penguin) can be read here; a PDF with Aspects’s original pagination is here.

A chilly death

A snowy week. Some days have been frigid. But in the “Little House” books the prairie settlers do just fine at 20-below (°F). It’s at 40-below that they have trouble. Today I wore shorts to take Samuel to his bus stop. It was 5 °F. The bus was 10 minutes late. I barely felt the cold (there wasn’t much wind). Samuel and I joked around: I sang, he punched. On the way back to the house I passed the cardboard box containing the frozen cat I’d put out by the curb, on Monday. Karin found the corpse in our shed. The Animal Resource Center promised to pick it up but never did. It’s no longer so distressing. The cat is under a blanket of snow. I know to look for a single paw that sticks out of the box; that’s how I can tell the cat is still there. Children pass it trudging to and from school. Sorry about this bummer of an entry.

A lifestyle change

A TikTok for the plus-sized. (Hat tip: Karin.)

This reaches deep into my psyche. I often dream that I’m searching the nooks of shopping malls for neglected fast food restaurants. (For more on shopping malls, see John Collier, “Evening Primrose.”)

🥨 🥨 🥨 🥨 🥨

The alluded-to lifestyle change is this: We’re placing our televisions under lock and key, away from our children.

’Bout time, I can hear you all murmuring.

No longer will I regularly watch TV with my wife, which I love to do. I’ll still view Hoopla and Kanopy and Tubi on my laptop. For special occasions (e.g., the World Cup), a television will be wheeled out for us all to view together.

The hoped-for gain is a reversal – or, at least, a slowing down – of our children’s barbarism. Daniel, especially, has been behaving like the titular character in the movie Bronson. This may be due to the arrival of his new brother, or it may be due to an excess of TV (or both). I’ll begin by trying to cut out TV.

Out, not down, because over time the safeguards have been eroded and the children’s dependency has become acute.

When Samuel was littler, I’d carefully restrict his viewing time. I believe what he viewed did him some good. He’d watch phonics videos; lo and behold, he learned to read. Other videos taught him countries, states, and capitals. A couple of years ago, he knew the names and nationalities of most of Brighton & Hove Albion’s soccer players – from viewing TV.

Then his preferences narrowed. He got hung up on the brands and models of motorcars, and then on Lego-building videos. Nothing wrong with those interests, but they crowded out the rest.

Daniel quickly learned the planets and dwarf planets … and, more than a year later, he still solemnly recites the planets and dwarf planets, and the numbers from one to ten. More than Samuel, he is drawn to purely sensory pleasure. Again: not bad in itself, but potentially limiting.

But much worse is how he behaves when he doesn’t get his “fix.” (Samuel, too.)

I hate to cut them off. Samuel has just gotten very interested in one of my childhood favorites, Captain Tsubasa (a.k.a. Supercampeones). (Or, to be precise, he is interested in its latest reboot, which has the same look and charm as the original.) He saves the show until night-time, along with certain snacks. Then he watches with utter emotional absorption. It’s as if he’s just now discovering TV as it’s meant to be consumed.

January’s poetry

… reminisces about the Trojan Horse.

I’ve begun watching The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, my first “real housewives”-type show. The religious angle picqued my interest. (The mountains are nice, too.)

So far, I’ve been struck by:

(a) The Jesus artwork in the McMansions.

(b) The very early marriages (late teens for the women). Performed in the Temple.

It’s hard to see how Mormonism or anything Christian has anything else to do with these people’s lives, even as a force to be reacted against. The characters make some half-baked references to resisting the patriarchy, but it’s clear that they just do whatever feels good at the time.

Or whatever makes money for them on TikTok.

Anyway, here is the poetry. The Greeks could have starred in one of these shows.

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

But Helen, child of Zeus, had other ideas.

She threw a drug into the wine bowl

They were drinking from, a drug

That stilled all pain, quieted all anger

And brought forgetfulness of every ill …

“… I couldn’t begin to tell you

All that Odysseus endured and accomplished,

But listen to what that hero did once

In the land of Troy, where the Achaeans suffered.

First, he beat himself up – gave himself some nasty bruises –

Then put on a cheap cloak so he looked like a slave,

And in this disguise he entered the wide streets

Of the enemy city. He looked like a beggar,

Far from what he was back in the Greek camp,

And fooled everyone when he entered Troy.

I alone recognized him in his disguise

And questioned him, but he cleverly put me off.

It was only after I had bathed him

And rubbed him down with oil and clothed him

And had sworn a great oath not to tell the Trojans

Who he really was until he got back to the ships,

That he told me, at last, what the Achaeans planned.

He killed many Trojans before he left

And arrived back at camp with much to report.

The other women in Troy wailed aloud,

But I was glad inside, for my heart had turned

Homeward, and I rued the infatuation

Aphrodite gave me when she led me away

From my native land, leaving my dear child,

My bridal chamber, and my husband,

A man who lacked nothing in wisdom or looks.”

And Menelaus, the red-haired king:

“A very good story, my wife, and well told.

By now I have come to know the minds

Of many heroes, and have traveled far and wide,

But I have never laid eyes on anyone

Who had an enduring heart like Odysseus.

Listen to what he did in the wooden horse,

Where all we Argive chiefs sat waiting

To bring slaughter and death to the Trojans.

You came there then, with godlike Deiphobus.

Some god who favored the Trojans

Must have lured you on. Three times you circled

Our hollow hiding place, feeling it

With your hands, and you called out the names

Of all the Argive leaders, making your voice

Sound like each of our wives’ in turn.

Diomedes and I, sitting in the middle

With Odysseus, heard you calling

And couldn’t take it. We were frantic

To come out, or answer you from inside,

But Odysseus held us back and stopped us.

Then everyone else stayed quiet also,

Except for Anticlus, who wanted to answer you,

But Odysseus saved us all by clamping

His strong hands over Anticlus’ mouth

And holding them there until Athena led you off.”

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

From the Odyssey, bk. 4, ll. 200–300 (approx.). Translated by Stanley Lombardo.

Some “life hacks”

(1) Stretch pants.

(2) Using the Internet to find out what’s avaliable at your local Half Price Books store.

This is harder than you might think.

The critical link:

https://www.hpb.com/search?q=&prefn1=instorePickUpAvailableStores&prefv1=HPB-131&prefn2=rareFind&prefv2=No&srule=recently-added&sz=80

Suppose that, at Christmastime, both sets of in-laws put gift cards for HPB in your stocking.

Rejoice! Be glad!

But also: How good is this “good” luck, really?

For it may be that you live in South Bend, on the West Side, and that HPB is in faraway Mishawaka (known, locally, as “BFE” or “near-BFE” [“E” is for east; “BF” is vulgar]). Who wants to trek out east twice in January to use both $5 discounts – each, activated by a separate $25 gift-card purchase – without prior knowledge of the inventory?

But HPB has online ordering!

Alas, it costs $3.99 to have each book shipped to your house.

But books in your preferred store can be reserved online and retrieved, gratis, in person.

Again, how are you to know what’s in your preferred store? (Besides by searching for one book or author at a time and then trawling through items that may or may not be in that store.)

By clicking the above link, that’s how. Behold a list of most of the books in the store.

Here’s the link again:

https://www.hpb.com/search?q=&prefn1=instorePickUpAvailableStores&prefv1=HPB-131&prefn2=rareFind&prefv2=No&srule=recently-added&sz=80

I’ve tweaked the search to exclude collectables and to show recent arrivals on top.

To add keywords (e.g., “Agatha+Christie”) to the search, type them into the web address between the first equals sign and ampersand:

https://www.hpb.com/search?q=Agatha+Christie&prefn1=instorePickUpAvailableStores&prefv1=HPB-131&prefn2=rareFind&prefv2=No&srule=recently-added&sz=80

Maybe you don’t want to order and retrieve from Mishawaka’s store. Maybe you live in darkest Chesterfield, Missouri. Then replace “131” above – the Mishawaka store’s number – with the “120” pertaining to Chesterfied’s store.

https://www.hpb.com/search?q=Agatha+Christie&prefn1=instorePickUpAvailableStores&prefv1=HPB-120&prefn2=rareFind&prefv2=No&srule=recently-added&sz=80

Voilà.

(The “store finder” page is here.)

R.I.P. Dr. Root, acquisitions librarian

His obituary is here.

I knew him best as the director of Bethel’s library, in which capacity he employed me as his student assistant. I also took a course from him, on Russian history.

He was very kind to students, as the following examples will show.

(i) He got back in touch with me in 2018 and urged me to finish writing my long-overdue dissertation. He was hardly the first person to urge this. But his intervention did the trick. He asked to read what I’d written so far, and he commented on a number of sections.

After this jump-start, I wrote regularly. I completed the Ph.D. the next summer.

(ii) A college acquaintance told me, long after the fact, that he and other young bucks once rashly denounced the quality of Bethel’s library holdings, in a letter posted on the “Wittenburg Door.”

(The “Wittenburg Door” was a cafeteria bulletin board. It was the college’s most picturesque – and cringeworthy – public forum.)

Dr. Root invited the young bucks to his office. He treated their concerns seriously and graciously, solicited advice, and ordered books they asked for. Little did they know, the library’s resources were severely constrained. Dr. Root didn’t complain of this to students; even I, his assistant, learned it from other sources.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

In his dress and in his politics, Dr. Root was a 1970s conservative. He hung a large portrait of Nixon over his student workers’ desk. Bold! But he didn’t do it to taunt the libs; that wasn’t his way. He genuinely admired Nixon’s statesmanship.

He grieved – privately, to me, at least – that the Republican Party, which he staunchly supported, had turned Trumpist.

He venerated missionaries. One of his pet projects was the indexing of Jim Elliot’s journals. I worked on this, occasionally, when there was nothing else to do; it was a relief when Jim and Betty finally tied the knot and Jim got courtship off his mind.

Dr. Root spent his life in midwestern towns and cities and shared his midwestern pleasures with his student workers. The end-of-term banquets were especially generous: I still savor the memory of one of them, an Amish dinner in the countryside. The summer workers were treated to daily donuts and the occasional lakeside outing; we’d observe a surprisingly lively Dr. Root playing volleyball and croquet. I was amused, too, when he’d return with stories of his holidays. Sometimes, he’d go abroad; usually, he’d stay in a friend’s Manhattan penthouse. For a few days each year, he’d change into a wild baseball- and theatre-goer, sushi eater, and book buyer. Book buying was his job, of course, but he relished the hunt.

It occurs to me that my time helping him to buy books for the library was what made me the habitual bargain hunter I am today.

Then again, he may have chosen me as his student worker because he already perceived that tendency. One day, he invited me into a back office to take what I wanted from the surplus of donated books. He must have liked the gusto with which I went about choosing, because that was when he offered me my job – much of which would consist of filling out forms from bargain book catalogs.

There’s a scene in Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall in which the ne’er-do-well Captain Grimes is offered his dream job of traveling from pub to pub to sample and rate the beer. (He has to turn it down for personal reasons, of course.) Something comparable, involving low-budget book buying, might have been my ideal job – the realization of my “true self.” Dr. Root did that job. Lucky man! I’m glad I was able to do it with him for a time.