Markup

From the New York Times:

“Train Tickets to 2026 World Cup at MetLife Stadium from NYC to Cost More than $100”

You’re free to stay home, I imagine free-market diehards retorting.

I’m also free to register my disgust.

🤮 🤮 🤮 🤮 🤮

One thing I like about Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do? – Michael J. Sandel’s opinionated and popular introduction to political philosophy – is that it opens with a discussion of price gouging.

Not with such classic questions as:

Is there a duty to obey the law?

and

Can the state be justified?

– asked from a libertarian-friendly starting-point –

but rather with:

If a storm has cut off the electrical supply for many people, is it moral for merchants to double (triple, quadruple, etc.) the price of a bag of ice?

Unlike the classic questions, this one puts libertarians on the back foot.

Of course, there are differences between the scenario discussed in the book and the stadium-transport markup scenario.

(1) The exploitees in the latter scenario are pleasure seekers, not hurricane sufferers.

(2) They’re exploited by NJ Transit – a governmental agency – not by private merchants.

(3) They’re (mostly) foreign tourists, not members of the polis.

Sandel wants us to conclude that price gouging is wrong because it’s uncivil, or because it’s bad for the polis, or for some such community-based reason. (I’m pretty sure he wants us to conclude that. I haven’t read the end of the book.)

But in the World Cup transport scenario, price gouging (of foreigners, mostly) might actually be good for the community.

I leave it as a reader’s exercise to explain whether these differences matter morally and whether marking up the price is wrong.

Death on the Nile

Once I finish this, I’ll have read every novel by Christie that features Hercule Poirot.

It’s a long book with a large cast and much stage-setting. After almost two hundred pages, no one has been murdered.

But it’s an interesting book. I like it when Christie goes biblical. Overt sermonizing in literature is unfashionable, but Christie can’t help herself, and it’s refreshing.

“You are of the Church of England, I presume?”

“Yes.” Linnet looked slightly bewildered.

“Then you have heard portions of the Bible read aloud in church. You have heard of King David and of the rich man who had many flocks and herds and the poor man who had one ewe lamb – and of how the rich man took the poor man’s one ewe lamb. That was something that happened, Madame.”

Linnet sat up. Her eyes flashed angrily.

“I see perfectly what you are driving at, Monsieur Poirot! You think, to put it vulgarly, that I stole my friend’s young man. Looking at the matter sentimentally – which is, I suppose, the way people of your generation cannot help looking at things – that is possibly true. But the real hard truth is different. I don’t deny that Jackie was passionately in love with Simon, but I don’t think you take into account that he may not have been equally devoted to her. … What is he to do? Be heroically noble and marry a woman he does not care for – and thereby probably ruin three lives – for it is doubtful whether he could make Jackie happy under those circumstances? If he were actually married to her when he met me I agree that it might be his duty to stick to her – though I’m not really sure of that. If one person is unhappy the other suffers too. But an engagement is not really binding. If a mistake has been made, then surely it is better to face the fact before it is too late. I admit that it was very hard on Jackie, and I’m very sorry about it – but there it is. It was inevitable.”

“I wonder.”

She stared at him.

“What do you mean?”

“It is very sensible, very logical – all that you say! But it does not explain one thing.”

“What is that?”

“Your own attitude, Madame. … To you this persecution [by Jackie] is intolerable – and why? It can be for one reason only – that you feel a sense of guilt.”

Linnet sprang to her feet.

“How dare you? Really, Monsieur Poirot, this is going too far.”

“But I do dare, Madame! I am going to speak to you quite frankly. I suggest to you that, although you may have endeavoured to gloss over the fact to yourself, you did deliberately set about taking your husband from your friend. … You are beautiful, Madame; you are rich; you are clever; intelligent – and you have charm. You could have exercised that charm or you could have restrained it. You had everything, Madame, that life can offer. Your friend’s life was bound up in one person. You knew that, but, though you hesitated, you did not hold your hand. You stretched it out and, like the rich man in the Bible, you took the poor man’s one ewe lamb.” …

“She threatened to – well – kill us both. Jackie can be rather – Latin sometimes.”

“I see.” Poirot’s tone was grave.

Linnet turned to him appealingly.

“You will act for me?”

“No, Madame.” His tone was firm. “I will not accept a commission from you. I will do what I can in the interests of humanity. That, yes. There is here a situation that is full of difficulty and danger. I will do what I can to clear it up – but I am not very sanguine as to my chance of success.”

Linnet Doyle said slowly: “But you will not act for me?”

“No, Madame,” said Hercule Poirot.

Body-text fonts, pt. 50: Baskerville (metal type, mid-20th c.); Baskerville 10 (digitization)

My favorite Baskerville specimens from the previous century are in Charles Williams’s novels (e.g., War in Heaven [1930]).

This, too, is representative:

Rose Macaulay
The Towers of Trebizond (1956)

From the 2003 NYRB Classics introduction by Jan Morris:

There was a time when the opening line of this book entered the common parlance of educated English and American people. Nearly everyone I knew could quote it, and “‘Take my camel, dear,’ said my Aunt Dot” became a commonplace of badinage or social pleasantry. The line still gets into dictionaries of quotations, but it is years since I have heard it used in conversation.

It’s too bad that we’ve moved from the gracious “Take my camel, dear” to the boorish “Hold my beer.”

(František Štorm’s Baskerville 10 is the font’s closest digital approximation.)

Too many Easter baskets

By church’s end, each of my children had received three baskets. Here I’ve arrayed some of our Jesuses and sheep:

We have to keep Abel from swallowing these toys. He also steals his brothers’ chocolates and dissolves them in his mouth – still wrapped.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Will Michigan win the championship? As I type, the Wolverines lead UConn by nine points. The Big Ten has gone uncrowned for roughly a quarter-century. Michigan State won in 2000; Maryland, not yet a conference member, won in 2002. Indiana, Illinois, Ohio State, MSU, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Purdue – every turn-of-the-century conference member, that is, except Iowa, Northwestern, Minnesota, and Penn State – lost in the championship game at least once after MSU won.

UConn first won in 1999 and went on to claim five more titles.

There are eighteen Big Ten members now. Loyal to the region, I penciled in Nebraska and Purdue as finalists. It was a bold but not outrageous prediction. Purdue unsurprisingly reached the Elite Eight; Nebraska advanced to the Sweet Sixteen having never previously won a tournament game. Had the Huskers gone far enough, I surely would have claimed Yahoo!’s $25,000 prize. (But it was the Huskies who reached the final.)

(A couple of years ago, I picked Creighton to reach the Final Four. I figure, the state is due.)

I did predict Michigan to reach the semifinal. I achieved 60th-percentile staus this year, which is much better than usual. Yahoo! graded my bracket as “fine.”

Peanuts PDFs; UK map; Midwestern wedding

All of the Peanuts strips, PDF format, $25. Offer ends in 12 days.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

My UK wall map – a Christmas gift from my father-in-law – has been framed at last in a heavy, wooden contraption from Goodwill. Karin, the handy one, did the framing. My idea is to hang the map next to the TV so that we can check it when we watch homicidal/​agricultural/​veterinary programs, e.g. our latest, The Highland Vet.

Current reading: François Mauriac, Genetrix; Sue Townsend, Adrian Mole: The Prostrate Years (the last book in the series). And lots of other books.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

I should describe the wedding we attended on Sunday. Samuel bore the rings with aplomb. The much younger flower girl lagged behind, so Samuel retraced his steps, grabbed some petals, and strewed them for her. All else went according to the script: the brief vowing ceremony; the post-vowing, pre-dining interlude for photos; the popcorn and donut tables; the soda and liquor booths; the dinner rolls, sweet corn, and mashed potatoes; the couple’s dance, the bride’s dance with her father, and the groom’s with his mother; and the Cha-Cha Slide. There was no removal of the garter with teeth – none we stayed for, anyway. When we left, I was dead-tired. I’d held squirmy Abel several hours. It was as wearying as if I’d spent the day moving house.

Samuel and Daniel loved the Cha-Cha Slide; their grandpa danced it with them. That ex-DJ was in his element. I’ve not met a more ardent ritual-relisher.

1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 97: Casper

… “the first feature film to have a fully computer-generated … character in a leading role,” according to the IMDb.

Indeed, when ghostly young Casper is granted a few hours of re-embodiment, his human portrayer is less winsome than the computer-generated spirit. This is a mark of technical virtuosity.

Along with Casper, there are three other principal ghosts: “Fatso,” “Stretch,” and “Stinkie,” Casper’s loutish uncles. Physically, they’re like overgrown soap bubbles. They’re corporeal, but just barely. You can see them – and see through them. If you touch them, they dissipate. (No harm is done; they easily re-form.) Fat or thin, they’re rounded: there’s little angularity, and no severity, in their faces.

The uncles are malicious but jovial. Casper himself would be cuddly were he more than minimally solid. Such is his plight: he can love, but he can’t be embraced by his beloved.

The movie is a child-friendly version of the classic story of a romantic encounter between a human and a god (an angel, a space alien, a sprite, etc.). The themes are inaccessibility and yearning.

The girl is 1990s “Child Scare-Queen” Christina Ricci (The Addams Family; Sleepy Hollow). Casper sees her and falls in love. (That’s also how I felt when I saw her in the mid-nineties.) She is Kat, the daughter of Dr. Harvey (Bill Pullman), a psychologist who specializes in therapy for the dead – or, as he calls them, the “living impaired.” Ghosts, he explains, are people who fail to fully “cross over” because of “unresolved issues.” Dr. Harvey has an unresolved issue of his own, which is that his wife’s death has dialed up his eccentricity to eleven. He drags Kat across the country so that he can talk to ghosts and track down his wife’s spirit.

Dr. Harvey and Kat end up in Maine, in the run-down, Gothic dwelling of Casper and his uncles, at the behest of treasure-hunters played by Eric Idle (Monty Python) and Cathy Moriarty (most famously, Robert De Niro’s chilly wife in Raging Bull). Idle and Moriarty are involved in the movie’s funniest scenes, some of which also benefit from cameos by Saturday Night Live icons – a conceit repeated by director Brad Silverling in his Land of the Lost.

For example:

The uncles like to frighten people; Casper tries to befriend them. The effect is the same. The living flee in terror. Until the Harveys arrive, that is. They weather the initial storm. Soon, Casper is cooking Kat breakfast, and the uncles are taking a shine to the Doctor. So much so, in fact, that they plot for him to die so that he can join their posse. Kat, meanwhile, is grateful for Casper’s attention, although she’d rather be with the local flesh-and-blood heart-throb (cue Carrie references). Will Casper win her over? In the spirit of Ray Bradbury, yes and no. Carefully attend to Casper’s re-embodiment. It becomes clear that Kat would accept Casper only under conditions that he couldn’t permanently satisfy. And rightly so, perhaps. The movie is bittersweet.

It also has more swearing and gross-out humor than your average children’s movie. (Again, see Silberling’s Land of the Lost, which, wisely, targets an older audience.) Casper’s plight may be at the movie’s center, but the prevailing tone is set by those hedonistic vulgarians, the uncles. Which is just as well; the core is perhaps too sad.

I liked the set design best. The run-down mansion is exquisite. There are lots of visual references to old movies – to Oz, especially. Afterward, I wanted to watch Casper again, to see how many I could count; Land of the Lost, too.

An entry, posted late, requiring every ounce of strength to type

Notable World Cup “tuneup” results:

• Ecuador 1, Morocco 1 (cracker of a game)
• Brazil 1, France 2 (France dominant)
• England 1, Uruguay 1 (tedious)
• Colombia 1, Croatia 2 (dunno)
• South Korea 0, Ivory Coast 4 (look out for the “Elephants”)
• USA 2, Belgium 5 (too soon to gloat, alas)

Tomorrow promises to be grueling; today already was. Lily, Karin’s sister, will be married tomorrow afternoon. It’s the childcare that vexes. Samuel, at least, is accounted for: he’ll bear the rings. He successfully brought the cushion down the aisle during today’s rehearsal.

Abel and Daniel are another matter. The last thing the ceremony needs is a chorus of squawking. I scouted the building today for possible retreating-places. There aren’t many.

Today, before I chased around and, ocassionally, strong-armed Abel and Daniel, I’d already tired myself loading a humungous, old brush pile – which had plagued our backyard since we bought the property in 2021 – into our pastor’s trailer. Pastor Josh and I took the debris to the church and tossed it into the forest next to the parking lot. It’s not every day you get to dump stuff in a forest.

This has been a grueling entry to type, too, because my “shift” key has been sticking.

Preview: Irish reading

Here is my list of Irish people to read in 2026–2027. (And afterward.)

Who’m I overlooking?

• John Banville, a.k.a. Benjamin Black
• Samuel Beckett
• Elizabeth Bowen
• Anna Burns
• Joyce Cary
• Erskine Childers (Mayfair-born)
• Roddy Doyle
• Maria Edgeworth
• J. G. Farrell
• Tara French
• Seamus Heaney
• James Joyce
• Claire Keegan
• C. S. Lewis
• Brian Moore
• Iris Murdoch
• Edna O’Brien
• Flann O’Brien
• Sally Rooney
• George Bernard Shaw
• Jonathan Swift
• J. M. Synge
• William Trevor
• Oscar Wilde
• Cecil Woodham-Smith (Welsh-born, Irish-sired)
• William Butler Yeats

I’ve read, or at least tried to read, all of these people but Bowen, Cary, Heaney, Edna O’Brien, Synge, and Trevor. I wouldn’t mind trying out everybody on the list.

I’m leaving Franks McCourt and O’Connor off the list. For now.

I also want to read a history book, The Rise and Fall of Christian Ireland. (Woodham-Smith’s Great Famine also is a work of history.)

My mother-in-law also has scheduled various Irish books to read this year. Amazingly, nothing on her list is on mine.

The idea for this project came from viewing Atom Egoyan’s excellent, unsettling Felicia’s Journey (1999) and reflecting that the source novel’s author, William Trevor, has been pretty well off my radar all my life.

Prolongation of woe

I.e., puking. Only Abel has been spared. We’ve brought the TV upstairs so as to get to the toilet promptly. Karin gallantly has been letting the children use the toilet first. She makes due in the hallway with her bucket.

Daniel, poor boy, is on his second cycle with this bug, having been symptomless one glorious week.

I’m well enough right now. I dread the second cycle.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

I’m teaching Samuel how footnotes work, using Barbara Holland’s Hail to the Chiefs. He’ll grow up thinking that studying history is fun.

Other reading:

• François Mauriac, A Kiss for the Leper (a mini-book)
• Voltaire, Candide (a re-read; a mini-book)
• N. T. Wright, God’s Big Picture Bible Storybook
• books, as yet unfinished, mentioned in previous entries

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

R.I.P. Chuck Norris, aged eighty-six. And Robert Mueller.

Body-text fonts, pt. 49: ITC Garamond

The Iranians are trying to have their World Cup games moved from the U.S. to Mexico.

Good. Luck.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Six-year-old Samuel, whom we don’t allow to use social media, has been talking about giving up social media for a week. 🙄

Not for Lent’s sake. For a Klondike bar. (“What would you do for a Klondike bar?”)

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Chubby ITC Garamond is this month’s typeface. (This link is to the darker version, and this link is to the lighter version.)

My children are less “Charlie Bucket,” more “Mike Teavee.”

Oscars

Viewing the ceremony – not comprehensively – after a multi-year hiatus. (Oscar-cast doubles as storm alerter tonight.)

I’m old enough now to be less concerned with the living than with the honored dead:

• Robert Duvall
• Graham Greene
• Diane Keaton
• Val Kilmer
• Robert Redford
• Rob Reiner
• Terence Stamp, etc.

(Some heavy hitters.)

Of the nominated movies, I’ve seen Sinners. Delroy Lindo, who plays a tragicomical virtuouso drunk (Cat Ballou’s Lee Marvin, anyone?), lost his contest to Sean Penn but would have been a worthy laureate.

And I’ve seen KPop Demon Hunters: unworthy but, tonight, triumphant.

Paul Thomas Anderson will win, one year or another (probably this year); and so will Jessie Buckley, who’s too good to feature in what gets made nowadays. She’s acted with Olivia Colman, which yields dividends, Oscar-wise. I’d like to see Jessie win for something schlocky like Beast or Men. (Or for a Richard Linklater adaptation of Mary Midgley’s Beast and Man.) Not for a prestige picture about one of Shakespeare’s love interests (everybody wins for that).

It’s been a grueling weekend. Daniel puked, I puked, and now Samuel has just puked. Three of us down, two of us to go.

Paul’s bedtime reading

Iran’s team has withdrawn from the World Cup. The newspapers are taking it in stride.

Surely, I’m not the only dismayed soccer follower in the West?

Update (March 13): The team has not withdrawn (or been ousted).

I’ll let you know when I know what I’m talking about.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

The war’s death toll has risen. And it’s beyond doubt that the U.S. killed those schoolchildren.

Update: I really hope the news about something so important is beyond doubt.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

I’ve also updated my unchangeable and definite reading list of the next two months. I’ll try to finish not five, not ten, but twenty-four more books before the late-April conclusion of my 2025–2026 cycle. And so it’s particularly cruel of the Web bots to pepper me with ads for the new John Galsworthy PBS show. I just can’t fit all nine of those novels into the schedule. If only Abel didn’t cling to me all day long.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Little suspecting the incalculable consequences that the evening was to have for him, he bicycled happily back from a meeting of the League of Nations Union. There had been a most interesting paper about plebiscites in Poland. He thought of smoking a pipe and reading another chapter of the Forsyte Saga before going to bed. He knocked at the gate, was admitted, put away his bicycle, and diffidently, as always, made his way across the quad towards his rooms. What a lot of people there seemed to be about! Paul had no particular objection to drunkenness – he had read a rather daring paper to the Thomas More Society on the subject – but he was consumedly shy of drunkards.

Frankly, Paul Pennyfeather’s life sounds lovely (except for that ominous bit about “incalculable consequences”).

The good news is, the Forsyte show looks missable.

March’s poem

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

A song the whilst
BASSANIO
comments
on
the caskets
to
himself

Tell me where is fancy [love based only on the senses, especially the sight] bred,

Or in the heart, or in the head?

How begot, how nourishèd?

Reply, reply.

It is engend’red in the eyes,

With gazing fed, and fancy dies

In the cradle where it lies.

Let us all ring fancy’s knell.

I’ll begin it. – Ding, dong, bell.

ALL

Ding, dong, bell.

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

The Merchant of Venice III.ii 63–72. Text and note from The Complete Signet Classic Shakespeare.

Springtime (pre-equinox)

Loud t-storm; air so warm, we have windows open. Earlier, when Samuel’s school bus arrived, he paced the aisle, unwilling to disembark in what was then a light rain. I had to climb aboard to coax him out. And earlier still, I’d gone with Karin, Abel, and Daniel to meet the boys’ new doctor (the previous one, a Seventh-day Adventist, has moved to Guam for a three-year religious sojourn). Upon our return to Toad Hall, the alarm was blaring. It took us an age to turn it off. Daniel ran down the block, did a round of hopscotch, and ran back.

I’m tempted to try reading Virginia Woolf’s Orlando but the schedule is just too packed.

“He – for there could be no doubt about his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it – was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafters.”

(The opening lines.)

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

I’m reading Adrian Mole and the Weapons of Mass Destruction, set just before Britain’s 2003 invasion of Iraq. Adrian is a die-hard Blair supporter. He believes there will be no war because that’s what Blair tells Britain. Adrian’s 17-year-old son Glenn has joined up and trains in Aldershot, running in full battle-dress on builder’s sand. Adrian has just used a Barclaycard blank check (29% interest) to obtain down payment funds (I forget how many thousands of pounds) for his trendy canalside loft, which he is furnishing on store credit (almost £10,000 at 20% interest). Moreover, his parents have sold their house to a developer and bought a pig-sty to convert, by “DIY” methods, into their new dwelling (“The Piggeries”). Meanwhile they live in a tent.

It’s a cheap trick, relaying what’s in other people’s books, but this stuff is too good to keep quiet about.

Iran at the World Cup?

“Trump to POLITICO: ‘I Really Don’t Care’ if Iran Plays in World Cup”

Again, I wish FIFA would choose a host that did care.

Iran’s withdrawal is likely. Maybe we’ll know more after the U.S. completes the expected four-to-five weeks of bombardment. Because then the war’ll be done-and-dusted, won’t it? Because, as Trump himself professes, Iran already “is a very badly defeated country.”

If Iran does play in the World Cup, this eye-popping scenario will be possible:

Iran is currently scheduled to play New Zealand in Los Angeles on June 15, Belgium in Los Angeles on June 21 and Egypt in Seattle on June 26. If both the U.S. and Iran finish second in their respective groups, the two countries could face off in a July 3 elimination match in Dallas.

The two countries played what were, in effect, elimination matches (in the group stage) in 1998 and 2022. Iran won the first meeting; the U.S. won the second one.

1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 96: Wag the dog

What with the ongoing sex scandal and, now, a war, Wag the Dog (1997) is the obvious choice for this month. (Well, either it or Canadian Bacon [1995].)

Actors:

• De Niro
• Dunst
• Harrelson
• Heche
• Hoffman
• Macy
  

and

• Willie Nelson (who, in scenes reminiscent of Nashville, directs a studio choir that records patriotic music)

Wag the Dog is funny. It ticks a lot of boxes, satire-wise.

Trouble is, it’s not cynical enough.

Nowadays, this is a quaint, almost feel-good movie.

The country, nowadays, is that much worse.

The nineties were a gentler time.

More trouble for the World Cup

Some dozens of recent killings in Mexico have stirred up anxiety about that country’s ability to safely co-host the World Cup.

The U.S. has safety worries, too. E.g., who will pay for the extra stadium guards and police in little Foxborough, Mass.? Not the 18,000 townspeople, who are threatening to deny FIFA the use of their locality.

Good for them.

See this New York Times article.

“We may get a little more [than usual] in meals tax and hotel tax,” a local official explains:

But this is not a moneymaker for this town. In fact, it’s probably more of a headache than it’s worth.

This is nothing more than seven events up there. If [the] World Cup wasn’t coming, we’d probably have seven concerts in that time. We’re not gaining much of anything by hosting this event.

So it goes when a country that doesn’t really care about soccer – or about, you know, the world – is awarded World Cup hosting rights. You run up against locals who refuse to sacrifice. Which is what hosting these games is. FIFA always has made money for the rich and compensated the masses with an experiential high. But these particular masses don’t care about soccer or foreign visitors, so they aren’t going to get that high.

FIFA should give more games – or all of the games – to Canada. I’m curious what the people of, e.g., Edmonton or Regina would say. Those cities have pretty stadiums; I’ve looked at them on Wikipedia.

Body-text fonts, pt. 48: Simoncini Garamond

Perhaps my favorite Garamond. The happy average of Garamonds “Monotype” and “ITC”: not too twiggy, not too fat. Spiky serifs; short descenders.

Sample 1: Mary Westmacott, i.e. Agatha Christie, Absent in the Spring (in an omnibus):

Sample 2: Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickle and Dimed:

If that doesn’t excite you, I don’t know what would.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Happy Paw Patrol-themed birthday, yesterday, to Daniel. We invited his cousins over to help him to empty his piñata.

It has become customary among our families to offer a piñata whenever a child turns a year older. Our boys had accumulated enough candy to fill a kitchen cabinet. So, we recycled as much of it as we could into yesterday’s piñata.

We told the other parents to put their children’s gleanings into the next piñata, then into the next one, and so on.

Royals

What with news of the arrest of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, it’s useful to have an updated Royal Family tree with birth years, titles, and succession indicators:

• article behind paywall (BBC)
• same article – gratis (Yahoo!)

For some readers this will be old hat. Not for me, alas. I’ve seen just one episode of The Crown.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Current reading (books):

• W. J. Cash, The Mind of the South (for the group)
• Agatha Christie, Evil Under the Sun
• Agatha Christie (writing as Mary Westmacott), Absent in the Spring
• E. W. Hornung, The Amateur Cracksman
• C. S. Lewis, Perelandra
• François Mauriac, The Holy Terror (a mini-book – for making up lost ground)
• John Steinbeck, Tortilla Flat (ditto)
• Aristotle, Poetics (ditto)
• John Perry, A Dialogue on Personal Identity and Immortality (ditto)
• Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince (ditto; a re-read)
• books, as yet unfinished, mentioned in previous entries

I was going to say it’s pretty cupcake, but surveying the list, I see the authors include two Nobel winners (Mauriac and Steinbeck), two Great Books of the Western World contributors (Aristotle and Machiavelli), and two theological giants (Christie and Lewis). So, not too shabby after all. Mr. Quiring would approve. Maybe not of Christie. I shake my head whenever well-read people don’t bother with Christie, especially if they do read Chesterton and Sayers. (See the latter’s gem “Aristotle on Detective Fiction,” which I found in Anthony Kenny’s Oxford World’s Classics edition of the Poetics.)

A long-awaited stroll; a latitude, hydrological divides, and other fancies

Snow: mostly melted. Temperatures: in the fifties (F); sixties tomorrow. I take Abel and Daniel strolling. Daniel jumps in all the puddles. He soaks the insides of his boots. I don’t know what he’ll wear if we go out again very soon.

Abel, in the stroller, leans forward, his head as near to the ground as he can get it, as if he were peering into tidal pools.

I halt to check if he’s all right; Daniel races ahead.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Fun fact I just learned: Canada’s lowest latitude passes through South Bend just a few blocks north of Toad Hall.

(Toad Hall is our house.)

I could pinpoint the location, stroll there, and hop back and forth over the line. “Now I’m south of all of Canada. Now I’m north of a little of Canada.”

I suppose the urge is due to having grown up near the equator.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

I could do this with the nearby drainage divide, too. “Now I’m daining into the Great Lakes. Now I’m draining into the Gulf of Mexico, I mean the Gulf of America.”

It seems a less arbitrary line since it has a basis in physical rather than political reality – until I remember that the Great Lakes drain into the St. Lawrence River and thence into the Atlantic, which encompasses the Gulf of Mexico (I mean, America). So that, ultimately, the distinction between these drainage basins is artificial.

Of course there’s a physical difference between draining one way and draining the other, but if you mark all such differences you end up with insignificant, postage stamp-sized drainage basins.

Artifice – human purposiveness – seems inescapable if much geography is to be done at all.

I remember checking out geography Ph.D. programs when I was very young. There was the respectable but daunting meteorology specialization; all else seemed postmodern free-for-all. A bitter disappointment to someone who’d vaguely entertained the thought that his vocation might consist of memorizing picturesque but unimpeachable facts, e.g. that Czechoslovakia’s capital is Prague.

Valentine’s

Abel has cabin fever now. He points at the stroller, squawks, climbs onto my chest, and beats it. Soon, Abel, soon.

Like his brothers before him, he attacks my face and snatches at my glasses when I put them on at night. His little nails must have cut inside my eyelid. When I fold it back I find the scab. It has been chafing my eyeball.

Happy Valentine’s (this time, on the day itself). No celebration for Karin & me tonight. We’ll go out later this week.

I did put on Sleepless in Seattle for the family. There aren’t a lot of Valentine’s Day movies. I’ve seen these others:

My Bloody Valentine and the excellent Picnic at Hanging Rock – two for the horror aisle;

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind;

and:

Some Like It Hot.

Irrespective of overall merit or demerit, only Sleepless preserves the spirit of, and does justice to, the holiday. (I’ve not seen An Affair to Remember.)

Happy birthday to my long-dead Great Grandad Valentine, my father’s mother’s father.

February’s poem

Happy St. Valentine’s Day.

Massive Attack, “One Love”:

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

It’s you I love

And not another

And I know our love

Will last forever

You I love

And not another

And I know we’ll always

Be together

Some men have one love

Two and three love

Four and five

And six love

But I believe

In one love

I believe

In one love

Some men don’t feel secure

Unless they have a woman on each arm

They have to play the field

Prove they have charm

They say, Don’t lay your eggs in one basket

If the basket should fall, all your eggs’ll be broken

But I believe

In one love

I believe

In one love

Oh girl

I believe

In one love

I believe

In one love

Oh girl

It’s not the everyday you find the woman of your dreams

Who will always be there – no matter how bad things seems

Ever so faithful

Ever so sure

No man could ever

Ax for more

I believe

In one love

I believe

In one love

Oh girl

I believe

In one love …

I believe …

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

Vocalist: Horace Andy.

Seahawks 29, Patriots 13

A Super Bowl for connoisseurs of defensive football. I’m not one. I understand what’s happening when a DB breaks up a pass or a lineman beats his blocker and troubles the QB. But os and xs, zonal coverage, disguised coverage … I know these things exist, but I can’t perceive them – not in real time.

I like Kenneth Walker’s running. Dude calmly glides toward his blockers, awaits the defenders’ removal, scoots past them. Elegant. Not unlike slow-roll penalty taking (in soccer).

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

My Facebook friends signal their politics by praising or condemning Bad Bunny’s halftime show.

What a stupid time to be alive.

I’ve not previously listened to Bad Bunny.

The sugarcane is good décor. The dancing is uncouth.

So are the lyrics. I learn them only by reading them online. (I can’t understand them sung; I have trouble with Puerto Rican Spanish.)

The apagón song stands out because I know what it’s like to endure frequent apagones (power outages). One extended passage in that song is reminiscent of, if not quite ideologically aligned with, The Vagina Monologues. Is it included in this Super Bowl performance? I’m not sure. I can’t make out enough words, and I’m distracted by utility-pole dancers.

Melania

The title of this post will have raised some eyebrows. Did he watch the documentary? Is he going to review it? And so I must immediately temper expectations. No, I didn’t watch it. Perhaps I shall, some day. I’m in no hurry.

I just want to note what strikes me as an extraordinary response by the public and the critics.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Melania has an aggregate rating of 1.3 from 10 at the IMDb. Some 49 thousand votes have been submitted.

Surely it isn’t that bad? Even Caligula (1979) manages a rating of 5.3.

Ah, here we go. “Our rating mechanism has detected unusual voting activity on this title,” the website disclaims.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

“Trump Film is a Gilded Trash Remake of
The Zone of Interest”

… The Guardian opines. Quite a good dig, that.

(The Zone of Interest, if you didn’t know, depicts the opulence of an Auschwitz commandant’s household.)

Again, the vitriol is excessive. Or not? Time will tell.

No, it really is excessive, no matter how things turn out. Melania evidently is no Triumph of the Will. It doesn’t show a nation’s diabolic fervor. It’s just a vanity project. This sort of thing has been done before and will be done again. Sometimes, a despot commisions it (cf. Turkmenistan); sometimes, it’s just the excrescence of some rich dude, as when Charles Foster Kane pays for his wife to be an opera lead. I expect Melania is in between.

Here’s a more sympathetic Guardian review.

Timothy Dexter

Ecuador is mentioned in the first sentence of the main body of the Harper’s Weekly Review.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

The Facebook bots kindly shared a mini-bio, in Spanish, of Timothy Dexter (1747–1806), history’s hombre más suertudo (luckiest man). It was intriguing enough that I went on to read Dexter’s Wikipedia bio. Then I read that bio aloud to Karin.

Certain commonalities with our President suggested themselves. Dexter, however, made money instead of losing it. And he didn’t start out with money from his father; he extracted it from his rich wife, whom he abused.

In business, he seems to have been lucky and devilishly intuitive, e.g. he turned a profit literally “shipping coal to Newcastle” (the proverbial expression for exporting to a saturated market).

I don’t intend to read any full-length biographies of Timothy Dexter. But I went looking anyway. The major ones are from the 1800s. The last notable book, the most recent edition of which is 65 years old, is by John P. Marquand – like Dexter, of Newburyport, Mass. – the author of the “Mr. Moto” fictions and of the Pulitzer-winning, satirical Late George Apley. I wonder how serious his treatment of Dexter is.

1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 95: The ice storm

In A Fish Called Wanda (1988), John Cleese, a midlife-crisis sufferer, paces nervously in his underwear. He’s in a strange house, waiting for his lover. …

Mr. Hood – Kevin Kline, Cleese’s Wanda castmate – does the same in The Ice Storm (1997). Kline doesn’t quite play it for laughs, but the situation is amusing – especially when Mr. Hood goes downstairs and finds his teenage daughter, Wendy (Christina Ricci), fooling around with little Mikey Carver (Elijah Wood).

Wendy has put on a Nixon mask. (It’s 1973.)

Why are you here, Mr. Hood asks her.

Later, he tells his wife what he caught Wendy doing.

Why were YOU at the Carvers’, asks Mrs. Hood (Joan Allen).

Mr. Hood is taken aback. The marriage has gone so stale that he has forgotten to disguise his affair with Mrs. Carver (Sigourney Weaver).

(Mrs. Hood also has a vice: she shoplifts.)

Mr. Hood’s affair is as stale as his marriage. Mrs. Carver tells Mr. Hood that he’s boring. He is, but she’s cruel about it. She leaves him in her bedroom, gets in her car, and drives away.

Humiliating her husband and her lover – simultaneously, if possible – is how she gets her kicks.

Her son, Sandy (Adam Hann-Byrd), a quiet, shy boy, also displays a touch of sadism. (It says something that he is one of the most likeable, or least despicable, characters.)

He blows up toys in the back yard.

Play with the whip instead, his mother tells him.

Mikey, Sandy’s brother, is a gifted student whose mind is in the clouds. He worries about molecules that drift through the air into people’s bodies.

He’s a chip off the old block. His father, Mr. Carver (Jamey Sheridan), a scientist, is like a planet with a huge irregular orbit. Kindly but distracted, he passes near his family once every few earth-decades.

The Carvers and Hoods live in New Caanan – an apt name, what with the regression of morals – on Connecticut’s Gold Coast. Other suburban dramas have been filmed or located there: The Swimmer, Revolutionary Road, and Nicole Kidman’s Stepford Wives.

The scenery is as important as the story. Look at those houses!

(Nowadays, you can tour them on realtors’ websites.)

One character is breaking away from New Caanan: Wendy’s older brother, Paul (Tobey Maguire), who attends a boarding school in Manhattan. He has normal teen misfortunes. He’ll get over them. He reads comic books – and the Russians. He is not trapped in his family’s social circle. He has a broader perspective on families. He’s able to generalize.

One worries more for the other children. Least for Wendy, perhaps, because her choices, while wrong, are deliberate. They’re experimental, not wanton or compulsive or knee-jerk. She even shoplifts experimentally (not desperately like her mother). It may not be nice that she carries on with both Carver boys at the same time. But, one perceives, she’s figuring out that she definitely likes one better than the other.

Ricci suggests all of this without saying much. Actors tend to specialize in either smart or dumb roles. Ricci can project intelligence or abject stupidity, as required. Wendy is shrewder than her deeds. Her face is bland but we can tell the gears are turning.

The other standouts are Hann-Byrd as Sandy, Sheridan as Mr. Carver, and Allen as Mrs. Hoover (the most reflective adult). Oh, and Allison Janney, who does a hilarious and unsettling turn as the hostess of a “key” party. (Men put their keys in a bowl; women draw keys; each woman goes home with the man whose key she has drawn.) Janney is New Caanan’s Ghislaine Maxwell, always smiling, coaxing would-be-sophisticates into becoming companions in degradation. None, afterward, can quite understand how he or she drifted into misery. They’re like their children, making the same mistakes, only they never learned to choose responsibly – as Wendy, in her one-step-backward-two-steps-forward manner, is doing. Perhaps the upheaval of the sixties permanently unmoored the grownups. I don’t know. The movie succeeds less as social commentary than as a rotation of vivid character sketches. Which is all right; that’s what ensemble dramas are for.

I should mention, also, that in the end, an ice storm purifies the air.

The snub

So, Belichick, who won eight Super Bowls (six as a head coach) and got to three others, wasn’t voted into the Hall of Fame.

“What does a guy have to do?” he asked, reasonably.

Brady: “Welcome to the world of voting.”

Amen to that. I mean, if Belichick – as qualified a candidate as there is – can’t get elected by so-called experts, what chance does electoral democracy have?

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

I finished Steinbeck’s East of Eden for the group. Taken page by page, it’s quite a good read. Taken all together, it has problems, not least that it’s a replotting and therefore a rebuke of the Cain and Abel story. My objection isn’t so much, How dare Steinbeck?; it’s that the Cain and Abel story really can’t be improved or even riffed on. Change it in any way, and its power is diminished.

Abel is dedicated in church; Samuel’s exactitude; weather; football; “E-learning”; ICE vs. Minnesotans

We dedicated Abel to the Lord this morning. Samuel and Daniel remained in the adults’ church service. Upon its conclusion, Samuel ran up to the pastor and scolded him for mentioning Duolingo, which is not discussed in the Bible. (The pastor, in his sermon on Acts 2, had joked about Duolingo’s provision of the ability to speak “in tongues.”)

I approve of Samuel’s zeal for the truth.

Yesterday I said “shoes” when I meant “boots,” and Samuel flew off the handle.

“I misspoke,” I acknowledged.

He was not appeased. “You and Mom say too many wrong things.”

“Do you think you speak better than your parents?” I asked him.

He does think so.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Across the nation it’s cold and blustery. Today I watched the Broncos and Pats fail to advance the ball in a Mile High snowstorm. The Pats survived, 10–7. (I’m not keen on any of the league’s semifinalists. The Broncos, Pats, Rams, and Seahawks all have terrible uniforms. Their uniforms were better in the early 1990s.)

It was cold enough on Friday that Samuel was kept home. He attended an “E-learning” session with his teacher and four other students who logged in. Daniel viewed the lesson, too, and greatly enjoyed it. He and Samuel fought on camera. Samuel must do “E-learning” again tomorrow. Karin has urged me to send Daniel to the basement to watch TV.

It has been cold in Minnesota, too, and much sadder. ICE agents murdered another civilian yesterday; at least, the videos sure make it look like murder. As awful as each attack has been, a certain implication is worse: that it could happen to anyone. (To any ordinary person, that is; those who live in gated communities probably are safe.) Even non-protestors have been attacked, people simply traveling from A to B.

If the perpetrators intend to terrify, then what they’re doing in Minnesota is terrorism. And maybe even if they don’t intend it.

Veronika of Austria; Bible reading; time capsules

Cows are smarter than people think, according to the BBC.

Despite about 10,000 years of humans living alongside cattle, this is the first time scientists have documented a cow using a tool.

The researchers say their discovery shows that cows are smarter than we think and that other cows could develop similar skills, given the chance.

I’m too tired to work out the details, but I suspect that trouble lurks here for Hume’s account of testimonial knowledge.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Bible reading report. I’m caught up reading Acts, but I’m three or four chapters behind in each of Genesis, Nehemiah, and Matthew. It’s not as dire as it sounds. Acts is by far the most thoroughly annotated of these books. The notes discuss every historical character (there’s a surprising amount of information about Sergius Paulus), every city that Paul visits, logistical reasons for travelers’ detours and delays, etc.

How, exactly, were worms involved in Herod Agrippa’s death? The possibilities are spelled out. (Bonus tidbit: the guy used to party with Caligula.)

Fascinating but long.

If I don’t begin reading before Abel wakes in the morning, I don’t finish by the end of the day.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Less demanding is my re-reading of Jay Bennett’s Deathman, Do Not Follow Me (1968). I read it in 1995, when I was 13 or 14. It seemed dated then. But now more years have gone since I first read it than between that reading and when it was first published. And the book feels, if anything, more fresh.

I had a similar feeling the other day, showing Steve McQueen’s Bullitt, also from 1968, to my family. That movie used to seem antediluvian. Now, its hospitals and airports remind me of my childhood; they look how hospitals and airports should look.

January’s poem

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

Indiana, our Indiana

Indiana, we’re all for you

We will fight for

The cream and crimson

For the glory

Of old IU

Never daunted, we cannot falter

In the battle, we’re tried and true

Indiana, our Indiana

Indiana, we’re all for you

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

Lyrics by Russell P. Harker. Tune based on Karl King’s “Viking March” – circus music.

Adrian Mole: The cappuccino years

At 10:00pm not-quite-four-year-old Daniel runs through the house like a madman, or a young cat. So he does most nights.

So Samuel used to do. But now he must rise for Kindergarten, and has conditioned himself to retire before eight o’clock.

Abel, at thirteen months, sleeps last. He has taken a turn toward ultraviolence.

Adrian Mole is in his fifth book. He is thirty years old. He has two sons. One of them, he recognizes as his son. The reader recognizes them both. Adrian isn’t the most self-aware diarist.

It’s the 1990s. Blair is the new Prime Minister. Adrian works as an offal chef at Hoi Polloi, a Tory restaurant. In his spare time he scripts an unsold radio serial, The Windsors, about the Royal Family. Princess Diana’s death scuttles Adrian’s plot. Adrian’s own life seems plotless, notwithstanding his acquisition of sons.

His parents also are chronic failures – after a livelier fashion (even what with Adrian’s father’s depression). The most impressive figure in this book is Adrian’s mother, who unexpectedly succeeds as a ghostwriter, spinkling pages with unsolicited references to Germaine Greer (author of The Female Eunuch).

“Philistines” always succeed where Adrian fails.

Adrian considers writing to be his vocation. Thus he wastes time agonizing over semicolons.

Pity. He is eloquent.

I sometimes wish I lived in pre-feminist times when if a man washed a teaspoon he was regarded as “a big Jessie.” It must have been great when women did all the work, and men just lolled about reading the paper.

I asked my father about those days when we were preparing the Brussels sprouts, the carrots and the potatoes, etc., etc. His eyes took on a faraway misty look. “It was a golden age,” he said, almost choking with emotion. “I’m only sorry that you never lived to see it as an adult man. I’d come home from work, my dinner would be on the table, my shirts ironed, my socks in balls. I didn’t know how to turn the stove on, let alone cook on the bleeding thing.” His eyes then narrowed, his voice became a hiss as he said, “That bloody Germaine Greer ruined my life. Your mother was never the same after reading that bleeding book.”

Bear in mind that Adrian is on the liberal end of the political spectrum.

I reflected on his feelings as I chopped vegetables for our “hobo’s stew.”

Bible reading

The bible I’m reading this year is the Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible.

It’s available in these translations: NKJV, NIV, and – less easily obtained – NRSV.

I’m reading the NKJV because I’ve read NIV and NRSV bibles in recent years.

I’m trying to read all the notes. I’ve never done this with any bible.

There are a lot of notes. They’re interesting, but they don’t aim to redirect one’s life or improve one’s soul – except perhaps gradually and cumulatively, by shining tiny light-beams upon thousands of details of the divine portrait.

One reads about, e.g., ziggurats because the Babel tower probably was a ziggurat. One learns why ziggurats were built, how they differed from Egyptian pyramids, etc. Does this change one’s life? No. Does it change one’s understanding of the Babel story? Up to a point, yes: it turns out that the builders weren’t trying to climb up to the heavens but coaxing heaven-dwellers down to earth. (Other ancient sources tell us that this is what ziggurats were for, and this information is summarized in the notes.)

One learns how radical the Abrahamic covenant was. Abraham’s society assumed that gods were to be manipulated, not covenanted with. What is more, gods – at least, the ones whose favor people typically sought – were associated with particular groups and places. It was believed that their powers were limited to their localities. But Abraham’s God told him to leave his family and its lands and to trust Him in a new place, among strangers. God asked Abraham not to try to establish himself in his own people’s memory. And that was radical because remembrance of the dead was thought to sustain the dead in the next life (as in the Disney movie Coco) (this last comparison is not in the notes).

This bible is bulky. I can’t read it with Abel in my lap – a significant limitation, since Abel rests in my lap much of the day.

It takes a long time to read each day’s passages and notes.

Frankly, I’m struggling to follow the schedule. But I think it’ll be very rewarding if I do so.

Body-text fonts, pt. 47: Agmena

The group has been reading Being Mortal: Medicine and What Happens in the End – hardly the last word on dying, but a good starting-point for preparing for one’s own death and thinking how to help those whose turn it is to die.

The best thing about reading this book – and I mean this as a sincere compliment, not in any backhanded way – was that it prompted me to finally read “The Death of Ivan Ilych.”

It, it, it … the passage is like that horror flick – that great mortality parable – It Follows.

The typeface sampled above is Jovica Veljovič’s Agmena. Tolstoy’s story serves as the epilogue of the anthology Leading Lives that Matter.

R.I.P. Keith and Stu

… missionaries to Ecuador (and other countries) who died within days of each other. Fixtures of my early life. Good men. Heroes, arguably. Keith gave his wife, Ruth Ann, a kidney. He died of complications from the surgery. Stu’s death was brought on by lung trouble resulting from Vietnam War wounds. He climbed mountains and ran marathons, but, over time, his injuries took their toll.

Stu and his wife, Bev, managed my dorm during two of my boarding-school years. They were kind. Stu used to take me jogging, and he helped me to get the hang of algebra. We’d talk about his reading: Dante, Cervantes, Hugo, Tolstoy, Pasternak, Herman Wouk, Bodie and Brock Thoene. I got him to read Kenneth Grahame and Jerome K. Jerome.

I remarked to someone, the other day, that my favorite missionaries were from Canada and the Midwest – especially, Minnesota. Keith was from Ontario, and Stu was from the Gopher/​North Star State.

R.I.P. “Minnie”

… a.k.a. Cinnamon Sprinkle, a.k.a. Cinnamon Sparkle: Cornell’s beloved miniature horse, who arrived on campus the year I moved away. (See, also, this earlier piece.)

Now that’s the kind of alumni reporting I’d like more of.

Had I known Minnie was at Cornell, I would have taken Karin to see her when we traveled to campus for my PhD defense.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Happy New Year. Today, the USA attacked Venezuela and captured its head of state.

All day long, I worried about geopolitics, not least about soccer.

What will FIFA do about the World Cup? It would be consistent to ban the USA, since Russia is banned for attacking Ukraine.

If only.

What will CONMEBOL do about the Copa América? The USA is a hosting candidate but has just attacked a CONMEBOL member.

I went on Facebook to see what my “friends” are saying about the attack.

The Ecuadorian church leaders are silent. I don’t object to that. Not everything needs to be discussed.

Other Ecuadorians are making jokes about Venezuelans. Many Venezuelan refugees live in Ecuador. The jokes hint that now is the time for Venezuelans to return en masse.

(A Venezuelan says goodbye to her Ecuadorian sugar daddy.)

My U.S. “friends” who used to live in Ecuador are debating whether the coup is a canny U.S. foreign policy move; whether it’s good for Venezuela; whether Venezuelans, in preponderant numbers, support it; whether Maduro was entitled to rule; and whether “individualism” is better than “collectivism.”

I’ve seen none of these “friends,” none of them, say anything like this:

The geopolitical order is an order of sovereign states. An order of sovereign states forbids particular states from unilaterally attacking other states and deposing their leaders, even bad leaders.

It’s amazing how this simple norm, so dear to Latin Americans – including Venezuelans (even, I daresay, opponents of Maduro) – appears not to figure in ex-missionaries’ thinking.

What were they doing in Ecuador, all those years?

Not reading the room, it would seem.