Why write yet another book on the justification of war? Why not a book on the arts of peacemaking instead? Surely peace, not war, should have first claim on our attention and reflection and creative intelligence.
I cannot deny the truth of this statement, nor the force of the questions preceding it. I cannot deny them, since I know that war is horrendous and that working to prevent its outbreak – even if in the end that should prove justified – is our first and most urgent duty. A fortiori as a Christian I cannot deny these things.
Nevertheless, I confess that I do not have it in me to write a book about peace. Maybe in due course I shall have; but I do not have it now. Now, as for most of my life, it is war that captures my imagination. I read nothing so voraciously as military history. Wherever I go, if there is a battlefield or a war cemetary, I will make a point of visiting it: Waterloo, Bull Run, Antietam, Gettysburg, Gallipoli, Ypres, the Somme, Jerusalem, Gibraltar, Maleme and Souda Bay in Crete, Leningrad, Malta, El Alamein, Assisi, Rome, Normandy.
Whence the fascination? I grew up in a country haunted by the two world wars. As a child I played in my grandmother’s air-raid shelter, and I heard about the German bomber that had crash-landed in the adjacent field only twenty years before. I attended a school and a university college where the names of the war dead cascade down whole walls. A brother of my father’s father left Scotland for France one September day in 1915 and was killed three weeks later at the battle of Loos. He was twenty-one years old. My mother’s youngest brother flew out over the Burmese jungle on another September day in 1944 and never was heard of again. He was twenty-two years old. My father himself volunteered in 1943, aged thirty, and spent the next two-and-a-half years in Italy first manning an anti-aircraft gun and then, when there were no more enemy planes left to shoot at, carrying a stretcher. …
War therefore exercises my imagination in a way that peace does not. I do not claim this as a virtue. I merely state it as a fact from which I cannot escape, but which therefore defines (for now) my vocation. The arts of peacemaking certainly deserve attention, and others who are differently located and called should reflect on them. In the meantime, however, it is my task to think and write out of the place – historical, cultural, emotional, imaginative – that has, with all its many limitations, been given me. I have inherited a certain fate, and I must honour it.
So here is another book on the moral justification of war. …
There are obvious rejoinders, but the apology rings true at least in this respect: many people really do believe in the link between heritage and justification. Some people refrain from condemning the Confederate cause or the Zionist cause (or whatever) just because the heritage that has fashioned their mental furniture – and that claims them as heirs – is Southern or Jewish (or whatever). Until the link between heritage and justification is undone, anti-war argumentation is beside the point.
New Zealand literature began in 1882 with the introduction of refrigerated shipping. This was the inimitable opening line of the New Zealand Lit course offered at Canterbury University in 1981. It was delivered by Dr Patrick Evans whose undergrad fame preceded him: his jokes were so good people actually wrote them down in lectures. Evans’ thesis, as it unfolded, was mesmerising – and deeply unsettling … something like this:
Refrigerated shipping – the vehicle for the frozen meat trade – entrenched the basis of the nascent New Zealand economy: the farming and slaughter of animals. The consequent despoliation and industrialisation of the landscape, and the transformation of the New Zealand colonist into a “systematic and calculating” butcher, described the progress of the “New Zealand Dream” from an imagined South Pacific eden (a “better Britain”) to a fallen society with, literally, blood on its collective hands. New Zealand became, not the pastoral paradise envisioned by British utopians, but a society in which industrialised violence was merely the sanctioned version of other widespread malignancies.
New Zealand literature, Evans argued, oscillated between work that danced around the “truth” of this national mythology, and work that confronted it in various compelling ways. Using short fiction and novels from the mid nineteenth century to the late 1960s he laid out the evidence for a “slaughterhouse” fiction …
Then, a list. I don’t know a lot of New Zealand authors, but most of those I’m aware of, down to the present day, are on Evans’s/De Goldi’s list or should be. Even Katherine Mansfield. (Ngaio Marsh, for all her murder-writing, would barely qualify – she’s one who “dances around” the slaughterhouse theme, preferring to write about theatre-killings and such – but I presume she’d make the cut, for Died in the Wool.)
(I don’t mean the philosophers – certainly not A. N. Prior. But Jonathan Bennett isn’t so far off, thematically.)
Think of moviemakers, too. “Systematic and calculating butcher” describes Peter Jackson rather well. And Jane Campion has her moments (In the Cut; the fascinating, disturbing Top of the Lake). Think, also, of the documentarian David Farrier (Tickled; Dark Tourist; Mister Organ).
Anyway, Sydney Bridge Upside Down is a piece of work.
People are always saying how civilized New Zealanders are, how exemplarily democratic, and maybe so, but New Zealanders do appear to relish churning out stories of brutality. As do the Swedes.
It’s counterintuitive, but a well-designed font can have a lot of subtle variation between letters and still look consistent on the page. The converse of this principle is that a font with too much consistency can be numbing to read. Cambria is an example of this problem. It works well on screen, but on the printed page, it’s a skull-clutcher. Guardian Egyptian … [is] similar to Cambria but [avoids] monotony.
An example of Guardian Egyptian:
This is hardly the best type specimen. The quote marks are “straight” rather than “curly,” and the dash in the second line appears to be a mere hyphen.
But I exhibit it because it’s an outstanding passage from one of my all-time favorite reviews: a pan of the great Kazuo Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans. It gets at what’s so elegant and so disconcerting – so craftily, poignantly removed – about Ishiguro’s prose.
(I’ve been reading Ishiguro’s books in order. Their formality is endlessly fascinating.)
The Guardian passage explains certain tendencies in my own writing.
I, too, am a kind of foreigner.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
Another insight along similar lines, due to Nancy Mitford (Don’t Tell Alfred):
You must remember, with Americans, that they are fighting to express themselves in a language they’ve never properly learnt. They need the dissertation; the kind of shorthand that we talk would be useless to them.
It was better to have the older English distinction between “I haven’t got indigestion” (I am not suffering from it at the moment) and “I don’t have indigestion” (I am not a dyspeptic) than to level both, as Americans have taught most Englishmen to do, under “I don’t have.”
If you introduce many non-natives into an English-speaking country, then – naturally enough – phrasal verbs will get phased out: got will be dropped from I haven’t got.
Suppose that, over time, that country’s influence is inflated. Eventually, the blood will be siphoned out even from the Mother Country’s speech.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
See, also, David Lodge’s chapter, in The Art of Fiction, on Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day:
Stevens [the narrator] speaks, or writes, in a fussily precise, stiffly formal style – butlerspeak, in a word. Viewed objectively, the style has no literary merit whatsoever. It is completely lacking in wit, sensuousness and originality. Its effectiveness as a medium for this novel resides precisely in our growing perception of its inadequacy for what it describes.
I don’t usually sleep with a Nutella jar. One of my sons added that prop.
I call this photo “Living High & Letting Die.”
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Our new pastor invited me out for coffee and asked what I’d been reading (besides the Bible). To his dismay, I told him I’d been making a special effort this season to get through various Gothic and horror classics.
What do you like about them, he asked.
The weather, I said.
It’s the truth!
Then I said something about “sins of the past.” That’s true, too.
Here are some items, a few of which I’ve already mentioned in this blog:
(1) Julia (Peter Straub; very Iris Murdochian)
(2) If You Could See Me Now (Straub)
(3) Ghost Story (Straub)
They’ve just been re-issued by the Library of America, although I’ve been reading them in other editions. Straub is the editor of the LOA’s two volumes of “American Fantastic Tales.”
(1)–(3) aren’t bad, but I wouldn’t have canonized them.
(4) The Greater Trumps (Charles Williams; introduced by William Lindsay Gresham, whose Nightmare Alley I might read, too)
We recently acquired a globe, courtesy of the abuelos (tireless Goodwill shoppers).
Samuel: “Every flat-earth person needs a globe.”
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There are very few living writers whose every new book I look out for. One is Michael Lewis. I have added his name to my St. Joe County Public Library “author alerts” list.
The library did not alert me that Lewis had just published Blockers: Rebels in the Deep State, his third book showcasing the invaluable contributions of unheralded civil servants (its predecessors are The Fifth Risk and Who Is Government?; other books – The Big Short, The Premonition, and Going Infinite – touch on related issues).
All ten hard copies of Blockers are checked out.
Well, I thought, I can at least find out the body-text font.
I could not. Only e-versions are previewable online, and they use other fonts.
On Faustian impulse, I turned to A.I. Would this demon supply the desired knowledge?
No.
Too Small; Didn’t Enlarge:
AI Overview:
The exact body text typeface for the hardcover edition of Blockers: Rebels in the Deep State by Michael Lewis (published by W. W. Norton & Company) is not publicly specified or documented in available records.
While W. W. Norton books typically include a colophon page at the very back of the hardcover detailing the typeface and composition history, this specific typographical information hasn’t been indexed online.
Uh, huh.
Might someone have uploaded some pages’ images to eBay? I checked. The closest specimen I could find was of the UK edition (Allen Lane). This edition appears to have been set in Dante.
This copy is being sold as “signed”:
Were I the buyer, I’d ask for a little more John Hancock for my buck (quid, whatever).
Día de la Raza, i.e. Race Day (Latin America, superannuated)
Día del Respeto a la Diversidad Cultural, i.e. Respect for Cultural Diversity Day (Argentina)
Día del Encuentro de Dos Mundos, i.e. Two Worlds’ Meeting Day (Chile)
Día de la Nación Pluricultural, i.e. Multicultural Nation’s Day (Mexico)
Día de la Descolonización, i.e. Decolonization Day (Bolivia)
Día de la Resistencia Indígena, i.e. Indians’ Resistance Day (Venezuela)
Día de la Resistencia Indígena, Negra y Popular, i.e. Indians’, Blacks’, and Proles’ Resistance Day (Nicaragua)
Día de los Pueblos Originarios y del Diálogo Intercultural, i.e. First Peoples’ and Intercultural Dialog Day (Peru)
Día de la Interculturalidad y la Plurinacionalidad, i.e. D.E.I. Bandwagon Day (Ecuador)
Fiesta Nacional de España, i.e. Spain Nation Fest; and Día de la Hispanidad, i.e. Spanishness Day (Spain)
Discovery Day (Bahamas)
Columbus Day (USA)
Thanksgiving Day (Canada)
Etc.
I lean toward either “Race Day,” “Discovery Day,” “Two Worlds’ Meeting Day,” or “Columbus Day.” (Columbus was a flawed man, but some flaws are worth remembering.) “Thanksgiving” is a nice sentiment, but giving thanks on this day is unseemly.
She is the second Icelandic laureate. (Halldór Laxness was first.)
I like to think the Nobel judges viewed, or couldn’t avoid hearing about, Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey; read Emily Wilson’s grousing about that movie; and decided, Let’s reward a more elliptical classicist.
The writer I know best who writes like Carson is Maggie Nelson.
Reading Charlie and the Chocolate Factory to Samuel:
He’s interested in, of all things, its physics – e.g., why a person (or an Oompa-Loompa), having drunk a “fizzy lifting drink,” should rise in the air.
Why does an ice-cube rise in a glass of water?, Samuel asks. It’s the right sort question. I’m impressed.
What blows Samuel’s mind is that, in Charlie, chewing a stick of gum produces the same sensory/nutritive effect as eating a three-course meal (I’m not sure he realizes it isn’t possible).
And the detail that really gets him is that, at one point during the second “course,” the gum tastes like a baked potato. Why this should impress Samuel so much, I don’t know.
That the gum turns Violet Beauregarde into a blueberry interests him less.
That she could be de-juiced back to near-normalcy interests him somewhat more.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
I once knew a college student who was very interested in The Lord of the Rings – for its metaphysics (her word).
Like, why Elves and Men differ as to mortality?, I asked.
Yes, she said.
That strikes me as the wrong approach.
Could this be one way to distinguish fantasy from science fiction? I.e., is physical or metaphysical inquiry appropriate for science fiction but not for fantasy?
Authors/works you couldn’t inquire about in that spirit (at least, not lamely):
Homer
Hamlet
Gulliver
M. R. James
Jekyll & Hyde (but see this paper, which I don’t disparage)
Alice
The Curdie books
Narnia (I haven’t read Michael Ward’s Planet Narnia)
Harry Potter (too many ad hoc creatures and spells)
The Borrowers
Charlotte’s Web
And, I’d say – despite all the “world-building” – The Lord of the Rings.
By contrast, Lewis’s “space” books more readily invite physical/metaphysical scrutiny. So does Slaughterhouse-Five. So does A Wrinkle in Time. So too, perhaps, might Watership Down, which I haven’t read.
So does Dante; the Divine Comedy is metaphysical SF with all the is dotted and ts crossed.
And it’s possible to go further down this path with H. P. Lovecraft than one might expect.
The Charlie books are an interesting case. There are physical explanations for some of the phenomena. These explanations don’t hold up for very long, and they’re articulated with the Alice books’ madcap irreverance; but they have a prima facie plausibility. It’s appropriate to try to work out the underlying laws – if you’re a child. Not so much if you’re grown up.
It recounts the career of serial murderer Graham Young – or, rather, it embellishes it. It makes it downright funny. Some of the movie’s characters and events are admitted to be fictitious. Other happenings – even some of the murders – are, officially, mere speculation.
For an account that purports to be more factual, if not less sensational, see “The Teacup Poisoner” (Fred Dinenage: Murder Casebook, season 1, episode 2).
The Young Poisoner’s Handbook is more like an inverted morality play.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
The movie is not, as Roger Ebert would have it, “a wickedly satirical view of ambition in a gifted, if misguided, youth.”
Satire and ambition: let’s consider these notions in turn.
The purpose of satire is to correct behavior. It assumes that redemption is possible. This movie appears to take the contrary view. It isn’t satire; it’s the bleakest kind of irony. (I could tell you what kind if I knew Northrop Frye’s literary taxonomy better.)
Ambition isn’t this protagonist’s driving motive; it’s his smokescreen. Graham (Hugh O’Conor) has genuine scientific interests, but his self-portrayal as a scientist is largely a pose. He tries to convince his prison psychologist that, deep down, he’s a sensitive soul who has permitted his yearning for knowledge to lead him too far, as if he’d only added heavy metals to people’s food and drink out of scientific curiosity.
Graham tries to convince himself of this, too. But he knows too well that he’s essentially a vindictive little cuss.
Alas, the psychologist decides that Graham is no longer homicidal and arranges Graham’s release from the prison hospital where he has been confined since his teens.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
The movie has three acts:
One: Early misdeeds
Two: Confinement
Three: Release
In each act, the object of satire – or, more accurately, of ferocious contempt – isn’t Graham himself so much as his social environment. Yes, Graham does terrible things, but he does them to silly, grotesque people. They are always the butt of the joke.
Take Graham’s best school friend, who brags about his forthcoming date with the girl that has captured Graham’s attention (a serial flirt). This friend has the habit of asking Graham to swap sandwiches with him. (An outlandishly reckless habit, if you adopt Graham’s point of view.)
Soon this friend is laid up in bed. Graham escorts the girl to a music hall, where she beams worshipfully at the crooner.
But then Graham’s supper-talk is too gruesome for the girl, and she flees. For all her insinuation, she’s disappointingly ordinary, after all.
Next, consider Graham’s family members, who appear to have been dreamed up by Roald Dahl. They park in front of the television while Graham experiments upstairs with his chemistry equipment. These philistines have the gall to complain that Graham’s chemicals have fouled up the tea-set. Even though it’s his sister’s fault! (She has been mixing together face-creams in the teacups.)
Graham puts something nasty in his sister’s eyedrops.
Then Graham’s stepmother – Ruth Sheen, at her most acrid – finds some dirty magazines in the house. Graham’s father guiltily lowers his eyes, but it’s Graham who’s blamed. His stepmother scrubs him down in the bath and destroys his precious chemistry set.
Not long afterward, she’s bent over with stomach pain. Her hair falls out. Never lovely, she becomes hideous and weak.
Graham volunteers to spoon-feed her. Too feeble to protest, she peers out in terror at her family.
It doesn’t end well for the stepmother.
Graham’s subsequent confinement in the prison hospital is not unlike Paul Pennyfeather’s, in Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall. We’re treated to the same bureaucratic dispute of that novel – rehabilitationism vs. disciplinarianism. The argument is rehearsed by hospital officials in front of the the inmates themselves, who, in a really clever scene, are locked up in a row of steam-baths so that only their heads are visible. We’re reminded of Dante and Virgil having it out over self-excusing sinners. (Silver-tongued these souls may be, but they are buried in mud.)
The harshest treatment is reserved for Graham’s victims of Act Three – his senior colleagues in the firm that employs him after he is released. They are ordinary factory workers. Some are cruel; some are kind; all are tawdry.
In one late scene, Graham sits on a grassy bank next to a reservoir, a bottle of poison in his hand. The implication is that he wishes to take revenge on all of society.
What damage might emptying the bottle do? Graham can’t know. It’s one thing to monitor subjects one at a time, measuring the dosage slipped into each victim’s tea and finding out and recording each bodily symptom. It’s something else altogether to pour poison into the general water supply. The effects couldn’t be inferred from the prior experiments. Nor would Graham be able to observe them.
Graham isn’t a sincere experimenter. He just wants to hurt. And the movie comes uncomfortably close to suggesting that his victims – indeed, that all members of society – deserve their suffering.
The trick of making the attacked less human than their attackers, so you feel no sympathy for them, is, I think, symptomatic of a new attitude in movies. This attitude says there’s no moral difference. Stanley Kubrick has assumed the deformed, self-righteous perspective of a vicious young punk who says, “Everything’s rotten. Why shouldn’t I do what I want? They’re worse than I am.” In their new mood (perhaps movies in their cumulative effect are partly responsible for it), people want to believe the hyperbolic worst, want to believe in the degradation of the victims – that they are dupes and phonies and weaklings. I can’t accept that Kubrick is merely reflecting this post-assassinations, post-Manson mood; I think he’s catering to it. I think he wants to dig it.
It’s an interesting question whether The Young Poisoner’s Handbook “wants to dig it.” Certainly, it presents the victims as “dupes and phonies and weaklings.” What it doesn’t do is glorify the victimizer. Graham is vicious, but, unlike A Clockwork Orange’s protagonist, he’s not a tough person; he wouldn’t instigate a physical fight. His choice of weapon betrays his cowardice. Nor does he dress or speak boldly. He’s essentially an overly formal, petulant little boy brandishing a chemistry set that has all the awesomeness of a model train.
Does this difference make the movie less or more misanthropic? At least in Kubrick’s Clockwork Orange, there’s one alluring character – even if he is a ruthless Nietzschean “overman.” The protagonist of The Young Poisoner’s Handbook has considerably less attraction.
There’s one way to avoid interpreting this movie as an expression of pure misanthropy, and that is to insist that since Graham is the narrator, everything is seen through jaundiced eyes. The key is to look for details that Graham doesn’t emphasize in his narration. Graham, we observe, is a Nazi enthusiast. But very little is made of this. We just know it because of some pictures on his wall. An obsession with Hitler was a large part of the historical Graham Young’s life. But when Graham tells us his story, he leaves it out. It’s as if he’s back with his prison psychologist, eliciting sympathy, omitting details on purpose, making his victims seem worse than they are.
What the movie shows us, then, is a weakling who tears down other people, in his thoughts and with his deeds – but always at some remove – to compensate for his own smallness. This leaves us with one contemptible figure, not a contemptible whole world. But, wicked though he may be, since he’s just one small person, he can’t deprive us of the magnanimity or the resources to pity even one such as himself – should we choose to do so.
I’ve been enjoying Part One (“Ancient Philosophy”) of Anthony Kenny’s four-part New History of Philosophy. The selection and arrangement of themes is pretty tidy, and in one passage – the conclusion of the epistemological chapter – it’s almost breathtaking how the dominoes topple over.
The study of ancient epistemology can teach us much about the nature of knowledge and the limits of scepticism. Several insights became part of the patrimony of all future philosophy: knowledge can only be of what is true; knowledge is only knowledge if it can appeal implicitly or explicitly to some kind of support, whether from experience, reasoning, or some other source; and one who claims knowledge must be resolute, excluding the possibility of being rightly converted, at a later stage, to a different view.
However, ancient epistemology is bedevilled by two different but related fallacies. Both of them are generated by a misunderstanding of the truth that whatever is knowledge must be true. One of the fallacies haunts classical epistemology, up to the time of Aristotle; the other fallacy haunts Hellenistic and imperial epistemology.
The first fallacy is this. “Whatever is knowledge must be true” may be interpreted in two ways:
(1) Necessarily, if p is known, p is true
or
(2) If p is known, p is necessarily true.
(1) is true but (2) is false. It is a necessary truth that if I know you are sitting down, then you are sitting down; but if I know you are sitting down it is not a necessary truth that you are sitting down; you may get up at any moment. Plato and Aristotle, over and over again, seem to regard (2) as indistinguishable from (1). Given the necessary connection between knowledge and truth, they seem to think, only what is necessary can be known. From the acceptance of (2) there flows the construction of the theory of eternal and immutable Ideas, and there flows the impossible ideal of Aristotelian science.
If whatever is knowledge must be true, then it may seem that knowledge must be the exercise of a faculty that cannot err. This is the form that the fallacy takes in Hellenistic times. The Epicureans and Stoics, unlike Plato and Aristotle, are prepared to countenance knowledge not just of eternal truths, but of mundane contingencies such as that Dion is now walking. But this, they claim, is possible only if we have faculties – whether sense or reason – that are capable of infallible operation. The Hellenistic fallacy is just the mirror image of the classical fallacy. Let F stand for some faculty. Then it is true that
It is impossible, if F knows that p, that F has gone wrong.
But that is not the same as, nor is it true that,
If F knows that p, then it was impossible for F to go wrong.
The epistemological fallacy, both in its classical and in its Hellenistic form, would cast long shadows through philosophy’s history.
If Plato, Aristotle, the Epicureans, the Stoics, and (presumably, for centuries) their descendents all really were confused on this point, then: Oof.
Little Abel has been feverish; his napping has been so fitful, he hasn’t remained asleep when I’ve tried to separate my body from his. Today he was less ill but just as unwilling to be parted from me. The household chores have suffered; my reading and writing “projects” have suffered; Abel’s napping “schedule,” insofar as one exists, has suffered. In the afternoons, I’ve had to haul him, at his groggiest, down the block to retrieve Samuel from the bus.
Samuel has brought home a workbook of optional math exercises. Most days, I force him to complete a few pages. He screams bloody murder but then settles down and does them easily enough.
Daniel, the middle child, finds ways to claim attention. He and I discuss the English and Spanish alphabets. He firmly believes in che, elle, and erre, although the Real Academia Española disavowed those letters in the mid-1990s. Alas, Daniel follows YouTube, not his father. His Spanish is therefore overcomplicated. His approach to reading in either language is downright glacial. He can sound out syllables but has to pause to lecture me about every letter. I tell him it’s no way to form words, let alone whole sentences. What really would suit him is a language of pictographs and ideographs. His calligraphy is rather good; he might learn to design type before he can read it.
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Most days, Abel and Daniel are good friends. They play and bathe together. Daniel has given them superhero bathing names: “Soap Man” and “Bubble Man.” Abel likes to pour water out of the tub and onto the bathroom floor.
When Abel is old enough, I’ll take them all outside and force them to run around the track that belongs to the school down the street. The two younger boys, especially Daniel, already like to run around the shed in our yard. They didn’t like to before, but I persuaded them with reverse psychology or some such trick.
Every day this week, Samuel has come home from school expecting to have received the latest issue of his (free) Lego magazine. No luck. I share in his disappointment.
Today, then, we were happy to find a magazine in our mailbox.
But it wasn’t the Lego magazine. It was an unexpected, free issue of Harper’s.
Eveloping the regular cover was an outer cover, on which was printed this enticement:
Dear Former Subscriber:
Remember the story of the prodigal son? How his father put on a feast and welcomed him back with open arms?
Well, that’s what we at Harper’s want to do for you.
Instead of setting a sumptuous table, we’ve come up with something far more satisfying: a money-saving opportunity to subscribe to Harper’s at the lowest available rate!
Restart your subscription today and get a full year of Harper’s (12 issues) for only $14.97 – that’s 86% off the annual newsstand price. You save $92.91 just by saying YES!
And so on.
I have to say, I’m put off. Harper’s Magazine is not my Heavenly Father.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
P.S. Even so: In the pretentious field of long-form journalism, Harper’s achieves a kind of modesty by going out of the way to pose as what, in Peppa Pig, is referred to as a “clever-clogs.” (The “clever-clogs” in Peppa Pig is Edmund Elephant.) The Harper’s style is to dress up serious reportage or reflection in snark.
“Revolt in the Heartland: Can Old-Time Populism Save the Country?”
“Ghost Towns of the Darién Gap”
“On the Front Lines of Canada’s Ostrich War” (didn’t the Australians have an ostrich war? No, they fought the emus)
That I’ve been a more faithful subscriber of Harper’s than of, say, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, or The New York Review of Books surely reflects my own penchant for off-the-wall self-effacement.
Or that I’m a cheapskate. Those other mags are pricey.
About a decade ago, I read and enjoyed several chapters of the middle book, Ethics for a Broken World. I would read that book again. I wish I could teach it to students of the past. I’m less sure about today’s and tomorrow’s students. The book is a series of “lectures” about late-20th- and early-21st-century moral and political philosophy, delivered to university students in the (ravaged) future three or four generations hence. Even this bleak scenario now seems naïvely optimistic. It assumes that there will be students in the (ravaged) future.
The historian belongs not to the past but to the present. Professor Trevor-Roper tells us that the historian “ought to love the past.” This is a dubius injunction. To love the past may easily be an expression of the nostalgic romanticism of old men and old societies, a symptom of loss of faith and interest in the present or future. Cliché for cliché, I should prefer the one about freeing oneself from “the dead hand of the past.” The function of the historian is neither to love the past nor to emancipate himself from the past, but to master and understand it as the key to the understanding of the present.
Now that I’m an old man of forty-four, not hopeful for the (this-worldly) future or much enjoying or understanding the present – at least as it exists outside my household – the past does seem more lovely. The picturesque past, that is. If this makes me an unfit historian, so be it.
A.I. could kill everyone before the decade ends, tech experts believe (or so a whistleblower claims). We all lose: not just this or that way of life, but life itself.
Of all the stupid ways to go.
⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯
The smith with the tongs both worketh in the coals,
and fashioneth it with hammers,
and worketh it with the strength of his arms:
yea, he is hungry, and his strength faileth:
he drinketh no water, and is faint.
The carpenter stretcheth out his rule:
he marketh it out with a line:
he fitteth it with planes,
and he marketh it out with the compass,
and maketh it after the figure of a man,
according to the beauty of a man;
that it may remain in the house.
He heweth him down cedars,
and taketh the cypress and the oak,
which he strengtheneth for himself among the trees of the forest:
he planteth an ash, and the rain doth nourish it.
Then shall it be for a man to burn:
for he will take thereof, and warm himself;
yea, he kindleth it, and baketh bread;
yea, he maketh a god, and worshippeth it:
he maketh it a graven image, and falleth down thereto.
He burneth part thereof in the fire:
with part thereof he eateth flesh:
he roasteth roast, and is satisfied:
yea, he warmeth himself, and saith,
‘Aha, I am warm, I have seen the fire’.
And the residue thereof he maketh a god,
even his graven image:
he falleth down unto it, and worshippeth it,
and prayeth unto it, and saith,
‘Deliver me; for thou art my god’.
They have not known nor understood:
for he hath shut their eyes, that they cannot see;
and their hearts, that they cannot understand.
And none considereth in his heart,
neither is there knowledge nor understanding to say,
‘I have burned part of it in the fire,
yea, also I have baked bread upon the coals thereof:
I have roasted flesh, and eaten it:
and shall I make the residue thereof an abomination?
shall I fall down to the stock of a tree?’
He feedeth of ashes:
a deceived heart hath turned him aside,
that he cannot deliver his soul,
nor say, ‘Is there not a lie in my right hand?’
‘Remember these, O Jacob and Israel,
for thou art my servant:
I have formed thee: thou art my servant,
O Israel, thou shalt not be forgotten of me.
I have blotted out, as a thick cloud, thy transgressions,
“And the residue thereof he maketh a god, / even his graven image: / he falleth down unto it, and worshippeth it, / and prayeth unto it, and saith, / ‘Deliver me; for thou art my god’.”
Shockingly, this is my first exhibition of the great Adrian Frutiger’s work. Behold.
Very nice, but one must tolerate long descenders. Observe the lowercase ps, qs, ys, and, especially, js (“jolly good job”). (The specimen is from a story by Francis Wyndham.)
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The household is watching Young Sherlock Holmes (1985) in installments: our attention spans are not long. The movie is faux-British. Barry Levinson, Chris Columbus, and Steven Spielberg are named in the opening credits.
Holmes and Watson are schoolmates. The school is proto-Hogwarts. There is a very picturesque scene with all the boys dressed for dinner in the Great Hall. The camera lingers over the table at which the Masters are seated. It cherishes their extreme decrepitude.
In other scenes, old men are injected with poisoned darts that cause them to hallucinate and kill themselves. The hallucinations involve the coming to life of chicken dinners, hatstands, and stained-glass windows.
Little Daniel excuses himself during these scenes.
The politicians of New Mexico have responded to Trump’s latest proposal.
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Samuel has been complaining about the wasting of his time. E.g., when someone else chooses a video to watch, that person is “wasting my [Samuel’s] time.”
He can be rather sweet about it, however.
“Mom is working [napping, etc.]. She is wasting my time.” He clarifies: “I wish I could to talk to her instead.”
Evelyn Waugh, Scoop:
He had published eight books … beginning with a life of Rimbaud written when he was eighteen, and concluding, at the moment, with Waste of Time, a studiously modest description of some harrowing months among the Patagonian Indians.
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Daniel: “Mommy, I am going to bed, and [the letter] A is going to spend the night with me. Can you carry me and A to bed?”
(2) Pablo of Texcoco, How to Be Grateful: An Aztec Guide to the Art of Gratitude (2025), reviewed at NDPR.
It was jarring to come across both reviews in the same week. It was like reading about Nazis and then learning that a collection of mid-20th-century Germanic homespun “wisdom” had just been issued by a major university press.
The “Nazi” remark isn’t a cheap exaggeration. Clendinnen’s work unavoidably brings the Holocaust to mind.
Still, the analogy isn’t perfect, especially when it’s applied to the other book. Pablo’s “wisdom” was written down quite a few years after the Spanish conquered the Aztecs. Would we demand that every postwar Germanic writer address the sorrowful legacy of the Nazi period? If not, then perhaps we shouldn’t object when Pablo and his 21st-century expositors choose not to dwell on the same Aztec qualities that Clendinnen describes.
Perhaps the introduction of Christianity into Nahua culture accounts for the surprising gentleness of the “Pablo” book.
Or perhaps not. It’s not unheard of for the same people to manifest brutality and exquisite etiquettical sensitivity.
How does Clendinnen’s work go down these days? Her scholarship is impossible to ignore. I fear that she is becoming unfashionable, however. I see that in the second (2022) edition of The Mexico Reader, the selection from Clendinnen has been considerably shortened.
Her drunk, laughing mother climbs into the tiny bed with her after a night out. For 18-year-old Sarah (Lena Headey), it’s the last straw. She resolves to leave home. A younger sister is left to contend for herself.
What could have been a depressing first scene is oddly bouyant. It’s lightened by notes from Leftfield’s song “Melt.” Rave music sounds throughout the whirlwind opening third of this 70-minute BBC drama for teens, as Sarah meets, takes ecstasy from, and moves in with Tom (Ian Hart). There are tracks by Orbital, the Prodigy, and similar musicians.
Trainspotting, the more famous drugs-and-techno movie, was released around the same time. Loved Up is much gentler. It’s basically an earlier version of The Spectacular Now, treating of an unsettled but ultimately tethered girl and her rootless boyfriend.
Tom lives in the Now. He pretends not to – he takes pride in his regular employment and considers his after-hours partying to be well-earned – but the truth is, he parties all day long. He plays with the merchandise in the toy shop where he works. He can’t relax at home: his pals are always dropping in, and he hankers for the club.
The movie’s final two thirds are a gradual come-down from the initial high. But what a high!
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As soon as Tom has given Sarah the ecstasy, he takes her to his pals. They all go clubbing and joyriding, and when a postal truck loses a sack of mail, the revelers open the letters and drive around the neighborhood, delivering the happy-sounding items. Bills and such, they throw away because, what use is unhappy news?
Then, at the flat, Tom and Sarah consummate their new love. The movie may have been broadcast to teens, but its U.S. rating would have been a solid “R.”
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Hart and Headey would go on to become famous for, respectively, Harry Potter and Game of Thrones. Headey also would hold her own as Stellan Skarsgård’s co-star in Aberdeen, playing a more grown-up version of Sarah. (Hart re-appears there, too.)
I guess Loved Up is a cautionary tale, but Hart’s and Headey’s heedless glee is what makes it worthwhile. Hart and, especially, Headey are infectious early on – Headey for Sarah’s wide-eyed innocence as she enters Tom’s funhouse scene, Hart for Tom’s pose of worldly assurance. The eventual undermining of these stances is a poignant, if minor, tragedy.
That’s not to put down the rest of the movie. There are some fine later sequences. Sarah invites Tom to meet her alcoholic mother, and Tom obtusely brings along a pal – and a bottle of sherry. Later, when, in an emergency, Sarah summons Tom, he loses the address and tells the cab driver to just follow after other cars.
Meanwhile, Sarah makes her own blunders, losing her job, trying too hard to compensate for forgetting her sister’s birthday, and allowing herself to grow too close to Tom’s dealer (a charming, snaky Jason Isaacs).
None of this is irreparable. There’s little of Trainspotting’s fatalism. One realizes, of course, that Tom will have to wake up, or else. The movie isn’t quite an argument for shortsighted revelry, but it doesn’t come down hard against it, either. What it does argue against is the permanency of this state.
I don’t think any viewer – teen-aged or otherwise – would wish to end up like Sarah’s mother.
