Mexico 2, Ecuador 0; Portugal 2, Croatia 1; predictions

Still he was a pius man in his way and found relief in prayer.

(Daisy Ashford, The Young Visiters)

We lost because Mexico was the home team. It pretty much boils down to that.

Mexico shouldn’t have hosted this tournament, but that’s a topic for another day.

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To my dismay, I’ve been driven very close to embracing a conspiracy theory.

Not because Ecuador lost, but because of how Portugal beat Croatia. A penalty kick was bogusly awarded to the Portuguese; later, Croatia’s tying goal was disallowed due to a tiny spike on a chart. The spike indicated an otherwise undetectable touch registered by a chip inside the ball.

Not even video review could corroborate it.

It’s not that I don’t believe the technology works. It’s that I’m not convinced that this chart isn’t a fabrication.

(It doesn’t help that this technology’s only other beneficiary has been Real Madrid, for a notorious judgment that decided a Champions League series.)

Or, to retreat just a little, a Croatian who chose to doubt the chart would be within his rights.

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Enough lamenting (for now). These are my predictions for the rest of the tournament (see the bracket). I may revise them after the round of 16, should Spain lose to Portugal, Norway to Brazil, or Colombia to Switzerland.

The Belgium/​USA match is hard to predict, too, but its winner shouldn’t last longer than one more round.

Morocco over Canada

France over Paraguay

Belgium over the USA

Spain over Portugal

Norway over Brazil

Mexico (at home again) over England

Colombia over Switzerland

Argentina over Egypt

France over Morocco

Spain over Belgium

Norway (unless undone by Miami’s heat) over Mexico (no longer at home)

Colombia over tired-looking Argentina

France over Spain

Colombia over Norway

Spain over Norway (or vice versa; it’s just a consolation match)

France over Colombia

Sally Rooney; body-text fonts, pt. 6: Garth Graphic

This is another August when I’ll fail to read Light in August. Instead, I’ll finish my second Sally Rooney novel. (No, I haven’t seen the TV episodes, which are reputed to be steamy.) I’m pretty sure Rooney is the youngest novelist I’ve read – the youngest, as in, the most recently born; not as in, the youngest to write a novel. That person is Daisy Ashford.

Rooney is less jaundiced than Ashford was at age nine. But you can sense Rooney inching toward disillusionment. These are her novels’ titles: Conversations with Friends; Normal People; Beautiful World, Where Are You.

Rooney’s pacing is propulsive. Her scenes are tautly constructed. Her protagonists make me feel like an old fogy: I spend most of the time feeling sorry for them. I suppose that for a lot of her fans, her blank young men and, especially, her aloof young women are personal reference points, imaginary peers for modeling oneself after or for suffering with or for projecting one’s self-conception onto. Some books lend themselves to that sort of thing. Jane Eyre is a fine example, carefully and richly realized though Jane and Rochester are as characters.

As much as I like Jane Eyre, I don’t read that way anymore: I stopped around age thirty-two or thirty-three. Sally Rooney is thirty-one.

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Now, this month’s mini-essay on the typefaces in my books.

One doesn’t often see this font used for setting body text. Which is too bad!

Look at those inconspicuous commas and apostrophes. Look at those very conspicuous, asymmetically serifed, lower-case ys. Look at those interrogation marks, and the big, spiky serifs on the Gs: were I a fly fisherman, this is the font I’d choose.

The mystery of a hansom cab

Since War and Peace is proving too difficult to read at this time, I am aiming much lower. The book I am trying out is Fergus Hume’s The Mystery of a Hansom Cab – “the original blockbuster crime novel,” according to the back cover of the Text Classics edition.

Arthur Conan Doyle did not admire the writing of Fergus Hume. I’m not sure I admire it, but I do like it.

“Well,” said Mr Gorby, addressing his reflection in the looking glass, “I’ve been finding out things these last twenty years, but this is a puzzler and no mistake.”

Mr Gorby is the detective. Other important characters – socialites in Victorian Melbourne – spend lots of time drinking tea, casually discussing the murder (which the newspapers have turned into a sensation), and trying to arrange marriages for themselves. The book reminds me of nothing else so much as Daisy Ashford’s The Young Visiters, which she wrote when she was nine.

The murder is done with poison (chloroform) late at night in a hansom cab. This method has the virtue of noiselessness. Writers of the genre’s later “golden” age would have opted for air-bubble injection – also ludicrous – or strangulation.