Of toilets

The British famously named one of their scientific boats Boaty McBoatface; in the same spirit, I hereby christen our new toilet Flushton McFlushface – “Flushy,” for short. (Karin’s dad kindly installed it yesterday.)

“Flushy” resided some days in our parlor, inside a big box, and became like a piece of furniture to us – which, I suppose, is what it is. Samuel and Daniel played upon, and inside, the box.

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The Middle Ages weren’t always so-called. Likewise, our old toilet, previously unnamed, is now “Not Quite Flushy” because of its position in the History of Toilets – and because of its chief defect.

We carried it out to the front porch where, due to rain, churchgoing (ours, not the toilet’s), etc., it has remained. With luck, it’ll be immortalized by Google Street View. This afternoon it toppled onto its side. I don’t know if it was pushed by wind, urchins, or stray cats; or if a part of it simply crumbled.

I intend to break it into smaller pieces with a hammer, to fit it into the trash.

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Enough of toilets. For the second half of my reading year I’m plotting a march through Dostoevsky. Curious thing. His canon is crowned by the “five major novels.” Russians list them differently than do English speakers. Russians include The Adolescent; English speakers typically don’t. They might include Notes from the Underground (a novella) or reduce the list to four. It’s not as egregious as, e.g., Oregon’s having become the best college football team in the Midwest’s 18-team Big Ten Conference; but it’s gerrymandered, all right.

Anyway, I plan to read Notes, the Russians’ “five,” and probably The Double and The Gambler; so, either way, I’m covered.

P.S. See this useful webpage re: translations.

Toads

Now viewing Cane Toads: An Unnatural History (1988) with Daniel, a.k.a. Toad. He likes movies with “little animals.” We rotate through various David Attenborough productions. The reptiles-and-amphibians series (Life in Cold Blood) has been an especial hit. Hence my search for more toad-content. Cane Toads, dir. by Mark Lewis, is basically what an animal doc would be if helmed by Errol Morris. (I guess Morris has made a couple of near-animal docs: Gates of Heaven, and one-third of Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control.) The toad movie has talking heads (politicians, scientists), historical “re-enactments,” dramatizations of humans’ encounters with toads, and sentimental old Queenslanders on their back lawns waxing lyrical and tearful about the cane toad’s essential decency.

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The next stop on my fantasy reading tour is The Hobbit, to which I’m returning after some decades. The first 120 pp. have been pretty much as I remember them, almost line-for-line. Disappointing, in a way. But then comes the “Beorn” chapter with quite the wittiest passage so far:

“If you must know more [said Gandalf], his name is Beorn. He is very strong, and he is a skin-changer.”

“What! a furrier, a man that calls rabbits conies, when he doesn’t turn their skins into squirrels?” asked Bilbo.

“Good gracious heavens, no, no, NO, NO!” said Gandalf. “Don’t be a fool Mr. Baggins if you can help it … He is a skin-changer. He changes his skin: sometimes he is a huge black bear, sometimes he is a great strong black-haired man with huge arms and a great beard …

There is a fearful hour – 9:30pm, more or less – when, his brother having dozed off, Daniel – normally so sweet, so docile – a virtual Dr. Henry Jekyll – transforms into someone (or something) more like the wicked Mr. Edward Hyde.

That hour is now upon us.

1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 66: Microcosmos

“A documentary on insect life in meadows and ponds” (IMDb).

I’ll try to be brief. This is the rare masterpiece about which the less is said, the better.

First, what it isn’t: a documentary in David Attenborough’s vein. No attempt is made to explain why these creatures are designed as they are, why they behave as they do, or how they are connected to the ecosystem. This is no sociological treatise. It doesn’t exist to sway one’s opinions or to add to one’s store of knowledge.

Very few words are spoken. They are in French.

There is an English version, narrated by Kristin Scott Thomas:

A meadow in early morning, somewhere on Earth. Hidden here is a world as vast as our own, where the weeds are like impenetrable jungles, the stones are mountains, and even the smallest pond becomes an ocean. Time passes differently here: an hour is like a day, a day is like a season, and the passing of a season is a lifetime. But to observe this world, we must fall silent now, and listen to its murmurs.

The creatures and their habitat remain alien, exotic. Perhaps the movie makes them more so. Dragonflies and bees, grasses and flowers and puddles, are so closely and brightly photographed that they look glossy and artificial, as if they were insect-mannequins perched upon display furniture. (By comparison, their synthetic counterparts in Honey, I Shrunk the Kids appear grittily realistic.) But if magnification makes real insects seem curiously more and less genuine, it also bestows personality on their movements. A viewer is tempted to ascribe human-like intentionity to these bugs – and, also, to the plants, which, in speeded-up sequences, curl themselves up or spread themselves out, or wrap themselves around hapless pollinators.

There is music: classical, new-age. There are idyllic panoramic shots. Surprisingly, it matters that the movie is French: I kept half-expecting to glimpse, at the bottom of the screen, that ant-like, Sisyphean pseudo-peasant, Jean de Florette, hauling building materials across a meadow. The lighting at close range is vivid, if not harsh; at a distance, it is softer, not so unlike the lighting and focus of those gorgeous, delicately pervy, tedious offerings of David Hamilton, that English confectioner of French nubile skin.

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My reaction, the first time I viewed Microcosmos, was ho-hum. I’d been hoping for years to see it, ever since it was reviewed by Siskel & Ebert. One afternoon, the Cornell Cinema screened it for children. When I sat down, I noticed a fellow grad student ushering his large brood across the theater row in front of mine. The excited children settled in; the lights were dimmed; clouds appeared on the screen, landscapes came into view, and the first insect protagonists did their numbers. Soon, I was asleep. I slept through the rest of the movie (it isn’t long).

I revisited it last night with Samuel and Daniel, who, insect-like, climbed up and down the furniture and my person the whole while. Even so, they paid attention. Samuel is still talking about Microcosmos today. I, too, itch to see it again.

It’s a good movie to chill out to.

More sleep trouble (a cautionary tale)

You might think that the trouble is with Air Supply, my CPAP machine. Indeed, for a couple of weeks, the mask was too tight, and I was getting terrible headaches. But I fixed that problem.

No, the trouble is that our mattress is wrecked. It has been for years.

When we bought it, Karin & I thought we were being clever, trying out mattresses in the store and then using the Internet to order a model that was similar to what we liked. Well, the joke was on us. Now the springs are damaged and we sleep in enormous craters.

I awoke with a backache that would persist all day. It was the final backbreaking straw. A few hours later, we ordered a new, more expensive mattress. This one is renowned for its firmness and has a lifetime warranty. It also will require us to make a lifetime of payments (or at least a year’s worth).

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David Attenborough’s Our Planet – a Netflix production – is free to stream on YouTube. Samuel and I watched Episode 8, “Forests.” Samuel was quite taken with the animals. He squawked at the TV several times.

Melting

Most definitely not snowed in; but the last two nights, walking has been perilous due to the ice. There are too few English terms for the different slicknesses I’ve encountered.

Today, though, we’ve had lightning flashes and thick rain. The snow mounds — formerly tall as houses, hard as marble — are greatly reduced.

(Will corpses be revealed, I wonder?)

If we’re lucky, the water won’t refreeze; the air will remain warm until the fluid has all trickled away. Meanwhile our yard is a slushy swamp, impassable in canvas shoes.

The male Sabby has sent me this beautiful thing.

The female has been nagging at me to continue applying, belatedly, for health insurance:

two Facebook messages;
one text message;
one email;
one e-card;
one postcard.

It’s so touching, I almost hate to do it.

Philosophy/television/tuna

Right now the most entertaining thing in my life is my philosophy class. I don’t expect Bethel to hire me again, so I teach however I want to. I’m always going on about which arguer bears the burden of proof. Not very riveting. … Well, too bad. I want my students to learn conscientiousness. I mean, I want them to acquire the habit of obsessing over who has the burden of proof.

(If they end up thinking in this way, I’ll have taught them something valuable: something which should serve them well during their marriages.)

(Dunno if I’ll ever write about my teaching at IUSB.)

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After a long day of teaching, I walk over to Mary’s & Martin’s house and we all lie on couches in the living room. (M&M are high school teachers: always tired.) Eventually we all try to grade papers. Martin goes away to the dining room. Mary and I remain in the living room and try to grade while watching Blue Planet (David Attenborough’s TV show about predation in the seas). Orcas hunt down a gray whale calf. They separate it from its mother and then push it under water to drown it. Mary is horrified. It seems to me, though, that the plankton get the rawest deal.

Later, Mary complains that the dolphins are skanky with one another. This is how I can tell that Blue Planet is her kind of show.

The episode causes Mary to desire tuna. She gets off the couch and puts some into a bowl. Bianca, the cat, wakes up, sniffs the air, and walks over to Mary (oh yeah, I forgot to mention that M&M have a cat). Soon I also am craving tuna. I warm up some leftover tuna casserole. Bianca walks over to me, doe-eyed (but in the manner of a cat). No dice, babe.