Closing credits

Everyone in the house has been ill. We’ve missed church two Sundays. We did go to a special Christmas service in the middle of the week (it seemed, briefly, that we were OK).

My fever broke last night. I’m still coughing. Please excuse the less-than-effusive presentation of this year’s credits list.

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I thank:

Karin;

Jasper and Ziva;

Samuel, Daniel, and Abel;

other relations;

Samuel’s teachers and bus driver;

Daniel’s teachers (the Numberblocks);

our church;

our neighbors;

our librarians;

my reading group;

the Psmiths, for their book reviews (see their latest);

fontsmiths, for their fonts;

poets, for their poems;

Jane Austen, Anthony Trollope, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, for domestic fiction;

Sue Townsend, for her “Adrian Mole” books (see, also, the “secret diary” of fourteen-year-old Margaret Thatcher …

… a work of hilarity, not charity);

the Ecuadorian national soccer team – especially, Moisés Caicedo, Pervis Estupiñán (whose year was actually rather poor), Alan Franco, Hernán Galíndez, Piero Hincapié, Willian Pacho, and Enner Valencia;

the Criterion Channel, especially for the Chinese crime dramas Black Coal, Thin Ice (now unavailable) (set in Harbin) and Only the River Flows (rural Jiangxi);

the Fox Corporation (!) for Tubi – especially, for Crime Stories, Da Vinci’s Inquest, From Hell (now unavailable), Lake Mungo, Looney Tunes, Tom and Jerry (esp. cartoons with Droopy), and, way back in February, the Super Bowl;

just about every streaming service, for Peppa Pig;

Goodwill Industries, for books and stretchpants;

Jarritos, especially for Mineragua;

and

Taco Bell, for soft tacos with potatoes, lettuce, cheese, spicy sauce, and supplemental guacamole.

Hoyle

Someday I’ll explain why, a decade or so ago, I resolved never to learn another brand-new board or card game – indeed, why I came to loathe the very idea of new games.

Tonight’s post is about why despite (or perhaps because of) this loathing, I bought The New Complete Hoyle, Revised (1991) at Goodwill.

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The book’s subtitle is: “The Authoritative Guide to the Official Rules of All Popular Games of Skill and Chance.”

All popular games. Of skill and chance.

Is this a literally true description of the book? No.

Was it true in 1991? No. There were other popular games than those in Hoyle.

The pretense of officiality also goes too far. See, for example, this admission:

The rules of Go differ somewhat in China, Korea, and Japan. Unfortunately they have not been codified even in Japan, where, in 1928, a championship tournament was interrupted and suspended for a month by a dispute over rules. A commission appointed to clarify the Japanese rules proposed a code in 1933, but it has not been generally adopted.

One might deplore the book’s exaggeration. On the other hand, one might admire its determination to establish a canon of games.

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Which brings me to what canonization is for.

Walk down any Walmart games aisle, or visit a specialty shop: new games proliferate like Hydra’s heads. This, at best, is a distraction from the sustained pursuit of excellence. At worst, it’s postmodern absurdity.

One is tempted to commit one of two opposing mistakes. The first is to renounce all gaming. This is the Charybdis of asceticism. The second is to try to keep up with new gaming. This is the Scylla of … well, probably not asceticism’s starkest opposites, wantonness and incontinence. It’s more like an arms race. Or like keeping up with the Joneses.

The sensible middle course is to choose just a few games and to stick with them. Here a canon of games is invaluable. It’s less good to practice something with no stock of wisdom built up around it. (I’m sure Alasdair MacIntyre would agree.)

Adhering to the canon ensures that one is communing, not only with today’s gamers, but also with those of the past, e.g. the Japanese who debated the rules of Go in 1928.

Hoyle is steeped in history, or aspires to be.

(Indeed, its stated pedigree is almost blasphemous:

The only truly immortal being on record is an Englishman named Edmond Hoyle, who was born in 1672 and buried in 1769 but who has never really died.

I imagine my pious grandfather, who refused to play cards, disapproving.)

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Suppose that one is nauseated by the uselessness of gaming and decides that total abstention is, after all, the way to go. Hoyle still is invaluable. What better tool is there for understanding scenes of gaming in old books? I’ve never actually played bridge, but (in some moods) my favorite Christie novel is Cards on the Table. Identifying the murderer in that book depends on knowing about bridge. Then there are the James Bond novels (Casino Royale, Goldfinger  … ). Even Austen’s and Pepys’s people are card fiends. A confirmed teetotaller probably should know a little about boozing, if only for literature’s sake.

Mansfield Park

This novel is more savage than its predecessors. Its matrons and widows are at least as pharisaical as those of Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice; its young gentlemen, at least as dissolute. In addition, the family’s fortune depends on volatile West Indian holdings. Will the slaves generate enough income to make up for the profligacy of the eldest son? And what will befall poor little Fanny Price, the household’s live-in cousin?

I don’t know how this story will turn out. For once, I’m in suspense.

The movie didn’t appear until 1999. I won’t be reviewing it for my “1996” series – at least, not for many years. (Recall that I’ve been casting a wider net, reviewing material that appeared from 1995 to 1997.)

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I’m nine or so books behind my hoped-for reading pace. So, recently, I read two celebrated mini-books: Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These, about Ireland’s Magdalene laundries; and Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny, about Nazi Germany, the USSR, and Donald Trump.

You could argue that they’re basically the same book. To use jargon from my old job as a tutor in IUSB’s first-year writing program: the second book is a “theory” text, and the first is an “example” text; and a student who read both books could write a paper making plenty of connections between them (one connection per body paragraph, of course).

(I wonder how teachers of first-year English at IU are coping with A.I. Not too badly, I expect. The in-house rules for papers are so detailed and peculiar, the bots probably still haven’t learned how to follow them.)

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This is Disney’s best song.

Abel has been standing up next to the furniture.

1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 89: Sense and sensibility

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of even a few female relations, who marries into a family in which females preponderate, will be exposed to screen adaptations of Jane Austen’s novels until his conscience compels him to read the source material.

I just read Sense and Sensibility – the working title of which was Elinor and Marianne – and am within a hundred pages of finishing Pride and Prejudice. This is a good time to reflect again on Austen.

(See this earlier review of Pride and Prejudice.)

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The movie Sense and Sensibility (1995) clocks in at a mere two hours and sixteen minutes. Necessarily, the story it tells is an abridgment.

Mrs. Dashwood (Gemma Jones) is widowed. Her daughters, Elinor (Emma Thompson) and Marianne (Kate Winslet), are left virtually penniless while their older half-brother, John (James Fleet), inherits everything. (A third and much younger sister, Margaret, is an amusing background presence but adds little to the story.) Mercifully, Sir John Middleton, a distant relation, invites the Dashwood women to live in the spare cottage on his Devon estate. To Devon they decamp, but not before Elinor has grown attached to the brother-in-law of her half-brother: Edward Ferrars (Hugh Grant). Edward is much kinder than his dreadful sister – John Dashwood’s wife – but, due to cinematic embellishment, he is painfully awkward: when he makes social calls, he blushes and stammers, and he struggles to cross the room and to put his bottom into his chair.

The Dashwoods are welcomed to Devon by their boisterous relation, Sir John (Robert Hardy); and by Sir John’s mother-in-law, Mrs. Jennings (played with gusto by Elizabeth Spriggs), who relishes matchmaking. Marianne soon acquires two suitors: middle-aged Colonel Brandon (Alan Rickman), as well as dashing young Willoughby (Greg Wise) with whom she falls in love. But, to the Dashwoods’ confoundment, Marianne is “ghosted” by Willoughby and Elinor by Edward. Marianne breaks down and almost dies; Elinor bears her grief stoically but is tormented by the devious Miss Lucy Steele (Imogen Stubbs), Edward’s old flame. The main theme of the story is the contrast between Marianne’s self-destructive passion and Elinor’s dutiful restraint. Because there is little doubt as to which husbands Marianne and Elinor ultimately will be paired with, the story’s interest lies in the moral scrutiny to which each party is subjected.

I say this is the story’s interest; the movie’s lies in what each actor does with this old material. Rickman, especially, delivers his lines with hammy verve. Winslet, whose Marianne strives to maintain high-flown ideals, paradoxically gives the least affected performance: her cry of relief when she sees Willoughby across a London dancefloor is endearing and pitiful. Thompson projects exquisite, quiet suffering: it’s lovely when, at the movie’s conclusion, Elinor’s reserve is shattered.

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One episode in the book that the movie surprisingly omits is a duel between Willoughby and Colonel Brandon. (“He [dueled] to defend: I to punish,” the Colonel explains.) Neither man is wounded, and the book dispenses with the matter in a few lines. It spends more time on caddish Willoughby’s (not entirely uncreditable) self-justification. Bizarrely, the movie’s nearest thing to a defense of Willoughby is spoken by Colonel Brandon, whose magnanimity is thereby underscored. (An unprejudiced viewer might suspect that Willoughby isn’t getting a fair shake.)

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Some minor characters are excised from the screen: Sir John Middleton’s wife, who, in the novel, combines flawless manners with an utter lack of interest in humans other than her children; and Miss Anne Steele, Miss Lucy Steele’s elder sister, a gossiping nitwit.

Thus, the movie leaves us thinking of old Mrs. Jennings as little more than a gossiping busybody. Her kindness and good sense aren’t hidden, but they’re less conspicuous due to the absence of the book’s more injurious gossip, Miss Anne Steele. And it’s harder, once we’re deprived of the sedate, self-absorbed Mrs. Middleton, to notice that Sir John’s helpfulness springs from a keen curiosity about his fellow creatures. Take away just a few minor characters, and the others are impoverished.

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Why look to Austen for moral insight today, now that – in theory, at least – we no longer venerate the aristocracy? Do we care so much about her implicit criticisms of that bygone society? No; what affect us are her descriptions of timeless differences between individuals.

For Austen, each person may fit into a slightly different place in the social hierarchy, but the crucial moral ingredient is character. (And if character isn’t determined by position, neither is it a matter of choice; if we’re to believe Mr. Darcy’s old housekeeper in Pride and Prejudice, it’s detectable in infants.) Character’s worth is intrinsic, but it’s to be judged comparatively, each person against other members of the same family or class. Elinor (for instance) may initially be considered on her own; but, for Austen, what finally tells is how she compares against Marianne. Similarly, we know that Edward is almost saintly, not because he always does what’s right but because his mother and siblings are so deficient in habitual basic decency. Even the conniving Miss Lucy Steele is shown to be worthy when measured against her sister. (Analogous things could be said about many of the figures in Pride and Prejudice; I haven’t read the other novels.)

Austen’s reformist point, then, is that a person is not to be judged by whether he or she comes from a distinguished family or class; social background doesn’t constitute virtue but merely supplies a context for discerning it. The book begins:

The family of Dashwood had long been settled in Sussex. Their estate was large, and their residence was at Norland Park, in the centre of their property, where, for many generations, they had lived in so respectable a manner as to engage the general good opinion of their surrounding acquaintances.

It’s this “general good opinion” attaching to certain families, so coveted in her day, that Austen seeks not to falsify so much as to banish as irrelevant. Why praise the Dashwood family when John Dashwood is far less good than Marianne, and Marianne far less wise than Elinor?

A sad realization for the boys

Out strolling, the boys didn’t want to go home just yet, so they begged to go to Kroger. “There isn’t much food there anymore,” I told them. (The store’s final closure is scheduled for this evening.)

They begged to go anyway.

So, we walked up and down the all-but-empty aisles. The boys were shocked. Samuel cried all the way home.

“I’ll only drink water now,” he said.

“Why, Sammy?”

“Because Kroger is closing forever.”

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A few remarks about my other sons, so as to be fair to all.

Daniel was treated to another solo outing (that is, without his brothers). Here he is at the zoo, with his Grandpa Scott. Notice how he’s leashed.

Abel has learned to scoot forward on his belly. When not impeded, he beelines for the cats’ plates. He overturns them and licks the pellet-food.

Today he seized the Trollope novel I was reading and tore its cover.

It was The Warden, which details the misdeeds of churchmen and reformers. A novel of enduring relevance.

I’d turned to it after reading Hatch’s Democratization of American Christianity (for the group).

(Jane Austen is a clergy critic, too.)

Here comes the tooth

For Abel:

Karin took Daniel to the county fair.

I was very worried. I thought he’d run away or climb out of the Ferris wheel. He didn’t.

I visited ancestors with Abel and Samuel. Samuel doesn’t like the fair.

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I’m reading Pride and Prejudice.

I’m re-reading Lewis’s Space Trilogy (it’ll be my first time through Perelandra, actually). It’s better than I remember it. Then again, I was twelve or thirteen when I last read Out of the Silent Planet.

I’d forgotten that Weston, the baddie, is a longtermist.

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A good bit from a good Substack:

LARPing as an Inkling is at least 15% of the point of the classical education movement. I say this with only love in my heart.

Samuel: “Dad, what’s LARPing?”

John-Paul: “You don’t need to know, Son.”

R.I.P. Western Avenue Kroger

STORE CLOSING

(A sign posted at our Kroger.)

Shoppers are invited to use the “neighboring” branch, seven miles away, on Ireland Road.

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Nearer to us, at a distance of just one mile, is the much “Guccier” Martin’s Super Market. It shouldn’t be too miserable to walk to, after the heat dome has dissipated.

(I walked to Martin’s and back, in the heat, on Sunday; and when I got home, I promptly fell asleep.)

But I don’t think I’ll often stroll to Martin’s with the children – not even in good weather. We’d have to scurry over busy Mayflower Road.

There’s a crosswalk, but cars aren’t meant to halt there. They just slow down. And not every time.

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I’ve almost finished reading Sense and Sensibility.

This is my favorite S&S cover painting. It adorns a Penguin Classic – but I’m reading from an old Modern Library omnibus.

A savage read!

Did you know that christianbook.com sells literary classics? (Only certain classics. Not, e.g., Sade or Céline. But still.)

I didn’t know, before today.

S&S is on sale now.

Dandelions, again (redux)

I mowed on Saturday. The next morning, when we left for church, the dandelion stems already had perked up.

They were taller at lunchtime. By the day’s end, they were “in flower.”

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Happy birthday to Mary, my sister.

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This year, I’m reading all of Jane Austen’s novels: one chapter each day. It’s almost like reading a daily comic strip, the dosage is so small.

First novel: Sense & Sensibility. Poor, decrepit Colonel Brandon, on “the wrong side of thirty-five.” (Oh, to be thirty-five again.)

Good-night.

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

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

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

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

“How long have you loved him?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My bracket; Mitfords, pt. 7

Well, obviously, I picked: (1) UConn, to repeat (one of every three bracket-fillers has done so); (2) Creighton – UConn’s conference rivals – to reach the final; (3) Nebraska, because wouldn’t it be silly if two teams from that state reached the Final Four; and (4) New Mexico, so that the UConn Huskies might compete against other “canines” (it was a toss-up between New Mexico and Nevada).

When these four pieces have fallen into place, the windfall will be mine.

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Daniel tipped himself headfirst off the bed, but I caught him just in time. I had been absorbed in Mitford novel no. 6, Love in a Cold Climate; when I lurched after Daniel the volume flew out of my hands and across the room, landing hard.

“My book!” I cried out.

“See, your father loves you dearly,” Karin told Daniel, “he dropped his book to save you.”

I rushed to my book; the landing had cracked its spine. But not fatally.

More marriage-woes in Mitfordania. Jane Austen has her detractors, notably Mark Twain; I think she’s fine to read, but not by herself (not even within her narrow field). N. Mitford is a necessary corrective.

Warning: oblique spoiler (but no worse than on dust-jackets).

Think of LCC as if the respectable Jane Bennet, not Lydia, were to have run off with Wickham – not Austen’s dashing Wickham but a dowdier one, more like Mr. Collins, with pedophilic urges.

1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 61: Cold Comfort Farm

Samuel recovered. But then I threw up, and Daniel threw up, and Karin had other troubles, and I had other troubles and a miserable fever. My mom came over to take care of the children while I writhed in bed. After she went home, she threw up.

We’ve started to feel better. Yesterday I ate only jello, but this morning I was able to hold down some toast and eggs. Then, tonight, I was very hungry, and I had some McDonald’s. That may have been a mistake.

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Cold Comfort Farm

I’ve read Stella Gibbons’s book. It has an undercurrent of, shall we say, nihilism? Anyway, it didn’t sit well.

The movie is, if not less mocking, then gentler, more humane. A lot of the same stuff happens, but it helps that the actors are so winsome in their self-inflicted despair. (A partial roll call: Eileen Atkins, Sheila Burrell, Freddie Jones, Ian McKellen, Rufus Sewell.) You could enjoy watching these people do just about anything. May as well watch them as dismal farmers trudging around in the mud, fornicating and birthing in the hay, giving themselves up to gloom and doom.

It’s funny.

It’s even funnier that a perky distant relation, a fresh-faced Londoner (Kate Beckinsale), recently orphaned, has come to live with them to learn about “life,” so that in middle age she will be able to write a novel in the manner of Jane Austen. She’s got one thing right: even though Austen’s novels are about rich people, a lot of their appeal is due to the not-infrequent trudging around in the mud that the characters are made to do. (Or maybe that’s just what I treasure from the movies.)

Flora, the city girl, proceeds to “improve” her country relations, the Starkadders. She aims to coax them out of their despair. The ruddy cheek!

No, that’s not how the Starkadders see it. They’re so insular, they don’t think of Flora as an entitled busybody. They’re likelier to suspect her of trying to steal their precious, miserable farm. Little do they realize, her ambition is more like an Austen heroine’s: she wants to arrange everyone’s life just-so.

But then, so does Ada Doom (Burrell), the matriarch who leaves her room but twice a year – in order to count her relations and farmhands – and who obsesses over a trauma of her girlhood, which is that she “saw something nasty in the woodshed.” This trauma is her justification for discouraging the other Starkadders from imagining that they could leave the farm. Only Flora’s cousin, Seth Starkadder (Sewell), spares any thought for the outside world, and that’s because he’s a devotee of the talkies. Oh, and so does old Amos Starkadder (McKellen). He preaches fire-and-brimstone sermons every week in the Church of the Quivering Brethren. His theme is that everyone is hellbound. Not hellbound yet redeemable through Christ – hellbound, full stop. The fire will never be quenched. There’ll be no salve for the burns: “There’ll be no butter in hell!” The Brethren quiver in the ecstasy of their damnation.

David, my brother, has noticed that it’s a very short step from this famous line to the Newsboys’ Christian pop lyric, “They don’t serve breakfast in hell.” One might suspect that the Newsboys are drawing from Gibbons’s book. (Or, just possibly, from this movie, which narrowly preceded the song.)

Anyway, Flora, like Austen’s Emma, channels these interests of Seth’s and Amos’s into meaningful, if not especially admirable, enterprises, and soon she is figuring out how to do the same to everyone else on the farm. But will her own destiny be tidied up so neatly? Will she detail and execute her own life-plan, or will she relinquish a little control to gain a little wisdom?

Sherlock Hound

… or, in Japanese, Famous Detective Holmes, is a 1984 TV series of Hayao Miyazaki’s. I never thought I’d get to view it without having to shell out a lot of money. Last night, though, our Amazon Fire TV Stick suggested that we try the show for free using the HappyKids.tv app. (We haven’t watched much of Miyazaki with the Fire Stick, but it must know that we like our British period shows.)

On the basis of our first episode – “A Small Client,” a.k.a. “Little Martha’s Big Mystery,” which adapts Arthur Conan Doyle’s story “The Adventure of the Engineer’s Thumb” – I’d say the show is a great success. Miyazaki’s Sherlock is youthful and tousle-headed. Mrs. Hudson – also surprisingly young, and exuding kindness – is a Victorian beauty (or, rather, she is as beautiful as a talking cartoon dog could be). Moriarty is a flamboyant wolf, while Watson and Lestrade belong to portlier breeds. Transport, done by hansom cab in Doyle’s stories, is here performed in a nifty little motorcar upon which Holmes – or Hound – has doubtless tinkered. Another marvel is a machine that wheezes and gasps as it mints counterfeit coins bearing the image of Queen Victoria.

Alas, as the show was being made, its production team turned over. Some of its episodes failed to reach the highest standard – or so says one reviewer. But a half-dozen episodes do evince the master’s touch. (The reviewer lists them.)

Karin & I are delighted to have found this show. Samuel also watched with interest and didn’t howl as he did when we tried to watch Sanditon – a Jane Austen series in which the men do naked sea-bathing (but not with such courage as in the Merchant-Ivory Room with a View).

Update: What we watched tonight: “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle” (the link is to YouTube – this video was uploaded within the last day or so).