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.

The origins of totalitarianism (1951)

A slog of a book, with prophetic flashes. Here’s one.

“I would annex the planets if I could” (Cecil Rhodes said this). Arendt comments in ch. 5:

The imperialist-minded businessman, whom the stars annoyed because he could not annex them, realized that power organized for its own sake would beget more power. When the accumulation of capital had reached its natural, national limits, the bourgeoisie understood that only with an “expansion is everything” ideology, and only with a corresponding power-accumulating process, would it be possible to set the old motor into motion again. At the same moment, however, when it seemed as though the true principle of perpetual motion had been discovered, the specifically optimistic mood of the progress ideology was shaken. Not that anybody began to doubt the irresistibility of the process itself, but many people began to see what had frightened Cecil Rhodes: that the human condition and the limitations of the globe were a serious obstacle to a process that was unable to stop and to stabilize, and could therefore only begin a series of destructive catastrophes once it had reached its limits. …

By “Victory or Death,” the Leviathan can indeed overcome all political limitations that go with the existence of other peoples and can envelop the whole earth in its tyranny. But when the last war has come and every man has been provided for, no ultimate peace is established on earth: the power-accumulating machine, without which continual expansion would not have been achieved, needs more material to devour in its never-ending process. If the last victorious Commonwealth cannot proceed to “annex the planets,” it can only proceed to destroy itself in order to begin anew the never-ending process of power generation.

There it is: why Elon Musk wants to colonize space and destroy the U.S. government.

I’d say “there in brief,” only it could be briefer.

I have a friend, a Trump/​Musk fanboy, who says he needs the “CliffsNotes” version whenever he’s directed to an explanation of why Trump/​Musk’s actions are illegal, repugnant, not in the country’s best interest, and so on. Usually I want to say: Just read the article (the legal document, etc.).

But I admit we need CliffsNotes for Arendt.

Here’s my own summary and application – not so brief, alas, but with plainer language.

It used to be that businessmen driven to make wealth from wealth didn’t involve themselves in national politics. (Arendt goes on about this at length.) If the government kept things stable enough for business, businessmen didn’t care who ruled the country. But countries are too small. Eventually, businessmen would use up their countries’ resources and saturate their countries’ markets. So they couldn’t indefintely keep growing their businesses at home. They’d have to go elsewhere.

Businessmen tried speculating abroad as private agents, but conditions proved too risky – too unstable. So they brought in their countries’ armies to guarantee stability. (And a leg up – although I don’t recall Arendt saying this; anyway, she doesn’t emphasize it.) Deploying armies required businessmen to involve themselves in governing their own countries as well as the new lands where they did business. So, eventually, businessmen came to dominate the business of governing (in no small part, by promoting the myth that businessmen are the best rulers). But, eventually, they’d run into trouble with other countries (ruled by their businessmen). Besides, the planet was too small. Country-scale problems of exhaustion and saturation were bound to recur on a global scale; as it’s shrewdly noted on James Bond’s familial coat-of-arms, “the world is not enough.” So, one “Bond villain,” Musk – possibly with Rhodes’s words in mind, Rhodes having been a big cheese in Musk’s home of southern Africa – tried colonizing other planets. But that was stupid. So, instead, he just took over the world’s most powerful government and destroyed as much of it and the rest of the globe as he could so that he could get more wealth for himself doing what governments used to do. This was less stupid, insofar as it profited him (tabulation is ongoing), but it sure was petulant, and the casualties were enormous.

I want to stress that I’m not endorsing ideas, just formulating them.

Body-text fonts, pt. 3: Melior

The mower is repaired, thanks to Karin’s dad; and the lawn is cut, thanks to me. And just in time, because this has been a rainy day.

On the whole, the weather has not been bad, but I haven’t wanted to go out strolling with Samuel and Daniel. I’ve been reluctant to take Daniel out very far: he’s still so small.

It’s not easy to think of good content for this blog when I don’t leave the house.

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This month’s font, Melior, was designed by the great Hermann Zapf.

Speaking of Bond, I suppose the Russians are due to make a comeback as “the baddies” of spy fiction.

The reason is terrible, of course.

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Domestic terrorism is featured in British thrillers more and more often. Has this been true of U.S. thrillers? Of the Jack Reacher novels, for example?

It’s fun to read about agents who fight exotic foreigners. I imagine it would be less pleasing to read a thriller about, e.g., a homegrown mass shooter.

How to hide an empire

I said I’d review this book if I ever got to finish it. Well, I’ve finished it.

How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States, by Daniel Immerwahr.

Better-written than most history books (and by a scholar, not a mere journalist). Nice, light touch. Frequently funny. This is a merciful quality, since reading about many of these events made me feel like throwing up.

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It’s unusual for an historian to get away with writing the phrase “In a delicious historical irony.”

It comes near the end of the guano chapter, in a digression upon the German-Jewish chemist Fritz Haber. “By inventing ammonia synthesis” – the basis of high-yield farming – Haber “became arguably the single most consequential organism on the planet.”

Nicely put, I thought, but only slightly pertinent to U.S. imperialism.

By the time I’d read the chapter’s last sentence, I was willing to forgive Immerwahr his digression.

And, it turns out, chemical synthesis is a crucial ingredient of today’s scaled-back imperialistic strategy.

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Before I continue discussing the book’s content, I need to say more about its style, which I admire but am irked by. It’s probably the most accomplished specimen I’ve seen of what I call “Young Scholars’ Writing.” By “Young Scholars,” I mean people my age or a little older or younger (it’s hard to be a superb scholar without being at least middle-aged). This writing is learned but studiously un-magisterial and un-avuncular – it’s studiously casual, in other words. It sounds like magazine writing: you could find it in The New Yorker or n+1. (See this representative piece by Immerwahr in n+1; his website has other magazine links.)

The prose is peppered with contractions and throwaway pop-culture references, the sort that erudite, hip up-and-comers would pride themselves on identifying. Recounting the U.S.’s colonization of the Philippines, Immerwahr says:

Building a road to Baguio would became an obsession of the colonial state. The steep slopes and regular landslides turned it into an all-consuming Werner Herzog-style man vs. nature affair.

The offhand allusion to Herzog is wonderful – compact, vivid, precise. In making it, though, Immerwahr signals that he is “preaching to the choir.” He isn’t writing to convert jingoists to anti-imperialism, or even to inform jingoists of the facts about imperialism. He doesn’t expect jingoists to read the book at all. To an old-fogey-minded person like me, that is disturbing.

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All right, I’ll try to set aside my own neuroses. What the book does brilliantly is to inform the anti-imperialist general reader of even more facts about imperialism. Out-of-the-way facts. There is nearly nothing about, e.g., the annexing of Florida and Texas. Theodore Roosevelt, the man, is discussed, but there’s surprisingly little about the U.S.’s early meddling in Cuba (the notorious Platt Amendment is briefly mentioned but not named). Of course, Cuba never was U.S. territory; but then neither were Liverpool (U.K.) or Australia, and they get coverage. There is a lot about the U.S.’s heavy-handed rule over and simultaneous neglect of such places as the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and the Aleutian, Hawaiian, and other Pacific islands; and there’s a whole chapter on the annexation of unpopulated “guano islands.” (And then, near the end, there’s another, James Bond-themed chapter about these and other islands.) The emphasis is on regions outside the “logo map,” the map of the contiguous forty-eight states. There is much discussion of maps. Reading the book is like going to one of those websites with topsy-turvy or weirdly-distorted maps that highlight neglected features of the world.

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A back-cover blurb says:

There are many histories of American expansionism. How to Hide an Empire renders them all obsolete. It is brilliantly conceived, utterly original, and immensely entertaining – simultaneously vivid, sardonic, and deadly serious.

This blurb is not something to fault Immerwahr for, but it also bothers me. It suggests that it’s a virtue of historical scholarship to render other histories obsolete or at least seriously deficient, as if the goal were one-upmanship. Go ahead, look at new books and scan the introductions and blurbs. It’s as if these scholars were laboring to lure people over to the newest, hippest thing – which is ironic when the subject is the past. (Besides, by the time of the writing, the hip idea usually isn’t new: we in the target audience are well aware that People Were More Racist, Sexist, etc. than Most of Us Imagined.)

Anyway, what the blurb says is false. This book doesn’t make other histories of U.S. expansionism obsolete. As I’ve noted, it doesn’t try to tell us much about, e.g., the acquisition of Florida and Texas. For all the nice points it makes about the influence of U.S. military bases upon, e.g., the Japanese economy, it says next to nothing about whether there was similar influence upon the South Korean economy. I could go on.

The book is, however, immensely entertaining. A lot of the vignettes are awesome.

Reading report

For the third time, I’m trying to read Rebecca. Some passages are very good. Some could have been trimmed down a bit. In general, the book emits a nice, festering scent of dread.

I was inspired to try out Rebecca again because I’d just finished a du Maurier-like James Bond novel: The Spy Who Loved Me. What a weird little book. Its narrator, a young woman, juxtaposes her sordid past with her terrifying present, in which two monstrous goons pursue her through a nightmarish landscape. Toward the end, James Bond becomes the narrator’s life-saver and lover. (I haven’t spoiled the plot, most of which can be discerned by reading the table of contents.) Bond behaves like a douchebag.

In the Bond novel, the haunted past is, for the most part, linearly recounted – not woven in along with the present terror, a technique that du Maurier skillfully employs in Rebecca. Ian Fleming should’ve written a second draft. But, apparently, he never did that with his novels. Not surprisingly, The Spy Who Loved Me was poorly received: none of the book’s plot was incorporated into the movie of that title, and Fleming made the book unavailable as a paperback for as long as he could.

These two fantastical novels have been something of a break from the realism of Sjöwall’s & Wahlöö’s police procedurals, of which I’ve read five in the last two months. I’m halfway through that series. I now have no trouble identifying the funny parts. When certain characters appear – especially the unrefined inspector Gunvald Larsson and the lazy patrolmen Kristiansson and Kvant – it’s a signal that humor is forthcoming. It’s the despairing kind of humor that says, “On such pillars as these, society rests.” The Swedish welfare state is criticized for allowing the lower orders to distract themselves with drugs, drink, and sex while the upper orders squirrel away the crucial assets. It’s a criticism from the Left: it explains why the workers of the world aren’t uniting.

A quiet holiday at home

Ahhhh, Fall Break (until Tuesday). A brief holiday, but a sorely needed one. I plan to rest and to dissertate. The section I’m currently writing is about the book of Ezekiel, chapter 4.

No holiday for Karin, even though she could use one, the poor dear. She’s miserably ill. Right now, we’re watching Pac-12 football (sort of) and she’s preparing the treasury report for our church.

The kitties just had a tremendous fight at the highest level of their cat tree. They do that sometimes. Outside, the weather is very stormy.

I read the inaugural Flashman novel by George MacDonald Fraser. Flashman is the James Bond of the 19th century, but more of a rake and a bastard, and certainly more of a coward. Unlike the Bond books, the history in Flashman is scrupulously accurate. The first book treats Britain’s imperial debacle in Afghanistan. It’s often said that U.S. officials would’ve known not to invade Afghanistan if only they’d recalled the Soviet debacle there. Well, they could just as profitably have read Flashman.

Imagine something like J.G. Farrell’s Siege of Krishnapur, comparably funny and anti-imperial but shown through a dastardly lens. That’s how Flashman is. Suppose one were to teach a course on British postcolonial novels. One couldn’t assign Krishnapur and Flashman right next to one another. They’re too alike; any reader would get burnt out. But one might arrange the books along Northrop Frye’s seasonal wheel, (i) reading Farrell, one of the gentler ironists, three-quarters through the term, and then (ii) going through one or two other ironical books before (iii) concluding with Flashman – irony at its bleakest, most wintry, and most comic.

(The kitties are fighting again at top of their cat tree. There are lightning forks outside the window.)

Gatsby

The nation rejoices: Castillo’s ligament isn’t torn. Though he won’t play for a couple of weeks, he’ll be included in our World Cup roster.

The score of our last warm-up, against England: 2 to 2.

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Martin and I watch the new Gatsby movie. (He might show it to his highschoolers.) We take turns cringing. … Though I’ve read the book twice, and seen an opera of it, I hardly remember the story. What I notice this time is how Gatsby keeps on repeating the phrase “old sport.” (I recall a similar faux pas by a character in From Russia with Love, the Bond novel. Is Fleming spoofing Fitzgerald?) … Downtown, Sabby (the male) says of a pedestrian: “There goes the Gatsby of South Bend.” What a sad description to be known by! And how ridiculous that I, so removed from the local “scene,” should know exactly who that person is. … Reputation is a horrid thing. When I’m introduced to new people, they look startled — and then they say they know my reputation. Those are the words they use. Nothing makes me queasier.

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“Come, meet Bianca,” I say to Cristian. The little beast is resting on a chair. She raises her chin, and Cristian strokes it. “You are beautiful,” he tells her. “At last I meet this cat — the Internet sensation.”

(This photo is nothing special; but with a laptop camera it’s the best I can do to show Bianca sleeping in her box.)