It turns out that, spiritually, I am Berkeleyan

We received our annual taste reports from Spotify (“Your 2023 Wrapped”). My listening habits were likened to those of the people of Berkeley, California; Karin’s, to those of the residents of Provo, Utah.

So, what do they listen to at BYU? Broadway tunes and Disney.

What do the liberal kids at UC Berkeley listen to? Evidently, Joe Hisaishi’s cartoon music. (Not so different from the Mormons, then.)

Other musicians who got lots of Spotify play from me in 2023: Boards of Canada, Stelvio Cipriani, Vangelis, Silver Convention, and Aphex Twin. And, too late to make the list, Enigma. I should note that it’s Samuel who asks to listen to much of this. “I want to hear Mix-Mad by Enigma,” he says (the album is MCXMD a.D.).

A typical October

Classic fall weather again – on the whole, a good thing. Leaves have been coming down in earnest and the lawn is thick with them. We don’t own a rake. I’ve read that it’s OK to mow over the dead leaves so as to “mulch” them, and that’s what I’ve been doing. The grass grows so slowly now that I keep telling myself, “One last mowing for the season”; and then, after one or two weeks, I mow again.

And now, my reading report.

(1) Patrick Allitt’s I’m the Teacher, You’re the Student: A Semester in the University Classroom describes several tantalizing U.S. history books, a few of which I’ve acquired. The golden discovery has been California: The Great Exception – the assigned text Allitt’s students loathed the most – written for that state’s centennial by Carey McWilliams, with lovely phrasing, apt detail, and shrewd analysis. Even in 1950, California’s growth was cause for wonderment. A boom in mining led to booms in farming, oil drilling, manufacturing, what have you. The mining boom was relatively egalitarian: claim sizes were restricted, and individual miners could prosper without capital. Then, the wealth gained by mining in California funded the mining elsewhere in the Far West, but this was company mining, adhering to other methods and rules. That’s what I’ve read so far. Agriculture, etc., will be discussed later. Allitt told his students to read the chapters about rivers and irrigation – the subject matter of Chinatown. They were bored to tears. I already look forward to reading McWilliams’s Factories in the Field: The Story of Migratory Farm Labor in California and North from Mexico: The Spanish-Speaking People of the United States.

(2) I liked Allitt well enough that I’ve begun another of his books: The Conservatives: Ideas & Personalities throughout American History.

(3) Also: Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy, which I read so long ago I hardly remember it. I’m not even sure I read all of it before.

(4) Some Gothic things for the fall:

• Agatha Christie, Endless Night (excellent, just excellent)
• Hilary Mantel, Fludd
• Ghost stories by Edith Wharton and M.R. James

(5) The Masters, the fifth and most famous book in C.P. Snow’s Strangers and Brothers series. It’s about the politics of an unnamed Cambridge college. Sure enough, it’s good; it might be THE ONE in the series to read, if that’s all you have time for; but it’s no better than the others.

Binging

“You’re not a complicated guy, are you, Dick.” – Logan Echolls, Veronica Mars

This series keeps raising itself out of the grave. The movie appeared long after the show’s initial demise, and the newest TV season has been released half a decade after the movie. The actors are the same. Apparently, they can’t get enough of this blend of high school soap opera and detective fiction.

Neither can I. It’s my third viewing. In 2011, I watched the three TV seasons that, to date, had been released. A few years later, I viewed seasons 1 and 2 again, with Stephen. The Veronica Mars movie was released in 2014. I didn’t view it. But now that Hulu has released season 4 of the TV show, my goal is to work through all this material with Karin – we’re in the middle of season 2 – and then, maybe, we’ll glance at the spinoff, Play It Again, Dick, which Karin discovered on the Internet. (Dick focuses on a minor character; it, too, boasts appearances by most of the actors from the main program.)

Dick Casablancas really isn’t a complicated guy, but it’s fun to watch him plunge into pleasure-seeking. He has a parachute: his trust fund. There are lots of characters with trust funds in Veronica Mars, lots of very rich emancipated minors, and one of the interesting themes is the recklessness that their wealth affords them. It rubs off on their poorer high school classmates, with whom they feud.

Veronica (Kristen Bell) isn’t rich – she’s the daughter of a hardworking private detective. She pursues the same line of work, mostly inside her high school and its environs in Neptune, Southern California. She’s very clever. But she’s infected with the heedlessness of her rich schoolmates when, really, she ought to listen to her father.

Veronica is complicated. Some of the rich kids are, too. One is Dick’s friend, the aforementioned Logan Echolls, who makes sparks fly in unceasing confrontations with Veronica, with the local biker gang, and with his movie-star father. Another is Dick’s younger brother, Cassidy “Beaver” Casablancas, who uses his own trust fund to correct imbalances of power. Another is the outspoken Lilly Kane, Veronica’s best friend, whose murder is the focus of season 1.

Hardly anyone – except, perhaps, Veronica’s lunch buddy, Wallace – is unambiguously good. Veronica’s father is wise and brave, but it’d be a stretch to call him a straight arrow. Sunny Neptune is a snakepit. The teenagers circle each other, hissing.

Meanwhile, in each episode, Veronica solves a mystery.

Sometimes, she finds a missing dog (or goat, or parrot). Other times, she’s hired to get to the bottom of high school intrigue (Who sabotaged the election for student body president? Who spread the nasty rumors about the cheerleading captain?).

Occasionally, things are more serious. Veronica reunites long-lost relatives. She uncovers domestic abuse or serial murder or organized crime.

She taunts the corrupt sheriff and other local powers. At school, she attracts grudges – and when others wrong her, she takes fierce revenge.

Let it go, says her father.

Let it go, says Wallace, her friend.

Veronica doesn’t let it go. For all its fantasy, the series gets at the truth in the hard-boiled detective genre. It’s about enacting retributive justice in a world in which no one is blameless enough to throw stones.

The first episodes are bubble-gummy. Then darkness gradually descends.

Fire

The Ecuadorian soccer schedue is winding down. Barcelona can no longer win the domestic league. The team still aims to qualify for next year’s Copa Libertadores.

The league title will be disputed between heroic Delfín, of Manabí Province, and dastardly Emelec. The final round consists of a two-game, home-and-away series. Emelec will be forced to stage its “home” game away from its own stadium due to an earlier misdeed (some Emelec fans burst open a water-filled plastic bag upon the manager of an opposing team).

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

It’s the week before IUSB’s final exams, and tutoring is extended two hours later than usual – well into the night. I’ve been scheduled to work during most of these lonely hours. Karin sat with me tonight and pasted things into her animal sticker book.

I’m still reading the Inferno. All along, I’ve been having trouble visualizing hell. But these pictures of the wildfires in Ventura County, California, are helping a great deal.

(Thanks, Creighton P., for sharing the photos, which were published by the L.A. Times.)

Bad TV

So exhausting was our encounter with the mouse, I needed a two-week rest from blogging.

My parents have returned to Ecuador.

Ana & David have returned to Texas.

My old flatmate, Kenny, and his wife, Lara, have moved to California.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

This will be my second year living in Mary’s & Martin’s house. I resolve (a) to do more cleaning up out of love for Martin, and (b) to uncomplainingly watch more bad TV out of love for Mary, who needs to have bad TV playing as background noise while she grades her students’ homework. (Good TV distracts her too much.) She watches such dreck as Dawson’s Creek; Kitchen Nightmares; 16 and Pregnant; and Call the Midwife, which has a birth scene in each episode. Her best show by far is Downton Abbey; alas, I’ve viewed most of that show six or seven times, and I’m not sure I could endure much more of it. (All right, I could.) … To my surprise, I’m not minding slogging through Beverly Hills 90210. I forgive its characters for being so self-important, because they’re so naïve.