Canadiana

The dandelions have returned. Fewer lawns are infested this year. Ours is one.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

More reading:

• Agatha Christie, Death Comes as the End (her novel set in *ancient* Egypt)
• Philippa Foot, Natural Goodness (supplement to MacIntyre’s book)
• George Grant, Lament for a Nation (see discussion, below)
• Alasdair MacIntyre, Dependent Rational Animals (for the group)
• Stefan Zweig, novellas: Burning Secret, A Chess Story, Fear, Confusion, and Journey into the Past (they’re great)

Grant’s 1965 book, summarized here, deserves some comment. What is Canadianness? North American Britishness, is the core of Grant’s answer. That is, Britishness nurtured as a tradition of political distinctiveness from the USA, featuring, e.g., a more serious commitment to federalism, as involving better treatment of and greater autonomy for minorities. Alas, when Britain itself was pulled into the U.S.’s military-economic orbit, Canada was pulled in, too. Canadian businessmen sold out first. Politicians followed. Nuclear weapons were brought to Canadian soil. Canada effectively gave up its nationhood and became a satellite.

(Lately, of course, the pendulum has swung the other way.)

A Canadian’s capsule summary, written two decades ago (scroll down the list to book no. 41):

Well, Canada is still here, but what, pray, is it? Grant wrote this brilliant, deep essay on the question in the early 1960s, in the aftermath of Diefenbaker’s political downfall. He wrote of a small “c” conservative society, respectful of tradition, that was disappearing under the pressure of continentalism. Forty years have passed, but Lament still speaks to us directly of important issues. It is a must-read for anyone interested in what might define a nation called Canada – especially given that the formula of “medicare with peacekeeping” is more glib than inspiring, and factually shaky as well.

Who in the U.S. knows about Prime Minister Diefenbaker? I’d guess less than one tenth of one percent (Canadian expats excepted). So, next month, I’ll read Desmond Morton’s Short History of Canada, which purports to make “acute observations on the Diefenbaker era.”

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Another item of Canadiana: The Peanut Butter Solution (1985). It includes music by teenaged Céline Dion. We watched this bizarre movie as a family. I won’t say I didn’t like it – I did! – but it fed my suspicion that our admirable northern neighbors are, in fact, deranged.

More trouble for the World Cup

Some dozens of recent killings in Mexico have stirred up anxiety about that country’s ability to safely co-host the World Cup.

The U.S. has safety worries, too. E.g., who will pay for the extra stadium guards and police in little Foxborough, Mass.? Not the 18,000 townspeople, who are threatening to deny FIFA the use of their locality.

Good for them.

See this New York Times article.

“We may get a little more [than usual] in meals tax and hotel tax,” a local official explains:

But this is not a moneymaker for this town. In fact, it’s probably more of a headache than it’s worth.

This is nothing more than seven events up there. If [the] World Cup wasn’t coming, we’d probably have seven concerts in that time. We’re not gaining much of anything by hosting this event.

So it goes when a country that doesn’t really care about soccer – or about, you know, the world – is awarded World Cup hosting rights. You run up against locals who refuse to sacrifice. Which is what hosting these games is. FIFA always has made money for the rich and compensated the masses with an experiential high. But these particular masses don’t care about soccer or foreign visitors, so they aren’t going to get that high.

FIFA should give more games – or all of the games – to Canada. I’m curious what the people of, e.g., Edmonton or Regina would say. Those cities have pretty stadiums; I’ve looked at them on Wikipedia.

A long-awaited stroll; a latitude, hydrological divides, and other fancies

Snow: mostly melted. Temperatures: in the fifties (F); sixties tomorrow. I take Abel and Daniel strolling. Daniel jumps in all the puddles. He soaks the insides of his boots. I don’t know what he’ll wear if we go out again very soon.

Abel, in the stroller, leans forward, his head as near to the ground as he can get it, as if he were peering into tidal pools.

I halt to check if he’s all right; Daniel races ahead.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Fun fact I just learned: Canada’s lowest latitude passes through South Bend just a few blocks north of Toad Hall.

(Toad Hall is our house.)

I could pinpoint the location, stroll there, and hop back and forth over the line. “Now I’m south of all of Canada. Now I’m north of a little of Canada.”

I suppose the urge is due to having grown up near the equator.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

I could do this with the nearby drainage divide, too. “Now I’m daining into the Great Lakes. Now I’m draining into the Gulf of Mexico, I mean the Gulf of America.”

It seems a less arbitrary line since it has a basis in physical rather than political reality – until I remember that the Great Lakes drain into the St. Lawrence River and thence into the Atlantic, which encompasses the Gulf of Mexico (I mean, America). So that, ultimately, the distinction between these drainage basins is artificial.

Of course there’s a physical difference between draining one way and draining the other, but if you mark all such differences you end up with insignificant, postage stamp-sized drainage basins.

Artifice – human purposiveness – seems inescapable if much geography is to be done at all.

I remember checking out geography Ph.D. programs when I was very young. There was the respectable but daunting meteorology specialization; all else seemed postmodern free-for-all. A bitter disappointment to someone who’d vaguely entertained the thought that his vocation might consist of memorizing picturesque but unimpeachable facts, e.g. that Czechoslovakia’s capital is Prague.

R.I.P. Keith and Stu

… missionaries to Ecuador (and other countries) who died within days of each other. Fixtures of my early life. Good men. Heroes, arguably. Keith gave his wife, Ruth Ann, a kidney. He died of complications from the surgery. Stu’s death was brought on by lung trouble resulting from Vietnam War wounds. He climbed mountains and ran marathons, but, over time, his injuries took their toll.

Stu and his wife, Bev, managed my dorm during two of my boarding-school years. They were kind. Stu used to take me jogging, and he helped me to get the hang of algebra. We’d talk about his reading: Dante, Cervantes, Hugo, Tolstoy, Pasternak, Herman Wouk, Bodie and Brock Thoene. I got him to read Kenneth Grahame and Jerome K. Jerome.

I remarked to someone, the other day, that my favorite missionaries were from Canada and the Midwest – especially, Minnesota. Keith was from Ontario, and Stu was from the Gopher/​North Star State.

Body-text fonts, pt. 45: New Caledonia

In this month’s font’s sample, Robert Graves discusses memoir-writing:

It’s the line about people reading about food and drink that gets me. I’ve noticed, perusing Madame’s excellent blog, that my pulse quickens at the gastronomic bits.

C. S. Lewis:

There is nothing to be ashamed of in enjoying your food: there would be everything to be ashamed of if half the world made food the main interest of their lives and spent their time looking at pictures of food and dribbling and smacking their lips.

As a teenager, I used to find this passage in Mere Christianity very funny; twenty-five years later, looking at pictures of food is precisely what half the world does.

(Madame, understand, I’m not criticizing your food photos. There’s obscenity, and there’s art. Your photos are on the respectable half of the divide.)

Madame has a second blog – a Substack where she posts excerpts of her memoirs. A word of advice, Madame. Put in all you can about food and drink, and murders, and ghosts or spirits, and the Prince of Wales (not unmanageable for a Canadian) … and tidbits about your children, whom I knew in high school. (I liked the detail about giving birth one room over from the woman who kept screaming, Que me haga cesaria.) My parents dredged up an old chestnut about me just last night. My mom led a Bible study at a church in Esmeraldas. She entrusted me to some youths who lost track of me. Neighbors found me outside the church. Most of my body had been buried in a mudslide. (This was during the Niño of 1982.) I’d heard this story before, except for the detail about my having been submerged in mud. (I thought I’d just gotten dirty.) Bear in mind, this was a Downtown Esmeraldas mudslide, so it would have contained garbage, sewage, etc. And I could have drowned. We’re always just on the other side of death; that fact is more obvious in some places than in others. Robert Graves’s tone may sound frivolous, but it’s a sweetener; his subject is the First World War.

Limping

I stepped on a fancy Hot Wheels ambulance. It had sharp tail fins. It made a dime-sized crater in the arch of my foot.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

A few recent club transfers involving Ecuadorians:

• Pervis Estupiñán from Brighton to Milan (permanent transfer)
• Piero Hincapié from Leverkusen to Arsenal (loan with purchase option)
• Kendry Páez from Chelsea to Strasbourg (temporary loan)
• Jeremy Sarmiento, Brighton’s last remaining Ecuadorian, to Cremonese (another loan)

It was expected that Joel Ordóñez and Kevin Rodríguez would be swooped up from Club Brugge and Union Saint-Gilloise, respectively; but they weren’t. So, they’ll have to spend another season lighting up the Belgian league.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Ecuador’ll play in Paraguay tomorrow night. We’ve qualified for the World Cup. Paraguay is on the World Cup’s doorstep.

So, our motivation is low, Paraguay’s is high, and Paraguay is playing better than usual (if nowhere near as well as from 1996 to 2011).

And we’ve only ever lost in Asunción.

Still, I’d wager, we’ll earn our first point there. Our defense just doesn’t let in goals.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Current mini-book: Ed McBain’s Cop Hater (1956), the inspiration for the novels of Sjöwall & Wahlöö. Inspired by the show Dragnet, which every other cop procedural is indebted to, e.g. the one that goes:

In the criminal justice system

Sexually based offenses are considered especially heinous

In New York City

The dedicated detectives who investigate these vicious felonies

Are members of an elite squad known as the Special Victims Unit

These are their stories

(Dun, dun)

Cop Hater is set in New York, but the place names have been changed.

Wikipedia says the first edition has 166 pp. and the revised edition has 236. I must be reading the text of the first edition. In my omnibus, the novel’s page count is 116.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Current late-night viewing: Da Vinci’s Inquest (1998–2005), starring Canadians who haven’t crossed over to Hollywood. That, in itself, is refreshing. I’m also enjoying the lingo. Royal Canadian Mounted Police = RCMP = The Horsemen. I keep expecting a guy on horseback to show up and harangue the cops at the precinct in Downtown Vancouver, but no, it’s always a twerp in a suit.

Lots of autopsies are performed. The nude bits are blurred out (unlike on Britain’s Silent Witness, which uses famous guest actors to play the corpses).

Da Vinci streams, free, via various apps.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

I think the weather has started cooling for good this summer. We’re getting a nice rain tonight. The back lawn is about nine inches tall. I would’ve mowed on Saturday, but my foot had a painful gash in it.

1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 86: The sweet hereafter

The spiderbitten little girl peers up at her father as he rides with her to the hospital. With one hand, he calms her; with the other, he grasps a knife to cut her throat that she might breathe, that he might not lose her. The girl survives. She grows up and addicts herself to drugs. Her father effectively loses her anyway. He’d once hoped for happiness with his daughter (and with her mother, from whom he also is estranged).

He thinks of the girl as he travels to a remote British Columbian town. A lawyer, he is recruiting plaintiffs for a class-action suit regarding a deadly schoolbus accident. Courting each household in turn, he trots out tired arguments for holding someone accountable, preferably a deep-pocketed entity, a municipality or a corporation rather than an individual. The more nebulous the scapegoat, the more eagerly the victims’ parents join the suit. They’re angry at a universe that has frustrated their expectations for their children, for themselves. (Just one parent resists this way of thinking. He already has had to grieve for a dead wife.)

Movies about grief are the hardest to watch. This is a hard movie. There are passages of startling beauty – flashbacks. They are not comforting. The camera hovers over wintry mountains and rivers, tracking the school bus as it wends toward disaster. Children play. They sleep. A teenager sings sweetly. The memory of these things is not sweet. All is embittered by the knowledge of how these lives will end.

The most piteous character is the lawyer (Ian Holm). The dark implication of his story, if I interpret it correctly, is that losing one’s children is the norm. They needn’t die; alienation suffices. But then, who’ll pay? Whoever is left to pay. Spouses. Neighbors. One’s town. Those with whom one does business. Anyone. The universe. Harboring vengeful thoughts, one becomes the prey of those who traffic in vengeance. The traffickers themselves are in vengeance’s thrall. This is this lawyer’s affliction.

The movie doesn’t object to vengeance as such. One character obtains it, and perhaps rightly: the teenager who sings so sweetly. The actress, Sarah Polley, performs a remarkable about-face. She is winsome, then ice-cold.

Maimed but not killed in the accident, this girl obtains new clarity about the false hope and love that her father (Tom McCamus) instilled in her. She avenges herself on him – and on the town. Arguably, her victims deserve their punishment. We have seen the town’s loyal spouses and its cheats, its wonderful parents and its abusers, equally bent out of shape by grief, equally desirous to inflict damage on third parties. One suspects that they grieve as much for their own frustrated ambitions as for the loss of their children. He would have been a good man, one townsperson, a sympathetic figure, says of a particular dead boy. Maybe so, but this child’s goodness, his special worth to others, is beside the point. The death of the unattractive “slow” boy is just as grievous.

Grief’s piteous distortions on the mind were previously studied in director Atom Egoyan’s great Exotica (1994). The Sweet Hereafter (1997) is interested in these, and in communal distortions. The movie quotes Robert Browning’s “Pied Piper,” in which a selfish town’s children are lured away, leaving the adults bereft. The poem’s significance for the movie is a complicated question. (Egoyan adds lines of his own.) But one clue is that it’s a poem about a community, not just one parent or family. One’s children, one’s hopes, even one’s grief – these things are not one’s exclusive property. Everyone participates.

March’s poems

… are by Dennis Lee and have been chosen in solidarity with Canada (which, apparently, is near Louisiana).

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

Alligator pie, alligator pie,

If I don’t get some I think I’m gonna die.

Give away the green grass, give away the sky,

But don’t give away my alligator pie.

Alligator stew, alligator stew,

If I don’t get some I don’t know what I’ll do.

Give away my furry hat, give away my shoe,

But don’t give away my alligator stew.

Alligator soup, alligator soup,

If I don’t get some I think I’m gonna droop.

Give away my hockey-stick, give away my hoop,

But don’t give away my alligator soup.

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

(I’ve actually eaten alligator.)

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

Mumbo    Jumbo

Christopher Colombo

I’m sitting on the sidewalk

Chewing bubble gumbo.

I think I’ll catch a WHALE …

I think I’ll catch a snail …

I think I’ll sit around awhile

Twiddling my thumbo.

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

Mississauga rattlesnakes

Eat brown bread.

Mississauga rattlesnakes

Fall down dead.

If you catch a caterpillar

Feed him apple juice;

But if you catch a rattlesnake

Turn him loose!

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

The “51st state,” pt. 2

A message from my high school French teacher and gentle fellow blogger, Madame Lorrie:

Good evening, JP – I just read your recent post regarding our sovereign nation. Most Canadians are spitting angry at the US President. I am one of them. We are refusing to purchase goods made in the USA, even groceries, which makes for some creative shopping. Stores are responding and are sourcing fruits and vegetables from countries other than the US with great success. We will not be traveling to the US for the foreseeable future.

I do thank you for the link to the list of Canadian literature. I have read 18 of them, mostly the fiction works, in my CanLit courses and my French courses. Alligator Pie is a fun book that my grandchildren enjoy listening to. Lots of rollicking rhythm and pure silliness that makes us all giggle.

We will not be conquered!

Hope you and your family are doing well.

I really ought to set up a decent commenting function for this blog.

Madame always was the best commenter.

Bless Canada. And Panama, and Greenland (and Denmark).

P.S. And Gaza. And Ukraine.

I shudder to think what other places will be added to the list.

On the “51st state”

Winter, for practical purposes, has ended.

Trump’s bizarre second term keeps lighting up the blogosphere. Will or won’t he annex Greenland and Canada? Is he serious? Who knows? Does he know if he’s serious?

What’s eye-opening, to me, is how seriously Canadians regard this bluster. But then Canadians have long feared annexation in one guise or another. There’s quite a literature on this. I never knew!

This book by George Grant is a notable example.

I’m tempted, now, to re-read Charles Taylor’s philosophy in light of the imperialist threat.

This list of Canada’s “most important” books (part one; part two) also is worth consulting. (Grant’s book is #41.) We may as well read what Canadians have to say, before we conquer them.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

In the hullabaloo I’d forgotten that outstanding YouTube channel, Un mundo inmenso. Its latest video is about Bangladesh. Speak of a neglected nation! Did you know that one of every twenty people on Earth is Bangladeshi? That the country is cricket- and soccer-mad? That Argentina’s soccer team has more fans in Bangladesh than in Argentina? (Big deal, cosmologists would say: the size of the universe guarantees that Argentina’s fans are many times more numerous on other planets …)

More results

Copa América quarterfinals

Argentina 1 (4), Ecuador 1 (2). We outplayed the world champions but lost the shootout. Pity.

We almost were knocked out by soccer kindergarteners, one Argentinian journalist complained.

Our coach, Félix Sánchez Bas, a Spaniard, resigned afterward. Rumor has it, his wife and children have been unhappy in Ecuador; they may even have been bullied by fans. I’m very sorry if this is the case. Sánchez is likely to take another job in Qatar.

Brazilians and Uruguayans are scoreless as of this writing. Canada beat Venezuela in another shootout, and Colombia thumped Panama, 5–0, in the Darién Classic.

UK general elections

Labour thumped the Tories. No Tories won seats in Wales.

Euros

Türkiye 2, Austria 1. A good game. Afterward, the Turkish goalscorer, Merih Demiral, was suspended. The Dutch eliminated the Turks today.

Spain 2, Germany 1. A good game. Alas, yellow cards were distributed willy-nilly, and various players were suspended. Spain’s is the only pleasing team left in these Euros.

The French are still tedious to watch, and the English are still putrid. Both teams have reached the semifinal round. Both could reach the final. Wouldn’t that be nice.

I liked what the Mexican commentators said about the English and Dutch fans: For all their color, they’re tepid once the game starts, probably because they’re already soused.

This would explain why the Turks outcheer pretty much everyone during the games.

R.I.P. Jonathan Bennett

A distinguished philosopher. More: A servant to philosophy. I wonder how many students have been helped by the website he curated during his retirement. It hosts “versions of some classics of early modern philosophy, and a few from the 19th century, prepared with a view to making them easier to read while leaving intact the main arguments, doctrines, and lines of thought.”

He wrote, among other things, a classic historical study – Kant’s Analytic (1966) – and a classic article, “The Conscience of Huckleberry Finn” (journal version here) which contrasts Huck’s conscience with Heinrich Himmler’s and Jonathan Edwards’s. He especially abhorred Edwards’s doctrine of hell. (To put it mildly: this doctrine sits poorly with my having titled this blog entry “R.I.P.”) (Bennett: “I am afraid that I shall be doing an injustice to Edwards’ many virtues, and to his great intellectual energy and inventiveness; for my concern is only with the worst thing about him – namely his morality, which was worse than Himmler’s.”)

He and his wife took their own lives: she, apparently without assistance, in 2014; he “through Canada’s MAID (Medical Assistance in Dying) program.”

Browsing his writings, I found this review of The Shorter Pepys; it ends with a quotation from the diarist about dreaming … and death.

Two streaks; season’s reading; body-text fonts, pt. 10: Optima

A little trivia, and then I’ll be quiet about the World Cup until the South Americans’ qualification tournament begins in March.

Two venerable – for me, virtually life-long – streaks were left intact:

(1) The tournament was won by a first-round group winner. Not since 1982 has this not occurred; that year, Italy won the tournament having finished behind Poland in the first round. (Italy did win its three-team quarterfinal group.)

The lesson: A team ought to play well enough from the outset to win its group and not just qualify out of it.

(2) Even more remarkable: The final game of this World Cup featured players employed by Bayern Munich and Inter Milan, as has every World Cup final since, and including, that of 1982. Dayot Upamecano (Bayern) was a starter in this year’s final, and Kingsley Coman (Bayern) and Lautaro Martínez (Inter) came off the bench – Martínez in the 102nd minute.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

I’ve picked some Canadian or quasi-Canadian literature to read or finish reading this winter.

• Margaret Atwood, Surfacing
• Kate Beaton, Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands
• Pierre Berton, The Comfortable Pew
• Rachel Cusk, Outline
• Robertson Davies, Tempest-Tost
• Brian Moore, The Mangan Inheritance
• Alice Munro, Dance of the Happy Shades
• Howard Norman, The Northern Lights (or maybe The Bird Artist)
• Carol Shields, The Stone Diaries
• Bernard Suits, The Grasshopper

And I’d like to get around to watching Mon oncle Antoine.

Good luck to me.

(This is in honor of the solstice, the coming blizzard, and especially Canada’s rare and brief World Cup appearance – most of which I contrived to miss. My Internet died during one game; I was in church during another; and during the third game, I chose to watch Belgium vs. Croatia instead.)

One of the books from my list is the source of this month’s body-text sample, which is set in Hermann Zapf’s Optima. This is surely one of the most elegant typefaces, although it’s not often used for large blocks of literary text. Which is a shame. The Canadian Journal of Philosophy was set in Optima many years ago. My church’s history, Merging Streams, is set in Optima, as is Tom Wolfe’s The Painted Word. This blog currently is typeset with an Optima clone, URW Classico. Another clone is Zapf Humanist 601; a third, with old-style numerals, is Epigrafica; and a fourth, with old-style numerals and small capitals, is Ophian.

A “budget” option

Monday is a bank holiday, the holiday of Washington and FDR and Trump and the fellow buried in Grant’s tomb, who might be my favorite of them all because he was the best writer. (The criterion isn’t so ludicrous. Whenever I see informal polls about the greatest [U.S.] Americans of the 19th and 20th centuries, writers get lots of votes, and I often catch myself thinking of writers first – especially, Frederick Douglass and Mark Twain – not so much because of what they did or stood for, though that also matters, but because of how they wrote.) Anyway, today, Karin worked her last shift in a good while. She expects to be on maternity leave through March – which isn’t a paid leave, she keeps having to tell people who assume otherwise. It’ll be good to have her at home. It’ll be good, though not so pleasant, to live more frugally.

Speaking of frugality.

I’d known about the Cambridge Elements book series, but I hadn’t known that so, so many of those books are free to download (some only temporarily).

Most are shorter than 100 pages. They all try to painlessly introduce the reader to important recent scholarship.

This webpage states the series’s goals and subject categories, and this one lists the titles in reverse publication order. You can see which books are currently free by ticking a box on the left.

I can vouch for this author, a professor of whom I was fond. Is he the world’s leading free-will philosopher? Maybe. Does he believe in free will? No; he comes as close to believing as one can do while disbelieving, which is cheeky. Does he believe in moral responsibility? Not if it should require free will; but he is open to revising the concept so that a person can be held responsible even if she isn’t free. Is he a religious believer? Yes. He is a Calvinist. But his main arguments don’t presuppose much, or anything, by way of doctrine. But whatever you think of his position, the point of reading this book is to get an overview of the recent secular literature, and so it is valuable.

Is he a great writer and therefore a great (U.S.) American? I should say not; he was born in the Netherlands, and as for his identification with this side of the pond, I believe that when he wrote his most famous book he was merely a Canadian.

His Cambridge Elements book is free to download through February 23.

A storm at suppertime

That incredible lad, Samuel, again seized the fancy remote control and subscribed our household to My Outdoor TV.

This time, he turned on a show about hunting in the Yukon. I had never heard such strong Canadian accents.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Spectacular rain and thunder tonight. Karin & I tried to take Samuel over to Karin’s dad’s apartment, but the car wouldn’t start, so Karin’s dad and his girlfriend, Carol, came to our place instead. We ate on the (covered) back porch while the storm raged around us. Samuel threw his chicken and pasta onto the floor, so I took him down from his highchair and he ran laps around the supper table.

Even now, close to midnight, the storm is quite loud.

Karin has lain in bed, sick, the last couple of days.

A cancelation

I was supposed to have seen a doctor yesterday about what kind of CPAP machine to use. But a clerk decided I wasn’t properly insured.

I was, though.

He canceled my appointment without asking me first. Then he called: he had to, to tell me he’d canceled my appointment.

Had he called first, I’d’ve set him straight about my insured status, and he would’ve known not to cancel the appointment.

Now the consultation is slated for late March. I’ll sleep poorly for at least two more months. When I see a doctor again, it will have been five months since I first consulted my primary care provider about sleep apnea.

They say treatment in Canada is slow. I wonder if it’s slower than this. (Canadian readers: how does your experience compare?)

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Samuel smiles constantly now, and he laughs by doing one giant wheeze at a time.

1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 14: Fly away home

Carroll Ballard has directed three fine movies about comunion between beasts and humans. The best, which everyone should see, is Never Cry Wolf (1983), in which a biologist, closely observing wolves, rediscovers his sense of childlike wonderment. The other two movies have children as protagonists. In The Black Stallion (1979), a boy and a horse are shipwrecked together on a tropical island; after they’re rescued, the boy becomes the horse’s racing jockey. And in Fly Away Home (1996), a girl (Anna Paquin) becomes a foster mother to some young geese.

This girl, a New Zealander, has just lost her mother and been brought to live with her father in his cluttered Ontario farmhouse. She isn’t very enthused about her father or her new school, but she enjoys the woods and fields. Her explorations give the camera a reason to linger over rural beauty.

Her father (Jeff Daniels) is a live-action version of a Hayao Miyazaki cartoon character. That is to say, he is an eccentric inventor, sculptor, and aeronaut. Flight is the theme of his creations. They include a gigantic metal dragon, a full-scale replica of the lunar landing module, and various leg-powered or motorized flying contraptions that he tests himself. He flies them well enough, but his landings are painful.

The inventor and his friends are full of sympathy for the girl, who is obviously lonely and frustrated (she wears her dead mother’s clothes around the house). But they are unable to earn her trust until another tragedy brings them under a common cause.

Some developers bulldoze a nearby woodland. Exploring the wreckage, the girl finds some abandoned goose eggs. She sneaks the eggs into a barn, incubates them, and watches the goslings hatch. Since she is the first creature they see, they regard her as their mother. They eat and bathe with her and follow her through the weeds and creeks and forests.

Only a broad-minded man would agree to have his house taken over by geese. The girl’s father doesn’t hesitate. By allowing his daughter to care for the geese, he helps her to come to terms with her mother’s death.

Eventually, however, it becomes clear that the geese must travel southward. It’s their instict; also, there are bureaucrats who’d destroy their habitat or even clip their wings. But without a mother to guide them, they’d never be able to find their way home.

And so the girl and her father decide to ride their aircraft to the south, over lakes and fields and skyscrapers, directing the geese in their migration.

Though all of this is fairly predictable, the movie isn’t on autopilot. Individual scenes play out in interesting ways, and certain passages evoke this biblical verse:

How think you? if a man has a hundred sheep, and one of them be gone astray, does he not leave the ninety and nine, and go into the mountains, and seek that which is gone astray?

(Substitute “geese” for “sheep.”)

There’s poignancy, also, in the father’s love for his daughter, and in the daughter’s engagement with the memory of her mother through her mothering of the geese. Best of all, though, is the lovely nature photography. The movie often feels like a nature documentary. It’s a bonus that an interesting human drama is happening in the background.

A prank; a vote; a forthcoming event; a new tutee; Zlatan

We’re well into June. The high schools have had their graduations.

At the school where I used to work, the seniors did an especially good prank. They put LimeBikes everywhere inside the building.

It was effective because whenever a janitor would try to remove a bike from the school, the bike would play a recorded message, threatening to call the police.

Eventually, though, the bikes were brought out into the parking lot.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Today, FIFA’s members voted to select the hosts of the 2026 World Cup.

They chose Canada, Mexico, and the United States.

Morocco was the losing candidate.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

David will arrive in South Bend tomorrow night. He plans to watch the first week or so of this year’s World Cup with his family.

The first game, Russia vs. Saudi Arabia, will be played tomorrow morning.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

At IUSB, my newest tutee is a middle-aged woman from Mexico. We held our first session today. Afterward, we tried to schedule our next appointment.

“Let me view my calendar,” I said, and I brought out the schedule of World Cup games.

My tutee immediately understood.

“Such-and-such hour is no good,” she said. “Two of Mexico’s group opponents play at that time.”

We agreed to meet at 10:00am, the hour of inactivity between the 8:00am–10:00am game and the 11:00am–1:00pm game.

She told me that two years ago, during the Euros, she’d been in the stadium when Zlatan played his last official match for his national team.

“I don’t have much regard for Zlatan,” she said. “I think Sweden has more success without him.”

I told her I thought Sweden’s success was beside the point.

“Well, my husband likes Zlatan,” she said. “I suppose you like Zlatan?”

“Zlatan is incredible. You should read his book.”

Apart from our disagreement about Zlatan, we had an excellent tutorial. I think she’ll be a very good student to work with.

Hockey night

Karin & I watched Hockey Night, a modest, Canadian sporting flick from 1984. Everything on the screen reminded me of Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario (the movie’s actual setting is Parry Sound). Megan Follows (Anne of Green Gables) gives a compelling performance.

What a tenderhearted movie this is. We associate sport with youthfulness. The best sporting movies are about coming of age or finding acceptance (or both): think of Breaking Away, Chariots of Fire, Hoop Dreams, Hoosiers, Lucas, My Life as a Dog, Rocky, Rudy …

Though Hockey Night is not quite as good, it conveys a similar feeling. Amidst the high drama of competition, the climax of a sporting movie can be surprisingly gentle, as if clouds were parting to reveal the sun.

This reflects the denouement of actual sport. There’s a moment when we quietly understand that all is settled. A scoring play is imminent, or the tide has irreversibly turned; we feel victorious even while we’re still losing (or we foresee defeat while we’re ahead).

Hockey Night understands this. It bypasses the crucial game and goes directly to the locker room.

I’ve viewed no leaner sports movie. Only the first hockey match is played out in detail; the others are hardly shown. We know their outcomes because they are logical consequences of the heart.

More quixoticism

So … my dissertation is coming along. I aim to complete it this spring. (Have I said this yet?)

I might apply to do another graduate degree, in history. MA to start out with; PhD if I really enjoy it. The topic: Latin American constitutions. My goal is to pile up so much knowledge as to become un-unhirable.

My emotions aren’t as frenzied as they were eleven years ago, when I was applying to philosophy PhD programs; still, I’m preparing as diligently as I can, reading books about Latin American legal history. This time I’ll have a better idea of the demands.

I’ve been writing to various historians, gauging their enthusiasm for me. Most of them haven’t replied. I did get a nice email from somebody at the University of New Mexico. I have fond memories of New Mexico, of the day I was in Albuquerque. Everything there was the color of dirt, except for the railings on the interstate, which were salmon-colored. I really did like it in New Mexico.

Karin: “New Mexico sounds lovely.”

JP: “New Mexico is the color of dirt.”

We look at the photos on Wikipedia.

Karin: “Ooooh, New Mexico really is the color of dirt.”

I wrote to somebody at the University of British Columbia, what with my fond memories of Vancouver. That historian hasn’t replied.

My sense is that most U.S. and Canadian Latin Americanists don’t spend a lot of time analyzing constitutions. (They might read old criminal cases, or whatever.) My pie-in-the-sky historian’s dream would be to edit something worthy of being included among the Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought. There are entries in that series by Gottfried Leibniz, by the Radical Reformers, by Walter Bagehot. Why is there nothing from my own continent? Latin Americans have said interesting things about race, about citizenship, about state-building.

What’s more, they’ve actually tried out lots of governments.