July’s poem

This poem is for the eliminated World Cup teams. The thing about international soccer is, you can’t just go out and buy the crucial missing pieces. You make do with what you have. (But if you’re France, you’ve already “imported” so many pieces that everybody else is scrambling for your castoffs.)

It’s demoralizing knowing that, however well you use what you have, you or whoever beats you will eventually surrender to France.

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

For want of a nail the shoe was lost,

For want of a shoe the horse was lost,

For want of a horse the rider was lost,

For want of a rider the battle was lost,

For want of a battle the kingdom was lost –

And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

(From The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes, edited by Iona & Peter Opie. Recited, in The Clocks, by Hercule Poirot. Previous versions due to: Benjamin Franklin, in Poor Richard’s Almanack; the poet George Herbert; the Germans; and the French.)

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Is the “want of a horseshoe nail” an “INUS” condition? (That is: an insufficient but necessary part of an unnecessary but sufficient condition; in ordinary English: a cause. See: J. L. Mackie.)

Losing the battle might suffice for losing the kingdom, even if the kingdom could be lost in other ways: e.g., due to a meteor strike.

Losing the rider might suffice for losing the battle, even if the battle could be lost in other ways: e.g., due to a meteor strike.

And so on, for each preceding line. (Let’s say the meteorite gets smaller and smaller.)

Or is causation better analyzed in some other way? I’m getting too old for this.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Q: What was the “horseshoe nail” that Ecuador wanted?

A: Goals. And (controversially), according to some journalists, avoiding getting death threats from Mexican cartels.

Glorious mysteries

We attended a funeral for J., Karin’s kindly old colleague.

“J. and I used to talk hockey,” said the priest. “Sometimes joyfully, sometimes with a little griping.”

That was about it for reminiscing about J. (Reminiscing is done at the wake, apparently.) The priest and mourners then prayed the Glorious Mysteries, in which are included:

• one Apostle’s Creed
• six Our Fathers
• six Glory Bes
• five Oh My Jesuses
• fifty-three Hail Marys
• other formulae

My heart sank around the thirtieth Hail Mary. Was the priest shooting for one hundred? Mercifully, no.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

I finished reading the Adrian Mole series. It gave me much pleasure.

I’ve begun reading The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side. It features Miss Jane Marple and is set in the classic murder-village of St. Mary Mead. When I finish, I’ll’ve read all sixty-six of Dame Agatha’s crime novels.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Daniel, somehow, is learning to speak in French.

Bonjour, Daddy, he grins. Ça va.

Not bad for not having been taught. And his accent is spot-on.

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.)

Here is 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 has 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.

Death on the Nile

Once I finish this, I’ll have read every novel by Christie that features Hercule Poirot.

It’s a long book with a large cast and much stage-setting. After almost two hundred pages, no one has been murdered.

But it’s an interesting book. I like it when Christie goes biblical. Overt sermonizing in literature is unfashionable, but Christie can’t help herself. It’s refreshing.

“You are of the Church of England, I presume?”

“Yes.” Linnet looked slightly bewildered.

“Then you have heard portions of the Bible read aloud in church. You have heard of King David and of the rich man who had many flocks and herds and the poor man who had one ewe lamb – and of how the rich man took the poor man’s one ewe lamb. That was something that happened, Madame.”

Linnet sat up. Her eyes flashed angrily.

“I see perfectly what you are driving at, Monsieur Poirot! You think, to put it vulgarly, that I stole my friend’s young man. Looking at the matter sentimentally – which is, I suppose, the way people of your generation cannot help looking at things – that is possibly true. But the real hard truth is different. I don’t deny that Jackie was passionately in love with Simon, but I don’t think you take into account that he may not have been equally devoted to her. … What is he to do? Be heroically noble and marry a woman he does not care for – and thereby probably ruin three lives – for it is doubtful whether he could make Jackie happy under those circumstances? If he were actually married to her when he met me I agree that it might be his duty to stick to her – though I’m not really sure of that. If one person is unhappy the other suffers too. But an engagement is not really binding. If a mistake has been made, then surely it is better to face the fact before it is too late. I admit that it was very hard on Jackie, and I’m very sorry about it – but there it is. It was inevitable.”

“I wonder.”

She stared at him.

“What do you mean?”

“It is very sensible, very logical – all that you say! But it does not explain one thing.”

“What is that?”

“Your own attitude, Madame. … To you this persecution [by Jackie] is intolerable – and why? It can be for one reason only – that you feel a sense of guilt.”

Linnet sprang to her feet.

“How dare you? Really, Monsieur Poirot, this is going too far.”

“But I do dare, Madame! I am going to speak to you quite frankly. I suggest to you that, although you may have endeavoured to gloss over the fact to yourself, you did deliberately set about taking your husband from your friend. … You are beautiful, Madame; you are rich; you are clever; intelligent – and you have charm. You could have exercised that charm or you could have restrained it. You had everything, Madame, that life can offer. Your friend’s life was bound up in one person. You knew that, but, though you hesitated, you did not hold your hand. You stretched it out and, like the rich man in the Bible, you took the poor man’s one ewe lamb.” …

“She threatened to – well – kill us both. Jackie can be rather – Latin sometimes.”

“I see.” Poirot’s tone was grave.

Linnet turned to him appealingly.

“You will act for me?”

“No, Madame.” His tone was firm. “I will not accept a commission from you. I will do what I can in the interests of humanity. That, yes. There is here a situation that is full of difficulty and danger. I will do what I can to clear it up – but I am not very sanguine as to my chance of success.”

Linnet Doyle said slowly: “But you will not act for me?”

“No, Madame,” said Hercule Poirot.

Body-text fonts, pt. 48: Simoncini Garamond

Perhaps my favorite Garamond. The happy average of Garamonds “Monotype” and “ITC”: not too twiggy, not too fat. Spiky serifs; short descenders.

Sample 1: Mary Westmacott, i.e. Agatha Christie, Absent in the Spring (in an omnibus):

Sample 2: Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickle and Dimed:

If that doesn’t excite you, I don’t know what would.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Happy Paw Patrol-themed birthday, yesterday, to Daniel. We invited his cousins to help him to empty his piñata.

It has become customary among our families to offer a piñata whenever a child turns a year older. Our boys had accumulated enough candy to fill a kitchen cabinet. So, we recycled as much of it as we could into yesterday’s piñata.

We told the other parents to put their children’s gleanings into the next piñata, then into the next one, and so on.

Royals

What with news of the arrest of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, it’s useful to have an updated Royal Family tree with birth years, titles, and succession indicators:

• article behind paywall (BBC)
• same article – gratis (Yahoo!)

For some readers this will be old hat. Not for me, alas. I’ve seen just one episode of The Crown.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Current reading (books):

• W. J. Cash, The Mind of the South (for the group)
• Agatha Christie, Evil Under the Sun
• Agatha Christie (writing as Mary Westmacott), Absent in the Spring
• E. W. Hornung, The Amateur Cracksman
• C. S. Lewis, Perelandra
• François Mauriac, The Holy Terror (a mini-book – for making up lost ground)
• John Steinbeck, Tortilla Flat (ditto)
• Aristotle, Poetics (ditto)
• John Perry, A Dialogue on Personal Identity and Immortality (ditto)
• Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince (ditto; a re-read)
• books, as yet unfinished, mentioned in previous entries

I was going to say it’s pretty cupcake, but surveying the list, I see the authors include two Nobel winners (Mauriac and Steinbeck), two Great Books of the Western World contributors (Aristotle and Machiavelli), and two theological giants (Christie and Lewis). So, not too shabby after all. Mr. Quiring would approve. Maybe not of Christie. I shake my head whenever well-read people don’t bother with Christie, especially if they do read Chesterton and Sayers. (See the latter’s gem “Aristotle on Detective Fiction,” which I found in Anthony Kenny’s Oxford World’s Classics edition of the Poetics.)

1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 94: Poirot: Dumb witness

[Preliminary rant]

I don’t believe in David Suchet’s Poirot.

“Who are you, and what have you done with Hercule?” (I keep wondering).

POIROT

I say all are capable of murder, mon ami.

Perhaps he says this somewhere in the corpus, but not in the novel Dumb Witness. Poirot seldom generalizes about murder. He is interested in particular murders.

Indeed, Poirot in this book rules out various suspects because he deems them incapable of the murder in question.

This is more than a difference of detail; it’s what the story turns on.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

More lines from the adaptation:

HASTINGS

Quite a list of suspects, Poirot.

POIROT

Which is not complete. You forget the sisters Tripp [local spiritualists].

HASTINGS

Oh, those two? They’re batty, yes, but not killers, surely.

POIROT

But what is murder but a kind of madness, mon ami?

No seasoned Poirot reader would impute to him the view that murder is doable only under the influence of madness.

It’s the sloppiness of impostor-Poirot’s aphorism that strikes such a false note.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Suchet’s body language is wrong, too. Poirot is famously dapper. Suchet puts on dapper clothes but not a dapper manner.

He is repitilian: he hunches down into his shoulders, scans the horizon, seems almost to taste the air with a forked tongue.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Worst of all, this Poirot’s eyes don’t twinkle. (For a more mirthful Poirot, see Evil under the Sun, with Peter Ustinov.)

A dearth of mirth betrays excessive self-seriousness, which betrays a deficiency of wisdom. But wisdom is the little Belgian detective’s outstanding, if seldom remarked upon, quality.

I might hire Suchet’s Poirot to solve a murder. I wouldn’t go to him for life advice. But that is precisely what the novels so richly provide.

I would stake my intellectual and moral reputation on the profundity of Christie’s hero. But I’d stake nothing on Suchet’s Poirot’s having more depth than a can of tuna.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Suchet has his champions. He certainly looks the part.

Those who turn to this production for its window-dressing will be satisfied.

It’s the window-dressing that I commend in what follows.

[End of rant]

This adaptation of the 1937 novel glamorizes the setting by moving it from the Home Counties (and London) to the Lake District.

An early sequence shows an attempt to set a speedboat-racing record.

[Digression]

Nothing like this occurs in the book. The sequence’s purpose is entirely sensory-nostalgic. This isn’t a damning quality, but it does encourage the thought that Christie was in the business of supplying comfort literature.

She was, and she wasn’t.

It’s comforting that justice – or, on occasion, enlightened vigilantism – triumphs in her books.

But as I never tire of asserting, the closest cinematic approximation to Christie, tonally speaking, isn’t based on her work at all. I have in mind Mike Leigh’s Vera Drake, which hardly produces a yearning for the time and place it depicts. Christie’s work is grittier than Suchet’s Poirot would lead one to think.

[End of digression]

The speedboat catches fire; the racer barely escapes alive. Afterward, there is a gathering at the house of the racer’s rich Aunt Emily. Present with the hostess and the racer – the rakish Charles (whose boat’s repairs Emily refuses to fund) – are Charles’s fashionable twin, Theresa; their dowdy cousin, Bella (another niece of Emily’s); Bella’s foreign husband, Jacob, and their children; Poirot and his friend, Captain Arthur Hastings; Miss Wilhelmina, Emily’s paid companion; Doctor Grainger, Emily’s physician and Miss Wilhelmina’s beau; the Misses Tripp, forecasters of doom and gloom; and Bob, Emily’s fox terrier.

The portrait of The General, Emily’s ancestor, hangs over the proceedings. These are hijacked by the Misses Tripp, who elicit from The General’s spirit a foretelling of Emily’s demise.

That night, Emily falls down the stairs. She survives – badly shaken. Did she slip on Bob’s ball (found on the landing)? No, thinks Poirot, who observes that Bob never leaves his toys haphazardly lying about. Emily was tripped. Poirot advises her to change her will.

Not long afterward, Emily is murdered, and then there is a second murder. These are spectacular scenes. Emily, before collapsing, is enveloped in a green haze. (“It’s her spirit passing!” gleefully exclaim the Misses Tripp.) The second victim is gassed with carbon monoxide. Instead of quietly losing consciousness, he jumps out of bed, gasps terribly, and flops over – not carbon monoxide’s usual effect, I understand. Nor is this murder included in the novel. Never mind. It’s window-dressing we want, and that’s what the adaptation gives us.

Poirot and Hastings remain nearby for all of this, at the Motor Boat Racing Club. Poirot is tolerated although he is not a member (and is a foreigner). For he is famous. Jacob, the foreign husband of Bella, Emily’s niece, is not allowed inside the building. Poirot is indignant but remains at the club. He and Hastings observe the waiter refill the salt shakers (“cellars”), exquisite artifacts justifiably incorporated into the story. (How careless of Christie to have left them out.)

Two masked, black-clad figures paddle up to a dock under glorious twilight and break into Emily’s house. Fortunately, The General’s portrait falls off its hook, crashes, and rouses the household. The burglars flee. I don’t quite recall, but I believe they paddle away in the dark. Poirot will reveal their identities when he gathers the household together to announce the identity of the murderer.

There is a final injustice, in the disposal of Emily’s property. Everyone wants Emily’s money, but no one wants Bob, her dashing, intelligent fox terrier. The Misses Tripp go so far as to hold a séance to accuse Bob of the crime. Poirot must hatch a deceitful scheme to secure a home for Bob. One admires the cuteness but doubts the wisdom of this scheme.

And that, in a nutshell, is how I feel about the adaptation.

Self-care checklist

Things I didn’t have time for yesterday, due to parenthood:

• the “All Ten” puzzle
• the NYT “Connections” puzzle
• the (NYT) Athletic “Connections: Sports Edition” puzzle

(I don’t “Wordle.”)

• showering
• reading
• posting

Once the children had started dropping off to sleep, I drafted a tedious account of the night’s culinary failure. But I couldn’t bring myself to post it. Even my banality has limits.

I slept well for a change. I awakened with time to spare, and now I’m posting first thing this morning. Or, rather, sixth thing. The routine must be maintained, or the ship goes to pieces.

That’s not true.

About those Internet puzzles. When you solve one, you want to solve another. Then another. Then you start looking around for other puzzles. It could go on indefinitely. When the urge is very strong, I give myself the equivalent of a cold shower: I take the “Agatha Christie Novels” quiz. And if that doesn’t cure me, I do a crossword. That usually tires me out.

Well, I must stop now. We just opened a bill for $888, for an emergency-room procedure that took 20 seconds and, due to insurance, should have cost $0. I must make a call.

Postmen vs. dogs, pt. 2

(Cf. “Dumb Witness,” the entry before last.)

From the second “Adrian Mole” book (The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole):

Monday June 14th
Moon’s Last Quarter

Our usual postman has been replaced by another one called Courtney Elliot. We know his name because he knocked on the door and introduced himself. He is certainly no run-of-the-mill postman, he wears a ruffled shirt and a red-spotted bow tie with his grey uniform.

He invited himself into the kitchen and asked to be introduced to the dog. When the dog had been brought in from the back garden Courtney looked it in the eye and said, “Hail fellow, well met.” Don’t ask me what it means; all I know is that our dog rolled over and let Courtney tickle its belly. Courtney refused a cup of instant coffee, saying that he only drank fresh-ground Brazilian, then he gave my father the letters saying, “One from the Inland Revenue I fear, Mr Mole,” tipped his hat to my mother and left. The letter was from the tax office. It was to tell my father that they had “received information” that during the previous tax year he had been running a spice rack construction company … from his premises, but that they had no record of such a business and so could he fill in the enclosed form? My father said, “Some rotten sod’s shopped me to the tax!” I went off to school. On the way I saw Courtney coming out of the Singhs’ eating a chapati.

Did you know that the first two books made Sue Townsend “the bestselling novelist of the 1980s?” (according to the author bio). (Would that be YA novelist, British novelist, or novelist full stop? No idea.)

Dumb witness

I may have mentioned that this year, I’ve been finishing the dozen Agatha Christie novels I hadn’t previously read from beginning to end.

My current read is Dumb Witness (1937), a.k.a. Poirot Loses a Client. The hero – apart from Poirot – is a little Scottish terrier named Bob. (Hastings narrates.)

“I don’t know why dogs always go for postmen, I’m sure,” continued our guide [Hastings and Poirot are touring a house].

“It’s a matter of reasoning,” said Poirot. “The dog, he argues from reason. He is intelligent; he makes his deductions according to his point of view. There are people who may enter a house and there are people who may not – that a dog soon learns. Eh bien, who is the person who most persistently tries to gain admission, rattling on the door twice or three times a day – and who is never by any chance admitted? The postman. Clearly, then, an undesirable guest from the point of view of the master of the house. He is always sent about his business, but he persistently returns and tries again. Then a dog’s duty is clear, to aid in driving this undesirable man away, and to bite him if possible. A most reasonable proceeding.”

He beamed on Bob.

“A most intelligent person, I fancy.”

Sometimes, I want to hug Poirot.

Reading report

Our first snowfall. Mary is polling the eight siblings and spouses – five of whom work for the schools – as to whether tomorrow’s school hours will be (a) normal, (b) truncated, or (c) canceled. My money is on (a). Not that money has been pooled. The prize is bragging rights.

UPDATE: It’s (b). I won’t have to go out early to put Samuel on the bus.

(I’ll have to drag Samuel and the other children down the snowy block two hours later, since Karin will’ve gone to work and I can’t leave Daniel and Abel at home.)

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

My reading year is half over and I’ve completed just one-third of the intended total. I’ll have to devote the rest of the year to kiddie novels.

Eve Titus’s Basil of Baker Street, a.k.a. The Great Mouse Detective, will be my second “mouse” book of the year.

Later, I may attempt the “Watership Down” series, which is about rabbits.

(It’s time someone wrote a capybara epic. Or does one already exist?)

I also have begun reading the eight-novel “Adrian Mole” series: hugely popular in Britain, neglected in the USA, unknown to me until some months ago. The first book is very proto-Dog-in-Night-Time (there’s even a hapless cur). Except, the narrator isn’t neurodifferent, he’s just an ordinary, awful thirteen-year-old boy. He’s not literally a mole or any sort of vermin. The book also has things in common with Mike Leigh’s movies, and (I suppose) with What Maisie Knew.

I also must read two Agatha Christies/​Mary Westmacotts per month; and I’m chipping away at my second Ed McBain police procedural, Give the Boys a Great Big Hand (a title which, morbidly enough, is meant to be taken literally).

As for the group’s reading, six weeks have been allocated to Uncle Tom’s Cabin and associated texts. I also continue to read Austen and Trollope. In short, everything I’m reading, except the rather acid Mansfield Park, has broad, crowdpleasing, page-turning appeal; all the fiction, anyway.

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.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

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.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

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.)

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

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.

Body-text fonts, pt. 44: the Fell types

Abel now climbs stairs.

Too, too soon.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Samuel has thought up a new Agatha Christie novel: Bossy (!).

“It’s about one man who kills another man in the Olden Days.”

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

These fonts are available, gratis, from Google:

IM Fell Double Pica

IM Fell DW Pica

IM Fell English

IM Fell French Canon

IM Fell Great Primer

They’re digitizations, by Igino Marini, of types “bequeathed to the University of Oxford by John Fell in 1686.”

The fonts aren’t especially alike, nor do they work equally well for typesetting just any content. One must use them very judiciously. Their attraction is that they’re VENERABLE-LOOKING and ROUGH.

(DISTRESSED is another word that comes to mind, as in: “distressed blue jeans.”)

Even so, the fonts, when properly sized and spaced, are very legible.

Whenever I see them – or their doppelgängers (more on one doppelgänger in a moment) – it’s in some pretentious children’s book, e.g. The Assassination of Brangwain Spurge by M. T. Anderson and Eugene Yelchin.

(The story is charming; the pretentiousness is due to the number of pages.)

(Spurge, an elfin emissary to the goblin capital – and a spy – is hosted by a goblin scholar, Werfel, who tries his darnednest to be hospitable but can’t help committing faux pas.)

The font in this sample is actually a commercial font that looks like IM Fell Great Primer. It’s surprisingly OK as body text, isn’t it?

Just don’t go hog wild and use Fell fonts in all your documents.

Rules for blogging

“Is this your ‘fall gothic’ blog look?” Karin asks.

Nah, I just compulsively reformat and revise, as regular readers know.

The most significant change is that the section-separating diamonds (♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦) are now tomato-colored, not orange. This would be tricky to implement globally rather than one entry at a time. So I haven’t done it all yet.

Some of my rules for blogging:

• Get the formatting right
• Corollary: learn the necessary HTML
• Get the prose right
• Revise style unstintingly
• Revise substance sparingly
• Post ten times per month (this constrains revision)
• Tell the truth
• Use free fonts
• Don’t try to make money
• Don’t track pageviews (I do see what countries my readers and reader-bots come from, but I can’t distinguish between them)
• Allow comments from human beings, not bots (right now, I’m failing to allow comments at all)
• Don’t worry about who reads (exception: Madame)
• Don’t worry if your wife doesn’t always read
• Don’t worry if people who once read don’t now
• Don’t worry if your content is utterly trivial
• You have almost nothing to say
• This blog is for exercise
• Just follow your very long nose; then retrace and clean up
• Write more like a Briton than like a gringo
• Corollary: some convolution is acceptable
• But emulate your stylist-heroes (e.g., Agatha Christie, Evelyn Waugh)
• If, in overall conception, you must emulate someone, let it be Pepys
• Read more Pepys so you know what you’re talking about
• The Shorter Pepys should suffice
• But it might not

I’ve posted some 1,300 entries here since 2013, and before that I posted on Xanga for almost ten years, so I can speak with some authority.

Dandelions, again

The mower has been “serviced” and cuts beautifully. But I’m frustrated. Headless dandelions tower over our lawn not two days after its trimming. The neighbors’ yards also are plagued. Is this how it’ll always be? Will the infestation be worse every summer? Is it caused by the warming of the Earth? Are dandelions mutating into super-dandelions?

Karin’s colleague keeps his dandelions in check. He constantly plucks and re-seeds his lawn. But he’s a childless bachelor with nothing better to do.

It was gusty a few days ago, and our useless, gigantic aerial blew off our house and hung, as if impaled, upon our fence. Our neighbor, Luis, kindly sawed it into bits for us. The weather is fine today, slightly less gusty, and I hope to coax the children out to the back yard.

I’ve begun my “weather disaster” reading with Maclean’s Young Men & Fire.

I intend, also, this year, to read all the novels by Agatha Christie that I haven’t finished: one each month. These include the novels that she wrote as “Mary Westmacott.” The first is Giant’s Bread.

Reading report

My reading year concludes on the 30th. Or, rather, on the 1st (a few years ago, I decided I could have a “day of grace”).

Books to finish (I’m behind):

• Christie, Towards Zero, which I’m rereading because there’s a new TV miniseries
• Forster, The Eternal Moment and Other Stories
• Garner, The Stone Book Quartet – this month’s “fantasy” choice: much less fantastical than I was led to believe, but no worse for that
• Dante, Paradiso, which I should have finished years ago
• Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne, for the reading group
• Homer, Odyssey, last month’s “fantasy” choice – and the preceding month’s, and the preceding month’s. … It’s not that I don’t like it – it’s great – I just keep switching, mid-month, to other fantasy books
• O’Brien, The Third Policeman, which I should have finished years ago; also fantastical; also brilliant (a book’s quality is no guarantee that I’ll finish it promptly)
• Powell, Temporary Kings and Hearing Secret Harmonies, the last two books of A Dance to the Music of Time (a “warm-up” for reading Proust next year)
• Wallace-Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth, a “warm-up” (pun intended) for next year’s “weather disaster” reading

I’m reading philosophy but won’t finish any titles by the end of the month. (Don’t think I’m neglecting my field.)

Anyway, if certain blog entries strike you as perfunctory, you can guess what is occupying me instead. (Actually, I might be brushing up on titles by Agatha Christie, typing them out for this quiz. I know all the titles but have trouble recalling them in one sitting. Once, I remembered all of them except [a] the novel I’d just finished and [b] And Then There Were None.)

I was finishing books at a regular clip until December, and then Abel was born.

Some “life hacks”

(1) Stretch pants.

(2) Using the Internet to find out what’s avaliable at your local Half Price Books store.

This is harder than you might think.

The critical link:

https://www.hpb.com/search?q=&prefn1=instorePickUpAvailableStores&prefv1=HPB-131&prefn2=rareFind&prefv2=No&srule=recently-added&sz=80

Suppose that, at Christmastime, both sets of in-laws put gift cards for HPB in your stocking.

Rejoice! Be glad!

But also: How good is this “good” luck, really?

For it may be that you live in South Bend, on the West Side, and that HPB is in faraway Mishawaka (known, locally, as “BFE” or “near-BFE” [“E” is for east; “BF” is vulgar]). Who wants to trek out east twice in January to use both $5 discounts – each, activated by a separate $25 gift-card purchase – without prior knowledge of the inventory?

But HPB has online ordering!

Alas, it costs $3.99 to have each book shipped to your house.

But books in your preferred store can be reserved online and retrieved, gratis, in person.

Again, how are you to know what’s in your preferred store? (Besides by searching for one book or author at a time and then trawling through items that may or may not be in that store.)

By clicking the above link, that’s how. Behold a list of most of the books in the store.

Here’s the link again:

https://www.hpb.com/search?q=&prefn1=instorePickUpAvailableStores&prefv1=HPB-131&prefn2=rareFind&prefv2=No&srule=recently-added&sz=80

I’ve tweaked the search to exclude collectables and to show recent arrivals on top.

To add keywords (e.g., “Agatha+Christie”) to the search, type them into the web address between the first equals sign and ampersand:

https://www.hpb.com/search?q=Agatha+Christie&prefn1=instorePickUpAvailableStores&prefv1=HPB-131&prefn2=rareFind&prefv2=No&srule=recently-added&sz=80

Maybe you don’t want to order and retrieve from Mishawaka’s store. Maybe you live in darkest Chesterfield, Missouri. Then replace “131” above – the Mishawaka store’s number – with the “120” pertaining to Chesterfied’s store.

https://www.hpb.com/search?q=Agatha+Christie&prefn1=instorePickUpAvailableStores&prefv1=HPB-120&prefn2=rareFind&prefv2=No&srule=recently-added&sz=80

Voilà.

(The “store finder” page is here.)

Onions

A work in progress.

In a rice cooker, combine:

Yellow onions, peeled, 2

Water, 2/3 cup

Butter, 1 tbsp

Pasta (e.g., bowtie), 2–3 oz

Meat: bacon, 1–2 oz; tuna, canned, 5 oz; leftover fried chicken; or what have you

Seasoning: oregano, cayenne pepper, mustard, what have you

The goal is to end up with tender, buttery, whole onions. Their layers should slide off each other at the touch of a fork. They should be slurpable.

The pasta adds calories and soaks up water. Some of it gets seared to the bottom of the pot (especially if it’s cooked with tuna). I like this.

But sometimes I eat the onions over toast instead.

Karin can’t stand onions, so when I cook this dish, I open the windows and turn on the ceiling fan.

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“Speed Is NOT a Die Hard Clone!” says my friend Andrew.

Turns out, Die Hard is basically just 12 Angry Men. An “everyman” vanquishes foes one at a time in a contained space.

This invites us to consider other riffs on the 12 Angry Men plot. (Actually, they precede 12 Angry Men.) (1) And Then There Were None. Murderers on an island get their comeuppance one at a time. The difference: there’s no “everyman”; the avenger is unknown. From this comes the “slasher” genre. (2) The Man Who Was Thursday. Anarchists are brought over to the side of law and order, one at a time. The difference: the location isn’t contained; the action spills over into several countries.

Those precedents are from the same century. What older ones might there be? Making this or that allowance, we might consider such questers as Jack the Giant Killer, and then Herakles, Odysseus, Beowulf, and Sinbad. Perhaps this would be straying too far.

The defining limitation appears to be how contained the setting is. 12 Angry Men has all the others soundly beaten along this dimension.

As for overcoming foes: in Kind Hearts and Coronets, an “everyman” bumps off, one by one, heirs to a coveted inheritance. If Thursday is kind-hearted and redemptive, KH&C is deathly cynical. You can support contrasting morals on the same frame.

I said Thursday’s setting isn’t contained, but, in a sense, it is: all the foes are together in an early scene, eating breakfast on the same veranda. And maybe spatial containment is just the most obvious kind. What matters is that there are foes one is given, as opposed to foes one seeks out. In 12 Angry Men, givenness is visceral because the foes are all in the same room, all story long. But there are other ways of depicting this. Foes can all show up for the same meal, or in the same family tree.

Murders on Orient Expresses

Hail to the Chiefs! Great team; great Super Bowl.

I tire of seeing the same teams succeed; but I wouldn’t mind if Reid, Mahomes & Co. kept on winning. This is saying something. I’ve despised the Chiefs most of my life.

I wish Travis Kelce & Taylor Swift all the best. ❤

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Speaking again of Kenneth Branagh: Here is a lovely video contrasting his (2017) and Sidney Lumet’s (1974) versions of Murder on the Orient Express.

I haven’t seen either movie. I don’t like the novel, although I love Christie and this is one of her most acclaimed works.

Cinema – Lumet’s kind, anyway – might be the best format for this story. What distinguishes each of these briskly treated characters is physicality: wrinkles, sex appeal, vigor, accent, clothes, etc. Stuff of cinema.

Christie was a dramatist, too. That’s what those suspects-gathered-in-one-room scenes at the end of her novels really are: theatre.

The world between them

I’m re-reading Murder Is Easy before the release of this feature-length BBC version.

It could be a technically superb movie and still disappoint. It’ll almost surely give Christie the Merchant-Ivory treatment, which is wrong for her.

The recent adaptations don’t capture Christie’s spareness. No matter how faithfully they render the plot and characters, they make the scenery and costumes too pretty. They embellish what the page (wisely) barely sketches.

Perhaps if Mike Leigh were the director …

If only Nicolas Roeg had adapted one or two of the creepier Christie novels, as he did The Witches and Don’t Look Now …

As T.S. Eliot famously said: “Christie and Shakespeare divide the world between them. There is no third.”

(OK, he said Dante and Shakespeare, but that wasn’t what he meant.)

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Shakespeare-wise, I have begun reading Coriolanus. How timeless these plebians and politicians seem!

Daniel, this week, decided to say dozens of real words. Previously, he had spoken gibberish.