House hunting, pt. 2001, a specious odyssey

We have a winner! And the winner is us! You’ll have noticed that on the real estate websites a certain property is listed as “pending.” That would be due to Karin & me.

Actually, I am more of a winner than Karin, because her commute will lengthen by approximately ten minutes each way. But we’re both winners in terms of price – and in terms of the house itself, which we like.

We’re winners, that is, if the sale goes through.

Samuel also likes the house, but he is less discriminating. Our other friend Sam, Sam the architect, saw the house and said its construction was sound.

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I finished reading The Mystery of a Hansom Cab, which was pretty lightweight despite its frequent allusions to classical literature. It had many funny scenes with loquacious landladies and back-alley women, and a truly horrifying deathbed scene. Marco Denevi, who wrote the excellent Rosaura a las diez, is said to have been influenced by Wilkie Collins; but I shouldn’t be surprised if he also studied The Mystery of a Hansom Cab.

Mother’s Day; mowing day; conspiracy theories

I wish a happy Mother’s Day to my own mother – and, for the first time, to Karin. I’m not sure what gifts they’d like. For my mother-in-law, I’m ordering a couple of novels by Wilkie Collins (I persuaded her to read The Woman in White for her birthday, and she enjoyed it). She needs more books because she Marie Kondo’d her house not long ago.

Honorable mentions for Mother’s Day: my grandmothers; my aunts; my cousins; and Ana, my sister-in-law.

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This evening, I mowed the back yard again. The grass was much shorter this week, and so it took about half as long to cut. The air was cooler, too. I didn’t get as tired.

It’s been three hours since I last arose from my chair.

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The friend I blogged about last time has posted the notorious “Plandemic” video to his Facebook feed. Actually, he posted it twice: once with YouTube, and once with Vimeo. YouTube removed the first upload. Facebook tagged the second upload with a “false information” warning and linked it to this useful debunking. (The original video is here.)

My friend had written of the video:

26 minutes. You decide.
Lots of info packed into a short video.
If you’ve watched it, feel free to comment.

I watched it but didn’t comment. It’s very gratifying, now, to read the debunking, which does contain some useful information.

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But this will do little to keep conspiracy theories from proliferating like Hydra’s heads. What’s needed is education about what conspiracy theories are and why they’re bad.

Some friends have shared this essay addressed to Christians, which makes some good points and includes useful links to sources that deal with conspiracy theories about the pandemic.

For a more systematic treatment, I recommend this book by the philosopher Quassim Cassam. It’s brief and clear; I was able to read it quickly. It distinguishes between theories about conspiracies and what Cassam calls Conspiracy Theories with capital initials (I’d prefer the label “conspiracy theories in the pejorative sense,” since, on Cassam’s view, all such theories are likely to be false). I found the book to be intuitively correct and very helpful for starting to think carefully about conspiracy theories. It also attends to psychological and sociological findings.

Unfortunately, not all reviewers have received the book approvingly or even charitably. It turns out that most philosophers who write about conspiracy theories are themselves conspiracy theorists (or are sympathetic to conspiracy theories). Which often happens in philosophy: those who write about a topic are likelier than others to take an unpopular view about it.

Armadale (finis)

I finished reading Armadale a little over a year after I began to read it. One reason why the novel took so long to read was that the tutee who got me interested in it spoiled the ending for me.

“The villainess gets hanged,” she let out after I’d asked her to say no more about the plot.

Happily, months later, I can report that my tutee got it wrong. The villainess doesn’t get hanged. I don’t know how my tutee got that idea.

You can all rest assured that that’s not how the book ends.

On the other hand, it was rather dreary for me, plowing ahead after the 600-page mark, expecting the villainess to get hanged but never reaching any such scene.

Armadale has its moments but is nowhere near as exciting as The Woman in White, which I read a decade ago, largely under the influence of jet lag. That book is still vivid in my memory, even chilling.

Armadale’s best characters are supporting ones: professionals such as lawyers, doctors, and private detectives who are called upon by the major characters to give expert advice, which they bestow elegantly and dramatically, with garnishes of delicious condescension. Oh, how they must suffer fools!

Among the major characters, the villainess, Lydia Gwilt, has the best literary reputation; but I prefer the anguished Ozias Midwinter. What a name! And what a backstory he has – as a child, he was a gypsy’s ward and had to sleep out on the open road, earning his livelihood by giving pathetic performances with dancing dogs. There is more than a little of the grotesque about Midwinter, and yet he behaves as quite the noblest person in the book.

Another of the book’s welcome qualities is its evocation of place. Key scenes occur in these locations: a sanitorium in Germany’s Black Forest; a ship, sinking in the Caribbean; a quiet village in Somerset; the Isle of Man, and a ship, sinking off its coast; the towns and wilds of Norfolk; crowded London; murderous Naples; a yacht, sinking in the Adriatic; and a mysterious medical house in Hampstead, worthy of being investigated by Sherlock Holmes. One comes away from the book having played the tourist.

I usually read only one old British novel at a time. I might try a short one next – Castle Rackrent or Vathek – and then another long one, such as Barchester Towers, Villette, or Wuthering Heights.

Suggestions?

The Isle of Man

Today’s adventure with Google Earth took me to the Isle of Man, which I’d been reading about in Armadale. Its scenery resembles that of Ireland (it’s in the Irish Sea). With relative ease, one is able to use Google’s “street view” function to trace the entirety of the A18, which connects several of the important coastal towns. This route also approaches the Isle’s tallest mountain (of some 2000 feet). The change in scenery, therefore, is dramatic in a small way. Occasionally, sheep appear along the road; the little towns, also, are nice to look at, and one infers from billboards that the motor racing is distinguished.

In honor of the Isle of Man, tonight I listened to the Bee Gees, who lived there before moving to Manchester and Australia. Here is a video of their underrated song, “Fanny (Be Tender with My Love).”

Armadale

One of my tutees at IU is writing a term paper about Wilkie Collins’s longest novel, Armadale. I’ve been scrambling to read the novel. I don’t want it spoiled for me.

It’s a page-turner. I’m already on page 76 of 680.

Alas, today my student brought in a draft containing many spoilers. Now I know which characters get married and to whom, and who dies, and the intricacies of various double-crossings.

You can read Armadale here. I’m reading the newest Penguin edition.

Rosaura; born in blood and fire; monsters’ offspring; Leibniz; I know what you did last summer; down a dark hall

I haven’t had much time for blogging, but during the last few weeks I’ve managed to read good-sized portions of several books. They haven’t been difficult books (not even Leibniz’s Political Writings have been very difficult; for one thing, Leibniz digresses at key moments to promote the use and development of microscopes). Nor have they been lengthy books. But they’ve all been “top quality.”

Some more titles:

(1) Born in Blood and Fire: A Concise History of Latin America, by John Charles Chasteen. My Spanish “beginning” students will be tasked, after Thanksgiving, with reading this. It’s the liveliest general history of Latin America that I know of.

(2) Rosaura a las diez, by Marco Denevi, with notes and cuestionarios by Donald A. Yates. This is an Argentinian mystery novel, in the fashion of Wilkie Collins. (Yates’s introduction goes so far as to say that Denevi’s only literary influence was Wilkie Collins.) Rosaura was recommended to me by my Uncle Tim, who read it in high school. Right now I’m forcing my Spanish “intermediate” students to read it. How they struggle.

(3) I Know What You Did Last Summer, by Lois Duncan. Until recently, I only knew this as the lousy slasher movie that came out when I was a youth – the movie with the hook-handed killer known as the “Fisherman.” Lo and behold, the tale began as an early-’70s novel. The novel has no “Fisherman.” It does have narcissistic teenagers in a hell of their own making, a hell of regret, of jealousy, and of fear. This is not a merciless book, but it is a deeply unsettling one.

Duncan was quite prolific, quite expert at writing this sort of thing. I’ve started reading another of her grim offerings, Down a Dark Hall.

(4) Children of Monsters: An Inquiry into the Sons and Daughters of Dictators, by Jay Nordlinger. Each chapter treats a different dictator and his offspring. Hitler – did he have children? Mussolini. Stalin. Mao. The Ceausescus. Castro. Gaddafi. Saddam Hussein. Mobutu. Bokassa. Amin. Pol Pot. It reads a little like Kings and Chronicles, especially when it covers the dynastic dictatorships (the Kims, the Duvaliers, the Assads). Though it’s wryly written, it’s still a bit of a chore to get through. The chapters are nevertheless worth reading in the given order, because they set the stage for one of the most compelling characters: Idi Amin’s son, Jaffar, who manages to be both a peace advocate and a “chip off the old block” (many dictators’ children have tended to be one or the other, but not both). With Jaffar it’s as if the psychological pieces almost fit together, and it’s poignant. (If only the dictators had been more like Jaffar, instead of, you know, murderers.)

Nordlinger has written a book which is “on the other side of the looking-glass” to this one. It’s about the recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize. I intend to read it soon.