A rough-and-ready distinction

Reading Charlie and the Chocolate Factory to Samuel:

He’s interested in, of all things, its physics – e.g., why a person (or an Oompa-Loompa), having drunk a “fizzy lifting drink,” should rise in the air.

Why does an ice-cube rise in a glass of water?, Samuel asks. It’s the right sort question. I’m impressed.

What blows Samuel’s mind is that, in Charlie, chewing a stick of gum produces the same sensory/​nutritive effect as eating a three-course meal (I’m not sure he realizes it isn’t possible).

And the detail that really gets him is that, at one point during the second “course,” the gum tastes like a baked potato. Why this should impress Samuel so much, I don’t know.

That the gum turns Violet Beauregarde into a blueberry interests him less.

That she could be de-juiced back to near-normalcy interests him somewhat more.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

I once knew a college student who was very interested in The Lord of the Rings – for its metaphysics (her word).

Like, why Elves and Men differ as to mortality?, I asked.

Yes, she said.

That strikes me as the wrong approach.

Could this be one way to distinguish fantasy from science fiction? I.e., is physical or metaphysical inquiry appropriate for science fiction but not for fantasy?

Authors/​works you couldn’t inquire about in that spirit (at least, not lamely):

Homer

Hamlet

Gulliver

M. R. James

Jekyll & Hyde (but see this paper, which I don’t disparage)

Alice

The Curdie books

Narnia (I haven’t read Michael Ward’s Planet Narnia)

Harry Potter (too many ad hoc creatures and spells)

The Borrowers

Charlotte’s Web

And, I’d say – despite all the “world-building” – The Lord of the Rings.

By contrast, Lewis’s “space” books more readily invite physical/​metaphysical scrutiny. So does Slaughterhouse-Five. So does A Wrinkle in Time. So too, perhaps, might Watership Down, which I haven’t read.

So does Dante; the Divine Comedy is metaphysical SF with all the is dotted and ts crossed.

And it’s possible to go further down this path with H. P. Lovecraft than one might expect.

The Charlie books are an interesting case. There are physical explanations for some of the phenomena. These explanations don’t hold up for very long, and they’re articulated with the Alice books’ madcap irreverance; but they have a prima facie plausibility. It’s appropriate to try to work out the underlying laws – if you’re a child. Not so much if you’re grown up.

1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 103: The young poisoner’s handbook

My dear grandpa (R.I.P.) would have disliked this morbid, cynical movie.

It recounts the career of serial murderer Graham Young – or, rather, it embellishes it. It makes it downright funny. Some of the movie’s characters and events are admitted to be fictitious. Other happenings – even some of the murders – are, officially, mere speculation.

For an account that purports to be more factual, if not less sensational, see “The Teacup Poisoner” (Fred Dinenage: Murder Casebook, season 1, episode 2).

The Young Poisoner’s Handbook is more like an inverted morality play.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

The movie is not, as Roger Ebert would have it, “a wickedly satirical view of ambition in a gifted, if misguided, youth.”

Satire and ambition: let’s consider these notions in turn.

The purpose of satire is to correct behavior. It assumes that redemption is possible. This movie appears to take the contrary view. It isn’t satire; it’s the bleakest kind of irony. (I could tell you what kind if I knew Northrop Frye’s literary taxonomy better.)

Ambition isn’t this protagonist’s driving motive; it’s his smokescreen. Graham (Hugh O’Conor) has genuine scientific interests, but his self-portrayal as a scientist is largely a pose. He tries to convince his prison psychologist that, deep down, he’s a sensitive soul who has permitted his yearning for knowledge to lead him too far, as if he’d only added heavy metals to people’s food and drink out of scientific curiosity.

Graham tries to convince himself of this, too. But he knows too well that he’s essentially a vindictive little cuss.

Alas, the psychologist decides that Graham is no longer homicidal and arranges Graham’s release from the prison hospital where he has been confined since his teens.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

The movie has three acts:

One: Early misdeeds

Two: Confinement

Three: Release

In each act, the object of satire – or, more accurately, of ferocious contempt – isn’t Graham himself so much as his social environment. Yes, Graham does terrible things, but he does them to silly, grotesque people. They are always the butt of the joke.

Take Graham’s best school friend, who brags about his forthcoming date with the girl that has captured Graham’s attention (a serial flirt). This friend has the habit of asking Graham to swap sandwiches with him. (An outlandishly reckless habit, if you adopt Graham’s point of view.)

Soon this friend is laid up in bed. Graham escorts the girl to a music hall, where she beams worshipfully at the crooner.

But then Graham’s supper-talk is too gruesome for the girl, and she flees. For all her insinuation, she’s disappointingly ordinary, after all.

Next, consider Graham’s family members, who appear to have been dreamed up by Roald Dahl. They park in front of the television while Graham experiments upstairs with his chemistry equipment. These philistines have the gall to complain that Graham’s chemicals have fouled up the tea-set. Even though it’s his sister’s fault! (She has been mixing together face-creams in the teacups.)

Graham puts something nasty in his sister’s eyedrops.

Then Graham’s stepmother – Ruth Sheen, at her most acrid – finds some dirty magazines in the house. Graham’s father guiltily lowers his eyes, but it’s Graham who’s blamed. His stepmother scrubs him down in the bath and destroys his precious chemistry set.

Not long afterward, she’s bent over with stomach pain. Her hair falls out. Never lovely, she becomes hideous and weak.

Graham volunteers to spoon-feed her. Too feeble to protest, she peers out in terror at her family.

It doesn’t end well for the stepmother.

Graham’s subsequent confinement in the prison hospital is not unlike Paul Pennyfeather’s, in Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall. We’re treated to the same bureaucratic dispute of that novel – rehabilitationism vs. disciplinarianism. The argument is rehearsed by hospital officials in front of the the inmates themselves, who, in a really clever scene, are locked up in a row of steam-baths so that only their heads are visible. We’re reminded of Dante and Virgil having it out over self-excusing sinners. (Silver-tongued these souls may be, but they are buried in mud.)

The harshest treatment is reserved for Graham’s victims of Act Three – his senior colleagues in the firm that employs him after he is released. They are ordinary factory workers. Some are cruel; some are kind; all are tawdry.

In one late scene, Graham sits on a grassy bank next to a reservoir, a bottle of poison in his hand. The implication is that he wishes to take revenge on all of society.

What damage might emptying the bottle do? Graham can’t know. It’s one thing to monitor subjects one at a time, measuring the dosage slipped into each victim’s tea and finding out and recording each bodily symptom. It’s something else altogether to pour poison into the general water supply. The effects couldn’t be inferred from the prior experiments. Nor would Graham be able to observe them.

Graham isn’t a sincere experimenter. He just wants to hurt. And the movie comes uncomfortably close to suggesting that his victims – indeed, that all members of society – deserve their suffering.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Pauline Kael, in her famous review of A Clockwork Orange, says:

The trick of making the attacked less human than their attackers, so you feel no sympathy for them, is, I think, symptomatic of a new attitude in movies. This attitude says there’s no moral difference. Stanley Kubrick has assumed the deformed, self-righteous perspective of a vicious young punk who says, “Everything’s rotten. Why shouldn’t I do what I want? They’re worse than I am.” In their new mood (perhaps movies in their cumulative effect are partly responsible for it), people want to believe the hyperbolic worst, want to believe in the degradation of the victims – that they are dupes and phonies and weaklings. I can’t accept that Kubrick is merely reflecting this post-assassinations, post-Manson mood; I think he’s catering to it. I think he wants to dig it.

It’s an interesting question whether The Young Poisoner’s Handbook “wants to dig it.” Certainly, it presents the victims as “dupes and phonies and weaklings.” What it doesn’t do is glorify the victimizer. Graham is vicious, but, unlike A Clockwork Orange’s protagonist, he’s not a tough person; he wouldn’t instigate a physical fight. His choice of weapon betrays his cowardice. Nor does he dress or speak boldly. He’s essentially an overly formal, petulant little boy brandishing a chemistry set that has all the awesomeness of a model train.

Does this difference make the movie less or more misanthropic? At least in Kubrick’s Clockwork Orange, there’s one alluring character – even if he is a ruthless Nietzschean “overman.” The protagonist of The Young Poisoner’s Handbook has considerably less attraction.

There’s one way to avoid interpreting this movie as an expression of pure misanthropy, and that is to insist that since Graham is the narrator, everything is seen through jaundiced eyes. The key is to look for details that Graham doesn’t emphasize in his narration. Graham, we observe, is a Nazi enthusiast. But very little is made of this. We just know it because of some pictures on his wall. An obsession with Hitler was a large part of the historical Graham Young’s life. But when Graham tells us his story, he leaves it out. It’s as if he’s back with his prison psychologist, eliciting sympathy, omitting details on purpose, making his victims seem worse than they are.

What the movie shows us, then, is a weakling who tears down other people, in his thoughts and with his deeds – but always at some remove – to compensate for his own smallness. This leaves us with one contemptible figure, not a contemptible whole world. But, wicked though he may be, since he’s just one small person, he can’t deprive us of the magnanimity or the resources to pity even one such as himself – should we choose to do so.

Body-text fonts, pt. 49: ITC Garamond

The Iranians are trying to have their World Cup games moved from the U.S. to Mexico.

Good. Luck.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Six-year-old Samuel, whom we don’t allow to use social media, has been talking about giving up social media for a week. 🙄

Not for Lent’s sake. For a Klondike bar. (“What would you do for a Klondike bar?”)

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Chubby ITC Garamond is this month’s typeface. (This link is to the darker version, and this link is to the lighter version.)

My children are less “Charlie Bucket,” more “Mike Teavee.”

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.)

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

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.

Illness; reading to Samuel; reading to Daniel; the canceling of books

Nasty colds this week for Samuel and Daniel. It’s the first cold of Daniel’s life. Samuel, poor lad, is old enough to ruminate upon how unpleasant illness is – and to feel not just ill but, also, demoralized.

To cheer him up, I read him four chapters of Fantastic Mr. Fox. He enjoys it well enough, and then he abruptly goes off to play.

When he is demoralized again, I read him half of The Enormous Crocodile.

“Do you like this book, Sammy?” I ask.

“No,” he says.

But we soldier on. When we finish, I again ask, “Did you like that book?”

“Yes,” he says in a low, raspy voice.

It won’t be very many days until we finish Fantastic Mr. Fox, and then Samuel will have had his first full excursion through an (almost-)novel. We’ve read a good amount of Stuart Little, too, but I had to put that devastating book down for a bit because I was demoralized. Samuel liked it pretty well until he was confronted with E.B. White’s rather technical descriptions of the schooner Wasp.

He may not yet be ready for Herman Melville or Patrick O’Brien. I may never be ready for Patrick O’Brien.

Like his brother before him, Daniel has been signed up for Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library, and this week he received the usual first installment, The Little Engine that Could, which I neither enjoy nor admire, and of which we already own maybe a half-dozen copies. This version has new drawings. Have the old ones been deemed to be morally beyond the pale? Or just too ugly? I know that a couple of years ago Samuel was given a copy with the old drawings. Since Samuel was born, some of Dr. Seuss also has been canceled, and Roald Dahl has had his bitter prose sweetened up by his publishers. I need to make sure to buy the editions that I like before they disappear.

(It’s hardly a new thing, of course – the canceling of children’s books because of a decline in tolerance for this or that wrongful or different attitude.)

A bonus poem

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

Look at these trophies.

See how my trophies gleam in the sunlight.

See how they shine.

What do you think it took to become

English hammer-throwing champion nineteen sixty-nine?

Do you think in that moment, when my big moment came,

That I treated the rules with casual disdain?

Well? Like hell!

As I stepped up to the circle, did I change my plan?

Hmm? What?

As I chalked up my palms, did I wave my hands?

I did not!

As I started my spin, did I look at the view?

Did I drift off and dream for a minute or two?

Do you think I faltered or amended my rotation?

Do you think I altered my intended elevation?

As the hammer took off, did I change my grunt,

From the grunt I had practised for many a month?

Not a jot, not a dot did I stray from the plot.

Not a detail of my throw was adjusted or forgotten.

Not even when the hammer left my hands

And sailed high up, up above the stands, did I let myself go.

No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No!

If you want to throw the hammer for your country,

You have to stay inside the circle all the time,

And if you want to make the team,

You don’t need happiness or self-esteem,

You just need to keep your feet inside the line.

Sing, children – two, three, four!

If you want to throw the hammer for your country,

(Habinot est magitem.) [Suitable is more.]

You have to stay inside the circle all the time.

(Circular! Magitem! Magitem!) [More! More!]

And if you want to teach success,

(Aaah …)

You don’t use sympathy or tenderness.

(Tenderness …)

You have to force the little squits to toe the line!

Sing, Jenny – two, three, four!

If you want to throw the hammer for your country,

(Regotem … Regotem varia magitem …) [To guide … To guide variety more …]

You have to stay inside the circle all the time.

(Tempero es te iste is.) [Thee are to control it.]

Apply just one simple rule –

To hammer-throwing, life, and school –

Life’s a ball, so learn to throw it.

Find the bally line, and toe it,

And always keep your feet inside the line.

Now get out.

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

From Matilda the Musical; lyrics by Tim Minchin.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Samuel, in a pleading voice: “Soccer on Peacock?”

John-Paul: “Tomorrow we will watch some soccer on Peacock.”

Samuel: “We will watch Netherlands versus Japan.”

John-Paul: “We will watch Croatia versus Argentina.”

Samuel, happy: “We will watch Croatia versus Argentina.”

He has a deck of cards with flags, country names, and capitals on them. He likes to put two cards opposite each other and announce the soccer matchup. “Denmark versus North Korea.” Or else: “Germany versus Thailand.”

That’s the spirit.

His Spanish pronunciation is improving, too.

A visit to Mexico; Easter; body-text fonts, pt. 2: Trump Mediaeval

Samuel asked to do an Easter egg hunt. We never taught him this custom. He must have learned it from the TV.

Karin bought the candy and plastic eggs. Her dad and his girlfriend Carol had Samuel over on Saturday to do the hunt. They kept him until Easter morning.

At home, it was very quiet, very peaceful.

Karin & I took Daniel out to a Mexican restaurant that we hadn’t tried. The other diners all knew each other. They also knew the prices, which weren’t written on the menu. I felt sorry to have to ask what the food cost, but it was good that I did: some of the meals weren’t cheap.

We watched a mariachi concert on the huge TV. The singer rode around the arena upon a dancing horse.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

The next day, quite a few people were in church for the Easter service. Three were baptized in a kiddie pool. Then we went to the city of Goshen so that Daniel could meet that branch of Karin’s family. Samuel was a great hit with his second cousins, girls aged eight to fifteen.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

And now, this month’s font, which is Trump Mediaeval.

(Samuel has the qualities of Matilda and the others in the Wormwood family. He is a great reader of books, but he also watches plenty of TV.)

I considered typesetting my dissertation with this font because (a) I was writing about political philosophy, and (b) at the time, Trump was the POTUS. But I chose a different font instead.

The theatre-goers

On Saturday, we drove to Fort Wayne – a city of a quarter-million people, Indiana’s second-largest – and spent the night with Carol, Karin’s dad’s girlfriend. We met Carol’s family and viewed a local production of Roald Dahl’s Matilda. It was our first trip, since Samuel’s birth, away from the environs of South Bend.

We drove home the next day and took Samuel to his first cinematic screening. It was of Kiki’s Delivery Service, at Notre Dame. Samuel was quiet through the first half of the movie. Then we lost his pacifier and he howled. We watched the last scenes behind the other audience members, near the exit.

It was a good movie to watch in an auditorium full of children. They all cheered for Kiki at the end.

Tomorrow night, Karin and her mother will view a theatrical production of The Lion King. I’ll stay home with Samuel. Matilda and Kiki were quite enough for me.

Besides, there’ll be more of Matilda in the coming months: South Benders will perform the play.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

R.I.P. Terence Penelhum (1929–2020), a Christian philosopher who wrote on religious topics, as well as on David Hume and Joseph Butler. His autobiographical chapter in InterVarsity Press’s Philosophers Who Believe is, for me, one of the more compelling ones. I especially like this passage:

For a period of some four or five years, … my parents became influenced by Christian Science. This is a sect toward which I have never since been able to assume the attitude of easy derision shown it by both Christian and non-Christian philosophers. Its thought may be egregiously confused; but it has no religious monopoly on this. I can well recall the exemplary serenity of one of the lady readers whom we came to know, and who had been converted to Christian Science through the dramatic physical healing she experienced from it. I also recall very clearly one occasion during the war when we were attending a service and the air-raid sirens sounded. The service was moved to a supposedly less vulnerable part of the building (I think a corridor). Another of the readers made the comment that the move had been made to conform to government regulations, but that since we were all in the care of God’s love, where could we possibly be safer? Such a direct and simple absorption of the New Testament preaching of Jesus (and there was no particle of anxiety) is something I much aspire to now, and have rarely encountered. If it was combined with muddled metaphysics, I am not so consumed by analytical fervor as to believe that this matters greatly.

This brief period introduced me to the possibility of deriving unorthodox results from biblical texts. My recollection may now be faulty; but a frequently repeated juxtaposition of readings yielded the following argument: All things were made by him, and without him was not anything made that was made; God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good; ergo, evil and disease do not really exist. The well-known dismissal of the reality of evil as “error” follows from this conclusion, and the perhaps muddled, but certainly very real, spiritual life of the few Christian Scientists I knew rested in no small measure on this argument.

One can see why Hume should have appealed to this philosopher, un-Humeanly modest though he is, Christian though he is.

There’s also this story about Penelhum, from a Leiter Reports correspondent:

[H]e didn’t like going to the American Philosophical Association meetings. He said he couldn’t abide sitting around with his fellow tenured friends drinking while watching all the unemployed new PhD’s running around begging for jobs. This was in the early 80’s. I don’t think much has changed. I always thought well of him for that comment. It revealed to me a kind heart.

Leg 2; “Esio Trot”; Brown City Camp; a new job

IDV lost 1–0 to Atlético Nacional, which was respectable enough to attract some more kudos from the continental and global journalists.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Last night Karin & I drove to Brown City Camp, a church camp in eastern Michigan where Karin’s mother has a cabin (she’ll soon join us, along with Karin’s little sister, Brianna). The trip was tedious. I perked up when we got near to Lansing and Flint, which I wanted to see a bit of, but we zoomed past those cities. We listened to novellas and short stories by Roald Dahl: Fantastic Mr. Fox; “The Enormous Crocodile”; and a cynical piece called “Esio Trot,” which I’d never heard of. This story was brutal even by Dahlian standards. I think even Dahl must have felt uneasy about it, because he gave it a redemptive ending that was out of step with the rest of it. (I’m also reading The Stranger Beside Me, the opus of Ann Rule, about the serial killer Ted Bundy. “Esio Trot” is more unsettling.)

When we got to the camp it was close to midnight. Karin parked in the main lot, just outside of the front gate. Suddenly we were confronted by a golf cart driven by a feeble old man and a bored teen-aged boy. They were wearing bright green shirts that said “Security.”

“What are you doing here,” said the old man.

“We have a cabin here,” said Karin. “We just arrived from South Bend.”

“Oh, all right,” said the old man. “Let me open the gate for you so you can park nearer to your cabin.” The golf cart drove away.

“That was bizarre,” I said to Karin.

“It’s after curfew,” she explained.

As we went down to our cabin we passed two other “Security” golf carts, one driven by two old women, another by a middle-aged man and woman who were extremely fat. I figured that I could outrun any of these security guards.

(On the other hand, so many of these golf carts were creeping around in the middle of the night, I’d probably be caught no matter what.)

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Prof. Robby has asked me to teach a few Spanish courses at Bethel. So that’s what I expect to do this fall, along with my other two jobs. I’ve agreed to teach Elementary Spanish II and Intermediate Spanish.

Reading report; dreaming report

I await my $0.64 copy of The Sorrow of Belgium. I bought it online from Better World Books. It has passed from BWB’s warehouse in Mishawaka (5–6 mi from my house) to Cincinnati, OH, to Allen Park, MI – near to Detroit. Now I’m hoping it’ll come back west.

It’s dumb for stuff to be shipped so circuitously. Would the Pony Express have taken this route? I doubt it.

Meantime, I’m making good progress reading these books:

Inner Workings by J.M. Coetzee;
The Witches by Roald Dahl;
Doctor No by Ian Fleming.

Later this month, Karin & I’ll go on a long car-ride to a place called Brown City Camp. I don’t like to listen to audiobooks, but Karin does. I’ll compromise. The key is to pick out something funny and gruesome: for instance, a book written by Roald Dahl and narrated by Stephen Fry, or by Hugh Laurie, or by some other British comic person. (Maybe also some nice sermons.)

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

I dreamed last night that I wasn’t very fat any more – but also not very limber; and that I was trying to play soccer on a tiny field with two dozen other people, and that the passing lanes were all blocked off; and that the overaggressive coach (or whoever he was) was telling me to “jab the foot in” more, and I was like, It isn’t necessary, Sir: on this congested field I can simply hold the ball carrier off; he will lose his control of the ball. And I dreamed that I scored my only goal by climbing up a chain-linked fence and waiting for the ball to come up to me and then tapping it in from above the other players; but everyone wanted to disallow that goal.

I dream a lot of dreams like this one.