Mansfield Park

This novel is more savage than its predecessors. Its matrons and widows are at least as pharisaical as those of Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice; its young gentlemen, at least as dissolute. In addition, the family’s fortune depends on volatile West Indian holdings. Will the slaves generate enough income to make up for the profligacy of the eldest son? And what will befall poor little Fanny Price, the household’s live-in cousin?

I don’t know how this story will turn out. For once, I’m in suspense.

The movie didn’t appear until 1999. I won’t be reviewing it for my “1996” series – at least, not for many years. (Recall that I’ve been casting a wider net, reviewing material that appeared from 1995 to 1997.)

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I’m nine or so books behind my hoped-for reading pace. So, recently, I read two celebrated mini-books: Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These, about Ireland’s Magdalene laundries; and Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny, about Nazi Germany, the USSR, and Donald Trump.

You could argue that they’re basically the same book. To use jargon from my old job as a tutor in IUSB’s first-year writing program: the second book is a “theory” text, and the first is an “example” text; and a student who read both books could write a paper making plenty of connections between them (one connection per body paragraph, of course).

(I wonder how teachers of first-year English at IU are coping with A.I. Not too badly, I expect. The in-house rules for papers are so detailed and peculiar, the bots probably still haven’t learned how to follow them.)

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This is Disney’s best song.

Abel has been standing up next to the furniture.

Can you feel it

No school for Samuel: MLK Jr. Day, then two “snow days” (temps below zero °F). And he has a stomach bug. He’s lain on the sofa, except to puke. It’s been our day’s work to keep Daniel from harassing him.

During one glorious moment, Samuel ran to the toilet to puke, but Daniel was sitting there already, doing his business, so Samuel puked on Daniel. I was so proud of them both for going where they were supposed to go. We tossed Daniel into the shower.

Abel has done some puking, but that’s normal.

More about the weather. I’ve made a list of books about natural/​ecological disasters, for this coming reading year (it begins in May). One book per month. Some, I’ve already read portions of. The list also is inspired by the SoCal fires.

• Maclean, Young Men and Fire
• Stewart, Storm
• Egan, The Worst Hard Time
• Hughes, In Hazard
• Steinberg, Acts of God
• Krakauer, Into Thin Air
• Grunwald, The Swamp
• Stewart, Fire
• Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts
• Hughes, A High Wind in Jamaica
• Jacobsen, Nuclear War
• Weisman, The World Without Us

This is a manly list. The only woman on it is Jacobsen. Then again, these last couple of years I’ve read the “Little House” books, which feature fire, blizzards, locusts, and tornadoes; Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God; and short disasterpieces by Didion.

One might complain that some of these disasters aren’t so “natural,” that humans are to blame for them. I agree. So would van Inwagen, who minimizes the distinction between natural and freely chosen evil. And so would various authors on the list (especially, I gather, Steinberg and Davis). But the point isn’t to allocate responsibility; it’s to imagine stuff and people getting burned up, or blown or washed away. There’s grandeur and pathos in these disasters. My former tutee at IUSB, an old Black woman, recalled how a tornado hit South Bend and she and the other children were dismissed from school to go die at home. They ran to their houses, into the wind. That’s like something out of Their Eyes Were Watching God, a colleague said, not a little incredulously, when I told him. Yes, exactly.

1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 75: Clockwatchers

Four office temps, clockwise from top-left: Paula (Lisa Kudrow), Jane (Alanna Ubach), Margaret (Parker Posey), and Iris (Toni Collette, in her wallflower mode).

Here’s the office manager: Barbara (Debra Jo Rupp).

And for kicks: Art, the weirdo in charge of the supplies.

The standouts are Margaret and Barbara. Margaret is the most spirited of the temps. She’s the quickest to criticize the company. Her clothing mocks the “business casual” style.

Barbara is evil. She’s a stock character – think of Prof. Umbridge, of the Harry Potter series. But don’t we all know someone like this, so sugary, so cruel? The niche fills itself.

There’s no glory in landing a mid-level job in this corporation. Look at Barbara; look at Art (I haven’t even mentioned the loathsome Bob Balaban character). Who in his or her right mind would aspire to that? This only makes the temps’ plight more poignant. They long for permanent employment. They’ve clocked in and out, for years, for this or that company. Some have worked diligently; others, not so much. It has made no difference either way. For them, “tenure” is beyond reach, as if by unspoken decree: These four shall not be gathered in. Permanency, at least at the level just above temp-hood, is for the Arts and Barbaras of this world: mediocrities’ mediocrities. If you’re female and dowdy (Iris), desperate (Paula), old-fashioned (Jane), or clever (Margaret), that elevator is closed. If you’re incapable of titanic complacency, the elevator is closed.

The four temps may not be happy with this state of affairs, but at least their common plight makes them friends.

Their comradery is tested when another young woman joins the company to do permanent secretarial work.

The temps are baffled. This new worker (Helen FitzGerald) is evidently dowdy, desperate, and old-fashioned (her cleverness is impossible to gauge; she barely speaks). How did she get the job?

A spate of thieving begins in the office. The higher-ups suspect the temps. They ask who else would be poor enough to resort to stealing, as if money were the sole incentive.

The temps suspect the new worker. Then, as the mystery drags on and this new uncertainty compounds their chronic anxiety, they suspect each other.

I’ve seen it written that Clockwatchers, unlike most movies, is about what work is actually like. That must be qualified. It’s less about what goes on at work than about temporary employment as a state of mind. The “work” in this movie is stylized. The workplace is overly sterile. The walls are too bare. The muzak is Les Baxter – only the blandest Les Baxter (no Ritual of the Savage). The workers swivel in their chairs a little too demonstratively, stare a little too hard at the clock, abuse the office supplies a little too grimly. (White-Out becomes nail polish; markers are used to induce chemical highs.) That’s no knock against the movie, which doesn’t aspire to realism on the physical level.

What isn’t stylized, what’s brutally accurate, is what the limbo between non-work and permanent work feels like. The longing for security, for inclusion, is warping. Is it more warping than the low-level insiders’ determination to keep the outsiders out? Perhaps not. But this movie is about the outsiders, not the insiders. It’s about those who don’t just watch the hours. They also watch the clock measuring one’s prospects of attaining the lowest level of “success.”

The same thing happens in universities. There are permanent faculty, who, ideally, form some sort of community; permanent staff; and temporary workers: adjuncts and tutors, who are pretty well out in the cold.

I was a university temp for seven years. (I don’t count the previous seven years of graduate study, which was genuine apprenticeship. The grad school timeline is more definite, and its occupants are treated as honorary community members.) I enjoyed good relations with my fellow temps, especially in the last three or four years. Actually, no, I enjoyed good relations with the writing tutors. There was another group tutors whose misbehavior, like the petty thievery in the movie, became a consuming distraction. I didn’t blame them so much as certain higher-ups who seemed wilfully oblivious.

But enough about me; that time of my life is over. The point is, the movie resonates.

Eclipses

Karin has had a cold all week; the boys have been sick even longer. I caught it two days ago. My dad has been watching the Final Four with us; he has a cold, too.

I’ve been ill during many NCAA tournaments. I’m used to watching with blankets and medicine and tea. It must have something to do with the time of year.

My neighbors have been mowing their lawns. It’s warm enough, and our grass certainly is long enough, but I’m just not up to doing it.

And now, the business on everyone’s mind: Monday’s eclipse.

Karin had talked of traveling to Indianapolis, into the path of totality. Bad idea, she decided. The highway will be crammed.

As for me, the memory of the 2017 event is fresh. It was a time of joy and solidarity on the IUSB campus. All too brief. The recollection literally pains me; it makes me squint.

Eclipses are better to study, or to read about, or to imagine, than to view. I recently came across one in King Solomon’s Mines; it was the usual rot about science-minded explorers displaying their “magic” in front of savages. It should be noted, however, that the idea of carrying eclipse-mania through “exotic” lands has a basis in the actual history of science.

I read this, yesterday, in Herodotus (Robin Waterfield, trans.):

The war lasted for five years and although plenty of battles went the Medes’ way, just as many went the Lydians’ way too. They even once fought a kind of night battle. In the sixth year, when neither side had a clear advantage over the other in the war, an engagement took place and it so happened that in the battle day suddenly became night. Thales of Miletus had predicted this loss of daylight to the Ionians by establishing in advance that it would happen within the limits of the year in which it did in fact happen. When the Lydians and the Medes saw that night had replaced day, they did not just stop fighting; both sides also more actively wanted an end to the war. Peace between them was brokered by Syennesis of Cilicia and Labynetus of Babylon, who were anxious that the two sides should enter into a formal peace treaty and arranged for there to be mutual ties of marriage between them. That is, they decided that Allyates should give his daughter Aryenis in marriage to Cyaxeres’ son Astyages, on the grounds that strong treaties tend not to last in the absence of strong ties. These people formalize their treaties in the same way the Greeks do, with the extra feature that when they cut into the skin of their arms, each party licks the other’s blood.

Here is the famous picture of my family observing an eclipse in Esmeraldas (perhaps in 1991). David is shooting it with a machine gun.