Come on, Hearts

As I type, the most important Scottish club match of the last forty years is being played at Celtic Park, where the hosts must defeat league leaders Hearts to retain the title. Only Celtic and Rangers have won the title since Alex Ferguson’s Aberdeen did so, in 1985.

It’s almost halftime, and the score is 0–0.

I watched Celtic and Hearts play other teams earlier this week. Hearts looked the better side. But Celtic are at home.

I can’t stream the match. The browser won’t load. It must be that so many people are watching, Paramount+ can’t handle the volume.

That can’t be right. Paramount+ broadcasts the Champions League.

Well, some things are bigger than the Champions League.

Update: Hearts have scored.

Update: Celtic have equalized. Halftime.

Update: Celtic scored two late goals.

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Disheartening: publishing a book with Oxford (!) now involves negotiating with robots.

R.I.P. “Lucy Pevensie”

… according to some. Lewis biographer Alan Jacobs isn’t convinced but happily pays tribute. Lewis devotees will recall the nice girl who lived at the Kilns during the Second World War. It’s good to hear how she turned out.

Her IMDb page.

Here she acts with Jean Simmons.

Some lives are blessed. Lucy’s (in the Chronicles) was even more favored. She reigned in Narnia; sailed to that world’s edge; and then, in her prime, was whisked away to Aslan’s country and the new Narnia.

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Speaking of how “Narnians” turn out:

A new Blu-ray collection of the BBC’s Narnia has been released some forty years after the series was first broadcast. Included is a documentary, Return to Narnia, featuring the original cast.

I learned this from the tabloids. (It popped up in various feeds.) The sensational bit is that Narnia was filmed next-door to pedophile Jimmy Savile’s studio. No Narnia actors were harmed.

The afore-linked piece tells that Downton Abbey’s Lesley Nicol was in this series. For completeness’s sake, here are a few other familiar names:

Tom Baker

Warwick Davis

Camilla Power

(Familiar, that is, if you’re a British-telly glutton.)

So far, a different Narnia adaptation has been released every twenty years or so since Lewis’s death.

May each “Narnian,” in time, be brought to Aslan.

Auden’s syllabus

My Uncle John shared a syllabus for a course that W. H. Auden taught at the University of Michigan in the early 1940s. Auden assigned 6,000 pp. of reading, according to The Paris Review.

(I’m not sure if the estimate is for recommended and required reading, or just for the latter.)

The way to complete so much reading on time is to begin before the term. Like, in grammar school. I imagine Auden telling his students: “I’m sure you’ve already read two-thirds of this material.”

I try to read a lot, and not only fluff. But there are just three items on this syllabus that I’ve read from beginning to end. I’ll let you guess which they are. Two of them, I first read in grammar school.

What on earth have I been doing since then?

The Philadelphian writer Joe Queenan has a nice memoir of his reading life called One for the Books. He gets through plenty of books and speaks candidly of their lousiness. You can get an idea from this passage. (Read to the end for a tidbit about Winston Churchill.)

The font is Caslon no. 540, which I’ve discussed.

Later in the book, Queenan makes a disparaging remark about South Bend.

P.S. It seems that Alan Jacobs was the first person to blog about Auden’s syllabus. Today, Jacobs posted another good entry, about early cinema.

P.P.S. When I took A.P. English in high school, students were expected to read 700 pp. every 2 weeks to earn an “A”: not quite Auden’s pace, but not so, so far off it, either. I wouldn’t have come close if we hadn’t been allowed to accumulate pages during the summer and Christmas holidays. Even so, I resorted to dubious measures like counting blank pages and skipping ahead to pages with three or four lines of text – at the end of a chapter, for instance. (I found dozens of virtually text-free pages in my parents’ edition of Walden. I also used a very generously spaced edition of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner that contained hundreds of pages. That book was a godsend because we were allowed to count each poetry page as three pages.)

Re-post re: Dorothy Sayers

Forgive this lazy entry, but it’s late and this has been a rough day. Here’s an entry by somebody else: Alan Jacobs, who is writing a biography of Dorothy Sayers that I very much look forward to reading.

And here is some music.

Some projects for the back burner; body-text fonts, pt. 23: Linotype Palatino

Another winter with a too-full garage. Not a terrible thing so far – the snow hasn’t been heavy, the car has been all right outside – but we really ought to clear the space once the weather warms. Ditto for other parts of the house.

We need haircuts.

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Anyone want to buy me the Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Friendship (ed. Diane Jeske, 2021)? It’s only $178 on Amazon; that’s a markdown of 34%. Having ruminated on this topic for eight years or so – roughly, the period of my marriage – I’ve come up with my own “theory” of friendship and am hankering to turn it into a publication, but my grasp of the recent literature is infirm.

(My grasp of the older literature, too. And, arguably, of the phenomenon itself.)

(The examples that motivate my “theory” involve people throwing darts and drinking beer together, not so much improving each other’s characters or visiting each other’s sickbeds. I guess this is a masculinist “theory.”)

(I may also need a copy of Bartlett’s or some other reservoir of folk wisdom.)

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In April there’ll be a memorial conference for my PhD adviser, Dick. Much as I’d like to attend, I can hardly think that far ahead right now. My last big trip was just in October. Before that, I hadn’t traveled farther than two hours since 2019 (when I last saw Dick).

Coincidentally, I’ve been dreaming that I still have to defend my dissertation. It’s always a relief to wake up and realize that I finished. That was the mother of all back-burner projects.

Philosophers talk about how personal projects give our lives meaning, and maybe they do, but they also give us lots to worry about.

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This month’s body-text font, Linotype Palatino, is known by all and loved and hated in equal measure. It isn’t Hermann Zapf’s original Palatino design; it’s the font on everyone’s computer. I love it in movie titles. I like it in some books. I kinda hate when people create their own documents with it; they usually don’t put enough space between the lines.

It often appears in textbooks.

This amusing passage opens Warren Hollister’s Roots of the Western Tradition. (Had he actually been reading E. O. Wilson, or was he just helping himself to a metaphor fashionable during his time?) Later editions only get crankier. Mine, the sixth, says: “In our own time, the pace has become so swift that some dull-witted people” (my emphasis) “see no point in studying history at all.” Such language is not now indulged.

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Look at this frog.

D1 and D2; Alan Jacobs

Daniel’d been having trouble seeing through his bangs, so we gave him the most drastic haircut of his life.

“Wow … different kid,” his Uncle David remarks.

I’m inclined to agree: I’d assign metaphysical import to this haircut. One boy, D1, used to live with us; another, D2, has taken his place. The genetic, psychological, and behavioral characteristics remain unchanged; but whereas D1 was innocent (if mischievous), D2 is responsible for misdeeds.

The leading corporeal, mental, and biographical theories of personal identity fail to account for this. I have more evidence, then, for my outrageous pet theory that personhood and personal identity are response-dependent properties. … I don’t really subscribe to this but suspect it’s as defensible as any response-dependent theory of anything.

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People in my orbit have been quoting from and forwarding blog posts by the consistently enjoyable Alan Jacobs. I never thought I’d have much interest in Thomas Mann’s Joseph and His Brothers, but Jacobs has changed that; and here is his nice little manifesto, “Bring Back the Blog,” of which I wholeheartedly approve.

Today, reading about Goodhart’s Law (but how well does it describe sports?, I wondered), I followed links and came across, in someone’s book, a reference to Jacobs’s admission that baseball, one of his lifelong passions, has come to a dead end. And my respect for him grew tenfold.