Preview: Irish reading

Here is my list of Irish people to read in 2026–2027. (And afterward.)

Who’m I overlooking?

• John Banville, a.k.a. Benjamin Black
• Samuel Beckett
• Elizabeth Bowen
• Anna Burns
• Joyce Cary
• Erskine Childers (Mayfair-born)
• Roddy Doyle
• Maria Edgeworth
• J. G. Farrell
• Tara French
• Seamus Heaney
• James Joyce
• Claire Keegan
• C. S. Lewis
• Brian Moore
• Iris Murdoch
• Edna O’Brien
• Flann O’Brien
• Sally Rooney
• George Bernard Shaw
• Jonathan Swift
• J. M. Synge
• William Trevor
• Oscar Wilde
• Cecil Woodham-Smith (Welsh-born, Irish-sired)
• William Butler Yeats

I’ve read, or at least tried to read, all of these people but Bowen, Cary, Heaney, Edna O’Brien, Synge, and Trevor. I wouldn’t mind trying out everybody on the list.

I’m leaving Franks McCourt and O’Connor off the list. For now.

I also want to read a history book, The Rise and Fall of Christian Ireland. (Woodham-Smith’s Great Famine also is a work of history.)

My mother-in-law also has scheduled various Irish books to read this year. Nothing on her list is on mine.

The idea for this project came from viewing Atom Egoyan’s excellent, unsettling Felicia’s Journey (1999) and reflecting that the source novel’s author, William Trevor, has been pretty well off my radar.

Another holiday at home

Merry Christmas. How plentiful the children’s recaudo was! (I raked in plenty, too.) During the unwrapping, a stomach bug struck Samuel, so I remained with him while Karin took Daniel and Abel to her mother’s. Thus, Samuel and I re-enacted our Thanksgiving.

Then I got sick. Dry cough; chills.

COVID test: negative.

Please excuse the brevity of this post.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Oh, yes, I want to note Abel’s delight in barnyard books, e.g. Duck on a Bike …

… and in babies.

We gave him a pack of wooden barnyard animals, as well as a baby doll.

Luke 2:8–12 (NIV):

And there were shepherds living out in the fields nearby, keeping watch over their flocks at night. An angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified. But the angel said to them, “Do not be afraid. I bring you good news that will cause great joy for all the people. Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; he is the Messiah, the Lord. This will be a sign to you: You will find a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger.”

I’ve never heard it remarked how natural the story of Jesus’s birth must seem to the youngest listeners. Of course the hero is a baby; of course he first appears among the sheep.

Scotland 3, Greece 1

I post this effusively-narrated goal in honor of a favorite movie of Karin’s that we saw this weekend (after a wedding, no less): So I Married an Axe Murderer (1992).

Roger Ebert calls it

a mediocre movie with a good one trapped inside. … The good movie involves a droll and eccentric Scottish-American family whose household embraces more of the trappings of Scottishness than your average Glasgow souvenir shop.

“I don’t know if a market exists for feature-length Scots-bashing,” Ebert continues, “but the domestic scenes … had me laughing out loud.”

Not me. I guess the times have changed. What I kept thinking was, more should have been made of the parallels with Chabrol’s Le boucher.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

I wrote an entry called “Gastrointestinal Woes” and read it to Karin. She didn’t veto it, exactly, but her evident discomfort persuaded me to excise most of it.

This paragraph remains. (TRIGGER WARNING !!!)

Karin’s mom gave Samuel a “sensory” swivel chair for his birthday. (A chair like this one – a cheaper one, maybe.) Samuel named it “Mr. Spinner.” He and Daniel had great fun spinning in it until Daniel puked up his breakfast Pop-Tart. I heard the howling and saw the mess and thought it was blood until I noticed the sprinkles.

The excised bits were much worse.

Inflation; remembering the Holocaust; I am a V.I.P.

Karin went to the grocery store. A man in the bread aisle turned to her.

Man: “It’s all so damn expensive!”

Karin: “It’s pretty bad.”

“This is my first time shopping in ten years!”

“It must be bad.”

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

As I type, I am listening to a long phone message from the local superindentent of schools urging us all to think about the Holocaust. Appropriately, my mother-in-law just returned my copy of Maus. I’d lent it to her to read to her current foster son, a highschooler whose plan of care includes being read to. He’d been objecting, reasonably enough, to the children’s books my mother-in-law had been reading to him. I suggested Maus. He liked it at first but later refused to sit next to my mother-in-law to look at the pictures. “And it’s pointless to read a graphic novel to someone who won’t look at the pictures,” my mother-in-law explained.

Some future Holocaust reading (for me):

Our Nazi (reviewed here).

Diaries of Victor Klemperer (hat tip: my cousin-in-law Peter and his Facebook friends).

Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism (this has been scheduled by my reading group).

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Samuel chose me to accompany him to today’s “V.I.P. breakfast” at his school. The scholars ate fruit and cheese. The grownups had coffee and donuts. They sat at cafeteria tables with their children. I stood while Samuel ran laps around me. “Take me to your friends,” I told him. He’d guide me within five feet of this or that child. Then he’d laugh and run away. I couldn’t always tell whether the child was his classmate.

A few parents introduced themselves. “My child often talks about Sammy,” they’d say. Most parents just looked at us as if we were deranged.

One child (not acquainted with Samuel, apparently) had smuggled Lego bricks into the cafeteria. Samuel kept trying to run away to play with those toys. The mother covered the Lego bricks with a jacket. Samuel lifted the jacket to get to the Lego bricks. I dragged him to the picture-taking area. We posed with an inflatable donut. Samuel took me to his classroom. His teacher put him right to work, and I went home.

Behold him watching football, earlier this week, with his abuelos and his Grandaunt Linda (a rabid Chiefs fan).

May’s poem

My precious History of Art by H. W. Janson remained intact for one month. Samuel climbed the bookcase yesterday and hauled it down, ripping off its cover.

Our superglues have all dried out.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Our household, minus kitties, went to the zoo with Karin’s mom, who is making the most of her grandparental season-pass (she went again the next day). In the African section, the wild dogs were in fine form, running laps, in contrast to our by-then-unenthused children. Lions, gators, snakes, and sloths practiced immobility. Kangaroos stirred more than usual.

My favorites are the huge animals: the bison, the rhino, the giraffes. The latter, in zoos, often languish down in some ditch, on the same eye-level as their observers; but at our zoo, one can walk up to their feet and let oneself be towered over.

This month’s poem, in honor of Mother Karin’s Day and our wedding anniversary (May 21), is “Pharaoh Story”; the lyrics are by Tim Rice. I’ve come, reluctantly, during our marriage, to like it.

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

Pharoah, he was a powerful man

With the ancient world in the palm of his hand

To all intents and purposes he

Was Egypt with a capital “E”

Whatever he did, he was showered with praise

If he cracked a joke, then you chortled for days

No one had rights or a vote but the king

In fact you might say he was fairly right-wing

When Pharoah’s around

Then you get down on the ground

If you ever find yourself near Rameses

Get down on your knees

Down at the other end of the scale

Joseph is still doing time in jail

For even though he’s in with the guards

A lifetime in prison seems quite on the cards

But if my analyis of the position is right

At the end of the tunnel is a glimmer of light

For all of a sudden indescribable things

Have shattered the sleep of both peasants and kings

Strange as it seems

There’s been a run of crazy dreams

And a man who can interpret could go far

Could become a star

Strange as it seems

There’s been a run of crazy dreams

And a man who can interpret could go far

Could become a star!

Could be a star!

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

Hey! God!

My sibling-in-law – “Atti” (Atticus, formerly referred to here as Brianna) – told an amusing story.

What with tuition breaks, Atti used to attend a private Christian high school in Granger, South Bend’s upscale suburb. Her mother (Karin’s mother) taught there. Being a teacher’s child wasn’t always easy for Atti.

One day, Atti + classmates were riding through South Bend to a charity recipient’s house for “Service Day” and talking about the privileged lives of Grangerites.

They passed a trailer park. Hey! Atti exclaimed. That’s where my sister – not Karin – used to live.

Nuh, uh! gasped Atti’s classmates.

It began to dawn on them that Atti was different from the others.

As the children rode along, the surroundings became curiously familiar to Atti.

Then they parked in Atti’s driveway.

Atti’s mother had signed them up to rake the leaves in the yard.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Samuel has been taught to say “please” and “thank you” but still begins most requests with “Hey!” This morning he was, as usual, taking out his frustrations on Daniel. I told him to ask God to help him to be patient, and to breathe some deep breaths.

Hey! God! Please help me to be patient! (Deep breath, deep breath.)

Christmas with Boney M. et al.

We went to Karin’s mom’s house for our final Christmas party. The best part was hearing stories about Karin’s grandma, who died in 2016. (Don’t tell anyone, but she was my favorite person from that branch of the family.)

Karin’s mom used to consult a book called Mrs. Dunwoody’s Excellent Instructions for Homekeeping.

Mrs. Dimwitty, Karin’s grandma called it.

Karin noted that her grandma was the “queen of ‘work smarter, not harder’.”

She liked to dump ingredients into a vessel and let them bake. Hence her fondness for cookie bars – which are cut out from a grid, not sculpted individually – and for casseroles.

And she’d start washing the dishes while everyone else was eating dessert.

That’s pretty much how I like to clean and cook, except that my appliance of choice is the rice cooker, not the oven.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

It was a rough Christmas. Samuel and Daniel opened many gifts and fought over them all day long. I kept thinking of The Gods Must Be Crazy (1980), in which Bushmen fight over a Coke bottle that has fallen from heaven. Would my children fight so viciously no matter what, or would they get along better with less? Some of the famous “peace” churches severely restrict private ownership. Does it help them, peace-wise? The Thomas Friedmans of the world think that competition and accumulation help to make for a more peaceful planet. I really don’t know. This is the sort of thing that ought to interest “peace studies” academics, those who talk about war-curbing and peace-building. How many of them are telling people to get rid of their possessions? I can’t imagine there’d be much incentive for that sort of message, even if it were correct, but again, I don’t know what those writers actually say.

Racing; gift-getting

A colleague of Karin’s gave our boys a small, looped racetrack and two battery-powered racecars that look like dinosaur heads. Samuel and Daniel have been fighting over this wonderful gift most of the day. Mercifully, Daniel napped, so Samuel got a long turn by himself, and then I took Samuel to the grocery store and the library, so Daniel got a long turn by himself. Now they’re both playing with the racetrack again. I was going to write that they’ve gotten along better in the evening, but Samuel just shoved Daniel in the face.

“What a beautiful race,” Samuel keeps saying as he watches the dino-head cars tailgate each other around the track.

Each car occupies the full width of the track. So, no passing (or, as they aptly call it in Australia, overtaking).

“I feel this race is rigged,” says Karin.

But occasionally Daniel will pick up one of the cars, waltz around the room, and put the car back down in a random position on the track. So, this race is a bit like Snakes and Ladders.

I forgot to mention, last time, that I turned forty-two, and my parents had me over to eat baked chicken, which is my mother’s specialty (or has been since she found the recipe on the Internet a few months ago). I have been asking people to buy me fonts (which they won’t do) or used bookcases (which they promise to keep their eyes peeled for). My parents brought over a nice bookcase yesterday and I’ve filled it with overflow from other bookcases. I could use at least one more. My mother-in-law sent a birthday greeting by email, remarking on the fine, sunny weather; but I prefer gloom, and anyway it was the wrong day. I sent her a brief thank-you and a thumbs-up.

Spring cleaning; Mother’s Day; May’s poem

A desperate house-cleaning, this afternoon, to the detriment of my sinuses. We wished to make the house agreeable for Karin’s mom. We had invited her over for a Mother’s Day supper.

The event was a success.

After Karin’s mom left us, we let Samuel play with marbles in the living room, and I took Daniel to the basement so he wouldn’t put them into his mouth. When the time came to bring Daniel back upstairs, Samuel didn’t want to put his marbles away, and in the ensuing fracas they were spilled under various pieces of furniture. We put one howling child into one room and the other howling child into another room. We moved the dusty furniture around to hunt for the marbles – again, to the detriment of my sinuses.

I don’t recall having ever taken medicine for allergies. This might be a good year to start.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

The first paragraph of A Pocket Full of Rye:

It was Miss Somers’ turn to make the tea. Miss Somers was the newest and the most inefficient of the typists. She was no longer young and had a mild worried face like a sheep. The kettle was not quite boiling when Miss Somers poured the water onto the tea, but poor Miss Somers was never quite sure when a kettle was boiling. It was one of the many worries that afflicted her in life.

I see that in 2014 I gave this novel a “C” grade. Admittedly, I didn’t remember it well. When I previously read it, I was fourteen.

On the strength of this opening paragraph, the novel is shaping up to be worthy of at least a “B-plus.”

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

For Mother’s Day, lines from the first half of Proverbs 31. Two versions.

I

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

These are the words of King Lemuel. This is the message his mother taught him:

“My son, I gave birth to you.

You are the son I prayed for.

Don’t waste your strength on women.

Don’t waste your time on those who ruin kings.

“Kings should not drink wine, Lemuel.

Rulers should not desire beer.

If they drink, they might forget the law.

They might keep the needy from getting their rights.

Give beer to people who are dying.

And give wine to those who are sad.

Let them drink and forget their need.

Then they won’t remember their misery anymore.

“Speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves.

Defend the rights of all those who have nothing.

Speak up and judge fairly.

Defend the rights of the poor and needy.”

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

(International Children’s Bible)

II

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

The words of Lemuel, King of Massa, with which his mother reproved him:

No, my son. Oh, no, son of my womb,

Oh, no, son of my vows.

Do not give your vigor to women,

Nor your ways to destroyers of kings.

Not for kings, Lemuel, not for kings,

the drinking of wine, nor, for rulers, hard drink.

Lest he drink and forget inscribed law,

and reverse the judgment of all wretched men.

Give hard drink to the perishing man

and wine to those deeply embittered.

Let him drink and forget his privation,

and his misery let him no more recall.

Open your mouth for the dumb,

For the judgment of all fleeting folk.

Open your mouth, judge righteously,

grant justice to the poor and the wretched.

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

(Robert Alter)

The picture is as good as it gets

I hope my mom doesn’t mind if I tell this story.

She and my dad bought a new TV. But we might return it, she said. The picture is distorted.

I offered to read the manual and explain how to change the settings.

Try to stream a program, I said. It’s easier to check the settings if the TV is in use.

The picture is fine when we stream things or play a local channel, she said. It looks all wrong when we play a DVD. Here is Jack Nicholson in As Good as It Gets. See how broad he looks.

Mom, that just is how Jack Nicholson looks in As Good as It Gets. He wasn’t young anymore in the nineties.

We try another DVD: About Schmidt.

Look at him here!, my mom says. She pauses the movie. Look at how broad he is!

Mom, the picture is fine.

I remind her that Nicholson was even less young – that, consequently, he was even more broad – when he made About Schmidt. And that in the early scenes of that movie, he had to wear an unflattering business suit.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

At the library, I spotted a DVD of Annika, the new PBS/Masterpiece series in which the great Nicola Walker plays the lead detective of a made-up Glasgow policing team called the Marine Homicide Unit (it investigates murders committed on boats). DCI Annika Strandhed is quirkier than most. She draws extended analogies between the crimes she solves and Viking or Greek mythology, Ibsen’s plays, bridge-building, or whatever. To my considerable amusement, she relentlessly soliloquizes – as often as not, in front of her longsuffering subordinate detectives.

Annika reminds Karin & me of no one so much as Karin’s mother.

Web bots, pt. 2; a birthday weekend

Quickly, a follow-up to the previous entry. A reader tells me about this announcement on the Canon Press website:

(To enlarge the image, click on it.)

No wonder the Web bots led me to The Case for Christian Nationalism.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Thank you, well-wishers and gift givers. I turned forty-one upon a day of classic “John-Paul” weather, as gloomy as all get-out (and windy). For my birthday supper, we drove to my in-laws’ house in Granger. The traffic was dense – Notre Dame was about to host a game – and, along much of the route, the power was extinguished; intersections had to be negotiated in the manner of four-way stops. We passed some accidents. We arrived safely.

“Meat loaf and cheesecake,” Karin’s mom said, afterward, when we were stuffed. “What good choices, John-Paul.”

“Karin chose them,” I disclosed.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Stephen visited today; we watched the first leg of Barcelona’s championship series against Aucas. Barcelona lost 0–1 and didn’t deserve better. The concluding leg will be played next week. I can truly say, I’ll be glad for Aucas to join the list of title winners.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

In this photo, Moisés Caicedo celebrates his birthday with the other Spanish speakers of Brighton & Hove Albion FC. There are three Ecuadorians, an Argentinian, a Paraguayan, and a Spaniard.

I wouldn’t be surprised if all but the young Paraguayan were chosen for the World Cup.

All in a day’s screen time

Samuel and Daniel have been watching domino-toppling and marble-racing videos, among others. After a couple months of escalating wildness, this is what my YouTube account has suggested we view:

“Hamster Escapes Pool Ball Traps for Pets in Real Life in Hamster Stories #2”:

Bizarrest cinema I’ve encountered in a while. Part rat maze, part funhouse, part video game, part fifties horror movie. Samuel loves it. Loves – present tense; as I type, the channel is streaming live.

The video goes on forever. This is what people do now, Karin says. This is how they spend their time: making and watching stuff like this.

I admire the video (I think?). Certainly, I admire the craftsmanship. I do feel sorry for the hamsters. I guess that in a perfect world, living, breathing creatures would be spared such an ordeal. But “sometimes you have to break a few eggs,” the makers of The Adventures of Milo and Otis must have told themselves every day they were filming. It’s more compelling that real hamsters are being filmed: just as it’s more compelling that, in Fitzcarraldo, the actors (well, the extras) really dragged the steamboat over a hill; that De Niro really gained weight for Raging Bull; etc., etc.

This video is what Karin & I put on after we watched the quiet, reflective Ruby in Paradise. Samuel begged for YouTube all through that movie. Now he is getting his wish.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

We spent half the day in Karin’s mom’s house because an exterminator was treating ours. We’ll go back to Karin’s mom’s house tomorrow. Scott, her husband, is getting baptized.

When we were driving home on SR 23, we passed a truck with two large, flowing, half-Union/half-Confederate flags. We must have gawked too hard. The driver gave us a dirty look. Half a city later, when we turned into our street, we saw him right behind us. He kept on going. He probably wasn’t deliberately following us, but I felt better when we got off the main road: his causes wouldn’t have been welcomed in our neighborhood.

Dinner with in-laws; another couch; September’s poem

Another dinner at Karin’s mom’s house. We watched Notre Dame lose, and then the conversation turned to how contemptible Joe Biden is and how “they” (the bad guys, i.e., the liberals) are coming after “us.”

“Personally,” McKenzie declared, “I’m looking forward to ‘the purge.’”

Karin’s mom had previously mentioned that she and her new husband intend to build a “family compound” in Kentucky.

“With whom does she expect to live in this compound?” I asked Karin.

“With all of us,” Karin sighed. “With all of her family.”

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Back at home, we have a new old couch. It was free for the taking. My parents happened to notice it while passing through Bremen, and some locals offered to haul it over to us in their truck (they were heading toward our part of South Bend, anyway). The couch is brown and plaid, and it’s from the 1980s. It looks like the furniture of Quito’s old Missionary Church Dorm.

Even more than our previous old couch, it “ties the room together.”

The cats already have peed on it.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

This month’s poem, by Rudyard Kipling, is “Recessional.”

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

God of our fathers, known of old,

Lord of our far-flung battle-line,

Beneath whose awful Hand we hold

Dominion over palm and pine –

Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,

Lest we forget – lest we forget!

The tumult and the shouting dies;

The Captains and the Kings depart:

Still stands Thine ancient sacrifice,

An humble and a contrite heart.

Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,

Lest we forget – lest we forget!

Far-called, our navies melt away;

On dune and headland sinks the fire:

Lo, all our pomp of yesterday

Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!

Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,

Lest we forget – lest we forget!

If, drunk with sight of power, we loose

Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe,

Such boastings as the Gentiles use,

Or lesser breeds without the Law –

Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,

Lest we forget – lest we forget!

For heathen heart that puts her trust

In reeking tube and iron shard,

All valiant dust that builds on dust,

And guarding, calls not Thee to guard,

For frantic boast and foolish word –

Thy mercy on Thy People, Lord!

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

(For the Diamond Jubilee of 1897)

A new niece; the “little house” books; the Hardy boys

The time has come to salute our new niece, Belladonna “Bella” Jean Louise. She was born to Brianna – who now goes by “Atticus” (“Atti”) – and to “Atti’s” partner, “Ike.”

Karin went to Michigan yesterday and visited the child and her parents.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Samuel pulled Laura Ingalls Wilder’s books off the shelf and spread them out across the floor. Which of them do you think caught his attention? That’s right: Farmer Boy. The only one in the series about little Almanzo Wilder. The only one about a boy.

The only one I’ve read, as it happens.

Karin tells me that when she was a little girl, she read all of the series *except* Farmer Boy. “That one is dumb,” her mom advised her.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

I had the opposite limitation. I tried, when I was younger, to read some Nancy Drew books. I failed. But I succeeded in devouring dozens of Hardy Boys mysteries.

Now, after some thirty years, I’m rereading one of my old favorites: While the Clock Ticked (the eleventh novel in the series). Samuel and Daniel will be reading The Hardy Boys before long, I expect, and I’d like to be conversant in that literature.

The pacing is breakneck. There’s an amusing scene in which Frank and Joe attend a party with their girlfriends for all of five minutes before they rush off again to pursue a lead.

The police are implausibly nice. They’d like nothing better than to share information with the teenaged sleuths. Frank and Joe’s friend group ticks the important boxes, race-wise. In just a couple of pages, the Italian-American “chum,” the Jewish-American “chum,” and the Irish-American “chum” all are introduced. (Introduced, but never developed as characters.) Nowadays, other races than these are the beneficiaries of token inclusion; but a similar diversity principle seems to have guided the great mercenary children’s writings of 1932.

Then, of course, there’s Chet Morton, a rounder character in more ways than one. The chums go hiking in the woods, and Chet keeps pleading with them to stop so they can all eat their sandwiches. This is where the book provides character development and comical relief.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Back to Laura Ingalls. I picked up Little House in the Big Woods, also published in 1932, and read the first chapter. Its prose is plain but descriptively exquisite; I wouldn’t be surprised if it were a direct influence upon that of Nobel winner Alice Munro. (I’m especially reminded of her story “Boys and Girls.”) A lot happens in the big woods, but it happens out of view. The children wake up to see dead deer hanging from the trees. Pa kills the family’s pig; Laura stays indoors and listens while it squeals. Predators lurk outside the house.

The taste for this more atmospheric sort of writing comes later in life, I think. First comes a hunger for stories like The Hardy Boys, stories for one-track-minded readers. Not all children, but many children, are like greyhounds chasing a mechanical rabbit.

An update about the pork: Or, what we did this weekend

The pork has been cooked and pulled. It required hours and hours of labor. Karin & I took turns tearing strips of meat off the bones and putting them into baggies for freezing (1 lb. in each baggie).

We employed different techniques. I bagged the meat together with the fat and the skin. Karin separated the fat and the skin from the meat; then, she fried the skin strips, for snacking, and saved the bones, for brothing.

Jasper and Ziva lurked close by.

I’ve been trying hard to stay within my caloric budget. To eat a decent quantity of pork in one sitting, I must forego its garnishes: sauces, coleslaw, etc.

We’ve had one pork meal so far. I ate my pork with a nearly plain baked potato.

Tonight, we went to Karin’s mom’s house for the monthly family dinner. A lot of my in-laws on that side of the family have worked as cooks. I wasn’t about to brag about how we had managed to cook our pulled pork.

They had plenty to talk about, anyway: shooting ranges; home arsenals; the bar scene; enormous, muscular bouncers with gentle dispositions; bouncers who work at shooting ranges, who used to be prison guards; and where in the Bible it says that God never gives you more trouble than you can handle (it says it nowhere, Karin’s seminary-trained mother told them; the idea that the Bible says this is hogwash).

A weed is a plant out of place

Karin got one of her largest paychecks of the year and went “hog wild” – literally – buying such a huge hunk of “clearance” pork that I had to lug it through the house for her.

Said she: “I’ll ask Scott” – her new stepfather – “to smoke it for us.”

Nothing doing. Karin’s mom & Scott moved into a new house this weekend. They no longer have access to their smoker.

I’m all for putting the pork into various slow cookers and then shredding it and eating it with homemade “Alabama” sauce.

(See, I am become a middle-aged man who talks about his meats.)

By the end of the week, we should have the picnic table that I ordered through Facebook Marketplace. I’ve been fond of picnic tables since I was in high school. I and my dorm-mates used to enjoy suppers out of doors.

Karin & I tend to pursue our respective “home improvement” ideas independently of one another. Her ambition for the back yard, tonight, was to pull out weeds that no one sees. This was complicated by her confusion as to what is and what isn’t a weed. I told her about a passage in Jim Thompson that I read not long ago, in which Lou Ford’s defense lawyer tells him a definition that comes “right out of the agronomy books”:

“A weed is a plant out of place.” I find a hollyhock in my cornfield, and it’s a weed. I find it in my yard, and it’s a flower. … You’re in my garden, Mr. Ford.

I’ve been revisiting the nineties’ contextualist epistemologists, whom I briefly studied many years ago, in order to read the aughts’ “pragmatic encroachment” epistemologists (whose work I was downright oblivious to at the time). Keith DeRose, in a recent collection of old and new essays, is apologetic because his “Solving the Skeptical Problem” is such a long paper. David Lewis ends his famous paper, “Elusive Knowledge,” by saying that although he could have written it longer, and nearer to the truth, that wouldn’t have been in anyone’s interest. His paper displays a certain amount of formalism thrown about informally, together with casual references to guys named Fred and Donald in the vicinity of San Francisco, in service of a view with Chestertonian paradoxicality. An insider’s paper: important, but surely a pain to teach. A paper with weed-like qualities in just about any home garden.

Another night out

I went with Karin and her mom to St. Mary’s College and viewed a performance of Legally Blonde Jr.: The Musical. This “junior” version is Legally Blonde: The Musical with the spicy bits excised. The actors were in elementary or middle or high school. Our old pastor’s daughter had a small but crucial role. She’s been performing for some years, but this was the first time I’d gone to watch her; I thought she was remarkable. But then, I’m biased: I’ve known her since she was a blobby little infant.

(Our own infants, Samuel and Daniel, were supervised by Karin’s dad and his girlfriend, Carol.)

After the show, the director came onstage and started talking about the sponsors and the crew and the “message” of Legally Blonde (“Follow your dreams,” was her take). “Lead us out of here,” Karin’s mom said, and so I did. When we got to the parking lot, Karin’s mom thanked me for having had the courage to leave before the speeches had ended. “I wouldn’t have done it on my own,” she said.

Karin has quite the weekend lined up for herself. Tomorrow she’ll hear Billy Joel at Notre Dame Stadium, and on Sunday she’ll watch a performance of Anastasia. I’ll look after the children.

A wedding

Continuing on the subject of gluttony, yesterday was my “last hurrah,” at least for the season: I made two trips down a Polish buffet line. (If anything has a claim to being “South Bend cuisine,” it’s Polish food.) The occasion was my mother-in-law’s wedding. You’ll recall that she was widowed in 2020. Now she is married to Scott, her dead husband’s ex-roommate. It was a canny move. When Rick died, she griefstrickenly bequeathed Rick’s guns to Scott; now, presumably, she has got them back. Karin and Samuel and I rode to the wedding with McKenzie, Karin’s mom’s ex-foster daughter. McKenzie wore sweatpants and swigged from a half-gallon of milk and talked on her phone to her imprisoned boyfriend. “I have a gift card,” she told him. “I’m going to sell it to buy you another phone card.” It was a cheerful conversation. Like Scott and unlike the rest of my mother-in-law’s family, McKenzie is a happy-go-lucky sort of person. She gleefully told her boyfriend that her tattoo artist had just been jailed.

We also had a delicious venison stew, courtesy of my mother-in-law’s Uncle Fred, who shoots deer and hangs them up in his front yard. Uncle Fred preached the sermon. Karin said it was about sin (Uncle Fred is another happy-go-lucky sort of person). I didn’t hear it; Samuel started howling as soon as the bride walked up the aisle, so I took him to a Sunday School room where he played with toy cars and I read Agatha Christie. Karin told me not to bring a book to the wedding, but I did anyway; one never knows. I don’t think Karin’s mom noticed. She seemed to be relishing everything else that was going on.

Corn pudding

While it’s worth remembering that the U.S. Capitol was attacked one year ago, this entry will discuss something far less momentous: my diet.

After Thanksgiving, I started procuring, from the store, pies of pumpkin, apple, and blueberry. This was a speed-bump on my path to personal excellence.

Happily, the last two weeks, I didn’t bring home any pies. But on New Year’s Day, at my mother-in-law’s house, I ate serving after serving of corn pudding; and so, lately, that’s what I’ve been craving.

Yesterday I made this recipe in the slow cooker. Some of it was gooey and some of it was burnt. I stirred it all together and it tasted better than I expected. In fact, it was delicious.

Next, I’ll make the “Mexican street corn” version.

Corn pudding is a calorie bomb. There were 625 kcals in yesterday’s serving of 250 g (a little less than 9 oz). I think corn pudding goes best with meatballs, meatloaf, chorizo, and the like. Those foods also are calorie bombs. Adopting corn pudding as your staple food is no way to live.

(“This is a fair assessment of corn pudding,” Karin says. “The good and the bad.”)

Renovations (cont.)

A really grueling couple of days. A close family member was hospitalized; this has colored everything, and our thoughts and prayers are never far from this person.

Karin & I again visited our new house with Samuel and worked for several hours, mostly pulling up staples and tack strips from the previously carpeted hardwood floors.

Karin’s mom gave us money to pay our neighbor to mow the front lawn.