Mister Knockout

Daniel’s front teeth pierced through his gums tonight.

Samuel arranged some wooden letters on his desk to give himself this nickname:

This year, Karin & I have decided not to watch TV while we eat supper. Instead, we’ve been reading the “family” portion of the M’Cheyne schedule. We use the International Children’s Bible. Samuel and Daniel are remarkably docile while we read the Bible out loud. Of course, they are strapped down in their chairs, with food on their trays.

Better get used to this, I tell them. We’re gonna keep it up until you’re old enough to leave the house.

Then, after we finish reading the Bible, we watch TV.

There is the “family” portion of the M’Cheyne schedule; and then there is the “secret” portion, which Karin & I each read on our own (in secret, of course). This year I’m secretly reading from the English Standard Version. I didn’t have an ESV bible until a few months ago when I broke down and got one because our pastor preaches from the ESV. I chose an edition called the Literary Study Bible. It’s published by Crossway and strikes me as very Wheatie, very Rykenish. It tells me what literary genre every passage is in. If the genre changes for a two-verse interval, the Literary Study Bible remarks upon it. So it’s useful if you wish to trace the outline of highs and lows and zoom-ins and zoom-outs. It’s also useful in bringing to the forefront of consciousness the obvious but too-often-neglected fact that the Bible is like the Dorothy Sayers novel The Documents in the Case: a collection of documents and a coherent story. (It’s too easy to think of the Bible as just one or the other of these things.)

Yesterday, I read this nice comment about Ezra 2:

Ezra was both a priest and a scribe (7:11), and the temperament of a scribe or recorder is fully evident in Ezra 2. The most obvious lesson that we learn from these lists of names is that the Bible is a historical document in which real events and real people are shown to matter to God and to the writers of the Bible. Although many of the names are unfamiliar to us, they serve to remind us that we, too, are known by God and that one day God will bring us home too.

To read this part of Ezra isn’t just to read a historian’s distillation (though some distillation occurs, of course). It’s more like being taken into an archive and shown a jumble of roll calls, receipts, and tax records – traces of People Who Were. Or it’s like reading names carved out in a graveyard or war memorial. It’s an invitation to pause and think about the dead.

And to be startled, later, when Jesus says: “He is not God of the dead, but of the living.”

Reading M’Cheyne; 1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 55: L’enfer (Torment)

If you follow M’Cheyne’s reading plan, then every so often, by coincidence, you’ll encounter some pretty stark juxtaposition. Yesterday I read Ezekiel 32, in which Egypt repeatedly is cursed to “lie among the uncircumcised.” Yes, it’s better to be circumcised, I couldn’t help thinking. But then I came to Galatians 5, which says that “if you let yourselves be circumcised, Christ will be of no benefit to you … in Christ Jesus, neither circumcision nor uncircumcision counts for anything.” Oh, snap.

I’ve read these passages before, of course; and I know that no one passage should be interpreted apart from the rest of the Bible. But there’s something to be said for reading a passage naïvely, as if it were unfamiliar. The power of the M’Cheyne plan is that it allows you to approximate this state of mind while recalling other parts of the Bible (because you’ve just read them). Everything feels more fresh. It’s one thing to hear Paul rail against circumcision; it’s another to hear him when you’ve just gone through a passage like Ezekiel 32 in which uncircumcision is abhorred.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

2 Samuel and 1 Kings also have been on the schedule lately.

King David was old and advanced in years; and although they covered him with clothes, he could not get warm. So his servants said to him, “Let a young virgin be sought for my lord the king, and let her wait on the king, and be his attendant; let her lie in your bosom, so that my lord the king may be warm.” So they searched for a beautiful girl throughout all the territory of Israel, and found Abishag the Shunammite, and brought her to the king. The girl was very beautiful. She became the king’s attendant and served him, but the king did not know her sexually.

In the same chapter, David talks with Bathsheba – whom, long ago, he took for himself because he desired to do so – who now must “[bow] and [do] obeisance to the king” to plead for her life and her son’s, while beautiful young Abishag is in the room “attending the king.”

Gripping, hardboiled stuff.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

L’enfer

I can’t figure out why Kanopy lists this among its movies of 1996. It was shown in France in 1994, and that’s when it was reviewed in the USA, so that’s when it must have been in theaters here.

Call it an honorary ninety-sixer.

Nasty old Claude Chabrol remakes an unfinished movie by Henri-George Clouzot (director of Diabolique, The Wages of Fear, etc.). It’s the flip-side of those “French people on vacation for weeks and weeks” movies, the kind that Éric Rohmer does so well. L’enfer is about the hoteliers, not the guests. For these characters, there is no vacation, no regeneration, not even in the off-season. Nevertheless, the owner’s wife (Emmanuelle Béart) disappears a lot when she’s supposed to be working. She’s beautiful. Her husband (François Cluzet) suspects that she is cheating on him. He walks down to the dock of their pleasant but hardly splendid little lake, and mutters to himself. The guests notice; the hotel staff notice; his doctor notices. His wife? “You’re jealous!” she gleefully taunts him, and runs off to the shower. As if she didn’t see that he’s coming apart at the seams.

If there’s a common theme in Chabrol’s work, it might be this: some people get their kicks egging others on.

(Isn’t that the basis of a lot of horror? Of Wake in Fright, for example? Of Neil LaBute’s infamous movies? Of Shakespeare’s Iago? Of the serpent in the garden? The satanic impulse isn’t just to ruin; it’s to persuade others to freely ruin themselves – to entice them to enslave or mutilate their own flesh.)

She flirts; she provokes. She literally drives her husband mad. Or maybe she’s just being friendly with the guests. It’s unclear whether she really is unchaste or even flirtatious: certain scenes must be entirely inside her husband’s head; possibly, others are, too. There’s no firm basis for the viewer to assign guilt or innocence to the wife. As for the husband, the evidence he has is ambiguous at best. So he is always trying to gather more evidence, spying upon his wife, questioning her. He wears her out. She threatens to really cheat on him if he doesn’t stop. He doesn’t stop.

Is he deliberately provoking her, then? Is he dragging her down into his hell with him?

Is this what she wanted all along? That’s what Roger Ebert suggests, on the premise that the movie needs this extra level of perversity to be interesting.

Well, I doubt the movie is meant to be interesting. It’s meant to be pretty. It’s meant to keep the viewer endlessly, fruitlessly guessing the wife’s real motives, as the husband must do.

Ambiguity is the task that some movies set for themselves. This one ends with a caption: SANS FIN. Without end. That’s ambiguous, too. Does this movie conclude like No Exit, in which the characters are in an unending hell? Or does it conclude like Last Year at Marienbad, with no resolution, no determinate meaning, no point: is it just an exercise in stringing the viewer along?

Or is the torment of uncertainty the attraction of the movie, as in “The Lady, or the Tiger?” Some people like to be frustrated. They seek it out. Maybe the husband in L’enfer does this. Maybe the wife does. Maybe, especially, the sort of person who watches a lot of movies by Claude Chabrol likes to be frustrated. Who’s the pervert, then?

Closing credits

This year, I thank:

First, the people who gave money, advice, or labor to help our family to buy and move into our new house. I love our house. Every day, I am happy to be in it.

Second, our COVID-19 vaccinators.

Third, our TV. These shows stood out:

• Benidorm
• Cracker
• Det som göms i snö
• Mystery Road
• No Offence
• Rebecka Martinsson (especially, the first season, with Ida Engvoll)
• Wire in the Blood

Now that I’ve listed them, I see they’re all police procedurals, except Benidorm (a sitcom). Their seriousness varies. Wire in the Blood is gothic and ridiculous. No Offence is jokey and ridiculous; it’s very near to being a sitcom. Rebecka Martinsson has the saddest murder cases. The saddest murderers are in Cracker, which Karin & I are currently watching. The best investigators to watch are played by Ida Engvoll in Rebecka Martinsson, Aaron Pederson in Mystery Road (and in two movies, Mystery Road and Goldstone), and Robbie Coltrane and Geraldine Somerville in Cracker. Pederson and Coltrane, I daresay, are great, and Somerville is often great (the script doesn’t give her enough scenes). Mystery Road and Wire in the Blood are stunningly photographed, and Mystery Road and Rebecka Martinsson have stunning landscapes. Benidorm is ugly to look at, and that’s the point.

One more show, or YouTube channel, is worth mentioning again: Un mundo inmenso.

For completeness, I’d have to list Samuel’s shows, which certainly have taken up much of my time; but I’ll let him discuss them when he begins to blog. This year he has taken great physical and intellectual strides. I am grateful to YouTube for his intellectual ones. Samuel now knows his colors, shapes, numbers, letters, animals, and vehicles; he recognizes quite a few written words; he repeats interesting phrases; and today, he sang a few lines along with Dua Lipa and Elton John.

This year I’ll have completed the Bible-reading schedule devised by Robert Murray M’Cheyne. It’s the best schedule I’ve used, and the Good News Translation has been a joy to read.

I also passed my eyes over more philosophy than in any year since I lived in Ithaca. I wrote down the title of every article and book chapter I finished. Perusing the titles, I’m dismayed that I remember so little of the content. There’s something to be said for reading less.

(This doesn’t reflect well upon the industry of philosophy, whose practitioners are caught up in a whirlwind of having to publish more and more and more.)

I also wrote down the vast majority of the calories I ate; and, consequently, I lost a lot of lbs.

So did Karin, though she’s been gaining weight again. In February, Lord willing, we’ll have another son.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

P.S. I forgot Clarkson’s Farm. That show was outstanding, too!