A busy holiday in my chair

I had my Spring Break this week, and I made good use of the time, sitting at home in my armchair. I wrote and read and kept company with the kitties. I applied for one full-time job (the response, so far, has been perfunctory) and plotted to apply elsewhere. I wondered if I could get a scholarship to do research in Scotland. … Tonight I read Larissa MacFarquhar’s 2007 essay about Barack Obama. I typeset it into a handsome 13-page, 2-column PDF, using William Addison Dwiggins’s neglected font, ITC New Winchester. (The relevance is that this font is like Dwiggins’s Eldorado, and Obama’s maternal grandfather hailed from a Kansas town named El Dorado.)

Karin went to work each day and played video games each night. On Tuesday, we ate supper with our old pastor’s family, and, last night, we washed our clothes.

Karin has been trying to interest the kitties in their mirror reflections. Ziva is downright alarmed by hers. Jasper at first feigned indifference to his reflection, but tonight I noticed him perching on the bathroom sink, looking at himself.

Parfit, R.I.P.

The big name Derek Parfit died on January 2.

His New York Times obituary – not particularly interesting – is here.

His 2011 New Yorker profile – by Larissa MacFarquhar, whose other journalism I have praised – is here.

This profile is well worth reading. It’s outstanding. I used to have a PDF of it, which, now, I cannot find … which vexes me.

End of an era

Bargain Books opened in Mishawaka during my freshman year of college. Tomorrow, it’ll close for good. Martin and I shopped there one last time. The books were being sold for $1 each. My haul was this:

1. Royce Flippin, ed., The Best American Political Writing 2007 (this has Larissa MacFarquhar’s essay on Barack Obama, “The Conciliator”);
2. Penelope Lively, The Photograph (all I know is, she wrote Moon Tiger);
3. Carol Shields, The Stone Diaries (I’d never heard of this);
4. Barry C. Smith, ed., Questions of Taste: The Philosophy of Wine (this book, I once wouldn’t have touched; but, yesterday, when I glanced at it, its tightly argued pretentiousness was irresistible);
5. D.M. Thomas, The White Hotel (I’d never heard of this);
6. Alec Waugh, Hot Countries (his brother, Evelyn, wrote much, much better);
7. Frank Welsh, Australia: A New History of the Great Southern Land;
8. Paul West, The Universe, and Other Fictions;
9. Mo Yan, The Garlic Ballads.

I’ll report if I read any of them.

Martin, who teaches U.S. literature to 11th-graders, bought a couple of Oxford World’s Classics: Letters from an American Farmer, and Wieland: “One of the earliest major American novels … a thrilling tale of suspense and intrigue set in rural Pennsylvania in the 1760s. Based on an actual case of a New York farmer who murdered his family, the novel employs Gothic devices and sensational elements such as spontaneous combustion, ventriloquism, and religious fanaticism” (this last find was much admired by everyone in our household).

As we were leaving the store, Martin noticed some tacky old i-Pod cases for sale, and so he returned to buy one. I went out to the parking lot to enjoy the weather. The clouds were thick. The temperature was in the fifties (F). A desolate little lake had been created from the melted snow. The breeze formed tiny ripples on it.

Since this was a Friday afternoon, Grape Road had a good amount of traffic.

Thinskinnedness

Apologies! Nearly a week has passed and I just realized that I forgot to link to LM’s interview in Boston Review. The link has been inserted! And for good measure, here it is again!

So transfixed I was, I tracked down LM’s article “The Kindest Cut,” about kidney donors. (Here’s the online version … this reprint may be cheaper.) No, I’m not about to give up a kidney; right now I couldn’t. Just reading the article was harrowing enough for me.

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My semester has ended, and as usual I’m sentimental about it. (The last student I tutored was writing her final college paper.) I’ll have a short break, and then it’ll be back to the office for Summer Sessions I and II.

South Bend rejoices for springtime. It never seems trite to marvel at the green shoots, at the flowers, the birds, the increase of rain, the river’s rising. How easy to forget the winter! And yet this is the time for planning ahead, for calculating how to cope. God, this year remind me to make allowances for the coming leanness. Remind me that to harvest, I must now plant (though the sower and the reaper are not always the same). Forgive me how foolishly I’ve been living.

Some years ago a friend was beaming at another’s child, and I said to her [Quote:] You need to get your own damn baby. Well, now she has one, and it’s my turn to do the beaming. How can a creature resembling, alternately, a roasted chicken and Jabba the Hutt still be piercingly adorable? Such is the power of this child. And my adoration is reciprocated. :)

But yesterday I mimicked, a little too harshly, the child’s cooing, and made her cry. It shouldn’t still bother me. But it does.

Larissa MacFarquhar

I made a Twitter account. I don’t care if anyone follows me. I don’t intend to follow anyone except for Kelly Oxford. I just wanna practice saying things in 140 characters or less.

For example: “When the moon is full, the tide is high.”

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From Boston Review, an interview with Larissa MacFarquhar, who writes about people who give to the needy as much as they’re able. They give effort … money … kidneys … etc.

[Boston Review:] How did you become interested in extreme cases of moral virtue?

[LM:] I’ve been interested in them for a long time, but one of the things I read that got me thinking in a more systematic way was the philosopher Susan Wolf’s essay “Moral Saints” [PDF]. She argues that our conceptions of perfect moral virtue (what she calls saintliness) and of a well-lived life are irreconcilable, so one of them has to go. She is basically anti-saint — she concludes that it’s our view of morality that has to go. I tend towards the other conclusion, but her essay was very useful in framing the question. It seemed to me, though, that you couldn’t think about the problem only in the abstract. If you want to consider the cost of making certain ethical decisions, you have to see how they play out in actual lives. So that’s why I decided to write about people who have a very demanding sense of moral duty and live their lives accordingly.

LM is trying to write about real-life “moral saints” who aren’t “kooks.” This fascinates me, because most moral saints I can think of are, in fact, a little kooky. But even if LM’s subjects were, too, I’m not sure how damning that’d be.

I think that if you’re doing something that’s hard to do and good to do, and that makes you feel proud, I just don’t see why that’s so terrible. One kidney donor told me that his donation made him feel better about himself — that it was one really good thing he’d done in his life, which he had otherwise made a pretty complete mess of. Some psychologists think you shouldn’t donate in order to feel better about yourself, but it strikes me as an excellent reason!

Feeling proud isn’t the same as feeling less awful about yourself. But whichever motive the guy had, I think LM is right to view it with some admiration, and with compassion.