Weather; counties; coasts; body-text fonts, pt. 9: Primer/Century 751

I waited for snow to fall this year to begin reading my first Henning Mankell novel – Faceless Killers. A few pages in, I learned that it doesn’t snow a lot in southernmost Sweden. So much for the book’s cover photo.

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U.S. counties I’ve lived in/their respective distances from the nearest U.S. coastline, measured by the number of intervening counties:

Lake (Illinois)/0
Platte (Missouri)/16
St. Joseph (Indiana)/1
King (Washington)/0
Tompkins (New York)/1

Platte County is the outlier.

“Where the Coastal Snobs Live,” this map is called. Yes, the dark patch in the middle looks like a squirrel or maybe a kangaroo – but this isn’t Australia. (Does the concept of a coastal snob have much purchase in Australia, where the vast majority of the people live along the coast?)

Q. What three U.S. counties are twenty counties away from a U.S. coastline? A. Washington County, Kansas, and Jefferson and Thayer Counties, Nebraska.

Someone (not I) should work out the average distance between counties and coastlines, in terms of how many other counties intervene. It’d be a small number, I expect. Earlier this year, I checked out a book called The Heartland: An American History, by Kristin L. Hoganson. The “heartland” county whose history Hoganson recounts is Champaign County, Illinois. According to the above map, Champaign County’s shortest distance from a coastline is four counties. Similarly, the historian of Indiana, James H. Madison, has written or edited at least three books with the word “heartland” in the title. Indiana and Illinois touch the same body of water. One would be tempted to argue, on this basis, that even the core of the United States is not very far inland. But that would be misleading, since Lake Michigan, which borders Illinois and Indiana, is entirely within the United States. Illinois and Indiana have coastlines in the same way that Utah has a coastline, and no one would say that Utah is coastal.

Ignore proximity to Lake Michigan; re-shade the map. The heartland is more landlocked than the map says. Still, it’s more coastal than is commonly thought, since much of the Great Lakes’ coastline is U.S. coastline. The map has a point after all. The Great Lakes do matter, culturally. There is a great cultural difference between Platte County, Missouri, on the one hand, and Lake County, Illinois, or St. Joseph County, Indiana, on the other. And it isn’t just proximity to a big city; Platte County is next to Kansas City. I daresay that culturally, Lake and St. Joseph Counties are more like Tompkins County, New York, or even King County, Washington, than like Platte County. What matters is proximity to a boundary, to something unamerican, even if it’s just water; or to put it differently, how many layers of Americana a county is enveloped by.

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This month’s body-text font is Primer.

This sample may actually be of Century 751, a clone of Primer designed for digital typesetting. Here is a sample of the real deal, set with metal type, from an early article in Philosophy & Public Affairs. (When that journal switched to digital typesetting, it began using Utopia for body text.)

A few other works set with Primer: Play It as It Lays; The Executioner’s Song; Come Along with Me.

The shipping news

These are tough times for the USPS. I ordered a book in early June. Although its shipping label was created in Saint Louis on June 5, the package remained in that city until June 12. It arrived in Memphis on June 13 and departed the next day. Thus far, not too terrible; but then, on the 15th, the package arrived in Springfield, Massachusetts, where it rested several days. Now it’s in Jersey City. I expect it to tour the eastern seaboard, and then maybe the Florida Keys, the Grand Canyon, and Las Vegas. Then it’ll rush like a shot to Indiana. I’ve noticed that everything that ships from Nevada comes promptly to Indiana.

Another package departed on June 1 from Eureka, Missouri. It, too, passed through Memphis. It appears to have become stranded ten days ago, in Detroit.

For what it’s worth, both packages contain apologetics textbooks.

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Here is a quite interesting review of Roger Crisp’s new book on the British Moralists. I’ve been looking for a good guide to this group of philosophers. Several are on the market, but this one seems best. Alas, the current price is $70.

But still! The buyer is made privy to such tidbits as this one:

The appeal of impartiality for Hutcheson [notes the reviewer] is in part due to his ethical aestheticism: “Impartiality has a certain dignity or nobility, which can be explicated in analogy with architecture: ‘the most perfect Rules of Architecture condemn an excessive Profusion of Ornament on one Part, above the Proportion of the Whole’” (116).

Try persuading partialists with that argument today. “Treat strangers on a par with yourself, or with your children, because an evenly ornamented building looks nicer than an unevenly ornamented one.” I’d like to hear that on NPR.

“The Radical Left is out of control”

… also, “They want to destroy America.”

Why have I been getting emails with these subject headings?

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I got this, too (click on it to enlarge):

It brought relief. (I’d worried that my thesis’s submission to ProQuest wouldn’t be approved in time for the August degree conferral.)

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Karin & I watched Paper Moon. It’s pretty thin, plot-wise, but I didn’t tire of admiring the black-and-white photography of Kansas and Missouri.

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More reading (continued from the previous entry):

(5) Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights – still not all read.

(6) Bill Hybels, Too Busy Not to Pray. This is our current Sunday school textbook.

(7), (8) Patrick White, The Aunt’s Story and Patrick White Speaks.

1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 13: 1979

I lived in Missouri in 1996, and Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness was the album the kids were listening to: two discs of epic pretentiousness. But the album had plenty of good tracks. Pop radio mostly played “1979.” It was one of the Mellon Collie’s quieter songs – and one of its fastest-paced.

Rock critic Amy Hanson writes:

Light, bright and just slightly off-kilter, “1979” was a somewhat surprising hit for the Smashing Pumpkins in February 1996. With James Iha’s guitars conjuring up just a hint of down-tuned drone à la My Bloody Valentine, and [Billy] Corgan winding a clear vocal through a mid-tempo melody with nary a shout or wrenching outburst in sight, the song was the perfect winter wonder. Disaster was lurking around the edges though, as a key portion of the accompanying video was lost when a production crew associate left the only copy on top of his car like the proverbial cup of coffee, or wallet, or important files, and drove away, effectively driving the images into nowhere. Never recovered, a frustrated band managed to recreate the moment, and duly dispatched it to MTV, where it became a heavy hitter. Although this wobble would become one of the earliest in a string of disasters that would eventually unhinge the band, before hindsight shook out its mane, the beauty and tenderness of “1979,” with the pure poetry in lyrics like “You and I should meet / Junebug skipping like a stone,” did more to erase the angst and anger of a generation of X-ers with its nostalgia tripping than just about anything else.

(I’ve changed some of Hanson’s punctuation and spelling.)

The video nails the jauntier aspects of what it was like to be a white teen in the mid-1990s. (If the 1950s and early 1960s are the “heads” of white teen culture, the 1990s are the “tails,” the muddier side of the coin.) As the video begins, the camera is caught inside a rolling tire. The perspective is intelligible and disorienting and reckless, all at once, and destined to be repeated in endless circularity, like Boethius’s wheel. So is the behavior of the idle teens in the video, who drive donuts and throw toilet paper rolls and wreak havoc in convenience stores. The cops arrive. The video highlights donuts of a different sort: more circularity (truly, nothing is new). The teens go to a party at someone’s house. They make out in the pool. They drive around some more. Billy Corgan, the Smashing Pumpkins’ lead vocalist, sits in the car’s back seat, surveying the chaos, and gently smiles and sings.

Many of these scenes would be repeated in a couple other grungy teen/twentysomething movies of the same year – William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet, directed by Baz Luhrmann, and SubUrbia, directed by Richard Linklater – and in other movies of the 1990s and 2000s. The content and style and moral tenor aren’t quite original in the “1979” video, however. One notable predecessor is Larry Clark’s Kids (1995). But in just four minutes, the music video conveys nearly everything the full-length movies do, only much more cheerfully, though not optimistically: “Faster than we thought we’d go / Beneath the sound of hope” (my italics). Yes, that is how those years were: despairing. But that doesn’t mean the kids didn’t have a good time.

Three billboards about “Three billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri”

A visit from Mother

After my grandpa’s funeral, my mother stayed in Kansas City with her mother and siblings, but now she’s in South Bend visiting her children. I, Stephen, and Mary all will take turns hosting her (my turn is first). All’s not well, however. When Mother got off her train last night, she forgot the knapsack in which she’d been carrying (1) her laptop, (2) both of her passports (Ecuadorian and estadounidense), and (3) other valuable documents. She called Amtrak, but its officials didn’t find the knapsack. So our family’s mood today has been rather glum. We aren’t even glad that Mother will be forced to remain in the U.S. with us until a new passport is issued to her.

Meanwhile, I’ve been making Mother watch episodes of Toast of London.

A snowstorm is predicted to slam us tonight and tomorrow. I plan to stay at home and to watch more TV with Mother.

The funeral, etc.

On Friday, Karin & I rode to Kansas City in Martin’s & Mary’s car, arriving with them in time for the “viewing” ceremony. Grandpa looked very peaceful in his casket. He’d been laid out in one of his comfortable flannel shirts. I talked to many people, including a guy named Ryan with whom I’d gone to high school in Missouri in 1996. A member of the armed forces, he’d traveled virtually everywhere; he had much to tell me about Antarctica. Later, I introduced Karin to my grandma, but only briefly because everyone wanted to speak to her.

Afterward, I ate at a Waffle House, which I hadn’t been able to do since 2010. Then Karin & I spent the night in a well-wisher’s basement. M&M shared a hotel room with Ana & David and were attacked by bedbugs. Edoarda & Stephen, who’d used that room the previous night, also suffered bug bites.

The funeral itself was held the next day. Three hundred people attended (or so I estimate). I and the other grandsons bore the casket. I was reunited with Amber, a schoolmate from Ecuador who’s now a missionary to Papua New Guinea. Later, an old farmer from Duluth, Minnesota, questioned me about my dissertation. One woman learned that I’d studied philosophy and then asked if I believed in God.

On the whole, it was a grueling day.

The next morning, Karin & I got back into the car with M&M and rode back to South Bend, where we discovered that Jasper and Ziva had broken into their plastic container of treats and eaten the lot. The kitties were but little harmed: their treats aren’t very calorific. Jasper actually looks thinner now.

Today, some undetonated pipe bombs were found at a busy intersection near my favorite Vietnamese restaurant.

R.I.P. Grandpa

My grandpa – my mother’s father – died in his sleep yesterday, in Kansas City, Missouri. He was ninety-five. Many of his relations, who are scattered around the globe, will join my grandma at the funeral. Karin & I will travel to Kansas City on Friday.

My grandpa was known to U.S. evangelicals for discovering the bodies of the five slain “Operation Auca” missionaries. The “Operation Auca” story has been told by Elisabeth Elliot in Through Gates of Splendor and other books; in Steve Saint’s book End of the Spear, and in the movie of the same title; in the documentary Beyond the Gates of Splendor, for which my grandpa was interviewed; and in my grandparents’ 2010 book, Unmarked Memories: Five Friends Buried in the Jungle of Ecuador. Many people also read my grandparents’ earlier book, Mission to the Headhunters: How God’s Forgiveness Transformed Tribal Enemies (1961; revised edition, 2002), which recounts their first years among the Shuar people.

My grandparents lived in Ecuador for thirty-seven years and then retired to the Missouri countryside. They helped out with various ministerial projects, traveling often. At home, my grandpa farmed pine and fir trees and beef cattle. I used to lend him a hand – bitterly, against my will. My grandpa didn’t understand why this teenaged grandson was so sullen. He enjoyed working with other people; he was naturally chatty and upbeat; as my other grandfather describes him, he was as confident as a person could be without turning downright cocky. Recreationally, he liked to fish … and to work (but I’ve already mentioned that) … and to be around other people who were fishing or working. He would attend a tractor auction for the fun of it.

He also could be very witty – even when he suffered from dementia (I describe this in a blog entry written during my last visit to him). A plain man, he enjoyed deftly pricking the balloons of pretense.

Here is a picture of him that I found on the Internet. With one hand, he holds his Bible, and with the other he greets a Christian of a warmer clime.

The return leg

On Sunday, we returned to Indiana. For lunch we stopped in hilly Hannibal, MO, at a Subway.

The after-church queue was too long. We pressed onward to a Wendy’s.

The Wendy’s was being remodelled. We retraced our steps to a KFC.

Edoarda ate mashed potatoes without any gravy. (She’s a vegetarian.) Suddenly, a crowd came in for the lunch buffet. Edoarda was a little startled. She’d never seen so many Missourians.

Martin also felt out of place. He noted that the people of Hannibal would likely go home to watch the Rams, not the Bears. (And not the Colts, either, remarked Edoarda.)

Mary was troubled by the country music. …

Stephen … I think he was mostly concerned about Edoarda.

Edoarda was doing just fine. She ate plenty of potatoes, and on the way out she picked up a brochure for tourism in Hannibal.

Leaving town, we took a wrong turn and drove around some of the hilly neighborhoods. Finally we made it onto the highway. We crossed the river into Illinois, and all at once everything was desolate and flat.

Around Joliet, my knee started hurting badly. My leg needed to be stretched out. Edoarda was sitting next to me, and so I asked her if I could stretch out my leg upon her lap. It was an indelicate request. Edoarda refused, and not just a little vehemently. Martin permitted me to rest my leg upon the center console.

And now we’re back in Mishawaka. The next order of business is to choose presents for our gift exchange.

Missouri

It was a painless ride to Missouri. Now we’re in our grandparents’ giant house, which they built for their visiting offspring. This house has bed-closets everywhere in it. I’ve not been assigned to a bed-closet, or to the basement; I’m in a proper bedroom. (This bedroom was reserved for Karin, but Karin couldn’t come with us, and so I was lifted up from “bed-closet” status.)

At breakfast, our grandpa went several times around the table, asking us where we were born. “Quito,” Mary told him. And so he stuck out his chin and said, “High class.”

He told us of his life as a missionary in the Oriente – clearing airstrips, building houses, trekking through the jungle. “But we had no beards,” he said to Martin.

For this visit, I have grown a mustache.

The quadrennial car ride

“Story of the Week” from Library of America.

Martin showed me that website. It combines two of my greatest interests: literature and PDFs.

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Thanksgiving upon us, we brace ourselves for a round trip to Kansas City. It involves two long car rides through featureless downstate Illinois. At least it should be a comfortable trip. We’re borrowing Martin’s parents’ SUV.

There is a Wendy’s that we like to stop at, outside of Hannibal. Or else we might go through St. Louis and Columbia, and gaze upon I-70’s “fine establishments.”

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What worries me is how to choose the music. Some years ago I rode with David, and we took turns selecting playlists. It came out well. This year the other passengers are Martin, Mary, Edoarda, and Stephen: too many different wills. No matter what’s chosen, someone is bound to be dissatisfied. (Worse, I doubt we’ll agree upon an equitable procedure for choosing.)

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I hope for cloudy weather, so as not to have to squint for hours.

In South Bend, today is the first day of noticeable snow.