He turned one. He slept most of the day because the doctor gave him five shots.
More appealing, if less vital, were these gifts:
Cupcakes.
Onesies (i.e., bodysuits).
Wagon, Radio Flyer, plastic, small. For giving rides to stuffed animals. (Did I mention he walks now?)
Dog, white with black spots, plastic, noise-making, profoundly disturbing to Samuel.
Literature: Fortunately, by Remy Charlip. Not really meant for Abel’s age-group (he doesn’t object). Amusing to Samuel. Mildly disturbing to Daniel. Both reactions are correct.
Most of these gifts were from Karin’s dad’s family.
Abel was to have had a little party at my parents’ house, but my mom slipped on some ice and broke her arm. She’ll have surgery later this week. Last night, when I called, she was in high spirits: adequately drugged, surrounded by other progeny.
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Here is another quote about the postman Courtney Elliot, from The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole:
Courtney Elliot has offered to give me private tuition for my “O” levels. It seems he is a Doctor of Philosophy who left academic life after a quarrel in a university common room about the allocation of new chairs. Apparently he was promised a chair and didn’t get it.
It seems a trivial thing to leave a good job for. After all, one chair is very much like another. But then I am an existentialist to whom nothing really matters.
I don’t care which chair I sit in.
I don’t think I would leave a university if I didn’t get a Chair, but I might if I didn’t get a chair. Some intellectuals (e.g., Victor Hugo, Sam the Architect) stand before a desk to work, but I’m not so vigorous as to do that.
Not just any chair would do. I would need a sofa, or at least an armchair from Goodwill.
I was teaching college again and couldn’t get the whippersnappers to hear, let alone listen to, what I was saying – not least because my mother was visiting the class, and her phone kept ringing. It played the overture to Rossini’s William Tell.
I had to ask her to leave the room.
I hope the students understood the gravity of the offense.
Happy Thanksgiving. Karin took Daniel and Abel to her mother’s. I stayed behind with Samuel, who was ill. I cleaned the basement.
I’ve been mystified by a billboard proclaiming KFC’s temporary “festive” pot-pie. How’s it supposed to differ from ordinary pot-pie?
My research has yielded no satisfactory answer – although I’ve read that this pot-pie doesn’t contain turkey (as I thought it might).
Obviously, to find out, I should hike over to KFC and eat one of these new pot-pies.
P.S. Karin wonders if the campaign is a response to McDonald’s’s “holiday” pies.
In this month’s font’s sample, Robert Graves discusses memoir-writing:
It’s the line about people reading about food and drink that gets me. I’ve noticed, perusing Madame’s excellent blog, that my pulse quickens at the gastronomic bits.
C. S. Lewis:
There is nothing to be ashamed of in enjoying your food: there would be everything to be ashamed of if half the world made food the main interest of their lives and spent their time looking at pictures of food and dribbling and smacking their lips.
As a teenager, I used to find this passage in Mere Christianity very funny; twenty-five years later, looking at pictures of food is precisely what half the world does.
(Madame, understand, I’m not criticizing your food photos. There’s obscenity, and there’s art. Your photos are on the respectable half of the divide.)
Madame has a second blog – a Substack where she posts excerpts of her memoirs. A word of advice, Madame. Put in all you can about food and drink, and murders, and ghosts or spirits, and the Prince of Wales (not unmanageable for a Canadian) … and tidbits about your children, whom I knew in high school. (I liked the detail about giving birth one room over from the woman who kept screaming, Que me haga cesaria.) My parents dredged up an old chestnut about me just last night. My mom led a Bible study at a church in Esmeraldas. She entrusted me to some youths who lost track of me. Neighbors found me outside the church. Most of my body had been buried in a mudslide. (This was during the Niño of 1982.) I’d heard this story before, except for the detail about my having been submerged in mud. (I thought I’d just gotten dirty.) Bear in mind, this was a Downtown Esmeraldas mudslide, so it would have contained garbage, sewage, etc. And I could have drowned. We’re always just on the other side of death; that fact is more obvious in some places than in others. Robert Graves’s tone may sound frivolous, but it’s a sweetener; his subject is the First World War.
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.”
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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.
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).
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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).
Happy birthday, yesterday, to me. I watched Liverpool torch Leverkusen. Guy Fawkes fireworks exploded all game long. People like that sort of thing, you know?
My mother was unwell but still brought me a cake.
The weather was how I prefer it. At night, I put on I Know Where I’m Going! for more of the same. The boys wouldn’t let me finish it.
An absolute knackering (knacking?) this day, what with the intensive cleaning of various ground-floor rooms. I have been dozing intermittently since 8:00pm. The boys, for the third or fourth time since the floor’s uncluttering, are running in circles, as in Alice in Wonderland’s Caucus Race. This is lively even by their standards – doubtless a spillover of last night’s mirth (we attended an “open house” at Samuel’s new school; I spent most of it chasing Daniel through the halls).
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I saw very little of the Olympics – none of it in “real” time – but was taken with this handballer’s story (NYT). He, too, has sleep apnea. Yes, this is what it’s like.
Earlier today I was slumped on the sofa, unable to remain fully conscious, while Samuel and Daniel crawled over me. I’d beg them to do a little cleaning. They wouldn’t. At last I rallied, was a virtual tornado for an hour and a half, and made the place spotless. The boys helped enough to earn some basement TV time. Then they came back upstairs, beheld the emptiness, and ran their first Caucus Race. Samuel tackled Daniel a few times. Daniel would urge him to stand up and keep running. High spirits.
I actually am the least tired adult in the house. Karin is pregnant again, you see.
Lord willing, our third son will be born the first week of December.
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P.S. The boys have been watching the infamous (but, to my mind, charming) Peppa Pig show. Samuel now calls himself Peppa; Daniel, he calls George; Karin, Mommy Pig; and yours truly, Daddy Pig. My parents visited; they are, respectively, Abuela and Abuelo Pig.
Old Ecuadorian friends came to town. I went to my parents’ and grandparents’ houses and listened to several hours of esmeraldeño Spanish – the best kind of Spanish.
Samuel asked me to draw Africa. He then surprised me by adding a very decent Eurasia to it.
He marked out China, India, the Republic of Georgia, Madagascar … and Japan, which isn’t where you’d think; it seems to have joined Russia’s Arctic islands. I asked him if he was sure. He was. “This is Honshu, this is Hokkaido. …” “Japan seems to have migrated,” I said. He thought this hilarious. “Japan migrated! Japan migrated!” he went around shouting.
Unfortunately, he left his map and his pens lying around, and Daniel came along and scribbled over the drawing. Samuel was very sad until I showed him the photo I’d taken. Now he gets such a kick, looking at his map on the computer screen.
… went the children yesterday. Daniel is in the 99th percentile, height-wise, and Samuel is in the 42nd; when he was Daniel’s age, he was in the 5th or 8th or thereabouts, so he is coming up nicely. We collected our WIC points and, to celebrate, bought McGriddles and hash browns (not with WIC points). Later my parents came over for Daniel’s birthday, and we ate burgers and chocolate cake. Daniel received cards, motorcars, dinosaurs, and books; Samuel, whose birthday it wasn’t, received a road map of Kentucky. And The Hobbit. Today I scolded him for coloring over Tolkien’s maps.
Samuel’s Hobbit is a gift for me, in a way, because I get nervous whenever he pulls my Hobbit off the shelf, which he started doing after he watched the cartoon starring John Huston and Orson Bean. I bought myself an extra Hobbit, too, just in case.
Ours is the latest state to have its universities meddled with.
In John Williams’s novel, Stoner (1965), a young academic ruminates with two colleagues about the purpose of the University:
“And so providence, or society, or fate, or whatever name you want to give it, has created this hovel for us, so that we can go in out of the storm. It’s for us that the University exists, for the dispossessed of the world; not for the students, not for the selfless pursuit of knowledge, not for any of the reasons that you hear. We give out the reasons, and we let a few of the ordinary ones in, those that would do in the world; but that’s just protective coloration. Like the church in the Middle Ages, which didn’t give a damn about the laity or even about God, we have our pretenses in order to survive. And we shall survive – because we have to.”
The speech is recalled later in the book:
“Gordon, do you remember something Dave Masters said once?”
Finch raised his brows in puzzlement. “Why do you bring Dave Masters up?”
Stoner looked across the room, out of the window, trying to remember. “The three of us were together, and he said – something about the University being an asylum, a refuge from the world, for the dispossessed, the crippled. But he didn’t mean Walker. Dave would have thought of Walker as – as the world. And we can’t let him in. For if we do, we become like the world, just as unreal, just as … The only hope we have is to keep him out.”
Is it a good idea to sponsor a refuge for brainy misfits? Maybe; maybe not. But force it to look like the world, and it’s no longer a refuge from the world; it’s no longer a university. It’s just another department of the world, doing the same things the world does (but issuing lots of publications). Which makes it redundant, inefficient, and certainly not worth paying for, doesn’t it? I see what you’re really up to, GOP.
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.
Twenty-five days before Halloween and, already, we’re in the thick of it. Karin found a Where’s Waldo? outfit at Goodwill; Samuel wore it most of the day.
The costume got him lots of compliments on the street – drivers were queueing up to smile at him and to respect his right-of-way – and at the library. One of the librarians carried a Waldo book over to Samuel. While I was occupied at the checkout machine, Samuel sneaked into the back offices (he also performed this trick last week), but he was so cute, the branch manager scolded him just a little.
Karin bought Daniel a full-body outfit of a skunk (one of his “spirit animals”). He hasn’t tried it on yet, but he’s been dragging it around the house. My parents, zealous Goodwillers, bought Daniel a Superman disguise that would look swell on him were it not a costume for doggies.
Happy birthday to Karin; to my sister-in-law, Ana; and, apparently, to quite a few of my acquaintances.
Here’s an old photo of Karin and her dad.
My parents baked Karin a cake. Daniel got it all over himself, and we had to toss him into the bath.
We asked Samuel if he wanted to bathe; he demurred. Later – too late – he apprehended that we were respecting his stated wishes, that we in fact didn’t intend to bathe him. He grabbed some fistfuls of cake and judiciously applied them. So we bathed him after all.
Daniel, whom we’d dried and partly dressed, climbed into the water again.
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This morning, I was urging Samuel to be patient, which got him onto his favorite Sunday School topic – the Fruit of the Spirit – and so we read from Galatians 5, which also mentions walking along with (beside, behind, in step with) the Spirit; which made Samuel impatient to take a physical walk; which we did take, along the perimeter of the nearby school. We observed the physical education students riding bicycles upon the running track. I never got to ride a bicycle in P.E. in my day. … Even stranger, a few yards ahead of us, a car casually drove over the grass and mounted the sidewalk and ambled behind the tennis courts and into a parking lot. I could hardly believe I’d seen this, but I checked the grass, and the tracks were there. What was so strange was the nonchalance of it, as if it were a familiar route for that car.
R.I.P. Carolyn (1934–2023), a kindly woman in our church who took a shine to our family. Karin & I attended her funeral – or Karin did; I remained in a Sunday School room with our offspring.
(Samuel and Daniel took turns gently pushing a doll in a pram, in circles, in the Sunday School room. By “took turns,” I mean they fought each other for the privilege.)
(Daniel sits on my shoulder as I type this and whacks me on the head. Will the violence ever cease?)
As the weather changes, my thoughts direct themselves toward pleasantly gloomy, autumnal things. Karin already has put our mermaid-skeleton on display. Indeed, she did so before the equinox. … Like my mother, who has gone to Minnesota to look at the leaves, I plan to take a short journey, within a month’s time; I have been thinking of what to read on the airplane. The current frontrunner is a volume of stories by Daphne Du Maurier: “Don’t Look Now,” “The Birds,” etc.
Kenneth Branagh has made a new Poirot movie, A Haunting in Venice, which evokes Du Maurier more than its ostensive source material, Agatha Christie’s novel Hallowe’en Party – which is set, not along the canals of Venice, but in the gardens and lanes of England. Ariadne Oliver is played by Tina Fey, which is another heresy. I should have preferred Nicola Walker.
I’ve almost finished reading the much-funnier-than-expected King John and have decided that instead of choosing my next play by lot, I’ll just reread Macbeth.
Samuel recovered. But then I threw up, and Daniel threw up, and Karin had other troubles, and I had other troubles and a miserable fever. My mom came over to take care of the children while I writhed in bed. After she went home, she threw up.
We’ve started to feel better. Yesterday I ate only jello, but this morning I was able to hold down some toast and eggs. Then, tonight, I was very hungry, and I had some McDonald’s. That may have been a mistake.
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Cold Comfort Farm
I’ve read Stella Gibbons’s book. It has an undercurrent of, shall we say, nihilism? Anyway, it didn’t sit well.
The movie is, if not less mocking, then gentler, more humane. A lot of the same stuff happens, but it helps that the actors are so winsome in their self-inflicted despair. (A partial roll call: Eileen Atkins, Sheila Burrell, Freddie Jones, Ian McKellen, Rufus Sewell.) You could enjoy watching these people do just about anything. May as well watch them as dismal farmers trudging around in the mud, fornicating and birthing in the hay, giving themselves up to gloom and doom.
It’s funny.
It’s even funnier that a perky distant relation, a fresh-faced Londoner (Kate Beckinsale), recently orphaned, has come to live with them to learn about “life,” so that in middle age she will be able to write a novel in the manner of Jane Austen. She’s got one thing right: even though Austen’s novels are about rich people, a lot of their appeal is due to the not-infrequent trudging around in the mud that the characters are made to do. (Or maybe that’s just what I treasure from the movies.)
Flora, the city girl, proceeds to “improve” her country relations, the Starkadders. She aims to coax them out of their despair. The ruddy cheek!
No, that’s not how the Starkadders see it. They’re so insular, they don’t think of Flora as an entitled busybody. They’re likelier to suspect her of trying to steal their precious, miserable farm. Little do they realize, her ambition is more like an Austen heroine’s: she wants to arrange everyone’s life just-so.
But then, so does Ada Doom (Burrell), the matriarch who leaves her room but twice a year – in order to count her relations and farmhands – and who obsesses over a trauma of her girlhood, which is that she “saw something nasty in the woodshed.” This trauma is her justification for discouraging the other Starkadders from imagining that they could leave the farm. Only Flora’s cousin, Seth Starkadder (Sewell), spares any thought for the outside world, and that’s because he’s a devotee of the talkies. Oh, and so does old Amos Starkadder (McKellen). He preaches fire-and-brimstone sermons every week in the Church of the Quivering Brethren. His theme is that everyone is hellbound. Not hellbound yet redeemable through Christ – hellbound, full stop. The fire will never be quenched. There’ll be no salve for the burns: “There’ll be no butter in hell!” The Brethren quiver in the ecstasy of their damnation.
David, my brother, has noticed that it’s a very short step from this famous line to the Newsboys’ Christian pop lyric, “They don’t serve breakfast in hell.” One might suspect that the Newsboys are drawing from Gibbons’s book. (Or, just possibly, from this movie, which narrowly preceded the song.)
Anyway, Flora, like Austen’s Emma, channels these interests of Seth’s and Amos’s into meaningful, if not especially admirable, enterprises, and soon she is figuring out how to do the same to everyone else on the farm. But will her own destiny be tidied up so neatly? Will she detail and execute her own life-plan, or will she relinquish a little control to gain a little wisdom?
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.
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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.
Samuel, I regret to say, has identified himself with a certain fictional character: Calvin, of Calvin and Hobbes. “Greetings, my name is Calvin,” he proclaims. “GREETINGS, MY NAME IS CALVIN. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!”
They do look alike.
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Aunt Linda – my parents’ oldest sibling – is visiting from Missouri. Samuel and Daniel are turning on the charm for her. My parents are at our house, too.
They reminisce about the Ecuador of the 1950s and 1960s. My dad talks about the night his family’s house in Esmeraldas burned down because a kerosene lamp was lighted with what turned out to be gasoline. After the fire, my dad’s family had to stay over with some missionaries who lived on the plot of land where, eventually, the Hotel Cayapas was built. I don’t envy my dad’s family their ordeal, but I am slightly intrigued. I grew up a block from the Hotel Cayapas; it was one of the fixtures of my childhood; it seemed the height of luxury and class (the grass in its yard was cut silently, with a reel mower, by a starched-shirted worker). I ate in the restaurant once or twice and dreamed of spending a night in the hotel. My dad slept there – or on the same land – during his family’s time of greatest need.
It’s strange to think of the hotel not existing. But, of course, travel to Esmeraldas was hardly easy in those days; vacationers certainly didn’t flock there.
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In theory, it wouldn’t be very hard for me to sleep in the Hotel Cayapas now. I look it up on Kayak: a night’s stay costs a little over $50. The hardest part would be traveling to Ecuador. The second-hardest part would be to avoid being kidnapped or killed. In recent years, Esmeraldas has become a hub for foreign drug cartels and their domestic recruits and conscripts.
When I was growing up, I’d go to sleep listening to the loud music of the discotheques on the beach. Now, because of violent crime, that nighlife has pretty well ceased. In the 1980s and early 1990s, that was unthinkable: that sort of thing only happened in Colombia, and Esmeraldas always would be a party town.
My parents set out yesterday for a tour of Illinois, Missouri, Nebraska, one or both Dakotas, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and I forget where else. How I envied them! They got as far as Illinois, and then my mother tested positive for COVID.
Some say this typeface is the best of the Jansons. I wish it had a longer-tailed Q, as Monotype Janson has.
Also, everything depends on what you count as a Janson. Is Ehrhardt a Janson? Now, there’s a question.
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It took five years, but Karin & I finished viewing all of Midsomer Murders. Twenty-two seasons; 132 episodes of 90–100 minutes.
My overall assessment:
Grainier picture → better episode.
More French horn → better episode.
More scenes with Joyce Barnaby and Cully Barnaby → better episode.
Teleplay by Anthony Horowitz → better episode.
In other words: the earlier, the better (as a rule).
As it happens, we concluded the project with an early episode: S2E3, “Dead Man’s Eleven,” about the cricket. When we first tried it – four years ago? – I couldn’t stay awake, due to my sleep apnea.
I don’t know if more episodes will be released.
Whatever will we do when we run out of Midsomer Murders?, I used to lament.
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.”
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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.
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This month’s poem, by Rudyard Kipling, is “Recessional.”
A warm welcome to George, my nephew, born yesterday to Ana & David. My mom is in Texas with them. She looks after little Ada and the dog, Russell, while Ana, David, and George are in the hospital.
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A synopsis (not by me) of Rats in the Ranks.
Each year, as part of the democratic process all over Australia, local councillors meet to elect a mayor to lead their council for the next year. Rats in the Ranks tells the story of this process in the Leichhardt council area of Sydney in 1994. Every September, the Leichhardt council meets to elect one of their twelve members as the Mayor and another for Deputy Mayor for the following year. The election is rarely a straightforward affair.
In 1994, the current mayor, Larry Hand, was popular with the local citizens, but they don’t vote for the mayor, the councillors do – and after three years of Larry, some of them were after his job.
In Rats in the Ranks, filmmakers Bob Connolly and Robin Anderson trace the story of the struggle for the mayoralty. They had extraordinary access to the councillors who were willing for the story to be filmed in the lead up to the election.
Arms are twisted, favours are called in, people are double-crossed, damaging stories are leaked to the media and deals are done. But right up to the vote, no one knows how the numbers will stick and who will walk away from the election as mayor.
missed out on a nomination in the “best documentary” category and most other categories at the 1996 [Australian Film Institute] Awards. …
The film’s failure to make it past a pre-selection jury into general membership voting became part of a larger ongoing controversy about the AFI Awards, and eventually led to a change to the AFI’s voting system. This was the year that the AFI Awards reached the level of contempt usually reserved for the Academy Awards.
(The last sentence is a bonus, I guess.)
The documentary is basically C.P. Snow’s The Masters, with this difference: the scheming Cambridge dons of that novel are conscientious and gentle souls next to the professional politicians of Rats in the Ranks. In what follows, I’ll not reveal the outcome of the election, but I shall describe some of its participants. My opinions of these people changed as I viewed the movie. Here I’ll present my final character assessments. I thought hard about whether I could cheer for anyone to win the election, and, in the end, I decided I could; but you might reach a different verdict. I recommend you watch the movie and then read this review.
The accents and slang aren’t always easy to follow. I watched with the captions turned on. Here is a YouTube upload; the movie also can be streamed through Kanopy.
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There is a councilor in Rats in the Ranks who may as well be Satan. (In some scenes, he even wears a cape.)
There is another councilor who is “Satan’s” dupe – in effect, his lackey – even though she belongs to the opposing party. She spends more time with the Satan figure than with her fellow party members. After her meetings with them, she runs over to tell “Satan” everything.
In good bureaucratic fashion, this lackey has a lackey.
Meanwhile, other members of her party conspire to defeat the Satan figure by means fair or foul. (Mostly fair means, but the foul cannot be overlooked.) So, there is a potentially fatal division within that party. This makes for some outrageous caucus meetings. These scenes would be ghastly if they weren’t so entertaining.
It’s fascinating to hear such good talkers make tactical blunders, lose all sight of values, etc.
What’s most disturbing is how little the populace matters in all of this. The residents vote for their councilors, but not for their mayor; which might not matter so much, except for two things.
First, the mayor has considerably more formal and effective power than the other councilors have. (Not even the deputy mayor comes close.)
And second, the councilors choose the mayor on the basis of their personal ambitions and resentments. They give lip-service to their parties’ and constituents’ interests; but, at the end of the day, those interests don’t determine their choices.
How can these people live with themselves? How can they sleep at night?, the Satan figure asks about his fellow councilors – though he himself would betray any of them, should the winds change.
Interestingly, the Satan figure is a very good public official. (At least, he convinces me that he is a good public official.) He gets things done. He listens to the citizens. When they disagree with him, he patiently and candidly explains to them why his way is better. Were I to live in Leichhardt, and were it in my power to vote in this election, I’d be tempted to vote for this candidate.
I also was favorably impressed by his main challenger. He, too, has the makings of a good public official. He is the schlubbiest of all these schlubs (or the second-schlubbiest, after the lackey’s lackey); but he has moments of reasonableness and forthrightness.
Indeed, he may be too forthright to be a very successful politician. The Satan figure runs rings around him, gamesmanship-wise.
The two men can’t stand one another. Perhaps this is because of a class difference. Or perhaps they recognize each other as genuine threats. Or perhaps they sincerely disagree about how to govern.
Another politician, who refuses to appear onscreen, makes a crucial intervention. He is Anthony Albanese; as of May of 2022, he has been serving as the Prime Minister of Australia.
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The other day, I said to Karin: Isn’t it funny that I, who find politics so distasteful, should have written a dissertation about political matters. But the word “political” describes two different inquiries. One inquiry is about how a polis should be run, and the other is about how the polis is run (which boils down to a lot of scheming, backstabbing, etc.). If the gulf between should and is is too great, it’s natural to be interested in one inquiry but not the other.
This movie shows a representative democracy whose representatives aren’t chosen with regard for how it’s best to run the polis. And yet the polis is run competently enough. This suggests that we may as well choose our representatives out of a hat, as some of the more trusting politicians in this movie are inclined to do; or by having each desiring person take a turn, as some of the more self-important and envious politicians insist upon.
Yesterday, I traveled with my parents to Wheaton, Illinois. Brian was graduating from college. He is my youngest cousin. I hadn’t seen him since he was a year old; he grew up in Indonesia.
He was very pleased to meet me, and we were immediately photographed together (I don’t have the picture). Then, we hardly spoke to one another. He is a pleasant young man, but very quiet. I am unpleasant, and also rather quiet.
Here Brian is with his parents, my Uncle Tim and Aunt Aphing (Ah-PING).
(My Uncle Tim is my mom’s brother.)
My Aunt Linda and her daughter, my cousin Tanya, visited from Kansas City.
Aunt Aphing served lots of good Indonesian food. But there weren’t enough seats at the table.
“Where will Brian sit?”
Aunt Aphing: “In his room.”
“But this meal is to honor him!”
Aunt Aphing: “But you are the guests.”
Brian and Aunt Aphing ended up eating in the kitchen, on barstools.
Not all of us went to the ceremony. Tanya and I stayed at home and read detective stories. Later, we livestreamed the ceremony, and my dad joined us. The greatest applause was for the ROTC graduates – which my dad thought bizarre (“at Wheaton, of all places,” he said); I thought it perverse but typical.
Watching this ceremony – and the baccalaureate religious service, earlier in the day – I was strongly reminded of Quito’s English Fellowship Church, in which North American missionaries would gather to use their mother-tongue. Wheaton’s organ music surely helped to remind me of the EFC. But the whole vibe of the place was familiar.
Wheaton’s evangelicals are more straitlaced, more prim, than those with whom I now associate in the United States.
Billy Graham was mentioned during the ceremony, of course, as were the famous missionary martyrs of 1956.
I continue to hunt for free books, resolving – ruefully – to borrow more from the Internet Archive. Yes, this will require me to read from a screen. But the books on that website are free.
Maybe I’ll stop carrying four or five volumes to bed with me.
My mother reads from a screen. Today I showed her how to search in the Internet Archive. We quickly found a few cherished books that she hadn’t read in years.
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One guy I won’t be reading onscreen is Harlan Coben. No need: his books are in the library.
And I don’t like them.
Oh, I’ve tried. I’ve been fascinated with Coben, or the idea of Coben, since I read this Atlantic article fifteen years ago.
He was popular then; now, he’s stratospheric. He and Netflix have contracted to turn fourteen of his books into different shows. Fourteen. How does such a thing occur? Netflix has been transposing these stories to England, Poland, France … just about anywhere outside of New Jersey, which is to Coben World what Britain is to Middle Earth.
The good news is, the shows are a hoot. Safe was all right. I liked the family of strivers who, out of sheer social panic, keep a body in their freezer. But the series that hooked me was The Stranger, with its “good kid” teenagers who go on a candy-colored drug trip and cut off an alpaca’s head.
Right now, Karin & I are watching Stay Close. Why are so many scenes set around a huge statue of a skinny, white head – a statue reminiscent of a certain Pink Floyd album cover? Why has this statue been erected in a clearing in the forest? Why do the characters not seem to notice it much? (Who writes this into a crime show?)
Why is the grizzled lead detective saddled with his ex-wife as his investigative partner? How could their boss allow this? And why does the boss look like he’s twelve?
And how does the ex-wife get away with letting her son ride around in the back seat of the police car? (“Childcare issues,” she vaguely explains.)
Why do so many perfectly manicured middle-class marriages have ridiculous secrets? How are the wives and husbands so oblivious to one another’s pasts? Why do these pasts involve things like embezzling and stripping and committing manslaughter?
How do such outlandish tropes get repeated in story after story?
Karin & I get a kick out of all this.
Coben World – the Netflix variety, anyway – is different from any I’ve encountered.
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Today, I started to read Babbitt. This year is its centennial.
