This movie, unfortunately, is less compelling as a story than as grist for speculation about the artists’ offscreen misdeeds. Which, in a way, is fitting, because it depicts the backstage scuzziness of a high-end theatrical production.
(The theatrical process itself is treated affectionately and accurately. This, I gather, is what critics like about the movie.)
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For nearly two decades, British-born Australian director John Duigan helmed acclaimed but smallish productions, including two longtime favorites of mine – wonderful coming-of-age movies – The Year My Voice Broke (1987) and Flirting (1991).
Alas, his relationship with Flirting’s leading actress, Thandie Newton, was … sinister.
(Allegedly. Newton denounced Duigan in several interviews, including this sobering one for Vulture.)
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Duigan gained international note for the fleshy Sirens (1994), which is about an English cleric and his wife whose mores are loosed when they visit a “liberated” artists’ colony in Australia.
Colonials 1, Mother Country 0.
The sides swap home fields but play similar games in Duigan’s The Leading Man (1996). Another colonial libertine – movie star Robin Grange (Jon Bon Jovi) – travels to London to headline a play. The movie’s opening scene shows Robin peering wolfishly across the Thames at the Houses of Parliament. This may not be enough to evoke Guy Fawkes, but soon Robin is talking of “blowing things up.” Hmm.
(I’m probably making too much of this association.)
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Anyway: Robin, with gusto, wreaks havoc on the production’s backstage intrigues.
One intrigue is conducted along typically dreary upper-middle-class British lines. Established playwright Felix (Lambert Wilson) is miserable in his affair with the ingénue lead, Hilary (Newton – at the time, allegedly, still in Duigan’s thrall). Felix spends evenings in the flat that Hilary shares with other young strugglers and returns late to his wife, Elena (Anna Galienna), for tongue-lashings.
Robin sizes things up and makes Felix an indecent proposal. Out of the goodness of his heart, he’ll seduce Elena: to take her off Felix’s hands, or at least to reduce her moral advantage over Felix.
So far, this is like an Iris Murdoch novel (A Fairly Honourable Defeat, perhaps). The difference is that the movie appears to side with the scheming Robin. It’s as if, in Othello, the patsy Roderigo were the tragic victim, Desdemona guilty, Iago worth cheering for.
This moral repulsiveness swamps whatever craftsmanship, style, and comedy the movie offers – which are not inconsiderable.
The movie is still better than what passes for urbane adult drama nowadays: e.g., The Undoing, with Duigan’s former actors, Nicole Kidman and Hugh Grant.
And so it bolsters my claim for 1996.
P.S. Newton went on to become a star. Duigan went on to make the terrible, pointless Lawn Dogs.
I’d had as much as I could stand of Art and Libby Tungsten
and of Tungstens generally when “Brainy” Tungsten strode into the
parlor.
You’re probably curious what the insufferable “Brainy” will do to ruin the narrator’s good temper. Alas, this character is a dead end. Having come upon the scene, “Brainy” just stands in place, tantalizing us with his name, refusing to confirm or discredit it.
Another passage:
It was rainy and bleak. I’d been crisscrossing the city for hours
and didn’t know where to get off the bus. The neighborhoods looked
rough. To dismount might be fatal. It would be wetting, at least.
“You can’t ride all night,” the driver said. “You must get down.”
“I don’t know where to.”
“Then do it here.”
The half-dozen other passengers were stony-faced.
Note the pared-downness of the Bulwer-Lyttonian opening. What to do when inspiration presents itself in the form of plagiarism? Make it more prosaic, e.g.:
Re: the last (and most glamorous) label. He transported livestock, in the 1940s, to war-ravaged Greece.
This portrait is from a 2014 “seagoing cowboy” reunion.
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He was best known as a missionary to Ecuador.
He lived in Esmeraldas and evangelized throughout the rustic northwestern provinces. He’d walk many miles from little town to little town.
The church published this condolence:
(The verse is actually Psalm 116:15. Here, in the Reina-Valera translation, estimada – like precious in the KJV and NIV – means costly. Compare: Mucho le cuesta al Señor ver morir a los que lo aman [this translation is Dios Habla Hoy]. The basic idea is the same as in “Jesus wept.”)
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He was the grandparent I knew best … the one near whom I lived longest … and the one who took me with him on several long trips (to Panama and Jamaica, and around Ecuador).
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He was the grandparent who’d discuss literature and movies with me. I’ll dwell on this at some length. Grandpa was a humane man. His Christianity certainly touched everything about him. But his faith wasn’t the only thing that made him humane.
I trust the other tribute-givers to highlight his more overtly spiritual qualities.
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He disagreed – respectfully, if somewhat impishly – with my rather bloodthirsty literary tastes.
Once, having read the Lambs on Shakespeare, I was going on about Macbeth (or whatever). Grandpa was unimpressed.
I think that when Shakespeare makes someone die, it’s because he has no further use for him.
That’s quite a notion to put to a second-grader. I’ve been mulling it over, ever since.
He didn’t care for Agatha Christie, either. The murders were too gleeful.
The detective story that I like best – he meant “A Scandal in Bohemia” – is a sentimental tale, in which the detective falls in love.
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But his was a sin-conscious romanticism. He was keenly attuned to grades of evil and redemption.
I told him, when I was reading Huck Finn, that I imagined Huck’s father to be like the drunkard in Hoosiers.
No, no, much worse, he said.
It was an enlightening correction.
Once, we watched a series of Disney movies together (he was looking after us children while our parents were out of town). He enjoyed the movies’ wit. But, to his own surprise, he was deeply moved by Beauty and the Beast.
I thank you, Father – he prayed with us that night – that you have made it possible for people to change.
He had no use for such movies as Kind Hearts and Coronets, with its casual, cynical violence, or Inherit the Wind, which treats an entire society as contemptibly cartoonish.
Not that he disliked cartoons as such: he relished 1066 and All That, Flannery O’Connor, and Peanuts.
As an adult, I lent him David Michaelis’s biography of Charles Schulz. He returned it with profuse thanks. I enjoyed it very much, he said, that is, until Schulz’s life went off the rails.
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I spent college vacations at his house. I’d catch him sneaking into my room, returning furtively borrowed novels by Kenzaburo Oe or J. M. Coetzee. Some he liked, some he didn’t. I could tell what he thought of a novel by how he put it on the shelf.
Of Coetzee’s Michael K, he said: This book describes a redemption that even a severely limited man can attain.
His own daily life was disarmingly simple. I believe he once seriously considered retiring to a trailer house. For lunch, he’d open a can of beans, or he’d take me down the street to Wendy’s, where he was content to eat a baked potato. His love for the underdog was almost fanciful. Hence his delight in such charmers as The Mouse that Roared and – to his family’s considerable amusement – Baby’s Day Out, which he first saw in Ecuador, on a bus. (I’ve already mentioned Hoosiers.)
He also liked novels that told the story of a life (the odd Dickens or George Eliot) or that described rural societies that preceded or coincided with his own (Stowe, Twain, Tarkington, Stratton-Porter, Rawlings; he was raised in Indiana but also spent time, as a youngster, in Florida). I believe his favorite book in Spanish was a rural idyll called El camino – most likely, the one by Miguel Delibes.
He spoke and wrote beautifully. I was in high school when I began, consciously, to pattern my syntax and cadence after his.
If I strain after a turn of phrase, it’s because I merely imitate, all-too-imperfectly, what came naturally to my exemplar.
The same is true of many of his descendants, in their respective pursuits.
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He died on Friday morning, of a heart attack. He’d turned ninety-seven the previous day. His widow, my step-grandma, is my sole remaining grandparent; my grandma died in 1991.
(1) Karin has a friend who arranges “watch parties.” Everyone stays at home, watches simultaneously, and exchanges text messages.
Are they good movies? They are not.
How can a person love camp to the exclusion of all else? How does she persuade family and friends to watch with her, month after month, year after year? It boggles the mind.
Two sub-genres of camp are represented at these parties: Hallmark and horror. ’Tis the season for horror. (Hallmark is for Christmastime.)
I relate this, not to complain, but to admit that last week’s selection was much better than usual. I’m referring to Dario Argento’s Phenomena (1985). (Philomena, I kept wanting to call it.) It’s set in a girls’ boarding school in the Swiss Alps. Jennifer Connolly and other girls climb out of dormitory windows and wander through forests, at night. Some girls are murdered.
Then there’s the little matter of Connolly’s ability to communicate with insects.
Baddie going to slice you open? Just summon a swarm of flies to protect you.
And there’s a hyper-intelligent monkey. And there are turns by Patrick Bauchau and Donald Pleasance.
This is the second of Argento’s movies I’ve seen. Suspiria (1977), an earlier “watch party” selection, was much worse. Karin’s friend loved Phenomena so much, she was ready to watch it again the next day. I might choose to watch it again on an airplane, or in prison.
(2) Midsommar (2019) is a tedious Wicker Man rehash with an awesome performance by Florence Pugh.
It’s sometimes remarked that the character of Hamlet is much too splendid for the rest of the play. Something like this can be said of Midsommar. What if Ophelia (not Hamlet), inarticulate but facially and gesturally exquisite, were to visit a savage (Swedish!) tribe? What if her companions – one of them, her loutish boyfriend – were a bunch of Rozencrantzes and Guildensterns?
That’s what Midsommar is.
It also must be said that the opening scenes, which involve a murder-suicide, are genuinely wrenching. Everything turns silly after that.
We’ve learned a little more about what goes on at school. Samuel’s teacher sent this report:
I should add that Samuel has been swearing more.
Today, after Samuel had returned from school, we went strolling. When conversation lulled I told the boys about the love of God. Samuel stopped in his tracks and became very quiet. Daniel pointed to a statue of the Virgin Mary in someone’s yard. “That is God,” he said.
This month’s poem is by Shakespeare. I’ve italicized the scholastic bit.
⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯
All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first, the infant,
Mewling [bawling] and puking in the nurse’s arms.
Then the whining schoolboy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress’ eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard [leopard],
Jealous [touchy] in honor, sudden [rash] and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon’s mouth. And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lined [perhaps an allusion to the practice of bribing a judge with a capon],
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws [sayings] and modern instances [commonplace examples];
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slippered pantaloon [ridiculous old man (from Pantalone, a stock figure in Italian comedy)],
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side;
His youthful hose [breeches], well saved, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank, and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his [its] sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere [utter] oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.
⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯
(As You Like It II.vii 139–166; text and notes from The Complete Signet Classic Shakespeare)
My reading year has just ended; it goes from May to April, with a day of grace, May 1, because stuff happens.
I had two targets. I met the easier one: completing 51 books. I needed this number to replenish my yearly average, which had dipped.
I almost met the harder target (52, or 1/wk) and was tearing through William Morris’s Wood Beyond the World (1894), a sex-fever of a book, when I fell asleep.
Earlier, I had finished Don’t Tell Alfred, Nancy Mitford’s last novel. This year I’ll read her biographical writings (1/mo): Madame de Pompadour, Votaire in Love, The Sun King, and Frederick the Great. A heavy dose of France-love. (Don’t Tell Alfred also is set in France; the narrator’s husband, an Oxford theology don, is made ambassador.) I may or may not read Nancy’s edited volume, Noblesse Oblige. Then, two books by Jessica Mitford; a volume of the Mitford sisters’ letters to each other; and, if I am still keen, the writings of Diana, one of the Mitford Fascists.
I still read Fielding and Shakespeare in light doses. The Complete Signet Classic Shakespeare, with annotations and critical essays, will be tallied as one book. A volume by Michael Frayn, Plays: 4, consisting of Copenhagen, Democracy, and one other play, is on the docket. It will be counted as one book. I intend to read all of the Little House books in order for the first time. My edition is in two volumes. I’ll record the series as nine separate books. The arbitrariness is obscene.
I don’t count the very short children’s books I read to Samuel and Daniel.
I am some ten cantos from the end of the Paradiso after all these years. I am dragging booty. I get through about a canto a month. The poem seems more and more alien to me, the further up into Heaven I get; Purgatory was more my level.
Watching Branagh’s Much Ado, in installments. Samuel runs around yelling, “Hey, nonny nonny.”
Reading N. Mitford’s Wigs on the Green, a comic novel about an aristocratic teenage fascist. Somehow I didn’t expect this kind of heroine, although I knew about the Mitford sisters: “Diana the Fascist, Jessica the Communist, Unity the Hitler-lover; Nancy the Novelist; Deborah the Duchess and Pamela the unobtrusive poultry connoisseur” (Ben Macintyre’s descriptions, although he qualifies them as “caricatures”).
I can understand why this family has a cult following. But the more I look into the Mitfords’ background, the less fantastical and more soberly realistic the novels seem.
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Is there a name for the déjà vu-like feeling you get when you encounter the less recent past and relive the more recent past (or the present)? I got it today from some toilet-reading: the chapter on Andrew Jackson in Barbara Holland’s Hail to the Chiefs: Presidential Mischief, Morals & Malarkey from George W. to George W.
(The footnote says: “All except non-folks like women, blacks, and Indians.”)
(The footnote says: “ ‘Ignorant, passionate and imbicile’ and ‘fierce ungovernable temper’ were some of the kinder descriptions. Jefferson said he couldn’t possibly think of anyone worse to be President.”)
Notice how the italic letters are just as wide as the Roman letters. This feature is unusual for this sort of typeface. A successor, Sabon Next, has narrower italics.
Due to all the snow, it’s time to list the most entertaining books I’m reading.
(1) Henry Fielding, Tom Jones. This’ll last forever. I average just one or two little chapters each day. I believe there are over two hundred. Daniel, roughhousing, caused me to drop the unread paperback I’d owned for twenty years; the cover and spine broke. The cover of my replacement copy shows Tom leching. I haven’t gotten there in the story. Tom is still an infant nearly a hundred pages in. He’s clearly on his way to ignominy, due to the circumstances of his birth. I plan to alternate between Fielding and Richardson: Tom Jones; Pamela; Joseph Andrews and/or Shamela; and, finally, the grandmommy, Clarissa. Wish me luck.
BTW, Daniel says dozens of words but just started saying “no!” this week. It’s his favorite word.
Back to the books.
(2) Michael Lewis, Going Infinite, about Sam Bankman-Fried. One chapter per day, most days. It’s a library book, so I can’t dawdle over it indefinitely.
(3) Nancy Mitford, Highland Fling (just completed) and now Christmas Pudding. Delightful. The scenes of old nobles and ex-military shooting grouse are especially compelling. I may race through all these novels and Mitford’s aristocratic histories and then finish reading the journalism and memoirs of her sister, Jessica, which I began some years ago and then put off. I think I’ve got the correct order now. One ought to read Nancy to appreciate Jessica, not vice versa.
(4) H. Rider Haggard, King Solomon’s Mines. I read half of this many years ago. I enjoyed it but am a chronic unfinisher of books. Until I’m not. It can take decades.
(5) Dolores Hitchens, Sleep with Slander. I read Sleep with Strangers in October. This second novel is ten times better. The private eye is hired to track down a young adoptee who may or may not be suffering abuse. The search should be straightforward. But everyone lies to the P.I. – even the people who have the child’s interest at heart. I dread what’s to come.
I regret to say I’m dragging my feet over the not-very-entertaining Coriolanus. It does have this going for it, that although the hero’s friends and enemies alternately tediously praise and condemn him, he isn’t very interested; he shows up, hears some praise or condemnation, and then is like, I’m bored with you morons, and exits. The Shakespeare-hating Sam Bankman-Fried might have enjoyed this. No, probably not.
What happened in 2023? It’s a blur. I get through a day at a time. I barely look ahead or behind.
Mostly, I chase after children who live only in the moment. They are rather wicked. (As I compose this, one of them is removing his diaper and peeing on the floor.) My wife kindly looks after them a few hours every third evening so I can record my thoughts on this blog; a week later, I’ll’ve forgotten what I’ve written.
I steal moments to do a little reading. A book or two later, I’ll’ve forgotten what I’ve read.
Someone at a party asked which books I liked best this year. I said Shakespeare, Harry Potter, and Narnia; I had trouble remembering anything not in a series. I had to check my list of “completed” books after I got home.
My life is turning into a series of disconnected events. I’m becoming the hero of Borges’s “Funes, the Memorious,” only without the memories.
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Before I forget, I wish to complain that the previously serviceable app Grammarly has quietly gotten much too big for its britches. Yesterday, I was typing in a document, and Grammarly sneakily auto-corrected “resistible” to “irresistible,” which is THE OPPOSITE OF WHAT I MEANT. This illustrates a larger point, that 2023 was the year when a lot of ordinary people started noticing (or reading online) that AI had “jumped the shark.”
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“You need to go to therapy, Sweetie,” says Karin. “This is the bleakest entry ever. ‘I remember nothing, and the robots are coming.’”
She is too young to understand.
Now that I think about it, it would be amusing to pay a stranger to listen to me read my blog entries out loud.
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Allegedly I groan a lot, even when I’m sitting still.
Do I groan, or purr? Jasper snuggles next to me as I type this, and our noises sound alike.
Jasper is middle-aged now; Ziva is almost middle-aged. They’ve both mellowed out. They hardly fight each other anymore.
I look forward to my sons’ attainment of this happiness.
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Every year, I read the book of Zechariah; and afterward, I am sorry to say, I forget about it until the next year.
It ends like this.
[14:16 ff. (NIV):] Then the survivors from all the nations that have attacked Jerusalem will go up year after year to worship the King, the LORD Almighty, and to celebrate the Festival of Tabernacles. If any of the peoples of the earth do not go up to Jerusalem to worship the King, the LORD Almighty, they will have no rain. If the Egyptian people do not go up and take part, they will have no rain. The LORD will bring on them the plague he inflicts on the nations that do not go up to celebrate the Festival of Tabernacles. This will be the punishment of Egypt and the punishment of all the nations that do not go up to celebrate the Festival of Tabernacles.
On that day HOLY TO THE LORD will be inscribed on the bells of the horses, and the cooking pots in the LORD’s house will be like the sacred bowls in front of the altar. Every pot in Jerusalem and Judah will be holy to the LORD Almighty, and all who come to sacrifice will take some of the pots and cook in them. And on that day there will no longer be a Canaanite in the house of the LORD Almighty.
So when you worry about war in Israel, or anywhere, think about that.
It could be a technically superb movie and still disappoint. It’ll almost surely give Christie the Merchant-Ivory treatment, which is wrong for her.
The recent adaptations don’t capture Christie’s spareness. No matter how faithfully they render the plot and characters, they make the scenery and costumes too pretty. They embellish what the page (wisely) barely sketches.
Perhaps if Mike Leigh were the director …
If only Nicolas Roeg had adapted one or two of the creepier Christie novels, as he did The Witches and Don’t Look Now …
As T.S. Eliot famously said: “Christie and Shakespeare divide the world between them. There is no third.”
(OK, he said Dante and Shakespeare, but that wasn’t what he meant.)
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Shakespeare-wise, I have begun reading Coriolanus. How timeless these plebians and politicians seem!
Daniel, this week, decided to say dozens of real words. Previously, he had spoken gibberish.
The eating begins in earnest just before Halloween and continues through December. Meanwhile, the northern hemisphere cools. One becomes sluggish.
I gained five pounds over Thanksgiving. Seven, the last two weeks.
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Having fallen behind in my reading, I’m trying to get back on pace by reading these short books:
Gabriel García Márquez, Chronicle of a Death Foretold (I read this in high school and again in college)
John Hersey, Hiroshima (I read this in high school, too)
C.S. Lewis, Prince Caspian (I don’t know how many times I’ve read this; I’d forgotten how odd it is when Aslan, Susan, and Lucy frolic with Greek mythic figures – Bacchus, Silenus, and the Maenads – while the chaps are at war)
Joyce Carol Oates, First Love: A Gothic Tale
Georges Simenon, The Yellow Dog (my first Maigret novel – only seventy-four to go after this one)
You’d think I’d polish ’em off in one sitting, but that’s not how I do it: I like to drag ’em out.
Shakespeare-wise, I rolled my dice, counted down my table of contents, and landed upon The Winter’s Tale to read next. Doubly appropriate because (a) ’tis (almost) the season and (b) I need something somber after The Merry Wives of Windsor and Much Ado about Nothing.
This is the third straight play in which the fear of being cuckolded fuels the plot. I am beginning to understand, dimly but surely, that this was a big concern in Shakespeare’s time (and in Molière’s, not long after).
Incidentally, here is Sam Bankman-Fried’s notorious criticism of Shakespeare (with special mention of Much Ado). It’s forgivable. He wrote this when he was twenty years old; I believe he was a college sophomore.
And here, the polemical philosopher Michael Huemer takes Bankman-Fried’s side. I do like Huemer, but this isn’t his best moment. He puts too much stock in what he thought of the plays when he read them in high school. (Fashioning my objection after Bankman-Fried: What do the priors tell us about one’s highschool or college self arriving at one’s most judicious possible evaluation of Shakespeare?)
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.
As I was typing out the poem, I got a bit of a shock: Samuel tried to hand me a glass of cold water and spilled most of it onto my chest. “It’s Daddy’s water,” he said.
His heart was in the right place. …
On his own initiative, he’d removed the pitcher from the fridge and poured the water into the glass. He left puddles in the fridge and on the kitchen floor.
This was the second time this week that he’d interfered with the fridge water. Two days ago, he emptied the same pitcher over Karin’s little potted plant.
Clearly, he likes to use the fridge. He also asks to microwave things; I lift him up so he can put food inside that appliance.
He also has been keen to press the “start” button on the dishwasher, regardless of the dishes’ readiness. This issue has been resolved. He now only presses the “start” button under my supervision, as a part of his bedtime routine.
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Shakespeare, this month.
⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯
ULYSSES
Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back,
Wherein he puts alms for oblivion,
A great-sized monster of ingratitudes.
Those scraps are good deeds past, which are devoured
As fast as they are made, forgot as soon
As done. Perseverance, dear my lord,
Keeps honor bright. To have done, is to hang
Quite out of fashion, like a rusty mail [piece of armor]
In monumental mock’ry. Take the instant [most immediate] way;
For honor travels in a strait so narrow
Where one but goes abreast. Keep, then, the path;
For emulation hath a thousand sons
That one by one pursue. If you give way,
Or hedge aside from the direct forthright [course of action clearly at hand, the path straight ahead],
Like to an ent’red tide they all rush by
And leave you hindmost;
Or, like a gallant horse fall’n in first rank,
Lie there for pavement to the abject rear [the miserable, degraded members of the rear (as in a military charge or parade)],
O’errun and trampled on. Then what they do in present,
Though less than yours in past, must o’ertop yours.
For time is like a fashionable host,
That slightly shakes his parting guest by the hand,
And with his arms outstretched, as he would fly,
Grasps in the comer. The welcome ever smiles,
And farewell goes out sighing. Let not virtue seek
Remuneration for the thing it was. For beauty, wit,
High birth, vigor of bone, desert in service,
Love, friendship, charity, are subjects all
To envious and culminating time.
One touch of nature [a natural inclination, common to all men (to praise according to superficial values)] makes the whole world kin,
That all with one consent praise newborn gauds [toys, trifles],
Though they are made and molded of things past
And give to dust that is a little gilt
More laud than gilt o’erdusted [more praise than gold covered with dust].
The present eye praises the present object.
Then marvel not, thy great and complete man,
That all the Greeks begin to worship Ajax;
Since things in motion sooner catch the eye
Than what stirs not. The cry [public opinion] went once on thee,
And still it might, and yet it may again,
If thou wouldst not entomb thyself alive
And case [encase] thy reputation in thy tent;
Whose glorious deeds, but in these fields of late,
Made emulous missions [competitive and jealous warfare (the gods took sides in the Trojan War, fighting among themselves)] ’mongst the gods themselves
And drave great Mars to faction [to become a partisan].
ACHILLES
Of this my privacy
I have strong reasons.
ULYSSES
But ’gainst your privacy
The reasons are more potent and heroical.
⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯
Troilus and Cressida III.iii 145–191. Text and notes from The Complete Signet Classic Shakespeare.
We aren’t very sick anymore. I have to blow my nose a lot, but that’s the extent of it.
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Last night, we saw a mouse in our basement. Get it, Jasper!, we said.
A little later, we saw our champion mouser trotting along, his mouth full, a bit of brown fuzz dangling out of it. Karin followed after Jasper with an empty potato-salad container. He tried to escape into one of his hidey-holes to play with his prize, but Karin caught him and he grudgingly released the limp thing.
It was a plastic toy. The bit of fuzz was a dust bunny. We didn’t see the mouse again.
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This, at last, is shaping up to be the August when I read all of Light in August.
I’ve read these passages I don’t know how many times, but before today it never occurred to me to pair them against each other.
First, Socrates:
To fear death, gentlemen, is no other than to think oneself wise when one is not, to think one knows what one does not know. No one knows whether death may not be the greatest of all blessings for a man, yet men fear it as if they knew that it is the greatest of evils.
Apology 29a (trans. G.M.A. Grube).
Second, Hamlet:
To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them. To die, to sleep –
No more – and by a sleep to say we end
The heartache, and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to! ’Tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep –
To sleep – perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub [impediment],
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil [turmoil],
Must give us pause. There’s the respect [consideration]
That makes calamity of so long life [(1) makes calamity so long-lived; (2) makes living so long a calamity]:
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
Th’ oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely [harsh language or treatment arising from haughtiness and contempt],
The pangs of despised love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of th’ unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus [full discharge (a legal term)] make
With a bare bodkin [dagger]? Who would fardels [burdens] bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovered country, from whose bourn [region]
No traveler returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have,
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience [self-consciousness, introspection] does make cowards of us all,
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast [color] of thought,
And enterprises of great pitch [height (a term from falconry)] and moment
With this regard [consideration] their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.
Hamlet III.i 56–88. Text and notes from The Complete Signet Classic Shakespeare – excepting the note for “contumely” (Merriam-Webster).
Cephalus, the old man in Republic, bk. I, fears death enough to rejoice that his wealth has guarded him from having to resort to injustice (as the poor often must do).
For Easter, we went to Goshen, where Karin’s dad’s parents live. Samuel found the touchscreen that controls his great-grandparents’ security system. He set off the alarm and instigated a confrontation with the police. … This is the third time he has summoned the emergency services. Some months ago he called 911, but I was able to pursuade the operator that it wasn’t an emergency. Another time, I saw an ambulance travel up and down our street; the driver seemed unable to figure out which house had issued the summons. I checked my call log and learned that Samuel had again called 911. … Since that day, if I catch him playing with my phone, I toss him immediately and mercilessly into the Chokey.
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I found a copy of Tikki Tikki Tembo upon the library sale cart. Surely, I thought, the library is divesting itself of this outdated and offensive tale! I paid a few cents and brought it home. …
(It turns out, the library has retained four copies – one of which is missing.)
Perhaps, despite its window-dressing, Tikki Tikki Tembo isn’t really about the Chinese – at least, no more than A Comedy of Errors, with its italianate duke and its Roman Catholic abbess, is about the historic city-state of Ephesus. …
No, that’s disingenuous. Justly or unjustly, the book satirizes the Chinese ethic of filial piety. Perhaps this subversiveness is what has made Samuel so fond of Tikki Tikki Tembo. He listens to it three or four times or until we make him stop. Fortunately, we don’t have to read it to him; he puts on a CD with a reading by Marcia Gay Harden (it was included in a flap at the back of the book). Whenever it’s time to turn a page, a gong sounds and Samuel turns the page and does a little dance.
Daniel, I am sorely tempted to call “Chang” – the name of the second son – but he already has plenty of nicknames.
I’m reading Marchette Chute’s Stories from Shakespeare, which I’ve discovered late in life. These retellings compare favorably with those of Charles & Mary Lamb and Leon Garfield. Chute outdoes those authors by discussing nearly all of the plays, even those that the Lambs and Garfield won’t touch. For example, Chute writes separate chapters for each of the three dreadful parts of King Henry VI. She mentions, but avoids dwelling upon, the chief plot points and characters of that trilogy. Its ambitious nobles – and, for that matter, commoners like Joan of Arc (who, according to Shakespeare, definitely was a witch) – rise up and are mowed down at a nice clip, as in Judges or 2 Kings. But Chute is uninterested in gore: Titus Andronicus is dispatched in a little more than a page. And the misanthropic Timon of Athens gets just three and a half pages. I was eager to read a quick dismissal of Pericles, which, apparently, Shakespeare nonchalantly co-authored with a brothel keeper; and then I realized that Chute avoids that play altogether by restricting herself to those of the First Folio. Well played, Madam, well played.
When I was a child, I loved Shakespeare and Shakespearean retellings, and then I put away childish things; and now I wonder if I ought to have stayed with with my first love.
Less than a fortnight before Ecuador is due to play in the World Cup, the Court of Arbitration for Sport (TAS) has ruled on the Byron Castillo case.
Castillo’s Ecuadorian citizenship has been reaffirmed, for the obvious reason – cited earlier by FIFA – that it’s up to the Ecuadorian government whether Castillo is a citizen. It was legitimate for Ecuador’s soccer team to field Castillo. No points earned in the 2022 World Cup qualification tournament are to be deducted. Ecuador will play in this World Cup, as scheduled.
But the TAS also has ruled that Castillo was born elsewhere and earlier than his passport says. So, although his citizenship and his eligibility to play are not objectionable, his documentation is. What is more, the TAS explains, the Federación Ecuatoriana de Fútbol (FEF) “is liable for an act of falsification … even if the FEF was not the author of the falsified document but only the user.”
The TAS grounds this on FIFA’s Disciplinary Code (the 2019 edition, presumably), article 21, paragraph 2:
An association or a club may be held liable for an act of forgery or falsification by one of its officials and/or players.
As punishment, Ecuador will be fined and must begin the next World Cup qualification campaign with a three-point deficit. That’s the equivalent of a three-draw or single-victory head start for each of Ecuador’s competitors. (Goal differential – and other tiebreakers – aren’t affected.)
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How sensible is this ruling? For argument’s sake, assume that Castillo – or his parents or other representatives – indeed gave false information so that he could obtain his citizenship papers.
The TAS’s ruling is consistent with the letter of FIFA’s Disciplinary Code. But a lesser punishment, or no punishment, also would have been consistent with the Code. An association may be held liable, the Code says. That is, punishment is optional; it should be determined on a case-by-case basis (and, eventually, by precedent).
Now, to take the word “may” so seriously is to interpret the Code rather literally; but then, a ruling against Ecuador depends on a severely literal reading of the Code. (Think of this as a “pound of flesh” sort of case.) As it is written, the Code says nothing about whether it matters if the party in question deliberately “used” a falsified document. But it seems that deliberate “use” was the Code’s target: it’s what the rule-makers evidently wished to discourage or punish (see paragraph 1 of the Code’s same article). And the TAS hasn’t determined whether Ecuador intentionally “used” a falsified document – at least, this isn’t stated in the ruling.
It behooves the authorities to be lenient on this occasion. The TAS is now imposing a harsh punishment for what hasn’t been proven to be anything worse than an unintended error. But this sets a fearsome precedent. How many other clubs or countries might be found similarly liable for failing to reject a false claim in this or that player’s papers? More than a few. And if this case becomes a precedent – as it must, if judgments are to be consistent – other cases would demand punishment than those involving “uses” of eligibility-determining falsifications. The present ruling makes it explicit that Castillo took the field eligibly. Ecuador’s punishment is for falsification, full stop – not for falsification-in-order-to-field-an-ineligible-player.
For insance, precedent would dictate that:
If a player lies about his birthday (height, weight, address, criminal record, etc.) but not his parentage, birth country, or any nationality-determining facts;
and if the falsehood is printed on his papers;
and if his country’s soccer association, acting in good faith, or in compliance with its national government, treats those papers as proof of the player’s citizenship;
then the soccer association must be harshly punished.
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There’s at least one other, perhaps more egregious, problem with this ruling. Again: FIFA’s Disciplinary Code only states that an association may be held liable for the offense of falsification. The Code doesn’t require FIFA to hold an offender liable; precedent, or some other consideration, would have to be adduced to generate such a requirement. Indeed, in its June ruling, FIFA refrained from holding Ecuador liable.
In so doing, FIFA acted in conformity with its Code. As far as I can see, then, without precedent, there is no basis for a higher court to overturn FIFA’s ruling; it was within FIFA’s discretion to rule as it did.
What robot decided I was the sort of person who’d want or need to read endless “BREAKING” allegations against “Sleepy” Joe Biden? (Not to mention his son.)
I ought to mark this as spam, but, every day, the headlines reel me in.
Some of today’s offerings (pretty mild, really):
(1) “Biden Retiring the U.S. Dollar” (in case I’d missed this bombshell the first four dozen times).
(2) “Hunter Biden Probe Will End with ‘Very Sympathetic Plea Agreement,’ Former Federal Prosecutor Predicts.”
(3) “BREAKING: Does Biden Really Have COVID or Is It an Elaborate Cover Up?” To be fair, this is where I first saw that Biden has COVID. (I’m assuming it’s not an elaborate cover-up.) I guess it’s possible to get real information if you read between the lines.
Next, the blogs and tweets of academia. Leiter rails against the woke young PhDs who are one-upping each other on Twitter. (These people really are pretty ludicrous.)
Do I have a short memory, or is public discourse at its lowest ebb since I was born? Or maybe I should say “discourses.” I was reading a postmodernist historian today who disparaged talk of the “discipline” of history in favor of talk of various “discourses” of history. (More on him some other time.) Are political “discourses” usually this insular? Are they usually this money-and-status-driven? (How do these things get measured?) Is this just par for the course, humanity-wise? In Shakespeare, old Lord Timon puts all his money into “culture,” gets zilch in return, quits Athens, and goes to live in a cave.
I would keep on ranting, but Karin wants us to go to sleep.
