Paul’s bedtime reading

Iran’s team has withdrawn from the World Cup. The newspapers are taking it in stride.

Surely, I’m not the only dismayed soccer follower in the West?

Update (March 13): The team has not withdrawn (or been ousted).

I’ll let you know when I know what I’m talking about.

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The war’s death toll has risen. And it’s beyond doubt that the U.S. killed those schoolchildren.

Update: I really hope the news about something so important is beyond doubt.

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I’ve also updated my unchangeable and definite reading list of the next two months. I’ll try to finish not five, not ten, but twenty-four more books before the late-April conclusion of my 2025–2026 cycle. And so it’s particularly cruel of the Web bots to pepper me with ads for the new John Galsworthy PBS show. I just can’t fit all nine of those novels into the schedule. If only Abel didn’t cling to me all day long.

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Little suspecting the incalculable consequences that the evening was to have for him, [Paul Pennyfeather] bicycled happily back from a meeting of the League of Nations Union. There had been a most interesting paper about plebiscites in Poland. He thought of smoking a pipe and reading another chapter of the Forsyte Saga before going to bed. He knocked at the gate, was admitted, put away his bicycle, and diffidently, as always, made his way across the quad towards his rooms. What a lot of people there seemed to be about! Paul had no particular objection to drunkenness – he had read a rather daring paper to the Thomas More Society on the subject – but he was consumedly shy of drunkards.

I think Paul Pennyfeather’s life sounds lovely (except for that ominous bit about “incalculable consequences”).

The good news is, the Forsyte show looks missable.

Rules for blogging

“Is this your ‘fall gothic’ blog look?” Karin asks.

Nah, I just compulsively reformat and revise, as regular readers know.

The most significant change is that the section-separating diamonds (♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦) are now tomato-colored, not orange. This would be tricky to implement globally rather than one entry at a time. So I haven’t done it all yet.

Some of my rules for blogging:

• Get the formatting right
• Corollary: learn the necessary HTML
• Get the prose right
• Revise style unstintingly
• Revise substance sparingly
• Post ten times per month (this constrains revision)
• Tell the truth
• Use free fonts
• Don’t try to make money
• Don’t track pageviews (I do see what countries my readers and reader-bots come from, but I can’t distinguish between them)
• Allow comments from human beings, not bots (right now, I’m failing to allow comments at all)
• Don’t worry about who reads (exception: Madame)
• Don’t worry if your wife doesn’t always read
• Don’t worry if people who once read don’t now
• Don’t worry if your content is utterly trivial
• You have almost nothing to say
• This blog is for exercise
• Just follow your very long nose; then retrace and clean up
• Write more like a Briton than like a gringo
• Corollary: some convolution is acceptable
• But emulate your stylist-heroes (e.g., Agatha Christie, Evelyn Waugh)
• If, in overall conception, you must emulate someone, let it be Pepys
• Read more Pepys so you know what you’re talking about
• The Shorter Pepys should suffice
• But it might not

I’ve posted some 1,300 entries here since 2013, and before that I posted on Xanga for almost ten years, so I can speak with some authority.

Body-text fonts, pt. 42: Monotype Garamond (or something close)

At the ripe old age of about sixty, Evelyn Waugh published A Little Learning, the first volume of his autobiography. It was his last book. Two years later, he died.

A Little Learning begins like this:

How’s that for eloquent weariness?

(There are Garamonds and Garamonds. I don’t know all of their histories. This is Monotype’s metal-type version or something close enough; the digitization is what everyone recognizes from Microsoft Word.)

Waugh’d be a challenge for me to read chronologically because I’ve gone through his early novels many times and his late works hardly at all. I’d have to make it past Brideshead and The Loved One to get to the really unfamiliar stuff. In the mid-1940s, Waugh began tackling a steeper grade than I’ve been able to climb at the breakneck pace he set in his comical works.

It’s better, perhaps, to try going backwards, to begin with sluggish, morbid despair and retrace the author’s path from initial breakneck hilarity (in its way, just as despairing).

Despair usually is a sin, but in Waugh’s case it may actually be a virtue.

Here love dies

This is the abstract of an article in the most recent issue of the premier journal for the philosophy of religion:

THE AI ENSOULMENT HYPOTHESIS

According to the AI ensoulment hypothesis, some future AI systems will be endowed with immaterial souls. I argue that we should have at least a middling credence in the AI ensoulment hypothesis, conditional on our eventual creation of AGI and the truth of substance dualism in the human case. I offer two arguments. The first relies on an analogy between aliens and AI. The second rests on the conjecture that ensoulment occurs whenever a physical system is “fit to possess” a soul, where very roughly this amounts to being physically structured in such a way that the system can meaningfully cooperate with the operations of the soul.

This inquiry appeals to me not one whit. It might initiate a nice little debate in Faith and Philosophy, though.

Funny thing is, were this in a journal for cognitive or technological studies, the philosophy of mind, metaphysics, or general philosophy, the inquiry still wouldn’t appeal to me, but I wouldn’t be annoyed.

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These are the first two paragraphs of Brideshead Revisited:

When I reached “C” company lines, which were at the top of the hill, I paused and looked back at the camp, just coming into full view below me through the gray mist of early morning. We were leaving that day. When we marched in, three months before, the place was under snow; now the first leaves of spring were unfolding. I had reflected then that, whatever scenes of desolation lay ahead of us, I never feared one more brutal than this, and I reflected now that it had no single happy memory for me.

Here love had died between me and the army.

Here love dies between me and the journal Faith and Philosophy.

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P.S. On the plus side, this book review appears in the same issue.

R.I.P. Dr. Root, acquisitions librarian

His obituary is here.

I knew him best as the director of Bethel’s library, in which capacity he employed me as his student assistant. I also took a course from him, on Russian history.

He was very kind to students, as the following examples will show.

(i) He got back in touch with me in 2018 and urged me to finish writing my long-overdue dissertation. He was hardly the first person to urge this. But his intervention did the trick. He asked to read what I’d written so far, and he commented on a number of sections.

After this jump-start, I wrote regularly. I completed the Ph.D. the next summer.

(ii) A college acquaintance told me, long after the fact, that he and other young bucks once rashly denounced the quality of Bethel’s library holdings, in a letter posted on the “Wittenburg Door.”

(The “Wittenburg Door” was a cafeteria bulletin board. It was the college’s most picturesque – and cringeworthy – public forum.)

Dr. Root invited the young bucks to his office. He treated their concerns seriously and graciously, solicited advice, and ordered books they asked for. Little did they know, the library’s resources were severely constrained. Dr. Root didn’t complain of this to students; even I, his assistant, learned it from other sources.

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In his dress and in his politics, Dr. Root was a 1970s conservative. He hung a large portrait of Nixon over his student workers’ desk. Bold! But he didn’t do it to taunt the libs; that wasn’t his way. He genuinely admired Nixon’s statesmanship.

He grieved – privately, to me, at least – that the Republican Party, which he staunchly supported, had turned Trumpist.

He venerated missionaries. One of his pet projects was the indexing of Jim Elliot’s journals. I worked on this, occasionally, when there was nothing else to do; it was a relief when Jim and Betty finally tied the knot and Jim got courtship off his mind.

Dr. Root spent his life in midwestern towns and cities and shared his midwestern pleasures with his student workers. The end-of-term banquets were especially generous: I still savor the memory of one of them, an Amish dinner in the countryside. The summer workers were treated to daily donuts and the occasional lakeside outing; we’d observe a surprisingly lively Dr. Root playing volleyball and croquet. I was amused, too, when he’d return with stories of his holidays. Sometimes, he’d go abroad; usually, he’d stay in a friend’s Manhattan penthouse. For a few days each year, he’d change into a wild baseball- and theatre-goer, sushi eater, and book buyer. Book buying was his job, of course, but he relished the hunt.

It occurs to me that my time helping him to buy books for the library was what made me the habitual bargain hunter I am today.

Then again, he may have chosen me as his student worker because he already perceived that tendency. One day, he invited me into a back office to take what I wanted from the surplus of donated books. He must have liked the gusto with which I went about choosing, because that was when he offered me my job – much of which would consist of filling out forms from bargain book catalogs.

There’s a scene in Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall in which the ne’er-do-well Captain Grimes is offered his dream job of traveling from pub to pub to sample and rate the beer. (He has to turn it down for personal reasons, of course.) Something comparable, involving low-budget book buying, might have been my ideal job – the realization of my “true self.” Dr. Root did that job. Lucky man! I’m glad I was able to do it with him for a time.

The scholar

Samuel’ll endure his first school day tomorrow. Tonight he is being supplied, bathed, dressed, taught to put on new shoes, made to sleep earlier, etc. His backpack is so large and full, he barely can carry it and keep his balance.

What’ll I do at home all day with just Daniel?

Karin disabused me of this worry. I was shocked to learn that Samuel’s classes would end by 10:30. “Just early enough for the students to grab McDonald’s breakfast,” Karin noted.

Samuel’ll be driven to school tomorrow. Soon – we hope – the South Bend schools will assign him to a bus route.

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With David, I have joined a book club. Its reading list is prodding me to brush up on my Homer and my William James.

Apart from this, I’ve finished Forster’s Howards End and moved on to his stories in The Celestial Omnibus; I’ve followed the Ingallses from Wisconsin to Indian Territory and now to Minnesota, where they’re living in a hole in the ground; and I’ve reached, in Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time, a cleverly titled but labored instalment, Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant (which Evelyn Waugh disparaged, his initial enthusiasm for the series having dwindled). The narrator has spent several books detailing his acquaintances’ love mishaps. It’s some relief to think that the Blitz can’t be far off: always picturesque, the Blitz.

Picturesque, also, are the killings in the Iliad, but their sheer numerousness makes the poem tedious.

Mitfords, pt. 8; body-text fonts, pt. 26: Dante; effects of nuclear attack

N. Mitford’s seventh novel, The Blessing (1951), is about an Englishwoman who moves to France with her promiscuous French husband and their son (and their son’s English, xenophobic nanny, who once was the Englishwoman’s nanny).

France-Britain comparison had been creeping into Mitford’s previous novels and here is “on at full blast.” Mitford lived her last years in France.

The dedication is to Evelyn Waugh.

My reading copy is The Penguin Complete Novels of Nancy Mitford: nearly 1,000 large pages set in teeny-tiny Dante (a font with pleasing apostrophes). What follows is a rather atypical passage for Mitford, since the main speaker is from the USA. The setting is a dinner party. The New Worlders want to talk global politics; the Old Worlders want to forget warring and get back to bedroom politics.

– let me finish –

what they ought to do in the case of atomic explosion, such explosion is robbed of half, or one-third, its terrors.’

‘Thank you, Charlie,’ said Mr Dexter. ‘I for one feel a lot easier in my mind. There is nothing so dangerous as a policy of lassair-aller, and I am very glad that the great American public, if I may say so, M. de Valhubert, without offending your feelings, is not hiding its head in the sand, but is looking the Bomb squarely in the eye.’

(“Heck” – para. 3 – is not an expletive but a British-conceived U.S. diminutive of “Hector.”)

This is hardly my favorite N. Mitford passage. But it goes nicely with this remarkable essay in the Daily Mail, also read by me today, which gives “macabre minute-by-minute detail” about what would happen during a nuclear attack. (Hat tip: Leiter.)

Sobering stuff, even if flanked by links to articles about celebrities, conjoined twins, sea monsters, and UFOs.

1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 69: Lust and revenge

Australian tycoon George needs a project for his spoiled, crisis-prone daughter, Georgina, to supervise. Why not commission a bronze statue? It’d be bulky, costly, valuable (at least, once the right critics have approved it), conspicuously placed in the wing that George built for the Adelaide museum, and therefore indisputably worthy of a tax write-off. As for Georgina, this is her sort of thing; she has trendy artist friends.

Lily, Georgina’s handpicked artist, wants to subvert the male gaze by sculpting a larger-than-life male nude. That’s fine with George as long as his tax write-off goes unchallenged.

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Enter a plebeian married couple, Cecilia and Karl-Heinz. She works in a New Age shop. He is unemployed. They need money. He wants to buy a cottage in a “cultured” suburb. She wants to give money to her cult. They’re at odds in the bedroom, too (he wants more sex, she doesn’t). One night, as they lie in bed, he propositions her. “Do you know what an OBE is?” she retorts. “Order of the British Empire,” he whimpers. “Out-of-body experience,” she explains.

Karl-Heinz submits his photo to the artist, who selects him as her model. The gig pays well. Now Karl-Heinz and Cecilia will have enough money for a down-payment on the cottage. Or to subsidize the cult.

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The modeling sessions would be utterly professional were Georgina not lurking in the studio. Cecilia isn’t threatened by her husband’s proximity to lesbian Lily, but she rightly mistrusts Georgina.

She confides in her guru, who has arrived from California to raise funds. The guru, realizing that a tycoon’s money is involved, sniffs a big score.

At this point, I had better stop describing the plot, except to note that (a) Georgina’s shrink prescribes her an SSRI with aphrodisiac effects, (b) other people end up taking the drug, (c) Cecilia is urged, against her conscience, to participate in the sculpting project, and (d) the artwork, for financial reasons and with the artist’s bland acquiescence, is turned into a subversion of a subversion of the male gaze.

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I haven’t seen anything much like Lust and Revenge, except one of the director’s celebrated earlier efforts, Lonely Hearts (1982), a work that is, if anything, stranger because its oddball characters enact a more conventional plot. Both movies hinge on the conflict between barely-suppressed male desire and the integrity of an odd but fiercely conventional woman. Lust and Revenge is particularly inspired in channeling Cecilia’s puritanism through kooky New Age beliefs. (Do these two elements combine in real life? I wouldn’t know.) Cecilia looks, speaks, and behaves rather like Ingrid Bergman in Cactus Flower; imagine that character in a cult.

Paul Cox, the director, is also known for a movie called Man of Flowers, summarized thus by IMDb: “An eccentric elderly man tries to enjoy the three things in life that he considers real beauty: collecting art, collecting flowers, and watching pretty women undress.” I haven’t seen Man of Flowers, but, having seen Lonely Hearts and Lust and Revenge, I’d wager that it, too, is more amusing than salacious.

Another movie of Cox’s, one I have seen, is the devastatingly serious Innocence (2000). In it, also, a woman’s integrity is challenged. That movie purports to be realistic. Lust and Revenge is deliberately cartoonish (and Lonely Hearts is somewhere in between). Tonally, Lust and Revenge is rather like Evelyn Waugh’s novel The Loved One, with its skewering of the commerce in sacred things (art, love, spirituality) and its grotesque concluding image of a human body’s (clandestine) desecration. South Australia may as well be Southern California.

Pepe is of the immortals

In one day, Samuel has gone from slithering on his belly to crawling. He used to crawl just one or two feet at a time. Now it’s his preferred mode of locomotion.

He still slithers when his arms are weary.

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Full episodes of Midsomer Murders have long been streamable gratis, with advertisements, through IMDb.

Now, FilmRise has posted quite a few episodes to YouTube. The videos appear to be ad-free.

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Watching the UEFA Nations League, I was a little surprised to see Pepe trot out onto the field for Portugal. “He is so, so old,” I told Karin.

(He’s only a couple of years younger than I am. He’s older than David.)

“Maybe he’s like Grimes,” said Karin.

It took me a moment to understand whom she meant. At first, I was thinking of Grimes the musician. Then I realized that Karin was referring to Captain Grimes of Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall.

GRIMES WAS OF THE IMMORTALS

End of an era

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

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

I’ll report if I read any of them.

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

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

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

10 books

This has been going around on Facebook:

“Rules: In your status, list 10 books that have affected you in some way. Don’t spend more than a few minutes, and don’t think too hard. Then, tag 10 people, …” (blah, blah, and the blah).

Here are my ten books in the order in which I first read them:

E.B. White, Stuart Little • Charles and Mary Lamb, Tales from Shakespeare • Roland Bainton, The Church of Our Fathers • Agatha Christie, Cards on the Table • Evelyn Waugh, A Handful of Dust • Roger Ebert, The Great Movies II • Peter van Inwagen, Material Beings • J.M. Coetzee, Youth: Scenes from Provincial Life II • John Rawls, Political Liberalism • Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

Each book influenced how I write, or how I live, or both; or else it interested me in a bunny trail of other books.

Some Catholic (and some non-Catholic) writers

It used to be, whenever I’d learn of a book I didn’t own, I’d have to go to Amazon right away to buy it. But now I’m a faculty member at two different colleges. I have borrowing privileges all out of proportion to what I do for anybody.

So if J.H. posts a link to the effect that Malcolm Muggeridge’s autobiography was the best autobiography that Mark Noll claimed ever to have read, I can say, “Oh, it’s in the stacks at Bethel,” and a few minutes later I’ll have walked to the campus and secured the book for the next six months.

It turns out that Muggeridge is the insufferable sort of writer whose every sentence is a gemstone. But whatever. I have the book. It feels good in my hand, and the font is nice. The cover has a blurb from someone cranky and pompous:

And the title reminds me of:

He had published eight books … concluding, at the moment, with Waste of Time, a studiously modest description of some harrowing months among the Patagonian Indians.

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Or if Madame mentions Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott, and I’m at IUSB, I can go to that library and soon the book is in my hand distracting me from the papers I should grade. Anne Lamott repeats her cleverest bits over and over, as Muriel Spark used to do. Anne Lamott must have learned from Muriel Spark, because she pays a sort of tribute to her:

I know some very great writers, writers you love who write beautifully and have made a great deal of money, and not one of them sits down routinely feeling wildly enthusiastic and confident. Not one of them writes elegant first drafts. All right, one of them does, but we do not like her very much. We do not think that she has a rich inner life or that God likes her or can even stand her.

That person must be Muriel Spark because, a few lines later, Lamott says:

Now, Muriel Spark is said to have felt that she was taking dictation from God every morning – sitting there, one supposes, plugged into a Dictaphone, typing away, humming. But this is a very hostile and aggressive position. One might hope for bad things to rain down on a person like this.

And soon I’m looking for evidence that Lamott herself is of the Roman church, but no, either she isn’t or I’m a bad researcher. And anyway she’s different from those other writers because she’s more explicitly self-effacing.

Now, you might wonder why my tone is so grouchy, why I’m so critical of these undeniably fine writers. Well, (1) I’m a grouchy guy; and (2) they were grouchy first, and when I was at a tender age I figured out, by reading such people, that eloquence could atone for being a grouch. Up to a point.

More of the same

Who are these Californians who read my Xanga? Sometimes I wonder.

Kenny and I finished viewing Barry Lyndon — an act of masochism. One scene, especially painful, showed various 18th-century bigwigs and damsels playing cards by candlelight. The shots were beautifully composed, but there was little dialog or drama, and the scene dragged on for ten minutes; all the while, tedious chamber music blared.

When, at last, the scene was changed, the narrator said: “To make a long story short …”

This sort of joke was repeated for three hours.

:(  :(  :(

Still no regular Web access, though not for lack of trying. As far as we can tell, our modem is defective.

:(  :(  :(

Today I am inspired by Evelyn Waugh.

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Finally my holidays have ended. Yesterday, Cat and Kenny and I went to the beach, and afterward I hosted a dinner party. (I entertained my guests by talking about my books.) But today I put in six long hours tutoring at IUSB.