Singing along

The Proclaimers, singing:

“My heart was broken / My heart was broken / Sorrow / Sorrow …”

Samuel: “My heart isn’t broken.”

John-Paul: “Oh, no? Why not?”

Samuel: “Because I always follow the rules of the road.”

Some of his interpretations are rather literal.

(The Proclaimers are wearing good pants.)

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Samuel has finished reading the Babar omnibus and is halfway through Little House in the Big Woods (which I first read only last year). Some days, he reads more than the required amount. He has caught the fire. His abuelo pays him $2 per completion.

He’s a good little (mercenary) book reader, but he’s too hard on the spines.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Abel now stands.

Daniel sings along with my Spotify favorites. Most are wordless, so he has to sing the violin parts (for instance). He has a favorite Beethoven piece: the “Turkish March” from The Ruins of Athens. I’ve known it all my life but only just realized it was Beethoven’s.

My reading year has concluded

I’m glad to report that I finished reading the principal works of Homer, Dante (not his Vita Nuova), E. M. Forster, Anthony Powell, and Laura Ingalls Wilder. And I finished all I’ll ever care to read about J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth.

I reached my numeric goal, too. But I was forced to rationalize at the eleventh hour. I’d galloped through The White Darkness – David Grann’s little picture-book about antarctic exploration – but was unable to do the same with Michel Foucault’s little picture-book on Magritte. I called it quits. It was almost midnight. I was two books short.

Then I remembered that the three parts of The Origins of Totalitarianism were first published as separate volumes. I’d finished reading Antisemitism and Imperialism. I did some reverse-gerrymandering and included them in the tally. Not without qualms. I appended asterisks.

Last night, I began reading Proust. I joined the long tradition of those who fall asleep reading the “overture” in Swann’s Way, which is about falling asleep.

Sir Walter Scott

I’ve finished reading the “Little House” books and begun Caroline Fraser’s celebrated Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder.

This quotation is from LIW’s First Four Years – a posthumous publication, much sadder than the other books. (The quotation isn’t sad.)

In December Laura felt again the familiar sickness.

(Nicely put.)

The house felt close and hot and she was miserable. But the others must be kept warm and fed. The work must go on and she was the one who must do it.

On a day when she was particularly blue and unhappy, the neighbor to the west, a bachelor living alone, stopped as he was driving by and brought a partly filled grain sack to the house, and taking the sack by the bottom, poured the contents out on the floor. It was a paper-backed set of Waverley novels.

“Thought they might amuse you,” he said. “Don’t be in a hurry! Take your time reading them.” And as Laura exclaimed in delight, Mr. Sheldon opened the door, closed it behind him quickly, and was gone. And now the four walls of the close, overheated house opened wide, and Laura wandered with brave knights and ladies fair beside the lakes and streams of Scotland or in castles and towers, in noble halls or lady’s bower, all through the enchanting pages of Sir Walter Scott’s novels.

She forgot to feel ill at the sight or smell of food, in her hurry to be done with the cooking and follow her thoughts back into the book. When the books were all read and Laura came back to reality, she found herself feeling much better.

It was a long way from the scenes of Scott’s glamorous old tales to the little house on the bleak, wintry prairie, but Laura brought back from them some of their magic and music and the rest of the winter passed quite comfortably.

The drawing is by Robert Scott Moncrieff.

A chilly death

A snowy week. Some days have been frigid. But in the “Little House” books the prairie settlers do just fine at 20-below (°F). It’s at 40-below that they have trouble. Today I wore shorts to take Samuel to his bus stop. It was 5 °F. The bus was 10 minutes late. I barely felt the cold (there wasn’t much wind). Samuel and I joked around: I sang, he punched. On the way back to the house I passed the cardboard box containing the frozen cat I’d put out by the curb, on Monday. Karin found the corpse in our shed. The Animal Resource Center promised to pick it up but never did. It’s no longer so distressing. The cat is under a blanket of snow. I know to look for a single paw that sticks out of the box; that’s how I can tell the cat is still there. Children pass it trudging to and from school. Sorry about this bummer of an entry.

Colombia 0, Ecuador 1

I recant.

We are AWESOME.

This is the best goal that Enner has scored for Ecuador.

We made a very good Colombian team look ordinary. We did it with the ball, the first half-hour – and without it the last hour, sans one player.

The Colombians created opportunities; but it was evident, early on, that they were going to have “one of those nights.” I sat back and watched them miss their tap-ins, point-blank shots, potshots … every kind of shot.

(I prayerfully sat back.)

We’ve conceded just four goals in twelve games.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Karin and Samuel are ill. Daniel and “Pip” and I aren’t – yet.

The first snow fell last night. It’s time to start my winter reading:

• Dostoevsky, various
• Kafka, The Castle
• Jack London, various
• Christiane Ritter, A Woman in the Polar Night

I already have begun reading The Long Winter from the “Little House” series. The Ingallses endure a South Dakotan blizzard … in October.

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.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

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.

I cook for the family

I read about cassoulet in an Iris Murdoch novel. Tonight, I cooked it. That is, I cooked “quick cassoulet” in a skillet (traditional cassoulet requires hours of baking), using canned beans.

The result was flavorful but chewy. The bites with celery were crunchy. I’m not sure that that’s how cassoulet is supposed to end up.

I ate three-quarters of the dish. Karin, Samuel, and Daniel ate much smaller portions. I doubt they’ll beg me to cook it again.

Tomorrow: Almanzo Wilder’s “fried apples ’n’ onions.”

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Half of vol. 3 to go in LOTR.

I continue to read (and, in some cases, re-read) Forster. Each book has bettered its predecessor. I’m now reading Howards End (1916). What does Forster really think of his sadsack, the clerk Leonard Bast? This poor young striver spends his free hours going to Beethoven concerts and reading Ruskin to “improve” himself. He befriends the rich and cultured Schlegel sisters and tries to talk literature with them, and they couldn’t care less; they’d rather treat him as their pet. And they’re much nicer than the other richos. Forster clearly pities Leonard, but he doesn’t seem to like him much. He makes him about as attractive as a trespassing cockroach that must be squashed. Forster likes other proles in other books; just not the strivers. Everything in its rightful place, after all, I guess.

Zuleika; LOTR; Farmer boy

One of my favorite chapter openings, almost as good as “The grandmother didn’t want to go to Florida”:

Her actual offspring does not suffice a very motherly woman. Such a woman was Mrs. Batch. Had she been blest with a dozen children, she must yet have regarded herself as also a mother to whatever two young gentlemen were lodging under her roof. …

The same is true of Karin: not with lodgers but with pets and strays.

This time, ’twas a spider. It spun its web on the prongs of our “Medusa” lamp.

Karin once feared spiders – maybe she still does – but she treated this one oh so tenderly. She brought it ants and flies.

Last night, she brought it a live Junebug. That cracked something inside of her. She was anguished for the Junebug: “It just fought so hard to live.”

She carefully removed the spider from our house.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Her actual offspring are with their grandfather tonight. A respite for us.

This morning I hazarded a library outing with them. They were loud, and I had to drag them home when Daniel wouldn’t stop running through the stacks. But it was gratifying that at first they shunned the e-⁠tablets. Samuel built with blocks from a Jenga-like game. Daniel filled, emptied, and refilled the Connect Four grid.

I kept an eye on them and read Tolkien. Pippin tries to sneak off with the palantír. Gandalf scolds him; then they ride away in the night, on Shadowfax.

As he fell slowly into sleep, Pippin had a strange feeling: he and Gandalf were still as stone, seated upon the statue of a running horse, while the world rolled away beneath his feet with a great noise of wind.

Thus ends LOTR bk. III. Tolkien is at his best in the concluding paragraphs of the “books.” So far, he has always concluded with a scene of hobbits. There are grand things in this story, but they are best viewed through hobbits’ eyes; they are too grand for anyone less humble. Tolkien himself may have been a bit of a hobbit, recording momentous and homely detail, for homely folk.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

I also am reading the Little House books. Nine-year-old Almanzo, in Farmer Boy, isn’t quite a hobbit, but he is driven to and fro by industrious larger creatures. The temperatures are frigid; the work is hard; but all is worthwhile because it is fueld by mountains of rich food, described unstintingly.

Reading report

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.

A new niece; the “little house” books; the Hardy boys

The time has come to salute our new niece, Belladonna “Bella” Jean Louise. She was born to Brianna – who now goes by “Atticus” (“Atti”) – and to “Atti’s” partner, “Ike.”

Karin went to Michigan yesterday and visited the child and her parents.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Samuel pulled Laura Ingalls Wilder’s books off the shelf and spread them out across the floor. Which of them do you think caught his attention? That’s right: Farmer Boy. The only one in the series about little Almanzo Wilder. The only one about a boy.

The only one I’ve read, as it happens.

Karin tells me that when she was a little girl, she read all of the series *except* Farmer Boy. “That one is dumb,” her mom advised her.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

I had the opposite limitation. I tried, when I was younger, to read some Nancy Drew books. I failed. But I succeeded in devouring dozens of Hardy Boys mysteries.

Now, after some thirty years, I’m rereading one of my old favorites: While the Clock Ticked (the eleventh novel in the series). Samuel and Daniel will be reading The Hardy Boys before long, I expect, and I’d like to be conversant in that literature.

The pacing is breakneck. There’s an amusing scene in which Frank and Joe attend a party with their girlfriends for all of five minutes before they rush off again to pursue a lead.

The police are implausibly nice. They’d like nothing better than to share information with the teenaged sleuths. Frank and Joe’s friend group ticks the important boxes, race-wise. In just a couple of pages, the Italian-American “chum,” the Jewish-American “chum,” and the Irish-American “chum” all are introduced. (Introduced, but never developed as characters.) Nowadays, other races than these are the beneficiaries of token inclusion; but a similar diversity principle seems to have guided the great mercenary children’s writings of 1932.

Then, of course, there’s Chet Morton, a rounder character in more ways than one. The chums go hiking in the woods, and Chet keeps pleading with them to stop so they can all eat their sandwiches. This is where the book provides character development and comical relief.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Back to Laura Ingalls. I picked up Little House in the Big Woods, also published in 1932, and read the first chapter. Its prose is plain but descriptively exquisite; I wouldn’t be surprised if it were a direct influence upon that of Nobel winner Alice Munro. (I’m especially reminded of her story “Boys and Girls.”) A lot happens in the big woods, but it happens out of view. The children wake up to see dead deer hanging from the trees. Pa kills the family’s pig; Laura stays indoors and listens while it squeals. Predators lurk outside the house.

The taste for this more atmospheric sort of writing comes later in life, I think. First comes a hunger for stories like The Hardy Boys, stories for one-track-minded readers. Not all children, but many children, are like greyhounds chasing a mechanical rabbit.