April’s poem

Here is Thriftbooks.com’s list of the most popular books in each state in 2021.

A few good books, a lot of “meh” ones, and some stinkers.

I am a little surprised that so many people are reading about birds, plants, and rocks. (See: Maine, Michigan, Montana, Oregon, Virginia, and Wisconsin.)

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This month’s poetry is from the Purgatorio, canto XI. It modifies the Paternoster. The proud recite it while doing their penance.

They circle around, bearing burdens that make them stoop; and they look at sculptures of the humble.

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Our Father in Heaven, not by Heaven bounded

but there indwelling for the greater love

Thou bears’t Thy first works in the realm first-founded,

hallowed be Thy name, hallowed Thy Power

by every creature as its nature grants it

to praise Thy quickening breath in its brief hour.

Let come to us the sweet peace of Thy reign,

for if it come not we cannot ourselves

attain to it however much we strain.

And as Thine Angels kneeling at the throne

offer their wills to Thee, singing Hosannah,

so teach all men to offer up their own.

Give us this day Thy manna, Lord we pray,

for if he have it not, though man most strive

through these harsh wastes, his speed is his delay.

As we forgive our trespassers the ill

we have endured, do Thou forgive, not weighing

our merits, but the mercy of Thy will.

Our strength is as a reed bent to the ground:

do not Thou test us with the Adversary,

but deliver us from him who sets us round.

This last petition, Lord, with grateful mind,

we pray not for ourselves who have no need,

but for the souls of those we left behind.

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

(Translator: John Ciardi)

1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 21: Ed’s next move

You twisted your ankle
I carried you
You got a divorce
So I married you
You fell off a cliff
So I buried you
I wish there were more bad times
To see you through

These lyrics are by Ed’s Redeeming Qualities, a band of four or five urban hippies. Some of them wear overalls and strum little guitars. One guy plays the clarinet.

A pretty girl named Lee (Callie Thorne) sings and plays the violin.

(“They sound like the music from Juno,” Karin says.)

We don’t know much about Lee, except that she is in this band. Eventually, we’ll learn about her unhappy dating history, but that’s almost an afterthought, something to provide a little turmoil for the movie’s last scenes.

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Ed (Matt Ross) doesn’t know much about Lee, either, except that she’s willing to give him the time of day.

On occasion.

Barely.

About him, we know more. He’s moved to New York to work in a genetics lab. He studies how to modify the genes of rice plants. The work is very interesting, he tells new acquaintances.

His only previous scientific discovery was accidental. He worries that it ought not to have been credited to him.

He had a painful breakup at home, in Wisconsin. His girlfriend didn’t like it that he’d mapped out the rest of his life before the age of twenty-five (he’d even reserved himself a burial plot).

It isn’t that Ed loves to be in control. It’s that he’s terrified of not being in control.

It’s a foible he’s been working on. His move to New York is a deliberate exercise in character improvement.

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He’s also trying to get better at talking to women (just one woman, really).

Ed and Lee first spot each other at a party. Later, they recognize each other in a diner and introduce themselves. Then Ed talks too much about the book Lee is reading (Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams). She leaves.

Another day, they both witness a traffic accident. They leave their phone numbers for the victim. Ed gets Lee’s number and calls her.

This time, she’s more interested.

She becomes more patient with him.

This is a movie about a nice man working to make himself nicer; about nice people such as Lee and Ray (Ed’s flatmate) cutting him a little slack; and about the nice diner workers who encourage them.

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One scene in the first half of the movie is pretty bad. Ed walks through the Wisconsin countryside with his old girlfriend. Interpreters go with them: a woman to translate “womanspeak” to Ed, and a man to translate “manspeak” to Ed’s girlfriend. It’s like a fantastical scene out of Annie Hall.

It’s bad because the rest of the movie is realistic. Even though he is so awkward, Ed really could attract such a girl as Lee. Lee really could choose to ignore him, then talk to him, then kiss him, then leave him, then come back to him. That wouldn’t be a strange path for a relationship to take.

Lee really could go over to Ed’s apartment, and Ed’s cat really could vomit on her leg. These things happen.

People really do kiss each other as clumsily as Ed and Lee do in this movie. People kiss each other while ill, or while falling off of furniture.

Whether you’d enjoy a movie like Ed’s Next Move depends on whether you’d enjoy watching realistically attractive, awkward people stumble through the early stages of courtship. Not because you cruelly enjoy watching people stumble, but because these characters’ stumblings are, themselves, rather nice.

Prospecting

About zero degrees Fahrenheit today. I stayed inside; I was on holiday, thanks to Martin Luther King. Karin & I did go out for supper, and I felt the cold then. I barely made it to the car.

A lovely philosophic job is advertised in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, in Marquette – a Lake Superior port town, four hours east of Duluth, eight hours from South Bend if one travels through Illinois and Wisconsin. Its hills and lake are beautiful, and its wooden sports dome is the world’s largest. But the cold! The snow! The darkness! If I barely can endure them here, how could I there?

This job was advertised a year ago as well; I wonder if that school has trouble attracting (or retaining) employees.

Another possible job – in Texas, not far from Ana & David – is in a nicer clime but would expire after a year or two.

Without the Ph.D., no job offer is likely to materialize; but I talked last week with my adviser, and we both realized that I am very close to finishing (though the degree probably wouldn’t be conferred until the end of May).

A visit to Indianapolis

Our anniversary is today. Karin & I were married two years ago.

On Saturday, we took a trip to Indianapolis. We stopped at the Dutch Café near Peru, Indiana, and ate several plates of food. This affected all the walking that we did at the Indianapolis Zoo.

It was a mediocre zoo on the whole. Some of the buildings were overly grand. They called attention to themselves rather than to the animals. The animals were minimally described by their placards, and many weren’t described at all. (I wistfully recalled the much humbler Austin Zoo, which gave heaps of information about each species, and, often, about an individual’s life history.)

Still, the zoo had four redeeming features:

(1) The parking lot design. Not all the lanes were parallel or perpendicular to each other. They seemed to be staggered diagonally.

(2) The elephants and rhinos. One male rhino, in particular, caused the ladies to blush.

(3) The suckling warthogs, whom Karin recorded:

(4) The pettable dog sharks. This, easily, was the best thing about the zoo. The sharks would swim around in a shallow tank. We visitors would reach in and pet them lightly with two fingers as they passed by. If a shark failed to receive a petting, it would make a u-turn and swim by again. The sharks seemed almost mammalian in their desire for affection. And their skins were wonderfully smooth; petting a shark felt like petting a loving, living hot dog.

Lest you worry that petting was forced upon the sharks, let me reassure you that there was a part of the tank where they could rest undisturbed.

Here’s a video from the Dodo about petting a somewhat larger shark:

Unfortunately, there was no traditional, farm-like petting section in the zoo. I guess the zoo could afford elephants but not goats.

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Afterward, we drove around downtown Indianapolis and saw the state capitol building. Without especially going out of our way, we have now seen the capitol buildings of the following states:

Utah
Wisconsin
Texas
Indiana

On the way home, we stopped at Half Price Books in Carmel, the ritzy suburb. We were one week too early. Next weekend, for Memorial Day, a sale will be held.

Anniversary, pt. 4: House on the Rock, Wisconsin

How long will these anniversary postings continue, you ask? I promise this will be the last one of the year.

Many thanks to my grandparents for the card they sent us, and for the cash, which this month was sorely needed.

Speaking of anniversaries: Martin’s parents recently had their fortieth. At their banquet, they inquired about me (Martin said). They told Martin they wished to take me out to dine again some day. (When I lived with Martin & Mary, I used to tag along whenever Martin’s parents would dine with M&M.)

It warms my heart to know how gratifying it is for people to take me out to dine.

I should say something about the House on the Rock, our last stop in Wisconsin. Touring it is like walking for three hours through the strangest passages of Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away.

It has Japanese gardens.

It has musical instruments that play themselves.

It has gigantic machines: steamship engines, train engines, music machines, Rube Goldberg machines, machines that do who really knows what.

It has thousands of carrousel beasts: hybrids of all forms, originating in mythology and in nightmare.

It has a room in which a gigantic whale – part sperm whale, part killer whale, part various other whales – battles a gigantic squid.

It has at least two gift shops. The postcards sold in these gift shops convey the merest hint of the weirdness, the overwhelmingness, of the whole complex. On the tour, strange artifacts are piled up all around you, and there is nothing to do but to follow the path, follow the path, until at the end you come out into the light. Then, in one last garden, there are kittens: extra-friendly ones begging to be scratched.

Anniversary, pt. 3: Madison, Wisconsin

I’d like to say that in Wisconsin we kept a sharp lookout for hodags. We didn’t, though – except in Madison. The State Capitol there is adorned with statues of small mammals.

Clearly, this statue is of a badger.

But this one? Badger, or hodag?

(Photos not by me or Karin.)

Another feature of the Capitol is its collection of fossils embedded in banisters, stair-steps, etc. We obtained a brochure about these fossils and dutifully sought them out. (This is the sort of tourism that Karin enjoys. She also likes finding her way through corn mazes.) To our frustration, no fossils revealed themselves. Then we realized we were misnumbering the floors. We retraced our steps and easily found an old starfish in a stair-step.

We walked out toward the University. Having years earlier forsaken UW–Madison for Cornell, I was eager to see what I’d missed. It boiled down to two things.

(1) The lakes. Of course, Cornell also has a nearby lake. But at UW the shore of Lake Mendota goes right up to the campus.

(2) The restaurants. Madison, I read, has more per capita than any other U.S. city. Had I lived there, I would’ve spent all my money eating out.

Karin & I stopped at a Peruvian restaurant near the campus. This, for me, was the high point of the trip. I ate lomo saltado and Peruvian ceviche, which, lacking tomato, is very different from Ecuadorian ceviche. Afterward, I told the chef that Ecuadorians put ketchup in their ceviche, which surprised and disgusted him.

Another nice feature of UW is its row of pompous old churches. The Lutheran church, of course, is by far the largest.

I seriously considered going to the Engineering Building to look up Nick Hichton of the Up documentaries, but I didn’t. (Too far to walk.)

We had a scare trying to check into our Super 8. Our reservation was for the previous night. But the helpful clerk got our fee refunded, and our refund was larger than what we paid that night, so we came out ahead.

Anniversary, pt. 2: Sheridan Road, Illinois; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Google Maps

We chose Wisconsin because we thought the travel would be easy. It wasn’t. According to Google Maps, the House on the Rock – our final and most remote tour stop – lay less than five hours from South Bend. And yet our return took us nearly eight hours. Our rests were brief; our detours were minor; traffic in Chicago was relatively painless. Google just got it wrong.

Around 12:00 last night, we reached home and joyfully were reunited with Ziva and Jasper.

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The trip to Wisconsin was lengthy by design. In Illinois we kept to the Sheridan Road, hugging the lake. I wanted to see the mansions in Evanston, Kenilworth, and other obscenely rich towns. Then we drove through some merely well-off towns; through the grimy naval town of North Chicago; through Waukegan, where I’d lived as a three-and-four-year-old; and through Zion, where I’d spent the third grade. I showed Karin my old haunts (the fast food restaurants). We stopped at my old church, which now seemed very small, and I pointed out all my acquaintances in the photos on the missions bulletin board. We then went downstairs and interrupted a baby shower. I said hello to the pastor’s wife, who made me greet her husband on the phone.

Then it was north through dismal Kenosha and west to Milwaukee, where our goal was to eat some famous bratwurst. The bratwurst was so delicious and the pretzel so enormous, we’ll probably never eat at that place again (the food was felt well into the night).

The music inside the bratwurst pub was very loud. This distressed Karin, who’d never been inside any kind of pub. (She also was distressed when one drunk young man swung around and serenaded me with “Call Me Maybe.”) Traffic downtown in Milwaukee was bad. Parking was expensive. We called it a night and settled into our Waukesha Super 8. The TV was showing a marathon of Law and Order (the version with Lenny Briscoe and Jack McCoy).

Next entry: Madison, etc.

Anniversary

Nearly one year married. Tomorrow, off with Karin to Wisconsin for a brief (and hopefully very cheap) holiday. Milwaukee; Madison; House on the Rock.

Mary will look in on the kitties.