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.

Body-text fonts, pt. 33: Century Old Style

The “Century” fonts – ITC Century, Century Expanded, Century Old Style, Century Schoolbook, etc. – aren’t as similar as one would expect. This is explained by font-writer Allan Haley:

Century Old Style (this month’s fêted font)

has more character and personality than the other Century designs. It is the red-headed, freckle-faced member of the family.

And why is that?

Not really an Old Style design [the other “Century” fonts aren’t, either], … it does have … angled serifs in the lowercase and a flavor of Old Style traits.

Ah, yes, I see what Halley means. The font is hardly Centaurish (for instance), but it’s also not abjectly un-Venetian.

Also notable is Century Old Style’s wonky uppercase “C.”

The font’s general plainness and its quirks ensure that it

almost cannot be used in an inappropriate application, and it virtually cannot be overused. Where other typefaces, which have a similar range of abilities, can become commonplace or unexciting (sort of typographic vanilla), Century Old Style maintains a personality and a presence (more like French vanilla).

I couldn’t have put it better myself.

Some pulpy Vintage Black Lizard crime novels (e.g., by Jim Thompson) are set in Century Old Style. Alas, I can’t find a worthy specimen to post here.

Instead, here is a page from a book of old British commercial art. (The author is Robert Opie, the son of those marvelous antiquarians, Iona & Peter.)

Enlarge, please.

And here is a page from a children’s bible.

Different companies issue darker and lighter versions of Century Old Style. I’m partial to this new (absolutely free!) version. Weary of Times New Roman? Use this instead.

January’s poem

R.I.P. Glynis Johns, one of the all-time cutest cuties.

Karin received a final Christmas gift: a calendar of cats of medieval art. Do check out these cats if you haven’t seen this sort of thing.

I read J. L. Carr’s A Month in the Country, a slim novel about a Great War survivor undergoing various crises, who accepts a job restoring a mural in a village church. The theme of the novel seems to be: This too shall pass (the good no less than the bad). The mural – a masterpiece – has lain under cover, relatively well preserved, since the Middle Ages; once uncovered, it will likely be whitewashed over by an unsympathetic churchman. The genius who painted the mural is long forgotten; the young artisan restoring it knows that his own glorious summer in the countryside will have no significant or lasting effect.

Halfway through, I realized how infrequently I read anything so alien to my own way of thinking as this book. Not alien because I believe my own actions are worth much, but because “his eye is on the sparrow.” This belief I share with almost all the murder books I read, even lurid or despairing ones.

This year I am reading the New English Bible, including, for the second time, the Apocrypha. I can’t speak to the accuracy of the translation, but the English is lovely.

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:

Its loveliness increases; it will never

Pass into nothingness; but still will keep

A bower quiet for us, and a sleep

Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.

Therefore, on every morrow, are we wreathing

A flowery band to bind us to the earth,

Spite of despondence, of the inhuman dearth

Of noble natures, of the gloomy days,

Of all the unhealthy and o’er-darkened ways

Made for our searching: yes, in spite of all,

Some shape of beauty moves away the pall

From our dark spirits. Such the sun, the moon,

Trees old and young, sprouting a shady boon

For simple sheep; and such are daffodils

With the green world they live in; and clear rills

That for themselves a cooling covert make

’Gainst the hot season; the mid forest brake,

Rich with a sprinkling of fair musk-rose blooms:

And such too is the grandeur of the dooms

We have imagined for the mighty dead;

All lovely tales that we have heard or read:

An endless fountain of immortal drink,

Pouring unto us from the heaven’s brink.

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

(John Keats, Endymion, the first twenty-four lines)

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.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

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.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

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.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

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.

November’s poem

Having reissued Kurt Vonnegut’s novels, the Library of America has been emailing me various writers’ declarations about Vonnegut.

This is by a Millennial writer, Ron Currie, Jr.:

People who knock Vonnegut often claim that his writing is adored by young adults, but that those same fans eventually grow out of him. The implication is that his work, if truly admired only by kids, is not to be taken seriously. But this misses the point. The point is that in his writing Kurt maintained, with great effort, the idealism most of us slough off. We call this self-degradation wisdom, or experience. And as is so often the case when we perceive a shortcoming in someone else, further reflection reveals that the deficiency is our own.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

A few years ago, some highschoolers wrote to Vonnegut. He replied. They framed his letter and posted it online, and it made the rounds. (Enlarge the image by opening it in a new tab and then clicking on it.)

Did the letter inspire inner creativity? It certainly inspired the highschoolers to turn it into a display piece.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

I am reminded of nothing so much as this passage by Tom Wolfe.

What about the idea of a permanent work of art at all, or even a visible one? Wasn’t that the most basic of all assumptions of the Old Order – that art was eternal and was composed of objects that could be passed from generation to generation, like Columbus’s bones? Out of that objection came Conceptual Art.

[§] The Conceptualists liked to propound the following question. Suppose the greatest artist in the history of the world, impoverished and unknown at the time, had been sitting at a table in the old Automat at Union Square, cadging some free water and hoping to cop a leftover crust of toasted corn muffin or a few abandoned translucent chartreuse waxed beans or some other item of that amazing range of Yellow Food the Automat went in for – and suddenly he got the inspiration for the greatest work of art in the history of the world. Possessing not even so much as a pencil or a burnt match, he dipped his forefinger into the glass of water and began recording this greatest of all inspirations, this high point in the history of man as a sentient being, on a paper napkin, with New York tap water as his paint. In a matter of seconds, of course, the water had diffused through the paper and the grand design vanished, whereupon the greatest artist in the history of the world slumped to the table and died of a broken heart, and the manager came over, and he thought that here was nothing more than a dead wino with a wet napkin. Now, the question is: Would that have been the greatest work of art in the history of the world or not? The Conceptualists would answer: Of course, it was. It’s not permanence and materials, all that Windsor & Newton paint and other crap, that are at the heart of art, but two things only: Genius and the process of creation! Later they decided that Genius might as well take a walk, too.

(The Painted Word, pp. 103–104)

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

I re-read Cat’s Cradle – the first of Vonnegut’s books I’ve read twice. I liked it better the first time.

“If you find your life tangled up with somebody else’s life for no very logical reasons,” writes Bokonon, “that person may be a member of your karass.”

At another point in The Books of Bokonon he tells us, “Man created the checkerboard; God created the karass.” By which he means that a karass ignores national, institutional, occupational, familial, and class boundaries.

It is as free-form as an amoeba.

In his “Fifty-third Calypso,” Bokonon invites us to sing along with him:

Oh, a sleeping drunkard

Up in Central Park,

And a lion-hunter

In the jungle dark,

And a Chinese dentist,

And a British queen –

All fit together

In the same machine.

Nice, nice, very nice;

Nice, nice, very nice;

Nice, nice, very nice –

So many different people

In the same device.

I said I liked the book better the first time, but then the first time I didn’t see much idealism in it, only a fantastical bitterness (as in Twain’s Mysterious Stranger, another book I ought to read again). The second time, more of the scenes seemed brightened with something like joy; I wonder if that’s what it was, or if the light was a mirage.

Justin E. H. Smith’s generation

I am a Scorpio, a Rooster, INTP or INFP (depending on what day of the week I take the quiz), and who-knows-what on the Enneagram. According to current BuzzFeed wisdom, my culinary preferences reveal that the Taylor Swift lyric –

if the story is over, why am I still writing pages?

(from “Death By a Thousand Cuts” – a song I don’t know)

– will describe my love life for the next six months. (Why stop at my love life? Why stop at six months?)

More credibly, perhaps, I was born near the temporal boundary that separates the GenX-ers from the Millennials. I assume it isn’t a sharp boundary. I exhibit characteristics of both groups. Alas, I seem to have been born on the boundary’s twerpier side. I’d rather be an X-er. So it was with some keenness that I tracked down the magazine article “My Generation” by the entertaining philosopher Justin E. H. Smith.

A few paragraphs in, my heart sank. Smith was presenting an inventory of what music he used to listen to and when he used to listen to it.

(I remember when it was more or less obligatory to recite that sort of thing to people. It got tiresome.)

The tediousness of his musical examples aside, Smith’s point is that the X-ers were the last cohort to believe in “art in the fullest sense”:

What is art in the fullest sense? It is impossible to give an answer that will please everyone, but we might say that it is a distillation of the spirit of its time that somehow succeeds in breaking out above its time, speaking to us across the generations in a way that transcends the limitations of its own local idiom and its own myopic present. It is shaped by its historical period but ends up saying something quite general about human suffering, human hopes, perhaps the possibility of human redemption (or not).

(It bears emphasizing: “something quite general” is not quite something universal; I think Smith is deliberately avoiding making a claim about universality. He is interested in pitting himself against those who disavow even the more limited cases of transcendency, e.g., of art that speaks across a number of generations.)

After the X-ers, creators and audiences stopped pursuing, valuing, or even acknowledging transcendency and narrowed their focus to content shamelessly generated for like-minded people. Authenticity, as an aspiration, became a casualty. Nowadays, creators and audiences, lacking any belief in a transcendent anchor to be true to, allow themselves to be pulled along by the strongest current, and everything eventually sinks into the whirlpool of upvotes, of (Smith emphasizes) The Viral, of The Monetized.

Whether or not he’s right about the chronology, Smith does seem to have identified two strikingly opposed ways of thinking, and it does seem that the allegedly newer way (the anti-transcendence tendency) has the upper hand, Zeitgeist-wise. Or so old fogies like myself like to worry.

I finish reading Harry Potter

Well, this afternoon, I became, at the age of forty-one – almost forty-two – the latest person to have read all of the Harry Potter series, excluding Fantastic Beasts, Beedle the Bard, Quidditch through the Ages, The Cursed Child, and whatever other appendices, spinoffs, and fanfictions there may be. That is, I read nos. 1–7, Sorcerer’s Stone through Deathly Hallows.

The series took hold of me as I read, and by the end I knew it was a profound thing.

My advice to serious readers disinclined to invest in Harry Potter, who’d dismiss it out of hand:

Just slog through book 1. It isn’t a great book. But it’s short, and it does some necessary scene-setting. If it seems lightweight, that’s because it’s supposed to be. The series is clever that way. At first, the characters concern themselves mostly with ephemera, with froth. This changes. Gradually, inevitably, things get weightier, starker, huger, until whatever trivia came before drops out of view.

Meanwhile, enjoy the satire. There’s a lot of it, and it gets cleverer and more pungent. Enjoy the gentle mockery of ordinary human foolishness. Enjoy it in good conscience. Ultimately, the series is on the side of these sinners, it’s about saving sinners, it doesn’t shirk from paying redemptive costs.

That’s a good rule of thumb for finding profundity in popular art (not that all art must be profound). If a work is to have depth, it’ll soon acknowledge discord: perhaps, evil. If so, as a popular work, it might handle its topic lightly. It might satirize. Ride this wave first. It might take you farther than you expected, to more sobering shores, especially if the piece is long: a book exceeding, oh, five hundred pages; a movie exceeding, oh, two hours; a daily comic strip or radio show or blog lasting, oh, two decades. Lo and behold, the thing might not just offer criticisms; it might offer a positive vision, a hopeful possibility worth considering. It might not only diagnose sin, not only prescribe a personalized cure, but gesture toward or detail a renovated world in which temptation and envy and fear need not have purchase, need not sting at all.

Moonbird; volto di donna; cul-de-sac; a scent of jasmine; old-school romance and horror

You know that painting, The Snake Charmer, which decorates the cover of Said’s book, Orientalism? My boys appear to have been regarding it as a fashion directive. … Samuel, first; then, Daniel, imitating Samuel (“following suit”).

A Flickr; October’s poem

The best Flickr I’ve been to.

Ogden Nash, “Kind of an Ode to Duty”:

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

O Duty,

Why hast thou not the visage of a sweetie or a cutie?

Why displayest thou the countenance of the kind of organizing spinster

That the minute you see her you are aginster?

Why glitter thy spectacles so ominously?

Why art thou clad so abominously?

Why art thou so different from Venus

And why do thou and I have so few interests mutually in common between us?

Why art thou fifty per cent. martyr

And fifty-one per cent. Tartar?

Why is it thy unfortunate wont

To try to attract people by calling on them either to leave undone the deeds they like, or to do the deeds they don’t?

Why art thou so like an April post-mortem

Or something that died in the ortumn?

Above all, why dost thou continue to hound me?

Why art thou always albatrossly hanging around me?

Thou so ubiquitous,

And I so iniquitous.

I seem to be the one person in the world thou art perpetually preaching at who or to who;

Whatever looks like fun, there art thou standing between me and it, calling you-hoo.

O Duty, Duty!

How noble a man should I be hadst thou the visage of a sweetie or a cutie!

Wert thou but houri instead of hag

Then would my halo indeed be in the bag!

But as it is thou art so much forbiddinger than a Wodehouse hero’s forbiddingest aunt

That in the words of the poet, When Duty whispers low, Thou must, this erstwhile youth replies, I just can’t.

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

So, this is what antiquarianism looks like

I pick up a moldy coffee-table volume from the library’s “for sale” shelf: Understanding Watercolours, by one H.L. Mallalieu.

’Bout time the children learned about paintings and such.

I page through the book. J.M.W. Turner’s name is prominent: that’s all I have to know to make my decision. That’s pretty much all I do know about the subject. I pay the dollar.

At home, I look more closely at the book. It belongs to a series:

• Understanding Watercolours
• Understanding Antique Wine Bottles [😳]
• Understanding Book-Collecting
• Understanding Miniature British Pottery and Porcelain
• Understanding Dolls

Almost every picture in the book has a caption with the word “Christie’s” or “Sotheby’s.” The publisher is the Antique Collector’s Club.

Uh, oh.

Well, this is a first. I’ve never before acquired a “how to” book for collectors. I’ve never desired to have any such thing in my, uh, collection.

Upon further review, the book is very strange indeed.

This book fills a long felt need for a practical introduction to the subject of collecting British watercolour paintings. There is a lot more to collecting than noting the price, the name of the artist and deciding whether or not one likes the subject.

Very true. Indeed, the same principle applies to books about British watercolor paintings.

Many watercolours are either not signed or bear false signatures, or perhaps have been saddled with misleading attributions.

The excellent text and carefully chosen illustrations take the collector behind the formal signature on the picture and show him what to look for in it, the idiosyncrasies of the artist, his style and his individual methods of working.

Yet even when all the technical points are understood there remains the whim of fashion which varies over long periods and has moved round, ignoring or puffing each artist in turn. Without an understanding of the movement of fashion, past collections and ideas on collecting, it would be hard to understand the subject.

This book, one of a series under the general title of ‘Understanding’, will be widely welcomed. There has never been such a practical and informative guide.

Emphasis on “practical.” I’ve never seen anything so concerned with art, that so determinedly disregarded the aesthetic qualities of art – except when these have monetary implications (e.g., A is a more lucrative artist to collect than B, and you can tell that a work is by A rather than B because A paints tree-trunks better than B does). There is a quiz at the back of the book. Question: “These two watercolours are painted by different artists. a. Who? b. Does it matter?” Answer: “a. J.R. Cozens; b. Turner. – It is possible that Turner’s Monro School copy would be more expensive than the Cozens original, but if you said that it does not matter, you have the makings of a connoisseur and should take five extra points.”

Well, that’s good to know: I had no idea about (a) or (b), but I guess I have the makings of a connoisseur.

Lots of pictures of Beethoven

When I wrote that Samuel’s been saying “Beethoven is so sleepy,” I didn’t realize he’d go on talking about Beethoven for days and days. When Samuel gets sad, he says, “Beethoven is so sad.” When he’s scared, he says, “Beethoven is so scared.” When he pulls my hair, he says, “Don’t pull Beethoven’s hair.”

Beethoven has become the all-purpose surrogate.

When Samuel wants breakfast, he says: “Let’s go to the kitchen, Beethoven.” “Have some candy corn, Beethoven.” (I’m not sure when we last had candy corn in the house. I think our supply was eaten by the mice.)

Really, what kid wouldn’t be obsessed with Beethoven. There’s the music, of course – Samuel’s favorite compilation is Beethoven for Babies – and then there’s this portrait that comes up on Spotify.

I wondered what Beethoven looked like in other pictures.

I found some.

Little boy Beethoven. Not so unlike Samuel.

Youthful Beethoven.

(These are from the chronological sequence on this webpage.)

Beethoven standing by a park bench.

Beethoven resembling Marcelo Bielsa.

Brooding Beethoven.

A bust of Beethoven: no doubt, the one on Schroeder’s piano.

This artist, Hadi Karimi, makes 3-D likenesses of famous people. Beethoven, appropriately, is a subject.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

My school friend, Hoku, has brought his family for a visit, one county to the north of us. I’ll do my utmost to see him.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Now, some sadder news. Our congressional representative, Jackie Walorski, died in a car crash today. The South Bend Tribune published this report.

Karin’s injuries; drawing; rolling over; body-text fonts, pt. 5: Charter

That longish stroll I mentioned last time was bad for Karin’s feet. She blistered them; then, unshoed at home, she cut her foot on the sharp edge of a bedframe. She sprayed her wounds, making them worse. She asked me to bind them. While I was doing this, Samuel got into the Band-Aid box (as is his way) and used up many Band-Aids. He asked me to put one on his wrist. He peeled it off and asked me to put it on him again. This was repeated many times. I’m not sure if he thought the Band-Aid needed to be attached just right or if he simply enjoyed having it come on and off.

He’s not averse to repetition – to practicing. This will serve him well in life.

He draws the same things repeatedly on his whiteboard. Or he asks me to draw. He never tires of looking at 2- or 3-D shapes. I tire of drawing them, though. One day, for novelty’s sake, I drew some foods – a pizza, a stick of broccoli, a banana – and gave them happy faces and hats. It was a mistake: Soon, Samuel was asking me to draw a happy eggplant and a happy daikon. I had to look up what a daikon is.

As usual, there’s less to say about Daniel, although I’m sure his little brain is quietly making even greater strides than Samuel’s right now. He continues to delight in everything (except when he doesn’t). Lately, he’s been rolling onto his belly, but not back the other way. He gets his arms caught under himself, which makes him panic.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Now, the body-text font.

A descendant of Fournier, Charter is one of the most versatile serifed fonts. Matthew Carter designed it in the 1980s, for low-res. printing.

It looks good at any size. (Any visible size.)

It looks good on paper, on computer and phone screens, and on signage for the St. Joseph County Public Library (although, in this example, more space should have been put in between the majuscules).

I often see Charter in e-books and on blogs. I don’t see it in many printed books. Not that it looks bad in them. I own five books set in Charter. The bible from which I read in high school was set in Charter.

I like Charter in newspapers and magazines, although I don’t often see it in those media. I prefer it on rough paper, not glossy paper.

Bitstream Charter – the original design – is free. Of the free variants, my favorite is XCharter. Charis SIL, with glyphs in many languages, is available as a Google font.

Charter, or Charis, would work as body text in a Google Doc or a slide show.

In a better world, Calibri, Cambria, and Times New Roman would be less ubiquitous in draft documents; Minion would be less ubiquitous in publishing (especially in scholarly works with tiny print); and Charter would be the apathetic typesetter’s default font.

Highs and lows

I dragged out my old whiteboard and Karin bought some dry-erase markers. Oh, how delighted Samuel was: they were like a drug for him. The first day and a half, he didn’t color or draw so much as slam the board on our laps, no matter what we were preoccupied with, and insist that we draw things. “Happy triangle,” he would plead. “Happy nonagon. Happy decagon.” (YouTube has taught him shapes and some emotions.) Then, yesterday, for a few brief hours, he drew the shapes himself.

Then, this morning, he couldn’t draw anything. “The markers have dried out,” I had to tell him. Still he pressed them to the board. So intense was his desire to draw, the concept of their drying out eluded him longer than it would have eluded someone with a cooler intellect.

An anniversary outing

Happy wedding anniversary to Karin & me – our sixth. My Aunt Ruth and her husband, my Uncle Tim, visited from Spain; they looked after Daniel and Samuel so that Karin & I could go on a little date. We went to Kroger and Goodwill. Because of the latest COVID surge, we got takeout instead of eating in a restaurant. We would’ve eaten at a park, but today was rainy. We took our food home and ate it in front of our guests and sons.

Uncle Tim liked Samuel’s murals (wall scrawlings). He kept talking about the pictures he saw in them. (Whenever he looks at a Rorschach test, he immediately sees dozens of pictures, I gather.) He wanted to take Samuel’s crayons and draw his own embellishments upon the murals, but we wouldn’t allow him to; Samuel can do with less encouragement.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

I’m reading The Premonition, Michael Lewis’s COVID book, another of his tales of “mavericks” outperforming “experts” by looking at statistics and ignoring red herrings, social pressures, etc. The previous book I read by Lewis, The Fifth Risk, was about how the government keeps disaster at bay. The Premonition, so far, is about how it’s a wonder that the government prevents disaster at all, so unbudgeable is its bureaucracy. If a few brave statisticians didn’t do their statistics in obscurity, on their own time, in defiance of CDC orthodoxy, the country would crumble to pieces. The book has a couple of nice stories about George W. Bush and Barack Obama. In the mid-2000s, Bush read John M. Barry’s history of the flu pandemic of 1918, decided the country needed to prepare for another pandemic, and set wheels turning which generated a containment strategy. Then, in 2009, a swine flu was detected in Mexico, California, and Texas.

What’s the worst case? asked the new president [Obama].

Nineteen eighteen, said Carter [Obama’s lone holdover from Bush’s pandemic containment team].

What happened then? asked Obama.

Thirty percent of the population was infected, and two percent died, said Carter. In the current situation, you’d be looking at two million dead.

Bush was a terrible president, but I’m grateful that he read books.

Fantastic beasts

Here is an interesting note about the Ukrainian artist Maria Prymachenko. It says that her themes and artistic style, as well as her country’s circumstances, were similar to those of Pablo Picasso. (Picasso, it turns out, admired Prymachenko.)

Not an outlandish connection; but right now, I’m primed to associate Prymachenko’s art with Blake’s paintings of fantastic beasts.

(As I’ve mentioned here and here, the Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk has explicitly connected her own work with Blake’s.)

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An update on our infestation:

Jasper has caught and killed three mud-room mice.

Ziva also has been hunting. She caught a mud-room mouse and brought it into the house. It ran away before she got around to killing it, though.

Since then, we haven’t seen any trace of that mouse. It probably didn’t survive long.

Karin found the hole in the mud-room through which the mice have been entering from the yard. We’ll put copper wool over the hole. That should keep them out.

November’s poem

I haven’t been contagious since Wednesday or Thursday, but Samuel needs me to stay indoors with him (he’s not allowed to go out until Monday). Today, with Karin at home, I left the house for the first time since I learned I had COVID. I ran the usual number of miles, with dismaying slowness. My plan for this afternoon is to visit the library.

I am dealing with my “cabin fever” just in time to endure another bout of it. Yesterday, we had our first snow of the year. More is expected.

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W.H. Auden, “Musée des Beaux Arts” (1938):

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About suffering they were never wrong,

The Old Masters: how well they understood

Its human position; how it takes place

While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;

How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting

For the miraculous birth, there always must be

Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating

On a pond at the edge of the wood:

They never forgot

That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course

Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot

Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse

Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away

Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may

Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,

But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone

As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green

Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen

Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,

Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

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I wonder if Breugel (he had dropped the “h” from his name) painted the landscape first, and then thought, This sea looks kinda Greek; I’d better put something Greek in it. How about Icarus.

Probably not.

Milestones

Happy first birthday, a couple of days ago, to Ada – my niece, Ana’s & David’s daughter – in Austin, Texas. Several dozen guests in at least four countries held a bilingual party for her over streaming video. The (hired) guests of honor were some llamas who live in Iowa – Ada likes llamas.

I was reminded of this painting by the surrealist Carel Willink:

(Some of my relations are surely rolling their eyes; I showed them this painting right after the party.)

It’s nice that the party was themed according to Ada’s interests.

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My own interests have evolved considerably. I now enjoy watching videos of the Dallas, Texas, High Five Interchange – a network of stacked traffic bridges, the tallest of which reaches as high as a twelve-story building.

I also enjoy fatherhood. Today, Samuel and I played peek-a-boo, and I carried him around on my shoulders. He has been consistently saying Da-da-da and Da-dee the last two or three days. He also has been venturing off his floor mat and getting very dirty.

Samuel received compliments this weekend from my Aunt Ruth’s brother-in-law, who stopped by to leave some things for my parents (he’s about to retire to New Orleans). “You can tell just by looking in a child’s eyes whether he’s being raised well,” he said.

I was glad that Samuel and Karin & I passed that test.

He then congratulated me on having finished my Ph.D. and told me that all of his children (or their spouses) had earned or were earning Ph.D.s. It was like the movie Conte d’été, in which the youths at the beach all have Ph.D.s.

Among the donations were four suitcases of books, which I raided. There were many Shuar grammars and a Shuar New Testament. There also was a Shuar blowgun. I didn’t take any of the Shuar paraphernalia. I did take an old copy of Locke’s Reasonableness of Christianity, which I’d cited in my dissertation.

There also was a tremendous wall hanging of llama wool. The fascination with llamas is certainly a familial one.

August’s poems

… are from Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience.

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The Divine Image
(1789)

To Mercy Pity Peace and Love
All Pray in their distress:
And to these virtues of delight
Return their thankfulness.

For Mercy Pity Peace and Love
Is God our father dear:
And Mercy Pity Peace and Love
Is Man his child and care.

For Mercy has a human heart
Pity, a human face:
And Love, the human form divine.
And Peace, the human dress.

Then every man of every clime
That prays in his distress,
Prays to the human form divine
Love Mercy Pity Peace.

And all must love the human form.
In heathen, turk or jew
Where Mercy, Love & Pity dwell
There God is dwelling too.

A Divine Image
(1794)

Cruelty has a Human Heart
And Jealousy a Human Face
Terror, the Human Form Divine
And Secrecy, the Human Dress

The Human Dress is forged in Iron
The Human Form, a fiery Forge
The Human Face, a Furnace seal’d
The Human Heart, its hungry Gorge.

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Vaughan Williams’s interpretation is the ancestor of certain TV theme songs, Karin suggests.

Some remarks upon the recent occasion of my birthday

I thank those who, via Facebook, wished me well upon my birthday, which also is Guy Fawkes Day (or Bonfire Night) and therefore easy to remember.

I especially thank my cousin Andrew for posting a video of our childhood. It received many “likes” and comments. It shows the now-demolished house in Esmeraldas where my family used to live.

I rebuke the as-yet unidentified person who noticed Facebook’s announcement of my birthday and decided to “unfriend” me.

However, I thank those who sent cards and money. I used the money to buy a book about modern art, which was on sale at Barnes & Noble. It appears to be the sort of book that presents each artist and movement in its best light.

I hope to also buy this new book about C.S. Lewis’s philosophy.

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I haven’t yet checked today’s electoral results. I might comment on them in the future.

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It occurs to me that From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, published in 1967, is an urbanized retelling of Walkabout (1959): hence, its fountain-bath episode.

Once more to the camp

With stops, our drive to the “thumb” of Michigan took six hours. It was quite tiring – we’d stayed awake late the previous night, due to Barcelona’s victory over Palmeiras in the Copa Libertadores – and when we arrived at the camp, we wished to rest. Alas, our cabin was filled with Brianna and her noisy teenaged retinue.

One grubby youngster, Noah, unknown to us, is Brianna’s new boyfriend of some few days. The other teenagers look ganglier and greasier than last year.

“Let’s turn around and leave,” said Karin.

“Yes! Yes!” I agreed.

But we didn’t.

Instead, we went to the church service. The speaker posited a “social trinitarian” conception of the Godhead, on the basis of which he argued for the value of community – and, by extension, against leaving the church. He showed Andrei Rublev’s famous painting of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit seated together at a table. “This is a picture of God,” he said.

I was glad to view that lovely painting. But I recalled that other pictures show the Godhead as one person with three faces. The “social” doctrine isn’t the only account of the Trinity.

(Not that the speaker needed that doctrine to make his point. Community can be important even if it doesn’t exist within the Godhead.)

After church, everyone lined up for ice-cream, which was served in heaping portions. This photo shows me eating a “single.”