Some old, old, old favorites

For the boys, we put on Chitty Chitty Bang Bang – overlong but not devoid of charm. I wouldn’t be surprised if it were responsible for twenty-five to fifty percent of my anglophilia. Daniel is transfixed, and Samuel jumps up and down: he loves the old automobiles. One of the best gifts I ever bought him was a huge volume called The Complete Encyclopedia of Motorcars ($1 at a library sale). It is too heavy for him to gently carry around, and so, over the years, he has wrecked its spine. (Lately, Daniel has been tearing out its pages; he also ripped the front cover off a paperback that I received in the mail today.)

I once read Ian Fleming’s Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang during a long car ride. The novel was disappointing. At least it is slim. The movie is 2½ hours long. Some of its musical numbers seem that long, all by themselves.

Tonight we don’t watch the whole movie. Instead, I put on Bugs Bunny: Superstar and we watch the first two cartoons. Samuel doesn’t know what to make of it. He’s a shrewder child than I was. Bugs Bunny may have unduly influenced my personality.

Edoarda & Stephen have acquired a puppy: Rembrandt (Remi). Last night we all went over to Mishawaka to meet him. He is still an excitable young beast.

Quino

Happy birthday, yesterday, to my dad. I spent a couple of hours at his house, along with Karin, Samuel, and Daniel. Stephen dropped by, too.

It turns out that my dad shares a birthday with Quino, the famous Argentinian cartoonist who died two years ago. If I had to rank newspaper comics in terms of, I dunno, some combination of intrinsic merit and life-impact, Peanuts would tower above all the others; and then would come Condorito, and then the gag comics of Quino. (I also grew up reading Quino’s daily strip, Mafalda, but was less taken with it.)

No niche-occupiers for me. I like my cartoonists to have hugely universal appeal.

Quino was just featured in a Google Doodle, throughout Latin America and in parts of Europe. I guess his appeal isn’t universal enough for the United States.

He isn’t a good caption writer. His best work is mostly wordless. Or it uses gibberish, as in this famous strip.

A few themes:

Owners.

Workers. (Uber, anyone?)

Politicians.

Law and order.

Reading/dreaming. (He is very good at drawing dreams.)

More reading.

Loneliness (one).

Loneliness (two).

Death (one).

Death (two).

The closest thing in this country is The Far Side. But Quino draws better, and with a certain grandeur.

Eminent historians

Staying at home while Karin goes to work is just terrible. Oh, I have job applications and other writing projects to do. But most of the day, I’m bored out of my brain.

I’ve also been too restless to read much – from print sources, that is. Somehow, the computer screen keeps me glued to it all day.

I’ll mention a few recent readings and then be done.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

My dad linked to this article by Gregory H. Shill in the Atlantic about how U.S. law unjustly favors driving. The article is a condensed version of this much longer paper, also well worth a look.

(There was a time when I wanted to write a philosophical polemic against driving, or at least against law that encourages it, but I doubt I could improve on the work of Prof. Shill.)

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

On a totally different subject, the eminent British historian Richard J. Evans has published, in the Guardian, a savage obituary of the eminent British historian Norman Stone.

A student of Stone’s replies here, and the Spectator, while not exactly disagreeing with Evans, defends Stone here.

Long ago, Stone himself published a savage obituary of the eminent British historian E.H. Carr in the London Review of Books. Here is a quotation:

In 1961 [Carr] delivered six lectures to [his Cambridge] Faculty on the theme ‘What is History?’: it may count as his most successful book, for there is a keen appetite in schools for this boring subject, and the paperback volume is frequently reprinted. It is probably as much a mistake to ask a working historian to discuss this theme as to ask a painter to give his views on aesthetics. Carr had not much more to offer than a version of Fifties progressivism: history teaches respect for the present, or, better still, the Soviet present. In places, it read like a Marxist 1066 and All That. It does, however, begin well, perhaps even brilliantly.

I have a copy of What Is History: it has always vexed me that I don’t know what history is. I also have Evans’s In Defense of History, because I don’t know what history is for.

Stone may or may not have been right that a working historian isn’t especially able to tackle the philosophical questions. But I wonder if his own refusal to tackle them was, fundamentally, what divided him from those he criticized and who now criticize him.

Submission

I turned in the dissertation. The last days of writing it were just awful. I felt like Daffy Duck trying to write the end of The Scarlet Pumpernickel.

The dissertation is about as looney as The Scarlet Pumpernickel, too.

No, really, it’s pretty bad.

Karin & I will begin our journey to Ithaca tomorrow (Friday). We’ll spend the night at an Airbnb near Cleveland and arrive in the Finger Lakes region on Saturday.

I’ll defend the dissertation on Thursday at 3:30.

An announcement has gone out around the philosophy department so that faculty can decide whether to attend the defense. I hope no one does, except my committee members. Then I hope they give me the chance to revise a lot of Chapter IV, and maybe the other chapters, too, and to take a bunch of things out. Really, the dissertation is pretty bad. I shudder to think of its being uploaded to ProQuest in its current state.