Adrian Mole: The cappuccino years

At 10:00pm not-quite-four-year-old Daniel runs through the house like a madman, or a young cat. So he does most nights.

So Samuel used to do. But now he must rise for Kindergarten, and has conditioned himself to retire before eight o’clock.

Abel, at thirteen months, sleeps last. He has taken a turn toward ultraviolence.

Adrian Mole is in his fifth book. He is thirty years old. He has two sons. One of them, he recognizes as his son. The reader recognizes them both. Adrian isn’t the most self-aware diarist.

It’s the 1990s. Blair is the new Prime Minister. Adrian works as an offal chef at Hoi Polloi, a Tory restaurant. In his spare time he scripts an unsold radio serial, The Windsors, about the Royal Family. Princess Diana’s death scuttles Adrian’s plot. Adrian’s own life seems plotless, notwithstanding his acquisition of sons.

His parents also are chronic failures – after a livelier fashion (even what with Adrian’s father’s depression). The most impressive figure in this book is Adrian’s mother, who unexpectedly succeeds as a ghostwriter, spinkling pages with unsolicited references to Germaine Greer (author of The Female Eunuch).

“Philistines” always succeed where Adrian fails.

Adrian considers writing to be his vocation. Thus he wastes time agonizing over semicolons.

Pity. He is eloquent.

I sometimes wish I lived in pre-feminist times when if a man washed a teaspoon he was regarded as “a big Jessie.” It must have been great when women did all the work, and men just lolled about reading the paper.

I asked my father about those days when we were preparing the Brussels sprouts, the carrots and the potatoes, etc., etc. His eyes took on a faraway misty look. “It was a golden age,” he said, almost choking with emotion. “I’m only sorry that you never lived to see it as an adult man. I’d come home from work, my dinner would be on the table, my shirts ironed, my socks in balls. I didn’t know how to turn the stove on, let alone cook on the bleeding thing.” His eyes then narrowed, his voice became a hiss as he said, “That bloody Germaine Greer ruined my life. Your mother was never the same after reading that bleeding book.”

Bear in mind that Adrian is on the liberal end of the political spectrum.

I reflected on his feelings as I chopped vegetables for our “hobo’s stew.”

Body-text fonts, pt. 31: Scala

The font.

Comparisons to Electra and Joanna are apt: not for actual shape so much as for, I dunno, a shared ideal of conspicuous unadornedness.

This early ’90s typeface (in terms of birthday, not heydey) is used here in a collection of writings by an art-history-informed feminist whose “moment” was the early ’90s.

I’m no accomplished gender theorist, but I do think it should count in favor of a theory of gender that it harbors resources to predict, or at least retrospectively explain, the widespread “gendering” of non-persons: words, objects, animal species, topographical features, and so on (in this passage: religion-types).

Typefaces, as designers and marketers often describe them, are manly or womanly.

Scala, Electra and Joanna, if womanly – as their names suggest – are so in a prickly, thorny way.

I’ll post about Electra and Joanna later.

Some wisdom from Mary Midgley

Here is a short and (for us) timely piece written in the 1950s by the philosopher Mary Midgley. It’s lovely from beginning to end – in many ways.

The topic of abortion is introduced in the last paragraph, which I quote here (but do read the earlier paragraphs first, if you are up to it):

Great men, simply by their ignorance of a topic, can lay a remarkably strong taboo on the mention of it even where it happens to be entirely relevant. I saw a singular instance of this lately in a correspondence about the law of abortion. A writer pointed out that many women who had wished to be rid of their child two months after conception were eager to bear it three months later, and finished apologetically, “Expect no logic from a pregnant woman.” But of course there was nothing wrong with the logic. The premises were changed. A child at two months feels like an ailment; at five months it feels like a child. The woman had passed from the belief, “I am not well” to the belief, “I am now two people.” And the only thing wrong with that belief is that it is one which is unfamiliar to logicians. That, I suspect, is an unphilosophic objection.

One might disagree that the mother’s feelings during pregnancy shed light upon the moral status of the unborn child (or upon the mother’s moral position vis-à-vis her child). But the burden of proof lies with the person who’d discount those feelings.

What’s cavalier is this sort of attitude:

P.S. Midgley’s piece was rejected when it was drafted. It appears now in The Raven,

a magazine of original philosophy written for intellectually curious readers with or without academic training in the discipline. It aims to revive an essayistic style of philosophy that was more common in academic venues as recently as thirty years ago but has gradually disappeared – that is, to publish contributions to the “literature” that deserve to be called literature.

P.P.S. I want to make one rejoinder to Midgley’s piece. It’s true that Descartes never married; but he did have a daughter, Francine, who died young. He’s thought to have been profoundly affected by the experience.

P.P.P.S. Just how solitary is Descartes’s theory of knowledge, anyway? Yes, the meditator’s own consciousness is the “Archimedean point” from which he comes to know the world. But when he examines his consciousness, he detects another person: a person more perfect than himself: a person whose commitment not to deceive, whose commitment vis-à-vis the meditator, is what enables the meditator to know the world. This may still be “adolescent.” A youth hopes that contact with one other person will open a window onto the world. But that’s not so self-centered as when a philosopher accepts the Cartesian starting-point and then tries to gather knowledge without looking to another person – outside, or inside, himself.