A story

“Of the Coming of John”: the only fictional chapter in Du Bois’s Souls of Black Folk, the book that my reading group discussed tonight.

There are similarities to Twain’s Puddin’head Wilson. What this means, I’m not sure.

I’m too tired to say more.

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Update (7 Feb): Good morning! Last night, I left the blogging until the last minute, and fell asleep.

’Tis the season! I bought Karin some roses. A week early, yes. But the opportunity presented itself, and I thought that this year I wouldn’t leave things until the deadline.

There was a table at the supermarket with bouquets and cute little buckets. I chose a bucket with roses because I knew those flowers wouldn’t poison the cats. I brought it home.

Uh, that’s a bush, for planting, said Karin.

Trouble is, we’d agreed to uproot an existing rosebush from our yard.

Could you have it on your desk, at work?, I asked.

Not enough sun.

The moral is, what matters isn’t to be early but to put thought into your gesture! It’s the thought that counts! (A corollary is, the supermarket pretends to be helpful by putting these displays near the checkout area, but it isn’t! It’s just rushing you! Beware!)

The Gulf of America, pt. 2

For the text of the executive order, click here.

Renaming the Gulf has one thing going for it, historian Greg Grandin comments.

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Re: oil spillage. This afternoon, while I was bottle-feeding Abel, Daniel got his mitts on our sesame oil. Let’s just say that the kitchen, hallway, and bathroom smell delicious now.

Actually, Daniel and Samuel were pretty good today. I’d worried because it was Karin’s first day back at work – my first full day alone with all three boys.

Daniel took a turn bottle-feeding Abel. He kept getting him to smile.

Abel has dimples.

Update: Samuel and Daniel both poured out the sesame oil. Samuel confessed.

They poured much of it onto Karin’s potted mint plant. That poor thing is subjected to unimaginable abuse. Yet it survives.

Disasters

Sad news from Morocco: 2,900 killed by an earthquake. Sadder news from Libya: 11,300 killed by Storm Daniel. In Libya, dams broke, and there was considerable flooding.

Libyan watering projects have long been vexed. The country’s infrastructure is discussed in this two-year-old video by Un mundo inmenso:

There are no rivers in Libya, the video says. Well, it depends on what is meant by river. Libya’s Derna region has long been vulnerable to flooding, a fact which, to outsiders, might seem mysterious or paradoxical. It isn’t so to desert dwellers for whom the concept of a wadi is old hat.

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Pray for Samuel tonight. He may have eaten a few berries of toxic bittersweet nightshade. What I’m sure of is that he put some into his mouth and spit them out. (He insists they were delicious.)

He shows no ill effects, but their onset may be delayed as long as nineteen hours post-ingestion.

A weed is a plant out of place

Karin got one of her largest paychecks of the year and went “hog wild” – literally – buying such a huge hunk of “clearance” pork that I had to lug it through the house for her.

Said she: “I’ll ask Scott” – her new stepfather – “to smoke it for us.”

Nothing doing. Karin’s mom & Scott moved into a new house this weekend. They no longer have access to their smoker.

I’m all for putting the pork into various slow cookers and then shredding it and eating it with homemade “Alabama” sauce.

(See, I am become a middle-aged man who talks about his meats.)

By the end of the week, we should have the picnic table that I ordered through Facebook Marketplace. I’ve been fond of picnic tables since I was in high school. I and my dorm-mates used to enjoy suppers out of doors.

Karin & I tend to pursue our respective “home improvement” ideas independently of one another. Her ambition for the back yard, tonight, was to pull out weeds that no one sees. This was complicated by her confusion as to what is and what isn’t a weed. I told her about a passage in Jim Thompson that I read not long ago, in which Lou Ford’s defense lawyer tells him a definition that comes “right out of the agronomy books”:

“A weed is a plant out of place.” I find a hollyhock in my cornfield, and it’s a weed. I find it in my yard, and it’s a flower. … You’re in my garden, Mr. Ford.

I’ve been revisiting the nineties’ contextualist epistemologists, whom I briefly studied many years ago, in order to read the aughts’ “pragmatic encroachment” epistemologists (whose work I was downright oblivious to at the time). Keith DeRose, in a recent collection of old and new essays, is apologetic because his “Solving the Skeptical Problem” is such a long paper. David Lewis ends his famous paper, “Elusive Knowledge,” by saying that although he could have written it longer, and nearer to the truth, that wouldn’t have been in anyone’s interest. His paper displays a certain amount of formalism thrown about informally, together with casual references to guys named Fred and Donald in the vicinity of San Francisco, in service of a view with Chestertonian paradoxicality. An insider’s paper: important, but surely a pain to teach. A paper with weed-like qualities in just about any home garden.

A new season

No tutoring this last week, but plenty of busyness: (1) attending meetings and turning in paperwork; (2) reading textbooks (and a few secondary sources); (3) writing essay prompts and syllabi.

(2) and (3) have been pretty exciting. I chose each textbook because of its fonts. And I’m writing my IUSB course documents in Plantin and my Bethel documents in Photina.

Next week — Monday! — I’ll begin teaching. And during the nights I’ll be packing up my books to move out of my apartment. This has been a convenient but pricey place in which to live.

Where will I end up? I don’t know. Mary & Martin have offered to host me until I find somewhere better.

They just bought a house near Bethel. Their yard has a hot tub in it, with a large fence for privacy. Between the fence and the sidewalk, flowers grow out of a narrow strip of dirt. I told Mary & Martin to clear out the flowers and to plant tomatoes for public use: “Mishawaka Unity Garden.”

Along the eastern boundary of the yard is a noisy road. The western boundary nearly touches a power station.

Others might recoil, but I find the scenery quite charming. Industrialism, traffic: I am able to glean comfort from such things. I will miss the river, though. And it will be sad not to be able to walk so easily to my church.