Postmortem

So, we failed to score against Curaçao, arguably the World Cup’s weakest participant – certainly its smallest. This is no surprise. Scoring is the surprise. Every goal of the last two four-year cycles has seemed miraculous. Enner, our country’s greatest scorer, is not a reliable scorer; he, too, is gripped by the national malaise.

My blood ran cold very early on, after Enner’s first miss. I knew it would be almost impossible to win.

It wasn’t a matter of not creating chances. Enner (and others) had chances.

It wasn’t a deficiency of technique. Enner has technique. And he has noûs. He does brilliantly until the final touch, and then he scuffs, or aims at the wrong side, or shoots too softly.

What of the longer-term perspective? How might the strategists have failed?

It’s not a matter of not having dredged the talent pool for better strikers. I doubt there are better ones. One could always scout farther afield or try out prolific scorers from the domestic league. But … I’ve watched Ecuador a long time. Even our best strikers have had miserable conversion rates with the national team.

We have no automatic scorers. No Ecuadorian believes that scoring for Ecuador is his God-given right.

Ecuadorians can believe in themselves to keep goals out, to win the ball, to pass or dribble around opponents. But tabulation is of another order.

It’s like accumulating riches. Talent, luck, and elbow grease can bring in large sums. But financial dominance requires illegal or legal ruthlessness: cheating, gouging, strongarming, or hoarding. In any case: a tremendous sense of entitlement.

For better or worse – for better, I’d say – an entitled attitude is something very few Ecuadorians have. Especially when they measure themselves, as Ecuadorians, against other nationalities.

It’s a thousand times easier for another smallish and good-willed country – Norway – to produce a goal-gobbler like Erling Haaland. Firstly, because his sort never worries about getting enough to eat. And secondly, because the Norwegians know their ancestors were Vikings. (If you don’t think old history inspires them, well, you need to watch more reels of Norwegian soccer players.)

Not that Haaland is a baddie. But one can understand why he has no trouble accepting that his destiny is to score goals.

Our next game is against Germany. Ecuador must win to advance. We could outplay the Germans. They’ve not impressed, and I do think we’re that good. But will we score?

It could happen. But it would be a miracle.

Prolongation of woe

I.e., puking. Only Abel has been spared. We’ve brought the TV upstairs so as to get to the toilet promptly. Karin gallantly has been letting the children use the toilet first. She makes due in the hallway with her bucket.

Daniel, poor boy, is on his second cycle with this bug, having been symptomless one glorious week.

I’m well enough right now. I dread the second cycle.

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I’m teaching Samuel how footnotes work, using Barbara Holland’s Hail to the Chiefs. He’ll grow up thinking that studying history is fun.

Other reading:

• François Mauriac, A Kiss for the Leper (a mini-book)
• Voltaire, Candide (a re-read; a mini-book)
• N. T. Wright, God’s Big Picture Bible Storybook
• books, as yet unfinished, mentioned in previous entries

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R.I.P. Chuck Norris, aged eighty-six. And Robert Mueller.

Timothy Dexter

Ecuador is mentioned in the first sentence of the main body of the Harper’s Weekly Review.

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The Facebook bots kindly shared a mini-bio, in Spanish, of Timothy Dexter (1747–1806), history’s hombre más suertudo (luckiest man). It was intriguing enough that I went on to read Dexter’s Wikipedia bio. Then I read that bio aloud to Karin.

Certain commonalities with our President suggested themselves. Dexter, however, made money instead of losing it. And he didn’t start out with money from his father; he extracted it from his rich wife, whom he abused.

In business, he seems to have been lucky and devilishly intuitive, e.g. he turned a profit literally “shipping coal to Newcastle” (the proverbial expression for exporting to a saturated market).

I don’t intend to read any full-length biographies of Timothy Dexter. But I went looking anyway. The major ones are from the 1800s. The last notable book, the most recent edition of which is 65 years old, is by John P. Marquand – like Dexter, of Newburyport, Mass. – the author of the “Mr. Moto” fictions and of the Pulitzer-winning, satirical Late George Apley. I wonder how serious his treatment of Dexter is.

Body-text fonts, pt. 46: Albertina

This’ll rankle people: “2026 World Cup ‘Pride Match’ to Feature Egypt and Iran” (BBC).

A 2026 World Cup fixture designated by organisers as an LGBTQ+ “Pride Match” will feature two countries where homosexuality is illegal. …

The plans were put in place before the teams involved in the fixture were selected or the draw for the 2026 World Cup was made.

The moral of this story is … [I leave it as an exercise for the reader].

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Re: the font.

In a not-too-wild alternate reality, universities decline less severely, and I obtain gainful employment. I teach classes and publish ten-page articles: some, in top journals; others, in Curaçaoan semi-annuals. Each article is repeatedly anthologized.

In time, I issue a pithy book. Then another. Then a third and a fourth. (I write bestselling mysteries on the side.)

I’m respected enough that it doesn’t matter with whom I publish the fourth academic book. Perhaps I choose Indiana, out of loyalty to the state; perhaps, a trade press (Norton? Penguin?). Perhaps I self-publish and do all the typesetting myself.

The first book, I publish in the “Cambridge Studies in Philosophy” series; the third, a dauntingly terse work, with “Princeton Monographs in Philosophy.”

What interests me tonight is the second book, issued, obligatorily, with Oxford. (“Obligatorily” because Oxford has just about cornered the market of the best academic books. The alternate reality isn’t so different that the major players have changed.)

The trouble with Oxford, as a publisher, is its meager font menu and tiny print size.

My Oxford font choice is Albertina for its long-tailed lowercase “y.”

(This specimen is from Barry Cunliffe’s By Steppe, Desert, and Ocean: The Birth of Eurasia, a lovely book that I got from the exchanging-box outside my library, for free.)

Body-text fonts, pt. 43: Spectral

Last week: Paraguay 0, Ecuador 0.

Tonight: Ecuador 1, Argentina 0.

We concluded South America’s World Cup qualification tournament with:

• qualification
• a victory over the World Cup champions
• a final position as runners-up (trailing only the aforementioned champions)
• a total of five goals conceded in eighteen games – the joint-lowest total in the tournament’s history
• a streak of five “clean sheets” (games with no goals conceded)
• a streak of eleven undefeated games

I think it was after the goalless draw in Uruguay, with eight games to play, that I predicted we wouldn’t lose again.

The bad news is that tonight, Moisés Caicedo received two yellow cards and was ejected. The second yellow card was extremely doubtful. The referee, who’d been obliged to eject an Argentinian, seemed to be trying to even up the numbers.

I’m sure we’ll appeal to CONMEBOL. Let’s pray that no suspension is enforced.

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Having recovered from injury and illness, I mowed the shin-high backyard grass. It was slow going, but painless … until, some hours afterward, my hip and ankle began to trouble me.

Then, today, I threw out my back.

Either I get sidelined due to a foot puncture – or sinusitus – and suffer; or I recover, then mow, then suffer.

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The font Spectral is common on the internet, especially on Substack (which only allows, what, four fonts?).

Too small? Click here; read the “Thunder Gun Express” of Substack posts. It’s just a very long summary of Niccolao Mannuci’s very long travelogue and history of Mughal India – the “Thunder Gun Express” of books.

Which I only learned about yesterday. It’s the awesomest book I’ve heard of. I’m not kidding.

Even if the Bible were turned into a wild AI-generated movie, it wouldn’t be as spectacular as this book.

But I doubt I’ll ever read the book, so thank goodness for the Substack post.

“A monument of misplaced scholarship”

… is how a Guardian reviewer describes a new edition of the diaries of Cambridge don and “Pomp and Circumstance”/​“Land of Hope and Glory” lyricist A. C. Benson (1862–1925).

Having previewed the book on Amazon, I concur.

See, for instance, p. 267, n. 4 (the font is Fournier).

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Samuel will return to school this week. Tonight, he realized that he’ll go to school from August until June every year for the foreseeable future.

I told him I went to school for twenty-four years.

He can count much higher than twenty-four, and he can do other mathematical operations – he and Daniel made extraordinary progress this summer (his teacher will be shocked) – but, clearly, the concept of twenty-four years is beyond his reach.

The concept of an hour is barely within it.

He has the concept of living forever. He’s all for it. Like Wilbur the pig, he doesn’t want to die.

Arendt, pt. 3

Perhaps Origins is just so huge, so comprehensive, that no matter what travesty might occur nowadays, it will have been foreshadowed in that book’s pages.

(I suspect that this very nearly is the case regarding some other interminable writings, e.g. Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy.)

Today’s historical parallel is with France’s notorious Dreyfus Affair, discussed in Origins, ch. 4. A mostly ordinary man – a member of an ethnic minority group – is shipped away and imprisoned. Probably, he is innocent; certainly, he is deprived of his basic procedural rights. His imprisoners, caught out, refuse to rectify their mistake. The incident divides society. One faction supports the prisoner. (If his rights are so egregiously disregarded, why trust the state to uphold others’ rights?) The other faction supports his captors. (Who’ll protect the nation if the captors lose face?)

The current travesty is less awful than the Dreyfus Affair in two ways: many politicians and ordinary people already support Kilmar Armando Ábrego García, and judges already have insisted on due process. Whether the righteous prevail remains to be seen. (And if you don’t know which side is behaving righteously, see this.) If the righteous do prevail, this item by Judge Harvie Wilkinson, a Reagan appointee, ought to become a classic. It was written for posterity. It will be anthologized. If highschoolers can still read, they will be made to read it. (A PDF is here.)

See, also:

France and the Dreyfus Affair: A Brief Documentary History

Prisoner of Honor (1991; dir. Ken Russell; feat. Richard Dreyfuss)

An Officer and a Spy (2019; orig. J’accuse; dir. Roman Polanski; feat. Jean Dujardin)

More Arendt

… which I’m sure you were itching to read this morning.

But first, an item of local interest: a graduate of nearby Goshen College is the author of the Library of America’s latest “story of the week.”

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From Origins, chapter 7:

It took the Boers several decades to understand that [British] imperialism was nothing to be afraid of, since it would neither develop the country as Australia and Canada had been developed, nor draw profits from the country at large, being quite content with a high turnover of investments in one specific field [gold mining]. Imperialism therefore was willing to abandon the so-called laws of capitalist production and their egalitarian tendencies, so long as profits from specific investments were safe. This led eventually to the abolition of the law of mere profitableness and South Africa became the first example of a phenomenon that occurs whenever the mob becomes the dominant factor in the alliance between mob and capital.

In one respect, the most important one, the Boers remained the undisputed masters of the country: whenever rational labor and production policies came into conflict with race considerations, the latter won. Profit motives were sacrificed time and again to the demands of a race society, frequently at a terrible price. The rentability of the railroads was destroyed overnight when the government dismissed 17,000 Bantu employees and paid white wages that amounted to 200 per cent more; expenses for municipal government became prohibitive when native municipal employees were replaced with whites; the Color Bar Bill finally excluded all black workers from mechanical jobs and forced industrial enterprise to a tremendous increase of production costs. The race world of the Boers had nobody to fear any more, least of all white labor, whose trade unions complained bitterly that the Color Bar Bill did not go far enough.

The racism described here is race-rule. Boer clans subsisted by forcing native tribes to farm for them. They didn’t want this arrangement upset by the development of industry or bureaucracy. (They got their wish.)

“Mob” in Arendt refers to the agglomeration of misfits: people excluded from the workings of a polity: people fulfilling no communal organizational or economic function. Mere hoarders of wealth; speculators; subsistence farmers; unemployed workers (the individualistic ones, not those moved by solidarity).

As separatist farmers, Boer clans belonged to the mob. So did people involved in the gold rush: investors as well as individual miners. Rich and poor.

Mob-rule occurs when such people use politics to prevent the development of “normal” governance and commerce. For example: Jews

settled down permanently into a unique position for a white group. [Footnote: “Jews constituted roughly one-third of the total immigration to South Africa in the twenties, and … in sharp contrast to all other categories of uitlanders, settled there permanently; their share in the annual emigration is less than a per cent.”] They neither belonged to the “lifeblood” of Africa nor to the “poor white trash.” Instead they started almost immediately to build up those industries and professions which according to South African opinion are “secondary” because they are not connected with gold. Jews became manufacturers of furniture and clothes, shopkeepers and members of the professions, physicians, lawyers, and journalists. In other words, no matter how well they thought they were adjusted to the mob conditions of the country and its race attitude, Jews had broken its most important pattern by introducing into South African economy a factor of normalcy and productivity, with the result that when Mr. Malan introduced into Parliament a bill to expel all Jews from the Union he had the enthusiastic support of all poor whites and of the whole Afrikander population.

The timeless lesson is that it behooves the most speculative and exploitative businessmen – captains of mostly useless industries (extraction of ornamental minerals, space exploration, gambling, luxurious transportation and housing) – to maintain a dysfunctional society: to lord it over desperate, disconnected, disaffected workers and voters. Plodding but sound officials and workers who bring order to chaos are best eliminated. Energetic immigrants who do so are best kept out. You can see how this describes our own moment.

As I read, I’m tempted to draw analogies between past and present, almost to treat Arendt as an oracle. Of course I don’t know enough to judge whether she gets the past right. And the analogies that suggest themselves in certain moods seem farfetched in others. How closely can Obama really be likened to Arendt’s Disraeli? I don’t know.

Eclipses

Karin has had a cold all week; the boys have been sick even longer. I caught it two days ago. My dad has been watching the Final Four with us; he has a cold, too.

I’ve been ill during many NCAA tournaments. I’m used to watching with blankets and medicine and tea. It must have something to do with the time of year.

My neighbors have been mowing their lawns. It’s warm enough, and our grass certainly is long enough, but I’m just not up to doing it.

And now, the business on everyone’s mind: Monday’s eclipse.

Karin had talked of traveling to Indianapolis, into the path of totality. Bad idea, she decided. The highway will be crammed.

As for me, the memory of the 2017 event is fresh. It was a time of joy and solidarity on the IUSB campus. All too brief. The recollection literally pains me; it makes me squint.

Eclipses are better to study, or to read about, or to imagine, than to view. I recently came across one in King Solomon’s Mines; it was the usual rot about science-minded explorers displaying their “magic” in front of savages. It should be noted, however, that the idea of carrying eclipse-mania through “exotic” lands has a basis in the actual history of science.

I read this, yesterday, in Herodotus (Robin Waterfield, trans.):

The war lasted for five years and although plenty of battles went the Medes’ way, just as many went the Lydians’ way too. They even once fought a kind of night battle. In the sixth year, when neither side had a clear advantage over the other in the war, an engagement took place and it so happened that in the battle day suddenly became night. Thales of Miletus had predicted this loss of daylight to the Ionians by establishing in advance that it would happen within the limits of the year in which it did in fact happen. When the Lydians and the Medes saw that night had replaced day, they did not just stop fighting; both sides also more actively wanted an end to the war. Peace between them was brokered by Syennesis of Cilicia and Labynetus of Babylon, who were anxious that the two sides should enter into a formal peace treaty and arranged for there to be mutual ties of marriage between them. That is, they decided that Allyates should give his daughter Aryenis in marriage to Cyaxeres’ son Astyages, on the grounds that strong treaties tend not to last in the absence of strong ties. These people formalize their treaties in the same way the Greeks do, with the extra feature that when they cut into the skin of their arms, each party licks the other’s blood.

Here is the famous picture of my family observing an eclipse in Esmeraldas (perhaps in 1991). David is shooting it with a machine gun.

A passion for exactitude

It’s time for a long quotation from the philosopher Michael Dummett. I mention him once or twice every ten years.

(I just realized that, as of December, I’ve been blogging for twenty years. I started on Xanga, and when that service became costly I switched to Blogger/​Blogspot. I may write a recapitulation soon.)

This is from pp. 3–5 of Voting Procedures (1984), one of Dummett’s excursions into what, for him, is “popular” philosophy.

In view of all this, one would expect that voting procedures and their operation would have been the subject of a considerable amount of intellectual enquiry. One would expect also that the results of such investigations would be well known both to political and social theorists and to all those concerned with practical affairs, and would be applied both by those who have frequently to take part in voting and, above all, by those concerned to devise voting procedures to be as fair and as satisfactory as possible. Of these two natural expectations, the first is indeed satisfied, but the second hardly at all. In the period since the end of the Second World War, a considerable body of theory concerning voting has been built up. This topic was pioneered by Professor Duncan Black, an economist, who published some articles about it in the late 1940s, and a book, The Theory of Committees and Elections, in 1958: an important contribution, not expressed specifically in terms of voting, was made by Professor Kenneth Arrow in his book Social Choice and Individual Values of 1951 [see note 1 below]. Since then, and especially in the last two decades, the theory initiated by Black and Arrow has been extensively developed, principally in articles published in learned journals. One of the most surprising features of all this is how recent this work is. Duncan Black devoted a section of his book to a historical survey. From this it emerged that almost the only serious work on the theory of voting that had previously been done was carried out in France just before and during the Revolution, by Borda, Condorcet, and Laplace; this work had subsequently been almost entirely forgotten, save by a few British mathematicians of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, who made insignificant contributions to it. A minor exception, not noticed by Black, is the unimpressive section devoted to the subject by the German philosopher Hermann Lotze in his Logik of 1874. The only exception mentioned by Black is the remarkable intervention by C. L. Dodgson (Lewis Carroll), contained in three pamphlets which he wrote in complete ignorance of the work of his predecessors, and which were directed at the voting procedure to be adopted by the governing body of Christ Church, Oxford, to which he belonged [see note 2 below].

[Note 1:] See the Bibliography for works by Arrow and Black. Arrow’s possibility theorem (more exactly called an impossibility theorem) is so fundamental to the subject that he is often credited with having been the modern initiator of it, especially since his basic notation has become standard. This is unfair to Black, who was the real twentieth-century pioneer of the theory of voting, as well as a diligent researcher into its earlier history; it may be due in part to the fact that, although Black’s original papers on the subject appeared in 1948–9, his book was not published until 1958, while Arrow’s celebrated monograph came out in 1951. Black was, in particular, the originator of the concept of single-peakedness (not used in the present book), with which Arrow is sometimes credited but which he in fact took over from Black. Single-peakedness is a condition which guarantees the existence of a top. For the case when some preference scales are weak, the condition was weakened by Farquharson and myself in our paper of 1961; alternative though analogous sufficient conditions were later given by Inada, Sen, and Pattanaik.

[Note 2:] See the Bibliography. It is a matter for the deepest regret that Dodgson never completed the book that he planned to write on the subject. Such were his lucidity of exposition and his mastery of the topic that it seems possible that, had he ever published it, the political history of Britain would have been significantly different.

I especially like Dummett’s asides on Dodgson (Carroll) and the also-ran, Lotze.

Once, eleven years ago, I mentioned Dummett by way of griping about George Saunders. Since then, I’ve read and enjoyed four full books by Saunders and zero by Dummett. It wouldn’t hurt to finish Dummett’s trenchant On Immigration and Refugees; completing one of his Frege books, much as I adore them (all too often uncomprehendingly, it must be admitted), is above my pay grade.

Mitfords, pt. 5

Another monstrosity: Pigeon Pie, a war novel.

At first, it seems a subdued, almost contrite work: an about-face from the fervid, jolly cynicism of Wigs on the Green.

It doesn’t stay that way. By the end, it outdoes its predecessor.

It was written in 1939. Nancy’s sister, Unity, the Hitler enthusiast, had just tried to commit suicide. The war had just begun. Heady days.

Dunkirk … the Battle of Britain … the Blitz … all were forthcoming.

The novel mocks Germans, Lord Haw-Haw, aristocratic volunteerism, the Cabinet, the House of Lords, parachutists, and real and pretending spies. The titular pigeons are messenger pigeons. None is actually baked in a pie. Some, bearing intelligence to the Nazis, are shot down over the Channel.

A surprising number of Germans drown underneath London, in the drains.

The heroine is an utter nitwit.

I confess I am very glad to have read this book.

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Daniel went to the physician again today (his own doctor, not the WIC doctor) and got shots. Karin had promised him a treat. She bought him some McDonald’s. They wouldn’t sell her a chicken McGriddle (the best kind). Maybe they don’t sell chicken at breakfast-time anymore. A bore, as the characters say in Mitford. I stayed home with Samuel, who played enthusiastically and in peace.

Since last week, we have had 60-degree (F) temperatures, then snow, then 60-degree temperatures (likely to climb to 70); snow is expected two days from now.

Mitfords, pt. 3; body-text fonts, pt. 24: Sabon

Watching Branagh’s Much Ado, in installments. Samuel runs around yelling, “Hey, nonny nonny.”

Reading N. Mitford’s Wigs on the Green, a comic novel about an aristocratic teenage fascist. Somehow I didn’t expect this kind of heroine, although I knew about the Mitford sisters: “Diana the Fascist, Jessica the Communist, Unity the Hitler-lover; Nancy the Novelist; Deborah the Duchess and Pamela the unobtrusive poultry connoisseur” (Ben Macintyre’s descriptions, although he qualifies them as “caricatures”).

The novel is Springtime for Hitler-esque, but from before WW2 (1935).

I can understand why this family has a cult following. But the more I look into the Mitfords’ background, the less fantastical and more soberly realistic the novels seem.

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Is there a name for the déjà vu-like feeling you get when you encounter the less recent past and relive the more recent past (or the present)? I got it today from some toilet-reading: the chapter on Andrew Jackson in Barbara Holland’s Hail to the Chiefs: Presidential Mischief, Morals & Malarkey from George W. to George W.

(The footnote says: “All except non-folks like women, blacks, and Indians.”)

The typeface is the Garamond-like Sabon.

(The footnote says: “ ‘Ignorant, passionate and imbicile’ and ‘fierce ungovernable temper’ were some of the kinder descriptions. Jefferson said he couldn’t possibly think of anyone worse to be President.”)

Notice how the italic letters are just as wide as the Roman letters. This feature is unusual for this sort of typeface. A successor, Sabon Next, has narrower italics.

Some projects for the back burner; body-text fonts, pt. 23: Linotype Palatino

Another winter with a too-full garage. Not a terrible thing so far – the snow hasn’t been heavy, the car has been all right outside – but we really ought to clear the space once the weather warms. Ditto for other parts of the house.

We need haircuts.

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Anyone want to buy me the Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Friendship (ed. Diane Jeske, 2021)? It’s only $178 on Amazon; that’s a markdown of 34%. Having ruminated on this topic for eight years or so – roughly, the period of my marriage – I’ve come up with my own “theory” of friendship and am hankering to turn it into a publication, but my grasp of the recent literature is infirm.

(My grasp of the older literature, too. And, arguably, of the phenomenon itself.)

(The examples that motivate my “theory” involve people throwing darts and drinking beer together, not so much improving each other’s characters or visiting each other’s sickbeds. I guess this is a masculinist “theory.”)

(I may also need a copy of Bartlett’s or some other reservoir of folk wisdom.)

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In April there’ll be a memorial conference for my PhD adviser, Dick. Much as I’d like to attend, I can hardly think that far ahead right now. My last big trip was just in October. Before that, I hadn’t traveled farther than two hours since 2019 (when I last saw Dick).

Coincidentally, I’ve been dreaming that I still have to defend my dissertation. It’s always a relief to wake up and realize that I finished. That was the mother of all back-burner projects.

Philosophers talk about how personal projects give our lives meaning, and maybe they do, but they also give us lots to worry about.

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This month’s body-text font, Linotype Palatino, is known by all and loved and hated in equal measure. It isn’t Hermann Zapf’s original Palatino design; it’s the font on everyone’s computer. I love it in movie titles. I like it in some books. I kinda hate when people create their own documents with it; they usually don’t put enough space between the lines.

It often appears in textbooks.

This amusing passage opens Warren Hollister’s Roots of the Western Tradition. (Had he actually been reading E. O. Wilson, or was he just helping himself to a metaphor fashionable during his time?) Later editions only get crankier. Mine, the sixth, says: “In our own time, the pace has become so swift that some dull-witted people” (my emphasis) “see no point in studying history at all.” Such language is not now indulged.

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Look at this frog.

1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 70: Citizen X

This 1995 HBO production is much, much better than the average made-for-cable movie of that period. I’ve seen it ten or fifteen times. It’s rewatchable because of the acting. I cherish each facial expression, every vocal intonation and contortion – even though the (Western) actors speak with Russian accents of varying thickness.

It’s based on the case of a notorious serial killer. It takes some historical liberties, one of which I’ll mention at the end of this review. How discrediting this is, I’m not sure. I can’t check all the facts, but I ought at least to read the book upon which the movie is based. Citizen X is superficially (and, therefore, deceptively) realistic; it’s hardly Amadeus, which a viewer can enjoy in good conscience as a kind of fable, realizing that much has been embellished.

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Rostov Oblast, early 1980s. A body is discovered in a field.

Search the woods, Burakov, the forensic specialist (Stephen Rea), tells one of his police underlings. That’s where this person was killed.

It’s almost five o’clock, the underling complains.

I don’t care what time it is. Search the woods.

That night, as Burakov is concluding his post-mortem, seven more bodies are wheeled into the lab.

Have a nice evening, says the underling.

And that is the basic pattern of the movie: Burakov works hard to catch the killer while others drag their feet.

It’s clear that we have a serial killer on our hands, Burakov reports to a committee of local Communist Party leaders. The most prolific in Soviet history.

The response is not encouraging. Serial killing is a decadent Western phenomenon.

No wonder nothing ever gets done, Burakov confides to his immediate superior: the smirking, urbane, politically astute Colonel Fetisov (Donald Sutherland). Fetisov is on the side of the angels. But he is not a conventionally nice man. He has just been mocking Burakov’s death-odor in front of the committee – Next time, a little less diligence, a little more hygiene – scoring cheap points against his detective in public. But he means to aid him, behind the scenes, in the long run.

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The killer (Jeffrey DeMunn) is an anxious little man. He recruits his victims in train stations. Most are young. He lures them into the forest and stabs them to achieve sexual gratification.

The camera lingers on him after his killings.

No glib psychopath he. We see him on the prowl, awkward with potential victims, avoiding police, receiving tongue-lashings from his boss and his wife. Always wretched. Always bracing himself for the hammer-blow. He exudes as much dread in daily life as he does in his execution scene. It’s a haunting performance.

(The movie says little about his background, which is as harrowing as anything else in the story.)

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But the heart of the movie is the interplay between Burakov and Fetisov. Burakov is passionate and direct; Fetisov, ironical and cunning. Fetisov, especially, utters some delicious lines.

Burakov: He finds his victims on the trains!

Fetisov: I have never ridden the trains, but they do sometimes impede my limousine.

(Dick, my PhD adviser, used to talk like this; he, too, was on the side of the angels.)

Each man, in his own way, works for the good.

Toward the end of the movie, Burakov and Fetisov recruit a psychiatrist – Max Von Sydow, in a small but winsome role – who, congratulating them on an investigative success, delivers this line: May I say that together, you make a wonderful person.

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Now, the inaccuracies. The investigation spans twelve years. The characters don’t age. Burakov has young children; they stay young. This might be an oversight, or it might be a deliberate artistic choice. Not aging, Burakov’s children subtly bring to mind the children who’ve been killed, who’ll never grow up, who haunt Burakov’s dreams.

The more serious inaccuracy – the fabrication – is Burakov’s recurring conflict with the committee of Communist Party leaders, and especially with an ogrish, blockheaded bully played by Joss Ackland (in another entertaining performance) who seethes from the end of the table whenever Burakov reports on the investigation.

I’ve read that there was no such conflict in real life. (Again, I’d have to check the book to make sure.) Bureaucratic idiocies did exist in the Soviet Union, but they may not have been so influential in this case.

The fabrication adds drama to the story, and it makes Burakov’s heroism more poignant; it also establishes why Fetisov must operate as he does. Arguably, the fabrication is artistically necessary. The story isn’t much of a procedural. The haphazardness of the policing (not Burakov’s, but the force’s) deprives this crime story of the usual pleasure that comes from watching an investigation logically unfold. Instead, the movie is driven by its personalities; and these are compelling because of what they must overcome.

I won’t decide whether the inaccuracy is fatal to the movie. I simply don’t know enough. But it remains true that the movie is absorbing to watch, with characters who are movingly played.

Body-text fonts, pt. 22: Caslon no. 540

“Colorado Supreme Court Disqualifies Trump from State’s 2024 Ballot.”

Another in a long list of amazing yet ho-hum headlines about Donald Trump.

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Congrats, again, to Alexander Domínguez for carrying Liga de Quito to a championship – this time, in the domestic league. He stopped two spot kicks in Liga’s shootout victory over Independiente del Valle.

The prodigy Kendry Páez scored IDV’s goal.

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At least four parties to go, and I’m already Christmas-partied out. The partying hasn’t been bad, but the gorging has been. For the first time in years, I’m repulsed by the prospect of eating cookies and potato chips.

Come to think of it, I ate cookies and potato chips today. At home.

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There are thinner and fatter Caslons; of the fatties, my favorite is Caslon no. 540.

The italics are … dramatic. Good for occasional emphasis; bad in bibliographies.

The dubiously named QualiType Caslan is a serviceably priced (i.e. free) imitation of this typeface.

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.

Disasters, pt. 2; body-text fonts, pt. 19: Linux Libertine

Samuel is fine; he seems not to have been harmed at all by the toxic berries that he put into his mouth on Friday.

Thank you, readers, for your prayers and your concern.

Today, my children have been dumping their grits and eggs onto the floor, sometimes accidentally, sometimes not.

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This month’s typeface is Linux Libertine, which is free to download and use, and which supplies glyphs for virtually all characters of today’s Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, and Hebrew scripts (and some others). You’ve seen it in Wikipedia’s logo (which employs an alternate “W”).

I especially like the top serifs of Libertine’s “C” and “G” and the long-tailed “Q” of the “Qu” ligature. The “O” too is pleasingly not-quite-symmetrical.

On the other hand, I think the “Th” ligature is distracting and pointless. Disabling it while leaving other ligatures intact isn’t an option, but these letters can be pulled apart using a zero-point kern.

Libertine has a companion humanist sans-serif typeface: Linux Biolinum.

I don’t often see Libertine used as non-electronic body text, although linguists seem to like it because it prints such a wide range of letters, punctuation marks, etc. I own a couple of philosophic volumes from Princeton University Press that are set in Libertine.

Rick Steves; body-text fonts, pt. 18: Walbaum

Sometimes, after working all day, Karin is too tired to follow a plot. Then – and only then – she consents to watch Rick Steves’ Europe with me.

Tonight we watched “Southeast England” – Dover, Canterbury, Brighton, Portsmouth. There are some incredible tourist sights in these towns. And, the video makes clear, some incredible numbers of tourists. Thank goodness for YouTube.

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Inspired by Bodoni, first designed around 1800, Walbaum has been redrawn many times. Sometimes it’s heavy, sometimes it’s startlingly light.

The latter passage is set in Monotype Walbaum. This version is what you’re likeliest to come across in body text.

In 2018, Monotype released a large new Walbaum “family” with this heavier font and this lighter one (among others). These are the best Walbaums for body text, but I’ve yet to see books typeset with either of them.

Bailleul, which is free, is, for some purposes, a tolerable approximation.

Coincidence? I THINK NOT!

Yesterday, the postman delivered these things:

(1) The latest issue of Harper’s, with Ian Buruma’s cover story, “Doing the Work: The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Wokeness”;

and

(2) Elmer Gantry.

Then, today, my old history teacher, J.H., posted on Facebook about the article and the novel.

Someone has been snooping in my mailbox. …

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Daniel has been sleeping in until 9:30 or 10:00 a.m. and still managing to nap in the afternoon (today, from 1:30 to 4:00).

He’s most active around midnight, i.e., my bedtime.

Tonight he catnapped; but now, at 11:00, he’s vigorously “rocking out,” alternating between his little rocking-chair and Moby, his little rocking-whale.

Samuel is in the basement. He’s listening to nature sounds on Spotify. His bedtime routine is less eccentric than Daniel’s, but he’s increasingly particular about which track or YouTube video I play for him. He repeatedly changes his mind. Sometimes I’d like to just surrender the remote to him, but that’d be to abdicate my parental duty, wouldn’t it?

Training up my little “future guardians”

With Samuel I’m watching Schoolhouse Rock!, which I didn’t grow up with. He loves it. It sure is clever and catchy. Alas, the history it teaches is on a par with the myth of little George Washington and his cherry tree.

Having recently re-read those parts of the Republic that talk about primary schooling, I can’t but suspect that Socrates would have heartily approved of Schoolhouse Rock!

I do like the “I’m Just a Bill” song.

The science in the show isn’t much better than the history. Don’t burn too much fuel, or it’ll run out and we’ll all be cold, is one lesson from an episode broadcast in 1979. (Oil was expensive that year.) Samuel and I haven’t gotten to the later episodes, but I assume that the message has been quietly revised for the climate science videos of the late 2000s.

The body is a machine, says the episode about human anatomy.

A computer doesn’t have emotions or morality, a later episode says. It’s just a machine.

Combine these two lessons, and the implications are … disturbing.