R.I.P. Dolly Parton

… whose music I don’t know well – I confidently recall only her songs “Jolene,” “9 to 5,” and “Islands in the Stream” – but whose generosity I appreciate. My children have received dozens of free books from Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library.

Speaking of libraries: Abel has become almost impossible to supervise in actual ones. He climbs on tables, ravages displays, chews tips off markers, and dumps toy bins upside-down. I follow in his wake, cleaning his messes. Today, while I was picking up toys, he moved through the Spanish-language book section like a tornado, pulling several shelves’ worth of volumes onto the floor.

The library’s rules, unfortunately (or fortunately), do not permit me to reshelve books.

My two least favorite librarians were on duty – the ones who sternly call me “Sir.” They were kind this time.

Yes, it’s good that we receive plenty of books at home, thanks to Dolly Parton.

April’s poem

Whenever we open the front door, Daniel – clothed or unclothed – runs outside and hollers:

Owwweee-ah-ee-oh! Owwweee-ah-ee-oh!

I was puzzled for weeks but finally came across the source: a scene from Peppa Pig. Peppa, her schoolmates, and their teacher, Madame Gazelle, travel to the Swiss Alps; Peppa’s voice echoes off the mountains; Madame Gazelle demonstrates yodeling to her charges. Later, they pitch their tents and sing campfire songs.

Daniel loves this sort of thing. He also enjoys Story Hour at the library. He’s ripe for pre-K.

He’s fairly advanced, mathematically, too.

If only he’d behave.

This month’s poem is from Peppa Pig.

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

Peace and harmony

In all the world

Peace and harmony

In all the world

Peace and harmony

In all the world

Peace

And harmony

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

I’m glad that Daniel watches Peppa Pig, a calming influence.

Housebound

It’s only mid-December. Already, more snow has fallen than in an entire “average” winter. Or so I was told in church, and I believe it.

Nearly-four-year-old Daniel has cabin fever. He suggested we go strolling around the block. I explained that it was very cold (single digits, Fahrenheit). He suggested we wear clothes. I explained that I wouldn’t be able to push Abel’s stroller through the deep snow. Daniel didn’t know what to say to that.

It’s now been well over a month since I last took the children to the library, which, in fair weather, can be walked to in less than ten minutes. Two days ago, I went without the children; the clerks just smirked at me. Ah, well, let them enjoy the quiet a little longer. I realize my sons are notorious hellions. Abel, of course, is well-received; but now that he walks, who knows what havoc he might cause.

“Housebound” is a misleading title – I do leave the house. I’ve taken Samuel to his bus stop and attended church services and reading-group meetings. And last week, our family piled into the car and braved narrow, unplowed streets to watch Samuel sing in his school’s winter concert. (This was one of the songs.)

I had intended to try Kafka’s Castle again during this confinement; instead, I find myself caught up in a balmier book, Owen Wister’s Virginian.

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].

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

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.)

The inner ring

It seems these days I have to read the New York Post for good news.

“Woman Rushed to Hospital with Appendicitis, Gets Shock of Her Life: ‘He Just Came Out of Nowhere’”

(She had a baby.)

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

My kindergartener is trendier than I am.

At the library, Samuel started singing “Soda Pop” from Netflix’s KPop Demon Hunters, and some middle schoolers joined in. Glances of mutual recognition passed between Samuel and the middle schoolers.

It was suddenly clear that I was “out” and they were “in.” It evoked a feeling described in C. S. Lewis’s “The Inner Ring” (which I happened to be reading).

I didn’t mind being “out,” but it was all too gratifying to see my child “in” with his betters.

He doesn’t care about being “out” or “in.” He just likes having friends.

He checked out this book because the girl on the jacket reminded him of a friend.

Karin met other friends of Samuel’s today. She took time off from work and joined his class on a field trip.

“It’s my mom!” Samuel told everyone. “And it’s her birthday!”

Happy birthday, Love.

A beach day

Not in the best of health. Even so, I spent the day out with my family, at a museum and at a windy, chilly Lake Michigan beach. We were joined by my old schoolmate, Dan, and his family. Funny how bearable an illness can be with old friends nearby. There were billowy clouds and lovely, white-tipped waves; we didn’t bathe, but the children enjoyed the playground. Daniel (my son) was so delighted that at leaving-time, he had to be carried away against his will (mercifully, he scaled the biggest hill himself).

We were mostly in touristy St. Joseph but also drove through Benton Harbor, the poorer twin, which has run-down churches with names like Aún Hay Esperanza.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

I’m reading Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life, which I found in our local library’s equivalent of the Little Free Library. Ursula Todd (1910–1910, 1910–1914, etc.) lives, dies, is reborn, and lives her same life again. And again. Her lifespan lengthens because déjà vu teaches her to avoid mishaps. (It takes her a few tries to figure out how to avoid getting Spanish flu.) It’s like watching a video gamer replaying levels; or Groundhog Day, set in Downton Abbey’s England, not Punxsutawney. Atkinson skewers some characters, especially the loathsome doctor who delivers Ursula (the girl sometimes survives his care, sometimes doesn’t). The repetition is macabre and funny. Working out the metaphysic isn’t easy. Michael Huemer’s theory of reincarnation comes closest, perhaps. But on that theory the déjà vu wouldn’t transmit real memories; and it would be unlikely – or, strictly speaking, rare – that the same siblings should be sired after Ursula.

Body-text fonts, pt. 36: Gill Sans

A sans-serif typeface – rare in this series.

Designed by the wicked Eric Gill. Practically synonymous with Britain.

I don’t care for the regular weight, actually, but the lighter weight is very nice in certain settings, e.g. in this remarkable Lego-builders’ book that Samuel borrowed from the library. (I refer to the body text, not the heading.)

I made the caption easier to read:

(Echoes of Ian Fleming’s prose.)

Gill Sans Nova is a nice compromise, weight-wise.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Ada and George, my little niece and nephew, visited today. They were eager to see their cousins but couldn’t keep their names straight.

Ada drew this card-brandishing soccer referee. Notice the microphone wrapped around his or her cheek.

R.I.P. Dr. Root, acquisitions librarian

His obituary is here.

I knew him best as the director of Bethel’s library, in which capacity he employed me as his student assistant. I also took a course from him, on Russian history.

He was very kind to students, as the following examples will show.

(i) He got back in touch with me in 2018 and urged me to finish writing my long-overdue dissertation. He was hardly the first person to urge this. But his intervention did the trick. He asked to read what I’d written so far, and he commented on a number of sections.

After this jump-start, I wrote regularly. I completed the Ph.D. the next summer.

(ii) A college acquaintance told me, long after the fact, that he and other young bucks once rashly denounced the quality of Bethel’s library holdings, in a letter posted on the “Wittenburg Door.”

(The “Wittenburg Door” was a cafeteria bulletin board. It was the college’s most picturesque – and cringeworthy – public forum.)

Dr. Root invited the young bucks to his office. He treated their concerns seriously and graciously, solicited advice, and ordered books they asked for. Little did they know, the library’s resources were severely constrained. Dr. Root didn’t complain of this to students; even I, his assistant, learned it from other sources.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

In his dress and in his politics, Dr. Root was a 1970s conservative. He hung a large portrait of Nixon over his student workers’ desk. Bold! But he didn’t do it to taunt the libs; that wasn’t his way. He genuinely admired Nixon’s statesmanship.

He grieved – privately, to me, at least – that the Republican Party, which he staunchly supported, had turned Trumpist.

He venerated missionaries. One of his pet projects was the indexing of Jim Elliot’s journals. I worked on this, occasionally, when there was nothing else to do; it was a relief when Jim and Betty finally tied the knot and Jim got courtship off his mind.

Dr. Root spent his life in midwestern towns and cities and shared his midwestern pleasures with his student workers. The end-of-term banquets were especially generous: I still savor the memory of one of them, an Amish dinner in the countryside. The summer workers were treated to daily donuts and the occasional lakeside outing; we’d observe a surprisingly lively Dr. Root playing volleyball and croquet. I was amused, too, when he’d return with stories of his holidays. Sometimes, he’d go abroad; usually, he’d stay in a friend’s Manhattan penthouse. For a few days each year, he’d change into a wild baseball- and theatre-goer, sushi eater, and book buyer. Book buying was his job, of course, but he relished the hunt.

It occurs to me that my time helping him to buy books for the library was what made me the habitual bargain hunter I am today.

Then again, he may have chosen me as his student worker because he already perceived that tendency. One day, he invited me into a back office to take what I wanted from the surplus of donated books. He must have liked the gusto with which I went about choosing, because that was when he offered me my job – much of which would consist of filling out forms from bargain book catalogs.

There’s a scene in Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall in which the ne’er-do-well Captain Grimes is offered his dream job of traveling from pub to pub to sample and rate the beer. (He has to turn it down for personal reasons, of course.) Something comparable, involving low-budget book buying, might have been my ideal job – the realization of my “true self.” Dr. Root did that job. Lucky man! I’m glad I was able to do it with him for a time.

Zuleika; LOTR; Farmer boy

One of my favorite chapter openings, almost as good as “The grandmother didn’t want to go to Florida”:

Her actual offspring does not suffice a very motherly woman. Such a woman was Mrs. Batch. Had she been blest with a dozen children, she must yet have regarded herself as also a mother to whatever two young gentlemen were lodging under her roof. …

The same is true of Karin: not with lodgers but with pets and strays.

This time, ’twas a spider. It spun its web on the prongs of our “Medusa” lamp.

Karin once feared spiders – maybe she still does – but she treated this one oh so tenderly. She brought it ants and flies.

Last night, she brought it a live Junebug. That cracked something inside of her. She was anguished for the Junebug: “It just fought so hard to live.”

She carefully removed the spider from our house.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Her actual offspring are with their grandfather tonight. A respite for us.

This morning I hazarded a library outing with them. They were loud, and I had to drag them home when Daniel wouldn’t stop running through the stacks. But it was gratifying that at first they shunned the e-⁠tablets. Samuel built with blocks from a Jenga-like game. Daniel filled, emptied, and refilled the Connect Four grid.

I kept an eye on them and read Tolkien. Pippin tries to sneak off with the palantír. Gandalf scolds him; then they ride away in the night, on Shadowfax.

As he fell slowly into sleep, Pippin had a strange feeling: he and Gandalf were still as stone, seated upon the statue of a running horse, while the world rolled away beneath his feet with a great noise of wind.

Thus ends LOTR bk. III. Tolkien is at his best in the concluding paragraphs of the “books.” So far, he has always concluded with a scene of hobbits. There are grand things in this story, but they are best viewed through hobbits’ eyes; they are too grand for anyone less humble. Tolkien himself may have been a bit of a hobbit, recording momentous and homely detail, for homely folk.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

I also am reading the Little House books. Nine-year-old Almanzo, in Farmer Boy, isn’t quite a hobbit, but he is driven to and fro by industrious larger creatures. The temperatures are frigid; the work is hard; but all is worthwhile because it is fueld by mountains of rich food, described unstintingly.

Misdeeds

The boys and I didn’t stay long at the library this morning.

Daniel kept trying to sneak out of the building. He would open the front doors by pushing the buttons meant for disabled people.

There was nothing for it but to drag him home, and Samuel too – just when he was occupied with the library’s Lego collection.

The protestations!

Samuel can be so quiet, one forgets that he has no sense of decorum. It’s usually all right to take him places, but, occasionally, one regrets it.

They really like it here, I told the librarians who watched me pull my shrieking children past the circulation desk.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

I viewed soccer this afternoon and came away from the TV to find Samuel “cooking” grits. It was his idea to add the taco seasoning.

Here is a more flattering depiction of the brothers. They supped at Karin’s dad’s house last night and managed to pose for him, more-or-less obediently.

Karin & I were busy celebrating our anniversary. We got haircuts and ate salad. We like the salad bar at Macri’s. It’s simple, but the ingredients are good: I especially like the beets.

We usually can’t finish the entrées we order with the salad, so we eat them the next day. They taste better after cooling and reheating.

Having eaten our salad, we went to a hardware store and looked at some macabre weeding tools.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Today I have a cold. I feel as though my nose will fall off.

I’ve begun reading a book I swore I’d never touch: Baroness Orczy’s Scarlet Pimpernel. As I age, I have less and less appetite for camp, but after the 8,392nd TV reference, the urge got the better of me.

I’ve also been reading Forster’s Where Angels Fear to Tread; various previously mentioned books (Tolkien’s dwarves keep reminding me of the twelve tribes of Israel); and some Platonic dialogs I hadn’t gotten to (more on them later).

As I type, Samuel threads a USB cable through a grate in the floor of our house.

Library “storytime”; Ninja Turtles; Chaplin; Fargo; a philosophy teacher

I took Samuel and Daniel to “storytime” at the local library branch. It was our third session. Thirteen or fourteen children attended: the largest number in two years, the librarian told us.

Strangely, there was just one little girl, and she was the first I’d seen at any of these gatherings. 🤷

Afterward, a few parents hung around while their children read, played, colored, or used the library’s electronic tablets.

One friendly little boy showed me a book about the Ninja Turtles. “What are their names?” he asked. I pointed to each in turn: “Leonardo, Raphael, Michelangelo, Donatello.”

He went to his mother. “That grandpa knows who the Ninja Turtles are.”

“Well, lots of people do,” she explained.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Karin was unavailable for supper, so I put on Chaplin’s Gold Rush (the 1920s version, not the 1940s re-edit). Samuel and Daniel liked it pretty well, especially when the very hungry gold prospectors eat Chaplin’s shoe for their Thanksgiving dinner.

One prospector, who is a little too hungry, imagines that Chaplin is man-sized dinner-fowl. The boys were astounded. “Not a chicken! Not a chicken!” Daniel kept saying.

The wary Chaplin takes the hungry prospector’s rifle outside and buries it in the snow, kicking a few drifts over it like a chicken scratching the dirt. The prospector comes out with an axe and chases him around the cabin. I got déjà vu. This is Fargo, I thought. Chaplin is Steve Buscemi; the other prospector is Peter Stormare; Buscemi buries something in the snow; a person runs out of a cabin, face covered, hands behind her … like a headless chicken. All for a little money.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Re: the philosopher Charles Parsons (decd.). His student, Peter Ludlow, has written an amazing remembrance. I’d quote my favorite passages, but they would amount to almost the whole essay.

Read it.

Dress-up

Twenty-five days before Halloween and, already, we’re in the thick of it. Karin found a Where’s Waldo? outfit at Goodwill; Samuel wore it most of the day.

The costume got him lots of compliments on the street – drivers were queueing up to smile at him and to respect his right-of-way – and at the library. One of the librarians carried a Waldo book over to Samuel. While I was occupied at the checkout machine, Samuel sneaked into the back offices (he also performed this trick last week), but he was so cute, the branch manager scolded him just a little.

Karin bought Daniel a full-body outfit of a skunk (one of his “spirit animals”). He hasn’t tried it on yet, but he’s been dragging it around the house. My parents, zealous Goodwillers, bought Daniel a Superman disguise that would look swell on him were it not a costume for doggies.

Here’s a video of Daniel resisting bedtime.

A few small victories and defeats

We bought a new digital scale. As soon as we’d removed it from the package, inserted the batteries, and weighed ourselves on it once, Samuel threw it down the stairs, and it broke.

Mercifully, Karin was able to fix it. Today I am several lbs. lighter.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

This morning the toilet overflowed, due, in no small part, to Samuel’s supremely inefficient use of it. (It was my fault, too; in the chaos of aiding Samuel, I flushed too many times.) While I was wiping down the bathroom floor, Daniel sneaked off with the shaving cream and slathered it upon himself.

I grabbed the shaving cream can, put it on the kitchen counter, and tossed Daniel into the shower.

When I’d finished cleaning and dressing Daniel, I returned to the kitchen. There was Samuel, covering that room – and himself – with the shaving cream.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

I was holding Daniel on my lap, and Ziva climbed into the armchair with us – quite a nice thing to do, given that the children often terrorize the kitties. Daniel responded by speaking two new words: “Ziva” (Zee-ah) and “cat.”

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

I took Samuel and Daniel to the library for a couple of hours. They mostly played with the toys. (They have toys at home, but the library’s are different.) I pulled Harry Potter off the shelf and read bits of it while keeping an eye on the boys.

As we were leaving, Samuel discovered that one of the library’s touchscreens has a language setting. He touched a couple of icons and changed the language to Swedish.

The rest of the day, he’s been talking about “the libraries in Sweden.”

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Argentina and Ecuador will play in Buenos Aires tomorrow night: our first World Cup qualifier.

Some neighbors stop by

Urchins knocked. They talked to Karin, who stood in the doorway.

“Is your son here?”

“Yes,” said Karin, bemused, as Samuel rushed over to see who was inquiring. “But he can’t go out. He’s just a little boy.”

“We mean your other son.”

“He’s even littler,” said Karin. (Just then, in another room, Daniel howled.)

Disappointed, the urchins went away.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Not long afterward, they knocked again. I opened the door this time.

“Can we [mumble, mumble, mumble],” the smallest one said.

“What was that?” I leaned down.

“Can we swim in your pool.”

“We don’t have a pool.”

They looked stunned.

“We have a sprinkler … ” I offered.

“Can you tell ⎯⎯⎯ to come outside?”

“I’m sorry. No one named ⎯⎯⎯ lives in this house. Is that a real tattoo?” (I asked the smallest boy).

“Yes.”

It was a huge tattoo – elbow-to-wrist, almost.

“How old are you?” I asked.

“Twelve.”

“Well, like I said, ⎯⎯⎯ doesn’t live here and we don’t have a pool. Are you thinking of the people next door? They used to have a pool, but they tore it down and moved away, and now someone else lives there.”

They’d had enough. My interlocutor wheeled around. His companion jumped down off the recycling bin he’d been sitting on, and they left.

I like to think that some day my sons will roam the streets with other neighborhood boys.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Have you ever heard the term threenager? It’s apt.

Samuel already wants to break out of our little household cocoon.

“Sammy and Daddy can go outside now,” he said. “To the street.”

I.e., not to the back yard.

(Karin and Daniel were at the doctor’s.)

I walked to the library with Samuel. As usual, he didn’t read there; he played with the toys. He did not want to leave.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

P.S. Daniel doesn’t have too much lead in his blood anymore.

Body-text fonts, pt. 14: Weiss

For Easter, we went to Goshen, where Karin’s dad’s parents live. Samuel found the touchscreen that controls his great-grandparents’ security system. He set off the alarm and instigated a confrontation with the police. … This is the third time he has summoned the emergency services. Some months ago he called 911, but I was able to pursuade the operator that it wasn’t an emergency. Another time, I saw an ambulance travel up and down our street; the driver seemed unable to figure out which house had issued the summons. I checked my call log and learned that Samuel had again called 911. … Since that day, if I catch him playing with my phone, I toss him immediately and mercilessly into the Chokey.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

I found a copy of Tikki Tikki Tembo upon the library sale cart. Surely, I thought, the library is divesting itself of this outdated and offensive tale! I paid a few cents and brought it home. …

(It turns out, the library has retained four copies – one of which is missing.)

Perhaps, despite its window-dressing, Tikki Tikki Tembo isn’t really about the Chinese – at least, no more than A Comedy of Errors, with its italianate duke and its Roman Catholic abbess, is about the historic city-state of Ephesus. …

No, that’s disingenuous. Justly or unjustly, the book satirizes the Chinese ethic of filial piety. Perhaps this subversiveness is what has made Samuel so fond of Tikki Tikki Tembo. He listens to it three or four times or until we make him stop. Fortunately, we don’t have to read it to him; he puts on a CD with a reading by Marcia Gay Harden (it was included in a flap at the back of the book). Whenever it’s time to turn a page, a gong sounds and Samuel turns the page and does a little dance.

Daniel, I am sorely tempted to call “Chang” – the name of the second son – but he already has plenty of nicknames.

The book is set in Weiss:

Other books set in Weiss:

Chinua Achebe: Things Fall Apart.

Harold Bloom: Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human.

Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl.

I am told that the design of the Swedish typeface Berling was inspired by Weiss.

A lawsuit

Now that we’ve recovered from our illnesses, Samuel has started throwing up. We hope it’s just a little food poisoning. He did get into some woefully expired milk. …

We are teaching him to throw up in a bucket and not on the furniture or the floor.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Four big publishers – Hachette, HarperCollins, Wiley, and Penguin Random House – have sued the Internet Archive. Today, a court ruled in their favor.

I’m not competent to evaluate this case. For all I know, this ruling is legally correct.

But I’ll say this.

I’ve found the Internet Archive to be extremely useful. As I pursue my non-lucrative – but, I hope, not entirely worthless – personal projects, I tend to study several sources at the same time. The public library system can’t or won’t lend me the kinds of sources that I use – not all at once, and certainly not on less than four weeks’ notice. Nor do I have convenient access to university library materials.

As readers of this blog know, I buy as many books as I can – often, books issued by these same publishers. But that doesn’t quite meet my needs, either.

Indeed, I regularly buy books because I’ve been able to preview them via the Internet Archive. For me, this website is a reference tool – a pit-stop on the way to other reading, not an ultimate reading destination.

My point is that for an ordinary bloke like me, certain extremely meaningful projects would become much more difficult, and maybe even impossible, without some free service like the Internet Archive. If what this organization does is illegal … well, then, we oughta try really hard to figure out some way for the same thing to be done legally.

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.

The picture is as good as it gets

I hope my mom doesn’t mind if I tell this story.

She and my dad bought a new TV. But we might return it, she said. The picture is distorted.

I offered to read the manual and explain how to change the settings.

Try to stream a program, I said. It’s easier to check the settings if the TV is in use.

The picture is fine when we stream things or play a local channel, she said. It looks all wrong when we play a DVD. Here is Jack Nicholson in As Good as It Gets. See how broad he looks.

Mom, that just is how Jack Nicholson looks in As Good as It Gets. He wasn’t young anymore in the nineties.

We try another DVD: About Schmidt.

Look at him here!, my mom says. She pauses the movie. Look at how broad he is!

Mom, the picture is fine.

I remind her that Nicholson was even less young – that, consequently, he was even more broad – when he made About Schmidt. And that in the early scenes of that movie, he had to wear an unflattering business suit.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

At the library, I spotted a DVD of Annika, the new PBS/Masterpiece series in which the great Nicola Walker plays the lead detective of a made-up Glasgow policing team called the Marine Homicide Unit (it investigates murders committed on boats). DCI Annika Strandhed is quirkier than most. She draws extended analogies between the crimes she solves and Viking or Greek mythology, Ibsen’s plays, bridge-building, or whatever. To my considerable amusement, she relentlessly soliloquizes – as often as not, in front of her longsuffering subordinate detectives.

Annika reminds Karin & me of no one so much as Karin’s mother.

Closing credits

This year, I read at least two books by each of these authors:

• Henning Mankell (Faceless Killers; The Dogs of Riga)
• Joe Queenan (One for the Books; Red Lobster, White Trash, and the Blue Lagoon)
• Sally Rooney (Conversations with Friends; Normal People; Beautiful World, Where Are You)
• Marjane Satrapi (Persepolis 1 and 2)
• Jim Thompson (The Killer Inside Me; Pop. 1280)
• Sylvia Townsend Warner (Lolly Willowes; Mr. Fortune’s Maggot)

A few of these books, I’m still working on, but I’ll’ve finished them by January 1.

Also, I enjoyed these authors:

• H. W. Brands (I finished Dreams of El Dorado)
• Ben Macintyre (I finished The Spy and the Traitor)

They both write popular histories/biographies. I can’t commend them enough: almost every page is rewarding.

I’m not including such deserving authors as Beatrix Potter and Margaret Wise Brown. Not because I didn’t read enough of their books or because those books are for children or are too short, but because I didn’t read them for my own sake. I also read lots of Mother Goose.

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Rooney’s Conversations with Friends may have been my favorite read of the year. That, or Roughing It, which is hilarious but doesn’t have the same narrative urgency as Conversations with Friends, even though some chapters of Roughing It are life-or-death. (Being a coming-of-age tale, Conversations only feels like it is life-or-death.) The lesson of Roughing It is this. The people of the United States are compulsive liars; also, they love to believe lies. It becomes less strange, upon reading Twain, that Donald Trump should have been elected President. The predilection for outlandish untruth has been around for a long time. Twain lampoons the lying while himself resorting to embellishment. I suppose that as a satirist, that is his right.

Chapter I of Pudd’nhead Wilson has this epigraph: “Tell the truth or trump – but get the trick.”

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Otherwise, this hasn’t been a year for getting through the classics. I did finish reading the Purgatorio. I am eager to read the Paradiso so that I can move on to the Decameron, which I became perversely eager for after I saw The Little Hours.

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On to the domestic front. I obtained a new stepfather-in-law. A nephew and a niece were born to me. My son Daniel was born in February. He’s now been outside his mother longer than he was inside her (unless each of us, in his or her earliest stage of development, is a pre-fertilized egg). For a couple of months Daniel seemed not to have a personality. Now he is an enterprising, zestful, strong-willed young man. Samuel likes him but constantly knocks him down or pushes him away, usually due to some property dispute. Daniel has learned to push back. I’m disturbed and pleased. Every night, I pray for my sons to love each other and get along; but I also want them to fight for the good, and being able to fight for the good entails being able to fight.

Ziva is the same as always: desirous of being stroked, she wakes me in the night. Jasper seemed ill – he lost many lbs. – but today the veterinarian confirmed that it’s because of the dieting we’ve been forcing him to do (he’s at his ideal weight for the first time since he took to stealing Ziva’s kitten food). Karin & I have continued our march through British TV. This has been the year of the Hobbit-like actor Ken Stott, who appears in the police procedurals Crime and, with Caroline Catz, The Vice; and of Catz’s sadly truncated Murder in Suburbia, in which two unmarried, lovelorn policewomen investigate crimes by “Karens” (“Grangerites,” in South Bend parlance). So, nothing too profound.

Of course, we all watched the World Cup.

We also explored our new neighborhood. I regularly visited the local library branch. I’d check out books and print out journal articles (up to 33 B&W pp./day, gratis). This library branch has a reputation for patron misbehavior – I learned this when I interviewed for a job there a few years ago – but I haven’t observed a single episode. This really is a tranquil part of town in which to live.

Anglophilia, pt. 55 BC

No one ever thought that 1066 and All That was All That, but that book turns out to have been a Good Thing after all. But to understand this, it helps to imagine the book read aloud by Internet wonder Philomena Cunk. This week, the Internet discovered that Cunk has been on the BBC for many years. She has become famous for wondering: “What is clocks?”

She ponders history as well as the “centuries of millenia” of architecture (“buildings”), as well as time. Not only is she an historian, she is a philosopher, or perhaps an idiot. Aristotle said that philosophy begins with wondering. Cunk, in her questioning of “experts,” makes us wonder who it is who would waste time on wondering. And yet, we cannot spend enough time inquiring along with Philomena Cunk.

(Has she ever interviewed Timothy Williamson? He would be almost ripe for it.)

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I checked out Madly, Deeply: The Diaries of Alan Rickman for Karin. Rickman is her idol. Karin worries that the diaries will spoil Rickman for her.

She needn’t.

He is – was (R.I.P.) – a good diarist and a decent guy. He clearly was fond of the Harry Potter kids.

I promised Karin I’d read Harry Potter 1 and 2 by May 1 so that we could watch those movies together. She’s reading Why Didn’t They Ask Evans? so that we can watch the Britbox series of that book.