The office aide

My new part-time job: secretary in the English and Social Studies depts at a local high school. (Afternoons, I continue tutoring at IUSB.) On my first workday, my new bosses didn’t have time to show me what to do, so they were like, “Just roam the halls and get acquainted with the school.” So I did that for four hours. (A security guard took pity on me and gave me a tour; later, a teacher gave me pretty much the same tour.)

Since then, I’ve been kept busier. They’ve trained me to use the photocopier, and they’ve told me which books to shelve and which books to put into boxes. I’ve spent many hours doing those things. We had a “lockdown” drill on Wednesday: it was my favorite part of the week. I had to sit for thirty minutes alone with the English dept chair, in her classroom; she kept trying to get rid of me, but whenever she’d open the door to let me out she’d see the principal or the police dogs and get nervous and close the door. After a while she let me just sit on her couch and read her Harold Bloom Shakespeare book.

Though I’m happy at my new workplace, I can’t help but dwell on its absurdities …

like, how mice scurry across the classroom floors;

like, how the guards are always having to round up the stray student-zombies who wander through the halls;

like, how already I’ve been asked to guest-lecture on philosophy (there’s an International Baccalaureate philosophy class, “Theory of Knowledge”);

like, how I have power over all the teachers because I control the photocopier staples (some aspects of this job are going to my head).

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Melanie Griffith, Tippi Hedren, and a lion: they remind me of a different family and their cat.

Book titles

Alliteration is pleasing:

Nicholas Nickleby

Pride and Prejudice

The Woman in White

And so is repetition:

Man and Superman

Beasts and Super-Beasts

(Though it’s a parody, Saki’s is perhaps the most delightful book title of all.)

Surely one of the greatest titlers is Robert Louis Stevenson. How simple his titles are — and yet how evocative, how iconic:

Kidnapped

Treasure Island

A Child’s Garden of Verses

Other titles benefit from garish incomprehensibility:

The Catcher in the Rye

A Clockwork Orange

Dame Iris’s books are so well-titled, I compulsively begin reading them (and then I don’t finish):

Under the Net

A Severed Head

A Fairly Honourable Defeat
The Flight from the Enchanter
The Unicorn

The Sandcastle

The Sea, the Sea

Nuns and Soldiers

The Nice and the Good

Long, repetitive titles are suitable for short-story collections:

Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?

Chesterton’s best titles, like his sentences, are paradoxical or alliterative (or both):

The Man Who Was Thursday
The Everlasting Man
The Innocence/The Incredulity of Father Brown
Four Faultless Felons

Chandler’s are shot through with tragic romance:

The Big Sleep

The Long Goodbye

The Lady in the Lake (alliterative, grisly — and allusive)

Crime titles tend to be good so long as they aren’t cookie-cutter. The Hound of the Baskervilles and The Valley of Fear are good titles; Holmes’s Adventures, Memoirs, and Return are not. No title is more urgent than this one.

And no publisher seduces better than Harlequin.

Fraktur

I thought I’d return to the theme of Nazism. This is from Alexander Lawson, Anatomy of a Typeface:

The classifiers of type place all informal gothics under the French heading lettre bâtarde. … A. F. Johnson, the English expert on early types, prefers simply to use the term bastard, although the Latinized bastarda is more generally employed by historians. … 

By 1490 bâtardes were in wide use in Germany, where the name applied to them, apparently arbitrarily, was Schwabacher (there is no evident reason why the Bavarian town Schwabach was thus memorialized, as there was no typefounding or even printing at that location). 

Until the middle of the sixteenth century the Schwabacher style was what was most used for German-language printing; it was saliently used at Basel in Switzerland, then a center of scholarly printing. The next important bâtarde to be developed in Germany was the Fraktur design, which for the following four centuries served as the German national type. 

Fraktur is a more condensed letter than the Schwabacher, and varies from the earlier type in being more pointed, with sharply tapered ascenders; printers naturally had a fondness for this narrower form, which made the type more economical in book work. The design of Fraktur is credited to the Nuremberg calligrapher Johann Neudörferr, and at the request of Emperor Maximilian it was cut in metal for type in 1513. Within the next decade a number of other Frakturs were produced, and by the 1540s it was beginning to replace Schwabacher as the preferred letter for German printing. … 

In the long run it was the classical influence of the Renaissance that spelled the end of the prevalence that the gothic hands had maintained in northern Europe since the twelfth century. Only in Germany did it remain a convention, where it survived as a text type even into the twentieth century. Elsewhere, by the close of the eighteenth century black letter was being used primarily for headings and for specialized liturgical printing. In every other instance the roman letter forms had taken over the world of printing. 

Even in Germany, where Fraktur was the national type, the black letter has had a curious history. During the middle years of the nineteenth century, a great period of European nationalism, the use of Fraktur was inevitably strengthened — sufficiently, in fact, to offset the modernizing influence of the Industrial Revolution, particularly through the dominance of German technical and scientific literature. With the growth of international advertising in the early years of the present century, the use of roman type in Germany increased, but even as late as 1930 almost sixty percent of the new books being published were still composed in the German black letter (also called Deutsche Schriften), and almost every newspaper stayed with the Fraktur. 

When Adolf Hitler came to power, his National Socialist Party decreed that the Fraktur be considered the only appropriate form for the German language. This resulted in a wider use of Fraktur in the twentieth century than in earlier times. In 1940, however, it was officially determined that Fraktur interfered with the German plan of world domination, since outside Germany the roman forms prevailed. Thus, the Nazis then issued a proclamation that roman would henceforth be the German standard type, the explanation given being that Fraktur was a ‘Schwabacher-Jewish type.’ 

In postwar Germany roman has become the standard type, although with some difficulty, as the schoolbooks through which all adults had learned their alphabet were composed in black letter. But there is little likelihood that Fraktur will ever again be the national type; now less than one percent of German books appear in that hand. As a display letter, however, the face has been revived.

Anglophilia

By now you should be tired of reading, every fall and spring, how the misty weather makes me anglophilic — how, suddenly, I want to think about punting on rivers, eating suet, having séances in gloomy houses. (I want to think about these things, not do them.) … Dystopias even seem agreeable. Right now I’m reading The Children of Men and envying the protagonists. Yes: hoodlums roam the countryside; but it’s jolly to be reminded of A Clockwork Orange. Yes: the government is ruthless; and so conspirators must plot in beautiful old churches, or in gardens, or museums. … What the survivalists hoard is wine. Where they live is Oxford. … Had C.S. Lewis remained in Ulster, would we have liked him just as well? Would we have been as interested in his life and writings? … What accounts for the forcefulness of anglophilia? … Even the Nazis, deep down, harbored affection for the English. Which was why they lost.

Mythopoeia

From The Inklings, by Humphrey Carpenter:

On this Saturday night in 1931, after they had dined, Lewis took his guests on a walk through the Magdalen grounds. They strolled along Addison’s Walk (the path which runs beside several streams of the River Cherwell) and here they began to discuss metaphor and myth. 

Lewis had never underestimated the power of myth. Far from it, for one of his earliest loves had been the Norse myth of the dying god Balder. … But he still did not believe in the myths that delighted him. Beautiful and moving though such stories might be, they were (he said) ultimately untrue. As he expressed it to Tolkien, myths are ‘lies and therefore worthless, even though breathed through silver’. 

No, said Tolkien. They are not lies. 

Just then (Lewis afterwards recalled) there was ‘a rush of wind which came so suddenly on the still, warm evening and sent so many leaves pattering down that we thought it was raining. We held our breath’. 

When Tolkien resumed, he took his argument from the very thing that they were watching. 

You look at trees, he said, and call them ‘trees’, and probably you do not think twice about the word. You call a star a ‘star’, and think nothing more of it. But you must remember that these words, ‘tree’, ‘star’, were (in their original forms) names given to these objects by people with very different views from yours. To you, a tree is simply a vegetable organism, and a star simply a ball of inanimate matter moving along a mathematical course. But the first men to talk of ‘trees’ and ‘stars’ saw things very differently. To them, the world was alive with mythological beings. They saw the stars as living silver, bursting into flame in answer to the eternal music. They saw the sky as a jewelled tent, and the earth as the womb whence all living things have come. To them, the whole of creation was ‘myth-woven and elf-patterned’. 

This was not a new notion to Lewis. … Nor, said Lewis, did it effectively answer his point that myths are lies. 

But, replied Tolkien, man is not ultimately a liar. He may pervert his thoughts into lies, but he comes from God, and it is from God that he draws his ultimate ideals. Lewis agreed: he had, indeed, accepted something like this notion for many years. Therefore, Tolkien continued, not merely the abstract thoughts of man but also his imaginative inventions must originate with God, and must in consequence reflect something of eternal truth. In making a myth, in practising ‘mythopoeia’ and peopling the world with elves and dragons and goblins, a storyteller, or ‘sub-creator’ as Tolkien liked to call such a person, is actually fulfilling God’s purpose, and reflecting a splintered fragment of the true light. Pagan myths are therefore never just ‘lies’: there is always something of the truth in them. 

They talked on, until Lewis was convinced by the force of Tolkien’s argument. But he had another question to put to his friends, and as it was late they decided to go indoors to Lewis’s rooms on Staircase III of New Buildings. There, he recorded, ‘we continued on Christianity’. 

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ 

Lewis had a particular reason for holding back from Christianity. He did not think it was necessarily untrue: indeed he had examined the historicity of the Gospels, and had come to the conclusion that he was ‘nearly certain that it really happened’. What was still preventing him from becoming a Christian was the fact that he found it irrelevant. 

As he himself put it, he could not see ‘how the life and death of Someone Else (whoever he was) two thousand years ago could help us here and now — except in so far as his example could help us’. And he knew that Christ’s example as a man and a teacher was not the centre of the Christian story. ‘Right in the centre,’ he said, ‘in the Gospels and in St Paul, you keep on getting something quite different and very mysterious, expressed in those phrases I have so often ridiculed — “propitiation” — “sacrifice” — “the blood of the Lamb”.’ He had ridiculed them because they seemed not only silly and shocking but meaningless. What was the point of it all? How could the death and resurrection of Christ have ‘saved the world’? 

Tolkien answered him immediately. Indeed, he said, the solution was actually a development of what he had been saying earlier. Had he not shown how pagan myths were, in fact, God expressing himself through the minds of poets, and using the images of their ‘mythopoeia’ to express fragments of his eternal truth? Well then, Christianity (he said) is exactly the same thing — with the enormous difference that the poet who invented it was God Himself, and the images He used were real men and actual history.

Do you mean, asked Lewis, that the death and resurrection of Christ is the old ‘dying god’ story all over again? 

Yes, Tolkien answered, except that here is a real Dying God, with a precise location in history and definite historical consequences. The old myth has become a fact. But it still retains the character of a myth. So that in asking what it ‘meant’, Lewis was really being rather absurd. Did he ask what the story of Balder or Adonis or any of the other dying gods in pagan myth ‘meant’? No, of course not. He enjoyed these stories, ‘tasted’ them, and got something from them that he could not get from abstract argument. Could he not transfer that attitude, that appreciation of story, to the life and death of Christ? Could he not treat it as a story, be fully aware that he could draw nourishment from it which he could never find in a list of abstract truths? Could he not realise that it is a myth, and make himself receptive to it? For, Tolkien said, if God is mythopoetic, man must become mypthopathic. …

The Queen of Crime, pt. 741

Stephen, desiring another blog entry, suggests that I rank the books of Agatha Christie from best to worst. What follows is a grading of the novels, the plot-linked story collections (asterisked), and The Big Four (in which four longish stories are glued together into one narrative).

GRADE: A
Cards on the Table
The Clocks
Partners in Crime*
The Moving Finger
The Seven Dials Mystery
Parker Pyne Investigates*
The Mysterious Mr. Quin*
At Bertram’s Hotel
Endless Night
The Mysterious Affair at Styles
And Then There Were None

GRADE: A-MINUS
The Pale Horse
Cat Among the Pigeons
Why Didn’t They Ask Evans?
Hickory Dickory Dock
The Body in the Library
Peril at End House
Appointment with Death
Ordeal By Innocence
Mrs. McGinty’s Dead
The Labours of Hercules*
Hallowe’en Party
The Secret Adversary
Lord Edgware Dies
The A.B.C. Murders
Poirot Investigates*

GRADE: B-PLUS
The Murder at the Vicarage
Murder in Mesopotamia
One, Two, Buckle My Shoe
Three Act Tragedy
The Hollow
Dead Man’s Folly
Sad Cypress
N or M?

GRADE: B
Crooked House
Sparkling Cyanide
Towards Zero
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
The Thirteen Problems*
Third Girl
They Came to Baghdad
A Murder Is Announced
Murder Is Easy

GRADE: B-MINUS
By the Pricking of My Thumbs
Nemesis
The Mystery of the Blue Train
Destination Unknown
Taken at the Flood
Five Little Pigs
The Sittaford Mystery
The Secret of Chimneys
A Caribbean Mystery

GRADE: C
The Man in the Brown Suit
The Big Four
A Pocket Full of Rye
They Do It With Mirrors
Hercule Poirot’s Christmas
Murder on the Orient Express
The Murder on the Links
Death in the Clouds

GRADE: D
Passenger to Frankfurt
Elephants Can Remember
Postern of Fate
Curtain

I haven’t read all of 4.50 from Paddington, Death Comes as the End, Death on the Nile, Dumb Witness, Evil Under the Sun, The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side, or Sleeping Murder. The best of these, I suspect, are Death on the Nile and Evil Under the Sun.

I haven’t read any of the “Mary Westmacott” romance novels, either. They’re supposed to be rather good. And I haven’t read the autobiography, Come, Tell Me How You Live.

Overstimulated

Tuesdays, my shifts go from 9:00 to 11:00 in the a.m. and then from 6:00 to 8:00 at night. In between: a long lunch, somewhere distant. (An effortful walk does me good.)

Today, though, I only got as far as the IUSB cafeteria, what with needing to quickly rid myself of jitters from breakfast (I’d drunk too much syrup and coffee). Therefore, after lunch I had an extra hour to kill in the library. I was restless. I was able to read just ten or twenty pages before I had to get up to browse the stacks. There’s that Tim O’Brien book I’ve been curious about. There’s another Anne Lamott book to wallow in.

But I figured, what I check out I’ll have to carry home, and hardbacks are heavy. So I put them back.

As it happened, though, Martin offered to drive me home because of the windchill. When we arrived at the house, Mary had the fire going, and Bianca was all snuggly. … Point is, I could have painlessly brought home those books.

Stephen and I have agreed to read Shirley Jackson’s The Road Through the Wall, one chapter per day, beginning tomorrow (the prologue counts as a chapter). We invite you to read it with us.

Snowed in, pt. 3 — “Effingham”

Three days of tutoring; so far, no tutees. :) And today, no work for me …

… or for Stephen (unemployed) …

… or for Mary & Martin (last night, Martin came downstairs and announced that because of the weather, school was canceled for him. Then he laughed maniacally and removed his trousers. … Mary anxiously peered at the TV until, several hours later, her school was canceled).

I finished reading Iris Murdoch’s book, The Unicorn. All along, I wondered: How should it have been typeset?

One major character has this sequence in his name: f-f-i. This, in itself, is unremarkable; but the resulting ligature leaps out. In Times Roman — what I was reading — the name looks like this:

Which, reiterated, is distracting.

Earlier this week, at IU, I found an edition set in Fairfield:

Would Palatino have improved the name? (I wondered, walking home through snow). The fs and is are discrete:

At body-text size, they pose no obstacle to readability:

And then I considered that the person, Effingham, is pompous and self-important, and no doubt deserves to carry such an ostentatious marker in his name.

Snowed in, pt. 2

A cat and four people, confined by the weather to a smallish house. Martin occasionally goes outside to shovel snow or to turn on the cars. (It keeps him sane.) Mary and I plant ourselves in front of the TV. Stephen pines for his gf.

I swallow pills of expectorant; for a spittoon, I use an old sour cream container. I sit on the couch, coughing and spitting, reading Zlatan’s autobiography. (The writing is incredible.)

Every day, M&M watch for school closings.

Monday night, we phone restaurants. Steak ’n Shake is open! We slowly drive up Grape Road … our spirits are refreshed.

Tuesday night, we watch Always Sunny (“The Gang Wrestles for the Troops”). Stephen traces Edoarda’s plane across his laptop screen. Georgia … Tennessee … Kentucky. When the plane approaches Indiana, M&M and I reach for our coats.

“Hey, what is this!” protests Stephen. “You’re not all taking me to the airport!”

Um, yeah, Stephen: The Gang Goes to the Airport.

“No! Not that! Not ‘The Gang’!”

Yes, The Gang.

Poor Stephen: how will he and his gf attain privacy?

At the airport, M&M and I allow Stephen to go in by himself. The young lovers are reunited. M&M and I sit in the car, listening to ’80s funk. The minutes tick away. It turns out, Edoarda’s luggage has gone missing; she and Stephen are taking this opportunity to get reacquainted near the conveyer belt. … Mary becomes tired of the ’80s funk and goes inside the airport. Martin and I remain in the car, grooving; we’ve (sort of) forgotten about Stephen and Edoarda.

By the time we all get home, we’ve spent two and a half hours in the car.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

This morning (Thursday), after three “snow” days, M&M resume their teaching. Tomorrow I’ll also return to work.

I’m coughing less and less …

ah, this is the life.

Snowed in

Still coughing …

and last night we had a blizzard; and at this moment, outside, it’s supposed to feel like −26°F.

Currently reading:

• Eleanor Catton, The Luminaries

• Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber

• Frank & Marie Drown, Mission to the Headhunters

• Anne Lamott, Traveling Mercies (while I was getting sick, I was finishing bird by bird; due to AL’s grudges and death scenes and neuroses, the book was actually making me feel worse)

• I Am Zlatan Ibrahimović (this is fantastic)

• … and articles for W130

Currently viewing:

• Misery

• The Shining

• WSBT StormTracker

• Downton Abbey

• The Pink Panther Strikes Again

The mall rats

Day Two of the winter holiday. Mary exercises at her gym; Martin cleans; Stephen cooks; I read.

Later, it might be interesting to watch some TV.

Stephen asks me to go with him to the mall. He’s itching to leave the house. Well, the mall does have a bookstore, and I do want to buy Dance Dance Dance — the sequel to the Murakami novel that I’ve just finished reading — and The Luminaries, the most recent Man Booker winner.

We’re all set to ride the bus when Mary comes downstairs: “All right, I’ll drive you to the mall.”

Then she sees Bianca sleeping on a chair.

“Hello, my little furry friend. You’re so cute. Who is it who loves you? Who is it who takes you to the vet?

“I love you, Bianca. Will you cuddle with me? Do you enjoy being cuddled with? Do you like it when I hold you? Will you miss me when I go away to the mall?”

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Mary drives us to the mall.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

At Barnes & Noble I run into an IUSB student who got an F in my course. Friendly as always, he shakes my hand. I glare. I’m not very gracious in these situations.

Mary buys me The Luminaries, which turns out to be an 830-page (zodiacal!) mystery set in 19th-century New Zealand. Its prose style reminds me of Kate Beckinsale’s in the movie Cold Comfort Farm (“The golden orb had almost disappeared behind the interlacing fingers of the hawthorn”) … which is a good thing, in my opinion.

The Luminaries is Eleanor Catton’s second novel. Aged twenty-eight, four years my junior, Catton is the youngest recipient of the Man Booker Prize. Jeez Louise, I feel unaccomplished.

10 books

This has been going around on Facebook:

“Rules: In your status, list 10 books that have affected you in some way. Don’t spend more than a few minutes, and don’t think too hard. Then, tag 10 people, …” (blah, blah, and the blah).

Here are my ten books in the order in which I first read them:

E.B. White, Stuart Little • Charles and Mary Lamb, Tales from Shakespeare • Roland Bainton, The Church of Our Fathers • Agatha Christie, Cards on the Table • Evelyn Waugh, A Handful of Dust • Roger Ebert, The Great Movies II • Peter van Inwagen, Material Beings • J.M. Coetzee, Youth: Scenes from Provincial Life II • John Rawls, Political Liberalism • Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

Each book influenced how I write, or how I live, or both; or else it interested me in a bunny trail of other books.

Whom we like

Susan Wolf, in “Moral Saints”:

When one does finally turn one’s eyes toward lives that are dominated by explicitly moral commitments … one finds oneself relieved at the discovery of idiosyncrasies or eccentricities not quite in line with the picture of moral perfection. One prefers the blunt, tactless Betsy Trotwood to the unfailingly kind and patient Agnes Copperfield; one prefers the mischievousness and sense of irony in Chesterton’s Father Brown to the innocence and undiscriminating love of Saint Francis.

It seems that, as we look in our ideals for people who achieve nonmoral varieties of personal excellence in conjunction with or colored by some version of high moral tone, we look in our paragons of moral excellence for people whose moral achievements occur in conjunction with or colored by some interests or traits that have low moral tone. In other words, there seems to be a limit to how much morality we can stand.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Anne Lamott, in bird by bird:

I once asked Ethan Canin to tell me the most valuable thing he knew about writing, and without hesitation he said, “Nothing is as important as a likable narrator. …” I think he’s right. If your narrator is someone whose take on things fascinates you, it isn’t really going to matter if nothing much happens for a long time. I could watch John Cleese or Anthony Hopkins do dishes for about an hour without needing much else to happen. Having a likable narrator is like having a great friend whose company you love, whose mind you love to pick, whose running commentary totally holds your attention … When you have a friend like this, she can say, “Hey, I’ve got to drive up to the dump in Petaluma — wanna come along?” and you honestly can’t think of anything in the world you’d rather do. By the same token, a boring or annoying person can offer to buy you an expensive dinner, followed by tickets to a great show, and in all honesty you’d rather stay home and watch the aspic set.

Now, a person’s faults are largely what make him or her likable. I like for narrators to be like the people I choose for friends, which is to say that they have a lot of the same flaws as I. Preoccupation with self is good, as is a tendency toward procrastination, self-delusion, darkness, jealousy, groveling, greediness, addictiveness. They shouldn’t be too perfect; perfect means shallow and unreal and fatally uninteresting. I like for them to have a nice sick sense of humor and to be concerned with important things, by which I mean that they are interested in political and psychological and spiritual matters. I want them to want to know who we are and what life is all about. I like them to be mentally ill in the same sorts of ways that I am; for instance, I have a friend who said one day, “I could resent the ocean if I tried,” and I realized that I love that in a guy. I like for them to have hope — if a friend or a narrator reveals himself or herself to be hopeless too early on, I lose interest. It depresses me. It makes me overeat. I don’t mind if a person has no hope if he or she is sufficiently funny about the whole thing, but then, this being able to be funny definitely speaks of a kind of hope, of buoyancy. Novels ought to have hope; at least, American novels ought to have hope. French novels don’t need to. We mostly win wars, they lose them. Of course, they did hide more Jews than many other countries, and this is a form of winning. Although as my friend Jane points out, if you or I had been there speaking really bad French, they would have turned us in in a hot second — bank on it. In general, though, there’s no point in writing hopeless novels. We all know we’re going to die; what’s important is the kind of men and women we are in the face of this.

Sometimes people turn out to be not all that funny or articulate, but they can still be great friends or narrators if they possess a certain clarity of vision — especially if they have survived or are in the process of surviving a great deal. This is inherently interesting material, since this is the task before all of us.

Romaniacs, pt. 533: The coffee drinker

Rainy weather, and so I’ve decided to read A Wrinkle in Time. “It was a dark and stormy night.”

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Last night, after I wrote those lines, I promptly fell asleep. I’ve been falling asleep very early. The previous night, at around 9:30, I was on the living room floor playing with the cat, and I fell asleep.

At least I knew which day it was.

Cristian: “How nice to see you, John-Paul. Are we supposed to go out for coffee today?”

JP: “No, Cristian.”

Cristian: “When did we recently go out for coffee? Was it last week?”

JP: “It was yesterday, Cristian.”

Edoarda, Stephen’s gf, remarks that during her four years at Bethel she has watched Cristian become more presidential, i.e. more gray. I point out that this is due to his age, not to his lifestyle.

Even so.

Cristian pushes himself through life by drinking loads of coffee; maybe that’s why his emails tend to arrive at 3:00 in the morning. I couldn’t live that way. After my third or fourth cup I’d be a jittery wreck. On the other hand, I fall asleep whenever I try to grade papers.

As we share a French press, Cristian tells me of the habits of a certain well-loved metaphysician who didn’t have a lot of grading to do. “He used to read detective novels all morning, and then he would cheerfully write for a couple of hours; then his workday was over.” A hint of bitterness. “With such a routine, who wouldn’t be creative!”

Indeed. And with such a routine, the guy’s prose had better be damned good. None of this unnecessary formalism in his popular writings; no tiresome avuncularity. He owes it to those of us who have trouble staying awake, who are too tired to read what we truly enjoy.

Some Catholic (and some non-Catholic) writers

It used to be, whenever I’d learn of a book I didn’t own, I’d have to go to Amazon right away to buy it. But now I’m a faculty member at two different colleges. I have borrowing privileges all out of proportion to what I do for anybody.

So if J.H. posts a link to the effect that Malcolm Muggeridge’s autobiography was the best autobiography that Mark Noll claimed ever to have read, I can say, “Oh, it’s in the stacks at Bethel,” and a few minutes later I’ll have walked to the campus and secured the book for the next six months.

It turns out that Muggeridge is the insufferable sort of writer whose every sentence is a gemstone. But whatever. I have the book. It feels good in my hand, and the font is nice. The cover has a blurb from someone cranky and pompous:

And the title reminds me of:

He had published eight books … concluding, at the moment, with Waste of Time, a studiously modest description of some harrowing months among the Patagonian Indians.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Or if Madame mentions Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott, and I’m at IUSB, I can go to that library and soon the book is in my hand distracting me from the papers I should grade. Anne Lamott repeats her cleverest bits over and over, as Muriel Spark used to do. Anne Lamott must have learned from Muriel Spark, because she pays a sort of tribute to her:

I know some very great writers, writers you love who write beautifully and have made a great deal of money, and not one of them sits down routinely feeling wildly enthusiastic and confident. Not one of them writes elegant first drafts. All right, one of them does, but we do not like her very much. We do not think that she has a rich inner life or that God likes her or can even stand her.

That person must be Muriel Spark because, a few lines later, Lamott says:

Now, Muriel Spark is said to have felt that she was taking dictation from God every morning – sitting there, one supposes, plugged into a Dictaphone, typing away, humming. But this is a very hostile and aggressive position. One might hope for bad things to rain down on a person like this.

And soon I’m looking for evidence that Lamott herself is of the Roman church, but no, either she isn’t or I’m a bad researcher. And anyway she’s different from those other writers because she’s more explicitly self-effacing.

Now, you might wonder why my tone is so grouchy, why I’m so critical of these undeniably fine writers. Well, (1) I’m a grouchy guy; and (2) they were grouchy first, and when I was at a tender age I figured out, by reading such people, that eloquence could atone for being a grouch. Up to a point.

I return to Bethel

Finally, my Xanga has been shut down.

I moved into Mary’s & Martin’s new house. My helpers were M&M, my uncle, my brother Stephen, and Sabby — heroes.

Right now, M&M’s basement contains approx. 30 boxes of my books. Their garden contains my treadmill, abandoned to the recyclers. So long, Timothy. …

I teach just one section at Bethel but often walk across campus to get to IUSB. What an innocent place, Bethel. There isn’t much feeling of urgency …

… except in the class that I teach. There the students sit up straight, eyes wide open.

Through the grapevine I hear:

The readings are difficult;

When he lectures he uses big words.

(And I thought I was so colloquial!)

Our first textbook is Hume’s Dialogues, which many of the students have been supplementing with SparkNotes (not what I recommended, but OK). The class discussions are satisfactory. The students make good points. I wonder which points are from SparkNotes.

Yet somewhere a screw has come loose. In previous years I would quickly learn all the students’ names; this semester, so far, I haven’t bothered to. I know the names of the most frequent talkers. That’s all.

Maybe the reason is that I have so many students (one section at Bethel, two at IU). Even a few students’ faces seem unfamiliar. I never used to have this problem.

Or maybe, during the last year, something happened that is now preventing me from caring like I used to.

The groomsman

And so Kenny & Lara were married. The previous night, the groom and his men slept in a fancy rented house; it made me happy because for the second time this year I was able to sleep in a bed. Around 2:00am I was awakened when the other groomsmen brought in Kenny and put him into bed with me. (But why did Kenny need to be helped into the bed?) … Anyway, for one last time, I was his roommate.

The thing about being a groomsman is, there’s a lot of waiting around. I read some Murakami (1Q84). The thing about being a single groomsman, I discovered, is that people subtly (or not subtly) put pressure on you to hit on the bridesmaids. So it must’ve been disappointing when I didn’t do that. Forgive me, bridesmaids.

Another who felt this pressure was one of the ushers, recently returned from Afghanistan. Near the end I found him outside, drinking beers. He poured out his heart to me: “I’m twenty-six years old and I can’t talk to a woman.” I felt sorry for him.

In a way, he was the hero of the wedding: earlier he’d been escorting guests, walking with them from the parking lot, holding an umbrella over them while he was getting soaked by the rain.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

The best dancers were Kenny’s little sisters & brothers, including the children. I mean that.

I posed for many silly photos. I expect to be embarrassed when they’re leaked out.

I caught Lara’s garter.

Portage

On the 3A and the 3B, the Portage Avenue routes, the bus makes many stops. Some are planned; others occur when necessary, e.g. when there’s too much swearing. “Profanity is not acceptable,” says the driver into his microphone.

Grizzled men protest their innocence.

“My bad,” says an old lady. “I said fuck.”

The bus starts up again; the bantering is resumed; the bus stops. “If you continue using that language,” says the driver, “I’ll throw you off the bus.” The crowd giggles. Camaraderie.

Two men sit down next to me. “Relax,” says one. “It’s OK to be seated next to a black man.” (On the bus I’m not unused to this sort of challenge.) I glare. They laugh. “Just messin’,” they say. We fist-bump.

“I don’t care if you make fun of me,” I tell them. They pretend not to hear.

“What are you reading?” they ask. I show them An Experiment in Love by Hilary Mantel, who’s twice won the Man Booker.

Solemnly, they nod. Respect.

Some drivers are less patient than others, and so I always make sure to thank them; this has put me into their good graces. Still, it’s not surprising that the driver who’s kindest to me is another puny white guy. When I disembark, I thank him, and he warmly says: “Take care.”

As I step out onto the pavement, I have a vision: a banquet hall (a warehouse) with many tables at which are seated the passengers and drivers. I hear my name called out: I’m summoned to the podium. I’ve been chosen as the MVP. The MVP of riding the bus.

Jonah

Now this is the best weather. Neither too bright nor too gloomy; neither too dry nor too wet. Lower 70s °F. Lightly breezy. Mostly (i.e., not completely) cloudy. Sporadically rainy, with t-storms at night. Much birdsong. Much comfort.

Remain this way!

Be like Quito!

Rats.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

The last few weekends, I’ve been invited by my pastor’s family to watch their daughters play soccer. They’re little; the style of play is clusterball. Even so, I can’t keep myself from analyzing the game, out loud.

“Will your children play in the youth leagues?” smiles my pastor’s wife, heroically optimistic. She’s my second-favorite person in the church.

“No, they won’t,” I say. “I wouldn’t want them growing up desiring to play for the U.S.”

She’s amused, because I mean it: I’m a man of principle.

The next weekend, I get a sunburn.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

In church, the sermon is about Jonah. I love that book. Jonah’s such a sulker.

Why doesn’t Jonah want to go to Nineveh? says my pastor. Is it because he’s afraid? No. Jonah’s not afraid.

I think: Jonah’s like, throw me overboard. He’s kind of a badass, in a grumpy (i.e., totally depressive) way.

Jonah doesn’t want God to show mercy, says my pastor. The book is about mercy. Redemption.

I know, I know.

Later, his wife speaks with me again. I tell her how much I love that book. “Remember, John-Paul, mercy,” she says. “Mercy.”

Thinskinnedness

Apologies! Nearly a week has passed and I just realized that I forgot to link to LM’s interview in Boston Review. The link has been inserted! And for good measure, here it is again!

So transfixed I was, I tracked down LM’s article “The Kindest Cut,” about kidney donors. (Here’s the online version … this reprint may be cheaper.) No, I’m not about to give up a kidney; right now I couldn’t. Just reading the article was harrowing enough for me.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

My semester has ended, and as usual I’m sentimental about it. (The last student I tutored was writing her final college paper.) I’ll have a short break, and then it’ll be back to the office for Summer Sessions I and II.

South Bend rejoices for springtime. It never seems trite to marvel at the green shoots, at the flowers, the birds, the increase of rain, the river’s rising. How easy to forget the winter! And yet this is the time for planning ahead, for calculating how to cope. God, this year remind me to make allowances for the coming leanness. Remind me that to harvest, I must now plant (though the sower and the reaper are not always the same). Forgive me how foolishly I’ve been living.

Some years ago a friend was beaming at another’s child, and I said to her [Quote:] You need to get your own damn baby. Well, now she has one, and it’s my turn to do the beaming. How can a creature resembling, alternately, a roasted chicken and Jabba the Hutt still be piercingly adorable? Such is the power of this child. And my adoration is reciprocated. :)

But yesterday I mimicked, a little too harshly, the child’s cooing, and made her cry. It shouldn’t still bother me. But it does.