On holiday in the “Region” (Northwest Indiana)

Karin & I will soon have been married ten years.

To celebrate, we dropped off Jasper, Ziva, and Dory at a cats’ hotel and headed west with our three little sons.

Not very far west.

Not as far as Illinois. Not even as far as Gary, Indiana. We did cross over into the Central Time Zone.

Our activities in the “Region” were zoological, botanical, athletic, culinary (White Castle), and commercial.

We toured: Michigan City, Valparaiso, Merrillville, Hobart, and – unpremeditatedly – Beverly Shores.

Beverly Shores is a beach town next to the Indiana Dunes National Park. Our phone GPS took us there because we asked it to find a playground. But we couldn’t park the car without a city-issued permit, so our children didn’t play in Beverly Shores.

Instead, we drove and gawked. We could see Chicago across the lake, and there were spectacular houses that looked out in that direction. Some had been built for the Chicago World’s Fair of 1933 and then transported east, by boat.

I hadn’t known that there was such glamor in the “Region.”

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Our hotel was in Portage. It had a breakfast buffet and an indoor swimming pool. We used those conveniences daily.

It took all our effort to keep the children from destroying our suite. Abel, in particular, was a menace.

Samuel asked to go home and, the first night, was physically ill. He improved.

It was Daniel who took to the holiday with especial keenness. We hardly could coax him out of the pool.

One night, our family was bathing when a man and a woman came into the pool area. They looked very sheepish (they had come in and gone out once before). They disrobed, got into the hot tub, worked up some courage, and, I daresay, proceeded to do the deed while we were across the room. You’d think it was their honeymoon or anniversary; such was their involvement. But I suspect they were adulterers who had come to the “Region” to escape detection.

Cat people

My 2025–2026 reading cycle has ended. On the last day, I finished reading six books. I came up three books short. (The final tally was fifty-seven.)

I thank Karin for her tolerance.

I caught Samuel trying to put one of my books on its shelf. He couldn’t slide it into the space; he was jamming it in. I stopped him before he could wrinkle the cover.

He’d brought the book downstairs from his play-room.

“Why did you take my book upstairs?” I asked.

He said: “I just wanted to copy out some of the text.”

I didn’t object to that answer. Indeed, I was rather pleased.

We have a new cat in our house: a young “queen” that Karin rescued from a gang of “toms.” We’re keeping her in our bathroom. The plan is to get her spayed ASAP; we’ll then consider whether to give her up or keep her. She’s starved but friendly, a year or so old. She may be the offspring of the winsome, irresponsible cat that lives across the street.

The “toms” have been prowling outside our house all day. I just saw them have their way with another “queen.” One can’t save them all.

Jasper and Ziva are none too pleased, perhaps because a new cat is in the house, perhaps because Karin medicated all three cats against fleas.

1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 69: Lust and revenge

Australian tycoon George needs a project for his spoiled, crisis-prone daughter, Georgina, to supervise. Why not commission a bronze statue? It’d be bulky, costly, valuable (at least, once the right critics have approved it), conspicuously placed in the wing that George built for the Adelaide museum, and therefore indisputably worthy of a tax write-off. As for Georgina, this is her sort of thing; she has trendy artist friends.

Lily, Georgina’s handpicked artist, wants to subvert the male gaze by sculpting a larger-than-life male nude. That’s fine with George as long as his tax write-off goes unchallenged.

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Enter a plebeian married couple, Cecilia and Karl-Heinz. She works in a New Age shop. He is unemployed. They need money. He wants to buy a cottage in a “cultured” suburb. She wants to give money to her cult. They’re at odds in the bedroom, too (he wants more sex, she doesn’t). One night, as they lie in bed, he propositions her. “Do you know what an OBE is?” she retorts. “Order of the British Empire,” he whimpers. “Out-of-body experience,” she explains.

Karl-Heinz submits his photo to the artist, who selects him as her model. The gig pays well. Now Karl-Heinz and Cecilia will have enough money for a down-payment on the cottage. Or to subsidize the cult.

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The modeling sessions would be utterly professional were Georgina not lurking in the studio. Cecilia isn’t threatened by her husband’s proximity to lesbian Lily, but she rightly mistrusts Georgina.

She confides in her guru, who has arrived from California to raise funds. The guru, realizing that a tycoon’s money is involved, sniffs a big score.

At this point, I had better stop describing the plot, except to note that (a) Georgina’s shrink prescribes her an SSRI with aphrodisiac effects, (b) other people end up taking the drug, (c) Cecilia is urged, against her conscience, to participate in the sculpting project, and (d) the artwork, for financial reasons and with the artist’s bland acquiescence, is turned into a subversion of a subversion of the male gaze.

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I haven’t seen anything much like Lust and Revenge, except one of the director’s celebrated earlier efforts, Lonely Hearts (1982), a work that is, if anything, stranger because its oddball characters enact a more conventional plot. Both movies hinge on the conflict between barely-suppressed male desire and the integrity of an odd but fiercely conventional woman. Lust and Revenge is particularly inspired in channeling Cecilia’s puritanism through kooky New Age beliefs. (Do these two elements combine in real life? I wouldn’t know.) Cecilia looks, speaks, and behaves rather like Ingrid Bergman in Cactus Flower; imagine that character in a cult.

Paul Cox, the director, is also known for a movie called Man of Flowers, summarized thus by IMDb: “An eccentric elderly man tries to enjoy the three things in life that he considers real beauty: collecting art, collecting flowers, and watching pretty women undress.” I haven’t seen Man of Flowers, but, having seen Lonely Hearts and Lust and Revenge, I’d wager that it, too, is more amusing than salacious.

Another movie of Cox’s, one I have seen, is the devastatingly serious Innocence (2000). In it, also, a woman’s integrity is challenged. That movie purports to be realistic. Lust and Revenge is deliberately cartoonish (and Lonely Hearts is somewhere in between). Tonally, Lust and Revenge is rather like Evelyn Waugh’s novel The Loved One, with its skewering of the commerce in sacred things (art, love, spirituality) and its grotesque concluding image of a human body’s (clandestine) desecration. South Australia may as well be Southern California.

1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 60: Un héros très discret (A self-made hero)

Albert grows up thinking his father died fighting for France in World War I. Probably not; probably, his mother lied to him. During the next war, the Nazis capture their village. The village officials welcome the Nazis. Albert’s mother discreetly collaborates with the Nazis so that she can receive the pension for war widows. Then the Nazis are driven out and the village officials welcome the liberators. The Nazis’ French collaborators are rounded up and dealt with. Albert’s mother is spared the worst treatment, however: Albert’s father-in-law has been sheltering Allied parachutists in his barn, and the whole family is protected by, indeed profits from, this clandestine heroism. Albert is humiliated that neither his father-in-law nor his wife saw fit to inform him that good deeds were being done. He hops on a train to Paris. There he falls in with a con artist and an unscrupulous businessman. He learns to inflate his credentials, rehearse catchphrases, and recall names. By dropping the right words into conversation, he insinuates himself into the postwar in-crowd. Its celebrities are the former Resistance fighters. Albert attends their gatherings and pretends to have been a Resistance fighter. He fits right in. The Resistance fighters also name-drop, and he can do it better than they can. He studies English phrases and street names and pretends to have been exiled in London. When he pretends to have been sired by a Polish Jew, his star rises especially high. Eventually, he impresses the right people and is given a prestigious army job.

He works hard at being an impostor. All the while, he is racked with guilt.

The story is sordid and tragic and brightly and cheerfully told.

This impostor’s tale is designed to make every honest viewer worry whether, or to what degree, he or she also is an impostor. It also develops a subtler theme. Is society responsible for incentivizing the deception that Albert practices? Yes, and for turning a blind eye to it. Consider Albert’s wife, and his mistress. Both suspect that something about him is screwy. Neither is especially bothered. They see potential in his talent for self-presentation. Consider the virtuous father-in-law, the one who heroically hides the parachutists in his barn. Deep down, he must not trust Albert; but he trains him in his salesman’s craft. By turning Albert into a disciplined performer, he helps him down the road to impostorship. Consider the soldiers and Resistance fighters. Some are clearly fooled by Albert. Others clearly are not. Most leave it ambiguous whether or not they are fooled. The prevailing attitude seems to be: Let’s see how far this guy will travel; let’s see how useful he can be to us. Hardly surprising, in a society that exalts Nazis or Resistance fighters according to who it is who happens to have the upper hand.

Throughout the movie, various men engage in homosexual flirtations toward Albert. I don’t believe that Albert is a closeted or latent homosexual. The sexual flirtation is a metaphor for a different kind of flirtation: I know what you’re really up to, but I’m going to let you get away with it because I can capitalize on it. The dance of sex is a dance of social advancement, or, in some cases, of social rebellion. Put your wedding dress back on, Albert tells his bride after they have consummated their marriage. Albert, the fraud, wants to recover the idea of purity, of transparency. His bride, who really is pure, is attracted to his deceptiveness. She won’t be the last to regard him in this way. Albert is a self-made “hero,” and a discreet one; and it is a discreet society that quietly calculates whether such a fraud as Albert can be allowed to pass for a hero.

The loneliest practices

I suppose Mishawaka could have another deep-freeze, what with it’s being April, but I’ve begun cutting the grass again. A week after the first mowing, the lawn has regrown so quickly that it looks like a jungle. Mowing is much easier this year, now that (a) I know better what I’m doing, and (b) I’m in better physical condition.

As my mower chews up the cud, I can’t help but to ruminate over After Virtue by Alasdair MacIntyre. His theory of the virtues depends, in part, on the notion of a practice, which he defines as

any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realized in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of, that form of activity, with the result that human powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions of the ends and goods involved, are systematically extended.

By way of illustration, MacIntyre says – notoriously – that “bricklaying is not a practice; architecture is.”

I wonder if J.M. Coetzee is having a little fun with this statement when, in Summertime, he writes of himself –

week after week, using a shovel and a wheelbarrow, he mixes sand, stone, cement and water; block after block he pours liquid concrete and levels it. His back hurts, his arms and wrists are so stiff that he can barely hold a pen. Above all the labour bores him. Yet he is not unhappy. … In fact, once he forgets about the time he is giving up, the work begins to take on its own pleasure. There is such a thing as a well-laid slab whose well-laidness is plain for all to see

– and when, a little later in the book, he attempts to situate his own slab-laying within a cultural history.

I take it that if laying brick isn’t a practice but architecture is, then mowing the lawn isn’t a practice but lawnscaping is. (Surely, what Hank Hill and his neighbors do is a practice.) So, perhaps I’m engaged in a practice when (a) mowing “begins to take on its own pleasure” – when I derive satisfaction from going in straight lines, not damaging the grass, etc. – and (b), what arguably is more important for MacIntyre, I ask friends for advice about how to cut the grass.

More likely, though, for MacIntyre, what I’m doing is not a practice. This is because, for the most part, it’s only incidentally cooperative. I very well could mow my lawn (lay brick, etc.) – mindful of “goods internal to that form of activity” – in drastic isolation. To a considerable extent, because of COVID and because of who I am and the society in which I live, I have no other option than to realize these goods in isolation.

This is what Coetzee does when he lays concrete; this is what Coetzee’s Michael K does when he gardens clandestinely – at night, on an abandoned farm in the countryside (where “there is time for everything”). This, mostly, is what I do when I mow the lawn or study philosophy or the Bible. This is what my life has come to – where it was headed all along.

Quiz

The grammar quizzes that I write have been getting more and more ridiculous. This week’s quiz questions were about Condorito. Here is an excerpt (with the blanks already filled in):

Don Cuasi and doña Treme write a letter to their daughter, Yayita, to warn her about her rakish boyfriend. We’ve always been proud of you, daughter, they say; we expect that you haven’t hidden anything from us; we don’t believe that you’ve dissimulated. But we fear that Condorito has been playing us all for fools. Though he’s promised to lift weights every night, that lousy bird hasn’t been eating an adequate dosage of protein (meanwhile, every week, he has smoked). His arms have been turning thinner and weaker. We don’t believe that he’s been trying to do any exercise. … Love, Your Parents.

This passage is very strange, says Mary.

Well, that’s what happens when one must work from a very puny vocabulary list.

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For the second time since she moved in with us, Ziva is “in heat.” With one arm, she drags herself all over the carpet. Jasper is sometimes responsive to this, sometimes not, but never (so far as we can tell) *consummately* responsive. … Fortunately, Karin has scheduled an operation for Ziva, to take place a few weeks from now.

April fragments

The best free Bembo clone I’ve found.

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What with recent rain, it seemed appropriate to watch The Ghost Writer. Much parodying: “Hatherton” is a parody of Halliburton; Pierce Brosnan is a parody of Tony Blair, of Ronald Reagan, of Bill Clinton, of George W. Bush, etc., etc.; Tom Wilkinson is a parody of Tom Wilkinson in Michael Clayton. There are jokes about Roman Polanski’s other movies and personal life. … But as I was saying, I watched The Ghost Writer because of the weather. The actors were always coming out of a downpour or enduring a drizzle, which made me feel cozy.

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Kenny’s gf Lara has moved to Indiana to be with him. They’ll be married at the end of June. Last night we went to the mall to try on dress shoes, and then on Lara’s lark we went into J Crew. For the first time ever, I felt ashamed to be underdressed. Note to self: avoid J Crew.

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Pickup soccer has been resumed, thank goodness.

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Speaking of being picked up, last week, at the bus station, I was standing on the patch of grass with the cigarette butts, minding my own business, when a black SUV with tinted windows crept up. The driver lowered his window; I stared (bad habit). The driver (middle-aged) said: “Want a ride?” I said: “No.” He drove away. At first I was like, doesn’t he realize I’m waiting for the bus? Then I was like, whoa.