Horror season; Lewis on modern theology; Abel’s accident

My favorite U.S. season begins tomorrow. A few leaves have turned color, and it’s been raining more. I had to mow our front lawn in the rain.

We’ve brought out our horrific mermaid decoration (“mer-skeleton,” Samuel calls it); and I’m reading stories by M. R. James, e.g. “The Mezzotint.”

(Someone’s GIF of that story.)

I used to reserve the spooky reading for October, but this year I’m continuing it all season long.

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One author who loathed horror stories – as a matter of personal taste, not (as far as I can tell) of principle – was C. S. Lewis.

(See The Pilgrim’s Regress’s afterword – or its foreword, depending on the edition.)

The group is reading short essays by Lewis.

These were his words to a cohort of Anglican seminarians:

A theology which denies the historicity of nearly everything in the Gospels to which Christian life and affections and thought have been fastened for nearly two millennia – which either denies the miraculous altogether or, more strangely, after swallowing the camel of the Resurrection strains at such gnats as the feeding of the multitudes – if offered to the uneducated man can produce only one or other of two effects. It will make him a Roman Catholic or an atheist.

(“Modern Theology and Biblical Criticism,” a.k.a. “Fern-Seed and Elephants.”)

I like that.

And later:

All theology of the liberal type involves at some point – and often involves throughout – the claim that the real behavior and purpose and teaching of Christ came very rapidly to be misunderstood and misrepresented by his followers, and has been recovered or exhumed only by modern scholars. Now long before I became interested in theology I had met this kind of theory elsewhere. The tradition of Jowett still dominated the study of ancient philosophy when I was reading Greats. One was brought up to believe that the real meaning of Plato had been misunderstood by Aristotle and wildly travestied by the neo-Platonists, only to be recovered by the moderns. When recovered, it turned out (most fortunately) that Plato had really all along been an English Hegelian, rather like T. H. Green. I have met it a third time in my own professional studies; every week a clever undergraduate, every quarter a dull American don, discovers for the first time what some Shakespearean play really meant.

This too is delightful, perhaps excessively so. I wish I could cackle uninhibitedly at the undergraduates and dull U.S. dons; but I’m afraid that there’s still sorting to be done: for every Aristotle who got Plato right, and (especially) for every Plato who got Socrates right, there was another near-contemporary of theirs who didn’t. And for every Simon Peter, there was a Simon Magus. Also, why think that “what some Shakespearean play really meant” was just one thing? The text may be richer than that. (Of course, supposing that more than one meaning may be true, if a new one is discovered, the old one need not always be invalidated; so, insofar as the moderns do try to invalidate the ancients to advance their own interpretations, Lewis is justified in distrusting them.)

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Abel fell off a bed and got a black eye; now it’s black and blue and green. I once fainted in my bathroom and acquired a black eye. My students asked if I’d been barfighting, and I assured them I had; it was quite a thrill for ten seconds, and then I told the truth.

Mansfield Park

This novel is more savage than its predecessors. Its matrons and widows are at least as pharisaical as those of Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice; its young gentlemen, at least as dissolute. In addition, the family’s fortune depends on volatile West Indian holdings. Will the slaves generate enough income to make up for the profligacy of the eldest son? And what will befall poor little Fanny Price, the household’s live-in cousin?

I don’t know how this story will turn out. For once, I’m in suspense.

The movie didn’t appear until 1999. I won’t be reviewing it for my “1996” series – at least, not for many years. (Recall that I’ve been casting a wider net, reviewing material that appeared from 1995 to 1997.)

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I’m nine or so books behind my hoped-for reading pace. So, recently, I read two celebrated mini-books: Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These, about Ireland’s Magdalene laundries; and Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny, about Nazi Germany, the USSR, and Donald Trump.

You could argue that they’re basically the same book. To use jargon from my old job as a tutor in IUSB’s first-year writing program: the second book is a “theory” text, and the first is an “example” text; and a student who read both books could write a paper making plenty of connections between them (one connection per body paragraph, of course).

(I wonder how teachers of first-year English at IU are coping with A.I. Not too badly, I expect. The in-house rules for papers are so detailed and peculiar, the bots probably still haven’t learned how to follow them.)

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This is Disney’s best song.

Abel has been standing up next to the furniture.

The women are up to something

This biography of the Oxonians Anscombe, Foot, Midgley, and Murdoch has been receiving buzz and now is endorsed by Thomas Nagel, the best reviewer of philosophical books of general interest. I expect that not a few upper-level seminars will be taught at Christian colleges on this episode in the history of philosophy – Anscombe is our (very judgmental) co-religionist – as well as upon one or two of Murdoch’s novels, because novels are fun. (The biography also touches upon Ayer, Austin, Hare, the French existentialists, and of course Wittgenstein.) I certainly am itching to design such a class, whether or not I’d teach it. Would Samuel allow me time for this pointless project? Would he even let me read through the book (not to mention, texts discussed in it that I haven’t read)? Would Samuel’s little brother allow it? It’s doubtful. Anscombe, famously, used to change her seven twerps’ diapers while conducting tutorials, and Midgley left the professoriate for many years to raise her children. So the endeavor would be personally as well as intellectually meaningful to me. And futile. And impossible.

Ben Lipscomb, the biographer, is interviewed here.

1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 41: Normal life

Look who visited! Our high school teacher, Mr. Quiring – all the way from his new home in Nebraska. Here he poses with Mary, Stephen, and me.

Mrs. Quiring visited, too. We learned that she used to grade our reading journals (with terrific speed, as I recall). Credit to her.

Mr. Quiring was a good teacher when I was in school; ten years later, when I visited his class – Stephen was his student then – I thought he was even better. Afterward, he must have improved even more (although, now, he hasn’t been a classroom teacher for several years).

Yesterday he was brimming with pedagogical ideas – perhaps because he was in a room of teachers.

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Normal Life

This sad movie is in the tradition of Bonnie and Clyde, Badlands, Deep Crimson (also released in 1996), and, later, Monster. The criminal twosomes seem less glamorous and more pitiful with each passing movie. (I am not including The Honeymoon Killers, which I haven’t seen.) The distinctive feature of Normal Life is how mismatched and disconnected from one another the two criminals are. They quarrel their way through a pretty appalling marriage before they begin robbing banks. At first, they don’t even rob together; it’s the straitlaced husband, the ex-cop (Luke Perry), who does it by himself to make up for the spending of his unstable wife (Ashley Judd). But it’s the chilling, heartless wife who’s the adrenaline junkie. Once she learns what her husband is doing, she wants in on the fun, and it’s only a matter of time until each of them goes out in a (separate) blaze of glory. Another good movie that Normal Life reminds me of is At Close Range, with a criminal father-son duo played by Christopher Walken and Sean Penn. Both of these movies evoke a brutal U.S. ordinariness – in At Close Range it’s rural Pennsylvania, and in Normal Life it’s the blander Chicago suburbs. No poetry here – this isn’t Badlands. Normal Life opens with a long drive past suburban housing developments and strip malls. It’s almost painful how similar they are to the housing developments and strip malls of today. The movie was filmed on streets and in parking lots and banks where the real-life robbers operated; the locations couldn’t have been more generic if they’d been scouted.

R.I.P. The Super League

The Super League is no more.

Fans protested; pundits criticized; politicians threatened. The English clubs withdrew. Other clubs withdrew.

(So much for the spiffy website.)

Now the clamor is for owners’ and sporting directors’ heads to roll.

Meanwhile, Florentino Pérez of Real Madrid continues to advocate for the Super League.

(The whole video is worth watching. This issue is so clear-cut, the pundits can’t say a wrong word: even terrible Alejandro Moreno delivers some nice zingers.)

European soccer will change, though. An overhaul of the UEFA Champions League was approved even before The Super League declared its intentions.

This video explains the changes:

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I should say a few things about my family, or at least about the boy. For several days, he has suffered from an ear infection. Sometimes he has been feverish. Today his mood was better, but he broke out in a rash: he appears to be allergic to his medicine.

We took him to Walmart for the first time since the pandemic began, and he was pretty amazed by everything.

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Oh, and I gave my last guest lecture on Alasdair MacIntyre. The students clearly were struggling to read all of After Virtue. Perhaps I ought to have refrained from mentioning other readings, so that the students could focus on getting through the book that had been assigned to them. But instead, I recommended a few shorter pieces that, realistically, they might digest by the end of the semester: “Is Patriotism a Virtue?” and “Politics, Philosophy, and the Common Good.” I think those essays display what is best about MacIntyre’s moral and political philosophy, more or less independently of his history of moral and political philosophy (which, tantalizing though it is, I am inclined to reject).

A tiring day

The lawn seems thicker this year. Some of its plant species are new; I wonder if this is good or bad. I mowed again yesterday and, in one hour, used two full tanks of gas.

This afternoon I gave the first of the two lectures on Alasdair MacIntyre. “You spoon-fed the students,” said my Uncle Tim. “Which was exactly what I wanted you to do.” The broth I spoon-fed them was pretty diluted. My seven-page handout was neither very comprehensive nor very detailed; even so, the writing of it felt like hard labor, and at class-time I was exhausted. So were the students, several of whom fell asleep.

I’m always reassured when students do this. The most gratifying teaching evaluation I ever received said that one half of the semester was “boring but very important”; it told me that I was doing something right.

My cousin Vickie, who has been looking after Samuel during these guest lectures, was unavailable today because she has contracted a disease. Her place was kindly taken by my Aunt Sally. When I got home, I received a report of the many activities that Samuel was encouraged to do.

I reacquaint myself with MacIntyre

Well, the vaccination did give me aches, chills, etc. for much of Saturday. But by Easter morning I felt all better – except in my arm. I continue to have “pain at the injection site.”

I should have remembered, before I got the shot, that this area of my shoulder is where Samuel likes to rest his head.

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My Uncle Tim has asked me to give two more guest lectures. The topic is Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue.

I can think of at least four other graduates of Bethel’s philosophy program who are better qualified to discuss this book. Still, I’m glad for the chance to reacquaint myself with it.

I now know more about the philosophers discussed therein, and so I grasp better what MacIntyre is saying.

(Famous last words.)

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Usually, I take my sweet time with any philosophical work longer than two or three chapters. I might spend a quarter of a year, or half of a year, or two or three years on something as long as After Virtue (which doesn’t even exceed 300 pages).

(Of course, I would also read other things during that time.)

This reading of the book will have taken just three weeks.

I’ll also have read several articles by or about MacIntyre – which is all to the good, except that I feel a little weary from having stuck so closely to one author, day after day after day. I keep on having to resist the temptation to read within fields that MacIntyre mentions but doesn’t discuss in detail. I’ve been gazing longingly at my books on social epistemology and free will; more generally, my appetite for studying the metaphysics of agency has been whetted again.

There is just too much to read.

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What my uncle’s students are making of After Virtue, I’m curious to find out. It can’t be easy going for them. Too many of the names, they won’t know from “Adam.”

Some polemical texts serve as good introductions to the ideas that those texts argue against. This is emphatically false of After Virtue.

If a student’s sole exposure to, e.g., John Rawls’s ideas is through this book, it will be very hard for him or her to give those ideas a fighting chance.

To be fair, if one’s sole exposure to Rawls’s ideas is through Rawls’s own books, it also may be hard to give those ideas a fighting chance, just because those books are so long, complex, and repetitive that it is hard to read them carefully.

I wouldn’t say the same about Rawls’s articles. Rawls’s ideas may be expressed canonically in A Theory of Justice and Political Liberalism, but often they are more alluring, more clearly motivated, in his briefer, less rigorous statements.

To some extent, this also is true of MacIntyre’s writing. This summary of After Virtue should help the students.

But I do hope that they carefully read After Virtue’s chapter 14, “The Nature of the Virtues.” The book’s constructive proposal is much more interesting than its criticisms of rival philosophies.

A lecture

Apparently, now that he’s done a few frolics on the grass, Samuel has learned the word “outside.” I haven’t heard him use it; but my cousin Vickie did, this afternoon, while she was looking after him.

It was the first time in months that both parents were away from him. (He did just fine.)

I was delivering one of two guest lectures in my Uncle Tim’s ethics class, on the topic of “political authority.” (Is the state a justifiable institution? What, if anything, makes it our duty to obey its laws?) It was the first college class I’d taught since 2016 – and the first philosophy class since 2013.

Will these lectures be my swan song as a teacher?

I wonder.

To prepare for today’s installment, I read well over a hundred new pages – and two or three dozen judiciously chosen old ones – and I wrote a seven-page handout for the COVID absentees. Is it unbecoming to say that, sometimes, I work pretty hard?

Leading Sunday School

For whatever reason, I’ve been made the de facto deputy leader of my church’s Sunday School class for adults. So far, I’ve led three sessions, and it looks like I’ll be given charge of all of the next series, in which we’ll read through John Stott’s study guide on the beatitudes.

I really like these study guides by Stott. I understand the biblical texts much better after discussing them, under Stott’s guidance, with my classmates. Stott’s questions are open-ended, yet they always seem to direct us to the truth.

Tomorrow, though, we’ll finish a different series, Jim Cymbala’s Life-Changing Prayer: Approaching the Throne of Grace. The plan is to watch a 24-minute DVD episode; to answer the two discussion questions left over from our previous meeting (we watch every episode twice); and then to spend the rest of the session praying (it is the last session, and the unit is about prayer, after all). Like Stott’s curriculum, this one also pretty well teaches itself.

(I’m glad to have been put under the spotlight at the very end of the series, since the final episode, “The Church That Prays Together,” has been my favorite by far.)

Small world

A lot of articles about South Bend’s mayor, Pete Buttigieg, have been appearing in my Facebook feed – especially now that he’s running for U.S. President.

One Facebook friend recently shared an article from The Daily Caller, a conservative news site founded by Tucker Carlson of Fox. What caught my eye was the reporter’s name. I did a little investigating. Sure enough: she’d been my “Introduction to Ethics” student at Cornell.

This is the second student of mine I’ve come across, in one way or another, in the national news.

The first has been serving as the mayor of Ithaca since January 1, 2012 – the same day Mayor Pete assumed office in South Bend.

Elizabeth Anderson

The philosopher Elizabeth Anderson is the subject of two recent articles in The New Yorker.

The newer article, published this week, surveys her career and personality.

The older one, published in September, reviews her book Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don’t Talk about It), which is built around her 2015 Tanner Lectures.

In all the time I was at Cornell, Anderson gave what I thought was the best talk by a visiting speaker. Its content was incorporated into her book The Imperative of Integration.

Her best-known article is “What Is the Point of Equality?”; her first book, Value in Ethics and Economics, is much cited.

I’ve never had occasion to assign her political writings in my classes. But I did assign her 2007 article “If God Is Dead, Is Everything Permitted?” in a class that I taught on the philosophy of religion. (This article is one of the best in the celebrated anthology Philosophers without Gods: Meditations on Atheism and the Secular Life; it also appears in Christopher Hitchens’s The Portable Atheist. Anderson’s colleague at the University of Michigan, Edwin Curley, presents a similar argument in a fascinating exchange with Peter van Inwagen, in the anthology Divine Evil? The Moral Character of the God of Abraham.)

I’m glad to see Anderson’s work noticed in the popular press. Her recent writings, especially, are very easy to understand. And her arguments tend to be motivated by lived experience rather than by esoteric considerations. I sometimes wonder how this or that view of hers, not widely held nor even previously articulated, could ever have failed to be among the top contenders in popular debate.

A brave couple of games

South Bend is powdery now. Jasper, who used to run out into the yard every time he could, has been staying well away from the front door. Karin & I’ve been doing seasonal errands – retrieving my coats from Martin’s & Mary’s house; buying salt for the outdoor staircase.

Yesterday, I walked to Bethel in the snow. It wasn’t a difficult walk, but in the classroom the melted snow dripped down from my curly, long locks.

I’m on Cloud Six or Seven because all of my course prepping is done. What remains is to give exams and to grade.

Today, I allowed myself a break and watched two soccer games. In the first one, Leicester City demolished Manchester City with some fine counter-attacking and less than thirty percent of the total possession. The British announcers enjoyed skewering Pep Guardiola, the possession guru, manager of Man City. “He won’t win the League this way,” they said. It was a proud moment for British soccer. And, truth be told, on the counter, Leicester looked lovelier than Man City ever did.

Then I went to Stephen’s and we watched B.S.C. play the last game of the season – the “victory lap” game (the championship had been clinched the week before). Though I’d watched plenty of games this year, I’d yet to see Barcelona take the lead in a game and win. In the first half, our lead was 3 to 0. Even our goalie, the brave Máximo Banguera, scored. Then, in the second half, the game fell apart. An offside goal was wrongly given, our opponents scored twice more, and I had to settle for watching a draw.

Karin has just come into the house. When she opened the door, both kitties rushed out onto the snowy porch. The goose-brains (Karin calls them).

I dream of hippos

My health is improved but does not, shall we say, sparkle. Tonight a winter storm is forecast. I’m hoping that tomorrow my high school workplace will be closed, or at least that its classes will be delayed for two hours; and that Bethel will not be closed. It’ll be the last day of regular classes there. I want to finish watching The Two Escobars with my students. It was gratifying, yesterday, to listen to them gasp at René Higuita (his famous escorpión play) and at Carlos Valderrama (his mere physical appearance).

Reflecting on Colombia, I am pleased to think of its wild hippos, whose ancestors escaped the finca of Pablo Escobar. Sadly, this article reports that the authorities have set out to castrate those hippos. Happily, this article suggests that it will not be easy to subject them to the knife.

Karin put up our Christmas tree last night, and while we slept the kitties knocked it down, which surprised us zilcho. Now we’re home from work. The tree is still upright. The kitties seem to have accepted the tree. I have two or three chapters of John Charles Chasteen to read this evening, and ten study questions per chapter to write, or else my students will get off easy when they take their final exams. As I said, the semester is nearly ended. I’m making a mental list of holiday readings for myself. I hope that over Christmas I’ll enjoy a respite from illness so that I can lie on the couch and read and watch TV.

The election

For my birthday, I’ve been asking for books by G.K. Chesterton.

Today at Bethel I spent one class session making the students read Borges’s “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” and the other making the students take a quiz. I was able to sit quietly at my desk. Such are the sessions that I truly love to teach.

Tomorrow, due to the election, I’ll enjoy six hours off from work. Whom shall I vote for? Not Trumpie, and not Hillary. I’d vote for Hillary if Indiana were a “battleground” state; but, according to the polls, Trump is certain to win here, rendering my vote causally irrelevant. And so I plan to use my ballot to declare my preference for a decent human being.

In Ecuador, the people simply stage a nice coup if the president turns out to be a knucklehead. (Setting aside the “coup” that was held against him in 2010, the fact that our current president has been in power so long is one indication that he isn’t such a knucklehead.) Our military is obliging in this respect. It allows coups to proceed against the unrighteous. Not so in the United States, or in any country where a rebellion would be put down by the invincible and loyal guardians of the regime (and where, moreover, the civilians would be at a loss as to how to rebel). I quote from Chesterton’s essay about Rudyard Kipling:

Now, Mr. Kipling is certainly wrong in his worship of militarism, but his opponents are, generally speaking, quite as wrong as he. The evil of militarism is not that it shows certain men to be fierce and haughty and excessively warlike. The evil of militarism is that it shows most men to be tame and timid and excessively peaceable. The professional soldier gains more and more power as the general courage of a community declines. Thus the Pretorian guard became more and more important in Rome as Rome became more and more luxurious and feeble. …

In the U.S., no institution is more important than the local Pretorian guard, which is constituted by the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, and so on. This guard was built up ostensibly to defend citizens from aggressors and would-be aggressors (the British, the Native Americans, and the Spanish; and, later, the Germans, the Japanese, the Soviets, and the terrorists). But its chief function, which no one discusses, is to be so big and powerful and disciplined that civilians could never overthrow the likes of Trumpie or Hillary – or any knucklehead who should be elected.

Rosaura; born in blood and fire; monsters’ offspring; Leibniz; I know what you did last summer; down a dark hall

I haven’t had much time for blogging, but during the last few weeks I’ve managed to read good-sized portions of several books. They haven’t been difficult books (not even Leibniz’s Political Writings have been very difficult; for one thing, Leibniz digresses at key moments to promote the use and development of microscopes). Nor have they been lengthy books. But they’ve all been “top quality.”

Some more titles:

(1) Born in Blood and Fire: A Concise History of Latin America, by John Charles Chasteen. My Spanish “beginning” students will be tasked, after Thanksgiving, with reading this. It’s the liveliest general history of Latin America that I know of.

(2) Rosaura a las diez, by Marco Denevi, with notes and cuestionarios by Donald A. Yates. This is an Argentinian mystery novel, in the fashion of Wilkie Collins. (Yates’s introduction goes so far as to say that Denevi’s only literary influence was Wilkie Collins.) Rosaura was recommended to me by my Uncle Tim, who read it in high school. Right now I’m forcing my Spanish “intermediate” students to read it. How they struggle.

(3) I Know What You Did Last Summer, by Lois Duncan. Until recently, I only knew this as the lousy slasher movie that came out when I was a youth – the movie with the hook-handed killer known as the “Fisherman.” Lo and behold, the tale began as an early-’70s novel. The novel has no “Fisherman.” It does have narcissistic teenagers in a hell of their own making, a hell of regret, of jealousy, and of fear. This is not a merciless book, but it is a deeply unsettling one.

Duncan was quite prolific, quite expert at writing this sort of thing. I’ve started reading another of her grim offerings, Down a Dark Hall.

(4) Children of Monsters: An Inquiry into the Sons and Daughters of Dictators, by Jay Nordlinger. Each chapter treats a different dictator and his offspring. Hitler – did he have children? Mussolini. Stalin. Mao. The Ceausescus. Castro. Gaddafi. Saddam Hussein. Mobutu. Bokassa. Amin. Pol Pot. It reads a little like Kings and Chronicles, especially when it covers the dynastic dictatorships (the Kims, the Duvaliers, the Assads). Though it’s wryly written, it’s still a bit of a chore to get through. The chapters are nevertheless worth reading in the given order, because they set the stage for one of the most compelling characters: Idi Amin’s son, Jaffar, who manages to be both a peace advocate and a “chip off the old block” (many dictators’ children have tended to be one or the other, but not both). With Jaffar it’s as if the psychological pieces almost fit together, and it’s poignant. (If only the dictators had been more like Jaffar, instead of, you know, murderers.)

Nordlinger has written a book which is “on the other side of the looking-glass” to this one. It’s about the recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize. I intend to read it soon.

The fall holidays

Three immanent fall breaks:

• the high school’s (Fri. of next week, and then Sat., Sun., and Mon.);
• IUSB’s (Mon. and Tues. of next week);
• Bethel’s (tomorrow).

Yesterday’s Spanish session wasn’t very well attended, and so it went much better than usual. It may’ve been the best session I ever taught. (Afterward, the student in front of whom I tore my pants stayed awhile to tell me that my lecture was crystal-clear. She’s a very kind, encouraging student.)

I began the session by showing soccer replays. “Look at how rapidly the ball travels in the high altitude,” I said. I taught about the elevation of La Paz. Then I showed photos of that city. The students gasped. Then I told them about El Alto, La Paz’s suburb, which is even higher and more populous.

I continued lecturing about the soccer replays. “Here is Ecuador’s first goal. See Antonio Valencia’s perfect first touch. The player who ends up scoring the goal is Énner Valencia, who almost got arrested during the previous game for not paying his child support.

“Here is our tying goal, scored, near the end of the game, by the same player.”

“One question,” interjected an athlete in the back row. “Ronaldo or Messi?”

“Messi plays better,” I replied (to his disgust).

“Can we watch replays of the Cubs?” asked a skinny young man in the back row.

“No.”

Then I taught about the impersonal se (as in: se habla español en Bolivia) and about the se which disavows responsibility (se me olvidó la tarea). This was the most crystal-clear part of the lecture. I was very pleased with how well I taught that day.

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The previous day, little Ziva’s uterus was removed. The surgery was completed by mid-afternoon, but Ziva was groggy all evening: her jumps were too low for their intended surfaces, and her head kept on bobbing sleepily.

Now her belly has a large, shaved patch where the surgery was performed.

Despite these ignominies, she recovers more of her strength every day.

Learn ’em up good

At last the dreary fall weather has arrived, which has put me into a very good mood. Also, my Spanish students – both groups, the Beginners and the Intermediates – have figured out that to get decent grades, they must memorize when to use the different verb tenses. And so their quiz scores are becoming more respectable.

For that matter, my command of Spanish grammar is becoming more respectable. I can now tell you what the pluscuamperfecto is. Before, I couldn’t have done so, though I would’ve had no trouble using that tense.

Having run out of episodes of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit to watch (I’ve now seen most of them two or three times), I’ve been casting my net wider. Karin & I tried out and rejected CSI Miami. It was rather soulless. Last night, on YouTube, I watched an episode of the long-running German/Austrian/Swiss police-procedural show, Tatort. It was very good: it had some vacant buildings in it, and a lot of rain, and the detectives themselves were adequately weathered. But I realized that scenery and weather weren’t enough for me. I also needed to understand the dialogue. This particular episode had English subtitles, but I would need to learn German to view all of the 900+ episodes.

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.

A conspicuous tear

A quick note to say that last week I was extremely busy teaching Spanish.

My favorite quiz answer so far: “A Melanie le gusta jugar el hammer y shotput.”

I wrote it on the board. “What’s wrong with this sentence?” I asked.

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At the college library, whilst I was talking to a student who’d come to my office hours, I leaned forward in my armchair to write on a piece of paper, and my pants loudly tore open from the back to the very front. I wasn’t super pleased about it. It must have been terrible for my poor student. … However, I carried on like a pro, teaching about syllabic stress. I wonder how well my student was able to concentrate on that lesson.

Let me record that of all the people with whom I’ve discussed this so far, Stephen has been the nicest. “I’m sorry that that happened, John-Paul,” he said.

A turn for the worse?

Typical:

The kitties are in another room, entangled together in a fierce struggle, emitting hideous sounds. … Panting, Jasper staggers out to us. He settles into his favorite laundry basket. I get up to search for Ziva, to make sure that she hasn’t been killed.

Probably she’s fine, says Karin. Jasper hasn’t got any blood on him.

(True enough.)

Ziva cautiously emerges. I advise her: Remain on the other side of the room, little Ziva.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

On Thursday night, the kitties fight for control over Jasper’s laundry basket. Let’s bring out a different basket for Ziva, I suggest to Karin. But when we do put Ziva into a different basket, Jasper climbs into it; they fight even more alarmingly in the tinier space.

My feelings on this particular night are raw already, due to Ecuador’s defeat against Brazil …

and due, also, to my having taught poorly the previous day’s lesson of Spanish. …

(Why don’t the kitties give me a break? Why don’t they just be nice to each other?)

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

In the small hours, Ziva crawls all over my body, rests her side against my nose and mouth so that I can’t breathe. The little dear is smothering me.

Jasper, who never used to do this, imitates his sister. It’s worse when he does it. He’s heavier, and he has longer fur.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

At Bethel, waiting to teach, I sit, haggard, in the empty classroom, my feet up on the desk. A student comes into the room.

I’ve been talking to the other students, he says. We all have a lot of sympathy for you.

Oh yes?

I mean, he says, what you’re trying to do – teaching a foreign language – it must be really, really hard.

What exactly are you saying?

Just that we have a lot of sympathy for you.

OK.

The other students file in.

Before I re-teach the previous lesson, I say, I want to thank you for your sympathy. But know that things aren’t all that bad for me. I have three jobs, and two of them are going very well. What’s bothering me more is that Ecuador lost last night against Brazil. We’d been playing better than Brazil these last five years. With this defeat, my world came crashing down a little. Now, the lesson.

I re-teach it. This time the students follow what I’m trying to say. They leave more satisfied. In the afternoon, six of them come to my office hours. As long as they keep doing this, the class should go all right.

Ziva and Jasper continue to fight, but, I now notice, the fighting has a distinctly playful quality. Karin shoots this precious video of them: