Eric The Blue

Splendors of Evelyn Waugh

Just finished reading, with considerable pleasure, a novel by Evelyn Waugh, A Handful of Dust. If all his books are this good, I have a baseball season's worth of indulgent gratification to look forward to, because he wrote seventeen novels. The best known of them is Brideshead Revisited. In reading around about Waugh, I gather that his career is often thought of as falling into two phases, an early one, audacious and hilarious, characterized by satire tending toward farce, and then a later one, more serious and conventional, on which his reputation as a leading "Catholic novelist" rests. Brideshead Revisited (1945) belongs to Phase Two. In retrospect, A Handful of Dust, which was published in 1934, four years after Waugh's conversion to Roman Catholicism, seems transitional. It's farcical and funny, but you'd have to be comatose not to detect a serious undercurrent that seems consistent with what a conservative and observant Catholic would likely think about the crazy events that are described, poker-faced, without any moralizing commentary. You laugh and laugh but by the end you may think that the book is more disturbing than funny.

The main character is Tony Last, the proprietor of a country house at Hetton, a small town in the northeast of England nearer to Scotland than it is to London. His wife, Brenda, starts an affair with one of their visitors, John Beaver (the names are Dickensian), a Londoner even more shallow than her undiscerning husband, whose suspicions are not even aroused when she rents a small apartment in London and starts staying there almost all the time. The reason for the affair would appear to be nothing  more  than that she needs something to do. She explains to Tony that she is auditing an economics course, the absurdity of which betrays her indifference about whether he is deceived. Nevertheless he is deceived. Their young son, who as a practical matter has been abandoned by his mother, is then killed in an accident, whereupon Brenda delivers to Tony a second grievous blow. Believe me, it's funnier than it sounds. The conversations they have with their respective barristers (English for lawyers)! Back then, there could be no divorce without "cause," the most common being abandonment and adultery. One service provided by Tony's firm is detectives who will accompany the client on a vacation with a lover, either actual or a plausible actor, so that "evidence" can be gathered for divorce court. So Tony goes off on one of these trips with a strumpet he has recruited from a bar usually too seedy for him to patronize. Against his instructions, she brings along on the trip her daughter: nothing else to do with the girl. Comedy ensues, the effect amplified somewhat by the fact, never mentioned, that this farce is executed for the purpose of working up "evidence" even though Brenda is actually guilty of both adultery and abandonment. 

Tony soon leaves England on a cruise, his apparent idea being that a change of scenery will change something else. But wherever you go, there you are. In the end, he comes to grief in the Amazonian interior of Brazil. I won't go into the details, except to say that I take the novel's geographic diversity to be an aspect of Waugh's religious—Christian, Catholic—sensibility. There is nothing anywhere in this world for the pilgrim. If you're at Hetton, you might yearn for the attractions of London, home to bounders like John Beaver who are screwing your wife when not worrying about what men's club they might be of sufficient status to join. You escape to Brazil. Maybe the natives there will reveal that the true savages are in England. No, the Brazilian ones disappoint, too. In one of Waugh's many brilliant strokes, a scene from Brazil is at one point juxtaposed against one concerning the world Tony has left behind. To travel into Brazil's interior, it is necessary to hire natives who can transport provisions and function as guides in the jungle. But Tony and his partner—there's a story behind how they made common cause!—arrive in the village when the men are all away on a drunk and so the two white men end up negotiating with a woman, Rosa, whose guile is exercised entirely in the service of obtaining . . . cigarettes. Meanwhile, back in London, an ancillary character, an acquaintance of Tony's who is a member of Parliament representing a rural district, has his finest moment. He's another frequenter of the club scene and, by the way, the fellow who accompanies Tony to the bar where he finds the woman to go off with him for the purpose of manufacturing and collecting evidence. This fellow, Jock by name, spends his time enjoying himself in the capital and being occasionally puzzled by the mail he receives from his constituents, who have questions and problems relating, for example, to their pigs. The following is what's placed opposite the negotiation with Rosa. It's also representative of Waugh's prose.

Ten o'clock on the river Waurupang was question time at Westminster. For a long time now Jock had had a question which his constituents wanted him to ask. It came up that afternoon. 

"I should like to ask the Minister of Agriculture whether in view of the dumping in this country of Japanese pork pies, the right honourable member is prepared to consider a modification of the eight and a half score basic pig from two and a half inches of thickness around the belly as originally specified, to two inches."

Replying for the Minister, the under-secretary said: "The matter is receiving the closest attention. As the honourable member is no doubt aware the question of the importation of pork pies is a matter for the Board of Trade, not for the Board of Agriculture. With regard to the specifications of the basic pig, I must remind the honourable member that, as he is doubtless aware, the eight and a half score pig is modelled on the requirements of the bacon curers and has no direct relation to pig meat for sale in pies. That is being dealt with by a separate committee who have not yet made their report."

"Would the honourable member consider an increase of the specified maximum of fatness on the shoulders?"

"I must have notice of that question."

Jock left the House that afternoon with the comfortable feeling that he had at last done something tangible in the interest of his constituents.

This statesman ends up with Brenda after Beaver leaves for America.

Race and democracy, I mean, "democracy"

When people talk about racial justice, they are more apt to have in mind police brutality than democratic reform—especially in the last few weeks. But doesn't the way in which our democracy is organized discriminate against people of color? Even if it's not, strictly speaking, the intent: the intent, for example, might be to screw over Democrats, which, considering who votes for whom, has the effect of screwing over African Americans.

Gerrymandering is one prominent aspect of the problem. African Americans are about 27% of the population in Alabama, enough to give them a pretty loud voice in how things go. In theory. In practice, not so much. For example, the state has seven congressional districts. One of them, the seventh, is 64% African-American. Is the explanation for this that black Alabamians are clustered together in one part of the state? The above is a map of the district. Rural west-central Alabama is heavily African-American and, in land mass, that's the heart of the district. But suppose that a computer were programmed to generate a million different ways in which the state might be divided into seven more or less geometrically regular districts of equal population. In how many of them would the so-called rural black belt be in the same district as much of metropolitan Montgomery (heavily African-American), much of metropolitan Birmingham (heavily African American), and the town of Tuscaloosa (not a ton of African Americans but, for Alabama, a lot of white Democrats, on account of the presence of the University of Alabama)? I think the answer is: none. The evidence would be that the irregularly shaped fringes of the map are precisely the parts needed to squeeze the cities into what is otherwise a rural district. 

People complain about "political polarization." Well, gerrymandering is a big part of that problem, too. If African Americans were a quarter to a third of the population in most of the districts, they'd have a moderating effect on the state's congressional delegation. The real right-wing nut-jobs would have a harder time getting elected, even in districts that would be strongly Republican. If you doubt this, consider that in the last US Senate election in the state, Judge Roy Moore, a wingnut with a fondness for very young girls, carried six of the seven congressional districts. Moore lost to Democrat Doug Jones by 1.5% of the statewide vote only because he got crushed, 78% to 21%, in the seventh congressional district. This gives you an idea of who can be elected in six of the seven districts.

The nonpartisan Cook Political Report assigns a PVI (partisan voter index) to every congressional district in the country. In Alabama, the seventh is Democrat +20. The other six range from Republican +15 to Republican +30. You draw district boundaries like this, then complain about "political polarization"? And deliver lectures on the decline of civility, an excess of "partisan rancor" and, gasp, cynicism? C'mon man!

I suppose you could say that African Americans in Alabama have a voice, even if it's diminished. That grants them a place in the hierarchy somewhat above residents of the District of Columbia. The population of the District is greater than that of Wyoming, which has a representative in the House and, like California, two seats in the Senate. Residents of the District, 47% of whom are African Americans, have no representation in the Congress. According to sloganeering patriots of yesteryear, they should therefore be exempt from federal taxation, but of course they aren't. The other day, Tom Cotton, Republican from Arkansas, gave a speech on the Senate floor opposing statehood for the District. His argument had to do with his disapproval of D.C.'s mayor. Also, he said that Wyoming, compared to the District, is "well-rounded."

I have a feeling that if the people of the District looked like the people of North Dakota (and voted like them), Cotton would want two new states, maybe "East D.C." and "West D.C." Four new senators! Democracy!

Voting by mail

My kids' linguistic habits reveal their alarming new way of marking time. Every day now I hear them launch sentences with, for example, "Back when school was a thing. . . ." or, "Before coronavirus. . . ."

I remember, back when school was a thing, worrying about this year's presidential election in Arizona, a candidate for the tipping point state and also one in which most ballots are cast by mail. What would happen if the Democratic candidate—we now know it's going to be Biden—won Pennsylvania and Michigan while Trump hung on to Florida, North Carolina, Wisconsin, and all the other states he won last time in the South and Midwest? As returns then started coming in from the West, all would hinge on Arizona. In the nightmare scenario, Trump holds a small lead on election night that Biden overcomes when, in the following days, mailed ballots are added to the tally. This is exactly what happened in Arizona's US Senate race in 2018. On election night, November 6, the Republican, Martha McSally, narrowly led Democrat Kyrsten Sinema, but was overtaken as more and more mailed ballots were counted over the next few days. By November 12, Sinema was ahead by more than 2% and McSally conceded.

It seemed to me naïve to think that in similar circumstances Trump would concede. Now that coronavirus is a thing, and many states are moving to adopt voting by mail, we need to worry about a lot more than Arizona. Trump and his apologists have made it clear that they are opposed to voting by mail, which they assert is riddled with fraud. The only evidence for this seems to be that votes cast by mail trend Democratic, but of course there is a good reason for that. I can't stand Trump, but I'm a member of his core demographic group—older, white, retired, male, time-on-my-hands, someone used to feeling a swell of Norman Rockwell emotion while strolling into my polling place on election day. Such people, I'm sorry to say, self-select for preferring the Republicans. Younger people call bullshit on standing in line to vote, especially when coronavirus is very much "a thing." Moreover, in September they have no idea what their work schedule will be on a Tuesday six or eight weeks hence. Many are gig workers who may not even know whether they'll be home or in a different part of the country or world on election day. One of the relatively few things I have in common with these people is a low opinion of our president and his party.

Plus that it's bullshit to have to vote in person on election day (even though I enjoy it).

Pennsylvania had a primary election on June 2. The above chart shows, by county and party, what percentage of the vote total was from ballots that were mailed in. For example, in Allegheny County, second alphabetically and home to Pittsburgh, Republican candidates got 48% of their votes from mailed ballots, compared to 74% for Democrats. As you can easily see, Allegheny is no anomaly. In every county, Democrats got a much higher share of their total vote from mailed ballots. The 48% figure for Allegheny County Republicans was actually the highest in the state. Republican candidates on average received only about a third of their votes on mailed ballots, compared to about two-thirds for Democratic candidates.

Let me float a theory. Trump's opposition to voting by mail has nothing to do with fraud and everything to do with who votes by mail. One thing that would refute this theory is actual cases of fraud connected to mailed ballots. But it's like the kids' joke about where pink elephants hide—in cherry trees, because no one has ever seen one there. If it's hard to vote, and you have to risk infection to do it, some people won't, and they'll be disproportionately Democrats. It helps if you close polling places where Democrats live. If you lose anyway, call "Foul!" That's the game. I'm hoping for a Biden landslide. For one thing, it's hard to say you were cheated when everyone can see you got thrashed. Also, if Trump were to lose narrowly, who knows what he'd do? I think sometimes the danger he poses is obscured by the bumbling ineptitude, the low comedy of his ridiculous schtick, the water-sipping demos and disquisitions on ramp walking, whatever it was the week before—I guess that would be the one in which he and his team of geniuses were getting punked by kids on TikTok—as the country slides. 

Laurie Kilmartin live tweets her mom's "facetime hospice"

 

Laurie Kilmartin is a comedian. The above is a specimen of her standup. She is also a writer for Conan and the author of two books, Sh*tty Mom: The Parenting Guide for the Rest of Us and Dead People Suck. Regarding Sh*tty Mom, I assume it's autobiographical and that the title describes the contents. A year or two ago I happened to be in Magers and Quinn bookstore one afternoon when she was there to read from Dead People Suck. It's about her dad's final illness and the hospice experience she went through with him and the rest of her family as he was dying. I don't know how funny it is, but, judging from the selections she read that day, it's for sure funnier than it sounds, in a dark sort of way that appeals anyway to me. 

As her Twitter followers know, Kilmartin has for the last couple of weeks been conducting an encore performance as her mother lies dying of Covid-19 in a hospital. The efforts of her and her sister to persuade the hospital to let them visit their mom at the ICU have been the subject of news reports in the LA area. For the most part, however, she monitors her mom over Facetime while live tweeting her last days. Does that sound inhuman? It's the opposite. Too tedious to paste in  tweets so I'll just type a few of them:

Busy watching the Season 82 finale of "Mom"

Glad I only had two parents, I can't do this again

so. mom's heart rate is 30. that seems low!

My sister and I are both heartbroken that mom's last words to us were complaints about the nursing home and not about our appearance.

She is barely breathing but it would be great if she could awaken from all this and tell me to wash my robe.

GAH I tried to put my head on mom's heart and hit all the keys on the keyboard

Getting in our last 300 "I love yous"

When her mom died this morning, Kilmartin tweeted—

She died not at home, surrounded by people she'd never met #COVID

—and followed it up, a few minutes later, with:

In lieu of flowers, the family asks that you throw hot coffee in the face of anyone not wearing a mask. 

Type "Laurie Kilmartin twitter" into Google if you want at least a hundred more "chapters" in this 21st-century art form.

A note on the Breonna Taylor case

The idea behind a "no-knock warrant," such as the Louisville police executed at the apartment of Breonna Taylor shortly after midnight last March 13, is to keep anyone inside from hiding or destroying evidence while the cops wait for the door to be answered. This must also explain why, as in the Taylor case, the warrant may be executed in the middle of the night, when it's unlikely anyone would see the police approaching. But isn't it obvious that these details, together with the fact that this is America so everyone has a gun, make what happened next entirely predictable? One of the points of contention seems to be whether the cops announced themselves before knocking the door off its hinges with a battering ram. They say they did. Taylor's boyfriend, with whom she was in bed sleeping when the warrant was executed, says they did not, and neighbors in the apartment building concur. But it's the middle of the night. The cops arrive and, let us say for the sake of argument, announce themselves and their intentions. Of course the occupants are sleeping so there is no response. Then the cops start battering the door down. That'll wake you up. From the perspective of Taylor and her boyfriend, a home invasion was in progress. There is a panicked 9-1-1 call to prove that. But the boyfriend has a gun and is licensed to carry. He shoots, the cops return fire, more than twenty rounds, and Taylor dies after being struck eight times. 

She wasn't even the principal target of the investigation. Police thought her former boyfriend was dealing drugs and using her apartment to receive his packages. They told the judge who signed the warrant that the postal inspector had verified that their suspect received packages at Taylor's address. After the tragedy, the postal inspector asserted this was not true. There were no drugs or packages or large sums of cash found in the apartment. The boyfriend who shot at police was arrested but subsequently released after journalists revealed more about what seems to have happened. The cops executing the warrant filed an "incident report" that was mostly blank, although they did check "No" next to "Forced entry?" and stated "None" for "Injuries." Do they distinguish "injuries" from "corpses"? I don't know. When the report was released, the Louisville mayor apologized and said it was the kind of thing that "eroded confidence" in the police. You have to be smart to be elected mayor!

Last week, the Louisville city council adopted a law banning "no-knock" warrants. Wonderful, but I wonder whether they've considered that the details of the Taylor case, so far as they are known, tend to elucidate social science research indicating that carrying a gun for personal protection is hazardous to your health. Breonna Taylor would be alive if her boyfriend had been just "a good guy," but instead he was "a good guy with a gun." 

Bloomsday, 2020

Feeling lazy, but I want to keep up the tradition of saying something about Joyce each year on June 16, Bloomsday, so-called because the action of his novel Ulysses, featuring Dubliner Leopold Bloom, occurred on June 16, 1904. Here are some earlier installments.

And, for this year's installment, here is a hand off to Jonathan deBurca Butler, author of the essay "James Joyce in Rome." Condensed version: he hated it! He wrote his brother, "Rome reminds me of a man who lives by exhibiting to travelers his grandmother's corpse." Butler thinks Rome made him almost fond of his hometown and that his poverty while living there—one Christmas, the Joyces, nearly homeless, dined only on pasta—may account for the "The Dead," which he conceived of in Rome, opening with a Dublin feast. 

Betting markets

The above is the Sportsbook for the 2020 presidential election at Betfair, an online betting exchange. A lot of people take this data more seriously than polls, on the theory that what people say with their money means more than what they say on the phone. The figures must refer to the amount of money you'd get returned if you bet a dollar on someone and then he (or she) won. Most bettors currently think Biden will win, which is why putting a dollar on him will return only 1.73. Someone who bet on Trump today would, were he to be reelected, get 2.25. Or you could go with, say, Andrew Cuomo. I guess the theory would be that Biden croaks before the election and Cuomo, after being drafted, defeats Trump in November. If you want to invest in that scenario, the return upon Cuomo's election would be just over a hundredfold. Pence comes in at just 51. That makes sense, since if Trump croaked, Pence would become president and, presumably, the Republican standard bearer. It's perhaps a bit of an insult to Pence that a bet on Nikki Haley returns only twice as much as one on him.

Up until a few weeks ago, bettors preferred Trump, even though polls showed him consistently trailing Biden. Over the past month or two, however, Trump futures in the betting market have resembled that ramp he doddered down the other day—a steep drop, no handrails, and an allegedly slippery floor. I say that some people think the betting markets have more predictive power than the polls, but I'm not sure that's very rational, since it appears the polls are mainly what drive the markets. When Trump trailed modestly in national polls, bettors thought he'd pull through in the electoral college, and they put their money on him. Now, though, Biden's lead has swelled, and the bettors are backing him. With regard to state polls, I wonder whether the bad news for Trump is less that he's behind in most of the "battlegrounds" and more that he's struggling in states he won easily four years ago. Polls show him behind Biden in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Worse (I mean better), they show him in virtual ties with Biden in Iowa, Ohio, Georgia, and Texas. You can also bet on the number of electoral votes Trump wins. Right now, the range with the lowest return is 251-269—in other words, a narrow Trump loss in the electoral college is regarded by bettors as the likeliest outcome. The second most likely outcome, according to the betting market, is that Trump wins only in the range of 201-250 electoral votes. The fourth most likely outcome is that he wins only 151-200 electoral votes.

As election scholars and historians have often observed, it doesn't generally help incumbents when "everything sucks."

In other bad news for Trump, back in 2017, when Melania hadn't yet moved into the White House (for the ostensible reason that she was staying behind in New York while Barron finished school), she was actually renegotiating the terms of the first couple's prenup. Back in the day, the poor immigrant wasn't holding the best cards, but the deck has been shuffled. 

Oh say can you hear Justice Robert Jackson?

 

 

 

Re-upping from 9/24/2017–because Flag Day is not my favorite holiday, though the Supreme Court decision I described is one of that institution’s finest moments.

When at a ball game that is preceded by the National Anthem, often performed by someone or some group evidently determined to hold the field for as long as possible, a goal abetted by certain musical characteristics of our anthem, the crowd always cheers as the last notes are played or sung.  I've never been sure whether the cheers should be attributed to patriotism or to relief that, the empty ritual having been performed, or over performed, the ball game can now finally begin.  I incline toward the latter view, but maybe that's a case of projection.  

Anyway, my partriotism, what there is of it, is more apt to get a lift from contemplating the history of the Supreme Court than from flag-waving and anthem-singing at sports venues.  For example, in January of 1942, just a month after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the state of West Virginia adopted a resolution requiring school children to salute the flag as "a regular part of the program of activities in the public schools."  Moreover, all teachers and students were compelled by the resolution "to participate in the salute honoring the Nation represented by the flag."  The details of the prescribed salute were described in detail and must have been intended to distinguish it from the Nazi salute of der Fuhrer.  The penalty for nonconformance was expulsion.  While expelled, the student was treated as "unlawfully absent" and was to be proceeded against as a delinquent.  Parents and guardians were subject to prosecution and, on conviction, had to pay a fine or be jailed for a term not to exceed thirty days.  To be readmitted after expulsion, a student had to participate in the salute.

A family of Jehovah's Witnesses, last name of Barnette, instructed their children not to salute the flag at the Slip Hill Grade School near Charleston, West Virginia.  When the children were expelled, the Barnettes brought suit, and a three-judge panel of the United States District Court in West Virginia ruled in their favor.  The West Virginia Board of Education appealed to the Supreme Court, which heard the case on March 11, 1943, while American servicemen were being killed daily in both theatres of the war.  Nevertheless the Supreme Court affirmed the decision of the district court.  The majority opinion was written by Associate Justice Robert Jackson, and I'll set down the concluding paragraphs:

National unity, as an end which officials may foster by persuasion and example, is not in question. The problem is whether, under our Constitution, compulsion as here employed is a permissible means for its achievement.

Struggles to coerce uniformity of sentiment in support of some end thought essential to their time and country have been waged by many good, as well as by evil, men. Nationalism is a relatively recent phenomenon, but, at other times and places, the ends have been racial or territorial security, support of a dynasty or regime, and particular plans for saving souls. As first and moderate methods to attain unity have failed, those bent on its accomplishment must resort to an ever-increasing severity.  As governmental pressure toward unity becomes greater, so strife becomes more bitter as to whose unity it shall be. Probably no deeper division of our people could proceed from any provocation than from finding it necessary to choose what doctrine and whose program public educational officials shall compel youth to unite in embracing. Ultimate futility of such attempts to compel coherence is the lesson of every such effort from the Roman drive to stamp out Christianity as a disturber of its pagan unity, the Inquisition, as a means to religious and dynastic unity, the Siberian exiles as a means to Russian unity, down to the fast failing efforts of our present totalitarian enemies. Those who begin coercive elimination of dissent soon find themselves exterminating dissenters. Compulsory unification of opinion achieves only the unanimity of the graveyard.

It seems trite but necessary to say that the First Amendment to our Constitution was designed to avoid these ends by avoiding these beginnings. There is no mysticism in the American concept of the State or of the nature or origin of its authority. We set up government by consent of the governed, and the Bill of Rights denies those in power any legal opportunity to coerce that consent. Authority here is to be controlled by public opinion, not public opinion by authority.

The case is made difficult not because the principles of its decision are obscure, but because the flag involved is our own. Nevertheless, we apply the limitations of the Constitution with no fear that freedom to be intellectually and spiritually diverse or even contrary will disintegrate the social organization. To believe that patriotism will not flourish if patriotic ceremonies are voluntary and spontaneous, instead of a compulsory routine, is to make an unflattering estimate of the appeal of our institutions to free minds. We can have intellectual individualism and the rich cultural diversities that we owe to exceptional minds only at the price of occasional eccentricity and abnormal attitudes. When they are so harmless to others or to the State as those we deal with here, the price is not too great. But freedom to differ is not limited to things that do not matter much. That would be a mere shadow of freedom. The test of its substance is the right to differ as to things that touch the heart of the existing order.

If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion, or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein. If there are any circumstances which permit an exception, they do not now occur to us.

We think the action of the local authorities in compelling the flag salute and pledge transcends constitutional limitations on their power, and invades the sphere of intellect and spirit which it is the purpose of the First Amendment to our Constitution to reserve from all official control.

The decision of this Court in Minersville School District v. Gobitis, and the holdings of those few per curiam decisions which preceded and foreshadowed it, are overruled, and the judgment enjoining enforcement of the West Virginia Regulation is

Affirmed 

What some of us find so striking about this, and even thrilling, is that the Barnettes were likely hoping to carve out for themselves an exclusion from the state regulation on narrow religious grounds. Justice Jackson had no time for that.  He and the other five justices in the majority--it was a 6-3 decision--held that the regulation violated the rights of all citizens.  That is, West Virginia was "enjoined" from compelling the Barnette children to salute the flag, not because they were Jehovah's Witnesses, but because they were Americans.

 

 

 

Wikipedia on Walker Percy

I can idle away more than a single Sunday afternoon collecting odd morsels on the Internet, but this afternoon's work of an hour or two related to the American novelist Walker Percy. If you've heard of him, it's probably because of his first novel, The Moviegoer, which won the National Book Award in 1962. The introductory paragraph of the Wikipedia article about Percy concludes:

His work displays a combination of existential questioning, Southern sensibility, and deep Catholic faith. He had a lifelong friendship with author and historian Shelby Foote and spent much of his life in Covington, Louisiana, where he died of prostate cancer in 1990.

This was interesting enough so that I kept reading, and, assuming the article isn't marred by wholesale invention, Percy's life doesn't get less interesting when you descend into the details. He was born at Birmingham, Alabama, in 1916. Next year, his paternal grandfather committed suicide. When Percy was 13, his father died the same way as granddad had, a self-inflicted gunshot wound at home. Two years after that, his mother died when she drove her car off a bridge: probably another suicide. Percy and his two younger brothers were then taken in by a first cousin once removed who was a bachelor, a lawyer, and a poet living in Greenville, Mississippi. I'm confused about the relationship indicated by "first cousin once removed," and am coming toward the view that this is because it can refer either to your parent's cousin or to your cousin's kid. Seems crazy, inasmuch as the former would usually be quite a bit older than you and the latter would usually be quite a bit younger. I'm thinking that William Percy, who took in Walker and his brothers, was the boys' deceased father's cousin. He might have thought he had a tidy life going there in Greenville. 

At least the eldest boy, Walker, was already 15. In a few years he was off to the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, where he majored in chemistry and was a good enough student to then be admitted to the medical school at Columbia University. He obtained his M.D. in 1941 and accepted an internship in psychiatry at Bellevue Hospital. His life then took another dramatic turn when, after working on an autopsy, he contracted tuberculosis in 1942. At the time, the only known treatment was rest. He entered the Trudeau Sanitorium at Saranac Lake, New York, in the Adirondacks. The Wikipedia article says he "spent several years recuperating" there. I have no idea how the finances of that worked. His brothers were off fighting in the war. The sanitorium, however, had a 7000 volume library and, while the world war raged, Percy read through the works of Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, Sartre, Kafka, and Thomas Mann. In 1946 he married Mary Townsend, a medical technologist, and the two of them were received into the Roman Catholic Church the next year. 

With regard to religion, Percy's family background was casual Protestant. Beware the converts! They self-select for being in earnest about it. Except for a brief stint teaching pathology at Columbia, Percy never returned to medicine. Though this is speculative, to me it seems likely that the traumas of his youth account for subsequent events—the child of two suicides going in for medicine, psychiatry in particular, and, when that didn't work out, turning to existentialist authors, a new religious faith, and literature. He made his debut as a "Catholic writer" in 1956, an essay on race in Commonweal magazine called "Stoicism in the South" that, according to Wikipedia, "condemned Southern segregation and demanded a larger role for Christian thought in Southern life." Since "southern life" is not ordinarily considered to suffer from a deficit of Christianity, I'm thinking maybe the emphasis is meant to fall on "thought"—"a larger role for Christian thought." And then his first novel, The Moviegoer, wins the National Book Award. Though I haven't read it, the impression I get, reading hither and thither about Percy, is that his characters tend to be smart and active, often young, sunk in modernity and trying to enjoy their sports cars and nice restaurants and disposable incomes, but feeling nevertheless estranged, sad, empty: thus, a quest for meaning. 

The Wikipedia article includes an enjoyable anecdote about Percy and his lifelong friend, Shelby Foote, whose face and voice became known to millions on account of Ken Burns's film on the Civil War. (Foote's life's work was a 3-volume history, The Civil War: A Narrative.) Anyway, "lifelong friendship" is a slight exaggeration, for Foote grew up in Greenville, Mississippi, and they met only after Percy moved there as a teenager to live with his first cousin once removed. They graduated from Greenville High the same year and then both went to Chapel Hill for college; Wikipedia  notes that Foote, on account of a Jewish ancestor, could not join Percy's fraternity. The anecdote, however:

As young men, Percy and Foote decided to pay their respects to William Faulkner by visiting him in Oxford, Mississippi. However, when they arrived at his home, Percy was so in awe of the literary giant that he could not bring himself to speak to him. He later recounted how he could only sit in the car and watch while Foote and Faulkner had a lively conversation on the porch.

The Wikipedia article on Foote is pretty interesting, too. I think his rather large place in Burns's film may be explained by the desire to show all sides, and Foote is one of the comparatively few eminent historians who is sympathetic to the South. He said he would have fought for the Confederacy then, and that he'd fight for it now, the absurdity of which reminds me of my favorite exercise in alternative history: What if Lincoln had just let the South go? But enough.

Finding Vivian Maier

When I saw the above photograph, my first thought was: thank goodness styles have changed, or that I was born in 1958 instead of 1938, because otherwise the fellow farthest left with the bird legs could have been me. The picture was taken by Vivian Maier. Until yesterday, I'd never heard of her. That's not particularly surprising. When she died at 83 in 2009, hardly anyone had heard of her. A couple years earlier, she had stopped making payments on a storage unit she'd rented in Chicago. The contents, which included tens of thousands of photographic negatives and prints, were sold at auction to three different collectors. One of them, John Maloof, was interested mainly in Chicago neighborhoods, and here were all these photographs of Chicago street scenes. Eventually, though, he got interested enough in the photographer to google her name. The exercise turned up the obituary of a Vivian Maier who for 40 years had worked as a nanny in Chicagoland. Could this be the woman whose photographs he had? Yes. He tracked down some of her former charges and summarized their description of her:

She was a socialist, a feminist, a movie critic, and a tell-it-like-it-is type of person. . . . She was constantly taking pictures, which she didn't show anyone. 

That's from the Wikipedia article about her. She might not have shown the pictures to anyone, but Maloof posted a selection of them to Flickr, where they attracted lots of attention, including from art critics. Before long, the photographs Vivian Maier took on her days off from caring for other people's children were the subject of exhibitions around the world. She's now pretty widely regarded as one of the leading American photographers of the 20th century. 

You never know what's going to happen to you, even after you're dead. Maier made a fair number of "self-portraits"—they often showed only her shadow. Maloof ended up making (with Charlie Siskel) a film about her, Finding Vivian Maier. It was nominated for the Best Documentary Oscar in 2015. You can view hundreds of Maier's photographs here.

 

Pivot

Last week, I kept forgetting to bring a face mask along when I was going someplace. It's hard to remember that old problem when you're getting earnest messages encouraging you to hide your trash bin and hook up your garden hose. The federal government seems to have forgotten about it, too. Every day, about a thousand more dead, but the administration is said to have "pivoted." I guess that explains the tweet about the 75-year-old Catholic fellow in Buffalo who, according to the first official police statement, "tripped and fell." But, unfortunately, once again, someone standing around with a cell phone, and it now develops that he's actually a bad actor who fell harder than he was pushed and, moreover, is probably an Antifa provocateur. 

Better pivot again. 

I watched a little of the Floyd funeral in Houston yesterday and, on account of all the swaying and clapping, was reminded of some lines of poetry:

The Lutherans sit stolidly in rows,
Only their children feel the holy ghost.

I was about to say I don't know why these lines are in my head, or who wrote them, but then I remembered it's 2020 and I typed into Google "The Lutherans sit stolidly in rows"—voila! Copyright 1978, when I was in college, and I wonder . . . yup, the author, Marilyn Nelson (pictured), taught English at St. Olaf College when I was a student there in the late 70s. Never had her, but that must account for my familiarity with the opening of one of her poems. It must also account for her familiarity with Lutherans. African-Americans who grew up on military bases generally aren't acquainted with the insides of Lutheran churches, but at St. Olaf it would have required an effort to maintain her innocence. 

Reading over the whole poem ("Churchgoing"), I think it must be intended as an answer to one of the same title by Philip Larkin. Larkin was a thoroughgoing atheist, but Nelson's poem concludes:

We sing a spiritual as the last song,
and we are moved by a peculiar grace
that settles a new aura on the place.
This simple melody, though sung all wrong,
captures exactly what I think is faith.
Were you there when they crucified my Lord?
That slaves should suffer in his agony!
That Christian, slave-owning hypocrisy
nevertheless was by these slaves ignored
as they pitied the poor body of Christ!
Oh, sometimes it causes me to tremble,
that they believe most, who so much have lost.
To be a Christian one must bear a cross.
I think belief is given to the simple
as recompense for what they do not know.

I sit alone, tormented in my heart
by fighting angels, one group black, one white.
The victory is uncertain, but tonight
I'll lie awake again, and try to start
finding the black way back to what we've lost.

Meanwhile protesters are cleared away so that our president, fingering a Bible as if it were an item for sale on a cable-tv shopping channel, could assume his position between a church and some photographers. I think George Will's column advancing the thesis that with Trump there is no bottom was published the day before that debacle.

Last 6th-grade math problem of the year

My 6th-grader, Lydia, did not exhibit much interest in the pictured "exceeding standard question"  about the regular octagon. She's cool with "meets requirements," especially when her friends are facetiming her. You can see the blank space for work and the perfunctory line drawn between points H and F, which was supposed to persuade me that she'd made an effort. Here are the steps of the approach I described to her while she glanced back and forth between the paper and her dinging phone.

1. You know the interior angles of a triangle sum to 180 degrees. It goes up by 180 degrees for every side added: for a quadrilateral (such as a rectangle) the interior angles sum to 360 degrees, for a pentagon 540 degrees, etc. A formula is: Sum of Interior Angles = 180(# of sides - 2).

2. So the interior angles of an octagon add up to 180 x 6 = 1080 degrees. Since it's a regular octagon (all sides equal length), the eight angles all have the same measure of 1080/8 = 135 degrees.

3. You're supposed to find the measure of ∠HAF, which can be thought of as the sum of ∠HAG and ∠GAF. ∠HAG is 22.5 degrees (because ∠GHA is 135 degrees and ∠HAG is half the remaining 45 degrees of triangle AHG). For the same reason, ∠BAC is also 22.5 degrees. 

4. Is this enough to persuade you that the 135 degrees of ∠HAB is made of six equal "little angles" all with vertex A? [Bored look.] Note that 22.5 x 6 = 135. [Completely impassive.]

5. If not, the hypothesis can be checked. Since the octagon is "regular," opposite sides are parallel and ∠AFE is 90 degrees. This means that ∠GFA is 45 degrees (since we know that ∠GFE is 135 degrees). Also, since ∠HGF is 135 degrees, and ∠HGA is 22.5 degrees, ∠AGF must be 135 - 22.5 = 112.5 degrees.

6. Therefore ∠GAF = 180 - 45 - 112.5 = 22.5 degrees. And ∠HAF = ∠HAG + ∠GAF = 22.5 + 22.5 = 45 degrees.

Lydia misses baseball, because in 5th grade, when the Twins were playing on TV, it was her homework, not mine.

Minnesota Lutheran lady speaks out from beyond

My mom has checked out of the hereafter in order to join the protests here on Earth.

American stories: Faulkner's "Barn Burning"

Since literature is made mainly by adults, you might think that adult characters and themes would predominate, and as far as I know that's mostly true. But the exceptions are often memorable. The greatest of the English novelists is probably Dickens, who, on account of his own blighted childhood, was obsessed with the lives of children, and the result is that we have Oliver Twist, Pip, Amy Dorrit, David Copperfield, etc., etc. What is the best American book? Maybe Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, concerning the picaresque adventures of a 13-year-old. It's the sequel to Adventures of Tom Sawyer, the events of which occurred a year earlier, when the boys were 12. When Dickens was 12, he went to work in a shoe-blacking factory after his father was incarcerated for debt at The Marshalsea prison. Mark Twain's father died when he was 11, and the next year he left the fifth grade to go to work as a printer's apprentice. 

William Faulkner might be an exception to the general rule that a writer, if interested in childhood, is consumed by it. His biography contains no early upheavals leaving permanent scars or demons to be exorcised. He is, though, the ambitious chronicler of his fictional Yoknapatawpha County, in north central Mississippi, where some of the residents are kids. The story "That Evening Sun," about the dysfunctional Compson family, is just one installment in the Compson family saga, which is developed most notably in the novel The Sound and the Fury. In "That Evening Sun" the Compson kids are initiated into the South's racial caste system against the background sound of their murmuring, querulous, narcissistic, ineffectual parents. In "Barn Burning," another of Faulkner's most frequently anthologized stories, he turns his attention to another Yoknapatawpha family, the Snopeses. 

First, the name: have you ever noticed that almost all English words starting sn- have negative, ugly connotations? One example would be snag, and, along this line, the Snopes family character on whom Faulkner lavishes the most attention is Flem Snopes. For background, here is Encyclopedia Britannica describing the family pedigree:

Through treachery and corruption, Flem Snopes gathers power in Frenchman's Bend, Miss. His cousins are emblems of depravity, including murderous Mink, pedophile Wesley, bigamist I.O., mentally disabled Ike, who lusts after a cow, and Launcelot ("Lump"), who sells tickets to view Ike's perverted scenes. The next generation includes a pornographer, a venal politician, a thief, and the uniquely honest Wallstreet Panic Snopes.

The main character in "Barn Burning" is Flem's younger brother Sarty, who is 10 years old. As the story opens, he's with his father, Abner Snopes, and an unnamed brother, which would be Flem, in a store where a justice of the peace has convened a trial. The complainant, a man named Harris, has charged that Abner burned down his barn. The story Harris tells is that Abner's hog wandered into his corn field. He returned the hog and told Abner that he should fix his pen. Next time he found Snopes's pig in his corn, he put it in his own pen. When Abner came to get it, he gave him some wire to mend his pen. Third time the pig got into his corn, he went to the Snopeses and saw the spool of wire he'd given Abner still rolled up in the yard. He now insisted Snopes pay him a small sum of money. That evening, Abner got a Negro to deliver the money to Harris, along with a message: "Wood and hay kin burn." Later that night, Harris's barn burned to the ground. 

The Justice of the Peace is not wholly persuaded by this strong circumstantial case. Harris admits that the Negro who delivered the money and the message has disappeared, but suggests that the needed direct evidence could be supplied by Sarty, who has been listening while at the same time being distracted by the sights and smells inside the store. He's 10 and his dim perception of the proceedings is rendered by Faulkner, in part:

He could not see the table where the Justice sat and before which his father and his father's enemy (our enemy he thought in that despair; ourn! mine and hisn both! He's my father!) stood, but he could hear them, the two of them that is, because his father had said no word yet.

As the Justice begins to question him, Sarty realizes that his father expects him to lie, and he means to lie even though he is in despair over it, but then Harris, too decent to feel good about pressing his case to this extent, withdraws his request that the boy testify against his father. Abner is acquitted of the barn burning, though the Justice also gives him some free advice: go somewhere else to live. Abner's reply, the first time he speaks, is "something unprintable and vile" and to the effect that he'd be glad to leave the area.

That's the first three pages. It establishes the low character of Abner Snopes. No reader can doubt who burned the barn down. Also, however, every detail helps fill in the picture. He sent a Negro with his money and his message about what can burn. He could have done it himself, but that would have deprived him of the degree of separation that ended up being the hole in Harris's case. Was he that sagacious? Then maybe that's part of his character, too. He's not an incompetent criminal. Also, he probably enjoyed sending a Negro on an errand for him. Harris is a better man than Snopes, but Snopes is good enough to send a Negro on his behalf. Not going to speak to you man-to-man. Got Negroes I can send to talk to you for me. That's how big a man I am. 

The story is about Sarty Snopes, however. He's 10 and was going to lie for his father to the Justice of the Peace, whom he perceives to be an enemy of his family. The story is a dramatization of something that must happen to almost everyone without often making it into literature. You're born into a family. For awhile, it's all you know and your loyalty is absolute. In time, you get to know other people and families. They aren't like yours. Comparisons are inevitable. What if you're a Snopes? The family ways and values are inferior to the ones you are now for the first time discovering outside the only world you've known. The essential, or comparative, decency of Harris and the Justice of the Peace is not lost on the reader. The former declines to press his case. The latter acquits Abner out of devotion to some unnamed principle. Sarty Snopes might not have words for his apprehension but he apprehends, too. In the climactic scene of the story, another barn is about to be burned, and Sarty disowns the Snopeses. In Faulkner's ceaselessly expanding chronicle, he's never seen or named again. There is a trilogy of novels concerning the Snopeses, sometimes called The Snopes Trilogy, and in the first of them, The Hamlet, a character is describing the Snopes clan and mentions that once there was another brother, a little one he vaguely remembers seeing somewhere once. In Faulkner's fiction that is the only other allusion to the existence of Sarty, who declared his independence from the Snopeses at age 10.

According to one view, Sarty is a 10-year-old hero who chooses honor and decency over Snopes family values, but I'm not sure the part of the story I've skipped lightly over justifies that. Abner does move his family, and the wagon conveying their possessions receives the following description:

It stood in a grove of locusts and mulberries across the road. His two hulking sisters in their Sunday dresses and his mother and her sister in calico and sunbonnets were already in it, sitting on and among the sorry residue of the dozen and more movings which even the boy could remember—the battered stove, the broken beds and chairs, the clock inlaid with mother-of-pearl, which would not run, stopped at some fourteen minutes past two o'clock of a dead and forgotten day and time, which had been his mother's dowry.

They're poor tenant farmers, what is called white trash. When they arrive at the house of their new landlord, it seems natural to compare the life suggested by the contents of their wagon with the house of the new landlord, set back in a "grove of oaks and cedars and the other flowering trees and shrubs," beyond "a fence massed with honeysuckle and Cherokee roses." When Sarty finally sees the house, he's rapturous, and the narration includes his italicized thoughts:

. . . he saw the house for the first time and at that instant he forgot his father. . . . Hit's big as a courthouse he thought quietly, with a surge of peace and joy whose reason he could not have thought into words, being too young for that: They are safe from him. People whose lives are a part of this peace and dignity are beyond his touch. . . .

And then his father's flat and deflating assessment of the house, spoken like a Snopes:

"Pretty and white, ain't it?" he said. "That's sweat. Nigger sweat. Maybe it ain't white enough yet to suit him. Maybe he wants to mix some white sweat with it."

Crude, but is Abner altogether wrong, and Sarty wholly correct? The dispute that brings on the prospect of another barn burning arises when Abner tracks manure into the glorious house, staining an expensive rug delivered from France, and then, charged with cleaning it, takes the rug home and ruins it by washing it in lye. A deliberate and despicable act, but I anyway do not feel a lot of sympathy for the landlord either, the owner of that great house whose anger is kindled by the staining of a rug. It's possible to detect the author's two-mindedness, his grudging respect for Abner Snopes, somewhat in the manner that you might admire an ugly weed for being able to live and grow out of a crack in the cement. Flem, endowed with his father's calculating rapaciousness, survives and prospers. Sarty drops from sight. 

In 1980, the story was made into a 38-minute movie starring a young Tommy Lee Jones as Abner Snopes; you can watch it at you.tube. The text of "Barn Burning" is here.

Books of the Bible: Joel

If, in a free-association test, the cue was "locust," some significant number of respondents might answer, "Plague of locusts in the Old Testament!" For that, we can credit the relatively high profile of the Exodus narrative, and the fact that locusts were one of the plagues sent by Yahweh to persuade Pharaoh to let his people go. But there is no biblical book in which locusts play a bigger role than Joel. It's a very brief book and is dominated by locusts the way that Hamlet is dominated by Hamlet. I don't mean to say that the insects are speaking forty percent of the time (as Hamlet is in his play), but they're usually on stage, and Joel's interest in them raises the question of whether he was, besides a prophet, one of the earliest entomologists:

What the cutting locust left,
the swarming locust has eaten.
What the swarming locust left,
the hopping locust has eaten,
and what the hopping locust left,
the destroying locust has eaten.

Lots of locusts! The commentaries take up the question of whether the different Hebrew words rendered "cutting," "swarming," "hopping," and "destroying" refer to different varieties of an insect species or perhaps different stages of an insect's development. As a Sunday School scholar, I remember out of boredom musing to myself about why they can't just call them grasshoppers. It seems the Bible has to invent new words to make the most common things seem . . . Biblical. (Abraham did more than "know" Sarah.) I see now, however, that "grasshopper" would not be the right English word for what Joel is talking about. A decent definition of "locust" is, according to an article in Scientific American, "grasshoppers gone biblical." Apparently they get serotonin on the brain, which causes them to swarm and ravenously eat, which is what turns the harmless grasshopper into a plague of locusts. There is no other biblical book the consideration of which leads inevitably to zoology. Birds eat grasshoppers, and when serotonin has worked it's magic, they have been known to eat so many of them so easily as to become temporarily flightless: grounded, by a very large meal. Sounds like a possible case of science explaining a bizarre religious "vision." 

The locusts are almost the only vivid thing about the book of Joel. I can understand why the commentaries should discuss elaborately the different Hebrew words for locust, for they can thereby avoid the question of what it all might be intended to mean. That has certainly been my strategy up to this point! Broadly speaking, however, the locusts are, as you'd expect, a visitation from God punishing the people for their sins. That much is clear. What exactly they've done to make God so mad isn't so clear—one is tempted to say the shade cast by the locusts makes everything hard to see. In the most impressive of the prophetic books, God's anger is kindled by Israel's laxity about social justice and, to make matters worse, the laxity is accented by copious amounts of self-satisfied religious observance. "I hate, I despise your feasts," inveighs Amos, "and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies. . . . Your burnt offerings and your cereal offerings are an abomination to me. . . . But let justice roll down like water, and righteousness like a mighty stream!" So clear, forceful, and memorable—nothing remotely like that in the Book of Joel. Indeed, he recommends placating God's anger with the kind of public worship that in other prophetic works is a source of God's nausea (especially if unaccompanied by care for the poor, the widow, the orphan, the sick, the sojourner from a foreign land):

Blow the trumpet in Zion;
sanctify a fast;
call a solemn assembly;
gather the people.
Sanctify the congregation;
assemble the elders;
gather the children. . . .
Between the vestibule and the altar
let the priests, the ministers of the Lord, weep
and say, "Spare thy people, O Lord. . . ."

Nor does the historical setting or any biographical tidbit lighten the shade. Scholars assign the work to "the Persian period of Jewish history (539-331 B.C.)" (headnote to Joel in Oxford Annotated Bible)—if the window is wide enough, you can't go wrong. The first sentence of the book

The word of the Lord that came to Joel, the son of Pethuel

is all anyone knows of Joel—namely, that he was Pethuel's son—but that doesn't help since nothing is known of Pethuel, either. 

So: for our imaginary "general reader," determined for some inscrutable reason to read through the Bible and record an honest impression of all the books no matter their status, what bones of Joel may be inspected for a few strings of meaty interest? There is this:

Proclaim this among the nations:
Prepare war, stir up the mighty men.
Let all the men of war draw near, let them come up.
Beat your plowshares into swords, and your pruning hooks into spears;
let the weak say, "I am a warrior."

If this sounds at all familiar, it's because in much more famous prophetic oracles the language is identical except for the order of operations being reversed. Here, for example, from the book of Isaiah:

[The Lord] shall judge between the nations,
and shall decide for many peoples;
and they shall beat their swords into ploughshares,
and their spears into pruning hooks;
nation shall not lift up sword against nation,
neither shall they learn war anymore.

Regarding these parallel but opposite passages, the conclusions of scholarship relate to questions of dating and historical setting. Joel's parodic sally depends upon the text from Isaiah being well known; therefore, Joel was after Isaiah. Moreover, the international situation when Joel prophesied might have been tense and marked by the threat of foreign aggression. Since one of the themes of these mini-essays relates to the troubles associated with regarding every word of the Bible as the inspired and inerrant word of God, I'd simply observe that centuries hence pious political figures faced with questions of war or peace, aggression or diplomacy, may quote Scripture to their advantage no matter which side they take.