2025 Readings 80

 A couple days ago I finished Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent, which I had somehow never read. I was inspired to tackle it after my recent reread of Heart of Darkness. The Secret Agent was quite good - in fact, I think that I liked it better than Heart of Darkness - and I'm disappointed that I had not read it previously. I make up for it because I can already sense a pretty quick reread. I don't think it's necessarily a fair criticism to state that the ending went a little off the rails, but it is suddenly and unexpectedly dominated by a couple characters who had played minor roles up until that moment. It's not that it doesn't work, because I think it does, but it spins off in a way that I don't think I've processed yet. Maybe I'll add to this post after my reread. Anyway, The Secret Agent is definitely recommended.

Why God Invented Metaphor

 And so it has begun, the end of my last year teaching at Champlain, or, well, probably anywhere (at least full-time). It has left some many things with a bittersweet feel. On Thursday I walked out the end of the hallway in Wick and saw this little message from God.

I may have come up with the term "The Corphanage," but I have a suspicion that the sign was created by either Pepin or Esckilsen.

2025 Readings 79

 Last night I finished George B. Kirsch's Baseball in Blue and Gray: The National Pastime During the Civil War, which is part of my recent run of baseball books. As I was telling my cousin Nick this morning, by the end of the CFL season I will have gone to at least three games - which is three more MLB or NFL games than I've gone to in the last twenty years. However, I've also gone to a boatload of minor league and college summer league games during the same period, which shows that I still love baseball in its purest form. I'm also fascinating by the early history of baseball, which led to me thinking about baseball during the Civil War (the Reds are baseball's first professional team, starting in 1869, so it was a short skip to the war). Here's one of my favorite passages:

In America's National Game Spalding recounted a rumor "that in Virginia, in the long campaign before Richmond, at periods when active hostilities were in abeyance, a series of games was played between picked nine from Federal and Confederate forces." Although Spalding reported no direct evidence of those contests, he did cite "cases where good-natured badinage was been exchanged between Union and Confederate soldiers on the outposts of opposing armies in the field." John G. B. Adams of the Nineteenth Massachusetts recalled that early in 1863 several men of the Union army encamped at Falmouth played baseball and also watched Confederates play games across a river. He wrote: "We would sit on the bank and watch their games, and the distance was so short we could understand every movement and would applaud good plays." (p. 40)

I immediately swiped this section and used it in my Epics books, in a chapter that discusses violence and warfare. It reminded me of that famous story of English and German troops exchanging presents during the first Christmas of the war, getting at the sense of war as sport before the overall horror destroyed that notion.

2025 Readings 78

 Recently I listened to the Why Evil Exist Great Course, for, seriously, probably the fourth time. And even when I'm no longer teaching my Nature of Evil class I suspect I'll continue to come back to this Great Course for a long time. Professor Mathewes clearly has a serious academic man crush on Joseph Conrad,  which inspired me to go back and reread Heart of Darkness. Unbelievably, I don't think I've read Heart of Darkness since before the first time I saw Apocalypse Now, which means it's going on something like fifty years (which is, obviously, another shameful admission on my part in a lifetime of shameful admissions). It really is a great now - and I may have to go back and listen to Professor Mathewes's talk on Conrad and Heart of Darkness and The Secret Agent (which I'm listening to right now, and, even more shamefully, it's the first time that I've tackle The Secret Agent (more on that shortly). Here's an all-time "duh" statement, but Heart of Darkness if wonderful. It's powerful but also more than a bit maddingly oblique, and purposely so. So, after re-listening to the lecture on Conrad I suspect I'll dive back into Heart of Darkness again (but don't worry, I won't count it). Truthfully, it's better than I remember it being, although I'm sure I was in no emotional shape to make sense of it as a teenager. "The horror, the horror."

The Pellets

 When Janet and I first got together and I moved into the cabin her in Calais we heated with a massive wood stove (there are several pictures of my constant morning battles with the stove here on the blog). Eventually, I convinced her to buy a pellet stove (I lost out on my goal of moving her all the way to acquiring an actual furnace) as part of my long-term plan to get a new dishwasher and microwave and now refrigerator. This just shows that she's a lot tougher than me, which is not saying much, obviously. On a day to day basis, heating with the pellets is simply a lot easier, or, to think of it another way, less wear and tear on my rapidly degenerating body. The one great exception to this rule is late summer when the mass of 40 pound bags of wood pellets arrive; then, as the excellent Mike Kelly would opine, shit gets real. I think the first year we bought five tons, and then had to buy more on a bag by bag option at the end of the season - and the second season we bought six tons, and still ended up buying more individual bags late in the season - and so this year we just went ahead and bought seven tons. Each pallet is a ton, comprised of fifty 40 pound bags. The first year I carried in most of them, with some much-appreciated help from Janet, Gary and Ali. The second year I vowed that I would get over my own idiotic self and make a more deliberate effort to get more help carrying them in; there was even talk of a group carry in the pellets chili party. However, it came to nothing, mainly because of my own obstinacy, which is a legitimate desire not to bother other people and my own rage against the dying of the light vanity. And so I carried in all six tons, little by little, with my main goal being to average five bags a day. At that pace I can get them into the basement of the cabin in a little over two months. Now, with my legs this is a real challenge, but I did definitely notice that I was getting stronger (although in no less pain) by the end, with the last few days featuring a half-pallet carried in. It's actually OK that it takes so long to get them in, not simply to prolong my fragile life, but also because we don't actually have enough room in the basement to hold all of them. We end up continuing to carry them on after we've started burning them, thus creating and filling space at the same time. As long as they're in by the time the snow starts I'm happy. Anyway, this year I've decided to get serious about bringing in more folks to help, even if it's just to hire young bucks to carry them for me. Of course, I said that last year . . .

Janet is clearly much more excited about the arrival of the wood pellets than I am.

OK, five down, only 345 to go.

They haunt me constantly, staring in mournfully from the back yard, reminding me of my many failures.

Oh, it's always the wood pellets . . .

2025 Readings 77

 I just finished a reread of Haruki Murakami's Kafka on the Shore. I had read it a couple of times before, but this time I listened to, based on my son's suggestion of a really good recording. He was right, the one that pops up on Audible was really well-done. Thankfully, he told me to avoid the recorded Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, which he says is terrible. My best memory of Kafka on the Shore was using it in a Rhetoric of the Self class that I was tagged at the last moment to teach at Champlain. I also had the students read the Overture to Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, the combination of which I'm pretty sure broke them. Despite the high quality of the recording, I'd also have to admit that I didn't like the novel as much as I did previously, and I'm not certain why exactly. If you research lists of best Murakami novels, Kafka on the Shore often comes out on top, which, truthfully, I've never agreed with. All of that said, the private library where Kafka retreats to, and which launches his true adventure, always carries a special place in my heart, and it would make the short list of literary locations where I could settle.

Museum of Everyday Life

 Last Friday the usual Breakfast of Excellence was switched from the TASTee Grill to the Village Restaurant in Hardwick, as Sandy and Kevin had plans to visit the Museum of Everyday Life. I'd always heard about the museum, but somehow never made my way to it, which is shameful because it's absolutely wonderful. It is, as the name suggests,  a celebration of the quotidian. There is a regular collection, in the main barn, and then a separate space for a temporary collection, in this case focusing on Stains. It was absolutely amazing. I'll definitely go back soon.

The main entrance, i.e. the upper barn.

In the temporary Stains collection you could mess with Stained Glass, which gave Sandy the opportunity to express his artistic side.

Thanks to Kevin to organizing the trip!

The museum, for many reasons, reminded me of the Museum of Broken Relationships, as both celebrated objects that anyone could contribute.

It was also like the Museum of Broken Relationships in that some of the displays were truly heartbreaking, so as this one.