Out and About

 Last Sunday was the last F1 race of the season, and super fan Janet was appropriately saddened. So, I managed to talk her into heading down to the Langdon Street Pub to watch the Vikings game, and partake of many appetizers. While I seriously lament the passing of Smitty's, the bar in Burlington who used to text me on late Sunday mornings to encourage me to come in, letting me know that my seat was waiting for me and that the Vikings were already on that TV (I would waltz in and a switchback and 13 hot wings would magically appear before I had my coat off), Langdon is a pretty fair replacement. An excellent time was had.

And, inexplicably, the Vikings played great, probably because I've sworn them off (as shown by my amazing Hamilton Tiger-Cats sweatshirt).

Kevin's Happy Day

 Every year my excellent friend Kevin takes the day off to celebrate his favorite band, They Might Be Giants. I know I, at one time or another, shared the story of my clumsy They Might Be Giants beginnings with Kevin. Year ago, probably at the Saint John's Club, a group of us were sitting around talking about music. In the process of making a point about the subjective nature of music appreciation (and all art, for that matter), I pointed out that my ex-wife loved They Might Be Giants, but that I had never warmed to them. I did not know that they were Kevin's favorite band, and he was rightly appalled by my philistinism. Almost immediately a They Might Be Giants concert ticket with my name on it showed up - and then another. In an odd way, I think it was actually the true beginning of our friendship. Anyway, every year a radio station in Minnesota holds a They Might Be Giants marathon, with all sorts of cool, appropriately quirky surprises, and Kevin takes the day off to happily listen. He even cancelled out on the weekly Breakfast of Excellence for the occasion. This, as a Tradition of Excellence, clearly trumps the Breakfast of Excellence, and I vouchsafe his decision.

This is literally the happiest I ever see him. What a great tradition.

2025 Readings 110

                             He was sad at heart, 

unsettled yet ready, sensing his death.

His fate hovered near, unknowable but certain; 

it would soon claim his coffered soul, 

part life from limb. Before long 

the prince's spirit would spin free from his body.

You know, I suppose I shouldn't actually include works that I read specifically for my Epics book, but I'll make an exception here. I had not read Beowulf in an age, but picked it up again because I was searching for a half-remembered passage that I wanted to include in a chapter. However, after sitting down, I ended up reading the entire epic again. In this case it was Seamus Heaney's verse translation, which wasn't obviously wasn't even in existence when I read Beowulf in college. As to be expected, the things that resonated with me now almost assuredly didn't interest me all those decades ago, and vice-versa. I'm sure the passage above speaks to the end of the year, the end of another semester, the upcoming end of my career, and my rapidly approaching sixty-sixth birthday. 

2025 Readings 109

 A couple nights ago I finished Edith Wharton's Ghosts, a collection, not surprisingly, of her ghost stories. I've always loved her novels, but had never really delved into her short fiction, and didn't, to my shame, even know that she was known for her ghost stories. They tended to fall into a very familiar pattern: outside is drawn into a very larger country house which has a spectral past, although I suspect that's more a limitation on the genre than it is Wharton as a writer. I didn't love the collection, but I would still recommend it.

The Human Condition

 Last week's Thanksgiving break was dominated by Janet unfortunately coming down with COVID. Happi8ly, it was a mild case, and our trip to Massachusetts to see her mom turned into takeout grilled chicken from Market 32. After laying up for a few days she's now right as rain, although still tires pretty easily (classic COVID). Now I'm the one who feels dreadful, although I've tested negative twice. While Janet slept long hours recovering I launched into the requisite movie marathon, re-watching the entire nine and a half hours of Masaki Kobayashi's The Human Condition trilogy: No Greater Love (1959), Road to Eternity (1959), and A Soldier's Prayer (1961). It's such a pity that the original set of novels of Junpei Gomikawa have never been translated into English. The right wing in Japan hated the novels and the films, and maybe that helps explain why it is under-watched (and obviously under-read) even today.

The greatest film trilogy in history is The Human Condition, and, no pun intended, I will die on that hill. I'm going to show part of it next semester in my Images of Fascism class, although, sadly, not the entire trilogy (which would make the foundation for a great class).

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 I've been watching a lot of Japanese cinema lately, and not simply all the films in my Japanese film noir class. Anyway, I was thinking of watching my favorite Akira Kurosawa film, Ikiru, again. It's a film that I always want to show in class, but, being a Kurosawa film, it's much too long. It's influenced by Leo Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich, which made me realize that I hadn't reread that classic in way too long a time. If you haven't read it (and shame on you if you haven't), it's essentially a novella (especially by Tolstoy standards), and on Audible it was only two and a half hours. It's message, that of a dying man, if only for about fifteen minutes about two hours before he dies, realizing how foolish his life decisions had been. completely still resonates today: "Ivan Ilyich's life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible." Highly recommended.

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 I've finished three different books in the last couple days, which is more impressive than it sounds. As we've discussed, I, like most readers, have several books going at the same time, and this time three just happened to finish up at the same time. I finished the second book in the Dune series, Dune Messiah. The ending redeemed the book a bit, although I don't know if it would inspire me to read any more in the series. I was telling my son that I thought Dune Messiah had too little of what made the first book, Dune, so good: extensive and fascinating world building - and too much of what often dragged down the first book: pretty clumsy dialogue, full of endless self-reflection and doubt. Obviously, it's not as if I'm opposed to the self-reflection, it's just that it was either clumsily delivered or painfully obvious, and tended to drag on. I'll do some research on the next installment and decide if I want to go on or not.