September 2024
Scriptural isolationism. Because I don't know the Bible very well I often get
caught out by scriptural references. So it was the other day when I was browsing my September 2024 issue of
The New Criterion.
That magazine always includes some original poetry. The poet in this issue was George Bradley, whose most recent collection, Late Montale, consists of his own translations of verses by the 20th-century Italian poet Eugenio Montale.
George Bradley's contribution to this month's New Criterion was a single well-wrought poem, five stanzas of ten lines each, unrhymed and with just enough scansion to pull the reader along. Title: "A dog by the ears." It opens:
A man who meddles in a quarrel not his own
is like one who takes a passing dog by the ears
says the Scripture, …
Does it? I didn't get the allusion. Fortunately my Scofield Reference Bible was close at hand and has a good concordance. Dog … dog … yep:
Prov.26:11; 2 Pet.2:22, as a d returneth
26:17, like one that taketh a d by ears
I looked it up:
Proverbs 26:17. He that passeth by, and meddleth with strife belonging not to him, is like one that taketh a dog by the ears.
According to a different American poet, Proverbs was written by King Solomon, who was famously — in fact proverbially — wise. Perhaps we isolationists should point out that particular bit of his wisdom at those of our pundits and policy-makers who want us to plunge up to our nukes in a war between the world's two most corrupt white nations.
Fiction of the month. Book or movie? Most often the book comes first. We've read and
enjoyed a novel; someone's made a movie of it; we watch the movie to see how faithful the movie-maker was to the novel's plotline and how closely the
movie characters correspond to the mental images we generated when reading the novel.
The result is often disappointing. A good book may not make a good movie. Perhaps the movie-maker didn't get the point of the book; perhaps he was in too much of a hurry, not feeling well, or under-funded; perhaps he's an ideologue who wants to send us a Message when the novelist only wanted to tell us a story. Or it may be that he's attempted the impossible. Novel and movie are different art forms. Perhaps some good books just can't be made into good movies.
This month I watched a movie, then read the book. Both were excellent. I'd be hard-pressed to say which was better: the movie, as a movie, or the book, as a book. The title in both cases was Me Before You. The movie (2016, 1h 50m) was directed by Thea Sharrock; the book (2012, 384 pages) was written by Jojo Moyes. Both ladies are Gen-X Brits.
I'd never heard of either novel or movie until early this month. Browsing social media, I saw some friends discussing a different book: Two Arms and a Head by "Clayton Atreus," pen-name of Clayton Schwartz. (A curious choice of pen-name.) This is not fiction, it's a memoir — and it may not be an actual print-on-paper book: I can't find a listing on Amazon.
You can read Two Arms and a Head here. I don't recommend you do so; I couldn't get very far with it. It quickly gets gross. What you mainly need to know is in a review at Astral Codex, posted last month. From which:
In May of 2006, philosophy student Clayton Schwartz embarks on a Pan-American motorcycle trip for the summer before law school. He is 30 years old and in peak physical condition.
He makes it as far south as Acapulco in Mexico before crashing into a donkey that had wandered into the road.
The impact crushes his spinal cord at the T5 vertebra, rendering him paralyzed from the nipples down.
On Sunday, February 24, 2008, he commits suicide.
In the year and a half in between, he writes Two Arms and a Head, his combination memoir and suicide note.
Writing under the pseudonym Clayton Atreus, he lays out in excruciating detail how awful it is to be paralyzed, and how his new life is but a shadow of what it once was. He concludes that his life is no longer worth living, and proceeds to end it.
Along the way, he addresses the obstacles that society has put in his way of dying on his own terms — the biggest of which is the fact that physician-assisted suicide for his condition is illegal at the time.
That review, incidentally, includes — a short scroll down — a good diagram of the human spinal column, with all the vertebrae labeled. Sure enough, T5 is just above nipple level.
(And I can't let the phrase "physician-assisted suicide" pass without recalling my mother's response to it, although I'm sure I must have mentioned it before. Mum was a full-time professional State Registered Nurse in England from the 1930s to the 1970s. When the legality of physician-assisted suicide came up in conversation once, she rolled her eyes, laughed, and said: "For Heaven's sake! Doctors have been doing that for ever!" Even to members of the Royal Family, we now know.)
Well, one of my friends, in their social-media chat about Two Arms and a Head, mentioned the movie version of Me Before You. I looked it up; it was the kind of thing my wife would like; so we streamed it from Amazon one Saturday evening after dinner.
Mrs Derbyshire did like it. By the end she was crying. Quote: "I haven't [sob] cried at a movie [sob] for ages …"
Yes, it's a woman's movie. I enjoyed it, though — not usual for me where women's movies are concerned. All the actors were excellent, the narrative pacing just right.
The male lead is Will, played by Sam Claflin: a formerly active and successful young man now afflicted, like Clayton Schwarz, with a paralyzing spinal injury. Will's injury is worse than Clayton's, though. He's a C5-6 quadriplegic, with very little function below the neck. (The medical profession nowadays prefers "tetraplegic" as being etymologically more correct, but the book uses "quadri-.") The female lead, a young woman named Louisa, played by Emilia Clarke, is hired to keep Will company.
I liked the movie so much I went and got the book from our town library. It's a good read, and clarifies some points the movie just didn't have time for — the family issues that complicate things for both Will and Louisa, for example. Nobody's at fault there. You can get more into a 384-page book than you can into a two-hour movie.
Me Before You, book and movie both, goes into matters we all ponder sometimes — assisted suicide, "ableism" — but without propaganda or wokery. It's just a touching, credible human story.
My sincere thanks to Jojo Moyes for her novel, and to the cast and producers of the movie version for, in both cases, first-class storytelling.
Clotheslines and Catherine wheels. Before leaving Me Before You, a brief
nostalgia note.
Here we are in Chapter 16 of the book. The heroine, Louisa, is at the rather grand house where Will and his parents live.
I was hanging washing out on a line. The line itself was hidden in what Mrs. Traynor called the Kitchen Garden. I think she didn't want anything as mundane as laundry polluting the view of her herbaceous borders. My own mother pegged her whites out almost as a badge of pride …
We've been told that the novel's main action opens in 2009. At that point, in Britain as in the U.S.A., cheap household clothes dryers had been available for several decades. Does anyone still hang out clothes on a line to dry? In the old country, apparently they do; in the U.S.A. much less so, but it's not unknown.
In my English childhood every house with a back yard had clothesline posts there. (Here are the ones in my Aunt Muriel's back yard: two sturdy concrete pillars fifty feet apart.) A horizontal hole had been drilled near the top of each post, and a wooden dowel fixed in it protruding a couple of inches at each side. You tied your clothes line to the dowels and … hung your clothes on the line to dry, securing them with clothes pegs.
Those wooden dowels had a secondary function. On Guy Fawkes Night, November 5th, every family with children — which, in postwar England, meant well-nigh every family (one of our neighbors had twelve) — would light a bonfire in their back yard and set off fireworks for the kids' delight.
A favorite firework was the Catherine wheel: a long tube of powder wrapped in a spiral round a small wooden core. You nailed that core to one end of the dowel on a clothesline post, checked that the thing was loose enough to spin, and lit the fuse. Off it went spinning, spraying out sparks all around as it spun. You watched in fascination until your older sister snuck up behind you and lit a jumping jack firecracker right behind your heels. I remember, I remember.
(Cheap household clothes dryers aside, after the moral and legal decline of recent decades I don't think it would be wise for British housewives to hang clothes out on a line in their garden. Gangs of illegal aliens would sneak in, steal the clothes, sell them in illegal street markets, and spend the proceeds on illegal drugs, with no fear of punishment for any of the illegalities, the constabulary being much too busy tracking down, arresting, and booking citizens who've posted unkind things on social media.)
Crisp explains Biden. "Why was Joe Biden spotted wearing a MAGA hat?" asked
Firstpost.com
on September 12th. I think I know.
No, I am not privy to the President's inner motivations and desires. I have, though, nursed an affection for Quentin Crisp (1908-1999) since reading his 1977 memoir The Naked Civil Servant forty-some years ago.
That affection was, I hasten to add, entirely literary: I never met the old queen. I should further add that (1) Crisp's writings are not for everyone and may not be for you, and (2) they may not even be for me any more, after the lapse of so many decades without revisiting them. Our tastes change.
Looking him up just now, though, I still find him pretty darn quotable. Here's the Crispian nugget of showbiz lore that came unbidden to my mind seeing Joe Biden wearing a MAGA hat:
I will tell you the advantage of growing old. As it's toward the end of the run, you can overact appallingly.
Oboes (cont.). My August Diary started off with
a long segment about oboist Blair Tindall's 2005 memoir
Mozart in the
Jungle, which I had been reading. I then carried the oboe theme forward into
my September 6th Radio Derb podcast.
That brought in a most interesting email from a longtime reader. Slightly edited:
Derb,
I once read an interview made with Arthur Sullivan when he was composing The Gondoliers. The interviewer seemed quite anxious that there be oboes in the overture, apparently a Sullivan trademark, and after playing around with him for a bit Sullivan assured him there would be, because no other instrument would do for his solos.
And here's something I came across recently, adapted from Wikipedia: In April 1945, Richard Strauss (who was not at all a fan of the Nazis, but it was a bit complicated) was apprehended by American soldiers at his Bavarian estate. As he descended the staircase he announced to Lieutenant Milton Weiss of the U.S. Army, "I am Richard Strauss, the composer of Rosenkavalier and Salome." Lt. Weiss, who was also a musician, nodded in recognition. An OFF LIMITS sign was subsequently placed on the lawn to protect Strauss.
The American oboist John de Lancie, who knew Strauss's orchestral writing for oboe thoroughly, was in the same army unit, and asked Strauss to compose an oboe concerto. Initially abruptly dismissive of the idea, Strauss completed this late work, his Oboe Concerto, before the end of the year. He assigned US premiere rights for this piece to de Lancie, who was surprised to learn he had even written it, and who then gave the rights to Mitch Miller for technical legal reasons.
(The story caught my eye because de Lancie's son, John de Lancie Jr., is a well-known actor, particularly for his work on Star Trek.)
Thank you, Sir. That's the kind of email I like — literate and informative.
Has the little world of oboe-playing found itself tangled in the race versus merit battles that currently disfigure our culture? Of course it has. A different reader sent me this three-year-old report from the Free Beacon: How Racial Anxiety Conquered an Orchestra and Crushed a Career. You can file it under "Shameful and shocking but not surprising."
America's most hated. So who is it that Americans hate the most? Donald Trump? Kamala
Harris? Harvey Weinstein? Vladimir Putin? Benjamin Netanyahu? Greta Thunberg? No doubt they are all up there in the rankings; but I'm sure that well
up there with them is whoever it was invented Lift'n'Peel sealers for plastic containers — supermarket jugs of milk, for example.
You know the thing: a circle of paper or foil with, fixed somehow along one of its diameters, a semicircle of clear plastic for you to grasp and pull at. You grasp, pull, and nothing happens. At last you either resort to pliers from the toolbench or else just hack the darn thing open with a kitchen knife.
Lift'n'Peel haters air their frustrations all over social media, to no effect. State and federal consumer-protection agencies show no interest; I suppose they have been bought off … or perhaps, like the rest of us, they're kept too busy just trying to open their milk containers.
Ten thousand years of technological advance; four centuries of rigorous scientific research; this is the end product?
Will no-one free us of this loathsome scourge?
The Jew Thing. A friend asked whether I get annoyed by all the antisemitism in the
comment threads to my posts. No, I really don't. I'm inured to it after years of my VDARE stuff being cross-posted to The Unz Review,
where the complement of Jew-haters among the commenters is exceptionally high. So no, no annoyance. It's just cranks and misfits barking at the
wind.
There is even some fun to be had in among those comments — a witty sub-genre of Babylon Bee-style spoofs of the antisems. There was one that made me smile in the comment thread to my September 20th Radio Derb transcript.
Ride-By Shooter
Reply to Salmon
His name is John, and he shows no sign of being ashamed of that Heebish contamination. I suppose that he can't bear the thought that M & P were idiots.
That's even funnier when you reflect that, as with the Babylon Bee, there are readers who will take it seriously. Yes! You see? Derb's parents were servile dupes of the evil Christ-killing Jew! They named him John — a Jew name! Jew! JewJewJewJewJew …!
What do these monomaniacs think about when they're not thinking about what they so winsomely call "the JQ"? And if they really think it's a Q, then what, in their opinion, is the A? Perhaps they would rather not tell us.
A Kipling Conservative. In the matter of comment threads: I can dream —
but alas! only dream — of getting a comment thread like the one Douglas Murray got at YouTube for
his September 9th interview with Piers Morgan for Morgan's British
video feature Uncensored.
Note the date. This was before Israel turned its principal attention to Hezbollah and Lebanon. The big talking point was Gaza and the widespread hope — shared by Morgan — for a negotiated cease-fire with Hamas.
The first thirty minutes of the show consisted of Morgan & Murray exchanging opinions about that. It seemed to me that Murray won every point: well-nigh all commenters agreed. Several expressed the wish for Murray to be Britain's Prime Minister. In the few dozen comments I scanned, not one accused him of being a gullible tool of world Jewry.
Murray was a steady beacon of reason and good sense. He pointed out, for example, that wars are not settled by cease-fires or diplomatic compromises: they are settled when one side surrenders to the other.
Do our leaders really not know this? We got a cease-fire with North Korea seventy years ago. Today North Korea is a bandit state, its people living in misery and hunger, its leader brandishing nuclear-armed ICBMs at its neighbors, and at us. Wars need to be won.
And Murray is right again, that when one side to a conflict is the fanatically intransigent head of a gangster-despotism answerable to no-one while the other is the elected chief executive of a civilized nation under daily scrutiny by a free press, outsiders will put all the pressure on the latter because he is the one on whom pressure might work.
If that pressure does work the outsiders' efforts will look fruitful and the outsiders will look good, leading to awards and promotions. What's not to like? Years, perhaps decades, of continuing tension and probable further outbreaks of war? Eh, that'll be someone else's problem.
Underlying Murray's outlook is what I think of as "Kipling conservatism." That's from a remark of Evelyn Waugh's:
[Kipling] was a conservative in the sense that he believed civilization to be something laboriously achieved which was only precariously defended. He wanted to see the defences fully manned and he hated the liberals because he thought them gullible and feeble, believing in the easy perfectibility of man and ready to abandon the work of centuries for sentimental qualms.
Not just for sentimental qualms, Evelyn, but also for personal advancement.
Triumph of the prudes. A century or so ago, vinegary old maids were frowning at
dancing, drinking, and sex. It looks as though they've won the arguments.
Social dancing is long gone. In my early-1960s high-school years, any of us with aspirations to a middle-class lifestyle was expected to be able to waltz, foxtrot, quickstep, and swing. The dance academy where I took lessons is, I'm surprised to see, still in business; but I'm sure their customer base today is way narrower and more specialized than it was back then.
(They didn't make much of a dancer out of me. When disco music took over and social dancing came to mean little more that the ability to twitch, jerk, and shimmy in time to music, I didn't mind at all. A few decades on I returned to formal instruction, and even wrote optimistically about a revival of ballroom dancing; but it was too late for me … and for it.)
Drinking? I keep seeing headlines like this September 5th specimen from the New York Post: Is Gen Z killing the wine industry? Young people reject unhealthy, "elitist" drink.
It's not just wine, either; it's alcohol in general:
In New York City, havens for alcohol abstainers have cropped up, such as the downtown haunt Hekate, which bills itself as a "sober sanctuary".
It's a stark contrast from the bar scene not even 20 years ago, when a strictly sober bar "wouldn't have had any wheels whatsoever," noted Stay co-owner Summer Phoenix.
And yes, even sex.
The worldwide sex recession is getting worse: there's never been a younger generation less interested in sex than this one.
Technology and social media are making it easier for people to avoid real-life relationships; student debt and housing costs has left many young people too stressed to prioritise relationships and intimacy.
Porn reduces the need for real-life encounters, now fraught with fears over safety and consent.
But it's not just younger people who are avoiding sex.
More than 30 per cent of couples who've been together more than two years are in sexless relationships — having sex six or less times a year.
Having no sex is the new sex.
Uh-huh. So I guess, taking all in all, having no fun is the new fun.
Nicotine fights back. Dancing, drinking, and sex may be in panicked retreat, but
nicotine is fighting a rearguard action.
There is vaping, of course — smoking without the smoke. (Vapor's particles are liquid; smoke's are solid.) There are also, I just recently learned, nicotine pouches.
Zyn is the best-known product here, but others are coming up on the outside. Tucker Carlson, who in the past has spoken positively about Zyn, is now disparaging it as "a brand for women and liberals." He told the Wall Street Journal in mid-September that he is planning to launch a brand of his own, to be named Alp.
Thus have opened new chapters in humanity's long love affair with nicotine. It seems to me, however, that neither vaping nor pouching (?), nor even smoking, is as weird as snuff-taking. For more than a hundred years well-bred gentlemen all over the Western world were interrupting their conversation to take out a small box, dip finger and thumb into it for a pinch of powdered tobacco, transfer the pinch to a nostril, and inhale it.
From the 1911 Britannica article on Snuff:
The practice of inhaling snuff became common in England in the 17th century, and throughout the 18th century it was universal. At first each quantity inhaled was fresh grated … This entailed the snuff-taker carrying with him a grater with a small spoon at one end and a box to hold the grated snuff at the other. Early 18th-century graters made of ivory and other material are in existence. Later the box and the grater were separated. The art and craft of the miniature painter, the enameller, jeweller and gold- and silver-smith was bestowed upon the box. The humbler snuff-takers were content with boxes of silver, brass or other metal, horn, tortoise-shell or wood … Though "snuff-taking" ceased to be fashionable at the beginning of the 19th century, the gold and jewelled snuff-box has continued to be a typical gift of sovereigns to those whom they delight to honour.
Snuff is still with us, if you go looking. The British blogger "Grub Street Lodger" reviewed seven different brands of snuff just twelve years ago.
The 18th century was the great age of snuff, though. It shows up in the literature of the period. In Alexander Pope's mock-epic poem The Rape of the Lock (1712), for example, the lovely Belinda has a lock of her hair surreptitiously snipped off (that's the "rape") by the Baron, one of her suitors. At the climax of the poem Belinda takes her revenge:
See fierce Belinda on the Baron flies,
With more than usual Lightning in her Eyes;
Nor fear'd the Chief th' unequal Fight to try,
Who sought no more than on his Foe to die.
But this bold Lord, with manly Strength indu'd,
She with one Finger and a Thumb subdu'd:
Just where the Breath of Life his Nostrils drew,
A Charge of Snuff the wily Virgin threw;
The Gnomes direct, to ev'ry Atome just,
The pungent Grains of titillating Dust.
Sudden, with starting Tears each Eye o'erflows,
And the high Dome re-ecchoes to his Nose.
(Pope's readers would have taken "to die" in line four to refer to la petite mort. The Gnomes are spirits of the air helping Belinda. That concluding sneeze would have embarrassed the Baron; it was considered bad form to sneeze after inhaling your pinch of snuff.)
I suppose that, when "snuff-taking ceased to be fashionable," the dwindling community of snuff-takers were regarded much as cigarette-smokers are nowadays. Who was the last person to take snuff in public, I wonder?
Drudge sludge. What's happened at the Drudge Report? I've been going there for years,
mainly just to check on the British newspapers, nicely available there.
I never noticed any particular bias in Drudge's selection of headlines; but then, I didn't really have occasion to notice. These last few weeks, though, I can't help but notice. Top headlines on September 22nd:
POLL: NEWLY POPULAR HARRIS BUILDS MOMENTUM
HOMESTRETCH WITH FAR BIGGER CAMPAIGN
CO-OPTS CONSERVATIVE CULTURE
TRUMP IN TURBULENCE
DODGES MORE DEBATE
That wasn't a one-off, either. The site has been shrieking its anti-Trump, pro-Harris bias day after day.
The phrase "regime media" has been current in our political vocabulary for years. I guess we can now add "regime media aggregator."
Math Corner. September is the time for fall
Derbhenge, when the Sun rises precisely at the end
of my street as I'm bringing Basil home from his morning walkies.
Every year — twice a year, of course — I have it in mind to capture a Derbhenge photographically. I don't have it very much in mind, though; usually I forget, and when I remember, the weather is uncooperative.
This year I remembered and the sky, although not ideal, gave some hints of sunrise color behind the trees.
Brainteaser: Here's a little oddity from the September issue of Math Horizon magazine. It's actually from what they call their Carousel: "an old problem that we like so much, we thought it deserved another go-round." It may be old to them, but it was new to me.
As an illustrative example, consider the set of the first four integers (i.e. whole numbers): {1, 2, 3, 4}. Now:
- Form all the non-empty subsets of those four numbers. Here they are: {1}, {2}, {2, 1}, {3}, {3, 1}, {3, 2},
{3, 2, 1}, {4}, {4, 1}, {4, 2}, {4, 2, 1}, {4, 3}, {4, 3, 1}, {4, 3, 2},
{4, 3, 2, 1}.
- There are 15 of these subsets. That makes sense: each of the four digits can be chosen or not chosen, giving 24
possibilities altogether. Ignore the single case where none are chosen, and there you are with 24−1
subsets.
- Plainly this can be generalized. If we were considering the first five numbers, {1, 2, 3, 4, 5} there
would be 25−1 subsets, i.e. 31 … and so on.
- Now, for each subset compute the product of its members. For our fifteen subsets of {1, 2, 3, 4} that will
give fifteen integers:
1, 2, 2, 3, 3, 6, 6, 4, 4, 8, 8, 12, 12, 24, 24.
- Add together the reciprocals of those fifteen product numbers: 1 + 1/2 + 1/2 + 1/3 + … + 1/24. Whaddya get? You get 4, the number we started with!
This doesn't just work for 4, it works for any positive integer. If you start with {1, 2, 3, …, n}, form all 2n−1 possible non-empty subsets, compute the product of the members for each subset, and add together the reciprocals of those products, you get n.
OK, so … prove it!