The Strange Insecurities of the Sort of Middle Class

A month or two ago I got a letter from the Social Security Administration telling me what I would get in retirement if I keep making what I make now till I retire -- which is one of those things I usually ignore since I tend to assume that I'll never get Social Security. However, the letter also shows your Social Security eligible earnings every year since you started paying into the system, and that really struck me. There it was, my financial history over the last 18 years or so since I got my first paycheck.

The interesting part was looking at the fourteen years since we got married. I was a Classics major in college, with no intention to go on in Academia and no real connections when it came to getting a job. The job I had when we got married I got through a temp agency: $14/hr on the basis of acing the temp agency test of Word and Excel skills, plus being able to type at 80 wpm. As a result, we lived pretty tight those first couple years out of college. Almost everyone I kept in touch with from college was making more than I was, but then almost all of them had had more practical majors. When we were expecting our first child, I desperately searched for another job so that MrsDarwin could stop working. She was part time at Barnes & Noble and part time stage managing, the former paid minimum wage and the latter paid less, but to pay the $1,000/mo rent on our Los Angeles apartment we needed that bit of extra income each month. I found a new job, quit my old one, and then got an offer to stay on at $40k a year, which seemed a pretty princely sum to me at the time, it was still a good deal less than a lot of my friends made. And that's kind of where we stuck for a while, as I tried to improve our lot by starting my own business, moving, temping for a year and a half, and finally getting a new salaried job that paid a little bit more.

The Social Security statement related all that in a neat string of numbers: increase, decrease, increase, flat. When I started this blog, ten years ago, we had two kids and made a little under the median income for households at the time. We had a newly bought house, a car payment, and two kids. My just about any definition we were right there in the middle of the middle class.

Then the numbers started to climb, with some downs in years when the big computer company I worked for didn't do well and so didn't give bonuses, and a couple of jumps when I switched jobs and then did so again. I passed the threshold which Jenny rightly identified as that after which people don't like to talk about how much they make. And now here were are, with six kids, and a house which is twice and big and twice as expensive (and six times as old) as the one we had when we started writing here.

The other day I read someone angrily disdainfully denouncing people who make about what I do as "the rich" -- his rational being that at that level one could pay $30k/yr for your kid's college bill and still have an income above the median left over. Looking back to when I was ten years younger, I remember talking about how when I made more money, I would keep living at the same level, so that I could save and put money away for emergencies.

It oddly sets one's back up to be dismissed as "the rich". I suppose some of this is the great American love affair with the "middle class". Only about 2% of Americans identify as "upper class", and only 10% as "lower class". All the rest of us describe ourselves as "middle" or "upper middle" or "working" class. And as a creature of the right, apparently I'm even more likely to see myself as middle class.

Some of this, I think, is that I identify at least as much with my past as with my present, and my family and my own early working years were right around the mean. Another we spend a lot of time with other people like us. The people I work with mostly make around the same that I do (which is to say: above the average) and the main affluence differences between us are that they mostly have spouses who work and make as much again, plus have half as many kids as I do. So I'm used to thinking of my circumstances as being comparatively modest, even compared to people a paygrade or two below me.

Still, it's interesting that in our cultural climate, being accused of wealth is somewhat insulting, and that even those far more well off than we are at great pains to insist upon their middle class status.

Nietzsche's Dead God

I've been trying to read Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra as my current audiobook, and it's been pretty hard going. The book itself is not hard to read in the sense of being dense, but it seems hard to get much out of in that it's written as a sort of pseudo-sacred scripture and as such it's full of the Nietzsche's fictionalized Persian wise man Zarathustra laying down wise sayings. It's called a philosophical novel, but although there are a few events, it's mostly just Zarathustra's clever sayings, and as such it's very disjointed and hard to remember, particularly when listening to it as an audiobook.

This morning, however, I hit a section which actually read a little bit like a story, and also seemed like an interesting summary of Nietzsche's ideas about God being dead, and also as a summary of Nietzsche's understanding of and dislike for the Christian idea of God. Zarathustra finds an old black man sitting by the side of the road, and this man proves to have been a servant of God's (this translation calls him the pope -- I don't know if that's in the original German and if it's mean to be the Roman Catholic pope) up until God's death.

"WHAT doth all the world know at present?" asked Zarathustra. "Perhaps that the old God no longer liveth, in whom all the world once believed?"

"Thou sayest it," answered the old man sorrowfully. "And I served that old God until his last hour. Now, however, am I out of service, without master, and yet not free; likewise am I no longer merry even for an hour, except it be in recollections. Therefore did I ascend into these mountains, that I might finally have a festival for myself once more, as becometh an old pope and church-father: for know it, that I am the last pope!—a festival of pious recollections and divine services. Now, however, is he himself dead, the most pious of men, the saint in the forest, who praised his God constantly with singing and mumbling. He himself found I no longer when I found his cot—but two wolves found I therein, which howled on account of his death,—for all animals loved him. Then did I haste away. Had I thus come in vain into these forests and mountains? Then did my heart determine that I should seek another, the most pious of all those who believe not in God—, my heart determined that I should seek Zarathustra!"

Thus spake the hoary man, and gazed with keen eyes at him who stood before him. Zarathustra however seized the hand of the old pope and regarded it a long while with admiration.

"Lo! thou venerable one," said he then, "what a fine and long hand! That is the hand of one who hath ever dispensed blessings. Now, however, doth it hold fast him whom thou seekest, me, Zarathustra. It is I, the ungodly Zarathustra, who saith: 'Who is ungodlier than I, that I may enjoy his teaching?'"

Thus spake Zarathustra, and penetrated with his glances the thoughts and arrear-thoughts of the old pope. At last the latter began:

"He who most loved and possessed him hath now also lost him most. Lo, I myself am surely the most godless of us at present? But who could rejoice at that!"

"Thou servedst him to the last?" asked Zarathustra thoughtfully, after a deep silence, "thou knowest HOW he died? Is it true what they say, that sympathy choked him? That he saw how MAN hung on the cross, and could not endure it? That his love to man became his hell, and at last his death?"

The old pope however did not answer, but looked aside timidly, with a painful and gloomy expression.

"Let him go," said Zarathustra, after prolonged meditation, still looking the old man straight in the eye. "Let him go, he is gone. And though it honoureth thee that thou speakest only in praise of this dead one, yet thou knowest as well as I WHO he was, and that he went curious ways."

"To speak before three eyes," said the old pope cheerfully (he was blind of one eye), "in divine matters I am more enlightened than Zarathustra himself—and may well be so. My love served him long years, my will followed all his will. A good servant, however, knoweth everything, and many a thing even which a master hideth from himself. He was a hidden God, full of secrecy. Verily, he did not come by his son otherwise than by secret ways. At the door of his faith standeth adultery. Whoever extolleth him as a God of love, doth not think highly enough of love itself. Did not that God want also to be judge? But the loving one loveth irrespective of reward and requital. When he was young, that God out of the Orient, then was he harsh and revengeful, and built himself a hell for the delight of his favourites. At last, however, he became old and soft and mellow and pitiful, more like a grandfather than a father, but most like a tottering old grandmother. There did he sit shrivelled in his chimney-corner, fretting on account of his weak legs, world-weary, will-weary, and one day he suffocated of his all-too-great pity."

"Thou old pope," said here Zarathustra interposing, "hast thou seen THAT with thine eyes? It could well have happened in that way: in that way, AND also otherwise. When Gods die they always die many kinds of death. Well! At all events, one way or other—he is gone! He was counter to the taste of mine ears and eyes; worse than that I should not like to say against him. I love everything that looketh bright and speaketh honestly. But he—thou knowest it, forsooth, thou old priest, there was something of thy type in him, the priest-type—he was equivocal. He was also indistinct. How he raged at us, this wrath-snorter, because we understood him badly! But why did he not speak more clearly? And if the fault lay in our ears, why did he give us ears that heard him badly? If there was dirt in our ears, well! who put it in them? Too much miscarried with him, this potter who had not learned thoroughly! That he took revenge on his pots and creations, however, because they turned out badly—that was a sin against GOOD TASTE. There is also good taste in piety: THIS at last said: 'Away with SUCH a God! Better to have no God, better to set up destiny on one's own account, better to be a fool, better to be God oneself!'"

The Point of Tax Deferred Savings

One of the proposals that President Obama will reportedly make in his State of the Union Address is to remove the tax exemption for earnings in 529 college savings accounts.

Right now, the way that a 529 savings account works is that someone (parent, grandparent, etc.) puts money into the 529 savings account for the beneficiary (future college student.) The money that is put in is after-tax money. You don't get to deduct the money you contribute from your income taxes, though some states do allow you to deduct contributions to that state's plan from state income tax. Over time, the savings grow. When the kid goes to college and takes the money out to pay for tuition, books, board, etc., the student does not have to pay taxes on the money earned.

Obama's proposal is that the savings would only be tax deferred, not tax free. Thus, when the student took the money out to pay for college, the student would pay taxes on the capital gains of the money in the account.

So, for sample:

If I put $2k in a savings account for DarwinJr, and fourteen years later that $2k has grown to $10k, which he takes out to help pay for college, currently he would pay no taxes on that $10k, but under Obama's proposal, he would pay taxes on the $8k in investment earnings when he took the money out.

Apparently critics on the left object to 529s and also to retirement savings accounts such as 401ks and IRAs because they figure that the "rich" do more saving than the poor, and so they'd like to tax all possible earnings instead in order to help the poor more, and figure the rich should be able to figure out how to save on their own without any tax benefits.

I have a principled preference that we tax people less, so I'm not much in sympathy with this line of thinking. But I also think there's an interesting behavioral aspect to tax deferred savings accounts such as 529s and 401ks.

See, a couple of the big problems with savings are:

- It's easy to put off doing it: not making the contribution this month.
- If some sort of financial squeeze comes along, the obvious thing to do seems to be to tap the savings and figure you'll make it up later.

Tax exempt savings accounts help with these because many people place an inordinate (indeed, arguably irrational) value on tax exemptions, and they are also inordinately hesitant to incur tax "penalties".

So, with a tax exempt account such as an IRA, where you can write off a certain size contribution to the account each year from your taxes, people place an inordinate emphasis on making sure that they get their contribution in every year.

People are also more inclined to set up to make direct payroll contributions to tax exempt accounts, because that way they "get away" with paying lower taxes. Indeed, payroll often provides a handy calculator which assures you that you'll practically see no less in your take home if you put just a little more into your 401k every check.

So the tax exemption encourages people to be more regular in making their contributions.

Additionally, these same tax exempt accounts tend to come with a hefty penalty that you pay for taking the money out early, and using it for something other than what the account is designed for. (For instance, raiding your 401k to pay for a new furnace, or taking money out of your kids 529 to pay for car repairs.)

These mean that people are much, much less likely to tap these savings early to deal with financial emergencies. This might seem frustrating when the emergency is going on. I know there have been times when we've run into some sort of financial crunch when seeing a 401k statement was maddening. There's $30k that I own and I can't even touch it to deal with this problem! But by forcing people to find other ways to make up those shorter term emergencies, the regulations actually perform a useful service. The biggest thing on your side in longs term savings projects such as saving for retirement is time. Taking money out sets you back a long term, not just because you lose the earnings you would have had on that principle while it was in there, but also because people are generally faster to pay off debts than to build up savings. This isn't super surprising. If you miss putting money in your savings account, you just have a little less saved. If you fail to pay on a loan, they come after you.

So, for instance, I'm dead sure that when we have the Great Boiler Disaster and had to put nearly 10k on our credit cards to get the heat back, we paid that 10k off much faster than we would have re-filled 10k that we'd taken out of savings. Thus, it's probably a good thing that we couldn't raid my 401k, even though at the time it was hugely frustrating to see how much money I "had" in there, but couldn't touch.

All of these, I suspect, roll together to mean that we actually get a pretty good deal, as a polity, by providing modest tax incentives for saving for major life expenses such as college and retirement. Encouraging people to put money into savings, and then making it very hard to get that money out early, means that people will be better provided for for those needs, and less likely to need to fall back on borrowing or state assistance.

The Great War, Vol 1, Chapter 7-1

Vienna. July 25th, 1914. “Is Mother up yet?”

Elsa -- who occupied an amorphous role in the household which included lady’s maid, general light work, and his mother’s companion -- shook her head as she set the coffee pot down next to Jozef. “She did not sleep well last night. I don’t think she will be up before eleven.”

Jozef nodded and unfolded the paper: GOVERNMENT AWAITS SERBIAN RESPONSE TO ULTIMATUM.

“What did Mother have you bring in for breakfast?” he asked.

“Fruit. I think she was already feeling poorly last night, and she said she wanted nothing but fruit. Would you like some?”

Jozef shook his head and settled down to read the paper instead. If mother was likely to get up around eleven he had an hour to spend, and once he had talked to her he could get a pastry when he met the other fraternity men at the coffee house.

It had been an absolute rule of the household for as long as Jozef could remember that Mother’s half of the flat was never to be entered until she rang for Elsa and asked for her breakfast and mail to be brought in. The layout of the flat lent itself to such privacy. The main door led, through a small passage with a coat closet and hatrack, into the drawing room. From there a hall led back to the dining room, and behind a door the hall continued in more utilitarian style to the kitchen, Elsa’s bedroom, and other rooms into which Jozef and Lisette seldom ventured. To the right and left off the hall between drawing room and dining room opened two doors, one leading into Lisette’s sitting room and bedroom, the other leading into Jozef’s. Even as a little child, the arrangement had been thus, with Nurse having her room set up in the sitting room outside his bedroom. As a child this distance had at times brought heartbreak. Memories of such things had faded into the obscurity of childhood, but there had been times when the three or four-year-old Jozef had cried himself to sleep, wailing that he didn’t want Nurse, he wanted Mother. Lisette, however, had always been firm. From the time she went to bed until the time she rang her morning bell, she was not to be disturbed under any circumstances.

Now, as an adult, he much enjoyed the privacy of the arrangement. Each little suite even had its own back staircase, should one wish to go in and out without going through the main rooms, a feature which he had found useful on occasion when returning home the worse for drink.

Today, however, he had something that he particularly wanted to discuss with Mother, and so their mutual pact of privacy necessitated that he wait until the bell rang. In the meantime, he read the conditions to which the perfidious Serbs would have to agree if they were to avoid punishment for their obvious complicity in the assassination. They would not, of course. If the Serbs were capable of anything other than self destructive defiance they would not have reached this point. But it would be better if it was a sure thing. How many times had some half compromise been accepted to paper the attacks against the empire, and now they were practically the joke of Europe. If only they had simply declared war and not left a loophole of this ultimatum which might allow the bureaucrats and the diplomatists to wriggle their way out of taking any real action yet again.

At last, Elsa passed through the dining room carrying Lisette’s breakfast tray. Jozef waited a few minutes, finishing his cup of coffee and the article he had been reading and then went to see his mother.

Lisette was sitting in her bed, propped and surrounded by pillows, in a kimono-style dressing gown with a black background decorated by a print of huge white and red flowers. Her breakfast tray was set over her lap, and she was carefully cutting a plum with a fruit knife.

Jozef waited for his mother to provide some acknowledgement of his presence, but she gave none. Having removed the pit of the plum and cut the flesh into wedges, she took a sip of tea and began to eat the wedges one at a time with a little fork.

“Mother.”

As if sensing that she would not like what he had to say, Lisette remained focused on her breakfast tray, alternating between slices of plum and sips of tea. Jozef resolved to plunge on regardless of her response.

[read the rest]

10 Women That Men Should Under No Circumstances Marry

My main task yesterday was to write a lot of novel (and I did get 1,000 words done for the next installment of The Great War) but I also go side-tracked into having way too much fun with a riff on Facebook. Calah Alexander had posted a link to one of those a-bit-reasonable-combined-with-a-lot-stupid lists of highly generalized relationship advice entitled 10 Women Christian Men Should Not Marry. Clare Coffey, who blogs sporadically over at Babes in Babylon, contributed a much more useful list, which Calah has recorded for posterity in a post, which includes such essential advice as:

3. Enchantresses. Yeah, good luck preaching the Word when she makes toads fall out of your mouth every time you open it.
4. Women Who Have Been Turned Into Bears.
5. Keepers of Alehouses. These bawdy temptresses will turn you to demon rum and popery.
6. Selkies. No matter how well you think you’ve hidden her sealskin, trust me, you haven’t.
7. Mermaids. Often confused with selkies, but they will actually just drown you.

Read more: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/barefootandpregnant/2015/01/10-more-women-christian-men-definitely-should-not-marry.html#ixzz3PHb8fHyt

I couldn't resist getting in on the action, so here is my list of additional relationship danger signs that every guy, Christian or not, should keep in mind:

11) Women you have to bring back from the afterlife first.

No matter how sweet that youthful love was, once she's dead it's best to leave her there. Women who have spent time in the underworld before marriage can never rest easy.

12) The king's wife.

Yes, you've had some chivalrous moments together, but is it really worth loosing war on the entire kingdom over?

13) Semi-goddesses who have spent long ages surrounded by rings of fire.

If you do, however, at all costs avoid taking a potion that will make you forget her and marry someone else. Vengeance will be swift and terrible.

14) The most beautiful woman in the world, whom all your friends also wanted to marry, and then had to promise to go to war to bring back if she was stolen.

Surely the terms and conditions should tip you off as how this could go wrong.

15) Enchantress-priestess-princesses who offer to kill their relatives and help you steal an ancient treasure of her kingdom to complete your quest.

Yes, it seems like a big help, but that is exactly the kind of girl who will kill your children and send your new girlfriend a poisoned crown after a big fight.

16) Volatile teenagers whose cousins you've just killed.

I shouldn't even have to tell you this, you perv.

17) Ambitious Scottish noblewomen with a propensity for killing royal house guests.

Yes, they seem loyal and tough as nails, but they crack under pressure. Stay away unless you're prepared to buy all the perfumes of Arabie to sweeten her little hands.

18) Pretty much anyone in the Julio Claudian line.

Watch I, Claudius if you don't believe me.

19) Daughters of any king who thinks it would be a good idea to retire and divide up his kingdom among his favorite kids.

You'll find yourself caught in the crossfire. And are you starting to get the point about marrying royalty?

20) That foreign princess whom you'd never seen before, who treated her maid so badly when she arrived that the maid has to tell her troubles to a kitchen appliance, and who also asked you to cut the head off her horse.

Surely this should have tipped you off that something funny was going on.



However, that woman who never speaks but is always knitting thistles into shirts, the one everyone is telling you is actually a witch: Don't listen to the haters. She's a keeper.

The Great War, Vol. 1, Chapter 6-3

This installment brings the novel to just over 66,000 words and concludes Chapter 6. I'll be posting the first installment of Chapter 7 on Monday night, if all goes according to plan.

Henri was emptying out the chest in which his military uniforms and equipage were stored, making neat stacks on the bed: One dress coat. Two field coats. One overcoat. One pair of dress pants. Two pairs of field pants. Five shirts.

The stacks covered most of Henri’s side of the bed. On the other side sat Philomene, in her nightgown, feet drawn up under her so that no part of her touched his uniforms.

At the very bottom of the chest were his two bags -- officer’s luggage, not packs meant to be worn on the back like a common soldier. He took them out, opened them, and pushed them out into shape. They exhaled the smell of old leather. It had been careless, a reservist’s blunder, to let them sit untouched the whole last year. He should have taken them out and and oiled and polished them. Now they were stiff. He examined them carefully to see if cracks were forming around the creases, but if there was damage to them it was not evident yet. He set them down and began to sort things into them.

Philomene was watching his every move, and the feeling of that gaze resting on him, holding him, saying all of the things which she would not say out loud, made it impossible to meet her gaze. Instead he worked with complete precision, folding each item with deliberation, squaring each stack before he put it in the bag.

“Couldn’t you finish that in the morning and come to bed?”

Henri shrugged. He carefully folded his two field coats and put them in a bag, hanging his dress coat in the closet to wear to mass the next morning.

“There won’t be time. I have to catch the 10:35 to Paris, and by the time we go to mass at eight-- It’s better to get it done now.”

The look she gave him at this was so aggrieved that he dropped the belt he had been rolling up and went around the bed to stand next to her, putting a hand on each shoulder.

“I love you.” He placed two kisses on her forehead, one over each eyebrow. “I just have to finish this packing. There’s just no other time.”

She reached up to grab his wrists, her grip surprisingly strong. “Come to bed.”

“Ma chere. I’m sorry.” If only she too could submerge the desperation of the moment in routine as well. Packing his bags, doing everything with neatness, brought a calm. It was a thing clearly under control and achievable, which allowed him to forget both that he would have to leave his family in the morning for he knew not how long and his own helplessness and uncertainty. Would they immediately attack, or wait to see what action Germany took? Would his reserve regiment be shipped north again from Paris towards the likely front lines facing Alsace or the Ardennes, or would they be left in the reserve defending the city?

But she was already dressed for bed, her hair brushed out, sitting on the bed with her knees pulled up before her. Perhaps if she would just lie down.

“I won’t be much longer. Do you want to lie down? It’s so late already.” He glanced at the clock to confirm his words. Almost two.

“I don’t want to lie down.” There was a tremor in her voice, but Henri made himself go back to packing. “I don’t want to go to sleep,” she continued, when he did not reply. “I want to be with you.”

[continue reading]

On Deliberate Misreading

I thought I had been angry. Darwin saw the latest Hobbit monstrosity and came home and tried to describe it to me, and I sputtered for a while in rage to hear how Peter Jackson had wrested the text into something so divorced from its source material that it could hardly be said to be the same story. At least in this case, though, there's so much deviation from Tolkien's book that no one could claim that Peter Jackson's vision represents anything like the story Tolkien was telling. The movie and the book are almost unrelated. Jackson didn't twist Tolkien. He just borrowed a few names and images and went his merry way.

I thought I had been angry. And then the other night, while Darwin was writing, I felt like watching a movie, and I browsed around, and I picked 2008's Brideshead Revisited, revisited. I thought I had been angry. I didn't know angry.

The trailer should have been the first clue. But surely, I thought, surely trailers often amp up and distort the movie a bit for dramatic purposes, and probably it was compressing a bit to fit it the allotted however many seconds a trailer takes, and the movie couldn't mess up Waugh's story that much.



Now there are many ways to tell a story, and a novel is only one way of depicting reality. A movie adaptation can go deeper than a novel in some ways. It can pick up different nuances, or use visuals to inform mood in a way that a book can't. A movie can create a tapestry of sensual experience to support the story being told. It has to compress, obviously, so it has to pick up on the most important strands of the story. Decisions must be made, plot points must be eliminated. A movie does not have the direct appeal to the intellect that a book does. We accept this. We know the subtext of the book must become much more obvious in a movie because of the visual element.

And movies can lie. This movie lies. The shell of Waugh's story is here. The lush Downton Abbey-esque images we expect from a movie about summer idylls in a country house and upper-class English life in the 20s and 30 are here to lull the viewer into thinking that he might also be getting the essence of the novel. But this is not Evelyn Waugh's Bridehead Revisited, a brilliant novel of nostalgia and moral awakening. The scriptwriter and director have borrowed a word here, a touch there, and created a Brideshead for 2008: an unsubtle didactic melodrama about the meany mean Catholics and the poor persecuted saintly homosexuals, so cute and flamboyant and harmless. Did Waugh write characters with layers, with depth, with humanity? Who needs that when there's a narrative to promote?

The question: Was Lady Marchmain so insufficiently controlling in the book that the movie needed to amp her up to eleven? I had though Emma Thompson an actress of charm and subtlety, rather like Lady M, perhaps, but her Lady Marchmain is an icy monster from the beginning, and in case we didn't get it, the scriptwriters have allowed themselves to improve on Waugh with some cloddish Catholic-baiting so we know, we understand, that Cruel Catholics are the Bad Guys. Lady Marchmain allows of no nuance, no actual human motivation, because people who persecute homosexuals aren't human and shouldn't be portrayed as such.

The movie gets every character so wrong that there's no question here of a new interpretation of Waugh. This, rather, is a deliberate misreading by people so anxious to come down on the Right Side of one of the burning cultural issues of our day (not Waugh's day) that they need to take every pain to alter the story to fit their conception. Julia is now a devout Catholic sacrificed to Rex Mottram, Catholic, for the prestige of the family. Cordelia and Bridey become ridiculous caricatures whose sole purpose is to show how ludicrous it would be for any right-thinking person to embrace any point of Catholicism. Sebastian is... well, Sebastian is a saint, of course, because he's gay. He drinks because he's gay. He's been given this special love from God because he's gay. Sebastian does nothing without reference to gayness, because to allow him to have any other aspect of personality might start to undermine the filmmakers' earnest dichotomy of Catholics: Bad; Gay: Good.

This corrupts the rest of the film too. How could anyone destroy the "Orphans of the Storm" part of the story? How could the filmmakers pass up all the allure of Charles and Julia's tension and desire for a ten-second romp in the hay? How could the beginning of an affair be so tedious? The movie fails on its own terms. I pass over the banalization of Charles's own arc into mere ambition, and the compression of timelines which results in Charles and Julia's relationship growing concurrent to Charles and Sebastian's friendship. These things are appalling, and yet might possibly have been excused on the grounds of the compact nature of a movie, if they'd been done well. But they weren't.

But perhaps all might still have been redeemed at the end if Charles had been allowed to pray at Lord Marchmain's deathbed. If he had been allowed to love Julia just that much, to wish for a sign for her sake, for the solace of her soul. But again the story is distorted. Charles won't pray. Charles can't pray, because he is a stand-in for the filmmakers and their campaign against religious fakery. And so Lord Marchmain's death comes off as one more triumph of Catholic guilt and oppression. Strangely enough, that scene also contained the one truly moving bit for me: Cordelia and Julia praying, begging heaven for a sign of repentance, praying like Hannah with lips moving, every nerve strained to the breaking point. And then Julia's prayer is answered, and her shaky irrepressible smile of release rang so true to me. And yet it was just one tool in the filmmakers' kit box to show how Catholicism corrupts love. At the last moment of the film Charles stands, not before the red light of the tabernacle, but before a candle burning in front of the Madonna and Child, and I was genuinely unsure how far the filmmakers would go at that moment to show their contempt for the Church.

And I was angry. This movie was painful, tear-your-hair-out painful, pull-out-your-teeth painful, Oh-God-how-much-longer painful. I writhed in my seat every time Emma Thompson showed up. I felt Waugh rolling over in his grave. I was driven to profane expression on Facebook, and my mom is on Facebook. Everyone involved in this production ought to have been ashamed of such a bastardized version of a great book. This movie wasn't fun or interesting or thought-provoking. It was, as so much modern art is, all bosh.

The Great War, Vol. 1, Chapter 6-2

Village of Chateau Ducloux, France. Friday, July 31, 1914.

“Henri.”

Philomene’s voice stopped her husband as he was about to leave their room. She was still sitting at her dressing table, her back to him but able to see him in the mirror that stood before her.

“Yes?”

“Should I be afraid?” This was the third morning that Henri had dressed quickly, made a quick excuse, and rushed off to read all the Paris morning papers as soon as they arrived at the coffee house. Philomene herself had been so busy with the fete that she had half-welcomed the solitude at breakfast, leaving her own copy of La Croix unread and hurrying off to her errands once she finished her spiritual reading. But this abandonment of routine was unlike her husband. Was this merely his interest in news and politics taken to new lengths, or was some lurking catastrophe waiting to spring out at her while she was focused on worries about her project, as last year she had been so consumed with worries about how she would manage another pregnancy, another baby, until the those worries were swept away by the greater fear inspired by cramps and bleeding?

Henri seemed to be trying to decide how to respond to her question. “Is it as bad as the papers say?” she asked. “Is there going to be a war?”

He stepped back over to stand behind her chair and placed his hands on her shoulders. She could feel the comforting warmth of his touch through the cotton fabric of her summer blouse.

“I don’t know if there will be a war. Austria has mobilized and shelled Belgrade. Russia has mobilized against Austria. Germany has demanded that Russia stand down. Britain has recalled their fleet. It is at least as dangerous as it was five years ago with the Bosnian Crisis. But nothing came of that, so there is hope. There are a great many people working for peace.”

“Are you afraid, Henri?”

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Having That Kid In Church

We have this routine, in church, the children and I. This last week was a good example, as MrsDarwin was cantoring the mass. This means that her only time to sit with the family is during the sermon. For the first half, she's up front, leading the opening hymn, the psalm, the gospel acclamation, and the sung parts of the ordinary. Then she sits with us during the sermon, and when we rise to say the creed she goes up to the choir loft to lead the rest of the singing from there.

The eight of us take up a long pew, but since we have to arrive early for MrsDarwin to sing, we can usually score one. The big three (ages 12 to 8) I can count on. They pay attention, follow along in the missalette and music issue, and can generally be relied upon to behave -- so long as no disagreement over precedence of seating order to the desperate desire to hush the younger children takes over.

The younger three... Well. They sit on both sides of and on top of me, and trade places routinely until I have to take some combination of them out.

Jack is six, and he does so mean to be good. He kneels down and bows his head devoutly and concentrates all of the unbounded energy of the six year old male on devotion for a good minute or two. Then he turns to the baby to make a face, reaches out to grab the baby's hand, is reminded, becomes devout again, then decides that he would really like to take his sister's place and make a stand for capturing the aisle seat. Were he alone and surrounded by grown ups in the pews before and behind, he would really do quite well. But there are just so many distractions.

Four-year-old Diana does not often buckle down for the thirty seconds of devout silence that Jack manages. She squirms, she looks around, she pokes at the baby, she considers whether she might get more attention if she were the baby, and then she resolves on going to the bathroom.

And the baby? William is almost thirteen months old, which means that he's reached that age where he's unlikely to fall asleep just because he's held in a parent's arms or given a pacifier. He likes to scramble about, and he likes to experiment with all the different sounds he can make with the wonderful mouth and tongue and lungs with which he was endowed by his creator. And he lacks any comprehension at all of what you mean by making those shushing noises at him. Should he make shushing noises? Well, it's not quite as fun as spitting or giving sudden loud squeaks, but he'll try it for a moment, before moving on to another trick like chewing the wrong side of the pacifier or throwing it at the old lady in the pew in front. He's almost never angry or sad in church, the problem is that he's not quietly happy, he's loudly happy. And so I tend to spend at least half of every mass standing in the back with him. The vestibule is somehow sobering for young William. He immediately quiets down and becomes contemplative. He remains quiet until the moment you try to bring him back to the pew, at which he sees all the nice people around him and begins to talk again. It's a great game. If you're thirteen months old and a cute fellow, you should try it too.

Given that William is the sixth child, none of this is at all new. The difference is that I'm finally getting used to it. Maybe it's that we have a fairly tolerant priest, or that by this point I've had far more people tell me after mass, "You have such wonderful children. And your wife's voice is so beautiful too." But I think that a lot of it is simply getting older and realizing there's really nothing I can do about it. I can be angry, or I can be calm, and the same things will happen.

Indeed, that was what was striking me this last Sunday, when I not only had to take William out for most of the mass but had to take miss four-year-old out as well. Unconscious of any disgrace at being removed, she skipped cheerfully down the aisle in front of me as we took the long walk back to the vestibule and then sat herself down on the heater and announced she was going to toast her bottom. William was at the top of his form, being silently submissive in the back and then boisterously chirruping when back in the pew, so we were in and out several times.

I couldn't tell from the backs in front of me whether this would be a week when they turned around after mass to smile and say what a wonderful family we had, or stalked out right after communion, shaking their heads and leaving a no mans land around us. And since there really was no telling, since it was truly out of my control: Why worry about it? The same cheerful-but-too-loud baby sounds can make one person angry and another smile indulgently, and if I have no control over which, in a sense it really doesn't matter. I continue to do my best to make sure that there are not distracting levels of noise in the church proper, whether that means taking the baby out or letting him silently scramble around my feet and see if he can find some contraband gum dried onto the bottom of the pew to pick at. And whether they choose to ignore him, be charmed, or be angry is really much more their own affair than mine.

Family History

The Baton Rouge Advocate has an article about East Baton Rouge's first, and only, female sheriff, who happened to be my great-grandmother, Eudora Slaughter Day.

The events leading up to Day’s election as East Baton Rouge’s only woman sheriff began on March 29, 1924. That was the day her husband was on patrol with another deputy when they stopped to break up a fight in the parking lot of a gambling hall off Scenic Highway. After they quelled the discord, Robert Day and his deputy went into the building and found some bettors. 

“They were taking names of gamblers down in a back room when, for some reason, shots were fired,” said Eastin, whose research, compiled mostly from old newspaper articles and reviews of old laws, will be the subject of an upcoming presentation. “They say somebody ‘blew out the light’ and fired a pistol.” 

In addition to the sheriff, at least one of the gamblers was fatally shot. Another was shot in the stomach and later developed pneumonia, but Eastin couldn’t find any record of his death. The deputy with Day wasn’t injured. 

The violence led to the bittersweet and historic appointment of the first and only female sheriff in parish history. It appears that Eudora Day would have been the first female sheriff in the state if not for Ella McCoy Gilbert, who was appointed Franklin Parish sheriff for a brief time after her husband, Jesse S. Gilbert, died while serving as sheriff in February 1924. 

Regardless, it would take a campaign featuring daily marches and the offering of classes where residents were taught how to write-in “E.S. Day” on the ballot for Day to prevail in the election. 

The teachers at the school, which was on Third Street, shortened her name to “E.S. Day” because it was easier to write, especially for anyone with subpar literacy. 

Campaigners even developed a slogan — “Don’t Stamp the Rooster” — in an effort to prevent voters from electing Day’s opponent, Edward B. Young, who appeared under the Democratic Party’s section of the ballot, which then was identified by a rooster.

What the article doesn't mention is that the Klu Klux Klan supported her opponent and ran both over-handed and under-handed campaigns against her. Big newspapers ads were run alleging that it was illegal to write in a candidate, and that anyone who did so would be prosecuted and face jail time. Despite these tactics, on the day of the election the turnout was 75%, the largest voting percentage in East Baton Rouge's history, and most of the voters didn't vote the whole ticket but only wrote in "E.S. Day" for sheriff.

My grandfather was 16 when his father was shot. The the originals of the photographs in the Advocate article used to hang at my grandparents house, and the resemblance between Grandpa and his father the sheriff was very striking. My mom was 10 or 11 when Eudora Day died in 1965, and remembers her well.

The Great War, Vol. 1, Chapter 6-1

Village of Chateau Ducloux, France. July 28, 1914. Henri was shown into the library at the Perreau house. It was a small room, smelling comfortably of leather and pipe tobacco. The shelves were filled with handsomely bound volumes, and the wood of the shelves glistened with careful dusting and polishing. However, if someone went so far as to pull a volume from it’s place, it proved to have plentiful dust on the top edge. The only reading material that showed actual wear was a rack of magazines relating to Justin Perreau’s two interests: photography and bird watching.

“Monsieur Perreau will be in shortly,” said the maid who had shown him in. “Make yourself comfortable.”

Then she left, shutting the door behind her.

There was only one visibly comfortable chair in the room, a large, worn, leather easy chair. A standing lamp and magazine rack stood on one side of it, the smoking table on the other. It spoke to much time spent in pleasantly reclusive solitude.

Henri sat instead on one of the two wooden chairs facing the desk and set his ledger book down on the desktop before him.

It was some minutes before Justin arrived. At last he burst in, making Henri start, then stopped to shut the door quietly behind him before going to his desk and sitting down.

“I’m sorry to be late, Monsieur Fournier. Mother becomes quite angry if either of us get up before she has finished with her tea.”

Henri shrugged. “You’re my last appointment of the day. I’m at your disposal.”

“Thank you, thank you.” Justin leaned forward and spoke in a lower voice. “What have you found?”

Henri opened the ledger book and laid it open on the desk facing Justin. “As you requested, I’ve conducted a full audit. This page shows the summary of income and assets.”

In neat columns, each of the family’s farm holdings and each of its financial investments was laid out, labeled, valued, and its income and expenses during each of the last three years listed. Writing out this ledger book for his client, all in pen with no mistakes, had been the work of several days, pulling together all of the figures, laying out the table in pencil on a loose sheet of paper, and then copying it carefully into the book. Many hours of interviews were reduced to figures, many hours of calculating figures summarized on a single page, all to provide the client with a view of his assets and income which made it easy for him to understand and make decisions about an estate too complicated for him to easily keep track of himself.

“Really, the estate is in very good condition,” Henri said, once he had run through the entire list, explaining each entry. “However, as you requested, I looked especially for any problems, any failures of management. I have found a few. There are two categories. The first, if I may summarize it bluntly, is that your mother plays favorites among the tenant farmers.”

Justin was nodding eagerly. Henri turned a page in the ledger.

“Here is one of the cases: Victor Morand. Five years ago he had the tenancy of sixty acres and owed you three hundred Francs in back rent. On your mother’s authorization he was given a loan by the estate for an additional five hundred Francs to buy additional equipment, and when Eloy died she gave Morand his tenancy as well, for the same rent that Eloy had paid, even though that was a below market rate due to his age. Since then Morand has fallen behind an additional one hundred Francs in rent, and he’s missed payments on his loan twice. There are two other, similar cases.” He flipped pages in the ledger, showing the summary of each case. “All three I was first tipped off to by other tenants who claimed, with some reason, that they would have been better choices for the additional land. The playing of favorites definitely causes some resentment.”

“And the other category?”

Continue Reading

More Story Time

The Murder That Never Lasted

narrated by Jack, age 6

There was a mom and a girl walking home from church. Suddenly a man shot the mother and stole her necklace and earrings. The little girl remembered the phone number of the police, and she took the phone from her mom's pocket and called the police. She told them that they were right in front of St. Charles Church. The police came right away with an ambulance and a police car.

The murderer, when he saw the police, slipped right away, climbing up a tree. A policeman saw him. The murderer jumped down and ran to his car. The policeman who saw him told the others that the man was escaping, so they went after him, but they lost him. But luckily they put a medal that tracked down the car on his car, and they were right next to him when the policeman shot out his tires. The murderer jumped out of his car and stole a police motorcycle. But luckily it didn't start because the police had the keys. But the murderer stole the keys of another one. He started the motorcycle, but when he saw the time bomb the police put on it, he ran from the motorcycle. Suddenly it blew up. When he was knocked out from a car hitting him, the police dragged him to jail.

Meanwhile the ambulance was taking the mother to the hospital. When the doctors found the bullet during the operation, they called the police. The police came right away. The little girl asked a policeman if her mother would be okay. The policeman said, "No. She will not. We will have to bury her."

When it was time for the mom to be buried, the little girl saw them putting her mom in the coffin. Suddenly she told the policeman, "No, wait! My mom is alive! Put her on the ground. I'll say something to her."

So the little girl said, "Mom, are you alive?" The mom said, "Yes! When the bullet was coming at me I said a prayer, and I got dizzy and fell down, but I didn't die."

The police said, "But we already found the bad guy. It's okay." Suddenly the mom fell back down on the ground and told the policeman to call the ambulance, and she told her daughter that she was going to have a baby.

So she had a baby and she called him Frederick, and for the rest of their lives, things went right. But when Frederick was five, someone was about to kidnap his sister when Frederick punched him in the stomach and called the police. The police came and dragged the kidnapper to jail. But the kidnapper escaped and bumped into a wall and they lived happily ever after.

The End

This story was written by Jack Hodge.

Story Time

The Murder of the Bloody Gun

Narrated by Jack, age 6

Part One

Once there was a lady. She was walking home from a ball when suddenly, a man snuck up and shot her. When the police came running up to the dead body, the policeman called for Chief Inspector Jack.

Part Two

Chief Inspector Jack inspected the body. He said, "Aha! There are bloody footmarks. If we follow the footmarks, we can find the murderer." So they did, but the marks didn't lead to the murderer. They led them to the park, where a bloody gun was found.

This Is Not The End.

More Science Report

Head

by A Naughty Moose, age 8

Some of your sensory organs are located in your head: your eyes, ears, taste buds, and organs of smell. Did you know that your brain controls your whole body? Your brain controls your eyes, ears, arms, Legs, hands and feet. If you had no brain you could do nothing.

Science Report

Isaac Newton

by Julia, age 11

Isaac Newton was born on christmas day but their calenders were diffrent so he was born on January 4 1642. Isaac was born early and they didnt think week tiny Isacc would survive. When he was ten he moved to a diffrent school since it was seven miles away Isaac stayed with a family called the Clarke's. Mr Clarke was a apothecary Isaac learned basic cemistry from Mr Clarke.

Isaac's mother wanted Isaac to be a farmer but Isaac's uncle and school teacher pleated with his mother to let him go to a univeristy and she finnaly agread. He mannley studied Greek and latin espesily Aristotle. In the year 1665 Isaac passed his exam for a bachelor degree. Pretty much as soon as he passed the exam he had to leave because of the plauge. Isaac went to stay at his mothers house.

Isaac saw a Apple fall and he wonderd what made the apple fall and that is Gravity. Isaac Newton also made the telascope. He and another man made the compass (calculus) without knowing the other Leibniz had a fight and Isaac won but we use Leibniz's compass insted. Isaac Newton was one of the men of all time.

Book Report

Jane Eyre

by Eleanor, age 12

The book "Jane Eyre" is a very tragic novel. I did not like it very well; I much prefer Howl's Moving Castle. The book is about a girl named Jane who is brought up by a cruel Aunt, and scorned by her cousins. After getting sent to a bad school, where she survives a fever epidemic, Jane takes the job of governess at Thornfeild Hall where her employer preposes to her and they nearly get married. but Mr. Rodchester (her employer) turnes out to have a mad wife locked away in a tower. After that, Jane runs away and meets cousins she never knew she had. One of them, Singon Rivers, wants to take her to India to be a helper to him in his missionary work, only he want her to marry him first because he thinks that she will go off with someone else while they're being missionarys. Then Jane goes back to Thornfeild Hall, only to find that it is a burnt ruin because of Mr. Rodchester's mad wife, who is now dead because she threw herself from the roof of Thornfeild Hall after setting the house on fire. Mr. Rodchester himself is now blind, one eye out, the other suffered nerve damage. Jane and Mr. Rodchester get married, and by the time they have a baby boy, two years later, Mr. Rodcester's eye that suffered nerve damage got better enough to see pretty well. If you unfocus your eyes you will have an idea of what his vision is like.

The End

The Great War: Vol, Chapter 5-4

This is the last of Chapter 5. On Thursday, we'll have the first installment of Chapter 6.

Walter found Erich in one of the tenement courtyards, playing a game that involved bouncing a ball off the brick walls of the building and periodically rushing in to tag the wall itself. For a few moments he watched the game, until a shouting match suddenly broke out.

“I touched the wall first.”

“You did not,” Erich said. “You’re out.”

“Are you calling me a liar?”

“I’m saying the ball hit the wall first, if you aren’t telling the truth that’s your own affair.”

Walter sensed that blows were about to fly and grabbed his brother by the collar. “Erich, I was looking for you.” Erich struggled but Walter held firm to his collar.

“What? You talk big and then get rescued by big brother?” the other boy demanded. “Stand up for yourself, coward.”

Erich made another lunge to get free, but Walter held onto him while fixing a stern eye on his antagonist. “Is that any way to talk in front of an adult, Herbert? Do I need to speak to your father about your respect for authority?” The father in question was free with his hand, towards both wife and children.

Herbert drew himself to attention. “No. I’m sorry, Herr Heuber.”

“I need Erich to come with me now. You two think about your differences over Sunday and if you need to fight it out go meet somewhere next week out of sight and fight it out like men. None of this scuffling in courtyards.”

He let go of Erich’s collar, and his brother straightened his jacket and gave Walter a resentful sidelong glance.

“All right, you two. Shake hands,” Walter ordered, determined that since he had been thrust into the role of arbitrator he would observe all the formalities.

The other boys gathered around to watch the adult-brokered peace. Erich and Herbert each took a step forward and cautiously shook hands.

“Good. Come on, Erich.” He led his younger brother away from the rest of the group. As they left the courtyard he could hear the ball begin to be bounced off the wall again.

“You didn’t have to do that,” Erich said, his shoulders hunched and his hands thrust deep in his pockets as he walked. “I could have taken him. And he was lying.”

“Well, take him later. I’m going to the Stadtschloss to see if the Kaiser addresses the crowd from the balcony tonight, and I thought you’d want to come.”

With the speed that still marked the thirteen-year-old as a boy rather than a youth, Erich’s sulky demeanor instantly fell away and a spring returned to his step. “We’re going to the Stadtschloss? Is there war news?”

“I heard the mobilization order an hour ago. I’ll have to leave first thing on Monday.”

“It’s war! It’s war! I knew it! When do you get your uniform?”

“Not till I get to the depot. I need to get back to Schneidemuhl, where the regiment is based.”

They continued on for some time this way, Erich peppering his brother with eager questions, Walter answering and basking in the admiration and excitement which was focused on him. At last they saw a street car which wasn’t already packed, heading towards the city center and climbed aboard.

[Continue reading]

To Each According To Their Desires

We had Erin of Bearing Blog and her family over to stay for New Years along with another big Catholic family. The three of us guys were all in fairly specialized fields. Erin's husband Mark is a chemical engineer. Matt is a medical physicist dealing with radiation treatments and such. And I do pricing analytics.

There were drinks aplenty. I was bottling a batch of Oatmeal Stout with the other two guys, and Matt had brought a couple bottles of port which he'd made. We are the sort of family which does not have large numbers of surviving glasses from the same set, so when it came time to pour six glasses of port for the six adults, the six wine glasses included four different sizes.

The result was best formulated by Mark in the form of a joke:

The physicist says that we should pour all the glasses to the same height.

The engineer says that we should take into account the different shapes of the glasses and pour to different heights in order to get the same amount of fluid in each glass.

The pricing analyst says we could just pour the glasses unequally and then ask the wives to pick first. They'll want the glasses with the least wine, and then we can have the others.

The glasses were poured and the wives were called back to the kitchen, where they did indeed pick the glasses with less wine. (One even poured some back into her husband's glass.) The men finished with a toast to market segmentation.

And that is why pricing analytics often resides in marketing.

Hobbit Movie Review: The Battle of Oversized Armies

I went to see the last Hobbit movie with low expectations, and Peter Jackson's last Tolkien effort met or exceeded them, but that's mostly a measure of how low my expectations were. As with the previous two movies, this one is over-big in every possible sense. The monsters are bigger, the armies are bigger, no emotion can be felt without scenery chewing and expository dialogue and even then it's good if we throw in some reality bending CGI just so there's no possible way you could miss what's going on internally.

Still, it's a Tolkien-based movie and it's the last we're likely to get in a long time, so I kind of felt I had to see it in order to see how it went down.

Review with spoilers follows.

The Right Sort of Book People

It's almost 18 years since I went to college, which as a side note means that soon MrsDarwin and I will have known each other half our lives. Not a bad thing, that.

We met at a Freshman dance and ended up talking till two in the morning. I don't recall exactly how it came up, but the moment when I realized we were going to be friends was when she said, "We could go over to the student center and talk for a while."

I replied, "Of shoes and ships and sealing wax?"

And she responded "Of cabbages and kings."

I'd come up to college with the conviction that probably the best indicator of whether someone was a worthwhile friend was whether they liked the same books. If someone liked Tolkien and Lewis, we were clearly going to get along. If they expressed a distaste for science fiction and fantasy (about which I felt strongly enough at the time that I was convinced it was an indicator of seriousness whether you knew to talk about SF rather than SciFi) they probably weren't worth knowing.

I'm not entirely sure how I got to thinking this way. My parents' set of friends mostly went back to their college days and they all shared an interest in Tolkien and Lewis, and in science fiction and fantasy more generally, but my parents themselves were not as exclusive as I, in my youthful enthusiasm, was.

The reason this is particularly strange for me to look back on is that in the ensuing eighteen years I've not only ceased to see shared interest in genre fiction as the primary indicator of intellectual commonality, but I've almost entirely stopped reading science fiction and fantasy. Looking back over the books I read this year, I read 26, of which 4 were science fiction or fantasy. Two of those were by my sister, and the other two were re-reading The Fellowship of the Ring and reading Andy Weir's near-future SF novel The Martian.

I think a part of this is that it wasn't till I got out and had a wider experience of the world that I began to realize what I had got out of favorite books was not necessarily what others got out of them. There are a lot of people who love Tolkien's books who get very different things out of them than I do, and love them for very different reasons. And just because I found beauty and truth in Tolkien's novels does not mean that people who aren't particularly interested in Tolkien have no interest in beauty and truth. Of course, this was deeply faulty logic, but one often barely thinks about these things consciously. Instead, one has a sense of what accounts for "like me" in some basic way.

Friendships tend to be sparked by some sort of commonality: intellectual interests, work, parenthood, religion, politics, living next door to each other. It's probably best to have friendships rooted in all these different areas, and to one extent or another I suppose I do. Even among friends who are also book people, as I've become less dogmatic in my reading tastes, I now number among my friends people who simply don't like Tolkien or Lewis. It does work.