Monday Links

King Hezekiah’s debt, Thomas McGuane’s novels, Guillermo del Toro’s “Frankenstein,” in defense of the disordered family, and more.

Fyodor Slavyansky, Family Picture (On the Balcony) (1851). Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Good morning! Archaeologists in Jerusalem have discovered an ancient Assyrian inscription that substantiates the Old Testament account of King Hezekiah:

The discovery, a tiny 2.5-centimeter pottery shard inscribed in Akkadian cuneiform, the world’s oldest written Semitic language, was uncovered near the Temple Mount and dates back approximately 2,700 years.

Researchers from Bar-Ilan University deciphered the inscription, revealing what appears to be a complaint from the Assyrian empire regarding a late payment expected from the kingdom of Judah . . . Scholars noted that this could correspond to events recorded in 2 Kings 18 and 19, during the reign of King Hezekiah.

Is the novelist Thomas McGuane the last of his kind? Tyler Austin Harper writes about his life and work in The Atlantic:

Not long after I walked through the open door of Thomas McGuane’s Montana farmhouse, his dog Cooper at my heels, he ushered me back out for a tour of the ranch and the trout-studded freestone stream that bisects it. It occurred to me to ask if I should be watching for rattlesnakes as we pushed through the brush in the sweltering heat. McGuane told me there was nothing to worry about, then added that he had stepped on, and been bitten by, a rattlesnake the year before last. “That’s how I learned I need a hearing aid,” he said dryly. He apologized for being an unsteady walker, though I was having trouble keeping up with his brisk pace across unfamiliar terrain.

McGuane, an athletic 85, lives on 2,000 acres of rolling prairie in the Boulder River Valley, 75 miles east of Bozeman. Along the back roads that lead to his property, which is in the remote community of McLeod (one bar, one post office, population 162), quarter-mile-long irrigation systems sprayed huge, unattended agricultural fields. And everywhere, in every direction, cattle. In preparation for the trip, when I’d asked if there was an address to put in my GPS, I’d been rebuffed: “There’s not.”

I’d ostensibly arrived here to interview McGuane about his new collection of short stories, A Wooded Shore. The more honest truth is that I was in McLeod because I am a fisherman and a writer, and had come to pay homage to the master. McGuane, who possesses the singular distinction of being a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Fly Fishing Hall of Fame, and the National Cutting Horse Association Hall of Fame, is the author of 10 novels, four story collections, and numerous essays, most of which are, directly or indirectly, about the sporting life. He is arguably the only major American fiction writer still living whose work is inextricably connected to fishing, hunting, and ranching. And he may be the last.

Matthew Walther defends the disordered family:

The Well-Ordered Family is “a management system” meant to help happening families like mine achieve the status of the eponymous compound adjective by “adapting business tools for family life.” It is, in other words, an “app.” Before downloading it, users are asked to fill out a survey, which consists of thirty statements, each of which requires a numerical response ranging from 1 (“Not true at all”) to 5 (“Very true”). It helps, probably, not to think very hard about what precise shade of meaning to assign to the other numbers here. (For my purposes, I assumed that 3 meant “I don’t know.”) Some of the statements are reasonably straightforward: “My family has crystal-clear digital policies for the children.” For us that’s a 5, in the sense that they don’t know what YouTube is but are well on their way to becoming experienced V.C.R. repair techs. “Certain relationships in our family are strained” also seems obviously true, though I have never met a family in which that was not the case. I for one would like to believe that “Our household rules and consequent discipline are clear, leaving no room for misunderstanding,” but you would be surprised how many interpretations “Put your toothbrush back in the cup after you are finished with it” admits of.

More:

The premise of Well-Ordered Family (the book) and Well-Ordered Family™ (the “management system”) is simple. Per the advertising copy: “There is a reason business runs smoothly and family runs chaotically.” I would think there is more than one reason. Reams of them, probably, depending upon our working definitions of “smoothly” and “chaotically.” But let’s back up. What kind of business are we talking about here? A publicly traded corporation? That one is easy: If my family were on the Dow, our stock would just fall until some other company came along and decided to strip-mine our handful of valuable assets (our youngest makes excellent cat noises). If we were privately held, we would file for bankruptcy and start over; maybe some of us would go to grad school; others would become diner waitresses or circus performers or unicorns.

Family does not work like that. I cannot fire my intellectually disabled son for saying “The track is fixed” two hundred times in a row. (That is not an exaggeration.) My wife and I, having undergone a “merger” of sorts, cannot easily decouple. If the products we’re making—mostly a lot of noise and craft-related messes in addition to a massive though lately oral cycle of legends about Bunny Town and Wa-Wa the Annoying Banana Butler—aren’t popular with consumers, too bad. We just keep making them anyway. Shifting production overseas in the hope of lowering costs or securing a more favorable regulatory climate isn’t an option either. There is no way to do our thing in China. Nor can we bring in new talent except by “hiring on” an additional “trainee.” That is bound to happen sooner or later, but there is no strictly business logic according to which it would make sense for my or any other American family to have more than two children.

Christian Lorentzen reviews Michael Clune’s Pan: “Clune’s drug addiction developed during his twenties when he was a graduate student at Johns Hopkins, picking up around Baltimore like an extra on The Wire. He’s now a professor of English literature at Ohio State University and the author of three scholarly works, as well as a second memoir, Gamelife (2015), which recounts the obsession with computer games he developed after his family acquired a Commodore 64 in the 1980s. The two memoirs together with Pan – which is autobiographical, though there are some deviations from his life (Clune is the child of Irish immigrants, and his younger sibling is a sister) – form a trilogy about the derangements of youth.”

Zoé Boucherie reviews a new book on secular asceticism: “What is the contemporary fate of asceticism, that key feature of religious virtuosity? This question is the starting point of Isabelle Jonveaux’s research. Jonveaux is a sociologist of religion at the Institut suisse de sociologie pastorale (Swiss Institute of Pastoral Sociology). Her book is premised on two empirical claims: first, that asceticism has declined in monasteries, and second, that corporeal disciplines are on the rise in secular society. Jonveaux has decided to study ‘secular asceticism,’ which refers to practices that involve ‘forms of abstinence and restriction to obtain spiritual results . . . that are not situated in institutional religious structures and do not directly respond to an institutional command.’ Why, in a secularized society, do people place restrictions on themselves?”