Laura’s second-eldest sister has her baby earlier today. Evidently this makes me an uncle. Doing my best to start feelin’ avuncular. It is interesting timing in light of a sublimely absurd phrase I see last week, in an obit for the late Sydney Pollack:

In recent years Pollack also specialized in the role of the powerful corporate or societal patriarch, one willing to lay down the law or to teach the hard truths of life to the protagonist. He played variations of it in Eyes Wide Shut, Changing Lanes and Michael Clayton and created what can only be described as avuncular malevolence, inspiring fear and awe while exuding a tinge of mercy.

AVUNCULAR MALEVOLENCE! My god, I could recite this monstrosity all day. Avuncular malevolence. Avuncular malevolence. Avuncular malevolence.

When I first read it, it doubly reminds me of a bit from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, when R. and G. are watching the rehearsal of the dumb-show of “The Murder of Gonzago”, which Hamlet has requested the players perform:

The mime (continued) — enter another. He takes off the Sleeper’s crown, kisses it. He had brought in a small bottle of liquid. He pours the poison in the Sleeper’s ear, and leaves him. The Sleeper convulses heroically, dying.

ROSENCRANTZ   Who was that?

PLAYER   The King’s brother and uncle to the Prince.

GUILDENSTERN   Not exactly fraternal.

PLAYER   Not exactly avuncular, as time goes on.

This uncle thread then summons up the title of Stevens’s “Le Monocle de Mon Oncle”, which poem incidentally contains a few morbidly bookish (or bookishly morbid) lines that remind me of Hamlet: his reading, his madness, his address to Yorick.

An apple serves as well as any skull
To be the book in which to read a round,
And is as excellent, in that it is composed
Of what, like skulls, comes rotting back to ground.
But it excels in this, that as the fruit
Of love, it is a book too mad to read
Before one merely reads to pass the time.

Also: This new nephew of ours is named Alexander, whose historical namesake is invoked by Hamlet himself as he’s holding Yorick’s skull in the graveyard scene:

To what base uses we may return, Horatio! … Alexander died, Alexander was buried, Alexander returneth to dust; the dust is earth; of earth we make loam; and why of that loam whereto he was converted might they not stop a beer barrel?

OK, so all this death-obsessed dithering is not the most appropriate literature to drag out for the occasion of a birth, but I had to mention the Hamlet lines in light of that bizarre reborn-as-a-beer-barrel-stopper conceit — since there is supposedly a family rumor that our young Alexander may have at one point been at least partially named in honor of the renowned Canadian beer Alexander Keith’s. (Prosit!)