Metaphysics and Facts

 Noticed in F.H. Bradley's Ethical Studies, in the chapter "My Station and Its Duties":

If, then, apart from metaphysic, one looks at the history and present practice of society, these would not appear to establish the 'fact' that the individual is the one reality, and communities mere collections. 'For all that', we shall be told, 'it is the truth.' True that is, I suppose, not as fact but as metaphysic; and this is what one finds too often with those who deride metaphysic and talk most of facts. Their minds, so far as such a thing may be, are not seldom mere 'collective unities' of metaphysical dogmas. They decry any real metaphysic, because they dimly feel that their own will not stand criticism; and they appeal to facts because, while their metaphysic stands, they feel they need not be afraid of them.

Something To Chew On

 In a review of the latest Matrix movie, Manohla Dargis wrote of the series that

It also provided grist for reams of articles, dissertations and scholarly books ("The Matrix and Philosophy: Welcome to the Desert of the Real"), taking its place as one of contemporary pop culture's supreme interpretive chew toys.

This brought to mind a passage from one of Henry Adams's letters, written to Hugh Blair Grigsby on October 9, 1877:

Dear old Jefferson! Never was there a more delightful ground for people to argue about! We discuss him here by the day together, just as though he were alive. We can fight about him as ardently as ever. He is supremely useful still (he and Hamilton) as a sort of bone for students of history to mumble, preparatory to getting their teeth.

 Well, Lin-Manuel Miranda has brought Hamilton back for pop culture interpretation, with I suppose Jefferson tagging along.

The Beginning of Knowledge

 Reading The Beginning of Knowledge by Hans-Georg Gadamer led to a number of reflections:

First, that though it is most interesting, still it is a bit odd to read essays on the Pre-Socratics when I know no more about them than I do. (Heraclitus mostly through Guy Davenport's translations in Seven Greeks; what I remember Plato and Aristotle saying about him and the others.) I should make the time to read what is available of the Pre-Socratics before I read this book again.

Second, that the notion of quoting Greek in the Latin alphabet is just odd. It offers no advantage to those who know no Greek. It must slightly delay and irritate those who know Greek well, unless they have the Pre-Socratics all but memorized. And those who know a little Greek it simply teases and annoys. I suppose that it saves on production costs.

 Third, that it speaks well for Collin County Community College that Rod Coltman, the translator of The Beginning of Knowledge, teaches or has taught there. The school does not have a faculty list that I could find on its website--considering that it has four campuses and must depend heavily on adjuncts, this does not surprise me. But a "review-my-professor" website shows Mr. Coltman teaching there as recently as 2017. That the reviews tended to be either terrible--all memorization and quotation--or superlative--the sort of course I came here to take--is not surprising either.

Fourth, that any translation leaves one wishing to have the original available for comparison. At least for a translation from any language one knows a little, there is always the desire to make sure that something hasn't been dropped out or oddly phrased.

Deduction, Induction, Abduction

 In 2020, I read a certain amount by the American philosopher C.S. Peirce. Some pages of what Peirce had to say turned on induction. Now, inductive proofs were familiar from a finite math class taken long ago. But the text for the course gave it much less space than Peirce and his moderns editor did.

Eventually I remembered or misremembered a passage from Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, in which Connie Sachs reports a disagreement with Percy Alleline.  In the book, it runs as follows:

Accused me of unscientific deduction. 'Whose expression is that?' I said to him. 'It's not deduction at all,' he says, 'it's induction.' 'My dear Percy, wherever have you been learning words like that; you sound just like a beastly doctor or someone.'

Certainly her inference about the Soviet spy was induction--but why that should be disqualifying, or how induction amounts to unscientific deduction is not clear. One infers on Alleline's part a mixture of feigned and real annoyance covering a weak case.

A search for more Peirce at Second Story Books turned up the monograph You Know My Method: A Juxtaposition of Charles S. Peirce and Sherlock Holmes. I have a notion, probably not uncommon among those who have read little Holmes, that Dr. Watson is forever congratulating Holmes on brilliant deductions; though the few cases that I remember seemed not to turn on deduction at all. But Holmes himself does speak of deductions, whether or not the inferences so named really are deductive.

The book cites Holmes as disclaiming guessing (The Sign of the Four). On the other hand, it documents Peirce's interest in a "singular guessing instinct", "more commonly referred to by Peirce as Abduction or Retroduction." It also gives the story of a case in which Peirce used such guessing to recover property stolen from him in the summer of 1879. (It is possible that the details of the recovery--in his disregard for the privacy of a residence--will impress or shock the modern reader as much as his acumen in identifying the thief and recovering the goods.)

 You Know My Method is part of a "Sherlock Holmes Monograph Series". It was published by Gaslight Publication of Bloomington, Indiana, in 1980. I suppose that the intended audience is one that is fascinated by Sherlock Holmes yet prepared to read about C.S. Peirce: the overlap of those fascinated by Holmes and those wishing to read Peirce must be pretty small.

Smiling

 In the section on the 1948 election in Great Expectations: The United States, 1945 - 1974, James T. Patterson writes of Thomas Dewey's lack of charisma that

Even smiling seemed to come with difficulty. A photographer once said, "Smile, governor." "I thought I was," he responded.

 I sympathize. I think that I do smile a fair bit, that my moods tend to be on the cheerful side. But anyone who wishes me to look glum can just point a camera at me. The photographs suggest that I am attempting to smile through discomfort or moderate pain. I don't know why, I have never looked back through old photographs to see whether this was always so, but it is so now. It's well I'm in a trade that does not put a premium on smiling.

Judith and Holofernes, Caravaggio and Artemisia Gentileschi.

 Last Sunday we made it to the Palazzo Barberini in Rome, mostly to see the exhibition "Caravaggio and Artemisia: The Challenge of Judith; Violence and Seduction in 16th and 17th Century Painting". Since the Judith in question was Judith of Bethulia, and the violence the beheading of Holofernes, we got to see quite a few paintings of decapitations. There was the occasional change, when pictures instead showed Judith and her servant bringing the head back home, but I remember only a couple of those.

Caravaggio's painting seemed to me distinctly the best of them. It struck me that his Judith's expression combines distaste with a concentration on doing the work properly, while her servant appears simply revolted. Artemisia Gentileschi's Judith is simply intent on the work, and her servant, much younger than in Caravaggio's picture, shows only concentration.

Data Protection

 Among the email accounts we use is one provided by our internet service provider (ISP). Most of the traffic comes from the neighborhood listserv, but we do use it for dinner invitations, book club news, and so on. The user interface is a bit clumsy.  Still, we're accustomed to it, we use it regularly.

But not from the European Union. On Saturday I tried to log in, and received an error page saying that the page http://webmail.[name-withheld].com/gdpr does not exist. I infer that somebody at the ISP decided that persons logging on with network addresses in European ranges should get a message stating the ISP's policy of adherence to the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR); and that somebody else neglected to set that page up, or set it up with the wrong URL. So at the moment I can't conveniently get into that email account. Yes, I could connect to the office network over its virtual private network and so connect to webmail with a US network address, but that doesn't count as convenient.

  I think GDPR makes sense. I just wish that our ISP didn't stop halfway in its recognition of it.

Twenty-Six Years Ago

 Yesterday's Google Doodle celebrated Johannes Vermeer. On clicking, I found that this was because November 12, 1995 was the day the Vermeer Exhibition opened at the National Gallery of Art, "featuring 21 of his existing 35 works". I remember that exhibition, both for its paintings and its circumstances.

The exhibition overlapped with two government shutdowns: November 14 through November 19, 1995, and December 19, 1995 through January 6, 1996. During the shutdowns, not all, but a good deal of the federal government was closed, including the National Gallery. During the second shutdown, when it began to appear that the exhibition would disperse on February 11, 1996 without many having seen it, a private foundation paid the expenses to open it. The National Gallery usually closes at 5 pm, but the Vermeer exhibition was open until 7 pm Friday through Sunday. I suppose that it must have been the only part of the National Gallery one could see while the shutdown continued.

I know that we visited it late in the day. I recall being drenched while waiting to get tickets, then chilled. It was worth the trouble.

Wonders and Cuff-Links

 Glenn Creason, for many years a reference librarian at the Los Angeles Public Library, has retired, and posted a farewell on the library's blog. I had never heard of him, or thought about that library, but clearly I was missing out:

 There is nothing quite like the variety in the ridiculous to the sublime public who visit libraries. I will miss the unpredictable curiosity of my patrons. Once I could rattle off "the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus" as one of "the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World" or patiently explain that I found no evidence that Columbus was wearing cuff-links when he discovered America. I could go on for several hundred more pages but it is only the law of averages when you get a hundred thousand questions there will be some bizarre fun in there.

Many thanks to the person who posted the link to Hacker News.

Meta, Evitata

The announcement that Facebook is now Meta has been met mostly with ridicule. It will also have little effect.  How many people speak of Alphabet rather than Google? I know two persons who have recently gone to work there, and both speak of "Google" rather than of "Alphabet".

"Meta" is in Greek a preposition or an adverb; of course it is the sense of "beyond", made familiar by "metaphysics" or "metalanguage", that tempted Facebook. However, in Hebrew, some have written happily, it means "dead". And in Latin it can be a noun, meaning boundary or turning point, so that one finds in Horace

sunt quos curriculo pulverem Olympicum
collegisse iuvat metaque fervidis
evitata rotis palmaque nobilis.

Translated by John Conington as

There are who joy them in the Olympic strife
And love the dust they gather in the course;
The goal by hot wheels shunn'd, the famous prize...

I am all in favor of shunning Meta.

Brows

 In A.O. Scott's review of the movie "The French Dispatch", which appeared in yesterday's New York Times, there is a passing reference to

... Harold Ross and William Shawn, the men who together and sequentially established The New Yorker as a pinnacle of middlebrow sophistication in the decades before and after World War II.

I don't often see The New Yorker, and won't vouch for the loft of its brow. Yet I wonder what the height of The New York Times's brow is.  High, upper-middle? And I wonder whether and how I would recognize a highbrow publication if I saw one. Perhaps the sign would be one that it left me muttering "It's very hard to be up to you intellectual lads", like Flann O'Brien's The Plain People of Ireland.

A Hoax

 At the end of the notes to Chapter III, "Columbus's First Voyage of Discovery", of Samuel Eliot Morison's The European Discovery of America: The Southern Voyages 1492-1616, appears

One of the most amusing hoaxes of our day is the story about Columbus submitting his great enterprise to the Senate of Genoa, all of whom turned it down (in a 964-page report) as impractical, impossible, and incredible, except the junior member, none other than Leonardo da Vinci! After seeing this squib given the dignity of print in the Congressional Record for 28 June 1971, p. S 10, 107, I ran it to ground. Through my friend Robert Sherrod I found that it was written as a satire by Dr. Ralph S. Cooper of the Scientific Laboratory at Los Alamos, to whose dismay it was taken seriously in many quarters.

Though I like as well as the next citizen to make fun of elected officials, I infer from the context provided in the Congressional Record that the Senate was not one of the many quarters that took the story seriously. Senator Sparkman of Alabama read the story into the record during a consideration of the NASA Authorization Bill, in particular whether the space shuttle should be funded.

I had opened Morison to refresh my memory on the date of Columbus's landfall in the Bahamas: it was, as I had thought, October 12, 1492.

GOTS

 Within the last few years, American sportswriters have taken up the term GOAT--"greatest of all time". So for example, one can argue whether Tom Brady is the GOAT among quarterbacks or Tiger Wood the GOAT among golfers. (As far as I know, nobody has suggested that we separate the sheep from the GOATs.) The position of quarterback has perhaps a hundred and fifteen years of history, if we count from the first legal forward pass. I suppose that professional golf has a few more. In any case, "all time" in such sporting contexts is both short and recent enough to be well documented and long enough not to sound ridiculous.

A bookstore that I've bought from sent an email last week, advertising among other books some new novels. Among them was one with a description including

Don’t miss out on maybe the greatest work of fiction published this season.

I can certainly believe in a best work of fiction published this season. But setting aside the mathematical or use of "greatest"--for example, the greatest common divisor of 128 and 198 is 2, and the greatest common divisor of any two mutually prime numbers is 1--one expects the greatest to be great. Is there a great work of fiction published every season?

The major American sports leagues have a Hall of Fame, admission to which ought to certify greatness, and name a most valuable player (MVP) every year. Sports buffs must know whether it is possible to have won an MVP award and not end up in the sport's Hall of Fame. I don't know, but I suspect that it has been done. Then there are arguments every few baseball seasons whether the MVP award should go to someone with outstanding numbers whose team finishes out of the playoffs, or to someone with less gaudy numbers whose contributions take the team to the playoffs, perhaps a championship. The question raised is whether "wins above replacement" count for that much when the team could have traded the star, found a replacement, and finished no farther out of the running. So perhaps GOTS--greatest of this season--would be a useful complement to MVP.

Keynes on Newton

 The outdoor carts at Second Story Books had a copy of Essays in Biography by J.M. Keynes, and of course $4 seemed a more than reasonable price. Most of the pages in the book are given over to economists: an essay on Alfred Marshall,  whose name I had never heard, takes up about a quarter of the book.

The most interesting essay is "Newton, the Man". There is much in it to quote and consider, but the paragraph that most struck me is

I believe that a clue to his mind is to be found in his unusual powers of continuous concentrated introspection. A case can be made out, as it also can with Descartes, for regarding him as an accomplished experimentalist. Nothing can be more charming than the tales of his mechanical contrivances when he was a boy. There are his telescopes and his optical experiments. These were essential accomplishments, part of his unequalled all-round technique, but not, I am sure, his peculiar gift, especially amongst his contemporaries. His peculiar gift was the power of holding continuously in his mind a purely mental problem until he had seen straight through it. I fancy his pre-eminence is due to his muscles of intuition being the strongest and most enduring with which a man has ever been gifted. Anyone who has ever attempted pure scientific or philosophical thought knows how one can hold a problem momentarily in one's mind and apply all one's powers of concentration to piercing through it, and how it will dissolve and escape and you find that what you are surveying is a blank. I believe that Newton could hold a problem in his mind for days and hours and weeks until it surrendered to him its secret. Then being a supreme mathematical technician he could dress it up, how you will, for purposes of exposition, but it was his intuition that was pre-eminently extraordinary--"so happy in his conjectures," said de Morgan, "as to seem to know more than he could possibly have any means of proving." The proofs, for what they are worth, were, as I have said, dressed up afterwards--they were not the instrument of discovery.

 In Adventures of a Mathematician, Stanislaw Ulam wrote that an hour of concentration on a problem is worth far more than two half-hours, and credited an American collaborator's powers of concentration. The proofs coming second recalls something that Richard Feyman said of another physicists work: there certainly were a lot of equations.

There are other essays in the book worth reading. "The Council of Four, Paris, 1919" gives a deplorable picture of Woodrow Wilson, how accurate I can't say. The essay on Malthus as economist gives the curious detail that his father was an enthusiast and friend of Rousseau.

Beyond the Hundredth Meridian

It is said to require twenty inches of annual rainfall to allow agriculture without irrigation. Within the United States, one can't or couldn't count on those twenty inches beyond roughly the 100th meridian of west longitude. Wallace Stegner's Beyond the Hundredth Meridian is a biography of John Wesley Powell, who led the first expedition through the Grand Canyon, founded the Bureau of Ethnology, and for practical purposes was the first director of the Geological Survey. Powell's notions about reclamation, damming, irrigation, and dry land agriculture were prescient. Stegner, the son of an unsuccessful dry land farmer, used Powell's history to draw in many threads of western American history.

The first part of the book, through the running of the Grand Canyon, can be read as an adventure story. Powell lost an arm at Shiloh:

Losing one's right arm is a misfortune; to some it would be a disaster, to others an excuse. It affected Wes Powell's life about as much as a stone fallen into a swift stream affects the course of the river. With a velocity like his, he simply foamed over it. He did not even resign from the army, but returned after a leave and a stretch of recruiting duty, and served as an artillery officer with Grant, Sherman, and Thomas. On January 2, 1865, after tasting more battle at Port Gibson, Grand Gulf, Raymond, Jackson, Champion's Hill, Big [Black?] River, Vicksburg, the Meridian Raid, Nashville, and having risen to the command of the artillery of the 17th Army Corps, he resigned [for family reasons].

Powell was in the first party to make a documented ascent of Long's Peak in Colorado (though I understand there are reasons to think that local tribes had climbed it and trapped eagles there). He did quite a lot of climbing of canyon walls for a man with just one arm.

The meat of the book occurs after the expedition has come out of the canyon in late 1869, though. Powell's exertions in geology, ethnography, and attempting to rationalize the pattern of settlement in the dry western plains were remarkable. In the last he was unfortunate in bearing a message that almost nobody wanted to hear: that water was scarce in the West, and that a fair allocation of water required time and care. The belief that "rain follows the plow" had been briefly shaken by a succession of dry years that followed some unusually wet ones. But the pressure for allocation of land was hard to resist. Still, many of Powell's suggestions were followed long after he had retired and died. 

The West now seems to be facing droughts more severe than in Powell's day. The fires in California in particular suggest that some patterns of land use are just not safe. The forces pushing back against regulation of the use of federal land have increased since the 1970s. Though it was published nearly seventy years ago, Beyond the Hundredth Meridian remains topical.

Hunger

 In Knut Hamsun's novel Hunger one reads the narrative of a starving writer. There is no glamour, just hunger, the attempts to get by with a little money from the pawnbroker or the publisher. The unfortunates of Gissing's New Grub Street are materially better off, pinched for money, getting nowhere, but never uncertain of the next meal. The picture is nearly that which Macaulay gives of life for struggling writers in London when Samuel Johnson was young:

The patronage of the public did not yet furnish the means of comfortable subsistence. The prices paid by booksellers to authors were so low that a man of considerable talents and unremitting industry could do little more than provide for the day which was passing over him. The lean kine had eaten up the fat kine. The thin and withered ears had devoured the good ears. The season of rich harvests was over, and the period of famine had begun. All that is squalid and miserable might now be summed up in the word Poet. That word denoted a creature dressed like a scarecrow, familiar with compters and spunging-houses, and perfectly qualified to decide on the comparative merits of the Common Side in the King's Bench prison and of Mount Scoundrel in the Fleet. Even the poorest pitied him; and they well might pity him. For if their condition was equally abject, their aspirings were not equally high, nor their sense of insult equally acute. To lodge in a garret up four pairs of stairs, to dine in a cellar among footmen out of place, to translate ten hours a day for the wages of a ditcher, to be hunted by bailiffs from one haunt of beggary and pestilence to another, from Grub Street to St. George's Fields, and from St. George's Fields to the alleys behind St. Martin's church, to sleep on a bulk in June and amidst the ashes of a glass-house in December, to die in an hospital and to be buried in a parish vault, was the fate of more than one writer who, if he had lived thirty years earlier, would have been admitted to the sittings of the Kitcat or the Scriblerus club, would have sat in Parliament, and would have been entrusted with embassies to the High Allies; who, if he had lived in our time, would have found encouragement scarcely less munificent in Albemarle Street or in Paternoster Row.

Hamsun's narrator has no bailiffs after him, and is imprisoned only has himself admitted to jail for a night on the pretense of having lost his key, to have a lodging for a night. He has occasional luck with publishers. But Macaulay's passage captures the tone.

The edition I read is translated by Sverre Lingstad.  It  is curious as giving twenty pages of preface to the failings of the previous translations into English, and eleven to an appendix giving examples of the lapses of Robert Bly's translation. I have a dim recollection of Nabokov's hard words for translators of Gogol and Tolstoy; but I don't remember his going into such detail.

Not Just One Cause

 On Wednesday, we woke up with the sniffles. This seemed to me a natural consequence of running the air conditioning at mid-summer power when the nights are getting cooler. Still, after some discussion, and some checking on the web, I drove down to the Mount Pleasant library to pick up a couple of COVID 19 test kits. We took the tests, registered them, and I walked them back to the drop box at the library. We heard Friday afternoon and Saturday morning that we do not have COVID 19, or at least did not on Wednesday. And we have a couple of spare kits for the next round of sniffles.

One forgets that there are other things that can make one feel rotten. Most winters that I can remember, I have had a week or so of feeling just awful, and winter of 2019-2020 was no exception. A friend felt bad about the same time I did, and he hurried out to get a COVID test as soon as they were available. He hoped that he would be found to have had it, be presumed immune, and could visit his mother, who is in frail health, without the risk of infecting her. He tested negative: it had just been routine winter crud.

Contacts Tracing

 About ten years ago, I received an email from an acquaintance, asking me to join her LinkedIn network. I sent her an email saying that I'd be glad to, but preferred to use LinkedIn with my work email only. She replied that she was by then considering leaving LinkedIn entirely. It developed that she had checked, or more likely failed to clear, a box allowing LinkedIn to see her email contact list. LinkedIn had then sent everyone in that list an invitation to join her network. She was embarrassed and angry.

This week, a friend sent me a link to a folder that he had set up on Dropbox. He wished to be sure that he had set it up properly, and since the intended user was not technically proficient, he wanted someone to test who could give a clear account of any difficulties. There were no technical difficulties; he had set the folder up correctly.

However, I found to my annoyance that when I signed in using my Google account that Dropbox wished to see my contact list. It had a moderately plausible reason for the request, to make it easier for me to share files with them. Unfortunately, there is no good way to take those contacts out of Dropbox as long as I use my Google account to log in. The user is I suppose expected to trust Dropbox to use the contacts only for proper purposes, or maybe just to regard them as an exchange for the 2 GB of free storage. Dropbox may be trustworthy, but it becomes harder to find reasons to trust such companies.

Sidewalks in Hawthorne and at P Street

 The Hawthorne neighborhood of northwest Washington, DC, is bounded by Pinehurst Branch, Oregon Avenue, and Western Avenue. Whenever I passed through it some years ago, I would see yard signs reading "No Sidewalks in Hawthorne". At some point, they were joined by "Yes, Sidewalks in Hawthorne" signs. I had never found it dangerous to run or walk through along Chestnut Street, NW, and hadn't much of an opinion.

Over the last three years, I didn't make it up that way often. But a few weeks ago, I followed Oregon Avenue from Wise Road to Western Avenue, and was gratified to see a sidewalk, along Hawthorne if not in it. Last week, on the way from Silver Spring to Spring Valley, I drove along Chestnut Street, and saw a block or two of sidewalk, and preparations to lay more. I hope that those who opposed sidewalks will be reconciled to them.

The ramp between P St. NW and Rock Creek and Potomac Parkway never had a sidewalk. Runners leaving or joining the bike trail along the parkway had their choice of running in the gutter of the ramp, or using a narrow and uneven track worn in the grass. This week, I noticed that there are wide asphalt sidewalks on both sides of the ramp. I didn't make use of them, but I expect I will soon.

Courage and Equality

 The remarks to paragraph 328 of Hegel's Philosophy of Right conclude

The principle of the modern world--thought and the universal--has given courage a higher form, because its display now seems to be more mechanical, the act not of this particular person, but of a member of a whole. Moreover, it seems to be turned not against single persons, but against a hostile group, and hence personal bravery appears impersonal. It is for this reason that thought has invented the gun, and the invention of this weapon, which has changed the purely personal form of bravery into a more abstract one, is no accident.

(Translated by T.M. Knox)

In the American west, there was a saying running roughly

God created all men, but Samuel Colt made them equal.

That seems to put one back in the world of abstract right: but paragraph 328 is well along in the section on ethical life, nearing the end of the consideration of the state.

 

Falling Trees

 On the morning of Friday, August 20, the car in front of me made an oblique right turn onto New Hampshire Avenue NW from the left lane of 16th St. southbound. I followed him, for as he turned, I could see that a tree was down across 16th about half a block south of U St. Judging from what the cleanup crews left, its roots had simply given up, and it had fallen:

 On the evening of Thursday, August 26, I was merging onto 16th St. NW from 15th St., when I saw buses turning off on to Irving. This suggested that something was wrong up ahead, and I detoured to 14th. When I came back west on Upshur, I could see what was wrong: a tree was down across the northbound lanes, so northbound traffic was diverted through one of the southbound lanes. This tree did not pull up from the roots:

 I can't imagine what splintered it so.

Then on Saturday a tree was down across Beach Drive in Rock Creek Park between West Beach Drive and Wise Road. A fellow on a bicycle supposed that it had fallen about two hours before, say 10:30 in the morning. I did not look for how it had fallen, just stepped through branches and went on my way. A friend lost power for several hours when a tree fell across Dale Drive near Georgia Avenue in Silver Spring.

Found on the Carts

 About forty years ago, I lent to a friend my copy of The Geography of the Imagination, by Guy Davenport. Shortly thereafter, her household began a renovation. The last thing I heard of the book was that they believed they knew in which octant of the house it was. We lost touch, and I forgot about it. Some years later I saw the book listed in a catalogue, and bought another copy.

Last week, I was at Second Story Books to pick up a couple of books purchased through the store's website. My preferred way to the store leads up 20th St. NW, past the outdoor $4 book carts, and as usual I dawdled to look. There I found a copy of The Geography of the Imagination in its original North Point Press edition. Of course I bought it, for there is bound to be someone I know who could use a copy.

Now Second Story Books is not far from the house where my old copy went missing. Did I buy that copy for the second time? I think not: another book bought about then shows that forty years ago I was still writing my name and address inside front covers, and this copy is not so marked. Even it were, I would not blame the friend for selling it, if she did. Certainly I have books on my shelves given or lent to me, with their provenance forgotten, and probably I have handed some of them off to Goodwill or Carpe Librum.

Does Your Parking Garage Have One?

 On the way to retrieve my car this evening, I noticed this:

It may well have been there in the morning, and escaped my notice because I hurried past it to the ramp, a bit distracted by the rainy morning.

Over the last fifteen years, I have seldom driven to work. Since our offices reopened in July, I have usually walked in. But today the rain was coming down hard, I was urged to drive, I drove. I imagine that the buses were much delayed, for there was a tree down across 16th St. NW between U and T. Cars wishing to continue south on 16th from U turned on to New Hampshire Avenue, and returned to 16th south of the tree, but at least the first couple of turns would have been tight for a bus. This afternoon, there was nothing left of the tree but a neatly sawn-off trunk on the west side of the street, about 20 degrees from the horizontal: I suppose the roots just gave up.

 Maybe next week, if I remember, I'll ask the parking garage attendant why there is or was a piano on the second level.

Robert Kagan, RIP

 The historian Donald Kagan died on August 6. The newspapers I read have not run obituaries in print, though Politico had one on-line. Yale, where he taught for many years, did publish a thorough obituary on-line.

Of his work, I have read only Thucydides: The Reinvention of History, which is concise, closely argued, and very well written. His sometime student John R. Hale credited Kagan with the inspiration and title of Hale's Lords of the Sea: The Epic Story of the Athenian Navy and Birth of Democracy. I suppose the proper tribute to the man's memory would be to locate and read more of his writings.

La Pléiade Is 90

 The bookstore Albertine in New York, a project of the Cultural Services of the French Embassy, emails to say that La Bibliothèque de la Pléiade is turning 90 years old this year. The books La  Pléiade produces seem to me admirable physically: compact for the number of pages, generally of a size to slip into a coat pocket, bound so that they don't shut on one. And I don't doubt that the editing is superb--the notes in the two volumes I have are full and informative--though I'm in no position to judge it.

Albertine is offering a deal whereby the purchase of two or more Pléiade volumes gets one a "magnificent Flaubert La Pléiade album". I have no idea what this album might be. However, it occurred to me that a Pléiade volume of Descartes might be a good thing to have. I checked, and found that Oeuvres et lettres cost $71, more than I had it in mind to spend. There are certainly other volumes published by the Pléiade that I wouldn't mind having. But if they are comparably priced--and a volume of Flaubert was $86--I think I'll hold off for now.

Graduate School USA

Perhaps three years ago, I considered taking Spanish-language courses at what I thought of as the USDA Graduate School. My recollection is that the offerings looked good, the prices were reasonable, and that I couldn't quite make the schedule work: the classes were offered near L'Enfant Plaza, a bit too far from work. I thought of the USDA Graduate School when someone asked about Spanish-language courses today.

The USDA Graduate School is now Graduate School USA, a renaming that I must have noticed and forgotten. The list of courses is much shorter, the areas of study much more focused on programs suited to the world of the federal government and its contractors, fourteen areas of study in all. To judge by the Information Technology courses listed, the courses are narrowly focused: in this case on Microsoft Access, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Project, and Microsoft Word. The Microsoft Office programs are ubiquitous and powerful; but they make up a fairly small part of the information technology one might be called on to use.

Perhaps the old system was unprofitable, though I doubt the instructors made much more than would cover their commuting. Still, I think it a shame to see an old, ambitious catalogue with courses ranging from Arabic to Zoology so paired down. On the other hand, I wasn't keeping it in business, was I?

Reading to Sleep

When I have time, I like to run, and I like to read. The former, what with changing in and out of running gear, cleaning up, and so on, requires larger stretches of time, which tend to be most available on weekends. Reading I can fit into bus rides or comparably short periods, but again, the time for serious reading is more available on weekends.

 Running leaves me for a while a bit tired for reading. This was the case forty years ago, when the distances and speeds were greater, it is the case now. A slumped posture, as on a couch, brings sleep on quickly. Reading at a table, with better posture, may or may not defer it. The matter read makes little difference: history, philosophy, poetry can all make me drowse.

 Robert Lowell wrote the poem Falling Asleep over the Aeneid, not as of an experience of his own, but in the voice of an old man in Concord, Massachusetts. My copy of The Mills of the Kavanaughs is misplaced, probably lost, but the Poetry Foundation kindly makes the poem available. Probably I have fallen asleep over the Aeneid, but certainly my dreams would not have been so colorful or learned.

Disk Space

 My wife needs a new laptop. The old one is slow, which I attribute largely to its having a hard drive rather than a solid-state disk (SSD); Microsoft must know that we don't all have SSDs, but its software does not reflect that knowledge. The old one is also getting to be flaky, shutting itself down now and then at random, and reporting a low battery when plugged into the wall.

So the new laptop will have an SSD, but of what size? The most economical laptops seem to have 64 GB SSDs. On the one hand, that seems stingy, for the laptops issued at work have 238 GB SSDs. On the other hand, what would one install that takes up 64 GB? She's not going to download movies, install Visual Studio, etc.

This morning, while watching a patch not quite install, I had a look at the drive of the laptop I use, and found that it had 111 GB used out of 234 usable. In less than the two hours required for the patch installation to timeout, I was able to bring this down to 84 GB used. The largest files removed tended to be either installation programs, for programs now installed on the laptop or for packages on Linux servers, or else large database exports--I'm not sure why I used the laptop as the intermediary in moving database, but I did.

The 27 GB removed went easily, but I don't know that the 111 GB remaining could be easily pared down. I've used the laptop since March 2020. I have been reasonably prudent in what I installed: communications programs, emacs, Python, Oracle clients, GIMP, Git, and Go. Is 128 GB the minimum that one needs? Probably so, for her laptop has over 100 GB used also.

The Jefferson Pier

 About forty years ago, while walking downhill from the Washington Monument, I noticed a small marker:

 

 

No other sense of "pier" coming to mind, I supposed that the Jefferson Pier must have been a landing on the Potomac. I knew that good deal of the land south and west of the monument was fill.

 

Since then, I had looked for it once or twice, not hard, always without finding it. On the Saturday before July 4, I was walking with visitors toward the monument and spotted the marker. While we were looking at it, a fellow with earphones in straightened up from his inspection and told us that this marked the first proposed site of the Washington Monument, as being due west of the Capitol and due south of the White House: his audio guide had told him as much. We thanked him, and I stood corrected.

The WPA guide, Washington: City and Capital does not include "Jefferson Pier" in its index. It does say that L'Enfant had it in mind to have an equestrian monument to Washington at the point where this marker now is, and that any movements to erect a monument to Washington were stalled by Washington's discouragement as long as he lived. Once Congress determined to build the monument, it was found that the footing was better a bit to the east, where the monument now stands.

Wikipedia has a clear account of the Jefferson Pier. According to that, the marker originally stood on the south side of Tiber Creek (long since buried), and was used as a mooring post for barges. But it was not on the Potomac. The pier is located as close as it can be to where it first was, but some feet higher, for the ground has been built up.

West's Disease

 Some years ago, a young relative moved to Los Angeles. He rented a unit, one of four, on a side street in a quiet neighborhood. Of the other units, one was rented by an aging foreign rocker, one by a young woman who acted in a serial drama of some sort--TV or streaming, I no longer remember--and the last I think by a retired couple. I mentioned this to a college friend long resident in that area, who said, Real Day of the Locust stuff.

I knew of Nathaniel West's novel The Day of the Locust, but had never read it. Recently I found a copy, a New Directions paperback containing also Miss Lonelyhearts, and did read it. I suppose I see what she meant, for among the residents in a rooming house, principals in the story, are a failed vaudevillian, his daughter, who is a not very successful actress, and a scenery designer.

Long ago, I read W.H. Auden's The Dyer's Hand, a collection of essays including "West's Disease", on the novels of Nathaniel West. On rereading the essay, Auden seems to me largely correct. I would say that the disease, or syndrome, of an inability to turn wishes into desires, does not seem to be something West discovered or exploited beyond his predecessors. Frederic Moreau in Flaubert's Sentimental Education seems to suffer from just such an inability to want and pursue something wholeheartedly.

 A minor character in The Day of the Locust asks, "What about the barber in Purdue?" According to West's brother-in-law, S.J. Perelman, Groucho Marx would ask, "What'll it mean to the barber in Peru?". Both had Indiana in mind, but Peru is a town, and Purdue a university. Both meant to suggest that one should avoid undue sophistication, but the fictional Claude Estee proposed to offer the barber "amour", and Groucho Marx I think must have had slapstick in mind.

Along 16th St. NW

Contractors have been working on the lower terrace of Meridian Park, just above Florida Avenue NW. Last week one could be delayed by a front-end loader dropping debris into a dump truck along 16th. The front end loader reached only so high, and the plywood ramp it drove up was limited in height by the need to allow pedestrians to cross. It usually took the operator of the front-end loader two or three tries to shake everything out of the shovel and into the truck. This part of the work seems to be done.

 For many years, the only commercial establishment on 16th St. NW north of Scott Circle was The New Hampshire Mart on the northwest corner of 16th and T. For some months now, probably for more than year, the property has been surrounded by a chain link fence, and the building undergoing some sort of reconstruction, though I never see anyone working on it in the morning. The store should have been profitable, for it sold wine and beer. Perhaps the price of real estate meant that the property was worth more than operating the store would have been.

To the east, the 1500 block of T was blocked off by equipment, and had been dug up. Now it is open to traffic, though the pavement is roughly patched the  Friends who live on the block say that this has been going on for quite a while.  It appears that the city is replacing water pipes there. The pipes replaced could be about 125 years old.

On the terrace of the Masonic Temple at 16th and S, there are yoga classes, or anyway sessions, on Monday and Tuesday morning. This is new since the pandemic: I have walked along this block for many years, and never seen anyone practicing yoga there. I suppose that a lot of persons within a few blocks found themselves working at home, ergo with more time. The usual complement seems to be a dozen or thirteen working out, plus the man who leads it.

A day camp is in session at the Jewish Community Center (JCC) at 16th and Q. Campers and counselors wait on the steps for a bus to take them to the JCC in Rockville, which has much more space. I think that a new session must have started, for yesterday I heard an older counselor introducing a camper to the bus counselor, saying that he could answer any questions she had while on the bus. The counselor looked to be fourteen or fifteen.

Signs and Times

 This evening, I was waiting for the S2 bus at the corner of 16th and L. A Kawasaki Mule 4x4, a vehicle about the size of a golf cart, pulled up to the curb. A man got out holding a liter bottle. I expected him to place it in a trash can, but he began to empty the water from it onto a sign on the sidewalk. This sign had a red background with blue lettering; it urged social distancing, and had been placed by the downtown business improvement district. The man emptied the bottle in a way to soak the sign evenly. He then stooped down and took the sign up in three pieces. Apparently the business improvement district has decided that social distancing is unnecessary outdoors. The woman who had been driving took cell phone pictures before he took the signs and after. He put the pieces in the back of the vehicle, and they drove off, I suppose to another sign. I wish I had taken pictures, too.

 

Sermons

 The New York Times reports on a minor stir in the Southern Baptist world, where one prominent minister seems to have repeated another's sermon. Those who are interested can no doubt find the sermons on YouTube and commentary on-line.

Coming from a more structured liturgical tradition (at least I think so--I know little of Southern Baptist services), I find the fuss surprising. Others might as well. When at the crisis of  Wodehouse's "The Great Sermon Handicap" the Rev. James Bates delivered the Rev. Francis Heppenstall's noted sermon on Brotherly Love, including "the rather exhaustive excursions into the family life of the early Assyrians",  the Rev. Mr. Heppenstall being out of action owing to hay fever, Bingo Little suffered, or a least registered, "grief, rage, despair and resentment":

"Well, all I can say," he cried, "is that it's a bit thick! Preaching another man's sermon? Do you call that honest? Do you call that playing the game?"

Bertie Wooster, though also out of pocket, spoke up for common practice:

"Well, my dear old thing," I said, "be fair. It's quite within the rules. Clergymen do it all the time. They aren't expected always to make up the sermons they preach."

(Second Story Books had the Germanic volume of The Great Sermon Handicap: pretty much every form of the Germanic languages newer than Anglo-Saxon, but excluding the Scandinavian languages, which have their own volume.  I guess that it is as well the the Romance languages volume wasn't there to be bought.)

I don't know what the expectations are among the Roman Catholic clergy, though I do know that any priest who approached the Rev. Mr. Heppenstall's forty-five minutes would be pushing the limits of his congregation's patience.

The Cicadas

 By the middle of May, there were cicada shells thick on many lawns in the neighborhood. I saw a little boy a block from here collecting the shells as his mother watched. I saw one fly by that weekend, and my wife saw one walk across the garage stoop. During the third week of May we saw few flying, but many squished on the pavement. The neighborhood dogs had mixed reactions. One I know of--with suspect tastes to begin with--ate every cicada he could reach. Others would sample them, others still regarded cicadas as something to look at but not to eat.

When we first started to hear them, they sounded like the sort of mechanical noise one hears through a large building's air-conditioning system, suggesting something poorly lubricated in the machinery. At their peak, about the beginning of June, the cicadas made a noise like sirens half a mile away. The volume of the noise seemed to be correlated with the heat. It took a while for them to be heard in Rock Creek Park, which is usually a few degrees cooler than the surrounding areas.

A couple of Saturdays ago, a young man came down the street with a plastic bag, harvesting what cicadas he could find. I thought it odd that someone who planned to eat cicadas should be wearing latex gloves to grasp them. But I referred him to the locust trees a couple of blocks away, where my wife had said that the cicadas were thick.

Then there was a heavy rain, and after that one did not see or hear the cicadas as much.

They are not handsome or agile insects. They are slow in flight, slow afoot, and they are top-heavy--a cicada on its back is unable to right itself. But every seventeen years they make quite a show.

The birds appreciate them. A neighbor whom I saw picking serviceberries said that most years he has to race to get them before the birds, but that this year the birds were indifferent to them, apparently preferring protein to sugar. And the cicada killing wasps of course appreciated them. One of these wasps dug its hole in our front flower bed, removing a good deal of spoil:

 

 

Signs

1.  With graduation ceremonies canceled last year, families of seniors graduating from high school put out yard signs with the schools' names, colors, and emblems. This year, there is a yard with two signs, one for middle school just left, one for high school to be started. The signs are a novelty, and informative: I'm not surprised that so-and-so graduated from X, but who's the kid that went to Y?--I never saw a teenager at that house. I know three students in the neighborhood due to graduate from the same high school next year. I trust they'll get an in-person ceremony, with or without a yard sign.
2. About every two hundred yards along a stretch of Rock Creek, one sees two signs close together: "Stay Safe/Stay Dry" and "Mantente Seco/Mantente Seguro", each with a statement in smaller type stating why one should stay out of Rock Creek. At greater or lesser intervals, there are people in Rock Creek. Some are small children, some teenagers, some adults. This happens even where one often catches the whiff of sewage. My wife has spoken to some of the people in the creek, with no greater effect on them than the signs had.
   

Back to the Barbershop

 For many years I have gone to a barbershop near my office, in the basement level of an office building mostly occupied by a think tank. It is close enough that I can get a haircut on my lunch hour, or after work be close to my usual bus stop. But its convenience depends on my being at the office, which I hardly been have since last March.

 At first, my wife would cut my hair. She has a good eye, and is good with her hands, so that she did an excellent  job despite the lack of adequate scissors. She got tired of this, and when our son returned from Los Angeles and located a decent barbershop in Adams-Morgan, I tagged along. The barbers there are good, but the shop is not in convenient round-trip walking distance.

 Yesterday I called the barbershop near work. The barber was in and recognized my name and voice--she asked whether I had a pandemic pony tail--and we arranged a time. I found that I had forgotten the convenience of going to a familiar barber, who does not need to ask what one wants. She may have asked, The usual?, or she may have not. In any case, she gave me the usual haircut with her usual proficiency.

At the end, she showed me her phone, with an array of before-and-after pictures of men who had arrived with manes of hair and left with good haircuts. For more than forty years, I have aimed to have a haircut about once a month, so I am no longer a good judge of this; but I'd say that most of the men pictured had done without a haircut for three or four months, and the champion perhaps six months. All pictures were taken from behind to preserve privacy in case she should put them up on her Facebook page. I don't think my hair on arrival was shaggy enough to warrant a place in the array, but I didn't notice whether she took photos.

 

Exegesis

 Some years ago, the University of Notre Dame hired a new football coach. The position of football coach at Notre Dame is an important one in American sports,  so I happened to read an account of his first press conference in one of the eastern papers, either The New York Times or The Washington Post. There was nothing particularly interesting until the end. Then, according to the reporter, the coach said, I intend to die like St. Peter,  leaning on my staff. However, the coach's brother, I suppose one of his staff, tugged at his sleeve and whispered a correction. The coach then amended St. Peter to St. Paul.

I thought this oddly at variance with the received hagiographies, particularly for men with an Irish surname coaching at a prominent Catholic school. I remarked on this to family members with connections to Notre Dame, and forgot about it.

But last week in reading Spinoza's Theological-Political Treatise I found

Those who are ignorant of this fact cannot justify the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews for interpreting (chap. xi:21) Genesis (xlvii:31) very differently from the version given in our Hebrew text as at present pointed, as though the Apostle had been obliged to learn the meaning of Scripture from those who added the points. In my opinion the latter are clearly wrong. In order that everyone may judge for himself, and also see how the discrepancy arose simply from the want of vowels, I will give both interpretations. Those who pointed our version read, "And Israel bent himself over, or (changing Hqain into Aleph, a similar letter) towards, the head of the bed." The author of the Epistle reads, "And Israel bent himself over the head of his staff," substituting mate for mita, from which it only differs in respect of vowels. Now as in this narrative it is Jacob's age only that is in question, and not his illness, which is not touched on till the next chapter, it seems more likely that the historian intended to say that Jacob bent over the head of his staff (a thing commonly used by men of advanced age for their support) than that he bowed himself at the head of his bed, especially as for the former reading no substitution of letters is required.

 Evidently the coaches had in mind a garbled version of the story of Jacob, who according to Genesis was indeed approaching his death but not quite on his deathbed. Quite possibly their version can be traced upward through a succession of football coaches to the days before face masks.

It had never occurred to me that reading Spinoza would enable me to understand coach-speak. But football is imperfectly distinguished from religion in some parts of America. It can be a stepping stone to politics also: there is a former college football coach in the Senate now, and football careers have led to the House of Representatives, the Cabinet, and the Presidency. Perhaps a theological-political treatise is just the thing.

Back to the Office

Yesterday I was at the office for the first time since March 13, 2020. I walked in, which as expected took just under an hour. The man at the security desk took my temperature with a forehead scanner, I tapped my wallet with the security card on the gate, and proceeded to the elevator. The rule says occupancy is limited to two persons, but there was no second person that side of the gates and desk.

The building was largely empty, perhaps thirty persons where the capacity is ten times that. Downtown was not deserted, but appeared to have many fewer persons than usual. A hamburger restaurant looked to have half a dozen patrons at 12:30 pm. Restaurants with outside tables might have had a quarter of them occupied. The sidewalks had plenty of space for all.

My commute to work was just an hour, walking. I ran an errand after work, so I can't say what the commute home would have been: forty minutes is a safe guess. When working from the dining room table, of course, my commute is either nil or the time it takes to walk down a flight of stairs.

They're Not That Bad

 In One for the Books, Joe Queenan has hard words for book clubs:

A few years ago, several people in my town asked if I would like to join a book discussion club. We would vote on a book, read it, convene at the library, discuss it, and then retire to a local brasserie for a few beers. I left town for about six weeks, disconnected my phone, stopped answering e-mails, and told people that I had a weird retinal pigmentation disease that made it impossible for me to read books. Especially books like The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.

It may be the case that in book clubs where the book is chosen by consensus

The reading experiences that book club members share are not intimate; they are generic.  Participants want to connect with other people who feel exactly the same way they do about a book.

Having said that, I have a hard time thinking of a case where one would share intimate reading experiences. I happy to talk about what I have read--perhaps I begin too easily and am too hard to stop--I am happy to lend or recommend books, but I don't see where intimacy could come in.

 I find our local book club anodyne. I don't expect anyone to agree with me about books--I would be frequently disappointed if I did. Occasionally we read a book that I enjoy and would not otherwise have thought to read: that is all to the good. Occasionally we read a really bad book: well, I've found some pretty bad ones on my own. Mostly it is a way to get together with some neighbors every couple of months, drink wine, and have dinner.

 I do agree with Queenan about the strangeness of the "Questions for Discussion" that one finds in the back of some editions. They savor at best of high school examinations.

Vocational Training

 In Modes of Being by Paul Weiss, section 2.90, "Education should include training, the mastery of techniques", the argument includes

Because vocational training has so often been assigned to those in economically or socially disfavored classes, and because it has been taught in almost complete abstraction from other phases of education, advocacy of vocational training has encountered opposition by the partisans of an exclusively liberal educational program. Their program in effect amounts to the vocational training of intellectuals, of teachers and college presidents, of discussion leaders and journalists, a fact obscured by the the low degree of success their pupils have had. Both they and their opponents are agreed that vocational and liberal education are antithetical in procedure and objective. This need not be the case. Vocational education need not be narrow, directed towards the preparation of young men to perform menial, servile work in later life.

One does occasionally forget the roots of liberal education in the training of clergy, lawyers, physicians, eventually civil servants.

Little Free Libraries

 There are three Little Free Libraries within a short walk of our house, and one not much farther away. With the elimination of my commute giving me more time to walk in the neighborhood, I have paid some attention to them, and retrieved a few books. A couple that I have recently read include

• The Diary of a Nobody by George and Weedon Grossmith. According to the back cover, Evelyn Waugh called it "the funniest book in the world." Perhaps so for the English, but I don't think the humor travels well. To find it more than mildly amusing, one must have more feeling for the English class structure of that day than I have, perhaps more than can be picked up from books. I returned it to the library where I found it.
  
• The Battle Cry of Freedom by James M. McPherson. This is an excellent history of the American Civil War, beginning with the mutual dissatisfactions of north and south starting in the 1840s, and ending with the last Confederate surrender. It is big, eight-hundred-some pages in the hardback edition I found, 936 in the paperback version now in print. I took it along, because I wasn't sure that a man of my generation--one in grade school during the centennial of the war--was allowed to pass up a free copy of such a book. Having read it through, I took it back to another Little Free Library because it was so big. I suppose that an Englishman might have found it as flat to read as I found The Diary of a Nobody; but perhaps the bulk would have deterred my hypothetical Englishman.
  

The Cost of School

 Noticed in Adventures in the Atomic Age: From Watts to Washington by Glenn Seaborg:

Given my family's finances, the nearby University of California at Los Angeles was my only possible choice because it was tuition free and I could commute from home.

This was 1929, and he had the challenge of coming up with the money for other expenses, but after a summer spent in the quality control department of a Firestone tire plant

I'd saved just enough over the summer to afford the forty dollars needed for incidental fees and to buy my books at UCLA.

In the course of his career, Seaborg was one of the discoverers of elements including plutonium, californium, berkelium, and (not his choice for name) seaborgium, and of the isotopes iodine 131 and cobalt 60, both heavily used since in medicine. For the discovery of plutonium, he shared the 1951 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He led an important part of the Manhattan Project and served some years as chancellor of the University of California at Berkeley, leaving to become chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission.

I would say that the University of California system more than got back its investment in Seaborg's tuition-free undergraduate education, and in the scholarships and fellowship that carried him through his bachelor's to his doctorate.

Tuition and fees for UCLA now run to about $14 thousand for California residents. In Seaborg's undergraduate days, one could earn the $40 for fees and books in about three weeks of apricot picking. Assuming a $15/hour minimum wage, the tuition and fees are nearer twenty-four weeks' work.

But certainly some matters are managed better now. When Seaborg attended David Starr Jordan High School in Watts,

 I saw firsthand the insidious irrationality of race and the restraints it placed on my black friends. When it came time for them to find a job, their own option seemed to be "railroading," as they called it.

(I assume that railroading meant manual labor for the Southern Pacific Railroad.) And women weren't much found in the laboratories, or really much employed by universities outside of secretarial roles.

Appearing Soon on the Letters Page

 The New York Times Book Review today includes a review of Louis Menand's The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War.  At about the three-quarters mark there appears

... The New Yorker, a publication, Menand notes, that catered to well-educated, culturally insecure folk "eager not to like the wrong things, or to like the right things for the wrong reasons."

 I expect to see a snide letter in the edition of May 30, suggesting that the description could as well apply to to The New York Times Book Review. A dozen years ago, an article on George Steiner included the passage

Though Sontag published in highfalutin journals like Partisan Review and The New York Review of Books, she expounded radically democratic notions of pleasure and power. Steiner, on the other hand, used the solidly middlebrow New Yorker (or the equally bourgeois Times Literary Supplement in Britain) to examine and ultimately uphold the sacredness of the very high culture Sontag was attempting to deflate. Both writers, consciously or not, appealed to their audience’s vanity: Sontag allowed her intellectually aristocratic readers to indulge their contempt for middle-class Kultur, while Steiner enabled his middle-class readers to feel empowered by aristocratic ideas of truth and beauty.

A snide reply appeared promptly on the Letters page that time.

Are We All Bostonians Now?

 Noticed in Santayana's Persons and Places, chapter "My Mother":

[Boston, ca. 1861] was a moral and intellectual nursery, always busy applying first principles to trifles.

"Applying first principles to trifles" sounds to me like an excellent description of a lot of what raises a fuss these days.

Wheelhouse

 Recently over dinner someone said that something was not in someone else's wheelhouse. I hear the expression fairly often, and understand as meaning "within someone's competence" or "within someone's area of interest."  This time, though,  it occurred to me to ask, "What is a wheelhouse?" Nobody had an answer.

One obvious possibility was the structure that holds the wheel of a ship, and this is one of the OED's first definitions. Before checking with the OED, though, I had a look at Life on the Mississippi and found that Twain consistently uses "pilot house" for that structure.

The Internet says that the current usage comes from baseball: the area in which a  batter prefers to hit the ball is his "wheelhouse." That I suppose derives from the term "wheel" as in "swing". I have seen Frank Howard quoted as asking "How are you going to wheel that timber tomorrow if you don't pound that beer tonight?"

 

 

One Was Not Very Brilliant Perhaps

 Having taken Seven Men from the bookshelves, I noticed in "Hilary Maltby and Stephen Braxton" the paragraph

'Which do you think is REALLY the best--"Ariel" or "A Faun"?' Ladies were always asking one that question. 'Oh, well, you know, the two are so different. It’s really very hard to compare them.' One was always giving that answer. One was not very brilliant perhaps.

By the time I was of age, women knew themselves competent to make their own judgments on literature. Or if not, they asked somebody other than one. Still, I understand the sense of flatness in recalling the things one habitually said decades before.

 The mention of Will Rothenstein in "Enoch Soames" led me to look at the National Gallery of Art website. There he appears as Sir William Rothenstein. None of his works are now on view, and for some--unfortunately including his portraits of Max Beerbohm, Hilaire Belloc, and Walter Pater--there is no image available.  ("On view": the National Gallery of Art will reopen on May 14, and until then nothing at all is on view; but I don't know what better term the website could use.)

 

S Mode

Last week, I picked up a newly purchased laptop, not very powerful, but more than sufficient for the limited purposes I had in mind. The initial setup somehow required that I log in to Microsoft, which was briefly frustrating, since I had forgotten my password and the reset prompts confused me a little. Still, I got it set up, checking off No to about eight categories of data Hewlett Packard and Microsoft thought I might care to send them. Then it was time to download the software I wished to use.

In trying to run the first installer, I learned that I would have to take the computer out of "S Mode". In S Mode, I learned, one can only run programs downloaded from the Microsoft Store. I can see the advantage of this for some users, for whom it probably makes computer use safer. I cannot quite see why one should have to go to the Microsoft Store to turn S Mode off, but I did. A friend in the computer business says that S Mode is for Windows 10 Home Edition, and that he always upgrades clients' machines to Windows 10 Professional first thing.

I was soon back at the Microsoft Store, for one of the first installers I ran was for Python. But when I entered "python" at a command prompt, the browser suddenly opened to the Microsoft Store, offering to download Python 3.7. I had forgotten this behavior from last year, when I first installed Python on a Windows 10 machine; but I quickly remembered it, and last year's brief but intense irritation. I looked up the instructions, and was soon able to run the Python I wanted.

I also removed programs running alphabetically from Amazon and Booking.com through XBox. This was not necessary to my purposes, but I didn't care to have them taking up space. Taken together with S Mode, they suggested that HP and Microsoft were selling into a market where the user wished to have his hand held and helped to shop. Perhaps some users want that.  

The setup was a little quirky, but not bad compared to what one used to go through. And having worked through the setup, I find that the machine does quite well what I bought it for.

Vartan Gregorian, RIP

 Today's newspapers carry obituaries of Vartan Gregorian, who in the course of a long career was provost of the University of Pennsylvania, president and chief director of the New York Public Library, president of Brown University, and president of the Carnegie Corporation of New York. Gregorian was born into an Armenian family in the north of Iran. He left Iran at the age of fifteen for an Armenian school in Beirut, then studied at Stanford, where he earned his degrees.

Gregorian is said to have rescued the New York Public Library from bad condition, through skillful direction and energetic fundraising. He would not have been available for the job had he been appointed, as he had reason to think he would, as president of the University of Pennsylvania.

In 2003, he wrote an engaging memoir, The Road to Home: My Life and Times. This is another memoir that I lent out and never got back, so I can't check my memory. But the portion before his arrival at the library was fascinating for its picture of childhood and education in Iran and Lebanon, then the world of the American academy and academic politics. The portion dealing with the library included a lot of important and celebrated names: I suppose that this was only fair, since the owners of those names helped build back the finances of the library.

Dennis Donoghue, RIP

Mostly I remember Dennis Donoghue for his memoir Warrenpoint.  Some years ago, I loaned my copy to a co-worker. She has since retired and left town, and probably took the book with her. I'm not really out of pocket, having bought it from the dollar carts at the Strand. Still, I now and then find myself wishing to re-read or quote Warrenpoint.

 By profession, Donoghue was a teacher and critic. At some point, I had a copy of England, Their England, and I might have had a copy of a book on American literature. But it is Warrenpoint that I remember, and wish I had on my shelves. It gives an interesting picture of his childhood and youth in Northern Ireland, where his father, a Catholic, was a sergeant in the Royal Ulster Constabulary. The reflections on reading and learning are what I remember it best for, though.

Facebooked

The latest public dump of personal data comes from Facebook. This morning, I saw that someone had put up a site "Have I been Facebooked", and I visited to check my cell phone number. The query gave me my first and last initials, though no hint for gender or date of birth. "Have I been Facebooked" seems to have received a cease-and-desist, but "Have I Been Pwned" (HIBP) has the phone numbers loaded in, including mine. (HIBP is cagey, though, and does not offer initials etc.)

Now, I have not signed into Facebook more than a handful of times, and those involved setting up the account. Many years ago, a young man told us that it was creepy when people our age (parents of teenagers) were on Facebook. By now, I gather it is a boomer colony and the trend-setting young have moved on. Still, I don't want to use it, and never have. I signed up only to test the use of its authorization protocol for some web applications that we had. Once I learned that the web application did not just then support the use of Facebook authentication, I forgot Facebook.

But Facebook didn't forget me. My account was one of 500 million accounts to have data spilled. The good news, I guess, is that the data did not include an email address or password. Still, I wonder whether junk phone calls will start to ask for me by name.

The Concomitants of a Printing-House

 Today I opened The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, by chance to the entry for October 14, 1772, and found

He asked me whether he had mentioned, in any of the papers of the Rambler, the description in Virgil of the entrance into Hell, with an application to the press; 'for,' said he, 'I do not much remember them'. I told him, 'No.' Upon which he repeated it:

Vestibulum ante ipsum, primisque in faucibus orci,
Luctus et ultrices posuere cubilia Curae;
Pallentesque habitant Morbi, tristisque Senectus,
Et Metus, et malesuada Fames, et turpis Egestas,
Terribiles visu formae; Lethumque, Laborque.

'Now,' said he, 'almost all these apply exactly to an authour; all these are the concomitants of a printing-house.' I proposed to him to dictate an essay on it, and offered to write it. He said, he would not do it then, but perhaps would write one at some future period.

A footnote gives Dryden's translation of the verses (Aeneid VI, lines 273-277):

Just in the gate, and in the jaws of hell,
Revengeful cares, and sullen sorrows dwell;
And pale diseases, and repining age;
Want, fear, and famine's unresisted rage;
Here toils and death, and death's half-brother, sleep,
Forms terrible to view, their sentry keep.

 

Ten Words

 Some time ago, I discovered ten words that work nicely to make persons hang up when they call to sell me warranties, lower my interest rates, or warn me that my social security number is being used from fraud, etc.: "Is there a number I can call you back at?" Some years ago, I found that "What company do you represent, and in what state is it incorporated?" shortened calls nicely.

 In something like five years of asking for a call-back number, I think that I've hit one naive fellow who actually did give me his employer's number. Unfortunately, I lost it before I could find someone to complain to.

Larry McMurtry, RIP

Today's papers carry obituaries of Larry McMurtry, novelist, screenwriter, essayist, and bookseller. I have read a couple of McMurtry's novels, a couple of his books of essays, a couple of memoirs. But I probably spent more hours browsing the shelves of Booked Up than I have spent in reading his books.

He was a good novelist, generally a good writer, and a good bookseller. I wish he hadn't taken Booked Up to Archer City, Texas, but really I don't see how he could have managed Washington rents much longer. A smaller used bookstore a few blocks away moved out to Bethesda about then, and closed a few years later: the proprietor's website said that he was tired of gambling his retirement money in a game with losing odds. I wonder how profitable Booked Up was in Archer City.

 I suppose that the best way to remember him is to acquire and read his books. Many of them are in print, or you could buy them used or rare.

Doubts

In the second of The Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes wrote

I shall nevertheless make every effort to conform precisely to the plan commenced yesterday and put aside every belief in which I could imagine the least doubt, just as though I knew that it was absolutely false. And I shall continue in this manner until I have found something certain, or at least, if I can do nothing else, until I have learned with certainty that there is nothing certain in this world.

Charles Saunders Peirce was not convinced:

We cannot begin with complete doubt. We must begin with all the prejudices we actually have when we enter upon the study of philosophy. These prejudices are not to be dispelled by a maxim, for they are things that it does not occur to us can be questioned. Hence this initial scepticism will be a mere self-deception, and not real doubt; and no one who follows the Cartesian method will ever be satisfied until he has formally recovered all those beliefs that in form he has given up. It is is, therefore, as useless a preliminary as going to the North Pole would be in order to get to Constantinople by coming down regularly upon a meridian. A person may, it is true, in the course of his studies, find reason to doubt what he began by believing; but in that case he doubts because he has a positive reason for it, and not on account of the Cartesian maxim. Let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts.

 ("Some Consequences of the Four Incapacities") Not that Peirce disregarded the uses of doubt:

The Critical Common-Sensist will be further distinguished from the old Scotch philosopher [Thomas Reid, or those of his school] by the great value he attaches to doubt, provided only that it be the weighty and noble metal itself, and not counterfeit nor paper substitute. He is not content to ask himself whether he does doubt, but he invents a plan for attaining to doubt, elaborates it in detail, and then puts it into practice, although this may involve a solid month of hard work; and it is only after having gone through such an examination that he will pronounce a belief to be indubitable. Moreover, he fully acknowledges that even then it may be that some of his indubitable beliefs may be proved false.

 ("Issues of Pragmaticism")

 

Willows, Poplars, Aspens

According to the translation of Psalm 137 preferred by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, the Jews in Babylonian exile hung up the harps on aspens. This surprised me. The Septuagint, the Vulgate, and King James Version all say that it was on willows. The Jerusalem Bible says poplars; the Revised Standard Version says willows but footnotes that with "or poplars".

The National Audubon society says that willows and poplars are two genera of the willow family. The American aspens are in the genera Populus (Latin for poplar). In the notes to his edition of The Odyssey, W.B. Stanford says of Book VIII, line 106

'Like the leaves of a tall poplar-tree': the comparison is between the continuous motion of the lightly hung leaves (probably of the aspen, Populus tremula) and the busy hands of the women [busy at weaving and spinning]....

So there is warrant for taking what are called poplars to be aspens. But then The Odyssey's word is αἴγειρος, poplar, and the Septuagint's is ἰτέα, willow.

 I suppose that my surprise on Sunday derived from the supposition that the aspen is a tree of the mountains. My first recollection of them is on the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, a much cooler and drier area than Babylonia.  And all aspens do seem to prefer cooler climates.

Shari, Chelsea, and the Bot

 We seldom get a telephone call worth answering on our land line. Most of them are faked to have our area code, sometimes our exchange. I pick them up less in expectation of a useful message than to keep them from going to the answering machine, which will then beep until somebody goes to hear and clear messages.

Automatic dialing machines, whether for anticipated dialing with live operators or for recorded messages, are programmed to hang up if one does not speak within some seconds of picking up. (I think the term is "voice energy detected"). This makes it sensible to pick up and just say nothing. If a friend, or a simply a person who has entered your number is calling, that person will probably say something--"Hello?"--after a few seconds of silence. An automatic dialler will drop the call, for there are thousands more to make.

Some of those with recorded messages economize by starting the message at once. One that I hear a couple of times a week runs

Hi, yeah, this is Shari, and I'm a senior executive with our

 Sometimes Shari goes on to "mortgage team" before disconnecting. Less frequently, I hear

 Hi, this is Chelsea. I'm in sales with

 I forget with what: something automotive, I think.

It is my impression that there is a also a Carly, but I haven't heard from her lately.

Then, and this seems to reach my cell phone more, there is

Hello. I am an AI bot, and...

 I suppose that the AI bot will speak its message through without hanging up, though I have never verified this; it goes on well past the point where Shari or Chelsea would have disconnected. It speaks to the prestige of artificial intelligence that someone should have recorded the message so. There may be some sophisticated programming behind the message, but it sounds to me as if it is coming from an interactive voice-response (IVR) system, such has been around for a long time.

Good Sense

 The first discourse of Descartes's Discourse on Method begins

Good sense is mankind's most equitably divided endowment, for everyone thinks that he is so abundantly provided with it that even those with the most insatiable appetites and most difficult to please in other ways do not usually want more than they have of this. As it is not likely that everyone is mistaken, this evidence shows that the ability to judge correctly, and to distinguish the true from the false--which is really meant by good sense or reason--is the same by innate nature in all men, and that differences of opinion are not due to differences in intelligence, but merely to the fact that we use different approaches and consider different things.

I remember my surprise on first reading this, something over forty-five years ago, and my admiration for the argument, combined with a feeling that something was wrong with it. This was long before anyone talked about the Dunning-Kruger effect. And really the Dunning-Kruger effect does not address Descartes's point as it affects the Discourse, for thoroughly intelligent persons of, before, and since his time have come to conclusions far different from his.

My old copy of The Discourse on Method and Meditations was lost in some move long ago, and I have just bought a used copy. The last time before yesterday that I saw the first sentence in print was in some Oracle documentation, in the days when one got a shelf's worth of printed manuals along with the software. The manual must have been Oracle Database Concepts, I think. Now all Oracle documentation is on-line, which for most purposes is much handier. But the pithy quotations at the beginning of chapters are no longer there.

Down to Half Street

 Our car's inspection sticker expired on February 26. Early yesterday I drove to Half Street SW, for what I expected to be a quick and pro-forma check. It was not quite what I expected.

For one thing, I expected to make the usual turn from Independence Avenue onto Washington Avenue. But it turns out that the intersection is about a half block inside the Capitol security perimeter. I turned down 2nd Street, found no way east, and backtracked to 4th Street. The chain-link fences along 2nd looked unusually high, perhaps 10 feet, though I may have misjudged them because I was seated. A couple of men in military uniforms were walking down on the other side of the fence, probably National Guardsmen.

For another, the car failed inspection with a couple of unresponsive sensors. The inspector advised me to Google "drive cycle", a manner of driving that may help awaken the sensors on a car that has been long parked. (It had not been parked that long.) The internet, of course, had plenty of advice about drive cycles, and for once the advice offered did not differ wildly. My brother offered a version that was similar, but specified starting with an almost empty tank of gas. But the owner's manual offers a recipe that does not require leaving the curb. Better still, it offers a way to see whether the sensors are responding. I'll see about this on Wednesday, when it will be warmer.

The Weather

 A year or a few ago, I described the then weather in Washington, DC, in an email to an Angeleno friend by saying that it could have been scheduled by the Los Angeles Tourism Bureau. I have since reused the quip, appropriately modified, for an acquaintance who has moved to Phoenix . But who would would use an account of her local weather to cheer me up?

My brother sends me updates on Michigan weather. It can be very cold there, so that even heavy gloves leave the fingers cold after enough time outdoors. There can be a great deal of snow, so that shoveling becomes exhausting, or the snow blower (when practical) runs low on charge. But we grew up together in northern Ohio and in Colorado, and he knows that I don't really mind cold weather and snow.

My brother-in-law lives in the Willamette valley, where it rains more or less all the time for about a third of the year. He could perk me up any time during those months by saying that it had been raining for weeks and the needles of the trees were growing moss. But he doesn't care for that weather, either and so ordinarily gets into an RV and drives to Arizona as soon as the Christmas tree is down.

I suppose that a friend from the states along the Gulf of Mexico could raise my morale with bulletins of the temperature and humidity from May through September. The heat and humidity of Washington, DC, can be impressive to some, though I tolerate them well enough. But New Orleans outside in June I could not enjoy, and no doubt the same would be true for St. Petersburg, Biloxi, Mobile, and Houston.

 

Not At All Disturbed

 The New York Times informs us that the French are concerned that American notions around race and gender are affecting the quality of thought in the French universities. I find myself not at all disturbed by the news. The jargon of French structuralism has colonized American English to the point that some government entities no longer solicit bids for "demolition" but for "deconstruction". A fair proportion of the liberal arts faculties think and write in terms worked out in the Paris during the third quarter of the last century. We Americans know something about foreign influences.

Is this a case of Foucault's pendulum swinging back?

House Floats

 A fortnight ago, neighbors told me that the planned to make a "house float". They said that this is something people are doing in New Orleans this year. The pandemic does not allow for Mardi Gras parades with elaborately decorated floats, so people are doing up their houses in the elaborate fashion of such floats. I asked whether they would throw me beads when I walked by, but then our conversation was interrupted.

 Sure enough, their house was decorated this week, with a banner announcing the "Krew d'Eatay" and showing vegetables that I suppose might go into crudités. There were strings of pennants, and a cardboard cutout of a leaping cat. Then the snow and rain came on. The banner, pennants, and cat are put away, I hope to return.

 

Close Reading

 In a letter of January 4, 1950 to Nancy Mitford, Evelyn Waugh wrote of Robert Gathorne-Hardy's book Logan Pearsall Smith that

The only way modern books are readable is by reading them between the lines. I see so many unconscious and conscious dishonesties in the book which is two books put together -- the Boswell and an apologia for his treatment of the final heir.

In the essay "Flashbacks", collected in At Century's Ending: Selections 1983-1984, George Kennan describes his duties in Riga during 1932:

I know the Russian language, and I, with two or three others, go thoroughly and systematically through the Soviet newspapers and magazines, reporting to our government on what they reveal of life in the Soviet Union. It is through these thousands of pages of small-type, poor-quality newsprint that I am obliged to form my first picture of the great Communist country that lies so near at hand and extends so far away to the east. I, like my colleagues, am appalled at the propaganda that pervades every page of this official Soviet literature--at the unabashed use of obvious falsehood, at the hypocrisy, and above all, at the savage intolerance shown toward everything that is not Soviet. ... And I am surprised to find how easy it is, if one looks carefully and thoughtfully, to perceive what does lie beneath these gray and brittle pages, and to realize that the meaning of the propaganda is not in the literal text but in the subtle changes that  occur in it from day to day--changes that every sophisticated Russian knows how to decipher and to interpret, as we ourselves, in time, learn to do.

 In "The Art of Interpreting Non-Existent Descriptions Written in Invisible Ink on a Blank Page", collected in The Hall of Uselessness, Simon Leys describes the method that made Father Lazlo Ladany's weekly China News Analysis "infuriatingly indispensable" (infuriating not to Leys, but to many of its western readers, who wished to think better of the People's Republic):

What inspired his method was the observation that even the most mendacious propaganda must necessarily entertain some sort of relation with the truth; even as it manipulates and distorts the truth, it still needs originally to feed on it. Therefore, the untwisting of official lies, if skilfully effected, should yield a certain amount of plain facts. Needless to say, such an operation requires a doigté hardly less sophisticated than the chemistry which, in Gulliver's Travels, enabled the Grand Academicians of Lagado to extract sunbeams from cucumbers and food from excreta.    

The Johnsons

 Last year, I read Janet Lewis's novel The Invasions and enjoyed it. I had set it aside, and was not thinking about it, when I noticed in Journey to America, a collection of De Tocqueville's journals edited by J.P. Mayer, a passage of August 6, 1831, from the Sault Ste. Marie:

The Johnson family (conversation forgotten) at the camp of the Indian traders.

Now, the family of The Invasions spelled their name "Johnston". It is true that names are often misspelled, and that Tocqueville had difficulties with English orthography. Yet Johnson is not an uncommon name, and there could easily have been other Johnsons or Johnstons then living near the Sault.

If Tocqueville did speak with William Henry Johnston's family, it is curious that he did not record the conversation and make more of it, given the interest his journals show in the relations of the races. A family with a Bishop of Belfast as great-uncle, and a notable chief of the Ojibways as grandfather should have been worth recording. Sam Houston's brief marriage to the granddaughter of a Cherokee chief is mentioned in another notebook--but then perhaps Tocqueville had more time to talk with Houston.