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?"