The Best Language

 While I was dusting off books to return them to a shelf, a copy of Dante's De Volgari Eloquentia happened to open to Book II, Chapter 1, where I noticed

And since language is an instrument for our thoughts just as a horse is for a soldier, and since the best horse is appropriate for the best soldier, so the best language suits the best thoughts. But the best thoughts are impossible without learning and intelligence; so the best language will suit only those who have intelligence and learning.

 Unfortunately, he goes on to say, not all poets are equipped with intelligence and learning.

Fred Brooks, RIP

 Fred Brooks, Jr., the manager of IBM's S/360 project, died yesterday at the age of 81. The S/360 line of computers revolutionized the computer business, providing models ranging from the small to the large, all capable of running the same software--and for that matter capable of running the software of a prior IBM line. The S/360 line also established (or helped to establish) the eight-bit byte as standard. Brooks summarized what he had learned from the project in The Mythical Man-Month. My copy of the 25th anniversary edition is by now 27 years old. (It is also lent out, which may be the case with many copies of such books.) And he wrote an influential, or at least frequently quoted, essay "No Silver Bullets" about the challenges of software production.

The Computer History Museum has an interesting interview of Brooks by Grady Booch.

 

Doris Grumbach, RIP

 This week, the New York Times carried an obituary of Doris Grumbach, who died on November 4, at the age of 104. The obituary states that Ms. Grumbach wrote six memoirs, published between 1991 and 2000. She had even by then many years to cover. The obituary also lists several novels.

Her long-time partner was a bookseller. I'm fairly sure that Ms. Grumbach owned a piece of a bookstore in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Washington, DC, a store I looked into once more than forty years ago. How I would have known that she owned it, I can't say. I thought that she had reviewed books for The Washington Post in those days, but if so, the Times lumps the Post in with "many other publications."

The History of His Parish

 Whispering Gums discusses nonfiction, and asks why we read it. A passage from Thoreau's journals, dated March 18, 1861, offers a partial answer:

You can't read any genuine history--as that of Herodotus or the Venerable Bede--without perceiving that our interest depends not on the subject but on the man,--and on the manner in which he treats his subject and on the importance he gives it. A feeble writer and without genius must have what he thinks a great theme, which we are already interested in through the accounts of others, but a genius--a Shakespeare for instance--would make the history of his parish more interesting than another's history of the world.

This is fair--I would hesitate to ready anyone else's four hundred pages about week of canoeing, but am happy to have read Thoreau's.

On the other hand, there is no end to the making of books, yet the supply of genius is limited. Of the nonfiction--history, biography, memoir, other--that I have read in the past year, one book was a biography of a genius, Erasmus, none were by geniuses. But some offered history I didn't know, or thoughtful reflections on a life, or amusing accounts of some topic.