Then and Now

 In Chapter XI, "The Conqueror (1837)" of Across the Wide Missouri, Bernard DeVoto wrote of the American Fur Company's earnest but ineffectual response to the 1837 smallpox epidemic that devastated the tribes along the upper Missouri River:

Suppose however that [the company] had the knowledge of every American today--except the million or so who belong to anti-vaccination, anti-vivisection, anti-research organizations and sometimes produce smallpox epidemics which differ from that which destroyed the Mandans only in that the rest of have been vaccinated...

A page or so later DeVoto suggested the rural south as at least a recent area of resistance to vaccines. Such resistance had not become popular among the prosperous and expensively schooled.

Across the Wide Missouri appeared in 1947, and won a Pulitzer Prize and a Bancroft Prize.

Loie Fuller

 The New York Times last week noticed a new film, "Obsessed with Light", about the dancer Loie Fuller. I know little about dance, but one of the sections of Yeats's "1919" begins

When Loie Fuller's Chinese dancers unwound
A shining web, a floating ribbon of cloth,
It seemed that a dragon of air
Had fallen among dancers, had whirled them round
Or hurried them off on its own furious path;...

The movie does not seem to have made it to Washington yet. I will have to look out for it.

Glasses

When the effect of age on my eyes was beyond denying, the optometrist suggested progressive lenses, saying that they worked well for those who worked with computers. I found that this was so. I also found drawbacks. Steps down required care until I was used to the glasses. Distance vision was best at a narrow strip across the top of the lenses, which sometimes made me tuck my chin down to see a block or two down the street.

This time, with the distance band having moved a few degrees down, I thought that I should try bifocals. I got them on Monday. For distance they were excellent. For reading print they were good. For computer work they were deficient. I make my living working on computers.

The eyeglasses vendor will replace the bifocals with progressives, for a nominal price. I am wearing my old glasses until the new arrive.

The Cabinet

 In The English Constitution, Bagehot makes a case for the superiority of the British cabinet system over the American. When I read this, I was not really convinced, and may not be now. However, it appears to me that as the federal government has expanded--as the cabinet has expanded, and one might say diffused--the cabinet has lost power.

The third through fifth presidents of the United States had served in the Cabinet, and Van Buren and Buchanan after them. That I can recall, the next member of a Cabinet to become president was Herbert Hoover. The Roosevelts topped out at sub-cabinet level, as Assistant Secretaries of the Navy. George H. W. Bush was director of the CIA, but long before that post came to be part of the Cabinet.

Since the earliest days of the republic, there have been complaints of the president ignoring the Cabinet and taking advice elsewhere. Henry Adams quoted John Randolph in a speech of 1806:

The first question I asked when I saw the gentleman's resolution was, Is this a measure of the Cabinet? Not of an open declared Cabinet, but of an invisible, inscrutable, unconstitutional Cabinet, without responsibility, unknown to the Constitution. I speak of back-stairs influence-of men who bring messages to this House, which although they do not appear in the Journals, govern its decisions. Sir, the first question that I asked on the subject of British relations was, What is the opinion of the Cabinet; what measures will they recommend to Congress?--well knowing that whatever measures we might take they must execute them, and therefore that we should have their opinion on the subject. My answer was (and from a Cabinet minister, too), 'There is no longer any Cabinet!'

(The Cabinet then included James Madison and Albert Gallatin; but Randolph disliked Madison, and may have been disenchanted with Gallatin as impossible to intimidate. In any case, Randolph's quarrel had to do with the President as much as the Cabinet.) I remember accounts fifty years ago of Richard Nixon ignoring his Secretary of State in favor of Henry Kissinger, then his National Security Advisor. Have matters changed at all?

It is said that the President elect's last cabinet considered declaring him unable to continue under the fourth section of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, and did not. It is also said that the current President's staff kept the Cabinet away from the President and unable to judge his state. Perhaps Bagehot was right.

Now Gone

 In early May 2017, a tree at 16th Street and Meridian Place NW began to sag:

Within a week or so, somebody did a bit of trimming to let the pedestrians by more conveniently:

But earlier this fall, somebody just dealt with it,

leaving some child from the neighborhood to decorate what was left.

The Public Domain

 This summer, I ordered a copy of Mental Acts: Their Content and Their Object by Peter Geach. I was mildly surprised to find that it was a reproduction of the edition published by Routledge, Kegan, and Paul. The back cover said, among other things, that

This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.

I find it odd that the writings of philosophers should somehow reach the public domain so quickly, when Disney's "Steamboat Willy" only made it into the public domain this year. I have made the same complaint of a copied edition of Quine's Word and Object. Disney died in 1966, Quine in 2000, Geach in 2013. Yet somehow Disney' works of the 1930s remain protected, while Quine's and Geach's works of the 1950s and 1960s are not.

The copy of Mental Acts also suggests objections to the attitude of those who think that quick entry to the public domain is wholly beneficial. This week I looked into the book to find its date of publication. The publishers had included a page with a little bit of library information from Osmania University, which must once have owned the copy scanned. But they had omitted whatever portion of the front matter included the publication date. The best I could do from the book was to establish a terminus a quo of 1953, the year of the last-cited publications. Wikipedia says that it appeared in 1957.

At the DMV

 Last Monday, I discovered that my driver's license had expired on my birthday, roughly three weeks ago. It was not practical for me to go to the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) during the week, because of the press of business.The DMV offices keep barbers' days, Tuesday through Saturday, and I decided on Saturday.

On Saturday, I considered taking the bus, given my unlicensed state. But Georgetown is within fifteen minutes by car, and could take an hour and half to reach by bus on a Saturday. I drove, which was prudent. I left a book behind, which may not have been.

An hour and ten minutes elapsed between my arrival at the reception desk and my exit with a temporary license. A book might have helped to occupy me, or might have been impossible to read, given the unceasing sound track that posted one on almost anything one might need to know about the DMV.

This office is in a small shopping mall, with a restaurant or two. The woman next to me agreed that the mall should get permission for its shops to display the readout showing the state of the queues for service. I could see the numbers for a driver's license paid for by credit card creep up from C134 to C147 (my number). Had the readout been visible in the shops or restaurants, I could have browsed the displays or sipped coffee until C144 was called.

I find that for my next license, when I will be (well) over seventy, I will need to find a physician to certify that I am sound of mind and body. The DMV calls this the "mature driver" portion of the form. I hope that I reached maturity as a driver some time ago, but it has never been certified.

(During the last few years, people have started to use the term "DMV" as designating the District of Columbia, Maryland, and Virginia. After so many years of using for a Department of Motor Vehicles--not just DC's, but Maryland's, I find this disconcerting.)

The End of October and the First of the Year

 This year I did a fairly bad job of carving a jack o'lantern. I marked off the features with an indelible marker, then decided that they were too low. I carelessly cut across the top of the mouth, not outlining the teeth. As a consequence, Jack has badly applied eye-black (and mouth-black), and a couple of dental implants. Of course, in the dark that doesn't matter much.

 It occurred to me, though, that I had a large, sound pumpkin, with room enough to carve another face on the back side--a Janus-faced pumpkin. One could carve contrasting faces, say masks of tragedy and comedy. Or one could just cut out a mediocre jack o'lantern face, not better or worse, nor deliberately different. Yet I wonder whether the cross-draft would burn down the candle faster. Perhaps I will carve such a jack o'lantern next year.

Credentials

Metro trains stop for perhaps thirty seconds when running properly. Earlier in the month, in a fraction of that time, I found myself looking at an advertising display on the Union Station platform, where I saw at least three, and perhaps four advertisements for schools: Rochester Institute of Technology, the Georgetown University McCourt School of Public Policy, and something from George Washington University--perhaps the Elliot School of International Affairs.

 The next time that I was in a Metro station, to add money to a SmartTrip card, I noticed advertising on the walls and the floor from the George Washington University College of Continuing Studies. If I occasionally forget to local thirst for credentials, I am reminded soon enough again.

The End of the Tomato Season

The local tomato season, the period during which one can buy good, local tomatoes grown outdoors, is now over. In the Washington, DC, area, the season begins about the beginning of July and now runs until about the middle of October. Of course one can buy tomatoes in the stores all year, but they are bred for shipping rather than for eating: they will not bruise under reasonable handling; they have very little taste.

During the tomato season, my wife will come home with bags from a local farmers market. We will have a dinner of bacon, lettuce, and tomato (BLT) sandwiches many weeks. Most Fridays we will have roasted tomatoes over fettucini. She has frozen some roasted tomatoes for a treat to be enjoyed between now and next July. The BLTs, though, are over until then.

 The night this year after she first brought home bags of tomatoes, I woke in the dark hours thinking that I smelled smoke. Of course the smoke alarms are more sensitive than a nose, certainly more sensitive than mine, but that did not occur to me. After walking about the house and sniffing, I went back to bed. In the morning it occurred to me that it was the unfamiliar smell of fresh tomatoes that I had taken for smoke.

Difficulties

 Noticed in Aquinas on Mind, by Anthony Kenny:

The ability to write philosophical prose easily comprehensible to the lay reader is a gift which Aquinas shares with Descartes, but which was denied to Wittgenstein and Aristotle. Wittgenstein did, of course, write a plain and beautiful German; the difficulty for the non-philosopher, reading his later works, is not in construing particular sentences, but in understanding the point of saying any of the things he said. With Aristotle it is the other way round; it is clear that what he is saying is of immense importance, but the problem is to discover what meaning it has, or which of the seven possible meanings is the intended one.

Well, I have read a very little bit of Wittgenstein in German, and cannot testify to the plainness or beauty of his prose. I am grateful to the translators who wrestle with the difficulties of Aristotle.

A page or so later in the book there appears

 Bertrand Russell was one of those who accused Aquinas of not being a real philosopher because he was looking for reasons for what he already believed. It is extraordinary that that accusation should be made by Russell, who in the book Principia Mathematica takes hundreds of pages to prove that two and two make four, which is something he had believed all his life.

At first glance that seems a little unfair to Russell, but is it?

K.u.K.

 There must be households that possess automobiles over many decades without encountering collisions and requiring auto-body repairs. We are not one. Over about 35 years as a household, we have had four trips to a body shop for repairs.

It was after the most recent visit, to Imperial Auto Body in northwest Washington, DC, that it occurred to me that our work has been parceled out between that establishment and Royal Auto Body of Rockville, Maryland. So far--and I hope that there will be no further--the score stands at three visits to Imperial, one to Royal. Who would have thought that such an everyday business as auto body repair would turn out to be Kaiserlich und Königlich?

Black Eyes

 Near the end of Aristotle's Eudemian Ethics there appears the passage

Further, if a man prospers or fails to prosper because he is the kind of man he his, just as a man sees poorly because he is blue-eyed, then not luck but nature is the cause.

(Translated by Anthony Kenny.)  Earlier in Chapter 2 of Book VIII, there is a reference to the superior eyesight of the black-eyed. This is not something I have heard of elsewhere. It is tempting to suspect that Aristotle had dark eyes. People used to suspect and perhaps still do that he had a snub nose, for more than once in his works he asserts that a snub nose is not a defect.

In Naples '44, Norman Lewis writes that in WW II the career of one who had finished a preliminary course in military intelligence was determined before the placement interview had officially begun: the blue-eyed got the demanding, interesting, and--to be fair--more dangerous assignments. The dark-eyed were sent off to be sergeants in Field Security. My stepmother (herself blue-eyed) once remarked that the heroes and heroines in Helen MacInnes's novels of suspense always had blue eyes; though I suppose that some of their opponents must have had blue eyes, given that they tended to be Germans or Russians.

I don't know where Aristotle would have placed my eye color on the range from black to blue. My driver's license calls them brown, the mirror suggests that hazel or green might suit better. (Be their color what it may, I don't see well without glasses.) The word Kenny renders as "blue" is "glaukos".  Liddell and Scott say that as applied to eyes this means blue or light blue--otherwise it seems to shade toward green.

 

Complaining Because They Won't

 Last month, the Sunday New York Times Book Review carried a piece by David Brooks on Tom Wolfe. This was part or all of an introduction Brooks wrote to a volume comprising Wolfe's pieces "Radical Chic" and "Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers". Two weeks later, there were two letters about the piece, one praising Wolfe, and one putting in a good word for the Bernsteins. Nobody addressed what I thought the strangest few paragraphs.

It appears that the old WASP world of Manhattan could trace its ancestry to Debrett's Peerage or the Almanach de Gotha:

The old aristocrats had it so easy, those stately bankers in the J.P. Morgan mold. They may have been frequently bewildered about why the masses didn’t like them, but their own place in the social aristocracy was secure. It was right there in their bloodlines — the generations of grandees stretching back centuries. The status rules were simple.

But the names offered do not convince:

 the old blue-blood Protestant elite — the Astors, the Whitneys, the Rockefellers

John Jacob Astor, founder of the family, was the son of a butcher. John D. Rockefeller's father was not especially reputable. The Whitneys went a good way back in the northeastern US, yet I suspect that the reflective among them would have agreed with Mrs. Archer in The Age of Innocence:

 "Don't tell me," Mrs. Archer would say to her children, "all this modern newspaper rubbish about a New York aristocracy. If there is one, neither the Mingotts nor the Mansons belong to it; no, nor the Newlands or the Chiverses either. Our grandfathers and great-grandfathers were just respectable English or Dutch merchants, who came to the colonies to make their fortune, and stayed here because they did so well. One of your great-grandfathers signed the Declaration, and another was a general on Washington's staff, and received General Burgoyne's sword after the battle of Saratoga. These are things to be proud of, but they have nothing to do with rank or class. New York has always been a commercial community, and there are not more than three families in it who can claim an aristocratic origin in the real sense of the word."

 Whatever the case, the new families did not have it so easy:

The members of the new cultural elite could never be so secure. Their status — their very reason for being — was based on their own superior sensibility. They lived by their wits and their public attitudes.

That sixty years ago in the Midwest I heard of Leonard Bernstein had nothing to do with his superior sensibility, except so far as it was reflected in his composing and directing music. I knew no more of his public attitudes than of George Szell's. (Of Szell's I knew only that he thought very poorly of persons arriving late at concerts.)

Then a few weeks later, the print edition carried a review by Jennifer Szalai of Hitler's People: The Faces of the Third Reich. There I was interested to read of

the easy lie of a noxious conspiracy theory in place of the hard truth, that Germany was incapable of defeating the Anglo-American coalition.

The French losses in World War I were about 15% greater than those of the British Empire; the American losses were not a tenth of the French. And Russia may have suffered more casualties than France. If any crank wrote to complain about the salience of the Anglo-American coalition, the letter did not make it into the Book Review.

T. Collin Jones, Esquire

 If you watched American television sixty years ago, almost certainly you heard Kodak commercials using the song "Try to Remember [that time in September]". That song came from the musical "The Fantasticks". The lyricist, Tom Jones, died last month.

I remember very little of the song, but I read with interest the obituary of Mr. Jones in The New York Times. In particular there was his account of his high school, and early college years in Texas:

 “Sometime during my sophomore year at Coleman High School, I became a ‘character’” — wearing bow ties and a straw hat to school, smoking a pipe, signing his articles for the school newspaper “T. Collins Jones, Esquire.”

“Even now, nearly 70 years later, I can’t help but stop and wonder what the hell I thought I was doing,” he wrote. “Even more, I wonder at the fact that the other kids — farmers mostly, and ranchers and 4-H girls — took it all in their stride."

But then he got to the drama department of the University of Texas, where

"for the first time, there were other people actually like me," he wrote. "Here, marvel of marvels, everybody was T. Collins Jones, Esquire."

It is well that he found his tribe.

One understands the wish for distinction. An American can grow up in a homogeneous world, one of so many so much alike, and feel an urge to stand out from the crowd. In "My Military Campaign", Mark Twain mentioned a young neighbor, who

 had some pathetic little nickel-plated aristocratic instincts, and detested his name, which was Dunlap; detested it, partly because it was nearly as common in that region as Smith, but mainly because it had a plebeian sound to his ear. So he tried to ennoble it by writing it in this way: d’Unlap. That contented his eye, but left his ear unsatisfied, for people gave the new name the same old pronunciation—emphasis on the front end of it. He then did the bravest thing that can be imagined—a thing to make one shiver when one remembers how the world is given to resenting shams and affectations; he began to write his name so: d’Un Lap. And he waited patiently through the long storm of mud that was flung at this work of art, and he had his reward at last; for he lived to see that name accepted, and the emphasis put where he wanted it, by people who had known him all his life, and to whom the tribe of Dunlaps had been as familiar as the rain and the sunshine for forty years. So sure of victory at last is the courage that can wait.

Will It?

 Seated at the airport gate not far from us early Monday was a young woman with a sweatshirt obviously from a well thought of university. On the back were Aeneas's words "haec olim meminisse iuvabit", from Book I of the Aeneid, line 203. Theodore C. Williams translates the full sentence, "forsan et haec meminisse juvabit",

.... It well may be
some happier hour will find this memory fair

 My first thought was that this made the university experience sound a bit dire: the memory of which Aeneas speaks includes near shipwreck, certain loss of one ship of his fleet, and apparent loss of others. One could argue that the omission of the first two words of the sentence "forsan et"--perhaps even--turns the sentence from a tentative encouragement to a positive statement. But in the years when all students arrived at the university knowing their Latin, wouldn't they have at once thought of the context? Perhaps I underrate their sense of irony, though.

My second, somewhat later thought, was that No, I would not relate with pleasure the annoyance of a four-hour delay. It is less than Roman virtue to say so. But we were not out to found a city, only to take a vacation.

The Cost of Running

 A few weeks ago, I received a notice from a local store stating that the registration fee for the DC Half Marathon was about to go up. I am not in condition to run the race, but I thought I would see what the price was. At the time, it was $100, now it is $110.

That seemed to me pretty steep. I haven't entered many races since the mid-1980s, and I am unable to say what registration costs were then. I'm guessing that I usually paid about $20 or $25 for a race. Back then, that would have been about a third of the price of a pair of good running shoes. This suggests that the fees have outrun inflation, for running shoes costing more than $250 are unusual.

The one race that I have run since 1987 is a local 5-kilometer race. I find that this year's fee is $20. At $4/kilometer, that isn't much lower than the price per kilometer of the DC Half. But were shorter races less expensive to enter than marathons in the old days? I just don't remember.

In fairness, there are some features now expected that weren't imagined in 1980s, notably bibs with microchips and the timing mats to record one's finish time and splits. Finisher's medals seem to be expected now, at least for marathons: then I think I got just one, for finishing in the top n of the Richmond Newspapers Marathon. Perhaps some races offer other swag as well, beyond the tee shirt one got in the old days.

Focus

At work I spend a good deal of time logging into this or that system. Often these days such a system requires more than a username and password, uses what is called multi-factor authentication (MFA). In many cases I use Google Authenticator on my phone for this--I find that I have nine applications using it, plus one application that we no longer use, and for which I should remove the entry. Google Authenticator will provide a six-digit code for an application, which code changes at short intervals.

A couple of the applications that require MFA will bring up a page where one may enter the code, but then do not set the "focus" to the input box. This means that one can confidently type the six-digit code, look at the box, and find that there is nothing there. In such cases, one clicks in the box, waits for the numbers on the phone to change, and types in the new code. I find this annoying, out of proportion to the real inconvenience.

One of the applications for which I get authenticator codes is Okta. An Okta login sequence always sets the focus properly for the code. Now, Okta's whole business is to centralize authentication for its customers, so you would expect them to have put thought into these matters. Anyway, good for them.

It is not only in HTML inputs that developers neglect focus. Recently I have been adding comments to some database objects, using Oracle SQL Developer. Once in ten times I will click on the comment tab of the window and start typing, having failed to remember that the focus is still with the object name above the tabs, and so wiping that out. It is hard to do damage this way, for a comment will not match the allowed format of an object name. Still, one must close the window without saving and start over.

Deaf Sentence

In Brief Lives: Notes from a Philosopher's Diary, Anthony Kenny writes of David Lodge as his favorite novelist, as having covered the various phases of Kenny's life in fair synchrony, from troubled English Catholic (The British Museum is Falling Down, How Far Can You Go?), to academic (Changing Places, Small World, etc.), to older man hard of hearing (Deaf Sentence).  On hearing, Kenny writes of learning from the radio that an Oxford historian had been convicted of murder, trying with his wife to guess who might be the victim and who the murderer, and his wife suddenly understanding that he must have heard "Oscar Pistorius", not "Oxford Historian".

My own hearing is not what it was, or anyway not what it should be. I thought that I should follow up on Deaf Sentence, and have done so. On the first page, I learned of

what is known to linguists as the Lombard Reflex, named after Etienne Lombard, who established early in the twentieth century that speakers increase their vocal effort in the presence of noise in the environment in order to resist degradation of the intelligibility of their messages. When many speakers display this reflex simultaneously they become, of course, their own environmental noise source, adding incrementally to its intensity.

(American restaurateurs love to produce the Lombard Reflex; I loathe it.)

 It is the conviction of Desmond Bates, a retired professor of linguistics that blindness is tragic, deafness comic. Lodge does get a good deal of comedy out of Bates's difficulties with noisy rooms, batteries that fail in hearing aids, and so on. I found myself grateful that I have rather more hearing left, and and am slightly older than Bates. On the other hand, the depiction of hearing aids is not encouraging.

Ultimately death does come into the novel--as part of history, as a wife's, as a father's.

I am glad to have read the book, and grateful to Kenny for having mentioned it.

Tech Support

 Going on forty years ago, I worked in tech support for a copy that made typesetting systems on Data General minicomputers. The typesetters would have have special-purpose green-screen terminals, but general communication with the system--to boot it, back it up, install new software--happened usually through a teletype. We called it the Dasher, which I think was the name of an earlier variant.

It often happened that the dasher was up close to one wall, and the telephone hung on another wall, well out of reach. It was then that I noticed the asymmetry of telephone handsets. Whether someone had the phone in hand or or not, I could hear their room loud and clear. But if the handset wasn't to an ear, anything I said, even a howl of "No! No!" was lost, a whisper a big room.

Computers have shrunk in size and grown in power, and technical support now has tools we didn't dream of. Still, the other night I was trying to help an older relative through some computer difficulties. Her phone was across the room from the computer, which led to intervals of silence while she went to try out an instruction. We did not get very far, which I think partly owed to a confusion of terms. It is frustrating to spend half an hour not accomplishing something I could manage in five minutes if on-site.

Twenty Years at the Same Location

 Twenty years ago this past weekend, we moved into this house. Our first two nights here we ate at restaurants, for the kitchen sink wasn't in place. On the third night, we ate at home and did the dishes in the basement utility sink. The radiators were not connected, and were pushed out of the way as suited us.

The house had not been lived in for something like five years when we bought it, and had not been maintained for some years before that. During the first heavy rain after we moved in, we found water rolling down the attic steps; a bit of plywood, nailed against joists, remediated that. During another early storm, we watched with interest, almost awe, as a gutter shot water several feet out from house.

We brought some skills to the work, and learned more, but we needed a competent contractor, whom we eventually found. Still, we did a great deal of the work ourselves. We refinished every double-hung window, we removed all the old varnish from woodwork, and restored it, we painted every room in the house at least once.

Before we got to twenty years, each of us had lived here longer than anywhere else. We lived in Maryland for fourteen years, and before that my wife's longest was twelve years in Central Pennsylvania, mine was twelve years outside of Cleveland.

Lists and Litanies

 Lately I have noticed that journalists think that "litany" is a fancier word for "list", or perhaps means "long list". In today's newspaper, one writes that the failure of Rudolph Giuliani's bankruptcy filing exposes him to a litany of creditors. I wonder how anyone so understanding "litany" came to hear of the word in the first place.

It is true that some litanies are built on lists: of divine or Marian titles, of saints, of sins to be protected against. But the list as such is not a litany, without the response from the congregation, say "Have mercy on us" or "Pray for us". The word derives from the Greek "litaino" or "litaneuo", beseech or request.

Pollen

 At the end of June and in July, lilies bloom in the garden. They are beautiful to see,

 

 

and in places they are hard to brush past without touching the stamens. As you would suppose, the pollen that comes off on one's clothes is the color of ground red pepper. After a day or two, it fades to a yellow-brown like that of a turmeric stain.

Fortunately, the errands that take me past the lilies do not require good clothes.

Heavy Hitters

 Early on in a recent New Yorker piece about repeat memoirists, the author writes

To be fair, memoirs have exhibited a tendency to multiply ever since Augustine recalled pocketing those pears. His "Confessions", which began appearing around 397 C.E., were spread over thirteen books, each conceived as a distinct unit.

Well, the last four books consist of philosophical and theological reflections. And in this case "book" means something other than a hefty bound volume: the handiest copy of The Confessions on my shelves, Garry Wills's translation, runs to 340 pages, autobiography and the rest together. The modern memoir of a comparably young man, Dave Eggers's A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, takes four hundred pages to cover fewer years.

The next sentence runs

In his wake, heavy hitters have included Diana Athill, Shirley MacLaine, Maya Angelou, and Augusten Burroughs, each of whom have produced a proper shelf of memoirs.

Someone understanding the reference of "heavy hitters" could say whether it is a match card or a lineup card we should not trust the author with.

 

Programming and Art

 The next book for our neighborhood book club is Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin, which follows a couple of the young in Los Angeles from late childhood through their early thirties, say 1987 through 2015, as they found and continue a business that creates computer games. A book review putting it that way would not interest me in the book, but I found the book very readable. I finished its 400 pages in a week or so.

One curious aspect of the book was its detachment from the work of computer programming. It mentions the programming language Java (perhaps a few months early for Java's release), and I think might mention BASIC. Almost the only terms of art are "bug" and "debugging". "Interrupt" and "stack" you will not find.

This is not an unreasonable choice. Programming can be very absorbing, but watching somebody program is indistinguishable from watching someone stare at a screen and occasionally press on a keyboard. It takes a good deal of patience for the non-programmer to sit and watch somebody program. When I saw the movie The Social Network, I was impressed at the manner in which the writers and producers had managed to obscure this truth: in the movie programming was hardly glanced at, except when done by the drunk or the oblivious.

Frederick Crews, RIP

 Today's New York Times carries an obituary of the critic Frederick Crews. The headline calls him a "Withering Critic of Freud", featuring what I had supposed was a sideline of his. I knew of him as a literary critic, though actually I had not read his chief works in that line.

 The one book of Crews's that I did read was The Pooh Perplex, a collection of essays on Winnie the Pooh in the manner of then (1963) prominent critics. Under the invented names,  I was able to pick out Fredson Bowers, F.R. Leavis, Leslie Fiedler, and D.W. Robertson. No doubt the more widely read could pick out more. I regret that I never bought for myself a copy of Post-Modern Pooh, published in 2001.

Series

 A visit to Second Story Books led to the purchase of The Wittgenstein Reader, edited by Anthony Kenny. The book is a collection of excerpts from Wittgenstein's works. I have copies of most or all of the excerpted works; but it is worth seeing how a gifted editor will assemble pieces of an author's work to cast more light on one another.

In the chapter Kenny names "Intentions", there are paragraphs in which Wittgenstein discusses what it means to understand something. As an example of something to be understood, he gives the series of natural numbers, 0, 1, 2, 3, ... and the task of teaching it to someone. What he says about how we judge understanding here makes sense. Yet the paragraphs leave the impression that teaching someone the series could be a challenge. (Philosophical Investigations I, sections 143 and following.) I had read these paragraphs before, but today I thought of something else.

In the years of the Baby Boom, I was a second grader in a classroom of about fifty others. Our teacher's notion of restoring order when we made a disturbance--noise, notes, talking--was to tell us to take out a clean piece of paper and write the numbers from one to one hundred. Commonly, the quick writers got to one hundred very quickly, while those like me were in the upper twenties. Often, they made more disturbances, and the teacher would bid up the numbers. I believe that more than once she told us to write the numbers up to one thousand.

We all did it. (Well, as time allowed--some of us were under 300 when the bell rang.) She did not, that I remember, judge our understanding of the series. She may not have collected the papers.

The router's lease hath all too short a date.

 Memory says that during the pandemic I worked from home with a network connection as steady as if I had been at the office and the computer had been connected by cable to the building network. Perhaps memory exaggerates.

We mostly returned to the office in mid-2021. For a while I did not work much from home, then presently I would work from home a day or two each week. At some point I found that the network connection to work--a virtual private network or VPN--just wasn't as stable. I put up with it, though.

Recently, I found that I was disconnected too often, and I started writing down the times of disconnection. These were almost exactly an hour apart. Today, after one of the disconnections, I noticed a message about the underlying network, and I had a look at the PC's networking setup with ipconfig /all. I was greatly interested to see that my DHCP lease was of one hour. (Dynamic Host Control Protocol or DHCP is a method by which a server can manage the network configuration of many client machines.) I'm used to DHCP lease durations measured in days, not hours.

On logging into our router, I found that the DHCP lease duration was indeed set to 3600 seconds, one hour. I bumped it up to eight hours, restarted the computer, and found that I now had a lease of eight hours. I predict that my next day working from home will be less frustrating.

I assume that our ISP, which provided the unit that serves as both router and cable modem, set the configuration as I saw it. I wonder what they were thinking to set the lease duration so low.

A Universal Expedient

There is a sort of jocular American folklore around duct tape as a universal expedient. Eighty years ago, I believe, one heard of "chewing gum and baling wire" as that which kept rickety equipment going. Somewhere in the last forty years, duct tape replaced baling wire, perhaps because so many fewer Americans work at baling hay.

I had never heard of duct tape used in first aid, but on Thursday I saw it. A crew was working out front to run a new pipe from house to main, bypassing the old lead pipe. By mid-afternoon it was time to remove from the hole the machine that had pushed a path for the copper pipe, and then pulled it back from the house. The machine was clearly heavy: my eyeball estimate was a hundred or a hundred and twenty-five pounds. The two men who were removing it from the hole were strongly built, but one injured his upper arm. The man I took to be foreman had to come out from the house and help with the machine.

Somewhere along the way, the injured man and another walked down to the truck. The other applied to the injured arm two six-inch strips of duct tape, one along the bottom of the deltoid muscle, one along the biceps. I have seen runners with bits of tape applied to a leg, but never duct tape.

More practically, I think, my wife brought out ibuprofen for the injured man. He remained on light duty for the rest of the job, and I suppose will be on light duty for a couple of weeks. Given that most of his work involved digging, I'm not sure what that will be.

Translated

 On Sunday, I pulled a book from a Little Free Library near here. The frontispiece read

DOUGLAS KENNEDY

AU PAYS DE DIEU

Traduit de l'américain par Bernard Cohen

 

There are a number of books around the house in French, none that I can think of translated from another language. I am tempted to stop by one of a couple of local bookstores that do carry French books to see whether other publishers believe in the American language.

In American English "God's Country" is a general term of approval. Seventy years ago, Jacques Barzun wrote the book God's Country and Mine: A Declaration of Love Spiced with a Few Harsh Words. Douglas Kennedy, to judge from the back cover of the book, refers to the Bible Belt.

Quiet

We stayed Friday night at a hotel near Harrisburg. On Saturday morning, I went downstairs before 7:00, for I was thoroughly awake. After a small breakfast, I wanted to read. I found that there was no public area out of earshot of a television. At one point, I had the notion of trying the fitness center; but a man was working out and watching the TV while he did so. I did manage to read from a chair that seemed to be at the optimal distance between televisions, such that words could hardly be distinguished from either. 

 I suppose that the chain has made a study of its clients' preferences, and has found that the television-everywhere group outnumbers those who wish to avoid it. If so, I wish the hotel would make a gesture toward accommodating the minority.

Exposure

 Some time back, I handed off a pile of technical magazines to a co-worker. This week she went through them, tearing out the stories she wanted to read, and putting the rest in recycling. Tearing out the articles of interest would not have occurred to me, but seemed practical.

She then brought me the front covers of the magazines, thinking that since they had my name and address on them I might want to shred them. I said that people still publish phone books, and that my name, address, and phone number appear in those. This had not occurred to her.

Given her age (somewhere in her thirties), she may never have paid for a land line, and so may never have appeared in the White Pages. When I first showed up in the local White Pages, maybe forty years ago, it did not feel like a breach of privacy, it felt as if I were getting somewhere in the world. Of course, the means of automatically collating information have greatly increased in power and fallen in price by then. But my name, address, and phone number are the least of the information that is now easily found on the internet.

Which Poem?

 Today's Washington Post sports section carries an article about a young man from Maine who is likely to be the first picked in the 2025 NBA draft. About the middle of the article, I noticed the sentence

His local high school, Nokomis Regional High, shares its name with a Native American character in a Henry Wadsworth Longfellow poem.

This I thought and think annoyingly coy. Was it Nokomis that carried the lanterns into the Old North Church tower to signal Paul Revere? Was Nokomis the caretaker at the Jewish cemetery at Newport?

Given that Nokomis appears first in the legends of the Ojibway, a nation that flourished far west of Maine, and that the legends were adapted by Longfellow for his poem Hiawatha, it is fair to suppose that "shares its name with" should be "takes its name from".

Kant in the Newspaper

 The May 2 print edition of the New York Times carried an article with the headline "Vision of a World Liberated by Reason", and devoted to the 300th anniversary of Immanuel Kant's birth. The article was published on-line on the anniversary, April 22, with the title "Why the World Still Needs Immanuel Kant". I suppose that ten days' delay counts for little on a scale of three centuries .

The need for Kant is a mediated one. My neighbors are in general well educated and many of them are widely read. But I suspect that if I were to go door to door claiming that I had misplaced my copy of The Critique of Practical Reason and asking to borrow the household's, I would have sore knuckles before I got the book. Yet his influence does persist. The Times this week carried a review of book considering John Rawls's A Concept of Justice: and Rawls drew heavily on Kant.

Oh, That Aristotle

 A while ago, I noticed in Alasdair MacIntyre's Whose Justice? Whose Rationality? an unfavorable reference to Saul Kripke's Naming and Necessity, concerning the implications of the name "Aristotle". I don't think that MacIntyre was quite fair to Kripke, who argued against (I believe) Russell's theory of definite descriptions. I jotted a question mark in the margin, kept on reading, and spent a couple of weeks not thinking about Aristotle.

Last week, though, I picked up Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege, intervening reading having made me curious about Frege's argument that the reference of a sentence is a truth value. Along the way, in the famous essay "On Sense and Reference", a couple of pages in I encountered a footnote on the sense of such a name as "Aristotle". 

It is easy to forget, but Aristotle, Hesperus (or the evening star), Phosphorus (or the morning star), as cases for such arguments do go back to Frege.

The essay appeared in 1892, Naming and Necessity in 1972, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? in 1988.

Appliance Jack

 The other Sunday, we found our freezer and refrigerator not working, and scrambled to locate and obtain small substitutes. They served until the repairman diagnosed and replaced a failed fan, then sat in our hall through the week.

Our two-wheel dolly had served well enough in getting the appliances into the house, but we weren't sure about its stability down the stairs to the outside, then to the basement. I announced that what we needed was an appliance jack, a two wheel dolly with a strap to secure an appliance--a refrigerator, a washer, or so on--and that our local hardware store probably rented them. I called up, and after the man in the rental department told me that I needed a dolly, we seemed to agree on what I needed, and he said they had it.

They did not. They had regular dollies just like ours. They did have a "Rachet Tie-Down", which sold for a few cents less than the price quoted for rental, and which worked nicely.

I wondered, though, whether "appliance jack" was a term used only by the company I worked for years ago, or something I dreamed up. A web search turned up many more actual jacks--items for lifting something--but about one image in ten was the item I had in mind. My brother thinks that the more common term may be "appliance dolly".

One of the Dozen Best

 In Brief Encounters: Notes from a Philosopher's Diary, Anthony Kenny writes of Peter Geach as "one of the dozen best British philosophers of the twentieth century." This may be so, but it made me wonder whether I could name a dozen British philosophers of the twentieth century, of any quality. Counting only those who wrote their major works in the last century, and leaving out edge cases--if we count Wittgenstein as British, must we then count Whitehead as American?--I just about could, though I hadn't necessarily read their works. I came up with

1. G.E.M. (Elizabeth) Anscombe (two books)
2. J.L. Austin (two books)
3. A.J. Ayer (one book)
4. Philippa Foot (two books)
5. Peter Geach (no books, though much of a volume of Frege he helped to edit)
6. Stuart Hampshire (two books)
7. R.M. Hare (no books)
8. Anthony Kenny (philosophically, just the judgments in Brief Encounters)
   
9. Alasdair MacIntyre (one book)
   
10. Mary Midgley (one book)
11. Iris Murdoch (one book of philosophy)
    
12. Bertrand Russell (some of Essays in Analysis)
13. Gilbert Ryle (one book) 
    
14. R.L. Strawson (some of a collection of essays he edited)

I did not pay that much attention to British philosophy when I was younger, but now I can't come close to that number for any other combination of country and century.

 

 

 

Reading Midgley

 Having read Iris Murdoch's The Sovereignty of the Good, I thought I might read something by Mary Midgley, whose Wickedness the publisher advertise among other books in the end papers. I did not expect to find her work in the local bookstores I usually rely on. My preferred out-of-town bookstores didn't seem promising, either.

A Little Free Library on New Hampshire Avenue NW yielded The Essential Mary Midgley, edited by David Midgley, which contains excerpts from ten of her books. I am more likely to find some of those books to read than I am to pass along this volume.

The themes that Midgley writes on include

• A rejection of the Cartesian split between mind and matter.
• Related to that, a rejection of the tendency to regard animals as machines, and their treatment as not worth considering.
• Also related, the assertion that humans have a nature, and cannot be considered as acting from arbitrary will.
• The validity of (sound) moral judgments, including the identification of evil and the ascription of blame.
• The need for philosophy in general to clarify our notions, including particularly moral philosophy.
• The misreading and misuse of Darwin's thought.
• The unjustified pretensions of certain scientists who write as public intellectuals.

The book is organized in five sections, each with chapters of about a dozen pages each, the sections being

1. The Roots of Human Nature
2. Philosophizing Out in the World
3. The Myths of Science
4. Reason and Imagination
5. Gaian Thinking: Putting it All Together

 Midgley writes clearly throughout. She requires careful reading, but I recall only one spot where I suspected something omitted in the text. She can be cutting, for example in the notes to the essay "The Elusiveness of Responsibility":

British philosophers, who in many other cases have now relaxed their rule of reading only one book by each philosopher, sternly adhere to it in Kant's case, and treat a few quotations from the rather dramatic opening section of the Groundwork as his last words on individuality and freedom. Both Williams and Nagel take as their chief opponent the resulting shadowy fixture, who is supposed to be Kant, but to whom they amazingly attribute 'a very simple image of rationality.'

So Many Wicked People

 At Second Story Books today, I noticed the volume Brief Encounters: Notes from a Philosopher's Diary by Anthony Kenny. Of course I bought it. The book is organized in short chapters, each with brief notices of three persons: "Three Oxford philosophers", 'Three Wittgensteinians", "Three cardinals", and so on. Kenny's career at Oxford and elsewhere brought him into contact with many persons worth writing and reading about.

Among the Oxford philosophers is R.M. Hare, whom I have not read, but have seen quoted and referred to a certain amount. Hare's specialty was moral philosophy, which one might have expected to give him a notion of human failings. But evidently real estate had things not dreamt of in his philosophy:

Because he was now a professor, on a university, rather than a college payroll, Dick had to vacate his college house. He said that trying to buy a house was one of the worst experiences of his life: 'I had no idea that there were so many wicked people in the world!' This from a man who, as a prisoner of the Japanese, had worked on the Burma Railway!

 

Frank Ryan, RIP (Belatedly)

 Frank Ryan, an outstanding quarterback for the Cleveland Browns in the early 1960s, died on January 1, 2024. He received respectful obituaries in the newspapers. Wikipedia has a long and detailed article on him (as on many other football players).

Ryan was unusual as earning a Ph.D. in mathematics while an NFL player. He taught at Case Institute (now part of Case Western Reserve) during some of his off-seasons in Cleveland, and later at Rice (where he studied as an undergraduate and earned his Ph.D.) and Yale. After his playing days, he oversaw the computerization voting of the House of Representatives. His wife, Joan Ryan, wrote on sports for the Washington Post in those days, as she had previously for the Cleveland Plain Dealer.

In his NFL days, home games were not broadcast on TV--tickets for the games cost an unaffordable $10--so I can have seen only so many of Ryan's games. But I remember the intense satisfaction we felt when he led the Browns to the 1964 NFL championship.

Lighting

 Today, one of the building engineers was replacing lights in fixtures in an open area near my office. The tubes looked unusually thin when I got a look at them, and I remarked on that. He told me that the tubes were not fluorescent lights, but LEDs. I had not previously seen LED lights in that shape. The connectors at the end are compatible with those for fluorescent tubes, so one need not switch out fixtures. The savings in electricity will be considerable. And the light seems to be warmer than a fluorescent's, which is all to the good.

Murdoch as Philosopher

 Long ago, in Iris Murdoch's first novel, Under the Net, I read a passage that embarrassed me:

Dave does extramural work for the university, and collects about him many youths who have a part-time interest in truth. Dave's pupils adore him, but there is a permanent fight on between him and them. They aspire like sunflowers. They are all natural metaphysicians, or so Dave says in a tone of disgust. This seems to me a wonderful thing to be, but it inspires in Dave a passion of opposition. To Dave's pupils the world is a mystery; a mystery to which it should be reasonably possible to discover a key. The key should be something of the sort that could be contained in a book of some eight hundred pages. To find the key would not necessarily be a simple matter, but Dave's pupils feel sure that the dedication of between four and ten hours a week, excluding university vacations, should suffice to find it. They do not conceive that the matter should be either more simple or more complex than that.

I found the passage uncomfortable, as depicting too clearly the attitude I then had toward philosophy. The character Dave is Dave Gellman, a philosopher, of which it is also said

Most of our conversations consisted of me saying something and Dave's saying he didn't understand me and my saying it again and Dave's getting very impatient. It took me some time to realize that when Dave said he didn't understand, what he meant was that what I said was nonsense.

At the time, I knew that Murdoch was a philosophy don. I had not read any of her philosophy, though. The other week I found and bought a copy of The Sovereignty of the Good. It is a book of about 100 pages, the first forty-some of which I had to read three times. I thought her arguments in general plausible, though I have the disadvantage of not wholly knowing the case she argued against: she mentions Stuart Hampshire, though the books of his she mentions are some years early than the ones I have read.

 The themes I picked out included: the difficulty of goodness; freedom as the matter of many small acts of attention, rather than as an arbitrary and unmotivated act in an otherwise determined world; art as a paradigm for attention to the world, not least because there is so much more bad art than good; love as another paradigm.

Counter Intelligence

 Most adult Americans have bought a car, or been with someone who has bought one, and know the mystifications practiced by dealerships, so that one is never quite sure what the actual cost is, and by the way did you want floor mats and the underbody sealed? Every new car sold in the US has a sticker on its window stating the manufacturer's suggested retail price (MSRP), which is something. But dealerships do their best to keep one guessing on the real price. One can leave a dealership wondering whether any transaction could be more opaque. We have have found some that can.

We are renovating our kitchen, and have discovered that the price of countertop materials is a secret between the vendors, fabricators, and contractors. It would be something to have at least a rule of thumb ratio, giving the price of Corian compared to the price of granite, etc. Even that does not seem to be available through the vendors. I would not care if a) I suspected the prices to be reasonable, and b) the stores where the unpriced goods are on display were nearer than a thirty minute drive. But neither condition holds.

The whole business of home design and decoration seems to run on the principle that if you have to ask, you can't afford it. Large cities in the US have "design centers", which do not admit civilians unless accompanied by a designer. I gather also that companies can be stiff about sending samples to those who are not designers. Clearly some customers don't have to ask the prices, and the design magazines are full of their residences. Yet there are some not positively rich who want better than "builder grade", and would like to improve their dwellings, within their means, if only they could discover how far those means would go.

My wife considers that the practices of the design centers have dampened sales, and that the bad condition of American design magazines is evidence of this. Comparable English businesses seem to have no such restrictions, and their magazines, she says, continue to flourish.

Books and Covers

 Twenty-five or thirty years ago,  probably at an in-law's, I pulled a copy of The Rector of Justin by Louis Auchincloss from the shelves. I looked into it, evidently at Chapter 2, and put it back on the shelf. The scene of a callow teacher failing to dominate a class of boys simply did not interest me. I wonder now whether the form of the book, a small Modern Library hardback (as I recall it) had some effect.

I wonder this because I bought a paperback copy at Carpe Librum on Friday at lunch time, and finished it yesterday evening. The setting is curiously foreign--set all but entirely in America, among persons speaking recognizably American English--but largely in Episcopalian boarding schools, or among rich families who would send their sons to one. A fair number fall into the category of those one is glad not to have met. The narrator, a man aspiring to and eventually joining the Episcopalian clergy, is not prepossessing. Yet the novel carries one along.

 Auchincloss wrote a memoir, which I read through at least once well before this. In the memoir he states that Frank Prescott, the rector, is based on the judge Learned Hand, not as some might have supposed Endicott Peabody, the founder of Groton. Peabody does make a cameo appearance in the novel, and gets a slighting mention. Clearly Peabody made a great impression on Auchincloss in his school days, but Auchincloss names Hand as the greatest man he had ever known.

 

German

 The last chapter in Gordon Craig's The Germans, "The Awful German Language" begins

In the days when Bismarck was the greatest man in Europe, an American visitor to Berlin, anxious to hear the Chancellor speak, procured two tickets to the visitors' gallery of the Reichstag and hired an interpreter to accompany her there. They were fortunate enough to arrive just before Bismarck intervened in a debate on a matter of social legislation, and the American pressed close to her interpreter's side so as to miss nothing of the translation. But although Bismarck spoke with considerable force and at some length, the interpreter's lips remained closed, and he was unresponsive to his employer's nudges. Unable to contain herself, she finally blurted, "What is he saying?" "Patience, madam," the interpreter answered, "I am waiting for the verb."

Craig of course quotes from the essay of Mark Twain's from which he took the title.  More seriously, he traces the history of the language from the days when Charles V said that German was fit only for speaking to horses and Martin Luther proved him wrong, up through Enlightenment clarity to Hegelian obscurity and beyond.

Not the API I Had in Mind

 For years, I have wished that there were a website that could tell me who is demonstrating which day near the White House. Some group often is, and anyone without an encyclopedic knowledge of flags must sometimes walk over to the edge and ask someone what the group, and perhaps the grievance, is. I have to think that most of the groups have a permit. I suppose that the two or three fellows I see with East Turkmenistan flags on Pennsylvania Avenue don't have or really need one, nor probably does the bagpiper who is often there. But the people who march for blocks to get to Lafayette Square or set up stands and sound systems must have one.

 A couple of weeks ago, I saw a post on Hacker News that linked to the page for an API offered by the US Park Service. This, I thought, was just the thing, for the US Park Police is in charge of Lafayette Square, among other areas around the White House. With the free API key and the clear documentation, it took little time to put together a script to retrieve and print information about sites in the District of Columbia. It took not much more to write a script to retrieve and print out information about all of the week's events at the White House and President's Park. But there were no such events. A closer look said that the events listed would be those arranged by Park Service. I thought perhaps alerts would serve me better than events. They did not--the only alert told of masking status at the White House.

French

 One recalls that War and Peace begins with paragraphs of "that accurate French in which our grandparents spoke and even thought". I had not perhaps realized how far French served, until yesterday I encountered a paragraph by Peter Demetz on Maria Theresa:

The dynasty was her nation; she corresponded with her children in French; as for her German, she spoke it with the sophistication of a plebeian Vienna wet nurse, as a popular ditty of her time suggested, and wrote the language of Klopstock and Lessing quirkily and according to French syntactical rules (only Frederick of Prussia's German was worse, but he was, after all, a French writer of note).

 (Prague in Black and Gold: Scenes from the Life of  a European City, chapter 6, "Mozart in Prague")

I had read that Frederick preferred French. I have not encountered his writings, and would be no judge of his French if I had, but Samuel Johnson thought poorly of his work:

 Sir Thomas [Robinson] said, that the king of Prussia valued himself upon
three things;--upon being a hero, a musician, and an authour. JOHNSON.
'Pretty well, Sir, for one man. As to his being an authour, I have not
looked at his poetry; but his prose is poor stuff. He writes just as you
might suppose Voltaire's footboy to do, who has been his amanuensis.
He has such parts as the valet might have, and about as much of the
colouring of the style as might be got by transcribing his works.'

 (Life of Johnson, entry for July 18, 1763)

 

A Long Career

Today's Washington Post carries a story about Louis Kokonis, a math teacher at Alexandria City High School who died on January 4. He was 91, and had checked in at the school on January 3. He spent more than 60 years teaching in Alexandria, Virginia--if the statement that he began teaching during Eisenhower's administration is correct, he likely had 65 or more years teaching there.

It was always my impression that Latin teachers were born 50, and remained 50 until their first students had retired from the workforce. But evidently math teachers can compete.