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.