Resented Reading

In school, I noticed that many of my fellow students resented reading assignments that I had enjoyed. At the time, I thought that this was out of a taste for easy prose, an unwillingness to engage more complicated writing. On reconsidering some of those readings, I think that my appetite was healthy but my palate somewhat undiscriminating. If I sent my older self back to read some of the selections that I remember as being in the anthologies, he would read them, but come to the lectures with a combative look in his eye.

Out of school, I enjoyed about a 25 year stretch in which I could choose my reading, and set it aside at will. A book that did not engage me ended up unread on the shelves, and eventually with Goodwill. Then we joined a neighborhood book club. The rules as I interpret them--not all members agree--are that you need not like, but you ought to read. On that interpretation, I have read a number of books that it would not have occurred to me to read, but which I enjoyed, and fewer that I'd never have read more than a dozen pages of.

The latest in the latter category is The State of Wonder by Ann Patchett. Ms. Patchett seems to write a great deal in phrases rather than words, often without concern with how the component words work together, or even what they mean.

• "he kissed her under her porch light" at which the snide reader supplies "where she had the rose tattoo" or "where the little birthmark was".
• "the wind tunnel that roared through the back seat". No, wind tunnels may roar. They may roar across some distance or other, but unless while in transit they do not roar through anything.
• "the red visage of his neck". How many faces can one man have?
• A boat navigates "the center aisle" of a river.

 This is to say nothing of the plot, which strikes me as written for an audience that wishes to relax and enjoy an adventure story with some romance thrown in. But she has read up on her rain forest novels, with a prop from Waugh and a tragedy from Garcia Marquez.

The cover bears a blurb from Emma Donoghue, including "Perfect from first page to last." I'd change "perfect" to "consistent."

Age and Technology

Owing to a combination of bad judgment and bad luck, last Monday we found ourselves on I-95 north of Baltimore with an obviously failing clutch. By undeserved good fortune, we were directed to Thompson's Towing and Auto Repair Center, which not only employs skilled mechanics, but has an Avis agency.  Within the hour, we were back on the road in a rented car, having left our sedan to have the clutch repaired.

What with parts that had to be ordered, the car was not ready until Friday. I caught the 12:20 MARC train out of Union Station, and called Thompson's from the Aberdeen train station. The mechanic brought the car himself. In the course of the explanation he remarked that he had been doing this work since 1968, which I found reassuring. And to be sure, the clutch feels just right.

It occurred to me later that I would not find the same reassurance if a programmer told me that he had  been programming since 1968--unless perhaps that programmer's name were Guy L. Steele. I would make no adverse judgment of the programmer, but many of the languages and technologies that I use were not devised by 1968. E.F. Codd's paper that projected the relational database was published in 1970, for example. Thompson and Ritchie developed the first version of UNIX in 1969, and that year Ritchie began work on the C programming language. The languages I use most often are a good deal newer, at most 20 years old. Clutches have been around a good deal longer.

If There Has To Be a Better Way, Ask a Techie

This morning in the course of an errand I happened by the cubicle of a young woman I've worked with now and then. In what was to be a moment of small talk, she mentioned a 5000 line spreadsheet she needed to work with: her task was to sum column n for every repeating set of columns 1, 2, ... n - 1. I asked whether I might sit down. I imported the worksheet into Access and wrote a three-line query with a GROUP BY clause. She had what she needed, exportable back to Excel.. Had I more experience with Excel, probably I would have created a pivot table and saved a minute or two.

I told her what now and then I've told others dealing with technology: if it seems that there has to be a better way, probably there is. Ask a techie.

Cutting Corners

Raymond Chen's 2012 year-end link clearance includes one to a New Yorker article about a man who seems to have gone to considerable pains to record very good marathon times without actually running the whole races. In the age of transponders and multiple mid-course timing mats, this would require a great deal more effort than it would have 30 years ago.

I took a short-cut in a marathon once, the Marine Corps Marathon of 1980: so did all the thousands of other runners, those anyway who made it a little more than two thirds of the way. The course was shortened in two places: first, when the lead runners followed the press truck in cutting off the very tip of Hains Point; second, when runners were directed to cut across the grass near the Jefferson Memorial. I rolled out of bed the next day quite happy with my time, read the news, and wished to go back to bed and sulk or mourn. But I believe I went to work instead.

As for transponders, I am now suspicious of them. In the last race I entered, the electronic results showed me finishing many places behind where I did. I'm guessing that in the hurry of handling the last-minute registrations the staff  mixed up name and transponder number. Well, the time I actually managed wasn't worth arguing about.

January 3: I should add that we who finished the 1980 Marine Corps Marathon received a certificate with two times on it: the actual finishing time, and the estimated time over the standard marathon distance. As I recall, the shortcuts amounted to about 500 yards.

Long Lost Books

Andrew Scrimgeour writes in the New York Times Book Review of his work sorting through the libraries of deceased scholars. I have read a bit about this sort of work in Larry McMurtry's memoir Books, but what I most noticed here was

Sometimes I find books belonging to libraries that long ago abandoned hope for their return. The letters of thankful astonishment that I have received from some librarians after they opened the unexpected packages are treasures in themselves. “Could we hire you to visit the homes of a few other delinquent scholars?” one library director asked. “We would be happy to make it worth your while.” Another concluded her note, “This gives new meaning to ‘Death the Grim Reaper.’ ”

I suppose that these were the sort of books that only the distinguished get to remove from the library--would a handful of Loeb Plutarchs or a Modern Library Gibbon be worth more than a polite thanks? I hope that there were no long lost library books in the holdings of  the scholar he names, James White, an historian of Christian worship, a man who had Calvin's Institutes open on his desk at the time of his death.

Tutoring

Heinrich Boll's What's to Become of the Boy: Or, Something to Do With Books is back in print, or at least back on the shelves at stores I frequent. It is worth reading in general, but I was struck by what he said of a brother's tutoring technique:

not long before, my brother Alfred had cured me of this [strange German math] trauma by systematically and patiently "probing back" to my basic knowledge, discovering gaps, closing them, and thus giving me a firm foundation.

There is an American blogger who has said something like this: if your child is not getting math level x, you need to find out whether he has understood levels x - 1 ... 1.

EIMI

At the going-out-of-business sale at Kultura's Books, I bought three or four books, one of them EIMI by E.E. Cummings. The Greek verb eimi is "I am" if the diphthong takes an acute accent, "I go" if it takes a circumflex. Cummings surely intended the ambiguity, for he goes plenty--to Moscow, to Kiev, to Odessa, to Istanbul, and back to Paris--and throughout emphasizes his is-ness. He made the trip in May and June of 1931.

The book makes rewarding, though slow, reading. Cummings writes with puns, with nested parentheses that eventually had me thinking of the programming language LISP, with colloquialisms now forgotten (or as" he might write "now And How forgotten). He did not like the USSR at all: not the theater, not the beer, not the food, not the management of day to day life, and particularly not the American enthusiasts for the system whom he met there.. He mentions mostly in passing the secret police, the GPU, who appear at times as "phibetas" after an American three-letter society. He speaks well of an American or two met there, and of a few Russians. Among the sites he visited, he writes with enthusiasm of a museum of modern art in Moscow, of a church or two in Kiev, and in general of Istanbul, particularly of Hagia Sophia and a bazaar.

In the essay "Transcendental Satyr", collect in Every Force Evolves a Form, Guy Davenport writes of EIMI

He went to Russia (the trip was subsidized: did the man ever pay for anything in his life?) and wrote EIMI, one of the best travel books of our time.

Davenport does not say who subsidized the trip. If it was the Soviet government, then the Soviets got a very bad bargain.