Overthinking it, Maybe

For the next meeting of the book club, we chose the novel The Door by Magda Szabo. I thought it an excellent novel. The novel is clearly placed in space, taking place almost wholly in Budapest, but it is less clearly placed in time. I could not quite place the span of almost twenty years in which the action occurs.

Then I noticed at a critical point in the plot the statement that "Easter fell early that year, at the very beginning of April". Within the plausible range of years for that point, the two earliest dates of Easter were April 2, 1972, and April 3, 1983. For other reasons, 1983 seemed the most probable date. I was pleased to have decided this.

The pleasure lasted for about five minutes after I walked away from the computer. Who is to say that the assertion of an early Easter had anything to do with a specific year, and not with the weather imagined by the writer? W.B. Stanford, editor of a Macmillan edition of The Odyssey, had some dismissive remarks about scholars who claim to identify the islands visited along Odysseus's way,  referring to them as "those who think they can map fairyland". Am I trying a similar enterprise?

Juvenal

Last winter I heard the eulogist of Abbot Aidan Shea say that in one of the upper level Latin classes about 1960, he had been unable to muster enthusiasm for Virgil, and that Father Shea had put him to reading Juvenal, whom he found more sympathetic: "sarcastic, rude, vulgar, right up my alley".

This weekend I happened to pull from the shelves Heinrich Böll's What's to Become of the Boy?: Or, Something to Do with Books, where I noticed, of one of Böll's high-school classes in Cologne in the late 1930s,

I don't know whether Juvenal was in our curriculum, or whether Bauer had recognized how topical he was and chosen him for that reason: in Juvenal, arbitrariness, despotism, depravity, corruption of political mores, the decline of the Republican idea, were described with ample clarity, even a few "June 30's", staged by the Praetorians, and allusions to Tigellinus.

Fortunate are the generations that can appreciate Juvenal for his sarcasm without finding him too topical.

Books as Gifts, Again

Suppose that you are a young intellectual working in Washington, D.C., for the minimum wage, $14 per hour. Suppose further that you wish to give a friend a copy of Diarmaid MacCulloch's The Reformation as a gift. Politics and Prose has it on its shelves for $25. The book will cost you less than two hours' wages before tax.

The Reformation has 812 pages. According to my recollection, twenty pages per hour would be a very fast rate for reading it with comprehension, but let's assume that the friend can read it at that rate. It will take the friend forty hours to read it, twenty times as long as it took you to earn the money to buy it. Now, if the friend is also employed at the minimum wage, and would have been likely in any case to acquire the book, he or she is two hours to the good. If your friend hadn't thought of reading the book, but does so dutifully, that will be three weeks of reading at two hours per night, not previously budgeted for.

This sort of consideration makes me think twice before giving books as gifts. It also gives me a bias in favor of books that can be picked up and put down--collections of essays for example. This is not to say that I wouldn't give someone a copy of The Reformation--which, after all, is admirably organized in chapters of about twelve pages--or a similarly hefty book. But I would have to know the recipient's taste very well.

Three and a Half Hours

In the time it takes to see the movie "The Irishman", a minute under three and half hours, one can

• If suitably fit--under 35, and putting in reasonable mileage--run a marathon.
• See "The Marriage of Figaro", and depending on the length of the intermissions maybe make it out of the Kennedy Center parking garage.
• Read any one of Hadji Murad, A River Runs Through It, one of Plato's medium-length dialogues, or (aloud) two books of the Iliad.
• Walk from Alexandria to Mount Vernon, with time for lunch along the way.

It is only fair to say that running a marathon will leave one with sore legs for a couple of days.

"The Irishman" struck me as being in some ways an accumulation of the weaknesses of the 1970 generation of movie making. It has actors who were young in 1970 playing in 2020 the young men of 1950. It has a Mafia of near omniscience and omnipotence. It has notably asinine assertions about two generations of the Kennedy family. (In a different movie from this generation, the CIA would have murdered JFK for wishing to pull us out of Vietnam; in this one, the mob votes him into office to overthrow Castro, helps him to stage the Bay of Pigs, and perhaps shoots him for failing to carry it off.)

I have wasted a lot of equivalent chunks of time in my years, and will soon enough stop grudging the time lost to "The Irishman". The man who strikes me as having a legitimate grievance is Jack Goldsmith, who makes a compelling case that his stepfather has been libeled.

Crabapples

Friday, at 16th and Church Streets NW:

Registering

Today I saw on the side of a Metrobus an advertisement reminding the young of their duty to register with the Selective Service. It seemed to me that the last men drafted into the US military must have been born in 1953. On getting back to a computer, I looked it up, and found that

• Some men born in 1952 were inducted into the military in 1972. No men born in 1953 or after were drafted.
• The draft lottery continued through 1976 even so. I imagine that few men born between 1954 and 1956 could tell you the order in which their birthday was drawn; many of those born between 1950 and 1953 must still remember it. Certainly it was a matter of conversation.

Those due to register next year are therefore fifty years younger than the last men drafted. The Pentagon has been quite clear for many years that it has no interest in expanding the military to a size that would require a draft. Yet the young must still register, and penalties attach to a failure to do so. The Selective Service's FAQ says that

Registration is a way our government keeps a list of names of men from which to draw in case of a national emergency requiring rapid expansion of our Armed Forces. By registering all young men, Selective Service ensures that a future draft will be fair and equitable.

Well, maybe. The WW II draft was more or less fair and equitable, but then the US military had something around 14 million in uniform from a much smaller population--the 1940 census counted 132 million persons.

Amazon Web Services

Monday's New York Times has an article on Amazon Web Services (AWS), its ubiquity, and its effect on software providers. It writes of Amazon in the tone which twenty years ago people wrote of Microsoft. I did not see "embrace, extend, extinguish" in the article, but maybe I didn't look closely enough.

Amazon has identified a soft point in "open source" software: it is in general freely available for anyone's use, it is in principle freely available to be modified and extended; but this can mean that the advantage goes to the user with the most hardware, and the one with the most money to fund the adaptation and enhancement of existing products. These days, Amazon might well have the most hardware and the most money. Those who developed MariaDB, MongoDB, and Redis get a smaller share of the revenue generated from their work than Amazon does.

Yet for one who has followed this for some years, there are omissions in the picture. IBM has run Linux virtual machines (VMs) on its mainframes for many years, and has recently purchased Red Hat, which makes one of the most popular Linux distributions. During the years before the purchase, did Red Hat or IBM make the most money from this? Nor are IBM and Amazon the only companies that have made money off Linux: Google, Oracle, Facebook, and these days Microsoft run a lot of Linux. Does anyone consider any of these corporations more benevolent than Amazon?

Google based its Android operating system on Linux. If you set up an application on the Google Cloud Platform and need a database, one of the options you will have is MySQL, from which MariaDB is derived. (To be sure, at the moment the entities most scared of Google in the cloud world are its customers, who believe that it has considered abandoning GCP and could do so if it can't outdo AWS.)

I find Amazon's tactics troubling, and not only in cloud computing. Still, I thought the article could have used some nuance.