Justice and Whigs

Over the last several weeks, I read A Theory of Justice by John Rawls, as time and energy allowed. It offers a closely argued adaptation of the social contract theory, in opposition to the utilitarian ethics that had dominated English--or English-speaking--social thought since the days of Smith and Hume. There are pages that read as if something had been obscured in the revisions for the second edition; but the fault is likely in my reading. It will be a while before I return for a second reading, though, for A Theory of Justice takes up 500 pages before the index.

During some of this time, I found myself wanting to read, yet without the energy to concentrate on Rawls. One of the books I looked into was The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War by Michael F. Holt. This book runs to 950 pages before the notes, not quite 40 for every year of the party's existence, 1833 through 1856. It makes a curious contrast to A Theory of Justice, for while Rawls tells us how a constitutional democracy might arrive at just rules and execute them, Holt tells us how one such democracy operated: with a concern for power and patronage at least as strong as its concern for abstract (or any other) justice. One must keep track of Hunker Democrats, Barn Burner Democrats, Silver Gray Whigs, Native Americans (not the people who were here before Columbus), canal board and customs house patronage, and so on. It is not the easiest book to read through. It is not dense with argument and inference, rather it is crammed with facts, not always organized in proportion to their importance.

A Tech Tip

 On Friday, I noticed a blog post by Tim Bray on the deficits in machine learning (ML). One of the cases he mentioned was Google's occasional tendency to place wanted emails in the Spam folder. On reading this, it occurred to me that I had recently found an email from a friend in the Spam folder. I had then marked that email as not spam, or anyway moved it to the in box, and hoped this would serve as a hint. I checked, though, and found seven such emails going back about three weeks.

Having moved these back to the in box, I had a look at the Gmail settings. It turns out that there is an option under "Filters and Blocked Addresses" to provide an email and use the setting "Never send it to Spam." The lesson seems to be that Gmail users should periodically check the Spam folder, which holds messages for one month only, and that they should remember that "Filters and Blocked Addresses" can be used to add never-blocked addresses.

Keys and Pages

 It has been quite a while since I last read through Middlemarch, and when I think of the book it is more likely to be in connection with electoral shenanigans than with anything else. Yet I remember that somewhere in Henry Adams's letters he wrote to a friend that he, Adams, was turning into a dreadful Casaubon, taking George Eliot's unfortunate cleric, author of the projected Key to All Mythologies, as the type of the pedant.

The other day, I followed up a reference in Peter Green's Antioch to Actium to see where exactly one finds the attribution to Callimachus of the dictum "big book, big evil." The note says Athenaeus 2.72a. Of the Perseus project's three versions of Athenaeus's The Deipnosophists,  the first had the corresponding numbering. But where one expects items at Perseus to be "chunked" by book, or by chapter or (if Biblical) verse, the first version of The Deipnosophists on Perseus, is by "casaubonpage". This was something of a surprise.

 It appears, though, that the "casaubonpage" takes its name from the French philologist Isaac Casaubon (1579-1614).  Wikipedia says that the editing of and commentary on The Deipnosophists was Isaac Casaubon's magnum opus. Judging from what I see on Perseus, either the commentary was large or the pages were small.

The Committee

 In What I Think I Did, Larry Woiwode quotes a conversation with his professor Charles Shattuck:

"So often I'm asked to chair the departmental committee that awards the writing prizes. This year it was no question with the committee on short stories--the pair of stories, submitted by 'number 19' were beyond measure the best of the season."

"Once we agreed on that, we hurried to the office to discover who the author of these brilliant revelations of a feminine imagination could be--so sensitive, so delicately phrased, so poetic, yes, in the highest sense!--I run out of terms we were using to characterize my nineteen-year-old feminine author, and in our hurry to find out who, this honestly came to me: that lovely young woman my feature actor [again, Woiwode] has been captivated by!"

"But no, Larry, it's you! You're the one. Dear Larry, good Larry, fine Larry, you've won it! How could you keep this from me?"

 I wonder how many women were on the committee that year, 1961? The question would not have occurred to at 20, or perhaps at 30, but it does now. I am happy to suppose that professors who read and grade the work of many young women every semester do know more about the feminine imagination than most male civilians would; still, I wonder.

Order of Adjectives

 In teaching English as a Second Language (ESL), I learned that there is a rule governing the order of certain adjectives, as in describing clothes: size, then color, then pattern. I suppose that I had followed this consistently from childhood without ever thinking to articulate it.

It is easy to think of at least two-component examples from titles of songs or books: "Long Black Veil", Thin Red Line, and so on. I found it harder to think of those with three components, though I know perfectly well that my wife has a long black and white striped dress. But this year, I thought of a title that included all components, in proper order: "Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini". I did not mention this to the class, given the difficulty of explaining the terms for size.

Paul Vance, who wrote the lyrics to "Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini" died last month. The New York Times carried an informative obituary of him.

Reading Matter

 I am in a hotel room in Philadelphia, near the Pennsylvania Convention Center. The room is clean and reasonably quiet. But it amazed me with its lack of reading matter. A canvass of the room showed the evacuation plan attached to the inside of the door, telephone instructions attached to the phone, operational instructions on the safe, and such labels as appear on the products in the bathroom and on the coffee. There is no stationery, no local information, no Gideon Bible. Management has concluded that the generation now traveling does not read print. I think this is premature.

Ties

 Clive James wrote that

Auden lived long enough for me to see his tie. I thought it had been presented to him by Jackson Pollock until I realized that it was a plain tie plus food.

("Sergei Diaghilev", collected in  Cultural Amnesia.)

In his memoir What I Think I Did, the late Larry Woiwode reported that

A sad-eyed grad who attended the Iowa Workshop and is back for his Ph.D. says Illinois lost its real writer, Bill Gass, when somebody in the administration complained about the food on his ties.

Well, since the beginning of the pandemic I have stained no ties, for I have rarely worn one.