The Gates of Europe

If asked to write down what I knew of the history of Ukraine, I would not have needed much paper. I remembered a few facts or situations at long intervals, running from the Scythians to the Maidan, bits of information about events separated by anything from a few decades to several hundred years. I don't think that the scantiness of my knowledge made me unusual among Americans who have not specially studied the history of Eastern Europe.

 Late last year, my wife bought and read a copy of The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine by Serhii Plokhy, who teaches Ukrainian history at Harvard University. When she had finished with it, I read it. This much improved my understanding of Ukraine, and also of its neighbors. At the moment I can give a more or less cogent account of the Kievan Rus', and of its relation with the Norse along the rivers to and from Novgorod; the origin and fortunes of the Cossacks; the career of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth; and so on.

The book is well organized and quickly read. The chapters run mostly to ten or a dozen pages, of which one can easily read one or two in an evening. At the front there are ten maps showing boundaries and settlements from the early Greek settlements through the post-2014. The back has suggestions for further reading, quite extensive and all in English; a timeline of events; a who's who; a glossary; and an index.

Calling on a Recorded Line

 The calls begin, "Hi, this is [Sue|Dave], I'm an [analyst|advisor] calling on a recorded line for ...". Sometimes there is what sounds like phone room chatter in the background. These are recordings, part of a fairly basic interactive voice response (IVR) system. Perhaps the "recorded line" is meant as quasi-candor; quasi since Americans have had years to get used to messages saying that their call to some company "may be recorded for quality-control purposes." In any case, the careless listener could imagine that a person is on the other end of the line.

When the recording pauses after "Can you hear me OK?", I amuse myself by replying "Who is the president of the United States?" This may get a prompt asking me to repeat what I said, in which case I may go on to "Who is the speaker of the House of Representatives?" Once, since the call was from a political action committee for veterans, I asked for the name of the Secretary of Defense. Sometimes the IVR program hangs up, sometimes it continues and I hang up.

I suppose that at some point the overhead of running natural language processing programs will be low enough that the IVR system will chirp back, "Joe Biden" or "Kevin McCarthy". But are there enough cranks out there to make this worth the expense to the operators?

To Be Avoided

 The "By the Book" page in the Book Review section of today's New York Times has Aleksandar Hemon offering the answers. I was taken by his answer to the question "And which [genres] do you avoid?"

No advice books, least of all self-help manuals, nor any of those middlebrow smartass books that explain humanity and its evolution and history in under 500 pages and a couple TED talks.

I have expressed my reservations before about attributions of brow height, but otherwise I will not complain. I will have to look up the man's novels.

Carpe Librum Is Open This Month

 Last week, I learned that Carpe Librum has a pop-up store at the southwest corner of 14th and I NW. It will remain open through the end of January. I have dropped off a couple of bags of books with them, and have purchased three or four books. Inflation shows up at Carpe Librum, too: a hardback book now costs $6, half again what it would have ten years ago.

Year's Reading

I omit some books I didn't care for. By category, fiction first:

• House Full of Dawn by N. Scott Momaday. Worth reading, though it has on it the marks of the first novel.
• Changing Places and Small World by David Lodge, the first two of a trilogy set in the academic world. Both are very funny, with much of the fun being of the boys behaving badly type, academic division. I suppose that I should go on and read Nice Work.
• A Conspiracy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole. I liked this novel better forty years ago.
  
• The Emperor's Children by Claire Messud.
  
• The Bell by Iris Murdoch.

Philosophy:

• Of Human Freedom and The Unconditional in Human Knowledge: Four Early Essays (1794-1796) by F.W.J. Schelling. These helped me with the next,
• The Science of Knowledge by Fichte, a book I had attempted to read at intervals over almost forty-five years.
• Minima Moralia by Theodor Adorno.
• A Theory of Justice by John Rawls.
•  On Beauty and Being Just by Elaine Scarry. I don't know that I agree with her argument that exposure to beauty increases our tendency to work for justice; but I greatly enjoyed the book.
• Natural Goodness and Virtues and Vices by Philippa Foot.
• On Man and Citizen by Thomas Hobbes.
  
• Beyond Good and Evil by Nietzche.
• From Parmenides to Wittgenstein (essays) by G.E.M. Anscombe.

 History:

• The War of the Running Dogs by Noel Barber, a history of the Malaysian insurgency.
• The Ukrainian Night by Marci Shore, essentially an oral history of the Maidan in 2014 and the events around it.
• To Lose a Battle: France 1940 by Alistair Horne.
  
• Carthage Must Be Destroyed: The Rise and Fall of an Ancient Civilization.
• The Tragedy of Liberation: A History of the Chinese Revolution 1945-1957 by Frank Dikötter.

Miscellaneous:

• The Walls Around Us by David Owen--most amusing for anyone who has ever worked on an old house.
• The Flight to Italy by Goethe, a travel diary and selected letters from his visit to Italy in 1786 through 1788.
  

This Ideal Activity

 Noticed in the Zusatz to section 396 in Hegel's Philosophy of Mind:

At first, however, the [newly born] child is much more dependent and in much more need than the animal. Yet in this, too, the child already manifests its higher nature. It at once makes known its wants in unruly, stormy, and peremptory fashion. Whereas the animal is silent or expresses its pain only by groaning, the child makes known its wants by screaming. By this ideal activity, the child shows that it is straightaway imbued with the certainty that it has a right to demand from the outer world the satisfaction of its needs, that the independence of the outer world is non-existent where man is concerned.

 

Carpaccio at the National Gallery of Art

 On Tuesday, we drove down to see the Carpaccio exhibition at the National Gallery of Art. It seems to me that we had previously seen one of the paintings, "The Lion of St. Mark" at the Doge's Palace; but that was more than twenty years ago. The rest of the paintings and drawings were all new to me. The exhibition was worth the trip.

The most spectacular painting was probably of a martyrdom of ten thousand at Mt. Ararat. It recalled Goethe's strictures on paintings with martyrdoms in The Flight to Italy. Yet here it was not that the tortures were gruesome, it was that they were extravagant. Ten men crucified makes for an appalling picture; dozens crucified is just odd. And none of the martyrs seemed much troubled by his condition. I say "his" condition, for my wife remarked that there were no women in the picture. According to information on-line, the martyrs are all said to have been legionaries, which would explain this.

The most interesting painting to my eye was "St. Augustine in His Study." You can see a images of a selection from the exhibition at the National Gallery's website.