Recently Read

 Last weekend I noticed a passage in The Hall of Uselessness by Simon Leys, which I don't remember reading before. though the short items on either side are quite familiar. It is headed "Urinals and Literary Practice", and begins

At the end of the nineteenth century, as France was swept by a wave of fanatical anticlericalism, many town councils and municipalities adopted the policy of erecting urinoirs along the walls of local cathedrals and churches; under the pretext of ensuring hygeine and public decency, the brilliant idea was to have the entire male population of the town pissing day and night against the most venerable monuments that the religious had built.

It seems to me that many modern editors of classic works of literature--and also many film-makers adapting literary masterpieces to the screen--are impelled by a somewhat similar desire for desecration. They append impertinent and preposterous introductions, they impose cover designs and presentations in complete contradiction with the expressed intention of the authors, they write film scripts that negate the meaning of the book they are supposed to adapt, they coolly chop off the epigraphs the authors had lovingly selected--they generally display patronizing arrogance and crass ignorance; they behave as if they were the proprietors of the works they should serve and preserve....

I wonder how I could have missed this. It appears in the chapter Detours of Part IV, Marginalia.

Once or Twice

 Recently I encountered the company name Apax. It occurred to me that this needed only a rough-breathing mark to read as "hapax", a Greek word I first encountered in "hapax legomenon", a philologist's term (or so I understand) for a word encountered once only in the known writings. By itself it means something like once, once only, once for all.

When I looked at Perseus's version of Liddell and Scott, I found that the first citation given was from the Odyssey, Book 12, line 22. In that context Circe is wondering at Odysseus's men, who have returned from Hades's home, and might be considered ultimately as subject to dying twice, when other men die once for all. According to Stanford's notes to his edition of The Odyssey, the word for dying twice, δισθανέες, appears only there: it is a "hapax legomenon."

Thomas and Kuznetsov

 Two and a half months ago, the New York Times ran an obituary of D.M. Thomas, a novelist known chiefly for his best seller The White Hotel. I read it when it came out in paperback forty-odd years ago. As the obituary remarked, it was a best seller in the United States, after doing not particularly well in Great Britain. My recollection is that Martin Amis had some snide things to say about this in some American magazine--the Atlantic or Harpers perhaps.

I think that Amis touched on a point that the Times omitted from the obituary. The obituary does remark that Thomas was inspired by Anatoli Kuznetsov's documentary novel Babi Yar. It does not remark that he quoted extensively from Kuznetov's book, in particular the testimony of Dina Pronicheva, one of the very few survivors of the mass murders at Babi Yar, and that Kuznetsov and Pronicheva, at least initially, received minimal acknowledgment in the front matter of the book.

Alvin Kernan's The Death of Literature gives a few pages to this, the meat of it being

The original edition of The White Hotel acknowledges some indebtedness to Kuznetsov and Pronicheva in small print on the copyright page: "I also acknowledge gratefully the use in Part V of material from Anatoli Kuznetsov's Babi Yar (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux; London: Jonathan Cape, 1970), particularly the testimony of Dina Pronicheva." The word "use" seems a circumlocution, especially in the context of the fulsome acknowledgment of quotation in the same paragraph that the Yeats estate required for a few lines of poetry. Two pages later, there is an elaborate "Author's Note," which explains, in much larger type, just how Thomas used Freud in constructing the theory of Lisa's hysteria and commenting on the complex relation of fact to fiction. But of the debt to Pronicheva and Kuznetsov, there is nothing more.
To put it bluntly, Thomas all but concealed that he had copied verbatim at least four or five pages, far beyond what any court has yet allowed as "fair user," from  Pronicheva and Kuznetsov. Furthermore, the pages "used" are by common agreement, the structural and emotional center of both books ...

 This all was gone over at the time in the letters section of the Times Literary Supplement, Kernan writes.

The Times's obituary quotes Thomas, speaking to People magazine in 1982, as saying

Suddenly, I saw a connection between the mass hysteria of the Holocaust and personal hysterias, and realized I had a novel.

I suspect that this sort of remark went over better in 1982 than it would now.  Freud's prestige here has diminished, I think.

Embassy Fences

 I try to walk to or from work a couple of times every week. My route consists almost entirely of 16th St., NW, and takes me past the Polish and Lithuanian embassies a bit before the halfway point. From time to time, they have exhibits on their fences worth seeing.

For a week or two, the Polish fences have been bare. The last set of placards concerned the first passage of a South American river, or of a portion of it that ran to falls and rapids. Before that, there were posters about noted Polish archaeological work

and about noted Polish scientists
 

 The most interesting exhibits, several years ago, showed Polish posters from the 1930s and on.

Last year, the Lithuanian embassy had displays showing modernist architecture in Lithuania:

 

 I am not a qualified judge of architecture, but I thought the buildings all at least handsome. Those are gone, now, though. In their place, there are posters concerning the 700th birthday of Vilnius. I wouldn't mind seeing Vilnius: still, I think the Vilnius posters less interesting than the ones about architecture.

Old Computer Books

 A co-worker retired at the end of last summer, and I assume that some of the books left out on a cabinet near his office had been his. I took Javascript: The Good Parts and Perl Best Practices fairly quickly. That was a few months ago.

Last month, I noticed the Apache Server Bible, a fat, perhaps four inch, volume from SAMS. The age is suggested by the cover note that it "Covers Windows 95 and Windows NT Platforms!" The front matter gives a copyright year of 1999. The stable version of the Apache web server was then 1.2 something; it is now 2.4. There is a fair bit of information about using Perl for scripting, but nothing at all about PHP, which shortly became far more popular than Perl. Python is mentioned in passing, but there could be no mention of WSGI, which came out in 2003.

Could one use the book? I assume that some of the directives for some of the modules, for example, mod_proxy, remain the same. Would I use the book? Probably I would not. I am used to going to the on-line documentation for that. But I am not an expert on Apache or a steady user: almost all that I have done with it lately uses either mod_proxy or mod_wsgi.

After I looked over the Apache Server Bible, I had a look on my own shelves at work, and had no trouble finding several of comparable age. Few of them have been on the desk and open lately. Apart from that, their possible relevance varies.

Programming Perl has a 1996 copyright date. I have used it until the front cover fell off. I suspect that an awful lot of my use has been to check the rules on the module Getopt::Long. Twenty years ago, I might have put in some time reviewing the rules around references, but not lately. I think that within the last fifteen years Modern Perl and Effective Perl Programming have been the books I checked first.

Oracle Design, by Ensor and Stevenson, has a 1997 copyright date. I read it thoroughly, as shown by marginal jottings. A good deal of the advice remains sound. But the Oracle database has gone through about 10 versions since then (they wrote mostly about Oracle 7), and there have been many enhancements to Oracle's SQL and PL/SQL. And databases in general have jumped several orders of magnitude in size (number of records) since those days.

Refactoring, by Martin Fowler, copyright 1999, has held up pretty well, I think. It is written for an early version of Java, and object-oriented programming is less dominant, or anyway trendy, than it was in 1999. Still, it has advice to consider.

My copy of Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach by Hennessy and Patterson is quite old, copyright 1990. There have been a number of editions since then. It was written in the early days when RISC seemed to be undergoing a Cambrian Explosion, and RAID for storage was not yet invented. (Well, Patterson et al. hadn't yet popularized the notion.) But the principles remain sound. It is a student's book, and I should hand it off to a student who doesn't need the latest thinking.

Reading Green

 The Second Story outside carts had a Penguin paperback of three novels by Henry Green, Nothing, Doting, and Blindness. At $5, I thought it worth a look. It was.

My first impression was of the high proportion of dialogue in Nothing and Doting. The last books I read in which dialogue so greatly exceeded narration and dialogue were George Higgins's crime novels The Friends of Eddy Coyle and Digger's Game.

My second impression was of the build of the characters. One of the women in Nothing has fat fingers, so-called at least twice. One of the young women in Doting has fat thighs, another has fat features. The middle-aged woman has "bulk". I assume that the men are not lean, either, for one in Doting has given up lunching on account of his weight. Given that, it seems hazardous for a man to sit on the arm of a woman's chair, then slide his way in beside her; yet that happens a couple of times. Nor can I quite see how the maneuver is actually managed.

Evelyn Waugh wrote to Nancy Mitford, "I think nothing of Nothing." His objection was to the dialogue, which he thought wrong for characters of that class. Of course I have no way of evaluating that. Waugh also wrote poorly, but in passing, of Doting. Do the blurbs on back cover, from respected writers, have reference to these particular novels?

Blindness is a much earlier, very different novel. It reads as a first novel, and in fact it was. According to Wikipedia, it was largely written at Eton, which appears in the novel under the near-anagram "Noat".

Asquith

 Once I had read Roy Jenkins's biography Gladstone, I wished to read any other biographies he might have written. About twenty years ago, he brought out Churchill, which I read and passed along. I was aware that he had written a biography of H.H. Asquith, but didn't suppose that I was likely to encounter it. Last month, it turned up on the Second Story Books Recent Arrivals page.

Asquith makes for less astonishing, perhaps less entertaining, reading than the other two, for Asquith lacked the extravagant streak in his character. It is hard to imagine him infuriating the US and embarrassing his cabinet with a speech such as Gladstone gave in 1863. He seems to have reached maturity without the boyish streak that Churchill long retained. But by all accounts he was a very good lawyer and a sound prime minister.

Much of the history of his premiership I had read of, in George Dangerfield's The Strange Death of Liberal England: 1910-1914. The textual apparatus of Asquith is minimal, limited to end notes with title and author but not date or publisher; but the title of Chapter XVI, "Strange Ailments of Liberal England", seems to nod to Dangerfield's title. For the most part, the narrative and the evaluations are the same in both books. Dangerfield, having just those five years to cover, gives more detail.

Asquith had a thorough classical education at the City of London School and at Balliol College. He lacked the eccentricity to write long books on Homer, as Gladstone did. And clearly he did not restrict his reading to the classics, at least the ancient ones. Near the end of the book, Jenkins quotes Asquith's daughter on the return from his last (lost) election:

Groping wildly for a life-line that might draw me into the smooth waters by his side, I asked in as steady a voice as possible: "I suppose you haven't by any chance got an old P.G. Wodehouse in your bag that you could lend me?" A smile of instant response, mingled I thought with relief, lit up his face as he replied triumphantly: "Being a provident man I have got in my bag, not one, but four brand new ones."

In Larry McMurtry's memoir Books, he mentioned in passing meeting Jenkins, describing him (I recall) as "an amiable enough British pol." Not that far away, McMurtry wrote of having a fondness for British political biography. The conjunction surprised me, for at the time McMurtry wrote, Gladstone had been out for some years, Asquith (1961) for many years more. How did it not come up at their meeting that Jenkins wrote too?