Things I Learned in Boston

We were in Boston at the end of last week. Having no duties to perform, I got to walk around and look at what interested me. I learned

1. Why Kendall Square Research, the long-closed supercomputer company was so named: Kendall Square in Cambridge is bordered by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, so it is a fine place to locate a company that needs excellent engineers.
2. That for some years I must have confused this with Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, "The Mushroom Capital of the World". I ceased to confuse them when I forgot about Kendall Square Research.
3. What William James's house looks like. Now, though, I can tell you only that it has a blue plate on the fence out front, giving the dates of his residence.
4. What the window of Ralph Waldo Emerson's dormitory room on Harvard Yard looks like. (A second-story window in a red brick wall.)
5. That the Institute of Contemporary Art looks far better from the water side than from the street.
6. That the T "Charlie Card" machines will not accept $5 bills of the older design.
7. That you must press the touchscreen "CASH" button on these machines before dropping in the five $1 coins it gave you in change for the last transaction; otherwise those coins are gone for good. (The next traveler who dropped in coins has my apologies.)
8. That Cambridge has more better bookstores close together than I remember to have seen, at least in some years. I don't now remember for sure whether the old Foreign Language Books on Dumbarton Street in Georgetown was comparable to Schoenhof's on Mt. Auburn Street in Cambridge, but I think it must have been smaller. And Foreign Language Books is long gone from  Georgetown.
9. That Boston's humidity toward the end of June is nothing to Washington's.

I'd happily visit again soon, but point 8 has increased my backlog of reading by several weeks.

The Vanishing English Major

Verlyn Klinkenborg writes in The New York Times of The Decline and Fall of the English Major. He has four points:

1. His students do not write well.
2. That were they better grounded in the humanities, they would write well, or at least better.
3. That the teaching of the humanities (or perhaps the learning) has fallen on hard times.
4. That this is in part because of societal pressure on students to study more profitable fields.

I agree with much of what he has to say, but would add a fifth point: the societal pressure on students to study more profitable fields is strongly correlated with the cost of college. Mr. Klinkenborg writes

In 1991, 165 students graduated from Yale with a B.A. in English literature. By 2012, that number was 62. In 1991, the top two majors at Yale were history and English. In 2013, they were economics and political science.

Well, the freshmen of the Yale class of 1991 paid about $17 thousand in tuition, room and board; those of the class of 2012 paid about $47 thousand. Adjusted for inflation, the difference is smaller, for 1987 tuition in 2008 dollars is about $32 thousand: call it an 88% increase. Between the 1991-1992 school years and the 2010-2011 school years, average pay for a teacher in a secondary school increased in 2011 dollars from $54,615 to $55,241. A discrepancy like that in rates of increase could make a student think harder about majors.

(The inflation calculator is provided by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, as are the statistics for teachers' salaries. The Yale tuition figures are from the Yale University Office of Institutional Research. Calculating the costs over four years, or the probability of a Yale graduate becoming a teacher in a secondary school, I leave as an exercise for the reader.)

Ratios

A friend, just returned from Barcelona, said that he had heard that they are many more women than men there in fact three to one. He apparently found the estimate plausible. His companion thought that this might be because he just doesn't notice the men.

When I first moved to Washington, DC, I heard that there were many more women than men here. I believe that the ratio I heard was 2 to 1. In Thomas Pynchon's V, set in 1956, the ratio is given as 8 to 1. I can't say that I ever noticed any such disproportion, unless maybe once in the salad line at a lunch spot. Probably between 1942 and 1946 there were many more women than men, since the government was growing rapidly and the armed services were drafting any man who was fit to serve. The 2010 census found 100 women to every 89 men, a ratio not far off the national one.

Listening Backward and Forward

One of the minor annoyances of advancing middle age is that I can no longer read over shoulders on public transportation. A book on the lap next to me I can read, but over the shoulder I can tell The Da Vinci Code from The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini only by bulk.

Yesterday, though, it occurred to me that there is a compensation in outdoors eavesdropping. My closing and overtaking speed, never elite, has diminished over the years, and so I spend more time in earshot of others on the routes that I run. On the trail about Porter St., I passed two women who were walking up the park as I ran down it. One had just uttered the word "amicable", a word unusual enough to catch my attention. I realized as I went on that I had heard "process", and before that "when I met him he was in the". This provided the word that I did not hear as we traveled away from each other, and I had the whole sentence, or at least clause: "when I met him he was in the process of an amicable divorce."

Variable Winds

Today I ran down the park to the Zoo and on towards P St.  The wind was steadily against me, and I thought this was all the better, for I would have it at my back on my return. As I struggled up Massachusetts Avenue toward Wisconsin, the wind in my face, I wondered at my naivete.

It is not, after all, as if I were new to the area and its weather. In 1980, at the Two Bridges run, I ran (as I thought) into persistent headwinds down to Mount Vernon, consoling myself with the thought that I would have it behind me on the return leg. I can hardly have been out of the Mount Vernon gates before I understood how wrong I was. I plodded on, until the lead woman in the race overtook me at National Airport. She and the man running with her looked so much stronger than I felt that the energy went out of me, and I had to walk a quarter of a mile or so before I could start running again.

Wilson and the Diplomats

In The Evolution of Diplomacy by Harold Nicolson, I find in the fourth chapter (lecture originally)

President Wilson was an idealist and, what was perhaps more dangerous, a consummate master of English prose. He shared with Robespierre the hallucination that their existed some mystic bond between him and "the people"--by which he meant not only the American people but the British, French, Italian, Rumanian, Jugo-Slav, Armenian, and even German peoples. If only he could penetrate the fog barrier of governments, politicians and officials, and convey the sweetness and light of his revelation to the ordinary peasant in the Banat, to the shepherds of Albania, or the dock-hands of Fiume, then reason, concord, and amity would spread in ever widening circles across the earth. He possessed, moreover, the gift of giving to commonplace ideas the resonance and authority of biblical sentences, and like all phraseologists, he became mesmerised by the strength and neatness of the phrases that he devised. During the long months of the Paris Peace Conference, I observed him with interest, admiration and anxiety, and became convinced that he regarded himself, not as a world statesman, but as a prophet designated to bring light to a dark world. It may have been for this reason that he forgot all about the American Constitution and Senator Lodge.

Nicolson being not only a career diplomat but a diplomat's son, the next paragraph begins

I have no intention of denigrating President Wilson, who was in many ways inspiring and inspired.

William Bullitt, later the first US ambassador to the USSR, about that time negotiated a convention with the Bolshevik government for the withdrawal of American troops from Russia. Wilson repudiated the convention. Bullitt's revenge was to collaborate with Sigmund Freud on a book psychoanalyzing Wilson.

The case of the Versailles Treaty and the case of the convention both point to a principle that Nicolson credits Cardinal Richelieu with establishing:

... that the most essential of all the components of sound diplomacy was the element of certainty. It was not only that the negotiation must result in agreements, the wording of which was so precise as to leave no scope for future evasions or misunderstandings: it was also that each party to a negotiation should know from the outset that the other party really represented the sovereign authority in his own country. Unless some certainty existed that an agreement once signed would be ratified and executed, then the give and take of negotiation became impossible, and international conferences degnerated into assemblies for the exchange of entertainment, platitudes or propaganda.

 Of course, under the US Constitution, this certainty can be harder to come by, for the Senate must ratify treaties. The difficulty was not wholly new with Henry Cabot Lodge and Woodrow Wilson: Jay's treaty with the United Kingdom, one of the first concluded under the constitution, was in danger of repudiation

Represented by Llamas

The Russian Orthodox church around the corner had a used book sale today. By the exercise of some will power, I managed to buy only three books, all slim. Along the way, though, I looked into a Russian-English dictionary, and a sentence caught my eye:

"The ruminants are represented in that country by llamas."

Now, it must be difficult to find or make specimen sentences to  illustrate usage. Yet this sentence seems to me to have the quality of those one hears in dreams, that make perfect sense then but leave one puzzled on waking.