David Lodge, RIP

 Last week, the New York Times carried an obituary of David Lodge, who died on New Years at the age of 89. Going through Wikipedia's list of his works, I find that I have read four of his novels, including his most recent, Deaf Sentence, which appeared in 2006.

 Alvin Kernan's memoir In Plato's Cave states that Stanley Fish cheerfully acknowledged that Lodge had modeled the character Morris Zapp (Changing Places and Small World) on him. The Times says that Fish put a Morris Zapp nameplate on his office door at Duke. That seems to me to speak well for Fish's sense of humor, and for Lodge's touch.

Books and Fates

One sees here and there the tag "habent libelli sua fata", "books have their fates". They do, and it has seemed to me that more and more it is a very quick fate--the Homeric epithet "okumoros", swift-fated, seems to apply. The book that was everywhere in 2010 became a special order in 2020, and now is simply unavailable at most stores.

A look through the best-seller lists of other years shows that the process is not always unfair, that many books deserve their quick disappearance. But there are others that deserve to be on the shelves and stay. Having looked into Sam Tanenhaus's biography of Whittaker Chambers, I thought it might be interesting to look into Lionel Trilling's novel The Middle of the Journey. The most likely local bookstore says that this is "not available"--NYRB Classics brought it back into print in 2002, but that was two dozen years ago. I gave a friend a copy of Hermann Broch's novel The Death of Virgil some years ago, but that also is not available. Well, Vintage brought it out 30 years ago. And apart from books never bought, there are those that one wishes to replace--lost by a loan, or to household disasters.

A textbook tells me that that the full clause is "pro captu lectoris habent libelli sua fata": books have their fates, according to the reader's ability. Fortunately, the ability of the reader is not fixed, and I have read with much interest books that I had set aside years before that as unreadable or uninteresting.

 

Then and Now

 In Chapter XI, "The Conqueror (1837)" of Across the Wide Missouri, Bernard DeVoto wrote of the American Fur Company's earnest but ineffectual response to the 1837 smallpox epidemic that devastated the tribes along the upper Missouri River:

Suppose however that [the company] had the knowledge of every American today--except the million or so who belong to anti-vaccination, anti-vivisection, anti-research organizations and sometimes produce smallpox epidemics which differ from that which destroyed the Mandans only in that the rest of have been vaccinated...

A page or so later DeVoto suggested the rural south as at least a recent area of resistance to vaccines. Such resistance had not become popular among the prosperous and expensively schooled.

Across the Wide Missouri appeared in 1947, and won a Pulitzer Prize and a Bancroft Prize.

Loie Fuller

 The New York Times last week noticed a new film, "Obsessed with Light", about the dancer Loie Fuller. I know little about dance, but one of the sections of Yeats's "1919" begins

When Loie Fuller's Chinese dancers unwound
A shining web, a floating ribbon of cloth,
It seemed that a dragon of air
Had fallen among dancers, had whirled them round
Or hurried them off on its own furious path;...

The movie does not seem to have made it to Washington yet. I will have to look out for it.

Glasses

When the effect of age on my eyes was beyond denying, the optometrist suggested progressive lenses, saying that they worked well for those who worked with computers. I found that this was so. I also found drawbacks. Steps down required care until I was used to the glasses. Distance vision was best at a narrow strip across the top of the lenses, which sometimes made me tuck my chin down to see a block or two down the street.

This time, with the distance band having moved a few degrees down, I thought that I should try bifocals. I got them on Monday. For distance they were excellent. For reading print they were good. For computer work they were deficient. I make my living working on computers.

The eyeglasses vendor will replace the bifocals with progressives, for a nominal price. I am wearing my old glasses until the new arrive.

The Cabinet

 In The English Constitution, Bagehot makes a case for the superiority of the British cabinet system over the American. When I read this, I was not really convinced, and may not be now. However, it appears to me that as the federal government has expanded--as the cabinet has expanded, and one might say diffused--the cabinet has lost power.

The third through fifth presidents of the United States had served in the Cabinet, and Van Buren and Buchanan after them. That I can recall, the next member of a Cabinet to become president was Herbert Hoover. The Roosevelts topped out at sub-cabinet level, as Assistant Secretaries of the Navy. George H. W. Bush was director of the CIA, but long before that post came to be part of the Cabinet.

Since the earliest days of the republic, there have been complaints of the president ignoring the Cabinet and taking advice elsewhere. Henry Adams quoted John Randolph in a speech of 1806:

The first question I asked when I saw the gentleman's resolution was, Is this a measure of the Cabinet? Not of an open declared Cabinet, but of an invisible, inscrutable, unconstitutional Cabinet, without responsibility, unknown to the Constitution. I speak of back-stairs influence-of men who bring messages to this House, which although they do not appear in the Journals, govern its decisions. Sir, the first question that I asked on the subject of British relations was, What is the opinion of the Cabinet; what measures will they recommend to Congress?--well knowing that whatever measures we might take they must execute them, and therefore that we should have their opinion on the subject. My answer was (and from a Cabinet minister, too), 'There is no longer any Cabinet!'

(The Cabinet then included James Madison and Albert Gallatin; but Randolph disliked Madison, and may have been disenchanted with Gallatin as impossible to intimidate. In any case, Randolph's quarrel had to do with the President as much as the Cabinet.) I remember accounts fifty years ago of Richard Nixon ignoring his Secretary of State in favor of Henry Kissinger, then his National Security Advisor. Have matters changed at all?

It is said that the President elect's last cabinet considered declaring him unable to continue under the fourth section of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, and did not. It is also said that the current President's staff kept the Cabinet away from the President and unable to judge his state. Perhaps Bagehot was right.

Now Gone

 In early May 2017, a tree at 16th Street and Meridian Place NW began to sag:

Within a week or so, somebody did a bit of trimming to let the pedestrians by more conveniently:

But earlier this fall, somebody just dealt with it,

leaving some child from the neighborhood to decorate what was left.