Lists and Litanies

 Lately I have noticed that journalists think that "litany" is a fancier word for "list", or perhaps means "long list". In today's newspaper, one writes that the failure of Rudolph Giuliani's bankruptcy filing exposes him to a litany of creditors. I wonder how anyone so understanding "litany" came to hear of the word in the first place.

It is true that some litanies are built on lists: of divine or Marian titles, of saints, of sins to be protected against. But the list as such is not a litany, without the response from the congregation, say "Have mercy on us" or "Pray for us". The word derives from the Greek "litaino" or "litaneuo", beseech or request.

Pollen

 At the end of June and in July, lilies bloom in the garden. They are beautiful to see,

 

 

and in places they are hard to brush past without touching the stamens. As you would suppose, the pollen that comes off on one's clothes is the color of ground red pepper. After a day or two, it fades to a yellow-brown like that of a turmeric stain.

Fortunately, the errands that take me past the lilies do not require good clothes.

Heavy Hitters

 Early on in a recent New Yorker piece about repeat memoirists, the author writes

To be fair, memoirs have exhibited a tendency to multiply ever since Augustine recalled pocketing those pears. His "Confessions", which began appearing around 397 C.E., were spread over thirteen books, each conceived as a distinct unit.

Well, the last four books consist of philosophical and theological reflections. And in this case "book" means something other than a hefty bound volume: the handiest copy of The Confessions on my shelves, Garry Wills's translation, runs to 340 pages, autobiography and the rest together. The modern memoir of a comparably young man, Dave Eggers's A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, takes four hundred pages to cover fewer years.

The next sentence runs

In his wake, heavy hitters have included Diana Athill, Shirley MacLaine, Maya Angelou, and Augusten Burroughs, each of whom have produced a proper shelf of memoirs.

Someone understanding the reference of "heavy hitters" could say whether it is a match card or a lineup card we should not trust the author with.

 

Programming and Art

 The next book for our neighborhood book club is Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin, which follows a couple of the young in Los Angeles from late childhood through their early thirties, say 1987 through 2015, as they found and continue a business that creates computer games. A book review putting it that way would not interest me in the book, but I found the book very readable. I finished its 400 pages in a week or so.

One curious aspect of the book was its detachment from the work of computer programming. It mentions the programming language Java (perhaps a few months early for Java's release), and I think might mention BASIC. Almost the only terms of art are "bug" and "debugging". "Interrupt" and "stack" you will not find.

This is not an unreasonable choice. Programming can be very absorbing, but watching somebody program is indistinguishable from watching someone stare at a screen and occasionally press on a keyboard. It takes a good deal of patience for the non-programmer to sit and watch somebody program. When I saw the movie The Social Network, I was impressed at the manner in which the writers and producers had managed to obscure this truth: in the movie programming was hardly glanced at, except when done by the drunk or the oblivious.

Frederick Crews, RIP

 Today's New York Times carries an obituary of the critic Frederick Crews. The headline calls him a "Withering Critic of Freud", featuring what I had supposed was a sideline of his. I knew of him as a literary critic, though actually I had not read his chief works in that line.

 The one book of Crews's that I did read was The Pooh Perplex, a collection of essays on Winnie the Pooh in the manner of then (1963) prominent critics. Under the invented names,  I was able to pick out Fredson Bowers, F.R. Leavis, Leslie Fiedler, and D.W. Robertson. No doubt the more widely read could pick out more. I regret that I never bought for myself a copy of Post-Modern Pooh, published in 2001.

Series

 A visit to Second Story Books led to the purchase of The Wittgenstein Reader, edited by Anthony Kenny. The book is a collection of excerpts from Wittgenstein's works. I have copies of most or all of the excerpted works; but it is worth seeing how a gifted editor will assemble pieces of an author's work to cast more light on one another.

In the chapter Kenny names "Intentions", there are paragraphs in which Wittgenstein discusses what it means to understand something. As an example of something to be understood, he gives the series of natural numbers, 0, 1, 2, 3, ... and the task of teaching it to someone. What he says about how we judge understanding here makes sense. Yet the paragraphs leave the impression that teaching someone the series could be a challenge. (Philosophical Investigations I, sections 143 and following.) I had read these paragraphs before, but today I thought of something else.

In the years of the Baby Boom, I was a second grader in a classroom of about fifty others. Our teacher's notion of restoring order when we made a disturbance--noise, notes, talking--was to tell us to take out a clean piece of paper and write the numbers from one to one hundred. Commonly, the quick writers got to one hundred very quickly, while those like me were in the upper twenties. Often, they made more disturbances, and the teacher would bid up the numbers. I believe that more than once she told us to write the numbers up to one thousand.

We all did it. (Well, as time allowed--some of us were under 300 when the bell rang.) She did not, that I remember, judge our understanding of the series. She may not have collected the papers.

The router's lease hath all too short a date.

 Memory says that during the pandemic I worked from home with a network connection as steady as if I had been at the office and the computer had been connected by cable to the building network. Perhaps memory exaggerates.

We mostly returned to the office in mid-2021. For a while I did not work much from home, then presently I would work from home a day or two each week. At some point I found that the network connection to work--a virtual private network or VPN--just wasn't as stable. I put up with it, though.

Recently, I found that I was disconnected too often, and I started writing down the times of disconnection. These were almost exactly an hour apart. Today, after one of the disconnections, I noticed a message about the underlying network, and I had a look at the PC's networking setup with ipconfig /all. I was greatly interested to see that my DHCP lease was of one hour. (Dynamic Host Control Protocol or DHCP is a method by which a server can manage the network configuration of many client machines.) I'm used to DHCP lease durations measured in days, not hours.

On logging into our router, I found that the DHCP lease duration was indeed set to 3600 seconds, one hour. I bumped it up to eight hours, restarted the computer, and found that I now had a lease of eight hours. I predict that my next day working from home will be less frustrating.

I assume that our ISP, which provided the unit that serves as both router and cable modem, set the configuration as I saw it. I wonder what they were thinking to set the lease duration so low.