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.

The Best Language

 While I was dusting off books to return them to a shelf, a copy of Dante's De Volgari Eloquentia happened to open to Book II, Chapter 1, where I noticed

And since language is an instrument for our thoughts just as a horse is for a soldier, and since the best horse is appropriate for the best soldier, so the best language suits the best thoughts. But the best thoughts are impossible without learning and intelligence; so the best language will suit only those who have intelligence and learning.

 Unfortunately, he goes on to say, not all poets are equipped with intelligence and learning.

Fred Brooks, RIP

 Fred Brooks, Jr., the manager of IBM's S/360 project, died yesterday at the age of 81. The S/360 line of computers revolutionized the computer business, providing models ranging from the small to the large, all capable of running the same software--and for that matter capable of running the software of a prior IBM line. The S/360 line also established (or helped to establish) the eight-bit byte as standard. Brooks summarized what he had learned from the project in The Mythical Man-Month. My copy of the 25th anniversary edition is by now 27 years old. (It is also lent out, which may be the case with many copies of such books.) And he wrote an influential, or at least frequently quoted, essay "No Silver Bullets" about the challenges of software production.

The Computer History Museum has an interesting interview of Brooks by Grady Booch.

 

Doris Grumbach, RIP

 This week, the New York Times carried an obituary of Doris Grumbach, who died on November 4, at the age of 104. The obituary states that Ms. Grumbach wrote six memoirs, published between 1991 and 2000. She had even by then many years to cover. The obituary also lists several novels.

Her long-time partner was a bookseller. I'm fairly sure that Ms. Grumbach owned a piece of a bookstore in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Washington, DC, a store I looked into once more than forty years ago. How I would have known that she owned it, I can't say. I thought that she had reviewed books for The Washington Post in those days, but if so, the Times lumps the Post in with "many other publications."

The History of His Parish

 Whispering Gums discusses nonfiction, and asks why we read it. A passage from Thoreau's journals, dated March 18, 1861, offers a partial answer:

You can't read any genuine history--as that of Herodotus or the Venerable Bede--without perceiving that our interest depends not on the subject but on the man,--and on the manner in which he treats his subject and on the importance he gives it. A feeble writer and without genius must have what he thinks a great theme, which we are already interested in through the accounts of others, but a genius--a Shakespeare for instance--would make the history of his parish more interesting than another's history of the world.

This is fair--I would hesitate to ready anyone else's four hundred pages about week of canoeing, but am happy to have read Thoreau's.

On the other hand, there is no end to the making of books, yet the supply of genius is limited. Of the nonfiction--history, biography, memoir, other--that I have read in the past year, one book was a biography of a genius, Erasmus, none were by geniuses. But some offered history I didn't know, or thoughtful reflections on a life, or amusing accounts of some topic.

A Flood and Some Books

 From the stairs this morning I saw condensation on the window and transom of the front door, which I would not have expected in October. A large puddle on the kitchen floor explained this, and I roused my wife to start on the cleanup while I went to turn off the water at the main shutoff valve. (The valve is awkward to reach, and stiff to turn.) The water clearly came from the dishwasher. The dishwasher had caused no problems in eighteen years, but made up for that overnight. The plumber tells us that the failure is in the dishwasher, not in any connection to it.

The basement had its own puddle, aggravated by fallen drywall tape and drywall debris. After some mopping, I hauled wet rugs into the backyard. One remained on the steps for some time until drained enough to be manageable. We will need to bring in someone to do serious drywall work.

One bookcase suffered. The books were swollen, so that it was difficult to extract the first couple from each shelf. Not all the books were affected, maybe eight of every ten, and those that were varied from a little damp to quite wet. Some are probably not salvageable. I don't know whether the bookcase itself will still be usable, for it is of veneer over plywood.

Had I been asked whether I wished to discard any of the books on the three shelves, I'd have probably said, No, why? Yet now the question for some is whether I'll replace them, and there the answer sometimes is No. I found Leszek Kolakowski's God Owes Us Nothing tremendously interesting, but do I need to review the theological history of Jansenism? Perhaps not. I have probably looked into John Lukacs's The Last European War within the last year or so, but will I replace that? Maybe not. On the other hand, I do want to have copies of An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Between Meals: An Appetite for Paris, The Last Puritan, and some others that suffered damage.

Longevity

About twenty years ago, I settled on a barbershop near work. The barbers then working there were mature, one having served in the U.S. Army in WW II.  He must have been born no later than 1928, therefore he must have been seventy-four or seventy-five when I first met him. The other had graduated from high school the year I was born, so he was about ten years younger.

The barbershop has since changed hands. The current owner told me today that she will be seventy-nine in December. I remarked that the veteran must have worked at least until he was eighty. She said that in fact he worked until he was ninety--though I don't think this can have been full time.  She said also that a lot of barbers work until quite old. Her explanation was that many of them have few friends to spend time with upon retirement. Perhaps so. It seems the sort of work that would be hard on one though, requiring one to stand while working, yet not yielding the benefit of steady walking.

 

Last Words

 A footnote in Philippa Foot's Natural Goodness give alternative versions of William Pitt the Younger's last words:

William Pitt the Younger's last words may have been, "Oh, my country! How I leave my country!", but in a different report, "I think I could eat one of Bellamy's veal pies." See Lord Roseberry, Pitt, p. 269 and Appendix D.

 An essay in Simon Leys's The Hall of Uselessness is called "Tell Them I Said Something", after the purported last words of Pancho Villa in front of a firing squad: "It can't end like this: Tell them I said something." The account that Leys gives seems unlikely, for Villa died by gunfire, but in an ambush, and probably hadn't the time to say much of anything. Pitt's friends, though, may have done well by him in telling what he might have said.

John Adams seems to have come up with admirable last words: "Jefferson survives." But they just missed being correct, for Jefferson died a little earlier on the same day, July 4, 1826,

The Zoo Loop Trail

 The trail skirting the Zoo tunnel reopened sometime last week. I discovered this on my run Sunday, and was delighted. Bypassing the tunnel by following the Klingle Road path was fine, if one was energetic enough for the hill. Running through the tunnel was OK, only the sidewalk was narrow and one had to squeeze around bicyclists and other pedestrians.  But the level trail is better than either.

I had run on this stretch of path on and off from about 1981 until it was closed for repair in 2016. I had never known that it had a name, and perhaps it didn't. A sign designates it as the Zoo Loop Trail, and gives its length as .5 miles. I'd have guessed it to be nearer a third of a mile.

Mike Causey, RIP

 Wednesday's Washington Post carries an obituary of Mike Causey, who for thirty years wrote the column the Federal Diary, a column covering the federal workforce and matters affecting it. The obituary credits him with popularizing, if not necessarily inventing, the expression "inside the Beltway." It says also that he was one of the first to make a circuit of the Beltway (I-495 and I-95) in 1964, of course for his job. Causey left in the Post in 2000 for the Federal News Network. He died in his offices there on September 26, after filing his last column.

The obituary remarks that Causey often broke news in his column, far back in the newspaper, that would show up a couple of weeks later on the front page with a big headline. If I recall correctly, The Washington Monthly forty years ago regarded this as a scandal. According to the obituary, Causey was mostly amused by it.

Casual Reading: Houses

It must have been about thirty years ago that I read a review of David Owen's The Walls Around Us: A Thinking Person's Guide to How a House Works in The Washington Post, for the book was published in October 1991. I knew of Owen as an entertaining writer, and the topic was one that much occupied me just then, but I did not buy a copy. I must have been too busy in my own dealings with how a row house did and did not work.

Last week, I rectified my neglect, for I found and read a copy. I greatly enjoyed it, and will send it on to my brother, who has undertaken much more ambitious home projects than I would think of. Yet I can't say that practically speaking I have missed out on that much over the thirty years. Probably sixty percent of what Owen writes of I had learned by then or have learned since. The other forty percent involves work I would not undertake--work with copper pipes and blow torches, work with power saws and routers, doing my own drywall work.

But Owen is quite entertaining. He is good on the madness that develops when the upper middle class deals with kitchens--

They live in the apartment just half the year, and when they are in residence they almost always eat out. ... The rest of the kitchen gets a real workout only during parties, when it used not by the couple but by people they have hired.
This couple did not build a drop-dead kitchen because they wanted to create a pleasant working environment for servant and caterers. They did it because they wanted to send the world a message about themselves. Their kitchen is not so much a place to cook as it is an affirmation of their wealth and good taste.

Or, occasionally, when it does its own home renovation:

The only real setback I encountered involved a wallboard screw that made a funny noise as I drove it in. I looked at it for a while and then unscrewed it. A thin column of water streamed horrifyingly through the hole. Like most plumbing disasters, this one occurred late on a Saturday night.

The Walls Around Us seems to be out of print now--I must have contributed to this, in a small way, by my long delay in finding a copy. It does not seem to be hard to find used, though one must distinguish it from a novel of that name by one Nova Ren Suma.

 

 

What Am I Missing?

 John Jay Chapman's preface to the second edition of his William Lloyd Garrison begins

I once knew a man who wrote a brilliant biography of Abraham Lincoln. He himself belonged to the Civil War epoch, and while writing the book in about the year 1895, he became so absorbed and excited by that war as he studied it, and lived it over again, that he could not sleep at night. He paced the room, lost in thought, awed by his subject. It was a contemporary of this biographer who told me that, while the Civil War was in progress, the enthusiastic historian had taken no interest in it; it didn't seem to attract his attention.

I find this odd, yet I have no doubt that there are matters I ignored between say 1975 and 1985 that will interest the future much, and would interest me also--if not to the point of insomnia--were they brought to my attention.

Obstructions

This summer, the city began a project to repair the bridge that carries 16th St. NW over Piney Branch Parkway. The project first closed off the northbound lanes and the sidewalk on that side, the east side. Traffic markers redirected the flow of traffic. Now the work is on the southbound, west side. I don't see what has been done so far on the east side except for the removal of some asphalt. The holes in the screen that prevents the idle from throwing objects onto the road below, and prevents the suicidal from jumping, still has a hole cut in it. The sidewalk is not repaired.

This morning, I noticed that the catwalk beside the bridge is open at the north end. I trust that it is built well--many construction workers are heavier than I am--but I have no real interest in walking on it. Still I liked the idea of crossing on the catwalk, and checked at the south end. There I found it blocked by a chain-link gate, secured by a spike in the pavement. I did not bother to pull at the spike to see how well set it is.

In the summer of 2016, high water in Rock Creek damaged the trail that allows pedestrians and bicyclists to skirt the National Zoo grounds, and avoid going through the tunnel below the Zoo. For a long time there was no sign of work. Then there were signs of work, then signs of near completion. Now from both ends of the tunnel, it appears that the trail--with a new bridge on the downstream side--is all ready. Yet the gates remain closed. I understand that projects take in more work that outsiders imagine. Still, I'm ready for this one to be done.

Many years ago, out running, I got to the downstream Zoo gate on the old trail, and found the gate closed. I suppose the chain that secured it was a bit long, and certainly I was thin: I squeezed through, and then somehow got out at the other end. A few days later I noticed three marks on a bicep, and imagined that they meant an outbreak of shingles, something I had already experienced, and did not enjoy. It was only when the marks did not develop but faded that I remembered squeezing through the gate, and remembered that the ends of some chain link had scratched me.

Units of Measure

 In An Elegant Defense: The Extraordinary New Science of the Immune System, a passage stopped me for a moment:

... Dr. Lambert drained 65 cubic centimeters of fluid from her left knee (about 65 teaspoons).

First, I thought this unhelpful. I know from cooking the size of a teaspoon, but seldom have reason to measure out more than one or two of them--how much room do 65 take? Second, a bit of calculation suggested that something was wrong. Sixty-five is about a sixteenth of 1000; a cubic centimeter is equivalent to a milliliter, and a quart is a bit less than a liter: so 65 milliliters are a bit more than a sixteenth of a quart, two ounces or a quarter of a cup. A teaspoon is a third of a tablespoon; four tablespoons make a quarter cup; 65 teaspoons ought to be a bit more than a cup and a quarter. It appears that the author simply forgot to apply a factor of five: five milliliters make a teaspoon, so one gets 13 teaspoons, 4.3 tablespoons, or a quarter cup and a bit.

All of this assumes that the measure in cubic centimeters is correct. In the kitchen, a quarter cup is small, but in the knee it might be conspicuous and inconvenient. I infer that we are supposed to be impressed by the amount. I have no desire to find out by experience.

 

Discomfiture

 Noticed today in Edmund Wilson's The Thirties, edited by Leon Edel, chapter "Washington, 1934":

[My infected nose became worse, and I had to go to the hospital. There I added to my discomfiture by reading Hegel's Philosophy of History.]

Given the quantity of Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky that Wilson had read or was shortly to read, a bit of Hegel doesn't sound that bad.

Foothills and Thresholds

 The New York Times, writing a few weeks ago of a new documentary on Leonard Cohen, mentioned a phrase occurring in one of his songs, "the foothills of old age". I did not read the article through, or with full attention. But it appeared that the writer, or somebody the writer interviewed, found the phrase telling.

It occurred to me that there is an expression in Homer relating thresholds to old age, γήραος οὐδός. I found that the version of Liddell and Scott available at the Perseus project regards the phrase as meaning "the threshold that is old age", the threshold, that is, leading out of life. Autenrieth's Homeric lexicon supports this reading, as does Cunliffe's. So do the notes to the Oxford World Classics edition of The Republic. On the other hand, an abridged Liddell and Scott on the shelves says "the threshold or verge of old age". W. B. Stanford leaves the question open in the notes to his edition of The Odyssey.

The majority reading--that of the unabridged Liddell and Scott, Autenrieth, and Cunliffe--is distinctly less comforting. It brings to mind Byron's reply to birthday wishes from Thomas Moore: "D--n your nel mezzo cammin--you should say 'the prime of life,' a much more consoling expression." Certainly Stanford's reading is much more consoling.

Justice and Whigs

Over the last several weeks, I read A Theory of Justice by John Rawls, as time and energy allowed. It offers a closely argued adaptation of the social contract theory, in opposition to the utilitarian ethics that had dominated English--or English-speaking--social thought since the days of Smith and Hume. There are pages that read as if something had been obscured in the revisions for the second edition; but the fault is likely in my reading. It will be a while before I return for a second reading, though, for A Theory of Justice takes up 500 pages before the index.

During some of this time, I found myself wanting to read, yet without the energy to concentrate on Rawls. One of the books I looked into was The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War by Michael F. Holt. This book runs to 950 pages before the notes, not quite 40 for every year of the party's existence, 1833 through 1856. It makes a curious contrast to A Theory of Justice, for while Rawls tells us how a constitutional democracy might arrive at just rules and execute them, Holt tells us how one such democracy operated: with a concern for power and patronage at least as strong as its concern for abstract (or any other) justice. One must keep track of Hunker Democrats, Barn Burner Democrats, Silver Gray Whigs, Native Americans (not the people who were here before Columbus), canal board and customs house patronage, and so on. It is not the easiest book to read through. It is not dense with argument and inference, rather it is crammed with facts, not always organized in proportion to their importance.

A Tech Tip

 On Friday, I noticed a blog post by Tim Bray on the deficits in machine learning (ML). One of the cases he mentioned was Google's occasional tendency to place wanted emails in the Spam folder. On reading this, it occurred to me that I had recently found an email from a friend in the Spam folder. I had then marked that email as not spam, or anyway moved it to the in box, and hoped this would serve as a hint. I checked, though, and found seven such emails going back about three weeks.

Having moved these back to the in box, I had a look at the Gmail settings. It turns out that there is an option under "Filters and Blocked Addresses" to provide an email and use the setting "Never send it to Spam." The lesson seems to be that Gmail users should periodically check the Spam folder, which holds messages for one month only, and that they should remember that "Filters and Blocked Addresses" can be used to add never-blocked addresses.

Keys and Pages

 It has been quite a while since I last read through Middlemarch, and when I think of the book it is more likely to be in connection with electoral shenanigans than with anything else. Yet I remember that somewhere in Henry Adams's letters he wrote to a friend that he, Adams, was turning into a dreadful Casaubon, taking George Eliot's unfortunate cleric, author of the projected Key to All Mythologies, as the type of the pedant.

The other day, I followed up a reference in Peter Green's Antioch to Actium to see where exactly one finds the attribution to Callimachus of the dictum "big book, big evil." The note says Athenaeus 2.72a. Of the Perseus project's three versions of Athenaeus's The Deipnosophists,  the first had the corresponding numbering. But where one expects items at Perseus to be "chunked" by book, or by chapter or (if Biblical) verse, the first version of The Deipnosophists on Perseus, is by "casaubonpage". This was something of a surprise.

 It appears, though, that the "casaubonpage" takes its name from the French philologist Isaac Casaubon (1579-1614).  Wikipedia says that the editing of and commentary on The Deipnosophists was Isaac Casaubon's magnum opus. Judging from what I see on Perseus, either the commentary was large or the pages were small.

The Committee

 In What I Think I Did, Larry Woiwode quotes a conversation with his professor Charles Shattuck:

"So often I'm asked to chair the departmental committee that awards the writing prizes. This year it was no question with the committee on short stories--the pair of stories, submitted by 'number 19' were beyond measure the best of the season."

"Once we agreed on that, we hurried to the office to discover who the author of these brilliant revelations of a feminine imagination could be--so sensitive, so delicately phrased, so poetic, yes, in the highest sense!--I run out of terms we were using to characterize my nineteen-year-old feminine author, and in our hurry to find out who, this honestly came to me: that lovely young woman my feature actor [again, Woiwode] has been captivated by!"

"But no, Larry, it's you! You're the one. Dear Larry, good Larry, fine Larry, you've won it! How could you keep this from me?"

 I wonder how many women were on the committee that year, 1961? The question would not have occurred to at 20, or perhaps at 30, but it does now. I am happy to suppose that professors who read and grade the work of many young women every semester do know more about the feminine imagination than most male civilians would; still, I wonder.

Order of Adjectives

 In teaching English as a Second Language (ESL), I learned that there is a rule governing the order of certain adjectives, as in describing clothes: size, then color, then pattern. I suppose that I had followed this consistently from childhood without ever thinking to articulate it.

It is easy to think of at least two-component examples from titles of songs or books: "Long Black Veil", Thin Red Line, and so on. I found it harder to think of those with three components, though I know perfectly well that my wife has a long black and white striped dress. But this year, I thought of a title that included all components, in proper order: "Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini". I did not mention this to the class, given the difficulty of explaining the terms for size.

Paul Vance, who wrote the lyrics to "Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini" died last month. The New York Times carried an informative obituary of him.

Reading Matter

 I am in a hotel room in Philadelphia, near the Pennsylvania Convention Center. The room is clean and reasonably quiet. But it amazed me with its lack of reading matter. A canvass of the room showed the evacuation plan attached to the inside of the door, telephone instructions attached to the phone, operational instructions on the safe, and such labels as appear on the products in the bathroom and on the coffee. There is no stationery, no local information, no Gideon Bible. Management has concluded that the generation now traveling does not read print. I think this is premature.

Ties

 Clive James wrote that

Auden lived long enough for me to see his tie. I thought it had been presented to him by Jackson Pollock until I realized that it was a plain tie plus food.

("Sergei Diaghilev", collected in  Cultural Amnesia.)

In his memoir What I Think I Did, the late Larry Woiwode reported that

A sad-eyed grad who attended the Iowa Workshop and is back for his Ph.D. says Illinois lost its real writer, Bill Gass, when somebody in the administration complained about the food on his ties.

Well, since the beginning of the pandemic I have stained no ties, for I have rarely worn one.

 

Ships and Prisons

 Happening to look into The Anatomy of Melancholy, close to where it split into halves, I found

What is a ship but a prison?

Having recently noticed, quoted in The Hall of Uselessness, one of Samuel Johnson's comparisons of ships to jails, to the advantage of the latter,  this set me to wondering how far the comparison goes back? Hardly, I would think, to classical antiquity. The Greeks and Romans did not make long sea voyages. Certainly the Mediterranean had galleys that were prisons for the oarsmen; but Burton and Johnson seem to have a different kind of servitude in mind.

There is a story of one POW at the Hanoi Hilton consoling another with the reflection that it still beat sea duty. Johnson said that in a jail one commonly had better company: but in this case I believe that both of the POWs were naval aviators.

People Also Ask

 A moment ago, I went to Google to verify the title of A Confederacy of Dunces, being momentarily unsure about the article. The first item on the page is a link to Wikipedia, and a very brief description. Just below that is a heading, "People also ask", under which the first question is

What is the point of A Confederacy of Dunces?

I am reminded of a passage from Leave It to Psmith, when the librarian remarks to Psmith that the detective novel he is reading looks quite enjoyable, and Psmith, then masquerading as a Canadian poet, says, "Ah, but what does it teach?".

Ford and Forward

 The primary election in Washington, DC,  is about a month away, and many signs are up. Most or all have URLs on them. Those running for nomination to city-wide offices--mayor, attorney general, etc.--tend to have domain names of the form namefordc.org. Those running for nomination to the council seat for a ward have domain names of the form nameforwardn.org. So for example one has "bowserfordc.org" or "monashforward3.org".  I find that my eye tends to pick out the "ford" in "fordc" and the "forward" in "forward3"

The Internet of Things

 Suppose that somebody ran an automated scan of your network for vulnerabilities, and reported that this web server had an outdated version of PHP, and that one an outdated version of JQuery. You would know to deal with this: if in a hurry, you would upgrade the packages at once, and trust in the developers to have maintained compatibility. If cautious, you might clone the servers, upgrade, and test carefully before upgrading the production servers. Either way, the path to the upgrade would be clear.

Now suppose that the outdated version warnings came attached to addresses that you did not recognize, and that on checking you found that they belonged to televisions and security cameras. Documentation on maintaining web servers is an internet search away, but not necessarily when those web servers simply provide the management interface for a device. A friend remarks that such servers could be implemented in firmware and essentially impossible for the owner to upgrade.

What can happen if someone uses a vulnerability in PHP or JQuery to take over a television or camera? Perhaps they could bore us by showing bad movies, or stream live video of our yards in Pyongyang. More likely, I suppose, intruders could set up the device as a base from which to try to break into more interesting systems. I would think that the facilities offered by a camera would be substantially less than those of a general-purpose computer, but I don't know.

Do "smart" devices with network interfaces--refrigerators, washing machines, etc.--make one's home less secure? I suspect that they do, but not substantially so, mostly because so much of the home is likely to be insecure already--routers with weak passwords, PCs without anti-virus software, users careless about clicking on links. Still, I wish that we didn't have to worry about the security of computers in devices that don't appear to have them.

Over the Heads

 Having found my copy of The Hunter Gracchus by Guy Davenport, I turned to an essay I did not remember, "Travel Reconsidered", and saw

This past summer I was cooling my heels outside the Musée du Louvre, a shrine not to be missed by the passionate pilgrim (Henry James's phrase for the American absorbing culture in Europe). Two such pilgrims with whom I was on vacation had wanted to see the Mona Lisa, and I, having shown them what I wanted them to see, had declined to try to see Leonardo's painting over the heads of five Lutheran Sunday School classes from Oslo, two busloads of Japanese businessmen, and a contingent of Mexican Rotarians.

I recall seeing the painting at some distance in 2007, and supposing that the crowds were brought by the popularity of The Da Vinci Code. But The Hunter Gracchus was published in 1996, so one can blame Dan Brown only so far. I do remember thinking that one could build a good small city museum around the paintings on any ten linear yards of the walls past which folks marched, eyes front, to see the Mona Lisa.

A couple of fellow Americans informed Davenport that the Mona Lisa was at the Louver, across town, and that what he was looking at was not the Louver but an old royal palace. Well, one can, as he goes on to write, get misinformation closer to home.

Grundoons and Others

 When my father worked at a Geological Survey laboratory in the early to middle 1950s, "grundoon" was a common facetious term for a small child. This was about the peak of the baby boom, so the term must have received a lot of use. I had supposed that "grundoon" was somehow related to "grandson", for I first heard it in relation to my father's grandson. In fact, the term came from Walt Kelly's comic strip Pogo, and the Grundoon was a baby groundhog.

When I first encountered the original Grundoon, in the book I Go Pogo, it was clear how the expression had caught on. One notices two qualities of the Grundoon: he is always asleep, and he is always utterly limber, draped over someone's forearm. Newborns spend most of their time sleeping, and they are very limber. It is true that few of them have the fine head of hair, something like Elvis Presley's, that I recall the Grundoon as having.

This came to mind at the sight of a neighbor's daughter, just two months old, and sometimes to be seen toted in a sling, curled up. We have met seldom, and so far I think she has been asleep or drowsy each time.

In Janet Lewis's novel The Invasion, Waub-ojeeg, a chief of the Ojibways along the western end of Lake Superior, and his son-in-law John Johnston, consider the infant Lewis Saurin Johnston:

One evening as the grandmother was taking the child back to his mother, his grandfather said, softly, affectionately, "Very soon he will be doing the only thing that Manabozho [a god of the Ojibways] could never do. You will be proud of him then."
"And what was that?" asked Johnston innocently.
"Manabozho could not put his toe in his mouth."

 

 

Rereading A Conspiracy of Dunces

 The book for the next meeting of our neighborhood book club is A Conspiracy of Dunces by John Kennedy O'Toole. The last time I read the book was probably forty years ago. I found that I remembered it tolerably well--only one character, Professor Talc, seemed wholly new, and he is a minor character. But pretty much everyone else seemed familiar, if not by name then by role.

It struck me in the reading that I have very little sense of Ignatius O'Reilly's voice. Does he sound like Foghorn Leghorn? Does he sound like someone with a heavy New York accent of the type less frequently heard now? Should I be hearing a bass or a baritone, considering his size? This did not disturb me the first time I read the book. Yet given the rich absurdity of nearly everything Ignatius says or writes, it would be better to be able to imagine the voice. Most of the rest of the cast speaks an English that is just enough off to guide one: "Idnatius" for "Ignatius", "ersters" for "oysters", "nucular bum" for "nuclear bomb". But Ignatius has been to school, and acquired diction, if not sense.

And there seemed to a lot of screaming: desk sergeants at patrolmen, bar owners at their staff, the residents of Constantine Street at neighbors and family. Is the screaming what a Midwesterner would call "yelling"? I think of screaming as more nearly unhinged than yelling.

 The book aged pretty well, I thought. There are usually reservations when one rereads, and this was not an exception. It seemed to me that Burma Jones's dialogue would have improved by losing about every other "Whoa!". Mrs. Levy served a purpose in the plot, but otherwise cluttered the page without gaining plausibility or adding much. And as I said, I couldn't hear Ignatius's voice.

The Great Cryptogram

 Second Story Books has the two volumes of Ignatius Donnelly's The Great Cryptogram: Francis Bacon's Cipher in the So-Called Shakespeare Plays and will sell them to you for $37.50. Together, they amount to 998 pages. The thought of all that print brings to mind the fellow in Wodehouse, one of the Mulliners perhaps, who tried to ingratiate himself with his beloved's eccentric aunt by reading up on the Baconian theory: for his trouble he found himself the audience of her long and bewildering explanation of some point, an explanation said to be unusually short and lucid for a Baconian's. It also reminds me what heroic reading Samuel Schoenbaum undertook when writing Shakespeare's Lives.

Brought to You by the U.S. Air Force

 Happening to look back at the front matter of First-Order Logic by Raymond M. Smullyan, I noticed that

The research of this study was sponsored
by the Information Research Division, Air Force Office
of Scientific Research, under Grant No. 433-65.

  I had known of the Air Force's role in sponsoring studies in operations research and computing, but I had not known that it sponsored studies in logic per se.

Lost Manuscripts

 Today I noticed in looking into a volume by John Lukacs the passage

In one instance, the book was delayed when the secretary who was supposed to retype the manuscript (the ephemeral paramour of the chief editor) forgot it in the broom closet of her summer rental apartment on Fire Island.

The book was The Last European War, 1939-1941, the passage appeared first in Confessions of an Original Sinner.

 This recalled what Wright Morris says in A Cloud of Light of his second novel, The Man Who Was:

... one of my first readers, a teacher at the Baldwin School, a Swiss woman with a profound dislike for speed reading, called me to ask if there was not something peculiar with a line of text on page 219. This line read "To get her mind off Boulder Dam I took the road up Baldy wanted to know about Boulder Dam." I allowed as how the line did sound a bit strange. A word or a phrase had been dropped. I would hasten to check on it. On checking this out--which took some time since I lacked the original copy of the manuscript--I found that eight or ten pages were missing.... Some months later, conducting my own inscrutable investigation, I discovered that the editor in charge of the galleys had been suffering a mid-career crisis, complicated romantically, that had finally revealed itself in pages missing from assorted galleys. They had simply vanished. The prime exhibit, designed to calm small losers like myself, was a mystery novel, written by Marjorie Bonner, the wife of Malcolm Lowry, which  was published without its concluding chapter. No question that this book was a mystery that remained unsolved. Only a handful of readers, besides the author, took the pains to point this out.

Here I don't see how lost galleys should have created the gaps. One sent galley proofs out for proofreading and perhaps reviews: the galleys themselves, long, heavy trays of type, by then usually Linotype slugs, never left the printer's. I would have expected bits missing from galley proofs to appear as clusters unusually dense in missed errors. I suspect that it was pages of manuscript that went missing rather than galleys.

In my copy-editing days, I once stepped off a train at Metro Center, leaving an envelope of manuscripts behind. Realizing this just too late to step back on the train, I took the next train out to Stadium-Armory, where the Orange and Blue lines diverged. There I waited for I suppose the second Blue Line train heading west, stepped on, and retrieved the envelope. I can't say that romance made me leave the envelope--I was just absent-minded.

Physically Awkward

 On an early page of Claire Messud's novel The Emperor's Children, I read

A big, physically awkward man with a square head and jowls, Frank Clarke had been a Green Beret in Vietnam, which was where he had met Thu, Julius's mother, after whom the boy took.

I suppose that "physically awkward" is to contrast with the asserted grace of the son. But do the physically awkward make it through the training required to qualify for the Special Forces, or any elite infantry force? One of my high school teachers, who was also the wrestling coach, had served in the Special Forces.  He was not at all physically awkward. Frank Clarke seems me more prop than minor character.

Advertising

 In the late 1980s, I would sometimes listen to the classical musical station  WGMS while driving. Now and then after a piece had ended, a folksy voice would explain the importance of the F-16 for America's security. Of course this advertisement was not trying to sell an F-16 to the listeners directly. I suppose that it was aimed at lobbyists and congressional staff. And of course the advertisement never came with a price tag.

At that time, and for another dozen or more years, The Washington Post was full of advertisements. Department stores, for example, would run pages of advertisements for clothing, household goods, etc. There were prices given for the goods and a fairly accurate statement of any discounts offered. I would look at them when I needed clothes, pots and pans, or what have you.

Not long ago, I looked in The Washington Post for advertisements to bring to an ESL class. I was surprised to find that newspaper advertisements resemble must more the F-16 advertisements than the dry goods advertisements of 1989. In the main sections of the paper, one may find advertisements for goods as expensive as a house or as relatively inexpensive as clothing (a line, not items). Whatever the price range, one seldom sees a price. The Sunday advertising supplements are an exception.

Two Erasmuses

 Leon-E. Halkin's Erasmus parmi nous, translated by John Tonkin as Erasmus: A Critical Biography, gives a full account of Erasmus's life and works. I am glad to have read it. The author seems a little anxious to emphasize the orthodox side of Erasmus and play down any skepticism one might suspect. The book as I read it seems to me to suffer from a number of drawbacks.

First, that the work is a translation.  Mr. Tonkin's French must be vastly better than mine. Yet here and there I find sentences that make me suspect that something is missing. Then I wish for a sight of the original. Still I know that reading the original would take longer and that in reading it I would make far more mistakes.

Second, that in his advocacy for Erasmus, the author ignores the claims of some of what Erasmus opposed. It is well to mock the ossified end of scholasticism; but Halkin mentions Scotism in passing, dismissively. The nineteenth-century American philosopher C.S. Peirce thought highly of Duns Scotus. On some matters of faith, Erasmus, or maybe just Halkin, seems reluctant to consider what Jaroslav Pelikan refers to as the lex orandi, theology as informed by the prayers of the faithful.

Third, that a biography of a writer ought to live through the writer's words, and this is not practical for a life of Erasmus. His writing was all in Latin, and I don't suppose that the flavor can be wholly brought over into English. Some writers have an adventurous enough life to sustain interest without regard to their writing: Stendhal, Tolstoy, and Hemingway come to mind. But Erasmus mostly wrote and worried about getting together enough money to let him continue to write and publish.

John Huizinga wrote a somewhat shorter book on Erasmus, available in English as Erasmus and the Age of the Reformation. My copy is gone, for it was falling apart when I bought it. Huizinga has a lighter touch, is unburdened--in my recollection--by any commitment to Erasmus's commitment to orthodoxy, and perhaps had a better translator--or perhaps Dutch comes more naturally over to English than French does.

Pelikan gives a brief notice to Erasmus in his The Melody of Theology. His judgments on Erasmus are in the end not that much different from Halkin's. Of course his judgment on the scholastics--represented in this book by Aquinas, not Scotus--takes their strengths into account as well as their weaknesses.

A Business and Its Beliefs

 A Business and Its Beliefs: The Ideas That Helped Build IBM, by Thomas J. Watson, Jr., was on the outside carts at Second Story Books before Christmas. The book, published in 1963, was part of the McKinsey Foundation Lecture Series, sponsored by the Graduate School of Business of Columbia University. It runs to 107 pages, in seven chapters. Watson was then chairman of the board, having succeeded his father as head of the company in the 1950s.

When the book came out, IBM was in the middle of its project to build the System 360. The book makes no reference to the effort, for it was not announced until 1964, and did not begin to deliver computers until 1965. It is said that IBM management bet the company on the project, which cost $5 billion in 1965 dollars. Something of the magnitude of that effort can be inferred from Frederick Brooks's The Mythical Man-Month, a reckoning of the lessons learned on the software side of the work.

A Business and Its Beliefs lists three primary beliefs:

1. respect for the individual
2. [a desire] to give the best customer service of any company in the world
3. an organization should pursue all tasks with the idea that they can be accomplished in a superior fashion

 The first reflects a paternalistic IBM that probably did not survive the 1990s, maybe not the 1980s. Watson wrote that IBM had never laid off employees. Now the tech press writes of IBM's urge to replace aging staff, with memos referring to them as "dinobabies". It also writes of salesmen not paid promised commissions.

The third was certainly true of IBM once in many areas, and may yet be in some. A lot of very smart people went through IBM, and came up with some remarkable ideas and technology. IBM management didn't invariably know what do with it--IBM sat on John Cocke's innovations in reduced instruction set computing (RISC), so that Berkeley and Stanford popularized the notion, and it was beaten to market in relational database management systems after it had demonstrated their feasibility with R1. It revolutionized the personal computer market, and fairly promptly lost it.

  The second section of the book, "The Broader Purpose", expresses thoughts less popular in the American business community now. The "Friedman Doctrine" that the social responsibility of a business is to its shareholders, was not offered as such until 1970, and had not occurred to Watson:

It is in this area of national well-being that the business community will be judged most critically in the years ahead. Business has demonstrated how successfully it can innovate and produce. What we must do now--it seems to me--is to assign a higher order of priority to the national interest in our business decisions.

 Watson was therefore in favor of federal aid to education and in favor of something to improve medical care nationwide.

The IBM of that day and somewhat later was notoriously stodgy. It was said that an IBM engineer could demonstrate that he was a genius by growing a beard and not being fired. A man I know who had joined IBM sales on leaving the Navy in the late 1960s said that a co-worker shocked the office by coming to work in suit, tie, and blue shirt--nobody had worn anything but a white shirt before that. I don't know that I'd have cared to work for that version of IBM, but bohemianism can be a pose of its own.

Buffalo and Ghosts

 In Ortega y Gasset's essay "In Search of Goethe from Within" occurs the passage

The Jena of that period [1790 through 1825] signifies a fabulous treasure of lofty mental incitements. Is it not a terrible symptom of Weimar's impenetrability that, though it is not a dozen miles from Jena, Jena never managed to affect Weimar in the slightest? I have never been able to imagine Fichte conversing with Frau von Stein, because I do not believe that a buffalo has ever  been able to converse with a ghost.

(Ortega takes Weimar to have petrified Goethe, to have separated him from his destiny.)

Penelope Fitzgerald's novel The Blue Flower mentions the uncanny effect Fichte had, without effort or intention intimidating students who intimidated everyone else. It appears that it was chiefly the novelty of his thought and the difficulty of grasping it that accounted for the effect. Having recently read a bit of Fichte, I sympathize with those students, and I wonder what Charlotte von Stein would have made of his conversation--quite a bit, perhaps, if she knew Kant inside and out, perhaps very little.

"In Search of Goethe from Within" is included in the collection The Dehumanization of Art and Other Writings on Art and Culture.

A Publisher's Notice

 On the page with copyright, ISBN, and so forth of a book fished out of a Little Free Library, the following paragraph appears at the top:

If you purchase this book without a cover you should be aware that this book may have been stolen property and reported as "unsold and destroyed" to the publisher. In this case neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this "stripped book."

Indeed. Bookstores always were able to return unsold stock to publishers for credit. In the case of paperbacks, they could strip the front covers of unsold copies, and send those back, saving themselves on shipping costs, and the publisher on storage. Going on fifty years ago, I worked for a department store that set out the "stripped books" in an area open only to staff. As I recall, I read Play It As It Lays and all or most of The Peter Principle in stripped paperbacks. Whether it was the chain's policy to offer the copies to staff or it was just the decision of the store management, I can't say. I suppose that every copy the staff took was one that the store didn't have to pay to dispose of.

 That was about it for my stripped book reading. A few steps from me there is a copy of  Beyond the Hundredth Meridian missing its front cover, but that cover was loosened by reading. I don't know whether in the age of Amazon retailers still strip covers. For one thing, computerized analysis has given the big wholesalers much better control of their inventory. For another, a publisher might require some daring to demand the covers of its unsold paperbacks back from Amazon.

The notice was not on the first page one would see were the cover gone. In fact, it is on a verso page, where it will be noticed only by chance, or because some went went in search of publication data.

Source Found

 When I read The Radetzky March, it occurred to me that I had read a disparaging remark on the Sunday dinner of District Captain Herr von Trotta und Sipolje, something to the effect that Tafelspitz was not what someone would have consumed on a Sunday. I don't know why this bothered me: however little Joseph Roth knew of the lives of the Hapsburg bureaucrats, it was far more that I know or wish to know. Still, I looked for the reference. It was not in Stephen Brook's The Double Eagle: Vienna, Budapest, Prague, which seemed a reasonable place to look. It was nowhere in Milosz's To Begin Where I Am or Milosz's ABCs, which no longer seem reasonable places to look--what would his friends have had to do with Moravia? I may have looked in Peter Demetz's Prague in Black and Gold. Nothing yielded the information I wanted.

 Then last week, looking for something quite different in Victor Klemper's diaries, I Will Bear Witness: 1933-1941, I found the passage that I must have remembered, in an entry for February 13, 1935. The Radetzky March has just been removed from the public library:

... Roth, the Austrian officer novel from Solferino to the World War--I can't remember the name. Maria Lazar made an amusing remark about this work. She said: The man knows his Galician ghetto, but he does not have a clue about Austrian aristocrats and officers. Proof: The General has beef for his Sunday roast. But that is an almost plebeian everyday meal and never a Sunday dish.

Maria Lazar was then living in Copenhagen, but I suppose her sources of information were sound. Klemperer makes no indication of doubt.

Being Followed

 Earlier in the month, I was reading a technical posting, of interest to one who develops web applications with Oracle Application Express (APEX), and needs to do something unusual in the processing of interactive grids. (In other words, not of really general interest.)  As I scrolled down the page, the text was interrupted by an image of models wearing clothing with black and white stripes. Now, the post I was reading had nothing to do with fashion, in fact it gave as an example a database of cricket matches, so for an instant I was surprised. But I immediately saw that the left-most model had on a dress I had recently purchased as a present.

I did not purchase the present on-line--apparently it was enough to have inspected it in December. Everyone understands, or should, the thoroughness and refinement of surveillance of on-line activities, yet still a reminder can surprise. I hope that the blog's author gets a cut of whatever advertising money wordpress.com collects.

Lost and Found

 While walking this morning, I noticed a child's Superman output, perhaps a pajama set hung up on a post a few blocks from here. It appears to be for a child of about four, and I can think of a neighborhood boy with a taste for superhero outfits. But it would be a hike for a four-year-old. And how does one lose an item like this outside in cold weather?

Over the last few weeks I have found

• A child's knit glove. I picked it up from the street, posted a notice to the neighborhood listserv, and heard nothing back.
• A child's mitten. This I placed on a stake used to guy up a tree. It stayed there for a while.
• A baby blanket, found while shoveling snow. This I was able to return, for the family that had dropped it on leaving the Orthodox Christmas Vigil liturgy parked a few houses down on Sunday.

There is also a child's boot at about eye level in the branches of a small tree down the street. I have the notion that I've seen it before, may even have suggested to someone that the tree was a good place for it. But I don't know this is so.

  As a child, I certainly lost plenty of objects. As a parent, I was astonished at the quantity of lost items the first time I dug through a school's lost-and-found box. I wish I could say that the experience reformed me, but I have certainly gone through some pairs of gloves since. I don't think I lose them outside, though.

Adjusting the Numbers

 In the chapter "The Army" of The Splendid Century: Life in the France of Louis XIV, W.H. Lewis writes of Louvois's vigorous efforts to suppress a fraud commonly practiced by officers of the army:

.... the most intelligent contented themselves with the profit to be made out of passe volants. Under this system, the captain who was receiving pay for a hundred men, would in fact pay and maintain perhaps sixty, annexing the money of the imaginary forty. Inspections were few and far between, commissioners of war were conveniently blind, and their visits well advertised beforehand; on the day of the muster a collection of valets, grooms, and beggars would be issued with musket and bandolier, and would shuffle along behind the real soldiers. The commissioner would sign the muster roll, the stage soldiers would be dismissed with a pourboire, and the captain could put the whole matter out of his mind for another twelve months...

The military aspect of the passe volant abuse was an even more serious matter than the financial, for it meant that a commander took the field in complete ignorance of the effective strength of his army. To be sure, he had the daily strength returns; but what percentage of the men inscribed thereon really existed? It follows from this state of affairs that we must be very cautious in accepting battle casualty figures in the earlier part of the century; for the captain whose company had a nominal strength of a hundred and an effective strength of seventy would undoubtedly, if he could manage to get his men under fire at all, report that he had lost thirty men in action when perhaps he had had no losses at all.

Near the end of The Chisholm Trail: High Road of the Cattle Kingdom,  Don Worcester describes accounting as it was managed in the Montana of the 1880s:

Northern ranch managers consistently wrote optimistic reports to stockholders or owners, playing down winter losses at "probably one or two percent." Experienced cowmen in Montana considered 10 percent a normal annual mortality. After herds purchased on the tally book counts had been ranged in the North four or five years, owners were beginning to inquire why beef shipments were not larger.

The severe winter of 1886-1887 helped to resolve the accounting:

There is, however, another side to the Big Die-up, as Colonel Samuel Gordon of the Yellowstone Journal pointed out many years later. "It is comforting," he wrote, "to reflect on the number of reputations that were saved by the 'hard winter' of 1886-87. It was a hard winter--the latter end of it--and the worst of it came when the cattle were weak and thin and unable to stand grief, but it never killed half the cattle that were charged to it. It came as a God-sent deliverance to the managers who had for four or five years past been reporting 'One percent losses,' and they seized the opportunity bravely, and comprehensively charged off in one lump the accumulated mortality of four or five years. Sixty percent loss was the popular estimate. Some had to run it up higher to get even, and it is told of one truthful manager in an adjoining county that he reported a loss of 125%, 50% steers and 75% cows. The actual loss in cattle was probably thirty to fifty percent, according to localities and conditions."