A Tradition Carried On

 In Roughing It, Mark Twain writes of a mining companion, Mr. Ballou:

Although he was more than twice as old as the eldest of us, he never gave himself any airs, privileges, or exemptions on that account. He did a young man’s share of the work; and did his share of conversing and entertaining from the general stand-point of any age—not from the arrogant, overawing summit-height of sixty years. His one striking peculiarity was his Partingtonian fashion of loving and using big words for their own sakes, and independent of any bearing they might have upon the thought he was purposing to convey. He always let his ponderous syllables fall with an easy unconsciousness that left them wholly without offensiveness. In truth his air was so natural and so simple that one was always catching himself accepting his stately sentences as meaning something, when they really meant nothing in the world. If a word was long and grand and resonant, that was sufficient to win the old man's love, and he would drop that word into the most out-of-the-way place in a sentence or a subject, and be as pleased with it as if it were perfectly luminous with meaning.

Mr. Ballou seems to have been an even-tempered man, but he could be provoked:

 Then the old man waxed wroth and abusive. He called Ollendorff all manner of hard names—said he never saw such a lurid fool as he was, and ended with the peculiarly venomous opinion that he "did not know as much as a logarythm!"

It presently appears that Mr. Ollendorf knew nothing of logarithms, but felt the force of the rebuke.

This came to mind today, for the New York Times obituary of Rex Reed quoted him as writing of 

the latest youth idols [seeming, in comparison to Bette Davis] about as interesting as a withered logarithm.

 I have probably been acquainted with logarithms for sixty years now, but have never encountered one that was withered, or for that matter one that was in leaf. If Reed knew at all what a logarithm is, he may have counted on his readers having slept through Algebra II, or having had the time to forget it.

The manner may be catching, for the obituary says that "he listened aerobically". It is hard to assign a meaning to the adverb, but perhaps Mr. Ballou would have approved.

Unknown Sees

 Last week, the The Washington Post reported that Bishop Evelio Menjivar-Ayala

was elevated from auxiliary bishop of the Washington Archdiocese to Bishop of West Virginia.

This surprised me a little, not because Bishop Menjivar-Ayala has been promoted, but because I had never heard of a Roman Catholic diocese named after a state. The Episcopalian Church (the Protestant Episcopal Church of the United States of  America) does organize its sees by state, but I had never heard of the Roman Catholic Church doing so.

Today I had a look at the website of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, and indeed Bishop Menjivar-Ayala's new see is the Diocese of Wheeling-Charleston. And of course the website lists not the "Washington Archdiocese" but the "Archdiocese of Washington".

A University of Which the Football Team Could Be Proud

 I thought the expression "a university the football team can be proud of" came from the Marx Brothers' movie Horsefeathers. I was wrong. The expression (which I didn't get quite right) did not come from screenwriters at a studio, but from a university president in a state senate hearing. ESPN gives a concise account:

Movies are not real life, although they might have been in February 1951. University of Oklahoma president George Lynn Cross, frustrated that state senators didn't understand his plea for more money for the university, told state legislators, "I would like to build a university of which the football team could be proud." The sarcasm didn't translate to the page, and Cross's remark went the midcentury equivalent of viral. Several months later, Cross received a $10 check in the mail from Reader's Digest, which, presumably with mouth agape, republished the quip as if Cross had been serious.

 This came to mind with the news that Ohio State University (OSU) has just dismissed a newly hired president. The OSU football team has pretty high standards. I hope the university as a whole lives up to them, though I don't really know.

The Chronicle of Higher Education says that

[The ex-president] is said to have pushed over a dozen employees to assist in the business ventures of a personal associate...

Given OSU's reputation for football, it is tempting to read the charge as [pushed over] [a dozen employees] rather than [pushed] [over a dozen employees]. 

The Accidents of Publishing.

 I have now and then complained about the sloppy practices of businesses that specialize in printing works that are in the public domain. But this week I noticed again that the books even of quite reputable publishers are subject to accidents.

I happened to open The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall 1477-1806, about a quarter of the way in, where I encountered

But, as the full gravity of the tobacco, played an appreciable part.

A closer look showed that the first seven words appeared on page 258, the rest on page 291. Somebody had left out a thirty-two page signature.

Now, the book, by Jonathan Israel, is part of the series The Oxford History of Early Modern Europe, a product of Clarendon Press. A publisher cannot be more reputable.

I don't know how one can defend against such errors, which occur late in production.  They do happen. Years ago I found that a stretch of Heidegger and Nazism (Victor Farias, Temple University Press) had pages blank on one side--the pressmen had failed to print one side of a signature.

The Irrational Laws of Civility

 On 30 September 1645, Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia wrote to René Descartes a letter including

To benefit from the particular truths you mention, we would need an exact knowledge of all these passions and preconceptions, of which most people are unaware. When we observe the customs and values of the country we are in, we sometimes discover extremely irrational ones, which we have to conform to in order to avoid greater disadvantages.

Since I have been here [Riswijk], I have had the most vexing proof of this, because I hoped that a stay in the country would do me good by providing opportunity for study; and yet I find that I have incomparably less free time than I had at the Hague, through having to entertain people who do not know what to do with their time; and although it is very unfair to deprive myself of real benefits in order to provide them with imaginary ones, I am obliged to yield to the irrational laws of civility in order not to make enemies. Since I started this letter, I have been interrupted at leas seven times by such troublesome visits.

Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia was daughter of "the Winter King", granddaughter of James I of England. Her letters to Descartes show a lively, clear intelligence.

The letter appears in The Passions of the Soul and Other Late Philosophical Writings of René Descartes, translated by Michael Moriarty.

 

Production Values

 The New York Times crossword puzzle for Sunday, March 29, included the clue "Odd-numbered page"  for the word "recto". This came to mind on Saturday when I was re-reading Mental Acts: Their Content and Their Objects by Peter Geach. It is not that Geach touches on the terms of publishing and printing, rather that I became aware that the odd-numbered page I was reading was on the verso of the physical leaf. And so it runs from page 1 (verso) through page 136  (recto).

This did not impede my reading, merely annoyed me as another example of the carelessness of production at Legate Street Press, which I have complained of before. What did slow me a little was off-by-one errors in references to sections. At times a reference to §x will turn out to be a reference to §x + 1. So in §18, there is a reference to an a treatment in §18, which turns out to mean §19. Now these are are not the sort of errors that can be introduced by optical-character recognition (OCR), which the press pretty clearly used. Was the volume copied by some chance an uncorrected proof?

Carelessness like this is why I qualify my enthusiasm for works moving quickly into the public domain. I don't just want the text of a book, I want the corrected text, meaning among other things text with the references to section numbers squared away. I want some context, for example the date of publication. I would like assurance that somebody, not necessarily a philosopher, but a competent editor, has looked at the page proofs before the book went to press. And that assurance is destroyed by a contradiction of the long-standing practice that odd numbered pages appear on the verso, and by erroneous section references.

Every One is Entitled

 The Gutenberg project this week feature among other books Volume II of Alexander Herzen's My Life and Thoughts. Looking into it, I noticed

Who is entitled to write his reminiscences?

Every one.

Because no one is obliged to read them

In order to write one’s reminiscences it is not at all necessary to be a great man, nor a notorious criminal, nor a celebrated artist, nor a statesman—it is quite enough to be simply a human being, to have something to tell, and not merely to desire to tell it but at least some little ability to do so.

Every life is interesting; if not the personality, then the environment, the country are interesting, life itself is interesting. Man likes to enter into another existence, he likes to touch the subtlest fibres of another’s heart, and to listen to its beating ... he compares, he checks it by his own, he seeks in himself confirmation, justification, sympathy....

But may not memoirs be tedious, may not the life described be colourless and commonplace?

Then we shall not read it—there is no worse punishment for a book than that.

Simon Leys quotes the first three sentences in his essay Overtures, collected in The Hall of Uselessness.

I think that "some little ability" to tell something is only so widely distributed. Still, as an account of why we like to read memoirs, Herzen is correct.

Reviewing

 About forty years ago, The Washington Post published a review of a biography of Sir Richard Francis Burton, I suppose the one by Edward Rice. The reviewer was Anthony Burgess, the review was informative and readable. Presently the Post's book section carried a letter praising the quality of Burgess's sketch of Burton's life, and remarking on his graciousness in making a passing mention of Rice's book.

Today I went to the Gutenberg Project to check on something Macaulay wrote, and having found it, read on in the Critical, Historical, and Miscellaneous Essays, Volume III. In part this was a hunt for typographical errors to be sent in as errata: the text appears to have been created through optical character recognition (OCR), which is pretty good but here and there subject to error. In part this was because (of course) Macaulay is very readable.

The essays in the volume are mostly reviews, and reviews of the sort that the Post's correspondent complained of. The author is often enough dismissed in the first couple of paragraphs, usually with dispraise:

There was, it is said, a criminal in Italy, who was suffered to make his choice between Guicciardini and the galleys. He chose the history. But the war of Pisa was too much for him. He changed his mind, and went to the oar. Guicciardini, though certainly not the most amusing of writers, is a Herodotus or a Froissart, when compared with Dr. Nares.

After that one gets Macaulay's own thoughts on the subject of the book. He has more than a few, and if not always convincing, they are usually entertaining. I suppose that a close criticism of Dr. Nares's work would make for much duller reading than Macaulay's harsh account of Lord Burleigh.

Still I wonder that he didn't consider the application his readers might make of

Almost all the distinguished writers who have treated of English history are advocates. Mr. Hallam and Sir James Mackintosh alone are entitled to be called judges. But the extreme austerity of Mr. Hallam takes away something from the pleasure of reading his learned, eloquent, and judicious writings. He is a judge, but a hanging judge, the Page or Buller of the High Court of Literary Justice. His black cap is in constant requisition. In the long calendar of those whom he has tried, there is hardly one who has not, in spite of evidence to character and recommendations to mercy, been sentenced and left for execution.

 

Not In a Post-Modern Era

 Noticed in the essay "Philosophy in a New Century", collected in the book of that name by John Searle:

If by "modernism" is meant the period of systematic rationality and intelligence that began with the Renaissance and reached a high point of self-conscious articulation in the European Enlightenment, then we are not in a post-modern era. On the contrary, modernism has just begun. We are, however, I believe, in a post-skeptical or post-epistemic era. You will not understand what is happening in our intellectual life if you do not see the exponential growth of knowledge as the central intellectual fact. There is something absurd about the post-modern thinker who buys an airplane ticket on the internet, gets on an airplane, works on his laptop computer in the course of the airline flight, gets off of the airplane at his destination, takes a taxicab to a lecture hall, and then gives a lecture claiming that somehow or other there is no certain knowledge, that objectivity is in question, and that all claims to truth and knowledge are really only disguised power grabs.

 

Doing Without

 For the first time in many years, we went on a trip without bringing a computer. We did not have, that is, a computer with a keyboard and a fair-sized display. We did have mobile phones, which have computational power beyond what some of those computers in the past did.

Only a few times did I think that it would have been well to have a computer. Those were times that I wished to write something at length, or to read something in larger increments than will display on a telephone. Yet despite my ineptitude with the iPhone "keyboard", I did get by, and may have managed to send some messages of a couple dozen words or so.

The benefit, apart from sparing a couple of pounds to carry about, was that there was no temptation to linger over the web after waking up. That probably gave me at least another half hour per day out looking around.

Following

At the end of February, the American runner Jess McLain and the two runners behind her followed a lead bike off course at the American half-marathon championship at about mile 13. They turned around to rejoin the course, finishing ninth, twelfth, and thirteenth. They filed protests, of course, but their protests were denied.

About 1985, a leader in the DC Marathon (a much less important race) was led off course with about three miles to go. I think that it was at that race another runner and I were nearly diverted off course by a policeman distracted in a conversation. We were well back from the leaders, and a loss of eight or ten places would have been nothing to garner us sympathy.

In 1980, the lead runners in the Marine Corps Marathon followed a press truck in cutting across above the tip of Hains Point, then were diverted across grass near the Tidal Basin rather than kept on pavement. My recollection is that the race was about 300 yards short of the standard distance. Curiously, the finishers' certificates that went out said that the runner had successfully completed the Marine Corps Marathon "at the Oympic distance of 26 miles 385 yards".  At the bottom of the certificate is the adjusted time.

Shipping

 About a dozen years ago, our washing machine ceased to spin properly. A check on the internet suggested that this was caused by a failed ratchet on the agitator, a part that as I recall you could hide under a quarter and that cost about $2.50. It cost that if you could find one, that is. The internet takes away as efficiently as the internet gives, and it appeared that there was no store within ten miles that sold the part. We ordered it from Tennessee.

About a week later, we were about to go out of town, the ratchet had not arrived, and the washing machine did not work. Considering our prospects--would the store in Virginia really have the part?--we called for a repairman, who did what I could have done, though I'm sure he was more efficient. The ratchet arrived a couple of days later. The out of town business had shipped "UPS to USPS", which allows UPS to do the efficient long haul work and leaves the more labor-intensive delivery to the Postal Service. Had that business folded a piece of paper around the part, placed it in an envelope, and mailed it for (then) 40 cents from the nearest post office or mailbox, we would have received the part in ample time.

A fortnight ago, I ordered a book through Alibris. The seller promptly sent a notice that it had shipped. After some days, I checked the tracking number. This showed that the item had been picked up by a USPS shipping partner and was ready for USPS pickup. Such was the status a week ago, such it is now. I had hoped to take the book along on a trip that starts Sunday, but now I doubt I will.

Given the low cost of media mail, I wonder how much money can be saved by using a shipping partner. I suppose the partner handles the labor of packaging, and probably has the equivalent of the postage meters I used long ago. I can see that one might wish to have somebody else manage the meter.

But I wish I had the book.

No One Will Debate

 Footnote 46 to Chapter 10, "Preface" of Quentin Lauer, S.J.'s A Reading of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit reads

No one will debate Hegel that a constant effort is required to understand his statements the way he intends them to be understood.

I certainly will not. 

The Washington Post

The reporter Gene Fowler grew up on Denver, and began his career there. In those days, a city as small as Denver might have five or more newspapers. One that employed Fowler suddenly shut down. The owner, a man who had made his money with a transit system somewhere else, suddenly decided that he had more interesting things to do with his money.  That being the early twentieth century, Fowler went on a bender at the Denver Press Club (and caught on with one of the remaining papers before he sobered up).

Jeff Bezos, the owner of The Washington Post, has changed his priorities. This does not so far amount to closing the Post down, though it is hard for me to see how the Post will sustain itself. The cutbacks include laying off 300 of 800 reporters, closing sections including the books and sports sections, and giving less effort and space to local coverage. The publisher who announced this is retiring from the Post. I doubt he made the decisions, but I understand that he might wish to leave.

Whether or not we continue to subscribe, I will miss the book section. It has been a mixed bag at times. Most recently, it has had at least three sound regular reviewers. One of them, Becca Rothfeld, will now be working for The New Yorker. I find it hard to see what savings can be found in a book section: one need not fly reviewers to Paris or New Delhi; one hardly need give them expensive office space; the publishers supply the books reviewed gratis.

And I will miss the sports section. When I moved to this area, and for another twenty years, the Post sports section employed Shirley Povich. He had reported on Babe Ruth, and before that had caddied for Calvin Coolidge. Shirley Povich died in 1998, but a look at the sports section recalls him. And there were plenty of other good sportswriters at the Post: Dave Anderson, Thomas Boswell, Christine Brennan, Ken Denlinger,  Sally Jenkins, Tony Kornheiser, Jim Murray, and Michael Wilbon come to mind.

I have seen Earl Warren quoted as saying that he always read the sports section of the newspaper first: the sports section was about humanity's triumphs, the news about humanities failures. Donald Graham, whose family owned and operated the post for about sixty years, has said that he always started with the sports section, though he did not give a reason.

The Post's Metro section has been weak for quite a while. When it was still printed as a separate section, I often found that a large portion of the section was provided by readers, not reporters. This struck me as sloppy and cheap: the effort to edit a half-page of reader comment must be less than is required to attend a city or county council meeting and produce a much smaller account. Much of today's space is given to an account of a wine robbery that occurred in November, and which the Post wrote up then.

Still, the Metro Section (folded in at the moment with Style and Sports) is the main reason we subscribe to the Post. The Metro section strikes me as a bad place to cut back, really as an invitation to drop the Post and keep the New York Times.

The Post of course has suffered from the disappearance of advertising, something that has affected all newspapers. The Post also lost subscribers, I have heard 200 thousand, by deciding not to endorse Kamala Harris in the 2024 election. No doubt this avoided offending Donald Trump, and may since have contributed to the health of Jeff Bezos's other businesses. But it lost the Post subscribers it likely will not get back. Without strong local coverage, why should one prefer the Post to the New York Times?

The Most Recent Snow

On Sunday, January 25, we had snow from the small hours of the morning through about noon, then sleet until nearly dark, the sleet briefly interrupted by freezing rain. The forecast predicted this accurately, and I saw no point in shoveling snow at midday to give the harder stuff a chance to grip the walks.

 The crust left on the snow Monday morning was not enough to hold my weight without crushing a little. A few days of daytime sun and nighttime cold changed that. After the first day, a plastic snow shovel would not break through the crust, and even on Monday it was only in colder area that it would. Late in the week we saw a shovel discarded by the side of a street, the plastic blade broken in two.

Dealing with the crust made clearing walks and digging out cars that much slower. After other snows in other years, I had smirked at the way people would assert a claim to a shoveled spot--then it was generally traffic cones or garbage cans to hold the space until the car returned. But clearing a spot last week could be two or three hours' work for a grown man. The variety of objects used to hold a spot has expanded: small cones such as soccer teams practice with, chairs, folding chairs, tables, a ladder.

Most of our neighbors cleared their walks promptly. Corners seemed to be no man's lands, though. Between corners and uncleared walks, one makes better progress walking in the street, even with stepping out of the way of a car every few minutes.

When we went shopping on Friday, the roads were not bad, though narrowed by the plowed snow. Intersections with or of side streets could be uncomfortably narrow. This past Sunday, the sidewalks along 16th Street were mostly in good condition, in part because so much of the way they are maintained by the staff of apartment buildings. 

The New Roman Empire

At New Years, a friend gave me a copy of The New Roman Empire: A History of Byzantium by Anthony Kaldellis. Having read through it, I have a considerably clearer notion of that empire, as regards its periodic contraction and growth, the dynasties that ruled it, and the management of the church councils that established dogma. Considerably clearer, but only so clear: the alternation of Palaiologos and Kantakouzenos, the despots of Epeiros and the Morea, and many other details remain vague. I suppose that a second reading would clear this up, but since the book has 918 pages, not counting end matter, a second reading will have to wait for a while.

I wonder about a number of points, including the account given of theological developments. To take an example from late in the book, Kaldellis makes Gregory of Palamas sound less serious than Jaroslav Pelikan does in The Spirit of Eastern Christendom.

 And Kaldellis is out to vindicate the eastern empire against the sins and biases of the West. No doubt the West has much of it coming. Still, he writes

The Latinization of Greek names ("Comnenus") and worse, their Anglicization ("John") is an offensive form of cultural imposition. It is practiced for no other culture except the "Byzantines," whose very name as a people ("Romans") has been deemed inadmissible for centuries.

(page 7). Here one recalls Frederick the Great, Philip II, the Archduke Charles, assorted Saints Francis and so on among those with Anglicized names. Didn't the Romans use the term "Scythian" rather loosely?

The index is imperfect, which is not surprising in a book of this length, but can be confusing. As an example, consider the entry for "Scholarios, Georgios Gennadios". The first four entries are for pages 327, 332, 898, and 901. Pages 327 and 332 refer to a magister militum and an exarch in sixth-century North Africa, who I suppose could be the same person. Page 898 speaks of "Gennadios, the first patriarch of Constantinople after the fall". Page 901, more satisfactorily, has "Georgios Scholarios (the later patriarch Gennadios II)".

 

 But most of this is quibbling. I am grateful to have received the book and glad to have read it. I will certainly read at least parts of it again.

Damnatio Memoriae

A friend sent me a copy of Latin Inscriptions: Ancient Scripts by Dirk Booms, a guide to reading the Latin on old grave markers, public buildings, and so on. It includes a photograph and explanation of the dedication of a bridge in Egypt, with two erasures: first of the prefect of Egypt who oversaw the building, then of the late emperor Domitian. Such erasure is called "damnatio memoriae", removal of someone's name from official records and monuments. It is not known why the official suffered this; Domitian's damnatio memoriae followed on his assassination.

I had heard of the practice, but never seen an example in stone. The penalty has no place in American law, but variants of it have been applied now and then. The aqueduct over Cabin John Creek in Maryland, now the Aqueduct Bridge on McArthur Boulevard, was built by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, begun when Jefferson Davis was Secretary of War. By the time the aqueduct was finished, Davis was president of the Confederate States of America, and the federal government removed his name. About forty years later, President Theodore Roosevelt had it put back.

Something like damnatio memoriae was applied to Benedict Arnold. He is remembered on the battlefield at Saratoga by an empty niche beside three with statues of the other American commanders, and by a boot with the epaulets of his rank--Arnold was shot in the leg on the field. At Saratoga there was no inscription or statue to remove, his treason having followed so soon after his services.

Keeping One's Books

In the New York Times this week, Roger Rosenblatt urges us to keep our books. For me, and no doubt for many readers to the Times, this is like counsel to exercise, eat well, and get enough sleep: what else would we wish to do? However, it is not wholly practical.

This past Christmas, I received about 2500 pages of reading matter, say 60% biography and 40% history. I will keep most of this, if only because of who gave it. But it takes up space on the shelves, and shelves are finite. Something else will have to go, sometime. We have only so much space to put up bookshelves.

And how many books are "your" books? If you bought it for a college class or for the neighborhood book club and disliked it, is it "yours" in more than a legal sense? If you can't say how it came to be under your roof, and in any case there is a better edition on another shelf, is it yours? I think that Rosenblatt might have explored the imperfect match of ownership as recognized by the law, and possession as measured by one's engagement with a book.

Rosenblatt concludes by quoting from one of Theodore Roethke's poems. I thought that I had a copy of Roethke's collected poems, but apparently not. Did we give it away or lose it in a move? Or was it a library's and so not mine?

Ain't

In Allen Tate's novel The Fathers, a use of "ain't" gets a footnote:

I may as well say here that my father did not speak dialect but the standard English of the eighteenth century. In pronunciation the criterion was the oral tradition, not the way the word looked in print to an uneducated school-teacher. For example, though he wrote ate, he pronounced it et, as if it were the old past tense, eat. He used the double negative in conversation, as well as ain't, and he spoke the language with great ease at four levels: first, the level just described, conversation among family and friends; second, the speech of the "plain people abounding in many archaisms; third, the speech of the negroes, which was merely late seventeenth or early eighteenth English ossified; and fourth, the Johnsonian diction appropriate to formal occasions, a style that he could wield in perfect sentences four hundred words long. He would not have understood our conception of "correct English." Speech was like manners, an expression of sensibility and taste. This view no longer holds in an era of public schools and state universities.

The conversation would have been in the early 1850s, the speaker a man born about the turn of the century, resident in Fairfax County, Virginia.

State universities go a long way back in the upper south: there is "Mr. Jefferson's university" in Charlottesville, of course, but the University of North Carolina is older still. The attitude towards the state universities if not the schools seems much more of Tate's time than his narrator's.