O Tempora, Oh Forget It

The Cambridge History of the American Novel, helped by a review by Joseph Epstein, has confirmed a number of persons in their opinion that the world is going to hell in a hand basket. I suppose there is much to be said for this view. Yet why do people regard this as a novelty? According to quite a few writers who put themselves forward as authorities--Dante and Calvin to mention just two--it has always been heading there.

I would not read this history, unless paid and closely supervised, for life is short enough as it is.  Yet the praise of the past seems doubtful to me, and the indictment of the present has holes.

The past:

1. "Only 40 or 50 years ago, English departments attracted men and women who wrote books of general intellectual interest and had names known outside the academy—Perry Miller, Aileen Ward, Walter Jackson Bate, Marjorie Hope Nicolson, Joseph Wood Krutch, Lionel Trilling, one could name a dozen or so others—but no longer." Barbarian that I am, I recognize of these names only Miller and Trilling. Miller was attracted to Harvard's faculty 80 years ago, Trilling to Columbia's about the same time. And though I live among reasonably literate (and graying) folk, I bet I could quiz quite a few before I met any who could give me a solid account of any two names in the list.
2. "Yet, through the magic of dull and faulty prose, the contributors to 'The Cambridge History of the American Novel' have been able to make these presumably worldly subjects seem parochial in the extreme—of concern only to one another, which is certainly one derogatory definition of the academic. These scholars may teach English, but they do not always write it, at least not quite." Doesn't this imply that things were better once? Epstein quotes Randall Jarrell in passing, but does not mention all the savage things he and others (Marvin Mudrick, Edmund Wilson) said about the criticism of their day, notably the criticism published in The Proceedings of the Modern Language Association. Anyone suffering from the impression that the good old days were evenly good should look up Frederick Crews's The Pooh Perplex or Yvor Winters's essay "What Are We to Think About Professor X?".

The present

1. "A stranger, freshly arrived from another planet, if offered as his introduction to the United States only this book, would come away with a picture of a country founded on violence and expropriation, stoked through its history by every kind of prejudice and class domination..." Need I hide my volumes of Faulkner when Mr. Epstein comes to visit? Need I hide Homer, Herodotus, Plato, and Xenophon, lest he think that I place too much emphasis on prejudice against barbarians, helots, and the mob? Or The Life of Johnson, since after all Johnson wrote "I do not much wish well to discoveries, for I am always afraid they will end in conquest and robbery."  and  "I know not why any one but a school-boy in his declamation should whine over the Common-wealth of Rome, which grew great only by the misery of the rest of mankind. The Romans, like others, as soon as they grew rich, grew corrupt; and in their corruption sold the lives and freedoms of themselves, and of one another."
2. "and populated chiefly by one or another kind of victim, with time out only for the mental sloth and apathy brought on by life lived in the suburbs and the characterless glut of American late capitalism." Right, I'll hide The Overcoat, Oblomov, and Mme. Bovary.
   

Perhaps this is the stuff to feed the readership of The Wall Street Journal. It does not strike me as saying anything especially new or worth one's attention. Academics are time-servers, apt to repeat what they hear around them? They are not alone. If Mr. Epstein or his readers were looking for comfort, which I doubt, I would tell them, "Look, don't worry. I was an English major. The majority of English majors are studying English as the simplest way to get through college and on to law school. They detest literary criticism only less than poetry, and had almost rather read The Golden Bowl than The Sacred Grove. The rest of those caught in their classes would rather be anywhere than where they are. The resentment of those who have to buy this back-breaker will feed the next revolution in critical taste. A book of 1200 pages, costing $200 is not the tool with which to corrupt the public."

The Storm, as Presented

Corin, in As You Like It, had noticed that "the property of rain is to wet". On Saturday we got to see the television stations demonstrate this at length, varying the rain now and then with storm surge and blown foam. The pictures were great, and we were impressed with a neighbor's composure as she reported from Calvert County. Yet I could see the rain better still from my porch.

We needed accurate forecasts of the rainfall, the wind speeds, and the duration of the storm. We got them all, as a tidy signal embedded in a volume of noise. I could happily have spared

• One station's report on the relation of wind speeds to height, how a wind that blows 50 mph at ground level blows 100 mph some tens of stories up; do you think that the engineers who built New York and drew up its construction codes hadn't thought of that?
• Many minutes of broadcasts from Ocean City and other beach towns.
• Our elected officials' visits with the local news desks.
• Radio reporters working their way through Roget to tell me of Irene's "ire" and "wrath".

The Storm, as Experienced

At our house, the main effect of the storm was about six hours of extra work, divided almost evenly between putting things away on Saturday, and bringing them back out and raking up Sunday. Saturday I put away pretty much everything--porch chairs down the basement, plants, tools, garbage and recycling cans in the garage, and so on. About all that I left loose outside were a door mat (too soft to cause damage if it blew) and the bird bath (unlikely to fly off). Today I brought most things back out, and then raked up a couple of big bags of twigs in the yard and the alley.

We had drizzle from 9:30 on Saturday morning, then rain from about 3 in the afternoon till about 8 Sunday morning. The water went around the house, mostly; a little got into the north side of the basement. We did not lose power except for a few second around 7 on Sunday morning. Matters could have been much worse.

It was our impression, looking out our windows or standing on the porch, that wind never got that strong. Across the street, by the light on a neighbor's house, the rain seemed generally to be within 20 degrees of vertical. None of the gusts that we were awake to see brought it anywhere near horizontal. We had discussed sleeping on the first floor of house, or even down the basement, for safety, since there are some big oaks near the house. At 10:15, though, the desire for a sound night's sleep took over, and we slept upstairs, in bed.

Languages and Letters

In looking up something John Ousterhout had written, I noticed with surprise that his home page is http://www.stanford.edu/~ouster/cgi-bin/home.php.

The last three letters were the source of the surprise, for long ago Ousterhout developed the scripting language Tcl (tool-command language), which serves decently enough for web development. Or it served so anyway, for the last updates to AOLServer happened in 2010, and to Apache mod_tcl in 2003. There doesn't seem to be much talk about either of them lately, for the first page on a Google query for either retrieves postings from years ago. There may not be many patches, either, if somebody comes up with a zero-day exploit.

Tcl has its maddening aspects; with a bit of searching one can find Richard Stallman's diatribe against it. It has in its favor that it was built to be readily extensible. I learned it first because "expect" was built on top of it, a tremendously useful tool for some system administration tasks. I've used it via Tk (Toolkit, a handy tool for setting up graphical user interfaces), "oratcl" for running jobs under control of the Oracle "intelligent agent", and then with AOLserver. And I didn't know how much I liked its "upvar" until I looked without success for an equivalent in PHP.

Clerical Names

At a used bookstore the other week, I picked up a copy of Memoirs of a Renaissance Pope: The Commentaries of Pius II, an Abridgment, which I have just started to look into. Early on, the author mentions an imperial delegate, Heinrich Senftleben, Dean of Breslau. To my eye, this "Senftleben" looks like "Sanftleben", "to live soft".  But perhaps that is not at all the derivation; Zenklava in the Czech Republic was also known as Senftleben.

Jaroslav Pelikan's history of Christian doctrine mentions one "Nausea",  bishop of Vienna late in the first half of the 16th Century. On following this up, I learned that the bishop's family name was "Grau"; "grauen" in German is to become queasy. I suppose it speaks to a rage for classicism or a sense of humor that he would have gone by a Latin equivalent.

The Earthquake

A little before 2 pm, I was listening to a Microsoft techie discuss Javascript, and noticed to my annoyance that the floor was bouncing slightly. I took this to mean that somebody nearby was bouncing his leg; I was beginning to glance around when the co-worker to my right said something. The bouncing intensified, the presenter broke off her talk to order an evacuation, and people began to leave. By the time I had my laptop unplugged, the bouncing had stopped. The half or so of the audience that had not yet left seemed inclined to stay. I plugged back in, and tried the Geological Survey web site; thanks to my unsatisfactory wireless connection, a neighbor beat me to it.

Those who went as far as the street report that the shoppers in the Friendship Heights stores were not distracted from their business, but kept right on. After about 20 minutes, so did the presenters. They did a good job despite the distraction.

I gather from what I hear that the shaking was more intense downtown. Quite a few buildings were evacuated there and elsewhere in the area. I must credit the builders of 5404 Wisconsin Avenue; on the fifth floor, the rolling and shaking was astonishing, but not by itself alarming--the notion that more might be on the way did trouble us.

Given that earthquake magnitudes are reported on a logarithmic scale, I think that 5.8 is plenty to satisfy my curiosity.

Mentee?

A blogger at the Harvard Business Review has come up with the interesting back-formation "mentee", meaning the recipient of a mentor's care. I would not expect HBR to copy edit its blogs, but this came to my attention via Bloomberg Business Week and an Association for Computing Machinery Career News digest, both of which passed "mentee" right along.

The expression has apparent symmetry to recommend it. On the other hand, it looks like "manatee" at first glance; then it sets the mind searching for the verb stem "ment", which leads directly to "mentir" and "mentior", probably not what those who speak earnestly of mentoring intend; finally it suggests that the writer cares nothing for or knows nothing of etymology.

I suppose that if I had to write on the topic I would use "protegee", though one expects a mentor to instruct as well as protect.