Oh, to be in Texas, Now That August's Here

Today's Washington Post notes that Larry McMurtry is closing down his Booked Up store in Archer City, Texas. The store's web site confirms this: on August 10 and 11, the store will auction off several hundred thousands of books by the shelf lot. The stores will be open for browsing the week before.

Unfortunately,

• I don't have a lot of shelf space for shelf lots.
• I lack the experience needed to buy efficiently when somebody is auctioning off tens of thousand of lots in two days.
• I have other commitments those days.

The books, then, that I remember from Booked Up's Georgetown days, if still with McMurtry, will be somebody else's prize. To those who have the time, the space, and the money, I can only quote Booked Up:

EXPERIENCE TEXAS IN AUGUST. 

An Odd Perspective

In an opinion piece, "The Inequality of Opportunity", in yesterday's Washington Post, Lawrence Summers remarks that

The number of children not born into the top 1 percent who move into it must equal the number of children born into the top 1 percent who move out of it over their lifetimes. So a serious program to promote equal opportunity must seek to enhance opportunity for those not in wealthy families and to address some of the advantages currently enjoyed by the children of the fortunate.

True enough, yet I found the notion that inequality is about the top 1 percent very odd. One could smooth out the curve considerably within the top 10 or 50 percent, yet leave troubling inequalities in place.

But Summers was president of Harvard University, where he remains a professor of economics. As viewed from the Harvard admissions office, or from the admissions office's chain of command, equality of opportunity is about the 1 percent. Those who graduate from high school functionally illiterate or innumerate aren't sending in applications. Perhaps the president of a decent state school or community college would put matters differently.

To be fair, Summers does mention the need to improve public education; still, the ending of the paragraph in which he does so doesn't quite reinforce his point.

The Slot in the Cabinet

In the houses where I grew up, there was a slot in the back of the medicine cabinet in the bathrooms, made so that one might dispose of old razor blades. Yet I have never shaved with a razor that took such blades. My first razor used a band of metal that one wound on the a fresh stretch when the edge became dull. Not long after, I began to use razors with the two blades in a plastic cartridge, which I have used since. All are much too big for a slot made to receive a flat, unenclosed blade.

Yet a row ouse where we lived, built in the early 1980s, had that slot in the medicine cabinets, though by then most American men must have moved on to the bulkier razor cartridges. I was a little disappointed, when we painted the bathrooms, to find that there was no special receptacle for the blades to fall into; anything pushed through simply dropped to onto the ceiling below. I knew that it was unlikely anyone would ever have collected years of old razor blades, but there was something unsatisfying in thinking of them falling onto old plaster, dusty drywall, and construction debris.

Parallel Texts: Waugh and Diogenes

Evelyn Waugh, in a letter to his wife, October 13, 1940, from a troopship

... In fact I am friends with all on board but I do wish sometimes I could meet an adult. They are all little boys. Some of them naughty little boys like the Brigadier, most of them delicious & just what I want Bron to be at the age of ten, but not one of them a mature man.

Diogenes, as translated by Guy Davenport in 7 Greeks:

Men nowhere, but real boys at Sparta.

Versatility

I am musically illiterate, so my opinions on music hardly deserve the name--they are prejudices. One is that Mozart is the greatest composer ever. Start my Desert Island mix with Symphony #40 and The Marriage of Figaro, and I'll consider it solid.

Yet a couple of times a year I admire Tchaikovsky's versatility. Around Christmas he is the favorite composer of girls between 5 and 7; on Independence Day he is the artillerist's favorite composer. At least, I think he must be the latter; maybe the gunners had rather pass in review to "The Caissons Go Rolling Along" than fire off Long Toms in the 1812 Overture. Of the former I can't doubt, after having seen a lobby or two of dressed up little girls spinning during the intermission of The Nutcracker.

The Middle of Next Week

In the introduction to his Essays Ancient and Modern, Bernard Knox writes

I remembered often the man in Lewis Carroll's poem who "thought he saw a rattlesnake,  / that questioned him in Greek, /He looked again and found it was / The Middle of Next Week." Though it had taken me a long time, I had finally realized that when you read Thucydides, or Sophocles, or any of the great Greek writers, you may think you see an ancient text that speaks to you in Greek. You look again, and find it is The Middle of Next Week.

 The book is absorbing, surprisingly so when I consider that it consists largely of extended book reviews. Of them, I so far like best "The Greek Conquest of England" and "Thucydides and the Peloponnesian War: Politics and Power."

Knox, who died just two years ago, led a remarkable early life, sketched out in the introduction. In 1937 he was wounded serving with the International Brigades at Madrid. In 1943 he was an officer of the U.S. Army, training for infiltration behind German lines with such men as William Colby, Lou Conein, and John Singlaub, all later notable Cold Warriors. He served behind the lines in Brittany, with Italian partisans ("party-jans" according to some less linguistically gifted generals) on the front lines of a then secondary front, and was fortunate not to be landed in Honshu to seek out Japanese party-jans.

Kickball Season

Kickball season seems to have just started. At least, it was last week  that I first noticed a couple of the young wearing their team shirts.

My generation gave up kickball at about age 12, maybe 11 if you don't count PE. Playing kickball at 13 or older would have caused one to be seen as simple-minded or simply uncool. Of course, so would have many actions that the distinctly cool do now: buttoning the top button of shirt not worn with a tie; wearing a tee shirt under an athletic shirt; wearing dark socks with athletic gear; etc.

A co-worker of about 30 tells me that mostly this has to do with drinking, and in fact one of the shirts I saw today showed that the team was sponsored by a bar on Capitol Hill. I am sympathetic to physical activities that serve as an excuse for subsequent beers, not that I ever required much of an excuse. I suspect kickball is supposed to be ironic. if so, the irony is lost on me, which would be satisfactory to the ironists and to me.