La Pléiade Is 90

 The bookstore Albertine in New York, a project of the Cultural Services of the French Embassy, emails to say that La Bibliothèque de la Pléiade is turning 90 years old this year. The books La  Pléiade produces seem to me admirable physically: compact for the number of pages, generally of a size to slip into a coat pocket, bound so that they don't shut on one. And I don't doubt that the editing is superb--the notes in the two volumes I have are full and informative--though I'm in no position to judge it.

Albertine is offering a deal whereby the purchase of two or more Pléiade volumes gets one a "magnificent Flaubert La Pléiade album". I have no idea what this album might be. However, it occurred to me that a Pléiade volume of Descartes might be a good thing to have. I checked, and found that Oeuvres et lettres cost $71, more than I had it in mind to spend. There are certainly other volumes published by the Pléiade that I wouldn't mind having. But if they are comparably priced--and a volume of Flaubert was $86--I think I'll hold off for now.

Graduate School USA

Perhaps three years ago, I considered taking Spanish-language courses at what I thought of as the USDA Graduate School. My recollection is that the offerings looked good, the prices were reasonable, and that I couldn't quite make the schedule work: the classes were offered near L'Enfant Plaza, a bit too far from work. I thought of the USDA Graduate School when someone asked about Spanish-language courses today.

The USDA Graduate School is now Graduate School USA, a renaming that I must have noticed and forgotten. The list of courses is much shorter, the areas of study much more focused on programs suited to the world of the federal government and its contractors, fourteen areas of study in all. To judge by the Information Technology courses listed, the courses are narrowly focused: in this case on Microsoft Access, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Project, and Microsoft Word. The Microsoft Office programs are ubiquitous and powerful; but they make up a fairly small part of the information technology one might be called on to use.

Perhaps the old system was unprofitable, though I doubt the instructors made much more than would cover their commuting. Still, I think it a shame to see an old, ambitious catalogue with courses ranging from Arabic to Zoology so paired down. On the other hand, I wasn't keeping it in business, was I?

Reading to Sleep

When I have time, I like to run, and I like to read. The former, what with changing in and out of running gear, cleaning up, and so on, requires larger stretches of time, which tend to be most available on weekends. Reading I can fit into bus rides or comparably short periods, but again, the time for serious reading is more available on weekends.

 Running leaves me for a while a bit tired for reading. This was the case forty years ago, when the distances and speeds were greater, it is the case now. A slumped posture, as on a couch, brings sleep on quickly. Reading at a table, with better posture, may or may not defer it. The matter read makes little difference: history, philosophy, poetry can all make me drowse.

 Robert Lowell wrote the poem Falling Asleep over the Aeneid, not as of an experience of his own, but in the voice of an old man in Concord, Massachusetts. My copy of The Mills of the Kavanaughs is misplaced, probably lost, but the Poetry Foundation kindly makes the poem available. Probably I have fallen asleep over the Aeneid, but certainly my dreams would not have been so colorful or learned.

Disk Space

 My wife needs a new laptop. The old one is slow, which I attribute largely to its having a hard drive rather than a solid-state disk (SSD); Microsoft must know that we don't all have SSDs, but its software does not reflect that knowledge. The old one is also getting to be flaky, shutting itself down now and then at random, and reporting a low battery when plugged into the wall.

So the new laptop will have an SSD, but of what size? The most economical laptops seem to have 64 GB SSDs. On the one hand, that seems stingy, for the laptops issued at work have 238 GB SSDs. On the other hand, what would one install that takes up 64 GB? She's not going to download movies, install Visual Studio, etc.

This morning, while watching a patch not quite install, I had a look at the drive of the laptop I use, and found that it had 111 GB used out of 234 usable. In less than the two hours required for the patch installation to timeout, I was able to bring this down to 84 GB used. The largest files removed tended to be either installation programs, for programs now installed on the laptop or for packages on Linux servers, or else large database exports--I'm not sure why I used the laptop as the intermediary in moving database, but I did.

The 27 GB removed went easily, but I don't know that the 111 GB remaining could be easily pared down. I've used the laptop since March 2020. I have been reasonably prudent in what I installed: communications programs, emacs, Python, Oracle clients, GIMP, Git, and Go. Is 128 GB the minimum that one needs? Probably so, for her laptop has over 100 GB used also.

The Jefferson Pier

 About forty years ago, while walking downhill from the Washington Monument, I noticed a small marker:

 

 

No other sense of "pier" coming to mind, I supposed that the Jefferson Pier must have been a landing on the Potomac. I knew that good deal of the land south and west of the monument was fill.

 

Since then, I had looked for it once or twice, not hard, always without finding it. On the Saturday before July 4, I was walking with visitors toward the monument and spotted the marker. While we were looking at it, a fellow with earphones in straightened up from his inspection and told us that this marked the first proposed site of the Washington Monument, as being due west of the Capitol and due south of the White House: his audio guide had told him as much. We thanked him, and I stood corrected.

The WPA guide, Washington: City and Capital does not include "Jefferson Pier" in its index. It does say that L'Enfant had it in mind to have an equestrian monument to Washington at the point where this marker now is, and that any movements to erect a monument to Washington were stalled by Washington's discouragement as long as he lived. Once Congress determined to build the monument, it was found that the footing was better a bit to the east, where the monument now stands.

Wikipedia has a clear account of the Jefferson Pier. According to that, the marker originally stood on the south side of Tiber Creek (long since buried), and was used as a mooring post for barges. But it was not on the Potomac. The pier is located as close as it can be to where it first was, but some feet higher, for the ground has been built up.

West's Disease

 Some years ago, a young relative moved to Los Angeles. He rented a unit, one of four, on a side street in a quiet neighborhood. Of the other units, one was rented by an aging foreign rocker, one by a young woman who acted in a serial drama of some sort--TV or streaming, I no longer remember--and the last I think by a retired couple. I mentioned this to a college friend long resident in that area, who said, Real Day of the Locust stuff.

I knew of Nathaniel West's novel The Day of the Locust, but had never read it. Recently I found a copy, a New Directions paperback containing also Miss Lonelyhearts, and did read it. I suppose I see what she meant, for among the residents in a rooming house, principals in the story, are a failed vaudevillian, his daughter, who is a not very successful actress, and a scenery designer.

Long ago, I read W.H. Auden's The Dyer's Hand, a collection of essays including "West's Disease", on the novels of Nathaniel West. On rereading the essay, Auden seems to me largely correct. I would say that the disease, or syndrome, of an inability to turn wishes into desires, does not seem to be something West discovered or exploited beyond his predecessors. Frederic Moreau in Flaubert's Sentimental Education seems to suffer from just such an inability to want and pursue something wholeheartedly.

 A minor character in The Day of the Locust asks, "What about the barber in Purdue?" According to West's brother-in-law, S.J. Perelman, Groucho Marx would ask, "What'll it mean to the barber in Peru?". Both had Indiana in mind, but Peru is a town, and Purdue a university. Both meant to suggest that one should avoid undue sophistication, but the fictional Claude Estee proposed to offer the barber "amour", and Groucho Marx I think must have had slapstick in mind.

Along 16th St. NW

Contractors have been working on the lower terrace of Meridian Park, just above Florida Avenue NW. Last week one could be delayed by a front-end loader dropping debris into a dump truck along 16th. The front end loader reached only so high, and the plywood ramp it drove up was limited in height by the need to allow pedestrians to cross. It usually took the operator of the front-end loader two or three tries to shake everything out of the shovel and into the truck. This part of the work seems to be done.

 For many years, the only commercial establishment on 16th St. NW north of Scott Circle was The New Hampshire Mart on the northwest corner of 16th and T. For some months now, probably for more than year, the property has been surrounded by a chain link fence, and the building undergoing some sort of reconstruction, though I never see anyone working on it in the morning. The store should have been profitable, for it sold wine and beer. Perhaps the price of real estate meant that the property was worth more than operating the store would have been.

To the east, the 1500 block of T was blocked off by equipment, and had been dug up. Now it is open to traffic, though the pavement is roughly patched the  Friends who live on the block say that this has been going on for quite a while.  It appears that the city is replacing water pipes there. The pipes replaced could be about 125 years old.

On the terrace of the Masonic Temple at 16th and S, there are yoga classes, or anyway sessions, on Monday and Tuesday morning. This is new since the pandemic: I have walked along this block for many years, and never seen anyone practicing yoga there. I suppose that a lot of persons within a few blocks found themselves working at home, ergo with more time. The usual complement seems to be a dozen or thirteen working out, plus the man who leads it.

A day camp is in session at the Jewish Community Center (JCC) at 16th and Q. Campers and counselors wait on the steps for a bus to take them to the JCC in Rockville, which has much more space. I think that a new session must have started, for yesterday I heard an older counselor introducing a camper to the bus counselor, saying that he could answer any questions she had while on the bus. The counselor looked to be fourteen or fifteen.