For Memorial Day: Two Set Pieces

From Democracy by Henry Adams, chapter ix:

"Yet even Sybil was startled as she rode through the gate and found herself suddenly met by the long white ranks of head-stones, stretching up and down the hill-sides by thousands, in order of baffle; as though Cadmus had reversed his myth, and had sown living men, to come up dragons' teeth. She drew in her horse with a shiver and a sudden impulse to cry. Here was something new to her. This was war—wounds, disease, death. She dropped her voice and with a look almost as serious as Carrington's, asked what all these graves meant. When Carrington told her, she began for the first time to catch some dim notion why his face was not quite as gay as her own. Even now this idea was not very precise, for he said little about himself, but at least she grappled with the fact that he had actually, year after year, carried arms against these men who lay at her feet and who had given their lives for her cause. It suddenly occurred to her as a new thought that perhaps he himself might have killed one of them with his own hand. There was a strange shock in this idea. She felt that Carrington was further from her. He gained dignity in his rebel isolation. She wanted to ask him how he could have been a traitor, and she did not dare. Carrington a traitor!

Carrington killing her friends! The idea was too large to grasp. She fell back on the simpler task of wondering how he had looked in his rebel uniform."

From The Bostonians by Henry James, chapter xxv:

'"Now there is one place where perhaps it would be indelicate to take a Mississippian," Verena said, after this episode. "I mean the great place that towers above the others—that big building with the beautiful pinnacles, which you see from every point." But Basil Ransom had heard of the great Memorial Hall; he knew what memories it enshrined, and the worst that he should have to suffer there; and the ornate, overtopping structure, which was the finest piece of architecture he had ever seen, had moreover solicited his enlarged curiosity for the last half-hour. He thought there was rather too much brick about it, but it was buttressed, cloistered, turreted, dedicated, superscribed, as he had never seen anything; though it didn't look old, it looked significant; it covered a large area, and it sprang majestic into the winter air. It was detached from the rest of the collegiate group, and stood in a grassy triangle of its own. As he approached it with Verena she suddenly stopped, to decline responsibility. "Now mind, if you don't like what's inside, it isn't my fault."

He looked at her an instant, smiling. "Is there anything against Mississippi?"

"Well, no, I don't think she is mentioned. But there is great praise of our young men in the war."

"It says they were brave, I suppose."

"Yes, it says so in Latin."

"Well, so they were—I know something about that," Basil Ransom said. "I must be brave enough to face them—it isn't the first time." And they went up the low steps and passed into the tall doors. The Memorial Hall of Harvard consists of three main divisions: one of them a theatre, for academic ceremonies; another a vast refectory, covered with a timbered roof, hung about with portraits and lighted by stained windows, like the halls of the colleges of Oxford; and the third, the most interesting, a chamber high, dim, and severe, consecrated to the sons of the university who fell in the long Civil War. Ransom and his companion wandered from one part of the building to another, and stayed their steps at several impressive points; but they lingered longest in the presence of the white, ranged tablets, each of which, in its proud, sad clearness, is inscribed with the name of a student-soldier. The effect of the place is singularly noble and solemn, and it is impossible to feel it without a lifting of the heart. It stands there for duty and honour, it speaks of sacrifice and example, seems a kind of temple to youth, manhood, generosity. Most of them were young, all were in their prime, and all of them had fallen; this simple idea hovers before the visitor and makes him read with tenderness each name and place—names often without other history, and forgotten Southern battles. For Ransom these things were not a challenge nor a taunt; they touched him with respect, with the sentiment of beauty. He was capable of being a generous foeman, and he forgot, now, the whole question of sides and parties; the simple emotion of the old fighting-time came back to him, and the monument around him seemed an embodiment of that memory; it arched over friends as well as enemies, the victims of defeat as well as the sons of triumph.'

 I have read that both Carrington and Ransom were modeled on L.Q.C. Lamar, briefly a Confederate soldier, then diplomat, eventually justice of the U.S. Supreme Court..

The Memoir as Score-Settling: de Tocqueville

 This past winter I reread de Tocqueville's Souvenirs, his memoir of 1848 and its aftermath. His judgments of his fellow actors run toward the epigrammatic and brutal. Early on, he remarks of Louis Philippe

"In general, his style on solemn occasions recalled the sentimental jargon of the late 18th Century, reproduced with facile copiousness, and singularly incorrect: Rousseau touched up by a 19th Century cook (a pretentious one)."

Opening toward the middle of the book (Part II, Ch. VI), I find

"Lamartine's wit reflected itself in Champeaux's stupidity like the sun in a smoked glass, which lets one see it without rays but more clearly than with the naked eye."

In the next chapter, a psychiatrist ("an excellent doctor, ... though himself a bit cracked") confides that various notables of his own left party are mad and should be in the hospital, not the assembly. In Part III de Tocqueville  tells how he kept the elder statesmen of the previous regime happy by flattery--always welcoming, often soliciting, almost never following their advice.

I should say that these portraits are a minor distraction, or even spice, to a fascinating book. One hesitates to believe that the other politicians were quite so lost or venal, or de Tocqueville quite so clairvoyant as he depicts them and himself; yet his speech of January 27, 1848 anticipates and explains the coming troubles clearly. 

His evaluation of French politics and society in the period is not much different from Flaubert's in Sentimental Education. One could, I suppose, read de Tocqueville's unflattering portraits as a key to Flaubert's roster of Dambreuse salon:


"There one met the great Monsieur A, the famous B, the intelligent C, the eloquent Z, the wonderful y, the old stagers of the Left Centre, the paladins of the Right, the veterans of the Middle Way, all the stock characters of the political comedy. [Frederic] was astounded by their abysmal conversation, their pettiness, their spite, their bad faith..."

Whites

Today I needed to paint a couple of small windows, in Benjamin Moore Atrium White like all our trim. Because I made searched from right to left and the quart can was at the left of the lineup, I made a fair survey of our paint holdings, at least those in standard Benjamin Moore trade dress. To summarize, we have a lot of white paint. Our holdings are largest in Cameo White, Decorator's White, and White Dove, amounting between them to five or six gallon cans. There is a gallon can of Corinthian White, and a quart can of Polar Ice, which I suppose must be a white. A couple of gallon cans of Moore's "Aura" line are probably White Dove.

Certainly I reached 20 without imagining that there was more than one thing called "white paint". I've learned better since.

RIP Tom West, Begetter of "a New Machine"

Tom West, who led the development of the Data General (DG) MV/8000 minicomputer, died last Thursday. He achieved fame 30 years ago when Tracy Kidder wrote about the project in The Soul of a New Machine, which won a Pulitzer Prize.

I read a bit of the book when excerpts appeared in a magazine, then a bit later read a roommate's copy. Later still, after I had some experience with the MV/Eclipse line, my wife was assigned the book for a management class, and I read it yet again. A couple of points were clearer on that reading:

• The decision to incorporate the 16-bit instruction set imposed certain constraints. The MVs had four general-purpose registers, for example; for another, one could address words but not bytes with a register-relative address.
• The lead architect of the team had wanted a VAX-like instruction set. The VAX instruction set was elaborate, just the thing if one were writing an operating system in assembly language.
• About the time that the book came out, researchers in California were discovering how hard it was to speed up the VAX to the point they wanted, and considering alternatives. The new model of "reduced-instruction-set computing" (RISC) produced some startlingly fast machines, and ate into the old minicomputer market at the high end while the 386 started to nibble at the other.

By the early 1990s, the DG users' group magazine quoted West as saying that customers "wanted to get their MIPS from gun-gray boxes running UNIX." This was pretty much true. With the Aviion, based on Motorola's 88000 RISC processor, DG made a very good effort to give the customers what they wanted. Alas, Motorola was one of many companies to discover that trying to fight the x86 machines was pointless. EMC bought up the wreckage of DG  for the Clariion storage line.

I enjoyed working with the MV/8000 and its successors, and for that matter their 16-bit predecessors. The AOS/VS operating system did many things well, the command-line interpreters were well thought out, and the assembler easily enough learned. I'm grateful for the chance to have worked with those machines.

Fun with Calculators

The Sunday NY Times carried an excerpt from Reckless Endangerment: How Outsized Ambition, Greed and Corruption Led to Economic Armageddon, by Gretchen Morgenson. The excerpt is interesting, and the book no doubt equally so. But a calculation slowed my reading:

"According to documents filed in a borrower lawsuit against NovaStar, Aurora Loan Services, a Lehman subsidiary, studied 16 NovaStar loans for quality-control purposes. What the analysis found: more than half of the loans — 56.25 percent, to be exact — raised red flags."

Or, in other words, "nine". The expression "56.25 percent" is most useful in cases where one cannot be exact--election or census returns, say. If you do not trust your readers to remember the previous sentence, the expression could be "nine of the sixteen"; if you do not trust them to remember grade-school math, you could throw in "more than half." But why use two decimal places?

Apparently because calculators make it easy. A couple of years ago, my wife received a synopsis of the student evaluations for a course she had taught. Again, the percentages were carried out to two decimal places. This would have made sense for a lecture section of a few hundred students, but there were 29 in her class. I found myself reckoning Well, OK, that's 23 of 29 thought the homework was appropriate.

What's in a Verb?

Various papers quote Michel Taubman, author of a campaign biography of Dominique Strauss-Kahn (DSK), as saying of his wife Anne Sinclair “She was subjugated by his intelligence and charm.”

Was he ill-served by his translators? A woman or two may have thought me quick on the uptake. One or two may have thought me intelligent. If I subjugated any, by intelligence and charm or card-tricks and soulful eyes, the record is lost. And conceding happily that I am not worthy to unlace DSK's sneakers, I must still say that I have read a fair bit about men of unchallengeable intelligence, and who had no reason to complain of women's unkindness--Richard Feynman, Bertrand Russell, etc.--and have not so far run into the verb "subjugate."

About 30 years ago, the National Lampoon ran an "Aggression" issue, in which P.J. O'Rourke had a piece taking literally the ways of speech of the young male urbanite: thought I'd have go into the kitchen and kill the cow myself/call in an airstrike to get a cab, and so on. I don't think the narrator got around to subjugating any talk-show hostesses, but then this was long before Oprah or Ms. Sinclair. O'Rourke knew he was being juvenile; he wrote for effect. Is Mr. Taubman serious?.

The Memoir as Vengeance, Introduction

Some time ago I noticed how much I enjoy reading memoirs: in the last dozen years I've read or reread the memoirs of such as John Lukacs, George Kennan, Alvin Kernan, and Iris Origo. In general these are not the sort of memoir that seems to have started wearing on people, in which the emphasis is on escape from bad familial and personal situations. All the authors just named lived through difficult enough times, chiefly WW II, but that is not why I read them. The clue is in Thoreau's Journals, entry of March 18, 1861:

"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,--on the manner in which he treats the subject and on the importantce 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."

A minor but entertaining interest in such works is the author's judgments on his fellows. Some memoirists, not particularly those above, set down in their works judgments that a devil's advocate might find harsh or at least unbecoming. In the Goncourt brothers' journals one finds

5 janvier [1865]--Sainte-Beuve a vu une fois le premier Empereur. C'était à Boulogne: il était en train de pisser. N'est-ce pas un peu dans cette posture-là qu'il a vu et jugé depuis tous les grands hommes?

Sainte-Beuve seems to have been notably given to this, to judge by the bits of his conversation the brothers--not ones themselves to waste good words on the undeserving--reproduce.