A Metallurgical Metaphor

Today's NY Times has a review of Robert Caro's latest volume, headlined "A Nation's Best and Worst, Forged in a Crucible" (page C1) and "A Nation's Best and Worst, Forged in a Crucible of Presidential Assassination" (C6).

Forging in crucible sounds like a messy business, likely subject to breakage, spills, and splashing. Perhaps, though, the crucible is the only tool of metalworking that the copy editors have heard of. And what a "Crucible of Presidential Assassination" might be, I can't guess; maybe somebody's ear matched "crucible" with "crisis".

A Reader's Tastes

Noticed the other night in The Diary of John Quincy Adams, selections edited by Allan Nevins, entry for
September 24, 1829:

In the evening I read several of Madame du Deffand's letters. It belongs probably to the effect of age upon the taste and judgment that these letters are more interesting to me than any novel. They are records of realities. In youth it was directly the reverse--fairy-tales, the Arabian Nights, fictitious adventures of every kind, delighted me. And the more there was in them of invention, the more pleasing they were. My imagination pictured them all as realities, and I dreamed of enchantments as if there was a world in which they existed. At ten years of age I read Shakspeare's Tempest, As You Like It, Merry Wives of Windsor, Much Ado About Nothing, and King Lear. The humors of Falstaff scarcely affected me at all. Bardolph and Pistol and Nym were personages quite unintelligible to me; and the lesson of Sir Hugh Evans to the boy William was too serious an affair. But the incantations of Prospero, the loves of Ferdinand and Miranda, the more than ethereal brightness of Ariel, and the worse than beastly grossness of Caliban, made for me a world of revels, and lapped me in Elysium. With these books, in a closet of my mother's bed-chamber, there was also a small edition, in two volumes, of Milton's Paradise Lost, which, I believe, I attempted ten times to read, and never could get through half a book. I might as well have attempted to read Homer before I had learnt the Greek alphabet. I was mortified, even to the shedding of solitary tears, that I could not even conceive what it was that my father and mother admired so much in that book, and yet I was ashamed to ask them an explanation. I smoked tobacco and read Milton at the same time, and from the same motive--to find out what was the recondite charm in them which gave my father so much pleasure. After making myself four or five times sick with smoking, I mastered that accomplishment, and acquired a habit which, thirty years afterwards, I had much more difficulty in breaking off. But I did not master Milton. I was nearly when I first read the Paradise Lost with delight and astonishment. but of late years I have lost the relish for fiction. I see nothing with sympathy but men, women, and children of flesh and blood.

thebreaks

I find that it takes me a while to get used to reading two words written as one, usually as part of a business name. I saw women with items of clothing or with bags marked "lululemon", a seller of women's athletic wear, and it took me a long time to read the name as "Lulu Lemon", as I gather it should be read. For some months I was sounding it inwardly as a double iamb: luLUleMON. Fortunately,  I never had to discuss it with anyone.

Then there is the restaurant "levelone" on 17th and S Sts. NW. After about dozenth time I walked by, I read "Level One". Yet I still can't shake the feeling it should rhyme with "provolone".

Truth in Danger?

James Russell Ament links to an Utne Reader piece on "The Death of Telling the Truth". It seems to me that, on the contrary, the illness is not mortal but chronic.

Do politicians lie more? Maybe. If so, though, it probably because they have more parties to placate. In the days of monarchies the statesman had pretty small constituency to worry about. Yet courtiers were not always known for keeping their words, were they? Ralegh's disdainful "Epitaph on the Earl of Leicester" includes the line

Here lies the noble Courtier, who never kept his word;

Do the rest of us lie more? I'd say the evidence is not clear there. To go way back, Sir Henry Summer Maine write in Ancient Law that

No trustworthy primitive record can be read without perceiving that the habit of mind which induces us to make good a promise is as yet imperfectly developed, and that acts of flagrant perfidy are often mentioned without blame and sometimes described with approbation. In the Homeric literature, for instance, the deceitful cunning of Ulysses appears as a virtue of the same rank with the prudence of Nestor, the constancy of Hector, and the gallantry of Achilles.

More generally, it is probably unwise to expect strict adherence to the truth when the party is speaking is at a disadvantage as against the audience, and particularly when party speaking considers the audience's advantage to be unfairly gained. Trollope thought the Irish of his time there "but little bound by the love of truth"; one could multiply examples.

What Would Flashman Say to This?

A visit on Wednesday to Idle Time Books in Adams-Morgan turned up a copy of Quartered Safe Out Here, a book I remembered glancing at on the shelves of Olsson's almost 20 years ago. I bought it, and set the book club's May novel aside until I finished it.

Quartered Safe Out Here, George MacDonald Fraser's memoir of his service in the late stages of WW II in Burma, is as good as I supposed it must be back in the 1990s. Fraser served as a private soldier and eventually a lance corporal in the Border Regiment, part of the 17th Division, in the fighting around Meiktila and Pyawbwe, and in smaller actions thereafter. The men of his section ("squad" in American) were mostly from around Carlisle, as he was. He was unusual among them, as coming from a prosperous family, and as being by name and identification Scottish, but seems to have gotten along well enough. By the time Fraser reached the line, the Japanese army had been badly damaged at Imphal, and was nearing collapse; largely it was a war of movement. The memoir lacks the nightmare quality of the later stages of E.B. Sledge's With the Old Breed, though no doubt the older hands in his section had seen fighting as awful around Imphal as the American troops saw on Okinawa.

I was amused, however, by a couple of passages I would not have imagined coming from the author of the Flashman books, regarding a leave in Calcutta:

 Maybe sex is more important nowadays than it used to be. Or maybe we were a more restrained, inhibited, pious, and timid generation. But I was interested to note that Nine Section, who for months had been deprived of female society, and had remarked on the fact from time to time showed no tendency to behave like Casanova gone berserk. They eyed what talent there was in the bars of Chowringhee, danced with abandon at the service clubs, and chatted up the Wrens, Waafs, ATS, and nurses, and that was about it, apparently.

Forster was an interesting case. On our first night in Calcutta he spruced himself up with Lifebuoy, flourished the prophylactic kit he had drawn from the M.O.'s office, admired himself in the mirror, sketched out a programme of debauchery which would have frightened Caligula, and strode forth like Ferdinand the Bull. Three hours later back, full of gloating accounts of his sexual heroics, and unaware than in the interval Grandarse and I had been sitting three rows behind him in the Lighthouse cinema, watching Laurel and Hardy.

Well, as Mencken wrote long ago, men are gaudy liars when it comes to their amours.

The Mystery Solved

Wednesday's Washington Post explains the curious structure on the JCC steps: it is a model of the Supreme Court Building, made according to plans provided by the District of Columbia Commission on the Arts and Humanities. Students at the Corcoran College of Art built it, which helps to explain the quality of the model. They built four, and coated this one in lacquer, which helped it survive a fortnight--a mostly dry one--outside.

Noticed at the JCC

Tuesday I caught the bus at 16th and Q Sts. NW, where I noticed this

namely a cardboard temple on the steps. Somebody put a lot of careful work into this, yet I find no allusion to it on the JCC's web site. It was still there Thursday morning, looking good; we've had a dry week.