Two Erasmuses

 Leon-E. Halkin's Erasmus parmi nous, translated by John Tonkin as Erasmus: A Critical Biography, gives a full account of Erasmus's life and works. I am glad to have read it. The author seems a little anxious to emphasize the orthodox side of Erasmus and play down any skepticism one might suspect. The book as I read it seems to me to suffer from a number of drawbacks.

First, that the work is a translation.  Mr. Tonkin's French must be vastly better than mine. Yet here and there I find sentences that make me suspect that something is missing. Then I wish for a sight of the original. Still I know that reading the original would take longer and that in reading it I would make far more mistakes.

Second, that in his advocacy for Erasmus, the author ignores the claims of some of what Erasmus opposed. It is well to mock the ossified end of scholasticism; but Halkin mentions Scotism in passing, dismissively. The nineteenth-century American philosopher C.S. Peirce thought highly of Duns Scotus. On some matters of faith, Erasmus, or maybe just Halkin, seems reluctant to consider what Jaroslav Pelikan refers to as the lex orandi, theology as informed by the prayers of the faithful.

Third, that a biography of a writer ought to live through the writer's words, and this is not practical for a life of Erasmus. His writing was all in Latin, and I don't suppose that the flavor can be wholly brought over into English. Some writers have an adventurous enough life to sustain interest without regard to their writing: Stendhal, Tolstoy, and Hemingway come to mind. But Erasmus mostly wrote and worried about getting together enough money to let him continue to write and publish.

John Huizinga wrote a somewhat shorter book on Erasmus, available in English as Erasmus and the Age of the Reformation. My copy is gone, for it was falling apart when I bought it. Huizinga has a lighter touch, is unburdened--in my recollection--by any commitment to Erasmus's commitment to orthodoxy, and perhaps had a better translator--or perhaps Dutch comes more naturally over to English than French does.

Pelikan gives a brief notice to Erasmus in his The Melody of Theology. His judgments on Erasmus are in the end not that much different from Halkin's. Of course his judgment on the scholastics--represented in this book by Aquinas, not Scotus--takes their strengths into account as well as their weaknesses.

A Business and Its Beliefs

 A Business and Its Beliefs: The Ideas That Helped Build IBM, by Thomas J. Watson, Jr., was on the outside carts at Second Story Books before Christmas. The book, published in 1963, was part of the McKinsey Foundation Lecture Series, sponsored by the Graduate School of Business of Columbia University. It runs to 107 pages, in seven chapters. Watson was then chairman of the board, having succeeded his father as head of the company in the 1950s.

When the book came out, IBM was in the middle of its project to build the System 360. The book makes no reference to the effort, for it was not announced until 1964, and did not begin to deliver computers until 1965. It is said that IBM management bet the company on the project, which cost $5 billion in 1965 dollars. Something of the magnitude of that effort can be inferred from Frederick Brooks's The Mythical Man-Month, a reckoning of the lessons learned on the software side of the work.

A Business and Its Beliefs lists three primary beliefs:

1. respect for the individual
2. [a desire] to give the best customer service of any company in the world
3. an organization should pursue all tasks with the idea that they can be accomplished in a superior fashion

 The first reflects a paternalistic IBM that probably did not survive the 1990s, maybe not the 1980s. Watson wrote that IBM had never laid off employees. Now the tech press writes of IBM's urge to replace aging staff, with memos referring to them as "dinobabies". It also writes of salesmen not paid promised commissions.

The third was certainly true of IBM once in many areas, and may yet be in some. A lot of very smart people went through IBM, and came up with some remarkable ideas and technology. IBM management didn't invariably know what do with it--IBM sat on John Cocke's innovations in reduced instruction set computing (RISC), so that Berkeley and Stanford popularized the notion, and it was beaten to market in relational database management systems after it had demonstrated their feasibility with R1. It revolutionized the personal computer market, and fairly promptly lost it.

  The second section of the book, "The Broader Purpose", expresses thoughts less popular in the American business community now. The "Friedman Doctrine" that the social responsibility of a business is to its shareholders, was not offered as such until 1970, and had not occurred to Watson:

It is in this area of national well-being that the business community will be judged most critically in the years ahead. Business has demonstrated how successfully it can innovate and produce. What we must do now--it seems to me--is to assign a higher order of priority to the national interest in our business decisions.

 Watson was therefore in favor of federal aid to education and in favor of something to improve medical care nationwide.

The IBM of that day and somewhat later was notoriously stodgy. It was said that an IBM engineer could demonstrate that he was a genius by growing a beard and not being fired. A man I know who had joined IBM sales on leaving the Navy in the late 1960s said that a co-worker shocked the office by coming to work in suit, tie, and blue shirt--nobody had worn anything but a white shirt before that. I don't know that I'd have cared to work for that version of IBM, but bohemianism can be a pose of its own.

Buffalo and Ghosts

 In Ortega y Gasset's essay "In Search of Goethe from Within" occurs the passage

The Jena of that period [1790 through 1825] signifies a fabulous treasure of lofty mental incitements. Is it not a terrible symptom of Weimar's impenetrability that, though it is not a dozen miles from Jena, Jena never managed to affect Weimar in the slightest? I have never been able to imagine Fichte conversing with Frau von Stein, because I do not believe that a buffalo has ever  been able to converse with a ghost.

(Ortega takes Weimar to have petrified Goethe, to have separated him from his destiny.)

Penelope Fitzgerald's novel The Blue Flower mentions the uncanny effect Fichte had, without effort or intention intimidating students who intimidated everyone else. It appears that it was chiefly the novelty of his thought and the difficulty of grasping it that accounted for the effect. Having recently read a bit of Fichte, I sympathize with those students, and I wonder what Charlotte von Stein would have made of his conversation--quite a bit, perhaps, if she knew Kant inside and out, perhaps very little.

"In Search of Goethe from Within" is included in the collection The Dehumanization of Art and Other Writings on Art and Culture.

A Publisher's Notice

 On the page with copyright, ISBN, and so forth of a book fished out of a Little Free Library, the following paragraph appears at the top:

If you purchase this book without a cover you should be aware that this book may have been stolen property and reported as "unsold and destroyed" to the publisher. In this case neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this "stripped book."

Indeed. Bookstores always were able to return unsold stock to publishers for credit. In the case of paperbacks, they could strip the front covers of unsold copies, and send those back, saving themselves on shipping costs, and the publisher on storage. Going on fifty years ago, I worked for a department store that set out the "stripped books" in an area open only to staff. As I recall, I read Play It As It Lays and all or most of The Peter Principle in stripped paperbacks. Whether it was the chain's policy to offer the copies to staff or it was just the decision of the store management, I can't say. I suppose that every copy the staff took was one that the store didn't have to pay to dispose of.

 That was about it for my stripped book reading. A few steps from me there is a copy of  Beyond the Hundredth Meridian missing its front cover, but that cover was loosened by reading. I don't know whether in the age of Amazon retailers still strip covers. For one thing, computerized analysis has given the big wholesalers much better control of their inventory. For another, a publisher might require some daring to demand the covers of its unsold paperbacks back from Amazon.

The notice was not on the first page one would see were the cover gone. In fact, it is on a verso page, where it will be noticed only by chance, or because some went went in search of publication data.

Source Found

 When I read The Radetzky March, it occurred to me that I had read a disparaging remark on the Sunday dinner of District Captain Herr von Trotta und Sipolje, something to the effect that Tafelspitz was not what someone would have consumed on a Sunday. I don't know why this bothered me: however little Joseph Roth knew of the lives of the Hapsburg bureaucrats, it was far more that I know or wish to know. Still, I looked for the reference. It was not in Stephen Brook's The Double Eagle: Vienna, Budapest, Prague, which seemed a reasonable place to look. It was nowhere in Milosz's To Begin Where I Am or Milosz's ABCs, which no longer seem reasonable places to look--what would his friends have had to do with Moravia? I may have looked in Peter Demetz's Prague in Black and Gold. Nothing yielded the information I wanted.

 Then last week, looking for something quite different in Victor Klemper's diaries, I Will Bear Witness: 1933-1941, I found the passage that I must have remembered, in an entry for February 13, 1935. The Radetzky March has just been removed from the public library:

... Roth, the Austrian officer novel from Solferino to the World War--I can't remember the name. Maria Lazar made an amusing remark about this work. She said: The man knows his Galician ghetto, but he does not have a clue about Austrian aristocrats and officers. Proof: The General has beef for his Sunday roast. But that is an almost plebeian everyday meal and never a Sunday dish.

Maria Lazar was then living in Copenhagen, but I suppose her sources of information were sound. Klemperer makes no indication of doubt.

Being Followed

 Earlier in the month, I was reading a technical posting, of interest to one who develops web applications with Oracle Application Express (APEX), and needs to do something unusual in the processing of interactive grids. (In other words, not of really general interest.)  As I scrolled down the page, the text was interrupted by an image of models wearing clothing with black and white stripes. Now, the post I was reading had nothing to do with fashion, in fact it gave as an example a database of cricket matches, so for an instant I was surprised. But I immediately saw that the left-most model had on a dress I had recently purchased as a present.

I did not purchase the present on-line--apparently it was enough to have inspected it in December. Everyone understands, or should, the thoroughness and refinement of surveillance of on-line activities, yet still a reminder can surprise. I hope that the blog's author gets a cut of whatever advertising money wordpress.com collects.

Lost and Found

 While walking this morning, I noticed a child's Superman output, perhaps a pajama set hung up on a post a few blocks from here. It appears to be for a child of about four, and I can think of a neighborhood boy with a taste for superhero outfits. But it would be a hike for a four-year-old. And how does one lose an item like this outside in cold weather?

Over the last few weeks I have found

• A child's knit glove. I picked it up from the street, posted a notice to the neighborhood listserv, and heard nothing back.
• A child's mitten. This I placed on a stake used to guy up a tree. It stayed there for a while.
• A baby blanket, found while shoveling snow. This I was able to return, for the family that had dropped it on leaving the Orthodox Christmas Vigil liturgy parked a few houses down on Sunday.

There is also a child's boot at about eye level in the branches of a small tree down the street. I have the notion that I've seen it before, may even have suggested to someone that the tree was a good place for it. But I don't know this is so.

  As a child, I certainly lost plenty of objects. As a parent, I was astonished at the quantity of lost items the first time I dug through a school's lost-and-found box. I wish I could say that the experience reformed me, but I have certainly gone through some pairs of gloves since. I don't think I lose them outside, though.