Description of the World - Part 67

Richard Jenkyns, The Victorians and Ancient Greece (The past is always with us, but it isn’t the same past. I’m still waiting for the publication of The Greeks: Who the Hell Were They? because it’s been a long time since I’ve had any confidence in my ability to distinguish my own blurry view of antiquity from the images in the hall of mirrors. The Greeks themselves began the process of idealizing their own reality in Hellenistic times by selection and editing, and the work of definition and redefinition has proceeded ever since. There’s a heavy element of recursion at work in this process since we not only have a changing view of the Greeks but a changing view of the various takes that have been taken of the Greeks before us and even some appreciation of the effects of becoming aware of the history of the interpretations. Maybe each layer of reflection is only 1/137 as important as the one before—I don’t know if there’s such a thing as the fine structure constant in hermeneutics—but the summed result is an enormous, baroquely complicated object of thought.

Francis L. Wellman, The Art of Cross-Examination, Fourth Edition (I don’t know if I’ve every used the methods suggested in this eminently practical book, but some of the quoted transcripts are memorable. Thing is, though, I found myself sympathizing with the witnesses caught up by the cleverness of the lawyers that crossed ‘em like the paranoid at a commitment hearing who was jollied along for a couple of hours until he was disarmed into simply admitting, “Yes, I am the Christ.” The downfall of Oscar Wilde comes across rather differently now than it must have when Wellman commented on it. Well, I’m guessing that whether you root for the prosectors or defendants on Law and Order rerurns reveals a great deal about a person.)

Interlinear Greek-English New Testament, ed. George Berry (The volume is out of place. I moved it from the other room a couple of weeks ago to check my memory on how the Bible winds up. I had thought that the last verse of Revelation was “Verily, come quickly lord Jesus.” Close but not quite. It’s the next to last verse that testifies (literally) to the impatience of the believers for the end of the world and the language is a bit more indirect than I remembered: “He which testifieth these things saith, Surely I come quickly. Amen. Even so, come, Lord Jesus.” To be fair (or merely accurate), the fact that the Bible concludes with an apocalypse doesn’t mean that Christians always obsessed about end things. Much as the Jews were always nervous about Ezekiel, the Christians, especially the establishment ones, tended to soft-peddle the Revelation of St. John because eschatology is politically dangerous. As Nietzsche knew, religions tend to moderate the craziness that gave them birth, as per the self-sealing radiator theory of the sociology of religion. Unfortunately, religions are as likely to neutralize what was good as what was bad in their origins. The Zen Buddhists say “If you meet Buddha on the road, kill him” The Christians didn’t waste any time when they met their founder on the road.)

Theodore Zeldin, France 1848-1945: Intellect and Pride (This is the first section of the author’s much longer book on France. I read the long version again last year. Oddly, I don’t think I ever got through this excerpt, which I must have acquired in the late 70s. It’s a damning inditement of my character that I find it easier to slog through two fat volumes than to read a shorter work.)

Gordon W. Prange, At Dawn We Slept: the Untold Story of Pearl Harbor(Prange was an obsessive researcher who piled up the materials for this definitive work on the outbreak of war for something like 35 years but never got around to finishing it. Donald Goldstein and Katherine Dillon finalized the book. Prange served as MacArthur’s house historian during the first several years of the occupation of Japan so he had access to huge amounts of information. As with any historical event, there are plenty of things we don’t know about what happened. There aren’t any grand or nefarious mysteries, however. Nevertheless, 700 (or 7,000) pages of documentation won’t convince conspiracy mongers from insisting that FDR let the whole disaster take place as part of his plan to get us in the war. Long before I read Prange, I wondered how anybody could believe that the government wanted half the fleet sunk. After all, a failed surprise attack on Hawaii would have gotten us into the war just as surely as a successful one. That argument didn’t work on my mother, who was sure that Roosevelt and Churchill planned the whole thing.)

Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution, Thomas Carlyle (Long before Hunter Thompson, Carlyle pioneered a style of prose that leaves you out of breath even if you read it silently. Of course this work is especially dash ridden, even for Carlyle, at least in part because the version we have is actually a rewritten work, a long book reconstructed after the original manuscript was accidentally burned up by John Steward Mill’s valet. Some of the mannerisms also hark back to a German writer almost unknown among English speaking people, Jean Paul Richter. A random sample that can stand for many others: “It is the baptism day of Democracy; sick Time has given it birth, the numbered months being run. The extreme-unction day of Feudalism! A superannuated System of Society, decrepit with toils (for has it not done much; produced you, and what ye have and know!)—and with thefts and brawls, named glorious-victories; and with profligacies, sensualities, and on the whole with dotage and senility,—is now to die; and so, with death-throes and birth-throes, a new one is to be born. What a work, O Earth and Heavens, what a work! Battles and bloodshed, September Massacres, Bridges of Lodi, retreats of Moscow, Waterloos, Peterloo, Tenpound Franchises, Tarbarrels and Guillotines;—and from this present date, if one might prophesy, some two centuries of it still to fight! Two centuries; hardly less; before Democracy go through its due, most baleful stages of Quackocracy; and a pestilential World be burnt up, and have to grow green and young again.”  For the record, the day Carlyle describes wasn’t the Fall of the Bastille or even the Tennis Court oath but simply May 4th, 1789, the ceremonial opening of the Estates General. Excitable kid.)

We Have Met the Enemy

Seven years ago I quoted this passage from Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism.  Seems like it’s time to quote it again:

“A mixture of gullibility and cynicism had been an outstanding characteristic of mob mentality before it became an everyday phenomenon of masses. In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think everything was possible and that nothing was true. The mixture in itself was remarkable enough, because it spelled the end of the illusion that gullibility was a weakness of unsuspecting primitive souls and cynicism the vice of superior and refined minds. Mass propaganda discovered that the audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.”

That’s very well and calmly said, though it had to help that the fascist nightmare she was writing about was over with when she wrote it. The same ideas probably need to be rephrased now in cruder and more imperative terms, especially for folks for whom the Hitlerzeit is no longer part of living memory. Trump’s transparent lies work because they have a ready audience. It’s hard to con an honest man, but not hard to con 40% of the American population. Trump may be a distorted reflection of the character of half the nation; but, to reverse an old joke of Lichtenberg’s, if an ape is looking out of the mirror, it’s not because an apostle is looking in. Trump doesn’t have supporters. He has accomplices.

Trump isn’t the truth of America, but he’s one of the truths. When people talk about the natural conservatism of the country, they’re really pointing to the deeply entrenched strains of racism and aggressive nationalism that are just as much a part of our heritage as respect for law or generosity towards other people. Conservatives haven’t won elections since Eisenhower because the people are determined to limit the size of government and bolster federalism. They’re voting white. They’re voting for bomb ‘em and take their oil.

That said, pointing out that Trump’s supporters bear the responsibility for Trump is probably not good politics. It’s probably smarter to come up with explanations for why otherwise good people might be tempted to vote for him even though most Republicans and many non-Republicans support him not because they don’t understand what he is but because they damned well do. I just figure we better get used to dealing with the dark side. It’s not going to go away even if Trump loses.

The Radical/Reactionary Popular Front

It’s easy to understand why a frustrated and angry man puts his fist through a window. We’ve all had that impulse even if we never acted on it. Understanding this bit of human-all-too-human behavior doesn’t mean we ought to recommend it, though. For example, I get it that for many Trump supporters the ineffable pleasure of giving civilization the finger outweighs the real-world cost of supporting a malevolent clown. That doesn’t make voting for Trump any the less stupid. What’s amazing to me is that many lefties of the pure soul persuasion who bewail this sort of thing in right-wingers don’t recognize that their own political behavior has a similar emotional logic. The diehard Bernie bros who refuse to support Clinton are also indulging in spite. Hard for a politician like Hillary to compete with the ecstasy of the self-destructive gesture when all she has to offer is the prospect of merely doing some good for actual human beings.

You can portray what’s going on with the Trumpsters and the political idealists as a search for transcendence, but only if you count shooting yourself in the foot as an instance of self-overcoming. Unfortunately, it’s really just a form of self-indulgence. There is a difference between the supporters of Donald Trump and the supporters of Jill Stein, of course. The former, like the Southerners who are their spiritual and often literal ancestors, have pretty much decided to be proud for evil. The later, more refined, have decided to advertise their goodness while refusing to do what is right. Both find the prospect of a grand political crackup intoxicating. This isn't the Grail quest. They're just getting themselves off.

Boring Radicalism

Disappointed Bernie fans are threatening to vote for Stein or Johnson or even Trump on the theory that half a loaf isn’t even worth half. Of course some of ‘em have bought into the Republican campaign to demonize Clinton and really think that she’s somehow a crook, but I think the deeper reason for this cunning plan to shoot yourself in the foot is the belief that only some sort of drastic, paradigm change will materially improve the situation. From where I’m sitting, there are two problems with this notion:

1.  An earthshaking comprehensive alternative to the neoliberal version of capitalism is simply not on offer. It’s not just that a really radical reorganization of America’s political economy is not politically feasible. It isn’t just the road to utopia that’s missing. It’s a credible utopia. Sanders may get credit for political courage by calling himself a socialist, but that is really a brag since his politics, considered issue by issue, is at most a not particularly left version of routine social democracy. You hear it said that wingnuts are like the dog that chases the truck, i.e., that they don’t have any idea of what to do if they manage to catch up with it; but the crew at the National Review don’t have a patent on that sort of thing. The Left has been searching for a substantive program for a long time now, but only the crankiest of cranks still thinks that a modern economy can dispense with markets. Nobody with any sense proposes to nationalize the toilet paper factory. Sanders certainly doesn’t.

2.  The absence of a vision of a new political economy doesn’t mean that capitalism in its current form is inevitable. Indeed, to judge by the history of the last two centuries, the one thing that apparently is inevitable is that capitalism will change. We still call it capitalism and will probably call its successor capitalism, but the economy of 2016 is a far cry from the economy of the 1950s with its huge centralized factories. Thing is, though, there is no replacement blueprint. That doesn’t mean that political action is futile, however. What the disaffected Left doesn’t seem to notice is that incremental changes can make an enormous difference, which is why the right, which is clearheaded on this score at least, fights apparently commonsensical measures with such passion. Raising the Federal minimum wage to $12 or figuring out how to make college affordable to people of middling means or increasing Social Security benefits or making the income tax more effectively progressive may not reverse the increase in economic inequality that has marked the last three decades but it will accomplish a great deal more than Jill Stein vapor wear. In fact, if you look at the measures of inequality over the last several administrations, you’ll note that for all its ideological impurity the Bill Clinton administration was actually a period during which the Gini coefficient didn’t rise and the incomes of middle class people did. The countless “little” decisions that a regime makes on a routine basis mattered. And there were also all those judges. If four years from now, the Supreme Court has a liberal majority, the entitlement programs are in good shape, we’ve actually taken material steps to deal with global warming, education has become more affordable, the infrastructure is being rebuilt, our immigration policies have been adjusted to reality, and, above all, if the disaffected two-fifths of the nation calms down, it will seem as if a revolution had taken place and not just to hysterical conservatives.

My overall point is this: incremental reform is not only the best outcome anybody can reasonably hope for at this point; it’s actually pretty radical.

Description of the World - Part 66

Top Shelf

Lord Macaulay, The History of England (Despite the title, this history focuses on the Revolution of 1688 and has little to say about the rest of English history except as prologue or consequence of that “Glorious” event. Hugh Trevor-Roper, who wrote the introduction to this abridged edition, sees the work as an answer to Hume, whose own version of the Revolution was the received Tory view. T-R portrays Macaulay as simultaneously hostile to theory and completely dogmatic. That sounds right to me. Macaulay’s Whiggish narrative of progress is political, not scientific; but his assurance that what he says is transparently right is highly reminiscent of the attitude of the New Atheists, who also think they are simply reporting the facts. Hume, who was a philosopher but not a dogmatist, was more empirical as a historian, which is why he didn’t focus so much on political facts and was accordingly sensitive to the emotional atmosphere of various eras. 

Alev Lytle Croutier, Harem: The World Behind the Veil (Of all the books I’ve bought and pretty much forgot I owned, this must be the most unlikely. Although it is a serious account of the custom, the subject is both exotic and erotic and the book is magnificently illustrated. Nevertheless, I don’t seem to have read it. Opening it at random, I came upon one description of one bathing sultana: “She had an indescribably fine complexion! Like fresh feta cheese….”)
K.N. Chaudhuri, Asia Before Europe (I found my summary of this work on the title page: “some interesting information suspended in a jello of useless theorizing.” I think what especially irritated or amused me (the two things are always hard to distinguish in my case) was Chaudhuri’s rather weird invocation of set theory as “a powerful logical instrument for identifying unities and discontinuities.” I read that and then searched in vain for the payoff. It’s not that you can’t think about such things in terms of sets. You can think of absolutely everything in terms of sets. I have plenty of tolerance for theory, but if you’re going to theorize, theorize. Don’t just throw in a “deconstruction” or two. Claim something.)

Robert N. Bellah, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (I was a little surprised when I realized that this book came out over 30 years ago, not that I actually thought of it as newer. It would fit just as well in the 70s or 90s or the aughts or last Wednesday since the conflicts in America between individualism and social responsibility and “the monoculture of technical and bureaucratic rationality and the specificity of our concrete commitments” are enduring tensions and certainly enduring themes, especially among mainstream sociologists. The moralizing tradition of what Bullah calls “social sciences as public philosophy” goes back to Talcott Parsons in this country and to figures like Durkheim in France. I don’t mean to denigrate this preoccupation. A critique of the limits of individualism, both as an explanation of what happens in society and as a basis for ethics and politics is absolutely needed. I just wish it weren’t so infernally boring.) 

Harvey J. Graff, The Legacies of Literacy: Continuities and Contradictions in Western Culture and Society (Graff uses quantitative methods to try to figure out not only how literacy advanced across world history but what literacy (or literacies) amounted to in practice. “Measuring the distribution of literacy in a population may in fact reveal relatively little about the uses in which such skills can be put.” For example, religions often promote literacy so that people can read the scriptures, but that doesn’t mean they want lay people to be able to read critically, and it certainly doesn’t mean they want them to read the wrong kinds of book. Almost all Americans can read, at least at a basic level, but few read more than a single book a year; and, as I’ve been complaining about for decades, college educated people seldom read serious nonfiction books at all. Graff calls the notion that literacy per se changes everything the literacy myth—he wrote a book with that title.)

F.J. Monkhouse, A Regional Geography of Western Europe (Despite the title, this work actually covers only France and the Low Countries as per 1967 or so. Readers of European political, military, and economic history will understand how a book like this can be an absorbing read. I enjoyed it for the same reason I watch the Tour de France. It puts a face on all the names. The setting goes a long way towards explaining the play.)

Colonel Blimp on High Strategy

It's pretty hard to figure out what's happening in a war by reading dispatches, but it sure looks to me that Isis is in serious trouble. The Kurds have expanded along the Turkish border making it harder for new recruits to join the radicals. The Syrian government, backed by Russian air power, is advancing on the Caliphate's capital from the Southwest. Fallujah is under siege, and Mosul is probably next. The combatant in the middle normally has the advantage of interior lines—the ability to rapidly switch forces from one front to another in order to achieve local superiority of force—but moving around Iraq and Syria in high summer is a dubious proposition granted all the planes and drones above. The situation with Isis is rather similar to that of the Confederacy in '64. All the Caliphate can hope for now is that its enemies will have a falling out among themselves or lose their nerve and resort to the really stupid strategy of converting a local insurgency into a global religious war. Jefferson Davis could hope that Lincoln would lose his election. Al Baghdadi can hope that Trump wins his.

If I'm right about this, the terrorist manifestations of the last year are signs of the weakness of Isis, not its strength. The South also resorted to desperate moves towards the end (e.g., General Hood's death march). Shooting up nightclubs is a poor substitute for the establishment of a secure territorial base. It can only work if the opponent panics. Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean it can’t work.

I’m sure that it will be possible to criticize the American response to Isis in retrospect, but I find myself thinking that our current strategy is beginning to look pretty sensible. That’s a desperate thing to have to write in a blog.

Description of the World - Part 65

John Man, Atlas of the Year 1000 (Things weren’t going swimmingly in Western Europe at the turn of the millennium, but other regions of the Earth were enjoying golden times, the Southern Song especially. The episode that captured my interest in this era, however, was the career of Mahmud of Ghazni who vandalized a good chunk of India in the name of Islam and the pursuit (no fooling) of an immense golden lingam. I know perfectly well that Mahmud was not a typical character, that Muslim invaders didn’t all go in for systematically destroying temples and monuments; but monotheistic religion is a permanent excuse for a certain kind of barbarism and Islam, whose crude purity is so appealing to ferocious young men, has licensed spasms of destruction right up to the demolition of Palmyra. That said, it’s an irony of Mahmud’s career that one of the luminaries of his court was Al-Buruni whose book on the Hindus, called the Indica in the West, is a model for the sympathetic understanding of one culture by another. As Vonnegut used to say, “So it goes.”)

James D. Robertson, The Connoisseur’s Guide to Beer (When the paperback was updated in 1984, there still wasn’t a lot to say about American beer. The revitalization of the Anchor Steam Company went back go the 60s, but Sierra Nevada was only founded in 1980. In those days you were a snob if you ordered Michelob. A good part of the point of this bibliographic exercise is to mark the passage of time—what else are us old men good for, after all—and at least in this one dimension there really has been progress. These days the beer aisle at the local Safeway makes me regret I have but one liver to give for my country. (The organ hasn’t sunk yet, despite the many torpedoes I’ve fired at it.))

Fritz K. Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins: The German Academic Community, 1890-1933 (I don’t necessarily believe that once you’ve bewailed the loss of metaphysiche Gesamtwissenschaft, the next thing you know you’re invading Poland. Nevertheless, if cultural conservatism isn’t responsible for the disaster, the profs didn’t do very much to prevent it. Ringer’s book is a sociology of knowledge study analogous to Pierre Bourdieu’s works on the French intellectual scene (Homo Academicus, etc.), but when I first read it (badly, no doubt), it mostly awakened the personal conflicts I’ve got about a tradition I both respect and distrust. I couldn’t get into the empirical part of it very well because I was looking for a homily. Or maybe, as an amateur player of the glass bead game myself, there was an element in self-flagellation in reading about the despair and protest of these men, this collection of characters who were, for all their accomplishments—and what the world owes German scholarship is seldom adequately recognized to this day—were also a prize collection of stuffed shirts who turned out to be criminally naive about the world. I note in passing that a dear friend of mine inherited Ringer's job at Indiana University. There are always connections.)

  

Alexis Lichine’s New Encyclopedia of Wines & Spirits, 3rd edition (As much as I like wine, I think I got this book because I like maps even more. I’m a sucker for landscapes with texture, the kind of places where great wines grow—featureless plains, plonk. Even when I was a kid, I associated quality with an intricate setting and not just when it came to wine. It struck me that so much of civilization originated in Greece because of its nooks and crannies. What matters is not the average but the deviations. Even a bug collector can share my taste for fine-grained heterogeneity. California is something of a paradise for entomologists because its innumerable microclimates make it home to an enormous range of endemic species.)

Description of the World - Part 64

Top of Third Bookcase

Olaus Magnus the Goth, A Description of the Northern Peoples 1555, Volume I (This is an odd volume from the Hakluyt Society, publishers of old travel narratives. In the fashion of its time, the full title of this work takes up almost a whole page and morphs into a blurb “…so it is filled with enjoyment and pleasure, readily instilling into the reader’s mind the utmost delight.” I own only the first volume. The entire work is five times larger. Olaus, who was the archbishop of Uppsala, mixes quotations from the Bible, Aristotle, and Pliny with observations of natural phenomena and a rather disjointed ethnology of various northern people. He has the curiosity of a Herodotus without the skill, but the little chapters with their woodcut illustrations are charming. Anyhow, if I hadn’t read the book, I wouldn’t have known about snowshoes for horses.)

Herbert H. Clark, Arenas of Language Use (As it is traditionally studied by linguists, language is rather like a specimen preserved in a bottle. It’s hard to tell whether the characteristics you assign to a sample belong to the animal or to the formaldehyde. You ask the informant to pass on whether a sentence is grammatical or not, but that’s a highly artificial questions since, as Clark points out “ it is utterances and not sentences that we actually produce, hear, or read. We never hear a piece of language that isn’t produced by a particular speaker for a particular audience on a particular occasion. Strictly speaking, it is a category mistake to speak of sentence comprehension or sentence production, as many investigators do…In most psychological experiments utterances…are stripped bare, before they are presented to subjects. The subjects are treated as if they had just begun overhearing a conversation between two strangers. Now there is nothing wrong with studying overhearing. But that must not be confused with studying understanding by addressees.” I wrote in the margin, “Us theoretical types can’t help but overhear, though.” It isn’t just the Ph.D. candidate trying to write a grammar for some Papuan dialect who treats language without a context. After all, somebody or other once claimed in the beginning was the Word, i.e., that meaningful language predates the creation of any context. The sciences are sometimes accused (and sometimes celebrated) for seeking the view from nowhere, but one might also asked who it is told to and who is listening. Anyhow, I was thinking about this issue a long time before I encountered Clark, which is why another marginal remark to the preface of the book records a dialogue which took place in the early 80s’: “c.f. [me] is this the ashtray? [Ralph] it is now.” Clark is a psycholinguist and his book deals with some of the empirical issues that become visible and salient when you focus on utterances instead of sentences. For example, he studied what goes on in literal overhearing, verifying the observation that many of us have made in coffee bars that overheard conversations are often unintelligible. He also made a study of nonce language, i.e., words and even grammatical constructions that are made up on the fly. I’m still waiting for a satisfactory psycholinguistic/ethnographic account of allusion.)

Karen Wynn Fonstad, The Atlas of Middle-Earth (I like Tolkien’s books well enough, but I’ve never been a fanatic about ‘em. I like geography so much, however, that maps of actual places aren’t enough. I even used to like paperbound mystery novels that had little maps of the crime scene in the back. When I was in elementary school and got tired of counting the holes in the acoustic tile on the ceiling or watching the house flies on my desk rub their hands together, I passed the time making maps of my own imaginary realms.)

The Tempest: A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare, ed. Horace Howard Furness. (Dover no longer keeps these variorum editions in print. I didn’t value them for their philological value, but for the source material and criticism in the appendices, which, together with the text, allow the patient reader to get some idea of what the play is in four-dimensions. The plain text of the work, even if it hasn’t been cleaned up or modernized, is merely a slice of the whole.)

Twelfth Night or What You Will: A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare, ed. Horace Howard Furness (In honor of Herbert Clark: “A sentence is but a cheu’rill glove to a good wit, how quickely the wrong side may be turn’d outward.” That’s because the good wit, aka the clown, acts like he is overhearing the conversations he is actually a part of and can therefore sport with the infinite possible meanings in his own sentences. Having slipped out of the straight jacket of occasion, “Foolery sir, does walke about the Orbe like the Sun. it shines every where.” Certain rabbis claimed that there were at least as many interpretations of the Torah as there were Israelites wandering around Sinai with Moses, but 603,550 greatly overestimates the range of readings because the Israelites were in the conversation and not all of ‘em were clowns. I note that the relentlessly witty Twelfth Night features a cross-dressing heroine, which, of course, meant that Viola or the actor who played her appeared in a disguise with two layers. He/she/he was a person of Neapolitan gender. The plot is as perverse as the language, which also seems appropriate. Didn’t Alain de Lille insist that figurative speech was the linguistic equivalent of sexual impropriety? The poet, or Nature herself complaining in his name, likened metaphor to homosexuality. I have a special respect for this comedy because of a wonderfully funny production of it I saw at El Camino Junior College in Gardena maybe fifty years ago. Every production since has been a disappointment.)

Jacques Gelis, History of Childbirth (Supposedly a history of childbirth, the book is mostly an assemblage of random information about conception, pregnancy, and birth. I didn’t manage to get past the illustrations of old ways of giving birth; kneeling, between two chairs, standing, and sitting on the edge of a chair or bed. I guess I’m too squeamish.)

Brewer’s Curious Titles, compiled by Ian Crofton (I got this book because I so enjoyed Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable or maybe because I’ve always like titles—the chapter of Rabelais that lists the books in the library of St. Victor is one of my favorite bits. The practice of titling texts had to be invented. Anciently, books were called by their first lines. The Babylonian creation epic, which we call the Enuma elish, was once “When what is above was not yet called the sky.” We may be returning to this practice. At least in Microsoft Word, the default title for an item is the first couple of words.)

W.S.Shears, The Face of England: a Book of the Shires and Counties (A description of England circa 1950. I’m guessing—the book itself has no date of publication. It would be a boon to anybody writing a historical novel who wanted a run down on every halfway impressive church or valley south of Scotland. The author even lists “dishes which may be sampled” for each shire. I don’t think I’ll go to Staffordshire just for the Beasting's pie, though I imagine a custard pie made from the first milk drawn from a cow after she gives birth might be especially rich. The book is rather like the Description of England William Harrison wrote as part of Holinshed’s Chronicles back in 1577—I have or had a copy of that, too, though I’ve only read parts of either book to get a sense of the texture of the country. I actually got further reading Michael Drayton’s Poly-Olbion, which is the same sort of operation in verse.)

Description of the World - Part 63

David Freedberg, The Eye of the Lynx: Galileo, His Friends, and the Beginnings of Modern Natural History (Libraries, museums, universities, governments, royal societies, and even department stores are all examples of what I call mesocosms. This book is about another one of these assemblages: the virtual encyclopedia of images produced by the 17th Century circle of adepts and enthusiasts that called itself the Society of the Linceans. Its most famous member was Galileo but much of the natural history work associated with it involved Prince Frederico Cesi. Another important patron was Maffeo Barberini, a Tuscan nobleman and cardinal whose coat of arms featured three bees, which partly accounts for the many images of bees produced by the group—Galileo produced microscopes as well as telescopes and his instruments made accurate drawings of insects possible. Of course Barberini eventually became Pope Urban VIII and loosed the Inquisition on Galileo, more out of pique than any obsession about geocentrism—the Pope, who was remarkably vain, felt that the astronomer had disrespected him. This book is about how the world was made visible.)

Walter Laqueur, A History of Zionism: From the French Revolution to the Establishment of the State of Israel (I figure that my assumptions about matters of fact, like the milk cartons in the refrigerator, have a sell-by date. That certainly includes what I think I know about the origins of Zionism, which is why this volume wound up in the to-be-read pile.)

Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the College de France 1975-1976 (I found Foucault’s lectures rather hard to understand, perhaps because he wasn’t so much reporting on what he had already concluded as thinking on the spot. I used to do that myself, though not so successfully, perhaps because the University of Connecticut isn’t the College de France and i’m not Foucault. Since I last looked at this book, I’ve read a great deal of early modern European history. Foucault’s meditations on state and nationality bear crucially on the central issues of those times. The first paragraph of the lecture of 18 February 1976 makes me think I need to go back to Foucault. Thinking about what happened in political history always seems to come back to a series of alternatives that, like false rhymes, don’t quite match up to one another. Romans vs barbarians, Franks vs Gauls, core vs periphery, liberty as privilege vs the rights of man, common law vs civil law, etc.)

Eviatar Zerubavel, Time Maps: Collective Memory and the Social Shape of the Past (I was once the Raymond Llull of 254 Prospect, contriver of mysterious diagrams, though most of ‘em were attempts to make sense of epistemology by locating the eye (I) in the intersection of physical, social, linguistic, and conceptual arrows or perhaps over on the side somewhere —in those days I had yet to swear off thinking about quantum mechanics without the appropriate licenses and still sent to ask for whom the wave function collapses. Zerubavel’s time maps are less dubious since they diagram ways in which people live historical time. He deals with many of the same questions of social memory that Jan Assmann investigates. If you’re going to integrate the history of man and the universe on the same chart, you better figure out some way to renormalize things or, in the alternative, you’ll have to use very, very small type on the right end of the line. The picture matters, even when you’re restricting yourself to human history. Some times count more than others. For example, a great many different peoples, regimes, and empires have claimed Palestine but the title never clears on that piece of real estate because the contending parties trace the deed back to different sacred times.)

The Oxford Book of Humorous Prose: a Conducted Tour by Frank Muir (Some of the excerpts are actually funny, which is not guaranteed in such anthologies. What I remember from it is the first known printed joke in English—it goes back to Caxton, no less. I paraphrase it for fear of violating copyright in the wake of the most recent trade agreement: A widower planned to remarry a widow. One of the widow’s maid servants warned her about the match. She had heard that the man was so lustful that he had worn out his first wife with lovemaking and caused her death. The widow replied, “I would not mind being dead. Is there not but sorrow and care in this world?”)

James H. Billington, Fire in the Minds of Men (I read this book at about the same time I moved into my present digs—1981—so that I don’t remember it very well even though the copious annotations show that I read it closely.  It dates back to a time when revolutionary aspirations were at a very low ebb indeed. Communism had long since lost its appeal in the West, the Soviet Union was becoming the sick old man of Europe, and neoliberalism of Carter was giving way to the frank reaction of Reagan. Billington picked a good time to look back at the 19th Century revolutionaries with condescension and (some) affection. He writes, “the revolutionary faith was shaped not so much my the critical rationalism of the French Enlightenment (as is generally believed) as by the occultism and proto-romanticism of Germany.” Leszek Kolakowski’s view of the origins of Marxism wasn’t so different; and on the left side of things, the remaining revolutionaries, the Maoists and the Red Brigade, didn’t have much use for scientific socialism. They were more left-Nietzscheans than left-Hegelians, more Bakunin, less Marx. Well, ideas are even less in view these days. Thoughtful people on the left and right despair of useful change for want of any plausible program, compelling narrative, or theory of revolution. Meanwhile the troglodyte reactionaries, fanatical Muslims, and various irredentist nationalists don’t feel the need for deep explanations. Fire’s enough.)

Charles Barber, Early Modern English (I read so much Shakespeare, Spencer, Donne, and Milton in my youth that I don’t register early modern English as an alien dialect. I expect that many people of my vintage feel equally at home with the older authors, though we unconsciously modernize the diction and certainly the pronunciation of 16th and 17th Century English and thereby obscure its unfamiliarity. Barber’s systematic account of the differences between early modern English and whatever it is we’re speaking now has the benefit of making the old writings strange again. English wasn’t domesticated as thoroughly as French was in the 18th Century, but it was considerably tamed. Nice to experience it in its rawer state, especially since my French is nowhere near good enough to get the same effect by reading Rabelais in lieu of Voltaire.)

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Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees, 2 vols. (This famous book is probably more influential because we know it exists than because anybody actually reads it. Mandeville’s message of the economic advantages of vice is not overplayed in the actual work; in fact the author is arguing in favor of a modern complex economy, not writing an encomium to sin. Indeed, the bite of the satire depends on recognizing that bad or dubious behavior really is deplorable even if it serves the good of the hive. Some passages of the verse part of the work sound like Juvenal, easy on the bile: Mandeville writes of lawyers who “to defend a wicked Cause,/Examine’d and survey’d the Laws,/As Burglars Shops and Houses do,/To find out where they’d best break through.”)

Richard S. Westfall, Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton (I’ve barely established a base camp at the foot of the Everest of a biography.)

William Kneale and Martha Kneale, The Development of Logic (Several of the books in this pile are heavy-duty reads I keep promising myself I’ll undertake. In fact the reason I haven’t posted another installment of Description of the World for a couple of days is that I’ve finally been reading my way into Kneale and Kneale, which I’m enjoying very much, though nobody speed reads a history of logic. I’m certainly no logician, but taught the basic course to hundreds of people back in the day. The standard curriculum for the subject is a mighty smooth pebble by now, having rolled down the stream for a couple of thousand years. It’s fascinating to go back the sources and handle the much more angular original. Anyhow, I always wanted to learn the mnemonic system for naming valid categorical syllogisms—Barbara, Darii, Baroco, Felapton, etc.—and have a better handle on second intentions.)

Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Annotated Emerson, ed. David Mikics (Nietzsche grew up reading Emerson. You have to wonder why Emerson ended up being quoted by the late George Apley (at least in the movie) while Nietzsche retains his virulence despite the best efforts of Walter Kaufmann to attenuate it by repeated passage through anodyne translations. For that matter, how come I find it so hard to get through Emerson’s essays? I admire the man for the same reasons Nietzsche did, but while I like his paragraphs but I don’t turn his pages. I have to admit I have trouble getting into many American authors. I guess I suffer from a sort of cultural auto-immune disease, though the prejudice seems to mostly cling to 19th Century Americans. Still, looking over Self Reliance, it occurred to me that it would a real pleasure to read it line by line with a couple of thoughtful friends. Does anybody do that anymore?)

Alain Badiou, Infinite Thought: Truth and the Return of Philosophy (The French still punch above their weight in many cultural areas, but the influential sequence of thinkers that runs from Sartre to the Postmodernists seems to have petered out. Badiou came late to this game; and if he has something distinctive to add, if, to use his own lingo, he is an event, the world of thought will have to catch its breath before it has the energy to recognize it. Or maybe it’s just me who hasn’t managed to marshal the will requisite to assimilate one more French philosopher. Still, there are bits and pieces that attract me. I expect that his claim to make literal use of set theory is mostly theatrical, but I also find the notion of the power set extremely useful, even if I decline to make a stump speech out of it. And then opening this little book to where I stopped reading I find, “I call thinking the non-dialectal or inseparable unity of a theory and a practice. To understand such a unity the simplest case is that of a science; in physics there are theories, concepts and mathematical formulas and there are also technical apparatuses and experiments. But physics as thinking does not separate the two.” That line reminds me a bit of my own definition of science: thinking with things.)

Roland Wilbur Brown, Composition of Scientific Words (This grand reference book, put together by an extremely diligent geologist, allows you look up Latin and Greek words for use in neologism like the scientific names for taxa and, used the other way around, allow you to finally figure out why somebody called a genus of beetles Scotodes—it’s from the Greek skotodinia, which means dizzy.) 

A Cultural History of India, ed. Al.L.Basham (This is really just a collection of essays on particular topics, but I’ve found it extremely useful when I need to sound like I know something about Indian culture on short notice. The book goes back to 1975, and the parts of it I’ve consulted seem to hark back to an era when Indians were less critical of their own traditions.)

Mark Elvin, The Retreat of the Elephants: an environmental history of china (This environmental history of China concludes, “There seems to no case for thinking that, some details apart, the Chinese anthropogenic environment was developed and maintained in the way it was over the long run of more than three millennia because of particular characteristically Chinese beliefs or perceptions.” Brief episodes of reforestation and soil conservation aside, population growth was stronger than imperial ideology or naturalistic philosophy. The epigraph of the book telegraphs the punch: “The straight tree is first to be felled;/First drained dry, the well of sweet water.” (Zhangzi)

Description of the World - Part 61

The Stack Behind the Chair

Orrin W. Robinson, Old English and Its Closest Relatives: a Survey of the Earliest Germanic Languages (I’d like to believe that sentences can soldier on alone like the knee in the Christian Morgenstern poem (“Ein Knie geht einsam durch die Welt./Es ist ein Knie, sonst nichts!”) I’ve tried to invent Kugelsätze for many years, but that effort is perhaps as contrived as Kugelsatz, a word I just made up only to discover there’s actually a such a word and also a mathematical theorem called the Kugelsatz, though in mathematics Kugelsatz means ball set, not bullet sentence. Robinson’s book contains a veritable Kugelsatz, one which has survived since the not only without a context but without any company in its own language—it’s the only remaining fragment of Old West Franconian: “hebban olla vogala nestas hagunnan hinase hic enda thu wat unbidan we nu.” Which means, “all the birds have begun nests except for you and me—what are we waiting for?”)

Petrarch, Canzoniere trans. Mark Musa (I was using an old deposit slip as a bookmark so I know that I got to Sonnet 123 some time after the fifth of August in 2003. As a kid, I read Petrarch’s poems in a Victorian translation, but after I acquired the Musa version I gave the old book, with its charming tinted picture of Laura, to an airplane stewardess who, as it happened, was named Laura. She had never heard of Petrarch. Well, I used to do jobs for a British engineer named Skelton who’d never heard of John Skelton, the immortal author of the Tunning of Elenor Rumming. Come to think of it, I also worked for an Irish engineer named Dooley, who’d never heard of Mr. Dooley—you probably haven’t either, though this creation of Finley Peter Dunne was frequently quoted at Teddy Roosevelt’s cabinet meetings as Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert might be at Obama’s. Of course a lot of what was once familiar richly deserves to become unfamiliar, but it still saddens me a tad that I can’t use my perfectly good W.C. Fields impersonation without causing bewilderment if not alarm in twenty-something baristas. Anyhow Mr. Dooley really was funny and so was Skelton. For that matter, Petrarch had his moments, though I doubt if the contemporary Laura ever got very far through that 19th Century translation—Victorian translators made ever poet sound like very other poet.)

John F. Collins, A Primer of Ecclesiastical Latin (I got this to help me during a period when I was reading the Vulgate. Maybe it’s my imagination, but Medieval Latin is a lot easier to read than the classical variety.)

Pius II, Commentaries, Volume One (I think I already commented on the second volume of this memoir of the 15th Century humanist Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini, aka Pius II. This volume contains a memorable account of his election. Speaking about easy Latin: “Convenere apud latrinas plerique cardinales.” Well, they met in the toilet to plot to elect a rich Frenchman pope, but it didn’t work, and Aeneas was acclaimed.)

San Francisco, an Eyewitness Travel Guide (These DK books don’t list an author. I used to get a new San Francisco guidebook every couple of years, but now that I’ve run out of relatives to show around town, I’ve lost interest, which is a shame, really, because I’m well aware that I haven’t explored all of this Disneyland for adults myself.)

Barry Cunliffe, Facing the Ocean: the Atlantic and its Peoples (Cunliffe takes the Atlantic face of Europe as distinct zone with its own history. Since his timeframe is 10,000 years long, his approach is largely archaeological. That gives the book a geographical flavor, which of course pleases me since I’m a fan of places and maps. Anyhow, I like edges; and the Galatians, Celts, and Bretons lived on a ragged edge.)

What the Koran Really Says: Language, Text, & Commentary, edited with translations by Ibn Warraq (I’ve been pointing out for many years now that it was philology not natural science that did the most damage to religious orthodoxy, at least in Europe. Nothing comparable to the higher criticism roiled Islam until recently. The works of the aggressive apostate Ibn Warraq are an exception. For the most part, Western scholars have been willing to go along with the Muslim version of the early history of the faith. Of course the Koran is a much more homogenous text than the Jewish or Christian Bibles so there’s no question of teasing out separate strands. It’s presumably all Muhammad (or Gabriel), though some of it may be modeled on or lifted from Syriac Christian sources. Trying to figure out the context of particular passages is another matter. When you read translations of the Koran, particular Suras are identified as having been received at Mecca or Medina, but this information is something added to the text and reflects the traditional version of Islamic history that was codified a century or so after Muhammad. The context matters, especially if you’re interpreting crucial texts like Sura IX.29, which became the canonical justification of the poll tax on non-Muslims—what could such a tax have meant before the Arabs established dominion outside of the peninsula? Several of the articles in this anthology chew over this issue. Muslims sometimes brag that their religion, unlike others, was, as it were, conceived with the lights on; but I think it more likely that their history seems unambiguous now mostly because the perpetrators got together later and agreed on a story.)

Henry Kamen, Empire: How Spain Became a World Power (Like everybody else who writes about the subject, Kamen spends more time on the first century of the Spanish empire than on the last, though it is a fascinating question how this ramshackle conglomeration lasted as long as it did. Or maybe in my old age I’m developing a morbid interest on how things end. Some empires persist because of rather in spite of their weakness rather like caterpillars left alive but paralyzed so that the wasp’s offspring can devour ‘em at leisure.)

Description of the World - Part 60

John S. Robsenow, A Chinese-English Dictionary of Enigmatic Folk Similes (Xieyouyu) (Although it would be hard to devise an excuse for buying this book, especially since it was rather expensive; but few volumes in my library have given me more pleasure. I ran across it in the textbook section of the San Francisco State bookstore where I was supposedly seeing what math texts were on order—I edited math books in those days. The sheer perversity of acquiring a big collection of Chinese folklore probably appealed to me. Or perhaps it was the frontispiece that lured me in, a drawing of a Chinese sage fishing with a barbless, unbaited hook. The picture illustrated the saying “Jiang Tai Gong going fishing—whoever gets hooked does so of his own free will.” That line could serve as an epigraph for inanis et vacua since it perfectly encapsulates my approach to literary self promotion. Many of the similes are drawn from Chinese history or timeless agrarian situations (“killing a rabbit while cutting grass—incidentally”), but there are references to anti-aircraft guns, Mao, and even Elizabeth Taylor, who the Chinese apparently regarded as an overstuffed frump. What I call objective delirium, the shared cultural detritus of a society, is like the unconscious. It is indifferent to contradiction and innocent of chronology. Robsenow’s book was probably used in classes on advanced Chinese. You are hardly fully fluent in a language if you simply understand its grammar and lexicon. That’s perhaps especially true in China. It may not be a case of Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra, but a great deal goes over your head if you don’t catch allusions. The one drawback of the book is the difficulty of looking anything up in it. I’ve been using one simile for years now but can’t find where I saw it and wonder if I’m quoting it right. “Throwing boiling water on your lice: it won’t kill ‘em but it will scald ‘em.”)

Literary Debate: Texts and Contexts—Postwar French Thought Volume II, ed Denis Hollier and Jeffrey Mehlman (My reading of this very rich anthology has been regrettably selective. I mostly just picked out a few favorite authors—Ponge, Bachelard, Serres—but I did reread Sartre’s writing on political commitment fairly recently and was surprised to find it so cogent. I came into the theater just as Sartre was being hustled out, but perhaps he’s becoming relevant again. Of course he wrote a great many absurd things, but to recognize that is not to set him apart from the rest of us. It’s like discovering that some politician or artist you like behaved badly in a sexual way as if human sexual behavior weren’t generally deplorable.)

Fernand Braudel, The Identity of France: Volume One: History and Environment (I’m a reader of the late works of famous authors, the books everybody ignores—Ovid’s Fasti, the last five cantos or Orlando Furioso, the Cantos on Mutability of Spencer, Hegel’s Larger Logic, the Mythologiques of Levi-Strauss. It’s probably my way of protesting against mortality as it also was for some of the authors. The old guys have to stick together. Braudel has a different take. In at writing at last about his home country, he celebrates a homecoming. “I have saved my white bread until last: there is still some left for my old age.” I don’t know if there is anything in this work that is novel from a historiographical point of view, but looking at France geographically makes sense of much of its history—I certainly wish that other historians would begin their syntheses with a deep description of the landscape of the events they will narrate and explain. Anyhow, I love the idea of pays, i.e., the distinct nooks and crannies of a country.)

Description of the World - Part 59

Albert O. Hirschman, The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy (I knew very little about Hirschman when I encountered this book. I don’t think I fully appreciated the wisdom of the man until I read Exit, Voice, Loyalty. I also rather misread the Rhetoric book or at least gave it a bit of spin. Hirschman writes about how reactionary thinkers that projects of political liberation routinely routinely result in less freedom or simply prove impossible or have various bad consequences.  I’ve been more impressed with the same sort of programmatic pessimism applied to technology. Perversity, futility, and jeopardy certainly catch the drift of anti-environmentalism. Liberals who quote Hirschman sometimes miss the other side of his argument: if the right overestimates the difficulties of doing anything, the left tends to under estimate them. Of course Hirschman is also known for the idea of the hiding hand, which points to the advantages of positive thinking, which is to say overly optimistic expectations. It’s perhaps a good thing that we don’t realize that accomplishing great things requires unpredictable creativity. Things always take longer than you expect, but you can’t win if you don’t play.)

J.C.Beaglehole, The Life of Captain James Cook (Great big exhaustive biographies seem to be making a comeback as witness Caro’s L.B.J. biography. Big books seem fitting for big persons. If they’re dull, the fault generally lies with the author, not the subject, though Beaglehole had a head start granted Cook’s adventurous life. Since Cook died in his early 50s, killed by Hawaiians but already ground down by command of three world-spanning expeditions back to back, it’s all the more astonishing that 700 pages doesn’t seem too much. Before Cook left on his first great voyage, he got informal instructions from the Earl of Morton who recommended “to exercise the utmost patience and forbearance with respect to the Natives of the several Lands where the Ship may touch. To check the petulance of the Sailors, and restrain the wanton use of Fire Arms. To have it still in view that sheding the blood of those people is a crime of the highest nature…They are the natural, and in the strictest sense of the word, the legal possessors of the several Regions they inhabit…They may naturally and justly attempt to repel intruders, whom they may apprehend are come to disturbs them in the quiet possession of their country, whether that apprehension be well or ill founded.” I wrote in the margin: “the original Prime Directive.” Cook does remind me of Picard, though in the event the British ended up being sufficiently high handed.)

Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law (I considered becoming an attorney for about twenty minutes in 1966, not because I had lost interest in philosophy, but because academia seemed to me a lousy place to practice philosophy and I had to do something. I kept a certain interest in jurisprudence if not law itself later on, even listening to jurisprudence classes from the hallway at Yale. I don’t think much of it stuck. I note that virtually the only note in this tome was appended to an ancient case from colonial Massachusetts: “In 1673, Benjamin Goad, ‘being instigated by the Devil, committed the ‘unnatural & horrid act of Bestiality on a mare in the highway or field.’ This was in the afternoon, ‘the sun being two howers high.’ The Court of Assistants sentenced him to hang; and the court also ordered ‘that the mare you abused before your execution in your sight shall be knocked on the head.’” I wrote in the margin “pretty unfair to the horse.”)

Maria Reidelbach, Complete Mad: A History of the Comic Book and Magazine (This anthology contains several of the Mad pieces that did more to shape my thinking than any point of common law. For example, it reprints the article from Mad #47 ‘How to be a Mad Non-Comformist.’ which I found very meaningful and even comforting at a time when I realized I didn’t fit in very well with people who didn’t fit in very well. All these years later, however, it still bothers me that the description of ordinary non-conformists says they patronize ‘obscure foreign language pictures with the sub-titles in pidgin Swahili,” but the illustration shows a picture subtitled in Sanskrit. Reidelbach also resurrects the “Potrezebie System of Weights and Measures,” which was the first publication of Donald Knuth, the great mavin of computer algorithms. I’m still envious of the juvenile Knuth for getting a publication in Mad with with illustrations by Wood no less.)

Description of the World - Part 58

N.J.G.Pounds, An Historical Geography of Europe (I don’t read fact-filled books like this in the expectation that I’ll remember a large fraction of their contents. Mostly I do so to keep my understanding of history and geography at a reasonable level by relearning things I first learned long ago. Meanwhile I apply to reading what amounts to management by exception, looking for the particulars that upset my expectations. I’m also looking for significant details. “In 1546 the emperor Charles V, when passing along the bank of the river Meuse, noted the city of VIllefranche on the opposite shore. ‘Whose is it,’ he asked, ‘mine or the King of France’s?’ Then ‘the records of the district…were brought and examined, and it was shown that the inhabitants…were subject of the French king.’ It was typical of medieval kingship that the limits of its authority were in many areas uncertain or unknown, and when questions arose, it was usual to ask the local population to whom they owned their loyalty. Such uncertainties were one by one cleared up as they arose, but some remained until the eighteenth century.” The ambiguity of frontiers wasn’t news to me. Lucien Febvre had made the same point in a well-known essay, but the anecdote makes it better. Another item, one which reinforces my suspicion that history moves faster than we suppose: “About 1530, corn, the first new World crop to be adopted in the Old, was being gown in Castile.”)

Claude Manceron,The Wind from America (The last four years of the American Revolution narrated as part of the history of France. The culminating event of the period isn’t Yorktown but the birth (finally) of a male heir to Louis XVI. Manceron’s anecdotal approach makes the book a considerably less strenuous read than Franco Venturi, but he cheats—you always know where things are headed.)

Clay Blair, Jr., Silent Victory: the U.S. Submarine War Against Japan (The War in the Pacific was a great demonstration of what human stupidity can accomplish, beginning, of course, with the biggest and best: the Japanese decision to attack a nation they knew would overwhelm them. We couldn’t match that one, but we had our moments. For example, even though we could intercept and decode American military messages, we didn’t ambush and shoot down Douglas MacArthur’s plane, thus ensuring that the war would last an additional six months to a year and that thousands of Americans, Australians, New Zealanders, Chinese, Filipinos, and Japanese would die to satisfy the vanity of an old imperialist. There were smaller errors, too. In the submarine war, we spent the first part of the war bouncing defective torpedoes off Japanese freighters and tankers because of the pig headedness of the relevant Navy departments. That admitted, though, the submariners contributed more to victory than almost any other element of our military. Their performance contrasted sharply with their Japanese counterparts who never loosed their fleet of excellent subs (and excellent torpedoes) against our shipping lanes.)

Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (This copy originally belonged to my ex-wife—I think there’s another copy of the book around here some place. I find reading her annotations more interesting than managing to have yet another thought about a book that has probably been read too many times by too many people to be readable for the foreseeable future. Rita was far more idealistic and morally rigorous than I’ve ever been. She wrote “Let justice be done though the heaven’s fall” on the flyleaf while I’ve more than once protested that even the categorical imperative shouldn’t be treated as a suicide note.)

Peter Gay, The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud (I’m not sure when or why I developed an aversion to Peter Gay, but the nit-picking annotations in this book prove that it was very much in evidence circa 1984. I even bitch about his adjectives, quite unfairly. The content of the book interested me enough to overcome my prejudices, however. The book is about sex in a purportedly straight-laced century. “This much should now be plain: the bourgeois experience was far richer than its expression, rich as that was; and it included a substantial measure of sensuality for both sexes, and of candor—in sheltered surroundings.” Gay quotes a length from the diaries of Mabel Loomis Todd to make the point—not even the Curies had so much fun experimenting together as Mabel and David. Well, at least in England, the Regency had been as raunchy as Victoria’s reign was repressed; but an obsession with sexuality, however modulated, appears to be something of a constant in cultural history. There are sex scenes in Tom Clancy novels.* We’re supposedly living in a period of hyper-sexuality, and yet we treat sexual offenses as worse than bloody murder.

*Speaking of constants. Everybody who’s ever written a novel or even begun one has congratulated themselves on the daring of their sex scenes even though their readers, if there are any, are seldom impressed.)

Jane F. Dunnigan and Austin Bay, A Quick & Dirty Guide to War: Briefings on Present and Potential Wars (This instant book came out the same year as Gay’s book and has something in common with it. ’86 was about the last chance to take Freud seriously in an English language publication, and it was also a golden moment for military intellectuals or would-be intellectuals to get their bets down on numbers that shortly wouldn’t be on the wheel. Dunnigan estimates the likelihood of various outcomes for the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan but doesn’t even consider the possibility that the Russians would give up, go home, and then have a revolution. Considering the military confrontation between NATO and the Warsaw pact, he doesn’t include the collapse of communism as even a remote possibility, though he does imagine a war of liberation waged from outside the Union. Bad timing. If you bat .300, you’re a star in baseball. The Mendoza line for war game enthusiasts is closer to .000.)

Carlo Ginzburg, Night Battles: Witchcraft & Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth Centuries (The Inquisition knew what it was going to find; and because it had ways of making you talk, it usually found it. The benandanti were peasants who participated in rituals featuring nocturnal dream battles against witches. The Inquisitors managed to interpret their activities as heretical, indeed a form of witchcraft, and eventually even convinced some of the peasants themselves. An old story. If you read the Witches’ Hammer and similar books, you’ll discover that an earlier generation of witch hunters had already turned witchcraft, at least in their own minds, into a form of heresy. For that matter, it’s unclear whether the heretics of Languedoc were really members of a sect of Cathars with a worked out dualist theology and elaborate rituals before all those Dominicans decided they were followers of Mani and created the reality of the heresy. The Inquisitors had learned all about the Manichees from reading Augustine, who had once been one. Maybe they figured that there was no reason to develop arguments against a new enemy when you could simply recycle the old arguments after convincing yourself that you knew what the heretics really thought. The same sort of thing happens in politics. If you hang around the comment threads of the National Review website, you’ll discover that you are actually a 1930s-style fellow traveller and will be earnestly entreated to give up the fantasy that the Soviet Union is a worker’s paradise.)