Category Archives: Books

Pet Peeve Opposites

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Time for a winter hiatus. Back to posting on February 22 or so, when there will still be plenty enough winter to go. At least we haven’t had the kind of wall-to-wall snow that Boston’s experienced lately.

Pet peeve for the day: postings, especially those containing business or economic data, that have no date, nor any way to figure out when they were posted. Worse than useless. I ran across two of them yesterday. Want to be cited in an article? Don’t do that.

But I don’t want to rattle on about pet peeves. Is there an opposite term for pet peeve? A small thing that consistently brings pleasure. One of life’s “itty-bitties,” as my Old Testament professor called them, though they could be good or bad. Finding money you didn’t know you had; a doughnut with a bit more cream filling than usual; a new understanding of a lyric or a plot point or a concept that suddenly occurs to you.

There has to be a term for that. Something just as pithy as pet peeve, that is. I haven’t been able to think of one, or spend any time looking. Finding such a phrase would, in fact, be an anti-pet peeve, considering the pleasure a pithy new phrase brings, so I’ll have to work on it. Besides the Internet – not everything is there yet – I’ll take a look in delightful books like They Have a Word for It and Lost Beauties of the English Language. When I have time; that can be the best little pleasure of all.

Divers* Notes on an Ordinary Thursday

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Maybe it’s time to go on another literary bender. Lately I’ve been reading The Dog of the South, which I’m enjoying, so maybe Charles Portis is just the thing. Since I read True Grit not that long ago, that only leaves three more novels of his left to read. The man’s got a gift for understated humor. Sometimes that’s the best kind.

Got one of a mass email from the principal of Quincy Adams Wagstaff Elementary School recently – an email of the times: “In light of the recent news regarding measles at a Palatine child care facility, District π is sharing with all families this Measles Fact Sheet from the Cook County Department of Public Health. At this time there have been no reported cases of measles in District π. Should there be a case of measles at your child’s school; [sic] parents/guardians would be notified.

“Measles is a highly contagious disease. However, more than 99% of our students are vaccinated against this disease and the measles vaccine is highly effective.”

What he didn’t say, but I wouldn’t have minded if he did: “We’re glad there aren’t a lot of anti-vax morons in our district.”

The usual suspects were over to celebrate Ann’s birthday last week.

Ann & friends Jan 30, 2015A close up of the cake. It’s the same kind as seven years ago, at Ann’s request. (She didn’t remember having it before, but was impressed when she saw it, and wanted it.)

Ann's 12th birthday cakeTo quote myself: “[The cake is] very dark and very round, heavy as a manhole, rich as Bill Gates. Among chocolate cakes, it’s a Union Pacific steam locomotive.”

* For some reason, I’ve long been fond of the archaic form of diverse “divers.” According to Grammarist: “The archaic adjective divers means various or many. Diverse means having great variety. For instance, a group of three can be called diverse if all three elements differ from one another, but we wouldn’t call the group divers because three are not many. Still, divers (usually pronounced DIE-verz) has given way to diverse in the sense meaning various, and in the many sense it gives way to other synonyms. The word has not been widely used in over a century, and even in the 19th century it was mainly a poeticism.”

Lopado­temacho­selacho­galeo­kranio­leipsano­drim­hypo­trimmato­silphio­parao­melito­katakechy­meno­kichl­epi­kossypho­phatto­perister­alektryon­opte­kephallio­kigklo­peleio­lagoio­siraio­baphe­tragano­pterygon

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Just showing off. This week I thumbed through my beaten-up copy of The Book of Lists (1977), and came across its list of long words. Such as Lopado­temacho­selacho­galeo­kranio­leipsano­drim­hypo­trimmato­silphio­parao­melito­katakechy­meno­kichl­epi­kossypho­phatto­perister­alektryon­opte­kephallio­kigklo­peleio­lagoio­siraio­baphe­tragano­pterygon. These days, that word has its own Wiki page. As is probably should.

BookofListsIt’s been years since I looked at the book, but looking again I can see why it was a mammoth bestseller. It’s one of the best browsing books that I know of, and the godfather of the slide show and the listicle. The back cover promises: the 10 worst films of all time; 7 famous men who died virgins; 10 sensational thefts; 15 famous event that happened in a bathtub; 20 famous high school dropouts; 9 breeds of dogs that bite the most; 10 doctors who tried to get away with murder; the 14 worst human fears; and much, much more! That last one’s no hype. The book comes in at 519 pages with fairly dense text.

The male virgins, incidentally, are on page 321, a list based on conjecture (and weaselly calling them “full-time or part-time” virgins). More accurate would be a list of historical figures suspected of long periods of celibacy, but that kind of phasing wouldn’t get enough eyeballs, to put it in modern terms. On the list: Isaac Newton, Immanuel Kant, Louis XVI, John Ruskin, George Bernard Shaw, Havelock Ellis, Adolf Hitler.

Another interesting list, more-or-less at random: Top 10 Air Aces of World War I. Of course, everyone’s heard of the number-one ace, Rittmeister Manfred von Richthofen, one way or another. But what about number 2 and 3 — a Frenchman and Briton, respectively? That would be Capt. René Fonck and Maj. Edward Mannoch. (Though Wiki puts Mannoch at number 5.)

And one more fun one: people who became words. Bloomer, Bowdler, Boycott, Braille, Chauvin, Diesel, Guillotin, Lynch, Nicot, Quisling, Sacher-Masoch, and of course John Montagu, the Earl of Sandwich.

Oz Day ’15

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Early Sunday morning more snow fell here in northern Illinois. About as much as in the pictures of subtropical Texas with snow posted yesterday — which is to say, not much for this part of the country. Not even enough to cover the grass completely. On the whole, it hasn’t been so snowy this winter, unlike last. But there’s still time for that.

Snow doesn’t deter the dog from checking for the sight, sound, and smell of intruders on her domain.

Payton Jan 25 2015Australia Day’s rolled around again. We could use a bit of that Southern Hemisphere summer about now, but not the aridity. Years ago, I had access to National Lampoon’s Tenth Anniversary Anthology, 1970-1980, which included japery by the young PJ O’Rourke, originally published in the magazine’s May 1976 issue: “Foreigners Around the World,” subhead, “A Brief Survey of the Various Foreign Types, Their Chief Characteristics, Customs, and Manners.”

More than 30 years later, I remember parts of it. So I found it online. The entire thing is linked here. It isn’t for the easily offended. From the section on Australia:

AUSTRALIANS: Violently loud alcoholic roughnecks whose idea of fun is to throw up on your car. The national sport is breaking furniture and the average daily consumption of beer in Sydney is ten and three quarters Imperial gallons for children under the age of nine. “Making a Shambles” is required study in the primary schools and all Australians are bilingual, speaking both English and Sheep…

Proper Forms of Address: Steady there, Cool off, For Christ’s sake, not in the sink, Stay back, I’ve got a gun!

Isaac’s Storm

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Isaac’s Storm by Erik Larson (1999) promises to be a good read. Especially if it’s as well written as The Devil in the White City, by the same author.

Got it the other day at a resale shop, a bit beaten up and miscategorized as fiction. Not so. “A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History,” says the subhead, which doesn’t quite pin it down as nonfiction, but I happen to know it’s about the Hurricane of 1900, which blew through Galveston, killing – no one knows for sure how many, but the usual figure quoted is 6,000 to as many as 12,000.

Isaac is Isaac Cline, resident meteorologist for the U.S. Weather Bureau at Galveston, and survivor of the storm, though not all of his family made it. In the movie version of this story, Isaac would heroically warn the unbelieving residents of Galveston that a bad blow was coming. Unfortunately, he seems not to have done that. No one knew how bad it was going to be. Hurricane science was still fairly primitive, after all.

I peeked ahead, and found that afterwards Cline had a long career with the Weather Bureau, posted in New Orleans. Among other things, he was there for the Flood of 1927, the subject of another book I want to read, Rising Tide (John M. Barry, 1998; I read his book about the Pandemic of 1918, though). In fact, though retired, Cline almost lived long enough to see the first weather satellites, dying in his 90s in 1955.

Thursday Stew

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A bit of meltage today, with temps around freezing, and the sunshine doing the melting where it hit snow directly. Compared with last week, the air felt good. But hard winter will be back, count on it.

Started working my way through Deadwood around New Year’s. When the show was still fairly new, the profanity put me off it. Not the profanity itself, but the fact that I considered it grossly anachronistic. Now I understand it as an intentional anachronism, done for good reasons. The show’s impressive: one that helps make the argument that now is a golden age of television, or at least the 2000s were.

Ann’s been reading Through the Looking-Glass lately, and looking for our copy of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, which has gone missing. Not long ago she read The Wizard of Oz. And she’s asked me to find our copies of The Hobbit and the first Harry Potter book, so she can read them. The kid’s got some kind of bug.

I have an ambition to scan more coins, specifically those I’ve encountered lately that don’t feature any Roman letters or even Arabic numerals. In the old days, it was a chore figuring out the origin of coins like that, so much so that for some time as a youngster I had a 1 yen coin that I thought was a 1 yuan coin. These days, all it usually takes is a focused Google search.

But I’ve alternately been too busy and too indolent to do much coin-scanning. I did get around to this one. Forgot to check the box that would correct for dust (the scanner’s got some impressive features for a cheaper model; guess the tech’s improving).

Ethiopian 10 SantimIt’s a well-worn brass 10 santim piece from Ethiopia. 100 santim = 1 birr. The lion, I suppose, is the Lion of Judah.

Time for A Time for Gifts

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Bitter cold today, and it’s only going to get bitterer. Maybe minus 15 F. by Wednesday, after another round of snow. At times like that, icy little puffs push through the cracks in your house to remind you that the chilly world is indifferent to your fate, you who came from subtropical climes but were headstrong about migrating toward the pole.

My reading material at the turn of the year is A Time for Gifts (1977), in which Patrick Leigh Fermor, who died in 2011 at 96, recounts part of his walk as a very young man from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople in the winter of 1933-34. A remarkable story, well told, and reminds just about everyone else (such as me) that their travels are pallid indeed compared with his.

It features a lot of interesting detail: “I pestered Fritz Spengel, the son of my hosts, with questions about student life: songs, drinking ritual, and above all, duelling, which wasn’t duelling at all of course, but ritual scarification. Those dashing scars were school ties that could never be taken off, the emblem and seal of a ten-years’ cult of the humanities. With a sabre from the wall, Fritz demonstrated the stance and the grip and described how the participants were gauntleted, gorgeted and goggled until every exposed vein and artery, and every inch of irreplaceable tissue, were upholstered from harm… and the blades clashed by numbers until the razor-sharp tips sliced gashes deep enough, tended with rubbed-in salt, to last a lifetime.”

And musings: “The Thirty Years War, the worst of them all, was becoming an obsession with me: a lurid, ruinous, doomed conflict of briefs and dynasties, helpless and hopeless, with principals shifting the whole time, and a constant shuffle and re-deal of the main actors. For, apart from the events – the defenestrations and pitched battles and historic sieges, the slaughter and famine and plague – astrological portents and the rumour of cannibalism and witchcraft flitted about in the shadows. The polyglot captains of the ruffian multi-lingual hosts hold our gaze willy-nilly with their grave eyes and their Velasquez moustaches and populate half the picture galleries in Europe…”

Custer Shorn

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Historical tidbit for the day, from The Last Stand by Nathaniel Philbrick, subtitled “Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of Little Bighorn” (2010), p. 38.

“Custer was known for his long hair, but in 1876 he, like many men approaching forty, was beginning to go bald. Before leaving Fort Lincoln, he and another officer with thinning hair, Lieutenant Charles Varnum, ‘had the clippers run over their heads.’ This meant that the former ‘boy general’ with the famously flowing locks now looked decidedly middle-aged.”

Nice detail. All the depictions I’ve ever seen of Custer just before he met his fate feature the distinctive locks. It’s a good book so far, as all of the other Philbrick books I’ve read – Sea of Glory, Mayflower, and In the Heart of the Sea – though this one isn’t about the sea. Unless you consider the Great Plains as a vast kind of ocean.

As the subtitle says, the book isn’t just about Custer. Sitting Bull gets equal billing as the winning commander.

Also interesting to note: Going west that spring, Custer, publicity hound that he was, hoped that a battle with the Indians would win him a large measure of fame back east in time for the Centennial. Sure enough, it did. But maybe not quite in the way he planned.

I don’t think I’ve read this much about Custer since before we went to Little Bighorn in 2005.

Last Stand Hill, 2005The stone with the black backdrop is Custer’s, but unlike the other men, his body was reburied elsewhere, at West Point in fact.

Early Winter Sky

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After a brief not-cold spell on Saturday and Sunday – I can’t call it warm, but still not bad – it’s winter cold again. Diligent neighbors used the interlude to sting lights on their houses or finishing removing leaves from their lawns. I did no such things.

The sunset on Saturday was shot with pink and gold.

Northern Illinois, Nov 29, 2014

I did manage to read Fahrenheit 451 over the long weekend. Or rather re-read, because I read it when – 40 years ago? Does that even count as re-reading? I picked it up because Lilly read it for school not long ago, and asked me about the story sometimes, but I had to confess to remembering very little about it, besides colorful scenes of book burning and the idea of becoming a living book.

I understand that it’s an important work. But I’m not particularly taken with Bradbury’s writing style. Not sure what it is. Also, Bradbury was clearly afraid of the pernicious effects of dumbing down society, especially as expedited by television, and I’m not entirely persuaded. Maybe the level of stupidity is always about constant, just manifesting itself in different ways across the decades.

TR & Saint-Gaudens

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Remarkable summer-like weekend just passed, but unlike the previous weekends, we didn’t go anywhere. Spent a fair amount of time on the deck reading. Seemingly overnight, some neighborhood trees have turned yellow.

The other day I picked up Striking Change: The Great Artistic Collaboration of Theodore Roosevelt and Augustus Saint-Gaudens by Michael F. Moran (2007) at Half-Priced Books. Looks good. Presidential history and numismatics: a winning combo for sure. I hope to get around to it soon, but then again I have Illegal Tender: Gold, Greed, and the Mystery of the Lost 1933 Double Eagle, by David Tripp, and I haven’t gotten around to reading it yet.

Anyway, TR thought US coinage of the time was uninspired at best, particularly the gold coins, and set about to change them. A lesser-known effort than busting trusts or digging the Panama Canal, but one certainly worthy of TR’s attention. So was born the well-admired Augustus Saint-Gaudens coins.

But there seems to be more to the book than that story. Q. David Bowers writes in Coinbooks.com: “The text is particularly valuable in showcasing the sculptor’s activities with important numismatic projects beyond the famous 1907 coinage. While the story of the coins has been told in depth in several places, including in Renaissance of American Coinage 1906–1908 (Burdette, 2007) and United States Gold Coins: An Illustrated History (Bowers,1982), treatment of the important medals has ranged from scarcely anything to light sketches. Striking Change ends that.

“Further, the author gives a comprehensive look at the design competition for new United States coins in 1891. This involved quite a bit of effort at the time, but ultimately ended as a non-event, as outside artists consulted in the competition did not seem to have created motifs that anyone liked—and Chief Engraver Charles E. Barber of the United States Mint ended up creating new motifs for the dime, quarter, and half dollar.”