Article by John Derbyshire |
||||
|
|
|||
| June
Diary The
old man’s snoring. Rain!
It seems to have been raining for ever out here on Long Island.
June broke all records. My
office is in a little annex added to the house as an afterthought around
1937. It has a flat roof made
of some nonferrous metal. My
working life this past few weeks — months? — I am losing track — has
been conducted to the steady thrum of rain on my ceiling.
The psychological effects have been rather depressing.
Did you notice?
I feel as if I am trapped in that Somerset Maugham story.
(There is actually an even rainier short story, set on Venus, by
one of the old sci-fi masters — Ray Bradbury, I think.) Trying
to fish something constructive out of all this endless thrumming and
dripping and squelching, I shall begin and end this month’s diary with
rain-related quiz questions. The
closing one will of course, in accordance with immemorial tradition, be a
math brain-teaser. Here, to
open with, is a tiny literary puzzle. “We
shall die in the dark, and be buried in the rain.” That line from Edna St. Vincent Millay has been knocking
around in my head for 20 years. Well,
I have just been reading Nancy
Milford’s biography of the poetess, from which I learn
that Millay did indeed die in the dark.
But was she buried in the rain?
The biographer does not tell us.
It’s absurd to be curious about such an inconsequential thing,
but I can’t help it. If
anyone knows whether or not Edna St. Vincent Millay was buried in the
rain, please tell me. O’Reilly
hits a big one.
You can say what you like about Bill O’Reilly.
And you do: any time I
mention him I get e-mails from O’Reilly doubters, O’Reilly scoffers,
O’Reilly sneerers and O’Reilly haters.
Fair enough, but there is no denying that once in a while
O’Reilly hits one out of the park.
This happened the other day. O’Reilly
was interviewing a Mexican consul (which
the Lad from Levittown pronounces
“counsel”) about illegal immigration.
They got to the point where the huge discrepancy in living
standards was mentioned. The
median family income in the USA is around $40,000; in Mexico it’s less
than $4,000. O’Reilly: “Yeah,
what’s that all about? What’s
wrong with things in your country, that her people don’t have a decent
living?” Exactly!
(In
Holidays
in Hell, P.J. O’Rourke gave the most popular Mexican
answer to this question: “What
is wrong, Señor, is that you Gringos stole the best part of our country
from us — the part with all the good roads!”) The
fire next time.
Jed Babbin writing in NRO:
“[O]ur
putative allies, such as Saudi Arabia, and ... the nations of Old Europe
... need to realize that our impatience will boil over if there is another
9/11. Many of them will
refuse to believe it, but in many ways we under-reacted to 9/11.
If there is another, no American president will have the luxury of
a patient investigation about how it happened.
The Afghanistan campaign will seem like Sunday school to whomever
had harbored or helped the perpetrators. And those nations — again,
Saudi Arabia is the best example — who talk peace but pay for terror may
not survive.” Steve
Sailer in VDARE:
“For
many Americans, so far as I can judge from listening to country music
radio stations, the Iraq Attaq wasn't about democratizing the Middle East.
It was about racial revenge. Some
Arabs blew up the World Trade Center, so we blew up some Arabs.
Mission accomplished.” I’ve
written a couple of pieces wondering aloud whether 9/11 really changed all
that much in America. It’s
still an open question, I think. There’s
not much doubt in my mind, though, that a second 9/11 would be a much more
definite and dramatic kind of turning point for our national psyche.
There would occur what physicists call “a phase transition” —
like water turning into ice. Jed
thinks the Democrats are positioning themselves for it, and that it might
lead to the impeachment of President Bush.
That’s an interesting idea.
I feel sure though, as Jed does, that whatever happens on the the
domestic front, the consequences for our enemies abroad would be very
terrible. A really ruthless,
Al-Qaeda- or Hamas-style attack — a dirty bomb at Disneyworld, something
of that sort — would unleash the furies that woke, but did not take
wing, after 9/11. It
wouldn’t be a matter of mere regime change, but of delenda est
Carthago. We would be
grimly extinguishing nations and sowing the ruins with salt.
Do our enemies, and our “putative allies,” know this?
To judge by their actions, probably not.
Well, they will find out. Dear
moron. Every writer (or blogger) gets a certain amount of hate mail
(or e-mail). We all have our
own way of dealing with it. I
myself can’t be bothered. I’d
be happy if I could just keep up with all the people who send me pleasant,
friendly e-mails. I’m
certainly not going to waste a second of my time on morons, bores, and
monomaniacs. Well, here is
historian Andrew
Roberts in the London Spectator for 6/21/03: “What
is the etiquette for dealing with hate mail?
I like to reply to every communication I receive, but to Mr John
Bull (surely not his real name) of East Ham all I could say was: ‘Dear
Mr Bull, Thank you for your letter. It
was so foully abusive and ignorant that I was cheered that I am on the
opposite side of the argument from you.
Yours sincerely, Andrew Roberts.’” Father’s
Day tribute.
My son Daniel Oliver, 8 years old next month, was asked by his
teacher to write an account of his Dad.
Here is what he wrote. Nothing
has been added, omitted, altered or corrected.
And yes, he really can spell “edible” — I checked. “My
dad’s name is John. People call him Derb. Sometimes
he is nice but most of the time he is very grouchy.
He eats almost everything that’s edible.
He is kind of strong but he never works out.
He always buys me gum to keep me away from hard sticky candy.
He took me to chess. He
takes me to piano lessons. Sometimes
we play a game of catch. “He
comes from England. His sister lives there.
He used to go to the hospital a lot when he was a boy because his
ear got infected. His dad was
very strict. His teacher was
very mean. He got detention
because he skipped a lecture. “The
thing I like best about my dad is he always takes me to the ice cream
store in the village. He always buys me gum in blockbuster video.” If
anybody bothers to write my obituary, I hope it is no worse than that. So
you want to write a book.
Continuing the thread I started in May, about my own case of having
gone from a well-paid Wall Street job to a meager living doing journalism
and e-journalism: Friedrich
on the
“2Blowhards” blog has a good piece about the
widely-shared fantasy of getting rich and famous by writing books. “Millions
of people are working on books, or believe that they could write a book,
or are planning to write a book. And
I'll bet that for many of them a part of that fantasy is the making - a -
living - as - a - freelancer - doing - something - interesting - rather -
than - working - as - a - flunky - in - a - boring - job element.
But how many people in the country actually manage to make a living
writing books? A couple of
hundred. Millions would like
to do it. A couple of hundred actually manage it.
In other words, your chances of making a living writing books are
perhaps better than are your chances of ever playing in the NBA.
But not all that much better.” I
don’t think it’s actually that bad, Friedrich. You can make a pretty fair living writing nonfiction books of
a useful or improving kind — books about cooking, or home repair, or
travel. You have to keep at
it, and turn out a new book every couple of years, but you’ll do as well
as the average office worker bee. (Of
course, if you choose to write books about obscure special-interest topics
like, oh, unsolved math problems, that’s your own fool affair.)
Fiction
is another matter, but with fiction there is always the chance — it is
quite a good chance, actually, I think around one in five — that some
movie studio will “option” your book for a few hundred thousand.
This even happens with nonfiction as a matter of fact.
At a book bash once, I met Jonathan Harr, the fellow who wrote the
book from which that John Travolta movie A
Civil Action was made.
He cleaned up very nicely on the deal.
There is even a way to make a living out of poetry, if you are
dogged about it. You get
known at the half-dozen significant magazines, cultivate some racial or
sexual shtick, get yourself a writer-in-residence position at some
college, do a bit of radio and some public readings, play the angles, and
pretty soon you’re in clover, or at any rate in the middle class. The
main thing about the writing life, though, is that it’s an adventure.
You lose security, stability, and probably a ton of money, but you
gain possibility. All
kinds of things can happen. Here
is a quote from one of my own books: “Pierre
Loti’s 1887 novel Madame Chrysanthème has a lot to answer for:
an opera of its own (by Messager, 1893), a short story (by Long,
1898), a play (by Belasco, 1900), a war (Russia vs. Japan, 1904 — the
Francophile Russian officer class, knowing nothing of Japan but Loti’s
disparaging, semi-comic portrait, fatally underestimated their enemy), and
Puccini’s opera (also 1904). The
opera created its own spin-offs: a
silent movie (Mary Pickford and Marshall Nielan, 1915), at least one pop
song (‘Poor Butterfly,’ words by John Golden to music by Raymond
Hubbell, 1916) and the ineffably silly play M. Butterfly (by Hwang,
1988), from which an even sillier movie was made.
Write a novel, see what you get.” —— Fire from the Sun,
Vol. 3, p.270 Not many books send out that
many ripples of course, but almost any book might. Any book might be a best-seller, if it happens to catch the zeitgeist
hurrying by. In moments of
despondency I like to remember Jonathan
Livingston Seagull. If
that thing can be a best-seller (and still in print after thirty-three
years!!), what can’t? Work
Americans just won’t do.
In my
Great Syllogism piece earlier this month, I included this:
”At
any point in time ... the United States economy needs ... a certain number
of garden-service workers, lumberjacks, auto mechanics, plumbers,
steel-fixers, cops, soldiers and child-minders.”
I went on to argue that the principle underlying the “No Child
Left Behind” policy is that no American-born person should have to do
low-status work. The logical
consequence is that we need vast numbers of Third World immigrants to do
that work. Note the inclusion of
soldiering in my list. I
don’t personally regard soldiering as low-status work, but there is no
doubt that large numbers of Americans do so regard it.
Round up a thousand or so elite Americans — high-priced lawyers,
movie stars, Congressmen, major-league athletes, cardiologists, CEOs and
so on. Count how many of them
have children in the armed forces. See?
So possibly soldiering is
indeed, or will soon become, one of those jobs “Americans just won’t
do,” like slaughterhouse work and lawn maintenance.
Three per cent of the armed forces are already non-citizens.
At the moment, illegal immigrants can’t enlist.
How
long will that last? Let
us remember the fate of great empires of the past:
the Romans, who ceased to be willing to do their own fighting and
began hiring Germans to do it for them.
The Arabs, who paid Turks to man their armies... I am not a fan of
conscription. What I would
much prefer is to see a strong, universal and socially-sanctioned ethic of
manliness, courage, duty, sacrifice, and patriotism, that led young men
from elite families to voluntarily set an example to the rest of us by
serving in the armed forces, at least for a few years.
The problem is, of course, that such an ethic would buck all
present social trends towards hedonism, materialism, careerism and
selfishness. Oh, did I say “manliness”
and “men”? Tsk, tsk.
The fact that you noticed that has nothing to do with the problem,
does it? Of course not.
That
Winston Smith feeling.
Nellie Derbyshire (4th grade) plays in her school orchestra.
This month they had a concert.
As well as the orchestra, the concert included the school band and
the school choir. The first
piece the band played was that old jazz classic “When the Saints Go
Marching In”... except that they had changed the title. It was printed on the program, and announced by the music
director, as: “When the Band Goes Marching In.”
I guess saints are just too intolerably elitist to be mentioned in
polite company nowadays. I
am sufficiently self-aware to know when my emotions are dragging me off
the sweet paths of reason, and I know that the uncontrollable fury I feel
when confronted with these petty adjustments of the familiar — these
tamperings with the past — is out of all proportion to the gravity of
the offense. Probably some
mild-mannered schoolmistress, a plump, sweet-natured mother of three, made
that change without giving it more than a moment’s thought.
Why is it that I should be glad to see that person burned at the
stake, after having first been dragged through the streets of Huntington
behind a tumbril while the populace pelted her with rotten fruit? JFK’s
headaches. In one of his National Review columns, Bill Buckley
retails the old gossip about JFK having told British prime minister Harold
Macmillan that he had to have sex once a day or he’d get a headache.
I am skeptical. Leaving aside the fact that Harold Macmillan was about the
last person in the world that anyone would share such a confidence with
— he was British “reserve” incarnate, and a failure in love, or at
any rate a cuckold — I wonder if Kennedy really said this.
If he did, I doubt he originated it.
More likely it was just going around, they way things like that do.
I recall a contemporary movie with Dean Martin and Kim Novak, in
which Dino says precisely the same thing.
Was Dino quoting JFK, or vice versa, or were they both just
plucking a common joke out of the early-1960s American air?
There is probably no way to find out at this distance in time. Romance,
English style.
The other day, for some reason I can’t recall, I got to thinking
of the little acronyms that young English people, in my salad days, used
to write on the envelopes enclosing their love letters.
BURMA was a favorite; it stood for “Be Undressed And Ready, My
Angel.” Another one was
BATH — “Bedsprings Always Twang Harmoniously.”
(They all seemed to be place names.)
Now here’s the thing. There
was one acronym I remember clearly as being commonly used in this context,
but I can no longer remember what it stood for.
It was LEEDS. Anybody
got a clue? Stiff
competition.
I am sorry, I seem to have wandered off into some zone of salacity.
Once you do that, it’s very hard to get back on the straight and
narrow... so I may as well continue in this regrettable vein.
David Frum has a nice piece in the 6/30/03 National Review
about traditional, modern, post-modern and post-post-modern styles of
naming companies. Well, there
is one U.S. corporation whose name is known to every English male
adolescent. They used to (and
for all I know still may) put out calendars for which there was a brisk
secondary market over there, just on account of the company’s name.
I am speaking, of course, of the Ridgid
Tool Company. If
you don’t get the joke, I am sorry; I am certainly not going to try to
explain it on a family website. (I
am sure I remember, by the way, that the firm... sorry, the company,
used to spell its name without that first “d”...
but this may be a false memory.) One
more on Muggeridge.
Wrenching myself away from this theme before things get totally out
of control: Roger Kimball, in
his
memorial piece on Malcolm Muggeridge, wonders if Mugg’s
writing will survive. I’d
like to think that the autobiographical writings will, at least, but the
world is very ruthless with dead writers, and after 20 years or so old
Mugg may have vanished without trace.
In
an effort not to believe this, I have been trying to think of some
Muggeridge quote or quip that is worth preserving.
The one he is most often credited with (and which I believe he
himself laid claim to) was the line about the Ten Commandments being like
an examination paper: six
only to be attempted. However,
that was in fact coined by Bertrand Russell.
The only other thing that comes to mind is: “Only dead fish swim
with the current.” It’s
possible he stole that from someone, too; I don’t know.
How hard it is to leave anything behind when you go!
I suppose that’s why we have kids. What
is truth? ...asked jesting Pilate.
I am kind of wondering myself recently.
How are things in Iraq, for example?
The London Daily
Telegraph: “America’s
rebuilding of Iraq is in chaos.” Thomas
Friedman in The
New York Times: “It's
too soon to tell. ... In a fluid situation like Iraq, there are 10 things
happening every day. All you want is that 6 out of the 10 be positive and
moving upward ... Right now, talking to U.S. officials, I'd say the score
in Iraq is about 5 to 5.” VDH
on NRO: “We
are making amazing progress.” Or
consider those Euro-weenies. It
is an article of faith with me, as with most conservatives, that mobile,
dynamic, religious, hard-working America will always out-perform the
laid-back, unionized, socialized, agnostic European nations with their dirigiste
economies. A steady stream of
analysis and commentary confirms this.
The Economist, for instance:
“The plain truth, which even the most ardent of Europe’s
welfare-state enthusiasts can no longer deny, is that Europe’s economies
have been trailing woefully behind America’s.
The reasons: a
sclerotic labour market, forests of red tape and over-regulation, vast
welfare and non-wage labour costs (especially in Germany), restrictive
hiring and firing practices, and a failure... to defruse a pensions
time-bomb caused by greying populations and too-early retirement on
extravagant terms.” (Issue
of 6/7/03 — you need a subscription to read it online.) So
far, so good. Now along comes
Philippe Legrain in The
New Republic with a fine contrarian piece arguing that
The U.S. is falling behind Europe and will continue to do so!
“While living standards in the United States have risen by a
healthy 16.1 percent over the past eight years, they are up 18.3 percent
in the European Union... Not
only does the European Union as a whole outpace the United States [in
labor productivity, 1990-2002], so do ten of the 14 individual EU member
states for which statistics are available.”
Holy triumphalism, Batman! Could
it be that my entire worldview is just totally wrong? A
friend of mine back in England, an actual working poet (see above), was
fond of saying that: “Nobody
has a clue what’s going on. Some
people fake it better than others, that’s all.”
Perhaps he was right. Amor
mortis conturbat me.
Arnold Beichman writes
on NRO about the Islamic cult of death worship.
This touches on a topic which is deeply distasteful to Americans.
We are a cheerful, optimistic people, on the whole, and do not care
to think too much about the dark side of human nature.
It’s there, though; and at its heart is a longing for death.
Who has not felt that longing at one time or another?
Poetry is riddled with it, Keats’s “half in love with easeful
death” being only the best-known instance.
Browsing
in one of my old commonplace books the other day, I came across an item I
had copied from a British newspaper several years ago. It was a news story about a healthy and successful man who
had shot dead his mother, wife and daughter before killing himself.
The thing that had struck me was the suicide note read at his
inquest. It was strikingly
lucid, not at all the product of a deranged mind.
It began with the sentence: “For
some years now I have wished to die.” The
ultimate political expression of the death-wish is totalitarian despotism.
In 1984,
George Orwell, who understood the spiritual roots of human society better
than most writers, gives us a clue as to who Big Brother actually was: “In
Oceania the prevailing philosophy is called Ingsoc, in Eurasia it is
called Neo-Bolshevism, and in Eastasia it is called Death-Worship.
... Actually the
three philosophies are barely distinguishable.” (My
italics.) Orwell was dying
when he wrote the book. Like
his protagonist, he had probably come to some sort of resigned acceptance
of Big Brother... Though a
very perceptive observer noted of Orwell in his last days
that: “I think that quite
often before he would have been glad enough to die; now he passionately
wanted to live.” The
death-wish is an ineradicable part of us, and, as Beichman shows, any
political movement that can tap into it has a very potent weapon indeed.
Barbara,
Celarent, Darii, Ferioque.
I shall lead gently into the math corner this month with a little
logic. Having studied
classical logic myself in a previous life, I started off that “Great
Syllogism” piece by inoculating myself against complaints from logicians
that I was mis-using the word “syllogism.”
Hopeless, of course — they complained anyway. Well, here is my revenge:
Archbishop Whateley’s example of the figure known as a
“destructive dilemma.” I
have taken it from his Elements of Logic (1826).
Ready? Here goes.
“If this man were wise, he would not speak irreverently of
Scripture in jest; and if he were good, he would not do so in earnest; but
he does it, either in jest, or earnest;
therefore he is either not wise, or not good.”
Got that? Math
corner. I find that I am now regarded as an authority on pop-math
books. Do I have any
recommendations, people want to know?
Well, yes, dozens. If
you are venturing into this field for the first time, I think the most fun
books to browse in are David Wells’s Curious and Interesting...
collections. I have
three of these on my shelf: The
Penguin Dictionary of Curious and Interesting Numbers, The
Penguin Dictionary of Curious and Interesting Geometry,
and The
Penguin Dictionary of Curious and Interesting Mathematics.
They are all very good. At
a more advanced level, John Conway and Richard Guy’s The
Book of Numbers is beautifully done, and full of
fascinating things. An
interesting sub-genre of pop-math books is biographies of numbers.
I have quite a collection of these:
Peter Beckmann's History
of Pi, Eli Maor's e:
The Story of a Number, Paul Nahin’s An
Imaginary Tale (which is about “i,” the
square root of minus one), and two different biographies of zero:
Charles
Seife’s and Robert
Kaplan’s. Well,
this month I have acquired an addition to this peculiar little collection:
Julian Havil’s Gamma:
Exploring Euler’s Constant.
Euler’s constant, which makes a very brief appearance in my own
book, has a decimal expansion that starts off
0.577215664901532860606512... It
is probably irrational, though no-one has been able to prove this.
The most we know in this regard is, that if gamma is a fraction,
the denominator must be a number of at least 242,081 digits.
(For
readers who are not sure what I am talking about: There are whole numbers, there are fractions, and there are
numbers that are neither. These
latter numbers are called “irrational,” and were discovered 2,600
years ago by Pythagoras, or one of his associates.
The simplest irrational number is the square root of 2, whose
decimal expansion begins 1.4142135623730950488...
This is obviously not a whole number, and it is easy to prove that
it isn’t a fraction either — there is a proof in my
new book, Endnote 11.
So far as the naked eye is concerned, the main difference between
fractions and irrationals is, that if you write out any fraction as a
decimal, the decimal digits sooner or later repeat themselves, or else
stop altogether. The digits
of an irrational number never repeat and never stop.)
In
any case, gamma is terrifically important in higher math for all sorts of
reasons I can’t explain here. Well,
here is a little gamma-related (and rain-related) puzzle I have adapted
from Havil’s biography of this fascinating number.
In
any given year, the weather station in New York City’s Central Park
observes a certain total rainfall. Assume
that one year’s total rainfall is unrelated to any other year’s — in
mathematical jargon, that total annual rainfall is “an independent
random variable.” Define a
“record year” to be a year in which the rainfall exceeds that of any
preceding year for which measurements were kept.
Given that the Central Park measurements began in 1835, by which
date would you expect to have clocked up 20 record years?
(Clue: over the
160-year period up to 1994, there were six record years.) |
||||