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THE
OLD MAN'S SNORING
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 (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
Steve Sailer in VDARE:
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 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
FATHER'S
DAY TRIBUTE
If anybody bothers to write my obituary, I hope it is no worse than that. SO
YOU WANT TO WRITE A BOOK
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:
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 33 years!!), what can't? WORK
AMERICANS JUST WON'T DO 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 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 ROAMNCE,
ENGLISH-STYLE STIFF
COMPETITION ONE
MORE ON MUGGERIDGE 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? 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 defuse 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. 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:
(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 MATH
CORNER 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.) |
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