I’ll get right on that!

The absurdly overwhelming nature of the world is a fun thing to contemplate.  One of my favorite demonstrations is when public intellectuals (I guess we’d call them?) on the Internet assign homework.  This is from Andrew Sullivan:

Praising Mahoney’s book, Carl Scott advises those unfamiliar with Solzhenitsyn’s work where to start:

Had I to start over again, I’m not sure the order I’d go in, but certainly theGULAG Archipelago first, in the abridged edition, perhaps some of the key essays and speeches next, available in the Solzhenitysn Reader, edited by Ericson and Mahoney, and then onto either In the First Circle, or the first two first “knots” of the super-novel The Red Wheel, namely, the just reissued–in the superior/complete Willetts translations–August 1914 and November 1916. The third of these is one of my very favorite novels, despite the criticism it gets for providing too much history and political commentary alongside its main sections. For In the First Circle and August 1914, make sure you get the newer versions. And somewhere in there, you need to delve into a number of the short stories and poems.

The “abridged edition” is 528 pages long.  I MIGHT not make it to the second of the two knots of the super-novel after I read 14.9 ounces about gulags?

Good story about mathematician Richard Hamming

who worked as a “human computer” in the development of the atomic bomb:

Shortly before the first field test (you realize that no small scale experiment can be done-either you have a critical mass or you do not), a man asked me to check some arithmetic he had done, and I agreed, thinking to fob it off on some subordinate. When I asked what it was, he said, “It is the probability that the test bomb will ignite the whole atmosphere.” I decided I would check it myself! The next day when he came for the answers I remarked to him, “The arithmetic was apparently correct but I do not know about the formulas for the capture cross sections for oxygen and nitrogen-after all, there could be no experiments at the needed energy levels.” He replied, like a physicist talking to a mathematician, that he wanted me to check the arithmetic not the physics, and left. I said to myself, “What have you done, Hamming, you are involved in risking all of life that is known in the Universe, and you do not know much of an essential part?” I was pacing up and down the corridor when a friend asked me what was bothering me. I told him. His reply was, “Never mind, Hamming, no one will ever blame you.”

Lifting this from Hamming’s wiki page which got it from Hamming’s article “Mathematics On A Distant Planet” and I owe an ht to Mr. Paul Ford’s twitter

Rather seriously deranged

Lots of good stuff n the Paris Review interview of John Hersey.

This one stuck out, because Patton happened to be on TV:

INTERVIEWER

Was it that natural a move, to go from writing nonfiction to writing fiction?

HERSEY

I guess I’d been thinking from the very beginning, and had been experimenting a little bit in the pieces I did for Life, with the notion that journalism could be enlivened by using the devices of fiction. My principal reading all along had been in fiction, even though I was working for Time on fact pieces. As I said, Malraux, Silone, John Dos Passos of those years, Hemingway, Faulkner, were all writers who had excited me; the kind of skepticism and challenging of the norms that Van Santvoord had put to me had attracted me to writers who were trying to break the molds in various ways. In Sicily I wrote some Life pieces about people there who interested me very much. I couldn’t take their stories in nonfiction beyond the articles I had written; but implicit in what they were like was the possibility of a novel. So I just plunged in. The book almost wrote itself. I was working under pressure of time—I had a month in which to work. I now look back on it as a naive book, and an imperfect one. But the example of Silone, who spent his last years rewriting his novels, has cautioned me against trying to repair A Bell for Adano, to make it better. Silone went around a long curve from left to right, and I think he wanted to take the political errors of his youth out of his early books. But instead he took his youthfulness out of them, and I think damaged them badly. As did Fitzgerald when he tried to straighten out Tender Is the Night. A Bell for Adano, as I see it now, had a value when it came out, flawed as it is, because it presented to the American public, at a time when the war was far from won, the spectacle of an American general who seemed to represent the very things we were fighting against—General Marvin, loosely based on Patton, who was I think rather seriously deranged during the Sicilian campaign.

From wiki:

Carlo D’Este wrote that “it seems virtually inevitable … that Patton experienced some type of brain damage from too many head injuries” from a lifetime of numerous auto- and horse-related accidents, especially one suffered while playing polo in 1936.

If the New Yorker archive is still free, take a read of John Hersey’s account of Lieutenant John Kennedy’s survival after the sinking of PT 109.  Kennedy seems to be the only source for the piece?

(photo from the National Archives)

Facewash

President Barack Obama wipes his face with a cloth handed to him by White House Butler Von Everett in the Blue Room of the White House following an event with business leaders in the East Room, Jan. 28, 2009. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

Getting teased by FDR and Stalin

The scene is the Tehran Conference, the first time Churchill, FDR, and Stalin all met.

Sir Archibald Clark Kerr, the UK’s ambassador to the Soviet Union, is telling Lord Moran, who was Churchill’s doctor, how one of the meetings went:

(Imagine joking around with Stalin about how many people were going to be shot.)

Anyway.

Was googling Kerr (not to be confused with the great Clark Kerr of the UC system) – that same year, 1943, he wrote a letter to Lord Pembroke, apparently a well-known bit of hilarious correspondence in UK diplomatic history circles:

“My Dear Reggie,

In these dark days man tends to look for little shafts of light that spill from Heaven. My days are probably darker than yours, and I need, my God I do, all the light I can get. But I am a decent fellow, and I do not want to be mean and selfish about what little brightness is shed upon me from time to time. So I propose to share with you a tiny flash that has illuminated my sombre life and tell you that God has given me a new Turkish colleague whose card tells me that he is called Mustapha Kunt.

We all feel like that, Reggie, now and then, especially when Spring is upon us, but few of us would care to put it on our cards. It takes a Turk to do that.

Sir Archibald Clerk Kerr, H.M. Ambassador”

The Forever War

This book should be required reading for American citizens.  It’s clear by the end that Dexter Filkins is pretty messed up by the experiences described.  I had to finish this book very quickly because I was worried reading it was making me less funny.

Here is an excerpt that’s one of the easier chapters to read.