Being slap-happy after yet another morning bout with the Federal Register for my work blog, I'm inviting the public to submit any housing-related (non-military) government document containing a string of more than six consecutive mutually modifying nouns. As of today, a string of six seems pretty good, as discovered in the title, "Evaluation of Lead-Based Paint Hazard Reduction Grantee Unit Costs." However, better strings are probably out there and submissions are invited.
I'm having great fun with Letters of C. S. Lewis. It's been savagely edited by Lewis's brother. This might disappoint a serious fan, but with the dross removed we're left with witty, perceptive observations on books and life. This is from a letter to his brother dated December 12, 1927:
I have done very little reading outside my work these last months. In Oman's Dark Ages I have come up against a thing I had almost forgotten since my school days — the boundless self-assurance of the pure text book. "The four brothers were all worthy sons of their wicked fathers &mdash: destitute of natural affection, cruel, lustful, and treacherous" — Louis the Pous was "a man of blameless and virtuous habits" — tho' every other sentence in the chapter makes it clear that he was a four leter man. "Charles had one lamentable failing — he was too careless of the teachings of Christianity about the relations of the sexes". It is so nice too, to be told without a hint of doubt ho was in the right and who was in the wrong in every controversy, and exactly why everyone did what he did. Yet Oman is quite right; that is the way — I suppose — to write an introduciton to a subject. . . . I am almost coming to the conclusion that all histories are bad. Whenever one turns from the historian to the writings of the people he deals with, there is always such a difference.
Martha once corrected a commenter here for referring to the "Democrat Party." Apparently it's a sort of playground taunt used by the party's opponents when they're feeling puerile. It was news to me, but apparently not to The Weekly Standard's Scrapbook columnist, who tracks down the term's origin in the most recent issue:
To the best of THE SCRAPBOOK's knowledge--which is pretty good, but not infallible--the phrase originated with Leonard W. Hall, a onetime Republican congressman from New York and chairman of the Republican National Committee during Dwight D. Eisenhower's first term in the White House (1953-57).
via HNN
Told in a letter from C. S. Lewis to his father, dated 5 June, 1926:
The best strike story I have heard is about engines. A train (with amateur driver) set out from Paddington for Bristol, first stop Bath. When it reached Bath half an hour earlier than normal express time, every single passenger got out of that train and refused to enter it again. Apparently the genius on the engine had just opened the throttle full, said to the stoker, "carry on", and left the rest to fate.
And here I was getting excited about Tear Down The Mountain: An Appalachian Love Story, when I read this:
She'd dislodged more than teeth; Sid's determination drained away when the crockery landed in his pie hole. Or maybe he sensed the difference in these tears and those that fell at Janet's time of the month or when her lotto ticket struck out, and felt sorry for her. Whatever the reason, he comforted her, though he blotted his lips in her hair while he massaged her spine, but she couldn't really hold that against him. His long fingers touched each vertebra as though he were tuning her, high notes to low, except for where the missing finger should have hit. As reckless with a chopsaw as he was with words.When he ran out of keys he picked her up by the cheeks and snugged her into him and carried her to the bedroom. Her heel hit the dryer's doorhandle as he wedged her back the narrow hall, and it thunked onto the swelled particleboard floor like someone had dropped a tangerine, and she wished she had a tangerine. The dryer was broke too, along with her last flowerpot and Sid's straight pretty teeth, and she'd have to go to the laundromat. She didn't have a thing fit to carry clothes in, and she wasn't going to walk along the road carrying Sid's undershorts.
Then they made love. Sweet love, where she nibbled the ruptured lips and felt the broken tooth stubs with her tongue and sampled his blood as if he were a honeysuckle and she a bee, and fun love, where the trailer rocked until she heard Sidemore's chain rattle out from underneath the bedroom. He'd sit outside slumped and dejected until they settled down, then he'd rattle back in.
Maybe they shouldn't post excerpts.
Something about the passage I've highlighted in today's IHE interview with Danny Postel just doesn't work.
In retrospect I’m self-critical about that. I now think people like Mary Kaldor (from Helsinki Citizens Assembly) and Joanne Landy (of the Campaign for Peace and Democracy) — among others on the Left — were spot on in simultaneously opposing U.S. militarism and supporting democratic dissidents and human rights activists in Eastern Europe. I retroactively stand with them and wish I had been with them at the time.
Maybe this is just a longwinded way of saying "I was wrong," but it seems to me that Postel is almost projecting himself backwards in history to be on the winning right side.
This may be old news to everyone else, but I was astonished by Bill Moser's observation in his excellent Nation column "The Way Down South":
The parity between the parties, unprecedented in the South's history, was neatly symbolized by the total tally of state legislative seats in the old Confederate states after the 2004 elections: 891 Democrats, 891 Republicans.
I've been reading Jane Jacobs' The Death And Life of Great American Cities, and a wonderful productively cranky book it is. I hadn't otherwise heard of Welwyn Garden City except in a snide reference from Orwell in his famous diatribe about "fruit juice drinkers" etc. Now it turns out the place was one of the early models for the now-discredited U.S. (and British, I gather) approach to project housing, according to which the people would be uplifted by proximity to green grass and separation from commercial or industrial uses.
As we now know, the green grass surrounding projects, even if well maintained, becomes dangerous ground because nobody has a reason to spend much time on it, and nobody walks on the promenades among the identical project buildings because they don't lead to a workplace or a movie theater or a shoemaker or a dollar store or a place to buy a cup of coffee or a newspaper. Jacobs adds the only-obvious-when-noted insight that awful boring uniformity is the near-inevitable result of any attempt to place large numbers of people on a finite piece of land that also must have some required percentage of green space around it.
Have other folks here read this nicely entertaining book? It's tremendous. She was the dean of all the Little Old Ladies In Tennis Shoes who fought to save U.S. neighborhoods from sweeping notions of urban renewal all through the twentieth century. Like Orwell, in a way, she had the courage to turn uncredentialed crankiness into a virtue rather than a liability, and the writing skill to get away with it.