50 book challenge: #28, #29, #30, #31

#28: Leon Sciaky, Farewell to Salonica. Memoir of growing up as Jewish boy in Salonica, the Greek city a.k.a. Thessaloniki. After the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, many migrated to Salonica, making it the city with the largest population of Jews in the world for a couple of centuries. The Jewish community remained strong until the end of the Ottoman empire in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This is a story of the end of that era.

#29: David Crystal, How Language Works. Now I know! Thanks! (Reading a book with this title is a little like Candide's finding out, to his amazement, that he had been speaking prose all his life.) Some interesting insights here for parents of a small baby just now trying out his first phonemes.

#30: Andre Aciman, Out of Egypt. Another memoir of the end of an ancient Jewish community, this time in Alexandria. The author's family was partly from Constantinople, partly from Syria. Eventually, they were forced to leave Egypt in the mid-1960s, one of the last left. The techniques here were heavily fictional in style, I would say (as in, extensive precise quotations from conversations the author was not a party to), so I'm not sure how much of this is experience and how much imagination.

#31: Barbara Tuchman, The Proud Tower. A story of European civilization in the days before World War One. One especially interesting chapter was on the rise and virus-like spread of a violent, dogmatic, and socially destabilizing ideology that resulted in numerous terrorist attacks and assassinations (including an American president): anarchy. I also like the chapter on Richard Strauss and his milieu. Oh, and also the one on the Dreyfus Affair. Overall, her prose was superb.

Athletic and diabetic.

Even though I have type-1 diabetes, I've completed a couple centuries on my bike, so I know it can be done with enough planning and commitment. This article in the New York Times ("Diabetic and Determined") gives a good overview of the challenges that diabetic athletes face--while showing how the disease can be a powerful motivator at the same time.

An excerpt:

WHEN Missy Foy, a professional ultra-distance runner, was told she had Type 1 diabetes 10 years ago, she “totally freaked out,” she said. She knew the perils of diabetes: possible blindness, kidney failure, nerve damage. And she worried that the diagnosis signaled the end of her athletic career.

“I cried for days,” said Ms. Foy, a doctoral candidate at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

Ms. Foy, 42, visited four endocrinologists before finding a doctor who helped her figure out how to balance her insulin levels while training. “Part of it was that they didn’t have any experience with it,” she said. “They thought it would be too difficult, too stressful, to balance insulin and the intensity of training.”

No more. Today athletes with Type 1 diabetes are blasting out of the starting gate in full force. Because of new technology, the emergence of companies that help them manage their illness, the rise of successful role models and sheer determination, they are running marathons, doing 100-mile bike rides, completing Ironmen — many with their doctor’s blessing.

Oh, and I just found out the identity of another athletic diabetic in this city: none other than 315-pound Kendall Simmons, starting right guard for the Steelers, who was diagnosed with type 1 in 2003. Here's his story.

Benji claps.

Geo pays a visit to Pittsburgh.

Georgia came for a few days. Her first time in the Steel City! A trip to Mt. Washington was in order.












As was a trip to Clayton, Henry Clay Frick's mansion in Point Breeze, and where his daughter Helen lived until dying in 1984. Apparently she was not only eager to tell neighboring children to get off her lawn, she was also not shy about telling them to stop playing on their own lawns. Good thing she didn't call in the Pinkertons.








Heh. Take that, Helen.


















I'm eating your leaves, Helen! What're you gonna do about it, geezer?

Georgia in Clayton's car museum, picking out her next ride.

A day at Schenley plaza; Benjy strips.

Recently, Benjy and his cousins traveled to Schenley Plaza, near Pitt, to ride on the carousel. Here's the gang.











Here's Jeanne, Benjy, and Yosef on the ride.













Last weekend, we took a trip to the Strip, a quasi-industrial neighborhood on the Allegheny (site of the former Pennsylvania RR depot) that is now home to many delicious food stores and markets. Here, I am too cool to be seen taking touristy photos. I'm a local, dammit! We're standing in front of St. Stanislaus, a Polish Roman Catholic church.






A view down Penn Ave. toward downtown.













Later that day, we traveled to the
residence of the baron and baroness in Wexford.

Our brush with royalty.

Recently we attended the investiture ceremony of Byron and Ariella as the sixth baron and baroness of the Barony-Marche of the Debatable Lands. We managed to smuggle in a rather anachronistic digital camera, and escaped with these photos.










"Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"













The investiture was held about 45 minutes north of Pittsburgh, near Moraine State Park. The annual Pennsic "war" is held in the same place, and in fact there's a permanent wooden fort that is used to stage assaults and sieges.

Here I am with Benjy in front of the fort, modeling his bjorn with my Moroccan semi-medieval-looking clothing.







"Yes? Can I help you?


















Back home in street clothes.

Bertrand Russell: How to Become a Man of Genius

Apropos of nothing:

If there are among my readers any young men or women who aspire to become leaders of thought in their generation, I hope they will avoid certain errors into which I fell in youth for want of good advice. When I wished to form an opinion upon a subject, I used to study it, weigh the arguments on different sides, and attempt to reach a balanced conclusion. I have since discovered that this is not the way to do things. A man of genius knows it all without the need of study; his opinions are pontifical and depend for their persuasiveness upon literary style rather than argument. It is necessary to be one-sided, since this facilitates the vehemence that is considered a proof of strength. It is essential to appeal to prejudices and passions of which men have begun to feel ashamed and to do this in the name of some new ineffable ethic. It is well to decry the slow and pettifogging minds which require evidence in order to reach conclusions. Above all, whatever is most ancient should be dished up as the very latest thing.

There is no novelty in this recipe for genius; it was practised by Carlyle in the time of our grandfathers, and by Nietzsche in the time of our fathers, and it has been practised in our own time by D. H. Lawrence. Lawrence is considered by his disciples to have enunciated all sorts of new wisdom about the relations of men and women; in actual fact he has gone back to advocating the domination of the male which one associates with the cave dwellers. Woman exists, in his philosophy, only as something soft and fat to rest the hero when he returns from his labours. Civilised societies have been learning to see something more than this in women; Lawrence will have nothing of civilisation. He scours the world for what is ancient and dark and loves the traces of Aztec cruelty in Mexico. Young men, who had been learning to behave, naturally read him with delight and go round practising cave-man stuff so far as the usages of polite society will permit.

One of the most important elements of success in becoming a man of genius is to learn the art of denunciation. You must always denounce in such a way that your reader thinks that it is the other fellow who is being denounced and not himself; in that case he will be impressed by your noble scorn, whereas if he thinks that it is himself that you are denouncing, he will consider that you are guilty of ill-bred peevishness. Carlyle remarked: ``The population of England is twenty millions, mostly fools.'' Everybody who read this considered himself one of the exceptions, and therefore enjoyed the remark. You must not denounce well-defined classes, such as persons with more than a certain income, inhabitants of a certain area, or believers in some definite creed; for if you do this, some readers will know that your invective is directed against them. You must denounce persons whose emotions are atrophied, persons to whom only plodding study can reveal the truth, for we all know that these are other people, and we shall therefore view with sympathy your powerful diagnosis of the evils of the age.

Ignore fact and reason, live entirely in the world of your own fantastic and myth-producing passions; do this whole-heartedly and with conviction, and you will become one of the prophets of your age.

28 December 1932

50 book challenge: #24, #25, #26, #27.

#24: Terry Pratchett, The Light Fantastic. DO. NOT. WANT. Thus ends my foray into Discworld territory.

#25: Lois McMaster Bujold, Shards of Honor. Yay! I had heard good things about this science fiction series, the Vorkosigan saga, and I'm pleased to report that it's overall pretty good. Dialogue and the plotting is excellent: Bujold really tells a rip-roaring adventure. There's the occasional misstep, but maybe that's attributable to early novel-writing--I'm still on the earliest instalments.

#26: Bujold, Barrayar. Yes, better than Shards of Honor. The author's approach is, evidently enough, to take her main characters, imagine the worst that could happen to them, then make it happen.

#27: Tolkien, The Two Towers. Frodo was alive but taken by the Enemy.

50 book challenge: #19, #20, #21, #22, #23.

#19: The Fellowship of the Ring. It's been about 10 years, at least, since I last read this.

#20: The Farthest Shore. Third book in LeGuin's Earthsea series. Tombs of Atuan is the best; both this and the first suffer from vague plots, and unspecified plot devices. This is a hazard where magic forms a major element of the story, I guess.

#21: Terry Pratchett, The Color of Magic. Meh. I was disappointed. As if Piers Anthony and Douglas Adams had a less funny love child. I will persist with the Discworld series because I've heard good things, though.

#22: Our Man in Havana, Graham Greene. Surprising; I didn't know what to expect, but I liked this. Reminded me in some ways of Lucky Jim, but with more serious stakes. (How could anything be more serious than the economy of the Dutch shipbuilding industry in 1630s?)

#23: Three Men in a Boat, Jerome K. Jerome. Needs less dull, more droll. I really, really wanted to like this, and parts were funny, but in the end JKJ never seemed willing to let me get the joke on my own---there was always a sentence that made things a little too obvious (even if part of the humor was in the obvious overstatement). I guess I'm in the minority on this one, since it seems to be universally adored. On a personal note, I once visited Jerome's house in Buckinghamshire, when I was living in London. A friend of mine and his family were living there currently, and we made a pitstop there while driving to Wales for a camping trip. It was a v. v. charming English country house. Thank you, Henry Curran. (At least now I know that Jerome originated the phrase: "I love work, it fascinates me; I could sit and watch it all day," without which hundreds of office coffee mugs would be vacant.)

50 book challenge: #16, 17, 18.

#16: Inventing the Middle Ages:The Lives, Works and Ideas of the Great Medievalists of the Twentieth Century. Norman F. Cantor. I should have gone straight to the chapter on Lewis and Tolkien, and quit after that. The writing was fluid but sometimes florid, and you sometimes got the feeling that Cantor was settling scores. The hagiographic approach to R.W. Southern, too, was odd. The failure to found an institute in his name was "Arthurian tragedy"? Talk about defining tragedy downward.

#17: A Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula K. LeGuin. Yes, I've been reduced to reading young-adult fiction. These books are good, though.

#18: The Tombs of Atuan, LeGuin.