MAY DIARY [8 ITEMS]: 12 O”Clock Excessive; Trangressing Girl; Gadget Enstupidation; Thanatophobia—My Existential Problem; ETC., by John Derbyshire

For V-E Day a pal despatched me a hyperlink to the full-length YouTube exhibiting of Twelve O’Clock Excessive, a 1949 film about World Struggle 2.

From the storyline at IMDb:

On this story of the early days of daylight bombing raids over Nazi Germany, Common Frank Savage (Gregory Peck) should take command of a “laborious luck” bomber group. A lot of the story offers along with his battle to whip his group right into a disciplined combating unit despite heavy losses, and withering assaults by German fighters over their targets. Precise fight footage is used on this tense struggle drama.

I don’t know why I acquired via these 75 years with out ever seeing Twelve O’Clock Excessive. If I point out it to pals of my very own era, there’s on the spot recognition. Late-Silent and early-Boomer American guys have all seen it.

“Guys” is a key phrase there. That is, I feel, probably the most male film I’ve ever seen. Watching it, I began to suppose there have been going to be no ladies in it in any respect. Then, about an hour and a half alongside, a nurse exhibits up for a short walk-on half. The actress was Joyce Mackenzie, billed within the full solid record as “uncredited.”

(Heh, a fellow “uncredited” spirit! However that’s unfair to Ms. Mackenzie, who had a good film and TV profession after Twelve O’Clock Excessive; and who, performing expertise apart, was approach higher wanting than I’m, or was.)

There aren’t any youngsters within the film both, nor any Variety. Ms. Mackenzie excepted, everybody was an grownup white male. Most of them smoked cigarettes (though Gregory Peck appears by no means to have smoked very a lot of his). Nineteen forty-nine, yeah.

Is it film? I believed so. Each the realities of Nineteen Forties aerial warfare and the tormented psychology of fight management are very nicely proven. The airborne scenes, fighter planes vs. bombers, are certainly precise WW2 footage, and Gregory Peck didn’t get 5 Oscar nominations for nothing (though he solely carried off the Greatest Actor prize for one, not this one).

However … 1949—so way back, so rattling way back.

The Summer season Preview 2024 Hammacher Schlemmer catalog acquired my consideration when it arrived in early Might. On the duvet: “The Solely Seven Particular person Tricycle.”

Inside I learn that:

That is the one tricycle that accommodates seven adults and facilitates close-knit conferencing throughout joyrides. The seven seats every have a set of pedals that riders can function concurrently to propel the tricycle as much as 10 mph, encouraging social interplay and team-building whereas pedaling.

It could possibly be mine for $20,000. (“Transport and dealing with charges fluctuate by location.”)

That is the newest approach of “conferencing”? Does Joe Biden seek the advice of with the Joint Chiefs of Employees whereas all of them pedal up and down Pennsylvania Avenue on a seven-person trike? That may clarify quite a bit.

The Hammacher Schlemmer catalog additionally presents extra routine wares: The Stress Relieving Full Head Massager, The 7-foot Sprinklesaurus “inflatable dinosaur that retains youngsters cool in summer time,” The Excessive Powered Quartz Callus Remover, and plenty of different devices, backyard decorations, and well being aids.

I get all these catalogs, not simply Hammacher Schlemmer’s. I get Sporty’s Device Store (An ornamental pretend rock to cowl ugly objects in your garden), Sharper Picture (Private Digital Artwork Museum “plugs immediately into your TV to showcase 500 basic work”), No matter Works (Photo voltaic-Powered Turtles, “When the Solar goes down, LED bulbs mild up the shells”), Heartland America (“Ultrasonic toothbrush vibrates 40,000 strokes per minute!”) Most popular Dwelling (a meditating frog statue on your Zen backyard), Alerts (Poseable Stick Determine Flooring Lamp), … I get ’em all.

To have ended up thus on all their mailing lists, I suppose I have to sooner or later have bought one thing or different from each one in all these catalogs. So OK, I’ve a weak point for devices and cute oddities.

Nonetheless, a seven-person tricycle? For $20,000? I feel the gadget-peddlers are testing the bounds there.

This $24.95 shoehorn-and-backscratcher combo is sort of nifty, although …

Wa-a-a-y again in 2005 I made a passing point out of Theodore Fontane’s 1895 novel Effi Briest, which I’d learn the yr earlier than. I wrote:

[E]very literate particular person is accustomed to the nice French and Russian novels of anguished, transgressing Nineteenth-century womanhood, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1856) and Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (1877). Only a few are acquainted with the German equal, Theodore Fontane’s Effi Briest (1895). (There’s a Penguin Classics translation by Douglas Parmée.)

Early this month it occurred to me that within the twenty years since Effi Briest I hadn’t learn a single German novel. (Though I can nonetheless be heard to mutter, when occasions get the higher of me, “Mein Leben ist verpfuscht.”)

For a self-proclaimed Germanophile, that’s a poor document. It was, I made a decision, well beyond time to make some addition to my data of German Lit. So on my subsequent journey to the native library I took out a duplicate of Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks (1901), which acquired its creator the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929.

It’s a splendid novel, a saga—massive and meaty, the way in which I like ’em. We comply with the fortunes of the Buddenbrooks, an upper-middle-class German household, from the 1830s to the 1870s.

I can choose nits, after all. The surroundings of the novel is approach over-described. Folks collect in a room to speak; however earlier than we hear any of the speak we get a much-too-detailed account of the room’s furnishings, lighting fixtures, carpets, home windows, wall hangings, and so forth.

With the human surroundings it’s even worse. When Alois Permaneder makes his first look in Half 6, Chapter 4 he comes with a full web page of description:

The decrease half of his face, cheeks and nostril, the again of his head, the nape of his neck—all of it merged like slightly pile of shapeless pillows …

Uh-huh. I suppose there was some excuse for this in pre-movie days; and the commentaries inform us that Mann was working some deep German technique—one thing to do with leitmotifs—that I couldn’t be bothered to pursue.

I used to be studying Buddenbrooks in English translation, after all. My schoolboy German received’t get me via a 700-page novel.

There are two translations in the marketplace, each by People: Helen Tracy Lowe-Porter’s (1929) and John Woods’ (1993). The library copy I began with was Lowe-Porter’s, in the Wisehouse Classics 2020 version. The interpretation is nearly as good because it must be, however the ebook manufacturing is horrible.

In Half 5, Chapter 4, for instance, when Thomas Buddenbrook must be reflecting on the character of his just-deceased Uncle Gotthold, the textual content—two full pages of it—is abruptly changed by a exact, letter-for-letter copy of two pages of textual content from Chapter 2 that don’t have anything to do with Uncle Gotthold. At that time I give up studying my library copy and ordered a distinct version from Classic Books, 1994.

It’s miserable to see such main faults in ebook manufacturing. I do know after all that printed books on paper are a dying medium, however as a book-lover I don’t need to be reminded of it. Does Wisehouse Classics not make use of readers to keep away from this sort of gross blunder (and plenty of typos)?

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The Classic Books version is a significantly better manufacturing with no single typo that I seen. It makes use of John Woods’ translation; so translationwise I’ve lined each bases, having learn the primary forty p.c of Buddenbrooks as rendered by Helen Lowe-Porter and the remaining by Woods.

I’ll register a slight choice for Woods’ translation as being a tad extra direct.

The one time I went to the German authentic, for instance, was to see what, precisely, was the Deplorable Phrase that Herr Permaneder hurled at his spouse Antonie Buddenbrook in Half 6, Chapter 9—the phrase that brought on her to give up the wedding and file for divorce. The German textual content is after all at Gutenberg.org:

Gei zum Deifi, Saulud’r dreckats!

Lowe-Porter:

Go to the satan, you filthy sprat-eating slut!

Woods:

Go to hell, you filthy sow, you slut!

(The Buddenbrooks are natives of Lübeck on the Baltic coast; Permaneder is from Munich, deep in land-locked Bavaria, the place folks regarded the lesser sorts of sea-food as disgusting. Mann brings to life the regional peculiarities of Nineteenth-century Germany.)

I’m additionally obliged to John Woods for having taught me an Americanism I’d by no means encountered earlier than: a secondary that means of the phrase “pony” given in Webster’s Third (1993) as:

pony … … 4 : a literal typically inter-linear translation of a overseas language textual content; esp : one used illegitimately by college students in making ready or reciting classes.

Lowe-Porter makes use of the British equal “crib.” (The 1971 OED permits Woods’ utilization however flags it as “U.S. slang.”) I had by no means earlier than encountered this utilization of the phrase “pony.” Is it nonetheless present?

For Buddenbrooks Amazon exhibits a wide selection of film and TV diversifications. I suppose the streaming companies have one thing, too. If anybody can supply a suggestion I’d be glad to listen to it.

What the hell occurred to X to make it so damned annoying?

• After I click on on the bookmark-bar image I don’t go direct to X, as I used to. I get a web page asking me to log in. So I log in through my Google account, and solely then am I in X. What’s the purpose?
• That login instantly—each time!—generates an incoming e-mail from X declaring that “We seen a login to your account … from a brand new machine. Was this you?” It then lists the brand new login location as “North Bergen, NJ, USA,” a spot I’ve by no means been to, haven’t any reference to, and don’t know anybody at. It additionally lists the “new machine”—which is identical browser on the identical laptop computer from the identical location that I’ve been utilizing since 2017—as “ChromeDesktop on Home windows.” Each time! The primary couple of instances I adopted the directions, did a password change and so forth.; however these idiot emails saved coming, so now I don’t trouble.
• Pornbot swarms, oy. At month finish, nonetheless, they appear to have stopped.
• The sudden, unheralded change from black textual content on white to white textual content on black. Why? Can I set it again to the previous model, which I preferred higher?

I wouldn’t thoughts residing in a world dominated by software program. What I really stay in is a world dominated by crappy software program.

Don’t get me began on McAfee … Oh, right here comes a McAfee pop-up. YOU’VE REACHED YOUR DATA PROTECTION LIMIT. No worries, although; there’s a button saying “Improve my safety.” I click on on it. It brings up a brand new window. YOU USED ALL YOUR FREE DATA PROTECTION FOR THIS MONTH. Right here the button says: “Attempt limitless VPN.” I click on on it. Nothing occurs.

I get a dozen or so of those pop-ups from McAfee in a mean working day. Each one in all them takes me, typically through intermediate home windows, to a lifeless finish like this. I used to concentrate to them; now I simply ignore them.

Again within the Nixon administration once I earned my residing as a mainframe pc programmer, a misplaced comma in your code may get you an indignant 3 a.m. name from the info heart. These days buggy code will earn you a billion and retirement at forty to a Caribbean island.

I examine sensational advances in Synthetic Intelligence whereas the on a regular basis apps on my laptop computer get dumber and dumber.

European music is among the best glories—maybe the best glory—of our civilization.

Different civilizations acknowledge this. Chinese language folks (with a couple of exceptions) cherish a prickly model of racial and cultural delight; but they ship their little children off to be taught piano, violin, and French Horn, and crowd into live performance halls to listen to visiting orchestras and opera singers carry out Mozart and Verdi.

For these of us Euros with low musical sensibilities, this creates psychological issues. I’ve tried for many years to boost myself to some correct appreciation of music, with very restricted outcomes. I’ve been ordering and listening to Prof. Greenberg’s lectures since approach again once they got here on cassette tapes and Nice Programs was known as The Educating Firm. I attend concert events and recitals as alternative presents.

Nothing’s helped a lot. Musically I stay what I started describing myself as forty years in the past: a middlebrow opera fan. Instrumental music sends me to sleep.

My failure is probably going genetic, as most issues are. My (Chinese language) spouse and I insisted on each youngsters having music classes—lady, violin; boy, piano. It didn’t stick. Now, coming into their thirties, neither ever performs.

For some purpose I can’t fathom, a excessive proportion of my pals are significantly musical. They make affected person, tactful efforts to boost my understanding. Considered one of them just lately gifted me a few CDs: Schubert and Schumann, string quartets in each circumstances.

I listened to each CDs with cautious consideration, however with out being both shaken or stirred. Schumann was, to my ears, the much less accessible. I listened to that CD over once more, and used a fraction of the music for my Might thirty first Radio Derb signoff.

Prof. Greenberg had acquainted me with each composers however I didn’t recall a lot—slightly of -bert however nothing in any respect of -mann. So I pulled down my copy of Schonberg’s The Lives of the Nice Composers and skim the Schumann chapter.

[A] surprisingly great amount of Schumann’s music is not performed. He’s not a composer to all people’s style.

Why not?

The unconventionalities apart, what made his music laborious to grasp totally—the identical is true as we speak—is the non-public nature of the content material. It’s virtually autobiographical.

Uh … OK. Schonberg left me completely confused. I can see how novel could be autobiographical, however a symphony? A concerto?

In search of some readability I consulted Heather Mac Donald, who’s a severe music lover (and occasional reviewer). Right here is Heather’s opinion, reproduced together with her permission:

Schumann’s music repertoire is attractive however extra unsettling than Schubert’s—extra open-ended, disquieting, and unresolved. The songs liberate the piano from subservience to the voice and set it off into unknown realms. The solo piano works are equally attractive and equally unsettling.

The facile acquired knowledge [shared by Schonberg—J.D.] that Schumann was inadequate as an orchestrator is ridiculous.

The piano quartet and piano quintet are monuments of the repertoire, insufferable of their ardour. The piano concerto is a dashing pressure.

In brief: all nice.

Thanks, Heather, however … the heck with it. Realizing once I’m out of my depth however unwilling to surrender altogether, I made a decision to strive Schumann’s one and solely opera. Schonberg:

Schumann achieved success in all musical varieties besides one, opera. He spent a lot time over Genoveva, which achieved no fame in its day and has had only a few performances since.

Genoveva premiered in 1850; there’s common account of the opera right here. I purchased a CD set of the 1951 Stuttgart efficiency with Friederike Sailer within the title function.

Eh, not dangerous; however with the nice bel canto composers nonetheless dominating the opera stage and Joe Inexperienced developing quick within the outdoors lane, it’s not laborious to see why Genoveva “achieved no fame in its day.”

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If you wish to pattern Genoveva, the heroine’s longish (7 minutes) despair’n’resignation aria in Act 4 is about nearly as good because it will get. It’s on YouTube at 1h42m42s right here in a live performance efficiency (no surroundings or performing), and sadly in German with out subtitles. I couldn’t discover an English translation of the libretto and my CD set doesn’t have one, so I fed the German textual content via Google Translate and acquired this. You’re welcome!

Wait a minute: Friederike Sailer? Any relation, Steve?

Dwindling fertility … marriage later and extra troubled … MeToo gold-diggers … the rise of the incels …: Relations between the sexes undoubtedly took a flawed flip someplace.

We geezers have lengthy been noticing this, even these of us not gifted with Steve’s powers of Noticing.

Story from the Bodily Remedy fitness center (from which I graduated Might twenty third).

The primary train in my schedule was the stationary bike. The therapist, who on this case was a fairly younger lady I’ll name Suzy, adjusted seat and pedals to my dimension. I seated myself, acquired my toes within the pedals, and waited for Suzy to achieve throughout me and press the START button on the management panel so I may loosen up with ten minutes of regular pedalling.

Suzy did so. “Let me flip you on,” she mentioned, as she reached throughout me for the button.

Me: “Please don’t flip me on, Suzy. I’m a married man.”

In actual life previous to about twenty years in the past, and within the TV sitcoms and film romcoms of that point, a girl in that state of affairs would have giggled or chortled; or she might need snorted contempt, or replied with some merry put-down. (“No prob, I don’t date Civil Struggle veterans …”)

Suzy uttered not a peep. She backed away in silence and left me to different therapists for the remainder of the session, with an occasional cautious look at me from throughout the room. I suppose I used to be fortunate to keep away from a lawsuit.

Can homo sapiens proceed to breed itself with sensibilities like this?

I don’t personally spend a lot time occupied with my loss of life. Hardly any time, actually; I imply, what’s the purpose? Dum vivimus, vivamus.

It was a concatenation of three occasions in mid-Might that turned me in that regrettable path.

• A Might thirteenth Twitter thread that somebody began with the query: “Does the worry of loss of life reduce with age and expertise?” It acquired my consideration as a result of one of many earliest replies was from Charles Murray: “When you’re doing it proper, sure.”
• A neighbor I’ve recognized for 30-plus years, age mid-70s, was hospitalized with a horrible affliction, and appeared seemingly to not make it. I’m glad to report at month finish that after some heroic surgical procedure he’s doing higher.
• I had simply acquired to Half 10, Chapter 5 of Buddenbrooks the place Thomas Buddenbrook falls into an extended meditation on the topic. At this level he isn’t a cheerful man. His son is a disappointment, his spouse has been flirting with a good-looking younger navy officer, and he’s been studying—eeek!—Schopenhauer. So: “What was loss of life? The reply to the query got here to him now, however not in poor, pretentious phrases—as an alternative, he felt it, possessed it someplace inside him …”

To the unique Twitter query: the expression “worry of loss of life” wants some definition of phrases. The Angel of Dying too typically comes presaged by disagreeable issues which can be to be feared on their very own account: ache, indignity, incapacity, dementia, neglect, … None of these issues is loss of life, although. Nor does loss of life inevitably comply with them: some could be cured.

So what’s to be afraid of? The precise second of loss of life? Why ought to I worry an infinitesimal on the spot of time?

There’s after all the matter of what, if something follows loss of life. What’s on the opposite aspect? There are exactly two possibilites: one thing, or nothing.

Our religions provide the somethings: a brand new sort of life in a brand new world, or reincarnation to same-old same-old on this one. Each, they inform us can be disagreeable and so to be feared: torment in Hell, or reincarnation as a pack mule. Our monks, pastors, rabbis, mullahs, yogis, and bonzes train us how you can keep away from these destructive outcomes.

Nothingness additionally has its pluses and minuses. The large plus—launch from earthly troubles—is nicely promoted in verse. There’s Spenser’s “quiet grave“:

Sleepe after toyle, port after stormie seas,
Ease after warre, loss of life after life does significantly please.

And there’s Tennyson’s Tithonus, pleading along with his scatterbrained goddess to withdraw her reward of everlasting life (to which she had forgotten so as to add everlasting youth): “Launch me, and restore me to the bottom …”

The minuses of nothingness should not so nicely marketed, maybe not so extensively felt. Right here is Philip Larkin feeling them at 4 a.m.:

This can be a particular approach of being afraid
No trick dispels. Faith used to strive,
That huge moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to faux we by no means die,
And specious stuff that claims No rational being
Can worry a factor it won’t really feel, not seeing
That that is what we worry—no sight, no sound,
No contact or style or odor, nothing to suppose with,
Nothing to like or hyperlink with,
The anaesthetic from which none come spherical.

If I worry something about loss of life, it’s these final moments of consciousness (if I’m cursed with them) when the world slips away. Thomas Grey captured them completely:

For who to dumb Forgetfulness a prey,
This pleasing anxious being e’er resigned,
Left the nice and cozy precincts of the cheerful day,
Nor solid one longing, lingering look behind?

With all its pains, troubles, and crappy software program, this world—the nice and cozy precincts of the cheerful day—shouldn’t be such a foul place. The irremediable unhappiness of parting from it: that is one thing I worry.

This brainteaser is a little bit of an previous chestnut however price one other airing. I’ve lifted it from the April 2024 Math Horizons journal, who inform us that it appeared as downside 2a within the ultimate spherical of the 2019-2020 Niels Henrik Abel Arithmetic Competitors in Norway.

Preamble. The phrase “quantity” in what follows means “constructive entire quantity higher than zero.” Each such quantity has a factorial, outlined because the product of all of the numbers lower than or equal to itself. The factorial of N, written N! is 1 × 2 × 3 × 4 × 5 × 6 × 7 … × N.

So 1! is simply 1; 2! is 1 × 2, which is 2; 3! is 1 × 2 × 3, which is 6; 4! is 1 × 2 × 3 × 4, which is 24; 5! is 1 × 2 × 3 × 4 × 5, which is 120; and so forth.

Factorials get massive in a short time: 20! is 2,432,902,008,176,640,000; 100! has 158 digits. For large numbers, Stirling’s method offers approximation.

(As outlined, 0! has no that means. It’s handy in some branches of math, nonetheless, to deal with 0! as equal to 1, so you may even see that. It isn’t related right here.)

OK, right here’s a curious reality: 3! = 1! + 1! + 2! + 2!

If a quantity N has factorial equal to the sum of N + 1 factorials of lesser numbers, I shall name it factorially additive. (To not be confused with factorwise compliant, heh.) Since 3! is the sum of 4 lesser factorials, it’s factorially additive.

Brainteaser. What different numbers in addition to 3 are factorially additive?

John Derbyshire [email him] writes an unbelievable quantity on all types of topics for all types of retailers. (This not consists of Nationwide Evaluation, whose editors had some sort of tantrum and fired him.) He’s the creator of We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism and several other different books. He has had two books revealed by VDARE.com com: FROM THE DISSIDENT RIGHT (additionally accessible in Kindle) and FROM THE DISSIDENT RIGHT II: ESSAYS 2013.