Eric The Blue

Everything is made of atoms

I've mentioned before how, in his first lecture, Richard Feynman asks the question about what single, short statement captures the most important bit of scientific knowledge--the one thing we'd like to preserve if everything else was lost in some cataclysm and we had to begin again to understand the world as best we can.  He proposes the atomic hypothesis, which he puts as follows:  "All things are made of atoms--little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another."

I've mentioned it before but haven't stressed how serious he is about it.  He asks and answers the question about the single most important idea to preserve near the beginning of the lecture.  Toward the end, he says:

Everything is made of atoms.  That is the key hypothesis.  The most important hypothesis in all of biology, for example, is that everything that animals do, atoms do.  In other words, there is nothing that living things do that cannot be understood from the point of view that they are made of atoms acting according to the laws of physics [emphasis in original].

Perhaps those for whom the theory of evolution is a particularly despised thing should turn their attention to the atomic hypothesis.  "Everything is made of atoms."  An alternative way of saying it:  Atoms is all there is.   

Beer Blogging III

My beer blogging is falling behind my consumption.  Tonight, I poured myself a Redbook ESB, and then, preparing coffee to Amanda's taste while listening to the ball game on the radio, absentmindedly dropped two packets of Splenda into the malty brew.  I had taken just one pull, which was enough to persuade me that I had lost something more than two Splendas.  Remember, I got all these beers at a silent auction, and have no idea about their availability or affordability. It is also possible that my sense of taste has been vitiated by the products of the Miller Brewing Company, or that the emotion welling up in my soul when I beheld the Splenda floating like a white oil spill on the surface of my ale has caused me to value too highly my one fleeting taste.  But I recommend the Redhook ESB.

Netflix: "Laura"

The film is regarded as one of the great noir mysteries.  Here's a few things that mystify me.

1. Why is the newspaper columnist, whose love for Laura drives him to murder, played as a mincing homosexual?  If he's so gay, why did he fall so hard for her?

2. Why would anyone fall so hard for her?  If the movie is going to be named for Laura, shouldn't the part be played by someone who isn't lost?

3. I love how the principal suspects are allowed to tag along as the detective does his thing.  Except for Gene Tierney's Laura, who only aspires to be a cartoon, the characters are all cartoons, and the entire situation is wildly implausible.  So why did I enjoy it?

Gleick's "Genius": a review

I've been reading Six Easy Pieces, excerpts from Richard Feynman's Lectures on Physics, and am reminded, by some of the personal reminiscences in the Introduction by Paul Davies, and in the Preface by David L. Goodstein and Gerry Neugebauer, of James Gleick's biography of Feynman, Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman, which I read when it was first published in 1992.  I took the trouble to write a review, which of course was never published, but now I have a blog.  So here it is.

Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman
by James Gleick
Pantheon, 531 pp.

The curtain rises, in this biography, on an instantly recognizable schoolhouse character--the shy, awkward boy with unusual mathematical aptitude who, conscious of being "different," casts about for a way to be one of the fellows.  In the case of Richard Feynman, growing up in Far Rockaway, New York, in the years following the First World War, the uneasiness was translated into keen admiration for working men who built and fixed things.  These, the boy thought, were real men.  He began hiring himself out for radio repair and, aided by library books with titles like Algebra for the Practical Man, embarked on an ambitious course of self-education.

About forty years later, in 1965, Feynman shared the Nobel Prize in physics with Julian Schwinger and Shin'ichiro Tomonaga for their work in quantum electrodynamics.  Though Feynman's work lagged behind that of the other two men, it was finally his formulation, which included the famous "Feynman diagrams," that made the theory comprehensible to other physicists and thus fecund.  Feynman watched with satisfaction as he eclipsed Schwinger in the footnotes to articles in The Physical Review.  The practical boy had triumphed.

For the biographer, however, the young Feynman does not cast so long a shadow as does the grown man responsible for two collections of memoirs, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! and What Do You Care What Other People Think?  These books, both best sellers, chronicle the adventures of a picaresque hero from his early days in radio repair to his legendary performance as a member of the presidential commission investigating the Challenger shuttle disaster.  Gleick aptly compares the hero of these stories to the child in the fairy tale who announces that the emperor is naked.  Feynman consistently appears more honest and plain spoken than everyone else.

What Feynman does not necessarily appear to be in his own stories is a supremely gifted theoretical physicist.  Scientific colleagues worried that he was playing the part of a buffoon.  Feynman, who began playing samba on the drums during a sojourn in Brazil, allowed that his biographer was sure to depict either a bloodless intellectual or a bongo-playing clown.  Gleick quotes the prediction and, while he tries to steer a middle course, the title alone indicates that he is determined to emphasize Feynman's intellectual achievement. 

The problem, of course, is that relatively few people are in a position to comprehend that achievement.  In giving a full account of, say, Feynman's contribution to a theory pertaining to elementary particles, the biographer risks glazing the eyes of even the pluckiest "general reader."  Gleick's thorough treatment is meant to broaden a mere anecdotal appreciation of Feynman's genius, but what lodged in my mind was new anecdotes.  Some examples:

1. During Feynman's senior year at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he took the Putnam Exam, which is administered annually to the best math students at universities across the country.  The persons attaining the top five scores are designated Putnam Fellows, and one receives a scholarship for graduate study at Harvard.  The test is so difficult that often more than half the examinees fail to solve a single problem in the allotted time.

On the day Feynman took the test, a friend was amazed to see him ambling across the campus while the exam was still in progress.  Later, the graders were amazed by the gap between Feynman's score and those of the four other Fellows.  Unfortunately for Harvard, the practical young man was more interested in physics than math, and he enrolled in the graduate school at Princeton.

2. About the time Feynman was finishing graduate school, he was recruited to work on the atomic bomb.  Upon accepting, he was quickly promoted to the position of a group leader.  Robert Oppenheimer called him the most brillian young physicst at Los Alamos. 

Part of Feynman's value to the Manhattan Project was his prodigious calculating ability.  In those days, calculating machines were cumbersome, and grinding through a complicated equation could be a very laborious process.  Colleagues soon learned that it was often easier just to ask Feynman.  His mind seems to have contained, among other things, pictures of logarithmic tables that he could read from.  Any problem he was given involved values he already knew, or values that were between two values he already knew, and he could interpolate with preternatural rapidity.

3. Feynman was for 37 years a member of the physics faculty at the California Institute of Technology.  In 1961, the department concluded that its undergraduate physics curriculum was antiquated.  Feynman accepted the task of teaching a new two-year course in basic physics to Caltech freshmen and sophomores.

He threw himself into the work.  Many undergraduates dropped the course--it was hard and idiosyncratic--but Feynman seems to have barely noticed, perhaps because their seats were taken by graduate students and faculty who realized that something remarkable was happening.  Moving quickly, and taking up topics in unorthodox sequence, Feynman built up, over the two years, the entire edifice of physical reality as it was understood by him. 

The lectures were edited and published as a three-volume text.  They have proven too difficult for use in college courses, but professional physicists regard The Feynman Lectures on Physics as a gift from the mountaintop.  A previous reviewer of Gleick's book, reaching back to the philosophic system contructed by Aristotle for analogy, calls the Lectures "a triumph of human thought."  Gleick, who is nothing if not sober and evenhanded, calls the lectures "a magisterial achievement": not since Newton, he avers, had a scientist given such a comprehensive account of his understanding of the world.

4. Feynman could easily have won three Nobel prizes.  In additon to the work in quantum electrodynamics, he supplied a theoretical explanation for the strange, frictionless properties of superfluids and, with Murray Gell-Mann, his Caltech colleague, developed a universal theory for the weak nuclear force.

One might think that such achievements are the mark of a mind not only powerful but also focussed.  Yet Feynman suffered through periods when he seemed unable even to find an appropriate problem to work on.  During one sabbatical year he dropped physics altogether in order to teach himself molecular biology.  Before the year was out, he had made an original contribution to the understanding of how mutations work in genes.

Perhaps, then, one can see why some prankish physicists once convened a seminar on the topic: Is Feynman human?  The apparently transcendent intellectual ability, together with the free-wheeling iconoclasm delineated in the memoirs, comprise the sturdy twin legs of the Feynman legend.  Gleick, however, may be most successful when showing that the stylized self-portrait of the memoirs doesn't begin to convey the complexity of his subject's character. 

Feynman's first wife, Arline Greenbaum, died of tuberculosis in a Santa Fe sanatorium while he was working on the Manhattan Project.  Gleick thinks that for Feynman the loss of Arline, which came with young love still in full bloom, before either could suffer any of the disenchantments associated with long familiarity, transfigured her into something like a Platonic form.  She stood out among women just as he stood out among scientists.  After Arline, he never let anyone get close to him.  He was 27 when she died. 

Gleick's psychological interpretation is marred by Feynman's third marriage, to Gweneth Howarth, with whom he raised two children, and also by a thousand other stories of lonely geniuses.  He nevertheless has provided a coherent exposition of the questions concerning Feynman's personal relationships, especially with women. 

In the almost exclusively male world of theoretical physics, Feynman's often active love life was a part of his mystique.  But many women, including some former girlfriends, were not impressed.  The breezy diction of Surely You're Joking suggests that, to Feynman, women were all either "put together" or "cornfed."  In the years immediately following Arline's death, he was quite promiscuous, at least by the standards normally applied to physics professors, and his sex partners seem to have been culled from the ranks of graduate students, the wives of colleagues, women he picked up in bars, and prostitutes.

Gleick's explanation is that Feynman tended to regard women as mere sex objects because none of them could be Arline Greenbaum.  There is no attempt to excuse, only to explain, and the explanation probably would not be very convincing if it weren't for Gleick's very moving and wholly convincing account of the Richard Feynman-Arline Greenbaum love story.

Arline's tuberculosis, which was diagnosed in 1941, provides the obstacle required by love stories.  The wedding, in a New York city office, with two strangers for witnesses, took place later that year over the strenuous objections of the groom's mother, who feared for her son's health.  On the advice of doctors, the newlyweds abstained from sexual relations.  Arline spent the rest of her life in sanatoriums. 

Predictably, Feynman immersed himself in the science related to tuberculosis.  He soon was sufficiently familiar with the medical literature to exasperate Arline's doctors with pointed, Socratic interrogations.  He remained proudly rationalistic.  On the day Arline died, the clock in her room stopped running at the time of death.  The physicist set about understanding the phenomenon.  The clock was weak--he had repaired it more than once--and he remembered that a nurse, making notes for the death certificate, had tilted the face toward a dim light in order to record the time of death.  He concluded that the slight upset had stopped the clock again.

Yet the Feynman who loved Arline appears inevitably vulnerable.  His love letters, necessitated by her confinement and his work, are alternately humorous, playful, hortatory, tender, and agonized.  He was not immune to self-deception.  When their conjugal celibacy finally ended, Arline immediately missed a period, and the ecstatic couple began preparing for parenthood.  To outsiders, however, it was obvious that the cessation of menses was not due to pregnancy.  Arline was dying.

It is understandable that a young husband's rational faculties should be vitiated by the emotional turmoil connected with his wife's illness.  But, then, this is the same husband who, maybe an hour after his wife's death, was determinedly solving the problem of the grieving clock.  What begins to emerge is neither the bloodless intellectual nor the bongo-playing clown but, I suspect, the best portrait we will have of one of the most notable men of the twentieth century.

Lutherans have their pictures taken

The Lutherans--Evangelical Lutheran Church in America variety--are having their convention here in town.  It has attracted considerable attention in the local press, because they voted on the question of ordaining homosexuals, which is great copy.  I, however, skipped the long articles in order to study the pictures of the delegates at work.  Evidently they pray a lot, and when they pray, they hold hands with one another and direct their gazes toward the heavens--though it seems the view would be interrupted by the industrial ceiling of Minneapolis's convention center. 

I have to say that I cannot enter into the experience of these people.  What happens to them when they pray?  Do they hear a voice?  They appear to be having an ecstatic experience almost erotic in its intensity.  Which reminds me that, when I was young, various Lutheran publications would come to our house in the mail and I would sometimes scan them for something interesting.  What could be interesting?  Well, one brave author took up the subject of sex.  Of course I read that.  The author was a minister and he advocated a "sacramental view of the marital act."  He went so far as to suggest that couples should construct a prayer shrine in a corner of the master bedroom where they could ask God to bless the marital act they were about to perform.  That seemed to me hilarious: couldn't help thinking of these stolid figures kneeling in their pyjamas thinking thoughts that, it seemed to me, had to be sort of mixed up and crazy. 

Anyway,  delegates voted to allow congregations to call homosexuals as pastors.  They were divided fairly evenly, so if they were praying for guidance and did hear a voice, it wasn't always saying the same thing.

Letter

I've mentioned before that my local daily, The Minneapolis Star Tribune, turns over about a dozen column inches every Sunday to a local dope named Katherine Kersten.  Today's essay was on how liberals are slandering the health care protesters who keep showing up at these "town halls" across the country.  I wrote the following letter to the editor:

To the editor:

Katherine Kersten strikes out again (“Left protests too much over the town halls,” August 23)! No one is saying that critics of health care reform can't speak up. But the ignorant things they say--and their preening loutishness--are richly deserving of contempt.  A few examples:

• The retiree who, at a town hall sponsored by his representative, loudly inisted that he did not want the government messing around with his Medicare. (Medicare, of course, is a government program.)

• The penchant of health care protesters for bringing guns, including military-style assault rifles, to their events. Apparently the wing-nuts have won enough battles so that nothing can be done about this practice. According to police in Phoenix, a protester who carried a semiautomatic rifle slung over his shoulder violated no law. President Obama was at the time speaking at the city’s nearby convention center.

• At a town hall sponsored by Rep. Bob Inglis, Republican of South Carolina, citizens were angry about more than just “socialized medicine.” One woman asked a question about government-mandated vaccinations. Inglis told her she should find something new to worry about, and the crowd hissed its disapproval--at Inglis!

• At a town hall sponsored by Rep. Barney Frank, Democrat of Massachusetts, a normal looking woman carrying a picture of Obama doctored to look like Hitler asked the congressman why he supported the president’s “Nazi policy.” Frank spoke for many of us when he retorted, “My answer to you is, as I’ve said before, it is a tribute to the First Amendment that this kind of vile, contemptible nonsense is so freely propagated.” He then excused himself on the ground that he had an appointment back on planet Earth (where, by the way, 47 million Americans have no health insurance).

--Eric Jorgenson

Some enjoyable viewing

First, spit gets gobbed upon people who deserve it. 

Next, spit gets gobbed on one person who deserves it.

And, while we are on the subject of the great health care debate, check out this mismatch.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Exclusive - Betsy McCaughey Extended Interview Pt. 1
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Healthcare Protests

You decide whose team you want to be on.  Hat tip to Majikthise.

Beer blogging II

Tonight I drank with my supper a product of Boulder Beer Company, Cold Hop.  Get it?  Sounds like cold pop, but it is cold hop, because beer is made of hops! 

I should have said that ale is made of hops, because according to the label, Cold Hop is a "high-gravity British-Style ale."  I'm foggy about the difference between ale and beer and the rest of that claim is even more mysterious.  Was it brewed in a black hole? 

What the label calls "a rich golden hue" I would call "orange," but you should check for yourself because Amanda has to dress me in the morning.  Soon I will get to the taste.  Nothing wrong with the aroma. Comes in a standard brown bottle, and, while the text on the label is to me incomprehensible, its blue-green scheme is attractive and makes me think maybe you are supposed to drink it with a lime.

I thought it tasted fine in a grainy, slightly aggressive sort of way. 

Beer blogging

At the aforementioned cancer benefit, I bid, in the silent auction, on a pail of twenty-four "exotic" beers.  Someone bid over me after we left, but, thanks to the vigilance of my father-in-law, I prevailed.  My plan was to write a post on each beer as I progressed through the pail, but I'm now three beers in and I can't remember anything about the first two.  Oh, wait, that is not quite true.  One was some species of a Summit, and I was reminded, drinking it, of my high-school classmate, Pat Borchardt, who, while drinking a Miller in a bar, was harangued on the attributes of Summit by a patron wearing loafers and no socks.  Pat heard him out, then said, Yes, that was all probably true, but if you're going to drink a million of them--"and I am"--then (holding up his HIgh Life) you want this one.  If it weren't for the husky African-American fellow clearing the High Lifes out of the luxury suite, Pat would be the world's best advertisement for that particular product of the Miller Brewing Company.

The other one was brewed by James Page.  Perusing their website, I think it was the Burly Brown, which is "distinguished by a deep brown color and creamy smooth taste."  There can be no disputing the brown color.  My mother-in-law was over that night and she said it tasted "a little different," by which I think she meant to indicate she wouldn't want a million of them.  I thought it was fine but can't think now what to say about it.  When it comes to beer, I remind myself of what the writer Flannery O'Connor said about her qualifications as a music critic:  "To me, all classical music sounds alike, and everything else sounds like the Beatles."

Tonight I enjoyed with my evening meal a Schell's Firebrick. According to the Schell's website,  Firebrick "has been described by Ted Marti as having a 'subtle maltiness combined with a hint of hoppy taste that creates a mild, pleasantly drinkable beer.'"  I'm plainly not qualified to disagree with that.  Still, if you want to have a million of something they brew, may I suggest the Grain Belt Premium?

At the movies

My in-laws live a few blocks from a suburban multiplex, and the other night, when we were at their place for dinner, they agreed to watch the kids so that Amanda and I could go on a "date" to the movies.  I wanted to see Funny People, but they recommended The Ugly Truth, and it seems we were obliged to do as the baby sitters suggested.

As they say on my side of the family:  Uff-dah.  The movie "reviews" available on this site are generally for Netflix rentals of movies of the kind that are often called "films."  I try, if I see an opening, to make fun of them.  But what to say about a movie that isn't even trying to be good?  At least, I hope it isn't.  The idea, apparently, was to work into a romantic comedy some guy-friendly put-downs of the chick-view of things that makes romantic comedies possible.  There is, however, a reason you usually do not drink Bud with your Twinkies.  As in pornography, the "plot" is just rickety scaffolding on which to climb while taking short breaks from delivering what the audience is thought to want: in this case,  "zingers" directed at an antagonist who, no doubt about it, is going to land happily in the bed of the enemy.  Fifteen bucks, and you won't get those two hours back, either.

Wilson on Dickens

Having finished Bleak House, I am re-reading Edmund Wison's essay on Dickens in The Wound and the Bow.  It is called "Dickens: The Two Scrooges."  After relating the story of his father's incarceration in Marshalsea Prison and Charles's employment for six months, when he was 12, in a blacking warehouse, Wilson writes at the beginning of the long essay's third section:

For the man of spirit whose childhood has been crushed by the cruelty of organized society, one of two attitudes is natural: that of the criminal or that of the rebel.  Charles Dickens, in imagination, was to play the roles of both, and to continue up to his death to put into them all that was most passionate in his feeling.

I know that my eyes have passed over these words before and am surprised now to think they made no impression on me.  Wilson seems exactly right but his Dickens, the brooding and subversive survivor of a childhood wound, is not the kindly lover of Christmas many think they know.  When Wilson tries to place Dickens in some kind of literary context the author whose name recurs is no Englishman.  It's Dostoevski.

Literary trailer

A morsel concerning Flann O'Brien, an author of whom my ignorance is perfect, from an article (behind a subscription wall) in The New York Review of Books:

[I]n O'Brien's macabre story "Two In One," published in The Bell magazine in 1954, a young taxidermist murders his master and disposes of the body, retaining only the skin.  He then has the idea of making his crime a perfect one by assuming both the skin and the identity of his dead employer.  The ruse rebounds on him, however, when the police investigate his own disappearance and he ends up being hanged for his own murder.

Cancer benefits and health care

Last night we went to a dinner and silent auction meant to raise funds for the son of a family friend who has melanoma.  The large room was packed to such a degree that the claustraphobic felt a little uneasy.  Or maybe I was made uneasy by the reflection that some of the attendees are likely ardent opponents of the health care reforms now being debated in the Congress.  Could there be a better demonstration of the need for reform than benefit events of this sort?  Why should a 20-something young man with a health insurance policy need to appeal to the charity of friends and local businesses in order to help pay his unmanageable medical bills?  We are not talking now about 47 million uninsured Americans.  This fellow has insurance, also a dangerous cancer, and the amount in the "you pay" column of his statements is enough to shove him and his middle-class family toward bankruptcy.  Since the Republicans are always and ever against every proposed reform of the health care system, they should have to say what this fellow has done wrong.  Failed to secure a "health savings account"?  Their problem is that no honest person can take them seriously.

For they are full of fetid ogranic matter.  I'm disgusted by the refrain concerning the alleged deficiencies of the Canadian health care system.  You have these huge bureaucracies, and their relative merits are to be gauged by what amount to a few personal anecdotes?  Again, they aren't serious.  Here is the high-level truth.  The Canadian health care system, compared to ours, is very much less expensive, covers everyone, and, as measured by basic health statistics, achieves better outcomes.  Sources here, and here, and here.  Republicans often insist that Canadians are dissatisfied with their health care system.  That, too, is a load of crapola.

None of the plans developed by different groups of congressional Democrats is anything like the Canadian plan.  So you might say that these invocations of the Canadian system are straw men.  But that line of analysis breaks down when you consider that the "straw man" is manifestly superior to what we have.  If you want to make a false analogy you really ought to find one that does not shame the argument you are trying to make. 

School principle applied to health care debate

Someone--Garrison Keillor?--has said that he likes an underconfident person.  Me too.  During my long career as a student I developed the theory that, in "recitation" or "discussion" sessions, the likelihood that a given person would speak up was inversely proportional to the likelihood that the person had anything insightful to say.  What became of all the know-nothing blowhards who, having declined to do any homework, tried to make up for it by dominating the class discussion?

It seems they are showing up at these "townhall meetings" on health care reform.  Check out, via Salon's War Room, this one, convened by Rep. Bob Inglis, Republican of South Carolina.  Salon's Gabriel Winant's corollary to the principle described above is, "And it seems like the more acute a questioner’s paranoia, the more eager the crowd’s support."  He's right.  Vaccinations!  Revolution!  Light bulbs! 

But these people are not really any more whacko than many of the bright lights of today's G.O.P.--Sarah Palin, for example, whose contribution to the health care debate I will reproduce in full so as to be immune to the charge of picking low-hanging fruit.  The whole thing is manifestly crazy, the polluted output of a mind that cannot be troubled by facts.

Statement on the Current Health Care Debate

As more Americans delve into the disturbing details of the nationalized health care plan that the current administration is rushing through Congress, our collective jaw is dropping, and we’re saying not just no, but hell no! 



The Democrats promise that a government health care system will reduce the cost of health care, but as the economist Thomas Sowell has pointed out, government health care will not reduce the cost; it will simply refuse to pay the cost. And who will suffer the most when they ration care? The sick, the elderly, and the disabled, of course. The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s “death panel” so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their “level of productivity in society,” whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.



Health care by definition involves life and death decisions. Human rights and human dignity must be at the center of any health care discussion.



Rep. Michele Bachmann highlighted the Orwellian thinking of the president’s health care advisor, Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, the brother of the White House chief of staff, in a floor speech to the House of Representatives. I commend her for being a voice for the most precious members of our society, our children and our seniors.



We must step up and engage in this most crucial debate. Nationalizing our health care system is a point of no return for government interference in the lives of its citizens. If we go down this path, there will be no turning back. Ronald Reagan once wrote, “Government programs, once launched, never disappear. Actually, a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we’ll ever see on this earth.” Let’s stop and think and make our voices heard before it’s too late.


- Sarah Palin

Take a shower, then for antidotes go here, and here, and here.

Family vacation to the poor man's ocean

We've just returned from the first ever Jorgenson-McFarlane family vacation, a two-day and one-night trip to the twin ports of Duluth, Minnesota and Superior, Wisconsin.  The exalted phrase, "family vacation," is really part of a successful advertising campaign undertaken by the elder Jorgensons, who wanted to persuade McFarlane, 6, that this short trip is a great treat.  We saw the zoo and the aquarium in Duluth and went on a cruise of the harbor that shoved out from Barker's Island in Superior.  All fine, but for me the whole reason for going is just to see the lake, the way the water and sky merge in a vast blank of gray.  Everyone who reads Moby Dick must wonder what is going to happen when finally Ahab meets the great white whale--and feel bored, probably, wading through the several hundred pages of Melvillean prose that precede this showdown.  My favorite moment, however, occurs before the Pequod has even gone out to sea.  Ishmael boards in port for a job interview, and is asked by Peleg why he wants to go a-whaling. 

"Well, sir, I want to see what whaling is," he answers.  "I want to see the world."  Peleg tells him to have a look out over the ship's weather bow.  Ishmael complies, and 

Going forward and glancing over the weather bow, I perceived that the ship swinging to her anchor with the flood-tide, was now obliquely pointing towards the open ocean. The prospect was unlimited, but exceedingly monotonous and forbidding; not the slightest variety that I could see.

"Well, what's the report?" said Peleg when I came back; "what did ye see?"

"Not much," I replied - "nothing but water; considerable horizon though, and there's a squall coming up, I think."

"Well, what dost thou think then of seeing the world? Do ye wish to go round Cape Horn to see any more of it, eh? Can't ye see the world where you stand?" 

No.  Had to go to Duluth. 

More enjoyable activities

What is new with Eric?  Well, the Torrens Twins, my entry in the Fantasy Baseball League of Hennepin County, are trying to be more than an also-ran, but an injury to Ian Kinsler and the prolonged slump of Jason Bay, now also hobbled, are holding them back.  What to do?  I thought I had made a shrewd move by picking up Jarod Washburn just before the division-leading Tigers acquired him in a trade, but I see that tonight he got beat up by the Orioles. 

On coffee breaks and in bed I read Bleak House and am now almost to the end.  At Caribou this afternoon Mr. Jarndyce stepped back so that Woodcourt could step forward, thereby clearing the way for Esther's bliss.  Such is the goodness and purity of Jarndyce that I have to suspect that the thirty or so pages in the 900s of my Penguin Classic paperback will relate yet more of his magnanimous acts.   But what was going on between him and Esther, all that "little woman" and "my Guardian" between people engaged to be married?  Even allowing for different courtship customs this one seems odd.  I see now, turning to Nabokov's Lectures on Literature, that his discussion of Bleak House includes a section headed "John Jarndyce's Curious Courtship" wherein he advances the theory that Jarndyce, who is perhaps 30 years older than Esther, proposes that their marriage be platonic--that is what he means by repeatedly insisting that "nothing can change" and stressing that on this "one point" she must be "quite certain."  In this light it seems possible to criticize old kindly Jarndyce, since under the terms of his proposal Esther, who is really not in a position to turn him down, will be denied children as well as any lover.  The whole thing is very strange and makes you wonder just how badly disfigured Esther had been by the smallpox, another topic on which Dickens seems to equivocate.  

In her column today Miss Manners alludes to Bleak House--to Mrs. Jellyby, in particular, in whose honor she names the Jellyby Syndrome, a condition in which "those who work on behalf of other people in general feel free to annoy the particular people with whom they come into contact."  I have elsewhere published my admiration for Miss Manners.