Quomodocumque

“I had been for the past year an editor of a new encyclopedia, and a hack who had been fired, after turning in several poor and inaccurate articles (he cribbed from older encyclopedias, and even his cribbing was mixed up, inaccurate, and disjointed) thought that I was the person who had been the cause of his losing his job. So he had called me at three o’clock in the morning, and attempted to hold a genial and intimate conversation, and when I told him I was trying to sleep, he asked if I had a woman with me! I hung up in anger, and he kept calling, night after night, until at last I told him how unkind he was to wake me up at that hour, and he replied, “My hatred of you has turned to pity,” but he had continued to call and then hang up without speaking.” –Delmore Schwartz, “The Track Meet,” 1959.

Of the writers I truly admire, Schwartz might be the one whose power is most mysterious to me. There were moments when I felt I had successfully imitated him a little bit but never figured out how to do it reliably. This passage is in some ways like the Richard Brautigan sentence (rather, non-sentence) I praised here, 15 years ago. 15 years ago! I’ve been blogging a long time. The constant return to the past (or the constant intrusion of the past on us, unasked for but not wholly unexpected, like a phone call deep in the night) is also Delmore Schwartz-like, as in, of course “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities,” which Schwartz wrote in a single weekend when he was 21 — 21! — if you haven’t read it, please, with what authority I have or can pretend to have over you I urge you, do.

“Like a snail I have lived in a small shell, which I found snug and comfortable, yet longed to desert often to inhale outside atmosphere. Each time I thrust my tentacle out, I felt it touching something unfriendly and drew it back to the old hole. Thus I have led a blank life and seem to be destined to it. Archery and Chinese penmanship take most of my time, though I am not good at them.” –Yutaka Maeshima, 15th anniversary report of the Harvard class of 1923

A photo to go with this old paper.

It’s weird that the plural of Alex and the plural of Alice are both “Alices.” Sort of a base/basis problem.

It was felt that the 1894 exposition in Chicago needed a big iron monument to rival the Eiffel Tower, and a man named George Washington Gale Ferris had the decisive insight that what the occasion demanded was not a needle but a wheel. And so the Ferris wheel was built, at titanic expense, and became the iconic symbol of the fair.

And now ask yourself: why was Ferris Bueller named Ferris? It’s not a common name and never has been. Ferris is the wheel. A magnificent spectacle, gazed at in wonder by huge crowds in Chicago, but which in the end is just moving around and around in circles, on a fixed course.

I am 100% sure I am right about this.

I was in Boston for Pesach and stuck around an extra day because some more Wisconsinites, the mighty Milwaukee Brewers, were also coming into town to play the Boston nine. CJ and I took in the game with friend of the blog and loud Sox fan Cathy O’Neil.

What is true baseball? True baseball is the bleachers in Fenway Park on an April night when it’s freezing cold and nobody on either team can seem to field a ground ball clearly and everybody’s drunk, especially the guy in front of you, who has poured his entire beer into his shoe, from which, to the delight and acclaim of all section 37, he chugs.

A good game? A good game to watch, though not a game I’d call well-played. Willson Contreras got hit, or did a convincing imitation of getting just barely nicked on the tip of his little finger, and gave a good jawing to Brandon Woodruff, who’s hit him five times before. The Brewers’ catcher, who is also Contreras’s brother, had to keep him away from the mound. Brewer-turned-Red Sox Caleb Durbin, who has not hit a lick since arriving here, makes an error at third to start a rally of dinks and walks that turns a 3-0 Boston lead into a 4-3 deficit. Contreras, still mad, RBI doubles and the Red Sox go back ahead. I forget how the Brewers tied it back up, but it was tied back up. The Brewers get a single and then Yelich walks. Garrett Mitchell hits a sharp single, placed where the runner on second is probably going to beat Roman Anthony’s throw to the plate, which throw Anthony heaves so far away from the catcher that it’s actually very difficult for fans in section 37 to understand where the ball is and where everybody’s going, but it is not so difficult for not that fast anymore but very very experienced veteran Christian Yelich, who has never stopped running since he left first base at the crack of the bat, and now realizes that the ball is so very far from home plate that he may actually be able to score, which, by a virtuoso feat of sliding, tag-dodging, and plate-swiping, he does, to put the Brewers up 7-5. Fenway Park boos so hard it vibrates. The Brewers tack one more on, I forget now. Top of the 9th, “Shipping Up To Boston” plays, the crowd is still coldly, drunkenly, in this game. Two meek outs, Willson Contreras comes up one more time, he’s still mad, he hits a no-doubt home run to left, next guy singles and now it’s really on. Very drunk Red Sox fan beckons to CJ and me: “Think we’ve got some more? Think we’ve still got some more?” Cathy high-fives him.

But they didn’t have more. Ground ball to Brice Turang, makes a nice throw, Brewers win 8-6 to go to 8-2. Red Sox, lots of talent but snakebit as the season opens, drop to 2-8. The crowd chants “Sell the team.” True baseball.

Twenty years ago this week (I thought it was twenty years ago today, but I just went back and checked and it was April 3, 2006) I fell down a flight of stairs at MSRI and broke the absolute fuck out of my left elbow. Knocked the head of the radius right off and it was apparently floating down around my wrist. The EMTs cut my shirt off, doped me up, and sent me down to the ER. I am a stubborn guy and gave my seminar the next morning with my arm immobilized in a sling. Went in for surgery the next Tuesday and they screwed the titanium rectangle to my bone that’s been in there ever since. Whoever scheduled it told me “You’re lucky, you’ve got the third-best elbow surgeon in the Bay Area.” I said, “Why only the third best?” They said “Because the best one works for the 49ers and the second-best one works for the Raiders.”

In my memory, they told me at the ER the night I broke it that I needed to undertand that my arm was never going to go back to its original anatomy, that this kind of injury meant a permanent change. But the emails I wrote that day said I was told I’d recover and just probably always have a little stiffness at the break. So maybe it was the surgeon who told me that, before I went under the knife. Whoever told me probably had a lot of experience telling patients that kind of news, and they could see me blanch, because they then said, “you’re never going to have a elbow that moves normally again, but also, a couple of years from now your elbow as it is will feel normal to you, and you’re just going to go through your life never thinking about the fact that it’s broken.”

This was true, it turned out. My left arm doesn’t fully straighten out and never will. And I barely ever find myself thinking about or even noticing this. It’s just the arm I have now, and have had for twenty years this week. I’m curious — if you know me, and especially if you didn’t know I broke my arm, is it noticable to you that one of my arms is never straight? Once you know to look, you can see it in photographs.

When they told me my arm was broken for good it felt like a life-changing disaster. And when they told me I’d just stop noticing it I thought they were lying to me to be nice. But people are built to adjust to change. I’ve tried to remember this over the years, when other shitty things have happened — that as bad as it is, there’s a future me who’s used to whatever it is, who is not as sad or mad or regretful about it as present me, and who is coming into being at astonishing speed.

“The High School Boy and His Problems” (pdf at link) is a 1921 book by Thomas Arkle Clark, Dean of Men at the University of Illinois. I think “The High School Boy and His Problems” would be an amazing band name; I, the front man, would be The High School Boy, and my backup band would be “His Problems.”

Anyway, this passage (p.19)This, , transposed from high school to college and from “most communities” to “most upper-middle-class communities,” and from “boy” to “student” holds up nicely a century or so on:

“It is a great opportunity which is offered a boy who goes to high school. In these days, however, when in most communities it is the rule rather than the exception for boys to go, the privilege is not infrequently valued rather lightly. The boy goes, not from any serious purpose on his own part or any special desire for training, but because it is the custom, because his parents have desired it, and because all the other boys in his class are going. Possibly it is better to go for these reasons than not to go at all, but if added to these there is also the eagerness on his part to train his mind, to add to his store of information, to prepare himself better for the work which he must take up later in life, and especially if there is for him some interest, some line of study which he very much desires to carry on, his chances of getting somewhere will be materially increased. No one can get far in any line of work without interest. The work we do without joy in the doing is pretty sure to be badly done.”

I do think, I believe along with Dean Clark, that most of our students do (if not always at first) find this “joy in the doing,” and that it’s a material part of our job as educators to help them find that joy.

This, on electives, is good too:

“When your grandfather went to high school—if fortunately he had the chance to do so—the course of study open to him was a pretty rigid one, very much indeed like an intellectual table d’hote at which he had little opportunity to pick and choose, but must take what was set before him and ask no questions.

There was a generous helping of mathematics with Latin and probably Greek, to form the heavy part of the intellectual meal. Physics and chemistry often made up a part of the requirement, with history and English to serve as dessert to lighten the repast. There were few, if any, electives then, and little questioning on the part of the students as to whether or not what they were taking was likely to “do them any good” or was particularly to their individual tastes; they took their studies as they ate the simple, nourishing food that was set before them at home by grandmother, in the belief that their elders knew best what was good for them.

Now everything is different. The program of study in the well-equipped modern high school carries an intellectual bill of fare as varied and as bizarre as that represented by the à la carte dining service of a first-class hotel. The boy entering high school today has so varied a program set before him, and has so many things from which to choose, that it is little wonder if he is not sometimes confused and at a loss to know just what to choose.”

Not long after Wisconsin’s ignominious elimination from the NCAA men’s basketball tournament, Duke gets knocked out too, on a wild half-court shot from a UConn freshman with 0.4 seconds left in the game. AB and I were in LaGuardia where it happened, not watching the game, and the sudden communal shout was terrifying for a second until we realized it was basketball. The shouts were happy shouts. There was not a single Duke fan, apparently, in all of Terminal B.

The last time Duke won a national championsihp was in 2015, against the best team Wisconsin has fielded in my time here, Most people around here feel we were the victim of poor officiating in the final going. In any event, since Duke’s questionable win over the Badgers, they have not been back to the finals, and we like to think they won’t again until Wisconsin wins March Madness and breaks the curse.

AB and I were in LaGuardia because we were coming back from Paris, where I gave Seminaire Bourbaki last week about recent progress in Cohen-Lenstra heuristics. I’ll post the notes soon. We got a good price on a sort of nutty ticket that went from Paris to JFK, then left LaGuardia 6 hours later, which gave us the chance to eat a gigantic Italian lunch/dinner at Bruno in Howard Beach, then take a couple of busses across the breadth of Queens to the airport with a direct flight back to Madison. AB has now been to Howard Beach, Astoria, Flushing, and Jackson Heights — she is surely in the 99th percentile of Queens literacy among Madison high school students.

Since 2013, a 12 seed has upset a 5 seed in the first round of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament 20 times. Four out of those 20 games were lost by Wisconsin.