The Washington Post

The reporter Gene Fowler grew up on Denver, and began his career there. In those days, a city as small as Denver might have five or more newspapers. One that employed Fowler suddenly shut down. The owner, a man who had made his money with a transit system somewhere else, suddenly decided that he had more interesting things to do with his money.  That being the early twentieth century, Fowler went on a bender at the Denver Press Club (and caught on with one of the remaining papers before he sobered up).

Jeff Bezos, the owner of The Washington Post, has changed his priorities. This does not so far amount to closing the Post down, though it is hard for me to see how the Post will sustain itself. The cutbacks include laying off 300 of 800 reporters, closing sections including the books and sports sections, and giving less effort and space to local coverage. The publisher who announced this is retiring from the Post. I doubt he made the decisions, but I understand that he might wish to leave.

Whether or not we continue to subscribe, I will miss the book section. It has been a mixed bag at times. Most recently, it has had at least three sound regular reviewers. One of them, Becca Rothfeld, will now be working for The New Yorker. I find it hard to see what savings can be found in a book section: one need not fly reviewers to Paris or New Delhi; one hardly need give them expensive office space; the publishers supply the books reviewed gratis.

And I will miss the sports section. When I moved to this area, and for another twenty years, the Post sports section employed Shirley Povich. He had reported on Babe Ruth, and before that had caddied for Calvin Coolidge. Shirley Povich died in 1998, but a look at the sports section recalls him. And there were plenty of other good sportswriters at the Post: Dave Anderson, Thomas Boswell, Christine Brennan, Ken Denlinger,  Sally Jenkins, Tony Kornheiser, Jim Murray, and Michael Wilbon come to mind.

I have seen Earl Warren quoted as saying that he always read the sports section of the newspaper first: the sports section was about humanity's triumphs, the news about humanities failures. Donald Graham, whose family owned and operated the post for about sixty years, has said that he always started with the sports section, though he did not give a reason.

The Post's Metro section has been weak for quite a while. When it was still printed as a separate section, I often found that a large portion of the section was provided by readers, not reporters. This struck me as sloppy and cheap: the effort to edit a half-page of reader comment must be less than is required to attend a city or county council meeting and produce a much smaller account. Much of today's space is given to an account of a wine robbery that occurred in November, and which the Post wrote up then.

Still, the Metro Section (folded in at the moment with Style and Sports) is the main reason we subscribe to the Post. The Metro section strikes me as a bad place to cut back, really as an invitation to drop the Post and keep the New York Times.

The Post of course has suffered from the disappearance of advertising, something that has affected all newspapers. The Post also lost subscribers, I have heard 200 thousand, by deciding not to endorse Kamala Harris in the 2024 election. No doubt this avoided offending Donald Trump, and may since have contributed to the health of Jeff Bezos's other businesses. But it lost the Post subscribers it likely will not get back. Without strong local coverage, why should one prefer the Post to the New York Times?

The Most Recent Snow

On Sunday, January 25, we had snow from the small hours of the morning through about noon, then sleet until nearly dark, the sleet briefly interrupted by freezing rain. The forecast predicted this accurately, and I saw no point in shoveling snow at midday to give the harder stuff a chance to grip the walks.

 The crust left on the snow Monday morning was not enough to hold my weight without crushing a little. A few days of daytime sun and nighttime cold changed that. After the first day, a plastic snow shovel would not break through the crust, and even on Monday it was only in colder area that it would. Late in the week we saw a shovel discarded by the side of a street, the plastic blade broken in two.

Dealing with the crust made clearing walks and digging out cars that much slower. After other snows in other years, I had smirked at the way people would assert a claim to a shoveled spot--then it was generally traffic cones or garbage cans to hold the space until the car returned. But clearing a spot last week could be two or three hours' work for a grown man. The variety of objects used to hold a spot has expanded: small cones such as soccer teams practice with, chairs, folding chairs, tables, a ladder.

Most of our neighbors cleared their walks promptly. Corners seemed to be no man's lands, though. Between corners and uncleared walks, one makes better progress walking in the street, even with stepping out of the way of a car every few minutes.

When we went shopping on Friday, the roads were not bad, though narrowed by the plowed snow. Intersections with or of side streets could be uncomfortably narrow. This past Sunday, the sidewalks along 16th Street were mostly in good condition, in part because so much of the way they are maintained by the staff of apartment buildings. 

The New Roman Empire

At New Years, a friend gave me a copy of The New Roman Empire: A History of Byzantium by Anthony Kaldellis. Having read through it, I have a considerably clearer notion of that empire, as regards its periodic contraction and growth, the dynasties that ruled it, and the management of the church councils that established dogma. Considerably clearer, but only so clear: the alternation of Palaiologos and Kantakouzenos, the despots of Epeiros and the Morea, and many other details remain vague. I suppose that a second reading would clear this up, but since the book has 918 pages, not counting end matter, a second reading will have to wait for a while.

I wonder about a number of points, including the account given of theological developments. To take an example from late in the book, Kaldellis makes Gregory of Palamas sound less serious than Jaroslav Pelikan does in The Spirit of Eastern Christendom.

 And Kaldellis is out to vindicate the eastern empire against the sins and biases of the West. No doubt the West has much of it coming. Still, he writes

The Latinization of Greek names ("Comnenus") and worse, their Anglicization ("John") is an offensive form of cultural imposition. It is practiced for no other culture except the "Byzantines," whose very name as a people ("Romans") has been deemed inadmissible for centuries.

(page 7). Here one recalls Frederick the Great, Philip II, the Archduke Charles, assorted Saints Francis and so on among those with Anglicized names. Didn't the Romans use the term "Scythian" rather loosely?

The index is imperfect, which is not surprising in a book of this length, but can be confusing. As an example, consider the entry for "Scholarios, Georgios Gennadios". The first four entries are for pages 327, 332, 898, and 901. Pages 327 and 332 refer to a magister militum and an exarch in sixth-century North Africa, who I suppose could be the same person. Page 898 speaks of "Gennadios, the first patriarch of Constantinople after the fall". Page 901, more satisfactorily, has "Georgios Scholarios (the later patriarch Gennadios II)".

 

 But most of this is quibbling. I am grateful to have received the book and glad to have read it. I will certainly read at least parts of it again.

Damnatio Memoriae

A friend sent me a copy of Latin Inscriptions: Ancient Scripts by Dirk Booms, a guide to reading the Latin on old grave markers, public buildings, and so on. It includes a photograph and explanation of the dedication of a bridge in Egypt, with two erasures: first of the prefect of Egypt who oversaw the building, then of the late emperor Domitian. Such erasure is called "damnatio memoriae", removal of someone's name from official records and monuments. It is not known why the official suffered this; Domitian's damnatio memoriae followed on his assassination.

I had heard of the practice, but never seen an example in stone. The penalty has no place in American law, but variants of it have been applied now and then. The aqueduct over Cabin John Creek in Maryland, now the Aqueduct Bridge on McArthur Boulevard, was built by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, begun when Jefferson Davis was Secretary of War. By the time the aqueduct was finished, Davis was president of the Confederate States of America, and the federal government removed his name. About forty years later, President Theodore Roosevelt had it put back.

Something like damnatio memoriae was applied to Benedict Arnold. He is remembered on the battlefield at Saratoga by an empty niche beside three with statues of the other American commanders, and by a boot with the epaulets of his rank--Arnold was shot in the leg on the field. At Saratoga there was no inscription or statue to remove, his treason having followed so soon after his services.

Keeping One's Books

In the New York Times this week, Roger Rosenblatt urgess\ us to keep our books. For me, and no doubt for many readers to the Times, this is like counsel to exercise, eat well, and get enough sleep: what else would we wish to do? However, it is not wholly practical.

This past Christmas, I received about 2500 pages of reading matter, say 60% biography and 40% history. I will keep most of this, if only because of who gave it. But it takes up space on the shelves, and shelves are finite. Something else will have to go, sometime. We have only so much space to put up bookshelves.

And how many books are "your" books? If you bought it for a college class or for the neighborhood book club and disliked it, is it "yours" in more than a legal sense? If you can't say how it came to be under your roof, and in any case there is a better edition on another shelf, is it yours? I think that Rosenblatt might have explored the imperfect match of ownership as recognized by the law, and possession as measured by one's engagement with a book.

Rosenblatt concludes by quoting from one of Theodore Roethke's poems. I thought that I had a copy of Roethke's collected poems, but apparently not. Did we give it away or lose it in a move? Or was it a library's and so not mine?

Ain't

In Allen Tate's novel The Fathers, a use of "ain't" gets a footnote:

I may as well say here that my father did not speak dialect but the standard English of the eighteenth century. In pronunciation the criterion was the oral tradition, not the way the word looked in print to an uneducated school-teacher. For example, though he wrote ate, he pronounced it et, as if it were the old past tense, eat. He used the double negative in conversation, as well as ain't, and he spoke the language with great ease at four levels: first, the level just described, conversation among family and friends; second, the speech of the "plain people abounding in many archaisms; third, the speech of the negroes, which was merely late seventeenth or early eighteenth English ossified; and fourth, the Johnsonian diction appropriate to formal occasions, a style that he could wield in perfect sentences four hundred words long. He would not have understood our conception of "correct English." Speech was like manners, an expression of sensibility and taste. This view no longer holds in an era of public schools and state universities.

The conversation would have been in the early 1850s, the speaker a man born about the turn of the century, resident in Fairfax County, Virginia.

State universities go a long way back in the upper south: there is "Mr. Jefferson's university" in Charlottesville, of course, but the University of North Carolina is older still. The attitude towards the state universities if not the schools seems much more of Tate's time than his narrator's.