“First find out what you are capable of”

Studying at Brigham Young University, Tara Westover is trying to figure out how she “could be a woman and yet be drawn to unwomanly things” like the study of history and politics. She goes to talk to Paul Kerry, her history professor, and blurts out that she arrived at Brigham Young having never heard of the Holocaust. Her parents didn’t believe in public education. Kerry suggests that Westover stretch herself and “see what happens.” He suggests applying to a study-abroad program at Cambridge. If she’s accepted, the program may give her an idea of her ability. She thinks it over:

I walked to my apartment wondering what to make of the conversation. I’d wanted moral advice, someone to reconcile my calling as a wife and mother with the call I heard of something else. But he’d put that aside. He’d seemed to say, “First find out what you are capable of, then decide who you are.”

Tara Westover, Educated: A Memoir (New York: Random House, 2018).

“First find out what you are capable of, then decide who you are”: I love that. As Westover will later write: “a life is not a thing unalterable.”

Educated is a great story about the ways in which education can open up a world beyond one’s upbringing. As Elaine suggests, the book would be excellent choice for “one book, one campus” purposes. But I doubt that many schools would dare to make Educated required reading. The book raises too many difficult questions about responsibilities to oneself and to one’s family. For Westover, there’s a price to becoming educated, and it’s not tuition and fees.

Coffee or die

In the news: “Drinking coffee is associated with a lower risk of early death — virtually regardless of how much you drink and whether or not it’s caffeinated, concludes a paper published Monday in JAMA Internal Medicine.”

Related reading
All OCA coffee posts (Pinboard)

Backblaze

I understand the name Backblaze, I think: it’s a backup service that’s meant to be blazingly fast. Or it’s something like a backfire, a protective measure. Still, I’m not crazy about the sight of flames with an app meant to protect data. But I’m using and can recommend using Backblaze, Wirecutter’s choice for best online backup service. Wirecutter’s recommendation — not mine — is the one that should carry weight.

I’ve used Mozy forever, or at least for the past fourteen or sixteen years, so switching was a difficult decision. Did I want to back up everything from scratch? No. But I switched anyway, because of Mozy’s high cost and disappointing customer service. Mozy charges $5.99 a month for 50GB of storage, and $9.99 a month for 125GB, with a $2 a month charge for every additional 20GB. Backblaze: $50 a year for unlimited backup. $119.88 v. $50: that’s an easy choice. And here is a recent example of Mozy’s customer service. In sharp contrast: when I had a couple of questions about how Backblaze manages large files, I filed a support request and had a reply within a day.

If you’d like to try Backblaze, here’s a link that will get you and me a free month each. One suggestion: look carefully at what Backblaze is backing up. You don’t really want to back up your Dropbox folder, do you?

[What’s the deal with prices ending in “.99”? A Mozy joke, like “reticulating splines”?]

An Almodóvar Jotter

[Matador (dir. Pedro Almodóvar, 1986. Click for a much larger view.]

The police commissioner (Eusebio Poncela) holds a Parker T-Ball Jotter. I’ve also noticed Parker T-Ball Jotters in Homicide, Populaire, and Shattered Glass.

The Parker T-Ball Jotter is my favorite ballpoint pen. Stop me before I notice again!

Other T-Ball Jotter posts
A 1963 ad : Another 1963 ad : A 1964 ad : A 1971 ad : My life in five pens : Thomas Merton, T-Ball Jotter user

Como dice Borges

Yes, as The New Republic says, Jorge Luis Borges hated soccer and its fan culture. But did Borges say or write these words?

El nacionalismo sólo permite afirmaciones y, toda doctrina que descarte la duda, la negación, es una forma de fanatismo y estupidez.

[Nationalism only allows for affirmations, and every doctrine that discards doubt, negation, is a form of fanaticism and stupidity.]

The New Republic piece on Borges and soccer includes the sentence in English, with a link to a source with the Spanish sentence. But TNR’s source gives no source for Borges’s words. Here’s a page that cites a 1994 issue of the periodical Tendencias. But look at what’s there:

[Google Books shows this periodical only in snippet view. But some searching and pasting makes the passage available.]

“Como dice (Jorge Luis) Borges”: as Borges says, followed by a statement not enclosed in quotation marks, and slightly different from the above: “En el nacionalismo sólo se permiten afirmaciones, y toda doctrina que descarte la duda, la negación, es una forma de fanatismo y de estupidez.” My translation: “As Borges says, in nationalism only affirmations are allowed, and any doctrine that discards doubt, negation, is a form of fanaticism and stupidity.”

And notice the guillemet (») at the end? Striking as this statement about nationalism may be, it’s a paraphrase of Borges’s attitude, not something Borges said or wrote. The more closely I look at the sentence, the more I suspect that perhaps only the first main clause is to be attributed to Borges: “As Borges says,” &c., and [let me add that] “any doctrine,” &c.

I finally found the source for this statement about nationalism by searching for “Quiero ser una persona internacional” [I want to be an international person]. The source is a 1994 interview with Mario Vargas Llosa. Here it is, in Spanish and in Google Translate’s English. The source for what Borges is said to have said is something I’d still like to discover.

More words for our times from this interview: “El nacionalismo es la negación de lo extranjero, y eso me parece una fuente de violencia.” [Nationalism is the negation of the foreign, and that seems to me a source of violence.]

Related reading
All OCA Borges posts (Pinboard)

[Nacionalismo, even in a paraphrase, seems to mean more than nationalism: in Borges: A Life (2004), Edward Williamson contrasts nacionalismo (“right-wing nationalism”) with Borges’s criollismo.]

Zippy Bumstead

[Zippy, July 1, 2018.]

Zippy as Dagwood Bumstead, Griffy as Mary Worth. Or is it Dagwood as Zippy, Mary as Griffy?

Related reading
All OCA Zippy posts (Pinboard)

“Here’s your problem”

[Daily cartoon, by Pia Guerra, The New Yorker, June 29, 2018.]

[I’ve reformatted the cartoon to remove a large gap between picture and caption.]

From the Saturday Stumper

A pair of clues from today’s Newsday Saturday Stumper, by Lester Ruff:

22-Across, five letters: “They often run about an hour.”

35-Across, four letters: “They run more than three hours for seniors.”

I especially like 22-Across. Even after getting the answer (the crosses let me know that it must be right), I was baffled. The dictionary was no help. I had to look at the answer again to understand.

Today’s puzzle — solvable! No spoilers: the answers are in the comments.

George Cameron (1947–2018)

George Cameron, singer, drummer, and original member of the Left Banke, died earlier this week at the age of seventy.

When it comes to the Left Banke, I am very late to the show. I started listening to the group just a few months ago, after seeing Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri and hearing the Four Tops version of “Walk Away Renée,” which made me remember the Rickie Lee Jones version, which made me think: I should really look into the Left Banke. I bought the group’s available LPs (two, reissued as CDs), downloaded a compilation (the two LPs and two singles, from iTunes), and discovered an extensive website about the group at archive.org.

Suffice to say that the Left Banke, though shortlived, was fairly brilliant: Beatlesque harmonies, psychedelic touches, and great (“baroque”) pop songs. Like the Beach Boys, the group had a musical mastermind at its center, the songwriter and keyboardist Michael Brown (d. 2015). And like Brian Wilson, Michael Brown had a musical father who brought considerable misery to his son’s life. The Beach Boys, in one form or another, have gone on and on. The Left Banke fell apart in the late 1960s — with brief reunion appearances in recent years, and with plans earlier this year for a reunion with Steve Martin Caro, the group’s long-absent lead singer.

Here’s George Cameron, who usually sang harmony, taking a rare lead: “Goodbye Holly” (Tom Feher), from The Left Banke Too (Smash, 1968).

[In the small-world department: our friend Seymour Barab played cello on the Left Banke’s second hit, “Pretty Ballerina.” I wish I could have asked him about that.]

“The donor class”

“I think that a lot of Democratic politics has been about trying to find the least offensive cause to the donor class to rally people around while stepping on the fewest toes”: Jeff Beals, Democratic candidate in a New York congressional primary race, as quoted in the most recent episode of This American Life, “It’s My Party and I’ll Try If I Want To.”

[See also Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.]