Andrew Patner's thoughts (as a graduate of the University of Chicago himself) on the late Karl Weintraub. Also, for anyone in the Chicagoland area, WFMT -- specifically Andrew Patner, I am told -- may (or may not) be broadcasting a recent recording they made of members of the Rockefeller Chapel choir (myself included) singing Hebrew chant this past Sunday. It should be appearing in a segment on Obadiah the Proselyte.

Anyhow, as Patner writes on Weintraub:

Teacher of Culture and Cultural Historian

"It is safer," the political philosopher Leo Strauss wrote in 1965, "to try to understand the low in the light of the high than the high in the light of the low. In doing the latter one necessarily distorts the high, whereas in doing the former one does not deprive the low of the freedom to reveal itself fully as what it is."

I never had the chance to discuss this observation with the late Karl Joachim Weintraub, the legendary teacher of the Western Civilization course at The University of Chicago who died last month at 79 after a prolonged struggle with a brain tumor. But it's my guess that he would have concurred with Strauss's prescription. Or rather he would have concurred with it after mulling it over, picking it apart a bit, and asking a number of perceptive and even unexpected questions about it.

When, for a complex number of reasons, younger faculty members lost interest in teaching his beloved course, Mr. Weintraub uncharacteristically became something of a fighter. Recalling his time as a hidden child and adolescent, he told several people, "I had enough of life without civilization." Illness took him from his own teaching soon after. Those who had the privilege of knowing him or studying with him, and those who did not, might commemorate him by looking into the works of Burckhardt and Huizinga he loved (the latter's The Autumn of the Middle Ages was translated by Weintraub's former student Rodney J. Payton along with Ulrich Mammitzsch and published by the U of C Press), paying a visit to the extraordinary Rembrandt show at The Art Institute of Chicago – which he served as a trustee -- and the Dutch humanism that it embodies and that played such an important role in shaping and literally in saving Jock Weintraub's life, and in attending a service in his memory to be held on Friday April 30 at Rockefeller Memorial Chapel. His life was one filled with the search for understanding and his death is surely the end of an era.

(text lifted from Mr. Patner's thoughts as posted on WFMT.)

Will: As may be painfully obvious, I can't think of anything interesting to blog about today. I'm sure somebody else will post something soon...

Houseguest here to do her duty!

Today your sommelier recommends St. Supéry sauvignon blanc to begin. The pâté and cheese tray will be out shortly. Meanwhile, light up a flavored smoke -- there are still states where it's legal to do so indoors! -- and kick back with Venturpreneur's first thoughts on the Google IPO. There's nothing like the free market on a fine spring evening.

Or if you'd prefer to make yourself wince (and capitalism doesn't do it for you), ponder the truly frightening jawline on the Alien Fish. Doesn't he just make you crave sushi?

Amber Taylor notes a too-cute-by-half response card used for a friend of a friend's wedding. This isn't the reason Miss Manners abhors the response card, but I'm sure if she knew about it, she would add it to the list.

[Why does Miss Manners hate the card?

"[S]uch modern crutches as the response card and the telephone number are pathetic attempts to make it easier on guests who consider it too much trouble to be polite to their hosts" (6/30/93)

"It's not just that any response cards are not-quite-nice because decent people of course already know (yes? yes?) that they must always reply to invitations. The sad fact is that for indecent people, cards are not going to help. Just as many unmailed response cards are reported as other unanswered invitations, so you might as well save the expense and trouble of enclosing them." (7/9/92)

"Not only does Miss Manners abhor 'response cards,' but those who use them report that they aren't working anyway. Delinquent guests are probably picking off the stamps to put on their bills, presuming they even recognize that they are still expected to pay their bills nowadays. As 'R.s.v.p.' (upper- and lower-case) is no longer eye-catching, Miss Manners suggests the formal alternative, 'The favour of a reply is requested.'"(10/17/93)]

Huh. I suppose it should come as no more surprise than Casablanca did to Matthew Yglesias, but Heart of Darkness is (thus far) a pretty good book:

He was the only man of us who still 'followed the sea.' The worst that could be said of him was that he did not represent his class. He was a seaman, but he was a wanderer too, while most seamen lead, if one may so express it, a sedentary life. Their minds are of the stay-at-home order, and their home is always with them -- the ship; and so is their coutnry -- the sea.

Scavhunt has now been restored to its rightful place in the Google hierarchy. Many thanks to Jess, Matt Reece, Maureen Craig, deleuzean potato, and Kathleen Moriarty, and absolutely none to PG.

Scavhunt.

As may be painfully obvious, I can't think of anything interesting to blog about today. I'm sure somebody else will post something soon, but since I haven't succeeded in killing enough time yet to avoid cleaning my room, and since I don't currently have any interesting email to respond to:
Jeremy Blachman wonders why so many people go to law school despite how many of them are unhappy. Query whether this is really a problem unique to law school, or just the result of the fact that most people are sad sacks.

Brock Sides joins me in my love of the hat. [Incidentally thanks to the Crescat reader who recovered my poor hat as it was whipping windily across the quads.]

Heidi Bond contradicts Brian Leiter on the question of Michigan Law teaching, and admonishes "don't extrapolate from one datapoint" (In interesting counterpoint to this recent Crooked Timber post in defense of generalizing from a single case).

Joshua at Foolippic has compiled his own top 100 list. It's obviously inferior to Crescat's list, of course, but his excuse for not putting Ada on the list is almost valid.

GMail just offered me two free invitations to offer to people who want accounts. The temptation to spend them on myself, grabbing a few extra names, is quite great, although I suspect it may violate some term of the service contract I didn't read. But since near as I can tell the invitation is "used up" whether accepted or not, I feel like I should make sure I won't be extending invitations to anybody who won't appreciate them.

Anyway, the service really seems to work quite well, and once it becomes widely available, I can't think of any reason (other than name availability) to create a freemail account with anybody else.

PG at De Novo has witnessed her first oral argument. One note-- she notes that Ted Olson was wearing tails, and while near as I can tell this isn't a privilege reserved to the Solicitor General, Lincoln Caplan's The Tenth Justice implies that the SG is one of the few people to regularly exercise it. I suspect only extremely experienced S.C. advocates can do so without seeming presumptuous.

UPDATE: A knowledgeable reader mails clarification:

technically, what the SG wears is not "tails" but a "cutaway." These days, only government lawyers wear the cutaway -- one of the more interesting sidelights of Nixon v. United States was the decision Charles Alan Wright, Nixon's lawyer, went through about whether to wear the cutaway, thus asserting Nixon's official status. He went with the business suit in the end.

The solicitor general actually wears a morning coat, not tails, which are evening wear. The two are distinct though obviously more similar to each other than to any item of contemporary clothing. Apart from the solicitor general at the S.C., I don't believe that morning coats are worn anywhere except at weddings (by the men in the wedding party) and maybe at some diplomatic functions.

If I'm not particularly interested, I can read a book -- history, social science, even hard sciences -- in about half an hour, and effeciently bookmark the few things I might want to take note of. Granted, I don't understand much of what passed me by, but it seems the best use of time, since I didn't really want to be reading that book I needed to read in the first place.

But the better I like a book, the slower I go. It's taken me about a week to finish a novella of barely over a hundred pages, Cees Nooteboom's The Following Story. Somehow, for some reason I don't quite understand, I have a stronger willpower when it comes to rationing good books than I do with many other things (watering the plants in my windowsill, to give an utterly mundane example I don't mind saying publicly). Though it's not willpower, not working here at least. It's a strong desire not to see the end. Fitting for a book in which time runs every which way.

Begin? That was not the right word, and it is important now to choose the right words; you know that better than I do. He did not begin; he ended. How can I put it? His story was a story with a beginning and an end, but at the same time it was the end of a story we had already heard a lot of ---. (102)

Evening in my memory, evening in Lisbon. The lamps in the city had been lit, my eyes were like a bird flying above the streets. It had grown cool, up there; I saw the dark shadows of lovers, statutes locked in embrace, lazily moving double-people. Ignis mutat res*, I muttered, but my matter was not to be changed by any fire. I had already changed. Around me there was burning and melting, other two-headed creatures came to life, but I had long since lost my other, so red-haired, head, the female half of me had broken off. I had become a sort of cinder, a residue. My reason for being here, on this perhaps or not perhaps sought-after journey, could well be a pilgrimage back to those days, and if so, I, like a medieval pilgrim, would have to visit all the sites of my brief holy life, all the stations where the past had a face. (54)
* Fire changes matter.

Can you keep track of my tenses? They are all past tenses, my thoughts were wondering; do excuse me. Here I am, back again, the imperfect reflecting on the past, simple past versus pluperfect. My present tense was a slip; it applied only to now, to you, although you are nameless. After all, we are both present here, still. (57)

What was it that I always told my class? Purely as form Tacitus' Histories are annalistic (yes, you oaf, that means in the form of annals and not what you think), but he frequently interrupts his narrative in order to stick with a strict order of events. (36)

It is a beautiful story -- spare language, divergences to an impossible series of worlds, and a classics teacher who is only slightly better a lover than the butler in Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day. I was, as I said, sad to reach the end. It's only in books that I'm good with actually acknowleding that the end is near. The rest of the time, I may pretend to know what's soon to happen, but no, I don't realize it. Stuck in my head a lot recently has been "Old Friends" from Sondheim's "Merrily We Row Along." With much gratitude to someone I know from back before one end (moving from home to Chicago) who was there lend me this book, wisely suspecting I'd like it.

Hey, old friend, Are you okay, old friend? What do you say, old friend, Are we or are we unique? Time goes by, Everything else keeps changing. You and I, We get continued next week.

Most friends fade
Or they don't make the grade.
New one's are quickly made
And in a pinch, sure, they'll do.
But us, old friend,
What's to discuss, old friend?
Here's to us - who's like us?
Damn few!
. . .
Hey, old friends,
How do we stay old friends?
Who is to say, old friends,
How an old friendship survives?
One day chums
Having a laugh a minute,
One day comes
And they're a part of your lives.

New friends pour
Through the revolving door -
Maybe there's one that's more.
If you find one, that'll do.
But us, old friends,
What's to discuss, old friends?
Here's to us!
Who's like us?