Ex Libris

We moved around a lot when I was a kid, people always asked if my Dad was in the army. No, he was a construction superintendent for S S Kresge, later to become Kmart. He was born in Winnipeg in 1914. The family was large and poor, a poverty that sat heavily on an unhappy family and was close to an obsession for all of them. Aunt Sonya's stories at 75 sounded like they had happened the day before and it was like that with Dad. Grandma was a strait-laced Irish lady, grandpa an illerate elevator operator at the train station. I remember visiting her in Los Angeles when I was thirteen or so. I'm named after her revered brother, who died young, and she sat me down and told me never to forget that I'm Irish (I'm 25% Irish). They say the Nazis are bad, but they're nothing compared to the British, who oppressed us for hundreds of years. Brash even at that age, I wasn't so stupid as to utter a word of opposition. The girls were to start in show business in order to meet wealthy men and find one to marry; the boys' path was education. The girls left home in their teens and became show girls (I've got pictures!). Uncle Wally got a PhD, but Dad was on the ten year plan for an engineering degree at the University of Manitoba. Grandpa beat the boys and Dad knocked him down once when he was starting in on Uncle Ed, said I'll kill you next time. So that was the end of life at home and up to the gold mines at 14, the Rio Grande Mine in northern Manitoba.

I always laugh when people deprecate Catholicism as mindless superstition, because I know better from direct experience as a product of four years of Catholic high school. I started out at Jesuit High in Dallas in 1961. Mr. Joubert was my home room, religion, and English teacher. A lot of French names - it was the New Orleans Province after all, not missionaries from Chicago (like my grade school, St. Luke's in Irving). So a tip of the hat to Mr. Vavasseur, my sophomore geometry teacher, a tall, skinny, kind and intelligent man who knew and valued his subject and also knew how to transmit intellectual excitement. He was an important milestone in my mathematical education, especially considering that geometry is where students first encounter the axiomatic method and proofs, the cornerstones of modern mathematics. Between proofs, Mr Vavasseur regaled us with stories of how geometry had been the canonical science for two thousand years, even people like Spinoza modeling their philosophical speculations on Euclid. He quite rightly mentioned Giovanni Girolamo Saccheri, S. J., who foreshadowed non-Euclidean geometry. He was hell on wheels when crossed though; I remember him thundering more than once, "I'll be in Room 214 after school, Jones, be there" (emphasis on the last two words).

My original calendar program was on the Casio fx-3600p calculator in 1980 or so - my first programming venue and exercised partly in spare moments when driving truck out on the route; a precursor mobile device you could say. My buddy Dave got me started. I might have scarred myself permanently though. The transition from math to software engineering is always tricky, considering that there are many commonalities, but just as important differences to snag the self-taught and perhaps obstinate and all-too-confident mathematician (perish the thought). The 3600 had this bizarre little macro language providing for a trade-off between memory and program size. You could have (say) fifty memory locations and 400 instructions or twenty locations and 600 instructions. They're really variables of course, but the memory locations were designated K0 through K19 or something.

Flying back to Pittsburgh with an old Elmore Leonard in hand (The Big Bounce, 1969) jogged some memories. Our man Jack Ryan, someone pulled his chain, the same phrase an upperclassman used on me the first day on campus in August 1969 and the first time I'd heard it. You're in the big leagues now, boy.

What a great English teacher the first semester and after a string of them in high school; the reading list as much as anything - he was a part-timer and probably wanted an excuse to read or reread some favorites. He had Swann's Way under his arm one day. For us it was Iris Murdoch (The Severed Head), Hard Times (Gradgrind!), and Middlemarch, the last my all-time favorite after many re-readings. I remarked in class one day that among the main characters in The Severed Head, almost every possible romantic combination had been consummated or at least entertained. He liked that and rejoined that two female characters were always touching each other, seemingly casually or mistakenly, he thought it was pretty funny. He was making the point with us one day that people can walk through their own lives as zombies without even noticing their remarkable surroundings, most appropriate in the immediate environment of Pitt with the amazing buildings. He said, consider the Civil War Museum, how many columns are there in front of it? Eight, I said (Math Department reporting). He was a little miffed, as if I'd interfered with his lesson.

Two works by Americans are canonical references for anyone who really wants to understand this monumental, cataclysmic event:

• Red Star over China, by Edgar Snow
• Fanshen, by William Hinton

Edgar Snow worked as a journalist in China as a young man and traveled to Yenan, the remote base of the Chinese Communists, shortly after the Long March brought them there in 1935. This was a period where little to nothing was known of Mao Tse-Tung and his associates or the Communist movement in China, extensive as it was. There had been a number of Soviet areas in south China governing millions of people in the early thirties - it was because of their encirclement by the Chiang Kai-shek forces of the Kuomintang (KMT) in the fifth anti-Communist extermination campaign that the legendary Long March was necessary to escape the old bases and relocate in the northwest at Yenan in Shaanxi. Snow interviewed Mao and other top leaders fresh from this epic campaign; till that point and long after, his account was the only one known in the West. He somehow got Mao to open up about his own background, something almost irregular among these self-effacing revolutionaries.

I still remember the day in seventh grade when, alone in the classroom, I found the geometry problems section in the appendix of one of our books and started to work them out, tentatively at first, but increasingly confidently as they started falling into place. Joyfully too -- bitten by the bug and still infected after all these years. The problem notebooks become buried under files with more pressing business, always to be brought back to the top after a time to receive another solution.

The preoccupation can become an ongoing part of your psyche. Ramanujan used to say that a Hindu goddess came to him in dreams with his formulas and he would write them down first thing in the morning. Poincaré has a story (as I remember it) that he had hit a stone wall on a problem after considerable application. He decided he needed a break and took a trip to the country by bus. When disembarking, as his foot rose from the last step and before it fell on the ground, the solution came to him. I was waiting for a friend at a bar once and drew a diagram of a geometry problem I'd been working on unsuccessfully on a napkin, not even applying myself, just doodling absent-mindedly, when the solution revealed itself.

This unusual book may shock you, will make you laugh, and may break your heart – but you will never forget it

So says the front of my copy of The Catcher in the Rye (24th printing of the Signet paperback, December 1962), a wrenching picture of Holden in flight on the cover. J. D. Salinger, Rest in Peace, dead at 91 on January 27, 2010. Like my friend Dan says, a moment of note for boys of a certain age.

The Catcher in the Rye was my first hint that a book can hit the mark, a gentle introduction to the power of literature at the age of fifteen.

Oddly enough, I wouldn't include most science fiction of my acquaintance in this category. Take that wonderful Philip K. Dick story where an itinerant handyman from around 1900 is transported together with horse and wagon to far in the future and interferes in major ways with the society of that time due to his preternatural mechanical ability and instinctive understanding of their advanced technology. It's a trick premise, but once granted, the changed physical and social environment depicted is well within reach. The people and their motivations, the political machinations, and so on -- all are similar to what you'd find in Jane Austen, given the different context.

Taking yourself too seriously is an occupational hazard of teaching. That's not surprising -- teachers have near absolute authority in the classroom, often with little oversight or supervision, especially at the higher levels; and an effective classroom presence requires projecting confidence, knowledge, and authority. The situation lends itself to dramatic and comic possibilities. Many good academic novels are written by professors, English professors in particular, and abound in allusion. Jane Austen specialist Morris Zapp in David Lodge's Changing Places, for example, names his children Elizabeth and Darcy. I missed that one until Lodge hit me over the head, but then was ready for Janet Dempster, heroine of George Eliot's Janet's Repentance. One uptight genius in the story talks himself out of a promotion by admitting he's never read Hamlet, because he thought it bought him some points at a dinner party.

Patrick Hunter S.J. introduced me to the Russians one day in 1962 by way of a little Chekhov story called Gooseberries. If you can even call it a story, direct and artless as it was. There was little plot and less drama, a first person story within a story about a retired government clerk who had realized his fondest lifelong dream of retiring in the country, only to be consumed by an empty all-consuming greed and without the spiritual resources to recognize or even admit to himself his utter failure. "You must never forget there are people in pain", summed up the narrator as I remember it, "We all need someone in the wall to knock on occasion to remind us." Mr. Hunter was a sly one, my religion and home room as well as English teacher. Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam -- he lived it (still does, God willing).