Alas, after two days I gave up. I could not, from Switzerland, produce Kenner, who resides in Baltimore.
But providence arranged it that at the high moment of my distress two of my sisters arrived for a fortnight's skiing and brought with them nephew Jay Buckley—who is a computer expert. He pays me what he calls "office calls" after skiing, every couple of days, as I accumulate fresh desires I know not how to satisfy. Now, having been taught empirically by Jay, I can turn back to Hugh's instructions and read them like a road map. Some people write with total lucidity, but implicitly rely, for an understanding of what they say, on a level of spatial imagery some people just don't have. It is precisely this lack on my part that caused my essay on celestial navigation, first published in my book Airborne , to be such an unusual success: because it presupposes nothing at all. I am going to repay Hugh's courtesy, before I am through, by writing a fresh set of instructions on operating the computer, entitled: "Instructions for a Mechanical Simpleton. An Aprioristic Guide to the Use of the Word Processor." Practically the whole of it will be devoted to teaching the layman how to cause to be typed by the Diablo Printer, from the disk drive, as directed by the computer, the words that appear above between quotation marks.
I write to Mr. Clement at the Heath Company and tell him that if he should let H. Kenner slip through his fingers, I'd sell my stock in Heath, if I had any stock in Heath.
The fight over who will be the next director of the National Endowment for the Humanities rages. Two candidates are close to the wire, a third is held in reserve. The last is Ronald Berman, who served as chairman with distinction under Nixon and Ford. The other two are William Bennett, of the National Humanities Center in North Carolina, and Mel Bradford of the University of Dallas. It is fair, but only roughly so, to say that the hard conservatives are backing Bradford, the neos, Bennett. I say it is only roughly fair, because some enthusiasm for Bradford is dissipated by speculation that he would fail confirmation by the Senate, the consequence of certain animadversions he has made in the past about Abraham Lincoln—none objectionable as historical speculation, but one or two the kind of thing you can mount mountainous demagogic campaigns on.
One month ago, in San Francisco en route to the passenger ship Viking Sky , on which I was voyaging and lecturing, I had a call from an assistant to the President with whom I have from time to time dealt, and she told me that Bradford was "out" and asked, in my opinion, were Bennett's credentials as a conservative authentic? I said that they were, and at the time thought the matter of the NEH disposed of.
Why, why do they drag these things out so? In any event, it is all very much alive, and now Irving Kristol writes to denounce an editorial in National Review that falsely, in his opinion, elaborates the qualifications of Bradford. "Last night I read my latest issue of National Review , with its editorial on the NEH, and I must tell you that it depressed me enormously. I keep saying that the clear distinction that was once visible between 'neoconservatives' and 'old conservatives' is now so blurred as to be meaningless, but every now and then National Review will remind me that a gap still exists. The sad truth is that too many 'old conservatives' are so far distanced from the academic-intellectual world that they find themselves saying things, and doing things, that make the position of all conservatives in this world that much more difficult. Your editorial was a case in point."
Kristol proceeded to reject, at considerable length, the factual representations we had made; indeed, he did so so categorically that I simply assumed him to be correct, wrote him in that vein, and chose to disregard the general complaints, here quoted, about the difference between the new and old conservatives. I did,
But providence arranged it that at the high moment of my distress two of my sisters arrived for a fortnight's skiing and brought with them nephew Jay Buckley—who is a computer expert. He pays me what he calls "office calls" after skiing, every couple of days, as I accumulate fresh desires I know not how to satisfy. Now, having been taught empirically by Jay, I can turn back to Hugh's instructions and read them like a road map. Some people write with total lucidity, but implicitly rely, for an understanding of what they say, on a level of spatial imagery some people just don't have. It is precisely this lack on my part that caused my essay on celestial navigation, first published in my book Airborne , to be such an unusual success: because it presupposes nothing at all. I am going to repay Hugh's courtesy, before I am through, by writing a fresh set of instructions on operating the computer, entitled: "Instructions for a Mechanical Simpleton. An Aprioristic Guide to the Use of the Word Processor." Practically the whole of it will be devoted to teaching the layman how to cause to be typed by the Diablo Printer, from the disk drive, as directed by the computer, the words that appear above between quotation marks.
I write to Mr. Clement at the Heath Company and tell him that if he should let H. Kenner slip through his fingers, I'd sell my stock in Heath, if I had any stock in Heath.
The fight over who will be the next director of the National Endowment for the Humanities rages. Two candidates are close to the wire, a third is held in reserve. The last is Ronald Berman, who served as chairman with distinction under Nixon and Ford. The other two are William Bennett, of the National Humanities Center in North Carolina, and Mel Bradford of the University of Dallas. It is fair, but only roughly so, to say that the hard conservatives are backing Bradford, the neos, Bennett. I say it is only roughly fair, because some enthusiasm for Bradford is dissipated by speculation that he would fail confirmation by the Senate, the consequence of certain animadversions he has made in the past about Abraham Lincoln—none objectionable as historical speculation, but one or two the kind of thing you can mount mountainous demagogic campaigns on.
One month ago, in San Francisco en route to the passenger ship Viking Sky , on which I was voyaging and lecturing, I had a call from an assistant to the President with whom I have from time to time dealt, and she told me that Bradford was "out" and asked, in my opinion, were Bennett's credentials as a conservative authentic? I said that they were, and at the time thought the matter of the NEH disposed of.
Why, why do they drag these things out so? In any event, it is all very much alive, and now Irving Kristol writes to denounce an editorial in National Review that falsely, in his opinion, elaborates the qualifications of Bradford. "Last night I read my latest issue of National Review , with its editorial on the NEH, and I must tell you that it depressed me enormously. I keep saying that the clear distinction that was once visible between 'neoconservatives' and 'old conservatives' is now so blurred as to be meaningless, but every now and then National Review will remind me that a gap still exists. The sad truth is that too many 'old conservatives' are so far distanced from the academic-intellectual world that they find themselves saying things, and doing things, that make the position of all conservatives in this world that much more difficult. Your editorial was a case in point."
Kristol proceeded to reject, at considerable length, the factual representations we had made; indeed, he did so so categorically that I simply assumed him to be correct, wrote him in that vein, and chose to disregard the general complaints, here quoted, about the difference between the new and old conservatives. I did,
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