Adventures in the Ocean, Adventures in OCR

 I’ve lamented previously on these pages the near anonymity of Kenneth Roberts, once a best-selling American author and winner of a special Pulitzer Prize for his historical fiction. It’s not just that people who read Stieg Larsson or Patricia Cornwell don’t know Roberts. It’s that it appears the people who read Cather and Fitzgerald and Updike don’t know of him anymore, either.

Earlier this month, I read Roberts’s The Lively Lady. I didn’t know until I started reading that it was a part of his Nason family series, but it turns out that it is (at least!) the third in a series beginning with one of my favorite books of twentieth-century American fiction: Arundel. The series – Arundel, Rabble at Arms, and The Lively Lady – tells stories about the Nasons and other people from the Maine town of Arundel (pronounced a-RUN-del at the time, now pronounced ken-ne-BUNK-port), and all place them in American wars (as far as I know: maybe Roberts wrote other books about the Nasons of Arundel that I don’t know about). Lively Lady finds Richard Nason outfitting a privateer and going after the British in the War of 1812. It felt so much like Patrick O’Brian at times that I found myself subliminally rooting for the British before remembering: “Hey! They pressed our men from our ships!”

I enjoyed the story, but I did not enjoy the frequent typos from the weak optical-character-recognition scan. It seems that no one at Amazon reads Kenneth Roberts, either: they just scanned the book, left the file as is without any editing, and sold it for $9.49. My purchase alone probably paid for all the labor and overhead involved in the production of the faulty file. To give you an idea of the problems, I offer you a quiz. Match each word or phrase, as it appears in the Kindle version of The Lively Lady, with its definition or description. It helps a lot to think that the OCR is reading thick vertical lines correctly but tripping up on the thinner curves that join the verticals. Here are 10 “words” as they appear in the text:

1. fives
2. tinned
3. bum
4. bam
5. dumb
6. comers
7. yam
8. half fight
9. cudass
10. stem

And here are 10 definitions or descriptions for the words that Roberts actually wrote:

a. A building in which to house animals and to store seeds, fodder, and tools
b. A fighting blade
c. A tale; a strand of wool or other fiber
d. Changed the direction in which one is facing
e. The aft end of a ship
f. The celestial condition at mid-dawn or mid-dusk
g. The parts of the eyes out of which one looks with suspicion
h. What a privateer might do to a captured ship
i. What people spend in their hometowns
j. What the yokel did to the cliffs

OK, don’t scroll down farther until you’ve matched them all and are ready for the answers.


Answers below.


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Are you peeking before you should?


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And now:


The Answers

1-i: fives = lives
2-d: tinned = turned
3-h: bum = burn
4-a: bam = barn
5-j: dumb = clumb (i.e. climbed)
6-g: comers = corners
7-c: yam = yarn
8-f: half fight = half light
9-b: cudass = cutlass (Yes, cudass isn’t even a word.)
10-e: stem = stern

Parts of Parts of Aquinas about Parts and Types of Parts

Thomas Aquinas gets the largest number of pages in the Britannica Great Books set. Only he and Shakespeare get two volumes, and the Domenican Ox’s volumes are quite a bit larger than the Bard’s. (Thanks to Aquinas, I now know that calling Shakespeare “the Bard” is a figure of speech known as antonomasia. Antonomastically, Aristotle is “the Philosopher” for Aquinas, and Irene Adler is “the Woman” for Sherlock Holmes.) Still, the whole of Aquinas’s monumental Summa Theologica doesn’t quite fit in all those pages. What another Adler – Mortimer, the driving force behind the Britannica collection – left out of the Britannica set were a supplement that may not have been written by Aquinas himself and parts of the Second Part of the Second Part. Yes, that is Aquinas’s own designation for his very medieval organizational scheme: the Summa as a whole is in three parts, and the second part itself has two parts.

For 2020 and 2021, I assigned myself to read large portions of the part excised from the Britannica set, and it has become clear to me why, if something had to be left out, it was these passages. The bulk of II-II (as A. abbreviates it) focuses on the four cardinal virtues: prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance. I fell in love with Aquinas several years ago primarily because of his clear, balanced mode of presentation, but also because in laying out Christian theology he actually gives me good, practical advice on how to live in a manner befitting a Christian. And I had hoped that these pages on the virtues would run over with wholesome instruction.

But, alas, St. Thomas is more interested here in analyzing and categorizing the virtues than in exhorting his readers to embody them. His primary method of analysis is to divide each virtue into . . . wait for it . . . parts. He even tells us that there are three different kinds of parts, so each cardinal virtue gets divided three ways. Then he asks such questions as whether martyrdom is a part of charity. Well, the answer goes, all virtues come from charity, but martyrdom is primarily a part of fortitude because it involves facing evil for the sake of a higher good.

Still, Aquinas made many interesting and useful points in the passages I read this year (on fortitude and temperance). Here’s a sample:

• Fear is sometimes quite rational.

• One can be humble proudly.

• All virtue in anyone whatsoever comes by the grace of God. (Not all grace is sanctifying grace.)

• "Insensibility," the denial of pleasures themselves, is a sin because pleasure in necessary things is part of the natural order.

• There is a good pride (happiness in the gifts of God) and a bad pride (essentially, the belief that oneself is more deserving of God than others).

• Pride is even more principal than the capital (i.e. “deadly”) sins, since they all flow from pride. The pride in the list of seven capital sins is actually “vainglory”: the desire for outward show of excellence and recognition of one’s special status.

• Knowledge of the truth is good in itself, but the virtue of studiousness can become the vice of curiosity when done to take pride in the acquired knowledge, to discover faults in others for the pleasure of knowing them, etc.

Given the subject, I’ll be medieval and leave that list at a wholesome, round seven points. May you use them to live more virtuously today!