not out

B. and I have both been ill this week. Fear of coughing, fear of being contagious, and general physical disinclination to do anything account for our absence from tonight's performance of a local production of Noises Off which we'd been looking forward to seeing. We've seen it before, but it's always good.

It also means I'm intending to miss two performances I was planning to see this weekend. After that, nothing till Thursday and I should be better by then.

We did at least manage to struggle up and out to redeem my car from the body shop which nicely fixed the bumper over the past week, during which for both the above reasons and a generally light schedule this week I hardly went anywhere, so I didn't even need a rental car, just borrowing B's for a couple of necessary errands. Like picking up my medication.

Other than that, just following the news with the usual amount of incredulity. The delta smelt and the LA fires is just another example of a regular practice: he picks up a mistaken impression of something from somewhere, probably by misunderstanding or not paying close attention, and from then on for him it's an immutable fact, untouchable by any corrections. Ever encounter that particular pathology elsewhere?

Oscar the grouch

Time for my annual confession of how few Academy-Award nominated movies I've seen.

Aside from the documentary short The Only Girl in the Orchestra, which I actually liked - whoops, how'd that get on here? - only two.

Dune Part Two - dull, duller, dulles.

A Complete Unknown - When Meryl Streep played Florence Foster Jenkins in a movie, despite what sounded like a noble effort she did not come anywhere near capturing the sheer wretchedness of the original's singing. Similarly here. Chalamet has Dylan's nasal tone down pat, but it's actually pleasant to listen to him sing, whereas the original is agonizing. (I had to forbid my college roommate from playing his Dylan records when I was in the apartment. All our other musical tastes were completely sympatico.) Some people seem puzzled by this movie's point. To me, it depicts Dylan as a man determined to do his own thing and not get enlisted in anybody else's causes.

I have little interest in seeing anything else on the list.

better things to do

We did not watch the inauguration. At that moment, we were in fact engaged in a useful activity: turning in my car at the auto body shop for some necessary work. (The front bumper cover had been mangled by some parking space stoppers and a particularly vicious dip.) That was the time they'd offered for check-in, so we were there. B. was with me to drive me home.

I looked at my posting archives and found that during the creature's previous inaugural, we'd also been engaged in a much more useful activity: we were at the veterinarian's, taking Maia in for her annual checkup.

pair of concerts

To Kohl Mansion last Sunday for the Reverón Piano Trio, named for a painter from their native land, Venezuela. Years ago I heard another Latin American chamber ensemble, the Dalí String Quartet, also named after a painter and who also filled half their concert with a Latin American potpourri. The difference was, the Dalí were delightfully wild and crazy guys in their Latin half, but their excursion into standard repertoire, by Mozart, was rather dull and unconvincing.

The Reverón were far more balanced. Their Latin half was taken soberly, though it included a lively chunk of Astor Piazzolla and a piece by Ricardo Lorenz in which the cello lengthily imitates the buzz of a noisy electric ceiling fan. Also in that half, a little waltz by the 19C piano virtuoso Teresa Carreño which sounded like circus music. That's because a lot of Latin American salon music of that era was transcribed for circus organs and that became the associated style. Here, have a listen to "Over the Waves" by Juventino Rosas, which is the piece I most have in mind in making that association. The main theme starts 30 seconds in; tell me you don't recognize it.

But the other half of the Reverón concert was anything but dull or unconvincing. For one thing, it wasn't a standard repertoire piece but the D-minor Trio of Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel, Felix's sister. This was the best performance of it I've heard, and it ought to be standard repertoire after this. Wonderfully clear, even compelling, full of individual character.

Anyway, I wrote a review saying all of that.

To Davies on Thursday for the San Francisco Symphony, which may be the last time I get to hear them for a while if the musicians go on strike when their contract extension expires next week. The Symphony Chorus appeared this week, having already gone through their own strike last fall, and were greeted by huge applause by the audience, and even bigger applause greeted the announcement on the supertitles screen that an anonymous donor has given $4 million to endow the Chorus.

What were they singing? Why, Carmina Burana. Led by guest conductor David Robertson, this was a pretty dull run-through if you've heard Carmina as often as I have. Heavy, trudging. Of the soloists, the soprano was OK, but the baritone, though deep-voiced enough, had nowhere near enough power to carry off the part. His drunken abbot was pathetic. The tenor, unusually, appeared on stage only to sing his one solo, the lament of the roasted swan, and then slogged slowly off again, perhaps sad because his character was dead but more likely because he'd been merely adequate in singing about it.

The Chorus was good, though, and even better was the strong and pure sound of the SF Girls Chorus in the children's role, singing (in Latin) words more hair-raising than any children should be approaching, but that's a perennial problem with this work.

Also on the program, yet another newly commissioned piano concerto, this one by John Adams. I liked it better than his clotted and noisy previous piano concerto. This one was light and shining, more like typical Adams. Titled After the Fall, it consists largely of falling phrases, get it?, first provided by soloist Vikingur Ólafsson as the strings shimmer in the background, then by the strings as Ólafsson shimmers in the background. Towards the end the piece is attacked by a lemming-like horde of copies of a quotation from a Bach prelude, which takes over without making the music sound much like Bach. Overall it was OK, though it would probably have gone better with a perkier conductor.

Oh yes, and an opener of Ives's The Unanswered Question, a piece too short and quiet, if dissonant, to contribute to a judgement of the evening.

fire in the hole

The terrible LA fires began in dry brush, which is a characteristic landscape on the edge of LA.

Now, the Silicon Valley area, where I live in Northern California, has a fire in a characteristic Silicon Valley landscape.

It's in a warehouse full of lithium batteries.

It broke out last night, and it can't be extinguished. It'll just have to burn itself out. Fortunately it seems to be contained within the warehouse. But the smoke and fumes are a terrible thing.

It's in a town called Moss Landing on Monterey Bay. Moss Landing is a very small town, which is fortunate as it had to be evacuated, and the area immediately around it is pretty empty.

It's about 50 miles from here, which I hope is far enough. All the same, I would avoid its entire vicinity for a while just to protect one's lungs: Castroville, Marina, Salinas, Watsonville ...

not a fan, I guess

David Lynch died. Looking over his list of films, I find I've seen three of them.

Mulholland Drive I found very weird, in a good way. It was captivating and I've even rewatched it. That's one good one on the list. If you find the plot confusing, it can be completely (well, mostly) cleared up in one sentence, a rare feat.

The Straight Story just annoyed me. When we were on motor home trips in my childhood, whenever we got to a campground, my father would set us up and then go off and find some other dad to have a long chat. The invariability of this became something of a family joke. My mother would sarcastically refer to it as Life Story Time, because those were what the guys mostly swapped. She liked The Straight Story. I said, "Mom, it's nothing but a guy driving across the country having Life Story Time!"

The Elephant Man I don't even remember. Probably drowned out by memories of The Tall Guy.

I never saw Twin Peaks. By the time I heard of it, descriptions made clear it had already sunk so far into Lynchian depths that it would be impossible to follow without having seen the earlier episodes, and it those days there were no streaming services to catch up on it with. But by the time it came out on DVD or VCR or whatever they had then, there were other things to watch that had come along in its wake and I never made the time.

in phosphors

I got an e-mail announcement for a recital by violinist Stella Chen, and just below the headline and the date and time, above the writeup, appeared this quote:

"The outstanding characteristic of her performance was her easy and sure command of the music."—San Francisco Classical Voice

I think I wrote that, I thought. I did write that.

Not the first time I've been quoted this way, but this is why concert promoters are so nice to reviewers; they're hoping for nuggets like that. My honor lies in just writing what I think, and letting the nuggets fall by themselves.

David Lodge

The British writer known for his comic novels died a couple weeks ago - I only just stumbled across the news - a month before his 90th birthday.

It was about 1982, I was in grad school, and one day walking through the portion of the university library stacks devoted to modern British literature, my eye was caught by the title of a novel on the shelf. The British Museum Is Falling Down. Intrigued, I took it down and found a very funny book about a hapless grad student in English, studying books at the British Museum, fretting about his inability to complete his thesis and about the rising number of children he and his wife are having, because they're good Catholics relying on the Rhythm Method.

It was amusing enough, full also of sly references to other modern lit, including passages of comic pastiche, that I took note of the author's name - David Lodge - and looked for more of his novels. The next one I found was his best-known, Changing Places, in which two professors of English exchange positions for a term: one from a thinly-disguised University of Birmingham in England, where Lodge himself taught, and one from an equally thinly-disguised University of California at Berkeley, where Lodge had spent a year and which was my own undergraduate school. The level of humor, subtle but dorky, is shown by the fictionalized Berkeley's English Department being located in a building called Dealer Hall. So what, unless you know that the real Berkeley's English Department is in Wheeler Hall.

I've kept reading Lodge's novels, most of which are actually more serious than those two, because I liked his style and offbeat approach, though I drew the line at the one about Henry James. It was more than obvious that Lodge drew most of his material from his own life, though he used it creatively. The problems of literary study, academic politics, and Catholic hangups about sex were his continuing themes, although gradually as he aged his contemporary novels began being less about sex and more about the plague of Lodge's own later years, deafness. None of these, except to a small extent literary study, have any personal resonance for me: what I liked was the way Lodge wrote about them.

Much of his nonfiction is academic and technical, but he did write some books for the general reader. I particularly liked The Art of Fiction, a collection of newspaper columns in a series exploring aspects of fiction-writing from Lodge's combined practitioner's and critic's viewpoint, with the aim of gently introducing technical concepts such as unreliable narrators and aporia, each column starting with a brief excerpt from a different novelist. A more miscellaneous collection called The Practice of Writing, about his experiences doing it, reveals that he'd wanted to call that first novel I'd read The British Museum Had Lost Its Charm, but he couldn't get permission to quote the Gershwin lyric. I wonder if the book would still have caught my eye as it did if he'd succeeded in using the other title. Without that piece of serendipity, I would probably never have found what became for me a favorite author.

independence emerging through the haze

One on my reading list reports that his wife sent their 6-year-old daughter on an errand to the local shop, about 2 minutes' walk away on a quiet street.

That's a welcome bucking of today's cocooning culture where, if reports can be believed, children are to be so protected from danger that they aren't allowed to develop any independence sometimes even after they're legal adults.

As someone who's never had children, I may have no eggs in this basket, but I am a citizen of a society where I like to be surrounded by competent and experienced people, and I strongly believe that the way to get these people is to start training them in these skills at an early age. The purpose of having a child is to create a functioning adult, and the subject has to learn those functions while still a child.

I can also testify from memory how thrilling, exciting, and morale-boosting it is for a child to be granted responsibility for something. Little things, things that mean nothing to an adult. I must have been 8 or 10 the day my father had to push a stalled car into the driveway. My mother wasn't around so he posted me at the steering wheel. That was exciting.

And when I was of age for it, he taught me to drive - with a manual transmission, a skill I've often been grateful to have. And my mother taught me to cook - a skill I make daily use of.

There were no nearby shops where we lived when I was 6 - we were in a newly-built housing development surrounded by orchards (mostly apricot) on all sides, the only outside access a mile's drive on a bumpy agricultural road with perilous irrigation ditches on both sides - but our development did have a school, 0.4 miles from our house (I just measured it on Google Maps), and I walked there. There was a traffic light, but traffic was not heavy.

The next year we moved out to the countryside. School was a hilly 1.4 miles away. I tried taking the school bus, but mostly I bicycled. On my own I bicycled all around the area, up to 15 miles away. My parents let me do it because even at that age my map-reading skills were exceptional, and I would always be home by dinnertime. (No mobile phones in those days either, don't forget.)

Going off to university at 18 was an awesome thing to do, in my mind, but by then I was well-prepared to do it, both academically and in terms of managing everyday living. Just not socially.

beyond The Last Dangerous Visions

Of the over 100 stories that Harlan Ellison collected for The Last Dangerous Visions, the anthology he keep announcing but never publishing for some 45 years until his death in 2018, over 40 were at some point withdrawn by their authors (or their estates) and published elsewhere.

When a book with that title finally appeared last year, edited (though not by name) by J. Michael Straczynski, it included some 17 of the remaining 50-plus stories. (In a couple cases it's not clear if the story published is the same as the one Harlan had been listing.) JMS promised to return all the remaining stories to the authors (or their estates) along with the rights, for them to do with as they liked.

So John Grayshaw of Amazing Stories decided to check up on their plans with as many of these authors (or their estates) as he could get hold of. He wrote to 56 of them, and here's his results. (h/t F770)

Of those 56, 9 have already been published in English and 2 only in French, which in most cases Grayshaw could have learned from the ISFDB. He did not hear from 34 of the authors (or their estates), leaving 11 that sent him replies. 5 said they have no plans to publish (Grant Carrington, Raylyn Moore, Edgar Pangborn, Joseph F. Pumilia, Bruce Sterling), 2 estates don't have copies of what in both cases were multi-part stories (Russell Bates's sister is looking for them; George Alec Effinger's widow thinks they were lost in a fire long ago, and Grayshaw suggests asking JMS; someone else reports having been reminded of their story by receiving it from JMS); and just 4 say some form of "maybe sometime" (Gordon Eklund, John Jakes, Robert Thom, Lisa Tuttle); no enthusiastic "yes" answers.

Of course there's all those "no reply" entries, plus another half-dozen on various proposed contents lists whom Grayshaw didn't write to, but remember that these are the half of the contributors who didn't withdraw their stories. Either they don't really care or else, like Carrington and possibly some others, they feel what was a dangerous vision half a century ago has lost its savor and best remains buried.

A few more may trickle out, and the latest to have done so on Grayshaw's list is "XYY" by Vonda N. McIntyre, one of the authors whose absence from JMS's contents list has been most regretted by reviewers. It's in a new retrospective anthology of her short work, Little Sisters and Other Stories, and I'll be getting that.