mystery solved

At Corflu, where the banquet was catered at our hotel meeting room from a Puerto Rican restaurant nearby, I was pretty sure I'd been to that restaurant before. Having gotten home, I went to leave a review on Yelp and discovered that not only had I been there (nine years ago, a wonder I remembered it) but I'd reviewed it.

Had I checked my review, I could have been definite on something I was trying vaguely to recall during conversations at the banquet. The food line offered two kinds of plantains, green and sweet. What I recalled was getting a mixture and liking one but not the other, but I couldn't remember which one. Turned out that what I'd written back then was, "The fried green plantains were fairly dry and crunchy, the sweet ones far too intensely sweet and got over anything they touched."

That was in contrast to general opinion at the banquet, which is that the green ones were inedible while the sweet ones were quite good. (I didn't have either this time.)

convention report: Corflu 43

Although I still receive a few fanzines, I consider myself retired from fanzine fandom, which is pretty much why I hadn't been to a Corflu, the annual convention of that small and elitist fraternity, in 15 years. But this one was to be in Santa Rosa, easily accessible from home, and the membership list was full of people I knew and would like to see again. So why not.

It felt like I'd never left. Conversations were resumed without any hitch. Only the visuals were startling. Many of us, and I don't except myself from this, have aged so much as to be hardly recognizable at first after a long time gap. And the number of physical infirmities and mobility aids was impressive. It's a sign of the times that, when 14 of us headed out on a group expedition to the Charles M. Schulz Museum (which I'd been to before more than once, but it's an excellent museum well worth revisiting), we all qualified for the senior discount but one, and she was given it by courtesy.

The hotel was a comfy Marriott just outside of downtown, with plenty of restaurants within walking distance, though because of my dietary restrictions I refrained from joining in. But I did risk the convention banquet, which was catered at our hotel meeting room from a Puerto Rican restaurant nearby, a favorite of Rich Coad, the convention chair. I was able to nibble at the ground beef picadillo, and some seasoned rice and beans, all delicious. It was an excellent choice of venue, at least for all of us, and the convention was altogether superbly run, so kudos to Rich and all the committee.

Interesting programming, too, curated by Jeanne Bowman. A couple panels on Bay Area fannish history, one on the Magic Cellar, which as moderator Deb Notkin aptly described it, was a nightclub that felt like home to the fans who frequented it; I was lucky enough to be one of its denizens for the last year of its existence in 1977-8. And a panel on local fandom of the 80s, which while it paid notice to the local clubs, the Little Men and PenSFA, which I frequented, concentrated on a circle focused in San Francisco some of whose members I knew well but which as a group I had no connection with.

Panels also on contemporary fan editing and APAs. I haven't belonged to an apa in 20 years, so some of the discussion of their migration away from print was news to me. I agree with the general opinion that an online discussion community isn't an apa, but the production of apazines as PDFs and their distribution over email, saving both the expense and time of physical mail - especially for international members - seemed a good idea, despite a song by Sandra Bond poking fun at the whole idea of efanzines that was sung lustily at closing ceremonies.

Of lighter programming, charades based on fanzine titles was a little dubious, especially as many of the attendees, including those tasked to do the charading, hadn't heard of some of the titles, and having them be ones we recognized was the whole point. On the other hand, slam storytelling - you get the microphone for five minutes, tell an amusing anecdote from your life - worked very well. The convention theme was pickles, so the storytellers worked that in somehow. In only a couple cases did that involve physical pickled cucumbers, but all the rest told of being in a pickle. Mostly stories of travel or of animals, or both. Tom Whitmore and Karen Anderson's story of transporting pet cats by car was perhaps the most amusing.

The Guest of Honor, name picked out of a hat as customary, was Jerry Kaufman, and his GoH speech at the banquet, on the embarrassing circumstances long ago which is why he never gives speeches, could have been another entry in the previous evening's storytelling. Past president of fwa, an honorary position chosen by acclamation, was Jeanne Gomoll. Geri Sullivan and Pat Virzi showed around the current draft of a book of Corflu memorabilia they're editing. Next year's Corflu will be in Vancouver BC, run by some of the same people running this one plus sundry.

I had a good time. I picked up a bunch of interesting-looking fanzines. I'm glad I came. Health permitting, I should resume going more often.

concert review: San Francisco Symphony

The problem with Mozart's Requiem is that he didn't live to finish it (ironically, since it's a requiem), and the substitute composers drafted in to complete the commission were not, frankly, very good. As a result a complete performance trails off awkwardly in the last few movements.

Various ideas have been tried to rescue the work from this problem. Today we had Manfred Honeck, music director from Pittsburgh, in to conduct his version. His plan is simply to cut out the parts Mozart had nothing to do with, and beef up the work by inserting other material. Sticking Ave Verum Corpus, a brief motet Mozart had written not much earlier, at the end was the conventional part of the plan; I've heard that done before, and it's a fine motet, so that works well. Also stuck in here, mostly as prelude but some as interludes, were other appropriate Mozart pieces, a movement from a Vespers and the Masonic Funeral Music, some Gregorian chants sung offstage by an almost inaudible male chorus, and some spoken readings, including the bit from Revelations about the Dies Irae, instantly followed by the music plunging into that movement of the Requiem.

The intent was to frame the work as a memorial for Mozart himself (highlighted by one of the readings being his letter to his dying father on the consolations of death), which was abruptly turned into a memorial for Joshua Robison, former SFS music director Michael Tilson Thomas's husband, who died last week. What it meant musically is that this was a very heavy, almost dragging, performance especially of the slow portions. I didn't find it very compelling artistically. That's a pity, because the performers (at least the ones onstage) were excellent, notably the Symphony Chorus which was as strong and rich as it's always been since Jenny Wong took over direction, and the soloists who don't get a lot, but of the four of them, all vivid with fine voices, the great Sasha Cooke stood out most.

Also on the program (the rebuilt Requiem took about an hour), works by Mozart's fellow Vienna classicists: Haydn's lively and quirky Symphony No. 93, and Beethoven's imposing Coriolan Overture, both more effectively put across than the main event.

three concerts in three days

It would have been four in four, except that a bad side-effects reaction to medication I'd been taking laid me out for a few days including Thursday's SF Symphony all-Beethoven concert. But I was feeling better by Friday.

Friday, Stanford Department of Music
All-Mendelssohn program by recent graduates. The Octet in full, the first two movements from the Op. 49 piano trio (in the opposite order. Why? Because they think it works better that way), and the first movement from the Op. 44/1 quartet. That last item was the best: dicey technically, but brought vivid soul to the music, especially the second theme.
Held not in the usual mini-auditorium but in the rehearsal hall, where there is little space. Already there was a small crowd there when I arrived half an hour early; by showtime the audience was bursting out of the room.

Saturday, Palo Alto Philharmonic
My niece's orchestra. Audible pizzicato thumps from the string basses, which she plays. Half Debussy: Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune, Nuages, Fêtes. Surprisingly technically proficient, and fairly crisp in the execution, which does Debussy more credit than he deserves. Half Tchaikovsky: the Pathétique. Rougher, without much grace but gotten through effectively.

Sunday, Junction Trio
Noe Valley Ministry concert in the City. Worth it for an exquisite Schubert Op. 99, Conrad Tao's piano merging perfectly with the strings. A little less notable for Beethoven's "Ghost" Trio, not as charming and, alas, disfigured by having alien music inserted between the ghostly Largo and the finale: an equally spooky piece by contemporary composer John Zorn supposedly inspired by the Beethoven but sounding nothing like it, instead being an entry in the "bleeps and whispers" school of ultra-modernism. Plus some early fragments by John Cage in the ethereal wispy style he cultivated when still writing conventional scores.

the reference formerly known

Why aren't people referring to Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor as "the Andrew formerly known as Prince"?

evens

You know the theory for how to get a piece of cake or some such cut evenly between two people? Ask one of them to cut it and the other one to pick. That will give the cutter an incentive to cut evenly and not cheat.

But what if - I was thinking while slicing brussel sprouts in two for B.'s dinner - what if the person doing the cutting isn't very good at slicing exactly in half? Then the cutter will be cheating him/herself.

your favorite Le Guin

A couple weeks ago I reported on a survey of readers' favorite Tolkien novels, and since I was focusing on Le Guin for my trip to her museum exhibit, I might as well consider favorites in that area also.

I found a Reddit thread and another on this topic, and toted up the results. Much more widespread than with Tolkien; I found a total of 17 books chosen, not counting a few people who preferred to choose individual short stories. But the favorite seemed to be The Left Hand of Darkness, followed by The Lathe of Heaven and The Dispossessed. I'm pleased to see The Dispossessed high up; for a while back there I considered it, if not the best, the most under-rated major Le Guin novel. As for Lathe, I rather have the distinct impression that it got a lot more attention after the 1980 PBS dramatization than before.

But while I like all these books, my favorite is Always Coming Home. Like just about everybody on the Reddit threads who named it, my reaction on first reading it was to be blown away in amazement.

New work by an author or artist who's already a favorite of yours can be a challenge. The existing work you've absorbed, you know it well and it's a part of you. The new work you haven't, and my experience is that it often seems a bit inferior at first, even if on absorbing it fully you conclude that it's their best yet.

Only thrice in my experience with a currently-working author or artist whose work I already loved passionately, have I encountered a new work which so dazzled me on first encounter that I immediately concluded that this was their masterwork to date, better than anything that preceded it. Nor have subsequent events changed my mind. One of these was Steeleye Span's setting of "Tam Lin". One was Donald E. Westlake's Kahawa. The third was Always Coming Home.

I've written before, for instance here, about how, when I headed the local group to run Mythcon three years after ACH's publication and had Ursula as Guest of Honor, we constructed the entire convention around a celebration of that book, so I won't go into that more here.

Instead, I'll note some supplementaries. The books which originally sold me on Le Guin as an author I'd like were A Wizard of Earthsea and The Tombs of Atuan. I picked those up in a library, I think, and saw the map of Earthsea and the diagram of the tombs (only in early editions, I find) and recognized their similarity to maps I'd drawn myself to occupy tedious hours in the classroom. "This author has seen within my soul," I thought, and that began a permanent association.

I also have a sneaking fondness for The Beginning Place, because I think I'm one of the few readers to have figured out the real purpose of that book. It's often criticized, but what the critics cite as a flaw is actually the point.

As for Le Guin short stories, I think my favorite is "Direction of the Road," for the sheer unusualness of its viewpoint.

Grant in the west

Having recently read a biography of U.S. Grant, I was primed to visit the sites of his western service in the Army, both of which sites were on the route of my driving trip.

Having graduated from West Point and done courageous and enterprising service in the Mexican War, Lieutenant Grant spent the first few peacetime years at posts on the eastern Canadian frontier, where he could have his wife and children with him. But in 1853 he was transferred to the Pacific Coast - time-consuming, dangerous, and expensive to get to, so he had to leave his family behind.

Lonely without them, bored by his routine quartermaster duties, depressed by the damp and gloomy weather, and not getting along with his commanders, Grant began to drink heavily - or not, depending on which authorities you believe. At any rate, having been promoted to Captain in the interim, after a year on the coast he resigned his commission and returned east, to face even greater personal failure as a civilian until the Civil War arrived and he found his true metier as a commanding general.

Grant served at two posts in the west, and I visited them both. There's little relic of his presence.

Fort Vancouver National Historic Site, on the Washington state side of the Columbia River opposite Portland, is built around the Hudson's Bay Company fur-trading post of that name, but it now also includes the US Army's nearby Vancouver Barracks, still a military post when I was last here. But most of the row of impressive Victorian officers' houses that now dignify the site weren't present when Grant was here. They were built by General O.O. Howard, of passing Civil War note, who was sent out here by President Grant to improve the facilities. Grant remembered having lived in crude wooden cabins, now long gone, elsewhere on the property. One full house which was here in Grant's time is called Grant House, but he didn't live in it. The site museum says a little about all this; I learned more from conversation with the curators.

Fort Humboldt State Historic Park, on a hilltop above Eureka, California, is mostly rebuilt buildings on an open lawn. Plenty of placards but no museum. The site had been saved from housing development in the late 19C by Grant fans who wanted to preserve the site, though the original buildings had been torn apart by Grant-worshipping souvenir hunters. The placards are mostly about camp life; passing note is taken of Grant's presence, but the main one on him concerns past Grant hagiography. There's still a commemorative plaque erected by the DAR; and the placard has a photo of a now long-gone ridiculously giant statue of Grant.

garden in Portland

Another thing I did in Portland was visit the Lan Su Garden, which was enthusiastically recommended in some guidebooks I consulted. Portland is sister cities with Suzhou, China, a city near Shanghai which is known for its classical scholars' gardens. So about 25 years ago, Portland imported a crew of artisans and a whole lot of Chinese building material to create this garden in the authentic style.* It occupies an entire city block, and it's not all or even mostly plants, though there are plenty of those. There are pathways paved with stones arranged in the shape of various flower petals; there are fish ponds and little bridges over them; and mostly there are what are called pavilions, free-standing buildings mostly about the size of a western living room, intended for various purposes. One is intended as the resident scholar's place; it has one smaller room for his study and workroom, and a larger one as his reception area, with furniture in the Ming dynasty style. An even larger one, with two stories, has been set up as a teahouse.

It's all quite charming - you can see a video tour at the above link - and the guided tour was informative. There's also a gift shop at which I bought a pair of golden butterfly earrings as a Valentine's present for B., which is why I am writing about it today.

*Meanwhile, artisans from Portland built a rose garden in Suzhou.

museum report: A Larger Reality, Ursula K. Le Guin

OK, I'm back from my trip to Portland, I'm beginning to be rested up from the rigors of the drive, and it's time to tell you what I went for.

About three months ago I learned of A Larger Reality: Ursula K. Le Guin, a major exhibit on one of my favorite authors, being held in a museum in Portland. "Well, that's nice, pity I can't get to it," I thought, but then I determined that, health permitting, I would. I'd driven to Portland before. The first weekend in February was the closing dates of the exhibit, and it appeared the ideal time to go. So, subject only to a health scare that nearly canceled the trip at the last minute, I went.

Oregon Contemporary, as the museum is called, is tucked away obscurely in a corner of the Kenton district in north Portland. Its roughly two-and-a-half rooms of exhibit space were occupied entirely with this one exhibit. The captions, I was told, were written mostly by UKL's son, Theo Downes-Le Guin, and they were fabulously informative about her background, her writing habits, inspirations and motivations, and much more. I told the curators that I hope this information winds up in a book sometime. There was an associated book with this exhibit, but it was an anthology of UKL's writings, not a catalog.

By the entrance hallway are three cases with personal artifacts ranging from her own drawings of her childhood homes (the house in Berkeley and the ranch in the Napa Valley) and a childhood teddy bear (one of many stuffed animals about which, the caption told us, she wrote stories), magazines in which her stories were published, including that one issue of Playboy, her protest-march handbag festooned with buttons like "Question Authority" and "Reality is a Crutch," on to her Nebula for Left Hand (no Hugos on display) and her Library of Congress "Living Legend" medal.

Beyond this in the main room was a large section devoted to maps. That she made maps first and constructed invented worlds by exploring the map was a major point in her creativity. Wall displays showed many maps that had been seen before and some that were new to me: a map of Orsinia (published only in the Library of America Orsinia volume, which I hadn't seen) confirms its resemblance to Hungary, which I always found more of a model than Czechoslovakia, the other preferred candidate.

On a table lay computer tablets loaded with videos about UKL's map making, with headphones to listen to the narration (which also appeared on the screen). These told of everything from her inspirations - among them, her father's maps of Indian lands in his anthropology books - to her map-making techniques. One video showed a glimpse of a different version of "Some of the Places and Peoples Known to the Kesh" than was published in Always Coming Home; expressing regret to the curators that it wasn't on the wall led to the revelation that it's on UKL's website.

Other videos discussed artists inspired by UKL's maps, including Michael Everson, who found two unpublished maps in UKL's papers at the University of Oregon, one of the planet Athshe from The Word for World is Forest, the other of an unknown land labeled in an unknown alphabet. Everson has redrawn these in a more professional style, but if the result has been published I didn't find out where.

A cubicle set up in the middle of the room contained UKL's original manual typewriter and another of the same model as the hum-less electric typewriter she eventually got. Attendees were encouraged to sit down at both and write their own compositions. I didn't do so, feeling too humbled by UKL's work to attempt to compete, but I did give advice to some younger attendees flummoxed by how the manual typewriter worked, especially its lack of a number 1 key. I advised that custom was to use the small l in its place rather than a capital I. Also in the cubicle was a binder of replicas of numerous rejection letters, mostly of the early version of Malafrena she sent out in the 1950s, including the oft-referred-to but never previously seen letter in which Alfred Knopf said that 15 years earlier he'd have published it, but couldn't afford to do so now.

Two other items enlivened the main room. One was a tree, a model construct built of wood, on whose branches and roots were perched copies of almost every book UKL ever published, including a few translations, which attendees were invited to peruse; alas places to sit and read were lacking, although some younger people did settle on the concrete floor. And in a corner, which did have some seating, was a video display giving continuous runs of an hour-long film, "Views from Open Windows: Conversations with Ursula K. Le Guin." This was made by Arwen Curry, but is not the documentary I'd already seen; it was Curry's own interviews with UKL interspersed with clips from speeches and earlier interviews, including her appearance at the 1975 World SF Convention. Curry's interviews were both at UKL's home in Portland and at Kishamish, the family Napa Valley ranch. Lots of choice quotes; and at one point when the Blue Angels fly overhead at Kishamish, Ursula gives them the finger, on camera.

In the other room, a series of display cases showing her drawings and paintings - all of real-world places; books that inspired her (a vast selection, along with a card with a quotation to the effect that all the books she read inspired her), and a series of manuscripts and letters showing the editorial process at work on The Tombs of Atuan. Also in this room were a number of artworks by others inspired by Le Guin, including an animated film showing kites (or possibly balloons) in the shape of cats gazing hungrily on others in the shape of fish.

But the reason I wanted to come on this weekend is that Saturday evening, Todd Barton, composer of the Kesh music in Always Coming Home was giving a special presentation. This was in a hall to the side of the exhibit space. He talked about the process, how Ursula had secretly auditioned him when hearing the music he'd written for plays as house composer for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival; how she sent a poem for his first setting, and he wrote back asking, "Do the Kesh speak English?" which led Ursula to take six months off to create the Kesh language; how they created the nonexistent instruments electronically; how LC at first refused to copyright the music on the grounds that they thought it was field recordings. He played recordings of some of the songs, recordings of the background material for others while he played or sung live; and he had the audience join in to sing the "heya" chant, but though it was a large and packed attendance, it didn't have the heft or moving quality of the time we did it at Mythcon. Barton did mention the Mythcon celebrating Always Coming Home at which he also performed the music, though he didn't remember the group's name. But this did give me the opportunity to introduce myself after the program. I walked up and said, "Todd, I wanted to say hello," and gave my name. "I was the chairman of that conference you mentioned." He was astonished to see me, and we spoke warmly of the memories. I was relieved, though, that he didn't ask after the woman on our committee who did most of the Kesh cultural lifting, because then I would have had to report that she sadly died in a traffic accident some years later.

Withal, this was a highly satisfying exhibit and program, and it was worth the trouble of driving to Portland for it.