notes

1. Maia knows that Pippin is gone - she's been looking for him everywhere - but now she is perturbed because the upstairs bathroom door is closed and there are odd, possibly cat-like, sounds coming from behind it. She's been chittering at it, but no definitive results so far. More on this as Maia learns more about it.

2. On Yom ha-Shoah, I went, accompanied by an Athenais, to review a most somber-themed concert: four composers actually murdered in the Nazi Holocaust, one who escaped only to fall into the clutches of Stalin, and one post-war memorial of the world they lost. Summarizing the character of each work in a sentence or so, which is all the space I had after explaining the premise, was the challenge in this one.

3. Last Wednesday, a more whimsical errand: I've been reading Mark Evanier's blog for 15 years, so why not take the opportunity to meet him for the first time, when he was doing a comic-store signing as close as Santa Cruz? So I drove over, walked in and found him at a table, and introduced myself as a lurker on his blog, though we have friends in common. He had piles of his book on Jack Kirby on one side of the table and piles of the volumes of the collected Pogo, which he's helped edit, on the other. I'm much more interested in the latter than the former, so I bought and had signed volume one of that. I enjoyed our chat, and so did he, and so did auncient friend James L. who also came in on the same errand.

4. A visit to work was interrupted by the arrival of our program director with three new books needing quick cataloging for an ed session this weekend. They were all on transsexuals dealing with their Jewish identity, a new topic for our collection. I judged it best to invent a new classification number in our 30-year-old system. The subject headings in the books were "Transsexual persons" and "Transsexualism", but online I found that they'd been changed to "Transsexuals" and "Gender nonconformity". Much better.

5. Good New Yorker articles: on Kamala Harris and the challenges she faces; on William Goldman's forgotten children's book (no, it isn't The Princess Bride).

6. Here's a little item for Inklings fans going on in LA next month.