appointments

1. I had a regular checkup appointment with my doctor last week, and asked him whether - as I'd gotten the bivalent covid booster when it first appeared, last September - whether I should get another booster now or wait for the fall. He said now, and get the next one in January. "So I should make an appointment with the clinic?" I asked, that being an option prominently displayed on the provider's website. "No, it's right across the hallway; go over there now," he said. So I did; there were no other patients there and they zapped me right away. No card, though my vaccination did appear on the state's certification website when I checked.

However, when I told this to B., who got her last shot the same time as I did, she was unable to get a timely appointment from the website. Should she have just walked in as I did, or did my doctor flash them a referral? I have no idea. Anyway, B. wound up getting hers from a commercial pharmacy.

2. I ventured to the Stanford Music Department for a lecture on Bach, by a visiting scholar, a Brit named Nick Zangwill, open to the general public. The title said it was responding to the late Richard Taruskin, which caught my interest as a Taruskin fan. Taruskin had argued that since the words of Bach's cantatas are severe and uncomfortable 18C Lutheranism, that the music should also be seen as uncomfortable, and that if we enjoy it, we're misreading Bach's intent. Zangwill, who suffers from the handicap of not being a musicologist (he's a philosopher), disagrees. He kind of fumpfed his way through it, but some interesting points were made, the most so being the question of: if you're not a believer, can you fully appreciate this religious art and what it means to believers? Zangwill says you can, Taruskin says you can't. I raised my hand and suggested that you may think you can, but you probably can't.

3. A visit to the Library of Congress authorities file to confirm that Diana Wynne Jones is filed under J and not W (I'm preparing the index for my book, that's why) elicited the startling fact that there is a genealogy writer named Diana Jones Wynne.