the annual year-end post

Oh, it's been a quiet year. My only scholarly writings were the annual bibliography and my contributions to "The Year's Work in Tolkien Studies," both in the volume of Tolkien Studies that came out in 2025 but was dated 2024. I co-edited that volume, but as I've retired that'll be the last one. Though I've signed up to do the next bibliography, and I may be back in the "Year's Work," though that's going in abeyance for the next issue.

I also had a report on the Mythopoeic Society's online conference, copied from this blog and put in the Society's newsletter, Mythprint.

And 22 formal concert reviews published online, the last in October. There will be no more of those, at least for a while until my health gets sorted out.

Places I've stayed overnight away from home:
South San Francisco, CA
Pittsburgh, PA
Ashland, OR
Brisbane, CA
Santa Clara, CA

Two overnight trips up to the City, one for a conference and one for a series of concerts in close temporal proximity, both times staying in airport hotels just outside of the City where it's cheaper; one glorious trip to my brother's wedding far away, my only plane flights of the year; one drive to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival; and, sigh, another stay in the hospital.

year's last miscellanea

1. Here's an evaluation of all of Rob Reiner's movies, in which, if you follow along, you'll see that the authors consider his eight best movies to be eight of his first nine movies. (The clunker is, of course, North, and if it and The American President had been flipped chronologically, the best eight would have been the first eight.) So what happened? The authors think that the instincts that led Reiner right in his early days went wrong in his later ones.

I've seen six of the eight best (somehow I've missed The Sure Thing and I wouldn't see Misery on a bet) and enjoyed all six*; the only one of his later movies I've seen is LBJ, which was not bad but was carried mostly by Woody Harrelson's performance in the title role. The thing is that I never found Reiner a particularly good director in the technical sense - the climbing of the Cliffs of Insanity in The Princess Bride was embarrassingly clumsy - but in his good movies he was great in other ways: his versatility in genre (the guy who made Spinal Tap made A Few Good Men? Amazing), brilliant casting all around (that's what really knocked my socks off about Princess Bride in particular), and his ability to let the script and the acting shine through.

*Though I enjoyed When Harry Met Sally, I bristled at Harry's contention that all men are like him. If there's one thing I've learned from life, it's that people are different. Reiner and Nora Ephron may have based Harry on himself, but I am not like that and neither are most of the men I know.

2. Saw an article somewhere in which Sam Altman was quoted as saying that you can't raise a child without the help of A.I. Here's not the original article but a more critical commentary. Apparently the A.I.'s job is to reassure you that you're not screwing up. Dr. Spock said pretty much the same thing; why don't you just read him? Because you can be sure that, though he might be wrong, he's not just making crap up, which A.I. is prone to doing. When ChatGPT first showed up, I experimented by asking it some tough musical questions I knew the answers to, and it only seriously messed up some but rarely got everything totally right.

Once I learned what it does, I would never ask A.I. for advice on anything real. In practice, I use it only to remind me when I need a word I know but which has slipped my mind, which happens depressingly often these days, maybe once a month. The last one was "foyer." At least then I know the answer is right when I see it.

I certainly wouldn't ask it to draft any writings for me. I wonder if I would ask it to do so if I still had to write anything that I struggled with the wording of. But the writing I had most trouble with was job application letters, and that requires personalized stuff the A.I. wouldn't know. So probably not.

3. But one technical advance I am very happy with is the U.S. Post Office's "Daily Digest" which sends you an e-mail early each morning showing the envelopes you're expected to receive that day. (Mailers, magazines, and packages are excluded, though it does tell you how many packages to expect.) So if a bill doesn't come, that's because your delivery person is running behind, and if it doesn't come the next day, that's when you call the biller and ask them to send another copy.

children's classics

British newspaper article by Anna Bonet, listing "The 14 children's classics every adult should read." Most of them British, of course. Organizing them by my experience with them, they are:

Read in childhood
The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
Watership Down by Richard Adams
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
The Railway Children by E. Nesbit
The Hobbit I encountered at 11, and it changed my life. I would not be most of the things I am today if I had not read The Hobbit. The Railway Children I remember enjoying at about the same age, but I haven't seen it since. I know Nesbit mostly through adult introduction to her as a foundational children's fantasist. Alice and The Little Prince were OK, but didn't really grab me. Watership Down wasn't published in the US until I was 17, but that was the perfect age to find it. Not even excepting Earthsea, which has a different feel, it is the only post-Tolkien epic fantasy with the same sweep and power. (Most of them are utter crap.)

Failed to read in childhood
Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
One of two classics I was given in childhood that I utterly bounced off of; the other was one of C.S. Forester's Hornblower novels. I did like Tom Sawyer.

First read in adulthood
Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett
The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis
The Wind in the Willows, which I picked up at about 24, is the one children's classic that I didn't encounter until adulthood that has become as dear to me as my childhood favorites. I read the entire Narnian saga when I joined the Mythopoeic Society at 18, having previously ignored Lewis; I found them thin and not particularly appealing. The other two I don't remember when I read them, but only once each. They were OK, but I find I rather preferred their cinematic adaptations.

Not read
Ballet Shoes by Noel Streatfeild
The Enchanted Wood by Enid Blyton
Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery
My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell
I think I may have picked up the Durrell at one point, but I didn't read much if so. I had a different encounter with Streatfeild, as I had another book of hers as a child, The Children on the Top Floor, which I did like very much (and still do, actually). Enid Blyton was completely unknown in the US in my childhood, though she's seeped in a little since then. I'd heard of Anne of Green Gables but never ran across it.

and it contained ...

The huge 'wine country gift box' I brought home from the Christmas gift exchange measures 23 x 12 x 10 with the lid closed, which was only possible to do after I removed all the wine bottles and those snacks I wouldn't care to eat (which I gave to B., figuring correctly that she'd like most of them, and the rest she could take to the snack table of her orchestral rehearsals). It was also so heavy that I shouldn't have carried it intact from the car into the house. It proved to contain:

6 bottles of wine (4 reds, 2 whites including a sparkling; 3 from Sonoma County and one each from Napa, Paso Robles, and Oregon)
8 boxes of various cookies
3 of biscuits, one with fruit filling (some of the cookies were also labeled biscuits, apparently in French)
6 of various crackers and hard breads
3 pastries
3 veggie snacks (2 asparagus, 1 olive)
1 each of madeleines, brownies, snack mix, kettle corn, jellies, ginger chews, lemon cakes, dip mix, dipping sauce, olive oil, hummus, and spreadable cheese

Most of the wine is probably destined to be regifted, but when will we manage to eat the rest of this stuff?

I'm dreaming of a wet Christmas

The downpour was severe most of the way up, and all the way back, to/from our niece T's house for Christmas dinner. This and the lighter rain we've been getting for the past week have been the first precipitation in over a month, so we ought to be glad to have it, local flooding nonwithstanding.

Inside, it was warm and cozy, though a bit underpopulated due to various constraints. Still, T's husband and both of their sons were there, including the one who's attending university a couple thousand miles away, and so were my brother and his wife, visiting from their home which is even slightly farther away. Another visitor was C., a supervisee of T's from work who's from Singapore and had no chance to celebrate with relatives, so she invited him over to her house.

T. insisted that we all participate in the all-food white elephant gift exchange, promising B. that she wouldn't get stuck with an assortment of hot sauce as happened one year. Most of the gifts were chocolate and/or wine. C. was mystified by opening presents in the presence of the giver, which is not the custom among his people. I got the last item nobody wanted to take, a huge 'wine country gift box' that T. was given as a reward for some professional service. It appears to have crackers and olive oil, among other things, in addition to wine. But I don't know what else is in it, because it's still out in the trunk of my car. Although it's wrapped in plastic, I didn't want to struggle in with it in the rain. Tomorrow is supposed to be lighter and the rain goes away after that.

For the dinner, I made my broccoli with garlic and cashews that had been such a success at Easter, and it was mostly devoured, despite being a large batch. So that was gratifying.

But now we're glad to have gotten safely home, and so are the cats, who'd been wondering when they were going to be fed.

on Rob Reiner

45-minute CBS documentary on Rob Reiner. Really thoughtful and insightful views of the man, mostly from actors he directed in his films. A couple of them (both men, by the way) even break down in tears while talking about him. Also plenty of clips from interviews with Reiner, the movies, and All in the Family. Very much worth watching if you're at all interested in Reiner or his movies. It's amazing that the makers were able to put together such a polished and substantial piece of work in such a short time.

fame

John Scalzi is still on the comfort movie circuit, and last night's entry was Notting Hill. I've seen that movie, but only once when it was new, but Scalzi's essay is mostly about a principal topic of that movie, which is the effects of being famous, and I do have some thoughts about that.

I wouldn't go up and speak to a famous person I saw just because they were famous, but a couple times I've been in the presence of an actor or author I admired in a position where I ought to say something. So I just said, "I admire your work; thank you for doing it," because I couldn't go into any more detail without burbling.

By author I mean outside the sf/fantasy field, because there we're both parts of the community and can converse on a more equal basis, and some of them I'm friends with anyway. There are 3 or 4 notable fantasy authors, all women by the way, whom I was already friendly with before they'd ever published anything.

When I lived in Seattle in the early 80s, there were several authors who were part of a fairly close-knit fan community: F.M. Busby (who was called Buz), Vonda N. McIntyre, Joanna Russ. One time when I was visited by friends who were fans but not part of this particular community, I took them along to a fan-community party. I didn't tell them until we arrived that it was at Joanna Russ's house, and they were properly croggled. (I had of course gotten Joanna's permission to bring guests along.)

I've had one brief experience at being famous, within the environment I was existing in. I define topical fame as a situation where everybody's heard of you but few of them know you personally. This was when I was an invited guest speaker at a Tolkien conference at Marquette University, which holds his papers, in 2004. (And which gave rise to this proceedings.) Unlike at a Mythcon, where I know most of the attendees and consequently didn't feel "famous" even when I was Guest of Honor, here I didn't know much of anybody except the other presenters, but they all knew me.

It was a deeply weird experience, I found. People I didn't know kept wanting to come up and talk with me. It was within the context of the conference, so they weren't random accosters like the guy Scalzi describes making a pitch to Tom Hanks. And they had no self-aggrandizing agenda, they just wanted to talk about Tolkien, which I'm happy to do. I kept fretting inwardly over whether I was being polite enough. I'm rather introverted and not very socially adept, so I wasn't sure if I was being good at this. My biggest relief was when I left campus by myself and wasn't famous any more, which - as Scalzi points out - is exactly what the truly famous can't do.

It occurs to me that, instead of a movie about a famous person dating a random everyman, as in Notting Hill, we could have a story about a relationship between two famous people from totally different walks of fame. And we do: it's Katy Perry and Justin Trudeau. (I suppose Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce might qualify, too, though a sports star's fame isn't as different from a pop singer's as a politician's is, and I'm not sure how walk-down-the-street famous Kelce was before he and Swift started dating.)

piano recital: a review and an adventure

I attended a piano recital in San Francisco on Sunday. It just wasn't the piano recital I'd intended to go to.

The one I'd intended would have been Sarah Cahill playing music by Terry Riley in a meeting room of the main SF Public Library at 2 p.m. The occasion was to honor Riley's 90th birthday, which was last June. Riley was one of the founding fathers of the minimalist movement in the early 1960s, though he's reinvented himself several times since then, and Cahill is an indefatigable proponent of new and unusual music; she was, among other things, one of the tag team of pianists who played Philip Glass's complete Etudes some years back.

But when I got to the library I found the building closed due to a power outage. This, I eventually learned, had begun the previous evening, but I hadn't heard about it. This was irksome, especially as I'd checked the website that morning to confirm the concert was still on. The power outage was widespread, but in spots, and this particular spot covered just a few blocks around the library. Not a concert in sight.

But! Earlier, on my way to lunch, which I had at a Chinese place nearby but well outside the outage zone, I'd walked past a pizzeria which had, taped to its front window, a small notification of a concert of Bach on the piano, to be held at a church in the Mission District at 3 p.m. "Too bad Cahill's concert won't be over by then," I thought, but when I found the library closed, I simply changed my plans.

So instead of Riley I heard Bach's seven keyboard toccata suites (BWV 910-916) played on a Baldwin baby grand in a 19th-century Lutheran church across the street from Mission Dolores. The pianist, whose name was Michiko Murata, was really good. Too bad there were only about 20 people there to hear her.

She played crisply and emphatically, with clean separation of parts and with the call-and-response patterns so basic to Bach clearly enunciated. It was 90 minutes of the master of intricate counterpoint showing his chops, and with this clarity of enunciation it was sheer pleasure to hear.

Fortunately there was a brief intermission halfway through, and I returned from the long trudge to the men's room just in time to see Murata in the sanctuary's foyer, about to make her entrance. "You're back," she said to me. "I thought you'd left." This is something you can say when your audience is so small you can count them. "Oh no," I replied, "I've got to hear how this comes out." (With one of Bach's few excursions into the major mode, as it turned out.)

a movie called Wanda

John Scalzi's 'comfort watch' for yesterday was A Fish Called Wanda. I find I have some thoughts about that movie:

I agree with Scalzi that it's a fabulously funny movie, which I enjoyed tremendously on first watching. And for a long time afterwards, too, but on more recent rewatches I've found myself enjoying it somewhat less. (Except for Otto, a character so terminally stupid and fearlessly portrayed by Kevin Kline that way, that this still works.)

What I'm finding less appealing is what Scalzi calls the 'cringe humor.' Normally, like him, I dislike humor relying on embarrassing sympathetic characters, but Wanda was funny enough to immunize itself against this. But maybe as I've gotten more used to the scenario, the immunity wears off.

Scalzi mentions a couple forms of humor that probably wouldn't pass muster in a film made today. One is what he calls casual homophobia. I don't think that Otto trying to disconcert Ken by pretending to be sexually attracted to him is actually homophobic as the term is normally used. Ken isn't being repulsed at the existence of homosexuals, just at being propositioned himself. He's not shown as homophobic, just as emphatically not homosexual himself.

The line that Otto steps across is that of verbal sexual harassment, and that's objectionable regardless of the sexual orientation of anyone involved. If Otto were to treat a woman that way, it'd be perfectly understandable for her being as uncomfortable with it as Ken is.

The other problematic source of humor is Ken's stutter. Here again it's not that simple. The character who mocks Ken is Otto, and that's part of showing what a nasty and unsympathetic person Otto is. Wanda and George are comfortable dealing with Ken, whose stutter is less severe when talking with them - obviously it becomes stronger under stress.

Which leaves the encounter between Ken and Archie, when they're both frantic and accordingly Ken's stutter becomes very severe. It seems to me the source of humor here is not the stutter but Archie's frustration in dealing with it (his impatience, while understandable, is a flaw in his character). But I shouldn't be surprised if those with stutters disagree about that.

Scalzi says to ignore the plot, but there's a plot problem with the movie that weighs on me more over time. The reason Wanda seduces Archie is because Archie is George's lawyer and might know where George has hidden the diamonds. Perhaps it's Wanda's unfamiliarity, as an American, with the British legal system that trips her up here, because, as the barrister, Archie is merely a hired hand; he has little direct contact with George and is not in his confidence. The person who is in George's confidence is his solicitor, who is George's actual lawyer in the normal sense, and he does know about the diamonds, as is shown by his passing secret messages between George and Ken. It's the solicitor, not the barrister, whom Wanda should have seduced, but the solicitor is a minor character and, unlike Archie, he's not sexy, so there'd be no movie there.

read these

1. My colleague Michael D.C. Drout on why The Lord of the Rings endures with readers. (If you don't have access to the NY Times, this link might get you there.) The essay takes a startling personal turn that may surprise readers who don't know Mike, but in the process it also reveals some of why Tolkien is such a moving and effective author. (And some of it is based on the lexomic analysis in the article Mike co-authored in the latest issue of Tolkien Studies.) It's a sad and beautiful article, like Tolkien's work itself.

2. What has become of NASA? Joel Achenbach's deep dive into the recent history and current state of the agency that's been mooting return flights to the Moon and also to Mars, and why it's not likely to happen, told with a clarity not always granted to such articles.

3. The angriest and hence best response to the thing that took to the airwaves to yell at America.

play reading

My online play-reading group has been exploring, among other things, 19th century English comedy. We've done most of Oscar Wilde's drawing-room comedies (I know, technically Wilde was Irish, but he worked in England) and wondered what else there was. We tried a play by Arthur Wing Pinero, since I knew he was popular at the time, and though the text was genteely anti-semitic (the moral lesson seemed to be that pushy Cockney Jews shouldn't try to socialize with titled gentry; they wouldn't enjoy themselves), but we did enjoy reading the play - it was called The Cabinet Minister - and will probably return to Pinero eventually.

But for our next venture in this area, I suggested that we try a play that I knew was a big hit comedy in its day, the laugh riot of the 1860s, but whose reputation has been besmirched by a tragic event that occurred during a performance. I refer, of course, to Our American Cousin by Tom Taylor, and if you want to read it, it's here.

It turned out to be fairly funny, itself, and again worth reading. As with the Pinero, it's about titled gentry facing money problems - this time they're being cheated by a crooked agent - who are also being faced by a visit by an American cousin who has become the heir to another relative's fortune.

The cousin is from Vermont, specifically Brattleboro, which is at the old, longer-settled end of Vermont, but he sounds and acts more like a Kentucky hillbilly. Before he arrives, another relative who'd gone out to see him writes that he's been out shooting with a party of the Crow people. In Vermont? The Crows live around Montana. Maybe they too were visiting for some unspecified reason, but evidently for Taylor, America is some kind of black box out of which anything can come.

Our member who read the part of Asa, the cousin, had a great time with it. My principal role was that of an inexplicable - there's no explanation of what he's doing there - nobleman called Lord Dundreary, who became the play's breakout character in the first production from a flamboyant performance by the actor. Lord Dundreary is both dimwitted and an inveterate punster, which I guess go together in some people's opinion, and I found it challenging to get across wordplay like this:
Why does a duck go under water? for divers reasons.
Why does a duck come out of the water? for sundry reasons.
According to the misspelling of his dialogue, Lord Dundreary suffers from both an interdental lisp (th for s) and rhotacism (w for r). Trying to perform both of these at once gave me an accent which sounded to me more Eastern European than English.

Interesting play; I'm glad we tried it. We're also finishing up the more obscure end of Shakespeare, our last venture having been Timon of Athens, which is also about a seemingly well-off man with money problems. When it turns out that his open-hearted generosity has left him broke, and none of his beneficiaries will now lend him money in his need, Timon suddenly switches personality and becomes a toxic misanthrope for the rest of the play. His encounter with another, more natively misanthropic character - dueling curmudgeons! - in Act 4 Scene 3 is one of Shakespeare's little-known gems.

retired

Yes, it's true, as announced yesterday: I'm retiring from my position as co-editor of Tolkien Studies. I've held this position for 13 years, and I was associated with the journal, mostly as author of "The Year's Work in Tolkien Studies," for 8 years before that, but is that long enough? No, I hope to continue to write for the journal - I just won't be editing it - as health permits.

Also for health concerns, I'm detaching myself from other long-term work-oriented commitments, because I don't want to cause a crisis if I'm suddenly unable to continue. You may not have noticed that I haven't published a professional concert review in two months. That's not too unusual a gap, especially as Christmas season is slow for the kinds of concerts I cover.

But what I've told my editors is to delete me from any coverage for the time being. If things go well, I may be back in the spring. In the meantime, I am attending concerts on my own as I can manage them. I'm hoping for one on the 21st, and my next ticket is for Jan. 15.

All this and some other similar matters makes me retired in a sense that I wasn't when I stopped working as a librarian, because then I had all these other things. So life feels a little vacant at the moment, but I'll go on writing here, and of course B. and I have a busy home life together - injured cat to the vet yesterday, turned out to be OK - so life will continue as long as it does.

Tolkien Studies: another announcement

Thirdly and finally, he said, I wish to make an ANNOUNCEMENT. He spoke this last word so loudly and suddenly that everyone sat up who still could.

Though thirteen years is too short a time to live among such excellent and admirable hobbits, I regret to announce that, as of this year, I am retiring from the co-editorship of the journal Tolkien Studies: An Annual Scholarly Review.

Health concerns are the proximate cause for my retirement. But I will continue to be associated with and do work for the journal as availability permits.

My co-editors, Michael D.C. Drout and Yvette Kisor, have appointed as the new co-editor of the journal, with my enthusiastic approval, Kristine Larsen, noted and prolific Tolkien scholar, sometime contributor to TS, and professor at Central Connecticut State University.

They are hoping to send the next issue, Tolkien Studies 22, to press with our courteous publisher, West Virginia University Press, sometime in the spring of 2026.

- David Bratman, former co-editor, Tolkien Studies

another day

Hanukkah tonight, but not a happy one. Some forty people shot, eleven of them killed, in an attack on a first-night Hanukkah celebration on a beach in Sydney, Australia. Anti-Semitism the apparent cause. Yes, again.

More celebratory news in the actor-comedian-dancer Dick Van Dyke reaching his centenary yesterday. He's good at what he does, I saw a couple of his movies when I was very small and enjoyed them, and that's about all I have to say about that. Such an intensely American figure should never have been asked to play a cockney chimney sweep in the first place, but his talent did a good job with the performance, accent or no.

Say, I've been to a couple of concerts. A Stanford student recital, various groups doing movements of chamber music pieces. The only work I knew well was Brahms's Op. 60 piano quartet, and I could hear how far the students had to stretch in this tumultuously dark work, but they tried hard. Most interesting was Chausson's Op. 3 piano trio, with its extremely strange first-movement ending. Two pianists playing a movement from a Rachmaninoff suite changed places with their page turners for the next movement; that was nice.

Up in the City, the Esmé Quartet was joined by Kronos cellist Paul Wiancko for Schubert's String Quintet, though the program book kept stating that it was a quartet. This was the last concert in the Robert Greenberg-curated series of morning Schubert concerts, and Greenberg had some useful things to say about how the piece is constructed from sub-ensembles: two overlapping quartets in the opening bars, a trio playing the theme in the slow movement with the first violin dancing descant above and the second cello providing pizzicato below. In that slow movement, when Schubert lowers the already pp volume to ppp, the softness and beauty were truly exquisite.

drat

The crossword puzzle clue read "Get lost!" with the quotation marks around it, and the first three letters of the answer were GOF. I was hoping the fourth letter would be U and so on, but there weren't enough spaces for the expected conclusion of YOURSELF. It was when the cross word revealed that the fourth letter was in fact L that I realized the entire answer was GOFLYAKITE, which fit, but who says that any more?

John Varley

And so I see also that the SF writer John Varley has died. He burst upon the SF scene in the mid-1970s with a series of stories set in a future in which various planets and moons in our system are colonized, dubbed the Eight Worlds. Sex changes for aesthetic purposes, and artificial environments for artistic purposes, were common. The most famous of these stories was probably "The Phantom of Kansas." Several of these were Hugo nominees, but they didn't win, which frustrated me; at one point I called Varley the best SF writer currently operating who'd never won a Hugo.

He did finally get a Hugo in 1979 for a story outside that universe, a searingly memorable one called "The Persistence of Vision," which resembled Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End in being framed as a hopeful scenario but which really comes across as a horror story. I once quoted, purely as an allusion without identifying it, the memorable last line of this story in a post about my relief after having had to be talking all day, and someone caught the allusion, to my pleasure. His two successor Hugo winners, "The Pusher" and "Press Enter█", both from the 1980s, were also stand-alones and searingly memorable, the former also with a killer last line, which casts a chilling air back over the whole story; the latter more openly a horror story from early on, with a surprisingly intense Luddite air. All three of these stories were excellent of their kinds, and are the Varley stories I remember the best.

He also wrote novels, of which I've read two and a half. As with many SF writers, he was better at short fiction. Also like many SF writers, he turned mostly to novels in his later years, and I know nothing about those later works.

I met him a couple of times in the early days, in passing at conventions. He was tall and looming, with a full mustache, and latterly a beard. His middle name was Herbert, and he was known informally to friends as Herb, which confused people who didn't already know that. One time when he had two stories in the same issue of Asimov's, he used "Herb Boehm" as a pseudonym on one of them, "Air Raid", a particularly gruesome story about (to mischaracterize it wickedly) rescuing passengers from an airplane crash, which turned out to be by far the better-known of those two stories. But he quickly reprinted "Air Raid" under his usual byline, and later expanded it into a novel, Millennium, which I read (it wasn't as tight as the original story), which in turn was eventually made into a movie, which I haven't seen.

Arthur D. Hlavaty

Arthur was an old friend of mine, in both senses of the word. I'd known him through apas from 1978, and we met in person a couple years after that. But he was also older than most of his cohort in fandom, having entered with a splash with his first personalzine in the spring of 1977, when he was 34, an unusual age when most neofans were in their teens or early 20s. He died a couple days ago at 83, after long illnesses.

Living at first in Westchester County, New York, and then moving to Durham, N.C., to attend library school, he was geographically far removed from most of the members of the apas I knew him in. When one of the apas ran a photo-cover, Arthur submitted a picture taken in a photo booth which made him look like a gnome tucked in a corner. I attended the collation, and as members perused the completed mailing with its key to the cover photos, I heard occasional cries of "That's Arthur?"

Without physical presence, it was the quality of his writing that made him a valued member of both our apas and fanzine fandom in general. He wrote long and thoughtful essays, many informed by his reading of Thomas Pynchon, Ayn Rand, H.P. Lovecraft, and above all the Illuminatus! trilogy of Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson, all of which he took as very interesting and provocative, but none of which he viewed without a skeptical eye. Arthur was also a great quipster, leaving fanzines littered with witty and insightful bon mots. Someone sent him as a joke some volumes of treacly moral tales for children called Uncle Arthur's Bedtime Stories, and our Arthur used that as a fanzine title for a while.

He was full of wit and bon mots in person, also, in a light textured voice with a trace of New York accent, when I finally met him at a convention. Without the gnome extension, he looked like this - a little later on, after his dark hair and beard turned white. Earlier than that, in 1983, I actually ventured down to Durham to visit Arthur at home. By this time he had acquired a permanent romantic partner, an English lit grad student named Bernadette Bosky, whom Arthur had first met in the pages of a Lovecraft-oriented apa. She seemed so perfectly matched for Arthur's distinctive character that some of those reading about her from far away doubted that she could possibly be real, and one of my goals in traveling to Durham was to be one of the first outside fans to meet her and confirm her corporeal existence.

Later, after my visit, Arthur and Bernadette were joined by Kevin Maroney as a third for their romantic triad. I'm not the only observer who's frequently pointed at them as proof that such a relationship can be stable and permanent. Then they moved back up to Westchester, whence Arthur had originally come, and settled in a house in Yonkers they called Valentine's Castle (Valentine was the name of the street). Here they became much more personally active in fandom, going to conventions especially the ICFA in Florida. I never got to that, but I do cherish having introduced my own B. to all three of them at Nolacon in 1988. Meanwhile, they had founded their own apa and held private conventions for its members; and many people came to see them at home, including me. I think I stayed over twice, and I met their pet rats, which were actually quite cute and had rat-pun names.

I got to know both Bernadette and Kevin as individuals, but Arthur was always there, though receding in the background a little as age-related illnesses began to take over. I'm sorry that physical problems of my own prevented my attendance at a big party they held a couple years ago. And now Arthur is gone, but at least we still have vivid memories of him, and his fanzines to read.

pulling up

Sean Duffy wants passengers to dress up for airplane flights, like they used to do in, I guess, the 1950s. OK, I'll do that if the airlines will resume treating passengers as they did then: in the way of diners in fancy restaurants, or passengers on luxury cruises. Then it would be appropriate. As it is now, it would be ludicrous.

He also wants them to exercise while waiting for their flights. In their dress clothes? RFK Jr demonstrated pull-ups while wearing a dress shirt and a tie, so I guess so. Especially from a man who's been known to pose shirtless.

That kind of exercise I wouldn't do, though, however dressed. I have never been able to do a pull-up, not even when I was a scrawny little kid, and I was a scrawny little kid. The other boys in the phys ed class, who could all execute a dozen without breaking a sweat, would stare in disbelief as I strained and strained and was not able to pull my head, let alone my chin, up to the bar.

I was also the slowest runner in the class. I was proud of getting the highest score in the 50-yard dash until I realized what that meant.

And DT wants visitors to the US to declare their social media use. Yet another reason to discourage visitors from coming here. My answer to that one would be a big MYOB. It doesn't say what counts as "social media," and lists I've seen usually don't include blogging platforms. Other than that, I've rarely indulged. I've left occasional comments on YouTube videos. I've been persuaded to get accounts on LinkedIn and Discord, both of which I've found pretty useless. I've never used Facebook or Twitter, but at least I've seen them and know what they are. Most of the rest, the likes of TikTok, Instagram, Pinterest (which I had to extract from a list as names I'd heard before), I've never seen and don't even know what specifically within the realm of social media they do. I may have been told but I can't maintain a memory of something that has no referent for me.

registering a car

The dealer where I take my car for servicing now wants customers to go online to make service appointments. The last time I tried doing this, on the old system, it got terribly confusing and I gave up and went back to phoning, which has its own difficulties, as there's not always someone available to answer the phone.

But the new system is much clearer about making the appointments, and I did so successfully, but getting to that point was difficult. I had to create an account, which involved confirmations both by text and by e-mail, and then I had to register my car on the system. First they asked for its Vehicle Identification Number, which is a long alphanumeric thing. I had to go downstairs, our to the car, and grab the registration on which the VIN is printed. OK, that done, now it asks for the current mileage and estimated number of miles driven daily. Back down to the car to get the current mileage.

Now, how to estimate daily mileage? I don't have a regular driving schedule, like commuting to work. Some days I do local errands, some days I don't go anywhere at all, some days I go up to the City for a concert. Aha, I know how I'll do this. Below my odometer is a useful figure showing the approximate number of miles driveable on what's left in the tank. I know that, when it's full, it'll say about 350 miles. I always buy gas from the same credit card. If I go through the statements for this year, which are conveniently in one place, I can count up the number of days between fillings (which I usually get when it's down to about 30 miles). Average out the number of days, divide that by 320, and there's the answer, which turns out to be about 25.

concert review: Harmonia California

I've been to a number of concerts by this nonpro string ensemble, conducted by Kristin Turner Link, and today was another one. They did a very nice job with Corelli's Christmas Concerto, and acceptably with Grieg's Holberg Suite. The other major work on the program was a tonal but astringent suite by a turn-of-the-20th composer named Mieczysław Karłowicz. The program said it was his Serenade No. 2, but I think they meant his Serenade, Op. 2.

reading and eating

Our Mythie book-discussion group held its annual Reading and Eating meeting in the back room of the same Irish pub we've used the past two years. Three people showed up who hadn't been to the pub before, and one regular wasn't there (we saddled him with one of next year's discussion meetings anyway), so we had nine people instead of the previous seven. Hurrah.

Looking for something easily edible for lunch, I had the fish and chips. So did several others.

One of my readings came from a collection of letters to the Times of London. I was heartened to read that in 1949 a reader wrote in to protest a figurative use of "literally," and that this was followed over the next couple of weeks by nearly a dozen other letters recounting favorite examples of this, of which "Clemenceau literally exploded" (during an argument) and "for five years Mr Gladstone was literally glued to the Treasury Bench" were the funniest. You can use "literally" this way if you want to - it's a free language - but you have to expect that people will laugh at you and mock your clumsiness at writing.

As usual for a Saturday, the radio on the way up was emitting the weekly Met opera. This time B. recognized it right off. It was La Bohème.

why I wouldn't attend an arena concert

As for the music, the low-frequency kick of the bass - amplified by the subterranean setting, contained within SoFi's steep sides, and ricocheting off the E.T.F.E. roof - was crushingly loud. It penetrated to the bone. A friend who'd joined me ... retreated from the volume and sat in a chair next to the congealing remains of a spread of wings and sliders, her head in her hands. I sought refuge in the suite's private bathroom.

- John Seabrook, The New Yorker, 12/8/25

And this was a Beyoncé concert. Beyoncé. Not a heavy metal band or anything like it, the sort of thing I wouldn't listen to regardless of the volume.

I would not have sat with my head in my hands or sought refuge in a bathroom. The moment this assault on the sense of hearing began, I would have stood up and walked right out of the stadium. Then, if possible, I would have gotten in my car and driven home.

The one time I actually heard a performer in an arena was back in the '90s when B. was working for AMD and they were riding high, so Jerry Sanders rented the local hockey arena for a big corporate party and put Faith Hill in it. The sound wasn't as bad as the above description, and the music as such was not at all objectionable, but I lasted about two minutes.

on campus

So first I was listening to Rachel Maddow's podcast on the mysterious death of Senator Ernest Lundeen in 1940 and his connection to Nazi propagandists, and then I read Wikipedia's article on the America First Committee - which wasn't founded until just after Lundeen died - and saw a photo labeled "Students at the University of California (Berkeley) participate in a one-day peace strike opposing U.S. entrance into World War II, April 19, 1940."

I attended UC Berkeley myself 35 years later, so I was curious as to exactly where that photo was taken. I couldn't enlarge it more than this, but that was almost enough to read the signs on the shops at the far side of the photo. The sign on the corner building reads "Sather Gate Inn."

Aha. Sather Gate is a symbolic gateway on the bridge over Strawberry Creek. It's now well inside campus, but I knew that it was once the entrance to campus. Before 1960, Sproul Plaza, which leads from the edge of campus at Bancroft Way up to Sather Gate, was an additional street block of Telegraph Avenue, which now terminates at Bancroft. And the west side of that block, where the Student Union and Student Center which now stand there were built in 1960, had shops. This must have been the Sather Gate end of that block.

But wait! There's a street sign reading "Allston Way." Allston? Allston is a street in downtown Berkeley off to the west. It's that far north of Bancroft, but it didn't go up to Telegraph. Or did it?

With a little searching, I found a 1942 map of campus online (click on the image to enlarge it). And sure enough, what is now a pedestrian pathway tucked between the Student Center and the creek was then a street which bore Allston's name. The low-slung building behind the cars parked on the street must be the university YWCA shown on the map.

So this photo must have been taken from a perch up on Sather Gate (on the right side of the photo above), facing southwest (the map has east at the top). Here's a current photo taken from within where the crowd was in 1940, probably from about where the flag is, facing in the same direction. That's the Student Center cafeteria, The Golden Bear, in front, where Sather Gate Inn used to be, with the Student Union looming over to the left.

I find it fascinating to compare the 1942 map with a current map of campus. Many buildings built, some demolished (including the old Chemistry Building whose cupola is the only surviving relic). The chemists who were creating plutonium at about the time of the old map were working in the then-new chemistry building, Gilman Hall, which still stands: there's a plaque by the door of their lab.

The other thing I should note about the current map is the note "Closed for Construction" just below Bowditch Street near the right-side middle of the map. That's where People's Park used to be.

smell of

Reading a news digest gives me my only glimpses into worlds like those of National Review, a contributor to which complained, "The U.S. has some of the greatest and most interesting cities in the world - New York, Chicago, San Francisco - and, over the last five or so years, almost all of them have become unpleasant to walk around in thanks to the ubiquitous smell of weed. Truly, it is everywhere - including, most distressingly, wafting through open-air restaurants and sidewalk cafes."

Really? In my college years, I hung around with people who smoked marijuana, though I never partook directly of it myself, so I know what it smells like. And I haven't encountered it lately in San Francisco, which I visit frequently.

The writer finds the smell of marijuana to be noxious, and I won't dispute someone else's personal tastes, but for me the smell is not particularly objectionable, in fact pleasantness itself next to the truly toxic, hellfireish stench of tobacco. Which used to be everywhere and completely inescapable. But, thanks to cultural change and anti-smoking laws, I haven't had to smell any, certainly not more than momentarily, for about 20 years. And I could go much longer than that.

how it went down

FLUNKY: Mr. Secretary, there are still two survivors from the boat we attacked, clinging to the wreckage floating in the water.

PETE HEGSETH: I want you to kill everyone.

FLUNKY: Everyone?!?

PETE HEGSETH:

AI Al

The Guardian has a long story about the development of artificial intelligence - and since much of it is going on in Silicon Valley and that's where the author did his research, it's full of Silicon Valley local color, focusing on the CalTrain line that many take to commute to work - I've commuted on it myself in time past.

But don't take it too much on trust: it's not "a short walk" to the Stanford campus from the Palo Alto station. Try to walk to the center of Stanford, where the work is going on, from the train station and you're in for a big surprise as you tromp for over a mile along the path paralleling a road running straight along a line of palm trees through a grove of oak and eucalyptus, the garish front of Stanford's Memorial Church growing faintly larger in the distance as you walk. You're on the Stanford campus, yes, but you're not there yet. This is why the university operates a shuttle bus line from the train station.

One thing the article doesn't mention is that the 101 freeway between Silicon Valley and San Francisco, another major commuter route, if one less drawing to a reporter from the UK where people are more likely to take the train, is littered with billboards with cryptic messages from AI companies. And almost every single one of those billboards is printed in sans-serif type. As a result of which, the initials "AI" look as if they say "Al" as in Al Gore or Al Haig.

This is annoying. I've started pronouncing it that way in protest. Whenever I see it without periods ("A.I.", which nobody uses) and without serifs, I'm saying "Al," the personal name.

2. Oh ghu, is this ever true.

3. Bruce Schneier, computer security expert, reports on a movement to ban VPNs. He doesn't tell you what a VPN is. If you Google VPN, the first entries and the Al responses don't tell you what a VPN is either. Eventually there are articles that do say what it stands for, but the explanations are aimed at people who already know what it means.

missions of California

The topic came up in a blog comment section of California students learning in school about the state's set of Franciscan missions, one of the most prominent activities, and one which has left a few intact artifacts till today, of the Spanish who first colonized this area.

Various Catholic religious orders founded missions in various far-flung corners of the Spanish new world empire - I know of ones in Arizona and Texas in the present U.S. (the Alamo was originally one) - with the purpose of converting the natives. Anyway, the Franciscans got Alta California, and started their project in 1769, eventually building 21 of them at regular intervals along a pathway dubbed El Camino Real (now mostly congruent with US 101) between San Diego and Sonoma. The missions were secularized in the 1830s, many of the buildings decayed, some were rebuilt as parish churches, but some of the originals are intact, and some that are not still being used as churches are now state parks. The best known are San Juan Bautista, near Hollister in northern California, setting for a memorable scene in Hitchcock's Vertigo, and San Juan Capistrano, near San Clemente, Nixon's one-time retreat, known for the swallows that nest there every summer.

With the modern concentration on the fact - never hidden, but not previously emphasized - that the natives were mostly used for forced labor, and that many died, especially of diseases carried by the Spanish, the mission reputation has been blackened. Junipero Serra, the priest who began the establishment here, previously considered a hero of California history - and who still stands as one of California's representatives in the National Statuary Hall in the Capitol - is no longer viewed so favorably. A statue of him on a hill overlooking the freeway south of San Francisco (and with his hand pointing in the wrong direction) was recently removed. I'm sorry it's gone; it was a weird and grotesque little thing.

So I'm not at all sure if, or if so how, California students are still being taught about the missions. But we were in my day. In one class we were instructed to choose one of the missions and write a report on it. In the process, though not specifically instructed to do so, I found that I'd memorized the names and locations of all 21 of them, and I just checked and found I still have them memorized.

I think I've been to all of them at one time or another. And I've been to classical concerts in six of them. I've also been to a wedding in one (not one of the six).

Here's what I had to say about Leslie Fish, who also died today.

Tom Stoppard

The great modern dramatist has passed on.

I've seen a number of his plays, but mostly when I was in college: I have this vague memory of signing on as an usher for a whole series of Stoppard plays in San Francisco. I don't remember them very well. The only ones I've seen more recently are Arcadia, The Invention of Love (which I saw in its first production in London, with John Wood in it), and Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead (most recently as a student production).

Besides the film of Rosencrantz, which I didn't think worked very well, I've seen two movies he contributed to the scripts of: Shakespeare in Love, which I cherish despite its playing with history in a way I normally find annoying - Stoppard is so clever with this I forgive him anything; and Brazil, a film I find fundamentally incoherent, though I doubt anyone would agree with me on this.

I started my play-reading group so that we could read Rosencrantz aloud, something I'd wanted to do for a long time. Four people: Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, The Player, and one for everything else, since everything else is just segments from Hamlet, plus stage directions.

more thanks given, I guess

I went to the big family Thanksgiving gathering yesterday. People were glad to see me, and I was glad to see them, particularly the niece from Fresno with husband and three kids, all of them now in their teens - it'd been a while since I'd seen them.

Nonetheless I found it a difficult experience for other reasons. I was not feeling very well, and was worse after I got home - I left immediately after dinner, about 3 hours after arrival, while B. stayed on for another four hours and, by arrangement, was delivered home by nephew and niece who live vaguely in this direction. Also the heavy food was tough for me to handle. I've been living at home mostly on soup, baked fish, and other soft and gentle things. But we improvise! Now to make turkey noodle soup for dinner with some leftovers I brought home.

thanks, I guess

I suppose I should feel thankful for this outcome. Instead, it's just irritating.

Wednesday afternoon I came home from a long series of errands and took out my wallet to balance my sales receipts against my bank statement which had just come. It was then that I realized my mobile phone was not in the same pocket, where it belongs. Uh-oh. It must have fallen out of the pocket somewhere, which it has done before.

Not in the car. I hopped in and dashed back to all of the shops and libraries I'd been to. No luck. One shop had already closed for the holiday, which I'd known they would, but there were people inside, which I'd hoped there would be. I rapped at the glass door. They pointed towards the hours sign and made "we're closed" gestures. I nodded - "I know" - and kept rapping until someone came to the door and I could shout through it at her.

I came home dejected. Thursday is no good; Friday I'll have to go out and try to find another of those quaint flip-top phones I prefer and then get it set up. Which I last had to do a year and a half ago, so it's not unprecedented. I changed into my house trousers, the flannel ones that cinch up and don't require suspenders.

It was then I discovered that I'd never taken my phone out of the pocket from when I'd been wearing them that morning.

This is why I don't usually take anything out of the trousers I'm using until I'm ready to change them for another pair. Wallet, phone, keys, other impedimentia stay in the pockets where usually I can find them. But that morning I'd been expecting the possibility of a call, so I took the phone and then afterwards completely forgot I'd done so.

Speaking of which, I still haven't found the computer glasses I know I set down in an unusual spot a couple weeks ago, I just can't remember what the spot was.

In other nuisances, I want to watch something on Disney+ on my computer, but the sound doesn't work. AI is no help: it keeps telling me to check the sound settings on my system, even though I keep telling it there's nothing wrong with that, sound works fine for other apps, it's just Disney+.

varied books on music

Ian Leslie, John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs (Celadon Books, 2025)

John Lennon and Paul McCartney, of course. The subtitle was almost enough to put me off this book entirely, but I'm glad I read it. It's actually really insightful, and does not gloss over their conflicts, as the subtitle might imply or some reviews have suggested. The emphasis is not on the love but the musical collaboration. (George, Ringo, and George Martin get an occasional look-in.) There's relatively little on the details of the early period when Lennon & McCartney were writing songs together "eyeball to eyeball," perhaps because little is known of exactly how they did it. But after the Beatles stopped touring constantly, so John & Paul were no longer constantly in each other's company, their partnership mutated into each writing his own songs in dialogue with the other's, and this continued even into the nastiness of their early solo years. (Paul zings "Too Many People" at John, John ripostes with the brutal "How Do You Sleep?", Paul writes "Dear Friend" to make peace.) In these sections, Leslie is at his best. I was particularly taken with his analysis of "Tomorrow Never Knows." Lennon wrote this in response to McCartney's "Yesterday" (yesterday ... tomorrow ... that's only part of it) and "Eleanor Rigby," but the most striking point for me was the mutation of an influence from somebody else. The first line of the song, "Turn off your mind, relax and float downstream," is a direct quote from Timothy Leary's The Psychedelic Experience, which John had been reading, except that he added the word "and." A trivial change? Not at all. As a cited musicologist points out, that turns the line into iambic pentameter, the standard English verse meter. John may not have realized that that's what he was doing, but he'd been reading a lot of poetry, and, Leslie says, "it was part of his verbal muscle memory." There's lots more like this.

Leslie is adamant about two things: first, that whatever the conflicts in the later years of the Beatles, John and Paul were always happy to make music together (and that they continued to collaborate in the creation of even their most distinctive individual songs for the Beatles), and that the stereotypes of John the caustic rebel and Paul the smooth charmer are quite inadequate. Paul had his harsh side. In an interview, John said, "Paul can be very cynical and much more biting than me when he's driven to it ... He can carve people up in no time at all, when he's pushed." As for John, the later part of the book has a lot of psychological analysis, including the repeated statement that what John really wanted in those years was to be loved, and he felt Paul was turning cold and distant; meanwhile Paul had no idea what John was going through emotionally.

The book dribbles to a close with McCartney's comments on Lennon since Lennon's death, and the suggestion that he's been whitewashing some of the conflict between them. It's a very long journey through this book, nearly 400 pages of text, and the opening chapters go into tremendous detail on the events of the Beatles' early, struggling years. You have to be a real fan to want this book, but you'll get a lot out of it if you are.

Nancy Shear, I Knew a Man Who Knew Brahms: A Memoir (Regalo Press, 2025)

What a strange book. At age 14 in 1960, Shear attended a Philadelphia Orchestra concert and fell in love not just with the music, but with the guest conductor, Leopold Stokowski (then 78). Despite her age, she quickly turned her passion into a job as a librarian with the orchestra: duties, mostly copying conductors' notations from the score into the individual musicians' parts. Then she parlayed that into a position doing the same thing for Stokowski personally as he undertook various gigs. How did she manage this? Sheer gumption and dedication, I suppose. This book is mostly a hero-worshipper's gushing love letter to Stokowski's talent: Shear considers him a conductor of unmatched skill and insight, an opinion that will not earn universal agreement. There is a lot about technical musical points, however. How Stokowski would modify scores to fit modern instruments' capacities (a controversial practice); does the orchestra tune up as a whole or by sections? That sort of thing.

But what about ...? Though Stokowski had a reputation for numerous affairs, Shear insists he always acted as a gentleman towards her, though she admits one might not believe this, and she does print some pretty personal letters and she says he frequently touched her in what she insists was a non-sexual way.

The book is almost entirely just about Stokowski. Though Shear says she worked with many great musicians, only two others get more than a momentary glance. The cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, much more physically handsy than Stokowski, and Shear mentions only casually and incidentally that she did have a sexual affair with him. And Eugene Ormandy, Philadelphia's music director, whom she did not like either as a musician or a man. He did try once forcibly to kiss her, which in telling it she brushes off in a manner that was typical of older accounts but seems beyond quaint when so told in a post-#MeToo world.

And the man who knew Brahms? He makes just a cameo appearance on page 62. Shear gives his name - Raoul Hellmer - but nothing else about him. He's not a famous musician, just some guy who visited backstage for some reason and who, as a boy in Vienna, once delivered a pharmacy order to Brahms. He shakes hands with Shear and that's it. "I (briefly) met a man who (briefly) met Brahms" is more like it.

more posthumous Le Guin

Ursula K. Le Guin, A Larger Reality, edited by Conner Bouchard-Roberts (Winter Texts, 2025), 339 p.

"A Larger Reality" is the title of an exhibit on UKL's life and work going on right now at the Oregon Contemporary Museum in Portland. Since I can't get there, I ordered this book, advertised as "the companion volume for the show," hoping that it would be the usual museum catalog of the exhibit.

It isn't. It's an anthology of UKL's writings, all previously published, with some interspersed essays by others, most of them also previously published though unseen by me. There are also some illustrations by UKL, possibly not previously published.

The contents include several stories - "The Day Before the Revolution" and "On the High Marsh" among them - some essays including "Science Fiction and Mrs. Brown," and three tranches of poetry from different spans of years. The essays by others include Harold Bloom's introduction to the Library of America edition of UKL's collected poetry, in which Bloom calls Yeats her major influence and quotes, in their entirety, some poems also included in the poetry sections of this book, so why didn't the editor make a different selection?

David Naimon also contributes a more impressionistic, less academic essay on Le Guin's poetry, and adrienne maree brown, who apparently spells it that way, includes in her essay a UKL letter to an unnamed local paper expressing her distress at the felling of a tree near her house - unmentioned in the commentary, this clearly is what's also commemorated in "The Aching Air," which I consider UKL's finest poem but which is not in this book.

Nisi Shawl writes about the story "Solitude," which story is also included, and the most interesting and useful essay is Mary Anne Mohanraj's on UKL rethinking her own work and publicly modifying her views when they've changed.

A list of UKL's other works includes six other "Winter Texts Collections," so this is evidently not this small press's first venture into repackaging Le Guin. It's a nice memento, and a convenient way to dip into some of her less-acclaimed work, but it's not what I was hoping for and not even an inadequate substitute for visiting the exhibit.

Obituary for Jill Flewett Freud. As a teenager during WW2, she was evacuated to Oxford and lived at the Kilns, the home of C.S. and W.H. Lewis. She became lasting friends with the Lewis brothers, and her memories have been a contribution to Lewis biography. Supposedly she was also an inspiration for the character of Lucy in the Narnia books, though not the only one (the name came from Lewis's goddaughter). She went on to become an actor and producer. More at the link.

concert review: South Bay Philharmonic

The community orchestra for which B. plays in the viola section held a concert on Friday, in its usual church venue in west San Jose. Under music director George Yefchak, they gave a miscellaneous program, the best-played piece of which was the Mazurka from Delibes' ballet Coppélia. The brass drowned everyone else out, but that usually happens in this sort of item. An abridged version of Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet also worked out pretty well. (Besides some judicious trimming elsewhere, the arranger cut out the recapitulation, except for the lush return of the love theme, which he stuck into the exposition.) But a full appreciation of the Adagio movements from Rachmaninoff's Second Symphony and Khachaturian's Spartacus was a bit beyond this orchestra's capacity.

There were a few hilarious date errors in the program book. It would have been difficult for Rachmaninoff to write that symphony in 1872, as he was not born until the following year, and Astor Piazzolla, also on the program, wasn't writing anything in 1892, as he wouldn't be born for decades. (I think they meant 1982.)

B. had a bit of a family audience this time. Her sister G., niece E. (G's daughter-in-law), and grand-nephew H. (G's grandson, E's nephew - my, family relationships can get complicated, can't they?) came along and sat in the audience right, from which they could best see B. on stage. I, partly in my role as B's sherpa, was sitting over on the left for tactical reasons. When a church representative asked the audience how they'd heard about the concert, "You're with the band" got the most raised hands. H. was new to this sort of event, I think, but afterwards he said he liked the music.

another Tolkien review, if you want it

J.R.R. Tolkien,The Bovadium Fragments, edited by Christopher Tolkien (Morrow, 2025)

One more tiny fragment from Tolkien. Nothing to do with Middle-earth, it's a sour joke complaining about Oxford traffic in the format of a mock-medieval scholarly manuscript study. The main text by Tolkien, written about 1960, is maybe six thousand words, not counting some draft material, a fair amount of commentary by the editor - which, interspersed as it is with other layers of JRRT's fictional scholars commenting on the fictional manuscripts, is enough to make the head spin - and a background essay on the traffic problem and relief road proposals of the time, by Richard Ovenden of the Bodleian, that's twice as long as JRRT's text.

If it takes twice as long to explain a joke as it does to make it, it probably wasn't worth the trouble of reading. This book is only worthwhile if you're a Tolkien completist or really interested in the history of Oxford city planning. Weirdly, I am both, but there aren't many of me. A friend to whom Tolkien showed the story told him that readers would be put off by the large amount of Latin (though most of it is translated elsewhere in the text) and probably wouldn't get the point, so he gave up any idea of publishing it. Originally he'd wanted to send it to a literary magazine called Time and Tide, and we're told more than once that Tolkien inquired plaintively of his publisher to find out who the current editor was. He couldn't have found an issue and looked at the masthead?*

To my mind, as intimidating as the Latin is the weight of the highly true-to-life mock-scholarly commentary that Tolkien - a scholar of medieval texts himself - loaded the text down with, a trick he also pulled, though less weightily in relation to the 'manuscript' part, in The Notion Club Papers. The idea is that they're far-future scholars trying to understand these cryptic records of the fall of our civilization. That the scholars are named Sarevelk, Gums, Rotzopny, Dwarf, and Sugob (read them backwards) and that Bovadium is "Oxford" translated into Latin are the most amusing part.

The three fragments themselves tell, in a vaguely formal and distant but not strongly medieval style, of Bovadium being taken over by the rising tide of Motores, to which the people become less masters than servants - I remember reading an SF story also using that conceit - and leading to total gridlock. In one fragment the inhabitants all die of the fumes, and in another a gas tank explodes, leading to a city-wide conflagration. The End, and good riddance.

*Despite the extent of the commentary, this book doesn't explain that Tolkien had published a poem - "Imram," extracted from the also then-unpublished Notion Club Papers - in Time and Tide a few years earlier, but the long-time editor had since died, thus presumably Tolkien not knowing who'd taken over.

sinkholes

Article on the hidden menace (because it doesn't get headlines much) of sinkholes in roads.

I'd thought this was mostly elsewhere, but we just got emergency notifications that one appeared in an intersection along the main artery through downtown of our city. The only good news is that I'm not going anywhere near there today; will be quite occupied elsewhere.

more things I don't understand

Why is everyone so shocked at the revelations about DT in the Epstein e-mails? This is exactly in keeping with his sordid, crass character as revealed in the Billy Bush tape, which came out before he was ever elected in the first place, and confirmed by everything he's done since. We can't say we weren't warned about what sort of man he is.

Then there's Larry Summers. It's news to us that he was pals with Epstein, but he's acting as if it's just as much a surprise to him as it is to everybody else. He didn't know that he was pals with Epstein??

rain of errror

What the F is "cloudflare"? It's telling me there's an error and I can't get to half the websites I want to visit. Nothing wrong with the websites, it says, it's an internal error with them. What good is a security service that doesn't work?

four concerts in just over one day

I had a string quartet concert at Herbst in the City on Friday evening, and another one on Saturday morning, so it made sense to stay up there overnight. I chose an airport hotel, less expensive than in the central city but still close enough to make driving in easy, especially on a weekend morning.

Then Saturday evening was the California Symphony out in Walnut Creek, which I determined to get to after I discovered that the Berkeley Symphony was holding an open rehearsal that afternoon, halfway between the other concerts both geographically and temporally.

Friday evening was the Modigliani Quartet, which played Haydn's Op. 77/2 with a brisk, clean-cut approach, devoid of emotional effect. None of the piece's humor came out either, but the clarity was striking. It may seem silly to talk about subtleties of instrumentation in a string quartet, but Haydn does some interesting things, and you could hear them here.

Then they played Beethoven's Op. 59/3 in exactly the same way, making it sound more like slightly larger-scale Haydn than Beethoven. Puzzlingly, they poured all the emotion they'd omitted from the main program into their encore, the Adagio from Beethoven's Op. 18/1, which they pointed out was written the same year as the Haydn but which, they said, opened up a new sound world - the world they'd done their best to omit from Op. 59.

(Also on the program, ten minutes of Webernian nonsense by György Kurtág, the most superfluous composer since the days of Baroque wallpaper. Why this dreck even bothers to exist in a universe with Haydn and Beethoven in it escapes me.)

Saturday morning, Robert Greenberg gives another lecture on Schubert followed by the Esmé Quartet playing the masterpiece which was the lecture's topic. This week, the G Major Quartet. Both lecture and quartet take about an hour each.

Greenberg is very good at structural analysis of the music, much less good at inventing biographical reasons for Schubert to have written it that way, which serve only to trivialize his genius. As for the music, the Esmé played it as if they were steering a sturdy ship firmly through rough waters. An hour with Greenberg was worth the price for such a fine hour with Schubert.

The Berkeley Symphony opened up their Saturday rehearsal because the Sunday concert, which I wouldn't have been able to make anyway, was sold out. Both rehearsal and concert are in Berkeley's First Congregational Church, a chamber with damp echoing acoustics that's no improvement over the Symphony's previous venue, the infamously dead Zellerbach Hall. The orchestra seems better than deserving this. Conductor Ming Luke devoted most of his attention to Richard Strauss's Four Last Songs, with Laquita Mitchell singing in a foghorn voice I find hard to credit deserving the label "soprano." Thanks to the acoustics, I could not make out a word she was singing, even with the lyrics open in front of me.

The California Symphony is at Lesher, where the seats are uncomfortable but the acoustics good, and the orchestra getting really impressive. Highlight of this concert under music director Donato Cabrera was Beethoven's Eroica, in an urgent, driven performance full of subtleties of dynamics from the strings, who were at the top of their game.

Also on the program, Mozart's "Elvira Madigan" concerto with the solo part played by Robert Thies in a cool and bloodless manner, and an overture by Jessie Montgomery, featuring lyric melodies played in the form of hideously dissonant chords. Not the most successful work of hers I've heard.

Meals on this trip were good. Dinner Friday at a grungy Chinese place in the Tenderloin with some of the richest and thickest wor won ton soup I've ever had. Breakfast Saturday included at the hotel, sausage and a little bell pepper omelet for me. Lunch, palak saag (spinach) at an Indian place a block from the Berkeley church. Dinner at the last remaining restaurant within walking distance of Lesher that I really like, a tapas place on Bonanza Street: little plates of shrimp and lamb were tasty and enough to eat.

not missing it

What these all have in common is that anything that would have made me care about the new change ceased to be the case a long time ago.

1. I'm not going to miss the penny. Ever since the disappearance of the last penny gumball machines - which must have been over 30 years ago - the penny ceased to have any use in itself but only serves as a marker to accumulate larger sums.
That's true of all coins almost all the time now. Only with the rare parking meter that doesn't take cards, or the even rarer occasions when I need to use a laundromat, do I need a few quarters. I no longer regularly carry coins in my pocket. When I do get some, on the occasions I use cash at all, I just take them out when I get home. Self-service checkout at the supermarket takes coins, and I scoop them up to use there sometimes, because with multiple machines I'm not holding up anyone behind me as I get rid of the nuisances.

2. I'm not sorry about the closing of many outlets of Wendy's. Long ago I ate their burgers regularly, but I stopped after they changed the menu so that all the burgers have cheese on them. They're so used to doing that that they put the cheese on even if you say, "No cheese." A few instances of that and I gave up. Fortunately if I want a burger there's Five Guys, which is better than Wendy's was even at its best, and they follow customers' topping instructions meticulously.

3. I'm not upset about pop songs made with A.I. Electronic pop songs that sound as if they were made artificially have been a thing for decades now - remember Kraftwerk? - so why not actually do it?

honor and experience

I should have written this yesterday, because it's about a veteran, but though I read then the piece I'm going to write about, it was late in the day.

I'd gone down to the city library to return some books, figuring they'd be closed so the parking lot would be empty, but it turned out that, though it was a federal holiday, it wasn't a city holiday and the library was open. So I went inside and browsed around a little.

There I found, but didn't check out or remember the title of, a book of political commentary essays. One of the essays was a profile of John McCain from the time of his presidential run in 2008. In this profile, McCain is annoyed. Here he is, a heroic ex-POW who kept his honor by refusing early release, and subsequently an experienced legislator, and he's losing the election to ... what? An inexperienced community organizer? How can this be?

Allow me to explain how it could be, because McCain was operating on invalid assumptions. Sure, he was a POW hero. What should we do about that? We should honor him! But that doesn't mean he should be President. The presidency is not a reward for valor.

I voted in that election, and I chose Obama for a simple reason. I agreed with his policies and principles a lot more than I did with McCain's. Nothing more need be said, but it can be. For voters want not just policy agreements, but the ability to do the job. And Obama exuded the gravitas and sober approach that convinced me that he would know how to be president, how to communicate and delegate and the other tasks a president must perform. And indeed, he turned out to be just fine in those respects. Whereas McCain was famously impulsive and hotheaded, and was a 72-year-old man in dicey health who thought Sarah Palin would make a dandy successor if anything happened.

For experience can be overrated. No other job in government is like being president, and experience in other positions cannot always predict how well you'll do. The most experienced earlier president, with many years and varied positions in his résumé, was James Buchanan, not a sterling argument for the importance of experience.

Besides, was Obama's experience all that thin? Consider his résumé at the time he first ran for president. He was a lawyer from Illinois with a fair chunk of service in the state legislature and a couple of years in Congress. The previous time we'd elected a president with that résumé, he turned out to be pretty good.

That's not to say Obama was another Lincoln or anything like it. But it does show that the important thing is not experience, but what you make of it.

Death by Netflix

I started to watch Netflix's Death by Lightning, its dramatization of the events of US politics of 1880-81. It's framed by interleaving the stories of James A. Garfield, who was elected and then served as President, and of Charles Guiteau, the weirdly upbeat loser who broke a mental gear and assassinated him.

I got about one and a half episodes in before coming to a screeching halt, which is about one episode further than I usually get in tv series.

Visually it's very impressive, filmed in Hungary no doubt not just for the cost (and a complete lack of concern about supporting an autocracy) but because you couldn't possibly find cityscapes that look like that in the US any more. The beards do not look as if they were casually slapped on the actors' faces with a dab of glue, a common failing in film set in this period (the movie Gettysburg was particularly bad in that respect).

The most distinctive characteristic of the acting is the extremely flat midwestern accents in some of the voices.

The script felt mannered and off in various ways, but differently from the usual. Except in the Republican convention scenes in episode 1, there was very little over-explanation for the audience's sake that I hate so much. For instance there are several references to Hancock without anybody saying, "He's the Democratic nominee, you know." You have to either already know that or pick it up. That's good. But the very 21st century use of powerful swear words in public grates, and much of the character depiction lacks subtlety. Garfield was reluctant to be nominee, yes, but did he express it that crassly? I don't think so. And the relationship between Arthur and Conkling, though based on reality, treats it ham-handedly.

What brought me to a screeching halt, though, was a scene in episode two featuring the thing I hate most in historical drama. And that is when a character shows up to preach 21st century morality at historical characters. Moral debates in historical drama should be conducted in the terms and contexts used at the time; it's not impossible to depict - the musical 1776 did it magnificently for the slavery question - and if it shows the characters as imperfect by our standards, they're less imperfect than they look when confronted by what are effectively time travelers from the present. If I can get the viewer app to tiptoe past the rest of that scene, I might continue, because I am curious as to how the script will handle the titanic conflict between Garfield and Conkling which was the main feature of the administration. But not right now.

introvert glasses

Like me, John Scalzi has two eyeglass prescriptions: one for general-purpose glasses (which in my case I use just for driving), and one for close-up glasses (which in my case I use just at the computer - or I did until I misplaced them last week).

He calls them his extrovert and introvert glasses, because he uses the former when interacting with the world and nobody (outside his family, I suppose) sees him wearing the latter.

I wouldn't use that terminology. I'm still an introvert even when I'm out interacting with the world, which yes makes interacting with the world a bit of a challenge, and people do see me wearing the computer glasses. I wear them when I'm on Zoom sessions (or I did until ... see above), and people have seen me then.

My latest Zoom session was my play-reading group. We've progressed far enough in Shakespeare to reach Timon of Athens. This is, as I well knew from having seen it on stage, an absolutely dandy play, delightful to read, yet hardly anyone knows it.

concert review: Poiesis Quartet

The Poiesis Quartet are the young ensemble who won first prize at this year's Banff International String Quartet Competition. I watched the whole competition on video broadcast and was deeply impressed by this ensemble. So I couldn't miss the opportunity to hear them in person, in the Noe Music series in a small but acoustically and aesthetically impressive neighborhood church in San Francisco. And one reason this small local series was able to nab the Banff winner, a hot ticket as classical ensembles go, is that they'd booked them before Banff. So, great perspicacity on the part of the Noe director-programmers.

Poiesis will occasionally play a "classic," but they're dedicated to more modern music, especially recent work. Their program included four contemporary works, all completed within the last 12 years, and the two most recent of which they commissioned themselves. They'd played all four* at Banff, but the experience of hearing them over an electronic connection on that occasion paled against the vivid, arresting quality of hearing them live now. This was the kind of playing where it was easy to tell how great the players are even without knowing the music well enough to evaluate it.

The four pieces had distinct individual styles, but there was a general family resemblance between them: excursions into lyrical tonality were separated by complex querulous sections without the grinding dissonance that once would have been obligatory in such works; plenty of exclamations of the kind of startling metallic effects (ponticello was a favorite) typical in the quartets of Bartók or Janáček, whom I think must be the patron saints of the composers represented here - that is to say, the composers seemed to be thinking, "Those are the kind of quartets I want to write."

To finish up, a modern quartet that's on the verge of hoary classic status, Prokofiev's Second. This was played with a firm, compelling hand that got across this rather difficult piece - I've rarely heard a satisfactory performance - more coherently and winningly than other renditions. Another big winner.

At Banff, it's not done for performers to speak to the audience during concerts. Here, all four players took turns introducing the various works. That too is unusual; if there's introductions to be made, usually one player does all the talking.

I'm so pleased that I was able to haul myself up to the City for this one.


*Pisachi by Jerod Impichchaachaaha' Tate; String Quartet by Brian Raphael Nabors; String Quartet No. 7 by Kevin Lau; and Many, Many Cadences by Sky Macklay.

more library books to read

Troublemakers: Silicon Valley's Coming of Age, Leslie Berlin (Simon & Schuster, 2017)
The trouble with business histories is that they're often not very readable. This one is. You want to read a history of Apple's early days that focuses on Mike Markkula, this is your book. Wozniak designed the machine, but Markkula recognized its value and built a company around it. Most histories of Apple acknowledge this, but treat Markkula as a sideshow. This one makes him central.
But that's not the only story. It tells of half a dozen driving entrepreneurs of his kind of that era, divided into small chapters interleaved. It makes more sense to read this book by picking out all the chapters on one subject, then going back for another one. That way you will also notice how much of the most interesting stuff is going on between the time periods covered by the chapters.

Year of Meteors: Stephen Douglas, Abraham Lincoln, and the Election That Brought on the Civil War, Douglas R. Egerton (Bloomsbury, 2010)
One thing 1860 was full of was conventions. There were three major political parties and they each had a convention, and the Democrats had about four of them to produce two competing presidential nominees. Then there were conventions in states that wanted to secede from the union, and conventions to produce compromises to persuade the states to remain in the union, and more. And Egerton is here to tell you about each one of those conventions in point by point detail.
It's less boring than you might think, because a lot of dramatic things happened. The substantive issues are treated rather lightly, but the presidential horse race is discussed in detail. One thing you'll learn is that before the Republican convention, which happened last, absolutely everyone expected that William Seward would be the nominee and made their plans accordingly. But when you get to the convention, you learn that there was substantive opposition to him as nominee, enough to make his choice doubtful from the beginning. This informational conflict is not resolved. What you do get is a lot of quotes from speeches, some of them the most astonishing racist blither I'd ever seen.
The book carries on to the death of Stephen Douglas in June of 1861, except that the war had started by then and there's almost nothing about that. Despite the fact that he's the person who shot up the Compromise of 1850 and sent the nation plummeting down the dark path, Douglas is something of the hero of this book, mostly because after he lost the 1860 election he rallied to Lincoln's side and became the most steadfast of union patriots.

Dangerous Melodies: Classical Music in America from the Great War through the Cold War, Jonathan Rosenberg (Norton, 2020)
This book has no theme. It's just a narrative history, built out of lots of quotes and references to journalism of the time, of the classical music manifestations of the international conflicts of WW1, WW2, and the early Cold War, up through events like Leonard Bernstein taking the NY Phil on tours of the Soviet Union around 1960. One of the few places where Rosenberg steps back to consider what it means is when he asks why there was so much vehement anti-German feeling in WW1 (prohibiting German music, arresting German performers), but not so much in WW2. His tentative answer is that in WW2 we had the Japanese to unleash our virulent racism against, so it didn't have to be directed at the Germans.

Bridge of Words: Esperanto and the Dream of a Universal Language, Esther Schor (Metropolitan, 2016)
There's a lot here about the relationship between the Esperanto movement and the early Zionist movement, but it feels like it's as much the story of the author's personal encounter with Esperanto as the history of the language movement. To my regret, there's no mention of two interesting people: J.R.R. Tolkien, who expressed some interest in Esperanto in the 1930s and might have attended a congress on the subject, and the composer Lou Harrison, who learned Esperanto to communicate with practitioners of folk music in various East Asian cultures and wrote some choral works with lyrics in Esperanto.

concert review: San Francisco Symphony

I was uncertain whether I'd recovered enough to invest in a trip up to the City for a concert, but I thought of it as a test run for Sunday when I really want to go. Also, it was a tempting 'comfort' program for me. And it worked out fine.

Karina Canellakis, whom I've heard before here leading some powerhouse Shostakovich, is a lean and intense conductor, and she leads lean and intense performances. The evening started with Dvořák's Scherzo Capricioso, a lively little piece with undercurrents of melancholy. Then Prokofiev's Third Piano Concerto went by in a flash. It was so brisk and succinct that it was over almost before I knew it had started. Alexandre Kantorow as soloist whizzed through his part with the speed of a flashier player but a more subdued approach. For an encore he took a slower way through a florid and player-piano-like arrangement of Wagner's "Liebestod."

After intermission, the main event, Sibelius's vast tone poem cycle, Four Legends from the Kalevala. This is where the Canellakis who had Shostakovich in her heart came out. The sound quality was golden. This was an hour of pure, distilled, 200-proof Sibelius, every note exuding his distinctive sound world. It was fabulous all the way through and gripping despite the fact that not much happens. This is still a great orchestra.

I've seen lately various comments suggesting that the Four Legends really form a symphony. Nonsense. Having four movements does not a symphony make. It doesn't have the structure, the sound, the approach, or above all the complex developmental concepts, of a symphony, and most certainly not a Sibelian symphony. It's a series of shifting static sound pictures. In short, it's what Sibelius said it was, a set of tone poems. The first item, "Lemminkäinen and the Maidens of the Island," is the most interesting and most varied. "The Swan of Tuonela," which would be the Adagio if this were a symphony, is the most lush and melodic, though there was a terseness to the approach here. "Lemminkäinen in Tuonela" is the most difficult to absorb, extended and more disconnected than "Maidens." It's the farthest thing from a scherzo, which a four-movement symphony would need. The finale, "Lemminkäinen's Return," is a bit disappointing. It still sounds great, but it's a hasty and bombastic wrapped-up conclusion, a problem that early Sibeius is prone to elsewhere as well.

The people sitting up behind me had, as they often do, brought a large dog. It might be a service animal though it had only a harness, not a vest. It was as always entirely well-behaved. At intermission and afterwards, passersby were asking if the dog liked the music. And the handlers would say, apparently so. As I went by to leave, one handler was cooing to the dog, "You like this better than the ballet, huh?" And I muttered, "Better music." At a look of inquiry I explained: the ballet orchestra here is OK. But the Symphony is something outstanding.

o to be a blogger

1. In writing my piece yesterday on Elon Musk misinterpreting The Lord of the Rings as a tale of the heroism of "hard men" like Tommy Robinson, I left one point out. If the Dúnedain of Arnor and Gondor don't actually qualify as "hard men" by Musk's standards, you know who does? The ruffians that Sarumen sent to the Shire. Those were as hard as you could want, and rather reminiscent of Tommy Robinson. But you wouldn't want them. Let's not take Musk's reading, shall we?

2.Well, the election results are encouraging. I don't have much to do with New York City, but the place is a large spectacle difficult to ignore, and I hope that incoming mayor Zohran Mamdani has better luck with his sweeping reforming agenda than have previous reforming NYC mayors like, say, John Lindsay. Judging from his recent interview on the Daily Show, Mamdani's plan for overcoming institutional barriers is to try really, really hard.

According to the Washington Post, Mamdani "says Israel should not exist as a Jewish state." No further elaboration on what he means by that. That's disturbing, and crosses a line that should not be crossed, but it's not in keeping with the judiciously balanced criticism I've otherwise heard from him. So I'm not sure whether to believe it, or indeed what it means as to the reliability of the Post as a source.

In other mayoral news, people are still trying to make excuses for Andrew Cuomo. "Cuomo had baggage, to be sure, but he was a “single Italian male” from a different era." I don't know what being Italian has to do with this, but don't give us that "different era" nonsense. Cuomo was born in 1957 and reached maturity in the 1970s, as did I. That was the heyday of second-wave feminism, and I and my male friends were steeped in that rhetoric. Our implementation was flawed and imperfect, to be sure, but we were taught to be respectful of women and certainly not to sexually harass our co-workers and employees. Because that would be wrong.

3. Joshua Kosman writes about a play depicting a thinly-disguised Fleetwood Mac creating Rumours, and thinks the only explanation for the thing's appeal is its depiction of what's involved in making a rock record. That might intrigue me. Despite watching much of the Beatles' Let It Be footage (and being stunningly bored by most of it), I know little of the creativity involved in this process, except that it's very different from how classical musicians work. I might like to know more.

4. Pretty much the last word on Dick Cheney.

5. I haven't had time to listen to all of this yet. It's a 90-minute oral history interview with Warfield M. Firor. He was a professor of surgery at Johns Hopkins Medical School, and I presume the interview is mostly about that (the beginning describes his own medical school days), but I wonder if it gets into his distinctive hobby. In the post-WW2 years when rationing was tight in the UK, Dr. Firor would send - purely as spontaneous gifts - canned hams to C.S. Lewis, who was apparently one of his favorite authors. Lewis would have these prepared by his college chef and served to his friends at invitational suppers, and rendered himself nearly speechless trying to write letters of thanks for this largess. Is there anything about this story from Dr. Firor's point of view?