three concerts

I've not often been to Boston, but I did once attend an organ recital at Trinity Church on Copley Square. That's close enough for me. Such memories help personalize and make vivid tragic events. Brrrr.

Musical happenings close to home have included:

1. Saturday, Redwood Symphony. Cycle of Persian songs, accompanied by Western orchestra in a gesture of culture rapprochement. Pretty nice stuff. Persian-born soprano looked delighted to be singing in her native tongue for once, instead of Italian operas which are her usual fare. Followed by Christopher Theofanides, Maestro Kujawsky's latest discovery in the field of big, tough modern symphonies. Weird and arresting-sounding, but brutal. Imagine a symphony composed by a bear. Huge walls of dissonance rolled out towards the audience. Maestro K. thought it ended quizzically (it does), so he topped it off with an encore of Prokofiev's "Dance of the Knights" from Romeo & Juliet. That's famously brutal, but it sounded mild after the symphony.

2. Sunday, San Francisco Symphony. Annual Blomstedt visit, week 1. This wasn't on my regular series, but I got a ticket because 1) I'm reviewing week 2 and wanted to see how he's doing; 2) it's Blomstedt. The Eroica, strong on the energy and the drive, less on the darkness and intricacy. Brilliantly vivid performance, dazzling musicianship. The same priorities did not fit so well with Wagner's Prelude and Liebestod. Also, ultra-modernist piece, Poesis by Ingvar Lidholm. Literally no melody, no harmony, and no rhythm. So what did it have? Jagged sheets of sound passing through the orchestra, so artfully juxtaposed that it actually sounded pretty interesting.

3. Monday, Calefax. This was an Oshman concert by a Dutch ensemble that's an orthogonal version of a wind quintet: oboe, clarinet, bass clarinet, sax, bassoon. It makes for a deeper, more woody sound than a regular quintet. It also means it has no repertoire, so the musicians have to arrange everything themselves. We got Debussy's Suite Bergamasque, a few bits from Weill's Threepenny Opera, and Bach's Goldberg Variations - the whole enormous thing. Bach is suited to this sort of assault and worked fairly well. The rest, not so much. Unimaginative tutti arrangements, unsuited to the instruments, coupled with a stolid playing style, made for a rather dull show.

Sir Colin Davis

A great conductor, long associated with the London Symphony Orchestra, has died. I have him in a lot of Berlioz, some Wagner and Tippett, a few other British composers. My most recent encounter with his work was this review.

Easy. Right. Sure it is.

It's actually been at least a couple of years that I've wanted to replace the seat on our inner upstairs toilet. We bought a new seat, but I found the process of removing the old one to be defeating, and figured I'd wait until we next needed a plumber for something substantive. That didn't happen, and then the seat started falling apart.

I decided to make another stab at this supposedly simple household task. I checked instructions online. First step, use a screwdriver to pop open the plastic caps over the bolts. Half an hour later, much scraping and gouging of the caps, no success. I called the plumbers we'd used before. They were incredulous that I couldn't perform a simple task like changing a toilet seat, and even more incredulous that I couldn't open the caps. But they wouldn't offer any advice on how to get past the problem, and house calls start at $130. Try a handyman, they said.

When I reached a reportedly competent handyman on the phone, he was willing to offer advice. If the caps wouldn't pop open, try pulling them with a pliers. Pull how?, I asked. They're rounded; nothing to grab on to. Getting past his tendency to accuse me of arguing with him when all I was doing was trying to make sense of his advice, he kindly warned me that if he did come out to do the job he'd charge almost as much as the plumbers would, plus, like all competent handymen, he's fantastically overbooked.

So I called a different plumber, who came this morning. Without any input from me, he ignored the caps and started out attacking the nuts underneath with his pliers. Then he gave up, and eventually sawed the plastic caps off with a portable circular electric saw. Not so easy or simple after all, was it?

Anyway, the job got done, and he charged $40. Worth it in elbow grease alone.

facing days without lunch

I must have been in a good mood this morning, for when I heard from downstairs a cat sound we hear too often, though less since we've restricted Pandora's intake, instead of groaning I burst into song, to the tune of Eric Bogle's "Nobody's Moggie":

Somebody's barfing by the side of the road
Somebody's pussy who forgot her eating code
Someone's favorite carpet has run clean out of luck
For Pandora is upon it and beginning to upchuck

Fortunately there wasn't much of it, but she did not have a good day, for I gave her nothing else to eat till dinnertime. As usual, food-deprived or not, if I sat upon the couch she came and sat on top of me and would not be dislodged for more than a moment.

My own good mood only lasted until lunchtime. Having a task at the Mountain View library, and knowing this would be my last chance to have lunch out for a few days, I was looking forward to my favorite Chinese place downtown, only to discover that it closed down a couple weeks ago, victim, as I learned on looking this up after coming home, of Rapacious Landlord Disease, the well-known phenomenon whereby a commercial landlord would rather have an empty storefront - sometimes for years on end in past cases - than refrain from inflicting punishing lease increases on a well-loved existing tenant. So no more Marni's Chicken for me. This is, I think, the third time in the current century that my current favorite Chinese place in downtown MV has closed, and it could easily happen several more times.

At least I got my car's broken wheel fixed, while I sat on a bench outside the nearby mall reading a biography of Catherine the Great that treats human psychology like little clockwork toy dolls. Catherine is deprived of her mother's love, therefore she is unable to show love, yadda yadda. Except when she does, but let's ignore that. Accounts of the development of relationships between pairs of people show so many random pingpong fluctuations of emotion as to rouse a suspicion that the author is gamely trying to find large-scale patterns in fragmentary and misleading surviving documentary evidence. At least there's a clear explanation of what was going on with the partitions of Poland, which have always puzzled me.

more news of the word

I mentioned our driving trip to LA. I didn't mention another one up to wine country for a family Easter at niece T's hidden vacation house, which we've seen before, and now I know how to find it in the unmarked crannies where it lies. Nephews L and the rarely-seen M, now uncles themselves, were there, and played with their nephews so we didn't have to wear ourselves out. Also visited and stayed over at B's sister G's new vacation home nearby, which we hadn't seen before because it's newly acquired. Reiterated that a Nook Color is a great device for reading when I wake up in the middle of the night in a guest room and don't want to turn the light on. Left with sufficient leftovers that I still have some. I ate all the leftover turkey skin before anyone else could get to it; I was a bad boy.

I finished that giant bibliography I mentioned and sent it out for review by other hands. Deep silence so far, but everyone's busy, as am I.

After having Pippin's teeth cleaned, I had my own teeth cleaned. Nothing special about that, except that the dentist wants to keep a record of what medication I'm taking, and this time I had to write it down.

Hopeful trips up to the City for various reasons. Stopped at Borderlands in hopes of finding Alan Garner's UK-published-only but available-in-the-US Boneland (almost wrote "Borderlands" again), which the Other Change had been out of. Not on shelf. On inquiry, junior clerk said, flatly, "It's not in our database" as if implying something between "And I don't care" and "No such book has ever existed; you're hallucinating it." Inquiry as to what database this was produced only a repeated emphasis that it wasn't in it. This is not how to behave if you want to sell books. Jude came to my rescue, found and special-ordered it; I could have done this via Amazon or B&N at home, but I want to support my local bookstore. I don't want them to make me regret doing it.

Nearer home, fortunately, hit my car against a high curb. Now I have to replace both the tire and the wheel rim, or whatever it's called. Not good news.

Dinner out at Bella Vita, nice local Italian place. Any special reason?

re-Ebert

Many of the numerous tributes to Roger Ebert that I've seen over the last couple of days refer to his mastery of the put-down of bad movies. For instance, this piece, actually titled "Funniest Roger Ebert Quotes," equating funny with critical.

Or - and don't read the previous one first if you want to try this one - an actual quiz, "Can you pick the movies by the quote from Roger Ebert's negative review?"

It's funny, because I was once (actually twice, by the same person) scolded for my criticisms of Peter Jackson on the grounds that there was no market for attacks on movies, because people who hated a given movie don't want to read about it. Don't want to read about it? Ebert raised the put-down to a high art! Did you know he actually published two book collections just of his bad reviews, in addition to all the others of his good ones?

True, I'm not as funny as Roger Ebert, though this reviewer certainly seemed to think I had struck an apt nerve, but the scolder wasn't criticizing my execution but the whole concept. What she really meant was, of course, "Don't say anything bad about movies I personally like."

While I'm generally more interested in reviews of movies I have seen than of ones I haven't, unless I'm actively trying to decide whether to see it, I have nothing to say against Ebert's pans of movies I've seen, even if I liked them better than he did. I saw The Village, and had to admire M. Night's talent for eeriness, even though, yep, what Ebert has to say about the secret is sadly true. (True, also, of every other movie of his I've seen, including the vastly over-rated The Sixth Sense.)

Also, Ebert's article on being an SF fan in the 50s, far more articulate than most such about the appeal of fandom, and something I was still able to feel when I came along 20 years later. I was particularly struck by this line of his: "Most fanzines had a small circulation of a few hundred, but they created a reality so intriguing and self-referential that, for fans, they were the newspapers of a world." Yes, that was a large part of it. There was a world to enter, it had a door, and the key to that door was to learn its terminology, customs, and folkways. It wasn't that difficult if you were devoted to it. This is why I find it so strange when people entering fandom today seem so burningly resentful of the fact that it's already around and already has its customs. They expect it to re-shape itself instantly in their image, or else. In my generation - even though it was the generation of youth most over-touted in the history of American adolescence - we were never so arrogant or self-centered. But there it is.

One other point. Some fool, possibly Sibelius, once said, "Nobody ever erected a statue to a critic." Besides not being true, actually, it's irrelevant. Critics aren't in the business of having statues raised to themselves; they're in the business of deciding who does get the statues. But look at the love and respect accorded to Roger Ebert today and is there any doubt? If it were still customary regularly to raise statues of the honored deceased, surely high on the list would be he.

(And in that statue, Ebert would be seated. And next to him would be Gene Siskel.)

Roger Ebert

What am I going to do without Ebert? No other movie critic was so close to being comprehensive in his coverage, and so reliable and intelligent in his judgments. Whenever I saw a potentially interesting new DVD release coming up, it's Ebert's review I'd go check to see what he thought of it.

news of the word

It looks like I have an additional classical reviewing gig. Watch this space.

A Hugo cautionary tale

Yesterday, Cheryl Morgan posted "A Hugo Cautionary Tale", a story concerning Hugo administration that I was involved with. For various reasons I do not wish to attempt to comment there directly, so I'll put my observations over here.

First off, once Cheryl corrected the date (an error that was not originally her fault), the facts are essentially correct. What I should say is first, about the 1994 Hugo Administrators. Though the Hugo Subcommittee does bear legal collective responsibility for its official actions, readers should be informed that Peter and Athena Jarvis did not participate in the decision to relocate nominees between categories. They were essentially the local arrangements subcommittee - in charge of the plaques and the administration end of the ceremony - and did not participate in counting or verifying the nominees. Neither, really, did Kevin Standlee, the source of Cheryl's information. He was our supervisor and liaison with the larger concom. All the actual counting, verifying, and determining of the identities of the nominees and winners was done by myself and Seth Goldberg, and that includes the relocation decision. This got attributed just to me in some of the popular writings about it, because I was the one who spoke of it publicly (Seth preferred to be purely a backroom boy), but it was a joint decision by the two of us. But Seth is no longer with us, so if anyone is going to speak today with authority of the intent behind the decision, it will have to be me.

What we were trying to do was to let the ballot better express the will of the voters by aiming for equity among the nomination thresholds of the short fiction categories, that is, the minimum number of nominations that a story needed in order to make the final ballot. The threshold for Novelette was distinctly higher than that for Short Story, which was so low that only three stories cleared the 5% threshold, and it seemed unfair that two stories in the novelette category with so many nominations should be excluded from the ballot. Fortunately, the WSFS Constitution allowed for a grey zone between each set of fiction categories adjacent in word length, and this permitted us to move enough stories around to achieve a rough equity in the three short fiction category nomination thresholds.

The argument that Mike Resnick made at the time was that this set an absurd precedent, because various Hugo categories receive varying amounts of nominator attention - people pay more attention to novels and movies than they do to fan artists, for instance; sad but true - and thresholds therefore differ. To attempt to reach uniformity across all categories would result in complete arbitrariness of placement between categories. Mike even wrote a fan-fiction story in which the precedent was used to declare that a short story belonged in the Novel category (between which and Short Story there is, in fact, no overlap) and finally got its award from the convention masquerade.

The comic absurdity of this shows the invalidity of Mike's objection. According to the WSFS Constitution, movement among categories is only possible between two whose wordage or running time directly abut one another, and this is necessary because the categories are, in fact, fuzzy sets, and determining exact wordage is in fact a Heisenbergian process. Without a computer file it's impractical to make an exact count of a story of any length, and even with a file, there's the definition of a word to consider. (Favorite example: how many words is "Los Angeles-San Francisco flight"?) The traditional SF print magazines customarily identify stories by categories in the ToC, but many other publications do not, and nominators cannot be expected to make accurate determinations. My experience as Hugo administrator was that nominators constantly put unlabeled stories in the wrong categories. Unless there was an obvious attempt at stuffing the categories (e.g. putting obvious short stories in the Novelette blanks because you'd run out of room in the Short Story blanks), Seth's and my practice was to give the nominator the benefit of the doubt and allow these in.

And story lengths may be genuinely doubtful. In 1996, for instance, when Seth and I administered again, Charles Brown of Locus insisted to me that Connie Willis's Remake was less than 40,000 words and therefore belonged in Novella, but every time I made a word count of it by counting sample pages and extrapolating, it came out well over 40,000, so into Novel it went.

Mike Resnick defended his position that the categories were non-commutative by claiming that a short story and a novelette are fundamentally different things, not just longer or shorter stories. That is not the impression I've gotten from what other masters of the genre have said on the subject of story length, but I'm not here to adjudicate and there is a sense in which Mike may be right. But his position against relocation amounted to a claim that, if the cutoff between Short Story and Novelette is 7,500 words, then a story of 7,499 words is an entirely different kind of beast than a story of 7,501 words, and I don't think that's a tenable argument. If it isn't, then there must be a grey or fuzzy zone of some size, and we're back to the possibility of relocation. And, again, my experience seeing, for instance, novelettes nominated in everything from Novella to Short Story has convinced me that the voters just don't see the categories as different in kind.

What Mike says today is that it's unfair to make a short story "compete against a novelette that is naturally going to be more complex since it contains close to twice the wordage." Again, there may be truth in this (someone else will have to determine if the longest stories in a category usually win), but any injustice in this is built into the categories already. Novella runs from 17,500 to 40,000 words; the longest novella is over twice as long as the shortest. Novelette has a similar gap. As for Short Story itself, some authors, like Fredric Brown, have written classic SF short-shorts of less than 150 words. The top of Short Story is 7,500 words. That's fifty times as long as a 150-word story.

Yes, Mike might say, some yawning gaps are inevitable. But only so far: some gaps are just too much. Very well, maybe they are. But who is to determine how far is allowable, and how far is too much? For the Hugos, that decision must be made by the WSFS Business Meeting and be reflected in the Constitution. And the Constitution of that time provided for a fuzzy zone of 5,000 words on either side of the category limits, and by that rule Seth and I abided.

Subsequently, the BM narrowed the fuzzy zone. That is their right, and if they were unhappy with the results of the process, I encourage them to make whatever changes they see as fit.

Do I acknowledge that the decision to move the stories between categories was a mistake? Well, yes and no. Relocation for this reason was unprecedented, and hard to understand. I first realized that we were in for trouble when I informed the relevant nominated writers of the impending move. One of them asked me if that meant the story had to be cut, and I had to correct this misunderstanding of the process. But then, there's a lot about the Hugo process that confuses a lot of people. SF fans are supposed to be smart people, but many are absolutely baffled by the Instant Runoff final-ballot voting system. Many people have asked me to explain it to them. People with Ph.D.s have asked me this.

We did get a lot of flack for the decision, but then, Hugo administration naturally attracts flack. One furious fellow demanded my resignation for obvious bias in 1996 when I announced during the nomination period that, if the DP nominators chose to pick the movie Apollo 13, we would count it, and not disallow it on the grounds that it wasn't SF. His idea was that we were somehow giving our blessing to the movie. But that ignores that the nominators still had to nominate it. (In the end, it did get a nomination, but lost the Hugo to a B5 episode.) We couldn't control that. All I could do was assure anxious voters who did wish to nominate it that they wouldn't be wasting one of their five nomination blanks. The only bias was towards assuring that it didn't miss nominations from voters who wanted it, but who feared we'd arbitrarily reject their choice.

But what would have happened if we hadn't made the relocation in 1994? The first thing that surely would have happened is that we'd have gotten a lot of flack for a Short Story category with only three nominees in it. And then, when the nomination figures were released after the Worldcon, we would have gotten flack from some of the few people who read such things for such a high cut-off point in Novelette, refusing worthy stories a place on the ballot.

In short, you'll get flack no matter what you do, so you might as well do what you consider, according to your best judgment at the time, to be the right thing in the first place, and that is what Seth and I did.

(Note: I wrote this without the actual nomination statistics of 1994 to hand, thus a necessary vagueness on some points, and the risk of the vagaries of memory.)

concert review

I'm rather pleased with this review. Although the wording is less than ideally graceful, the ideas being conveyed came out just as I wanted them. I sit there after a concert with various thoughts about the performance jostling around in my head, and I wonder how they're going to fit together. This is how.