fast day

Working as a reference librarian, which I used to do, requires an ability to juggle a lot of unrelated activities in real time. It was like that at home yesterday.

I came back early afternoon from an outing with more data for the Potlatch restaurant guide to find B., who was off work that day, reporting that the DVR wasn't working. Playing around with it myself suggested that the problem was that the batteries in the remote were dead, but that turned out not to be it. I called up customer service and got stuck on the automated system's question, "Is this problem only on one TV?" We only have one TV, so either answer is misleading. When I got a human, we ran through various tests with no luck, so she got us a repair appointment for 4-8 pm.

The repair guy actually arrived early, and not only was I in the middle of adding the restaurant info to my database on my computer, a delicate matter of shuffling around info from a lot of scribbled notes, I was actually downstairs on the phone dealing with a call from my editor about upcoming review assignments when the doorbell rang, so I pointed the guy at the TV and finished the conversation, but I couldn't return to the computer, because there turned out to be a lot more to the repair. The guy had to check where the line came in and looked totally disgusted at the way the phone box had been wired up (and I flashed back to memories of the disagreeable time we had getting that work done, several years ago, and how much better everything was going this time), so he had to redo all of that, incidentally cutting off both internet and phone for a while, and then he got to look at the back of the TV set and resume his look of total disgust at how that had been wired up. So he installed a new cable and gave us a new remote, and I handed it over to B. who watches 90% of the television in the household and consequently is the far better person to ensure it's all working right.

This had lasted long enough that I also made and we ate dinner in the middle of all of it, and it was only after he left that I finally got to finish everything up with the restaurant and send an e-mail to the friend I'm attending this weekend's concert with to OK a change of plans from the phone call and then get that confirmation back to my editor, and feed Pippin who'd finally come out of the closet that he'd disappeared into when the doorbell rang. (Pandora, on the other hand, had had to be physically removed from nosing around in the vicinity of loose pieces of insulation she might try to eat.) So all around it was a very fast day.

when is Thanksgiving?

It's a simple question. In the US, it's the fourth Thursday in November. You'd think that'd be easy to figure out. But apparently it's difficult.

This year, for instance, because November starts on a Friday, the rest of Thanksgiving weekend, from Friday on, is the fifth week of November. This seems to have confused a lot of people into expecting Thanksgiving on the fourth weekend, i.e. the 21st instead of the 28th. (Remember, remember, fifth weekend November / football games, leftovers brought / I see no reason the Thanksgiving season / Should ever be forgot.)

For instance, the glossy, attractively-designed, nicely-printed holiday garbage and recycling collection schedule that the city just sent out on a large postcard. As usual, collection services for Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year's, and the rest of the days of that week are all pushed to the following day. That much is on their web sites, but the specific dates for this year are only on the postcard, which says "Thursday, Nov 21 -> Friday Nov 22; Friday Nov 22 -> Saturday Nov 23." Oops. I hope a sufficiency of people are phoning them up to say, "You clowns, didn't you check a calendar?"

But checking a calendar may not help! My pocket calendar for this year has it right, but I was just transferring info to next year's and discovered that it tells me that Thanksgiving will be on Tuesday, Nov. 25.

The prize for awesome stupidity in calendar-making, however, goes to a decorative appointment book I once saw which put 31 days in June and made up for it by omitting July 6. Even Pope Gregory would have been baffled by that one.

media report

1. Is it by Brahms? Read. Listen.
I'll go along with the critic so far as to agree that it certainly sounds like Brahms, but not that the alternative has to be "a completely unknown composer." I'm not the first one to suggest: what about Brahms's friend Albert Dietrich? Here's some Dietrich for comparison.

2. A silent film (with period music) on the manufacture of books in 1925, taken at the printing facilities of the Oxford University Press (the Clarendon Press, in Jericho, Oxford).
What's particularly interesting is the combination of tasks rather fearsomely automated with those still requiring painstaking hand work. (And the bizarrely rigid sex segregation thereof.) Any old-time SF fanzine fan will heave a sigh of recognition at 11:00: they're collating!

3. We're up for the 150th anniversary of the Gettysburg Address next week, so here it is.
Listen: Read by Stephen Colbert. Read by every celebrity Ken Burns could get, backed by Ken Burns music. Read by somebody who really knows how to read it.
Read: As if it were written by George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Sarah Palin. And a classic: as if Eisenhower had written it. Finally, As Abraham Lincoln wrote it.

4. Just read: announcement of the death of John Tavener, British composer of "holy minimalist" sacred choral music without parallel. Here's a work of his.

revivified concert review

The falling banner ad to the right, for a new CD from the San Francisco Symphony, appeared on an ad-driven website I was reading. If you want to purchase the CD, click on the ad; but what attracted my attention was the blurb at the bottom from San Francisco Classical Voice, because it was written by me: it's from my review of the live concert last spring. My words, if not my name, in lights.

Of course, in the review I was referring only to the Symphony No. 2, of which I also said, "This performance is being recorded, and should make a honey of a CD." Unfortunately, they paired it with its concert partner, the Joseph Cantata. Of that I wrote instead, "The instrumentalists and singers alike did what they could to do this work justice. It simply doesn't merit much revival." That wouldn't make much of a blurb.

For some reason, this piece nevertheless gets dragged out on occasion. What hardly ever gets heard is its sister cantata, for in addition to this one on the death of the Emperor Joseph II, Beethoven also wrote a Cantata on the Accession of the next Emperor Leopold II. And it's even a much better work as well as, unsurprisingly, a lot cheerier. (Leopold in turn died only two years later.)

veteral day

I stumbled into a Veterans' Day public event today. Various local politicians walked up to the podium in quick sequence, each testifying to having younger relatives in the service if they did, or just offering three cheers to the veterans if they didn't, and sitting down.

Meanwhile, at home, here's TMCI (Too Much Cat Information): Pippin barfed after breakfast today. This is unusual for him; Pandora is the principal cat barf producer in the household. I heard these unusual coughing-like sounds and thought, "That's a cat doing something we'd rather it not do," and went over to his favorite nesting spot to find Pippin sniffing with curiosity at these strange objects that had somehow appeared on the floor in front of him.

musical outing

This looked like it'd be fun, and it was. B. and I wandered over to Stanford this afternoon to park ourselves in the airy commons room of Toyon Hall, one of the old and colorful dorms, to hear a little program from the Music Department. We had a lot of company, including quite a few small children, only some of whom looked bored.

It was billed as "Romeo and Juliet as told by Charles Gounod and Leonard Bernstein" and consisted of a dozen undergraduate singers and a small instrumental group performing selected arias and ensemble numbers from Roméo et Juliette and West Side Story tossed together in a flash-cut sequence roughly outlining the mutual plot. Juliette sings "Je veux vivre dans le rêve qui m'enivre" and then Tony sings "I just met a girl named Maria." Roméo steps over the corpses of the Jets and Sharks after their rumble to climb a wheeled construction platform, standing in for a balcony, for his final duet with Juliette, in which they sing silly operatic lines like "O joie infinie et suprême - de mourir avec toi!" The corpses lay twitch-free for the entire thing, R & J joined them in immobility, and then everybody stood up for enthused applause.

The singing ranged from passable to very good. Maria was seriously underpowered compared to the rest of the cast, and Roméo wobbled a bit, but senior Praveen Ramesh as Tony made a brave showing in a part that'll test any tenor's manhood, and junior Christina Krawec as Juliette was good enough to go on a local opera company stage right now. B. looked delighted.

library visit

Went to the public library to turn in a book, and then stand in line at the desk to have my account fiddled with.

Stopped in at the new book shelf when finished, as I usually do, and, as I often do, found an interesting book. Went to check it out at the automatic machine and found that I'd checked out two books, the other one of which I'd never heard of.

Back to the desk. Apologies from the clerk, who had inadvertently helped the next customer with my account and had just fixed that.

The book I checked out was Parkland by Vincent Bugliosi, the what-happened-on-the-spot abridged edition of his Reclaiming History on the JFK assassination. Detailed enough to tell us what Oswald had for breakfast and about the bumpy railroad crossing on the road to the hospital. Scene of Governor Connally in the emergency room reminds me: always know your loved ones' blood types. One question so far: If Bugliosi has this amazingly precise command of facts, why does he not know that nobody who actually knew him called JFK Jr. "John-John"?

ten miscellanies make a blog post

1. Huge book sale going on in Berkeley this month. You might want to know.
   
2. Nine things I already knew about The Hobbit, and one thing I didn't care about because it's actually about the movies (via JDR)
   
3. In the 1920s, C.S. Lewis was a silent partner in a secret gang with a diabolical plot to -- buy up properties for the National Trust. (via MJW) This revelation sent me into research mode. It's known that Lewis knew Margaret Pollard (née Gladstone: she wasn't W.E. Gladstone's niece, btw, but something like his great-great-grand-niece); Lewis's Collected Letters has casual friendly missives he sent her in the 1940s and 50s. But their earlier history was new to me. She isn't mentioned in the diary he kept then, but he didn't mention lots of things in his diary. What most intrigues me is her secret gang pseudonym, "Bill Stickers." For at just about that time, Lewis's friend J.R.R. Tolkien began telling his children tales about a crafty villain named Bill Stickers. (You knew he was bad because of the signs around that said, "Bill Stickers Will Be Prosecuted." And who would prosecute him? That righteous military man, Major Road Ahead.) Coincidence ... or something else?
   
4. PNH is mildly irked when people don't get his name right, but he figures it's because he's not that well-known outside of SFnal circles. Yeah, but it happens inside those circles too, like at a WFC. Alas, fame will not save you. What about all the people who can't spell Tolkien?
   
5. Gay Talese annotates his famous anecdote about Frank Sinatra and Harlan Ellison.
   
6. Photos and more photos of the Crissy Broadcast.
   
7. The lousiest opera singer that people think is good. Includes video link so you can hear it for yourself. (via Lisa Irontongue, who would rather you didn't) She's terrible, but she's nine years old. As Dr. Johnson put it (never mind what he was comparing this to), it "is like a dog's walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all."
   
8. So which eleven counties in northern Colorado are voting today on whether to secede? Most news stories are surprisingly reticent. Here's a map. (And the news story it comes from.) That's Weld north of Denver; Logan, Sedgwick, and Phillips, in the northeast; Washington, Yuma, Elbert, Lincoln, Kit Carson, and Cheyenne in the east; and Moffat all by itself in the northwest. I've been in eight of them, though not recently.
   
9. A while ago I wondered why the once-ubiquitous Douglas R. Hofstadter had vanished from public discourse. I wasn't imagining it; he really has and this is why.
   
10. The Worst Person in the World. What should you do if your friend has a tacky character trait that really bugs the heck out of you? A: Steam in silence for years, then wait for him to be off-guard - like when he invites you to accompany him to the opera, so he obviously has no clue he's annoying you - and lash out and storm off. Then write a self-righteous blog post about how it was his responsibility to read your mind and know your preferences. All right, the friend may be crass and tasteless. But that's no excuse for responding by being evil.

concert review: Estonian National Symphony Orchestra

An Estonian orchestra. How about that? Like an American orchestra of the 50s playing Adagio for Strings as the opener for a more generic program, they began theirs with the most famous adagio from their country, or indeed the greatest from anywhere the last half-century, Pärt's Cantus. They followed it with the mighty Fifth of their neighbor Sibelius, which they played a little less mightily than I'd prefer, and Dvořák's Cello Concerto, a work which is capable of interesting me, but not if you play it as a meandering rhapsody.

So, not a great concert, but pretty good, and I'm glad I heard it. The San Francisco Symphony fairly blew out Bing's sound capacity when they played at the opening festivities in January; this orchestra is much smaller, and turned out to be just right in size. (At the other end of the scale, chamber groups tend to get swallowed up unless they're prepared for it.)

Neeme Järvi is one of those elderly conductors of the old school who leads as much by just standing there and staring at the musicians with great intensity as by any cues he might give with his arms occasionally. He froze them into shaping up when they tripped over their own shoelaces.

Two of the works have very odd endings, and it was interesting to hear the audience's reaction. Cantus ends with a single bell note reverberating away. You're supposed to be absorbing the overtones. Although Järvi didn't move even when the bell ceased ringing altogether, the audience stayed silent until then, and then applauded.

Sibelius' Fifth has one of the great applause tripper-upper endings: five tutti dominant chords, each played with an echoing space of two bars of silence after it, followed by one tonic chord and that's the end. If you're not paying attention to the harmony, you applaud early by not realizing that the cadence hadn't resolved yet. At this concert, though, it had resolved and the audience still was silent. Again, Järvi was providing no physical cue. So I quickly realized that nobody in the audience was absolutely sure the music was really over now, except me, because I know this piece. Somebody had to start the applause, so I did.

My SFCV review.

dire-book report

The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr (Norton, 2010)

Which are more exasperating, books extolling our glorious flawless information future, or books decrying it as the end of civilization? This is one of the latter.

Carr's thesis is that what the internet (by which he actually means the web: e-mail, newsgroups, or FTP don't figure much in his narrative) is doing to our brains is rewiring them to make it harder for us to perform "deep reading": thoughtful, slow consideration of complex, lengthy texts. This would mean, of course, that nobody could read his book (which is only either complex or lengthy by web standards), but I did.

The obvious objection is that modern media have already rewired our brains. Carr brings this up, but only in the context of adducing collateral evidence to prove that exterior input can rewire our brains, so if those things can do it, so can the internet.

But his claim is that this particular rewiring is essentially new and unprecedented. Yet except for a few desultory statistics implying that our entire culture consisted of deep, penetrating readers before the internet became ubiquitous - a statement ludicrous to anyone old enough to remember those days; Carr was born in 1959, and maybe he was just a little slow coming to terms with his culture - he has nothing to show that the phenomena he describes don't predate the internet.

For my part, I learned brutal skim-reading in college, where it was the only way to get through the vast amount of reading required in social-studies classes in a reasonable time. In those days, the only computers I dealt with were the ones processing the punched cards we used for class registration.

Carr has a chapter on recent trends supporting his thesis, but I kept thinking that his trends are either not actually new or have some other explanation. For instance, the decline of Newsweek wasn't due to its futile attempt to buck the trend and publish long, thoughtful essays. It's because those essays were written and edited by fatuous clods.

Carr makes one brief passing claim that the rise of television didn't destroy deep reading. Oh, but that's not what people thought at the time. I don't know how right they were, but I don't know if Carr is right either. For proof of how deeply that belief was embedded in popular culture in the television age, please consider the Oompa-Loompas' lament over Mike Teavee in Dahl's book, and that was published in 1964. It's all about how kids don't read any more and how television destroys your power to think. The same lament, just a different era.

Carr's complaint that public libraries are now filled with the clicking of computer keys and are no longer temples of silent reading is, again, a little out of date. Those temples were enforced by the once-ubiquitous stereotype of the shushing librarian, and she was made obsolescent half a century ago. Even before then, she was fighting a futile rearguard action to preserve the 19th century, or more accurately the Middle Ages.

I entirely agree with Carr's concern over Google's land claim over the entire information commons, but that's not about what the internet is doing to our brains, but what it's doing to our social contract. I also entirely agree with his claim that it's foolish to rely entirely on outside storage of facts to supply your thinking. If you don't already have an in-depth knowledge of a subject, no amount of skimming of outside facts will enable you to think coherently about it, and the way to get that knowledge is to learn the facts and process, not just store, them in your own brain. Consultation of outside fact sources is for verification, for a certain amount (but not all) of detail, and above all for increasing your own knowledge. But the web didn't pose that problem, it just intensifies it. Carr quite cleverly distinguishes the kind of brain processing he's trying to preserve here from the kind outsourced by doing your arithmetic on pocket calculators, but, again, he's running after a train already long gone, because there's already a lot of literature on the innumeracy engendered by over-reliance on calculators and how the brain then fails to recognize error-caused absurd conclusions: a pre-web failure of deep thinking caused by a tool that, like the internet, was intended to free us to think deeper.