the history of my website

I got my own personal website when I went to work for a library at Stanford and was put in charge of maintaining the department's internal website (manuals, project status sheets, etc.). To help me do this, I was sent to a staff training class that taught us how to hand-code HTML - this was 20 years ago, and web design programs were still rare - and had us practice this by creating our own personal pages on the university server. I put in a then-new photo of me at work, and links to a few pieces of mine that others had already loaded onto the web.

I gradually added more pages to the web site, especially before I got a new outlet by starting a blog. Design and color scheme, as I previously mentioned, were chosen with the help of Vonda N. McIntyre. I was looking for a background color as dark and unglaring as possible that black type would still be easily visible on, and she helped me with that. When I left Stanford, I moved the site over to the web-hosting of my personal e-mail provider, Earthlink, and there it's sat ever since, occasionally updated. I keep my personal bibliography and list of concert reviews updated, and add things as they come in to other lists like the one of the Inklings in fiction. Other projects I've let fall behind. But it's still all (except outside links) my own raw hand-coded HTML.

So things were until a month ago, while I was in New York, and found that the whole Earthlink web site was down while it was being migrated. Eventually it came back, but at first my web site didn't. It was only after receiving a cryptically-phrased e-mail and getting some clarification from phone help that I learned that Earthlink was phasing out the customer web pages that were being kept on their own server.

They were, however, still offering web hosting; you just had to get your own domain. It's taken me four long phone conversations with the web hosting people (all very helpful and intelligent; all men with the same voice and the same heavy Indian accent; each with a different name like "Frank") to get this up and running - not uploading the files; that was the easy part; but getting the web site recognized and available as one glitch or omission or another got addressed - but it's up now. I love the direct file uploader, which is much smoother and less gnarled than the FTP I used to use, and I am now the proud owner of https://www.dbratman.net. Please change any previous URLs you have for me, and let's hope this gets propagated onto Google and such in searches for me.

Mayor Pete

The politician of the hour is Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, who - unusually for a politician with such a workaday job - is running for President, and making some hay out of it. To my mind, this is the most insightful article I've seen yet on the serious implications of his candidacy.

But never mind that, how do you pronounce his name? Buttigieg has been putting out that it's "BOOT-edge-edge" which doesn't strike me as very helpful. Run together it's a tongue-twister, and at least one of the cascade of mispronunciations collected in this Daily Show segment is by someone who's apparently seen that version and avoided the tongue-twistiness of it by pronouncing it as three separate words. No; that can't be right.

"BOOT-edge-edge" doesn't even parse very well. If that's it, then why is the first "edge" spelled "ig" and the second one spelled "ieg"? That's very puzzling.

But in fact that's not it. Wikipedia offers "BUU-deh-jij", which not only makes a lot more sense in terms of spelling (now the last syllable is spelled "gieg"; OK, that kind of works), and it flows more easily off the tongue, it is - from the same Daily Show segment - much closer to the way Buttigieg pronounces it himself.

Interestingly, to me at any rate, I've actually been to South Bend since Pete took office as Mayor - twice, in fact, once with snow and once without. It struck me as a modestly nice place. Here's what I wrote about it:

South Bend, although a noted university seat, comes up short in the bookstore department. ... Besides Notre Dame, South Bend appears to be notable for two things: it's where Studebaker autos came from, and it makes chocolate. Chocolate being more portable than universities or obsolete cars, of course I brought some home.

in the political arena

The slow job of transitioning our city from at-large to district council elections continues. I'd already been to a session designed to inform citizens about the issues; now we're in a stage of holding workshops to solicit citizen input on some of the major issues involved.

I went to the first workshop 3 weeks ago, in a large room at the community center. Each participant was randomly assigned to a round table for discussion, so there were 4-5 of us per each of 7 tables, plus each had a facilitator from the consulting firm the city has hired. My table had, besides me, one woman from the bitter anti-politics faction I'm well familiar with from neighborhood politics, but not so bitter that she couldn't be negotiated with; one Hispanic guy from the other end of town; and one white guy who claimed to have nothing to say but actually offered some cogent comments.

I actually found our discussion useful. Our first question concerned the mayor. By our charter, this person is chosen by council from among its members, chairs council meetings and serves as city spokesperson, but has no other executive function ("weak-mayor system" is the customary term). Our question was, if council goes to districts, should the mayor, who represents the city as a whole, be elected separately at large? I came in not knowing what I thought, but we concluded that having the mayor voted on by everybody was outweighed by the at-large seat being contrary to the spirit of district elections. Anti-politics woman said it'd make the seat more susceptible to influence from real-estate developers, which is what the anti-politics people always say, but I proposed the more general language of the previous sentence and she accepted that. It was at this point that she suggested I speak for the table when we gave our reports at the end of the session.

Second question: on what basis - besides equality of population, of course - should district lines be drawn? A number of criteria were listed, but we found that all our ideas fell under the category labeled "community of interest". School districts, neighborhood associations. Council districts are being proposed to increase ethnic diversity on council, but one problem is that there aren't any real geographic concentrations of ethnicities here. There is one neighborhood that's heavily (though not overwhelmingly) Hispanic; in another form of division, there's a part of town full of mobile home parks. All we could do about those is say that they should be the centers of districts, not divided between them.

At the end the table spokespeople all stood up and went to the microphone to deliver brief reports. (This was videotaped, and was supposed to be put up on the election website. I've been waiting for it to appear before posting about this, but it's been 3 weeks and I still don't see it there.) Most though not all of us were in agreement. I hobbled slowly over, not realizing until the next morning that the cause of my difficulty walking was not my usual leg problems but a small cat toy stuck in the toe of my shoe.

Hobbit deconstruction

I watched most of the first episode of Lindsay Ellis's Hugo-nominated film critique "Hobbit Duology" (which is actually in three parts), but stopped there, because although my sympathy for a harsh criticism of Peter Jackson's Hobbit movies is vastly extensive, my tolerance for listening to one is severely limited.

I don't disagree with much that she says about the Hobbit films, except in the brief section where she finds aspects to praise. She likes the change of making Bilbo being visible to Smaug, but that only increases the intensity of the question of why or how Smaug fails to incinerate the entire company, about which Ellis complains vociferously later. She likes the joke about the dwarves disliking eating Elvish greenery. Jokes about Elvish cuisine originated with Bored of the Rings. Turning Tolkien's story into slapstick is merely one of Jackson's lesser persistent flaws. I think she's dead wrong that The Hobbit should have been two 2-hour movies; one 3-hour would have been more than enough.

Much of what Ellis says about Tolkien is inaccurate, but rarely significantly so. For instance, most of the changes in the text of The Hobbit, aside from the rewriting of "Riddles in the Dark," date from 1965-66, not 1951 as she says, and again aside from that they are very minor; but that doesn't matter. Contrary to her claim, Bard does appear in the story before he shows up to kill the dragon, but that doesn't matter because she's right that he could use more development, at least in a version of the story that's not about Bilbo. She seems extraordinarily irritated by the insertion of the White Council's attack on the Necromancer, considering that she acknowledges that the movies have to tie themselves to The Lord of the Rings as the book did not. It's true that the Necromancer's only function in Tolkien's story is to get Gandalf offstage, but it isn't true as she says that he wasn't then identified with Sauron. Even when writing The Hobbit, Tolkien was certain that the Necromancer was the same as the character from the Silmarillion then usually called Thû. But again, that's not very important. References to the Silmarillion in The Hobbit were private hints to himself, as his children hadn't then read the Silmarillion.

What I do disagree with Ellis with is her comparisons with The Fellowship of the Ring movie, which she holds up as a standard of virtue by contrast with The Hobbit series. And yes, the Lord of the Rings movies are not quite as extensively awful as the Hobbit ones, but they are bad in the same way. I've been struck by the number of people who, since the Hobbit movies were released, have approached me about my criticisms of the Lord of the Rings ones that I made at the time, and said, "Now I understand what you were complaining about."

In particular, Ellis claims that, while the Hobbit movies added much extraneous material that wasn't in the book, Fellowship added very little. What is she talking about? True, there's more of the actual book in it; but by the standards of the list she provides for The Hobbit, the list of superfluous additions in Fellowship is just as long. She calls it "tight and streamlined," which is ludicrous for a movie which adds a bad fan-fiction story of Pippin and Merry at the Party; which undercuts Tolkien's steadily increasing spookiness of the Black Riders by having them chasing the heroes at top speed from the start; by making the Watcher in the Water wave Frodo around in the air a while; by inserting a completely pointless fall of another bridge just before the encounter with the Balrog; and much more that I've probably mercifully forgotten.

Even Ellis's specific praises of Fellowship reveal its flaws. She likes that the movie folded Glorfindel in to Arwen, and I agree that makes sense for a present-day movie's purposes. But she says that each character "rescues Frodo," and that phrasing reveals that she hasn't noticed how Jackson changed Tolkien. Arwen in the movie does rescue Frodo: she rides the horse, she confronts the Riders in the stream. Frodo is just an inert lump in her saddlebag. But Glorfindel in the book does not. He puts Frodo on his horse, but Frodo rides the horse, Frodo speaks the lines of defiance against the Riders. Tolkien's Frodo is the hero of his own story; Jackson's has his agency stripped from him, and becomes luggage for other characters to haul around. This is not the only case of that, and it's parallel to the way Bilbo is shunted off to the side of the Hobbit movies, which is one of Ellis's main complaints.

Ellis thinks Jackson's Boromir is actually an improvement on Tolkien's. Well, sure he is. Boromir's error is that he thinks he's the hero of a different kind of story than the one Tolkien wrote. Tolkien has trouble because he isn't at home with that other kind of story, the sword-and-sorcery thud-and-blunder adventure. Jackson succeeds with Boromir, better than with any other character, because Boromir is the only character in the story that Jackson understands.

Ellis admits that her love for the Lord of the Rings movies may be due to her having been young and impressionable at the time they came out, and I'm sure that's so; but she uses them in her critique as if they're objectively good, and that's not so. They're just not quite as bad.

on geography

B. will be driving off soon to a several-day workshop in a town a couple hours drive from here, which is considerably outside our regular traveling orbit. (I've been to the area a few times.) As I am geographically enabled, while she is not, I wrote out detailed step-by-step driving directions to the specific locales to which she's traveling.

Looking over and marking up these directions, she asked me, "Do you memorize directions to where you're going?"

I said: "No. I keep a little map in my head and I navigate off of that. Directions of the kind I gave you I don't find very helpful. If someone gives them to me, I look them up on a map and memorize the map. But I know that a lot of people prefer written directions, so I'm happy to provide those if that's what they want."

And that's what it means to be a spatially-oriented person.

theatrical review: Shakespeare, mashed up and sent up

Silicon Valley Shakespeare, which normally puts on its plays during the summer in an insect-infested amphitheater up in the mountains, did something different, in a small pre-fab hut in a city park that some other local company has set up as a 70-seat indoor playhouse.

The topic was "Greatest Hits from the 48-Hour Play Festival," and I gather that the rule of these festivals is that a general premise is chosen, and the playwrights and actors have 48 hours to write and perform a short play taking off from Shakespeare using that premise. This greatest hits included two plays from each of four premises. All the concepts were good, but whether the play worked depended on the quality of the writing, which varied greatly. The acting was mostly good, lively without being anxious, though a few of the actors were having trouble remembering their lines. This was the first of three performances.

The offerings were:

1. Epilogues to Shakespeare plays. (In both of these, all the characters were dead.)
A. Most of the characters from Hamlet work out their problems with each other in purgatory. Hamlet Sr. is pleased that his murder was avenged, but not at the number of other people Hamlet Jr. managed to off, directly or indirectly, in the process.
B. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (more Tom Stoppard's than Shakespeare's) meet Richard III. He didn't seem at all like Shakespeare's character either, and I found most of the dialogue in this one merely incomprehensible.

2. Mash-ups of two Shakespeare plays. (Apparently 1B above didn't count.)
A. Lysander and Hermia have a marriage counseling session with Dr. Hamlet (Ph.D., Wittenberg). This was the funniest play of the set, due to the vast number of Hamlet's famous lines aptly salted in to the dialogue, revealing him prejudiced in favor of Lysander ("See, what a grace is seated on this brow") and against Hermia ("O most pernicious woman").
B. Viola and Friar Laurence pour out their troubles to a bartender (who turns out to be Shakespeare himself), who gives them lousy advice.

3. Shakespeare and cyber-technology.
A. Romeo and Juliet friend each other on Facebook the morning after the party. With both on stage at once reacting to each other's postings, and Mercutio and the Nurse along to kibitz, this was hilarious, and would doubtless seem even funnier if I knew anything about Bookface, as the Nurse keeps calling it.
B. Viola rescues Sebastian's Samsung Galaxy from the shipwreck, but the main point of this one is to short-circuit the play's plot and have Viola and Orsino acknowledge their love in a jiffy.

4. Shakespeare and sports.
A. King Lear rewritten as the retirement of a baseball manager. This was not improved by trying to stuff the entire plot of the play on a weak premise, though Lear's speech in the storm scene with baseball references added ("Blow, winds! Crack, bats!") was pretty funny.
B. All the characters in Hamlet place bets with a bartender (who again turns out to be Shakespeare himself) on a curling match between Hamlet's team and Claudius's. The bartender keeps making curling jokes which the other characters don't get, and I didn't get them either, because I didn't even know what curling is. (OK, I looked it up on Wikipedia when I got home.) From the brief part of the match that slips onstage, the game appears to be played with broomsticks and a Roomba.

With two genuinely funny plays and four more that were OK, this was almost worth the trouble of sitting through nearly two hours of. Highest marks in playwriting, then, to Doll Piccotto for Hamlet, marriage counselor, and to Melissa Jones for Romeo + Juliet + Facebook.

an unusual concert

A percussion quartet, at Herbst. Third Coast Percussion, it's called. All of the ten pieces played are recent compositions, some of them by members of the ensemble. Most were for, or largely for, marimbas and/or other tuned mallet instruments, and were largely soft, gentle, and peaceful, even the one titled "Death Wish." One piece (by Augusta Read Thomas) was for a set of tuned Tibetan prayer bowls: that was very peaceful.

The only one that used much conventional orchestral untuned percussion - wooden blocks, snare drums, tambourine, that sort of thing - was the newly commissioned piece by the senior composer of the bunch, Philip Glass. Titled "Perpetulum," it only sounds like typical Glass in a few eruptions of Glass-like themes from those tuned mallet instruments. It wasn't otherwise at all minimalist; the only one that did sound at all minimalist was by an English pop musician named Devonté Hynes.

The one piece I'd heard before was Mark Applebaum's Aphasia, which is for pre-recorded soundtrack (mostly electronically-processed vocal sounds) to which the musicians silently mime. I thought it was funnier and more imaginative the previous time.

A few of the quieter pieces were enhanced with ambient sounds from outside the hall (which is in a building also used for other purposes) or, from inside the hall, the same stentorian snoring from audience right that also enriched the string quartet concert on Monday. Either wake up, or do your sleeping somewhere else.

two concerts

Sunday I went to the Australian Chamber Orchestra at Bing. I had been thinking of taking this in anyway, and then my editor asked if I'd like to review it. Sure, I said.

Monday, up to Herbst for the Elias Quartet. Like the ACO, this was a softer and more gentle group than the last time I heard them. Their Schumann 41/1 was light-textured and shining, and so was much of their Britten Second, gnarly though that piece often is. And again, as with ACO pulling out a firmer and grittier sound for their new piece, so did Elias for a new quartet by Sally Beamish. This was inspired by the Schumann, in the sense that Beamish bases each of her numerous short movements on a tiny fragment taken from the Schumann piece. It helps to have the Schumann immediately in your ear when listening to this (in the playbill, they were going to play the Beamish first, which would have been odd), but it's listenable to on its own. Eclectic, but not totally disjointed. For an encore, this proper British ensemble played a Scottish folk waltz with an intriguing air of American bluegrass to it. I suppose that's where that originally comes from.

women here today

I'd just like to point out, regarding this year's Hugo nominations, that 80% of the finalists in the five Hugo prose fiction categories are by women. Eighty per cent. I think that's a new high.

Even in the Retro Hugos, covering a much more male-centric time in SF authorship, counting co-authored stories as half a story for each author, 23% are by women, which would have been a very respectable percentage in the regular Hugos almost any time before 2010.

Vonda N. McIntyre

died today.

The obituaries have a lot, not just about her great fiction - Dreamsnake remains a classic, and don't miss The Moon and the Sun, and much more - but on how much of a pillar of the sf community she was.

In particular, as its webmaster. Among other things, she got her close friend (and sometime collaborator) Ursula K. Le Guin online. That led to many good things, including UKL's last essay collection. Vonda even gave me a lot of helpful and patient advice on layout and design when I was setting up my personal website. Her goal, too, was to help me figure out what worked for me that was aesthetically well-designed, not to push me into a standard template.

And I wasn't even a particular friend of hers, just a long-time casual acquaintance. She was most generous with everybody she knew. A real treasure.