extremely little

Distracting from other events, here's an article, striking off the trailer release for the upcoming Little Women, on casting for this and past adaptations. The writer is mostly fixated on the fact that William Shatner once played Prof. Bhaer, but there are lots of other little-known interesting castings we can find in television adaptations. Two years ago the BBC did a version - only the latest of several from them - with Angela Lansbury as Aunt Marsh and Michael Gambon as Mr. Laurence; an earlier BBC version in 1970 had Patrick Troughton as Mr. Marsh. But the oddest one was a 1958 tv version which was evidently a musical. Margaret O'Brien, then 21, reprised her film role as Beth from nine years earlier, but the really striking castings for the later-day viewer (if there are any: I haven't yet been able to find this online) are, as Meg, Florence Henderson; and, as Laurie, Joel Grey. Well, well.

And speaking of unexpected juxtapositions, here's a historical trivia question for you: Who had, let's call it, personal encounters with both Tolkien and Allan Sherman? You might be surprised at the answer.

the day that came off

For her birthday, B.'s present was tickets for the two of us to attend yesterday's performance in the San Francisco run of The Play That Goes Wrong. As an old fan of Noises Off, I'm always in the market for another play on the same premise (comedy about an incompetent performance of some other play), as long as it's good. And The Play That Goes Wrong is fresh enough and with a different enough flavor from Noises Off that it worked well. We enjoyed it all the way through and laughed a lot.

Of course no cold review could convey the flavor, but I was particularly tickled by:
The actor who writes down on his palm all the hard words in his part, and mispronounces every one of them.
The gay actor struggling to get out of a scene in which his character makes out with a woman.
The obligatory extremely bad acting by crew members drafted in as emergency replacements.
The director/star's introductory speech, in which he prides himself on finding a play with a cast small enough that his company can fill it, in contrast with their earlier productions of Chekhov's Two Sisters, The Lion and the Wardrobe, and Cat.
The point at which he breaks character and yells at the audience for laughing. ("This isn't television, you know. I can see you!")

Mind, I've read grumpy reviews which criticized these same features for being tiresome, so it takes all kinds, or, rather, it doesn't. Everyone in this audience (reportedly Thursdays are particularly good nights for comedy in a stage run) enjoyed it, and the acting (the real acting, this time) was energetic and wonderfully deadpan. My only complaint is that the play-within was a country-house murder mystery, and, as with most bad mysteries (including some which fans of the genre insist are good), the plot eventually reached a point where it was no longer possible to follow nor interesting enough to try. But by that point the slapstick had reached the purely absurd, so it wouldn't have much mattered if only it had wrapped up a little faster.

This required going up to the City, and considering B's walking problems I decided to drive: though public transit would have been possible, it would still have meant a lot of trudging around. First a stop at Borderlands (most challenging parking of the trip), then a mile's drive for a long-awaited visit to the KitTea Cat Cafe, where you can purchase an hour in the cat lounge, surrounded by lounging cats which are rather used to all this attention, plus unlimited access to several pots of varietal Japanese green teas. Sipping tea while surrounded by cats is a pleasant interlude. Then dinner at a gratifyingly good Indian restaurant across the street, then a mile's drive to the show.

This was at the Golden Gate Theatre, which is superior to the more prestigious Union Square theaters in being wide and broadly built, so there's a sufficiency of seats on the ground level, instead of the only affordable choices involving peering from a high balcony down onto the tops of the actors' heads, but inferior in being located in the Tenderloin. I don't begrudge the homeless a place to hang out, but that doesn't mean I have to enjoy walking through large crowds of them who are energetically doing whatever it is they do all over the sidewalk. The two block walk from the garage to the theater was more exciting than the play, and that was coming in at 7; leaving at 10 was even more interesting.

This isn't a kind of expedition we make often, but we enjoyed all of what we came for.

Mythcon additional

One thing I didn't mention in my Mythcon report was some of the new people I met. Mythcon has a lot of regulars, but every year new people come, and some of them come back again later. Two in particular this year I hope to see again.

One was Sarah O'Dell, who gave the paper on Dr. Ha-VARD, as I'm still trying to learn to re-pronounce the name. We'd corresponded before, and I gave her the benefit of what research I'd done on the minor Inklings, though on this particular topic she's done a lot more than I have. But this was our first chance to meet. I don't know how old she is, but she looks very young, and is rather amazingly simultaneously pursuing an M.D. and a Ph.D. But she's brisk and natty and intensive enough that I believe she can do it. She'd expressed hope that we could use Mythcon to have a long talk on Inklings work, especially as I have a long-standing dream of editing a collection of essays on the minor Inklings, but I've had a heck of a time convincing anybody to write the essays. But, ha ha, there's no TIME at Mythcon to schedule a long talk. I hope to be in L.A. this fall and maybe we can meet then.

Then there was this man I first spotted sitting on a bench outside the cafeteria. His clothes were very casual, he had a broad-brimmed hat, with long sandy hair and a beard. In short, he looked like a refugee from the 1970s, in particular like the sort of guys who attended Mythcon then. And he was doing something I hadn't seen anybody do since the 1970s, reading a copy of The Well of the Unicorn by George U. Fletcher. Yes, the original edition. (Later editions have acknowledged that it's actually by Fletcher Pratt.)

He turned out to be Jamie Williamson, lecturer at the University of Vermont and author of The Evolution of Modern Fantasy, which won our scholarship award two years ago. When I learned his identity, I hastened to introduce myself as the person who'd given his book an enthusiastic review in Mythlore (and, I didn't need to add, done all I could to promote it for the award). We chatted ad hoc on fantasy both old and new, and fantasy criticism both old and new, and he gave a paper comparing and contrasting William Morris's The Well at the World's End - which I finally got all the way through by bringing it as my sole extra reading on a cruise to Alaska - with The Lord of the Rings. They're quite alike in some ways, disconcertingly different in others. Fascinating discussion, and I hope he comes back for some more.

concert review: Cabrillo Festival

So I say pretty much enough about the concert in my review. Aside from assuring you that the last paragraph is true, and that I felt totally shattered and almost ill after the concerto, the only thing I feel like adding that didn't fit in is that Cabrillo is the only orchestra I know where both conductor and concertmaster play with untucked shirts.

The drafts contained a lot of apologetic material about my unfamiliarity with jazz, but I kept hacking that out. As I attributed to Marsalis, I see the various genres of music as having distinct aesthetic and artistic principles, which explains the common phenomenon of people who love one sort of music and loathe another. It turned out, on watching the hour's documentary on the concerto which Cabrillo embedded in its website, that the approach of classical and jazz musicians towards a score is profoundly different too and that this caused some conflict between Marsalis and his soloist. His reaction towards a query about how to play a passage was to rewrite it, because to him the score is just the reflection of his thoughts, but this was disastrous to a classical performer, whose attitude is that the score is basic. Learn it, decide exactly what you want your bow and left fingers (if you're a string player) to do, memorize and internalize this, and only then are you ready to start building your personal interpretation and expression on top of it.

Even though I'm not a performer, that may explain my affinity to classical. I hate being told to improvise or be creative at anything unless I am already completely confident in doing it in the straight and default manner. Then I have the confidence to cut loose and play around, and that applies to almost any learned skill from dancing to cooking to driving.

In any case, it's easy for me to see classical and jazz as distinct, as my reactions to them are so different. I have loved the idiom and language of classical since the first time I heard a Beethoven symphony, while jazz, though I don't loathe it as I do some pop idioms, mostly washes off me leaving no trace in my head or heart. And this remained true no matter how many hours I spent in my youth browsing in dusty used book stores where inevitably there was jazz on the stereo system. Nor is this because I wasn't listening carefully, because I've certainly often had the experience of having my mind totally commanded by some music I wasn't paying conscious attention to at all, if it's music I have a strong affinity to.

box office from another planet

I had a particularly surreal experience at the box office of the concert I reviewed last night. I arrived at the window and said, as I usually do, "There should be a ticket for me" and gave my last name. The fellow behind the window went off to look for it.

Usually, in these circumstances, when the person comes back, they say my first name in a tone of query, just to confirm it's the right ticket. Only this guy didn't say my name, he said "Bruce?" I said, "No, David," and he said, "It is [last name], though?" I said "Yes" and he went off again, leaving me to wonder who this Bruce with my rare surname who also attends classical music concerts might be.

He came back and said, "All we have is this," showing me tickets with a blank on which was handwritten my full name and "SFCV." I said, "That's me." He asked how I'd ordered the tickets, and I said, "I'm the reviewer for San Francisco Classical Voice. My editor would have phoned the request in." He said, "Just let me confirm this with the director."

While he was off this time, a woman came to the window and asked, "You're a reviewer with a paper?" I said, "With San Francisco Classical Voice. It said 'SFCV' on the receipt the man showed me." She nodded and seemed to understand.

Then the fellow returned, said it was OK and handed me the tickets, but asked, "Just one question: what's your relationship with this David?" I said, "I'm David." He said, "Oh, I thought you said your name was Bruce." "No," I said, "you said Bruce. I said, 'No, David.'"

So I don't know what planet my tickets came from, possibly the planet of the Bruces (Norstrilia?), but at least I got the tickets.

tea leaf

The tea leaf is for the impending Amazon Lord of the Rings-inspired series, and it takes the form of this video, which is essentially a credits reel for the writers, producers, etc. of the series. But it also begins with a map of Middle-earth, and among the credits is one for Tom Shippey with the job title of "Tolkien Scholar."

Now it's interesting in itself that Shippey should have signed on, given that he's pretty much retired from the role of Tolkien Scholar, feeling that he's said what he has to say on the subject and being disinclined to repeat himself. But here he is, and here, ta da, is an interview with him on the video and what he's willing and able to say about the project. Which isn't much. He does observe that the map depicts the Second Age, because Númenor is present. He also notes that some of the names are different, though he doesn't go into specifics. "Calenardhon" was the pre-Rohirric name of Rohan, so that's an understandable placement, but the utter blanks where Gondor and Mordor will be seem problematic. Mordor was first occupied by Sauron relatively early in the Second Age, so that name could be there. But Gondor was probably so named by its Númenórean settlers at the end of the Second Age (see Letters 409), and we don't know what it was called before that, though it probably had the same meaning ("Stone land"). But if the Sindarin name Gondor was only applied then, the same could be true of the other Sindarin names in the area, including Calenardhon, which was then a region of Gondor. Oh, the tangled webs ...

What Shippey does say takes a different angle. He speaks of Amazon having a free hand with the Second Age; that is, so long as they do not contradict any of Tolkien's written material about the period (sketchy as regards Middle-earth, much less so for Númenor), they can make up any additional material they want. But the First Age, which is covered by the Quenta Silmarillion, and the Third Age, the age of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, are "off-limits."

I wonder if that's how it's expressed in the contract. Shippey is concerned with the fact that the Second Age has two parts, before and after the Fall of Númenor, but the question of permitted zones is actually much more complicated than that. First off, The Hobbit takes place in 2941 T.A., leaving nearly 3000 years of very interesting earlier Third Age history potentially available if just staying out of the way of the main plots of those stories is the issue. But perhaps the intent is to leave out any periods covered by the historical material in the Peter Jackson films? The chronologies estimate Gollum to have been about 500 years old at the time of The Hobbit, so that roughly dates Jackson's flashback about his origins. But the battle depicted at the start of the Fellowship movie is at the very end of the Second Age. So is that forbidden to Amazon or not?

We'll find out later on; my only interest here is in pointing out the fuzziness of what we're talking about.

oh yes, Mythcon

After my last report, written in the middle of the night last Friday when I couldn't sleep, on subsequent nights I got more sleep, and was so busy in the day there was no opportunity to write. After a long day-and-a-half drive home afterwards through the high desert, to avoid the LA traffic, I collapsed in bed and was only perhaps fully awake again two days later. Which was B's birthday, so I had other occupations, like taking her out for a pancake breakfast and then fixing our special meatloaf for dinner.

Despite various pre-con planning calamities, the event itself went well with no major disruptions, and people adapted to the odd workarounds we'd had to install, like moving the dorms to a different building, and then two different buildings, from the one where the cafeteria was. Having cafeteria meals limited to a 45-minute time window seemed alarming, because at most buffets you can wait almost that long in line to get your food, but it worked, partly because the site strictly limited the number of on-campus groups eating in any one window, and partly to other techniques like setting out lots of plates with the day's entrees (two of them) and sides on counters, so diners could take one immediately with no back-ups. It did mean you were stuck with whatever they served, but if you only liked part of what was on the plate you could come back and get another.

What most concerned me as con programmer was space in the programming rooms. With three rooms each seating about 45, and total attendance of over 130, it was likely that the more popular items would overflow. I tried to prevent that by scheduling items of similar popularity against each other, and it seems to have worked. There were a few items with a number of extra people standing in the back, but so far as I know nothing spilled out into the hall. My decision back in the planning stage to stick with these rooms was justified, to my great relief.

Two presenters cancelled at the last minute, both due to family medical emergencies (there's going to be more of this as we and our loved ones all grow older, alas); in both cases they had finished papers which we gave to other readers and carried on.

Our late substitute author GoH (due to more medical stuff) Tim Powers had a couple topics he said he wanted to explore, so I gave him panels to do this on. The keynote panel, in which he interviewed three scholars (all women) representing the Inklings, went very well. He raised questions from a professional author's POV for these largely amateur authors, beginning with asking their attitude towards and concern with the money they made from their work. It's a good question, which the scholars responded to coherently, but one which rarely gets raised. The other panel, on Catholicism in fantasy, never really got organized, and expended itself largely in telling anecdotes and jokes about priests. Which I guess is what happens if you put a group of Catholics together without an agenda, just as I've discovered at sf cons that if you put a group of authors together without an agenda, they'll talk about agents.

I was on one panel myself, on the early days of Tolkien fandom and scholarship. As we were each asked to give our background, the first speaker had read Tolkien in high school in 1967, and described having very much a "Summer of Love" context to his experience. I was next, and said I encountered Tolkien when my fifth-grade teacher read The Hobbit to our class in 1968. But it wasn't the Summer of Love or even the summer after, as these were deeply socially conservative suburbs and I had no way of contacting the rest of the Tolkien-reading universe. I didn't connect with fandom or find anybody at school interested in him for another seven years, and they were long years. Where others were captivated by the languages, what captured my interest was the history and timelines. So, when eventually The Silmarillion was published, I was the first person to publish a "Tale of Years" for the First Age, having noticed in the text enough bits like "Fifteen years after that battle, this happened" to piece one together. This data of course all came from the Annals, but we didn't have the Annals, and worked with what we had. That was my first contribution to Tolkien scholarship; later, as editor of Mythprint, I reviewed all the History of Middle-earth books as they were published; and during that period also wrote for Beyond Bree a potted summary of every book about Tolkien that had ever been published, because I'd read them all. At that time they'd all fit on one shelf. Today I have two bookcases full, and I no longer have everything. This work got me invitations to contribute to anthologies, and the gig writing "The Year's Work in Tolkien Studies" after Tolkien Studies began in 2004. When I was asked to do that, I went through the previous year's bibliography I'd be working from, found I had all the books to be covered, and realized I could do this. And it's been on from there.

Evening stuff went well. Saturday in the student union's raked theater, with a brief costume presentation (4 entries, including B with a humorous "what really happened to the Entwives") and a pleasant concert by a folk duo our chair discovered; Sunday banquet in an appropriate hall, with the usual food sculptures to drive the GoHs mad, the Not Ready for Mythcon Players to drive the audience mad (I narrated as usual, with better luck than usual at being able to keep an eye on the shenanigans I was describing), a recorded video talk on allegory by our withdrawn GoH John Crowley (having seen this already, I'd been most concerned about the clarity of the audio, which came out fine), and the Mythopoeic Awards. Scholar GoH Verlyn Flieger was stunned to receive an award for her latest essay collection, but she shouldn't have been: it's a great book. I'm now at home reading the strange and charming children's literature winner, Bob by Mass and Stead.

Had another day and a half to drive home, so spent it avoiding LA. Out to Riverside on Monday afternoon, staying over there in Moreno Valley (formerly Sunnymead, which at least I know where it is), and the next day cutting through the high desert by way of the Cajon and Tehachapi passes before heading down to Bakersfield and then onto I-5 for home in time to feed the kitties.

Shakespeare meme

I've been attending the Oregon Shakespeare Festival for 45 years. Not every year, certainly, but often enough. And I've sought out other productions. I saw Cymbeline and The Two Noble Kinsmen on a recent trip to England, for instance. There may be a couple minor ones I've missed (Troilus and Cressida? I can't recall offhand whether I've seen that), but aside from that I've seen staged productions of every play Shakespeare wrote. The lesser-known plays that most impressed me with the dynamite of a good performance were Coriolanus and the Henry VI trilogy, all at OSF. But then I've seen good productions of almost everything, even Pericles. Also at OSF.

Aside from my period in a Shakespeare reading group at the public library, however, I've almost never sat down and read one of his plays from end to end. Drama is for seeing on stage, not reading in the armchair. Tolkien held it to be a distinctive art form from literature (fiction and poetry), not as an insult but as a principle of classification, and even though it's often written by the same people, I agree. I feel the same way about opera vs. concert music.

phixing phirephox

So I come home from the Mythcon trip (more on the rest of that later) and turn on my computer to discover that Firefox has created a new updated version which is a complete tabula rasa. It doesn't include any of your logins, bookmarks, cookies, add-ons, display preferences, anything.

Panic. How do I get these things back? The new version welcome page indicates you can do this, but I follow the links and it takes me to a page where you sync your display with your smartphone. OK, but that's not what I was looking for.

After considerable searching, I find a help article which purports to explain how to do this. I find it confusing and hard to understand.

Eventually, having worked through this instruction and that, and comparing what I get here with what I get there, I come up with a much simpler answer.

1. Type "about:profiles" into your search box.

2. There will be two profiles. (Use the "root directory" versions only, not the "local directory.") For both, click on "open folder."

3. This will open up Windows file manager boxes for each. It should be obvious which one is the new directory (its file dates will all be today; the other one will have older dates, particularly if you last used Firefox a week ago before you left for Mythcon.)

4. Now that you have these open, close Firefox itself, because you are about to rock its world.

5. Make a copy of the new directory, just in case.

6. Copy all the files from the old directory to the new one. All of them. The help article doesn't want you to do this, because it doesn't want you to be able to preserve your add-ons or display preferences. Ignore this. Do it anyway.

7. Re-open Firefox. Presto, the new Firefox now has everything the old Firefox had.

on to Mythcon

We live in the same state as San Diego, but it would be a long and hard trip as a one-day drive. So we reproduced a previous experience by heading off in the afternoon, dining on seafood at Morro Bay (eponymous rock hidden by fog), staying over in the area, and breakfasting the next morning on Danish pancakes in Solvang.

There is no longer a congestion-free route through LA, even at mid-day, so it was nearly dinner time before we arrived in SD, checked in to our room at the Worst Western motel (gads, you don't want to know, but how often have you been trapped in the bathroom by a malfunctioning door? Just as for instance?) and slipped down to Old Town for a hearty Mexican meal.

Next couple of days were occupied with calling on J's sweetie, tourist stops at the Mission (quite worthwhile) and Point Loma (spectacular view), and above all the zoo's Safari Park out near Escondido. B. rented an electric scooter and zipped about contentedly for the whole of a six-hour visit (including lunch), while I puffed along behind. Tigers prowling, lions lyin', flamingos flaming, meercats meering, and lots of other animals doing what they do.

That brought us to Thursday and the beginning of transition to Mythcon. Noon meeting on campus with conference services for final checkup and handover of keys et al, eventually followed by jolly dinner of early arrivals at convenient Mediterranean restaurant, but the real action proceeded that evening as more members arrived. One disabled member, an old friend, parked in a strip mall lot with no idea where to go or what to do next, turned to Facebook to express her plight. Fortunately B. had some notification turned on and caught this. I deduced which lot she must be in and rushed off on foot to help. With much assistance from the junior committee member, our chair's grandson, we got her car repositioned at the dorm, person and belongings extracted from the car and into the building, to which I had a key, as far as the check-in desk, but by that time it was late enough that I needed to take B. back to the hotel for the night.

After all that rushing about on Thursday, on Friday, the actual first day of the con, I could hardly walk at all and hobbled about, but things like registration were well-organized, and the first program items started of themselves.

Vast sweeping paper on Tolkien's framing by intrepid scholar, invites niggles. New research on Dr Robert Havard of the Inklings revealed not only that, despite claiming no literary accomplishments he left a large sheaf of poems, some published, in an archive, but that, according to his sons, the name is pronounced ha-VARD, rhymes with hard, something apparently nobody in Inklings scholarship had known or revealed.

Panel involving discussion of academic research on Tolkien produced first-time audience member incredulous that his work has been looked down on by the academic literary establishment. Wasn't he one of them, an English professor himself? Afterwards I took this fellow aside and and explained a few things. He mused on wondering where Tolkien got his validation from. "Well, the Inklings, for one," I said. Blank look. Not familiar with the Inklings? Nope. Well, more to say.

Now, much later, I am finding that the dorm's plastic mattresses do not facilitate sleep, so I'm up reporting this.