unlinked

I saw an article (it went behind a paywall when I tried to look at it again) about networking in the absence of in-person networking events. That suits me fine, because I always hated anything promoted as a networking event, and I was always very bad at it.

Networking by computer feels less distasteful, but that still doesn't mean I know how to do it. The author specifically recommends using LinkedIn.

Well, that's interesting, because years ago, before the heyday of Facebook and before I learned to be wary of social networks, a friend recommended I join LinkedIn, so I did.

But I then had no idea what I was supposed to do with it. I got a lot of "please add me to your network" emails from people I knew, but I ignored them because I didn't know what to do with them.

Gradually they stopped and I heard no more from LinkedIn for years. But then a year ago I wished to contact a stranger for professional purposes - on a colleague's recommendation I wanted to offer her a writing assignment - and the only contact info I could find for her was a LinkedIn profile. So I dusted off my account and sent her a message.

All went well with that, eventually (she doesn't check LinkedIn very often), but somehow this managed to reactivate my account, and I'm getting "please add me to your network" emails again, this time from a somewhat more exotic collection of friends.

For instance, I just got one from a very old friend (I first met her 40 years ago, gaaah), whose peripatetic life I haven't always been able to follow but who is now a professor of ecopsychology at a Buddhist university, how's that for having friends who do something different? I looked her up with that specification (her name is not rare), and here she is on video talking about how mentally healthy it is just to get outside from time to time. At this moment that's particularly good advice.

By now I've learned to go ahead and add these people to my network, so I suppose I can keep track of where they are, but I still have absolutely no idea what else to do with a LinkedIn account. Any advice?

telephonery

A rather different story on my reading list about a mysterious phone conversation reminds me of a traumatic event of my early/mid-childhood - I must have been about 4 or 5 - that probably explains my anxiety about using the telephone.

Instead of speaking with my grandfather first and then putting me on the phone to say a few words, my parents decided it was time for me to initiate the conversation. But I was still too young to dial the number, so they did that and then handed me the phone while it was still ringing at the other end.

The ensuing typical grandfather-and-grandson conversation had proceeded for some time before any incongruities in the exchanges penetrated my trusting and juvenile brain.

I was talking to somebody else's grandfather. My parents had misdialed the number. "Hello, Grandpa, it's [very common first name in my generation]" just happened to be a greeting this guy would also expect to hear.

That's one reason that, for instance, if I get an answering message that doesn't identify the party by name, I'm still apt to hastily terminate the call, check the number carefully and call again.

2) You'd think in these days of stored numbers that wouldn't happen. But I still get a lot of calls whose callers take a long time to grasp that they've dialed the wrong number, no matter how puzzled or frosty my replies to their cryptic (to me) friendly greetings.

2a) It never happens to me when I call the number; I'm just terrified that it will.

3) I'm trapped in another kind of phone hell because I can only communicate with this investment through my broker. My broker sends me a form, I call to ask a question about it, my broker says she'll call the company. Three hours later, she calls back. The company thinks I have an old form. I say I don't think so, since it says "Rev. 12.19" on it - also I'm thinking it's unlikely an entire major option has disappeared in five months. She says she'll call them back. Four hours later, I'm still waiting. By now it's the end of the day.

4) E-mail exchange with a colleague with whom I hadn't communicated in several months includes him saying, "Now my entire life seems to be spent on video calls." Apart from the Easter one with B. to her family, I haven't had one of those yet. My first solo attempt comes with a committee meeting in two days. I tremble.

5) I still haven't found my cell phone.

shirered

I suppose I ought to be spending my leisure reading time, like at meals (yes, B. and I sit opposite each other at dinner, each busily reading away: this is what happens when introverted bookworms mate), on some of the new books on Tolkien that have been coming in; but I have to spend so much of my other time on Tolkien that I've been putting them off.

Right now, for instance, I'm reading The Collapse of the Third Republic by William L. Shirer, one of the fat historical volumes I inherited from my father. I read this book, this very copy, when it was new around 1969, when one would think I was too young for thousand-page historical tomes, even ones for popular readership. And it's true that I retain little from that reading, so not being an expert on French history some of this is coming as new to me. The more so as Shirer deems it necessary to back up through the entire 70-year history of the Third Republic to explain why it collapsed in 1940.

For instance, here's an anecdote that would sound goofier in any other telling than Shirer's dead-serious portentous style. In the 1880s the Third Republic was not stable or established. Remember that both Republics #1 and #2 had quickly mutated into Empires, and nobody expected better of this one. An anti-republican general with pretentions to glory (yes, a real guy) spectacularly won a parliamentary by-election in Paris over united republic-supporting opposition. As the news emerged, his followers gathered in the streets, expecting him to lead them in a march on the government offices to stage a coup. (And the government took this seriously: they were cowering under their desks.)

But the general, being French, decided to spend a few hours dallying with his mistress first. By the time he arrived, all his followers had given up and gone home.

[Interruption from cat. I am just a pathway between the table behind me and the floor in front of me.]

A few dozen pages and a few decades later, we're introduced to a rising politician named Pierre Laval. In the personality sketch, we're told that Laval "remained devoted [to his wife] to his dying day." That would be the day in 1945 that he was executed for treason, wouldn't it? But Shirer is going to keep that little nugget of information to himself for a while from those readers who don't already know it, is he? Sneaky bugger.

it's not Mother's Day

Not for us; we're both orphans now, and for several years. *sob*

Yes, we miss our mothers. It's tough to read ads saying do this or that for your Mom, and I can't.

Biggest accomplishment of the day: I submitted my paper. On the new electronic submission system, and it actually worked, yay. Last thing I did to the file before submitting it: changed the font size to 12 and double-spaced it. I don't mind submitting it like that, but I can't write that way.

After my computer glasses and my pocket calendar last week, what's missing this week is: my cell phone. I have vague recollections of putting it on a shelf somewhere, but it's not on any of the likely shelves. Another good reason for not giving up my land line. And another reason: I've been invited to be interviewed on a podcast, and damned if I want the sound quality to be as awful as many of the other guests (so no Skype or Zoom either), and damned if I'm going to spend half an hour talking on a cell phone.

to be continued

We're still carrying on in the lockdown period, but I think the cats - who never went outside even before - are going a little stir-crazy. Tybalt has taken literally to bouncing off the walls - he'll run at an angle, and jump up on the wall to take off in a different direction - and he gets more insistent on playtime, meowing loudly until we acquiesce. Unfortunately, as his most active times coincide with my sleepiest, things don't always go as he wants.

It's also beginning to get warmer, lovely time to be cooped up inside, and not much better broiling outside, and the cats are reacting to that too; Tybalt lying stretched out in the manner of "the cat was thiiiis long" jokes, while Maia curls up like a pill bug.

Our nephew is still doing our weekly shopping, plagued by intermittent shortages: eggs one week, cooked chicken meat the next, frozen desserts (!), toilet paper still going on. This may have to continue for some time. I'm very concerned about premature re-openings, and here is Mr Drum explaining why. And our leadership: he has something to say about that too; the thought that there are still people prepared to vote for this guy astounds me; if you don't like the current alternatives, get another one, or just stay home, which is what you're expecting the opponents who don't like the alternatives to do.

In the meantime, there's rough times for the economy, but there are ways to mitigate the suffering for individuals, if the government is willing to do it, without sacrificing lives in a pandemic, though some claim willingness to pay that price, at least in the form of other people's lives. The Oregon Shakespeare Festival has just now given up on the remaining dregs of its season, which I was expecting to happen, just not quite this fast. Sweet Tomatoes/Souplantation, the last self-service buffet restaurant that was really good (there were some not so good) has announced its permanent closure; I'll miss their clam chowder. One of the local orchestras has just sent out a patron survey asking nervously what it would take to get us back in the concert hall, and what substitutes we'd otherwise accept. My answers will not thrill them: no amount of social-distance cautioning will get me in the concert hall while the virus thrives; it'll have to go away on its own (possible: the 1918 pandemic eventually did) or a reliable vaccine be available, and another chart from Mr Drum explains why: concerts and theater are up in the upper right with restaurants and weddings. I'm keeping my contacts in the lower left and trying to minimize those.

In the meantime, I'm reading, and writing, and more on that later ...

quasigrecian thoughts

1. How about that, I've finished writing the paper I was working on. I didn't expect it to be done that quickly. That is to say, it's a complete text with no more gaps or notes to myself to move this or write that here. It's still over a month before the deadline, so I'll let it marinate for a few days before reviewing it and checking the e-mails from the editor I submitted the proposal to, to see how much I covered of what she wanted.

2. B's nephew and niece from the distant east unexpectedly sent us some cloth masks. They're the slip-the-loops-over-the-ears kind, which is much easier to put on than the tie-the-strings-behind-the-head kind B's sister already provided, but less comfortable to wear. Niece must have made them from leftovers from one of her theme parties, because the fabric pattern depicts the Tardis. I'm willing to wear this so long as nobody beards me with Dr. Who trivia questions. Who played the first Doctor? I don't remember his name offhand. Who plays the current Doctor? I don't remember her name either. Who was your first Doctor? Peter Cushing; does he even count?

3. Joe Biden says, "[The accusations] aren't true. This never happened." Maybe it didn't, but that's exactly what Brett Kavanaugh said, so it doesn't carry conviction. Here's something that only recently came to my attention: Five years ago, Jon Stewart ran a piece openly accusing Biden of being a groper of women: not in an explicitly sexual way, but with an "uncomfortable tendency to invade the personal space of women in his vicinity." Five years ago! The most trusted political commentator in liberal America! At the height of his powers! Why didn't anyone, no matter how maliciously, bring this up during the primaries? It may not be too late to do anything about it now, but it would be ... difficult.
Still, anyone - anyone! - minded to abandon Biden for Trump - Trump! - because of this has their sense of appropriateness completely backwards.

4. Oh, relax. More good music over Zoom, in the form of Beethoven slow movements. The Second Symphony. The Op. 130 string quartet.

5. Meme time: A band that begins with an L, and not a classical one either. Lindisfarne.

performers, ay!

I've mentioned before having felt disappointed with some performance videos created under social-distancing quarantine conditions. This one, though, is just great. And it's my favorite number from my favorite Sondheim, so ...

cheery day

Yes, it's being a cheery day, and that despite the fact that (as often) I didn't get much sleep. I used my waking hours to make enormous progress on the paper I'm currently writing, and digging through one of my stack of documents cubbyholes, in (successful) search for some old paperwork I needed for the scholarly paper, also revealed that that's where I absently stuffed my computer glasses that I'd been wondering for most of the last week what had become of them. Working on the computer with my nose up against the screen, so that I could see what I was doing, was getting old. I'd presumed that Tybalt, who enjoys rampaging around my desk, which is where I usually leave the glasses, had knocked them off into an inaccessible corner somewhere.

Other cheery discoveries of the weekend:

How to cut up bone-in chicken thighs: When I make jambalaya, I usually buy a couple deboned, skinless chicken thighs, cut them up, and brown the meat with the sausage before cooking the stew. But last week the store had no boneless thighs, so I bought a couple bone-in ones. I don't find cutting up uncooked chicken very easy when it's bone-in, though. So here's what I did: par-broiled the meat. For 20 minutes instead of the usual 30 that I take when cooking them as a separate item. That made the meat cooked enough to cut easily, but still left some pink. I dropped it in the pot as the sausage was finishing up, and it browned fine without overcooking. And now I have bits of chicken skin in the jambalaya, which is actually appealing.

How to defrost your freezer: our freezer builds up ice on the bottom, and I've never been able to get it to stop permanently. Usually I partially defrost it every couple months, enough to be able to chip away the ice. But that's inadvisable when the freezer is packed because of isolation. So it occurred to me to try a hair dryer. I blew the hot air at the edge of the ice for a minute, chipped a bit off, tried again. After just a couple rounds, the knife suddenly lifted up the entire block of ice from the freezer bottom. That had never happened before. I put it down, removed everything from on top of it, and picked the block up again with the knife and a dish towel. Moved it over to the sink, where it didn't fit. Ran water long enough to chop the block in half, which made it small enough to fit in the sink. Left it there to melt on its own.

In both cases, I think I'll do it this way on purpose from now on.

postponement

It's official: Mythcon this summer, the one at which I'm to be scholar guest of honor, has been postponed to next year. The Mythopoeic Society's board of directors met yesterday (online, I presume; in my day as a director, the meetings were usually conference phone calls) and did the deed; the con chair had alerted me this was going to happen. I'd already expressed my preference for a postponement over an online event (though we could have an online event too; it just wouldn't be Mythcon).

With the big local summer music festival, Music@Menlo, having also last week postponed itself to next year, that wipes out the last public events on my calendar until the end of September. We'll see what happens then, but I'm not hopeful. What frightens me is not the postponements, but the protests demanding the re-opening of society. I can understand the frustration: the initial closings were just for a few weeks, but nothing was then said about what conditions would constitute an "all-clear." It seemed to me that this would take months, not weeks, but nobody was saying either so or not; I wrote a post back on March 16, just as the shutdowns were starting, expressing my own bafflement over that.

But slowly those questions have been answered, and some people are determined to defy them, some of them bearing guns. Oh, that kind of person. Well, they frighten me a lot more than quarantine does, and indeed I may have to quarantine myself all the more firmly now that they're around. Because during the hushed period of April, if I did have to go out, I could at least count on not running into anybody. But if people resume gathering in crowds, how am I to maintain my distance? Because so far, at least, the virus is still around. It might withdraw over the summer, but that has to happen first. Remember that you wear a cloth mask, not to protect yourself, but to protect other people from you. If others aren't wearing them, what price one's own safety? Even if that's enough: airlines are requiring that everyone wear masks, but that doesn't reassure me, not to mention that wearing a mask for the hours on end required by this isn't appealing. But that's OK; both my flying trips this summer, Mythcon and another conference which already postponed itself two months ago, are out, and I have nowhere to go for a while.

*

I do, however, have social media in my future. My library committee plans to meet on Zoom next week, and my scholars' group has opted for WebEx the week after that. There's no camera on my desk computer (or B's), but my tablet has one, so I loaded the apps onto it, and my brother - who's been teaching law school classes on Zoom for half a term now - and I tested it out yesterday. It appears to have bandwidth problems on such a low-powered device, let's just say that. Going into another room in search of a stronger WiFi signal, I found Maia lounging on the floor, so the cat made a cameo appearance on Zoom. I'm less pleased with my own appearance: I tend to hold the tablet close and below, so my face fills the screen and, even though I keep my beard short, it makes me look like Fidel Castro. I started calling my brother Raúl.

I attempted to watch a play whose production had been moved to Zoom. I didn't watch it on Zoom: the recording had been put on Vimeo. But I didn't last long: the tinny and stuttering sound quality and the awkwardness of the group video display might be tolerable for a meeting, but a play is for entertainment, and this got in the way of my appreciation.

I had more luck with a more standard stage recording, the National Theatre's Twelfth Night last week. (This week they're doing the Frankenstein with Benedict Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller, but I have no taste for Frankenstein right now.) For this production, they figured that since Olivia has abjured men, her servants should all be women, so the play had characters named Fabia and Malvolia. Malvolia? Still, the performer (Tamsin Greig) did a great depiction, and I count this a good production of my favorite Shakespeare comedy.

alternative universe III

Oh, it's about time for another monthly list of concerts I'm not attending because they're canceled.

Thursday, May 7: San Francisco Symphony, Davies
On my series, because otherwise I'm not sure I'd want to sit through the same Nicola Benedetti playing the same Marsalis Violin Concerto that I heard last summer at Cabrillo again. Maybe I would have shown up at intermission just to hear the Symphony from the New World instead. Some pieces I do enjoy hearing again.

Friday, May 8: Music at Menlo, St. Bede's Church
This was going to be their latest off-season theme concert, this one on "The Soul of the Americas." Lisa Irontongue had already reamed them out for programming no women and saving a lot of space for pseudo Latin American music by Copland and Gershwin. So how I was going to review this thing after that, I don't know. Now I don't have to.

Saturday, May 9: Symphony Silicon Valley, California Theatre, San Jose
Mixing the Lutoslawski Concerto for Orchestra, definitely one of his more interesting works, with the Brahms Violin Concerto and, oh well, the Haffner Symphony (by all odds my least favorite Mozart symphony), made for an interesting program.

Wednesday, May 13: New Century Chamber Orchestra, Bing Concert Hall, Stanford
A potpourri program with a lot of odd stuff, including Arvo Pärt's Fratres, pieces I don't know by both Philip Glass and Michael Nyman, a movement fro Karl Jenkins' The Armed Man, and an arrangement for strings of both Mars and Jupiter from Holst's The Planets, what an odd concept. I was looking forward to this one.

Thursday, May 14: San Francisco Symphony, Davies
I was thinking of scoring an extra ticket to this, because it looked so appealing. MTT conducts, Yuja plays the Brahms First Concerto, bang and crash. Also, the Sibelius Fifth, and after what MTT could do with subtler Sibelius works, I was expecting to be amazed by this tub-thumper.

Friday, May 15: Peninsula Symphony, San Mateo PAC
I was considering this as an alternative for a Daily Journal review from the NCCO. But I'm not sure why: the Dvorak Cello Concerto and Tchaikovsky's Fourth are pretty basic and often-heard stuff.

Saturday, May 16: Chamber Music Silicon Valley
I was up to review this for SFCV, but the page had already disappeared from CMSV's flaky website before the cancellations came out. I remember that this was going to include a chamber-music arrangement of a Beethoven symphony, and they were going to survey their audience to determine which symphony. Hey, how about the Ninth?

Sunday, May 17: St Lawrence String Quartet, Bing Concert Hall, Stanford
Or was it this concert I was going to review? I can no longer be certain. Oh, another Golijov commission. The last time they tried to play one of these, he didn't get the piece finished before the concert, and I got to review what sounded like the fragmentary sketch it was. And a Haydn, and, omg, the Amy Beach Piano Quintet, must we?

Sunday, May 31: Masterworks Chorale, Grace Lutheran Church, Palo Alto
Another possibility for a DJ review, and this one B. would like. It's an American song program with Copland's Old American Songs, excerpts from West Side Story, and more.