book discussed

A Master of Djinn by P. Djèlí Clark (Tor)

Spoilers for the first chapter and (but not too explicitly) the ending

This was our Mythopoeic Society book discussion topic for today's meeting, and I read the whole thing (well, with a lot of skimming in the middle). That's a test that few novels pass for me these days, but I don't consider it a very high bar. So while the world-creation was provocative and fairly well-done, I didn't find this a satisfying read because the plot and characters weren't very interesting.

The opening chapter is entirely different from the rest and promised a different book from what we get. It introduces us, in some detail so we think he'll be a major character, to a man, an Englishman living in Cairo in 1912, mostly among other expatriate English. Clearly, too, this is an alternate universe, with magic and advanced technology that puts Egypt, not Europe, at the top of the civilized world.

But then it turns out that the chapter is going to depict a mass murder and our viewpoint character is one of the victims. Apart from references to some paperwork he left behind, that's the last we ever hear of him.

More glaring is this at the end: "... their screams filled the room. Not just their screams, Archibald realized. Because he was screaming too."

Oh, come on. You don't incidentally notice that you're screaming. You're screaming because you're in terrible pain or distress, and that should be occupying all your attention. It's weirdly emotionally detached sentences like this that make me wonder if the author has ever met a human being.

Also really, really annoying to me is references to a character, one of the expatriates, who is called both "Lord Alistair Worthington" and "Lord Worthington." You can't be both. Later we're told he was the younger son of a duke, so the former is correct, the latter is not. Christ, if Clark had only read the stories of Lord Peter Wimsey, who is also the younger son of a duke, he'd know that the character is always called "Lord Peter" for short, never "Lord Wimsey." Same should apply here. And don't tell me "it's an alternate universe." There is nothing in this universe that explains why the centuries-old established rules of British noble nomenclature should be changed to match the ignorance of an American author.

At this point, everyone you've met being dead except the (unidentified) murderer, the story switches gears and becomes a police procedural detective story to identify and arrest that murderer. This is where it started to bore me. I don't read formula mystery novels (I only like Sayers insofar as her books aren't mysteries), I'm not interested in plodding investigative work to piece together clues. I didn't find the detective very attractive or interesting, nor her partner, nor her girlfriend. It goes on for quite a while. I took to skimming a lot.

Eventually a character previously noted for being a wallflower is revealed as the villain and suddenly erupts into a monstrous wielder of powerful magics who meets an end when the magics turn on the wielder in what should make a spectacular light & magic climax when this book becomes an animated movie.

A lot of the characters are not humans, they're djinn. They're kind of a lower-class servant caste. I was reminded disturbingly of American Blacks in the Jim Crow era. There are some scenes of "hey, your best friend might be a djinn in disguise" and "djinn have feelings too" but I saw nothing to suggest that we should feel really uncomfortable with the second-class citizen bit. Making it worse is the presence of some American Black proto-jazz musicians hanging out the way in our world they hung out in Paris. They like being in Cairo because there's no Jim Crow there. Well, not for Blacks.

Kaiser Wilhelm II is in town for some conference and makes a couple cameo appearances. He doesn't much resemble the original, who was the Donald Trump of the turn of the 20C.

This book is a finalist for the Hugo Awards this year. Well, worse novels than this have actually won the Hugo, but it doesn't encourage me to read the other finalists.

concert review: Redwood Symphony

This was just a pretty good concert, not much more to say than that. This conductor's last outing in Tchaikovsky did not turn out very well, but whatever his problems with that composer, he solved them here. Yeah, pretty good show.

morning after an election

California had its primary election yesterday. It came on with a bit of a start to me, as we'd long since cast our votes, dropped off our ballots, and got e-mails saying they'd been counted, and didn't pay any attention to the actual election day.

Necessary background: We have a top-two primary system here. All candidates regardless of party run in the same primary, and the two who get the most votes, regardless of party, compete in the general election in the fall.

But here's a wrinkle I didn't know. I was reading a news article about some of the local races - county offices and such - and it said, "To win outright in those races and avoid a runoff, a candidate must collect more than 50% of the vote."

I didn't know we did that. But which races does that apply to? I mean, Governor Newsom is getting 56% of the total vote in his re-election race, but surely he's not going to avoid a runoff. (In Louisiana, the other state which has these "jungle primaries," he would.) In fact, the articles are already talking about which shrimp is going to take him on: it'll be one who got 17% of the vote - 17%! - a Republican state senator from Lassen County. That's about as obscure a locale as we've got.

So where does the "avoid a runoff" provision apply and where does it not?

away, foul temptation

I just got an announcement: the Garden of Memory is returning this year. That's the annual spring solstice walk-through concert at the Chapel of the Chimes in Oakland, that I started going to about 15 years ago and have always had a fabulous time.

It ceased with the pandemic, of course, but this year they're doing it again. Vaxx and masks are required, but still ... it's awfully crowded and stuffy (not much air circulation) in there, and you're sitting around for four hours, and the virus is no respecter of vaccination: that just increases the probability you'll have a mild case.

I so want to go again, but this one, I think: better not.

concert review: San Francisco Symphony

I had given some thought to getting a ticket to last week's SFS concerts, but decided not to bother, until my editors pinged me at the last minute and asked me to review it. (I'm almost always available, so I make a good backup when the regular people have to cancel.)

I am so glad I went. I have rarely enjoyed a new work, even by the same composer, as much as I did the Piano Concerto by Mason Bates. I remember how skeptical I was of his work when I first heard it 15 years ago, and then of how each subsequent new work has improved vastly. The great part of sitting in the reviewer seats in the VIP section of the main floor is that I was literally right in front of Mason Bates. When his piece ended I got immediately to my feet, turned around, and said, "That was your best work yet!"

So I want to assure you that I drafted my review entirely from my notes and memories without any outside influence, because only then did I read Kosman's review in the Chronicle. To no surprise from me, he didn't like the concerto, but he was impressed by the other new work, by Lotta Wennäkoski, in a way that I was not. So I added a few comments that, without saying so explicitly, are a direct reply to Kosman.

What bothered Kosman about the concerto was that it presented itself as a little tour through musical history without sounding much like the periods it was intended to show. Well, I'd figured out that it wasn't supposed to, and already had that in the review, saying among else that "Bates is writing not pastiche but impressions." What I added to that was the comment that "listeners who find the concept distracting should ignore it; it will only confuse them." That listener I'm referring to is Kosman, the point being that he's hung up on the concerto not being what it's not trying to be.

Not only had I noted that the orchestra didn't sound much like the historical periods, but the piano was even less so. When I wrote that in one movement the piano was "at least as reminiscent of cool jazz-pop pianism as of anything older," I was thinking of Vince Guaraldi, but I didn't mention his name both to save space and because he's one of the few composers in that style I know. Another section, I said, was "of a soft-jazz cast," of which all I need say is that before the term "new age music" was invented, "soft jazz" is what it was usually called.

What made me sure that Kosman was being intellectually dishonest was his claim that "the opening movement is less reminiscent of the actual Renaissance than of second-tier imitations by such 1970s prog-rock bands as, well, Renaissance." In the first place, there's not enough Renaissance-era evocations in Bates's piece to justify this kind of differentiation. In the second, I know the work of the prog-rock band Renaissance, I know it very well, and despite their name they did not go around imitating Renaissance-era music. That's a cheap shot, and an ignorant one.

On the other hand, Kosman was enraptured by Wennäkoski's use of a theme from an opera by the earlier Finnish composer Ida Moberg. This didn't work for me. I'd already written that the full presentation of Moberg's theme was undigested and didn't fit with the remainder of Wennäkoski's work. In reply to Kosman's remark about Wennäkoski quoting the theme in her own melodic fragments, I added, "if the listener doesn’t know it thoroughly, then the references mean no more than the implications in the Bates." So there. Everyone's entitled to their own opinion, and their own judgment, but somebody has hold of these works entirely by the wrong end of the stick, and I don't think it's me.

congraduations

To our niece's son, who just graduated from high school. (He's going to Case Western in the fall.) (He's planning on being an engineer, like all three of his uncles.) (But not like his parents, who are an accounting executive and a psychologist.) This is the grand-nephew whose birth announcement was one of my first LJ posts, so that's how you measure time passing.

Mom, as is her wont, threw a party to celebrate. This was not the typical family holiday party. For one thing, she hired a local taco vendor that does catering, and they set up their portable grill on the back porch, where they made fresh tortillas on the spot and sizzled up little carne asada, pollo, or carnitas tacos to order for no extra charge. Very tasty. I didn't have to seek out any dinner before heading off to the concert I was reviewing ... more on that later.

Another thing she rented was a karaoke machine. This was my first close-up encounter with one of these. Judging from the songs that other guests, mostly younger, were singing, there wouldn't be anything on it that I knew, but someone showed me the massive catalog of the contents, and sure enough, there were. Later B. commandeered it and sang a few show tunes like "Anything Goes" and "Cabaret", but in the meantime I looked up a few of my favorite popular-music bands and found that exactly one of them had exactly one song in the catalog. It was "All Around My Hat" by Steeleye Span. I thought I could sing that, so I gave it a try. I had the usual amateur's difficulty of matching my pitch to an actual backing track, but I only sang about half the song, spending the other half arguing with the cheat screen's terrible mistranscriptions of the lyrics.
But on the catalog's "new additions" list I found something that B. and I could do as a duet. It was "We Don't Talk About Bruno." That was fun. That went well. I'd do that again. Note to self: If ever forcibly dragged up to a karaoke machine, demand an appropriate duet partner and sing "We Don't Talk About Bruno."

theater review: The Odd Couple

I've gone occasionally to the Tabard Theatre, a small company that performs in a rickety old building off San Pedro Square in downtown San Jose, when they're doing something interesting. I enjoyed their all-female 1776 some years ago, and a serious play about an infamous 1930s murder and lynching that occurred right here in town.

This month they're doing Neil Simon's The Odd Couple, which I've seen performed before, so I knew at least the script was good. Going there was a strangely bifurcated experience. San Pedro was hopping: there was a deafening drum kit (sounding like the kind employed by college marching bands, without the band) playing outside the restaurant where I tried to have a quiet dinner, and when I got out at 10 PM the crowds around the bars were seething even though it was only Thursday.

And none of them had a mask on, of course (though it was required in the theater audience). This is how the virus spreads, children. A relevant sight when I was up in the City on Friday (what I was doing there will wait for later) was a man wearing a t-shirt reading "That which doesn't kill you, mutates and tries again." Despite this grim but accurate sentiment, he didn't have a mask.

What made this bifurcated is not just the mask dichotomy but that, despite the crowds outside, the theater was nearly deserted. Maybe they should do fewer performances, as even the small space (would seat maybe 100) had few patrons: there were only 11 people in the audience.

Nevertheless the actors were fully professional and put their all into the performance without becoming frantic about it. I laughed as much as I could (knowing the show meant no real surprises) and clapped and cheered loudly at the end. Looking at it from a review perspective, I really liked the Oscar, a husky fellow who was quick and sarcastic. Felix, though tall and thin and thus physically appropriate for the part, didn't seem to inhabit it quite as much, though Felix's carryings-on (his honkings to blow out his ears, his cries of pain at any physical strain) were well-done. The rest of the cast (the poker players and the Pigeon sisters) were not quite up to the leads' level as part-players, but they were all competent actors, and distinctly individual both in looks and behavior.

It's playing through Sunday matinee, and again next weekend Thursday-Sunday. Locals, why don't you go and give this little neighborhood company a deserved boost?

dentistry as industrial process

All my life I'd been going to dentists in hushed offices in professional buildings. Each hygienist had a personal station inside an individual carpeted office with a closable wood-and-glass door, the dentist had his own, larger office; the ambiance was quiet and deliberate, the pace was slow and thoughtful, the buildings were in suburban or hospital-fringe professional centers.

When I graduated out of pediatric dentistry, my parents signed me up with a partner of their own dentist (because he's the one who had room for new patients) and I stayed with him for several decades - even when I was living 900 miles away for grad school, I arranged my dental appointments for when I was back visiting. (If I'd had a dental emergency, I would have had to do something else, but I never did during that period.) When he retired, he sold the practice to a younger man specializing in prosthetic work who wanted a regular practice on the side, and I've been there for several decades. I've always had excellent hygienists: very slow (which does mean you have to sit there for quite a while), very cautious and careful.

Until now. Change of insurance plan on entering medicare meant my existing dentist wasn't covered. Telling them I was parting was an unemotional business arrangement; we were friendly but not personal friends. The insurer sent me a list of covered dentists noting which ones had openings. I picked the one B. has been going to: they seemed as OK as any of the others. My first appointment was yesterday.

It's in a local shopping center, near B.'s gym and a drug store I often visit. It's part of a chain. There's no carpeting. Go through the door from the front counter and there's a long corridor with numbered open bays with dental chairs, the ambiance rather resembling auto repair bays. You're assigned a number, the hygienist comes in, then so does the dentist (a woman, by the way) who gives you a quick look-over. The hygienist is equally efficient, fast and systematic. I felt as if I was part of an industrial process.

They want me to try some things my old dentist never mentioned. They employed a laser to clean my teeth, something else new to me. I have a partially-broken tooth that isn't causing me any trouble. My old dentist had said, it probably needs a crown, but he never seemed inclined to do anything about it. I get the impression my new dentist is not going to be so casual about it. I'm returning in a month to see how the regime is going, something else I'd never had. It's a new world.

the dish ran away with the bowl

So B. reads a notification on FB from "NH Public Health Service" (is that New Hampshire? I'd guess so) that certain old dinnerware may have lead in it that may be exposed in scrapes. We've had ours for over 30 years, which is old enough to be covered (I thought lead was already phased out by then, but I guess not), and it's from this manufacturer, Corelle, so we ordered a new set.

There were some mighty ugly and annoying-looking patterns out there, but we're simple folk and went for a simple pattern of dots and lines neatly around the edges of the plates, not unlike the pattern we had before.

They arrived yesterday and got washed, and my first use of one of the new items was a small bowl for mixing the dressing for Asian chicken salad, which is the one cold dinner in my repertoire for hot evenings like yesterday. Let's see: so much soy sauce, rice vinegar, sesame oil, ginger and garlic ...

cold running crud

So the latest misconception I find one has to guard against is the belief that the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, the gyre where the plastic and other waste that's going in the ocean winds up, is an actual floating pile of garbage.

It's not. Here's an article about that.

The so-called patch isn’t so much an island as it is a soup, however, in which broken-down bits of plastic are like pepper flakes. Much of the waste is pea-sized or smaller and floats below the surface. That explains why, when you’re there, “it just looks like ocean,” said Melanie Bergmann, a marine biologist at the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Germany, who last visited the region in 2019. The same is true for a handful of other marine garbage patches, which form around gyres — systems of rotating currents.

According to NOAA, while there are some abandoned fishing nets and other macrotrash out there, there's no heaps of it and most of the time you won't see anything at all. By the time it gets out there, most of it has been broken down into tiny fragments. The curse of plastics is that, no matter how much you break it down, it doesn't go away, and that's why these patches - and ocean pollution generally, because the patches are really only a small part of it - are such a problem.

But if you see anyone claiming to have skimmed huge piles of plastic trash - of the kind you'd expect to see in your city garbage dump - from the middle of the ocean, it's a fake.