where

I was in a hurry for some reason when I put down my reading glasses, and I remember thinking, "This is not where I usually put them." But where that somewhere was, I now cannot in the least recall.

For several days now, I've been checking every shelf and drawer in the house without luck. I use the glasses mostly for the computer screen. Without them, I have to bring my face right up to the screen - that, or increase the font size bigly, which I don't like doing because I find it choppy to read with fewer words visible.

I dreamed I found them, but I checked when I woke up and they weren't there.

My vision hasn't changed much, but I may have to schedule an eye exam and then buy new glasses. What a nuisance, especially with my schedule already being filled up with medical appointments. I hope they still have the heavy black frames I got these with, because I wanted something sturdy for glasses I was always taking on and off (though not as eccentrically as Derren Nesbitt in that Prisoner episode).

when to hang up the phone

We have a landline, which means we get a lot of junk and spam calls despite being on the Do Not Call registry.

This is not a reason to give up the landline, because I get junk calls on my cell phone too. Most of the latter are in Chinese and appear to be live persons. The last one to call when I had the phone on called three times before registering - whether understanding my English or not - my saying "You have the wrong number" and hanging up.

Many of the junk calls on the landline used to be live persons. I had good luck squashing them by telling political callers that we have a rule in this household: we don't vote for any candidate who calls us more than once. Another oddity was one caller who asked to speak to the homeowner. "They're not here," I said; "they're never here." "I don't understand," said the caller. I replied, "Have you ever heard of ... rentals?" And then hung up. But a lot of callers, whether live or recorded, are from police charities or "the department of medicare" or something, so I just say, whether live or recorded, "Wrong number" and hang up.

What I really hate is live callers who begin by giving their name but then saying, "How are you today?" This is a fine piece of social lubrication to begin a mutually-agreed upon business conversation between two people who each know why the other is there. It is not a good way to begin one where the party being asked is completely ignorant of who the caller is or what they want. I usually say something like "That's a strange question to call somebody up in order to ask them." Then they usually hang up.

However, I'm expanding my rules for hanging up immediately without saying anything.

I'd noticed that calls that turned out to be boiler-room salespeople always began with, after you picked up and said "Hello?" a little boing sound. I think this was to notify the boiler room switching equipment, which probably calls many numbers at once, that here was a live one, before transferring to a person, which always took a few seconds. So now when I hear that sound, I instantly hang up.

But now I'm getting a lot of calls without the boing in which the response to my saying "Hello?" is for the caller also to say "Hello?" Before I established that these were all recorded, I figured it was a boiler-room who had just been switched onto the line and who said this to verify they had a caller. So I would say, "No, you called me. The way this works is, I say hello, and then you tell me who you are and what you want." Then there follows a pause while the computer tries to figure out what kind of response this is. Then they give a name and launch into the prerecorded spiel.

So my new rule is: If the response to my saying "Hello?" is to also say "Hello?" I will hang up immediately. I may trip up some live callers with bad connections this way, but they'll probably call back, like that Chinese-speaker did. I just don't want to waste any more phone etiquette lessons on robots.

concert review: San Francisco Symphony

David Afkham, a German conductor new to SFS, led two wildly unalike Russian works, Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto (with Sergey Khachatryan) and Shostakovich's Eighth Symphony. Amazing that only 65 years separate them.

Actually they do have one thing in common: when they were new, people who disliked them derided them as vulgar. But there was nothing vulgar about Friday's performances. Though there's plenty of vigor in the Tchaikovsky concerto, the overall mien of the piece was soft and gentle, perhaps taking a cue from the soloist, who leaned so far in that direction that the high notes in his cadenza disappeared off the edge of audibility. (And his encore was a soft and gentle Armenian lament that went on for quite a while.)

Afkham did something similar with the Shostakovich, at least in the slower, first and fourth movements. The stark tragedy of these parts in other performances vanished entirely, and it was ... soft and gentle. This didn't stop the more vicious parts of the first movement from being firm enough, or the two scherzi from being fairly caustic. The finale leaned towards the cheerful, but gave full value to the enigmatic ending, where - as with the Fourth but none of the intervening works - Shostakovich refuses to supply an upbeat conclusion.

The result of this combination of fast parts played in a usual manner and slow parts purged of the strongly emotional was an Eighth that felt entirely different from any performance of the work I'd heard before. Weirdly revelatory.

library books to read during long medical procedures

(liable to be the first in a series)

Richard White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (Norton, 2011)
A deconstruction of everything I learned at school about the mighty 19C transcontinental railroad system. First, as I knew well, they weren't transcontinental: they only ran west from places like Omaha and St. Louis. But though the existing system covered everywhere east of there, it wasn't continuous: different gauges, breaks between lines, made everything slow. The transcontinentals were supposed to pay for themselves with freight, but freight trains were irregular and ad hoc, and it was still cheaper to send goods by ship via Panama, even though there wasn't a canal there yet, so financing was precarious. The mighty financiers like C.P. Huntington spent their time bailing themselves out of disaster, and they knew nothing about running a railroad. Meanwhile the people who did run the railroad didn't know what they were doing either, and setting freight rates, which had such a big effect on development of the country, was a guesswork procedure. The main lesson of this long and overdetailed book is that everybody was incompetent, including senators: "In making a case for political compromise, one should avoid John Sherman. If Henry Clay was the Great Compromiser, John Sherman was the Not So Great Compromiser."

Martin Amis, The Rub of Time: Bellow, Nabokov, Hitchens, Travolta, Trump: Essays and Reportage, 1994-2017 (Knopf, 2018)
Trump? Yes, I picked up this book because I'd seen that in 2016 Amis reviewed Trump's latest book and compared it with the 30-year-old Art of the Deal, concluding even then "that in the last thirty years Trump, both cognitively and humanly, has undergone an atrocious decline." (But wait: did he write his own books? "We can be confident that Trump had something to do with their compilation: it very quickly emerges that he is one of nature's reluctant micromanagers.")
Other than that, to appreciate this book you have to be really interested in Bellow and Nabokov, and I'm not. (There's not much about Hitchens or Travolta, or Trump.)

another song that goes like this

at least one war

Of all the croggling statements to come out of the presidential mouth lately, the most astonishing is "We’ve never had a president that solved one war, not one war." That's so untrue.

In particular, in 1905 Theodore Roosevelt was the major figure "in bringing to an end the bloody war recently waged between two of the world's great powers, Japan and Russia." And for doing so, he won the Nobel Peace Prize. (The quote is from his prize citation.)

I'm actually inclined to give the occupant some credit for adjudicating a cease-fire in Gaza and the return of the surviving hostages - all along I've said, if Hamas wants to negotiate, they should return the hostages, then we'll talk; well, they've done it, so let's talk - even if his only motivation is the desire for his own prize. What are prizes for, if not to encourage people to perform acts that deserve them? If only he weren't starting more wars, some of them against Portland and Chicago, then he claims to be stopping, it might even be a net plus. Even though we've been in positions like this before in the Mid East, and it always came to nothing.

reimagining Górecki

When the composer Henryk Górecki died 15 years ago, I wrote a post largely about how I'd discovered his music. Excerpts:

Sometime in the mid 1980s, DGK, explorer of new and unusual music, showed me an obscure LP he'd picked up out of random curiosity. Packaged as the soundtrack album to a French film called Police, it consisted in fact of a full recording of a modern Polish symphony for soprano and orchestra. Neither on the record album nor anywhere else that he looked was there much information to be had on the work or its composer, one Henryk Górecki. DGK was astonished and spellbound by the audacity and craft of this music, and, unlike with many of his passions, when he played it for me I was too. ... For years, this marvelous piece of music remained our secret shared passion that hardly anybody else had heard of, like The Lord of the Rings in its early days. When I began to collect CDs a few years later, I found a German import with this work on it, and bought it quickly. Imagine our astonishment, then, when in 1992 a new recording of it on Nonesuch, a well-known American classical label - conducted by David Zinman - became a monster hit and the toast of the classical world, the first contemporary work to reach the top of the classical charts. The musical equivalent of the Lord of the Rings paperbacks had hit the stands. Suddenly our obscure passion was the talk of the town.

The resemblance with being an early Tolkien fan hit me forcibly, though I wasn't old enough to remember that personally. Of course, we didn't think we were literally the only people who knew this piece, but nobody we knew did and no critics we read mentioned it, so it remained our secret gem. And then, all of a sudden in 1992, as with Tolkien in 1965 its fame exploded and everybody, at least in the field, knew it and was talking about it all the time.

Now DGK has sent me a scholarly (but readable) article on the history of the Third's reputation before the Zinman recording. It didn't have the wide renown of subsequent years, but no, it wasn't that obscure. It was played and commented on. True, some people hated it (and still do!) but it was generally praised and considered remarkable. I guess we just never came across those. Though in fact DGK tells me that he'd gone looking for the record after reading a review in Fanfare, the review magazine for fans of the truly esoteric in classical record collecting. I hadn't known of that alert, but it proves the point: there was awareness and praise of the work.

But the article makes the situation remind me even more forcibly of Tolkien. For, of course, there were lots of reviews of The Lord of the Rings when it first came out in 1954-55, and articles about it later; it just wasn't the widespread popular phenomenon it became after 1965. And, as with Górecki's Third, though there's an assumption that it was generally panned when new, that turns out not to be true. There's an article in the upcoming Tolkien Studies 21 - which is in press right now - called "Reconsidering the Early Critical Response to The Lord of the Rings" by Matthew Thompson-Handell, which reveals that the general early critical response to the book was quite favorable, even among some of the reviews which have gained a reputation as pans. The guy who wrote, "This is not a work which many adults will read through more than once"? That's taken totally out of context and does not express what he meant. Read Thompson-Handell's article and you'll see.

concert review: SF Music Day

Today I did get up to the City early on. But as I didn't need to be there until 12.30 instead of 10.00, it was easier.

The topic was SF Music Day, an annual event I'd never heard of before. The promoters take over the Veterans Building for an afternoon, presenting 6 events (each slightly less than an hour) in each of three concert spaces in the building. Times are coordinated, so attendees can hop from one room to another, but I didn't. Most of the items in Herbst Theatre, the main space, were jazz-oriented, so I planted myself for the entire afternoon in the cavernous and echoing room on the second floor where the classical performers were. The acoustics were fine for the music, but it was difficult to make out any spoken words from anybody.

The highlights came at the end. Pianist Elizabeth Schumann thundered her way through Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition and loaded it with enough tone color that an orchestration seemed superfluous. Then she surprised everybody by choosing for an encore Gershwin's "Embraceable You," but encores have a long tradition of clashing strongly with the main work. Then Schumann came back with four of her colleagues from Ensemble San Francisco for an energetic and catchy run through Dvořák's Op. 81 Piano Quintet.

The day had begun with the Benicia Chamber Players, who regularly perform on both sides of the Carquinez Strait, in two movements from Schubert's "Rosamunde" Quartet, the work I missed yesterday, and a squeaky squawky work by Gabriella Smith. Then some of the young chamber musicians who are the subjects for master classes at Kohl Mansion played movements from string quartets and piano quartets by the Viennese classicists.

In between these and the closing numbers, we got a couple more varied groups. The Turas Ensemble is two barefoot sopranos who sing ethereal versions of I know not what, because I couldn't make out any of their spoken explanations of what they were doing, or their lyrics either. Some songs unaccompanied, some with dulcimer or hurdy-gurdy or whatnot. And the Berkeley Choros Ensemble play instrumental popular music from Brazil, rather pleasant to listen to and moving enough to encourage one older couple to get up and dance, or at least sway together, to the music.

Getting out of a concert in the City at 5.45 on a Sunday - not Friday or Saturday when places would be crowded - would ordinarily be a perfect time to seek out a restaurant for dinner. But today I felt no urge to do that, and went straight home instead, where I'm partaking what I ought.

two concerts in a day

It was going to be three, but going up to the City for a morning string quartet event and then dashing back down here for the afternoon seemed a bit much to attempt in the current state. So two it was, both community orchestra events in my local area.

The Winchester Orchestra under James Beauton essayed a Halloween concert. It had both Danse Macabre (excellent solo work by concertmaster Bill Palmer) and Night on Bald Mountain (the old, Rimsky-edited version of Mussorgsky's score). It had Stokowski's arrangement of Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, favorite music of evil scientist organists everywhere. The orchestra struggled with the beginning of the fugue. It had a dance from The Firebird, and they struggled even more with that. It had music from two movies, Psycho (with the conductor making a stabbing motion with the baton when we got to that scene, as if the music wasn't clue enough) and The Mummy Returns. And we had a ten-minute précis of Johan de Meij's Lord of the Rings Symphony in an orchestrated version (the original is for concert band). It summarized up three of the five movements: Gandalf, Lothlórien, and Hobbits, and they did that one very well.

The Palo Alto Philharmonic under Lara Webber began with Of Paradise and Light by Augusta Read Thomas for strings, a weak echo of Barber's Adagio, and continued with the Suite for Viola and Small Orchestra by Vaughan Williams. This concerto, for that's what it is, in eight short movements is from VW's pastoral side with no hint of the hairier directions his music was taking by 1934 when he wrote this. But it's not top-drawer VW pastoral either, though soloist Jenny Douglass played very well. For a conclusion, Brahms's First. There was some blattiness, but for the most part this came off lucidly and excitingly. This work is naturally very heavy, but here it was both light and powerful, a nice trick if you can pull it off.

absence

Been away for a couple of days. Not on my favorite form of vacation. Now back. Very thirsty, mostly.