jan howard finder

who died yesterday at 73, though he always seemed far younger than his years, deserves to be remembered as, among other things, perhaps the first, and the most dedicated, professional Tolkien fan. By which I mean, Tolkien fandom for its own sake is what aroused his interest and enthusiasm. He wasn't noted for the creative or scholarly work he personally did; instead, he was the cause of it in other people. He liked to organize things, and he liked to enthuse about them: he organized some of the first scholarly Tolkien conferences in the 1960s, which eventually resulted in a book titled A Tolkien Compass with a couple of dandy pioneering papers in it, and he renewed the series of conferences in later years; the last time I saw him, at the Reno Worldcon, he was talking about the last one he'd done and the next one he planned. (Most of these were on the east coast, and I never had the chance to attend one.) As a general enthusiast, and as someone whose other fannish interests included costuming, he was equally burblish about the movies, and do I remember him also talking about organizing tours, trans-Pacific flights included, of New Zealand? It's just the sort of thing he'd do. It was impossible to criticize or look down on jan for the width and indiscriminacy of his enthuasisms: he was just too cheerful, innocent, and warm-hearted a guy.

Just don't ask me to explain about the wombats.

a thought

What is so rare as a container of plain yogurt? (I needed it for cooking.) Yes, I found one, but - my word.

oboe oh no

But the most moving and disturbing news of the weekend was the collapse of San Francisco Symphony principal oboeist William Bennett from a stroke during a concert, and while playing the solo part of Richard Strauss's oboe concerto, yet. This article from the Mercury News reads a little more full than the SF Chronicle's, except that the latter says it took 20 minutes for the paramedics to arrive. That seems awfully long in the circumstances and considering the location. Time is everything in a stroke.

Whether Bennett will recover remains to be seen. But the incident itself, besides raising concern for his health, and for being a horrible embarrassment, is a musical tragedy, because Bennett is one of SFS's finest players. I would name three in the current lineup whom I've heard perform particularly outstanding in-orchestra solos, and Bennett is one. (The others are principal flutist Tim Day and associate principal horn Nicole Cash.) If he must depart, it would be a major loss.

(One point about the Merc article, where it tells you that a concerto is "a virtuoso piece where the soloist stands alone in front of the orchestra." I'm amused that it was thought necessary to explain this.)

morning after

I didn't watch any of the Oscar telecast: I contented myself with checking up on news websites a couple of times in the evening as I worked on the computer, which is also how I've been following election returns for the past decade.

So, with that comparison, it's appropriate to think of Nate Silver and his attempt to wade into Oscar predicting, a field with no reliable polling and no release of voting figures. He based his predictions entirely on the results of other movie awards, as a substitute for polling.

So far this morning I haven't seen any post-mortems on his predictions - maybe it's still too early in the morning - but, heck, here's his original article. Of the six categories he forecast, he got four of them right, and the two that he didn't were the ones that he acknowledged his data was insufficient for a reliable prediction on, and they still went to high-probability candidates.

So Silver has struck again, even in this unlikely field for election prediction.

My own comments on the results would be virtually nil, as there's no category I've seen more than 2 of the nominees in, except for Best Picture where I've seen 3. I thought they were all pretty good movies, but that speaks more to my ability to select the movies that I'd like than to the Academy's ability to select the movies that I'd like.

all Beethoven with the Escher Quartet

I could hardly believe that I was sent to review this concert. For one thing, I don't recall that my editors told me about it before I found myself listed for it in the master calendar. It's a good thing they sent me only for the Friday concert of the two-concert set, because I'd already made a social commitment for Saturday evening by the time I found out about this.

For another thing: Beethoven, again. Not that I don't love Ludwig. But I have reviewed nearly twice as much Beethoven as any other composer, and this is the third time I have reviewed each of the three quartets on this program. Accordingly, even though I can't associate a given quartet's title with the music in my head as I can for Beethoven's symphonies, I didn't bother to listen to them beforehand, sure that I'd recognize everything in them in the concert as soon as I heard it.

Which was no problem, and remembering some of those earlier performances is what kept me focused on the ups and downs of this one. Beethoven's music is thought of as rough, but he writes some stunningly curvaceous melodies, which are darling when played with the right kind of neatly oiled grace. But that, more than anything else, is what was lacking in some otherwise technically amazing and vividly committed performances. Which, even more than the mention of David Soyer in the post-concert talk, is what brought the Guarneri Quartet to mind. I first heard the Beethoven quartets in recordings by the Guarneri and the Juilliard, the prestigious ensembles of the day, and they played just like this: heavy on the commitment and the energy, light on the beauty and the fun. As someone who didn't know the quartets at the time, I found them hard to get a grip on this way. It wasn't until I heard performances that differed markedly that I got to know and genuinely enjoy these works. Now I can appreciate any performance for its merits, but that's my reward for a heck of a lot of listening.

skip

Skipped the Santa Cruz clam chowder festival this afternoon because, though I like chowder, I didn't wish to face the heavy crowds, or to devote that much time.

Skipped one celebratory party this evening in favor of another to which we'd already accepted the invitation. Celebrated host likes unusual beers. All right, so I brought him a six-pack of bottles of assorted beers, one each from Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. Unusual enough for you? Shared out in sips among the party-goers, the Polish beer went well, or so much I gathered.

And the Oscar for

Best Use of Movie Theme Music in a Cat Video

goes to ...

This.

(Of course the cat was all right! Go ahead and laugh!)

(via a John Scalzi comment thread)

start again

Sustained only by some old notes, I've been writing what I thought was going to be the actual text of my presentation at an upcoming Tolkien conference. I know that I'll have only 20 minutes for this, but I started writing last week, intermixed with a lot of other activities, and I've just now gotten to the start of the main point and I already have 2,000 words.

This is how all my papers get to be an hour long. But I don't have that luxury this time. I have to back up and start again.

add to list of argumentative fallacies

The "shrillness as an indicator of weakness" fallacy

Twice in the last couple of weeks I've come across cases of people inclined to give credence to a fringe theory - in one case "intelligent design", in the other the Oxfordian theory - on the grounds that the orthodox reply to each is "shrill" or "hysterical".

Of course they're not arguing that this is dispositive evidence on the question (the biggest argumentative fallacy of all, one which I've never seen discussed, but would trash thousands of pages of denunciations of "logical fallacies" if anyone did, is mistaking your opponents' suggestive probabilities or triage to ignore the absurd as attempts at logical proofs). What they are saying is that a shrill response suggests that the opposing side has hit you a good one and that jumping up and down in fury is an attempt to hide the absence of a better answer.

But in both these cases, that assumption is completely mistaken, so it shouldn't be assumed to be helpful in other cases either. The shrillness of the orthodox response to both those theories is actually a result of:
1) Exasperation at how totally ridiculous they are to anyone who actually knows the subject;
2) Weariness at having extensively rebutted them over and over again, and finding that they still haven't gone away.

If you find that the orthodox response to a fringe theory is shrill and unsubstantive, make sure you check around, because the extensive and substantive arguments are probably already there, in some other source.

Princess Ida

I got to see a production of Gilbert and Sullivan's Princess Ida. This was about as different from the Stanford Savoyards' H.M.S. Pinafore as may be, because it was by the Lamplighters Music Theatre, and the Lamplighters, though technically also nonprofessional, know emphatically exactly what they are doing. I rarely see their productions any more, because their normal venue for many years now has been the Yerba Buena Center in San Francisco, which is all fine and dandy for an OtherMinds techno-post-modernism concert, but is as ill-suited for the warmth and intimacy of Victorian musical comedy as might be imagined.

However, sometimes they take their productions elsewhere for a weekend or two, and such was the case here. I like Princess Ida, which tends to be neglected: it has some magnificent music in it, and I once celebrated it in a post here.

Star, I think, of this production was the costumes, which, though of a completely default style for this show - vaguely pseudo-post-medieval; imagine an idealized 15th century - were magnificently done within that style. Scenic and costume design by John Gilkerson and Melissa Wortman, so all hail to them and their crew. I particularly liked that the girl student chorus in Act 2, though their gowns might have looked at first identical, were all wearing different styled hats and different colored sashes. It made them into individuals.

As singers, the chorus were loud and clear, and as actors, they were always clearly choreographed and involved in their roles. None of this confused milling around. Orchestra considerably less wobbly than I sometimes heard of the Lamplighters of old.

Ida was Jennifer Ashworth, a powerful low soprano. Her program bio says she's performed Mozart's Queen of the Night, and I can believe it. Hilarion, Robert Vann, had a highly reedy voice, but strong. I liked Florian, played by Chris Uzelac, who strongly resembles Stephen Fry both in appearance and manner. King Gama was played by veteran Lamplighters grossmith Rick Williams, who was just what you'd expect if you'd ever seen him before in anything. Jamie McDonald as Lady Blanche was thin but glowering and imperious. Charles Martin as Arac hulked impressively, and his brothers (Sean Irwin and Jordan Eldredge), though given nothing to do by Gilbert, made good character backups. King Hildebrand - a tough role, as apart from the Lt of the Tower in Yeoman he's the only character in all G&S who is both absolutely firm-minded and entirely competent - was carried with some dedication by Robby Stafford, and I liked the use of some moments between him and Hilarion in the first act to demonstrate that the king and his son share a warm mutual affection. This helps explain why the peppery, impatient king lets Hilarion head off on his unlikely expedition to woo the objecting and hard-edged Ida with flowers and wine.

On the other hand, while the crumbling of Ida's forces, the women's chorus at the start of Act 3, was impressively silly, Ida's own change of mind at the end of the act did not hang together well at all. It's possible that Ashworth's singing simply considerably outdoes her acting.