A Mirror for Observers, by Edgar Pangborn (1954)

When I wrote a couple weeks ago that I had borrowed a copy with intent to read, I got a few unsolicited comments from people testifying how much they loved this book.

Well, now I've read it. I didn't like it.

It's the near future, as of the date of writing. Martians have been living secretly on earth, disguised as humans, for thousands of years. Most of the book is the journal of a Martian agent who's been assigned to watch over a 12-year-old boy in a Massachusetts mill town, to protect him from the Bad Martian. The agent is not very good at his job. He misplaces the boy and doesn't find him again until he's an adult nine years later. Nor does this prevent the Bad Martian from carrying out his Evil Plan, although as world-destroying Evil Plans go it's something of a damp squib. (But it's still a major disaster, so making it come across as a damp squib is a monumental achievement in bathos.)

However, it was never clear to me why the Bad Martian is interested in this particular boy, or how the Evil Plan couldn't be carried out with his presence, or alternatively - since this seems to be how it actually goes down - without his presence. This lack of understanding on my part isn't that important: it just destroys the entire plot and character motivation for me, that's all.

Also, none of the dialogue sounds as if was spoken by human beings, even humans who are actually Martians in disguise. This is particularly glaring with the lines spoken by children, even though they're supposed to be precocious children. But then, precocious children are an SF specialty almost always handled spectacularly badly. That, in addition, the Martians don't seem very alien is a trope so common in SF as hardly to be worth mentioning.

John Hertz asked me about this book because he wanted my opinion of the writing about music. The 12-year-old boy has a 10-year-old girlfriend (yes, they get married at the end, after they're grown up) who is a budding piano student, and she bonds with the Martian because he plays piano also, despite one finger on each hand being artificial as part of his human disguise.

After the girl is grown up, the Martian attends her debut piano recital in New York, and this is where most of the book's music natter is located. The one thing that's clear is that Pangborn - who was conservatory-trained - loves piano music, especially Beethoven and Chopin, and gives that love to his characters. The description of her concert rendition of Beethoven's "Waldstein" Sonata is detailed enough that, as I am tolerably familiar with the work, I get an impression of what it would have sounded like. I wish I could hear it.

I got less out of the description of Chopin. The recital includes "the sonata" (which one?) and "the F Sharp Minor Impromptu." There is no F Sharp Minor Impromptu. It probably means the F Sharp Major Impromptu, one of that majority of Chopin pieces I don't get much out of, so I can't judge the Martian's emotional reaction to it.

The most curious comment comes in connection with the music of a (fictional) contemporary composer. (Remember, the story was published in 1954, and this part takes place 18 years later.) The Martian, as critic, contrasts this composer with "the I-don't-really-mean-it school of the '930s and '940s." The reference is presumably to something historical, and I might be better able to guess what school this is if I knew Pangborn's own stylistic affiliations in modern music. As the antidote to this school is being influenced by Brahms, I wonder if it means neo-classicism, as Brahms is smooth and shaded while neo-classicism is bright and brittle, and was thought by some at the time to be mannered and insincere.

But neo-classicism is traditionally considered to have been founded by Stravinsky's Pulcinella and Prokofiev's Classical Symphony in 1917-20, and flourished in the 1920s, so it's of slightly earlier date. The style that most distinctly flourished in the 1930s-40s is socially-conscious populism, as in Copland's most popular works. The reference is unlikely to be to serialism, which began earlier but didn't become dominant until slightly later. So I dunno.

concert review: San Francisco Symphony

MTT opens his penultimate season as music director with a two-week Stravinsky festival (surprise!¹), of which this is the second week's program. Like all Stravinsky festivals, it's built around his three famous early ballet scores for Diaghilev, a concentration of repertoire not appropriate for any composer worthy to be the subject of regular festivals. Regardless, we get two of the three tonight.

I'd be more eager for this if I were more of a Stravinsky fan. As it is, I almost wonder if I really want to go and hear The Rite of Autumn², I mean Spring, again. But I drag myself there because I know that SFS will do an absolutely splendiferous job on this music, which they do. Likewise on Petrushka and the ringer on the program, the 1931 Violin Concerto in D. Leonidas Kavakos saws off the solo part energetically, and it's generally a much better performance than I ever expected to hear of this piece.

As I walk back to the BART station afterwards, the most peculiar sound is drifting out of the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium down the street as I walk by. It sounds like a punk-rock version of Celtic folk, and I find on checking later that that's exactly what it is, a band called Flogging Molly. From behind two thick walls, which is probably the minimum safe distance, it sounds pretty good. At any rate it's attracted an unusually large number of hot dog vendors, cooking franks with bacon and onions on stovetops-on-wheels on the sidewalk outside. If only I were still hungry at 10:30 pm, and if there were somewhere unawkward to eat one before entering the BART station, where food is frowned upon ... but neither of these things is so, so their marketing resourcefulness goes unrewarded by me.

1. I'm being sarcastic.
2. Joke courtesy of B.

testimony 2

I watched parts of Kavanaugh's testimony, and was sorry I did.

Not only did he ramble around into irrelevancies and repeat himself incessantly when avoiding answering questions, he did the same things when he was answering the question, even if the question was a simple one to which we already knew the answer, like "Did you drink alcohol in high school?" (And notice how he danced around acknowledging that it was illegal for 16-year-olds to do.) Never mind the charges, he should be dismissed from consideration for inability to communicate alone.

Also, someone that angry - and that nakedly partisan - should not be a judge of any description. Just no.

And if this were a criminal trial and he the defendant, that amount of anger on display over the charges and the way it was disrupting his life would have any trial judge throwing him in the can.

You want to know what it was like without having to watch or listen to it? Alexandra Petri has caught it.

testimony

We don't have much in the way of cable-only channels, so I wasn't expecting to watch the Christine Blasey Ford testimony, but I found a feed embedded in the Washington Post home page (we have paid access to that paper), and I picked it up during DiFi's time. They're on lunch break right now. Thoughts.

1. Each senator gets only five minutes, except Chairman Grassley who gets to interject whenever he wants. Whenever a Democrat complains about the lack of an FBI investigation, Grassley takes a time out afterwards to defend himself. When one senator (I think it was Leahy) complained of the rush, Grassley said there would have been plenty of time to hold an investigation before Ford's identity was revealed, if only DiFi had been willing to pass that along to the committee. He assures that Ford's identity would have been protected, but he also twice misspeaks and talks about telling the whole world about it, which reveals how much his assurance of privacy would have been worth.

2. No other Republicans have talked at all, so far. Probably wise on their part: no feet in mouth. They all yield their time to the majority's hired lawyer, who - also wisely - concentrates on establishing details of facts in Ford's account. She sounds less like a prosecutor than a neutral investigator. Again probably wise: prosecutorial attacks would probably not go over well.

3. When asked about her reactions to the assault, Ford speaks in the voice of a traumatized victim, which comes across movingly, except when she suddenly switches gears and gives the technical responses of a psychology professor, which comes across authoritatively.

4. Some of the Democrats, Leahy and Durbin in particular, don't have much in the way of questions. They just want to give speeches about how courageous she is, which is kind of embarrassing when delivered to her face.

observation

"If you had told me in the 1990s that, between Bill Cosby and Donald Trump, one would go on to become President and one would be going to jail for rape, I would have got that one wrong."

- Ted Alexandro

ear worm

Hello kitten my old friend
I've come to give you food again
Because it seems while I was sleeping
Up onto my bed you came creeping
And the meowing that you planted in my ear
Woke me here
And caused the sound of munching.

Andrew Ducker found an article claiming that apes can't really use sign language, and that causes me to think about communication with animals, pet cats and dogs in particular.

True enough that, as the article says, my conversations with our cats are mostly about their wanting something. "Feed me! Pet me! Get me a peacock feather! Clean my litter box!" And that there is absolutely no syntactical grammar in any of this. So I wouldn't call it language. But it is communication.

For even if the cats can't give a complex account of their emotions, they clearly have emotions which express themselves in behavior and tones of meowing. And because we live a simple, well-organized life with regular expected events - and the cats get very disturbed when this is upset - they've learned to know whether the humans' actions are proceeding towards filling feline wants, even if there's no direct connection between those actions and those wants.

This second-order understanding is well-known among dogs. The dog gets excited at the prospect of a walk when it sees you going towards the closet, because it knows that that's where the leash is kept. That sort of thing. Cats, certainly those house cats that are responsive to human interaction, can grasp concepts at the same level of understanding.

concert review: Redwood Symphony

So SFCV sent me to a concert featuring a somewhat different iteration of the Three B's. And the review comes out here.

I'm somewhat less than optimally satisfied with how well I expressed in words my thoughts about this one. At least it looks a lot better than it did before I excised excess verbiage. Originally, lines like "His music is warmly accessible and easy to get to know" and "the orchestra proceed[ed] deliberately and cautiously through Brahms's noble utterances" came with explanations of what I meant by that, but I judged them superfluous.

Since it was just about the only appropriate local concert of the month but I couldn't also review it for SMDJ, for them I wrote one of my usual annual season previews, dull to write but I hope a little whetting to read for locals with a taste for this.

Tolkien conference in New York

Here's something that's been in the works a while and may now be announced: a weekend conference next March in connection with the visit of the Bodleian's Tolkien exhibit to the Morgan Library in New York City.

On Saturday, March 16, there will be speakers at the library, and an opportunity to see the exhibit in company of some of the scholars who'll be visiting. (Note: You'll need to buy a ticket to see the exhibit; it's not free as it was at the Bodleian.)

On Sunday, March 17, we'll move a few blocks downtown to Baruch College for a symposium sponsored by the NY Tolkien Society. There'll be a lot more speakers on various aspects of Tolkien and his work, including me. And there will be music!

Details and more links here.

books and refrigerator

I checked three literary books out of the university library yesterday.

1. Three Plays by Noel Coward. I wanted to track down the Coward quote, "Certain women should be struck regularly, like gongs," that Brett Kavanaugh's friend Mike Judge had included in his high-school yearbook page. Out of context it sounds incredibly crass, so what was the context? I'd found online that it was not in Coward's own persona, but spoken by a character in his play Private Lives, but the full text wasn't available to me online. So to the library. Private Lives is a comedy about a divorced couple who re-meet accidentally, fall back in love, and then resume having the fierce arguments that caused their divorce in the first place. The line (about a third of the way through Act 3) is one spoken by the man in the course of one of those arguments consisting of insults and belittlement. It seems to me that to quote it alone, with apparent approval, is to defy and deny the purpose for which Coward wrote it. You can do that, but it should be noted that that's what you're doing. What's the woman's response in the play? She says, "You're an unmitigated cad, and a bully." Say that, if anyone smugly quotes the original line at you.

2. Apples at Night, by H.A. Manhood. I'd come across a blog review of a new edition of this obscure 20C English author's stories, which intrigued me enough, when I saw that the library had a couple of his original collections, to check out one. I've read about half the book so far. They're slice of life stories, mostly set in rural England, with long descriptive passages, and plots based on ironic twists that I'm usually not sure I fully get the point of.

3. A Mirror for Observers, by Edgar Pangborn. Classic SF novel I'd never read. John Hertz had asked my opinion of it at Worldcon, so I intend to acquire an opinion. What John wanted my evaluation of was its descriptions of classical music. Browsing through I see that one character is a pianist specializing in Beethoven and Chopin. OK, I'll read this.

Meanwhile, like Christine Lavin's Mysterious Woman*, I've been concerned with defrosting my refrigerator. The freezer compartment isn't supposed to develop layers of ice on the bottom that steadily thicken until I chip them out and then start all over again, but it started doing that a while ago, and past attempts to defrost haven't stopped it. They (whoever They is) recommend 24 hours, but that wasn't long enough. So I tried 36 hours instead. That required arranging with both B. and myself a time when the freezer could be emptied, and there was little enough in the fridge that it could fit in our coolers along with the ice packs. The project finished up yesterday evening, and so far it seems to have worked.

*This is her parody of Suzanne Vega, and to my taste the funniest song she's ever written.

reading the news

1. It's Anita Hill all over again. That too came out in public after the hearings were already under way. And I fear it will lead to the same result, including the smearing of the accuser which has already started.

But holy weep, I think there's only one person between me and the accuser. B. and I have a long-time friend who's also a psychology professor at the same institute. Her subfield of interest is entirely different, but they must know each other. Cripes.

2. I'm in the "But what about the traffic?" camp about this newsworthy development plan. It's right around the corner from us, we went to the defunct shopping center when it was still open often, and the construction will cause as much headache as the Apple spaceship right next door did.

3. I never thought much of Princess Eugenie, but now I feel sorry for her. Her parents are hijacking her wedding.

4. I always vote for bonds if they're not for prison construction. But this water bond is opposed by a Sierra Club leader. This needs further investigation.

5. Vote for the best Bay Area ice cream. I've only had one of the four finalists, and it was too creamy for my taste. I'd have voted for Three Twins, but it lost in the previous round. But the best Bay Area ice cream, hands down, is Old Uncle Gaylord's. It's been out of business for decades, but it's still the best.

6. Obituary: She shot Nazis.

7. Football player retires from his career at halftime during a game. That's showing them. If only they'd all do that.

8. Disney has somehow gotten its hands on the rights to make a Mary Poppins sequel. Good thing Travers is dead. Note from trailer that grown-up Michael has pulled a Susan Pevensie and doesn't believe in that childhood magic any more. Note also trailer's avoidance of revealing what Lin-Manuel Miranda's cockney accent sounds like, shades of Dick Van Dyke (who's also in the new movie! So is Angela Lansbury! Incredibly old people rule!)