present to myself

Ursula K. Le Guin, Always Coming Home: Author's Expanded Edition, ed. Brian Attebery. Library of America, 2019, hc, 826 pp., ISBN 978-1-59853-603-4; $35.00.

When Le Guin's Always Coming Home was first published, I reviewed it as "her masterpiece to date ... it rivets the imagination like no other secondary world since Middle-earth itself ... [it depicts] a joyous, happy, mature society without the didacticism, sappiness, or artificial perfection of a utopia."

I still consider it her masterpiece, and her magnum opus, which is why I was so delighted to find that the fourth volume of Le Guin in the honored and authoritative Library of America series, after sets of the Orsinian and Hainish stories, is this one. It is likely to remain the definitive edition of this great work.

First, there is the original text of the book, in all its complex, varied, and extensive form. It's meticulously proofread – one spot where I was sure I spotted a typo turned out to be a correction from the first printing – and clearly presented. Neither the pagination nor all the features of the layout of the original are preserved, but all the words are there (except the publisher's blurb), and all of the maps and Margaret Chodos-Irvine's illustrations are there, in pretty much the same place as typography permits. The recorded music and poetry are not there, but they may be ordered separately as CD or download, and information for doing that is given.* The major change from the original text is that the endnotes after some individual items have been converted to footnotes: placed at the bottom of the relevant page and marked with asterisks. This strikes me as a superior presentation.

There is, however, more. Le Guin preserved and later revised about 40 pages of additional Kesh material: poems, mostly from the women's Blood Lodge; some material on Kesh syntax which will please the linguists; and what from its billing appears to be the addition Le Guin was most asked for by readers: the "complete novel" Dangerous People, the Kesh novel of which chapter 2 appears in the original book.

Well, it isn't a complete text. Dangerous People is described in ACH itself as a "long novel," but turns out to be only three chapters, of which chapter 3 is fragmentary, having been "damaged in transit" from the Kesh. However, chapter 1 at least is well worth careful study. Read after chapter 2 it bears some quietly-presented but astonishing revelations which deepen the reader's appreciation of chapter 2 considerably. So do innumerable footnotes, to both the old and new material, which explain Kesh customs the reader otherwise picks up only by osmosis or here and there in the book's bits of expository material.

But there’s more than that. Editor Attebery has included other writings by Le Guin related to ACH. These include "May’s Lion," a sketch for a short story reimagining a real-life incident from the primary-world valley involving an old woman and a wayward mountain lion into a tale of the Kesh; and several essays discussing Le Guin's approach to fictional creativity and her relationships both with the California landscape and the Native peoples who inspired this story. Most of this material previously appeared in collections issued during Le Guin's lifetime.

But three items did not, and it's their presence here which most pleases me. For all three derived from the 1988 Mythopoeic Conference at which Le Guin (and Attebery, too) were Guests of Honor, and up until now all three have only been seen in the pages of Mythlore, the Mythopoeic Society's journal. To have them available in this definitive edition pleases me utterly, especially given my role in midwifing them all into existence. For I was the chair of that Mythcon, I chose the Guests of Honor and the ACH-related theme, and thus commissioned Le Guin for her GoH speech, "Legends for a New Land," which outlines her motivations and goals behind the book far more explicitly than she wrote elsewhere.

Then there is the panel transcript, "The Making of Always Coming Home," featuring all four of the people on the original title page: author, artist, composer, and geomancer (to find out what that word means, read the transcript). I feel particularly proud of this detailed explanation of how the book was put together. I conceived the panel, arranged for all four of the participants to be on it, made the tape recording, transcribed it, sent it to the panelists for corrections, and finally submitted it to Mythlore where it appeared in issue 65. I had also asked some of the questions which kept the panel going: the first questions on each of pp. 762, 764, and 769 were all me.

Lastly and most preciously, there's the endpaper illustration by Patrick H. Wynne, "The Valley of the Na, looking south near Kastóha-na." The credits don't say this, but this was the headpiece to the publication of Le Guin's speech in Mythlore 56. And in neither place is the origin of this illustration explained. After Mythcon, I arranged for and conducted a van tour of the Napa Valley with an eye towards the places significant in Le Guin's fictionalized Valley of the Na, whose locations I had determined from the author’s maps. On Highway 29, going up into the mountains above Calistoga (site of Kastóha-na in the book), we stopped at a foothill turnout that overlooked the valley. A photograph of the scenescape taken at that stop formed the inspiration and basis for Pat's gorgeous illustration.

And now all Le Guin devotees, not just those who know about Mythlore, may see and appreciate all these things in this most magnificent and worthy volume.

*The CD is supposed to include a copy of Le Guin's original liner notes and lyrics, but the copy I ordered did not. Fortunately I still had two copies of the original cassette, so I transferred one copy of the sheet over to the CD sleeve.

news of web and cats

On top of everything, my personal website was on the fritz. I noticed this before I went to New York; all the host gave was an announcement of a migration. When I came back I found nothing at all. (Nothing wrong with my e-mail, which comes from the same host; just webspace.) Then followed long conversations with the kind of tech reps you expect: their names are Anglo, but their accents say they're from India. I was told that migration had been delayed, but I could be escalated, and I'd get an e-mail in a couple days when it was up. First I got the e-mail but the website wasn't up. Then, several days later, I didn't get another e-mail but the website was up.

Well, most of it. My reviews listing, which would be rather helpful vita material if I were looking for a job, wasn't there. And I needed to update it today anyway, with this review of the Peninsula Symphony. Then I found the FTP [file transfer protocol] isn't working, so I can't update the file. And the host's team that deals with that is closed on weekends. So, let's wait.

I also should try to figure out how to get the web site to reappear on a Google search for my name, from which it's entirely vanished.

Meantime, there's much cat activity at home. Tybalt is a bold little boy, and will jump up on the kitchen counter to lick spills off the stove or dirty dishes in the sink. Now Maia is doing that too. She never used to. But apparently she figures if it's OK for him to do it, she can do it too. The problem is that no, it's not OK for either of them to do it, and they know that, because they jump off guiltily when they see us coming. But there's a reason that the word is "copycat".

However, Tybalt is quite the little charmer at playtime. He makes tiny inquisitive mews (yes, with a rising inflection) when he wants to play, and squiggles around. He carries his plush toys (plus the strings and poles they dangle from) around the house to stashes in different rooms, and I have to hope one of the stashes is around when he wants to play. Sometimes he plays on top of the bed, and will dash right off the edge, or even fall off while squiggling.

Occasionally he is the self-playing cat. Watching him skillfully bat around a small plastic ball on the kitchen floor yesterday, with the finesse of a good soccer player, I thought about making this inquiry of the soccer association: although human players are in most play situations not allowed to touch the ball with their arms, if you're a four-legged player, do your front legs count as legs?

harsh day

The nightmare began Wednesday evening, as I used the aggregator site to search for a flight for my next trip to the East Coast, which will be in about 3 months. I found a suitable schedule at a suitable price, and was taken to the discount broker to ticket it. It was processed fine, but when I went to the airline's site to double check, it had the booking but indicated that it hadn't been ticketed or paid for. But the broker's site said it had been.

It was too late to call the broker, but I spent the next day submitting a series of increasingly concerned e-mails and phone messages to them with no response. I had also called the airline to confirm the status and that they couldn't do anything to unplug the problem.

This morning I called the airline back. I already had the basic info; what I was trying to find out now was what would happen if it stayed in this limbo status indefinitely. (Broker reservations don't automatically expire.) I spoke to three successive agents, and all three absolutely and utterly sucked at customer relations. They kept on telling me things I already knew (like that I needed to contact the broker), despite the fact that we'd established that and I was trying to move on to follow-up questions. They kept blaming me for the broker's problems, even saying it was my fault for being foolish enough to use one. And when I got frustrated at this unhelpfulness, they blamed me for that, too.

Then I made one more call to the broker, and surprise, got right through. I told the guy, who said he was a manager, about all the messages both written and spoken I'd left the previous day, and he apologized but didn't object when I said I wouldn't be using them again. But he also said the reason for the holdup was that the airline's website wasn't processing the order properly. It wasn't a problem with my credit card, as I'd feared. So maybe it wasn't the broker's fault, but the airline's? The man said he'd cancel the reservation and I should try booking directly with the airline. The cancellation went right through, and I thanked him and hung up.

Now, on to the airline's site to discover that I couldn't book the return I'd gotten on the previous booking, and none of the options it offered were anywhere near as good schedule-wise. So I called them again and was able to book it through one of their agents, though it cost a heck of a lot more. Was its unappearance due to one leg being a code-share flight? Was it due to the extra-long layover at O'Hare? Was either of these the reason their site didn't process my original reservation? I was unable to get an answer to any of those questions, but I did get the ticket.

And I like my 5-hour (yes, 5) layover. This should be long enough for me to leave the airport and take the El to some appealing neighborhood in Northside Chicago to have lunch, something I've done before. I was dreaming of such a thing, in fact, on my nonstop flight home from New York. It wasn't at all uncomfortable by the standards of air travel, but I felt intensely restless and itchy, and was wishing for a good long layover as a break. If this makes for a less restless trip, then I may just not book non-stops westbound (which takes longer) from the east coast any more.

indicative vote

So the hapless UK House of Commons, having been unable to find a Brexit plan, or anti-Brexit plan, that a majority of MPs will support, decided in the teeth of the government to hold an "indicative vote," that is, a sense of the House that didn't bind them to anything. And instead of voting on a series of proposals, whose order of consideration might affect the outcome, they took the possibly unprecedented step of voting on all of them at once. Eight varied proposals appeared on the voting paper, and MPs could vote for as many of them as they approved of.

And they all lost. All of them. This only proves what we already knew: that there is no path through this thicket that a majority of MPs support. That means one of two things will happen.

One is that, no matter how many times the House passes a resolution against a no-deal hard Brexit, it will happen, just two weeks later than originally expected, because that's the default course they're on now, and will stay on unless they choose another one, and as we've seen they can't agree on another one.

The other is that somebody - remotely the UK government, possibly the EU, more likely the House - changes their mind. Theresa May's plan seems to be to keep submitting her exit plan over and over until deadline pressure forces the MPs to recognize that it's this or a no-deal hard exit. The problem is that the MPs most susceptible to government pressure in general are also the ones who are least bothered by, and in some cases welcome, the idea of hard Brexit.

But since the indicative vote is intended to be the beginning of discussion, maybe the wise old heads like Letwin and Clarke will come up with some meeting of the minds.

Here's something to think about, though. Here's a list of how everybody voted. I had wondered - did anybody vote against all the proposals? Turns out that 28 MPs - all but two of them Tories - did.

And I thought: what if you couldn't do that? If enough people vote against everything, then of course anything will lose. But surely you have to be in favor of something, even if it's revocation (which was one of the options). What if those 28 were disallowed on the grounds that nihilism isn't an acceptable option?

Subtract 28 from the no votes, and two of them win. Ken Clarke's permanent customs union, which came closest at 264-272, would win at 264-244. So would Margaret Beckett's request for a confirmatory vote, which would squeak through at 268-267. (A number of other MPs abstained on some items and voted no on all the rest; subtracting them doesn't change any additional outcomes.) Nor are these two strictly contradictory, and I wonder if negotiations could start from there.

engrouched

Mark Evanier, whom I read, has so often praised Frank Ferrante's one-man "An Evening with Groucho" show that when it came to town I decided to go see it, even though I'm not a big Marx Brothers fan. The small theater downtown was not entirely full, and I got the impression that his complaints that the audience was not very responsive were not entirely part of the act. The fact is that stage performers of the vaudeville era, where Groucho originated, were very "hot" and fast in their presentations. Compared to today's slower, cooler stand-up comedians, they require a lot of concentration by the audience to follow and appreciate. I was kind of tired out and it was hard to summon up the energy and intense application needed. Some of the puns were new to me, but the jokes were mostly old ones. Good ones, and well delivered, but not subject to bursts of surprised laughter. I felt dampened, and a little embarrassed for the performer, because the level of impersonation he displayed was very high.

The bigger problem is that, while I never disliked the Marx Brothers as I did the Three Stooges, I was never a big fan of theirs, either. (Nor were my parents, who were more of their time. My mother's favorite comedian was Jack Benny.) I learned the Marxes mostly by osmosis, as they were revered by my generation of college students as great comedians of an earlier age, much as (I take it) Monty Python is by many young people today. (And the major Marx Brothers movies were no older then than the heyday of Python is today, and doesn't that seem weird.) I've seen most of the movies, but usually only once each, long ago. In fact, my favorite Groucho incarnation is his avatar as the wily ruler of a late-medieval city-state in Dave Sim's barbarian-hero-parody comic book Cerebus.

I'm reminded, indirectly, of the many people reprocessing their often intense personal feelings about Michael Jackson in the wake of the disturbing claims publicized by the recent documentary. What causes the reminder is that here I feel even more separated than I do in a roomful of Marx Brothers fans. I'm not reprocessing my personal feelings about Michael Jackson because I have no personal feelings about Michael Jackson, and never have. He's never meant anything to me, and thus ranks in my mind with all the molesters I'd never previously heard of at all. The only song by Michael Jackson I know is "Eat It" by Weird Al. As with Sim's Lord Julius, that's kind of a separate thing.

New York: culture

Did I do anything more high-cultured in New York than visit historical buildings and eat bagels? Yes, surely.

I had three consecutive musical nights out. One I mentioned before, a house concert in a private apartment with baritone Peter Walker and pianist David Alpher to hear songs by Swann and Vaughan Williams, a very fine performance. The other two were more public.

1. Lincoln Center. I'd known this was there, I'd never been in it. A large concrete plaza surrounded by theaters. The Metropolitan Opera over here, the symphony hall over there. And in this corner, one with a thrust stage currently hosting a touted revival of Lerner and Loewe's My Fair Lady, and that's what I saw. The sets were remarkably able in suggesting detail and depth with a minimum of means, and were constantly being flown or twirled on and off stage in an astonishing way (Higgins' house was four roofless rooms on an enormous table, and each would slowly turn to be in front as the actors walked through them). The cast seemed more competent than vivid. Laura Benanti as Eliza had more verve than bite. Harry Hadden-Paton as Higgins seemed almost bland, but his songs seem to stick with me more than most. Danny Burstein had all the energy that Doolittle's songs require. I'll give Christian Dante White the credit to have a powerful enough voice to pull off Freddy's "On the Street Where You Live" without sounding at all sappy. A few points of acting were of note. At the very end, Eliza lightly caresses Higgins' face (when this production first opened, she slapped him: glad they changed that) and then walks off, raising the question, so why did she come back at all? Allan Corduner's facial expressions as Pickering in response to Higgins' theoretical questions about male behavior in "A Hymn to Him" suggest that maybe Pickering is in love with Higgins, and wouldn't that be a kick?

2. At a medium-sized theater on the Upper West Side called Symphony Space, the Irish Arts Center in collaboration with Carnegie Hall (on whose web site I read about this, and was surprised then to learn it wasn't held there) hosted the annual Celtic Appalachian Celebration, and it was two days before St. Patrick's, wasn't it? One Irish-American band (The Green Fields of America: 2 fiddles, mandolin, accordion and concertina), one Appalachian bluegrass band (The New Ballard Branch Bogtrotters: fiddle, banjo, mandolin, guitar, and string bass), and assorted other musicians including a black bluesman (Jerron Paxton), played separately and multi-culturally together. Also accompanied by some free and easy Irish dancing. This was Irish dancing as I saw it at folk events in the 70s: while yes, it's all about the feet, they do still move their arms around freely, not hold them stiffly by the side like those weird Riverdance people did. A fairly genial and friendly evening.

And books: paid brief visits to Argosy and Shakespeare on the Upper East Side, which enabled me to eat up there too; Academy Records, which I escaped without anything; and two lengthy delves into the Strand, meeting up with DGK for lengthy abstruse discussions, and taking out two literary essay collections, the sort of book they're best at in there.

New York: more posts about buildings and food

NYC is strange territory to me. I've not been there often; this was my first visit in over a decade, and its six days is by far the longest I've ever spent there at a time. I actually feel more comfortable in, know better, and have spent more time in London. But this visit gave me enough time to get to know at least Manhattan, which apart from going to and from airports I never left. For one thing I finally began to figure out the subways, and only found myself on the wrong platform twice in the whole trip.

Touristing besides the Morgan Library: Theodore Roosevelt birthplace. Exact replica of the original building, filled with original and period furnishings. Excellent tour focusing on the development of TR's political and moral philosophy (very liberal, by today's standards) from his parents' training. // Federal Hall. Site of the US capitol when that was in New York in the 1780s, but not the same or a replica building, but a tomb-like early 19C Greek temple. A few museum exhibits in the corner, but not much. // Fraunces Tavern. Original 18C building, major social center in its time, as explained in the fine museum upstairs. Lots of interesting period artifacts. One dining room is where Gen. Washington said farewell to his officers at the end of the Revolutionary War (as recounted in a memoir by Benjamin Tallmadge, his head of intelligence). Restaurant downstairs, serving modern (not period) bar food, good place for lunch.

Food: Besides 18C tavern and British-style pub, I ate Chinese, Thai, and Korean (all quite good), and soul food in Harlem (highly-touted restaurant, not good at all). But the function of eating in New York was to try the city's specialties and compare them to the versions available back home.

Delis: Not many of these left, actually. 2nd Ave Deli (no longer on 2nd Ave) had impressively soft and tender matzo balls, kishke (rarely seen, too big and heavy a lump to finish), brisket that was too dry, and was out of tongue pastrami, which I'dve liked the nerve to try. Not really a match for the good delis in LA; SF is more variable. Didn't get to Katz's this time, though I remember it fondly from past visits. The winner was Pastrami Queen, a tiny establishment oddly located on the Upper East Side. Claims to have the best pastrami in New York, and it was both tasty and impressively tender.

Bagels (a separate item): From a list of the five best bagels in New York, I tried two. Black Seed Bagel was no more than OK. Absolute Bagel, way up the Upper West Side, however, is as good as any I've had: crunchy outside, soft and chewy inside. Yes, more than a match even for Izzy's in Palo Alto, my go-to home for bagels.

Pizza: Of the seven great pizzarias in Jon Stewart's famous rant about New York pizza, so far as I could tell from their web sites only Joe's serves pizza by the slice,* so since I was on my own and have to limit my pizza intake, it was the place to go. And it was good, but ... better than the slices from Pizza My Heart back home in California? No. Just a light basic pizza, notable mostly for startlingly fresh tomato sauce, to which the toppings added little and even got in the way. Connoisseurs supposedly eat it plain, and I can see why.

*I wasn't going to tramp around and check in person, and phone them? And try to make out what's shouted at me unintelligibly over the noise of a New York pizza parlor? No thanks.

seen at the Morgan

The Tolkien exhibit at the Morgan Library was open to a free viewing by anyone attending the Saturday conference for an hour before it started, but I decided to avoid the crowds and the rush by coming in on Thursday. Not only was the exhibit smaller and hence more easily grasped than the monumental one in the Bodleian, it was also better lit. It occupies the single exhibit room up on the second floor of the building. I spent a couple hours wandering around it, taking it all in.

At one point a docent tour came in at the start of the exhibit, and I tagged along to hear what it would say. Persistent small factual errors were hilarious but insignificant, so I didn't attempt to correct them, not even the repeated references to Tolkien's guardian as "Father Brown," which is most famously the name of a G.K. Chesterton fictional character. It was particularly strange to get the name wrong in the Morgan Library, as that was in fact his name.

The Morgan of the library, though - no relation - was the famous financier J.P. Morgan, who had the original wing of this building built to house a sumptuous office where he could display and gloat at his treasured paintings and rare books. The office is now open for viewing, and made a better sight than the overly precious modern art in the other new display galleries. The office is lined with valuable Italian Renaissance paintings, interspersed with two of J.P. glaring down at himself. "I celebrate myself, and sing myself," I murmured, quoting Whitman, as I gazed upon this spectacle. To the side, now open for all to see, is the hidden vault, the size of Imelda Marcos's closet, where J.P. kept his most valuable treasures to gloat on in private.

in the company of cats

I came home from a quick visit to the library to find that a reply, fortunately unsent, had been opened to the e-mail that happened to have been sitting on my desktop at the time I left. The text read:

5v44444444444444444444444jjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkumuuuuuuu

Just so you know.

Tolkien conference in New York

The reason for silence over the last week is that I was fully occupied in the events surrounding the New York Tolkien Conference to which I've previously alluded. Living in a tiny hotel room in the middle of Manhattan, going out every day on the subway to here and there, is not my normal life, and I found the physical strain of so much tromping around on concrete and climbing stairs (escalators and elevators are only occasional luxuries on the subway) to be stressful to the point of damaging on this aging body, so I'm glad I don't have to live that way very often. But my, it was exciting and adventurous while it went on.

The inspiration for the conference was the importation to the Morgan Library, one of NYC's more notable private museums, of the Bodleian's fabulous Tolkien exhibit that it put on last year. The Morgan version is still going on through May 12, and I'd urge anyone interested who's not already seen this to get there and do so.

It's worthwhile even though it's a much smaller exhibit than the Bodleian put on. I'd estimate that about a quarter of what the Bodleian displayed made it over, but that does include such precious objects as the original art for the Hobbit jacket, the working map of Middle-earth for The Lord of the Rings with all its corrections and pasted-on overlays, and the cover of the composition book labeled "The Cottage of Lost Play," the beginning of the first version of the Silmarillion.

Having traveled to England for the Bodleian exhibit, I wouldn't have gone to NY just for the Morgan version (though, again, I'd encourage you to do so if you're in the US and haven't seen either), but I was glad for the renewed acquaintance; and the opportunity to also attend and participate in a Tolkien conference, in the NY series I'd heard of but had never attended before, was the kicker, as the opportunity to attend a Tolkien conference is the main thing likely to get me on the road these days.

The conference came in two parts:

1) Saturday afternoon, March 16, a 3-hour symposium in the Morgan's lecture hall. This had five selected guest speakers from the passel of Tolkienists coming in.

2) Sunday, March 17, an all day (10 am-5 pm) conference, mostly three tracks of papers, held on the 6th and 7th floors of a "vertical campus" belonging to CCNY's Baruch College. This was about ten blocks away from the Morgan, like it on the east side of midtown Manhattan.

Once I learned that the program would include a performance of the Tolkien-Swann song cycle The Road Goes Ever On (more on that below), plus a paper by David Emerson analyzing "Errantry" from that cycle (impressively insightful), I decided to resurrect my old Mythcon paper "Music in Middle-earth", on the kinds of primary-world music I think Tolkien had in mind when describing the music within the secondary world. This paper is fun to give because it comes with lots of musical illustrations. I brought my sound files on a flash drive and, amazingly, it all worked perfectly on the classroom's computer on the first try.

Lots of interesting stuff, but the most enlightening two hours came from 2-4 on Sunday afternoon, in which a vehemently insightful paper by Nicholas Birns on the roles of unmarried males, as such, in The Lord of the Rings was followed by a panel of brief presentations labeled "Queer Tolkien." These seemed to me to be ideal models for the study of sexuality and sex roles in Tolkien's work. Instead of having an agenda of "proving" that Frodo and Sam are gay, in violation of both the text and the author's inspirations, as has been done so often in the past, these all started without agendas and studied what Tolkien actually wrote about sexuality, and seeing what comes out. Chris Vaccaro, convenor of the panel, had introduced the concept of "homo-amory" in his talk the previous day, defined as the demonstrative love between men without assuming either the presence of a sexual relationship or its absence. This attitude freed him from a lot of irrelevant baggage and enabled a clear view. I was also particularly impressed with Yvette Kisor's analysis of Tolkien's actual use of the word "queer", though she didn't have time to give much more than her statistics. She showed good reason to see Tolkien defending the word "queer" from the negative connotations of his time, thus almost prefiguring the recent reclaiming of the word by the very people it's been hurled as an insult at.

I didn't attend bass-baritone Peter Walker's performance of The Road Goes Ever On at the conference, but that was because I'd heard him and his pianist, David Alpher, at a small house concert in a high-rise apartment near Lincoln Center the previous evening. In addition to Road and the Vaughan Williams Songs of Travel with which they paired it, at the house concert they had the time to add a few more appropriate songs by the likes of John Ireland and Ivor Gurney. Peter's strong deep voice made an ideal Treebeard, he enunciated excellently, and he had good control over his high notes, which was particularly desirable in the VW, a work sometimes attempted by tenors who can't quite manage it.

There was more to my visit to the Morgan and to Manhattan in general beyond this, and I'll tell you more about it later.