conversation piece

So I was sitting in the members' lounge at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, having a lively conversation with the young man tending the lounge and a woman of about my own age, who was wearing a nametag identifying her as Susan, a Festival volunteer.

We were talking about reading Shakespeare's plays as allegories, and whether it made a difference if Shakespeare intended it that way. I commented, "A famous author once drew a distinction between allegory, which lies in the control of the author, and applicability, which lies in the freedom of the reader."

"Oh, I like that," said Susan. "Let me write it down," and she pulled out an e-device to do so. "Who said that?" she asked.

"Tolkien," I said. "It's from the foreword to the second edition of The Lord of the Rings."

Both my hearers were impressed with the specificity of this offhand citation, and after I modestly admitted to a certain degree of expertise in Tolkien, Susan said, "You must really like fantasy literature."

"Actually, I hate fantasy," I said. "Pull down a fantasy novel at random from the bookstore shelf and I'll probably hate it. I only like a few good authors."

"Like who?"

Judging it best not to retreat to the real old masters, I named some newer authors who are only recently deceased. Ursula K. Le Guin, whom Susan had heard of. Diana Wynne Jones, whom she hadn't. Patricia McKillip.

Susan mentioned Octavia Butler. I agreed she's a great writer, but really more science fiction than fantasy.

"I've been reading a newer author whom I'm really enjoying," offered the young man. I asked who that was, and from his reaction he must have seen my face fall when he said it was Brandon Sanderson.

I explained: "I read his first novel, Elantris, and couldn't make head or tail of it. But don't let me get in the way. These books are written to be enjoyed, and if you enjoy them, they're serving their purpose."

if cats could read Tolkien

Maia has read The Lord of the Rings, but found the movies too scary. She preferred to hide under the bed.

Tybalt tried to read the book, but the only part that interested him was the cats of Queen Beruthiel. Most of the rest didn't stick in his memory.

not a music post

No, I don't have anything to say about DT's music playlist. Some of the songs on it are OK. Though I am puzzled by his fondness for "YMCA", one of many hits of that era with no discernible tune.

The campaign has been speckled with instances of pop musicians objecting to DT using their songs at his rallies, because they do not endorse his campaign. But I can't recall anyone responsible even being asked what they think of his use of "YMCA", which reinforces the impression that the Village People never actually existed but were only an A.I. construct.

Obama's inaugural, which hardly counts, aside, I think the last president who would admit to listening to classical music was JFK, and it wasn't he who invited the likes of Casals and Bernstein to play at the White House, it was Jackie.

vote for tweedle

Our state Assembly member is running for Congress (not in our district) and making something of a botch of it, so his Assembly seat is vacant. The two survivors of the jungle primary to succeed him, and thus the candidates in next month's election, are of different sexes and ethnicities, but are otherwise very much alike. Patrick Ahrens and Tara Sreekrishnan are both young, they're both Democrats, they're both natives of the area who experienced poverty and deprivation in childhood. They're both employed as legislative aides - Patrick is a staff director for the current Assembly member, though he's kind of coy about saying that on his web site - and they're both members of local school boards (he: community college board; she: county board of education).

They also have very similar positions on issues, and they've both received a 100% rating from Planned Parenthood by agreeing with all the statements on PP's questionnaire. And therein lies the rub, because for whatever reason, Planned Parenthood has endorsed only Patrick. (It could have endorsed both. Our city's Democratic club did, and I presume so did our city council member, who's listed in the endorsement pages of both candidates.)

So Tara, making the best of the situation, has put her 100%-rating sticker on her website and mailers, only she's put it under the endorsements heading. Planned Parenthood cried foul: it makes it look as if they'd endorsed her. They've told Tara she can't use the 100%-rating sticker any more. But she's continuing to do so.

This sounds wilful and unethical, but I noticed something odd in the local newspaper's article on the subject. Planned Parenthood actually says that putting the sticker under endorsements is OK when other people do it.

Other non-endorsed candidates across Silicon Valley have put their 100% rating under the endorsements section on their website. But [Lauren] Babb [vice president of public affairs for Planned Parenthood Advocates Mar Monte] said that’s allowed because they don’t expect candidates to have a separate section of their website for the rating.

It's putting the sticker in the endorsement section on her paid mailers that is Tara's sin. I find the minuteness of the distinction here between 'perfectly OK' and 'absolutely forbidden' to be so bizarre, I can't fault Tara for ignoring PP's directive.

Meanwhile, Patrick is making his own hay while the sun shines by plastering "The ONLY Candidate Endorsed by PLANNED PARENTHOOD!!" [sic, exclamations and capitals and all] on his website.

But also, I've received an odd mailer, not from Patrick's campaign but from supporters of his, that accuses Tara of chronic absenteeism in her school board post. But the footnotes on the mailer supporting the claim identify the board as that for a local K to 8 district that Tara has never belonged to. Do they have her confused with someone else? Do they have the board confused with the one she does serve on? I have no idea. Apparently Patrick has not spoken up to disavow this strange thing. Here's an article about it.

The big local daily supports Patrick because it thinks he's more experienced and has a better grasp of issues, but I don't trust their recommendations in general. My friend Max, who belongs to the Democratic Club and follows local politics closely, supports Tara, partly because Patrick hasn't denounced that mailer, but also because, though he considers both competent, Tara is "more wonky."

I believe I know what I think, but I'll let it sit there.

the other half Shakespeare

When B. and I visited the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in June, we saw all the plays on my want-list except one, because it hadn't opened yet: a production of Coriolanus put on by the lower-cased upstart crow collective, a troupe of women and non-binary folk who were responsible for a fabulous King John last year. King John is a little-known standout among Shakespeare's plays, and so is Coriolanus, so I was expecting great things from this. For that reason I made another trip up this last weekend - the last weekend of the performance season, in hopes that summer weather would finally have calmed down by then, which in the nick of time it did.

Coriolanus had its excellences, and the bottom line is that I was very happy to have seen it, but it also had its difficulties. The main one is that, unlike other Shakespeare plays, it has a very large cast of characters. Having them all portrayed by only eight players didn't always work. One had to keep an eye on whether they had their coats buttoned or not, for instance: that indicated different characters. Some of the actors, notably Betsy Schwartz, were good at conveying in speech and action that they were playing different people; others not so much.

Jessika D. Williams portrayed Coriolanus as stolid, brusque, and lacking in emotion, to the point where his capitulation to his mother's entreaties felt weirdly out of character. It was very different from the sly and sardonic Philip the Bastard who Williams played in King John. It was also very different from the greatest previous Coriolanus I've seen, here at Ashland many years ago. Denis Arndt played him as a man convinced that everything he says is sweet reasonableness itself, and is surprised, hurt, and indignant that it isn't taken that way.

As long as I was there, I saw the closing or near-closing performances of two plays I'd seen much earlier in their runs. This production of Macbeth featured the eeriest, creepiest, strangest Weird Sisters ever seen, and I had to admire them again. One of them, Amy Lizardo, was at the post-performance talk, and I got to tell her how good they all were. Macbeth himself seemed to be acted better than he had been, and even Macduff was slightly less than inert.

Much Ado About Nothing was also somewhat better-acted, even though a comparison was difficult because both Benedick and Claudio were being played by different people than before. The play seemed less the glorious romp than it had been, though the outright funny parts were probably funnier. Rex Young as Dogberry in particular seemed to have caught a groove he was missing before.

I stayed at a maze-like hotel which had not caught on that it would be a good idea to add the lobby as an entry to the directional signs in the corridors. The first time I tried heading there from my room I had to stop at the housekeeping break room and ask them.

I took along The Last Dangerous Visions on this trip, and made some progress reading it.

concert review: The Reverberays

Why was I listening to a surf rock concert? I was there, I had the time, it was free and outdoors. Besides, I like some of that music. Of course they played the theme from “Hawaii Five-O”, without which no surf rock concert would be complete. They played an uptempo instrumental rock version of “The Sound of Silence”, which raised my eyebrows a little. And they played, and sang, “Secret Agent Man”. And a lot of stuff I didn’t know.

The band was lively and together. Standard four-piece: two guitars, one doubling trumpet; bass (the only woman, cf Talking Heads); drums. It was not too loud and I enjoyed it.

also without having read the whole thing yet

You didn't think I was going to inflict another 1100-word book review on you, did you? Instead, here's 600 words of statistical thoughts about The Collected Poems of J.R.R. Tolkien.

weather report

Just as the heat wave in California has broken and given us some relief, the Southeast gets another hurricane. Hurricane Milton (the Monster) has, as I write, just made landfall near Tampa and the expected winds and floods are ensuing. I wish everybody and everything in its pathway the best of luck.

Still, the Florida peninsula sticks right out into the middle of hurricane alley. It's a target, and gets hit quite frequently. I wouldn't want to live there, for that and numerous other reasons, and nobody much did, except the Seminoles, until the invention of air conditioning. It's given the false impression that this land is generally habitable.

However, what is one to make of Marjorie Taylor Greene's declaration that an unspecified "they" control the weather? If I had control of the weather, I wouldn't have hurricanes at all. What a strange and unhelpful thing to invent. I don't quite understand them anyway, although I took a course in meteorology in college. Hurricanes seem to be created by the following algorithm:

1. Heated tropical water transfers excess energy to the atmosphere.
2. ????
3. Hurricane!

I'm sure there's more to it than that, but that's the impression one gets from the news.

Tropical cyclones do form in the east Pacific, but the shape of the land is such that the tracks usually take them out to the most isolated part of the ocean. Occasionally one hits Mexico, and brings heavy rains to southern California, but that's about all we get. It's the shape of the land which spares us where the Southeast gets slammed. Geography really is destiny.

without having read any of the stories yet

The Last Dangerous Visions, edited by Harlan Ellison (actually by J. Michael Straczynski, but he modestly leaves his name off the title page), Blackstone Publishing, 2024: a review of the concept and the ancillary material (which I have read).

Here it is, the third Dangerous Visions anthology of science fiction stories, finally out 50 years after it was promised by its editor, a year or so after the second anthology, and some six years after that editor's death, put together by his literary executor.

Or is it? LDV, in all the announcements made of its imminent publication during the first decade or so that Ellison sat on it, was going to be legendarily long. A typewritten list by Ellison from 1979, reproduced here, lists stories by 108 writers. Of course such an enormous anthology was not practically publishable, as ex-contributor Christopher Priest pointed out many years ago now. And over 40 of the stories were withdrawn and published elsewhere by authors - or their estates - tired of waiting for a publication they'd been repeatedly assured was imminent.

Besides those, JMS says that many of the stories are just outdated today, or were never any good in the first place, having been bought by Ellison as favors to his friends. And as history wended on into the 1980s, JMS says, writers were less willing to be "dangerous" than they had been in the 60s or early 70s. So granted that a publishable anthology today would be a lot shorter than what Ellison tempted us with, what JMS presents us here is stories by 24 separate authors (one author is responsible for eight vignettes). It's a hefty volume - 433 pages - but the original Dangerous Visions had stories by 32 authors and Again, Dangerous Visions by 43, if I've counted correctly, so after all that anticipation, a 24-author anthology feels a little damp. Besides, seven of the stories are new ones bought by JMS, leaving only 17 authors from Ellison's stash.

It's a little hard to tell at a glance which are the new stories. They aren't marked in any way, though the authors are named in the afterword. All the stories are followed by brief author bios, many of which give the author's age, some of them stated to be "at the time of this sale," but others, if you know the author's birth year, are obviously as of some date between 1973 and 1980. And then they go on, in the rare "future-in-the-past" tense, to explain what the author has done since then. Which, in eight cases, includes that they've died. While waiting for their stories to be published. On the other side, if the author's age is of 2020 or so, this must be a new story.

JMS includes a long essay, much longer than any of the stories, titled "Ellison Exegesis," that after a lot of throat-clearing about his own childhood discovery of Ellison's work, explains the history of LDV and how it clashed with its editor's life. Besides those favors to friends, JMS says that Harlan continued buying stories for LDV to fill gaps in the anthology as stories were withdrawn by impatient authors - or their estates. That sounds strange: given the huge oversize of the volume, Ellison should have been relieved at its reduction. There were other reasons too: to keep the anthology new and relevant, and also - JMS says - Ellison bought stories the way that people eat potato chips, reflexively and impulsively.

But JMS doesn't recount the repeated announcements of imminent publication, nor does he discuss another obvious motive of Ellison's - his desire to get every SF author of worth in the DV anthologies somewhere, and his increasing frantic rush as new authors kept appearing. JMS can be critical of Ellison, but he's not that critical.

In his initial announcement of the book, JMS said that it would include "one last, significant work by Harlan that has never been published ... that ties directly into the reason why The Last Dangerous Visions has taken so long to come to light." The only sign of that here is JMS's explanation of why Ellison couldn't bring himself to finish up the anthology: his refusal to see a psychiatrist who could diagnose and treat his bipolar condition. It was this condition, JMS says, that torpedoed any sustained work, not just LDV: Ellison could toss off short stories at speed, but after a few brief efforts very early in his career, he never wrote a novel. Finally, JMS says, he essentially forced Ellison to see a shrink and go on his meds, after which he began to feel a lot better. But soon after that, his physical health began to fail, and that was as far as that went.

DV and ADV featured long and entertaining introductions by Ellison to each story. It was facing the prospect of writing the same for LDV that apparently stymied work on it. Why didn't he just give up and let the stories appear unintroduced, or let someone else write the introductions? According to JMS, Ellison only completed one introduction, and it's here: it's an introduction to Edward Bryant's story and it's basically an apologia for being too jocularly rude about Bryant (a close friend, so the rudeness was intended as humorous, God help it) for his story in ADV. JMS also prints the abortive beginning of a general introduction to the anthology that Ellison couldn't bring himself to finish.

Each story (except for the vignettes) is accompanied by a full-page black-and-white illustration, as was the case with the earlier anthologies. This time, they're by Tim Kirk, who, like the authors, has been waiting half a century for his work to appear in print. This includes the new stories and the two introductory essays. Are the illustrations for those repurposed from stories that did not get published here, or did Kirk draw new ones? I suspect the former, but it doesn't say.

During the long wait - it's been four years since JMS's first announcement - for this refurbished version of the book to appear, JMS has made a lot of announcements that made it sound as if, like Ellison before him, he'd bitten off more than he could chew. That made me very nervous, and I worried that JMS was following in Ellison's footsteps in another way, by making promises he couldn't deliver on.

In a sense he didn't deliver. The actual book is much more modest than the announcements suggested. On the other hand it does now really exist in print, which Ellison's version never did, so full points to JMS for that. And on its own, not in comparison with DV and ADV before it, it's a pretty sizeable anthology.

Now to read the stories.

faucet fix'd

We had a plumbing crisis a few days ago. I have a tub/shower in my bathroom, and the little gadget for shutting off the tub water and making it come out of the shower instead has long been sticking and acting up.

And then one day the entire faucet fixture fell apart and came off in my hand.

It was at this point that I discovered that tub faucets are not fastened to the wall. A water pipe extends several inches out from the wall with a screw thread on the end. This screws onto a thread on the inside of the faucet fixture.

OK, that looks easy. To the hardware store to buy a tub faucet fixture. They only sell kits: the faucet, the control handle, the shower head. OK, I could use a new shower head too: the old one tended to dribble.

Brought it home, tried to screw on the faucet fixture. It wouldn't screw on.

Call a plumber. He couldn't do it either, nor could the other plumber from the same outfit whom he called to replace him with greater skill. It took the third plumber, who had to wield a blowtorch (!) to remove the old screw thread from the end of the pipe and solder on a new one, to get this to work.

But victory was ours, and he replaced the shower head too. (He could not, however, figure out that you had to pull, not rotate, the handle to turn the water on.)

As soon as he left, I took my first shower in three days (I'd been subsisting on sponge baths), and - considering how badly the old shower head worked - my first really satisfactory shower since the last time I stayed in a hotel room a month ago. Bliss.