The terrible LA fires began in dry brush, which is a characteristic landscape on the edge of LA.
Now, the Silicon Valley area, where I live in Northern California, has a fire in a characteristic Silicon Valley landscape.
It's in a warehouse full of lithium batteries.
It broke out last night, and it can't be extinguished. It'll just have to burn itself out. Fortunately it seems to be contained within the warehouse. But the smoke and fumes are a terrible thing.
It's in a town called Moss Landing on Monterey Bay. Moss Landing is a very small town, which is fortunate as it had to be evacuated, and the area immediately around it is pretty empty.
It's about 50 miles from here, which I hope is far enough. All the same, I would avoid its entire vicinity for a while just to protect one's lungs: Castroville, Marina, Salinas, Watsonville ...
Kalimac's corner: a journal by DB
Friday, January 17, 2025
Thursday, January 16, 2025
not a fan, I guess
David Lynch died. Looking over his list of films, I find I've seen three of them.
Mulholland Drive I found very weird, in a good way. It was captivating and I've even rewatched it. That's one good one on the list. If you find the plot confusing, it can be completely (well, mostly) cleared up in one sentence, a rare feat.
The Straight Story just annoyed me. When we were on motor home trips in my childhood, whenever we got to a campground, my father would set us up and then go off and find some other dad to have a long chat. The invariability of this became something of a family joke. My mother would sarcastically refer to it as Life Story Time, because those were what the guys mostly swapped. She liked The Straight Story. I said, "Mom, it's nothing but a guy driving across the country having Life Story Time!"
The Elephant Man I don't even remember. Probably drowned out by memories of The Tall Guy.
I never saw Twin Peaks. By the time I heard of it, descriptions made clear it had already sunk so far into Lynchian depths that it would be impossible to follow without having seen the earlier episodes, and it those days there were no streaming services to catch up on it with. But by the time it came out on DVD or VCR or whatever they had then, there were other things to watch that had come along in its wake and I never made the time.
Mulholland Drive I found very weird, in a good way. It was captivating and I've even rewatched it. That's one good one on the list. If you find the plot confusing, it can be completely (well, mostly) cleared up in one sentence, a rare feat.
The Straight Story just annoyed me. When we were on motor home trips in my childhood, whenever we got to a campground, my father would set us up and then go off and find some other dad to have a long chat. The invariability of this became something of a family joke. My mother would sarcastically refer to it as Life Story Time, because those were what the guys mostly swapped. She liked The Straight Story. I said, "Mom, it's nothing but a guy driving across the country having Life Story Time!"
The Elephant Man I don't even remember. Probably drowned out by memories of The Tall Guy.
I never saw Twin Peaks. By the time I heard of it, descriptions made clear it had already sunk so far into Lynchian depths that it would be impossible to follow without having seen the earlier episodes, and it those days there were no streaming services to catch up on it with. But by the time it came out on DVD or VCR or whatever they had then, there were other things to watch that had come along in its wake and I never made the time.
Tuesday, January 14, 2025
in phosphors
I got an e-mail announcement for a recital by violinist Stella Chen, and just below the headline and the date and time, above the writeup, appeared this quote:
"The outstanding characteristic of her performance was her easy and sure command of the music."—San Francisco Classical Voice
I think I wrote that, I thought. I did write that.
Not the first time I've been quoted this way, but this is why concert promoters are so nice to reviewers; they're hoping for nuggets like that. My honor lies in just writing what I think, and letting the nuggets fall by themselves.
"The outstanding characteristic of her performance was her easy and sure command of the music."—San Francisco Classical Voice
I think I wrote that, I thought. I did write that.
Not the first time I've been quoted this way, but this is why concert promoters are so nice to reviewers; they're hoping for nuggets like that. My honor lies in just writing what I think, and letting the nuggets fall by themselves.
Monday, January 13, 2025
David Lodge
The British writer known for his comic novels died a couple weeks ago - I only just stumbled across the news - a month before his 90th birthday.
It was about 1982, I was in grad school, and one day walking through the portion of the university library stacks devoted to modern British literature, my eye was caught by the title of a novel on the shelf. The British Museum Is Falling Down. Intrigued, I took it down and found a very funny book about a hapless grad student in English, studying books at the British Museum, fretting about his inability to complete his thesis and about the rising number of children he and his wife are having, because they're good Catholics relying on the Rhythm Method.
It was amusing enough, full also of sly references to other modern lit, including passages of comic pastiche, that I took note of the author's name - David Lodge - and looked for more of his novels. The next one I found was his best-known, Changing Places, in which two professors of English exchange positions for a term: one from a thinly-disguised University of Birmingham in England, where Lodge himself taught, and one from an equally thinly-disguised University of California at Berkeley, where Lodge had spent a year and which was my own undergraduate school. The level of humor, subtle but dorky, is shown by the fictionalized Berkeley's English Department being located in a building called Dealer Hall. So what, unless you know that the real Berkeley's English Department is in Wheeler Hall.
I've kept reading Lodge's novels, most of which are actually more serious than those two, because I liked his style and offbeat approach, though I drew the line at the one about Henry James. It was more than obvious that Lodge drew most of his material from his own life, though he used it creatively. The problems of literary study, academic politics, and Catholic hangups about sex were his continuing themes, although gradually as he aged his contemporary novels began being less about sex and more about the plague of Lodge's own later years, deafness. None of these, except to a small extent literary study, have any personal resonance for me: what I liked was the way Lodge wrote about them.
Much of his nonfiction is academic and technical, but he did write some books for the general reader. I particularly liked The Art of Fiction, a collection of newspaper columns in a series exploring aspects of fiction-writing from Lodge's combined practitioner's and critic's viewpoint, with the aim of gently introducing technical concepts such as unreliable narrators and aporia, each column starting with a brief excerpt from a different novelist. A more miscellaneous collection called The Practice of Writing, about his experiences doing it, reveals that he'd wanted to call that first novel I'd read The British Museum Had Lost Its Charm, but he couldn't get permission to quote the Gershwin lyric. I wonder if the book would still have caught my eye as it did if he'd succeeded in using the other title. Without that piece of serendipity, I would probably never have found what became for me a favorite author.
It was about 1982, I was in grad school, and one day walking through the portion of the university library stacks devoted to modern British literature, my eye was caught by the title of a novel on the shelf. The British Museum Is Falling Down. Intrigued, I took it down and found a very funny book about a hapless grad student in English, studying books at the British Museum, fretting about his inability to complete his thesis and about the rising number of children he and his wife are having, because they're good Catholics relying on the Rhythm Method.
It was amusing enough, full also of sly references to other modern lit, including passages of comic pastiche, that I took note of the author's name - David Lodge - and looked for more of his novels. The next one I found was his best-known, Changing Places, in which two professors of English exchange positions for a term: one from a thinly-disguised University of Birmingham in England, where Lodge himself taught, and one from an equally thinly-disguised University of California at Berkeley, where Lodge had spent a year and which was my own undergraduate school. The level of humor, subtle but dorky, is shown by the fictionalized Berkeley's English Department being located in a building called Dealer Hall. So what, unless you know that the real Berkeley's English Department is in Wheeler Hall.
I've kept reading Lodge's novels, most of which are actually more serious than those two, because I liked his style and offbeat approach, though I drew the line at the one about Henry James. It was more than obvious that Lodge drew most of his material from his own life, though he used it creatively. The problems of literary study, academic politics, and Catholic hangups about sex were his continuing themes, although gradually as he aged his contemporary novels began being less about sex and more about the plague of Lodge's own later years, deafness. None of these, except to a small extent literary study, have any personal resonance for me: what I liked was the way Lodge wrote about them.
Much of his nonfiction is academic and technical, but he did write some books for the general reader. I particularly liked The Art of Fiction, a collection of newspaper columns in a series exploring aspects of fiction-writing from Lodge's combined practitioner's and critic's viewpoint, with the aim of gently introducing technical concepts such as unreliable narrators and aporia, each column starting with a brief excerpt from a different novelist. A more miscellaneous collection called The Practice of Writing, about his experiences doing it, reveals that he'd wanted to call that first novel I'd read The British Museum Had Lost Its Charm, but he couldn't get permission to quote the Gershwin lyric. I wonder if the book would still have caught my eye as it did if he'd succeeded in using the other title. Without that piece of serendipity, I would probably never have found what became for me a favorite author.
Sunday, January 12, 2025
independence emerging through the haze
One on my reading list reports that his wife sent their 6-year-old daughter on an errand to the local shop, about 2 minutes' walk away on a quiet street.
That's a welcome bucking of today's cocooning culture where, if reports can be believed, children are to be so protected from danger that they aren't allowed to develop any independence sometimes even after they're legal adults.
As someone who's never had children, I may have no eggs in this basket, but I am a citizen of a society where I like to be surrounded by competent and experienced people, and I strongly believe that the way to get these people is to start training them in these skills at an early age. The purpose of having a child is to create a functioning adult, and the subject has to learn those functions while still a child.
I can also testify from memory how thrilling, exciting, and morale-boosting it is for a child to be granted responsibility for something. Little things, things that mean nothing to an adult. I must have been 8 or 10 the day my father had to push a stalled car into the driveway. My mother wasn't around so he posted me at the steering wheel. That was exciting.
And when I was of age for it, he taught me to drive - with a manual transmission, a skill I've often been grateful to have. And my mother taught me to cook - a skill I make daily use of.
There were no nearby shops where we lived when I was 6 - we were in a newly-built housing development surrounded by orchards (mostly apricot) on all sides, the only outside access a mile's drive on a bumpy agricultural road with perilous irrigation ditches on both sides - but our development did have a school, 0.4 miles from our house (I just measured it on Google Maps), and I walked there. There was a traffic light, but traffic was not heavy.
The next year we moved out to the countryside. School was a hilly 1.4 miles away. I tried taking the school bus, but mostly I bicycled. On my own I bicycled all around the area, up to 15 miles away. My parents let me do it because even at that age my map-reading skills were exceptional, and I would always be home by dinnertime. (No mobile phones in those days either, don't forget.)
Going off to university at 18 was an awesome thing to do, in my mind, but by then I was well-prepared to do it, both academically and in terms of managing everyday living. Just not socially.
That's a welcome bucking of today's cocooning culture where, if reports can be believed, children are to be so protected from danger that they aren't allowed to develop any independence sometimes even after they're legal adults.
As someone who's never had children, I may have no eggs in this basket, but I am a citizen of a society where I like to be surrounded by competent and experienced people, and I strongly believe that the way to get these people is to start training them in these skills at an early age. The purpose of having a child is to create a functioning adult, and the subject has to learn those functions while still a child.
I can also testify from memory how thrilling, exciting, and morale-boosting it is for a child to be granted responsibility for something. Little things, things that mean nothing to an adult. I must have been 8 or 10 the day my father had to push a stalled car into the driveway. My mother wasn't around so he posted me at the steering wheel. That was exciting.
And when I was of age for it, he taught me to drive - with a manual transmission, a skill I've often been grateful to have. And my mother taught me to cook - a skill I make daily use of.
There were no nearby shops where we lived when I was 6 - we were in a newly-built housing development surrounded by orchards (mostly apricot) on all sides, the only outside access a mile's drive on a bumpy agricultural road with perilous irrigation ditches on both sides - but our development did have a school, 0.4 miles from our house (I just measured it on Google Maps), and I walked there. There was a traffic light, but traffic was not heavy.
The next year we moved out to the countryside. School was a hilly 1.4 miles away. I tried taking the school bus, but mostly I bicycled. On my own I bicycled all around the area, up to 15 miles away. My parents let me do it because even at that age my map-reading skills were exceptional, and I would always be home by dinnertime. (No mobile phones in those days either, don't forget.)
Going off to university at 18 was an awesome thing to do, in my mind, but by then I was well-prepared to do it, both academically and in terms of managing everyday living. Just not socially.
Saturday, January 11, 2025
beyond The Last Dangerous Visions
Of the over 100 stories that Harlan Ellison collected for The Last Dangerous Visions, the anthology he keep announcing but never publishing for some 45 years until his death in 2018, over 40 were at some point withdrawn by their authors (or their estates) and published elsewhere.
When a book with that title finally appeared last year, edited (though not by name) by J. Michael Straczynski, it included some 17 of the remaining 50-plus stories. (In a couple cases it's not clear if the story published is the same as the one Harlan had been listing.) JMS promised to return all the remaining stories to the authors (or their estates) along with the rights, for them to do with as they liked.
So John Grayshaw of Amazing Stories decided to check up on their plans with as many of these authors (or their estates) as he could get hold of. He wrote to 56 of them, and here's his results. (h/t F770)
Of those 56, 9 have already been published in English and 2 only in French, which in most cases Grayshaw could have learned from the ISFDB. He did not hear from 34 of the authors (or their estates), leaving 11 that sent him replies. 5 said they have no plans to publish (Grant Carrington, Raylyn Moore, Edgar Pangborn, Joseph F. Pumilia, Bruce Sterling), 2 estates don't have copies of what in both cases were multi-part stories (Russell Bates's sister is looking for them; George Alec Effinger's widow thinks they were lost in a fire long ago, and Grayshaw suggests asking JMS; someone else reports having been reminded of their story by receiving it from JMS); and just 4 say some form of "maybe sometime" (Gordon Eklund, John Jakes, Robert Thom, Lisa Tuttle); no enthusiastic "yes" answers.
Of course there's all those "no reply" entries, plus another half-dozen on various proposed contents lists whom Grayshaw didn't write to, but remember that these are the half of the contributors who didn't withdraw their stories. Either they don't really care or else, like Carrington and possibly some others, they feel what was a dangerous vision half a century ago has lost its savor and best remains buried.
A few more may trickle out, and the latest to have done so on Grayshaw's list is "XYY" by Vonda N. McIntyre, one of the authors whose absence from JMS's contents list has been most regretted by reviewers. It's in a new retrospective anthology of her short work, Little Sisters and Other Stories, and I'll be getting that.
When a book with that title finally appeared last year, edited (though not by name) by J. Michael Straczynski, it included some 17 of the remaining 50-plus stories. (In a couple cases it's not clear if the story published is the same as the one Harlan had been listing.) JMS promised to return all the remaining stories to the authors (or their estates) along with the rights, for them to do with as they liked.
So John Grayshaw of Amazing Stories decided to check up on their plans with as many of these authors (or their estates) as he could get hold of. He wrote to 56 of them, and here's his results. (h/t F770)
Of those 56, 9 have already been published in English and 2 only in French, which in most cases Grayshaw could have learned from the ISFDB. He did not hear from 34 of the authors (or their estates), leaving 11 that sent him replies. 5 said they have no plans to publish (Grant Carrington, Raylyn Moore, Edgar Pangborn, Joseph F. Pumilia, Bruce Sterling), 2 estates don't have copies of what in both cases were multi-part stories (Russell Bates's sister is looking for them; George Alec Effinger's widow thinks they were lost in a fire long ago, and Grayshaw suggests asking JMS; someone else reports having been reminded of their story by receiving it from JMS); and just 4 say some form of "maybe sometime" (Gordon Eklund, John Jakes, Robert Thom, Lisa Tuttle); no enthusiastic "yes" answers.
Of course there's all those "no reply" entries, plus another half-dozen on various proposed contents lists whom Grayshaw didn't write to, but remember that these are the half of the contributors who didn't withdraw their stories. Either they don't really care or else, like Carrington and possibly some others, they feel what was a dangerous vision half a century ago has lost its savor and best remains buried.
A few more may trickle out, and the latest to have done so on Grayshaw's list is "XYY" by Vonda N. McIntyre, one of the authors whose absence from JMS's contents list has been most regretted by reviewers. It's in a new retrospective anthology of her short work, Little Sisters and Other Stories, and I'll be getting that.
Friday, January 10, 2025
concert review: San Francisco Symphony
In an interview in the program book, guest conductor James Gaffigan says that Prokofiev's Fifth Symphony "is his grandest ... it has everything in it [and] will show the musicians in an incredible light." So this is a conductor who sounds minded not to trip up and let this lyrical yet motoric work go flat and drab, as too often happens.
And he succeeded. It was fast enough, loud enough, energetic enough, tight enough, implacable enough, bristling enough, everything you want it to be. Except that somehow it wasn't exciting enough. It did all this without dazzling the listener. MTT or EPS would have dazzled. Except for the finale, which did kind of get there ... (I'm trying to avoid fire metaphors; right now isn't the time).
Also on the program, Barber's Violin Concerto with Ray Chen, who played with a tone that was constantly variable but always somewhere in the middle of the violin's possibilities - never high or shrieky, never low or growling. I was reminded of the person who said that, politically, "I'm a moderate man - a violently moderate man." A little more violence would have done Chen some good: he wasn't always powerful enough either. Still, a dedicated job.
And Sinfonia (for Orbiting Spheres) by Missy Mazzoli, a curtain-raiser in typical Mazzoli style, shimmering and drooping draperies of string sound, quietly backed by winds and brass, with clattering percussion thumps (also backed by winds and brass) laid over on top.
This was my first trip up to the City in two months (and my first symphony concert in almost that long, blame the holidays) and it felt a little nostalgically retro to make the trip, the more so as I had to scout out the Richmond district for zones that don't have a two-hour parking restriction on weekday daytimes for the upcoming conference. Found 'em, too.
And he succeeded. It was fast enough, loud enough, energetic enough, tight enough, implacable enough, bristling enough, everything you want it to be. Except that somehow it wasn't exciting enough. It did all this without dazzling the listener. MTT or EPS would have dazzled. Except for the finale, which did kind of get there ... (I'm trying to avoid fire metaphors; right now isn't the time).
Also on the program, Barber's Violin Concerto with Ray Chen, who played with a tone that was constantly variable but always somewhere in the middle of the violin's possibilities - never high or shrieky, never low or growling. I was reminded of the person who said that, politically, "I'm a moderate man - a violently moderate man." A little more violence would have done Chen some good: he wasn't always powerful enough either. Still, a dedicated job.
And Sinfonia (for Orbiting Spheres) by Missy Mazzoli, a curtain-raiser in typical Mazzoli style, shimmering and drooping draperies of string sound, quietly backed by winds and brass, with clattering percussion thumps (also backed by winds and brass) laid over on top.
This was my first trip up to the City in two months (and my first symphony concert in almost that long, blame the holidays) and it felt a little nostalgically retro to make the trip, the more so as I had to scout out the Richmond district for zones that don't have a two-hour parking restriction on weekday daytimes for the upcoming conference. Found 'em, too.
Wednesday, January 8, 2025
no longer with us
The bad
Jean-Marie Le Pen, 96, founder of the French far-right party, the National Front. Long since ousted in a party coup by his estranged daughter, who is alive and, well ...
The mixed
Peter Yarrow, 86, beloved folk-singer and unbeloved molester. His conviction on that matter is, I'm told, why Peter Paul & Mary originally broke up, but you won't learn that from my local paper, which deleted any reference to the matter from the obituary.
The good
Perry, 30, the local (Palo Alto) donkey who was the model, both in looks and behavior, for Donkey in Shrek. I've met Perry and can testify that the physical resemblance is precise. Though he didn't talk.
And now with us ...
Here's a detailed map of the new Sáttítla Highlands National Monument in far northern California. (You want the blue line; the green lines are national forest boundaries.) I've been to Lava Beds NM (the brown area at the top) but never within the bounds of the new monument, which has only a few back roads and is very remote.
Also with us
Wind-driven fires in LA. Some of my friends and acquaintances have, or might have, to evacuate, along with thousands of others. Thoughts and prayers. And water, lots of water. Where is Tia Pepa when we need her?
Jean-Marie Le Pen, 96, founder of the French far-right party, the National Front. Long since ousted in a party coup by his estranged daughter, who is alive and, well ...
The mixed
Peter Yarrow, 86, beloved folk-singer and unbeloved molester. His conviction on that matter is, I'm told, why Peter Paul & Mary originally broke up, but you won't learn that from my local paper, which deleted any reference to the matter from the obituary.
The good
Perry, 30, the local (Palo Alto) donkey who was the model, both in looks and behavior, for Donkey in Shrek. I've met Perry and can testify that the physical resemblance is precise. Though he didn't talk.
And now with us ...
Here's a detailed map of the new Sáttítla Highlands National Monument in far northern California. (You want the blue line; the green lines are national forest boundaries.) I've been to Lava Beds NM (the brown area at the top) but never within the bounds of the new monument, which has only a few back roads and is very remote.
Also with us
Wind-driven fires in LA. Some of my friends and acquaintances have, or might have, to evacuate, along with thousands of others. Thoughts and prayers. And water, lots of water. Where is Tia Pepa when we need her?
irksome editorial rules
Another editor used to maintain a prohibition against the phrase died suddenly. “All deaths are sudden,” he’d declare solemnly. “One minute you’re alive and the next you’re not.” (Source)You've never seen anyone dying in the hospital, have you?
Tuesday, January 7, 2025
ave Vaughan Williams
Vaughan Williams and His World, ed. Byron Adams and Daniel M. Grimley (University of Chicago Press, 2023)
U Chi Press announced a sale on their musicology books, and the only one I really wanted was this collection of essays. I consider VW to be one of ... what? "the greatest"? Too dogmatic. "my favorite"? True, but too weak. "most profound, most moving"? maybe ... composers out there, and I enjoy reading about him, despite his living a placid and uneventful life. (Well, there was the ménage à trois, but let's ignore that.)
The book has a lot of interesting articles, discussing his visits to the US, his time teaching composition at the Royal College of Music (did you know that his students included Anna Russell? the musical parodist? VW complained that her Sullivan pastiches were getting into his head and interfering with his own music), lots on the technique and placing of his film music.
But the best article is the last one, by the conductor (and frequent writer) Leon Botstein. It's a sweeping discussion of the nature, meaning, and evaluation of VW's music. It begins with a fine description of the same argument I've been making about what I call "the hidden city." By the time of VW's death in 1958, music like his was in critical disrepute, while high modernism, especially atonality, had the prestige. His music was thought dull and insignificant. But over the decades since, the cult of modernism has faded, and "the emergence of new music with overt spiritual and expressive ambitions, evident links to popular cultural forms, and free of a lingering distaste for nineteenth-century Romanticism" has also also encouraged a re-evaluation of earlier 20th century music. VW shares these aesthetics, especially that of creating music informed by a deep philosophical basis. Botstein then goes into that basis, attributing this particular form to VW's specific generation, citing his friendships, began as students at Cambridge, with the philosopher G.E. Moore and the historian G.M. Trevelyan. (VW also knew Bertrand Russell there, but he had less impact.) Botstein traces how VW's views on the function and ethics of music, apparent in his compositions, reflected the work of these thinkers (and also that of the historian H.A.L. Fisher, who was VW's brother-in-law). VW himself read history, music not being a topic for an undergraduate major in his time.
Botstein concludes by comparing VW to two slightly younger prose writers who shared a similar aesthetic. Surprise, they're Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. Specifically and most interestingly, he says that Tolkien, despite his deep Catholic faith, showed in his fiction "a resolute, universal, and essentially secular sensibility," with which I agree - Tolkien was deliberately trying not to limit his audience to fellow believers. In this, and in the religious sensibility which nevertheless drapes his works, Tolkien was like VW, who, though not a churchman, was open to the spiritual and moral world attached to religion - he wrote a lot of religious music. But where Tolkien seems to reject the modern (overstated, but it's there), VW sought to integrate it.
Botstein writes a lot about VW's holding beauty in music as a virtue, rather ignoring works like the brutal (but also curiously jolly) Fourth Symphony and the nihilistic Sixth. But that could be part of his engagement with the modern. Anyway, fascinating essay.
U Chi Press announced a sale on their musicology books, and the only one I really wanted was this collection of essays. I consider VW to be one of ... what? "the greatest"? Too dogmatic. "my favorite"? True, but too weak. "most profound, most moving"? maybe ... composers out there, and I enjoy reading about him, despite his living a placid and uneventful life. (Well, there was the ménage à trois, but let's ignore that.)
The book has a lot of interesting articles, discussing his visits to the US, his time teaching composition at the Royal College of Music (did you know that his students included Anna Russell? the musical parodist? VW complained that her Sullivan pastiches were getting into his head and interfering with his own music), lots on the technique and placing of his film music.
But the best article is the last one, by the conductor (and frequent writer) Leon Botstein. It's a sweeping discussion of the nature, meaning, and evaluation of VW's music. It begins with a fine description of the same argument I've been making about what I call "the hidden city." By the time of VW's death in 1958, music like his was in critical disrepute, while high modernism, especially atonality, had the prestige. His music was thought dull and insignificant. But over the decades since, the cult of modernism has faded, and "the emergence of new music with overt spiritual and expressive ambitions, evident links to popular cultural forms, and free of a lingering distaste for nineteenth-century Romanticism" has also also encouraged a re-evaluation of earlier 20th century music. VW shares these aesthetics, especially that of creating music informed by a deep philosophical basis. Botstein then goes into that basis, attributing this particular form to VW's specific generation, citing his friendships, began as students at Cambridge, with the philosopher G.E. Moore and the historian G.M. Trevelyan. (VW also knew Bertrand Russell there, but he had less impact.) Botstein traces how VW's views on the function and ethics of music, apparent in his compositions, reflected the work of these thinkers (and also that of the historian H.A.L. Fisher, who was VW's brother-in-law). VW himself read history, music not being a topic for an undergraduate major in his time.
Botstein concludes by comparing VW to two slightly younger prose writers who shared a similar aesthetic. Surprise, they're Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. Specifically and most interestingly, he says that Tolkien, despite his deep Catholic faith, showed in his fiction "a resolute, universal, and essentially secular sensibility," with which I agree - Tolkien was deliberately trying not to limit his audience to fellow believers. In this, and in the religious sensibility which nevertheless drapes his works, Tolkien was like VW, who, though not a churchman, was open to the spiritual and moral world attached to religion - he wrote a lot of religious music. But where Tolkien seems to reject the modern (overstated, but it's there), VW sought to integrate it.
Botstein writes a lot about VW's holding beauty in music as a virtue, rather ignoring works like the brutal (but also curiously jolly) Fourth Symphony and the nihilistic Sixth. But that could be part of his engagement with the modern. Anyway, fascinating essay.
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