Tolkien in the old days

One feature of the early Tolkien fandom days of the 1960s whose import is hard to recapture today is the little cries of bliss that Tolkien fans would emit whenever a major publication dared to acknowledge that Tolkien existed, and maybe was important, by publishing an article about him.

One such article appeared in the Saturday Evening Post issue with a cover date (normally the date the issue goes off sale, but whatever) of exactly sixty years ago today, July 2, 1966. It was titled "The hobbit-forming world of J.R.R. Tolkien" - puns on the word 'habit' were almost obligatory in media coverage of Tolkien in those days - by Henry Resnik, and you can read it on the SEP website here.

One thing you'll notice if you read the article is that, despite some useful factual information on Tolkien and how he came to write The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings - Resnik could have drawn a lot more than he did from his telephone interview with Tolkien which is transcribed here, starting on page 37 - it's mostly about what the article calls "Tolkien people," i.e. American fans, whom Resnik has also interviewed in quantity. As with most such articles, the interviewees are better at demonstrating their intense devotion to Tolkien than at explaining what about his work excites or moves them so.

Despite its prominent publication, then - and it was the only article the SEP ever published on Tolkien, by the way - I find this a trivial and rather useless article for anything other than recording testimonies to this devotion. The presentation of the article - the tireome-pun title, Tolkien's photo inserted in a drawing of flowers, with photos of buttons reading things like "go go Gandalf" in Tolkien's alphabets running down the page without explanation - suggests that the editors didn't take the article very seriously either, and sure enough, they didn't.

This is from a memoir by Otto Friedrich, then managing editor of the Post, describing the editors' attitude towards the whole phenomenon of 'teen articles' (the youth of Tolkien's fans is emphasized by Resnik):

It was the celebrated youth movement, though, that precipitated the most vehement and irreconcilable arguments. Emerson [William A. Emerson Jr., the editor in chief], who had two adolescent daughters, regarded the whole phenomenon with a mixture of horror and fascination. His commercial instincts, however, convinced him that this was a subject that would sell millions of magazines. [After the magazine's first Beatles cover] sold out, and a second Beatles cover did the same, Emerson knew that nobody cared very much about explanations. A cover story on Sonny and Cher sold very well too, and so did one on Bob Dylan, and Drugs on the Campus, and Teen-Age Drinking, and the Peril of Pep Pills. Our younger editors were still not satisfied with this paternalistic approach, however, and in time the youth fad became almost a religion among magazine editors, and so we went along with the herd in publishing stories on body paint and old-costume fashions and various weird rock groups.
Whether this was really good journalism was a matter of endless debate. I myself strongly opposed the whole trend, arguing that most Americans do not dance to rock music or smoke marijuana, after all, that all the teen-agers together represent a relatively small part of the population, and that the median age in this country is not getting younger, as many people think, but older. In short, as the times changed, my own role gradually changed from that of the young militant to that of an aging conservative. ... I vetoed the whole subject of Tiny Tim. (Decline and Fall (Harper & Row, 1970), p. 218; Friedrich was 36 at the time, Emerson was 43.)

I think the condescending and dismissive attitude that reeks from this passage, which clearly applies to the Tolkien article - Resnik says the Tolkien Society of America was so wildly popular it had 800 members! 800! - is also evident both in the presentation and the content of the Tolkien article.

And that's what we had to deal with, back then.

two 19C history books

Robert Strauss, Worst. President. Ever.: James Buchanan, the POTUS Rating Game, and the Legacy of the Least of the Lesser Presidents (Lyons Press, 2016)
The publication date explains how it was still possible to attribute this superlative to Buchanan, who sat there unmoving as the nation plunged towards civil war, having already endorsed the Dred Scott decision, which essentially negated the free states' anti-slavery laws.
The book starts out as whimsically as its title, with the author pawing through his father's history book collection for info on Buchanan - there isn't much. But it mutates into not just a full biography of the man, but a history of his political times. There's an entire chapter which has very little on Buchanan, but is a detailed account of the political background behind the presidential election of 1856. There's also a comparison of Buchanan with other Bad Presidents, explaining why he's worse.
The one thing Strauss doesn't do is explain how Buchanan could be such an active, even belligerent executive in other areas - the Mormon rebellion, the Pig War, he even launched an invasion of Paraguay (Paraguay?!) after the government there fired on a US ship - and yet be so inert at southern threats to take over US forts. Some of the other books on Buchanan that Strauss mentions - he's quite thorough bibliographically - get into this, but Strauss doesn't allude to it. (Basically, he was secretly sympathetic to their cause, but this motivation got buried in postwar historical analysis.)

Speaking of which, there's
Jonathan Horn, The Man Who Would Not Be Washington: Robert E. Lee's Civil War and His Decision That Changed American History (Scribner, 2015)
The decision was, of course, the one to resign his US Army commission and go with his state Virginia's decision to secede, even though he thought secession was a bad idea, had nothing but misgivings about the war to come, and he wasn't enthusiastic about slavery despite being a major slave-owner himself.
What Washington had done was declare himself primarily a citizen of the US as a whole. He would never, Horn says, have supported a state's secession. Why didn't Lee? Why did Lee decide that the one thing he couldn't do was raise arms against his native state?
Horn doesn't really answer this question, and despite the title doesn't concentrate on the decision. This is a full biography of Lee, though it skips lightly over some of the eventless years in the peacetime army. There's nevertheless a lot of interesting background, especially about his personal and family finances. Did you know that 1) Lee was available to lead the Harper's Ferry campaign against John Brown, although he was stationed out in Texas at the time, because he was home on leave after his father-in-law died? 2) that for many years Lee was not a legal resident of Virginia at all, but of the District of Columbia, because Arlington was in the west bank portion that was part of D.C. until retroceded to Virginia in 1846? 3) although he'd previously worn a mustache, he didn't grow his beard until after the Civil War started?

no movie

There's a new movie that's been getting a lot of enthusiastic recommendations, called The Sheep Detectives.

It turned out to be on Amazon Prime, so I could see it for no added cost.

I watched the first few minutes.

I hated it.

concert review: Redwood Symphony

Saturday evening was Redwood's annual outdoors concert, held in the courthouse square downtown. It's right near the train station, so I took the commuter train up. It runs every half an hour, well into the evenings, on weekends, and the parking garage down at my end won't be full.

Advertising for the concert advised bringing lawn chairs. I don't have one, and wouldn't be inclined to lug it on the train anyway. I figured I'd arrive early and sit on one of the low stone walls that surround the plaza. But what I found was that a large number of slat chairs had been arranged in front of the orchestra's tent, so I could sit in one of those.

The orchestra was under a tent, and was festooned with microphones, the speakers for which gave a tinny and metallic sound to the music, especially the strings. They played Dvorak's "New World" Symphony, which I'm always up for hearing, sloppy and warbly in places, but the Largo and finale came out pretty much OK.

Also on the program, the waltz from Swan Lake, and two extremely catchy military marches, the second of which conductor Eric Kujawsky is convinced was an homage to the first: the "Colonel Bogey" March, and the main theme from the movie The Great Escape, by Kenneth Alford and Elmer Bernstein respectively. I know both marches well, but this was the first time I'd ever heard either in concert.

When I was very small, 3 or 4 I guess, "Colonel Bogey," then in the flush of fame coming off its appearance in The Bridge on the River Kwai, was my favorite piece of music. I wrote lyrics to it about my baby brother, the first line of which is all I can remember and which went, "Mikey, he is a pike-pike boy." What a pike-pike boy may be, I can alas no longer remember.

When we went to a record store to buy a recording of "Colonel Bogey," my parents encouraged me to make the request. "Do you have 'Mikey Is a Pike-Pike Boy'?" I asked. The clerks disclaimed knowledge of this until my parents told me to sing it. Then they said, "Oh yes, we have that."

vacation planning

I'm planning a major vacation, or what counts as major by my standards, next month. This started as a convention trip, but I hanker to tootle around what's strange country to me while I'm there. And having made plane, car, and hotel reservations, I've been exploring the matter of what to do and see, and just as importantly what to eat, while I'm there. This involves checking out a whole host of tour books - I'm partial to Moon and Lonely Planet - from various libraries, jotting down notes about tempting things located where I'm going, and then checking everything online for accuracy and up-to-dateness. Detailed planning, with lots of options rather than a rigid schedule, whets the appetite for the trip.

There's two catches. One is that things closed on the one day of the week that I'll be there are a specialty everywhere. And also, some areas are better covered by tourist guides than others. I'm visiting four states on this trip, and I find that while there's plenty of tourist information on Texas and New Mexico, for Oklahoma and Kansas the material is more limited. I have some old AAA tourbooks, from back when they were still covering restaurants, and both states have entries in the sketchy but intermittently useful "Off the Beaten Path" guidebook series, which I was able to find at one cozy library. That helped.

Having made my lists of sites and restaurants, I then print out a series of maps from Google Maps of the various towns and small cities I'm visiting, and mark on them the locations of my sites. Bigger cities are more difficult to handle this way, but photocopies of urban area insets from the state maps, and of tourist districts from the tourbooks, serve as substitutes.

What am I seeing? I'm inclined to history museums, mostly - not the little local ones that collect miscellaneous junk, but serious explorations of the history of a region. And some scenery, so long as I don't have to take a hike to see it, since long walks are beyond me now. And as for eating, I follow the way of the Trillin, which is to look for solid but not fancy expressions of the local cuisine. In Texas and Oklahoma that means steakhouses and barbecue, and in New Mexico lots of green chile. Also, Louisiana cuisine - my favorite US regional - leaks over as far as central Texas, so I'm noting that as well. There's lots of Mexican and Tex-Mex places too, and I'm noting those for when there's nothing else or when I simply want a change, but since those are cuisines well-supplied at home, I'm not prioritizing it for the trip.

Now to turn my attention to preparing to pack, and shopping for anything I'll need.

I will

All the signing and stamping have been done, and B. and I have officially created our wills. It's a rather complicated procedure; we're establishing a living trust and putting some of our assets into it, with the trust as the sole heir of each of us. Then, after we're both deceased, come the bequests and the distribution of the residue of the estate. This, our financial advisor explained, will simplify matters and avoid probate. I won't live to see it, of course, but I hope it works out that way.

After getting the documents drafted, for which we employed an online legal service, we needed witnesses - for which we asked the nearest nephew & his wife - and a notary. Then we needed the relevant assets transferred to the trust, which meant visits to brokers and a lot of paperwork which isn't complete yet.

Our medical provider had already nudged us into filling out advance directives using their forms (a lot better drafted than the ones the legal service provided), and we're keeping those with the same documents.

the file vanishes

This has happened to me more than once lately.

I'm using a library computer, saving files onto my USB drive. I check the directory frequently; the files I've already copied are all listed as saved files. I've chosen my USB's directory, no other.

When I'm done, I carefully use the "eject" command before removing my drive.

But when I take the USB drive to another computer, the files I've saved have all vanished. They're completely gone, no trace.

How do I stop this from happening?

concert review: Garden of Memory

Owing to scheduling glitches, I missed last year's edition of the annual walk-through avant-garde concert held at Chapel of the Chimes, Oakland's ornate columbarium and mausoleum. But I got there this year, nabbing a nearby parking space by arriving 2.5 hours early, with my lunch packed in my car.

Unfortunately many of my favorite performers didn't get there this year. So instead of focusing on them, I decided to emphasize the walk-through aspect and prowl around until I found things worth sitting and listening to for a while.

Garden of Memory always begins at 5 pm rather unpopulated, but although the organizers limit attendance, it tends to get more and more crowded over its four-hour length until it becomes deucedly uncomfortable. So I figured I'd start at the part of the building that gets the most crowded later on, the east end of the old wing, and I headed straight for the room designated the Garden of St. Matthew. Instead of being a niche like many of the "garden" rooms, it's along a major pathway. When I've been there before, interesting music was always going on, but I could never stop and listen to it but had to proceed directly towards the exit on the other side of the room, and the reason was that the room was so crowded that, if you stopped, you were blocking the only (and invariably busy) pathway.

So this time I got there early to get a spot where I could stop and listen, and found singer-songwriter Majel Connery on double-tracked vocals and electronic keyboard, accompanied by Felix Fan on electronic cello. I'd actually heard Connery here before, and was impressed with what I heard, but I'd never sealed her down as one of my favorites. I have now. I found this stuff enrapturing; unfortunately nothing of hers online really sounds like what I heard, so I guess you'll have to take my word for it.

Proceeding onward, I wound up in Laura Inserra's old stomping grounds (she's not there this year), the Garden of Eternal Wisdom, where I found violinist Shira Kammen, hammer dulcimer player Robin Petrie, and Celtic harpist Shelley Phillips playing what sounded like Celtic folk music with a Middle Eastern edge to it. I was able to grab the only chair in the room and sat in comfort for quite a while to listen to this charming stuff. Getting lost in the building is part of the experience, the publicity says, and as always in this room I noticed someone starting at the event map trying to figure out which room they were in. (I whispered it to them.) When I left, I found the twisty passage leading to the room was packed with people waiting for an opportunity to enter and listen, so again I had been wise to get there fairly early.

At this point, I found it was time for a set I wanted to hear in the largest venue, the Chimes Chapel, customarily shared by 3 or 4 performers. This was a contemporary classical art song recital, mezzo Silvie Jensen accompanied by pianist Sarah Cahill (founder of this concert series and a regular performer here) in songs by Philip Glass, Meredith Monk, and some other younger composers whose names I didn't know and didn't catch. The Glass and Monk sounded very typical of their composers although I hadn't heard these particular pieces before.

I then hung around for the next set, which was the women's chorus Kitka - which I first encountered here, many years ago - applying their standard nasal vocals to their usual repertoire of obscure Eastern European and Central Asian folk music. As always, a half hour set by Kitka is easier to take than a whole concert. Talking with the people next to me beforehand, I found they'd never heard Kitka before. This is going to be unusual, I warned them.

By this time it was 7:30 and I moved onward to the new wing, which I'd avoided earlier in the day, as it's more spacious and is consequently better saved for later when things are more crowded. Here I passed by a lot of performers of ambient noodling, none of which attracted me enough to make me want to sit down and listen for a while. So eventually I meandered back down to the entrance and left just before the closing time of 9 pm.

MTT memorial, pt 2

The second MTT memorial was the annual Pride Concert of the Bay Area Rainbow Symphony, a group of LGBTQIA+ and allies, held at the SF Conservatory's concert hall. It was pretty well packed.

The highlight of the concert was the local premiere of a song cycle by Jake Heggie, titled "Good Morning, Beauty," to poems by the performance artist Taylor Mac, who refers to the poems as "a present to queers in long-term relationships," and they're about the long-termness of it. It says: "Good morning, beauty / How are you here? / How has it happened? / Year after year?" The art song settings with elaborate orchestration was conducted by music director Robert Mollicone and sung by mezzo Nikola Printz, who went ambigender in an outfit that was a man's black suit on the right and a woman's white dress on the left. And the dedication in the program book read "to the memory of Michael Tilson Thomas and Joshua Robison, whose fifty years together embodied everything the piece celebrates."

Also on the program, a suite reconstruction of the orchestral music for the 1939 Wizard of Oz, a movie with iconic status in this community, composed by Herbert Stothart (who won an Oscar for doing so), based partly on the song melodies by Harold Arlen (who also won an Oscar for that).

And Brahms's Third Symphony. Why Brahms, who as far as we know was straight? Let Mellicone explain: "This felt like a great tie-in for Pride not only due to the broad spectrum of emotions involved, but also because of the musical code embedded in the opening (and recurrent) statement of the work: Frei aber Froh, or 'Free yet Joyful.'" It was a somewhat hairy performance, with things oddly sticking out of Brahms's mellow texture, but nicely and passionately performed.

MTT memorial, pt 1

(pt 1? Yes, pt 2 is coming along in a couple of days)

Regular San Francisco Symphony guest conductor James Gaffigan was scheduled to lead Beethoven's Ninth this week. After former music director Michael Tilson Thomas died two months ago, management decided to repurpose this concert as a memorial to him.

This was appropriate, as the Ninth was a signature work for MTT. He performed it in his inaugural concert as music director in 1995, and I heard him conduct it at least twice - when he recorded it in 2013, and in the last concert by him I ever heard, in 2023.

To the Ninth - which was originally scheduled as the whole concert - management added new material as a first half. It began with brief appreciation/reminiscences by representatives of the orchestra, the chorus, and the symphony board - all women, by the way. I particularly enjoyed the chorus member talking about the time that MTT, with a combination of curiosity and whimsical joy, scheduled a fiendishly difficult choral work by the Italian ultra-modernist Giacinto Scelsi. Thanks to MTT's attitude, both performers and audience had a great time.

Then, three brief works - a lullaby movement from Brahms's German Requiem, done just as a memorial, I guess; Ives' The Unanswered Question, because it was a favorite of MTT's; and a raucously Bernsteinian squib by MTT himself, titled Agnegram.

Gaffigan took the three instrumental movements of the Ninth with broad imperturbability, satisfying without trying to dazzle. The Ode to Joy was bolder and busier in its instrumental presentation. The chorus burned through the score with unspeakable power, towering over everything Beethoven forced them to do. Principal soloist bass Peixin Chen gave an impressively deep sound, with a hollow tone that sounded as if he were singing from within a very large cave. Tenor Thomas Cooley was lighter and fleetier, with a pleasing strong tone quality. The two women don't get enough solo material to judge, but soprano Jessica Faselt and mezzo Kelley O'Connor were both strong and clear in voice, topping each other in turn as they sang together.