latest scare

So now it's our turn to be terrified of cyclosporiasis. No more green salads for a while - which is a nuisance, as B. often has salads for lunch, and it's my custom to make Asian chicken salad, with romaine lettuce, for dinner on really hot days, to avoid cooking. And we have some really hot days lining up for this week.

An informative e-mail prior to Iolanthe yesterday named some restaurants in the neighborhood recommended by theater staff. By far the closest was a ramen place. Ramen restaurants here do not serve the cheap hot-water-and-noodle dish loved by impecunious college students everywhere. This is a big bowl of really serious Japanese soup, and unlike much Japanese food it's been known to appeal to my tastes. I went by the restaurant, and saw on the menu posted outside that just about everything came with scallions. I like scallions, but as a garnish they're frequently served raw, and they're among the most frequent cyclospora vectors. So I passed, and ate somewhere else.

Gilbert and Sullivan review: Iolanthe

The Lamplighters, San Francisco's Gilbert & Sullivan troupe, is reinventing itself, due to the financial pressures facing local theatrical groups of all kinds now. No more large-scale productions carted around to big local theaters around the Bay Area; they're commencing small-scale productions in small local theaters in the City. This Iolanthe's entire run was sold out before the first performance, so I can't send you to it even though it'll be running next weekend; all I can say is that they'll be doing Pirates of Penzance in the spring.

The venue was the ODC Theater in the Mission district, just three blocks from the BART station, a small space converted from a brick warehouse by installing a steeply raked bank of merely nine rows of seats on one side. Since it looks like one anyway, the setup was a backstage theater area, with costume racks and other paraphernalia floating around; the setting was simultaneously the London of the original 19C show, with a bit of San Francisco salted in, and the backstage it looked like. Private Willis was converted to a stagehand, and made several nonspeaking appearances in that capacity in Act 1 before his first canonical appearance in Act 2, for instance.

There were a few other tinkerings with the text, mostly to change outdated references. Strephon is now "a parliamentary Costco: he carries everything." When Mountararat says "This comes of women interfering in politics," he's roundly booed, and the conductor, former Lamplighters star soprano Jennifer Ashworth, says, "Watch it, baritone."

The costumes, however, were scarfed from the Lamplighters' extensive costume shop which covers decades of productions, so they were full-scale. Mostly pretty conventional, though the fairies were in dark and eerie hues.

The performances were lively and full of imaginative stage business. When the fairies want to run around but not be seen, they put big signs reading "Invisible" around their necks. The only thing that didn't work was the fairies' ability to control the peers' movements, which made hash out of the "don't go" song. The best singer all-round was Ash Hurtado as Phyllis. Her voice was a quite spectacular combination of the light and delicate with the strong and powerful. The dialogue between Mountararat (John Melis) and Tolloller (Jacob Bronson) where they're trying to negotiate over claims to Phyllis's hand was also quite delightfully done. Iolanthe (Rose Waldman) dominated the show rather than being buried underneath everyone else as often happens. Strephon (newcomer Matt Skinner) was bluff and intense, the Fairy Queen (Sonia Gariaeff) was fierce when she ought to have been, nd the Lord Chancellor (veteran Chris Uzelac) was played with heft but a minimum of eccentricity.

As an experiment, this worked, but I hope they come up with different new and original ideas for subsequent shows.

dental prosthesis

I've mentioned that I had as broken tooth extracted. This leaves a space which has to heal for a period of several months until an implant can be placed. In the meantime, there's a gap, and to keep the neighboring teeth from moving over and filling the gap I've been given a prosthesis. This isn't just an artificial tooth to fill up the hole; the artificial tooth is embedded in a hard plastic device that fits over my entire upper teeth and was made by taking a putty impression of my bite.

I can't eat with this thing in, and I'm not expected to wear it more than half the time. I've been putting it in after dinner and leaving it there until breakfast, taking it out briefly if I have a late-night snack. It's very snug, hard to get in place and equally hard to remove. I've been assured it will loosen over time, and even after only several days I'm noting a bit of that, just a bit. It's transparent and close to invisible from outside unless you look closely, and it doesn't interfere much with my speaking, though yesterday when I told B. I had been watching the old movie Mr. Deeds Goes to Town she thought I'd said Mr. Bean.

And that's going to be my duty for the next few months. This is just one of the medical regimens that shape my life right now, but it's the easiest to write about.

cleverest remark I've heard lately

"I poured root beer into a square glass. Now I have just beer."

quiz lolly

Slate has been running a daily quiz of six questions each with four multiple-choice possible answers, which runs the gamut from six questions I know the answers to offhand to six questions I have absolutely no idea of.

Occasionally there's a clever question or set of answers, and I liked one of today's in a cultural quiz; the question was, what were the names of the other two members of Josie and the Pussycats? Though I've seen the movie, I didn't remember the answer - which was Valerie and Melody - but I got it right because of what the wrong answers were. They were 1) Veronica and Betty, 2) Violet and Patty, 3) Velma and Daphne. I could remember where all three of those pairs came from, though two of the sources I've had no contact with in a long time, so elimination gave me the right answer.

concert review: TACO

So I did, Sunday afternoon, attend an Independence Day celebration of a sort. The Terrible Adult Chamber Orchestra, that group of nonprofessional musicians who get together to practice purely for the fun of it, was holding one of its rare public concerts, in the grass-lined amphitheater bowl in the park at the Mountain View civic center.

B. plays violin in this orchestra, so I chauffeured her to the event - a lot easier than driving in by herself - and stayed to listen to the concert. The conductor, knowing I was coming, even labeled one of the ADA chairs with my name. I was grateful for the chair: sitting on the ground at the top of the bowl, as the rest of the audience did, would not be in my repertoire these days.

For a patriotic program, they played not the usual custom of American classical standards like Gershwin and Copland, but resurrected one of standard patriotic songs, most of them in very fine arrangement. We had the national anthem, the Battle Hymn of the Republic, America ("My country 'tis of thee"), and America the Beautiful. We had a couple of Sousa marches (Stars & Stripes Forever and the Liberty Bell, of course). We had a few popular songs of patriotic cut: George M. Cohan's Grand Old Flag, Irving Berlin's God Bless America (on seeing that title, I always wonder if America sneezed), and Woody Guthrie's This Land is Your Land.

Most of these were instrumental, though the national anthem and one other were sung by a 13-year-old female student with an impressively powerful voice but some rather irregular, TACO-like, ways of expressing it, plus a pop-singer-like way of circling around the final note in a phrase before landing on it. The orchestra needed a second try on one or two of the numbers, but handled most of it pretty well.

One catch with a volunteer orchestra is that you can't control what instruments you get. For this concert, there were no oboes. Fortunately, a clarinet in C can cover the oboe part and serve as - brace for it - a fauxbo.

on the need for Alex Ross

There is no need for me to write about the soul-crushing news that Alex Ross, probably the finest classical music critic of all time, is retiring from his regular job as critic for The New Yorker, where he would occasionally - too rarely - write long and thoughtful articles, far beyond quotidian concert reviews, about the state of music. He'll continue to write, not always about music (as not always in the past, either), but it's not the same.

I don't need to write about it because it's already been said eloquently by Joshua Kosman, Will Robin, and Lisa Hirsch. And here's Ross's own thoughts in reaction to this.

I've met Alex Ross a couple of times. He would occasionally come out to speak in my area, and I was able to chat with him after the talk. I particularly remember thanking him for his then-recent article about Florence Price, whom I'd been erratically pushing as the first great American female composer. Now I had Ross's endorsement of her greatness, and it later turned out to have kicked off a virulent Price revival, whereby her previously obscure music is now heard all the time.

Such was the respect in which Ross was held and the influence that his statements had. As a sometime music critic myself, I can say that he was the highlight, the monument, of my profession.

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.