Saturday

It was Saturday, yes. To the Last Homely House in the afternoon for the traditionally-evening, but we're changing the tradition, Reading and Eating Meeting, where my reading offering was selections from The Hobbit - the scenes introducing Gandalf and Gollum - in token of the brief remaining interval during which we still can read it, unbesmirched. (Anyone who says "the book will still be on the shelf" will be docked of their Tolkien credentials for terminally unperceptive cluelessness.)

Then rush down to San Jose for this Symphony Silicon Valley concert. Fortunately, the horrible acoustics down in the pit gave me plenty to write about, because after a hard afternoon's reading and listening and eating I was a little tired out, which lowers my aesthetic sensitivity level drastically. The other weird thing for me about writing this review was referring to the pianist as "Serkin". Though Peter Serkin is now long since a senior, respected figure in his own right on the concert stage, to me the name "Serkin" by itself still means his late father Rudolf, just as there were still people in the 1940s to whom "Churchill" by itself still meant Winston's father, Lord Randolph.