a thought for your Christmas bird

Turkeys, the bird, are not from Turkey, the country, but they're named for it from a mistaken association* similar to the one by which American Indians, who are not from India, are nevertheless named as if they were.

Now the country's government wants English-speakers and others to call it Türkiye, which is the spelling in its own language, to reclaim a little unavian dignity. But since they had the name first, they really ought to ask us to change the name of the bird instead.

*Guinea fowl, which aren't from Turkey either, they're from Africa, were imported via Turkey, so they became known as turkey-cocks, and the American birds reminded people of them so they took the same name.

oh Miss Bennet, the fan fiction is calling

Miss Bennet: Christmas at Pemberley by Lauren Gunderson & Margot Melcon, Theatre Works Silicon Valley

This play is a sequel to Pride and Prejudice, and its spirit is pure fan fiction, the open wish-fulfillment of finding an appropriate mate for the neglected Bennet sister, Mary (who has succeeded to the formal title of "Miss Bennet" now that both her elder sisters are married).

Her obvious mate is one Arthur de Bourgh, a cousin of Darcy and of Anne de Bourgh previously unknown to history. A major part of this play, and in truth the best part, is the attempt by two nerdish Asperger's types to try to fit in to the social customs of the Jane Austen era.

None of the existing characters really matched up closely with the book or with well-known adaptations, but some were better than others. Mary could best be described as being polished up. She's more accomplished at her art (mostly playing Beethoven at the piano, including pieces that probably hadn't been written yet) and less quite so awkward. But her sisters remark on how she's matured, and considering her supposed age that's reasonable.

But Lizzy didn't remind us (B. went with me to this one) of any previous incarnation of Lizzy, being giddy, more like Lydia. Anne has somehow grown up to be like her mother, a real shock because she wasn't like that in the book at all, and this time a comment from another character wasn't enough to cover it. Mr. Darcy and Mr. Bingley also lack some of the flavor associated with them, and spend most of the play serving as advisors to the lovelorn, trying futilely to relate their experiences of falling in love to Arthur's.

The three-level set - including a library room which immediately attracts both Mary and Arthur - was stunning, and the portrait of Austen on the wall was noted with pleasure. But the acting was mixed. The leads were good, especially in the tall Arthur's way of cringing when he's embarrassed, which he is frequently, but the Lydia didn't really fit the flighty character well, and both Lizzy and Anne talked too fast and didn't enunciate clearly enough.

But you don't go to this for any of that other stuff. You go to watch Mary Bennet fall in love. That's something of a wish-fulfillment for me, because I'm convinced she would have been the Bennet girl for me. Lydia and Kitty, they are not for me, and Jane and Lizzy, I am not for them. But Mary, even in her hamhanded book incarnation, would be someone I could imagine being with, and Arthur is a far more perfect mate for her than that.

This is a play for the warm fuzzies and only the warm fuzzies.

sweet dish served cold

I attended an online session in which half a dozen Tolkien scholars gave brief presentations discussing aspects of the second season of Rings of Power. I had figured - correctly, by the combination of the experience and the thrust of the talks - that this would be not only a quicker but a more entertaining way of finding out what happened in it than by actually watching the thing.

My heart was warmed by the sight of all this ragging on the show in the same way that I was ragging on Peter Jackson twenty-odd years ago. And I told them that.

concert review: Palo Alto Philharmonic

I've been to this local community orchestra before, and I might have gone to this concert anyway, but I had a special reason: our niece E. has joined it. She plays double bass. In fact all three of the double bass players in this orchestra are women, and if you're reminded of the Netflix documentary The Only Girl in the Orchestra about the first woman, a double bass player, to join the New York Philharmonic, so am I. (I also know someone who used to be a cellist in this orchestra, but he left some time ago.)

A few other family members, including our nephew L., E.'s husband, showed up to cheer along. B., however, had been at a music-making session earlier and had had enough for one day. L. was attempting to concoct a baseball joke about third bass, but I warned him it's been done.

The program featured a flute concerto by the Japanese composer Yuko Uebayashi, with Ráyo Furuta as soloist. I've heard Uebayashi's flute chamber music before, under Furata's curation, and I liked it a lot. I was not so excited by the concerto, which was more of the Debussyean impressionist part and less of the bouncy, exciting part. E. confessed that she wasn't always sure what key the music was in, which likely was a result of the Debussy influence; and listening to the orchestra, I'm not sure they always knew what key they were in either. Furuta, though, as usual was a dazzling soloist.

Followed by Beethoven's Fifth, a dramatic and urgent, and pretty well together, performance, nicely led by music director Lara Webber.

That was Saturday. On Friday, B. and I did go out together, for a concert by Brocelïande, our favorite Renaissance/folk band. Half of it was the Christmas seasonal music they do so well; the other half was their music for other seasons to honor the publication of their first songbook, which covers that part of their repertoire. They were a little tired and out of sorts this time, but it was enjoyable nonetheless.

quiz: why is the Pentagon in the shape of a pentagon?

1. Because it would be silly to call a building "The Pentagon" if it wasn't shaped like a pentagon.
2. To signify the five branches of the military: Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, Coast Guard.
3. To evoke the shape of 15th-century fortifications.
4. To confuse any potential assailants, like the ones on 9/11, as to which face of the building to attack.
5. To best fit in the space they decided to build it in.
6. To fit in the space they were originally going to build it in, but they moved the site and decided to leave it as a pentagon because it looked cool.

what we have come to

This review of the new War of the Rohirrim movie, which like other reviews I've seen describes as dull and forgettable this attempt to fill out Tolkien's brief backstory of Helm's Deep, gets one important thing critically right. The author writes, "Game of Thrones ... and others have assumed that fantasy will only appeal to modern audiences if it's people using violence to jockey for position. This is a far cry from The Lord of the Rings the world fell in love with, where power is a corruptive force and inflicting violence, while necessary in war, is not necessarily what makes a hero." (I've moved a comma to improve the grammatical sense.)

This is one of the strongest of the important points that distinguish Tolkien's work from the hack-and-slash fantasies so often incongruously associated with his. I once wrote, "Those mighty-thewed warriors would consider even Aragorn a rather sniveling fellow, and would not grasp the concept of the non-violent Frodo as a hero at all." So many people don't get this difference; this writer does; so far so good.

The problem is that context shows that what the writer means by "The Lord of the Rings the world fell in love with" is the Jackson movies. We have reached a state of degradation where Jackson's atrocious distortion of Tolkien's themes looks like a beacon of faithfulness to the original in comparison with the even worse atrocities - including Jackson's Hobbit - that have come since.

I survived only one episode of Rings of Power and found myself wondering why anyone who loves Tolkien's work would even want to watch this. The amoral whinging - so similar to the description of War of the Rohirrim in these reviews - is so totally unlike Tolkien as to leave nothing in common but a few of the character names. Surely that's not enough to account for its appeal. You might like this kind of hack fiction also, but only as an entirely separate thing: to affiliate it with Tolkien's suggests you weren't paying attention when you read the original.

Such a problem infects another review of War of the Rohirrim I've seen which takes a similar tack to the first one. This author claims that the sheer length of Jackson's movies is "part of why [they're] so beloved," explaining that "Jackson's films mimicked the feeling of reading Tolkien's novels, more focused on spinning a yarn than structuring a story for the necessary constraints of television."

Well, that Jackson didn't care about constraints for structuring his story is true. Jackson told the story the way he wanted to, ignoring the "rules" of moviemaking whenever he wanted to (which is why I refuse to accept the necessities of the rules of moviemaking as a defense for his atrocities on the source material). He didn't tell it the way that conventional moviemakers would have wanted, or the way that Tolkien would have wanted.

But if that's what makes his movies beloved, then his Hobbit - even longer (relatively) and less structured than his LR - should be even more beloved. But it isn't, so that's hogwash. And even more hogwashable is the claim that LR "mimicked the feeling of reading Tolkien's novels." My god, did you see the movies? Did you read the book? Despite the movies' length, the rush-rush-rush of the action, the pitching directly from one catastrophe into the next (not 100% accurate, but it feels that way next to the book), with pauses either entirely omitted (where's the days-long creeping through Moria, for instance? It could have been depicted in a brief shot of a few seconds without adding anything to the run time) or treated ineptly (Rivendell, beautiful but perfunctory and hamhanded, and Lorien, not even beautiful) is so far from mimicking the book as to be one of the atrocities.

I won't be watching War of the Rohirrim. I have no interest in a hack-and-slash adventure, even if it's supposedly set in Tolkien's world and has his invented names on some of the characters. And I don't get why other Tolkien fans would bother to watch it.

two little concerts

Sunday I went to a Harmonia California concert. As with the previous time, I was impressed with the strong and heavy sound of this tiny (17-person) string orchestra, perfect for Baroque-period works in the minor (a Handel concerto grosso and an oboe concerto variously attributed to one or the other of the Marcello brothers - soloist Laura Griffiths was skilled far beyond the community orchestra level) and Tchaikovsky's Serenade.
Also on the program, a new five-minute piece by the orchestra's manager, Alan Hebert, who's taken up composition in his retirement from his day job. It's inspired by his favorite composer, Gerald Finzi. Finzi? That's an unusual choice for ... it sounded at least as much like Delius to me.

Tuesday a student group at Stanford was playing two Brahms chamber works with piano: the Quintet Op. 34 and the Quartet Op. 25, both favorites of mine. As often, especially with Brahms, I wished my mother were alive to go with me. The result was rather tepid in the offering, but earnest enough and competently played. The students, a group of mostly juniors who've been playing together since they were frosh, include 3 computer science majors, one in biomedical computation, and one in symbolic systems, whatever that may be. As B. points out, you don't go to Stanford to major in music. You play it on the side, and that's what they do here.

Getting there was a little exciting. The vet had been running busy, and I didn't get the cats out until 6. From there it's 15 minutes home without the commuter traffic which was heavy; the Stanford concert was at 7:30 and it takes 20 minutes to get there. In between which I wanted to make and eat dinner (that's myself and B). So I pan-fried up the frozen quesadillas I'd bought at Lunardi's last week. Being frozen they actually took longer to cook than the ones I make myself, but at least I didn't have to assemble the ingredients. Result, mixed quality.

cats in bondage

Every time one of our cats wanted to snuggle in the last couple of weeks - and they've wanted a lot of it - I felt guilty, knowing that today we would betray their trust and take them to the vet. Maia did her damndest to avoid being locked up in the cat carrier, while Tybalt sort of gave up. He's a very bright and personable pussycat, and I think he's figured out from past experience that resistance is futile.

That didn't prevent him from yowling loudly from the carrier, at least whenever he could see that I was around. But unlike Maia, who darted for cover the instant we opened the carrier on returning home, Tybalt just sort of sauntered out and was soon looking for love and petting again. Maia reappeared as soon as there was Food.

Tybalt has a heart condition, and part of his vet appointment was an echocardiogram, which he hadn't had before. I was afraid that being forced to lie prone for ten minutes while the sensor rummaged around his chest might traumatize him, but he seems OK. The vet said the cats were well-behaved, which is not how they sounded as the stereo yowling accompanied me as I carried the two hi-fi speakers into the vet's office.

another online conference

This weekend's was co-sponsored by the Tolkien Society (UK-based, though very international) and the Tolkien Society of Serbia, and Saturday's papers were to be in Serbian. I was busy anyway, so I skipped that, and listened to as much as I could - not much, as it turned out - of Sunday's in English.

The best one I heard was a presentation by Erik Jampa Andersson on the historical framing of the legendarium. He talked lucidly and with command of the material about the purported fictional translations, and about the real-world historical setting, postulating that Tolkien pulled back from the initial idea of a mythological English origin story to something set further and further back in history,* to the point - Andersson said - that the legends could be depicted as the origins not just of English or even broadly European myths, but more generally - so as to authorize anybody to write Tolkien fanfic or create media adaptations? I wasn't quite clear what the argumentative point was here.

Andersson then segued into discussion of media adaptations in general, and here I lost more of his thread. Noting Tolkien's belief that drama was naturally hostile to fantasy, producing mechanical tricks which strain to generate secondary belief, Andersson simultaneously argued that viewers of fiction films can't be totally immersed into the experience because they can't forget that they're watching actors and not the 'real' people, but also that a movie, because it is visual and auditory, not just textual, 'cements' that version of the story in viewers' minds, making them think that's the 'correct' version.

This ties in with my argument about media colonization - that you can't just ignore an effective movie and take the book down from the shelf, because the movie will be in the head - but Andersson was more interested in contrasting this 'cementing' with Tolkien's preference for unreliable narration.

Here I thought he went a little far. It's true that Tolkien experimented with writing stories that were factually unreliable within the fictive universe, but I think you can tell which ones those are, and while there are small points in The Lord of the Rings which are unknown or unanswered, the oft-used trope of claiming Sauron as the hero and depicting the book as a giant libel on him does not, I think, fall into that category. I mean, you can write that, but don't claim Tolkien's imprimatur on it.

*Andersson said what I've also noted, which that it is often difficult to explain to people that Tolkien's legendarium is set - as Andersson very nicely put it - not in an imaginary place, but in a real place in an imaginary time.

reading and eating

Today was our book discussion group's annual 'reading and eating' meeting, where we gather for food and to read short selections of our choice aloud to each other. And it was our second year in the back room of an Irish pub. Seven people again, almost all the same folks as last year. And we had lunch, most taking food typical of an Irish or British pub, only I had a caesar salad, and then did our reading.

As B. and I came by car, it wasn't difficult for me to lug along all three newly-published volumes of Tolkien's Collected Poetry to show them off and to read from. My first selection I introduced by saying "You all know the song which ends 'That's what Bilbo Baggins hates! / So carefully! carefully with the plates!' But what did J.R.R. Tolkien hate? Motorcycles!" And I read the previously unpublished poem expostulating almost incoherently against motorcycles in alliterative verse.

Other readings included more Tolkien, William Morris, Charles Dickens, Connie Willis, The Bloggess, and Yangsze Choo if I've spelled that correctly.

On the drive up I had the radio on, and Saturday morning is the weekly opera broadcast, into which we were dumped in the middle. We tried to figure out whose music it was. The sung language was German, so that limited the possibilities. The orchestra was wildly emotive enough to be Wagner, but the tone colors didn't have a distinctively Wagnerian air. B. thought maybe Weber, who certainly could be weird enough, but I thought the harmonic language beyond him. Then came a passage to which my comment was, "Now it sounds like Richard Strauss." It was. The act ended just before we arrived. It was Die Frau ohne Schatten.

the text police

I realize there are far more important things going on in this article, but what caught my eye in this story of dating gone wrong was the description of this as suspicious in the man's behavior: "Over the four weeks that they chatted virtually, though, he was 'hot and cold'—sometimes going silent for eight hours."

Eight hours? That's how long an average human being goes silent every day because they're asleep. I've never been used to instantaneous back-and-forth message communication, not even on e-mail, and I certainly wouldn't tolerate it now. If anyone started sending me messages at a rate at which an eight-hour gap was considered 'going silent,' I'd have to ask them to stop. The idea of being tied down to my mobile phone like that is horrifying. (When would I have the time to charge it?)

All this was going on by text, of course, and the above even leaves aside the fact that I hate texting anyway. I'm a touch typist, and any form of typing which doesn't allow me to place eight fingers on the home keys is anathema to me, I just hate it. It's even annoying at the desktop computer when I have to use one hand to hold a cat which wants to sit on my chest; cat cuddling is compatible with reading or watching videos, not writing. I will only text to send a short message for business purposes, and even then only if my recipient clearly expects it that way. Fortunately I only deal with a couple of people who are like that.

I admit that in a noisy situation, texting eliminates the problem of not being able to hear a voice call. Though I've found that, when trying to send a text in a fast-moving situation - we're both in the same building and need to meet right away, that sort of thing - the situation is usually changed (e.g. the other person has actually found me) before I can finish writing the text.

This is rendered worse because I keep getting the backspace and delete buttons on my phone mixed up in my mind. I make a typo and want to change that one last character, and suddenly find I've erased the entire message and have to start over.

I hate texting, and I won't do casual chatting that way. Thank the Lord I'm married to a woman as quiet as I am and I'm permanently out of the dating market.

four concerts

The weekend before Thanksgiving I went to three concerts. I was reviewing two of them, but the publication of the reviews was very late. So I waited to write about them until now.

1. South Bay Philharmonic, Friday
This is the community orchestra that B. is a violist in. They gathered to play Vasily Kalinnikov's First Symphony, which I've been hearing practiced in my living room almost continuously for the past several months. You may not have heard of Vasily Kalinnikov or his First Symphony, but I had. It was written just after Tchaikovsky's death, and sounds more like a Tchaikovsky symphony than anything else that isn't a Tchaikovsky symphony. I like it a lot, and enjoyed what was I think only the second time I'd heard it live. Especially the Andante, which was haunting.

2. Redwood Symphony, Saturday
This gathering was to play Dmitri Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony, which is the Very Difficult symphony I wrote on Nov. 22 that I was facing reviewing. My review says most of it, including why I was so looking forward to hearing this, which is that it's by far the most Mahlerian symphony Shostakovich ever wrote, and the Redwood Symphony does revelatory Mahler. I didn't find this performance revelatory in terms of casting insight as to how or why the composer wrote it as he did, but it was excellently done, just sizzling. I was particularly relieved that my study sessions had enabled me to internalize this "one damn thing randomly after another" piece enough to usually know what was coming next, because it really contributed to my appreciation of this first time I'd heard the piece live.

3. Peninsula Symphony and Stanford Symphonic Chorus, Sunday
Then I went to Bing to hear something by a favorite composer that I'd never heard at all, live or otherwise. Indeed, for years I hadn't even been aware that Howard Hanson had written a final, choral, seventh symphony. He called it "A Sea Symphony." So did Ralph Vaughan Williams title his choral symphony, 65 years earlier. Hanson set poems by Walt Whitman extolling the sea and shipping on the sea. So did Vaughan Williams. Hanson wrote four movements. So did Vaughan Williams. But Vaughan Williams's symphony is an hour long, Hanson's only 20. It also doesn't sound that much like Vaughan Williams, or like Hanson either, being a bit imitative but a bit watery. I'm glad I heard it, though, and I wrote a review.

Then this week, I went to hear

4. The Chamber Music Society of San Francisco, Monday
at the Freight - which does classical chamber music occasionally - in the form of a string quartet, playing Mozart's K. 575 and Beethoven's Op. 127. Good solid performances, just not as weighty as the works deserve. Large audience, mostly grey-haired.
Distressing discovery of the evening was that almost the entire block of Center Street with the good restaurants that are convenient to the BART station has been closed down for redevelopment, and will be shut off for the next two years. One of the restaurants I like has moved, but to too far away to be convenient for a pre-Freight dinner, alas.

strangulated girl

No human females are harmed in this post; the reference is to the word.

I've seen it noted that people not native to English often have particular trouble attempting to pronounce the word "squirrel." I would like to suggest a companion in that misery, and not just for second-language speakers: the phonetically slightly similar "girl."

I had noted how Prince Harry, with his cut-glass upper-crust British accent, sounded strangulated when trying to tell Oprah the (putative) sex of his then-impending child. The word didn't seem to fit his manner of talking.

But it was more recently when I was on the phone with a service representative who had, I think, some form of South Asian accent that I really began to wonder. He was reading an alpha-numeric code off to me, and for one letter said "G as in grr." "G as in what?" I asked, not sure if I'd heard the letter correctly. He repeated it. It took some time to establish that the word he was trying to say was "girl," but that neither the vowel nor the final L seemed to exist in his phonetic vocabulary. Possibly he should have picked a different word, but maybe the company had a required list.

matching Cleveland

The imminence of the second occasion in US history that a former president has returned for a second, non-consecutive term sends me thinking to the first occasion, Grover Cleveland in 1893. The question of appointees makes me wonder: did Cleveland reappoint in his second term anyone who'd served in his first term?

And the answer is, not in his Cabinet. He made a deliberate decision not to do so. One of his former cabinet officers did reappear in his administration. First-term Secretary of State Thomas F. Bayard was second-term Ambassador to the UK. Also note that William F. Vilas, who'd been Postmaster General and Secretary of the Interior in the first term, was during Cleveland's second term a US Senator, from Wisconsin, where he was a major spokesman for the administration. Some of Cleveland's other cabinet members were active in politics in a non-office-holding capacity, but their principal occupations were in private life.

Flipping the other way, of his second term major officers, Vice President Adlai E. Stevenson had been the assistant Postmaster General in the first term, and Secretary of War Daniel S. Lamont had served on the president's staff. Some others were office-holders outside of the executive branch: Secretary of the Treasury John G. Carlisle, for instance, had been Speaker of the House.

no-drama thanksgiving

Our niece hosted the usual big friends-and-family gathering today, and politics never came up. The obnoxious brothers who used to express right-wing views have now moved far away, and those few left who might share them are more circumspect. Everyone present had a good time. My brother and his fiancée came in from out of town, and I got to introduce her to the hostess's famous artichoke dip.

My own contribution was a roasted broccoli dish the recipe for which I found in my files a couple weeks ago and made for dinner at home, where it earned raves from B. and a strong suggestion I bring it for Thanksgiving. So I did even though I wasn't sure it would keep. It has broccoli, parmesan, and pine nuts, marinated in a combo of olive oil, vinegar, soy sauce, margarine, lemon juice, and just about every herb and non-hot spice in the cabinet.

Carnivorous offerings included smoked turkey, prime rib, and a beef Wellington that only appeared after most of us had eaten.

I sat for dinner next to the autistic grand-nephew who's now in his 20s and whose social skills have made impressive leaps in the last few years. I'm quite proud of him.

Afterwards, most of the family contingent drove by appointment to the nearby rehab facility where the patriarch, hostess's father, is recovering from physical difficulties and also beginning to suffer from dementia. We met him in a largish room set aside for such gatherings. He was in good cheer and easy to talk to, though he was having difficulty remembering who people were, even his own son. A sad situation.

Christopher Tolkien conference

Thursday was the centenary of the birth of Christopher Tolkien, son and literary executor of JRRT, and the man responsible - directly or indirectly - for all of the books that have come out in the last fifty years since JRRT's death with his name on them. The amount of, often very interesting, unpublished material that JRRT left behind him is very large, possibly unparalleled among major authors; and the amount of dedication displayed by CT towards that material is definitely unparalleled.

So the Tolkien Society held an online conference on Zoom last weekend to celebrate him. Being UK-based, it had rather odd time fixes over here. It started at 2 or 3 AM and finished around noon. Being often up in the middle of the night, I heard some of the early papers, but then I'd go back to bed again and missed more. Of the 28 presentations given, I heard all or part of 17.

More than half of the presentations I heard were personal testimonies of "how I worked with Christopher Tolkien." Someone described him as an 'editor-in-chief' and indeed he subcontracted out much of the work. People like Christopher Gilson, who's edited linguistic material, and Christina Scull and Wayne G. Hammond, who've edited everything, told much the same story: how their correspondence or conversation with CT led to him suggesting they might want to edit something, or at least have some suggestions as to how it might be presented in print, and that this led to a long collaboration in which CT would send photocopies of papers in his possession, carefully annotated (this page is the verso of that page; this part is in red ink; etc.), and showed infinite patience and tolerance for detail in answering questions, but his determination that the work be done right was inflexible.

There were several of these, and the same principle applied to talks by artists who've illustrated the work (Alan Lee and Ted Nasmith), to CT's own editor at his publishing house, and most interestingly to the archivist at Marquette University, where JRRT sold many of his manuscripts back in the 1950s. The talk was mostly a historical account. Not much attention was paid to these papers until CT started to need to consult them for his own work, and he developed a good relationship with the then-archivist. But what CT really needed, especially as his focus on the Marquette material increased, was a dedicated and knowledgeable on-the-spot assistant with the time and energy to do the work. And he got one: the late Taum Santoski. I knew Taum personally, though not as well as some, and I'm delighted he's received this attention in a talk that was almost more about him than about CT.

Other papers were about the work that CT did, some just generally about it being there and implying his importance by the fact that he put it out, but others focusing on the work he did and the complex interlayering of JRRT's basic writings, JRRT's commentaries on them, CT's comments on each, his arrangements of the material and his selections of them. (It's estimated that the four huge volumes on the writing of The Lord of the Rings contain only about 40% of what JRRT wrote.) Then there's the complexity of JRRT's work - the recastings, the revisions and erasures, the stories where the characters misunderstand the lore they've been told, the parts where JRRT himself wasn't sure what the answer was ... and CT's careful presentation of it all. Two papers, by Sara Brown and Kristine Larsen, discussed the Athrabeth, a key text in the legendarium, analyzing all of the layers of writing and the choices involved in editing it, and they and Verlyn Flieger emphasized even CT's courage in publishing this thing, which cut down to the bedrock of the fictional universe and touched the author's own deepest religious beliefs. I got the impression, listening to Sara and Kris speak and reading the chat function, that the mere existence of the Athrabeth was news to a lot of the attendees. There's a lot of exploring yet to be done, so let's get on and do it.

what's up

1. It's been raining, a little. Not quite the first storm of the season, as one hit while I was in LA (where it did not rain at all). Owing to Berkeley's more exposed location, I should have expected it'd be worse there went I went to see The Magic Flute on Wednesday. It wasn't so much that it was cold and drizzly as that it was windy. When I emerged from the BART station, my original plan had been to walk 3/4 of a block in one direction for dinner before coming back and walking 1 1/2 blocks in another direction to the theater. But both weather conditions and (as it turned out) time available argued against that, so I walked directly towards the theater in hopes I'd find a quick place to eat that way. On previous occasions I've stopped at a little East Asian place that serves the blandest chicken and rice imaginable, but this time I noticed an outlet of a local chain that does sub sandwiches. I don't really like subs, but I went in anyway and ordered one on their screen ordering device, then did what I usually do with meat sandwiches, which is take them apart and eat the pieces separately.

2. I do the crossword puzzles in the magazines I subscribe to. (Just in print; I've never figured out how to do an online crossword.) I fill out as much as I can, then hand it to B. who can usually do all the rest. But yesterday I could not hand it over, because for the first time in my life I succeeded at finishing a crossword puzzle. It was the one in The Week for Nov. 22. It didn't have any particularly clever clues, but it did tempt me with a few clues that were screamingly obvious, at least to me, like "Debussy composition whose title means 'The Sea'" and "Country between Ukraine and Romania."

3. I'm reviewing a Very Difficult symphony on Saturday. I know the work, but not as well as I'd need to. So I've been listening and re-listening to recordings, with online scores and with commentary from the books I have on the composer. In addition to being Very Difficult, it's also Very Long, so this is taking a while.

4. We bought a new tv set. Our old one, which must be at least 20 years old, was fading in color saturation. I confirmed with Consumer Reports that Samsung, which we had, was still the best brand for smaller sets (our new one is 32", just small enough to fit on the table we put it on), and I went down to Best Buy - the independent retail appliance stores around here are mostly gone - and bought one off the shelf. To my astonishment, all the cables from the old one still fit the new one. What we had problems with was the new feature, access to streaming services. Some of the ones we have subscriptions to worked OK, others failed loading in eccentric ways. That was the first day. Over the next couple of days, they got better. Still, the number of times I had to enter a code from the screen into the company's web site on my tablet before it would let me in was irksome.

opera review: The Magic Flute again

Last June, I went to the San Francisco Opera's Magic Flute, which I found so boring and dreary that I got up at intermission and never went back.

This week I decided to give Mozart's wayward opera a chance again with The Matchbox Magic Flute, adapted and directed by Mary Zimmerman and given by Berkeley Rep, which is a theater company and not an opera company, and it did sound like it.

That's part of what made it "matchbox." The word meant that it was small-scale: designed for a small theater, cut down to two hours instead of three, minor characters as well as plot distractions and lengthy dialogue disposed of, simple staging, a pit band of only five players, and singers who would have been more at home in musical theater than grand opera. But since The Magic Flute is a Singspiel and not an opera, that's appropriate.

Kosman hated it: he claimed that it retained the original's entire pointless plot (not true) and that the singers weren't up to the music. It's certainly true that Mariene Fernandez as Pamina was the only one who sounded like an opera singer, and that Emily Rohm was too weak in her high notes for such a powerhouse part as the Queen of the Night. But I attend enough musical theater, and dislike operatic grandiosity for its own sake enough, that I didn't mind that. What I really regretted was that most of the singers didn't have clear enough enunciation and it was hard to make out the words. Usually opera companies put up supertitles, but since Berkeley Rep isn't an opera company, they didn't. The Lamplighters, the local Gilbert & Sullivan group, do use supertitles even though their singers all have outstandingly clear enunciation. The only performer in this cast who sounded as clear as that was Shawn Pfautsch as Papageno, who has done G&S.

But was it fun to watch? Yes! It was clever and witty and charming and I had a good time. Zimmerman's translation, insofar as I could make it out, was naturally phrased and fit the music well. I liked the sly contemporary references, and making Papageno into a bird himself, not just a bird-catcher, meant that he could be silenced by removing the beak that he otherwise wore (and when, while wearing it, he was offered some wine, he drank it like one of those bobbing duck toys).

concert review: San Jose Chamber Orchestra

I attended and reviewed an unexpectedly unusual concert on Sunday. Here, the headline my editors put on it says it all: San Jose Chamber Orchestra Plays Two Works With Three Conductors.

musical events

Not really concerts as I normally go to them, but certainly musical:

1) Caroline Shaw and Gabriel Kahane
This was at Herbst and sponsored by the classical promoter, and the performers both have classical credentials, but it was more like a singer-songwriter event at the Freight, not least in consisting of one set lasting just over an hour. Kahane, at piano, and Shaw, sometimes with viola, sang and played reflective and ruminative songs they'd severally and jointly written, many of them forming a cycle called "Hexagons" whose lyrics set them in Borges's Library of Babel. That made it a pretty high-culture event, even by Freight standards, but the music didn't indulge in any of the post-modernist abstractions both composers are known for. It would have fit right in with the more ethereal and thoughtful performers at the Freight, much more than it did with anything else I hear at Herbst.

2) Palo Alto Players, Fiddler on the Roof
It's been a while since I've seen a production of this; happy to do so again. The first thing you need for this show is a Tevye with real stage presence, and in Joey McDaniel they had that. Golde (Brittney Mignano) was strong; the girls (Gabrielle Goodman, Madelyn Davis-Haddad, Teagan Murphy) did a great job with "Matchmaker Matchmaker"; Yente (Marsha van Broek) was emphatically Yenteish to the delight of all; Fruma-Sarah (Marie Finch) loomed adequately; Motel (Joe Steely) sang a better "Miracle of Miracles" than the song deserved. But in a show like this there always has to be one performer who can't sing. This was Perchik. He acted his part very well, but ... he could not sing.
Despite a large cast, a little thin-sounding in the ensemble numbers, but well-staged, good costumes, an enjoyable show. Playing through Nov. 24 at Lucie Stern.

Fantasy: Realms of Imagination

And the other artistic expedition that I made on my trip to LA was to venture down to the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana, because it was hosting the touring version of the British Library exhibit by the above title.

A couple hundred items in four or five rooms, mostly books and manuscripts (usually from the BL collection) but a fair number of media items, less illustrations (though there were some of those) than screens showing videos. Some of these were talks of the interview sort with authors, of whom the only one I knew was Terri Windling. But there were also some clips from movies and tv shows, ranging from the 1910 Wizard of Oz film to a clip from Buffy (Tara running away from the Gentlemen).

At one end of one room was a 14th-century manuscript of the Iliad, at the other a 1983 kit for Dungeons & Dragons. That'll give you an idea of the scope and range. No single author got more than minimal attention. CSL had an early US edition of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and a copy of the poster of Pauline Baynes's Narnia map. Tolkien had a first edition of The Hobbit, open to Thror's Map, and a Swedish translation open to an illustration by Tove Jansson depicting Gollum as a giant troll-like blob. The caption astutely noted that Tolkien subsequently added the adjective "small" to Gollum's description, but it leaves the impression that Jansson was the only artist who made this strange interpretation: no, she wasn't.

Manuscripts included the faint pencil of a page from The Wind in the Willows, a typescript page with extensive pen changes from Macdonald's Lilith, and the notebook in which Le Guin wrote the first draft of A Wizard of Earthsea, placed so far back in the case it was not possible to read any of it.

Such a circumstance was the locale of the one factual error I found in the caption. It said we were looking at the "original manuscript" of Terry Pratchett's The Colour of Magic, but it wasn't. It was the galley proofs. I mentioned this to the clerk in the exhibit gift shop, figuring to get a shrug, but no, she was a former part-time English lit grad student who was very interested and promised to pass this on, though I had to explain both what galley proofs were and why they're called that.

I wasn't in a position to say what really bothered me about the way the exhibit was presented, which was its depiction of all these assorted authors as if they were engaged in a conscious group project, each contributing a stone or two to a vast edifice. But at least until the advent of a publishing genre of original fantasy in the 1970s (or earlier if limited to sword and sorcery), the characteristic of literary fantasy was that, though authors were intermittently aware of and admiring of one another, each plowed their own furrow; they were distinctive for their individuality. There was no "group project" about it and it belittles them and the field to suggest there was.

That there was something naive and belittling about the entire thing was communicated by the animated illustration at the entrance. It was of a unicorn, depicted as a horse with a horn in its forehead. There's more to a unicorn than that, but I'm not going to bother saying so.

mini-Mythcon

In a living room east of LA on Monday afternoon, five locals who are Mythopoeic Society regulars but were not able to attend this year's Mythcon gathered to hear me, come down from NorCal for the occasion, give my paper from this year's Mythcon on one of the most elusive and atypical Inklings, CSL's pupil John Wain.

I described how he didn't fit in with the Inklings, how he didn't fit in with the younger writers of his own generation with whom he's most associated, and then described some of his novels (modern realist, decidedly not fantasy, except insofar as he's deluding himself about human behavior), all of which I've read. Some I thought casually worthwhile, others are ... not.

After the paper, and some supplementary prepared contributions to panels at Mythcon, and much discussion among the Mini-atures, we adjourned for dinner at a local roastery. And a Good Time was had by all.

concert review: blech

Having another free evening in LA, searching the events listings beforehand I found what I thought would be a Rodgers and Hammerstein revue.

It wasn’t. When I arrived, at the PAC at a community college in the Pomona Valley near where I am staying, it was billed as a tribute to the Great American Songbook, but what it actually was, was jazz vocals. You know the kind, where the singers unpleasantly distort the melody, then hand it over to the instrumentalists, who distort it further to the point of unrecognizability. This is why I hate jazz. I stuck out the 90 minutes, more because I was curious as to what songs they’d maul than eagerness to hear them maul them. (There was no set list in the program booklet, which was only available by QR code anyway, and from the age of the audience I doubt I was the only person there who couldn’t access it, though I was apparently the only one who raised enough of a fuss about it that the assistant manager let me look at her phone.)

Anyway, the singers, Benny Benack III and Stella Cole, semi-performed three R&H songs, Some Enchanted Evening, The Sound of Music, and Getting to Know You; a bunch of other Broadway musical theatre songs of that era (I Could Have Danced All Night, Till There Was You, Almost Like Being in Love, Hello Dolly and Food Glorious Food - a bit later date, those two - and a few others, almost all of which I knew), and a few songs from movies (including Moon River and Over the Rainbow, both of which Stella liked so much she sang them almost straight) and a few other miscellanea.

Not a great use of my time.

Sondheim Festival VII: Pacific Overtures

I attended a whole sheaf of productions of Sondheim shows in the first half of last year; here's a supplement. It was Pacific Overtures, a show rarely done, perhaps because it requires a cast of Asian ethnicities, and all-Asian theater companies are not thick on the ground, perhaps? I don't know. But the East West Players in Los Angeles is such a troupe, and I caught the first preview performance of their new production - it runs through December 1 - on my current trip to LA. I'd encourage anyone in LA who's interested in this kind of theater to go; it's one of the best Sondheim productions I've seen.

So Pacific Overtures - with "Pacific" meaning peaceful, not the ocean, and "Overtures" meaning introductory offers, not what comes before an opera, phrase taken from a letter by Commodore Perry, tells the story of the 1850s opening of Japan to Western contact, almost entirely from the Japanese point of view, with the rest being what the Japanese might imagine the Americans and other Westerners are like. Despite some tragic events, it's mostly comic, even silly, almost slapstick, and I'm almost surprised that the Japanese don't object to this Western portrait of their ancestors.

For most of the plot, the Japanese are just trying to make the Westerners go away, Perry and his ships in the first act and various others following in his wake in the second act. Things get hairy - there's a nasty scene, reminiscent of something from Sweeney Todd, where three British sailors - played, like all the Westerners, by regular cast members in masks - menace a high-ranking Japanese woman pursuant to her rape, but at the end the Emperor takes charge, officially bans rejection of the visitors and the scene segues into a quick closing account of all that Japan and Japanese people have accomplished since adopting Western ways, though the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere doesn't get a reference.

The music is perhaps vaguely Japanese in style without being pentatonic, with interjections of what I guess was authentic Japanese folk music, but what struck me was the lyrics with echoes of the Sondheim writing style from shows like Into the Woods (especially the ensemble opening number) and Sunday in the Park with George.

But oh, the production! Brilliantly colorful costumes, ingenious staging of characters sometimes speaking for each other, and the most fervent and dedicated acting and singing. The song that struck me as the best in the show depicted the shogun's advisors considering how to react to Perry's arrival. I thought about posting a link to a recording, but none of the performers of the principal part I found online were even close to a match for the delight of hearing and seeing Gedde Watanabe (who was actually in a small part in the show's original production in 1976) perform it onstage last night. And they were all like that, with special marks to Jon Jon Briones as the Reciter, the principal character.

This was a winner. Go see it if you're anywhere in the area. Through December 1. Ticket info at the company web site.

concert review: Jerusalem Quartet

Joshua Kosman, retired newspaper reviewer who's now blogging, is "at the moment struggling to imagine what purpose is served by going to concerts, listening to music, and thinking and writing about it" in our new authoritarian reality.

I look at it differently. I see music as a refuge, a - not a "comfort," that's too facile - but a means for healing and enriching the soul. Even music that's dissonant can do that. That's why I posted a link to A Child of Our Time on Wednesday, and that I think is the point of having any form of art at all.

Which is why I went with cheerful anticipation to this concert by a string quartet group I knew nothing about. They're four men from Israel, a country whose exports some would prefer to boycott, though how avoiding its cultural features would help the people in Gaza is not clear to me. Perhaps it's just to chide the entire country for having an obnoxious government, though if that's the motive then come January I'd have to start boycotting myself, and I'm not sure how I would do that.

So I just ignored that point. This concert ought to have been in Herbst, but there was a scheduling conflict after the performers had to change their date, so it was moved to the large(r of the) halls at the San Francisco Conservatory down the street, a much better venue than it looks. They played Haydn's Op 50/1, a lively piece, Dvorak's Op 106, an expansive one, and Shostakovich's Twelfth. Shostakovich's Twelfth is in D-flat major, an insane key to write for strings in, but I think Shostakovich had a plan, if he lived long enough (which he didn't), to write a string quartet in each key, like The Well-Tempered Clavier. As for why this one, apparently the Jerusalem Quartet is working its way through a Shostakovich cycle, and this was just the Twelfth's turn to come up.

This is the work which begins with an attempt to write twelve-tone music, but soon enough the composer gives it up and goes back to writing like Shostakovich. It was at this point that it became crystal clear what the Jerusalem Quartet is good for, and that's for playing fast loud passages in unison. They simply burn the carpet. Something similar had been revealed in the Haydn, not in unison but in a quick forte exchange, where despite the quartet's serious mien they passed the phrases around with the vim and vigor of children playing with a ball.

And so it was a pretty good concert, and I preceded it with trying out for dinner a nearby Burmese restaurant (hey, this is San Francisco - we have every national culture in the world) of some reputation, where I had Strange Catfish (not its name, but should have been).

responsive music for a troubled time

Michael Tippett, A Child of Our Time

concert review: California Symphony

I think that Mason Bates's update to the Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra was supposed to be the highlight of this concert, but the Brahms Fourth Symphony took that prize instead, in my ears, so that became the focus of my review.

concert review: Redwood Symphony

What is this? It's the entire bassoon section of the Redwood Symphony dressed as gnomes for the orchestra's Halloween concert. Everybody was dressed up: they were conducted by a pirate, and Batman played the timpani.

And I reviewed it.

Watching ten small children, each bearing a souvenir baton, escorted in turn up to the podium for 30-second stints "conducting" a Sousa march - it reminded me of the old joke of a conductor with a small piece of paper on the music stand in front of him which proved to read "Wave hands around until music stops." The main point of the exercise, of course, was for their parents to take photos.

return to history

Unruly: The Ridiculous History of England's Kings and Queens, by David Mitchell (Crown, 2023)

David Mitchell is a British comedian, tv panelist, and writer whom I think is not well-known in the US. I know his screen work exclusively from clips on YouTube. But I'm aware that he's both very funny in a ruthlessly logical way and extremely intelligent, so I picked up this book which is a history of English monarchs from post-Roman times up through Elizabeth I, which is when, Michell says, royal history became too much of a subset of general history to be worth pursuing.

Reviews describe this as a humorous book, but while it does have some comic digressions in the manner of John Oliver, it's mostly an entirely serious historical account; it's the way that it's told that's funny; and this appeals to me, for though my style is different and I'm nowhere near as good as Mitchell, that's similar to the effect I aim at when writing informally about history myself.

Mitchell has a main theme which becomes more explicit as the book goes along, which is an analysis of the whole point of having a king, what good does it do to have one in a medieval society. And he measures the kings he discusses in terms of how well they succeed at those aims.

I'll leave that analysis to him, but I would like to quote extracts from his extraordinarily level-headed (i.e. he agrees with me) evaluations of some of the more challenging historical problems of the period.

On whether King Arthur actually existed:

Some people will still say he might have existed, but the sort of person they say he might have been is so far removed from King Arthur in any of the forms we understand him that it feels like they're just saying he didn't exist in a different way. Perhaps a Roman officer who served in Britain, or a Romano-British chieftain, or a Welsh king. Someone like that, the idea goes, might have been the bit of real grit in the imagination oyster that turned into the Arthurian pearl. Personally, I don't think imagination oysters need real grit any more than metaphorical bonnets need real bees.

On whether Richard III was really a bad guy:

It's well established, then, that the Tudors worked hard to make Richard III look bad. Too well established. People in modern times got a bit overexcited about it and started to jump to the contrary conclusion that Richard was, in fact, lovely. This is a bit of a leap. The lamentable problem that you can't believe everything you're told is not solved by merely believing the polar opposite. I find all this a bit daft. It's nice to take an active interest in history. But we don't and can't really know these people. The truth is lost under centuries of propaganda and then centuries of contrarian rejection of it.

This is an amazing, entertaining, and useful history book.

soup for dinner

When B. and I were up in Ashland, Oregon, last June, I stopped in a grocers that carried interesting stuff that I didn't see at home. I bought several packets of a northwest brand of soup fixings - one envelope of pasta or beans, another one of seasonings, a recipe card inside.

It was hard to believe, in June, that it would ever again be cold enough for soup for dinner to be desirable, but at last it's come. I got down the bag from the back of the pantry where the packets had been sitting all these months, pulled out the basic chicken noodle soup mix, and made it. Of course it expected you to add chicken, but on the back of the card there were some additional suggestions, one of which was a cup of fresh vegetables: "We like summer squash & broccoli." Substitute zucchini for the summer squash and it not only sounds good to me, I was already planning to put those in before I saw the back of the card.

So that was our nice small dinner, and I'll make the others soon.

And that was our Halloween. No trick-or-treaters in our neighborhood in recent years, so no costumes, no decorations, no candy, no lights on, just a normal evening at home.

no, el coward

Our play-reading group just finished our second play by Noël Coward. We've all agreed that it will be our last.

Some time ago we read Blithe Spirit, and despite the degree that it's about the staging rather than the dialogue, we enjoyed it and decided to pick another one some time. I argued against Present Laughter, because I'd watched a tv presentation of that and found it boring and tedious, despite the fact that it starred Kevin Kline. The amount of bad writing required to make Kevin Kline boring and tedious is unimaginable.

Instead, we picked Private Lives, which as a play with only four characters (essentially: there's a maid with a brief walkon) was ideal for a four-reader group. It's the one about a divorced couple who run into each other while each on their honeymoon with a new partner, who rediscover first why they got married in the first place and then why they got divorced.

But no, it's more than that. They actually reunite, then split up again, then reunite again, meanwhile revealing themselves as both truly unpleasant people whom we felt bespoiled by trying to impersonate by reading their lines. This is the play with the infamous line so beloved by Brett Kavanaugh's frat brothers, "Certain women should be struck regularly, like gongs."

It should be noted that the woman addressed replies to the man saying it, "You're an unmitigated cad, and a bully." But he returns, "And you're an ill-mannered, bad-tempered slattern." We couldn't say that either of them were wrong.

As the play went on it turned out that the discarded partners, instead of sympathetic innocents, are just as bad as the other two. And we noticed retrospectively how the general air of nastiness and inhumanity infects Blithe Spirit as well: it was just disguised by the comic situation. This one is not so well-disguised. Coward's world turns out to be an unpleasant one we just don't want to spend any more time in, and so, no more.

And so, having done all of Shakespeare's history plays, we're turning to Marlowe's Edward II. Those people are also nasty and brutish, but they're not pretending to be oh-so-cleverly witty about it, and that makes all the difference.

concert review: Other Minds

The Complete Piano Sonatas of Galina Ustvolskaya
Conor Hanick, piano

This was a concert so profoundly unusual and interesting that I felt compelled to go to it. Other Minds is a sponsor that does offbeat modern music events; I've been to them occasionally before. For this one, they rented the Freight & Salvage in Berkeley.

Ustvolskaya was a Soviet-era composer who was a pupil of Shostakovich (he had a crush on her, as he did on most of his female pupils, but nothing came of it). But her music is not like his; in truth it's not like much of anything else, and she was even more insistent on her own uniqueness than is justified by the music.

Her output is small. She wrote six piano sonatas over the course of her career, four in 1947-57 and the other two in 1986-88. What I learned from this concert was how different the two subsets are: I'll explain that. There are recordings of these pieces, but the impact of hearing them live is incomparable.

After a half-hour talk on Ustvolskaya by musicologist Simon Morrison and a brief break, Hanick sat down and played all six sonatas without a break, only stopping long enough to take his hands briefly from the keyboard between works: one solid 70-minute wad of music.

It takes something really good to keep from being wearying over that time. Not only was Hanick a solid and vivid pianist (and the Freight's acoustics are wonderfully clear for piano music), but it was constantly evident throughout that this was music of great substance and thought, no matter how uningratiating it was - and it was, very. The contrast could not have been greater with certain renowned modern composers whose difficult music is empty and void of anything except challenges to the performers.

From the beginning, Ustvolskaya's music was tough and brutal. Someone dubbed her "the lady with the hammer." Yet throughout the early sonatas, there were quiet and tender passages as well. The variety was part of what kept the flow working. Though the music held interest and was obviously of intellectual substance, I was not sure if I was really connecting with it on a visceral level.

This changed when we got to the last two sonatas. If the earlier music was tough and harsh, this was tougher and harsher. Hanick slammed the keys down, and even employed his forearm to play tone clusters - not for the gentle washes of sound that Henry Cowell, their inventor, had done, but for the ferocious clang that people think they're for.

It was at this point in her career that Ustvolskaya started employing insistent repetitions of notes and phrases, always at top volume, that put tremendous tension and drive into the music. This is what caused one critic to dub her an exponent of "sado-minimalism," a term whose cleverness can't disguise that it's inapt for both of its components. Though severe, it isn't painful, and there's nothing of the absorbent trance of canonical minimalism.

Though you'd think I'd be beginning to be tired out from all this, instead I found my interest renewed and refreshed, absorbed and captivated by this hard but very human stuff. It spoke a strange and hard language, but it spoke clearly and compellingly. I'm not sure I'd want to listen to it again soon, but I'm oh so glad I did, and was I ever artistically satisfied by the evening.

concert review: Voices of Silicon Valley

This was the 10th anniversary celebration of a little (17-voice) local acappella choir that I hadn't heard of before. SFCV actually promoted this concert, though they haven't reviewed it, at least the first performance (I went to the second, yesterday). But what inspired me to go was that my old friend K., who's belonged to other local choirs, has joined this one. I think she felt it was more her style.

Its style is an offbeat combination of avant-garde experimental pieces and epically tuneful musical excerpts from video games.* The main work on the program was Bits torn from words by Peter S. Shin, which has lyrics but mostly consists of oohs and ahhs overlaid on each other in complicated ways. It sounds great in the recording by the famed avant-garde choir Roomful of Teeth. But though VoSV sang this challenging piece with fair competence, they lacked the artistic flair needed to put it across effectively. Nice try, though.

I was much more impressed with the premiere of a commission from one of their own tenors, Alexander Frank. Describing the work beforehand in a talk that deserved the title Chatter as much as the composition did, Frank said that, because the work consists entirely of spoken words, he does not classify it as music, but as 'voice.'

Oh, I thought, I wish my old buddy V. were alive to hear that. She and I used to have intense arguments about this. I said that certain types of aural compositions were not music, not to denigrate them but to classify them properly, because they needed to be listened to differently in order to be appreciated. (Imagine listening to the 'music' in, say, a Shakespeare soliloquy as if it actually were a musical composition. It would just be wayward and irritating.) V. insisted it was all music; music is the whole sphere, it's not differentiated. I would say fine, in that case we need another word to describe what the term 'music' used to mean. I suggest 'music,' and for the larger category of organized sound, something like 'organized sound.'

Anyway, it sounds like Frank agrees with me. His composition was a fascinating collage of mostly unintelligible chatter. It began with everybody talking at once, like the sound of a restaurant full of diners, and then reduced to a few voices, then increased again. Sometimes a couple voices would talk in unison. It was not music because there was no melody, no harmony; but there was rhythm and timbre and there was certainly multiplicity of line if not exactly counterpoint, and as with other such works I've heard (Varese's Ionisation for percussion ensemble) I found myself absorbed by those elements, though I would not wish the piece to go on any longer than it did.

More conventionally, VoSV sang a piece called The House of Belonging by Jeffrey Derus, one of those efforts in which the words are stuffed awkwardly into music which they don't quite fit; and Friede auf Erden by Arnold Schoenberg, in German.

Their pianist, whose role was mostly to serve as a pitch pipe, though she did accompany a couple of pieces, also played a solo piano work, one of the most totally useless pieces of music I have ever heard. Its sole point seemed to be to proceed slowly down the entire keyboard from the top note to the bottom.

After intermission there was a brief interjected set by a local high school choir, who did pretty well for themselves. Their set included a motet by Josef Rheinberger, a 19C figure who's the most renowned composer from Liechtenstein, but their most challenging and effective piece was a setting of the Lamentations of Jeremiah by the noted living American choral composer Z. Randall Stroope. Then they joined VoSV at the end for the grand finale, a nice arrangement of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah."

The first performance had been at the Hammer Theatre in San Jose, but I skipped that both for scheduling reasons and to avoid Hammer's dodgy acoustics, preferring the venue of the small and friendly, if perishingly cold, Tateuchi Hall in Mountain View. I might have been better off at Hammer. The chorus was miked, which in a hall as small as Tateuchi led to an overload of sound, with a couple of the sopranos (not K.) shrieking unpleasantly.

I think the choir strove for more than they could do here, but some of it came off well, and it's the striving that's important, right?

Credits: VoSV artistic director and conductor, Cyril Deaconoff. Pianist, Ting Chang. High school choir, Saratoga. Its director, Beth Nitzan.

*They sang themes from Genshin Impact and Portal 2, not that either of those names means anything to me, but I know that if I don't mention it, someone will ask. They also sang, with boombox-style accompaniment, music from Gladiator, which if it's not a video game, ought to be.

concert review: Esmé Quartet

I heard this group two-and-a-half years ago, in their North American debut, at which time they consisted of four young women from Korea who had been studying in Germany. Now they consist of three of those women plus a man from Belgium, and they're not in Germany any more, they're right here in San Francisco, having all four been hired to teach at the San Francisco Conservatory, which is some six blocks down the street from the Herbst Theatre where both of these concerts were held.

At the previous concert they gave a stunningly effective performance of Dvořák's Op 106, a work which doesn't always come off that well. So how would they do this time with Schubert's G Major, which is one of the most lyrical quartets in the repertoire? Oh, one felt floating along in a timeless state of bliss listening to this lengthy work: the combination of lyricism and drive was superb. Here: this is a very fine video of the previous Esmé lineup playing this work, and it will give you something of an idea.

I was particularly pleased with the forte outbursts in the first movement, which had the bite and drama one associates with Schubert's previous quartet, "Death and the Maiden," and by the fast rondo of the finale, which had the momentum of a waterwheel or of a snowball rolling unobstructed downhill: it was as if it was being driven by the force of gravity.

Yet even more remarkable, by the same standards, was the rest of the program. Mozart's D Major Quartet, K. 575, one of his late "Prussian" Quartets, rose above any routine Mozart scribbling with an elegant sense of gracefulness and an unending emphasis on the lyric flow. Astonishingly, the same thing was true of Ligeti's First, a tiresome collection of random 1950s avant-garde tricks strung together. No matter how gritty, fragmented, dissonant, or harsh the music, the Esmé players found that lyrical flow of a melodic line. It was an astonishingly graceful performance, unlike anything I've heard in this work before. It didn't make me like Ligeti any better, but it further cemented my admiration for Esmé.

For an encore, despite now being only 3/4 Korean, they played a piece of Korean folk music, which in its ceaseless presentation of bent note slides outdid even Ligeti in weird modernism.

smashing pumpkins

Article (paywalled) about what to do with your jack-o-lantern after Halloween.

Don't put it in the garbage; it will just release methane from the landfill. Compost it, or donate it to be fed to pigs or other omnivores, or take it to a pumpkin-smashing event, after which they'll compost it.

I thought with sorrow of all the ex-jack-o-lanterns I dumped in the garbage after past Halloweens, because I didn't know any better and knew of nothing else I could do. We did keep a compost heap for a short period, but I quit because it was not something I could manage, and it wasn't large enough to have taken a whole pumpkin in a short period anyway.

But a few years ago, our garbage can was replaced with one with a separate compartment for food scraps, which I think go to the omnivores. And I would be happy to put the pumpkin in that, if we still kept a jack-o-lantern. But the number of trick-or-treaters in our neighborhood, once hefty, trickled to a near-stop years ago, so now we just turn the lights off and go to bed early on Halloween. No candy that we'd only have to eat ourselves, and no decorations and no jack-o-lanterns.

But it's nice to know what we should do if we did it.

and the trivia goes on

So Anna Kendrick was on Stephen Colbert's show a day or two ago, to promote her new movie Woman of the Hour (which I've actually seen: it's on Netflix), the true story of a woman who goes as a contestant on The Dating Game not knowing that one of the three eligible bachelors is a serial killer. (And what happens then? Stephen: "The person you play, was that a real person?" Anna: "Yes." Stephen: "And was she OK?" Anna: "Stephen! Premise of the film!")

She's talking about, having already been cast in the lead role, she applied for and won the vacant position of director, though she'd never directed a film before. She was having an internal debate on whether to apply or not, and described it (4:08-4:22) as "a Gollum/Smeagol battle of who's going to win out here."

Now that was interesting, because not only did she make the comparison, but she did so aptly: Gollum v. Smeagol is an internal debate within one person, not (as some viewers of the movie might presume) between two different personas in a multiple-personality case. Good for her.

And also, she pronounced "Gollum" correctly, whereas Colbert in response (4:35) is still saying "Golem." I wish someone would correct him on air about that. Isaac Asimov was once on The Tonight Show, and was irritated by Carson pronouncing his name "EYE-ZAK", so he fantasized about calling his host "JOE-NEE" but didn't have the nerve.

Colbert didn't know he was engaged in a Lord of the Rings trivia contest last night, but he lost it to Anna Kendrick.

more corrections

A few years ago, I cobbled together a series of corrections and additions I'd accumulated over the years for a major article I'd published about 30 years ago. I sent those updates to the original journal, two editors later, and they published it.

I've just learned of another correction that I would have included had I known about it. Another researcher, plunging into related topics, tried to order by ILL a copy of a rare article I had cited and was told that no article of that kind existed in the named issue or anywhere near it. She wrote to me and asked for help finding it.

I had received this article by photocopy from - someone else, I don't remember whom. It had no publication information on it. Where I got the citation from, I don't know either: probably the person who supplied it. But this was evidently wrong. I applied a little clever research skill and was able to determine that the article was actually five years older than I'd been told, 1976 instead of 1981.

I sent this information to the enquirer, along with a PDF of the photocopy, which came from some material I've kept in my handy file drawers all these years. She was greatly appreciative.

For a further trick, I went to a local university library which is one of the few holders of a book that one of my "Year's Work in Tolkien Studies" writers needs but which she can't get from her college's ILL, which evidently charges by the search, like the old Dialog service did. Fortunately the local university library has a usable scanner, and fortunate also that I needed only two chapters from the book. One more PDF.

those ruddy bastards

I'm really annoyed.

I was in LA in mid-August, and on Sunday morning (this was the 18th) decided to drive over to a favorite used book store in east Hollywood, because I'd been there the previous day and noticed signs saying they were having a big all-hands sale the following day.

This is what transpired, taken from my blog report of the trip. "Traffic was fine until I got to Hollywood, where something was going on. Streets were closed and the traffic was packed. It took me 15 minutes to travel five blocks." I was eventually able to turn off on to a side street a few blocks from the bookstore where, to my surprise, I found available parking. The bookstore itself was not over-crowded, and I took twisty and mystifying back streets through the Hollywood hills to get out of there. But the experience was so shattering that, once I got back to my hotel, I spent the rest of the day recuperating, and got out of LA first thing the next morning instead of in the afternoon as I'd intended.

I've just now found out what caused the congestion. I was reading an article on Slate about the future of LA traffic, and found a reference to "CicLAvia, an enormous, movable parade that runs through different parts of Los Angeles some eight times a year and draws about 50,000 participants. Six miles of streets open up to pedestrians, cyclists, joggers, roller bladers, and wheelchair users, with traffic barred at some intersections and directed by police at others."

I'd never heard of this before, but I thought, "eight times a year ... could it ...?" so I looked it up and yep, it did. Sunday, August 18, it was going right through Hollywood, just one long block away from the street my bookstore was on.

And I repeat: I'd never heard of this, either the specific event or the program in general. Nobody had told me.

My absolute opposition to protesters blocking streets to force the public to suffer for some cause does allow for an acceptance of pre-planned parades. You know they're coming, where they're going, when they will stop, and that police will monitor them; travelers can plan around them. But not if they haven't heard about them. I visit LA fairly often, but I'm only a visitor. This project has apparently been going on for some time, but I'd never heard about it. There were no temporary street signs up a block away, even on Saturday, saying "warning: the streets will be congested and Hollywood Boulevard will be entirely closed on Sunday the 18th." There was nothing on the signs in the bookstore announcing the sale adding, "You might want to think twice about trying to get here that day, though."

Now I know. Whenever I go to LA in the future, I'll have to check ahead and see if there's one of those closures going on, the same way I check to see if there are any wildfires going on in the hills near where I'll be. But when it actually hit me, I didn't know. Those ruddy, ruddy bastards.

concert review: Borromeo Quartet

Borromeo Qt. L to R: Yeesun Kim, vc; Kristopher Tong, 2v; Melissa Reardon, va; Nicholas Kitchen, 1v

Sunday evening I went up to Kohl Mansion to hear the Borromeo Quartet in the first concert of the chamber music season in their magnificent Great Hall, a sort of drawing room on which a platform has been placed on the mid side, so that people in all the chairs surrounding it can see; there's no trouble with hearing. In fact, the acoustics are stunning, which brought particular vividness to this particular performance.

This was an exceedingly serious string quartet concert. The repertoire had its lighter moments - Beethoven's Op. 135 is often seen as a reversion to his clever Haydnesque youth with the greater perspective of maturity; and Sibelius's Voces Intimae Quartet has a couple of lighter and bouncier movements. But they didn't come out that way this time. Nor did the darker portions - the slow movements of both works are potentially emotionally intense, but they had a much drier interpretation here.

The Borromeo Quartet play with a hard crispness that's really best suited for the high modernist 20th century repertoire. They're known for their penetrating Bartok, and I'd be fascinated by what they could make out of Shostakovich. But when they play Romantic or Classical works with that style, it makes the music feel high modernist even if it doesn't actually sound anything like it. They have sprightliness and clarity, but only at a couple small moments - notably the pizzicato moment that almost concludes the Beethoven - was there even a trace of the lightness or wit inherent in the music. They have awesome drive and exactness of control, which expressed itself most clearly in the finales. Beethoven's had some agonizing drama until it faded away; and instead of being a frantic dance, the finale of the Sibelius was a machine of vehement power bearing down on us and nearly crushing the life out of its hearers.

I have to count this a great performance within a certain very limited perspective of interpretation. It was certainly an impressive thing to listen to.

There was a little more to the concert than that. One of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier prelude and fugue sets, arranged for quartet. Evidently the fugue has only three lines, because that's the number of performers playing at once throughout it. And Remember by Eleanor Alberga, three minutes of wistful chordal lament. A fairly succinct program.

concert review: Winchester Orchestra

B. and I attended together a symphonic pops concert by this local community orchestra - the one she belonged to briefly before deciding a different one better met her needs - because it looked like fun. It was the Halloween concert, and the theme seemed to be music that told stories that might be heard at Halloween.

We had the fanfare from Strauss's Also Sprach Zarathustra, Grieg's "Hall of the Mountain King", Berlioz's "March to the Scaffold", Saint-Saens's "Danse Bacchanale," and a whole movement, the finale, from Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade.

Plus suites from three movie sequences: The Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, and Pirates of the Caribbean. I think the last of these is the best as music, but unfortunately the visuals of this performance were spoiled by a guy dressed as Captain Jack running around through the audience and even the orchestra during the performance.

And yes, he was authorized, having even been introduced by the new conductor, James Beauton, who seemed to have a clear enough beat but whose appearance and style may be best described by saying he resembles a young Jerry Seinfeld.

This was in the same church they played in before, with the winds and brass on stage and totally drowning out the strings which were down in the pit below.

Anyway, it was fun, and not too long, and I appreciated getting a big chunk of Scheherazade.

work anniversary

Today marks 20 years since my first professional concert review was published - in phosphors, on the San Francisco Classical Voice website.

I'd been reading SFCV for some time already, and I had noted a news item there about Symphony Silicon Valley (since redubbed Symphony San Jose) moving to a new venue, the California Theatre in downtown San Jose. This was a 1927 film and stage theater that had fallen on hard times and had been renovated, and the premiere concert was going to be a vintage celebration.

I was going to be attending, and as I'd always been particularly interested in reviews of concerts I'd attended myself (to match my opinions against the reviewer's), I was looking forward to reading what they'd have to say. But when that week's batch of reviews came out, SSV wasn't in it.

So I wrote them and asked if they wanted a review. I had one already: I'd written one for LJ, having acquired the habit of reviewing all the concerts I attended. I rewrote it and beefed it up, and sent it in, and they published it. (I had to scarf this from the Wayback Machine because SFCV did not get its archiving system organized until several years later.)

And they paid me for it. And then they phoned me up a couple weeks later and asked if I could cover this string quartet concert that was coming up. And that's how I became a professional concert reviewer.

Of course, having been listening to classical music closely for over 30 years already at that point is part of what gave me the confidence to do this, as did the frequent experience of reading something noted in a review and thinking, yeah, I noticed that too. That convinced me I had the ears for the job. And I've been doing it ever since. Here's my most recent effort; I'm sure I've improved in judgment and authority, but there's a spontaneous lightness to my early reviews that I haven't always maintained.

a touch of Cajun food

On my way back from Ashland, I had to do some quick library research at UC Davis, so that also gave me time to stop at Pedrick Produce, a barn of a place by a rural freeway exit on the way back from Davis. I've been there before; besides produce they have lots of bagged bulk candy (chocolate-covered pretzels, that sort of thing) and nuts.

On a previous visit I'd discovered what I hadn't noticed before that, a wall of hot sauces, including mango sauces that are not paired with habanero, which drowns out the mango taste. And on this visit in a corner I found a case with cajun food, which really sparks my interest. I bought a couple packages of a brand of jambalaya rice mix I hadn't seen before, which has a really interesting recipe (don't use chicken broth; instead, make broth by boiling the chicken pieces that you'll later cut up and put in the mix, then add a can each of french onion soup and cream of celery soup). I bought a pound of andouille sausage - again, a brand I didn't know - to put in the jambalaya.

And they had boudin. I've only ever seen that on restaurant menus and fresh in meat shops in cajun country itself, never packaged and never so far from home. But I really like the stuff and was delighted to get some. I'll have to venture up to Pedrick's a lot more often.

Boudin is classed as a sausage, because it comes in a sausage casing, but it isn't really. It's a loose mixture of meat (usually pork, though I've had crawfish boudin) and rice, stuffed into the casing. When I've had it before, it's boiled or poached, and the casing is too tough to eat. You cut it open and scoop the filling out.

But a thorough discussion online of how to cook it offered me another method: pan-frying. Fry it at medium heat in a little olive oil until brown, and it's crisp. I found that 9 minutes got it brown and caused the ends of the casing to pop open and the filling to spill out a bit. I flipped it over and ran it 9 minutes on the other side, and not only was it fine, but the casing was crisp and edible. Ate it with a little of the leftover jambalaya I'd made from the mix. And very satisfied with my lunch was I.

Wikipedia says there are various forms of boudin, but in cajun country there is just the one kind, with only the meat variable. Wikipedia further suggests that it's akin to the British dishes of black pudding and white pudding, but the cajun variety certainly isn't; it's totally different, both in ingredients and how it's put together.

I don't know how to pronounce boudin. When I was in cajun country, what I heard the natives say was "boo-dan." But when I tried to say "boo-dan," they couldn't understand what I meant.

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.