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.

without having read any of the stories yet

The Last Dangerous Visions, edited by Harlan Ellison (actually by J. Michael Straczynski, but he modestly leaves his name off the title page), Blackstone Publishing, 2024: a review of the concept and the ancillary material (which I have read).

Here it is, the third Dangerous Visions anthology of science fiction stories, finally out 50 years after it was promised by its editor, a year or so after the second anthology, and some six years after that editor's death, put together by his literary executor.

Or is it? LDV, in all the announcements made of its imminent publication during the first decade or so that Ellison sat on it, was going to be legendarily long. A typewritten list by Ellison from 1979, reproduced here, lists stories by 108 writers. Of course such an enormous anthology was not practically publishable, as ex-contributor Christopher Priest pointed out many years ago now. And over 40 of the stories were withdrawn and published elsewhere by authors - or their estates - tired of waiting for a publication they'd been repeatedly assured was imminent.

Besides those, JMS says that many of the stories are just outdated today, or were never any good in the first place, having been bought by Ellison as favors to his friends. And as history wended on into the 1980s, JMS says, writers were less willing to be "dangerous" than they had been in the 60s or early 70s. So granted that a publishable anthology today would be a lot shorter than what Ellison tempted us with, what JMS presents us here is stories by 24 separate authors (one author is responsible for eight vignettes). It's a hefty volume - 433 pages - but the original Dangerous Visions had stories by 32 authors and Again, Dangerous Visions by 43, if I've counted correctly, so after all that anticipation, a 24-author anthology feels a little damp. Besides, seven of the stories are new ones bought by JMS, leaving only 17 authors from Ellison's stash.

It's a little hard to tell at a glance which are the new stories. They aren't marked in any way, though the authors are named in the afterword. All the stories are followed by brief author bios, many of which give the author's age, some of them stated to be "at the time of this sale," but others, if you know the author's birth year, are obviously as of some date between 1973 and 1980. And then they go on, in the rare "future-in-the-past" tense, to explain what the author has done since then. Which, in eight cases, includes that they've died. While waiting for their stories to be published. On the other side, if the author's age is of 2020 or so, this must be a new story.

JMS includes a long essay, much longer than any of the stories, titled "Ellison Exegesis," that after a lot of throat-clearing about his own childhood discovery of Ellison's work, explains the history of LDV and how it clashed with its editor's life. Besides those favors to friends, JMS says that Harlan continued buying stories for LDV to fill gaps in the anthology as stories were withdrawn by impatient authors - or their estates. That sounds strange: given the huge oversize of the volume, Ellison should have been relieved at its reduction. There were other reasons too: to keep the anthology new and relevant, and also - JMS says - Ellison bought stories the way that people eat potato chips, reflexively and impulsively.

But JMS doesn't recount the repeated announcements of imminent publication, nor does he discuss another obvious motive of Ellison's - his desire to get every SF author of worth in the DV anthologies somewhere, and his increasing frantic rush as new authors kept appearing. JMS can be critical of Ellison, but he's not that critical.

In his initial announcement of the book, JMS said that it would include "one last, significant work by Harlan that has never been published ... that ties directly into the reason why The Last Dangerous Visions has taken so long to come to light." The only sign of that here is JMS's explanation of why Ellison couldn't bring himself to finish up the anthology: his refusal to see a psychiatrist who could diagnose and treat his bipolar condition. It was this condition, JMS says, that torpedoed any sustained work, not just LDV: Ellison could toss off short stories at speed, but after a few brief efforts very early in his career, he never wrote a novel. Finally, JMS says, he essentially forced Ellison to see a shrink and go on his meds, after which he began to feel a lot better. But soon after that, his physical health began to fail, and that was as far as that went.

DV and ADV featured long and entertaining introductions by Ellison to each story. It was facing the prospect of writing the same for LDV that apparently stymied work on it. Why didn't he just give up and let the stories appear unintroduced, or let someone else write the introductions? According to JMS, Ellison only completed one introduction, and it's here: it's an introduction to Edward Bryant's story and it's basically an apologia for being too jocularly rude about Bryant (a close friend, so the rudeness was intended as humorous, God help it) for his story in ADV. JMS also prints the abortive beginning of a general introduction to the anthology that Ellison couldn't bring himself to finish.

Each story (except for the vignettes) is accompanied by a full-page black-and-white illustration, as was the case with the earlier anthologies. This time, they're by Tim Kirk, who, like the authors, has been waiting half a century for his work to appear in print. This includes the new stories and the two introductory essays. Are the illustrations for those repurposed from stories that did not get published here, or did Kirk draw new ones? I suspect the former, but it doesn't say.

During the long wait - it's been four years since JMS's first announcement - for this refurbished version of the book to appear, JMS has made a lot of announcements that made it sound as if, like Ellison before him, he'd bitten off more than he could chew. That made me very nervous, and I worried that JMS was following in Ellison's footsteps in another way, by making promises he couldn't deliver on.

In a sense he didn't deliver. The actual book is much more modest than the announcements suggested. On the other hand it does now really exist in print, which Ellison's version never did, so full points to JMS for that. And on its own, not in comparison with DV and ADV before it, it's a pretty sizeable anthology.

Now to read the stories.

faucet fix'd

We had a plumbing crisis a few days ago. I have a tub/shower in my bathroom, and the little gadget for shutting off the tub water and making it come out of the shower instead has long been sticking and acting up.

And then one day the entire faucet fixture fell apart and came off in my hand.

It was at this point that I discovered that tub faucets are not fastened to the wall. A water pipe extends several inches out from the wall with a screw thread on the end. This screws onto a thread on the inside of the faucet fixture.

OK, that looks easy. To the hardware store to buy a tub faucet fixture. They only sell kits: the faucet, the control handle, the shower head. OK, I could use a new shower head too: the old one tended to dribble.

Brought it home, tried to screw on the faucet fixture. It wouldn't screw on.

Call a plumber. He couldn't do it either, nor could the other plumber from the same outfit whom he called to replace him with greater skill. It took the third plumber, who had to wield a blowtorch (!) to remove the old screw thread from the end of the pipe and solder on a new one, to get this to work.

But victory was ours, and he replaced the shower head too. (He could not, however, figure out that you had to pull, not rotate, the handle to turn the water on.)

As soon as he left, I took my first shower in three days (I'd been subsisting on sponge baths), and - considering how badly the old shower head worked - my first really satisfactory shower since the last time I stayed in a hotel room a month ago. Bliss.

concert review: Miró Quartet

The Miró Quartet was previously heard by me at the Music@Menlo summer festival back in 2005, when they played four of Beethoven's Op. 18 quartets at one concert. Now they returned, with one member different, to open Menlo's winter season with a standard string quartet recital at the Spieker Center on the Menlo School campus last Saturday.

The Miró have a firm and somewhat gritty, but clear, straightforward, and above all pliant style. Their Haydn sounds like Haydn, and their Debussy sounds like Debussy. (Not everyone does this.) Haydn's Op. 77 No. 1 in G, one of his very last quartets, was fast, chipper, matter-of-fact, and suffused with a humorous geniality, just as it should be. The clarity making all the lines audible was gratifying and impressively balanced.

Debussy's Quartet (he only wrote the one) exposed those impressionist harmonies without wallowing in them. That gritty foundation was vital here in keeping the music grounded and focused on the melodic motifs and the interplay of the instruments. The result was that I have never heard a performance of Debussy's scherzo that so demonstrated a stylistic resemblance and similarity of purpose with the one in Ravel's Quartet. Debussy and Ravel are usually classed together, though not by me. (I see Debussy as more like Delius, and Ravel more resembling Respighi.) But this time I agree, they go together.

And in between, a piece the Miró commissioned several years ago from the ubiquitous (at least if you go to the Cabrillo Festival he is) Kevin Puts, titled Home. Inspired by the 2015 refugees from the Middle East, this piece is about leaving home and then, I guess, returning. It begins with several minutes of a rocking motif in thick, variable, but consonant harmony. That's "home." Then it goes chaotic, or at least as chaotic as the sober, straightlaced Puts can manage. Pointillism, grinding tuttis, glissando runs, and chromatic scales are all tried out momentarily, though nothing goes really wild. When it returns to the opening, it's a rougher, more astringent consonance. It's all earnestly played by the Miró four.

Some quartets open their program with Haydn to be dull and dutiful. Not this one. Here the Haydn was the treat of the program. But Debussy and Puts also received careful attention from this impressive ensemble.

concert review: San Francisco Symphony

EPS conducted Brahms' Fourth Symphony and Shostakovich's First Violin Concerto. What these works have in common is that each has a movement resurrecting the old Baroque form of the passacaglia, which is a set of short variations in triple meter over a repeating (but itself variable) bass line. Nevertheless the composers handle them differently: Brahms follows the passacaglia strictly but melds the successive variations into an overarching sonata-allegro form. Shostakovich is more free in form and wilder in intrumentation: he introduces his passacaglia with a solemn statement for horns, lower strings, and timpani, and finishes it with a cadenza for unaccompanied solo violin.

Sayaka Shoji was the violinist, who carried her full and solid tone both through the long slow movements (of which the passacaglia was one) and the violently wild fast ones, which went on at a ferocious clip longer than would seem possible. Her command of this disparate material was what was impressive. After the cadenza merges into the finale, the composer inserted a brief orchestral-only section before the violin launches into vigorous motion, at the behest of the original violinist, who wanted a break to wipe his brow. Shoji didn't look as if she needed it.

Brahms is a more subdued composer than EPS normally specializes in, but he knows how to be subdued and exciting at the same time. This performance of Brahms' most neglected symphony was a masterful blend of the cool and sober with the dramatic and tense, each coming in just the right proportion. The third movement, the closest Brahms ever came to a scherzo, really evoked the Beethoven tradition in its outer sections.

On the walk from BART to the concert hall, the book I was carrying fell out of my pocket and was lost. (It was expendable: don't worry about it.) On the way back, the concert program also fell out of my pocket and was lost. You'd think I'd learn not to put things like that in my pocket.

set of Bruckner

I missed noting the bicentennial of Anton Bruckner's birth, which was Sept. 4 while I was up in Oregon. But I didn't neglect celebrating it later, by buying the new box set of his symphonies, the "Complete Versions Edition," conducted by Markus Poschner. It has all 11 of his symphonies, including the two unnumbered ones, in 18 full versions plus a few extra versions of individual movements. It's not actually complete complete, but it has all the standard editions, except for the Robert Haas combined edition of the Eighth, which took what Haas considered the best parts from two competing versions, which is no longer considered a kosher procedure.

So far I've listened through the 3 versions of the Fourth, plus the single versions of the Fifth and Sixth, plus the 'student' symphony in F Minor, which I'd never had a satisfactory performance of before. Judging by his Fourth through Sixth, Poschner isn't the greatest of Bruckner conductors, but he does well enough with the F Minor, especially the Andante movement which is just charming.

What can I say of the multiple versions? The standard 1880 version remains the best-sounding Fourth, the 1876 version sounding too sketchy and the 1888 version too clotted. The other symphonies in multiple versions (1, 2, 3, and 8) I don't know as well, so that will require more chewing. But first I want to listen to the other noncanonical symphony, "Die Nullte" or No. 0. There is no attempt in this set to produce a hypothetical completed version of the finale of the Ninth, which Bruckner left in sketches when he died and has been worked on by several people, none of them really satisfactorily. It was in putting all the pieces together in final form that Bruckner's genius principally lay.

put not your faith in bookstores

It's October, right? The first full month of autumn? Yet, after a month of mostly reasonable late-summer temperatures, this week we're undergoing the biggest heat wave of the year. It's been consistently above 95F since Monday, mostly over 100. Strangely, I'm finding it less enervating than on previous experiences, and on days when I need to be home for health reasons, I'm managing.

But I'm still feeling desolated, because I can't read what I want to read. The Collected Poems of J.R.R. Tolkien was published in the U.S. on Sept. 17. I pre-ordered a copy. It still hasn't arrived. The Last Dangerous Visions was published on Oct. 1. I pre-ordered a copy. It hasn't arrived either.

debate

I didn't watch this debate either. Same reasons: too nervous, didn't want to hear 45 minutes of the other guy blithering.

From what I've read, Vance delivered himself, in his smoother and slicker way than his boss, of lie after disingenuous non-truth after lie. There's been a lot of discussion of CBS having put fact-checks under QR codes, but not a single person I've read seems to have gone and looked at any of them. The one time the moderators tried to correct him, he objected that there wasn't supposed to be any live on-air fact-checking. Which is as much as to say, "Hey! I was supposed to be able to lie with impunity!"

Walz apparently challenged almost none of this, but stuck to his pre-set talking points. This is what most candidates do at debates. Unless you're extremely skilled at impromptu debating - the recent presidential candidate who's by far the best at this is Chris Christie - there's no time to think on your feet. Best to answer any question by finding the most relevant memorized nugget in your banks and deliver that.

Besides, Harris didn't respond to most of Trump's imbecilities either, except to laugh at them. The danger of fact-checking a lie-spewing opponent is that you spend all your time doing that, letting them set the agenda and never having time to expound your own.

Several liberal commentators have said that, although Vance was smoother, Walz won the debate in terms of giving better arguments. But will they be perceived as better? If not, he can't be said to have won.

Walz could have been less nervous, and folksier, as he is in speeches. But at least it wasn't a disaster.

no movies

My attention was caught by this article discussing the choice of movie that Tim Walz took his future wife Gwen to on their first date.

It was Falling Down, a 1993 drama featuring Michael Douglas as a man who loses his cool from being stuck in traffic and goes on a rampage. (In 1993, this was apparently satire.) The article's author hadn't even heard of this film. I had; I remember noting it from when it came out and putting it on my "maybe I'll go see this" list, though I never actually did.

But what a strange pick for a first date movie? Perhaps less so when you consider they were living in a small town in rural Nebraska with only one movie theater, so there wasn't much choice.

Looking back to when B. and I were dating - this would be 1987-9 in our case - I can't recall our going to the movies. B. is not a movie person, and even less of a movie theater person, and I'm not that much of those either. Once we moved in together, we rented a fair number of movies (VHS from Blockbuster in those days) and watched them at home, but our dates were to classical and folk music concerts, science-fiction/fantasy clubs and book discussions, and Regency dances.

The only movie either of us can recall going out to together in our dating days hardly counted as a date, because it was in the daytime, and the theater was packed with enthusiasts, many of them people we knew. It was a sneak preview showing of the yet-unreleased The Princess Bride. We were all big fans of the book, an entity almost forgotten about these days. And we were very happy with what we saw. The Princess Bride remains my gold standard for an excellent adaptation of a book to a movie, and the fact that the script was by the original novelist probably has a lot to do with it.

I would also rate The Last Unicorn highly for the same reason, and it also comes to mind as one of a number of delicate fantasies from the early 1980s that I saw on dates before I ever met B. Another one that I remember with particular fleeting fondness is one that I caught on an exceedingly brief theatrical run in Berkeley, after which it vanished and was never heard of again. It was a goofy story made by the unusual technique of cut-out stop-motion animation, and it was called Twice Upon a Time.

Actually it did have both VHS and DVD releases, not that I ever laid eyes on either. But it was hardly in theaters at all, and today it's not online in full. This clip will give you a better idea of what the movie as a whole is like than other clips on YouTube, and yes that is Lorenzo Music, better-known as the voice of Garfield the cat, asking most of the questions. (Other voices, Marshall Efron and Julie Payne.) *sigh* I really ought to go find a copy of this and see it again.

(Not regarding movies, but I've been introduced to "Colin from Portsmouth," a parody of a right-wing ranter on British call-in radio. This one on Elon Musk is one of the funniest, as well as on a topic that Americans will get.)

this is just to record

that B. and I got our flu and covid shots this morning. There was already a long line when we arrived 15 minutes before the clinic opened - possibly it'd have been quieter if we'd arrived in mid-afternoon, though in general Kaiser is usually busier in the afternoon - but when they did open, they scooped up the people with canes and walkers first, as they've done before. What they were not prepared for was the size of the line, as they had only two stations open.

We picked this week so that I'd be covered for people-heavy events I'll be going to in another week and a half, but should still be at strong coverage during the holidays.

Looking over my previous post, it occurs to me that it would have been more coherent if I hadn't written it in late evening when I was about to fall asleep. I'll have to watch my timing.

assorted books

Astoria: Astor and Jefferson's Lost Pacific Empire, by Peter Stark (HarperCollins, 2015)
Books on the history of US Western exploration usually, after describing Lewis and Clark's journey in great detail, mention briefly that wealthy merchant John Jacob Astor sent a party to establish a fur-trading post, to barter with the natives, at the mouth of the Columbia, the far end of L&C's journey; that they did so, calling it Astoria, but at the outbreak of the war of 1812 a couple years later, they gave in to the threats of the Brits' far stronger navy and sold them their assets, and that was the end of that.*
But you don't hear anything about how Astor's men got there in the first place. This book tells that, in hideous but captivating detail. This was only the second party of whites to cross the continent north of Mexico, and the skill and luck of Lewis & Clark is demonstrated by the terrible time of it these people had, taking nearly two years, including two winters in the wilderness, to get there, losing several people along the way. Meantime, Astor also sent a ship around the Horn, which got there first but also had a terrible time of it, also losing several people along the way. Stark's theory is that, by the time they got there, everyone involved was suffering from PTSD, which is why they were so inert about getting the post set up. Other weird events included the destruction of the ship by a suicide bomber. Yes, in 1811.

The Lede: Dispatches from a Life in the Press, by Calvin Trillin (Random House, 2024)
Not as consistently interesting as Trillin's previous retrospective collection of a half century of journalism, Jackson, 1964, and Other Dispatches, which covers racial issues. This one mixes serious articles with humorous pieces, and the problem is that, in classic New Yorker style (where much of this originally appeared), many of the serious reports are far longer than any possible interest the reader might have in the subject. I guess it depends on your inherent interest, because the one on the rise of the satirical redneck movie reviewer Joe Bob Briggs did not become wearisome. It seemed to me that the trouble with Joe Bob began when the paper didn't take enough care to mark the satire off, for instance mixing Joe Bob's four-star ratings of splatter films with the regular reviewer's two-star ratings of serious films.

*However, the fact that the Americans were able to establish a post there before the British in the first place - the Brits kept finding the wrong rivers when they were trying to float downstream from the upper end of the Columbia in what is now B.C. - plus Lewis and Clark, plus an American ship having made the whites' discovery of the mouth of the Columbia in the first place (which is why the river is called that), contributed to a U.S. claim to the area, which is why Oregon and Washington are U.S. territory today, and there's a town called Astoria on the site of the Astor post. It was because I was going there that I bought this book at Powell's in Portland, though I didn't read it until after I got home.

concert review: San Francisco Symphony

Their first week's concert having been cancelled by a chorus strike, SFS finally put on a regular concert - no chorus this week - Friday evening. Of course, given the cavalier way management has treated the chorus, I expect the orchestra players also to go on strike again (they've done this before) when their contract comes up, but that's not until November, and I don't have any concerts scheduled after next week until January.

Esa-Pekka Salonen - the music director whom management let get away - thus began the subscription concerts of the final season on his contract with this performance. He was greeted by huge audience cheers when he arrived and even huger ones when he was finished, having demonstrated yet again what a loss his departure will be.

The big piece on the program was Hindemith's Mathis der Maler Symphony, which you don't hear very often. Its thematic material consists mostly of unpromising-sounding fragmentary motifs, but a good performance builds them up into a big hefty solemn-sounding work that sounds more compelling than the material making it up. That happened here.

The symphony material is taken from an opera about a 16th-century painter, though there's nothing 16th-centuryish about the music. Somewhat more concrete 20th-century references to earlier music were found in two shorter accompanying pieces. Hindemith's rare Ragtime (Well-Tempered), from his early cheeky period, takes a phrase from a Bach prelude and adapts it into as much raucous noise as an orchestra can generate. Edward Elgar orchestrated Bach's Fantasia and Fugue in C Minor, which had an integrated texture that made it sound like it was being played on an organ with more different stops than you'd ever heard of.

For another big piece, EPS has commissioned yet another new piano concerto, this one from composer Nico Muhly and written for pianist Alexandre Tharaud, whose album of French Baroque music Muhly had admired. There was supposed to be an air of, but no quotations from, music of that kind in the outer movements, but the music sounded to me more like fast pulsating minimalism of the Steve Reich school. In the slow movement, Tharaud played an endless series of soft diatonic chords, for all the world as if this were by Georgs Pelēcis, while the orchestra steadily built up into a contrasting din around it.

If you want an account of the mess that led to the strike, and the labor/financial situation that SFS is in, a simple but right-headed accounting comes from retired Chronicle reviewer Joshua Kosman; but for the full-throated burn, Kosman suggests the latest (as of now) four posts from this blogger, Emily Hogstad, who isn't even a Californian but is viewing this from Minnesota, but is her gaze ever piercing, informed as it is by their own orchestral troubles a few years back.

My own take is that the only solution here is to dissolve the management and get a new and more level-headed one, while keeping the musicians - nothing wrong with them. That's what they did in San Jose a couple decades back, and things have been fine there since. The big difference is, San Jose was a local orchestra that learned to live within its budget, while SFS is a world-class ensemble that has yet to grasp that to retain that status, they need to pay for the requisite talent instead of trying to run it on the cheap. If they're going to drop back into a regional-level orchestra, which is where they're headed, they should acknowledge that and have a good excuse for it. But if they want to keep on, they need 1) a clearer, less waffling, and more rip-roaring vision, that will attract the donors they say they want; and 2) a willingness in the meantime to dip further into their enormous endowment to keep the coaster running.

research day

I spent Thursday at UC Berkeley, doing research for the Tolkien Studies bibliography, in particular catching PDFs of the articles so that I'll have them handy for the next year's "Year's Work." It was a successful and rewarding day: lots of available indexes, lots of full-text links, easy access for a visitor to the databases, no trouble getting a stack pass for the hardcopy material, and the same brilliantly designed scanners in the stacks that I've found so satisfactory before. The only irritation was the increasing number of articles that say they're about the book but are actually about the movies.

So now that UC Santa Cruz has made on-campus visitor parking permits difficult to obtain (by changing to some ornate online process instead of the old system, which was to drive up to a booth at the entrance to campus and pay them $10), and the one relevant journal that Santa Cruz carries and nobody else around here does is now online, and it's clear to me that Berkeley actually has better access to databases, I think in future I'll come here first, when my home online research is done and it's time to turn to universities.

Of course, Berkeley has no weekday on-campus visitor parking either, at least not that I've been able to figure out, but unlike Santa Cruz it's in the middle of a city, so there's commercial garages, which have space available at least if you get there before noonish.

But it was clear to me, after walking around among three campus libraries as well as venturing off-campus for lunch, that the sort of rushing around that I did as an undergraduate, all those years ago, is no longer in my repertoire.

I had one little scare when my car wouldn't start. Battery wasn't dead but the engine wouldn't respond. It was fine later, so I don't know what went wrong, but in the meantime I called the AAA, though I called back to cancel later. I'd heard that AAA now makes you fill out an online form, which I can't do unless I'm at home, because I don't have That Kind of a mobile phone, but it turns out they only send you there if you answer "yes" to the automated-vocal inquiry, "Are you calling from a mobile phone?" Otherwise they continue to ask you questions by automated voice and then eventually send you to an agent to handle any queries or problems.

voting quiz

My dreams, however vividly recalled at the moment I wake up, tend to crumble into dust over the next few minutes.

All I can recall of this one is that a cancelled debate between Trump and Harris had been replaced with a voter quiz/challenge, items designed by the Trump campaign. If you could accomplish the task/pass the quiz, you could be counted as a vote for Harris ... if you wanted to, I guess. I can't remember how that part worked.

There were five parts. They were:

1. Park your car properly in a Trump-owned parking lot.

2. Answer the question, how far away is the nearest star to the solar system, Alpha Centauri? ("Four light years" would do.)

3. Do you prefer dogs or cats? (Dog people = Trump; cat people = Harris)

... I can't remember the others.

I've outwitted myself

So I want the newly-released 3-volume edition of Tolkien's collected poetry, but I haven't got it.

I don't usually pre-order unpublished books, but I did in this case, a few weeks ago. My first instinct was to support my local independent bookstore, but to my surprise the book was not listed in their online catalog of books available for pre-order. (The Last Dangerous Visions was, and I ordered that.)

So, since that implied they wouldn't be carrying it, I placed my order with Barnes and Noble, figuring it'd get shipped so that it arrived on publication day, the way the Harry Potter books were. US publication day was yesterday, Tuesday. It hasn't arrived. My order status says it's expected to arrive today, but it's also listed as on back order.

So it may not come for some time, despite the order status's promise. Meanwhile, now that the work is published, the independent bookstore now has it, and their online catalog says there's a copy for sale in their local branch.

I could rush down there this morning and buy it, and make the booksellers happy with a big sale (it's over $100), but it's too late to cancel my Barnes & Noble order, even though it hasn't been shipped. I don't want to buy two copies of such a large and expensive work, so I'm stuck. Why didn't the local bookstore have it listed on pre-order?

it concludes with a concert

Saturday I was out for a long round trip that took me to errands in four different places around the Bay Area.

1. Stopping for an early lunch at the Irish pub in Millbrae where our Mythopoeic book discussion group rented their back room last December for our annual festive reading meeting, and to arrange to rent the room again for this year.

2. Up into the City for another visit to the public library for more research on the Tolkien Studies bibliography.

3. Across the Bay to Berkeley for an afternoon invitational gathering in honor of the hostess's Big Round Number birthday. As I entered the room, I saw, seated on the couch beneath the window (so that the light was behind her and I couldn't see her very well), the hostess's daughter, the one who lives at home and had organized the party. She raised her hand in greeting and I acknowledged back. Then Mom, who was seated on the opposite side of the room, said that same daughter could fetch me a drink. I looked into the interior room, and there she was! Puzzled, I looked back to the window, and realized that the one who'd greeted me was the other daughter, the one who lives 2000 miles away and is consequently not often seen. She looks only a bit like her sister, but as I said the light was bad. Her husband and son were there too: it was a festive gathering.

4. And lastly, over the hills to Walnut Creek for my first achieved concert of the season, the California Symphony in the bicentennial bash of Beethoven's Ninth. What a magnificent performance. The orchestra, under music director Donato Cabrera, burst with fervor and intensity. Where did the brass learn to play with such stentorian energy? All three fast movements had craggy vigor, while the slow movement had an unexpected majesty. The chorus, from the SF Conservatory, wobbled in some dicey spots, but had the vocal power necessary. The lead soloist, Sidney Outlaw, sang in a light-toned and lyrical baritone, almost as if he were a tenor, but he too had the carrying power. Of the other soloists, soprano Laquita Mitchell surprised with the intensity of her vocal production.

This was a glorious concert, and I learned something driving to it also. I learned that the electronic signs on the freeway giving the time to various destinations are not to be trusted. In Oakland, it said 15 minutes to Walnut Creek. 15 minutes later, I was still stuck in the traffic jam caused by drivers apparently too cautious to enter the Caldecott Tunnel at speed. This had obviously been going on for some time, but nobody told the signs about it. Next time I need to take this drive, I'll go around on San Pablo Dam Road instead.

no concert

The San Francisco Symphony did not open its season last night with a performance of Verdi's Requiem, and I, holding a ticket, was perforce there to not hear it.

I first suspected this was not going to come off when I read the previous day that the union representing the professional part of the symphony chorus had voted to authorize its contract negotiators to call a strike if they thought it necessary.

However, I heard nothing more than that - there was nothing more to hear, it turns out - and, having added a couple more errands to the billet of my trip to the City, I headed up unusually early. The first errand was to exchange tickets for future concerts, and I got to the box office, which is in the lobby of the symphony hall, at about 4:30, just as someone was taping signs to the front doors announcing that tonight's concert had been canceled. Apparently they had just then called the strike.

That figures, I thought, and went in and did the exchange. Then I tromped off two blocks to the main library to do some work on the Tolkien Studies bibliography. While I was there, at about 5:30, B. called my cell to inform me that the Symphony had just called us at home (the number they have) to say the concert was canceled. That's still well over an hour after the last possible time I would have left home for the evening, even if I had had no other errands.

By the time I walked back past the symphony hall, about 6:10, a picket line had been set up, though by that time the box office would be closed on a non-performance night. The picketers were chanting "No chorus, no piece," a rare pun in a labor demonstration. Apparently the orchestral instrumentalists were also out in support, as a lone trombonist was playing "The Battle Hymn of the Republic."

I set off in search of dinner and then drove home.

books from the Lewis conference

George Fox University, where the conference was held, is a small campus with an even smaller bookstore. A single room with not much but textbooks and campus-themed clothing, it did put out a table filled with plenty of copies of special-ordered books by conference presenters. A few more books drifted in on the second day of the conference, but more of them, though promised and expected, did not appear before the end of the event

Most of the books on display I already had, but there was one new one I eagerly purchased, and one of the non-arrivals I simply ordered online after I got home.

Tolkien's Faith: A Spiritual Biography by Holly Ordway (Word on Fire, 2023)
Some readers - fewer these days than formerly - are unaware that there's a Catholic dimension to The Lord of the Rings at all. Some writers - more these days than formerly - are Catholic enthusiasts practicing landsmanship on Tolkien and claiming The Lord of the Rings as a Catholic allegory dripping with intentional religious symbolism in a C.S. Lewis mode.
Both these ideas are misled. Ordway is trying to steer a course between Scylla and Charybdis here; I detected as much from the first chapter and, having read that far, wished the author good luck at it when I met her at the conference. In the end, she'll succeed if readers attend closely to what she's saying, which they don't always do, cf the consistent misreadings of Christopher Milne's memoir.
This is a full biography of Tolkien: it's very long (365 pages in main text) and covering his whole life in detail, but only in its religious and spiritual aspects. There's nothing beyond a few context-providing sentences about his academic life or scholarly work, his World War I service, or even the writing of his fiction. The last, mostly LR, makes scattered appearances to show only how Tolkien's deep religiosity informed his creative thinking. Thus Galadriel obviously resembles Mary in aspects, but in the farewell scene her words echo Christ at the Last Supper, so there's that aspect too. Ordway's conclusion is that Tolkien's characters are not allegories of Christianity but types of Christ or other figures, in imitation of Christ as Thomas à Kempis put it: an observation first made in regard to Tolkien by Gracia Fay Ellwood in 1966, so Ordway is on solid ground here.
The book's major focus is on placing Tolkien's faith in context. So when Ordway says that Tolkien liked to say particular prayers, she goes into detail on exactly what those prayers say and what it meant to a Catholic believer in Tolkien's day. There's an appendix with the full texts of the prayers in Latin (which Tolkien used in prayer, even after the vernacular reforms) and English. There's a whole sequence of biographical paragraphs on the priests of the Birmingham Oratory whom Tolkien would have known when he was receiving his childhood religious training there. There's even longer discussions of saints Tolkien especially venerated, and of the godparents of all of his children - a significant clue as to what was important to their parents. There's physical descriptions of the churches Tolkien attended, noting that the old churches in England had all been claimed by the Anglicans, and that most Catholic churches were drab functional buildings, sometimes claimed from other uses, until new ones of better aesthetic quality were built.
Despite all this detail, Ordway assumes that the reader knows absolutely nothing. She explains what the Old Testament is. She even explains what Christianity is. This smoothly blends into discussions of the anti-Catholic environment of England at the time, as reflected in those makeshift churches. She notes, which I think previous biographers have not, that Tolkien was initially one of only four Catholic professors at Oxford, and that the four of them carried the sacred canopy in the first Catholic procession in Oxford for centuries in 1934.
All of this works very well. Yet it doesn't always do so. Some reviews have called this book a hagiography, despite Ordway's specific denial; I wonder if anyone making that charge has ever seen an actual hagiography. But there is a tendency to skim over or argue against negative aspects. That Tolkien came close to lapsing from his faith in early adulthood, and that his wife was at times resentful that he'd made her convert, are mentioned, but there's very little detail on these. Perhaps there's none to be had, though in other respects Ordway is a remarkably diligent researcher.
More serious is the case of a chapter on Tolkien's racial views, which is mostly about his opposition to anti-Semitism and on the reflection of the Jews in the Dwarves. This reflection is framed as complimentary, so there's nothing about how the Dwarves in the earlier legendarium are basically evil. It's also unconscionable at this late date to discuss Tolkien and racism without noting his reflexive acceptance of negative stereotypes about Asian peoples and their reflection in the Orcs.
Later on, there's a rather strained and desperate argument that Tolkien wasn't really as much opposed to the reforms of Vatican II as he's usually depicted, and an even more strained and desperate argument that Tolkien's friend C.S. Lewis wasn't really as anti-Catholic as he's usually depicted. Lewis combined deep personal friendship with individual Catholics with a reflexive anti-Catholic general attitude that often pained Tolkien and which probably descended from Lewis's Ulster Protestant childhood. This makes Lewis a perfect example of why "Some of my best friends are X" is a worthless defense of oneself against charges of prejudice.
I finished this book less happy with it than I'd been halfway through.

C.S. Lewis's Oxford by Simon Horobin (Bodleian Library, 2024)
I was especially anxious to read this detailed account of Lewis in Oxford, because I wondered what it would say about the Inklings. Many writers tend to jump to unwarranted conclusions about the history of this poorly-documented group. Horobin doesn't. He lays out the known facts, and doesn't speculate beyond them.
This is a marvelously researched book, delving into plenty of detail, particularly uncovering material about Lewis's interaction with his tutorial pupils from his comments on their essays, preserved in his papers in the Bodleian - something I can't recall seeing previous writers do. He's also wise and judicious on the dicey matter of Mrs. Moore.
The Inklings chapter does not reveal anything new, but at least it sticks to what is known. I was particularly pleased with lines like "Although Thursday-night meetings petered out at the end of the 1940s," because that's exactly how much is certainly known, no more. It's so reliable that two tiny errors stood out glaringly. Horobin calls the Cretaceous Perambulators, Lewis's walking group, "a subset of the Inklings," which they were not: the overlap between the groups was minimal. And he writes of "one August evening in 1940, when the group met at Tolkien's home." In fact, as is shown elsewhere in the letter by Lewis that Horobin quotes from (offering Lewis's paraphrase of Tolkien as Tolkien's words), Lewis and Havard going to Tolkien's home was a substitute for a meeting not held because nobody else (including Tolkien) could come to Lewis's college rooms that evening.

language lesson

Mikey, what's that?

clown

It's a cloud, Mikey. Can you say cloud?

clown

Mikey, say k.

k

Now say loud.

loud

Now say k-loud.

k-loud

Now say cloud.

clown

the other Lewis

The Tolkien conference in Seattle having been Saturday the 31st, and the C.S. Lewis conference outside Portland not beginning until the next Thursday, and only a 5-hour drive between them, what was I to do with the rest of my four days? I could spend them pleasantly just hanging around Seattle and Portland, but I had another idea.

A few years ago I spent an enjoyable week following the trail of another Lewis - Meriwether Lewis - and the Lewis and Clark Expedition around western Montana. Why not explore the western extent of their journey down the Snake and Columbia Rivers? Unlike the Montana sites, I'd seen most of this before, but not as a continuous journey.

So on Sunday I drove up and based myself in the Tri-Cities (Richland, Pasco, and Kennewick), and on Monday drove up along the Snake as far as the Nez Perce villages east of Lewiston, Idaho, and back again. Tuesday I went down the Columbia as far as Portland (arriving in time to make a visit to Powell's) and then checked into my hotel for the CSL conference. Wednesday I drove back to the river and down it to the coast, then back up by the direct road.

Mostly I was watching the scenery. The Clearwater and Snake in western Idaho and eastern Washington are huge flows of water through dry, desert landscapes, often with dramatic cliffs framing the water; further down on the Columbia, the cliffs become even more dramatic, and demonstrative of geological layers, about the point that the Oregon border hits the river. The mid-Columbia has gentler shores, but in Lewis and Clark's day it was full of hazardous rapids, since smoothed out by a system of power-generating dams. Coming down from Portland on the Oregon side of the river, the town of Rainier is the first one that looks and feels like it's near the ocean, and from then on the salt air is palpable.

I stopped along the way at every museum and historic site that my guidebooks listed as having a Lewis and Clark reference, and wound up reading a vast number of independently written descriptions of the expedition, most with some special reference to the site they were at. I was most concerned to get to the Interpretive Center at Cape Disappointment on the Washington shore, because it was still being constructed the last time I was there. I arrived, having come down that side of the river past Dismal Nitch (which I'd been to before, but it hadn't yet had that name - taken from Clark's description of the place in the November weather - on the signs then), at about noon, only to find that the tiny parking lot was entirely full. I gave up and, the local town having nowhere to eat, drove across the estuary bridge - four miles long - to Astoria on the Oregon side. Astoria is full of eateries with excellent clam chowders. Then I went down to Fort Clatsop nearby, where the explorers had finally settled in for the rest of the winter. The replica fort has been rebuilt, in a more authentic style (logs hewn by axe instead of chain-saw, for instance), since I was last there long ago.

At about 4 pm I headed back across the river to try Cape Disappointment again. This close to closing there were parking spaces, but the path up the hill to the center was steep and exhausting. Aside from the requisite expedition history and some impressive ocean views, there wasn't much to it, but I'm glad to have been there and seen what it was like. That their admission desk only takes cash while the one in Oregon only takes credit cards, though they're both NPS facilities, is just a little mystery.

The Undiscovered C.S. Lewis Conference

Much of a week's gap in my posting here was due to my attendance at a conference of this title, held at George Fox University, a Quaker institution in Newberg, Oregon, a town between Portland and Salem. The Cascade Moot in Seattle of which I'd previously written having been the previous weekend, a combination trip by car seemed feasible.

I was one of a few Tolkienists among the 250 Lewisians at this conference, and probably (I didn't ask) the only non-Christian in the entire number, so what was I doing there? Well, you don't have to be a Christian to enjoy the work of C.S. Lewis. I find his to be a mind of intense interest that I enjoy engaging with. Lewis's Christianity was a substrate that underlay everything he did, as was also the case for Tolkien; it was more prominent in Lewis mostly because he wrote theology and apologetics, and it's also more detectable in his fiction, but it doesn't shake the reader as some other Christian novelists do. And in so much of his other work, particularly literary history and criticism, his intellectual curiosity is primary and while his religion remains present, it's that substrate which informs his work.

The presenters at this conference were the same way. Intellectual curiosity about Lewis, even his openly religious works, was the constant theme. There was little preaching and no berating, if only because they are secure in their beliefs and assumed that everyone agrees with them. I accepted the context for the purposes of attending the conference, same as I did when I attended gatherings of Peter Jackson movie fans. In other words, it was totally unlike a typical Christian radio station.

The conference lasted three days spread across four calendar days, and it was busy. Meals were included for those who cared to pay the fee, and plenary sessions, including six keynote speakers, were held in the same large private dining room in the cafeteria building where we took meals, except for two theatrical presentations in the evenings. Between plenaries, we scattered to classrooms across campus - this was during term, so on Thursday and Friday things had to be squeezed in - for any of usually five paper sessions going on at once.

The main theme of the conference, perhaps the reason it was dubbed "Undiscovered," was the description of an immense number of unpublished, and generally unknown, Lewis works in manuscript. I'd been aware of the unpublished section of the preface to The Screwtape Letters tying it into the world of the Ransom trilogy, but I didn't know of the trove of sarcastic poems that Lewis wrote in his own copies of books by a philologist whom he found particularly irritating (you can read the full article by the presenting scholar), or of the report of his year as Vice-President of his Oxford college, an administrative job for which he was totally unsuited, which he put in the form of a facetious verse play, handwritten in a book of such reports, where nobody but succeeding Vice-Presidents was ever likely to see it. It was titled "The Tragi-Comicall Briefe Reigne of Lewis the Bald." There were also discussions of other annotations Lewis wrote in books he owned, and the attempt to date them according to his changing handwriting; and a collection of the publishing blurbs he wrote for his own and others' books.

But the best keynote presentations were two detailed scholarly analyses, based on divergent scholarly principles. Holly Ordway, the only Tolkienist among the keynoters, did a stunningly careful source analysis of exactly what evidence survives of Tolkien's opinion of Lewis's Narnian stories. It turns out that every negative comment Tolkien is credited with are all responses to Lewis having read him drafts of the first two chapters of the first book, so depictions of this as a sweeping condemnation are unwarranted. It's true that, later on, he didn't care for Narnia as a whole, but he framed that as a matter of personal taste, it did not affect his friendship with Lewis, and he was happy to recommend the books and give copies to his grandchildren.

Then Michael Ward, author of Planet Narnia, explored the origins of the name "Narnia" in Lewis's mind. We have two writings by Lewis giving different sources; one the name of a Roman town and the other derived from the Latin word inane, which differs both in pronunciation and meaning from the English word. The two are not necessarily incompatible. But that's all we know, so Ward proceeded to speculate on the implications of these, but unlike most speculating scholars he had his feet firmly planted in the known facts.

And there was much more. There were only about four other people there I knew, but it was easy to strike up conversations, because we were all there for the same purpose. I was staying at a hotel in the next town down the road, and there wasn't much time between conference session to do much other than ablutions and sleep, so that's why you didn't hear from me. I was engrossed in Lewis.

debate

I didn't watch the debate. (It seems to have been blacked out on our tv anyway, and I would have had to use the computer.) The reasons for not watching it were two: I was too nervous about it, and I didn't want to have to sit through DT ranting.

Instead, I've read and watched commentaries and clips. And that seems to have been enough to convey the gist. DT is so full of himself, so sure he's wonderful, that he figures he can just walk through it against an experienced prosecutor. He can't.

Oregon

The most surprising thing I learned in Oregon is that it's no longer illegal for drivers to pump their own gas there.

US road warriors have long known that two states, Oregon and New Jersey, required attendants to do it, as was the custom everywhere before the first gas crisis of 1973. I suppose it was a combination of a job creation program for gas station attendants and a fear that drivers wouldn't do it right. (Indeed, driving off with the hose still in the tank is an oops known to happen.)

The first time I filled the tank in Oregon on this trip, I didn't know the law had changed: there was still an attendant to do it, a practice I suppose will stick around for a while and gradually fade away. But the second time, there was no attendant, and when I went in to the shop to ask, I was told the law had changed over a year ago. This is the sort of news that should have produced banner headlines in the AAA magazine, but I didn't see anything there.

Here's the rules, though it doesn't seem to fit the discount station I was at, where they told me an attendant doesn't come in until mid-afternoon. This was in Yamhill County, which is one of the more populous counties where stations are required to offer attendant service at all times. But there was no attendant and no signs.

Cascade Moot

It was a whim, of sorts. I spent Saturday in Seattle at Cascade Moot, one of the numerous regional meetings sponsored by Signum University, Corey Olsen's Tolkien-oriented study group, and presented the John Wain paper I'd written for Mythcon. The moot's theme was "The Importance of Secondary and Tertiary Characters," so I retitled it "John Wain: A Tertiary Inkling."

About 35 people, some older but mostly 30s-40s by the look of them, gathered in a ground-floor classroom in what is otherwise mostly a dormitory (though you wouldn't know it from what we saw of it) of the University of Washington, but it wasn't really necessary to be there, because there was also a large Zoom attendance. In fact six of the ten papers were given over Zoom, which is why it was a whim for me to travel this far.

Five of the ten papers, not counting mine, were Tolkienian in topic. Despite some of the presenters confessing nervousness at giving a presentation, they were fine, though more than one presenter pronounced "Aragorn" as "Aragon." The best papers were close readings of the texts of minor characters' appearances, squeezing out what could be fairly deduced about them: a theory that Goldberry is the personification of a yellow water lily; a comparison of three encounters with gatekeepers in LR, each introducing a new culture to the story in what are quite different expressions of the same basic concept. The same was true of some of the non-Tolkien papers: the very little that's said of Mrs. Hudson, the landlady, in the Sherlock Holmes stories, but she's been expanded on in pastiches and film adaptations; and the evolution of the concept of a "Scooby gang" and how it differs from an Avengers-like collection of heroes or a hero-and-sidekick situation. Besides Scooby-Doo and Buffy, The Goonies and Stranger Things (neither of which I've seen) were cited as having the distinctive characteristics of a collection of diverse misfits who contribute individual skills to form a protagonist group greater than any of them.

More broadly, we had a firm reading of Eowyn from a woman who understood that her driving force was despair, and who suggested that victory opened the future for her and offered Faramir as a non-military role model, thus leading to her change of heart; and an even firmer reading of absent mothers, mostly in the Silmarillion, and how they're blamed for their children's misdeeds. Somewhat more dubious was a paper on Beregond which ran out of time to address the character's distinct appeal and human qualities after having spent an enormous amount of time on categorical throat-clearing of unnecessarily trying to distinguish primary, secondary, and tertiary characters in LR: why are you obsessed with these fine distinctions? what difference does it make?

The day got off to an awkward start when it turned out the AV setup hadn't been tested beforehand, and what was supposed to be the 15-minute introduction turned into 20 minutes of computer troubleshooting, and we only got back onto schedule when one paper on some minor character in some book I didn't know turned out to be so minor the paper was exceedingly short. But it mostly worked out well, and my own paper, which came last, attracted some interest and a few favorable comments, as well as a number of people now determined to read Diana Glyer's The Company They Keep.

I took the light rail in from the suburbs where I'm staying. Parking at the station was dicey as the lots have been hijacked by people using them as free airport parking for the holiday weekend (there's a station at the airport), but a few spaces had appeared early Saturday morning and I was on my way.

Latest form of internet humor: impressions of JD Vance trying to be human.

experience counts II

I already provided a list of the previous public office experience of each non-incumbent Republican Vice Presidential candidate since the end of WW2; here, a little slower off the mark (but I've had this sitting on my desktop for weeks and wanted to deal with it) are the Democrats:

Alban Barkley, 1948: DA 3 years, county judge 4 years, US House 14 years, US Senate 21+ years
John Sparkman, 1952: US House 10 years, US Senate 5+ years
Estes Kefauver, 1956: US House 9 years, US Senate 7+ years
Lyndon Johnson, 1960: US House 12 years, US Senate 11+ years
Hubert Humphrey, 1964: mayor 3 years, US Senate 15+ years
Edmund Muskie, 1968: state legislature 5 years, Governor 4 years, US Senate 9+ years
Thomas Eagleton, 1972: DA 4 years, Attorney General 4 years, Lt Governor 4 years, US Senate 3+ years
Sargent Shriver, 1972: city board 6 years, US agency director 7 years, ambassador 2 years
Walter Mondale, 1976: Attorney General 4 years, US Senate 11+ years
Geraldine Ferraro, 1984: Asst DA 5 years, US House 5+ years
Lloyd Bentsen, 1988: administrative judge 2 years, US House 6 years, US Senate 17+ years
Al Gore, 1992: US House 8 years, US Senate 7+ years
Joe Lieberman, 2000: state legislature 10 years, Attorney General 6 years, US Senate 11+ years
John Edwards, 2004: US Senate 5+ years
Joe Biden, 2008: county council 2 years, US Senate 35+ years
Tim Kaine, 2016: city council 4 years, mayor 3 years, Lt Governor 4 years, Governor 4 years, US Senate 3+ years
Kamala Harris, 2020: Asst DA 12 years, DA 7 years, Attorney General 6 years, US Senate 3+ years
Tim Walz, 2024: US House 12 years, Governor 5+ years

Note the predominance of senators. Tim Walz is only the third in all that time never to have been one, a much rarer thing than among the Republicans. He is, however, the second Tim to have served as running mate to a female presidential candidate, a fact I have not seen noted.

Democrats, day 4

Sorry, I think I reached surfeit stage after three days. I didn't watch the proceedings, except for KDH's big acceptance speech. And that was satisfying to see: I particularly liked the careful balancing in the Gaza section.

But I don't have to say much; there are excellent and insightful articles by Dahlia Lithwick and Fred Kaplan and Jim Newell and Amanda Marcotte.

I've also seen note of how confident and prepared she is now, far more than in her first run. The stories about her dysfunctional staff are far behind her: they got that straightened out in around the second year of Biden's term, and - despite reports of huge glitches at media checkin, which strangely did not color the media reports - the convention went very well. Mark Evanier is still marveling at how well the roll call went, a terribly complicated technical feat of TV production that they pulled off with minimal problems.

Jonathan Last is equally impressed by the convention and the nominee's performance. "But her speech last night was very good. Her entire campaign has been very good. We are watching a politician execute, at the highest level, with an enormous degree of difficulty. Harris is doing something extraordinary and I don’t think we should take that for granted."

But yeah, yeah, haven't we seen this before? Wasn't Hillary acclaimed in 2016? But a couple things are different now. First, DT is eight years older and eight years more tired and more incoherent. The other is that up to now we've had four major party tickets with a woman on them. The first three lost. But the fourth won. Maybe we've turned the tide. Maybe. It's still a long slog and the race is tight.

Here's something I haven't seen publicized much: a casual personal conversation between Harris and Walz. They talk about their preferred foods and the music they grew up with, and they establish that despite their very different personal backgrounds, they share the same values. That helps make them a good ticket.

Democrats, day 3

I managed eventually to get through all of this, though it wasn't easy. An AP video had the whole thing, but the sound kept going out, including for the entirety of Bill Clinton's speech. I switched over to a video on Kamala Harris's account, which only had the prime-time speeches, but at least I'd gotten that far before the AP started glitching.

The climax was, of course, Walz's acceptance speech. This began as an apologia for himself and his governmental accomplishments, replaying some of the points he made in his introductory speech in Philadelphia, skillfully morphing by the end by dropping his own ego and turning into a straightforward cheerleading session for Harris. The videos I watched did not have many of the reaction shots of Walz's children which have afforded so much commentary (critical from the Republicans, charmed from everybody else), but this article discussing the matter has embedded a CNN video which does include the reaction shots. When Walz described how years of infertility treatments had finally produced a child and that's why they named her Hope, from her seat Hope (who is now 23) formed a little heart symbol with her hands, an "I love you, Dad" gesture which sent commentator Stephen Colbert quivering with tears.

In the long list of previous speakers: A surprise appearance by Oprah Winfrey. A loose-jointed effusion by Lateefah Simon, a former Harris deputy at the SF DA's office (she has a story, not told here, of Harris sending her home on her first day to put on more professional clothes, and then personally buying her a suit), who is the nominee to replace Barbara Lee in the House, so we're going to be hearing a lot from her in the future. The parents of one of the hostages still held by Hamas, who made it clear that they're equally opposed to bombing civilians in Gaza, but they do want their son home. With all the fuss being made over the Palestinian victims, I was grateful for this gesture made towards the Israeli ones. As was made clear, there is no point to be made in competing victimhoods. They're all topics of our concern, and the audience seemed appreciative.

Most of the speeches emphasized the positive, of course, but it was the jabs at the opposition which most stuck in the mind. Today the prize went to Hakeem Jeffries, who compared DT to "an old boyfriend who you broke up with, but he just won't go away. He has spent the last four years spinning the block, trying to get back into a relationship with the American people. Bro, we broke up with you for a reason."

But there's been an immense amount of commentary on a gesture of Barack Obama's in his speech the previous day. I'd hardly thought this worth discussing at the time. Listing DT's oddities, Obama mentioned "this weird obsession with crowd sizes." As he did so, he gestured with his hands - holding them palms facing each other, moving them farther apart and closer together but still apart, and looking down dubiously. This has widely been taken and even roundly criticized as a visual joke implying that DT has a small penis. Jordan Klepper of The Daily Show thought it so brutal that he remarked "That's the second time this summer the Secret Service has failed to protect Trump from a lethal attack."

Sorry, but that strikes me as overthinking it. This moving of the hands back and forth, as if playing an air accordion, is a standard gesture of Trump's, so much so that it's been adopted by comedians like Colbert and Seth Meyers when doing DT imitations. I think I even saw Walz make the gesture at one point in some other speech, though I can't remember that for sure.

Or maybe Obama is just relying on plausible deniability.

Democrats, day 2

So today I watched the unannotated feed of yesterday's convention proceedings. It was even more raucous and joyous than Monday's, largely because of the roll-call vote. This was purely nominal, as the official vote has already been tallied, and any opposition votes were subsumed under "Present". The proceedings were that each state called upon offered the usual local puffery followed by the vote announcement; what made this one different was the presence of a dj, who played a song selected to be appropriate for each state while its representatives were speaking. They were almost all upbeat contemporary pop numbers, which made it a little exhausting for me to listen to, and I had to take several breaks. There was no singing on the recordings; they were all of instrumental riffs, which made it a bit hard for me to recognize even any of the half-dozen songs I actually knew. Here's a complete list.

The evening began with the grandson of Jimmy Carter and the grandson of JFK each testifying that Kamala Harris is in their grandfather's tradition, followed by a couple of renegade ex-Trumpistas. Both of these themes could have been carried on for quite a while, but I guess they judged it best to stop at two or three of each.

Of the midlist speakers, some good jabs at Trump were delivered by Governor Pritzker ("Take it from an actual billionaire, Trump is rich in only one thing: stupidity") and Senator Duckworth, who remember is one of those maimed war veterans Trump is so disdainful of ("I take it personally when a five-time draft-dodging coward tries to take away my rights and freedoms in return"). Then came Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff, whose message was basically that Kamala was the right thing for him at that particular time, and that she's the right thing for the country at this particular time.

Then to end the evening the con pulled out the big guns: Michelle, followed by Barack. Michelle said that Kamala believes "that regardless of where you come from, what you look like, who you love, how you worship, or what’s in your bank account, we all deserve the opportunity to build a decent life. All of our contributions deserve to be accepted and valued." And that, children, is what Thomas Jefferson meant when he said "All men are created equal." And then she said that when things get tough, don't mope or whine: "Do something." And Barack did something similar when he responded to boos of one of his digs at Trump by saying "Don't boo. Vote."

Useful reminder for the slog ahead. Go get 'em.

Democrats, day 1

I didn't see any of this when it was happening; I was still driving home from LA. I started to watch day 2 live this evening, but the talking heads kept rambling on instead of letting us hear the proceedings, and they did not say anything that hadn't already been heard many times. So I turned it off and spent my time watching the unannotated video of day 1.

This was the "Thank you Joe" day, and that came through clearly. I'm confident that Biden's withdrawal freed Democrats to express their natural love and respect for him and what he's accomplished, without it being burdened by the problematic need to support him for a second term. Biden's own speech concluding the evening included a specific denial that he's angry at anyone for forcing his withdrawal. You can believe that or not. The speech was a stemwinder, and fortunately largely State of the Union Joe rather than Debate Joe, though there were a few glitches, mostly places where it appeared the needle had skipped over a groove, to use an obsolete metaphor I still find useful.

Many other speakers mixed the Biden eulogy with the Harris-Walz support card. A lot of names got chanted, mostly speakers' first names, including Laphonza Butler, whom I wouldn't have thought that well-known; though when Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez appeared, the form of her name that got chanted was "AOC! AOC!"

The speeches that most stuck with me were Jamie Raskin, elegant in a suit and white tennis shoes, who got in a few crufty lines like "banana Republicans" and "kangaroo Supreme Court," and Raphael Warnock. When Warnock calls a vote "a prayer for the world we desire" and adds that "our prayers are stronger when we pray together," you can't forget he is a preacher. He also made a point that's rarely brought up about public health: that our own health is protected by investing in the health of our neighbors. We really are in this together.

Of course he also called DT "a plague on the American conscience," and a lot of others had similar remarks, but mostly this was an upbeat evening about healing and moral imperatives. Hillary Clinton's major speech, in which she called Harris's nomination the culmination of a long series of women's advances, from the 19th Amendment to Shirley Chisholm's run to Clinton's own nomination. She seemed happy to pass the torch on, and so did Biden. I hope that's the case, and I'm ready to watch day 2 unannotated on day 3.

more than a concert review

Sunday evening I was seated in a large, high-vaulted Catholic church tucked away in a corner of downtown Pasadena. The entire surface was various shades of orange marble, and the decorative style vaguely Byzantine. I was there for a concert of various Bach and Telemann works for strings and continuo, performed by a small group (3-9 players per piece) called Kontrapunktus. They were very good, but the echoing reverberation in the hall was epic.

But Pasadena is down in southern Cal, 350 miles from where I live in the north. What was I doing there?

I had originally planned to come down and visit a couple of friends who'd asked for a reading of my Mythcon paper which they'd missed. But family medical emergencies caused the indefinite postponement of the plan. It was at this point that I discovered that my hotel reservation was on a special rate that couldn't be cancelled. So since I was paying for the room regardless, I decided to make the trip anyway.

The extra time gave me a chance to do a little research at the UCLA library that had been on my want list for years. I did that on Saturday morning. It's intersession, so nobody was around though the library was open. On the way back that afternoon I stopped at a used bookstore in Hollywood, but was persuaded not to buy anything by the sign announcing a 50% off sale the following day.

So I came back. 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. When I finally got out of there, I retreated back to my hotel room and napped all afternoon, deciding that the peaceful Baroque concert close to where I was staying would be a more pleasant way to spend the evening than any other possible outings.

Nor was that the only traffic difficulty I had or the stress I had in dealing with it. I'm glad I didn't attempt to go very far around the area when I was there. On Monday, instead of sticking around through lunch as I'd intended, I fetched out of that traffic hellhole of the LA basin as quickly as possible, over the Grapevine and down for lunch in Bakersfield, thence home.

I'll have to come back for the reading when that's rescheduled, but my ability to handle the local congestion seems on the decline.

books of cultural history

Many of my readers have indicated an interest in cultural history; I think they'd like these books, particularly the first one.

Kathryn Hughes, Victorians Undone: Tales of the Flesh in the Age of Decorum (Johns Hopkins Univ Press, 2018)
Victorian writers, Hughes says, tended to avoid describing raw human physicality. So she's going to research the significance of body parts in some well-documented Victorian cases. I got this book for the chapter on Charles Darwin's beard. Darwin didn't grow his famous beard until after he'd written The Origin of Species, and it altered his appearance so much his friends didn't recognize him. (Photos confirm this difference.) He said he grew it because of his eczema, which should but doesn't raise the question of why he waited, since he was a late adopter of the beard. I was hoping that Hughes would say something of why the Wave of Beards arose. She offers a reason I've read before, that the failure of the 1840s revolutionary movements freed the beard from its association with revolutionaries and criminals, and supports this with a reference to a series of 1850s Punch cartoons in which the likes of railway porters, offering to help passengers with their luggage, are taken by the passengers as hold-up men because they have beards; the old image took a while dying. But she also says that the growth of the sedentary middle-class and the fall of outdoorsy he-man occupations made men want to show their he-man credentials with big bushy beards. Also that barbers were scary (ref the legend of Sweeney Todd, which made its first appearance then). Maybe, but it reads as if Hughes is just making all this up.
Darwin is the only male subject. Other chapters discuss the infamous case of Queen Victoria's lady-in-waiting who was taken as pregnant in an unmarried state, a shocking thing at the time, until she died of the tumor that she actually had; the biographical dispute over whether George Eliot worked as a dairymaid in her youth and consequently had a coarse and muscular right hand: some insist she did, some insist she didn't: Hughes comes down on the "didn't" side but has no definitive proof; the disappearance from the historical record of D.G. Rossetti's long-term mistress; and the gruesome case of the murder-dismemberment of an 8-year-old girl whose name, "sweet Fanny Adams," eventually became a slang term indicating meaninglessness.

Jeremy Eichler, Time's Echo: The Second World War, the Holocaust, and the Music of Remembrance (Knopf, 2023)
This is more a continuous narrative than separate accounts, but it describes four WW2 memorial works of music and the events in the composers' lives that led them to it: Richard Strauss's Metamorphosen, Arnold Schoenberg's A Survivor from Warsaw, Benjamin Britten's War Requiem, and Dmitri Shostakovich's Babi Yar Symphony. That Schoenberg's and Shostakovich's works are directly about the Holocaust, while the other two avoid it (Strauss's is purely instrumental anyway: no words) is part of the point, and Eichler explores this thoroughly. He also explores why Britten's requiem, though ostensibly about WW2, winds up being a memorial to WW1 instead. This is, Eichler says, because WW1 in Britain was by far the more searing experience (though Tolkien did not find that in people who were guessing the war relevance of The Lord of the Rings), while in Russia, where Shostakovich was, it was the other way around.
Eichler goes to the places described in the music and tries to evoke what it feels like to be there. He also devotes a lot of awed description to the subtleties and meaningfulness of the music itself. I'll reluctantly go along with this for three of the pieces, though my reaction to them is different than his; but A Survivor from Warsaw, which describes a tale of Nazi brutality that Schoenberg just made up to an accompaniment of the composer's emptiest twelve-tone style, strikes me as a piece of worthless kitsch, and it's embarrassing to see it described in this worshipful tone.

Craig Brown, 150 Glimpses of the Beatles (Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2020)
The exact opposite approach: 150 short separate essays, mostly in chronological order, covering the Beatles from their childhoods up to the band's breakup. This allows Brown the opportunity for lots of digressions, but some of these are among the most interesting parts of the book. A chapter on what classical composers (Britten, Copland) and literary critics thought of the Beatles was mostly new to me, and there are a number of other outside views elsewhere in the book. The last chapter is a biography of Brian Epstein told chronologically backwards. Gives a new perspective. Brown also emphasizes how contingent the Beatles' early history was by positing some alternative history. For instance: if Paul McCartney had passed Latin in school, he wouldn't have been held back a year and wouldn't have became close friends with a boy in the next class named George Harrison. An entire chapter guesses what would have happened if Gerry and the Pacemakers had had the big breakthrough instead of the Beatles, and why they could be seen as better qualified to do so.
But I have to approach this book with some caution, because the chapter on the possibility of the Beatles making a movie of The Lord of the Rings doesn't match up with anything else I've read on the topic.