end of the St. Lawrence

An announcement appeared in my e-mail and on the St. Lawrence String Quartet website:

After a one year hiatus following the death of founding violinist Geoff Nuttall, the members of the St. Lawrence String Quartet (SLSQ) today announced that 2023-24 will be the ensemble’s final season. They are continuing, however, to make their lives at Stanford University, where the SLSQ has been in residence since 1998 —performing, teaching, directing Stanford’s chamber music program, and producing their annual Chamber Music Seminar, in addition to pursuing other musical projects.

Well, there's more to the press release than that, but I guess that means they will no longer be giving concerts under the St. Lawrence name, with the three of them plus various guest musicians. I've been going to the public concerts of the Chamber Music Seminar, at which the St. Lawrence musicians host but usually do not perform. I've heard solo recitals by the cellist, but I haven't heard the others without a St. Lawrence label. So I don't know what they're going to do in place of what they have been.

I'll miss the group, but really the group was lost when Nuttall died, and everything since then has been a quiet afterlife. Anything that follows will be more of the same.

concert review: California Bach Society

A friend had a ticket to this concert that they couldn't use, so passed it on to me. I'm not normally much of a consumer of Baroque choral music, but I don't dislike it by any means, so I was happy to go. And it turned out to be a good concert. A tiny round church in Palo Alto resembling a concrete flying saucer but with excellent acoustics, and a small choir with an impressive sound. That one of the altos is an old fannish friend is only a plus. But I was especially taken with the tenors, often a choir's weak link but powerfully strong here despite there being only five of them. And the whole directed by Paul Flight, who has a very good name hereabouts for directing early vocal music.

The program contained an early motet by Bach, BWV 228, plus similar pieces by Telemann and some other North German composers older than Telemann or Bach: Buxtehude and two I wasn't familiar with, Franz Tunder and Johann Schop. Perhaps I ought to have known of Schop, since according to this he wrote the melody that Bach used for "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring." All the pieces sounded lovely, even in German, though a couple had severely Lutheran lyrics. Flight mentioned that the Telemann, an early piece titled "Schaffe in mir, Gott, ein reines Herz" (create in me, God, a clean heart), doesn't sound much like the Telemann we normally hear. I don't know Telemann's choral music enough to tell, but the instrumental parts (the chorus was accompanied by six string players and a positive organ) sure sounded like Telemann to me. But the best work was Buxtehude's "Jesu, meines Lebens Leben" (Jesus, life of my life), with its creative use of the individual sections of the chorus.

Despite the group's name and this program, they don't always sing Baroque. Next season has four concerts, one German Baroque and one French Baroque, an Eastern European Christmas program, and a survey of British choral music "from Tallis to Tavener" which covers over 400 years. That one in particular interests me and I'll probably be back. Singing this good deserves patronage.

concert review and petition: San Francisco Symphony

Last week, I heard Vaughan Williams's Third Symphony. This week, it was Prokofiev's Third Symphony: equally obscure and rarely-heard, dating from the same period (1920s), but otherwise totally different: violent, stressful, startling, creepy, weird. But, being Prokofiev, it is also strangely lyrical, even beautiful in its ugliness, which is why I find it so much more appealing than equally violent, stressful, etc. works by the likes of Bartok or Stravinsky.

Under guest conductor Gustavo Gimeno (Spanish, like Philip II works mostly in the Low Countries but is also MD in Toronto), the orchestra took it with ferocity and brilliant color. This was a deserving performance which ought to put this piece on the same shelf with the better-known Fifth.

Also on this program, SFS principal violist Jonathan Vinocour was soloist in William Walton's Viola Concerto, which also dates from the same period. The viola is not a very carrying instrument anyway, not when there's only one of it (the whole SFS viola section handled the opening of Prokofiev's slow movement very nicely), and it had a hard time being heard over the loud and clangorous orchestration.

Nevertheless the audience seemed to enjoy it. There weren't many people there, but those who were applauded after each movement of both works, a rather unusual response.

Before the concert, musicians from the orchestra were standing outside, passing out flyers asking audience members to sign their petition online. The petition was linked to only with a QR code, which is useless to me, but I was able to find the petition through searching, it's here.

The petition is to "urge the Board of Governors to do everything in their power to retain Esa-Pekka Salonen as Music Director and reverse planned cuts to programming, touring, and education." I was surprised; I told the musician I was speaking with, a first violinist, that I'd thought Salonen's resignation was definite. She said no, if the cuts that caused him to resign - cuts to the very programs with which they had enticed him to join in the first place - were reversed, he'd stay.

They're also worried that this induced departure, and the pandemic-era musician salary cuts which (unlike at other ensembles) haven't been reversed, will make it hard to attract top players, and the orchestra's quality will suffer. The institution has the funds for this, so what is the problem?

I said I agree. I said there are good orchestras where I live, but I travel 45 miles to hear the SFS because it is so superb. I said I know my history and the disastrous decline in quality after Pierre Monteux retired in 1952, which still hadn't been recovered from when I started going to concerts in 1970. But the last three - four, actually - MDs have been titanic in their quest to rebuild the orchestra, which has been at top quality for over three decades now. It would a shame for that to be lost.

So I'm signing.

concert review: Dover Quartet and Leif Ove Andsnes

I almost didn't get to this concert. My plan for Thursday had been to come back from going out to lunch at about 12.30, which would give me time to rest up and complete a few errands, like submitting the week's grocery order online, before driving up to the City at about 2 in time to attend a free student chamber recital at the Conservatory at 4, then have dinner and walk to the nearby Herbst where the evening concert would be.

But then when I was out for lunch, my car's engine started to overheat. The dealer where I get my regular servicing done was 18 miles away, much too far to take with an overheated engine. So I nursed the car a few blocks to an industrial zone where I hoped I'd find an auto repair shop. I did, but they doubted they'd get to my car before Monday (they're closed on weekends). Fortunately the signup didn't take very long, and they were able to get Enterprise to come and pick me up and take me to their rental lot, so I got home and got that stuff done, but at the price of missing the Conservatory recital, and was able to leave by 4, which is my usual time for an evening trip to the City.

So what was there was not quite the Dover Quartet I knew. Since I last heard them, their violist has left and they've gotten a new one - like the rest, she's a Curtis graduate, but is a few years older than the others, who were all classmates. And their first violinist was out sick, so they borrowed the one from the Escher Quartet, whose grittier sound didn't blend ideally with the Dover's smoother texture, but there were no technical difficulties: these players are all far too professionally skilled for that.

I've heard the Brahms piano quintet played slowly with solemn weight, and I think it works better that way, but there's always room for a fiery speed demon of a performance if it's good enough, and this one certainly was, ending with a dazzle. The Dohnanyi Second Quintet, which I've heard at Menlo, the players took more slowly and cautiously, putting the emphasis on the slow sections rather than the sprightly opening. It certainly impressed the fellow I was chatting with at the bus stop after the concert, to whom it was new. Dohanyi was a conservative composer in a revolutionary age, so he tends to get neglected. We then shifted to the winnowing process which filters out the new music that deserves to be forgotten, and to point out how much of that there is, he cited Sturgeon's Law, except that he attributed it to Fred Pohl. I didn't say anything about that, or even indicate that I already knew that principle, but - Fred Pohl. Interesting.

concert review: Monterey Symphony

It takes at least an hour and a half, when there's no traffic (which is rarely the case) to drive from here to Carmel, where the Monterey Symphony plays, and it feels farther away than that. So it's not surprising that I'd only gone once, about 20 years ago, because they were playing Gluck's haunting Iphigénie en Aulide Overture. (Here, this is the recording I discovered in my university music department's record library in my student days, and came back and listened to every day for weeks.)

On the same program, they did pretty well with Mendelssohn's "Reformation" Symphony, a work needing a lot of doing well to be successful at all, but made a total hash out of Bruckner's Te Deum.

So, not a consistent orchestra. But it's been 20 years since then, most of the local professional orchestras have improved greatly over that time, and Monterey has acquired a new music director a couple years ago. So I was primed as heck to get to a concert including a work I'd much like to hear but which is never done, Ralph Vaughan Williams's A Pastoral Symphony, also known as his Third. RVW's nine symphonies don't often make it to US concert halls, but I've managed to hear five others live over the years, though I had to go to London to catch one of them. But the Pastoral? Not a chance. Its title, and its consisting of four movements, "all of them slow" (as the composer quipped, accurately enough), have given it a reputation of being utterly static.

But it isn't. Much of it is tough, even wiry, and it works even better if you hear it as what it really is, not a placid "cowpat school" product, but a memorial to the soldiers who died in the pastoral fields of France in WW1. Though already in his 40s, RVW had served there as a medical aide, driving horse-drawn ambulance wagons.

And then I mentioned to my editor that I was going to this, in place of some other concert he suggested that I cover, so he put this on my schedule instead, and here's the review. I wasn't expecting how much music director Jayce Ogren would emphasize the WW1 background of this work, to the extent of having war scenes projected on the back wall during it, and framing the entire concert as a contemplative, meditative event.

It worked very well, and the performance of the Pastoral gave much satisfaction. RVW's distinct orchestral sound came through consistently, and the whole symphony was an opportunity to bask in it.

And the rest of the concert was good too. Britten's Serenade song cycle was much more incisive than the last time I heard it; Pärt's Cantus came off with an effective production of its ghostly ending; and Adolphus Hailstork is always a reliable workaday composer.

I went to the Sunday matinee performance, a tricky proposition as there's no available parking in Carmel on weekends. The signs on the theater parking lots saying concert parking only didn't stop anyone. But I arrived early enough that there were a couple fugitive spaces left, trudged off to have lunch at a seafood place I remembered being good from my last visit to Carmel ten years ago - it still was - and came back to sit and wait for the concert. It was worth the trouble.

retiring critic

Here's the news: Joshua Kosman, classical music critic of the San Francisco Chronicle, is retiring after 30 years as the paper's chief (and mostly only) classical critic.

Kosman could be a thoughtful reviewer, and I've sometimes found it useful, when we covered the same concert, to triangulate my views against his, especially as our tastes often differ. And I appreciated some of his cultural commentary, especially his recent analysis of what led the SF Symphony and music director Salonen to a parting of the ways. But his frequent tendency to begin - or sometimes spend the entirety of - reviews with complaints of how he disliked the repertoire seemed unprofessional, and a couple times on tangential matters he's seemed to me to cross the line of intellectual honesty.

Still, even with that, it was better to have him than not have him - the more intelligent reviewers out there, the better - and I entirely agree with the thesis of his farewell piece, that a music critic is just a listener - any intelligent, articulate listener - with an opinion of how the concert went. It's your reaction to the artistry displayed before you that counts. But, he adds, how good a critic you are depends on skills that you've learned, and I've found that so. My professional reviewing grew out of my blog reviewing, though it's developed into an idiom of its own, and I've learned a lot in the 20 years I've been doing this.

Kosman says he discovered classical music in his early teens and "knew it was going to be a lifelong commitment." I had the same - I think I was 12 when this happened - though I'd phrase it more as realizing that this was the music for me, the kind of music I'd wanted but didn't know it. Kosman says he had been "an ordinary pop music buff as a kid," but I was not. I detested most of the pop music of the time - and I'm only a couple years older than he is - and floated around listening mostly to comedy songs and musical theater, liking it (as I still do) but not feeling emotionally satisfied until I found the big heavy classics, starting with Beethoven.

Kosman is going to be giving a conversation in a cafe-cum-auditorium in the City next week. I hesitated about getting a ticket, because I wasn't sure what it meant on the announcement page when it said "A free live stream of the event will be available with RSVP." What did that mean? Was it an ornate way of saying that you had to get a ticket to access the live stream? Or did it mean it will be accessed through a program, like Zoom, whose name is "RSVP"? But it didn't make any difference, because by 8 AM when I finally went over to the ticketing page, the free live stream was sold out (how can a free live stream be sold out? that sounds like a contradiction in terms) and I nabbed one of the last live tickets instead. So I guess Kosman has a lot of fans, or at least curious readers. He'll take questions, it says, but I should probably bite my tongue.

One thing he probably won't know is: who will be replacing him? If anyone? And how good will they be? And what will they think of Salonen's successor, whoever that will be?

thoughts on red

Sometimes when I'm sitting in my car at a red light which is not showing an inclination to turn green, even though nobody's coming in the opposite direction, I fantasize about honking my horn.

This would, of course, cause any driver in front of me to turn around and say "Hey, I can't move. The light's red."

And I'd say, "I know. I'm not honking at you. I'm honking at the light."

And they'd say, "The light? The light can't hear you."

And I'd say, "I'll just have to honk louder, then."

Why this level of frustration? The pointlessness of the light remaining red when we're waiting there and nobody's coming on the cross street, plus having arrived at the light just as it turns red, having been temptingly green all during our approach (and thus letting through all the cars that had been waiting all that time on the cross street as nobody came in our direction), plus the fact that we arrived at the light when we did because of the previous light's equally pointlessly long red.

Isn't this wasteful of both drivers' time and of fuel?

I once met a traffic engineer and posed this problem, and asked, in essence, whether it was incompetence or malevolence that was responsible. His answer amounted to "It's incompetence," but I know it can be malevolence too, because I once read a city traffic report that suggested deliberately mistiming the lights on a street the city didn't want drivers to use as a through artery, presumably to keep them away through raw frustration.

political opinions

1. I already wrote about the California jungle primary, intended to provide two finalists of any party for the general election, and how two candidates tied for second place, leading to a decision to put them both in and have a three-candidate final.

But now they're doing a recount to see if they can establish if one or the other really got second place. I can't help feeling there's something wrong here. It's one thing for a final election, where one single candidate has to win, but in the jungle primary, picking one candidate over the other, in a vote so close, feels arbitrary and denying the voters of a choice they ought to have. It isn't my district (though it's geographically close enough that both the tied candidates have been my representative on one level or another at one time or another), but I'd be very anxious and concerned about expressing my choice if it were my district.

2. I wrote about this privately, but I'm dismayed at the defenses offered, in the latest news articles, for the protesters who blocked traffic on bridges and freeways here a few days ago and chained themselves in place to make it hard to remove them. The authorities want to throw the book at them, but I'd rather throw the concrete-filled barrels they chained themselves to.

The defenders speak of the arrests as an attempt to "chill the exercise of First Amendment rights." No, protesting is exercising your First Amendment rights. Blocking traffic is not.

They say it's "a nonviolent act of civil disobedience." No, civil disobedience is when you break the law. Forcing other people into complicity with your actions is not. Also, when you force people, it's hardly nonviolent. Not unless you think that pointing a gun at somebody's head isn't violent either.

They claim that Dr. King blocked roadways during the Civil Rights movement. I don't think he did - as far as I recall, he held pre-announced marches (these blockages were not announced, because they'd have been stopped if they were), which may have interfered with traffic like any parade might, but that's not the same thing as sitting down in the roadway and blocking traffic. Not least because they walked through and then got out of the way. And if he did sit down and block traffic, I'd oppose that too.

Most offensively, the defenders claim that these blockages are merely "inconvenient for drivers." Inconvenient?? If it were merely inconvenient, the protesters wouldn't do it. It wouldn't be worth the trouble from their apocalyptic point of view. Traffic congestion caused by protesters on the sidewalk yelling and waving signs, that's inconvenient. What was aimed at here, and achieved, is massive disruption.

3. The states of Maine and Iowa are responding quite differently to recent mass shootings. Maine is enacting new restrictions to attempt to keep guns out of the hands of certified nutballs. Iowa is authorizing school teachers to carry guns. I'd feel safer in Maine. It's a good thing Mythcon this year will be in Minnesota instead of Iowa where the organizers live. I don't want to go somewhere with elementary school teachers packing heat.

duned

I went to see Dune Part Two in the movie theater, to catch all the epic sfx. I came out wishing that I hadn't bothered.

I'd rather liked Part One, and I'd enjoyed other Villeneuve movies, so I figured I'd give this a try. I should have paid more attention to my general stricture against sequels, and to the fact that, when I read the book long ago I'd liked the first half a lot more than the second half.

I didn't like the long draggy plot that wandered on and didn't get much of anywhere until it gathered up its skirts in anticipation of the ending. I didn't like the murky colors, the bulk of the movie being either in black-and-white or in such drab coloring that it might as well have been black-and-white. I didn't like the booming sound effects and/or music. I didn't like the mumbling unintelligibility of most of the dialogue underneath that, except for lines in the Fremen language which I could follow because there were subtitles. I didn't like the way Paul kept disavowing any interest in ruling the people but acting as if that was his intention. (The only character I could identify with was Chani.) I didn't like having to get up in the middle to visit the restroom, and I liked even less that the guy in the middle of the same row had to get up about six times. I didn't like the way the plot didn't come to a stopping point, but ushered in the entirely different plot of the next movie, which I'm certainly not going to see.

In fact, the only thing I did like was that I didn't have to see the previous movie again in order to follow what was going on. I remembered what I needed to know well enough.

not recommended

Nick Groom, Tolkien in the Twenty-First Century: The Meaning of Middle-Earth Today (Pegasus, 2023)

I read the foreword of this book on Amazon last fall and denounced it then. Basically, Groom says that "Tolkien ... is not simply an author and a body of work, but a vast and growing field of cultural activity and products" (xviii), i.e. (though he doesn't put it that way) a lot of marketing kitsch and crappy adaptations. Specifically - and this was the main point of my critique - that you can't defend the smear of adaptations by saying that "the book is still on the shelf" because you can't read the book any more without the context of the adaptations. Also he has to insult and sneer at the existing Tolkien scholarly literature by unfairly caricaturizing it. On top of which, he says he's going to write "Middle-Earth" instead of Tolkien's preferred "Middle-earth" because you wouldn't write "Sackville-baggins" (xv), would you? which is a stunningly inept comparison.

So, having already annoyed the intelligent reader three different ways, Groom says he's going to write about "the Tolkien phenomenon today" without "get[ting] rapidly bogged down in the minutiae" (xvii-xviii). But that's not what he does. Chapter one is an extremely clotted biography which begins by getting immediately bogged down in the minutiae of listing twenty-three different names, nicknames, pseudonyms, literary incarnations, or terms of address which Tolkien used or by which he was known, some of them of extreme obscurity (2). It doesn't get better from here, going on to describe Tolkien's complex early life in the kind of detail of a full biography but not of much use to someone who just wants to understand the works, before getting into an abstruse academic bibliographically-oriented description of Tolkien's earlier work. Chapter two is on The Hobbit and chapters three and four on the writing of The Lord of the Rings, going into a lot of detail on how the drafts were developed, and on obscure and difficult points of interest to those abstruse and boring Tolkien minutiae scholars who were bashed in the foreword (like, is the shadowy figure in the eaves of Fangorn Gandalf or Saruman?), but that still have no connection with Tolkien in the 21st Century.

Finally we begin to approach the precursor of the supposed topic in chapter five, which is essentially a history of film adaptations of The Lord of the Rings, running lightly through music inspired by it and mentioning earlier attempts before plunging into detail on the Boorman script, the Bakshi movie, the Sibley-Bakewell radio version, and the Jackson movies. These are fairly astute analyses, particularly noting the thrust of the changes these versions made in the story, but again the focus on detail seems inappropriate for the broad canvas this book's premise promises. I started to cheer at an incidental rebuttal to Michael Moorcock's critique of Tolkien, but swallowed it when Groom implies Moorcock was just jealous at Tolkien's success (214).

So then chapter six does the same thing with adaptations of The Hobbit, offering a weak justification for the disaster that Peter Jackson made of it by claiming that he haaaaad to make it stylistically congruent with The Lord of the Rings. Groom is learned enough to know that Tolkien once tried to do the same thing (257), but he is clueless as to why it failed, and failed again when Jackson tried it.

That's not enough to make a chapter, so Groom then turns to a discussion of the morality of war, mixing up descriptions of Tolkien's book and Jackson's movies so thoroughly that the untutored reader may be forgiven for not being able to distinguish them, and thus going away thinking that Tolkien is to blame for some of the atrocities committed only by Jackson's characters. There are also bits on gender roles and ecocriticism. Groom is again fairly good, if not particularly original, when he sticks to Tolkien, but feels rapidly off when he takes a wider focus, as with declaring that Hobbiton is no longer English but in New Zealand (293), which was not the impression Jackson wanted the viewer to leave with either.

Chapter seven is labeled "Conclusion" (what? is that as far as we get?), which is again focused on detail in Tolkien (religion, the Silmarillion, racial and nationalist issues, dreams in the stories, the element of horror, words and language) before touching at the end on Amazon's Rings of Power. The point seems to be - or would be if Groom approached this from a wider perspective - that the meaning of the story depends on who's reading it, or who (in the adaptations) is retelling it. That would be the beginning, not the end, of a book really about Tolkien in the 21st Century.

Then there's a brief afterword on the first season of Rings of Power, which must have been added at the last minute because we already had a bit on Rings of Power. This mostly discusses what the series did and didn't pick up from Tolkien or from Jackson, which are treated equally as source material, lord save us.

And that's it. I found this in the public library new books shelf, which is not a place I normally expect to see scholarly new books about Tolkien. I hope that casual readers who pick this up will get more out of this book than I think they will.

two new symphonies

I've been to hear the premiere performances of two new symphonies in the past week. It wasn't planned; it just worked out that way. I generally like symphonies; they're my favorite genre of music, and it pleases me when more are added to their number, particularly when they are themselves interesting works as these were.

The first was Lee Actor's Symphony No. 4, played by the Palo Alto Philharmonic, for which he's composer-in-residence. I reviewed this for the Daily Journal. As I mentioned in the review, his work occasionally reminds me of Shostakovich, of Rachmaninoff, of Nielsen, of Bruckner, and those are all good composers to sound like if you want to please me. It's not crass imitation, it's mostly just flashes of a turn of phrase.

The other was by Howard Qin, a Stanford senior undergraduate. I saw on the Music Dept. calendar that a free concert in their tiny recital hall would feature the premiere of a symphony, and that intrigued me enough to go. The hall was fairly packed, but I wouldn't be surprised if I was the only person there who didn't know the composer personally. He assembled a student orchestra of some 20 people, under his direction, to play this expansive but not over-long four-movement work depicting the seasons at Stanford. In the finale, two singers join the ensemble to intone the mottos of various universities.

That was the grandest movement; the other three all begin softly with just a few instruments and then build up. The themes are memorable, there is a decent amount of counterpoint, the whole has weight and movement. Despite the small numbers, the winds and brass tended to overbalance the strings, so more practice with orchestration is my only suggestion.

Also in the last week, I heard an all-Czech chamber music concert and reviewed it for SFCV. That was enjoyable, and even the ferocious attack on Janáček's Second Quartet worked in context.

And I went back to Stanford for another free concert; Christopher Costanza was playing the suites for unaccompanied cello by, no not J.S. Bach, but Benjamin Britten. These were written in the 1960s for Mstislav Rostropovich, for whom Britten wrote quite a lot in those days. I was hoping the suites would be enlightening. Instead they were incomprehensible. Obviously interesting to play but I couldn't make anything out of them as a listener.

Costanza is the cellist of the St Lawrence String Quartet, the Stanford resident ensemble. His bio in the program for this concert refers to the recent release of "the final two SLSQ recordings." Final? So I guess that means they have no intention of ever replacing their violinist Geoff Nuttall, who died a year and a half ago, but will just go on as they have been: mentoring and teaching at Stanford, which is part of their job; and performing individually and as part of other chamber ensembles. Well, I can live with that, and in any case Nuttall was in truth irreplaceable.

Tolkien in Vermont

I attended online part of the annual one-day Tolkien at the University of Vermont conference today. This year the online vendor was something called Microsoft Teams. Please may they not use it again. It was no trouble getting on it with my Windows machine, but I had the damndest trouble staying on. Throughout the conference, on an average of twice a minute, literally, the thing would momentarily lose its signal and display an error message for a couple of seconds before reconnecting to the audio and then, more slowly, the video. Twice a minute. All day.

Fortunately for this, most of the speakers were just reading their PowerPoint slides aloud, so I had already figured out what they were going to say during their missing two seconds, but the ones that weren't ... I missed a few good jokes. Coming back from an outage to hear the in-person audience laughing at something you missed is annoying even the first time.

Also, the presenters forgot to watch where the camera was pointed. Several in-person speakers were only visible to the extent of one arm as they stood just out of camera range. A couple other times the camera suddenly switched angles so that we had a facial close-up, looking up the nostrils, of someone in the audience.

However, the presentations were good. Lots of Jungian and/or Freudian interpretations. The keynote speaker, the invisible Sara Brown (invisible because her PowerPoint started before she came up to the podium, and afterwards was standing in the wrong place for the camera), compared the burden of the Ring to Simone de Beauvoir's polemics against the burden of pregnancy, which was quite a comparison. I think it was she who also pointed out that the other Rings are also burdensome, noting Galadriel and the Dwarves, though it took another speaker to suggest that perhaps bearing the Ring of Fire explains why Gandalf is so cross and irritable all the time.

Yet another speaker pointed out that Sam is also cross and irritable. I've always found him an unpleasant character, but I've never found agreement on that point. Maybe this will explain it.

Then there was a paper pointing out that Tolkien's intent for some of his fictional languages to sound 'harsh' comes out a lot different if you speak a human language that he'd classify that way, like German or Turkish; one describing "The New Shadow" as a story about the failure of pedagogy (don't scoff: Borlas actually admits as much); and a couple good reinterpretations of The Hobbit: one arguing that Bolg the goblin has good reason to resent the Dwarves' treatment of his people, and one analyzing why the ponies in The Hobbit get killed while those in The Lord of the Rings survive: the earlier book's lighter tone make it possible to kill off minor characters without injecting unwanted notes of tragedy.

A good conference; I'm just sorry I kept missing bits of it.

three things about O.J. Simpson

1. I know a lot more about his acting career than I do about his football career. I watched the Naked Gun movies. I never saw him play football.

2. One sunny Sunday morning in 1994, B. and I were married. That very night, Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman were murdered. I just don't cotton to that concatenation of events at all.

3. A few days later came the famous Bronco chase. I happened to turn the TV on at the end of it. The car was just sitting in the driveway with nobody getting out of it, but the newspeople were yammering on at full force as if this were the most dramatic sequence of events in the history of the world.

This was the moment at which I decided to stop watching television news.

I've kept to that decision ever since. Of course I didn't watch the trial. By the time of 9/11, I'd figured out what to do instead when there's a major breaking news story. I open up a tab to a reputable newspaper site. I go about my other computer business, and every half hour or so I turn to the tab and hit the refresh button to see if anything has happened. Usually it hasn't, but I've been spared being made frantic by it.

the unknown soldier

Michael Palin, Great-Uncle Harry: A Tale of War and Empire (Random House Canada, 2023)

Of World War I battles, I'm particularly interested in the Battle of the Somme (July-November 1916) because that's the one J.R.R. Tolkien fought in. He was his battalion's signaling officer, rotating between the front lines and reserves as was customary, for four months during this battle until he fell ill. During this time his close friend R.Q. Gilson was killed on the first day of the battle. Tolkien's other close friend G.B. Smith died after the battle had petered out, but it was still possible to be hit by a German shell, which Smith was.

Another notable figure killed on the Somme was George Butterworth, one of the most promising young English composers.

But so were many others. The lives of the little-known are no less valuable spiritually than the famed. They deserve to be remembered, and their lives can give us a context to understand others. Here's a biography of one: Lance-Corporal H.W.B. Palin, killed on September 27, 1916, aged 32.

Michael Palin, the Monty Python guy, received a sheaf of family papers, including the terse but extensive diaries of his grandfather's youngest brother, Harry. Michael had known virtually nothing about Harry, but he set out to learn more. Michael is indefatigable in his research - to the extent that John Cleese yawns theatrically when the subject of Michael's books comes up - and he found quite a lot. He is also big on the garrulous digressions: for instance, when discussing Harry's relationship with his much older siblings, Michael recounts his own relationship with his much older sister.

Though Michael doesn't like to say so in so many words, Harry was an underachiever. Unlike his oldest brother, he did poorly in school. He went off to India to earn his fortune like so many ambitious young Englishmen in those imperial days, but failed miserably, being fired for poor work from two blue-collar jobs, on a railway and at a tea plantation. (He did, however, learn Urdu - not Hindi, Urdu, a curiosity not addressed - which served him well later on.) He seems to have done somewhat better as a farm laborer in New Zealand, clearing tree stumps off some newly-designated farmland (Michael does not discuss the environmental damage attendant on this). That's where Harry was when war broke out in 1914, and he joined the Anzacs. He was one of the few uninjured survivors of the horrors of Gallipoli, where in addition to regular soldiering he served as a translator for troops from the subcontinent. Then he was sent to France where the Somme awaited.

Despite Michael's confident command of detail, and his sure way of covering gaps in the historical record, he seems fuzzy about some facts. Besides my not being certain that he knows the difference between Urdu and Hindi, I'm not certain he knows the difference between a vicar and a rector, one of which Harry's father was.

But despite these things, this is a fascinating and readable book. The accumulation of detail helps the reader understand the environments in which Harry lived, a necessary approach given the paucity of primary source material. I'm glad I picked this one up from the library.

der Mond

B. and I traveled to St. Louis for the 2017 total solar eclipse, at the invitation of a friend who lived in the zone of totality. Several other friends accepted the invitation, and we had a pleasant backyard party of it. We found no congestion, no trouble making hotel reservations, etc. And we experienced the totality.

I wouldn't mind seeing another one, but the difficulties of travel, both personal and pandemic-wise, have increased since then, so this time I stayed at home to see the partial. Maybe a good thing too, as B. tells me that everybody on FB who's gone to Texas has found heavy cloud cover. (No word yet from my brother in Pennsylvania.) It was bright and sunny here, a change from the dripping rain we've had off and on for weeks.

And I did see the partial. I went to the plaza outside the city library, but found nothing there I couldn't get at home besides a long line of people waiting to view through the telescope. So I went back home. My pinhole viewer did not produce good results, but with the eclipse glasses I had an effect unlike any I'd seen before at an eclipse. Not only was there a bite taken out of the Sun, but - faintly, as if a ghost of itself - I could see the full outline and features of the Moon. Probably it would have been clearer without the glasses, but of course then the Sun would drown it out, and fry your eyes into the bargain.

Over the course of an hour, taking a peek half a dozen times, I watched the Moon come over the Sun on the right, then slowly move down below it, still taking a bite, and then gradually move off to the left and vanish. Astronomical movement in action.

assorted concerts

Thursday I trudged my way again from the far-off parking garage to the San Jose State music auditorium for another Beethoven Center event. During term they hold monthly noon concerts, often of historic arrangements of Beethoven works, but this one wouldn't fit in their own tiny recital room because it required two pianos. It was Liszt's arrangement of the Ninth Symphony.

Played by locally noted pianists Tamami Honma* and Daniel Glover, with the quiet addition of timpani by John Gerling (plus triangle for the janissary section of the Ode to Joy), but with no singers, it came across rather jangly, a contrast especially audible in the slow movement. Liszt frequently passes the lead back and forth between the pianos. The quintessential moment may have been the great choral declaration of the Ode theme, which was accomplished with one pianist slamming away at the theme in massive chords while the other swept maniacally all over the keyboard to reproduce the accompaniment. The ending was so tumultuous it sounded as if they'd sent out for reinforcements.

And then I had to walk back to my car through a hailstorm (technically sleet, as the word is used in the US, I suppose).

For the evening I ventured up to the Freight to hear a five-person Scottish folk band called Breabach. I wasn't familiar with them, but I like that type of music. Lots of bagpipes going on, and they were the full-bodied Highland pipes, too. Enough to make your teeth rattle.

*Who's just released her recording of all 35 - that's right, 35 - Beethoven piano sonatas, which I would have bought on the spot had I $50 in cash - which was all they'd take - in my pocket, but I didn't.

news of the weird

A couple odd things going on locally that might not have hit the broader news feeds:

1. In California we have what's called the jungle primary, in which all the candidates of whatever party run together, and the top two finishers, whatever their party, go into the general election.

But what happens if two candidates are tied for second place?

That happened in the race for an open congressional seat hereabouts, an attractive prospect for many a local officeholder. One candidate led, and two others kept shifting for second place as more votes were counted, and eventually ended up tied.

The answer is, all three of them will make the final ballot. This isn't my district, but it's interesting to watch.

2. Oakland International Airport has decided it needs more respect. Like many cities, San Francisco has more than one convenient airport but not everybody knows about it. San Francisco International is about 15 miles from downtown; Oakland International is across the Bay but is only about 20 miles from downtown SF, and both are served by the rapid transit system. (Oakland is also less likely to get fogged in.)

But Oakland has been losing flight slots because people don't know to use it. So now they want to change the name to San Francisco Bay Oakland International, a mouthful but like SFO it is right on the Bay and this will let people know where it is. But the SFO administration are annoyed by this; they say it's confusing. I must admit some sympathy with that position, remembering some misleading airport designations in my past, and especially since an Oakland administrator said "No one owns the title to the San Francisco Bay."

That's the sort of snotty remark you make only if you know you'd be confusing the customers and are deliberately planning to do so.

gender dysphoria

Statistics on gender dysphoria in pre-teens and teens.

I wonder. Questions like this didn't exist when I was a child, but I wonder how my answer would have been taken when I was a pre-teen. I despised typical boy-like behavior, I hated being a boy and being forced to associate with other boys, I thought girls were much nicer people, I sometimes wished I was a girl, but only so that I wouldn't have to be put with the boys. And I never thought I actually was a girl. So is that gender dysphoria or not?

celebrity fan

George was a Python fan in the way that other people were George fans. He'd taken tapes of his favorite episodes with him on the Dark Horse tour, often turning to them at moments when Rolling Stone was being particularly horrid. At every venue he had the "Lumberjack Song" played during the countdown to showtime and he registered at hotels as "Jack Lumber."

- Philip Norman, George Harrison: The Reluctant Beatle

And, of course, it tells the story of how he financed Monty Python's Life of Brian.

Staking the house he loved more than anything else in his life on the riskiest of all gambles was an act of incredible, foolhardy generosity to his Python friends (and a glaring contrast to fobbing off his first wife and incontrovertible creative muse with £120,000). "I just wanted to see the film" was his throwaway explanation, prompting the quip to which various Pythons would claim authorship, that he'd bought "the most expensive cinema ticket in history."

eatster

Customary Easter gathering for food and conversation at the spacious house of our well-organized niece. About half relatives, half friends of the hosts. I brought steamed broccoli, just about the only offering which was neither meat nor carbohydrates. B's sister, the family's whiz baker, baked me a birthday cake, chocolate of course. Nephew T., master of the outdoor cooking, roasted two chickens by the beer-can method. Approaching the platter at serving time, I took two of the four wings. Coming back for seconds much later, the other two wings were still there, so I took them too. If nobody else likes wings but me, I won't deny myself.

Cats were petted. Plastic easter eggs were gathered from the front lawn. They proved to contain not chocolate, but little plastic dinosaurs. B. and I have no use for these, so we gave them back along with the eggs, which have been reused for years beyond count. Although I did not fail to point out that we could use the dinosaurs to imitate Wash. "And we will call it This Land!"

Fortunately things were late enough getting going that we missed the closure of the freeway caused by a wrong-way driver doing what wrong-way drivers do, which is crashing into other cars.